I had seen storms that were ring-tailed wowsers. I had seen plenty of black clouds, and I’d heard thunder that had jarred the earth, but I had never seen a sky as forbidding as this, or thunder that sounded as if it was going to bring the cliffs down on top of us.
No one could adequately describe the sky. It was more than black; it held a weird, frightening shade of purple except where the lightning slashed across it and brought its own peculiar flickering light into the bottom of the cañon, which had become almost as dark as night.
“Turn around, Mark!” Abbie cried. “I’m scared. It looks like the end of the earth.”
It did for a fact. I was shocked that the change had come so rapidly. The smell of rain was in the air. I could see it directly ahead of us, moving downstream like a curtain that had been pulled across the cañon.
This had happened in what must have been only a matter of seconds, although it seemed much longer. I would have turned back the first time Abbie asked me if I hadn’t been curious about what was happening. In fact, I couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing, but I believed it now, and I knew that, if we were caught in the cañon, we’d be climbing the sides or we’d drown.
I said—“Hang on.”—and turned the rig around and applied the whip.
We went rocketing down the rough road as fast as the horse could run. He was boogered plenty and glad to go, sensing, I guess, that this was no place to linger. Abbie hung on, all right, her face a pasty green.
The thunder seemed to be one continuous roar, the echoes of the previous clap still pounding at our ears when the next one came, the lightning flashes snapping so fast that the cañon seemed to be alternately light and dark every other second.
A savage wind was slamming us from the rear and rocks were rolling down the sides of the cañon by the time we reached the Narrows. It would be a deathtrap unless we were just plain lucky. We were. We pounded through the Narrows like a bobtailed meteor, with good-size rocks hitting the road in front of us and behind us and rolling into the cañon below us.
Abbie grabbed me by the arm and hung on as if somehow I was her hold on life. The rocks were big enough to smash our buggy and kill the horse if one had hit him on the head, but we made it through by the grace of God and not by my skillful driving.
Just as we roared out of the Narrows, the lightning struck a pine tree beside us. It was the closest I had ever been to lightning at the moment when it actually struck something. The blinding light burst out into a blossom of flame like an exploding shell.
I could smell the brimstone; for a moment I thought I was blinded. Abbie hid her face against my shoulder and began to cry. The horse reared and pawed at the air with his front hoofs, then decided that it was not the proper place to stop and meditate, so he started toward town as if the devil had tied a knot in his tail.
We were all right then. I knew it and I think Abbie knew it, but you don’t get over a scare like that in a matter of seconds. As I pulled up in front of my house, I yelled: “Run for it! I’ll put the horse away!”
The rain was coming down hard before I stopped. Abbie ran for the front door, but before she reached it, she was soaking wet. It didn’t seem to be rain. The sky simply opened up and dumped the water so it was like being under a waterfall. Of course I was wet, too, before I got the horse unhooked and led him into the shed. When I lunged through the back door, Abbie was standing in the middle of the kitchen with water dripping off her and making a puddle on the floor.
She was the most bedraggled-looking woman I ever saw in my life. She said solemnly: “Mark, I’m drowned.”
We laughed with more hysteria than humor. I took her into my arms and kissed her wet lips, then I shoved her toward the door of what had been my mother’s bedroom and gave her a pat on the behind.
“You’ll find towels in the top drawer of the bureau,” I said, “and a robe in the closet that will fit you.”
I went into my room and changed clothes. The rain was still pounding on the roof. There must have been hail in it because the racket sounded as if someone was up there banging away with a hammer. I figured I’d have a roof to fix when this was over. The shingles on the livery stable would probably be in splinters, too.
When I returned to the front room, Abbie was standing near the door, wearing my mother’s blue robe. It was pretty skimpy for Abbie and reached only to her knees, my mother having been several inches shorter than Abbie. Her hair was a mess. She gave me such a forlorn look that I laughed.
“Don’t you dare,” she threatened, and then giggled. “You still want to marry me after seeing me this way?”
“Yes, I want to marry you,” I said.
“I guess this ought to be the supreme test,” she said.
She came to me and kissed me. So it was settled, I thought, and was vaguely uneasy. I wondered why we had gone through all the messy business of her having to tell me she couldn’t marry me, and, if I didn’t know why, she couldn’t tell me.
Nothing had been changed as far as I could see, but now for some reason she was willing. I was sure she wasn’t wearing a thing under the robe, a thought that I found exciting, but at that particular moment I was in no mood to pursue the matter.
The storm had petered out to light rain and an occasional flash of lightning, but suddenly we heard a new sound, a terrifying roar that made the earth tremble. For an instant I thought it was another giant clap of thunder and immediately knew it wasn’t, and then wondered if it was an earthquake.
We rushed to the front door and yanked it open. What we saw was more frightening than the sound had been. A ten-foot wall of water was pouring through the mouth of the cañon. I had never seen anything like it and I hope I never do again.
The flood swept out into the valley, the crest gradually disappearing. The backwater rushed toward us. I knew it would reach Main Street and my house and barn. The livery stable, too. Abbie was hanging onto me with both arms, sniffling and shaking and saying that she thought the danger was past.
“It is,” I said. “This isn’t going to hurt us.”
But those words were for Abbie. I wasn’t that sure. We couldn’t do a thing but stand there and wait. The water was already around the house. I didn’t think we could outrun it to higher ground, so we stood there and watched.
The shacks along the creek were gone, along with the old Pleasure Palace building, the weathered boards and beams bouncing on the water like corks as they floated past. The power of the flood was unbelievable. The water covered the valley from one side to the other, but our house and the business buildings on Main Street were on higher ground and I could see now that we were out of the main current and would not be hurt.
It was different closer to the banks of the creek where nothing stood against the power and violence of the stream. Pine and cottonwood trees had been torn out by the roots and were sweeping past us, turning and twisting as the whirling muddy water carried them downstream.
Abbie was quiet now. I held her in my arms and she was satisfied to stay there. She didn’t move or say anything, but huddled against me as if finding comfort in my strength. We stood there a long time, until the water began to recede, leaving the ground around the house thoroughly soaked with puddles that would remain until the sun came out and sucked the water from the earth.
I picked Abbie up and carried her into my mother’s bedroom. I put her down and covered her with a quilt. She had been shivering. The air had turned very cool and was heavy with moisture, but I wasn’t sure whether she was cold or still frightened.
“I’ll build a fire and put the coffee pot on the stove,” I said.
“Get in here beside me, Mark,” she begged. “Make me warm. I’m freezing.”
I lay down beside her. She pulled the quilt over us and I put my arm around her so that her head was on my shoulder. She kissed me and said: “I’m glad I was with you, Mark. If I’d been alone, I’d have been in hysterics. All of the talk about the goodness of Mother Nature is crazy. She’s a monster that tries
to devour us.”
“She did today,” I agreed. “I hope I never see that side of her again.”
“I want to be with you always,” she said. “Don’t ever let me go, Mark.”
I held her shivering body close to mine until she was warm. When she fell asleep, I slipped out of the bed and shut the door. I crossed the front room and looked out on an ugly sea of mud. The water was slowly draining away from the valley land that it had flooded and would soon be contained inside the banks of the creek.
Piles of boards and uprooted trees dotted the valley. The crest of the flood was somewhere below us now, and I wondered what was happening to the ranchers who lived downstream from us and anyone who might have been on the road beside the creek.
Later I heard that no one was drowned, but a great deal of damage was done to buildings and hay meadows and roads before the high water poured into Las Animas River. All of us who lived in Angel’s Landing felt lucky that the town wasn’t swept away, which it would have been if the business block had been laid out closer to the creek, and lucky, too, because no lives were lost.
But we did lose something that was of great value to us—our way of life. We found that out a week later.
Chapter Five
Bremer County roads were never kept up very well because the county was small and lacked both money and equipment, but the road to Durango was the only avenue we had to the outside world. All of our mail and freight came in over it, so we had to get it open.
For the next five days after the flood every able-bodied man in Angel’s Landing and all of our teams worked on the road below town, moving rocks and driftwood, scraping the road, and digging back into the bank where the water had cut away so much of the road that a rig couldn’t get by.
We still didn’t have a boulevard when we got done, but the road was passable as far as the county line. On the sixth day I rode to Durango and gave the commissioners hell for not cleaning up their end of the road. They promised to get work started on it immediately, and I made some threats about building a new road over the mountains to Silverton, an idle threat because those were mountains you just didn’t go over. I knew it and I knew they knew it.
I’m sure I didn’t scare the commissioners, but they assured me the road would be open within the week, and I guess it made me feel better to threaten them because they had always more or less ignored the road up Banjo Creek, and people in Angel’s Landing had been sore about it as long as I could remember.
After that there wasn’t much we could do but wait. We had plenty of staples in the Mercantile, but Kirk Bailey never had much variety and he had less now. If the road wasn’t opened in another week or so, we’d have to bring supplies in on a pack train.
The day after I’d been to Durango, we got together in Yager’s Bar for a drink and some talk about what we’d do if the Durango people didn’t keep their promise. That was when we heard the news that changed our lives.
The day was a hot one, and we were drinking beer that was a long way from being cold, Rip Yager’s ice being long gone, when we heard someone yelling in the street.
“Sounds like that feller’s getting murdered,” Rip said. “Better go see about it, Mark.”
I didn’t figure anybody wanted to murder anybody else in Angel’s Landing. We hadn’t had any real trouble since I’d taken the star. My guess was that some cowboy from below town was getting worked up enough to raise a little hell, which was the worst that ever happened in Angel’s Landing, so I set my beer down and went out through the batwings into the hot sunshine.
It wasn’t a cowboy who was doing the yelling. It was old Catgut Dolan, a prospector we figured was older than Engineer Mountain. He’d been all over the San Juans a dozen times; he’d prospected up and down Banjo Creek so often he could draw a map of every rock in the cañon from memory, and he never had made a strike.
I guess he lived off fish he caught and animals he shot and berries he picked and maybe roots he dug up. Sometimes he’d work a few days, just long enough to buy salt and ammunition and clothes, then he’d head out again. He had a white beard and long hair. He stunk so badly nobody could stay in the same room with him, and that made him about as popular as a skunk with hydrophobia.
Catgut was standing beside his burro in the middle of the street, waving his battered old hat and yelling something about striking gold. When he saw me, he pulled his gun and started shooting at the sky.
I walked up to him, figuring he was drunk. I said: “Cool off, Catgut. This is pretty early in the morning to be caterwauling like this.”
He stopped yelling and shooting long enough to hear what I said. He stuck his gun back into his holster and jabbed a forefinger in my direction.
“I ain’t had a drink in two weeks,” he said. “You figger I’m just a dirty, no-good old prospector, don’t you? You high and mighty town bastards figure I’ll never amount to anything, don’t you? Well, by God, I struck gold, and I can buy the whole bunch of you out.”
Of course I didn’t believe it. I said: “Go over to the jail and sleep it off, Catgut. I’ll put your burro in the stable and take care of him till you’re ready to start out again.”
He ignored me. He went over to his burro and untied a partly filled sack and shook it at me. “Here it is, Sheriff. I’ve got more gold here in this sack than you ever saw. I found it right under your nose.”
I took the sack from him, surprised at how heavy it was. All the time I was thinking that I’d have to shove him into jail by force, but mostly out of curiosity I opened the sack and took a look at the rocks that were in it. I wasn’t an expert on such matters, never having had any desire to go prospecting, but I’d seen some high-grade ore and this looked like the real thing.
I wheeled around and headed for the saloon. Catgut took after me, yelling: “You can’t have it! I’m going to Durango and file my claim. Give it back, damn it!”
I beat him through the batwings and emptied the sack on the bar. “Take a look,” I said.
Catgut was yelling: “That’s mine! You can’t have my gold. I’m taking it to Durango!”
Nobody paid any attention to him, but Bailey, Doc Jenner, and Joe Steele had lived in the mining country most of their lives, and they knew gold when they saw it. I didn’t pay much attention to them, though. Rip Yager was the one I watched because he had done some prospecting and had made enough money out of one mine to buy the saloon.
They all nodded and looked at each other and nobody said a word for a good minute or more. I don’t think they even breathed. At that moment I didn’t hear a sound except the buzzing of a big fly on one of the windows. Rip Yager stood there as if frozen, staring at the gold, then Dutch Henry walked in.
Dutch was more of an expert even than Rip Yager. He asked: “What was this old goat yelling about?”
“I hit it!” Catgut screamed. “You didn’t ever think I would. You’re younger’n I am but you quit looking. I didn’t, and I found the biggest damn’ vein you ever saw right here under your nose.”
Dutch picked up a chunk of the ore, looked at it, then looked at me. He started to say something, choked, and finally managed: “By God, boss, the old buzzard finally found something.”
“Don’t call me an old buzzard,” Catgut fumed. “I’m a millionaire and you’d better start treating me like one. I’m gonna record my claim and then I’m gonna go to a bank and get the backing I need. I’m gonna run a tunnel into the side of the mountain and I’ll take out more high-grade than you ever seen.”
Dutch kept picking at the ore, shaking his head and breathing hard. He asked: “Where’d you get this, Catgut?”
“You think I’m gonna tell you before I get to Durango?” Catgut screamed. “I ain’t as stupid as you think. You just foller back up Banjo Creek when I show up with wagons and machinery and powder, and you’ll find out where I found it. I’m fixing to call my mine the Lucky Cat.”
He dropped his rocks back into the sack and stalked out of the saloon. Dutch Henry shook his he
ad at me. “It’s a kind of fever, boss. I figured I was over it, but I ain’t. I’m quitting my job and I’m going up Banjo Creek. I’ll stake me a claim right beside old Catgut’s.”
“You’ve been eating regular lately, Dutch,” I said. “Take the day off and borrow a horse, and then come back to work tomorrow.”
“Nope,” Dutch said. “I’m quitting.”
He stalked out of the saloon. We watched him go, everybody still too shocked to say anything until after the batwings slapped shut behind him. Then Rip picked up a bottle and five glasses and walked to a table, jerking his head at us to follow.
We sat down and Rip poured our drinks, then set the bottle on the table slowly and carefully. He said: “Gentlemen, I’m the oldest man here and I reckon I’ve seen more strikes and boom towns than any of you. I’m a ’Fifty-Niner. I came to Denver when there wasn’t nothing but a few shacks on Cherry Creek. I just want to say one thing. I like living in Angel’s Landing, but in a few days I ain’t gonna like it one bit. It’ll take Catgut a day or two to get to Durango. It’ll just take another day or two after that for the parade to start.”
Kirk Bailey and Doc Jenner were about ten years younger than Rip Yager, and Joe Steele was younger than they were by another ten years or more. They all looked at Rip and scowled, thinking, I guess, that they’d seen the elephant about as many times as he had, but nobody tried to argue with him.
“You’re not much different than the rest of us, Rip,” I said, figuring I could talk to him better than the others. “I was just a kid during the boom days here, but I remember how it was, a killing every day and a wide-open camp. I saw so many rigs and horses in the street that I had a hard time getting across to the other side. It’ll be the same thing all over again.”
“Not if I can help it,” Rip said somberly.
“You can’t help it,” Doc Jenner said. “I’ve liked it this way, too. I reckon we all have. I’ve made a living and I haven’t had to work very hard doing it. Now I’ll be up twenty hours a day digging bullets out of men and sitting up with them that have the fever and doing my best to save some old floozy who’s taken too much laudanum. Maybe I’ll just leave town.”
Law at Angel's Landing: A Western Story Page 3
