“Strongheart,” Big Scars replied. “That suits you. Good name. At least I got killed over an important principle. That gives me some comfort. Harlance has the ring. He got it from Jeeter.”
His gaze froze and his chest stopped rising up and down. Big Scars Cullen died just like that.
Joshua whistled, and Gabe soon appeared and came trotting up the hill, dodging rocks like a dancer negotiating a stage. His reins had been tied around the saddle horn, so neither would drop down and cause a stumble. He whinnied when he smelled death and blood, and Big Scars's giant horse whinnied back from the tank and little meadow.
Strongheart gave his horse some loving and removed his saddle and bridle, saying, “Go join your new sidekick and get some grass. I have a job ahead of me.”
He dragged the body down the ridge, until he came to a cut-bank spot. Using a small flat rock, he tried to scrape away some of the rocky soil, and then dragged the body up against the cut bank. Next, he got above it and stomped dirt down on top of it. Then Joshua started rolling large rocks down and made a pile over the expedient grave. He laid the man's holster across the head of the grave and stood up, sides heaving with exertion, bowed his head, and said words over Big Scars, the man that two hours before was trying his best to kill him.
Joshua made his way down to the scarecrow and retrieved his clothes, then climbed back up to the camp of the outlaws. He walked over, stripped off his holster, moccasins, and breechcloth, and went straightaway into the tank. The water was cold and felt wonderful. He then sun-dried, dressed in his clothes, after examining the bullet hole in his wide hat brim, and made lunch. Joshua then lay down and took a nap.
When the warrior awakened a half hour later, his eye was almost completely swollen shut and very discolored. He felt very refreshed though.
When he walked into Zachariah Banta's store near sunset, the old man looked up, and seeing the swollen black eye, and the large bullet hole through Strongheart's hat brim and two more through his shirt, he just chuckled.
“Couldn't jest plug old Big Scars, could ya? He was too big and mean,” the old man said between chuckles. “Ya jest had ta test yerself. Too much of a challenge.”
Joshua just grinned and shook his head.
“Come on,” Zack said, as he locked his store and walked out with the Pinkerton.
“What ya gonna do with thet big boy? Sell him ta Paul Bunyon?” Zack said, chuckling at his own joke.
“Who is that?” Joshua said as they walked into the hotel and restaurant and sat down at a table.
Zack said, “Aw, an old legend among timberjacks. Giant ole lumberjack an' he had a big blue ox named Babe.”
“Is it in a book?” Joshua asked.
“Nope, not yet,” Zack mused, “but someone'll write it up one a these years. Too big a legend. Been around a long time.” He paused and took a sip of water, then said, “Harlance must a had an appointment. He shore moved through here earlier like someone had lit his horse's tail on fire.”
Strongheart said, “Bet his banker wanted to talk to him about a mortgage.”
Zack started chuckling even more.
With Zack's insistence, Strongheart tied a raw steak over his eye and wore it there while he ate. They both had a hearty dinner of wild turkey and vegetables, and followed it with fresh blueberry cobbler and coffee.
Joshua had eliminated six of the members of the holdup crew. Now he had three more outlaws to pursue if need be to recover the ring from Harlance. Meanwhile, miles to the south and still in the saddle, Harlance McMahon had other plans.
8
The Chase
In southern Colorado at the time there had been some upheaval about slavery. There were many Hispanic settlers and ranchers in the area, and many of them owned slaves, in full contradiction of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. Most of these slaves were either women or children and a great many of those slave-owners held captured Utes, Navajos, and even a few Apaches and southern Cheyenne. These captives were rounded up in raids, sometimes kidnapped, and given in exchange for money owed Spanish landholders. Some tribal elders or parents would actually allow these Spanish colonials to purchase captives, in order to keep the women and children from being killed if attack seemed inescapable.
Chief Ouray, the most famous of the Utes, was actually hired by the U.S. government as an official interpreter in 1864, and under his watch many deals were made for hapless Ute innocents.
Once enmeshed in these Hispanic ranching families, however, the slaves were often assimilated into the family, and in many cases, the wealthy ranchero fathered many children with Native American women or some captured Mexican women. Although they were slaves, for many it actually turned out to be a very good situation.
Less than a decade before Joshua Strongheart showed up in the Wet Mountain Valley, several courts found Spanish-and Mexican-born landowners in southern Colorado guilty of violations of the Civil Rights Act of 1866. To that end, they lost slaves who had in effect become members of their household in many cases. A few of these cast-off American Indians, primarily from the Ute and Navajo nations, originally formed into little bands and caused some trouble for the population of southern Colorado. Most of them spoke Spanish, English, and their native languages.
Harlance had used a couple of these gangs previously on big holdup jobs and decided now he would hire one of the gangs to help him set up somewhere to bushwhack Joshua Strongheart when he came for him.
Jeeter was the real aggressor of the two brothers, but Harlance was the brains. It did not take a college professor to see that Joshua Strongheart had fought members of the gang that ambushed him and had eliminated six out of nine members so far, including one of the gang's two leaders. He also noted that the man did this with numerous wounds, as well. In short, Harlance was no dummy and Strongheart scared him. In fact, thinking about the half-blooded Pinkerton being on his trail sent chills down his spine.
Harlance thought Strongheart was simply executing the gang members one by one for revenge. He did not know that the man was seeking the ring, which really meant very little to McMahon, but a great deal to one of his many former victims. He had no clue that he might not have to worry about Strongheart again if he simply left the ring with Zachariah Banta at the Cotopaxi store or dropped it off in Westcliffe. He also had no idea that Strongheart was a Pinkerton agent. He had read the dispatch for General Davis, but it meant little to him, and nothing in that money belt really identified Joshua as a Pinkerton. Harlance only knew him as a powerful, wily fighter who seemed to be half-red and half-white and totally schooled in the warrior skills of both societies.
Harlance knew of a gang south of Westcliffe, down toward La Veta, and he would recruit them. As far as he remembered, there were six in the gang, so he would be recruiting as many as he had already lost. In the meantime, he would try to locate Gorilla and Percy Moss on the pretense of warning them. In reality, he wanted to recruit them for his ambush.
What he did not know, however, was that Joshua Strongheart already figured contacting them would be his next move. He and Zack had already talked over possibles as far as hideouts and whereabouts of the father-and-son hellions.
Joshua was now astride the saddle of Gabriel, but first he would take a quick side trip. As he left Cotopaxi, heading south toward Westcliffe, he was quickly climbing on an easy, winding road with high rocky ridges rising to his left and right, but more to his right. Before him he could see the top half of Spread Eagle Peak, Wulsten Baldy, and a couple more peaks in the more northern end of the Wet Mountain Valley. They loomed before him like giants rising up out of the land. Cloud banks on the western San Luis Valley side of the mountains pushed up against them, straining against the granite sentinels as if wanting to break over their fourteen-thousand-foot peaks and rush out east across the valley, over the shorter Greenhorns and across the great American prairies. However, the giant bodyguards of the plains and prairie stood unmoving, despite the large presence of the stratocumulus invaders.
Zack had heard that the Mosses were in the San Luis Valley, having crossed over the Big Range and passed through the Great Sand Dunes. He also told Joshua that he guessed they could possibly have said that to throw people off and might be hiding near Marble Mountain, which held the mysterious Caverna Del Oro, the “Cavern of Gold.”
Joshua was fascinated when he heard the story about the mysterious place from the grizzled ole shopkeeper.
In 1541, long before any white men were around, three Spanish monks from the Coronado Expedition came to the area accompanied by some Utes. They found a large labyrinth of caves with an entrance at about eleven thousand feet of elevation and a higher entrance at twelve thousand feet of elevation on the thirteen-thousand-foot Marble Mountain. However, the Indians felt the caves were inhabited by demon spirits, so they killed two of the monks. Instead of arguing about the demons, the third monk, named De La Cruz, convinced the Indians that he was able to control the demons, and they would do no harm to the Indians unless they did not treat him right.
The expedition then started enthusiastically mining the gold out, using the Indians, who were actually slaves captured or purchased along the way by the armed Spaniards accompanying the monks. They built a fort near the lower entrance, and apparently because the upper entrance, at twelve thousand feet, was so frequently under snow, they painted a very bright crimson cross above the upper entrance. They also supposedly built in two large wooden doors within five hundred feet of the lower entrance and locked a lot of gold behind them, with plans to travel by pack train back to Mexico with their treasure, and then return. Upon making this decision, the monks killed the Indians who had done all the mining for them.
Just four years before Joshua Strongheart met Zack Banta, Captain Elisha P. Horn had explored the Sangre de Cristos, mapping one of the massive fourteeners, and it was named for him, Horn Peak. A little to the south of Horn Peak was Marble Mountain, so Horn explored there also, and after hundreds of years of its whereabouts only being rumored, the Caverna del Oro was rediscovered by Horn and his explorers. They climbed up through very thick woods on a very rocky, boulder-strewn trail, wondering if they would ever reach timberline. From the bottom, they had only gone six and a half miles, but it seemed more like fifty to the weary explorers because of the rugged trail, thick forest, and rocks everywhere. Then suddenly, at around twelve thousand feet, they hit timberline, and around August they could finally get into the big treeless bowl and Horn spotted the faded crimson cross. Traveling to it, he found a skeleton garbed in Spanish armor, and an old Ute arrow protruded right through the armor. He started the careful exploration of the labyrinth of caves that, to this day, are so filled with noxious gasses, straight drops, and winding passageways, they should only be explored by very experienced and knowledgeable spelunkers with the right equipment.
Later, looking down below in the treed area, Horn found the ruins of the old fort that the Spanish explorers had built, and his men found many arrowheads, both around the old fort and around the upper cave entrance as well. In later years, equipment from the 1600s would be found, including pottery, a windlass and rope, a two-hundred-foot ladder, a skeleton chained to a cave wall, shovels, picks, and many other items.
Upon inspecting the area and based on the few research materials he was able to discover, Horn came to believe that the lower entrance to the mine, which was located in the aspen forests near the ruins of the old Spanish fort, had been completely entombed by a giant rockslide of thousands of massive boulders jarred loose from the giant limestone cliff. Decades later, the lower entrance would still be hidden away, but many experts in later years agreed with Captain Horn's assessment that the entrance was probably buried under a slide, whereas the hidden gold was supposed to be locked away behind two, still undisclosed large wooden doors within five hundred feet of that entrance.
It was fascinating to Joshua to learn the many stories about the area. The Caverna del Oro was the talk of the entire territory right then because of its rediscovery by Elisha Horn.
Strongheart was not headed south yet, in the direction of Horn Peak and Marble Mountain just beyond, because he had some unfinished business to attend to. Charlie the Ute had no clue that Harlance had already come through and headed out of the area, because after sending up his smoke to alert McMahon of the approaching half-breed the day before, he had settled down with a bottle.
Joshua turned to his right and headed toward the ridge looming before him. He could clearly see a switchback mining trail going right up the side of the ridge, and he jumped a creek, spooking some bedded mule deer, and headed toward it. He zigzigged back and forth up the trail, which was farther south down the ridge and out of Charlie's sight.
When he saw him depart south from Westcliffe on the stage road, Charlie the Ute had sent up a smoke signal indicating that Strongheart was leaving the area, but he could not see him now climbing the mining trail he had used himself. He was wondering whether he should stay to send up more smokes or go back down.
Charlie thought about fixing breakfast, but instead he decided he should warm up by the fire and finish the bottle he had started on the day before. He grinned to himself as he raised it toward his lips.
Boom! The bottle exploded and liquid drenched his lap and legs with whiskey and broken pieces of glass. Charlie snapped his head and looked into the eyes of the half-breed he had been watching, holding a Colt .45 in his right hand, with smoke coming from the barrel. Joshua spun the gun back once into the holster. Charlie the Ute, eyes wide, raised his hands.