Reverend Jake looked behind the wagon too, but not at the howling pack scattered into the long distance of flat land; he put his fierce eyes on the two horses tethered close to the wagon. The two horses ran well together, the one burdened with roped-over sacks of supplies, but the Reverend’s fierce blue light was fixed on the Indian woman who rode high in the saddle of the other horse. The leather flow of the long fringed buckskin dress beat out in the wind behind her, the length of her hair was caught flapping straight out from her shoulders like a wet black horsetail. Reverend Jake poked the barrel of his gun into the Bummers back, “Bummer, where’d you get this Injun woman?”
The Bummer jerked around, flashing his mouthful of gold, “Reverend, let’s just say I’ve got a fondness for squaws. I bought her off a Mono Lake salt trader in Virginia City, he threw that leather dress in for nothing. She’s a special one, very rare bird, it’s not everyday you see a skinny squaw. Before us Whites came along and civilized these red heathens they were running around half starved, eating nuts and berries, plenty of skinny squaws in those days. But nowadays Reverend we have improved their miserable lot so much they all turned lazy, soft and fat, you could stick a fork in them like a turkey. This squaw here is worth a thousand-dollar pan of Gold, nice and skinny, but well padded in the right places so a gent doesn’t stick himself and get bruised. Don’t let her leather dress fool you Reverend. This squaw’s not a Plains Injun, not by a long shot. She’s not from one of your warring Injun tribes. She’s from the rabbitblood Injuns, just like Captain Rex next to me here. Her name’s Molly Moose, she’s Washo.”
Reverend Jake turned and put his intense blue light back on the Indian woman. The ground beneath the hooves of the galloping horses was going soft, the straight road before them turning to sand. Out across the land the brown grass was disappearing in the sunblasted clumps of sagebrush. The road followed along the dry gash of the Carson River. The sand from the riverbed rolled up over into the sand of the Desert. Shadows thickened in the empty sky, sprouting long black wings, until great swooping swirls of buzzards blocked the sun. A stench swarmed across the land. The spinning wheels of the buckboard slowed in the sand. Strong white jagged glares in the distance on the sand began to take shape, the buzzards dropping in among them. The Bummer tied a bandanna around his nose as the wagon drew closer, the shapes of the jagged glares rising like scorched blades from the sand were humped white carcasses of cattle, horses and oxen stretching off to the colorless horizon. Spikes of horns stuck up through the sand, countless bonewheels of ribs lay half hidden in the heavy drifts. The road turned closer to the river, the deep sand almost sucking the wagon to a stop, the drone of flies going into the buzzard filled air. Over into the dry gash of the river rotting bodies lay where they had stopped sliding down the steep slope, their rotting black hide stretched and slashed open by the flesh twisting rip of buzzard beaks. Along the dried slopes of the river gangs of buzzards perched on the weakening bodies, standing high on ribs and skulls, their bellies glutted on stinking flesh, their gut stuffed with eyeballs gashed from wide sockets of shrunken heads, their oily feathered beings too burdened with flesh to lift their wings from the earth at the wild sound of the passing wagons. The slow trickle of the river’s slovenly current carried off bits of festered flesh from horses and cows that had plunged their heads into the slimy skin of water, their entire necks sinking into the mudsuck where their staggering bodies had plunged in a last thirsty gasp. The wagons rode on, more and more carcasses began to stack up out across the sand. Great mounds of blasted bones lay heaved up along the dry gash of river where the lost bodies last gathered for animal warmth before the starving air collapsed them on the soft earth in wasted piles. The Bummer shouted through the bandanna tied around his nose and mouth, “Nature’s great spectacle gents! A carnival of flesh! I remember just a few years back before Silver was struck at the Comstock when this was a green grassy plain, the Carson River used to run deep even in the summer. I remember the Washo Injuns even had a camp along here, maybe you was one of them Injun gents Captain? Of course that was before Virginia City Silver, before the river up in the Sierra was dammed so they could jam logs to the timber mills that cut up the lumber so the mines could be built. They used enough raw timber in the Comstock mines to build the city of Frisco twenty times over. This here was the road out of California to Virginia City, used to be a thousand gents along every mile of it heading for the Silver. No time to stop and feed pack animals, nothing to feed them anyway. Animals just became walking skeletons, even the best horse would try to eat his own head off. Walking ghosts they were. Summer and winter they came, gents and their animals. Starving cattle being buried under snow in winter, water hungry oxen being buried in summer sand, shriveled-up horses sucked to death in river mud. It was a real carnival of rotting flesh gents. I’m glad I lived to see it, a rare spectacle. Every pound of Silver yanked out of the Virginia City hills was paid for here by a thousand tons of animal flesh, hair, and bone. C. P. Huntington got his yellow coolies to lay track down past Reno, so now all the gents headed for the Comstock come into Reno then head up over the pass to Virginia City. No need for a gent to bring in animals anymore, even if he got one up there it would do him no good. Hay is going for $800 a ton, and when you think that a loaf of bread the size of a biscuit is selling for twelve-bits you’d have to be dumb enough to cut butter with an ax to pay $800 a ton to feed a cow when you could cut it up and sell it for more a pound than Silver is worth. But by the time you got the critter up there its sides is caved in from starvation. Half dead meat of a cow will rot your stomach out if you eat it. They’ve hung more than three gents in Virginia City for selling it.” He twirled his cane in the air, its gold tip flashing at the buzzards drifting endlessly off in the distance, “Yes sir gents, wherever man finds precious metals to dig out of the earth, just look over your shoulder, the great carnival of flesh is sure to follow. Whether it be man or beast, it will follow.”
The road broke from the river and began to harden beneath the pounding hooves of the horses headed toward the high Sierra wall of mountains. They pulled their burden behind them up into the clean wind blowing down from the spotted snow ridges and pushing the stench of rotting flesh before it into the desert. The Bummer tore the bandanna from his face and turned around, “You can untie your bandanna now Reverend Jake, the stink is gone. But then, Reverend, a dog always smells his own hole last. He-Yawwwww, git along there!” He whipped the horses up the steep ledge cut down the arm of a mountain. “He-Yaaaaarwwww! Don’t look back now!” The horses pulled the wagon higher and steeper until the bottom of the earth fell out behind them to the white and brown floor of the Carson Valley fading into a colorless haze. “Heee-Yaaawhheee! UP! UP! UP!” The winding road before the horses turned in on itself, narrowing on one side with jagged rocks blading out of the cut cliff, dropping off on the other side to needled points of pines spiking up from darkened granite canyons below. “Heey Geyiup!!” All down the road the line of spinning wheels banged and jolted off the scramble of rocks strewn before them. Men dug their spurs into the flesh beneath then, “Git Git Git!” Men lashed their cracking whips over the blunt heads of oxen, jerking the power of the reins held in their hands so the steel bits cut and bloodied the soft mouths of beasts. “Hup Hup Hup! Git up over this rut! Buckle to it now! Buckle to it!” The struggling beasts labored up the jutting mountain edge, the axles beneath the wagons grinding like screeching gulls as the wheels worked their way over stone. “Git on up! Work for me! Work for me!” The beasts labored, pulling the men up to the clouds. The men screamed in the thinning air, the scorn twisted on their sweating faces as they prodded the brutes before them even higher, “Work for me! Work for me!” The slick sweat ran down their man muscled backs, their dirty faces cried out in the hot muscle reek of air for the animals to carry them to the top. “Work me! Git goin sweet Mother! Git it Up!!!” The road ran up before the sky and hooked over out of sight like the steel blade of a sickle. The Summit. “HEEEYAR! I knew ye
could do it. I knew ye could!” The long train of horses, mules, wagons and oxcarts carried over the Summit in the blind wake of its own weight. The downgrade struck out below them, the road cut in and out of granite snags, elbowing its turns along steep ledges. “Come on. Git ye UP! Head DOWN!” The brute weight of men and beasts hurled down the grade. “Watch where you’re goin to! Watch it!!!” The steel spurs cut into the bleeding sides of horses. “Watch it!” The dead weight of a wagon wheel spun free, hurling itself off the mountain. “Cut loose! Cut loose!” The blind weight of a wagon swung around and slammed itself into the cliff, dragging the braying muleteam behind it. Bridles jerked back and horses reared up as rocks began rolling, knocking into animals. “Keep together! Keep together! Or we all GO!” Clattering hooves struck off for solid ground as they staggered beneath their burdens. A wagon wheeled over on its edge, its boarded side splintering against the rock earth as it carried down the road smashing apart another wagon. “Wheel! Wheel! Wheel! Cut back for your lives! CUT LOOSE!” A dragging wagon pulled two oxen behind it, their large bodies cutting over the rocks on their backs. “Dismount! Dismount! Dismount!” The steel bridles dripped with blood, horses reared right up and over, crashing into the side of the cliff, their steel-bottomed hooves kicking in the air. The bleating mules stood against the crushing tide, their hammer heads flung back in the dust swirl air as their riders kicked them, beat their fists against their necks and tried to bite the ears rigid with fear to spring them from the onslaught. “Cut back! Dismount! Dismount!” A horse went over beneath a wagon, the twisted foot of its rider caught in the stirrup, dragging him under the crush of falling weight. Another rider struggled with the reins twisted around his wrists, tying him to the stampeding horse slashing its saddled sides as it galloped between overturned wagons and the sharp side cut of the cliff. The road was studded with the weight of struggling flesh and the roar of wagons plunging off the steep rock cut slopes to crash their flesh and wood below.
The Bummer walked jauntily back and forth, tapping the gold tip of his cane against the earth and tucking it up under his arm. He turned smiling, his tall shiny hat reflecting the red of the setting sun. He looked up at the mountain and turned his ear to the distant echo of shouts and cries floating down through the darkening steep gulches. “Reverend Jake,” he glanced up at the man sitting in the buckboard and winked one eye open so it twinkled. “I hear your flock calling.”
Reverend Jake put the intense light of his eyes on the man in the white broadcloth coat, “I’m staying right here Bummer, with you in my sights.”
“Hah, Reverend Jake, you can’t turn your back on your real life’s vocation.”
The Reverend kept his eye on the man in the white coat, “Bummer, I’m beginning to think the Lord sent me into this world to work another vocation.”
“And what would that be Reverend Jake,” the Bummer popped his eye open wider.
Reverend Jake lifted the fat barrel of the shotgun and aimed it at the Bummer’s stomach, “To put you flat on your back in a box six feet under.”
The Bummer let his other eye snap open in a wink, he drew a slim brown cigar from his coat pocket and bit off the end, “Smoke, Reverend Jake? No.” He spit the end out, “I suppose not. I should ask if limes grow on apple trees. You Mormons don’t eat, sleep, smoke nor fornicate with less than seven women at one time. They run you out of every State in the Union, so you had to go and invent your own State. You Mormons are so holy you do everything the opposite of everybody else. If it was raining soup you Mormons would be standing out in it with a fork.”
Reverend Jake lifted the shotgun and took sight on the blue cloud of smoke slipping out of the Bummer’s mouth.
“Go ahead and shoot Reverend. You better make up your mind which horse you’re going to throw your saddle on.” The Bummer joined his hands behind his back and threw his chest out, the burning cigar pointing straight back at the gun barrel.
“What’s to stop me from shooting you Bummer, then taking the Injun myself and picking up all that Gold?”
“She is.” The Bummer nodded over at the Indian woman sitting high in her saddle, “She has a pistol under her dress. You shoot me, she shoots you. Then she and the Injun go pick up the Gold.”
The Reverend lowered his sights. He leaned back against the wooden seat and turned his intense blue light on the Indian woman.
The Bummer kept his own eyes on the Reverend, he took the cigar out of his mouth and laughed, “Well Reverend Jake, every cripple has his own way of walking.”
One of the wagons creaked its way down the last turn of the steep road and pulled to a stop next to the buckboard. The driver stood up, his lips shaking loose the crust of dust on his face, “Reverend Jake, there’s whole lot of boys hurt up yonder, bleedin and cut up bad. You’d better go on up and give em the word of the Lord. I don’t think all of them are going to make it.”
“Reverend Jake has a new vocation,” the Bummer sucked on his cigar and blew a cloud of smoke in the driver’s direction.
The driver spun around, the red circles of his eyes flashed in his dusty face, “You know Mister, you’re the one that led us up that old stage road. You said it was so we could keep hid. A body would think you were tryin to kill us all. That road’s no wider than two body lengths in some steep places.” His eyes glowed in the dying light, “Mister, there better be a lot of Gold where we’re goin.”
The Bummer stretched his arms, “Gents, I’m tuckered. I think I’m going to put my bedroll down right here. In the morning we can count up how many goldrushers will still be riding with us. Let’s turn in.” He took his bedroll from the buckboard and spread it flat on the hard ground. He lay down puffing on his cigar. Over his head the light went out of the sky everywhere and the stars danced through the thin mountain air like drunken dogs.
The Bummer pushed the stovepipe hat off his face and blinked his eyes in the morning sun. He got to his feet. There were no fires going. The narrow meadow at the base of the road was filled with wagons and carts, some only on three wheels, leaning down until one corner touched the earth, others with every board splintered and barely hinged to their own axles. The sound of moaning and snoring arose along the strip of meadow as the Bummer went over to his packhorse and slipped a roll of rope off the saddlehorn. He stepped up the side of the buckboard and looked in. The Indian’s nostrils pinched tight as loud snores belched from his open mouth. Reverend Jake was behind him, sitting in an upright position, one hand on the barrel of the shotgun propped across his knees, his head slumped over in a dead sleep. The Bummer raised the gold tip of his cane to the sun and whacked it down on the base of the Reverend’s head, then lashed the rope around his arms and legs until he was tied up in a ball with a bandanna stuffed in his mouth. The Indian jerked from his seat and looked into the trees as if someone were coming to shoot him, then he saw the Bummer right before him the words hissing from the delicate curved mouth, “You lying thievin Injun, running off with all my Badger bet money in Truckee. Your sidekick Squirrel got his Injun brains blasted all over the desert, but you got away again. Honest to John I ought to have left these gents here to hang your red tail. But you’re going to pay me off first, John C. Luther is not sharing that Gold with the devil. You’re taking me, and me alone, to that lake, then you’re going to sink to the bottom of it with a ton of rocks tied around your neck. Look at this.” He motioned down to Reverend Jake, “look what your lying thieving red hide’s got me into.” He gazed around at the broken wagons and bleeding animals tethered to trees. “Now you ve got me fishing troubled waters. But honest to John Captain, you can bet your boots this time you’re going to pay your dues. This time you’re going to pay off. Now get up on the back of Molly’s horse, ride slow into those thick trees, then ride for your life.”
The Indian swung up behind the woman and grabbed the reins around her waist The Bummer prodded his own horse up behind them and shoved the barrel of the Reverend’s gun into the Indian’s back, “Don’t try to shit any fancy
turds Captain. I’m riding right behind, this little number you feel up against you will blow the heart right out of your body and through the woman. Now git.”
The Indian turned the horse around and spurred it into the long shadows at the edge of the meadow. The morning sun had not broken through the trees. He moved his horse into the night of the forest until he saw daylight bursting before him and heard the Bummer behind, “Ride, Redskin, Ride!” The Indian brought the sharp heel of his boots into the horse’s flanks and spurred it through the tall trees into the daylight and back onto the old stagecoach road.
“Hold up here.” The Bummer reined his horse to a stop and pushed himself up, leaning his ears back at the forest. The sharp chirp of a bird cut the air over his head and he jerked around in his saddle. He kneed his horse up even with the Indian’s and flashed his gold smile out from beneath the black brim of his hat, “Well Captain, it appears as if all those gents back yonder are sleeping like logs.” He took out a cigar, lit up and clenched it in his teeth, “Ride for your life! Heeeyaaah!”
The Bummer halted his horse at the edge of the river, “This must be the middle fork of the Yuba.” He swung his head back at the piles of darkening clouds falling over one another in the fast sky, “Looks to be rain before it turns night, we’ll get across the river now while it’s low. Once we get to the other side it’ll rain and the water will rise up so fast no gent will be able to get a horse across the river for another two days. We’ve got a day’s ride on those gents behind, but even if they make better time than us they’ll never be able to get over this swollen river. Dismount, Captain, we don’t want to lose our horses in these rapids. We’ll walk them across.”
Rabbit Boss Page 42
