The Revenge of John W: Desert Intrigue, Daring Prison Escape: Thrilling Action (Unlimited exclusive, Joe Corso Book 1)

by Joe Corso

  Two days passed before he noticed the point of a knife protruding from a portion of the grout between the stones. The prisoner on the other side of the stone pushed with his feet while John pulled the part of the stone he could grab with his fingers. Suddenly, the effort of one man pulling and the other pushing caused the stone to break free of the wall, landing unceremoniously between John’s legs. If the stone had landed a little further above his knees instead of between them, he would never become a father if the opportunity ever presented itself.

  A man’s head popped out of the empty space. “Here take this from me.” John took the small oil lamp and put it on the one chair in the room, welcoming the light it gave off. “Now give me a hand, lad.” John grabbed the old man’s hands and pulled him free from the space behind the wall. The man wiped his brow, then dusted himself off. “Hi, I’m Dutch Henry,” he said with a warm smile on his face. “What’s a nice boy like you doing in a rotten place like this?” That was his way of greeting John W. He said it with a smile and John marveled at the fact that even in a place like this, the man could still have a sense of humor. The old man immediately lifted John W’s spirits. “John Wesley Hardin at your service, but my friends call me John W. It’s a genuine pleasure to meet you, Mr. Henry.”

  “Same here, John W. But call me Dutch or Dutch Henry. Either name will do. Couldn’t be that the famous gunfighter was a kin of yours, could it?”

  “That’s what my daddy told us. He said he was a distant cousin of Barnett Hardin on my father’s side. Barnett was brother to Judge Will Hardin. My daddy told us that if you looked at the Texas Constitution you’d see another uncle, Augustine Hardin’s name signed on it. At least that’s what my daddy told Ma and me. But if you don’t mind me asking, why were you digging your way into this cell?”

  “Well, that’s a long story, young fella, but seein’ as we have nothing but time, I’ll sit on your cot if you don’t mind and catch my breath and rest a little while and I’ll tell you about it.

  “There’s this fella who’s now the Governor of this great state and me and him done some business back a few years when I needed a grub stake.” John grew up in the desert and he met a few prospectors so he knew what a grub stake was. The old man continued with his story. “This man owned a large hardware store and I traded him some gold nuggets for equipment I needed, like a pick and shovel, a new canteen, and all the other items an old fool like me needed to hunt for gold up in those mountains. As the years passed, this man grew his business to where he had a lot of these hardware stores all over the state. He became so popular that he ran for Governor and won by telling a bunch of lies over the television. Well, that man tracked me down and he wanted me to tell him where I found my gold. To tell you the truth, son, I found a ton of gold. I set my mind when I was a young man to find the lost Four Peaks Gold Mine and I spent a good part of my life searching for it. The area I concentrated my search on comprised the southern portion of the Mazatzal Mountains. It was a big job trying to find what no one else ever dreamed of finding. The Four Peaks which are nearly 8000 feet high have always been an important landmark in this part of Arizona and as a kid, I always dreamt that I would be the one to find the legendary mine. So where does one start when he wants to find a lost gold mine?” He had John’s absolute attention now and the young man was hanging on every word the old man said.

  “Where does one start, Dutch Henry?”

  The old man laughed, showing some brown stained teeth along with a few missing ones. “Got your attention - don’t I? Well, you can’t see the old fort because the intervening peaks hide it. Old Fort Reno lies about 14 miles north of the Four Peaks area. Forgive an old man’s rambling, son, but I am getting to my point. Old Fort Reno was constructed on the eastern flanks of the Mazatzal Mountains, overlooking Tonto Creek to the east. The Mazatzal peak known as Mount Ord rises only four miles to the northwest of the old fort. Beyond Mount Ord, the mountains swing around to the northwest.

  “During the 1800's, the Mazatzal Mountains were in the middle of Apache country. The Tonto Apaches wandered these mountains in search of game, but they had something else, something everyone wanted. Rumors circulated for years of a hidden Apache gold mine in or near the Mazatzals. Tonto Apaches, the local Indians, always seemed to have plenty of gold nuggets for trading. It was said that during the 1850's, the friendly Tontos took the famous Dr. Abraham Thorne to an Apache gold mine. Although he was blindfolded, Thorne insisted till the end of his days that the mine was in the Salt River country. I even read where in 1853, Francis X. Aubry saw local Apaches making bullets out of gold! So, I set my sights and began digging in the Mazatzal mountain area. I spent forty years searching for that lost gold mine.Through the years, I picked up traces, bits and pieces, nuggets of gold brought down the mountains by the rains but I never found the mine itself, until 11 years ago. After decades of searching I hit the jackpot. I found the lost mine, and that greedy bastard Governor Wilson wants what I've spent a lifetime searching for. I broke my ass digging the gold out of that mine, then, just when I started enjoying the fruits of my labor, Governor Wilson arrested me on some trumped up charges and threw me in this hellhole six years ago. I near starved, was almost killed a few times, nearly froze to death and this baby-assed Governor thinks he can steal my gold.

  I’d rather die first than see him get it.” John W. Hardin let out the breath he hadn’t realized he was holding.

  “Whew. That’s some story. Man, what you must have gone through. Yet you endured and in the end, you did find the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.”

  “You got that right, John W. I surely did find that pot of gold.”

  “But that doesn’t explain why you were digging a tunnel to the 11A cell.”

  “That’s not 11A, son. It’s Roman numerals meaning ‘2A.’ You can’t see it but the cell across from this one is 1A. Look. When Holland Wilson, our illustrious Governor, threatened me with prison, he took me out here and showed me where he said I’d be spending the rest of my life if I didn’t tell him the whereabouts of the mine he was certain I found. That was his first mistake. I may be old but I didn’t get to live this long by being stupid. I told him to give me a month to think about it. As soon as he left, I went to the library and paid a young man with computer knowledge fifty dollars for an hour of his time. I wanted him to do an Internet search for me. You see, I knew inmates from the Yuma Territorial Prison built this prison. I needed to track down relatives of the men who built this place and see if they left a record or diary of their time here. The young man I gave the fifty bucks to did a hellova job. He found out that the Yuma prisoner who was in charge of building this prison was one Willard Smith doing twenty years to life.

  “The boy discovered that Smith had a granddaughter, name of Priscilla Bluestone, and she was living in Amarillo, Texas. I tracked her down and told her that I was writing a book on the Yuma Territorial Prison and I wanted to speak to her about her grandfather. She agreed to see me. When I met her, I told her that I did some research and found that her grandfather was in charge of building the Gila prison. I asked her ifhe left a record of the work he performed on that site. She told me that she had two large boxes of her grandfather’s papers and books in the attic and she agreed to let me look through them, but she didn’t want the boxes brought downstairs because it would mess up her tidy house. She said if I wanted to look at her grandfather’s information, I’d have to climb up into the attic, put the light on, and look through the boxes up there. When I got the first box opened and I rummaged through his papers, I found a lot of interesting information on Yuma but very little on the Gila prison except a small paperback book on the history of the place. After emptying the first box and looking through his papers, I came up empty, so I put everything back and started on the second box. I didn’t hold much hope of finding anything. But I was wrong, because when I opened the second box, I found his diary right on top. I scanned through the diary, hoping to find something that would help me and I was ri
ght. This diary was the ticket. I looked through the rest of his papers and books but found nothing more that would help me, so I closed the box and took the diary downstairs. I was sweating like I was in a sauna as I showed it to Smith’s granddaughter.

  “I said to her, ‘I hope you don’t mind me bringing this diary down here, I found it in one of the boxes. It was kind of hot sitting on my haunches trying to read it upstairs in the dim light and the heat so I brought it downstairs where it’s cooler.’

  “‘No of course not. Here sit at the table. You look very hot. I’ll bring you a cool glass of iced tea to refresh you a bit.’ I opened the diary and started reading from the first page and I made notes as I read through it. Her grandfather wrote important details of each step of construction and the renovations he made while toiling in the hot sun in the Gila desert. When I finished reading the diary, I had what I was looking for. Priscilla said that he kept it because he was a very thorough man and besides he didn’t want to forget any of the details in case he became forgetful. I knew that she listened to what he said but she never read the diary. He didn’t keep this record for fear of becoming forgetful. This was his insurance policy in case he was ever transferred there. If she had read the diary, she would have known that. She told me that her grandfather was a civil engineer before he killed his partner in a heated dispute over money and because of it, he was sent to Yuma prison. The warden approached Smith one day and told him he’d be getting out of Yuma for a while. He was making him the foreman and putting him in charge of prisoners he picked to build the Gila Prison and Smith jumped at the chance.

  “Now here’s how he pulled it off. Put yourself in the guard’s place. Imagine their mindset. Here they are in the middle of the desert where the temperature rarely gets below 120 degrees, working in the sun without shade. What man in his right mind wants to stand outside in the sun when he could be in a tent sipping a cool beer? It was just them. There weren’t any supervisors around and they weren’t worried about prisoners escaping because where would they go? There was no place for them to escape to - so there was no need to watch them while they worked. The guards spent the day in the shade of a tent and they came out at noon to inspect the work the prisoners did that day. Then at noon, the prisoners would return to their tents and play cards or read a book until the following day. Then the routine would start all over again. Remember now, the cells they were constructing were designed to hold the one or two prisoners that did something really bad. One or two cells would have done the trick but Willard Smith suggested putting eight cells with an eight-foot area filled with stones and dirt separating one cell from another. He laid the blueprints on the kitchen table and explained to the guards how this design was better than the original plan and it served two purposes. The first was it was a simple way to stop prisoners from talking or passing things to one another and the second was with the eight cells spread out along the length of the floor it fit the aesthetic design of the prison. The guards liked Smith’s suggestion, so they approached the Captain for his approval and received it. Even the eight-foot spaces between cells were agreed to. Smith was told to build it just the way he described to it them but they added a condition he wasn’t happy with. ‘Make sure the space between the cells is filled with eight feet of solid rock with dirt added as a fill instead of just filling it with dirt.’ But that wouldn’t work for Smith. What the guards didn’t know was Smith intended to build a back door out of the prison in case he was ever incarcerated there. ‘Look,’ Smith said to the guard. ‘I can fill the space between cells with dirt and add sand instead of stone, but I don’t have enough time to haul those rocks down from the mountains. The work detail doing that work would be the same as a chain gang chipping away at a mountain. Let me use sand with the dirt as a filler instead of rock. The sand will work just as well and more importantly; it will cut six months off the time needed to build this prison. But you fellas have to make that decision so I’ll leave it to you. But think about it for a minute and tell me if what I’m suggesting doesn’t make sense to you. If you think it doesn’t, and if you still want stone, then it’s no problem to get a gang together and march them out into the desert and cut it out of the mountain. But if we do that, then figure on adding another six months to complete the job.’” That got the guards attention.

  “The guard liked the idea of cutting the time down by six months and said he’d talk it over with the Captain. He told him he’d get back to him in a little while, and then he left to have a talk with the Captain. Smith watched him walk away and he chuckled to himself. Moron. I could walk to the base of the mountain and pick up all the rocks I want without chipping away at any mountain. He knew the Captain would approve sand instead of rock, because everyone knew that all the man dreamed about was to get the hell away from this god forsaken prison. It wasn’t long before he heard the tap, tap, tap of the guard’s steps as he walked back down the stairs. ‘Forget about using stone, go ahead and build it with dirt and sand.’ He said, ‘The Captain said we don’t need rocks, they won’t serve any purpose down here.’ Smith had the Captain’s approval, as he knew he would.”

  “Are you telling me you found a way out of this place?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. Now, with your help we can do it in half the time. Might take us another year or two and if we’re not released by then, and I don’t expect we will. We can break out of here ourselves.”

  “Wait a minute,” John W said. “We can’t ever get out of here because we don’t have a means to cross the desert, besides, the moment we’re gone they’ll know we’re missing.”

  “That’s not exactly true, John W. You see, Smith was ahead of you. He foresaw the problems you just mentioned and he found a way to work around them. Just behind that wall is a room, which isn’t filled with dirt. Remember all the prisoners and the guards all slept in canvas tents.”

  “Yeah. But so what?”

  “Smith was smart. He knew good canvas wouldn’t rot in the short term and maybe not for the next two hundred years. He made sure the canvass he requisitioned was heavy-duty, long-lasting canvas. He justified it with the guards by telling them that if they had one of those torrential seasonal downpours while they were in their tents made of a thin canvas and that canvass was all that stood between them and the rain, they’d be soaked in no time at all. And remember this, when Carter found King Tut’s mummy, the linen Tut was wrapped in was still serviceable. Heavy canvas will work for us just like Tut’s linen. No, the canvas Smith chose for his tents will work just fine for us.”

  “Wait a minute. What do we need canvas for? I don’t understand any of this. Please, Dutch Henry, get to the point and explain all of this to me.”

  The old man was getting a kick bantering with John W. Hardin. “It’s simple, John. We need the canvas to inflate our hot air balloon because the air needs something to inflate. Don’t you understand, the air balloon is made out of the canvas Smith bought for his tents? When he ordered the canvas, he ordered a lot more than he needed. You see old Willard Smith, Civil Engineer prisoner in charge of building this prison, had to figure a way of escaping if he was ever put in one of these cells here. The only thing he could think of to escape was a hot air balloon. In that room, behind the wall that you’re leaning on.” He pointed his finger at it. “There’s a hot air balloon made by the prisoners out of canvas, and it’s waiting to take us out of here.”

  “How would we inflate it, Dutch Henry?”

  “Smith left the means to inflate it in that room. Once we dig our way into that room, we’ll assemble the balloon and then we’ll wait until we have the opportunity to inflate it without alerting the guards.”

  “But won’t they miss us when they check on us in the morning?”

  “Smith planned for that as well. You see, John. In that room, besides the hot air balloon, there’s also dynamite. It’s rigged and ready to blow, and it has a slow burning fuse. About twenty minutes after we’re in the air, this place will go up like it w
as bombed. When they check in the morning, they’ll find a few of our things but nothing more. They’ll assume that we were killed in the explosion.”

  John W thought about that for a moment. “But what would they attribute the explosion to?”

  The old man just smiled. “Did you know that old dynamite has some very peculiar characteristics and is very tetchy? Smith left the dynamite in the hidden room under the foundation. They’ll figure it began to sweat through the years, causing it to release nitroglycerin, causing the dynamite to become unstable. Finally, after all these years of laying here in the heat, it just blew up. There is no other explanation that will make sense to anyone. The explosion will give the state the reason it finally needs to close Gila Prison. Or at the very least make it a ghost town like Yuma Prison.”

  John nodded. “Yeah, I guess that would explain it. This could work, Dutch Henry.”

  “Son, it has to work. Listen, when we get out of here, I’m going to set you up for life. I’m an old man now and I’m reaching the end of my rope. I have no relatives to leave my fortune to, so I’ve decided I’m going to leave everything to you.” The old man paused a moment and reached up and took hold of John W’s shoulders, deciding whether to continue. “Now, if for some reason I don’t make it out of here, I want you to promise me that you’ll get even with that lying scoundrel of a Governor for me.”