The Beautiful Dead

1

December, 1850

Snow fell from the sky as a wall of white flakes and coated the earth in glistening powder. Two riders, weary and freezing, clutched their coats tightly to their chests and knelt their heads against the oncoming snow, trudging into the endless waves of white shimmering in the moonlight. The steaming breath of their horses came like pipe smoke, plumes fuming from their flared nostrils and streaming into the air to disappear. One of the men carried a lantern, the flame glowing orange like a flickering candle amidst the grey-blue night--his face was younger than the other man's, less harsh with eyes still glistening with adventure. The other rider rode in darkness, the cold biting at the flesh of his aging, grimaced face.
   "How far ahead do you think?" Pete Hastings, the younger man, called out looking to the shadowy figure hunched over his horse. He turned when he heard Pete and answered, "Maybe a couple miles off. Should be catching up to them by now. Not many folks would like traveling in this weather."
   "Can't say I much like it either, Dick," Pete smarted.
   "No, I reckon you couldn't."
   Richard McCarthy looked ahead to the expanse of frozen ground, crystal white and pure, it's surface smooth and soft-looking. A few pines grew up amongst the emptiness, their rich color stunning against the white backdrop. Clouds rolled across the sky, grey and silver-lined, moving at the men's pace, sluggish yet perpetual. The wind whistled and howled at times, deafening, sharp to the touch, carrying the snow off the ground into beautiful, twirling whirlwinds. It was dangerous country, and it's aesthetic allure made it easy to be drawn into its hazards.
   With the cold beginning to ache his bones, Richard reached into the saddlebag next to his rifle and felt for the bottle of whiskey wrapped snugly in several animal skins inside. He pulled down the thick scarf covering his face and popped the cork from its top and spat it out in his other hand, then raised the bottle to his lips and took a few burning swigs of the liquid. It only took a moment for it to settle in his belly and rest warmly inside.
   He let out a gravelly sigh and pushed the cork back in. He pushed the scarf back up quickly over his mouth and nose, the cold had already began to numb the wet skin of his lips. There was a time, he remembered, when he'd listened to an old trapper tell stories about men freezing to death out in the country. Of course, the man had been drunk and rambling at a pissant bar somewhere in Mississippi so Richard wasn't even sure the man had actually been to the far north, but how he described the men dying--frozen near-solid in place like statues where the northern wind came and swooped upon them as if the great biblical judge of mortal men itself--Richard had to admit he was growing less skeptical the farther they went.
   Pete looked over at him, his face illuminated sharply in the light of the lantern, and nodded at the bottle in his hand.
   "You gonna let me have a sip?"
   Richard glanced at him, "Man's got to stay warm. You've got that little fire of yours, I have this." Then he placed the bottle back in his saddlebag and reached up to push the tip of his hat down, already caked over with snow.
   "Are we gonna ride all night or are we going to make camp somewheres?" Pete asked.
   "No. If we ride through the night we can catch up to them by morning, besides, the snow's already falling, might as well push through it."
"Can't even see the tracks, how you gonna know where yer goin'?"
"Intuition," he smarted, "We'll find 'em before dusk tomorrow. Now be quiet."
   "Well, maybe we won't freeze to death before then," Pete muttered to himself.
   Not another word was said between the two men as they pushed forward through the night, though both's minds were filled with thoughts of what would be to come by tomorrow's end. Pete had noticed a melancholy growing within Richard, it had become more noticeable the longer they rode. He noticed him sometimes staring blankly into the sky while his hands laid upon his guns, as though the feel of them brought back some memory which he could see in the clouds. If, at any time, he heard a sudden, loud sound his hands would jolt to the guns, hammers cocked, and a sort of madness would burn in his eyes, hot and red like coals, darting back and forth in their sockets until he regained his composure and something akin to regret would flush his face for a moment. Most times, though, there was just a sadness hidden behind the tough expression he wore, and Pete wondered to himself if the man was just waiting for death. He didn't know what to say to him, or even if there was something to be said, so he kept quiet.
At some point during the night the snow stopped falling. The moon reflected off the hills and snowbanks, giving the men some light, however vague and clouded, by which to ride. Luckily, the weather held for the rest of the night, and the men were given a somewhat less cold and easier travel, though both found themselves shivering every so often and couldn't help noticing the numbness developing in their fingers and toes.
Richard reached into a pocket and pulled out a wood pipe; it was richly dark and polished, so much so that light reflected off its surface, then he reached back in for his tobacco. He took a pinch and stuffed it in the bowl of the pipe, compressing it tightly, then lit it with a match. He flicked it against the end of his thumb and held it to the bowl of the pipe until it glowed red and he took a deep puff of the Mexican tobacco. He blew the smoke out his nose and tried to make a ring with his mouth, the result being a crude, wavy oval. He frowned, took another long puff of the pipe, and spat out bits of tobacco which had found their way into his mouth.
   After a few hours, and the sun beginning to rise above the mountain peaks far behind them, the ground ahead began to slant downward into a ravine, with a steep cliff to the right of the slope. Richard led his horse toward the cliff and dismounted once he neared the edge. He hitched the reigns around an old tree nearby. His boots plunged into the snow up to the mid-calf of his legs, and the stinging cold seeped through his trousers and ached his feet. He stepped heavily through to the edge of the cliff and crouched.
He spotted a cottage in the ravine, rested in a clearing with a line of trees just beyond it at the other side. It wasn't large, possibly a total of thirty or forty feet long and nearly as much in width. He figured it must have belonged to someone, most likely a farmer or shopkeeper, a resting place for travelers and the like. A column of smoke rose from the chimney, black and thick, while a burning lantern on the front stoop fought meekly against the dark. Four horses were tied to a hitch post by the steps, covered in the orange glow of the lantern.
   "There's four horses down there," Richard said to Pete when he came up beside him, "Could be them. Hard to tell from here, though."
   "Well we can't rightly go down there and knock on the door, see who it is."
   "No. We'll have to either wait 'em out or head on down there in the morning with our guns and hope we don't catch a bullet." He ran a hand through his beard and looked thoughtfully at the building, then he opened his coat and pulled a piece of paper from a breast pocket, he unfolded it and read:
WANTED
                                                           Dead or Alive
                                              The Forrester Brothers Gang
James Forrester--robbery, murder, rape, menace, assault, battery, assault of an officer
Kirk Connors--robbery, murder, menace, assault, battery, assault of an officer
Billy Connors--robbery, murder, menace, assault, battery, assault of an officer
Frank Williams-- robbery, murder, menace, assault, battery, assault of an officer

                                                      $100 for each man

                   Return any captured or killed bounties to law enforcement for                         
                                                 processing and payment.

   Richard looked up and folded the paper and placed it back in his pocket. Out of instinct his hands fell upon the pistols on each side of his belt; the steel was cold, and the wood grips familiarly worn. He stared hard at the cottage and considered the prospect of trying to fight the men head-on. The way he figured it there wasn't much chance attempting such a fight, he might could outshoot one or two if it came down to it but more than likely he and Pete both would wind up dead or shot and left out in the cold to freeze or be eaten by wolves.
"They'll have to come out of that place sometime, I say we wait 'em out, kill whoever walks out."
"You planning on doing some sharpshooting, old timer?"
"Not likely. I'll head down there with these here pistols and sit out back in case they try to run that way while you sit up here with that Sharps rifle of yours."
"You seem to be putting a lot of faith in me killing most of those boys."
"Don't need faith. I've seen you shoot, ain't much more to it than that."
Then Richard stood and walked to his horse, where the rifle sat in its scabbard, and pulled it out. He cocked the lever to ensure the weapon was empty, then reached into his pack for cartridges. He pulled out five and pushed them into the side-loading breech one at a time. As a second thought, he took out the bottle of whiskey he had yet to finish then he walked to the rocky edge of the canyon, bent down with a groan, and sat in a spot mostly clear of snow.
"What are you doing?" Pete asked.
"Waiting."
   Pete turned to his own horse and tied it the same way, then covered both the animals in blankets and carried his saddle over to a rock where he wiped the snow away and sat it down. He wrapped his rifle in his coat when he sat beside Richard, who gave him a sideways glance.
   He thought about asking the old man what was going through his mind, what it's like to be chasing down someone you once knew. Pete couldn't reckon it, what it would be like to pull the trigger on an old friend, the kind of weight that would hold, and he wasn't sure he wanted to. Still, his mind conjured fantasies of Forrester and Richard in their younger years riding side by side and made him all the more curious about their early years.
   "Did you and James Forrester really know each other?" he finally asked.
   Richard took a swig of the bottle, then answered, "That's right. We knew each other. I knew a lot of people."
   "Ya'll rode together, didn't you?"
   He nodded.
   "Did worse than that. Much worse," Richard said.
He paused to drink again, and Pete kept talking excitedly.
"People say Forrester once gunned down three bounty hunters in a standoff, beat 'em in the draw and shot 'em all dead."
"Do they now?" Richard said.
"It didn't happen?"
"It happened, but it weren't Forrester who done it. He was off getting drunk in the saloon trying to wet his pecker on some cheap whore. He wouldn't have been able to shoot a damn thing."
   Pete stared at the old man, waiting for him to tell the story, any story, but he was kept in longing.
Richard took another drink and stared ahead into the dark, looking for something.
"Was you the one who killed Harry McCoughlin?"
He didn't answer.
"Luke Chancy?"
   Still no answer.
   "I've heard a lot about ya'll. Folks talk about Forrester and those who rode with him as something damn near mythical. You, Forrester, all them other boys, you're what me and a lot of the other boys I grew up with ever talked about."
"Folks talk a lot about the past, but none of them would be talking about it if they had actually seen it. People like legends, but not the truth behind them," Richard finally said, the words falling heavily, "There was a time when Forrester, me, all of us, we weren't even men, we were something else, like the right hand of the Devil himself. You wouldn't be looking so kindly on me if you'd have been there to see the things we were capable of."
   The way Richard said it, the memory itself of those long-ago days carried in his words, put Pete to silence. The glow left Pete's eyes. Richard took another drink, a long one, and stared down at the cottage. Together they sat on the edge of the cliff, listening to the sound of the wind in their ears and the distant echoes of ghosts in the night.