Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839) (7 page)

The clerk nodded and slid open a wide, flat drawer, saying, “I know what you have in mind. Other marshals have been studying the same crazy situation. You won't find the siding everyone's looking for. Half of the old narrow-gauge tracks up there have been pulled up for scrap.”

Longarm spread the map on a nearby table and ran his finger along a red line between Manzanita and the Big Valley. He mused aloud, “If there's unused track laying around up there to be claimed by any junkman, it wouldn't be impossible for somebody to build his own siding in some wooded stretch of canyon.”

The clerk shook his head. “The other lawmen have been all up and down the line. Besides, the train crews say they've never stopped or been stopped between the mine tipple and the mills down here.”

“What about this other fellow, Hearst?”

“George Hearst? He lives in Frisco. Ain't heard about him missing any gold. Like I said, they crush their own ore up at Sheep Ranch and ship it almost pure. They send it down in freight wagons, under guard. The way I hear tell, nobody wants to tangle with old Hearst. He's in politics in the city and thick with the Big Five. This young MacLeod likely don't have as many friends who'd back his play against high-graders.”

Longarm smiled thinly. “He has the U.S. government in his corner. He contracted with the treasury to deliver his gold to the mint. Where does this Hearst jasper send his gold?”

The clerk shrugged. “Same place, of course. Nobody else buys gold in quantity on this coast.” He saw Longarm's puzzled frown and asked, “Did I say something important, Deputy?”

“Maybe. These robberies have added up to a mess of gold, no matter what the quality of the stolen ore might have been. But you're right. You can't sell a real pile of gold to anyone but Uncle Sam—not without attracting a lot of attention.”

“Mexico?” the clerk suggested.

The marshal tugged at a corner of his mustache. “Doubt it. For sure, they couldn't haul it that far as ore. They have to have a refinery we don't know about. If MacLeod's extracting with the cyanide process, it can't be just some backwoods stamping mill, either, You say the Hearst mine has its own mill?”

The old man shook his head. “Wrong tree, Deputy. The mill in Sheep Ranch is just a simple crusher that runs the slurry over mercury beds. They boil the mercury out of the results and wind up with rich dust. If the Lost Chinaman's ore needs cyanide to leach it from the rock, the Hearst mill couldn't extract it worth mention.”

“How about those other ghost towns up there, like Angel's Camp?”

“They ain't quite dead, for one thing, so you'd have witnesses. There ain't no cyanide mills, either, so you'd get no gold.”

“Try it this way. What if MacLeod's wrong? The ore might be rich enough to run through an old-fashioned mill and settle for half, letting whatever gold the cyanide might get out stay where it is?”

The man scratched his wispy-haired pate vigorously. “Well, high-graders is called high-graders 'cause they skim the cream. You could get some gold out of nigh
any
rock with a pan and running water. They're going to a lot of effort if that's their play, though. MacLeod's ore is marginal. Wouldn't be worth digging if they hadn't come up with new methods in the past few years. Hell, if
I
was up there high-grading, I'd rob George Hearst's mine. It's a third richer in color.”

Longarm thanked the clerk and left. He went next to the offices of the
Sacramento Bee
, where he found another friendly cuss who was more than willing to jaw about the newspaper's back files.

He knew he was wasting time asking about the high-grading. If the case could have been solved by reading old reports on paper, the treasury never would have come bleating to Justice for a helping hand.

He asked about the Calico Kid and was told, “He got the name and the rep down near Los Angeles. Mining camp called Calico. Nobody knows who he was or where he came from before he started shooting folks as a hobby.”

Longarm pursed his lips and said, “Hung out in mining country, did he? Now that's right interesting. You got anything in the morgue about him robbing gold shipments?”

The reporter shook his head and said, “Nope. The way they tell it, he was just a wild saddle tramp. Rode with some other young owlhoots of the same stripe. They've shot up a few towns for the hell of it, and been run out of twice as many. But the kid never had any robbery pinned on him.”

“What
did
he do for a living, then? Folks can't just ride around like something in a Ned Buntline novel with no visible means of support. Bullets cost a nickel apiece and drinks are three cents a shot!”

The reporter shrugged and said, “He probably let folks grubstake him some. Lots of people sort of like to stay on friendly terms with a mean-eyed jasper with a rep.”

The deputy pondered this for a moment, then said, “I don't see him as a man who begged for handouts. If he didn't work, he must have been stealing for a living.”

“Could be,” the newspaperman agreed. “If he ever robbed anyone, they never saw fit to press charges, which isn't hard to understand. They say he had about five sidekicks riding with him, all of them just as mean as he was.”

Longarm saw that he wasn't getting anywhere, and left. He found a café and had some chili and a beer. They both stayed down, so he figured he was getting over the set-to with Curly.

By the time he got to the Wells Fargo office again, the stage was loading up for its run up the slope. The jehu holding the reins was a fierce-looking old man of about seventy. The shotgun rider at his side was a consumptive-looking hunchback with a bullet hole in the brim of his dusty Stetson. Longarm saw that two passengers were already aboard, so be climbed in.

His fellow passengers were a tall man wearing a business suit and a blond mustache, seated across from a girl of about twenty-five. She wore black Spanish lace and her face was a dusky shade of rose. If she wasn't at least half Indian, he'd never met one. Her dark eyes smoldered angrily in a way that led Longarm to believe that anger was a natural condition with her, so he just smiled and sat beside her, introducing himself to the man in the opposite seat.

The man held out a hand and said, “I'm glad to know you, Deputy. I'm Kevin MacLeod.”

Longarm blinked and asked, “The same Kevin MacLeod who owns the Lost Chinaman? I was beginning to think I'd never find you. This must be your pretty little wife I've heard so much about, right?”

The girl gasped in dismay and MacLeod said, “Not hardly. Allow me to present Señorita Felicidad Vallejo. One of the Vallejos of Old California.”

The girl looked away, trying to ignore them both. MacLeod shrugged and said, “She doesn't like gringos very much.”

Longarm refused to be snubbed, and he said, “It's an honor, ma'am. I read about your kinsman, General Vallejo. He sort of chased our army through a few canyons before they called the war off, didn't he?”

She didn't answer. So he shrugged and turned back to MacLeod as the jehu atop the stage cracked his whip and shouted, “
Move
, you oat-wastin' sons of bitches!”

The stage lurched into motion and took off in a cloud of dust, swaying on the rawhide thoroughbraces as if it were a small craft plunging through choppy water. MacLeod grinned and said, “It gets worse when we reach the high country. I think old Logan, up there, has been trying to die young. You can see he never made it, but it's not for lack of trying.”

Longarm turned toward Señorita Vallejo, touched the brim of his Stetson, and asked, “Mind if I smoke, ma'am?” She kept her face averted, gazing out the window, and made no answer. The deputy shrugged and, taking her silence for consent, produced a cheroot from an inside coat pocket and planted it between his front teeth. He turned back to MacLeod and said, “Let's talk about rocks. Just how many shipments have we lost track of, so far?”

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.