Silver Rock

by Luke Short

  Alec was looking at him. “Come get a load of this!”

  Tully climbed over the seat and joined Alec on the tread, and he saw Alec pointing mutely at the fuel pump. Its top was cracked and smashed, its sides stained by leaking diesel oil. Tully swore softly under his breath and knelt to examine it. There was no mistaking the damage. It looked as if someone had taken a sledge to the pump.

  Alec reached out and lifted a shattered bit of metal from the caved-in housing. Then he glanced at Tully, both wrath and bitterness in his dark eyes. “What you figure?”

  Tully said grimly, “Looks like somebody took a sledge to it.” He looked at Alec. “What’s the road bed like between here and Galena? Could a rock have fallen on it in one of those canyons?”

  “Rock, hell!” Alec said angrily. “Funny it would pick the fuel pump to fall on.” His glance held Tully’s. “Who knew it was coming?”

  Tully rose and, hands on hips, frowned in thought, “That’s just it, nobody.”

  “Where’d you call from?”

  “The pay phone in the hotel lobby. Nobody was there, not even the clerk. I had to go next door to get change.”

  Alec shook his head. “Somebody knew it would be here.” Now he rose, too.

  “What’ll it do to us?” Tully asked.

  “Gimme a minute,” Alec said sourly. He swung off the flat car, ducked under it and lugged his tool box out of the jeep. Tully helped him swing it onto the car, and then Alec went to work dismounting the fuel pump, Tully gloomily watching and helping when he could.

  In a little while they knew the extent of the damage. It was not a thorough job of wrecking, as if whoever did the furtive job was in a hurry. When at last Alec assessed the damage, Tully said flatly, “All right, let’s get on the phone. They may have repairs in Galena.”

  The ride back to town was a silent one. Tully directed Alec to drive to the courthouse, and then lapsed into gloomy silence. The whole thing made no sense to him. Only Alec, Sam Horne, Sarah and Kevin knew about the cat coming. It was true the station agent could have known and informed Hodes. Tully would check with Sarah on the agent.

  Sarah was at a ledger when Alec and Tully stalked in. She looked from one grim face to the other as they halted at the counter, and said, “Something’s wrong, I can tell.”

  Briefly Tully described the condition in which they had found the cat. Then he asked, “What about the station agent, Sarah? Would he tattle to Hodes once he saw the bill of lading?”

  “Ollie Harnes?” Sarah asked in surprise. “Hardly. Ben has made his life so miserable in shipping concentrates that he hates him.”

  Alec nodded. “That’s out.”

  “Then, how did Hodes know?” Tully demanded.

  The three of them looked at each other in silence. “Well,” Sarah said slowly, “an RD-7 isn’t easy to hide.”

  “The train got in after midnight,” Alec said. “I was awake when it whistled.”

  “You don’t walk up to a cat with a sledge in your hand and wreck it in broad daylight,” Tully said. “It must have been at night. Who knew it would be in?”

  There was no answer to that, and now Tully wearily skirted the counter. “Sarah, can I make a call from your phone and pay the charges?”

  Sarah nodded, and Tully pulled a blank piece of paper in front of him, picked up a pencil and began to list the parts needed. When he had questioned Alec for additional needs, he picked up the phone and called the construction company at Galena.

  It took less than a minute to get a connection and Tully first checked on the condition of the cat when it left yesterday. Since it was loaded under its own power, they informed him, the fuel pump could hardly be defective. Then Tully read from his list and asked if the parts were in stock. When they asked him for further details, he handed the phone to Alec who rattled off the desired information. Standing above him, Tully listened. Finally Alec looked up at Tully and only grinned and nodded.

  Finally Alec said into the phone, “I’ll take off in an hour. I’ll get there sometime tonight. Where can I pick the stuff up?”

  Details settled, Alec hung up and said, “We couldn’t have been luckier. They’ve had fuel pump trouble on one of their RD-7’s, so they’d ordered a whole new unit that hasn’t been installed. It’s in their stockroom.” He rose, lifted a cigar from the breast pocket of his coveralls and lighted it. “I can borrow a car and start right now. I’ll be back in the middle of the morning.”

  Tully said, “Hold on a minute.” He picked up the phone, checked the long-distance charges, counted money out on the desk and then looked briefly at Sarah. “See you later.”

  When Tully and Alec had gone, Sarah walked slowly over to the desk and sat down. There was no doubt in her mind that Ben Hodes was behind this sabotage of the cat, but how he had learned of its coming baffled her. She stared, musing, at the change Tully had left on the desk, and then reached out to pick it up.

  As she did so her glance fell on the list of repairs Tully had written. Her hand halted, and then gently settled to the desk top as she studied the handwriting. Where’ve I seen this writing before? she wondered. It was a curious, delicate, slanting engineer’s calligraphy with its own peculiar way of inserting oddly formed capital letters in unexpected places. It was as individual as a thumbprint.

  For still seconds she searched her memory, and then it came to her with shattering abruptness. This was the handwriting of the letters which Kevin Russel had received from his son, Jimmy, when he was in the hospital.

  For an aching minute Sarah considered the implications of this knowledge. Tully had written those letters for Jimmy—letters in which Lieutenant Tully Gibbs had been praised as a friend and a hero. In one bleak moment Sarah, remembering that Tully had denied any knowledge of the letters, knew that he had composed them and used them to obtain a half interest in the Vicksburg Claims and the Sarah Moffit Mine.

  CHAPTER 5

  Sarah wakened reluctantly to her mother’s gentle scolding coming from above her.

  “All right, Ma,” she said in a voice slurred with sleep.

  “You’re sure you’ll get up this time?”

  “Uh-huh.” She heard her mother’s footsteps retreat and she lay a moment looking at the ceiling, her pale hair spread awry on the pillow, feeling the depression settle on her spirits once more. She had finally fallen asleep just before dawn, after endless hours of tormented indecision. First she had wondered if she could confront Tully with her evidence of his crookedness. She further wondered if she should tell Kevin. The answer to that, of course, was no. Knowledge that Tully had defrauded him would probably kill the old man. Was it better, she wondered, to keep silent and pile up evidence of Tully’s further dishonesty or should she speak up and halt this swindle now? Beyond that, she had begun to like a man who was an unprincipled crook.

  She flung the covers aside, irritable with the knowledge that she was as bewildered and uncertain this morning as she had been last night. It was in the middle of her shower that the answer came to her. Why not lay the whole thing before Sam Horne? It was really evading the issue, but Sam might be able to help.

  Her mother had laid out her breakfast before she left for work. Sarah turned on the radio in the sunny kitchen and as she ate she listened to the hearty voice of the announcer spread the daily portion of gloom.

  She did not let the fact she was late for work hurry her. Now she had arrived at some sort of decision she felt relieved and lazy and hungry. She was also melancholy.

  It was almost the middle of a sunny, crisp morning when she stepped onto the street. She noted immediately that the first of the red-garbed hunters were arriving in town for hunting season. Azurite was in the heart of the elk country, but what had once been a local sport had lately assumed the proportions of a plague. Sarah knew that within the next couple or three days, scores of trucks with trailers hauling horses, baled hay and even jeeps would swarm into town. The firing range up beyond the city dump would be booming from dawn to dusk as hunt
ers sighted in their guns. On opening day the town again would be deserted, the hunters having taken to the hills. Shortly afterwards the reverse process would occur; the trucks and jeeps, loaded with game lashed to fenders or lying stiffly in truck beds, would pass through town headed for home. Before the season ended chances were that at least one hunter would be killed or that a search party would have to be mustered from the weary but helpful townspeople to find a lost hunter. Time was, Sarah thought, when hunting was the most carefree time of the year, when hunting was the province of hunters. Now, anyone who had the price of a gun was a hunter; skill and woodcraft counted for nothing. The woods were full of hunters who shot at anything that moved or made a sound and in turn, risked death or mutilation from their fellow hunters. I am depressed, she thought.

  Two blocks down the street she stepped into the dark, ink smelling, single long room that housed the Azurite Nugget. The first thing she saw was Beth Hodes seated at a new rolltop desk jammed up against the far wall behind the counter. When the door swung shut behind Sarah, Beth looked around.

  “Hi, Beth,” Sarah said. “What’s this, the new waiting room?”

  “No such thing,” Beth answered, and smiled shyly. “This is my working desk.”

  Sarah’s lips parted a little in amazement. “You’re working here?”

  Beth nodded.

  “Good girl!” Sarah exclaimed, then added, “What did you do, poison Ben?”

  “I didn’t have to. I moved out.” The two girls looked at each other with understanding.

  “Did he hit you?” Sarah asked then. Beth rose and came over to the counter and Sarah noticed that there was a lingering excitement in Beth’s eyes.

  “I moved all my clothes over to Mrs. Kelly’s yesterday afternoon. I left a note for Ben telling him I’d taken a room there.” She started to giggle now, and then continued, “He came rampaging over after work. Mrs. Kelly met him with a poker, ordered him off the place and locked the door. I haven’t seen him this morning, but I expect he’ll be around.”

  Sarah was laughing, too, now. Then her face sobered and she said earnestly, “Make it stick, Beth. You’ve got to make it stick. If you don’t now, you never will again.”

  “I know that,” Beth murmured. “Whenever I feel myself weakening, I remember Frank Nichols. I remember—” She broke off, and shrugged. “If I don’t make it stick, I’ll buy a ring for my nose. But I will!”

  Sarah patted her hand lightly and it was at once a gesture of belief and sympathy and reassurance. “I believe you.”

  She looked down the room now and saw Sam in conference with the linotype operator. He was in shirt sleeves and a soiled denim apron was tied around his ample middle. When Sarah halted beside him he looked up from a sheet of yellow copy paper that he and Ed Small, the bespectacled linotype operator, had been studying. “Hi Sarah,” Sam said gloomily. Then he nodded toward the front. “When I hired her, she said she could spell. Look at this. Chlorophyl with one l.”

  “It has one l,” Sarah said.

  “It has two,” Sam said belligerently. Then he added with less truculence, “You sure about that?”

  “It’s optional, I think,” Sarah said.

  “You think!”

  “Don’t bully me, Sam Horne,” Sarah said warningly. “I’m not working for you. As a matter of fact, if you jump on Beth the first day she’ll probably go back to Ben Hodes.”

  Ed Small laughed. “You tell him, Sarah. This is the only newspaper office in the country that hasn’t got a dictionary. We just take a vote on words we don’t know.”

  “I can spell,” Sam said aggressively.

  “We just had a demonstration,” Sarah said dryly. “Come on, Sam. Let’s go out back and have a smoke.”

  Sam, smiling at his own discomfiture, led the way past the composing table, the type cases and the job press out into the furnace room at the rear.

  The walls of this room were papered with a hundred yellowing job press samples of posters, hand bills and auction notices printed on paper of all colors. It gave an oddly gay air to the room which held besides the big metal furnace a cluster of all the things that Sam could not bear to throw away. Strewn about was wrecked furniture, broken tools, gummy paint cans, half-empty bottles and, in a far corner, a mound of inextricably tangled wire coat hangers. A black, leather-covered overstuffed rocking chair rose as an island out of the litter. An old copy of the Sunday New York Herald Tribune kept its seat springs from impaling its occupant, and now Sam steered Sarah toward it. Beside it stood a rickety table. Sam, putting a leg up on it, offered Sarah a cigarette which she declined. Sam lighted his own and then said, “What’s the new grief?”

  “How do you know there is any?”

  “You’re too phony cheerful for this hour. Besides, you should be at work. Besides, I could get a couple of bowling balls in the bags under your eyes.”

  Sarah sighed. “All right, Sam, it’s grief.” She stretched out her long legs and crossed them, and then began her story. She told Sam of Tully’s courthouse call to Galena for the bulldozer parts, saying that before he made the call he had made a list of the needed repairs. She went on to tell Sam of how Tully had left payment for the call on the desk and that in picking it up she had glanced at the list he’d written. The handwriting, she said, was the handwriting of the letters Kevin Russel had received from Jimmy while he was in the hospital.

  When she finished, she only looked at Sam. He was staring searchingly at her, his cigarette burning unheeded in the corner of his mouth, a hard intelligence in his eyes.

  Slowly then he reached up for the cigarette and murmured wryly, “That’s a cutie—a real cutie.”

  “Isn’t it? Do you see what he’s done, Sam?”

  Sam nodded. “He’s cut himself a piece of cake.” He smiled again.

  “How could he do it, Sam? How could he?” Sarah asked vehemently.

  “These kids nowadays get awfully hungry for money,” Sam said. “I just didn’t think he was that kind.”

  “But to prey on poor old Kevin!”

  Sam looked at her sharply. “Wait a minute. Tully put up the only loot that’s been put up, didn’t he?”

  “In return he got a half interest in a mine, didn’t he?”

  Sam didn’t answer immediately, then he said slowly, haltingly, “Yeah, but there are degrees of dishonesty. If he pulls this off, he’ll make Kevin halfway rich. That was your idea, wasn’t it?”

  “But look how he’s going about it!” Sarah countered. “It’s detestable. Praising himself, bragging about himself, lying his way into Kevin’s confidence—lying until I wonder his teeth don’t turn black!”

  “Well, I wouldn’t recommend his type for a scout master,” Sam conceded. “Still, you can’t hang him for it.”

  Sarah leaned forward now. “How can we believe anything about him now, Sam? Do we really know he’s a mining engineer? How do we know he didn’t steal this money he put up? How do we know he’ll even give Kevin his rightful share?”

  “Whoa,” Sam cut in. “This is a partnership. Old Judge Hardy has drawn up the papers.”

  “You mean it’s too late?”

  Sam was already shaking his head in negation. “For Kevin to back out? Why should he?” He rose, dropped his cigarette on the floor, stepped on it, then ran his hands deep in his apron pockets. He walked slowly over to the furnace, stared at it thoughtfully, then kicked it. Wheeling he came back to Sarah, a ferocious scowl on his face.

  “Look, kid,” he began, “we’ve got to be smart about this, because it might hurt a lot of people. Let’s look at the facts. Kevin, for the first time, is going to have a good operating mine. He’s put up nothing but the ore underground in that mine and some equipment. Tully, on the other hand, has put up ten thousand bucks. Add to that he seems to know what he’s doing. In a partnership, books are audited and money is accounted for. A double signature on a check and endorsements will stop any fancy stuff.” He spread his hands, palms upward, and shrugged. “Why wake it
up?”

  “Because Tully’s dishonest!” Sarah said hotly. “If he’s dishonest in one thing, he’ll be the same in another!”

  “Between us, we’ll keep a tight check on him.”

  Sarah rose now. She shook her head vehemently. “But that’s not right, Sam! He’s a crook.” She halted as if something important had occurred to her. “Why, how do we know he was a Marine flyer? How do we know he was even decorated? Couldn’t he have heard about Kevin’s mine and simply mailed those letters from San Diego claiming to be Jimmy’s pilot?”

  Sam thought a minute. “That’s possible, except you forget one thing. The Marine guard at Jimmy’s funeral mentioned his name and said he’d been awarded the Navy Cross.”

  “Ha!” Sarah said scornfully. “I’ll believe anything now. I’ll believe even a Marine guard can be bought. After all, wasn’t that brat of a Jimmy a Marine?”

  Sam leaned against the table again and regarded her thoughtfully. “You’re a little mite suspicious this morning, aren’t you?”

  “Wouldn’t you be?”

  Sam nodded, but said nothing.

  “Then what do we do, Sam?” Sarah’s voice was insistent.

  “Just watch—and keep it away from Kevin.”

  “That’s not good enough for me,” Sarah said soberly. “I’m going to find out about this Gibbs character, one way or another.”

  Sam was silent a long moment, then said slowly, “I’m going to do a little gumshoeing myself. The thing that interests me most is where he got the ten G’s to invest in Kevin’s claims.”

  “How will you do it?”