Strongheart by Don Bendell Read Free Book Online Page A

floor, from where he caught glimpses of the stage road far down the canyon, winding its way up the twisting hardpack. Using a small piece of mirror, he flashed light on the patch of trees where Jeeter and Harlance were hiding. He then made his way down the rocks, hopped on his beautiful gelding, and hid it across the road, behind a large cottonwood and a pile of collected dried logs and boulders left there from the last of the flash floods that occasionally plagued Copper Gulch.
    Jeeter and Harlance had grown up in the steep mountains of West Virginia north of Charleston and felt right at home in these rocky canyons, which were like exaggerated versions of their home territory. The canyons out west in southern Colorado, however, were much larger, rockier, and more rugged than their homeland, but that presented the two criminals with a haven that was like Heaven to them.
    Besides Westbrook, they had Ruddy Cheeks Carroll, Wilford “Slim” Dyer, Stumpy Shaw, Gorilla Moss, his son Percival, and Big Scars Cullen in their gang, each a dangerous and calculating outlaw capable of murder and other types of mayhem.
    It was understood that once they divided the spoils from the holdup, any of the gang could go where they wished, and in fact, Moss and his kid had always liked traveling and seeing new country, so they planned to break off on top and head down past Westcliffe and cross over the Sangre de Cristo mountain range on Music Pass. They would come out in the San Luis Valley at the Great Sand Dunes, and they knew that when they crossed them, the wind would take care of covering all their tracks. The Great Sand Dunes were located at the base of the Sangre de Cristos and contained pure sand dunes over five hundred feet high, stretching for some miles. There was no vegetation at all, just sand, which was constantly shifting. It was an area in the western slope of the range where all the sand from the largest high mountain valley in the world accumulated. The others would stay with the McMahon brothers for a while, pulling off more holdups, and they had spoken about trying some train robberies.
    When he was thirteen, Jeeter had had a problem with a neighbor boy who had stolen some muskrats and beaver out of the trap string Jeeter had run along a stream that emptied out into the Elk River, near its junction with the Kanawha River, near Charleston. Jeeter and his younger brother Harlance told their pa about the neighbor boy stealing their animals from the leg hold traps they set along the creek.
    His solution was simple: “When someone takes waz your’n, ya kill ’im.”
    That was that. Jeeter grabbed a pick handle, and Harlance took his uncle’s hickory walking stick that stood two feet above the boy’s head. There were steep ridges on both sides of the heavily wooded stream, and the brothers took off into the woods, heading toward the stream. There, they slept during the night behind two side-by-side trees halfway up the hillside. Sure enough, the next morning right after daybreak, they heard Wilford Fisher walking down the bank toward the muskrat trap below them. As he approached the log where the trap was attached, the two started slowly down the hill. They made it within ten feet before Wilford heard Harlance step on a twig and spun around. The two rushed him, screaming like banshees and swinging their heavy clubs. By the third strike to his head, Wilford saw the sky swirling above him and felt himself falling faceup into the cold stream. The brothers plunged in after him and stomped on his face and body, holding him under until he was a lifeless, bloody mess. They let him go, and the body slowly disappeared down the stream, heading toward the big river, where it was found two days later caught in a pile of branches along a bank of the Kanawha. Wilford’s folks knew who did it and why, but they wanted no part of Jeeter’s family and surely did not want a blood feud. The family packed up a wagon