The Dead Spend No Gold Page 20

  But it was Patrick’s head that had been pulled away from his body, and even in the distance and the gathering dark, Frank could see blood spurting high into the air. Patrick’s arms moved upward, as if searching for his missing head, then flopped to his sides, like a scarecrow full of straw. Not a man. Not a brother.

  Silence fell on both sides of the river.

  Then the creature disdainfully, almost casually, tossed the body into the water. Still holding Patrick’s head in one hand, it faced the onlookers.

  “Skoooooo! Coooooom!” came the call. It was a challenge. Come across, the creature was saying. Or I will come and get you.

  None of the men took up the challenge. Their cries were not of defiance, but fear. And rising above them all was the forlorn wail of Thomas Whitford as he lost the second of his three sons. He teetered in his saddle and fell, landing with a splash in the soft mud of the riverbank.

  The monster twirled Patrick’s head by his hair, around and around, faster and faster, and then released it to fly far out over the river. For a second, Frank thought it would land at their feet, but it splashed into the deepest part of the river and was carried away.

  * * *

  The remnants of the search party made camp. They had no choice. The rain was coming down even harder than before, if such a thing was possible. There was dry firewood inside the broken ferry building, and the fire they made comforted them for a time, but the wood diminished, the rain increased, and the fire slowly went out.

  The men sat back to back, rifles in their laps, none of them certain whether the gunpowder in the weapons would even fire. They sat in misery, waiting for their doom to come. There was no light, for thick clouds obscured the moon and stars. Frank found that his hearing was enhanced, so the slightest shift in position by one of his companions, the merest brushing of a branch against a tree, was easily discerned. Someone had taken the ferryman’s body down, he noticed.

  Frank spent the evening at his father’s side, watching over him as he slept and listening to the growl of thunder. The image of Patrick being killed ran over and over again in his mind. In a strange way, he was glad that his father wasn’t awake, for he would have wanted to talk about Patrick. Frank wasn’t ready for that yet. He’d been so angry at his brother, and now Patrick was gone. The anger was gone, too, replaced by guilt and grief.

  When Thomas Whitford woke, it was with a howl more bloodcurdling than that of the beast, a scream of pure, unreasoning grief.

  Nor did it stop. Frank tried to console him, but the old man seemed not to know him. Preacher MacLeod stepped in. McLeod was calm in the face of death, consoling the elder Whitford.

  Suddenly, the clearing was filled with light as a giant bolt of lightning flashed across the sky, bringing an acrid odor. Its flash illuminated the ferry derrick, the long chain empty and swinging.

  The Indian girl, Feather, had called the creature a “god.” Could it control the weather? Had the ranchers offended nature itself? It certainly seemed as though everything that could go wrong had gone wrong, that everything in nature was conspiring against them, including the skies, water, and earth.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t the beast doing it, but the Christian God, who had looked down on their sins and was meting out justice.

  In the darkness, Frank had a hard time believing in gods, big or small. We just aren’t important enough, he thought. We don’t deserve either God’s grace or his wrath. Nature and bad luck were against them. There was no larger meaning.

  What about the creature? Frank wondered. It seemed a natural creature, motivated by revenge and territorial instincts. No more mysterious than a grizzly bear or a pack of wolves.

  Then how to explain the girl beside him? Virginia wasn’t a normal girl. There was something extraordinary about her. She seemed neither frightened nor at a loss. She was always focused and resolute, no matter what happened around her. She was eternally vigilant, aware of her surroundings. When Feather called her a Hunter, the description was exactly right. She was a Hunter; a defender. The Canowiki.

  But how could this slim young girl hope to fight that beast? All the grown men in the party were defeated. Frank could see that. She should have been in the center of the circle, surrounded and protected by the men, but instead, she seemed the only one who still had the will to fight. She was the only one standing, waiting for the beast to appear.

  And, because of her spirit, he felt hope, as did Feather and Jean Baptiste, who stood and joined her, waiting for battle. They were slightly apart from the others, in their own little group, as if they intended to take on the beast all by themselves.

  In the midst of the gloom, the rain abruptly stopped. The ranchers lifted their heads, and could make out the trees for the first time. The clouds parted, revealing a full moon, and soon the clearing was filled with soft moonlight. For a moment, all of them felt a glimmer of hope.

  And then, in the middle of the clearing, there stood the beast, as still as a statue.

  The men started firing wildly, those who still had a good load of gunpowder. The moon passed behind the clouds again, and the creature blinked out of sight. There were cries of alarm and at least one shout of pain. Frank thought it likely that one of the shots had gone awry, catching one of the other men in the crossfire.

  When the moon appeared again, the creature didn’t look as though it had moved, and there wasn’t a wound on it. But there were two men sprawled motionless at its feet.

  Dave Martin marched toward the monster, a gun in each hand. He raised his weapons to fire. Darkness descended again and two muzzle flashes lit up the night. When the moonlight returned, half of Martin’s body lay at the beast’s feet, while the creature held Martin’s head and torso in his hands, seeming to stare into the dead man’s eyes.

  Frank aimed at the creature. As if the beast could sense him aiming, it turned its head toward him. Frank saw the intelligence in its gaze. He hesitated. I was wrong, he thought. This is not an animal…this is a thinking being. From that moment on, he saw the beast as a he instead of an it.

  One of the men at the creature’s feet stirred, and with a single stomp, the monster crushed the man’s head, splattering blood and brains across the clearing.

  Frank gulped and his finger twitched. By the time he pulled the trigger, the monster was already moving. Again the moonlight dimmed, and again there were cries of pain.

  Then the creature became visible again. Everyone else had fled. For a moment, it seemed to Frank that he faced the monster alone. And then, as the moon came from behind a cloud, he saw Virginia standing directly in front of the beast. She reached as high as his waist and was about as wide as one of his legs. She was armed only with a bowie knife.

  How can she possibly fight this monster? Frank thought despairingly. He stepped forward, but felt a restraining hand on his arm. He looked down to see Feather shaking her head at him.

  “But we have to help her!” he said. It came out as a whisper.

  “She is the Canowiki,” Feather whispered back. “Thou wilt only be a hindrance to her.”

  Frank looked up at the sky. There wasn’t a cloud in sight. Whatever happened, he would see it all.

  If the monster could have laughed, he surely would have laughed at the sight of the girl brandishing her knife. Yet he did not. He examined her, tilting his head slightly, as if bemused and curious. It was her demeanor that he assessed; she stood as if unmovable, as if she fully intended to defeat him. Therefore, he considered the possibility.

  He swung a massive fist at her head in a motion so fast that Frank caught only the end of the swing and cried out after it was over. Virginia ducked, moving to one side, and yet, she seemed to have barely moved.

  “Skoooooo! Coooooom!” the creature rumbled, and stepped toward her. She ran at him and darted between his legs. Then she climbed onto his back, scrambling upward by using his fur for handholds. He twisted and spun, but her swift blade kept him from dislodging her. Reaching his shoulder, she dug the point of her k
nife into his right arm socket. He gave a bellow and swung at her with his other arm, and almost connected. Virginia leapt away, landing on her feet.

  She ran.

  He lumbered after her, if such a fast movement could be called lumbering. Virginia was ten steps ahead of him, but with every stride, he drew closer. She clambered onto the derrick, swinging on the chain till she could grab one of the struts. There, she adjusted the chain in her hands as she watched the creature approach.

  She waited till he reached the bottom of the chain’s arc before leaping, the chain clutched tight in her small hands as she swooped toward him. The monster grabbed for her and missed, and then she swung past him.

  Swinging round and round, fast and faster, she wrapped the chain around his upper arm, swinging under, then up and over it, until the chain was wrapped securely around the wounded limb. Twice more she swung while the monster howled and tried to catch her. Each time, she avoided his grasp.

  Dropping to the ground, she ran behind the derrick. The Skoocoom turned to chase after her. The other end of the chain was hanging near the top of the structure, and she jumped up and grabbed it. The chain’s slack was quickly taken up as it rushed across the wood with a rurrring sound, and then Virginia was hanging in midair. The creature moved toward her, then suddenly stopped.

  His arm was extended behind him, and slightly upward. As Virginia put her full weight on the chain, it became even tighter. Blood streamed down the creature’s dark fur. The beast’s other hand was only inches from Virginia, but the pain of his bound arm kept him from getting nearer. Virginia turned her head toward her friends, and a signal was passed.

  “Now we help,” Feather said, and she sprinted toward Virginia, followed closely by Jean Baptiste. With one flying leap, Feather caught hold of the chain, adding her slim weight to it…just in time, for the monster had decided that he could stand the pain and was pulling against the chain, his bound arm raised awkwardly behind him. He managed to get within inches of Virginia.

  Then Jean was there, jumping higher than both of the girls and grabbing the chain right above Virginia’s whitened knuckles.

  Now the creature was frantically struggling, howling and spinning around, but instead of freeing himself, he was only getting more tangled. Frank hesitated below the friends, looking for a way to add his weight to theirs, for there was no way he could jump high enough to grab the chain without knocking one of them off.

  He scrambled up the timbers of the derrick, finding handholds where he never would have thought possible, at times bracing himself between the struts, stretched out in midair, amazed he was still aloft.

  He looked up at where the chain passed over the top of the derrick, and as he felt himself slipping, he leapt and grabbed it. His weight pulled the chain down only another couple of inches, but it was enough. If Frank thought the creature was making a racket before, he hadn’t heard anything yet. The deep, booming voice became an ear-splitting scream.

  Suddenly, all the tension on the chain was released. Frank fell, still holding onto the now rapidly sliding chain, and saw, below him, that Virginia and the others had crumpled to the ground. He hurtled toward them and managed to twist himself to one side before he landed on them.

  He hit the ground hard, and couldn’t breathe. He was certain that a splinter had stabbed into his chest, for he felt a heavy weight there.

  The monster is loose! he thought, panicked. He couldn’t move. Then he saw Virginia standing over him, looking concerned. She checked him over for injuries. Finally, she smiled and took his face in her hands. She impulsively kissed him on his forehead.

  “You’ll be fine,” she said, seeming embarrassed.

  As if she had released the bonds around his chest, Frank gulped in a mouthful of air. He gasped for a few moments, then rose to one elbow.

  The beast was nowhere to be seen.

  But hanging above Frank’s head was the monster’s long arm, torn from his shoulder, swinging gently in the wind.

  CHAPTER 18

  The beast’s arm swung from the chain, the breeze scattering drops of blood. Someone took it down, and once it was on the ground, the limb seemed even bigger than it had before, longer than a tall man and nearly as thick around. It was covered in black hair, and the long fingers were clawed. There was dried blood on the hand and up the forearm. The limb had come off at the socket, and bone protruded from amongst the gristle.

  It was flesh and bone, though; that was incontrovertible. That was a relief, for most of the men in the party had begun to believe that it was a demon attacking them, that a creature from Hell itself had risen from the ground to take them away. Dave Martin was barely recognizable. Harold Simmons and Alan Percy were also dead, their bodies torn apart, their heads crushed. The two men wounded in the attack on the Miwok village had been left in the middle of camp while the others scrambled to get away.

  The ranchers were not as joyous at the beast’s defeat as might have been expected, for they were remembering the lost, and fearing repercussions.

  Most of the men were sure that all that had happened was retribution, believing the worst because of their guilt. They all knew, by then, that Indians hadn’t slaughtered the miners. They all realized that they had attacked the wrong people; innocent people, even if they were godless savages. The ranchers were decent folk in their day-to-day lives, but mob fever and gold fever had transformed them into vigilantes.

  Most of the ringleaders were gone. Henry Newton stood alone and uncharacteristically quiet. His men had been wiped out. Thomas was still a pale shadow of himself. Preacher MacLeod, the eldest member of what was left of the search party, seemed to be directing things now.

  If Virginia, Feather, and Jean had been apart from the ranchers before, now the distance was a gulf. Anger burned in Frank until he realized the men weren’t shunning them out of contempt, but out of awe. The distance was attributable to their respect for the trio as much as to their fear of them. To his surprise, Frank was included with the three of them, for the men had seen how he had joined in the attack on the monster.

  They crossed the river at dawn. Partridge and Persimmons lashed the severed arm of the Skoocoom onto one of the spare horses. Three more of the horses were given to Virginia and her companions. Once they were loaded up, though, no one wanted to be the first to brave the river.

  “Well, hell,” Sam Partridge said. “If no one else is gonna do it…”

  He spurred his reluctant horse into the river and crossed the swift current, landing safely near where Patrick’s body lay. The rest followed without incident.

  Thomas Whitford was among the last of the party to cross, and then only because Preacher MacLeod guided him. He didn’t speak; he hadn’t spoken since Patrick’s death the night before. His gaze was directed in front of him, unseeing.

  Frank watched him make it to the far shore, feeling as though he should have been the one leading his father instead of MacLeod. But his father had not responded to him, while, childlike, he would follow simple instructions from MacLeod. From a distance, Frank watched as the old man was helped down from his saddle. Thomas stood over the body of his son. MacLeod pulled a shovel off a packhorse and started digging a grave farther up the bank.

  “I need to help him,” Frank said to the others. “Ready?”

  Virginia nodded. She turned to mount her horse, but hesitated when no one else moved.

  Feather and Jean Baptiste were standing nearby, Jean with his hand on her shoulder.

  “We are not going back,” Feather said. “I have done what I set out to do. I found the Canowiki—and helped her defeat the Skoocoom.” Her eyes found Virginia’s. “I will never live among the white man again.”

  “I’m staying with her,” Jean added.

  Virginia started to object, but hesitated. Finally, she nodded. “I understand. Will you be safe, Jean?”

  “I have been counted as a white man, because that is what I pretended to be, because I mimicked their clothing and speech,” he said. �
�But I spent the first half of my life as an Indian.”

  “Then go with my blessing,” Virginia said. “I wish I were free to seek my own way, but my job is not done. The werewolves of the town must still be dealt with. That isn’t your task; I understand that.”

  She stepped forward and took Feather into her arms. “I will miss you, Feather.”

  “Litonya,” the Indian girl corrected her. “I will no longer answer to the name the white man gave me.”

  Virginia just hugged her tighter. Frank had thought Virginia was small, but when she enveloped the smaller, slimmer Indian girl, it emphasized her strong and healthy body. Jean Baptiste waited his turn for a hug and was rewarded by a big one.

  “Take care of each other,” Virginia said. She turned away and mounted her horse. Frank nodded at the pair, and they waved back. Then they turned and started across the river.

  Preacher MacLeod had dug most of the grave by the time Frank was safe on shore. He took the shovel from Preacher MacLeod’s hands and finished the job. It felt good to put his muscles to work, to sink a pickaxe into the tougher areas of the ground. They put Patrick’s headless torso into the grave and covered him with earth and rocks to keep the wildlife from digging him up. Then the surviving members of the search party stood at the graveside while MacLeod recited the Twenty-third Psalm.

  Frank held his trembling father upright. When the brief ceremony was done, he turned the old man gently, as you would a sleepy child, and helped him mount his horse. MacLeod took the reins and led Thomas away.

  * * *

  Several hours later, Virginia turned aside, pausing on a gentle slope near the Plumas River. There was a green lea there with red wildflowers rimming the edge. The morning dew was turning into a fine mist, and the river flowed by peacefully.

  “Can we stop here for awhile,” Virginia asked, “while the others go on?”