The Highbinders

by F. M. Parker

  Sigh sped up to the first rider and held out his hand for the man’s weapons. The man gripped his rifle and looked uncertainly from Yutang to Keggler.

  “All of you give your rifles and six-guns and all your ammunition to Sigh,” Tom ordered. “Yutang will sure as hell kill that man if you don’t.”

  As the riders still hesitated, Tom raised his pistol. “Give your guns to Sigh,” he shouted out in a strident voice. He must get the firearms now or quickly start the battle anew before they all attacked him in unison.

  “What will you do if we give them up?” asked Ottoson.

  “You can go on your way safely,” replied Tom. “All we want is to be left alone.”

  “All right,” agreed Ottoson. He called out to the other outlaws, “Give the damn Chinaman your guns.”

  All three gave their rifles and pistols to Sigh. He backed away with his armload of weapons and cartridge belts to stand beside Tom.

  “Yutang, let the man go,” Tom said.

  “No. Now I finish tearing off his head,” replied Yutang in a vengeful tone.

  “We have their guns,” said Tom. “They can’t harm us.”

  “It is stupid to let our enemies live. They can get more guns in Baker City and return. We must kill them now that we have the chance. I can do it so very easily. Just a little jerk.”

  Sigh spoke to Yutang. “Tom is correct. We said they could go safely away from here. Let them know we are men who honor our word.”

  “Honor can get a man killed,” said Yutang. He wrestled with his doubts about releasing the outlaw leader. With misgivings, he said, “You two are my friends so I will do what you ask.”

  Yutang threw Keggler away from him as if he were something rotten. The outlaw fell upon the rocks.

  “Help him to get on his horse,” Tom motioned at Ottoson.

  The man guided his mount up beside Keggler’s steed, caught the reins and led the animal to the man lying on the ground. “He can’t set up, let alone ride,” Ottoson said.

  “If he can’t ride, then tie him on,” ordered Tom. He jerked a thumb at the other two outlaws. “You two get down there and put him up on his horse.”

  The men lifted Keggler astride. He teetered in the saddle and would have fallen had Ottoson not steadied him.

  “Rope his feet under the horse’s belly,” commanded Ottoson.

  The men quickly complied and remounted. At Ottoson’s signal, the bandits walked their mustangs up from the river and once on the level ground, kicked them into a trot south on the trail to Baker City.

  “I know we should have killed them,” Yutang said. “We will regret the day we let them leave here alive.”

  “We have guns now,” said Tom. “They will not attack knowing that.”

  Sigh shook his head. “In China only soldiers and Triad warriors have firearms. Very few of us who were farmers have ever fired a gun. And even we who have used them are very poor at hitting a target.”

  Tom pointed up at the cold, heavy overcast and the white flakes in the air. “Winter has arrived. The mountains and a deep snow should stop anyone from bothering us until spring.”

  “The bar is about one-third searched for gold,” said Sigh. “If we work as fast as we can during the winter, we can have about half the gold washed by the time spring comes. Another full year will be needed to completely sluice all the gravel and many things can happen in that span of time.”

  “During the winter, I will teach you to shoot. We can then post guards on lookout next summer and be safe.”

  “A better plan would have been to kill all of them so they could not return,” Yutang said.

  “Let’s get some tools and bury these two dead men,” said Tom.

  “No burial for these thieves,” growled Yutang. “Their flesh should be eaten by worms and their bones scattered over the land.”

  “Even thieves deserve a Christian burial,” argued Tom.

  “You have saved us from our enemies, Tom, and I want to do what you ask,” Yutang said. “But these men could not be Christians, and I am not Christian. They are bandits and deserve to go into the river.”

  Yutang went to the slain rifleman on the slope. Catching the man by the foot, Yutang dragged the body unceremoniously over the rocks to Cardone. Hesitating a second to take hold of the gunman’s collar, the Chinaman towed both corpses out into the swift water of the Snake.

  Blood swirled away from the bodies and soiled the water as Yutang gave the corpses to the current. They floated for three or four yards and then as their clothing became soaked, sank into the watery depths.

  “All of you give the miserable dogs your worst curses,” Yutang called to the crowd of men standing and watching from the shore.

  A chorus of Chinese invectives rang out over the turbulent flow of the Snake River. Only Tom said not a word.

  * * *

  During the night, the snowstorm fell upon the valley of the Snake like a mean white dog. Throughout the black hours, a frigid wind hummed through the cracks in the walls of the ill-built cabin. Tom rolled himself in his thin coverlet and wished for another to ward off the chill.

  Dawn light crept in slowly. The Chinamen arose, but did not go out to work. They merely gazed out into the storm and then congregated in groups and talked or played games of cards.

  Tom took one of the rifles and went out into the storm. The deer would be driven down from the high mountain slopes by the snow and would gather in the brushy areas adjacent to the river. The wolves, the predatory nemesis of the deer, would also come there to feed upon them. Their prime winter pelts would make an excellent sleeping robe.

  Tom built a blind of broken juniper limbs on the downwind edge of a field of bitterbrush. The deer would come to the dark green bush, their favorite winter food.

  He waited, the snow mounding around him. Then the deer came, scores of bucks with antlers held high, does, yearling and fawns of the past spring, down the ancient game trails through the pine forest. Warily they stole into the bitterbrush, sniffing the wind, listening, watching.

  The deer did not detect Tom sitting motionless behind his ring of obscuring juniper. They scattered, wandering among the clumps of brush to feed on the leaves and tender tips of the branches.

  The hours passed. The storm piled the snow to a depth of a foot or more.

  Silently as the fall of the snowflakes, five grayish-black wolves ghosted in, coming up the wind off on Tom’s left. He raised his rifle and waited for their closest point of approach.

  They halted. Tom sighted on the large male on the far side of the pack. Always shoot the most distant one first.

  The rifle cracked and the wolf was slammed down. In startled confusion the animals hesitated. Tom killed a second.

  Then the remaining three wolves were in a flat-out streaking run. Tom caught one in his sights, tracked it for a second and burst its heart with a lead projectile. It collapsed, tumbling end over end in a flurry of snow.

  The deer panicked, bounding away in all directions.

  Tom went to the slain wolves. The fur, after a proper tanning, and softening by gently pounding between two stones, would make a soft sleeping robe, one that would keep him warm to many degrees below zero.

  In the evening, Tom rested on his pallet and let his mind wander. For many days he had been busy with hunting, toiling on the bar from daylight to dark, and sleeping so deeply as to be almost unconscious. He was surprised at how easily he had settled into the ritual of the Chinamen. Not once had he considered leaving. Scorn’s threatening demeanor bothered him at times, but now since the fight with the white outlaws, all the other men had accepted him and he was comfortable in their companionship.

  * * *

  Tom felt the slow gathering-in of his memories, time falling away, going back to his deepest recollections. Back past the sheriff’s posse to his brother and their small ranch in the mountains north of the Black Rock Desert. He recalled his brother Zeke, really his half brother for they had different mothers. His father’
s first wife, mother of Zeke had died and his father had lived as a widower for several years. He then married again and Tom was born. His mother had died at childbirth. Tom still felt the bittersweet emotion of sorrow for not having known the woman that had mothered him.

  A few years later his father had died of typhoid fever. There after, Zeke and Tom lived alone on the ranch in the mountains, with Zeke being some eleven years older, directing the operation of the ranch and caring for Tom. Rarely did the two see other humans, mostly in the times when they went to town to sell cattle or buy provisions.

  For twelve years Tom and his brother lived alone on the ranch and tended their small herd of cattle. During times when work was not pressing, Tom roamed the hills and far out on the desert. He tracked the deer, mountain lion and wolf, following the sign for many miles. He stalked the big predators as they stalked their own prey. Only rarely did he kill one of them. Always at the end of these excursions, he hurried home to the small stone house on the mountain to help his brother.

  His father had a small library and Zeke added books to it when they sold cattle. Zeke and Tom would study and discuss what they studied in arithmetic, history, and geography. One lesson was practiced often, the use of firearms.

  The boy’s father had been skilled with guns and had taught Zeke. Now Zeke taught Tom. They often practiced with the guns, the shortage of cartridges being the limiting factor for money was often scarce and bullets expensive. He could still hear the sound of his father’s voice giving instructions to Zeke. It had a flat tone, an emotionless timbre that never varied regardless of whether he was correcting Zeke’s arithmetic or telling him where to shoot a man to kill him most swiftly. He remembered the day his father had complimented Zeke: “You are a strong man and your hands are quick. You are better than most men you will ever encounter.” His father had motioned for Tom to come up near Zeke and had continued to speak. “Do not hurt other men, but also do not allow them to hurt you or take what is yours. There may be times when you have to kill. Do not grow to like it.”

  His father had lapsed into silence and had not spoken for the remainder of the day, as if he had said something that had turned him completely inward.

  * * *

  The drought came upon the land and lasted a year and little grass grew on the hills. Then another year with only a few showers and they did little to grow feed for the cattle. Early one day in the third spring and the drought continuing, Zeke saddled his favorite horse, a big gray, and leading an extra one, rode away to the northeast. Tom had asked Zeke his destination and when he would return. Zeke had replied,’Take care of things until I get back’.

  * * *

  The gray horse carrying Zeke came to the stone house in the middle of the night five days later. Tom heard the iron-shod hooves on the rocky yard and went outside.

  Zeke lay along the neck of his mount, arms weakly clutching the long, coarse hair of the mane. Blood leaked from a bullet wound in his side. Tom took him down in his arms and carried him inside. Gently he placed his Zeke on a bunk.

  “It’s not all that bad,” Zeke said and looking into Tom’s worried eyes. “Hurts like hell and bled a lot. But I’ll live. Put some salve on it and bandage it up tight.”

  “Who shot you?”

  “A man who was damn mad.”

  “About what?”

  Zeke caught hold of Tom’s arm. “You might as well know the truth right now. I robbed a man. We just had to have some money to keep the ranch going. I didn’t want to hurt him and that made me careless. He had a hidden gun and shot me as I rode off. I’ve been riding hard for two days. Wore out one horse and run the gray until he was ready to fall.”

  Tom was silent as he considered the awful news. He had never expected Zeke to do such a thing. Watching his brother’s face, he asked, “What do we do now? Is anybody following you?”

  “The law surely is. But I rode the first horse for a long ways and then switched to the gray. I’ve most likely lost them. I didn’t intend to come to the ranch right off but when I got shot, I had to find a place to rest and heal.”

  “They may track you to the ranch and arrest you.”

  “Maybe. But I can’t ride any more just now.”

  “Did the man know you?” A plan was jelling in Tom’s mind.

  “No, he was a stranger to me. A cattle buyer from Sacramento. They usually have cash money on them. And buyers are mostly cheats, downgrading your cattle so they can buy them cheap. And getting together with other buyers and not biding against each other. So with us needing money so bad, I didn’t feel too awful about taking his.”

  “Which way did you come from town?”

  “From the north. I didn’t want to come straight back to the ranch so I went west until almost to the badlands and then came south to ranch. What’re you thinking?”

  “I can head them off and lead them farther west into the badlands and loose them.”

  ’That’d be damn dangerous. I wouldn’t want you to get caught them thinking you was me.”

  “Nobody can catch me on my horse.”

  “That much is true. And it could work. But I hate to think that I’ve got you into trouble. And maybe shot and killed.”

  “You’d do the same thing for me.”

  “I don’t think you’d ever rob anybody.”

  “I’ll leave at daybreak and follow your tracks north and let them see me at a distance and lead them far away from the ranch.”

  “Don’t shoot anybody.”

  Tom rode away from the ranch following Zeke’s horse’s tracks barely visible in the frail twilight of the sun still below the far eastern horizon.

  * * *

  In the afternoon of the second day of the storm on the Snake River, a ghost disk of a sun shone through the thinning clouds. The men put on coats and went out into the foot of snow and down to the river bar. In the deep cold, the men’s breath showed as a cloud as they skimmed the snow away and fell into their routine of swift and silent assault upon the deposit of gravel and rock.

  The men labored late, for the white snow seemed to have a luminescent glow all its own to brighten the dusk of evening. When they finally gathered in the cabin and the day’s washing of gold was spread on a plate for viewing, the men said not a word. Each wondered silently if the white men of this foreign land would allow them leave for home with any wealth at all.

  CHAPTER 10

  Weeks meandered into deep winter. Some days the weather was good enough to allow the men to work outside. In those periods the men hurried at their tasks of moving boulders and shoveling and sifting large amounts of sand and gravel for its gold.

  During the long, cold evenings when the snow fell, Tom and Sigh taught each other their language before the fireshine. The other Chinamen talked among themselves in low voices like strange sundown birds before they fell silent at last and the only sound was the wind outside and Tom and Sigh murmuring awkward, foreign words.

  Sometimes with the language lessons done and the Chinamen asleep, Tom sat for a long time without moving a muscle, without blinking, speculating upon the nature of his unpleasant deeds, the killing of other men. Then he would consider and reflect upon what different action he could have taken. Each time he could think of nothing else he could have done without letting his enemies harm him or his friends. His father had told him never to let that happen.

  Tom ceased his moralizing and found real peace with the Chinamen. The peace of hard work with men who knew nothing except hard work. And the peace of resting quietly with them afterwards in the late hours when the day became black. Then, heavy-lidded with weariness, Tom would crawl into his blankets and wolf fur on the pallet of straw and sleep in the dark of the midnight cabin deep in the valley beside the Snake.

  * * *

  The day was clear. Thick ice, like polished steel, lined the banks of the Snake River. A frigid wind came down from the snowy mountains, eating away the warmth of the bodies of the men laboring on the gravel bar.

  No use coul
d be made of the sluice boxes. The river had accumulated winter in its depth and the water taken from it turned instantly to ice upon being thrown into the riffled wooden trough. All the men concentrated on carrying the bigger stones and rolling the boulders from the bar.

  Yutang, Scom, Yuen and Tom worked at the base of a large round boulder that had been deposited in the gravel bar in some ancient unrecorded age of flooding water. They had dug a sloping trench from the stone to the river’s edge. Now the last of the material of the foundation of the boulder was being removed. The men hoped to start the stone rolling and then its momentum would carry it down the trench and into the river.

  “It is close to moving,” said Yutang, climbing out of the pit. “Only a thin base holds it. Now let’s use the pry poles to tip it over. All four of us put our pressure on this uphill side.”

  They strained on the ends of their leverage poles. The boulder swayed, then settled back into its original position.

  “Its rounded form makes it difficult to apply enough force to move it without the poles slipping off,” said Tom.

  “I can apply much more force with my shoulder,” said Yutang. “I will go down into the hole and push. All the rest of you pry.”

  “It is dangerous to be in the hole with the rock,” cautioned Tom.

  “I know. Do not let it fall back on me.”

  Yutang sprang into the pit behind the bounder. He grinned up at the other men. “This time we make it roll into the river. There is often much gold at the base of these big rocks. Give all your strength. Now heave!”

  An edge of the stone lifted an inch, six inches, a foot up from its resting place.

  Yutang’s foot, thrusting powerfully, slipped as the ground crumpled beneath it. His leg went in under the boulder. At that moment Scorn’s pole lost its hold. The giant stone toppled back into its previous location with a loud crunching sound.

  A colossal moan erupted from Yutang. He looked up at Tom, his black eyes wide pools of hurt. “Help me,” he cried.