A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  From what Katzendorf had said, though, it sounded like there was only so much improvement that could ever take place.

  “What’s it look like over the long run, Doc?” Smoke asked.

  Katzendorf spread thick fingers.

  “Who can say? My experience and expertise tells me that the young man’s life expectancy will be shortened, but by how much? That is impossible to predict. If he takes good care of himself, leads a healthy life, and avoids undue exertion and excitement, he may live another twenty to thirty years.”

  “See?” Louis grinned. “Not that bad.”

  Smoke was in his early fifties now. The doctor was saying he didn’t think Louis would make it to that age. That angered Smoke, but some enemies couldn’t be fought with fists or guns, or even outwitted. A bad ticker was one of them.

  Louis went on, “This leaves me more convinced than ever that my future lies in the law. I’m thinking that next year I may try to attend Harvard.”

  “Your mother won’t like you leaving home again,” Smoke cautioned.

  “Well, Denny will still be there on the ranch. If you’re not careful, Father, she’ll take over running the Sugarloaf from you. She’ll be giving the orders before you know it.”

  “That’ll be the day,” Smoke said, but deep down, the prospect didn’t displease him that much. One of these days, Denny might well be running the ranch, and Louis would be handling its business affairs.

  When that happened, he could just sit back in a rocking chair and enjoy his old age. Yeah, Smoke Jensen in a rocking chair . . .

  Nope, he thought. He just couldn’t see it.

  CHAPTER 2

  Staghorn, Nevada

  Two men rode down the main street of the bustling settlement, which served as the supply center for the mines that lay to the northwest and the ranches spreading across the range southeast of there.

  Having both in such close proximity meant that clashes between the pick-and-shovel men and the cowboys were inevitable, but it also ensured that Staghorn was a busy, profitable place, with a lot of cash flowing into the merchants’ coffers.

  Because of that, the First Bank of Staghorn—which was the only bank in Staghorn, actually—usually had a decent amount of money in its safe.

  The two strangers on horseback rode all the way from one end of Main Street to the other. Then, satisfied with what they had seen, they turned their horses and moved back along the street at a leisurely pace until they reached the hitch rail in front of the hardware store next to the bank. They swung down from their saddles and looped the reins around the rail, where three more horses were tied at the moment.

  One of the men was a tall, rawboned hombre with a prominent nose and Adam’s apple and straw-colored hair sticking out from under a battered old hat. He looked around the town again and commented quietly, “I figured we might see some o’ them new-fangled horseless carriages here, but it looks like they ain’t made it this far yet.”

  The other man grunted and said, “Good. From what I hear, they stink up the air something fierce.”

  He was shorter and stockier than his companion, with a face like a bulldog. His name was Warren Hopgood. The rawboned man was Deke Mahoney.

  They had come here to rob the First Bank of Staghorn.

  Mahoney glanced at a bench on the boardwalk in front of the hardware store. A man sat there reading a newspaper, or at least pretending to read a newspaper. He gave Mahoney an almost unnoticeable nod. That meant there were no lawmen or anybody else who appeared too threatening in the bank. Magnus Stevenson was the gang’s lookout and horse holder, and he was good at his job.

  A glance across the street told Mahoney that Otis Harmon was in position as well, leaning casually against one of the posts supporting the awning over the boardwalk. Harmon was the fastest gun in the bunch and the coldest nerved, as well. He wouldn’t hesitate to shoot down anyone who caused a problem—man, woman, or child.

  The bank sat on a corner, and on the other side of the cross street, the fifth member of the gang sat on the steps leading up to the boardwalk. Dark curly hair spilled out from under his thumbed-back hat, and he wore a friendly grin as he whittled on a piece of wood with a Bowie knife. Jim Bob Mitchell was an expert with the knife, and not just when it came to whittling.

  Satisfied that everybody was in place, Mahoney nodded to Hopgood and led the way into the bank.

  Two tellers stood behind a windowed counter helping customers. One teller had two customers in line, the other just one. Three more customers stood at a raised table filling out deposit or withdrawal slips.

  A fat man in a suit sat behind a desk to one side, looking through some papers. Another desk was empty. The safe stood behind the desks. Its door was closed.

  Mahoney’s experienced gaze took in all of that in one quick scan around the room. He noted that four of the customers were men and the other two were women but didn’t really pay attention to any details beyond that.

  So, nine people in the bank and none of them looked particularly dangerous. Mahoney nodded to himself, satisfied that he and Hopgood could proceed.

  He hauled the Colt from the holster on his right hip and clicked back the hammer. The ominous, metallic sound made silence drop like a curtain.

  “Everybody stand still,” Mahoney ordered in a loud, clear voice. He didn’t shout. Yelling sometimes spooked folks into doing something stupid. “We ain’t here to hurt anybody. We just want the money.”

  Hopgood had his gun out, too. The women gasped as he swung the weapon toward them.

  Mahoney covered the tellers as he told the customers, “All of you move over there to the side, out of the way. Do it now if you don’t want to get shot.”

  “See here,” the fat man at the desk began.

  “I ain’t forgot about you, tubby,” Mahoney said. “Stand up, slow and easy, and come over here with the customers.”

  “I’ll do no such thing!” the man blustered. “You can’t come in here and—”

  Mahoney pointed the Colt at the man’s face, which was turning red with anger. Staring down the barrel of the gun made the banker gulp and shut up, though. He tried to keep his hands raised, but he couldn’t lift his bulk out of the chair without putting his hands on the desk and pushing.

  Mahoney let him get away with that. He stepped back and tracked the banker with the Colt as the man crossed the room to join the customers.

  Everybody except the tellers was grouped now under Hopgood’s gun. Only a minute or so had passed since the two outlaws entered the bank. Things were moving along nicely.

  Mahoney approached the counter and took a canvas bag from under his coat. It had the name of a bank in Kansas stamped on it and had come from a previous robbery.

  Mahoney tossed the bag onto the counter in front of the teller on his left and said, “Fill it up. All the bills and gold coins from your drawer.”

  “Mr. Miller?” the teller asked tentatively as he looked at the banker.

  The fat man sighed and nodded. “Do as he says. I don’t want anyone to be hurt.”

  The teller scooped loot from the drawer and shoveled it into the bag. It wasn’t long before he said, “That’s all I have.”

  “Pass it over to the other fella,” Mahoney ordered.

  One of the female customers, a stout, older woman with gray hair under her hat, said, “I just deposited fifty dollars! You can’t have it!”

  “Sorry, Grandma,” Mahoney said. “We’re takin’ all of it, includin’ your fifty bucks.”

  “No, sir, you are not!” The woman reached into the big handbag she was clutching and pulled out an old percussion revolver.

  The sight was so surprising that Hopgood didn’t react immediately. But as the woman dropped her bag, held the heavy revolver with both hands, and pulled the trigger, he thrust his gun toward her and fired.

  The shots blended together in one thunderous boom that shook the bank’s front windows. Hopgood howled as the lead ball fired by the woman ripped a furrow acro
ss the outside of his upper left arm.

  The woman stepped back against the wall and her eyes rolled up in their sockets as blood welled from the bullet hole in her chest. Her legs went out from under her, and she sat down hard.

  “You killed her!” the banker cried in shock. He took a step toward Hopgood.

  The wounded outlaw’s face was twisted in pain. The graze wasn’t serious, but it hurt like hell. Furious because of that, and with gunfire having already broken out, Hopgood turned toward the banker and fired twice more.

  The fat man grunted and doubled up as the slugs drove into his ample belly. Both hands clutched his stomach. Crimson welled between the fingers. He fell to his knees and then pitched over onto his side.

  “Well, hell!” Deke Mahoney said. So much for any money that was left in the safe. There wouldn’t be time for that now. He gestured with his Colt toward the second teller and yelled, “Empty your drawer! Now!”

  Stunned by the deafening shots, the stink of powder smoke, and the brutal violence, the man didn’t react quickly enough to suit Mahoney. He stood there gaping.

  Mahoney lost patience and shot him just above the right eye, the bullet’s impact snapping the luckless teller’s head back. He collapsed.

  “Get the money!” Mahoney shouted at the other teller, who instantly leaped to obey, grabbing greenbacks and handfuls of gold eagles and double eagles from the drawer and stuffing them into the bag.

  After a moment, Mahoney said, “That’s enough!” and leaned over the counter to grab the bag. Even in this frenzied moment, he could tell it had a nice heft to it, but even so, because of that stubborn old woman and her unexpected hogleg, the gang wasn’t going to clear as much from this job as he’d hoped.

  Waving his gun at the remaining customers and teller to keep them cowed, Mahoney told Hopgood, “Let’s go!” and headed for the doors.

  Hopgood snarled and looked like he wanted to shoot somebody else, but he followed Mahoney.

  As they burst out on the boardwalk, Mahoney saw that Magnus Stevenson was up on his feet and had moved to the hitch rail to grab the reins of the gang’s mounts.

  Across the street, shots blasted from Otis Harmon’s gun as he ventilated a couple of men who were running toward the bank, drawn by the gunfire.

  On this side of the street, in the next block, a middle-aged man with a lawman’s badge pinned to his vest rushed along the boardwalk. Jim Bob Mitchell tossed aside the piece of wood he’d been whittling on, rose lithely, and plunged the Bowie into the star packer’s chest.

  The lawman came to an abrupt stop as his eyes widened in shock and pain. Mitchell pulled the knife out and stabbed him twice more, the deadly blows coming almost too fast for the eyes to follow. The lawman’s knees buckled.

  Mahoney howled and sprayed lead around the street, being careful not to hit his partners. The wild shots made everybody on the boardwalks dive for cover. Harmon and Mitchell sprinted to the horses and leaped into their saddles.

  Hopgood had holstered his gun and tried to mount as well, but he couldn’t raise his wounded left arm to grasp the saddle horn as he usually did. He had to grab it with his right hand and swing up awkwardly. Stevenson gave him a shove to help him.

  Mahoney made it onto his horse. Stevenson was the last man to hit the leather. All five outlaws yanked their mounts around and drove the spurs to them. The animals leaped away from the hitch rail and thundered along the street at a dead run.

  Mahoney, Harmon, Stevenson, and Mitchell kept up a steady fire, pouring lead into the buildings as they galloped past. That would keep everybody’s head down and give the outlaws a better chance to get away.

  They rode out of Staghorn headed for the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains to the west. They knew that rugged country quite well and were confident they could give the slip to any pursuit.

  Once they were clear of the settlement, Mahoney looked at Hopgood and called over the swift rataplan of hoofbeats, “You all right, Warren?”

  “Yeah, I will be,” Hopgood replied. “Arm just hurts like blazes, is all. But it’s not serious.” He grimaced. “We didn’t get as much as we should have—again!”

  Mahoney bristled at this challenge to his leadership. “Frank left me in charge! It was a good job. Ain’t my fault it didn’t pan out just like we expected!”

  “Maybe,” Hopgood said. “But Frank’s going to be out of prison soon, and then we’ll see how things pan out!”

  Mahoney tried not to glare. He needed to concentrate on making sure they got away clean. A glance over his shoulder told him that the townspeople hadn’t mounted any pursuit yet, and Staghorn was falling farther behind with each passing moment. By the time they got a posse together, it would be too late.

  That was satisfying, but Mahoney couldn’t stop thinking about what Hopgood had said. The wounded man was right. Frank Colbert was supposed to be released from prison any day now, and once he got out and returned to the gang, Mahoney’s days of being the leader would be over. He wasn’t sure exactly how he felt about that, but he knew he was going to miss calling the shots.

  On the other hand, he wasn’t going to argue too much with Frank taking over again.

  Because defying Frank Colbert was just about the quickest way a man could wind up dead.

  CHAPTER 3

  The Sierra Nevada Mountains

  Under gray skies, the westbound train chugged up the steep grade toward Donner Pass. At the controls of the big Baldwin locomotive was the engineer, Clete Patterson.

  Huge clouds of steam billowed out into the cold air, which also caused a chill to go through Patterson. The locomotive’s cab was partially enclosed, but air still whipped through it.

  The fireman, Alvie Forrester, leaned on his shovel and looked out at the pine-covered slopes going by.

  “Never thought I’d see the pass this clear in December!” he called to Patterson, raising his voice to be heard over the locomotive’s booming rumble. “Why, there ain’t but a dustin’ of snow on the ground, and here it is, comin’ up on Christmas!”

  The florid-faced engineer waved a gauntleted hand at the sky. “Yeah, but just look at those clouds!” he replied. “They’ve got plenty of snow in ’em, mark my words!”

  “You been sayin’ the same thing since the middle of November, Clete, and there ain’t been a heavy snowfall yet!”

  “Give it time!” Under his breath, Patterson muttered, “Good weather can’t hold. Not at this time of year.”

  It never had, not in his experience, and he’d been making this run over the summit for nearly ten years. The snowsheds and the so-called Chinese walls and the tunnels built by the Central Pacific kept the snow off the tracks for the most part, but it always piled up in drifts many feet deep on both sides of the right-of-way. Every now and then, there was a blizzard bad enough to shut down the road, although it hadn’t happened in several years.

  Alvie was right, though, Patterson thought. This much bare ground in the Sierra Nevadas in December was just . . . unnatural, somehow.

  It made Patterson wonder if when the snow finally started falling, it would ever stop.

  Forrester’s sudden shout cut into his reverie. The fireman yelled, “Holy hell, Clete! Look up there!”

  Forrester was leaning out the window on the other side of the cab, pointing at something up ahead. Thinking there must be some sort of obstacle on the tracks, Patterson quickly stuck his head out on his side and peered at the iron rails as they cut through the rugged, rocky approach to the pass.

  They were clear as far as he could see, going between cutbanks, along narrow ridges, and through stands of trees.

  “I don’t see anything!” he called to Forrester. “What’s wrong?”

  “I saw him! By jumpin’ jiminy, I finally saw him, Clete. It was the Donner Devil!”

  A feeling of disgust welled up inside Patterson. “Not that again,” he said. “There’s no such thing.”

  Forrester stared at him. “You didn’t see it?”

&n
bsp; “I didn’t see anything except the tracks, and they look clear all the way to the summit.”

  “But he was there, I tell you!” Forrester smacked the side of his fist against the cab wall. “A big, hairy critter scamperin’ across the tracks!”

  “You saw a bear.” If you saw anything, Patterson added to himself.

  “This wasn’t no bear, I’m dang sure of that! I’ve seen enough bears to know how they lumber along. This thing was kinda crouched over, but he was runnin’ on two legs, sure enough! Like he was part man and part animal!”

  “People have been saying they’ve seen something like that up here for years,” Patterson said patiently, “but they never really seem to get a good look at it. Think about all the trains that have passed along this route, to say nothing of all the wagons and stagecoaches and fellas on horseback. If there really was anything that strange in these parts, don’t you think more folks would have seen it by now? Or even shot and killed it?”

  “The thing is canny,” Forrester insisted. “It knows how to hide, and it don’t let itself be seen except ever’ now and then. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to, Clete, but I know what I saw!” A shiver ran through the fireman that had nothing to do with the temperature. “I don’t mind tellin’ you, it kind of spooked me, too.”

  “You’d be better off worrying about the weather,” Patterson said. “One of these days, that sky is going to open up and dump snow on these mountains like you’ve never seen before. And when that happens, that Donner Devil of yours is liable to be up to his neck in the white stuff!”

  * * *

  Smoke sat in an armchair in the Palm Court of the Palace Hotel, waiting for his children to come down from the suite so they could go to dinner. The lounge was sumptuously furnished with potted palms, comfortable chairs and divans, and marble-topped tables. Seven stories of white-railed balconies rose around it.

  Until the previous year, this area had been the hotel’s grand entrance, where horse-drawn carriages could drive in off the street for guests to disembark, then turn around and depart. It had been remodeled into this luxurious lounge.