Six Ways from Sunday, page 13
“He didn’t aim good,” she said. “I can aim better than that.”
I sure agreed with her.
We got up there and just to be on the safe side, I pulled that iron, and then knocked.
Nothing happened for a while, while the moon dipped behind some stringer clouds, and then I knocked again. Three in the morning was a pretty good time, I thought. We finally heard some hollerin’ in there somewhere, and finally the door creaks open a piece.
“What?” Brashear asks.
I pushed hard, and then we were in the doorway and he couldn’t slam her shut. He was wearing one of them nightshirts. I’d heard tell of such things, baggy cotton dresses, but I’d never seen one live on a body.
“Time for you to do some explaining, Brashear,” I said.
“What are you talking about? Get outa here.”
“You’re gonna open up that office down there and we’re gonna look at some records and you’re gonna tell us how come you took the Fat Tuesday mine and gave it to Carter Scruples.”
“Come back in the morning,” he said, trying to shut the door.
But he wasn’t getting nowhere ’cause I was in the middle of it.
That’s when Celia Argo, she sort of got right into it.
“You crook,” she said. “You’re gonna come downstairs and show us the books.” She was wavin’ that little lady gun at him. “Know what’ll happen next? I’m gonna shoot you in the crotch. And after that, I’ll shoot your fingers and hands off. You want to go through the rest of your life getting fed because you can’t hold a spoon? You want the friendly fellow next door to wipe your butt with a corncob because you can’t?”
He wasn’t paying her no attention, so she sent a shot sizzling past his ear. That sort of got his attention. Then she pointed her lady gun straight at his family jewels, and he got the message. I had to hand it to Celia. She was a match for Armand Argo, all right, and most ever’body else come around. And she didn’t neglect to pull that spent brass and shove another in there, ready to perforate the minin’ camp secretary.
“I’m going to haul you to Butte,” he managed to say. “I’m a deputy.”
“I’m thinking maybe we’ll haul you to Butte,” I said. “Haul you up and lock you in there and tell that sheriff what you’re doing around here.”
He looked mighty sullen, but she waggled that lady gun and aimed straight at his jewels, and he got the message that time.
I followed him in there whiles he got his skeleton key, and it was mighty close in there. In fact, it plain smelled bad. But so did Brashear. We followed him down them stairs. I knew he wanted to stop for a leak, but I was in no mood, and Celia would have shot anything that came to view, so we just shoved him down, and he barefooted around the building and opened up the door.
“There’s nothing to see,” he said.
“There’s records, and they been fixed to make Carter Scruples look legal, even if he ain’t.”
Brashear, he didn’t say nothing.
“How’d you steal the mine from me and Armand?” she asked.
“It was all perfectly up and up,” he muttered.
“Show me,” she said, waving that little lady revolver right at his crotch.
“Don’t,” he said, placing a limp white hand between that lady gun and his jewels.
Real slow, he lit a lamp and pulled a big ledger book off a shelf.
“Look for yourself,” he said, plainly not wantin’ to go any deeper into it.
“You show us,” I said.
“All I do is keep track of who owns what,” he said.
“Where’s the Fat Tuesday?” Celia asked.
“That’s claim number forty-seven,” he said.
He thumbed through the ledger. Each claim was on a separate page. When he got to Number 47, he paused. At the top was a description: “From claim cairn, 600 feet west to staked corner, then 1500 feet north to corner, then 600 east to corner, then 1500 feet south to cairn.”
“They’re all like that,” Brashear said.
Beneath was simply a record of the original claimant and transfers of ownership. The Fat Tuesday had gone from Willis Bank to Armand Argo to Transactions, Incorporated. That transfer was dated a week earlier, which sure interested me.
“Who come here to record the new ownership?” I asked.
“Carter Scruples, he came with a bill of sale from Argo, so I recorded it proper,” he replied.
“What bill of sale?” Celia asked.
“Proper bill of sale, signed by your man,” he said.
“Show it to me.”
“That’s in Scruples’ possession.”
“How much was paid for the claim?” she asked.
“How should I know? Me, I just keep the books is all.”
“Show me the Hermit Mine,” I said.
“That’d be claim number 122. That was one of the last ones filed,” Brashear said.
He paged through and found it.
“That was filed on by six men, as you can see, standard 600-by-1500-foot claim, and transferred to Transactions, let’s see, two months ago.”
“And he showed you a bill of sale?”
“Yep. That’s how I keep the books.”
“And did you challenge it?”
“Scruples had a proper bill. That’s all that’s needed. I’m just the recording secretary, keeping a legal record.”
“This stinks.”
Celia waved her little lady gun at his privates. “Stop making it look right. You show me the true bill now, or I’ll blow your balls off.”
That little widow lady sure was determined. All of us knew that Armand Argo hadn’t sold his mine to anyone, but there it was on the books, lookin’ legal and proper. Me, I ain’t got the brains to figure it out. Crooks are a lot smarter than me, which is why they’re crooks. There’s crooks, and the rest of us are just ordinary dumb folks trying to do the right thing.
Next I knew, Celia was counting. “I pull the trigger at three,” she said. “One, two…”
“All right, all right,” Brashear howled.
He reached for another gray ledger book on the shelf, this one smaller. It had a label on it that said “Assessments.”
“District assesses every mine every year,” he said. “That’s sort of a tax to keep this office going and settle disputes and write out deeds and claims. If a mine falls behind on the assessments, it can be auctioned off, and that’s how Scruples buys them up.”
“Auctioned off?” she asked.
“I hold auctions one minute past midnight on the announced day. And Scruples, he’s the only one shows up.”
I started laughin’. “You turd, what’s he paying you?”
Brashear cooled down. “You accusing me of something?”
“I’ll shoot your pecker off,” Celia said.
“This district is run up and up,” he said.
Celia put a bullet between his legs, right through that nightshirt. I didn’t see no blood gushing down his leg, so I guessed she spared his privates.
“My Gawd,” he whispered.
“I don’t know how your crooked game works, but here’s what you’re gonna do,” she said. “You’re gonna write me a deed that says that Armand Argo or his heirs owns the Fat Tuesday. Then you’re gonna write the same thing for every other claim that Scruples took over.”
“He’d kill me.”
“Then get out of town. Now start writing,” she said. “’Cause if you don’t, you won’t have any fingers left, and that’s just the beginning of the parts you’ll lose.”
I sure had to hand it to her.
Brashear, he hunkers down at his desk, dips the nib into the ink pot, and begins scribbling out deeds and recording them in his ledgers. She’s lookin’ over his shoulder, too, making sure he’s doing it proper. I never seen such a woman. She knew more words than I’d thought there were. She taken each deed, compared it to the original, and tucked it under her arm.
I didn’t know if all this paperwork did much good, not with that army Scruples had roaming around out there, but at least it was something to hand them miners, them that hadn’t fled the district. If Scruples was gonna get this Swamp Creek District, it’d be straight shooting-iron theft, and not a lot of stealing only a law clerk could figure out.
But then I remembered something that Carter Scruples told me when I was tied up with that bunch. He said he didn’t know a thing about mining, and he was gonna sell the whole Swamp Creek District, once he got his hands on the mines, and get out. So that was why he needed all that paper. He had to prove to any buyer that he owned all them mines. Him and Amanda weren’t gonna get far without those deeds, or claims, or whatever. I never did know all the proper words, but it didn’t matter none. They needed good paper to sell out, and that’s why they was putting the screws to the district secretary.
Old Brashear, he sat there in his nightshirt, sweating, lookin’ into that muzzle of Celia’s little lady pistol now and then, but he kept scratching, and she kept eyeing the result and comparing it with the ledgers. It took an hour, and it wasn’t long until dawn when he finally finished up.
“Open that safe,” she said.
I’d hardly noticed the safe. It had pink cupids painted on black enamel.
“No, what’s in there’s mine,” Brashear said.
“Open it before I blow off your fingers one by one.”
“Then you’ll never get it open,” he said.
“And anything else dangling around,” she added.
He got religion, all right, and began spinning that dial, and pretty soon he creaked that heavy door open and we got a look in there. It was just a little safe, after you got past them thick walls, but it was stuffed with flannel bags, and they sure was heavy.
“How much gold is that?” Celia asked.
“That’s my personal money,” Brashear said.
“That’s what Carter Scruples paid you, and we’re taking it to the sheriff in Butte,” she said.
I sure marveled at that girl.
“But that’s mine!”
“We’ll let him get it straightened out,” she said. “Now, you gonna get out of town before Scruples comes hunting you?”
He didn’t say yes or no. He just sort of deflated, like gas leaving a gasbag, and then he walked wearily around the building and up them smelly steps, with Celia right behind, not giving him a chance to do her harm.
Well, the deal was, he got himself dressed and packed, and we followed him over to Bunsen’s Livery, where he woked up the proprietor and got himself a buggy and a trotter, and tossed his stuff in there and headed toward Virginia City, just about the time dawn was breaking.
“Don’t know whether we’ll see him again,” Celia said as we watched that old crook slap reins over the trotter and take off.
“Guess we’d better take this loot up to that there sheriff in Butte, before Scruples get ahold of it,” I said.
“Lotta gold in there,” she said. “Maybe we could just bury it.”
“No, we’re gonna do it right,” I said. It sure was funny what gold did to good people. “It don’t belong to us.”
Chapter Nineteen
Well, I had second thoughts about that. I didn’t know that there sheriff in Butte. For all I knew, he was Brashear’s kid brother and twice as crooked. I got to thinkin’ maybe we’d better sort this out ourselves.
But I sure didn’t know what to do with all that stuff.
“You or Armand got a trunk?” I asked Celia.
“Yes, there’s an old leather one with straps in our rooms.”
“Well, let’s get this stuff into it. I want ever’thing. Them ledgers, that seal, the stamp, the blank forms Brashear used, all that stuff, and the bag of gold, too.”
I had in mind getting every record and form from the mining district out of there, and hiding it so Scruples couldn’t get his mitts on any of it. That would slow him down when it come to sellin’ off the whole Swamp Creek Mining District, like he was plannin’ to do.
So Celia, she got her an armful of stuff, the ledgers and blank forms and all, and I got the seal and some stamps and the little bag of double eagles, and when we emptied that little safe and all, I shut her tight. It was gettin’ toward dawn and I didn’t want nobody to see us, so I looked real sharp around that quiet little mining camp, and then we slid out, and cut along the creek instead of the streets, and pretty quick we got into them rooms Armand and Celia had.
She dug out the old trunk, which looked like a little casket of leather, and even had an ancient lock on it. We opened it up, found it was empty, and pretty quick we loaded the mining camp ledgers and papers in there, and put the little bag of gold on top, and then some of Armand’s duds to sort of cover the whole thing, and then we closed the lid. I turned the lock and gave Celia the skeleton key to keep. The whole thing didn’t weigh a lot, maybe thirty pounds.
I had a pretty good idea what to do with it. I didn’t want it out in the open country, or at some abandoned mine site, where someone like Glan would find it. I wanted it hid in plain sight, and that meant the Wells Fargo office, where they stored trunks on a shelf for pickup by customers.
“Celia, can you run down to the Wells Fargo and get a tag for the trunk? And see who’s laying about?”
She nodded and took off into the gray dawn. Swamp Creek was still mighty quiet. She come back with a tie-on tag.
“I didn’t see anyone,” she said. “The clerk, he just handed the tag to me.”
I’m no good at writing, and it’s all I can do to print letters. I never did figure out how to write that script. So I let her do the job.
“Choose a simple name,” I said.
“Philippe Desiree?”
“That’s simple? I guess you think so. Make it to him.”
She wrote the name on the tag.
“I gotta look like someone else,” I said. “Armand got a hat?”
She found two, one of them a black silk stovepipe, and the other a white straw Panama. I thought the stovepipe might do just fine, so I left my own slouch hat there, and screwed the stovepipe down. She found a string tie and helped me wrap that thing around my neck, since I didn’t know nothing, and then I hefted that old trunk, and we headed out the door.
We got that trunk down to the Wells Fargo office and shelved before the town began to stir, and I thought we’d done a good job. That clerk, he didn’t know me from Adam’s off ox, and when I was done, he said, “thanks beaucoup, Mr. Desiree.”
So the keys to the kingdom were sitting there in Wells Fargo, and maybe that’d slow Scruples down a little.
“I guess we’d better see if old Billy Blew’s got his saloon open,” I said.
We slipped over there, and he was up and around, all right.
“Where were you? I took your blankets off the pool table,” he said.
“Busy night,” I replied.
He looked Celia over but didn’t say nothing. She was too young to be hanging around in a saloon, but nobody paid no mind to that in Swamp Creek.
“Billy, I need your help. But you’d have to be real quiet. These here are deeds to all them mines out there. They’re good, signed by Brashear. I want you to hand them real quiet to the owners of the mines when they come in here. Like if those boys from the Hermit Mine show up, just give ’em this,” I said. I pawed through the pile and found the one for that mine and showed it to Billy.
He sort of cocked an eyebrow. “I thought Transactions got all the paper on those mines.”
“Well, Billy, someone sort of persuaded Johnny Brashear that it would be healthy for him if he fixed up these deeds.”
“You?”
“Nope, not me,” I said. “But I didn’t mind it at all.”
He glanced briefly at Celia, not crediting her with anything, and that was fine with me.
“Yeah, I’ll do it,” he said. “But some of them boys, they’ve packed up and left the country.”
“Well, do what you can, and guard those deeds real good,” I said. “They’re good as gold. Leastwise, that’s how I understand it. Those boys have got their mines back—if they can keep Scruples out.”
“That’s a big if,” Billy said.
I didn’t argue it. I didn’t know if that paper would do them any good at all. But at least it would make it harder for Carter Scruples to steal them mines.
Billy turned to Celia. “Have we met?” he asked.
“No,” she said.
“I’m Billy,” he said.
“Pleased to meet you,” she said, and let it stay like that.
Billy was a little miffed at not getting a handle on her, but he tried not to show it.
“Guess we’d better go,” I said to her.
Billy, he studied on us as we walked out of there. He sure wanted to put a name to her, but if she didn’t feel like telling him one, that was her choice.
Swamp Creek was stirring now, and shops were opened up.
“Guess we’d better ride up to your mine,” I said. “If there’s guards, then we’ve still got trouble.”
She nodded. I tightened the cinch on Critter, who didn’t like it. He preferred to see me roll under his belly because I didn’t cinch the saddle down good.
Celia, she said she’d walk and lead the mule. It was Aggie’s mule and I sure didn’t know what to do with it. But we started anyway, me riding, Celia leading that four-footed beast, and when we got to shouting distance of the Fat Tuesday, I hollered, half expecting the muzzle of a gun to poke from a window somewhere. But nothing happened.
When we finally pulled into the mine yard, there were a few miners standing at the shaft, watching us ride up.
“You fellows waiting to do your shift?” I asked.
“Who are you?” one big one in bib overalls asked.
“Most people call me Cotton.”
“Who you work for?”
“Right now, I’m working for her. She owns this mine.”
They stared at Celia, not quite believing.
“This sign says the mine’s closed, and owned by Transactions. That you?”
“No,” Celia said. “I’m Armand Argo’s widow, and this mine belongs to me. I have the papers.”
