Authors: Charles G. West
“We’d best put these poor souls in the ground and be on our way, ma’am,” Buck softly urged. She nodded and turned toward Trace who was already scraping out a shallow grave for one of the others—Ned Turner, she guessed, although she could not be sure.
“I’m sorry there don’t seem to be no keepsake for you to take with you,” Buck said. “They was stripped pretty clean.”
“His watch,” Annie spoke softly, not really meaning
to say it out loud, “I wish I could have kept his watch.”
“Ma’am?” Buck asked.
Realizing then that she had spoken loud enough to be heard, Annie explained. “I gave Tom a silver watch for a wedding present. I had his name inscribed on it. I just wish I could have kept it.”
“Oh—Well, I’m sorry, ma’am.”
* * *
The rest of the afternoon was spent burying the remains of the four prospectors. There were still several hours of daylight left before the shadows would close in on the valley, but Trace and Buck agreed that they wouldn’t find a better campsite than where they stood. After making sure that it wouldn’t be too painful for Annie to spend the night at the scene of her husband’s massacre, they decided to wait until morning to start back to Laramie. While Buck and Luke gathered wood for a fire, Trace took a closer look at the area where Tom Farrior and his partners had been slain.
The sign was several months old, but there were still enough clues to enable Trace to get a pretty fair picture of Tom Farrior’s final hours. According to Annie, each of the four men had led three packhorses. Based on this, Trace concluded that the four had no more than two or three visitors to their camp. There were not a great number of prints, and all but a few of them came from shod horses. It would be impossible to determine the exact number of horses—dependent upon the comings and goings of the party, and how many days they spent at this campsite. But Trace was confident that the number of tracks definitely ruled out a large war party. In addition to the four skeletons, there were bones from a large animal—probably
a deer from the size and shape of the bones.
“Whadaya think happened here?” Buck asked when Trace came over to the fire.
“Hard to say,” Trace answered. “Ain’t no way to know for sure, but if I had to guess, I’d bet they were visited by two or three strangers pretending to be friendly—probably murdered them in their blankets.”
* * *
By the time night’s heavy veil had lifted from the deep-shaded valleys, Trace was halfway down the back side of the ridge, working his way carefully toward the chimney rock. He figured the others were still in camp, probably getting packed up to ride by then. Trace had felt a need to scout the way back to the old game trail before the four of them started out again. He didn’t like surprises, a trait that had contributed to his longevity in hostile territory. He also had a healthy respect for the tracking ability of the Sioux warrior.
When he spotted the towering rock below him some two hundred yards away, he dismounted and tied his pony to a pine bough. Moving quickly but silently, he made his way farther down the ridge, his eyes alert to every movement of the wind in the pine needles that whispered a muted warning. Below him, a bird suddenly fluttered from its nest, screeching an angry protest for having been disturbed. Trace froze, his eyes searching. Then he saw them—two Sioux scouts, kneeling to study the ground where Trace and the others had left the trail the day before.
The discovery of the two warriors caused no sense of fear in the Mountain Hawk but served to alert every fiber of his mind. He dropped slowly to one knee and carefully scanned the forest below him. The
decision to be made now was whether to fight or run, depending upon the number. His decision was easily made, for only seconds later, the two scouts were joined by two others, with the rest of the war party on their heels. Trace counted fourteen more that he could see through the trees—he couldn’t say how many more were hidden from his view.
Moving quickly, carefully placing each foot so as not to dislodge a stone or limb that might alert the warriors of his presence, Trace climbed back to where the paint was waiting. Still on foot, he led the pony back over the crest of the ridge before climbing in the saddle and starting down the slope toward the stream.
When he rode into camp, his companions were ready to leave and only awaiting his arrival. “Where the hell you been?” Buck demanded, “We’ve been ready to ride for half an hour.”
Trace couldn’t help but smile. Noticing that Luke was still adjusting Annie’s saddle for her, Trace estimated it to be more like five minutes. “I expect we’re gonna have to find another way out of here.”
No more needed to be said as far as Buck was concerned. “They found where we left the trail, I reckon.”
“They did,” Trace confirmed.
“How close?”
“Thirty minutes, maybe.”
Buck looked around him, at the slope they had originally come down, to the even steeper opposite wall of the valley, then back at Trace who had already determined their escape route. “Don’t look like much choice, does it?” Buck quickly determined. “Down the stream for as far as we can.” He would have told Luke and Annie to get ready to ride, but he glanced back to discover they had already mounted and Luke
was checking his rifle. Glancing back at Trace, Buck asked, “You have any idea where this stream comes out?”
“Nope,” Trace answered, “but this is as good a time as any to find out.”
“I reckon,” Buck snorted and climbed up in the saddle.
With Trace leading, they rode down the middle of the stream for approximately a quarter of a mile until the slope steepened and the stream became narrower and deeper, making it too difficult for the horses to find solid footing. Leaving the water, they made their way through the trees that hugged the coursing waterway, and detoured around a flume of solid granite, picking up the stream again some distance down the mountainside. As the slope continued to steepen, it became more and more hazardous, with the riders almost laying on their horses’ rumps in some places. And in even steeper areas, it was only possible to keep from tumbling head over heels by sidling along the slope, back and forth, gradually working their way down.
Annie could feel her heart pounding against her ribs as she held onto the army saddle for dear life, the muscles in her legs almost cramping from pressing so tightly against the horse’s sides. It seemed to her that she was about to fly over her horse’s neck at any moment. In spite of the threat of pursuit, she was too afraid of tumbling down the mountainside to worry about the Indians behind them. She could see the valley a quarter of a mile below and no apparent access to it. The tiers of tall pines stood like rows of sharpened spears, waiting to impale the horse that made the first misstep.
Ahead of her, Luke Austen laid back in the saddle, trying to help his horse maintain its balance—his
concern for her safety apparent in his frequent glances back at her. Leading Luke, Buck’s horse hit a patch of loose shale and started to slide sideways. The horse, a mountain horse like Trace’s, recovered, finding solid footing after a slide of some seventy-five feet, coming to a stop in front of Trace.
“I swear, Buck,” Trace deadpanned, “if you wanna lead, just say so.” Then he looked back to make sure Luke and Annie avoided the soft spot Buck had hit.
Buck held his horse back to let Trace lead. “For a minute there, I thought I was gonna take the shortcut down,” he said. “You go right on ahead. I’m kinda interested to see how you plan to git us offen this dang mountain.”
“I’m kinda anxious to find out myself,” Trace returned. “We’ll just keep sidling till we come across a gulch or a draw that leads down from here.”
“We better find somethin’ pretty soon before we have a pack of Sioux warriors slidin’ down on top of us,” Buck said as Trace’s paint passed him. He continued to hold back to let Trace’s packhorse by. Usually hitched by a lead line to the back of Trace’s saddle, the packhorse was no longer tied. It was not as surefooted as the paint, and Trace didn’t want to risk having the packhorse lose its footing and drag him down the mountain with it.
Buck waited for a few minutes until Luke and Annie caught up, then continued the treacherous descent toward the trees below. After what seemed a painfully long time, Trace disappeared into the pines that formed a thick ring around the mountain, and it appeared that the four of them might gain the cover of the trees before being spotted by the warriors pursuing them. Buck was about to call back to Annie and Luke to hurry when he heard a sharp cry of alarm high up the mountain above them.
“Damn!” he uttered, looking up to search for the source of the war cries that now rang out from above. In a few moments he spotted them. Several hundred feet above, he could see them scrambling over the boulders, trying to find a place to get a clear shot. Moments later, he saw an eruption of tiny puffs of black smoke, like mushrooms suddenly sprouting forth among the rocks, and the sounds of lead balls rattling through the trees followed immediately.
“Hurry!” Buck called, as he herded Luke and Annie into the thick pine forest. As soon as they reached the cover of the trees, the shooting stopped, but the war cries increased. They hurried to catch up to Trace, the ground having leveled out to form a ridge at last. Making better time now, Annie and Luke followed Buck as he weaved his way through the thick forest, still mindful of the red horde wildly descending the mountain behind them.
The easy going was short-lived, for the three of them had gone no more than fifty yards when they found Trace waiting for them. There appeared to be an opening in the trees beyond him which was immediately interpreted as a bad sign by Buck. Just as he feared, the ridge they had been following ended abruptly before a cliff. Trace had dismounted and was looking over the situation when the others pulled up.
“Well, now ain’t this somethin’ to write in your diary,” Buck cracked when he joined Trace at the edge of the granite cliff and peered down at a lower ridge two hundred feet below. “How we gonna git down there? Fly?” He paused to give Trace a mischievous glance. “’Course, you bein’ the Mountain Hawk, that might be what you had in mind.”
“We’d better find some way outta here or we might have to find out if we can fly.” He turned to
face Luke and Annie. “Lieutenant, we ain’t got a lot of time, so we’d best split up and look for a way down from here. You and I can follow the cliff line along the slope ahead. Buck and the lady can follow it in the opposite direction. That all right with you, Buck?” Buck nodded. “All right, then, let’s get to it.”
Closer now, the war whoops rang from the mountainside above them, only muted slightly by the thick stand of trees that hid them from sight. Trace knew that the Sioux braves would abandon all caution in an effort to overtake them. Half of them might end up sliding and tumbling down the slope, but the other half might be enough to rub the four of them out. Moving as fast as they could, he and Luke led the horses along the rocky ledge, searching for some means of escape. If worse came to worst, they might have to abandon the horses and climb down the face of the cliff. Trace sought to avoid that if at all possible.
Luke and Trace soon came to the eastern limit of the ledge, only to find that it ended at the face of another cliff that ascended straight up—a dead end. They turned around, retracing their steps, when they heard Buck sing out.
“It ain’t exactly the St. Louie turnpike, but I expect it’s the best we’ll find.”
It proved to be little more than a gully that slashed across the face of the mountain. But plenty of sign showed that it was an old game trail, so Buck was confident that it had to be a way down the mountain. “We ain’t got a helluva lot of choice,” Trace commented dryly. “At least they’re deer tracks and not goats, but I reckon we’d better go down on foot, though.”
“I reckon,” Buck agreed. “That nag of mine ain’t exactly no deer.”
Buck led the way, followed by Annie, then Luke. Trace stayed behind to make sure everyone got a headstart on the angry mob pursuing them. Calling to Buck, he said, “I’m gonna see if I can slow ’em up a little.” It would be slow going for at least fifty yards until the rude trail disappeared around an outcropping of granite. If the Sioux caught them on the open face of the mountain before they reached that point, they’d be sitting ducks for even the poorest of shots.
After tying his packhorse on a lead line once more so it wouldn’t stray, Trace left his horses at the head of the gully, grabbed his Hawken and an army rifle that he had picked up from one of the dead troopers, and made his way up through the pines. As he had figured, the Sioux warriors were still on the open mountainside, but they had nearly reached the belt of pine trees. Scrambling wildly in an effort to overtake the white men, their ponies sliding and stumbling, the warriors drove recklessly on. Lying on his belly at the base of a medium-sized pine, Trace paused a moment to determine the range. Then he carefully lined his sights on the leading Indian and squeezed the trigger. The warrior threw both hands up in shocked surprise when the lead ball tore into his naked chest, rolling him backward over his pony’s rump. There was only a few moments’ pause by the warriors behind him as they sought to avoid the confused riderless horse. Trace picked up the other rifle and took deliberate aim. A second warrior cried out in alarm when the lead ball found its target.
While the startled Sioux scrambled for cover among the rocks, Trace reloaded his rifles and waited for a clear shot. Certain that Buck and the others had now had time to reach the bend in the gully, still he waited, thinking that if he could convince the Sioux that they were making a stand, he might gain ample
time to make good his own escape. He had to wait no more than a minute before the first impatient warrior showed his head from behind a jagged piece of granite. Even at that distance, Trace could clearly see the look of profound surprise when the slug created a neat hole just above his eyes. This last casualty created the span of time Trace hoped for as the Sioux drew back to powwow over a plan of attack. Trace moved a few yards farther to his right and fired another shot just to make them think there was more than one of him. Then he quickly withdrew and started back down through the trees at a dead run.