Colter's Journey Read online

  “This your rabble?” Reno asked.

  Jenkins grinned, and looked at the wayfarers, a bunch of hayseeds from Ohio, he told Reno. “Nah. My party should be listenin’ to Bridger’s lies by now. This here party is being capt’ned and guided by Mr. Zacharias Hetzel yonder.”

  Hetzel, a tall, gangly man in spectacles and a big black hat and coat, stepped forward.

  “He’s got hisself a book.”

  Yep, Hetzel held some book in his hand, and it wasn’t a Bible. Reno had heard of such trail guides. There weren’t that many, yet, but he figured they would be selling faster and faster as more and more people left the East for that Garden of Eden called Oregon. Books like that told the fools back east what they needed to carry along the trail, how much food, what kind of clothes, what kind of weapons. He studied the weapons most of the men had. The fowling piece held by the old farmer was flintlock, but Reno spotted at least one Mississippi Rifle held by a man in a plaid shirt and britches patched at the knees.

  He had seen only one Mississippi Rifle before, carried by some Dragoon, and he had to admit that it was a fine piece, with a thirty-three-inch barrel of .54 caliber. He looked around and spotted some others, shouldered by the Ohioans or butted on the ground. Problem was, a rifle like that used those new-fangled percussion caps.

  Mighty fine invention, percussion caps. Not as prone to misfire as a flintlock like Reno and Jenkins and others carried. Meant you could reload a damn sight quicker, and wouldn’t have as many parts you might have to replace.

  But at South Pass, and even in the Willamette Valley, just where did these wayfarers think they could find percussion caps for sale?

  Reno also figured that the guide book Mr. Hetzel held would also showcase the sites where emigrants should camp, where they could find wood, grass, water, the best places to ford a river, probably described the route, and provided an educated guess as to how far it was from one place to the other. Some of the guides had been taken from diaries or newspaper accounts published from diaries or letters by folks who had traveled to Oregon. But a lot of them, probably the bulk of them, were fiction. If Reno had one, about the only use he would find would be to help get a fire going.

  He saw the two Conestoga wagons off the trail, how the wagons had been ransacked, clothes littering the sage, and noticed the big cairn and the cross some deer or elk had likely knocked over.

  As he dismounted, Jenkins introduced him to the men. The women, and most of the children, kept a safe distance from a wild creature from the mountains like Jed Reno.

  “It’s Indians!” Mr. Hetzel exclaimed. “They massacred those poor men and women who were traveling with Mr. Jenkins’s party.”

  Reno reached the cairn and knelt beside it. He felt Jenkins’s shadow fall over him. “That true?”

  “They was with us, sure enough. Couple families from Pennsylvania. Some town I ain’t never heard of. Man named Scott had a wife and daughter and ’nother family called Colter.”

  “Colter.” Reno smiled at the name, and he looked up at Jenkins. “You remember John Colter?”

  The trapper’s head shook. “Just stories is all. Way before my time.”

  “Mine, too. But I saw him once when I was a kid. In St. Louis. Had a farm or something at Miller’s Landing. Fine life he lived. Seen this country when it was really wild.”

  Reno looked back at the grave.

  Jenkins kept talking. “Colter family was bigger. Man, wife, three kids. Two boys and a girl. No. That ain’t right. Two girls and a boy.”

  “And the Indians killed them all!” That wasn’t shouted by Jenkins or Hetzel, but one of the other emigrants.

  Reno looked up again at Jenkins. “You bury them?”

  Jenkins’s head shook. “And they didn’t, neither. ’Nother grave by the other wagon, and more arrows plucked out of the body, I reckon. Smaller grave, though. Likely only one body buried in it. Me? I figure there be two in this one.”

  “We found the site of this tragic affair this morning when we arrived,” Mr. Hetzel said. “Mr. Jenkins arrived shortly after. He is the one who found the arrows, and told us about them.”

  “I done tol’ you, Hetzel, there ain’t no Mister to my name. It’s Just Jenkins.”

  Reno had seen the shafts of several arrows in the wagons, but Jenkins gestured to a mound of arrows, shafts, and obsidian heads darkened by dried blood near the grave.

  Reno’s stomach gurgled at the sight, not because of the blood or any imagination he might have had about what had happened, but because he began to understand more of Louis Jackatars’s nefarious plan.

  “Ain’t just one band, Jed.”

  “I see that,” Reno told Jenkins.

  Shoshone. Arapaho. Cheyenne. Sioux. And others. Just like Red Prairie had told him earlier.

  “We’re going to find the butchers,” the loudmouth said, “and make them pay.”

  “Somethin’ else you oughta see,” Jenkins whispered.

  Reno let Jenkins lead the way through the woods, and the hayseeds from Ohio began gathering in a circle, talking in angry voices that carried. Reno couldn’t understand most of the words, but he did not need to.

  “You left those folks”—Reno tried to remember the names—“the Scotts and Colters, behind?”

  “Wasn’t my idea, Plenty Medicine.” Jenkins pushed a low branch ahead, and held it until Reno had passed. “They voted this gent named McDonnell as captain, and he give the orders. Me? I only given advice. Told ’em we should stick together. But you know those folks. In an almighty big hurry to get through this country. He told Scott that they would wait a few days at Bridger’s Trading Post. About a day’s ride from Bridger’s, I talked the capt’n into lettin’ me ride back and see what might be keepin’ ’em folks. This be what I found. And this.”

  He stopped, pointing toward the creek.

  The body—or what once had been a body—lay strewn about the creek, among piles of buckskin remnants and bones.

  Reno studied the carnage before walking toward it, looking for sign before giving up.

  “The hayseeds found it, too,” Jenkins said. “Fools don’t know nothin’ about tryin’ to find no sign.”

  “No chance of reading much now,” Reno conceded.

  The wolves and other carrion had done their work quickly and neatly. He looked at the ripped garments but could not tell if they had belonged to a white man—which he guessed—or an Indian. Mountain men often let Indian squaws make their duds.

  “Folks with that train,” Jenkins said, “they think he was injun.”

  “That’s what they want to think.” Reno thought about telling Jenkins about Louis Jackatars but decided against it. Just Jenkins would want to tag along, and Reno did not want anyone to get hurt or killed on his account. Besides, Jenkins needed to get that fool McConnell and whoever was left in his wagon train to the Willamette Valley.

  “Found a horse,” Jenkins said. “And ashes from a fire.”

  “And?”

  “Horse was a pinto. Indian saddle. But that don’t mean nothin’. Hawken rifle. Which an Indian could have owned.”

  Reno pointed at the bones. “But Indians don’t leave their dead behind.”

  “Aye. Horse was well from that little camp. Upstream, staked where he could get water.”

  “With the Hawken?”

  “Yep.”

  “That ain’t like an Indian or a woodsman.”

  “Confident,” Jenkins said. “He had a bow and quiver of arrows at that camp.”

  “Wanted to be quiet,” Reno said.

  “Yep. And ’em Ohioans didn’t get to ruin all that sign. They don’t even knows ’bout that horse.” He pointed in the general direction.

  Reno nodded. He would find the horse after the wayfarers were gone.

  “The bow? The arrows?”

  “Shoshone.”

  Left behind, he thought. Maybe. As a sign. And this man? He looked at the remains.

  “He chased some kid,” Jenkins said.

>   Reno straightened. “Kid?” He was thinking that the man, likely one of Louis Jackatars’s fiends, had found a woman, maybe one of the daughters, and—He shuddered. Maybe another piece of vermin had then killed this man in a jealous rage.

  “Boy,” Jenkins said. “The Colter kid. Good boy, though greener than a tree frog. From the looks of the sign, be my guess. But then ’em wayfarers come along and wiped out most of the other sign.”

  “Colter, you say?”

  “Be my guess,” Jenkins replied.

  Reno let out a mirthless chuckle. “You mean to tell me that that square-head, snot-nosed kid from Ohio—”

  “Pennsylvania,” Jenkins corrected. “’Em square-heads up yonder hail from the Ohio country. Train I was leadin’ come from Pennsylvania mostly.”

  “Pennsylvania, then. You’re telling me that a kid—how old?”

  Jenkins shrugged. “Twelve to sixteen, I reckon. We wasn’t all that sociable, and I ain’t got much of a head when it comes to judgin’ no age of no white kids. Indian kids, now that be different.”

  “A kid, though. A boy. You think he killed that man?”

  Jenkins shrugged. “Well, you always tell that story about Kit Carson and that Frenchy fella at that Rendezvous way back when. How Kit was thinner than an aspen sapling, yet he out that big cuss under.”

  “All right.” Reno wasn’t going to debate. He would find the trail and figure out what had happened. He headed back toward the shouting white men.

  “You think Indians done this, Jed?” Jenkins asked.

  “No. But I think someone wants us to think it was Indians.”

  “Makes no sense.”

  “Hatred usually don’t make any sense whatsoever.”

  “What you talkin’ ’bout?”

  “Just a hunch, Jenkins. But I want you to get them square-heads to Bridger’s. And when you do, you tell Jim that I’m gonna find out what happened, but don’t let no war start before I get back. Tell him to give me two weeks. If he ain’t heard from me by then, he can do as he sees fit.”

  “Two weeks ain’t much time, even for you, Plenty Medicine.”

  “Might be long enough for me to stop a war. Or get killed.”

  CHAPTER 16

  “I’m figuring,” said the loudmouth Ohioan when Reno and Jenkins reached the campsite, “that we send the women and children on to Bridger’s. The rest of us go after those red devils that killed the entire families. By thunder, this could be you and your family, Wilson. Or yours, Leonard. Or even you, Hetzel. We’ll wipe the dirty heathens off the face of this earth.”

  Reno spit and shook his head.

  “You’re probably no better than the savages who did this dastardly act,” the loudmouth said. “You likely lived with the Indians.”

  “I have,” Reno said, and that caught the white men from back East off guard. “But you’d do best to just go on to Oregon.” And get the hell out of this country that I so admire.

  The loudmouth recovered. “Two families—white families—murdered by savages. All of them!”

  “All of them?” Reno asked pleasantly.

  “Look around you, you damn fool!” the loudmouth cried.

  That caused Jenkins to take a few steps back. He knew the code of men out there, which the Ohioan surely did not. Men who had been called far less insulting than damn fools had found themselves in a fight to the death. But Reno decided to let the loudmouth live.

  “I see two graves,” Reno said, nodding at the big one and the smaller one off to his left.

  “That’s right.”

  “Who you reckon buried these folks?” Reno asked.

  That shut everyone up.

  He could have gone on, let the Ohioans know that, most likely, the raiders—be they white or red—had killed the two men, maybe the two mothers, and made off with three girl captives, but Reno knew better. That would fire up these fools who belonged back East even more. That would start a war, and after the Indians had killed these fool white folks, the Army would come in. The country would be scorched with cannon and musketry. The people would be dead, and the land would be ruined.

  Nah, Reno wanted to stop that from happening. He had to.

  “You boys get your families out of here. Jenkins here will get you to Bridger’s place, then Mr. Hetzel and his fine book will get you to the Willamette Valley. Maybe.” He whispered the last word. “I’ll go after the vermin that did this. No matter what color they are, they’ll pay for this. That I can promise you.”

  The loudmouth stepped forward. “Maybe you were one of those butchers. Man who lives with injuns, he ain’t a man I’d trust. Maybe—”

  Reno belted the man with his left hand and heard the teeth smash. The loudmouth went down, dropping his fowling piece, rolling onto his hands and knees, spitting out blood, a piece of tongue he had bitten clean off, and teeth that Reno’s solid fist had busted.

  When the man turned around and clawed for the long gun, Reno stepped forward, sighing, and slammed the stock of his Hawken across the man’s skull.

  “Goodness gracious!” Mr. Hetzel shouted. “You’ve killed him.”

  “Nah.” Reno tucked the big rifle back underneath his arm. “But if you folks don’t get moving right quick, I’m likely to start killing. And Jenkins here knows. When I get the bloodlust, it ain’t likely slaked.”

  Somehow, Jenkins managed to keep his face straight. He clapped his hands, gathered the hackamore to his own horse—a fine, high-stepping blood bay mare—and swung into the saddle. “Let’s ride, folks. Ride and walk. We’re burnin’ daylight, and it’s a fer piece to Bridger’s.” He looked at the unconscious Ohioan on the ground. “Best cart him to his wagon, fellers. Don’t look like he’ll be walkin’ none this fine day.” He looked back at Reno. “Slaked. You sometimes use big words, Plenty Medicine. Musta read a lot of books before you come out here to God’s country.”

  * * *

  When the square-heads and Just Jenkins were maybe a quarter mile down the pass—which sure took that long train of prairie schooners long enough—Jed Reno unsaddled his horse, grained it and the pack mule, hobbling both. Grabbing his Hawken, he cut through the woods to the creek and followed the water upstream, as Jenkins had indicated. Soon, he found the horse that had been picketed by the river.

  Jenkins was right. Indian horse. He found the Hawken rifle leaning against the saddle. Some Indians had found long arms—most of them spoils from a battle they had won with a white man—but Reno shook his head at the dead man’s audacity. Leave a fine weapon like that. Leave a good horse without food. Must have been quite confident that he would finish his job in a hurry.

  Well, he was dead. Fools often paid a price in that country.

  Reno saddled the horse, fetched the rifle, and led the horse back to the camp where it could eat. The saddle he shoved in with his packs and then went to find the camp the man had made.

  Just Jenkins had been right. Back in Kentucky, when he wasn’t traipsing through the woods, Jed Reno had done his share of reading. His ma had often made him read. And he still read, only not books, but the land itself.

  If the train of emigrants from Ohio had not shown up, he figured Jenkins would have read the sign. But he had guessed correctly. The boy had survived the massacre, probably hidden somewhere in the woods. Jackatars had left one man behind to kill the kid, and that man had been killed instead, and been food for wolves, ravens, and whatnot. Reno could not guess how a kid from Pennsylvania—who lacked enough sense to find the horse the man had left behind—had come out ahead in that scrape, but the evidence was there. The boy had won, through pluck or luck or a mixture of both, and had buried the dead. Three, Reno guessed, two men and a woman.

  And he had found this camp. Reno could tell where the kid had sorted through the dead man’s traps, carrying off what he needed, leaving behind what he didn’t need—at least, what he thought he would need.

  Reno returned to the camp and examined the two graves. He wondered how long it would have taken
the kid to haul all those stones from the creek to cover the bodies. Keep the wolves off.

  Boy had grit. Plenty of it.

  ’Course, Reno figured he would have done the same for his mother. But his pa? Maybe not. At least, not after his father had apprenticed him to that wheelwright in Louisville—although that had led to Reno’s discovery of himself and the Rocky Mountains.

  If what he could read after the Ohioans had traipsed all over the campsite was right, the boy had lighted out from camp after burying the dead, and that in itself took a lot of effort. Jackatars’s bandits had ransacked the wagons, taking anything of value—spades, weapons, even the oxen and a trailing large horse—which meant the boy had dug those two graves by hand, even made a cross for each burial site, before setting off afoot. Only instead of following the ruts all the way to Bridger’s Trading Post, he had walked among the tracks of unshod ponies.

  The kid’s tracks sure weren’t steady, at least as far as Reno got—no more than a hundred yards. Was he delirious? Did he think that would take him to civilization, or what passed as such in this rugged patch of earth?

  Reno laughed as he walked back to the campsite. No, the boy knew what he was doing. At least, he thought he did. Reno shook his head as he realized, the boy wasn’t trying to find Bridger or some other white men. The fool kid was going after his sisters, and the other women—likely two, if Jenkins was right. A mother and her daughter, and the boy’s two sisters. Or the kid’s own mother.

  “Guts,” Reno told the horses and mule. “Boy’s got a ton of guts. I’ll give him that.”

  Back among the abandoned prairie schooners, Reno led the mule and two horses to the creek—away from the scattered bones of the dead idiot—and let them drink. He also refilled his canteens and drank himself—upstream from the animals—and splashed the cool water over his face and neck.

  He stood, led the mule and horses back to the camp, then looked around some more. From the look of the tracks, Jackatars had better than a dozen men riding with him. Leaving a trail anyone could follow. Reno knew that had been purposeful. The half-breed wanted white men to follow them. Probably to some Indian camp, so he could start his war. The tracks led northwest. Toward the Popo Agie.