“That’s the thing about California: because everyone comes here from everywhere, it’s like a kettle where we’re all stirred into the same stew. But tell me about these cabins, or pens.”
Buckle looked and sounded very solemn as he spoke. “You are aware, I suspect, that there are places in the world where human beings, particularly females, are bought and sold like cattle and treated worse than such. Enslaved. Used and misused. There are bad men in Mexico, and farther south, who are involved in this. But not just them. All around the world are those willing to trade in humanity as a commodity. I’m not speaking here of slavery as we ordinarily understand it and which is so prevalent through the South and elsewhere. The kind of slavery I’m speaking of involves women. Women, young and old, of any race, who get washed away in a terrible river of human trade, stolen away, sold, resold, hurt. And worse.”
“I’ve heard of such but know little about it,” Jedd said. “Are you telling me that it’s going on here?”
“I know nothing for a certainty,” Buckle replied. “What I am told, though, is that a small valley overlooked by the western end of this ridge has little prison cabins and is used sometimes as a holding location for women either being moved down to Mexico—where they are transferred like so much merchandise to men who serve as brokers and continue the process until these sad souls are turned over to masters, abusers—or taken to the coast, where, at secret bays and inlets, they are put on ships and carried to Asia, to Europe, to some of the large islands that are like small nations to themselves. There are bad men of all peoples and races and nations, Dooley. Men who relish the destruction and domination of others in all kinds of ways. And others, less wicked, perhaps—or perhaps equally so—who are willing to serve as the vendors, agents, and suppliers for those evil ones, willing to give them what they want. It is that, specifically, that I am told goes on, at least sometimes, in this valley we will visit. Ah! Here we are at the base of the trail. It is a closely grown trail, just a narrow path, and nearly impossible for a rider to traverse. We shall best be served to dismount and walk on foot.”
“I know,” Jedd said. “I came down this very path earlier, all the way from the main road across the ridge. Looking for this very valley you’ve been talking about, with cabins that I was told would be missing something I would spot right away. It was a drunk who told me about it, and I had no idea whether to believe him. But he said nothing about the use of those cabins as human pens. Maybe he didn’t know about that, or didn’t believe it, or just didn’t want to spread a story he hadn’t verified. He’s an oddly moral fellow for a drunk. He’s Ben Scarlett, the very man whose find of gold led to the mining town of Scarlett’s Luck.”
“So you’ve already traveled this path….”
“But saw no valley, no cabins. I did, though, see the fork of the trail, and could only travel one of them. The one I chose, this same one that we’re at the base of right now, took me only to the ridgetop and down to the road we met on. The other, I reckon, must have been the one leading to the valley.”
“Ayuh. We’ll know soon enough. I suggest you lead the way, Dooley, since you have more familiarity with this bit of terrain.”
They advanced onto the trail and began climbing toward the top of the ridge.
“I need to let you know that my name’s not Dooley,” Jedd said as they moved along. “My name is Jedd Colter.”
“Well…why did you say before that your name is Dooley?”
“I didn’t. I said I was duly appointed as a deputy in Scarlett’s Luck. You misunderstood me. Bad ears?”
“Ayuh. Especially this right one. A gun went off too close to my ear almost a year ago, and I’ve been waiting for the full hearing to return ever since. I despair now of it ever doing so.”
“I’m sorry.”
Buckle pursed his lips and shook his head, thinking. “Duly appointed,” he said. Then he grinned. “Know what it sounded like to me? Dooley Poindexter. That’s what I thought you said, Jedd. I do hope you’ll beg this Yankee’s pardon.”
“We Poindexters are generally forgiving types, especially to the deaf,” Jedd said with a chuckle. Buckle laughed heartily, but stopped abruptly.
“I’ll be!” Buckle said. “I didn’t notice that!” He was looking back down the short distance of inclining trail up which they had progressed. They were still close enough to the Bowater Road below to see it, and Jedd followed Buckle’s gaze to look at the far side of the road.
“I didn’t notice it, either,” Jedd said. “And for a man who prides himself on his keen eyes and woodcraft, I’ve got no excuse I can name.”
“Shall we go back down and have a look while it’s still bright daylight? Perhaps it has a bearing on what we’re looking for.”
They headed back down the trail and across the road to the thing that had drawn their attention.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
The name on the grave meant nothing to Jedd Colter, but the fact that it was located not in a proper graveyard but in a small clearing beside the road, and the fact that there was a smaller grave beside it, was intriguing.
“Just a child,” Jedd said to Tom Buckle. “Always a sad thing, the grave of a child.”
Buckle squinted at the words on the wooden marker, read them aloud. “‘Winnie Belle Napier, Born 1841, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, died California, March 1850. Loved by her Maker and her family. Nine years of blessing to her parents.’ Lord, Jedd. That’s enough to make a man weep. And why do you reckon that little grave is there beside hers?” Buckle asked. Jedd knelt beside the tiny grave to take a closer look.
“‘Cat,’” he read aloud. He heard Buckle give a loud, wet snort and looked up to see the young lawman wiping tears from his face.
Buckle spoke in a breaking voice. “Jedd, you know what that must mean? She had her a cat that she loved so dear that it died right along with her, and they buried them side by side.” Buckle actually sobbed out loud then.
Jedd marveled at the unexpected display of emotion from a man who didn’t give an initial impression of being likely to be sentimental, and who had already declared himself “toughened” to life’s harsher realities. It became a clumsy moment for Jedd, because Buckle proved to be, unfortunately, one of those men who look and sound hilariously comical when in grief. Jedd chuckled against his will at the sight of the tear-gushing man and tried to disguise the chuckle as a cough. It didn’t matter, really, because Buckle’s bad ears hadn’t heard it, anyway.
The moment of out-of-place jocularity brought out a mischievous sense of dark humor that occasionally surfaced in Jedd. He looked at Buckle, who quickly got control of his weeping out of embarrassment, and said, in a dead serious tone, “Buckle, I believe it didn’t happen like you said. I think that cat there killed that little girl. She was sitting there, petting on it, cooing at it like a gentle little dove, and that Satan of a cat up and went for her throat and tore it right out. Poor little Winnie Napier died with that cat hissing and spitting at her while she bled to death. And with her last flicker of life, Winnie put her hand on a stone lying near her and brought it down on that cat’s head and killed it dead just as she died herself. They buried them side by side. That’s what I think happened. Or maybe they hanged the cat for her murder.”
“No! You don’t mean it!”
“Oh yes, oh yeah. I mean, ayuh.”
“That all sounds mighty unlikely, Jedd.”
Jedd astonished himself by maintaining his dead-serious composure a little longer. “Unlikely? No, sir. That was exactly how my little sister, Molly, died. Seven years old and her cat tore out her throat. Nearly removed her head from her shoulders. Mama was never the same after that. Molly never got the chance to kill that cat with a rock, though. She was indoors when it went after her. No rocks.”
Buckle, his face blotchy and damp from his earlier tears, sputtered and stammered, then looked deeply at Jedd’s face. Jedd could no longer hide his mirth and laughed explosively in Buckle’s face. Buckle began to glower.
“Damn you, Jedd Colter—or Dooley Poindexter or whoever the hell you are!” Buckle growled. “You’re making a jest out of me, damn you!”
Jedd shook with laughter. “I’m sorry, Buckle. I couldn’t hold back from it. You looked so durn funny sitting there blubbering in the saddle. I just had to rag on you a little. I never had no sister named Molly, nor one named anything else. And if I had, it’s danged unlikely she’d have died from having a cat tear her throat out.”
By now Buckle was catching Jedd’s mirth, and looked as funny in laughter as he had in tears. Both men happened to glance down at the burial site again, realized it was very inappropriate to be laughing at such a solemn place as this, and turned to start back up the inclined trail again.
“Really, though, what do you suppose is the story about that cat buried beside her?” asked Buckle when a few minutes had passed and the laughter was done.
“A pet, I guess,” Jedd replied. “It is strange they both died at the same time, though, if that’s the case.”
“I guess we can’t know.”
“I guess not.” They strode silently a few more minutes. “It’s an odd thing, people and animals and how attached they can become. I knew a man back in Tennessee who made the journey with my emigrant group to California. He had a cat, an old pet of his, that had died and he had it stuffed and preserved, and kept it with him about all the time. He held and petted and scratched on that dead cat like it was still living. It was an odd thing. But he’s a bit of an odd man. I almost married that man’s daughter back in Tennessee. He was president of a college there for quite a few years.”
Jedd halted suddenly and stared straight ahead, thinking hard about something Crozier Bellingham had said about McSwain…about jewels stolen from the coffers of Bledsoe College and probably smuggled across the country by McSwain, possibly inside the preserved carcass of Cicero the cat. And how McSwain, after clinging to that cat for hundreds of miles, had suddenly passed it on to someone else. A little girl on her way to California with her family, in fact. An ailing little girl.
“What’d we stop for?” asked Tom Buckle.
Jedd started to tell Buckle that perhaps he knew the story behind the cat buried beside the little girl’s grave after all. But he shut up even before he started, realizing telling the tale wouldn’t be worth the effort, just a distraction from what they had come here for.
“Well, at least finish what you were telling me before. The college president and so on.”
“His name is McSwain. His daughter married a man named Wickham, and they live in Bowater, of all places. Your own mining town.”
Buckle gaped at Jedd. “Stanley Wickham?”
“That’s the man. You know him?”
“I know who he is! Everyone for miles around knows Stanley Wickham. He’s a merchant of mining and dry goods and has the best house in Bowater, though it isn’t much to look at. Something of a hodgepodge. Wickham’s wife, though…now, there is beauty to any man’s eyes! Did I hear you say you almost married her?”
“I did. But it…it didn’t happen.”
“I must say it’s your loss, then, because Stanley Wickham is the envy of every man in a dozen different mining camps for his wife’s beauty. Here we are in a state with not enough women to fill a teacup, and who but a mouse of a man like Stanley Wickham has the finest one in several states?”
“Life ain’t fair, Buckle.”
“No, it’s not. And what makes it worse in Wickham’s case is that he seemingly doesn’t appreciate what he has. The man is reputed to have climbed into the nests of many a soiled dove. A woman like he has deserves better than that. Sorry even to tell you that, Jedd.”
“I already knew. To tell you the truth, Buckle, I have every notion of seeing Emma when I can. It’s most of what drew me to California. I’ve got to see her and know how she is. If her husband is hurting her, I will not stand by and let it go on.”
“I can’t fault that, Jedd. But to change the subject a moment…we’ve reached the fork of the trail.”
Jedd looked down the trail branch he had not taken before. “Shall we ride down to that valley, assuming we find it?” Jedd asked Buckle.
“I’m inclined to stay on foot. Easier to stay quiet, low, and out of sight on foot. Why don’t we hobble the horses here and come back for them later?”
“I think that’s a good notion, Tom.”
They went on, more tense now, wondering how much truth there might be in the rumor they were chasing. Jedd asked Buckle a question that had been bumping around the back of his mind for several minutes now. “Tom, why did you have to buttonhole me, a deputy marshal from another town, to help you do this? Why did your own marshal not come with you?”
“Well, Jedd, because he is occupied more with his mining than his work for the law. I often feel that I was hired to do his duties for him while he gathers up his flakes and dust and guards his claim.”
“Like we talked about, life ain’t fair.”
“No.”
They went on. Jedd, experienced at reading landscapes, could tell from a subtle difference in light, breeze, and atmosphere that they were approaching a depression in the hilly land. The valley of cabins, most likely.
A few paces on, Buckle said, “Jedd, you asked why my marshal did not come with me. I’ll ask the same question back to you.”
“My marshal, man name of Rand Blalock, doesn’t know about any of this, doesn’t know I’m out here today. It was me who Ben Scarlett talked to about it, Blalock not being there to hear it. So I came on alone, in case it turned out to be nothing. And also because I wasn’t certain just what I would do…whether I would come up here or go on to Bowater to find Emma.”
“Jedd.” Buckle had stopped in his tracks and pointed ahead. “A cabin. Just one. You see it?”
Jedd looked and shook his head. “No. I see at least five of them.”
He was right, though it took Buckle much longer to see them. “So it’s true,” he said.
“At least about there being cabins in this valley, yes. And Ben was right about the cabins…something missing.”
“I think I see. No windows. No doors.”
“But some missing chinking here and there…to let air through, I guess.”
They stood silent for more than a minute. There was no sound at all but a light breeze.
“Do you think anyone is down there?” Buckle asked.
“I don’t think so. Let’s go down, quietly, and see.”
Buckle drew back, nervous. “There might be someone guarding the place, if there are people in any of those cabins.”
Jedd shook his head. “What I smell isn’t the scent of humans.”
Buckle sniffed the air. “I don’t smell anything.”
“It comes from spending enough time hunting, tracking, trapping. And from being a Colter. They say that, in the earlier days of my family, Joshua Colter could smell the scent of deer long before he could see them. And do the same with people.”
“So, if those cabins don’t hold people, then what?”
“Ever heard of bull and bear fights, Buckle?”
“Ayuh. Saw one once. Fearsome bloody thing, ayuh, is a bull and bear fight.”
“Well, I think those cabins are maybe there to hold bears captured for use in bull and bear fights. That’s what I smell. Bear spoor.”
“No women held here, then? Just bears for the fights?”
“That’s what I’d bet we’ll find. I’m going down to look. If there’s ever been people held here, I’ll be able to tell. But I have to say, Tom, even though I know the kinds of things you talked about really happen, women and girls being captured and hauled off to be misused by bad men in other places, I doubt it happens much compared to most things. I think it’s more likely there’s something not quite that devilish going on here.”
To Jedd’s surprise, Buckle’s eyes filled with water again. He frowned, tears brimming over. “It may not be as uncommon as most would think,” he said, his
voice quaking a little. “And don’t think that it can only happen somewhere else.”
“Tom, what’s going on with you? Is there something about all this that cuts close to the heart with you? Did you maybe know a woman who—”
“I can’t do it, Jedd. I can’t. I thought if I had somebody with me, I could get through it. But I was wrong. If we go down there and find that there have been women held here after all, I…I don’t know what will happen. I don’t think I could bear being there, knowing…”
“Knowing that somebody who matters to you was hurt in a place like this…if this proves to be that kind of place. Am I right?”
Buckle nodded fast and couldn’t look at Jedd any longer. His eyes and face were wet now. “You aren’t the only one who has lost a beloved woman, Jedd,” he said. “In my case it was my sister. Taken from us too young, and in circumstances no woman should ever have to face, anywhere, anytime. The kind that the rumors say might prevail in that valley there.”
“I’m sorry for whatever happened, and whoever it happened to. You needn’t go down there with me, Tom. I’ll take a look and then I can tell you.”
“I’m not going to wait. I’m going to go on back home, Jedd. I don’t even want to know what you find, not today. You can look me up and tell me sometime later.”
It was clear to Jedd that, whatever had happened to Tom Buckle’s lost sister, it had had a devastating effect. The man was wrecked, shaking now as if the California day had just gone as cold as a Canadian winter. Buckle’s tears came hard, but this time Jedd had no impulse at all to laugh at his grimacing expression.
“Go on, if you need to, Tom. I’ll get with you another day and we’ll talk some more. As much or as little as you want to.”
Buckle nodded and managed to pull himself together a bit. His emotions settled enough for the tears to stop.
Jedd shook Buckle’s hand and began trudging down into the valley. Ten steps down, Buckle called to him, “Wait just a second.” He trotted down and joined Jedd.
“What is it, Tom? Have you changed your mind?”
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