by Tim Champlin
She shrugged. "Where do any o' them come from? Folks killed, or they left him, or he ran away. Don't rightly know. He never said and I never asked. Reckon he'll tell me if he takes a notion. It's not my place to pry into other people's affairs. Kenneth Joseph—I don't know his last name—kinda took a cotton to me." Her eyes twinkled, and she half smiled. "And I reckon the feeling was mutual. He's gonna amount to sumpin' some day, that boy."
"He'll be at a disadvantage if he doesn't get some schooling." I offered.
"He'll get enough schoolin' t'see him through," she answered, unperturbed.
"Sure wish I had some corn bread to wipe up this juice," I said, scraping my plate clean.
"That would be good," Curt said. "Too bad they're saving what corn is left to parcel out to the stock."
"Well, that was mighty good, anyway, Missus Hayes," I said, draining my coffee cup down to the grounds. "I'm feeling to good, I may take a walk to town today."
"Sure you're up to it?" Curt asked. "You may not be able to get your boots on; your feet are still swollen."
"I'll just slip on those sealskin overshoes over these moccasins you got me."
"Well, get your stuff on and I'll help you."
"Right. I've got to get out for a while. This thaw is giving me spring fever."
Thirty minutes later, Curt was helping me down the back steps that connected Williams Street to Main. We first went by my newspaper office, where the editor, Jack Colcroft, pounded my back in greeting, then quickly assigned me the job of writing up my personal account of our harrowing experience.
"This will give us a real exclusive, even on those two new dailies that are just trying to get off the ground," he told me. He was a tall, balding man, with quick, nervous movements and an easy smile.
"When's it due?" I asked.
"Just as soon as you can get it to me," he replied. "We'll put out a special edition."
"Okay, Jack." I smiled ruefully. "I wouldn't have stopped in if I'd known you were going to put me to work so soon."
He slapped me on the back again as we went out. "I'll be looking for that piece by tomorrow."
I limped on down the boardwalk, breathing in the milder air and feeling the warmth of the morning sun that was finally penetrating the deep gulch. I could hear water dripping and gurgling and gushing everywhere as the snow was melted rapidly by the warm wind and sun. The slushy snow on Main Street was rapidly turning into mud under wheels and hooves. The streets were alive with people—people I hadn't seen in weeks. They were walking up and down the boardwalks with no apparent purposes in mind. It was as if everyone were shaking off the lethargy of winter hibernation and coming out for a breath of fresh air.
We passed the Wells Fargo and the telegraph offices. Both were still closed. Evidently, the line to the outside world was still down. No wonder my narrow escape from freezing was still the biggest news. The rest of the world could have disappeared for all we knew.
"Hey, K.J.!"
I looked up from my reverie at Curt's call. The boy was coming down the sidewalk toward us, his old coat flopping open and his hands thrust into his side pockets. He stopped, and I could see the stoppered neck of a bottle protruding from his outside pocket.
"You're not taking up drinking, are you?" I joshed him, indicating the bottle. "At least, not before noon."
"Naw." He grinned. "This is a bottle of that medicine."
"That what? You mean elixir? From the medicine man?"
"Yeah. He gave me some for Missus Hayes."
"What's wrong with her?"
"Nothin'. It's just supposed to keep her healthy."
"Missus Hayes impresses me as the type who would concoct her own tonic if she needed one," Curt remarked to me.
"Where'd you see the medicine man?" I asked K.J. "I thought he'd left town."
"Down at the Alhambra. That's where he hangs out, mostly. Mister Mortimer's a good tipper; I run a lot of errands for him."
"What kinds of errands?"
"Oh, just different stuff. Some of it's kinda strange."
"How so?"
"It's not the usual stuff like shinin' his boots, or helpin' him hitch and unhitch that nice horse, of his, or fetchin' grub to his room, or gettin' his washin' back from them Chinese. He has me do stuff like gettin' a close look at somebody's spurs, or sidlin' up to some men at the bar and listenin' to what they're talkin' about, or somethin' like that. The other day he bought one o' my papers and told me to take it up to one of the rooms and tell the man inside that it was from the hotel manager. What he really wanted me to do was see if I could get a look at the man with his shirt off or his arms bare, to see if he had a knife scar way up here on his arm."
Curt and I exchanged curious glances.
"It's fun and kinda mysterious-like. Mister Mortimer told me he was a spy during the war and he wanted to train me to be one, too."
"He didn't tell you why he wanted to find out all these things?"
"Nope. He just told me he was real curious about a lot of things, and gave me a big tip, so I just quit askin' questions."
"I wonder if he's still selling his elixir?"
"I seen him sellin' a bottle now and then, usually down at the Alhambra at night. Some o' those miners get drunk on it," K.J. replied. "Or at least, they sure act drunk after they drink a whole bottle of it." He made a face. "It smells terrible. I took a sniff o' this bottle. Thought I might try a sip, but it smells like pine tar. Whew!"
"Is Mortimer at the Alhambra now?"
"He was. I gotta go. In this muddy weather, they's gonna be some boots need cleanin', and I wanta get to 'em first before I go to dinner at the Grand Central."
"You're eating at the Grand Central?" I asked. "That's pretty high class."
"Oh, I'm not eating in the dining room. The cook always saves the best scraps for me and hands 'em out the back door. People sure waste a lot o' good food. Besides," he said matter-of-factly, "it saves Missus Hayes's having to feed me. She has a hard enough time."
He waved, and was off up the boardwalk.
"Good kid."
"Yeah."
"Wonder who this Mortimer is? Seems like he's got more than peddlin' snake oil on his mind."
"It sure does. Might make a good story for the paper if I can get next to him and find out what he's up to."
"Always the reporter. Want to see if we can look him up right now?"
"Not just now. My feet are beginning to hurt again. How about helping me back up to Missus Hayes's place. I think maybe tomorrow I can move back up to our room, though."
As we came around the corner of a building to the stairs leading up to Williams Street, we saw Mrs. Hayes about halfway up, carrying her usual daily bucket of beer from a nearby saloon. Two well-dressed women were just crossing the open space between the buildings, holding their skirts out of the slush, and saw Mrs. Hayes at the same time.
"Mercy! Look at that old lady, sneaking around the back doors of these saloons and guzzling beer. Mighty poor example for those youngsters she keeps, if you ask me," one of them remarked to the other. "And I hear she even smokes a cob pipe, too!"
"What can you expect from somebody who welcomes harlots into her house?" the other woman replied in a lower voice as the two of them walked on out of earshot, still talking.
Curt and I looked at each other and grinned.
"What do you reckon Wiley Jenkins would have said about that?" Curt asked.
"I hate to think," I replied. "But I'll bet it would've scorched the bustles off those self-righteous biddies."
CHAPTER 14
The next day we moved back to our hotel room. My feet and fingers were improving rapidly. The swelling had gone down, but the itching of the dead, flaking skin was intolerable. I stayed in all day, since I couldn't stand to have moccasins or boots on.
Before cold temperatures set in again the day after, most of the snow had melted. When the mushy bare ground froze, it made Main Street rough but passable again. By the end of that week I was back t
o normal, and Curt and I immediately went to make the acquaintance of Mr. Floyd Mortimer, the snake-oil drummer. But he was nowhere to be found. The elixir salesman had mysteriously vanished from his old haunts at the Alhambra, and even K.J. swore he had not seen him in several days. Some discreet questions revealed that he was still registered at the Grand Central, but the desk clerk had no idea where he had gone.
To fill the time, in addition to some of my newspaper's columns, we decided then to look up Mr. Jacob Stoudt, our former stage passenger and bank executive. I had no clear idea of what I was going to ask Mr. Stoudt if and when I got an interview with him, but I thought maybe my role as a reporter would at least allow me access to him.
"You could always make up some story about wanting to interview him about life as a bank president in a frontier gold camp as compared with life as a banker back East, or wherever."
It was a pretty flimsy excuse for an interview, but I thought I'd give it a try anyway. His reaction to the stage robberies would have been a meatier interview, if I hadn't suspected him of having something to do with them and wanted to avoid the subject for the time being.
But the whole thing became moot when I couldn't even find Jacob Stoudt to interview. At the second bank where I inquired, I was told by a teller that Mr. Stoudt was indeed the president, but that he seldom visited his office there, especially now during the slack business of the winter months. I was directed to his house on Main Street about a block from the bank, but a servant answered the door and told me that Mr. Stoudt was not seeing anyone without an appointment. The fact that I identified myself as a reporter mattered not at all. I would have to make an appointment through his secretary at the bank during regular business hours. Besides, the servant told me, Mr. Stoudt was out of town just now. Then I tried another tack and told the servant that I had been a passenger to Cheyenne with Stoudt when the stage had been robbed in the Fall, and I wanted to interview him concerning any losses his bank had sustained since the robberies started. The black-suited young servant again told me his boss was out of town, and when I insisted on trying to make an appointment through him, he suggested I leave before he called the sheriff.
"Well, that was a waste of time," I observed to Curt as we walked back up the street.
"Not necessarily. You learned a few things. First of all, you know that Stoudt is a secretive man. Second, you know he doesn't want to see anyone he hasn't invited, including you. You know he's not too far from here, since the roads out of the. hills are still covered with ice and mud. He couldn't have made it on horseback as far as Custer, sixty miles south, unless he walked and camped out along the way. Somehow, he didn't strike me as the type for that."
"So, that leaves me totally frustrated. The two men I most wanted to talk to—Mortimer and Stoudt—have both disappeared somewhere here in town."
"It does seem strange," Curt admitted. "Maybe they know you're a reporter and for some reason don't want to talk to you."
"Well, I don't really care. Whatever's going on, I guess it's really none of our business. If it's illegal, it may be the town's business, but not ours personally. I really took this job as a reporter to have something to do during the winter, but I'm getting sick of everything now. Cabin fever has about got me. I'm ready to get back out on our claim."
"Won't be long now. Next week is March first."
"Spring can't get here too soon to suit me."
But spring did seem to be somewhere forever in the future. I dragged around town for the next two weeks, trying to get enough news, or make up enough news, to help fill the two issues of the paper that came off the Washington press under Jack Colcroft's hand. I saw nothing of either Floyd Mortimer or Jacob Stoudt. They had either vanished from Deadwood or were both in hiding.
We had one more snowfall in mid-March--about a four-incher. But it was winter's last fling. The weather rapidly moderated after that. And with the sunshine and the lengthening days came the melting of the snow, which turned the creeks into torrents and the gulch into a sea of mud.
As soon as the roads became passable again, the telegraph line was repaired, and suddenly Deadwood was part of the larger world once more. Some soldiers came and went. They were members of a detachment under a Major Brown, who had been sent up from Fort Robinson, Nebraska the previous October to winter in and around Custer and to patrol the Hills, helping to protect settlers from any roving war parties. Curt didn't recognize any of them, but he stayed out of sight when they were in town, just to be safe.
With the thaw came something else the winter residents had long been expecting and bracing for—the spring influx of gold-seekers. Earlier than I thought it possible, even before the stages began to run again, the gold-hunters began to trickle into town. By the first of April the trickle had become a flood. They came on horseback, on muleback, in wagons and every conceivable kind of rig. Some later arrivals even came by foot. Fortunately, most of the early arrivals brought their own provisions, something Deadwood was woefully short of. By mingling with these new prospectors in the saloons and restaurants, we heard of the privations and troubles some of them had already endured just getting here. Some of the more unorganized groups had suffered losses of many mules to mud fever. I had never heard of such a thing, but Curt explained that the long hair along the belly and the hair from hock to fetlock becomes so caked with mud that the pores are clogged and the mules can't sweat, causing them to die from overheating. Curt said he guessed a lot of these greenhorns were either too tired, too ignorant, or too lazy to clean off their wagon-pulling mules after a long, tiring day on the trail.
The influx of new people and the fairing weather had stirred my desire to get back out on our own claim in Thunder Valley. The feverish pace at which the newcomers were heading into the surrounding hills somehow made me feel that all the gold would be gone, and every inch of ground staked. And the continuing stream of incoming wagons made me think there were almost enough people to do just that.
Gold fever and Spring fever had gripped me so hard that I gave my editor my notice that I was quitting. He begged me to stay on, saying my chances of striking it rich were slim.
"We've got a pretty fair-looking claim, Jack," I told him. "And I'm itching to get at it."
He walked outside in his leather apron, wiping the ink from his hands on a rag.
"Why don't you take the stage down to Cheyenne?" he suggested, blinking in the bright sunlight. "I'll pay your way. From the looks of some old newspapers these newcomers have brought in with them, and what's coming in over the wire, you could gather enough news in two days to make this sheet into a daily for a few weeks—maybe permanently."
"Thanks, Jack, but I came here to find gold, and I've done only fair so far. Besides, these people who are just coming in know what's going on in the outside world. They want news of Deadwood and the Hills, and the new strikes and the stage robberies and all that."
"You may be right. I guess I can get enough national news by telegraph or from these old newspapers to fill out the columns and give the pages some variety. Let's leave it this way: If things don't work out, or if you want a little part-time work, your job's always open. I hate to lose a good, experienced reporter. Besides, the way this town's booming, I could keep three reporters busy."
I grinned and gripped his hand. "Done."
"By the way, here's a copy of The Rocky Mountain News I just gleaned a few items from. Thought you might want something new to read for a change."
"Thanks."
"I said 'new,' but it's hardly current. That thing's about four months old."
"Beats reading my own stuff or labels on cans."
My last remaining job was to get a story about the resumption of stage service and gold shipments, so I went to the Wells Fargo office to see Bundy. Since the stages started running, two weeks before, I'd seen little of Bundy, who had been kept busy nearly fifteen hours a day in his office. There had been no reports of any holdups so far. I didn't know if this meant there had been no gold shipped
and I doubted—even considering my friendship with Bundy—that I was about to find out.
"Nope, no gold shipments have gone out yet this season," Bundy told me with unexpected candor, leaning on the counter. A stage bound for Pierre had just pulled out, leaving him with a few minutes of slack time.
"Is that really the straight of it, Chuck? You wouldn't want to give me a statement for the paper, would you?"
"I don't mind. What do you want to know?"
"Can you tell me what precautions have been taken to protect the gold shipments to Cheyenne this season?"
"The company and I and Sheriff Pierce are working on some ideas we hope will work."
"Like what?"
"You know I can't tell you that for publication, Matt." He shrugged. "Although I can't say it would make much difference. Somehow, those robbers found out nearly every move we made last year."
"Well, you haven't had any holdups so far this year."
"I guess they're not interested in passenger valuables, even though all of those inbound stages from Cheyenne and Sidney have been loaded—people hanging off them everywhere. Probably laying back and waiting for our first bullion shipment."
"When will that be?"
Bundy shrugged again. "We've only got a trickle of dust so far. Hope that's not an indication of a lack of trust in Wells Fargo. But it's early yet."
We talked on for a few more minutes until a customer interrupted us, and I stopped jotting down notes and left, knowing I wasn't going to get anything concrete.
As I stepped out into the sunshine of the beautiful April day, a warm south wind was blowing along the street, drying the mud. Curt was coming up the sidewalk. He had been to the livery stable, checking on our animals and settling up our bill.
"Get anything from Bundy?" he asked.
"Not much. But I don't blame him. He's really on the spot. I wouldn't say anything at all if I were in his position."
"How about a beer? On me."
"Sounds good. It's about lunchtime, anyway. I'm starved for some vegetables."
"Let's try the Grand Central, then. I knew their dining room is already serving some of the tinned vegetables that came in on that first bull train from Pierre."