Chapter 3 - The Shadow Over South Pass
Sixty miles to the west, in the overcrowded, filthy boomtown of South Pass City, Silas Whitcomb sat near the iron stove in the back of the Golden Eagle Saloon.
He was thinner than he had been two weeks ago. His eyes were bloodshot, surrounded by dark rings of exhaustion and cheap whiskey.
On the table in front of him sat a glass of dark rye, a half-eaten plate of cold greasy salt pork, and a pouch containing eighty dollars in gold coins—coins he had received that morning after selling his last mule, Barnaby, and his Springfield rifle to a teamster bound for Oregon.
Silas reached into his pocket and pulled out a small leather diary. He opened it, looking at the entry he had written three days after leaving Mercy:
October 20, 1878. Reached the outpost at Sweetwater. Heavy snow behind me. The wagon is gone. Mercy is surely gone with it. A tragedy of the trail. One cannot fight Providence.
Silas took a long sip of his whiskey. He had told everyone in town that his wagon had been attacked by drifters near the Sweetwater Cut, and that his poor, fragile wife had been carried off in the night while he was out hunting for meat.
He liked that story. It made him a tragic figure—a grieving husband who had fought valiantly against the wild frontier. It bought him free drinks from sympathetic miners and pity from the women at the boardinghouse.
"Another rye, Silas?" asked the saloon keeper, a fat man named Gidley, wiping the wooden counter with a filthy rag.
"Fill it up, Gidley," Silas said, dropping a silver dime onto the table. "It’s a hard thing for a man to sit in a warm room knowing his beloved wife is buried under five feet of Wyoming snow."
"Aye," Gidley agreed, pouring the dark liquid into Silas’s glass. "The prairie takes many a frail woman, Whitcomb. They just aren't built for the cold like us men."
Silas smiled behind his whiskey glass. "Frail" was not the word he would have used for Mercy, but it sounded good in a saloon.
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He intended to take the stagecoach south to Salt Lake City in the spring, start fresh with a new name, a new store, and eventually a new, petite wife who wouldn't eat him out of house and home.
He didn't know that miles to the east, in the dry creek bed where he had abandoned her, Mercy Whitcomb was currently building a stone fireplace inside her dugout.
