One of them, a tall man named Pearson, indicated the carts. "You won"t be able to use those much longer. The trails are too narrow. Put your stuff on pack horses."
"My old horse will carry a pack," Brandy suggested. "He"s done it before."
We sat long with the two travelers, getting as much advice as we could. They drew the trail in the dirt for us, indicating the pa.s.ses.
"How are things up there?" I asked. "Peaceful?"
"Generally speaking. Some of the boys get a mite noisy now and again. There"s brawls and such and once in a great while a shooting. Mostly, they"re just noisy."
"The best claims are all taken," the other one said. "If you"re figuring on staking claims, forget it."
"We"ll just sell our beef and get out," Orrin commented. Then, tentatively, he added, "We promised delivery to a man named Sackett, Logan Sackett."
They stared at him. "Too bad about him, and I"m afraid you"re too late. He"s dead."
"What?"
"I"ll say this for him. He was a man. Party got trapped in the pa.s.ses last year, and he went up and brought "em out. Saved seven men and a woman. He brought "em through snow like you never saw. Avalanche country."
"You say he"s dead?" I asked.
"He went north. There were rumors of a strike up in the Dease River country. Story was that he was killed in a gun battle up there with some outlander."
"Big man?"
"Your height," Pearson said to Orrin, "but heavier by twenty pounds. Come to think of it, he favored you somewhat."
"Who killed him?"
"That was a bad outfit. They"d been in some trouble in Barkerville. Don"t recall what. Five or six of them, and smart, tough men. The one who seemed to be the leader was named Gavin."
"Gavin?" I glanced over at Nettie, who was listening.
"Kyle Gavin?"
"No, this one"s called Shanty. Shanty Gavin, and he"s as mean and tough as he is smart."
Pearson looked over at me. "It was Shanty Gavin who killed Logan Sackett. Shot him dead."
Chapter XXII.
Logan Sackett dead? I didn"t believe it. He was too durned ornery to die. Besides, I"d seen him come through cuttings and shootings and clubbings like he was born to them.
Shanty Gavin? Any relation to Kyle Gavin?
Who was Shanty, and what did he want? For that matter, who was Kyle Gavin?
Pearson and his partner headed on east, back to the fleshpots and away from the gold fields. Fraser River gold was too fine, and the Cariboo was played out, or so they said, but we"d learned long ago to discount anything anybody said who was either going to or coming from a gold field.
"Any way you look at it," Cap said, "we"re drivin" these cows right into trouble."
"I never seen any trouble a cow couldn"t handle," Haney said wryly. "What I"m wonderin" about is us. What are we gettin" into?"
"Move "em along," I said. "The time"s gettin" short, and if we don"t hurry, there"ll be frost on the punkin before we get where we"re going."
"I want to get there," Shorty said, "so"s we can get out before the snow settles down. I"m a warm-weather man myself, born for the sunny side of the hill."
That was the night we left our carts behind. We divided what they contained into packs for four horses.
"We can burn them," Fleming said. "They"ll make a hot fire for cooking."
"We"ll leave them," I said. "Somebody may come who needs a cart. We"ll push them back under the trees and leave them for whoever comes. Good hands made them, and I"ll not destroy honest work."
Again we moved out, pointing our way into the darker hills. The forest was changing now, and ahead of us we saw peaks that were bare of growth, and some were covered by snow. Gra.s.s was scarce, and we watched for meadows where the cattle could stop and feed. Our travel was arranged to make the most of gra.s.s when we found it. There were firs among the poplars now and sometimes groves of stunted pine. We skirted a forest blown down by winds where the dead trees lay in rows like mowed grain.
Orrin was riding point when we met the grizzly. We"d been coming along a forest trail, the cattle strung out for a couple of miles or more and Orrin riding quiet, making no sound. Suddenly, the grizzly arose from the brush and stood tall in the trail. Startled, Orrin"s horse reared, and Orrin kept his seat, drawing his pistol as he did so.
The first we knew of trouble was the sharp bark of his pistol, then three times more, rapid fire. Tyrel, Haney, Cap, an" me, we lit out for the front of the column.
Ever try to get through a trail jammed with cattle? It took time, too much time.
Cattle began bucking and plunging, trying to get into the woods and brush on either side of the trail, and we could hear the roaring and snarling of what was obviously a mighty big bear. We fought our way through, but getting there was tough.
We heard two more shots, and we broke through to find a big grizzly lying in the trail, crippled but still full of fight.
Orrin was just getting up off the ground. His hat was gone, and his buckskin jacket was ripped, and there was blood on his shoulder. He made it to his feet, staggered, and commenced jamming loads into his pistol. Me, I took my rifle from the scabbard and killed that grizzly with two good shots.
He would have died from Orrin"s shots, we later saw. Two of them had hit him in the neck, and after going down, Orrin got two more shots into his spine, fired as the bear was turning. They had crippled him in the hindquarters, which kept him from getting at Orrin. He"d hit him one glancing swipe, knocking him tail over teakettle into the brush.
It taken us the rest of the evening to skin out that grizzly and get the best cuts of meat; then we had to get the cattle around the blood in the trail. The carca.s.s we hauled off with that old plow horse of Brandy"s.
Scouting ahead, Shorty found a long meadow along a winding stream, and we turned the cattle in there for a good bit of gra.s.s and water. We rounded up some of the cattle that got away into the trees, but there was a few of them we never did find and didn"t take the time to hunt. One old steer came up the trail after us when we started the next morning.
All the following day we struggled through bogs, the cattle floundering and plunging, our horses doing no better, and the trail when it could be found at all was wide enough for one animal only. During the whole day, we made scarcely four miles, yet the next morning we climbed a low hill and then another and emerged in a forest of huge old poplars, scattered but with no undergrowth. Here and there, the cattle found a bite of something, usually a clump of wildflowers. We made good time and by nightfall had twelve miles of easy travel behind us.
We broke out into a plain at sundown, and the cattle scattered on the good gra.s.s there, and we found a camp up against some willows and near a small stream.
We were dead beat, and me an" Shorty were taking the first guard. I slapped a saddle on a dusty red roan and cinched up. I was putting my rifle in the scabbard when suddenly there was a thunder of hoofs, wild shrill whoops, and we saw a party of Indians swooping down upon us.
I grabbed my rifle back out of the scabbard, saw Tyrel hit the dirt behind a log, and heard Haney"s pistol barking, and then they were gone and with them about fifty head of our cattle.
Well, I done some cussing, then apologized to Nettie, who came up from the campfire to see what had happened.
"Blackfeet," Cap said. "Count yourself lucky they wasn"t war minded."
"Let"s go get "em!" Shorty suggested.
Cap just glanced at him, but that glance said more than a pa.s.sel of words. "Blackfeet, I said. You don"t chase Blackfeet, Shorty. You just count your blessings an" let "em go.
"Those were young braves, just out for a lark. They wasn"t huntin" scalps, but you go after them, and they will. We lost some cows. Let"s move out of here."
"To where?"
"Any place but here. They might get to thinkin" on it and come back."
Tired as we were, we put out our fire, loaded our gear, and headed off up the trail. We found a meadow three miles farther on and bedded them down.
n.o.body set by the campfire that night; n.o.body wanted a second cup of coffee. Everybody crawled into his bed, and only the night guard was left.
Day after day, we plodded on; we had lost cattle one way or another until at least a third of them were gone. Old Baptiste killed a mountain sheep, and we dined well, but it had been weeks since we had seen a buffalo. There was little talk now during the day. Fleming looked sour and discontented. He seemed to have been expecting something that did not happen.
"Overlanders have come this way," Cap said, "but it"s been a while."
All the tracks we found were old, and we were getting more and more worried.
"Beats me where we"re to meet Logan, if he"s alive."
"That feller said he was dead," Fleming said, "that he"d been killed."
"He"s a hard man to kill."
"A bullet will do it for anybody," Fleming said. "If he"s. .h.i.t in the right place, one man is no tougher than another."
"Seems like we"ve been pushin" these cows forever," Shorty said. "I wouldn"t mind standin" up to a bar for a drink."
"Be a while," Tyrel said. "You boys set easy. Goin" back will be easy as pie."
"If we ever," Fleming said.
Nettie and Mary had been keeping out of the way. They knew this was a trying time, and they had done their best to help. Both of them had become good hands, although Mary a" well, she"d been born a hand.
"If my brother is out here," Nettie asked Orrin, "where do you think he would be?"
Orrin shrugged. "There"s Barkerville, and there"s Clinton. I don"t know many of the towns, but I can tell you this. If he"s in this country or has been, some of those folks will know. This is a big country, but she"s right scarce of people. A body can be away up yonder at the forks of the creek, and somebody will have seen him. There"s nothing happens up here somebody doesn"t know about."
Fleming chuckled. It was a dry, rather unpleasant, skeptical chuckle. n.o.body said anything.
We"d been keeping our eyes open for sign. All three of us Sacketts expected it, and we knew the sort of sign one Sackett was apt to leave for another.
We found nothing.
We waded rivers, fourteen crossings in one day, and wove our way through some fir trees whose wet branches slapped us wickedly as we pa.s.sed. The horses were game. They struggled through the muskeg, and finally we topped out on some reasonably solid ground.
Supplies were running low, and game was scarce. All day we had seen nothing. Ducks flew over, the Vs of their flight pattern pointing south. In the morning when we awakened, there was a chill in the air.
"Wonder what become of those Injuns we had followin* us?" Cap asked one day. "I kind of miss "em?"
"Little Bear," I said, "now there was a lad."
"If we don"t get something to eat soon," Lin suggested, "we"ll have to slaughter a beef."
Now there"s little goes more against the grain of a good cattleman than killing his own beef. But we"d left buffalo country behind, and we were fresh out of bear. Me, I was of no mind to tackle a grizzly unless he came hunting trouble, which they often did. A grizzly has been king in his own world for so long, he resents anybody coming around. Only man threatens his world, and whether he avoids or fights men depends pretty much on his mood at the moment.
Down San Francisco way during the gold rush, some of the gamblers used to pit bears in cages with lions, tigers, and most anything that would fight. The grizzly almost always won in quick time. In one particular case, a full-grown African lion lasted less than three minutes.
There were a lot of grizzlies in these mountains, but mostly they kept out of the way, not because they were afraid, but because they simply did not want to be bothered.
Orrin, who reads a lot, was reading me a piece in a magazine, Century or Atlantic, I think, about some explorers coming back from some foreign country where they"d been hunting some wild creature. They were busy hunting for a few weeks and came back saying there was no such thing. Now I"ve lived in panther or mountain lion country most of my life and never seen but one or two that weren"t treed by hounds. Wild animals don"t want to be seen, and it"s sheer accident if you see them.
We were climbing all the while, getting higher and higher, and the nights were getting colder. Then, one morning, Tyrel come to me. "Tell," he said, there"s a fringe of ice on the lake, yonder."
Well, that sent a chill through me. A fringe of ice a" and we had some distance to go. I wasn"t sure how much.
Now we were moving up some magnificent valleys, green and lovely with great walls of mountain rising on either side; often these were sheer precipices of bare rock, or with an occasional tree growing from some rock a body could no way get to. We caught fish, and one night I got three ducks in three shots with a rifle, two sitting, one just taking off. They were needed, as grub was getting low. We had flour, salt, and the like, but we needed meat.
Every morning now there was frost. The sky was gray often enough, and one night, when there were no clouds, we saw the Northern Lights, a tremendous display brightening the whole heavens. I"d heard of it but seen it but once before, in Montana, but never like this.
It was late afternoon, and Tyrel was riding point. It was an easy trail, across some green meadows and up along a trail through huge boulders and scattered clumps of fir. Me, I was riding on the flank when I saw Tyrel pull up short.
Well, my rifle snaked into my hands, and I saw Cap Rountree out with his, but Tyrel wasn"t drawing. He was looking at a big gray boulder beside the trail.
Coming down off the slope, I rounded the head of the herd and pulled up alongside him. I started to say, "What"s wrong, Tye?" and did say it before I looked past him and saw the mark on the face of the boulder.
Scratched on the face of the rock was CLINCH-S-Dease-?
"Well," Orrin had come up, "he isn"t dead then."
"Who isn"t dead?" It was Fleming.
Orrin an" Tyrel glanced at me, and I said, "We"re losin" time, boys. We"ve got a far piece to go."
Fleming stared hard at the scratching on the rock.
"What"s that mean?" he wondered. "It don"t make no sense!"
"Doesn"t, does it?" Tyrel said mildly. He turned his mount "Hustle them along, Charlie. We"ve a ways to go."
Reluctantly, Charlie Fleming turned away.
Nettie Molrone rode up with Mary McCann. "What is it, Orrin?"
"Just some scratching on a rock," he said. "We were wondering about it, that"s all."