“Well,” he said. He was just a wizard when it came to talking to a girl. He thought of something to add. “You didn’t know.” Say something else, he told himself, and he did, which sort of surprised him. “Besides, you and Butch and the half the population of San Francisco could have turned that city inside out and never would have found me. General Grant, Blue, and I were miles and miles from town by the time you would have formed a search party.”
That seemed to make her feel better. The tears disappeared anyway. “You still have that dog?”
“Yes. Didn’t Butch tell you?”
“No.” The way she said it gave Dooley pause. Butch was a tad older that Julia, Dooley had figured, but nowhere near the difference in age as that kid and Dooley himself. He started to ask about George Miller, but stopped. A man did not pry into the affairs of a woman.
Affairs. He almost blushed from the thought.
Woman. He leaned back.
What was that Butch Sweeney had mentioned? “You figured we were too green to handle, or none of our business, or . . . too hard on our tender eyes or ears.” Butch had often complained, he now remembered, that Miss Julia had a mouth that went off like a Gatling gun, and he had called her Little Miss Loudmouth. Stuff like that. She and Butch were kids. At least, they had been all those years ago in Arizona and California.
He made himself drink some of the water in the glass before him.
She wore a tailor-made suit of garnet cashmere—skirt with thin, knife-plaiting along the bottom, two panels on each side of the blouse with buttons and green, yellow, and black stitching, and long drapery of a rich green and gold in the front and looped at the side. The hat was elegant, and she had removed her white gloves while she ate. It was a far cry from the rags she had been wearing when Butch and Dooley had found her in that miserable cave.
Her hair was tucked up underneath that hat, showing off her cute little ears, with a few strands of hair—darker now that he remembered—showing on her forehead. The collar was one of those stand-up types, black with garnet stripes, hiding most of her throat.
He had to keep telling himself that Leadville might be two miles high and a grueling, numbingly cold, miserable, multiday stagecoach ride from Denver City. And that there might not be any railroad service here, but this town was mighty rich, filled with silver barons and famous folks like Buffalo Bill Cody. It was a place of wealth. And Julia Alice Cooperman sure looked to be filling that bill.
Kid?
Her eyes were soulful, haunting, and her face unblemished. She reminded Dooley of those dolls he saw in stores in good, proper towns like . . . well . . . Des Moines, maybe. But not Council Bluffs. Not the raw, savage towns he had seen in Denver, Julesburg, Omaha, Yankton, Tucson, Tempe.
The nose turned up just enough, and her lips shone a deep red. But Dooley knew she wore no paint on her face. No rouge. No lipstick. She was a natural beauty. Little Miss Loudmouth had grown up to be someone any red-blooded man would be staring at. And Dooley realized that he certainly was staring. He looked at the open doorway, at the folks passing by the dining hall on their way to the opera house in Leadville or upstairs to their rooms.
“You always thought of me as a snot-nosed kid, Dooley,” Julia Alice Cooperman told him.
Dooley swallowed.
“You sure aren’t a kid anymore, Julia,” he told her, and rose. He held out his hand—didn’t know why, but it seemed to be the proper thing you did when you were in the presence of a lady, and she rose, pulled those skinny little gloves onto her hands, and took Dooley’s into one of hers. Her arm fitted in nicely in the crook of his elbow as he escorted her through the entrance and into the lobby. He was heading her to the staircase when George Miller came down, grinning like a fellow who had just hit blackjack on a sizable bet.
“Hello, Dooley,” George said, and he took Julia from Dooley.
“Hello, dear,” Julia told George Miller.
“I trust you had a pleasant evening,” George Miller told Dooley.
“Yeah.”
“Well, good night to you. It’s good to reunite. I’m sure I’ll see you plenty over time in Leadville. It’s a fast-growing metropolis, a wonderful boomtown, but it is not . . . say . . . San Francisco.”
That’s when Dooley noticed the linen wrapping around George Miller’s wrist. He also noticed something else.
“Let’s retire to our room, dearest,” George Miller said, and he escorted Julia Cooperman up those stairs, leaving Dooley just standing there like an oaf.
Just staring . . .
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
. . . just staring at that slim gold band on Julia Cooperman’s finger.
“Son of a gun,” Dooley said. “They’re married.”
* * *
So here was Dooley Monahan, finally in a boomtown—not a ghost town—with money in his pocket and a chance to do some real mining. He had been reunited with old friends Julia and Butch and an old colleague, George Miller, whom Dooley certainly wasn’t going to call a friend now that he knew he was married to Julia, no matter how many bottles of champagne he bought. Hell, Dooley didn’t even like that bubbly booze. Besides, Dooley had noticed that bandage on Miller’s arm. George Miller, good old George Miller, was the man who had led those road agents. George Miller was the ornery hombre who had murdered Chester Motz and had stolen Dooley’s deed, not that the deed meant anything. There was some justice to that.
So here Dooley sat in that fancy café with the swell-tasting doughnuts he had just discovered, and laid out his plan to Butch Sweeney. Dooley was even buying breakfast.
Butch sipped his coffee, set down the cup, and ran his fingers through his hands.
“Well, Dooley,” the young cowboy said, “I appreciate the offer. And I surely wish you luck finding all the silver that ain’t already been plucked out of the ground. But I got me an idea. It ain’t as hard on the hands as a pick and shovel, though it might make my butt sore.”
Dooley let out a long breath. He felt so lucky, and now, not so lucky. Yet he was curious.
“What do you mean?”
Leaning forward, Butch began a conspiratorial whisper. “It’s like this, Dooley. I’m going to get back to that stagecoach that those badmen robbed. I’m gonna buy the mules from the livery man. They’re not his mules anyway, but he found them, laid claim to them, and I already checked. Motz didn’t have no kin. And he was the sole proprietor of the Leadville-Denver Transportation Company. Well, Horatio Whitman was his partner, too, but he’s dead, you know.”
“I know,” Dooley said regretfully.
Butch leaned back and grinned. “I figured it would sure beat riding herd on doggies. Easier on my thighs if not my hindquarters.” He found his doughnut, dunked it, and shoved the rest in his mouth. As he chewed he said, sort of regretfully, as if he knew how Dooley would answer already: “I was sort of hoping that you might come in with me.”
“Riding shotgun?” Dooley asked.
“As my pard,” Butch said.
Dooley frowned.
“And ride shotgun, too,” Butch said. “Though we could switch if you ever got bored. I mean . . .” He started speaking faster, the words running together. “You could drive some. Have you ever driven a team? Oh, knock my head off. Of course you have. I’m not asking you to ride shotgun because of your reputation. I mean, that didn’t stop those badmen . . . Oh. That came out wrong. And it’s not that I’m trying to step on Chester Motz’s grave or nothing. You know. I just thought . . . well . . . I guess . . . you don’t want to do it, do you?”
Dooley stared at the doughnut, which did not look so appetizing anymore. With a sigh, he explained, “It’s not that I don’t want to do it, Butch. It’s just that . . . well . . . for years I’ve wanted to try my hand at mining. I’ve cowboyed. I’ve gambled. I’ve led a dad-blasted wagon train, sort of. I’ve been trying to get to a boomtown for as long as I can remember, and now I have. Now . . .” He made himself smile. “I think you likely have the right idea. That stage line wi
ll make you a profit, or at least a decent living. And I suspect it’s real pretty and a little bit warmer once summer arrives. So I wish you luck. And maybe, when I don’t strike it rich, I’ll look you up for a job.”
“Would you?” Butch perked up.
“You bet.”
They shook hands across the table.
Dooley felt better until Butch said, “I reckon I’ll have to ask George Miller to ride shotgun.”
Dooley had been about to eat that doughnut but now his hand stopped, and he stared, feeling his ears start to burn in anger. “He’ll likely tell me no, too,” Butch was saying, “but he probably could get someone to do it for me.”
He saw Dooley’s face, and his red ears, and mistook the anger as being directed toward him. “Not that I’d make George or somebody he knowed a pard, Dooley. He’d just be on for . . . wa—”
“I wouldn’t do it, Butch.”
Butch Sweeney swallowed. “You know he married Julia, don’t you?”
Dooley nodded.
“Happened up in Alaska. I was looking for some rubber boots to buy in this store in Skagway and . . . well . . . he found a preacher. It struck me in the gut like bad whiskey, but . . . well, I heard tell that Kit Carson married this gal who weren’t no older than fourteen, but that was Kit Carson. And that was in New Mexico. Or someplace like that. And . . . well . . . Julia always had a mind of her own. You know that.”
“I’m not jealous,” Dooley lied.
“Well, of course not, Dooley. I ain’t jea—” Butch couldn’t finish.
Dooley started to talk, stopped to let the waitress refill their coffee cups and collect Butch’s empty plate. She left Dooley’s, though Dooley wasn’t certain he could finish the doughnut now.
He stared at the steaming coffee, which matched, he thought, his steaming head. He leaned forward and said, “Butch, George Miller robbed that mud wagon. George Miller murdered Chester Motz.” And he told the kid everything he could remember. Afterward, he thought of something else.
“I also think that George Miller was the one who clobbered me with a pistol butt from behind in that livery in San Francisco. It was George Miller who give me the amnesia.”
That got Dooley to thinking and steaming some more.
Then Butch asked, “Can you prove any of that?”
Dooley frowned. He made himself drink some coffee just to keep his hands busy. Afterward, he shook his head. “Probably not. My word against his. He wore a mask, flour sack pulled up over his face. Couldn’t see him. And a hole in a man’s arm doesn’t mean nothing.”
Outside, as if to prove a point, a gunshot boomed, and moments later, a man’s voice cried out, “Harley Boone has kilt Cheater Norris!”
A few patrons got up. Some stared out the window, whispering to one another. Others opened the door—ringing the little bell and letting in the cold—and stepped onto the plank boardwalk to get a better look. Most, of course, kept right on eating, as murders and shootings happened quite often in Leadville.
Dooley saw that Butch Sweeney was a mite skeptical, so he said. “The county clerk saw George, Butch, I’m certain of it. He told me that a fellow came in, said he was a newspaper reporter from Cheyenne, and that he asked the same questions that I did. About that claim on Halfmoon Creek. Was George gone recently?”
Butch frowned, but nodded. “Said he wanted to check some things in Silver Plume.”
Ears getting redder with each fact, Dooley squeezed his hands into fists that trembled. “He was in Denver. Waylaid me. Killed Horatio Whitman. He must have seen me win that hand, and the deed. I’m sure he knew about the deed. He’s a low-down, murdering, back-shooting coyote . . . even if he hasn’t shot anyone in the back. He would.” Then he got excited. “Butch,” he said, “the county clerk . . . he could identify George. That would give me the proof.”
He felt good, slightly. The clerk would identify George Miller as the man posing as a newspaper reporter. Which might not be enough to get a man tried legally and then legally hanged in a civilized place, or semicivilized, like Denver or Cheyenne or Georgetown or Omaha, but certainly that and the hole in his arm would be enough proof for the vigilance committee to string George Miller up.
“Dooley.”
He saw that look on Butch’s face.
“Did you hear that fellow outside? Cheater Norris. The one Harley Boone just killed? Cheater Norris—that wasn’t his real name, don’t recall his real name, just what folks called him . . . Cheater Norris is, I mean was the county clerk.”
Dooley swore again. And to think of all the prospects he had just a few days ago.
“Dooley?”
Frowning, the coffee in his stomach rocking the one doughnut he had managed to get down before his breakfast and morning soured, Dooley looked again across the table at his old pal, young Butch Sweeney, whose face, never bronzed like Dooley’s, was turning paler with each falling snowflake outside.
“You ain’t gonna shoot down George Miller?” Butch measured each word. “Are you?”
Not without a call, Dooley thought to say, and started to say, but stopped.
“Because . . . well . . . you just can’t do it, Dooley,” Butch said. “No matter how many men he has murdered or how many claims he has jumped, or how many men he has paid Harley Boone to gun down. You just can’t do it.”
But Dooley was thinking that, well, he would be doing the world a favor, bringing at least a wee bit of justice to this lawless city of silver and wealth and greed and cold. He had killed men in self-defense. It would be better, he wanted to make himself to believe, to kill someone for the betterment of the United States of America and her Western territories.
“Dooley.” Butch Sweeney had summoned his resolve. “I know George Miller’s a mean, contrary, no-good person. But if you kill him, well, just think what it would do to Julia.”
It would make her a widow, Dooley thought angrily. It would make her a hell of a lot better off than she is now.
But the anger, the hatred, left him, almost immediately. Julia Alice Cooperman had done a lot of growing up over those years since San Francisco. So had Butch Sweeney. Hell, now Dooley realized that he needed to grow up, too. He made himself smile, even though he was a million miles from happiness. He made his head bob up and down as though he agreed with Butch’s assessment of the situation.
“You’re right,” he said softly. “You’re right, Butch.”
He made himself look out the window, mostly so that Butch wouldn’t see those tears welling his eyes. The snow kept coming down harder, wet snow, heavy flakes, and people walking by breathed out frosty air like a locomotive’s smokestack as it tried to climb a high grade. Folks in Leadville kept saying this was spring, but it sure still looked like winter to Dooley, and Dooley had spent some time in high country. He knew about cold. He watched two men in duck trousers and winter coats haul the late Cheater Norris down the boardwalk across the street, taking the recently departed county clerk to the Silver, Gold, Lead and Dead Funeral Parlor.
“I wish you luck with that stage line, Butch,” Dooley heard himself say. “You keep yourself safe, old pard. And . . . well . . . you tell Little Miss Loudmouth I said good-bye. I’ll see you after the snowmelt.”
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The wind blew hard, rustling through the trees, dumping snow from the limbs and branches. Yet Dooley found himself comfortable in the little dugout he had managed to dig.
Mining, he learned, was mighty hard work. And this time of year, cold work at that.
Now he understood why most miners gave up during the winter, moved down to lower, more manageable, elevations, where March really did mean spring. But the dugout was deep and big enough for Blue, General Grant, and a toasty little fire. The pack mule, of course, could not fit in completely, but he was a tough old bird, used to the elements, the man at the livery had said, and now he did not seem to mind blocking the wind. Dooley had enough food to last till true spring arrived, and for the most part, he had Halfmoon Creek and
all of the rough country around it to himself.
Using the crude map he had copied from the detailed maps in the office of Cheater Harris, the late county clerk, Dooley had ridden his horse, pulling the loaded-down mule behind him, with Blue trudging along in the snow. They rode southwest out of town until they hit the Arkansas River, then rode along it till it intersected with Lake Fork. They had crossed the freezing, slow-moving river at the crossing there, and rode up Lake Fork, on the left bank, and a short while later came to Halfmoon Creek. They only made it to Derry Ditch that first day. That’s how tough and rough and hard on everything this country happened to be.
The next day proved a mite easier. They made it to the abandoned old cave somewhere between a mountain stream and Ebert Creek, and Dooley figured this place would make a good base camp until he got too far to come back to it. He worked six days a week, ice fishing in the pond on Sundays, or what he thought might have been Sundays, mostly to save up his strength.
He did not shave. He brought no whiskey and certainly not any bottle of champagne.
At the Tabor Book Shop, he spent $2.17 of Buffalo Bill Cody’s grubstake on a book, and he read it on Sundays as the fish fried in his skillet, before the sun sank and it became too dark to read. The sun disappeared really early in these rugged mountains and did not rise in any hurry, either.
SILVER MINING: A Primer
How to make your fortune in the rugged
Western Frontier!
What to look for . . . What to bring . . .
Stories of men JUST LIKE YOU, wanting
to find their FORTUNE—
ALL you need to know!
BY A MAN WHO MADE IT RICH!
Written by J. K. L. O’Brien.
On the fifth day, he explored the mountainous ridges on the far bank of the creek. He caused a small avalanche, and, after digging himself out, he went back to the dugout to warm himself and dry his clothes. That was the night he burned J. K. L. O’Brien’s book.
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