High and Wild

by Peter Brandvold

  Apparently, no one else had seen what Haskell thought could possibly be a man, possibly one of a group of men, leaping from the rocks along the trail to the train. Maybe what he’d seen had only been the silhouette of a passing tree or a large bird, possibly an eagle, flying over the coach. But what about the thump he’d heard in the ceiling?

  Merely the conjuring of his imagination, honed too sharply from all his years of brawling and warring and tracking bad men, the spawn of an overly acute sense of imminent danger? Maybe. But together, those two things had fashioned in him a sixth sense that had kept his bacon out of the frying pan more times than he cared to remember.

  Haskell pushed through the rear door and pulled his hat down tighter on his head to keep the passing wind from stealing it. He looked up at the tin-edged roof of the next car back.

  Nothing there but the deep, faultless blue bowl of sky with a few, small, very high tufts of benign clouds.

  He glanced at the escarpment rising along both sides of the trail. Keeping his right hand on the stock of his rifle hanging against his side, he turned toward the platform of the car he was on and climbed the iron rings of the wall ladder rising to the right of the door.

  He stopped halfway up the ladder and edged a look over the rim of the roof. All clear. Nothing but the slightly peaked roof itself, with a tin chimney pipe rising from the left front corner. The sun glinted off the roof, piercing Haskell’s eyes like a million tiny javelins.

  Bear turned to look at the coach roof behind him. Nothing there, either, or on any of the other cars jostling and swaying behind it.

  Haskell turned his head forward and caught a glimpse of a man aiming a rifle at him from the other end of the coach. He jerked his head down none too soon.

  There was the menacing buzz of a slug careening through the air where his head had been a quarter-second before. Haskell dropped his shoulder and brought up the Yellowboy, quickly levering a cartridge into the action and then raising the rifle over the top of the roof.

  He took hasty aim at the man peering over the roof from the coach’s other end—a broad-faced gent with red sideburns and a red mustache beneath a shabby brown bowler hat trimmed with a red hawk feather—and squeezed the trigger.

  The Yellowboy leaped and belched, stabbing flames toward the far end of the coach. Haskell’s opponent was jacking a fresh round into his own rifle’s breech, bunching his lips and glaring toward Haskell, when the Pinkerton’s bullet slammed through the middle of the man’s broad forehead.

  The man’s head jerked back. His hat tumbled forward onto the edge of the roof before the wind ripped it away and it skidded sideways in a wind gust to bounce off the escarpment rising on Haskell’s right.

  The man himself fell backward and down from the ladder he was on, out of Haskell’s sight. Bear thought he heard a scream above the noise of the train.

  A shadow slid over his left shoulder and onto the coach’s roof. Instinctively, the big detective threw himself to his left, holding the ladder’s top rung with his left hand, and was rewarded for the quick action by another bullet missing his back and punching into the end of the coach, one foot below the roof.

  He looked at the coach behind him. Another rifle-wielding son of a bitch was cocking another round into the breech of his carbine—a tall man with wind-blown auburn hair and wearing a long sand-colored duster, his brown Stetson blowing back behind him from the chin thong around his neck.

  Heart thudding, Bear watched the man narrow his pale blue eyes as he snugged his rifle up to his right cheek and sighted down the barrel, stretching his mustache-mantled lip back in a dry grin.

  The Pinkerton, hanging from the one ladder rung and facing his next opponent, opened his left hand, releasing the rung. As the shooter’s rifle puffed smoke and stabbed flames, the Pinkerton’s boots hit the coach’s wooden platform.

  Haskell bent his knees to save his back. Still, the drop was violent enough to stun him for a moment. He lost his balance on the moving train, pitched to his right, rolled, came up onto his heels still holding his rifle, and threw himself against the front wall of the rear coach car, his hat dangling down his back by its braided rawhide thong.

  He looked up, unable to see the shooter from this vantage, which meant the shooter couldn’t see Haskell, either.

  The sun was angling behind the man, however. His shadow slid across the platform in front of Bear. The man, holding his rifle barrel-down, dipped his chin to stare into the gap between the cars. Haskell shuffled to his right and then took one step out away from the car. He aimed up at the hardcase, who jerked his head toward the Pinkerton, eyes startled.

  He started to raise his carbine but promptly dropped it when Haskell’s .44-caliber slug blew his jaw off and into the wind blowing beside the train. Blood sprayed, flecking the stone escarpment.

  The man’s carbine bounced off the edge of the roof and clanked onto the platform near Haskell’s boots a half-second before the wind grabbed the jawless outlaw’s weakened frame and tossed it straight back out of Bear’s line of sight.

  He gave a satisfied snort.

  Then he heard a crunching sound to his left. Racking a fresh round into his Winchester’s chamber, he turned to see a ragged hole in the rear wall of the coach car he’d been riding in.

  Another hole appeared. Another and another, the muffled pops of the shooter from inside the car sounding little louder than snapping twigs beneath the clattering and grinding of the train’s iron wheels.

  Screams and anxious shouts rose. A baby began crying.

  “God damn it!” Haskell shouted, and leaped across the platform, slamming into the door with his right shoulder and ripping the latching bolt out of the frame.

  He stopped inside the door, crouching and raising his Winchester. The passengers were all hunkered down and yelling.

  A man with a pair of saddlebags draped over one shoulder and wearing a flour-sack mask with the eyes cut out was running down the aisle toward Bear, eyes bright, the cloth buffeting in and out around the robber’s mouth as he screamed and triggered the two pistols in his outstretched hands.

  One of the slugs carved a burning trough over the top of the Pinkerton’s left shoulder, while another plunked into the wall behind him. He was running too fast to draw a decent bead—to his own detriment.

  Haskell pumped two quick rounds into the man’s chest, throwing the shooter back and into the two cowboys who’d been playing two-handed poker, triggering one of his pistols into the ceiling. Another train robber was just then bursting through the door at the car’s opposite end, shouting, “What in God’s name is . . .?”

  He let his voice trail off when he saw Haskell, who was ejecting his last spent cartridge and levering a fresh one into the Yellowboy’s action. The robber at the other end of the car—a short, stocky hombre with incredibly long pewter-colored hair hanging down from beneath his mask and his weather-battered, sun-faded Stetson—began to raise the pistol in his hand toward the Pinkerton.

  Haskell raised his rifle and shouted, “Give it up, or give up the ghost, friend. Most of your pards are already dancin’ with the devil!”

  Bear drew a bead on the outlaw’s lumpy chest.

  The hardcase lowered his pistol, turned quickly to his left, and pulled the middle-aged woman in the widow’s weeds out of the seat she’d been cowering in. Haskell heard the woman’s chicken scream a shrill alarm, and then the woman herself was screaming and flopping her arms wildly, pleading for her life.

  “Drop the rifle, or I’ll send this bitch to her old man!” the stocky outlaw shouted from behind his flour-sack mask.

  Haskell triggered the Yellowboy.

  The stocky hardcase’s head snapped back as the .44 slug tore into his left temple and blew out the back of his head to paint the window of the door behind him with blood, brains, and bone. The man dropped his pistol unfired as he stumbled back against the bloody
door and tore it off its hinges before he and the door hit the car’s front platform.

  “Look out, Mister!” a raspy voice shouted amid the bawling and general hubbub. “Behind you!”

  Haskell started to turn his head just as he felt something cold, round, and hard press against his right ear. There was the ominous, ratcheting click of a gun hammer being cocked.

  A man nearly Haskell’s height stood behind him, grinning through the mouth hole of his mask. Both eyes were frosty blue and bright with cunning, the whites liberally stitched with red.

  In a heavy Mexican accent, the man said, “Amigo, I hope you are a friend of Jesús, because you are about to veezit him.”

  His mouth opened suddenly, forming a perfect O in the mask hole. Both eyes widened, and the light in them grew from cunning to incredulous. The pistol dropped from his hand to hit the floor near Haskell’s right boot. As Bear turned toward the masked Mexican, his would-be assailant gave a groan through his wide-open mouth and dropped to his knees. He reached up toward his neck with one hand and then fell belly-down on the floor, quivering.

  Haskell looked around. There was only the crowd, most of them filling the center aisle as they high-tailed it for the coach’s back door.

  Haskell frowned. “Who . . .?”

  He dropped his gaze to the dead man.

  The slender ivory handle of a knife—judging by its size, a stiletto—protruded from the back of the Mexican’s neck.

  Haskell checked to make sure no more robbers were near. When he saw only the horrified passengers, he dropped to a knee beside the dead Mexican and lowered his head to get a better look at the knife handle.

  The slim ivory grip was inset with the delicate carving of a black bird in flight.

  A raven.

  The flat end of the handle, which formed a perfect circle, was inset with a silver R.

  Haskell looked around. He turned toward where the old widow had been sitting. She was gone. So was her chicken.

  He looked around some more. Nearly all of the coach passengers had left the car. The train was slowing, having come to the bottom of the pass and the engineer likely having heard the gunfire. Since Haskell hadn’t seen the conductor, he figured the man was probably lying dead in one of the other coach cars.

  As he himself nearly lay dead right here.

  He regarded the dead Mexican again and then looked around once more, his thick beard spreading in a knowing grin.

  9

  In Colorado Springs, at the foot of Pikes Peak, Haskell spent the night gambling and drinking before bedding down in a locally famous, if not infamous, bordello appropriately called Garden of the Goddesses, located on the trail out toward the Garden of the Gods, that jaw-dropping wonderland of nature-carved sandstone monuments a few miles northwest of Colorado Springs proper.

  Bear figured he’d best have his sap bled off—what little Raven had left him—before the long ride into the mountains. The playful young octoroon who’d acquired the honor had done a right serviceable job, although any girl would have trouble living up to the night the big Pinkerton had spent with his beguiling colleague in the Larimer Hotel.

  Miss Raven York even gave the lovely Sonoma a run for her money.

  At dawn’s first wash the next morning, he rented a horse stout enough to carry a man his size without blowing out both lungs and breaking its legs and headed west through the Garden of the Gods and a couple of fledgling but raucous mining towns. When he had Pikes Peak well out of the way to the south, he swung west and started the slow climb toward the Continental Divide.

  He was glad to leave the summer behind him. With every passing mile that he climbed higher into early autumn, he felt the air gradually cooling and freshening. Pine resin and cedar perfumed the often sharp breeze sifting down from the snow-mantled peeks spreading out ahead and to both sides.

  He’d ridden through this country many times before, but those rugged monoliths, with their sawtooth ridges pocked with woolly-looking late-summer ermine and the granite peeking through here and there above the timberline, never failed to make him feel dizzy with childlike joy at the eternal magic and mystery of earthly creation.

  Someday, when he was old, he’d live up there among those towering peaks drained by chill, rollicking streams, far from the madding crowd. With just a dog or two, a mule, maybe a pet raccoon, and picks and shovels and gold-panning gear. Nothing else. Just that. A cabin, of course. A woman might be nice, but he knew from experience that women got on a fella’s nerves right fast. And he, despite his charm and wit, somehow always managed to get on women’s nerves, too.

  Imagine that!

  He chuckled at the notion. Then, just because there was no one else around to think him loco, he threw his head back and guffawed. He guffawed louder, enjoying the lingering, slowly receding echoes of his own voice and then bellowing with genuine laughter at the fool he was, riding a big horse through the piney mountains and yelling like an old mountain man who’d long since grown soft in his thinker box.

  Or maybe he himself had gone soft in his head. Crazier’n a tree full of owls.

  The war and all, his estrangement from his family . . .

  Oh, well. Mostly, he made a good time of it, and he had a knack for curling a girl’s toes, that was for sure!

  He bellowed again, leaning far back in his saddle and causing the big black to twitch its ears at the crazy Texan in its saddle.

  His first night on the trail from Colorado Springs, Bear stayed in an Overland Stage swing station and played cards by the light of an old bull’s-eye lantern with the one-eyed station agent, Pete Fitzsimmons, while the old agent’s wife snored raucously beyond a blanket curtain.

  The Pinkerton climbed even higher the next day, crossed the Divide, wearing his shaggy bear coat with its collar raised, and made camp along the Arkansas River.

  He fished for his supper while sipping Sam Clay bourbon from the bottle and smoking a fresh Cleopatra and pan-fried two red-throated trout with salt and butter and a sprinkle of wild sage.

  He washed down the fish with coffee liberally laced with his prized Sam Clay and watched the night descend, black as the inside of a glove. His breath plumed on the chill, still air. The river chuckled over rocks concealed in darkness behind him.

  Coyotes yammered. When they stopped, a lone wolf took over the night’s entertainment with a wild, lonely dirge. The stars kindled to life, appearing so close that Haskell imagined he could hear the cracking and popping of their individual conflagrations.

  Late in the night, he was awakened by the shrill cry of a hunting mountain lion. He looked around, pulled his Yellowboy close, slid his hat back down over his eyes, and let sleep pull him back down into its warm, cradling arms.

  The next day, in the mid-afternoon, he reined the black to a halt at the lip of a steep ridge and stared into the vast canyon below. The chasm was egg-shaped and carpeted in green grass so tall that it curled back on itself. It was threaded by a curling stream lined with mountain willows and sage. It was both an elk park and a beaver meadow, with several dams forming dark pools reflecting the westering sun.

  Beyond this park and a little higher on the gradually rising bench that rolled up against a vast pine and fir forest toward shouldering, snow-capped peeks, lay a town.

  Wendigo.

  The town was dwarfed by the size of the canyon and the monoliths rising beyond it, beyond the gently rising forest. But after Haskell had inspected the settlement closely, he was satisfied that it was no jerkwater or mere stage stop. It was Wendigo, all right, a boisterous gold and silver boomtown here in the heart of the Sawatch Range, a hundred miles nearly straight south of Leadville.

  The Pinkerton consulted a relatively recent government map he carried in his saddlebags, and then, satisfied that he hadn’t gotten off on a wrong trail, he stuffed the map back into a pocket of his coat, clucked to the black, and started
down the trail that switchbacked through towering pines and tamaracks. The loamy, resiny smell of forest duff rose all around him. Small forest birds piped, and squirrels chittered angrily. An occasional pinecone dropped with a dull thud.

  Far up in the cobalt sky, a hunting hawk gave its ratcheting cry.

  Nearly a half hour later, horse and rider reached the bottom of the ridge, where the fresh, mineral smell of a narrow, clear-as-glass stream rose. While the black gelding drew water from a slender pool, Haskell watched a rainbow trout flick-and-pause among the pale, polished rocks, its sides sparkling like sequins on a cheap whore’s scanty frock.

  Wendigo was far larger than it had appeared from a half-mile away. It was also noisier and smellier and teeming with men of every size, shape, and color. Most were dressed in skins and firs of various types, and as Haskell put the black along the broad main street between tent shacks, log cabins, and false-fronted business establishments, he heard at least three languages other than English: German, French, and what he thought was either Swedish or Norwegian.

  As he continued along the street, he saw several Chinamen with their hair in queues but dressed similarly to the others, and a swarthy little gent was selling corked brown bottles out of a wagon whose canvas top read, “Dr. Luigi Baliani’s Love Potions & Snake Oil.”

  Girls dressed like pretty, multicolored birds called from balconies of a half-dozen gaudily painted establishments on both sides of the street. As much as Haskell didn’t want to, he passed them all—even after one of the painted ladies called to him in a thick French accent, “Hey, big man on the black horse, if you let me suck your cock, I’ll let you play with my titties!”—and reined up in front of easily the largest and most resplendent establishment in town.

  The Sawatch House Hotel and Saloon.

  Haskell had learned from experience that if you wanted to find someone who’d gone missing under suspicious circumstances, as Malcolm Briar most likely had, you didn’t just burst into town asking around about the man. Or even about the other man, the detective who’d disappeared, Calvin Wexler.