Power in the Blood

by Greg Matthews

  “No, I can’t say I did, but the man did his best, I’ll give him that. I don’t regret asking him in, nossir.”

  “Waste of time for someone like you, I reckon,” said Herb, nosing suspiciously around the cell.

  “You may be right, Herb, but anything’s worth trying once, don’t you think? Are you really looking for a gun left by a man of God, Herb? That’s kind of farfetched, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I got orders. Anyone sees you, they get treated the same, I don’t care who they are. You’re in deep trouble this time, boy. They’re out to get you good. You stepped on the wrong toes this time around, I reckon.”

  “A man without enemies, Herb, he’s got to be a pretty poor example of spunk, probably a scared little fellow that never says boo to anyone. I wouldn’t want to be that kind of a man.”

  “You ain’t any kind of a man, so how would you know?”

  “Always glad to hear your opinion, Herb.”

  “You’re keepin’ me up nights. My wife, she don’t like it, that’s my opinion.”

  “Sorry to inconvenience you. Why don’t you take the night off? I promise I won’t saw my way out of here before morning.”

  “Damn right you won’t. I’m gonna be right out there, keepin’ watch. They pay me extra, see, for the nights.”

  “That’s good to know, Herb.”

  Herb’s sleep was intruded upon that night by cries from Drew’s cell. He went to the door and looked inside through the peephole.

  “What the hell’s that racket!”

  “Appendicitis …,” Drew gasped. “Get a doctor.…”

  “You’ve just got a bellyache is all, now hold down the noise.”

  “Doctor …,” Drew pleaded. “Please, Herb … oh, God! Get a … get a doctor!”

  Herb swung the keys from his belt and unlocked the cell door. He wasn’t about to leave the prisoner alone in the jail-house while he went running for a doctor the prisoner didn’t need. Anything could happen while he was away. He’d check the boy’s forehead, and if it wasn’t sweating a stream the way it should if he was genuinely sick, he’d smack him good for disturbing his sleep and maybe even plotting escape.

  “You just better be real sick. Hold still now. Quit that squirmin’ around, I said!”

  “Herb … it hurts so bad.…”

  Herb’s fingers brushed against Drew’s perfectly cool and dry forehead, but before he could summon outrage to his voice he found a tiny pistol resting its muzzle against the skin of his eye socket.

  “All right now, Herb, you do what I tell you. First thing we’re going to do is walk out to the desk, nice and slow. Come on, Herb, out we go.”

  Made speechless by surprise, Herb allowed Drew to take his pistol and holster from the desk drawer. A pair of handcuffs were tossed to him. “Try these on for size. Pass the chain around behind the pillar.”

  Tears of humiliation at the shame to come were already welling in Herb’s eyes as he fastened himself to a pillar of brick in the center of the room. His wife would never let him forget this, nor would anyone else. “Sorry, Herb,” said Drew, and hit his jailer across the temple with the barrel of Herb’s own gun.

  Drew passed from the jail through the rear door, the pistol jammed into his waistband. He proceeded at a fast walk to the livery stable where Marion had arranged for two good horses to be waiting. A boy was waiting with them, and Drew wondered if this one would become Marion’s new protégé. He mounted up without a word and led his second horse through the streets of Houston to the plains of darkness beyond.

  The quickest way out of Texas was south, to the gulf, but Drew was not disposed to take the obvious trail, in part because it was too obvious an escape route, primarily because Vanda’s sphere of influence lay in that direction. He supposed he couldn’t blame her for not wishing to assist him in his hour of need; he had proved as wayward an excuse for a son as Yancy, returning to Galveston only on business for Marion de Quille, and only visiting with his would-be mother three times in five years. He couldn’t resent her lack of concern, nor expect assistance onto a ship. These would be prime targets in any case, since the whole of south Texas knew he worked for Marion, and Marion’s trade at the receiving end was merchant shipping of dubious registry.

  No, he would have to leave Texas the hard way, the longest way, by heading west until he crossed the state line into the territory where he had wandered alone and been found by Yancy Berdell a lifetime ago.

  18

  Leadville was the last and most illustrious stop on the line, but within minutes of arriving there, Zoe and Omie learned of a newer, potentially richer discovery further into the mountains, which had transformed a high valley without a name into a rip-roaring camp among the clouds. This abode of bighorn sheep and bears near the great divide was now called Glory Hole.

  Its discoverer was a longtime miner by the name of Gumpe, whose luck in the lower mining towns had never brought him more than a meager living. Following a dispute with his partners that prejudiced him against human company, Gumpe had set off on his own toward the monumental skyline of central Colorado. He panned and probed along remote creek beds for ten weeks without result, and grew lonely in the process. He asked himself if maybe he was prepared to forgive humanity its faults and rejoin the community of miners downstream, but could not make up his mind.

  Made angry by his own indecision, Gumpe kicked at the ground with his scuffed boots, and unearthed a nugget, dull and ordinary in appearance, yet to Gumpe’s trained eye, unmistakably gold. He promptly forgot his misery and began digging. Within minutes he had enough nuggets to fill a tin cup, and within the hour had reached, at the remarkably shallow depth of four feet, a veritable treasure trove of nuggets clustered together in so tight a formation he thought they must constitute the biggest lump of gold in creation.

  The cluster broke apart as he worked around it, and as he raked out the separate chunks, Gumpe felt his heart begin to gallop all over again as yet more nuggets were revealed beneath those already dislodged. He had in truth stumbled upon a glory hole, the work of years culminating in one furious hour of digging, the riches of several lifetimes revealed in a space no larger than a hip bath. Gumpe had his reward, and the anonymous place he had wandered into had a name.

  Glory Hole was as yet beyond the reach of rails, was not even at the end of any established road, but even as Zoe stepped from the train at Leadville, men were packing up possessions and equipment and streaming up toward the higher peaks to become part of the rush to Gumpe’s valley of gold. With the naïveté of the newly arrived, she thought at first the pandemonium in the streets was an everyday occurrence. Only when Omie was knocked over, and the perpetrator stopped for thirty seconds to lift her up and explain by way of apology, did Zoe learn of the need for haste among the hundreds of men swarming by.

  So pervasive was the atmosphere of optimism and excitement around her that Zoe thought briefly of joining in, then reconsidered. She had in her tote bag a little over three hundred dollars, proceeds from the sale of her home in Pueblo, and had concocted while on the train from there to Leadville a scheme for its practical investment.

  One of her few domestic accomplishments while married to Bryce Aspinall had been the art of cookery. Unable to do much more than peel potatoes and shuck corn in the beginning (these having been her primary tasks in the kitchen of Mrs. Hassenplug, back in Indiana), Zoe had quickly earned the stilted praise of her husband through the purchase of a common cookbook, followed by assiduous application of the recipes therein. If Bryce, with his nonadaptable palate, had found satisfaction at her table, then others would presumably do the same.

  Zoe had no grand notions of establishing a fancy restaurant; an ordinary eating house would suit her modest talents. She even had a name for it—The Cornucopia—borrowed without compunction from a thriving store in Pueblo. Zoe’s eatery would dispense food fit for miners, and plenty of it. She had been convinced it would work long before the locomotive ceased its toiling and set herself a
nd her daughter down among the thin air and thinning population of Leadville.

  She would ignore the new strike, and sink her money into a community already established in national importance. This place called Glory Hole that men were stampeding toward would in all likelihood prove to be a flash in the pan, as so many of the new strikes did. She and Omie would have no part in it.

  Finding accommodation was not difficult, given the sudden surge of humanity toward Glory Hole, and within a short while mother and daughter were established in a rapidly emptying hotel that offered Zoe’s two basic requirements: cleanliness and cheapness. Their bags unpacked, they went downstairs again to watch from the sidewalk as tidal waves of activity swept back and forth along the street. They were joined by the proprietor, who shook his head at the spectacle of energy and movement before them.

  “It’s hopes of finding their own strike,” he explained. “Around here it’s all been claimed and worked over till there’s only the big fellows can afford to sink mines for the stuff deep underground. No one wants to work for someone else when there’s a chance he’ll find his own lode under the sky and not have to crawl like a mole for some big fellow that’s already made a pile of money. Chasing dreams, that’s the reason for this. Most of them’ll be back inside of three, four months, asking for their old jobs, and most likely getting them too, for less wages. It’ll be a lesson for them, ma’am, but you can’t tell them beforehand. I’ve seen it in Nevada, and I’ve seen it here.”

  The proprietor had only glanced once at Omie’s birthmark, just enough to settle his curiosity, not stared and stared at it as many people did, so Zoe was inclined to open a conversation with him. “You must have been drawn to a dream yourself,” said Zoe, “to have experience of both places.”

  “That I was, and never regretted it, but I’m no miner, so it’s different for me. So long as there’s precious stuff coming out of the ground right here in Leadville, I won’t be moving up there to Glory Hole, not unless it turns out bigger than this town, which isn’t likely. Is your man coming to join you, ma’am?”

  “No, he is not.”

  “Excuse my asking. See, I’ve got the habit of looking at my guests and figuring just who’s here for what, if you see what I mean, and you strike me as a lady that’s here for a definite purpose. Committed, you might say. No offense.”

  “None taken,” Zoe assured him; she continued, “I have a notion to open an eating house. I wonder if you could advise me as to my first steps in that direction.”

  “Eating house? We’ve got plenty of those, right on up to the kind of place you can get yourself just about anything the human stomach’ll accept, and mighty expensive too. Larks’ tongues—ever tried ’em?”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  “Me neither, but if you care to try, there’s a place just a block and a half away’ll set it down in front of you on a dish you can just about see through, and charge you a week’s wages.”

  “I have in mind a more practical place, with ordinary fare.”

  “We’ve already got as many as is needed, ma’am, and I’d say there’ll be too damn many for the population that’s left at this rate, begging your pardon.”

  “You’re saying I have arrived at the wrong time?”

  “Exactly the wrong time, ma’am, I’m sorry to be the one that tells you. You stay around, though, and most of them’ll be back, like I say, but that’ll be a while yet, right about when the cold weather starts. Nothing like a cool breeze coming through the holes in his clothes to make a man see good sense again and go find himself a paid job.”

  “Could it be that with so many leaving, there are eating establishments up for sale by owners with the gold-mining fever?”

  “Ma’am, I just don’t know. This rush only got started yesterday, so you’d have to be finding out for yourself. Me, I need to be asking around if there’s hotels in the same condition, and finding out if I’m in the same bad situation I recall from Nevada.”

  “I do hope not, for both our sakes.”

  “Me too, ma’am, but I’m not hopeful, not after the last time.”

  “Mama,” said Omie, “will we go where the men are going?”

  “No, I think not. That is, I hope not.”

  She was no longer sure of anything. The plan hatched en route to Leadville seemed foolish in the light of events taking place before her eyes, events based on the mercurial nature of human activity when meshed with news of a fresh strike. Not even reports of plague or imminent flood could have caused so many men to move so quickly in one direction. Only the siren song of gold in the mountains could have accomplished this anthill scurrying, as men rushed for the newest place where the oldest song was heard.

  Zoe felt the tugging of panic at her sleeve. This was not what she had been expecting. It was unkind of fate to have stolen from her a reliable husband, then whipped from beneath her trusting feet a plan to make up for his disappearance. Maybe she should have gone back east, instead of bringing her daughter further into the regions of uncertainty Colorado seemed built upon. It was too late now for regret, however; she would just have to find out at first hand what options were available, and make a choice accordingly. She would do this with a view to whatever was best in the long term for Omie who, although possessing the ability to see future events and report on them to her mother, had not done so in this case.

  “Is all of this surprising to you?” Zoe asked Omie, knowing the hotel proprietor would not understand the question’s deeper meaning.

  “Oh, yes,” Omie said, smiling with great enthusiasm.

  Zoe knew she could not rely on her daughter to provide warnings in advance of disaster or sudden change, a circumstance she found ironic, given Omie’s proven powers.

  By evening the rush had dwindled to a smattering of late starters setting out on foot or on horseback for the new diggings. Zoe felt the time had come to assess Leadville’s need of her dream, and so commenced to stroll about the town. Every commercial enterprise appeared to be flourishing; there seemed little chance of the community’s becoming deserted, despite Glory Hole’s allure. On every street she found movement and noise enough for two towns.

  Omie was with her, having protested at being told she should stay in their room until Zoe’s return. She held tightly to her mother’s hand as they passed from one block to the next, surrounded by the cacophony of miners drenching their throats at the end of a day’s shift, crowding the sidewalks in front of every saloon, shouting to each other of Glory Hole. It was all so fascinating, this clamor and clatter; Pueblo had never known such commotion.

  As the windows and street lamps began to come alive with light, Omie grew excited, then restless. Something was pulling at her awareness, some unidentifiable thing that had no place on the street, a presence inside her, becoming more familiar to her senses with every visit. It was without personality, faceless and voiceless, yet it commanded her attention as surely as if invisible hands had grasped her face and turned her eyes toward whatever the thing demanded she should notice.

  “Omie, keep up or you’ll get lost. Omie!”

  She had slipped her hand from Zoe’s, an almost frictionless sundering of contact, and stood now before a dance hall’s double doors, which beckoned to the lonely with colored flames in sconces mounted overhead. To Zoe it looked like hell’s doorway, with Omie an innocent about to be swallowed by it forever. She hurried back and took her hand again.

  “The blue-eyed man …,” murmured Omie.

  “Come along, and keep up.”

  Men entering the place stared at Zoe in passing. Loud, jangling music spilled briefly from inside as the doors were opened, then closed.

  “Only one eye is blue,” said Omie firmly, recovering herself. “The other one is brown.”

  “What eye? What man?”

  “The man with the blue eye. In there.”

  She pointed at the dance hall doors.

  “Well, he has nothing to do with us, and we have nothing to do with him, or th
is place, so please come along.”

  Zoe had to drag Omie for several steps before she consented to be led away down the street. Zoe glanced at her each time they passed a lighted window, and felt a moment’s exasperation at the dumbstruck expression on Omie’s face, almost as if Omie were not there behind her own features.

  “What is it?” she asked, stopping. Omie stared resolutely beyond her, lips slightly parted, eyes unblinking.

  “It’s gone …,” she said.

  “What is? What’s gone?”

  “The … the money.”

  “What money? What do you mean?”

  Then Zoe knew. She had hidden her three hundred dollars beneath the carpet in their room at the hotel, thrusting it far from the edge, spreading the bills with her fingertips so no trace of a bulge could be detected. It was not possible that this was the money to which Omie referred, but she felt coils of apprehension begin to tighten around her heart anyway.

  “Ours …?”

  Omie nodded slowly, her face without identifiable regret or alarm. She still was not looking at her mother.

  “Hurry!”

  Zoe began to run, hampered by her long skirts and Omie’s unresponsive weight on her arm. “Hurry! Please hurry!”

  The desk clerk was made curious by his newest guest’s panic-stricken face and hoarse breathing as she collected her key.

  “Has … has anyone been up to my room?”

  “No, ma’am, not even the maid, not till tomorrow. Something wrong?”

  She ran for the stairs, the little girl dragged along behind with a perfectly blank expression on her peculiar face. The desk clerk decided the proprietor should know about such goings-on, and sent a bellboy to notify him at the restaurant across the street, disturbing his supper with a woman who was not his wife. Annoyed, the proprietor sent back word that the desk clerk should investigate for himself, and report on what he found, if anything, the following morning.

  Receiving his instructions mere minutes after Zoe had flown with her key to the stairs, the desk clerk trudged up to the second floor, where he found Mrs. Dugan sitting with head in hands on the edge of the bed, while her little girl stood looking at the carpet between them.