Treasure Mountain (1972) (15 page)

"In Shalako, too? Why, he'd stampede every horse in the valley!"

"He don't stampede Jacob. Jacob an' him, they get along."

Jacob, I took it, was the mule.

"Well," I got up. "Those boys yonder will think I went to get a drink and the hogs et me. I'd better start back, but you come down and see us. We'll be around for a day or two ... and you keep an eye open for those men I spoke of. They ain't pleasant folks. Nobody you'd invite to a quiltin' or a box social, like."

By the time I got back to the fire everybody was settin' about. They'd eaten and we're drinking coffee and listening for trouble. I made no effort to be quiet, and, when I was within distance, I hailed the fire, as a gentleman should. The ungentlemanly often ended up with a bellyful of buckshot.

A man who shoots when you don't call out doesn't have too many friends, but his enemies are surely all dead.

"What took you so long?" Orrin asked The Tinker was looking at me kind of wise and so was Judas Priest.

"I was keepin' comp'ny," I said. "I was settin out with a gal."

"Up here?" Orrin scoffed.

"I think he's telling the truth," the Tinker said "He doesn't act like he'd been out among the bears."

So I explained to them about Nell Trelawney and about old Jack Ben Trelawney down at Shalako waiting for his daughter to pan out enough gold to get them out of hock.

Orrin shook his head. "That's hard work for a man," he grumbled, "and no woman should be doing it."

"Jack Ben's all crippled up," I said. "What would you have her do? Set still while they starve?"

"All the Treawney girls could cook," he suggested "and the food isn't all that good in these mining towns."

"That needs cash money to lay out for flour and the like. You got to have a place."

"I agree with Mr. Orrin," Judas said positively. "It is no task for a woman."

We had our own problems, and that night I got out the daybook again I gave it to Orrin to read to us.

I have been writing in secret, but it is far from easy. I think Pettigrew suspects what I am doing, but he is a secretive man and merely smiles that sly smile and says nothing.

Somebody has found gold! This morning Pierre found a small hole, dug near a tree and hastily filled in. The marks near the tree were of Pettigrew's boots.

Later, alone with Pierre, I told him the tracks were faked to implicate Pettigrew. He scoffed at me and didn't believe it. I told him they wanted to eliminate anyone who might be on his side and they would probably try to raise suspicion about me next, and if that didn't work, there would be another Indian attack. He was angry and demanded to know what I meant by that. I told him there had been no Indians, I had found no tracks. Had there been Indians, they would have returned to destroy us.

He was listening by then, and he asked who would fake such an attack and why. I told him I thought it was Andre and Swan. He was annoyed because I accused his brother-in-law. I said it seemed clear that Andre didn't mind killing and neither did he seem to mind Swan's brutality to Angus.

Pierre did not like it, but he listened. "You think gold has been found and held out?" he said. I told him that was exactly what I believed.

I took to sleeping away from the others, on a pretense of watching for Indians, and I made my bed among leaves and branches that could not be walked over without noise.

Moreover I watched my back.

We read on Pa had apparently been doing some scouting around and he had come up with a camp location--two locations, in fact. He argued with Pierre Bontemps that there had been friction within the detachment. The story was that the Utes had attacked them, killed many, and that some had died of starvation later. Only a few men were supposed to have escaped. For several reasons, the story did not make a lot of sense, for this hadn't been a patrol, but a large body of men--perhaps as many as three hundred. Pa believed there were less.

He figured there had been difficulties in the camp and they had separated. Under such primitive conditions animosities could develop, and something had obviously happened there. Pa found two camps, both with stone walls roughly put together, and he found pestholes--the posts were rotted away but the holes could be cleaned out. Rough shelters--he found a button or two, and a broken knife.

Pa was shot at twice in the woods, but merely commented it must be Indians.

Meanwhile he stopped telling anyone his conclusions. From bones he dug up and other signs, he decided one camp was doing a lot better than the other. The men in that part of the French military detachment were eating better, living better ... must be an Indian or a mountain man in that outfit.

May 24: On the run. Wounded. We found the gold, or some of it. Andre and Swan acted at once. Luckily I'd spread my bed as usual, then being uneasy I moved back into the aspen. Had a devil of a time finding a place to stretch out, so close they were. Suddenly I awakened and heard movement, then a roar of rifles.

They'd slipped up and shot into my bedding. Unable to get close, they stood back and fired. They must have poured a dozen rounds into the place where my bedding was.

I heard Andre say, "Now for Pettigrew. Move quickly, man. Tell him it's Indians and when you get close ..." Swan asked him what to do about Pierre, and Baston said, "Leave 'im to me."

I couldn't get to both of them in time, but I ran toward Pierre, moving silently as could be.

We didn't need no pictures to tell us what was happening there atop the mountain. Baston and Swan had turned to murder as soon as night came, wanting the gold for themselves. They'd tried to kill pa first, and they believed the job was done. Only it didn't work out the way they planned. When Swan got to Nativity Pettigrew's bed, the man was gone. It wasn't until later that they discovered a horse was also gone.

Getting out of the aspen was a job, and pa had to find his way back to the camp in the darkness, expecting a shot any minute, having only a single-shot rifle and a pistol.

He was coming up on them when he heard Baston.

"... no use reaching for that gun. I took the powder from it last evening, Pierre. Sackett is dead, and soon you will be." There was a shot, then Baston laughed, a mean laugh it was, too. "That was one leg, Pierre." Another shot.

"The other leg. I never liked you, you know. I knew someday I'd do this, planned it, thought about it. I just wish I could stay and watch you die."

Swan ran up, and there was talk. I guess they'd found Pettigrew was gone. I heard swearing, and I moved in for a shot.

Eager to get a shot, and unable to see in the dark I lifted my rifle, stepped forward for a better shot, and stepped into an unexpected hole. My body crashed into a bush. My rifle went off, and bullets cut leaves near my head. Another shot was fired, and I felt the shock of a bullet. I went down, falling on my pistol. If I moved they'd hear me. I drew my knife and waited.

They did not find me, and neither was of a mind to come hunting me in the dark.

I heard Baston talking to Pierre, saying, "You're dead. I will leave you here to die. You've lost blood, both knees are broken, and you'll never be found. We didn't find as much gold as I'd hoped, but we can always come back. We'll be the only ones who know where it is now."

"Pettigrew got away. He'll tell them," Pierre said.

And Andre answered, "Him? We'll catch him before he gets off the mountain. And when we do, we'll kill him."

Chapter
XVI

When Orrin put down the daybook, too sleepy to read further, I was of no mind to take it up. Mayhap I was fearful of what I'd find, or just too tired, but the thought was with us all that Andre Baston, Hippo Swan, and whoever was riding with them were comin' up behind us.

No doubt, after shooting Pierre Bontemps and killing Angus and maybe pa, they had taken off, carrying gold with them. However, they had unfinished business.

If Pettigrew got away, they had to run him down and kill him, or try. And that was what they'd done.

We were lyin' in our blankets when Orrin said, "They daren't leave pa alive.

Philip Baston seemed a kindly man, but Andre fears him or fears what he can do, and Andre is his own brother and knows him better than we do."

"I'm wonderin' where Pettigrew got that daybook. Did he steal it off pa? Or did he come back and find it later?"

Tomorrow we had to go up the mountain with a lot of questions unanswered. Facing us was a showdown with Baston, and there was no low-rating the man. Some of the things we'd been reading about him in pa's daybook were clumsy, you might say, but Andre had twenty years to grow handier with his killing, and by all accounts he'd not wasted his time. All of them seemed to have low-rated. Nativity Pettigrew, including Andre, and they never guessed that Pettigrew had come by some gold.

Lying there, before I dropped off to sleep, I worried some about Nell Trelawney.

Of course, she had that dog ... if it was a dog.

Anybody going around there at night would be apt to lose a leg or an arm before he knew what he was tangling with. One time I met a man told me about the mastiffs they have in Tibet. They're as big as the mastiffs we have only they have much longer hair. This Neb dog might be one of them.

Morning found nobody wishful of using language. We set around glumlike, roasting our meat over the fire and drinking coffee.

Orrin got up and took his Winchester. "Judas, stay by the camp, if you will. We can't afford to lose the stock or whatever else we've got. And Tinker, if you'll go see to Miss Trelawney we'd be pleased. Tell and I will scout around up top."

It was no easy climb. Heavy timber, with game trails here and there, and we made it up to the top. We Injuned around, looking for sign. It was there, all right, but from down those forgotten years. Marks of axes where men had chopped wood for fires long since burned up, branches cut to make a lean-to or to hang kettles from. There was evidence enough that men had lived around about at some time far gone.

We split up and worked back and forth across the top of the mountain, comparing notes now and again. We wanted to find some sign of pa, but we kind of hoped we wouldn't. When you don't see a body laid away, that person is never quite dead for you, just sort of gone away, or not around right then.

We were playing against time. Whatever we were going to find we'd have to find now, for Andre, Swan, and them would be coming up the slope. And I wondered a little about Pettigrew. He was a sly man, maybe not as crippled up as he let on.

Orrin crouched beside me under a tree. "The story has it there were three separate caches of gold," he said. "Now, even if there was only five million, it is still a lot of gold to carry, and none of them took more away than could be carried on the horses they rode.

"It is my thought, and I believe it to be yours, that some soldiers kept some gold for themselves. Perhaps they were permitted to. Perhaps they simply high-graded it, but I believe that is what Pettigrew found, and what Andre himself found.

"I think two things are at work here. They fear what we might discover and reveal to Philip, but also they fear we may find the gold they failed to find."

Sunlight fell through the trees, and a camprobber jay hopped from branch to branch above us. I looked off through the trees, thinking of pa and what his thoughts must have been when he had played out his deadly hand, knowing the fall of any card might mean death to him.

At the end there, lying wounded in the brush with Pierre crippled and perhaps beyond help, the rest of them riding away, what would pa have been thinking?

We had to find that place, but how, after so many years? Had Pierre Bontemps died there?

My eyes wandered over the slope. The human eye has a readiness for patterns.

Much is not seen simply because the mind is blind, not the eyes. The eyes see in lines, curves, and patterns. Man himself works in patterns simple or complex, and such things are often evidence of man's previous presence.

Twenty years ago some evidence of the old camps had remained, even after half a century that had fallen between. "Orrin, there's got to be some sign of those camps. Stone walled, they said."

"Yes, there should be something of them left." He got up, and, skirmisher fashion, we moved off through the scattered trees, walking on pine needles, eyes alert for everything.

High up in the mountains you don't have to think of rattlers. They stay down lower where it is warmer, and they thin out mighty fast above sixty-five hundred feet.

As we moved along under the trees the camprobber jay followed us, never more than twenty feet off. They are the greatest companions in the high mountains, but also the worst thieves. Anything left where they can get at it is eaten or gone, and they'll do things mighty nigh unbelievable to get at what they want.

"Tell?" Orrin pointed with his rule. Under the trees up ahead we could see a dug-out hole, and when we got there we could see it was old. Somebody had dug down four feet or so, but the edges had caved in, and plants were growing into it. There was a patch of snow in the bottom where no sun reached.

It might be a hole dug by the folks we knew of, or it might have been dug by some other treasure hunter. There was nothing up here an animal would dig for.