"Hear tell you've been picked to run the next one, too."
"That so? They don't tell us until the night before, so we can be sure to be here when the Special is made up. Be right proud to do it again. I get a bonus of a hundred dollars for the run."
"I heard you were getting a bonus of a million dollars."
Pritchard's head snapped up. His mouth came open and he let his eyes go wild for a minute before he recovered.
"What you mean?"
"I heard that if you run the train the way you're told, stopping it at the right place or slowing it down, you'll be paid a bonus of a million dollars."
"That's crazy. Who could pay a million dollars?"
"The men who rob the gold train. Out of thirty million, they could spare a million for you."
"Crazy, that's crazy."
"Yeah, right, Pritchard. That's what I told the man who suggested it. A million is way too much for a simple living man like you. You'd probably settle for five thousand."
Pritchard stood and walked the length of the room. He stared at Spur for a minute. Then his face worked into an angry scowl.
"I don't know who you are, or what you're trying to do. But I don't want you in my house. Get out. Get out! Right now! You come in here spouting lies, and I don't have to listen. I worked for this road for thirteen years! Hard work, and I don't got to listen to you call me a traitor!"
"Just passing on the rumor that I heard, Pritchard. An innocent man has nothing to worry about. You are innocent, aren't you?"
"I ain't done nothing illegal, nothing attal."
"What about conspiracy, Pritchard? That word mean anything to you? It means that two or more people get together and plan and take some kind of overt action to carry out a crime. Have you conspired to rob that train, Pritchard?"
"Out! Damnit! Get out of my house!"
Pritchard jumped at Spur but didn't swing. He wanted to. Spur saw that the man was furious. He was so angry and probably frightened that he ought to have done exactly what Spur wanted. Spur held up his hands and went to the door. He opened it and stared at Pritchard until the man looked away. Then Spur went out the door into the night.
Less than twenty minutes later McCoy watched Pritchard turn out the lights inside the small house and come out the front door. He moved uphill at once and Spur walked along in the shadows behind him a hundred feet. The man never looked back.
The route led past the mines and the stores, up to the residential sections and on to the top streets where the mine owners had built their large houses.
Pritchard went past the ornate fronts of three big houses, then paused at the fourth before walking quickly to the back door. Spur moved around so he could see the man knock and be admitted. McCoy went back to the front and studied the name plate on the fancy front door. The plate read: Rush Sommers, Esq.
Spur walked a block over to Tracy's big house and let himself in at the back gate with a key she had given him.
Tracy met him with a tray of food.
"Thought you could use a midnight snack," she said smiling. "That includes the food on the tray, or the hussy with her tits about to flop out of her gown."
Spur took a slice of watermelon and a chocolate cupcake.
"I'll be working most of the nights from now on, and getting some sleep during the day," he said. "I don't aim to let any hootenanny claim that outlaw reward on my hide."
TONY GIARDELLO KNEW people. He could tell a first time dance hall girl the minute he saw her, even before she opened her mouth. As a saloon, gambling hall and part time bordello owner he had to be able to pick them out.
He could tell the gamblers, too. The professionals were easy to spot, a bit over friendly, always with a story or a joke, but then deadly serious when the money was in the pot.
Usually he could tell when the slick boys were going to cheat. It was a gift he had. Sometimes he knew when an honest player was going to try to deal off the bottom. He had that feeling he could never describe and that almost always worked.
Part of his knowing people helped him to rise from a bank teller to the second to top man in a little under four years. He knew all the banking procedures by heart, and exactly where the firm was a little loose in its affairs. So one Friday night he made a highly illegal withdrawal of over thirty thousand dollars, jumped on the train and was well away from the Eastern seaboard by Monday noon when the bank president discovered the loss.
Soon there was a trail of Pinkerton men follow ing him, but he changed his name and costume so often they had trouble staying up with him as he moved around freely. At last they lost him in Denver, where he had become a stocks and bonds salesman with a full beard and top hat. What had always amused him was how he almost sold one of the Pinkertons some gold mining stock one slow evening.
Now he had taken that ability to understand people and built it into a nice little bundle of money here in Virginia City. His saloon was doing well, and would flourish as long as the Comstock Lode held out. But the good pockets of ore were vanishing fast. The smart money, and the smart men were looking down the road for the next action, the next bonanza, or just another town that had some continuing reason for survival.
With his recent contacts and his skill in planning, Giardello had worked his way into the biggest deal of his life. If everything went as planned he could come out of this little operation with as much as fifteen million dollars! Tony knew Sommers would play it close to his vest, but if the mine owner did not pay off as they had agreed, the big man would have an extra .44 caliber navel. Fifteen million dollars!
Tony had picked his five riders the way he did everything, with a lot of thought, and as a last test, checking the men against his own gut feelings. He had found the five men he wanted over the course of a week from his own customers.
Many of the miners in town came from other occupations, a lot of them cowhands. Tony picked carefully, and told each one he tested and cleared that he would begin work tonight, a Tuesday.
They had come into the back door of the Golden Nugget at midnight and he sent them one by one to the Enright Livery stable, where Enright himself helped them find the best riding mounts, then picked out five sturdy pack horses or mules for each man. The animals were fitted with heavy load pack rigs that rode on the sides of the mounts.
As soon as each man was rigged out with his mount and pack train, he moved through the darkness to the first splash of green in Crooked Creek south of town. When the last one had been outfitted, Tony led them down the grade to the others. It had been two years since Tony had forked a horse, and how he remembered why he was never a cowboy. But the payoff would be well worth it.
He nodded to the others at the spot of green trees where the little creek bed lay. Crooked Creek had water in it only when a boiling thunderstorm dumped rain on the mountains, or a thick snowpack began to melt in the spring. Over the years the trees had lived from one rain to the next, so only the sturdiest with the deepest roots could survive. Tony nodded. He was one of the sturdy ones.
He looked at the five men gathered around him in the moonlight.
"First, your advance. Each of you gets fifty dollars right now."
The men cheered.
"This is the advance against the five hundred dollars I promised you for the two weeks work. Now, as we mentioned before, for this kind of money you might have to do something you might not ordinarily do. I give the orders, you do the work, whatever it is. We all know from the start this is not going to be some kind of church picnic."
They all laughed nervously.
He handed out the greenbacks, and each man looked carefully at the cash in the light of the small fire they had built. The night already had a touch of a chill to it in mid-October.
"I'll lead the way down the trail. It isn't much of a track. At one time it was the southern horseback route into Virginia City from Carson City. It roughly follows the route of the train tracks. We'll move out slowly and should be there in an hour."
Someone moved in
the brush behind him and Tony fumbled for his six-gun as he spun around.
"No shoot!" a woman's voice called. She ran into the clearing and Tony saw that she was a breed, half white, half Chinese. He knew her. She was just over eighteen. "No shoot!" she said again. She stood straight and tall and threw out her chest so her breasts strained at the cloth. She had inherited her mother's big breasts.
"My name is Lee," she said carefully. "My Tony bring me in from San Francisco to work for him. All time day or night I entertain you five gentlemen." She waggled her finger. "No more than one fuck a day for each man."
The riders whooped and hollered.
Tony lifted his hand for quiet.
"Hope you men appreciate this additional benefit of working for a first class operation!" They shouted that they did, and quickly picked numbers one to five to see who would get China Lee tonight.
"Now, we should get moving on down the trail. Any volunteers to ride double with Lee?"
A large Irishman with a red beard from Wyoming won the right by grabbing her and throwing her over his back, then marching to his horse and string of pack animals.
They arrived at the base camp at a little after three a.m. The cowboys told Tony the time by checking the position of the big dipper as it worked its nightly circle around the north star.
"See the Big Dipper?" one of the men asked. "Spot them two stars on the outside of the cup. Call them the pointer stars. Follow a line straight up from them, or down, anyway a straight line and you'll find the North Star right up yonder."
Tony found it. "I'll be damned!"
"I can tell you the time near to fifteen minutes what it rightly is, just by looking up there."
They came to a heavy growth of trees, a few pines, some brush along the creek and a lot of willow and alder that screened it all from the railroad tracks three hundred yards above on the edge of the cliff.
"This is camp," Tony said. "Just tether the animals for tonight. Tomorrow I want you to make up a temporary corral from that extra quarter inch hemp rope we brought along. Might as well make a camp as comfortable as you can, cause you might be here for a week before you get to work."
"What we gonna be doing way out here?" one of the men asked.
"I'm gonna be screwing that little Chinese breed till I can't get it hard no more!" somebody shouted. They all laughed.
"What else you're doing, you'll find out when the time comes. It will be sudden and at night. That's all I can tell you. Now settle down for the night, and don't wear out my little Chink. I got to get back to town before daylight."
They waved goodbye to him and the man who held the magic number one, tied his horse and motioned in the moonlight to Lee.
"First we make pine boughs bed and put blanket over them and then fuck-fuck," she said.
His name was Teddy and he grabbed her and pulled her dress open and began eating her breasts.
"Wait, hell!" Teddy said between bites. He picked her up, carried her into the woods a ways and laid her down on a spot of grass.
"What's your fucking hurry?" she asked, her strange pidgin English gone.
"Never could stand to wait around for things," he said, pulling off the rest of her clothes.
"Don't you want a fire, so you can see me all naked?"
"Hell no. I just want to blow my nuts, and then get to sleep."
Lee shrugged. It was going to be one of those weeks.
A half mile back up the trail toward town, Tony Giardello grinned when he remembered the expressions of the men when China Lee came up. They were so surprised he thought they had all shit their pants! She would keep them busy until it was time to get to work. China Lee would be one more of the crew who would not live to spend her bonus, but what the hell, it was a tough world.
He hated the horse he rode before he got back to the livery. Tony left the horse still saddled and tied to the rail at the stables and walked back to his saloon. He lived over the gambling hall and found Lottie snoring in his bed. He slapped her and she sat up, peeling out of her nightgown automatically.
"Not now," he snarled. "I'm too damn tired. You can massage my shoulders though. Damn, never gonna ride a horse again as long as I live!"
Lottie rolled him over and sat on his back, then leaned into him with her hands and punished his shoulder muscles with her massaging fingers until he wailed. She eased off at once and with soothing strokes on his shoulders and down his back, had him asleep in two minutes. She looked through his wallet, figured he would never remember how many small bills he had, and took fifteen dollars. She hid it in her shoe, then lay down beside him. When he woke up he would have a morning hardon and demand immediate service.
Sometimes Lottie thought it would be easier to be married and only have to worry about servicing one man. She shook her head. That would be boring, she'd go out of her mind in a week. Lottie grinned as she began to drift off to sleep. Tony had given her a twenty dollar bonus for telling him what she found out about Spur McCoy. That was the big reason they had put out the kill-reward on the Secret Service Agent. In this town McCoy wouldn't last more than two days. She went to sleep, still smiling.
Back at the mountain camp, Lee stood in the shadows and called softly. She had found only one more of the five waiting for her. The other three had been so tired they slept slumped on the ground wherever they wound up after hobbling their mounts and pack string. Leave it to a dedicated cowboy to tend to his horses before he thought about himself. She would never understand these men.
She fingered the pants pocket of the closest cowboy and removed his wallet. Silently she took out forty of the fifty dollars he had been paid. She went to four of the five and did the same thing, taking the wad of ten dollar bills and folding them tightly. She put the cash in a flat tobacco tin, closed the top, and looked for a good place to hide it. It would have to be a spot that would stay dry, not be obvious and be where she could find it again after this work was all over.
A hundred and sixty dollars! Think what she could do with that!
At last she found a place. The old lodgepole pine had been hit by lightning, and the top broken out fifty feet above the ground. A fire had evidently started because there was a blackened cavity burned in the base of the tree. Lee looked in it but could see nothing. The tree had been three feet thick at base, and the burned area was nearly half way through it. She felt upward as high as she could reach and found a narrow shelf where the fire had failed to burn. She pushed the tobacco tin up there. It fit well. It was back out of sight. A person would have to feel on top of the little shelf of the tree inside the burned area to find it.
The money would stay dry, it was safe and no one else would find it. And she could come directly to the scarred old snag later on and get the money.
Lee lay down on her blanket after slipping her dress on and nestled her head on her arms. After this week she would be a rich woman. Mr. Giardello had promised her two hundred dollars for the week's work with the five men. That with the hundred and sixty was a fortune!
Only for a moment did she think what the men would do when they woke up and found most of their money gone. She decided they would accuse each other. After all, she had no money, and certainly not theirs! A few seconds later China Lee slept.
The men all shivered in the morning when they woke up in the October chill of the six thousand feet elevation. They quickly found the good sized warming fire that China Lee had built. They looked in wonder at the cooking fire she had going, and at the kitchen gear that she had unpacked from one of the supply packs. Soon she had flapjacks with hot syrup and a pair of sunnyside up eggs and biscuits ready for each man. They ate quickly and with a good appetite. Then one of the men decided to look at the fifty dollars in his purse.
It was Teddy who unsnapped his long leather purse and reached inside. When his hand came out with one bill, he exploded with rage.
"Which of you yellow bellies stole my money?" he roared.
"Nobody stole nothing," one man said.
; "You probably gave it to China Lee for the pussy."
"Not a chance, she's paid for," Teddy said. "Who nipped into my purse while I slept?"
The other men began examining their wallets and snap purses, and there were more shouts of outrage.
"I'm short forty dollars!" one screeched.
"My whole poke is gone ...no I got ten dollars left. Forty gone!"
All of them but one had had money stolen. The other four looked at him with anger. He quickly opened his billfold and spread out his cash. He had fifty three dollars and twelve cents.
"I always sleep with my cash looped over my underwear and lay on it," he said. "No bastard can lightfinger me that way."
Through the outbursts, China Lee had continued to cook flapjacks at the small fire surrounded by rocks pushed in enough so her heavy frying pan would fit over it. The men looked at her.
"China Lee has no money," she said quietly. "China Lee here to fuck-fuck, not steal money. Look in my blanket roll."
Teddy was not convinced by her protests. He went to her blanket roll and dumped it out. He found only another dress, a skirt, one blouse, and three hair ribbons.
"Please do not take the hair ribbons," she said.
Teddy jumped at her, grabbed her by a breast and pulled her toward the big fire.
"Whore, you tell the truth, or I'm gonna burn your hair off, you savvy? First burn it off your head, and if you still don't confess, then I'm gonna spread your legs over the fire and burn your pussy hair off."
The men laughed at the idea, but when Teddy began to push the back of her head toward the fire they pulled her away.
"What the hell you doing? This whore stole our money and hid it. What else could have happened?"
The men all yelled at once, then the big redhead pushed Teddy away from China Lee.
"Argue that later, Teddy. I tell you one thing for sure. You hurt this little lady, and you're the sonofabitch who has to do the cooking for the next week. You want to do that?"
Teddy took a long breath. Shrugged. "Hell, guess good grub is worth the forty bucks. But the food better stay good, you damn sideways cut Chinese whore!"
Spur: Nevada Hussy Page 11