‘Well.’
‘Sit down, Mr. Crow. Sit down and let you and I have ourselves some talk. Yes, indeed, some talking.’
Chapter Four
It was an interesting talk. Crow was aiming to try and make himself some more money, and get across the Sierras. Here was a man thrusting dollars in his pocket with sweating, trembling fingers, and offering still more if he’d do a simple scouting job.
‘No scouting job’s ever simple. There’s nothing in life to depend on, ’ceptin’ yourself,’ replied Crow.
‘You have no trust for others?’ asked the woman, dabbing delicately at her face. Crow wondered why she was sweating so much more than anyone else.
‘I got me little belief in the goodness of human nature, Ma’am, if’n that’s what you mean.’
‘Why not?’
‘I learned me some things in life. Like never drawing to an inside straight and keeping your guns clean. Never stand facing the sun in a fight. And if a man comes to you in a saloon and bets you ten dollars that he can make the whiskey bottle dance a jig on the bar-top and then empty itself in your boot, then hold on your ten dollars. If’n you don’t there’s two certain things. You’ll end up ten dollars poorer and have a boot filled with liquor.’
The Easterner laughed, throwing back his head with such false heartiness that his gold-rimmed spectacles nearly toppled off the fleshy bridge of his nose. ‘Upon my soul, Mr. Crow, but I like that. I believe I can trust a man who trusts nobody. Indeed I can. But let me tell you something about myself and why we are all here in this grim valley of death.’
Richard Hugo Okie was a merchant with a house on Beacon Hill. His trade had begun with tea, ironic in the home of the notorious Boston Tea Party, but he had widened his talents to include coffee and then wines, imported straight from Paris, France. It was swiftly obvious that the world was divided into two parts. Richard Hugo Okie and the rest.
His wife was Amaryllis Okie, called Amy for short. While her husband and Crow were talking about the future for them, she vanished out of the back door. When she reappeared she was a different woman from the nervous twitching person who’d left. Her step was more firm and she walked without a tremor round the great lake of congealing blood that the Navaho was still trying to remove with a dry broom and plenty of sand. There just wasn’t enough water around Hobson’s Hole to wash away the mute evidence of the slaughter.
Mrs. Okie laughed a deal more and didn’t seem to be perspiring any more. Her fingers were steady again and she looked straight at Crow when they talked. He wondered just what had been in the small reticule of green silk that she had carried out with her, tucked under her right arm. Maybe some kind of white powder that had given her such an amazing lift? It was a question that Crow simply filed away along with some other queries. The main one of which concerned the black bird that seemed to interest everyone so much.
The sons rejoiced in the names of Edgar Lexington Okie who was seventeen – the fat one – and his brother, a year younger, and several pounds lighter, called Arthur Concord Okie.
I consider myself just as much of a patriot as the next man,’ insisted their father. ‘Since our great struggle for our independence came too soon for me to participate I have done what I can by ensuring that my kin take on the names of those great battles.’
Crow sniffed. Patriotism wasn’t a word that meant a lot to him. Looking after yourself came at the head of his private list and looking after anyone else came a long way back in second place.
‘I wouldn’t wonder that you have noticed a mention from my boys of the coincidence of your name, being that of … not to put too fine a point on it ... a black bird. Crow. A black bird.’
‘It’s been said before.’
‘Of course. But there is another meaning to the words “Black Bird” that has resulted in our having trekked all this way from home, leaving the business in the hands of my wife’s drunk of a brother. But there was nothing for it. I could trust nobody.’
‘You about to trust me?’
The directness of the question threw Okie off the thread of his conversation.
‘What?’
‘You said you was hiring me to scout for you. Now, I can’t do that without you telling me where you want to go and something of what you aim to do there.’
‘My goodness, Mr. Crow, but you certainly speak out plain. I am a plain-speaker, sir, and I respect that in another. Hurry with that beer, my man!’ he shouted suddenly to the surly Navaho still leaning silently behind the bar.
Word of the killings had raced around the little township and there were better than a dozen men in the saloon, talking in whispers, pointing out the dark stain on the floor, and the taciturn man in black who had done the work.
‘Then speak up plain about this black bird.’
‘Hush, hush, Mr. Crow,’ urged the merchant, his chubby face paling at the idea that someone might overhear his secret. Whatever it was.
‘Then tell me, damn it!’
‘You have a most beautiful voice, Mr. Crow,’ interrupted Amaryllis Okie. ‘Like a great poet, yet tinted with dying. Like a finger stroking its way down a set of black velvet drapes.’
Her eyes were dreamy as she looked at him and she allowed her tongue to flick out across her thin lips in a gesture that Crow normally linked with fifty-cent whores, rather than with the wives of affluent Bostonians. But he’d lived long enough and seen enough women to know that they were all the same beneath the skin. Panting and rutting in their fevered imagination when they saw a man who fulfilled their fantasies.
‘Hush up now, Mama, while Papa’s talking.’ He leaned forward in the classic manner of all conspirators, drawing the attention of every single person in the saloon to him. Crow smiled bleakly at the man’s mixture of arrogance and stupidity. But he was also a rich man and that made him worthy of some attention.
‘Go on, Mr. Okie.’
‘I have a cousin. Had,’ he corrected himself. ‘His name was Radley Hungerford and he was something of a bad lot. The base metal of our family tree.’
Crow wondered how a family tree could have base metal in it but he contented himself with a nod of encouragement.
‘Went off West before the fighting and we heard nothing from him for long years.’
‘He had an Indian squaw,’ said Edgar, picking at his teeth for the remnants of the last plate of spicy Mexican food he’d demolished. Neither of the boys seemed in the least affected by the massacre that had taken place right under their noses, both of them seeming even more objectionable now Crow got to know them a little better.
‘Now you know we said we’d not talk about that.’
‘Hush, Mama. Radley suddenly appeared on our front step, about six months back.’
‘Like a skeleton with big bleeding sores all about his face,’ piped Arthur, the skinny son.
‘Little children should be seen and should not be heard,’ cautioned their mother, oblivious to the fact that both her sons were taller than she was.
Mr. Okie shook his head at the constant interruptions to his tale. ‘Please, Mama. Please. He brought with him a large, heavy, locked trunk. Tattered clothes. And an illness that carried him off within the month.’
‘Why did he come to you?’
Okie smiled fatly. ‘Because I am the senior surviving member of my family. The paterfamilias, as it were. Radley knew I would not turn him away.’
‘You fed him dearest,’ said his wife, but her smile beamed at Crow. Seeing the size of the dark pupils of her eyes he again wondered about what kind of medicine she was taking for her nervous condition.
‘Scraps and cores and stale bread and sour milk,’ chorused the boys, to the evident irritation of their father, though he tried to turn it to a joke.
‘They will jest, Mr. Crow. Boys will be …’
‘Boys,’ suggested Crow.
‘Quite so, quite so. You are the man for the keen phrase and no mistake, Sir. Where was I?’
‘Feeding your dying cou
sin.’
‘Indeed. We took every care for poor dear Radley during those four dreadful weeks. Why, I even called out my own physician, Doctor Kennedy, fresh from a drowning he was. A poor girl trapped in a wagon that had overturned. Doctor Kennedy came a’running and said that there was naught he could do for Radley. Poor fellow.’
‘Amen to that,’ muttered Mrs. Okie, piously.
‘He never quite came to, in a manner of saying. He had lost his mind. He spoke to us of high mountains, and snow and burning deserts. And of …’ here his voice became so low that Crow had to strain to catch it, ‘a lost gold mine.’
That was it.
The whole western half of the United States of America was riddled with tales of lost mines. Mainly gold, with a few silver lodes thrown in for good measure. The stories all had a common thread. The discovery of a massive strike by a man or a company of men, with clear evidence in the shape of high-grade assayable ore or nuggets bigger than a sheep’s skull. Then the finder or his partners were either found dead in mysterious circumstances or were never seen again.
There was the Bowie and the Sheepherder; the German and the Spanish; the Crying Woman and the Drowned Child. And a whole lot more. Everyone knew about them and there were often clear pointers to their general whereabouts. But Crow had never heard of anyone actually finding any of them.
‘Gold?’ he asked:
‘Sure,’ squeaked Arthur Okie. And, before anyone could stop him, he stood and whipped off his dusty Eastern cap and yelled to everyone in the room. ‘My Pa’s found gold!’
Crow had read reports in newspapers of the finding of big strikes, like the notorious one on January 24, 1848, at the millstream near John Sutter’s fort. And there was always a deal of shouting and leaping about with men throwing themselves on horseback and rushing off whooping and hollering.
The saloon wasn’t like that at all.
The main thing that happened was that there was a sudden and total silence, with not a sound in the room. The barkeep froze halfway through polishing a glass, holding it in his hand as though time itself had stopped in its tracks. Drinks checked inches from lips and conversation died somewhere between throat and mouth.
The second thing that happened, over the next ten minutes or so, was that the saloon gradually emptied of everyone, as men slunk away to talk matters over in greater privacy, leaving the Okies and Crow alone together.
The thin son’s outburst was so ill judged and so potentially appalling that even he seemed to recognize it, ducking away under a slap from his father and eluding a grab from his mother, running out the door and wandering some little distance off in the dazzling heat, moodily kicking some loose pebbles around.
‘Oh, that boy,’ moaned Amaryllis. ‘Look at what he’s doing there. He’ll ruin that good pair of boots and you know that they cost me . . .’
‘Amy …’ interrupted Richard Okie. ‘Please hush up now. That boy’s gone and landed us in deep trouble, isn’t that so, Mr. Crow?’
‘That’s like saying that the back end of a horse tends to smell a little of shit, Mr. Okie,’ said Crow, disgustedly.
Only after the saloon had emptied did Okie return to the subject of his cousin and the missing mine.
‘He wore the key to his chest around his neck during his stay with us, and would he allow us to remove it for him?’
‘No, dearest. I thought that you knew he wouldn’t,’ chirruped the woman. ‘Indeed, you said that if you…’
‘Amy! Go and keep Arthur company or hold your tongue.’
‘Oh. You were not always so roughly spoken to me,’ she moaned. Crow noticed that she was already beginning to perspire again and he wondered how long it would be before she needed to slip out back with her little green bag to “revive” herself.
‘What I was and what I am becoming are two different things, wife, and you would do well to hold that fact in mind.’
‘I’m sorry, Dicky.’
His face flushed and his eyes behind the thick lenses seemed about to pop from their sockets. ‘Do not call me that name in public.’ He stopped, making a visible effort to control himself. ‘My wife has never been the same since the birth of … well, there would have been a third child. And after it there were … female complications. You understand?’
Crow had a vague idea of what the man meant so he nodded. The truth was that he didn’t care a flying damn for the woman or her feminine complications. All he wanted the man to do was hasten with his tale. It seemed that he was now closing in on the interesting part of the story.
‘The doctors gave her… certain substances to endeavor …’
‘And they truly hit the spot for me, did they not? I was a different woman after them.’
‘Indeed you were, Amy. But now I beg you, for the last time, to be quiet and allow me to tell Mr. Crow here the remainder of my tale.’
‘I am sorry, Richard.’
‘Radley eventually left us.’
‘Went back west?’ asked Crow.
‘No. He was transmuted.’
‘Into gold?’
Okie laughed. ‘I think you are mocking me. I believe you take my meaning.’
‘You manage to wrap it up better than a bishop’s wife in a Dakota winter, Mister.’
‘Oh,’ Rallying. ‘I mean that my poor dear cousin was referred to the pastures celestial. He went before.’
‘Jesus!’ said Crow, disgustedly. ‘You mean he up and died.’
‘Well, yes. There are times when your plain speaking is almost too much for me to keep up with, Mr. Crow, and that’s the truth.’
‘So?’
‘Oh, yes. So we naturally wondered what was in his chest, and the talk of deserts and mountains intrigued us. And there was this repeated babbling of seeing a great black bird.’
‘He say what kind of bird it was?’ asked Crow, glad that Arthur Okie was safely outside.
‘No. That was the odd thing. Just a black bird. He said that he loved looking up at that old black bird. Those were his very words.’
Crow nodded. There was a germ of an idea but he didn’t much want to pass it on. Not until he knew more about the Okies, and maybe not even then.
‘So you opened the chest with the key from round his neck.’
‘Not quite. The key didn’t open it. I believe that the lock must have been damaged. It was a sorry moment when I tried to turn the key and it simply grated to a stop. I had to force the lock with a shovel.’
‘Inside you found several pounds of high assay ore or some nuggets and a map. But the map wasn’t quite good enough for you to walk straight out here and start bringing out wagons full of rich yellow dirt.’
Okie’s jaw dropped and he sat looking at Crow as if he had revealed the secret of the ages to him. ‘Upon my soul, Sir! But …’ His eyes narrowed suspiciously. ‘My wife has told you? Or the boys?’
‘You know damned well I never seen a hair of any of you folks before this day. And since I’ve been in your company all that time since I can’t hardly have picked a secret talk. No. That was all a guess.’
‘Then it is a miracle. A bloody miracle, and I don’t care who hears my language. Is it not, Amy?’
His wife wasn’t really listening, teeth worrying again at the ragged-fingered gloves. But she nodded nervously at her husband’s question.
‘It’s a common enough tale in the South-West, Mr. Okie. But it’s odd that you didn’t have to buy this map of yours.’
‘You mean that men try this as a fraud?’
‘Been done.’
‘Radley was not that sort of person. Oh, he was a rogue and a spendthrift, but not the man who would do that to his own cousin.’ But there was a grudging note of doubt in the man’s voice.
‘You got it there?’
‘Yes.’
Crow waited but the Easterner showed no sign of being about to produce the map.
‘If’n you want me as guide then we agree terms on it and that’s that. But I don’t agree less’n I get to see
that map.’
If it was like all the other phony treasure maps that Crow had ever seen it would show some major features on it in total detail, then just when it started to show the region where the supposed mine actually was then it would become strangely blurred and coy and uncertain. Rivers would vanish and mountains shift about from north to south. Settlements would move a dozen miles one way or the other and there would appear names that nobody had ever heard of.
Names like “black bird” thought Crow.
‘All right. But it shows this place on it, all clear and unmistakable.’
‘Then?’
‘Then there are great descriptions of natural features which are beyond any skill of mine to find.’
‘In detail?’ asked Crow, for the first time feeling a flicker of interest.
‘Oh, truly. There is a bearing to follow from here and accounts of how far to go. Then Radley simply tells of so far up a particular draw or across dry riverbeds. And near the ending there is the black bird drawn in but it seems to me that a man would need to actually be there to track down the last part of the journey.’
‘Best not show it here and now. I’ll charge you ten dollars a day and food and bullets. Is it high in the hills?’
Okie shook his head. ‘I know not. Why?’
Crow sniffed. ‘-Any day now and the big snows are going to start up yonder over the tree line. If’n we’re goin’ after this mine, then the sooner we start the better.’
‘How soon?’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Crow.
Chapter Five
If the map was a fake, then it was the most convincing that Crow had ever seen.
During the afternoon he went with Okie and the sons to the small store in Hobson’s Hole to buy supplies. To his surprise they were able to buy themselves a beaten-up Conestoga wagon with two pairs of mules. The Easterner finally honored his word and paid over the promised six hundred dollars to the shootist for dispatching the three men. And he also paid him one hundred dollars more . . . “On account of the first ten days scouting.”
Bodyguard Page 3
