John waited, watching the fog build up along the creek, thicken, swell, and rise until he could no longer see any of the tents along either bank. He was glad he was up there with Ben. Gold panning was hard, backbreaking work, and the dry rockers were a chore, as well. And he hated throwing buckets of water into the sluice boxes. It was boring, hard work, too. They had hoses and sometimes siphoned water from the creek into the hoses; that ran pretty well, but this often did not provide enough force to move the gravel through the boxes.
Ben had taught John a secret about finding gold, and he had just put it into practice the night before. He had taken two horse blankets way upstream, away from all the other claims, and tied them together, strung them across the creek, and tied the ends to trees. Ben said that gold would wash down the creek, settle in the blankets, and he could wash them out in a pan and find dust and sometimes nuggets. He planned to check his blankets that evening when they got finished crushing rock and running the gravel through a sluice box. Ben worked for John's father, but he also had his own claim along the creek. They were all working on shares, and so far, his parents and some of the other miners who had come with them had already accumulated quite a bit of dust and several respectable-sized nuggets.
“Oh, Johnny, you can wheel that barrow on in here. I'm going to light one of these candles and just come to the light.”
John entered the mine. He could still smell the exploded powder and dust tickled his nose, but it was already settling. He had to bend over, once inside. He saw a flicker of light and headed toward it. His head throbbed even worse inside the mine, perhaps from stooping over. He could barely see through the pain shooting through the backs of his eyeballs.
“Let's take a look,” Ben said, holding the candle flame close to the wall. He stood in a pile of broken rock. John had to push the wheel hard to get over some of it. Finally, when he was close enough, he set the barrow down and picked up a shovel. Then he felt woozy, and nearly fell against the wall.
“What's the matter, Johnny?”
“It's my head. It hurts like hell, Ben. Damn you, anyway.”
“I told you not to handle them sticks with your bare hands.”
“Yeah, after I already had.”
“Then, I told you not to touch your hands to your head. I seen you wipe sweat from your forehead. That'll do it ever' time. That stuff Mr. Dupont puts on the sticks gives a man a terrible headache.”
“How long does it last?”
“Oh, it'll be gone by this afternoon, I reckon.”
“Well, right now, it's like somebody's worked me over with a sledge.”
Ben laughed.
As he scoured the wall, John began to shovel ore into the wheelbarrow. The rock made a hollow sound against the wood until the bottom was covered. Then the fragments just made chunking sounds that got duller as the pile got higher.
“Well, looky here, will you?” Ben said, his voice just above a whisper. “I do believe I see yaller gold.”
John felt his pulse race. He dropped the shovel and stepped to the wall where Ben held the candle close.
“See it?” Ben said.
John had to strain his eyes, squint them to slits, but he saw it. Small specks of a dull yellow metal embedded in the rock. Then Ben took his shirt sleeve and rubbed a spot nearby. Black soot came off on his sleeve and there, like a splash of yellow paint, was a vein, perhaps six or eight inches long and four or five inches wide.
“Is that gold?” John asked, his headache almost forgotten.
“That be a little lode, Johnny. And where that lode is, could be a streak, and that streak might lead to a great big one.”
“I see it. It's beautiful, Ben.”
“Run and fetch me an adze, a maul, and a chisel. I'm going to peck around the edges here and see what we got. But we got gold, just like I said we would. Now, don't you breathe a word of this until I show it to your ma and pa. We don't want a bunch of panners running up here and blowing holes in the mountain trying to outflank us.”
John was shaking now. He could hardly think. He had seen gold before, but never sticking out of bare rock like this was. His hands started to tremble and his palms slickened with sweat. And he couldn't move his feet.
“Well, what're you waiting for, Johnny? Go and fetch them tools. Take your barrow out and dump the rock where we usually do. You can be crushing rock whilst I look for more vein.”
John just stood there, frozen, staring at the gold streak in the wall.
He felt as if he had stepped into another world, a world of riches beyond imagining. The gold hypnotized him, held him in its golden spell, and he never wanted to leave that place and go out into the sunlight where everything he had seen in that dark pit would vanish like the morning dew.
2
THERE WERE EIGHT MEN CAMPED SOME TWO MILES FROM DAN Savage's mining claim. They had been there for two days and some of the men were getting impatient. Their leader, Oliver Hobart, had insisted on a dry camp, with no fire to give them away to any who might be watching. They were not even on the creek but below it, and the men there had to sneak up to the creek at night to fill their canteens. They were eating only hardtack, beef jerky, and canned peaches, and were running low on food, as well.
“Damn it, Ollie, you sure about this Savage feller?” Dick Tanner struck a match on his boot to light his Chesterfield. He was nearing forty, and, like the others, couldn't rub two nickels together. He wasn't as tall as Ollie, who topped six feet in his moldy stockings, nor as muscular, for Ollie was all muscle and hard bone, but he, too, was big and wide in the shoulders, with arms that could crush a hardwood keg into matchsticks. Both men had dark flint eyes and heavy caterpillar brows. People thought they could have been brothers, but they were, in fact, cousins, so the resemblance came natural. They had grown up together and both had learned how to backshoot a man at an early age. Neither one of them was born with a conscience, so killing came easy to them, as easy as stealing or any other crime, for that matter.
“Yeah, Dick,” Hobart said. “He's due to pull out for Pueblo tomorrow. Last time he was down, a month ago, he cashed in so much dust he blinded the clerk at the bank.”
“We gonna hit this Savage this morning, right?” Mort Anders said. He, like the others, hadn't shaved in a week, and his face was shadowed with beard stubble. He was in his thirties and wanted for murder in at least two states, perhaps three. His pale blue eyes were as cold and dead as a three-day-old mackerel.
“Soon as Pete and Luke get back from glassing Savage's camp and tell me the fog's done lifted,” Hobart said.
“Shit, I hate this damned waiting,” Fritz Schultz said. He was sitting on a deadfall pine log, digging up the ground with a stick he had whittled to a sharp point. He was wanted for bank robbery and murder back in Kansas.
“Hell, it's free gold, Fritz,” Red Dillard said. He was the youngest, at twenty-five, and he had at least five notches on his gun by the time he was eighteen. Red was a small-time thief with an itchy trigger finger. His eyes were blue, also, but blue as the sky and they were never still in their sockets. The man had a nervous tic right below his left eye and he was constantly twitching the other cheek as if to balance things out.
“Not exactly free,” Hobart said. “But that bastard Savage and his crew are like beavers on that creek. They're pulling gold out of Cripple Creek faster than old Bob Womack can make it to the assay office in Colorado Springs.”
All the men laughed at Hobart's reference to Bob Womack, who had started the gold rush to Cripple Creek in 1890. He hadn't hit it big yet, since he first found some gold up one of the creeks back in '78. But in October 1890, after filing a lot of small claims, he took ore down to Colorado Springs from a new claim. That El Paso lode panned out at $250 the ton, but nobody believed him when he started bragging about it. Men around Denver and El Paso had heard it all before.
But a man named Ed De La Vigne, a mining man, believed Womack, and the following spring, in April of 1891, he formed the Cripple Creek Mining District and Womack got the credit for starting the gold rush.
But Dan Savage had listened to Womack, too, and did some exploring of his own, and Hobart had seen him in El Paso cashing in dust and nuggets. Cripple Creek was choked with prospectors, but few knew about Dan Savage and his claims. Savage wasn't one to brag, as Hobart found out.
“How much dust do you figure Savage has?” asked Army Mandrake, the oldest man in the group. Mandrake was almost fifty and he'd been on the wrong side of the law since he was fifteen, when he murdered his father so he could buy a horse. He'd been on the run ever since, having left Ohio shortly after the murder, and he'd left many a man buried in boot hill because Mandrake didn't believe in working for a living. He had once killed a man for fifty cents. It didn't make any difference to him. He'd sooner kill a man over a bowl of soup than struggle to fulfill his needs. He had coal-black eyes buried deep in his skull and their gaze had chilled many a man at the business end of his Colt.
“It'll be in the thousands,” Ollie said. “More than he had the first time. He's got more men working with him, and he's had more time on that creek.”
“How'd they come to name it Cripple Creek, anyways?” Mandrake asked.
“Story is a cow clumped acrost it and broke its leg,” Dillard said. “Leastways, that's the way I heard it.”
“You heard right,” Ollie said. “Bob Womack's family farmed up here nearabouts. That's what got him started looking for gold up all these creeks. I guess he didn't like farmin' much.”
The others all laughed, low in their throats, so that they sounded like feral beasts feeding on carrion.
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Pete Rutter handed the binoculars to Luke Wilkins, who was lying next to him on large boulder atop an outcropping in the dense forest upstream from Dan Savage's mining camp. Tall pines shielded the pair from being seen by anyone downstream, but there were also spruce and juniper growing nearby, and two large deadfalls in front of them and to the rear that would make it difficult for anyone to reach them in a hurry. Their horses were tied to some pine trees less than a hundred yards away. A thick bank of fog hung over the creek, but the sun was already burning off some of the thin clouds that shawled the mountainside on the other side of the creek.
“Wonder what that explosion was?” Luke asked.
“Miners are always blowing holes in the mountain. Don't mean nothin',” Pete said.
“Sounded damned close.”
“It was up on that mountain yonder, but it don't mean they found gold. It means somebody's lookin' for gold.”
“I saw the smoke, then them clouds came down, so I couldn't tell rightly where it was.”
“Don't worry about it, Luke.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Here, take a look, Luke. I still can't see a damned thing. Just a lot of shadows.”
“I can hear them moving around down there,” Wilkins said, taking the binoculars from Pete.
“Yeah. I think everybody's up by now, but that damn fog's stickin' like cotton candy to the creek and everything on both banks.”
“Where'd you ever see cotton candy, Pete?”
“In St. Louis. Carnival come to town when I was a boy and us kids got some for a penny. Man used a bellows to blow the sugar stuff into a big reddish puff. We got it all over our mouths and clothes and Ma like to had a pure-dee fit.”
“I had some once't down in N'Orleans. My brother told me it was made by spiders and I wouldn't touch it.”
Pete laughed.
“Luke, you're dumber'n a sock full of hickory nuts.”
Luke put the binoculars to his eyes, peered at the camp downstream.
“I can see some legs. Oh, there's a shovel. And arms. I can hear that gravel going into the sluice box. And now they've got a bucket brigade goin', a-sloshin' water into that long box, runnin' the sand down over the ribs. Yep, they're working that stream good, Pete. I hope they find a lot of color by the time that fog lifts.”
Luke took the binoculars away from his eyes and rubbed them.
“What do you think, Pete? Too soon?”
“To go back and tell Ollie? Yeah. He said don't come until we can see every hair on those boys' skin. Still too much fog.”
“But the sun's up now. Should burn off pretty quick, I'm thinkin'.”
“Yeah. Should. Been that way nigh ever' day since we got here. Every morning, anyways.”
“You see that sunrise this morning, Pete?”
“Yeah, I saw it.”
“Goin' to come a hell of a storm tonight or tomorrow.”
“We got slickers.”
“Yeah, and rain'll make it hard to track us.”
“Well, I think Ollie's going to have something to say about that, less I miss my guess,” Pete said.
“What do you mean?”
“You know damned well what I mean, Luke.”
Luke's eyes glittered. He was a small, wiry man with close-set porcine eyes and a shock of unruly straw hair. Lean as a whip, he was lightning fast with a six-gun and seemed to enjoy killing human beings. By contrast, Pete Rutter had close-cropped hair with gray streaks at the temples and was a burly, thick-necked man with just the trace of a German accent tingeing his Mississippi drawl. He had murdered a family in Oxford, stole their wagon and poke, sold the wagon in Jackson, and gone to Texas where he continued his life of crime.
They had all met Ollie in Auroria when Hobart was waylaying miners from Cherry Creek and stealing their pokes.
The eight men had seen a bigger opportunity in Cripple Creek when the main street started sprouting gambling halls, saloons, dry goods stores, and the like, and the creek crawled with prospectors. But Hobart had seen a greater opportunity with Dan Savage as a single target. As he told the others, “We can roll drunks until we're all gray-haired, toothless, old coots, or we can get enough gold in one swoop so's we can light a shuck for California and leave these cold, freezing-ass winters behind.”