The Legend of Shamus McGinty's Gold

by I. J. Parnham

  Wiley held the oil lamp higher. “What can we talk about? I have beans. You want beans. I want five hundred dollars. You need to give me five hundred dollars.”

  “The price of those beans is steep.”

  “Maybe it is, but the price will get steeper.”

  “The problem is I haven’t got five hundred dollars.”

  Wiley shrugged. “You charge ten dollars for each bottle of universal remedy. You can make a lot of bottles from a bag of beans.”

  “I can’t make that many. The process is long and complex and demands a heavy use of beans. I can only make thirty or so bottles from one bag. For the price you’re asking, I can’t make a profit.”

  Wiley waggled the oil lamp over the bag of beans.

  “Then take a lesson from me and charge more.”

  Fergal tucked his fingers into his jacket and shook his head.

  “The trouble is I don’t think I can charge more after today. Your townsfolk nearly lynched me.”

  “People will pay good money for something that works and what you provided today didn’t work. What you’ll provide tomorrow will work, but only if you have this bag of beans.”

  Fergal tapped his chin. A smile spread across his face.

  “What about a trade?” Fergal lowered his voice. “I can give you something other than dollars, such as gold.”

  “What?” Quinn shouted, and stormed across the main drag.

  Wiley backed into his store with a shriek, but Quinn headed for Fergal. He slammed a hand on Fergal’s shoulder and spun him around.

  Fergal shrugged. “Why worry? That seems the best solution. He has beans. We need beans. He wants five hundred dollars. You won’t pay him five hundred dollars. So we give him some of the gold.”

  While Quinn muttered under his breath, Wiley poked his head out of the door.

  “What gold would that be?” he said.

  Fergal turned to Wiley and rubbed his hands. “In return for the beans, I’m offering you a share in more gold than any man could ever want.”

  “It’s not your gold to offer,” Quinn said. “If you want to be a fool, you’re offering him part of your share.”

  Fergal smiled at Wiley. “So what do you say? Do we have a deal?”

  “I need to know more about the gold,” Wiley said, his eyes gleaming.

  “In that case, I’ll explain,” Fergal said.

  Quinn grunted as Fergal began talking. He spun away from them and strode back to his men.

  “Don’t worry, Quinn,” Randolph said. “We’re getting closer to the gold.”

  With an angry lunge, Quinn kicked at a stone. “Then why does it feel like it’s getting farther away?”

  “That sounds like hogwash to me,” Wiley shouted from the store doorway. “I don’t want gold. I want dollars, five hundred of them to be exact.”

  Fergal sighed. “You’re the only person I’ve met who didn’t want gold.”

  “That’s my decision and my loss. So do we have a deal or do I destroy the beans?”

  “Five hundred dollars might be a fair price, but I don’t know whether your rotten beans will work.”

  “There’s only one way to find out.”

  “Then it’ll be too late and I’ll have bought an expensive bag of beans.” Fergal nodded. “I’ll tell you what. Give me a few handfuls of your special rotten beans and if they work, I’ll pay the full price.”

  Wiley rubbed his damp forehead. Then, with a frown, he nodded.

  “If I do that, the price for a full bag will rise to one thousand dollars.”

  “We haven’t got that sort of money.”

  “I heard you say Quinn has five hundred dollars. I’m sure an enterprising man such as you can raise another five hundred.”

  Fergal kicked at a loose stone on the ground. “To raise that sort of money, I’d have to sell everything, but it’s a deal.”

  “I’ll come with you.” Wiley shook a finger at Fergal. “And there’s no point trying any funny business while I’m gone. Only I know which bag contains the special beans and you’ll never discover which one it is.”

  When Wiley dashed back into the store, with a wide grin, Fergal turned around.

  “We have a deal. Get back to the wagon, Randolph, and fire up the pot. We’re making a new batch of the universal remedy.”

  Randolph strode from the store, leaving Quinn and the rest standing in a bemused circle. Despite this success, Randolph’s stomach rumbled. Whether from alarm or from the thought of having to taste the universal remedy again, he couldn’t tell.

  Chapter Thirteen

  THE POT BUBBLED HAPPILY as Randolph poured the cooked beans into the muslin bag. He had an attentive audience of Fergal, Jed, Wiley and Quinn’s men, and they watched the procedure as if he carried out the most fascinating set of actions anyone ever had.

  “How many bottles of the universal remedy will you get from this pot full?” Wiley asked, as Randolph poured another handful of the most expensive beans in history into the pot.

  Randolph stirred the pot. “I’ll get fifteen, maybe twenty if we’re lucky.”

  “We need to work out if this works, so perhaps you should only produce the one bottle. I can get someone with an ailment to drink a bottle. If he perks up, we’ll know the universal remedy works, and Fergal can buy the rest of the beans.”

  “That’s a great idea,” Jed said.

  “It is good thinking,” Randolph said, and smiled as Jed danced a short jig on the spot.

  “I agree,” Fergal said as he strained the muslin bag into a pan.

  “I don’t agree,” Quinn said from the other side of the fire. “The only person I care about curing is Morgan, so this first bottle goes to him.”

  Jed stopped his jig and slumped to the ground.

  “I don’t think that’s a good idea,” Wiley said.

  Quinn pointed at Wiley. “Don’t push your luck, storekeeper. You’re living on borrowed time.”

  “Agreed,” Fergal said. “We try this bottle of universal remedy on Morgan first.”

  With a steady hand, Fergal poured the contents of the pan into a bottle.

  Quinn nodded toward the bottle. “Are you telling me that the only ingredient of your foul-smelling brew is beans?”

  “Nope, I’m adding the other important ingredient soon: a secret recipe an ancient native tribe gave to me.” Fergal sighed and stood up. “Except I’m guessing you don’t want to hear about the details.”

  “You guessed right, tonic seller.”

  With a smile to everyone gathered around the fire, Fergal hurried to his wagon. While he was gone, Randolph stirred the bean slurry. This simple action calmed him more than he’d have expected, and in a strange way he’d miss not making the universal remedy when he left Fergal.

  After a few minutes, Fergal came out of the wagon with a bottle of the amber liquid clutched aloft. The liquid sparkled in the firelight, as he stood beside the fire and tapped the bottle.

  “Let’s see if this cures Morgan,” he said.

  Quinn snatched the bottle from Fergal’s grasp.

  “This had better work, so I’ll see if it does. You don’t need to come.” Quinn turned away and then lowered his voice to a whisper. “While we’re gone, don’t go anywhere.”

  “More to the point, don’t go anywhere yourself. We have a deal.”

  With a grunt, Quinn stormed from the fireside with his men.

  Wiley rose to his feet. “So, do I get my one thousand dollars when he returns?”

  Fergal shook his head. “You get your one thousand dollars when Quinn returns, Morgan is better and we get our hands on some gold.”

  “That soon?” Wiley sighed and shrugged his apron above his knees. “While we wait, I’m getting some sleep. Don’t go anywhere without me either.”

  Wiley shuffled under a spare blanket. Within seconds, he was snoring. Randolph stirred the rest of the expensive beans into the pot. As he tipped the small bag, a few beans escaped and rolled on the ground at hi
s feet.

  As these beans were precious, Randolph picked them up. He poked the beans around his hand as he searched for a difference from normal beans. Aside from being a little old, they seemed the same. Then, from nowhere, he remembered part of an old childhood story his ma had told him.

  “Magic beans,” he murmured.

  Thinking more about those magic beans, he chuckled. The chuckle grew into a laugh.

  “What’s that?” Wiley said.

  “Nothing,” Randolph said. “Go back to sleep.”

  Wiley rolled over and restarted his slumber with a rasping snore, but Randolph couldn’t stop the occasional chuckle escaping from his lips.

  “What’s cheered you up, Randolph?” Fergal asked from the other side of the fire.

  “Magic beans have cheered me up.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Randolph thought about the childhood story, but he couldn’t remember the full tale. He shrugged and threw a bean to Fergal. When Fergal failed to catch it and it bounced off his chest, Randolph nodded to the ground.

  “You’d better find that bean. It’s a magic bean. That single bean is probably worth a dollar.”

  “The beans are worth more if the universal remedy cures Morgan.”

  Randolph stroked his chin. He didn’t have the kind of devious mind that Fergal possessed, so he couldn’t resolve all the details, but he knew about one element.

  “As a man who likes the occasional gamble, I’m prepared to bet that this version of the universal remedy will cure Morgan. Are you?”

  “How much are you wagering?” Fergal said with a frown.

  Randolph considered, but however much he pondered, he couldn’t see any fault in his thoughts.

  “I’ll bet our deal. If the universal remedy cures Morgan, you let me go, this evening.”

  “And if it doesn’t cure him?”

  “You can name your price.”

  Fergal poked at the fire with a stick. “My price would be that you have to stay and protect me for life.”

  As Randolph had expected this counteroffer, he nodded.

  “It’s a deal.”

  Fergal shook his head. “No deal. I want the cure to work and I’m not betting against it working. Besides, if it does work, I’ll need your help to get the gold.”

  As Randolph hadn’t thought that Fergal would accept his first offer, he smiled.

  “I’ll make you a different offer. You won’t bet against something you don’t want to happen, so let’s bet on whether Morgan will take us to a buried stash of gold. I reckon there isn’t any gold. What do you think? It’s the same stakes, but a different bet.”

  With his head on one side, Fergal narrowed his eyes.

  “What have you figured out?”

  The strain of keeping his thoughts quiet broke Randolph and he threw his ladle into the pot. With a sigh, he hurled the palmed beans into the air. The small, light-colored seeds disappeared into the night.

  “Magic beans, that’s what I know.”

  “The beans aren’t magic beans. They just contain something that’s good for people.”

  “They’re magic to me.” Randolph accepted that he wouldn’t get any reward from the situation, but he settled for gloating. “But I’m asking myself why Fergal O’Brien, the finest tonic seller on this side of the Mississippi, would want to buy magic beans.”

  “I keep saying that they aren’t magic beans,” Fergal snapped.

  Randolph nodded to the snoring storekeeper. “In a way, you’re right. The magic isn’t in the beans. The magic is in getting someone to pay five hundred dollars or more for them.”

  “As I say, they’re worth the price when you think about the gold we can get our hands on.”

  “We’ve not seen the gold.”

  “Morgan says it’s there and Quinn believes him.”

  Randolph chuckled. “Except as you’ve often told me, if you want people to give you money, you tell them what they want to hear. Tonight, we have a practiced trickster who is prepared to pay hundreds of dollars for a bag of rotten beans. Why? Because someone has said that he can be rich if he does.”

  Fergal rubbed his brow and turned to the fire. He shuffled forward to look into the pot.

  “The universal remedy worked and it’ll work again if the rotten beans are responsible.”

  “That’s more magic. Not magic that the universal remedy worked, but magic that you believed it did.”

  Fergal leaned back on his haunches, his face pale. “Spell it out, Randolph. What do you mean?”

  Randolph took a few deep breaths, savoring his response.

  “For the last few years, we’ve produced a universal remedy that doesn’t work. One day, it suddenly works, but does so only the once. We know that if it works again, we get huge amounts of gold, although we’ve never seen that gold. The only way we can make the universal remedy work again is to buy an expensive bag of beans. You’re the huckster. You figure out the rest.”

  “I’m no huckster,” Fergal said, tapping his forehead. “I’m a man of medicine. I cured dozens of people. I saw them.”

  Randolph patted his leg. “You’re right. You cured me of my sore leg. If I remember right, you cured Jed of his deafness in Redemption City. Three weeks ago in Brown River Town, you cured me of a false leg.”

  “Yeah, bad choice that one, but we got away with it. The folk there weren’t too bright.”

  “They’re no more stupid than we’ve been for the last few days. We’ve believed in magic beans.”

  With his eyes wide open, Fergal shook his head. “This can’t be, surely. I didn’t cure the one or two people that I’d planted in the crowd. I cured everybody who came to me.”

  “You cured people like Morgan who searched you out, and you cured a few townsfolk. If you can hire me and Jed to get better, I’m sure Morgan, Quinn and Wiley can hire a dozen or so townsfolk to get better, too.”

  “You’re wrong,” Fergal said with his voice low. “Quinn gave me five hundred dollars for five bottles of the universal remedy.”

  “Wrong, he gave you five hundred dollars as bait. Then he took it back when you’d bitten.”

  Fergal slapped his forehead, muttering oaths under his breath. For a minute, he peered into the pot of beans, his face set in a deep frown.

  “That’s some mighty fine reasoning there, Randolph.”

  Despite the situation, Randolph grinned at the praise.

  “What will you do?”

  Fergal rubbed his hands. “It’s time to turn the tables. This is one trickster – sorry, tonic seller – who isn’t getting tricked.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Fergal’s gaze was lost in the flames. So Randolph lay back and tried to sleep, knowing he’d need the rest for what was about to happen.

  Chapter Fourteen

  AN HOUR AFTER RANDOLPH and Fergal’s discussion, Quinn rode back to their fire and stopped on the edge of their campsite. Five riders surrounded him, all hunched against the night chill, including the frail Morgan.

  “Believe me,” Morgan said as he directed his horse closer to the fire. “That universal remedy is the finest thing I’ve ever drunk. It’s a miracle, and that’s official.”

  “So you drank the whole bottle?” Fergal asked.

  Morgan patted his stomach. “I sure did.”

  “That’s what I call an official miracle,” Fergal said with a smile to Randolph.

  “You can say that again. Quinn, my boy, it’s time to pay the man for the universal remedy.”

  “Don’t call me, ‘my boy,’” Quinn said. “You’re well again, so I’ve completed my side of the bargain. Now show me to the gold. You’ve pushed me as far as I can go. I’ve not got the patience for more discussion.”

  “Those are my feelings exactly.” Morgan pointed to the northern horizon. “Follow me.”

  “What about us?” Wiley said.

  “If you want to join us, you’d better come, but we’re not waiting around,” Quinn sa
id.

  As Quinn led his group from the campfire, Wiley turned to Fergal.

  “What about paying me for my beans?”

  “I still want them, but you heard the man,” Fergal said. “We’re getting us some gold. If you want paid for the beans, you’d better get your horse.”

  Wiley winced. Then, with a shrug, he dashed from the fire. Jed and Randolph gathered their pots, pans and universal remedy bottles. Once the wagon was ready, Fergal joined them sitting on the front of the wagon and they trotted from their campsite, heading after Quinn.

  They rode through New Hope Town. In the middle of the night, the town was deserted expect for a solitary figure who stood by the saloon, stroking what appeared in the dark to be a bushy beard. Once they were on the other side of town, Jed directed the wagon along the northern trail, and they headed into the dark.

  “What do you reckon will happen?” Randolph asked.

  “You tell me,” Fergal said. “You seem to have all the answers this evening.”

  Randolph shrugged. Having made the magic beans connection, he felt drained of inspiration. He stayed quiet and, for the next two hours, they trundled into the hills. One hundred yards ahead of them, Quinn and his men rode, and behind the wagon, Wiley followed. To their right the dawn glow coated the horizon, promising a fine spring morning.

  “Halt!” Morgan hollered when they were deep into the hills.

  Morgan stopped on the crest of a small slope, two hundred yards from a river, which gushed beside them. Preparing for whatever was about to happen, Randolph stretched and checked his Colt.

  Morgan dismounted, followed by the other riders. Jed stopped the wagon beside them. Without discussion, Fergal, Randolph and Jed alighted from the wagon and joined the group.

  Once Wiley had also joined them, they stood in a circle, watching one another. Of all the people, the one who stood with the most confidence was Fergal. With hands on hips and his jacket spread open displaying his green vest, he maintained a smug grin.

  “How are we dividing this gold that we’re about to find?” Fergal said, speaking first.