Pale Rider (2 page)

Somewhere a mockingbird trilled uncertainly. Two Stellar jays chased each other through pine branches. Again the rumble, louder this time and sustained. Not thunder. Something else. Though it
could
be thunder. Spider Conway prayed it was thunder as he put his pan aside and squinted downcanyon. Was that a cloud rising from the lower elevations, or creek mist? But creek mist manifested itself only in the early morning, when the sun was still below the mountaintops. It was midday now, long past the time when such climatic conjurations occurred.

Megan Wheeler heard the noise too. She turned to stare down the creek. Fifteen going on sixteen (some might’ve said fifteen going on twenty), Megan Wheeler was poised awkwardly between childhood and womanhood. She was blessed with a precocious beauty that reflected both the vibrant voluptuousness of her mother and the sleek good looks of her long absent father.

She was using both hands to carry the heavy water bucket. Some of the water sloshed out as she whirled to gaze down the canyon. The dog that had been trotting at her heels also paused to eye its mistress quizzically. It wouldn’t be very big even when it was full-grown, an important fact which Megan had used to advantage when she’d argued with her mother about keeping the mutt. Like Megan, it was full of energy and curiosity, half dog and half puppy. It did not turn its gaze down the canyon, but the manner in which its ears perked up showed that it too heard the intensifying rumble.

Hull Barret was working his sluice in the shade of the huge granite boulder that marked the center of his claim. The small mountain stuck out into the creek, forcing the flow around its immovable base. While he was momentarily glad of the shade, Barret had cursed the huge monolith from the first day he’d begun panning. The big rock squatted right where he would’ve liked to have set up his Long Tom. Nothing to do about it but begin work elsewhere, though. It takes time and money to move mountains, even small ones. Barret had little of either. So the chunk of mountain stayed where it was, a constant taunt to his best efforts. He lavished what little time and as many curses as he could spare on its smooth sides.

There was concern on his face now as he let loose of the sluice rocker and moved slightly upslope to get a better view down the canyon. Hull Barret was thirty-five. Somehow he managed not to look any older despite a lifetime of doing everyone else’s hard work. The latter was what had driven him all the way across the continent to California and eventually to Carbon Canyon. The work he was doing now was harder than ever, but for the first time in his life he didn’t have to kiss the hem of anyone’s shirttail or bow and scrape in return for a meager paycheck. He was his own master, like the other miners in the canyon. What little he wrung from the creek belonged to him and no one else.

By now all the inhabitants of the canyon were staring nervously downstream. A man would have to be deaf in order to be able to ignore the sound. It echoed off the canyon walls and rattled the few glass windows in the better-built cabins.

Conway dumped the contents of his pan on the ground and prepared to run for high ground. As he turned a gleam in the pile of discarded sand caught his eye. The nugget was tiny, barely bigger than a fleck, but a nugget it was. He bent to retrieve it, and felt the weight of it as it rested in his gnarled hand.

Now don’t that just beat all, he thought, wondering why the find failed to relieve his anxiety over the rising thunder. Apprehensively he pocketed the tiny lump and began to retreat in the direction of his cabin.

Abruptly the source of the noise hove into view. It was neither storm cloud nor one of the rare earthquakes that occasionally rattled this part of the Sierra. Nine, ten, a dozen horses and riders were pounding up the creekbed at full gallop toward the little community. Spray flew from hooves, creating the cloud that had intrigued Hull Barret. It caught the sun and shattered it into a thousand tiny rainbows just as the horsemen were destroying the peace of the midafternoon. The spray itself was beautiful, but neither miners nor kin thought of standing their ground to admire the transitory beauty.

“Goddamn!” Conway growled. His fingers clenched and opened helplessly as he watched the riders approach. Then he grabbed up his pan and gear and ran for his cabin.

Everyone was running; scrambling to recover mining equipment or personal effects, racing for shelter, just trying to get out of the invaders’ path. They were full of despair, panic, and resignation. Disaster had befallen them, and the worst of it was they had come to expect it.

Not everyone was fleeing from the oncoming horsemen. A small spotted dog chose to stand his ground, barking with feeble ferocity at the far larger quadrupeds that were heading straight for him. As a race dogs are brave but not very bright.

“Linsey!” Megan Wheeler turned to scream at the pup. It ignored her, caught up by the overwhelming frenzy of the attack. Sharing with the dog a lack of maturity and common sense, Megan dropped the water bucket and raced downslope.

The horsemen began to spread out to cover both sides of the creek, firing their pistols into the air, yelling and hooting, and trying to do everything possible to add to the general confusion and panic. They were not the sort of men one would invite to a genteel family function, and they were having themselves a high old time wreaking as much havoc as possible. They’d come to Carbon Canyon to have themselves a party. Only the locals weren’t laughing.

Sarah Wheeler burst out of one of the older shanties set high up on the hillside and anxiously searched the confusion below. Her sharp blue eyes swept the slope, the creekbed, and the forest opposite without finding the figure they sought.

“Megan? Megan?” Her eyes widened and her face turned pale as she thought she saw a familiar shape darting about in the very thick of the havoc. No one turned to her. She couldn’t make herself heard above the screams of men and women, the neighing of excited horses, and the echo of gunfire.

None of the many bullets found flesh, however. The visitors were not interested in murder. They’d come to batter the miners’ spirits, not their bodies. A pity, too, some of the horsemen thought. There were so many easy targets, and of the best variety: the kind that don’t fight back. Orders being orders, though, the gunmen restrained their natural impulses, aware that none of the dirtscrabblers now fleeing like sheep would ever think to thank them for exercising this forebearance.

They chased the retreating miners up the slopes until the grades grew too steep for horses if not panicky men. With the field cleared they turned their attention to the precious equipment that had been left behind. A single voice of defiance could be heard above the noise and disarray. It belonged to the only inhabitant of Carbon Canyon who still had the guts to offer some resistance, and it was a sad commentary that this voice belonged to a half-grown dog.

Not everyone ran all the way into the woods. Spider Conway reached his shack and stopped there, unwilling to abondon his home. Hull Barret took up a position between his precious sluice box and the onrushing horde. He gripped a shovel in both hands and waited.

One rider came close. Barret swung, but the horse was moving too fast and the blow went awry. He overbalanced, was unable to correct for the swing, and went head over arse into the cold creek while the man he’d taken the swing at looked back and laughed.

The two horsemen following him simply ran over and through the Long Tom, pausing only long enough to ensure that their mounts’ hooves smashed in the sides of the sluice and broke the wooden legs before riding on. Barret sat in the creek and looked on helplessly, holding tight to the useless shovel. There was nothing he could do, not a damn thing, and the knowledge of that helplessness was far more damaging to his enterprise than the ruined sluice could ever be.

One of the marauders chose to demonstrate his skill with the lariat. The pride he took in his effort was misplaced, since his target wasn’t moving. It wasn’t hard at all to get the loop around one of the supporting legs of a cabin while the other end was fastened to the saddlehorn. A few “gee-up’s,” a quick taste of the spur, and the man’s horse did the real work. The support post pulled away cleanly, collapsing the cabin like a pile of cards. A solidly built structure wouldn’t have suffered so, but like the majority of shelters in Carbon Canyon, this one had been put together more with hope and spit than with expensive nails and good wood. Even so, up until the rider had elected to exercise his cheap skill and bad humor, it had been somebody’s home.

Now, like much of the invaluable mining equipment that had been abandoned along the creek when the riders first arrived, it was a pile of garbage.

Sarah Wheeler stepped down off her porch and fought to focus on a single shape running in and out amidst the mass of horsemen. There was fear in her voice.

“Megan, no! Come back here, Megan!” She tried to run after her daughter and nearly darted into the path of an onrushing horse, pivoting to safety at the last possible second. Panting hard, she clung to the porch as the man who’d nearly run her down galloped through her clothesline, sending freshly laundered shirts and pinafores flying, trampling newly-scrubbed bloomers into the dirt.

The dog screamed then, the sound sharp and high pitched in the manner of dogs when they’re surprised by an unexpected pain. Dogs and little children are convinced of their invulnerability and so pain always comes to them as a shock. It seemed remarkable that so piercing a sound could issue from so small an animal. Only rabbits can scream louder.

Eventually the horsemen gathered on the far side of the devastated colony. Distance and the hard breathing of horses drowned out their crude comments and muted their laughter as they turned and rode off together toward the upper end of the canyon. Soon the air belonged again to the song of the creek and the calling of birds, save for a flurry of anxious calls and the occasional moan.

Moving with the slowness of the damned and displaying the utter despair of those who have experienced more tragedy than is fair, the miners and their families began returning to the creek and to their homes—those that remained standing. The dust and the dirt that the invaders had stirred up didn’t bother them. They lived with that every day, and a dozen horsemen raised no more soil than a good wind. It was the frequency of these malign visitations that was becoming harder and harder to bear. The frequency of them, and the certain knowledge that today’s visit was not the last.

Hands recovered tools and hats from the ground and the shallow water. Men who had endured twenty-foot snows and near starvation wept silently over broken sluice boxes and bent gold pans. Those lucky ones who this time had lost but little joined together to help those less fortunate recover what they could. Somewhere an infant was crying softly, muffled and warm as its mother tried to rock it to sleep.

Near the edge of the creek Megan Wheeler knelt alongside something that resembled an old, torn shoe. She was crying silently as she picked up the tiny body. It was light in her arms, much lighter than the filled water bucket had been, and in death it appeared smaller than ever. She was choking slightly, not on her tears but on her anger, and she ignored the blood that stained her hands.

Turning, she quietly beseeched her neighbors and acquaintances for some kind of recognition of her loss, for some small expression of concern. None was forthcoming. The numbed citizens of Carbon Canyon had no sorrow to expend on a dead mongrel. They were too busy trying to reassemble their own lives from the chaos the invaders had wrought.

Megan was old enough to realize that no one could help, that there was nothing that could be done. That didn’t keep her from wishing it were otherwise. She had sought sympathy and had found none. There’s little sympathy in a beaten man, and the inhabitants of Carbon Canyon were just about beat. One more ride through, one more party would finish them.

Megan didn’t care about that, didn’t care about the future of the town-to-be or the hard-pressed people who comprised it. She cared only about the dead animal in her arms, which she had loved. She started climbing the slope toward the treeline.

Sarah saw her daughter coming and took a step in her direction, then halted. She’d been hurt deeply herself, having lost someone she’d loved, and she knew from experience that there were no simple, soothing words, no verbal tonic that could ease the pain in her daughter’s heart. She knew Megan well enough to know that for now it would be better to say nothing. The girl was stubborn and determined. She would want to know
why.
She would want reasons, and Sarah had none to give. Having no answer for herself, she could not possibly have one for her grieving daughter.

So she simply stood there close by the cabin and watched as her child made her own way into the wooded upper slopes that framed the canyon. Children grew up fast in this country, and by running to Megan now Sarah knew she could do more harm than good. Then she turned her attention to the ruined laundry, the trampled vegetable garden. She had work of her own to attend to, and the sooner she started on it the less time she would have to spend thinking about it.

It was quiet in the forest. Up over the ridge and in among the pines and spruces you couldn’t hear the creek, much less the resigned chatter of those eking out a living along its banks. That suited Megan just fine. She had no time for them now, not for their complaints or their excuses. Her own personal tragedy overwhelmed everything else that had happened this morning.

After a brief search she found the spot she wanted, a hollow between tree roots where falling pine needles and other debris had collected to form a thick mulch above the underlying granite. It was easy to excavate a small hole in the soft organic soil. The grave didn’t have to be very big to accommodate the tiny body.

She laid the corpse of the puppy gently into the basin, then covered it with the material she’d scooped out, patting it down firmly in hopes of keeping the scavengers away for a little while, at least. It would have been better if she’d had some big rocks to put atop the grave, but there weren’t any in the immediate vicinity and suddenly she was too tired to go hunting for some. The packed earth and mulch would have to suffice.