Comstock Lode

by Louis L'Amour

  Crockett took out a cigar and bit off the end. He stared at it for a minute, then lighted it. Melissa refilled his cup. “A lot of men are going to get rich here, Will. You could be one of them. You’re in on the ground floor like George Hearst, and you can do well, but you’re too trusting, Will, much too trusting…of me, of Al Hesketh, of everybody.”

  “Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe.”

  Trevallion went to work on the MacNeale claim, mucking out rock that had already been shot down and sorting it for that worth shipping. He crushed some of the richest-looking fragments and panned out what gold he could find. It was a piddling operation, but it added a little to his supply of ready money as well as giving him an idea of the ore’s potential.

  The lode seemed to dip to the west, but he distrusted it and spent a good bit of time wandering over the side of the mountain or sitting on the slope below the town, just studying the roll of the hill and the convolutions of what exposed strata he could see. Several times he encountered others doing the same thing, but none seemed to have any idea what they were looking for. Probably they hoped to find an outcropping of gold ore thrusting itself up at them.

  There was no sign of Waggoner.

  Two weeks after the return with Ledbetter, he got his first lead. It came from Langford Peel.

  He was having coffee at the bakery when Peel entered. He crossed the room and sat down, and Melissa brought them coffee. “I was in Genoa a few days ago,” he commented, “and there was a man in there with some blankets for sale. A bundle of them. Now there hasn’t been a pack train over the mountain in a couple of months, and I just thought you’d be interested.”

  “Know the man?”

  “I do. As I once suggested, he trails around with Sam Brown. The name he’s using is Kip Hauser, but when he was around Corinne awhile back, he was using another name.”

  “I think I’ll go see him.”

  Peel nodded. “Want me to come along?”

  Trevallion smiled. “Now that’s kindly of you, Lang, it really is, but I think we feel just alike on that score. That every man should saddle his own horses and fight his own battles.”

  “But this is Jim Ledbetter’s fight. I like Jim, and he’s laid up.”

  “I’ll handle it. But, thanks.”

  Peel finished his coffee and glanced over at Melissa. “Thanks, ma’am. That was right good coffee.”

  When he had gone Melissa looked after him. “So that’s the fabled Farmer Peel, the Chief of the Comstock! He seems such a nice man.”

  “He is. He was a fine soldier, too. He was a bugler at first, survived many Indian battles and was noted even then for his skill with weapons. He’s not a man who looks for trouble.

  “As a matter of fact, few of the men who are noted as gunfighters are trouble-hunters. It’s been the custom from the beginning of time for men to settle their difficulties with weapons. It’s not a policy I advocate, Melissa, but that’s the way it is, and the way it has been.

  “By the time a man has won two or three such arguments, he has a reputation. If a man is drawing a gun on you, there’s not much choice but to shoot him, if you can.”

  He sat over his coffee, thinking it out. If Hauser was peddling blankets, they were almost certainly some of those stolen from Ledbetter’s mules. Every available blanket in town had been sold long ago, and as Peel said, no mule trains had come in.

  He remembered Hauser somewhat vaguely as a man seen around Gold Hill. He was a lean, tired-looking man with watchful black eyes, but his tired looks were deceptive. Trevallion had seen him win considerable money in a jumping contest when he had seemed the least likely jumper in the lot.

  Hauser knew him by sight, and as Clyde entered the bakery the solution became obvious. “Sit down.” He gestured to Melissa. “I want you to meet Dane Clyde. He’s an actor, and a friend of mine.”

  Later, he described Hauser. “You can do something for me, but I don’t want you in trouble. At the first sign that he has recognized you as someone he has seen before, quit. He’s a dangerous man.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Who he hangs out with, and if possible, where he goes.

  “He doesn’t know you, and I want you to keep away from me until this is over.” He explained about the robbed pack train and what he suspected. He also described Sam Brown. “Avoid him, he’s deadly. He needs no excuse to kill.”

  “I’ll be careful.”

  Clyde was a pleasant man, easy to talk to and a good listener. “My last job was in Frisco,” he explained. “I’d come out with a company from New York. Came around the Horn. Before that I played in Dublin, London, Paris—wherever there was a good role.” He smiled. “And often enough where there was any kind of a role!

  “But I worked a season with Rachel Felix, and then went on tour with Miss Redaway in Ticket Of Leave Man.”

  “Who did you say?”

  “Miss Redaway, Grita Redaway. You wouldn’t have heard of her. She’s new, but very good. She was with Felix for a season or two as an ingenue, but she’s just been coming up this past year or so. Good notices, very professional.”

  “Unusual name.”

  “It is, you know? She’s a Yank, too. American, I mean. Played some through the South when very young.”

  “Attractive?”

  “More than that. She’s beautiful, a very rare beauty. That was why she and Rachel parted ways. No hard feelings you understand, Rachel just told her she was too beautiful and was drawing attention from her, from Rachel, that is.

  “I heard it, myself. Rachel just told her, ‘Honey, you’ve got it, use it.’ But they’re good friends.”

  “How old would she be? This Miss Redaway?”

  “Young, just a girl, actually. I doubt if she’s twenty. In fact, I am sure she isn’t.”

  Dane Clyde drifted away and Trevallion finished his coffee. An uncommon name, certainly, but unlikely, very unlikely.

  He remembered that night all too well, remembered holding the trembling child in his arms, frightened himself but braver because he was needed, because she needed him. Her need had made him stronger, helped to bring him through what followed.

  It was, he reflected sourly, the only time anybody had ever needed him, the only time he had ever felt that need to protect, to shield. Grita had given him, in those few moments, something priceless, something he had been a long time recognizing.

  His father had had his mother; whom did he have?

  CHAPTER 17

  When the winter came he stayed in the cabin, warm against the threat of wind and snow. The fires in the sheet-metal stove blushed its sides with heat, and the rooms were snug against the storm. Trevallion heard the wind and remembered old rocks upon the Cornwall coast and the sea against them, and the cold rain falling.

  He read a little from the few books MacNeale had left, and by day he worked in the drift, deepening it, and finding a little more width to the vein. He took the gold from the best rock and put the silver ore to one side.

  From his hillside he could look down upon much of the town and see it scattered along the streets, if such they could be called. Snow turned white the hills, and the Washoe zephyrs filled the air with it, moaning about the eaves of the cabin and prying with ghostly fingers to find a way to the warmth inside.

  On a Monday night when the snow fell, Dane Clyde came up the hill and tapped on the door. Trevallion opened for him with a gun tucked behind his belt, and Clyde went to the stove, slipping off his mittens and extending stiff fingers to the heat.

  “I found where the blankets are kept, and all the rest too, aside from what they’ve eaten.”

  Trevallion waited, and he said, “It’s a cabin, not where we thought, but in a canyon about a mile above Cedar. There’s a trail. Do you know it?”

  “I do.”

  “The cabin’s
about two hundred yards up. Nobody lives there, but there’s a corral and a shed. The cabin’s mostly dug-out.”

  “Anybody there?”

  “No. They come and go. Mostly it’s empty.”

  “Good.” He turned to the coffeepot. “Sit down. It’s almighty cold out there.” He filled his cup. “Did they see you?”

  He shrugged. “Maybe. I started the story that I was getting over an illness, and the doctor had told me I must walk. I started walking each evening a different direction, and finally, I think, they got used to me and paid no attention.”

  “I hear you’ve been singing a bit down at Lyman’s.”

  “I have. But elsewhere too. It’s the old Irish songs they like best, but I’ve a lot of amusing ones from the music halls. It’s a living.”

  He was quiet for a moment. “You’ve not been down for a few days?”

  “No.”

  “Sam Brown killed a man. Cut him with a bowie knife, ripped him wide open, then shoved the body under a table and went to sleep on it, his hands still bloody.”

  “That’s the way he is.”

  “I could stand the murdering brute if he’d just take a bath sometimes. He’s about the foulest thing I’ve ever seen on two feet.”

  Clyde sipped his coffee. “I’ve seen Hauser with Brown, and I’ve seen him with several others.”

  “With a man named Waggoner?” Trevallion described him.

  “No, there’s no such man around now. If he was here, he must have gone out with the crowd for California.”

  For a while they were silent, sipping their coffee. Clyde glanced at the books on the makeshift shelf. “Yours?”

  “They came with the house. He picked them up, here and there, in abandoned camps. Some of them he found in the Forty-Mile Desert, thrown out to lighten the load.”

  “Read much?”

  “Now and again. A man alone gets hungry for some kind of communication, even if he’s not a reader. I knew one who was snowed in one year, and when he came out with the spring thaw, he’d come so close to memorizing the Bible that he became a preacher.”

  Trevallion got up. “If you want to you can wait here, but I’d guess the bakery would be a better place.”

  Clyde looked up, startled. “You aren’t going over there alone?”

  “I think that’s the best way. I can come in the back way. I won’t ride through town. With any luck I’ll find what I’m looking for and get back here before they know what happened.”

  “I’ll come with you.”

  “Thanks, but no.” He glanced at Clyde. “Have you ever used a gun?”

  “No, no, I haven’t. I guess I could if it came to that.”

  “Better leave them alone, although it might pay you to learn how to handle one. This is rough country, and a gun is handy in many ways.”

  He needed help to do what he wished to do, and the first man who came to mind was Tapley. Clyde, despite his willingness, was not the man for what he had in mind.

  He found Tapley in his dugout, nursing a cup of coffee. “You sure picked a night,” he commented. “What’s up?”

  Trevallion explained, then concluded, “We’ll need about four pack mules, I guess, and a lot of luck.”

  “None of that outfit likely to be out tonight,” Tapley said. “Hauser was down to Lyman’s, and he was about half-drunk.”

  Icy wind slammed into their faces and bodies as they rode out, the mules fighting to return to the reasonably warm barns. Trevallion led off, the wind sucking the breath from his throat as he tried to hide his chin behind his coat collar.

  There were many lights visible from the town, and farther along, from Gold Hill and Silver City, but they could see no movement.

  The cabin was where Clyde had said it would be, and Trevallion was in no mood for waiting about. He rode right up to it, half expecting the door to burst open and a man with a gun to appear. Yet when he reached the door it was closed with a hasp and a lock.

  It was a solid door, but the hasp itself did not look strong. On the third kick the hasp tore free, and the door opened.

  It was all there, everything but the mules. There were bales of blankets, sacks of flour, sugar, and coffee. Wasting no time they loaded the mules, overloaded them, actually. Some of the supplies listed as stolen were already gone, either used by the thieves themselves or peddled here and there. Even so it needed two trips to empty the cabin, and it was almost daylight when the job was completed. All the goods were stored in Ledbetter’s own storeroom.

  Over coffee back in his cabin he looked over at Tapley. “The mules, we’ve got to find those mules.”

  “They’ll be down along the river, more’n likely. Has to be a place where they can be hidden and where there is water and feed—feed means hay or else browse.”

  “First, I move we catch some sleep,” Trevallion said, “and then we hunt mules.”

  “You reckon that stuff will be safe?”

  “It’s right in the middle of town. Cash money is scarce. I’ll find two or three tough miners to keep an eye on it.”

  Tapley rode beside him into the quiet morning, this the third morning of their search and no mules yet. The blown snow was gone, except for threads of white in the shadow of boulders or places where long dead streams had cut banks and then abandoned them to wind and sun.

  “You need a woman,” Tapley said again, “it’s no life for a man alone.”

  “You’re alone.”

  “I have my daughter. It’s a comfort to think of her and plan for her. Maybe the plans will come to nothing, but it is something to think on, and she’s someone to love.”

  “Maybe, someday.”

  “You’re young. When you’re young there’s always a tomorrow, or so the young believe. There isn’t, of course. As many of the young die as the old. In this land it is an accomplishment to grow old, and mighty few will ever make it.”

  “Man back at the store said he saw some tracks up here, paid them no mind.”

  “We’ll find them.”

  They rode a winding trail westward along the canyon of the Carson. Trevallion looked up at the canyon wall, haggard with years, its hard shoulders worn by the sandblowing wind. “Good place for a man to get himself killed,” he commented.

  “Aye, that’s an easy thing to do, anyway. You thought of what Sam Brown will do when he finds that shack?”

  “I don’t like him,” Trevallion replied. “I don’t care what he does.”

  “Somebody will be guarding the mules,” Tapley said. “Come spring, they’ll be worth a fortune. Jim’s brand can be changed. That JED brand of his, saw a man in a bar the other night with a pencil. He was showing Hauser how it could be changed to three 8s or a 3 and two 8s.”

  “Ledbetter knows those mules like a man knows his own youngsters.”

  “Aye,” Tapley agreed, “but can he prove it? We’ve got lawyers in town now.”

  “That’s the beginning of trouble.”

  Ancient cedars reached for them with twisted, gnarled arms. Trevallion broke off some cedar leaves and rubbed them in his fingers. “I like the smell,” he commented.

  “You better shuck your rifle,” Tapley said, “look at your mule’s ears.”

  The ears were pricked forward, and the black mule was about to bray. Trevallion kicked it lightly in the ribs to distract its attention and took out his rifle.

  They came around a slight bend in the canyon and saw there at the junction of Carson and Brunswick Canyon a small meadow with some brown grass struggling to become green.

  The mules were there, all of them, and a fire was burning in front of a tent.

  At that moment a man backed out of the tent with a frying pan in his hand. He put it down on a flat rock and began slicing bacon into it. When he had finished, he turned and walked to the fire.

&nb
sp; Something must have caught the tail of his eye, for he suddenly looked sharply around and saw them sitting quiet on their mules. “Wha—Who the devil are you?”

  He was wearing a gun, and there was a rifle standing against a rock near the tent door.

  Neither of them spoke. Slowly, very carefully, he put the bacon and the frying pan down on the flat rock. Then he wiped his hands on his pants, and it was in his mind to reach for his gun, but both rifles covered him. Neither man had made a move, each had his rifle across his saddle, each muzzle was pointed at him, but there was no threat, no gesture.

  “You fellers lookin’ for something?”

  “We found it,” Trevallion said.

  The man’s tongue fumbled at his lips. He dearly wished to draw, but the rifle muzzles were there, right on him.

  “I was fixin’ bacon,” the man said.

  Neither responded, they just looked at him. Tapley rolled his chewing tobacco in his jaws and spat.

  Trevallion said, “That cedar yonder?”

  “Ain’t hardly tall enough. Got to be six foot, anyway, maybe eight. Eight’s better,” Tapley added. “Got to have clearance.” He gestured at a coil of rope on the man’s saddle. “Brung his own rope.”

  “Now see here!” The man’s hands were still on his thighs where he had started to dry them. “Who are you fellers? What d’ you want?”

  “Did we say we wanted anything?” Trevallion said. “We just found Ledbetter’s mules. That’s what we came for.”

  “You’re huntin’ trouble. These here mules—”

  “Were stolen. And we find you in possession. How far’s the nearest court, Tap?”

  “Placerville, I expect. Maybe Salt Lake, as this here’s Utah Territory.”

  “Too far. We take him there for trial we got to stay there to testify. We’d be tied up half the summer. No sense to that. And when we got through they’d just hang him.”

  “Don’t make sense,” Tapley said, “takin’ him all that way for such a little job. We got us a tree, an’ he’s got a rope.”

  “He’s also got a gun,” Trevallion said. “Shall we just shoot him a little first?”