Colter's Journey

by William W. Johnstone

  He signed to Pinto Killer, “If Red Coat wants these women, I need help.”

  Pinto Killer nodded, his face showing concern.

  Jackatars continued. “White men follow us. They want the women. They come to take them from me.”

  The Indian looked around the camp.

  “You have men,” he signed. “You have many weapons. You should fight them.”

  “Where,” Jackatars signed, “do you see men?”

  Pinto Killer smiled and nodded.

  “We get a woman each,” he signed. “For doing your fighting.”

  “I have only these four,” Jackatars signed. “Red Coat would not be pleased.”

  “You promised more women. We are not to blame.”

  Jackatars nodded. “You will go?”

  Pinto Killer surprised him by shaking his head. “Not all of us. We leave one behind.”

  “You do not trust me?”

  “No.”

  It was Jackatars’s turn to grin. “I do not trust you.”

  “We understand one another.”

  Jackatars nodded. “I will send one man with you. You will leave one man behind. Which one?”

  He hoped it would be the boy. He would be easy to kill. But Ugly Face spoke and stood.

  Jackatars had no choice but to agree. He motioned Malachi Murchison to join them.

  The fool went over, squatting by Jackatars’s side, and listened, his face paling, as Jackatars told him what had been agreed upon. “Abaroa and Baillarger should have been back by now. That means someone’s trailing us. These two Piegans are going with you. That one’s called Pinto Killer. The kid is Stupid Boy. Find Reno. And this time, kill him.”

  “What”—Murchison swallowed hard—“what makes you think it’s Reno? I told you that I—”

  “Who else would it be? Easterners bound for Oregon? They’d have quit long ago. It’s Reno. Don’t play me for a fool. I want him dead. Bring me his head and not some damn lie.”

  Murchison actually shivered, and not because of the cold. “Where do we meet you when it’s done?”

  “You know where I’m going.”

  Murchison gave a feeble nod, and somehow managed to stand. “You keep sendin’ me to cover your back trail, Louis, and you might not have no men left to fight for you when the time comes.”

  Jackatars smiled evilly as he looked up.

  “Why do you think I’m sending you?”

  * * *

  When the two Piegans and Murchison had ridden out, Jackatars filled two cups with tea and left Ugly Face by the fire with a plate of sheep meat, which the dirty Indian ate with his fingers, wiping the grease off on his leggings.

  Jackatars walked to the snow-covered trees where the four white captives sat shaking from the cold and damp. He had not given them blankets, but he did hand one tin cup to the prettiest of the younger girls.

  She took it, but instead of drinking, passed it to the smallest. “Drink it, Margaret.”

  Jackatars grinned.

  The girl—Jackatars remembered her name as Patricia—stared.

  The mother, sitting to the half-breed’s left, spoke. “Who are those Indians?”

  “Piegans,” Jackatars answered, but kept his eyes on the teen, looking her over from her shoes to her tangled hair.

  “Where did they go?”

  “Away.” He kept staring at the girl.

  “What—”

  “Shut up,” he snapped. “I ask questions. When I don’t, you stay silent. Or I give you to the buck the Piegans left behind. And when he’s through with you, you won’t look better than he does now.” He rose. “Drink your tea. We ride in an hour.”

  Jackatars walked away, sipping his own cup, and thinking that maybe, just maybe, he would not want to live on this earth all by himself with only animals. The girl, this Patricia Scott, once he had taught her how to act and how to do certain things, she might be a good Eve to his Adam.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Long about now,” Jed Reno said, “I bet you’re glad you got that skunk on your head, boy.”

  Tim Colter refused to answer. Nodding or shaking his head—even if he grudgingly had to admit that the mountain man was right—took too much effort. The skunk skin did keep his head warm. So did the other wolf skins that the one-eyed trapper had given him.

  He did manage to grumble, even though moving his frozen lips hurt. “I-It’s Au-Au-Au-gust.” At least, he thought it was August. After everything that had happened, and all he had been through, he couldn’t be certain.

  “It’s also nigh eight thousand feet,” Reno said.

  After another few hundred yards, Reno spoke again. “Don’t fret, boy. This ain’t blizzard season. Lucky we ain’t run into hail. Storm’ll pass. The moisture’s good for the land.”

  Reno, as normal, proved correct. The snow stopped before noon, the sun reappeared, and for the rest of their ride through thick evergreen forests, Tim Colter felt himself splattered as snow fell from the limbs of the trees overhead. By afternoon, however, he was relatively dry, and had tied the wolf skins on behind the saddle. He had done that task—to his amazement—while riding behind Reno, the spare horse, and the pack mule. Done it himself, twisting in the saddle, and not getting bucked off or knocked off by a low limb.

  They rode down where it was warmer, and where no snow was left. The country remained rugged, yet amazing. Tim held his breath as a herd of antelope—there must have been upwards of one hundred—bounded through the hills. They moved on, and began climbing again. Hills and forests and off to the north, what had to be the highest mountains Tim had ever seen. Danville had not been located in a desert, yet he had never seen country so green. Just a few days back, Tim remembered he had been traveling through rough, ugly, raw desert. Now he was in a paradise, albeit a paradise filled with danger. The snow had been an example of that.

  Toward sundown, Reno stopped at a relatively flat place that looked as if it had been an Indian encampment many years ago. Teepee poles still rose in a few places—though the hides used to cover them were long gone—and there were fire rings, not used in ages, and remnants of whiskey kegs.

  He pointed at a river. “That’s the Siskeedee-Agie. The Green. Over yonder’s where the padre, DeSmet, held mass. That was in 1840. Lifetime ago. Lot of water’s flowed through here since then.”

  “That was only five years ago,” Tim said.

  Reno’s head shook. “Feels like fifty. Lot can pass in five years, boy. By Jupiter, in five years, you might even fill them britches you’re wearing. Ain’t likely, though.” He swung from the saddle and picked up a piece from a busted rotted keg.

  “What did that padre think of that?” Tim smiled.

  So did Reno. “The padre didn’t come here to save our souls. He was out to convert the Indians. A good man, wise, but I swear, boy, DeSmet loved this land like I do. Held mass here, then let some Indians lead him way up there. See them rugged peaks yonder way. That’s the Gros Ventre Range. Preached to more than a thousand Flatheads, Nez Perce, and Pend Oreilles. Then went back East. Tell you what, boy, I saw a lot of me in that padre, and I reckon he saw a lot of him in me.”

  “But he went back. You never did.”

  “Never had much call to see cities again. But DeSmet come back. Very next year, he come back. Only 1840 was our last Rendezvous, so he couldn’t come with Bridger and the boys who guided him first time. Showed up here again, met another Flathead, and went up to preach and see the land. That time he went all the way into the Bitterroot Valley, and he built a mission—first one for the Jesuits in this country.” Reno’s head shook. “I was never partial to his black robes, but you got to marvel at a man like that.”

  He moved about then, setting up camp. Tim knew to help and before long, he knelt, holding a piece of steel between his thumb and index finger, and flint in his other hand. Quickly, he struck the steel against the rip and watched the sparks fly into the tinder he had set in the depression in the ground. He puffed when the sparks settled in th
e tinder, until he saw the orange glow. Cupping his hands, he blew again, but the tinder did not catch. It did less than a minute later, and when the smoke turned into fire, he fed a few twigs atop it.

  When the coffeepot was on the fire, Reno squatted across from Tim and pulled off the sack that hung around his neck, from which he withdrew the pipe and what he called tobacco.

  “Why do you carry your pipe and tobacco there?” Tim asked.

  Reno took a burning twig from the fire and held it to his pipe. He did not answer until the tobacco was burning and he had pulled in a deep draw, holding the smoke, before exhaling through his mouth. “This?” He picked up the pouch. “This is my gage d’amour. That’s what it’s for. Other foofaraw I keep in my possible sack.”

  That meant absolutely nothing to Tim. He pointed at the packs that had been removed from the mule grazing with the picketed horses. “And what are those?”

  Reno turned to look. “You mean my traps?”

  Tim nodded.

  “Six of them.” Reno let out a mirthless chuckle. “Don’t even know why I still carry them, beaver being practically all gone and not much of a market for them. Good money in the day, though, up to five dollars a pound. That would buy a man a smart of whiskey at the Rendezvous.”

  “How much was the whiskey?”

  Reno laughed. “Three dollars a pint. I bet you don’t know how much whiskey’d cost back in Danburg.”

  “Danville,” Tim corrected, surprising the trapper, who seemed to be in a halfway human mood. Maybe it had something to do with the jug he had been sipping on since the snow first started to fall and the jug that still sat by his side at the campfire. “Thirty cents a gallon.”

  He was a teenager after all, and boys knew about such things from listening to their fathers or the rabble that gathered about the grog shops that Tim’s mother, and Tim’s friends’ mothers did not know they were passing—very slowly and very curiously—each day after school.

  “Boy, you can be a wonder.” Reno’s head shook.

  What seemed a wonder to Tim, though, was how a man like Reno could get robbed blind by the whiskey peddlers at the Rendezvous. Thirty-cents-a-gallon to three-dollars-a-pint was one hefty markup.

  “How did it work?” Tim asked. “Trapping beaver?”

  Reno puffed again, leaned forward to spit in the fire, and answered, “Well, it was work.” He rose, weaving instead of walking straight, and made it to the packsaddle, where he reached into—maybe his possibles sack, Tim thought—and returned with a piece of wood, hollowed out with a stopper plugged in a hole, secured with a leather thong. Dropping beside Tim, Reno pulled out the stopper and held the wood container in Tim’s face. “Get a whiff of that, boy.” He seemed to be slurring his words.

  Tim almost vomited.

  Reno returned the stopper, tossed the container into the grass, and dropped back onto his buttocks, slapping his thighs with both hands. “That’s the bait, boy. Beavers loved it. Beaver castor. It’d draw them critters to the traps. You catch yourself a fat beaver, full grown, and take the castor out and that’s your base. I doctor mine up with mustard and some secrets I ain’t sharing. Put a few drops in your box with your trap. Beaver can smell a good ways, three hundred yards, maybe even farther than that. They smell that, and they’re on their way to becoming a skin.”

  “Anything could smell that,” Tim said, wiping his watering eyes.

  Reno remained talkative. “So I go and fetch me one of them steel traps. They weigh about five pounds, and each one has a chain on it, five feet long or thereabouts, with a swivel and ring at the end. I fix that to my float, wade into a stream or pond or some such, put the trap in water, five-six inches deep, drive the float deep into the mud, and tie the other end to the bank. Then I set the trap, dip a small stick in that there bait, put it right above the trip. Before long, here comes Mr. Beaver. He gets caught, drowned, and when I come back the next morning, I fetch him back to camp, skin him, cure the skin. Make my pile.”

  He sighed, picked up the jug, shook it around while listening closely, and then stoppered the jug and put it away. He decided to smoke his pipe some more. “Ought to sell those traps to some fool who thinks the beaver’s still prime.”

  “You ought to sell the bait.” Tim did not think he would ever get over the stink.

  “No, boy. Bait ain’t just for beaver. It’s a cure-all. Saved many a fool from a bullet or arrow wound. That’s no lie, boy. Pure gospel.”

  Tim wasn’t sure if Jed Reno could tell anything altogether true, but he did not argue. “You did that all year?”

  “Noooo.” Reno puffed again on the pipe. “Indians have a way with the circle. Teepee. It’s a circle. Camps. They’re a circle. The earth is a circle. All things be a circle, boy. Same with trapping.” Left hand holding the pipe, he raised his right hand over his head. “Winter, ponds and some rivers is all frozen over, buffalo are down in the valleys, beavers ain’t around. We’d build us a cabin, or we’d find some squaw at some Indian camp. Fix traps, and do our clothes mending. Rest up for spring.”

  His arm rotated down to his side. “Come spring, that’s when the beavers are prime. That’s when we’d do our first go at trapping.” The arm came down to his belly. “Then come summer, beavers are moving around, pelts not so prime, and they’re looking for food for the winter. That’s when we’d get ready and go to the Rendezvous, and we’d be drunker than you thought humanly possible. Fights and frolics and fun, boy. Rendezvous. Nothing like it in the world.”

  The arm came to his other side. “Then come fall, the beavers would find their home ponds, and we’d trap some more.” The arm returned to over his head. “Then it be winter. Another year come and gone. Circle. Always a circle, boy. Life be a circle.”

  The coffee was ready. Tim Colter figured that Jed Reno sure could use some.

  CHAPTER 28

  The next morning, Jed Reno woke up, as Tim’s Ma used to say, “on the wrong side of the bed.” He cursed the mule, the horses, the country, Father DeSmet, the wind, the mountains, himself, and, when Tim did not react to an order fast enough, Tim.

  The coffee they drank for breakfast did seem to settle him down a bit, and after he washed his face in the Green River, the mountain man seemed to be in better spirits. His eyes, however, remained bloodred, and his face still didn’t have its natural color.

  Once the mule’s packs were loaded and secured, and all three horses hobbled, Reno motioned at the pistols Tim had become accustomed to carrying in his belt and beckoned Tim to follow him.

  They stopped a good fifty yards from the animals, and Reno pointed at the remnants of what appeared to be a table. Fallen on its side, the middle plank of wood was missing. It was about fifteen yards ahead, half-swallowed by the high grass. “Screw-barrel first. Top plank.”

  Yesterday, the one-eyed trapper had talked like a schoolgirl. Today, he acted as if just lifting his tongue hurt like the devil. He leaned against his Hawken rifle, the stock butted on the damp ground, and groaned.

  Tim drew the pistol, made sure the priming powder wasn’t wet or fouled—or had blown out of the pan—and aimed one-handed at the target Reno had specified.

  They had been doing that pretty much every morning. One shot. Usually with one pistol, rotating the .45 with the massive Harper’s Ferry. That morning, it was the screw-barrel’s turn.

  The powder flashed in the pan, ignited the powder in the barrel, and the pistol roared. Tim had learned to step out of the smoke to see if his target was hit, although he heard the thud of lead against wood first and knew before his eyes confirmed the fact that his aim had proved true. The top corner of the table had been splintered by the .45-caliber ball.

  Immediately, he fetched a ball from his bag and began reloading the pistol.

  That was something else Jed Reno had taught him. An unloaded gun was worthless.

  As Tim plunged the bullet atop the fresh powder in the barrel, he sought out Reno, expecting to hear some praise from the crusty old man.

/>   What he heard, however, was, “Jupiter, that’s loud.” Reno rubbed his temple with his free hand.

  After returning the pistol to his belt, Tim looked at the trapper, expecting him to walk back toward the horses.

  Instead, Reno pointed at him. “Now the .54.”

  Tim knew better than to question anything Jed Reno told him. The man had to have some reason for testing both pistols, so Tim drew the heavy Harper’s Ferry cannon.

  “Other side,” Reno said. “Bottom corner.”

  Tim aimed, holding the weapon with both hands. The barrel steadied, he drew in an easy breath, held it for a moment, then exhaled, making sure of his target. He squeezed the trigger and felt his two hands buck from the .54’s recoil.

  He did not hear the thud of lead and ball, but through the white smoke, saw that the rotting edge of the table had disintegrated.

  What Tim wanted to do was leap for joy. He had hit both targets, clean shots, and no matter what Jed Reno might say, neither had been luck. He was getting better. He stood there, though, reloading the big horse pistol, not even looking at the mountain man.

  “All right,” Reno said. “Let’s ride.”

  As soon as they mounted the horses and rode toward the river, Reno pulled his big dun to a stop. Three men on horseback had stopped their horses at the edge of what once had been a rendezvous site. Two were Indians. The third was a white man, dressed in the same fashion as Reno.

  Softly, Reno swore and handed the lead rope to Colter. “Knew we shouldn’t be practicing shooting like that. Reckon they heard our racket. But one good thing about it. We’re on the right trail.”

  He rode alongside the mule and pulled the second rifle from the packs, then rode a few yards ahead of Tim, calling back, “Stay here, boy, but keep your pistols handy.”

  * * *

  Tim’s hands turned clammy, and a chill ran up his backbone. The coffee bounced around in his gut, and most of his body turned numb.