A High Sierra Christmas Read online

  “I take it that was a bad decision,” Louis said.

  “There were more than eighty people in the group. Come spring, not much more than half of them made it out alive. The ones who died had frozen or starved to death.” Smoke shrugged. “But if it hadn’t been for them, even more of the settlers wouldn’t have survived.”

  “Why not?” Denny asked.

  “Because once some of them started to die, the others didn’t starve as fast.”

  Denny and Louis both stared at Smoke in confusion for a second; then expressions of horror and loathing began to creep over their faces.

  “You don’t mean . . .” Denny said.

  “Surely they wouldn’t . . .” Louis said.

  Smoke nodded solemnly. “Yep. That’s what they did, all right. It was that or certain death.”

  “I would have died first!” Denny said.

  “As would I,” Louis added.

  “It’s easy to say that,” Smoke told them. “Fact of the matter is, though, most folks never know what they’re capable of until they have a life-or-death situation staring them in the face. When they do, some of them rise to the occasion. That’s why there’s the old saying about how heroes are made, not born.” Smoke shrugged. “And sometimes, when the chips are down, people fail. It’s not always a reason to be ashamed. You can’t really blame folks for wanting to save their lives.”

  “You can blame them for crossing a line like that,” Denny said. “You’re talking about people, not animals. When you get right down to it, there’s such a thing as right and wrong, good and evil. You do believe there are evil people in the world, don’t you?”

  “I’ve traded lead with enough of ’em,” Smoke said. “There’s no doubt about it.”

  “Damn right,” Denny muttered. “And some of them deserve to be shot.”

  “I can’t say as I disagree with you.”

  Smoke lifted his head as he heard a clanking noise and felt vibration shiver through the floor under his feet.

  “I reckon we’re about to get moving at last,” he said. “And not a moment too soon to suit me.”

  Louis was frowning in thought. He said, “You don’t think . . . in this day and age . . . if this train was to get stuck in the mountains people would resort to such drastic measures?”

  “Let’s hope we never find out,” Smoke said.

  CHAPTER 8

  Reno, Nevada

  Deke Mahoney had to admit that he liked the looks of Reno. It reminded him a little of Staghorn, where he and the rest of the gang had just hit the bank, because there were several lucrative industries in the area. Mining, ranching, and logging all poured money into the town. The railroad had helped it grow, too. A successful town meant the bank would be worth robbing, even under normal circumstances.

  According to the conversation Magnus Stevenson had overheard, the circumstances were soon going to be anything but normal here in Reno. The outlaws didn’t know how big that cash shipment coming in was going to be, but considering how much money flowed through Reno to start with, it might be as large as a hundred thousand dollars. Maybe even more, although Mahoney wasn’t sure he ought to allow himself to dream that big.

  Warren Hopgood was waiting for him when he stepped out of the telegraph office.

  “Get it sent?” Hopgood asked.

  “I sure did,” Mahoney replied. “Don’t know how long it’ll take Frank to get it, but I bet he’ll be on his way here before the day’s over.”

  “If he got out of prison on time,” Hopgood reminded him. “Maybe something happened and they decided to extend his sentence and not let him go.”

  Mahoney shook his head. “Not Frank. You know how smart he is. Once his time got short, he would’ve been on his best behavior. He wouldn’t do nothin’ to risk gettin’ out of there when he was supposed to.”

  Hopgood grunted and said, “Yeah, you’re probably right about that.” He looked up at the overcast sky. Every so often, a tiny snowflake would fall, more like a little frozen pellet of moisture instead of a crystal. Hopgood lightly ran his right hand over his left upper arm. “I don’t like this weather. Makes that bullet graze hurt even worse.”

  “Maybe once we get our hands on all that dinero, we ought to go some place where it stays warm all the time. Hot sun, hot food, and hot little brown gals.”

  “Not me,” Hopgood said. “I don’t want to spend the rest of my life with nothing but stinking greasers for company. I was thinking I might go to New Orleans and buy a saloon or something like that.”

  Mahoney slapped Hopgood on the shoulder, being careful to avoid the left one and clap his hand on the right, instead.

  “How about a whorehouse?” he suggested. “I can just see you becomin’ a whoremonger.”

  “Blast it, I’m serious,” Hopgood insisted.

  “Damn, Warren, you mean you’re actually gonna become an honest businessman? I can’t hardly imagine that!”

  “To tell you the truth, neither can I.” Hopgood let out a bitter chuckle. “You know what’ll happen, more than likely.”

  “No, what?”

  “However much money we get from this job, we’ll blow through it in some spree of debauchery, and then we’ll be back to scrounging around, looking for some bank or store to rob. You ever hear tell of an outlaw who actually turned his back on it, walked away from that sort of life and never went back?”

  Mahoney sighed. “No, I can’t say as I have. And now you’ve got me feelin’ all gloomy again, just like the weather. Where’d the other fellas go?”

  “They were going to hunt up some place to have a drink.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. What say we go find ’em?”

  Donner Pass

  Juniper Jones stifled a yawn as he stepped out onto the railroad platform next to the Summit Hotel. He had snatched a little sleep on the cot in his office during the night, but he hadn’t gone up to his room to get some real sleep because he didn’t want to be away from his key for that long.

  In bad weather, a telegrapher had to be on the job around the clock, unless he had a relief man to spell him, which Juniper didn’t. Important messages could come through at any time of the day or night, and he had to be on hand to relay them.

  Also, every hour on the hour, he checked in with the offices in Reno to the east and Sacramento to the west, to let them know that the lines were still up and working. The wind was still blowing hard enough to swirl the snow in mad patterns, but the telegraph wires had stood up to it so far.

  Earlier, Herman Painton had taken a pair of snowshoes with him just in case and walked the tracks from one end of the pass to the other.

  He came back brushing snow off his coat and shaking it out of his hair and reported that the tracks were clear, although the drifts were getting worrisome close in places.

  “If it doesn’t get any worse, I think we’ll make it,” he had told Jones, who dutifully relayed that information to his superiors without being convinced of it himself.

  Now, as he stood on the platform with a biting wind trying to work its way inside his coat, he looked at the snow and frowned. It seemed to be falling faster and thicker now. The clouds were so dark and solid it might as well have been night. Juniper couldn’t see more than fifty feet past the end of the platform.

  He needed to go back inside and let Painton know he thought it was getting worse. A bad feeling gnawed at Juniper’s guts. His experience and instincts warned him that they might not dodge this bullet after all, despite Painton’s earlier optimism.

  He was about to turn away when he caught a flicker of movement from the corner of his eye and stopped. Squinting, he peered toward the spot at the far end of the platform where he thought he had seen something.

  Nothing was there. Juniper blew out a disgusted breath and shook his head, then turned away again.

  Only to freeze and jerk his head around in that direction again as more movement darted at the side of his vision. He frowned and called over the howling wind, “Is someb
ody there?!”

  There was no answer, of course. How could there be? The wind would have whipped away any words. And nobody would be out there in that white maelstrom, anyway.

  Nobody sane.

  A memory tickled the back of Juniper’s brain. During the decades he had spent in these mountains, he had seen things . . . heard things . . . he just couldn’t explain. Half-seen glimpses of what most people would claim was a bear or some other animal. Long, ululating cries raised on cold, lonely nights, like that of a wolf. Things easily explained away . . . by someone who hadn’t been there to see and hear them.

  But the sheer, eerie strangeness of them had gripped Juniper and never truly let him go.

  It had been years since he had run across anything so odd, and he had told himself that if there ever had been something unnatural in the Sierra Nevadas, it was long gone. Eventually he had stopped even thinking about it.

  But now those memories came flooding back. Whatever he had just caught sight of—if there was really something there—had darted through the snow with a weird, hitching gait. Not like an animal, but not truly like a man, either.

  Juniper took a step toward the end of the platform and shouted, “Dadgummit, if somebody’s out there, you damn well better answer me!”

  Nothing. Just the wind and the snow . . .

  Then what sounded like the tiny fragment of a laugh, and memory whispered a name in his ear.

  Donner Devil.

  Juniper backed toward the door to the hotel, suddenly aware that he wasn’t armed. Inside his office, he kept an old Remington. 44 revolver, in case anybody ever tried to rob the hotel—something that had never happened—but the gun wasn’t going to do him any good out here. He backed a few more steps, head jerking from side to side as he peered futilely into the thick white curtains of snow.

  Then his nerve broke and he turned and ran.

  Just as he yanked the door open and threw himself inside, he caught a whiff of a scent.

  Something feral.

  Then he slammed the door and it was gone. Juniper pressed his back against the panel and tried not to shudder.

  “Still snowing out there, Juniper?” Herman Painton called from across the lobby.

  “Yeah,” Juniper replied, his voice weak. “It’s still snowin’. And it looks like it’s gettin’ worse.”

  * * *

  Alma Lewiston approached the conductor and said, “I was told that a man named Jensen is on this train. Smoke Jensen. Do you know him?”

  The man frowned at her. “Employees of the line don’t make a habit of gossiping about our passengers, ma’am. You understand, I’m sure.”

  “Of course,” Alma said easily. She smiled, knowing that when she did, it made the lines around her eyes and mouth disappear almost completely and the years of hardship and disappointment fall away from her. “But Smoke and I are dear old friends. I’m sure he’d want to see me again.”

  She made it sound like she and Jensen were more than just friends, but as soon as the words were out of her mouth, she saw the disapproval in the conductor’s eyes and knew she’d made a mistake.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Jensen have traveled on my trains many times, ma’am.”

  “I’m sure they have.” Alma tried to salvage the situation. “Why, Mrs. Jensen and I are friends as well.”

  “Is that right? You know Mrs. Jensen, do you?”

  Alma realized the man was waiting for her to provide the first name of Jensen’s wife. She hadn’t even known the man was married, let alone what his wife was called.

  All she could do was summon up another smile and say, “Well, if you see him, tell him I was looking for him, would you? I’ll be in the club car.”

  Maybe when Jensen heard that an attractive blond woman was looking for him, he would be curious enough to seek her out. Most men would be.

  In the meantime, she would try to come up with some other way to locate him.

  “Ma’am, if you’d tell me your name . . . ?” the conductor said as Alma turned away. She ignored him and kept moving.

  She walked forward to the club car. She needed to think, and she might as well be comfortable while she was doing it. She knew she would look a little out of place there. Her traveling outfit had been a nice one when it was new, but time had dulled the dress’s luster . . . just like it had done with her.

  It had taken most of the money she had squirreled away just to purchase her ticket on this train. She had booked her passage through to Reno. That was as far as she could afford, and she figured she would have found Jensen by then and persuaded him to drop the charges against Gordon. If she hadn’t accomplished her goal in that amount of time, chances were she never would.

  She had a little money left over. Enough for a drink, anyway. And there was always the chance she wouldn’t have to pay for it. Men still tended to want to buy her a drink . . . especially when she smiled.

  She took a seat at the bar in the club car and looked around. Most of the booths were occupied, some by couples, the others by men either alone or in small groups. One man sat by himself at the counter, several stools away, his hands wrapped around a cup of coffee.

  Alma glanced in his direction, then had to look again. He was a big man, with a hard-planed face and dark hair and mustache. His suit was a little on the cheap side, just like hers. Muscles bulged the coat’s shoulders.

  She judged by the man’s grim expression that he was brooding about something. But he must have sensed Alma looking at him, because his head turned and his eyes swung to meet hers.

  “Hello,” she said. She held her left hand so that he couldn’t see the wedding ring she wore. She should have slipped it off before she came in there, she thought, on the chance that she might meet a man like this.

  She hadn’t always been so shameless. Well, actually, she had been, she supposed, but she had tried to be faithful and true to Gordon. He knew quite a bit about her past but hardly everything, and he had told her it didn’t matter. Grateful for that, she had tried to put it behind her.

  Then he had gone off to fight in that war against Spain and come home still recovering from his wounds and addicted to laudanum. With a thriving Chinatown nearby, it was easier to get opium, so he had turned to the smoke of the lotus and had never been the same since.

  But she still loved him and would do whatever she had to in order to save him from going to prison. He was right: if he was locked up for very long, he would die in there.

  So if helping Gordon meant playing up to some stranger on a train, Alma was more than willing to do it.

  Especially if he possessed the hard, cruel, primitive appeal that this one did.

  The big man nodded curtly to her and said, “Ma’am.”

  “Is that coffee good?”

  “It’ll do,” he replied with a shrug. He was trying not to show it, but she could tell that she had caught his interest. His dark eyes kept sliding over to study her.

  “I’ll have a cup,” she told the man working behind the counter.

  “It’s on me,” the stranger offered, just as Alma expected.

  “Really? Why, thank you. That’s very kind of you. People need kindness on a cold, snowy day like this, don’t you think?”

  The man’s grunt told her he had never given that thought much consideration, one way or the other.

  He was on the hook now, and she didn’t want him to wiggle away. Still smiling, she said, “I believe I saw you back there in the depot. You were just ahead of me at the ticket window. My name is Alma Lewiston.”

  She didn’t add the Mrs. Let him work that out for himself, if he wanted to go to that much trouble. As soon as he wasn’t looking and she had the chance, she would slip off the wedding ring and put it in her handbag.

  “Frank,” he introduced himself. “Frank Colbert.”

  “It’s very nice to meet you, Mr. Colbert. If I may be so bold as to ask, are you traveling for business or pleasure?”

  “Business,” he answered without hesitation. “Bu
t that’s no reason the trip can’t be enjoyable as well.”

  Alma liked the sound of that. She picked up the cup of coffee the counterman set in front of her and said, “To success in business. . . and pleasure.”

  CHAPTER 9

  By noon, the storm over the Sierra Nevadas had strengthened into a true blizzard. A man caught out in it wouldn’t have been able to see his hand in front of his face and would have been hopelessly lost if he went more than two steps from shelter.

  In Donner Pass, the snow drifted so high against the sides of the snowsheds that it began to pile up on top of the structures. The drifts grew deeper and deeper until the sheds were completely covered and looked like a huge snake winding along underneath the thick carpet of white.

  The sheds were sturdy structures, built to withstand a great deal of weight. But a storm such as this came along once in a decade. Maybe even less often. As it dumped more and more snow on the sheds, the timbers supporting the roof began to groan under the burden.

  Then, half a mile east of the Summit Hotel, one of those timbers gave way with a rending crack. The roof sagged, and then another support timber broke. The roof split apart. Tons of snow poured through the jagged opening. More boards splintered. The collapse spread until snow and debris were piled six feet deep on the tracks for more than a hundred yards.

  The rumble generated by that catastrophe echoed from the surrounding mountains, even though those slopes couldn’t be seen in the blizzard. The echoes were a long time dying away, and before they did, they caused a shiver to run through some of the deep drifts high above the pass.

  Inside the hotel, Herman Painton came to the little room where Juniper Jones sat hunched over his telegrapher’s key and said, “You sent for me?”

  A few minutes earlier, Juniper had looked out into the lobby, seen one of the maids going by, and asked her to find Painton. He stood up now and handed the hotel manager the message he had copied down when the key began to chatter.