Winter Kill

Chapter 19

Frank had noticed when he went across the street with Conway and Jennings to stable the horses that Salty Stevens was no longer huddled in his furs on the front porch of the hotel. He asked the clerk, “That old-timer who was outside earlier, where can I find him?”

The clerk frowned. “You mean Salty? Did that old beggar bother you, mister? I try to run him off whenever I see him out there. The boss doesn’t like him hanging around the hotel.”

Frank wondered if the boss was Soapy Smith. Smith had been quick to direct them here to the Klondike and might well be the owner of the place.

“No, the old man didn’t bother us,” Frank said in reply to the clerk’s question. “I just want to talk to him. I think we may be from the same part of the country.”

“Oh. In that case…there’s a saloon down the street called Ike’s. I think Salty hangs around there a lot, too, trying to cadge drinks.” The clerk shook his head. “I warn you, though, mister, it’s a pretty squalid place.”

From what Frank had seen so far, most of Skagway fit that description. But he just nodded and said, “All right, thanks.”

As he came out of the hotel, Conway and Jennings emerged from the stable across the street. They had been tending to the horses, or rather Conway had, since Jennings couldn’t see. He was able to stand and hold a saddle, though, if somebody handed it to him.

Frank told them, “I want to talk to that old-timer who was at the hotel earlier. I figure he can tell us something about what the weather’s going to do. The clerk says that if he’s not here, he’s probably at a saloon called Ike’s.”

“I know the place,” Jennings said. “I can show—Well, no, I reckon I can’t show you where it is, after all.”

“We’ll find it. Come on.”

Jennings looked surprised. “You still want me to come with you? I figured once we got to Skagway, I’d be on my own.”

Frank lowered his voice and asked, “How long would you last in this town without being able to see? From what I can tell, there are as many dangerous critters around here as there are in the woods.”

Jennings sighed. “Maybe more.”

“So you’re one of us now, at least for the time being.”

Conway frowned, visibly upset by Frank’s words. “No offense, Frank,” he said, “but this fellow is an outlaw. As far as we know, he may be the one who killed Neville.”

Jennings shook his head emphatically. “I didn’t kill nobody, Mr. Conway. I was holdin’ the horses while the rest of the boys jumped your camp and grabbed them ladies. I swear it.”

“Yeah, you’d say that whether it was true or not,” Conway said with a disdainful grunt.

Jennings held up a hand like he was being sworn in to testify in court. “Word of honor, sir. I…I stole plenty of things in my life, but I never killed nobody, at least not that I know of.”

“You can travel with us as long as you behave yourself,” Frank said. “Get out of line, though, especially with the women, and you’re on your own.”

“You can count on me, Mr. Morgan.”

The three of them walked along the street, Frank resting a hand on Jennings’s shoulder to guide him. Ike’s was a tent saloon with a couple of stumps in front of it where pine trees had been cut down. When Frank pushed aside the canvas flap over the entrance and stepped inside, he saw several more stumps sticking up from the dirt floor. Men sat on them to drink, using them as makeshift chairs. The bar was to the right. It consisted of rough planks laid across the tops of several whiskey barrels. As a saloon, Ike’s was about as crude as it could be.

It was doing good business, though. More than a dozen men stood around nursing drinks from tin cups, and all the stumps were occupied. Frank looked around and spotted a familiar pile of furs shuffling along the bar, stopping next to each of the customers to ask something. Each of the men shook his head, and some of them barked angrily at the desolate old-timer.

In fact, one of the drinkers seemed to take offense at being approached like that. He turned toward Salty and said loudly, “Get away from me, you damned bum.” He drew his arm across his body, as if he were about to backhand the old-timer.

Frank’s left hand fell hard on the man’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t do that if I was you, mister,” he said.

The man jerked around with a furious glare on his face. He started to say, “Who the hell do you think you—” Then he stopped short as he saw the menace glittering in The Drifter’s eyes. He said, “You know that old tramp?”

“We’re amigos,” Frank said.

“You ought to keep him from bothering people, then.”

Frank took his hand off the man’s shoulder, reached into his pocket, and found a coin. He tossed it on the bar and said coldly, “Next drink’s on me. Just take it down to the other end of the bar.”

“Sure, sure,” the man muttered. He held out his tin cup to the moon-faced bartender for a refill, then moved away toward the other end of the bar.

“Thanks, Tex,” Salty said, “but you didn’t have to do that. I’m sorta used to gettin’ walloped.”

“Well, you shouldn’t be. We want to talk to you, Salty. Is there someplace better than this?”

Salty licked his lips, which were barely visible under the bushy white mustache and beard. “I reckon we could go to my shack.”

“How about if we take a bottle with us?”

Salty cackled. “Now you’re talkin’! Damned if you ain’t!”

Frank bought a bottle from the bartender, who looked like a half-breed. The bottle had no label on it, and he was sure that what was inside had been brewed up in one of those barrels. It was probably raw stuff, but if they were lucky, it wouldn’t give them the blind staggers.

The four men went outside. Salty led the way to the edge of the settlement, stopping at something that was more shed than shack, a haphazard arrangement of broken boards, tarpaper, tin, and canvas. It looked almost like the various parts of it had been thrown up in the air, and however they came down was the way Salty had left it.

The place had a door, though, and when they went inside, Frank saw that it had a rickety table as well, and a tangle of blankets in a corner that served as a bunk. The only places to sit down were a wobbly stool and an empty nail keg. Frank told Salty and Jennings to take those seats, and then placed the bottle in the center of the table.

Salty licked his lips again and obviously ached to grab the bottle, but he resisted its lure for the moment. “How come you’re bein’ so nice to me, Tex?” he asked.

“I told you, we’re from the same part of the country. And the name’s Frank Morgan, by the way, not Tex.”

Salty’s head jerked up. “Frank Morgan!” he repeated. “You mean The Drifter?”

“Heard of me, have you?”

“Damn straight I have! You might not know it to look at me, but there was a time I worked as a range detective with a cousin o’ mine and his pardner, and I was friends for a while with a deputy U.S. marshal, too. I weren’t never an official lawman, mind you, but I was next thing to it.” The old-timer sighed. “Them was better days, that’s for damn’ sure. Anyway, I heard of you, sure enough, Mr. Morgan. And the way I heard it, you’re one o’ the fastest fellas ever to slap leather. If anybody’d asked me, though, I’d’ve had to say that I didn’t know whether you was still alive.”

Frank grinned. “I’m still kicking, all right. Tell me, Salty, where are you from?”

“Well, I was born in Arizony. Or was it New Mexico Territory? Been so long ago, I don’t rightly remember. But I growed up all over the whole Southwest, a-huntin’ and a-trappin’. Met one o’ the last o’ the old-time mountain men once, a contrary ol’ critter called Preacher. When I got a few more years on me, I done a mite of scoutin’ for the army and drove a stagecoach for a while out Californy way. It was a while later I met that marshal fella and then went to range detectin’. Been a good life, a mighty full life.”

Conway said, “A man your age ought to be sitting in a rocking chair somewhere, enjoying his old age.”

Salty got a truculent look on his bushy face. “Old age, is it? I’ll have you know, young fella, that I can still mush all day on a pair o’ snowshoes if I have to, and I can grab a gee-pole and handle a team o’ sled dogs just fine, too.”

“What brought you to Alaska in the first place?” Frank asked.

“Gold, o’ course, same thing as brought all these other cheechakos and stampeders up here!” Salty paused, and when he went on, there was a wistful note in his voice. “And I, uh, got a mite tired o’ sittin’ on my granddaughter’s front porch in that rockin’ chair the young fella just mentioned. Figured I might have one last grand adventure in me, so I took off for the Klondike! Found me a nice gold claim, too, and worked it for a while. Had me a poke full o’ nuggets when I got back here.”

“And then what happened?”

“Soapy Smith and his gang o’ thieves and swindlers and murderers happened,” Salty said. “Soapy claimed I was breakin’ a local ord’nance when I got drunk, and he got his pet judge to sock a big fine against me. One o’ his pickpockets finished cleanin’ me out. I couldn’t go home, couldn’t go back across the passes to Whitehorse, couldn’t do nothin’ but stay here and become a bum.” The old-timer spread his hands. “And that’s what you see before you now, gents. A plumb worthless excuse for an old fool.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure about that,” Frank said. “You say you’ve been to Whitehorse, so you must have been over Chilkoot Pass.”

“Yeah, and White Pass, too. You got to go over it before you get to Chilkoot.”

“What do you think? If a party left Skagway in the next day or two, could they get over the passes and make it to Whitehorse before winter sets in?”

Salty frowned, but the only way to tell it was by the way the scraggly curtain of white hair lowered over his brow. “Well, I don’t rightly know. I’d have to think on it…and I think a mite better when my thinkin’ apparatus is lubricated.”

Frank pushed the bottle of rotgut toward him. “Oil it up, old-timer.”

Salty pulled the cork with his teeth, spit it out, and lifted the bottle to his mouth. The whiskey gurgled as he took a long swallow of it.

“I hear that,” Jennings said. “It’s a pretty sound.”

Salty reached out, took Jennings’s hand, and pressed the bottle into it. “Have a slug, old son. It might not restore your sight, but it can’t hurt to try.”

While Jennings took a drink, Salty looked up at Frank and went on. “If folks was to leave right now and had good sleds and dogs, I reckon they could make it through the passes to Whitehorse.”

“You couldn’t go on horseback?”

Salty shook his head. “No, there’s already snowpack up there. You could go part of the way on horses, but you’d have to break out the dogs to get over the passes and on down to Whitehorse.”

“How about getting back here?”

“That’d be riskier. Still, a fella might could do it, if he knew the quickest way there and back.”

“Someone like you, you mean?” Frank said.

“Well, come to think of it…yeah. I know all the trails.”

Frank didn’t hesitate. “How’d you like to go to Whitehorse with us?”

Before Salty could answer, Conway stepped forward and lifted a hand. “Wait a minute, Frank. We’ve already picked up a blind outlaw—”

“You’re an outlaw?” Salty said to Jennings.

“I was,” Jennings replied with a sober nod. “I’ve given up banditry. I’m a changed man because of Mr. Morgan.”

As if he hadn’t been interrupted, Conway went on. “Now you’re going to add a drunken old man to our party? You’d put the safety of those ladies in the hands of a—”

“A former range detective, army scout, and unofficial deputy U.S. marshal?” Frank said. “I reckon I would.”

Salty reached for the bottle again. “Now, the young galoot may have a point there, Mr. Morgan. I ain’t all that dependable these days, not since I got a taste for this Who-hit-John.”

Frank picked up the bottle before Salty could. “Then maybe it’s time to put this away. How about you have the rest of it when we get back to Skagway from Whitehorse?”

“But…we might not make it back till spring. That’s a long time!”

“You’ll be all right, Salty. You’ll have a job to do.”

The old-timer ran gnarled fingers through his tangled beard. “That would be nice,” he said in a half-whisper. “Folks used to depend on me, and I never let ’em down.”

“You won’t now, either.”

Salty gave an abrupt nod. “Count me in,” he declared. “Put the cork in the bottle, and we’ll have it when we get back.”

“Maybe,” Frank said, “or maybe we’ll have something better.”

Conway looked like he thought they were making a big mistake.

The young man would really feel that way, Frank thought, if he knew that before they left Skagway, he intended to have a talk with Soapy Smith about an old man’s stolen gold.