“Prospector?” he said, frowning at the packhorse to which two shovels and a pick were strapped.
“Looks like.”
While Yakima removed a pair of worn leather saddlebags from the grullo’s back, the horse itself nickering as it lowered its neck to sniff its dead rider, Lewis went through the panniers strapped to the wooden packsaddle. Yakima sat on a rock and began going through the saddlebags. If they could find out who the man was and where he was from, they could take him home for burial, or at least send word back to his family, if he had one. They owed him that much.
“Nothin’ much over here. Most of the panniers are empty. A little coffee and flour and pipe tobacco. Some rocks with a little gold color in ’em. Small bottle of busthead. He must’ve been headin’ to Wolfville for supplies.”
Yakima hadn’t found much in the saddlebags, either. A few more small quartz rocks streaked with gold, a few old Confederate gold pieces in a small hide pouch, a bag of chopped pipe tobacco, and a pale envelope. All by itself in one bag was a burlap sack about the size and weight of a five-pound sack of sugar. He set the saddlebags and the envelope aside, then, balancing the sack on his knee, untied the whang string holding the neck closed, and peered inside.
He frowned. His heart beat faster.
He dipped a hand into the sack, poked his fingers into the sugary grain but knew right away it wasn’t sugar. Why would a man be low on all other supplies and still carry five pounds of sugar around in his saddlebags?
Yakima carefully pulled out a handful and looked at the gold dust flashing beguilingly at him. “Holy Moses.”
“Huh?” Lewis said, lowering the small liquor bottle he’d found in a packsaddle pouch.
“Somewhere he struck a vein.”
“Let me see.”
Lewis walked over in his bandy-legged way and stood over Yakima, extending the half-filled bottle of brandy to him. The half-breed shook it off and looked up at the small brown little man with a hawk nose and close-set gray-blue eyes that grew brighter by the second as they stared down at the gold dust in Yakima’s broad red-brown palm.
“Holy shit,” Lewis said, dipping a finger into the small mound of dust in Yakima’s hand, then touching it to his tongue as though to prove to himself it wasn’t flour or sugar, though Yakima had never seen flour or sugar that color. “How much you think he’s got there?”
Yakima carefully poured the dust back into the sack, then lifted the sack in both hands, hefting it. “I’d say five, six, maybe seven pounds.”
“Damn,” Lewis said. “That man done found him a fortune!” He paused, licked his lips. “You . . . uh . . . you reckon it’s ours?”
Yakima was about to set the gold on the ground, but Lewis took it from him, hefting it in his hands, pale eyes growing brighter, the older man’s breath wheezing eagerly in and out of his lungs. Lewis was a wild-horse hunter and breaker, and he was as wild as the horses he trapped and sold to the army and area ranchers, and sometimes as hard to figure and get along with. His mother, Old Judith, was the same way, as was his daughter, the scrappy but lovely Trudy.
“Go easy on that,” Yakima said as he reached down to pluck the envelope off the right saddlebag pouch.
“What—you think I’m gonna drink it?” Lewis chuckled. “Hell, I’m just gonna ogle it some’s all. Why, this bag here’s prettier’n them teats on the beefy whore over to the Silk Slipper in Wolfville!”
“I’m gonna tell Old Judith on you.”
“Go ahead, and I’ll tell Trudy about you cavortin’ with . . .” Seeing the flat, reprimanding cast to Yakima’s gaze, Lewis let his voice trail off and looked away like a chastised dog. His good mood returned only moments later, however. He chuckled as he dipped a long, gnarled hand into the gold bag and let the dust sift through his fingers.
Meanwhile, Yakima turned the envelope over in his hands and read the delivery address on the front. Mr. Delbert Clifton, Wolfville, Wyo. Terr. The return address was Mrs. Delbert Clifton, Belle Fourche, Dakota Terr.
* * *
Yakima used the pick and Lewis used the shovel to dig a neat grave about four feet deep. While they worked, hawks and buzzards circled over the dead marauders who’d attacked them, and they kept a close eye out for more.
It was late in the day, the shadows elongating from rocks and shrubs and surrounding bluffs, when the half-breed and Lewis Shackleford wrapped the man whom Yakima assumed to be the recipient of the letter he’d found in the saddlebags—Delbert Clifton, previously of Belle Fourche in the Dakota Territory—in the man’s own soogan, and stared down at his face one last time. Guilt no longer pained Yakima. He knew it wouldn’t bring the man back. Most men died ugly, needlessly out here.
The gold, however, burned in his brain. And the letter . . .
When he and Lewis had lowered the man into the grave and then covered it and mounded rocks over it to keep the predators away, Lewis leaned on his shovel, his wrinkled, sweaty forehead glistening like copper in the early evening sunlight angling under dark, flat cloud strips in the west. “What’s it say?”
Yakima looked at him.
“The letter.”
“I’ll tell ya later. Best be gettin’ back to the ranch.”
Yakima walked over to where his black stallion, Wolf, stood tied to a piñon, near where Lewis’s own blue roan mustang stood with Delbert Clifton’s grullo and the bay mule. The black and the roan switched their tails eagerly, knowing it would soon be suppertime and they still had an hour’s ride back to the ranch. The men had run the horses down before they’d dug the grave, keeping them close now that night was falling fast, as it did in December this far north.
Now as Yakima grabbed the grullo’s reins and stepped into Wolf’s saddle, he again looked around cautiously, making sure no more of Wyoming Joe’s bunch was closing in on him and Lewis, and then reined Wolf around. He glanced at his left saddlebag pouch bulging around the gold. He’d stuck the letter in the pouch, as well.
“You know, Yakima,” Lewis said, taking another pull from the black man’s brandy bottle and then giving a sigh and smacking his lips, “that gold’s ours now. Yours and mine. I say we split it like everything else—sixty-forty.”
Yakima’s belly tightened against the man’s comments. He looked at the flat bottle that Lewis held low by his side as he stared up at Yakima. He sensed the fire that was starting to grow inside the old, horse-hunting Irishman, because tanglefoot often had the same effect on Yakima himself. That’s why he kept a thumb on the vice, sticking mainly to beer and the occasional cigarette, though he knew that if a man smoked too much he lost his sniffer. And a man often on the run, as he was, couldn’t afford to lose his sense of smell any more than a deer or an antelope could.
“We’ll talk about it later, Lewis,” Yakima said, apprehension stiffening his neck as he touched moccasin heels to the flanks of his black stallion, who gave an eager nicker at the prospect of a warm barn and a bucket of oats.
Yakima rode back through the canyon where they’d first seen Hendricks’s men trailing them and had hightailed it to the dry wash. Lewis’s roan clomped along behind, leading the black man’s mule.
The half-breed didn’t like Lewis riding back there. He’d gotten to know the man well enough over the past four months that they’d been working together, splitting their income from their mustanging sixty-forty, since Lewis had the ranch and the corrals they needed for breaking, but Yakima knew that you never really got to know a man as hardheaded as Lewis Shackleford. You never really got to know an alcoholic, especially one given to Lewis’s dark moods that could often evoke the rough-hewn poetry in him but would often as not boil into a walleyed, unreasoning rage.
Those rages had not yet been directed at Yakima, but the half-breed knew they would be eventually. And the gold could be just the trigger. So he didn’t like him riding behind him, because he wasn’t e
ntirely sure that Lewis wouldn’t back-shoot him. Though not from anything specific Lewis had said, he knew that his partner considered him less of a man for his Indian blood, just as his mother, Old Judith, did. As he rode, keeping a sharp eye on the darkening land around him, he kept an ear skinned for the snick of Lewis sliding one of his old hog legs from its holster.
The only sound he heard besides some wailing wolves and coyotes, however, was the sudden screech of glass as Lewis, finished with the brandy, hurled the bottle against a rock along the trail. When Yakima jerked with a start and looked back at the man, his right hand instinctively closing over the horn grips of his Colt, Lewis merely snickered.
When they rode into the ranch yard, it was good dark, stars glistening across the sky. The high sandstone ridge looming up behind the two-story cabin made the clearing even darker despite the glow in the cabin’s first-story windows, behind the flour-sack curtains that Old Judith and Trudy had dyed ochre with Indian roots.
In the barn, Yakima and Lewis tended their mounts in moody silence. They turned the horses and their savior’s mule into the rear paddock with seven half-broken mustangs, then headed for the cabin.
Yakima had the black man’s saddlebags slung over his left shoulder. He didn’t know what else to do with them besides haul them into the cabin. He and Lewis would have to have it out over the gold, so he’d best keep it close. He already knew what he intended to do with it. While Lewis wouldn’t like it, he felt certain that he’d made the right decision.
Trudy warmed some elk roast and potatoes for the two men, who ate at the long half-log pine table while Trudy washed supper dishes and the wizened Old Judith sat in a rocking chair by the fire, knitting and rocking. Neither woman said anything. They’d sensed the tension between the two men who’d returned after dark, and neither had even inquired about the saddlebags that Yakima had carried in with him and hung on a peg by the door.
Lewis washed his food down with frequent sips from his stone coffee mug in which Yakima had seen him pour as much whiskey as coffee. The brown-haired Trudy, who was eighteen but sported a full, ripe body behind her gingham dress and soiled apron, had seen it, too, and she’d shot Yakima a tense, suspicious glance. When both men had finished, Lewis slid his plate forward and said to Trudy, “Get this plate out of here, girl. I’m done with it.”
“Yes, Pa.”
The girl gave Yakima another faintly accusatory glance as though to ask: “What did you do to rile him?”
When Trudy had taken both their plates and was working on them over at the scrub pail in the dry sink, Lewis said, “What’d the letter say? Read it to me.”
Yakima stood and retrieved the letter from the saddlebags.
“Bring the gold over here, too.”
Yakima looked at him and shrugged. Lewis wasn’t going anywhere with the bounty tonight. The half-breed pulled the hefty sack out of the saddlebag pouch and set it on the table.
Trudy was looking over her shoulder at the sack, one brow arched, as she added hot water from the reservoir on the range to her bucket of dishwater. She held her head and lips so that Yakima could see the missing eyetooth, courtesy of a contentious, ewe-necked broodmare, on the left side of her mouth. Still, she was a pretty brown-eyed girl growing up too soon out here, on the backside of nowhere. Old Judith looked at the table over the half-glasses resting low on her age-spotted nose as she rocked and knitted.
“What you got there, Lewis?” She hadn’t addressed Yakima directly since he’d thrown in with Lewis. She did her best to pretend the redskin heathen wasn’t here, that it was still just her and Lewis and Trudy, though Lewis was getting too old and becoming too much of a drunk to do much horse trapping or hunting on his own anymore. Yakima knew the old Irish horse hunter had a good grubstake for himself and the women, however, for whenever he and Yakima had ridden to town for supplies, Lewis had paid from a large wad of cash he carried in a money belt.
“That there, Ma, is gold dust,” Lewis said, throwing back another belt from his coffee mug. “Maybe ten pounds’ worth.”
The old woman stopped rocking. Trudy turned slowly from her bucket, holding her soapy hands straight down in front of her soiled apron and shabby gingham dress. The top of her dress drew taut against her swelling breasts. Her brown eyes were riveted on the gold.
“Go ahead and read the letter, since you can read so well, red man,” Lewis said. The man’s hard tone tied a half-hitch knot in the half-breed’s gut.
The way the women were eyeing the gold made the knot even tauter.
Chapter 4
A gun blasted in the street outside the Snowy Range Hotel. A man screamed. Glendolene Mendenhour, dozing in her deep copper tub, awoke with a gasp. She pushed herself up out of the water, grabbed a towel, walked barefoot to the room’s single window, and slid the rose red curtain aside with the back of her hand.
She squinted into the street below. The lit candles and oil lamp she’d lined up on the dresser were reflected in the dark glass, but then she saw beyond the reflections a man stumble out of the Longhorn Saloon on the street’s far side, nearer the hotel than the Silk Slipper. This smaller, rougher saloon than the Slipper sat perpendicular to the hotel, its side facing the Snowy Range, so Glendolene could see only the man’s profile as he staggered across the saloon’s porch, clutching both hands to his belly.
There was a flash inside the saloon. A quarter second later, the gun’s blast rattled the hotel window in front of Glendolene, and she gave another gasp as she took one step back but continued staring down at the street lit by oil pots and torches bracketed to porch posts. The wounded man jerked and then flopped forward down the porch steps to lie sprawled in the street. The five or six horses tied to the saloon’s hitch rack whinnied and nickered and pulled against their reins.
Glendolene clutched the blanket tight around her dripping, wet body. “Good Lord!”
Two men in fur coats, one holding what appeared to be a gun in his right hand, walked out of the saloon to stare down at the man in the street, whom Glendolene could hear groaning and rolling from side to side in agony.
One of the two men on the porch holstered his pistol, said something to the man standing beside him. They laughed, then turned and walked back into the saloon. Behind them, the wounded man continued to thrash around, groaning. Glendolene stared, aghast, as the saloon’s double front doors closed.
What were they going to do—just leave him there to die alone in the street?
It was a cold night, and no one else was out and about. Smoke wafted in ghostly gray tufts over the street. A single rider materialized from the east, to Glendolene’s left, and the man dressed in a long hide coat and with a red scarf tied over his head beneath his hat merely glanced once at the wounded man and then crouched to casually light a cigarette before touching spurs to his horse’s flanks. Horse and rider trotted on past the wounded man, disappearing to Glendolene’s right.
Her heart thudded as she stood there before the window, clad in only a towel, her thick hair piled atop her head, and stared down at the thrashing figure of the man who was surely dying. Dying alone on a cold night in a Wolfville street, while a saloon full of men and parlor girls frolicked only a few yards behind him.
Wind gusted, blowing silhouettes of trash along the street. Something moved beyond the dying man, and Glendolene stretched her gaze toward the gallows beyond the saloon. Something long and dark swayed beneath the platform. More revulsion washed through Glendolene as she stared at the body of Preston Betajack still hanging there.
“What on earth . . . ?” she muttered.
But she knew why Betajack still hung from the gallows. He remained there as Lee’s and Sheriff Neumiller’s grisly example to any outlaws passing through town, and as a stern message to Betajack’s outlaw father to clear out of the county. His brand of ranching, which mostly involved rustling cattle and horses from othe
r men’s ranches, and which had been a bane to Lee’s own spread that he shared with his own father, Wild Bill Mendenhour, would no longer be tolerated in Big Horn County. It was also Lee’s and Neumiller’s message to Betajack that, despite the hired guns on his roll, they weren’t afraid of him.
Sending such a message was all well and good, she supposed. It was the frontier’s brand of justice. But word of the hanging likely would have spread by now. Why leave the body to the crows?
Glendolene returned her gaze to the wounded man thrashing now with less vigor in front of the Longhorn Saloon. “Help me,” she heard him say, weakly, ramming the back of one fist into the ground beside him.
She backed away from the window. She turned away quickly, as though to rid the man from her mind as well as her eyes. She couldn’t help him. She had no real desire to help. He’d probably deserved that bullet he’d been fed in the Longhorn, and it was none of her business, anyway. As Lee had told her over and over again, it was a harsh world out here. It begat harsh men who died badly at times. Such was the price of living at all.
“Help me. . . .”
Glendolene tensed her shoulders, trying to fight the image of the dying man, his weakening pleas, from her mind. She tried to think about the stage ride tomorrow, of spending Christmas with the couple who’d raised her—Uncle Walt and Aunt Evelyn Birdsong. They owned a harness shop and blacksmith business in Belle Fourche, and they’d raised her since she was seven years old, when her own parents had died in a plague. She even tried to think about Lee and their life together, and if she really wanted that life to continue on the ranch where she was treated like a child by Lee and his overbearing father, Wild Bill.
Dead Man's Trail (9781101606957) Page 3