Brian Garfield (3 page)

Wilstach simmered. “I had my druthers—”

“Forget it, John B. It don't mean nothing.”

“Tomorrow,” Wilstach said in anger.

“All right, tomorrow.” Boag watched the two men walking away. Not walking; swaggering. Wilstach was right. Tomorrow.…

Ben Stryker approached in his clawhammer coat. “Smart,” he murmured. “All set? Come on—it's time.” And the three of them went into the office, Stryker pulling a shotgun out from under his coat and talking softly to the clerk and the two guards on the interior door. “All right, don't get notions. Stand still and nobody gets theirselves hurt.”

Gutierrez backed into the room behind them and Boag heard the door click shut.

“Lord Jesus,” the clerk said. “Road agents.”

From the set of Stryker's dreamy smile Boag knew enough to feel sorry for the two sentries if they even thought about being brave.

They didn't. They let Wilstach take their guns. Stryker stood guard with his shotgun, his eyes half closed in wedges; the clerk and the two sentries sat down on the floor behind the clerk's counter and Gutierrez held them there at gunpoint while Stryker went to the door and opened it and made hand signals in the twilight, and soon seven men came through the door and helped Boag break into the back room.

“Christ,” one of them said, “I wish to hell it was greenjackets instead of that stuff. Look at how much that stuff weighs.”

It was piled on pallets in stacks up to a man's waist, four pallets—pyramids of gold bars stacked up crisscross like loose bricks. In the poor light it glistened. Boag's breath got hung up in his throat.

“That's fine,” Stryker was saying. “Nice and quiet.”

Boag looked over his shoulder and the dockside was calm: nobody had noticed anything. Yet.

“Throw all that on one buckboard, you gon bust the wagon,” Wilstach warned.

“We use two wagons,” Stryker said. “Here they come—get back from that door, hey?”

Boag heard the splintering crackle when crowbars broke the outer padlock hasp. The outside door of the freight room yawed open and two men, sentries, backed inside with their hands in the air. Three of Pickett's old-timers came in prodding them with guns and after they had a quick look around the room one of them went back to the door and called outside:

“All rat, brang up 'at wagon.”

There was the loose rattle of buckboard tires against the dock planking. Stryker said, “Start heftin', boys.” Boag reached for an ingot and went to lift it off the stack and nearly lost his balance. It was as if the thing was nailed down with railroad spikes.

“Jesus.”

Stryker said, “That's what you boys here for. Bend your backs.”

Boag grinned at him and heaved. He got the gold bar off the stack and tucked it under his right elbow and heaved a second ingot up in his left hand and carried the two of them out the side door to the buckboard.

But he was breathing hard when he came back for the second load.

5

Eight of them moved the buckboard to the ship's gangplank—Boag and two others on the yoke, pulling, and the other five at the back of the wagon with their shoulders to it, hauling up on the back spokes of the rear wheels. This was the risk part because now the whole damn town saw what was happening.

There had been a lot of argument back in camp because Stryker and some of the others didn't see why you couldn't just let the Johnson-Yaeger crew load the gold onto the boat themselves. That was where it was going anyway. But Mr. Pickett had ruled that out. The gold was generally one of the last things loaded aboard the ship because it had to be one of the first things unloaded at the Yuma end of the voyage. By the time they would have waited for the express company to carry its own weight aboard, the ship would have been crowded with passengers and crew. That was no good, Mr. Pickett said. The boat had to be as nearly unoccupied as possible.

It wasn't just that it made a lot of sweat-work. It was that the whole town would see it happen.

That was why, Mr. Pickett had explained, you had to have a thirty-man army to carry it off.

Now Boag was heaving on the wagon tongue and the rest of them were yanking and shoving and the heavy wagon was creaking up the slight pitch of the gangplanks to the low-riding main deck of the
Uncle Sam,
and back at the shore end of the wharf Mr. Pickett's men were strung across the pier in an armed line with shotguns and rifles holding back the curious and the angry. Hat peaks showed along most of the adobe and shingle rooftops: those were Mr. Pickett's men too, their rifles stirring constantly so that everybody in the buzzing crowd knew there was a gun on him. Citizens were hurrying to and from the waterfront with ideas and plans and the news. The crowd got bigger and bigger and its noise became higher-pitched, hotter.

“
Heave.
”

The wagon lurched onto the deck. Boag dropped the tongue and they all reached for ingots. Boag said, “Don't nobody drop one of these, likely it'd go right down through the deck.”

But there wasn't time for making neat stacks. They just set the bricks down by the wagon in a heap and then they were dragging the wagon off the ship and shoving it off the side of the pier to make room for the new buckboard that was already half loaded with ingots back by the company office. The empty wagon floated a few yards downstream and got wedged on a sand bar. Boag and Wilstach were on their toes, running. Inside the office they shouldered into the trio of loaders and lent a hand finishing the wagonload. The light was very bad by now and Stryker had refused to light a lantern in the gold room—“You want to be an easy target?” They had to load the last bricks by feel.

They started to wheel the buckboard down the pier and a flurry of gunshots erupted. Boag threw himself flat on the planks. A bullet screamed off one of the gold bricks. Mr. Pickett had a surprisingly big voice for a man his size: it was calling across the wharves. “Get that damn fool.” There was a fusillade of shots, mostly from Mr. Pickett's outposts on the rooftops, and Boag saw a man fall out of the second-story window of the assay-office building, and somewhere in the crowd a man started to scream; there was another volley of shots from overhead and the scream was cut off abruptly in its middle.

A ragged aftervolley, and things calmed down; the citizens were scrabbling for cover and the waterfront streets were emptying.

Somewhere back there in the town the local defenses were organizing themselves and it wouldn't be long before an army of locals came charging down the alleys filled with determination and brimstone. There wasn't a whole lot of time. Stryker was bellowing: “
Heave.
Damn you lazy bastards!”

Boag was heaving; he caught the flash of Wilstach's grin. Mr. Pickett went forging past them up the gangplank at the head of a wedge of his men; they were heading straight up for the pilothouse on the Texas deck, where a couple of the men already had guns on the captain and the helmsman. There was another Pickett man in the engine room and now when Boag's boots reached the gangplank he felt the heavy throb of the mechanisms under his soles.

Mr. Pickett's sharpshooters were making their way down from the rooftops. Now another firecracker series of gunshots began: That was Mr. Pickett's men, retiring, firing the occasional shot to keep the townspeople's heads down. In the darkness the rifles shot out orange lances of flame. Boag had his fingernails clawed into the splintery wood of the buckboard tongue; he backed up the gangplank, his back arched over, hauling. The sharpshooters began to swarm up along the pier and a few of them lent their shoulders and finally the wagon was bumping onto the deck.

Stryker was talking: “Never mind unloading the damn thing. Somebody lash it down where it stands. Use a couple of them shore lines—there's cleats all along the rail there.…”

Half Stryker's words got eaten up in the explosions of gunshots. The town had rallied and a crowd pressed onto the wharf blazing away at the boat: there was a lot of hysterical calling back and forth, a lot of confusion and rage; they were shooting into the Uncle Sam because they were too stupid to realize if they sank the riverboat it would cost more to replace her than the value of the gold they were trying to save. But bullets were punching through the woodwork and shrieking off the brass, and Boag threw himself flat into a companionway and lay there, streaming sweat.

Men were running along the deck and he heard Stryker somewhere: “Cut those fucking shore lines!” There was a high grinding racket as the paddlewheels began to roll; that was Mr. Pickett up in the wheelhouse with his gun muzzle pressed against the Captain's throat.

Boag fished the revolver out of his belt and went to the corner of the companionway but he didn't fire any shots; he had nothing against the townsfolk.
Just keep your big ass out of sight, Boag.

The Uncle Sam was easing out now. Citizens in stupid panic were running out onto the pier firing their guns and Pickett's sharpshooters on the high Texas deck were picking them off with cool calculation. Three or four of them flopped down on the pier before the rest got smart and wheeled for cover.

The riverboat backed into the current and began to turn her nose downstream; the Colorado picked her up and swept her away from the lights of Hardyville. After a bit Boag put his revolver away and went looking for Wilstach.

He found Wilstach at the rail just aft of the left-hand paddlewheel housing and Wilstach didn't look happy or even relieved. Half a dozen of Pickett's old-timey rawhiders were clustered loosely around Wilstach and three of the other new hands that Stryker and Gutierrez had recruited. Gutierrez was there, emitting the hoarse laugh he always barked out when he was nervous, and Stryker was coming down the stairs from the Texas deck behind two more of the new hands, a pair of Yuma Indians they'd recruited coming up along the riverbank last week.

Stryker said, “This most of them?”

“All of them,” Gutierrez said. “We left four back on the pier.” The nervous laugh. “I reckon the town's having fun with them right about now.”

After that there was an ugly little silence as Stryker came down the stairs to the deck. Boag saw it shaping up and thought about ways to handle it. He started to edge back into the deeper shadows but Gutierrez had fast eyes: “Come on, Boag.”

Wilstach said, “Hey …” because he suddenly saw it too.

Then the dark banks were rushing past on both sides of the ship and outlined against the sky at the head of the stairs was Mr. Pickett, his strong voice breaking the throbbing night: “Get it done, Ben.”

“Yes sir,” Stryker said. “All right now, you boys right over the side.”

Stryker hadn't even showed his gun but there were a dozen of them up on the rail of the hurricane deck, watching.

“Aw you rotten bastards,” Wilstach said wearily.

Boag picked up sudden movement in a corner of his vision—Gutierrez whipping out a knife behind Wilstach. Boag tensed to move but Wilstach had seen it too; Wilstach wheeled, whipped his hand up and caught the knife descending: it razored into his palm but Wilstach twisted, snapped it out of Gutierrez's fist, and took the hilt in his left hand to stab. Wilstach's hand flashed with the knife and when Gutierrez swerved to parry the threat, Wilstach kicked him brutally in the crotch.

Stryker was bawling: “Hobble it! Hobble it!” in his twanging voice but nobody paid him any mind. A high reckless joy filled Boag's chest and he waded in toward Gutierrez but then two of Pickett's rawhiders were right in front of him with knives.

“Carve them up,” Pickett bellowed.

Boag knocked one of them aside backhanded and grabbed the second one and got the knife away and stuck it against the man's throat.

Boag threw his head back. “Mr. Pickett.”

“What?”

“You want this little ballet to continue, Mr. Pickett, I'm going to have to kill this man here.”

“Well I wouldn't do that Boag, because if you kill Sweeney you'll get twenty men to sit heavy on you. Now you just turn loose of him.”

Sweeney struggled in Boag's grip and Boag pricked the point of the knife against Sweeney's Adam's apple. It quieted him down. Boag backed slowly over to the rail. “Come on, John B.”

“You gon jump, Boag?”

“I am.”

“Without our shares?”

“How you gonna swim with gold bricks?”

“Well shit,” Wilstach complained, but he broke away from Gutierrez and came over to the rail. Gutierrez snarled a little and then cackled nervously again.

Sweeney stirred again and Boag let him feel the point of the knife. Sweeney was big enough to make a good shield. It was the only reason they weren't shooting at him.

Mr. Pickett said, “Go on then, get over the side. I'm tired of looking at you.”

Boag reached around behind him left-handed and fumbled the revolver out of his belt but as soon as it came in sight, Mr. Pickett backed away from the hurricane rail, out of sight.

Boag glanced at Stryker at the foot of the stairs. Stryker had a gun out. Boag thought about shooting him but it wouldn't change anything if he did. None of them cared that much about Sweeney's hide; they'd sacrifice him. There just wasn't any way to win this one. Finally Boag said, “Go on over, boys. Ain't no choice.”

There were the two Yuma Indians and there was a new white hand who called himself Frailey. And there were Wilstach and Boag. These five were the ones Mr. Pickett had no further use for.

The white one, Frailey, climbed over the rail and Boag heard the splash when Frailey hit the water. Boag said, “Go on,” but the two Yumas shook their heads and Boag understood. They couldn't swim.

That was when Sweeney kicked back hard. His bootheel caught Boag in the shin. Sweeney dived away and Boag was standing there right out on the bare-ass deck and there was nothing to do but flip himself back over the rail.