Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839), page 7
MacLeod’s smile faded as he said, “Thirteen. I don’t know what I’m going to do if you can’t find out who’s been doing it, Deputy. We’ve been digging damned decent stuff out of that mountain, but my men have to be paid and my wife and I are down to bread and beans. If they keep robbing us, we’re just going to have to cash in our chips. Our original grubstake’s about used up.”
Longarm struck a match on the coach’s window frame, and touched the flame to his cigar. “Haven’t you made any money on the mine?”
“Not a red cent! I figure, allowing for a rough assay, we’ve shipped at least a quarter of a million in extractable ore since we reopened the mine. Not a speck of it’s ever reached the mint.”
Longarm blew out a large cloud of smoke that dissipated rapidly in the breeze from the window. He was tired of going over the same ground, so he didn’t ask about the shipments. Instead he asked, “Do you know a mining engineer named Baxter?”
“Ralph Baxter? Sure. He’s staying at the hotel in Manzanita. As a matter of fact, he’s made me an offer for the Lost Chinaman.”
The deputy’s eyebrows rose slightly. “You don’t say. Now that’s sort of interesting.”
“Not really,” MacLeod said. “I have no intention of selling—not if I can help it. Baxter is fronting for an Eastern syndicate, and frankly he’s been talking penny-ante. He knows what we have up there. I took him through the mine myself. You know what he offered us? A measly million dollars!”
Longarm whistled and asked, “You call that measly? For a man living on bread and beans, you think big, MacLeod!”
“Hell, I’d be big if they’d let me! The vein I opened promises to assay out a hundred times that amount. That reef of quartz shows no sign of having a bottom to it. Given the time and a little more backing, I can dig for gold all the way to China!”
“Maybe, but in the meantime we have to see about getting it to the mint. Have any others made you an offer for your mine? I’ve got reasons for asking.”
MacLeod nodded and said, “I follow your drift. Ralph Baxter might be a crook, but I sort of doubt it. I checked out the people he works for. I’m not supposed to know who they are, but a man who’s knocked around the mining business knows who to compare notes with. Baxter’s outfit is made up of Boston bankers with solid reputations. I’d say his offer was legitimate, but it’s way the hell too low to consider.”
“How about the Hearst interests, over in Sheep Ranch? Do they seem interested?”
“They sent a man over to congratulate us when we hit pay dirt. He didn’t make an offer. I showed him through the mine. He said the rock formation we’re into isn’t the same one Hearst is working. He said that was all he was really interested in. You see, some folks think the gold quartz runs all the way under the Sierra, clean over to the diggings in Nevada. But we agreed we’ll have to dig some even to get near one another underground. Sheep Ranch is a good ten miles from Manzanita and the Lost Chinaman.”
“Maybe. I’ll ride over there and have a talk with them, though. From everything I’ve heard about George Hearst, your mine’s just the sort of thing he’s been buying up on both sides of the range. Didn’t it strike you as odd that they weren’t interested in buying you out?”
MacLeod frowned and said, “Not at the time. Now that you mention it, though, Hearst has the capital and muscle to make the Lost Chinaman a paying proposition. You see, you usually lose money on opening a mine and organizing things. A lot of small operators go broke holding rich enough claims. It takes money to make money, once you’re into hard-rock deep mining. But they have money, and they know we’ve opened a new vein. Do you think—?”
Longarm held up a cautioning hand. “Let’s leave off thinking till we know some more. You eat the apple a bite at a time, in my business. I’d best start with the suspects closer to home.”
They rode on in comparative silence for a time. The stage was jarring hell out of them all as it started hitting rougher road. The Mexican girl was pouting fit to bust, and Longarm was heartily sick of running over the details of the mysterious high-graders. It seemed that no matter who he met up with, they all had the same impossible tale to tell. He knew they’d all missed something. Something simple. Nobody could simply lift a running freight car filled with gold ore off the tracks in broad daylight without the train crew noticing it. Someone had missed something—something important. He’d just have to bull on through till he spotted something in the pattern that nobody had seen up until now.
* * *
They were a couple of hours out of Sacramento and had just topped a rise when Longarm felt the stage slow down and heard the jehu cry out, “Son of a bitch!”
His oath was followed by the crack of a rifle shot and the sound of something or someone thudding to the dust outside. Then the stage was moving faster and a bullet slammed into the doorjamb near Longarm’s head!
MacLeod gasped, “Road agents?” as he drew his own Smith & Wesson. Longarm didn’t answer. He was leaning out the door he’d opened, gun in hand and looking back.
There were four of them, riding hard after the runaway stage and shooting from the saddle. Longarm spotted the body of the jehu on the trail as one of the road agents jumped his pony over it and kept coming. Longarm took aim and fired. He missed with his first shot. His second slug hit the pony he’d been aiming for and spilled the outlaw ass-over-teakettle into the dust.
He fired again, dropping another mount with its cursing rider, and then the survivors were reining in. One of them was shaking his fist.
Longarm climbed out on the side of the careening coach and looked up at the boot. There was nobody sitting up there, with or without the reins. He swore and climbed all the way to the top, holstering his gun as he crawled to the vacant seat. The shotgun rider was down in the boot, alive but bleeding like a stuck pig. Longarm saw that he’d managed to hang onto the traces, albeit with no control over the frightened mules. He said, “Good man!” and pried the blood-slicked reins from the shotgun’s hand.
The hunchback made a gargling sound and tried to say something. Longarm said, “Just hold on, old son. You ain’t hit bad. I’ll have a look-see as soon as I get these infernal mules under control!”
He lied, of course. The poor bastard was done for, but he didn’t think it would cheer the shotgun to hear it from him right now.
Longarm hauled back hard and kicked the brake rod, locking the wheels. The team dragged the coach a few yards, then came to a nervous, dancing stop. Longarm reached down with his free hand and groped for the shotgun wedged between the bulkhead and the dying guard. Then he looked quickly around in a full circle. They were alone on a stretch of rolling mustard meadow. Kevin MacLeod, gun in hand, stuck his head out and called up, “You seem to have driven them off, Deputy. What happened to the crew?”
Longarm said, “Both hit. The jehu didn’t stop when they threw down on him. He was a good old man. Can you handle a scattergun?”
“Of course. Toss her down.”
“Nope. You come up here and watch my ass while I turn the team around.”
The mine owner joined him, gasping at the sight of the dying hunchback down in the boot. Longarm handed him the shotgun and said, “They may have given up. They may be back. They’ll hit us from the rear if they hit us at all.”
As Longarm hauled on the reins, MacLeod asked, “Where are we going, back to Sacramento?”
“Nope. Back to pick up the old man. Wouldn’t be neighborly to leave him for the buzzards. There might be some sign to read back there, too.”
MacLeod braced his heels on the boot above the moaning hunchback, and said, “I’m sure he’s dead. I saw him hit the ground. But you’re right. We can’t just leave him.”
Longarm swung the team back the way they’d just come and clucked them into motion, holding a tight rein to keep them from stampeding again. As the lead mules sniffed the body on the trail ahead, they started fighting the bits, but even without a whip the deputy managed to drive close enough. Then he set the brake and handed the reins to MacLeod, saying, “Don’t let them have an inch of slack or you’ll be on your way to wheresoever.”
He climbed down and walked over to the body of the jehu. He didn’t have to roll the old man over to see that he was dead. There was a gaping hole between the driver’s shoulder blades. Longarm sighed, “Poor old bastard. You should have stopped, but I’m glad you didn’t.”
The door opened and the girl jumped down, asking, “Is there anything I can do?”
Longarm said, “Not for this one, ma’am. There’s a man hit bad up in the boot who could use a woman’s hand on his brow, if you have the belly for it.”
Felicidad stared down at the dead man in the road and sighed, “Ay, pobrecito!” Then she turned and walked to the front of the coach. MacLeod reached a hand down to help her, but she ignored it and climbed up beside him without comment. Longarm noticed that she climbed proficiently for a woman in skirts. She placed a foot on a spoke of the near wheel and went up like a hand climbing the side of a corral one jump ahead of a rogue steer. He surmised that she sat a pony well, too.
Leaving the dead driver for the moment, Longarm walked a big circle in the dust, searching for sign. The bodies of the two ponies he had shot carried no brands and had been stripped of their gear. He spotted a hoof print and muttered, “Son of a bitch. I thought so!”
Then he bent over, reholstered his gun, and dragged the body by its heels to the coach. The dead jehu was as limp as a dishrag, but a good deal heavier. It was a task getting him inside, but Longarm managed. He slammed the door and climbed up beside MacLeod and the girl, saying, “This other fellow might be more comfortable down there, too.”
Felicidad shook her head and said, “He is dead. What do we do now?”
Longarm said, “For openers, one of us has to drive while another rides shotgun. You want to give her the shotgun, MacLeod?”
The young mine owner looked surprised, so Longarm explained, “I can see by the way you’re holding that thing that you ain’t a skeet shooter. Miss Felicidad, here, knows her country and moves like a lady who’s used to traveling around it safe and quick. How about it, Miss Vallejo?”
The girl lowered her eyes and said, “I have hunted since I was six. If they intend to hit us again, it will be up past the next few bends, where the trail passes between high outcrops.”
Longarm laughed and said, “There you go, MacLeod. Give the lady the scattergun. If you’re any good with that .38, move back along the deck and keep an eye on the brush on either side. They’ll hit us low if they don’t hit us high.”
MacLeod did as he was told, and once everyone was in place, Longarm swung the team around once more and yelled, “Heeeyah!!”
As they lurched forward, Felicidad asked, “Are we pressing on? I thought you’d head back to Sacramento for another driver.”
Longarm said, “We’ve got a driver. Me. I’ve been trying for a week to get to the damned old mine, and it’s getting tedious as hell.”
MacLeod called forward, “I’m for that. My wife will worry if we’re late. Did you find anything back there, Deputy?”
Longarm said, “Yeah. A hoof print. U.S. army issue. I thought one of the rascals was riding my gelding and shooting my old Winchester at us. Lucky he didn’t know its windage is a hair off to the right.”
“Jesus! You mean those rascals had the horse you say Constable Lovejoy took from you?”
“I do. It’ll be interesting as hell to see what Lovejoy has to say about it. He’d best have one good story, and his stay on this earth depends on whether I believe it or not.”
Chapter 3
A stagecoach got its name, of course, because it got where it was going by stages. Calaveras County lay a good forty miles from Sacramento, mostly uphill, and a good team can sustain a ten- or twelve-mile-an-hour trot for little more than two hours. So the coach had to stop for a fresh team every twenty miles. Like other lines, Wells Fargo maintained a cross-country network of roadside corrals with comfort stations and, occasionally, kitchens for the passengers. So Longarm hauled in eighteen miles out of Sacramento for a change of teams—and to get rid of the bodies before they started bloating.
They told the Wells Fargo crew what had happened and the telegrapher put it on the wire. So all stage crews, of any company in the area, would be watching for road agents. The man in charge of the station seemed to think Longarm should let him have his company’s stagecoach back. He said that they’d send for another crew and that the three survivors should wait awhile. Longarm said he was commandeering the coach for U.S. government business. When the Wells Fargo agent said he’d have to check with his headquarters, Longarm told him to do anything he liked as long as Longarm, MacLeod, and the girl didn’t have to hang around.
They were still arguing—or rather, the agent was arguing at Longarm—when the deputy whipped the fresh team into motion and left the bewildered man standing in the road, calling out, “Hey! Come back here with my coach, God damn it!”
Kevin MacLeod was roaring with laughter and, for the first time since he’d met her, the girl at Longarm’s side reluctantly chuckled. She shifted the shotgun in her lap to cover an approaching grove of five oak and observed, “It’s nice to see an Anglo screaming helplessly for a change. I didn’t know you people were as highhanded with one another as you are with us.”
Longarm grinned and said, “There was nothing personal meant by it when we stole California from you, Señorita. We’d just as likely have taken it had it belonged to anyone else.”
She no longer looked amused as she nodded and said, “I believe you. You people are natural bullies. You seem to have understood the survival of the strong long before Darwin published his outrageous book.”
Longarm shrugged and said, “You’d best take that up with God, ma’am; He made the rules. Besides, we could have been even meaner, if you study on it. I’ll allow that some of the forty-niners were a mite uncouth, and some of your people got the short end of the stick, but a lot of your Spanish grants were recognized by the U.S. government.”
Her dark features took on an ironic cast. “I see. You think, because you only stole half of our land, that that makes it just.”
“Not as just as it might have been, but a better deal than you folks offered the Indians who owned all this land in the first place,” Longarm said evenly. He saw that he’d scored a point and added, “How much land did Cortez let Montezuma keep?”
She flushed and said, “That’s not the same!”
“Sure it is,” he insisted. “You Spanish found a land filled with gold and Indians, so, being tougher than the original owners, you just up and took it. The forty-niners found a land full of gold and comfortable Spaniards and they were just as tough on the Spaniards as the Spaniards had been on the Indians. Like I said, it was nothing personal.”
“We were not living under the tyranny of Castile,” the girl objected. “California belonged to Mexico, a friendly democracy!”
“Mexico was friendly as hell at the Alamo,” Longarm countered, “and if you want to call Santa Ana’s dictatorship a democracy—Well, what the hell, we’ve elected some funny folks ourselves, so you’re likely right. I’d give California back if it was up to me, but it ain’t, so let’s talk about something else.”
She smiled wryly, and replied, “It is a waste of time now, isn’t it? Do you think those banditos are liable to come back?”
He shook his head and said, “Doubt it. I left two dismounted and we showed them we weren’t schoolmarms. We’re carrying some mail in the strongbox under the seat, but the agent says there’s no gold aboard.”
“Then why did they try to rob us in the first place?”
“Because we were aboard. There’s usually a gold watch or a pretty gal aboard any stage. If that bunch is who I suspicion, they don’t run to much common sense. You might say they rob folks on impulse.”
“You know who they were?” the woman asked with a puzzled frown.
“Not for sure, “but I think they’re what’s left of the Calico Kid’s gang. The one who was riding my gelding looked like a rat-faced saddle tramp I met in Manzanita near the livery stable. Either Constable Lovejoy gave it to them or they stole it.”
Felicidad’s lip curled contemptuously. “I know this Lovejoy. My people call him el stupido.”
He chuckled and replied, “Fair is fair. When you folks are right, you’re right. Do you live in Manzanita, Señorita?”
“No. Our rancho is just outside of town. We will pass it on the way in and I will get off there. How soon do you think we will be there?”
“A couple of hours, the Lord willing and the creeks don’t rise. You say your people know Lovejoy well enough to call him names. Can you tell me if they have any notions about those high-graders stealing from Mr. MacLeod back there?”
The girl shook her head and said, “We have heard of the robberies. We would like to think it was one of our people, but that is too much to hope for. Some of our vaqueros are sure it is the work of Joaquin Murietta, but that is just wishful thinking.”
He frowned and said, “It’d have to be. Joaquin Murietta was shot and beheaded nearly thirty years ago!”
“I know. But some of our people still see him, late at night on a moonlit trail.”
* * *
They dropped Felicidad off on a wooded path a mile outside of Manzanita. Then Longarm drove the stage to the Wells Fargo office, where MacLeod’s wife was waiting with a buckboard and a worried look. Lottie MacLeod was a pretty Utile dishwater blonde in a sun bonnet two sizes too large for her little head. Longarm could see that her face had been freckled by the mountain sun in spite of the bonnet. He told the MacLeods he’d be up to visit them as soon as he found something to ride. As the MacLeods drove off, Longarm explained to the suspicious-eyed Wells Fargo men whose hands were resting casually on their sidearms that he hadn’t really stolen the coach. They’d gotten some of the story by telephone, they said. Everybody but the U.S. government seemed to believe in the newfangled things. The station boss said the company had posted a reward on the rascals who’d shot their employees. Longarm said, “I ain’t allowed to accept rewards, but it’ll be my pleasure, anyway. One of the bastards was riding my horse.”
