Paint the Wind

by Cathy Cash Spellman

  Hart digested the soliloquy in silence and was unable to answer, for the sadness it provoked in him. Bandana never gossiped; he obviously thought these were things Hart ought to know.

  "Like I always said," Bandana finished up as he pointed Hart toward Chance's new house on the hill, "the higher you climb, the more rocks you gotta dodge along the way."

  Hart decided to check out the mine first. It was chilling to see how damaged the area around Leadville had already become. Trees stripped, ground gray with tailing dumps... he wondered how anything good could come from a process so destructive.

  "Chance has gone mad as a meat-ax," Caz said when Hart had settled in at the Fancy Penny. "He's told me to put a sock in it everytime I complain about what's going on. And who the hell can find him when you need him? He follows everybody's advice except mine about how to spend the mine tucker. You know he's always been as game as Ned Kelly when it comes to spending— the Fancy Penny and the Last Chance have been expanded radically, but Chance has leveraged everything to buy up more and more properties—and on some of them I think he's got a raw deal. Now there's so much squawking among the men and so much strike talk that I've sent for Bandana to ask his advice. You know McBain, mate, he's gone bush again, and you damned near need a net to pull him into town."

  It seemed to Hart that none of what Chance was doing was wrong in itself. In the hands of a brilliant speculator or even a decent businessman, what his brother was up to might work just fine, but Hart had a hunch Chance was operating out of his depth, or that somebody else was pulling his strings. It could be Chance's ego had gotten the better of him; it wasn't easy to keep your equilibrium, in the face of overwhelming riches.

  He saw the worried expression in Caz's eyes, the dark circles around them, and the deep frown lines that hadn't been there when he left. Whatever was wrong at the Fancy Penny was serious, and it wasn't new.

  "What's the real beef with the men, Caz?" he asked, knowing he would hear the truth. Caz fancified and embroidered only when storytelling, never in answer to a straight question.

  Caz rubbed his chin, collecting a huge store of facts into an orderly progression. "The arrival of the new railroad last summer brought in a shitload of cheap labor, Hart. You know how it is, mate: miners are itinerant workers, they go where the work is. Easier transportation meant a flamin' flood of men from all over the state willing to work for tuppence ha'penny. Our boys here in Leadville were cut off at the knees.

  "Owners is owners. A glut of new laborers means only one thing to them, laddie buck. Lower wages. Now Tabor has invented this half-ass militia to put down a strike over how much the men get paid. He's a cheap bastard, if you ask me—rich as Croesus and not about to put a bob in a beggar's cup."

  "And where does Chance stand in all this?" Hart asked, incredulous that so much in his brother's life could have gone awry in the same few years when everything in his own had fallen so perfectly into place.

  Caz shrugged. "Chance's heart is with the men, mate, I'll give him that—and a rum time he's had fighting the politicos over that, let me tell you. Chance knows the pit, knows what the men are up against down there. You've got to give him credit, he's held the line and refused to lower wages even though the big boys have threatened to pull out their support for his political aspirations. I'd say your brother's made some real bad enemies among the other owners by siding with the men.

  "Trouble is, at the end of it, in the men's eyes, Chance is still one of the blokes in the big houses, while they live in shanties and feed their families on salt pork and sourdough. The kettle's about to boil over, mate, you mark my words it is." Caz took a breath as if deciding whether or not to say the last of it, then he shook his head and said, "About Fancy, Hart. She's feeling real crook. She blamed your brother for the tyke's death—unfairly, too. Never saw a man so ga-ga for a child. The little one was damaged, you know—she was slow-minded, but loving as a kitten. Chance needed the love she gave him, is my call. Fancy loves him, but she's a prickly pear—soft on the inside and covered with thorns. My guess is they've torn each other up pretty damn good. Ain't love sublime, mate?"

  Hart tried to digest all he'd heard. The trip's exhaustion had made him irritable, and every piece of news was lousier than the last. Before leaving the mine office, he asked to look through the ledgers and came away more puzzled than ever. Chance had moved all their money into paper assets, leveraging himself up to his new Stetson. If anything happened to tip the scales... didn't his brother see how precarious things were?

  Hart went back to town feeling sobered and uncertain. The mine was bringing in vast sums of money, but without him or Bandana to keep an eye on it, where would it all go? And how soon? If other rich strikes could run out of ore, so could theirs; and if nothing had been put away for safety, they'd all be back out on that bare-ass mountain scraping for supper money.

  The McAllister house stood on the top of a small, well-manicured hill, a commanding Victorian presence that dwarfed the lesser structures of the town below. Hart rang the doorbell like any other visitor and waited while a servant summoned Fancy.

  He settled uneasily into a gentleman's chair near the corner window and looked around with curiosity. The parlor—or was it called a drawing room in so ostentatious an establishment?—was ornate and filled with patterns. An Oriental rug covered the parquet, antimacassars perched decorously on the arms of chairs and horsehair sofas, a piano occupied a place of honor between the large windows. He was pleased to see, among the many framed lithographs and photos on the walls, a sketch he'd made of Fancy long ago; it occupied a place of honor above the mantel. He could read the love in it so clearly, he wondered if Fancy, too, could see its transparent emotion.

  Her footfall on the stair brought Hart back to attention; she stood silhouetted in the doorway and her beauty struck him forcibly as ever—a tightening of the solar plexus, a pounding of the pulse, a self-admonition to get control—and then they were hugging and crying and talking all over each other's sentences, and the feel of her in his arms made question marks superfluous.

  "Oh, Hart, you look so grand! Why, you seem positively elegant in your city clothes and you're twice as big as I remember."

  Hart smiled at her exuberance; the overpowering life-force that engulfed a man when she was near was part of her magic. It was so easy to be lost in her....

  "You look more beautiful than ever, Fancy. Marriage and motherhood must agree with you." A cloud passed over her expression and she answered honestly, as he knew she would.

  "Chance and I have made a terrible mess of marriage, Hart." She took his hand and led him to the solarium, a room blessedly free of velvet.

  A sunbeam fell across Fancy's shoulder where she sat, spilling yellow light onto her organza dress and ringing her in an aura of golden radiance.

  With annoyance, Hart felt his pulse quicken. "What's happened, Fancy? When I left, you two couldn't breathe for happiness."

  Fancy bit her bottom lip as she always did when nervous.

  "It isn't just one thing, Hart, it's so many big mistakes. Chance is gambling hard and tossing money into dubious places. He's got troubles at the mine, too. Strike talk... of course, to give the devil his due, he has stood up against the other owners quite courageously and he's the only one who has. But the whole thing's a terrible disgrace, really..." She stopped and dropped her eyes to her fidgeting hands.

  "Oh, Hart, that isn't it at all! I'm just babbling to cover up what I can't bear to say to you. I was too hard on him after my baby died and I turned him away with my coldness. He has other women, Hart, and that made me so scared and so mad I went back to work, and now we've fought so much I don't see how we can ever fix things up between us."

  "Do you still love him, Fancy?" Hart asked quietly, fearing his own response to her pain.

  "Yes, I love him! But that doesn't matter a damn, because he's shamed me, and I've gone and got independent again." Hart could hear the hurt pride clearly.

  "But that isn't what yo
u want, is it, Fancy? Not really."

  "No, but it's all I've got, Hart. And I'll be damned if I'm going to eat crow and tell Chance it's perfectly all right for him to sleep with every nightbird in Leadville."

  "Didn't you know the kind of man he was when you married him, Fancy? Didn't you see the wanderlust and the wildness?"

  "Yes, I saw it, Hart, but I thought we'd be wild together. Now here I am, stuck at home with two children and all the responsibilities in the world, and he's out exercising his wanderlust and his wildness with other women and with money that belongs to all of us."

  "Other women have forgiven their husbands for infidelities."

  "Damn it, Hart, I'm not other women! I've fought too hard for life to let any man take me for granted. I'm not afraid of being alone and doing it all myself—I've done it before, and by God, I can do it again, if I have to."

  Hart's voice was husky when he answered her. "There's nothing good about being alone, Fancy. We all need somebody to love, even if that somebody fails us, sometimes. Take it from me, babe, we all need somebody to love."

  Fancy wondered if he was still in love with her... it seemed unlikely after all these years.

  "I'll go find Chance and see if between us, Bandana and I can talk some sense into him, but dammit all, Fancy, you're the one who married the man. Even if he's done you wrong, maybe you just have to be big enough to forgive and forget and move on from your hurt. You've got children to think of... and you've got a commitment."

  Hart left Fancy sitting in her parlor, hands in her lap and a chorus of thoughts clamoring in her head.

  Hart walked out into the light of late afternoon, unsettled and angry. You're a damned fool, Hart McAllister, he told himself. You've just done everything you could to send her right back into his arms, when all you really wanted was to take her in your own.

  Chapter 76

  "There isn't any question in my mind," Madigan said, pushing the map across the table toward Henderson, "the main body of ore runs into the Fancy Penny. I've been down there half a dozen times consulting on one thing or another." The map of the Mosquito Range was crisscrossed with hundreds of claim lines, all looking like so much chicken-scratch to the banker. "The McAllisters and McBain are going to be very rich for a very long time.

  "I've staked out every piece of property around there that they don't own and I've set up a number of dummy companies to accommodate the income."

  Henderson nodded; his friends in the East had told him every- thing he needed to know about Madigan when first he'd come to Leadville. By now their dealings were many and all lucrative.

  "I've purchased the Little Nell, the claim just above theirs that was abandoned by Hopkins, years ago," Jason continued. "Not in my own name, of course. You never know... in a pinch there are other measures one could consider...."

  Henderson frowned. "I think we should try to get what we want the easy way first, Jason."

  "If I'm right, and the lode line is under their part of the mountain, you may be very pleased to do it any way that will force them out."

  Henderson looked up from the map and nodded; it was easy to see how Madigan had amassed his empire. Besting a man who's both smart and ruthless was damned near impossible.

  "What exactly is it you're suggesting here, Jason? Hypothetically, of course."

  " 'Hypothetically,' it wouldn't take more than a few judiciously placed charges of dynamite to flood their mine enough to keep them from working it. With labor conditions as they are, and the fact that McAllister has made enemies by siding with the men in this labor dispute, I don't imagine the other owners would rush to his aid."

  "To what end?"

  "Force them to sell."

  "They won't."

  "Then we buy whatever outstanding shares there are and short the stock fortuitously just at the moment the unfortunate 'accident' takes place. Our people in the East could sell short at the proper time and we could make a bundle."

  "All anonymously?"

  "All anonymously, or through any of the blinds I've set up. Chance has other mines; if he had to, he could abandon the Fancy Penny altogether and still stay solvent with the Last Chance."

  "We at the bank can make more money if Chance McAllister stays very, very rich, Jason, and I have no personal ax to grind in this, while I suspect you do." He'd seen Madigan chatting with Mrs. McAllister on the street more than once; how much of this scheme was based on money and how much on lust?

  Madigan snorted a laugh. "Let's understand each other, John. Every man has a right to take what he can by being a better businessman than his neighbor, or a tougher one."

  Henderson nodded. "In principle I concur completely, but for practicality's sake, let's just play this hypothetical notion of yours out, Jason. Wouldn't it be damned dangerous? What if you accidentally loose some hot underground river into the shaft and kill somebody? I saw a man pulled from such an accident once—they got him out, but the flesh fell off his bones like a chicken in a stewpot. Besides which, you run the risk of rendering the richest strike in the Gulch unusable. Could be you're letting your personal feelings toward McAllister interfere with your business judgment."

  "You don't get anything in this world by being reticent, John."

  "Nor by being greedy, Jason. You know my father used to say to me, 'John, the bulls make money and the bears make money, but the pigs never make money.* I think I may have to pass, on this hypothetical what-if of yours."

  "As you wish," Madigan replied with equanimity; he had no need of accessories.

  "It would not be in the bank's best interest to have you mention any of this to McAllister, of course," Jason said evenly, gauging his companion correctly.

  Henderson looked directly into the man's face with a slow smile. "No, I don't suppose it would be."

  Jason made his way out of the Little Nell's broken-down entrance and looked to right, left, and behind. He'd set the charges close enough to the wall separating the two claims so no one would ever be able to tell it hadn't been a missed shot in the Fancy Penny that caused the explosion. It had taken weeks of careful investigation to assess the correct placement, and to make sure dynamiting was being done in the Fancy Penny, near enough so a missed shot could obfuscate the cause. Making certain Chance McAllister would be below ground at the proper moment had been the difficult part—the man spent precious little time at his own mine for an owner, and Jason considered it a stroke of great good fortune that he'd overheard Chance tell McBain he intended to visit the men on the morning shift.

  Jason wiped his hands on his denim workpants and mounted up. If he'd set the timing device correctly, he'd catch the morning shift around their break, thereby giving himself plenty of time to get back home and provide a reasonable alibi, should he ever need one.

  Hart clapped the resin-hardened hat onto his head with distaste and nodded to Bandana, who had just done the same. He'd talked McBain into accompanying him on the first shift, as a means of testing the temper of the men below. Chance had intended to question the men himself, but Hart had argued that he and Bandana had a better shot at getting honest answers, and Chance had reluctantly agreed to stay behind.

  Hart and Bandana clung to the thick wire cable of the cage on the sickening descent, remembering to keep their limbs away from the rushing rock. Best thing I ever did was to leave this stinking hole behind me, Hart thought grimly as the world above was lost in eerie darkness.

  The two owners made their way among the sullen men, but even those who were usually open and talkative eyed them with suspicion. Finally, they headed for the lunchroom in search of men in a more communicative mood.

  The hollowed-out space next to Stope 18 was euphemistically called "the lunchroom." The cavelike opening in the rock face was ringed by primitive wooden benches; it was the spot where, once each shift, the men took a break and ate whatever they'd carried down with them in tin buckets.

  Johnson and McNamara were seated along the left wall of the lunchroom as Bandana and Hart arriv
ed; Jakes, Kittery, O'Brien, Kowalski, and Schmidt straggled in, giving the two owners a wary once-over. At least the visitors weren't dandied up like that other McAllister, who always looked like an ad for a custom-tailor shop.

  "How's it goin', Mick?" Bandana began; he'd known the stocky Irishman long enough to expect a civil reply, but the square-bodied man merely shrugged.

  "Thought you had a reputation as a jawsmith, McNamara— you ought to know Hart and me ain't here to stir up trouble. We cain't help you none if we don't know the score."

  The man shrugged again but said nothing.

  Bandana turned toward Jakes. "How about you, Augie? Near as I kin recall you always have a hand, voice, or foot in anythin' lively. You willin' to talk about what's troublin' you?"

  "You're all right, McBain, you ain't never done any man wrong I know about. I'll talk to you. We're thinkin' about walkin' out because we're dirt poor, us and our families. A lot of men are gettin' rich off our sweat, includin' yourself, even if nobody'd know it to look at you." All the men smirked at that, including Bandana. "That's okay, mind you—that's just the way the world is, some's luckier than others. But men like us are paid more for our labor some other places in this state, and we want a fair shake here in Leadville. Prices are damned high and our kids gotta eat."