Gold In The Red Desert Part 2

Gold In The Red Desert

Book One of The Owl Hoot Trail

by T.H. Bear

Published by BluewaterPress LLC at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 T.H. Bear

The contents of this book regarding the accuracy of events, people and places depicted; permissions to use all previously published materials; all are the sole responsibility of the author, who assumes all liability for the contents of this book.

All rights reserved. Except for fair use, educational purposes, and short excerpts for editorial reviews in journals, magazines, or web sites, no part of this book shall be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the publisher.

International Standard Book Number 13: 978-1-60452-118-4

International Standard Book Number 10: 1-60452-118-X

BluewaterPress LLC

52 Tuscan Way Ste 202-309

Saint Augustine FL 32092

http://bluewaterpress.com

The hardcopy version of this book

may be purchased online at -

http://www.bluewaterpress.com/

Thank you for downloading this ebook. This book remains the copyrighted property of the author, and may not be redistributed to others for commercial or non-commercial purposes. If you enjoyed this book, please encourage your friends to download their own copy from their favorite authorized retailer. Thank you for your support.

I dedicate

‘Book One’

Of

‘The Owl Hoot Trail’

To my baby girl,

Patricia Carol,

Who I loved so and miss dearly

Gold In The Red Desert

The Owl Hoot Trail

This trilogy, we call the Owl Hoot Trail, is the story of a man, not unlike many of this very day, who leave their home and everyone they love to serve their country in the time of war. This man was a soldier, like all good soldiers, who did not question the politicians or their motives, rather he devoted his all in serving to protect his nation from an invader, only to return and find almost everything he had loved had been swept away and his homeland in the hands of corrupt officials and an occupational army. How different were the feelings of the people of Belgium, France, and Poland between 1940 and 1945 from the people of Alabama, Florida, and Georgia between 1863 and 1873?

These books were named ‘The Owl Hoot Trail’ because in those times, a person who was considered a criminal fugitive was often referred to as an Owl Hoot and the roads they took to ply their trade and evade their pursuers was known as ‘The Owl Hoot Trail.’ It is upon this trail our returning soldier must travel until he can clear his name of an uncommitted crime.

Book One: Gold in the Red Desert tells us how, in a vain effort to protect his family, Clifford Brown, was unjustly accused of murder and thrust upon the owl hoot trail, and finding this trail leading him to the gold fields in and around South Pass City in the Territory of Wyoming. There he witnessed a murder and as a result became entangled in a struggle to right this wrong. There also he found the only woman he would ever love.

Book Two: The Withlacoochee Renegades reveals his return to his native state of Georgia during the infamous Reconstruction Period, and of his forming a band of brothers, who like vigilantes everywhere throughout time, were created only by desperate souls in desperate times when legal authority either failed or was too corrupt to protect the people.

Book Three: The Long Trail allows us to ride with Cliff Brown in pursuit of the almost mythical villain who was responsible for the murder of several members of his family. A pursuit that takes him more than six years, on a 3500 mile journey through seven states, where in every corner he must struggle with the evils of greedy people and the revenge burning fiercely within himself, each begging, often commanding an inner peace that would be denied him for over seventeen years.

Acknowledgements

To say that this book is totally fiction would be an insult to most historians. Surely, all with a general knowledge of American History, especially the times of Mr. Lincoln’s War and those twenty or so years after, when great immigrations occurred into what we now call ‘The West’, would know that there was indeed a Gold Rush in the Sweetwater Region of Wyoming, that indeed there was a General Nathan Bedford Forrest, a Judge Esther Morris, a Lieutenant Caspar Collins, a Wild Bill Hickman, and other true to life people who lived and contributed to the future of America, and some of these people offer a small contribution to this story. Regardless, I must make clear that this is a novel not a history book, and the main characters, and the people and events in this story that they become involved in and with, are totally from my imagination and not to be confused with any living or dead individual or occurrence.

Appreciation

The illustrations contained in this book are either from my own family’s collection of photographs, by courtesy of The State of Wyoming Department of State Parks and Cultural Resources, State of Wyoming Archives; or taken from the web site Wyoming Tales & Trails. Were it not for the enormous labor and endless hours of devotion in preserving the pictorial history of The Great State of Wyoming by Geoff Dobson so much would not be available to the reader. It is to this site we give much credit and appreciation.

Thank you, Geoff.

Chapter Nine - The Long Cold Winter

Chapter Ten - Pacific Springs

Chapter Eleven - The Anniversary

Chapter Twelve - The Southbound

Chapter Thirteen - The Constable

Chapter Fourteen - Haggai Magraw

Chapter Fifteen - The Trial

Chapter Sixteen - The Telegram

Chapter Nine

The Long Cold Winter

Cliff made sure that he was never again alone with Connie, not that she didn’t flirt even more openly now than before, especially in front of her sister. She even made small attempts to arrange a chance rendezvous a couple of times, but he saw through them and was always able to be somewhere else or have something else pressing at the time. It was not that he had found Connie a poor bedmate, on the contrary, he had thought many times of the youthful fury she had displayed during their coupling, a passion not often found in such an inexperienced girl. ‘At least I think she is inexperienced.’ His reasons of concern were more, he supposed, of the storm that would break should others find out about that night’s affair, especially from Carol.

Of course, he also believed that such gossip would not go well with the court when he had to defend himself on the Johnson shooting. Now he really had time only to work towards that event.

Bruce Whittacur was devoting all his time to Ashley in her quest to find her brother’s lost mine. They were sure when Mr. Snow arrived it would be cleared up. The problem was Mr. E. P. Snow had not returned from Cheyenne as expected. Instead, he had gone east to Kansas City, for a big meeting with several government officials.

Bruce Whittacur was devoting all his time to Ashley in her quest to find her brother’s lost mine. They were sure when Mr. Snow arrived it would be cleared up. The problem was Mr. E. P. Snow had not returned from Cheyenne as expected. Instead, he had gone east to Kansas City, for a big meeting with several government officials.

So, on they waited while the snows began to fall almost on schedule. It seemed that every four days a strong storm would come rushing in from the northwest and dump several feet of fresh powder on them. Then the next day it would be very calm with nary a breath of a breeze, the sun shining bright in a sky so blue one would wonder where such a color came from. A day when the air was so clear that a body could see a hundred miles, a grand day, but also a day when the mercury thermometers would drop into their little ball and want to escape even further down, only to be trapped there. Then on the next day, the wind would come rushing in out of the southwest with such fury, that all the snow on the open plains would be blown to some point further eastward, where one only wonders as they look upon the brown grasses, that a day before were covered in a blanket of white. And then on the fourth day another storm would come and start the cycle all over again.

Cliff had known cold before. It was cold in the swamps of Georgia where the air was so damp, cotton spun garments would wring wet with what they captured from the air. Cold mornings, when it had been his chore to sit from before daybreak in the fork of a big sweet gum waiting for the elusive whitetail, the family’s main source of meat when the smoked pork was all gone. Mornings, when the first rays of the sun would find their way down through the moss covered limbs. A time when he would move his foot ever so quietly, until it was in a location to capture some small degree of warmth offered there by the sun as it slowly rose, a time in the morning when this same ever so slight warmth would cause the stillness of night air to give up, and begin to move. All good southern hunters know that the coldest time of night is really just after sunup.

Cliff had also been cold in Tennessee and Maryland. They too were damp, and when the snows came to those rolling hills it came as a wet snow, a snow that would freeze bare feet.

In the winter of ’64-’65, not one in five of the men he lived beside had shoes. He, along with a few others, had been fortunate enough to find boots that fit on the dead Federals who had fallen to confederate guns. It was suggested by one newspaper in Saint Louis that the rebels were at that time killing, not for the cause, rather for northern uniforms and boots. Cliff knew better. He killed because the blue army had invaded his homeland, his State, a place the Constitution said they had no right to be. At least that was what he thought he was killing for. Looking back, he was not sure; near the end perhaps he was killing just to stay alive. That winter of ’64-’65 had been the coldest he had ever experienced, before coming to Wyoming Territory. Now he realized no one living at a lower elevation had any expectation of the fierceness of a winter spent a mile and a half above sea level, a place where drifts would be fifteen feet deep from October to May and in the mountains as deep as forty feet. A place where the wind would blow so hard, had it been in Georgia, they would have called it a hurricane; a place where the smallest exertion could rob you of your breath and then cause every gasp to be as painful as tearing of the skin, and a place where on the few good days it would warm up to five or ten degrees above zero. Such was the winter Cliff spent in South Pass City.

The powder had drifted so deep in the mountain range between Laramie and Cheyenne, no westbound trains were getting through. What little supplies they did receive had come by way of Salt Lake City.

Now, Mr. E. P. Snow was trapped by his namesake and had chosen to spend the winter in Cheyenne. Judge Kingman also stayed away. Esther Morris received word Kingman would be staying with Doctor and Mrs. Lathrop, at Platte River Crossing, until the weather broke. This was both good and bad news.

It was on the morning of December the fifth, shortly after the rising of the sun that Art Houghton, looking at the clear still air, decided to take a chance and make his run from Green River City to South Pass City. He had tried the week before, but had to turn back due to heavy drifts blocking the road. However, late in the afternoon of the fourth, a company of cavalry had pushed their way from Big Sandy Creek and Lieutenant Ewing told him the wind had mostly cleared the way, if more snow did not fall.

Cotter had urged him not to try the trip, but here as he stood in the cold morning air looking at the clear blue sky, he decided to go.

The wagon had been loaded with much needed supplies for the inhabitants there, and too, there was Mr. Stone who had paid a fair sum to be a passenger on his wagon, since the stage line had not moved north in three weeks.

Stone, a man in his late thirties, was tall and lean with a strong drawl, not unlike that of Mr. Brown; a distinctive accent on the western plains. Not that the southern drawl was unknown to the west, rather the contrary. After the war so many men had returned to find their homes burned or occupied and hundreds found all loved ones dead or gone, thus the migration to the frontier was often a beckoning call. Surely, a third of the workers on the U.P. were from the South, but the accent from deep in Dixie was different from most other drawls, and there was no mistaking the fact that Brown and Stone had their up-bringing close to one another. However, they would find it had been Stone who had first come to the region, not after the war, rather during it.

He had paid Art for his passage with new folding notes drawn on the National Bank of Austin, and he gave every appearance that there was more of the yellow-backs in his possession. They arrived on the little hill overlooking South Pass City an hour after dark, having had little trouble, save losing the road once for half an hour or so. The flickering lights of the saloons were a welcome sight to the nearly frozen men.

Houghton drove straight to Colfax Street, and there he unhitched his team and housed them in Teachman’s barn for the night. Then, he and Stone headed, without further delay, to ‘The Sisters’.’

The little wooden structure seemed a hundred degrees inside when they stepped in from the sub-zero outside, where in truth the small stove barely was able to keep it above forty. Still, the sudden change was both welcome and overwhelming at the same time.

Both sisters were moving about serving steaming bowls of elk stew, and each gave the freighter a warm smile when they saw who emerged from the frozen haired buffalo robe.

Oh, thank Sweet Jesus, you’ve come! Carol said looking at Houghton. Did you bring our list?

Yours was the first I loaded, he said back.

Oh, thank you so much. We are almost out of everything.

Oh, Carol, stop talking about material stuff, her sister scolded. We are mostly glad to see that no bad fortune came your way on that awful trip here.

Of course we are, Carol agreed. It’s just we need the supplies to keep the place open.

I know that, Miss Steele, he answered back, That was one of the reasons I had to make the trip.

Now, who is this you have with you, Mr. Houghton? Connie asked looking at the stranger standing next to Art.

Oh, I’m sorry. My manners, he added shaking his head. This is Mr. Stone.

Welcome, Mr. Stone, she said to the newcomer.

Had I known there were a brace of beautiful women in this faraway place, I would have stayed here five years ago.

Five years ago we were not here, Mr. Stone, Connie said, smiling at the tall man.

I know, he replied.

Another Southern Gentleman, Carol said in a cautioned tone.

Is that bad, Ma’am? Stone questioned as he removed his fox skin hat.

No, it’s just once burned, twice shy, she replied and then turned and walked back towards the kitchen.

Come on and sit right over here, Connie said leading the way to a nearby table.

Bill Sneed, this is Mr. Stone, and you know Mr. Houghton, she said to the seated man, They will share your table, if that’s all right?

You know, Miss Connie, if ’n you ask, it’s all right with me, the miner replied.

She was just returning with two more bowls of stew when she overheard Sneed ask, What brings you to the frozen plains, Mr. Stone?

Please call me Pebbles, the man replied. I am in the textile business. I represent a large syndicate of mills in the south, and we are expanding westward now that the railroad is through, and the Indian trouble is over.

Over? exclaimed Sneed almost spilling his bowl. It’s hardly over in these parts. Hell, them thieving varmints butchered Kirt Puckett not six months ago right here nigh on in town.

Really? Stone questioned as he turned to Houghton with a concerned voice, but secretly smiling inside.

I wonder why you would make such an exposed trip way up here, knowing that? he said to Art.

Well, to begin with, we seldom have Indian trouble, but a single man do need to be careful, Houghton admitted.

"I just can’t believe you took my money and never warned me about the