Hell's Jaw Pass

by Max O'Hara

  “I have a feeling you have.” She tossed him a saucy smile and a wink.

  “Say, what ends against what middle do you think Ivy is working on me?”

  “I don’t know,” Lori said. “But you can bet she is.” She narrowed a warning eye. “Just watch your back.”

  “Oh, believe me, darlin’—I was born with eyes in the back of my head.” Wolf had a feeling that second set of eyes was going to come into particularly good use here around Wild Horse.

  * * *

  “Beautiful, isn’t it?” Lori asked an hour later as she and Stockburn followed the rails northeast of Wild Horse and into the rocky dikes and cedar-stippled canyons of the southwestern flank of the Wind River Mountains.

  “Certainly is.”

  “This is Big Sandy Creek,” she said, glancing at the wide, dark, sun-dappled creek that tumbled through the wolf willows and purple mountain sage to their right, on the opposite side of the newly laid and still intact spur line rails. “That peak ahead and left is Desolation.”

  “Good name for it.” The gray, cone-shaped crag looked like a massive, spade-shaped rock tipped with the dirty white of last winter’s snow.

  “Straight ahead is Philsmith Peak.” Lori threw up a glove hand, pointing, gradually sliding her arm from left to right. “That one is Gannett Peak. Henderson is over there, Klondike Peak that way, and way over there, nearly out of sight to the south, is Jackson.”

  “Breathtaking.”

  The surroundings really were.

  As Wolf and the girl followed the rails into the mouth of a canyon through which Big Sandy Creek tumbled toward the lowland on which Wild Horse lay below and behind them, the crisp air grew winey with the smell of cold rock, snowmelt rivers, pine resin, cottonwoods, and aspens. The deep green grass that turned shorter, browner, and yellower as they climbed higher and deeper into the mountains, rippled like a rug on a clothes line, and was swept with cloud shadows.

  As the riders followed a curve in the rails as well as the canyon floor and the creek on their right, Stockburn spied a black-tailed doe and a fawn tugging on wild berry branches on the creek’s opposite side. The deer were partly shaded by the high, pine-covered slope behind them to the northeast, but the morning sun laid a glistening gold stripe across their sleek, fawn-colored front quarters.

  Their dark-brown eyes regarded the two passing riders with mute interest; they twitched their big ears as they chewed the berry leaves, moving their mouths nearly in unison with each other, from side to side.

  Eyeing the strangers warily, the little fawn, a third of its mother’s size, stepped up close to the doe for protection and reassurance then lifted its left hind leg suddenly and angled its head back to snatch a bug from its spotted-furred flank.

  As it lowered its leg, Wolf could hear beneath the creek’s quiet rippling the soft thud of the hoof set down on the grassy turf. Black flies glinted like dust motes in the red-hued sunshine, contrasted against the dark shadow of the mountain behind.

  Crows cawed from the high tip of a fire-blackened spruce to the left of the rails.

  “It’s hard to leave a place this beautiful,” Lori said, looking around with a pensive expression, her voice pitched with a curious sadness. “No matter how much you need to leave . . . know you should leave . . . know that you should follow your family’s wishes . . .”

  The girl shook her head, her eyes following the three crows lighting from the top of the spruce and flapping their large, black wings out over the creek. “Still . . . it’s hard.” She glanced at Wolf riding on her left. “It’s like leaving heaven.”

  “Is that why you came back?” Stockburn asked, unable to resist the urge to pry—a professional habit that he could forgive himself for.

  “I don’t know. No.” Again, she shook her head, her thoughts and emotions obviously in conflict with one another. “I don’t know,” she repeated. “I suppose, partly.” She looked at him again across her slender left shoulder. “There are other things. Other reasons I can’t go into.”

  She turned her head forward again, leaving it at that.

  They followed the rails into a broad open valley hemmed in on both sides by steep stone walls tufted with hardy-looking conifers and occasional pockets of aspens to which dark-gold leaves flashed like new pennies in the lens-clear light.

  Stockburn had been noticing cow plop along the trail they’d been following—some of it old and flaky, some relatively fresh. Now as they passed a copse of aspens mixed with white-stemmed birches and a few cottonwoods, he spied several cows, two dark-brown ones and their calves born earlier in the spring, one heifer, and a large brindle cow with two big-shouldered, curly-headed bull calves. One of the young bulls was just then trying to mount the other.

  “Boys will be boys,” Lori quipped.

  “Are those your father’s?”

  “I think so. I can’t see the brands from here. This is open range, though, so the herds get mixed. They’ll be gathered soon if they aren’t already, and driven down to the lower pastures for the winter.” Lori pointed again, this time to the left side of the rails. “Do you see that break there?”

  Stockburn followed her gaze to a gap in the canyon wall, roughly a hundred feet wide.

  “That’s the trail to my father’s Triangle headquarters.” Lori slid her arm to the right, pointing with her gloved finger now to another, larger break in the wall to the east of the rails and beyond a broad, sunlit meadow that appeared to have been shorn recently of its grass by cattle. “That gap there leads down to Rufus Stoleberg’s Tin Cup spread.”

  “Drier over there on that side, I take it?” Wolf asked.

  Lori nodded, drawing her mouth corners down as though with sadness. “Most of the moisture falls on our side of the mountains. Stoleberg’s spread is on the southeastern flank. By the time the clouds roll over his place, they’ve already spent most of their moisture on us.”

  “That doesn’t appear to make you all that happy, if you don’t mind me saying so, Lori.”

  Lori glanced at him, one brow arched. “Why should it? That lack of moisture has meant the difference between my father’s relative wealth and Stoleberg’s poverty. Well, not poverty, but close to it, anyway. No man’s misfortune makes me happy. Besides, the difference has made both men truculent and sour in their relations with each other.

  “Stoleberg makes an adequate living for a cattleman—especially now with the markets so fickle—but the nasty twist of fate in him happening to build his ranch on the wrong side of Desolation Peak, and my father’s happening to build his on the right side, drove a wedge between the two men. Between our families. It made my father happy and wealthy. It made Stoleberg surly and bitter.” She added, after a brief, brooding pause, “His family has suffered.”

  “Oh?” Stockburn asked. “How so?”

  Lori rode along, thinking, then turned to Wolf and said with a forlorn air, “They just have—that’s all, Wolf.”

  “All right, then.” The girl was a puzzle, Stockburn reflected. A puzzle with secrets. He couldn’t help remembering Ivy’s warning about Lori. But, then, Lori had issued her own warning about Ivy.

  Damned right confounding . . .

  Lori turned her head forward again, then said, “Whoah!” and drew back on her horse’s reins. As the horse stopped, blowing and shaking its head, switching its tail at black flies, Lori dipped her chin to indicate the railbed ahead of them. “Looks like we’ve come to the end of the line, Wolf.”

  Stockburn halted Smoke and then followed the girl’s gaze along the fresh rails to where the two, arrow-straight lines of steel became badly twisted and separated, angling off to each side of the bed like a peeled banana.

  “We must be approaching the sight of the massacre,” Lori said, rising up in her stirrups to gaze farther ahead along the ruined rails.

  “I’ll take it from here, young lady,” Stockburn said. “I might be awhile, sniffing around. Why don’t you ride on to the Triangle and announce yourself to your family?”<
br />
  The girl turned to Stockburn, frowning. “I’m not in any hurry to do that, Wolf. I can wait for you.”

  “I don’t want to delay you. Besides, your homecoming is a personal matter.” Wolf smiled.

  Lori studied him, scowling. She pooched out her lips and nodded. “I suppose you’re right. All right—into the breech, I reckon. You’ll be along shortly? I can’t wait to show off the famous rail detective who saved my life . . . and killed that hydrophobic dog, Riley Hennessey,” she added with a curled nostril.

  “Indeed, I will.”

  “All right, then. Good luck, Wolf. I hope you find some clues.”

  “I do, too.”

  When the girl had galloped off to the left side of the canyon, heading toward the gap in the cliff wall showing where the trail to the Triangle branched away to the west, Stockburn slowly slid his Yellowboy from its scabbard jutting up from under his right thigh. He cocked the Winchester one-handed.

  Setting the hammer to half-cocked with his gloved right thumb, he rested the barrel on his saddle pommel and shuttled his narrowed gaze to the right side of the canyon where, two minutes before, he’d spied a rider moving furtively amongst the forest beyond the creek.

  At least, he thought he had. Now, gazing in that direction, he wasn’t so sure that what he’d seen hadn’t been a trick of the wind, light, and shadows. He saw nothing now but the trees with their boughs and branches dancing in the wind, the wood making occasional, eerie creaking sounds.

  If he had seen a rider, it might only have been a rider from one of the nearby outfits keeping an eye on the herd though he’d been doing so with a mighty furtive air about him.

  Stockburn perused the forest on the canyon’s south end carefully one more time. Not spying the rider—if there had been a rider—he nudged Smoke forward along the trail. He kept the Yellowboy in his right hand, index finger curled through the guard, drawn up taut against the trigger.

  He’d keep those two eyes in the back of his head wide open. Hennessey might have sent a man to put a bullet in his back.

  He booted the horse into a trot, perusing the bent and twisted rails as he rode. Whoever had vandalized the rails had put some effort into it. The rail bed showed the craters of where dynamite had been detonated, blowing the rails up out of the ground and throwing them wide.

  In some places, the rails appeared iron jackstraws lying in various angles along the bed and down its sides. The tracks had been vandalized to the point they couldn’t merely be reset upon the ties but would have to be replaced. There were a lot of them, too, which meant the need for many replacements at great expense.

  The modesty of the small office and grounds had told Wolf the Hell’s Jaw line was not a wealthy company. At least, he didn’t think it had money to spare. Destruction like this could hamstring the Stewarts, which is most likely what the man or men who’d sent the killers had intended.

  Finding out the reason to affect such an atrocity might very well lead Stockburn to the culprits.

  A hundred yards beyond the first of the destroyed rails, he rode up on more destruction. The work train that had supplied the workers at the end of the tracks had been blasted off the rails.

  There was a locomotive, a tender car, a flatbed that had transported the rails and ties, and an equipment car, which would have hauled the sledgehammers, tongs, shovels, bars, and kegs of spikes and bolts and the plates for fastening the rail ends together.

  The last car, which lay a burned-out hulk on its side beside the rail bed, was a bunk car though apparently the workers had opted to sleep outside this time of year. Bunk cars were notoriously cramped and uncomfortable.

  The white canvas tents—or what was left of them—lay off to the right side of the rails, maybe a hundred yards away, near the creek that curved between the tents and the pine-stippled ridge. That was where the workers had been killed, some while still asleep, others while scrambling to their feet and grabbing pistols and rifles to combat the attackers.

  Continuing to keep a wary eye skinned on the forest beyond the creek, in case he had an ill-intentioned shadow, Wolf rode through the wreckage of rails and blasted cars. He scoured the ground for clues.

  What those clues might entail, he had no idea. He’d likely know if and when he found something. The problem was that the massacre had occurred three weeks ago, so the weather had likely scoured away any sign of hoof or boot prints the killers might have left behind.

  When he found nothing around the work train and the strewn rails, he turned Smoke toward the tents, most of which had been leveled, the soiled pale canvas and the ropes flapping in the wind.

  He’d just ridden up to some brown-stained sage—the brown being old blood shed by one of the murdered workers—when the eerie whine of what could only be a heavy-caliber bullet preceded the heavy thunk! of that bullet slamming into the ground jarringly close to Smoke’s right front hoof.

  The stallion gave a screeching cry of deep indignation, and reared. Since he still had his right hand wrapped around the Yellowboy’s neck, Wolf had a hard time reaching for the horn.

  Too hard a time. He missed it.

  He gave a bellowing yell of shock and fury as he went flying ass over teakettle over the smoky gray stallion’s arched tail.

  CHAPTER 12

  Stockburn struck the ground hard on his chest and belly. The air was punched from his lungs. His head spun. His ears rang.

  “Damn!”

  He rose to his hands and knees, spat grit from his lips. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. He heard the thuds of his fleeing horse.

  “Thanks, Smoke. Appreciate that.”

  Again, came that eerie whine. Stockburn’s heart turned a somersault half a wink before the heavy-caliber round slammed into the ground four inches to the right of his right hand. It blew up dirt, gravel, and a chunk of sod, throwing it over his hand. The sulfur smell of hot lead assaulted his nose.

  The thundering roar of the big rifle vaulted around the valley, fading and swirling as it climbed skyward.

  Stockburn saw his Winchester lying a few feet away on his right. He rolled toward it, grabbed it, and looked around for cover.

  Damned little.

  The ground within a good two hundred square feet was nearly pancake flat. His heart raced. He knew the bushwhacker was drawing a bead on him. He could feel it like a hot dime pressed to his forehead.

  He sucked a breath and threw himself to the right again, rolling.

  Good thing he had. Again came that consarned whine. It was like the ghost of a moaning old whore, growing louder as she approached the crest of her pleasure. The bullet slammed into the turf just behind where Wolf had been before he’d rolled.

  That one would have taken his head off.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  Stockburn took a quick look toward the southeastern ridge. That’s where the bullets were coming from. He spied movement atop a cluster of rocks on the ridge wall about thirty feet down from the crest. He didn’t risk getting his head shot off for a second look. That was the shooter, all right.

  He took another breath then cursed sharply as he rolled to his left. He rolled again, hearing that whore’s ghost give another tooth-gnashing moan that grew louder . . . and louder . . . until—WHAM!!

  The bullet plowed into the ground where he’d been a second before, uprooting a sage tuft, tossing it along with a handful of gravel high in the air and back toward the ruined rails.

  The thundering crash of the big-caliber rifle followed a second later, echoing like thunder around the canyon.

  Stockburn fired another look toward the ridge. White smoke rose from that cluster of rocks, just above where a rifle barrel rested on a rock, pointing toward him. Above the rifle was the low crown of a black hat topping the dark oval of a man’s face silhouetted against the rocks behind it.

  “You son of a bitch!”

  Again, Wolf rolled, this time back to the right.

  Another whine . . . another bullet plowing up rocks, dir
t, and bits of sage where he’d just been.

  Wolf, having recovered somewhat from his fall from his horse, heaved himself to his feet. The only cover was the forest on the other side of the stream, where the trees formed a tongue shape as they pushed out from the base of the ridge wall, to the right of where the bushwhacker was shooting from. He had to cross the stream and get into those trees. Using the cover of the trees, he could work his way to the ridge wall and get within range of his Yellowboy and return fire on the cowardly bushwhacker and his large-caliber gun—a Sharps Big Fifty or some similar-caliber sporting rifle, Wolf figured.

  A bullet the size of those being fired at him could cut a man nearly in two.

  He took off running as hard and as fast as he could, leaving his hat behind him on the ground. He held the Yellowboy in his right hand.

  The bastard on the ridge had reloaded the single-shot rifle by now. He was fast, might have been a buffalo hunter back when there were still buffalo. Most likely, he’d slid another long cartridge into the rifle’s breech. He’d clicked the rifle’s heavy hammer back. He was squinting down the long, octagonal barrel, taking aim again.

  Trying to draw a bead on his target.

  “Here we go!” Wolf said to himself, swerving sharply to the right.

  He’d hoped the next shot would come then, just when he’d swerved to avoid it. No dice. The bastard was still tracking him, trying to line up the sights on him.

  Gritting his teeth against the cold fear of knowing the next bullet could come at any time and shred his heart or blow the back of his head onto the ground behind him, Stockburn swerved again.

  The shot came—the eerie whine growing louder until it was replaced by a sharp spang as the big bullet ricocheted off a rock just over Wolf’s left shoulder.

  “Missed, you coward!” Wolf shouted, shaking his left fist in the air.

  He continued running.

  “I have three seconds,” he told himself. “It takes him three, four seconds to seat a fresh round. Three seconds to reload, another couple of seconds for that black-hearted cuss to line up the sights. That means . . .” He swerved sharply to his right, ducking. “He’s shooting now!”