The First Mountain Man

by William W. Johnstone

  The man asked sensible questions, trying to learn about the land and its people, and Preacher answered each question as best he could.

  “Is this the Shoshone River we’re crossing now?” he asked, as they forded the stream.

  “Nope. It’s a fork off of it, though. This branch splits off east of what some folks call Heart Mountain. Injuns call it Spirit Mountain. It’s sacred to some of them. Bear in mind to keep out of Injun buryin’ grounds. That’ll bring bad medicine on you. We won’t cross the Shoshone this day. Tomorrow, ’bout noon, if all goes well.”

  “What do you mean by bad medicine?” Melody asked. “You don’t believe in Indian superstition, do you?”

  “What’s the difference in what Injuns believe and what you’re tryin’ to bring to them? Only difference is the Injuns don’t have no book like the Bible. Their religious ways is passed down by mouth. And each tribe has their shamans; they’re like you folks, sort of. They believe in the Great Spirit, and life after death. That Happy Hunting Grounds claptrap is white man’s bullshi ... dooky.”

  Even Edmond and Penelope had pulled closer and were paying attention and not bitching about this, that, and everything else. For a change.

  “Injuns is real good to their kids. Very kind to them. Once you get to know them, and they like you, they’re good people. I’ve lived with them, I’ve fought them, and I’ve killed them. And likely I’ll do all three things again. And don’t you think that most Injun women is loose, ’cause they ain’t. An Injun father is just like any father anywhere. You start messin’ with his daughter, and he’ll kill you.

  “You take the Cheyenne tribe, for instance, Tough, mean fighters. Everybody’s scared of the Cheyenne. But for all their fierceness, they hold women in high regard. A girl’s comin’ of age is a big deal in a lot of Injun tribes. And any number of tribes worship dogs and wolves. If one has to be killed for whatever reason, they’ll apologize to it. And to a Cheyenne, a dog is damn near a god. They even have a warrior society called the Dog Soldiers.”

  “It sounds to me that you actually like the Indians,” Edmond observed.

  “Oh, I do. You can’t blame them for fighting the whites. Hell, this is their land. It’s been theirs for only God knows how long. Thousands of years, probably. If they’d let me, I’d never strike a hostile blow against any of them.”

  He thought about that for a moment. “Well, exceptin’ maybe them goddamn Pawnees.”

  When they made camp that afternoon, Preacher figured they were within a half day’s ride of the Shoshone. As soon as they crossed it, he’d cut south, down toward Togwotee Pass. He sure wasn’t going to attempt to take them across the Snake and over the middle part of the Tetons. At least he hoped he wouldn’t have to.

  While they had been resting back at the ambush site, two horses had wandered back into camp, anxious for human closeness. Preacher had rigged up frames and they were used for pack horses. He’d found enough canvas that hadn’t been burned to use as shelters for the pilgrims. While it wasn’t any fancy Eastern hotel, it did offer a small creature comfort.

  “It’s a great, vast, lonesome place, isn’t it?” Melody asked, sitting close to the fire as the sun sank past the towering mountains.

  “It’s big, all right,” Preacher told her. “But lonesome? Well, I never dwelled on that too much, though some folks do call it the High Lonesome. I’ve knowed men who’ve gone crazy out here, sure enough. And a lot more men who gave up and headed back to towns and people and such. Takes a special breed to make it out here. I knowed one old boy who lost his horse and was afoot during the winter. He fought him a puma to the death. We found ’em both come the spring. Both of them froze stiff to a tree. He had his hand on that big cat’s head, like he was sayin’ ’It’s all right. No hard feelin’s. We both was just doin’ what come natural.”’

  “Did you bury him.”

  “Not right then. Ground was too hard. We come back about a month later and put them both together in a cave and sealed it shut.”

  “That was a nice gesture,” Penelope said.

  Preacher looked at her. “I reckon. Howsomever, we didn’t have much choice in the matter. They was both still froze together. It’ve took an axe to get them apart.”

  * * *

  By noon of the next day, Preacher knew they were being followed. Problem was, he didn’t think they were Injuns. If they were renegade white men, they could turn out to be worse than Injuns. The mountains weren’t exactly overflowing with renegade white men, but there were enough of them to cause trouble every now and then. They’d knock trappers in the head, or even shoot them for their pelts or for food or their boots or coats, for that matter. And, he thought, trying to cheer himself up, it could be a party of government surveyors or explorers.

  But he couldn’t quite make himself believe that.

  He figured they were renegades after the women. Two beautiful white women could make even a good man go bad. Especially men who hadn’t even seen an ugly white woman in years.

  When he called a break and the women stepped behind some bushes to do their business, Preacher got Richard and Edmond close.

  “We’re bein’ followed,” he told them. “I don’t think it’s Injuns, and it ain’t the Army—I’m sure of that. They’d have seen ’way back that we’re not a hostile party and they’d have closed with us. Any good scout would have seen the sign that women leave and they’d be mighty curious. I think we got us some renegades on our trail and I think they’re after the women. So keep your powder dry and be ready to fight and fight quick. ’Cause when they come, they’ll do it one of two ways, they’ll either come real sudden like, or they’ll hail the camp and get in amongst us. That’s what we don’t want. We can’t let ’em get in amongst us. I know you two think of yourselves as highly principled men, but you just remember this: there ain’t no law out here except the gun, the knife, and the war axe. And if they’re renegades, missionaries or not, they’ll kill you both and do it without blinkin’ an eye. You got the women to think about. They got to come first.”

  “Neither one of us has ever used violence against another human being,” Edmond pointed out.

  “Well, you’re about to do so,” Preacher said, “unless you want to die. Make up your minds. I don’t think we got a lot of time to ponder it.”

  “We should warn the women,” Richard said. “I feel they have a right to know about this.”

  “It’s only a suspicion,” Edmond said. “Why alarm them unduly?”

  Preacher walked away, leaving the two men arguing. When Melody and Penelope stepped out of the bushes, he walked up to them. “You ladies stay put with the men. Rest awhile. No fires. You understand me?” They nodded. “Good. I’ll be back in an hour or so.”

  He took his Hawken and set out at a ground-covering lope. Preacher could run all day, and had done so several times during his time in the mountains. He’d had more than one horse shot out from under him, by both white men and Injuns, by bullet and arrow, and been forced to run for his life.

  He ran for a couple of miles, then scrambled up on a ledge. He squatted down, studying their back trail. Far below and behind them, he could pick out tiny doll-figures moving toward them on horseback. He counted eight riders, and they were not Indians. They had only two pack horses, so they were not trappers. They were not dressed in uniform, so they were not military. That left government explorers or renegades. Preacher had him a strong suspicion they were the latter.

  “Damn!” he said. As if he didn’t have enough problems without this being added. If that was Bum Kelley’s bunch, they were in real serious trouble.

  Bum had come out back around ’28 or ’29 and immediately started making trouble wherever he happened to be. He always had anywhere from ten to fourteen thieves and killers and toughs hanging around him, and the gang ranged from the Utah Territory up into the British-held lands. There wasn’t nothing Bum and his bunch wouldn’t do, and precious little they hadn’t done—and all of it bad.

 
He wished he had him a spyglass, but then figured as long as he was wishing he might as well wish for a detachment of soldier boys and about half a dozen of his good friends, like Thumbs Carroll, Nighthawk, Tenneysee, and some others. They’d probably all be ’way south of his position, though.

  “Might as well wish for the moon,” Preacher muttered, and then picked up his rifle. He paused as four more riders caught his eye, one of them leading a pack horse.

  “That’s about right,” he muttered. “Twelve bad ones and me with a one-eared gospel shouter, a smart-aleck missionary, and two faithful female followers. Lord have mercy on a poor mountain boy.”

  He picked up his Hawken and loped back to where he had left them. “Mount up,” he told them, bending over to catch his breath. “We got big troubles about five miles behind us.”

  “You ran five miles?” Penelope asked.

  “I’ve run all day, lady, and half into the night ’fore. I’ll tell you about it sometime. But not now. Let’s go!”

  Preacher pushed the group. He knew where he wanted to go. It wasn’t no more than a day’s ride, and he set a hard pace. They had crossed the Shoshone and now, instead of cutting south as he had planned, Preacher rode straight west, toward a place he’d once wintered. He figured the hidden cave was still there. He had no idea what it would take to make it disappear. Other than God.

  He rode into a tiny creek and told the others, “Stay right behind me. Don’t get out of this crick. It won’t fool them for long, but it will slow them up tryin’ to figure out where we left it.” He chuckled. “And that, boys and girls, is something that’s gonna take them a-while to do.”

  They rode for several miles, always staying in the creek, until coming to a sandy, rocky flat. “We’ll leave it here,” Preacher told them, as he swung down from the saddle. “Stand down for a couple of minutes and rest; let the horses blow. I got to do something.”

  He had saved his old buckskins and now he cut them up to make socks for the horses’ hooves.

  “Why are you doing that?” Richard asked.

  “So’s the steel hooves won’t scar the rocks and leave a trail,” Preacher told him. “Get that old ragged blanket off my pack horse and do the same with it. Quickly, people. Every minute counts.”

  When the hooves were covered, Preacher led the group to the timber and told them not to move from that spot. Then he led the horses over, one at a time and had each one mount up.

  “Stay with me,” he told them. “Don’t snag a thread on a branch. If you do, holler and stop and pick it off. They’ll find this trail, eventually, but let’s don’t make it any easier for them.”

  Preacher led them deep into virgin forests, forging his own trail, the needles and leaves making only faint whispering sounds under the hooves. He pointed to a tree, which had strange markings some twenty feet off the ground. “Grizzly. And a big one. He’ll stand twelve feet high and weigh damn near half a ton. If a grizzly gets after you, climb a tree. They’re so big and heavy they don’t climb. Usually,” he added with a smile.

  Edmond looked up at the scratchings and shook his head, wondering what it would be like to come face to face with a beast that large.

  It was a trail-weary and saddle-sore bunch that finally slipped out of the saddle just at dusk. Preacher had set a grueling pace. And he didn’t make matters any better when he said, “Cold camp. No fires. Roll up in your blankets now and stay there. Cool clear night like this, the odor of food cookin’ or coffee boilin’ would travel five miles. This spruce and pine’s got an odor to it, too.”

  “Not even a little fire?” Penelope asked.

  “No. See to your horses, rub them down good, and picket them careful on graze.”

  “Tyrant!” she muttered.

  Preacher slept well but cautiously that night, as he usually did in the mountains. He did not awaken at natural sounds. The sounds of a hunting owl seizing a mouse or rat or rabbit would not pull him awake. The lonesome call of a coyote or the talking of wolves would not alarm him. A breaking twig would pull him instantly alert, for deer or elk or most forest creatures would not step on a branch unless they were frightened and running. Man steps on twigs and branches.

  The rain woke him several hours before dawn would touch the high country.

  He quietly climbed out of his blankets and rolled them in his ground sheet. The others slept on, unaware of anything that was happening around them; they would have to learn the woods, or they’d die.

  With it raining, he would chance a small fire for coffee, built under an overhang to break up the smoke. He checked the snares he’d set out the evening before and found two fat rabbits. He skinned them out and carefully scraped the meat from the skin and rolled them up from habit. They made good glove linings. He had the meat cooking before the others began stirring.

  Melody was the first up. She completed her morning toilet and joined Preacher by the small fire, both of them waiting for the coffee to boil and the meat to sear.

  “We’re in trouble, aren’t we?” she asked.

  “It ain’t the best situation I ever been in,” he acknowledged. “But it ain’t the worst, neither. I get to my secret hidey-hole-and it is a hole—we can all get some rest and figure out our next move. It’ll take Bum and them others some time to find us there. They might never,” Preacher told her, knowing it to be a lie.

  He poured them coffee, both of them cupping their fingers around the tin, warming their extremities, for the morning was cold this high up. The others slept on.

  Preacher met her blues across the fire. “Edmond’s sweet on you.”

  “I know. But I don’t share his feelings. At all. He’s not a bad person, really, Preacher. He’s just far out of his element. And he’s scared. Like all the rest of us. Except you.”

  “I’d be scared in a big city like Phillydelphia. Too damn many people for my tastes.” He shook his head. His hair was long, hanging well past his ears, for he hadn’t cropped it all winter. It helped to keep his head and face warm during the brutal mountain winters. “You don’t act like no gospel-shouter I ever seen, Melody. Richard and Edmond, yeah, and Penelope, too. But not you. How’d you get tied up in an outfit like this one?”

  “Through a society I belong to. We all thought it would be a grand adventure and we could help bring the Lord to the savages. I’m afraid we didn’t think it out very thoroughly.”

  “You sure didn’t. No place for a woman out here. Not yet. Someday, yeah. Someday this country will be ruined with people.” The last was spoken with some bitterness.

  Melody smiled at him across the flames. “It has to be, Preacher. The nation is growing. People want to build new lives, to explore, to expand. Do you know about the steam locomotives?”

  “The what?”

  “Locomotives that run by steam. It’s true. We’ve had them for almost six years now. Soon the railroads will be running everywhere.”

  “Not out here!”

  “Oh, yes, Preacher. Even out here. A true visionary by the name of Doctor Hartwell Carver is proposing a transcontinental route.”

  “A trans-what?”

  “Coast to coast railroad tracks. You wait and see. It will happen.”

  “Stars and garters! I never heard of such a thing. Why, I had a man tell me that no more’n five or six years ago, they wasn’t but a hundred miles of track in the whole United States.”

  “That’s true. But I assure you, there are many, many more miles of track than that now.”

  Preacher shook his head. “Makes a poor man like me feel plumb ignorant.”

  She smiled. “No, Preacher. Never ignorant. You’ve just been isolated, that’s all. When was the last time you read a newspaper?”

  “I ... don’t remember. I can read,” he quickly added. “I went to the fifth grade. But it’s been so many years since I read a word I’d have trouble, I ’magine.”

  “I understand that there is talk already of an expedition to chart a route from St. Louis to San Francisco, although I’m
sure it will be several years before that happens. Can you just imagine that? A railroad from St. Louis westward all the way across the nation? It’s mind-boggling. Preacher, the government will be looking for men like you to lead those scouting parties. Men like you who know the wilderness that so many of us have only read about. Ignorant, Preacher? No, you’re far from being that. You’ve been to California?”

  “Oh, yeah. I seen the blue waters a couple of times. I been to California and Oregon. Hard, mean trip from here. A railroad? That’s impossible! You can’t build no damn railroad through these mountains.” He again shook his head. “That’s a pipedream, Melody. It ain’t possible. You can’t hardly get a wagon through. You can’t even do that in most spots.”

  “But you are going to take us to Oregon, aren’t you, Preacher?”

  “I shore ain’t gonna leave you out here alone,” he hedged the question slightly.

  She smiled and kissed him right on the mouth. Startled Preacher so bad he spilled the hot coffee right on his crotch and he jumped up, hollering and bellering and slapping at himself. The others thought they were under attack and went into a panic. Penelope got all tangled up in her blankets, shrieking like a banshee, and Richard jumped out of his blanket, the back flap to his underwear hanging down. Edmond flew out of his blankets and ran slap into a tree, knocking himself goofy—which wasn’t that long a trip.

  Melody and Preacher hung on to each other, laughing so hard they had tears in their eyes.

  4

  “Lost their tracks,” the renegade reported back to Bum. “He took ’em into that crick yonder. I don’t know whether he went up or down. Down, if he was smart.”

  “Preacher is anything but smart,” Bum replied, knowing he was telling a lie. Preacher was as wily a mountain man as ever tracked a deer, and as dangerous as any puma. He remembered that time down on the Poison Spider Crick when an ol’ boy name of Jason Dunbar got to needlin’ Preacher about his name. Preacher took all he could stomach and told him to lay off or stand up and get ready to duke it out. Dunbar was a good foot taller than Preacher and out-weighed him by a hundred pounds. But when Preacher got through with Dunbar and finally let him fall, Jason Dunbar didn’t have no front teeth left him a-tall, couldn’t straighten up for a week, and only had half of his left ear. Preacher had bit off the top half. Preacher had put a thrashing on Jason that was talked about for years afterward.