Easy Pickings (19 page)

She wiped her lips with the butcher paper, and disposed of it.

“They say the gang up there, ones called Laidlow group, they drove you out.”

“I never know whether it's Laidlow or Roach, but it's all kin.”

“I get word from the brothers, and I don't know about Helena,” Sean said. “But if they say to help a lady in pink, and get something hearty into her, I'll do it, no questions asked, no favors wanted.”

He was twitchy, and finally stood. “That train, it's number seven-thirty-two, and you ask the conductor or brakeman if it's the Helena train, and he'll wave you up. Me, I'm gonna be on shift pretty quick, so I'll let you be.”

“Oh, Sean…”

“You're a pretty one,” he said, and swiftly retreated. She watched him abandon the tan-colored station and trot up the long grade toward a cluster of mines with smoke boiling from a row of stacks.

She still had the apple. She would save it for Helena. She wondered if pasties could be had in Marysville. She thought they might. Tommy Cruse had hired his own people, the way the mining men of Butte did.

This brotherhood, she knew little about it, but she knew it was a secret army working toward Irish independence. And for some reason they fought the Roaches and Laidlows, the whole clan of them. And that made her a friend.

She caught the train without difficulty, and sat in a old coach with wicker seats. Ahead was a baggage car, and that was it. The little train chuffed up a grade, and then wailed its way along an alpine valley clear to Helena. She watched nervously as the engine hissed to a stop, billowing steam. But she saw no sign of constables or trouble.

She had another long wait in Helena, and was grateful for the apple. Her handsome pink dress and silk-flowered hat proved to be disguise enough, so she walked the streets, up Last Chance Gulch, once a wild placer mining district, and now lined with small shops, and a few handsome stone buildings barely completed. She eyed the county courthouse on Broadway, where a crooked judge along with a crooked quack had banished her from the sight of the world—and had nearly brought her life to a sad limbo.

And it was not over. And she had no means. She was realizing she had friends, better friends than she had imagined, and maybe there was some hope in all that. She drifted to the little station down on the lower end of the gulch, and caught the right train, the one to Marysville, and arrived there at night.

There was no one waiting for her. Constable Roach wasn't lurking. The half dozen other passengers swiftly dissipated into the quiet. Up the slope, the Drumlummon stamp mill was throbbing, its heartbeat keeping the little town alive.

This was home. She walked to the washerwoman cottage in full dark, her carpetbag heavy, her arm aching. She was weary. She only wanted sleep, days and days of sleep. The night was peaceful. It was not late; the late summer sun had settled only two hours before. She did not know what she would do next, or how she would avoid recapture—surely Marysville would be the first place they would hunt for her—but this night she would sleep.

She found the cottage, sitting in its grove, quiet and serene, but she first circled it in the pale moonlight, and finally edged to the back window, and saw nothing. She entered through the laundry room, the door creaking, but nothing leapt out at her. And then she stepped into the one-room quarters. Nothing. Only the great quiet of a safe place, the pale glow of night filtering through the window.

On the sturdy table, in the moonlight, was a plate with some hard-boiled eggs, some pretzels, and several apples. She had friends, and they had not forgotten her, and they knew her needs. Never before had she contemplated the value of true friends.

“Tipperary Leary, you are a good man,” she said.

A little food in her stomach was just fine. She ate, abandoned the pink dress that had protected her for many hours and miles, and stumbled into bed, her eyes suddenly wet. She wanted to think she was home, but her mind would not let her. At least it was not a narrow bed in a lunatic asylum. Or the metal bench of a prison cell.

She slept fitfully, and awakened to a soft tapping. She had no robe, but hurried into the asylum dress, the drab Mother Hubbard, and peered out.

“Tipperary!” she said, opening to him.

“So it is the madwoman,” he said.

She could not answer, but hurried him to one of the two wooden chairs.

“Would you like an apple?” she asked, and they smiled.

“You are safe for the moment,” he said. “But only that. They will expect you here, and spring upon you when they can. Tell me all, spare me nothing.”

She did, beginning with her trip to Helena to confront District Judge Roach. When she got to the exam by Doctor Jerrold Laidlow, and the results, Tip Leary was hissing like a steam kettle.

“I knew nothing about him!” he said. “So that's how they railroaded you. Without a care about you, who you are, whether or not you're mad as a hatter. None of it. Just get rid of her, any way they could. And they did.”

“I thought I was all alone, washed up on a beach in a strange land, until yesterday,” she said.

Tip Leary didn't like that, and glared a moment. Then he reached across the table and took her hand. “You were never alone,” he said. “And never will be.”

She felt embarrassed. If there was one idea that dwelled in her thoughts after being condemned to spend all the rest of her life in an asylum, was that she was alone, forgotten, and beyond help. “Oh, Tip,” she said.

“Now there's more, Mrs. McPhee.”

“It's March, please.”

He nodded. “They've expanded your mine. They've got two shifts, a dozen men, and the ore's thicker and better every time they blast. They're running laterals, it's becoming a big T in there, and the word is, they'll be taking out a thousand dollars' worth of ore every day. They're sinking some capital back in, with timbering, a dormitory, a tailings dump, and all. But they're running two shifts a day, every day, and your little mine's a bonanza mine, and even now, just at the start, it's clearing ten thousand a month, net profit. I hear that from all over. I hear it from Wittgenstein, from half a dozen people at the mill, where that ore goes. And, get this, from Jerusalem Jones, who comes in and brags about it. He's the big cheese now.”

“A hundred thousand a year,” she said. “Even after expenses. If it lasts.”

“It's lasting. They say that seam follows a fault, and that fault's solid quartz full of gold, and it's now a yard wide and getting wider.” He eyed her. “There's wagons up and down Long Gulch all day, every day,” he said. “They go straight to the Drumlummon for custom milling. The Roach crowd's already got its first monthly payout. There's six principals, and a second generation, they get halves of one share. Maybe twenty. That boy Jerusalem, he comes into my place, and likes to brag. I sure do listen. He got his first half-share payment, and spent a lot of it on suds. He says there's to be one a month now.”

“I have my work cut out for me,” she said.

“You gonna fight?”

“You just persuaded me to.”

“And you on the lam. You got any ideas?”

She did, but simply shook her head. She wasn't ready to say anything about that. “I'll need some help,” she said. “Food. I don't have a shilling.”

“Consider it done. It'll be here, on the table, whenever you come here. This place, it's fine for the moment, but if they start hunting you down, it's not safe here.”

“I know of some places up high,” she said. “Good until snow comes.”

He grinned. “You are some lady,” he said.

“There's something you could do,” she said. “Who's in that clan? Who's getting paid? If Judge Roach gets a share, I want proof of it. If that miserable doctor, Jerrold Laidlow, gets a cut, I want to know it. If our Constable Roach gets a cut, I'd like proof of it.”

“That's a tough clan, March. I don't know why I have a bad time calling you by your given name. They can pinch any man, convict a man, throw the man into jail, seize his assets.”

“Women. Women too, Tip.”

“And worse,” he said. “When you've got the police and courts and a crooked doctor, you're a machine.”

He slipped away, staying in the aspen grove until he was clear of the washerwoman cottage. She watched him cross open fields, and she saw no one eyeing him. It was time to plan her day; or rather, her night.

She had things to do. First, she needed to stow away her things. She would stay here off and on, meet Tip here, pick up supplies here, but she wanted the place to seem unoccupied to any casual observer. And she feared that soon there would be not-very-casual observers.

She put on the men's clothing that she wore out of the asylum. It was dark; the britches fit, and it would take some scuffing. Then she stored most everything else, including the pink dress and hat, in a closet. She put a few things, mostly food, in the carpetbag; those would go with her. She debated taking the men's straw hat, and decided she would even though it was light colored and visible. But it hid her hair.

When she was ready, she locked the door behind her, studied the quiet world, the long limbs of the mountains, the distant town of Marysville, and then headed across open country, far from anyone, heading quietly toward Long Gulch and the dangerous trip toward her mine.

She entered the gulch as if stepping into a narrowing funnel, knowing that if she encountered one of those many ore wagons, she might have no place to hide. But for the first hour she met no one, and when she did see a heavy wagon coming down from the mine, drawn by a six-mule team, she had no trouble slipping into a rocky defile choked with brush, and the wagon rumbled by. That was close to where she intended to leave the gulch anyway, and so she started climbing the timbered slopes, negotiating her way around deadfall and ledges. She saw no one now; the woods shaded and closeted her, and she slipped through as lightly as a doe, heading for the vaulting cliffs and scree not far from her mine.

She spotted no one; no one saw her. She reached her hideaway and found it untouched, except perhaps by animals. She found nothing that suggested the miners nearby had located it.

She settled in, and then climbed toward another overhang to the left, even higher, making sure that Kermit's supplies were where she had hidden them long before.

They were all present. The Bickford fuse, the copper caps, the crimping tool, the lamps and igniters, and the box of waxy red DuPont dynamite.

 

Twenty-three

March marveled. The McPhee Mine was large and busy. From her vantage point, shadowed by forest, she noted that large stacks of timbers waited to be taken into the mine. Shiny rails erupted from the mine head and ended on a low trestle where one-ton ore cars could unload rock into a growing tailings heap at one point, or into ore wagons at another spot. She saw two steep-sided wagons, with their teams, awaiting loads to haul to Marysville. Just outside of the portal, two sorters separated quartz and country rock in mixed loads. Timber men were shaping posts and crosspieces, and sending them into the mine on empty ore cars.

The powdermen were using Kermit's powder safe, located well to one side of the shaft. Even as she watched, two muckers hand-pushing an ore car appeared at the portal and the surface men took over. The muckers rolled another car into the gloom. She saw Jerusalem Jones, apparently the straw boss, wandering about, a sidearm prominent at his hip. She backed away, slipped into the welcoming forest, and headed for another vantage point a hundred yards lower. Her canvas house had vanished, and in its place stood a crude, tarpaper barracks, the paper held onto rough lumber with battens. The remote mine had crews on hand at all times.

A bell clanged and three burly miners, wearing dust caps, slowly emerged from the portal, blinking at the bright sun after hours in deep dark.

“Fire in the hole,” yelled a powderman, walking deliberately out of the portal, and turning sharply left. Several miners stood well away, and a few seconds later a muffled rumble broke loose, a burst of dirty air boiled out, followed by several more thuds, and then silence. That would keep the next shift busy. And if this mine was true to form, the second shift would start an hour later, after the choking dust had mostly settled. No one was collecting at the portal just yet.

She had been watching much of the afternoon, getting a sense of how the McPhee was being run. Every carload of milky quartz that tumbled into a freight wagon sent a pang through her. That was her gold. She waited patiently, watching a red squirrel hide pine nuts against the looming winter. The next shift collected only a half hour later, but this shaft was still very short, and the blast had actually blown much of the dust and debris out of the portal. She reckoned that the second shift would finish up at midnight. It would be working the other lateral, not the one that had just been blown. Under the lamps, or candles, the muckers would shovel ore or country rock into cars. If they had laid a turning sheet on the floor ahead of the blast, the rock would have landed on sheet iron, making the shoveling much easier, and making it possible for someone to turn an ore car around and back onto its rails.

It was impressive. They were taking several tons of rock a day out of that portal. They were running three or four ore wagons down to the mill, for custom processing, every day, including Sundays.

Probably at midnight the second shift would finish, the powdermen would fire a charge in the face of the other lateral, and the mine would rest quiet and dark until before dawn, when the morning shift would start in all over again. That quiet time was what she was waiting for.

She had seen what she needed to. But she hovered patiently, feeling the cool evening air slide down the slope and eddy through the forest. The season would change soon, and the freedom of summer would give way to cold rains, snow, and struggle. She watched the crew straggle back to the tarpaper barracks. A stovepipe in the roof leaking white smoke told her that someone was cooking. It would be a rough life, breaking up the bitter rock, shoveling tons of it, breathing the flinty, gritty air lingering in the shaft and laterals. It was a grim labor for these womanless men.