by Tripwire
Wilstach gave it thought. Finally he said, “Maybe you’re right.”
When Stryker came back and saw the bottle was empty he said, “You’re in, then.”
“Aeah,” Wilstach said.
“Twenty-five hundred apiece.”
“Right,” Boag said.
“I’m kind of glad you agreed to join up,” Stryker said. “Otherwise we’d of had to kill you. Couldn’t have you two tracking around loose knowing what you know.”
Boag said, “That gives a man a nice warm feeling, Mr. Stryker.”
3
The Johnson-Yaeger express company had an office on the pier, at the shore end of the dock. Tickets for passage were sold here, and shipments added to bills of lading. The warehouse for shipments was on an adjacent pier but the gold was held in the first building, probably because it was easier to guard: the building was small, it was exposed on all four sides, and it had only two doors, front and east side: There were windows here and there but they were barred with heavy cast-iron grilles bolted through to the inside of the timber studs. The front door gave access to the ticket window inside; behind the ticket counter was another wall with a door in it that led through to the back room where the gold was kept. That interior door had two armed sentries on it and the outside side door had two more. But there was more of a problem than that. The armed sentries weren’t all that formidable by themselves. The town was.
Hardyville was a town of armed citizens all of whom were aware of the gold in the Johnson-Yaeger office, some of whom owned shares in it, and a few of whom might be willing to die to protect it. No one could say how many would fight, but the gold belonged to the town as a whole so if you wanted the gold you had to be prepared to fight the whole town.
Johnson-Yaeger had built its express office on the pier deliberately, not only because it was the nearest place to the riverboat landing but also because it was surrounded on three sides by the bulk of Hardyville. From the office it was a seven-block gamut in any direction before you reached the outskirts. So you either had to run that gamut or swim, or use a boat. The only boats in Hardyville were the skiffs used by Californians to cross the river, and none was nearly big enough to carry a ton and a half of gold bullion. In fact all of them together couldn’t carry it.
The way Mr. Pickett had it worked out, the time when Hardyville felt safest was the time when the riverboat came and collected the gold and took it away. At that point the gold was no longer Hardyville’s responsibility.
But that was also the time when the gold was easiest to take.
Boag tied his mule to a rail in front of the Bella Union saloon. He left the heliograph on the saddle because he didn’t expect to need it again. He had a two-pound revolver under the skirt of his campaign jacket, rammed in his belt just aside from his spine. He walked the two blocks from the Bella Union to the Johnson-Yaeger pier, not hurrying, drawing a few incurious glances from pedestrians. Traffic was light on the street but what there was of it was converging slowly toward the riverboat pier because the rumor had gone around that the boat was due in this afternoon.
There was a knot of people around the waterfront when he got there. He posted himself in some shade across the street from the Johnson-Yaeger wharf and watched the fast brown river lash itself against the pilings. The sun was west of zenith and made painful reflections on the water.
He spotted Gutierrez and Stryker in the crowd, milling aimlessly, pretending they didn’t know one another. Gradually during the next half hour a dozen of Mr. Pickett’s rawhiders came along singly and by twos and melted into the throng awaiting the Uncle Sam. Empty freight wagons began to appear, drawing up at dockside ready to unload the flat-bottom hundred-foot vessel when she berthed.
He saw John B. Wilstach come down the street on his jackass and tie up in front of the assay office. A little while later the crowd’s mutter began to grow into a roar and he saw Mr. Jed Pickett walk in sight around the corner of the Inter Ocean Hotel, and that was the sign that the riverboat had been sighted from the roof of the hotel.
Wilstach was over near the express office and when he caught Boag’s eye he flashed his grin, filled with its rowdy flavorings. Boag pretended he didn’t see Wilstach. None of them was supposed to know any of the others.
Boag was thinking of ways to spend his twenty-five-hundred dollars. You didn’t just piss that kind of money away. You went to a town somewhere where they didn’t mind the color of your skin too much and you opened an establishment. A saddlery and blacksmith shop, he figured, because he’d been enough years in the Cavalry to know everything you had to know about repairing tack and mending gear and shoeing horses.
It wasn’t much of an ambition but then ambitions were new to him and he was feeling his way. In the army you just did your forty miles a day on beans and hay and you let the War Department worry about ambition; once you got your sergeant’s stripes you were as far up as a nigger soldier was ever going to get, but there was nothing wrong with being topkick of a good line troop of Buffalo soldiers, a man didn’t need any more ambition than that.
Now he was thinking vaguely in terms of Oregon or the British Columbia country. Need to get a long way away from this part of the world after today. And up in western Canada he’d heard around the barracks that they didn’t piss on black skin.
Boag was slow to hate, his temper took a long time rising, but he was getting ready to hate the army for what it had done to him.
The steam whistle shrieked across the desert and the crowd got up on its toes. The Uncle Sam wasn’t in sight yet; there was a last bend for her to come around.
You needed manpower, Mr. Pickett had explained to them all, and you needed to time it right. There would be a point when the ship was just about completely unloaded—that would be just short of sundown—and at that point most of the ship’s crew and the longshoremen-for-the-day would be ashore, and that was the point when you had to strike. It would take most of the twenty-eight rawhiders to hold back the crowd on shore while the rest moved the gold on board the boat and got the drop on whatever crew was left there.
“Moving the gold aboard,” Stryker had told Boag, “that’s you new boys’ job.”
It put Boag and Wilstach and the rest of the new recruits at the bottom of the gang’s ladder, but Boag was willing to be nothing more than a strong back for a day, for twenty-five-hundred dollars in gold. You had to spend five years in the army to earn that much pay and you never saw more than forty dollars of it in one hunk.
The tall structure of Uncle Sam hove in sight with the paddles grinding away at the water, straining; the current along here ran pretty close to sixteen knots. Boag tipped his shoulder against the weathered clapboard wall and settled down to wait.
4
The clerk in the Johnson-Yaeger office was a weary man with his hair all wet down, a bony pale man wearing sleeve garters and an eyeshade. Boag stood across the doorway from Wilstach, looking in. Two men were booking passage on the downstream leg; the clerk was chastising them for being tardy. “Most everybody booked two, three weeks ago.”
“You got room or ain’t you?”
“Deck passage only, Mister. You stand up all the way unless you can find a wagon to sleep under.”
“I’d stand barefoot on hot coals all the way to Yuma to get out of this God-forsaken country.”
The two men got their tickets and left, coming out between Boag and Wilstach. One of them brushed Boag’s shoulder and turned his head quickly, ready to apologize until he saw what Boag was. Then his face tightened. “Jesus Christ. Don’t you know no better’n to get in a white man’s way?”
Boag lowered his eyes. The man said, “You want to learn better manners, boy,” and hit Boag in the belly.
Boag let it cave him in. He sagged back against the wall holding his stomach in both hands. “Yes sir I sure got to learn better manners sir.”
“Christ you niggers ain’t worth the powder to blow you to hell.” The man turned to his partner. “You coming?”
His partner was bent over against the building because he was laughing so hard. Finally the two of them moved away.
Wilstach simmered. “I had my druthers—”
“Forget it, John B. It don’t mean nothing.”
“Tomorrow,” Wilstach said in anger.
“All right, tomorrow.” Boag watched the two men walking away. Not walking; swaggering. Wilstach was right. Tomorrow.…
Ben Stryker approached in his clawhammer coat. “Smart,” he murmured. “All set? Come on—it’s time.” And the three of them went into the office, Stryker pulling a shotgun out from under his coat and talking softly to the clerk and the two guards on the interior door. “All right, don’t get notions. Stand still and nobody gets theirselves hurt.”
Gutierrez backed into the room behind them and Boag heard the door click shut.
“Lord Jesus,” the clerk said. “Road agents.”
From the set of Stryker’s dreamy smile Boag knew enough to feel sorry for the two sentries if they even thought about being brave.
They didn’t. They let Wilstach take their guns. Stryker stood guard with his shotgun, his eyes half closed in wedges; the clerk and the two sentries sat down on the floor behind the clerk’s counter and Gutierrez held them there at gunpoint while Stryker went to the door and opened it and made hand signals in the twilight, and soon seven men came through the door and helped Boag break into the back room.
“Christ,” one of them said, “I wish to hell it was greenjackets instead of that stuff. Look at how much that stuff weighs.”
It was piled on pallets in stacks up to a man’s waist, four pallets—pyramids of gold bars stacked up crisscross like loose bricks. In the poor light it glistened. Boag’s breath got hung up in his throat.
“That’s fine,” Stryker was saying. “Nice and quiet.”
Boag looked over his shoulder and the dockside was calm: nobody had noticed anything. Yet.
“Throw all that on one buckboard, you gon bust the wagon,” Wilstach warned.
“We use two wagons,” Stryker said. “Here they come—get back from that door, hey?”
Boag heard the splintering crackle when crowbars broke the outer padlock hasp. The outside door of the freight room yawed open and two men, sentries, backed inside with their hands in the air. Three of Pickett’s old-timers came in prodding them with guns and after they had a quick look around the room one of them went back to the door and called outside:
“All rat, brang up ’at wagon.”
There was the loose rattle of buckboard tires against the dock planking. Stryker said, “Start heftin’, boys.” Boag reached for an ingot and went to lift it off the stack and nearly lost his balance. It was as if the thing was nailed down with railroad spikes.
“Jesus.”
Stryker said, “That’s what you boys here for. Bend your backs.”
Boag grinned at him and heaved. He got the gold bar off the stack and tucked it under his right elbow and heaved a second ingot up in his left hand and carried the two of them out the side door to the buckboard.
But he was breathing hard when he came back for the second load.
5
Eight of them moved the buckboard to the ship’s gangplank—Boag and two others on the yoke, pulling, and the other five at the back of the wagon with their shoulders to it, hauling up on the back spokes of the rear wheels. This was the risk part because now the whole damn town saw what was happening.
There had been a lot of argument back in camp because Stryker and some of the others didn’t see why you couldn’t just let the Johnson-Yaeger crew load the gold onto the boat themselves. That was where it was going anyway. But Mr. Pickett had ruled that out. The gold was generally one of the last things loaded aboard the ship because it had to be one of the first things unloaded at the Yuma end of the voyage. By the time they would have waited for the express company to carry its own weight aboard, the ship would have been crowded with passengers and crew. That was no good, Mr. Pickett said. The boat had to be as nearly unoccupied as possible.
It wasn’t just that it made a lot of sweat-work. It was that the whole town would see it happen.
That was why, Mr. Pickett had explained, you had to have a thirty-man army to carry it off.
Now Boag was heaving on the wagon tongue and the rest of them were yanking and shoving and the heavy wagon was creaking up the slight pitch of the gangplanks to the low-riding main deck of the Uncle Sam, and back at the shore end of the wharf Mr. Pickett’s men were strung across the pier in an armed line with shotguns and rifles holding back the curious and the angry. Hat peaks showed along most of the adobe and shingle rooftops: those were Mr. Pickett’s men too, their rifles stirring constantly so that everybody in the buzzing crowd knew there was a gun on him. Citizens were hurrying to and from the waterfront with ideas and plans and the news. The crowd got bigger and bigger and its noise became higher-pitched, hotter.
“Heave.”
The wagon lurched onto the deck. Boag dropped the tongue and they all reached for ingots. Boag said, “Don’t nobody drop one of these, likely it’d go right down through the deck.”
But there wasn’t time for making neat stacks. They just set the bricks down by the wagon in a heap and then they were dragging the wagon off the ship and shoving it off the side of the pier to make room for the new buckboard that was already half loaded with ingots back by the company office. The empty wagon floated a few yards downstream and got wedged on a sand bar. Boag and Wilstach were on their toes, running. Inside the office they shouldered into the trio of loaders and lent a hand finishing the wagonload. The light was very bad by now and Stryker had refused to light a lantern in the gold room—“You want to be an easy target?” They had to load the last bricks by feel.
They started to wheel the buckboard down the pier and a flurry of gunshots erupted. Boag threw himself flat on the planks. A bullet screamed off one of the gold bricks. Mr. Pickett had a surprisingly big voice for a man his size: it was calling across the wharves. “Get that damn fool.” There was a fusillade of shots, mostly from Mr. Pickett’s outposts on the rooftops, and Boag saw a man fall out of the second-story window of the assay-office building, and somewhere in the crowd a man started to scream; there was another volley of shots from overhead and the scream was cut off abruptly in its middle.
A ragged aftervolley, and things calmed down; the citizens were scrabbling for cover and the waterfront streets were emptying.
Somewhere back there in the town the local defenses were organizing themselves and it wouldn’t be long before an army of locals came charging down the alleys filled with determination and brimstone. There wasn’t a whole lot of time. Stryker was bellowing: “Heave. Damn you lazy bastards!”
Boag was heaving; he caught the flash of Wilstach’s grin. Mr. Pickett went forging past them up the gangplank at the head of a wedge of his men; they were heading straight up for the pilothouse on the Texas deck, where a couple of the men already had guns on the captain and the helmsman. There was another Pickett man in the engine room and now when Boag’s boots reached the gangplank he felt the heavy throb of the mechanisms under his soles.
Mr. Pickett’s sharpshooters were making their way down from the rooftops. Now another firecracker series of gunshots began: That was Mr. Pickett’s men, retiring, firing the occasional shot to keep the townspeople’s heads down. In the darkness the rifles shot out orange lances of flame. Boag had his fingernails clawed into the splintery wood of the buckboard tongue; he backed up the gangplank, his back arched over, hauling. The sharpshooters began to swarm up along the pier and a few of them lent their shoulders and finally the wagon was bumping onto the deck.
Stryker was talking: “Never mind unloading the damn thing. Somebody lash it down where it stands. Use a couple of them shore lines—there’s cleats all along the rail there.…”
Half Stryker’s words got eaten up in the explosions of gunshots. The town had rallied and a crowd pressed onto the wharf blazing away
at the boat: there was a lot of hysterical calling back and forth, a lot of confusion and rage; they were shooting into the Uncle Sam because they were too stupid to realize if they sank the riverboat it would cost more to replace her than the value of the gold they were trying to save. But bullets were punching through the woodwork and shrieking off the brass, and Boag threw himself flat into a companionway and lay there, streaming sweat.
Men were running along the deck and he heard Stryker somewhere: “Cut those fucking shore lines!” There was a high grinding racket as the paddlewheels began to roll; that was Mr. Pickett up in the wheelhouse with his gun muzzle pressed against the Captain’s throat.
Boag fished the revolver out of his belt and went to the corner of the companionway but he didn’t fire any shots; he had nothing against the townsfolk. Just keep your big ass out of sight, Boag.
The Uncle Sam was easing out now. Citizens in stupid panic were running out onto the pier firing their guns and Pickett’s sharpshooters on the high Texas deck were picking them off with cool calculation. Three or four of them flopped down on the pier before the rest got smart and wheeled for cover.
The riverboat backed into the current and began to turn her nose downstream; the Colorado picked her up and swept her away from the lights of Hardyville. After a bit Boag put his revolver away and went looking for Wilstach.
He found Wilstach at the rail just aft of the left-hand paddlewheel housing and Wilstach didn’t look happy or even relieved. Half a dozen of Pickett’s old-timey rawhiders were clustered loosely around Wilstach and three of the other new hands that Stryker and Gutierrez had recruited. Gutierrez was there, emitting the hoarse laugh he always barked out when he was nervous, and Stryker was coming down the stairs from the Texas deck behind two more of the new hands, a pair of Yuma Indians they’d recruited coming up along the riverbank last week.
Stryker said, “This most of them?”
“All of them,” Gutierrez said. “We left four back on the pier.” The nervous laugh. “I reckon the town’s having fun with them right about now.”
