Mending His Wounded Heart, page 10
“I need to get lanterns and blankets loaded into the wagon,” Beatrice said.
Marcia turned to find the middle-aged woman close by. Did her expression show the same dismay and horror that Beatrice’s did? Were her cheeks just as pale? Marcia nodded and moved for the steps. The old men who’d been playing checkers were already halfway down Main Street, ready to help in any way they could.
Marcia turned to Beatrice. “I’m going to get things ready for any wounded or …” She didn’t finish her sentence. Or the dead.
Chapter 8
At the sound of shouts, Dale pulled his gaze from watching the antics of a squirrel in the front yard of the doctor’s house to watch a man racing down Main Street and toward the bridge, his hat flying from his head just before he reached it. The man skidded to a halt, backtracked, snatched his hat from the ground, and then, grasping it tightly in his hand, continued on toward the doctor’s house. He barely spared Dale a glance as he rushed up the steps and pounded on the door.
“Doc! Doctor Sam!”
Dale eyed the man with a frown. “What’s going on?”
The man finally seemed to notice Dale. “Cave-in! There’s been a mine collapse! Miners are trapped in there, and I need the doc!”
The front door opened, and Samuel stared at the man with a lifted eyebrow. “Cave-in, you say? At the mine? How bad?”
The frantic man crammed his hat back on his head. “I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I was only a short way down the shaft when I heard a horrible rumble and… and then everything just started to collapse. I ran for my life.” He caught a breath. “Several of us made it out, but I know there’s some that didn’t.”
Doc pointed back toward Main Street. “Go round up as many people as you can. Get as many buckets, shovels, and axes as you can from the mercantile and the livery. Does James know?”
At first, Dale wasn’t sure who James was, but then he remembered that Marcia told him that her uncle, yet another co-founder of Cooper’s Rest, owned the silver mine.
“Yancey’s on the way to his house right now.”
“Go on, I’ll be there as soon as I can,” Samuel said. As the man left on the porch and raced back toward town, he glanced down at Dale. “I’m afraid I’m going to have to leave you here alone for a while,” he said. He cast a great gaze toward town. “Marcia should be back from the mercantile soon. She can take care of you while I’m gone.”
“I’ll be fine on my own,” Dale said. “Maybe you’ll need her help at the mine.”
“I don’t want her there,” the doctor interrupted.
“Well, be that as it may, I can take care of myself just fine.” To Dale’s surprise, the doctor turned an angry gaze his way.
“I’m warning you, Mister McCandless, that I don’t want you taking advantage of her innocence!”
Dale lifted a hand to interrupt. “I assure you, Doc, that I have no such intentions. In fact, as soon as I can saddle and sit on my horse, I’m going to brush the dust from this town from my boots and move on.”
He and the doctor stared at one another for several moments before the doctor grumbled. “Just so you know, I don’t want you encouraging my daughter’s affections.”
Dale snorted. “What affections? And besides, I’m not interested in your daughter, not in that way, and like I said, as soon as I’m able, I’ll be back on the trail.”
“Good,” the doctor said.
The door shut, and Dale sat in the chair on the porch, shaking his head in wonder. What gave the doctor the impression that he was sweet on his daughter? While he admired Marcia and his respect for her had grown, he had no intentions of pursuing anything with her.
“Dale!”
Dale turned to find Marcia hurrying toward him, practically running as she stepped off the bridge and turned toward the house. He saw the alarm in her eyes and quickly stood, immediately regretting the move as a surge of blood rushed to his head, prompting dizziness. He quickly sat down, cursing his own weakness.
She quickly made her way onto the porch and stood over him. “I’m sorry, are you all right?”
“I wish people would quit asking me that,” he muttered. “I’m fine, just got up too quickly. What’s wrong? There’s a mine collapse? I just heard!”
“No, well…yes, it is that, but something else too.”
The front door opened, and Samuel stepped onto the porch, settling a hat on his head and carrying his doctor’s kit. He eyed his daughter. “I’m going to the mine to see what’s happening there. You stay here with Mister McCandless.”
“I’m going to help,” Marcia said. “I can help—”
“I want you to stay here,” the doctor snapped. He sighed and muttered an apology, then gave his daughter a kiss on her forehead. “At least until I can assess the situation. If I need you, I’ll send for you. But it’s best if you say here. We’ll be receiving patients, I’m sure of it, and I need you to prepare what room we have for them.” He paused and frowned. “Depending on the situation, we may need to convert the church or maybe the schoolhouse into a makeshift hospital.”
Dale watched as Marcia lifted a hand to her throat, her eyes wide and her face pale.
“You think it’ll be that bad?” she stammered.
“I don’t know,” her father replied honestly. “That’s why I want you to stay here. We’ll need to be ready, just in case.”
“Yes, Father,” Marcia agreed. “I’ll make sure that we’re ready.”
With that, the doctor moved to step off the porch but paused long enough to send another meaningful glance toward Dale. The man didn’t have to say a word. That look told him that Marcia was off-limits to his kind. There was no use in trying to convince the doctor that he wasn’t interested in Marcia that way, although he couldn’t deny his curious attraction to the younger woman.
As soon as her father was out of earshot, Marcia returned to Dale’s side. “Dale, do you have those wanted posters of the men in the gang you were tracking?”
Dale pulled his gaze from the doctor’s retreating back and glanced up at Marcia, an eyebrow lifted. “What?” He thought about it. “I don’t know. The sheriff brought my saddlebags back, but I’m not sure if the wanted posters I was carrying are still in it.” He started to stand. “I’ll go look.”
She frowned and shook her head. “No, it’s all right. It can wait. I think.”
Her eyebrows pulled together, and once more, he found himself captivated by her expressive eyes.
“Why? What’s happened?”
She glanced down at him, then at her father’s retreating back and beyond him toward the town. “I was at the mercantile getting some things. A couple of men came inside. I didn’t recognize them. Of course, I don’t recognize a lot of men around town these days, and most especially, the miners.”
“Marcia, what about them?” he interrupted, his curiosity piqued. He didn’t get the impression that Marcia startled easily, so if the sight of two men in the mercantile had bothered her, there had to be a reason. “Did they accost you? Did they say something offensive?” She looked down at him, her eyes meeting his, her hand idly fiddling with the collar of her blouse.
“No, not exactly. They looked a little rough, but that’s fairly common around these parts. Still, one of them was asking for spirits or salves to treat an injured horse.”
Nothing unusual about that, not out here. “What was it about the encounter that bothered you?”
“One of them seemed vaguely familiar like maybe I’ve seen him around before, but I can’t remember where or when…”
Dale waited for the rest.
“And then I heard the slightly older one calling the younger when Benny. And then the younger one, just before they left the mercantile, the man called Benny mentioned another man by name, but I forgot it already. I can’t remember.”
Benny. Could it be? Could it possibly have been Benjamin Jepson? Why would he still be hanging around Cooper’s Rest? And if he was here, was Blake nearby?
“What did they look like?” Dale sat straighter, wondering if it could possibly be. Would the Aldrin gang be hanging around the area? Blake had been shot, but Dale didn’t think his wound would have been serious enough to prevent him from traveling. He’d managed to get on his horse and ride away quickly enough. Still, he had to wonder if his quarry might still be in the area.
He started to rise, thinking he’d go to his little patient’s room, grab the saddlebags, and pull out the wanted posters to show Marcia. Maybe she might recognize the man she’d seen in the mercantile as one of the same faces that were emblazoned on the wanted posters.
He eyed the town, deep in thought. “Where’d they go? They still in the mercantile?”
“No, they left. It was only moments after that that a couple of miners came running into town shouting about the mine collapse. I didn’t see where they went.”
“Well, let me go—”
Just then, a wagon drawn by two mules pulled his attention away from Marcia. The horses clopped over the bridge and pulled to a stop moments later in front of the doctor’s house.
“Miss Marcia! We’ve got a couple of wounded men here. Where should we take ‘em?”
The men from the mercantile forgotten, Dale stood-– more carefully this time - as two men jumped down from the bench seat. The driver wrapped the long reins around a brake handle and then joined his companion in lowering the back gate of the wagon. They pulled a man from the wagon bed and carried him toward the front of the house.
Marcia gestured. “Around the side! I’ll go open the door.”
Soon, more wagons and buggies arrived. In less than an hour, several wounded men lay on the grass outside of the doctor’s office, no more room inside. Some of them weren’t wounded too badly, a broken arm here, a bleeding gash there, a couple with bruised or broken ribs. Others were more seriously injured. Two men lay dead in the corner of the yard on the far side of the doctor’s office, covered with blankets.
“You the gunfighter?”
Dale turned to find a man with a deeply tanned, leathery face staring up at him. His features were half-hidden behind smears of dirt, his clothes covered in dust. He could have been twenty-five or sixty years old. Dale couldn’t tell. He frowned at the man. “I’m not a gunfighter.”
“So, what are you then?” The man had no front teeth and spoke with a heavy lisp.
“A bounty hunter.”
“Good, good.” The man grinned. “Maybe you can help.”
“Help with what?”
The man tsked. “Sheriff Chase tries, I gotta give him that, but he hasn’t got a bloodhound’s nose, you know what I mean?”
Dale strove for patience. “What do you need help with?” he repeated. He wanted to try to help Marcia, scrambling as she tried to take care of patient after patient arriving at the doctor’s office. Dale glanced over his shoulder toward town, wondering where her father was. They needed help here.
“I’ve told the sheriff time, and again that stuff has gone missing, but he doesn’t do anything about it.”
Dale turned back to the miner. “What kind of stuff?”
“Lots of it.” The man shrugged. “Well, food mostly. But other stuff is missing too, like some blasting caps and sticks of dynamite. Grain for the horses. And some of our lamps, you know, so we can see in the mine. And some other stuff. It’s all kept in a shack not far from the mine entrance. But this past week, stuff has been going missing. Can you help us find the thieves?”
Dale grimaced. “I’m not deputized or otherwise considered the law in this town or this territory.”
“You’re kind of a lawman, ain’t you, being a bounty hunter and all? I bet you’re more experienced than Sheriff Chase.”
“Cooper’s Rest is Sheriff Chase’s town,” Dale said. He knew better than to stick his nose into another sheriff’s business, especially without invitation. He had learned that lesson a long time ago.
Most lawmen that he had met along the way, not all, but some, had resented his efforts to help them capture outlaws and criminals. Dale had never done so with the intention of embarrassing any of them or making them feel inept. Some of them were, of course.
He just had more experience when it came to hunting down fugitives. Fortunately, or unfortunately, as the case may be, he was often able to put himself into the mind of the outlaw. Think like them. Anticipate the reasons why they behaved the way they did, trying to determine where they might hit next or where they were most likely to escape.
At the moment, Dale felt sure that Blake Aldrin wouldn’t head further west into more crowded cities. No. Knowing Blake, he would likely head east. Maybe toward Cheyenne or closer to the site of Dale’s own upbringing in Fort Collins. Which brought him to another thought. Blake knew who had been tracking him from Arizona. Now two of his gang were dead, and he likely blamed that fact on Dale as well. Would Blake Aldrin head back toward Colorado to take revenge on Dale’s family?
The very idea prompted a chill to race down his spine. Was it possible?
“Mister… are you listening? Can you help?”
“My name is Dale McCandless, not Mister,” Dale snapped. “He glanced at the miner, the others being brought to the doctor’s office for reticle care, some able to walk, some walking wounded, and some being carried by their fellow miners. He needed to go help Marcia, not that he would be able to do much.
Fatigue already tugged at his body, and he cursed his weakness. But he couldn’t deny that he was also interested in the miner’s story. Blasting caps. Dynamite. Food. Was it possible that the Aldrin gang was still in the area? If so, what was Blake planning?
And then it struck him. He recalled Marcia telling him that his uncle didn’t take much silver out of the mine anymore, but enough, along with other ore, to keep the mine going and to make her uncle one of the richest men in town. He glanced at the miner.
“Is there an assay office here in town?”
The miner narrowed his eyes, confused for a moment by the change in topic, but muttered an affirmative. “Just a small one. Why?”
“Is this assayer’s office large enough to handle the amount of silver and other ore coming out of the mine?”
The man looked at him as if he had grown two heads. He snorted. “’course not! The ore gets transported by wagons, either up to Reno or down to Carson City, depending.”
“And the money for that ore is transported back the same way? By wagon?”
“’course not!” The miner huffed. He shook his head. “You don’t know nothing about mining, do you, Mister... McCandless.”
Dale gently shook his head, which still occasionally throbbed and prompted waves of dizziness. “No, I don’t. That’s why I’m asking you. So how do you get paid? How does the owner of the silver mine get paid for his silver and ore?”
“I have no idea how the owner gets paid, probably has some fancy bank in Reno,” the miner grumbled. “But we get paid almost every Friday, least when the weather’s good and the stagecoach is on time.”
“Stagecoach?”
“Sure,” the miner said. “The money… the payroll… comes back to pay us and for supplies and all that on the Wells Fargo stage. It leaves Reno, passes several towns, including Cooper’s Rest, and then heads down to Carson City. I’m not sure where they go from there.”
Dale’s interest grew, and he focused all his attention on the miner. “How is the money transported?”
