CHAPTER 33
Smoke dropped off the lead horse and fought his way through the deep snow toward the coach, kicking up the white stuff as he did so.
Salty was already climbing down from the box, hurrying despite the arm he still had in a sling. He shouted, “Everybody outta the coach! Now!” He turned to Smoke and went on, “The axle’s just cracked. If we can bind it up with rope and get it to hold just a spell longer—”
With a splintering noise, the coach tipped even more to the left. Someone inside cried out in alarm. The vehicle lurched again, and something else broke.
“That does it,” Salty said. His voice had turned grim and hollow. “It’s busted plumb in two now. She ain’t goin’ nowhere.”
The door on the right side opened. Denny looked out and said, “Pa?”
“You might as well stay in there,” Smoke told her. “The damage is already done. At least you’ll all be out of the wind, to a certain extent.”
She nodded and pulled the door closed. The passengers might be uncomfortable because of the way the coach was tilted, but as Smoke had said, they were protected from the fierce bite of the wind as long as they were in there.
“How far you reckon we’ve come?” Salty asked quietly.
“From the spot where we spent last night? Half a mile. Maybe.”
“Then the hotel could be just half a mile away. Maybe even less. It’s mighty hard to be sure o’ distances in weather like this.”
“As long as it’s snowing and the wind is blowing like this, the hotel might as well be a hundred miles away,” Smoke said. “If a man set out in this blizzard, he’d be blind and lost within a hundred yards. Somebody would find his frozen carcass next spring . . . if he was lucky.”
Salty reached under the bandanna tied over the lower half of his face and scratched at his beard. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right. But we got to do somethin’, Smoke.”
Smoke’s brain was already working quickly. “We’ll take the canvas off the boot and a couple of those lap robes and make a lean-to tent out of them, with the coach as one side of it. Once we’ve done that, I’ll shovel the snow out of it and we can build a small fire for warmth. If everybody huddles around it, they won’t freeze to death.” He glanced up at the sky, which was still unleashing a torrent of snow, and muttered, “If this blizzard would just stop. . . .”
“That’s a lot to count on.”
“I’m not counting on it. We’re still going to try to find the hotel.”
Salty’s weathered forehead creased in a frown under the turned-up brim of his old hat. “You just said it was too dangerous for a man to set out in this weather.”
“I said he’d get lost. But if there was a way to keep that from happening, somebody could scout on ahead, maybe spot the hotel if it’s not too far away.”
“How do you figure on doin’ that?”
“We’ll take all the pieces of rope we have, plus we’ll cut up the harness into lengths and tie them together, too, to make more rope. String it all together and a man could go a couple hundred yards and still have a lifeline to get back.”
Salty thought about it and nodded slowly. “Might work,” he said. “Don’t know if that would be far enough to do any good.”
“Only one way to find out,” Smoke said, “but let’s get that shelter built first.”
Smoke cut the canvas cover loose from the boot at the back of the coach while Salty got two of the lap robes from inside the coach. They knotted corners together, then tied the makeshift tent to the trim around the top of the coach, on the left side since the vehicle was tipped that way and that side was closer to the ground. It took a third robe to make a large enough shelter to satisfy Smoke.
With that done, Stansfield and Kellerman got out of the coach and held the canvas and robes up while Smoke bent to get underneath them and work with the shovel. He cleared as much snow as he could off the area under the shelter and then put rocks on the corners to hold it in place.
There were gaps in the cover, but it would provide some protection from the snow and wind, especially after they hung robes over the openings at the sides.
The snow underneath the coach was deep enough that it served as a wind block on that side.
Denny had been gathering wood while the others were working on the shelter. When it was finished, she built a small fire. The wind snatched away some of the heat, but most of it reflected from the cover and kept it from being unbearably cold in the shelter.
“Somebody will have to crawl out every now and then and brush away the snow that collects on the canvas and the robes,” Smoke told the group gathered next to the stagecoach. “Otherwise it’ll melt and drip through and make things more miserable, not to mention making it harder to keep the fire going. I won’t lie to you, it’s going to be pretty miserable anyway, but we’ll be all right until this blizzard stops, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”
Kellerman said, “The blizzard has lasted for several days already. How do you know it’s going to end anytime soon, Jensen? And by that, I mean before we freeze or starve to death!”
“Nobody’s going to freeze or starve to death,” Smoke snapped. “We have supplies.”
He was a little more worried about firewood, although he didn’t give voice to that thought. But he had been looking around, and since they were now in the pass, there weren’t nearly as many trees around as there had been earlier. Denny might have already gathered up all the broken branches that were in the immediate vicinity.
Venturing out farther than that in search of firewood might turn out to be dangerous. As he had told Salty, it was easy to get lost in conditions like this....
“Anyway, we may not have to wait for it to stop snowing,” Smoke went on. “I’m going to see if I can find the hotel. If I can, I’ll bring back help and we’ll all be fine.”
“Wait a minute, Pa,” Denny said. “You don’t need to be wandering around out there in this weather. You won’t be able to find your way back.”
“Salty and I have thought about that already. We’re going to use the rope and some lengths of harness to make a lifeline. I’ll tie one end to the coach, and all I’ll have to do is follow it back.”
“You should let me go,” Denny volunteered without hesitation.
Smoke shook his head. None of them were what could be considered safe, by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t going to allow his daughter to run that extra risk.
“I’d rather you stay here and keep an eye on things,” he said. He turned to Louis, who sat next to Melanie and Brad. It seemed to Smoke that Louis’s color had improved slightly, although it was difficult to be sure in the shadowy, flame-lit, cave-like space under the lean-to. “How are you doing now, son?”
“I’m all right,” Louis said, but Smoke could still hear some strain in his voice. “The pain isn’t as bad.”
“But it hasn’t gone away.”
Louis shrugged. “That takes time. But don’t worry, Father. I have a good nurse on hand, after all.”
He smiled at Melanie, who said, “I don’t know how good I am. I never cared for a patient with a bad heart.”
Louis took her hand. “You make me feel better just by being here, although I wish you and Brad were somewhere much safer right now.”
“Good Lord, kid,” Frank Colbert rasped. “We’re freezing, and you’re making calf eyes at a woman!”
“No one asked for your opinion,” Louis responded with a glare.
Denny said, “Are you sure I can’t come with you, Pa?”
“No, you stay here,” Smoke told her. “Salty, let’s get busy putting that lifeline together.”
They left the shelter and went back out into the snowstorm. Smoke began tying the lengths of rope together while Salty cut the harness loose and used his knife to separate it into usable lengths. He could manage that one-handed, but it took two hands to tie secure knots.
Smoke added the pieces of harness to the rope. While he was doing that, Salty said, “There’s one thing we didn’t think about, Smoke. What if that . . . varmint . . . we both saw last night comes back?”
“You mean . . . ?”
“The Donner Devil.” The old-timer nodded emphatically. “That’s what I mean, all right. You don’t want to run into that critter when you’re out there by yourself.”
“Whatever it was, he helped me,” Smoke pointed out. “He grabbed that wolf and pulled it off me, then broke its back by throwing it against that tree. Sounds like he’s on our side.”
“You don’t know that,” Salty insisted. “Like I said, he looked like he was half wolf his own self. Maybe that one he killed was his enemy from the pack. Maybe he just didn’t get around to attackin’ us yet.”
“He had his chance last night. Instead he ran off, according to what you told me.”
Salty nodded. “He did. Didn’t seem to take no interest in us at all. But that still don’t mean he’s friendly. Or it. Don’t hardly seem right, somehow, callin’ that thing a he.”
“Well, I don’t expect we’ll find out one way or another. Whatever it was, it’s probably long gone by now.” Smoke touched the grip of his Colt through the sheepskin coat he wore. “But I’m packing iron if anything does give me trouble out there.”
The makeshift rope was ready. Smoke tied one end to the stagecoach and then coiled the rest so he could play it out as he made his way through the snow. He told Salty, “Get back inside the shelter. You might as well be warm.”
“No, sir,” Salty replied. “I’m gonna hang on to this end of the rope. You run into trouble, give it three tugs, and I’ll come and find you.”
Smoke considered that suggestion and then nodded. “That’s a good idea.” He began trudging in the same direction the coach had been going before the axle broke, holding the rope in his gloved left hand and letting it play out from the coil in his right.
It was slow going because of the deep snow. Smoke didn’t think he had gone very far when he looked back, but his eyes were able to follow the rope for only a short distance before it disappeared in a white void behind him. He peered intently toward the spot where the stagecoach should be, but he couldn’t see any sign of it.
Smoke sighed, looked ahead of him again, and pressed on. He knew that the tall, rocky walls of the pass had to be rising somewhere on either side, but nobody could prove that by him, because he couldn’t see a thing.
The snow got in his boots. There was no preventing it. He felt his feet getting colder and colder. He couldn’t leave them like that for too long, or he’d risk losing his toes to frostbite.
Right now, though, that was the least of his worries. His breath fogged in the air before the wind snatched it away, along with seemingly every ounce of warmth in his body. His teeth began to chatter so hard he clamped his jaws together to keep them from breaking.
In this white hell, there was no way of knowing how far he had gone, so he wasn’t really surprised when he came to the end of the tied-together lengths of harness.
That was it. His lifeline was stretched out behind him, and it was his only way of getting back to the stagecoach. Without it, he could pass within fifty feet of the vehicle and never see it, and his shouts might never be heard because of the wind’s howling.
Smoke gripped the harness tightly in his left hand and peered ahead of him, searching for anything other than the whipping snow. A light, a glimpse of a building, any sign of the hotel.
Nothing.
He used his teeth to pull the glove off his right hand, then slid that hand between two buttons and under his coat. The fingers were so cold they felt like stiff, dead sticks, but after a few moments they began to warm up. When he could flex them again, he closed them around the Colt’s grips and pulled out the. 38. Pointing the gun into the air, he squeezed off two shots.
If somebody at the hotel heard those shots, they might come out to investigate, bringing their own lifeline with them. It was unlikely, Smoke knew, since the wind was so loud . . . but wind was capricious and did funny things. You never could tell when and where sound might carry.
He stood and listened.
After an unknowable time, Smoke sighed and looked around. No trees were in sight, but he saw an iron-gray rock jutting up from the snow about twenty feet to his left. He made his way over to it.
What he was contemplating amounted pretty much to suicide, and he knew it. But his children were back there, and despite what he had told them earlier, he wasn’t confident that they and the others could survive in such a primitive shelter for four or five days or even longer, depending on when the blizzard ended. For one thing, he didn’t think they could find enough wood to keep the fire burning for that long, and without it they would freeze. So he had to take a chance and trust his natural ability to find his way. That instinct had never let him down before.
He took a deep breath, feeling the cold air burn his lungs, then wrapped the lifeline around the rock and knotted it in place. It was high enough that it would keep it from being covered up with snow, at least for a while. He ought to be able to find it if he could get back here. As long as the lifeline remained taut, Salty would believe he was on this end of it.
Smoke took a good look around him, even though there wasn’t anything to see except snow. He hoped the mere act would help keep him oriented and pointed in the right direction.
He started walking again, deeper into the pass. If he was able to keep going straight, he would find the Summit Hotel sooner or later. The trick would be to keep himself from veering off or even starting to go around in circles.
One foot in front of the other, he told himself. One foot in front of the other . . .
Damn Frank Colbert for getting us all into this predicament. That outlaw’s greed might wind up killing all of us.
Smoke wasn’t sure how long he had been walking when that thought crossed his mind. A long time, that was for sure. His legs felt like lead except for where they ended at his feet.
He couldn’t feel his feet at all anymore.
He stopped, his arms hanging. Despair did not come naturally to Smoke Jensen. It wasn’t just that he didn’t like to give up. The thought of surrendering almost made him ill.
“Preacher would keep going,” he muttered to himself. “You don’t want to let Preacher down.”
Sally wouldn’t want him to quit, either, he thought suddenly. She had a core of steel stronger than any woman he had ever known. That was one reason he loved her so much. He hated to think that they would have to spend Christmas apart, but if he survived, he would make it up to her.
Not if, he corrected himself. He was going to survive, and so were Denny and Louis.
He took another step, then another and another.
Then stopped again to lift his head. He dragged in a deep breath of the frigid air, feeling the snowflakes against his face.
There it was again, the thing he thought he had smelled a moment earlier.
Wood smoke.
A fire meant people. More than likely, it meant the hotel.
Unless he had looped around despite his best efforts and was right back where he started from, smelling the fire underneath the makeshift lean-to beside the stagecoach. That possibility brought a bleak chuckle from him. There was only one way to find out, so he had to keep moving.
He had taken only a few steps when a large, dark shape loomed up in front of him. Not the hotel—it was too close to be the building, and shaped wrong, to boot. This was a vaguely human figure....
That thought had just formed sufficiently in Smoke’s mind to set off alarm bells when something whipped out of the snow, crashed against his head, and sent him pitching backward. The blizzard’s whiteness faded into an enveloping black.