Cain (Ben Blue Book 5)

by Lou Bradshaw

  CAIN

  By Lou Bradshaw

  Description

  Shadrac Cain, or simply Shad to his few close friends, but most just call him Cain, is a mountain man, a loner, and someone whose good side you want to stay on. He strictly adheres to nine of the Ten Commandments, but there are those who just need killing. Cain finds a home in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, but he also finds the region is infested with a band of white renegades, who are as cruel and ruthless as any in the annals of history. When Cain stands between a powerful war lord and his victims, it becomes an all out fight to the finish.

  Cain first appeared in Ace High and was instrumental in helping Ben Blue get his herd through to the railhead. It is the 5 th in the Ben Blue series.

  CAIN © 2014 LE Bradshaw

  CAIN Cover Art © 2014 LE Bradshaw

  No part of this book may be reproduced by any means, with the exception of excerpts for review purposes only, without written permission from the author or his representative.

  Cain is a work of fiction and is entirely the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is coincidental.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of Mrs. Betty McGeehon, that one teacher who cared enough and had patience enough to change a boy’s life.

  Other Books by Lou Bradshaw

  A Fine Kettle of Fish

  The Ben Blue series in order of completion:

  Hickory Jack

  Blue

  Ace High

  Blue Norther

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 1

  I’d been hunting meat for a mining camp up in northern Colorado. I’d go out and shoot an elk or two, dress ‘em out, and take ‘em back to the camp, where I’d sell ‘em off to the eating places for too little money. Then I’d go back out again in a couple of days.

  My last trip out, I ran into a bit of a late spring storm. It wasn’t much as storms go, but I was high up in the rocks and pines when it hit. There was a bit of snow which turned into rain and with the rain came the thunder and lightning. Now, a lightning storm when you’re setting in a cabin warming your feet by the fire is one thing, but if you’re out there at seven or eight thousand feet on the side of a mountain it can be a whole nuther thing.

  I found shelter under an overhang, which was big enough for me and my two horses. So we settled in to wait it out. I figured we was hunkered in for the night, so I built a little fire with what I could find blown in along the back wall. The horses seemed to think that was a pretty good idea, and I liked it myself. After making some coffee and putting a chunk of fresh elk on the spit, I went over to comfort the horses. They weren’t happy with the lightning and thunder, their eyes rolling around with each strike.

  It was early evening, but it had already grown pitch dark out there. The storms were coming in waves, with a stretch of calm in between ‘em. But when the calm was finished, she’d start cracking and booming, and all around there were explosions of light, which seemed to be trying to blast these mountains to pieces.

  My saddle horse was doing alright with the fireworks, but that pack horse was about to go crazy. He wasn’t much more than green broke anyway, and probably still mostly wild, but I hated to see him that spooked and scared. I tried to stay close by and kept talking to them. It seemed to help a little.

  After a while the storms seemed to pass over and things got quiet, so I went back to my fire and my supper. I’d been asleep for several hours, when I was bounced out of my dreams by a blast so close by that it caused my hair to stand up. My eyes opened and I could easily see my horses flash across my line of vision and disappear into the darkness. Shaking my head to clear the cobwebs, I looked at the fire, which was nothing more than a few glowing coals. But the whole area was aglow. Crawling out of my blankets, the first thing I did was to put on my moccasins and then my hat. I’d learned to make those moccasins back home and I preferred them to high heeled boots.

  What I found was a tall pine, which had been blasted all to hell about twenty yards from the overhang. Burning debris was strewn everywhere, and the skeleton of that tree was still ablaze. It was wet enough after the rain that I wasn’t too worried about that tree causing any problems. So I just grabbed ahold of some of those pieces of burning branches and drug them under the overhang. Waste not want not… as someone once said.

  I figured that we’d still be getting more rain through the night and that burning stuff out in the open would be doused. But if I kept a fire going my horses might come back. I wasn’t going out there to look for ‘em in the dark and in the rain. My chances of finding them in the dark were practically nonexistent. But then my chances of picking up their tracks in the morning were about the same.

  Cain’s my name. That’s all anyone ever calls me. That’s all most folks are allowed to call me. My front name is Shadrac, but I won’t answer to that. In fact calling me by that name could get a fella shot. Right after I was born, our cabin caught fire. Pa and Granny McCord were quick to haul my ma out of there, but forgot that I was laying on a pallet squallin’ my head off. By the time they come to realize that I wasn’t with my ma, the whole place was in flames. Granny scooted back in there and fetched me. She said that any child who could live through that just had to be one of them Children of Israel from the fiery furnace story. She couldn’t remember all three names, so she settled on Shadrac because Abednego would be too much to yell when it was yelling time.

  Pa said that wasn’t a proper name and argued it over with her, but Granny was a stubborn old Scotswoman, who wasn’t about to be swayed. That was back in the Tennessee mountain country about thirty five years ago more or less, and now I was crouching under an overhang in the high up mountains of Colorado.

  When I was about fourteen years old, pa came to me and said “Shad, we got us a war brewing between the north and the south. I know you don’t believe in slavin’ any more than I do… I’d hate to think of you killin’ men who believe the same as you, just because they come from the north. But I’d hate to think that you were maybe shooting some of your own kin, if you were to join the other side.”

  “So what I want you to do is leave this part of the country and go out to the west. Your ma is gone, and Granny is gone. It’s just you and me on this little hardscrabble farm. The only thing we can grow here is trees and rocks.”

  He was right; I’d known about the trouble brewing. That’s about all anybody talked about in the village. No one around here had any slaves, if anything; we were slaves…slaves to the thin rocky soil.

  Pa gave me one of our three horses, an old saddle, and twenty dollars. “Boy, if I was twenty years younger, I’d go with you.” He said. “Go with God, and keep a keen edge on your knife and your wits….and, Shad… don’t look back.”

  Ever since I’d been a little fella, all I ever wanted to be was a mountain man and trap for furs. I was born about fifteen or twenty years too late for that. But I figured if I went to those mountains, I’d find a way to make a living… and I did.

  Oh, I trapped with some of the old stubborn, hard headed mountain men and learned their ways. I lived off the land like the redman. I fought
with Injuns and I lived with them. They weren’t much different than white folks, in that they loved and protected their families. Some of them were good and some were bad… some were leaders and some were followers. They were just folks.

  So I rolled up in my blanket, and with a nice fire going, I went to sleep. Pa always said, “Sleep when you can because there’ll come a time when you won’t get the chance to.” Pa said a lot of things like that.

  The next morning, I was startled to wide awake by something or someone moving around heavily within a few feet of me. My first thought was a bear, but a bear would be ripping that pack apart to get at the elk meat. Finding my sixgun, right where it should have been, next to my left hand. Me being off handed like I was, I wouldn’t have expected it to be anyplace else. When I had my hand on the butt of it, I peeked out of a sliver of eye opening to come face to butt with my saddle horse. Opening both eyes, I got up on one elbow and looked around for the other one, but it was nowhere to be seen.

  That horse was sure happy to be back. He looked like pure hell. I started to rub him down and found a number of scrapes and cuts, but none were serious. No telling how many times he’d run into sharp rocks or broken branches out there in the dark that way. I asked him what happened to that skittish pack horse, but he didn’t seem inclined to tell me, so I didn’t push it. Come to think of it, that horse never did answer any of my questions, so I just let it drop.

  The way I saw it, that horse was going to have to carry a double load back to the mining camp, and he was in no shape to carry just me. So I decided to give him at least a day to rest up. I had no plans to leave a hundred pounds of meat out here for scavengers if there was any way to help it. I figured to need what money I had for another pack horse. So I wasn’t about to leave six or seven dollars lying under this overhang.

  So, I went about making myself useful by picking up pieces of charred wood from that blasted tree. I worked at it till I’d gathered enough to get me through the night. Then I went over to that tree. I’ve always been in awe at the power of nature. I’ve seen trees that were split right down the middle like some giant had taken an ax and whacked it… and the two parts were smooth as polished floors. I’ve seen ‘em with rippled surfaces, and that wood is almost always fully cured, even though the tree had been living and green when it was hit.

  I thought to have myself a looksee at this one. At first glance, there wasn’t anything worth noting about it, until I looked at the base. There I saw where the force of that lightening had gone right on into the ground, boiling up rock and dirt… and something else.

  I knew what it was; I hadn’t been working around miners and mining camps for nothing. I knew gold when I saw it. It was only a speck… no bigger than the pupil of a gnat’s eye. But it shown like a beacon in that wet black dirt. Picking it out with my big old rough boney hands was a bit of a trick. When I finally got it separated from the dirt, I could see that it was bigger than a gnat’s eye. It was probably as big as the whole gnat. It was so little that I didn’t know what to do with it. At last, I folded it up in a patch of doeskin, and then put it inside my pouch for safe keeping. By its self, it wouldn’t be worth a whole lot, but I was counting on that little bit of yellow flake had some kin folk nearby.

  I aimed to find out, and see if I could get a family reunion started. Forgetting all about looking over that tree trunk, I went to work on its roots with my hatchet. I had something that passed for a small shovel in my pack. So I had some digging and chopping to do. It was going to take a while, so I set up a proper camp and picketed my horse.

  Every shovel full that came out of that hole was spread on a piece of leather, and then it was gone over grain by grain. I was finding more and more, mostly they were just flakes, but every now and then I’d find a little pea sized nugget. I’d spent three days grubbing in the dirt and sifting out tiny kernels of gold. Then I spent three nights cleaning those kernels.

  By the fourth day, I’d tunneled right under that burnt out skeleton of a tree. I’d made wages so far. Well, let’s say, I’d made banker’s wages, although I’d worked a site harder than any banker was likely to. I was actually working on my knees and under that tree. I came up to a spot past the tap root, where there was a root leading toward the front. As I’d been doing with those small to medium roots, I cut it where it attached and went to tuggin’ at it.

  The first couple of tugs got me nowhere, so I quit tugging and started pulling. That root had been tangled up with a buried boulder, and a couple of good yanks broke it loose. I almost fell backwards when it let go, but being on my knees, I wouldn’t have far to fall. That little root was like pulling a buried rope, it just came ripping right out of that dirt… right back at me, and stopped at my knees. So I just backed a few feet and pulled some more. It ripped out of that dirt just fine for about two or three inches, and then stopped again.

  Chapter 2

  With shovel and hatchet I started digging out that root, mainly because I was curious. The farther I dug the more and more little kernels I found. Well, I figured, I was really making banker wages then… Why, I was probably making saloon owner’s wages. Finally, I reached a knot of root that was woven together as tight as a Navajo basket, so I gave it another yank. It was still too tight. It looked like that was a gathering of a half dozen or so roots, and they had all come to one place.

  I wasn’t about to let this little basket stop me now, so I got my horse and a rope. Getting a rope on one of those feeder roots below the tangle of root, I walked that horse a few steps till the rope went limp. When I got back, I could see that little Navajo basket was up and out of its nest. Hacking away the rest of the roots leading out from it, I took that mass and tossed it out of the pit where I was working and went about the business of picking up little pea sized bits of gold.

  After picking up about all I could find in and around where that root lump had come from, I figured that I’d cleaned this little deposit out and climbed out of there. Not being a true miner, I had little knowledge of what I’d found under that lightening blasted pine, but I placed it at about a hundred dollars. That was the stake I needed to kiss this place goodbye and get away from all these hungry miners.

  I crawled out of that hole for the last time. I was about to toss that root tangle back into the pit. As I was picking it up, I caught sight of a tiny glitter peeking out of that mess of root, rock and dirt. Picking at it, I found it to be pretty well tied in to the rest of that clump, so I just toted the whole thing down to the overhang where I could do some cutting. A few more of those pea sized nuggets wouldn’t hurt a thing.

  Once I got to cutting and pulling those root tangles away, I found a whole bunch more than I’d bargained for. That ball was made up of about one third root, one third dirt and rock, and one third pebbles of what was called jewelry rock…. Nuggets of gold from less than an eighth inch to half the size of your thumb. I spent the rest of the day and well into the evening cleaning it up.

  The following morning, I spent a couple of hours filling in the hole under that tree, as best I could, and then I tore down my jerky rack and packed up. By mid day, horse and I were on the trail. I took all the jerky that had been drying while I was grubbing around under that tree and I left four or five dollars worth of elk there for whatever wanted it. Seemed a bit of a waste, but I figured I could afford it.

  It was a good guess that showing up at the assay office back at the camp, with that much gold would cause something of a stir. So I took a roundabout way down and out of the mountains. There’d be a number of eager beavers trying to back track me, and I wasn’t anxious to make it easy for them. Who knows, I may want to come back and look for some more of it one day. I seriously doubted that, but it could happen. I wasn’t a miner, and I didn’t want to be, I just wanted to be shut of towns and mining camps.

  Oh, it wasn’t that I disliked people in general. I just disliked it when there were more than a few of them in one place. And I sure didn’t want to get caught up in the idea of digging gol
d out of the ground.

  Finding that gold was a matter of pure luck, whether it was good or bad luck I didn’t yet know. I do know that digging and searching for the last little speck of it was a different feeling from anything I’d ever felt. I can see how folks can get crazy and greedy because of it. That’s why I just walked away from it when I figured I had enough.

  As I got closer and closer to the mining camp or settlement for want of a better word, since it had about as many wood structures as it had tents, I started coming on to more and more folks. There were whole families living in tents here and there. There’d be two or three grimy little youngens playing in the dirt, while pa and ma would be wading around in ice cold water with pans. Well, luck to them.

  I rode on up a feeder creek looking for a place to cross, when I come upon a couple of big ol’ bruisers shoving a miner around with intent to hurt him or run him off. One of them was smacking him pretty good while the other was doing his best to scatter that miner’s outfit from hell to yonder.

  I pulled up at the edge of the clearing, and watched for a few seconds. That miner was game, but he was outclassed. He didn’t have much left, but he kept on getting up…. I admire a man like that. It didn’t take a genius to figure out what was going on. Those big fellas were trying to take over this boy’s claim.

  There are times when a man’s got to make some choices, and I reckoned that this was one of them. I could back my horse out of there and take a wide route around that camp, and no one would be the wiser, excepting me. Trouble with that choice, is I can be pretty hard on me, and I’d nag myself unmercifully. The other choice was to butt in and likely get hurt or killed. Oh well, at least I’d die a rich man.

  I nudged that horse, and we moved out into the open. That big lump of a man who’d been doing the miner so much disservice, never even saw me until I said, “Mister, you keep poundin’ on that man’s face like that, you’re likely to get your hands all skinned up, and they’re gonna feel like hell in the mornin.”