Slocum #396 : Slocum and the Scavenger Trail (9781101554371)

by Logan, Jake

  “You have thirty feet of fuse?”

  “More than enough,” Slocum said.

  “Set it for thirty. Me and the boys’ll be back in an hour to make sure you’ve done the work.”

  Slocum and Baransky both threw up their arms to protect their faces when Plover fired his rifle. The report in the enclosed space was deafening and the slug bounced off a couple walls before spending itself in a side wall. Chunks of rock had splintered. Slocum touched his cheek where a razor-sharp piece had left a shallow cut.

  “Just to get you workin’,” Plover said, backing off. When he was far enough away, he spun, his men leading the way to the central chamber.

  “What do we do now?” Baransky asked.

  Slocum couldn’t think of anything that would get them free, so he picked up a hammer and held it out to the mining engineer.

  “You want to hold the chisel or swing the hammer?”

  Slocum ended up using the ten-pound sledgehammer as Baransky positioned the bit at the spots he thought best. An hour later, they sank to the floor, covered in sweat and panting with effort. The lack of air made them both dizzy. For his part, Slocum found it hard to lift his arms after the hard work of using the hammer. The ring of steel on steel filled his ears and made thinking harder.

  “We’re going to die in here,” Baransky said in a neutral tone, showing he was giving up. “Melissa and Stephen are safe, though. They have to be or this isn’t worth it.”

  “Did you figure to get rich prospecting?” Slocum asked. He mopped his face with his sleeve, then ran his fingers over his empty holster. There had to be something he could do without needing a six-shooter.

  “I wanted the money for the operation. In Europe,” Baransky said in his dull voice. “We didn’t have much since the last coal mine I worked for went out of business. The owner stole the money and lit out for California.”

  “You were on his trail?” Slocum perked up. This would show more determination in Baransky than he had seen.

  “He died somewhere on the bank of the Red River. Got word of his body floating north into Canada, but I never saw it. But what does it matter if I ever found him? The money he owed me would be long spent.”

  “You really believed you’d get lucky?”

  “Lucky? Mining’s not about luck. Attention to details. Knowledge. Having a bit of intuition to know when to make a bigger gamble and when to back out. I’m a good engineer, not some wild-eyed prospector thinking he’s the one who’ll get rich when the rest around him starve.”

  Slocum looked at Baransky with new admiration. The man understood both the lure of mining and how to approach it for a better chance to make decent money.

  “You didn’t buy a treasure map or anything foolish like that?”

  “I have a few photographs. Oh, not on me. In my luggage. They were with my gear, but I don’t have any notion what happened to them.”

  “Photographs?”

  “Of the rock structure near the gold strike. If the locations are accurate, the prospectors are going away from the mother lode, not toward it. Such an opportunity! I could get enough for my wife’s surgery.”

  “So you were broke?”

  Slocum read the answer in the man’s bleak expression.

  “I had to do something, and there wasn’t a job to be had near Philadelphia. Nowhere in Pennsylvania, in fact. Why not roll the dice and go for the big strike? Clara needed the operation. Poor, poor Clara.”

  “Poor you, especially since you think you can read where the gold is in the photographs,” Slocum said dryly. Secret treasure map, photograph, it didn’t matter. To Slocum they were one and the same, though the photos might be cheaper since they could always be tacked on the wall for decoration after they proved worthless.

  “Didn’t say I found gold there, only a better place to look. I’m an engineer, Slocum. The science I employ gives better odds but not a surefire find.”

  That made some sense. Hunting for blue dirt increased the odds of finding gold. Slocum had seen this work more than once for the old-timers while the greenhorns made their claims based on nothing more than a gut feeling and a dream.

  “We’ve got the holes drilled,” Slocum said. “Do we actually set the charges?”

  “Plover will check. If we don’t, we’re goners.”

  Slocum got to his feet and began sliding sticks of dynamite into the three-foot-deep holes. It felt as if he’d stuck his head into a noose as he tamped the holes shut after crimping a blasting cap and attaching a length of black miner’s fuse to each charge.

  He exchanged a silent look with Baransky, then began splicing the black fuses sticking out of the rock wall to a single one that he unrolled back into the tunnel, walking toward the miles-distant rock chambers where Plover and the rest of Trueheart’s gunmen waited.

  16

  “Hold it right there,” came the cold words. Slocum looked over at Baransky, the intense carbide light turning his face into shadows and planes. He might have been a ghost he appeared so pale. In his gut Slocum worried that they’d both be real ghosts soon enough.

  “You sure they set the charge right?”

  Slocum turned his light past Plover, who blocked the way with his rifle leveled, and saw Trueheart. The man was dressed like a peacock, in a flashy green cutaway, purple vest, and striped pants. All that was missing was an appropriate hat but the tunnel ceiling was too low for that. Slocum had to walk hunched over to keep from banging his own head against rock. Trueheart matched his six-foot height and then some.

  “It’s properly planted,” Slocum said when he saw that Baransky was too frightened to speak. He knew what Trueheart showing up now meant.

  “Then light the fuse and let’s run like hell.”

  “Boss, wait,” Plover said. “We’d better head out first, then have them light the fuse when we’re clear of the tunnels.”

  “Where’s the fun in that? Race you!”

  Slocum and Baransky exchanged looks. Trueheart was as crazy as he dressed. His plan matched his looks and behavior, but Slocum remembered the flood of equipment into his personal town and how the scavenger king had sent out bands of men to plunder along the trail over the pass. And then there was Sally and her whorehouse. He might act crazy, but he was a cold-blooded killer.

  “You want it lit? Give him a head start,” Slocum said, pointing at Baransky.

  “All for one, one for all. Light the fuse.” Trueheart’s words came out cold and precise.

  Slocum reached into his vest pocket, found his tin of lucifers, and lit one. It flared pale and almost invisible in the glare of the miner’s lamps. He inclined his head slightly to warn Baransky, then he put the burning tip to the fuse. It sputtered for a moment, then the magnesium in the waxy black fuse flared.

  “Yee haw!” cried Trueheart. He pounded down the tunnel, followed by Plover and two guards.

  Slocum didn’t know if he could run a full mile in the stuffy tunnel, but he had no choice unless he pinched off the fuse. To do that would bring Trueheart back—Trueheart and his murderous henchmen. While he ran, Slocum heard Baransky behind him, huffing and puffing, cursing now and then as he slipped, but keeping up. The run stretched to eternity, taking on an eerie quality in his carbide light, which bounced around as his head bobbed.

  Then he burst into the huge cavern. Trueheart’s men had already left. From the gasping and occasional curses, Slocum knew that Plover had fallen behind his boss by some distance.

  “Can you make it the rest of the way?”

  Slocum looked back down the tunnel in the direction of the charges they had planted, then knew he could never get back before the explosion. He had measured off somewhere between twenty and thirty feet of fuse. That gave twenty to thirty minutes before the detonation.

  “Keep goin’,” gasped Baransky. “I’ll keep up.”

  Slocum got his arm around the man’s shoulders and herded him forward. How long had it taken for them to get this far? He didn’t know. He ought to have measured t
he fuse better, checked his watch to know the time of detonation.

  “Ahead,” panted Baransky. “I see the mouth of the—”

  The explosion caused the ground to lift and buckle under their feet. Slocum crashed into the mining engineer and lay atop him as a rush of debris blasted above him. The shockwave stunned him, but he wondered why it wasn’t hot gas searing his back.

  As the dust began to fall from the roof, he realized a mile of tunnel had cooled it. Or was it something more?

  “Water,” he said. He dragged Baransky to his feet. “The tunnel’s flooding!”

  Gasping, they burst out into fresh air. They fell into the dirt in the middle of a ring of Trueheart’s men. Slocum expected Trueheart to give the order to shoot them, but a look of awe on the man’s face told how transfixed he was by the blast.

  “Listen,” Trueheart said so softly he could hardly be heard. “We have changed nature. We are like gods. I am a god!” He threw his arms into the air and spun in gaudy circles.

  Indians protected their crazies, thinking they were touched by the gods. Seeing Trueheart and his victory dance caused Slocum to believe they were right.

  “Water? The roar,” Baransky got out. He stood with hands on his knees, bent over and still gasping for air. Outside the air was fresh, cold, invigorating. “It’s going away?”

  “The underground river is draining,” Slocum said.

  “How’s that possible?”

  “Let’s find out. You two, ahead of us, and be quick about it.” Trueheart motioned for Plover and another guard to prod the two back into the tunnel.

  Slocum went willingly, because he was curious about what damage the dynamite had caused. Plover had a harder time forcing Clem Baransky back into the tunnel.

  Stepping over rock and other debris that had been knocked loose from the ceiling and walls, Slocum reached the huge cavern. Some of the stalactites had tumbled from the ceiling, but the room was otherwise unaffected by the explosion. It took him longer to retrace his steps to where they had planted the dynamite because he didn’t have the goad of being blown up to keep him running like a bat out of hell.

  “Son of a bitch,” Plover said fervently when they finally came to what had been the end of the tunnel. “I don’t believe it.”

  Slocum edged forward and shined his light on a wet tunnel with only a trickle of water running down it.

  “The explosion blew off the far side of the mountain,” he said. “It drained the river.”

  “Into the goldfields,” Baransky said. “It must have sent a huge wall of water erupting from the mountainside across the goldfields.”

  Plover said something to the gunman with him, then poked Slocum in the back. “You first. Let’s go explore.”

  The empty waterway was worn smooth and slippery, but Slocum made his way for more than an hour along it. The last fifteen minutes inside the evacuated waterway he had strong wind in his face. When he reached the point where the shock of the explosion had blown a hole in the side of the mountain, he looked out and saw the devastation. Mine shacks had been washed away in the broad, saddle-shaped valley. Some mines lower on the side of the hill still gushed water and might for a long time. Anyone in those mines when the water broke free of its channel was a goner.

  “We’re right above the smelter,” Baransky said. “That’s the smelter—or what’s left of it.”

  The water had poured through the structure and hit the hot furnaces, which had erupted like volcanoes. Any workers nearby would have been killed outright. Slocum saw where craters six feet deep had been blasted. Some still held water like black stock ponds, but others had been eroded away and spilled the contents still lower on the mountain into the valley.

  Slocum saw bodies strewn about the smelter as well as glittering spots in the mud. Gold. Bars of gold smelted and prepared for transport.

  “We don’t have to go clean over the pass to get here now. This worked even better than the boss thought it would.” Plover lifted his rifle and sighted in on Slocum.

  Slocum’s hand twitched the slightest amount. He wasn’t going to allow Plover to cut him down without a fight, no matter how futile. Before either man could make a move, Trueheart’s booming voice cut across the still landscape.

  “Move on in, men. You know what to do. And Plover, get them to hauling. Gold’s heavy and we can use every strong back we can find. It’s not going to be long before the survivors come looking for what we’re taking.”

  Trueheart danced around a bit, his coat catching the first rays of sunlight. The cloth had been woven with gold thread, making him gleam like the gold scattered at their feet.

  “Yes, sir, this is mighty fine. I’d thought to take a few wagon loads of equipment, supplies, things left by the miners that weren’t too waterlogged. And gold. I never expected to have a road opened up for me smack through the mountain. Who needs cans of beans when we can all have bars of gold!”

  Trueheart bent and pulled a bar from the sucking mud. He wiped it off on his coat and held it aloft so the sunlight glinted from its metallic edges. His laughter filled the valley.

  “You heard him. Get to rooting around in the mud like a hog. Don’t want to leave a single bar of that there gold,” Plover said.

  “You going to help?” Slocum asked. His and Baransky’s execution had only been postponed. After they had moved as much gold for Trueheart as they could, their reward wouldn’t be golden but rather leaden.

  “A good supervisor is worth two workers—at least the two of you,” Plover said, an evil grin curling his lip. He motioned with the rifle for Slocum and Baransky to get to work.

  It was past noon before Plover gave them a break. Slocum looked at the waist-high stack of gold bars. One of those could make him a rich man. The dozens he and Baransky had recovered from the flood plain would buy a fancy house on Russian Hill in San Francisco, entry to the Union Club every night, and all the Gran Monopole a man could swill.

  Gunshots caused Baransky to perk up. He had been seated, back against the gold, head drooping from exhaustion.

  “What’s that? What’s going on?”

  “Trueheart’s men are making sure the miners don’t come back.”

  “Water’s still gushing from the lower mines,” Baransky said.

  “Wouldn’t matter to a man seeing a chance for wealth—or to jump a claim. Might even be some of the miners survived the flood, though I can’t see how that’s possible.”

  “The explosion must have cracked open the bottom of the channel and sent the river to a lower level. It’ll flow for a long, long time. There’s no way anybody is getting back to those mines.”

  “They’ll try,” Slocum said.

  “Yes, I think you’re right. I would have, if it meant my possible death weighed against gold enough for my wife’s operation.”

  “Enough of that lollygaggin’,” Plover said. “Get a sledge and start dragging some of this gold to the hole in the mountain.”

  “We’re taking it all the way through to the other side?” Slocum asked.

  “Start pulling, and we’ll see.” Plover’s answer suggested that they were safe enough if they worked to move the gold. When they reached the other side of the mountain miles off and through the empty river channel and mile of tunnel, they would become too much trouble to keep around.

  Until then…

  “I found a pallet,” Baransky said, “that will be good for dragging along.”

  Slocum attached rope to the front of the wood and then helped Baransky load gold onto it until the slats began to crack.

  “Can’t load any more or the sledge’ll break.”

  “So?” Plover didn’t sound impressed.

  “If we have to carry the gold one bar at a time, we’ll be here for a month of Sundays.”

  The distant reports of rifles told Slocum how Trueheart’s men were being challenged. There wouldn’t be enough ammo in the world to keep an angry mob of miners at bay, especially if they realized how their hard-won gold was be
ing stolen. Unless he read Trueheart wrong, Slocum thought the scavenger was more inclined to grab and run rather than stand and fight. He might not make off with as much gold, but his mentality was more like a crow stealing a suddenly shiny object than a beaver diligently building its dam.

  “Get on with what you can,” Plover said. He followed them a few paces as they struggled to pull the load through the muddy ground. Once when Slocum turned around to dig in his heels to yank the sledge onto a rocky stretch, he saw how Plover staggered along. Trueheart’s henchman had picked up a gold bar for his own and was having an increasingly difficult time carrying it up the steep hill to the gaping mouth of the underground channel.

  Trueheart stood just outside the empty channel, nodding as his men lugged gold into the mountainside.

  “You are doing good work, you two. Especially you, Doc. Keep it up and you might find yourself with one of those gold bars.”

  Slocum held his tongue. The only way Baransky would be rewarded with a gold bar was if Trueheart smashed him over the head with it. It wasn’t in a scavenger’s makeup to share. He put his back to the work and got the sledge into the emptied riverbed. Slocum slipped and then found himself sailing along.

  “The water’s cutting friction,” Baransky said.

  “Easier pulling,” Slocum agreed. He kept a sharp eye out for a way to escape. Many newly formed cracks along the floor showed where the river had been diverted. Somewhere ahead of them the main river had gone to a lower level, leaving this one empty. They reached the point where the wall had been breached before Slocum found an escape route for them.

  Armed guards urged them into the tunnel. The going proved more difficult here, having to lug the gold over fallen rock, but eventually they reached the far side of the mountain, where a pair of wagons awaited.

  Rather than go to Trueheart’s town, Slocum wanted to take the branching road, the one to Almost There, and get the hell away. He knew it was more likely they would be shot out of hand now that they had done the work required of them.

  “Trueheart’s getting antsy,” Plover called. “We’re not movin’ enough of the gold and them miners are gettin’ guns.”