He no longer had to hide from the subjects of his investigation and could go to the dining car. The moment he had dreaded from the beginning, running into Betsy had happened, and while it was unpleasant at first, everything had come out right enough in the end. She had apparently forgiven him for following them to Colorado and absolved him of the crime of stealing her story.
The worst was yet to come, however. The story of Ross's dealings with Frankie Galbotto still had to be written, and Max was certain Betsy was no closer to believing that her brother could have a connection to that creep than she had been in New York.
Even though he hadn't seen the two thugs from the depot since leaving Manhattan, Max couldn't forget Gus Kritsky's words. Frankie Galbotto would get his pound of flesh from the Sheridans somehow, and Max just hoped it wouldn't be at Betsy's expense.
Entering the dining car was like entering a whole new world. Max had seen his share of fancy ballrooms and well-appointed drawing rooms, but this experience was in a class by itself. Shimmering chandeliers hung every few feet along the mahogany paneled ceiling. Gas jets reflected off stark white linens. Sterling flatware gleamed on the tables, and crystal water goblets sparkled in the flames of votive candle centerpieces.
Conversations at every table were kept to a discreet hum. Knives and forks clinked delicately against fine china plates, and attentive waiters with starched napkins over their arms were summoned with a wave of a jeweled finger. Ah, the world of the Sheridans, Max thought
The ladies were elegantly attired, and the men wore lightweight summer jackets tailored to a tee...all but one that is. Dooley Blue was like a buzzard among peacocks. While he fit the dress code by definition, having somewhere procured a jacket, under the outward trappings he was still Dooley from the back alleys of Manhattan. Grime from years of neglect, fell into the age cracks of his face. His untrimmed beard held an assortment of food from the morning meal. All in all, as he sat at the elegant table, Dooley seemed like a poor man's Christmas tree put to shame by his neighbors’ dazzle.
Max strode up to the table of the Fair Day three. Ross was the image of the pampered young squire. Betsy, clad in her green and gold traveling suit, was as fresh as a new morning despite her midnight escapade. All three looked at Max, but Dooley’s eyes sparked with recognition.
"Hello, Mr. Blue," Max said.
“I know you,” the old man said.
Max glanced at Betsy, and she gave him a weak smile. “Mr. Blue,” she said. “You remember Max?”
Dooley scratched his chin. "Now I recall. I showed you the rock."
"You what?" Ross exclaimed.
"He's girlie's brother ain't he?"
Ross's eyes widened with annoyance. "No, he isn't. I am, you id..."
"Ross, it's all right." Betsy reached across the table and patted his arm. "Dooley and I know this man. I can explain." The seat next to her was vacant and she motioned for Max to join them.
"That's right, young fella, sit," Dooley agreed. "We're almost there, to Denver. We'll be scaling that mountain soon enough. “
Max sat down and leaned close to Betsy. "I see why you trust this man’s judgment. He's sane as a judge. He's pegged me as your brother."
"That’s not fair, Max. Dooley gets a little confused by the details, that's all, but when it comes to the story of the Faraday brothers and the mine, he's perfectly rational. You'll see."
Ross stretched across the table demanding his sister's attention. "Criminy, Lizzie, who is this guy? And why do you and Blue seem to know him and I don’t?"
"Oh, sorry, Ross. This is Max Cassidy. He's a reporter for the True Detective Gazette."
Max extended his hand and Ross grasped it absently.
"What's he doing here?"
"It's a long story," Betsy said. "I met Max shortly before we left, and I took him to meet Dooley thinking he might be interested in the mine. As it turned out, he wasn't, but then his paper sent him here to write about it, and...oh, dear, this does get confusing."
"What have you done, Lizzie?" Ross asked in a panic. "How many other people have you told? There won't be enough money to divide between you and all your so-called friends!"
Max put his palms up in a gesture of surrender. "Cool off, Sheridan. You've got no threat from me. I'm just here for the journalistic pleasure of it."
"That's for sure, young fella,” Dooley said. “Pure pleasure, that's what it'll be. 'Specially when we start picking what’s left of that ore." He looked right into Max's eyes. "You're going be a rich man, my boy."
"He is not!" Ross said.
"No, I’m not," Max said.
"Quiet, all of you," Elizabeth warned. "The waiter's coming."
A young employee hovered with an order pad in hand. "Have you decided yet, sir?" he asked Max.
Max opened his menu and gulped at the prices. Maybe he should be grateful he'd been forced to eat his meals on the loading docks. Gus hadn’t given him enough to blow his pittance on steak and eggs. "Coffee," he said. "And a bowl of oatmeal. I'm not all that hungry."
Max was just finishing his coffee when Dooley announced he was going out for a smoke, and Betsy said she was going to finish packing. "Are you coming, Ross?" she asked.
"I'm going to stay and have a word with Cassidy here."
She hesitated, a worried look on her face.
"You can go," Max said. "We'll behave ourselves."
"You'd better. Ross?"
"Yeah, go." He waved her away.
When they were alone, Max turned sideways in his chair and waited for Ross to say something.
"Let's be honest with each other, Cassidy," Ross began with swaggering confidence. "This mine is really important to me. I've put a lot of effort into it."
"I'm sure you have."
"I found Dooley. I set the whole thing up. I'm financing it. And I'm going to see it through to the end. I don't want anything to ruin my chance for success. You understand? I've got too much riding on the Fair Day Mine."
"I don't doubt that," Max agreed.
"So I'm warning you...you'd better be on the level about not wanting the silver."
"I'm on the level all right," he said. "And it's a good thing, too. One of us has to be."
"What's that supposed to mean?"
With his forefinger, Max jabbed Ross' silk tie where it rested against his sternum. "I know how you're financing this venture, Ross, and now I'm warning you. I don't give a damn about your success. But nothing better happen to your sister or the old guy. For some reason, they believe in you, and they're counting on you. For my money, that's a little like living on the edge of an active volcano and counting on the fact that it won't blow."
Max stood up and set his napkin on his plate. But his gaze never wavered from Ross's face. "I'm going to be watching you, big brother. All the way to the Fair Day Mine."
He walked away from the table without looking back and exited the dining car. He would have kept going but stopped in his tracks when he glanced into the passageway connecting the next car. Two men stood in the shadows. Max recognized them immediately. They still wore their expensive Italian suits. And they outsized every other passenger in the area by pounds, inches and muscle.
One of the men glanced in Max's direction. Their eyes locked for just an instant before he stepped further back into the shadow, coaxing his companion with him. If they're on the Rio Grande train, they definitely bear watching, Max decided. He didn’t believe in coincidence.
Chapter Nine
The two big apes from Manhattan weren't on the Denver and Rio Grande train. Max searched every car and concluded that either the men would arrive in Central City by other means, or they were headed to other destinations. He would keep his guard up just in case however. He knew they'd all had a good look at each other that morning, and if the big men were indeed following the Sheridan party, they would be careful to stay hidden from now on.
Searching the train had been easy. Each of the three coach cars was only half full. All but the most dog
ged prospectors had loaded up their gear and headed to richer fields leaving hastily constructed buildings to rot in the sun as ghost towns around Central City.
The scarcity of passengers was even more conclusive proof to Max that Dooley's fortune did not exist, but it didn't seem to be a concern to any member of the Fair Day party. Ross spent the short journey reading his notes. Dooley slept with his head against the window frame.
Betsy was an image of bundled energy, crossing every few minutes from one side of the car to the other. Max couldn't understand what held her attention so intently since there were no towns in sight, and the only vegetation was low scrub bushes and struggling prairie grass. A few scrawny aspen trees, turning gold in the cool October air, poked their slender trunks out of rocky outcroppings in the barren land. Nevertheless, Betsy penciled her impressions in a tablet, apparently finding something to write about in the bleak landscape.
Once she breezed by Max, who was in a losing battle with the wind over who would gain dominance of the Denver Post. She grasped the top of the newspaper with her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from his face. "Aren't you taking notes?" she asked.
"On what?" he said, giving up the attempt to read and trying to fold the fluttering paper to a manageable size.
"Why, the scenery of course. It's all so...well, earthy. Mother Nature at her unspoiled best, unpruned, untended, and growing wild in the Colorado wind. Magnificent really. And this train...so rustic and utilitarian, symbolic of the rich history of the west, unencumbered by the cold materialism of society."
The corner of his mouth crept up toward a skeptical, narrowed eye. "If you say so." He squirmed uncomfortably on a wooden bench. "It's just giving me a sore backside."
She cocked her head to the side and waggled the end of her pencil at him. "You know what your problem is, Max?"
"Yeah, I just told you."
"You're jaded. You think if someone's not getting beat up, or losing their money in a crap game..." She gave him a smug little grin. "...or if some upstanding citizen isn't suddenly worthy of a story in your tell-all gazette, then there isn't a story at all."
"Your point, Betsy, if there is one?"
"My point is that all of this is story." She swept her arm in a grand arch that was meant to encompass the entire state of Colorado. Instead the gesture was halted in mid sweep when a flying insect landed in her palm. "Oh!"
"Watch yourself, Betsy. All that rich history comes with eight legs and wings."
"You're impossible, Cassidy!" She sauntered down the aisle, shaking the bug off her hand.
Max pulled his hat down over his eyes, settled back into the lumpy comfort of his satchel, and smiled.
The D & RG train arrived in Central City shortly after noon, and the Fair Day party boarded a roofless hire coach to take them to the center of town. If Max expected the economic depression that had attacked the rest of the eastern Rockies to have affected Central City, he was wrong. At one time called "the richest square mile on earth," Central City was as vibrant and exciting as it ever had been, claiming a number of fine hotels and rooming houses, a grand opera, and several glittering saloons and gambling parlors.
Since many of the original wooden structures had burned to the ground in 1874, the town planners had elected to rebuild using brick and stone. The result was a city of stylish square-front masonry buildings climbing wide curving streets. Each of the two and three story structures on Main and Lawrence Streets boasted narrow, sturdy windows and bold entrances enhanced by regal Victorian lintels.
Most of the buildings were crowned with painted cornices, giving the town the look of an elaborately decorated birthday cake. It was clear that, while other mining towns had withered in the winds, Central City was alive and well and living off the fat of her prosperous citizens.
Most of the well-to-do inhabitants lived in grand residences on the numerous side streets or in gingerbread mansions on the hillsides at the edge of town. In the business district, fancy carriages and buggies sat outside emporiums and restaurants, their groomed horses nose to nose with shaggy, long-eared burros.
When the hire coach reached the center of town, Max took his first notes, observing that while Manhattan was certainly the melting pot of diverse cultures, Central City was a small but just as varied microcosm of class structure. The very rich ambled sidewalks alongside the dirt poor. Occasional breaks in the rows of buildings gave Max a view down narrow side streets to clusters of ramshackle cabins and even temporary canvas structures proving that not all Central City hopefuls had struck it rich.
The hills sloping away from town were pockmarked with the crumbling remains of mines long since abandoned. Max wrote in his notebook, "The desolate, gaping holes in walls of unforgiving rock, like the toothless grin of an old prospector, tell the story of the heyday of gold and silver with humbling realism."
Many of the mines were closed off, ragged sections of wood nailed across lumber-reinforced entrances. But occasionally a lone miner, not yet resigned to the fact that his forbearers had stripped the hills of all their glittering treasures, walked wearily out of a working mine.
"As the sun descends over the Rockies," Max wrote, "the man, bent nearly double with his day's backbreaking labors, comes down off the mountain again, his sacks empty, his burden heavy."
"What a place this is," Betsy exclaimed from the seat in front of Max. She had been writing and sketching since they'd left the train, and had produced several commendable drawings of the main streets of Central City.
She tended to see only the gilded trappings of Central City while he concentrated on the sadder underbelly. But one fact was definitely true...it was quite a place. This little city, a living testament to good luck and bad, was a tantalizing display of man's excesses and failures.
Once the wagon reached the center of the business district, Ross asked the driver to recommend the best accommodations in town.
"Why, that'd be the Teller House on Eureka Street," he said. "Even has running water on every floor, pumped all the way up from Prosser Gulch."
"Running water on ev'ry floor? Gawlee! That's the place fer us, ain't it, Lizzie?"
"Ross, stop it," Betsy said to stop his ridiculous mimicking. "The Teller House will be just fine," she told the driver.
"'Course it's a pretty steep fee to stay there," the driver went on. "Costs three dollars a night, but worth every penny. Some real notables have bunked there over the years."
"Then by all means, drive on, good man." Ross looked around the wagon to make sure everyone was aware of his clever banter. "What's a mere pittance like three dollars when we can immerse ourselves in the luxurious ambiance of your fair city?"
The driver stared at Ross and tightened up his features as if to say he didn't understand a word the young man had said, and what's more, didn't want to.
Max leaned toward Betsy and whispered, "Class will tell all right. That brother of yours is a charmer. He'll have these people eating out of his hands."
Betsy shot him a warning look but, for once, didn't argue.
The Teller House lived up to its reputation, including the driver’s tale of twenty-six silver ingots. The citizens of Central City, in order to impress their most famous visitor, Ulysses Grant, laid bricks of solid silver to form a pathway for the general to walk to the entrance of the Teller House. Ross was the first one down from the wagon, and he made a quick but surreptitious perusal of the simple red bricks currently leading to the door of the hotel.
"They're not here now, son," the driver said. “Nobody'd be stupid enough to think those blocks would still be left in plain view in the sidewalk. We're not idiots who live here, you know."
"It's a good thing those ingots are gone, Betsy," Max chided. "Otherwise I think Ross might be down here in the middle of the night trying to pick them out with his pocket knife."
"Very funny." Betsy tossed a piece of her luggage to the sidewalk."What are you waiting for, Max?" she said. "Get your bag."
"You'll have t
o count me out," he said. "This place is a little too fancy for my tastes. The driver told me about a rooming house up the street, and I think it suits me better."
"Or suits his wallet," Ross muttered.
Was it Max's imagination, or did Betsy actually look disappointed that he wouldn't be staying at the hotel? She started to say something, and he sincerely hoped she wasn't about to offer him a loan. Her brother cut her short before she got the words out.
"Forget about it, Liz," he said. "Let the man do what he wants. I'm sure Max will find a comfy bed and a plate of warm vittles to see him through the night." He gave Max a private look meant to convey the enormity of class differences between them. It was all Max could do to refrain from jumping off the wagon and adjusting Ross's attitude with a sample of the only worthwhile lesson old Seamus Cassidy had ever given his son.
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