Ghosts of Elkhorn

Kerry Newcomb and Frank Schaefer

For Ann and Paul Newcomb

For Frankie

Special thanks to Aaron Priest, agent and friend

1

The wind spilled down the mountain, kicked up the dust on Main Street, slid through the broken front door of the funeral parlor, and woke the Wind River Kid. Dreams faded before the reality of creaking joints, tired muscles, cells that refused to regenerate, and veins that creaked with blood. He smacked his lips and groaned, worked a kink out of his left shoulder. He groaned again and scratched his belly. He rubbed the grit out of his eyes and stretched carefully. It was a full five minutes before he lay still again, sighed, and ruefully admitted to himself that damn and by damn he was awake.

Outside, patched with a mid-September frost, the town of Elkhorn, population one, waited. The wind returned and stirred the dried leaves pressed against the walls of the defunct funeral parlor. They sounded somewhat like the rattle of chains in a ghost house, Wind River thought, then reconsidered, and decided more like the clatter of loose false teeth. There was a certain comfort to be gained in knowing one was beset by choppers rather than the spirits of the dead. Lying soft and warm under the covers, he thought about that for a while, too, and finally concluded that he was blessed with the best of both possible worlds, if best was the word. On that note, he sat up and looked around for the ghost of Aden Creed.

Wind River’s frown, as sour as the taste in his mouth, faded when he saw he was alone. The morning grew a little brighter with the knowledge he’d be able to wash in peace and quiet. Cheered, he swiveled sideways and, careful not to touch the floor, pulled on the socks he’d put under his pillow the night before. Warm feet on cold boards made a big difference. So did the new sun that bounced a yellow beam of light off the water in the basin and turned his hair as gold as it had been when he was a child. Suddenly pensive, he glanced back over the seventy-one years and tried to remember what it had been like to be a child, what it had been like being born, to be so close to a woman that he was inside her, to be loved like that. He had no idea of what his mother looked like, but he hoped her face wasn’t as ugly and gnarled as his reflection made him out to be.

The taste in his mouth was back. Wind River scooped up a handful of water, held it in his mouth until it was warm enough not to hurt his teeth, and then swished it around a minute before spitting it into the hole in the corner. Hell. He wasn’t all that bad off, he thought, moving to the mirror he’d lugged up from Widow Guthrie’s dress shop. He’d had his share of ladies in a youth that had stretched from then until now. He walked straight and steady, and his belly was still flat. He had his hair, long, white curls that caught at his shirt collar, which was more than could be said for Aden Creed, and he did not drool like Lode Benedict down in Mountain City.

A shingle flapped on the roof. Wind River glanced around to see if Creed had entered, but he was still alone. Muttering thanks, he crossed to the stove to build up the fire. That was another part of the morning he liked, especially when fall was in the air. He poked ashes down the grate, blew on the coals until they glowed red. He dropped in a handful of dried pine needles and twigs. When red flames followed the sweet smell of smoke, he added split wood, closed the lid, and slid the coffeepot into place.

Different paths had brought the Wind River Kid and Aden Creed to the town of Elkhorn. Creed had been carried there in 1868 after getting caught in a slide that nearly tore off his left leg. By the time the leg mended, he and Angelina at the Victorian Palace were thick. He had forsaken his mountains to stay with her in Elkhorn. A year later in the winter of 1869, when a skinny, bedraggled, half-frozen and near-starved thirteen-year-old boy staggered into the rough and roaring mining town, Creed and Angelina took him in, fed him, and nursed him back to health.

The runaway had had no parents and no place to go, so it was only natural he should stay. Creed, the gimp-legged mountain man who had always wanted a son, took the boy under his wing. He taught him mountain lore: where to sleep in a storm, how to hunt without sound, build a fire without smoke, walk without leaving tracks. He taught him the taste of strong coffee and thin mountain air, the red smell of beaver blood, and how to wait through the lonely vigil of the hunt and pass the test of stinging snow. But Angelina was there, and she was another kind of teacher who preferred steak served on fine china and knew the difference between good wine and bad. She instructed Wind River in the sophisticated ways of men who wore silk vests and sent cards dancing from manicured fingers and always won at the gaming tables.

Creed had argued, remonstrated, berated, and derided, but to no avail. There were the mountains, and there were the wild and sinful ways of men, and the boy chose the latter with scarce an apology or word of thanks. A man of eighteen, he put on his suit, packed his carpetbag, saddled one of Creed’s pack mules, and rode out of Elkhorn for Mountain City, Denver, and points east and south, into a world of gaiety and light, a world of luck and the men who ruled it, a world of sweet soiled doves who cooed and dipped their low-cut bodices and gazed in open avariciousness at the stacks of chips and showered their lusty treasures on the winners, only the winners. They called him Kid then. He was good with the women and better with the cards. He learned the easy shuffle and the Dakota slide and the palmed queen and the left-hand cut and a dozen other deals. The cards danced for him as did the women in the night.

As a man will discover a natural talent previously untried, he became a shootist quite by accident. A poor loser in a tiny settlement called Wind River, Montana, disputed the three fours that Kid held. Seconds later, the cowboy lay dead, slain by a hand that was swift with cards and as quick with the gun worn more as an ornament until that single moment when it appeared in Kid’s hand like an extension of fate. Before too long and too many more poor losers, the Wind River Kid had built a reputation as a man who was plain downright authoritative when it came to staying alive.

It had been as simple as that.

Luck had ridden with the Wind River Kid, had sat at his side at a thousand poker tables, and had given him everything he asked for and some things he didn’t, like enemies. For eighteen years, he had shrugged off the enemies, turned his back and contemptuously walked away from them, or simply shot them. And then one day his luck, and his nerve, had run out. Paunch Pepperdine dead at his feet, Butch and Dupree Pepperdine riding to avenge the death of their father, Wind River tucked his tail between his legs and ran.

The year had been 1892, the Wind River Kid a lean thirty-six, no longer a kid but stuck with the name because that was the way everyone remembered him. His nerves as frayed as his shirt collar, he had headed for Elkhorn, sanctuary of his early days, there to find Aden Creed for the second time. Wiry, a tattered fossil too damned stubborn to lie down and quit, the ex-mountain man had become an eccentric, drunk old coot who eked out a living working the tailings of a silver mine and running a string of traps that seldom caught anything. At seventy, long since kicked out of Angelina’s heart and her Victorian Palace, Creed still had his principles. When he and Wind River met in Wind River’s room at the Great Northern Hotel, Creed didn’t like what he saw, and said so. Wind River told him to go to hell, but Creed wasn’t inclined right then because there was work to be done—work requiring a mountain man with cougar courage, a keen eye to sight along the steel barrel of a Hawken rifle, and a willingness to die in a coward’s place.

Memories of long ago drifted and died in the short walk from basin to stove and back again. The sun had moved on and restored Wind River’s hair to its present and rightful white, which was fine with him. He’d stared at his past too many times to want to again that morning, and gratefully plunged his head into the water, scrubbed and snorted and blew like an old bear in a mountain stream. “Whee-unhh!” he said, shaking his head and shivering, then reaching quickly for the whiskey bottle behind the washstand. Red flannel long johns spotted with ice-cold water, he leaned back and took a swallow of pure hell. “Whee-heohhh!” he croaked, still testing his voice, “and one to grow on.” He wiped his hand across his mouth, looked about to see if Creed had snuck in, then drank again. Fire coursed through his veins and his throat burned. “That’s got her started,” he wheezed. “Now to finish the job.”

The fire in the stove was roaring, the coffee steaming. He added a handful of fresh grounds to the sludge at the bottom of the pot, emptied in a quart bottle of water, moved the morning coffee to the edge of the firebox so it wouldn’t boil too fast. The initial heat generated by the whiskey was fading, and Wind River became conscious of the cold. Moving quickly, he grabbed for his clothes. The elbows of his Sears, Roebuck plaid flannel shirt were frayed, but elbows were the least important parts of shirts, so long as long johns were whole. His dungarees were patched, but like his bones were basically sound and had a good deal of life left in them yet. As for his boots, it was true that the soles were thin and had started to work loose, but he had leather and awl and thick waxed string, and would repair them some time before the first real snow. The one thing he didn’t dare forget was the thick, padded plaid cap with the earflaps tied up.

The coffeepot was singing. Wind River decanted a cup of the steaming black acidic brew and moved outside into the sunlight. The year before, the day after he’d moved out of the Horned Owl Saloon and into Muenster’s Funeral Parlor, he’d rolled his sitting log up the street. Now he checked the sky and sat and stared at the morning, taking his time because that’s what it was, his time, and Elkhorn’s.

Outside of winter, spring, summer, and fall, time wasn’t worth much for a seventy-one-year-old man. Hadn’t been for Wind River for over a quarter of a century. As far as he was concerned, he was alive and that was all that counted. He simply didn’t care that the year was 1927, for example. He neither knew nor cared that Rif rebels had been bloodily suppressed in Morocco, that transatlantic commercial telephone service had been opened between New York and London, that Trotsky had been expelled from the Communist Party, that Germany had repudiated any responsibility for World War I. He had not read The Great Gatsby or Elmer Gantry or Winnie the Pooh. He had not heard of Picasso, Kafka, or cosmic rays. It did not matter to him that Darwin’s theory of evolution had been banned in Tennessee or that Lucky Lindy had flown the Atlantic nonstop, so long as all named parties stayed out of Elkhorn and left him in peace.

The sun was what mattered. The sun and the fresh air and the private, empty sky. Wind River set his cup on the log and stomped around, flapped his arms to work a little life into his muscles. He picked up his cup and drank, set it down again, and stretched. He stared down Main Street. Burnished gold by the sun, the gray-washed buildings hinted at earlier, precarious days of grand fortune. To the east, visible through the empty lot where Doc Bufker’s house used to sit, he could see the Rampage Valley, long and wide and green. To the south was Damnation Hill, obscuring Fremont Valley and the road to Mountain City. To the west and north, granite slopes, gray slabs of rock poking through thick clusters of pine and evergreen, rose to windswept peaks. The trees had been stripped from the north slope years earlier, and a puckered wound marred its upper face where men had dug and died for silver. The town itself was still in moderately good shape because Wind River had a habit of repairing a walkway or floor plank whenever he fell through. If civic improvement now and then kept him from breaking a leg, it was well worth the effort.

The Wind River Kid knew the valleys and the mountains as well as he knew Elkhorn. He knew every gulley and ravine. He knew Elkhorn Creek from where it sprang out of the rocks a mile and a half north of town at Silvertip Spring. He knew the first ankle-deep yards that ran through a polished cleft of granite. He knew the aspens, the wild flowers, the mosses that bordered it as it grew to a singing brook. It was said that the men who panned Elkhorn Creek for gold in the old days had to keep a hand free to flip the trout out of the way, so teeming were the waters. Wind River was sure the story was true because the fish had come back during the last ten years, and it was no trouble at all to scoop out a lunker when bacon ran low. He knew the deer trail that funneled cautious bucks and dainty-eyed does out of the aspens, guided them through the tumbled boulders and past Silvertip Falls all the way to where the Elkhorn joined Oak Creek above Mountain City. He knew Silvertip Falls and the pristine glen at its base better than he wanted to. There Elkhorn Creek fell twenty feet into a cold, icy pond. Blackfeet and Crow, Cheyenne and Nez Percé had bathed in that holy glade. The wild creatures had drunk there since time immemorial and did still. Wind River avoided the glade. Aden Creed derided him about his aversion, but he didn’t care. At least three men had died there. Three the Kid knew of. But that was a black thought, best forgotten. Easily forgotten, most days in the routine born of years of silence and loneliness.

A wolf will urinate a boundary around his domain. Wind River pissed in the alleys. Years might have rusted his vitality but never tarnished the image of himself as a gambler and a gentleman, and gentlemen did not wet the street. This morning, Wind River peed belly-high on the barbershop from three feet away, flipped it dry, and stuffed it back with a satisfied smile. “Seventy-one by God,” he crackled, crossing the open space between the barbershop and the Great Northern Hotel and stopping under the porch to check the sky again. Twice before he’d looked, but it never hurt to check again. A man couldn’t be too careful. The goddamn falcon had showed up a year earlier, taken a dislike to Wind River, and swooped down on him whenever it had the chance. Wind River sometimes suspected Creed of conspiring with the bird, but he couldn’t be sure and hadn’t accused him. Shrugging his relief, he headed back into the street to finish his coffee.

Mornings were a clock of sorts, one with actions instead of hands. The waking and scratching, the rising and rinsing, the fire and the coffee, the water and the whiskey. Likewise, each morning, he surveyed Elkhorn and made note of the myriad changes that had occurred overnight. The changes were minute, not even recognizable to someone who hadn’t watched so closely for thirty-five years. A crack widened a hair’s breadth here, a knothole fallen out there. Here a beam had shifted, there a spot of rust had peeled off a nail. In truth, the town looked much the same as it had since the turn of the century, except that only the main street was left, the eight houses that had been the residential section having fallen in the slide of ’03, when the eastern slope gave way and slipped into Rampage Valley. As it stood on this golden morning in 1927, Elkhorn was a hotel, a boardinghouse, a barbershop, a funeral parlor, a general store, a dress shop, a bank, a restaurant, a newspaper office, an assay office, a stable, a sheriff’s office, five saloons, the Victorian Palace, and a whorehouse that still smelled like women when the wind and humidity were right.

Each of the other buildings smelled of memories, too; some sweet, some sour. This morning, Wind River stood for a moment in front of what had once been a whitewashed cottage, where columbine bloomed wild in the spring. Doc Bufker, Elkhorn’s one and only doctor, had lived and practiced there. A singular and vainglorious physician, Bufker was a stalwart believer that pain had medicinal as well as religious attributes, and once had cured a miner’s headache by stomping on the surprised fellow’s toe. The cure, once discovered, became a frightening panacea. Many a lad left Doc Bufker’s limping, rubbing a bruised arm, massaging a kicked buttock, and unable to remember exactly what ailment had led him to the doctor. Bufker had come to Elkhorn in 1887 after being expelled from the medical profession in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, the year before. Two years later, he had married a whore named Mon Cher, who took a vow of respectability before God and the doctor, but forgot to make a similar pronouncement to the rest of mankind.

The doc’s troubles started in ’93, one evening in June when he was called out to repair the busted wing of the town marshal, Deke Long. Managing to clean the wound and bind it without complication, he returned to his house, eased himself wearily through the white picket gate that Mon Cher had added for a homey touch, and paused to take a leak in the garden. There, watering the downy phlox and fairy bells that would later revert to a wild state, he beheld, through the bedroom window, his wife giggling in her altogether in the arms of not one but two miners. Bufker did the only manly thing he could have. He dug into his battered black satchel for the derringer nestled between his surgical tools and a decanter of Foxworth’s Black Strap for the Jitters and Croup, Soothes Diarrhea. He waited for the miners to leave—he couldn’t blame them, after all—reached over the window-sill, steadied his arm, and fired a small caliber bullet with surgical precision into the forehead of his beloved.

If he’d shot the miners, or Mon Cher, in the act, he would have gotten off scot-free for an act of passion any man in his right mind could have understood. It was the waiting until the miners left that did him in. Doc Bufker stood trial and was trundled off to prison in Denver, where he found a thriving vocation ministering to the aches and agues of outrageous patients. The house itself became a landmark when the drama it had contained found its way into the San Francisco Police Gazette under the title “Princess of Passion Slain.” The issue made its way to Elkhorn, and for a while people walked about with their chins lifted in civic pride, and their egos bloated with self-importance, because Elkhorn was by damn on the map!

Unlike the present, with events taking place in splendid isolation, one thing followed another back in 1893, when Elkhorn was still alive and thriving. Three weeks after the Gazette brought notoriety to town, the Reverend Phillips, whose church languished for a roof and doors, burned the Bufker house to the ground in a fit of sanctimonious despair. Phillips left Elkhorn the next night. A broken man, he moved to Mountain City, where he lost his religion, became a baker’s apprentice, and later a baker more concerned with men’s stomachs, he was proud of saying, than with their souls. He died of a stroke in 1912, when Doc Bufker, his debt to society if not to Mon Cher paid, returned to Elkhorn, found the town abandoned, and set up shop in Mountain City. At sixty-eight, Phillips had thought he had forgotten, but hadn’t. Hastily repentant, he died cursing the blasphemous bunch in Elkhorn who had never shown him anything but the slow side of lethargy when it came to building the house of God, yet made a temple of notoriety out of the house where Satan had lived and basked in scurrilous glory.

Wind River headed down the street. To his right was the barbershop, to his left the sheriff’s office and jail, still intact but fifty feet down the slope created by the slide, followed by the general store and the Widow Guthrie’s dress shop. The Great Northern Hotel sat on the west side across, naturally, from the Great Northern Bank. A side street separated the bank from the south and seedy end of town. To the west, the Horned Owl Saloon sagged dangerously, mirroring the JoLetty Restaurant across the street. Lorine’s Boardinghouse and the Silver Lode Saloon faced the Twin .45 Saloon that balanced precariously on the edge of the slide, its rear hanging over empty space. Why the Elkhorn Chronicle sat at that end of town was a mystery that no one had solved, but rumor had had it that Endicott Norman, the owner, once had been more than friends with Angelina, who ran the Victorian Palace next door. The last two buildings on the east were the Texas Saloon and the Gold Nugget Saloon. Sometimes, when he wanted to feel horny, Wind River wandered into the Gold Nugget for a look at the naked blonde over the bar. Faded though she was by years and weather, everything was still there. This morning he passed by, dug his bootheels into the dry dirt street in front of Lucie Pleasant’s whorehouse and bath, the last building on Main Street, and turned to survey his town. Everything was intact, as whole as it would ever be. Up by the livery, a cloud of dust exploded and disappeared, a phantom on the breeze that funneled down from the granite peaks. Somewhere to his left a jay scolded. He could hear the wind in the pines behind him. All was well with the world. Wind River gazed with contentment on Elkhorn, in all its pristine shabbiness.

A fart echoed like a drumroll, followed by the raw rasp of a knife blade cutting through wood. Wind River’s shoulders tensed as his eyes roamed up and down the street searching out the direction. Ghosts always announce themselves. Some come with chains to fill the night with rattling dread, some with moans crimson with horror and promising gore, some in anguish or mad glee, some sobbing for murdered lovers, some with shrieking pleas for release from their curious imprisonment. A fart and a whittle announced Creed’s earthly materialization.

Wind River spotted him on the front porch of Lorine’s Boardinghouse. Curled slivers of wood covered his moccasins and his egg-smooth skull was shiny in the morning sun. Creed glanced up as Wind River approached. “Morning, younker,” he said lazily.

“Morning,” Wind River said, liking the sound of the old talk and glad, in spite of himself, to see the old mountain man. “You’re at it early.”

“Yup.” His blade never missed a stroke as it bit into the wood with a flick flick flick.

Wind River knotted his fists, dug them into the small of his back, and stretched. “What’re you makin’?”

“Same as always.” Creed spit on his knife, honed it on his boot before starting on the antlers. He never whittled anything but deer. “Better set and soak the warmth. Can’t tell when there’ll be more, this time of year.”

“Up and about is better. Gets the blood movin’,” Wind River said, looking around as if he’d misplaced something. “Mite early for too much settin’.”

“Our age, it’s never too early for settin’,” Creed answered, watching him. “It’s back there on your log.”

“What?”

“Where you left your coffee,” the mountain man’s ghost explained.

Wind River grimaced. The morning had been going fine, and then Creed had to trample all over his thoughts. “Thanks,” he said sarcastically, his mellow mood gone.

“No call for that,” Creed said. “I was just tryin’ to help.”

“The hell you say.” Wind River was getting cantankerous. “I didn’t ask for help.”

“You gonna be that way …” Creed stood. If seventy years of prodigious eating hadn’t filled him out, neither had an extra thirty-five of wandering about without earthly sustenance thinned him down. His long arms and legs fit his six-foot-plus frame just right. “Well, good day for a walk. Maybe I’ll check my traps.”

“You ain’t got no traps,” Wind River unkindly reminded him, trying to get even.

Creed rammed his knife into its sheath. “I’ll check anyway, if it’s all the same with you. The memories are sweet. Besides, there might be one I missed.”

“Be nothing but rust, now,” Wind River said, rubbing it in.

“Maybe I’ll check yours then,” Creed snapped.

Wind River’s hands bunched into fists and his shoulders hunched menacingly. “You leave my damn traps alone, you hear?”

Creed chortled like he always did when he got Wind River’s goat. “Sure, Kid. Whatever you say.”

“And I ain’t no kid!”

“So you ain’t.” Creed’s eyes danced merrily. “I forgot,” he said, farting explosively.

Wind River wrinkled his nose. “Cut that out.”

“Wasn’t me.”

“Hell it wasn’t. Who else is there?”

“Wolves.” Creed arched one eyebrow, spat into the dust as he stepped off the porch. “You stayed in the hills like you was supposed to, you would of known that’s what wolves sound like when winter’s comin’.” He chuckled, began to amble toward the trees, and paused. “Oh, yeah. You better get my old Hawken down and clean it up.”

Wind River frowned suspiciously. “Why?”

“Might need it.” Creed pointed toward the graveyard on the slope below the old mine at the north end of town. “Scar came down last night. Heard his footfalls. Woke me. Damn red eye and yellow teeth. Not a calming thing to see in the night. I called out to him in Injun.”

“I don’t suppose,” Wind River snorted derisively, “he said what he wanted, did he?”

“Might have, but I never learned to speak bear.” Creed looked as if he was going to fart, but didn’t. “He was pawing at the graves, though. A bad sign in any tongue. Change coming, Kid. Even here. Even to Elkhorn.”

“I guess a man who believes a bear could be damned near sixty years old can believe anything else he’s a mind to,” Wind River said with a smirk.

Creed scratched his jaw and picked a scab of dust from his drooping beak of a nose. “Laugh if you like,” he warned. “All the same, you best watch out for Ol’ Scar. When I took his eye, I left him with a bad temper. He ain’t content to watch no more. Ol’ Scar’s up to mischief.”

Wind River watched the mountain man saunter into the emerald line of evergreens and head north and east. That meant the old bastard would be following the trail to Silver-tip Falls and the glen. For a second, Wind River was tempted to follow, to prove, to Creed and himself Well, to prove that he could.

But what for? To listen to more nonsense about bears that should be dead and God knew what else? Grumbling, he walked back up Main Street to get his cup and, like a prize fool, didn’t listen and, like even more of a prize fool, failed to hear the whistle of wings arced back in a perfect, single-minded dive. Only when it was too late, when there wasn’t time for more than a flit of imagination, did he suspect, and then WHAP! and he was rolling in the dirt. He came to his feet with a stone in his hand.

“Goddamn!” Wind River shouted, chunking the stone at the rising falcon and missing by a country mile. “Bird!” he shouted, shaking with fury. “Goddamn beady-eyed bird!”

The falcon’s screech, a pulsing, piercing call of joyous victory, echoed high and taunting on the frail mountain air, and then he was gone, swooping deep into Rampage Valley.

That did it. Wind River gingerly felt the lump rising on the back of his skull. He picked up his hat, retrieved his cup, and stomped into Muenster’s Funeral Parlor. If he had any sense, he thought, he’d leave. Saddle up and ride out. He’d threatened to a hundred times before, but this time he really would. Let the damn bird, Creed, and his imaginary bear have the whole bitching town. That was the answer, by God, and that’s exactly what he’d do. Right that minute, while Creed was checking his rusted beaver traps and the goddamn beady-eyed bird had meat, not meddling, on his mind. Leave and never come back.

The coffee was cold, the fire down to a pile of coals. “Determination,” Wind River said, adding wood. That’s all it needed. A blaze sprang up and he put the lid back, shoved the pot over to heat up. Hell, he had determination by the yard, by the acre. His stomach growled, and he reconsidered. Better to have breakfast and then leave. Travel on a full stomach.

Humming a cracked tune, he poked a finger in the coffee. It was still cold, which got him thinking again. With all he had to do to get ready, it would be noon before he could ride. Better to take his time and leave in the morning. That way, if he took the shorter, steeper, cut off trail, he’d have to spend only one night on the ground before he got to Mountain City.

Wind River perked up, began to feel good again. Like he was only fifty, maybe. Where would he go? It didn’t matter. Luck would lead him. Always had. Brought him to Elkhorn, took him away, and brought him back. And now away again. “Damn and by damn,” he said aloud, anticipating all the people he’d meet, all the sights he’d see. He grabbed the whiskey bottle and toasted his new freedom. “Whee-unhh!” he said, his eyes glistening with excitement. Damn and by damn, but he was going to have himself a time!

He was leaving. This time for good.

2

Silent lay the markers, wood and stone. Some, faithful in their vigil of the years, waited resurrection whole. Others, broken by snow and ice and insects, lay crumbled in the dust.

DEL STUDER 1842–OCTOBER 17, 1869

A GOOD FRIEND AND HONEST

BUT NOT TOO SMART OF A HUNTER

KILLED AND PART ET BY A GRIZZ

Wind River squinted at the marker as the sun angled down toward the western peaks and sliced the clearing into streaks of shadow and painfully bright light. Right next to Del’s grave was another weathered plank with the letters and date burned into it.

OCTOBER 19, 1869

THE GRIZZ

FOUND DEAD ABOUT HALF A MILE FROM DEL

Grizzlies and men were an age-old combination. Only one king to every mountain, all that time and space allowed. Wind River sauntered on, hoping to give the impression he was just out for a stroll and not looking to see for himself if Scar had come down during the night.

LUCIE JEAN MARCKHAM

JUNE 1, 1890–DEC. 16, 1893

A LOSS BORNE BY US ALL

Wind River remembered Lucie Jean. He remembered her stiff and dead in a pink, frilly dress in a white satin-lined coffin made by the blacksmith and his twelve-year-old son. He could not remember the blacksmith’s name. Lucie had been three years old, the youngest child left in a town that was itself dying. A month after she died her father had closed the store and departed with his wife and two sons, leaving a total of five less in Elkhorn. Wind River had given Lucie a card once. The queen of hearts from his last deck, as he recalled. Enraptured, squealing with delight and scraped knee forgotten, she had scurried back to her father’s general store. Six months later winter killed her, a winter that brought fever and pneumonia to chill and fill the lungs of a little girl and whisper a lullaby of dreamless sleep.

Great claw marks had ripped the ground covering Lucie. “Son-of-a-bitch!” Wind River muttered, anger contorting his face. “Son-of-a-bitch grizzly!”

A breeze sifted through the tall pines. How long was a mountain grizzly supposed to live? Hard to say. Twenty-five years, maybe? Not as long as Scar. Hell, Creed had shot the damned thing in what? Eighty-eight or something?

“Eighty-seven. October. And he weren’t no cub then.”

Wind River squawked and spun around so quickly he lost his footing and tripped over a splintered marker.

Creed was sitting on his own gravestone, a piece of shined granite paid for by Wind River. The letters were cut deep and said:

ADEN CREED. MOUNTAIN MAN

1822–JULY 17, 1892

KILLED BY OWL HOOTS

“Easy, Kid,” Creed said, tapping his pipe on the stone. “It’s a long way downhill with a broken leg.”

There was more than a hint of truth in that, Wind River thought with a shudder. He picked himself up and dusted his Levi’s. “Damn, Aden, but you give a man a death, sneakin’ up like that.”

“Can’t be helped,” Creed replied, innocence looking out of place on his face, like a smile on a wolf. “I’m past makin’ a ruckus. Quiet sort of comes natural to a fellow in my condition.”

“Okay, okay,” Wind River snapped. “I don’t want to hear about it.” He pointed to the claw marks on Lucie’s grave. “What was he doing here?”

“Scar?”

“What else has claws like that? An eight-foot beaver? Hell yes, Scar. What was he doing to her grave?”

Creed peered at Lucie’s grave as if he hadn’t noticed anything out of the way before. “Offhand, I’d say digging. But you can see that for yourself.”

“Why?”

“Grizzly business, I reckon.” The mountain man chuckled, amused by his pun.

“You bastard.”

Aden leaned forward. His mud-brown eyes drilled into the Wind River Kid’s. “You never in your life cared about anyone or anything except yourself. So why this sudden, self-righteous concern? Spare us. Spare me.”

“You don’t know,” Wind River said, sniffing defensively. “If that bear comes to Elkhorn, I’ll kill it.”

“He is here already. He has come for our memories.” Creed looked dreamy, as if, having seen so much of the past, he had learned how to look into the future. “Scar ain’t like me. He still has his claws. He’ll dig up those graves and he’ll tear down Elkhorn board by board. That old rogue won’t die until the mountain is pure again.”

“You never did talk sense.” The words sounded empty.

“Weren’t no point to it. You never would listen.” Creed tucked his thumbs inside his belt. The bright beads strung by a long-dead Cheyenne squaw brightened his soiled buckskin shirt and breeches. “Be that as it may,” he said, standing and looking around. “These graves are getting me depressed.”

Wind River glanced upslope where the mountainside receded into concealing shadows. He thought there had been a movement in the underbrush, but could not be certain and decided against checking. Let claws rip, let snout dig, let jaws snap the whole town to battered, shredded wood. What the hell, when it came right down to it. He was leaving. What happened to Elkhorn was its own business. Still, he couldn’t help being apprehensive. Creed had been around a long time and knew things most living men had never thought of. Wind River stared at the underbrush. Had it moved again? What breathed there out of sight? What waited, certain as sin, patient as fate? A hungry grizzly named Scar? “If you’ve come for my memories, you one-eyed bastard,” the Wind River Kid said in a voice as soft as the shadows, “you can have them. And good riddance. To you both.”

Creed led the way down the hill toward town. With the angle of the sinking sun just right, occasional patches of amber-colored light danced through the mountain man’s body. Just like him, Wind River thought sourly. About the time he thought the old man was real, Creed took to appearing and disappearing, or worse, that tricky in-between state. Trouble was, who could tell the difference anymore? Real bear or ghost? Probably looked alike and sounded alike. Probably even smelled alike, to judge from Creed’s farts. One good thing about the falcon, Wind River thought, rubbing his noggin as he picked his way across a stony place, that bird was for sure real.

He wouldn’t have to put up with it much longer, though. Only one more night. Wind River pushed into the nearly dark livery to check on his horse, a hammerhead Appaloosa with a penchant for viewing the world as a wholly unremarkable place. The horse begrudged a gallop and, come boot, quirt, or curse, stuck to a firm and steady gait that more properly might be called a plod. The Wind River Kid would have complained bitterly in years gone by, but no longer. With age settling in the small of his spine, he was content to let the beast set his own pace. Wind River peered through the gloom. He liked the livery, the smell of hay and dust and horse. Not very many places in town were warmer either, when it came right down to it. Relaxed, he pulled the last bag of oats out of the old tin lard can he kept it in, walked out the back door and poured half of what was left into the trough tacked to the rear of the barn. Sure enough, the Appaloosa perked up his ears at the sound and plodded toward his beneficiary and master, and his oats.

The Appaloosa was one horse that couldn’t have cared less about the struggle between men and mountains. Or bears, for that matter, so long as they left him alone. An appetite appeased, a roll in the grass, a cinch drawn none too tightly, and an occasional pail of oats or corn were all he asked of life. Wind River watched him dip his muzzle into the trough and then, talking softly, checked his legs and hooves, feeling the tendons and looking closely at each shoe. “Well, you’re fit, I guess,” he finally said, slapping the horse’s rump. “Kind of a waste, puttin’ up all that hay, but what the hell. Let Creed eat it, if he wants.”

It was that time of day. Wind River left the Appaloosa and climbed the fence to sit on the top rung. Daydreaming, he fished a cigar from his pocket, dug out a match, and filled his lungs with the acrid, pungent smoke. Charlie Russell might have sketched him then. Still part of the Old West, the old ways, Wind River rested his elbows on his knees and watched the shadows fill Rampage Valley and creep up the eastern hills. In the distance, the sun was still bright on Diamond Peak, his favorite. Years ago, Creed had taken him there and shown him the outcropping that was so thick with mica that it reflected light like a mirror. Wind River still enjoyed watching it sparkle at sundown, and pretending it was real diamonds just waiting for him to go and pick them up.

A hush was on the hills and the town. Somewhere an owl hooted softly, calling to the wind that soughed through the trees. Darkness would fall fast when the light left Diamond Peak, but Wind River didn’t care. After thirty-five uninterrupted years in Elkhorn, he could have found his way blindfolded. The chill worked its way through his flannel shirt and long johns, attacked his skin. The Appaloosa finished and came to him, butted his head against Wind River’s calf, and then stood silently as gnarled, calloused fingers scratched behind his ear. Too bad he was leaving, in a way, Wind River thought lazily. A man could travel a far piece before he’d find a view to compare. Oh, he’d seen the sights in his day. Places with taller trees and steeper mountains and wilder rivers. Richer places and poorer places. Towns to the south where there were more wildflowers than a man could count, towns to the north where the aurora streaked the night sky and stole a man’s breath. But never quite the same combination of peace and tranquillity, never quite the easy days and star-song nights, never where the dusk fell quite so slow and soft, where the earth seemed to sing itself to sleep with a lullaby more sweet than any sung by woman.

A fart broke through his thoughts. Wind River’s hand froze and his head twisted back and forth looking for Creed before he realized the sound had come from the Appaloosa.

“Don’t you start on me now, horse,” he said, giving the animal a final scratch, then shoving him away with his foot. At the same time, the last bit of light on Diamond Peak faded. With it, Wind River’s spirits fell. Another dark night alone faced him. Christ, but it was all too much. A bear, a falcon, and the ghost of a mountain man all picking at him. Beauty be damned; he was glad he was leaving.

Glad, hell. He was ecstatic. Another few days and he’d be among people again. Bright lights and music. Action. That was what he yearned for. He flexed his fingers, tried to imagine what it would feel like to have a new deck of cards in his hands. Oh, he’d take ’em, all right. They’d never suspect an old geezer like him. They’d let him sit in, wink, and plan on taking all his money. He’d show ’em, every man jack of ’em. Eyes slitted, he could see the cards falling, could hear the soft whisper as they slid across green felt tables. In his mind’s eye, he counted the deck. He’d know who held what, who was bluffing, who playing straight. Wouldn’t be luck, either. His memory was razor keen.

Hot water baths. Perfumed soap. Steaming towels wrapped around his face in barbershops where the talk was quiet under the clean sound of clicking scissors and razors being stropped. Steaks and potatoes and fresh vegetables. Clean napkins and shining silverware and gilt-edged plates that sparkled in candlelight. Waiters moving silent as cats and never having to be told twice. Coffee with sugar and real cream, and fruit and brandy and cheese. Women with golden hair and low-cut bodices who smelled like lavender and roses and Paris itself. Women with soft hands and sweet breaths, women who smiled and laughed gaily and held on to a man’s arm when he won, even if he was old enough to be their grandfather, women who could leech the years from dry bones. He wondered if there were any women like that left.

“Ooo-weee!” he shouted suddenly, unable to contain the excitement. More alive than he’d felt in years, he pitched away the glowing stub of his cigar and climbed down from the fence.

“Oh, come, you painted beauties,” he sang. “Enfold me in your arms.”

By God, but he’d celebrate. Eat at the hotel, right in the dining room.

“Hug me and kiss me, and whisper of your charms.”

Wear his finest. It was his last meal in Elkhorn, after all.

“If you love a winner, well, that’s what you’ve found.”

Invite Creed, even! No point in doing something half-assed.

“I’m a wild-eyed stallion who’s pawin’ the ground.”

The Wind River Kid was breaking loose!

3

Wind River kept his good clothes in a huge, carved cedar wardrobe in the President’s Suite at the Great Northern Hotel. Mason Nederly, president of the Northern Mining Corporation, wouldn’t mind. He had died before the mine played out in 1891.

Nederly died, then the mine, then the town.

A neat progression, Wind River thought, stripping off his shirt. His boots and pants followed, a dingy pile in the corner, before he pulled his single white shirt off the hanger and shook it. A little billow of dust puffed into the room. Wind River sneezed, pulled on the shirt and buttoned it with care, making sure the ruffles stood out as they should. A string bow tie, clumsily handled because it had been so long since the last time he’d bothered to dress formally, followed. Pop! Black trousers snapped like a whip and spawned another cloud. Wind River pulled them on and buttoned them up, then carefully threaded the thick, worked-leather belt with the silver buckle through the loops. His vest was black with deep red trim, fancy but understated. The buttons were mother-of-pearl, and stood out like a vertical row of eyes. Stooping, he hauled his boot bag out of the bottom of the wardrobe, catching, in the process, a velvet wrap that fell open and spilled its contents onto the floor.

What lay there gleamed dully in the dim light. Black grain leather brushed soft from years of careful oiling and service. Blue metal remarkably free of rust. Worn bone grips, almost black in the coiled-snake carving. There was only one, a .44-caliber Colt revolver converted by an expert gunsmith from cap and ball, holstered to be worn forward of his left hipbone, butt forward in the cross draw favored by gamblers. A man didn’t have to stand but could clear leather while sitting at the poker table. Wind River squatted and stared at the gun without touching it as he slipped backward through time. He heard a soft oath, a cry of anger. His muscles remembered the fluid movements so long engrained they were automatic and always led to twin explosions thumbed so quickly they sounded as one. He saw days of slumber, nights of sweet women, the run of Lady Luck, and the thrill of accepting a challenge and never backing down. Never. Of living on the raw edge of nerve.

“Strap it on, Kid,” Aden Creed said from the dimly lighted doorway.

“Goddamn you,” Wind River said, looking up guiltily.

“Not very friendly words for one who was as close to you as a father,” Creed sniffed.

“I never knew my father. I don’t think my mother did either.”

“Put it on.”

“Leave me alone. You were invited for dinner. Not to watch me dress, or to butt in where you’re not wanted.”

“A hostile tongue is a busy tongue.”

“You ought to know. Yours is as busy a one as I’ve ever heard. Especially for a dead man,” Wind River said. He rewrapped the gun and shoved it beneath a pile of moth-eaten linen on the wardrobe floor. Where he was going, he wouldn’t need a gun. Not a man-killing gun, anyway. That part of his life was far behind him and there was no sense in trying to regain it.

Creed sighed. “Out of sight, out of mind. Just as well, I guess. Little too late to do anything else. Oh, well. You can right some of the wrongs all of the time and all of the wrongs some of the time, but you can’t right all of the wrongs all of the time.”

Wind River stared at him, a pained expression on his face.

The mountain man coughed, shrugged. “Proverbs. A person in … uh … my condition ought to have a command of wise sayings.”

“You make more sense when you pass gas,” Wind River replied sarcastically. He pulled out his coat, shook it and put it on. The silvering on the mirror had flaked off during the years, making him look like a ghost himself. He shifted from side to side in order to get the whole picture, adjusted his tie, and checked his hair. Satisfied, he picked up the oil lamp and walked out of the bedroom.

Creed stepped aside, then followed. A breeze gusted in his wake, disturbing the thin layer of dust that had settled on the worn burgundy comforter on the bed in the corner. The fringed canopy overhead fluttered and more dust drifted down like pollen, unseen in the sudden darkness. In the hall, a chromolithograph of Andrew Jackson, framed in the disrespect of wormy wood, tilted askew as the wall vibrated to Wind River’s footsteps. A hanging scrap of wallpaper cast a swiftly moving shadow as the lamp passed.

Wind River set the lamp on a table in the hall in order to make a grand entrance into the dining room he’d spent an hour arranging. A half dozen oil lamps with flames dancing lightly inside globes of milky glass lit the scene. The tablecloths, once white, cast a glow like old gold. Silver gleamed at the twenty places set. Wind River strolled casually to his table in front of the fireplace, sat, and lit a cigar, pretending that no one was watching him. When the cigar had burned halfway down, he sighed, rose, and headed for the lobby.

That was the trouble with daydreaming, he thought, spinning the dial on the combination lock. Just about the time everything was going right, reality intruded, and a man was forced to fix his own supper. The door to the safe swung open. Wind River checked the last couple of pounds of bacon, found they were still good. He’d take them with him for the trail in the morning. He removed a bag of dried chili peppers, sugar, flour, and the coffee he kept at the hotel for just such occasions. Whistling a tune he’d heard in Daisy’s parlor down in Mountain City, he shut the safe, spun the dial, and hurried to the kitchen.

The rabbit he’d trapped the day before and had thrown in the oven to roast prior to dressing smelled like ambrosia. The beans he’d put on to soak that morning were already boiling. Wasting no time, Wind River dumped out the sourdough he’d carried down from Muenster’s, fashioned biscuits, and dumped the rest of the dough back into the clay crock for a starter. Sliding the biscuits in to cook, he pulled out the rabbit. The drippings were meager, but enough for gravy. He transferred the rabbit to another pan and slid it back into the oven. To the first pan, a black iron skillet that had been left behind when the hotel was vacated, he added water, a palmful of flour, a three-fingered pinch of salt, and a double shake of pepper. When the gravy began to boil, he moved it back from the fire so it could simmer safely. The coffee water was boiling by that time, so he dumped in new grounds and a dab of salt. If he’d had an egg, he thought, he could have used it in the biscuits and added the shell to the coffee. That would come soon enough, though, he promised himself. Another two days and he’d be in Mountain City and have all the eggs he wanted. A cloud of steam billowed from the bean pot when he removed the top. Wind River tasted, crushed a dried chili pepper into the brown liquid, stirred, took another taste, and smacked his lips. Pausing to check the rabbit and move it toward the side of the oven to hasten the cooking, he scooped two ladles of lard from a tin, dropped it into a skillet, and set it on to heat. By the time he’d peeled and sliced three potatoes, the grease was smoking. He pulled the skillet off the hot part of the stove and, humming “The Girl from San Antone,” arranged the wet potatoes in the hot grease. By heavens, but he’d have a meal to travel on!

Everything was ready, all calculated to be cooked to a turn by the time he’d had a drink. Wind River wandered back into the once plush dining room of the Great Northern Hotel. Hurrying into the circle of warmth that held the night chill at bay, he poured himself a drink and eased into an armchair taken months earlier from the lounge.