A High Sierra Christmas

by William W. Johnstone

  That comment brought up something Smoke had been mulling over in his mind. He waited until everyone except Colbert and Alma had a cup of coffee and a tin plate of food. Those two would be fed their meals later, because Smoke didn’t plan on untying them again.

  “There’s something we need to talk about,” Smoke said as he stood beside the cook fire. “And that’s where we go from here.”

  “Where we go?” Stansfield echoed. “I assume we go back to Sacramento. Surely you don’t still intend to try to make it through the mountains in this terrible weather, even on that less hazardous trail farther down.”

  “That’s just it,” Smoke said. “I reckon we’ve gone past what they call the point of no return. The snow’s already more than a foot deep, and it doesn’t show any signs of slowing down, let alone stopping.” He shook his head. “Under these conditions, I don’t think we could make it back to Sacramento. We’d get stuck, and then we’d have to survive for who knows how long with a limited supply of food and nothing for shelter except the coach.”

  “You’re saying we’d wind up like—” Denny began, but she stopped short at the look Smoke gave her. He knew she’d been about to say Donner Party.

  “But . . . but if we can’t go back, what can we do?” Kellerman asked. His normal bluster was heavily tinged with fear now.

  Smoke looked around. They were all watching him with anxious expressions, except for Salty, who seemed to have figured out what was on Smoke’s mind, and Colbert, who was still too filled with rage to be worried.

  “If we can’t go back, then we have to go on,” Smoke said.

  “Ha!” Colbert burst out. “Just like I wanted all along, and you told me we couldn’t do it, Jensen!”

  Stansfield said, “That’s right, Mr. Jensen, but now you claim we can make it through Donner Pass after all?”

  “I never said that,” Smoke replied. “But we don’t have to make it all the way through the pass and on down to Reno to reach a better place than this. I figure the Summit Hotel is less than two miles from here. If we can get that far, we can hole up there.”

  “For how long?” Melanie asked quietly.

  Smoke shrugged. “Probably a week or two, to be honest. It may be that long before the railroad can get a work train up here to try to clear the pass.”

  “So we won’t make it to Reno for Christmas.”

  “No, ma’am. But we’ll all be alive. I’m betting they’ve laid in a good stock of supplies at the hotel, and it’s a sturdy building, meant to stand up to mountain winters.”

  Denny asked, “Will the telegraph line still be up?”

  “No way to tell until we get there, but I doubt it. As hard as the wind’s been blowing the past twenty-four hours, and with all the snow piled on the trees, too, some of them have probably come down on the wires by now. But even if the hotel is out of touch with Sacramento and Reno, the railroad will send a relief train as soon as it’s able to get through.”

  “Well, then, your suggestion makes good sense, Pa.”

  Salty chuckled. “Whatever your pa says usually does, Miss Denny.”

  Kellerman had overcome his nervousness enough to say, “This is unacceptable. I can’t sit in some hotel in the middle of nowhere for two weeks.”

  “I think you can if the alternative is freezing to death,” Stansfield said dryly.

  “This is none of your business,” Kellerman snapped at the reporter.

  “I’d say I’m in the same boat as you are, Kellerman. Or stagecoach, as the case may be.”

  “We can’t change the weather, Mr. Kellerman,” Smoke said. “All we can do is try to stay as safe as possible, and that means making a try for the Summit Hotel.”

  Kellerman glared at him for a moment, then said, “Oh, very well. In that case, I suppose I vote yes.”

  Stansfield said, “The fact that you think it’s up for a vote is rather amusing.”

  Kellerman looked like he wanted to make some angry retort, but Smoke cut it off by saying, “All of you finish your breakfast and get back in the coach. The sooner we get started, the better.”

  He left it at that and didn’t say anything about how the speed with which the snow was piling up concerned him. It might get too deep for the horses and the stagecoach to break through before they even reached the Summit Hotel.

  “Why don’t I ride up on the box with you?” Salty suggested. “I know the trail mighty good, and I can help keep an eye out for wolves. Them varmints could still come back, you know.”

  Smoke nodded. “Thanks, Salty.”

  The others climbed in, Colbert and Alma first once they’d been fed a sparse breakfast. Stansfield and Kellerman took the front seat, while Denny got in the rear seat and watched the two prisoners. Brad scrambled aboard next, and then Louis started to help Melanie step up.

  Before he could do so, his knees suddenly buckled, and he dropped to the snowy ground.

  “Louis!” Melanie cried in alarm. His collapse had thrown her off balance since he was supporting part of her weight, but she caught herself and knelt beside him.

  Smoke reached his son’s other side in a heartbeat. He put his arm around Louis’s shoulders and helped the young man sit up.

  Louis’s hat had fallen off. Melanie brushed away the snow that tried to collect on his fair hair. She leaned closer to him and said, “Louis, what’s wrong?”

  Through teeth gritted against obvious pain, he said, “It’s just this . . . bum ticker of mine. Isn’t that . . . what you’d call it, Father?”

  “You’re sure it’s your heart?” Smoke asked.

  “Yes, I’ve had . . . attacks like this before . . . when I exerted myself . . . too much.”

  “He . . . he wasn’t really doing anything that hard,” Melanie said.

  “It adds up,” Denny said as she knelt beside her brother, too. “The past few days have been rough on all of us.” She put a hand on Louis’s knee and squeezed in encouragement.

  “I’ll be fine,” he said. “I just need to . . . rest a bit. You know what the doctors in Europe all said, Denny. It’ll pass. . . .”

  “They said the attacks will pass with rest . . . until the one that doesn’t,” Denny said with a grim note in her voice. “The one that—”

  “That’s enough,” Smoke said. “Stansfield, give me a hand. We’ll get him up and put him in the coach. Sorry you’re going to have to be jolted around, son, but we need to get started.”

  Louis nodded and said, “Go ahead. I understand.”

  Denny got into the coach first, and then carefully, Smoke and Stansfield lifted Louis into the vehicle, where Denny helped lower him to the seat. Melanie got in then, and Brad crowded in beside her, next to the window.

  Louis mustered up a smile. “Now I’m the one . . . sitting between a beautiful woman . . . and my sister.”

  “Shut up,” Denny told him. “I know good and well you’re just trying to make Melanie feel sorry for you.”

  The worry in her eyes made it clear she actually didn’t feel that way, however.

  A few minutes later, with Salty beside him on the driver’s box, Smoke got the team moving. The horses didn’t like forcing their way through the deep snow, which built up on the coach’s undercarriage and weighed it down, making it even more difficult to pull.

  “I hope you’re right about how far it is to that hotel,” Salty said quietly, so the passengers couldn’t hear. “I ain’t sure how far we can go in this.”

  “We have enough rope we can tie on the other eight horses in front and have them pull, too,” Smoke said. “We’ll have a fourteen-horse hitch.”

  “When I was workin’ on the borax wagons down in Death Valley, sometimes we’d have twenty mules hitched in a team,” Salty reminisced. “I sure remember them ol’ Death Valley days.”

  Their progress up the mountain was agonizingly slow. Smoke and Salty could both still make out where the trail ran, but it was getting more difficult to follow. In some places snow had drifted deeply enough across the
trail that Smoke had to climb down, get a shovel from the boot, and clear some of it before the stagecoach could go on.

  They hit another switchback. Over the constant moaning of the wind, Salty said, “Best get them other horses. We ain’t gonna make it up these slopes otherwise!”

  Smoke agreed. He got Stansfield and Kellerman out of the coach to help. Both men complained bitterly as they worked in the flying snow, moving the horses from the rear of the coach to the front. Smoke ripped rope harnesses for them and tied some of them to the regular team while the others were tied directly to the coach.

  “I can handle the reins, even with one hand,” Salty said. “You get on one o’ them lead horses. Otherwise I don’t reckon they’re gonna go.”

  Smoke agreed. He went to the front of the elongated team and swung up bareback on one of the leaders. He dug his boot heels into the animal’s flanks and urged it to lean forward into the storm.

  When Smoke glanced back over his shoulder, the snow was so thick in the air that it blurred the sight of the stagecoach with Salty on the driver’s box.

  “Come on!” he yelled at the horse underneath him.

  Slowly, the coach lurched up the switchback trail. The only advantage to the steeper slope was that the snow didn’t drift as deeply here.

  Smoke hunched over against the wind and the flakes that were pelting him so hard they almost felt like raindrops. He wouldn’t have said that this was the coldest he had ever been in his life . . . but it was right up there.

  He didn’t know how many turns the trail made, but one by one, they fell behind the struggling horses and the coach. When they finally got to the top, he thought, they ought to stop and let the animals rest for a while.

  Unfortunately, they couldn’t. It was a race now, with the Summit Hotel as the finish line and the lives of everyone aboard that stagecoach as the stakes.

  The trail turned, but not as much, and almost a minute went by before Smoke realized they were traveling over mostly level ground again. He thought the switchback they had just overcome was the last one on the approach to the pass. They ought to be in Donner Pass now.

  Unless he had miscounted and there was another such ordeal ahead of them. If that was true, they were doomed. The horses couldn’t make it.

  The snow was even deeper here on the flatter ground, up to the horses’ bellies, up to the bottom of the stagecoach, packed in around the wheels and the axles. Smoke heard a sudden crack, felt the lurch through the rope tied to the horse he was riding, and looked back in alarm. Something was wrong. The coach was tipped a little to one side.

  The front axle had broken.

  And with it, their chances of survival were crushed as well.

  CHAPTER 33

  Smoke dropped off the lead horse and fought his way through the deep snow toward the coach, kicking up the white stuff as he did so.

  Salty was already climbing down from the box, hurrying despite the arm he still had in a sling. He shouted, “Everybody outta the coach! Now!” He turned to Smoke and went on, “The axle’s just cracked. If we can bind it up with rope and get it to hold just a spell longer—”

  With a splintering noise, the coach tipped even more to the left. Someone inside cried out in alarm. The vehicle lurched again, and something else broke.

  “That does it,” Salty said. His voice had turned grim and hollow. “It’s busted plumb in two now. She ain’t goin’ nowhere.”

  The door on the right side opened. Denny looked out and said, “Pa?”

  “You might as well stay in there,” Smoke told her. “The damage is already done. At least you’ll all be out of the wind, to a certain extent.”

  She nodded and pulled the door closed. The passengers might be uncomfortable because of the way the coach was tilted, but as Smoke had said, they were protected from the fierce bite of the wind as long as they were in there.

  “How far you reckon we’ve come?” Salty asked quietly.

  “From the spot where we spent last night? Half a mile. Maybe.”

  “Then the hotel could be just half a mile away. Maybe even less. It’s mighty hard to be sure o’ distances in weather like this.”

  “As long as it’s snowing and the wind is blowing like this, the hotel might as well be a hundred miles away,” Smoke said. “If a man set out in this blizzard, he’d be blind and lost within a hundred yards. Somebody would find his frozen carcass next spring . . . if he was lucky.”

  Salty reached under the bandanna tied over the lower half of his face and scratched at his beard. “Yeah, I reckon you’re right. But we got to do somethin’, Smoke.”

  Smoke’s brain was already working quickly. “We’ll take the canvas off the boot and a couple of those lap robes and make a lean-to tent out of them, with the coach as one side of it. Once we’ve done that, I’ll shovel the snow out of it and we can build a small fire for warmth. If everybody huddles around it, they won’t freeze to death.” He glanced up at the sky, which was still unleashing a torrent of snow, and muttered, “If this blizzard would just stop. . . .”

  “That’s a lot to count on.”

  “I’m not counting on it. We’re still going to try to find the hotel.”

  Salty’s weathered forehead creased in a frown under the turned-up brim of his old hat. “You just said it was too dangerous for a man to set out in this weather.”

  “I said he’d get lost. But if there was a way to keep that from happening, somebody could scout on ahead, maybe spot the hotel if it’s not too far away.”

  “How do you figure on doin’ that?”

  “We’ll take all the pieces of rope we have, plus we’ll cut up the harness into lengths and tie them together, too, to make more rope. String it all together and a man could go a couple hundred yards and still have a lifeline to get back.”

  Salty thought about it and nodded slowly. “Might work,” he said. “Don’t know if that would be far enough to do any good.”

  “Only one way to find out,” Smoke said, “but let’s get that shelter built first.”

  Smoke cut the canvas cover loose from the boot at the back of the coach while Salty got two of the lap robes from inside the coach. They knotted corners together, then tied the makeshift tent to the trim around the top of the coach, on the left side since the vehicle was tipped that way and that side was closer to the ground. It took a third robe to make a large enough shelter to satisfy Smoke.

  With that done, Stansfield and Kellerman got out of the coach and held the canvas and robes up while Smoke bent to get underneath them and work with the shovel. He cleared as much snow as he could off the area under the shelter and then put rocks on the corners to hold it in place.

  There were gaps in the cover, but it would provide some protection from the snow and wind, especially after they hung robes over the openings at the sides.

  The snow underneath the coach was deep enough that it served as a wind block on that side.

  Denny had been gathering wood while the others were working on the shelter. When it was finished, she built a small fire. The wind snatched away some of the heat, but most of it reflected from the cover and kept it from being unbearably cold in the shelter.

  “Somebody will have to crawl out every now and then and brush away the snow that collects on the canvas and the robes,” Smoke told the group gathered next to the stagecoach. “Otherwise it’ll melt and drip through and make things more miserable, not to mention making it harder to keep the fire going. I won’t lie to you, it’s going to be pretty miserable anyway, but we’ll be all right until this blizzard stops, and then we’ll figure out what to do next.”

  Kellerman said, “The blizzard has lasted for several days already. How do you know it’s going to end anytime soon, Jensen? And by that, I mean before we freeze or starve to death!”

  “Nobody’s going to freeze or starve to death,” Smoke snapped. “We have supplies.”

  He was a little more worried about firewood, although he didn’t give voice to that thought. But h
e had been looking around, and since they were now in the pass, there weren’t nearly as many trees around as there had been earlier. Denny might have already gathered up all the broken branches that were in the immediate vicinity.

  Venturing out farther than that in search of firewood might turn out to be dangerous. As he had told Salty, it was easy to get lost in conditions like this....

  “Anyway, we may not have to wait for it to stop snowing,” Smoke went on. “I’m going to see if I can find the hotel. If I can, I’ll bring back help and we’ll all be fine.”

  “Wait a minute, Pa,” Denny said. “You don’t need to be wandering around out there in this weather. You won’t be able to find your way back.”

  “Salty and I have thought about that already. We’re going to use the rope and some lengths of harness to make a lifeline. I’ll tie one end to the coach, and all I’ll have to do is follow it back.”

  “You should let me go,” Denny volunteered without hesitation.

  Smoke shook his head. None of them were what could be considered safe, by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t going to allow his daughter to run that extra risk.

  “I’d rather you stay here and keep an eye on things,” he said. He turned to Louis, who sat next to Melanie and Brad. It seemed to Smoke that Louis’s color had improved slightly, although it was difficult to be sure in the shadowy, flame-lit, cave-like space under the lean-to. “How are you doing now, son?”

  “I’m all right,” Louis said, but Smoke could still hear some strain in his voice. “The pain isn’t as bad.”

  “But it hasn’t gone away.”

  Louis shrugged. “That takes time. But don’t worry, Father. I have a good nurse on hand, after all.”

  He smiled at Melanie, who said, “I don’t know how good I am. I never cared for a patient with a bad heart.”

  Louis took her hand. “You make me feel better just by being here, although I wish you and Brad were somewhere much safer right now.”

  “Good Lord, kid,” Frank Colbert rasped. “We’re freezing, and you’re making calf eyes at a woman!”

  “No one asked for your opinion,” Louis responded with a glare.