CHAPTER 32
Smoke looked intently at his old friend for a long moment. Salty seemed completely serious, even though what he had just said clearly made him uncomfortable.
“I never saw a wolf that could walk on two legs, Salty,” Smoke ventured. “Maybe one in a circus somewhere could do a trick like that.”
“This weren’t no circus animal,” Salty said. “It was big and fast and strong. I never got a good look at it, mind you. But I could tell it weren’t nothin’ that ought to be walkin’ around on this earth.” He paused. “Smoke, did you ever hear tell of a critter called . . . the Donner Devil?”
Until Salty asked that, the name hadn’t cropped up in Smoke’s thoughts. But once he heard the words, he did recall stories he had heard in the past. Crazy stories about a creature roaming Donner Pass and the mountainous area around it that was half bear, half man . . . or half wolf and half man, depending on who was spinning the yarn.
Salty obviously came down on the half-wolf side.
“You don’t put any stock in that tall tale, do you, Salty?”
The old-timer frowned. “Well, I never did until now. But I never seen anything like what I saw tonight, either.”
“You say it ran off after it killed that wolf?”
“Yeah. Loped off through the trees. Didn’t seem to be in a hurry, but it went out of sight mighty quick-like, let me tell you.”
“And it was still moving on two legs?”
“It sure was.”
Smoke nodded and said, “There’s nothing we can do about it now, other than be grateful that it helped me, for whatever reason. I don’t know how long I would’ve been able to hold off that wolf.”
From behind him, Denny asked, “What are we going to do now?”
Smoke looked around at his daughter. “You heard what Salty was saying?”
“I heard.”
Salty began, “You probably think I’m plumb loco, Miss Denny—”
She held up a hand to stop him. “You don’t need to worry about that, Salty. Louis and I have spent a lot of time on the continent—in Europe, I mean—and there are places over there where you hear all kinds of strange stories. Why, we were touring through the Carpathian Mountains once, and we heard a story about some bloodthirsty count from hundreds of years ago—”
“We can swap stories later,” Smoke said. “For now, Salty, why don’t you get back in the coach and get some rest? Denny and I will take turns standing guard tonight.”
Salty shook his head and said, “Let the gal rest. Ever since I got plugged, y’all have been makin’ me take it easy, and I’m startin’ to feel plumb useless. I’m rested up enough so’s I can stand watch, and there ain’t nothin’ wrong with my right arm. That’s my gun hand, you know.”
Smoke thought about it and then nodded. “Good idea. Denny, you get in the coach. But before you do . . .” Smoke took the pistol Colbert had been carrying from behind his belt, where he had tucked it away, and held it out to her. “You’ll be packing iron from now on. I know I can trust you to use it if you need to.”
“That’s the truth,” she said. “But what if you need a handgun?”
Smoke reached under his jacket and brought out the Colt Lightning that Colbert had taken away from him the day before. “He had this one in his pocket when I tied him up. After I tackled him, he never had time to try to get it out.” He hefted the Winchester. “Plus I have this rifle if I need it.”
“And there’s another o’ them repeaters in the boot,” Salty added. “What kind of a rifle shot is Louis?”
“He’ll do,” Denny said in a tone of grudging admiration. “But I’m better.”
Smoke smiled. He wasn’t sure his children would ever get completely over that sense of sibling rivalry....
As Denny climbed into the coach, Smoke said, “You get some sleep now, too, Salty. I’ll wake you later.”
“I don’t mind takin’ the first turn,” the old-timer said.
“No, I’m fine. Fact of the matter is, now that I’ve got a gun on my hip again, I feel pretty good.”
He would feel better, though, he thought as snowflakes brushed his cheeks, if they weren’t all still facing a very uncertain future here in these blizzard-swept mountains.
* * *
Smoke and then Salty, when the old jehu took his turn, were able to keep the fire blazing brightly all night. Smoke didn’t see any sign of the wolves coming back, and Salty reported the same thing the next morning when Smoke climbed stiffly out of the coach.
A faint gray light hung in the heavens. With the thick overcast and the snow still falling heavily, the day might not get much brighter than it was right now.
Everyone else got out of the coach for the breakfast Melanie prepared. Now that Brad was no longer in imminent danger, she seemed much calmer and reserved.
She made sure that Brad stayed close to her, though, and began to look anxious whenever he strayed too far away.
Louis appointed himself to help Melanie with the meal. Denny was charged with guarding Alma Lewiston while the woman went off into the trees to tend to her personal business. Smoke handled the same chore with Colbert.
When he came back, he found that Stansfield and Kellerman had started switching the teams. He grinned and said, “We’ll make stage station hostlers out of you fellas yet.”
“Not likely,” Kellerman snapped. “I just want to be on our way as quickly as possible. The sooner we get back to civilization, the better.”
That comment brought up something Smoke had been mulling over in his mind. He waited until everyone except Colbert and Alma had a cup of coffee and a tin plate of food. Those two would be fed their meals later, because Smoke didn’t plan on untying them again.
“There’s something we need to talk about,” Smoke said as he stood beside the cook fire. “And that’s where we go from here.”
“Where we go?” Stansfield echoed. “I assume we go back to Sacramento. Surely you don’t still intend to try to make it through the mountains in this terrible weather, even on that less hazardous trail farther down.”
“That’s just it,” Smoke said. “I reckon we’ve gone past what they call the point of no return. The snow’s already more than a foot deep, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, let alone stopping.” He shook his head. “Under these conditions, I don’t think we could make it back to Sacramento. We’d get stuck, and then we’d have to survive for who knows how long with a limited supply of food and nothing for shelter except the coach.”
“You’re saying we’d wind up like—” Denny began, but she stopped short at the look Smoke gave her. He knew she’d been about to say Donner Party.
“But . . . but if we can’t go back, what can we do?” Kellerman asked. His normal bluster was heavily tinged with fear now.
Smoke looked around. They were all watching him with anxious expressions, except for Salty, who seemed to have figured out what was on Smoke’s mind, and Colbert, who was still too filled with rage to be worried.
“If we can’t go back, then we have to go on,” Smoke said.
“Ha!” Colbert burst out. “Just like I wanted all along, and you told me we couldn’t do it, Jensen!”
Stansfield said, “That’s right, Mr. Jensen, but now you claim we can make it through Donner Pass after all?”
“I never said that,” Smoke replied. “But we don’t have to make it all the way through the pass and on down to Reno to reach a better place than this. I figure the Summit Hotel is less than two miles from here. If we can get that far, we can hole up there.”
“For how long?” Melanie asked quietly.
Smoke shrugged. “Probably a week or two, to be honest. It may be that long before the railroad can get a work train up here to try to clear the pass.”
“So we won’t make it to Reno for Christmas.”
“No, ma’am. But we’ll all be alive. I’m betting they’ve laid in a good stock of supplies at the hotel, and it’s a sturdy building, meant to stand up to mountain winters.”
Denny asked, “Will the telegraph line still be up?”
“No way to tell until we get there, but I doubt it. As hard as the wind’s been blowing the past twenty-four hours, and with all the snow piled on the trees, too, some of them have probably come down on the wires by now. But even if the hotel is out of touch with Sacramento and Reno, the railroad will send a relief train as soon as it’s able to get through.”
“Well, then, your suggestion makes good sense, Pa.”
Salty chuckled. “Whatever your pa says usually does, Miss Denny.”
Kellerman had overcome his nervousness enough to say, “This is unacceptable. I can’t sit in some hotel in the middle of nowhere for two weeks.”
“I think you can if the alternative is freezing to death,” Stansfield said dryly.
“This is none of your business,” Kellerman snapped at the reporter.
“I’d say I’m in the same boat as you are, Kellerman. Or stagecoach, as the case may be.”
“We can’t change the weather, Mr. Kellerman,” Smoke said. “All we can do is try to stay as safe as possible, and that means making a try for the Summit Hotel.”
Kellerman glared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh, very well. In that case, I suppose I vote yes.”
Stansfield said, “The fact that you think it’s up for a vote is rather amusing.”
Kellerman looked like he wanted to make some angry retort, but Smoke cut it off by saying, “All of you finish your breakfast and get back in the coach. The sooner we get started, the better.”
He left it at that and didn’t say anything about how the speed with which the snow was piling up concerned him. It might get too deep for the horses and the stagecoach to break through before they even reached the Summit Hotel.
“Why don’t I ride up on the box with you?” Salty suggested. “I know the trail mighty good, and I can help keep an eye out for wolves. Them varmints could still come back, you know.”
Smoke nodded. “Thanks, Salty.”
The others climbed in, Colbert and Alma first once they’d been fed a sparse breakfast. Stansfield and Kellerman took the front seat, while Denny got in the rear seat and watched the two prisoners. Brad scrambled aboard next, and then Louis started to help Melanie step up.
Before he could do so, his knees suddenly buckled, and he dropped to the snowy ground.
“Louis!” Melanie cried in alarm. His collapse had thrown her off balance since he was supporting part of her weight, but she caught herself and knelt beside him.
Smoke reached his son’s other side in a heartbeat. He put his arm around Louis’s shoulders and helped the young man sit up.
Louis’s hat had fallen off. Melanie brushed away the snow that tried to collect on his fair hair. She leaned closer to him and said, “Louis, what’s wrong?”
Through teeth gritted against obvious pain, he said, “It’s just this . . . bum ticker of mine. Isn’t that . . . what you’d call it, Father?”
“You’re sure it’s your heart?” Smoke asked.
“Yes, I’ve had . . . attacks like this before . . . when I exerted myself . . . too much.”
“He . . . he wasn’t really doing anything that hard,” Melanie said.
“It adds up,” Denny said as she knelt beside her brother, too. “The past few days have been rough on all of us.” She put a hand on Louis’s knee and squeezed in encouragement.
“I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need to . . . rest a bit. You know what the doctors in Europe all said, Denny. It’ll pass. . . .”
“They said the attacks will pass with rest . . . until the one that doesn’t,” Denny said with a grim note in her voice. “The one that—”
“That’s enough,” Smoke said. “Stansfield, give me a hand. We’ll get him up and put him in the coach. Sorry you’re going to have to be jolted around, son, but we need to get started.”
Louis nodded and said, “Go ahead. I understand.”
Denny got into the coach first, and then carefully, Smoke and Stansfield lifted Louis into the vehicle, where Denny helped lower him to the seat. Melanie got in then, and Brad crowded in beside her, next to the window.
Louis mustered up a smile. “Now I’m the one . . . sitting between a beautiful woman . . . and my sister.”
“Shut up,” Denny told him. “I know good and well you’re just trying to make Melanie feel sorry for you.”
The worry in her eyes made it clear she actually didn’t feel that way, however.
A few minutes later, with Salty beside him on the driver’s box, Smoke got the team moving. The horses didn’t like forcing their way through the deep snow, which built up on the coach’s undercarriage and weighed it down, making it even more difficult to pull.
“I hope you’re right about how far it is to that hotel,” Salty said quietly, so the passengers couldn’t hear. “I ain’t sure how far we can go in this.”
“We have enough rope we can tie on the other eight horses in front and have them pull, too,” Smoke said. “We’ll have a fourteen-horse hitch.”
“When I was workin’ on the borax wagons down in Death Valley, sometimes we’d have twenty mules hitched in a team,” Salty reminisced. “I sure remember them ol’ Death Valley days.”
Their progress up the mountain was agonizingly slow. Smoke and Salty could both still make out where the trail ran, but it was getting more difficult to follow. In some places snow had drifted deeply enough across the trail that Smoke had to climb down, get a shovel from the boot, and clear some of it before the stagecoach could go on.
They hit another switchback. Over the constant moaning of the wind, Salty said, “Best get them other horses. We ain’t gonna make it up these slopes otherwise!”
Smoke agreed. He got Stansfield and Kellerman out of the coach to help. Both men complained bitterly as they worked in the flying snow, moving the horses from the rear of the coach to the front. Smoke ripped rope harnesses for them and tied some of them to the regular team while the others were tied directly to the coach.
“I can handle the reins, even with one hand,” Salty said. “You get on one o’ them lead horses. Otherwise I don’t reckon they’re gonna go.”
Smoke agreed. He went to the front of the elongated team and swung up bareback on one of the leaders. He dug his boot heels into the animal’s flanks and urged it to lean forward into the storm.
When Smoke glanced back over his shoulder, the snow was so thick in the air that it blurred the sight of the stagecoach with Salty on the driver’s box.
“Come on!” he yelled at the horse underneath him.
Slowly, the coach lurched up the switchback trail. The only advantage to the steeper slope was that the snow didn’t drift as deeply here.
Smoke hunched over against the wind and the flakes that were pelting him so hard they almost felt like raindrops. He wouldn’t have said that this was the coldest he had ever been in his life . . . but it was right up there.
He didn’t know how many turns the trail made, but one by one, they fell behind the struggling horses and the coach. When they finally got to the top, he thought, they ought to stop and let the animals rest for a while.
Unfortunately, they couldn’t. It was a race now, with the Summit Hotel as the finish line and the lives of everyone aboard that stagecoach as the stakes.
The trail turned, but not as much, and almost a minute went by before Smoke realized they were traveling over mostly level ground again. He thought the switchback they had just overcome was the last one on the approach to the pass. They ought to be in Donner Pass now.
Unless he had miscounted and there was another such ordeal ahead of them. If that was true, they were doomed. The horses couldn’t make it.
The snow was even deeper here on the flatter ground, up to the horses’ bellies, up to the bottom of the stagecoach, packed in around the wheels and the axles. Smoke heard a sudden crack, felt the lurch through the rope tied to the horse he was riding, and looked back in alarm. Something was wrong. The coach was tipped a little to one side.
The front axle had broken.
And with it, their chances of survival were crushed as well.