“That’s right,” Brad said. “Nobody’s been there in a long while since the Utes and Arapahos were driven out. It’s a big valley, and there are probably still a few wild horses from Indian times that go there. Elk and deer aplenty, last time I saw it.”
“So, is that where we start?” Joe asked.
“That’s where we start, Joe. Tighten your cinches and let’s head into the mountains while there’s still daylight.”
Julio grinned.
“I wish to see this place,” he said as he spurred his horse, Chato.
“You will, Julio, you will,” Brad said and rode back to the trail leading into the massive mountains.
They rode with the sun in their faces and jumped mule deer and jackrabbits on the trail. They rode into the high, lonely mountains, leaving all traces of civilization behind them.
Far out on the prairie, a dust devil came into being. It arose from the earth and swirled across the landscape like a living being. Then it vanished over the horizon and left no trace of its path in the gama grass.
And the three riders vanished into the wilderness of the Rocky Mountains. Somewhere a mountain quail, perched on a yucca, piped a plaintive series of notes that might have issued from some ancient flute. Then, all was stillness under the jagged skyline of glistening mountain peaks flocked with snows that looked as if they were filled with tiny diamonds.
NINE
Jack Trask was a wizard with the running iron. So was his partner, Wilbur Campbell. They took turns with the iron. While one brought up a haltered horse and steadied it, the other planted the hot iron onto the existing brand and created a new one.
Jack had a hot fire going and plenty of cherry-red coals. There were three running irons basking against the coals. He turned the shaft every so often to keep the irons glowing uniformly.
“Okay, Wil,” he called to Campbell. “Bring up the next horse.”
Campbell pulled on the rope attached to a tall sorrel gelding bearing the brand Bar S. The horse was one of those stolen from Brad Storm.
The other horses were confined in a rope corral built just for branding purposes. Once they bore new brands, they were turned loose to graze with the large herd in Wild Horse Valley.
The sorrel neighed as it approached the blazing fire. Campbell jerked its head down and pulled on the lead rope until he had brought it alongside the branding fire in the ring of stones.
“What’re you makin’ these, Jack?” Wilbur asked as he tightened down on the rope to hold the horse’s head down close to its chest.
“I’m just goin’ to make it easy for us. Thought about makin’ it into a Box 8, but with one iron I’ll have a 2 Bar 8.”
“It’s enough different, I reckon. Where are these new ones goin’, do you know?”
“Some have been sold to a logger up above Estes Park. Others are goin’ to a mine twixt there and Lyons, I reckon.”
“Jordan sure knows his business,” Wilbur said.
“Yeah, for a half-breed. Ever been to his saloon up in Cheyenne?”
“Nope. I met Killdeer a few times, once’t when he come down with some new men he wanted me to break.”
Jack laughed.
“Yeah, like you break horses, Wil,” he said. He brought the end of the iron close to the sorrel’s haunch and held it a few inches away from its hide.
“Hold him steady, Wil,” Jack said.
He placed a hand on the horse’s hip and pushed, then drove the hot branding iron into the “S.” The curved iron turned the “S” into the figure “8.” Then he added a “2” with another iron. Hair burned and flesh sizzled as the burning brands did their work. The horse jumped and kicked out both hind legs. But, the brand was set.
“He’ll get over it,” Jack said. “Go get another of them Bar S horses, Wil.”
Wil slipped the halter off the sorrel’s head and turned him out with a slap on the rump. The horse galloped off to join the other horses at the rope corral. But when it saw Wilbur walking back with the rope and halter in his hands, the horse turned in a tight circle and galloped off to join the horses grazing in the long wide valley. Sheer bluffs of sandstone rose around three sides of the valley and the other end was thick with timber. There was a road down through a pass in the bluffs and another emerging from the timber.
Wilbur caught up another horse, a bay mare. This was Felicity’s horse, Rose, but he didn’t know that. He didn’t even know where the horses had come from since the three men who drove them into the valley never spoke of their deeds. They were under strict orders from Jordan Killdeer not to discuss where they had been to any of the other hands. He paid well and demanded loyalty. Someone always came down from Cheyenne once a month to pay Wilbur and Jack. They never knew his name and he never told them anything. He just gave the men cash money and then rode off to parts unknown.
But Jack knew that Killdeer had several men working for him in the mountains. They saw them only when they brought in horses or took out the ones with changed brands to either mining or lumber camps.
“Got you a mare, Jack,” Wilbur said as he pulled the horse up to the fire ring. “Pretty thing, ain’t she?”
“They’re all pretty, Wil,” Jack said.
“This was probably some woman’s horse. Gentle as a kitten. Hell, I even crawled between her legs and she never lifted a foot nor bobbed her head.”
“You ain’t supposed to play with the stock, Wil. Just bring ’em up to the brandin’ fire.”
“Hell, there ain’t that much to do way up here in the middle of nowhere. I’d like to ride this one.”
“If Jordan ever found out, he’d have you draw your pay.”
“Aw, he wouldn’t do that. He ain’t never fired nobody. Leastwise, I never heard such.”
“Well, you ain’t been with him as long as I have, Wilbur. They was one man what quit one day and just rode off. Next thing I knew was that he was shot dead up in Laramie.”
“Bar fight?”
“No, he was back shot at night. And he wasn’t the onliest one I heard who quit or got fired from Killdeer’s outfit.”
“Oh? Who else?”
“Well, there was a young feller who got in an argument with one of the bunch. He said he was goin’ to quit, and they shot him to pieces before he could get on his horse.”
“You’re just tryin’ to scare me, Jack.”
“I’m just tellin’ you like it is, Wil. Don’t nobody work for Jordan Killdeer and quit on him. Or, if he fires you, you ain’t goin’ far.”
“You are scarin’ me, Jack. Hell, I didn’t know it was that way. I mean I’m an outlaw, but there is such a thing as honor among thieves. Ain’t there?”
Jack laughed and turned the iron before drawing it from the coals.
Wilbur pulled on the rope and Rose bowed her head as docile as a lamb.
“Not in Jordan Killdeer’s book. He don’t want nobody talkin’ about his doin’s. So he makes sure by killin’ anybody who quits him.”
Jack set the iron on the “S” of Rose’s brand and made it into an “8.” Rose snorted and whinnied but did not jump or kick out.
“Jordan believes in the old sayin’ ‘dead men tell no tales,’ Wilbur. And, if he don’t like you, you’re gone in a heartbeat. And, I mean real gone. Forever.”
Wilbur swallowed a trickle of spittle and felt a shiver crawl up his spine like spiders with icy feet.
He slipped the halter from Rose’s head and turned her away from the rope corral.
He gulped in air and watched Jack put the iron back on the coals. Then he shrugged and walked back to get another horse.
Jack dug out the makings from his shirt pocket and started to roll a cigarette.
“Makes you think, don’t it, Wil?” he said as he struck a match and touched it to the end of his cigarette.
Wilbur nodded but said nothing.
He looked out at the horses in the valley, then back at the ones in the rope corral.
“We’re all prisoners up here,” he muttered under his breath.
He suddenly felt more sorry for himself than for the horses. He kicked at a clump of grass and then crawled under a rope to catch up the next horse to be branded. At least the horses are goin’ somewhere, he thought. “And I ain’t.”
The last was just a whisper, as if he were talking to himself. Which he was. He now realized that he could not expect any sympathy or understanding from Jack, who could work for a man like Jordan Killdeer because he was cut from the same bolt of cloth. Neither Jack nor Killdeer knew the meaning of the word “mercy.”
Damn them, he thought.
But he, too, was an outlaw, and he drew his pay just like all the others.
He wondered how long the job, all their jobs, would last.
And he didn’t have an answer.
TEN
Brad and his two companions rode deep into the forest. There was no longer any road into the mountains. They encountered only game trails and thick timber. Just before dusk began to darken the sky and deepen the shadows, they entered a region where many trees had been cut down. There were drag marks where large logs had been skidded uphill to some unknown destination. The ground was littered with broken pine branches, pinecones, and scattered pine needles.
“We’d better make camp,” Brad said to Joe and Julio. “It gets dark real quick up here.”
“Too open here,” Joe said. “Too many trees gone.”
“We can use the pine branches for shelter and cut some spruce boughs to put under our bedrolls.”
“Good idea,” Joe said. “We can make camp in that stand of timber over yonder to keep us out of the wind.” He pointed to a thick stand of pine and spruce a hundred yards off to their left.
Brad nodded and turned Ginger in that direction. He had been pensive all afternoon and had not said much on the ride. He seemed to be in a world of his own and Joe attributed his quietness to the recent death of his wife, Felicity. Besides, the mountains had their own soft hum beneath the deep silence. They occasionally heard the sounds of deer and elk rising from their wallows and moving like shadows through the trees, sometimes cracking a downed branch or rustling brush. There had been a distinct solemnity to the afternoon and none of them had spoken much.
They found a small glade in the timber and halted their horses. They dismounted and unsaddled, tying their mounts to small trees until they had finished setting up their camp for the night. As Julio gathered rocks and cleared space for the campfire, Joe and Brad cut spruce bows and laid them on the ground before covering them with their bedrolls. Joe pulled squaw wood down from the pines to use as kindling, while Brad helped Julio gather downed limbs that they stacked next to the fire ring.
Joe and Brad looked for small forked limbs. They cut these from the trees and also cut straight limbs for braces. They each sharpened one end of the forked limbs, driving these into the ground on both sides of each bedroll. Then they laid the straight limbs in the crotch of the forked limbs, which gave them a framework for building a makeshift shelter. They cut thick spruce boughs and stacked them from the ground to the top of the frame. When they finished, they had three lean-tos that would protect them from rain and falling pinecones during the night.
Julio built a fire using squaw wood and small dry pieces of fallen limbs. When the fire blazed, he added larger logs that were dry. The smoke gave off the scent of pine. The fire and its smoke helped keep the insects from annoying them.
The night was deep and black and came on suddenly after the slow dusk and the brilliantly painted sunset that lingered long enough for them to hobble their horses and remove the bridles. Each of them set his rifle and case next to their bedrolls.
Julio set a pot filled with water from one of his canteens on the fire and added ground coffee. They chewed on jerky and hardtack bought in Denver, and Brad opened a can of peaches with his knife. Each of them forked the peaches with their knives and gobbled them down as an antidote to the dry food.
In the blow of the banked campfire, Brad looked up at the sky.
“Up here,” he said, “you almost feel like you’re a part of that Milky Way up there. The stars seem so close.”
“Yeah, it’s beautiful,” Joe said. He sprawled out and looked upward through the pines. “Makes a man feel mighty small.”
“The stars are far away,” Julio said. “And a priest once told me that they are suns like the one that shines on us every day.”
“He’s right,” Brad said. “They are suns, but so far away they look like silver stars.”
“Hmm,” Joe said. “Looks like we have a couple of astronomers in camp.”
“Somehow,” Brad said, “when I look up at the sky, I imagine that Felicity is looking down on me. I know it sounds crazy, but all afternoon I could feel her on the wind. I felt her all around me, somehow, as if her spirit had scattered in a billion places.”
“I’m so sorry that she’s gone,” Joe said. “I hated to see the boys lower that pine box into the ground.”
“I choked up when Pablo dropped that first shovelful of dirt on her coffin,” Brad said. “That’s when I really knew that she was gone from my life forever.”
“Pilar was weeping, and I could not speak,” Julio said.
“I’m just glad Luisa wasn’t there when Felicity got killed. They would have killed her, too.”
“Who’s Luisa?” Joe asked.
“She’s a kind of criada, a maid who helped Felicity with the household chores, helped Pilar milk the cow and feed the stock we kept in the corral.”
“Why wasn’t she there?” Joe asked.
“Felicity gave her a month off to visit her family in Pueblo. She’ll be back in a couple of weeks, I reckon.”
“She will cry, too,” Joe said.
“Yes. She and Felicity were close.”
The men went silent for a while. Brad continued to scan the sky. Julio put more wood on the fire.
“I wonder where she is,” Brad said, after a few minutes. “She believed in heaven, but I never had much truck with it. I guess the Injuns believe we all go to a Happy Hunting Ground up there. They even call the Milky Way the Star Path, and I guess they believe their souls, or their spirits, follow that path to the hunting grounds.”
“I don’t much believe in heaven, either,” Joe said. “My pa always said ‘when you’re dead, you’re dead,’ and I ain’t never seen no evidence that he was wrong.”
“I believe in heaven,” Julio said. “I am Catholic, and we believe there is a heaven and a hell.”
“I think,” Brad said, “that ancient people, like the Egyptians and maybe the Greeks and Romans, thought we all had souls that went someplace, to some kind of paradise. Maybe in the sky, maybe someplace else. It’s hard to imagine.”
“I can’t imagine it,” Joe said.
Julio was silent. He poked the fire with a dry stick, and hundreds of sparks flowed upward with the blue tendrils of smoke.
“What gets me,” Brad said, “is that if there isn’t anything else when we die, then why in hell do we live? I think some part of who we are, or who we were, must go somewhere like those sparks that Julio stirred up. I think the Greeks thought that it was the breath that was the soul and that when a person took that last breath, it went on up into some kind of heaven. Egyptians buried their kings with all kinds of jewelry, food, and eating utensils. They wrapped them in bedsheets and sometimes put boats in their tombs so that they could sail up to the gods.”
“People get funny notions, I reckon,” Joe said.
“Yeah, and I feel lost without Felicity. I don’t know where she is, but I hope some part of her is alive, her mind, her spirit, her breath, maybe just her sweet smile. It seems to me such a waste to be born and die and turn back to dust.”
“I can’t make no sense out of it,” Joe said.
“In the church, the priest, he says you must have the faith,” Julio said.
“Faith in what?” Joe asked.
Julio shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe you got to believe that there is a life after death, that we have souls that leave the body and go up to heaven like smoke. I do not think of these things much, but my mother and our priest talked much about them when I was a little boy.”
Brad got up and stretched.
“I think we better change the subject,” he said. “I’m thinking, also, about tomorrow and that I left something out of my plan today.”
“What did you leave out, Brad?” Joe asked.
Brad brushed the dirt and bark off his trouser legs.
“I thought maybe the horse thieves were selling what they stole to mining camps. I didn’t even think about lumberyards. There are probably more lumberjacks working in these mountains than hard-rock miners.”
“Maybe they’re sellin’ to both,” Joe said.
“Sure, they could be. The men who cut timber have to haul the logs to wagons. They have to pull the wagons and get the logs to the sawmills. They need horses even more than the miners, maybe.”
Joe sat up and clasped his legs with both hands.
“I think you’re right, Brad,” he said.
“Let’s follow one of those drag marks and see if there’s a lumber camp close by. See if they have any horses they bought in the last few months from some wandering horse trader.”
“That’s a damned good idea,” Joe said.
“It’s another place to start,” Brad said. “I still want to go to Wild Horse Valley and see if the horses are wild or broke and stolen.”
“I think we will find out something,” Julio said.
“Bound to,” Joe said.
Brad walked to his bedroll and unbuckled his gun belt with its knife and pistol. He wrapped the holster and sheath in the cartridge belt and set it next to his bedroll. He rolled up his saddle blanket and put it down for a pillow at the head of his blanket. He sat down, pulled off his boots, and set them under his saddle.
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