Skin Medicine

“ Ye killed ‘em during the war, didn’t ye?” Cobb put to him. “What’s the difference now? They ain’t real folk anyhow, they’s just injuns what like to act like white men. All the more reason to drop and peel ‘em, ye ask me. Fuck, son, we got us a crop ready for the harvesting, one that’ll turn into lots of green and folding…if ye follow me on that.”

The others agreed most heartily, particularly Coolan, the big ex-ranger who it was said decapitated no less than two dozen Mexican officers during the war…using nothing but a short-bladed hunting knife. But Grendon just couldn’t get by his morals and ethics, so they shot him and Coolan scalped him as a joke.

They hit a Mexican village and caught the entire population in church. They charged in on horseback, pulling triggers and throwing knives and hatchets until their arms were sore and pistols smoking and the dead were heaped-up like sheaves of wheat. It took them the better part of four hours to scalp all two-hundred of ‘em, but they went at it with the diligence and zeal that marked the professional. They made a broad sweep through central Mexico and harvested so many scalps, they began wiring them together in bails.

In 1850, just before the boom died out, they rolled into Sonora with nearly 8,000 scalps piled high in the bed of a wagon.

Shortly afterwards, the scalping business went belly-up and Cobb rode hell-for-leather out of Mexico with a price on his head for murdering Mexicans.

But as Cobb said later, it was fun while it lasted.

***

The next twenty-odd years of his life passed in the blink of an eye.

Cobb rustled cattle and horses. Worked as range detective for various cattle combines, a hired gun for just about anyone who would pay him. He robbed banks and stages, made something of a name for himself as a road agent. Was arrested no less than three times and escaped the noose each time by breaking out of jail. He served as scout during the Indian Wars, sold guns to renegade Apaches, and managed a brothel in San Francisco. But that came to a crashing halt when it was discovered that he and the ladies under his employ were not only robbing their patrons, but murdering them and burying their remains in the cellar. After that, he ran roughshod through Indian Territory, stealing and killing and forcing Indians and whites alike to pay his gang protection money. He became something of a terror along the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers.

Then in 1873…he lost five-thousand dollars gambling in Deadwood, Dakota Territory. Lost it to a professional gambler named Maynard Ellsworth. Cobb pulled his hatchet and split the crown of Ellsworth’s head. After that, he lived his life pretty much on the dodge.

But in 1875, he was arrested for extorting mining camps in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming Territory and sentenced to five years in the territorial prison. Of which he served every single day. As the warden was heard to say to a parole board, “James Lee Cobb is completely lacking in anything which might be even remotely considered human. He is, gentlemen, the very epitome of what the territories need to be purged of-creatures that walk like men, but think like animals.”

When Cobb got out, evading bounty hunters and numerous warrants out circulating for him under various aliases, he joined three men-Jonah Gleer, Lawrence Barlow, and Butch Noolan-in a peculiar undertaking. Cobb had coerced them into following him up into the Sierra Nevadas to search out a gold mine he had heard of in prison.

Problem was, Cobb didn’t really know where it was.

See, a voice in his head told him that up in the high Sierras he would find his destiny. The voice was not vague as usual, but quite absolute and determined that Cobb should listen to it.

So he did.

And this is how the elements of his life-a vile stew at best-finally came full circle.

6

Six weeks then.

Six weeks Cobb had been trapped up in the high country, just waiting and waiting. Gleer, Barlow, and Noolan waited with him…though Barlow had suggested a heroic outbreak through the snows that had sealed off the pass and locked them tight at the foot of the summit. Nobody took him up on it.

At least not yet.

They weren’t desperate enough.

But it was coming, God yes, you could see it just as Cobb was seeing it now as he looked into those weathered, rutted faces burned by subzero winds and discolored by frostbite. You could see it there along with the bitterness and unease and animosity that was fermenting in them. For the past week it had been raging inside each of them, a potent and toxic brew bubbling up from the seething pit of each man. A brew that was sheer poison, seeping and simmering and smoking. It was fast becoming a palpable thing in the confines of the cedar-post cabin and its stink was raw and savage.

None of them had spoken in three days now.