City of Gold

by Will Hobbs

  “Any proof that Uncle Jacob was pushed?”

  “Sadly no, but we have our suspicions, beginning with the company man who searches our lunch pails for high-grade ore at the end of every shift. Your uncle was alone on the lift when he came up from below. An accidental fall defies comprehension. This we believe: rather than talk with Jacob Hollowell, they silenced him forever.”

  12

  The Notorious Smuggler-Union

  ONCE WE PUT our backs to the cemetery and headed for town, Merlin told me I better hurry if I intended to rent a horse and make it to the Tomboy and return before dark. I took off at a run for Rogers Brothers. Around three in the afternoon, mounted on a sorrel mare, I started up the trail to the mines.

  Too narrow and rough for wagons, the trail climbed steadily through the band of red rock before it turned sharply into and out of a ravine with falling water. The aspens were gold, their leaves fluttering pretty as you please. The mare had no tricks up her sleeve, nor was she ruffled by the steady stream of riderless horses and mules, mostly mules, squeezing by us single file on their way back to town.

  Before long there was nothing but air on our right as the trail started across a cliff ledge, heart stopping for me but business as usual for the mare. I snatched glimpses of the view. Down below lay Pandora with its mills and tramways. Beyond Pandora, on the heights of the closed end of the box canyon, there was the tall waterfall where I’d stood on the brink the day before. Ingram Falls, as I came to learn.

  Here came some more unattended mules, reins looped around packsaddle forks, about to crowd us over the edge of the cliff. I held my breath and hung tight until the mules and the danger passed. When I praised my ride, the mare gave me an eye roll as if to ask what I’d been so nervous about. In my defense, the drop may have been a thousand feet. She took me through a tunnel and over timbered crib works that supported the trail across an especially perilous narrow spot. With the crossing of the cliff behind us, the trail climbed steeply through the dark spruce forest. On account of the grade and the thin oxygen, the mare’s breathing was labored. I let her take her time.

  Above eleven thousand feet the air had a wintry chill to it, and yesterday’s snow hadn’t melted. At a fork in the trail I glimpsed one of the major mines, apparition-like, high above on the mountainside. The mare stopped for a rest pending further instructions. I watched the big iron buckets in motion to and from the mine’s tramway station. Coal was coming up, ore was going down.

  Behind me, riders were ascending the trail. I waited to ask the name of the mine up above. It turned out that my apparition, perched on the edge of oblivion and backed by solid rock, was the notorious Smuggler-Union where my uncle died. The riders were returning from time off in town. They were miners who worked the night shift. Their rented horses would return to the stables on their own.

  The most you could make was three dollars a day, Merlin had told me, with a dollar deducted for room and board. “Wage slavery,” he called it. These men must have known my uncle and lived and worked alongside him. Pa’s brother had written us about his three-story boarding house. Two hundred men lived in it year-round, through the long and brutal winter. They had electricity, steam heat, a lounging room with a big open fireplace, a post office, a bowling lane and pool tables, a library, and packrats. The food was decent and the coffee was “fit for removing boiler scale.” I was about to tell them who I was but held back. It was enough that Merlin and the rest of the men at Oma’s knew.

  “Looking for work?” asked one of the miners.

  I thought he must be joking but wasn’t sure. “Looking for my mule that got stolen and sold to the Tomboy,” I answered.

  “Good luck to you,” another said. “Mules too long underground go blind.”

  They pointed the way and I took my leave. The trail to the Tomboy crossed the creek, angled up to a ridge, and turned the corner into the next basin. Before long I came to a sign high atop a metal pole wedged among the rocks. BEWARE THE BIG ELEPHANT, it said. I recalled the tombstone I’d seen hours before. Local humor, I decided.

  Suddenly the Tomboy came into view, the settlement and the mine works, clustered on a flattish patch of mountainside under the peaks. Echoes of industrial thunder surprised my ears. Sure enough, the Tomboy Mine had its own stamp mill and reduction works, as well as a tramway. As Merlin would explain that evening, having their own mill meant they no longer sent raw ore down the tramway to Pandora, only concentrates. The mine was owned and capitalized by Europeans of immense wealth, the Rothschild family. According to rumor, the Tomboy had recently added its own retort and would soon be making gold bullion in small amounts. As for the Big Elephant, that was the Tomboy’s nemesis, a monstrous snowslide that ran across the trail several times a winter, taking lives nearly every year.

  I wondered if the Tomboy’s blanket of new snow meant winter was here to stay. The place was so high up, it gave me a nosebleed just looking at it. Stunted spruce here and there were the only greenery to be seen.

  Within sight of the shaft house where men and mules were lowered into the earth, I tied up in front of the stable. I was thrilled at the prospect of finding Hercules but daunted by the battle on my hands. I intended to have my way.

  The barn doors stood wide open. Comforted by the familiar smell of hay and animals, I wandered inside. To my left, the door to the office was open. A man had his back to me and was talking on a telephone, which surprised me no end way up there. As yet, I’d never spoken on one. “Did I hear you right?” I heard him say. “Seven hundred pounds? You got to be kidding.”

  I went deeper into the barn. It had eight stalls on each side. Above, on three sides, the loft was chock-full of fresh-baled hay. There were four horses in the stalls, no mules. The mules were all underground, I figured.

  The Tomboy’s stableman appeared from his office, eyes down and deep in thought. He was bowlegged, from years in the saddle I supposed. His mustache hadn’t been mowed in months. From one moment to the next, he noticed me standing there. “Can I help you?” he said, surprised and somewhat annoyed.

  “I hope so,” I replied, nice and friendly. The stableman heard me out, granite-faced except for a flicker in his eyes when I said that the Tomboy had bought my family’s stolen mule. I proceeded with an exact description.

  “Weighs fifteen hundred pounds?” he scoffed.

  “Yes, sir, his mama topped a ton, and his daddy was the biggest donkey there is, a Catalonian mammoth. Both from Missouri, where they breed the best mules.”

  “Sonny, I ain’t laid eyes on the animal.”

  “Do you suppose they’d let me go down in the mine and look for him?”

  He laughed. “Not a chance in blazes. No unauthorized personnel—far too dangerous. Take my advice, kid, cut your losses and catch the next train to Durango.”

  This was the second time in a day I’d been told to go home. I thanked him, for what I didn’t know, and asked his name. “Tatters,” he said grudgingly, “Fred Tatters.” As I swung into the saddle I was thinking of appealing to the mine superintendent, but thought better of it. More than likely, I gathered, Hercules was still in Telluride.

  I rode down the mountain into the glare of the setting sun without noticing a thing. I was in a blue funk at the whole situation and angered over the injustice of it all, especially the likelihood that Jacob was murdered. It was dusk when I returned the mare to a surly hand at Rogers Brothers. When I asked when the packers would be rigging mules in the morning, he begrudged me two words. “First light,” he said.

  Too late for supper at the boarding house, I found something to eat at a backstreet restaurant, the cheapest thing on the menu. Slumgullion stew, they called it. Till would’ve called it slop. I was up at first light, having slept in fits in Oma Oleson’s front room before giving up and reading a couple chapters of the dinosaur book Pa had given me. Oma found me trying to sneak out the front door and insisted I eat “a quick something.” In a minute’s time she was cracking eggs, and I left on a fu
ll stomach.

  I posted myself at the head of Oak Street, and over the next couple hours I kept my eyes on the pack trains heading up the trail to the mines. The mules were carrying everything from bagged flour and canned goods to lumber and hay and boxes of dynamite. Hercules wasn’t among them. And where was Peaches?

  At least I had something to look forward to that Monday morning—paying off a debt.

  13

  The Gentle Giant

  THE LINE AT the bakery was out the door. Molly, with her hair tied back and wearing an apron, was working the counter. Her mother appeared now and then from the back to replenish the breads and treats behind the glass. Glued to the conversation of two men right behind me, I lost track of time. “Darndest thing I ever saw,” said one of them. “They lowered it onto his back with a chain hoist. Seven hundred pounds on the back of a mule! Three hundred is standard, and the most you ever hear of is four hundred.”

  Seven hundred pounds. Now I knew what Tatters was talking about over the phone.

  “What’s the load?” asked the second man.

  “A single piece of cast iron, part of the new compressor for the Tomboy. They broke it down into parts, but this one couldn’t be broke down any further. They’re going to put the compressor back together up at the mine’s machine shop. You should see the mule, brought in for the occasion, I heard. He better be as strong as he is big—the John Henry of mules!”

  “This I gotta see. How’s the animal taking it?”

  “Kicking and breathing fire!”

  This didn’t sound like our gentle giant, but it’s not in a mule’s nature to suffer fools. I was going to have to see for myself.

  “Think it can be done?” I heard over my shoulder.

  “That much weight, a six-mile climb in air that short on oxygen? No, sir, I do not. It’s lunacy.”

  The line had dissolved in front of me. “Owen,” Molly called, and I stepped to the counter. Distracted as I’d been, I hadn’t even looked at the pastries. I was at a loss. “What’ll it be?” she asked with a bright smile.

  “Have any apple strudel?” I managed.

  “Apple strudel it is!”

  Molly made change and I gave her back a nickel. “You remembered,” she said. “Wish we weren’t so busy . . .”

  “I’ll be back. I may have just heard something about Hercules.”

  “Good luck, then!”

  Outside, I waited for those two men and followed them past some warehouses and up Oak Street. A crowd was gathered in front of the New Sheridan. I heard the squeal of a frightened, angry mule. I had little doubt it was Hercules.

  And it was. His ears were laid back, his tail was up, and the whites of his eyes were showing. His feet were dug in and he was going nowhere. The man on horseback attempting to lead him was cursing and yanking on the halter rope. Two men with switches, one on either side, were drawing blood on his rump. Pa would have rolled over in his grave.

  While hiding Hercules, they’d built a contraption meant to enable him to carry seven hundred pounds up the mountain. The bell-shaped hunk of iron, the core of the Tomboy’s new compressor, was nested in a special-made packsaddle. Its most curious feature was an oversized carpenter’s sawhorse with a wide top centered under the load. The legs on either side were a few inches short of touching the ground. No one there that day, I imagine, had seen the like. The whole rig looked nothing short of ludicrous.

  My first instinct was to shout to high heaven and run to Hercules, but mules don’t take to yelling and shouting. Instead I stepped from the crowd and said, “Stop that!” to the men goading him from behind.

  At the sound of my voice, Hercules lifted his jackrabbit ears and swiveled them around. His head followed suit.

  “Her-cu-les!” I called, and he answered, his long whinny ending with a plaintive hee-haw. His ears tracked me as I came alongside, and when I stood before him, they pointed straight at me. I reached out my hand to his muzzle. He blew out a snort, took in my scent, and nickered. “Hercules,” I said, “I’m so glad to see you, and so sorry.”

  I dabbed at my tears, patted his muzzle, and scratched behind his ears the way he liked. I knew him from the black fringes inside those ears to the white rings around his eyes, to every eyelash. Oh, how I loved him. He rubbed his great Roman nose up and down my ribs, making sounds new to me, doleful and questioning. Where have you been? he was asking. Look what they’ve done to me!

  The packer leading Hercules wheeled his horse around. “What do you think you’re doing, kid?”

  “He’s mine,” I said. “I’m taking him home.”

  “You’re doing nothing of the sort,” he snarled.

  The crowd murmured their disapproval. Some were looking to a man who stood apart, watching with an expression I took for sardonic amusement. He was imposing, tall and brawny, rugged and broad-shouldered. An older man but not an old man. There was a star on his vest and a gun on his hip. So, this was Jim Clark. The vest and the Stetson hat were dark brown, his trousers a lighter brown. Like his badge, his bushy mustache was dull silver. He looked like a character out of one of Till’s dime novels.

  Hercules relaxed, bending at the knees, and when he did, the four legs of the sawhorse met the street. For the time being, the weight was on the sawhorse instead of his back. He crouched, resting, waiting for what came next. I thought the marshal would intervene but he was staying out of it. True to his reputation, “a difficult man.”

  The packer raised his voice. “I have a job to do, kid. They need this load up at the Tomboy and they need it today. I can see the animal has taken a shine to you. Maybe you can help. Either do that or get out of the way.”

  “It’s too much for him to carry. And besides, he’s never packed a day in his life. He’s a plow mule.”

  “Are you going to help, or what? We think he can do it.”

  There’s no stopping them, I thought, but I could prevent them from mistreating him. Hercules might even succeed if I went along. I said, “I’ll help if I get to talk to the mine superintendent when we get there.”

  “All right, then.”

  “You promise me it’s a deal?”

  “Ain’t that what I just said?”

  I told him to call off his dogs—the men with the switches—and I took the halter rope in hand. I had a little talk with Hercules. I told him I believed in him and spoke more low and soothing words of encouragement, but I had my doubts. Mules are creatures of habit, and Hercules was used to pulling a plow with me behind him, reins in hand, doing the driving.

  I coiled the halter rope, positioned myself a bit ahead of him and to the side, and called, ”Let’s go! Let’s go!” like we always do when it’s time to pull.

  No sooner said than done. Hercules rose on his legs, took all that weight on his back, and followed me up the street to the cheers of the crowd.

  The packer, having nothing better to do, rode ahead with glances over his shoulder. I suppose he thought he was showing me the way. I didn’t care what he was thinking as long as he kept his end of the bargain. If we made it all the way up to the mine, that is.

  The crowd and the men with the switches followed us as far as the head of Oak Street, where the trail took off. From there on Hercules wasn’t so nervous, and that was a good thing in light of the cliffs ahead. It doesn’t take much to startle a mule. As Pa would say, their deepest instinct is self-preservation, widely mistaken for stubbornness. A bit of burlap flapping on a barbed wire fence might be a harbinger of doom. Water of unknown depth might be hiding a crocodile.

  As the trail steepened, Hercules was breathing hard and fast, but that was to be expected. He knew when he needed to stop and settle and get that awful weight off his back. The first time he rested, I checked his flank for Pa’s omega. Our brand had been smeared with mud that had dried and flaked, and I could see through it to the work of the running iron. The bottom of the omega had been closed to make it into a tall hat, and a bar had been added above.

  When Hercules took
the weight again, I encouraged him with ”Let’s go! Let’s go!” and we were on our way. Never once did I pull on the halter rope. Every now and again he would stop and point those big ears toward some perceived danger. A little reassurance and we were on our way. Hercules was doing it for my sake.

  The tunnel and the cliffs didn’t faze him, nothing did. As long as I was by his side, he was good with it. I sang his favorite song for him three times through, “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad.” We didn’t have to deal with oncoming mules and horses. Someone had telephoned ahead and told the mines to hold them back until we came through with the extra-wide rig.

  Approaching timberline and the fork to the Smuggler-Union, I was having my doubts. Hercules was new to the mountains yet here he was up in the thin air, climbing steep grades above eleven thousand feet with seven hundred pounds on his back. He was streaming sweat and breathing so fast, so loud and heavy, I was afraid his great heart would burst.

  At the creek, Hercules took a long drink. We still had a mile or two to reach the Tomboy, and there could be no unburdening him until we got there. This is my fault, I thought. I made the wrong call. They wouldn’t have gotten him out of town without me.

  “Let’s get a move on,” the packer snarled.

  “Why don’t you suck eggs,” I snarled back.

  Once we angled over the ridge, the climbing wasn’t as steep. Hercules gave me a grunt and a groan and a sigh. The Tomboy came into view, its early blanket of snow having all but melted since the day before. I called louder now, in the jubilant tone Pa would use to encourage the team when the task was daunting but the end was in sight. The big fellow responded with a surge of Herculean strength. Somehow he had more to give, knowing the end of his ordeal was at hand.

  A small crowd was waiting for us—men, women, and children. I heard high praise for Hercules. Indeed, they were astounded and cheering. At the machine shop they had a chain hoist ready and made short work of lifting that infernal hunk of iron off his back.