Hang Him Twice

by William W. Johnstone

  He stared.

  She looked at her feet and at Blue.

  He tried to find some papers to move from one pile to another.

  Refusing to look at Dooley, Julia asked, “How old is Blue now?”

  “I don’t know.” Dooley moved the pile of papers back to where the pile had been when Julia first entered his office. “Ummm . . . I don’t know how old he was when I first met him.”

  “There are gray hairs on his coat now,” she observed.

  Dooley ran his fingers through his hair. “I’ve got more than he has nowadays.”

  She laughed, not really a hard laugh, more like a sigh. A real sigh followed, and she looked up, sipped water, set the glass on the floor, and finally just looked deeply into Dooley’s eyes.

  “Oh, Dooley,” she said.

  He had no response.

  She filled her lungs with air, exhaled, and at last raised her head to look Dooley eye to eye.

  When she did not say anything, Dooley tried, “How did you get here?”

  “I rented a horse at one of the liveries.”

  “A horse?”

  “Sidesaddle,” she said.

  “Sidesaddle?”

  Her head tilted. “I mean . . .” It was Dooley’s turn to draw in a deep breath, hold it, let it out, and try to sound like he still retained all of his faculties. “We’re working on grading a road, clearing some of the forests and rocks, basically following the creek . . . but . . . well, it’s rough country for anybody.”

  “No rougher than Arizona Territory,” she said.

  He made himself smile, to take her mind off whatever was troubling her. But he had good inclination of what her problems were, what had brought her all the way from the Hotel Tabor to Dooley’s mine. He thought he might break every bone in George Miller’s body for giving sweet, innocent Julia a black eye that she had to hide with rouge like some two-bit . . . He stopped the mean thoughts, and remembered that he was trying to cheer her up. “But sidesaddle?”

  He grinned, and felt his heart skip when she grinned back and sipped more of the water he had poured.

  “Have you seen Butch?” Dooley asked. “I haven’t seen him in a spell.”

  She shrugged. “Not much. I think he’s in Denver now, or on his way, maybe on his way back. He stays busy with the stage line.”

  “And you?”

  She shrugged. “Oh, you know. I . . .” The gentleness left her eyes. “I stay in the hotel room and stare at the paintings, the china, the silver. And when needed, I accompany George to balls and to the theater and the opera house, and a dinner or a supper and sometimes even a breakfast with some of the silver barons in Leadville.”

  “Well,” Dooley said, “I reckon I’m a silver baron.” He found his sack in the bottom left-hand drawer and brought it out, cringing at the wet spot of grease on the bottom. “You can dine with me.” He frowned. “It’s only a roast beef sandwich and some taters, fried in bacon grease.” He stared at the sack, saw Julia shaking her head, and dropped it back into the drawer, which he slammed shut.

  “I reckon you eat a mite better than that.”

  That pained her, and made Dooley curse himself.

  “Dooley,” she said. “That’s not it. I came here . . .” She caught her breath. “I came here because . . .”

  He wanted to leap out of his chair and over the desk and sweep her into his arms and kiss the tears off her damaged cheek and swear to her that she would be all right, that he would protect her.

  What stopped him was when she said, “Dooley, you just have to sell this mine.”

  He felt as if he had been kneed in the groin. She must have seen the color drain from his face, and he felt he had trouble even stopping the tears from welling in his own eyes. He hated the first thoughts that raced through his mind.

  So that’s how George Miller is playing this game. He and his filthy-rich pals in the silver-mining business can’t buy my mine, so he sends Julia to do his bidding.

  “Dooley,” Julia cried. “They’ll kill you if you don’t sell this to them.”

  “Oh.”

  Now he despised himself for thinking that even a scoundrel like George Miller could persuade his wife, a beautiful, honest lass like Julia, to do his evil bidding.

  He tried to ease her fears. “Julia. They can’t kill me. That’s why Harley Boone and I didn’t shoot it out those weeks, or maybe months, ago. They know that if they kill me, the United States marshal and the Denver Telegram and my lawyer will be visiting them and making them pay. I’ve got what amounts to the best life insurance out there.” He wanted her to know how smart he was. “I figured that out myself. And that made Harley Boone back down. And that’s why I’m still here and doing what I always wanted to be doing.”

  That wasn’t entirely true. What Dooley had dreamed of doing was panning for gold, not paying other men to blow up the insides of caves and haul out silver to be taken to the smelter and turned into greenback dollars and double eagle gold pieces to pay off miners and clerks and wagon masters and road builders and carpenters and guards armed with shotguns. When he had taken off for Alaska, and when he had lit out for Deadwood in the Dakota Territory, he had envisioned himself as a grubby old miner, not that far removed from being a bone-weary dirty-outfitted, thirty-a-month-and-found cowhand. Instead, he wore silk shirts and Prince Alberts most of the time and sat behind a desk being bored out of his mind listening to what his clerk and his assistant and his foreman and his accountant and everyone else told him what to do.

  It wasn’t a hell of a lot of fun being rich. Or being the boss man.

  “Dooley,” Julia pleaded.

  He waved his hand. “I’m safe, Julia.” He wanted to add that he could take her with him when he did decide to sell—once he thought he had had enough of mining and once silver prices reached what the accountant and the foreman and his conscience told him was likely to be as good as things would ever get. Or maybe right now. If she’d just ask him to help save her from a scoundrel like George Miller and from a lousy, doomed-from-the-start marriage.

  “Dooley.” Her voice lost its gentleness, its entreating. Julia’s eyes turned as hard as they used to be back in Arizona . . . and San Francisco . . . back when she had been a corncob-rough hellion in her teens and not the genteel wife of a county clerk who aimed to control all of Leadville for himself.

  “You need to grow up.”

  Now she sounded just like Little Miss Loudmouth.

  “Quit being a damned fool.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Now she sounded more like Butch Sweeney, or the old Dooley Monahan when he was trying to keep him and Butch and Julia alive.

  “Do you know who you’re up against? This isn’t some twenty-dollar gunman like Jackson Taylor or whatever his name was, or his brothers, or anyone else you’ve gunned down on the streets in defense of your person and just happened to collect a nice bounty for staying alive.”

  Blue whined.

  Dooley felt like joining him.

  “These are silver barons. This is George Miller, who isn’t just some corrupt clerk who does the biddings of rich, filthy, evil men. Harley Boone is an ant compared to the men out to crush you, Dooley.”

  “But I’ve got the U.S. marshal—”

  “Damn it, Dooley, listen to me. I’m not the stupid kid you always thought I was. Thought Butch was. A United States marshal can be bought. Do you understand what I’m saying? Any reporter in Denver can be bribed. So can your pettifogging lawyer. You’ve got to get the hell out of Leadville, Dooley, or they’re going to bury you here. And that would kill me. And it would get Butch Sweeney killed, too.”

  * * *

  “I’m sorry,” Julia said after she finally dammed the tears.

  “It’s all right.” At least, he thought he said something, and that was what he had meant to say. It’s all right. He shook his head. What a stupid thing to say. He stared at the bruise on Julia’s cute little face and felt the blood rushing to his head one more tim
e. He wanted to march out of his office, saddle up General Grant, and gallop down the road they were trying to finish grading all the way into Leadville and trash George Miller, just kick him up and down the street and finally out of town.

  “You’ll do what you always do, Dooley,” Julia said, and she pushed herself out of the chair. She meant that Dooley would dismiss her notions and do what he had planned on doing.

  Dooley told her: “What I do, is stay alive.”

  She stared at him, and Dooley grinned. “I’ve gotten to be pretty good at it.”

  He waited. He knew it was coming. It had to come. If it didn’t, his heart would break right then and there, and he’d be worthless. Harley Boone would have no trouble gunning him down.

  There it came. Dooley’s heart leaped and he felt ten years younger.

  Julia smiled at him. She shook her head, but could not shake off that look.

  “You are incorrigible, Dooley Monahan,” she told him. The smile left, and she whispered, “You will take care of yourself, won’t you?”

  “I will,” he affirmed. “Now that you’ve warned me, I’ll know what to look out for. Do you need an escort back to Leadville?”

  Her head shook.

  “You sure? That’s barely even a road right now.”

  “No. I still know how to ride. I still know how to look after myself. And . . .”—her head shook sadly as she frowned and sighed—“. . . well . . . it just wouldn’t be proper for me to be seen with you, Dooley.” Her head lifted, but he saw no tears.

  “Do you understand?” she asked.

  “Of course,” he said. He opened the door, and Julia knelt to pat Blue and whisper a string of pet names at the shepherd, then she held out her right hand. Dooley shook it, then thought: Was I supposed to kiss it? Would that have been proper had Jarvis saw me do that?

  It was too late. Julia was out of his office and made a beeline for the door. When that door closed, Dooley looked at Jarvis, who busied himself shuffling papers from one side of the desk to the other. Dooley closed the door to his office and moved to the filing cabinet behind the desk. He pulled it open and withdrew the Colt .45 and shell belt, which he usually deposited there every morning when he got to work. This time, he buckled it on, opened the chamber gate, and rotated the cylinder to check the loads. Briefly, he thought about filling the empty chamber—the one underneath the hammer, kept empty as a safety measure—but decided that would be silly. He did not holster the Colt, though, but left it on the top of his desk in plain view.

  Then he sat down and tried to focus on some of the papers the clerk said he needed to look at, but Dooley could not make heads or tails out of those things. So he leaned back, stared at the wall, then at Blue, and kept thinking about those days in Arizona and even California.

  At some point, Jarvis tapped lightly on the door, opened it, and came in with more papers for Dooley to sign. His face paled at the sight of the Colt, but he swallowed down that fear and told Dooley what he was signing and why and a few other things Dooley did not understand. Dooley answered with a nod, and the clerk left the office. Dooley read the papers, read them carefully, before he signed them.

  When the six o’clock whistle blew, Jarvis again opened the door. This time he brought in a tin box and not more papers with figures and legalese and stuff only an attorney-at-law could figure out. The clerk set the box in front of Dooley and stepped back. Sighing, Dooley opened the lid and stared at more gold coins than he had ever seen, not to mention greenbacks stacked to the lip of the box.

  “What’s this for?” Dooley asked.

  “Payday is tomorrow, sir,” the little runt said.

  “Oh.” Dooley nodded as if he understood. “Well, see that the boys get paid.”

  Jarvis cleared his throat. “Sir, I have already put the payroll into the safe for tomorrow. This is yours, sir.”

  Dooley blinked. He found it hard to comprehend, especially when Jarvis kept talking.

  “Naturally, there is much more money from the silver we have mined over the past month, sir, but that went into the mine’s account, a reinvestment, so to speak, sir. You understand, I am sure.”

  “Well . . .”

  “If I were you, sir, I would take that money to the bank and deposit it quickly. Rogues have been known to . . . well . . . you know.”

  Dooley thanked the clerk and watched him leave, shutting the door behind him. Then Dooley kept staring at the tin box. At length, he counted out thirty dollars in scrip and shoved those bills into his trousers pocket. He also took a twenty-dollar gold piece and slipped it in, as well.

  He waited until he heard Jarvis leave, heard the commotion as most of the miners left, waited until darkness came and the only ones left at the mine were Dooley and the two guards with the shotguns. That’s when Dooley opened the door and went to the toolshed, fetched a shovel, and paced off twenty yards behind the shed and started to dig.

  Banks? Dooley already had what he considered a sizable sum in that bank in town. He saw no need to risk any more, because Dooley remembered a time—not that long ago—when the Dobbs-Handley Gang had robbed the bank in Omaha, Nebraska, and then at another bank in some other town in that state. He remembered hearing about the James-Younger boys robbing that bank in his own home state of Iowa, over in Corydon, and he had read about that bank robbery back in ’66 down in Liberty, Missouri—and how that place went out of business a short while after the robbery.

  Banks got robbed. People lost their life savings because banks got robbed. Dooley remembered his father, that hardworking farmer who never trusted any bank and always put what little hard money he ever owned in ajar and stuck it back by the pigpens because nobody was going to go digging around near a pigpen if he didn’t have to.

  There were some pigpens in Leadville, but Dooley figured somebody would see him digging there, as busy as that town was. So he dug here. Then he leaned the shovel against a tree and walked back to his office.

  He closed the lid and lifted the box, strained, and let the box slide safely back onto the desktop. That timid little Jarvis, a runt of the litter if Dooley had ever saw one, had managed to get that box from his desk to Dooley’s, and here was Dooley straining like a weakling.

  Blue yipped, ready to go home. Dooley frowned. “I’m getting soft sitting behind a desk, Blue,” he said, “lifting nothing but a pencil or pen all day.” An idea struck him, and made him feel good. He went outside and counted the number of miners on the payroll, came back into the office and counted out that number of five-dollar coins. He thought about the guards and Jarvis, and counted out three more. And the foreman. There was another. These, he slid into the big drawer of his desk, and thought the boys would be right pleased at getting a bonus from their boss after work tomorrow.

  After sneaking back to the hole, he deposited the tin box. Of course, Jarvis would probably want the tin box back, so he returned to the office, found a couple of sacks, and then hurried back to the hole, careful to make sure he didn’t arouse the suspicion of the shotgun-wielding guards. That appeared unlikely as the guards stayed in the mine, keeping any silver thieves out. Which reminded Dooley that maybe he ought to talk to the foreman and Jarvis about having another guard, one to patrol the perimeter of the mine. The safe, for one thing, was in the office. Equipment like shovels and picks did not come cheap at Leadville prices.

  Dooley loaded the paper currency into one sack and the coins into another. He started shoveling and pondered on another thought.

  But if I hired a guard and he walked around outside, would he see that a hole had been dug here? Mightn’t he do some investigating, perhaps digging? And wouldn’t two sacks filled with a fortune be more tempting than whatever we paid him, even at Leadville prices?

  Dooley kept shoveling, cursing himself. Oh, boy, how he wished he were just that thirty-a-month cowboy again, with no worries except the caring of the boss man’s cattle and horses.

  * * *

  He arrived to town late—not that Leadville was asle
ep—found a café he had never been to, and took his supper there. Dooley told himself he was just seeing if this Chinese joint was worth taking any friends to, but he failed to convince himself of the lie. What Julia had told him stuck with him, and he figured he shouldn’t make his moves a pattern.

  He did not board General Grant at the livery, but tied him up in the alley that ran behind the hotel. He even took the rear staircase to his room, and drew his Colt before unlocking the door.

  “You’re being paranoid,” he told himself.

  “You’re being safe,” he argued.

  He slept that night with a chair hooked under the doorknob, woke before sunbreak, and left Blue in the room.

  It was too early to pay a visit to his lawyer or the bank, so he rode out of town and back to the mine.

  The boys sure were happy at the bonus they got, and that made Dooley feel better. He mentioned the idea about an extra guard, and the foreman and Jarvis said they would put together some figures and see what it would cost and if it was worth it, the two old skinflints. Again, he worked late, not that he was actually working, and waited till everyone had left after the last shift. He checked on the hole he had dug, saw nothing to make him fear his hiding place had been discovered, and went back to his office. He slept there that night, thinking that he had left Blue enough water and some food and several copies of the Leadville Ledger on the floor so the shepherd could do his business.

  On Sunday, he went fishing, but took Blue with him. Of course, the water was running too fast to catch any trout, but he felt relaxed, soothed by the rushing water, being out in the woods alone. Of course, his mother had always warned his father about fishing on the Sabbath. It went against her religion. Bad things happened to those who fished on Sunday. But nothing bad happened to Dooley that Sunday. God waited till Monday to punish him.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  The office of Jonah Terrance Cohen, attorney-at-law, was upstairs of one of Leadville’s banks in which Dooley had no deposits. After taking breakfast in the restaurant next to the hotel, Dooley walked down the street, turned the corner, and climbed the rickety staircase that led to the upstairs offices. Jonah Terrance Cohen, J. T. to his pals, had the corner office on the left side of the hallway.