by Dan Arnold
If Clay Atwater had known how much Yellow Horse hates to be called a “half breed”, or if he could have seen the fire in his eyes, he would have kept his mouth shut.
“Come on, Clay! Is that what this is about?”
“You don’t even have the sense to deny it. We’ll see what the Judge has to say about this.” He slammed his hand down on the desk and stormed out.
I looked at Yellow Horse. He would not have been offended if Clay had called him an Indian, or even a redskin. He was proud of that heritage. He hated it when people thought he was half white. He will not be insulted. He will repay evil for evil.
This meant trouble.
“I’m done here. I’ll go back to Texas. Buy my ticket.” He walked out.
The door had barely closed, when it opened again.
In walked the newspaper man.
I was thinking I needed to lock the door and pretend I wasn’t there.
Jerry Starnes was the publisher, printer, editor and principle reporter of the Bear Creek Banner. I say principle reporter, because it seemed like half the women in town carried stories to him. He tried grilling me about the shooting, but I had no comment. He was clever and tried several different tactics. He did manage to confirm that the “victim” in the shooting was a man named Ed Rawlins. Ed Rawlins was wanted by the U.S. Marshal in Denver, on suspicion of murder charges. Rawlins was also wanted locally for jail breaking, theft of property, breaking and entering, and suspicion of murder in the deaths of town Marshal, Jack Watson and local horse trainer, Willy Walker. He learned that Ed Rawlins had been armed and he had fired on the new town Marshal, John Everett Sage. He learned all of that, without me ever making a statement. There was not one thing he could quote me on. I had mostly just made faces or nodded my head in response to his questions. I noticed my hands had stopped shaking, but I was very, very tired.
“Well then, do you have any comment on the theft of the payroll?” He asked.
I know I shot forward in my chair. I’m pretty sure I was about to say something stupid like, “What payroll?”
Somehow I managed to avoid it.
“Perhaps I can confirm the information you already have.” I speculated.
“OK. Is it true the payroll for the mines has been stolen?”
“You’ll have to confirm that with the mining companies and the bank.”
“Is it true Preston Lewis, the bank officer was killed?”
“That name is not familiar to me, personally. I’m new to Bear Creek.”
“Is it true the County Sheriff’s deputies, who were guarding the payroll, are missing?”
“Mr. Starnes, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go. Your questions would be better answered by Sheriff Atwater.”
I stood up and grabbed my hat.
“I tried that.”
“When did you talk to him?” I was headed for the door.
“I was interviewing him just before the shooting at the Bon Ton cafe.”
“What did he tell you?”
“Nothing, he seemed very angry and confused.”
I found the Sheriff of Alta Vista County at the courthouse, sitting behind his desk in the Sheriff’s office. I suppose he could tell by the look on my face that I had learned about the robbery.
“I guess you heard about it. You know everything, don’t you?”
He looked like he might cry.
“Tell me all of it.”
He took a deep breath.
“Friday is payday for the miners, once a month. The payroll never showed up in Flap Jack City, yesterday. They sent some men out to look and they found the body of Preston Lewis in the buckboard by the side of the road. There was no sign of the payroll or the deputies. They sent a rider down here to tell me. He got here late last night.”
He was running his hands through his hair.
“What are you going to do?”
He covered his face with his hands for a moment.
“What can I do? They were my men, my deputies. I hired them. I look like a fool.”
Suddenly I couldn’t take anymore; I was mad, straight through.
“I’ll tell you what you can do. You can start by getting over feeling sorry for yourself and your precious position. You need to be thinking about how to get the mine payroll back and catching whoever killed the bank officer.”
“How can I do any of that?”
He was running his hands through his hair again.
“You’ve got resources man, use them!” I shouted.
He scowled at me.
“I’ve got nothing but one old deputy, and he really works for you.”
“I’m placing all the resources I have at your service, including the best tracker I’ve ever known. You can start by apologizing to Yellow Horse.”
“That’ll be the day,”
“It will be today, right now in fact,” I snapped.
“You can go to hell, both you and Yellow Horse.”
I slapped him.
He lunged up, tossing his desk off to the side, as if it were an empty crate.
He froze when he heard me cock my Colt, which he was surprised to see, was now pointed at the tip of his nose.
“You will apologize to Yellow Horse, you sorry son of a bitch. If you’re lucky, very lucky, he’ll let you live. If he feels like it, he might even agree to help us clean up this mess.”
I took a step back, then another.
“I’m going to wait for you on the courthouse lawn. When you come out, you’ll either be ready to apologize to Yellow Horse, or use that pistol on your hip.”
I turned and walked out.
I chose a place outside where I could see both ends of the courthouse and the door to the Sheriff’s department. I swept my coat tail back on the left side. I’m right handed and I carry my Colt on the left side in a cross draw holster. I do this so I can easily reach it whether standing, sitting, or on horseback.
While I was standing there, my anger melted away. Every thought, word and deed has consequences. The Bible says every way of a man is right in his own eyes. I couldn’t justify my words or my actions this time though. I had allowed my temper to get the best of me.
Sin is sin. The wages of sin is death.
Yellow Horse is no Christian. He is proud. He will not be insulted. He always gets even. I couldn’t have him doing that. I had dangerously placed myself in the middle.
I wondered if I was about to reap the reward for sewing the wind.
From where I stood, I could see that the crowd was drifting away from the Bon Ton. Rawlins body had been carried away. I saw Tom, Buckskin Charlie and Hugh coming my way. They passed by the workmen who had gone back to laying brick in the streets surrounding the courthouse.
“What’s going on?” Tom asked. Hugh could tell by looking at me. Buckskin Charlie figured it out real quick.
“Who are you waiting for? Is there gonna be another shooting?” He asked.
I glanced at them. “Leave it alone, boys. This is a personal matter. Whatever happens, don’t mix in.”
The door to the Sheriffs’ department opened and we could all see Clay Atwater coming up the steps. Tom tried to grab my sleeve, but I shook him off.
Clay reached the top of the steps and he had his hands out away from his body. He wasn’t wearing his gun. I was aware that, like me, he could have a hide-out piece on him somewhere, so I was watching him closely. He stopped at the top of the stairs.
He was only about fifteen feet away.
I figured he was unarmed. He had to know I wouldn’t shoot an unarmed man. I fully expected him to rush me and beat me to a pulp. I would be nearly defenseless against him. If he decided to fight me barehanded, he could crush me like a bug.
“OK, let’s go talk to Yellow Horse” He said.
Mercy can be better than justice, especially when we are the beneficiaries.
19.
As we walked over to the livery stable he explained that after he calmed down, he realized he had brought all this on
himself. He even thanked me for my offer of help. He also explained that he couldn’t stand killing. He hated it and wouldn’t even kill a rattler. He couldn’t imagine killing a man.
I was astonished. I asked him why he carried a gun.
“All lawmen do, don’t they?”
Clay never ceased to surprise me with his basic honesty and accurate self-assessment. His pride had temporarily blinded him to his responsibility, but it had not goaded him into a fight. I was all too aware my pride had done so. Pride may be the worst sin of all. I apologized for my earlier behavior. I also told him that not all lawmen carried guns. There were other options. It could be his choice, either way.
We said hello to Al, then went to the back of the livery where Yellow Horse had his room.
Yellow Horse was standing in the door to his room. Behind him, I could see his things were on the bed, packed and ready to go.
“John,” he nodded “you have my ticket?”
He ignored Clay
“Not yet. Clay would like to say something to you.”
Yellow Horse looked at him as if he had just noticed he was there.
Clay looked like he was feeling kind of sick.
“Uh, yeah…you see the thing is…I’m a jackass sometimes…” he trailed off.
Yellow Horse regarded him silently.
“What I mean is…you aren’t…uh…..” he trailed off again.
Yellow Horse turned to me.
“I will take the train to Denver.”
“Yellow Horse, I’m sorry. Really, I acted like an idiot. I shouldn’t have said what I said.” Clay blurted.
Yellow Horse turned back to face him.
“No?” He raised an eyebrow.
“No, I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry I did.”
“Yes.” Yellow Horse nodded, looking him in the eye.
Clay looked at me, clearly baffled. He had no idea where to go from there.
I did.
“Yes. What?”
Yellow Horse turned to Clay.
“Yes, I accept your apology. Yes, you are an idiot. Yes, if you say it again, I will take your hair.”
He turned to me.
“Tell me what you need.”
We decided a small party could be prepared and provisioned much more quickly than attempting to put together a larger posse. Even so, by the time we made arrangements and got outfitted for the trip, it was nearly noon.
Clay told us the place where the bank officer was killed was only about a mile above North Fork, but much higher up in the mountains. Because it was pretty much uphill all the way, it would take at least three hours to travel the ten miles to North Fork. Past North Fork the road got narrow and there were many switchbacks. We would need to rest our horses often. It might take nearly another hour to travel the extra mile to the scene of the theft. I wondered if Clay’s horse could handle the challenge.
When we rode past Lora’s boarding house, she was working in the garden. I stopped to have a word with her, as Yellow Horse and Clay went on.
She and I had been spending some time together. I explained the situation to her, and as I started to remount Dusty, she stopped me and kissed me.
“Be safe out there, and come back to me as soon as you can.”
I was more than sufficiently motivated.
I caught up to the others, and as we rode west, I learned that the payroll was mostly in gold and silver coins. The miners only got paid once a month and many didn’t like paper money. Usually there was about three thousand dollars in coin and paper. To be more secure, the payroll never went up the mountains on the same day of the week. It sometimes went in a strong box on the stage, sometimes on a freight wagon of one kind or another. The freight wagons were frequently on the road, hauling equipment or supplies in, and the ore back out. The stage went to Flapjack City only once a week. The stage was the preferred method of the bank officer who always traveled with the payroll. This time it had been on a freight wagon. This time there had also been more money than usual.
That was a surprise to me.
“Why was that?
“The snow will come soon, so about this time of year they usually send up three or four months’ worth of payroll. They secure it up there in the mining offices,” Clay said.
“It isn’t even fall yet,” I pointed out.
“Not down where we live. We have another six weeks or more before it gets frosty, but up there,” he pointed toward the top of the mountains, “where the mines are, you can see the old snow. New snow could fly at any time now. They try to keep the roads open, but heavy snows can close the roads for weeks at a time. And there are rock slides and avalanches. It’s too dangerous to try to take the payroll up in the winter.”
“Your deputies knew that,” Yellow Horse observed.
The search party had found the body of Preston Lewis slumped in the wagon seat, where he had been shot. One deputy had been mounted and one had been driving the team. The deputies and the harness horses were missing. They had abandoned the buckboard wagon, because it was too big to negotiate narrow mountain trails.
It was nearing dusk in the high mountains when we started on their trail. Night comes fast up there, so we wanted to get a sense of where they might be headed. There were few ways they could go, because of the steep mountainsides.
Although the search party had messed up the tracks at the scene of the murder, the thieves trail was obvious from where they left the road. They had headed downhill, along the edge of a narrow creek that ran down into Bear Creek.
Yellow Horse spent some time on foot to become very familiar with the size and shape of the hoof prints their horses were leaving in this soft ground.
“Three men mounted, leading two horses, one is carrying a load.” He said.
“That can’t be right,” Clay said. “There were only two men and they only had three horses.”
Yellow horse shook his head. “Five horses, three men.”
“Are you sure about that?”
“I could follow this trail in the dark,” Yellow Horse replied.
“That’s good, we’ll need to. They have a day’s start on us,” I said.
“We can’t keep going in the dark. We’ll lose their trail and it’s dangerous.” Clay opined.
Yellow Horse got back on his mount and continued down the trail. I followed him. The Sheriff of Alta Vista County didn’t have much choice, he had to follow us.
We crisscrossed the stream wherever the trail led, letting the horses drink occasionally. We were often moving through chest high thickets of Pussy Willow, working to avoid bogs. Doing that became more important when the sun went down behind the mountains.
At one point we stopped and Yellow Horse got off his horse and studied the ground. He took us up an embankment. We started working our way up the shoulder of a mountain through the spruce and aspen groves, then around and down. It was now fully dark; the only light was that of the moon and stars. The ground here was firm and often rocky. I couldn’t see any sign of the trail the thieves had left.
Yellow Horse could.
We had been riding in the dark for hours. We came to an opening in the aspen trees and out into a meadow. The stars above us were spectacular. It was very cold now. I could hear a creek running somewhere.
Dusty pricked his ears forward, something moved at the far edge of the meadow. It could have been an elk, mule deer, or even a moose. It had been that big. Dusty was calm though, and unconcerned. We heard a whinny.
Yellow Horse and I hit the ground holding our reins in one hand and our guns in the other. Clay managed to get down beside us. We waited for a shot that didn’t come.
After a minute Yellow Horse motioned he was going to circle around the edge of the meadow. I nodded and took his reins, and he disappeared. The big thing I had glimpsed materialized at the other edge of the meadow. It was a horse. After a few more minutes we heard a whippoorwill call.
That was the “all clear” signal from Yellow Horse.
I s
tood up and started out into the meadow, Clay was right behind.
We led our horses across the meadow. Yellow Horse met us part way across.
“We will sleep there,” he said, pointing back the way we had come.
“What’s wrong with over there?” Clay asked, pointing at the edge of the aspen grove Yellow Horse had just come out of. We could hear the creek just beyond the trees.
“Dead men,” Yellow Horse said.
Taking the reins from me, he led his horse past me and I followed him. Clay followed us.
After we had secured our horses and unsaddled them. We gathered together to talk.
“They camped over there,” Yellow Horse began, “late last night. They had a picket line for the horses and a small fire. They had food and coffee. Two men were killed, while they slept. There are no horses on the picket line now. I saw two in the meadow grazing. I don’t know where the other three horses are or where the third man is. I will look again in daylight.”
“OK, let’s get some sleep.” I directed.
“Wait a minute. Where is the mine payroll, Yellow Horse? Did you see any sign of the money?”
Clay was clearly tired and cranky. We all were.
“John and I will look tomorrow.”
“I say we go over there now. We can build a fire and have a look around. At least we can have a hot meal.”
“No.”
Clay was about to argue some more, but I was too tired to listen to it.
“We’ll do it in daylight, Clay. We’ll just make a mess of any sign that might be over there, if we stumble around in the dark tonight. Besides, do you really want to sleep over there with the dead bodies?”
“No, I’m just saying…”
“We have maybe four hours till first light. We’ll sleep now, if we can.” I said.
He didn’t like it, but he didn’t fight it anymore. We chewed on some jerky and cornbread and drank from our canteens, and then we rolled up in our blankets.
When we woke up, just before sunrise, we had frost on our blankets.
