CHAPTER 30
“He’s dead?” Nathan had crawled out of his bedroll to stand beside Angus, looking down at Dutch, the big man’s bearded face still twisted in horror at the raging bruin that had indirectly killed him.
Killed him in his sleep. In his dreams. Nightmares . . .
“He’s dead, boy,” Angus said, pulling the man’s top soogan blanket up over his face.
Jackson and Davis stood gazing down at the dead man. Jackson was stepping into his boots.
He said, “Well, I say we skip coffee an’ breakfast. Eat some jerky on the trail. The sun’s already up. We gotta get a move on.”
He grabbed his frock coat from where it lay over a log and shrugged into it.
“What’re you talkin’ about?” Angus said. “You gotta bury your dead.”
Leech scowled down at him. “No time, old man. We’ve wasted enough damn time. Jackson is right. Let’s saddle up an’ get movin’.”
Angus couldn’t believe what he was hearing. A man always buried his dead. Always.
“Don’t tell me you’d just leave him”—he threw his arm out to indicate the dead man—“like this!”
Jackson had built a cigarette and, smoking, quickly rolled his soogan inside his rain slicker. “We’ll bury him on the way back.”
Angus gave a deep sigh and stooped to retrieve his folding camp shovel, which he’d carried strapped to his saddle. He thrust it out at Leech, narrowed one eye angrily, and said, “Bury your dead. Don’t leave it to me an’ the boy. You both have two arms. You’ll make faster work of it than I would.”
Jackson rose angrily. “That’ll take a good hour. We don’t have a good hour!”
“Like I done told you,” Angus said, “the only way down out of these mountains is the same way up. If those train robbers decide to make another run for it, they’ll have to come down that trail right there!”
He pointed toward the two-track mining trail they’d been following, rising and twisting up one pine-clad ridge after another.
Angus added, “Even if we leave in an hour, we should make Ghost Mountain in good time. We’re only a couple of hours away.” Again, Angus thrust the shovel toward Leech Davis. “Best get diggin’. We’re burnin’ daylight!”
The two Pinkertons shared an exasperated glance.
Their eyes were flat and hard, deeply angry.
Jackson turned to Angus, and his right eye glinted furiously in the morning sunlight washing down through the pine boughs. “What if we just kept following the trail?”
“Good luck. There’s plenty of unmarked forks leadin’ to mines and prospector diggin’s, each one a chance for a man to get forever lost.” Angus dropped the shovel at Davis’s feet, then knelt to begin building up the fire for coffee and beans. “It won’t be as easy as you think.” He glanced up at Jackson, narrowing one eye, shrewdly. “And do you remember your way back down?” He smiled, again shrewdly. “Many men have climbed into these reaches . . . never to be seen or heard from again.”
He glanced at Nate, chuckled, then set some crushed pinecones on smoldering embers in the fire ring and slid his head low to blow on them.
Jackson and Davis shared another glance.
Davis sighed, stooped to pluck the shovel off the ground, swung around and began tramping out into the forest. “I reckon I’ll get started . . . buryin’ poor old Dutch!” He gave an exasperated laugh and started digging.
Jackson gave a frustrated sigh of his own then sat down on the log to smoke his cigarette. Nate had gone off to tend the horses’ morning needs and to fetch more firewood. The raspy snicks of the shovel as Davis dug the grave mixed with the morning piping of the birds. When Angus had gotten a fire going, brewed coffee, and set a pot beans and fatback to boil, he and Jackson sat on either side of the fire from each other, sipping their coffee.
Angus set his cup aside to roll a smoke of his own from his makin’s sack. Firing a match to life on his thumbnail, he narrowed an eye again as he peered across the fire’s low, dancing flames at Jackson, who regarded him stonily. Nate had gone off to remove the feed sacks from the horses’ snouts and to saddle his and Angus’s mounts.
“Who are you?” Angus said, dropping the match and mashing it out with his boot.
“What?” Jackson said, incredulous.
“Who are you?” Angus repeated. “Really.” He smiled, wagged his head slowly. “You ain’t no Pinkerton. Neither is Davis. Neither was Dutch. A Pinkerton wouldn’t balk at buryin’ his dead. No good man would balk at such a thing.”
Jackson continued staring at him, stone-faced. He brought his quirley to his lips, drew on it, blew the smoke out his nostrils. He jutted the index finger of the hand holding the quirley at Angus and said, “All you need to do is get me an’ Leech to Ghost Mountain. That’s all you need to worry your gray head about, old man.”
Nate had just walked into the camp. He stopped suddenly and looked from Jackson to Angus, apprehension in his eyes.
“Come on, boy,” Angus said, picking up his coffee cup. “Beans is ready. Eat your fill then you an’ me are gonna mount up an’ track the bear.”
“What?” Jackson said, scowling. “Why?”
“Because I don’t want no more surprises outta that monster,” Angus said and sipped his coffee.
* * *
It wasn’t a monster after all, Angus was relieved to see a half hour later, when he and Nate, following the blood spoor, had tracked the bear to its destination.
The horses were jumpy at both the smell of bear and of death. Angus and Nate held them under tight rein as they stared down at the huge bruin sitting back against a rock, rear legs stretched out before it, front legs hanging down against its side. The bruin’s head to its chest made bloody by the several shots Angus and the others had drilled into it.
The old bruin looked nothing so much like it had just decided to sit down here for a bit and take a mid-morning nap. Except for the blood. It’s still-open eyes staring at nothing.
“By God, that bruin had some hate in him,” Angus said, shaking his head in disbelief. “I must’ve put two rounds in his heart. Two fifty-sixes. Still, it ran a good mile!” He paused, staring down at the beast every bit as large as a bull buffalo. “Gotta admire him, in a way.” In the way he’d admired and was terrified by last summer’s bruin, the one who’d fed on both Bar Box B stock and the men who’d tended them, almost killing Hunter, as well.
Such wildness. Like the wild of the world at the beginning of time.
“Why do you think it hated us so much, Grandpa?” Nate asked.
“I don’t know. I reckon we were trespassers on its territory. On what it had marked out as its territory. He had a right. He fought us for it the same way we fought the Indians for it. We fought back. We won. The bear lost.” Angus drew a deep breath. “Maybe people should stay where they belong, leave the wild country to the wild creatures who call it home.”
“What about the Box Bar B?”
Angus gave a droll chuckle, shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “What about it? I don’t know, son. I don’t know about our place there. Fought so hard for it. Two of my boys died for it. As they say in the army, that’s above my pay grade. Sometimes I think it’s all above my pay grade.” He reined the dun around, booted him back in the direction of camp. “Come on, son. Them Pinkertons . . . or whoever they are . . . is likely chompin’ at the bit.”
“Whoever they are?” Nate asked, frowning curiously.
“Just stay close to me, boy. Stay close. I’m not sure who we’re dealin’ with, but if they’re Pinkertons, I’m a monkey’s uncle.”
“Who do you think they are?”
“I don’t know. Bounty hunters, maybe. I got a feelin’ we’ll find out soon.” Angus glanced at Nate, warningly. “Just stay close to me, grandson.”
Nate nodded. “All right, Grandpa.”
“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” grouched Leech Davis as Angus and Nate rode up to the camp twenty minutes later. “What’ve you two been doin’? Off enjoyin’ the scenery, havin’ you a nice little morning ride.” He squinted at the sky. “Or is it afternoon by now?”
“Nope, still mornin’,” Angus said in his customarily affable tone, devilishly, knowing how it graveled the Pinkertons . . . or whoever they were . . . and not caring.
Leech and Jackson were sitting on the log by the fire, each with a steaming cup in his hand. As they’d ridden in, Angus had noted the freshly mounded grave piled with rocks between a pine and a fir tree, a makeshift wooden cross angling up out of the ground ahead of it.
“Nice work,” he added. “Dutch should have him a peaceful rest there.”
Jackson tossed his remaining coffee into the fire, removed the iron tripod, and kicked dirt on the flames. “Let’s go!”
He and Davis strode over to their horses, both saddled and ready to ride. They mounted up, and Angus gave another warning look at Nate, silently reminding the boy to stay close to him. Angus had no idea what they were in for at the end of the trail, but he had a feeling he’d be surprised. Probably not in a good way. He reined the dun down the grade to the rocky, two-track trail and swung northwest, toward where Ghost Mountain rose, its long, apron slope a furry blue green in the buttery, late-morning light.
Angus swung off the two-track trail and followed a narrow canyon up the ridge, a stream roiling down the grade, foaming over the ladder-like rungs of rock, on the riders’ left side. As he and the others climbed, Nate keeping his steeldust close off the tail of Angus’s dun, the craggy peak of Ghost Mountain grew before them, more and more of the mountain exposing itself, the lower fur forest sliding up until Angus could see where the forest stopped and the stone face of the mountain jutted straight up in the air for two hundred feet, cracked and fissured. Boulders balanced precariously on granite shelves, pines and firs stubbornly growing from narrow cracks in the bastion’s face.
At the top of the ridge, the canyon dead-ended at a stone outcropping from the base of which the spring that formed the stream bubbled, so cold that when Angus stopped to let his horse drink and to slake his own thirst, he thought the last of his old teeth would crack. Nate let his own horse draw the cold water while he filled his canteen. Jackson and Davis, understanding that their own horses were weary from the steep climb, and tired themselves, stopped without argument.
In ten minutes, they were all back in the saddle.
Angus led them up out of the canyon via a game trail spotted with mule deer and elk beans. Ten minutes after that, the weary riders stopped their horses at the bottom of a broad stone escarpment maybe fifty feet high. Angus shucked his Spencer and climbed the rocks leading toward the stony ridge’s flat crest. When he reached it, he thought his heart was going to explode, his knees splinter and cut through his skin. He hadn’t made a climb like that in years.
He was surprised as well as impressed that he’d made it.
He wasn’t breathing too much harder than the others, including the boy, when he gained the broad flat crest of the ridge, walked to the opposite side, and hunkered down in the rocks at the formation’s edge. From here he could see the canyon opening on the other side of the scarp. On a shelf jutting out of the slope on the far side of the stream running along the canyon’s bottom sat a humble, gray log cabin with a mossy, shake-shingled roof.
The shack sat at the very base of the stone wall that jutted straight skyward to the craggy crest of Ghost Mountain.
“Here we are,” Angus said.
He’d hung his spy glass around his neck by a leather thong.
He raised the glass and adjusted the focus. After he’d taken a long gander at the cabin and the terrain around it, he lowered the glass and turned to Jackson. “Smoke rising from the chimney. Looks like someone’s enjoyin’ a nice fire, anyway.”
“Let me have a look.”
Jackson took the spy glass from Angus and inspected the cabin. He returned the glass to Angus and said, “All right. We’ll take it from here, old man.”
Jackson grabbed his rifle and flinched. “Oh!” he said, slapping a hand to his left ear.
As he did, a rifle barked from a near ridge.
When Jackson pulled his hand away from his ear, Angus blinked in shock.
The top of the man’s ear had been blown off, leaving a ragged nub.