Sartain set his elbows on the table and touched a flame to his own cigarette, blowing smoke out his nostrils and waving out the lucifer. “I got no idea why they were so intent on dressin’ me in a wooden overcoat, Mr. Northcutt.”
“Call me ‘Dad.’ Most folks around here do. And since you’ve become such fast and close friends with Belle and all . . .”
“All right, Dad. I will share a secret with you, though, if you promise not to share it with Belle.”
“Secrets already? Say, you two oughta get hitched!” Dad wheezed a laugh and then choked on cigarette smoke. When he stopped convulsing, his face as bright as a freshly cooked brick, he said, “All right.” He twisted his fingers beside his mouth, locking his lips.
“Just before he died, Billy Brown told me that Belle and Japer Garvey were in on the robbery together.”
The old man said, “He did, did he?”
“You don’t seem shocked.”
“Well . . .” The old man drew on his quirley and looked away, blowing smoke toward the far side of the room from the bar. “Pshaw! Everybody’s got a theory. That don’t sound like Belle. At least, I don’t think it does. Come to think of it, she and ole Jasper were mighty. . .” He scowled and shook his head. “Ah, nuts! No, sir, I don’t believe it. Folks think all kinds of things when somethin’ like this happens. Nothin’ like stolen gold to start the yarn-spinners a-gildin’ their lilies!”
“You don’t seem to think it’s totally impossible.”
“Well, hell. Belle’s a headstrong kid, and she’s been trapped here in this little flea on a gnat’s ass of a wide spot on the trail for most of her life. But—ah, hell, I don’t believe that! There’s all kind of rumors goin’ around, and they began about five seconds after it started gettin’ odd that the sheriff and Garvey weren’t pullin’ into town with the strongbox.”
“What were the other rumors?” Sartain asked, blowing smoke and lifting his half-empty mug to his lips.
“Well, hell, folks started thinkin’ maybe both the sheriff and Garvey took off with the gold. Neither one of ’em is a rich man. Some folks—namely, them who had no fondness for the sheriff—started thinkin’ out loud that maybe he killed Garvey and headed for Mexico.”
Northcutt glanced past Sartain, throwing a cautionary look at the stairs. Lowering his voice, he continued, “They think maybe the sheriff is waitin’ down there for his daughter, who will join him after a reasonable amount of time has passed and it doesn’t look too odd that she’s sellin’ the saloon.”
“Uh-huh,” Sartain said, nodding as he pondered the possibility. “But if that were so, why would she bring me in, almost kill me to test my skills, and then put me on the scent of her old man?”
“Right,” Northcutt said. “I didn’t say I thought any of these rumors made sense. I’m just tellin’ you what’s been goin’ around town and the whole damn county.”
“Any more theories?”
“Aside from Belle’s theory, which is also shared by others, you mean? Well, sure—they mighta been cut down by road agents. And, if you ask me, that’s most likely what happened. Could have been bushwhacked by the same gang them bounty hunters was after before you made it so they wouldn’t be after anything anymore. At least, not on this side of the sod.”
“I assume someone has ridden into the mountains to investigate.”
“Sure, sure. I did myself. Gotta admit, my trackin’ skills ain’t what they used to be. Once upon a time, I could track a nekkid Apache over a caprock under cover of darkness, but the peepers have dimmed a might. I rode both trails, didn’t see hide nor hair. Though, like I said, that don’t really mean much.”
“Has anyone else investigated?”
“Oh, I’m sure the mine owner, Maragon, sent someone out to investigate. I was here when he sent a courier down to the Wells Fargo office to wire the Pinkertons, askin’ them for help. The Pinkerton rode through here last week, asked a few questions, and headed on up the mountains. Didn’t seem like the capable sort to me. Ain’t seen the federal marshals Maragon asked for. Likely won’t tell next year.” Northcutt chuckled, sipped his coffee again, and licked his mustache. “Now, Belle’s a smart girl. Too smart for her own good sometimes. She wouldn’t call in a man like you unless she really wanted you to find her father and the gold, or at least find out what happened. To him and Garvey and the gold. No, sir.”
Sartain pondered the puzzle. Coming up with only more questions, he asked Northcutt for directions to the mine.
“There’s two trails—Weaver’s Meadow Trail, and the Old Ute Trail,” the oldster said, tapping ash from his cigarette onto the floor. “Higgins always went up into the mountains via one trail and came down the other. He never told me—or anyone, as far as I know—which trail he’d be taking whichaway. It was his way of lessening his chances of getting held up, so I don’t know which way he went into the mountains and which way he started down. Doubt he told anyone up at the mine, either. The sheriff was the cautious sort.”
Northcutt went on to draw both trails to the mine with his fingers on the table and laid out the landmarks Sartain should look for. He told The Revenger it was a good four-day trip, two days climbing, another day and a half coming back down.
“Another cup of coffee?” he asked, stubbing his cigarette out on the table. Judging by the scars, it wasn’t the first quirley mashed out on the age-silvered boards. “Stove should be hot enough by now. I can cook you some breakfast. How’s ham and eggs sound? I just brought the eggs in from the Burlinson coop. Still warm from the hens’ behinds!”
“That does sound good,” Sartain said, finishing his coffee. “But maybe next time, on my way back through town. I’m burnin’ daylight, Mr. Northcutt.”
“Dad!”
“I mean, Dad.”
“That gold’s been gone nearly two months now. Same with the sheriff and Garvey. You got time for a bite o’ my vittles—which ain’t too shabby, I might add, despite what Belle might say about ’em. She musta taken some juice out of ya last night. You look a little yellow around the gills. A near-virgin in heat will do that to a feller. Just glad it was you and not me. If it was me, I’d likely be gettin’ fitted for a wooden overcoat about now. Food will put some lead back in your gun.”
The old man rose, winking and cackling. “If’n you get my drift?”
Sartain thought the man was probably right. He did feel a little hollowed out and bone-tired. His gun needed some lead. Another cup of coffee and some belly padding might be just what the doctor ordered. And what his trip into the Sangre de Cristos required.
“All right, Dad, you done twisted my arm,” Sartain said and got up to refill his mug at the coffee pot.
Chapter 7
An hour later, with a grub sack that Dad had packed for him hanging from his saddle horn, Sartain put Boss onto the trail that led northeast out of Silverthorne. The two-track wagon trail wound through sage and wheat-colored bunchgrass over tabletop-flat country for about three miles. Then it began to climb—first over low hogbacks and then twisting up through the creases between crumbling buttes.
The country quickly grew more rugged. Prettier, too.
The bunchgrass and sage gave way to cedar and piñon stippling the shelving rock formations and pitch-roofed mesas. A creek meandered along the ever-climbing and twisting and turning trail for short stretches before swerving away and then swinging back to it for a few more twists and turns before dropping down into a canyon obscured by pines and taller, greener grass and ferns.
The air was rich with the tang of pine resin and the verdant green smell of forest duff. As Sartain continued to climb, the cool air drying his sweaty shirt and vest and burning like a hot iron against the back of his neck, the sounds were birds chirping—nuthatches, magpies, and robins—and squirrels chittering noisily from pine boughs. Occasionally he heard the low roar of a falls echoing up from the canyon.
He kept a close eye on the trail, looking for any sign of a holdup or shooting. Two months’ worth
of wind and rain would have erased hoofprints, but there still might be a cartridge casing or two, or maybe some blood staining a shrub.
Around noon, he swung off the trail into the deep, sun-dappled pine forest and drew Boss to a halt near another narrower creek rippling down from the higher reaches, its bed studded with mossy rocks and lined with boulders, dense grass, and ferns. Dark trout pools cut into the banks. One such pool, under an escarpment of black granite, had toppled a good-sized aspen. The aspen’s dead branches would make a hot fire.
A prime place for lunch.
He unsaddled and hobbled Boss in the grass near the creek, rubbed the horse down, and gave him some grain. Then he dug a small firepit, ringed it with stones, and snapped off some of the dead aspen branches. When he’d gathered tinder comprised of bark, dried pine needles, and cones, he built a fire and brewed coffee.
Dad had made him some ham and egg sandwiches on crusty wheat bread, and he ate one of these with some cheese he’d bought in Alamosa, washing it down with the hot black coffee. Finished with the main meal, he ate peaches from an airtight tin with his fingers and washed the sugary dessert down with another cup of coffee.
He wanted to head on up the trail, but he found the previous night’s lack of sleep weighing heavy on his shoulders, tugging on his eyelids. The lulling music of the creek dropping down the slope and over the shelving rocks in its bed, the warm sun shining down through the forest canopy, and the rich fragrance of the woods only further convinced him that he needed a nap.
He laid down in the soft grass, rested his head against the wool underside of his saddle, and tugged his hat brim down over his eyes.
He intertwined his hands on his belly, and the piping of the robins and the warm, fragrant breeze caressing his face soon had him snoring. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed when he woke with a jerk.
Something had reached into his unconscious and pulled him out of his slumber. It was a sixth sense keen for possible trouble that his years of hunting and being hunted had developed and honed.
He looked around, blinking and shrugging off the sleep that had ensconced him. Boss stood near the water, tail arched, ears twitching, staring into the pines on the far side of the six-foot-wide creek. Sartain followed Boss’s gaze. Something was moving in the forest about fifty, maybe sixty yards away. There was a splash of red moving there, and maybe some yellow and tan.
A person, most likely. Possibly someone trying to sneak up on him.
Sartain shucked his Henry from his saddle sheath, walked over, and ran a soothing hand down Boss’s neck. “Easy, boy. You stay here and stay quiet. I’m gonna check it out.”
The horse gave a quiet snort of understanding and lowered his snout toward the grass once more, but Boss’s ears kept twitching and he kept his eyes on the forest beyond the creek.
Sartain moved upstream, which was also upslope, about fifty feet, and then crossed the creek on a short stretch of beaver dam composed of a fallen aspen and intricately woven aspen and fir branches. On the creek’s opposite side, he crouched as he traced a zigzagging path through the trees, using the pine boles for cover as he moved as quietly as possible toward the movement in the forest beyond and slightly downhill from him now.
He topped a rise, dropped into a shallow ravine threaded by a spring-fed rivulet, and climbed three-quarters up the opposite ridge. Doffing his hat, he crawled the rest of the way and edged a slow, cautious look over the ridge crest littered with old leaves and pine needles. Shadbark and ferns screened him from the view of the person in the next shallow ravine.
Sartain had no problem discerning that the person was a woman. A pretty blonde woman, at that. She’d opened her man’s plaid wool shirt and, kneeling beside the little stream that trickled through the ravine as well, facing in The Revenger’s direction, she was cupping water to her pale breasts. She’d pulled an undershirt up to her neck.
In spite of the Revenger’s recent tussle with Belle the night before, his throat constricted at the surreal vision of this young woman—her thick hair, the color of the summer sun, pulled behind her head in a loose French braid—making her ablutions in the fragrant forest with birds chirping all around and a crow cawing somewhere in the distance. The sun slanting through the pines shone like diamonds the same color as the woman’s hair on the surface of the chuckling brook.
She was leaning far forward over the water. Her porcelain-pale, cherry-tipped bosoms jostled and swayed as she cupped water to each one, in turn, slowing massaging the refreshing liquid into each. Sartain chided himself for not pulling his head back and giving the woman some privacy, but what man in such a situation would?
He’d slip away in a second and she’d never know he’d been here.
When she was finished bathing, she lowered her head to the water and drank, slurping audibly. For some reason, those sounds further warmed the blood coursing through Sartain’s loins.
A mule brayed loudly. Sartain jerked with a start.
He’d been too enamored of the woman to have done more than merely notice and vaguely register the short cream mule standing beyond the woman, partly screened by shrubs and trees. The woman did more than merely notice and vaguely register Sartain, however.
She’d snapped her head up quickly with a gasp, and as her eyes darted up the slope and locked with Sartain’s through the brush that had inadequately screened him, she gave a clipped cry. She pushed to her feet with one hand while pressing her other arm across her chest. Wheeling, she ran over to the mule, which was outfitted with a wooden pack frame and canvas panniers.
A rifle was also strapped to it, and this she quickly shucked from its scabbard.
His face burning with shame, Sartain left his rifle on the ground and rose to stand with both his hands in the air. “Miss, I do apologize. I didn’t mean to intrude. My horse just warned me that . . . Hold on, miss! I’m tryin’ to explain!”
But she was listening to none of it. Instead, she loudly pumped a cartridge into her old Spencer’s chamber and, jaws hard, cheeks flushed with fury, and eyes narrowed, she raised the carbine to her shoulder. The rifle belched, stabbing smoke and fire, and the slug tore up dirt and leaves near The Revenger’s boots.
“Miss, I assure you I meant no harm!”
She was pumping another round into the chamber and, to avoid getting himself deservedly drilled by the understandably piss-burned woman, he wheeled and flung himself back down the slope. The woman’s bullet snapped the brush near where he’d been standing a quarter-second before. Sartain landed hard on his right hip and shoulder, rolled, and then crawled back up to retrieve his rifle.
The woman’s carbine barked twice more, and then a third and fourth time, each bullet snapping and throwing brush or pluming dirt and pine needles. A pinecone bounced down the slope to roll up against his right boot.
“I apologize, miss!” Climbing to a low crouch, Sartain scuttled back down the slope like a schoolboy who’d just been caught peering through the half-moon hole in the girl’s privy door.
Only when he’d hopscotched the dam and was back on the same side of the creek as his horse did he start to wonder who she was and what she was doing out here. That, he supposed, was no more his business than what he’d been watching her do.
His ears were still red as he approached the camp. It didn’t help that Boss turned to him with what he couldn’t help believing was an admonishing cast to his copper-eyed gaze. The stallion gave his tail a sharp, derogatory switch. Of course, there was no way the horse could know what Sartain had been caught doing, but some folks thought horses had a sixth sense, and the way Boss pawed the ground as though openly jeering his master, Sartain was beginning to wonder.
“Ah, shut up. If you’d seen her, and seen how well set up she was, you’d have ogled her too.”
With a sense of genuine shame, and hoping he hadn’t scared the woman too badly, he broke camp, first kicking dirt on his fire and then kicking the rocks onto the dirt, making sure the flames were thoroughly out. Then he g
athered his gear.
Her image stayed with him, however, as he rode back out to the main trail and resumed his journey. You didn’t find too many women as good-looking as she was out here. Of course, he’d found Belle, who was this young lady’s equal, but gals like Belle and the blonde were generally few and far between. The Western frontier—and especially mining country—was notoriously hard on women.
This lass must have been some prospector’s daughter. She’d probably been having an afternoon in the mountains by herself, enjoying some rare, precious time away from her otherwise endless chores, only to have her sojourn ruined by some degenerate ogling her from the brush while she’d stolen a few minutes to relax and cool off.
Sartain cursed himself for a low-life, but he couldn’t help chuckling. She might have been a rarefied beauty, but she knew her way around a rifle, and she’d damned near kicked him off with a bullet. Maybe he’d learned his lesson.
“The next time you come upon some blonde-headed forest sprite bathing her titties in a creek, just ride on, old hoss!”
He snorted another laugh and then started scrutinizing the trail, focusing on the task at hand.
The trail continued to twist, turn, and rise ever higher, stone fingers of eroded rock towering over him, high above the sun-splashed tops of the firs, pines, and tamaracks. Occasionally, the trail flattened out as it snaked through an open valley or across a clearing, but it soon rose again.
All that first day on the trail, aside from the blonde forest sprite, he didn’t see another soul. He didn’t see many tracks on the trail he was following, either. A few shod horses had made their stamp on the two-track trace, and two or three light wagons, but that was all.
Apparently, the Weaver’s Meadow Trail didn’t see much traffic, though Sartain knew gold and silver had long since been discovered in the Sangre de Cristos, and he suspected plenty of miners and prospectors had staked their claims up here somewhere. It was a vast range, however, studded with deep hanging valleys, stretches of forests, beaver meadows divided by crags, and dogleg canyons. The Revenger just didn’t happen upon any of them.
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