by Lauran Paine
UTE PEAK
COUNTRY
LAURAN PAINE
Copyright © 2012 by Mona Paine
E-book published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
The characters and events in this book are fictitious.
Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental
and not intended by the author.
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6125-4
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6124-7
Fiction / Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
Blackstone Publishing
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Ashland, OR 97520
www.BlackstonePublishing.com
Chapter One
There was a brisk, cold wind blowing down the canyons. Where it came funneling to the gray grasslands under that overhead leaden sky, it whipped around and beat back upon the foothills, punishing them with its cutting chill.
Clouds scudded from north to south, gray-edged, ragged, and rushing headlong down the alien sky. Spring was close but winter had not yet surrendered; it sent its marshaled forces in reckless and headlong charge to the far curving of prairie, there to hurl its frigid blasts against that warmer air coming northward.
Ute Peak stood bulky and immense, its sides corrugated from the eternal struggles that took place in the high country between spring and winter each year, its rough-cut peak where the everlasting snowfield lay, alternately dead-white and pink, alternately reflecting the mood of those soiled clouds, or the thin shafts of sunlight that occasionally broke through to strike up there.
Otherwise, the land was rough, rocky, tilted to flowing, wild, uninhabited mostly, scourged by elements and shunned by most men, except in the spring when lowland cowmen drove herds to the parks, the meadows, and the great grassland plateaus where an indigenous tough, wiry shortgrass grew that put more grease under a critter’s hide in thirty days than he’d otherwise get in five months of hay feeding.
Except for this, perhaps, the lowland people would have only come to the Ute Peak country to hunt elk, deer, and bear.
Up here were blue-blurred ranks of spruce growing upon granite escarpments where a pine couldn’t grow. But lower, near the meadows, ringing them around, were the firs, the pines, even some raffish old junipers. Here one had no trouble encountering bears and lions and, like now with spring close by, rutting bull elks large as a horse with swollen necks and bloodshot eyes, more to be feared in this, their mating season, than a she-bear with cubs.
The cattlemen didn’t normally make their upland drives until the last snowfall was surely past, but this was not always so, for the first cattle into the high country had that much head start on a weight gain over subsequent herds, so usually some bold spirit brought his critters up the torturous trail out of the lowland, settled parts of Colorado, in late April, or sometimes in mid-May.
But one thing was certain. With that gusty bitter wind pushing those gray-lined clouds, the game would return, and with it would come men, for this was the heavenward sign of burgeoning springtime, and a man like Jackson Miggs, who had wintered under Ute Peak in his strong log cabin with its six-foot ceiling and its two-foot solid log walls, was ready to welcome anyone, even the cowmen whose animals spoiled his trout streams and closely cropped the forage, driving elk and deer higher up into the saw-toothed backcountry mountains.
Jackson Miggs was no more than five feet seven inches tall, but Mother Nature had rammed a lot of sheer brute strength down into that tough hide of his. Jack weighed two hundred pounds and could match the death hug of a two-year-old bear, muscle for muscle. Legend said that he’d actually done it, had actually stood up one time when a young shag-back had reared up at him from behind a tree, and had before three cowboys from Hyatt Tolman’s outfit met that bear face to face and had locked his immense arms around the bear, squeezed harder than the shag-back could hug, left the bear unconscious in a thin snowbank, and laughed.
Those thoroughly awed range riders had taken that story back down to the Pagosa plains when they’d returned to the settlement country with the last drags of Tolman’s cattle. It had been good for many a free drink in the Pagosa saloons, too, as all such stories were.
But Jackson Miggs never profited from it. He only went to Pagosa once or twice a year. Even then he wouldn’t go if he could inveigle someone else into fetching back supplies for him. Jackson Miggs didn’t like civilization. He liked people, but not mobs of them. He once told Frank McCoy that towns made him feel panicky, that when he looked out a window and saw a building across the road less than two hundred feet away, he felt like things were closing in on him.
He told Frank McCoy a lot of things, and Frank, in return for Jack’s friendship in that lonely world up under Ute Peak, packed Miggs’ winter-trapped pelts and plews out for Jack every fall, sold them at Fort Laramie or farther east, in Cheyenne, hid the money, dug it up again in the spring, and brought it back to Miggs on his way into the Ute Peak country from the north. In fact, it was usually with this north wind at his back that Frank came angling down out of some dark and twisted canyon, bundled to the eyes in a blanket coat, with a shawl over his head and ears, tied under his throat, and his broad-brimmed black Stetson hat snugged down tightly over the shawl.
That was why, when the gusts would momentarily diminish, Miggs would look up from where he was chopping at the woodpile and run a searching look out and around. The storms had been scudding past for ten days now, too high, too fast moving under the bitter wind, to dump more snow downward, but bound instead for the lowland country where they would dump rain. To a knowledgeable man like Jackson Miggs, or to one like Frank McCoy, this was the sign of spring.
But McCoy didn’t come that day, or the next day, either. He didn’t come swinging down out of a northward canyon for another seven days, and then he did not come alone, nor did he announce his arrival as he usually did with a ringing, loud Ute scream. But even so, riding steadily through lingering night shadows out of a canyon’s mouth, Jack Miggs caught his movement thirty seconds before even an Indian would have.
Jack was sitting outside on a bench, with his back to the rough front wall of his house, doing nothing, just sitting there letting the thin sunbeams beat against him, thawing his winter-hardened marrow. Even after he saw McCoy, he didn’t move. In fact, not until Frank reined back to let his companion come up beside him where the canyon ended and the meadow began, did Miggs even flicker an eye.
But then he did, because even at that distance, it was obvious—swaddling coat, big hat tugged low, bearskin gauntlets and all—that Frank’s companion was a female.
Jack watched, sitting still like an Indian, until consternation stirred; then he got up, passed swiftly from sight inside his cabin, scooped up discarded clothes here and there, stuffed them into a closet, hid an earthenware jug of rye whiskey behind the stove, kicked at scattered whittlings near the woodbox, and darted to his mirror to comb hair and great shaggy beard. By then his dismay had crystallized into indignation, and if there was one thing Jackson Miggs could not do, it was keep how he felt from showing in his face, in his dead-level blue eyes and down around his wide, bearded mouth.
“He’s in there!”
Jack put down the steel comb, squinted self-consciously at the mirror, and began to turn away.
“Hey, you old south end of a bear, come out here!”
Miggs hastily pushed his woolen shirt into his trousers at the waistban
d, walked over, took a breath, and opened the door.
McCoy let off a bellow and stiffly climbed out of the saddle, his face, what of it was visible, corrugated with pleasure, his little pale eyes dancing.
“She’s got a little mite of gray in ’er this year, that bush of yours, Jack, but I brought back a new straight razor so you can shed the underbrush.”
Miggs stood uncertainly, near to smiling, his smoky glance jumping from McCoy on the ground to the girl still sitting atop her horse, and back again. He finally smiled, took two long steps forward, and roughly caught McCoy’s ungloved and outstretched hand. They bawled at one another, wrenched each other’s arms with powerful tugs, and beat each other upon the back.
“Come inside,” said Miggs, “you doggoned settlement man. You’re late this spring, but you’re still the first to reach the uplands.”
Frank McCoy turned, called to the girl to get down, to come along inside, then turned without another glance backward and went rolling along with his wide-shouldered, narrow-hipped gait, beside the short but vastly broader bulk of Jackson Miggs, into that massive log house with its little patches of dirty snow at the earth line and its stringy spiral of woodstove smoke rising from the mud-wattle chimney overhead.
“Hey,” roared McCoy, shedding his blanket coat, his head shawl, and hat, swinging his long arms, and standing back to the stove, “where’s the jug of corn squeezings?”
“Where’s my money?” countered Miggs, heading for the stove, halting though before he brought the jug forth because the girl had just entered, closed the door at her back, and stood there looking frail, looking small and out of place, but also smiling at the bearlike antics of those two rough men.
McCoy reached under his shirt, tugged out a fat money belt, and flung it upon the table. “Twenty-seven hundred dollars,” he boomed. “Jack, you know what’s going to happen to you someday? You’re going to die up in here some wintertime, and no one’s ever going to know where you hide this damned money.”
Miggs stood there, grinning but silent. He was watching the girl, and because he had been raised thinking womenfolk should never see menfolk drink hard liquor, he kept his back to the stove and the jug behind it, until McCoy turned, gazed over at him, and said: “Well, what you waitin’ for you doggoned old hidebound hermit? Fetch the jug out.”
The girl removed her hat, her head shawl, those hair-side-out, bearskin gauntlets, and her coat. With all those things discarded, she was no more than a slip of a female. Jack thought that, wringing wet, she wouldn’t have weighed more than a hundred and five or ten pounds—and that, with both pockets full of stones.
But it was well distributed, that hundred and five or ten pounds. She was as pretty as a picture with her jet-black wavy hair, her steel gray eyes like forming smoke from a winter campfire, and her red lips that gently lifted at their outer corners and lay full and heavy at the centers. Her cheeks were red from the wind, her eyes sparkly wet and shiny.
Jack took in a long, deep breath and let it slowly out; somewhere inside him a sharp pain came and went. He was fifty-four. She couldn’t be over twenty. Sometimes a man came face to face with what he might have been in this life, with what he might have possessed. It hurt, whenever this happened.
“Come on, Jackson, consarn it. The whiskey, man, the whiskey. We’re froze to the bones and you stand there … Oh, excuse me. I forgot my cussed manners. This here is Miss Beverly Shafter. Miss Bev Shafter, this here is Mr. Jackson Miggs.”
Jack gallantly nodded. He was old enough to be concerned about this slip of a girl being in the wild, rough, and lawless Ute Peak country, yet still young enough to feel the tug of her uncommon beauty.
She said: “All the way up and over the rim, Frank’s been telling me about you, Mr. Miggs. About the time you outwrestled a bear. About the time the Utes caught you poaching their trapping streams and tied you with rawhide ropes … how you raised your arms, took a big breath, and burst every rope they had on you, then challenged any two of them at a time, and, after beating eight of them, how they let you go and called you a Dakota.” She paused.
Miggs swiveled his gaze to Frank McCoy and wagged his head. “Don’t you always believe Frank,” he said. “Little lady, Frank McCoy’s the longest-legged horse thief and the biggest liar between here and Kingdom Come.”
The girl moved closer to the stove. She said from smiling, knowledgeable eyes: “He’s also thirsty, Mr. Miggs.”
She was quietly laughing at Jack’s old fashionedness, and he knew it, so he brought out the earthenware jug, gravely handed it to McCoy, and settled his dead-level eyes once more upon Beverly Shafter.
“One time, many years back, I knew a man named Shafter. That was maybe before you were born, though. He trapped the uplands and drove freight in the summers. Sometimes he scouted for the army, too, and, the way I heard it, that’s what finally got him … scouting for the army, I mean. Of course that was some years back when the Indians were still playing Old Nick up in here.”
The girl’s gray eyes lost their smile slowly when she said: “Whatever happened to him, Mr. Miggs?”
“Well,” said Jack, accepting the jug back from Frank McCoy, “I can’t say for certain, little lady, but Hyatt Tolman, a cattleman from southward down around the Pagosa country, come onto the skeleton of a man sitting with his back to a big fir tree about fifteen, eighteen years back when he was hunting stray cattle in the backcountry.” Jack paused to point up where an old, rusty long rifle lay across two whittled pegs along a beam rafter.
“Tolman brought back that musket. It was lying across the skeleton’s lap. That was Jedediah Shafter’s gun, little lady. I hunted and trapped and camped with him enough times to know it on sight.” Jack dropped his big hand back to his side. “Well, the following spring I went up where Tolman told me he’d found the skeleton, but there wasn’t anything left. I expect the cougars and wolves and whatnot packed it all off during the winter to gnaw on. I did find a piece of a buckskin Ute hunting shirt, but that was all.”
Chapter Two
They sat at Jackson Miggs’ handmade table, the three of them, two rough, graying men and the lovely girl, listening to scrabbling wind fingers worrying the outside rafter ends, and talked. For Miggs it had been a long, silent winter. He wanted to hear all the settlement news, but as this memorable day began to haze over with shadows from that towering monolith of northwestward granite, Ute Peak, and daylight began gradually to become a blue-gray blur, Miggs rose up, saying to McCoy: “Let’s tend to the horses and supplies, Frank, and Miss Bev can make up supper if she’s of a mind to.”
This was a signal. McCoy recognized it as such and arose. Miggs smiled at the girl. “There’s an elk haunch hanging out back under the eaves,” he said, “and there’s baking powder and flour in those drawers by the sink if you’re of a mind to make biscuits. But the coffee, well, I ran out of coffee sometime back.”
She smiled up at him. “Are you sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “I’ve been told bachelors don’t like women in their kitchens.”
“Mind? Why, Miss Beverly, you’re just about the nicest thing that’s happened to me in twenty years. I don’t mind at all.”
Outside, Frank McCoy stood off a little distance, looking up with his head tilted, watching sunlight’s last golden spikes driving down hard into that pink snow field atop Ute Peak miles away. He heard Miggs come up and halt beside him, but he did not lower his head.
“That Shafter you told her about,” he said quietly. “Jack, that was her paw.”
“What? No, it couldn’t have been, Frank. Why, old Jedediah Shafter never would’ve married a woman.”
“He never did marry one,” said McCoy, still squinting at that soft saffron overhead. “But he was her paw nonetheless.” Finally, McCoy dropped his head, swung it, and said: “Tell me something … it’s been plaguing me all the way up here. Just what kind of a man was Jedediah Shafter, any
way?”
Jack looked over his shoulder. He muttered: “Come on … bring your horses to the corral. I’d rather not talk this close to the house.”
While they were offsaddling, turning the animals loose up a grassy box canyon that required only three peeled-log poles across the open end to keep the beasts imprisoned, Jackson Miggs told Frank McCoy about Jedediah Shafter.
“He was a bull elk, Frank. I’ve seen him raise the yell and wade into the Ute war parties like he was crazy. I’ve also been with him when he’d cheat an old squaw out of her eyeballs, then get her drunk and steal her iron pots. Jed never had any use for females, whether they were doe elk or squaw Indians. He lived hard, trapped good, fought like a she-bear, and I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that he just didn’t sit down with his back to that tree and up and die like Tolman said he found him.”
“No?”
“No. Jed just wasn’t put here to die like an old squaw in the peaceful forest. No siree, he wasn’t. That’s why I made the trip up there to look at his carcass. I figured Tolman might’ve overlooked a bullet hole.”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know. Like I said in the cabin, Frank, by the time I got up there, wasn’t enough left of Jed to tuck into the ground, but that’s about right, too. Men like Jed Shafter don’t die, really, they just sort of disappear. Maybe the Ghost Rider comes for ’em. Maybe …”
“That’s Ute talk, Jack. You know better. But tell me … why would them soldiers he was scouting for shoot him?”
“Not the soldiers, Frank. Hell’s bells, the soldiers couldn’t have tracked a man like Jed Shafter. Indians.”
“Indians shot him?”
“Utes. I’m not saying they did, because I don’t know. But they had reasons to try to, believe me about that.”
“Why?”
But Jackson had said all he meant to say on that score. He walked over where McCoy was finished with hanging his rigs from some low limbs where night varmints wouldn’t chew them to pieces looking for salt, and stood a while gazing down where smoke stood straight up from the chimney.
