A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Painton read the printed words and looked up with a worried frown on his face. “The line wants me to check the tracks again.”

  “Yeah,” Juniper said dryly. “I know.”

  “I just checked them a few hours ago!”

  “The storm’s gotten a lot worse since then. The line has an eastbound that’ll be pulling into Sacramento pretty soon. They need to know whether it can get through.”

  “Your telegraph is still working. That means the storm isn’t too bad.”

  “Just because the lines are up don’t mean the tracks are clear,” Juniper pointed out. “You know that, Herman.”

  Painton’s frown deepened. He was in a bad spot, Juniper thought. Although technically an employee of the hotel, during the winter when there was only a small staff up here, Painton also served as the railroad’s superintendent for this station. If the line wanted him to check the tracks, he had little choice but to carry out the order.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” Painton asked.

  “Me?” Juniper said. “I work for the telegraph company.”

  “But you’re also my friend, aren’t you? A man doesn’t need to be out in weather like this by himself.”

  Juniper grimaced. Painton was right about both of those things. Juniper knew it, but he didn’t have to like it.

  He liked it even less because of what had happened earlier that morning, when he thought he had seen something out there in the storm . . . something that shouldn’t have been there.

  But Painton looked so miserable that Juniper sighed and said, “All right, I’ll come with you.”

  He wasn’t going unarmed, though. He turned back to the desk, opened a drawer, and took out the long-barreled Remington.

  “What do you need that for?” Painton asked, puzzled by his friend’s actions.

  “I’ll just feel better havin’ it along,” Juniper said. He shoved the gun in his waistband. It was awkward carrying it there because of the long barrel, but he didn’t have a holster for the revolver. He reached for his heavy coat, which was hanging on a nail.

  A few minutes later, the two men left the hotel and started walking east along the tracks. They were bundled up against the cold and wore caps with fleece-lined flaps that pulled down over their ears. Each man carried a pair of snowshoes.

  Juniper hoped they wouldn’t need the snowshoes. If they had to leave the tracks, they were pretty much dead, anyway. They wouldn’t survive long in this howling storm.

  Painton carried a lantern, too; otherwise it would have been pitch black inside the snowsheds. The drifts were high enough to cover them and cut off any light from outside. A dusting of white that had sifted through cracks in the structures covered the tracks here and there, but that much snow wouldn’t cause any trouble for the locomotives.

  Juniper stuck his hand inside his coat so he could reach the Remington if he needed to. The circle of light cast by the lantern upraised in Painton’s hand didn’t seem to extend very far. The flickering glow moved along with them, which meant darkness closed in behind them.

  Juniper looked over his shoulder and saw a speck of light that marked the location of the railroad platform adjacent to the hotel. It seemed lonely in the murk.

  “Everything looks fine,” Painton said as they followed the tracks that made a long, gentle curve through the pass.

  “So far,” Juniper said.

  “You really are spooked today, aren’t you? What put a burr under your saddle?”

  Juniper hesitated. Painton had been around the mountains long enough that he’d probably heard of the Donner Devil, too, but what would he think if Juniper admitted that he believed he had seen the creature? Would he decide that the telegrapher had gone mad, maybe from being stuck up here at this isolated post?

  Juniper didn’t want his friend to think he was crazy. Yet, he felt a compulsion to share his suspicions. Maybe Painton had noticed something odd, too, and was just as wary of talking about it....

  Before Juniper could say anything, Painton stopped short and exclaimed, “Oh, dear Lord!”

  Juniper saw the same thing. A couple hundred yards ahead of them, faint gray light filtering into the snowshed revealed a wall of snow blocking the tracks. Broken beams stuck out of the barrier like toothpicks.

  “There’s your answer for Sacramento and Reno,” Juniper said. “Won’t be any trains gettin’ through that for at least a week.”

  “It’s going to take more like a month to clear that away and rebuild the shed,” Painton said with devastation obvious in his voice. “Juniper, this is terrible—”

  He didn’t get any farther because Juniper grabbed his arm and said, “Listen!”

  Both men heard the rumble that was slowly but steadily growing louder. They stared at each other, eyes growing wide with terror, and yelled the word that everyone who lived in the mountains during winter dreaded above all others.

  “Avalanche!”

  They turned and sprinted toward the hotel. Both cast aside the snowshoes so they could run faster. The rumble turned into a roar. The ground trembled beneath their feet.

  It wasn’t easy running on railroad tracks. They had covered fifty yards and the noise around them was deafening when Painton’s foot caught one of the ties and sent him sprawling forward. He dropped the lantern. It bounced ahead of him and somehow didn’t break. It even stayed lit.

  Juniper saw the mishap from the corner of his eye and slowed for a second. He didn’t know if Painton was hurt or just stunned, but the hotel manager wasn’t scrambling back to his feet like he should have been. Juniper stumbled to a stop and swung around.

  His heart was pounding so hard from fear it seemed like it was about to burst from his chest. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to keep running. Unguessable tons of snow were about to come crashing down on the shed at any second.

  But Painton was having trouble pushing himself even to hands and knees as he shook his head groggily.

  Biting back a curse at his own foolishness, Juniper sprang to Painton’s side, reached down to grasp his arm, and hauled him upright.

  “Let’s go!” Juniper yelled over the roar that was like the world ending.

  And that was what it seemed to do as the two men staggered and ran toward the hotel. The snowshed’s roof exploded inward, and a huge wave of white swallowed everything.

  * * *

  It was midafternoon when the train reached Sacramento. Because of geography, the route from San Francisco went down the coast, then back north again on the other side of the bay for a considerable distance before turning west toward California’s capital city. Sacramento was the last major stop before the tracks began the climb into the Sierra Nevada Mountains, although there was a small depot at Folsom, west of Donner Pass.

  Smoke, Denny, and Louis had eaten their midday meal in the dining car, then returned to their compartment. Louis complained of being very tired. Weariness was one of the symptoms of the heart ailment that had plagued him ever since he was born. Smoke had advised his son to rest, while he and Denny walked up the train to the club car.

  They got cups of coffee and sat down in one of the booths. Smoke sipped the strong black brew and said, “I worry about your brother.”

  “So do I,” Denny said, “but it would be better if you don’t let him know you’re worrying. Louis is determined to live as much of a normal life as possible.”

  “I don’t blame him for that. Determination’s a good quality to have.” Smoke chuckled. “Although your mother has been known to say that in me it’s more like mule-headed stubbornness.”

  “I come by it honestly, then.”

  That brought an outright laugh from Smoke. “You said that, not me.”

  Denny grew more serious as she went on, “Louis doesn’t want to be coddled.”

  “I don’t do that, do I? I always figured it was best to just let him do whatever he feels like he’s up to. He ought to know what he can and can’t do better than anybody else.”

  �
��Yes, but sometimes he can be mule headed, too.” Denny shook her head. “I’d rather break a horse or pull a cow out of a mud hole or even swap lead with rustlers than try to deal with somebody’s feelings.”

  “You mean like the feelings you and Brice Rogers have for each other?” Smoke said, cocking an eyebrow quizzically.

  Denny’s face instantly flushed a little. “What are you talking about? Brice Rogers is a pain in the rear end, and I’m sure he feels the same way about me. It can’t get much simpler than that.”

  “Maybe so,” Smoke said, thinking about how Denny and the young deputy U.S. Marshal had worked together to break up the gang of outlaws responsible for him being wounded and laid up earlier in the year.2 “Seemed like the two of you got along all right when you needed to.”

  “Yeah. To keep from getting killed. But it doesn’t go any further than that.”

  “Oh,” Smoke said, nodding. He wasn’t convinced by what his daughter was saying, though. Not for a second.

  Denny was saved from having to explain herself even more by a new arrival. A small boy who was walking through the club car stopped beside the table in their booth and stared at Smoke. He was about eight years old, slender, with brown hair and a few freckles. He wore a suit and a shirt with a stiff collar, but from the way he moved his head around uncomfortably and pulled at the collar, he didn’t care for the garb.

  “Howdy, son,” Smoke said to the youngster. “Do I know you?”

  Instead of answering directly, the boy said, “You look like a cowboy. Are you a cowboy?”

  “I am. I have a ranch and I work with cows all the time.”

  “My pa was a cowboy. But he’s dead now.”

  “I’m mighty sorry to hear that. What’s your name, son?”

  “Bradley,” the boy said. “But I’d rather folks call me Brad.”

  A woman came along behind the boy and said, “Bradley, stop bothering those people.” She smiled at Smoke and Denny. “I’m sorry, my son doesn’t seem to see anything wrong with coming up to complete strangers and annoying them.”

  Denny said, “He wasn’t annoying us. I think he’s adorable.”

  Smoke got to his feet, pinched the brim of his hat, and said, “We were just having a talk about cowboys, ma’am. No harm done at all. You’ve got a nice polite boy there.”

  The woman smiled. “Well . . . I’d like to think he is, most of the time.”

  She was young, probably in her midtwenties, and quite pretty, with light brown hair and a nicely shaped body in her dark gray traveling dress. She went on, “My name is Melanie Buckner.”

  “I already told ’em my name,” the boy said.

  “I’m Smoke Jensen,” Smoke introduced himself, “and this is my daughter, Denise. We call her Denny. At least I do. Her mother still calls her Denise most of the time.”

  Brad said, “Would you rather be called Denny?”

  She smiled at him. “Most of the time.”

  “But Denny’s a boy’s name.”

  “Well, I like to ride horses and rope cows and shoot guns, so a boy’s name suits me just fine.”

  Brad’s eyes got wide. “But you’re a girl.”

  “I know. And it really annoys some of the hands on my pa’s ranch that I’m better at those things than they are.”

  Melanie Buckner put her hands on her son’s shoulders and said, “I think we’d better go now, Bradley. It was very nice meeting you folks, and again, I’m sorry if Bradley made a pest of himself.”

  “Don’t think a thing in the world of it, ma’am,” Smoke assured her.

  He sat down as the woman and the little boy went on their way. “Friendly little shaver,” he commented.

  “I wonder what happened to his father,” Denny said.

  “I didn’t reckon it would be polite to ask.”

  “No, probably not.”

  A couple of minutes later, the conductor came through the club car and announced, “We’ll be rolling into Sacramento very shortly, and we’ll be stopped here while I check on the weather and track conditions up ahead.”

  Smoke looked out the window and saw that the snow was coming down at a faster rate now. He had been over the Donner Pass route several times and knew that the snowsheds and the barrier walls could handle quite a bit of snow.

  But avalanches were always possible, and as the train bumped and jolted a little as it slowed for its stop at the Sacramento depot, he knew that he didn’t have a good feeling about this journey.

  CHAPTER 10

  Smoke’s misgivings grew stronger as half an hour passed and the train hadn’t started moving again. He and Denny returned to the compartment to find Louis awake after a nap that had left him looking refreshed and stronger.

  “You have a copy of the railroad schedule, don’t you, son?” Smoke asked.

  “I do,” Louis responded with a smile. “I’m very organized, as you know.” He reached inside his coat and found the folded schedule, which he held out to Smoke.

  “We met the cutest little boy in the club car,” Denny said. “When Pa just called you ‘son,’ it reminded me of him.”

  “I remind you of a little boy?” Louis frowned. “I wonder if I should be insulted.”

  “Not at all, silly. I didn’t say you reminded me of him. It’s just that Pa called him ‘son,’ too.... Never mind. The boy was very interested in cowboys. He said his father had been one . . . but was dead now.”

  “That’s terrible. How old was he?”

  “Seven or eight, I’d say.”

  “So his mother couldn’t have been very old.”

  “A few years older than us, I suppose.” Denny said. “It depends on how old she was when she had him. Why are you curious about that?”

  “I was just thinking . . . I mean, if there’s a young, pretty widow on the train . . . I assume that she was pretty?”

  Denny pointed a finger at him and told him disapprovingly, “You’re the one who’s terrible.”

  “Twenty minutes,” Smoke said as he slapped the schedule against the palm of his other hand.

  Both his children looked at him and said, “What?”

  “Twenty minutes,” Smoke repeated. “That’s how long the stop here in Sacramento was supposed to be. And since we were late leaving San Francisco, I reckon normally the engineer would try to move faster at every stop and shave a few minutes off of that time, to get us back closer to being on schedule. This delay will throw us behind even more.”

  Before Louis or Denny could comment on that, a knock sounded at the door of the compartment. Smoke swung around and opened it to find the conductor standing there.

  The man touched a finger to the brim of his cap and looked uncomfortable as he said, “Sorry to have to tell you this, Mr. Jensen, but there’s a problem.”

  “Donner Pass is blocked, isn’t it?” Smoke asked.

  The conductor looked surprised. “How’d you know that?”

  “Because I can tell how hard it’s snowing here, and if it’s coming down like this in Sacramento, it’s likely to be a lot worse up in the mountains.”

  “The storm started last night,” the conductor said, nodding, “and it’s just gotten worse as the day’s gone on. A telegram came through a little while ago saying that there’d been an avalanche. Some of the snowsheds were destroyed, and the tracks are completely blocked.”

  “Oh, no!” Denny said. “Was anybody hurt?”

  “I don’t think so, Miss Jensen. The telegrapher and another fella who works up there at the Summit Hotel were almost caught in it, but they made it to safety by the skin of their teeth.”

  “The hotel’s all right?” Smoke asked.

  “As far as I know. The snowsheds collapsed just east of there. They’re buried for at least a quarter of a mile. That’s how wide the avalanche was.”

  “Then the train could go that far,” Smoke pointed out.

  “Yeah, but what would be the point?” The conductor spread his hands. “The bosses can’t even start thinking about ge
tting a work train and a repair crew up there until the storm stops, and who knows how long that will be? Sometimes those blizzards settle in and don’t budge for days. Once they can start clearing the track, it’ll take a week or more to get it in good enough shape to use again.” The blue-uniformed man shook his head. “The line has decided that this train’s not going any farther. It’s going to pull onto a siding and sit right there in Sacramento for the time being.”

  “But it’s nearly Christmas!” Denny exclaimed. “People need to get home to their families.”

  “Believe you me, I know, Miss Jensen. I’ve been hearing an earful about it since I started passing along the news. But blizzards and avalanches don’t stop for holidays.”

  Smoke’s face was grim as he said, “What about some other way to get through the mountains?”

  “Not by train. I hate to say it, but you folks are stuck here. The railroad is offering free passage back to San Francisco. For those who’d rather wait and see just how bad the situation is, they’re willing to put folks up in hotels for a few days—”

  Smoke stopped him with a gesture. “I’m not worried about that. My children and I can get rooms here in town. I just don’t like the idea of being away from home for Christmas. My wife will be expecting us.”

  “You can get a wire through to her and let her know what’s going on,” the conductor suggested. “The wires are still up, or at least they were a little while ago. Might be a good idea to go ahead and do it, though. With a storm like this, you can’t ever tell what else might happen.”

  Smoke nodded and said, “All right. Thank you.” He managed a smile. “I know this isn’t your fault.”

  “You know what they say—everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it!”

  The conductor moved on to deliver the bad news to more of the passengers. Smoke turned to his children. Louis said, “Mother’s going to be disappointed. This was going to be the first Christmas that Denny and I were home to stay.”

  “I know. Your uncles and your cousins were going to be there, too.”

  “Spending Christmas in a Sacramento hotel room,” Denny said. “That doesn’t sound very festive at all. But I suppose we’ll have to make the best of things.”