A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  Smoke had his right ankle cocked on his left knee, and he held his Stetson on his right knee. He alertly observed all the comings and goings of the hotel’s wealthy guests. It wasn’t that rich folks interested him all that much; he was just in the habit of taking note of everything going on around him.

  That caution was a big part of the reason he had stayed alive as long as he had, while living a very adventurous and perilous life.

  Because of that instinctive wariness, he realized the man crossing the Palm Court was looking for him well before the hombre reached him. Smoke had a small pistol in his pocket, and his hand wasn’t far from it as the stranger came up to him, holding a derby hat. The man’s dark hair was parted in the middle, and he had a thin mustache that curled up slightly at the ends.

  “Mr. Jensen?” the man asked. “Kirby Jensen?”

  “Not that many folks remember my real name anymore,” Smoke said. “What can I do for you?”

  “My name is Peter Stansfield. I’m a journalist.”

  Smoke smiled. “An ink-stained wretch, eh?”

  Stansfield returned the smile and said, “You’ve read Dr. Samuel Johnson, I see. That phrase is often attributed to him.”

  “And I’ve known some newspaper reporters,” Smoke said. “The description generally fits.”

  “Indeed it does.” Stansfield gestured with the derby toward another armchair nearby. “Do you mind if I sit down?”

  “Nope. I can tell you right now, though, that if you’re planning on interviewing me, I’m not interested. I’ve talked to more than my share of newspapermen over the years.” Smoke added dryly, “It’s been my experience that they don’t pay real close attention to what I say and just write whatever they already had their minds made up on before they ever talked to me.”

  “I assure you, sir, I’m not like that,” Stansfield said as he sat down.

  “Yep, that’s what most of ’em claim, all right.”

  “Speaking of someone having his mind made up.”

  Smoke inclined his head in acknowledgment of Stansfield’s point. He said, “Speak your piece, Mr. Stansfield.”

  “I am a police reporter, Mr. Jensen. I was at headquarters earlier today when a prisoner was brought in . . . a prisoner with a broken arm. According to the report made by the arresting officer, the man was injured when he attempted to rob you.”

  “That’s true, I reckon. A fella tried to hold me up. I took his gun away from him and didn’t figure on hurting him too bad, but then he came at me with a knife. I took that away from him, too.”

  “And broke his arm in the process.”

  “When you attack somebody, you’re just asking them to fight back,” Smoke said, his voice hardening. “At that point, I figure whatever happens to you is on your own head.”

  “I wouldn’t disagree with that. I just thought that perhaps a story about how frontier justice visited the streets of San Francisco. . .” Stansfield’s voice trailed off as he stared across the Palm Court. After a moment he found his tongue again and said, “My word, what a magnificent creature!”

  Smoke said, “I’d like it better if you called her a beautiful young woman, Mr. Stansfield, since that happens to be my daughter. Actually, I’d just as soon you didn’t comment on her at all!”

  The reporter swallowed hard and said quickly, “My apologies, Mr. Jensen. I assure you, I meant no disrespect. I was just surprised to see such a . . . rare flower.”

  Smoke’s flinty gaze told him the reference wasn’t that much better than what he had said before. As Smoke got to his feet, he said, “So long, Mr. Stansfield.”

  “Mr. Jensen . . . !”

  Smoke ignored the man and walked away from the chairs to meet Denny. He said, “Where’s your brother?”

  “He’ll be down in a minute.” Denny nodded toward Stansfield. “Who was that you were talking to?”

  “Nobody,” Smoke said. “Here comes Louis.”

  The young man joined them, and the three of them walked past the bank of rising rooms toward the hotel’s entrance. The rising rooms were sometimes called elevators and could be raised and lowered on cables so that guests on the upper floors of the hotel didn’t have to walk up and down several flights of stairs.

  Smoke had to admit that he didn’t care much for being shut up in a little room that moved, but Denny and Louis had experienced many such modern things in Europe and didn’t seem bothered by them.

  Smoke put his hat on as they stepped out of the hotel. It was a cool, dank evening. Here on the coast, winter never set in with a fierce grip like it did inland. The weather had been on Smoke’s mind, and as they walked along the street, he said, “Did either of you have anything else you needed to do here in San Francisco?”

  “Not me,” Louis replied. “Now that I’ve seen Dr. Katzendorf, I’m finished here.”

  Denny said, “I’ve already picked up the few things Mother asked me to shop for and made some purchases of my own.”

  Smoke smiled. “Are we going to need a baggage car on the train just for that?”

  “You know me better than that,” Denny replied sharply.

  It was true. Smoke did know his daughter better than that. Denny appreciated fine clothes and jewelry and wore them well, but at heart she was just as happy in jeans and boots and a work shirt, sitting a saddle and riding the range.

  “First thing tomorrow morning, I’ll see about getting us on the next train to Colorado. We cut this trip a little closer than I’d like. Christmas is only a week away.”

  Louis said, “This was when Dr. Katzendorf could see me. And we have plenty of time to get back to the Sugarloaf before Christmas, don’t we?”

  “Sure. It’ll only take a couple of days by train.”

  The warm yellow glow of lights ahead of them marked the location of the restaurant where they were going to have dinner. The place had a reputation as one of the best in San Francisco. It wouldn’t be able to beat Sally’s cooking, Smoke thought . . . but no restaurant he’d ever found was capable of doing that.

  Why, this place probably didn’t even serve bear sign!

  A gust of wind ripped along the street just as Smoke, Denny, and Louis reached the restaurant. Smoke felt fingers of ice in it and frowned.

  Winter might not be able to take hold of San Francisco, but there was a lot of high country between here and home. And he didn’t like to think about what it might be doing up there.

  CHAPTER 4

  The warmth from the campfire felt mighty good to the five men huddled around it. Not far away, their unsaddled horses stood heads down and rumps to the wind. The men felt sort of like doing the same thing.

  “I’m still not sure building a fire was a good idea,” Warren Hopgood said, “but I’ve got to admit, we’d be freezing our tails off without it.”

  “I kept an eye on our back-trail all day and never saw no sign of a posse,” Deke Mahoney said. “Anyway, it feels like a storm buildin’, and even if some of those townies from Staghorn came after us, they’re bound to have turned back as soon as that first blast o’ cold air hit ’em in the face.”

  Hopgood nodded as he cupped his gloved hands around a cup of coffee. “We can sure hope so.”

  The bulk of a bandage wrapped around his upper left arm was visible under his coat sleeve. Earlier, as soon as the outlaws were far enough away from the scene of the bank robbery and murders to risk it, they had stopped and Magnus Stevenson had cleaned and bound up the wound on Hopgood’s arm.

  Hopgood had lost quite a bit of blood and his arm would be stiff and sore for a while, but he could still use it. To help with the pain, he had spiked his coffee with a good slug of whiskey from a flask.

  “You know,” Stevenson said now, “I was paying attention while I was sitting there pretending to read that newspaper.”

  “Well, I should hope so,” Mahoney said. “It’s your job to be lookout, after all.”

  “No, I mean I was listening to what people were saying while they walked past me or st
ood around on the boardwalk, talking. You never know what you’ll pick up that way.”

  In a voice almost as frigid as the wind, Otis Harmon said, “If you’ve got something to say, spit it out, Stevenson.” The gunman had never had much in the way of patience.

  “The telegrapher had left his office and come over to the hardware store to pick up something, and as he left he was talking to a friend of his he’d run into there. You know how those fellas aren’t supposed to tell anything that’s in the telegrams they send, but some of them just can’t help themselves. They’ve got to drop a few hints to make themselves sound important.”

  Seeing the angry look on Harmon’s lean face, Mahoney said, “Best get on with it, Magnus.”

  “There’s a big money shipment coming in to the bank in Reno,” Stevenson said. “The telegrapher in Staghorn had to pass along a message about it because of trouble in the lines somewhere else. I don’t know why the money’s coming, but it’s supposed to be there before Christmas. I think one of those big mining tycoons is bringing it in. Maybe he wants to buy out another mine owner or something and needs cash for the deal.”

  Mahoney rubbed his beard-stubbled chin and frowned in thought. “Reno, eh? That’s less than half a day’s ride north of here.”

  “It’s a bigger town than Staghorn,” Hopgood pointed out. “More law. We wouldn’t be able to hooraw everybody into ducking for cover.”

  “A job like that would take some good plannin’, all right,” Mahoney admitted.

  “We’d need Frank for that.”

  “Frank ain’t here. You said yourself he’s supposed to get out of prison any day now,” Hopgood cut in. “Hell, for all we know, he’s already out. You got that letter from him six months ago. He told you to get in touch with him when the time came and let him know where we were so he could join up with us. But you haven’t done that, have you, Deke?”

  “I just ain’t got around to it,” Mahoney said, unable to keep a surly tone out of his voice.

  In truth, he had been dragging his feet about contacting Frank Colbert because he didn’t relish the idea of giving up leadership of the gang. They had pulled off a number of successful jobs while Colbert was in prison. Nothing spectacular, mind, and there had been some lean times as well, but Mahoney believed they had garnered a respectable amount of loot under his command.

  Now Colbert intended to come in and take over again like he’d never been gone. At least, that was what Mahoney assumed was his intention. Nobody could blame him for not cottoning overmuch to the idea.

  “There’s a telegraph office in Reno,” Hopgood said. “I think we should ride up there tomorrow and start getting the lay of the land. You can send a wire to that saloon where you’re supposed to get in touch with Frank, tell him where we are and that we’ve got a line on a good job to pull, and maybe he can join us in time to figure out how to go about it.”

  “If the wires don’t blow down in this wind,” Stevenson said. “And if the weather holds and the pass stays clear enough for the trains to get through. Hard to say for sure about things like that at this time of year.”

  Hopgood said, “It’s always hard to predict everything. What do you other boys say? Should we ride to Reno tomorrow?”

  “Now, hold on there,” Mahoney said as he leaned forward. “I’ve been makin’ the decisions here. Frank left me in charge, and all of you know it.”

  “Times change,” Hopgood replied. “I don’t reckon it’ll hurt anything to see what everybody thinks. That way you can make your decision better.”

  Anger boiled up inside Mahoney. He wanted to yank out his Colt and blast Hopgood for challenging him like this. All five of them knew good and well that Hopgood was actually calling for a vote on whether Mahoney was actually in charge of the gang anymore.

  What stopped Mahoney from giving in to the impulse was his uncertainty over how the others would respond, especially Harmon, who was the fastest on the draw of all of them. If Harmon took Hopgood’s side, he could have his gun out before Mahoney ever cleared leather. A bullet blasted through Mahoney’s guts would settle things, sure enough.

  So Mahoney kept a tight rein on his temper and said, “All right, fair enough. What do you boys think?”

  Jim Bob Mitchell drew his Bowie and ran the tip of the blade under the dirty thumbnail on his other hand. With the usual pleasant smile he wore even when he was killing people, he said, “Goin’ to Reno sounds like a pretty good idea to me. Hell, if nothin’ else, you said we cleared near nine hunnerd dollars in that Staghorn job, Deke, and that’d be a good place to spend some of it on good whiskey and bad women.”

  “I can’t argue with that,” Stevenson said. “Based on what I overheard, it’s worth checking out, anyway.”

  “I say we go,” Harmon bit off in clipped tones.

  Hopgood shrugged. “It’s settled then. Unless you can come up with a good reason not to, Deke.”

  Mahoney knew that further argument would result in outright rebellion. And with him outnumbered four to one, there was only one way that would end. He had no doubt that eventually he would wind up in a cold, lonely grave. That was nearly always an outlaw’s fate. But he didn’t want it to be tonight.

  “All right,” he said with a nod. “Come mornin’, we head for Reno.”

  Before any of them could say anything else, a sound cut through the night, carried on the frigid wind. At first Mahoney thought it was a wolf’s howl, but then he realized there was something different about it, something almost . . . human . . . like the wail of a lost soul. But at the same time, it held the shivering ferocity of a wild beast.

  “What the hell is that?” Stevenson exclaimed.

  The cry died, shredded and whipped away by the wind. Harmon grunted and said, “Wolf.”

  “I don’t know,” Mitchell said, and for once he wasn’t grinning. “It didn’t sound exactly like any wolf I’ve ever heard.”

  Hopgood said, “It doesn’t matter. It was some kind of wild animal, and that means it won’t come anywhere near this fire. And we’ll be taking turns standing watch all night, so if any varmint does come around, it’ll get a dose of hot lead.”

  “Yeah,” Mahoney said. “Nothing to worry about.”

  He wished he believed that. But between the near-mutiny of the other outlaws and the bizarre cry that had just swept over the foothills, his stomach had started to hurt.

  Maybe being the boss was too much of a burden. Maybe it would be better to just turn everything over to Frank again, so he could stop thinking and worrying all the time. The more he thought about it, the more appealing that prospect sounded.

  He sipped his coffee, peered narrow eyed into the darkness, and wished this night was over.

  Donner Summit

  Elmore “Juniper” Jones stepped out of the hotel onto the platform covered by a long snowshed and pulled his coat tighter around himself as the icy wind tried to bite into him. He had stepped away from his telegraph key for a moment to check the weather, and as he looked up into the night sky, he didn’t like what he saw.

  Nothing but blackness hung over Donner Pass tonight. Not even a hint of starlight penetrated the thick clouds. Jones sniffed at the air. He had been around the Sierra Nevadas, man and boy, for nigh on to fifty years. He could smell snow.

  Of course, it helped when he could also feel the little crystals hitting his cheeks, like a couple of them did just now.

  It was starting.

  The westbound had come through earlier that day, stopping as usual at the Summit Hotel, and Jones had exchanged a few words with old Clete Patterson, the engineer. Patterson was worried that a big snowstorm was building up and might break any time. Jones had had the same feeling. The two old-timers had commiserated about the looming change in the weather.

  But Patterson got to go on and was well out of the mountains by now. Jones was stuck here at the summit. If a blizzard came through, the hotel might be cut off from the outside world for days, even weeks.

  James Cardwell ha
d built the original hotel at the summit of Donner Pass a little more than thirty years earlier, when the driving of the Golden Spike at Promontory Point, Utah, meant the country was finally linked, coast to coast, by the steel rails. Cardwell had envisioned travelers stopping here in the high Sierras and making the hotel a successful resort. And so it had been until fire destroyed the place.

  Cardwell had rebuilt, though, and the Summit Hotel had carried on. The railroad tracks, covered by snowsheds, ran right past the platform at the hotel’s front door. Telegraph wires linked the establishment to Sacramento, San Francisco, and Reno. It was a busy place during the summer, as folks came here to take in the spectacular scenery and enjoy the soothing mineral waters.

  Not many people stopped in the winter. Now, with Christmas only a week away, the hotel was empty. Any travelers at this time of year were on their way to see their families and wouldn’t risk getting stuck in the mountains. Because of that, the hotel had only a few employees working at the moment.

  Jones worked for the telegraph company, though, not the hotel, and he couldn’t abandon his post.

  If they did get snowed in, the hotel had plenty of supplies and firewood. Nobody would freeze or starve to death. It was possible, though unlikely, that the telegraph wires would stay up, so they might even maintain contact with the outside world.

  Still, Jones didn’t care for the idea of the pass being closed. If anything bad happened up here, they would be on their own, with no way to get help.

  The snow was falling faster now. He could see it swirling in the wind beyond the snowshed. A few flakes found little gaps in the shelter’s construction and fell on the platform. Jones brushed another away from his face and turned to go back into the building.

  Herman Painton, the manager of the hotel, called across the empty lobby, “How’s it look out there, Juniper?”

  “Startin’ to snow,” Jones replied. “It’s already comin’ down pretty fast and heavy. The wind’s stayin’ strong, too. It’ll pile the stuff up, sure enough.”