Spur: Nevada Hussy

by Dirk Fletcher

  Some of the levels showed only a flickering candle, some a dozen miner's lamps held by men moving off to work. Gradually the speed reduced and they could see more at each level, until the cages below them came to a stop at the eight hundred foot level tunnel. The cages under them emptied out into the tunnel, and at last Spur's cage lowered to the tunnel mouth and he moved off the platform with the others.

  He had never been in a deep mine before. This hard rock mining was new and strange to him. The tunnel mouth was like a "main street" with several other tunnels branching off it. Some had rails on them where the large hand-pushed ore carts sat.

  At once he looked for the bushwhacker, and saw him being ordered down the main tunnel with a crew of men carrying picks and shovels. Spur pushed past a burly foreman who swore at him, and hurried after the clot of men with his quarry at the lead.

  The roof of the tunnel was nearly eight feet high. It was shored up with "square sets" of sturdy wooden timbers. These timbers, twelve to fourteen inches square, were built in rectangular frames four to six feet long, and six to seven feet high. They were square box frames with the top of one "box" forming the bottom of the next "box" that was built on top of it.

  Such a framework with each timber fit snugly together with mortice and tendon joint was tremendously strong, and could hold up the ceiling of some of the largest "rooms" of ore extending sixty to eighty feet high.

  Spur saw that at some points along the way the hollow cores of these square sets were filled with rubble and worthless rock, to make them even stronger.

  Ahead he saw the bushwhacker turn into a side tunnel or "drift" as the miners.called it. The rest of the workers continued ahead down the tunnel with the tracks toward what he guessed was the end of the tunnel where they would pick out the ore.

  For the first time Spur realized the tunnel was getting hotter. He touched the walls and found them moist and warm. He unbuttoned his vest and then his shirt.

  There was no light in this part of the tunnel, and Spur had only a candle he had been given by a foreman at the start of the tunnel. Ahead he saw the wavering light of the other man's candle. If the thin, small light went out, the tunnel would be the blackest place that Spur could imagine.

  He wiped sweat from his forehead. There was a good chance the other man could hide his light, or put it out and wait for Spur to walk up to him, making a perfect target with his own candle.

  The Secret Service man shielded his candle from the front, and stared ahead until he was sure he saw another candle, then he continued.

  He splashed through puddles of water, and at times small flows of water rippled near the tracks. He avoided them when he could. Ahead he noted that the light had ceased to waver, as if the man holding it had stopped walking. Spur held his candle behind a square set beam at the side of the tunnel and watched. The light moved. He figured the other man was no more than a hundred feet away. Here the tunnel was straight.

  Then the light moved again, faster now, up and down as if the man were running. Spur tried to keep up. The tunnel curved and he lost the other light for a moment, then it came back.

  Suddenly the other light was gone.

  Had the bushwhacker fallen down and snuffed the candle?

  Had he put it out and waited in a trap baited and ready for Spur?

  The Secret Service agent moved ahead slowly, shielding the light, staying out of its glow, holding it as far from his body as he could.

  After ten minutes of slow progress he found that the tunnel had reached a "room," a pocket of ore which had been worked out. It was over forty feet tall, and the square sets held up the "roof' rock. Somewhere in there the bushwhacker crouched waiting.

  Spur squatted by the side of the tunnel just back from the pocket and studied what he could see of the square sets. Far to the back he spotted the glow of the candle.

  A pistol roared less than ten feet away, and Spur felt the hot lead slug tear across his left arm, burn away part of his shirt and bloody a crease in his flesh.

  He jolted backward, nearly lost the candle, and knew the man had set his candle far to the rear, and come back for a sure shot. If the desperado had been a better marksman, Spur knew he would be dead. The explosive sound of the shot in the enclosed tunnel echoed and re-echoed up and down the length of the tube. A few rocks fell from the sides of the room.

  Spur quickly put his candle on a rock shelf on the edge of the tunnel and hurried in the darkness fifteen feet back down the cavern away from the light from his own candle.

  He waited.

  For several minutes there was no sound. Then Spur heard boots scraping along the rocks and rails. They went slowly at first. He sensed rather than knew that someone was running toward him. The gunman came into the light with his six-gun out and he fired twice at the candle, although it must have been obvious that no one was holding it.

  Spur had drawn his Colt and aimed with precision as the man came to a stop near the candle in the glow of its one candle power. Just as Spur fired, the bushwhacker screamed and turned. The heavy slug hit the killer's gun hand, broke his thumb, nearly blasted off his smallest finger, and sent the small revolver spinning away in the darkness.

  The bushwhacker screamed again and again and ran blindly down the tunnel, his own candle forgotten in the pocket, his hand bleeding, and paining him. He ran out of stark, uncontrollable terror. The walls had been closing in on him. As soon as he got on board the cage he knew he had made a mistake. But it was too late. When McCoy saw him in the cage even at the surface, he was sure he was deep in trouble.

  Mark Wilkes Booth ran ahead, his hands out. The rock wall slammed against him, his arms scraped across rock and rough timbers and he fell to the rock floor again. He sat there panting. Booth trembled with fear and agony. Never had he been so frightened! It was a deadly, all-encompassing terror that shriveled his mind into a raisin and left him functioning on gut level reflexes.

  Run! He had to run! His hand throbbed. He knew he had lost too much blood, but he lacked even a handkerchief to wrap up his thumb and finger.

  He ran again, hit the wall as the tunnel turned. Then he felt ahead and found only rough rock. Wilkes stumbled on something and fell on the ground. He touched a pick and two shovels. He Was at the end of the tunnel. There was nowhere to go.

  Something made a noise in front of him. He wasn't sure what the noise was.

  Something alive touched his foot, then moved away. A rat?

  Mark Wilkes Booth shuddered. He heard the new sound, and this time it was clear-the agitated, unmistakable sound of a rattlesnake warning an enemy to stay away.

  Booth looked behind him and saw the light moving toward him.

  The shovel! He could slam it against McCoy's head, take his candle and walk back to the cage where he would demand to be taken to the surface!

  Sweat streamed down his shirt. His trousers were half soaked with his perspiration. He started to reach down for the shovel, but something touched his shoe, then worked its way across it.

  The rattler was on his shoe!

  Booth screamed, a wailing cry of frustration and anger at the world for treating him so badly.

  The chilling sound of a dozen rattlers chattered in the tunnel and all around him.

  Booth screamed again and stepped to one side. His foot came down on a squirming, living animal. He jumped away and at the same time felt something hit his shoe. Another object hit his leg.

  A cry of desperation, pain and agony shattered the quiet tunnel, as the rattler's fangs sank into his soft flesh, deposited their vemon in a fraction of a second and withdrew.

  Booth leaned against the tunnel face. He felt something slither over his hand and jumped back.

  He knew he had been rattlesnake bitten. One wasn't so bad if he could get to the light and cut open the fang marks.

  Before he could move, the second snake struck, then a third and a fourth set of fangs dug into his legs.

  Mark Wilkes Booth screamed. His voice penetrated the farthest str
etches of the tunnel, bouncing back and forth like a continuing cry of dread and anguish.

  Spur McCoy moved up slowly. He was still fifty feet away when he heard the rattles of the snakes. The agent stopped and held the candle lower. A three foot rattlesnake slithered toward the light. He kicked the reptile back the way it had come before it could strike.

  "For God's sake help me, McCoy!" The voice was deep yet laced with terror and agony. "Rattlers, McCoy! Don't know how they got in here. Must be hundreds of them! I've been bitten, need a doctor. Get me out of this nest, McCoy!"

  "What's your name?"

  "Booth, Mark Wilkes Booth. Yes, the infamous John was my brother."

  "Booth? Then we've met before."

  "Yes, in Virginia nine years ago. Now get me away from here!"

  "You did help your brother that night at Ford Theatre in Washington, didn't you?"

  "Yes! I helped him plan how to do it, got him to the balcony and helped him get away after he shot Abraham Lincoln. Now get me the hell away from these damned snakes!"

  "How many times have you been bitten?"

  His voice came softer now, but intense. "I'm not sure. Ten or twelve times. Everytime I move. Help me, Spur!"

  Spur checked the floor of the tunnel, found some splinters where an errant ore car had jumped the track and shattered a bracing timber. He lit a sliver, then a thicker piece of wood until he had a torch and held it low as he walked forward. There were only three or four snakes on the tracks. Spur chased them ahead of him with the fire.

  "...for God's sakes..." He heard another soft plea from the doomed man.

  Spur knew that one or two bites from rattlers could be treated with success if done quickly enough. But a dozen bites, pouring that much venom into a man's blood stream made it almost impossible to save his life, even if a doctor was right there.

  McCoy moved ahead slowly, deliberately, flushing the snakes in front of him with the fiercely burning torch.

  "God, have mercy on my soul," Booth said softly in a clear, perfectly enunciated voice, the work of a consummate actor. "I have sinned. God in heaven I have sinned, have mercy on me, a sinner!"

  The words stopped. In the glow from his torch, Spur saw the man a dozen feet ahead. He sat on the tunnel floor between the tracks. More than a hundred three and four foot, fully grown rattle snakes crawled over him, sensing his body warmth. Everytime he moved another snake struck him in his side, his arm, his leg.

  Slowly his head drooped forward. When Booth opened his eyes he saw the flashing, deadly black eyes of a rattler a foot in front of his face. In a lightning thrust the triangular head of the snake slashed forward, its fangs piercing Booth's cheek, gushing the deadly fluid into his mouth.

  Booth shook the reptile free and screamed. A dozen snakes coiled and struck him again and again. He writhed on the tunnel floor in the semidarkness of the flickering torch and each time he moved another group of rattlers struck.

  He bellowed in anger and fear once more, then gave a long sigh as he died and the last breath whistled from his mouth.

  Spur turned. John Wilkes Booth's brother! He hadn't thought about him for many years. He had died of shock more than the poison. The accomplished actor had been killed by the emotions he had lived by. Shock and fear and simply knowing that he was going to die had killed him. The rattlesnake poison would not have done its evil work for three or four more hours.

  Spur McCoy kicked one slithering snake away, walked slowly back toward the big pocket room with its multiple square sets. He found Booth's candle and took it with him. A single candle like that set against a timber had been responsible for one of biggest and costliest mine fires in the Cornstock.

  The heat hit him again as he trudged out. He took off his shirt and vest and carried them, grateful that he did not have to work in this hole in the ground. It had to be one of the worst jobs in the world.

  He had to stay at the end of the tunnel for two hours before the cage was sent up with an injured miner. His legs had been broken by a rock fall. Spur held him on the floor of the platform as it rocketed to the surface almost as fast as he had ridden it down.

  Eager hands helped the injured man at the surface.

  Slowly Spur put on his shirt and trudged up the hill toward the International Hotel. He would go in the back door and take a bath. He snorted in continuing surprise. So Mark Booth had helped his brother, and four times he had fooled Spur. The man was an actor, he deserved the title. But somehow Spur was disappointed in the scene the master thespian had played when his private final curtain came down.

  TWO HOURS AFTER Spur came up from the eight hundred foot level of the Consolidated California mine, he lay on his bed in the Continental Hotel catching his breath from his hot bath. He had pulled on underwear and pants and lay with his hands behind his head.

  A key turned in his door lock and before he could grab his gun from the dresser, a woman stepped into the room. He had seen her before at the Golden Nugget. Spur had sat up when he heard the key turn, now he lay back down and put his hands behind his head.

  "If I'd been a bushwhacker, Spur McCoy, you'd be dead by now."

  Spur just looked at her. She was older than most of the girls at the Golden Nugget, perhaps the first lady, the company madam.

  "You're not much of a gentleman, not even standing when a lady comes into a room. I'm Lottie."

  "Yeah. You swing your tits around at the Golden Nugget. And I'm an impolite sonofabitch."

  She laughed. "That ain't what Stella tells me."

  "Stella who?"

  "The Stella you were humping in the bathroom at the New Frontier Hotel a couple of days ago. On a blanket on the floor. No she didn't tell me. I followed her and saw you both go inside and I knew how Stella sounds when she's blowing her tits off with a good fuck."

  "Why do you care one way or the other?"

  "Business. I'm a working girl. I don't think you're who you're saying you are around town. You just don't look like no lawyer. Me, I got to think you're some kind of a lawman. I figure you don't want nobody to know that, so I'm offering you a business deal."

  "How much?"

  "Only a hundred dollars."

  "It would take you fifty cowboys to earn that much cash even if you humped up a storm on each one."

  "So?"

  "So what's the business deal?"

  "You give me a hundred dollars and I won't tell my boss Tony Giardello that you're a Federal Marshal."

  "I never pay blackmailers, they keep wanting more."

  "Not this time. As soon as your sneaky, secret work is done here, I won't have anything to sell. Until then it should be worth a hundred."

  "Be cheaper for me to strangle you and throw you into the alley."

  "But a lawman wouldn't do that. And if you aren't a lawman, you wouldn't have any reason for killing me. So you won't." She unbuttoned her dress and flipped back both sides. Her breasts were brown tipped with small buds of nipples on softly brown aerolas. "Just to show you I ain't mad at nobody, I'll throw in an afternoon in bed to sweeten the pot, so as to speak."

  Spur laughed and took out his leather billfold. From a secret compartment he took out a hundred dollar bill and tore it in half. He gave Lottie the smaller piece.

  "You keep your mouth shut about whatever you think you know about me, which probably isn't right, and I'll leave the other half of that bill in an envelope for you. If you talk to anybody, I'll find out and I'll cut off your hair and shave your head. You won't make a dime whoring for three months. Fair enough?"

  She used both hands and lifted her breasts toward him. "Hell yes. Now, you want to chew on these?"

  Spur shook his head. "I'm saving myself for my wife. You wouldn't want me to lose my virginity here in a hotel would you?"

  Lottie frowned. "You joshing me? You're serious?" Her grin exploded into a laugh. "Hell, you are joshing. Not a chance you're still a virgin. Stella saw damn well to that if by some miracle you lasted this long. You're a joker." She tucked the half a hun
dred dollar bill between her breasts and fastened the buttons on the top of her dress.

  "You got an agreement. No talk, and that other half of the bill. How long?"

  "A week should do it. Can't tell for sure. You'll know. I'll leave the envelope with your barkeep sealed up safe and sound, if you keep your part of the bargain."

  She turned, then walked to the bed, leaned down and kissed both his man breasts where he still lay on the bed.

  "Damn, but you would have been fun. Anytime you want a free ride, you stop by. Anytime!"

  Lottie grinned and went out the door.

  Spur lay there a minute longer. His logic was shattered. He had been working out his next few moves with Rush Sommers.

  He gave up, went downstairs and had an excellent dinner, then found out where Tracy Belcher lived and walked up the hill past the houses that got better and better until he came to the street that held only the mansions of the mine owners. They planned it that way.

  He wasn't sure why he was coming up here, although he had said he would last night at dinner. He was curious, he decided. Spur was a half hour early when he rang the bell outside the four story frame house with its three towers, a walkway between two of them, and a colorful variety of shrubs, trees and flowers planted around the formal garden inside a white picket fence.

  A smiling Washoe Indian girl answered the door.

  "Mistah McCoy," she said. "You expected. This way, please."

  Spur nodded at the girl. She was definitely Indian with her black eyes and long black hair. The unusual part was that she was scrubbed so clean she would squeak. Her face was clear, her skin smooth. Her eyes sparkled. The girl wore a simple cotton dress drawn snugly around her waist. Her only bow to her heritage was a pair of white, doeskin moccasins.

  She walked ahead of him and wobbled her little buttocks more than was needed for locomotion. Spur appreciated the show. They went down a beautifully decorated hallway to another wing of the big house, through a door into a garden room with a roof that had been lifted off to give a large variety of flowering plants some sun and night time humidity.