King of Spades

by Frederick Manfred

  Two hours later, just as Ransom was about to climb a hogback, he spotted a blue color darker than the blue of the sky. First black hats appeared under the pines along the skyline, then blue uniforms, then gray horses. It was an Army patrol out looking for stray prospectors.

  Ransom was off his horse in a whip. Quickly he led Prince and the packhorse into a thicket of lodgepole pines. He threw an arm around each horse’s neck and with his hands muffled their rubbery lips. Luckily the two horses were too tired to be unruly, and stood patient and still.

  “Sooner or later,” Ransom muttered to himself, “the Sioux are gonna have to get out anyway. And I mean to be the first in to make the big strike.”

  The patrol halted on the crest. While they blew their horses, an officer carefully surveyed the canyon with a glass. Once Ransom was almost sure the officer had spotted him. The officer’s glass swiveled back suddenly and seemed to fix on Ransom’s hideout in the thicket. Silver reflection gleamed momentarily on the glass like a flash of gunfire.

  “Damn, but I don’t want to go back after coming this far.”

  Ransom checked his packhorse to see if any of the metal might be gleaming in the sunlight, the new spade, or the pickax and pan. There was nothing glinting that he could see.

  His heart clopped in his ears.

  The officer at last put his glass away. He raised his arm curtly. And then the patrol was off, galloping along the top of the hogback, going southwest toward the Cheyenne trail.

  “Now, if I don’t run into them mad Sioux, I’ll make it.” Ransom led his two horses out of the thicket. “And I’m sure not going to stop in Custer now.” He checked the one-man diamond-hitch on the packhorse to see if all was secure. “I’ll go around it to the west. Cross over on high ground.”

  More and more pinnacles and peaks of rock emerged out of the green mantle of the forest. Stunted pines no higher than Indian corn passed under the belly of his mustang. Ransom rode over weathered granite passes as slick as river ice. On the right, far ahead, he spotted the highest point in the Black Hills, a bald crag of gleaming granite.

  The canyons deepened. Most were dry. Heated bark exuded clouds of pine perfume. Even the raw rock had a singular aroma.

  Occasional Indian graves hung like clots of moss in the trees. The bodies were invariably wrapped in green blankets. Offerings in memory lay in the grass underfoot.

  Ransom came upon an awesome ravine, long, deep, a stream trickling down the middle of its green bottom.

  “I better take it. It leads straight north. Besides, it’s time to irrigate the horses.”

  He slid off Prince. He checked the diamond-hitch on the packhorse. Then, peering down and picking out a route, he carefully led them down. They inched along narrow ledges. They passed under teetering boulders. They slid between massy trunks of ponderosa pine. They circled through mazes of half-fallen trees. They plowed across powdery rotten trunks. Occasional rattling rockfalls splashed to either side of them.

  “One slip and our name’ll be mud.”

  Magpies, dippling their long tails and flashing white, clattered angrily at them.

  The head of the stream began exactly where they hit the bottom of the ravine. A spring poured quietly out of a wall of green turf. It ran as if someone had only just then punched a hole in the green wall.

  The packhorse stepped up and drank sidewise at the falling jet of water.

  Prince waited. Prince had taken a fancy to drinking out of Ransom’s sombrero.

  Ransom, thirsty himself, had to laugh at Prince’s delicacy in waiting. “All right, you win.” Ransom filled his hat and held it out for Prince.

  Prince drank in his usual graceful sipping manner.

  “Don’t know what’ll become of you should they ever gun me down.”

  Prince drank the hat dry, down to the last drop, then nudged Ransom for more.

  Ransom obliged him.

  When Prince had finally filled his belly to almost double its size, Ransom helped himself to a hatful.

  The two horses had gone to grazing lustily, and Ransom was about to sit down on a rock and have himself some jerky, when he became aware of another presence.

  A dozen paces away, in deep brush, stood a prospector. He had on a big black floppy hat, a red flannel shirt, a black vest and pants. His leather belt and boots were badly scuffed. He’d half drawn his gun. He was an old man.

  It was too late to go for his own gun, so Ransom decided to bluff it through, easy. “Hi there, Old-timer. I see the Army sweep missed you too.”

  The old prospector’s red-streaked eyes oscillated. His cheeks swelled in and out like a turkey gobbler’s.

  “Find any colors?”

  The old prospector rolled his head from side to side, all the while looking at Ransom and his horses exactly like a mad bull.

  Ransom stayed cool. A smile wriggled in his black mustache. “We’re just passing through. We don’t mean to run you off your claim.”

  The old prospector lifted his gun an inch.

  “C’mon, Old-timer, pour your coffee in a saucer and let it cool.”

  The old prospector chewed with a gobbling sound.

  Ransom eased his feet apart. “Got yourself a prospect hole and won’t let anybody else in, eh?”

  The old prospector raised his gun another inch, almost free of its holster, the tip of the gun sight flashing.

  “No need to snap your gun, friend. I don’t intend to hang around. I’ve got my own idee about where the mother lode is.” Ransom quietly scratched his belly through his buckskin shirt.

  The old prospector’s mad grizzly face finally parted in the middle. “No funny tricks now, sonny. You moughtn’t fare so well with a feller what wam’t brought up gentleman-like.” “Them’s high words, friend.”

  “You better board that horse again, pilgrim. And dust. Before I decide to take him for myself.”

  “What’s the matter, did the blue ducks take yours?”

  “No.” All of a sudden the old prospector began to break. “No, the Army didn’t get ’em. ’Twas a goddam panther.”

  “Cat? In the Hills?”

  The old prospector let his gun fall back into its holster and sat down with a thud on a rock. “The Hills are full of cats.” His head sank between his shoulders.

  “I’ll have to be more careful from now on.”

  “Had me a fine mare with a stud colt. Bays, the both of ’em. Best friends I ever had.” The old prospector wept. “It happened t’while I went to set out my location marks. Left the mare and colt behind. Tied the colt to a tree, thinking the mare would stick close. Well, a panther came along. The mare broke away, of course. I can’t blame her for that. And when I come back, all I found of the colt was that over there.” The old prospector pointed behind his back without glancing around.

  Ransom looked. Not forty steps away lay a colt’s fuzzy head, tail, and feet. Green flies buzzed around the remains as thick as swarming bees. “Lord.”

  The old prospector wept unashamedly. “I’m as brimful of bawl as a egg is of meat.”

  “Too bad.”

  “I ain’t had an hour’s sleep in four weeks, thinking on where my darling went, waiting for her to come back.”

  “Your darling?”

  “My mare.”

  “That’s awful.”

  “Yep, that’s what comes of concluding to make a shortcut to wealth.”

  Ransom sat down on a rock across from him.

  “Yep, when I came out here a couple of months ago, I felt like I’d at last dealt myself a royal flush in the game of life. That the whole world was my jackpot.”

  “The mare never did come back?”

  “No, she didn’t.” The old prospector wiped his tears on his sleeve. “The panther probably got her too.” Hate flashed out of his black beard. “But, by God, I got my revenge. I got the panther what got the colt. Hrr!” The old prospector’s eyes blazed yellow for a moment. “I waited patient for a week and finally nailed him. He came back for the
rest of the colt.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Yep.” Then the old prospector’s head sagged again. “But after killin’ and eatin’ the panther, I been dreamin’ of cats every night. For a fack.” The old prospector heaved a beard-ruffling sigh. “You hain’t got some barbwire juice on you?”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Just my darn luck.” The old prospector scratched himself. “Yep, goddam, here I am, three hundred miles from a lemon.”

  “You said something about location marks. You did find some colors then?”

  At that the old prospector turned shifty. “Well-I … you know … you set out stakes along a likely gulch.”

  “But there are colors through here then?”

  “Well-I … some ways off from here there is.”

  Ransom worked his nostrils once.

  “Could be the real mother lode is still farther north.”

  “That’s what I heard.”

  “That where you headed?”

  “Likely.”

  “Plenty of gulches up there all right.”

  Ransom fixed him with steady eyes. “This gulch of yours, what’s it like?”

  “What do you want to know for?”

  “To get an idea how wide and how deep a gulch should be before you find gold in it.”

  “Well, mine’s wider’n a horse can jump. Though a hen might be able to fly across.”

  “And it’s deep enough for gold to start showing?”

  “No doubt about it.”

  Ransom stood up. “Thanks.”

  “You’re on your way then?”

  Ransom nodded.

  “Now I will be lonesome.” The old prospector got out a dirt-specked quid of tobacco and bit off a corner. “Goddam, I almost wisht the Army had’f found me.”

  Ransom climbed aboard his horse. He dug out a strip of jerky and threw it down to the old prospector. “Need anything else? I can’t spare you much.”

  “Naw. On your way.”

  “So long, Old-timer.”

  Ransom had proceeded down the blue gloom of the canyon some fifty yards, when the old prospector yelled after him, “Don’t peach on me now.”

  “I never saw you.”

  “If anybody asks after me, say you know me all right, but that you’ll be damned if you’ll tell ’em when or where you last saw me.”

  “I never saw you.”

  Ransom pushed northward.

  Hogbacks lay across his course like a series of quarter- moons with the horns up. A couple of hours later the crests began to curve the other way with the horns down.

  “It’s like working your way through a bunch of ringworms one inside the other.”

  There was little or no water. Prince and the packhorse sweat. Luckily some of the draws were deep with lush wet grass.

  One high slough was black with ripe huckleberries. Ransom filled up on them.

  At dusk he shot a blacktail drinking from a wriggling stream. “Mule deer,” he murmured to himself. “Sometimes they’re pretty dry and stringy.” But this was a young doe, fat, and he had himself dripping venison broiled over a low fire. He jerked the rest of the meat and hung it up to dry.

  While the horses grazed, he panned the little stream. A little mica shone in it. That was all.

  During the night a storm passed to the south of them. A great wind brushed across the tops of the trees. The deep ponderosa pines moaned. He felt lonesome for Katherine and her bed back in Cheyenne. “If only she hadn’t made all that money the way she did.”

  The wind gusted ferociously at times across the higher crests. He nuzzled deeper into his woolen suggans. “Never heard the wind get up and howl so.”

  The wind died down after a time.

  He slept soundly under the great dreaming pines.

  Daylight came as usual. He had fresh rabbit for breakfast.

  By the time the sun speared down into his gulch, he’d packed his gear and was ahorse.

  He worked his way along sinuous canyons. He climbed wave after wave of pinnacle and mountain. His course was wormlike. The farther he penetrated the heart of the Black Hills, the more mysterious and dark and brooding it became.

  “Good place for a murder.”

  The gnarly rock took on strange shapes: a warning granite finger, a forbidding granite turret, a looming granite fortress. One of the bare granite ridges even resembled an enormous sleeping lizard half-buried in mud.

  He loved it all. He was lonesome, but that only made it that much the better. He had never felt so alert, so alive, in his life. His eyes picked up the smallest detail. His ears caught the call of magpies a mile off.

  Occasionally Prince stopped to nibble a bit of moss off the side of a tree. Or nipped off a juniper bud. Or cropped a few leaves of buckbrush. Or tested the leaf of a white birch. The packhorse meanwhile, having a fondness for rose hips, often nosed through wild rosebushes looking for them.

  He stumbled upon some animal carvings on a red wall facing the sun: deer, puma, bear, geese. One was of a huge reptile, some dozen feet long, with a terrifyingly long tongue. There were also several sunbursts and other geometric figures. The carvings were Indian and ancient.

  Ransom puzzled over the petroglyphs. He tried to imagine the kind of people who might have made them. He contemplated them until they became dancing sunspots in his brain. His eyes lidded over.

  In the evening he came upon another long deep gulch. Dreary patches of burned-over dead pine covered the upper slopes.

  He descended into its gloom. He spotted several holes resembling the raw broken mouths of lizards dug into the sides of the gulch.

  Presently he came upon a half-dozen deserted shanties beside a fast-running stream. Wagon parts, shovels, picks, pans, and other camp debris lay around in the grass as if a tornado had ripped through the tight valley.

  “Some joker done this out of pure cussedness.”

  Ransom spotted a board nailed to a tree. Someone had carved an inscription on it with a jackknife. Ransom rode over for a look. Peering down from his horse, he slowly made it out.

  WAS ORDERED OUT BY CAPT. POLLOCK.

  CAPT. POLLOCK IS A DAMN SHIT ASS

  Ransom had to smile to himself.

  He spotted other prospect digs into the slopes farther down.

  “No use sticking around here. The Army is sure to keep checking this place.”

  He looked up toward the head of the long gulch.

  “Think I’ll go up this stream a ways. If the boys found gold float here, it’s bound to have washed down from above.”

  He let the horses have a drink. Then, in the falling dusk, he crossed over on an abandoned beaver dam and ascended the gulch.

  He found the head of the stream just as it became dark. A lively spring poured out of the roots of a giant ponderosa pine. He unburdened the horses of all the gear and staked them out for the night. He had a cold supper of dried jerky, hardtack, dried prunes, and cool mountain-spring water.

  He rolled out his suggans on a thick bed of pine needles and old moss. For the first time since he left Cheyenne, he undressed. He gave himself a brisk hand bath in the spring, changed to another set of red flannel underwear, and with a happy sigh of anticipation crept into his suggans. When he looked up he found that a vast hoarfrost had come out over the skies.

  He missed Katherine again and her lipping kisses.

  “Got to strike it big now. So she can give her bad money away to some charity somewhere.”

  He nuzzled his head back and forth on his leather saddle. “Sure miss her. More than I ever missed old Sam.”

  A branch cracked behind him.

  Automatically his hands checked to see if his six-shooter and Winchester were ready.

  “Can’t be a cat. Because if it was the horses would’ve already been in the suggans with me. More than likely a deer.”

  The spring murmured sweetly.

  “Never saw such a blizzard of stars before. We must be pretty high up.”

 
Breathing the crisp night air was like drinking pure sweet alcohol.

  “The whole West is my nut to crack and I’m going to bust her wide open. Right here in the Hills.”

  He went to sleep thinking about how he would kiss away the tiny wrinkles in the corners of Katherine’s eyes. She would like that.

  2

  He awoke about light. The horses were safe. There were no cat tracks about. Good.

  He built a fire and made himself some hot coffee and fried some bacon and venison and warmed the last few biscuits Katherine had sent along with him. The sun broke over the Hills and touched his face just as he was finishing the last of his breakfast. In the clear morning light he could make out, beyond the last peaks, the prairies of the far Dakotas.

  He watered his horses, gave them a good brisk rubdown, and staked them out to some new tender grass.

  He studied the spot carefully. At that point the gulch wasn’t too deep, with rock walls but a dozen feet high. Winds had knocked off some of the tree tips, and here and there had pushed over a few of the older ponderosa.

  “No blossom rock that I can see. But then you never can tell.”

  He saw where a small yellow pine had been torn out by the roots a couple of rods above his campsite. It was at the base of the wall. The little pine was dying so he went over and got it and threw it next to his gear. Later he would chop it up for fuel.

  He next carefully checked the raw earth from which the little pine had been torn. He scratched through it with trailing fingers.

  “No glance rock here.”

  He was about to turn away, when there bloomed in him the feeling that a pair of eyes was watching everything he was doing.

  He drew as he wheeled.

  Nobody. All he could see were four horse eyes busy looking for the best grass.

  He studied every pine branch, every shadow, every boulder, with intent care. Still nobody.

  He kicked through a patch of grayish-green wolfberry. Nothing.

  He stepped carefully through a thick patch of glittering green-leaved shrubs. The shrubs clung close to a slope of loose dirt. He had the feeling that something else besides leaves waited glittering in the shrubs. Nothing.