Kindle Edition
Amazon
Amazon
Category:
Western
Publisher: Outlaws Publishing
ISBN-10: B07PFR7RYD
Type: Fiction
Pages: 317
Copyright: Mar. 6, 2019
Price: $0.99 (eBook)
The latest book from the bestselling author of "Mountain Man Zeb Simms."
Zeb Simms was a mountain man, trapper and a scout. Hired first by a missionary to guide himself and his wife into a land of Indians they intended to convert, Simms found himself hired on as a guide to an eastern trader named Jake Styles. Styles had heard a story of an untamed wilderness with riches in abundance and beaver with pelts as white as snow. Styles was intent on reaching this valley deep within what was known as the Unorganized Territory. Simms, however, knew it to be called Colter’s Hell.
Led by Simms, Styles and his small company of men, headed for unknown territory with one thing on their minds, getting rich. A Blackfoot chief named Lame Bull, however, had other plans for the group. His plans included the deaths of them all. Both Styles and Simms managed to escape Lame Bull not once, but twice, and Zeb Simms found that his most dangerous adversary all along was the man who had hired him as a guide, Jake Styles.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
"Get him over there."
Old Dave, as he was known by whites, lay in the street near the sutler's cabin; a sutler being a civilian trader who sells supplies to an army post. He knew his time had come and he was going to visit the Great Spirit, for he had choked up vomit mixed with blood.
Helpless, unable to rise, his eyes looked upward from his bed on the rain-soaked earth, when he felt hands lifting him. A white trapper and two other men carried Dave to a drier patch of ground underneath a lean-to made of scrawny logs, used to keep buffalo hides out of the elements, but empty now. Dave would not be brought inside a building at the fort. He was an Indian.
"I don't want him dying next to my place. You keep him in here," the sutler said nervously. He returned to his store.
"Doc's been sent for," a trapper told Dave. The trapper was dressed in buckskins, and wore a brown fur cap made from the skin of a bobcat, with the animal's preserved head mounted in front.
Doctor Walter Elihu Howe stumbled along the dirt road toward the scene. He was dangerously incompetent when sober. But now he was roaring drunk. "Where's the patent?" He bellowed.
"Right here, Doc," the trapper said.
"What seems to be the problem?" The doctor slobbered, and wiped spittle from his lips with the dirtied cloth arm of his black frock coat.
"Old Dave," the trapper said. "Drank too much again must'a rolled out of that wagon. The rig done ran over his midsection and leg."
Despite the searing pain, Dave did not cry out, or even flinch.
The doctor knelt and inspected the damage, nodded, and slurred his words. "Crushed his leg. We'll have to saw that off. You'll have to help me."
The doctor rummaged through his worn leather medical bag, spilling several metal instruments onto the dirt. He lifted from his bag a small bottle half filled with red whiskey, and took another drink, for courage. "Pin his legs."
The trapper sat on Dave while the doctor went to work on the crushed limb with a bone saw, right through the pant-leg, without removing the pants. Dave remained silent, didn't blink.
"How can he take it like this?" The trapper asked, incredulous.
"He doesn't speak English, so I don't have to worry about my bedside manner," Howe said, cynical and pompous. "Old Dave is an Indian. They're impervious to pain, because they have different nervous systems than you and I, and smaller brains. The brain is very small, like that of an animal. You can shoot one of them, and it takes a long time before the impulse of the injury travels up to the brain core. That's why they're so sluggish in their habits. They've lived in a state of nature, you might say. They don't feel it the way Christian men like you and I would, because they're not intelligent enough to feel it. Here, hold this clamp."
Howe began screwing a metal screw, shaped like a cork screw, into the bone, to aid the process. Exhausted, the doctor sank back onto his haunches. He lifted the bottle and took another drink. "This is no good," he said. "We'll have to cut into him, the belly. If we can stop the internal bleeding there, we can return to the leg."
Howe ripped Dave's ragged shirt open, took a knife and cut a horizontal slit across the stomach. He parted the flaps of skin.
The trapper blanched at the sight.
"See that?" Howe said of the internal organs.
The trapper, squeamish, nodded.
"I've got to cut that long thing there and retie it. See how it spurts? Hold him!" Howe made the incision.
"Now, it's really leaking," the trapper said. "Are you sure you were supposed to cut that?"
Howe's forehead dripped sweat, and he shook his head as if unsure. He sank wearily back into a crouch, and buried his face in his lap. He pulled himself up, and flung his head from side to side, as if trying to rid himself of the alcoholic haze that gripped him. "No," he admitted. "I wasn't supposed to cut that. Let's have another drink."
They left Dave split up the middle, with the bone saw still upright in the Indian's leg and the screw attached. They walked a few paces, and squatted. The doctor shared a drink with the trapper.
"Aren't you going to sew him back up?"
"What for?" Howe looked somewhat relieved. "He's done for. I've done all I could. One less Indian. Think anybody will mourn?"
The trapper glanced casually over to the prostrate body. "Old Dave, he's a hands-out-beggar, like the others. And boy, like the others, does he love his liquor. Sutler's apprentice must have give him some good alky last night, that shine they give the Injuns' around here, the kind with a kick of mercury from the cooking vat. Yep, Dave! He's a hangs-around-the-fort."
"A nest of parasites," the doctor agreed, and lifted his bottle. He toasted Old Dave, and began to singing a jaunty Irish drinking song. "Here's to me Uncle Mike my boy, here's to me Cousin Jim......."
Dave weakly leaned up and beckoned. He began hand-signing, a universal way of talking understood by most tribes of the plains, as well as mountain men.
"What's he want?" Howe asked.
The trapper came over and hunched down next to Dave, reading the signals on his fingers. The trapper leaned closer. Dave told him of a magical place to the north, never seen by white men, where rainbows made of rock glowed, and hissing fountains spewed forth from the ground, the clouds that filled the sky. He said there was a white beaver there, solid white, white as the driven snow. The white beavers were bigger than any beavers men had yet seen. There were more of them than leaves on the trees.
Jewels could be picked up off the ground in this place, and water ran uphill. Rainbows froze in place. The buffalo god was there.
Dave hoped these two, who had caused him pain, would try and go there, for he knew that death was likely for anyone who ventured into the valley of the smokes. He wanted a little revenge on the race that had liquidated him and most of his people.
"Where is this place?" the trapper signed with his hands. "Tell me!"
"The valley of the smokes, of the white beaver, is to the west. Follow the sun to where the earth rises up in red rock, and a plain of buffalo grass curls toward the snowcapped mountains. Cross the mountains to find a peak shaped like the front of an Indian's bark canoe. Three rivers you must cross, to find the lake of creation. Do this, and you will find heaven. You'll be able to see into the center of the earth. All your wishes will come true."
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