Ute Peak Country

by Lauran Paine

  They ultimately came near the little glen where they’d met earlier when Miggs had been trotting along upcountry, and here Jack flung back an arm to Frank.

  McCoy dutifully remained back where he was watching Jack quarter. When he thought Miggs should have all that sign read, he called ahead.

  “What is it?”

  Instead of answering Jack simply beckoned McCoy forward and struck off on an entirely new tangent. Now they were heading almost due east. But now, also, the trailing became much more difficult.

  “It’s her all right,” said Miggs after a while, sounding pleased, sounding enormously relieved. “Right now I wish she weighed more, so the tracks would be easier to see, but at least, Frank, if she’s walking along, she’s alive.”

  McCoy made no comment for a long time. Not until they’d passed in and out of several forest strips. Then he said: “Jack, hold up a minute. The way we’re going and have been going is straight for your cabin.”

  “I know,” retorted Miggs. “But if we hadn’t been in such an all-fired hurry this morning, we wouldn’t have missed the place where she either got away or he threw her off his horse. So let’s keep on tracking this time, and if she crawls into the underbrush or something, we won’t rush on by.”

  “You do that,” retorted Frank. “I’m going on ahead. I know that little lady … she’s tougher’n a rawhide boot. She’ll be at the cabin by now.”

  Miggs watched McCoy rush on easterly until Frank disappeared in among the trees, then he shrugged and continued his painstaking trailing of Beverly Shafter’s sturdy, small tracks. He privately thought Frank was entirely correct, but, as he’d said, they’d hurried too fast once and missed finding the place where Jed Shafter’s girl and her abductor had parted company, and he did not want to risk losing her again.

  He did increase his pace, though, where he dared do this, and once he neglected to seek the exact spot where the girl had crossed a fiercely tumbling creek and instead quartered the far side, picked up her sign, and went along it again.

  He was still a goodly distance from his own meadow and his cabin when he heard a gunshot. He whipped fully upright and stood stock-still until a second shot came. That, he knew, was a signal, and since to his knowledge the only person still ahead was Frank McCoy, it had to be that Frank had found something.

  Miggs hefted his rifle in the middle, held it down at arm’s length, and broke over into that distance-consuming trot of his.

  He had placed the exact spot that shot had come from. There was a little glade no more than two acres in size dead ahead. He made for this place, broke over into it out of the forest, and saw two things simultaneously. One, the most foremost object in his immediate sight, was a big, red-eyed bull elk with an enormously swollen neck from the rutting urge. The second thing he saw was Frank.

  McCoy had somehow been separated from his rifle. The ferocious bull elk was pawing up big clods between Frank and his gun, which lay several hundred feet behind the red-eyed, frothing bull.

  “Get down and stay down!” Miggs yelled. He had to move well to the north to be sure that no deflected bullet would strike anywhere near McCoy.

  At his shout, though, that bull elk, easily fifteen hands high and weighing well over a thousand pounds, whirled and set himself to charge. He was, Jack could see plainly, insane with rage. There was no more deadly animal alive than these huge bulls who had gone out of their heads when the mating urge was on them. They would charge one man or a hundred men, completely blinded to the certainty of their own death. That was what this one did now—set himself for the charge.

  Miggs stepped up beside a red-barked old fir tree, cocked his rifle, dropped to one knee, and aimed. He had only seconds to get set before that beast began his blind run. He caught that monstrous head over his sights, drew it down the barrel to him, and fired.

  The huge bull seemed to freeze, to turn suddenly to stone. It was as though he was dumbfounded by the blast of that long-barreled rifle. He began to weave gently from side to side. A burst of gushing claret abruptly poured from his nostrils, and with an earthshaking crash, he fell.

  Jack stayed back until he’d reloaded, then stepped forth into plain sight. Frank McCoy, also, moved out into the little glade. He went over, retrieved his rifle, examined it carefully, then passed dourly over where Jack was coming to a halt beside the big bull elk.

  “Good shot,” said McCoy roughly.

  “How’d he separate you from your gun, Frank?”

  “I’ll show you,” muttered McCoy, turning to go back into the underbrush. Miggs followed. Where Frank halted, Miggs also stopped. He was gazing down at some crushed and broken underbrush. He stepped around Frank, kneeled, put out one finger, and trailed it across some bruised leaves.

  “Blood,” he said.

  McCoy nodded. “Pretty fresh, too.”

  “Hers, Frank?”

  McCoy nodded again. “It’s got to be. There are no other tracks.”

  Miggs stood up, twisted to consider the dead bull elk, hoisted his gun, and jerked his head. “Go on like you were doing,” he directed McCoy. “Head for the cabin. I’ll continue tracking her out.”

  They parted again, Frank ignoring all but the most obvious sign, while Jackson Miggs passed along eastward at a much slower gait, picking up Beverly Shafter’s tracks and carefully following and reading them.

  After her encounter with the bull elk, Beverly’s tracks seemed much less positive than they’d been before. They paused often, and once, at a little seepage spring, the girl had obviously washed and rested before going on.

  She was hurt, Miggs knew that, but he was heartened by the very fact that she could still walk along. In a way he blamed himself for what had happened to her. He should have given her a pistol, should have insisted that she wear one. But calm logic told him that, if she’d shot that bull elk, only wounding it instead of killing it, the big animal would certainly have killed her.

  The same thing might even have applied to the man who had abducted her. If she’d tried to shoot whichever of the Denver Holt’s men had stumbled upon her while crevice mining, he just might have shot back. It was possible that a man who would steal a girl would also kill one.

  Less than a mile from the cabin, the tracks of Jed Shafter’s daughter began to straighten up again, to grow firm and steady in their onward striding. Jack Miggs sighed with relief. Whatever had happened between her and the cowboy, or between her and the bull elk, must not have caused her any bad hurt.

  He came within sight of the cabin, finally, and paused a moment to look ahead. There was a little wispy stringer of wood smoke standing straight up into the golden daylight from his mud-wattle chimney. He saw no one, but then he probably wouldn’t have anyway, because his approach was from the cabin’s rear.

  One of Frank McCoy’s horses nickered at the sight of him from up the box canyon. He looked up and looked back, stepped forth into his own clearing, and walked down to the cabin and around it. The door was partially open, so he eased through.

  Frank was at the cook stove. Beverly had her back to the door.

  Miggs said: “How are you, little lady?” And when she whipped around, the breath logjammed in Miggs’ throat.

  There was a bloody bandage on Beverly Shafter’s upper arm, and high on her right cheek was a purple bruise, the swelling of which made her face lopsided. Her normally good color was gone, and in its place were dark rings around the eyes and a gray pallor elsewhere.

  She made a ghastly little smile at Miggs and said: “I’m not as bad as I look. Frank told me how you killed that big elk. I walked right into him. He was browsing just across the clearing. I guess he didn’t see me, either, but when I walked near him, he made a noise like a trumpeter and charged. I tried to get behind a tree, but he knocked me down once before I got there. Afterward, I’m not quite sure what happened. I think I crawled behind the tree, but I’d bumpe
d my head and things were foggy. I do remember crawling carefully away, though, keeping that big tree between us.”

  Miggs leaned his rifle upon the wall, strode over, and bent to examine her wounds closely.

  McCoy spoke up next, saying: “He hooked her arm, but aside from that, and the bump on her face, I think she’s all right.”

  Miggs finished his rough examination, straightened up, looked grim as death, and said: “Which one of Holt’s men took you out of that canyon where you were crevice mining?”

  Beverly went to a bench, sank down, and shook her head at Miggs. “I didn’t see him.”

  Miggs’ eyes widened. “What? You were with him all last night and …”

  “Jack,” broke in McCoy quietly, “she was unconscious. He knocked her over the head with his pistol barrel. She’s already told me that part of it.” Frank went over to the girl, smiled, and said: “Bev, you climb into your blankets and rest. When that there gruel I’m making on the stove is ready, I’ll waken you.” He gave her an assist up off the bench and went with her as far as the little partition beyond which was her cot.

  Miggs was still standing by the stove when Frank came over, jerked his head toward the door, and moved on across the room toward the outside sunshine and warmth. Miggs followed.

  When they were out front, McCoy said: “She caught only one quick glimpse of him, Jack, and that was when his spurs made noise just before he came up behind her. She told me she turned to run … and that’s all she remembers, until she came to all alone by a little moonlighted meadow where he’d evidently dropped her, thinking he’d hit her too hard and she was dead.”

  “That would be the meadow where we found her tracks heading for home,” mused Miggs. “Frank, that one glimpse she had … was he big or short, thin or fat, young or …?”

  “He was just a silhouette in the trees and rocks to her. All she recollects is that he had spurs on … because she heard ’em.”

  Miggs went to a rough bench in front of his cabin and dropped down upon it. “We’ll find out which one did it. If he had spurs, that narrows the field, Frank. It was Holt or one of his men. We know that for sure now.”

  McCoy squinted at the reddening afternoon sun. “We knew that before,” he calmly said. “Jack, I never in my born days saw as tough a woman as Bev Shafter is. No bigger’n a mite, but she took a gun barrel over the skull, a face-to-face run-in with a rutting bull elk, walked alone with blood running out of her arm near two miles, and, by God, when I walked into this cabin, you know what she was doing? Fixing to cook supper so’s we wouldn’t have to go hungry when we came home.”

  Miggs solemnly nodded his head without speaking for a time. Everything within his sight was calm now and peaceful. He hadn’t had much rest lately, and he wasn’t as young as he’d once been. Weariness welled up in him along with relief. She was safe. Bruised and hurt, but safe. He felt as a father would have felt, shaky and weak but tremendously thankful, too.

  Chapter Ten

  It was after sundown when Fred Brian, Lex Murphy, and Red Morton returned to Miggs’ clearing, put up their animals, and walked over to the cabin.

  Jack and Frank were eating mush. They’d heard the cowmen ride up, but, knowing who they were, neither of them had gone outside to verify this. They were both dog-tired, whisker-stubbled, and edgy.

  When Fred Brian knocked, Miggs called for him to enter.

  The three riders came in out of the deepening dusk, Brian foremost. He looked from McCoy to Miggs and back to Miggs again.

  “You find her?” he succinctly asked.

  Miggs looked up and saw the eyes of those three cowboys steadily widen, looking past him. Miggs turned.

  Beverly was standing in the doorway of the space that had been partitioned off for her. She had washed and combed her hair. In the yellow lamp glow inside Miggs’ cabin, even the bruise on her cheek and the bandage on her arm could not entirely obscure the fact that she was very pretty.

  She was staring, round-eyed, over at big Fred Brian. Miggs felt something like an electric shock pass back and forth between those two. He looked at Frank.

  McCoy looked straight back at him, then Frank introduced Beverly Shafter to Hyatt Tolman’s range boss and his two youthful cowboys.

  Murphy and Morton swept off their hats with gallant flourishes, but Fred Brian stood there like a man suddenly struck dumb.

  Beverly smiled a little self-consciously, crossed to the stove, and said, without looking back at any of them: “Maybe Mr. Brian and his friends would like something to eat.”

  That broke the electrified atmosphere. McCoy got hastily upright, saying: “Sure, Bev, sure. Here, boys, sit down at the table. I’ll fetch you some bowls of right fine gruel.”

  Jackson Miggs sat plumbing the depths of the confused and confusing atmosphere, gazing from Fred Brian to Beverly and on over at Murphy and Morton. It had not occurred to him that the girl’s presence would make any difference. In fact he hadn’t thought that far ahead at all, but he now realized that he should have. Three healthy young bucks, sturdy and in their prime, and a beautiful girl.

  Brian sat down; so did his riders. Frank brought them bowls of mush, and Beverly brought over three more tin cups and the coffeepot. She smiled at Lex and Red but did not look directly at Fred, only poured his coffee with her face profiled to Brian, wearing the faintest of approving looks, which, in the now comprehending view of Jackson Miggs, was almost a declaration of solid interest. Jackson, a lifelong reader of signs, read the faces of those two across the table from him with no difficulty at all.

  He suddenly was no longer hungry or tired. The others talked, bantered Beverly a little, and questioned her about the man who had abducted her. Jackson heard all this but only indifferently; he was absorbed in something altogether new to him. He was looking at Fred Brian from the standpoint of a father, was measuring Fred’s worth, dissecting what he knew of his disposition, his past, his future prospects, and it was all very disturbing to him.

  Finally, when Frank sat back down, stuffed his little pipe and lit up, Jack caught his eye and jerked his head. McCoy calmly nodded and arose. The pair of them left the cabin scarcely noticed.

  Outside, night was fully down, and a strong rash of stars lay scattered across the high curve of heaven. Jack went over to a pair of small salt sacks Tolman’s men had brought up with them for salting the cattle, eased down upon those sacks, and looked worriedly up at McCoy.

  “It’s one thing after another,” he muttered. “We got her back alive … and now this.”

  Frank gazed down, puffed a moment, then quietly said: “This? What’s this, Jack?”

  “You know doggone well what I’m talking about. You saw how he looked at her, Frank.”

  “Well, yes. And I also saw how she looked at him.” McCoy removed his pipe, peered into its bowl, tamped the ashes with a thick thumb pad, raised his sly gaze, and considered his old friend.

  “A lot goes on in the world a feller hardly ever comes across when he lives alone and apart, Jack. She’s a good girl … clean and strong and sound as new money in limb and wind. He couldn’t do better.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of him, dammit.”

  “All right, let’s reverse it. He’s a big strong young buck. He’s not a brawler or a drunk. He don’t steal cattle or horses … so far as I know, anyway. He’s got a good job with Hyatt Tolman. She could do a heap worse without half trying.”

  “Frank, you said yourself she’s only eighteen or nineteen. Why, she’s just a …”

  “Whoa, old friend. Those pretty little Ute squaws used to get hitched when they was fifteen and sixteen. I’ve known my share of settlement girls that’ve done the same thing. Eighteen or nineteen is downright old for a gal to be getting married nowadays, Jack. Anyway, it’s sort of with girls like it is with colts … if they’re big enough, they’re old enough.”

  Miggs picked
up a little stick, examined it with a scowl, and turned it over and over in his hands. He was quite unused to the mood that was now upon him. In fact, he’d never before experienced anything like it. He was a simple, forthright man. Where civilization had complicated the lives and thinking processes of other men, it had never done this to him for the elemental reason that he’d made it a practice to avoid civilization.

  Frank McCoy stood there hipshot, puffing his little pipe, fathoming to a surprising degree the mood and turmoil that plagued his old friend. In Frank’s experience the things in life that tore at the heart and guts of men were seldom the things that had a price tag on them. They were instead, as in this case, events that involved a man’s emotions, his beliefs, and his lifelong convictions, and he told himself, knocking dottle from his pipe, they were also things of which strong men were often quite ignorant.

  Love, for instance, was something Jackson Miggs had never experienced. Not the love of a man for a woman or a woman for a man. Because it was foreign to him, he sat there now, torn apart by his doubts and fears, and, like most people with powerful doubts, he didn’t want it to happen, didn’t want it to intrude in surroundings with which he was thoroughly familiar and at home, because he was entirely ignorant of it. It frightened him.

  “Frank?”

  “Yes.”

  “Maybe I’m reading sign where none really exists.”

  “Maybe, Jack, maybe.”

  Miggs lifted his shaggy head, found Frank’s eyes, and looked deeply into them. “You don’t think so though, do you?”

  McCoy pocketed his pipe and gently shrugged. “I’ve lived just long enough to know that where females are concerned, it does no good to try and second guess ’em.”

  “So we wait and see what develops. Is that it?”

  Frank went over closer and squatted down with both long, skinny arms dangling off his bent knees. “Jack, if it happens, you can’t stop it. Neither can I. Even old Ute Peak up there couldn’t stop it. I’ve seen this happen before, and one thing always stuck in my mind. There’s no power on earth can turn back the attraction of a young buck or a young girl when the signs are right. And the man who tries is bound to find that out the hard way. I know how you feel, Jack. Hell, I’ll even admit now that’s why I brought her up here. I counted on you feeling that way. Not just because she was Jedediah Shafter’s girl, but because I know you, Jack. You always have to help the weak and the lonely. You’ve been that way for twenty years. I was counting on you sort of fathering this little lady. But I sure never figured this other thing’d crop up, and that’s a plumb damned fact. But it has cropped up, so now I’ve got to step in, because I’ve seen a lot more of this than you have. Jack, you take my word for it … neither of us can stop it … and I’m not sure either of us has any right to try and stop it.”