CHAPTER 4
The warmth from the campfire felt mighty good to the five men huddled around it. Not far away, their unsaddled horses stood heads down and rumps to the wind. The men felt sort of like doing the same thing.
“I’m still not sure building a fire was a good idea,” Warren Hopgood said, “but I’ve got to admit, we’d be freezing our tails off without it.”
“I kept an eye on our back-trail all day and never saw no sign of a posse,” Deke Mahoney said. “Anyway, it feels like a storm buildin’, and even if some of those townies from Staghorn came after us, they’re bound to have turned back as soon as that first blast o’ cold air hit ’em in the face.”
Hopgood nodded as he cupped his gloved hands around a cup of coffee. “We can sure hope so.”
The bulk of a bandage wrapped around his upper left arm was visible under his coat sleeve. Earlier, as soon as the outlaws were far enough away from the scene of the bank robbery and murders to risk it, they had stopped and Magnus Stevenson had cleaned and bound up the wound on Hopgood’s arm.
Hopgood had lost quite a bit of blood and his arm would be stiff and sore for a while, but he could still use it. To help with the pain, he had spiked his coffee with a good slug of whiskey from a flask.
“You know,” Stevenson said now, “I was paying attention while I was sitting there pretending to read that newspaper.”
“Well, I should hope so,” Mahoney said. “It’s your job to be lookout, after all.”
“No, I mean I was listening to what people were saying while they walked past me or stood around on the boardwalk, talking. You never know what you’ll pick up that way.”
In a voice almost as frigid as the wind, Otis Harmon said, “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out, Stevenson.” The gunman had never had much in the way of patience.
“The telegrapher had left his office and come over to the hardware store to pick up something, and as he left he was talking to a friend of his he’d run into there. You know how those fellas aren’t supposed to tell anything that’s in the telegrams they send, but some of them just can’t help themselves. They’ve got to drop a few hints to make themselves sound important.”
Seeing the angry look on Harmon’s lean face, Mahoney said, “Best get on with it, Magnus.”
“There’s a big money shipment coming in to the bank in Reno,” Stevenson said. “The telegrapher in Staghorn had to pass along a message about it because of trouble in the lines somewhere else. I don’t know why the money’s coming, but it’s supposed to be there before Christmas. I think one of those big mining tycoons is bringing it in. Maybe he wants to buy out another mine owner or something and needs cash for the deal.”
Mahoney rubbed his beard-stubbled chin and frowned in thought. “Reno, eh? That’s less than half a day’s ride north of here.”
“It’s a bigger town than Staghorn,” Hopgood pointed out. “More law. We wouldn’t be able to hooraw everybody into ducking for cover.”
“A job like that would take some good plannin’, all right,” Mahoney admitted.
“We’d need Frank for that.”
“Frank ain’t here. You said yourself he’s supposed to get out of prison any day now,” Hopgood cut in. “Hell, for all we know, he’s already out. You got that letter from him six months ago. He told you to get in touch with him when the time came and let him know where we were so he could join up with us. But you haven’t done that, have you, Deke?”
“I just ain’t got around to it,” Mahoney said, unable to keep a surly tone out of his voice.
In truth, he had been dragging his feet about contacting Frank Colbert because he didn’t relish the idea of giving up leadership of the gang. They had pulled off a number of successful jobs while Colbert was in prison. Nothing spectacular, mind, and there had been some lean times as well, but Mahoney believed they had garnered a respectable amount of loot under his command.
Now Colbert intended to come in and take over again like he’d never been gone. At least, that was what Mahoney assumed was his intention. Nobody could blame him for not cottoning overmuch to the idea.
“There’s a telegraph office in Reno,” Hopgood said. “I think we should ride up there tomorrow and start getting the lay of the land. You can send a wire to that saloon where you’re supposed to get in touch with Frank, tell him where we are and that we’ve got a line on a good job to pull, and maybe he can join us in time to figure out how to go about it.”
“If the wires don’t blow down in this wind,” Stevenson said. “And if the weather holds and the pass stays clear enough for the trains to get through. Hard to say for sure about things like that at this time of year.”
Hopgood said, “It’s always hard to predict everything. What do you other boys say? Should we ride to Reno tomorrow?”
“Now, hold on there,” Mahoney said as he leaned forward. “I’ve been makin’ the decisions here. Frank left me in charge, and all of you know it.”
“Times change,” Hopgood replied. “I don’t reckon it’ll hurt anything to see what everybody thinks. That way you can make your decision better.”
Anger boiled up inside Mahoney. He wanted to yank out his Colt and blast Hopgood for challenging him like this. All five of them knew good and well that Hopgood was actually calling for a vote on whether Mahoney was actually in charge of the gang anymore.
What stopped Mahoney from giving in to the impulse was his uncertainty over how the others would respond, especially Harmon, who was the fastest on the draw of all of them. If Harmon took Hopgood’s side, he could have his gun out before Mahoney ever cleared leather. A bullet blasted through Mahoney’s guts would settle things, sure enough.
So Mahoney kept a tight rein on his temper and said, “All right, fair enough. What do you boys think?”
Jim Bob Mitchell drew his Bowie and ran the tip of the blade under the dirty thumbnail on his other hand. With the usual pleasant smile he wore even when he was killing people, he said, “Goin’ to Reno sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Hell, if nothin’ else, you said we cleared near nine hunnerd dollars in that Staghorn job, Deke, and that’d be a good place to spend some of it on good whiskey and bad women.”
“I can’t argue with that,” Stevenson said. “Based on what I overheard, it’s worth checking out, anyway.”
“I say we go,” Harmon bit off in clipped tones.
Hopgood shrugged. “It’s settled then. Unless you can come up with a good reason not to, Deke.”
Mahoney knew that further argument would result in outright rebellion. And with him outnumbered four to one, there was only one way that would end. He had no doubt that eventually he would wind up in a cold, lonely grave. That was nearly always an outlaw’s fate. But he didn’t want it to be tonight.
“All right,” he said with a nod. “Come mornin’, we head for Reno.”
Before any of them could say anything else, a sound cut through the night, carried on the frigid wind. At first Mahoney thought it was a wolf’s howl, but then he realized there was something different about it, something almost . . . human . . . like the wail of a lost soul. But at the same time, it held the shivering ferocity of a wild beast.
“What the hell is that?” Stevenson exclaimed.
The cry died, shredded and whipped away by the wind. Harmon grunted and said, “Wolf.”
“I don’t know,” Mitchell said, and for once he wasn’t grinning. “It didn’t sound exactly like any wolf I’ve ever heard.”
Hopgood said, “It doesn’t matter. It was some kind of wild animal, and that means it won’t come anywhere near this fire. And we’ll be taking turns standing watch all night, so if any varmint does come around, it’ll get a dose of hot lead.”
“Yeah,” Mahoney said. “Nothing to worry about.”
He wished he believed that. But between the near-mutiny of the other outlaws and the bizarre cry that had just swept over the foothills, his stomach had started to hurt.
Maybe being the boss was too much of a burden. Maybe it would be better to just turn everything over to Frank again, so he could stop thinking and worrying all the time. The more he thought about it, the more appealing that prospect sounded.
He sipped his coffee, peered narrow eyed into the darkness, and wished this night was over.
Donner Summit
Elmore “Juniper” Jones stepped out of the hotel onto the platform covered by a long snowshed and pulled his coat tighter around himself as the icy wind tried to bite into him. He had stepped away from his telegraph key for a moment to check the weather, and as he looked up into the night sky, he didn’t like what he saw.
Nothing but blackness hung over Donner Pass tonight. Not even a hint of starlight penetrated the thick clouds. Jones sniffed at the air. He had been around the Sierra Nevadas, man and boy, for nigh on to fifty years. He could smell snow.
Of course, it helped when he could also feel the little crystals hitting his cheeks, like a couple of them did just now.
It was starting.
The westbound had come through earlier that day, stopping as usual at the Summit Hotel, and Jones had exchanged a few words with old Clete Patterson, the engineer. Patterson was worried that a big snowstorm was building up and might break any time. Jones had had the same feeling. The two old-timers had commiserated about the looming change in the weather.
But Patterson got to go on and was well out of the mountains by now. Jones was stuck here at the summit. If a blizzard came through, the hotel might be cut off from the outside world for days, even weeks.
James Cardwell had built the original hotel at the summit of Donner Pass a little more than thirty years earlier, when the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, meant the country was finally linked, coast to coast, by the steel rails. Cardwell had envisioned travelers stopping here in the high Sierras and making the hotel a successful resort. And so it had been until fire destroyed the place.
Cardwell had rebuilt, though, and the Summit Hotel had carried on. The railroad tracks, covered by snowsheds, ran right past the platform at the hotel’s front door. Telegraph wires linked the establishment to Sacramento, San Francisco, and Reno. It was a busy place during the summer, as folks came here to take in the spectacular scenery and enjoy the soothing mineral waters.
Not many people stopped in the winter. Now, with Christmas only a week away, the hotel was empty. Any travelers at this time of year were on their way to see their families and wouldn’t risk getting stuck in the mountains. Because of that, the hotel had only a few employees working at the moment.
Jones worked for the telegraph company, though, not the hotel, and he couldn’t abandon his post.
If they did get snowed in, the hotel had plenty of supplies and firewood. Nobody would freeze or starve to death. It was possible, though unlikely, that the telegraph wires would stay up, so they might even maintain contact with the outside world.
Still, Jones didn’t care for the idea of the pass being closed. If anything bad happened up here, they would be on their own, with no way to get help.
The snow was falling faster now. He could see it swirling in the wind beyond the snowshed. A few flakes found little gaps in the shelter’s construction and fell on the platform. Jones brushed another away from his face and turned to go back into the building.
Herman Painton, the manager of the hotel, called across the empty lobby, “How’s it look out there, Juniper?”
“Startin’ to snow,” Jones replied. “It’s already comin’ down pretty fast and heavy. The wind’s stayin’ strong, too. It’ll pile the stuff up, sure enough.”
“Do you think the tracks will stay clear?”
Jones shook his head, not in the negative but just to say that he didn’t know. “It all depends on how long the storm lasts. Clete Patterson said his bones tell him it’s gonna be a bad one.” He headed for the little room off the lobby where his telegraph key was located. “I’m gonna let headquarters know.”
“Is there anything we should be doing to get ready?” Painton had worked up here at the summit during a number of snowstorms, but no real blizzard had blown through during his tenure. The trains had always been able to run.
“Anything that could be done has already been done,” Jones told him. “From here on out, we’re at the mercy of whoever decides the weather.” He smiled grimly. “So you might try prayin’.”