Colter's Journey

by William W. Johnstone

  A young Indian was mounted on a fine black and white horse, his braids blowing in the wind. He, too, looked in awe and terror at the smoking and fiery land off to the north.

  Margaret screamed. Patricia and Mrs. Scott stepped back, but kept their hold on the horses. Nancy scooted to the other side of the mule.

  Tim lowered the rifle and reached for his knife.

  The Indian turned away from the fire and smoke and held out something. Tim sucked in a deep breath. It was Jed Reno’s hat.

  Tim’s first thought was that the Indian had killed the one-eyed trapper, but his brain still worked, and he remembered what Jed had told him earlier. That his hat was his bona fides. Whatever that had meant.

  The Indian stuffed the hat under his bone breastplate and pointed off to the north. He said words Tim could not understand, and for all Tim had learned during his time with Reno, sign language was not one of them.

  But he understood. He could not hear anything anyone said, but it seemed as if Reno was speaking to him. Reno’s voice came to him clear as a bell.

  “Mount up. Everybody on a horse.” Tim went to help his younger sister. “Margaret. You get on behind me.”

  The Indian swung from his horse and hurried to Mrs. Scott, who backed away from him, screaming and cursing.

  “It’s all right!” Tim told her. “He’s a . . . friend.”

  Mrs. Scott’s face turned white as the Indian came to her, and helped her onto the horse’s back. Tim boosted Patricia onto the dead Indian’s horse. She said something, but, again, Tim could not make out her words. Nancy managed to climb onto the mule without any assistance.

  The Indian barked words again as he leaped onto his pony’s back.

  Tim found his horse, but did not mount it until he had reloaded the rifle and his two pistols.

  The Indian gestured again, and Tim nodded, pointing to the north. “You lead.” He told the girls, “Follow him.”

  Patricia looked at him once and then pulled on the hackamore to turn the horse.

  He watched them ride off as his heart sank.

  Another explosion rocked the world and caused his horse to turn in a circle.

  “Easy,” Tim told him, and once the mount had calmed down, he looked at the ugly smoke-filled sky.

  “Jed,” his voice croaked. “Oh . . . Jed.” He did not cry. He figured he had no tears left in him.

  “Run,” Jed had told him. “Run, Tim. Run.” Just like his ma had told him. Save yourself, had been her thinking. Save the girls had been Jed’s.

  Fort Union, Tim told himself. He would not look back at the burning hell. He saw the Indian and the girls crossing the river, nudged his horse into a walk, and followed them.

  Once across the river, they kicked their horses into a lope. Tim did not look back as they rode away from Colter’s Hell.

  * * *

  When the moon rose, Tim tightened the cinch in his saddle. The Indian tossed him a leather pouch, which he opened, spooned out a handful of the greasy mixture, and stuffed it into his mouth. Wiping his hands on his buckskins, he walked over to his younger sister first and held the bag out toward her.

  “What . . . is it?” Margaret asked.

  “Pemmican. Good for you.”

  “It stinks.”

  “Eat it. We’re riding.”

  “But—” Seeing the look in Tim’s eyes, she choked back whatever excuse or argument she had been about to say and grabbed a handful of the mixture. She ate.

  He let Nancy have some, too. His older sister stared at him blankly, questions forming on her lips, but she had no strength to ask—which suited him fine enough. He wasn’t sure he wanted to talk.

  Mrs. Scott ate the pemmican without a word. She just kept staring at the Indian as he watered the mounts.

  Tim went to Patricia Scott last.

  “Tim,” was all she could say . . . at first.

  “We’ll ride out,” he said.

  “We’ve ridden all day.”

  He nodded. “I know. Know it’s hard on you. But we have to keep moving.”

  She chewed the pemmican and blinked. Her lips moved, but no words came. Finally, she shook her head in disbelief. “Tim . . . is it . . . really . . . you?”

  He smiled, reached out, and took her hand in his own. “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “We thought . . . you were . . . dead.”

  He had an answer for that, but he knew she would not understand. He merely smiled and squeezed her hand, although what he really wanted to do was take her in his arms and kiss her. That, he knew, would be wrong.

  The girls . . . women . . . had been through hardships no one should ever have to face. They were fragile. It would take them a long time to recover, and he could not imagine the hell they had been through, riding all that time with the likes of those blackguards. The farther they rode from Colter’s Hell, the closer they got to Fort Union, the better off they would be.

  The Indian had finished watering the horses. He swung onto his pony’s back, and his head thrust off toward the east.

  “Time to ride,” Tim said, and heard the women moaning, but they moved. They mounted. They rode after the Indian, and Tim trailed them, every so often looking back, hoping to find Jed Reno.

  He saw only the night.

  What he had wanted to tell Patricia Scott was that he had died. He’d been lost, dead spiritually and mentally, and soon to be dead physically. Then he had met a one-eyed mountain man named Jed Reno.

  He remembered talking to—Tim grinned—the Cyclops. “How long have you lived here?”

  “I was born here, boy.”

  Reborn. That’s what Reno had later said. At that time, Tim had not understood what the trapper was talking about, but now he did. For Tim Colter had been reborn in these mountains. He had found himself.

  As he rode, Tim realized he had been wrong about something, though. Thinking of Jed Reno, he reached up and brushed away a tear. He could cry after all. The tear rolled through the fuzz that might become a beard . . . if he ever filled the dead man’s britches he wore.

  * * *

  Tim heard the thundering of hooves and brought up the gun. Buffalo, he thought. He hurried with the Indian to the horses and mule. They grabbed the hackamores and watched the dust rising.

  Not buffalo, Tim realized, but horses.

  He thought they were running wild, for he had heard stories of wild mustangs running across this country—indeed, he had even seen a few from afar—but these, he soon realized, were being driven. By Indians.

  The Indian boy grinned with excitement and said something that Tim did not understand.

  He looked back at the women. “It’s all right,” he told them. “More friends.”

  I hope.

  * * *

  He figured it out without sign language or reading the Indians’ minds.

  They had been the ones riding with Jed Reno when they attacked Louis Jackatars’s camp. They had stolen the horses and mules, leaving the men—if any survived the horrendous explosion—afoot. Horses, Tim had learned, meant wealth in most Indian cultures. Those Indians would return to their lodges with much, much wealth.

  Maybe that’s why they had ridden with Reno. Maybe he had bribed them.

  Tim frowned. Even though he knew it was rude, he turned his back on the Indians as they talked their grunts. He went to the women, who still feared Indians. Feared everything. He tried to steady his breathing, tried to dam the tears that wanted to flow down his face like a waterfall.

  Patricia Scott stood at his side and put a hand on his shoulder. “Tim?” she said softly. “What is it?”

  He sniffed, wiped away a tear, shook his head.

  “Tim.”

  His voice cracked. “It ain’t fair. Indians get . . . rich. I get . . . you and my sisters. Jed . . . Jed . . . Jed Reno. He saved us all. And he’s . . . dead.”

  She pulled his head onto her shoulder, and he sobbed once and then felt her hands on his dirty, long, greasy hair.

  “Boy.�
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  Tim jerked away from Patricia, startling her, and he turned to the voice he thought he had imagined.

  Jed Reno staggered toward him, pulling a big horse behind him. “You look peaked, boy.”

  Tim blinked. Wiped his eyes. His mouth hung open.

  “Is this the gal you’re sweet on?” Reno asked, and Tim could not even blush. “By Jupiter, boy, I’d be sweet on her, too, even if I’m partial to Crow squaws.”

  Tim could not help himself. “Jed!” he screamed at the top of his lungs, and ran, leaping into the mountain man.

  Reno grunted and cursed. “Don’t kill me, boy. I didn’t survive that scrape in Colter’s Hell to get killed by my pard.”

  When Tim let go, Reno tugged on the hackamore to the big horse. “Recognize this elephant, boy?”

  Tim blinked. It was his pa’s prized Percheron stallion.

  * * *

  “The explosion?” Mrs. Scott asked.

  Reno sipped the tea he had brewed out of something the women did not want to know.

  “Touched off the gunpowder Jackatars and that Hudson’s Bay rogue meant to give the Blackfeet scoundrels.”

  “But how”—Tim shook his head—“how did you survive?”

  Reno grinned. “They don’t call me Plenty Medicine for nothing, boy. That ditch. I rolled into it.” He touched his buckskins, one sleeve and leggings blackened and burned by the blast. Much of his beard and hair on that side of his body, likewise, had been singed. “I figured I’d just follow your trail. Catch up to you at Fort Union.”

  “Afoot?” Tim asked in wonderment.

  “Boy. I’m a free trapper. I don’t really need no horse.” Reno sipped tea and stretched his legs out before the fire. “But Red Prairie”—he gestured at one of the Indians—“he come back. Good Cheyenne, Red Prairie. They’s good people. Hate to say good-bye to them.”

  “Good-bye?” Nancy asked.

  Reno nodded. “Well, they’re headed for their village. I figured we’d go our own way. Your way.”

  “Fort Union,” Tim said.

  “Fort Union?” Reno chuckled. “Why on earth would you want to go that far? Boy, I thought y’all was bound for Oregon.”

  CHAPTER 39

  Tim laughed. He was about to step up to Jed Reno and give that great big, grizzled, one-eyed, hard-as-granite Cyclops a hug when a terrifying war cry filled the air. Tim and Reno whirled toward the sound.

  Another figure rode up, reining a lathered horse to a stop at the crest of a hill just to the south. “Let us finish the fight!” the rider called out.

  Tim heard Patricia’s gasp.

  The rider on a big black horse yelled, “Come, Reno. I shall put you under!”

  Tim did not recognize the man, but he was big, with dark hair and a full beard, wearing what remained of a fur cap atop his head. He had to be one of Jackatars’s men.

  Tim’s stomach heaved. Just when I thought everything was over . . .

  Reno spit. “Well, I reckon this affair ain’t quite done. At least, not until I kill Dog Ear Rounsavall.”

  The name made Tim wince. He could not make out the rider’s face from that distance, but he could picture the man clearly—the face and the figure that had haunted Tim’s sleep for so long, the evil Goliath in buckskins who had split his mother’s head with a tomahawk. A feeling rose in Tim’s chest that he had never known.

  Hate.

  The one-eyed trapper picked up his Hawken rifle and walked to his horse.

  Tim stopped him.

  “Jed, this is my fight.”

  Reno’s eye filled with fury. “Boy!” he snapped, pointing the barrel of his rifle toward the waiting giant of a killer. “That there’s Dog Ear Rounsavall. He’s a holy terror, maybe even worse than that cur-dog cutthroat Louis Jackatars. Maybe he’s the devil himself. It’s time someone planted him, and I figure I’ll be the one to do it. That scoundrel has killed—”

  “My mother,” Tim said.

  For once, Jed Reno couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Remember my nightmare?” Tim asked. “That time . . . you told me that I’d have to kill more folks, if I wanted to live. Remember?”

  Reno’s head moved slightly. He started to speak, stopped, looked again at the waiting Dog Ear Rounsavall, and tried again. “I reckon you done your share of killing back at Colter’s Hell, Tim. This here be my fight.”

  Tim shook his head. “No. It’s mine.” Without waiting for any more argument, he tugged on the old horse pistol, checked the powder in the pan, and then did the same with the screw-barrel .45. He shoved both inside the sash and walked to his own horse.

  “Tim!” Patricia Scott ran to him.

  “Patricia.” He dreaded this, remembering the spring in Independence when he had kissed her, practically promised to marry her . . . someday. He remembered how he had felt after the attack on their camp at South Pass, wondering if he would ever see her again. Now he feared she might cry, and that might weaken his resolve.

  Still, he stopped, turned, and told her, “This is something I have to do.”

  “I know.” She smiled and kissed him on the cheek. “Good luck. God be with you.”

  “By Jupiter, boy!” Jed Reno called out. “Haul off and kiss her back. For luck. Don’t keep Dog Ear waiting.”

  Grinning, Tim kissed Patricia on the lips. It might not have been as electric as that kiss had been back in Missouri, but he felt contented. If something happened in the next few minutes, if Dog Ear Rounsavall somehow managed to kill him, well, at least he had kissed Patricia Scott one more time. At least he would die knowing he had been loved . . . by his girl . . . by his sisters . . . by his parents . . . and even by that one-eyed Cyclops who had saved his life, taught him how to survive and how to live.

  By Jupiter.

  As a strange silence descended on the country, Tim tightened the cinch on the saddle, checked his weapons one last time, and swung onto the horse’s back. He kicked his mount into a walk and rode to meet the awaiting Dog Ear Rounsavall.

  He laughed when Tim reined up. “You send a boy to do your fighting, Reno?” Dog Ear Rounsavall called out, adding a few curses in French and English.

  “Boy’s man enough to kill you, Dog Ear!” Reno yelled back. “But don’t wet your britches, you damned rapscallion. I won’t let the boy scalp you. I’ll save that pleasure for myself.”

  The French renegade cursed again as his horse fought the hackamore, dancing, feeling the approaching danger, the death in the air. He kicked the horse and thundered toward Tim Colter.

  Tim waited, counted to five, and kicked his horse’s sides hard. The mount exploded into a gallop. He could see the big man with the black beard and short braids. He could feel the wind blasting his face. Death he could taste. Yet somehow, Tim Colter felt no fear.

  Letting loose of the hackamore, Tim drew both pistols.

  “Tim!” cried out his sisters and Mrs. Scott. Patricia sucked in a deep breath. Jed Reno wondered if his heart would stop.

  The thundering horses came closer. Dog Ear Rounsavall dropped his hackamore and brought up his Hawken to his shoulder.

  “Not yet, boy,” Reno said softly. By Jupiter, he realized he was sweating and he wasn’t the one dueling with that sorry, low-down killer. “Wait,” he whispered. “Wait till you’re in range.”

  Reno remembered all those stories he had heard—and a few he had even read—about the Middle Ages and the knights and jousting. Mostly, though, he remembered that time on the Green, all those years ago, when a strapping young kid well on his way to becoming a man had dueled Joseph Chouinard in that Rendezvous.

  “Waghhhh!” Reno shouted. He raised his Hawken over his head, cheering on the boy he had taught, the kid making him proud as a peacock.

  Dog Ear’s Hawken roared, answered immediately by Tim Colter’s big pistol. White smoke blocked out horses and riders for a moment as Tim’s sisters screamed and Mrs. Scott let out a gasp and a prayer. Patricia stood with her hands clasped, watching the smoke.
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br />   One horse galloped on, riderless. To the south, Tim Colter and his mount appeared out of the cloud of smoke. He tossed one smoking pistol away and leaned forward, grabbing the hackamore. He turned the horse—as if he had been born in the saddle—and loped back toward where the wind was carrying off the gunsmoke.

  Dog Ear Rounsavall staggered, hatless and no longer holding the Hawken he had fired, yet still very much alive. He stepped back and drew his tomahawk in his right hand and that razor-sharp knife in his left. He yelled French insults at Tim, who kicked the horse hard, lowering himself as he approached the giant, the killer, at a gallop.

  “Tim!” his sisters screamed.

  “By Jupiter,” Jed Reno called out. “That boy has growed up to be a hell of a lot like me. Only a damned sight better!”

  Dog Ear Rounsavall threw the tomahawk, which sailed harmlessly over Tim’s back. The screw-barrel. 45 boomed—definitely not as loud as the bigger pistol—and Dog Ear Rounsavall spun around, falling to his knees as Tim rode past him.

  Again, Tim pulled the horse around and rode back, slowing to a trot, then a walk before he reined up right behind Dog Ear Rounsavall.

  Echoes of horses and gunshots died away. The sisters, the Scott women, and Jed Reno watched as Tim kicked a foot loose from the stirrup, planted his left foot against the back of Dog Ear Rounsavall, and shoved.

  The Frenchman fell on his face and did not move again.

  Slowly, Tim Colter wheeled his horse around.

  “Let’s see if that boy remembers everything I taught him,” Reno said, speaking mostly to himself.

  Sure enough, Tim rode back to pick up the first pistol he had fired and dropped. He swung from the saddle, blew off the dust, checked the action, and reloaded it. He reloaded the screw-barrel. Finally, after climbing back into the saddle, Tim loped toward his sisters, Mrs. Scott, Reno, and a beaming Patricia.

  “That’s my boy.” Reno shook his head and laughed. “Be back directly, folks.” He strode toward the corpse of Dog Ear Rounsavall.

  Jed Reno was a man of his word. He would lift that dead man’s scalp. Then he would come back to the camp, and tell those womenfolk all about Kit Carson and the time he had dueled Joseph Chouinard. That was one for the legends.