by Matt Braun
“Then that makes you an even bigger liar.”
“Wait a minute!” Davis said indignantly. “You got no right to come in here and start calling me names!”
Starbuck’s smile seemed frozen. “I’ll call you dog and you’ll wag your tail! ’Cause if you don’t, I’ll kick your lardass right up between your shoulders. You begin to get the picture?”
Davis’ eyes went round as saucers. “I think I got it.”
“You’re smarter’n you look.” Starbuck studied his downcast face a moment. “Now, we’ll make this quick and painless. I want a description of whoever it was that left the warnin’.”
“Description?”
“You ain’t deaf, are you?”
“No.” Davis averted his eyes, darted a quick glance along the bar. “I don’t know as I could do that.”
Starbuck got the uncanny impression he was being told something without words. He leaned into the counter, motioned Davis closer. “You afraid to talk?”
“Yessir, I am,” Davis said in a hoarse whisper. “Mortally afraid.”
“Why so?”
“That’s him!” Davis hissed. “The one at the end of the bar!”
“You’re sure?” Starbuck demanded. “No mistake?”
“None,” Davis muttered softly. “He come in not ten minutes ago. Asked me if I’d had any news from Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“How come you suddenly remembered him?”
“Just did,” Davis said weakly. “When he asked me that, I placed his face from last time.”
“If you’re lyin’,” Starbuck growled, “I’m gonna turn your blubber into worm meat.”
“Honest to Christ, I’m telling you! It’s him!”
Starbuck was still leaning on the bar. He casually dropped his hand below the counter and eased it inside his vest. His fingers closed around the butt of the Colt and he slipped it from the crossdraw holster. Then he turned his head just far enough to rivet the man with a look.
“Mister, I’d like a word with you.”
The man was unremarkable in appearance. He wore soiled range clothes and a battered slouch hat. He was of average height, trimly built, with the kind of face lost in a crowd. The only thing noteworthy was the pistol positioned close to hand. It looked well oiled, and much used. He straightened slightly, then turned. His gaze settled on Starbuck.
“You talking to me?”
“Nobody else,” Starbuck said with a wintry smile. “I understand you’ve been askin’ questions about Hole-in-the-Wall?”
“What’s that to you?”
“All depends.”
“On what?”
“On who you know at Hole-in-the-Wall.”
“Try me and see.”
“How about Mike Cassidy?”
“Never heard of him.”
“You’re plumb certain?”
“Positive.”
“Then how come you’re back here checkin’ on things?”
“What things?”
“The warnin’ you left Cassidy … about me?”
“Hold off a—”
The gun appeared in the man’s hand and he fired a hurried snap shot. The slug plowed a furrow in the counter at Starbuck’s elbow. He shifted, swinging the Colt from beneath his vest, and touched off the trigger. The pistol roared, spat a sheet of flame.
A surprised look came over the man’s face. He dropped the gun and raised both arms, like a preacher warding off evil spirits. Then a splotch of red widened across his chest and his legs went rubbery. He sat down heavily on the floor.
Starbuck approached and knelt beside him. “You’re dead, so it don’t matter now. Tell me about Ira Lloyd.”
“Who’s he?”
“The man who hired you to kill me.”
“That’s a … laugh.”
“Quit stalling!” Starbuck commanded. “You don’t owe Lloyd nothing. Spill it while you got time!”
“Nothing … to … say.”
“C’mon, talk! What’ve you got to lose?”
“Starbuck”—the man smiled and a trickle of blood leaked out of his mouth—“you fool.”
His grin became a wet chuckle, then a strangled cough. Suddenly he choked and vomited a great gout of blood down across his shirtfront. His eyeballs rolled back in his head and he dropped dead.
Starbuck passed a hand over the man’s eyes. Then he rose to his feet and stood staring down at the body. He heard again those last words and any lingering doubt was dispelled. Proof positive lay dead at his feet. The bastard had called him by name! And hammered him to the cross with one last breath.
He was indeed a fool!
Chapter Eleven
The sun was a fiery ball lodged in the sky. Across the plains, a shimmering haze like spun glass bathed the land in a glow of illusion. Far in the distance, waves of heat pulsed and vibrated, distilling small mirages under glaring shafts of light. A faraway knoll sometimes seemed touchable and the plains went on forever.
Starbuck was roughly a hundred fifty miles northwest of Hole-in-the-Wall. He’d followed the old Bridger Trail for three days, with the Big Horn Range to the east and the Absaroka Mountains to the west. Early that morning, north of Stinking Water River, he’d crossed the line into Montana. Now, with the sun fading westward, he intersected the Bozeman Trail. A tributary of the Yellowstone flowed through the juncture, providing fresh water and plentiful graze for the gelding. He decided to pitch camp for the night.
A stand of trees along the stream afforded shelter and a ready supply of deadwood. He unsaddled, then hobbled the bay and turned him loose on a grassy stretch near the shoreline. He dumped his gear on the ground and left the rifle propped against a tree. After collecting an armload of wood, he built a small fire. Nights were brisk, the temperature plummeting when the sun went down and a cheery blaze was one of the few comforts on the trail. He loaded a galvanized coffeepot and put it to boil on a couple of rocks beside the flames. Supper would consist of hardtack and a rabbit he’d shot late that afternoon. His treat would be a tin of peaches he’d been hoarding.
With the campsite in order, he spread his bedroll beneath the trees. He built himself a smoke and lit it with a stick from the fire. He was reminded of the joke Indians told among themselves. A white man kindled a roaring blaze and backed off from it, whereas a red man built a small fire and hovered near its warmth. The thought did little to improve his humor, and nothing at all to dispel his guarded mood. He stretched out on the bedroll and lay back with his head pillowed on the saddle. He stared at the muslin blue of the sky and wondered where it would all end.
The killing at Cheever’s Flats was still very much on his mind. Several things were immediately apparent. The dead man, despite his denial, was yet another of Ira Lloyd’s stooges. He’d returned to Cheever’s Flats for the express purpose of verifying whether Starbuck had been killed at Hole-in-the-Wall. In the event that gambit had failed, he was doubtless under orders to pick up Starbuck’s trail and arrange an ambush. The most troublesome aspect, however, was confirmation of something Starbuck had until then merely suspected. The dead man—along with the two bushwhackers killed previously—had known him on sight. Clearly, his attempts to disguise his identity hadn’t worked.
All of which added a new dimension to Ira Lloyd. The mine owner had orchestrated a far-flung assassination plot. He had retained William Dexter, whose role in the affair was still somewhat murky. Then he’d hired at least three veteran gunhands and set them to tracking Starbuck across the vastness of the High Plains. Obviously a stickler for detail, he had let nothing escape his attention. He had acquired Starbuck’s photo—probably from one of several articles in the Police Gazette—and each of the hired killers had quite plainly committed it to memory. There was an overall coordination to the plot that smacked of someone with a keen mind; not unlike a wily chess player, Lloyd had made his moves with a certain analytical perception of men and events. Then, too, the magnitude of the operation indicated a large outlay of funds. No cheapskate, Llo
yd was clearly willing to spend whatever it took to get the job done. He was determined and relentless, a man of craft and spidery patience. He wouldn’t quit until Starbuck was dead.
A similar thought was uppermost in Starbuck’s mind. He possessed his own brand of bulldog tenacity, and the word “quitter” was not part of his lexicon. Yet he was still operating somewhat in the dark. His gut feeling told him that Lloyd somehow anticipated his every move. There seemed to be a contingency plan every step along the way, and no end to the number of assassins who dogged his trail. At Cheever’s Flats, he’d taken precautions to insure he wasn’t followed. After searching the dead man, he had gone directly from the saloon to the trading post. There, he replenished his victuals and indulged himself with the purchase of a coffeepot. Then he rode south, toward Hole-in-the-Wall. Only after full dark had he reversed course and turned north. So he was relatively certain no one shadowed his backtrail.
What lay ahead was an altogether different story. He planned to follow the Bozeman Trail, which paralleled the Yellowstone in a westerly direction. Another couple of days would put him at Fort Ellis, and some miles past there he would swing northwest, toward the Missouri River. Four days from now, barring the unforeseen, he would arrive in Butte. Thus far, however, his hindsight had been considerably keener than his foresight. The trail ahead was rough country, desolate and virtually devoid of habitation. Ambush sites were around every crook and turn; the terrain was made to order for bushwhackers. For all he knew, another of Lloyd’s assassins awaited him even now. Based on events to date, he could only surmise that Lloyd would anticipate him once more. Whether the next attempt would be made on the trail—or in Butte itself—was anybody’s guess. Yet he needed no crystal ball for a look into the future. A pattern had been established, and patterns were seldom broken. There would be another attempt on his life.
The coffeepot suddenly rattled. He stubbed out his cigarette on the ground and climbed to his feet. With his jacknife, he cut green branches and fashioned a spit. Then he dressed out the rabbit and put it to cook over the fire. Afterward he walked to the stream to clean his knife. He hunkered down and then stopped, grunting softly to himself. He stared at the blood on his hands.
And thought of Ira Lloyd.
Butte was situated directly on a mountain. The town sprawled over and around the mountain, which was shaped like a woman’s breast and filled with the world’s richest lode of copper. Unlike other mining camps, there was a sense of permanence to the community. Butte was the prized play-toy of millionaires.
Starbuck rode into town around midday. He left the gelding at a livery stable, and spent the next couple of hours drifting from saloon to saloon. His grubby appearance made him one of the crowd, for the miners were rough-garbed and covered with powdery grime. He casually engaged men in conversation, and kept them talking with an occasional question. He was a good listener—a master of subtle interrogation—and a few rounds of drinks bought him all the inside information. He discovered Butte was on the brink of open warfare.
The story told by the miners typified what was happening all across the West. In the 1870s, when gold was the lodestone in Butte, a man worked his claim by hand. Within a few years, however, the gold diggings petered out. At that point, large corporations bought up the claims and began exploitation of minerals locked deep within the bowels of the mountain. By the end of the decade, copper was king, and the town was controlled by bankers and financiers. Absentee owners, generally a consortium of wealthy businessmen, pulled the strings from New York and San Francisco. Their singular interest was profit—at any cost.
Technology was the key to the financiers’ takeover. A new invention—dynamite—was used to blast through the rock and excavate tunnels. Underground drilling, formerly done by hand, was now accomplished with power drills, operating on compressed air. Working in tandem, dynamite and power drills made it possible to burrow far beneath the earth’s surface. Some operations were thousands of feet below ground and extended for miles through a labyrinth of tunnels.
As the mines probed ever deeper into the mountainside, the danger to workers multiplied at an alarming rate. Safety measures were virtually nonexistent, and accidents became commonplace. Men were killed and maimed by cave-ins, sometimes drowned when subterranean springs flooded the tunnels, and frequently incinerated when fire swept through the timbered mine shafts. Adding fuel to the workers’ discontent was a miserly pay scale of thirty cents an hour. The inevitable result was revolt and violence.
Only two years ago, the battle between management and miners had flared into open hostility at Leadville, Colorado. Workers went on strike—demanding four dollars for an eight-hour shift—and the mines closed. Owners and miners armed themselves, and Leadville teetered on the edge of anarchy. The state militia was activated and the miners were ultimately forced back to work. Yet the battle cry had been sounded all across the West.
Embittered workers rallied to the exhortations of radical union organizers. With armed men on both sides, a strike more often than not developed into a bloody confrontation. Murder, complete with bombings and midnight assassinations, was the rule. Still, the owners controlled the courts and the law, and as a last resort, the militia. Strikes were generally broken by the might of force, and the miners seldom realized any lasting benefit. The struggle, nonetheless, continued unabated. A climate of revolution spread like wildfire throughout western mining camps.
Even now a strike was brewing in Butte. Starbuck learned that labor leaders were organizing the miners along military lines. Weapons were being distributed, and rifle squads were openly training in the surrounding hills. The plan was to call a general strike, and challenge the owners with their own tactics. The hired guns of management—known as goon squads—and the militia would be met by organized resistance. The battle lines were drawn and an explosion was imminent. Butte was where the union leaders would take their stand.
Starbuck discovered the impending strike directly affected his own plans. The Grubstake Mining Company—owned by Ira Lloyd—had suspended operations. The mine had been closed almost a month past, with no prior warning of a shutdown. Several miners attributed the closing to the threat of a strike. Grubstake management apparently preferred to sit out the battle and wait until the dust settled. As for Ira Lloyd himself, the name was unknown in Butte’s saloons. George Horwell, the general manager, had operated the mine for the last three years. The day after the shutdown he had simply vanished from town. No one could hazard a guess as to where he’d gone.
Late that afternoon, Starbuck went to have a look for himself. The Grubstake was located on the west side of the mountain, near the bottom of the slope. Everything he’d heard was substantiated by what he found. The windows and door of the office were boarded up, and the mine shaft was sealed off by heavy timbers. There was no watchman, and no evidence anyone had been near the place in several weeks. For all practical purposes, the mine appeared abandoned.
Unless William Dexter was a fool, he’d known the Grubstake was closed when he offered Starbuck the assignment. Then, too, it seemed curiously strange that Ira Lloyd was a cipher to everyone in Butte. On top of that, there was the additional mystery of George Horwell, the Grubstake manager. Why he’d disappeared and where he’d gone were equal parts of the overall riddle. The upshot of all these imponderables was a cul-de-sac. A dead end that seemingly stopped at Butte.
Starbuck took a room in one of the local hotels. His investigation was stymied and he was momentarily at a loss. A bath and a decent meal and a good night’s sleep seemed very much in order. He would think on it overnight and then decide his next move.
For the next move might very well be the last.
Starbuck rolled out of bed and padded barefoot to the washstand. He poured water from a pitcher into a cracked basin and briskly scrubbed his face. After rinsing his mouth, he smoothed his hair back and caught his reflection in the mirror. The vestiges of Hole-in-the-Wall marked his features.
The bridge of
his nose was slightly off center and an angry scar still puckered one eyebrow. The puffiness was gone from his lip, but a hairline crease was visible. He looked vaguely like a pugilist who had stepped into the prize ring once too often. He wondered how Lola would react when she got a glimpse of the rearrangement. Then he laughed at himself for wondering at all.
After supper last night, he’d gone on a quick shopping spree. A men’s emporium was able to outfit him in a suit and accessories that were reasonably passable. He had swapped the Stetson for a derby, and chucked the range garb, including the vest and the conchas belt, into a trash bin. His last purchase was a straight razor and a soap mug. Then he’d walked down to the livery stable and sold the bay. He got a good price, but it made the chore no easier. The horse had served him well.
Pouring fresh water, he lathered his face and shaved with dull concentration. His thoughts this morning were not on the bay, and only fleetingly on Lola Montana. He was, instead, mentally preparing himself to assume a new guise. He finished shaving and toweled his face dry. Then he dressed, remembering to remove the fake dead tooth, and walked out the door. He left nothing of Arapahoe Smith behind.
By eight o’clock, he’d had breakfast and inquired directions to the sheriff’s office. A cheap cigar was wedged in the corner of his mouth, and the derby was cocked at a rakish angle. He thought it added just the right touch to his cover story. Hurrying along the street, he worked himself into the proper mood of outrage. He stormed into the sheriff’s office with a look of bellicose indignation.
Hiram Urschel was less lawman than politician. He was bald and potbellied, and wore thick, wire-rimmed glasses. He was also the tool of the mine owners, and currently sitting on a powder keg called Butte. He looked nervous as a whore in church.
“Earl Suggs,” Starbuck announced, shaking his hand. “Western District Manager for the Olympic Mining Equipment Company.”
“Yessir,” Urschel replied without much interest. “What can I do for you, Mr. Suggs?”