Colter's Path (9781101604830) (34 page)

J
edd Colter rose slowly from the kneeling posture in which he'd been, examining the corpse they had found near a tent in the now-empty valley of log pens. He shook his head as if to clear it and looked at Tom Buckle. “Tom, I've seen some dead men in my time. That one there, though, is about as dead as I've ever laid eyes on.”

“Or hope to again,” Buckle said. “A pickaxe through the topknot and out through the mouth! Lordy, who would even think of such a way to kill somebody?”

“Somebody who wanted to be very sure the dead one really, surely, truly was as dead as he could be. Somebody you might say was
motivated
.”

“What do you reckon he'd done to have somebody that mad at him?”

“Tom, if this here was the kind of place the rumors say it was, and if this gent here was one of the ones involved in holding women captive here, it might be best that we don't know all he did to earn that kind of death.”

Buckle frowned, thinking. “Jedd, you reckon there's any chance that the ones who killed this man were the very women who'd been held here?”

“The thought had crossed my mind. The pens are all empty, after all, but you can tell there's been people living
in them. Somebody tied up with cords that are still in the pens, but severed like somebody cut them with a knife. What if those women got loose somehow and surprised this man who'd been their jailer, so to speak? Maybe caught him sleeping, or knocked him cold and took the pick to him while he was out. However they did it, and whoever it was, it looks like somebody stood over him and swung the pick down at the top of his head while he was lying on his back.”

“I wonder if any woman could do such a thing.”

“A woman can do anything a man might do, if she's pushed to it.”

“I suppose so.” Buckle looked at the body again for a moment. “Jedd, did you notice that it looks like somebody's carved on the corpse some?”

“I did notice. It's all the more reason to think it was probably one or more of the women here who did this. You'll notice that his, uh, privates are gone. Cut off and probably lying out in the weeds around here somewhere, if a wild dog or something ain't already made off with them. What I'm getting at is that cutting off of the privates is something you'd only do if you were trying to make a point, know what I mean?”

“Something somebody would do who was, like you said,
motivated
.”

“Very motivated.” Jedd nudged Paco's body with the toe of a boot Ollie Slott had made for him in a different lifetime.

“What now?” Buckle asked.

“Let's track these women. We need to find what became of them and what's gone on up here in this place.” Jedd looked at his deputy. “Your sister, you said?”

“That's right. My little sister. God, when I think what she must have gone through.”

“Don't think about it. It's past for her. Think about the ones who are still suffering from such things. They're the ones who need the thought and the help now.”

“Ayuh.”

“Tom?”

“What?”

“You're going to have to break yourself of that ‘ayuh' nonsense. The word is ‘yeah.' Or just plain old ‘yes' will do.”

“Ayuh. I know. I'll try.”

It was not difficult to find the direction the group of women had gone. Their tracks told the story, and the experienced trailsman Jedd Colter was able to read it.

They'd trekked down to the Bowater Road and paused by the grave of Winnie Napier and “Cat,” probably to puzzle, as everyone seemed prone to do, over why a grave was at such a place and why a cat was buried with a human.

Then on up Bowater Road they had traveled, heading toward Emma's town. If Emma had been among the captives, might she be taking the freed group of them to her home? Jedd considered the element of oddity that would be added to his long-anticipated visit with Emma if it wound up being done in the context of a lawman investigating the flight of hostages from what was essentially an illegal prison compound.

Life could take a man on strange journeys, he pondered. He'd gone from being a free-roaming trail guide and outdoorsman to being a mining town marshal, and little to none of it had really been planned.

He and Tom rode toward Bowater, and Jedd turned and said, “Tom, the way I have it figured, sometimes life is something that kind of cooperates with your plans and hopes. Happens
with
you. Other times it's just something that happens
to
you.”

“You're a philosopher, Jedd.”

“No need for name-calling, Tom. No need at all.”

Though neither he nor former marshal Rand Blalock knew it, Liam Turner and Blalock had purchased their individual horses from the same horse trader. The horses, though born in different years, had come from the same mother, sired by the same stallion. And both had exactly the same hereditary defect of the heart that had already
dropped Blalock's horse beneath him on the main avenue of Scarlett's Luck.

When the heart of Turner's horse finally lost its lifelong struggle to continue beating, Turner was at the edge of Bowater, some miles from Scarlett's Luck. The death of Turner's horse mimicked that of Blalock's almost down to the last tremor, except that Turner's horse collapsed more vertically and did not break Turner's leg, as Blalock's had been broken. Turner simply found himself standing beside a dead animal in the middle of a road, stunned and wondering what to do. A man could hardly be expected to heft up a dead horse on his shoulder and move it to the side of the road as he might a wagon-crushed dog or cat.

Turner stood fretting and chin rubbing, looking down at his horse and hating it for putting him in this predicament.

He was still standing there when around the bend he'd just passed came a group of very ragged, very dirty, and very familiar women. The group of them had stopped for a break and rest in a wooded grove and had not seen Turner ride past mere minutes before his horse departed the earthly coil to enter whatever afterlife awaits the equine.

Turner gaped at the women, backed up, and tripped over an extended leg of his dead horse. He fell back hard onto his rear, landing on a sharp-pointed stone that deftly broke his tailbone and sent him into excruciating pain. He howled loudly, squeezing his eyes closed. When they opened again moments later the women were close upon him, and one of them was tugging his pistol from its holster. He realized with a start that it was Rosita.

“Who's prisoner now, you wicked, stone-hearted son of a harlot!” Rosita hissed at him, aiming the pistol at his head and thumbing back the hammer.

“No, Rosita,” Emma said. “You mustn't murder him…. If you do, it would bring trouble to you. The law wouldn't abide it.”

“The law?” Rosita replied, a look of astonishment on her face. “What law is there for a man like this one? The
same law that found my father at the end…the law of justice, of vengeance.” Rosita looked around at the faces of the former prisoners whom until today she had helped tend like so many penned animals. “Think of what this man has done to all of you! And now God has delivered him into our hands!”

“Rosita, he is not worth the cost of your life and freedom should you be accused of his murder!”

“Shoot him!” one of the other women demanded. “Put that pistol against his head and pull the trigger. Blow his brains onto this road and I will dance in them!”

Turner looked up at Rosita, a man who had brought many tears to others now about to cry himself. “Rosita, where is your father? Where is Paco?”

Rosita looked trapped for a moment; then suddenly she chuckled in a grim manner. “I wanted his advice on how to help these women escape, so I went to him and said, ‘Father, may I pick your mind?' He said yes…so I did.”

Laughter rippled through the group of women. Turner looked more hopeless by the moment. He eyed the roadside and in his mounting panic seriously considered bolting and running. He did not, being sure that Rosita, who seemed to have turned from an ally to a foe, would shoot him at once.

“What's going on here?”

The voice was Jedd Colter's, and Emma knew it the moment she heard it. Drawing in her breath and holding it reflexively, she turned and saw the man she had come close to marrying looking down at her from his horseback perch. He looked at her as if he could never tear his eyes away, a surreal feeling overwhelming him. He managed to smile. “Hello, Emma.”

She felt the world swim around her and collapsed. Jedd snapped out of his own foggy sense of momentary unreality, dismounted, and went to Emma's side.

“She's just fainted,” said one of the women. “She's had an…unusual day. We all have. Are you law?”

“I'm marshal of Scarlett's Luck. My name's Jedd Colter.” He looked over at Turner, who was on his side in a
very nearly fetal posture, eyes locked on the pistol in Rosita's hand. “Who is he?” Jedd asked.

“His name is Turner. A man who enslaves women so they may be sold to others worse even than he is…and he is the devil himself. If you are law, you should arrest him now and lock him away forever.”

Emma's eyes fluttered open. “Jedd,” she whispered. “Jedd.”

He smiled down at her. “I'm here, Emma. I'm here. With you.”

Tom Buckle got out of his saddle and walked over to Rosita. With a smile and gentle manner, he took the pistol from her. “I'll handle him now,” he said to her, flicking his eyes toward Turner.

“He should hang. He has imprisoned and sold women, and even today he committed murder. He killed a crippled girl in the prison camp where he held us. Him and my own father, who is dead now.”

“Your father…Mexican man, pickaxe through his skull?”

“I put it there. I am not ashamed to confess it.”

“We didn't find the corpse of a crippled girl….”

“They hid her body. There are places they have…. I can find her, probably.”

“We'll probably call on you to do that, miss.”

“I am guilty, too,” Rosita said. “Over time I have helped my father and that one there with their evils.”

“Then I'm guessing you'll prove mighty handy when it's time for evidence to be spoken in court against them.”

“It will be my honor to do that.”

“And the same for all of us,” said a woman who so far had not spoken.

Turner leaped up then, a sudden and amazingly agile move by a man who saw the evil life he'd built about to crash around him. His quick movement caught Tom Buckle by surprise, and before he knew it, Turner had wrenched the pistol from his grasp. He leveled it at Buckle's head, swore and called Buckle a “dead lawman,” and was about to pull the trigger when Jedd Colter's
big Dragoon boomed and put a slug through his temple. Turner was dead before he hit the ground. It was Buckle who noticed something falling from Turner's pocket as he dropped. It was, of all things, a human ear. Severed, and with a notch missing from it.

As they realized that Turner was truly dead, the women, every one of them, wept in shock combined with wild joy.

T
he divorce caused a scandal, as divorces will, but Emma survived it well. Stanley Wickham did not. When word of his offenses came out, his reputation hit the ground faster than had Rand Blalock's horse. Wickham's business suffered, a circumstance that allowed other merchants such as Wilberforce Sadler to move in to fill the void. Wilberforce's success was short-lived, though, because word leaked out that he had been prepared earlier on to go into business with the discredited Wickham. So toxic was Wickham's reputation that it poisoned Wilberforce Sadler by association, and he, too, saw his stores begin to close, one by one, until only two remained, providing him a living but not the spectacular wealth and influence he and Wickham had dreamed of. As Wilberforce's star faded, though, his brother's rose. Witherspoon Sadler launched a series of stores of his own, beginning small and avoiding the use of the Sadler name. Witherspoon Mining Supply and General Mercantile became a presence in almost every town in the mining districts, and the gentle kindliness, honesty, and excellent reputation of Witherspoon Sadler only bolstered the enterprise. Time rolled by and Witherspoon became one of California's most successful and
beloved public figures. His 1852 marriage to a widow named Rachel McCall was the social event of the year, attended by people ranging from the highest state dignitaries to the most common miners and grassroots citizens whose patronage was what made his business interests thrive.

Jedd and Emma Colter were honored guests, their arrival at the wedding reception heralded so loudly that Jedd reddened in embarrassment and had to fight not to visibly shirk away from the applause.

Even though he was still serving in the humble role of town sheriff of Scarlett's Luck, Jedd was becoming a famous name not only in California but across the nation. The reason was his fictionalization in a series of cheap novels by the young writer Crozier Bellingham, who had planned to write a major, serious novel of the gold fields but instead settled for more lurid fare. Had they been published only a few years later, the series of fast-paced adventures of
Jedd Colter: Gold Country Marshal
would have been called dime novels, and in fact, dime novel editions of the books were published throughout the 1860s. Jedd read only the first of them, and though the stories departed vastly from the facts of the real Jedd Colter's life, Jedd had to admire the clever way Bellingham incorporated the themes, if not the actual facts, from his life into his whole-cloth fiction. The most popular Jedd Colter novel, for example, was
Jedd Colter and the Diamonds of Finnegan Hall
. Bringing up second place in the roster of popularity was
Jedd Colter and the Ring of Slavers
.

Of all the Colter stories, however, none was more lurid and violent than
Jedd Colter and the Murderous Axeman.
It was also the Colter story most closely tied to fact, telling an only slightly fictionalized account of Jedd Colter's teaming up with a visiting marshal from North Carolina, named Campbell, to track down a man named Collier who had murdered an entire family over an old feud back in Carolina. Collier had left the body of the father of the family horribly mutilated. He had fled to California in a quest for gold and, he hoped, to escape
from having to pay for his crime, but Campbell trailed him all the way across the country. In California, the Carolina lawman teamed up with Jedd Colter, gold country marshal, and the pair tracked down and fatally punished Collier for his brutal crime.