by Stan Krumm
He caught on to what I was doing and without enthusiasm repeated the word—“packsack.” He didn’t do badly. The word was recognizable.
“We will go,” I said, miming the action of walking, “and you will take the packsack. Go.”
“Go,” he said, nodding comprehension.
“We will go. You will take the packsack. I will lead the mule. Mule.”
He had a little trouble with that word. He pronounced it “mooah.” The letter “l ” seemed to be in the wrong place, so I tried a substitute, not worried about technical accuracy.
“Donkey. You can say, donkey, I will lead the donkey.”
Rosh was not enjoying our session, which irritated me a bit, because it seemed so appropriate to me at the moment. Still, he patiently repeated the lesson thus far.
“Packsack,” he said, and pointed to the bundle.
“Mooah,” he slurred, gesturing to the mule.
“Donkey,” he chirped brightly, and pointed at me.
“No! No, I am not a donkey. If anyone is a donkey, it’s you, my friend. You’re as stubborn as a mule and you have that talent at kicking people, so don’t blame me if the similarity becomes well known. Just grab the packsack and let’s go.”
It was obviously the end of my attempt to tutor him in the language of his new homeland.
“Packsack. Go.”
“Shut up.”
We returned to the trail and travelled ten or fifteen miles before making camp on the edge of a bluff giving view to several benches of the descent to the Thompson River Valley.
In spite of my recent near-disaster running into Hec Simmonds, we were now so far from Barkerville that it seemed reasonable to risk travelling full-time on the main road. We had already been forced by the terrain to do so from time to time, and we had been able to use a few simple techniques to avoid confrontation with passers-by and the few other sojourners on the route. We kept to one side of the road as we walked, and as another person came into sight or within speaking distance we would contrive to be busy with our bootlaces or some segment of the mule’s baggage. People on horseback or in wagons were past in a moment, and pedestrians such as ourselves were usually in too much of a hurry to be gregarious. Apart from the Indians, there were few permanent residents in that country, and no one had much reason to loiter along the way.
Thus it was that my attention was so closely drawn to the strangers we passed on the next afternoon. Two men and a horse stood fifteen paces from the verge of the road on the uphill side. They were not camped, but neither did they seem to be on the move. Both men were tall, one clean-shaven, one with a dark beard, and when they exchanged nods with us as we passed, I felt as if they were watching us in a way that was more than casual. Observing them, though, I saw nothing out of the ordinary, apart from the saddle on the sway-backed grey, which was a homemade affair with stirrups of braided rope. I did not want to seem overly curious, and had returned my gaze to the path in front of us when I caught a glimpse of the third man as he stood up in the dark shadows, deeper in the trees.
It was the slippery little fellow that Rosh had kicked around two days previously.
That section of road is rough and rocky, up and down over gullies and ridges as it switches back and forth, moving down a fairly steep slope. It also weaves in and out of stands of pine and spruce, and once we were out of sight of the three watchers, I made for the nearest patch of forest, telling my partner to wait there with the mule at the meadow’s edge.
I don’t believe he had seen, let alone recognized, the third man, but he had picked up my nervousness. I would have liked to explain the situation to him but could not, of course. Since the day was sunny and warm, my coat was draped across the packs on the mule. I reached into the pocket and took out my handgun. My thought was to circle back and above the others to watch their movements, but I was no more than twenty yards uphill into the bush when they hallooed and called for us to wait.
I squatted down and peered through the branches to the spot where the trail ran up in front of Rosh and the mule. Four or five minutes later I saw them walking up the approach—the short man and the bearded man, along with the horse. They kept up a flow of jovial greetings, but now that they could see my companion, their eyes moved quickly from place to place.
“Where’s your partner, Chinaman?” the little fellow asked. “Where’s your friend?”
From my hiding spot I was thinking the same question—where was their partner?
The pine trees were fairly well spaced, with little underbrush. It was better country to hunt than be hunted in, and I scurried farther up into the trees, bent over almost onto all fours. A hundred yards up, I emerged cautiously into the open and slid behind a great grey lump of rock, puffing like a broken boiler.
I could hear voices calling far away but could not make out the words. The run through the woods had left me almost too tired to think. I was safe for the moment, but I needed to come up with a plan, and I couldn’t conjure up a thing. The only clear thought I had was that if I didn’t act quickly, I would lose everything.
After checking to make sure that the Colt was fully loaded, I crept down in the direction from which I had come.
Once I felt sure that no one was going to come up behind me, my fear was assuaged, and I slipped as lightly as a ghost from tree to tree over the bed of moss and needles, crossing the slope systematically but quickly. As I have said, there was little underbrush and visibility was good, so it almost startled me when I found myself immediately behind my quarry, no more than ten feet away. He was moving parallel to me and like me was slightly hunched over, squinting into the gloom.
“Looking for me?” I whispered.
He held his rifle at the level as he spun around, but when he fired the shot went off somewhere into the treetops. I gripped the Colt firmly in both hands, and my first bullet hit him directly in the chest. He rolled some distance when he fell.
I had no time to pause and consider what I had done. I ran as silently as I could in a great semicircle through the forested area, wanting to come out of the trees close to the other three men but from a different direction than they might have expected from the sound of the gunfire. I misjudged both the exact layout of the trees and meadow and my own stamina, though. I ran too far across the hillside and had to backtrack. It must have been ten minutes later when—plodding, panting, and covered in sweat—I stumbled into the clearing where I had left Rosh.
Everyone was gone.
I must have made a strange sight then, hurrying laboriously up the wagon road with no hat or coat, swinging the oversized revolver at my side and mumbling a stream of foul threats. My emotions were a poisonous mixture of anger, impatience, and fear. They boiled around in my head, clouding my vision for the better part of an hour. Only then would I admit to myself that I was going in the wrong direction.
I had given the blackguards a ninety minute headstart at the least, and I would be hard-pressed to catch them up before dark, if indeed I caught them at all.
Once I had worked my way back to my starting point, I found their trail painfully easy to follow. For the first stretch, at least, it followed the main road, and, since they had two animals in tow, I knew it wouldn’t be hard to spot any divergence. Thinking of my partner, I guessed that he would be doing his best to slow their progress as much as possible, but I hoped that he would temper his efforts enough to maintain his own safety. Logically, there was no reason why the brutes shouldn’t dispose of him immediately, but so far as I could see from signs on the trail, they were leading him along as a prisoner. Perhaps they were curious about the immensity of our riches and wanted to interrogate him further once they had the time. When they reached the stage of dividing up their loot and separating, though, I had to believe that Rosh would be in serious trouble.
It was after four o’clock when the country levelled out for a while and the highway met up with a creek. I am not sure of its name, but even at that time of the year it was twenty feet across and
looked to be deeper than a man’s waist at many points. Gasping at the cold, I waded across. The next half mile was a tangle of willow bushes, but it was level at least, and I slogged through it without any trouble.
I was scuffed up a bit on hands and knees, and my trousers were torn, but I was not particularly tired or hungry. I was not really afraid anymore, either—not of danger, nor of losing my fortune. I was driven by anger. I wanted to rescue my partner, and of course I wanted to save my gold, but at that moment I wanted more than anything to teach two wicked fools their due lesson.
I scrambled up an embankment of gravel to get back to road level, and stood for a moment with my gun tucked into my belt, picking slivers of sagebrush out of my hands and glancing around for animal tracks. I found none.
I looked back and forth closely. The ground was easily read, and there was no sign of mule or horse having been through in the last few hours. I realized that I had overtaken and passed the Chinaman and his captors, and immediately ran for the shelter of the cottonwoods and willow trees along the road’s verge. I tried to stay hidden in their midst as I hurried back, parallel to the main route.
I almost overran the tracks when they crossed unexpectedly beneath my feet. A few leaves had been kicked up, and some rough signs could be seen going up a little dry gully, perpendicular to the main thoroughfare. Down to the road I went to check the tracks there.
I was right. The characteristic hoof markings I had come to know quite well had followed the main route to that point, then left it to move up the draw on the left. There on the bare dirt between the two wagon wheel ruts, something else caught my eye—a spray of gold dust catching the late afternoon sun.
That puzzled me for a moment, then brought a grim smile to my lips, for I could come up with only one explanation. Rosh hoped that I would follow, and he had dropped a signal to indicate the junction in their path, using the only thing he had at hand. It showed cleverness and courage, but if I had a chance, I thought, I would reprimand him for it. After all, he should show a bit more confidence in my abilities as a tracker and a little more respect for the value of pure gold.
I had wondered why the two ruffians so quickly abandoned their compatriot back at the scene of the ambush. Now I guessed that an arrangement had been made to rendezvous later at a predetermined spot. This was evidently the place, though how far down the gully they were was impossible to say.
My first plan was to move up through the pine and scrub to the top of the ridge, then slowly down the length of the ravine, keeping watch below me as I went, but this proved easier said than done. The ridge top, when I got there, was thickly treed and hard to follow. After a few hundred feet of crawling and winding through the bushes, I realized that I was unsure even of where I was in relation to the main line of the gully. In that cover, with the rustling breeze confusing even the sounds nearest me, I could skirt past a herd of buffalo and be none the wiser.
I was catching my breath, leaning up against a pine tree, when I heard the mule bray a short distance below me and to my right. This was followed by a loud argument, carried on in two languages. As I reached the edge of a clearing next to a high rock face that formed one border of the gully, the tired bellow of the mule rang out once again, followed by the angry voice of the character I now thought of as Squealer.
“Stop that! You just cut that out!” he shouted. “There’s nothing wrong with her feet. Leave her alone, you yellow devil!”
Rosh responded with loud protestations and explanations while the other man declaimed with foul curses and coarse insults that spanned several generations.
From my initial vantage point, I could not see Rosh or the mule, but Squealer stood not ten feet away with his back to me, holding a rifle by the barrel like a walking stick. When there was a break in their colourful conversation, I spoke in a voice just loud enough for him to hear.
“Don’t move one muscle, friend, or you’ll be dead before you can say ‘God help me,’” I said. “Now let the rifle drop, and step backwards. Don’t turn around. Don’t speak a word. Just step straight back.”
He went straight as a stick, and the gun clattered to the ground. He was smart enough to follow my orders on the whole, but he took it on his own initiative to stick his hands high in the air.
With my revolver clasped in both fists, I nosed forward through the last screen of bushes, trying to see in three directions at once. Straight ahead of me, the old grey horse munched at the tall grass on the far side of the clearing. To my left, Rosh knelt beside the mule, who was tethered to a pine tree. To my right, the path headed back to the main road. I couldn’t see the other villain anywhere.
I slid up behind Squealer, grabbed the back of his collar, poked the gun barrel into the vicinity of his kidneys, and pulled him close.
“Where’s the other fella?” I demanded. My captive made a noise like someone stepping on a frog, but Rosh stood up and pointed down the trail. His easy smile told me that we were alone, at least for the present, and I gave Squealer enough of a push to land him on his stomach in the dirt.
My partner was happy to see me, of course, but he looked a little the worse for wear. His first steps forward betrayed a bit of a limp, and a cut along one cheek had swollen his eye half shut.
I looked at our captive, face down now on the ground before me.
“Where’s your pal?” I asked him, and when he hesitated a second before replying, I kicked him in the ribs about as hard as I could without losing my own balance.
When I looked at Rosh it was hard to read his expression, his face was so badly puffed up. I guessed that it had taken him some time to convince the two bushwhackers that he spoke no English.
Squealer was all twisted up, gasping for breath, but when I repeated my question, he managed to blurt out an answer very quickly, before I had a chance to use my boot again.
“Bill’s gone after Percy,” he choked. “Looking for you and Percy.”
I presumed that I knew who Percy was and that Bill would be disappointed when he eventually found him.
“When’s Bill supposed to be back?”
The little hoodlum was resting on his hands and knees now, with his head down.
“I don’t know,” he grumbled.
That may have been the truth, but I knocked him over with another kick in the ribs, and turned to Rosh.
I pulled my pocket watch out and let it dangle by the chain against my leg, then pointed in the direction that Bill had gone and asked whether it was a short time or a long time. He responded by holding his hands a fair distance apart and nodding. The other crook had been gone for a fair while. I was lucky I hadn’t run into him on the way.
Looking closer at the Chinaman’s face, I saw that the cut was more ugly than serious. The eye was not endangered. I reached out and touched his left side, and he winced and drew back, but in answer to my gesture of concern, he shook his head and waved one hand in dismissal.
“We’re all right then,” I said, but I knew that the statement was a bit of an oversimplification. I spoke again to our captive—“You’re a lucky fellow,” I stated. “You’re a snivelling skunk, but you’re alive, and if you play your cards right you have a decent chance of staying that way.”
He cursed under his breath, but since it was a general sort of curse and not specifically directed at me, I let it go. Finally he rolled into a seated position and looked up at me.
“What’d you do with Percy?” he asked.
“He’s waiting for you at the gates of hell, and it’s all the same to me if you want to join him now and keep him company until Bill’s ready for the trip, but I’m going to give you a chance to hang around here for a few more years, if you act nice for us.”
The scruffy little man put his head between his knees and rocked and moaned. I had the impression that his sadness was at least partially on behalf of the departed Percy. It appeared that these characters held some concern for each other, if for no one else.
Particularly in this modern age,
when steam trains roar across the prairie faster than the fastest horse, and messages fly through wires, connecting town to town almost instantaneously, there is a strata of mankind that does not even pause to consider their sins as they pursue a life of greed and violence. Neither fearsome threats nor sweet persuasion can teach this sort of person the meaning of compassion, and I regret to say that they exist everywhere I have ever been. Most especially they congregate where money is loose and liquid.
Percy, Bill, and Squealer were good examples, but there was at least a shadow of empathy between them, which was a good thing, for it was possible we would need to use Squealer as a hostage later on, if Bill didn’t fall too easily into our hands. I wasn’t sure exactly what we would end up doing, but I hoped that we could avoid killing the two in cold blood, so to speak. The sense of having killed someone—even a murdering scoundrel—is a foul thing to have at the back of your mind.
The first step was to capture Bill, and I thought I should begin the watch for him right away. The little cliffs behind us could be climbed fairly easily by a roundabout route, and they looked like they would give a good view in the direction of the wagon road.
Firstly, I went to the mule and got a length of rope from the packs. While doing so, I released the rest of the ropes, dropped the baggage to the ground and relieved the poor pack animal. I used the rope to tie our prisoner’s hands, then looped it over a high limb so that he was standing rather uncomfortably, with his arms above him. He commented unfavourably on the position with his usual tasteless colloquy, but, as I informed him, his comfort was not my concern.
I motioned Rosh to sit on a nearby log, cocked the .45 revolver, and handed it to him. I explained to him both verbally and in signs, partly for Squealer’s benefit, that if the prisoner made noise or talked too much, he should be shot dead.
The Winchester was gone from our baggage, possibly now in the possession of the third robber, so I took the big Sharp’s buffalo rifle and moved down the ravine to the steep slope at the edge of the cliff. I scrambled up there like a giant prairie dog, sending showers of gravel and rocks into the trees below, stopping to rest every dozen yards or so. The fatigue of the day was beginning to catch up with me.
