And, of course, there was also the confirmation afforded by the stage’s three passengers, a reputable Mormon rancher from Salt Lake and two of his wives. At the moment, the ladies were under the care of a local physician who was treating them for shock.
“Couldn’t it have been a williwaw?” he asked hopefully.
“Nope,” said MacLeish, striking with unerring accuracy into the spittoon a second time. “’Tweren’t the likes o’ no wind or beastie I ever seed nor heard tell of, Mr. Fraser. I kinna say more than the truth.” He squinted hard at the agent. “D’ ye doubt our word?”
“No, no, certainly not. It’s only that I have no idea how I am to report the nature of this loss to the company. If you’d been held up, that they would understand. But this… There will be questions. You must understand my position, gentlemen.”
“And you should’ve been in ours, Mr. Fraser, sir,” Hunt told him fervently.
The agent was not by his nature an imaginative man, but he thought for a moment, and his slim store of inventiveness came to his rescue. “I’ll put it down as a storm-caused loss,” he said brightly.
MacLeish said nothing, though he made a face around his wad of fossil tobacco. Hunt was less restrained. He gaped at the agent and said, “But there weren’t no storm where we was comin’ through, Mr. …”
Fraser favored him with a grave look. Hunt began to nod slowly. Meanwhile, MacLeish had walked to the corner and picked up the ten-gauge. He handed it to his partner. The two of them started for the door. And that was the end of that.
For about a week.
“Another month, boys, and I think we can call it quits.” A bulbous nose made a show of sniffing the air. “Snow’s in the wind already.”
“Damned if you ain’t right, there, Emery,” said one of the other men.
There were four of them gathered around the rough-hewn table that dominated the center of the cabin. They were spooning up pork, beans, jerky, dark bread, and some fresh fowl. It was a veritable feast compared to their normal cold meals, but they had reason to celebrate.
Johnny Sutter was an eighteen-year-old from Chicago who’d matured ten years in the twelve-month past. “I,” he announced, “am goin’ to get me a room in the finest whorehouse in Denver and stay stinkin’ drunk for a whole month!”
Loud guffaws came from the rest of the men. “Hell, Johnny,” said one of them, “if’n yer goin’ t’ do that, don’t waste your time doin’ it in a fancy place. Do it in the streets and let me have your room.”
“Dang right,” said another. “You’ll get yourself too stiff t’ do what you’ll want t’ be doin’.”
“Not stiff enough, mos’ likely,” corrected the mulatto, One-Thumb Washington. He laughed louder than any of them, showing a dark gap where his front teeth ought to have been. He’d lost those two teeth and four fingers of his left hand at Shiloh and never regretted it. Two teeth and four fingers were a fair enough trade for a lifetime of freedom.
Wonder Charlie, the oldest of the four, made quieting motions with his hands. His head was cocked to one side, and he was listening intently with his best ear.
“What’s wrong with you, old man?” asked Johnny, grinning at all the good-natured ribbing he was taking. “Ain’t you got no suggestions for how a man’s to spend his money?”
“It ain’t thet, Johnny. I think somethin’s after the mules.”
“Well, hellfire!” Emery Shanks was up from his chair and reaching for his rifle. “If them thievin’ Utes think they can sneak in here the day afore we’re set t’—”
Wonder Charlie cut him off sharply. “’Tain’t Utes. Ol’ Com-it-tan promised me personal two springs ago when I sighted out this creek bed thet we wouldn’t have no trouble with his people, and Com-it-tan’s a man o’ his word. Must be grizzly. Listen.”
The men did. In truth, the mules did sound unnaturally hoarse instead of skittish as they would if it were only strange men prowling about the camp. It if was a grizzly, it sure would explain the fear in their throats. A big male griz could carry off a mule alive.
The miners poured out the cabin door, hastily donning boots and pulling up suspenders over their dirty long johns. One-Thumb and Emery fanned out to search the forest behind the hitch-and-rail corral. The moon was swollen near to full, and they could see a fair piece into the trees. There was no sign or sound of a marauding grizzly. One-Thumb kept an eye on the dark palisade of pines as he moved to the corral and tried to calm the lead mule. The poor creature was rolling its eyes and stamping nervously at the ground.
“Whoa, dere, General Grant! Take it easy, mule…. Wonder what the blazes got into dese mu—”
He broke off as the mule gave a convulsive jerk and pulled away from him. There was something between the camp and the moon. It wasn’t a storm cloud, and it certainly wasn’t a grizzly. It had huge, curving wings like those of a bat, and wild, glowing red eyes, and a tail like a lizard’s. Thin tendrils protruded from its lips and head, and curved teeth flashed like Arapaho ponies running through a moonlit meadow.
“Sweet Lord,” Johnny Sutter murmured softly, “wouldja look at that?”
The massive yet elegant shape dropped closer. The mules went into a frenzy. Wonder Charlie, who’d been at Bull Run as well as Shiloh and had emerged from those man-made infernos with his skin intact, didn’t hesitate. He fired at that toothy, alien face, the rifle kabooming through the still mountain air.
The aerial damnation didn’t so much as blink. It settled down on wings the size of clipper ship toproyals and began digging with pitchfork-sized claws at the watering trough just inside the corral. The mules pawed at the earth, at each other, at the railing in a frantic desire to crowd as far away from the intruder as possible.
One-Thumb ducked under the sweep of a great translucent wing and shouted in sudden realization, “Curse me for a massa, I think the monster’s after our gold!”
Sure enough, several moments of excavation turned up a small wooden box. Inside lay the labor of four men sweating out the riches of a mountain for a year and a half, a glittering horde of dust and nuggets large enough to ensure each of them comfort for the rest of his life.
Monster bird or no, they’d worked too damn hard for any of them to give up so easily that pile they’d wrested from the icy river. They fired and fired, and when it was clear to see that guns weren’t doing any good, they went after the intruder with picks and shovels.
When it was all over, a somber moon beamed down on a scene of theft and carnage. The gold was gone, and so were the bodies of young Johnny Sutter and One-Thumb Washington and a mule named General Grant….
There were not many physicians residing in Cheyenne at the time and fewer still who knew anything about medicine, so it was not entirely coincidental that the one who treated the Mormon rancher’s wives would also become conversant with the story related by the unfortunate survivors of the Willow Creek claim. He brought the information to the attention of Mr. Fraser, the local Butterfield Line agent who had seen to the care of the distraught passengers. Now these two comparatively learned men discussed the events of the week past over sherry in the dining room of the Hotel Paris.
“I am at a loss as to what to do now, Dr. Waxman,” the agent confessed. “My superiors in Denver accepted the report I sent to them which described the loss of the strongbox on a mountain road during a violent, freak storm, but I suspect they are not without lingering suspicions. My worry is what to do if this should occur a second time. Not only would the cargo be lost, I should be lost as well. I have a wife and children, Doctor. I have no desire to be sent to a prison… or to an asylum. You are the only other educated citizen who has been apprised of this peculiar situation. I believe it is incumbent upon the two of us to do something to rectify the problem. I feel a certain responsibility, as an important member of the community, to do something to ensure the safety of my fellow citizens, and I am sure you feel similarly.”