This Violent Land (12 page)

“I hate men like that. I hate them almost as much as I hate the lawman who can be bought. I've never heard the names, but you can be very sure that if I ever do hear anything about them, I'll let you know.”

“Thanks. I appreciate that.”

O
n his way back to Denver that night, Smoke camped out just twenty miles east of where Clell Dawson was camping. The two men were far enough apart to not run into each other and traveling along trails that wouldn't cross. Even if they had met on the trail there would have been nothing more than a nod between them. While Smoke had heard of Clell Dawson, and Clell had heard of Smoke Jensen, neither would recognize the other on sight.

The next morning, Clell made coffee by putting a few coffee beans he had chewed up into a tin cup of water, which he then heated. That and a piece of jerky was his breakfast. As he sat there, he wondered how far it was to the next town. Going from town to town and settling down in none of them was vastly different from the life he had planned when he'd studied medicine.

He had become a doctor because he'd once thought that he had a genuine desire to help people. Then came the war, where he had been a surgeon on the battlefield. That experience had changed, forever, how he looked at the profession of medicine.

He stared into the fire, remembering.

 

 

 

Standing up next to his campfire, Clell tossed out the last dregs of his coffee, and with that action closed the door to his memories. Over the years he had developed the skill of being able to dip into those memories when he wished and shut them off when they became too painful.

Not all veterans of that terrible war were so skilled.

The brutal, bloody struggle between North and South had ended when Lee surrendered to Grant at Appomattox, Virginia, but for many, the surrender was just the beginning of a much more personal conflict. Young men who had lived their lives on the edge of death for four years found it nearly impossible to return home and take up the plow, or go back to work in a store, repair wagons, or any of the other things that were a necessary part of becoming whole again.

Some found nothing to come home to. Many who had fought for the South returned to burned-out homes, farms gone to seed or, worse, taken for taxes. Those men became the dispossessed. Unable to settle down, they became wanderers. Many of them went West, where there would be less civilized encroachment upon their chosen way of life.

Some took up the outlaw trail, continuing to practice the skills they had learned during the war. But most were innocent wanderers with all bridges to their past burned and the paths to their future uncharted.

Clell Dawson was such a man. Finding that he no longer felt a calling for medicine he, too, had nothing to come home to.

But there was another, darker side to Clell. The same deft touch and dexterity that had made him a great surgeon also made him exceptionally good with a gun. Never, in all his wanderings, did he openly seek trouble. But neither did he back away from it.

“All right, Dan. What do you say we get going?” Like many men who rode the lonely trails, he had gotten into the habit of talking to his only real companion—his horse. “We've got another long day ahead of us.”

Dan snorted, then stood quietly as Clell extinguished the fire and threw on the saddle. He mounted and resumed his wandering, with no particular destination in mind and no need to go back to anyplace he had been before.

It was mid-afternoon when Dan stepped into an unseen prairie dog hole. With a sharp whinny of pain, his right foreleg folded, he went down, and Clell was tossed over his head.

Getting up, Clell hurried back to Dan.

Dan was lying on his side, looking up at Clell as if his big, brown eyes were begging the man to do something for him. A bloody, jagged end of bone was sticking out through the skin of Dan's leg.

“Oh no,” Clell said, shaking his head. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them, the terrible damage hadn't gone away. “No no no.”

He stroked Dan's face for a moment, talking quietly to him. “We'll meet again someday, Dan. I know damn well we will. But you're going to have to go on ahead of me.”

Clell took out his pistol and aimed it right between the horse's eyes. Dan continued to look at him, and he knew that Dan knew what was about to happen. Closing his eyes, Clell pulled the trigger.

* * *

Late that afternoon, Clell dropped his saddle with a sigh of relief. Climbing up the ballast–covered berm, he stood for a moment on the crossties between the twin ribbons of iron. He looked first toward the distant and empty horizon to the east, then he turned toward the purple mountains to the west. For the moment, the empty tracks offered no more comfort than the empty prairie or the foreboding mountains. He knew that a train would be passing that way sometime before sundown, whether going west or east, he wasn't sure. It didn't matter.

It had been a long, hard walk to the railroad, but he hadn't wanted to leave his saddle behind. Climbing back down from the berm, he lay down beside the tracks, making a pillow of the saddle.

He waited for the train for just over an hour, and when first he saw it, it was coming from the east. Against the great panorama of the plains, the train seemed puny, and even the smoke that poured from its diamond-shaped stack made but a tiny scar against the deepening blue of the eastern sky. He could hear the train quite clearly, the sound of its puffing engine carrying across the wide, flat ground—the way sound travels across water.

It was a freight. He had been hoping for a passenger train. He believed he would have been able to flag it down and pay for passage to the next town. He sighed. The only way he was going to get a ride on this train was to hop onto one of the cars, and because he was carrying his saddle, he would have to choose a car with an open door. He sighed again. He knew it wasn't always possible to find a car with an open door on a cross-country freight.

He caught a break as the train approached. It had started up a long, gradual grade, slowing down to no faster than a brisk walk.

Clell waited in a little gully until the engine passed. He didn't want the engineer, the fireman, or the brakeman to see him. After the engine and tender had passed, he looked down the row of cars until he saw one with an open door. Picking up his saddle, he climbed up the berm and began running alongside the train, not quite matching his speed to it, so the car with the open door caught up to him. Matching its speed, he tossed the saddle in through the open door, and was about to grab hold, when a hand stuck out from the darkened interior of the car.

“Grab ahold, friend, and I'll jerk you up here!” a voice called.

For a second, Clell was hesitant to trust the offer, but he figured if it wasn't genuine, he could always jerk the man down from the car. The man didn't try any tricks, though, and with the stranger's help, Clell half climbed and was half pulled into the car.

The man in the car appeared to be in his late forties or early fifties. He had long white hair and a scraggly white beard.

“Thanks,” Clell said. “That was decent of you.”

“Yes, sir, well, I've been pulled onto a few trains myself, from time to time. You're new at this, ain't ya?”

“Yes, how did you know?”

The old man chuckled. “You don't see a lot of boes carrying saddles.”

“Boes?”

“Hoboes,” the man said. “That's what I am, and I'm proud to claim it. The name is Nick.” He stuck his hand out.

“Clell,” he said, taking the man's hand.

“Somethin' happen to your horse?”

“Stepped in a prairie dog hole and busted his leg. I had to put him down.”

Nick shook his head. “Sorry to hear that. I hate to see any creature have to be put down. I had me a dog that used to travel with me for a while, but he jumped down afore he was supposed to one day, and got runned over by the train. Sure pained me when that happened. I don't mind tellin' you, it plumb brung me to tears. Where you headin'?”

“To the next town.”

“Do you know what the next town is?” Nick asked.

Clell shook his head. “I don't know, and I don't particularly care.”

Nick laughed again. “Clell, you may not know it, but if you are of that kind of a mind, why then, you're a bo, same as the rest of us. But just so that you know, the next town will be Kremmling. It's about another hour or so, I reckon. We're 'bout to go through Kremmling Pass. If you got a interest in it, we can climb up on top of the car and you can get a real good view of the pass as we go through.”

“That sounds good to me,” Clell said.

“Wait till we go around the next curve, then climb up on the near side of the car to the curve. If you climb up on the out side, why it'll purt' nigh throw you off, for some reason. But if you're on the inside, what it does is, it throws you against the side of the car, and that helps you to hold on as you're aclimbin'.”

“Centrifugal force,” Clell said.

“Beg pardon.”

“Centrifugal force,” Clell repeated. “It's the force that tends to throw a body away from the center of rotation.”

“You don't say. Well, whatever it is, it's a good thing to keep it in mind when you're outside on a train while it's agoin' around a curve. Get ready, we got one comin' up, now.”

The long string of freight cars bumped and rattled on the uneven tracks and filled the pass with thunder as steam gushed from the drive cylinders of the laboring engine. The two men climbed to the top and perched on the forward end of the car. Their legs dangled over the edge in such a way that they could look down between their feet and gauge the speed of the train by watching the passing of the cross ties and the ballast. Not long after, it grew so dark they could no longer see the ground.

No matter how the train lurched and jerked over the rough roadbed, though, the two were sitting as securely in their places as birds on a swaying tree limb. The two men, who had never met until Clell decided to jump the freight, were sitting elbow to elbow, engaged in measured conversation. Clell had learned long ago that it wasn't good to give away too much information to strangers.

“I tell you what,” Nick said. “When we get to the very top of this pass, if you'll look to the right, just between the V of the tops of the hills, you'll see the lights of Kremmling. It looks just real purty out there on the valley floor, all lit up like that.”

“Have you ever been to Kremmling or do you always just pass through?” Clell asked.

“Oh, from time to time I've stopped there. Sometimes you can find a hobo camp just out of town, down by Muddy Creek. There's most always some folks there, and most always a pot of stew goin', but they like for you to bring somethin' to throw in it, like taters or carrots or some such thing.” Nick laughed. “This time o' night, I can generally snatch me up a chicken somewhere and use that to buy my way in. By the time whoever I steal the chicken from discovers it missin' and goes to the sheriff about it, why it's too late, the chicken's done been throwed into the pot and et, so there ain't nothin' nobody can do about it. I got me some taters in a sack down in the car, though. There ain't no need for me to steal nothin' tonight. You're welcome to come to the camp with me if you want. My taters will get us both in.”

“Well, I appreciate the offer, Nick, but I'm not sure I would feel comfortable going in there, carryin' my saddle.”

Nick chuckled. “I know what you mean. We'd better climb back down into the car now. We'll need to jump off before the train comes into the depot. Like as not, they'll have railroad bulls lookin' for us. And they ain't pleasant men to be around.”

Fifteen minutes later, both men were sitting in the open door of the car.

Nick said, “I'll tell you when to jump. And do it as soon as I say so, 'cause if you wait any longer, you'll wind up on the rocks.”

Clell picked up his saddle and was holding it so he could toss it out when he got the word.

“Now!” Nick said, and with Clell tossing the saddle even as he jumped, the two men leaped from the car, hit soft dirt, and rolled a few feet before coming to a stop.

“This here is the only soft dirt on this part of the road,” Nick said.

“You picked a good spot,” Clell replied. “It was almost like jumping into a featherbed.”