by Clay Fisher
RETURN OF
THE TALL MAN
Clay Fisher
Copyright © 1961 by Clay Fisher
E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6188-9
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6187-2
Fiction / Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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Return of
the Tall Man
1
The Scripture
The old man stood peering up through the glittering windrows of ice crystals which even now, hours later, seeded the canyon air. The utter stillness hung like a hoarfrost shroud above the motionless, sprawling body of the avalanche. Behind him a china-eyed pack mule, ageful and mountain wise as the man himself, made no move other than to wall his oddly colored eyes, wigwag the ragged semaphores of his ears. The old man looked back at the mule.
“God help anybody that was up there last night,” he said.
The mule grunted noncommittally. There was no other answer, save the trickle of a small stone dislodged by a slight movement of the old man’s feet in the treacherous mass beneath him. He waited, holding his breath, until the stone had found a safe lodging. Then he shivered, looking upward again.
It was the tenth day of December, 1866, sunrise of a bitterly cold Montana morning. The slide had spilled down during the night from the shoulder of Rotten Rock Mountain. It had been a bad one, carrying away a quarter mile of the Virginia–Salt Lake stage road, depositing it eight hundred feet below and halfway across the ice-choked bore of the Madison River. The old man shook to a second chill, started once more around the dangerous waterside fan of debris, the gray-muzzled mule following free behind him.
It was chancy work. The wrong step could start the slide moving from above, inundating them where they stood, or shake loose the frothy pack below them, spewing them into the freezing blackness of the river. Either way would guarantee certain termination of their earthly travails. Chilkoot Johnston could not speak for his mute companion, but as for himself he felt he still had a few mortal griefs owing him. In consequence, he eased his way along the slide as warily as an old boar grizzly. Yet he was not wary enough. Midway of the fan, his reaching foot struck a pocket of powder snow, and he went in to his arm hollows. The mule stood safely ten feet in the rear and stayed there. This time not even his eyes or ears moved.
By grace of a Providence which the old man had tempted many times in his long life, his plunge initiated no new slippage in the poised rubble. After a prayerful wait, he began cautiously digging himself free. Presently, his fingers brushed against a substance, the peculiar waxen feel of which brought his neck hairs erect. He paused, glancing again toward the great wound on the mountainside. There had been someone on the stage road last night. And from the faint warmth of the skin beneath his fingertips, that someone was yet alive. With redoubled caution, Chilkoot returned to his exhuming of himself and the still-bodied stranger from their near sharing of an avalanche tomb on Madison River, seventeen miles south and east of Montana’s fabled Alder Gulch and the sinister vigilante city called Virginia.
It was forty-eight hours before the man from the landslide regained consciousness. When he did, Chilkoot, bending over him, peered into two gray eyes as vacant as the windows of an abandoned house.
“Rest easy, son,” he told him. “It will all come back to you.”
But it did not come back to the man. Not even when, a week later, Chilkoot watchfully told him his name.
“Ben Allison,” he said, “San Saba, Texas. Least that’s what’s burnt here inside your gun belt.”
He unrolled the gun fighter’s Buscadero rig which held the old model cap-and-ball Colt, showing the stranger the legend branded upon its inner leather. But the latter only shook his head and answered quietly.
“Sorry, old-timer, it don’t mean a blessed thing to me.”
“Well, do you think it’s your outfit?” persisted Chilkoot.
His companion took from its holster the walnut-handled .44, closing his big fingers about its worn grip. Unthinkingly, with reflex familiarity, he shifted the weapon from hand to hand. Directly, he slid it back into its leather with a flick of the wrist which left the old man’s narrowed gaze a blink behind. Again he said quietly:
“I don’t rightly know, old-timer. But she feels mine.”
“Yes, I reckon she does,” nodded Chilkoot, uneasy now. Then, after an awkward pause, “Well, that takes care of that part of it.”
The stranger glanced up. “There was more?”
“Considerable. Say like the ten thousand dollars in new paper bills in that money belt I found around your middle.”
“Partner”—the other smiled, treating Chilkoot to his first look at his quizzical, bright grin—“you are full of jimson juice. I never had more than five dollars hard money in my whole life. Excepting maybe it was Confederate.”
“Yes,” said the old man, “that’s another thing. You was a reb, wasn’t you?”
“I tell you I don’t know; I don’t seem to know anything about who I was—or what.”
“Oh? I can tell you something you know. That’s how to handle a gun.”
“That’s something?”
“In these parts it can be everything.”
“I’ll take your word for it, old-timer. Anything else?”
“Yes. I can tell you are a reb. You got a boondock Texas drawl would give you dead away anywheres north of Red River.”
“You’re doing pretty good, old-timer. Keep telling.”
The other had lost his quirky grin. The old man bridled at the change in temperature, bobbing his beard feistily.
“All right, I’ll tell you this; if you can’t remember nothing about yourself, how come you can say for certain that that money ain’t yours? Or that you didn’t come by it dishonest?”
“I just know. Where on earth would a fellow like me get his hands on ten thousand dollars? Honest or dishonest.”
Chilkoot increased the angle of his whiskers.
“I can tell you one place. A mule-train owner from Orofino, over in Idaho, was murdered in his blankets not far from here and not long gone. They found him cut backjaw-to-backjaw, head damn near off, Indian style. He had sold off his trade goods in the mining camps up in Alder Gulch, was packing his profits home in paper, figuring to ride and maybe get around the road agents.”
“Road agents?”
“Don’t play kitteny with me, boy. I’m too old. I said road agents.”
“I heard you.”
“Highway robbers, damn it! Thieves, murderers, cutthroats. The miserable sons’ been forgetting what the vigilantes done to Henry Plummer and his bunch only three years gone this January.”
The stranger’s warm gray eyes turned frosty.
“So I’m a road agent,” he said softly. “Then what?”
“Then like this,” said the old man. “A vigilante posse from Virginia run this here killer’s track line square up to the edge of that slide which took out the Virginia–Salt Lake road; the slide which brung you down off the mountain and buried you where I found you. The posse never picked up the track line on the Salt Lake side of that break in the road, boy. Far as I know, they still ain’t picked it up, a
nd that’s what makes it interesting for you.”
“Why me, old-timer?”
Chilkoot studied him, head cocked to one side.
“Simple matter of mathematics. That feller from Orofino was carrying ten thousand in paper bills. In a money belt. Around his middle. They found him naked as a jaybird from knees to nipples. Now did they teach you to put two and two together where you come from or didn’t they?”
He let the cynical question hang suspended in the brief silence. But the younger man, when he replied, only asked in his gentle way:
“Old-timer, you figure I killed that man cold blood in his blankets? You think I’m the one that posse’s after?”
Chilkoot wagged his beard quickly.
“No, sir,” he denied. “If I had, you’d have woke up in the Virginia jail instead of my shack. Way it is, I don’t know what to think. I just don’t. Past giving you the benefit of reasonable doubt, like the jury fellers say, I’m stuck.”
The stranger’s dark face relaxed.
“Thank you, old man. I’m beholden for the trust.”
“Name’s Chilkoot,” gruffed the other. “Chilkoot Johnston. Spelt with a t. Some around here make it Crazycoot Johnston. I don’t argue it none.”
His companion grinned, the gray eyes warming again.
“Like the poet fellow says, ‘What’s in a name?’ You tell me you’re Robert Edward Lee or Ulysses Simpson Grant, I’ll believe you. Meanwhile, we’ll make it Chilkoot—Chilkoot.”
The old man studied him another lengthening moment. It was as though he were weighing the younger man against some difficult, long-delayed decision. When at last he spoke, the soft-voiced stranger knew that his simple words held some future promise—or menace—far beyond their disarming literality.
“You will do,” was all the old man said and got up and stalked out of the one-room cedar cabin on Nameless Creek.
It was the first open weather of that remembered hard winter of 1867; a fine, wind-still day, the skies cloudless, the temperature already arise, the sun only just then brimming the high saddle of the Absarokas between Emigrant and Monitor peaks to the east. Ben Allison and Chilkoot Johnston knew what the good weather meant. They sat now discussing the prospect on a pine-plank bench outside the latter’s shack.
Because the aging wanderer of the creeks had chosen his den with all the cunning of a timber wolf, and because the record snows and abysmal cold had closed the trails, Ben’s presence in the country was yet unknown. But with the weather breaking and with eager men waiting on both sides of the landslide to resume their tracking of the missing ten thousand dollars, such anonymity could not continue. Any dawn past this one could bring the fatal first posse or solitary bounty hunter, probing Chilkoot’s gulch to determine the source of the cabin smoke above the alders. It was this contingency which Chilkoot now considered.
“Ben,” he said, “let’s see how she stacks up. First off, there’s you. Who are you, and where did you get that ten thousand dollars? Next off, there’s me. What’s kept me these past weeks from snowshoeing into Virginia City and reporting you and the money to the vigilantes? Boy, I’ll sign you a grant deed that we don’t need to go no farther than that. Not with them damned stranglers from Alder Gulch. You would get the rope, and I would get more years in the territorial jail than I got left to give. It’s a real problem, believe me.”
Ben thought it over in his slow, careful way.
“Well, partner,” he asked finally, “what do you suppose?”
Chilkoot bobbed his head quickly.
“Bury the money, boy. Dig it far under, belt and all. Give it time to work out its own secret.”
“That’s fine,” agreed Ben wryly, “for the belt and the money. Now how about me?”
The old man looked away toward Rotten Rock Mountain. This was what he had been waiting for, and he was ready.
“Ben,” he began, far-eyed, “you’ve been given a rare opportunity and rare tools to meet it with. You’re young, steady, strong, watchful, a good, straight thinker. You talk a little slow, but there ain’t a whisper of a doubt about the speed with which you lay your hand to that slick-butt Forty-Four. Better yet, you got a grin to thaw rim ice and a way about you which makes folks open up and talk to you where they wouldn’t to a fee-paid lawyer. It’s why I’m talking to you and why I’m hoping you will listen to what I’ve got to say.”
Ben felt the stir of the words.
“Sure, Chilkoot, go ahead. But cinch her down all you can. I want to be gone before the sun hits the road up there on the mountain.”
Chilkoot glanced upward, nodding. For a silent time, he sat watching the pink flush of the sunrise creep downward toward the broken course of the Virginia City–Salt Lake stage line. Presently, he looked back at Ben.
“In 1843,” he said, “I started for Oregon in the first rush. I had a wife, three little girls, a rickety wagon, a double hitch of mules, and whatever of a second chance in life lay ahead of me.
“When our train got beyond Goose Creek in Snake Valley, down in the south of Idaho, I thought that chance had struck sure enough. Some of the folks come to me with a idea about splitting off for California. They had heard I’d trapped that country in the early days, and their question was, did I know a way through it for wagons?
“Well, I told them that I thought there was a way angling south and west to hit the headwaters of the Humboldt and following that stream’s grass and water across the Nevada desert to the Sierras. It was wilderness country, I warned them, with no wheel ruts to follow, no trading forts to fall back on, no army posts to hold off the Indians. But if they had the faith in me, I would take them on their trust and guide them to California the best way that could be found. That was it. We left the main bunch next morning, heading for the Humboldt.
“No need to say what my own hopes was. I was forty-seven years old, had never done a useful thing for others in my life, not even provided decent for my own family. Now I felt it in my bones that the Lord had sent me a brand-new chance. My heart was higher than timber line. I felt twenty years younger just for the belief those good folks had in me. I knew I would make it this time. Hope springs eternal, boy; it ever and forever does …”
He let it die away, sighing as though the full weight of Rotten Rock Mountain had been laid upon his shoulders by the memory now called forth.
“At the third night’s camp,” he continued, “a band of Utah Paiutes straggled into our fires. They was half a territory off their usual track, and when I asked their chief what the trouble was, his answer struck a fear chill into my belly which I can feel freezing me to this day.
“The ‘spotted sickness’ was what he told me.
“Well, we rustled them Indians out of camp like they was hydrophobia wolves. We burnt what we was sure they had touched, boilt and scrubbed with lye soap what we wasn’t sure of or what we couldn’t spare, no matter.
“Then we started on. We counted the days like they was numbers on the clock of doom. At Arapaho Wells, in the Nevada badlands north of Pequop Summit, Ethel Pearl, my eldest girl, complained her insides hurt her low down. That was the beginning. Within twenty-four hours she was fevered out of her mind. In another twenty-four the spots were showing. We all knew what it was, and I ordered a sick camp set up there at the Wells. It was none too soon. Within three days the smallpox was onto us full rage.
“There was fifty-nine people in that California train; thirty-seven of them was buried there at the Wells, my woman and two eldest among them. When that happened, my reason left me. I turned like a rock inside.
“The poor folks that had been spared begged me, even quoting the Scripture of a man being his brother’s keeper, to stay with them and to guide them on out of that wilderness. But I wouldn’t listen. I took my gun and my woman’s picture locket with the tintype of the baby in it. I give the baby herself to a young couple which had lost their own three
tykes to the pox. With that, and with them still calling after me to wait, I walked off into the desert, never once stopping, never once looking back.”
Chilkoot paused while memory scanned the back trail and cut the squint lines deep and haggard about his eye corners.
“Point is, boy,” he concluded, low-voiced, “that I forgot God made me stronger and more able than the others for a reason … a reason of his own.”
“Old-timer,” broke in Ben gently, “all that was near a quarter century gone. It took place many a hundred mile from here. What’s it to do with us today?”
The old man peered at him searchingly.
“Ben,” he said, “it’s like the Lord was saying to me, ‘Chilkoot, I’ve sent you this tall boy so’s you can have him to take up where you left off. He’s you all over, excepting this time I’ve cut him a mite wider and higher to better suit the job. And he’s yours to send out to finish that job, providing you can make him see the need for it and convince him to take up your journey on the right terms. You got to make him understand that he ain’t never to turn his back on small folks in trouble. You got to get him to promise he’ll always look out for them as ain’t been give his size and heft to look out for themselves. If you do that, Chilkoot, then you can lay down your own burden knowing it’s been took up by the man you ought to have been and never was.’”
The words faded again. Chilkoot sat staring at the sunrise on Rotten Rock Mountain, the mists of years unused and opportunities forsaken dimming his eyes. At length he placed a gnarled hand on Ben’s shoulder. With the other hand, he brought forth from within his frayed wolfskin coat a tarnished, small gold locket and segment of chain. He gave the worn token to Ben. Ben took it, knowing that it and the tiny child’s face within it were all of mortal connection remaining with the trail Chilkoot Johnston had lost twenty-four winters ago; the trail which he now charged Ben Allison to find and to follow to its unknown ending somewhere beyond Arapaho Wells on the old California cutoff.
