ANGEL FALLS

 

A Frontier Epic of Love & War

Derek Catron

 

 

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

ANGEL FALLS. Copyright © 2017 by Derek Catron. Second edition. Copyright © 2022 by Derek Catron. Minorca Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

SECOND EDITION

 

 

CHAPTER 1

 

Annabelle Rutledge heard the big miner plod into the store before she saw him.

His boots fell heavy against the pine board floors. Without looking she knew she would have to sweep again. The miners tracked in so much mud from Virginia City’s gold-laced streams it was a wonder the town’s surrounding hills hadn’t been worn to rocky nubs.

Her eyes flickered past the errand boy from Kessler’s brewery who stood at the counter, and she took in Clawson’s burly figure. He stood before a row of shelves filled with canned goods. His head bobbed like a grazing buffalo, but his dull eyes never left her.

Annabelle took her pencil to Kessler’s shopping list. The boy was illiterate, so she showed him her mark next to each item on the list and where she had packed it in the boxes on the counter. The boy nodded as if he could read the words. He smiled at her diligence, grateful, she suspected, for being saved a cuffing if he failed to return with everything.

Clawson cleared his throat with an animal grunt until she met his gaze.

“I’ll be with you in a moment.” She forced a smile she hoped struck as cold as the winds off Montana’s snow-capped peaks and returned her attention to the boy and calculating the bill. Gold was the region’s currency since its discovery in Alder Gulch in 1863. A dollar’s pinch of dust could buy a man a dance and a drink at one of the hurdy-gurdy houses. Annabelle wondered what two dollars might procure, but she never asked. The trip west after the war had shed many of her conceptions about what constituted good manners, but vestiges of her Charleston decorum endured.

While she completed the tally, the boy fingered a set of tools her father had purchased that morning from a miner headed back east. Years of hard labor in the gulch had left the man richer in experience than in the pocket. Optimism gleamed like gold in the boy’s eyes, and she recalled the words an old man once spoke to her. “A young man’s hope will outlive any run of disappointments.”

She smiled, recalling the Union cavalry officer who’d led her family’s wagon train most of the way from Omaha. The Colonel—no one dared call him by his given name—was laid up at Fort Phil Kearny near the Bighorn Mountains, wounded in a battle with Indians. She missed his avuncular wisdom, but he had never been a miner, and life in the goldfields might have tested his aphorism.

The boy hefted a pick in his soft hands while she completed the invoice. “You have a mind for staking a claim, do you?”

“Yes ma’am.”

Annabelle intended her query as a jape, for the boy was too slight by half to work as a placer miner. Seeing his earnestness, she knew he meant what he said. Thousands of miners had rushed to the area, pulling millions of dollars from the creeks and hillsides in the past three years. With the war’s end, even more settlers came. By the time Annabelle and her extended family had arrived two months earlier, intent on rebuilding their fortunes as shopkeepers in a boomtown, Virginia City stood as capital of the country’s newest territory.

“I’m saving my money to buy a stake,” the boy said. Pride showed in the set of his jaw.

“It’s hard work.”

Early arrivals told of scooping a pan into the stream, swirling the water over the edge to carry away the sand, and walking away with enough gold in the bottom of their pan to buy dinner. It was no longer so easy. Deposits lay as many as twelve to twenty feet below the creek’s surface, making for backbreaking work even for men as big as Clawson.

He moved to hover over Annabelle and the boy, his frame casting a shadow across them and the shelves behind. Standing so close, Annabelle choked on the stench of dried sweat and dead animal. She had been ill that morning, and her stomach roiled at his odor. She stepped behind the counter to give herself space as he loomed over the boy.

“If you’re not going to buy those tools, why don’t you skedaddle?” he said, his face splitting into a grimace Annabelle figured was supposed to be a smile. Clawson was a powerful man, the muscles in his shoulders and back bulging beneath his cotton shirt. Such a man would have unnerved Annabelle once, but she had endured too much in her twenty-five years to quake before anyone in the store that bore her family’s name.

After her husband’s disappearance during the war, she oversaw a plantation. She mourned the deaths of two brothers and made the decision on her own to sell out and finance her family’s trek west with enough goods to start a business. Not everyone had survived the journey through disputed Indian lands, but those who did were made stronger by the experience.

“Wait your turn or go,” she snapped.

Clawson scowled at the boy and cleared his throat with a menacing rumble.

The boy took the hint. “I need to get,” he told Annabelle, his eyes turned up toward Clawson. “Mr. Kessler will tan my hide if I’m gone too long.”

He swept the packed boxes from the counter, staggered a moment beneath their weight, and shuffled toward the French doors, leaving Annabelle alone with Clawson.

*****

The look Clawson gave her brought to mind a man who sits down to a steak dinner after a week of hardtack. He often visited the store but rarely purchased anything. He came instead to look over the wares, including Annabelle—appraising her dark hair and lithe figure as if she were for sale like one of the girls in the town’s many sporting houses.

Annabelle sighed. She was accustomed to unwanted attention from men, but she found it especially burdensome since Josey had left.

Josef Anglewicz, known even in these parts as Josey Angel, had been the wagon train’s scout but became much more to Annabelle. She had mocked him the first time she saw him; wearing four pistols and a rifle slung over his shoulder, he looked to her like a boy playing bandit. That was before she had seen him use those guns.

She didn’t doubt Josey loved her. For the six weeks he stayed with her while they recuperated from the trail, she knew the kind of love she’d convinced herself existed only in fairy tales and poetry. Then Josey left, gone to retrieve the Colonel, he said. Annabelle wondered if he would return. They’d exchanged harsh words before their parting. Well, she had spoken harshly. Annabelle had never known Josey to speak that way. A man who worked a Henry rifle the way he did had little use for sharp words.

No, Josey just brooded. And left. Which was worse. Because when Josey Angel came into the store, even men like Clawson stood back. Now nothing forestalled Clawson’s attention. His eyes took her in head to foot and lingered at what lay between.

“Do you want anything?”

Another grimace-smile split Clawson’s wide face, his lips thick and wet behind a beard so coarse it brought to mind a buffalo snout. The gears in what passed for the machinery of his animal mind were grinding their way toward a clever retort, and Annabelle regretted her choice of words. “Be careful what you say next if you ever want to shop here again.”

He nodded, but his expression hadn’t changed. He pointed to the shelf over her shoulder. “Are those peaches?”

Annabelle didn’t have to look to know the cans were marked. “That’s what it says.”

“I like peaches.” He smacked his lips for emphasis. “I’ll take those.”

Annabelle knew his mind—it wasn’t hard to figure. The peaches he pointed to were on the top shelf. She would need the ladder her father kept behind the counter to reach them, providing her uncouth customer a generous view of her bustle as she did so. She would have laughed at the pathetic ploy if she hadn’t thought Clawson would be charmed by her reaction. Not for the first time she saw the parallel between the attentions of men and those of a dog begging at the dinner table. His mouth was open as she reached for the ladder—and stopped.

“Let me see your money first.”

His snout glistening in the light from the windows, Clawson drew a gold nugget from the pocket of his vest. Nuggets were rare for placer miners. A gold nugget the size of a silver dollar carried a value of two hundred-fifty dollars. This one, the size of Annabelle’s smallest fingernail, was worth about twenty. Finding such a nugget could make a man feel full of sand.

“You can make change, I expect.”

“No doubt.”

Her fingers twined around the ladder’s side rail. She turned her back to him, feeling his eager eyes on her. She placed one foot on the ladder’s bottom rung—and stopped. “Oh, look. I have some peaches here.” She drew out an identical can from a lower shelf and placed it on the counter. “That will be one dollar.”

His eyes hardened, and Annabelle turned cautious at the anger she sensed. Stupid men were the most dangerous of all. His voice thundered. “I don’t want those peaches.” He pointed to the top shelf. “I want those.”

Annabelle spoke in the soothing tone she would use on a skittish horse. “All right. Just a moment.”

She’d had her fun. Now he would have his. No harm would come from looking. He could brag about it later to the boys at the faro table before he lost the rest of his money. She climbed the ladder, mindful of her long skirt and heeled shoes. She extended her arm toward the peaches. Just as her fingers wrapped around the can, something pushed against the fabric of her dress.

“I aim to get my money’s worth.”

His voice was hoarse and throaty. Annabelle felt cool air against her leg as he hiked up her skirt and petticoats past the knee. Her breath caught as his callused hand, rough as a bristle brush and cold as iron, raked across the bare skin above her stockings.

“It’s warm in here,” he said.

Annabelle closed her eyes against his touch, her body rigid, feeling his fingers reach higher. She balanced against the ladder with one hand. With the other she reached into the pocket sewn into the right-side seam of her skirt. His thick fingers snagged in her garters as he stretched for more. Annabelle shuddered, her spine arcing so she had to grasp the ladder to maintain her balance. Her free hand took hold of something else, just as Clawson’s coarse fingers extended toward their objective.

“Looking for this?”

The derringer had been designed for pockets. While the single-barrel pistol could fire only once and was difficult to reload, Annabelle was confident she wouldn’t need a second lead ball at this range.

Clawson fell back against the counter. Annabelle descended from the ladder, keeping the pistol’s front sight lined up with his wide chest. With her free hand she rearranged her skirt and petticoats, never taking her eyes from him.

“It looks like a child’s toy,” she said, “but this was the very type of gun that killed Abraham Lincoln. Isn’t it funny to think what trouble such a small gun can cause?”

The miner didn’t laugh as he retreated around the counter. “I meant no harm,” he whined, raising his hands in a defensive gesture.

“You should learn to keep those to yourself.” The memory of his hands against her skin brought the taste of bile to her throat. I should shoot him just to teach all these miners a lesson.

She might have pulled the trigger, but she couldn’t remember when she had loaded the derringer and worried that moisture in the tube might prevent it from firing. Josey had warned her about keeping guns clean. How many mornings had she watched him clean his rifle and revolvers before he would do anything else?

With the counter between them, Clawson found courage in her hesitation. “Put that away. You wouldn’t shoot a man.”

“The last man I held a gun on thought the same thing. He was my husband.”

Confusion washed over Clawson’s snout. “I didn’t know you were married.”

“I’m not any longer.” She lifted the gun with both hands so he could see into the barrel as she pulled back the hammer. “Do you see my point?”

 

CHAPTER 2

 

Josey rode hard the first day out from Virginia City. He stopped to sleep for a few hours when the moonless sky grew so dark he feared his gray Indian pony might stumble and break a leg. He rose before dawn, maintaining a measured pace to spare the horse but determined to spend another full day in the saddle. The farther he got from her, he figured, the clearer he would think.

The Yellowstone River was low and flowed so slow cottonwoods growing along its banks reflected against the water like a shimmering canvas. Branches showed through in places. Soon the trees would be bare. It had snowed once already, and the weather could turn again at any time in the mountains. He told himself that was the reason for his haste. He had to get to the Colonel while time remained to get back before winter set in. If he rode far enough, he might believe it.

The day turned warm so long as he kept out from the shade. At times the trail left the river and wound into the hills. The grass was brown and dry. Mottled with dark sage and other brush, fields and hills rolled all the way to the mountains. Josey enjoyed riding through an emptiness where his thoughts could roam, and the only sounds were the plodding footfalls of his horse and the flap of the wind as it whipped across the plains. Yet even here his thoughts felt crowded. He rode on.

By dusk he was falling asleep in the saddle. If he’d been more alert, he would have seen the fire’s orange glow against the boulder in the cleft between two bluffs. He’d hoped to avoid other travelers as well as Indians. Before he could turn clear, a voice called out.

“Hey stranger. Why don’t you come sit by our fire before you fall off of that horse?”

Josey eased his mount toward the sound of the voice. A man, bowed under the weight of years and the bucket he carried from the river, watched him from the shadows among the rocks. A set of white whiskers ringed the old-timer’s round face like a halo encircling the moon.

“That’s kind of you, but …”

The man spit, a messy, wet sound. “Rather have you ’round our fire t’where we can see a friendly face than wonder where you are in the dark.”

Josey didn’t need to see to know the man was heeled. Probably had his hand on the grip of a revolver, just in case the strange rider proved a threat. Josey dismounted and approached. “That’s an invitation a man can’t refuse.”

The old-timer’s face stretched into almost a perfect circle when he smiled. He spit while he waited for Josey, tobacco juice leaving a stain against the gleaming whiteness of his beard, like piss in the snow. He introduced himself. Josey forgot the name the moment he heard it. “Josef Anglewicz,” he replied with a nod and a touch to his broad-rimmed hat.

The old-timer’s rheumy eyes rolled past Josey and the twin gun belts he wore at his waist and settled on the rifle butt extending from the saddle scabbard at his horse’s side. “That be Josey Angel to friends?”

“That’s how most men say it.”

The man hooted like he’d won at faro. He treated Josey to another full-moon smile and spit again, more stains on the snow. “We ain’t got much, just some beans and bacon I’m stirring up, but you’re welcome to join us. I’d sleep easier with that rifle of yours in our camp.”

Josey forced a smile. “I’d be obliged.”

The others returned to camp after seeing to their horses and pack mules. There were four of them, younger men, closer to Josey’s age. Two looked like brothers. They appraised Josey while the old-timer made introductions.

“I thought you’d be bigger,” said the older brother, standing to his full height so he could look down on Josey.

“I thought he’d be older,” the other said, hanging back a bit and not meeting Josey’s gaze.

The old man ignored them. “They say he shot fifty Indians at Crazy Woman Creek this summer. Held off the entire Sioux nation and saved an army patrol.”

Josey shook his head. “Wasn’t like that.”

Humility fueled their curiosity. “What was it like?” one of the brothers asked.

“Yeah. If it weren’t fifty, how many did you kill?”

Josey looked away. Someone always had to ask, like it was a card game and somebody was keeping score. In a fight, Josey didn’t think so much as react. He aimed. He fired. He levered in another round and aimed again. There wasn’t time to see what happened after the first shot. Any corpses left afterwards weren’t his to claim. They belonged to God. Josey had learned His appetite for slaughter was insatiable.

“Enough,” he said.

They liked that answer, and Josey regretted saying anything. A vague response permitted their imagination to fill in the account. The next time he heard the story it might be three score or more dead Indians. People were always eager to build up a man—until they were ready to take him down. Those like the old-timer praised a man so they could feel bigger for knowing him. He’d be swapping stories of Josey Angel for the rest of his life. There was no harm in it, least not for him. He might even get a few free drinks if he told the stories well enough.

The harm came when the stories grew too big for some men. Men who felt small in the hearing of them. Men who could see no way to feel better about themselves than by killing the man from the stories. It was one of the reasons Josey first came west. Stories from the war had spread so far he couldn’t go into a town without drawing a challenge from someone looking to make his own reputation. Josey hadn’t been able to outrun the old stories, and when some of those were forgotten, new ones replaced them. He worried about the next time someone heard one of the stories and decided to test their truth. There would always be a next time.

Leaving the fire to tend to his horse, Josey unsaddled the gray gelding and picketed it on a loose tether so it could graze. The night breeze carried some of the old man’s words. He was telling the others about Griswoldville. Yankees loved that story. The numbers were big, and a partisan storyteller left out the parts of how the Georgia militia by then was mostly boys and their grandpas. Josey brushed the horse down, losing himself in the task.

At supper, he learned his hosts were miners who’d seen the elephant. They’d been working the stream near Nevada City, finding just enough dust to nurture a flicker of hope before time and backbreaking labor snuffed even that. The brothers were first to pull up stakes.

“Got a letter from our ma,” the younger brother said. He had the lean face of a boy who’s known too much hard work on an empty stomach. “Our pa’s sick.”

“We’re needed on the farm,” the other said, his hard look a challenge to anyone who thought to contradict the account. They weren’t quitting. Their ma needed them.

Josey knew enough of mining not to begrudge the “gobacks” who abandoned the camps. For every man who hit a strike, hundreds like these poured their sweat into an unyielding earth.

“Where are you headed?” the younger brother asked.

“Phil Kearny,” Josey answered. He explained that his friend remained behind at the fort.

“Is he a invalid?”

Josey choked. The Colonel was an old man, but he would have shot anyone who suggested he was a cripple in his presence. “No. He was wounded in the Indian attack and had to lay up at the fort while we continued.”

The old-timer nodded, like he knew that part of the story. “Why didn’t he just come along with another wagon train? Why do you have to go back for him?”

Josey chewed on his beans. He’d heard the question before. “Because I promised him I would.”

After eating, Josey returned to his horse. “You’ll be warmer by the fire,” the old-timer called.

“I’ll sleep better knowing the horse is fine.”

“Suit yourself. Hope we don’t find you scalped in the morning.”

Josey waved an appropriate salute. The stars were out, and in the absence of the moon they sparkled like icy snow in the sunlight. Had it been any brighter, Josey would have helped himself to some coffee and pressed on.

By rising early, he figured he could be on his way before the others woke. It was at least a six-day ride to the fort, and the miners would slow him down. Worse, they would ask more questions, want to talk about things he’d crossed the country to forget.

The Colonel called him a misanthrope, partly because he liked to think Josey didn’t know the word’s meaning. Josey understood it well enough not to dispute the label. A few years spent watching those around him die and hiding from strangers who would shoot him on sight had eroded Josey’s regard for his fellow man.

He came to see war as God’s way of culling the herd, something every generation had to endure until the horror and waste sated its bloodlust. God demanded a sacrifice, and Josey did his part to see it done. More than his part. The Colonel said he possessed a rare clarity of thought when everything around him was going to hell. Plenty of soldiers shot targets as well as Josey, but it was different when bullets flew back. Instead of panicking, Josey found a focus in those moments—along with feelings he didn’t like to admit, even to himself.

The Colonel called it a gift. The gift, to Josey’s mind, was the sixteen-shot Henry his father gave him when Josey left for war. The repeating rifle meant Josey could keep firing while everyone around him stopped to reload. That was his gift, he told the Colonel.

Gift or blessing, Josey’s skill came at a price. He had no hope for quelling the nightmares. Not until he met Annabelle. In surviving their journey west together, Josey discovered more to live for than he’d ever expected to have again. Yet some days, even when he was with her, his mind cast about for something lost and forgotten. She was angry with him for leaving to fetch the Colonel. He didn’t have the words to make her understand why he had to go back. Even if he could explain himself to her, he wasn’t sure that he should.

Josey led his horse a short distance uphill from the camp. He hoped he would be warm enough with his thick buffalo-skin blanket. As he settled in he recalled another starry night on the trail when Annabelle came to him wearing nothing but a thin cotton gown. He recalled the feel of her warm body pressed against his. The way her dark eyes lit up whenever she saw him. No one else in the world looked like that on seeing him. He tried shutting his mind to the memories. He’d find no sleep chasing such a line of thought. Then, worse, he pictured her dressed for one of those fancy balls people liked in Virginia City, dancing with the newspaperman she’d met. Josey didn’t dance. He’d been glad there’d been someone to take his place when the dancing started. He wasn’t so glad now that he was gone and the newspaperman was still there.

It was a fitful sleep with such thoughts in his head, yet Josey drifted off, his mind freed from Griswoldville and Crazy Woman Creek and the effort to separate fact from the stories that were told. He pondered new philosophies. If none of the stories we tell ourselves are true, then anything we choose to believe should seem real enough. He wished the Colonel was around to chew on that with him.

*****

The raised voice of one of the miners woke Josey later than he’d intended.

“They’ve got our mules!”

Josey rolled to his rifle and was up in an instant. He liked to clean and reload his guns first thing in the morning, but it was habit more than necessity. He levered in a cartridge and went to his horse, the sound of pounding hooves coming from near the campsite.

Clambering to higher ground, Josey saw two Indians atop the next bluff, surrounded by four mules. One of the horsemen dismounted and inspected the forelock of his pony. Josey couldn’t see the miners, but he heard them giving chase.

“His horse is hurt. We can catch them!”

Bad idea.

Two riders—they looked like the brothers—scrambled up the ridge toward the Indians. Their big horses struggled for footing in a scree. Loose stones tumbled down the slope. The Indians watched, even the one who was supposed to be worried about his pony. Before the miners drew within range for their revolvers, the Indians remounted and disappeared over the far side.

Don’t chase after them.

The riders crested the hill. They spun their horses around at the top, maybe looking for signs of where the Indians had gone, maybe gathering courage. Josey hoped it was time enough for their wits to catch up with them. The other two young miners were mounted and climbing the ridge after them.

Josey looked east. The sun wasn’t up, but he saw mountains silhouetted against a gray sky. There wasn’t enough light to tell if the gray rose from clouds or morning haze. Even if he could maintain his pace, he was still days out from the fort. He saddled his horse and wished he were on his way.

“I see ’em!”

One of the riders—it looked like the older brother—pointed and urged his horse in the direction the Indians had gone. For a moment Josey thought the younger brother might hold his position, that he might return to the relative safety of the camp, but the hesitation was just the time it took him to bring his horse under control. He followed after his brother.

Josey slipped his rifle into the scabbard. He tied both gun belts around his waist. They were heavy and made walking awkward, but a man need only try loading a black powder revolver once under fire to determine he couldn’t have too many guns. Josey led his horse to the campsite.

The old-timer was there, as agitated as a squirrel in a wolf den. “I told them the mules weren’t worth it. They said they were all they had left, and they wouldn’t go home empty-handed.”

Josey walked to the edge of the camp. It was far enough removed from the bluff to provide good sightlines. Boulders on the backside provided a natural screen. He tethered his horse there and drew out his rifle. An old log the brothers had used for a bench the night before lay by the firepit. Josey dragged it to the edge of the clearing and sat down.

The old man wore a gun belt and paced the campsite. He stopped at each of the places where the men had slept to sort through clothes and bedding. “I can’t find my powder flask. It was here last night.”

Josey watched how the man’s hands shook. “Won’t be time to reload, anyway,” he said. He turned away so he wouldn’t have to see the old man quake.

They didn’t have to wait long. An explosion of gunshots echoed over the hill. Too many to count, then silence. Another shot. A few more seconds of quiet. Another shot. Then nothing.

Josey looked back to the old man. At least he was still. He nodded toward the man’s holstered gun. “I hope you know how to use that thing.”

Josey slid down from the log and lay behind it. He inhaled, a tang of pine on the still air. He tested the sightlines again with his rifle. Its wooden stock felt warm in his hands, like a living thing. A meadowlark fluted, invisible in the field. Pounding hoofbeats, like the roll of thunder, drowned out the bird’s call. Their rhythmic beat drew nearer. Josey waited, his mind as clear and cool as the snow-fed streams from the mountains.

Buy “Angel Falls” by CLICKING HERE!