Clay Nash 8

by Brett Waring

  Wells Fargo troubleshooter Clay Nash was on his way to solve one crime when he became embroiled in another. Someone knocked over the Wells Fargo office and stole a cool ten thousand dollars in hard cash. By a strange coincidence, the trail seemed to point to Nitro Mantell, the outlaw Clay had been planning to go after for the Squirrel Creek bank robbery. But somehow the pieces just didn’t seem to fit. How could Nitro have been in both places at once? Who slipped Clay a Mickey Finn and who strangled the saloon girl who could have supplied all the answers?

  Clay was determined to unravel the mystery any way he could. But he quickly found himself hampered by an unwanted companion—the beautiful Liz Garrett, who was after the contents of the Red Rapids heist for her own very personal reasons …

  CLAY NASH 8: THE FARGO CODE

  By Brett Waring

  First Published by The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd

  Copyright © Cleveland Publishing Co. Pty Ltd, New South Wales, Australia

  First Smashwords Edition: February 2018

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with The Cleveland Publishing Pty Ltd.

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Series Page

  About Piccadilly Publishing

  One – Nitro

  Two – The Fargo Code

  Three – A Night to Howl

  Four – Morning After

  Five – The Nitro Trail

  Six – Buckskin

  Seven – Swamp Battle

  Eight – Raw Deal

  Nine – Long Memory

  One – Nitro

  Handling the dynamite of the 1880s was dangerous. It was an unstable product that could explode under all kinds of unexpected conditions including excessive heat and hard knocks. Merely carrying it could be risky. This was especially so if it were already in a ‘sweating' condition.

  Beads of clear, oily moisture formed on the sticks, making the paper wrapper greasy. This was pure nitroglycerine, not only more highly explosive than the dynamite itself, but vastly more dangerous to handle.

  There were men who aimed to put this liquid to their own use. Some were fools, nearly all were brave, and many were dead within seconds of trying to put the beads of moisture into a glass phial. However there was a method that could be used to extract the nitro. It was highly dangerous but many an outlaw and safecracker took the chance so they could have a ‘portable’ high explosive. A small glass container of the clear amber liquid, wrapped carefully in cotton wool and tightly corked, could be carried with relative safety in a man’s shirt pocket provided he didn’t get into any brawls or fall off his horse.

  It was not surprising, then, that men such as these were loners.

  And yet, there were ‘nitro men’ who could gather a hardcase bunch around them and go on to make a reputation for themselves. The successful ones commanded a lot of respect, from both sides of the law, for there was no doubting the courage of these nitro users.

  Such a man was ‘Nitro’ Mantell. Long ago, before he had the scrape with the law that set him riding the owlhoot trail, Mantell had worked silver in the hills back of Reno, Nevada, with a grizzled old sourdough prospector. The old man not only taught him about mining but also showed him how to extract nitro.

  His method was simple and dangerous. He would fill a clean oil drum with water and cautiously pack it with sticks of dynamite. The drum was then heated very gradually. This was the secret.

  Mantell learned to build the fire very, very slowly, over a period of hours, allowing the water to warm up but never to boil. Once the water started to simmer, the nitroglycerine floated to the surface and formed a thin, amber film. Then came the tricky part: collecting the nitro in a bottle.

  Impatience at this stage, guaranteed a man a visit to the angels. It was important that the oily liquid be allowed to trickle down the side of the container, otherwise it would explode.

  From a dozen sticks of dynamite, a man could expect to get a full fluid ounce of nitro; sufficient for blowing twenty or thirty frontier safes—or for wiping out a whole town if things went wrong, as they sometimes did.

  Like the time Nitro Mantell and his bunch of hardcases decided to rob the bank at Squirrel Creek.

  But Nitro’s big mistake was in hiring a man who went by the moniker of ‘Crazy’ Catlow. He was a man who lived up to his name; he had no fear, and that alone made him a very dangerous companion. Such a man is unable to assess the risks and makes many foolish moves.

  But Catlow was available and Mantell needed another gun. More importantly, he needed a man who knew the country around Squirrel Creek. Catlow seemed to fill the bill and Mantell took him into his gang. He lived to regret the move, but only just.

  Squirrel Creek was a small and insignificant tributary of the South Platte River, trickling down from the Horseshoe Hills, joining the big river about halfway between Julesburg and Denver. The town of the same name had been built near the creek’s headwaters and had been founded on a goldfield that still operated at payable rate, though the town itself now served a rich grazing land that had been opened up for settlement beyond the hills.

  The future looked pretty bright for such a small, ramshackle town and the Colorado First National Bank opened an office there. Miners, cattlemen and businessmen soon started using the bank’s services—not the least being its heavy Fawcett-Carlin vault. It was thought to be impossible to break into the heavy steel box of the Fawcett-Carlin safe and most folk considered that their valuables were as secure as they possibly could be at the First National—until Nitro Mantell thought he would give it a try. He knew there was a lot of gold and a lot of money in that safe and he decided to get it out—with the aid of his bottle of nitro. He and his gang broke in at night through the rear of the building by hitching four horses to ropes tied to the bars over a window and then driving the animals off. The window was wrenched loose with a lot of noise and dust and rubble, but there was no one to hear. The town was sleeping but, in any case, the local stamp mill was working through the night, crushing ore. The steady, rhythmic thunder of this was an effective blanket for noise when the bars pulled loose.

  Mantell led his men in through the broken wall, kicked in a door that barred their way to the main part of the bank and then posted lookouts. The men with the getaway horses were already stationed at the side door and another man guarded the way they had entered. They opened the blinds and there was sufficient moonlight spilling through the windows to allow Mantell to work on the safe door. Crazy Catlow stood by the main front door, moving sweating hands on the stock of his sawn-off shotgun, staring out over moonlit gardens to the deserted streets beyond.

  Up on the hill at the far end of town, there were lights at the ore mill and the stamp mill thudded on monotonously. Catlow bared his teeth and muttered a curse as he stared at the mill.

  “Goddamn noise. Goes clear through a man’s head.”

  “Shut up, Catlow,” growled Mantell, a short, thick chested man. He ran his fingers over the cold metal of the large safe. “We wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for that racket.”

  “It won’t cover the sound of the nitro goin’ off,” Catl
ow snapped.

  Mantell shook his head slowly, turned to Cherokee, the ’breed beside him holding a special lead-headed hammer and hardened-steel cold chisel. “Open up the seam about here, Cherokee. Then here—and here. Shear the heads of all them rivets around the lock plate first, though. I’ll start droppin’ in the nitro. Plug ’em while you’re workin’ on the rest.”

  The breed nodded, placed the chisel point against a steel rivet head and struck with the hammer. There was a dull thud but only the edge of the rivet head bent up, showing a small bright scar. He turned to Mantell who cursed. “Hardened steel. Gonna take a mite longer than we reckoned.”

  “Long as we get out of here by sunup,” Catlow said from the door.

  “Just watch that goddamn street and leave the rest to us,” snapped Mantell. “You don’t like it, Catlow, you can vamoose right now.”

  Catlow’s jaw muscles knotted but he said nothing; his face cold and tight in the moonlight as he turned back to watch the street. Mantell took the chisel and hammer and together, he and Cherokee worked on the rivet heads around the lock’s plate. It took them two hours to get the nine rivets sheared off and by then the chisel point was chipped and blunt. Cherokee took another from the burlap bag he carried and began work on the seam where the outside flange of the door joined the main safe body. This, too, was harder steel than they had expected but they had to keep going. Mantell took out his bottle of nitroglycerine and carefully unwrapped it. He smiled faintly as the lookouts instinctively moved a few feet away. Not that it would make any difference if he dropped the bottle but he could understand their wishes to put as much distance as possible between themselves and that high explosive.

  He removed the cork and, with a small eyedropper, trickled a little of the liquid down into the lock through each of the rivet holes. He plugged these with small balls of clay. When the main charge blew, its force would set off the nitro that was already pooling inside the lock and it should blow the lock mechanism to pieces. But what Mantell didn’t know was that this Fawcett-Carlin safe was one of the first to be fitted with a new explosive-activated back up locking mechanism. This meant that when the main lock was blown out, the violence activated a series of specially-strengthened steel rods in six different positions around the door, driving them three inches into recesses in the main body of the safe, locking the door securely in place. The automatic action took place even if the massive hinges themselves had been removed.

  It lacked less than an hour to sunup when Mantell and his crew discovered that, though the nitro had exploded on cue and shattered the lock and jarred the hinges off their massive pins, the safe door was just as immovable as before they started.

  Coughing in the nitro fumes, Mantell and Cherokee began attacking the door with their short crowbars while Catlow stood nervously by the door, licking at the beads of sweat on his upper lip.

  “Come on, damn it, come on,” he hissed, without looking at the struggling men. “The whole damn town’s wakin’ up. Lights comin’ on everywhere.” Mantell struck at the door viciously then threw the crowbar across the room. He knew it was useless to continue. They would have to leave it; the first townsmen were appearing, armed, gathering at the front of the bank. “We’ll have to cut and run,” he shouted. But as he spoke Catlow smashed the glass of the door and blasted both barrels of his sawn-off into the crowd. Three men went down and another staggered away, screaming, holding an arm that dangled like a limp rag. The men scattered, some going to ground and firing into the bank. Catlow laughed with the release of nervous tension as he reloaded. Mantell knew that the sweat on the man had been caused by him holding back: he had wanted action, not the tension of cracking a safe. It was too late to do anything now but make a run for it. And they would have to shoot their way out. Mantell didn’t waste breath on Catlow: he would take care of the man later. He snatched up his rifle and started shooting at the scattering townsmen.

  “Get to the broncs,” he bellowed. “Don’t try to make a stand. Shoot on the run and get clear pronto before they pin us down.”

  Cherokee dropped his bag of tools. The others fired wild shots through the bank windows into the early morning. Glass shattered and Catlow’s laugh could be heard as his sawn-off boomed again. Cherokee snatched up a metal box from a desk, determined to get some profit from the night. Mantell yelled at him to move—and fast. The ’breed ran for the hole in the rear wall, clasping the box to his chest.

  Catlow almost fell as he stumbled over Mantell down on hands and knees desperately searching the floor.

  “What the hell you about?” Catlow said, reloading.

  “The nitro,” Mantell bellowed. “Watch your feet.”

  Catlow jumped away, eyes bulging momentarily, and then a crooked smile split his face as he saw something glinting in the moonlight. He bent and picked up the small, part-filled bottle of oily amber liquid.

  “Here it is,” he said, holding it between finger and thumb. He ducked instinctively as several bullets whined through the room, splintering wood and shattering glass.

  “Hell! Don’t drop it,” Mantell shouted, reaching for the bottle as Catlow snatched it out of reach. A volley of rifle fire raked the room, and Mantell shouted again: “Gimme that.”

  “Like hell,” said Catlow and jerked his head towards the bullet-splintered door. “I’m gonna give it to them.”

  He jumped towards the door, holding the bottle of nitro gingerly. Mantell made a lunge for him, missed, and sprawled headlong. He got to his hands and knees instantly, ignoring the bullets that buzzed and whined about him.

  “It could go off in your hand,” Mantell screamed. “You’ll kill half the town.”

  “More chance to get away, then.” Catlow laughed. Mantell whirled on his heel and ran for the hole in the rear wall. He didn’t aim to stick around and try to reason with a loco fool like Catlow. With the bottle half empty, just the motion of drawing back his arm to throw it could jar it enough to cause an explosion that would take them all to hell.

  Mantell dived headlong through the hole in the brickwork. Cherokee came out of the dark, leading his horse. Nitro leapt into the saddle as a terrifying explosion ripped through the hole in the wall. The horses reared and bucked, almost unseating the two outlaws. They fought the frightened animals, ears ringing, hearing bricks falling somewhere at the front and, beyond, the screams of mortally-wounded men. Cherokee looked stunned as he glanced at his boss.

  “Catlow,” gritted Mantell, then he whirled as a ragged figure lurched through the dust and stepped out of the hole in the wall.

  Catlow grinned up at them through the grime on his face, his clothes in shreds, but with only a few minor cuts on his body. He put a hand on the reins of Mantell’s mount.

  “No need to—hurry,” he panted. “Ain’t no one left to come after us. They was blowed all over the street.”

  Mantell looked at him with a hard face, then abruptly drew his six-gun and fired into the middle of the man’s startled face. Catlow was blown back three feet, his body twisting and falling so that it was draped over the broken brickwork. Mantell holstered the smoking gun and looked at Cherokee.

  “Loco fool. Should never have hired him. Now every damn lawman between the Rio and the Canadian border will be after us. We got to find us a hole to crawl into, Cherokee, and then we pull it in after us. The law ain’t never gonna forget this massacre. And if we get caught, we’re dead.”

  They wasted no time in leaving Squirrel Creek and the carnage strewn around the once beautiful gardens of the Colorado First National Bank.

  Two – The Fargo Code

  It was Clay Nash’s last bullet. He knew that if he didn’t make it count he was as good as dead.

  The mist in the hills was helping the man who stalked him, allowing him to come up the slope, through the ghostly trees, painted a pale shade of gold in the early morning. The man Nash was after had nothing to lose; Nash had been trailing him for weeks and had run him to ground in these sierras, not fifty miles from where h
e had carried out his crime against Nash’s employers, Wells Fargo. The man, named ‘Arizona’, had stolen a company horse—with valuable company papers in the saddlebags. Not all the papers had belonged to Wells Fargo; there had been inter-bank mail and other legal documents that the company had undertaken to deliver by special messenger. It was a fast service that Wells Fargo offered to those who could pay. It cost a lot, but the Wells Fargo guarantee of delivery was behind the service.

  When Wells Fargo said they would deliver something, they delivered. There might be some delay while they recovered the article if it were lost or stolen, but they stuck by their guarantee no matter what the price. It was known throughout the West as the Fargo Code.

  Clay Nash was the man most often called upon to enforce this code and recover lost or stolen articles. His success rate was extremely high. It wasn’t simply that Nash was dogged or intelligent: he was both of these, but he was also a man who could outlast any running outlaw in the wilderness and, when they met, he was most always the faster gun. If someone could beat him to the draw, Nash used his intelligence to outwit the man and get the upper hand. Just as he had with Arizona when they had met face-to-face down in Julesburg two days ago. Arizona wasn’t lacking in guts and even if he were a mite short on brainpower, there was lightning in that right hand of his.

  When Nash had braced him, Arizona had set his hand streaking for his six-gun and had got it clear of leather before Nash’s Colt was halfway out of the holster. Nash hadn’t bothered to finish his draw. He threw himself down and sideways, rolling into a ball and somersaulting. This upset Arizona’s aim—though he managed to get off three shots before Nash squirmed over onto his belly and snapped off his first. The bullet clipped Arizona’s ear lobe and sprayed his neck and shoulder with blood. As he staggered back his gun exploded by reflex action. It was a lucky shot, for the bullet slammed Clay’s Colt from his hand, shattering the cylinder.