The High Graders

by Louis L'Amour

  “Is he?” Babcock asked skeptically. “You’d better be almighty sure.”

  Hollister was on edge and belligerent. He had always been a fool, trying to spend with the spenders, gamble with the sharpers, test his strength with the strongest. Sooner or later he would get himself killed, and others with him. Mike Shevlin wanted nothing between himself and Hollister but distance.

  “I hear Gentry killed Eli Patterson?” Mike said it like a question.

  The atmosphere of the loft altered in some subtle fashion. With years of violence and tension behind him, Mike knew when he had touched a nerve, and he had now.

  “Never did figure that out.” Babcock was honestly puzzled. “It wasn’t like Eli to carry a gun.”

  “Whoever says he carried a gun,” Shevlin replied shortly, “lies. Eli was a Quaker, and he lived by it.”

  “You can’t be sure of that,” Hollister protested.

  “I knew him.”

  “The hell with that! You never know a man until he’s pushed. All right, you came here to sleep, so sleep. We don’t want any argument.”

  Shevlin walked to a pile of straw, pulled some out and scattered more over it, then lay down with his slicker stretched over him.

  As he relaxed he thought of Eli Patterson. Patterson had lived by his code, and so must Shevlin live by his, different though they might be. In the last analysis it was all a man had to live by. Patterson, a man of peace, had died by the gun. It remained to see how Shevlin would die. This was what he was thinking as his eyes closed. And this was in his mind when he awakened to broad daylight and an empty loft.

  He climbed down the ladder and stirred the few coals into a fire. Someone had been considerate enough to leave the coffeepot among the coals. The coffee was hot as hell itself, and black as sin.

  Well, now that he was here, what was he to do? What could he do but what he had always done? He would bull his way in, worry the ones who had something to cover up, and force them into some kind of a move. When men moved hastily they often made mistakes. ...

  He would start with Mason. He saddled up and rode into town.

  When he sta4 his horse at the livery stable he ignored the hostler who sat tipped back in a cane-bottomed chair chewing the stem of an ancient pipe. He was a thin old man with a narrow face and shrewd blue eyes that told nothing.

  Shevlin walked to the door of the stable and stood there, lighting a Spanish cigar. As his hands cupped around the match, he spoke without turning his head. “You’re a long way from home, Brazos.”

  “This here’s home, an’ don’t you be a-spoilin’ it for me!”

  “All I want is information.”

  “In this town? That’s the last thing you’ll get.

  This here town is scared. Ever’body rollin’ in money, an’ ever’body scared.”

  “Have you heard the name of Jack Moorman?”

  Shevlin asked.

  “That’s one of the things scares ‘em. Seems he was beat to death in the street one night, but nobody seen it, an’ nobody believes it.”

  “Any talk about it?”

  “Not no more. On’y once in a while somebody gets liquored up. Seems ever’body in Rafter suddenly set out to get rich, an’ the on’y two honest men in town got stiff-necked about it. Moorman was one of ‘em, so he got himself killed ... handy-like.”

  “And the other was Patterson?”

  “Inquest ruled it a fair shootin’,” Brazos said, “but nobody paid much mind. Nobody went to the inquest, an’ you never heard less talk about anything. Seemed like they was all too anxious to get their fists into the honey-pot.”

  “They say Gentry did it,” Shevlin said.

  “Why, now. He was the one showed up at the inquest an’ took the blame.”

  “You don’t think he did it?”

  “You take a hostler now—he’s like a bartender or a waiter,” was the way Brazos answered. “Folks just naturally talk as if they wasn’t there at all, or else was born without ears. Folks get so used to ‘em they even forget they’re around.

  “I heard the shot that killed Patterson,” Brazos went on. “Heard it plain—only shot fired that afternoon—but at the time I thought nothing of it. Some drunk is always shootin’ around.

  “I didn’t have no time to get curious, even if I was of a mind to. Gentry, he come ridin’ in about that time. He’d promised to top off a bad horse for Clagg Merriam, so he took off his coat and his gun belt and hung them on the nail by the stall.

  “Whilst ever’body was at the corral, I took a look at Gentry’s new guns. They was Smith and Wessons, and I’d heard tell of ‘em, but never looked at ‘em before. Mind you, I’d no idee anybody had been shot.

  “Mike, Gentry’s guns was full-loaded and clean as a whistle. There’d been no time for him to clean ‘em after that shot was fired ... couldn’t have been more than a minute until he came riding in, and he was in plain sight for a few seconds before that. About ten minutes later somebody came runnin’ in and said Patterson was dead.”

  “Who did they say did it?” Shevlin asked.

  “Nobody had any idee. Then along about sundown it got around that Gentry’d done it, and had turned himself in to the sheriff. There was a hearin’, an’ Mason testified he seen it an’ it was fair shootin’.”

  “Thanks, Brazos. You keep your ears open, you hear?”

  A buckboard driven by a girl was turning in to the door as he spoke.

  “You better cinch up tight, boy,” Brazos said, “you’re ridin’ in rough country.”

  ****

  MIKE SHEVLIN, carrying his duffle, crossed the street to the Nevada Hotel without glancing back. Had he turned, he might have seen Brazos gesture toward him, although he could not have heard the words that were spoken.

  “Ma’am,” Brazos said in a low tone as he helped the girl from the rig, “you ever need he’p, you talk to that man there. If I was headin’ into grief, there’s no man I’d rather have ridin’ point for me. When that man wants to go somewhere an’ there ain’t no hole, he just naturally makes himself one.”

  Mike Shevlin registered at the Nevada House, where the clerk was a stranger, then he went upstairs to his room and dropped his gear. He had finished shaving and was buttoning his shirt when there was a light tap at his door.

  His .44 Smith and Wesson Russian lay on the bureau. He picked it up, draping the towel over it as if about to dry his face, and then he said, “All right, come in with your hands empty.”

  The door opened and the girl from the buckboard stepped in, closing the door swiftly behind her.

  She was slender and tall, her cheekbones were high in her triangular face, her lips a shade full. She was beautiful, but hers was by no means an ordinary beauty, nor was she pretty in the accepted sense.

  “Mr. Shevlin, I am Laine Tennison, and I am here to talk business.”

  “Sit down,” he suggested, “and start talking.”

  “Brazos is my friend, Mr. Shevlin. The only friend I have in Rafter ... unless it is the people with whom I am staying.”

  He said nothing, waiting and wondering. She was a lady ... he had known very few in his lifetime, but this was, definitely, a lady. She looked it, carried herself like one, and dressed it—not quite plain for the times, and with style.

  “Mr. Shevlin, I want you to find out why certain men want to buy the Sun Strike Mine from me.”

  He tucked the pistol behind his belt, her eyes following it. Then he folded the towel and placed it on the bar beside the bureau.

  “No one knows that I own that mine, Mr. Shevlin, and I do not want them to know. My grandfather bought the mine from the original locator. He bought it through a company he controlled, and his name did not appear. I inherited the mine.”

  Her hair was auburn, with soft waves, her eyes green and slightly slanted. Rather like a cat’s eyes, but large.

  “Nobody knows you own that mine?” Mike Shevlin asked.

  “Only Brazos ... and now you.”

  �
�You spoke of the people you are staying with. Don’t they know?”

  “Dottie Clagg is an old friend—we went to school together in Philadelphia. But she believes I am here for my health.”

  “Clagg?”

  “Her husband is Dr. Rupert Clagg, a physician and surgeon.”

  “Related to Clagg Merriam?”

  “A second cousin, I believe. It was Mr. Merriam who influenced them to come to Rafter, I think.”

  Mike Shevlin combed his hair as he looked in the mirror. He knew too little of what was going on here. He felt that he was like a blind man in a strange room filled with objects unfamiliar to him, whose design had no meaning for him.

  Clagg Merriam had been a silent partner of Eli Patterson’s, but he had his hand in half a dozen enterprises. He had owned this hotel, and probably still did. He speculated in cattle, too.

  Shevlin remembered him now, a tall, too handsome man who dressed well and never seemed to do anything, yet actually did a great deal.

  “If you’re that cautious,” he said to the girl, “you must have a reason.”

  The green eyes looked directly into his. “I will be honest with you, Mr. Shevlin. I sent a man here to investigate. He was killed. They said it was an accident. He had gone to work in the mine and somebody dropped some drill steel down a manway when he was coming up the ladder.”

  That was an ugly way to die. In the narrow limits of the manway there was no chance of escape from falling drills—and small chance of accident, when it came to that. His miner’s lamp would have been clearly visible, and one was supposed to call “Timber!” before dropping anything. Or at least that had been the rule in hard-rock mines where Mike had worked.

  “Why would they want to kill him?” he asked.

  She opened her bag and removed an object wrapped in a handkerchief. She unfolded the handkerchief and placed a chunk of ore in his hand.

  It was heavy, and it was literally cobwebbed with gold. High-grade ... high-grade ore. “If there’s much of that, you’re making a mint,” he said.

  “That is just the point, Mr. Shevlin. The mine barely pays for itself. There are some months when it does not even do that. That piece of ore came to me in a package with no return address and no comment. It was then I sent the man to investigate.”

  She hesitated. “Mr. Shevlin, when I was growing up I lived in California and Nevada, where there were mining towns and cattle towns, and in coming here I passed through several such towns. I do not believe I have ever seen a town so prosperous as this one.”

  “What is it you want me to do?”

  “I believe a rich strike has been made, and that my gold is being high-graded ... stolen. I want you to find out if this is true; and if it is, who is buying the gold, and where it is kept. Then”—she lifted her eyes to his—“I want you to stop the high-grading and recover the gold.”

  He gave her an incredulous smile. “I don’t know what Brazos told you, Miss Tennison, but I don’t believe any one man could do what you ask.”

  “You can do it.”

  He crossed to the window and looked down at the town. Until she mentioned the town’s prosperity, he had not given it a thought. His mind had been too preoccupied with his own weariness when he arrived, and with the problem of Eli Patterson; yet some subtle atmosphere about the town had worried him, and now he knew what it was.

  Brazos had phrased it perfectly: Everybody rolling in money, and everybody scared.

  But how did you fight corruption when all were corrupt?

  Turning back from the window, he asked, “You said somebody wanted to buy the mine?”

  “The first offer came from Hollister and Evans. That was quite a while ago. I refused to sell. The second came a few months later from a man named Mason. He wished, he said, to close down the mine and reactivate the Rafter H cattle company.

  “The Mason offer was repeated a short time ago, but the letter was from the Rafter Mining Company, saying their man Mason had made a previous offer. It was simply repeated in the same terms.”

  “Who signed that letter?”

  “A man named Ben Stowe.”

  Ben Stowe!

  The last time Shevlin had seen Stowe he was living in an abandoned homesteader’s shack, rustling a few head of cattle, and riding with a wild bunch. And now he was offering to buy a mine!

  “What you say about the town,” he said softly, “is true—it is prosperous. My guess would be that everybody connected with the mine is high-grading, if the stuff is actually there, and every place of business in town is taking gold in trade, or buying it. As to recovering your gold, I’d say it would be impossible. By now it must be lost in the normal channels of trade.”

  “I do not think so.”

  She leaned forward, her hands in her lap.

  “Mr. Shevlin, I believe all that gold is right here in Rafter. I believe someone with capital—perhaps the people who wish to buy the mine—are buying the gold from the stores and holding it. I believe they intend to buy the mine with my gold, then dispose of the remainder after they own the property.”

  She got to her feet. “Mr. Shevlin, gold is not easy to conceal; and as you undoubtedly know, the gold from no two mines is exactly the same. It is difficult to dispose of gold without it being known, and no sales have been reported from this area, no gold has appeared that cannot be accounted for.

  “You think I am only a foolish girl, but believe me, Mr. Shevlin, my grandfather treated me like a son in many respects, and among other things he taught me a great deal about business, and a great deal about gold and the marketing of gold.

  “The Pinkertons checked on gold sales for me, beyond what I could do through the normal channels of exchange. I do not believe the Pinkertons could find out what is happening here. I believe it will take somebody with local knowledge.”

  He glanced at her with respect. This was a girl who knew her own mind, and was uncommonly shrewd along with it.

  High-grading, the stealing of rich ore from a mine or smelter, was always difficult to control. Opening a change room where the miners changed from their digging clothes to their outside clothes could stop some of it, and checking lunchboxes or canteens could, too, but where there was high-grade ore there would always be ways to steal it.

  If what she believed was true, the men who controlled the working of the mine must have deliberately permitted the miners their chance to high-grade in order to involve them, and the community itself, in the crime of high-grading. Then the operators of the mine simply kept the vastly greater amount of gold for themselves, allowing only a small amount to go through legitimate channels, and this small amount was bought from the storekeepers to keep it out of circulation.

  It required capital, rigid control, and some shrewd operation to make it work. Once the mine was owned by the operators of the high-grade ring, then they might take other steps; certainly they must realize such an operation could not long continue.

  “I will pay, Mr. Shevlin,” the girl went on. “I will pay well. I will give you ten per cent of all you recover, and if my calculations are near the truth the recovery might reach a half a million dollars.”

  “You’d have to trust me. What’s to keep me from locating the gold and keeping it for myself?”

  She smiled at him. “Mr. Shevlin, you have a very bad reputation. You are said to have stolen cattle, it is said that you are a gunfighter, that you have engaged in public brawls, that you were once friendly with the very men who are robbing me. I have heard all that. Nevertheless, I believe in you.”

  She gathered her skirts and stepped to the door. “You see, Mr. Shevlin, Brazos was not the only man who told me you could be trusted. Long ago my uncle told my grandfather, when I was present, that there was one man in Rafter who could be trusted under any circumstances. He said that no matter what anybody said, Mike Shevlin was an honorable man, and an honest man.”

  Now who the hell would say a thing like that about him? Turning away, he walked to the window again to k
eep her from seeing how much her words had touched him.

  “Your uncle can’t have known me very well,” he said.

  “He thought he did, Mr. Shevlin, and he believed in you. I think you knew him very well, Mr. Shevlin. His name was Eli Patterson.”

  Chapter 3

  THE STORM had broken. Scattered clouds raced across the sky, and between them the stars shone like the lights of far-off towns.

  He stood alone on the wet street, with enemies all about him. It was after midnight, and only a few lights looked out upon the rain-darkened walks, the muddy streets, and the blank faces of the false-fronted stores across the way.

  Now, at night, it might have been any little western town, but it was not just any town. It was a town built on deceit and theft, a town corrupted by its own greed, a town that had arrived at this point without realizing how deep were the depths into wh it descended.

  Mike Shevlin looked gloomily from under the black brim of his hat. He looked upon the town with no hatred. Here his best friend had been killed, brutally shot down in an alley because he had the courage to stand against evil. But Mike Shevlin knew all too well how easy it was to accept that first dishonest dollar, and he knew all the excuses a man could give himself.

  After all, a man would say, the gold comes out of the ground, why shouldn’t I get some of it? Everybody else is getting it, why shouldn’t I? There were a multitude of easy excuses, useful in all such cases; but the trouble was that evil can plant a seed, and the seed can grow. From easy acceptance of a minor misdemeanor, one can come to acceptance of a minor crime, and from a minor crime to a major one. And this town had now accepted robbery on a large scale ... perhaps larger than any one man knew, except for the leaders. And they had accepted murder.

  Thereby came fear. For murder breeds murder, and those who have killed once for gain, will kill again; and those who have agreed to ignore a murder, will ignore another if it is to protect some small security of their own—property, or guilt they themselves possess.

  Mike Shevlin knew this because there had been a time when he had himself been guilty. It had seemed a great lark to run off a few steers to sell for a spree in town. And then suddenly he had wondered how he would feel if those had been his father’s cattle, or his own.