by Logan, Jake
Randolph and Billy might have cooked up some scheme that would get them both planted six feet under.
“When’s Tucker getting back to town?”
“Eh? Dan? I can’t rightly say. Might be sometime tomorrow. But you can’t go orderin’ him about like he was your deputy, Slocum.”
“One of you can stay in town. The other can hit the trail as we track down the boys,” Slocum said.
“Now, you listen to me,” Whitehill said, getting his dander up finally. “I’m in charge here. I say who rides where. You and Marianne are out of this here jail because I said so. For two cents, I’ll clap the both of you back in.”
“No, you won’t,” Slocum said. The menace in his voice caused Whitehill to harden and reach for his six-shooter on the desk. “Don’t think about trying that, Sheriff. You won’t like the way it turns out.”
Whitehill froze.
“It might be that Marianne and I leave town for a while. It’s to fetch back Randolph, wherever he went. You won’t come after us or send Dangerous Dan either, because we’ll be back when Randolph’s safe.”
Slocum turned his back and felt the sheriff measuring him for a shroud. One quick grab of that hogleg on the desk, a close-by shot, and Slocum would be dead on the floor. He walked through the door into the night without taking a .44 slug in his spine. Judging Whitehill meant less to him right now than finding the boy.
Cursing all the way to the hotel, he stopped on the steps and saw Marianne in the sitting room, swaying back and forth furiously in a rocking chair. Rather than go in since he had nothing to tell her yet, he headed for the Lonely Cuss Saloon. The crowd was sparse. Tom Gallifrey’s brother worked the bar, idly swiping at the shot glasses and mugs, stacking them in curious piles, then starting all over with the time-killing construction.
Slocum went directly to the bar, leaned over, and grabbed the corpulent man by the front of his shirt. A hard yank sprawled him half over the bar.
“Who was with the boys? Randolph and Billy McCarty? Who?”
The man sputtered.
“Let Justin go.”
Slocum looked up to the dirty mirror behind the bar and saw Tom Gallifrey’s reflection. The man wasn’t armed. At least he hadn’t thrown down on Slocum.
When Slocum did as he was told, Justin Gallifrey fell back, caught himself, and started to go for a weapon under the bar. Slocum would be content putting a .36-caliber slug in the man’s gut, but quicker than a bullet came Tom’s order.
“Don’t be more of a jackass than you have to be, Justin. Go fetch some more mugs from the back room.”
“But Tom, he—” Justin Gallifrey sputtered, then obeyed with ill grace.
Slocum didn’t have to tell his brother he had saved his life.
“You look to be mighty good with that Colt, Slocum,” Tom said. He inclined his head toward a table at the far side of the saloon. Slips of paper were scattered on the surface, some held down with empty beer mugs. A tin cashbox stood open and empty.
Gallifrey sank into the chair and leaned forward to cover some of the papers. Slocum read more than one of them marked OVERDUE. Gallifrey wasn’t pulling enough business to stay afloat. Slocum reckoned how this took special skill to go bust selling whiskey to thirsty miners in a boomtown.
“Randolph has a job here. A couple folks saw him talking with a miner before he upped and disappeared.”
“He don’t work any harder than that whore ma of his,” grumbled Gallifrey. He looked up, eyes wide, when Slocum’s hand drifted for his six-shooter. “’Course I know what her problems are, so that’s not so bad, her missin’ a few shifts forcin’ me to call in my no-account brother to work in her stead.”
“The boy,” Slocum said.
“He was sweepin’ up for me. Heard that he got kidnapped, but since he came back real fast, I discounted that.”
“It was this afternoon, early evening, when he’d have come by for more work.”
“Never laid eyes on him today,” Gallifrey said. The man’s thin face tightened and his big nose twitched. “Saves me a few pennies, not havin’ to pay him.” He looked up again, his eyes like chips of ice. “The only customers in here this afternoon were from the Argent Mine. Don’t know their names, but they worked for Carstairs ’til she sliced his belly open and killed him.”
Slocum knew Gallifrey referred to Marianne. He didn’t bother correcting him about how Jim Frank had murdered the mine foreman.
“Anything you know would be a help,” Slocum said.
“Smitty. One of them galoots was named Smitty. Leastways, that’s what his partner called him. You know how it is with miners. That might be a summer name and—”
Tom Gallifrey spoke to thin air. Slocum ran from the saloon and made a beeline for the hotel and Marianne Lomax. In ten minutes, they were on the road leading to the Argent Mine. By sunrise they had found it.
• • •
“What do we do, John?” Marianne shifted uneasily behind him on the Indian pony.
“If Gallifrey wasn’t lying, the miner who talked to Randolph is in this camp.” He remembered his earlier scouting into this camp, and how he had barely escaped with his life. But Carstairs had been alive then, in command of the entire crew.
Was his replacement any better? For all he knew, the whole damned bunch of miners might have been in on the scheme to steal Bedrich’s map with Les Carstairs.
“Let’s go.”
He started to tell Marianne to stay there, then knew she would never obey. Worse, he would have his attention split in two directions. Finding Randolph was paramount, but if he worried that Marianne would be discovered and captured, too, he couldn’t expect to have a good outcome with the miners.
He snapped the reins and got the pony walking slowly into the camp. A couple miners poked at breakfast. The smell of biscuits and frying bacon made his mouth water. It had been a spell since he’d eaten. From the way Marianne leaned toward the cooking fires, he knew this was on her mind as well.
“Who’re you?” demanded the miner boiling a large pot of coffee. He didn’t seem upset at the sight of Slocum. The question was reflexive.
“We’re looking for a miner named Smitty. He’s supposed to work for the Argent.”
“What’d that scalawag gone an’ done now? He sure as hell didn’t knock her up. He’s so damn ugly not even the cows’ll let him get that close.”
This produced a round of chuckles, but not outright laughter. Slocum took that to mean Smitty fancied himself a ladies’ man and likely wasn’t too ill-featured.
“Please, we’ve got to find him. It’s important!”
The miner poured himself a cup of the hot coffee, sampled it, and spat it into the fire. He dashed the contents to the ground, then poured himself a new cup and sipped at it before looking up again.
“He got back from town ’fore midnight. That’s ’bout the time I dragged my tail into camp, and he was here already.” The miner pointed toward a tent.
From astride his horse, Slocum saw only a blanket flat on the ground. The miner had already left, if he’d even been there at all.
“I . . . I’ll serve you all breakfast if you tell us where he is,” Marianne said. She kicked free of the horse and landed lightly. Settling her dress and making a point of pressing her hands into her breasts got the miners’ attention.
In a few seconds, she had a dozen of them crowding around, holding out cups and tin plates for her to fill.
“Now, boys, don’t crowd. I’ll be happy to serve Smitty, too.”
As a chorus, the other miners declared he had already left to work in the mine. Slocum nodded to Marianne and saw she would be fine. Her work in the Lonely Cuss had inured her to the rough jokes and other antisocial behavior that passed as acceptable among the miners.
He rode in the direction of the mine, then galloped when an explosion shook the
ground. A huge gout of dust billowed from the mouth of the mine and covered him with fine rock powder. He hit the ground running, secured the horse, and made his way through the brown cloud to the mine.
“What happened?” He took off his hat and fanned away the choking dust.
A man stumbled out, then dropped to his knees. Bending double, he put his head between his knees and spat blood before looking up.
“Powder went off premature.”
“How’d that happen? Why are you blasting by yourself?”
“Got a couple powder monkeys. Might be they screwed it up and detonated early.”
“Are they trapped in there?” Slocum demanded. He went to the mouth and peered into the darkness. Whatever damage had occurred to the Argent had been much deeper. This part was shored up well.
Then a coldness settled into his belly. He backed away, drew his pistol, and shoved it into the miner’s face.
“You named Smitty?”
“Hell, mister, I’ll be whosoever you want me to be. Put that pistol away.”
“Those new powder monkeys wouldn’t be a pair of kids from town, would it?”
“Offered ’em a dollar a day to be my assistants. The one claimed to know everything there was to know about blasting. Thought he was young, but he sounded real sure of himself.”
“Name of Billy?”
“That’s him.”
This was all the further Smitty got before Slocum swung his pistol. The hard metal barrel crunched into the side of the miner’s head, sending him sprawling.
“You stupid bastard,” Slocum said. “Billy’s fourteen and Randolph’s only twelve. What could they know about mining or setting powder charges?”
He plunged into the mine, choking at the dust rising about him. He found the ledge where the miners kept their thick, squat wax candles. It galled him to stop to light one but going deeper without seeing where he stepped amounted to suicide. Suicide like allowing two young boys to set charges and blast.
Candle guttering, Slocum edged forward a dozen yards before he came to the spot where the mine roof had collapsed. Randolph and Billy were on the other side of a solid rock wall.
Trapped.
21
“John, John! They’re trapped, aren’t they? Randolph and Billy?” Marianne felt sick to her stomach and clung to herself, arms wrapped about her body tightly.
Ahead in the dust Slocum paid her no attention as he moved the feeble candle about, its flickering light hardly enough to see anything. Stumbling over the fallen rocks, she made her way forward until she could touch his shoulder. He jerked in surprise when her fingers gripped down with more force than she intended. One thing that had always drawn her to him was how he could concentrate. Sometimes, she wished he would concentrate more on her and less on everything else in the world.
But now she wanted him to save Randolph.
“Smitty used them to set dangerous charges,” Slocum said grimly. “They didn’t know what they were doing, and this was the result.” He waved the candle around to indicate the destruction.
She reached out to steady his hand. Hot wax trickled over her fingers, making her flinch. She guided his hand back to the spot she wanted lit better.
“See that?” she asked.
“You’ve got good eyes,” Slocum replied. He moved closer to the darkness at the top of the rock fall blocking the mineshaft. The flame flickered and then moved in the direction of the hole. “They’re getting air. The draft is carrying the flame in that direction.”
“That means there’s a larger air hole on the other side of the rocks, doesn’t it?”
“The miners burrowed into the hillside,” Slocum said, looking at the layers on the walls, then returning to the hole letting air flow deeper into the mine. “They wouldn’t get this deep without ventilation.”
“There might be cracks in the rock all the way to the shaft,” she said. “Can we reach them that way or will it be easier to remove this rock wall?”
“Ain’t no use tryin’ to get through that ’less you want to blast some more,” Smitty said.
Slocum whirled around and started for the miner. Marianne stopped him. She felt Slocum’s heart hammering in his chest as she pressed hard to keep him from ripping the miner’s head off. It didn’t calm her knowing he was so scared. Outwardly, he had a cold anger toward Smitty, but she felt how he was anything but cold inside.
“You mean blasting will only bring down more rock?” she asked, leaning hard against Slocum and not looking at the miner.
“No way of knowin’ what the roof looks like deeper in the mine,” Smitty said. He spat. “Might take a month to dig out this rock. Might be lucky, and it’d only take a couple days.”
“They’ll be dead by then,” Slocum said.
Marianne pressed harder against him and felt his heart beating even faster.
“We might get water through the air hole to them,” she said.
“Ain’t nuthin’ to tell us they’re alive,” Smitty said.
Now it was Marianne’s turn to want to rip the man’s head off. She shoved Slocum back to let him know she’d take care of this. Swallowing her fear and directing it toward the miner, she said, “They’re alive. Say anything different and it’ll be you who’s pushing up daisies in some unmarked grave.”
“Don’t mean nuthin’ by it,” Smitty said. “Plenny o’ miners bought themselves a rock grave. More ’n a half dozen in the Argent, and this is one o’ the better mines fer that. Hardly nobody dies.”
“And those boys you lured to work for you won’t die either,” Marianne said. “Come with me, John. I want to find the air holes in the hill and call down to them . . . because they are still alive, dammit!”
She shoved Smitty out of the way and flounced off, head high. She had to duck more than once to avoid rocks jutting down from the roof. What seemed an eternity later, she burst into the open space in front of the mine. Fighting hysteria, she looked around, pushed her matted, dirty hair back out of her eyes, and then started walking to circle the hill where the mine gouged out its load of silver.
“Wait up,” Slocum called. “You’re going off half-cocked.”
“That was never your problem, was it, John?”
“Marianne, use your head. We need to be methodical about how we find the air vents.”
“So? How do we do it?” She swept her arm about to take in the entire side of the hill. She paused, swallowed, and then pointed. “Like that? There?”
She didn’t wait for Slocum to see what she already had. A fountain of dust had risen from the solid ground—only it couldn’t be solid. The funnel of dust had to blow out from the mine. Scrambling up the rocky slope, barely avoiding patches of prickly pear cactus, she found the source of the dust.
“See, John? A crack in the rock. This must go straight down to the mineshaft where Randolph is!”
The boys would get plenty of air this way, but despair hit her like a solid body blow again as she realized the crack in the rock was too narrow for anything else.
“We can dribble water down. If they see it, they can catch it as it drips from the crack. We might stuff down food and—”
“Here, Marianne. I found a bigger vent.”
Eyes wide and hope soaring, she went farther up the hill to where Slocum worked to move a large rock. Beside it a large vent still spewed out dust. On the gritty cloud she caught the acrid stench of blasting powder. She remembered how Texas Jack would come to her bed reeking of it. He would always laugh it off and tell her it was the smell of money. Then they’d make love all night long, and she had come to associate the sharp scent with manliness.
Now the smell turned her stomach. Her son might be dead down below.
She dropped to her knees, cupped her hands around her mouth, and shouted, “Randolph! This is Mama. Are you all right?”
She tu
rned and put her ear close to the wide vent. For a moment she heard nothing, then she looked up at Slocum, excited.
“He’s alive. That’s his voice. Faint, but he said he and Billy are alive. But they’re trapped, pinned under rock.” She laughed. “Of course they’re trapped. They’re in the mine that fell in on them. They’re safe!” She laughed until she cried. The tears turned to sobs she couldn’t control. Slocum took her in his arms, and it felt good, secure and safe again.
She finally pushed him away and asked, “How do we get them free?”
Slocum’s reaction did not hearten her. He kicked at the edges of the vent and shook his head after a closer examination.
“We’ve got to find another way to reach them. This chimney is too small for me to wiggle down.”
“I’ll go!”
Slocum looked at her as if she had gone crazy. This sparked her anger.
“What’s the matter? Don’t think I can get down there?”
“What’ll you do when you get to them? Dig out?”
“If I have to! What would you do if you went down?”
“Get a rope around them, pull them up. They’re likely small enough to fit in the chimney.”
“I couldn’t pull them up. You’re stronger.”
“They’re buried under rock. There’s no telling how injured they are.”
“Blood,” she said, “doesn’t matter to me. I’ve seen plenty in my day. The boys can’t get out from under heaps of debris. I can move rock because I have to.”
She wiggled to the vent and put her feet into it, then slid half in before Slocum could stop her. Marianne looked up, daring him to prevent her from saving her son.
“I’ll get a rope. Don’t go any farther until I tie it to you.”
“Good idea, John,” she said. “If I get stuck, you can pull me back up.” She graced him with a quick smile to speed him on his way. Then she scooted lower, testing the size of the rock chimney. She pushed herself back up and sat on the edge, chafing at the wait for Slocum to get back with a long rope. She had expected miners to come with him.