The Wolves of Seven Pines

by E. L. Ripley

  It was a forest like none Carpenter had ever seen before, with vast trees and mountain slopes covered with boulders the size of houses. The sun emerged to warm the ground and light up the path with a scattered speckling of gold over the ever-present carpet of pine needles.

  They crested a rise, coming into something like a clearing and nearly stumbling over a cluster of mushrooms that stood as tall as their ankles. Carpenter considered the position of the sun, then looked ahead.

  “How fine should we cut it when we get to the camp?” he asked Silva. “Simpler to take it on the north.”

  “I’ll defer to you, Mr. Carpenter. I’m a poor navigator at the best of times.”

  He sighed. “Then, though I don’t care for any more nights than necessary on the ground, I would say we take our time. Hope that Hale loses interest, if he is keeping an eye out. Or that be believes we’ve gotten past him.”

  “Seems reasonable.”

  The sun brought heat with it, and by late afternoon, the bubbling of the river was too much to resist. It was a narrow stretch with a good deal of the water in rocky shallows. It was a good place to stop and bathe, and nice enough to look at that it wouldn’t have been half bad just to sit idle.

  As they climbed out to dry and dress, Carpenter stopped in his tracks.

  “What’s the matter?” Silva joined him, wiping water out of his eyes.

  “My eyes are even worse than I thought.” Carpenter pointed to a small pile of stones. It must have been there all along; they had walked right past it, more interested in the cool water of the river than anything else. “Savages, you think?”

  Silva shook his head. “Prospector. To show that he’s already panned here.”

  “I thought they used flags.”

  “They’re meant to. Only, there shouldn’t be any claims here. This is all the commissioner’s land.”

  “That won’t stop anyone.”

  “Clearly. We had best be wary; whoever put this here is in violation of one law already. He might see fit to violate another.”

  He was right. They had strolled along without a care, but no matter how much it might seem they were the only two men in these mountains, they most certainly were not. Still, they were better off to follow the water in the open than to go creeping through the brush.

  Some half a mile down, they paused again. Though the breeze tried gamely, it couldn’t completely carry the smell away.

  Silva covered his mouth with his shirt, but Carpenter didn’t. It was an unmistakable odor. He’d spent long enough at war to know a rotting body when he smelled one.

  “Must we?” Silva asked, following his gaze into the trees.

  “Might as well,” Carpenter replied.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  There wasn’t much left of him.

  Wolves had done for the rest, and done it thoroughly enough that there was no telling what had killed him. Perhaps he had worked too hard, or been injured and succumbed to sickness. Or maybe the wolves themselves had done it. The poor fellow had had no weapon to defend himself by the look of things, but if it was men who had done this, they might have taken it. He did have a piece of paper crudely drawn on with charcoal. Carpenter couldn’t make sense of it, but he put it in his pocket anyway.

  “Wait a minute,” Carpenter said, hefting a small bag. “My mistake. He wasn’t robbed.”

  Silva was holding his distance and his nose. Carpenter threw him the bag, which he caught.

  Silva pulled the strings and opened it, looking surprised. “Gold,” he said. “Not as much as it looks like, though. There’s stone here as well.”

  “Still enough to make a man curious.”

  One of the man’s canvas bags was still intact, likely because there hadn’t been any food in it.

  “The only thing I’m curious about is how long you want to linger,” Silva said.

  “We still have to bury him.”

  “There’s a time to stop being decent.”

  “Maybe so, but this ain’t it.”

  Silva groaned and joined him, picking up the prospector’s shovel. “Here?” he asked, irked.

  “Go down a bit. The earth will be softer.” Carpenter pointed.

  “At once, sir,” Silva replied dryly.

  A burial was necessary, and a marker. That was all, though. They would still take what might be useful. The trek ahead would be long, and making it with nothing but a shaving knife would likely make it feel a good deal longer. Carpenter had no particular compunction about robbing the dead man under the circumstances; he wasn’t superstitious.

  Silva dug, and Carpenter used the line he’d woven on the way for snares to tie a cross for the prospector. An hour later the work was done, though the flies still gathered in the air.

  Together, they considered the grave.

  There was an obligation to say something, but nothing came to mind. Carpenter was no preacher, and he’d never been especially pious. Silva seemed to be of the same mind.

  “Lonely way to die,” Carpenter murmured after a minute, wiping his brow.

  Silva just nodded.

  They returned to the water, where the fresh air and the breeze carried away the worst of the smell, though it still lingered about the canvas bag. They had taken a sack of tobacco from the dead man, among other things, and Carpenter hoped the odor wouldn’t stay tenaciously enough to deter them from smoking it.

  There were rabbit dens under some of the smaller trees, and the prospector had had wire in his pockets, so there was no more need for milkweed. Carpenter tied snares and placed them, then rejoined Silva at the edge of the water, perching on a rock still warm from the sun, which was getting low.

  “We haven’t made but five miles today,” he noted.

  “If that,” Silva agreed, resting his chin on his hands and staring at the distant peaks.

  Carpenter considered this side of the river, then the other. There weren’t any markers here.

  After several minutes, he got to his feet and rolled up his trouser legs. Silva looked on curiously as he took the prospector’s pan from the bag and waded out, feeling with his toes for promising gravel.

  The truth was, he’d always wanted to try it. It wasn’t as though he’d get a better chance.

  He got a bit of gravel and went about the business of sloshing the water from side to side.

  Unable to help himself, Silva waded out curiously for a closer look.

  “Is this what it is?” he asked, unimpressed. “This is what they all come all this way for?”

  “You want to do it a certain way,” Carpenter murmured distractedly. He switched to sloshing in a circular motion.

  “Why?”

  “The gold is heavy. This will keep it at the bottom. We get rid of the rest.”

  “I know that much, Mr. Carpenter.” Of course he did; he’d been to school.

  Carpenter carried the pan back to a rock and set it down, picking out some of the larger stones.

  “To do this all day,” Silva said, shaking his head. “I know they do, but I don’t believe I could.”

  “All day. But with method,” Carpenter explained. “To determine where the real gold is.”

  “How, though? That part, I don’t fully understand.”

  “If I knew that, I might have tried my hand at it.”

  “At your age?”

  “Why not? Gold will do that to a man.”

  Together, they poked through the silt and fine gravel that remained in the bottom of the pan.

  “This is good,” Carpenter noted. “Black sand.”

  “It’s not sand. It’s metal.”

  “Is it? I only know that it means we did it right.”

  “Tedious work, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, but look there.” Carpenter indicated with a dripping finger. There was a tiny glimmer
in the dirty water. He scooped it out, and separated the tiny piece of gold from the sand. It was hardly larger than a few grains of the sand, but it was unquestionably gold.

  “Well,” Silva said.

  “Isn’t it something?”

  “It really is.”

  Carpenter peered past him. “And upstream, somewhere, there’s a meaningful deposit.” He snorted and shook his head. “Finding it, though . . .”

  “Shall we try again?” Silva asked, taking the pan, not bothering to hide the eagerness on his face. Panning wouldn’t make him rich, but it was a novel diversion for a while.

  Birds erupted from the trees, and the crack of a rifle shot was what had made them do it.

  The bullet struck the pan, sending it spinning in the air, sand and water flying.

  Silva was faster to act than Carpenter was, pulling him down to the stream and behind a boulder. Silva held his pistol above the water but didn’t lean out to look. The shot had come from upriver, in the trees on the south side. The shooter had to be some distance off, or he wouldn’t have missed.

  The pan struck the water, and Silva pointed. Carpenter wasn’t inclined to make it a debate.

  Silva rose, firing rapidly as Carpenter made a run for it, splashing through the shallows and onto the bank. He snatched up what he could of their belongings on his way to shelter behind a thick tree.

  Another shot came from the rifle, but Silva scrambled out of the river unscathed.

  They plunged into the trees, making as fast as possible for better cover. It had been naive to think that because no pursuer had caught up to them at once there was no pursuit. Giving in to laziness and following the water had been bad enough; giving in to sloth and simply waiting to be killed had been nothing short of an invitation to that bullet.

  Carpenter would never know if he’d really been foolish enough to think they were safe or if he had just convinced himself that they ought to be. It was too easy to let suspicions lie, to tell himself that the details didn’t matter when the bullets were flying.

  The truth was what it had always been, what should have been obvious to him from the beginning: Hale hadn’t meant to run Silva out of town. That had not been anyone’s goal, and it hurt that Carpenter had allowed himself to believe it. Of course, if merely convincing Silva to leave had been the intent, they would have made no effort to stop him. There would have been no need for jailing him.

  And certainly no cause for pursuing him. But here Carpenter and Silva were, crashing over loose, crumbling rocks that threatened to send them tumbling down slopes, scratched and cut every step of the way by sharp branches because all of those things were preferable to the alternative.

  Silva had never been meant to leave Antelope Valley.

  Carpenter lost his footing, but caught a sturdy branch and stayed on his feet, staggering down the hill and into a clearing. Silva was already there, tipping the spent cartridges out of his pistol, but he had no more. Even if he had, they wouldn’t have done any good.

  It was hard to know who was out there. Whoever it was, they had poor judgment to have attempted that shot, and they had made very poor time in their pursuit. But in the end, despite those things, they would still be soldiers, or men who had been at one time. Their slow pace suggested more of them, not fewer.

  There was nothing as obvious as crashing footsteps to give away their pursuers, but all the birds had gone quiet, and a new sound rose up over the distant rushing of the river. They stumbled to a halt, gasping for breath and looking up in wonder.

  The howling was such a powerful chorus that Carpenter wouldn’t have thought there could possibly have been so many wolves in the world.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The moon hung in the air all but full, taunting them.

  Never had Carpenter covered so much ground on foot, even as a young man, even during the war. At least in the war, they had marched like civilized people. This mad, ragged dash across the mountains was another matter entirely, and it didn’t suit him.

  Silva fared little better. He was younger but not stronger.

  The howling had died down hours ago, and Carpenter was more worried about bullets now. Fred had to be behind that rifle; he was the only one foolish enough to ruin everything with a greedy shot. It might have been Isaiah with him or O’Doul, or the both of them, or even John as well. It wouldn’t have been Hale’s younger hired men; clearly his true intent wasn’t known to them or even to his own son. William had tried in good faith to drive Silva out. He’d taken his father’s words at face value.

  No, the only ones Hale would have trusted enough for this work were his own men, the ones he had known a long time. That was good; even the youngest of them was over forty, so they couldn’t be making much better time than Carpenter and Silva.

  They found a shallow brook and waded upstream for at least three hundred yards before continuing into the brush. That would stand a good chance of shaking off their followers, at least for a while.

  With the sun down, it wasn’t long until the cold set in, but it was only after they finally stopped moving that they started to shiver. Not a word had passed between them since the river, but Carpenter considered it a point of pride that he wasn’t groaning in pain with every move he made. He settled on the pine needles and put his back against a tree. He didn’t know how many days this body had left in it, but if they were days like this one, it wouldn’t be many.

  Silva was just a shape in the dark. A fire was out of the question. A smoke, though? He didn’t have the strength to roll it.

  “I take it they want what you buried,” he said finally. “Was that why William was watching you?”

  “No. He wouldn’t have ridden on, if so. He was just to let his father know that I really had come back.”

  “What did you bury?”

  “My patent. Plans. Some money.” Silva sighed, propping his feet up against another tree. “It’s the patent he wants.”

  Carpenter put his face in his hands and rubbed.

  Driving Silva out and putting a stop to the factory had never been to Hale’s advantage; of course he’d never really wanted it gone.

  He’d wanted it to be his.

  “It don’t make sense,” Carpenter groaned, running his hand through his hair. “Why?”

  “There is only one reason, Mr. Carpenter.”

  “I know that.” He sighed. “He made money after the war. I know he did.”

  “I can never know for certain,” Silva replied. “My inference was that he overplayed.”

  “I wrote to the man. He wrote to me.”

  “I am sure he mentioned only his successes. Hale is a vain man, Mr. Carpenter.”

  That much he’d already known. He grimaced.

  “I believe he looked to the west and he saw the gold, the camps, and the profits flowing, but did not understand. These men are not uncommon. They see the success of others and attempt to duplicate it without ever properly understanding why it came about.” He hesitated for a moment. “I wonder if Mr. Hale, in his haste, did not wish to wait for credible intelligence of a likely gold deposit.”

  It took Carpenter a moment to take his meaning. “You want to say that instead of following the prospectors to Antelope Valley, he incited them to go in the first place?”

  “He may have had a rumor,” Silva suggested, “or something to that effect to guide him.”

  “He gambled and lost,” Carpenter growled. “I can believe it. The man always was the worst card player that God ever cursed this earth with. What I can’t believe is that he’s doing this.”

  “He’s your friend.”

  “That ain’t the point. You want to tell me he’s a common robber.”

  Silva snapped the branch he’d been toying with. “I don’t have to tell you,” he said quietly, and that was true enough.

  Carpenter had seen all of the s
igns for himself. It was pathetic that it had taken him this long to look at it with clear eyes, but now that he had, he couldn’t find it in himself to be surprised.

  The urgency in the things that Hale had done: Carpenter had noted it before, and he hadn’t been wrong.

  “He owes money,” he said.

  “I expect he does,” Silva replied.

  “To someone who puts the fear of God in him.”

  “Or the fear of something more meaningful. And immediate.”

  Carpenter groaned. Silva let out something that might have been a laugh.

  “You look as though you’re the one who’s had his house burned.” A pause. “And his hound butchered.”

  Carpenter swallowed. “You’re butchering my memories, Silva. And they have some value for me. Or I should say that they did.”

  The other man grunted noncommittally, but he understood even if he wouldn’t say so. The shadows of the past stretched so long that the present was lost in them. The two of them hadn’t eaten, and they carried nothing helpful with them. Nothing to make a snare with, and nothing for fishing, not that Carpenter had any intention of going back to the river. Hunger and thirst weren’t the foremost things on his mind, but they would be soon. The growling of his belly wouldn’t let him forget it, and Silva was no better off.

  “Hale’s foolishness and his debt became my misfortune,” the younger man mused.

  Carpenter didn’t reply to that. It was succinct, and though he didn’t take kindly to it, it was true.

  “How far do you suppose I’ll have to go,” Silva went on, “to be away from him and all this?”

  “I couldn’t tell you.” There had been a time when he’d have had an answer, but that was behind him. Tonight he’d opened his eyes to all of it, and it was as though he didn’t know anything at all. Of all the men to give advice, he would be the last.

  “You’re his friend, aren’t you?” Silva pressed.

  “Yes.”

  “If he’s willing to turn on you, I suppose there is no saying how far he’ll go. May I at least stop running once I reach the Atlantic?”