Lost Banshee Mine

by Jackson Lowry

  “Banshee, banshee, what’s this bee in your bonnet about banshees?”

  “Look, I’m not lying. They have the map. I saw it,” she said, then hastily added, “But I don’t know what it meant.”

  “I’ll pretend to believe you’re not lying. Don’t go gallivanting off. You stay here in Oasis till I find out if they have the map.” Jensen edged toward the livery and went inside. It took him longer to saddle up than usual. His arms were as rubbery as his legs, but new energy flowed through him to keep him going. He believed her that Cooley and his partner had the map and they were upslope.

  He rode out and wasn’t the least bit surprised the girl had hightailed it. Telling her to stay in Oasis meant she’d do the exact opposite. From what he knew about the territory, the only place she was likely to head, thinking to hide there, was Bisbee. If she had lied to him, finding her would be easy enough in a town like that.

  Weak and wobbly as he was, he started on a well-worn trail back to the Trafalgar Mine. Although he stopped several times to rest, Jensen still got there just before sunrise. He left his horse beyond the first fork in the road and trudged to the cabin, wary of being seen. With only two of them, they’d have to swap off acting as sentry. They were miners, though, and not inclined to think like army soldiers. He made his way to the cabin wall and found a sizable hole to peer through.

  It took a few seconds for him to figure out the layout of the room. Beds on either side with a table between. That was obvious. Part of the back wall was only leaning up from where he’d knocked it in before. But the lump in one bed had a blanket pulled over it. Try as he might, the other bed was just out of his field of vision. Bursting in and shooting the one sleeping man and expecting to get the other before he reacted lay beyond his skill at the moment. All day he had noticed his reflexes were slow, and he had fumbled as he rode. More than once the reins had slipped through his fingers. Killing the one man he saw was easy enough, but expecting the second to fall to his six-gun would push his luck.

  And luck it was, not skill. Not until he recovered. He cursed Mandy for shooting him in the back. They deserved his swift leaden justice, only it wasn’t going to be swift.

  He started to move around to find a second hole to check the position of the men when he heard a sound behind him coming from the path leading up to the mine. Not daring to move, he remained as still as a fawn stalked by a mountain lion. He held his breath so long, he began to get giddy from lack of air.

  Whoever was behind him came closer, whistling tunelessly. Jensen knew he hadn’t been spotted. Nobody tried to sneak up while whistling. He had played poker once with a tinhorn gambler who whistled as he played, not knowing he did it. If he’d had a better ear or an appreciation of music, he’d have been able to take the gambler for every dime on the table. As it was, he’d just shot him.

  Jensen moved like molasses, his hand dropping to his six-shooter. The dark figure on the path passed within ten feet and never saw him. When he heard the door creaking open, he pressed his eye to the hole once more. The man entered and lit a lantern. The pale yellow light showed both miners, the one sleeping and the one who’d just entered holding a length of hose.

  “Cooley, wake up. I’ve the hose from the mine.”

  Jensen kept from letting out a whoop of glee. He’d been right about the sleeping man. John Cooley. That meant the one who had passed by in the dark was England Dan.

  “So what?”

  “The mule. Mabel. She swallowed that entire burlap bag. We need to pour mineral oil down her gullet, or she’s sure to die.”

  “You do it. I’m too tired.”

  England Dan shook his partner. Jensen considered busting in, six-shooter firing. The pair of them were close enough together that missing one hardly mattered. He’d wing the other one. He slid his pistol from the holster and dropped it. His fingers were nerveless. He ducked down and picked up his gun. A few quick swipes got most of the mud off. He flexed his fingers and knew his chances of shooting both men had swirled away. His shoulder ached, his chest hurt and his gun hand was numb.

  “Get your bones out of bed. If we get the bag to pass, we can ride out right away.”

  “That mule’d eat anything.”

  “Mabel did. Now, get up.”

  “There’s a funnel in the shed. It’ll fit into one end of the hose. You can cram the hose down Mabel’s throat so I can pour in the mineral oil.”

  “That’s the idea.” England Dan stepped back and picked up the kerosene lamp.

  Jensen smiled. The light revealed the map spread out on the table. England Dan went to the map and pressed his finger down onto it. He said something to his partner about what was there.

  The two miners exited the cabin and hiked away toward the shed, where they stabled the complaining mule and a horse. Jensen stepped away from the cabin into the path and lifted his gun. His hand shook so hard, he braced it with his left hand. The muzzle wandered all over. Unless he was firing a Gatling gun, he’d never be sure of hitting either of the men. And their backs presented wide targets.

  Even as that thought entered his mind, the opportunity passed; they rounded the bend in the path and vanished from sight. Jensen slid past the half-open door into the cabin. They had taken the lamp with them, but he remembered the layout well enough to get around the small room in the dark. Two steps in took him to the table. He picked up the map with both hands.

  There wasn’t anything worth stealing, and he had the map. He ducked back out and held up the map to reflect some starlight. His smirk became a wide smile. This was the map. He had the map.

  “Poke, you’re gonna be right proud of your little brother.” Lars Jensen folded it and tucked it into his coat pocket. Hurrying as fast as he could in the dark without tripping and falling, he got back to his horse, pulled himself up and rode down the trail to the fork. The left trail returned to Oasis. The right meandered into the mountains. He took that, letting the horse pick its way.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  THE MULE BELCHED. Mineral oil leaked out around the hose England Dan had crammed down the beast’s throat and dribbled down to the straw spread over the shed floor.

  “Whew,” Cooley said, averting his face and holding his nose. “That smell’s enough to gag a maggot.”

  “It’s pretty bad,” England Dan agreed, “but the mineral oil ought to lubricate its innards all the way through so the burlap bag will pass by morning.”

  “If Mabel’s breath is that bad, what’s the smell going to be like when everything comes gushing out the back end?”

  “We don’t have to clean it up. We’re leaving the Trafalgar for good.” England Dan felt uneasy as he spoke. This was his mine. His and Cooley’s. They’d found the vein, assayed it and staked their claim in Oasis, when there had been a land office there. There were few enough things in his life he took pride in. His father thought he was a failure, and his brother, Syngin, refused to ever speak his name again. The last time they’d been seated at the same dinner table, Syngin had acted as if he were made of glass. He had stared right through England Dan and never answered a direct question or spoken to him.

  England Dan had seen similar behavior in India and hated it there, too. He had become an untouchable, the lowest of low in the caste system—someone so despicable, no one of good breeding would even acknowledge his existence.

  The Trafalgar Mine was his shining accomplishment, though the gold taken from it had failed to approach the amount he’d need to return to Britain and show up his brother. He knew the estate’s finances. If he placed a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of gold in a London bank, his net worth would be greater than the family fortune.

  “Why bother?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing,” said England Dan. “I was talking to myself.”

  “There’s no need for you to. That’s what a partner is for.” Cooley stepped out of
the shed into the cold, crisp night and sucked in a deep breath. “I was going to puke if I stayed in there another second.”

  England Dan agreed but had enough breeding not to agree. He checked the stars. It was a few minutes shy of sunrise. The high, thin clouds drifting through the sky were dry, all squeezed out of the rain that had pummeled them. The sky promised sunny days without showers to slow them down as they made their way through the mountains to Mule Springs.

  “You think the mule will be all right? I want to get another couple hours of sleep.” Cooley yawned widely and stretched.

  “We can both use some rest. Everything’s all packed. All we need to do is load it on the mule and get on the trail at sunup.”

  “About that,” Cooley said. “I won’t be able to ride Mabel with all the equipment weighing her down. If you ride that stallion you stole from Gonzales, that means I’m on foot.”

  “I didn’t steal the horse. I claimed it as a reward for saving his life. He never said as much, but he’d have given me Whirlwind if he’d been able to speak.”

  “Are we talking about the same Alberto Gonzales? That man would take food from his grandmother’s mouth if he thought it got him an inch closer to capturing an outlaw.”

  England Dan stopped and held out his arm to keep Cooley back. He whispered, “The door’s wide open. It wasn’t like that when we went to tend the mule.”

  “The whole cabin’s falling apart. So what?” Cooley pushed past and went inside.

  England Dan crowded close. He held up the lamp. The first thing he saw was the bare table. “It’s gone. Somebody took the map.”

  “What are you going on about?” Cooley was slower to notice. When he did, he let out an anguished cry. “The map! It’s gone!”

  England Dan cast the lamplight on his partner and studied his face. He wouldn’t have put it past Cooley to hide the map, thinking to find the mine and keep all the gold for himself. He’d as much as said the only way he would ever win Mandy back was to pile a ton of gold at her feet. But England Dan had followed his partner out of the cabin. He, not Cooley, had been the last one inside.

  The door was askew. It had been broken after they left. He lowered the lamp and looked at the dirt floor. Distinct new boot prints that didn’t match either of their sole prints came in and left. Walking slowly, he followed the trail. Whoever had stolen the map had spied on them and then gone back down the trail.

  “Is that the way the varmint went? I’ll rip his heart out! I’ll gouge out his eyes and torture him until the Apaches will sing songs about it!” Cooley got so het up he turned red in the face.

  “Calm down, Cooley. I need to think. Who’s likely to have taken the map?”

  “Mandy,” his partner muttered.

  “Those aren’t a woman’s boots. The foot’s bigger than mine.” He stepped beside a print. The track was a good inch longer, and he had a long foot.

  “Lars Jensen is dead. Mandy shot him down.”

  “I thought you said you killed him. Never mind. I’ll take your word that he’s dead. Who else knows we have the map? The cowboy you bought it from is dead. The only one who’d know or care is Gonzales.”

  “Why would he take it? How does he even know about it? That man had a mind so oriented toward catching Jensen, he was a compass needle never wavering from north.” Cooley lengthened his stride, intending to pursue the robber right now. England Dan stopped him.

  “We’ll fall into an ambush for sure if we go after the thief in the dark. It’s not long until daylight. Let Mabel get rid of that burlap bag she ate. We take what little equipment we might need and leave the rest so you can ride. Then we go after him.”

  England Dan held up the lamp and saw how the boot print circled around the path and disappeared in the distance. The only good thing he saw in this was that Big Ear wasn’t the thief, not unless he wore white man’s boots. And the chances that Big Owl had swooped in to steal their map were less than drawing to an inside straight.

  They returned to the cabin. England Dan tried to sleep but couldn’t. Cooley was snoring in a few minutes. England Dan worked over their plans and how everything had changed in the span of a few minutes. If the mule hadn’t gotten hungry and swallowed the bag, clogging her intestines, none of this would have happened. Then he considered that whoever took the map would have likely gunned them down as they slept. Their luck was good or bad, depending on how he looked at it.

  Right now he had to believe a run of bad luck was plaguing them.

  He finally drifted off to fitful, nightmare-racked sleep. When he awoke, it was to the mule braying loudly. Cooley already had left his bunk. England Dan stretched, tapped his boots to be sure nothing had crawled in overnight, then pulled them on.

  Cooley bellowed from outside, “It’s past sunrise. Get out here. We’ve got a trail to follow.”

  He stepped out. Cooley was already mounted on Mabel, and he held the reins to the stallion for his partner. A quick look at the sky showed only a few puffy white clouds. “It’s not going to rain anytime soon. Maybe by this afternoon. That’ll get us going on the trail.”

  “I wish we had ammunition.” Cooley tapped the butt of his pistol.

  England Dan had no reason to check his. He knew better than to get into a gunfight with only a single round. More than ammo, they needed supplies for the trail. It was a two- or three-day ride across the Superstition Mountains into New Mexico Territory. That might drag out if they had to chase the map thief much longer, but he figured they were all headed for the same location. Mule Springs was the starting point for the map.

  No Shadow had said so, and from what England Dan remembered of the map, he agreed.

  They set out down the trail. As he thought, the thief had mounted and ridden away, taking the fork away from Oasis and into the mountains. He settled in for a ride, but Cooley insisted on yammering away.

  “We’ll catch him soon enough, won’t we, Dan? It looks like the tracks are fresh. Might be he curled up somewhere under the stars to catch some sleep last night. Thieving must be hard work, after all.”

  England Dan grunted and rode a little faster. To his disgust, Mabel matched the stallion’s pace. Eating and excreting a burlap bag sat well with the mule.

  “We might pick a different way of going about this whole matter,” Cooley rambled on. “Rather than overtake the highwayman and force him to return the map, why not let him go on and do our work for us?”

  “What do you mean?” England Dan listened with half an ear. Something about the tracks bothered him, and he couldn’t put his finger on what it was.

  “We keep trailing him all the way to the mine. He finds it, we take the mine.”

  “We’d be the claim jumpers then.”

  “No, no, you got that wrong. The Lost Banshee Mine is ours! We came by the map legitimately. He’s the crook. But we let him think it’s his and swoop in like an eagle on a running rabbit and take it away. He does the work. It’s only fair. That’d be payback for him stealing the map from under our noses.”

  “How good are you with a lariat?”

  “What? What are you going on about, Dan? You know I can’t spin a lasso to save my life.”

  “The thief finds the mine. How do we take it from him? I have a solitary round in my gun. You’re as dry as the Sonoran Desert when it comes to ammunition. If we don’t rope and hog-tie him, how else are we taking the mine from a man who likely has a belt filled with spare ammo?”

  “You don’t know how well armed he is. He might have become a sneak thief because he doesn’t have any more firepower than we do. He couldn’t shoot us in our sleep because he didn’t have the bullets, so he crept in while we were gone and took the map. That’s possible, isn’t it?” Cooley grumbled a bit more and fell silent. He recognized the truth in the argument and hated the way it destroyed his wild harebrained scheme.

  A half mile fart
her down the trail, England Dan came to a halt. He hopped down to the ground and ran his fingers over the tracks in the soft earth.

  “You lose him? I thought you were the almighty talented frontiersman, the tracker who couldn’t be thrown off the trail? Now, my relative Daniel Boone, he—”

  “There’s someone else ahead of us,” England Dan interrupted.

  “Two riders? You mean he has an accomplice?” Cooley came back and leaned over as far as he could while remaining on mule back to study the prints England Dan found.

  “I don’t think so. The second rider is an hour or two behind our map thief.”

  “How far behind are we?”

  “Another hour. We’ll overtake the sneak thief in a couple hours, but we’ll find the other rider before that.” England Dan paced alongside the trail. “He’s not riding to catch up. He’s following the tracks, too.”

  “We’ve got competition for the map,” Cooley blurted. “We have to speed up, Dan. We can’t let somebody else get the map!”

  “What’s it matter who has it if it’s not us?” England Dan paced along a few more yards, measuring the strides of the horses ahead of them. One was barely a pony. The other, ridden by their thief, was a full-grown horse. He kept walking and found evidence alongside the road. A tiny pile of fresh horse dung just now drew flies. It had come from a tiny horse. Or one needing a dose of mineral oil.

  “I bought that map fair and square. It’s not right if somebody—two somebodies—steal what’s mine.”

  England Dan mounted and kept a sharp eye on the trail. A half hour later, he drew rein and shook his head.

  “What’s wrong now?” Cooley turned belligerent. “You’re finding new reasons not to keep going?”

  “I want to find the mine,” he said. “But you’re right about a new complication entering the picture. See that?” He pointed to a section of cut-up sod.

  “One of the horses went dancing around there. So?”

  “So it’s a third horse. The rider came in from the west.” England Dan closed his eyes and tried to picture the mountains in this area. He had gotten lost before, proving he didn’t know the terrain as well as he should, but the new rider had come from an area he knew better than the rest. “He rode in from Bisbee. That’s the only town in that direction.”