Alder Gulch

Ernest Haycox

• Publisher: Borodino Books
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781789120165
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

BLAZIN' JUSTICEVirginia City, Montana. Gold fever struck hard in 1863, with miners pannin' for nuggets up and down the length of nearby Alder Gulch. But a gang of guntoughs was ridin' them roughshod. With the law lookin' the other way, the sidewinders dealt out hot lead for a man shippin' his poke or even carryin' gold dust for his grubstake.Jeff Pierce had been on the hard dodge since Portland, until he staked his claim at Alder Gulch. As a favor, he carried another miner's poke through the forty miles of danger to Bannack, only to find that the scummy gunhawks had filled the old-timer with buckshot. Now the varmints had Pierce as a marked man. The gang was fixin' for a showdown, but they'd be a mite less cocky if they knew the charge he was up for—murder!"Ernest Haycox is a master and ALDER GULCH is one of his best."—Dallas Times Herald

NINE—THE JUNGLE BEASTS GROWL

By night the revels of Virginia City rolled up-Gulch in warm waves of sound; yet for two weeks Pierce never left the boundaries of his claims.

At times he was his own great puzzle, troubled by the lack of order in him and the lack of meaning in the world around him; and when these times came a black cape seemed to envelop him in blind bitter solitude, to make him feel as though he were the only living thing on the planet, with all the forces of the earth, impersonal and relentless, seeking to destroy him. It was a game of survival—one man against the gods. Survival was the one hard and fast law.

Now and then, in his unguarded moments, he caught the vague intimations of other patterns of life and when that happened he put his whole mind to the search, reaching out and out to capture those elusive things that might be. For a moment he heard the sound of them and caught the shadowed color of them; afterwards they vanished, to leave him more thoroughly alone with his dominating memory of the destruction of his mother and the scattering of his people by the brute savagery of the world.

It was this memory which made him hate the forces pushing against him and, hating them, resist and defy them. To survive.

He threw himself into his work single-mindedly, rising before light came to the Gulch and falling asleep long after night dropped down. This was the only way he knew by which to dissipate an energy which drove him so hard. Some of the prospectors along the wall of the gulch got together to build a flume which would carry water from the upper creek along the face of the Gulch shoulder and thereby do away with the hard job of packing pay dirt to the creek. He joined them and built the flume to his own side-canyon; he rigged up a sluice box, shoveling pay dirt into the sluice and turning water from flume to sluice. At the end of the week, when he cleaned out the riffles of the sluice box, he had five hundred and forty dollars of dust.

During the second week he moved over to work Barney Morris’ claim. This was an obligation. The dead man’s hand held him and the dead man’s instructions bound him. Half of the gold from that claim went to him, and the other half to Mary Morris, Centerville, Ohio. Sometimes at night, just before falling into dreamless sleep, he thought about Barney Morris, widow two thousand miles away who depended on a man she had never met—and at that moment the hint of a better reason for life touched him with its softness, and went away.

During the middle of the first week A. J. Oliver came up to see him. “That eight thousand dollars you brought into the Bannack office is still there. The toughs know about it, of course. They won’t try to lift it out of the safe but the moment I start it to Salt Lake they’ll stage a holdup on the road.”

“How’d they find out?”

Oliver gave him a gray side-glance. “They hear everything. It leaks out from places you wouldn’t expect. You don’t know with whom you’re talking in this camp. I thought I’d wait until a good strong caravan of freighters started from Bannack and send the gold with them.”

“Probably they’re waiting for that,” said Pierce. “Eight thousand is worth waiting for. I wouldn’t do it, Oliver. I’d let it stay in the safe. About a month from now let’s drop the news around that you’ve already smuggled it out. Might throw them off guard. Then we’ll figure a way.”

“You can’t be the man to do it,” said Oliver. “If you show up in Bannack the toughs will catch on.”

“We’ll do it through somebody else.”

“All right,” agreed Oliver. As he turned down the Gulch he stopped to add, “You know they’ve got you on the black list don’t you?”

“Yes,” said Jeff. “I know.”

There were no secrets in the Gulch. News traveled from Summit to Junction with the wind, seeming to need no human carrier. Everybody knew the toughs had him on the list. But it was strange how this same news brought him friends. There was, it appeared, an underground wire for the honest ones. During the latter part of the first week Parris Pfouts, one of the new merchants in the Gulch, came up along the diggings. All he said in the beginning was, “You’re Pierce, aren’t you? I’m Parris Pfouts.” Then he stood by, idle in the sun and not making much out of the visit; yet Pierce felt the survey of the man and the following judgment. Presently Pfouts added, “Barney Morris was a particular friend of mine. I hated to see him go. Any ideas on who did that?”

“Yes,” said Pierce, “I know who did it.” He kept on working. Pfouts remained indolent under the warming sun, not pressing the subject. He was, Pierce realized, wise enough to know that a direct question would be out of order. In this country men were close-mouthed before strangers, and so far he and Pfouts were still strangers. Pfouts simply said, “There will come a time of reckoning.”

“There was a time of reckoning,” answered Pierce, “when you had Lyons and Stinson and Forbes cold with the goods. But the boys were washed out on a flood of tears. It is too late now. The toughs have the whip.” Pfouts said, “I have seen toughs before who had the whip. But they always used it too hard. And then they got wiped out.”

“Not until this Gulch quits voting on tears. The strong and the smart always run things, Pfouts.”

“I agree. The strong and the smart—and the honest.”

“Maybe.”

Pfouts smiled. “I heard you were considerable of a hard one. Don’t believe in much, do you?”

“Not too much.”

Pfouts moved upgrade to drop a word with Archie Caples on the adjoining claim; and later returned to Virginia City. This was on Thursday. On Friday, moving in much the same casual manner, Jim Williams appeared on a beautiful bay gelding and paused at the sluice box. Williams was near Pierce’s age, a broad-chested and muscular young man with a dark and gentle face. His ragged mustache ran down around his mouth and fell into equally ragged chin whiskers and his eyes were a melancholy brown. He rested his arms on the saddle horn and, as Pfouts had done, took his time to estimate Pierce. “That flume,” he observed, “saves a lot of work.”

“Yes,” said Pierce.

“I heard a piece of talk in town this morning,” went on Jim Williams. “Ketchum opened his mouth in Tanner’s and some brave words fell out. Your name was with the words. It is none of my business, of course.”

“Thanks,” said Pierce. He stopped his work and met Jim Williams’ glance, and for a little while they frankly swapped inspections. This Williams was no talker. Pierce had met him before in Virginia City and had observed that he always kept in the background of a group, and yet he had also observed that Oliver and Pfouts and the substantial men of the district always liked to have Jim Williams’ opinion. He was that kind of man, reserved and thoughtful; with an underlying sadness or pessimism strongly influencing his character. Pierce said, “Pfouts came up to drop a hint yesterday. He is too optimistic about law and order.”

“There will be no law and order,” said Jim Williams in a half-asleep manner, “until things get a good deal worse.”

“The pack,” said Pierce, “always follows the strong side.”

“How many men does it take to make a strong side?” murmured Jim Williams.

“One man is enough,” said Pierce. “One man against the whole damned world—if he’s not afraid of dying.”

Williams made a brief nod of his head and then he smiled. Pierce answered that smile and at that instant these two knew each other well, and trusted each other completely. Williams reined around and trotted down the Gulch.

Two days afterwards, near twilight, Pierce noticed Rube Ketchum move up the Gulch on the opposite side of the creek and pass by, neither looking toward him nor showing curiosity. Yet that lack of curiosity was itself a warning and after he had finished supper Pierce took his shotgun and blankets and climbed the ridge of the side-canyon and made camp in the brush. He repeated this the following nights. On Friday of the second week, again near dusk, Ollie Rounds and Ben Scoggins appeared before his small supper fire.

“We were having a drink in The Senate,” said Scoggins cheerfully, “and we thought of you. Seemed natural to pay a visit. Ain’t seen you for ten days or so.”

Day after day with himself dawn to dark, he had begun to turn sour. There was a limit to a man’s loneliness, a time when cabin fever, or its Gulch equivalent, began to turn his nerves ragged and to canker his disposition. He was genuinely pleased to see them and threw an extra chunk of alder on the fire. Scoggins and Rounds dismounted and settled by the blaze. Rounds said, “You smoke these things,” and offered Pierce a cigar. The three men lounged back and let the silence run...All up and down the Gulch firelights burned from claim to claim, and traffic went scratching and gritting along the gravel bars and voices kept calling. The hum of Virginia moved at them, the steady muted mixture of music and man-noise; and now and then a shot broke sharp-edged through and above this racket. Day’s heat slowly lifted from the Gulch, replaced by coolness.

Pierce said, “I heard about that sardine venture, Ben. You’re a damned Yankee trader. What’s next?”

“Well,” said Ben Scoggins, “I hauled lumber from Bannack for couple three days until I got my bearings. Met a fellow over by Bannack last week who was busted down with a load of flour he’d freighted in from Salt Lake. So I made a dicker and brought the flour up the Gulch.”

“Sell it?”

Ben Scoggins laughed aloud. “Buyin’ and sellin’s my business. I sold out before I got to Central. There ain’t enough of anything in this country.”

Rounds pointed out a possibility: “Population around here doubles every week. If you’d held that flour a month, Ben, you’d gotten more for it.”

Scoggins shook his head. “Always take a profit when you see it. Keep turnin’, keep goin’. The fellow that holds is a speculator, and speculators always go busted. Buy and sell.”

Pierce remarked, “You were in the flour business. Now you’re out of it. What’s next?”

“I bought a corner on Jackson Street. Puttin’ up a store building. Sent to Salt Lake for a stock of general merchandise. Should be open by late July.”

Ollie Rounds, never a restful man, seized a stick and worried the coals of the fire around and around. “You have found your spot. Fifty years from now you’ll be on Fourth of July platforms, talking about the old days of Alder Gulch.”

“No-o,” said Scoggins, coolly making his forecast. “I will ride this wave until I see it about to break. Then I will sell and go. You never saw a mining camp live very long. All these fellows in the Gulch are travelers. They don’t make a country. They don’t stick. If you’re bankin’ on the future go to a country where men bring their families and take up land and start stringin’ fence lines. Where they put up schools and go to tradin’. Traders make towns. Farmers make towns. Grist mills. Boats stoppin’ at a landing make towns. This country ain’t meant for big towns. It is grass and gold country. Gold will go. Grass will stay—and then the cattle will come.” He looked at the other two men with his thoughtful eyes. “Maybe that’s what I’ll do. Take up land for a ranch.”

Ollie Rounds grinned. “You leave that life to the tough fellows, like Jeff here. You stick to your last.”

“A man can have his hankerings,” said Ben Scoggins.

“Yes,” said Ollie Rounds, and lost his humor, “a man can have his hankerings. But if he follows them they’ll lead him to the swamps. Don’t make pretty pictures, Ben. Let fools like me do that.”

Pierce lifted his eyes to thoughtfully appraise Ollie Rounds. Horsemen slashed through the creek’s gravel, bound toward Virginia City in haste. A hundred feet beyond this spot another fire burned large and bright, whereby Archie Caples did his laundry in a half-barrel his knuckles drumming on the corrugated washboard. Virginia’s music came clearer, and died away, and came again. Pierce said, “What are you doing, Ollie?”

“I never do more than I can help.”

Pierce said, “Don’t let the world make a sucker out of you, Ollie. It tries. That’s the only game worth playing—to buck the big tiger trying to destroy all of us. Well, buck it. Don’t let it push you along.”

“Now, now,” said Ollie Rounds, half surprised and half resentful, “no use giving me a lot of fatherly advi...

Table of contents

• Title page
• TABLE OF CONTENTS
• “PIERCE, I’VE GOT TO TAKE YOUR GUN.”
• ONE-ESCAPE
• TWO-THE SECOND FUGITIVE
• THREE-THE WICKED AND THE BOLD
• FOUR-“TAKE ME WITH YOU”
• FIVE-EVIL PROMPTS A MAN
• SIX-TEST OF STRENGTH
• SEVEN-ON THE BANNACK ROAD
• EIGHT-THE WILD BUNCH
• NINE-THE JUNGLE BEASTS GROWL
• TEN-IVES SETS A TRAP
• ELEVEN-DEATH AT BANNACK
• TWELVE-THE BLACK HAT
• THIRTEEN-THE CAPTAIN’S GHOST
• FOURTEEN-LIL ASKS HER QUESTION
• FIFTEEN-TEMPERTON’S PAST
• SIXTEEN-THE TRIAL
• SEVENTEEN-VIGILANTES
• EIGHTEEN-“LET ME LIVE!”
• REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER