Death Rattle

by Jory Sherman

  “Wonder if he can fit me in. I’m in kind of a hurry to get home.”

  “He might, if you grease his palm and tell him I sent you.”

  “I’ll walk Ginger down there,” Brad said. “I got a four-hour ride ahead of me.”

  “Yeah, you live way back in the hills, don’t you?”

  “I live so far back I have to cart the sun in with a wheel-barrow every morning.”

  Ethan laughed.

  “And it’s all uphill,” Brad said.

  “It’s a good twenty miles. I hunted elk up there last fall and seen your herd.”

  “That’s right,” Brad said. “Felicity poured hot coffee in you until I was scared you might drown.”

  “That was one cold mornin’,” Ethan said. “I can get that shoe for you if you want to take it to Ruben’s.”

  “Sure. That the smithy’s name, Ruben?”

  “Yeah. Ruben Sanchez. Got him a pretty little wife, I think.” He walked toward the tack room. “I’ll get you that shoe.”

  “I’ll walk Ginger down there if you point me in the right direction.” Brad was trying to remember a furniture store being on the same block as the livery. It seemed to him that there was a man running some kind of shop where he could hear the lathe spinning, the ripping sound of a whipsaw, and the sound of a blunt iron hammer on wood. An old German guy, if he recollected right, fuzzy white beard all over his face, a bald head so shiny it blinded a man when he stood outside his shop in the sun. Yes, he remembered the place.

  “Whatever happened to old Grunig?” Brad asked when Ethan returned with the badly worn shoe in his hand. “Otto, wasn’t it?”

  “Yeah. Otto Grunig.”

  “He die?”

  “Nope. He packed up one day a couple of months ago, moved to Cherry Creek or Littleton, somewhere up by Denver.”

  “Business bad here in Leadville?”

  “Naw, Otto was doin’ all right. Least I think he was. He said he wasn’t goin’ to pay no insurance to thieves.”

  “You pay insurance here?”

  “Hell, I don’t own the place. Lemuel Foreman does. And yeah, he pays insurance. Two percent of what we take in ever’ week, he says.”

  “You know who he pays that money to?”

  “He told me it was some outfit called the Golden Council.”

  “You ever see any of the, what do you call them, collectors?”

  “No, they don’t come by here, ’cept to put up their horses. I think Lem just makes his payment over to the bank.”

  Brad took the shoe and stuck it in his back pocket. It was thin on one side and bent out of shape.

  “What bank, do you know?”

  “Leadville Bank and Trust, over on Main.”

  “I know where it is,” Brad said. “Thanks, Ethan.”

  “Just turn right when you go out,” he said as Brad led Ginger toward the front doors. “Same direction as the smithy. You can’t miss it.”

  Brad raised a hand and shook it behind his back and over his head.

  “I know where it is,” he said again.

  He walked Ginger out into the street and past the horses at the hitch rail. There was a saddle and bridle shop next door, then a small flower shop where they also sold clay pots, seeds, latticed arbors, bags of fertilizer, wood trim, and gardening implements. Then a small vacant building that had once been a furniture store.

  The sign on the small false front read BLACKSMITH, R. SANCHEZ PROP.

  There were three horses tied to hitch rings set in concrete in front of the shop. These had the same brand as those at the livery, Circle PM, owned by the Panamint Mining Company.

  Brad tied the halter rope to an empty hitch ring and walked inside through the wide double doors. He smelled the smoke and the red-hot iron and the sweat of horses. He saw a small man bent over a forge, holding a horseshoe in one hand and pumping on a bellows with the other. The shoe glowed a fiery orange on one side, and black smoke poured from the forge in curlicue spirals. The blacksmith wore smoked glasses and a black skullcap made out of heavy leather.

  He wore an old Colt Navy .36-caliber pistol on his belt that had been converted from cap-and-ball to percussion. The belt was shiny with brass bullets.

  “Mr. Sanchez,” Brad said when he walked up behind the blacksmith.

  Sanchez whirled around and clawed for his pistol. He let the shoe drop into the shortened barrel of water and pushed his dark glasses up on his forehead.

  Brad shot out a hand and gripped Sanchez’s wrist.

  “Whoa there,” he said. “I come to have you shoe my horse, feller.”

  Sanchez relaxed.

  “You a-scared me,” he said in a liquid Spanish accent.

  “Didn’t mean to. Can you shoe my horse?” Brad pulled the worn and bent shoe from his pocket and showed it to Sanchez.

  Sanchez shook his head.

  “I got four horses to shoe right now,” he said.

  “I know. Ethan told me. I’m in a real hurry. I’ll make it worth your time.”

  Sanchez, a diminutive, slat-thin, clean-shaven man who looked to be in his late twenties, with skin the color of old cowhide and a broken nose, heaved a sigh that sounded like a thin version of his bellows.

  “I don’t know. I got one in here, and more outside, and some still up at the livery.” He pointed to a large black horse in the back of the shop. It stood hipshot in front of a chute, much like a man waiting to get into a barber’s chair.

  “Five dollars gold if you can get me mounted in a half hour,” Brad said.

  Sanchez stuck out his hand.

  “I am called Ruben Sanchez,” he said. “I will make your horse the shoe. Bring him inside.”

  “Thank you,” Brad said.

  “Five dollars. It buys much of the rice and beans.”

  Ruben’s grin was infectious and Brad smiled back.

  “I appreciate it,” he said and started to go outside to get Ginger. He stopped and turned to Sanchez.

  “Who did you think I was when I came up behind you?” he asked.

  It seemed to Brad that all the blood drained out of Ruben’s face. He turned away, picked up the tongs, and retrieved the shoe from the water.

  “No importa,” he said in Spanish. “It does not matter.”

  But Brad knew that it did matter. It mattered a hell of a lot. He looked at the old pistol on Ruben’s gun belt. Ruben shrugged.

  “That iron can get you in a lot of trouble,” Brad said.

  “Or keep me alive,” Ruben said.

  FIFTEEN

  It was not just by chance that Pete Farnsworth saw Cole Buskirk and Tom Ferguson ride into Leadville and head straight for the Leadville Bank & Trust.

  He had been watching the bank before it opened, writing down in his little notebook what he observed. He saw, for instance, the first person to open the bank, a man he took to be the janitor since later Pete saw him sweeping the flowered walkway to the entrance. And there was a woman, a couple of men he took to be clerks, and, finally, a portly man in a double-breasted pin-striped suit that might have come from Brooks Brothers in New York, who wore both spats and a derby hat and carried a straight cane with a gold or polished brass head on it.

  The man, Pete was sure, was the owner of the bank, Adolphus Wolfe. He also carried a small leather briefcase and had arrived in a fancy sulky drawn by a sorrel gelding with a star blaze on its forehead and four white stockings. The driver of the sulky was a Negro man dressed out in fancy livery, including a silk top hat, white vest and bloodred shirt, dark blue trousers, and shiny black boots.

  After Adolphus Wolfe entered the bank, the driver turned the sulky around and drove it down the street in the direction from whence it had come. Pete was sure the black man would return at the bank’s closing time.

  When the restaurant across the street from the bank opened before noon, Pete walked over and took a seat outside at a table with a large umbrella over it that provided both shade and a modicum of concealment. The restaurant was called Chez
Paris and was owned by a Frenchman from New Orleans named Pierre Brevert who had come to Colorado as a prospector, made enough money to realize he would die poor before he was forty years old, and so opened a restaurant because, as he said, “Men must eat.” He put on French airs and did speak a kind of French patois, but all he knew about France was from reading Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, and Émile Zola. He was the self-educated son of a French thief and a Creole woman who had once been his father’s favorite whore. He made a decent living as a restaurateur, but employed male Mexican waiters and a Chinese cook who provided him with opium to smoke.

  Pete did not know Pierre but knew something about him. He didn’t like the man, but the food at the Chez was good and the coffee, Arbuckles, even better.

  He ordered a light lunch of crêpes suzette stuffed with boiled beef, sliced pommes frites, and a boiled egg, with coffee. He made notes in his tablet and continued to watch the front of the bank. Shortly after noon, while he was still eating, he saw two riders approach. They tied up their horses at the hitch rings in front of the bank and dismounted. He recognized one of them and wrote his name down in the tablet.

  Cole Buskirk.

  Pete’s blood quickened as he saw the two men go to their saddlebags and extract two bundles each. The bundles appeared to be burlap sacks wrapped around their contents.

  Pete left five silver dollars on the table and walked across the street. The man who was with Buskirk dropped one of the bundles just as Pete came up behind him.

  Buskirk turned at that moment and looked down at the burlap sack.

  “Tom, you dumb sumbitch,” he said.

  Tom bent down to pick up the sack, but he grabbed it by the wrong end. The sack unraveled as he picked it up and its contents spilled out onto the ground.

  Pete’s eyes widened as he saw the silver bars glistening in the postnoon sun.

  “I’ll help you,” Pete said, leaning over to pick up one of the bars.

  “Hey,” Tom said and reached for the bar.

  Pete snatched it away and stood up.

  “You,” Cole said before he could think, and Pete stared him down.

  “Just helping the man,” Pete said as Ferguson grabbed the open end of the burlap sack and began pushing the silver back inside.

  Pete turned the bar over in his hands, looked at all sides of it.

  “Give it back,” Ferguson said as he stood up, his face flushed from the effort.

  “Some silver bars were stolen from the Leadville Stage about a week ago,” Pete said. “These look an awful lot like them.”

  “They ain’t them,” Buskirk said.

  “I can see that. These bear a different stamp than the Circle PM.”

  “What’s it to you?” Ferguson said, stretching out his arm, his hand turned palm up in a beseeching gesture.

  “What’s GC stand for?” Pete said.

  “None of your damned business,” Buskirk said. “Hand him back that bar.”

  “Is that a wolf’s head underneath?” Pete asked.

  “He done told you it was none of your business, mister,” Ferguson said and lunged for the bar.

  Pete stepped back and pulled the bar back with him, out of Ferguson’s reach.

  Ferguson began to sweat. Perspiration glistened on his forehead. He was juggling two sacks, and the open one hung down from one hand like a sack of potatoes, while the other seemed to be slipping from his grasp.

  “Farnsworth,” Cole said, “this ain’t none of your business. Now, give Tom back that chunk of silver or I’ll draw down on you.”

  “I’m investigating a robbery, Buskirk,” Pete said, “and I have every right to examine this silver bar or any others you might have in your possession.”

  “Them bars ain’t stole,” Ferguson said, his face drenched with sweat.

  “Tell me what the GC stands for, Tom,” Pete said.

  He shifted the bar to his left hand and let his right hand drop to the butt of his pistol.

  Ferguson looked at Buskirk, as if to say he was helpless and didn’t know if he should answer Farnsworth’s question.

  “Golden Council,” Cole said, a look of hatred in his eyes. “Now give it back.”

  “You work for the Golden Council?” Pete said to Cole.

  “I ain’t answerin’ no questions.”

  “What about you, Tom? You a member of this Golden Council?”

  Ferguson’s eyes seemed to beg Cole to tell him whether to answer Farnsworth’s question or not.

  “Cole, what are we gonna do?” Tom said.

  “Go get the sheriff if he don’t give that bar back to you in two seconds,” Cole said.

  “Sheriff Jigger?” Pete said. “I might go get him myself.”

  Cole glared at Pete, his lips crunched tight, his nostrils flaring with rage.

  “If I put these bags down, Farnsworth, the next thing I’ll do is draw down on you and blow your sorry ass plumb to hell.”

  Pete smiled and handed the bar back to Ferguson.

  “Here,” he said. “We wouldn’t want any gunplay right here in broad daylight, would we?”

  Ferguson grabbed the bar and slid it into the open sack. His lips quivered in relief, and he heaved a heavy sigh.

  “Come on, Tom,” Cole said. “We won’t have no more truck with this bastard.”

  Tom turned and walked to where Cole was standing. He wrestled with the awkward sack of silver that dropped under the weight of the bars.

  “I’ll be seeing you, Cole,” Pete said as the two men headed for the front doors of the bank. “You can bet on it.”

  Cole didn’t answer. He and Tom disappeared into the bank, looking like robbers going the wrong way.

  There was a paper banner stuck against one window of the bank that Pete hadn’t noticed before.

  WE PAY HIGHEST INTEREST ON SAVINGS, it read. And, in larger type: 2% PER ANNUM.

  Pete wrote that down in his notebook and walked back to the restaurant. He sat at the same table that had been cleared. When the waiter came by, he said, “I didn’t finish my coffee, Paco. Can you bring me a fresh pot?”

  Paco nodded.

  Several minutes passed while Pete sipped his coffee.

  Cole and Tom emerged from the back. They were now carrying empty burlap sacks. Cole was stuffing a receipt into his shirt pocket. He looked all around before he walked to his horse behind Tom.

  “Yeah,” Pete murmured to himself, “you can bet I’ll see you again, Cole Buskirk.”

  He took out the makings and began to roll a cigarette.

  He wondered if he should follow Cole and Tom. No, he decided. Leadville wasn’t that big of a town. When the time came, he could find them.

  It was that bank sign that intrigued him at the moment. Two percent per annum. That’s what the bank paid in interest on savings accounts.

  That, he thought, was mighty interesting.

  SIXTEEN

  Ruben snubbed Ginger up to a freestanding post and patted the horse’s neck. He had already straightened the shoe Brad had brought him and found a matching size among the blank shoes hung on nails driven into one of the walls of his shop. He walked behind Ginger and backed into the horse’s left hind leg, lifting his bare hoof. He took a curved knife and began to trim the hoof where it had frayed after the shoe was thrown.

  “Good horse,” Ruben said. He put the knife away and pulled the new shoe from his leather apron pocket. He placed it against the hoof and examined its fit.

  “You’re pretty good at that, Ruben. You have a good eye.”

  “Sometimes I am lucky.”

  He dropped Ginger’s hoof and reached over to a small keg filled with horseshoe nails. He selected several and put them in his mouth, points facing outward. Then he picked up a small hammer, backed into Ginger’s haunch again, lifted the hoof, and fitted the new shoe to its contours. He drove a nail partway into the hoof through the top center hole.

  “‘Skilled’ is the word I would use,” Brad said.

  “What is ‘sk
illed’?”

  “Good at what you do.”

  “I do this to make the money,” Ruben said. “When I do not shoe horses, I make the iron figures.” He looked up and pointed to a dark corner in the rear of the shop. Brad saw several wrought-iron sculptures. One of them was a man with a helmet and a spear in one hand. He resembled a drawing Brad had seen of a Spanish conquistador. There was another one of a fat man on a small fat horse. They were like stick figures drawn on paper except that they were made of iron, and he could feel the power in their fluid lines, the energy in their complex designs.

  “A man with a spear,” Brad said. “Pretty good.”

  “That is Don Quixote,” Ruben said. “And the fat one on the donkey, he is Sancho Panza. I will make a windmill next.”

  “I know the story,” Brad said. “What’s your story, Ruben?”

  “Eh?”

  “You don’t pay the insurance to the Golden Council. Did they threaten you?”

  “They say I will be sorry that I do not pay.”

  “Are you afraid of them?”

  “I have the pistol. I have fire to throw in their faces if they come back.”

  “These are dangerous men, Ruben.”

  “They are cobardes, how do you say, ‘cowards,’ I think.”

  “Cowards, yes. But cowards do not come at you face-to-face. They sneak up behind you. Hide in the bushes.”

  “Yes, that is true. I am afraid of them, but I will not pay what they ask. I do not pay for protection I do not need.”

  “Do you know the names of the men who threatened you?”

  “No.”

  Ruben finished hammering the nails in the shoe and dropped Ginger’s hoof. He spit the extra nails back into the keg and set his hammer down. He untied the halter rope and walked Ginger around in a small circle, observing how the horse walked.

  “The shoe, it fits,” he said to Brad.

  Brad gave him a five-dollar gold piece. Ruben looked at it and smiled.