Slocum's Four Brides

by Jake Logan

  “You’ll have to come out to the Sombrero some time and visit, John.”

  “The Sombrero?” Slocum was puzzled.

  “That’s his mine. You just ride north of town until you see a signpost. There’s a marker telling how to get to the mine.”

  “Don’t rightly know if I’ll have a chance,” he told Sarah June, “because I want to be on my way. All you ladies have finally gotten settled. There’s nothing keeping me here.” Slocum wondered what Sanders would give him for his share in the Lucky Lady. It was about time to find out. He bid Sarah June good-bye and saw how she seemed reluctant.

  If they had not been in public, he thought she would have kissed him.

  Slocum got his horse and left Aurum, riding straight to the Lucky Lady mine. As before, Sanders worked like a fool moving ore from the depths of the mine and dumping it in a glittering pile just at the mouth.

  He waved to Slocum, hailing him. “Come on up, Slocum. We got work to do, you and me. This here ore’s begging to be separated. Then we can cart it down to the smelter in the valley and get even richer.”

  Slocum tethered his horse behind the cabin, took off the saddle, and slung his holster over the saddle horn. If he was going to put in a day’s work, there was no need to have three pounds of iron at his hip.

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’ve done it before, I reckon. Sort the dross from the rock with gold in it.”

  Slocum began working and found enough gold in every hunk of rock to merit smelting. After an hour of work, he had a very small pile of dross and a large one of rock with gold in it.

  “Let’s take a break,” Sanders said. He wiped sweat from his forehead. “Looks like a bad batch from the mine today.”

  “What do you mean? There’s hardly any rock compared with the gold-bearing.”

  “The Lucky Lady doesn’t produce bad rock. This is, well, this mine’s a gold mine, Slocum.”

  Sanders went to the cabin and returned with a bottle. He pulled the cork and took a deep drag.

  “That’s for what ails you. My muscles don’t ache quite so much after a few snorts.”

  Slocum took a pull himself, then got down to a question he had been working on ever since he had gotten to the mine. “Where’s our partner? Where’s Heywood?”

  “You found out, didn’t you? Or did you figure it out on your own?”

  “Tell me,” Slocum said, not sure what Sanders meant.

  “I bought him out right after we got to Aurum. Heywood was never too bright when it came to finding blue dirt. I knew right off the Lucky Lady was my ticket to riches. He thought he could do better.”

  “At the Sombrero mine.”

  “I always knew you were sharp, Slocum. It didn’t take you hardly any time at all to figure it out. Yeah, that’s his mine. Not great, but this whole damn region’s rife with gold. Heywood’s not getting rich, but he’s not starving, either.”

  “I want to know the entire story, not just pieces,” Slocum said. He took a long draw on the whiskey and let it slip down his gullet to warm his belly. He realized it had been a while since he had eaten anything. The fiery liquor made him light-headed even as it gave him new strength to work another few hours.

  “Me and you were partners back in Salt Lake City.”

  “Not so much partners as friends. That’s when you got the stake from me,” Slocum said. “I felt I owed you.”

  “You loaned me the money, went your way, and I teamed up with Heywood, Yarrow, and Carson.”

  “Carson? Yarrow?” Slocum had no idea who these men were.

  “The four of us cut quite a swath through Salt Lake City, then Carson cut out on us and went his way. But me, Yarrow, and Heywood came straight out here ’bout six months back.”

  “That’s when you found the Lucky Lady and Heywood went off on his own to work the Sombrero? And Yarrow got a mine of his own, too?”

  “Yup,” Sanders said, putting the cork back into the bottle. “Wish you coulda shared some of the times the four of us had in Salt Lake. The Silver Dollar Boys, that’s what they called us.”

  Slocum stared at his partner. He had seen Wanted posters for the Silver Dollar Gang offering hefty rewards. Try as he might, he could not remember what crimes had been mentioned, not that it mattered much. Slocum’s own past was checkered with Wanted posters for more crimes than he could remember. Killing a carpetbagger judge back in Georgia was the most serious of the crimes, but he was anything but pure as the wind-driven snow.

  “The name was Carson’s idea. He wanted secret hand-shakes and passwords and I don’t know what all.” Sanders laughed. “Me and Heywood always figured it was because Carson had tried to get into the Masons or Elks and they wouldn’t have him, so he started his own secret society. We went along because he knew his way around Salt Lake City and the rest of us didn’t.”

  “So you came here because you had to? One step ahead of the law?”

  “Something like that,” Sanders admitted. “But you caught me trying to do you out of your share in the Lucky Lady. Or at least cut it down, and for that, John, I offer my apology.”

  Slocum nodded. If Sanders had made him think he owned only a quarter of the mine, that meant he had to pay less when he bought him out.

  “Carson the other partner?”

  “I threw him in, just to see if I could get by with it. He’s back in Utah. Never came out here. No, John, you and I are half owners of the Lucky Lady. And there’s something I want to show you.”

  Slocum tensed. Sanders wasn’t the confessing sort. He wished he had not left his six-shooter hanging around his saddle horn.

  “Come on into the mine. Oh, don’t worry your head none. I’m not fixing to do you in.”

  Sanders went into the mine, Slocum following a few feet back. Sanders found a shelf with miner’s candles, lit two, and handed one to Slocum.

  “I’d dug purty near a hundred yards into the hillside and never noticed this until yesterday. You showing up was a sign. You brought me—us—good luck.”

  Sanders held a miner’s candle above eye level to show a bright gold vein almost an inch thick in the wall.

  “If that runs more than a foot or two, we’re richer than we ever dreamed of being.”

  Slocum stared at the mother lode, speechless. He was rich!

  15

  Slocum came out into the bright autumn sunlight and noted how short the days were becoming. That hardly mattered when he spent most of the day underground, choking on the fumes from candles and swinging a pickax to pry loose the precious gold from the mine walls. He sat on a rock and let the sun warm him. He stared at the small mountain of rock they had pulled from the Lucky Lady in the past week.

  Any part of that would make him a wealthy man. If he kept working alongside Lem Sanders, he would be rich enough to buy a fancy mansion in Denver, go to the opera and have his own box, and eat oysters and drink French champagne. The only problem with all that was how much he hated big cities, had no desire to live in a house with more rooms than he could count, had no appreciation for the caterwauling opera, and thought eating oysters was like swallowing snot. Of the things rich people did, drinking champagne was the one that appealed most to him.

  Harkening back more years than he really cared to remember, he had captured a wagonload of Gran Monopole champagne destined for some Yankee senators and their wives and mistresses come out to watch a battle. He had scared off the politicians and their ladies and had ten cases of the fine champagne all to himself. He had divvied it up among his men, but he still had gotten royally drunk on four bottles.

  He could do that again, and this time he didn’t even have to chase off any Yankee senators. He could buy it. He could hire someone to buy it for him.

  This was the life.

  Slocum wanted to move on. Soon.

  He squinted when he saw dust being kicked up on the road below. He had put the wagon and the yoke of oxen to good use. Every other day, either he or Sanders drove a load of ore d
own into the valley, where the crusher worked overtime sending gravel into the smelter. He had made two trips and Sanders one during the past week, and they had more than a hundred dollars a day to show for their work. Each.

  He threw his pick down and brushed dust off his clothing. He was a walking dust devil. Slocum walked down to the spot where they loaded the ore into the wagon.

  “What took you so long?” Slocum called to Sanders. “I’ve got an entire wagonload ready to go. You haven’t been lollygagging in town again, have you?”

  Slocum saw the expression on Sanders’s face and stopped his joshing. Something serious had happened. His friend normally had a hair-trigger temper, but of late, with everything going so well, Lemuel Sanders had been joking and carrying on like a schoolboy. That good humor was gone.

  Sanders fixed the reins around the wagon brake and jumped down.

  “He’s dead, Slocum. Deader than a doornail.”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Heywood. An accident over at the Sombrero mine, I heard.”

  “What happened?” Slocum asked.

  “Nobody knows. They haven’t recovered his body yet from the mine. You mind coming with me? I want to give the son of a bitch a decent burial, though he hardly deserves one.”

  “You driving the wagon?”

  Sanders nodded glumly. Slocum saddled his horse and trotted along to catch up. Sanders had left immediately, forcing Slocum to hurry.

  “You think it might not be an accident?” Slocum knew his partner well enough to see that something troubled him.

  “Hell, mining’s a dangerous profession. Heywood was not what you’d call a careful man, either.” Sanders looked over at Slocum riding alongside the wagon. “You think I have a bad temper. Heywood would fly off the handle at the slightest thing. He might have done something really dumb while he was in the mine. Ax handle breaks, he could have gone berserk and collapsed the mine on his own head. I don’t know. He had quite a temper.”

  They rode the rest of the way to the Sombrero mine in silence, each wrapped in his own thoughts. The death of Sanders’s former partner set Slocum to thinking again on moving on. He had taken a fortune out of their mine in the past week. If he asked Sanders to buy him out for a thousand dollars, that would last him for years and yet hardly put a dent in the mine’s output. Sanders would get rid of a partner sucking up half the profit, and Slocum would have more money than he had ever dreamed about. And he would be free to drift wherever the wind took him.

  As cold as it was getting at night, Slocum considered finding a nice warm señorita down south of the border to keep him company all winter long.

  “There’s the mine,” Sanders said. Slocum wheeled his horse onto the small rutted track leading up to the Sombrero mine. He saw Sarah June sitting in a chair outside a tumble-down shack. She had her head down, and he thought she might be crying, but as he neared he saw she was reading a newspaper. She looked up, smiled when she saw him, carefully folded the paper, and rose to greet him.

  “I hadn’t expected to see you, John. How good of you to come.”

  Slocum had expected a grieving widow, but Sarah June looked as if her day included nothing more upsetting than having her newspaper reading interrupted.

  “Sorry to hear about your husband,” he said, dismounting.

  “Tragic,” she said. He expected a tear or at least a frown. If anything, she showed her dimples as she smiled at him.

  “That there’s Lemuel Sanders,” Slocum said. “My partner over at the Lucky Lady.”

  “The Lucky Lady? You’re a partner? That’s a mighty important mine in these parts.”

  “Can’t complain,” Slocum said. He stared at the mine shaft. The timbers were intact. “That where he died?”

  “Yes, inside,” Sarah June said. She turned and stared at Sanders. The expression on her face was unreadable now. “How good of you to come along with Mr. Slocum.”

  “Felt it was my duty,” Sanders said, tipping his hat to her. “Don’t reckon you want to keep the body around. If you don’t mind, we’d like to get it on into town for a burial. Unless you have other plans?”

  “I sent word into town that the body was, well, difficult to reach.”

  “In the mine shaft?”

  “A deep pit,” Sarah June said.

  Slocum watched the blonde staring at Lemuel Sanders as if she tried to place him but couldn’t.

  “Let’s go see what can be done,” Slocum said. “Are there lanterns in the mine?”

  “Two,” Sarah June said. “If you don’t mind, I would prefer to stay out here. The sun is quite pleasant today.”

  “Get on back to your newspaper,” Sanders said a bit sharply. Slocum understood Lemuel’s attitude. He and Heywoodhad been partners. Slocum had known Sanders for only a short while, but he had the feeling that Sanders had been partnered up for quite a spell. Certainly far longer than the six months they had been in Aurum and whatever time they had spent in Salt Lake City.

  Slocum and Sanders trudged uphill to the mine. Slocum kicked at rock all around, hunting for the bright shine of gold in the rocks. He saw some iron pyrite—fool’s gold— but nothing worth hauling to the smelter.

  “Not a good claim,” he said when they ducked and went into the shaft. Just inside, on a rock shelf, they found the two lanterns Sarah June had mentioned. Slocum worked to light them, then sloshed the kerosene around. “Not more than an hour’s light in either of them.”

  “Shouldn’t take that long getting a body out,” Sanders said.

  “He was a good friend, wasn’t he?”

  Sanders spat. “I went from hating his guts to thinking of him as my brother and back again, sometimes in an hour’s span. What it all came down to was how alike we were. I said he had a temper. So do I. Somehow, we shared in ways most folks never can.”

  “You understood each other.”

  “Let’s just say we took pleasure in the same ways,” Sanders said. He held his lantern up high and started into the mine.

  Slocum saw that Heywood had not bothered to lay tracks for an ore cart. That meant extra work in the long run, because he had to use a wheelbarrow to get his gold out of the mine. As he walked bent over, Slocum studied the walls, hunting for gold. He saw a few flecks, but nothing like in the Lucky Lady.

  “Hold up, Slocum. This must be where Heywood got careless.”

  Slocum poked his head around Sanders’s shoulder and saw a yawning chasm in the floor. The light from the lantern penetrated only a few feet down. The pit was far deeper than that.

  “You reckon he fell in? What’s he doing digging a pit like this?”

  “No telling what Heywood was up to,” Sanders said. “No good, that’s my opinion.” Sanders moved his lantern around, looking at the edge of the pit. “Don’t see that the rock gave way.”

  “May have been drunk,” Slocum said. He kicked a pint bottle out of the way and dropped to his belly so he could look down into the hole. The lantern barely illuminated the bottom. “That must be twenty feet down.”

  “He could have survived,” Sanders said.

  “Unless he was drunk when he fell in,” Slocum replied.

  “That makes it all the more likely he would survive,” Sanders said. “He would have been crawling around on the bottom wondering what had happened.”

  “I see what must be his body.” Slocum turned his head to the side. He could see moderately well, but the smell of decay rising from the pit was enough to gag him.

  “I’ll go fetch him up,” Sanders said. “It’s the least I can do, since he was my partner.”

  “Don’t know how easy it’ll be getting you out,” Slocum said. He looked at the beam overhead. “Might be able to rig a pulley. The timber looks safe enough for that.” Slocum checked the strength of the beam, then ran his hands down the supporting timbers. He knelt when he saw a section of the wood that had separated.

  He frowned when he saw that it was a loose board. Bloodstains on the side gave mute testimony to a s
erious accident. Heywood must have hit his head and then fallen into the pit.

  “Let’s do it. The sooner I get Heywood out, the better I’ll like it.”

  They worked in silence for almost twenty minutes, settinga pulley just above the pit and fixing a rope with a loop for Sanders to slip his shoulders through. Once it was around his body, he nodded. Slocum took up the slack, then began lowering. The pulley creaked and the beam protested, but everything held until there was suddenly no weight on the rope.

  “You down?”

  “Yeah. Rats got to him. How long’s he supposed to have been dead?”

  “Sarah June never said,” Slocum called down. “Must have been a day at the outside, though, or you would have been told earlier.”

  “From what’s left, he might have been here for three or four days.”

  Slocum felt the rope tighten. He began pulling and brought the body up. His gut flip-flopped when he saw Heywood. Sanders had not been joking about the degree of decay or how the rats had feasted. How they got in and out of the pit Slocum didn’t want to know, but he had seen rats run up and down almost vertical ropes.

  “He must have been going down into the pit,” Slocum said, as he swung the corpse around and laid it out on the floor of the mine. “There’s bits of rope he must have used to lower himself.” Slocum stood, held the lantern, and stared. Heywood had not used the rope to lower himself. It looked as if the rope had been lashed around his feet.

  “Get that rope back down here. This pit’s giving me the willies,” Sanders shouted.

  Slocum quickly pulled it free from around Heywood and dropped the loop back to Sanders. It took longer getting his partner up because the beam began to sag and Slocum worked more carefully. When Sanders set his feet on solid rock, he heaved a deep sigh of relief.

  “That’s nothing I want to do again until I’m actually planted in a graveyard,” he said. “It felt like I was in a grave the whole time.”

  “Did you tie his feet together to make it easier for me to pull him up?” Slocum asked.

  “I just looped it around his waist. Hell, touching him was bad. I seen men blown up in explosions that didn’t cause my stomach to churn like it did down there.”