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Rocky Mountain Revelation

By Lisa J. Flickinger

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Rocky Mountain Revelation
By Lisa J. Flickinger



Chapter One

A sharp squeal pierced the air, followed by a dull thud. Will tightened his grip on the tin cup of coffee he’d been nursing for half an hour and looked to his left. Was someone in trouble?
Mack shot out of the cook tent. Tight on his heels ran a woman—or perhaps girl was more appropriate—a long black braid coursing down her back.
With a cast iron frying pan raised in one arm, she chased Mack toward the trees. “You’re going to regret that!”
“I already do,” Mack said over one shoulder and rubbed the top of his head before he stretched the gap between himself and his angry pursuer.
Will’s gaze moved to the man, who looked around his pa’s age, perched across from him on the six-foot half-log deacon seat beside the crackling campfire. His stomach clenched. The man would be around his pa’s age, if Pa were still alive. “You figure those two are going to be all right?” Will thrust his chin toward the opening in the pines where Mack appeared to be aiming.
For the first time that morning, the brim of the older man’s wool cap lifted, and his dark brown eyes bore into Will’s. “I ‘spect so.” The reply was more of a grumble than actual words.
The last of the girl’s white apron strings disappeared into the forest. He tossed his cold coffee onto the ground. The vile stuff still hadn’t grown on him. He uncrossed his long legs and stood to follow Mack and the girl.
“You know that boy?”
Mack was a year older than Will, and they’d just finished their first season chopping for Pollitt’s Lumber up on Cougar Ridge Mountain near the town of Stony Creek. They’d been thrilled to be taken on for a spring river drive in the Rocky Mountains. The log drive would deliver Pollitt’s, and several other companies’, winter season’s logs to the West Pine Timber Company downstream.
Preach, the foreman over at Pollitt’s, had given Mack and Will a fine recommendation to join the drive. Will still wasn’t sure if he deserved it or if Preach simply felt sorry for him. “Ya, I know him.”
“I imagine there’s a reason your friend was recommended.” Mack was scrawny, no doubt. Will carried more meat on him, but Mack’s agility and stamina would hold up in the long days and hard work of the drive.
“He can probably manage his current predicament,” the stranger said. “Don’t you figure?”
Will’s gaze drifted back to the woods. The man had a point. The girl was just a slip of a thing, and Mack usually deserved any grief he acquired. The boy was relentless in playing practical jokes.
Will resumed his place before the fire. “My name’s Will. I don’t think we’ve met.” Not that they’d met anyone yet. Mack and he had arrived at Isaac Lake the afternoon before. Since then, they’d spent most of their time in the tent sleeping off the couple of days they’d caroused in Stony Creek to celebrate the last payday of the logging season.
The pay was one of the reasons Will found the log drive appealing. He stood to make two dollars a day for three weeks. It would go a long way to cover his recent loss. He’d been rolled the last evening in town, and the entire month’s pay had gone to a pretty face with some fast fingers. Now that pa was dead, Will’s ma depended on her three sons to take care of the family. Eight mouths were a lot to feed.
“They call me Gabe,” the older man said. “It’s nice to meet you, son.”
Will gritted his teeth to keep the term from twisting his features. No one had called him son since Pa’s death last fall.
Gabe leaned back and snatched up a branch of spruce from a pile of deadfall behind the deacon seat. He shoved one end under a cogged leather boot, snapped the branch in two, and tossed them into the fire.
The fire cracked and popped as it consumed the new fuel.
Will swallowed to steady his voice before he spoke. If he took his time, it wouldn’t squeak like it usually did when his emotions were churning. The last thing Will needed on the river drive was for the men to think he was some kind of punk. At seventeen, he might well be the youngest, but folks said he looked older than his years. Will straightened his shoulders, “You have any idea when we might be heading out?”
“More than likely in the next day or two. It’s expensive to keep feeding the drivers if they’re not working.”
If river drivers ate anything like loggers, piles of food stuffs disappeared in minutes. It would take a lot for the drive’s cook to beat Lou Franklin’s cooking in such primitive conditions. She and her niece Isabelle had kept Pollitt’s men well supplied with cookies, pies, and—Will’s personal favorite—Lou’s raisin cake. “The cook any good?”
Gabe huffed and sipped his coffee.
Steam spiraled up, obscuring the deep crevasses lining his face, crevasses earned by spending a lot of years out of doors.
“Shorty is one of the best. He won’t be too happy your friend ran off with his assistant. He’s got a lot of men to feed.”
Will thought of the young woman who’d chased Mack out of the tent, her dark eyes snapping. Tall and willowy, like his eldest sister, Vesta, the girl’s heart-shaped face and narrow pointed chin held a determination Mack would be unlikely to outrun. “Seems like an unusual job for a girl that young.”
Gabe’s eyes combed Will’s as the heat built up under his collar. It was a dumb thing to say considering Will’s own tender years. He lifted the gray wool cap covering his shoulder-length blond hair and slicked through the curls before he returned the hat to his head and cinched it low on his brow.
Ernie, a fellow logger from Pollitt’s Lumber, had taken Mack and Will under his wing after he learned they were working the drive together. He had also crushed Mack’s hopes of a romantic entanglement when he’d informed him the same rules applied on the river drive as in the lumber camp—no single women allowed.
“She married?” Will asked and chuckled at his own humor. There was no way a girl that young—
“Widowed.”
The information caught in Will’s throat, he bent to cough as Gabe took another sip of his coffee.
“Widowed?” Will’s voice squeaked. Drat! He coughed again. Maybe Gabe would think Will had something in his throat.
“No more than two months. She’s still hurting. The drive will keep her busy enough and that should help.”
Spending time in the woods with a rowdy bunch of men was not the best choice for a grieving heart. He should know. More than likely the drive would find the girl another man to marry if she wanted one. It wouldn’t be Will, though. He was too young to be tied down. And he wasn’t particularly fond of having his noggin bashed with a frying pan either. “It’s a sad thing.” Will lowered his chin, hoping his face held the appropriate amount of sympathy to fit the poor girl’s loss.
Gabe rose from the fire. “I’m going for a walk before breakfast. You care to come along?”
Will looked to the break in the trees where Mack and the girl had vanished. There was still no sign of the couple. It would feel good to stretch his legs and take his mind off his rumbling stomach. Breakfast wasn’t for another half hour. “Sure, I’ll come with ya.”
Gabe’s tin cup clanked on the bottom of the white enameled dish tub, when Will and he passed the canvas cook tent. Cursing, muttered under a man’s breath, followed Gabe and Will as they stepped into the shade of evergreens no more than thirty feet tall, interspersed with flat topped stumps. The sharp musk of the forest wafted on the air. Branches snapped under their feet with every step as they hiked.
They’d been hiking in silence for ten minutes when Will asked, “Do you know when the area was logged off?”
“My pa, my brothers, and I logged here in seventy-eight. I wasn’t much older than you.”
Will stared at the back of Gabe’s broad Mackinaw jacket, the red-and-black plaid a bold contrast to the emerald of the forest. “That would have made you about…”
Looking over his shoulder, Gabe shot Will a retort. “Eighteen.”
Will couldn’t help the disappointed grunt that escaped his chest. The girls in town had been lying to him for six months. “All right, you got me figured. I’m only seventeen, but that doesn’t mean I can’t put in a man’s worth of work.”
“Did you hear me say you couldn’t?”
Several jays took flight, the flap of their wings overhead, as Will lengthened his stride to catch up with Gabe. “I was a chopping over at Pollitt’s with my pa until…” Telling Gabe Will was the reason his pa was dead wasn’t going to bolster Gabe’s opinion of him, but Pa deserved for Will to admit what he’d done. Gabe stopped and rotated to face Will.
Will’s chest heaved as he attempted to slow his breath.
Raising a heavy dark eyebrow, Gabe placed his hands on his hips. “Until?”
Even though Will could only thank himself for bringing the topic up, it didn’t make the telling any easier. He lifted his cap and ran his fingers through his hair. Preach and the other loggers had been trying to convince Will it wasn’t his fault ever since Pa had died, but it hadn’t taken root. “I hate to say it.” Will swallowed the bile rising in his throat. “Until I killed him.”
Gabe’s eyes took on a look of flint. “Are you telling me you killed your own pa?”
“I didn’t raise my hand to him, but I might as well have. Last October, he and I had already met our quota by early afternoon. I guess it went to our heads, and we figured we could fall a sidewinder.” The next words caught in Will’s throat. “I was wedging the blasted thing when she blew. The doc told Preach Pa didn’t feel a thing, but it doesn’t make him any less dead.”
Gabe grabbed Will’s shoulder with wide fingers and squeezed. “I suspect your foreman told you the logging business is dangerous. You didn’t know it was going to happen.”
Will dropped his chin to his chest. “You can’t hold yourself responsible.”
Preach had said those exact words. Hearing them from Gabe didn’t make them feel any more true.
Gabe gave Will’s shoulder a final squeeze before he resumed his trek through the woods.
Several minutes later they arrived at a narrow stream. The water rushed over the rocks, and debris heaped on its bed. After bending a willow branch, Gabe let the length of it slide through his fingers and inspected the buds at its tip.
Will stepped onto the smooth stones that lined the stream and scooped water to his lips. The frigid liquid, straight from the mountain’s top, slid down his throat and soothed some of the ache caused by rehashing Pa’s death. Will slurped down another scoop before he stepped onto the bank.
Gabe was sifting a thumb through several poplar catkins curled on his palm. He studied them for a moment before he lifted his gaze upstream.
“You looking for anything in particular?”
“Nope. We’ll cross on over to Harper’s Creek on our way back. How are your feet?”
Will wiggled his toes inside his Bass boots, known in the area to be the best footwear for river drives. The movement renewed a burn on his heels. Any man worth his salt could tell the boots were brand new and more than likely causing the wearer considerable pain. “They’re not too bad. I’ll be fine.”
“You sure about that?”
Will didn’t need the men on the log drive pampering him as they had over at Pollitt’s. It was time Will Matheson became a man. “I said I’ll be fine.”
Drawing his brows together, Gabe looked Will over as if he didn’t believe him.
Who did Gabe think he was, anyway?
“Talk to Noah before we head out. He’s got a tin of rub he swears by, if you can stand the smell of the stuff. It’ll make your boots waterproof and soften them up some.” Gabe headed back the way they’d come.
At Harper’s Creek, he surveyed the banks and checked the buds on the willow, cottonwood, and alder trees like some kind of nature fanatic before they returned to the camp. As the white of the cook tent came into view, Gabe sent Will on to breakfast and claimed he’d eat later in the day.
“The cook stands for that? Men chowing down whenever they want?” The only time Lou interfered with the meal schedule at Pollitt’s was when the whole bunkhouse was down with hand, foot, and mouth. If a man tried to sneak into the kitchen between meals, he was likely to get a hot dipper of water thrown at him or, at the very least, a straw broom warming his backside.
Gabe chuckled as if he recalled some private joke. “I don’t suppose Shorty does. You enjoy your breakfast.”
Will rounded the cook tent. Beside the fire, tin plates and forks in their grip, sat a motley crew of about fifteen men destined to be either his good friends or his bad enemies. Every one of them wore the typical garb of Mackinaw jacket, Humphrey pants, and leather caulked boots.
The only men Will could be certain about were the ones who had come over from Pollitt’s with him. Ernie, who’d assigned himself as Mack and Will’s keeper, and Perley, gambler extraordinaire.
It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say Perley would risk losing his own mother if the odds appeared in his favor. As it was, he didn’t look like himself, owing to the fact that he’d lost a wager while the Pollitt’s crew caroused in Stony Creek. The loss required the shearing of the long brown hair he’d grown through the winter, and of which he’d been particularly proud. Unfortunately, the lack of hair made his beak of a nose and wide lips more prominent than usual.
Perley swung an arm over his head and motioned Will toward the fire. “It’s about time you woke up. I was about to come looking for you and Mack— after breakfast that is.”
Several men in the vicinity guffawed, raising the hackles on Will’s back. Mack made a nuisance of himself with all his horsing around, but he never meant it in a mean-spirited way. The same couldn’t be said of Perley. He loved to get under your skin like a tick, and once he was there, it was hard to shake him lose.
“I was drinking coffee at sunup.”
Perley’s eyes widened. “You were drinking coffee?”
More like holding a full mug to keep his hands warm, but Will wasn’t going to admit the fact. If being a man meant you had to like coffee, he’d learn to like it.
“Where’s your better half then?” Perley asked.
The man to Perley’s right snorted before he twisted the corners of his manicured mustache. The last thing Perley needed was somebody who egged him on. Perley bobbed his head to his neighbor. “The boys are a couple of young boomers our push sent over. I’m not sure what he saw in them. I don’t imagine they’ll last long.”
The two cackled like a couple of old hens.
If Perley wasn’t a head taller than Will’s five foot eleven, he might take a swing at him. It was Mack and Will’s first river drive, but they meant to prove their worth. It wasn’t as if Perley had much to brag about, it was only his second year on the drive.
The jangle of the breakfast gong interrupted Will’s irritation. Like a bunch of school children running for recess, the crew raced to the makeshift table outside the cook tent.
Will followed several lengths behind. Where in tarnation was Mack?
The men fell into an orderly line and heaped flapjacks, fried ham, and eggs onto their plates out of large enameled tubs. The majority also poured a thick layer of corn syrup from a galvanized pitcher over their plate’s contents before they returned to their seats beside the fire.
When the white bottom of the flapjack basin peaked through, one of the men called for the cook. Will struggled to keep his mouth from flopping open as the smallest man he had ever seen whisked out of the cook tent.
No higher than Will’s chest, the cook’s slender frame and delicate shoulders looked out of place hauling a basin full to the brim with flapjacks. “Get out of my way,” he said with a surprisingly low voice as he shouldered a path through men anxious to fill their plates. The cook’s droopy brown mustache quivered with the effort.
“Shorty, there’s no need to be ornery,” one of the men growled back. “We’re hungry.”
Shorty replaced the empty tub of flapjacks with the full tub before he thrust his chin toward the speaker. “I wouldn’t be so ornery if someone hadn’t taken off with my helper more than half an hour ago. You know how much effort it takes to feed you ruffians?”
In unfortunate timing, Mack and the girl appeared at a gap in the trees, and the men started up a ruckus of hooting and hollering. Mack, a hangdog look about him, followed the girl, who wore a black halo of mussed hair about her face.
Shorty marched toward the pair, shouting a string of curses blue enough to turn Will’s throat red.
The girl’s boots grabbed the dirt not two paces from Shorty. Her chin flicked up.
“I’m of half a mind to fire you,” Shorty said.
“You just try.” The words shot from her mouth like a warning.
Shorty leaned sideways to peer around the girl and stared up at Mack. “Until we head out on the river, you’ve got yourself a job—cook’s second helper. That means you listen to me and her.” Shorty shook a pointer finger at Mack. “And if I have to raise my voice, even once, to find you, you’ll be the body they never discover at the bottom of the lake. Follow me.” Shorty whirled around and headed back to the cook tent, the girl and Mack in his wake.
Perley’s voice could be heard above the other voices drifting from the campfire. “She’s a fine piece of calico.” He sucked air between his teeth and tongue.
Will gaze returned to the girl who followed Shorty. In spite of her disarray, the features Will had observed earlier fell together to make a particularly pretty picture. Perley had no business noticing, though. A girl that young and sweet looking, her attack on Mack aside, was much too good for the likes of man with Perley’s predilections. 

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