By the Neck

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Time to earn your keep, Cap.” Rollie clucked and lightly snapped the lines again. Cap leaned forward and plodded up the grade as Rollie guided the rattling little work wagon around gullies carved by a recent rain. Between those and the gray jags of granite jutting at inconvenient spots throughout the ragged roadway, the horse had all the challenge he could handle. Maybe there really was little more to Boar Gulch than what he imagined. It was a sobering thought and he chastised himself for foolish thinking. “Keep in the sunlight,” as ol’ Benjamin Franklin had once said. To this, Rollie appended the words “until it rains.”

  The track wound through pretty country, much of it shaded by mammoth ponderosa pines and a scatter of aspen and oak clusters. The rises were lessened by repeated switchbacks that made the journey possible, if not entirely enjoyable. The jarring, thumping ride ached Rollie’s wounds, and he found his breath coming harder than it had even a few thousand feet lower, his game lung whistling a stuttering rhythm with Cap’s digging steps.

  “Nearly there, boy,” said Rollie, by way of encouragement to the sweating beast before him. No way could Rollie make the trek on foot. They were barely getting to it at that. Any steeper and Cap would have told him to go to hell and turn around.

  At the perfect moment, the trail leveled and grassed out alongside a boisterous, roaring flowage Rollie guessed would be classified somewhere between a brook and a river. He guided the horse and wagon off the roadway and onto the grass, and admired the spot.

  Could make a decent camp for the night, but he reasoned that the gold town, such as it was, couldn’t be all that much farther. It felt like they were closing in on the peak. Then what? Downward? After all, it couldn’t be called a gulch for nothing.

  That word conjured images of a raw chasm of a place lost behind a scatter of rough-and-tumble mountains. With that sobering thought, he said, “We’d better call it quits for the day. What do you say, Cap? Rest up here?”

  He eased himself to the ground and stood, stretching his back, then knelt on the grassy bank upstream of Cap and sipped. He looked up and saw an alert Cap, ears perked forward, water drizzling from his muzzle, staring across the river.

  Instinct’s insistent tingle guided Rollie’s hand to drag free the Schofield even as he scanned the far bank for sign of whatever it was spooking the usually calm beast. He saw nothing but low-sweeping pine boughs hugging close to the edge. That bank was steep, but less than man height, before tapering back into shadowed forest. Likely a deer, he thought, keeping low and thumbing back the hammer.

  The horse kept his ears perked and offered up a low whicker. Rollie was glad he hadn’t unhooked the beast yet. He’d given in to a rare moment of laziness because the grassy span sloped down to the water, wide enough for him to drive Cap right to it.

  The last thing he needed was a spooked horse, though from the terrain they’d scrambled through, and the road ahead, Rollie doubted Cap would get far. The horse resumed drinking, and so did Rollie. Then it was Rollie’s turn to jerk his head up. He heard a snapped stick and a soft rustling, as of a footfall, followed by others. He squinted and was rewarded with a flash of honey-tone hair, then a broad, snouted face poked through low branches. A bear. Grizzly, it looked to be. The black nose twitched up, down, to and fro as if tugged by an unseen string.

  “Oh, damn,” muttered Rollie.

  Cap took that as a signal to give in to his rarely seen flighty side and jerked back and forth in the traces. The wagon creaked.

  Rollie was too far away from the horse to gentle him. At least too far away for someone who moved with a hitch and a wince. “Cap!” he growled.

  Apparently the horse had forgotten his name. He kept on scuffling, not really getting anywhere or doing anything useful, but fidgeting and getting himself worked up.

  The bear watched the commotion and sniffed and snorted, and then Rollie saw one, two, three small bear faces pop out beneath the lowest branches along the bank near the big bear. They made high-pitched, bawling sounds. The mother bear snorted, chuffed, and commenced to pop her teeth.

  “Oh, damn again.” Rollie dropped to his belly and pushed himself backward, not wasting any time in getting away from a mother bear and her cubs. If the bear had a mind to, she would be on him before he could gain the wagon seat. Better to stay low and make a slow retreat.

  If he could get back to the wagon, he could slick his Winchester from its scabbard beneath the seat. He felt his shirt work its way upward from his trouser waistband, grimaced at the fresh, hot pains his damn slow-to-heal wounds offered, and then felt gravel scraping his belly. No matter, he’d whine later. He had to keep Cap from making an even bigger spectacle of himself. And he had to get that rifle. He didn’t think the rifle would drop the bear before it dealt them damage, but a lucky shot in the eye might slow her. That had to be a last-gasp effort, though.

  He didn’t want to kill any bears today or any day. He had nothing against them. In fact he was inclined to liking them—from a distance. But this distance wasn’t one he had in mind. He wanted distance.

  He’d almost reached the wagon’s front wheel, something he could use to help haul himself upright, when the mother bear let loose a great bawling roar. It stopped Rollie short, prickled the hair on his scalp, and he looked back across the water. Two of the three cubs were splashing into the river, making for a sandbar midway across, and looking intent on making the far shore—which was Rollie’s near shore. The sow grizz saw this the same time as Rollie, and somehow, deep in her little bear brain, became convinced he was the cause of her cubs’ misbehavior. She charged.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The ex-Pinkerton agent’s fingers of his right hand grabbed for the rifle while he reached across his chest with the Schofield in a tight fist and rapped the horse on the rump to distract him. “Knock it off, Cap!” he growled. He should have known, all it did was rile the horse more. Rollie tugged free the rifle, but didn’t take his eyes from the charging she-bruin.

  Yep, she was on her way, surging through the river upstream from her cubs. She made such a commotion, raising explosions of spray as she thrashed on through, Rollie reasoned that if the water were a man, it would have been torn apart by now.

  He swallowed back a dry lump like a clot of powdered clay lodged in his throat, and stepped away from the horse and wagon. He worked sideways to his right, missing the third leg the cane afforded him. “Don’t fall now, you fool,” he told himself.

  His intent was to draw the bear from Cap and give himself enough room that he might fire, crank, and repeat until the bear reached him. He had no doubt that bear would be on him in seconds.

  And then the great geyser of spray subsided.

  The beast, though in the river, had lessened the gap between them to a tight six yards when she paused, raised herself into a half-standing position, and swung her torso downstream. Rollie looked, too, and heard a high-pitched bawling. Then a second voice joined the first. He saw what the mother bear had seen—two of her cubs were being carried downstream. Little brown heads bobbed and spun in the swirl. She swiveled her head back toward Rollie and roared, and he saw pure, killing hate. She recognized him as a threat to her babies, but now there was a different, unexpected threat.

  As quick as she looked at him, she was gone, shoving water before her, spraying it a dozen feet high in all directions as she grunted and surged downstream toward her struggling, wayward offspring.

  Rollie didn’t waste a second of the opportunity and dove into the little wagon, which the dancing Cap had conveniently half-turned in a churning pivot. Snatching up the slack lines, Rollie let off the brake, growled hard at Cap, and snapped the lines on the riled horse’s back. The nimble gray didn’t need any more urging and spewed gravel as they regained the rough road upward toward what Rollie hoped was Boar Gulch.

  He glanced backward a good many times in the next few minutes, but of the enraged grizzly mama, he saw no sign. He hoped the unfortunate, but most welcome fuzzy little distractions would suffer l
ittle more than a thorough soaking, and maybe a tongue-lashing from their ticked-off mama.

  It wasn’t long before man and horse were back to their slow, struggling pace of the day before. That was fine. While none of it was easy on Cap, at least they weren’t getting their hair parted by claw and fang.

  A couple of hours past the streamside ruckus, they crested what Rollie thought was the final rise. It was difficult to determine with all the pines clogging the view, but the air was thinner and any sweat he’d worked up had dried, replaced with a chill that made him wish he’d tugged his wool shirt from his war bag. Even Cap’s glistening back was drying in the cooler mountain air.

  They rounded a curve, and the roadway widened and kicked downward. To their left—the northwest—the thick ponderosas parted to reveal a long view of successive mountain peaks, one after the next. Clothed in green close up, they faded to black, then purple, before graying out in the afternoon sun. Rollie also saw why the trees had parted. Men had hacked down a number of them, leaving a ragged stump field, likely for cabins and firewood. “Getting close, Cap.”

  He was surprised to feel a nervous flutter in his gut. He couldn’t recall the last time that had happened. Out of the game too long, he guessed. They rolled forward in no hurry and rounded another bend. And there it was—Boar Gulch. Had to be. To his surprise and relief, it looked better than he’d imagined.

  From what he could see, the inhabitants appeared to have put effort into laying out the main and only road, spacing tents and log structures far enough away that two wagons could pass each other with room to spare. He saw five on one side of the street, four on the other.

  That pleased him, given that most mine camps he’d seen were barely more than a scatter of crude shelters close by a miner’s diggings. He hadn’t read that any investments had been made in Boar Gulch, that it showed promise of becoming a boomtown. With luck, maybe he’d find himself on the early edge of that boom.

  He’d seen plenty of diggings and was familiar with the rudiments of the enterprise, but his present lack of a robust body might present a problem. On the journey from Denver City, he kept telling himself he’d worry about that later. But later was almost on him.

  He popped the lines. “Okay, Cap. Let’s see what Boar Gulch has to offer.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  From the logged knoll on down, the road was in decent condition, the best stretch of the entire trip into these rugged Sawtooth foothills. Rollie came into sight of the tents and cabins he’d seen from above. As he rounded the last dip and bend that led straight onto the main street, two things happened at once. Rollie saw a hand-painted sign, black letters on a fresh-cut plank that read BOAR GULCH, and he heard a gunshot, then another, then two more.

  A woman screamed and a large man, not fat but tall and wide of shoulder, staggered backward out of a raised plank-and-canvas structure to his left. He looked to be wearing a grimy apron.

  The big man held his gut with both hands and lurched backward across the narrow boardwalk, and kept going, right through a flimsy log railing. It snapped, and the man dropped and hit the dirt of the street, landing on his back. Dust puffed outward as his head and legs bounced, then he lay still, arms flopped to his sides.

  Rollie had pulled up on the lines without thinking, and he and Cap watched the odd scene unfold before them. A handful of men pushed out of the same door the man had staggered out of. Some jumped down off the porch, a four- or five-foot drop, and bent low over the fallen man.

  Through gaps in the small cluster of people, Rollie saw dark spots on the big man’s apron. Blood, and a lot of it. Gut shot, a real bleeder, and given the size of the structure, not much distance could have been between the shooter and the recipient of the bullets.

  From out of a tidy structure up the slight rise at the far end of the street, a thick man wearing a brown suit, white shirt, string tie, and a derby hat bustled his way toward the commotion. He puffed hard and fast on a thick cigar poking from the middle of a close-cropped dark beard, plumes of smoke trailing behind him as if from a hardworking train.

  As he approached the others, he waved his hands as if swatting at flies and said something in a tight, sharp bark. Rollie couldn’t quite hear what the man said, but the people parted and the man knelt, smoke boiling up.

  He must have been asking questions, because a couple of the gathered men nodded and pointed back toward the wood-and-canvas structure from which the entire commotion had erupted. The woman, presumably the one Rollie had heard scream, began a high, false-sounding wail. No one paid her any heed, and she stepped back a few feet from the crowd, her wailing diminishing with the lack of attention.

  So far no one had noticed Rollie. That suited him fine. That feeling lasted about ten seconds more, then the loud woman standing with her hands on her hips looked his way and said something. No one paid attention to her. She said it louder and kicked the boot of one of the kneeling men. He looked up at her, then to where she was pointing. At Rollie.

  Within seconds all ten or so people were standing, staring at him. The suited, cigar-puffing fellow stepped over the gut-shot man and pushed past the rest of them, then thumbed his lapels and puffed on his cigar with renewed vigor. The rest seemed comfortable crowding behind him. The prone man notwithstanding, the scene reminded Rollie of a cluster of prairie schoolchildren he’d encountered gathered behind their teacher some years before.

  He’d ridden up and relieved them of the fugitive he was seeking. Seems the man had been hiding in the schoolhouse, the only structure on the Kansas prairie for miles. How he got there, Rollie never learned, though he’d wanted to know, particularly as the man had made his way west after embezzling a tidy fortune from an ice-selling firm in Providence, Rhode Island. He’d been on his way to San Francisco, but his map had been inadequate.

  Rollie hadn’t dredged up that episode in years. Funny, he thought, what will trigger a memory.

  The fat man in the suit beckoned toward Rollie with a wide gesture, then plucked the cigar from his mouth with the other hand and shouted, “Welcome! Welcome! Ride on in, sir!”

  So Rollie did.

  He wheeled up to within twenty-five feet of the group, then stopped. Everyone eyed him and he did the same to them.

  “Well, well. Welcome to the business district of Boar Gulch!” The sentence was a loud proclamation accompanied with another grand wave of a thick hand, this time toward the sign Rollie had seen on his arrival.

  He nodded and offered a slight smile, a touch of his hat brim toward the woman. He couldn’t be certain, but it looked as if she blushed—a rare feeling for her, he bet.

  The man stepped closer and held out a hand. They shook, Rollie offering a firm but not a crushing shake. His father had taught him long ago when he was a boy in knee pants that to squeeze a man’s hand and prevent him from offering a fair shake in return was a sign of fear and weakness. It had taken Rollie years to figure out what his father meant, for it seemed the opposite. But Da had been right.

  This man, however, gave him a soft, weak handshake, something Rollie couldn’t imagine offering another man, even on his deathbed.

  “I am Chauncey Wheeler, unofficial . . . ah . . . mayor, shall we say, of Boar Gulch!” The man said this again in the same way as before, as if the very words caused a frenzy within him. He reminded Rollie of a revival preacher, or a huckster with nostrums for sale, both pretty much the same thing, in his experience.

  “I didn’t hear your name, sir.”

  “That’s right,” said Rollie, meeting the man’s gaze and waiting for him to break off.

  He did in short order. “Yes, well, ah, you seem to have caught us good citizens at a most inopportune moment.”

  “Just him,” said Rollie, nodding toward the shot man.

  “Ah, yes, yes.” The mayor turned toward the prone man. “Poor Dawber. We have lost our one and only saloon keeper.” He turned back to Rollie, smiling, and poked the air toward him with that big cigar. “Unless you, sir, happen to b
e a member of that most noble, nay, vital, occupation?”

  Rollie looked at the faces behind the man, a group of dark, unshaven, dingy faces on bodies clothed in trousers and shirts made of rough cloth, bookended with floppy-brimmed hats and well-worn boots. As if he needed reminding, mining looked to be hard work.

  Rollie looked back to the well-rested, smiling mayor in his fancy togs and decent-smelling cigar. Mining might well be hard work, he thought, but mining the miners? That sounded like something he might be able to do.

  “Not as yet.” Then he smiled. Because he had an idea.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Rollie stepped down, aware he was stiff and moving like a much older man than he appeared. At least he hoped he wasn’t regarded as that old by the staring miners. He got his feet under him and stretched, eyeing them back until they looked away. It always worked.

  He slid his cane out from beneath the seat and ran a hand across his backside. Even though he’d managed to make the plank seat more comfortable by sitting on his draped winter coat—a sheepskin-lined affair that had kept him from freezing on many a winter day—it had been a bone-snapping journey up the savage pass. He was only too glad his wounds hadn’t somehow worked themselves open again and leaked out his life juices. And poor Cap. He was a trouper who deserved a feed and a rest. But first things first. Rollie sensed that the town blowhard had something to tell him that might be of importance.

  As if reading Rollie’s mind, the self-proclaimed mayor said, “Let’s take a short stroll up our grand promenade and chat, shall we?”

  Rollie and the mayor walked side by side slowly. They moved toward the far end of the street, a few hundred yards north.

  “You see, my new friend,” said Chauncey Wheeler, trying to drape an arm around Rollie’s shoulders. Finnegan shrugged it off without looking at him, but it didn’t slow the man’s patter. “As of quite recently, the good citizens of Boar Gulch find themselves in a pickle. As I mentioned, Dawber was our saloon keeper. And while he called himself the owner of said establishment, he was that only in theory.”