“There are people watching,” Joe said, jacking a thumb back toward the town they’d just left. “You can be sure that word will get back to Ransom Holt that we headed back into the Wasatch Mountains.”
“But why east?”
“Fer two reasons,” Joe said as they walked swiftly toward the high, blue mountains. “One bein’ that even with a few days head start, we wouldn’t get far in that desert with only two full canteens and an old pistol. We’d either die of thirst or the Paiutes would kill us for certain. An’ you can’t hide your tracks out there in that desert.”
“And the other reason?”
“I trapped in the Wasatch for two years,” Joe told her. “And even more important, I know some of the Indians up in those mountains. I expect they’ll help us even if those folks in Perdition didn’t.”
“We got a very fair shake from Ira Young,” Fiona said. “I was deathly afraid that they might hang or lash us like they did Ransom Holt and Eli Brown.”
“We got off free because we were shackled and chained all the time we were in Perdition so there was no way that Ira Young could say we might have been in on the thievery.”
Fiona looked at her wrists, which were chafed bloody from the manacles she’d worn. “I’m going to carry these scars for the rest of my life. So are you, Joe.”
“Scars are just the badges you earn for livin’,” Joe told her. “Show me a man or a woman without scars and I’ll show you someone who ain’t done squat. Anyway, you’re still gonna be a pretty woman.”
“But I’m not now because I’m so skinny and—”
Joe stopped and hugged his poor wife. “Fiona, you’ve gone through hell and I hate to say it, but we’ve still got a hard row to hoe before we can ever expect to get our daughter back. Ransom and Eli will be comin’ after us once they heal from the bullwhippin’ . You heard what Holt yelled at us back there. He ain’t one to give up.”
“Maybe Eli will, though.”
“I expect Holt will talk or force Eli to stick with him in chasin’ us down,” Joe said. “I don’t reckon Holt wants to go against me one on one.”
“What can we do when they come?”
“Well,” Joe said, releasing his wife. “The first time they caught you, I wasn’t with ya. Then they caught me because I was alone. So the way I’m figurin’ it, if we stick together and use our noggins, maybe we can get through all this. But I’ll have t’ kill ’em both.”
“That won’t be easy, Joe.”
“No,” he admitted. “It won’t be, but there is no choice. They won’t stop huntin’ us and we can’t run forever. They know that sooner or later we’re gonna show up at St. Mary’s Church in Virginia City to collect our daughter.”
“What about the half-breed?” Fiona asked. “What about Johnny Redman?”
Joe almost smiled. “He’s the joker in the deck. He’s the only one that I haven’t been able to figure. He’s a half-breed, and generally those kinds of men just want to stay away from whites and even from their own people. They don’t fit in with either the white man’s or the Indian’s world, and they don’t care a good damn about money.”
“But Johnny was interested in the bounty on our heads.”
“So he told Ransom Holt,” Joe commented. “But I’m not sure that the bounty of a thousand dollars is why Johnny Redman signed on with Holt.”
“What other reason then?”
“Maybe none. Maybe something. I don’t know. I just figure we haven’t seen the last of that half-breed.”
“Do you think he’ll try to capture us and take us to the Comstock so that he can collect the entire reward?”
“He just might be thinking that way,” Joe said, consciously making an effort not to walk so fast that Fiona couldn’t keep up without trotting next to him.
“I hope not. I hope we never see or hear from Redman again.”
“I’ll second that,” Joe agreed. “That half-breed is a dangerous, dangerous man.”
That evening, tired and exhausted from all their walking, Joe and Fiona made a cold camp in the foothills of the Wasatch Range. Fiona was limping badly because her ill-fitting Mormon shoes had given her flaming red blisters. Joe was limping for the same reason, and he knew that they had to get better shoes or boots and some food and supplies.
At dusk, he shot a big mountain jackrabbit with the Colt Navy, and used two sticks to rub together to finally get a cooking fire under way. Joe gutted the rabbit and they roasted it on sticks. They had used both canteens of their Perdition water while getting off the salt flats, but there was a clear stream coming off the mountains and the water tasted delicious.
“Joe,” Fiona said. “I can’t wear these awful old shoes any longer, and I can’t walk over this rocky ground in my bare feet. I’ve gone lame.”
“I’ll make you a moccasin out of this rabbit skin. Gonna need to shoot another for the second foot, though.”
“You were married to an Indian woman once,” Fiona said. “Did she make moccasins out of rabbit pelts?”
“Nope. A rabbit’s hide ain’t tough enough to stand up to much hard travel.”
“Then maybe we ought to find a little settlement and see if we can work a few days to get enough money for shoes and supplies.”
“Maybe,” Joe said, not sounding too keen on the idea. “But I hate to lose any of our head start on Holt and Eli.”
“I know what you mean. But what choice do we have?”
“If we come upon a settlement, then I might be able to win some money in a card game.”
Fiona raised an eyebrow in question. “You don’t have any money to bet.”
“I could bet this old Colt Navy.”
“It isn’t worth much.”
“No,” Joe agreed, “but it’ll buy me a few hands and if I’m lucky, I could build up the winnin’s.”
“But if you’re unlucky at the cards, then we don’t even have a weapon with which to defend ourselves.”
“Not true,” Joe said with a grin. “I got my ’hawk and I can defend the hell out of us with it.”
Fiona squeezed his arm. “I just won’t abide you taking any more scalps, Joe. Killing someone in self-defense is one thing, but scalping is quite another. Please tell me that scalping is now in your past.”
“Oh, hell,” Joe said. “If it really troubles you, then I won’t scalp no more men. But many was the time I’d pull a good scalp from my pouch and trade it for useful things.”
“Joe?”
“All right,” he said. “No more scalpin’. But the ’hawk will protect us in troubles, Fiona. Trust me on that.”
“I do.”
“That’s good to know.”
The following morning, Joe used another one of his six precious bullets to shoot another jackrabbit, which they again roasted and devoured. Then he skinned the animal and used a strand of the rabbit’s gut to sew a pair of crude moccasins for Fiona.
“But, Joe, they’re still slick with blood and fat!” she protested, making a face as he laced them on her poor, blistered feet.
“Better the pelts are that way than your feet,” Joe said. “And you won’t have to wear ’em for long. We’re avoidin’ Salt Lake City and the farms around here, but as we move into these mountains we’ll find folks and work things out.”
“I sure hope so.”
“Ya got t’ trust me and yourself,” Joe told her. “’Cause that’s all we got left to believe in.”
“No,” Fiona countered, “we’ve got our daughter.”
“Tha’s right,” Joe said with a smile. “And don’t you ever let me forget that.”
“Believe me, I won’t.”
Late on the afternoon of the second day, now deep into the high mountains, they faintly heard a rifle shot, and shortly afterward saw vultures circling in the sky. Joe said, “Probably a hunter shot some deer meat.”
“Should we just avoid him?”
“Nope. Sharing your meat is the rule of the mountains. Some don’t want to do it, but I a
lways did and this fella will, too . . . one way or ’nother.”
It took them an hour of moving through heavy timber and over and around big rocks before they climbed up to a point where they looked down and saw a dead man being eaten by a sow grizzly bear and her cub. “Oh,” Fiona cried, covering her eyes. “How awful!”
“Awful for him,” Joe said, “but good for us.”
“Are we just going to stand here and let that man be eaten?”
“I reckon so,” Joe replied. “The sow and her cub will eat for a while, then scratch and kick dirt over the body. They’ll go away to sleep and come back later to eat more.”
“I think I’m going to be sick,” Fiona told her husband as she covered her mouth and turned away to retch.
Instantly, the sow heard the unfamiliar sound, and its massive head whipped around just as Joe pushed Fiona to the earth and they huddled out of the grizzly’s sight.
After a few minutes, the sow returned to her gorging. Her cub had never stopped.
For the next two hours the bears stayed next to the dead man, eating off his legs, arms, and a buttock. The sow, with her long claws, ripped off the man’s clothes, and when the two grizzly bears were filled with fresh meat, they finally ambled off into the trees.
“You wait right here,” Joe told Fiona. “That man had a rifle and probably a six-gun. Too bad for him that he wasn’t a better shot.”
“You’re going down there to strip him?” Fiona’s face displayed shock and revulsion.
“You betcha,” Joe told her. “And if we’re real lucky, he’s got a camp and a horse tied up not too far away.”
“Bury him, Joe. Please bury the poor soul.”
“I can’t take the time,” Joe told her. “That momma bear isn’t going to go far from her kill. I’ll have to slip in fast and get out even faster.”
“If the man had a rifle, you could . . .”
“It’s empty,” Joe told her. “That’s the shot we heard a while ago. I reckon the fella will have a pistol, but I already got one and ain’t no pistol gonna stop a ragin’ momma griz.”
“Be careful!”
“I will,” Joe vowed. “I do have my ’hawk, you know.”
“That’s no match for a grizzly bear.”
“Well, I reckon that’s true enough,” Joe told her as he headed down the slope toward the half-eaten body.
It took him nearly a half hour to reach the dead man, and it wasn’t a pretty sight. The vultures had already landed on the body and begun picking out the eyes and protruding tongue. Joe scared them off, but they didn’t fly far, and some only hopped away a short distance and screeched at him in anger.
The man had been middle-aged and his eyesight must have been poor because he was still wearing a pair of spectacles, although they were now covered with blood and one of his round lenses was missing.
Joe wasted no time at the sow’s fresh kill. With the goresplattered vultures screeching and hissing at him, Joe went through the man’s blood-soaked pockets and found seventeen dollars and change. He also stripped off the man’s gun belt and pistol, this one the heavier Colt Army .45. Joe removed chewing tobacco, a pocketknife, and a nice hunting knife from the remains. He searched for a wallet or some identification, but he didn’t expect to find any and did not.
Lastly, Joe pulled off the dead man’s boots, which looked as if they might be a good fit, along with his socks. Joe would have liked to take the man’s coat, but it was too ripped up and bloody, so he left it. But the real prize was the Spencer rifle and its bullets, which were spilled close by the body. With a rifle and ammunition, Joe knew that he could now shoot all the meat that he and his wife needed to survive in the mountains.
“I thank you for your belongings, mister. Sorry I can’t tell your kinfolk what became of you,” he whispered to the corpse. “But then again, they’d probably not want to know about your bad ending.”
Suddenly, the sow grizzly burst out of the trees with her cub following right behind. When she saw Joe, she reared up on her hind legs and snarled, showing long fangs and slinging saliva back and forth.
“I was just leavin’,” Joe told her, backing away fast from her kill. “Just right now I’m leavin’.”
Joe continued to back up and reload the Spencer. Once he had a bullet in the breech, and with two cap-and-ball pistols already loaded, he was more than confident that he could shoot the sow and her cub and feast well on bear meat that night.
But for some reason, he didn’t want to kill the mother bear or her cub. “It’s your prize,” he said to the pair. “And you’ve done us a big favor, so I’m gonna just leave you and your cub in peace . . . if you’ll allow it t’ be that away.”
The sow stopped advancing and snapping her glistening teeth. She watched Joe retreat back down the mountainside into the trees and brush before returning to her kill.
“Look what I got us!” Joe said, barely able to conceal his joy. “Fiona, we got a whole new lease on life now!”
“What about that poor, poor man?”
“He’s gone from this world,” Joe said. “He ain’t in no pain and he’s passed on to us many good things.”
“I still wish we could at least bury his remains.”
“The sow will bury what she don’t eat, and then the vultures and the varmints will eat and scatter what little is left. What we got to do is to find the man’s camp.”
“How do you know he has one?”
“He didn’t have a pack nor bedroll. He was pretty well dressed and I got seventeen dollars cash off’n his body, so he would have a horse and outfit. The horse will be tied someplace in the trees, and we got to find it before the sow or another grizzly does. Once we do that, you won’t have to worry about your poor feet no more because you’ll be ridin’ high!”
Fiona managed a sad smile. “I just wish it wasn’t at that poor man’s expense.”
“He should never have been out here on foot in heavy timber knowin’ he couldn’t see well nor shoot any better,” Joe said without condemnation. “His mistake cost him his life, but it might have saved ours.”
“Let’s find the horse and try not to find any grizzly bears,” Fiona said.
“Fiona, kin you walk a mile or two in those new rabbit moccasins I made you?”
“I sure can.” Fiona shielded her eyes and looked up at the circling vultures, then shivered. “Let’s go!”
It didn’t take Joe Moss more than an hour of brush beating to locate the dead man’s camp. His horse was a strawberry roan, and a nice one at that. The bedroll was newly bought and well made. There were pots and pans and a little burro that was bawling and scared half out of its wits. Tied up to an aspen like the roan, the burro was so upset that it had wound itself around and around the tree until its shaggy little head was tethered tight against the white bark.
“What’s he so upset about?” Fiona asked as Joe got the pack animal straightened out and then laid a soothing hand on its trembling hide.
“The burro is maybe a little smarter than the strawberry,” Joe explained. “And it knows there’s a grizzly out there, and maybe it even smells the dead man’s blood.”
“What are we going to do now?”
“Let’s pack the burro, saddle the horse, and cover as much ground as we can before dark,” Joe decided. “That griz has tasted human flesh, and once they do that they’ll come for you near every time they get hungry.”
“Then let’s hurry!”
“I’m a-fixin’ to do ’er,” Joe told his wife as he sat down and pulled the new socks and then boots on. “Damned if that dead fella didn’t have big feet like me!”
“Joe, please let’s hurry.”
Joe jumped up and started packing the skittish burro. Once he had that done to his satisfaction, he saddled the strawberry roan, then glanced at Fiona’s legs and adjusted the stirrups to her length.
“Mount up,” he said, holding the roan’s reins.
The strawberry was a tall, handsome animal and Fiona was not a
tall woman, so she really had to stretch to climb up into the saddle. But once that was done, she asked for the reins and the strawberry proved to be as gentle as a child’s pony.
“He’ll do you fine,” Joe judged, picking up the lead on their new pack burro and starting off. “We’ll go a ways to the south and when we’re well clear of the Salt Lake, we’ll cut back to the west and into the big basin desert.”
Joe looked back, and seeing his poor, abused wife astride the nice strawberry roan made his heart feel good and proud. A man should always take care of the woman he loved, and Joe felt as if he had done a few things right in the last couple of days to take care of Fiona. She still looked pretty awful from all the starvation and ill treatment she’d received, but Joe knew that she was stronger than she appeared and would begin to fill out and mend.
“What about water?” Fiona called out.
“Water?”
“Yes, Joe. Water. If we’re going back into the desert, we’ll have to have lots of good water.”
“That’s for sure.”
“Well?” Fiona asked. “We sure don’t want to go out into the desert and die of thirst. That’s probably a terrible way to die.”
“It is,” Joe said. “It’s about the worst I ever saw.”
“You saw someone die of thirst?”
“A partner long ago. I nearly joined him . . . but that’s not worth the tellin’ and it’s a bad story.”
“Then how will we survive until we reach the Humboldt River?”
“I’ll find water holes along the way there,” he promised. “Either that, or I’ll pay some Paiute to lead us to the hidden desert water holes. And after a while, we’ll get to the Ruby Mountains, and then we’ll traipse on down to the Humboldt River and follow it all the way to the Comstock Lode.”
“But what if that’s exactly what Ransom Holt and Eli expect and they’re waiting to catch us?”
“Then they’re just waiting to die, darlin’,” Joe said, leading the little burro out of camp and striking south. He raised his new Spencer and yelled back to Fiona, “Yes, Missus Moss, if that’s their plan, then they’re just waitin’ to die.”
Comstock Cross Fire Page 13
