By late morning he was crossing a high, almost flat divide, sunshine making the bright-gleaming snowcap on Pikes Peak almost hurtful to the eye. Before him the north-south-running peaks and ranges ran on and on to the west like so many waves marching across the ocean surface. Except these waves were carved of solid rock and rose many thousands of feet into the sky.
Longarm wasn’t sure, but he guessed he was at eleven, maybe twelve thousand feet of elevation there. He could feel the thinness of the chill air in his lungs, and he slowed his pace lest the lowland-raised horses take sick on him. He’d known horses to die at these high elevations, just go into hard sweats and then lie down and die for no other apparent reason, and he did not especially want to find himself afoot up there. There was no particular danger, of course, but the loss of the time it would take to walk out would damn sure be a bother, to say nothing about having to leave all his gifts behind.
He stopped for an early lunch at the top of a talus chute, a narrow gap that descended at an appallingly steep angle for at least three hundred feet into the next valley.
The chute was not rump-sliding steep. But it didn’t miss it by a hell of a lot. It was bad enough that normally he would have looked for an alternate way down off the peak, but the only trail in sight dropped faithfully into the scree there. And if both game and Indians took it for the easiest path, Longarm wasn’t going to argue the point.
He let the horses rest before tackling it, then checked and tightened his cinches before starting down. Even so, he got a scare about halfway down when his damn front cinch slipped and he found himself riding the neck of the rented horse with nothing but the animal’s ears in front of his pommel.
The horse was steady, thank goodness. A fall onto the rocks and small boulders that filled the chute there would have been a bitch at best, and quite possibly could have spelled disaster. Longarm dropped off without spooking the horse into a misstep, set the saddle once again—even tighter this time; he supposed the damn horse had puffed its belly full of air the last time—and made it the rest of the way down without incident.
Picking his trail from several that fanned out from the bottom of the rocky chute, he made his way out of the rocks and aspen groves onto rolling hills covered with thin, coarse, high-altitude bunchgrasses, then into a broad, shallow bowl that looked like the mouth of an ancient volcano. And probably was.
A narrow stream meandered out of the west side of the bowl and down toward a broad, spring-green basin that Longarm could see beyond and below the dense pine forests that covered the slopes now that the elevation was diminishing a mite.
At one point, when he splashed through the creek for the twentieth time or thereabouts, crisscrossing back and forth to hold to the easiest path, his horse stopped to grab a mouthful of cold water. Longarm leaned down from his saddle to help himself to a handful of it too, and was amused to see the bright glint of purest gold sparkle up at him from a dozen points or more on the creek bed at his feet. Gold. A newcomer to the country would have gone wild at the sight. But then Longarm wasn’t a newcomer. And these mountain streams were full of the iron pyrites known—quite rightly—as fool’s gold. He settled for the drink of water and left the “gold dust” where it was.
Another few miles and the trail crossed an open hump, giving him a view of the land spread out below. More miles to the northwest he could see smoke. Several plumes of smoke rising into the sky. Finally, he thought, riding on, this time with a destination he could aim for.
Chapter 12
“Dammit,” Longarm snapped out loud even though the only living things anywhere close enough to hear were the horses. The plumes of smoke he’d seen from up on the mountain were not a Ute camp but a collection of log cabins, a white settlement way the hell and gone up there. He even recognized the place. Damn if he hadn’t been there before. But he’d never approached from this direction before, which was why he hadn’t realized how close he had come.
He could not immediately recall the name of the place, but as he got closer he could see a sign nailed over the front door of the largest and most centrally located structure: “United States Post Office, Florissant, Colorado.” The wording was off center, and behind the word “Colorado” he could see where the additional word “Territory” had been scratched off sometime after Colorado was granted statehood. The place had been there for some time, obviously.
And yeah, he had been there before. Stopped at least once that he could recall, and passed through another couple of times. The settlement had been built on the major roadway linking Colorado City with Fairplay and a number of other mining communities on the far side of South Park. There still was no railroad here, although one was talked of from time to time, mostly due to the amount of commerce over the highway. Down in Colorado City there were a number of manufacturers of mining equipment, and of course there were customers for the fabricated goods over west in the mining camps. That sort of arrangement generally led at least to the cutting of roadways, as it had here, and sometimes as well to quicker and more effective means of hauling heavy equipment like the boilers and hoists and things made down below.
Longarm remembered that now. But he sure hadn’t realized how far north he’d angled after crossing south of Pikes Peak.
He didn’t have any particular need of a store at the moment, having stocked up down in Colorado City before he left there, but the thought of coffee and cooking other than his own was always welcome. Besides, someone here might well know where he could find the late-traveling Utes.
Longarm tied his horses and swung down onto the dark red, gravel-filled soil. He had been in the saddle steady for some hours, and it felt good to move around now. He took out a cheroot and lighted it, then stepped inside the building.
“Hello, Marshal.”
Longarm blinked. The man behind the counter looked vaguely familiar, but Longarm sure as hell could not put a name to him. “I’m sorry, but I-“
The Florissant postmaster grinned. “Bob Giver,” he said.
“Sure, I remember now, Bob,” Longarm lied. “Nice to see you again.” Giver offered a hand, and Longarm shook it.
“You up here to arrest somebody, are you?”
“Oh, no, nothing exciting like that. Trying to find the dang Utes. They aren’t down yet, though they normally would be by now.”
“Nothing serious, I hope,” Giver said.
“Naw, nothing serious.” Murder, bombing, stuff like that. Nothing serious.
Giver peered off into the distance as if there was something in a far corner of the roof that would give him the powers of insight. Or something. After a moment he shook his head. “I’m not for sure where they’d be either. Used to come by here every year before now, but they quit using the road a couple years back after that bunch of young bucks ran wild and killed those fellows down the other side of the Divide.”
Longarm remembered reading about that, although he hadn’t been involved in any investigation that might have taken place afterward. A bunch of young Ute warriors who had never proven themselves in a fight decided one night to claim their manhood by way of taking some scalps. They slipped away from the rest of the band and found a pair of out-of-work mining men camped out beside the highway, jumped and killed them, and took their scalps to dance with. It had made quite a stir in the newspapers at the time, but that was half a dozen years ago or longer. As far as Longarm could tell, that was the last time these eastern Utes had killed anyone. “I remember that,” he said, accurately this time.
“So do others around here. Made it pretty clear the savages weren’t to use the road anymore.” Giver shrugged. “It cost me a little business, but not so much. They never did all that much trade with me anyway when they came through.”