“What’re you doin’ with Jim’s badge, Judge?”
“Jim’s gone,” I replied. “About everybody’s gone but you and me. There’s a new gold stampede to somewhere up the Powder Keg, and they skipped out of Three Deuces like fleas from a scalded pig.”
“So that’s why Joe wanted Meadowbloom.” Pete spat on the floor and shook his head. “I might’ve knowed that somethin’ like that was happenin’.”
“What’s meadowbloom?” I inquired, slipping the key in the lock while he was giving his attention to the problem of Joe’s departure.
“That squaw I had, Judge. Joe Severn bought her last night; I suppose so’s he could have her to cook for him on the trail. He cheated me on the price, me bein’ in jail and all, but I was just as glad to get rid of her. She was waterin’ my liquor and chargin’ me for high-class tarantula blood.”
By that time I had turned the key. “You mean the liquor you were sobering up on?” I asked, as I stepped back from the door.
“I was soberin’ up on the watered half,” Pete told me. “You ain’t goin’ to stay in town just to keep me in the hoosegow, are you?”
“You’re free now,” I said. Going into the office, I waited until he had joined me. “You have a meal or so due you, and the city of Three Deuces is squaring accounts by giving you a steak and some cheese.”
“That’s right nice.” While I was undoing the parcel, with a view to giving him his share of the food, he alarmed me by pulling a revolver I hadn’t noticed from where it hung from a nail. “Jim kept this safe for me,” he remarked, sticking the weapon inside the waistband of his trousers. “Yes, sir; I’d say you was both the right kind of gents.”
Giving him some matches, I parted company with him. There were still live coals in the kitchen range when I returned to the Golden West. Building up the fire, I cooked my steak on a stove lid. When I had eaten as much of the half-charred, half-raw result as I needed, I wiped my pocket-knife on a chunk of bread, dumped the refuse on the dying flames and went upstairs to pack.
The engineer in charge of the Glow Worm, the town’s biggest mining operation, was leaving his room as I strode down the hall. “Hello, Duncan,” I said. “Are you joining the stampeders?”
He put one of his bags down, so that he could take the cigar from his mouth. He was a lean chap, sporting auburn sideburns that emphasized his sturdy seriousness. Just now he looked disgusted.
“I’m not joining their fool stampede, but I’m leaving just the same. I haven’t got any crew.”
Most of the diggings around Three Deuces had been owner-operated. The problems connected with the larger mines had not previously been brought to my attention.
“Well, you’ve still got gold there; some, anyhow. Will you just leave it?”
“That depends on what they say when I wire Pan-Western. Maybe they’ll want me to go to Powder Keg, which may turn out to be really big, for all I know.”
“But what will you recommend?” I persisted. “Would you like to come back here and finish up?”
He put his cigar back in his mouth just long enough to make sure that it remained alight. “I’m a company man, Carruthers. What I like or don’t like hasn’t much to do with the case. Of course, they’ll hold onto the property, and of course it’ll be mined out eventually; but I hope the home office will understand that there isn’t a chance of my getting another crew unless they send in immigrant professionals. I’ll never find any American miners who’d be willing to stay here.”
“Why not?” I asked. “A job’s a job, you know.”
“Not to these people.” He shook his head at a fact he detested but recognized. “They don’t want to make money; they want excitement. We’ll say I returned with the hundred and ten men I need. Well, in a week five of them would be shot and the other hundred and five would leave when they found that there weren’t enough of them to draw ace gamblers and grade-? whores.”
He was on his way again when I remembered that I was the proprietor of a public transportation system. “The stage is leaving for Chuckwalla in about an hour if you need a lift, Duncan.”
“I’ve got a buckboard outside,” he called back. “The postmaster was asking about the stage, though.”
As my sole possessions were clothes, a few books, a sheath knife and a rifle, it didn’t take me long to prepare for the road.
Leaving my duffel in the lobby, I stopped at the post office on my way to the livery stable. George Volney was technically on duty, but he was engaged in sorting fishing tackle rather than mail.
“I’ve taken over the stage from Tom Cary,” I said. “Have you anything to go, George?”
Pulling his glasses down from their roost above his eyebrows, he found a mail sack. “Most of them didn’t take time to notify their loved ones that they had went. You ain’t coming back, I suppose.”
“No.” He looked contented, but I thought I ought to make the offer. “I’ll wait a little, if you want to ride out with me.”
“Thanks, but not a chance, Baltimore. Why, I’m being paid by the Federal Government, which is counting on me to be faithful to my sacred trust.”
“That’s a mighty fine thing to be,” I acknowledged, “but how are you going to manage it without a post office?”
“But I’ll have one for most a year,” he beamed. “It’ll take Washington six months to find out that this town has fallen into a mine shaft at Powder Keg, and another six for the P. O. Department to get around to closing this office up. I’ll ride my mule in to pick up my pay at Chuckwalla once in a while. In between times I’ve got some fishing to catch up on, and I’ll try a little prospecting myself. So long now.”
As a boy visiting the plantations of sundry relatives I had learned how to handle teams. Later on I had raced two- and four-horse rigs against those of other Maryland young bloods. A stagecoach was a little outside my experience, but I harnessed my two blacks, my two grays, and two chestnuts in the confidence that I would pick up whatever new tricks were necessary.
Having rounded the livery stable, I was wheeling along Bullion Street when I heard a shot behind me. It dismayed me to see Pete dashing my way with his six-shooter in his hand, but he promptly let me know that his intentions weren’t hostile.
“I want a ride,” he shouted. “Meadowbloom done stole my cayuse.”
“This coach takes passengers,” I said, when he had caught up with me, “but I’m not going to Powder Keg.”
“I ain’t neither, Judge.” Food had tended to sober him, without completing the job. “I couldn’t make it without a horse and outfit, and beside it’d be just my luck to get Meadowbloom back.”
He wanted to climb up on the driver’s seat with me, but I was afraid he’d get sleepy and fall off. “The rules of the line say passengers ride inside,” I explained.
He complied without protest but dismounted when I did so in order to pick up my luggage. His purpose was not to assist me, however. He started poking around the empty rooms of the hotel, and while I was loading the boot with my bags he emerged with a quart bottle of whiskey, over half full.
“There’s always some chicken head that gets so worked up over a stampede that he puts his pants on backwards or forgets his liquor,” Pete observed. “One for the road, Judge?”
“A good town marshal never drinks on duty,” I said. Unpinning my badge of office, I looked around for a closed window to throw it through. “Ask me after I’ve resigned.”
When I had attended to that formality, as well as the one Pete had suggested, I thought we were ready to leave. It was then that I heard a frantic shriek.
“Hey! Wait for me, Tom!”
It could not be said that Hangtown Jennie was making good speed toward us, but she was doing as well as her weight, billowing skirts and the bag she was carrying permitted. “That was — close!” she said, when I relieved her of her burden. “I fell — asleep on — the bar at the Lucky Miner. Then — when I — waked up — I couldn’t find — nobody nor nothin’. Even the rats
— have pulled out — for Powder Keg.”
Discovering that she had a small trunk at her lodgings, I solicited Rogue River Pete’s aid. By the time we had stowed the trunk away, her nerves had become restored to their usual robust good order.
“Sure, I think we ought to drink to Three Deuces,” I heard her bawl, as I urged the team into action. “It was a good old town in its day, even if it ain’t no more use now than a played-out plug of tobacco.”
In truth it looked sad enough. Clouds had closed over the little valley, bringing to early afternoon the soft gloom of twilight. A cool wind blew down the Little Buck, raising the ghosts on Bullion Street. Doors which nobody had bothered to close swung crazily back and forth. Windows with nobody behind them rattled, and the eaves responded with low moaning, in undertone to the flap of loose shingles.
Past the empty Bucket of Nuggets we went, and the abandoned city hall and another deserted building with a sign which boasted that the Three Deuces Democrat was “the newspaper of the West’s fastest growing city.” I could not muster a smile. It looked like the end of the world to me, with desolation where I was and nothing to hope for when I moved to other parts. And that mood stayed with me until Jennie raised her voice high in song.
My first camp was Fan Tan
Which tapped the Mother Lode;
From soft dirt and hard pan
A golden river flowed.
My yes,
And how my business growed.
The words were new to me but not to Rogue River Pete. His bellow supported Jennie’s hoarse soprano as we neared the end of the street.
Somebody shoved the cork back;
The golden river quit.
We jumped town, the whole pack,
And landed at Fair Hit.
Yoo-hoo!
And I made hay where we lit.
Turning into the stage road, I cracked the whip. The horses broke into a trot, and we sped past a welter of old diggings, piles of tailings and makeshift hoists to where trees overhung the gorge of the Little Buck. There was no sense in looking back, and Jennie’s song, whose tune I was now beginning to hum, advised me that I was in a region where the past was not a subject for elegiac reflection.
Clocks run down, and camps do;
The buffalo had went;
So Fair Hit was all through
When the railroad made Fort Dent.
Hi, boys!
We’re settin’ up our tent.
When Fort Dent was flat bust
They’d started up No Go.
We cleared out and kicked dust
To meet the cows, you know.
Well, sure
The beef had men in tow.
It had started to rain a little, but I pulled my hat down and grinned at the road ahead. It would lead me, as I was being reminded, through a land where men were as much at home in space as whales in the ocean. Perforce I hauled in on the reins as we neared the rickety bridge across the gorge. Once we were beyond it, though, I pushed the team until the road started its zigzag ascent of the Rinkatinks.
We left the rain in the valley, climbing in a silence which was only broken by the thudding of hoofs, the grating of metal rolling over earth and the creak of the great leather bands on which the coach rolled with the bumps. My passengers had given up song, and I took it that they had fallen asleep. For hours before I breathed the team at the crest of the pass, I heard no voice but my own, cursing when a wheel jarred into a particularly deep rut.
Darkness had already taken over in the pass, and the wind which reached me had first blown over the snowdrifts yet to be found in the high forest around us. Congratulating myself on the forethought which had led me to buy a pint, I put a lining of whiskey in my stomach to make a good home for the crackers and cheese to follow. It was while I was wrapping up what was left of this refreshment that Jennie stuck her head out of the coach.
“Are we there, Baltimore? This looks awful dead, even for Chuckwalla.”
“We’ve got a ways to go,” I told her. “Another three or four hours should see us there, I think.”
Lowering the leather curtain she had lifted, Jennie settled back again. “I’ll get some more shut-eye,” I heard her rumble.
No doubt she did, but she was awake again about an hour later. We were passing a large clearing known as Burnt Cabin Meadow when she burst forth with another stanza of her threnody for lost towns.
My next camp I ain’t seen,
But I’ll make out all right —
My first thought was that the voice which interrupted was an echo. But it shrilled again, and I halted the team.
“I’m coming as fast as I can,” the voice called. “Wait there, please.”
It was the nature of the voice rather than the words which left me hardly believing my ears. Jennie had made the same interpretation that I had. As I peered into the mist which rose above the meadow her comment smashed the silence.
“Christ on a raft, Pete, that’s a girl! She won’t do no good around here.”
Chapter 3
THE FIGURE WHICH STRUGGLED out of the waist-high growth of the clearing was undoubtedly feminine. A moment later the woman was peering up at me, holding a rifle.
“Is this the Three Deuces stage?” Although agitated, it was a clear, young voice.
“When it’s heading the other way,” I said. There was nothing to be made of the face through the veil of the night. “Would you mind not pointing your gun this way?”
“I really wasn’t aiming it, but I’m not used to carrying weapons.” To my relief she used the rifle to point back whence she had come. “Would you go with me to see if you can help my father? He isn’t well.”
My passengers had alighted, so I asked Pete to hold the horses. “What’s the matter with your old man?” I heard Jennie ask, while I myself was dismounting.
“I’m so glad there’s a woman here,” the girl said. “Do you know anything about medicine? Father’s had some sort of a spell.”
“I’ve made a lot of medicine in my day,” Jennie informed her. “If he’s a man, I guess I can tell whether he’s worth keeping or ready for the bone yard. Where’s he at?”
“Over by the spring behind the old burnt cabin.”
During this exchange I busied myself lighting the lantern which was a standard part of stage equipment. The young woman’s clothes showed that she had been through a lot that day. The expensive traveling dress extending below her cape was torn in a couple of places and the lower half of the cape itself was soaked from pushing through the dew-damp grass. There was nothing wrong with the fine, fresh complexion, however, nor with the wavy fair hair around it. I judged her form to be as pleasing as her face, though the folds of the heavy cape denied any exact knowledge. About twenty and tall for a woman, the girl was no more than a couple of inches shorter than myself.
“How did you manage to get stranded out here?” I asked, as we made for where the beaten-down grass marked her route of passage from the spring.
“It was silly of us,” she declared, “but when we got off the train we were told that the stage only ran every other day. We didn’t want to wait in Chuckwalla — ”
“I don’t blame you for that,” Jennie broke in. “They have livelier times in boot hill.”
“So we decided to hire a team, although all we could find was one mule,” the girl continued. “You see, we weren’t sure Three Deuces was just the right place for us, and we were in a hurry to look it over, so we could decide whether or not to have our heavy baggage sent on from Pueblo. Well, we’d hardly reached the edge of this clearing when the biggest bear I’ve ever seen and two cubs — ”
Stopping, I swung the lantern and held it so we could all see each other. “A grizzly or a cinnamon?” I said. “Did it charge you?”
“It didn’t get a chance,” she answered. “That mule took one look and went tearing off the road, over bumps and hollows and everything. We simply couldn’t hold him.”
“Mules make swift decisions
and stick to them.” I could imagine that wild ride and the jarring of the careening buggy. “Did he throw you out?”
“He stopped when we came to the trees, but he was still acting terribly nervous. Father thought the best way to calm him was to unharness him and let him graze a bit.”
“And then you never could catch him again,” I finished the story. “He’s back in Chuckwalla by now, so they’ll send out for the rig in the morning. How did your father get hurt?”
“He isn’t injured; he just collapsed. We followed that mule for hours, and then we gathered up our luggage, which had been dumped out while he was escaping from the bear. By then Father was complaining that he wasn’t feeling well, and by the time I found the spring behind the cabin, he was too ill to do anything but lie down. I heard at least one rig go by a couple of hours ago; but it was getting dark, and I didn’t know precisely who we might meet on a road like this. I was just as glad that the driver didn’t seem to hear me call.”
That would have been Duncan, and I smiled at the probable thoughts of that careful citizen, when he heard a woman’s voice hailing him. “I don’t blame you for being cautious, but what led you to chance running out to meet us?”
“Oh, when I heard her singing,” the girl said, “I knew it would be all right. As long as a woman was with you, I could count on you being safe, respectable people.”
“On behalf of Rogue River Pete, I thank you,” I murmured. “As for your father, I imagine the whole trouble is that he chased around after the mule before he’d become used to this altitude.”
I decided that I had guessed right when we came to where her parent was stretched out on a mattress made of their combined wardrobes. The long coat with which he was covered made it impossible to see anything but his well-made shoes and his face, which was that of a professional man in his middle forties. He was awake, but his only response to our inspection was to stare back with questioning, troubled eyes.
In my hip pocket I had the all-purpose medicament of the West, but something told me that the mention of whiskey would not be welcomed. Setting the lantern down where it would not cast light enough to make the label legible, I drew forth the flask.
Dead Warrior Page 3
