Every window in every building in town was gone, blown in. Rolled up like balls of string, the carefully laid wooden slat sidewalks had all piled up like so many giant tumbleweeds in front of Mordecai Smith’s Stable and Smithy at the far end of town. All the hitching posts were gone, as were the watering troughs. But the rest of the town appeared to have survived more or less intact.
Of Hearts Doland there was no sign. Having failed at the last to heed the hotel owner’s warning, he had played a final gamble and lost.
Staggering outside, Barker was at once astonished and relieved to see that save for the loss of every window and a considerable quantity of decorative architectural bric-a-brac, the bulk of his establishment remained intact. All up and down the street, shaken citizens were emerging in ones and twos to take stock of their own establishments. In keeping with the general inexplicableness of the shocking occurrence, the church steeple was intact but the heavy iron bell that had come all the way from New England was missing, borne away as lightly as a leaf on an intruding breeze.
It was not many minutes thereafter that the two men encountered a face they did not recognize. This surprised them, as while sizable for one of its type, the population of the town was not so vast as to preclude knowledge of all its citizenry by each and every responsible inhabitant.
“That were something, weren’t it?” Barker inquired conversationally of the unknown gentleman. “Never seen a wind like that. Never hope to again.”
From the back of his horse, the man frowned. “What wind?”
The hotel owner and the doctor exchanged a look. “What do you mean, ‘what wind?’ sir? Can it be possible that someone was too soundly abed to have not been rudely jostled awake by the recent local apocalypse?”
The rider made a face. “Damned if I know what you two are on about. Are you daft? Been peaceable calm hereabouts nigh on a week now.”
Stanton stepped forward. “Sir, I account myself a physician of some competence. Enough to know when I am awake and when I am drowsing in the grip of a dream. Setting even that knowledge aside, I and my friend can declare with the same certainty as should you that at this time of year this part of Colorado is never ‘peaceable calm.’ ”
The other man drew back. “Now I know you two are daft.” He looked around, squinting. “Or maybe you’re right and I am too. Been through this part of Nebraska a dozen times before and never come upon this community. Don’t know how I could’ve missed it.”
With that he chucked the reins he was holding and, patently unsettled, continued on down the street. Barker and Stanton looked at each other. Of one mind, they commenced to search for a certain exceptionally large recent resident of the hotel owner’s establishment in the hopes that worthy might could shed some light, or perhaps fresh air, on the unexpected conundrum with which they had suddenly been presented. Regrettably, they never again encountered him or his mount.
Both giant horse and giant rider were gone. Gone with the ghost wind.
Claim Blame
As I’ve said, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, I like better than to pull together seemingly disparate elements into a cohesive story. For example: Mad Amos Malone, the California gold rush, a couple of tough Irish miners, Scandinavian gold-mining immigrants, and a real place and name. Oh yes, and a certain city in a distant state famed for its own gold discovery.
What made this tale so much fun to write was the collision of two different immigrant cultures, Scandinavian and Irish, with Malone acting, for a change, as not the protagonist but the intermediary. Settling conflicting miners’ claims was a full-time job for some authorities during the gold rush. Who better to utilize his skills to prevent open warfare between such groups than Amos Malone?
Aside from the irritable Scandinavians and Amos himself, everyone else in the story is real and everything really did happen this way. There’s just no mention of the, um, Scandinavians in the history books.
Heck, even Old Pancake was real.
* * *
—
“This be our mountain and our mine and nobody digs here without our permission!”
Peter O’Riley turned beard and body to his partner, the mightily mustachioed Patrick McLaughlin, and then looked back down at the quartet of angry gnomes.
“Now, now, little friends, maybe we can work something out. What if we agreed to mine the strike for shares? Now, wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“No shares. Not lovely.” Norvalst, chieftain of the gnomes, wore suspendered pants, work boots, a long-sleeved white shirt woven of some coarse eldritch material, and a brown cap. His eyebrows were as white and heavy as his shirt, his mien uncompromising and foreboding, and his nose Herculean. His chest was broad, and downsized muscles bulged beneath the sleeves of his shirt.
O’Riley tried another tack. “We’ll take just a quarter of the diggin’s.”
“No quarter. We give none and take none.” A second gnome, stockier and even more muscular than his chief, stepped forward. He held a miniature iron pick, threateningly. “No shares. Our mountain, our mines.”
“We’ll throw in whiskey.” O’Riley leaned over as far as he could go, until his lean jeaned form was all but face-to-face with the gnomic headman. “Lots of whiskey.”
Tiny eyes nearly vanished beneath enormous ivory brows. “No whiskey!” His tone softened ever so slightly. “If you had some real brännvin, now…No! No shares! Now get off our mountain!”
And with that he brought the flat of his small but surprisingly heavy shovel down square and hard on Peter O’Riley’s right foot.
The miner stumbled back and howled as he grabbed at his insulted toes, but his yelp of pain wasn’t half as loud as that of the battle cry of the gang of tetchy little men who now surged forward, swinging picks and hammers and shovels while shouting insults in several languages, a number of which had no honest counterpart among the nations of humankind. McLaughlin running and O’Riley hopping, the two men beat a hasty retreat down the rocky, scrub-covered slope. The enraged gnomes chased them past their diggings, through their unprepossessing camp, and halfway to the river before their anger finally subsided. At that point they broke off the pursuit and, picks and shovels a blur, seemed to melt back into the very ground itself.
His heart hammering against his ribs, McLaughlin bent over and fought to catch his breath. “Well, that’s torn it. The little whoresons don’t seem half-inclined to negotiation.”
A gasping O’Riley nodded agreement. “ ’Tis mightily unreasonable they are bein’, Pat. I say we toast their refusal with a few cans o’ black powder and leave the sortin’ out to the Almighty.”
“Aye. But that might damage the pit. More work for us. And there be no guarantee it would loosen their grip. Or their determination to hold on to this piece of rock.” He took a deep breath and considered the dry, uninhabited landscape. “Maybe we should try and hire us some help.”
Still breathing hard, O’Riley stretched. Joints crackled like popcorn. His expression was grim, his tone washed with bitterroot. “Sure and now that’s a fine idea, Pat. We’ll just find ourselves a few of the locals and tell ’em we need their help drivin’ a tribe o’ tiny devils off our claim.” Bending over, he held one hand palm facing downward until it was a foot off the hard ground. “This high they are, an’ miners like ourselves. ’Tis naught but a wee inconvenience that we need help with.” He straightened again. “We’d be laughed out o’ the Sierras.”
McLaughlin continued to gaze down the mountainside. “That be true enough, Peter. Though…the last time we went into town for supplies, I heard tell of a gentleman lingering hereabouts who, if the whispers and tales about him are half to be believed, might be inclined to take the reality of our difficulties to heart and without scorn.”
O’Riley sniffed. “One man? Did you not see the size of the little monsters’ army? We need many guns to fight them, Pat. Guns
aplenty, and men with no fear o’ the unnatural to hold them back from using them. For this be no ordinary bit o’ intervention we’re dealin’ with.”
Still looking down the raw, rugged mountainside, McLaughlin stroked his mustache, the twin points of which drooped to below his chin. “Strange as it seems, Peter, I heard somewhat the same about this particular fellow.”
* * *
—
“Well, good sor, we got gnomes, sor.”
Sitting by the side of the creek that hemmed the little valley as prettily as a blue ribbon around the brim of a young girl’s bonnet, the giant in the buckskins and leather puffed thoughtfully on his meerschaum as he contemplated both the stream and his visitors’ problem. A wolf’s-head cap covered but could not constrain the mad dash of black and gray hair that spilled out behind and to the sides. While McLaughlin waited patiently and O’Riley wondered if confronting this brooding accretion of undisciplined humanity was such a good idea, Amos Malone silently pondered water, greenery, rock, and infinity.
Eventually he turned and rose. And rose, and rose, until Peter O’Riley was convinced he and his partner had made a bad decision indeed. With a smile that materialized amid a vast flush of beard, Malone put them at ease.
“What kind o’ gnomes?”
The supplicants exchanged a glance. McLaughlin spoke up. “Well now, Mr. Malone, sor, we don’t rightly know, the classification of supernatural folk not bein’ among our general store o’ expertise.”
“They’re miners, sor,” O’Riley put in. “Sittin’ on our claim, they are, and won’t get off. We offered them free shares in all our takings, we did, and they outright refused, resortin’ to hostilities to force us off what’s rightly ours.”
Malone tapped the bowl of his pipe on a rock, checked the interior, then consigned it carefully to the depths of a pocket in his enormous shirt. McLaughlin could have sworn he heard the pale graven face on the pipe let out a small cough.
“Rightly yours?”
O’Riley didn’t hesitate. “That be God’s honest truth, sor. Worked that claim for weeks now, we have. Got the proper papers an’ all. Had weak luck we did until Mother Fate took pity on us and all our hard work.” He grinned, showing a miner’s typical assortment of damaged orthodonture. “About to give up on the place, we was. Abandon the claim, as it were, when wouldn’t you know we discovered that the bottom of the pit that we’d sunk merely to collect water for our rockers was layered with gold.”
McLaughlin nodded confirmation. “Enough to make us rich right quick, it is. Or was, until these little men showed up an’ drove us off our land. Off our own claim!”
“Talk like foreigners, too,” O’Riley added darkly, conveniently discounting his own transatlantic origins.
“I see.” Malone was walking toward his horse as he spoke, compelling the miners to follow. The mountain man’s mount, McLaughlin observed, was of dimensions in keeping with that of Malone himself, though for the life of him the miner could not identify the elephantine breed. “And what is it exactly you fellers want of me?”
Once again the partners made eye talk. “There’s whispering around these parts,” McLaughlin began hesitantly, “that you, sor, are conversant with certain branches and aspects of knowledge that are denied the average man. Given our distressed circumstances, it would seem that you would be the only one hereabouts in possession of sufficient education in such matters to cope with our unique difficulty.”
Malone looked back at the miner. As he did so, McLaughlin could have sworn that the mountain man’s wolf’s cap peered down at him as well.
“Gnomes.” A far-off look came into Malone’s eyes. “Don’t much care for ’em myself.” His voice grew faint with reminiscence. “There was thet time in Trondheim…” Towering over the two men, he nodded curtly. “Right, then. I reckon we can go and have a chat with your gnomish interlopers. Ain’t no harm in a friendly powwow, even with gnomes. Beyond that I make no promises.”
“That’d be fine, sor, that’d be just fine of you!” McLaughlin was beaming, his partner still wary. “Now then, Mr. Malone, sor, if you wish to discuss the matter of payment for your services…? In truth we’re just poor hardscrabblers, but I swear we’ll do our best to make this right by you.”
Again Malone flashed the broad smile that showed his teeth were, if naught else, at least as impressive as the rest of him. “Let’s first see what it is exactly we’re dealin’ with here, gentlemen, and then we’ll speak to the doing o’ good by it.” Without another word and displaying a surprising litheness of movement, he swung himself up into the massive saddle. At this his mount looked back at him, let out a disgusted snort, spat something at the ground that for just the barest fraction of an instant lay smoking, and started off into the hills. It occurred to O’Riley that though he had not seen Malone pull on the reins, the horse had headed in the correct direction. A fluke, he thought as he and McLaughlin hurried to where they had secured their own horses to a nearby tree. And no doubt typical of Malone himself. The man seemed a collection of flukes, not all of them necessarily benign.
Which, given the current situation he and his partner were facing, might not be entirely a bad thing.
It was a late afternoon when they finally arrived back at their diggings. To the miners’ great relief, nothing appeared to have been disturbed. Their tent still stood, and the rest of their meager belongings and supplies remained where they had been left. As for the pit itself, that sainted glory-hole-to-be, as near as they could tell it had not been filled in or otherwise damaged. Except for some scattered brush, the slope where they had been working so hard was still barren and unappealing. It mattered not. That which was truly worthwhile lay below ground and out of sight. But not, hopefully, for long.
Dismounting, Malone studied his immediate surroundings. The slope was crusted with gravel and broken rock, like crumbs on a coffee cake. Of the miners’ tiny tormentors there was no sign, a fact which he immediately pointed out to his anxious hosts.
“No need to concern yourself on that score, Mr. Malone, sor.” McLaughlin was solemn in the face of expectation. “We know how to summon them forth.”
With that he and his partner set to work, using bucket and winch to draw water as well as gravel and sand from the pit, dumping it in the big rocker and working it through, cursing all the while. As soon as they finished they presented the rocked batch for Malone’s inspection.
“See the gold, sor!” O’Riley did not try to hide his excitement and enthusiasm. “Almost washes itself out if not for all the blue-black glar that surrounds it. Clogs the rocker that muck does, and just makes for more work.”
Malone nodded sagely. “Gold it is, my friend. You two have struck it fair.”
“Nothing fair about it!” The voice that interrupted was high-pitched but insistent.
The mountain man turned. Where a moment earlier had been only scrub-laden hillside there now stood a mass of small menfolk. Armed with the tools of their trade, they glared ominously at the intruders. Before Malone could respond, O’Riley was replying—while being careful to remain behind the bigger man and keeping his feet well out of shovel range.
“Sure an’ we’re back, you little bugger-mothers! You say this is your mountain. Well, we’ve brought a mountain of our own!”
The leader of the gnomes tilted his head back to gaze up at the hireling. And back, and back, until his small thick neck could abide no further inclination. Malone reacted by kneeling before him. Though appreciative of this courtesy, the chief let out a small but distinct grunt of disapproval.
“Matters not how big you be, sir. There are many of us, and should you choose to interfere in this private matter, we will cut you down to size as quickly as we can dig and shore a cross-tunnel.”
“Now then, hövding, there be no need for threatening here.” Malone gestured back to where the two miners stood watching, at
once fascinated and fearful. “Let’s talk this out in the manner of a proper stämma and see if we can’t come to a conclusion that leaves all parties equally satisfied and content.”
The chief’s enormous eyebrows rose in surprise. “You know a little of the truespeak! What manner of man be you?”
“A mannered one, I reckon. These fellers say this ’ere mine is theirs. I don’t expect they need the whole mountain t’ satisfy their claim.” He squinted upslope. “Seems to me there’s plenty o’ room fer all of you. They say they’ve filed right and proper papers to this place.”
“That’s right!” Coming forward, O’Riley pulled from his shirt pocket a sheet of paper that he proceeded to unfold and thrust first at the gnome, then at Malone. “All registered correct, as any fool can plainly see. No matter his size.”
The mountain man smiled thinly. “Perhaps best not to inject matters o’ size into this discussion, Mr. O’Riley.”
“Pagh!” Turning, the gnome made a short, sharp gesture. One of his tribe promptly scurried forth. Slighter in build than the majority of his fellows, he wore a red cap with a bent peak and thick glasses. From within a multitude of pockets in his oversized jacket, he drew forth a scroll. This he proceeded to unroll until it stretched from his ink-stained fingers past his chief, past Malone, past the two startled miners, past the assembled horses, and another ten yards down the mountainside before the end finally came to rest against a creosote bush.
The chieftain of the gnomes punctuated this presentation with a derisive sniff. “Our claim deed.”
“Now wait a minute…!” McLaughlin began. But Malone had already begun to read the extensive document.
How he could discern the tiny print, much less make sense of the lines of gibberish that to O’Riley looked like nothing more than chicken scratches, neither miner could imagine. With a speed that astonished even the gnomes, the mountain man had soon scanned the entire lengthy document. Having concluded his unnaturally swift perusal, he handed the mass of paper back to the care of the gnomish clerk, who, muttering under his breath, entered into the arduous task of rerolling it.
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