Story Violet

[gonewacky]

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 1

The morning sun clawed its way over the jagged snow-dusted spine of the Cascade Mountains, as it spilled gold into the valley floor. It found the cabin first illuminating the dust motes dancing in the air and settling gently upon the face of six-year-old Violet. For a heartbeat the warmth chased away the cold and the hollow ache in her chest. It was the lingering shadow of a nightmare that didn't end when she opened her eyes.

Violet blinked expecting to see the silhouette of her father Vincent hunched over his sharpening stone, or checking his rifle by the door. But the cabin was quiet. It was the heavy suffocating quiet of a place that had lost its heartbeat.

It was the third day.

The week before the world had shrunk to the size of a pine box under the great Oak Tree. That’s where her mother Grace now slept beneath a mound of fresh damp earth. The fever had been cruel and fast. It was a thief that left no time for goodbyes. Then three nights ago the second thief had come. It was the silence. Vincent had stepped out into the velvet dark to check the north trap line, and promise to return before the sun climbed high still echoing in the rafters.

Violet sat up with her small legs hanging off the edge of the cot. She didn't cry. Tears held no currency in the high country, and she had learned that early. She looked at the hearth; the embers were long dead. She looked at the table; the last heel of rye bread sat like a lonely stone on a wooden plate.

"He's just checking the lines," she whispered to the empty room with her voice thin and reedy. "He said three days. He never misses three days."

She climbed down and smoothed her apron. She walked to the bucket by the door, and found it nearly dry. So she grabbed the tin pail. Outside the air was crisp smelling of pine needles and impending frost. She walked the familiar path to Stone Creek, as the water sing a slow mournful song that sounded suspiciously like a dirge. As she dipped the pail her eyes scanned the tree line. Every shadow looked like a man; every rustle of the wind sounded like a footstep.

She filled the pail and looked toward the mountain pass. Nothing moved but the hawks circling in the blue distance. She returned to the cabin, and ate the dry crust of bread. Then she sat by the window. She watched the sun travel across the sky tracking the tragedy of her solitude. She waited for a man miles away who was currently watching his own life ebb out like the tide.



Vincent didn't hear the man approach. He had been kneeling by a beaver trap in a ravine thick with hemlock when the world exploded. There was no argument, no challenge. There was only the sharp crack of a Winchester rifle, and then the blinding searing wetness of blood flooding his vision.

He hit the dirt hard. He heard the approach of heavy boots. He felt the cold iron of a pistol barrel nuzzle pushed to the back of his neck. Then the rough hands of a stranger stripping his pack, and unbuckling his belt then leading away his mule and his horse. The stranger didn't even bother to check if Vincent was dead; he simply took the furs, the gold-dust pouch, and the animals. Then he left Vincent to the mercy of the mountain shadows.

Vincent lay face down in the cold mud of the Cascades with the mud soaking into his cheek. The forest grew dim. His strength wasn't just fading; it was leaking into the dirt. Just as the darkness began to knit itself into a shroud he felt a presence. It wasn't the cold wind. It was warmth, and had a scent of dried lavender and summer rain.

Grace?

He couldn't turn his head, but he felt a hand brush the matted hair from his brow.

"Vincent," the voice whispered. It sounded like the wind through the pines, but clearer. "Violet needs you. It’s not your time yet. You need to hold on. I’m sending help."

He wanted to reach out, to weep, but his body was a locked house. He heard the rustle of a skirt. It was impossible and ridiculous yet it was there. Then he had the feeling of a promise being made. He stopped fighting the dark and started fighting for the breath. He clung to the ghost of his wife’s command tethering his soul. It was the thought of a six-year-old girl waiting for a father who was supposed to be back by noon.



Jim Johnson was a man who lived by the terrain not the calendar. He was a trapper and a wanderer. He was the kind of man who understood that in the high Cascades you never look for what you want; you look for what the land gives you.

He was crossing the upper ridge of Stone Creek. His horse was lathered and tired when he saw the deer. It was a stag of impossible size with its antlers a jagged crown against the skyline. It paused for a heartbeat as its ears flickered toward the valley, before bounding over the ridge.

Jim didn’t need the meat, but the hunt was in his blood. He urged his mount upward planning to crest the hill and catch the stag in the open. But as he crested the rise the hunt dissolved.

There was no deer. There was only a man sprawled in the mud like a cast-off garment.

Jim slid from his saddle with his hand hovering near his holster. He approached cautiously with his eyes scanning the brush for the man who had done this. The silence of the mountain was absolute. Finding no one he knelt by the form.

"Damn," Jim muttered pulling the man over.

Vincent’s face was a mask of gore. The blood had clotted black and thick, and was masking the actual wound. Jim took a deep breath. He grabbed his bandana, and dipped it into his canteen. He began to wash the side of Vincent’s head with slow gentle clinical movements.

As the blood cleared Jim let out a low whistle. "Well, I’ll be. You’re either the luckiest man in the Oregon Territory or the universe just plain has a soft spot for you, partner."

The bullet hadn't penetrated the skull. It had hit at an angle sliding along the bone. It tore a long ugly gash like a knife on a whetstone. It had bled enough to kill a man, but hadn't done the job. It was a trauma that promised a hell of a headache and a long road back, but it wasn't a death warrant.

Vincent’s eyelids fluttered and a groan escaped his cracked lips.

"Stay with me," Jim commanded with his voice rough. "You’ve got a girl, I reckon? I see the ring on your hand. You ain't dying here in the mud."



The next six hours were a blur of grueling labor. Jim Johnson didn't have the luxury of slow medicine. He knew the rail line was ten miles of treacherous terrain to the west. He cut saplings, and fashioned a travois. Then he lashed Vincent to it bracing the man’s head with his own bedroll.

The journey was a descent into purgatory. The travois scraped against granite; the mule stumbled, and Jim’s own muscles screamed in protest. But he didn't stop. Every time Vincent drifted Jim would slap him, or swear at him, or tell him stories about the gold fields until the man’s eyes flickered back to consciousness.

They finally broke through the dense timber into the clearing near the rail tracks. The sun was a dying ember on the horizon. The Seattle-bound train was late. Witch was a common occurrence in ’73, but it was coming. They could hear the distant mournful wail of the steam engine long before the iron monster tore through the mountain silence.

With his chest heaving Jim flagged it down with his hat. The train screeched to a halt, as the brakes screamed against the rails. The Conductor stepped down looking with suspicion at the mud-caked trapper and the blood-soaked man on the stretcher.

"He was bushwhacked," Jim shouted over the hiss of steam. He reached into his vest, and pulled out a twenty-dollar gold piece. It was a small fortune he was shoving into the Conductor’s hand.

The Conductor blinked shifting the gold in his palm. "I’m a rail man not an ambulance service."

"He’s a father," Jim growled stepping into the man’s space. "You take him to the doctor in Seattle. You see he gets looked after. I’ll be in town tomorrow. If he’s not alive, I’m coming back for that twenty."

The Conductor looked at the gold, and then back at Vincent. His hand suddenly twitched, and his fingers grasping at the dirt as if trying to hold onto something. The Conductor sighed, and signaled his crew. Then they hoisted Vincent into the passenger car.

"Seattle doctor," the Conductor promised. "I’ll see to it."

As the train pulled away the rhythmic clacking of the wheels echoed against the mountainside. Jim watched until the red glow of the tail lamp disappeared into the dark. He turned back toward the wilderness, and toward his own camp. He thought of the girl. He didn't know her name, but he knew the look in the man’s eyes. It was the look of being pulled back to earth by the memory of her waiting at home.



The Conductor was a man whose face was etched with the grime of a thousand miles of locomotive coal dust, and hadn't spoken a word since he’d loaded the broken trapper onto the train in the high mountain pass.

"Stay with me, friend," the Conductor had grunted with his voice barely audible over the shrieking whistle of the iron horse. "Seattle’s got doctors. If you’ve got the grit to keep your blood inside you, you’ll be the one to tell your own story."

When the train screeched to a final halt in Seattle, the transformation was jarring. The air smelled of salt spray from the Sound, brine, and coal smoke. It was a far cry from the crisp pine-needle scent of the Cascades. Vincent was handled with rough efficiency, and transported in the back of a shuddering freight wagon. That’s where one of the men freed him of his wedding ring. Vincent Long drifted between the agonizing burn of his head and the cold dark void of unconsciousness. He was taken to a cramped dimly lit clinic on the edge of the shipping district.



Back at the cabin the moon had risen flooding the clearing with cold silver light. Violet was still sitting by the window. She had fallen into a fitful sleep with her head resting on the pine table.

She dreamt of the oak tree, and she dreamt of her mother standing in the branches pointing toward the path. He is coming Violet. Keep the door unlatched.

She woke and the air in the cabin had changed. There was a sound. It was the low rhythmic crunch of gravel under heavy boots. Not the light springy step of a deer, but the heavy drag-footed gait of a man.

Violet scrambled to the door, and she pushed it open.

The woods were alive with the nocturnal hum of the Cascades, but there emerging from the shadows of the pines was a silhouette.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 2

High above the sea-level mists of Seattle, back in the heart of the Cascades the cabin was a fortress of silence.

Violet Long stared at the larder. It was empty. She scraped the last of the flour from the barrel, and the bread jar held nothing but a few dry crumbs. The winter wind howled against the heavy timbers. It was a mournful hungry sound that seemed to mock her solitude.

She remembered her mother Grace teaching her how to make pancakes over the hearth. But Grace was gone, and her father Vincent had been gone for days. She was left with the cold and a gnawing ache in her belly.

She knew the rule: Never touch the matches. Never play with the fire. Her father had been strict about the danger of the high-altitude winters; a fire out of control meant the cabin would be ashes in minutes, and leave them to freeze on the mountain. But hunger was a different kind of cold.

She looked up at the rafters, as if she could see through the roof to the gray churning sky where her father had vanished.

"Like you always said, Dad," she whispered with her voice brave despite the trembling in her hands. "Sometimes you just have to take some things into your own hands, and do what needs to be done."

She knelt before the cold soot-stained fireplace. Her small hands worked with practiced nervous precision. She gathered the pitch-coated pine. It was the wood that burned as hot and fast as a torch, and she crumbled dry-rotted cedar over it. She stacked the tinder with the focus of a clockmaker.

"Please," she breathed clutching a single match. "Let it take just one match."

She struck it against the stone hearth. A flare of orange light illuminated the dark room. She touched the flame to the cedar. Poof.

The reaction was instantaneous. The dry rot caught, and the scent of pine sap filled the air as the pitch began to crackle and pop. It was a beautiful ferocious sound. She fed the fire greedily adding thicker logs until the logs glowed with a fierce amber intensity.

Then she sat on the floor with the warmth of the fire washing over her skin like a benediction. She waited watching the wood collapse into a glowing bed of coals, perfect for cooking.

She grabbed the bowl with her hands moving with a fluid grace she’d inherited from her mother. She measured the flour, the baking powder, and a dash of salt. She added water, an egg, and a dollop of fat. Then she reached into the back of the pantry for her final treasure: two big spoons of blackberry jam preserved from the late autumn.

The batter was a pale sweet-smelling pink. She slid the heavy iron gridiron over the coals and set the pan down. As the batter hit the hot metal it hissed. It was a joyous sound, and the smell of browning dough and sweet berries filled the room.

For a moment, as the pancakes bubbled Violet felt a sense of triumph. She was keeping house. She was surviving. But as she flipped the first cake the wind lashed against the door again rattling the heavy latch.

She looked toward the door with her heart hammering. Down in the valley, or perhaps across the range her father was out there somewhere. She wondered if the fire she had built to keep her body warm was enough to guide his spirit back to her, or if the mountain had already claimed him leaving her to build a life out of embers and memory.

She sat down at the table with the pancake steaming on her plate, and stared into the fire. The storm grew louder, but in the cabin for the first time in days there was light.

The storm had rolled over the peaks like a great angry beast, as it hurled sheets of white across the pine‑clad valleys. Inside the Long cabin the fire was casting trembling shadows on the rough‑hewn walls. Violet Long pressed a greasy finger to the edge of the plate and watched the steam rise from the pancake, as the scent of blackberry filled the cramped room. Beyond the frosted window the wind moaned through the eaves, and rattled the shutters as though it were trying to force its way in.

She stared into the fire watching the orange tongues licking the bottom of the iron skillet. The storm grew louder with the rain hammering the roof in a relentless rhythm, but for the first time in days the cabin held light. It was a fragile thing, and a small island of warmth in a sea of cold.

The last bite of the pancake slid down Violet’s throat, and she felt the heaviness of a full belly settle in her chest. She pulled a threadbare blanket over her knees with the wool scratching her skin, and lay her head on the rough pine table. The fire crackled a low lullaby that seemed to warm the very stones beneath the floorboards. Her eyelids fluttered as if pulled by an unseen hand, and she slipped into sleep.

In her dream she was back at the old oak that rose like a sentinel over Stone Creek. Its limbs sweated sap in the fall sun, and perched among the branches was her mother Grace. She pointed down at a blaze that seemed to burn beneath the roots. “Violet, keep the fire going,” she whispered with her voice like a breath through dry leaves.

Violet awoke with a start. The fire in the hearth still glowed, as a smear of amber against the black stone. She rolled over the half‑burnt log that lay across the hearth, and found a bed of hot embers hidden beneath it. Her fingers trembled as she gathered dry cedar needles, and tossed them onto the coals. Then she blew lightly. A soft whoosh rose as the kindling caught, and flames erupted licking the air hungrily. She added larger pieces of wood feeding the fire. Then she felt for a moment that the world might stay warm a little longer.



Rick Tomson known in the towns along the Yampa as Jack, was a man of iron and wool. He had spent forty‑four winters in the goldfields. His beard was as white as the snow that now buried the hills he called home. At sixty‑two his bones ached and his joints creaked when he rose. The harshness of the Cascades had taught him the mercy of a warm fire. When the snows began to creep down the passes he left his claim at the mouth of Quartz Creek. Then he set his sights on Seattle where the winter was milder and a hot meal could be bought for a copper.

That morning with his mule Thunder at his heels Jack guided Thunder down Stone Creek. A line of traps had been set along the creek-bank by Vincent Long, and he had promised Vincent he would check them when departing for the city. The line wound through the pine forest past a shallow ford. It was where the water whispered over smooth stones, and past the ancient oak that stood sentinel over everything.

As the oak loomed into view, a fresh grave marked by a hastily placed pine bough caught his eye. The soil was still soft and the mound barely a mound. Jack’s breath steamed in the cold air, as his heart beat a cautious rhythm. Whoever lay there had been buried only days ago. He glanced at his pocket watch. There was no time for mourning. Only the pressing need to reach the Long cabin before darkness swallowed the trail.

His mind thought of who it might be. It was too big to be Violet, but was it Vincent or Grace? Was he going to find a mother and daughter, or a father and daughter?

“Hello in the cabin!” he called with his voice echoing off the trees.

The sound of his own voice bounced back at him mingled with the wind’s howl. He could have sworn he heard a tiny footstep on the pine‑covered ground like a rapid rustle. He tightened his grip on the lead rope with the leather warm against his palm, and eased Thunder toward the cabin’s sagging porch.

The door swung open before his boots even touched the threshold. A small figure burst through the door with her hair tangled, and her cheeks flushed with cold. “Jack!” she cried, and the world seemed to tilt on its axis.

Jack’s senses sharpened. The little girl vaulted into his arms with her feet barely touching the floor as she clung to his chest. “Did you see my daddy?” she begged with her voice cracking like thin ice.

“No, isn’t he home child?” a low voice whispered from the doorway. It was Jack’s own though the man who had called himself Jack for most of his life seemed suddenly a stranger.

Violet’s eyes raw with tears searched his face. “No. He left four days ago to check a trap line, and he never came back.”

Jack’s jaw tightened. “Your mom?” he asked with his voice barely above a murmur.

Violet’s shoulders slumped, her head dropping. “The fever took her Jack.” The word hung in the chill air like a dreadful syllable. In that moment Jack understood: the fever had claimed Grace Long’s life.

Violet clutched his hand tugging it in with sudden resolve. “Don’t just stand there. Put Thunder in the loafing shed, and come in the cabin.” She tugged his arm toward the shed with her voice steadier now, as if she knew the strength she needed not just for herself but also for the man holding her in his arms.

 

[gonewacky]

Jack followed her into the corral. Then into the loafing shed where he set the rabbits on a wooden board, and then he began to skin them. The knife glinted in with the blade slick with blood. He worked efficiently with a skill honed from years of hunting and trapping in the high country, and soon the raw flesh was laid upon a cast‑iron griddle.

“Do you think we could dig up some of the potatoes your mom planted?” Jack asked as he turned the rabbits flipping them to a perfect sizzle.

Violet’s eyes lit up. “I’ll get the pitchfork!” she shouted, rushing out of the cabin, her small feet leaving prints in the soft dirt that the storm would soon erase.

She returned with a rusted pitchfork clutched in her hand. She seemed smaller for a moment with the weight of grief pressing down on her shoulders. “We were going to dig them, but Mom got sick…” she whispered with her voice barely audible over the crackling fire.

Jack set the pitchfork to the ground beside the wall. The soil was soft from a recent rain, and the prongs slipped into the earth. He thrust the pitchfork feeling the resistance give way. Together they lifted the first handful of potatoes. They were brown and small, but still enough to feed a starving child.

By nightfall the cabin smelled of roasting rabbit and fried potatoes. Jack flung a fresh log onto the fire, and the flames caught with a bright hiss painting the walls with dancing shadows. He sat on a rough‑hewn bench and watched Violet eat. Each bite was a small victory over the emptiness that threatened to consume them both.

“Your father… he might be out there somewhere,” Jack said quietly with his eyes never leaving the fire. The wind outside howled like a banshee, and the snow on the mountain was erasing any trail that might have led to Vincent. “We’ll keep a watch. If he finds his way back we’ll be here.”

Violet looked up with the flickering firelight catching the determination in her young eyes. “I’ll wait,” she whispered, “for Daddy.”

When the little girl finally drifted into sleep and her breathing was slow and steady. Jack stoked the fire and climbed into the small loft above the cabin’s main room. From his perch he looked out the grimy window at the black silhouettes of the Cascades. It was where the peaks were shrouded in swirling drifts. Somewhere beyond those mountains the world stretched out to towns with copper roofs, train tracks that sang on hot steel, and men with new faces and new names.

He could not shake the image of Vincent Long. Jack’s thoughts turned to the trail that loped down the creek to the grave beside the oak. Then to the distant town of Seattle where a man named Jim Johnson had rescued a ghost from the winter’s clutches.

He made a silent vow then. He would not ride to Seattle that winter. He would hold the line for Violet until the mountains either gave up their dead or released their living. The fire hissed sending sparks flying into the gloom like fireflies. Violet’s softly murmur a name that sounded like “Papa” that floated up to the loft. Jack placed his rifle on his knee and rested his palm over the cold wood as he waited for dawn. In the heart of winter a hot fire and a promise were the only weapons a man had against the encroaching night.

The frost clung to the cabin walls like a shroud, and a silver filigree that hinted at the brutal silence of the coming Cascade winter. Inside, Jack Tomson moved with the practiced efficiency of a man who had spent his life in the mines, but his heart felt heavy with the weight of someone else’s tragedy.

He had woken early, the chill in the room biting through his woolen shirt. He had gone straight to the pantry, hoping against hope that he had miscounted the previous night’s inventory. He hadn't. The flour bin was scraped clean, the ghost of white dust clinging to the wood. There was enough salt pork and beans to last a week, perhaps ten days if they rationed like misers. After that, the mountain would take what was left of them.

Stepping outside Jack found the yard well-stocked with pine logs. Vincent Long had been a man of foresight, and had a tall sturdy stack of hay for the horse. It was fuel and fodder for a winter that would trap them, but it wouldn't keep the belly full. He looked toward the Oak Tree at the edge of the clearing where a fresh mound of earth sat beneath a light dusting of snow. Grace Long was there. Somewhere else far to the west in the city of Seattle Vincent Long was fighting for his life. He had been stripped of his memory and his identity.

Jack turned back to the cabin. Six-year-old Violet was waiting at the table with her small hands folded tightly.

"There’s no flour Violet," Jack said choosing his words with the care one uses when handling dynamite.

Violet looked up with her eyes wide and solemn. Her eyes were too solemn for a child. "I know. Daddy was going to trade his furs. He said he’d bring back a sack of flour and sugar for the winter. He was going to take me with him when he got back."

Jack pulled out a chair and sat across from her. The girl possessed a strange brittle courage that both impressed and terrified him. "I’m going to make you a deal. We’re going to leave a note for your father here in case he finds his way back before we return. We’ll hitch Lightning to that buckboard of yours and head for Jackson’s Prairie. It’s a long haul, but we can make it if we push."

Violet didn't flinch. She simply processed the information. "My daddy always said," she whispered with her voice steady, "That sometimes you just have to take things into your own hands and do what needs to be done. I guess we better do it."

Jack felt the tightness in his throat. "We’ll leave first light tomorrow. I’m going to let the fire die down tonight to save the wood. It’ll be a cold morning, but I’ll have it laid and ready. A single match will bring it back to life the second we get home."

Violet’s face brightened, but only for a moment. "Do you think… do you think we can get some sugar?"

Jack couldn't help but smile, a rare, genuine expression that reached his weary eyes. "Violet, it would be a waste of a trip if we didn’t."



Miles away in the bustling rain-slicked streets of Seattle the air tasted of salt and coal smoke. Inside Dr. Sawyer’s cramped clinic the smell of carbolic acid and stale tobacco hung heavy.

Jim Johnson, a trapper whose face was a road map of scars and hard winters stood by the cot of the man known as Vincent Long. The man was alive, but he was a hollow shell with his eyes vacant as he stared at the ceiling.

Dr. Sawyer a man with ink-stained fingers and tired eyes adjusted his spectacles. "I’ve checked him over twice Jim. There’s no physical reason he shouldn't be speaking, but the trauma to the skull… it’s wiped the slate clean. He doesn’t even know his own name."

"How did you know he had a girl?" the doctor asked gesturing to the empty space where a memory should have been.

Jim shifted his boots creaking on the floorboards. He looked down at his own callous-hardened hand. "By the ring, Doc," Jim said with his voice a low gravelly rasp. "A man doesn’t wear a ring like that if he doesn’t have a girl somewhere waiting for him. It’s a mark of a promise."

The doctor shook his head, looking puzzled. "He doesn’t have a ring on his finger Jim. He didn't have one when the Tanners dropped him on my porch."

Jim’s demeanor shifted instantly. The sorrow in his posture hardened into something lethal. He stepped closer to the doctor, as his shadow loomed large against the white-washed wall. "How did he get here? From the train?"

"A freight wagon," the doctor replied sensing the sudden change in temperature in the room. "Run by Hunter and Jasper Tanner. They said he was found near the base of the foothills half-dead and delirious."

"You know where I can find them?" Jim asked.

"If there’s an incoming train they’ll be at the railhead looking for a haul," the doctor muttered. "If not, you’ll find them at the Red Dog Saloon. They usually don't go far when they’ve got coin in their pockets."

Jim turned toward the door with his hand resting instinctively on the worn leather of his holster. "Thanks, Doc. If he wakes up or starts remembering anything you tell him I’m coming back."

"I'll see you Jim," the doctor called out, but the trapper was already gone disappearing into the gray Seattle mist.



Back in the Cascades, the silence of the forest was absolute. Jack was up before the sun and the mountain air was so cold it felt like needles against his skin. He moved with practiced quiet speed, as he laid the kindling in the hearth.

Violet was already dressed in her heavy wool coat standing by the door with a satchel over her shoulder. She looked like a small sentry guarding a fortress.

"Ready?" Jack whispered.

"Ready," she replied.

They stepped out into the pre-dawn gloom. The mule Thunder shifted nervously in the stable. His breath was blooming in white plumes. Jack harnessed the beast to the buckboard with his fingers numbing despite the thick leather gloves. He tacked a piece of paper to the cabin door. It was a simple desperate message in case the man from the clinic somehow made his way home.

Gone to Jackson's Prairie for supplies. Back soon. Jack & Violet.

The sun began to bleed over the jagged peaks, as it painted the snow in shades of violet and bruised orange. Jack took the reins with the wheels of the buckboard crunching against the frozen ground. It was a rhythmic sound that seemed to mock the stillness of the valley.

They were heading toward the prairie, and toward the supplies they needed to keep the fire of life burning in that lonely cabin.

 

[gonewacky]

But miles away in the dark corners of the Red Dog Saloon the ghosts of the past were waking up. The Tanners were drinking, as the doctor was tending to a man with no identity, and Jim Johnson was coming for the truth.





The winter was coming, and with it a storm that none of them were prepared to face. Jack cracked the reins, and the buckboard lurched forward leaving the safety of the clearing behind. They were plunged into a world where the only thing guaranteed was the cold, and the only thing that mattered was the strength to hold on.

The wind gusted against the rough-hewn timber of the Jackson’s Prairie Trading Post, and it sounded like a wounded animal seeking shelter. Outside the gray sky pressed down upon the peaks of the Cascades, and the promise of a winter that would soon bury the world in six feet of silence.

Inside the scent of sawdust, cured tobacco, and heavy wool hung thick in the air. Jack Tomson leaned against the counter with his weathered hands tracing the edge of a crumpled slip of paper. He was a man carved from granite and stubbornness. He was a gold miner whose skin had been permanently stained by the dust of a dozen diggings, but today his eyes were fixed on the small girl shivering by the apple barrel.

Tom Reed the proprietor took the list. His eyes scanned the scrawled ink until they snagged on a single word. He looked up with his brow furrowed.

“What about this, Jack?” Tom asked pointing a calloused finger at the word toys.

Jack didn’t hesitate. “Just pick out a couple things for the little girl, and nail it up in a box.”

Tom’s gaze drifted over Jack’s shoulder to where Violet stood. She was six years old wearing a coat three sizes too large, and her hair was a tangled mat of gold spun from sunlight and neglect.

“Isn’t that the Long girl?” Tom whispered with his voice pitching down into a gravelly undertone.

Jack stiffened. “Sure is. Her mother Grace died of the fever three weeks back. Vincent went out to check his trap line in the high pass and never came back. I found her in the cabin alone four days ago. She was sitting at the table waiting for a dinner that wasn’t coming.”

Tom’s face went blank, and the color drained from his cheeks as if he’d been struck. The tragedy of the Long homestead was already drifting through the valley like smoke, but hearing it confirmed in the cold hard light of the trading post. That made the air suddenly feel very thin.

“Can we get some apples Jack?” Violet called out with her voice fragile as winter ice. She held up a bruised ruby-red apple with her eyes wide with a hunger that wasn't just for food.

Tom snapped back to reality with his chest hitching. He forced a smile that didn't reach his eyes. “Jack has them on the list sweetheart. I’ll help you pick them out in a minute.”

As Violet turned back to the barrel distracted by the simple joy of fruit. Tom leaned over the counter. He brought his voice to a low urgent murmur. “You going to stay there with her? That cabin is a tomb Jack. And winter is two days away.”

“I don’t have much choice,” Jack muttered, “Her father was a neighbor. A man doesn’t walk away from a promise like that. I gave her my word I’d see her through.”

Tom hesitated with his eyes darting toward the frosted windows. “There’s talk Jack. A mountain man came through last night headed for the lowlands. He heard a trapper found an injured man on Stone Creek. He had a bad head wound, and was acting like a lost soul. The trapper hauled him all the way to the train. You think that was Vincent?”

Jack turned his head slowly looking out at the pines swaying rhythmically in the gale. The image of the cabin, the cold hearth, and the empty cot burned in his mind. “It could be. Maybe it’s not. But I can’t chase shadows in a blizzard Tom. I’ve got a child who can’t eat shadows. Maybe next spring when the drifts recede I can look into it. For now she’s all I’ve got.”

Tom nodded accepting the finality in Jack’s tone. He pushed off the counter and stepped toward the apple barrel. He knelt with his bulky wool coat rustling. “Six, Violet. That’s what we’ve got room for. Pick the ones that look like they’ll keep through the first snowfall.”

Violet’s small hands danced over the fruit with a sudden desperate gravity. “This one, and this one,” she whispered.

“Now go put them in the box on the counter,” Tom said gently, “and I’ll start getting the rest of the supplies.”

As the girl hurried toward the counter, Tom looked up at Jack. “If it was him he’s in Seattle now. Dr. Sawyer’s clinic. If he’s alive he’s lost his mind Jack. Men with those kinds of wounds… they don’t come back the same.”

“If he’s alive,” Jack replied with his eyes dark with a mixture of hope and dread, “he’ll have to find his own way back. I’m just trying to keep his daughter breathing until the sun returns.”



Miles away in Dr. Sawyer’s clinic in Seattle a man sat on the edge of a narrow iron cot. His head was wrapped in thick white linen stained faintly with yellowing dried blood.

He looked at his hands. They were calloused and scarred by steel traps and bitter winters, but he didn't recognize them. He didn't recognize the room, the scent of carbolic acid, or the man in the white coat standing by the window.

“Stanley?” the doctor asked softly.

The man looked up. His eyes were the color of a storm-tossed sea, troubled, hazy, and wide with a terrifying emptiness.

“I keep seeing a girl,” the man whispered with his voice raspy from disuse. “She’s standing in a doorway. It’s freezing. And there’s a name… a name I’m supposed to remember. It’s on the tip of my tongue, but every time I try to say it the mountain swallows it.”

Dr. Sawyer sighed turning away. He couldn't tell the man that the mountain hadn't swallowed it; he couldn't tell him that he was a ghost walking through the wrong life. He only knew that the winter was coming, and some things were better left lost until the spring.



Back at the trading post Jack hammered the lid onto the wooden crate. The sound echoed through the rafters like a sharp metallic rhythm against the rising howl of the wind. Violet stood beside him clutching a small carved wooden bear Tom had tucked into the box.

“Are we going home Jack?” she asked.

Jack took her small hand in his. His grip was firm, and a tether against the coming storm. “We’re going home Violet. And we’re going to wait for the thaw.”

Outside, the first flakes of the great winter began to fall. It turned the world white masking the tracks of the past, and burying the secrets of the Cascades deep beneath the ice. The journey to the truth would have to wait. In Jackson’s Prairie survival was the only currency that mattered.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 3

The Cascade Mountains at the end of October, 1873 were not merely a landscape; they were a closing fist. The mountain peaks sharp as obsidian shards scraped the belly of a low bruising sky, and that promised nothing but ice. Violet huddled tight against Jack Tomson’s wool-clad side as the buckboard lurched over a deep rut in the wagon trail. Each jolt sent a shudder through the frame of the old buckboard, and echoed the tremor in the child’s small shivering body.

Violet’s breath puffed out in rhythmic white clouds, and mimicked the chugging smoke stack of the steam trains. The same steam trains that were slowly pushing the frontier into history.

Jack gripped the reins with his knuckles white and calloused. His eyes map-lined and weary scanned the darkening tree line. He was a man who had known the mountains when they were silent. Back when the only laws were the ones written in blood and fur. But the beaver were gone and trapped into near-extinction, and the prices for pelts had dwindled until they were hardly worth the sweat of the harvest. Now, the mountains were infested with settlers building fences and missionaries preaching about souls that the wilderness had long ago claimed for itself.

He looked down at Violet. She was six, and innocent of the truth that sat heavy in Jack’s gut. The old ways were dying, and men like him were being pushed into the margins. The mountains didn't care about a man's courage or the years he’d spent taming the wild. This coming winter would be a reckoning; it would prove that the wilderness was not conquered, but merely rented. And the rent was due in blood.

"Is Papa going to meet us at the cabin Jack?" Violet’s voice was small and muffled by her thick woolen scarf.

Jack hesitated. He had intended to head for Seattle. To the relative safety of a boardinghouse with a warm stove and a roof that didn't leak snow. But he had given his word to Vincent Long’s daughter. A man’s word was the only currency that held value in the high country, and Jack was a man of the old school.

"Your father said he’d be there, Violet," Jack lied with his voice gravelly. "And a man like Vincent doesn't break his word."



Miles away at the Red Dog Saloon in Seattle was a cavern of stale tobacco smoke and spilled rye. The air was thick enough to chew. Jim Johnson a trapper whose face looked like it had been carved from the very granite of the Cascades, as he pushed his way through the swinging doors of the Saloon. His coat was dusted with the gray slush of the city, and his eyes were dark, focused, and pitiless.

He didn't scan the room. He knew exactly where they were.

The Tanner brothers Hunter and Jasper were hunched over a scarred pine table in the back, as they nursed a single bottle of rotgut. Jim walked toward them. With his spurs biting into the floorboards with a metallic clink that silenced the nearby gamblers. He placed a heavy dirt-stained hand on the butt of his holstered Colt.

"Which one of you took the ring?" Jim’s voice was a low growl vibrating with the threat of violence.

Hunter the elder of the two didn't look up. He swirled the amber liquid in his glass. "What ring? You’ve been out in the hills too long. You’re seeing things."

Jasper the younger and weaker link froze. His eyes flickered toward the exit. Then toward Jim’s hand. He was vibrating like a trapped rabbit.

Jim didn't blink. "I don't care which one of you is the thief," Jim said with his tone indifferent, as if discussing the price of salt. "I only need one of you to talk. I’m going to put a bullet in one of your heads. If the other one survives he can tell me where the ring is. If I kill the right one I suppose the problem solves itself."

Jasper’s control snapped. He slammed his glass down with the whiskey splashing across the table. "We traded it! We traded it to the bartender for the bottle!”

Hunter blurted, “You fool, he’s going to kill us!"

Hunter went pale with his stutter returning. "W-w-we don't have the money to buy it back. It’s gone. The bartender took it as payment."

Jim didn't argue. He kicked the table leg with enough force to send their drinks crashing to the floor. Then he turned on his heel and strode to the bar. The bartender was a man with apron strings stretched over a fat gut, and didn't look happy to see him.

"That ring from the table over there," Jim said leaning over the mahogany. "Hand it over."

"That’s paid for friend," the bartender grunted reaching for a club beneath the counter. "Trade is trade."

Jim leaned in with his face inches from the man’s. "That ring belonged to a man in the doctor’s clinic. A man who was shot in the head trying to protect his family. That ring is evidence of a robbery connected to an attempted murder. You keep it, and you're an accessory. I can either call the Marshall. Who I hear is looking to make an example of thieves in this part of town, or I can show you how a trapper handles a man who steals from the dying."

The bartender looked at Jim’s eyes. He saw the soul of a man who had lived through ten winters in the Cascades, and decided the ring wasn't worth his life. He reached into his pocket and slid a gold band stained with a dark dried smudge across the wood.

Jim snatched it up with the metal biting into his palm. He didn't look back at the Tanner brothers. He walked out into the rain-slicked streets of Seattle toward Dr. Sawyer’s clinic.

Inside the clinic the air smelled of ether and lye. Dr. Sawyer was a man of science, but he looked baffled. He stood over a bed where Vincent Long lay. His head swathed in thick blood-crusted bandages.

"He's awake," Sawyer whispered as Jim entered. "But he doesn't know who he is. The bullet grazed the frontal lobe, but missed the fatal path. It’s a miracle he’s breathing let alone talking. But his memories... the trauma seems to have wiped the slate clean. He’s a stranger in his own skin."

Jim approached the bed. Vincent’s eyes once sharp enough to track a mountain lion through a blizzard, but now were unfocused and drifting over the ceiling.

"Trapper," Jim said gently.

The man on the bed turned his head slowly. A flicker of recognition, or perhaps just a reaction to the sound of a voice crossed his features. But it didn't hold. "Who... who are you?"

Jim didn't answer. Instead, he reached into his pocket and pulled out the ring. He held it up letting the dim light of the gas lamp catch the gold. "This is yours. You fought for it. You fought the Tanners to keep it."

Vincent stared at the ring. His face contorted into a mask of pain as he struggled to reach into the dark shattered attic of his mind. Suddenly a gasp tore from his throat. The name Grace slipped out. It was a broken desperate sound.

"Grace," Vincent whimpered with his fingers trembling as he reached for Jim’s hand. "Where is she? The cabin... the cold..."

"I don’t know," Jim said gripping Vincent’s shoulder. "I have to go Trapper. I have to look for her before the snow shuts the passes."

Vincent looked at the doctor. Then he looked back to Jim with the fog in his eyes beginning to clear with the sharp agonizing blade of recollection. "Save her," he whispered. "The winter... it’s coming early. Don't let her freeze."



Back in the Cascades the temperature had plummeted. The wind howled through the timber like a banshee, and the first flakes of a blizzard began to dance in the air. It was heavy, wet, and blinding.

Jack pulled the buckboard to a halt. Thunder was lathered in sweat, and his breath thick and ragged. He looked at the mountain pass ahead; it was already disappearing into a wall of white.

"Jack?" Violet asked with her voice trembling. "It’s getting dark."

Jack pulled a heavy buffalo robe over her tucking it in tight. He wasn't a religious man, but he looked up at the black peaks that loomed over them silent and indifferent. He realized then that he couldn't make the cabin. He couldn't make it to shelter. They were going to have to hunker down right there beneath the boughs of a sheltering fir, and wait for the storm to break.

He climbed down from the seat and began to unhitch the mule. He knew this was the end of his time. He was too old and his bones too brittle for this kind of cold, and the mountains were calling his name.

He looked at the little girl tucked into the seat. She was watching him with eyes that were already beginning to mirror the stoicism of the wilderness. He would keep her warm. He would feed the fire with his own gear if he had to. He would give her his last bit of strength to ensure that when the thaw came. She would be the one to walk out.

As the wind roared and the world turned white, and Jack Tomson smiled. The old ways were ending, yes. The mountains were cruel. They were indifferent, and wild. But as he sat by the fire holding the little girl against the encroaching frost he knew that some things. Like honor, protection, and the fierce stubborn love of the frontier was not so easily killed.

But for the first time in his life Jack didn't fear the cold. He was just a mortal man, and small, but he was holding the line. And for tonight, that was enough.

Jack was a gold miner who had traded his dreams of ore for the raw desperate reality of survival, but the peaks were currently closing in like the jaws of a trap.

The night had been an eternity of teeth-chattering cold and the rhythmic hollow ache of exhaustion. Jack broke off another brittle branch from the underside of a fir with his movements stiff and agonizingly slow. He fed the fire watching as the flames danced a pathetic flickering jig against the onslaught of the blizzard. Beneath his heavy wool coat he held Violet tight. The six-year-old was a dead weight of ice-cold shivering against his chest. If he slept the darkness would take them both. He knew the biology of the mountain: sleep here was not a rest; it was surrender.

"Stay with me Violet," he whispered with his voice cracking like dry timber. "Just a little longer."

He thought of the supplies strapped to the buckboard. The flour, salted pork, and the precious medicine meant for a girl who had seen too much sorrow before her seventh birthday. He thought of Vincent Long. Not knowing her father who was currently lying in a sterile room in Seattle. With his mind wiped clean by a bullet to the skull, and oblivious to the fact that his daughter was inches away from freezing in the high passes. Jack wasn't a hero; he was just a man who had promised a girl he would bring her family back together piece by broken piece.

As the pre-dawn twilight bled into the horizon the howl of the wind dropped an octave. The storm was reseeding, and was pulling its claws back into the clouds. Jack didn't wait for the sun. He scrambled to his feet with his joints protesting with every movement. He hitched Lightning to the buckboard. The animal stood with his head bowed, eyes rimmed in ice, and waiting for a command that Jack barely had the breath to give.

The ride to the cabin was a blur of pale white drifts and the biting sting of wind-driven ice. Then the timber-hewn walls of the cabin finally materialized through the haze. Jack felt a wave of relief so intense it nearly buckled his knees. He pulled the buckboard to the door, and scooped up Violet. Who was now ominously silent, and stumbled inside.

The interior of the cabin was a tomb. It held the stale air of a hundred empty nights. Jack set Violet by the hearth with her small body curled into a ball. He reached into his pocket for his matches, but his fingers were no longer his own. They were waxen, white, and twitching with a fine uncontrollable tremor.

Hypothermia, he thought with his mind feeling like a heavy waterlogged rug. This is the stage of the shakes. He knew the signs of hypothermia, and was shivering. He knew hypothermia was setting in on him. His body was already trying to generate heat through the shakes. His hands were shaking too bad to light a match, so he put his hands under his armpits in an attempt to warm them enough to light the match.

 

[gonewacky]

His breath was coming in whistling ragged gasps. He watched the fireplace. The kindling and tender he had meticulously laid before their supply trip were covered in a fine crystalline coat of snow that had drifted down the chimney. It mocked him.

He crawled toward the hearth with his movement’s jerky. He tried to blow the snow off the pine shavings, but his lips were numb and incapable of forming a seal. A puff of air emerged weak and pathetic. The snow didn't budge.

"Come on," he hissed at himself as his vision began to tunnel. Colors muted into shades of grey. He remembered the doctor in Seattle who had spoken of the confusion before the end. He fought to keep his focus, but the edges of his mind were blurring.

He stared at the matchbox. He had to light it. He had to. He brought his hands out with his fingers stiff as talons. He struck the match against the box, once, twice, but the head snapped off the match. It was useless. He let out a low guttural moan that sounded nothing like a human voice.

He looked at Violet. Her eyelashes were frosted. If he didn't get that fire going now the cold would stop her heart, and then it would stop his.

Think, he commanded his fading consciousness. The cabin isn’t just wood. It’s a box.

He forced himself to his feet swaying like a drunken man. He staggered toward the worktable where they kept a tin of whale oil for the lantern. He fumbled knocking a heavy iron pan to the floor. It made a deafening clang that echoed through the empty cabin like a funeral bell. He found the tin, but his hands couldn't grip the lid. He used his teeth, and the metal tasted of iron and filth, as he pried it open.

He poured the oil over the snow-dusted tender. It soaked through turning the white powder into a sullen grey sludge. It wasn't perfect, but it was fuel.

He struck another match. His heart hammered in his chest like a frantic bird in a cage. Strike. The match flared. Drop it, he thought.

The flame caught the oil-soaked shavings. A small blue-orange tongue of fire licked upward. It was hesitant, and then greedy. Jack collapsed back against the stone hearth with his strength fully spent. He watched the fire grow, as its warmth reached out to touch his face.

He looked over at Violet. She hadn't moved. Fear sharper than the cold surged through him. He crawled to her with his legs dragging behind him like dead weight, and pressed his ear to her chest.

Thump-thump.

A miracle.

Jack lay back on the floor as the firelight cast long dancing shadows against the log walls. The cabin began to fill with the smell of burning pine and the radiant heat of the hearth, and he closed his eyes.

He didn't have to fight anymore. The supplies were here. The fire was lit, and in the morning if the mountain allowed. They would get another day. He had kept his promise to the best of his ability. He drifted into the darkness, but for the first time in three days, he wasn't afraid. The fire was alive, and because of it the girl would have a chance to wake up. For Jack that was enough.



The Cascades were not merely a mountain range in the autumn of 1873; they were a closing iron trap. The frost had settled into the deep creases of the earth like a burial shroud, and the winds that howled through the timber carried the sharp metallic scent of premature snow.

In the small drafty cabin the hearth was the only thing holding the encroaching void at bay.

Violet awoke with a start. The internal clock of a child living on the frontier was tuned to the rhythm of the fire. When the embers dimmed the cold bit deeper, and the silence became heavy. She slid from her furs and scurried across the rough-hewn floorboards to the pallet where Jack lay. She shook his shoulder with her small hands trembling slightly.

“Fire needs wood Jack,” she whispered.

Jack opened one eye. The lid was heavy and crusted with the exhaustion of a man whose bones were seventy years old, and felt like dry kindling. He sighed a raspy sound that rattled in his chest. “Put some wood on it, child. We can’t let it go out. Not tonight.”

Violet hovered over him for a second longer. “Lightning needs to be put in the loafing shed,” she added with her voice barely audible.

Jack groaned with every joint in his body protesting the movement. He wanted to curl back into the warmth of the quilts and sleep until the spring thaw, but the responsibility of their survival was a weight he couldn't shed. If he slept the Mule froze, the fire died, and the hunger would finish what the cold started.

“Put the wood on, Violet. You can do it,” Jack said struggling to sit upright. “I’ll get up. I’ll take care of Lightning. Then we need to unload the rest of the supplies from the buckboard before the frost freezes the crates to the wood.”

He watched her move to the hearth with her small figure illuminated by the orange glow. She was a resilient thing, Grace’s daughter. Seeing her move he couldn't help but see a ghost of the woman who had nurtured this cabin before the winter turned cruel.

Outside the air was a physical blow. Jack moved like a man wading through deep water. His breath hitching in his lungs as he led the Mule Lightning into the loafing shed. The Mule didn’t hee-haw or whinny it brayed shivering in the sudden stillness of the structure. Jack patted him on the neck with his stiff and numb hands.

He returned to the cabin with the door groaning on its hinges as he fought to pull it shut against the gale. He dumped the last of the dry goods onto the table.

“Salt pork,” he muttered with his voice hollow. He dropped a chunk into the iron pot. “Violet, cover the meat with water. Put it on the gridiron. We’ll add the beans when I bring them in.”

He collapsed into his chair by the fire with his chest heaving. The cold had settled deep into his marrow during the short trip to the shed, and the weakness was returning like a slow creeping paralysis. He watched Violet work. She was efficient with her movements mirroring the habits her mother had instilled in her.

“I put the molasses over next to the hearth,” she told him with her voice steady. “Mommy always did that. She said it gets too thick when it’s cold.”

Jack forced a smile even though his hands were shaking so violently he had to tuck them under his arms. “That’s right little one. Smart girl.”

“I’ll put the beans in,” she said moving toward the ten-cup.

“One cup,” Jack instructed leaning his head back against the chair. “Watch the water. We didn't have time to soak them, so they’ll drink up the broth faster than usual.”

He watched her stir the pot with her small hands navigating the heavy iron utensils with ease. In that moment the suffocating cloud of his own frailty began to lift. She was the reason he was still drawing breath. She was the tie to a world that was rapidly turning white and silent.

She walked over and sat on his lap leaning her head against his chest. “I can make some cornbread to go with the beans Jack. I helped Mommy make it lots of times.”

Jack felt a pang of ache. Not in his bones this time, but in his heart. “I got us a can of baking powder, and we can put a spoon of that and a spoon of sugar in it too.”

Violet frowned with her brow furrowing in concentration. “I only know how to make what Mommy called hot water cornbread.”

“Same thing,” Jack said squeezing her shoulder. “We just add the sugar and baking powder to make it rise. It’ll be a treat.”

That night the cabin smelled of salt pork and the sweetness of the cornbread. It was a small defiant victory against the mountain. Violet cuddled into Jack’s side as the wind shrieked against the logs reaching out to claw at the roof.

“That cornbread was like cake Jack,” she whispered with her eyes wide with the simple pleasure of it.

“I know, sweetie,” Jack muttered staring into the flickering embers. “That’s why we made it like that.”

She was quiet for a long moment watching the fire. “You think we can make that when my daddy gets home?”

Jack froze. The silence in the cabin seemed to deepen with the fire popping as a spark hit the hearth. He looked down at her. Her innocent expectation was shining in the firelight. He knew the truth of the Cascades. He knew what Mountain could do and a week of exposure meant. Vincent Long wasn’t coming back. There was no room for him in this winter.

A hot stinging tear tracked through the dirt and gray stubble on Jack’s cheek. He pulled her tight burying his face in her hair so she wouldn't see his expression.

“Sure we can,” he lied. His was voice thick with a sorrow he couldn't name. “Sure we can, Violet.”



In Seattle the air was warmer smelling of salt spray and coal smoke instead of pine and eternity.

Jim Johnson pushed open the door to the boarding house shaking the dampness from his hat. He had been working double shifts at the Mercantile to pay for the doctor’s bills, and his body was aching in a different way than Jack’s. His was a weariness born of grief and relentless labor.

He walked to the clinic with his boots heavy on the boardwalk. Dr. Sawyer was there with his sleeves rolled up looking tired. In the corner Vincent Long sat in a wooden chair. He was thinner, his face a pale map of scars, and his eyes unfocused.

“He can’t walk yet,” Dr. Sawyer explained with his voice low. “His balance is wrecked. It might come back, or it might not. He might be walking with a stick for the rest of his days.”

The doctor stepped back. “I’ve given him a name. It’s Stanley.”

Vincent looked up with his gaze distant. “I picked it out. I don’t know where it came from, but you have to call me something. It’s better than being a ghost.”

Jim stepped forward with his heart hammering against his ribs. “Did the ring bring anything back Stanley?”

Vincent looked at his hand. He was wearing a plain gold band etched with initials that he couldn't quite decipher. “No. But I wear it. I think… I think I was married. I keep seeing flashes of a woman, a cabin, and a fire. But it’s like looking through a frosted window. It’s all before the ring. Before the darkness.”

Jim looked at his friend. He was a man who had been a titan of the woods. Now he was reduced to a confused and broken stranger named Stanley. “Well,” Jim said forcing a smile that didn't reach his eyes. “It’s good to see you out of bed. I’ll stop in tomorrow after work. I’ve got to go. If I’m too late the boarding house won’t have a scrap of supper left.”

Vincent gave a faint slow nod. “Then get going man. I’m not worth starving over.”

As Jim walked back out into the Seattle night he looked up at the mountains in the distance. They were veiled in thick heavy clouds. Somewhere up there the winter was closing its fist. He felt a sudden inexplicable shiver. It was a cold that didn't come from the rain, but from the realization that miles away. Someone was waiting for a man who didn't even know his own name.

The mountains kept their secrets, and the winter was only just beginning.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 4

The wind howled against the rough-hewn timbers of the cabin, and made a lonely mournful sound that seemed to rattle the very marrow in their bones. Outside the world was being swallowed by the Cascade’s unforgiving winter. Jack had spent the better part of the morning battling the drifts, and tethering a thick hemp rope from the porch to the loafing shed. It was a primitive frayed lifeline, but necessary. As long as the rope held he could navigate the whiteout to bring in wood and light.

Inside the fire crackled fighting a losing battle against the encroaching chill. Violet sat near the hearth, her face pale in the flickering amber glow. The creek was their only source of water and still chattered over the stones, but the ice was creeping in from the banks. It was like jagged crystalline teeth biting closer every hour.

"It’s going to freeze tonight," Violet whispered, pulling her shawl tighter. "The silence is getting louder Jack."

Jack leaned back against the rough wall with his hands calloused and stained by years in the mines. "The mountains are just resting Violet. We’ve got wood to last, and the creek is still fighting. We’ll be fine."

"Tell me a story," she pleaded with her eyes wide. "Tell me something from before. Not about the mine, and not about the cold. Tell me about when you were a man of the law."

Jack paused, as the memory surfaced like sludge in a sluice box. He looked at the shadows dancing on the logs and began.

"It was 1843," he started with his voice gravelly. "I was just a pup really. I was a Deputy for the U.S. Marshal in Seattle. Back then it wasn't much more than a collection of cedar planks and mud. We were riding the perimeter when we saw it: a plume of black smoke choking the sky above the hills. We spurred the horses and climbed the ridge thinking it was a wildfire."

He closed his eyes seeing the charred skeletons of the trees. "When we reached the top the cabin was gone. It was just a pile of glowing ash-choked embers. The barn stood though, and a few sheds looking like headstones in a graveyard."

"The Marshal and I pulled up," Jack continued with his tone dropping to a conspiratorial hush. "I remember the smell of burnt pine and something sour like rot. There wasn't a soul around. Just two horses in the corral with their ribs showing like washboards. The whole place felt like it had been forgotten by God."

"The Marshal was a seasoned man. He kicked at the dirt and sighed. “It’s odd, Jack. A man that lives out here has to have a rhythm. But this place… its rust and ruin. And he didn't even care for his stock.”

We found a well that was bone-dry and covered in cobwebs. The Marshal figured the man lived on rot-gut whiskey, and drank himself into a stupor. Then he tipped a lamp over in his sleep. A simple, ugly end."

Violet leaned forward mesmerized. "But it wasn't just him, was it?"

Jack shook his head slowly. "That’s what I thought when I saw the creek bed. I caught a flicker of movement it was a bit of color in the grey slush. Marshal, I said with my throat tight. I don't think he was alone."

He described how they’d walked down to the water’s edge. There standing among the frozen ferns was a girl. She couldn't have been more than ten. She looked at them with eyes that held no fear only a strange hollow sort of vacancy.

"She told us her name was Lucy," Jack said. "Lucy Kill. She spoke about the fire like she was describing soup cooling on a stove. She told us, 'I tried to make him move. I pulled at him, but he was too big.' Her dress had been scorched at the hem, and there was black lace where fabric used to be."

Violet shivered. "Was he her father?"

"That’s what the Marshal asked," Jack nodded. "She said, 'He married Mama when I was little. She told me to call him Daddy, but I didn't like him.' She told us her mother died three years prior. She was entirely alone, and trapped in that cabin with a man who smelled of sour whiskey and violence."

Jack shifted the weight of the memory pressing on him. He told Violet about the ride to town, the livery stable, and the visit to Dr. Sawyer. He remembered the smell of the clinics carbolic acid and clean linens. It was a sharp contrast to the smoke and the grave-dirt of the hill.

"Dr. Sawyer was a good man," Jack recalled. "He checked her over, but when he came out to the waiting room his face was pale. Marshal, he’d said, she’s got no burns. Not a one. And there’s something else. She doesn't act like a child. She acts like she’s already lived through a long dark life."

Jack paused staring into the dying fire. He could still hear the clinical detached way Lucy had recounted the afternoon. The lamp was on the floor, she had said. I went to get my breakfast of berries down by the wall. He didn't talk to me, and I didn't talk to him.

"She was terrified Violet," Jack whispered. "But not of the fire. She was terrified of the silence that came after."

Outside the wind slammed against the cabin. It was a sudden violent gust that made the lantern flicker and die. Total darkness rushed into the room that was heavy and suffocating.

"Jack?" Violet’s voice was a tremor in the dark.

"I'm here," he said reaching out to strike a match. The flame bloomed illuminating his face exposing it was hard, etched by the mountain air, and weary.

He didn't tell her the rest of the story. He didn't tell her about how the Marshal had found the hidden journals under the floorboards, or how the man hadn't died from the fire, but from a blow to the back of the skull. A blow that happened before the lamp was tipped. He didn't tell her that the doctor told him someone had done unmentionable things to her. Things a girl that young shouldn’t even know about, or when they went back to find Lucy. The girl had simply vanished into the woods leaving nothing behind but a smear of ash in the shape of a small foot.

"The past is a heavy thing, Violet," Jack said with his voice softer now as he relit the lamp. "Some fires leave marks you can't see. And some girls… some girls just walk away into the mountains, and you never know if they found their way home, or if they just became part of the winter."

Violet stared at him with her pulse visible in the hollow of her throat. She looked toward the rope the line that led to the shed, and then back at the dark window.

"Jack," she whispered, "do you think she's still out there?"

Jack stood up with his joints popping, and went to the heavy iron bolt on the door. He checked it twice. "The mountains keep their own counsel Violet. Tonight the only thing we worry about is keeping the fire from going out."

He sat back down, as the wind screaming against the glass like a child crying for a way in. He grabbed the wood axe setting it by his chair, and kept his eyes on the door. The story was over, but the cold was very much still here. In the silence of the Cascades he could have sworn he heard a dry hollow laugh dancing on the wind.

The wind howled against the cedar logs of the cabin, and a sounded like a wounded animal seeking entry. It was November 1873, and the Cascade Mountains were bracing for a winter. It promised to be as unforgiving as the men who sought gold in their frozen veins.

Violet sat on a wooden box that had been brought up from the trading post in Jackson’s Prairie. Her small fingers were tracing the rough grain of the packing crate. She stared into the flickering firelight, as its orange glow casted long dancing shadows against the chinking of the cabin walls.

“Why did you buy a chamber pot when we already have one Jack?” she asked with her voice small against the roar of the gale outside.

Jack Tomson was a man whose face was mapped by the jagged scars of mining accidents and mountain winters. He looked up from his whetstone and stopped sharpening his knife to look at the girl. He wasn't her father that was Vincent Long. Who was a man who had vanished into the tree-line months ago, but in the brutal arithmetic of the Cascades survival often meant temporary alliances.

“That’s yours Violet,” Jack said with his voice gravelly. “From now on you empty yours, and I’ll empty mine every morning. We’ll do it together okay? No sense in you traipsing out into the drifts alone before the sun has a lick of warmth in it.”

Violet muttered under her breath with her brow furrowing. “I already have to do that,” she whispered. It was a chore she had performed for her mother Grace until the silence had descended on their cabin. It was the silence that began the day her father didn't return.

"Okay," she said aloud. Louder this time bowing to the inevitable.

Jack stood up with his joints popping like dry kindling. He gestured toward the heavy oak door. “Now you go stand by the window. I’m going to get wood from the shed. When you see me reach the threshold pull it open fast. As soon as I’m through you slam it shut. The wind is stealing our heat, and I won't have us freezing before the first snow hits the floor.”

Violet did as she was told. She stood by the frosted pane peering out into the swirling grey abyss. The world outside was disappearing, swallowed by the premature twilight.

Jack stepped into the storm. His silhouette bent double against the gale clutching an armful of split pine. When he reached the door he hammered on it with his boot. Violet threw the heavy iron latch and hauled the door back. The wind shrieked swirling snow across the floorboards. Jack pivoted dumping the wood, and Violet slammed the door shut locking it against the void.

They repeated the process until Jack’s beard was crusted in ice and his breath came in ragged wheezing gasps. Defeated by the biting cold he collapsed onto the hearth rug. Violet sat beside him pulling her shawl tighter with her eyes bright and expectant.

"Tell me a story Jack," she prompted. "Tell me about the city. Tell me about my papa."

Jack hesitated. He reached out and poked the fire letting the sparks fly up the chimney. He knew the truth, or at least the jagged pieces of it. News had drifted up the mountain carried by Jim Johnson. He was a trapper who had helped another trapper. But the story Jack was told in Jackson’s Prairie wasn't one a six-year-old could easily hold.



"Your father," Jack began slowly choosing his words with the care of a man walking a ledge, "is a man of many miles, Violet. He’s tough as the timber. Even when the world tries to break a man some folks have a way of lingering on."

"Did he?" Violet asked.

"He found something," Jack replied with his gaze distant. "He found a clinic. Dr. Sawyer’s place."

Jack remembered the story. A bullet wound to the head that hadn't claimed his life, but had stolen his map of who he was. Vincent Long was alive, but he didn't know his name, his wife, or the little girl waiting by a fire in the Cascades.

"Is he coming home?" Violet whispered.

"He's trying," Jack lied with his heart heavy. "But the mountains are high, and the memory is a fickle thing, and sometimes when a man has been hurt. He has to learn how to walk before he can find his way back to the things he loves."

Outside the storm shrieked, but for a moment the room held a fragile desperate warmth. Somewhere a hundred miles away a man named Vincent sat in a sterile room. He was staring at a window he didn't recognize. While in the dark heart of the Cascades his daughter prayed to a winter sky, and waited for a man who had forgotten she existed.

Jack pulled a blanket around them both turning his face toward the fire. "Rest now Violet. Tomorrow we’ll chop more wood. We have to keep the light burning. If the light stays the path stays open."

Violet leaned her head against his shoulder. She didn't know about the bullet, or the amnesia, or the doctor in Seattle. She only knew that the door was locked tight, and as long as Jack was there to command the gate she was safe. For now in that small cabin that was enough.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 5

The snow had let up giving Jack a break from shoveling a path to the loafing shed, but when jack went out to feed Thunder and get firewood he saw it. There were the cat tracks. If Jack was in the Rockies it would be called a mountain lion, but here in the northwest it was called a cougar.

He also knew it didn’t matter what you called it. The damn thing was dangerous, and it was hunting Thunder. Jack turned right around and went back to the cabin. As Jack stepped on the porch Violet swung the door open, and slammed it shut behind him.

Jack barked, “You don’t leave the cabin unless you’re with me! You understand that? We got a cougar running around out there and it’s hungry.”

Violet stuttered, “Is it dangerous Jack?”

Jack looked at the fear on her face, as he strapped on his pistol, “Not if we stay in the cabin sweetie. It can’t get through the log walls.”

Then he went to one knee and pulled Violet to him and whispered, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do? I want to get off this mountain, but I can’t do that. There's no turning back, and now I need to be strong. I've had time to think it through, and maybe I'm not good for you, but I’m all you got.”

The little six-year old girl put her arms around Jack’s neck and whispered, “Your all I need Jack until my Daddy gets back.”

Jack mumbled, “About that… it’s been a long time and…”

Violet pulled back enough to put her hand over his mouth and insisted, “He’s coming back Jack I can feel it.”

Jack held her back by her shoulders and replied, “Then get to the window. I’m going back out again, and you know what to do.”

Jack went back out to the loafing shed. Inside he patted Thunder on the neck and tossed some hay in his stall. Then he turned to the far wall where Vincent’s workbench was with the traps hanging on the wall. He took one down and looked it over mumbling, “This one looks good. Better test it.”

He put the trap on the bench and set it. Then he went out the back of the loafing shed to get a piece of firewood to test the trap with. Seeing the feathers everywhere he stopped in his tracks muttering, “Looks like the chickens are gone.”

He just shook his head as he pulled a stick from the wood pile, and went back inside. He tossed the stick on the trap, and it sniped shut jumping off the bench clamped to the stick.

Jack smiled as he picked up the trap, and went back out. He set the trap in the cougar tracks by the loafing shed door, and covered it with snow. Then he hooked the chain on it to the carol post. With a smile Jack went and got some wood and headed in.

As he made it to the door it flew open, and slammed shut behind him as Violet asked, “Was that one of Daddy’s traps you set.”

Dropping the wood on the stack by the fire Jack replied, “You bet your sweet behind it was. I’m doing what I thought you daddy would do. Now I don’t have to stay up all night waiting for it to come back.”

Violet replied, “If we get it we have to save the pelt. Daddy told me one of their fur pelts will buy a whole winters worth of supplies.”

Jack looked at Violet and asked, “Have you ever seen one?”

Violet dropped her head and said, “Not yet Jack.”

Jack muttered, “Well we’ll see if we can change that. Think we can cook some bacon for the fat to make gravy, and cook some biscuits over the fire”

The silence that blanketed the Cascade Mountains was never truly silent. It was a heavy suffocating weight that was broken only by the groan of freezing timber, or the occasional whisper of wind through the pines. Inside the cabin the air smelled of wood-smoke, old pine needles, and the lingering metallic tang of the cast-iron.

Jack Tomson paced the length of the main room, as his heavy boots thudding against the rough-hewn floorboards. Every few minutes he caught himself glancing at the heavy oak door. His hand hovered reflexively near the Colt Dragoon strapped to his thigh. It was a habit he’d picked up in the gold fields though he hadn’t struck a lick of ore in months. Here the currency wasn’t gold; it was survival.

Violet sat on a small stool by the hearth with her knees pulled to her chest. She was six, but her eyes held a clarity that made her seem decades older. She was stitching a scrap of burlap with her small fingers moving with a practiced rhythm. It was something she’d inherited from her mother Grace.

"The snow is settling," Jack murmured more to himself than to her. "It’ll crust over by midnight. That’s when it’ll be quietest."

Violet didn’t look up. "He’ll be careful Jack. The cougar knows the scent of a trap. Daddy told me they have whiskers that sense the snap of a spring before it hits."

Jack stopped pacing. He looked at the girl that was the daughter of Vincent Long. "Your daddy was a smart man Violet," Jack said with his voice softening. "But he didn’t have to deal with a cat this bold. Taking the chickens right from the shed? That’s desperation. And a desperate animal is a dangerous one."

"He’s not just an animal," Violet whispered finally looking up. "He’s a ghost of the woods. That’s what Daddy called them."

Jack grunted turning to the window. Outside the world was a monochromatic sketch of grey and white. Somewhere out there, miles away in a sterile Seattle clinic a man named Vincent Long sat staring at a wall. He didn’t know his name, he didn’t know why his head throbbed with a dull ache, and he certainly didn’t know that a gold miner was currently playing father to his daughter in the high Cascades.

"I’m going to check the perimeter one last time," Jack declared hefting a lantern. "You keep that bar thrown across the door. Don’t you open it for anything short of a direct order from me."

"I know the drill Jack."

He stepped out into the sub-zero air biting at his lungs like a serrated knife. He walked the perimeter of the loafing shed first. The trap he’d set was a heavy-duty steel contraption Vincent had forged himself. It was buried, but the snow around it had been disturbed.

He knelt with his breath fanning out in a thick cloud. A large singular paw print was pressed into the frozen snow near the chain. It was fresh. The cat had circled smelled the iron, and perhaps the luck of the mountains held. This kept the cat from stepping exactly where it shouldn't have.

Jack peered into the darkness with his hand gripping the cold metal of his pistol. He felt a sudden irrational spike of guilt. If he could just abandon this place, and walk down the mountain toward the valley he could leave the danger behind. But Vincent had left a life here. It was a life that Jack was currently holding together with spit and prayer.

I'm not a father he told himself. I’m a caretaker. And I’m failing at both.

He returned to the cabin with the scent of cooking bacon fat greeting him. Violet was busy at the hearth flipping strips of salt pork in a skillet. She looked small against the vast dark logs of the cabin walls.

"Did you hear anything?" she asked.

"Nothing yet. Just the wind," Jack lied. He wouldn’t tell her he’d seen the fresh tracks right beside the trap. If the cat had been caught, it would have been thrashing. The silence meant the cat was still out there, or the trap had failed.

"Jack?" Violet said with her back to him.

"Yeah, kid?"

"When Daddy gets back... will you stay?"

The question hung in the air heavier than the snow outside. Jack pulled off his coat with his movements stiff. "Your daddy is a long way off Violet. And he’s got a long road to walk before he remembers his way home.”

"He’s coming," she insisted with her voice trembling just slightly.

Jack walked over and knelt beside her. He took the wooden spoon from her hand and set it on the table. "Violet look at me."

She turned. Tears welled in her eyes, but she didn’t let them spill.

"If he doesn’t come," Jack said choosing his words with agonizing care, "I’m staying. You hear me? I’m not going to let this mountain take you too. We’ll hunt, we’ll trap, we’ll mine if we have to, but you won’t be alone."

Violet leaned in resting her forehead against his chest. "I knew that Jack. I just wanted to hear you say it."

Suddenly a sound tore through the night. It wasn't the wind. It was a high-pitched guttural shriek. It was a scream that sounded like a woman in agony as it vibrated through the log walls. It was the cougar, and it was close.

Jack surged to his feet grabbing his Winchester from the rack above the door.

"Stay away from the window," he commanded.

He crept to the door and cracked it open just enough to see out into the yard. The lantern light caught the glint of steel. The trap was gone. The chain had been ripped from the post, and there was a dark erratic trail leading toward the timberline.

He slammed the door shut and bolted it.

"He’s wounded," Jack said with his jaw tight. "He’s dragging the trap. He’ll be back, or he’ll die in the brush. Either way we’re keeping the fire high tonight."

He sat down with the rifle across his lap, and watched the door. Outside the forest groaned. In the heart of the mountains two souls waited for a morning that felt a lifetime away. While far to the west a man in a white room blinked. A fragment of a memory of a girl with braids and an open door flickered like a dying candle in his mind.

It was the end of October and the winter of 1873 had only just begun.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 6

The next day the snow had stopped, and Jack was shoveling the path to the loafing shed once again. The snow was knee high, but it was waste high along the path from the shoveling. Jack had no calendar and wasn’t sure what day it was, but he knew they were half way through November. It would be Thanksgiving soon, and he’d have to start soaking some of the salt out of the ham he was holding back.

Jack decided to talk to Violet about Thanksgiving, “I was thinking we should cut the ham I got in half, and start soaking the salt out of it. We can save the other half for Christmas. Then we can have the sweet potatoes you’ve been looking at. Thanksgiving is coming soon, and we’re going to have a feast.”

Violet’s eyes opened wide as she asked, “What are sweet potatoes like Jack? I’ve never had them before.”

Jack smiled, “Their sweet and melt in your mouth like butter then they kind of slip down to your belly. You’ll love them. It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without them.”

Jack cut the ham in half and set the half back for Christmas. Then he started soaking the other half in a pot for their feast.

The days went by with Jack and Violet doing there chores together, emptying their chamber pots, bringing in the wood, and melting snow for water. The day had come to start cooking their feast. They roasted the ham over the fire with the sweet potatoes. In the Dutch oven Violet was making the biscuits with sugar and baking powder.

The cabin was filled with the smell of the ham, potatoes, and biscuits. Violet kept asking, “Is it done yet Jack?”

Jack just smiled, “Soon child, soon.”

What they didn’t know was the smell of their cooking was going up the chimney, and was blowing in the wind. This made it so others could smell their cooking food.

The silence in the Cascade Mountains was rarely absolute. In previous winters, Jack had found comfort in the steady groan of shifting timber or the rhythmic howl of the wind. But that late November, the silence was predatory. It was a vacuum created by the presence of a pack of grey wolves, their hunger sharpened by the scent of salt-cured ham, and warm biscuits emanating from the chinks in the cabins walls.

Then Jack cried out, “Oh crap! As he ran over and closed the inside shutters and latched them. Looking at Violet jack explained, “We can’t let them see us. They will never give up if they do.”

Violet inquired, “Why do you think wolf's came Jack.”

Jack shook his head, “The smell of your good cooking I guess.”

Jack could hear them clawing and whining at the crack in the door and around the window, as others were howling.

Jack whispered, “We have to be quiet. We can’t let them hear us in here.”

Violet clung to Jack and was shaking. He ran his hand over her hair and realized her hair was a mess full of knots.

Jack whispered, “What do you do about your hair?”

Quietly Violet answered, “Mommy would brush it every night before I went to bed, but she’s gone now.”

Jack asked in a whisper, “Can you get me the brush?”

Violet slipped from Jack and went and got the brush. She handed Jack the brush and sat between his legs as the wolf’s howled and clawed at the door and window. Jack tried to run the brush through her hair, but it just skimmed over the top and got caught in her hair. He realized he had to pull out a little at a time and try to brush it. He was working on a knot, but he was just pulling her head to the side. That’s when he knew he had to cut it out. He slipped his knife from its sheath and whispered, “I’m sorry Violet I have to cut your hair some. I should have been taking care of this sooner.”

Violet softly said, “It’s okay Jack. Just do what you have to do.”

Violet sat tucked against his side, her small frame shivering despite the wool blankets wrapped tightly around her shoulders. Her hair, once a cascade of soft curls, had been shorn unevenly at the back where Jack had been forced to cut away the stubborn knots. She looked smaller, more fragile, yet her eyes held an unnerving clarity.

Cutting another knot Jack replied, “I think we should check the biscuits, and we can work on this after we eat.”

They ate taking glances at each other as the Wolf’s clawed and howled at the door. Jack smiled to reassure Violet they couldn’t get in, but he kept looking at the wood stacked by the fireplace. He hoped it would last long enough for the Wolf’s to leave. He knew if the fire went out they were done, and the mountain would claim them.

That night Violet held tight to Jack all night long, and Jack heard her mutter in her sleep. “Daddy please come home.”

The next morning Jack climbed into the small loft above the cabin’s main room, and looked out the window. It was snowing lightly and he could see the Wolf’s lingering around the loafing shed. He knew Lighting had no water by now, and what there was would be frozen. He needed to get more snow to melt for water, but he would just have to ration what they had. That is when he decided to have a talk with Violet.

Jack informed, “I’m going to let the fire die down, and keep a small fire going. We’ll have to make the wood last, so you’ll have to keep wrapped up in your blanket.”

In a whisper Violet asked, “Did you stay with me because you love me, or was it because it was the right thing to do?”

Jack muttered, “I believe it was a little of both, but love is more powerful and that did it.”

Speaking softly Violet went on, “I dreamed about Daddy last night. He didn’t know who I was, but when he saw me he remembered me. I think he’s coming. He’s just a little lost and trying to find his way.



In Seattle Vincent or Stanley as people in Seattle knew him saw the little girl in the mercantile again. This sent flashes of Violet running through his mind. He saw her playing in the creek, and cooking with Grace. Then he saw the mound under the Oak Tree go through his mind. Like so many things he couldn’t put it together. He remembered riding a horse with a Mule tethered to it, and a pile of animal hides strapped on it.

Vincent went back to packing the order for delivery, but his mind was trying to put the broken pieces together.

"You're drifting again, Stanley," Jim Johnson said, leaning against the doorway with a pipe in his hand.

Vincent looked up, his brow furrowed. "I keep seeing her Jim. The girl. She’s small, and she’s cold. Why is she so cold?"

Jim walked over kneeling in the sawdust. "That’s the mountain talking Stan. I’m sure you were a trapper, and took furs to a place called Jackson’s Prairie. Tom Reed runs a post there. If anyone knows where your life went it’s him."

Vincent stared at his hands. For a fleeting second he could smell wood-smoke and roasting ham. It was a strange phantom scent in the salty air of the Seattle docks. He gripped the edge of the crat with his knuckles turning white. "I have to find her in the spring Jim. Before the ice melts, and I need to know why I feel like she’s waiting."



Back in the Cascades the tension inside the cabin had reached a fever pitch. Jack had allowed the fire to die to a mere bed of embers to conserve the remaining logs. The cold began to creep through the gaps in the floor biting at their ankles.

Outside, the wolves were no longer just scratching; they were throwing themselves against the door with a heavy rhythmic thud. It sounded like a giant knocking to get in.

"They’re getting angry," Violet whispered clutching Jack’s sleeve.

"Stay low," Jack commanded with his voice firm. He moved to the small window he had shuttered tight. He pressed his ear to the wood. The howling was a chorus now with a haunting mournful sound that echoed off the granite peaks.



That night at the doctors clinic Vincent talked with Jim about his memories. He told him about the little girl again, and about the flashes of the Trading Post where he traded his firs.

Jim smiled, “I bet the Trading Post was in Jackson’s Prairie. That’s up by where I found you. I think that would be a good starting point when spring comes.”

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 7

To a thoughtful person like Jack the emotion of terror need not be activated only by the horrendous. There are many forms of terror. The quick and sudden terror which makes the soul scream out in agony. The slow and eroding kind which makes the soul moan in mounting fear.

Is the terror of a man going to his death any greater than say. Violet wailing with hunger and in fear there may not be another meal?

Rick Tomson or Jack as he is known can give you the answer.

Jack leaned his head against the door breathing a sigh of relief. The sound of the wolves was gone. He huddled back down beside Violet pulling the blankets over them both.

"Tomorrow," Jack whispered, "We’ll check the snow drifts. We’ll ration the hardtack, and we’ll wait for the sun. Your dad might be lost Violet, but we’re going to be here when he finds his way back."

Violet closed her eyes with the warmth of Jack’s presence steadying her. "He's coming," she murmured with her voice drifting into the realm of sleep. "I saw him in my dream. He’s walking through the snow, and he’s looking for me."

Outside, the wind began to howl again covering the tracks of the wolves, and masking the cabin in a shroud of white. They were now waiting for the spring thaw that would bring either salvation or the final reckoning of the mountain.

Back in Seattle Stanley was loading a wagon when Mr. White informed, “The train didn’t come in yesterday. I have a steam engine coming from Western Machine Works. They make logging equipment and steamboat engines. I know people still call it Stump-town, but times are changing. After I take this load back to the mill I’ll go check on the train. You can come by and sit with me if you wish.”

“I might,” Stanley replied, “Things have been kind of slow lately.”

Pulling out Mr. White yelled, “I would enjoy the company.”

Jim came out to the loading dock, “How was Mr. White doing?”

He’s still waiting for his steam engine to arrive. Stanley muttered as he picked up a box.

Jim informed, “He’s just too cheap to send a telegraph to Portland.”

Stanley laughed, “Could be, but the Mill is slow this time of year. His workers probably like it that he’s not watching over their shoulder.”

Jim replied, “You’re probably right.”

Stanley cleaned up the back room and headed to the train station. Seeing Mr. White sitting on a bench Stanley took a seat next to him.

Mr. White kept looking down the track as he muttered, “Glad you could make it Stanley. The doctor tells me you lost your memory of who you were.”

Stanley replied, “It’s coming back. It’s just coming in flashes. I think I had a wife and a little girl, but I can’t remember their names. Just like I can’t remember my own. Jim thinks if we go back up where he found me I might remember.”

Mr. White replied, “That might be true, but you’ll have to wait until spring to go back there.”

Stanley agreed, “I know there is too much snow on the mountain to get back there now.”

Mr. White offered, “If there is anything I can do to help. You just let me know.”

Then Stanley heard the rhythmic clatter of the iron beast off in the distance, as the train rattled along. “I think I hear it,” Stanley said.

The rhythmic clatter was a counterpoint to Seattle’s roar, as Mr. White acknowledged. Here it comes.”

The train came into view and began to slow, the rhythmic clatter of the wheels changing to a more labored, deliberate pace. The whistle echoed as the beast of iron and smoke rolled into the station. Three cars back was the flat-car with the Steam Engine on it. Mr. White slapped Stanley on the back and said, “Let’s go look at what I got for my money.”



The Cascade Mountains in the winter of 1873 did not merely grow cold; they hardened, turning from a landscape of pine and granite into a silent smothering monolith of white. By November, the passes were choked, and the world outside the cabin ceased to exist.

Inside, the air smelled of wood-smoke, cured venison, and the dry medicinal scent of dried cedar boughs hung near the stone hearth. It was a close heavy air. That was thick with the quiet grief of a six-year-old child, and the quiet desperation of a man unaccustomed to playing nursemaid.

Jack Tomson sat near the fire on the box with Violet’s Christmas presents in it. He was using the tip of his hunting knife, and scraping a lump of dried mud off the heel of his heavy leather boot. He was a gold miner by trade, and a man built of sinew and river-grit who preferred the company of a gold pan. Not the delicate fragile machinery of a child's mind. Yet here he was holed up in Vincent Long’s trapping cabin six thousand feet up a freezing slope, and waiting out a five-month winter with little Violet and a belly full of worry.

Violet sat cross-legged on a braided rug near the hearth, as her small fingers idly plaited the frayed wool of an old blanket. Her face was pale by the cold and the long months of isolation. Her mother, Grace had died of a fever six weeks back leaving Vincent to raise the girl between trap lines. Now Vincent was gone too. He was not dead as far as they knew, but vanished into the brutal fall of Seattle over a month ago, struck down by a bullet and left with a mind as blank as the snow outside.

Jack looked up from his boot watching the firelight flicker across the girl’s face. She hadn't spoken in hours. The cabin was so quiet he could hear the distinct hiss of sap popping in the pine logs, and the low heavy groan of snow piling too deep upon the cedar-shake roof.

"Penny for thoughts," Jack muttered with his voice gravelly from disuse.

Violet didn't look up immediately. She kept working her fingers through the blue wool, as her small brow furrowed in a way that made her look far too much like her missing father.

"I had a dream of my Papa," she whispered. The words dropped into the room like pebbles into a deep well.

Jack paused with his knife still against the leather. He had heard a lot of things from the girl since the first snow locked them in. Crying for her father, asking when he was coming back from the big city, wondering if the doctor in Seattle had given his head back yet. But there was a strange glassy stillness in her voice now. It made the hairs on the back of his neck prickle.

"Did you now?" Jack said gently setting the knife aside. He shifted on his box leaning forward. "What’d he look like?"

Violet lifted her chin with her wide dark eyes fixing on Jack with an unsettling intensity. She recited the words as if she were reading them from a book she had memorized in the dark. Then her voice took on a melodic haunting cadence:



“In the silence of the night a whisper calls my name. Snowflakes weave the story in my dream. I saw him in my dream walking through the snow. It was in the moonlight in the shadows where the heart can’t see. With every flake that fell a memory would rise, And I was chasing shadows where the winter wind blows. He’s calling out my name everywhere he goes, and looking for a way to hear my silent screams. His footprints on the ground lead into the haze. I reach out for him and get lost in the haze. In the silence the light begins to fade, and I’ve lost him again.”



The cabin seemed to grow colder as the last word faded. Jack sat frozen with his mouth slightly open. He had known Vincent Long for five winters. Vincent was a mountain man, and a hard-nosed trapper who smelled of wet wool and pine pitch. He was a man who didn't believe in ghosts or premonitions. But hearing those words come out of a six-year-old girl’s mouth in the middle of a blizzard. Well, it felt less like a dream and more like a summons.

"Where'd you hear a talk like that, Violet?" Jack asked with his voice dropping an octave.

"I didn't hear it," she said simply looking down at the blanket again. "I saw it. It’s what Papa’s dreaming too. I know it is. He’s out there in the white Jack. And he can't find his way back to us because his head is broke."

Jack swallowed hard. He rubbed a heavy hand over his beard feeling the stubble rasp against his palm. He knew the facts of it as well as anyone. Jim Johnson the other trapper who had brought the news up from the lowlands. He did it before the snows hit, and had told Tom Reed the whole grim tale. Vincent had taken a slug right to the skull. Jim had saved the man’s life, but when Vincent woke up he didn't know his own name. Let alone the trail back to the Cascades or the little girl waiting in the pines. He was sitting in a whitewashed room a hundred miles away, staring at the rain against a window, and was a blank slate of a man.

And here was Violet thousands of feet up in a frozen wilderness dreaming his ghost.

"Dreams are just dreams, kid," Jack said even though he didn't sound entirely convinced himself. The mountains had a way of playing tricks on men's minds when the snow walled them off from the rest of creation. "Your daddy’s down in Seattle warm and dry in that doctor's house. He ain't out in this snow."

 

[gonewacky]

"Then why did he call me?" Violet asked with her voice cracking slightly. A single tear slipped down her cheek catching the firelight. She wiped it away with the back of a small dirty hand. "He's looking for me Jack. I can feel it right here." She pressed a hand against her chest. "He's cold."

Jack stood up abruptly with his knees popping in the quiet room. He walked over to the small frosted window, and scraped a circle clear with his fingernail. Outside nothing was visible. Just the violent gray swirl of wind-driven snow eating the forest whole. The world had shrunk to the four log walls of the cabin.

"He's safe Violet," Jack lied with his breath fogging the remaining ice on the glass. "Dr. Sawyer is taking care of him. We just gotta wait for the thaw. Come spring we'll go down and get him."

"Spring is too far," Violet whispered to the floor. "He's losing us in the haze Jack. If we don't find him first he's going to stay gone forever."



By December the storm had settled into a relentless grinding routine. The snow piled against the northern wall of the cabin until it reached the eaves, and sealed the door halfway. Every morning Jack had to tunnel his way out just to get wood, and fetch a bucket of snow to melt for water.

The isolation began to curdle the air between them. Jack was a man used to the solitary grind of a placer claim. That was where a bad day meant low color in the pan, but this was different. This was the claustrophobia of shared grief. Every time he looked at Violet. He saw Vincent’s sharp jawline and stubborn gray eyes looking back at him from a face half his size. He was trapped in a room where Violet’s pain presses on his chest. It was leaving no space for his own unique way of hurting.

They spent their days in near-silence. Jack whittled small wooden animals for her. He made a clumsy bear, and a lopsided cougar using his pocketknife until his fingers cramped. Violet would take them, and line them up on the edge of the hearth. Then she would stare at them as if waiting for them to move.

She hadn't mentioned the dream again, but the words hung in the stale cabin air like a shroud. His footprints on the ground lead into the haze.

One night, as the wind screamed down the chimney blowing the flames. Jack sat by the dying fire oiling his Sharps rifle. He pulled the bolt back to check the chamber, and slid it home with a solid metallic clack.

Violet stirred on her cot in the corner. "Jack?"

"Go back to sleep child," he murmured rubbing a rag along the walnut stock.

"You're thinking about leaving, aren't you?"

Jack stopped his hand. He looked across the dim room at the pale oval of her face in the shadows. "Leave? Where in God's name is a man gonna go in six feet of fresh powder Violet? We ain't going nowhere until May."

"Papa left," she said softly. "He walked right out of his head. And you look like you're trying to walk out of yours too."

Jack let out a long slow breath, and set the rifle down across his knees. She was too sharp for her own good. The truth was the cabin was driving him mad. He kept seeing things out of the corner of his eye. Like a shadow passing the frosted window, a boot print on the porch that couldn't possibly be there. The winter silence was heavy with the phantom presence of Vincent Long. He could almost smell the man's pipe tobacco lingering in the corners of the room. Even though Vincent hadn't smoked that particular blend since before he went to Seattle. That is if that was where he was.

"I ain't going nowhere kid," Jack said with his voice softer now. "I promised I’d look after you until your daddy got back. And I'm a man of my word."

"He didn't mean to leave," Violet said with her voice dropping to a near-whisper. "He got lost. Mr. Reed at Trading Post said, “Jim Johnson said he took a bullet right to the head. When somthing digs into a man's head like that,” Jack... do the memories fall out?"

Jack felt a cold knot tighten in his stomach. He hadn't expected the girl to understand half of what Jim Johnson had said at Tom Reed’s trading post. Back in October before the passes closed.

"Some things get scrambled," Jack admitted carefully choosing his words as if walking across a frozen crust over deep water. "His body would heal, but his mind... well, the past gets foggy. Like a mist rolling off the water."

"That's the haze," Violet said with her eyes gleaming in the dark. "In my dream. The haze where he can't find his way back. If we don't remember for him, he won't know who he is."

Jack stared at her with a strange creepy chill settling into his bones. The kind that had nothing to do with the winter wind outside. The kid was six years old, yet she spoke with the heavy unyielding certainty of an old prophet.

"Go to sleep Violet," Jack said gruffly standing up to toss a fresh log onto the embers. The sparks flew up orange and brief, before dying in the dark. "Tomorrow I'm gonna dig us out and check the snares. Maybe we'll catch a snowshoe hare. How'd you like fried rabbit for dinner?"

She didn't answer. She just pulled the scratchy wool blanket up to her chin and turned her face to the log wall. This left Jack alone with his rifle and the whistling of the wind.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 8

At the end of December the wind howled down the chimney of the isolated Cascade cabin. It rattled the loose cedar shakes driving the December snow into blinding drifts against the door. Inside, the world shrank to the orange glow of the hearth, and the steady rhythmic breathing of six-year-old Violet asleep on her cot.

Jack Tomson wiped dust and wood smoke from his tired eyes. He was a gold miner by trade who was used to swinging a pick in dark damp tunnels, but the winter of 1873 had trapped him here. Trapped him with a little girl whose father Vincent, had lost his mind to a bullet wound and amnesia. This leaving Jack to watch the child until the spring thaw opened the passes.

The snow stood six feet high against the windows sealing them in a quiet white tomb. Jack decided it was close enough to Christmas to do his surprise.

He crept across the creaking floorboards with his boots making no sound. He waited until Violet’s breathing deepened into the heavy rhythm of sleep. Then slid the heavy iron latch of his canvas pack. He pried open the small wooden box Tom Reed had quietly handed him at the Jackson’s Prairie Trading Post before the snows hit. It was the same box that sat by the fire they used for a stool. They had both been sitting on in it since the day they brought it back from the Trading Post.

Jack gently lifted the items out placing them one by one on the hearth. First came the carved wooden cup-and-ball toy polished smooth by a craftsman's hand.

Next, he set the miniature wooden bowling pins and the tiny ball beside it. He arranged them just so in the flickering firelight. Finally, he pulled out two unbroken peppermint sticks. It was a rare sweet luxury this high in the mountains. He crossed them leaning them against the wooden cup like a festive teepee.

A soft melancholic smile touched Jack’s weathered face. He imagined Violet waking up tomorrow morning, and her wide eyes taking in the small miracle left by the hearth. He pictured her smiling fully believing that a jolly fat man in a red suit, and wondering how he braved the deadly mountain blizzard to slide down their narrow chimney in the dead of night.

Jack glanced back at the cot. Violet stirred with her small hand clutching the ragged woolen blanket.

Outside, the Cascades roared with the fury of a relentless winter. This was a cruel and unforgiving wilderness. But inside this little cabin framed by snow and silence Jack had carved out a safe haven. He pulled a woolen blanket over his own shoulders and sat back in his chair, as he kept watch against the dark. He was determined to preserve the magic for just a little while longer.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 9

January brought the deep freeze. The thermometer outside the door dropped until the mercury shrank to the bulb. It refused to register the true bite of the air. The trees cracked in the forest with the sound of pistol shots as the sap froze within their trunks.

Jack spent his days bundled in wolf-hide furs, as he dug trenches through the crusted snow just to reach the woodpile fifty yards from the cabin. It was back-breaking work and the kind of labor that burned the lungs and made the muscles scream, but it kept the madness at bay.

At least it did until the third week of the month.

He was out by the woodpile with the axe in his hand when he saw it.

It wasn't a wolf, and it wasn't a cougar it was about a hundred yards up the slope. Right where the timberline gave way to the jagged granite ribs of the upper ridge. A figure was standing motionless among the ghost-white skeletons of dead firs.

Jack froze with his breath pluming white in the sub-zero air. He lowered the axe slowly, as his hand drifted toward the revolver strapped beneath his heavy coat.

The figure wore a tattered wool coat that was frosted white with ice particles, and a wide-brimmed hat crusted with snow. He stood with a peculiar halting posture with one hand half-raised, as if reaching out to touch a tree trunk that wasn't there.

"Vincent?" Jack called out with his voice instantly swallowed by the vast dead quiet of the mountain.

The figure didn't turn. It just stood there outlined against the gray flat glare of the snowfield. Like a silhouette carved out of winter itself.

Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. He knew it was impossible. Vincent Long was over hundred miles away in a Seattle hospital. Where he was most likely staring at rain-streaked windowpanes. He couldn't be here. He couldn't have walked the mountain in the dead of winter with a bullet-scratched brain, and no snowshoes.

And yet, the stance was unmistakable. The way the shoulders squared with the slight list to the left from an old injury. It was Vincent down to the bone.

"Hey!" Jack shouted louder taking a step forward through the drift. "Get down here! You'll freeze!"

As Jack moved the figure turned. For a fraction of a second Jack thought he saw a face. It was pale, sunken, with dark hollow sockets where the eyes should be, and it was staring right through him with a look of absolute uncomprehending terror.

Then the wind hit. A vicious gust of spindrift swept off the granite shelf. It was white and blinding filling the air with a blinding fog. Jack threw an arm up across his face, as he squinted against the stinging ice.

“His footprints on the ground lead into the haze,” Violet’s voice echoed in his memory clear as a bell through the screaming wind. “I reach out for him and get lost in the haze.”

When the gust died down a moment later and the air cleared, and the ridge was empty. There was nothing up there save the jagged teeth of the rock and the silent, tomb-like pines.

Jack stood breathing hard with his boots sinking six inches into the crust. He walked up the slope anyway with his boots crunching rhythmically in the stillness, as his hand gripped the butt of his pistol.

When he reached the spot where the figure had stood he looked down at the snow.

There were no tracks.

There was only the smooth unbroken expanse of the wind-packed drift. That stretched out toward the high timber like a blank sheet of paper.

Jack didn't tell Violet about the figure on the ridge. He kept it locked inside him. He didn’t want her to know that the rising panic that the mountain was getting into his own head, and twisting his thoughts the way it had twisted Vincent’s.



February wore on with the slow, agonizing crawl of melting icicles that immediately refroze into daggers by nightfall. The cabin grew darker, and the walls seeming to close in an inch at a time.

Violet had grown quieter still. She spent most of her time sitting by the hearth with her knees pulled up to her chin. She would star at the wooden animals Jack had carved for her. She looked smaller, her skin translucent, like parchment held up to a candle.



In Seattle Vincent remembered a name. It was Violet, but was it the woman or the little girl? He also saw a cabin in a dream. He tried to open the door, but his hands were too cold to work the latch. Piece by piece his memory was coming back, but it was like the pieces of a puzzle that didn’t fit together.

Vincent awoke to the doctor standing over him. “Are you remembering things? Or was it just a bad dream, Stanley?”

Vincent or Stanley, as the people in Seattle knew him answered, “Remembering in a dream I think, but I can’t put the pieces together. I did get a name though. It’s Violet, but I don’t know who Violet is.”

Dr. Sawyer offered an encouraging smile, as he adjusted his wire-rimmed spectacles in the dim gaslight of the clinic. “This is good, Stanley. I think soon you’ll see something, or hear something that will make more come back. Even a smell can make memories flood into your head. But if you get all three at once… you see, hear, and smell something. Well, I’d bet it would all come rushing back. Your name, your home, and all the people in your life, so don’t give up, Stanley.”

Stanley stared up at the stamped-tin ceiling, his jaw tightening. “I’m never giving up, Dr. Sawyer. You can bet on that. Jim would never let that happen. I think he wants to know who I am as much as I do.”

Dr. Sawyer chuckled softly patting his shoulder before stepping back into the dispensary. Stanley closed his eyes chasing the ghost of the cold door latch.



Back at the cabin as the light turned the color of bruised steel outside the frosted window, Violet looked up at Jack.

"He's closer tonight," she said.

Jack was sitting at the rough-hewn table trying to mend a split snowshoe. He was using deer sinew and stopped his work. He didn't look at her. He couldn't bear the look in her eyes. It was that terrible ancient certainty she had.

"Nobody's out there child," Jack said with his voice rough. "The storm's socked us in tight. Even a wolf wouldn't be stupid enough to be out in this."

"It's not a wolf," she whispered. "He's standing right outside the door. He can't find the latch because his hands are too cold."

Jack felt a cold sweat break out across his neck despite the chill in the room. He laid the snowshoe down on the table, stood up, and walked slowly across the floor. Every joint in his body ached. The cabin was suffocating quiet, save for the low rhythmic ticking of the wind against the shingles.

He reached the heavy oak door. He didn't want to open it. Every instinct he had as a mountain man, and every survival reflex honed by ten winters in the Cascades. All screamed at him to keep the bolt thrown. The mountains in winter were a graveyard for men who answered phantom knocks.

And yet, he couldn't leave the child sitting there with those eyes.

Jack slid the heavy iron bolt back with a sharp clack. He gripped the wooden latch as he took a deep breath, and threw the door wide open.

The wind didn't rush in.

Instead, a wall of white snow packed hard against the frame by weeks of drifting snow. suddenly slid inward spilling a cascade of cold powder across the floorboards.

Jack peered out into the gray twilight-draped gloom. The storm had finally broken leaving behind an eerie breathless stillness. The moon was rising behind the peaks casting a pale spectral blue light across the drifts.

There was no one on the porch.

There were no footprints on the step.

Just the endless glittering expanse of white stretching down toward the timberline, and the dark silent valleys below.

Jack let out a shaky breath he didn't know he was holding. He started to reach for the door to slam it shut against the freezing draft when something small and dark caught his eye. Half-buried in the snow drift right at the edge of the threshold.

He reached down with his fingers stiff with the cold, and brushed the powder away.

It was a small brass-bound compass.

Jack picked it up holding it up to the pale moonlight. The glass face was cracked straight down the middle, and the needle inside twitching sluggishly before settling dead south. It was pointing away from the cabin, and away from the pass down toward the lowlands where the river ran toward Seattle.

He turned the compass over in his palm. There was something scratched into the brass back in crude jagged letters. That looked as though they had been carved with the tip of a hunting knife. It was two initials: V.L.

Jack stood frozen on the threshold with the wind dying to a whisper around his ears.



Down in Seattle over a hundred miles away in a whitewashed room sat a man with a scarred skull, and an empty mind. He suddenly looked out a rain-streaked window, as he felt a sudden inexplicable tug at his chest. He reached out into the dark for a little girl he couldn't quite remember, but could never truly forget.



In the cabin, Violet didn't say a word. She just sat by the hearth with her small fingers tracing the wooden bear Jack had carved her, and watching the moonlight spill across the floor.

Jack closed the door slowly sliding the iron bolt home, and pocketed the compass.

Spring was still a month away, and the snow was still six feet deep on the trail, but as he turned back to the fire Jack knew one thing for certain:

Vincent Long was coming home.



In Seattle the fog hung low over the harbor smelling of salt, dead fish, and unhealed trauma. Inside Dr. Sawyer’s cramped clinic, Vincent Long touched the tender, scarred skin above his left ear where the bullet had grazed bone and stolen his past. He had just awoke from a dream, and knew his name was Vincent. He knew he had a wife named Grace and a little girl named Violet waiting somewhere out in the frozen labyrinth of the Cascades.

Beyond that his mind was a white sheet of snow.

He knew he would need money for his trip, but he wasn’t even making enough to support himself. Jim Johnson the trapper who had brought him down the mountain, and Dr. Sawyer had to help him with that. They had been slipping a few meager coins his way to pay for his meals. But charity wouldn’t buy passage back to whatever life he had left behind.

Vincent stared at his empty hands. He knew he would need to get a horse, and supplies to make the trip. He didn’t even have a knife or a gun. It would be stupid to go into the woods without either one. He knew the mountain would be unforgiving. How he knew it he didn’t know, but he knew it was true. A deep visceral dread hummed in his marrow every time he looked east toward the mountain. That was where the jagged cloud-shrouded peaks where, and winter was already baring its teeth.

He had one choice, and that was to go see Mr. White about a job. He had told if he could help to just ask, and Vincent needed help more than ever.

He went down to the bustling cedar-dust-choked sawmill, and the air thrummed heavy with the chug of the logging crews. They were sweating and straining against the dead weight of a massive iron Steam Engine, as they worked to set it in place. Seeing Vincent approach Mr. White wiped soot from his forehead and waved him over. Shouting above the clatter Mr. White asked, “You come to help us?”

Vincent wasted no time and spit it out, “I need a job to get a horse and supplies for my trip.”

Mr. White stopped resting his heavy hands on his hips. He looked at the hollows in Vincent’s cheeks and the haunted look in his eyes. Rumors of the shooting, and Stanley living at the clinic had already whispered through the frontier town. A slow understanding smile touched the older man's weathered face.

“I’m glad you’re going to try and find out who you are son,” Mr. White said, clapping a heavy hand on Vincent's shoulder. Then, his expression hardened to business. “Well, don’t just stand there. Get over there and help them get the horse going again. We still need to move this damn iron thing another six feet to make the belt fit.”

Vincent nodded rolling up his sleeves. He didn't know how to trap anymore, and he barely knew his own name, but he knew how to sweat. And every drop that hit the sawdust brought him one step closer to the mountain.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 10

Locked in a cabin makes stress hormones raise. Then the brain's logic center shrinks, and a person may experience severe anxiety, paranoia, and hallucinations.

That was what was happening to Jack and Violet. The hallucinations of Vincent were clouding their minds. They were losing their grip on what was real and what was imagined. A distorted reality was taking over, and all the days seamed to run together. This was a normal defensive reaction to an unnatural environment.

Jack and Violet were having a loss of their routine. They were forgetting to eat, sleep, or take care of basic daily needs.

Jack looked at the wood stack next to the hearth and asked, “Where did the wood go?”

“I think we forgot to do it Jack,” Violet muttered as she thought of her Papa. “Papa would tell me we have to help each other until the snow melts. If we didn’t we’d would all go crazy and die.”

Jack agreed, “We need to start reminding each other about everything Violet. Come on and get bundled up and help get the wood, or we’ll freeze tonight.”

The snow did not fall in flakes; it fell in sheets like heavy gray wool, and erased the timberline by late October. Then it swallowed the rest of the world by November. By January the world had been reduced to the four walls of the trapper’s cabin. The snow covered the low pine-shake roof, and the ever-deepening drift that plastered itself against the windows like lard.

Inside, the light was the color of a wet slate.

Jack Tomson sat on the edge of the rope cot. His calloused hands had spent two back-breaking seasons turning over creek gravel, as he search for yellow color that came from a pan hanging between his knees. His flannel shirt was stiff with old grease and wood smoke. When he moved his head his neck gave off a dry crackling sound. It sounded like pine bark splitting in a freeze.

"You smell it?" Jack asked.

Violet didn't look up from her place on the floor. She sat with her knees pulled to her chest, and wrapped in a buffalo robe that shed stiff dark hairs onto her skirt. Her eyes were fixed on the small black hole in the back of the chimney. It was where a wedge of soot had flaked away.

"Smell what, Jack?" Her voice was flat and dry as corn-husks. She hadn't brushed her hair since the first big blow three weeks ago, or was it four? The days didn't have names anymore. They had only degrees of dark.

"The mutton fat," Jack said. He leaned forward with his nose twitching. "Vincent left a crock of it up on the high shelf behind the dried sage. I can smell it turning rancid. It’s crawling with green beetles."

Violet blinked slowly. The movement took a great deal of effort, as if her eyelids were lined with grit. "Papa didn't leave any mutton. Papa was a beaver man. You know that, Jack. Don't you remember Jim?"

Jack frowned with his brow bunching into deep purple trenches over his nose. "Jim Johnson’s dead," he muttered. "Found him face-down in the Clearwater with his boots iced to the rocks back in '71."

"That was someone else," Violet said.

She reached down to touch the wooden toggle at her throat, but her fingers found only bare wool. The button had fallen off into the cracks of the floor days ago, or was it weeks.

In the corner near the butter churn Vincent Long stood by the washstand.

He was wearing his beaver-skin cap with the tail hanging down between his shoulder blades. It was exactly as he had worn it the day he rode out and never came back. Jack looked right through him, as his eyes glazed slightly and the shadow shifted against the peeled logs.

Then his mind heard the doctor talking to Vincent. “The brain’s logic center shrinks,” Dr. Sawyer had told Vincent. It was in that high whitewashed room in Seattle, and back when the world still had doctors and apothecary jars and men wore waistcoats. “When the air goes thin and the blood stays high the mind makes its own company. It builds fences where there ain't no pasture.”

Jack didn't know anything about Dr. Sawyer though sometimes he heard a man coughing behind the chimney. It was a sharp rattling cough that sounded like someone shaking a tin box of nails.

"Vincent," Jack said raising his chin toward the washstand. "Tell her about the wood."

Violet turned her head. Her gaze crossed Vincent's boots with caked dry mud that hadn't seen the Cascades in years, and landed on Jack’s face. "Papa isn't there, Jack. Papa’s in Seattle Jack.”

"He’s standing right by the washbasin," Jack insisted with his voice rising a notch. "Look at his whiskers. He’s waiting for us to grease his snowshoes."

"There aren't any snowshoes," Violet whispered. She felt a small hard knot. It was behind her ribs, but not from fear, exactly. It was a hollow sinking like the sensation of stepping down on a stair that wasn't there. "We burned the webbing off the big pair. Don't you remember the smell of the deer-hide burning, Jack? It smelled like old hair."



Jack stared at her. His mouth stayed slightly open, and a string of saliva caught between his lower teeth and his gray-stubbled lip. His mind felt like a dry creek bed after a July burn. It was like cracked gray mud where the water used to run, and full of sharp edges that didn't fit together. He couldn't remember why he had come up into the mountains with a shovel and a three-dollar pan. He couldn't remember if he had ever seen a nugget bigger than a pumpkin seed.

"Where’s the wood?" Jack asked again. The question felt like it had just been born, and was perfectly new. Even though he had asked it four times since the last time the candle burned down to the wood.

Violet rubbed her temples. Her skin felt hot and dry, like parched leather left in the sun. "I think we forgot to do it, Jack."

"Forgot what?"



"Papa would tell us," she murmured with her eyes drifting back to the hearth where Vincent was now leaning against the crook with his arms crossed over his greasy wool coat. Vincent wasn't looking at them; he was looking down at his own right hand. he was turning it over and over as if he were trying to remember how the fingers worked. "Papa always said we have to help each other until the snow melts. If we didn't... if we didn't keep the rhythm going, we’d all go crazy and die."

Jack digested this slowly. He reached up and scratched behind his ear, as his fingernails scraping against his skin with a sound like dry grass. "Who said that?"

"Papa."

"Vincent?"

"My papa."

"Your old man’s in Seattle," Jack repeated. Even though the name Seattle sounded like a word he had read in a book once. Maybe fifty years ago in another state. "He was a trapper down on the Cowlitz."

"He was right here," Violet said with her voice dropping into a register that was almost singing. "He was sitting right on that three-legged stool when the salt pork ran out. He told me the flour was in the tin, but when I looked there was only mice turds and a dried-up crust of sourdough. That was as hard as a horseshoe."

Jack nodded solemnly. "The mice. Nasty little buggers. They get in the flour and then you’re eating hair and droppings till your teeth turn black."

"We didn't eat the flour, Jack."

"No?"

"There wasn't any flour."

Jack stood up. His knees made a wet cracking sound. He swayed for a moment with his shoulders nearly touching the low rafters. That was where strings of dried apples hung. That now shriveled to the size of buckshot and hard as slate, as they hung like bat carcasses. He took three long steps toward the stone hearth with his boots dragging.

He looked down at the hearth. The space beside the stonework was completely bare. There was a heap of gray ash that spilled out onto the puncheon floor like spilled salt, but the woodpile. The great stack of seasoned alder and pitch-pine that Jack had cut, and stacked was gone.

Not low. Gone.

Jack blinked, his eyes watering from the gray smoke that drifted back down the chimney. It happened whenever the wind gusted from the north. "Where did the wood go?"

Violet didn't answer right away. She was watching Vincent. Her father had reached out and put his hand flat against the greasy pine of the wall. It was right where the chinking had fallen out to reveal a thumb-width of gray driving sleet. The sleet didn't seem to melt against his fingers; instead, his fingers looked like they were turning into gray wood themselves, the grain of the cedar running straight through his knuckles.

"We burned the cedar chest," Violet said after a long silence.

Jack turned with his face blank. "What chest?"

"The one with the linens that had the blue crochet work around the hems."

Jack tried to find the chest in his head. He saw a blue blur, or maybe it was the sky over the ridge the day he crossed the divide, but nothing else. "Why’d we burn her linens?"

"To keep the kettle on," Violet said. She reached out and touched her own cheek. Her skin felt tight, stretched too thin over her cheekbones. Her fingers were very cold, but her face felt like it was sitting near an open stove. "We didn't have nothing else. The dry wood went first, and then the three-legged stool. Then the box of letters."

 

[gonewacky]

"Tom Reed," Jack muttered, tasting the name. It felt large and greasy in his mouth, like tallow. "Tom Reed’s got a barrel of salt beef and a keg of Jamaica rum with a brass spigot."

"Tom Reed is forty miles down the trail, Jack. Through ten foot of drift."

"We can walk it," Jack said. He took another step toward the door, as his hand reached out for the latch. The latch was a heavy piece of strap-iron fastened through the wood with a square-headed bolt. Around the iron, a thick gray beard of frost had grown three inches long. It was curling inward like a sheep’s wool around the bolt. "We’ve got the snowshoes."

"We burned the snowshoes, Jack."

He stopped with his hand hovering two inches from the iron. His fingers were shaking. Not with a steady pulse, but in small rhythmic jerks like a frog leg touched to a copper wire. "We did?"

"For the tea-water."

"Was it good tea?"

"It tasted like deer hide," she said.



Vincent turned away from the wall. He didn't walk so much as he simply ceased to be in one corner and was present in another. He was standing right between Jack and the door. He was taller than Jack remembered, and taller than any man had a right to be in a cabin with a seven-foot ceiling. He had to duck his head so his beaver cap brushed the smoke-blackened cedar poles overhead.

Vincent Long, Jack thought, though the name didn't belong to a man anymore; it belonged to the weather. It belonged to the gray sky and the hemlock boughs snapping under the weight of the ice. Like a Trapper shot in the head, or left for dead in a clinic down by the salt water.

No. That was someone else. That was a story Tom Reed had told over a pipe while the grease dripped into the coals.

"We need to get the wood," Jack said with his voice dropping to a stubborn whisper. He looked at Vincent’s boots which were not touching the floor at all, but hovered an inch above the dirt-filled cracks. "If we don't bring the wood up from the creek the fire will go out before midnight."

"There isn't any creek, Jack," Violet said her voice very small now, as it came from somewhere deep inside the buffalo robe. "The creek froze solid in November. We went down there with the bucket and the pick, remember? You hit the ice and the pick handle split right down the middle because the wood was as dry as a bone."

Jack frowned. He remembered the sound of the pick, “thunk, thunk, thunk,” like hitting an anvil in an empty barn. He remembered the way his hands had blistered until the skin came off in grey rags stuck to the pick handle.

"We need to remind each other," Violet said quoting some ghost she had lived with before the snow came. It was her mother perhaps, or some schoolteacher in a gingham apron who had taught her how to spell cat the winter before the mountains took her. "Papa said if we don't keep telling each other how things are. We’ll start believing the cabin is a church, or a bear’s den, or the bottom of the lake."

Jack looked around the room.

The corners were entirely gone, and swallowed by a dark that had nothing to do with the sun going down. The fire was getting cold. On the table sat an empty lard tin with a dead wick stuck to the bottom in a puddle of gray wax.

"Violet?"

"Yes, Jack?"

"What day is it?"

"It’s the day after yesterday," she said.

Jack considered this. It seemed as good an answer as any. He turned back from the door with his boots scraping on the bare puncheon floor, and walked over to the hearth. He sat down beside her with his hip bumping against hers through the thick wool of her skirt, and the hide of the robe. They didn't feel warm. They felt like two stones left in the shade of a boulder after the sun went down.

"Come on," Jack said, his voice returning to that flat, mechanical rhythm. He reached out and tugged awkwardly at the corner of the buffalo robe. "Get your shawl on. We’ve got to go out and haul the wood before the dark gets in."

Violet didn't move for a long time. She looked up at her papa. The trapper was standing by the hearth now with his hands held out, as if he were warming them at a roaring blaze of pitch-pine. His fingers were gray and stiff, and when he rubbed them together there was no sound at all.

"All right, Jack," she whispered with her teeth beginning to chatter. It was not from the cold, but from the sudden sharp certainty that if they didn't stand up right now. The walls would lean in another inch and squeeze them flat as dried leaves. Just like leaves between the pages of an old Bible. "Let’s go help each other."



The winter wind was biting down from the jagged peaks of the Cascades, but down in the valley at the sawmill it was a place of relentless motion and deafening noise. Stanley wiped the sweat and sawdust from his brow, as he gripped the edge of a fresh-cut pine board. That slid from the whining blade of the big circular saw.

He had finally cut ties with the mercantile, and traded the smell of dry goods and calico for the heavy resinous air of Mr. White’s lumber mill full-time. Next to him stood Liam the seasoned saw-operator. His hands moved with a blur of practiced rhythm feeding the carriage with steady unyielding focus. Stanley caught the pace catching the boards as they cleared the teeth, and hauled them away stacking them high against the crisping air.

Every drop of sweat that stung Stanley’s eyes had a purpose. The coins in his pocket were hard-earned and heavier by the week. They were earmarked for two vital debts. The first went toward settling the growing ledger with Dr. Sawyer. He was the man whose quiet clinic held the fragile flickering hope of memories. It was the memories long lost to a bullet wound. The second portion went toward the vital gear he needed: heavy wool, a reliable compass, sturdy snowshoes, and provisions for the treacherous trek he had to make. He was going home. He just had to remember where home was, and who was waiting in the snow.

A few yards away amid the hiss of escaping pressure and the clank of iron stood Mr. White. Who was covered in soot and grease. He was bent over the mill’s newest pride. It was a massive, iron-ribbed steam engine. With a wrench in hand Mr. White was painstakingly rigging the drives and belts to hook the engine to the Haven Planer. Once operational the mill would no longer just produce rough timber; it would turn out smooth polished planks. Finished lumber meant flooring. That was a commodity that would fetch top dollar when the spring thaw finally opened the mountain passes.

As White wrenched a bolt tight he paused and straightened up wiping his hands on a greasy rag. His sharp eyes scanned the chaotic floor of the mill, as it lingered for a long calculating moment on Stanley.

Word had gotten around the settlement about Stanley’s quiet diligence. He didn’t complain about the back-breaking labor of pulling boards, nor did he flinch at the danger humming in the saw blades. Mr. White saw a man driven by an inner fire, someone desperate for every cent, yet possessed of a steady methodical mind. White had been quietly vetting him, and grooming him in his own mind. When the Haven Planer was finally hitched to the steam engine White wanted a steady hand at the throttle. A man he could trust to run the intricate machinery without losing a finger or worse.

Stanley didn’t notice the mill owner’s appraisal. He hoisted another heavy plank with his muscles straining, as he locked it into place on the towering stack.

Far up in the frozen crags of the Cascades miles above the valley floor the world was already dying a cold white death. In a small isolated cabin buried deep beneath the early snowdrifts. A little six-year-old Violet huddled close to the hearth with her small fingers clutching a scrap of blanket. Jack Tomson the weathered gold miner who had taken it upon himself to watch over her tended the dying fire, as he casting worried glances at the thick drifts sealing the door shut. They were trapped for the winter with their world shrunk to the four timber walls, and the howling gale outside. They were completely unaware of the dangers or the salvation making its slow way toward them from the valley below.

Stanley grabbed the next board as it cleared the saw. He thought of Seattle, of Dr. Sawyer’s sharp spectacles, and of the phantom fragments of a life half-remembered. He had to earn enough. Winter was coming to an end, and time was running out.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 11

The cold bit deep into the floorboards of the cabin, creeping up through the cracks like invisible frost-vines. When Jack and Violet pushed the heavy wooden door open to empty their chamber pots, the contrast was blinding.

Outside, snow was falling on a bright, blindingly sunny morning.

Jack stood on the threshold squinting against the glare bouncing off the drifts. He looked up expecting to see a blanket of gray clouds choking the sky. There was nothing. The sky was an impossible crystalline blue. It was a stretching sharp and clear over the jagged teeth of the Cascades. Not a single cloud marred the infinite expanse.

Turning to Violet, Jack muttered, “The Mountain is talking to us. High up on the top of the Mountain the snow is blowing off, and it’s coming down on us. Its telling us winter is still here, and the Mountain owns us.”

Violet didn’t laugh. She stood wrapped in a moth-eaten wool blanket with her breath pluming white in the freezing air. Her eyes were fixed on the swirling white veil drifting down from the clear blue sky. It was sparkling like diamond dust in the morning light.

“I kept seeing Papa yesterday,” Violet whispered low looking at the snow.

Jack swallowed hard with the taste of stale tallow and fear sitting heavy on his tongue. “Me too,” Jack replied. “It’s the Mountain getting into our heads. We need to keep busy.”

He forced a stiff encouraging grin. He was eager to chase away the lingering ghost of Vincent Long. Vincent, who had left to check the trap lines months ago before the big storms hit. He was believed to be in Seattle. That’s where he would most likely be getting treated for a shattered skull and amnesia. That is if he had even made it that far. Vincent felt as dead to them as the frozen timber rotting beneath the snowpack.

“After we feed Lightning and get the wood,” Jack said quickly, rattling off the chores like a list of spells to ward off the madness, “We can play the bowling game, and see who can knock down the most pins.”

Jack smiled trying to inject warmth into the chill. “That’s if you make the griddle cakes first. You can make it from the flour you told me was all gone.”

Violet gave a dry fragile laugh with the sound scraping against the quiet of the mountain. “I checked it this morning. We still have half the barrel. When I said it was gone that was the Mountain talking.”

“See?” Jack went on, gripping the handle of the chamber pot a little tighter. “Then we can get the snowshoes, and go check for a snow rabbit.”

Violet blinked with her brow furrowing. “We burned the snowshoes to make tea.”

Jack took a deep breath, the cold air burning his lungs. “They’re still hanging on the wall you silly girl. I’ll looked this morning, and see if they’re still there.”

Violet stared at him for a long agonizing beat with her eyes wide and glassy. Then, slowly she nodded. “Right. On the wall. Of course.”

They stepped back inside kicking the snow from their boots, and bolted the heavy door against the mocking, sunlit world outside.

The winter had not arrived as a season; it had arrived as a siege.

The first heavy flakes began to fall back in October, and Jack Tomson had figured he’d ride it out. He was a gold miner by trade, and a man that was used to hard rock, cold water, and the endless aching gamble of the pan. He had come up into the Cascades chasing color in the creeks, but when the passes choked shut. He had found himself sharing this isolated cabin with a trapper’s young daughter.

Violet was only six, but the mountain seemed to have aged her ten years since the snows trapped them. Her father, Vincent Long was a seasoned mountain man who knew these ridges like the back of his hand, or he had until the day the bullet hit his head and he never came back. Jim Johnson, another trapper passing through in late autumn had found him, and brought back grim ragged rumors. Vincent had taken a bullet to the head. Jim had dragged him down to the train, and sent him to Seattle. There he was in Dr. Sawyer’s clinic in the city. Whether Vincent was dead, mad, or was wandering the muddy streets of Seattle. They didn’t know if he was without a memory of his own name, or if his memory of the cabin was the same.

He was gone and the Mountain had closed its fist around Violet and Jack.

Inside the cabin the air smelled of wood-smoke, dried venison fat, and the rising desperation of two minds fraying at the edges.

Jack tossed a few split logs into the stone hearth, and watched the orange flames leap greedily. The wood pile was dwindling fast. Every stick meant digging a trench through four feet of snow just to reach the wood-stack.

Violet stood by the flour barrel in the corner with her fingers tracing the rough staves. She lifted the heavy wooden lid. Inside a mound of pale fine flour sat untouched, as it glowed faintly in the dim light of the cabin.

“See?” Violet murmured to herself. “It’s there.”

“Of course it’s there,” Jack said not looking up from the fire, but a cold knot tightened in his stomach. He remembered quite clearly the night before when Violet had scraped the bottom of the barrel, and wept softly as she showed him the bare wood. Then they had gone to bed with empty bellies.

The Mountain is playing tricks, Jack thought. Or the hunger is.

“Make the cakes, Violet,” Jack said gently. “I’ll go out and see to Lightning.”

Lightning, Vincent’s old mule was stabled in the stall attached to the back of the loafing shed. The mule was the only living link they had to the outside world, and a heavy warm presence in the freezing dark.

Jack pulled his heavy buffalo-hide coat over his shoulders. Then he jammed his wool cap down over his ears, and unlatched the door. The sun was still blazing overhead, as it cast sharp ink-black shadows across the blinding white landscape. It was the kind of day that should have felt joyous and full of promise. Instead, it felt the oppressive. Like a spotlight trained on them by an unseen audience.

He waded through the drift to the lean-to shoving the warped wooden door open.

Lightning blew a long rattling breath of warm mist into the freezing air, as he turned his dark liquid eyes toward Jack. The mule was painfully thin with his ribs pressing against his hide like barrel hoops. Despite the meager rations of dried grass they had managed to hoard.

“Easy, boy,” Jack murmured stepping into the dim stall and dumping a small measure of crushed oats into the feedbox.

Lightning plunged his muzzle into the box crunching greedily. Jack stroked the mule’s matted neck. He could feel the violent tremor running through the animal’s muscles. Animals knew things men didn't. Lightning could smell the deep frost, and the immutable permanence of the snowpack that sealed them in a tomb of ice.

As Jack turned to check the latch on the back wall a glint of metal caught his eye.

Nailed to the rough-hewn pine post beside the stall was Vincent’s old Henry rifle. Next to it hung a pair of snowshoes woven from rawhide and ash wood.

Jack froze, and his breath hitched in his throat.

The snowshoes were there. They were real. He reached out and brushed his gloved fingers across the taut rawhide netting.

We burned the snowshoes to make tea. Violet’s voice echoed in his memory from just twenty minutes ago.

Jack pulled his hand back as if he’d touched a hot coal. He stared at the snowshoes, then down at his own boots. Then back out the half-open door of the lean-to where the sun beat down on the endless sea of white.

A drop of sweat rolled down Jack’s temple freezing instantly as it hit his cheekbone.

She’s losing it he thought, as the cold terror of it gripped his chest. Or I am.

When Jack stumbled back into the main cabin the rich buttery smell of frying griddle cakes hit him. Violet stood over the iron skillet with her face flushed with the heat of the hearth, as she flipped a golden-brown cake with a spatula.

She looked up offering a small tired smile. “Smells good doesn’t it? Almost like when my mommy was here, and before you came to save me.”

Jack closed the door slowly leaning his back against the heavy timber. He looked at Violet. He really looked at her. Her eyes were sunken with dark smudges staining the pale skin beneath them. Her hair was tangled and matted with soot and ash.

“Violet,” Jack said with his voice barely above a whisper. “The snowshoes… in the lean-to… They’re hanging right where they always do.”

Violet paused with the spatula hovering over the pan. She didn’t turn around. Her shoulders stiffened beneath the wool blanket.

“I told you,” she said with her voice flat devoid of emotion. “They’re on the wall.”

“You said we burned them to make tea Violet.”

She turned slowly facing him. The firelight flickered in her eyes casting dancing shadows across her face. “Did I?” she asked softly. “Or was that just the Mountain talking Jack?”

Jack didn't answer. He walked over to the wooden table and sat down pulling his hands through his hair. The silence of the cabin pressed in around them heavier than the snow outside.

By afternoon the sun had shifted casting long skeletal shadows across the valley floor. True to his word Jack insisted they stick to the routine. To stop moving was to invite the frost; to stop talking was to invite the ghosts.

 

[ncsfsgm]

Good job! I like this...

 

[gonewacky]

They set up a makeshift bowling game using the pins and the ball Violet found waiting on Christmas morning.

“Your turn,” Jack said sliding the ball across the rough wood.

Violet knelt on the floor lining up her shot with intense manic concentration. She rolled the wooden ball. Clatter-clang. Three pins went flying.

“Three!” Violet laughed with a sharp brittle sound that lacked any real joy. “I’m beating you, Jack.”

“Beginner’s luck,” Jack muttered even though he couldn't muster a smile.

As they reset the pins a sudden sound outside made them both freeze.

Thump.

It wasn't the settling of snow or the groaning of pine boughs under the weight of the drifts. It was a heavy deliberate sound. Like a boot striking the hard-packed crust outside the front door.

Jack’s hand dropped instantly to the skinning knife tucked into his belt.

Violet went completely rigid with her eyes locked on the heavy oak door. The color drained entirely from her face, and left her looking like a marble statue carved out of the winter itself.

“Papa?” she whispered with the word escaping her lips like a puff of steam.

“Stay back,” Jack hissed rising to his feet and pulling the knife from its sheath. The cold steel felt slick in his sweating palm.

Then there was another sound. It was slow dragging scuff against the porch boards.

Scrape. Pause. Scrape.

Jack’s mind raced back to the rumors Jim Johnson had brought up the trail. Vincent Long was shot in the head, and in the doctor’s clinic in Seattle with amnesia...

What if Vincent hadn’t stayed in Seattle? What if the bullet had scrambled his brain so badly that he’d walked back up into the mountains, and was driven by some primal instinct to return home. Could he have walked straight through the blizzard-choked passes like a walking corpse?

Or worse? What if it wasn't Vincent at all? What if it was just the wind, or a starving wolf, or the Mountain itself playing a cruel final joke on them?

“Jack,” Violet whimpered with her fingers clutching at his sleeve. “Open it.”

“I’m not opening it,” Jack breathed with his eyes fixed on the heavy wooden latch.

Suddenly a fist struck the outer door.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

“Hello?” a voice rasped from the other side. It sounded like dry leaves scraping across frozen ground. It was hoarse, broken, and barely human. “Open up... damn it, it’s freezing out here.”

Jack’s heart hammered against his ribs like a trapped bird. He gripped the knife tighter with his knuckles turning white.

“Who’s out there?” Jack shouted with his voice cracking slightly.

The figure on the other side didn't answer with a name. Instead a low rattling chuckle echoed through the thick timber of the door. It was a sound that sent a jolt of pure unadulterated terror straight down Jack’s spine. It was a laugh he had heard before, but not from a living man. It was from the dark fevered corners of his own mind during the worst nights of the storm.

“Jack,” Violet whispered with her voice trembling violently as she stared at the door. She reached out with her hand trembling, and grasped the iron latch.

“Don't!” Jack yelled lunging forward to stop her.

Too late.

Violet threw the latch up. The heavy door swung inward creaking on its rusted hinges, as it was pushed wide by the relentless pressure of the wind.

Jack braced himself raising the knife. He was ready to fight whatever monster the Mountain had sent to claim them.

The doorway was empty.

There was no bloodied trapper with a shattered skull. There was no ghost of Vincent Long, no wolf, and no wanderer from the Seattle clinic.

There was only the blinding, merciless glare of the afternoon sun hitting the fresh snow, and the steady endless drift of white flakes falling from a cloudless mocking sky.

Jack stood frozen with his knife half-raised, and staring out into the blinding white nothingness.

Behind him, Violet let out a long quiet sigh, as her breath mingling with the cold air rushing into the cabin.

“See?” Violet murmured softly with her voice carrying a strange horrifying calm. “The Mountain is just saying hello.”

Jack slowly lowered the knife. He looked up at the infinite cruel blue of the sky, and for the first time he knew with absolute certainty that they were never going down the trail.

The Mountain owned them now, but winter was coming to an end.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 12

The end of February had arrived, and Seattle had turned entirely to mud.

It was not merely wet; it was a sullen, heavy saturation that seeped into the marrow of the town, as it turned the unpaved streets into chocolate bogs where wagon wheels vanished to the hubs. A stray dog moved with the reluctant caution of creatures wading through molasses. The rain was a relentless grey curtain that fell day and night without variation in pitch or volume. It drummed a dull hypnotic tattoo against the cedar-shingle roofs of the fledgling port.

At the sawmill down by the tide flats. The air smelled of wet sawdust, heavy grease, and the sharp tannic tang of cedar logs. Mr. White the mill owner stood with his hands deep in the pockets of his oilskin coat. He was watching the men wrestle with a balky line of green timber. The mud was thick enough to pull the boots right off a man’s feet, but the work went on. It had to.

Mr. White pulled Stanley from the hauling crew and put him with a detail of loggers tasked with building a massive sloping timber cover. They were constructing a drying shed for the lumber that would soon be fed into the Haven Planer. It was the mill’s pride and joy, and a massive cast-iron beast sitting crated in the dry house waiting for the steam engine to be fired. The lumber had to be bone-dry, or the blades would choke tearing the wood rather than shaving it down to the silky precise boards. That was needed for flooring in the growing town.

Stanley worked methodically driving thirty-penny nails with heavy rhythmic blows of his framing hammer. He was a broad-shouldered man with a thick beard, and eyes that had the startled searching quality of a deer caught in a brush-pile.

Mr. White stepped through the mire behind him with his boots squelching softly in the sawdust. “You got a minute, Stanley?”

Stanley stopped his hammer mid-swing. He turned around wiping his brow with a forearm black with mud and sweat, and offered a faint smile. “I always have time for you Mr. White.”

Mr. White went on keeping his voice low beneath the roar of the runoff sluicing off the mill’s tin roof. “How is the memory coming along?”

Stanley’s smile faded, and was replaced by that inward-looking frown that had haunted him all winter. He’d been that way ever since he had woken up on a blood-stained cot in Dr. Sawyer’s clinic, and had a bandage wrapped tight around his skull with a hole in his past the size of Puget Sound.

“I’m learning more all the time,” Stanley confessed as his gaze drifting past the Mr. White’s shoulder toward the grey smudge where the bay met the sky. “I’m sure I have a little girl. I can’t see her face clearly yet, but I think her name is Violet. I’ve been having flashes of her hugging my leg with her little fingers tangled in my trousers. Sometimes she’s sitting on my lap by a hearth. But then it shifts. I keep having thoughts of setting steel traps, smelling pine needles, and skinning animals in the freezing dark. I think I was a trapper Mr. White. But it’s all like the pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. The logs don't match the corners.”

Mr. White nodded slowly. He had heard bits and pieces of it before, but the fog in the man's head was stubborn.

“Well,” Mr. White informed him leaning against a squared-off fir, “It will be the middle of May or early June before we have enough dry lumber stacked to make firing the boiler worthwhile. So, I was thinking. I could let you use one of the mill’s horses. The roan gelding is quiet enough. I figured you should be done building this cover, and have the current batch stacked, by the middle of April. Then you could take a few weeks. Ride up into the foothills and go get whatever it is you find on the mountain, and bring it back here.”

Stanley dropped his head. The hammer felt suddenly heavy in his hand. It was like a dead weight dragging him down into the muck. “But what if I don’t remember? What if I get up there and the trail’s gone, or there’s nothing left, and I can’t find anything?”

Mr. White stepped closer. He reached out and put a heavy calloused hand on Stanley’s shoulder. Then speaking softly so only Stanley could hear over the hiss of the rain.

“Listen to me son. When you get back from the mountain you’re going to run the Haven Planer. It’s the best-paying job in this mill, and it takes a steady hand. And while you’re gone I’ll have a small house built for you and whatever you find. You don’t need that kind of life anymore where you’re living out in the timber alone, and dodging the frost and the loneliness. This is where you belong now. This town is growing, and we need men who can work. Now, get back to work and think about it. You and I both know the snow won’t break enough for you to get up on the mountain until after April, and I can’t run the new steam engine and the Haven Planer until the middle of May or early June anyway. I think this will work for both of us.”

Mr. White gave Stanley’s shoulder a firm reassuring squeeze. Then he turned and sloshed away through the grey mire.

Stanley stood still for a long moment with the rain plastering his hair to his skull. Then a slow uncertain smile broke through his beard with warmth kindled in his chest. Sharp and sudden his thoughts rushed through his head like meltwater finding a new crack in the stone.

Violet.

The name echoed in his mind sharp as a gunshot, and for the first time all winter the puzzle pieces didn't seem quite so impossible to fit.



Up on the mountain miles east and three thousand feet closer to the gray belly of the sky the cabin sat. It was buried to its window sills in packed blue-tinged snow. Inside, the air was thick with the smell of wood-smoke, dried venison fat, and the stale confinement of five long months.

Jack Tomson, the gold miner who had hunkered down with Violet, since the first October blizzard slammed the door on the Cascades. He sat on a three-legged stool near the hearth whetstone in hand. He scraped the edge of his skinning knife with a rhythmic shing, shing, shing, his eyes fixed on the amber tongue of the fire.

Suddenly, a strange resonant thud echoed from the roof. It was not the muffled slide of settling snow, but something sharp and distinct like a heavy footfall on frozen boards.

Jack blurted, “Do you hear that?”

Violet was sitting cross-legged on a moth-eaten blanket near the wood-box. She her chin propped in her hands, and looked up instantly. Her dark eyes were too large for her pinched pale face, as she darted toward the window.

She scrambled to her feet with her small boots clacking against the floor, and cried out, “It’s raining, Jack! It’s really raining!”

It was. The change had come upon them with the stealth of a cat, for weeks the cold had been absolute. Now it was a crystalline tyranny that froze the breath in their throats and kept them prisoners of the hearth. But overnight the wind had shifted from the frozen interior to the southwest, and was blowing up a warm wet breath from the Pacific.

The mountain loosened its grip on them.

The days were getting noticeably longer, and though the sun remained hidden behind a heavy quilt of cloud. Its warmth was palpable. The thick crust of snow which had defied shovels in January began to weep. It melted in sheets during the day, and rushing down the cedar-shake roof in muddy rivulets. Only to refreeze with a vengeance each night as the temperature dipped just below freezing.

This daily cycle of thaw and refreeze wrought a strange transformation on the world outside the cabin. Long icicles thick as a man’s thigh at the eaves and sharp as lances at the tips began to hang off everything: the porch rail, the lower branches of the firs, and the lip of the stone chimney.

The big icicles on the front of the cabin had grown so long and heavy that by the second week of March. They stretched all the way to the ground forming a sparkling crystalline cage around the doorway. The giant fir boughs overloaded with sodden snow and ice. Bowed lower and lower toward the earth until they groaned under the strain.

Then with the suddenness of a gunshot a cluster of massive icicles would snap free from the eaves, and come crashing to the frozen pack below with a sound like breaking glass. The air was filled intermittently with the sharp echoing cracks of ice shattering. Then it was followed by the dull whump of snow sliding off the roof in heavy avalanches.

It was a violent noisy business, but to the two inhabitants of the cabin it was the most welcome sound on earth.

Winter was over, and the thaw was underway.

Violet pressed her nose against the cold of the window squinting out into the grey drizzle. The snow pack had shrunk a foot in forty-eight hours, and revealing the dark humped shapes of buried logs and the charcoal-black skeletons of huckleberry bushes.

“Do you think the trail is open yet Jack?” she asked with her voice trembling slightly with a mixture of hope and old fear.

Jack stopped his whetstone. He looked at the girl. He really looked at her, and saw the dark circles under her eyes. The way her homespun dress hung loosely on her frame, and the quiet maturity that had settled into her bones during the long dark months. It was when they rationed the last of the dried corn, and prayed for a chinook that felt like it would never come.

He laid the knife down on the table wiped his hands on his trousers, and walked over to stand behind her. Resting his heavy dirt-grained hand on her small shoulder, “Not yet, little bird,” Jack said gently with his voice like grinding stones softened by grease. “The snow’s turning to slush, but that just means the slides will start. We got a few weeks yet before a mule could get up this draw, let alone a man.”

Violet’s shoulders slumped, but she didn’t cry. She had used up all her tears back in January when the snow locked them in. Instead, she reached out and touched the icy glass of the window leaving a faint smudge of warmth.

Jack muttered, “The creek will be running again. That means no more melting snow for water.”

“He’s coming, Jack,” she whispered more to herself than to the miner. “I can feel it. He’s coming back.”

Jack didn’t answer. He looked out past the dripping eaves toward the grey wall of the forest. It was where the mist was rising from the melting drifts like smoke from a hundred hidden fires. He hoped the man was coming, because up here the wilderness was waking up hungry, and the cabin was running out of time.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 13

It was April in the high Cascades of 1874, but the seasons up here didn’t consult the calendar. They took their cues from the sky and the drifts, and right now the snow was still piled a little over a foot deep. It was wet, heavy, and crusted with a grey skin of spring ice. It was just a little too deep to chance it with the buckboard. The wheels would sink and catch an axle-snapping root or a frozen rock, and leave them stranded a mile out with no team strong enough to yank it free.

Jack Tomson sat on an upturned pine stump near the cold hearth. He was whetting a skinning knife he hadn’t used in months. His hands shook slightly but not from the cold. In his sixty’s the cabin was bitter enough to frost a man’s spit at his age. Forty winters on the mountain and his joints felt like rusted hinges every time he stood, and his lungs rattled like dry pods whenever the wind howled down the chimney.

He looked across the room at the girl.

Violet was six and soon to be seven, and small-boned like her mother, Grace. Her hair the color of dried cedar needles, and eyes that had grown too quiet over the long shut-in months. She was scraping the sides of the iron flour bin with a bent spoon trying to salvage the dust.



Jack rubbed his whiskered chin. If he put Violet up on Lightning, and strapped the hickory snowshoes to his own boots. He could walk them both out to Jackson’s Prairie. It was twelve miles of steep treacherous switchbacks, but it was doable.

The trouble was. Jack knew with the cold certainty of a dying elk that if he left this mountain. He was never coming back. He was too old, and he just couldn’t live this life any more. The damp had settled deep into his marrow; every breath tasted of pine needles and iron. He’d spent forty years chasing colors in creeks that froze your fingernails off, and what did he have to show for it? A tin box buried beneath three feet of shale and roots, and a little girl who wasn’t even his by blood. She was just a little girl that was left behind when the world went sideways.

Now, Jack had to think up a way to tell Violet. He knew if he told her they weren’t coming back she’d never go. She was a stubborn little thing attached to this drafty miserable box of logs, because it was the only home she remembered and because her father. Before he took a bullet to the brain and ended up in Seattle had built the bed she slept in. But they needed supplies in a bad way. The salt pork was gone, the beans had run out in March, and they’d been living on whatever scrawny hare Jack could snare when the weather let up enough to check the lines.

He was going to make her go with him to Jackson’s Prairie for supplies, and then tell her there.

He knew he wasn't coming back, so he’d have to make a detour to get his buried gold. Jack had a spot in a notch between two twin firs about a mile off the trail. That’s where he had been burying a little gold every year. Just a poke here and a nugget there squirreled away against the day his bones finally gave out. And now that he was being forced to raise a child. This was the time to retire from the mountain. It was no place to raise a child anyway. The silence of it would hollow her out until she was nothing more than a ghost with braids.

That was it. His mind was made up. After they got some supplies they would head west down to Seattle. Let the salt air rot his boots instead of the mountain frost.

That night as Violet used the very last of the flour to make biscuits. Jack stood over the skillet making the gravy. He muttered keeping his eyes on the bubbling grease, “Last of the flour?”

Violet pressed her small palms into the dough, her face smudged white. “A few spoons to thicken the gravy, and that’s it Jack.”

Jack informed with his voice gravelly and low, “Then that’s it. We go to Jackson’s Prairie tomorrow for supplies. We’ll leave a note for your dad. You got the one we left last time?”

Violet paused looking toward the corner where Vincent Long’s old flannel shirts still hung like limp ghosts. “It’s under daddy’s book by the chair.”

Jack nodded with his chest tightening. “Good. We’ll leave it on the table when we leave.”

Knowing Violet couldn’t read yet, and knowing she wouldn’t look too closely at a man’s hurried hand. Jack added a single definitive line to the note before they blew out the candle:

Went to Seattle.

The rain in Seattle didn’t fall so much as it hovered, a permanent grey mist that turned the unpaved streets into rivers of yellow mud.

Inside the small whitewashed clinic near the docks the smell of carbolic acid and wet wool hung thick. Dr. Sawyer wiped his spectacles with a stained handkerchief and looked down at the man sitting on the examination table.

The man had a jagged puckered scar just above his left ear where a bushwhacker’s lead had grazed his skull. It had torn through his felt hat and bone before exiting clean. It had left him alive, but hollow. For weeks he had sat in this room like a sack of grain staring at the floor. Not knowing his name was Vincent Long, or he was a trapper. He’d had flashes of his wife named Grace, but didn’t know that Grace was already long gone.

What Vincent couldn't find no matter how hard he scraped at the inside of his skull, was the cabin. Nor could he find the face of his little girl.

"The memory returns in patches Vincent," Dr. Sawyer said tossing the rag onto a tray. "A sound, a smell, or a sudden drop in temperature can bring a peace back, but you can't force a broken clock to strike by shaking it."

"I have to go back," Vincent said with his voice deeper than he remembered. He stood up shrugging into a heavy canvas coat. "The snow’s breaking, and Jim told me Tom Reed at Jackson’s Prairie post... he knew me. He bought my pelts every autumn. If anyone remembers where my clearing was, it’ll be Tom."

At the doorway a second man waited. He was leaning against the doorframe with a toothpick between his teeth. Jim Johnson was a trapper down in the lowlands, and had found Vincent coming back from Snoqualmie.

Jim had offered to ride up with him. Not out of charity exactly, but because the woods were opening up again, and two guns were better than one when the mountain-men started coming down out of the high country.

They called the man Stanley now. It was his middle name, but he didn’t know it.

"You got your gear?" Jim asked patting the flank of his mule as they stepped out into the Seattle drizzle.

Vincent or Stanley, as the locals had taken to calling him swung up onto his roan gelding. He did it with the mechanical stiffness of a man whose muscles had forgotten how to ride. "Pack’s on the mule. Let's move before the mud turns to knee-deep grease."

They pointed their horses east, toward the jagged white teeth of the Cascades. They followed the Snoqualmie trail as it climbed out of the green valleys into the shadow of the pines. Jim was hoping Tom Reed would know who Stanley really was, and more importantly where his cabin was at. Because Vincent Long wasn't just a trapper who’d lost his memory; he was a man with ghosts behind him, and Jim had a quiet nagging suspicion that those ghosts weren't all buried.



The trail to Jackson’s Prairie was a white scar hacked out of the timber.

Jack led the way with his snowshoes hissing against the crust. Behind him perched high on the saddle of Lighting, was Violet holding tight to the saddle horn with both hands. She looked small against the vast blinding expanse of white, as her breath plumed out in white puffs that vanished instantly into the thin mountain air.

“Are we almost there Jack?” she asked with her voice small against the wind.

“Getting close little bird,” Jack lied. They had another three miles to go, but more importantly they had to make the turn-off.

About a mile before the trail sloped down toward the clearing where Tom Reed kept his trading post. Jack veered left. He guided Lightning off the packed track, and into a thicket of dwarf cedars. It was where the snow was slightly shallower trapped beneath the dense weeping boughs.

“Jack? Where are we going? The trading post’s down the hill.”

“Left something behind,” Jack said with his breathing coming hard and shallow. He unstrapped a short-handled grub hoe or mattock from the side of the saddle. “Just you sit tight Violet. Don’t let Lightning step into any squirrel holes.”

He waded through the knee-deep drift to a spot where two ancient red cedars grew so close together their bark seemed to have fused into a single massive trunk. At the base buried beneath a foot of frozen duff and snow, was a flat slab of granite.

Jack dropped to his knees ignoring the sharp stab of pain in his hip, and wedged the blade of the mattock beneath the stone. With a grunt that tore at his throat he levered it up. It gave way with a wet sucking sound.

Beneath it lay a cast-iron lard tin wrapped tightly in oiled wool.

Jack hauled it out with his fingers stiff as he unwrapped the twine. Inside coin clinked against coin. They were mostly gold Eagles and double-eagles he’d panned out of the gravel bars of the Skykomish. It was back when he was half his age and twice as mean. He’d added to it every summer swearing he’d buy a house with a porch in the lowlands. Instead, he was buying a train ticket to Seattle and a new start for a girl who wasn’t his kin.

He dumped the heavy tin into his saddlebag, right beside the last slab of dried venison, and shoved the stone back into place.

“All right,” Jack wheezed wiping his brow with the back of a calloused hand. “Let’s go see Tom Reed.”



Tom Reed’s trading post smelled of rancid lard, coffee beans, and damp wool.

The bell above the door jangled with a tinny ring as Jack pushed it open, as he shielded Violet from the rush of cold air that followed them in. The room was dark, and lit only by a single kerosene lamp on the counter and the light filtering through a window.

Tom Reed looked up from a ledger with his spectacles sliding down a bulbous nose. He was a round man who looked like he’d swallowed a flour sack, but he had sharp eyes for trade.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” Tom said closing his book with a thud. “Tomson. Thought the cougars would have had you and the girl by January. You look like death warmed over in a skillet.”

“We’re alive, Tom,” Jack said leaning heavily against the counter as he dropped two twenty dollar gold coins on the counter, “We need flour, Sugar, Salt pork, and a side of bacon if you got it. And two tickets on the train to Seattle if you can arrange it.”

Tom raised an eyebrow, “The conductor will sale you the tickets, but you have to go to North Bend to catch the train. Where you going Jack?”

“Let’s just say I’m cashing in my chips, Tom,” Jack said quietly. He looked down at Violet, who was warming her small red hands by the potbellied stove in the corner. “We’re heading down to the bay. For good.”

Tom stared at him for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly. He didn't ask about Vincent Long. Everyone up here knew Vincent had been put on a train with a hole in his head, and never came back leaving the girl with the old miner. It was a mercy most folks figured.

“I can pack your box,” Tom said turning to his shelves. “Train runs out of North Bend every day about noon, but you can’t make it there today. You’ll have to wait until tomorrow in the line shack.”

“We’ll wait,” Jack said.

Then they headed to North Bend.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 14

​

The Cascades did not so much yield to spring as they drowned in it. For six months the world had been a monochrome of blinding white and suffocating silence. It was the kind of cold that freezes the breath in a man’s mustache and makes the cabin logs groan like dying men. Jack Tomson had spent those six months rationing flour, melting snow in a blackened tin kettle, and watching the little girl.

Now the mud was knee-deep, and the air smelled of rotting pine needles and wet earth.

Outside the Trading Post in Jackson’s Prairie Jack strapped the supplies to Lightning’s broad back, as Violet asked with a sad face, “We’re not going home, Jack?”

Jack lied with his hands fumbling slightly with the leather cinch. “Sure, but I think we should go to Seattle and look for your Papa there. He might not remember his way home, and we might need to show him the way.”

With a shaky voice Violet agreed rubbing her knuckles into her eyes. “I think we should check the doctor first. He should know if the hurt man was Papa.”

Helping Violet up onto Lightning Jack replied, “Good thinking Violet. That’s just what we’ll do.”



Later that day and miles down the trail beneath a sky the color of a wet slate shingle Stanley stopped. The horses plodding through the slush stopped short.

Vincent Long…Stanley pulled back on his reins, as his eyes fixed on the tree-line. His heart gave a strange violent lurch against his ribs though he couldn't have said why. It was just a stand of hemlocks and a drift of old snow.

“Something wrong?” Jim Johnson asked reining his mule to a halt beside him.

“I don’t know,” Vincent murmured lifting a gloved hand to touch the puckered scar above his ear. A sudden sharp pain flared behind his eyes. Then the smell of cedar smoke, and the sound of a child’s laughter with the weight of a little girl sitting on his shoulders.

“We got twenty miles before dark if we want to reach Reed’s place,” Jim said, scanning the timber with the practiced eye of a man who didn't trust the woods, the weather, or his own shadow. “Come on Stanley. Let’s ride.”

Vincent stared into the grey woods a second longer. He was feeling the ghosts of a winter that wasn't quite dead yet whispering through the boughs. Then he turned his horse’s head toward Jackson’s Prairie. Not knowing that fifty yards away through the screen of falling mist and black timber. An old man and a little girl were stepping out of the mountains forever.



North Bend was little more than a scar carved into the wilderness. There were two weathered buildings and a train platform with a line-shack. One building served as the bunkhouse for the freight office workers, and the other was the freight office itself. It was sitting flush against the tracks with a timber loading dock. Just past that stood the line shack. Jack unloaded their gear onto the platform tucking it under the protective overhang of the soffit. He shoved their bedroll into the dim dusty interior of the shack. Then taking the leather harness off Lightning he swatted the mule firmly on the rump. The animal snorted kicking up a spray of dark mud before galloping out into the open valley field to graze.

Violet watched him go with her brow furrowing. “Why did you do that Jack?”

Jack lied again smoothing down his wool vest. “Well, we can’t take him on the train, and he’ll be right here when we get back. He’ll just roam around eating until we return.”

Violet blinked processing the logic with a child's trust. “Oh.”



The next morning. Violet awoke to a tall raw-boned man standing in the open doorway of the line shack, and blocking the grey dawn light. She shook Jack, and the old miner blinked heavily pushing himself up from the bedroll.

The man tipped his hat. “You waiting for the train?”

Jack rubbed the sleep from his eyes, his joints popping. “Sure are.”

“North or South?” the man asked.

“North to Seattle.”

“The southbound will be through in about an hour, but the northbound won’t be here until noon. If you want you can bring the girl over for a hotcake. I’d enjoy the company. Oh, by the way, my name’s Bentley, but you can call me Ben.”

Violet piped up with her small voice cutting through the morning chill. “I’m Violet.”

Jack offered a tired genuine smile. “It’s Jack to my friends Ben.”

“See ya then,” Ben said turning on his heel and walking back toward the bunkhouse.



They rolled up their bedroll, stacked it with the rest of their belongings on the platform, and made their way across the damp dirt to the bunkhouse. Stepping inside, the smell of grease and chicory hit them instantly.

Ben gestured with a spatula. “This is Zack. He’s the telegraph operator.”

Jack nodded curtly. “Nice to meet you Zack.”

Ben insisted shoving a heavy ceramic plate toward them. “Have a seat. I got a couple hot ones coming off the grill.”

Zack, a thin man with ink-stained fingers squinted, as he pushed a tin cup of dark liquid across the rough wooden table toward Jack. “Here is the sugar water for the hunks of wood Ben calls hotcakes. You’ll need it to soften them up.”

Ben waved the spatula defensively. “You just never mind Zack. He complains about everything.”

Now with their bellies heavy with dense dough and sweet syrup a sound echoed. It was the sharp shrill shriek of a train whistle echoing down the canyon.

Ben dropped his rag. “Let’s go old-timers. We have to head over to the freight office and wait for the cars.”

As they stood Zack looked down at Violet. “Say, you can come with me into the office and see how the telegraph works. Have you ever seen one?”

Violet shook her head with curiosity briefly chasing the shadow from her eyes.

“We have to send a message down the line that the train’s arrived,” Zack explained leading her toward the clicking instrument on the back desk.

Outside, the iron beast materialized from the mist belching grey billows of wood smoke, and screaming a mournful cry that rattled the windowpanes. When the heavy locomotive ground to a halt the Conductor stepped down from the passenger car. He was accompanied by two soot-stained miners.

The Conductor walked over to Ben wiping his brow with a greasy bandanna. “No freight this trip, Ben. You got anything going out?”

Ben shook his head leaning against the freight dock. “Nope, not today.”

“See you next trip, Ben.”

The Conductor climbed back aboard. The whistle shrieked again, and the hulking iron-and-steam machine groaned, before its drive wheels spinning once in the muck before catching traction. Then the hulking iron beast pull away northward leaving only the smell of burning coal in the damp air.

Ben looked over at Jack’s small pile of supplies sitting exposed on the platform. “I got an empty crate in the freight office we can pack your stuff into. I’ll give you a claim ticket. Then when you get to Seattle you can catch a buggy, and come back down and get it once you’re settled.”

While Ben and Jack hauled the gear inside, Violet stood beside Zack’s desk in the telegraph office. The brass key clicked out its rhythmic dit-dah-dit, signaling the train’s departure.

Unable to hold it in any longer Violet’s words tumbled out in a rush. “We’re going to Seattle to find my Daddy. Mr. Reed at the trading post said a man put him on a train to Seattle, and he had a hole in his head. Jack thinks he died, but he won’t tell me. I think he’s alive. I can feel it. I just have to find him.”

Zack froze with his hand hovering over the telegraph key. His breath caught in his throat. “Was this last October? Just before the big snow?”

Violet stared at him with her eyes wide. Then shooting a sideways glance toward the door where Jack was returning. “You know about what happened to him?”

Zack realizing he had said too much, and tried to soften the blow. He did not wanting to ignite a child's heart with false hope. “Sure. Everyone along the line knows the story about Stanley.”

A heavy suffocating sadness fell over Violet’s small frame, as she heard the name Stanley.

Zack kept his voice low glancing toward the threshold. “Peat was the engineer on the train that took him to Seattle. He was hurt real bad, and Peat was scared he wouldn’t make it. But he did. He lost all his memory though. Peat sees him all the time now. He uses the name Stanley, and he comes to sit on the bench at the Seattle depot. He waves at Peat when the engine pulls in. Word is he fell in with Mr. White at the lumber mill. They’re good friends now, and Stanley works right there at the Mill.”

Violet looked up at Zack with her small jaw set with fierce determination. “You think he could be my Daddy and he just doesn’t remember his real name?”

The air in the tiny office grew thick with the weight of her hope. Zack swallowed hard speaking softly. “I don’t know child. But you can go straight to the mill and check it out the minute you get to Seattle.”



Miles to the south beneath a bruised starless sky the horses plodded into Jackson’s Prairie. The mud sucked at their hooves with a wet squelching sound. Jim Johnson hauled himself down from his saddle with his old bones protesting every inch of the descent. He pushed open the door of the trading post, and the tinny little bell jangling a sharp warning into the quiet room.

“Tom? It’s Jim. You in here?”

A plump balding man emerged from the shadows of the back storeroom. He was wiping his hands on a greasy apron. “Hey Jim. I was just calling it a night. Put your animal out in the corral, and you can sleep by the potbellied stove in the corner. Just toss a stick in now and then to keep the coals alive. I’ll get you whatever provisions you need in the morning.”

Jim let out a long shuddering breath untying his kerchief. “All right, Tom. I’ll see you then.”

The next morning the pale dawn cut through the windows of the trading post. Tom looked down from the loft stairs stopping dead in his tracks. “Well, look at that. There’s two of you now.”

Jim opened one sleepy eye as Tom dropped a heavy iron coffee pot onto the top of the cast-iron stove, and shoved a split log into the firebox. Muttering under his breath Tom walked back toward the counter. “They must’ve had a long hard ride yesterday.”

Within minutes the pot began to perk, and the trading post filled with the rich bitter aroma of fresh coffee. The smell was potent enough to rouse the dead, or in this case two hardened mountain men whose brains had been addled by trauma and trail dust.

Jim and Stanley rolled up their bedrolls, and wandered over to the warmth of the stove with tin cups extended. Jim blew across the surface of his coffee glancing sideways at his companion. “You know Stanley here don’t you Tom?”

Tom took a long hard look. The man standing before him bore only a ghost-like resemblance to Vincent Long. His face had gone gaunt and hollow, his cheeks sunken, and his arms looked half the size they had been before the winter. The city-bought wool coat and trousers hung loosely from his frame. This was making him look less like a rugged mountain trapper, and more like a lost traveler who had wandered out of a dream.

 

[gonewacky]

Puzzled Tom scratched his jaw. “Can’t say I do.”

Jim jabbed a thumb toward Stanley's chest. “This is the man I told you about last year. The one who took a bullet clean through the skull.”

Tom stepped closer squinting in the harsh morning light. His mind raced backward through the gossip of the previous autumn. He whispered aloud, “Vincent Long? Now that I look at him… I suppose he could be Vincent.”

Jim took a sip of his coffee wincing at the heat. “That lead scrambled his memory good. I’m trying to take him back up to his old cabin. I was hoping familiar ground might rattle something loose inside his head.”

Tom shook his head slowly leaning against the counter. “Ain’t no use going up Stone Creek right now. The cabin’s empty. The old miner Jack, and little Violet were in here just the day before yesterday.”

Stanley’s cup paused halfway to his mouth. The name Violet hung in the air like a phantom whisper that seemed to echo against the low rafters. Stanley showed no sign of recognition only a vague troubling furrow of his brow.

Tom continued unaware of the internal earthquake he was causing. “They were headed for the train. North or South I couldn't rightly say, but from the way they packed up their gear. It sounded like they weren’t coming back.”



The northbound freight train groaned to a halt at the North Bend platform precisely at noon. It was just as Zack had promised. Jack hoisted their canvas bag tossing it into the train. Ben loaded the cerate onto the baggage car, as the conductor impatiently tapped his silver pocket watch.

“Come on little miss,” the conductor said offering a calloused hand to Violet.

She took it casting one last look back at the line shack, and the open valley where Lightning was grazing in the distance. Jack climbed up behind her with his breath coming raggedly. He had spent his whole life avoiding towns, avoiding crowds, and avoiding the creeping expansion of the iron rails that chased men like him out of the mountains. But he would walk into the mouth of hell itself before he let that little girl face Seattle alone.

The train chugged away from North Bend accelerating along the winding banks of the river. Zack stood on the platform waving a greasy rag, and Ben watched from the freight office door tipping his hat.

Inside the passenger car the smell of coal smoke, damp wool, and stale tobacco was thick. Violet pressed her face against the grimy glass pane. She watched the dense evergreen forests of the Cascades blur into a rhythmic wall of green and brown.

“Jack?” she whispered with her voice barely audible over the clatter of the iron wheels against the rail joints.

“Yeah, Violet?”

“Do you think he’ll remember my name?”

Jack swallowed hard staring down at his worn dirt-caked boots. He thought of the telegram Zack had whispered about. The stories of a man sitting on a depot bench staring blankly at locomotives, and working for a mill owner named White with a mind as smooth and blank as river glass.

“I don’t know honey,” Jack said with his voice cracking slightly as he placed a heavy reassuring hand on her small shoulder. “But we’re gonna find out together.”



Miles to the south beneath the same grey sky. Jim Johnson and Stanley stood outside the Jackson’s Prairie trading post with their horses saddled and ready.

“Which way Jim?” Stanley asked with his voice flat, and devoid of the passion that once made him a master trapper of the high ridges. He looked down the muddy wagon road. His fingers absently touching the jagged scar tucked beneath the hairline on the side of his head.

Jim looked north toward the jagged peaks of the Cascades where the railway cut through the passes. A strange uneasy prickle ran down the old trapper's spine. He couldn't have said why.

“We ride south to the creek first Stanley,” Jim said turning his mount toward the timberline. “And if the cabin don’t talk to you… then maybe we take a train north. To the city.”

Neither of them knew that the steel ribbons of the Northern Pacific were acting like a giant pair of scissors, and were closing the gap between a father who had forgotten his past, and a daughter who refused to let him stay dead. The train rushed onward through the damp mountain air, carrying a six-year-old girl toward Seattle unaware that the ghost she was chasing was already moving to meet her.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 15

Jim led Vincent up Stone Creek, as thoughts were spinning around in his head. The crisp biting air of the Cascade foothills carried the scent of thawing pine and wet earth. It was a familiar perfume of early spring in 1874. But for Vincent, the journey was heavy with unspoken anxieties. He was remembering Tom Reed back at the Jackson’s Prairie Trading Post, and the quiet heavy burden of trading winter furs for basic supplies. He remembered the specific bends in the river where he used to set his beaver traps, and how the wilderness had a way of swallowing men whole if they weren't careful.

More and more flooded into his mind as they pushed their horses up the creek, the melting snow sloughing off the heavy boughs in wet heavy thuds. Then he saw the tree and stopped short hauling back on his reins.

Vincent’s horse bumped against Jim’s flank snorting a cloud of steam into the crisp air. Vincent blinked with his brow furrowed beneath a rough-hewn cap.

Vincent looked toward the massive gnarled Oak Tree at the edge of the clearing. Beneath its sprawling bare branches sat a mound of earth. It was half-swallowed by the melting gray snow. Grace Long was there, or at least in the ghosts of memory that Vincent carried. He remembered building the rough-hewn cabin with Grace and Jack years ago. It was back when the world felt wide open and full of promise. He remembered Grace holding their newborn baby they named Violet, and he remembered the bleak crushing day he stood holding her hand as her last breath left her body. Then he remembered little Violet who was just six years old. She cried uncontrollably as they lowered her mother into the cold earth beneath the Oak Tree.

Vincent knew from the grim calculus of the mountains. That a body sometimes vanished when the snows melted and the scavengers came. But the mound remained.

Vincent dropped heavily from his saddle with his boots sinking into the slush. Without a word he ran toward the mound under the tree, as he stumbled through the mud and dropped violently to his knees. He buried his face in his hands and wept. Then a sound tore from his chest. It was a raw agonized scream that echoed off the granite walls of the canyon, and rattled through the awakening woods scaring a flock of birds from the canopy.

Jim nudged his horse forward stopping a few paces away. He looked down at the shaking man. “Is it coming back, Vincent?”

Vincent slowly turned his head. His eyes were bloodshot and wide with terror and sudden blinding realization, as he locked onto Jim. “It’s all coming back,” he choked out with his voice cracking with decades of lost time.

He scrambled to his feet swaying slightly, and looked past the tree to the weathered cabin standing silent at the clearing's edge. Without waiting for Jim Vincent began to walk. His pace was quickening into a desperate stumbling march. Jim rode behind him watching the man he had known in Seattle simply as "Stanley," He was a quiet broken man at Mr. White’s lumber mill, and he never could quite explain the scars on his skull or the blank years behind his eyes.

Jim was now entirely sure that Stanley was in fact, “Vincent Long,” the man left for dead by bushwhackers last year.

“Try the door, Vincent,” Jim advised softly pulling his horse to a halt.

Vincent reached out with a trembling calloused hand and pushed on the heavy timber door. It groaned on its rusted iron hinges swinging inward. He stepped across the threshold and just stood there staring into the dim interior.

His mind raced. He saw Grace moving gracefully by the stone hearth tending a cast-iron skillet. He saw a little girl with bright tangled hair sitting at the rough-hewn wooden table, as she kicked her legs. The phantoms flickered and faded like smoke as he stepped further into the room, and then the reality of dust and emptiness rushing in to take their place.

On the center of the table sat a piece of folded paper weighted down by a smooth river stone. Vincent approached it as if it were a loaded weapon. He unfolded it. The handwriting was crude scrawled by a hand unaccustomed to ink and parchment, but clear enough.

We went to the Trading Post in Jackson’s Prairie. Jack and Violet.

Beneath Jack and Violet’s names in an even clumsier hand was added:

Went to Seattle.

Vincent’s breath hitched. He snatched the paper turned, and grabbed Jim by the shoulders shaking him with a sudden ferocious strength as he yelled, “Violet’s my daughter! And she’s looking for me!”

Jim smiled with a slow weathered grin spreading across his face. “Vincent, it looks like we’re heading back to Seattle.”



In Seattle, far from the silent majesty and cruel isolation of the Cascades. Jack Tomson and young Violet had settled in at Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse. Jack knew the place well; he’d spent the last few winters there nursing his battered bones, and saving whatever dust he could pan out of the cold gravel bars. Then he’d head to Seattle before the high mountain passes closed up for the season.

The morning air smelled of salt water, coal smoke, and fried bacon. After a hearty breakfast in the communal dining room Jack took Violet by the hand, and led her up the narrow wooden stairs to their modest room. He reached beneath the loose floorboard near the washstand and pulled out a heavy canvas pouch. He untied the leather string and dumped a cascade of heavy gold coins onto the quilt. Then he put a few in his pocket and put the bag back.

Looking down at Violet who was standing awkwardly in her tattered flour-sack dress Jack informed, “We can’t go see anyone like this Violet. We need some new clothes. I’m going to get you a dress, and shoes. Me, I need everything. I look like a walking rag, and you don’t look much better in that sack. We’ll want people to respect us. You see in the city people are different than where we come from. Clothes make the man, and the lady.”

Violet whined with her lower lip trembling. “I thought we were going to go see the Doctor about Papa? Tom said the doctor might know!”

Jack gently placing a hand on her shoulder and insisted, “We will, I promise you. But we have to look right first. Miss Tomson told me there’s a dressmaker just two blocks away. She’s right across the street from the mercantile. We’ll stop there first so was can get you sorted, and then outfit ourselves properly.”

Reluctantly Violet agreed, as she wiped her nose with the back of her sleeve.

Moments later they were navigating the muddy planked sidewalks of downtown Seattle, as they dodged horse-drawn drays and hurried businessmen in woolen coats. They found the small shop with a polished wooden sign that read Mable’s Fine Sewing & Millinery.

Inside the air smelled of lavender water and crisp starched cotton. Mable was a sharp-eyed woman with silver-streaked hair pinned neatly to her head. She took one look at the wild-eyed mountain child and the rugged bearded miner, and assessed the situation instantly. She didn't blink at their rough appearance; she had seen plenty of prospectors coming down from the hills looking like runaways.

“Well now let’s see what we have here,” Mable said bustling out from behind the counter with a measuring tape slung around her neck. She quickly found a ready-made dress of forest-green wool. Mable exclaimed, “It’s warm, durable, yet fine enough for a city girl.”

It fit Violet’s slight frame remarkably well.

As Mable helped Violet slip the garment over her head Violet noticed small neat embroidery. It was hidden along the inside hem of the skirt. She ran a curious finger over the tiny looping stitches.

“What does this say?” Violet asked tilting her head.

Mable smiled warmly adjusting the collar. “That is my name Violet. Mable.”

Violet’s eyes widened slightly. “Was this yours when you were little?”

Mable softly laughed a rich musical sound. “Of course not child. When you make something and you’re proud of it. You put your name on it. Then others will know the quality of your work, your attention to detail, and your high standards. A garment should last. Just like a good name.”

Jack watching from a wooden chair by the corner, as he reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar gold piece laying it flat on the counter. “Could you make her another dress? Something for Sundays, maybe?”

Mable picked up the heavy coin, and tested its weight with a practiced flick against her thumb. Then she smiled brightly. “It will be ready in about two weeks Mr. Tomson, and I think this should cover it just fine with plenty to spare for your trouble.”

From there they crossed the muddy street to the bustling mercantile. The clerk a thin man with sleeve garters and spectacles perched on the end of his nose eyed them warily. That is until Jack dropped another heavy handful of silver onto the counter. By the time they left Violet was wearing sturdy new leather shoes and thick wool socks that didn't pinch her toes, and Jack had traded his tattered sheepskin coat for a clean canvas jacket, a fresh flannel shirt, and a pair of sturdy denim trousers.

Carrying their remaining bundles they headed back to the warmth and safety of the boardinghouse.

As they pushed open the front door. Miss Victoria Tomson the formidable proprietress whose sharp tongue was matched only by her enormous heart. Intercepted them in the hallway with Victoria’s eyes landing on Violet, and she gasped dramatically.

“Oh, look at you!” Victoria exclaimed clapping her hands together. “You look just beautiful! That green brings out the color in your eyes. But my word we have to do something with that hair.”

Before Violet could protest Victoria reached out and took the girl by the hand. Then she dragged her down the hall toward her own private sitting room. She set Violet down firmly on a cushioned chair before a vanity mirror. Then Victoria picked up a heavy-bristled silver hairbrush, and began the arduous task of untangling the bird's nest on the child's head.

“Oh, this is a crime,” Victoria muttered tugging gently through a stubborn snarl. “Who in the world cut the hunks out of your hair like this?”

Violet whispered staring miserably into the mirror at her jagged uneven locks, “Jack did with his knife. We had to. It was the only way to get the pine sap and the knots out after the blizzard.”

Victoria clicked her tongue shaking her head. “Well, we won’t have any of that nonsense here. Your hair will be brushed every single day if you live under my roof. I hear you came all the way down from the mountains looking for your father?”

Violet whispered again with her voice tight with hope and fear. “Tom at the Trading Post said he came here to the city before winter. I’m going to see the doctor to find him. Jack said the doctor might know where he went after he got hurt.”

Victoria paused with the brush hovering inches from Violet’s crown. Her expression softened significantly. Then the stern no-nonsense landlady melted away into a sympathetic woman of the frontier.

“I heard the story about that poor man,” Victoria said quietly resuming her rhythmic brushing. “The one that came from the train with a head wound, and lost his memory. People say he’s a quiet hard-working fellow. I hear he works down at the lumber mill for Mr. White now.”

Violet gripped the edge of the vanity table with her knuckles turning white. “I’m going to go there too. That is as soon as we see the doctor.”

Victoria patted Violet’s shoulder reassuringly. “Well, that is the absolute best we can do right now. We’ll work on your hair some more tomorrow. Maybe get it cut into a proper bob so it grows out even. I think Jack has about changed his spots by now too. Jack’s heart is simply too big for his own good. Dragging an orphan girl off a freezing mountain... not many men would do that. You’re a very lucky girl Violet. Now you run along and drag that old miner over to Dr. Sawyer’s clinic, and let me know what you find out.”

 

[gonewacky]

The brass bell above the door of Dr. Sawyer’s clinic chimed softly as Jack and Violet stepped inside. The waiting room smelled of carbolic acid, dried herbs, and old paper. It was a clean sterile scent that contrasted sharply with the salt-stiffened air of the docks outside.

Dr. Sawyer was a graying man with wire-rimmed spectacles and rolled-up shirtsleeves. He looked up from a ledger at his mahogany desk. He took in the sight of Jack now looking respectable in his new clothes, and Violet standing tall. She looked proud in her new green dress, and her jagged hair partially tamed beneath a small ribbon Victoria had lent her.

“Good afternoon,” Dr. Sawyer said setting his pen down. “How can I help you folks today?”

Jack stepped forward pulling his hat off his head and holding it against his chest. “Doc, we’re looking for some records. Back from last fall of eighteen-seventy-three. A man brought in with a head injury the last part of October. He lost his memory.”

Dr. Sawyer’s eyebrows rose. He leaned back in his leather chair, as he interlocked his fingers over his stomach. “That would be the case of the man that came in on the train. Shot in the head he was. Took weeks for him to wake, and when he did he didn't know his own name. I consulted him on the neurology of his injury.”

Violet stepped out from behind Jack with her heart hammering against her ribs. It was pounding so hard she was certain the doctor could hear it. “Did he have a name, sir? Did he say where he came from?”

The doctor looked down at the young girl with his gaze softening at the intensity in her eyes. Dr. Sawyer Admitted, “It was October 14, 1873. John Doe was found on the mountain unconscious near stone creek. He had taken a built to the parietal region likely from a rifle. He suffered profound retrograde amnesia.”

The doctor looked up peering over his spectacles at Jack. “The man eventually recovered his physical strength, but he retained no memory of his past life before the injury. The men at the lumber mill took him in, and gave him work. They call him Stanley now.”

Violet felt the room tilt, and she reached out catching the edge of the doctor’s desk to steady herself. “Stanley,” she whispered. “Is... is he still at the mill?”

“As far as I know yes,” Dr. Sawyer replied, “Mr. White keeps him on. He’s a quiet man, works hard, and keeps to himself mostly.”

Jack placed a steady comforting hand on Violet’s shoulder. “Thank you Doctor. We appreciate your time.”

“Before you go,” Dr. Sawyer added reaching into a small ceramic jar on his desk and pulled out a peppermint drop, and handed it to Violet. “Tell me child... why are you looking for this man?”

Violet looked down at the red-and-white striped candy in her palm. Then up at the doctor with her voice steady and clear. Then despite the tears welling in her eyes she said, “Because he’s my papa. And I came all the way down the mountain to bring him home.”

Dr. Sawyer stared at her for a long silent moment. A profound understanding passed through his weathered features. He nodded slowly. “Well, Mr. White’s mill is down on the south flats right past the dry dock. If you hurry you might catch him before the shift ends at five.”



The South Flats of Seattle echoed with the concussive shriek of the steam-powered saws, and the heavy rhythmic thud of falling boards. The air was thick with the sharp clean scent of fresh-cut cedar and Douglas fir sawdust. That was mixed with the greasy black smoke of the boiler engines.

Jack and Violet walked briskly down the plank road. That leaded to the sprawling complex of Mr. White’s lumber mill. Workers in soot-stained shirts and heavy leather aprons hauled logs from the slipway, as they moved like cogs in a massive deafening machine.

“Stay close to me Violet,” Jack shouted over the roar of the machinery.

The crisp pine-scented air of the Cascade foothills was thick with the roar of the sawmill. Fresh sawdust drifted like pale snow over the damp earth, and it cling to the boots of laborers who hauled and stacked the newly cut fir.

Mr. White wiped a soot-darkened hand across his brow as he saw Jack and Violet walking down the plank road. Stepping away from the main sorting floor where a group of men struggled with a fresh-sawn board. He moved toward the edge of the elevated platform.

“Need to place an order?” he yelled over the screech of the blade.

Jack yelled back dodging a cart laden with timber, “No, we’re here to talk about Stanley!”

Mr. White waved a hand toward a modest structure nearby, as he yelled over the steady deafening thrum of the machinery, “Let’s go to my office and talk!”

They followed the mill owner through the damp chill to a small wood-paneled building. It was nestled just off the plank road. Inside, the noise of the mill dulled to a low rhythmic thumping. A sturdy oak table with a few mismatched chairs sat beside a cluttered roll-top desk.

Mr. White gestured to the seating. “Have a seat. So, you want to talk about Stanley?”

Violet couldn’t hold it back. The weight of the long winter, the terrifying mountain trails, and the desperate hope carried all the way from the cabin spilled over. She blurted, “Is my Daddy here?”

Puzzled, Mr. White stopped pulling out his chair. He looked at the weather-beaten gold miner Jack Tomson. Then to the slight wide-eyed girl. “What’s your name?”

“Violet, and I’m looking for Stanley. I think he’s my Daddy,” Violet said her voice shaking as she gripped the edge of the table.

Mr. White put his hand to his head and leaned slowly back in his chair with a heavy sigh escaping his lips. The chair creaked in the sudden quiet of the room. “I don’t know what to tell you Violet. He left a week ago to go look for you. He remembers your name, and he told me about it. I don’t think he remembers your face, but he will.”

Jack reached out placing a reassuring calloused hand on the girl’s thin shoulder. “We would have come sooner Mr. White,” Jack explained with his voice gravelly from the cold mountain air. “We’ve been snowed in all winter up on the ridge. This was the first chance we’ve had to make it out of the cascades.”

Mr. White nodded grimly tapping a finger against the scarred wood of the desk. “It was the same for Stanley. He spent the whole winter here haunted by fragments of his past. This was his first chance to try to get up the mountain to find you. I have a few men building a small home for him right now. It’s just down the trail. You can move there when it’s done if you wish.”

Jack shook his head glancing down at Violet. She was tracing the grain of the wooden table with a trembling finger. “We’re staying at Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse now. I think we’ll be fine there until we find what Vincent Long wants to do. That’s his real name, after all.”

Mr. White offered a faint sympathetic smile. “That’s a nice place. I know Victoria well. She’ll take good care of you. But if you need anything at all… supplies, food, a warm meal. You come see me.”

He stood up walking to the small window that looked out over the sprawling lumberyard where men moved like shadows through the pine-scented mist.

“I guess we all just wait until he comes back,” Mr. White murmured staring out at the endless expanse of dark timber stretching toward the snowy peaks. “And if we’re lucky, he’ll come back as Vincent.”

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 16

A massive amount of memories were flooding into Vincent’s mind. Everything was coming back to him as he walked to the creek. The sharp scent of rotting pine needles filled his senses. The bone-chilling air of the Cascade Mountains collided with the life he had lived as Stanley, as the quiet forgetful mill worker down in Seattle. He remembered Grace. He remembered the little cabin. He remembered the small bright face of his daughter Violet. Whom he had left behind just as the snows started to fly.

The bear awoke from its winter hibernation hungry, and mean.

It was a massive grizzly with its coat matted with dried mud and old snow. Its ribs were pressing against its hide like fence rails, and it didn't make a sound as it ambled down the rocky bank.

He saw Vincent bent over in the creek as Vincent was filling his canteen. That’s when the bear saw him as food and attacked.

Vincent screamed a jagged tearing sound that echoed off the frozen granite walls of the canyon, and Jim heard the noise and looked.

The bear was on top of Vincent swinging its razor-sharp claws at Vincent, as it bit into him jerking its head wildly to tear away flesh. Blood bloomed instantly in the clear freezing water of the creek, and turned the current a dark swirling crimson.

Jim jerked his pistol from its holster and shot three times. The deafening cracks of the Colt shattered the mountain quiet, but it had no effect. The bullets merely stung the beast's thick hide and heavy fat sinking harmlessly into muscle. The bear just became more enraged, and tossing its massive head and roaring a guttural challenge that rattled the loose stones on the bank.

Jim had no choice. He turned and ran back to the cabin where he had left the Winchester on his horse. His boots slid on the frost-slicked grass, but he caught his balance grabbed the lever-action rifle, and pumped a round into the chamber.

Running back to the creek he saw the bear toss Vincent up in the air like a rag doll, and jump back down on top of him.

With his heart pounding so hard it shook his entire body Jim skidded to a halt. He raised the rifle and tried to aim, but the weapon was jerking wildly with every violent beat of his pounding heart. Adrenaline coursed through his veins making his hands numb. As the gunsight finally swept past the bear's shoulder he pulled the trigger.

The crack of the Winchester echoed through the trees. The bear flinched pausing for a fraction of a second, and then went right back to the attack. Its jaws was snapping near Vincent’s ruined shoulder.

Jim was more determined now than ever. He jerked the lever down with the brass casing ejecting with a sharp clack, and chambered another round. Then he walked forward straight at the bear, as he fired from the hip.

The bear rose up on its hind legs towering over him like a furry monolith, and came lunging at Jim.

Jim jerked the lever again chambering another round. “Boom.” The heavy slug struck the bear square in the chest, but it had no effect; the momentum carried the beast forward. The bear just kept coming with blood dripping from its frothing maw.

Jim kept walking stepping backward now as he kept jerking the lever chambering rounds, and firing into the mountain of fur and muscle. Boom. Boom. Boom.

Then the rifle went click. Empty.

At that exact moment the heavy frame of the bear buckled. It gave one final choking cough and fell heavily at Jim’s feet, as it kicked up a spray of mud and water before lying still.

Jim dropped the Winchester to the ground with his arms shaking so badly he could barely keep his fingers curled. He stared down at Vincent lying half-submerged in the crimson-tinted creek. His clothes were half torn off exposing shredded muscle and bone, and his face... his face looked like ground meat. It was unrecognizable beneath the mask of blood and river silt.

Jim staggered forward dropping to his knees in the icy water. He grabbed Vincent by what remained of his collar and said panting heavily, “I take it back. I thought the Territory or the universe just plain had a soft spot for you partner... but now I think it just wants you off the mountain.”

Vincent let out a low bubbling moan, as his fingers twitched against the gravel.

Cursing under his breath Jim dragged him out of the water, and up onto the muddy bank away from the crimson pool. Then he hurried to get their horses. Which were tethered next to the cabin. Jim worked with frantic speed and clumsy cold fingers. He somehow managed to get Vincent’s limp bleeding body draped across the saddle of his horse.

He tied Vincent’s boots securely into the stirrups so he wouldn't slide off, and bound his hands tightly to the saddle horn with a length of leather hide. Then he grabbed the reins and tethered Vincent’s horse to his own, and pointed their heads down the trail toward North Bend. Then he prayed to whatever God listened in the high country, “Please let Vincent survive the long ride out of the Cascades.”

Down in Seattle far removed from the brutal frost and jagged peaks of the Cascades. The air smelled of salt water, damp earth, and wood-smoke.

In the bright airy dining room of Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse Victoria had Violet helping her. They were setting the table for the mid-day meal. The clatter of heavy porcelain plates and polished silver echoed against the wainscoting, as Violet went on and on about what she had found out during her wanderings through the bustling seaport town.

Victoria smoothed down her apron pausing to listen, as the young girl chattered about the shops near the wharf and the strange sights of the city.

Stopping to fold a linen napkin Victoria inquired, “Then you’ll be staying with us until your father gets back from looking for you?”

Violet stopped from putting the silverware on the table and looked up at Victoria. Her eyes were wide with a mixture of confusion and fierce loyalty. “Where else would I go? Jack and you are all I got.”

“Why Violet,” Victoria exclaimed with her voice softening with genuine affection. Then she walked over and placed a hand on the girl's small shoulder, “I am honored you would think so much of me. You do know as soon as Jack finds you a home he’ll go back up on the mountain and look for gold. He does that every summer. He just spends the winters here. The only reason he stayed on the mountain was for you.”

Violet stepped back shaking her head with her jaw set with stubborn conviction. “That’s not true. He told me he was done with that, and was going to stay in the city. He said he was too old to do it anymore.”

Victoria smiled gently with a knowing look. It was the look of someone who had lived through too many seasons with men who had gold fever in their blood. “Is that so?”

Violet insisted crossing her arms defensively over her chest, “Sure is ma'am. He dug up his money and everything. Not coming back, he said.”

Victoria offered a warm reassuring smile, as she decided not to press the old miner’s romantic notions any further. “Looks good. Let’s go check the soup, and make the sandwiches.”

They walked together through the swinging door into the warm kitchen. This was where a large iron pot of potato and leek soup simmered on the woodstove, as its rich savory aroma felled the room. Victoria reached for a loaf of heavy dark rye bread sitting on the cutting board, as Violet fetched the butter crock from the pantry.

Neither of them knew that hundreds of miles away in the dark rain-slicked foothills of the Cascades. A broken man was being dragged down the mountain. It was a man who had lost his name, and found it in a rush of agonizing memory. And now was now fighting a losing battle against the very wilderness that had tried to claim him.

 

[gonewacky]

The journey to North Bend took all day and night of grueling nightmarish travel.

Jim Johnson barely slept. Every time he closed his eyes he heard the roar of the grizzly, and the wet tearing sound of bone and muscle. He kept his own horse moving at a steady relentless walk, as he pulled Vincent’s horse behind him. Up ahead the trail wound through dense stands of Douglas fir, as the dripping branches shed cold rain and melting snow down onto their backs.

Vincent drifted in and out of consciousness. The fever had set in by the morning turning his skin burning hot to the touch, and he muttered broken frantic names and things into the dark, “Grace, Violet, Tom Reed, and the trading post. Jim ignored the rambling keeping his eyes fixed on the muddy trail ahead. He had strapped Vincent into the saddle with such tight leather bindings that the wounded man’s circulation was surely compromised, but it was the only way to keep him from tumbling into the brush.

When they finally crested the final ridge overlooking the small settlement of North Bend, the grey mist parted just enough to reveal the train station and the smoke rising from the bunkhouse chimney.

Jim let out a long shuddering breath that frosted in the damp air. He kicked his horse into a sluggish trot. He was eager to get the bleeding broken trapper to someone who could stitch him up, or at least offer a clean bed and some laudanum to dull the agony.

As Jim rode into the settlement Ben from the Freight Office, and Zack the Telegraph operator stepped off the wooden platform. Tipping their hats and staring in grim silence at the horrific state of the man tied to the saddle. Wordless Jim led the horses directly toward the two men.

He dismounted with stiff aching joints with his legs barely supporting his weight. Untying Vincent’s hands from the saddle horn Jim caught the unconscious man as his dead weight slumped forward.

"Help me with him!" Jim shouted to Ben and Zack standing nearby. "He tangled with a grizzly up near the headwaters."

Between the three of them they carried Vincent’s ruined blood-soaked body into the line-shack at the platform. It was the same line-shack Jack and Violet staid in just days ago.

Ben informed, “The north bound will be her in about an hour.”

Zack insisted, “Get some wet rags on him. He’s burning up. I’ll go send a Telegraph to Seattle to have the Doctor waiting at the station.”

Jim stepped back out into the cool air of North Bend, pulling his hat low over his brow. He looked back toward the dark, towering wall of the Cascade Mountains looming in the distance, their snowy peaks hidden once more behind a thick blanket of grey clouds.

Ben called out, “Over here. I have a bucket of water. If you get it I’ll get a hand full of rags.”

Ben, Zack, and Jim gathered around Vincent. Ben was dipping rags in the water bucket and placing them on Vincent’s brow trying to break the fever. It had settled into his skin like a heavy winter frost. Zack had got a bottle of something dark and potent and was pouring it carefully into Vincent’s slack mouth.

Jim narrowed his eyes at the amber glass. “What’s in the bottle Zack?”

Zack didn’t look up as he slowly administered the draft. “It’s Laudanum, and it has morphine and codeine in it. When you work for the railroad as long as I have you learn trains have no mercy. I’ve seen my share of bad accidents. I watched a man die screaming in pain from getting crushed between two railroad cars. He was screaming in pain for hours before he died. He would pass out, and when I thought it was over he’d start up again. That’s when I got the Laudanum. If a guy is going to go out in front of me I’m going to make sure it’s not yelling and screaming.”

Jim nodded slowly with the grim reality of the frontier settling over him. “I know working around trains is dangerous. I’ve heard of people falling between two cars and losing a leg.”

Ben wrung out another rag with his jaw tight. “I can attest to that. A train wheel will chop a leg right off, and anything else that falls under it.”

Vincent let out a shallow rattling breath with his mind wandering far from the rough-hewn walls of the depot. He was a man suspended in a cruel fog. He was shot in the head months ago, and surviving only to lose his memories entirely. He had been taken down from the high country ending up miles away and working anonymously at Mr. White’s mill. Using the name Stanley his past as a trapper, and a father too little Violet was locked behind a wall of amnesia. Now, fate had broken him down again, and his friends were racing against time to get him to Dr. Sawyer in Seattle. They had to do it before the light faded from his eyes for good.

Zack was satisfied that the dose was enough to quiet the phantom agonies of Vincent's shattered frame, and he went back to his telegraph. Zack tapped out the rhythmic clack-clack-clack resuming its urgent pulse to clear the line. Ben and Jim kept diligently changing the cold wet rags on Vincent’s forehead.

Then the distant mournful whistle of the train echoed through the valley, as it bounced off the granite cliffs of the Cascades.

The train began to slow, and the rhythmic clatter of the iron wheels changed to a more labored deliberate pace. Brakes groaned against steel sending up a smell of hot grease and friction, as the conductor leaned out to announce their arrival at North Bend.

The iron horse was a grimy beast of iron, soot, and smoke. Its arrival shattered the sleepy silence of the mountain depot with a handful of passengers. They were mostly weary miners and travelers looking to escape the mud-choked mountains, as they shuffled off the train and onto the boarding platform.

The conductor stepped down onto the planks and was met immediately by Ben and Zack. Ben quickly explained Vincent’s grave condition, as he pointed back toward the freight office.

The conductor stopped squinting through the mountain haze as Jim stepped out behind them. The conductor’s eyes widened with sudden recognition. He pointed a finger at Jim. “Wait a minute. Aren’t you the same guy that put the last almost-dead guy on my train?”

Jim met his gaze without flinching. “This is the same guy.”

The conductor’s mouth hung open in disbelief. He dragged a hand down his soot-stained face. “I think you need to keep him off the mountain mister. My baggage car looks like a field hospital every time you show up.”

There was no time for bickering. They all agreed that putting Vincent in the heated crowded passenger car was a bad idea; the stifling air might finish what the mountain started. Instead, they decided to load him onto the open flatcar. Two railroad workers heading down the line to Seattle agreed to stay with him and manage his care.

They lifted Vincent carefully securing him on the flatcar alongside a fresh barrel of cold water. The two railroad men rolled up their sleeves. They were ready to spend the journey changing the rags and keeping the fever at bay. When they pulled into Seattle Dr. Sawyer would be waiting at the terminus with a carriage to take Vincent straight to the clinic.

The steam engine hissed a mournful heavy song as the iron drivers spun gripping the rails. Slowly the train pulled away from the North Bend platform hauling its heavy load of timber, ore, and wounded humanity as it headed North toward Seattle.

Ben stood on the platform watching the red caboose shrink into the mist until it vanished around the bend. He let out a long breath and put a heavy comforting hand on Jim’s shoulder.

“Let’s go get something to eat,” Ben said quietly nodding toward the small bunkhouse. “You got a three-day ride on horseback to catch up to him, and you’re going to need your strength.”

Jim took one last look down the empty tracks, and prayed that Dr. Sawyer’s hands were steady and that somewhere beneath the fog of amnesia. Vincent Long would finally find his way back home to his daughter Violet.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 17

The train whistle shrieked a mournful cry that echoed through the misty air, as it pulled into Seattle. The train approached the station with the squeal of the breaks echoed across the platform.

Dr. Sawyer watch with two men and a stretcher, as the train came to a stop in a cloud if steam. A man yelled from down the platform, “Down here at the flatcar doc.”

Dr. Sawyer picked up his bag and head to the flat car with the two men and stretcher right behind him.

Seattle was damp smelling heavily of Puget Sound salt and burning coal, but beneath those familiar notes lay the distinct metallic tang of fresh blood.

Doctor Sawyer kneeled next to Vincent looking at his face and shoulder, and pulled the wet rag away from his face. It was mutilated and swollen disfiguring his face beyond recognition. Dr. Sawyer had no idea it was the men he knew as Stanley. Putting his stethoscope to Vincent’s chest, “His heartbeat is week but study, and he’s burning up. Get that stretcher up here. We need to get him to the clinic.

Loading the Man on the wagon Dr. Sawyer asked, “Dose he have a name?”

The two Railroad workers looked at each other and replied, “They never said, but they all seemed to know who he was. All we know was he was attacked by a bear.”

Dr. Sawyer looked to one of the men that came with him, “Jason go to the telegraph office and send a telegram to North Bend, and find out who he is.”

The doctor headed to the clinic with Dave the wagon driver, as Jason went to the telegraph office.



In his treatment room with Vincent on his operating table. Under the harsh glow of oil lamps Dr. Sawyer went to work. He looked at the half empty bottle of Laudanum. The Railroad workers said the telegraph operator Zack gave it to them, so the doctor would know what he gave the man. Then he instructed them if he starts moaning give him a little more. The workers admitted to giving him some about an hour before they got to Seattle.

Dr. Sawyer set the bottle on his work table mumbling, “Don’t think he needs anything else. He might already be in a coma. Then he looked at the left arm and shoulder. The wound to the arm was torn wide open to the humerus bone, and he could see the deep impressions of a grizzly’s teeth marks on the bone. He was stitching the shredded flesh up when Jason came in announcing, “They don’t know who he is. The man who knows and took him to the train already left. He’s on his way here on horseback.”



Across town, and sheltered from the damp chill by the hearty warmth of a woodstove at the boardinghouse. Violet was helping Victoria with dinner. Putting the last slice of bread on the plat Victoria instructed, “Take this plate of bread to the table, and I’ll take out the pot of stew.

Well the boarding house residents ate at the table in the dining room. Six-year-old Violet ate with Victoria at the small table in the kitchen. Victoria was now doing the things Violet’s mother Grace Long would have done, if she was still alive. The brutal winter that Violet and Jack had barely survived, as they were trapped in a snowbound mountain cabin felt like a lifetime ago. Yet, the ghost of that isolation still lingered in Violet’s quiet watchful eyes.

Taking their bowls to the sink Victoria revealed, “I’m about out of baking-powder. I’ll go get some tomorrow. You want to go with me?”

Violet asked, “Can we go to the mill and see if they heard anything from my daddy.”

Victoria smiled, “We sure can. We’ll get my Buggy and go down there. Jasper needs the exercise I’m sure. We just have to be back in time to make lunch. Is that okay with you?”

Violet’s eyes brightened, “You’re nice Victoria.”

Victoria put a warm hand on Violet’s tangled hair and responded, “Why thank you child. I try to be; besides that will give me a chance to see Wyatt.”

Violet asked, “Dose Wyatt work there?”

Victoria smiled with her eyes crinkling at the corners, “Yes he dose Violet. He’s my brother and he’s the owner of the mill, and he built this boardinghouse for me.”

Violet asked, “Your brother is Mr. White?”

Victoria chuckled affectionately rubbing her hand on the little girl's head one more time, “He sure is, but I don’t call him that. He’ll always be Wyatt to me. Now let’s peek out the door and see if their done yet. We need to get and wash the dishes.”

Then with Victoria’s head high and Violet’s low. Victoria pushed the door open a crack to peek out. Then she let the door swing back and whispered, “I think we’re about a cookie away from them being done. What do you think?”

Violet replied, “It looked like about a cookie to me.”

Victoria instructed, “Take a seat at the Table and I’ll get us one.”



Back at the clinic, the air was thick with the smell of carbolic acid and sweat. Dr. Sawyer wiped his brow with a blood-stained cloth, as he stared down at the battered trapper who called himself Stanley.

Somewhere out there in the sprawling misty port town was his little girl Violet. She was sleeping under a stranger's roof, and searching for a father who might not even remember she existed. And out on the muddy trails cutting down from the Cascades. A lone horseman was galloping hard through the twilight, as he raced toward the coast. Not knowing he would finally reveal who the broken man on the table really was.



The Cascade trails were a jagged thawing mess, but Jim Johnson didn’t care about the mud. He had pushed his gelding and Vincent’s horse to the absolute limit. He was desperate to bridge the distance between himself and the man mauled by the grizzly. Finally the heaving flanks of the animals forced his hand. He had no choice; if he pushed them another mile he’d drop them both.

Dismounting in a sheltered hollow Jim hurriedly cleared a patch of damp earth he sparked a fire, and tossed his bedroll near the flames. He heated a tin of beans, but the food sat heavy and tasteless on his tongue. His mind refused to rest. It was looping relentlessly back to the man he had found bleeding out in the dirt six months ago. The man he called Stanley.

Back then the bullet to the head had scrubbed the man clean of his past. "Stanley" had been a quiet easy-going man content to haul timber and drift through the days without a care. But just yesterday the fractured pieces of a ruined memory had slammed back into place. Jim now knew the man’s real name: Vincent Long.

Jim stared into the popping embers as the weight of Vincent’s tragedy pressed down on him. First had it was the fever that swept through the cabin. It stole his beloved wife Grace despite Vincent’s frantic desperate efforts to save her. Then there was the bushwhacking, and the bullet that robbed him of his mind leaving him a blank slate. And now just as the memories of Grace, of his old life, and of his six-year-old daughter Violet had finally clawed their way back to the surface. A grizzly bear had torn him to ribbons in the high timber.

Would he survive the mauling? Jim clenched his jaw. And more than that would he survive the memories?

All the grief Vincent had bottled up with all the crushing guilt of losing Grace. This had returned in a tidal wave alongside the recollections of little Violet, and her carefree cheerful smile and her fierce unyielding stubbornness. It was a stubbornness she had inherited straight from her father.

As Stanley the man had been malleable drifting through life like a leaf on a stream. But if being Vincent meant he possessed that hard-headed grit that refusal to quit. Then Jim needed that stubbornness now more than ever. He needed Vincent to fight.

Jim barely slept, as the ghost of Vincent’s whispered confessions spinning a maddening web in his head. It lasted all through the long dark hours. The moment the eastern sky bled a bruised shade of grey Jim threw off his blanket.

He saddled the horses and packed his gear with ruthless efficiency, as he chewed mechanically on a dry piece of hardtack. He knew he was still over a day’s grueling ride away, and the terrifying realization that he might arrive too late made his stomach knot like old hemp rope.

Stepping out of the camp Jim took the reins of both horses. He decided to walk them conserving their strength mile by agonizing mile. If he rode them into the ground now he’d have to finish the journey on foot, and every ticking second felt like a heartbeat slipping away from Vincent.

"Hold on old friend," Jim muttered into the damp morning air, pulling the horses forward. "Just hold on."

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 18

The morning sun cut sharp and golden through the mist rising off Puget Sound, as it cast long shadows across the muddy streets. This was where men of the Northwest Territories gambled their lives for timber and gold. But inside Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse the concerns were entirely domestic, at least on the surface.

Victoria had sent for her horse and buggy shortly after dawn. The sleek chestnut gelding Jasper stood patiently hitched to the wooden post out front, as his breath puffed white in the chilly air. After a breakfast of hot oats and salt pork Violet had eagerly helped Victoria. They clear the table and scrub the heavy iron skillets.

"Hands make light work," Victoria had said with her tone brisk yet kind. With a shadow of her private sorrow that often flickered behind her dark eyes.

Once the kitchen was spotless they went out front to the waiting buggy. Jack the seasoned gold miner who’s scheming had inadvertently brought Violet to the bustling port town tagged along. Victoria dropped him off at the local barbershop for a much-needed shave and a haircut. She was eager to rid the grizzled prospector of his winter beard. She didn’t want him to frighten any more of her boardinghouse patrons.

With Jack disposed of Victoria and Violet steered Jasper toward the mercantile, so they could pick up a can of baking powder for the upcoming week’s baking. They climbed back into the buggy, and turned the horse's head toward the lumber mill, and where Victoria’s brother worked. Violet’s little heart pounded with a frantic rhythm that was heavy with the anticipation, and hope of news of her papa.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl, and each deliberate step of Jasper’s hooves felt like it took forever. Violet cast a sideways glance at Victoria with her big expressive eyes wide with a child's desperation.

Victoria noticed the tension immediately. Pulling back gently on the reins, as she asked, "What’s the matter child?"

Violet whispered so softly Victoria could barely hear her over the rattle of the buggies wheels, "It just seems to be taking a long time to get there."

Victoria smiled softly with an understanding curve on her lips, and whipped the reins lightly against Jasper’s flank calling out, "Pick it up Jasper."

The horse broke into a steady reliable trot. "How is that?" Victoria asked.

Violet smiled as a genuine flicker of relief lighting up her face. "That’s better Victoria. Thank you."

Soon, the clatter of the buggy changed timbre as they reached the rough-hewn plank road. That led down to the sprawling waterfront mill, so Victoria slowed Jasper back to a walk.

Up ahead amidst the deafening shriek of steam-powered saws and the earthy scent of fresh-cut cedar, Wyatt White the mill owner and Victoria’s brother paused in his work. He spotted his sister’s familiar buggy weaving through the maze of stacked timber. Leaving the main sorting floor where a group of straining men wrestled with a heavy fresh-sawn board. Wyatt strode toward the edge of the elevated platform and hopped down to the plank road.

Reaching the buggy Wyatt rested a calloused hand on the side panel. "What brings you down here Sis?"

Victoria offered a warm greeting. "I was wondering if you would have dinner with me tomorrow, and Violet here wants to know if you’ve heard anything from her dad."

Wyatt’s expression tightened just a fraction. He looked up at his sister, and then shifted his gaze downward to meet the eager upturned face of the little girl.

"I’ll be there Sis," Wyatt answered Victoria first. Then he leaned in closer to talk directly to Violet. "I told your dad not to come back for two or three weeks. That depended on what he found out in the mountains. It’s only been a week, and we don’t even know what he’s doing out there. If he found out you were gone from the cabin... well, I don’t know what he would do."

Violet’s lower lip quivered. She spoke up bravely though her voice shook. "We left a note for him. And Jack confessed he tricked me into coming with him, and he wrote that we went to Seattle."

Wyatt nodded grimly. "So you crossed paths, and he knows you’re here. But even if he turned right around the moment he read that note. It would still take another week to get back over the trail. I think we’ll just have to wait little one."

Violet was visibly saddened, and the heavy truth crushing the fragile hope she had carried all morning. Wyatt could see the heartbreak pooling in her eyes. The agonizing irony of being so close to finding her father, and yet trapped on opposite sides of a vast unforgiving wilderness. Wyatt knew it weighed heavy on Violet’s small chest.

Searching for a distraction Wyatt extended a large rough hand. "Why don't you come and see the machine your dad will run when he gets back?"

Violet was surprised and blinked as she looked up at Victoria for permission. Victoria offered a gentle nod. "Go ahead child."

Wyatt took her small hand pulling her easily from the buggy. With a secure protective grip he led Violet up the wooden ramp and onto the main sorting floor.

"Customer on the floor!" a burly mill worker yelled above the noise.

Instantly the chaotic symphony of the mill died down. The roaring belts slowed their frantic pace, as the steam valves hissed into a momentary hush. Then a dozen rough-hewn men turned their soot-smudged faces to watch the little girl walk by. Everything had come to a standstill except for the massive whining sawblade in the distance, as Wyatt guided Violet past towering stacks of lumber toward the crown jewel of the operation: The new steam engine and the Haven Planer.

"Well, this is it," Wyatt shouted over the lingering hum of the machinery. "You put rough boards in one end, and they come out the other end smooth as glass. What do you think?"

Violet’s eyes opened wide taking in the towering iron gears and the hissing brass valves, as the belts spin with relentless power. "It's... its real big," she whispered in awe.

They walked a slow circle around the heavy iron chassis of the Planer and the chugging steam engine. With Wyatt satisfied that the child's mind had been momentarily diverted from her sorrows. Wyatt led her back toward the edge of the sorting platform. As they stepped off the elevated walkway and reached the waiting buggy. The mill hands immediately turned back to their labor, and the deafening roar of production resumed.

Wyatt easily lifted Violet back onto the wooden bench seat. "I’ll see you two at dinner tomorrow," he assured them flashing a reassuring grin. "And we can talk about looking at the house I’m building for Violet and her dad."

With a final wave Victoria turned Jasper around and headed back toward the boardinghouse. Unaware that across town a web of fate was tightening with ruthless speed.



At Dr. Sawyer’s Clinic the air smelled heavily of carbolic acid, old sweat, and the sharp tang of sickness. Dr. Sawyer stood over a narrow iron cot holding his stethoscope to the chest of a man. It was the one he still believed was a nameless stranger. He was the unfortunate soul mauled by a grizzly bear up in the foothills, and shipped down on the train. Not knowing it was the man hired at the mill under the alias "Stanley."

The doctor pressed his ear to the cold metal disc. The heartbeat was a faint agonizingly weak erratic thrum, but it was still working.

 

[gonewacky]

Dr. Sawyer exhaled a long breath muttering to the empty room, "Well, by some miracle you’re still alive my friend. I just wish I knew who you were... and if you had some family around here to fight for you."

Vincent Long was a trapper, father, and a man whose shattered memories were trapped behind a wall of cranial trauma. He laid completely motionless in a deep unnatural comatose state. He was hanging to life by a fraying thread.

Dr. Sawyer prayed aloud that the man would make it through just one more day. The longer he lasted the better his chances of weathering the storm. The doctor desperately wanted to administer morphine to ease the silent agony etched into the lines of the patient's pale face, but it was too dangerous. He couldn't risk it until the man regained consciousness. Stanley had lost a staggering amount of blood during the attack, and the heavy dose of laudanum administered earlier made any further narcotics a death sentence. It might stop his faltering heart entirely.

For now all the doctor could do was watch, wait, and hope that time hadn't run out.



The morning of the third day broke gray and damp over the Cascade foothills. Back on the mountain trail Jim Johnson was pushing his mount to the absolute limit. He rode his own tired horse while leading Vincent’s horse tethered tightly behind him. The empty saddle was serving as a grim reminder of the man fighting for his life miles away.

Jim had been riding hard since before dawn. He was passing through the rugged terrain between Lake Washington and the backwaters of the ocean, and Seattle was finally only a few hours away. His anxiety had reached a fever pitch; with every hoof-beat a nagging voice in his head asked the same terrifying question: Is Vincent even alive?

Just around the hour of the midday meal Jim finally crested the final ridge, and plunged down into the muddy streets of Seattle. He didn’t hesitate, and headed straight for Dr. Sawyer’s clinic.

He threw open the heavy oak door with the bell jangling frantically, and strode right up to the doctor. "Are you all right Jim?" Dr. Sawyer asked surprised by his wild-eyed appearance.

"I’m fine," Jim barked with his chest heaving. "Is he still alive?"

Dr. Sawyer blinked with a bewildered look crossing his tired face. "You mean the man that got attacked by the Grizzly?"

"Yeah, you know damn well who I mean Stanley!" Jim snapped with his patience evaporating. "I put him on the train myself!"

Dr. Sawyer went pale with his jaw going slack. "Oh, my god, man. I didn’t know who he was! He’s comatose and lost way too much blood. He needs a transfusion, but it’s a hell of a gamble. Sometimes it kills them outright, but it can work. The best chance we’ve got is finding a close family member like a mother, a sibling, or offspring. Blood ties improve the odds, but it’s still a roll of the dice."

Jim didn't hesitate for a fraction of a second. "He has a daughter right here in Seattle!"

Dr. Sawyer’s eyes widened. "I know. She was in here a few days ago with a rough-looking fellow named Jack."

"Of course," Jim cursed slapping his thigh. "Jack the miner! I know right where they are. They’re staying at his sister in-laws at Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse. Jack always stays there!"

Without another word Jim spun on his heel, and bolted out the door kicking up a spray of muddy slush in his wake.

Dr. Sawyer thought, I should have put that together. Miss Tomson and Jack Tomson, of course.



Back at Miss Tomson’s Boardinghouse, Victoria was busy in the bright warm kitchen setting a small oak table for three. Violet watched her with a curious tilt of her head.

"We’re not going to eat in the big dining room at the long table?" Violet asked eyeing the empty plates.

Victoria smiled warmly and dropped down to one knee so she was eye-level with the child. "The big dining room is for our paying customers little one."

Violet frowned. "You mean I’m not a customer?"

Victoria chuckled softly. "You work in the kitchen with me don’t you?"

Violet nodded slowly. "Yes ma'am."

"Then that makes you a worker, and not a guest," Victoria explained gently. "And all the workers eat right here in the kitchen."

Just then, the back door swung open, and Wyatt stepped inside stamping the mud from his boots. Violet’s inquisitive mind immediately seized upon a new mystery. She turned to the mill owner with her eyes wide. "How come your brother's last name is White, and yours is Tomson?"

Victoria stiffened slightly as a flash of defensive pain crossing her features. "My goodness child you’re just full of questions today, aren’t you?"

Wyatt however, stepped in before Victoria could brush the question aside. His expression softened though his tone brooked no further argument. "It's because she was married to my good friend and brother-in-law Logan. A falling tree took his life and made her a widow. She doesn’t like people around here knowing she’s a widow which is why she goes by Miss Tomson. She doesn't like to talk about it... so that’s the last time we’ll speak of it."

Violet immediately felt a heavy pang of remorse. Her face fell, and she muttered softly looking down at her shoes, "Oh."

Before the heavy silence could settle over the kitchen the front door banged open with a deafening crash. Heavy frantic boots pounded across the wooden floorboards of the dining room.

Jim Johnson barged into the room, as his eyes scanned the space until they locked onto Jack Tomson. He was clean shaved with his hair cut, but it was him casually buttering a roll at the main table.

Stalking toward the miner Jim demanded, "Where is the girl?"

Jack merely pointed a grease-stained thumb toward the kitchen door. Jim didn't wait for an invitation. He shoved past the swinging door and burst into the kitchen coming face-to-face with Wyatt and Victoria.

Without drawing a breath Jim blurted out the words that shattered the quiet evening into a million jagged pieces:

"Stanley got attacked by a grizzly! He’s down at Dr. Sawyer’s clinic, and it doesn't look like he’s going to make it. The girl needs to be there…now."

Wyatt’s head snapped toward Victoria with horror and urgency warring in his eyes.

Without a single wasted heartbeat Victoria gripped Violet’s small shoulders with her voice fierce, steady, and resolute. "Take Violet and go Wyatt. I need to finish up here."

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 19

The air inside Dr. Sawyer’s Seattle clinic smelled heavily of carbolic acid, dried blood, and the distinct coppery tang of impending death. Spring had brought the mountain thaw turning the muddy streets outside into a quagmire, but inside time seemed to freeze entirely around the iron-framed cot where Vincent Long lay.

At the clinic, Jim led Wyatt and Violet to Vincent’s bed with Dr. Sawyer right behind them.

The lamp oil flickered casting long jittery shadows against the rough-hewn pine walls. Violet looked at the mangled man in the bed and questioned, “Are you sure that’s my daddy? It doesn’t look like him.”

Indeed he’s the same man with the bullet wound to his head, and that combined with the brutal grizzly attack had left his face swollen, discolored, and caked with dried crimson. Jim knew him to be the quiet mill worker named Stanley

Jim looked at Vincent’s mangled swollen face and assured, “I know it’s him. He told me all about you, and showed me your mother under the Oak tree.”

Violet stepped closer with the hem of her woolen coat brushing the wooden floorboards. Her breath hitched. “Then it has to be papa,” Violet whispered with a shaky voice. “Only daddy, me, and Jack know that.”

The memory of the bitter winter trapped in their mountain cabin with Jack Tomson. Now felt a lifetime away. They had crossed the jagged passes driven by a desperate hope, and that had finally brought them to this harsh frontier city. But hope was a fragile thing in the face of such devastation.

Dr. Sawyer stepped up wiping his blood-stained hands on a rag. “He needs a transfusion, but it’s a hell of a gamble. Sometimes it kills them outright, but it can work. The best chance we’ve got is finding a close family member like a mother, a sibling, or offspring. Blood ties improve the odds, but it’s still a roll of the dice. With Violet being his only blood line, I need to know if she wants to try it.”

Jim and Wyatt looked at each other with the weight of the frontier hanging heavy in their silence. They knew the risks. They had seen men die of lesser things in the timber camps and gold fields. But Violet didn’t hesitate. She took Vincent’s cold calloused hand in her small hand and whispered, “I’m here daddy. You need to get better. I need you.”

Before anyone could speak further heavy boots echoed in the front room, and Victoria’s voice rang out, “Where are you at?”

Wyatt replied, “Back here Sis.”

Victoria hurried into the cramped back room with her coat damp from the relentless Seattle drizzle. Dr. Sawyer immediately stepped forward explaining the mechanics of the blood transfusion, and the grim razor-thin margins of survival.

Victoria looked down at the battered man with her jaw tightening. She asked, “How long until we know if it works or kills him?”

Dr. Sawyer dropped his head, and his graying hair fell across his forehead. “It will cause rapid shock, breathing failure, and organ shutdown. In his condition I would say just a few minutes, and we’ll know.”

Victoria turned her eyes finding the small trembling frame of Violet. She called Violet over. “You heard all we talked about?”

Violet was shaking and breathing hard as she nodded with her eyes wide, as she filled with a terror that a six-year-old child should never have to bear.

Victoria asked, “What do you want to do child?”

Violet swallowed hard with her voice barely a squeak. “If I don’t do it, will he die?”

Victoria informed with her voice steady despite the tremor in her own heart, “That’s the most likely outcome.”

Violet asked, “But if I do it he could die too.”

Victoria countered softly, “He could live too.”

Violet leaned into Victoria, as she looked up with her big tear-filled eyes. “What would you do?”

Victoria answered without a flicker of doubt, “My dad told me if you don’t take a chance or try you will never win. I would do it.”

Violet took a deep shuddering breath squaring her shoulders, as only a child raised in the unforgiving mountains could. “Then I’ll do it.”

Dr. Sawyer wasted no time. He moved with practiced surgical precision setting up the brass- glass apparatus, and rubber tubing that would bridge the gap between daughter and father. It would be the bridge between life and death. He quickly instructed Violet on how to keep her arm steady explaining what she had to do.

But Dr. Sawyer was a man of science who relied on cold logic and standard medical texts. He was entirely unaware of the biological tempest raging beneath Violet’s fragile exterior. He was unaware of the massive amount of adrenaline pumping into Violet’s blood from sheer unadulterated terror, and what horrific effect it would have on a man whose brain was already hanging by a thread. Along with the adrenaline came a tidal wave of amino acids, monoamines, and neuropeptides. This was driven by a nervous system that was already operating on absolute overload.

The glass tube was connected. The valves turned.

For a terrifying eternity the only sound in the room was the heavy rattling breath of Vincent Long.

It was only a few minutes into the procedure when Vincent’s eyes snapped open.

They weren't the dull confused eyes of Stanley the mill worker. Nor were they the gentle eyes of the father who had walked beneath the oak trees with Grace Long. They were wide, bloodshot, and wild with the agonizing fury of a wounded animal.

Vincent screamed.

It was a raw unearthly sound of pure unmitigated agony, by a man pulled violently from the dark abyss of amnesia. His nervous system flooded not just with matching blood, but with a roaring torrent of a child's pure panicked terror. The chemical storm rushing through the tube hit Vincent’s brain like a bolt of lightning striking dry timber.

The shockwave of adrenaline and neuropeptides slammed into Vincent’s damaged cerebral cortex. His back arched off the cot in a violent spasm.

The sudden piercing scream was too much for Violet. Her own body already stretched to the absolute breaking point of physical and emotional endurance short-circuited. Her eyes rolled back, and she collapsed limp to the floorboards before anyone could catch her.

“Violet!” Victoria screamed dropping to her knees beside the child.

“Hold him!” Dr. Sawyer shouted lunging forward as the equipment rattled violently on the tray.

Vincent thrashed on the bed with his chest heaving and his fingers clawing at the air, as the strange volatile mixture of blood and raw surging neurochemicals tore through his veins. The clinic plunged into utter chaos, and the line between life and death blurred into a blinding agonizing flash of red.

Dr. Sawyer reached over Victoria and pulled out the transfusion needle, and held his thumb over the hole. He could see she was breathing, so he pushed his stethoscope to her chest. The beat was a little fast, but nothing to worry about.

Pulling the bandage from the tray he wrapped it around Violet’s arm, as Jim and Wyatt held Vincent down. He helped Victoria get Violet back in the chair, and turned to Vincent. He undid the transfusion tube. Then Vincent went limp as he moaned in pain.

Dr. Sawyer pulled Wyatt aside. His shirtsleeves were rolled up revealing forearms caked in dried grease and sweat. It was relics of the frontier surgery he’d been performing by lamplight for the last three hours.

“Recovering from a trauma-induced coma after a bear attack is a slow complex medical journey,” Dr. Sawyer murmured keeping his voice low so as not to disturb the small girl in the corner. “It involves waking up from an unconscious state caused by severe massive blood loss. It might have caused brain injury and psychological damage. He will face intensive care treatment, and long physical and cognitive rehabilitation. He will most likely need some deep emotional healing, and there is no way of knowing if he slipped back to the man we knew as Stanley. He might be the mountain man Jim told me about, but we won’t know until he comes back.”

 

[gonewacky]

Wyatt was still breathing hard from pinning the thrashing, muscular frame of the man they had all known as Stanley. The millworker wiped a hand across his forehead with his fingers leaving a streak.

“How long will that take doctor?” Wyatt asked glancing over his shoulder at the bed. Vincent’s chest rose and fell in shallow rattling gasps.

Dr. Sawyer sighed unpinning a blood-spotted linen towel from his waistcoat, and tossing it into a galvanized bucket. “The end of summer most likely. I will have to do a few more surgeries between now and then. I have two drain tubes in his arm that I have to deal with, and that could take weeks itself.”

Wyatt frowned, as the floorboards groaned beneath his heavy boots. “So you think he’ll make it?”

Dr. Sawyer admitted, “Although I’ve never seen a reaction like that from a transfusion. Mixing family blood to kick-start a man whose mind was half-frozen in the Cascades. I think we would know it by now if he was going to die. I think he has a good chance.”

Before Wyatt could press further Victoria’s voice rang out sharp with sudden panic.

“Violet’s waking up!”

Dr. Sawyer rushed to Violet’s side as her eyes opened wide. The six-year-old had spent the entire winter trapped in a snowbound cabin with Jack surviving on scraps before making the grueling trek to Seattle to find her father. Now, her face was as pale as the flour sacks at Tom Reed’s trading post.

Seeing Dr. Sawyer loom over her Violet blinked against the harsh lamplight and asked, “Did we do it?”

Dr. Sawyer proclaimed with his stern face softening into something resembling a grandfatherly smile, “We gave him a chance. But how about you? How do you feel?”

Violet grimaced, her small hand instinctively clutching the white bandage around her forearm. “I feel strange… kind of tingly and dizzy.”

Dr. Sawyer disclosed checking her pulse with two ink-stained fingers, “You’re a small girl, and I tried not to take too much. We need to get you something to eat, and I have to tend to your father.” He looked up at Victoria who was already hovering with a tin cup of water. “Get some broth from the stove downstairs. Rich beef bone if Mrs. Higgins left any.”

While Victoria moved toward the door Dr. Sawyer turned back to the center of the room. He picked up a small glass mortar containing powdered morphine. Mixing it with a few drops of water in a tin spoon he did his best to pour it into Vincent’s mouth a little at a time, as he watched the man's throat work convulsively. He watched the wild haunted look in Vincent's eyes, as it finally began to recede into a drugged heavy-lidded stare.

Jim Johnson stepped forward with his boots clicking heavily against the floor. Then he looked down at the man who had left with two weeks ago. He was the man Mr. White the mill owner had hired under the name Stanley. At that time he couldn't remember his own name let alone his wife Grace or the little girl sitting pale beside him.

“He ain't looked at me like that since the ridge,” Jim muttered pulling a frayed pipe from his coat pocket, and rolling it unlit between his calloused fingers. “When he was working the saws for Wyatt he’d just stare into the timber. It was like he was waiting for something to jump him. Said his name was Stanley, and didn't know nary a soul.

Wyatt crossed his arms leaning back against the rough-hewn walls of the Seattle clinic. Outside, the rain was beginning to beat a steady tattoo against the glass. This was typical of the Puget Sound spring.

“He took a bullet to the head Jim” Wyatt reminded him quietly. “That’s what wiped the slate clean in the first place. It was long before the grizzly ever got hold of him on the mountain slope.”

“Aye,” Jim spat toward the corner fireplace though he missed. “He took a bullet from some sidewinder, and then a bear nearly peeled the arm off him. Now half of little Violet’s blood is running through his veins. A man’s got to be made of ironwood to survive all that.”

Victoria had managed to scrounge up a piece of dry salt-bread. Violet was nibbling slowly on it with her eyes constantly darting toward the cot where her father lay.

“Dr. Sawyer?” Violet’s small voice cut through the murmur of the men.

The doctor wiped his hands on a clean rag and walked over. He kneeled beside her chair so they were at eye level. “Yes child?”

“Is he still Stanley?” she asked with her lower lip trembling just a fraction. “Or is he my papa again?”

Dr. Sawyer looked over his shoulder at the rough-hewn trapper on the bed. Vincent’s breathing had evened out, and the morphine had finally taking full hold of his shattered nervous system. The lines of tension around his jaw showed the hard defensive of a man. It was the man who had spent his time working for Mr. White under a false name. It had made him seem slightly less severe in the dim light.

“I don’t know yet Violet,” Dr. Sawyer said honestly placing a warm hand on her uninjured shoulder. “Memories don’t rush back like a river in the spring. They come back like melting snow, drop by drop. But he has your blood in him now. And down here in Seattle we know one thing for certain: blood remembers what the mind tries to forget.”

Jim nodded slowly tipping his hat down over his brow. “Give him till the end of summer little gal. Your papa’s been a long way off, but he’s heading home now.”

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 20

The spring air hung heavy and damp over the bustling port of Seattle, as it carried the scent of salt and wet timber. But inside the cramped boardinghouse room the world felt small, and confined entirely to the heavy ticking of a brass clock and the ache behind Violet’s eyelids.

Back at the boardinghouse Violet had trouble getting to sleep. All she could think of was her daddy, and how bad he looked. She so wanted him to come to her in a dream, but it didn’t happen. Sometime in the night she fell asleep from exhaustion, and the next thing she knew Victoria was waking her.

Violet was staggering around as they entered the kitchen, so Victoria sat her at the oak table. “Here, sit here and I’ll feed you first. You’re still weak from that brave thing you did. You scared me when you fell out of the chair. I thought I lost you forever.”

Putting a cast-iron pan on the stove Victoria asked, “How does some eggs and toast sound?”

Violet looked at Victoria with her big eyes. “Can I have some jam on the toast?”

Victoria smiled. “Of course. No, don’t get up, I’ll get it.”

The simple meal tasted like ash in Violet’s mouth, yet she forced it down because Victoria watched her with that quiet motherly intensity. After breakfast Victoria and Violet cleared the table, and Victoria started the soup for lunch. Jack came in and started doing dishes. The burly gold miner moved with surprising gentleness around the crowded kitchen.

As the suds splashed against the basin Victoria explained, “Jack will do the dishes so we can go see your dad. My buggy should be out front.”

Then she took off her apron hanging it over the back of a wooden chair, and took Violet’s hand. On the way out Victoria explained the rhythm of their new fragile routine. “We can only stay for a short time. We have to get back to make the sandwiches for lunch, but my brother is coming for dinner tonight. After we eat he’s taking us to see your dad.”

Then that is how it went for the next two weeks. Every morning bled into the next, and defined by the clatter of the boardinghouse. The short agonizingly quiet visits to the clinic, and the long agonizing wait for a man whose mind was trapped somewhere behind a wall of silence.

Vincent Long lay in the narrow iron cot. His broad shoulders that where once capable of hauling heavy pelts through the deep unforgiving snows, and over the Cascade Mountains. Now looked hollow beneath the coarse wool blankets of the clinic, and all Vincent did was lie in the bed staring blankly at the whitewashed ceiling and moan once in a while.

That was until the second week.

Then sometimes he’d open his eyes and look around a little with his gaze dull and unfocused. He was like a man peering through a thick morning fog. But he never said a word. He just closed his eyes again retreating back into the dark.

The city outside was moving on as steamships whistled at the docks, loggers shouted down by Mr. White’s mill, and the telegraph office in clicked out messages of a growing restless territory. But inside Dr. Sawyer’s clinic time stood still.

After two weeks of this silent vigil Wyatt had a talk with Violet on the way to the clinic. “I think you need to do more than just sit next to him and hold his hand,” Wyatt said gently with his weathered face lined with concern. “You need to start talking to him. He can hear you, and it will help him pull out of it. If you can get him to say just one word we’ll know he’s in there. Can you do that?”

Violet swallowed hard with the weight of the frontier resting on her small shoulders. She had endured a brutal winter trapped in the snow just to reach this bedside. She whispered just loud enough for Wyatt to hear, “I can try, but he just looks like he’s sleeping.”

Victoria, standing close behind them with her shawl pulled tight against the coastal chill spoke up. “I know it looks that way child, but he’s using all he has to fight his way back. He’s not asleep. He’s fighting.”

They stepped inside the clinic with the smell of carbolic acid and dried herbs hitting them like a physical blow. Vincent’s room was dim, and lit only by a slant of gray evening light cutting through the grime of the windowpane.

Violet pulled up her usual straight-backed chair beside the iron cot. She reached out with her small calloused fingers wrapping around her father’s large limp hand. His skin felt cool and dry.

“Daddy?” she whispered with the word trembling in the quiet room.

Vincent didn't move. The rhythmic shallow rise and fall of his chest was the only sign he was alive.

Violet thought back to the cabin buried deep in the Cascade snows, and to the long nights when the wind howled like a starving wolf against the timber walls. She thought of the trails they used to walk and the way he could read the forest like a book. Then about the quiet warmth of his laugh before the bullet tore through his head and stole his memories.

“Daddy it’s me. It’s Violet,” she said with her voice growing stronger fueled by a sudden fierce desperation. “We made it out of the mountains Daddy. Jack and me. We came all this way to find you. You remember the cabin don’t you? You remember teaching me how to set the snares?”

Across the room Dr. Sawyer watched quietly from the doorway with a clipboard in his hand. Victoria stood near the foot of the bed with her hands clasped tightly together in front of her apron, as she prayed silently.

Vincent’s brow furrowed. It was a microscopic movement that was just a slight tightening of the skin above his nose, but Violet caught it. Her heart hammered against her ribs like a trapped bird.

“You’ve got to fight Daddy,” she pleaded squeezing his hand tighter pressing her cheek against the edge of the coarse blanket near his arm. “Dr. Sawyer says you’re fighting. Victoria says you’re fighting. But you’ve got to come back to me. I don’t have nobody else. Mama’s gone, and the cabin’s empty... it’s just you and me.”

A long agonizing silence stretched across the room. The brass clock on the wall seemed to mock them with its steady uncaring ticks.

Then Vincent’s head shifted slightly to the left.

Violet held her breath with the air locking in her throat.

Slowly, painfully, the eyelids fluttered. The dark familiar eyes… eyes she had feared she would never see awake again revealed themselves. They weren't the sharp knowing eyes of the trapper who had navigated the high passes; they were clouded, confused, and distant. But they were looking at her.

His lips parted. A dry rasping sound crawled out of his throat, like wind brushing through autumn brush.

Violet leaned in closer with tears spilling over her lashes. “Daddy? Please... just one word.”

Vincent’s chest hitched. His hand twitched within her grip, and his fingers brushed against hers with the faint residual memory of a grasp.

“V-Vi...”

The breath failed him, and his eyes fluttered shut once more.

The room fell dead silent. For a second Violet thought she had imagined it, and that her own longing had conjured the syllable out of the sterile air.

Then Dr. Sawyer stepped forward with a rare hopeful smile breaking across his tired face. He laid a warm hand on Violet’s shoulder.

“Did you hear that Violet?” the doctor murmured softly. “He’s in there. He heard you.”

Victoria wiped a sudden tear from her cheek with the corner of her shawl and looked down at the little girl. “He’s fighting, honey. Just like I told you. He’s fighting his way back to the light.”

Violet looked down at her father’s pale, sleeping face. She didn't let go of his hand. She gripped it tighter feeling the faint stubborn pulse beneath his skin. He hadn't said the whole name, but he had tried. And for the first time in two weeks the crushing weight in Violet’s chest felt a little bit lighter.

“I know you are Daddy,” Violet whispered back into the quiet room with her voice steady now. “Take your time. I’ll be right here waiting.”

And that’s what she did. Day after day she sat and talked to her dad. She came on a Sunday with Wyatt, and for the first time she saw how Dr. Sawyer was feeding her daddy. He had him propped up on the bed pouring a little broth in his mouth. Then he watched Vincent’s throat to see him swallow, and then he’d pour a little more in his mouth.

Violet asked, “Is that medicine you’re giving my daddy?”

Dr. Sawyer informed, “No, this is a rich beef bone broth. This is how I have to feed him. In fact, I’ve been cutting back on the medicine so he’ll wake up.”

Violet asked, “Can I feed him?”

Dr. Sawyer stood from the chair. “Sure you can. Just pour a little in at a time, and wait until he swallows. Then if some runs down his chin, wipe it with the cloth.”

Violet sat and poured some broth in her dad’s mouth and talked to him. “I know you’re in there, daddy. You need to drink to get better. That’s it. You’re doing a good job.”

Then she started rubbing the forearm of his bad arm asking, “Can you feel that? Your arm is getting better. The doctor said he was going to take out the last tube.”

 

[gonewacky]

Then Vincent opened his eyes, and looked right at Violet.

Violet exclaimed, “I knew you were in there daddy. You’re going to get better now. Just keep fighting.”

Then his eyes moved to Dr. Sawyer and Wyatt, as he tried to speak. But Wyatt put his hand on Vincent’s leg and spoke softly, “It’s alright son. You don’t need to talk yet. You just save your strength to get better.”

Then he took a big gulp and finished the cup of broth. Violet looked up at Dr. Sawyer and asked, “You think he can have some more?”

Dr. Sawyer replied, “Sure, but just a half of a cup. We don’t want him to get sick from too much. Just hand me the cup and I’ll get it.”

Vincent drank the next cup right down. Then she moved to the other side of the bed, and sat on the edge of the bed. She put his hand on her lap, and he raised it to her hair. He gave it a little tug, and Violet explained, “I know we had to cut it to get the bad spots out. Jack’s not good at brushing hair, and it got all knotted up. He cut them out with his knife, but it’s okay. Victoria took me to a hair-cutting lady. She said it will grow back just fine.”

Then she pulled his arm close, and wrapped her arms around it as she looked into his eyes whispering, “I’ve missed you so much.”

Then as Vincent’s eyes closed a tear slipped down her cheek.

Dr. Sawyer looked to Wyatt. “I’ve noticed your sister quit coming at night, and in the mornings she stays out of the room.”

Wyatt explained, “You know it was only a few years ago her husband Logan died in a room here. He was in a very similar shape to Violet’s dad.”

Dr. Sawyer replied, “I remember. You want me to give you something for her?”

Wyatt speculated, “No, I think she’ll be fine. She’s a strong woman. It’s just she has become attached to the child. She is afraid Violet will have to go through the same thing she did with Logan, but after what we saw today, I think the worst is over.”

Dr. Sawyer confessed, “Don’t get your hopes up too much. Sometimes they get surprisingly better just before they pass, but I don’t think this is the case here.”

Wyatt muttered, “Me too. At least I sure hope not.”

Dr. Sawyer went on, “There is another thing. He’s going to wet the bed, and I think it is best if the girl don’t see us clean him up and change the bedding. Give her another hour and take her home.”

Wyatt assured, “You got it, Doc.”

On the way back to the boardinghouse, Wyatt talked to Violet about Victoria. “You know my sister loves you. That’s why she put you in that tiny room by yourself, and has you help her in the kitchen. That is her way of showing you love. I know you won’t understand, but she saw this before when her husband was like your dad and didn’t make it. Everything she does is her way of staking a claim on you. You’re the child she lost. I think you should try to get her to come in the room with you. Then she can see he’s going to make it. Do you understand?”

Thoughts were already spinning around in Violet’s head, and now she had to add this to her brain. Her brain was trying to solve the uncertainty and stress, by looping through the information over and over.

The long winter trapped in the snow-choked mountain cabin with Jack. The burly gold miner whose rough-hewn kindness had kept her alive felt like a lifetime ago now. Jack had done his best. He had hauled her across the frozen passes fighting the Cascades when the snow was piled high. All to bring her back to Seattle to find the father the town had almost forgotten.

Vincent Long the quiet trapper who had taken a bullet to the head in a forgotten land. He had spent months wandering the sawdust floors of the local mill under the name Stanley. With his memory wiped clean by lead and trauma. Mr. White the mill owner had thought him to be just a quiet slow-moving hand. But blood and bone don't lie, and neither did the small girl with the unevenly chopped hair who refused to let him slip away into the dark.

When they reached the boardinghouse the smell of roasted mutton and wood-smoke drifted from the kitchen. Victoria was standing by the cast-iron stove with her hands flour-dusted. With her face set in that mask of stern efficiency that hid an ocean of raw jagged scar tissue.

Violet stopped at the threshold. She remembered what Wyatt had said: She is afraid that she’ll have to go through the same thing she did with Logan.

"Victoria?" Violet's small voice cut through the hiss of fat in the iron skillet.

Victoria didn't turn around right away. She kept her back to the girl with her shoulders rigid beneath her wool shawl. "Supper's not ready yet Violet. Go wash your hands at the basin."

"He woke up," Violet said softly stepping further into the warm grease-scented kitchen.

The scrubbing brush in the washbasin clattered against the tin, and Victoria froze. Slowly she turned with her eyes wide and dark, as she remembered the exhaustion of a woman who had fought death across a sickbed before and lost.

"What did you say?" Victoria whispered with her voice cracking slightly before she caught herself.

"He drank two whole cups of the broth," Violet said walking over to the older woman and tugging tentatively at the hem of her apron. It was the exact same way she had tugged at her father’s thumb just an hour before. "And he looked right at me. He knows I'm there Victoria. Dr. Sawyer took the last tube out of his arm. He's coming back."

Victoria looked down at the six-year-old girl. She saw the choppy uneven line of Violet's hair, from the crude work of Jack’s hunting knife, and the fierce unbroken light in the child's eyes. It was the look of someone who refused to be left behind in the snow.

A tremor passed through Victoria’s jaw. She reached out with her flour-whitened fingers trembling, as she touched the top of Violet’s head smoothing down a stray lock of hair.

"He really opened his eyes?" Victoria asked with her voice barely a breath.

"He squeezed my hair," Violet insisted nodding earnestly. "He knows us. But... he's tired Victoria. He needs to rest some more."

Victoria swallowed hard looking past the girl. She looked toward the foggy windowpane that faced the muddy street leading down toward the clinic. For a long time she had kept herself locked behind a wall of chores, small rooms, and bitter memories of Logan dying in that sterile little room down the block. She had built a fortress around her heart to keep from loving the motherless girl standing in front of her.

And she had failed. She loved her already. Down to the marrow.

"Tomorrow," Victoria said with her voice dropping into a fierce protective register, as she knelt down so her eyes were level with Violet's. "Tomorrow, after the morning chores you and I are going down to that clinic together. You hear me?"

Violet smiled a bright sudden thing that banished the shadows from the dim boardinghouse kitchen. "Yes, ma'am. He's gonna like that. He likes when people talk to him."

Victoria pulled the little girl into her arms burying her face in Violet’s neck, as she breathed in the scent of wood-smoke and ocean air. For the first time since the winter thaw had begun to turn the Seattle mud into a soup. The heavy weight in Victoria’s chest began to lift.

Across town in the quiet dark of the clinic Vincent Long slept. His breathing was steady with the harsh rattle in his chest replaced, by the deep rhythmic rise and fall of a man who had decided against all odds to stay.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 21



The crisp morning air of Seattle still carried the chill of the Cascade snowmelt. But inside the boardinghouse the kitchen was already warm, and the scent of roasting chicory and fresh biscuits filled the air. Victoria called out to Violet with her voice cheerful and brisk, and they went straight to the heart of the home to start the day.

After a hearty breakfast the two of them worked in practiced rhythm to clear the table. Victoria filled a heavy iron pot with water, onions, and root vegetables. Then she set the soup to simmer for the midday meal. Just as the broth began to bubble Jack walked in with his heavy boots clicking on the floorboards. He rolled up his sleeves wading right into the wash basin, and started tackling the mound of breakfast dishes.

“Thanks Jack,” Victoria said as she untying her flour-dusted apron. “And don’t forget to stir the soup every now and then.”

She hung her apron over the back of a ladder-back chair just as she did every single day, and reached out to take little six-year-old Violet’s hand.

On the way out the front door Victoria looked down at the bright-eyed girl. “My buggy should be tied up out front. Do you want to try and drive it today?”

Violet’s eyes went wide reflecting the morning sun. “You think I can Victoria?”

Victoria smiled warmly stepping off the porch. “Only one way to find out, and that’s to try it.”

Violet hesitated chewing her lower lip. “Is it scary?”

“Only if you let it be,” Victoria assured her squeezing her small hand. “I’m sure you will do fine.”

At the side of the weathered wooden buggy Victoria hoisted Violet up onto the high leather bench. She placed the leather reins into the girl's small hands and instructed, “Just give the reins a little flick and yell giddy-up.”

What Violet didn’t know was that Jasper was a remarkably well-trained horse. He knew the route to the clinic by heart and would go there all by himself the moment he felt the slack leave the lines. Violet sat tall gripping the leather genuinely believing she was the one guiding the animal through the bustling Seattle streets. She shouted, “Giddy-up!” and Jasper trotted forward with steady reliable grace.

As Jasper pulled them along Violet asked, “What was Jack’s brother like? You know jack is real old, was Logan old like Jack?”

Victoria chuckled, “Oh for havens sake child of course not. Logan was the youngest of four boys, and there were over twenty years between them, and two sisters in there somewhere. Logan was about your dad’s age, and a happy go lucky man. He liked to joke around a lot. I think that’s what I like to remember the most. Now let’s not talk about him. I loved him a lot, and it hurts to think about him. Just like how you felt giving you daddy your blood.”

Violet felt sorrow for Victoria, and didn’t say another word. There was no need to. They both understood.

As they drew near the doctor’s clinic Victoria gently placed a hand over Violet’s. “Okay pull back on the reins and yell whoa.”

Jasper immediately eased into a stop right beside the wooden boardwalk. Victoria took the reins and advised, “I’ll park the buggy and hook Jasper to the hitching post. I’ll teach you how to park when you get good at driving.”

Once they were down on the boardwalk Victoria reached up to pat Jasper’s soft nose. Then she praised the horse before wrapping the reins securely around the hitching post.

Inside the clinic the air smelled of soap and dried herbs. Violet walked softly with her boots barely making a sound on the floorboards. She pulled a chair up to the bedside and reached out to take her father’s hand.

Vincent Long the trapper, woodsman, and a man who had narrowly cheated death from a gunshot wound. That had left him wandering with amnesia stirred, as his eyes popped open fixing on Violet with a foggy disoriented stare.

The sudden movement caused Victoria to step closer to the bed placing a firm reassuring hand on Vincent’s leg. The weight of her touch drew his gaze upward. She leaned in close speaking in a firm clear tone. “Welcome back Vincent. I’m Victoria and I’m taking care of your daughter, so you don’t have to worry about her at all.”

Vincent swallowed hard. In a voice dry, raspy and barely recognizable that was scraped from weeks of disuse he whispered, “Thank you.”

Then with a sudden surge of strange desperation he pulled his hand away from Violet’s grip, and weakly clutched at the fabric of Violet’s dress staring at Victoria intently.

Victoria glanced down. “The dress?”

Vincent blinked once in confirmation.

Understanding washed over her face. “My brother-in-law Jack got this dress for Violet along with the Sunday dress she wore yesterday. He bought it with some of his gold money from the mines, and he’s the one who stayed alone in the cabin with her through the brutal winter snows. Don't you worry I’ll get her another dress for you.”

A ghost of a smile touched Vincent’s swollen battered face. His eyelids fluttered heavy with exhaustion, and he drifted back into a deep healing sleep.

Just then Dr. Sawyer pushed through the door holding a steaming bowl of beef bone broth. “I thought you would want to feed your dad,” the doctor said looking at Violet, “but it looks like you already wore him out. Don’t worry he’ll be back. He’s been drifting in and out since you arrived yesterday. I’ll just set this here on the bedside table. Call me when he wakes up again, and I’ll come and prop him up for you.”

Over the next few days Vincent’s strength slowly returned, and color creeped back into his weathered skin. By Friday Dr. Sawyer deemed him well enough to move out of the private recovery room and into the general ward.

That evening when Wyatt Victoria’s quiet steadfast brother arrived at the clinic with Victoria and Violet. Dr. Sawyer motioned for Wyatt to step aside.

“I’ve moved Vincent to the ward,” the doctor said quietly wiping his hands on a towel. “That means his daily rate drops from a dollar a day to seventy-five cents. I’ll round it off to five dollars a week. I just want to know if you still want to cover his bill. It’s already over twenty dollars plus medication, and it’s going to be a long time before he can work again. In fact he might never regain the full use of his left arm. I don’t think you’ll be able to have him work off the debt at the mill Mr. White.”

Before Wyatt could even open his mouth to answer, Victoria gave Violet a push and insisted, “You go find your father.”

Reluctantly Violet headed to the ward looking back as she went.



Then Victoria stomped over with her jaw set with absolute fury. “Look here! You just send us the bill, and we’ll pay it. And don’t you ever bring up money matters like that in front of the little girl again!”

Without waiting for a response Victoria turned on her heel, and marched down the hall after Violet.

Dr. Sawyer offered Wyatt a sheepish look. “I’m sorry Wyatt. I just wanted you to understand the reality. If this was an investment in the man you were making. It would take a year’s wages for him to pay you back, and with that left arm…”

Wyatt simply crossed his arms with his expression unreadable beneath his brimmed hat. “It’s alright Doc. I knew we’d be having this conversation eventually. It’s not about the money at this point. My sister has taken a fierce liking to the girl, and she’s intent on keeping her in her life. I think Victoria had already made peace with the idea that Vincent wasn't going to make it. She thought it was going to be like Logan, and she had quietly decided the girl was going to be hers. We’ll just have to wait and see what comes of Vincent now that he’s waking up, but until then Victoria has staked her claim on that child.”

Dr. Sawyer chuckled dryly shaking his head. “There’s no doubt about that.”

Back in the ward Vincent was propped up against a stack of pillows looking remarkably more human. A nurse was just finishing fluffing his bedding. “There,” the nurse smiled, “You should be ready for your visitors.”

Violet practically bounced onto the edge of the bed while Victoria took the wooden chair right beside her. Without a word of hesitation Victoria reached out, and placed her hand firmly on Vincent’s arm right next to Violet’s small fingers.

Vincent turned his head, as his gaze shifted between his daughter and the formidable woman taking charge of their lives.

Victoria met his eyes squarely. “We need to talk about Violet.”

A deeply puzzled look crossed Vincent’s face. His brow furrowed as he rasped out, “About what?”

Victoria laid out her plans with the absolute certainty of a general mapping out a campaign. “When you can get in and out of bed on your own I’m moving you to my house. I’ve already set up a room for you so you can recover properly. And in the fall I’m sending Violet to school. She needs a proper education, and frankly I don’t have the time to teach her letters and run a full boardinghouse at the same time.”

Vincent blinked stunned, and looked down at his daughter. “What do you think Violet?”

Violet’s face lit up like a lantern in the dusk, and in an excited rush she blurted out, “You’ll like it Daddy! The house is real big, and I even have my own room now. You’d like it there too, and I could see you every single day. Oh, and Jack lives there too!”

Vincent slowly turned his gaze back to Victoria with a mixture of resignation and profound relief washing over his tired features. “Well... it looks like I don’t have much of a choice, and you two have already got it all planned out for me.”

Victoria flashed a triumphant radiant smile. “Good. Then that’s settled.”

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 22

The spring air in Seattle carried the sharp clean scent of the nearby Puget Sound. It was mixed with the heavy sawdust drifting down from the mills. It was 1874, and the bustling port city was expanding faster than its muddy streets could handle, but on the quiet edge of town where Victoria’s boardinghouse sat. Things still moved at the deliberate pace of a frontier community.

Inside the kitchen the warmth of the woodstove chased away the lingering chill of the morning. Victoria stood over the counter deftly kneading a batch of bread dough while keeping a watchful eye on the front window.

"Is he coming yet?" Violet asked kneeling on a wooden chair so she could peer out the glass. Her small hands were dusted with flour from helping shape the rolls.

"Not quite yet, sweetheart," Victoria said offering a gentle smile. "Don’t worry Wyatt will be here in time."

"I can drive Jasper fast," Violet declared as she puffed out her chest. "Just like I practiced."

"I know you can," Victoria replied with her heart softening at the fierce pride radiating from the six-year-old.



It had been a harrowing winter. While Violet and Jack Tomson, Victoria’s rough-hewn gold-mining brother-in-law had survived. What was a brutal snowbound siege in a mountain cabin. Vincent Long had been enduring his own private purgatory. A violent encounter with an grizzly bear and a brutal gunshot wound to the head. That had left him stranded in Seattle with amnesia, and working the logging camps under the name Stanley. That was before Jim Johnson a fellow mountain man had finally helped piece his memory back together, and brought him to the doctor.

Now, Vincent was coming home. But home wasn't the lonely cabin in the Cascades anymore. It was this boardinghouse ruled by Victoria’s unbending iron will, and filled with the bright stubborn presence of a little girl who had grown up far too fast.

Victoria’s hulking brother and owner of the local mill stood out front next to the horse-drawn buggy. He has his arms crossed tightly over his chest, and watched Victoria approach with a skeptic’s glare.

"I still don’t think this is a good idea Victoria," Wyatt insisted with his deep voice carrying over the rumble of a distant wagon.

Victoria wiped her hands on her apron and fixed him with a look that had silenced loggers twice his size. “I’ve planned this all out. I got everything from the doctor, and put him in a downstairs room right next to Violet. I’ve been working with Violet everyday teaching her to drive the buggy. It’s only a few blocks to the clinic and it’s straight down the road. She has done real good turning the buggy around, so don’t worry about it Wyatt. I don’t go down to the mill and tell you to not have a man run the saw, so don’t tell me how to raise a child.”

Wyatt threw up his hands defensively. "But she’s only six year’s old Victoria!"

Victoria huffed with her chin tilting up. “The rules are simple: you must provide unconditional love, set clear and consistent boundaries, model positive behavior, and encourage independence. Here she comes. Now don’t say a word.”

The front door burst open. Violet darted down the steps, and scrambled up onto the buggy's wooden bench. She grabbed the reins and looked down at Victoria with wide glowing eyes. "I’ll be right back!"

Victoria nodded stepping back. Violet flicked the leather straps and yelled, "Giddy up Jasper!"

The old horse leaned into the traces, and the buggy rattled smoothly down the dirt road, as it left Wyatt shaking his head in disbelief.

At the clinic a few blocks away. Dr. Sawyer and a brisk-looking nurse stood waiting. Vincent Long sat in a wheelchair with a bulky white sling cradling his left arm. His face was still bearing the pale drawn look of a man who had stared death in the face, and barely crawled back.

Violet reined Jasper in with surprising grace, as she pulled the buggy right up to them. Dr. Sawyer and the nurse stepped forward carefully assisting Vincent, as they helped him onto the wooden bench next to his daughter.

"Take care of that head Mr. Long," Dr. Sawyer cautioned handing over a small paper parcel of lingering medicines. "And keep that arm immobilized. No lifting, no trapping, and no foolishness."

Vincent offered a weak nod with his eyes fixed on the small girl holding the reins. As the nurse stepped back Violet flicked the straps and commanded, "Giddy up Jasper!"

The buggy lurched forward rolling cleanly down the street. Vincent stared sideways at her with a mixture of shock and amusement breaking through his pale features. "You command this like you’ve been doing it for years."

Violet kept her eyes proudly fixed on the road ahead. "Victoria teached me, so I could bring you home."

Vincent chuckled though a wince followed as the buggy hit a rut. "She did it well, but I do believe the word is taught, and not teached. I believe Victoria is right you need schooling. With your mother gone you’ll never make it without it."

At the mention of Grace a heavy silence fell between them for a brief moment, but Violet didn't falter. The boardinghouse loomed ahead. With a practiced tug Violet swung the buggy wide as she executed a crisp turn, and backed it right into its designated spot by the hitching post. Then she brought it to a smooth halt.

Victoria walked out to the edge of the porch looking up with an approving eye. "Looks like you made your solo without an incident."

Violet beamed as she hopped down to tie off the reins. "I did it just the way you teached me ma’am."

Victoria frowned playfully correcting her instantly. "It’s taught Violet. The way I taught you."

Wyatt stepped forward reaching up to help Vincent down from the high seat, as Vincent muttered under his breath, "I told you Violet..."

With Wyatt supporting his good side and Victoria leading the way Vincent limped into the boardinghouse. His eyes took in the clean polished floors, and the smell of roasting beef coming from the back.

Victoria guided him straight to a ground-floor room situated right beside Violet’s. She swung the door open and ushered him inside laying down the law with military precision.

"I wish you to keep yourself to the first floor," Victoria announced standing squarely in the center of the small tidy room. "You can use your room, the parlor, and the dining room. Dr. Sawyer told me you were having some dizziness. It’s most likely from the bear beating and that shot to the head you took, so I don’t want you going up the stairs or outside without help."

Vincent looked around bewildered. "What about my clothes?"

"Dr. Sawyer burned them," Victoria replied flatly.

"So all I have is this scratchy robe from the clinic?" Vincent complained gesturing to the thin cotton garment wrapped around his gaunt frame.

"Wyatt will pick you up something respectable to wear later today," Victoria insisted crossing her arms. "You will be sitting next to my brother-in-law Jack at the table. His room is upstairs, and I don’t want you going up there. There is a chamber pot under the bed, and I want you to use it. Either Violet or I will empty it for you. There will be a nurse coming to help you work that bad arm. That sling lying on the bed is to be used at all times unless the nurse or doctor tells you to take it off. Is that understood?"

Without waiting for an answer she turned and took Violet’s small hand and said, "Come on Violet. We have to get lunch ready."

As the door clicked shut Vincent slumped against the edge of the mattress, and looked up at Wyatt who had lingered in the doorway. "Boy she’s a bossy thing."

Wyatt smiled a rare, genuine expression that softened his rugged face. "But she’s right you know. You’re lucky to even be alive Vincent. If not for Jim Johnson you’d be dead twice now."

 

[gonewacky]

Vincent stared down at his useless bandaged arm with a shadow crossing his face. "I did remember everything though. I think I know why I got shot. On that last trip to check my traps I got the white-face. I’d been tracking that albino cougar for a few years. I think I could have gotten fifty to eighty dollars for that pelt. That would have set us up for a year of supplies."

Wyatt patted his good shoulder. "Forget the pelt Vincent. You've got a daughter out there who drove a horse and buggy to fetch you. Now, I’ve got to get back to the mill, and you need to keep to the rules. Put that sling back on your arm and go sit in the parlor. Jack’s waiting in there for you."

By evening the boardinghouse was filled with the rich savory smells of dinner. Jack Tomson the sunburned bearded miner who had spent the winter huddled in the mountain cabin. Along with little Violet sat at the head of the parlor table. He was swapping stories of the gold fields with a quiet attentive Vincent.

Wyatt returned just as the sun dipped below the horizon. He stomped the sawdust from his boots before sliding into a kitchen chair next to Victoria and Violet. He accepted a mug of steaming black coffee and gave Victoria a knowing look.

"I thought you told Vincent not to go out to the outhouse," Wyatt murmured over the rim of his cup.

Victoria paused with a bowl of potatoes suspended in her hands. "I did."

"Well," Wyatt said dryly, "I saw him stumbling out toward the outhouse just as I rode up."

Violet instantly dropped her fork, and with her eyes wide with righteous authority. "I’ll get him!"

Victoria shot out a hand, grabbing Violet’s wrist. "Sit child! I’m taking care of this."

Wyatt chuckled as he nudged Violet back into her seat. "I think we best just sit here Violet. Let your aunt handle the mountain man."

Victoria marched down the hall. Then she threw open the back door, and stomped across the yard straight to the wooden outhouse. She pounded a heavy fist against the weathered door.

"Mr. Long! Are you in there?"

A muffled groan echoed from within. "Go away Victoria!"

Victoria scolded him right through the thin pine planks. "You shouldn’t come out here alone! With those dizzy spells and that useless arm, if you fall down you might not be able to get back up. We can’t have you lying out here on the cold ground all night!"

The door cracked open a few inches, and Vincent peered out looking thoroughly chastised and deeply indignant. "With all due respect Ma'am can’t a man even take a crap in peace? I’ve been using a bedpan so long... I just wanted to remember what it was like to use a proper outhouse!"

"After this you let me know, and I’ll walk you out here, or make Jack keep an eye on you," Victoria demanded holding her ground.

With a heavy sigh Vincent pushed the door all the way open, and stepped out into the cool spring evening. Without missing a beat Victoria stepped forward and looped her strong arm firmly through his good one, and clamped down with a grip that left no room for argument.

"Mountain men," Victoria muttered half to herself as she steered him back toward the warmth of the boardinghouse. "They're all the same. Too damn independent for their own good. Now, that wasn’t so bad was it? Just ask next time you want to go outside."

Vincent offered a reluctant crooked grin, as the cool night wind swept across the yard. With it came the undeniable promise of a new beginning.

As Victoria walked Vincent into the boardinghouse. He caught a sudden violent dizzy spell, but it wasn’t just any ordinary wave of lightheadedness. It came with a sharp electric tingling that rippled through his whole body, as blinding flashes of long-lost memories struck him like the crack of a Winchester rifle. He saw the laughing face of Grace, and the smell of pine and wood-smoke. A cabin tucked deep in the Cascades. His mind raced frantically trying to grasp the fragments while his knees buckled, and he started going down.

Fortunately Victoria Tomson was a strong woman, and was hardened by years of running a bustling boardinghouse and dealing with rough-and-tumble frontier folk. With a grunt of effort she hauled him back up wrapping her arm tightly around his waist, and she supported his dead weight.

That sudden contact only made things worse. The jolt sent a fresh shockwave through his nervous system, and his vision began to tunnel fading rapidly to black. Here he was a seasoned mountain trapper who had survived freezing blizzards and hungry predators. Now he was held helplessly in the arms of a woman, as she fought desperately to drag his scattered senses back to the present. None of this made sense. He was supposed to be the quiet man who worked at Mr. White’s mill, and a man with no past and no name before Dr. Sawyer patched him up in that clinic.

Finally the blackness receded and he was coming back, but the tingling was still rushing through his veins like icy mountain runoff. Leaning his heavy head against Victoria’s sturdy shoulder he forced the words past his dry lips, “Thank you. I think I should go lay down for a few.”

Victoria navigated the narrow hallway walking Vincent to his small room, and depositing him onto the mattress. As she stood over him with her maternal and protective instincts flared. She began to scold with her voice sharp with worry.

“I knew something like this would happen. Just think if this had happened out in the yard, or down by the wharf. What would that do to little Violet? Don’t you think that child has been through enough without adding something like this to it?”

She was right of course. Violet had spent the brutal winter trapped in a snowbound mountain cabin with Jack Tomson. He was the gold miner who had braved the drifts just to bring the little girl down to Seattle to find her father. Little Violet had lost her mother Grace to the cruel frontier, and the thought of her losing her father all over again. Even to a ghost in his own mind, was too much to bear.

Lying back on the bed staring at the water-stained ceiling Vincent somehow managed to mutter, “Just rest… I just need a little rest.”

He watched Victoria through half-closed eyes, as she stopped at the doorway turning back to cast one last assessing look at him. He wanted to tell her about the flashes, or to ask her if she knew about Grace. Did she even know a bullet wound to the head had stolen the face of his own daughter? But the tingling was still rushing through his temples making it impossible to think let alone speak.

With a soft sigh Victoria turned and pulled the door nearly shut leaving him in the dim quiet. Vincent closed his eyes terrified that if he fell asleep the memories might disappear forever, or worse that he would wake up and forget Violet all over again.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 23

After Victoria, Violet, and Wyatt ate dinner Wyatt asked, “What does he think about you keeping Violet in the kitchen all day?”

Picking up her plate Victoria answered, “He hasn’t said a thing about it, but she can see him after the dishes are done. He got to see her every day and night when he was in the clinic and that won’t change here. Violet understands. Tell him Violet.”

Violet looked at Wyatt and explained, “I have to work. The Doctor cost a lot of money, and so does the food and rooms. Everything we need cost money and Daddy can’t work, so I have to do it. At 50¢ a day I should have the Doctor paid off by the end of school.”

Wyatt cleared his throat, “You’re charging her for both rooms Victoria?”

Victoria replied, “Yes, but I told her she won’t have to pay for her room when she starts school, and I’ll still pay her the 50¢ if she does well. I know that only leaves four dollars to go towards the doctor bill, but there is other stuff I’m not charging her for.”

Wyatt looked at Violet and asked, “You think you’re old enough to take this on at six?”

Violet didn’t hesitate and advised, “I’ll be seven next week, and Victoria’s going to teach me to make a cake. I’m old enough to do things.”

Wyatt shook his head, “Okay Victoria, it’s your plan. I just hope it don’t blow up in your face.”

Victoria stood from the table, “Come on Violet. Let’s go get the dishes from the dining room. After we get them washed you can go see your dad.”



After clearing the dining room and doing the dishes Violet headed to her dad’s room. Looking through the gap in the partly open door she saw him sleeping. She slowly pushed the door open and walked to the bed. Bending down she whispered, “Good night Daddy. I love you.”

Then she kissed him on the head and went to her room.

Vincent had slipped deep into dream land. He was dreaming he was on a train and Victoria was sitting between him and Violet. She was keeping him from Violet, but he didn’t know why. Why does she keep her from me? He thought. Then he realized that even with that knowledge he would be hopeless, because there was no one he could talk to about it.

Then it came to him. Wait a minute haven't I seen her somewhere, but I was young and just married. I suppose she don’t remember me. Oh sure of course Victoria that's right. Grace and I were happy back in that time. We’d just got off the ship and there she stood waiting for her brother. He was returning from buying some Mill equipment.

Then we saw her again when Grace and I were getting what we needed to stake our land claim. That’s when I read about Victoria in the paper. A tree had fallen on her husband in a logging accident, and he was at the clinic. He must have died. That was eight years ago.

But why am I dreaming about this now? I know her well. She brought Violet every day to see me at the clinic. She would sit in the chair as Violet sat on the edge of the bed. Sometimes she would put her hand on my arm next to Violet’s hand. The thought of it made the tingling shoot through his body. This made Vincent wonder why she was doing this to him.

Then he opened his eyes as Victoria pulled the blanket up over him. She saw his eyes open and said, “Shhh… you need you rest. Go back to sleep. I’ll get the door.”

He opened one eye and watched as she pulled the door shut. Then he went back to dream land, and found himself in a field with Violet picking flowers. Victoria was hanging on his bad arm telling him, “We’ll get through this Vincent, and Violet will grow to be just like her mom.”

Then he moved and rolled over on his bad arm. Pain shot through his body and he snapped awaked seeing Victoria standing next to his bed. She smiled, “I was just checking on you. I’m on my way to wake Violet so we can fix breakfast. Do you want her to bring you anything? I could send her with coffee.”

Vincent requested, “Could you walk me to the outhouse?”

Victoria smiled, “Sure. We can do that. I’ll get your robe. We don’t want people thinking the wrong things. Now do we?”

After helping Vincent get the robe on. Victoria looped her arm through his good right arm, and took ahold of his wrist. This made the tingling go through his whole body again, but he kind of liked it this time. Walking passed Violet’s room Victoria called out, “Time to get up child.”

As Victoria walked him to the outhouse she explained, "The Nurse is coming today. Do you mind if I join her, so I know what is going on.”

Vincent replied, “That’s fine as long as you don’t talk to me through the outhouse door.”

Victoria snickered, “Deal.”

After Victoria returned Vincent to his room she went to the kitchen. Violet looked up from the stack of dishes she was taking to the dining room, “You think Daddy can eat with us today?”

Victoria advised, “Set the dining room and we’ll talk about it. Alright?”

Violet answered, “Yes ma’am. I know my job.”

As Violet finished Victoria walked behind her in the dining room. Straightening up a fork Victoria muttered, “Looks good child. Let’s go make the biscuits, and talk about your dad.”

Victoria had already made the dough, and rolled it out on the table. Handing the knife to Violet she explained, “Now you just cut them the way I taught you.”

Violet replied, “I know my hands are small so make them four fingers wide.”

Then she held her left hand to the dough and pressed the knife into the dough, and pulled it straight across the dough. She did row after row, and then moved to the side of the table and did it again. Victoria was putting the square biscuits on the baking sheet as Violet finished each row.

Looking at the filled sheet Victoria said, “Looks good child. I’ll get the oven door and you can slide it in.”

As the biscuits baked in the oven Victoria put the pot on the stove for the gravy. Looking to Violet she instructed, “You make the gravy today. Get your stool for standing at the stove, and tell me what to add. I want to know that you know the recipe.”

Violet put her stool next to the stove and stepped on it. With what looked like a little broom. Then she said, “Okay, equal parts bacon grease and flour.”

Victoria put in the bacon grease as Violet steered it around with the whisk. Then she started adding the flour a little at a time, as Violet instructed, “Get the milk ready. Okay it’s bubbling, so start adding the milk.”

Victoria started pouring in the milk and Violet steered it in with the whisk. When it started to bubble Victoria added the salt and pepper. Then she tasted it with a spoon, and handed it to Violet, “Taste it and tell me what you think.”

Violet dipped the spoon in the gravy and put it in her mouth, “Taste like gravy to me.”

Victoria smiled, “Me to. Get the severing plate Violet. It’s time to take out the biscuits.”

With the biscuits on the platter Victoria insisted, “Now go get your father so he can see what you do.”

Violet shot out of the kitchen and down the hall. Soon she returned with her dad, and sat him at the table. Victoria was scrambling a large pan of eggs on the stove and ordered, “Get the bowl child.”

Violet got the bowl and Victoria filled it with the eggs, and handed it to Violet. She took it and set it with the gravy and biscuits. Next they did the potatoes and put the bowl with the rest.

Then they started to take things out to the table. Victoria took the Coffee pot and Violet did the biscuits. Then Violet took the eggs and Victoria took the gravy. Then Victoria started the pancakes, as Violet took out the potatoes.

With Violet in the dining room Victoria asked, “What would you like Mr. Long?”

Vincent asked, “What is Violet having?”

Victoria replied, “She always has a pancake.”

Vincent replied, “Then I’ll have the same.”

Violet came in and Victoria handed her a plate with three pancakes on it, and Violet blurted, “I know, pancakes for Mr. Harris.”

Then she shot back to the dining room.

Upon returning Violet sat next to her dad as Victoria set a pancake on her plate.

Violet beamed with pride with her small legs swinging slightly beneath the chair, and took a bite of her pancake. She was nearly seven now, and a resilient child forged in the harsh winters of the Cascade Mountains. That’s where she and Jack had weathered the snow before their journey to find her father. Violet was under Victoria’s stern protective eye, but she had carved out a role for herself in this bustling boardinghouse.

“Are you eating enough Daddy?” Violet asked tilting her head, as she watched Vincent struggle slightly with his fork in his hand. His left arm was still recovering from the severe injury, and rested awkwardly in the sling beneath his robe.

“Just fine sweetheart,” Vincent replied with his voice raspy. He cast a glance across the table toward Victoria. She was effortlessly managing the flow of the kitchen while keeping a watchful eye on the dining room.

Wyatt White, Victoria’s brother and owner of the mill sat at the head of the table. He was buttering a square biscuit. He chewed slowly with his keen eyes shifting between Victoria and Vincent. Wyatt had made his skepticism clear the night before about Victoria’s arrangement, and having a six-year-old girl work off her and her father's steep medical and lodging debts. But he knew better than to argue with his sister once her mind was set.

 

[gonewacky]

“The nurse is scheduled to come by this morning Vincent,” Victoria announced wiping her hands on a clean apron. Her gaze lingered on him for a brief moment. It carried an unreadable depth. It was the same one that sent that familiar faint tingling sensation through Vincent’s arms. “I intend to sit in on the examination. I want to know precisely how fast that shoulder is healing.”

Vincent managed a dry smirk. “Just make sure you don’t interrogate the poor woman through the door like you did me at the outhouse.”

Wyatt snorted into his coffee mug. Victoria merely rolled her eyes, as a playful twitch at the corner of her mouth betrayed her amusement. “No promises Mr. Long. The doctor’s bills in Seattle aren’t cheap, and neither is the room and board you’re both taking up. I intend to see that investment heal properly.”

Breakfast concluded with a clatter of silverware and the scraping of chairs. While the boarders filtered out toward the docks, the mills, and the trading posts. Victoria set Violet to work clearing the plates.

“You know your chores child,” Victoria said gently resting a hand on Violet’s shoulder. “Clear the tables then help me prep for the midday meal. After the nurse leaves we’ll talk about your reading lesson.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Violet chirped gathering a stack of small plates with surprising dexterity.

Vincent retired back to his room down the hall, and the quiet solitude returning the moment the door clicked shut. He sat on the edge of the narrow bed rubbing his temples. The dreams from the night before still echoed in his mind, as did the image of his late wife Grace standing on the docks years ago; the fleeting memories of Victoria greeting her brother at the boat, and the bizarre recurring visions of Victoria standing between him and Violet in a mist-shrouded train. Why did Victoria feel so familiar, yet so elusive? He remembered her visiting him daily at Dr. Sawyer’s clinic in Seattle while he drifted in and out of consciousness. He remembered the comforting weight of her hand on his arm. But the exact nature of their history before the shooting remained locked behind a door in his mind that refused to open.

A sharp knock at the front door broke his concentration. Heavy boots scraped on the porch, and were followed by Victoria’s firm voice greeting someone in the foyer. Moments later light footsteps approached Vincent’s room.

The door pushed open to reveal Nurse Albright. She was a stern-faced woman with spectacles perched on the end of her nose, and carrying a black leather medical bag. Right behind her true to her word was Victoria with her arms crossed over her apron. She looked like a general inspecting the troops.

“Morning, Mr. Long,” Nurse Albright said stepping into the room. She set her bag on the small wooden nightstand. “Let’s see how that shoulder wound is coming along. Victoria tells me you’ve been up and walking about.”

“I’m not an invalid,” Vincent muttered though he obediently shifted so the nurse could examine his bandages.

Nurse Albright unwrapped the linen from his shoulder, and Vincent felt a fresh wave of throbbing pain. He clenched his jaw, as he stared at the rough plaster wall across the room. Without a word Victoria stepped closer. She was hesitant at first. Then with firm reassurance she reached out and placed her hand over his good arm. Then she let her fingers rest lightly against his wrist.

The physical contact sent a sudden jolt of electricity through him, and anchored him against the pain. He looked up meeting her gaze. In her eyes he saw no pity. Only a fierce unyielding resolve that seemed to say we are going to get through this.

Nurse Albright cleared her throat breaking the heavy silence in the room. “Well, the inflammation is down significantly. The wound is healing well Mr. Long, but the nerve damage will take months to fully mend. You’ll have good days and bad days. No heavy lifting, no going up in the mountains just yet. You need rest, proper nutrition, and low stress.”

“Low stress,” Victoria echoed dryly stepping back as the nurse began packing her instruments. “In a boardinghouse full of loggers and miners? That might be a tall order.”

“Just do your best Victoria,” Nurse Albright advised with a knowing smile, as she gathered her bag. “He’s healing remarkably well with all things considered. The girl being here seems to do him a world of good.”

After the nurse was seen out Victoria lingered in the doorway. The hallway outside was quiet; Violet was busy in the kitchen scrubbing the heavy iron skillets under the supervision of Wyatt. He had taken a rare morning off from the mill to keep an eye on things.

“You heard her,” Victoria said softly leaning against the doorframe. “No mountains. No heavy work. You’re staying right here until the snow melts completely off the high passes.”

“And if I want to contribute?” Vincent asked with his voice low, and his dark eyes searching hers. “I can’t sit here indefinitely watching a six-year-old girl work off my debts Victoria.”

“Violet is learning independence,” Victoria countered stepping back into the room and closing the door halfway. It was just enough to afford some privacy, but leaving it cracked as she always did. “And as for you. You’re contributing more than you realize. Your presence here… it grounds the place. It grounds me.”

Vincent shifted slightly on the bed wincing as the movement strained his shoulder. “You knew Grace didn’t you?”

Victoria froze her hand which had been smoothing down the edge of the quilt, and went still. She did not look up immediately.

“Back when she and I first came off the ship,” Vincent continued piecing the fragments of his dream together with the waking reality. “You were standing on the docks waiting for your brother. And later when we were filing our land claims. I saw your name in the paper after the logging accident took your husband. That was years ago.”

Victoria finally raised her eyes meeting his with a steady unblinking gaze. “Yes Vincent. I knew Grace. And I knew you even if you couldn’t remember the half of it. I thought you might remember while you were lying in Dr. Sawyer’s clinic hallucinating.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because you had enough ghosts to fight without digging up mine,” Victoria said quietly, as her voice lost its usual administrative edge softening into something vulnerable. She walked over to the side of the bed with her boots making no sound on the braided rug. “When the telegram came from North Bend about a wounded trapper matching your description, and when Jack brought little Violet down out of the snow… I didn't care about what happened eight years ago. I only knew that a little girl needed her father, and a stubborn trapper needed a roof over his head.”

Vincent stared up at her with the remaining fog in his mind finally clearing away, and revealing the simple stark truth of the woman standing before him. She wasn't just a boardinghouse owner running a ledger of debts and fifty-cent wages; she was the silent anchor keeping their fractured world from washing away in the spring thaw.

“And if I decide I want to stay here?” Vincent asked with his voice barely above a whisper. “Even after the doctor’s bill is paid off?”

Victoria’s lips curved into a rare genuine smile. It was one that reached her eyes and swept away the last remnants of her guarded demeanor.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it Mr. Long,” she said turning toward the door. “Now rest. Violet is making a mess again, and I need to go rescue the kitchen before Wyatt comes in and eats all the food.”

As Victoria slipped out and pulled the door shut behind her. Vincent lay back against the pillows. The pain in his shoulder was still there, and the mountains were still waiting out beyond the horizon, but for the first time since he had woken up in Seattle. He felt entirely at home.

 

[gonewacky]

Chapter 24

The heavy scent of frying bacon, roasting coffee beans, and baking flour filled the boardinghouse hallways, promising a hearty start to the day. For Vincent Long the awakening was a slow agonizing process. His body ached from the lingering trauma of the grizzly attack that had nearly taken his life in the Cascade Mountains, and the amnesia that still clouded the edges of his memory felt like a thick fog rolling off the Puget Sound.

It had been a little over two weeks since Vincent left the Seattle clinic, and he was now allowed to have his arm out of the sling for an hour or two a day. He sat on the edge of his narrow bed rotating his stiff shoulder, as the muscles protested. He knew there was something about Victoria he couldn’t remember, but it remained trapped just outside the perimeter of his consciousness. It was obscured by the haze of his recovery.

Down the hall unaware that seven-year-old Violet was already awake and listening from her cracked-open door. Wyatt confronted his sister in the kitchen.

“Why haven’t you told him you know him Victoria?” Wyatt hissed keeping his voice low as he poured a fresh cup of coffee. “We all came from the same town in upstate New York. We went to the same one-room schoolhouse for Christ’s sakes.”

Victoria let out a heavy defensive moan with her hands gripping the edge of the flour-dusted counter. “I didn’t want to scare him Wyatt. He’d been through enough with that bear attack and his head injury, and I didn’t want to add to it. You knew I liked him back then, but he married that young Grace that was years younger than either one of us.”

Wyatt crossed his massive arms leaning against the timber wall of the boardinghouse. That he practically kept afloat with his mill earnings. “You know we came from the big house with the rich parents, and Vincent was a poor farm kid as was Grace. I know she was only fifteen and he was almost twenty, but she wanted to live away from everyone. You wanted the city life and to be with me, so when Jack offered to pay Logan’s way out here. You married Logan and had me hire him. If you’d just tell him he might remember. Hell, I had him working for me at the mill under his old alias, and I didn’t even know he was the same Vincent we went to school with.”

“That is because he was going by Stanley,” Victoria reminded him sharply with her eyes flashing. “I didn’t know either, not until Jack came home with that little girl after they survived the winter trapped in the snow. As soon as I heard the name Vincent Long I knew Stanley was Vincent. And when Violet told me her mother was Grace... well, I knew I was looking at his child. So tell me why you haven’t said anything to him?”



Wyatt rubbed the back of his neck suddenly finding the grain of the floorboards fascinating. “You knew because Jack told you, and that I’m sure of. As for me I’m ten years older than him, and he couldn’t have been ten when I left school. I didn’t think he would know me even if he hadn’t lost his memory. I just saw no need for it. But you’re different. You did things with him, and Logan was his friend.”

“He has enough ghosts to fight without digging up mine,” Victoria insisted with her voice trembling slightly. “And I want him to remember it as his own, and not because I handed him a script.”

Hidden just around the corner little Violet clutched the hem of her nightgown. Her wide eyes blinked in the dim morning light.

Early the next morning, as the spring rain tapped a steady rhythm against the windowpanes of the boardinghouse. Violet cornered Victoria near the linen press.

“I heard you talking last night,” Violet admitted with her chin held high with a maturity far beyond her seven years. “Did you know my Daddy when he was little?”

Victoria sighed crouching down so she was eye-level with the girl. She gently pushed a stray lock of hair from Violet’s forehead. “We knew each other when we were in school sweetie. And the reason I don’t tell him is because memories do strange things to people. He might not want to be here if I push the past on him, and I don’t want to lose you too.”

Violet puffed out her chest. “Then we’ll have to make sure he only remembers the good ones.”

Victoria took Violet into her arms and hugged her tight whispering against her hair, “I knew you’d understand sweetie.”

Violet nodded resting her chin on Victoria’s shoulder. “I know it’s a lot to take in. But he’s safe now, and that’s what matters. I saw him moving his fingers yesterday. He was trying to pick up the candle in his room.”

“It’s good he’s trying to use it now that he can have the sling off for a little while,” Victoria remarked pulling back with a small fond smile.



That very night, when the boardinghouse had settled into a quiet hush Violet crept down the hallway. She pushed open the door to her daddy’s room. Vincent was fast asleep and breathing deeply with his wounded arm resting awkwardly over the quilt.

Standing on her tiptoes beside the bed Violet leaned close. “You need to remember Daddy,” she whispered into the dark room. “You know you went to school with Victoria when she was a girl like me. You have to remember.”

She kissed his forehead smoothing his hair down gently before padding back to her own room. What she didn’t know was that she had planted a seed. Her whispered words wove their way past the barricades of his trauma, and seeped into the architecture of his sleeping mind.

Vincent dreamed.

He wasn't a grown man hiding in Seattle under the name Stanley aching from a bear's claws. He was a boy again. He felt the rough bark of the old apple trees outside the one-room schoolhouse. He dreamed of walking down the dirt road with a young Victoria, as they headed toward the big house at the edge of town. He smelled the fresh-turned earth of his family's farm a mile out, and saw his old friend and neighbor Logan. He was walking beside him kicking up dust with his boots.

The fog over Puget Sound didn't lift all at once, but it tore. The edges unraveled, and memories flooded in like a sudden spring thaw rushing down the Cascade Mountains.



The next morning, the dining room was buzzing with the usual clatter of utensils and low chatter. However in the kitchen Violet eagerly seated her dad on the other side of the kitchen table. She did it so his back would be facing the stove, and shielding him from the immediate bustle. Then she bounced around to sit directly across from him with her heart hammering against her ribs.

Vincent stared down at his plate. He had a subtle light returning to his eyes that hadn't been there since Dr. Sawyer discharged him from the clinic. He looked up locking eyes with Victoria as she stood by the stove holding a heavy iron skillet.

“I think I’ll have an egg with my pancake today Vicki,” Vincent announced smoothly.

Victoria froze mid-stride with the skillet hovering inches from the counter. Wyatt sitting near the end of the table violently snorted his coffee, and choked as he slammed his mug down.

Vincent offered a slow knowing smile watching as Violet’s mouth hung open and her eyes bulged out in sheer disbelief.

Regaining her composure with a sharp intake of breath Victoria barked, “That will be enough of that Mr. Long. You know its Victoria.”

Wyatt wheezed out a single word grinning like a schoolboy: “Boom.”

Vincent leaned back in his chair taking a slow sip of water. “As you wish, but I remember we called you Vicki.”

Victoria’s face flushed pink. She barked back, “So it was, but that’s a child’s name. I’m not a child anymore, and it will be Victoria.”

A look crossed Victoria’s face that was a mixture of panic, vulnerability, and sudden stark exposure. It was something that Violet had never seen before. It made a sudden knot build up in the little girl's stomach.

“Stop, Dad!” Violet cried out with her voice cracking. “If you can’t be good then you can go out and sit with Jack!”

Vincent lowered his head as a familiar playful mischief danced behind his eyes and whined, “Sorry Victoria. I just wanted you to know I remembered.”

Without a word Victoria set a plate of hot pancakes and eggs down in front of Vincent. Then with deliberate slowness she picked up her own plate and moved it to the other side of the table. She sat shoulder-to-shoulder with Violet deliberately putting distance between her, and the man she had spent weeks guarding against the past.

Wyatt pushed his heavy oak chair back with a groaning scrape against the floorboards and announced, “I have to go. I just hope the dust sidles by the time I get home.”

He tipped his hat to his sister, and gave Vincent a curt hard nod. It was the kind men who ran lumber mills exchanged when they shared more history. It was something they didn’t care to speak of, and he let the kitchen door slam behind him rattling the window panes.

Violet took the last bite of her buttermilk pancake chewing thoughtfully and informed, “I’m going to go check the dining room.”

She hopped down from her chair with her boots making a soft thud on the floor, and scampered to the swinging door. She pushed it open just enough to take a peek into the main dining room. “It’s just Jack and Mr. Harris out there,” she reported back with her voice bright, and unbothered by the heavy tension that had settled over the breakfast table. Like a sudden Cascade fog.

Victoria gave her approval offering a tight maternal smile. “Go ahead child. Start bringing in the dishes.”

As the girl’s light footsteps retreated toward the dining room. Victoria turned her gaze back to the man sitting across from her. Vincent Long the man she had known as the quiet broken lumber hand called Stanley, was staring down at his empty coffee cup. The left sleeve of his wool shirt was pinned neatly to his chest. It was a stark reminder of the grizzly bear that had nearly taken his life.