A Gift From Crick

by John McNally

  No time for patience now, he thought, I’ll just pour it on up here and ease off when I hit the clearing at the top. I need to get in close, if I shoot from too far away I might hit Don coming up the other way. He held an arm up to brush the bushes out of his way. I hope to God Don’s careful when he opens up. Damn it, of course he’ll watch out, he’s no greenhorn, he’ll do the right thing.

  His doubts from the previous night suddenly lifted, he felt them disappear, his spirits picked up and he ran on full of energy and purpose, his muscles hard and corded like rope.

  After a couple of hundred paces, his legs started to shake with fatigue and he looked up the grade, measuring the distance to the top. He could see the glare of the brittle sunlight through the trees where the ground levelled off and the timber opened up. He began to walk taking deep breaths, his face ran slick with sweat, he rubbed it with his hand and wiped his palm down his trouser leg. He drew one of the Colts. He edged his way through the brush, blinked a couple of times to let his eyes adjust to the brightness and waited. His gaze followed a sandy path and he saw footprints etched in the dirt. A cool wind pushed through the grass that hid him and leaves lifted and rustled above his head. The trees fluttered with shadow.

  He looked out of the dark shade through gaps in the trees like gates of sunlight, and he studied the landscape and tried to picture in his mind where he went last night. Ahead on the right he remembered the clump of trees in a fold in the land where branches reached the ground like dark caves. He felt certain he skirted that in the night and came out by the rocks and trees where Mooney had stood, smoked and watched their camp.

  Apart from the foot prints he found no other signs of Mooney but Carter guessed he would be in the same place. He heard another shot echo up from below and he started to move.

  Then he had him. Hunkered down by a clump of rocks, he glimpsed Mooney’s hat and burly shoulders by the trunk of a fallen tree, looking down the incline. Carter crept forward, lowered himself to the ground and inched his way across the thirty paces to a lichen-covered boulder where he knelt and glanced across to the deadfall. Mooney had gone.

  Carter heard the three clicks of a gun being fully cocked and a shadow fell across him.

  ‘Well, if it ain’t my old partner,’ said Mooney in a deep hoarse whisper. He stepped through fern and brush and stood over Carter, blocking out the sun like a huge thunder cloud.

  ‘I just saw some big feller lumbering up the other way making more noise than a cattle drive and thought I’d go round and pick him off when I stumbled across you scuttling about like a skink in the grass.’

  Carter threw himself forward and crashed into Mooney’s legs. As he hit him, a pain from the wound in his back shot down his leg but Mooney toppled over backwards and Carter fell with him in a tangle of arms and legs. Mooney went down hard, his back crashed with a solid thump against the ground and whacked the air from his lungs in a whoosh. His gun flew from his hand and clattered into the rocks. Carter swept his own Colt up but a huge calloused hand clamped on his wrist and wrenched his arm aside. Mooney’s grip bit into his arm like a vice twisting his elbow. Carter glanced down and saw Mooney glaring up at him with eyes filled with malice, his ruined face stiff and set like a death mask. Mooney levered his huge shoulders upwards and pushed Carter sideways like he weighed next to nothing. Mooney’s left fist swept over and caught Carter on the temple, knocking his hat off and slamming his head into the dirt. Carter’s gun hand lost all feeling under the pressure of Mooney’s iron grip and he felt the Colt slip out of his fingers.

  Carter brought a knee up and caught Mooney in the groin and the big man coughed, retched and let go of Carter as he lurched to his feet. He backed off a pace, doubled over with his hands between his legs.

  ‘You’ll pay for that, mister,’ he gasped as Carter scrambled to his feet.

  Carter swung a punch and felt his arm jar as he caught Mooney on the point of the chin, he grazed his knuckles and it felt like he had walloped a rock. Mooney’s head did not move, he simply smiled a grimace as stiff as an iron bar and thrust forward, fastened his brawny arms around Carter’s waist and pinned his arms to his sides. Mooney grunted and lifted Carter off the ground and squeezed. An excruciating pain from Carter’s wound shot up his back, he gasped in anguish and his spine arched in fresh agony. Mooney cast him aside like an old coat. Carter tried to roll away but Mooney seized his shirt collar with one hand and grabbed his belt in the other and heaved. Carter felt himself lifted into the air. Mooney held him like a fence post across his chest and walked to the other side of the clearing where a sheer drop of fifty feet or more fell to the rocks and river below.

  Mooney grunted, straightened his arms and jerked Carter above his head. Carter looked over his shoulder. He smelled the wet air, he saw the emptiness that plummeted down to glossy boulders webbed with moss by the edge of the water and the wide river that looked to have a solid black metal surface, far below.

  ‘Time to die,’ said Mooney.

  ‘If I don’t get you in this life I’ll be waiting for you on the other side,’ said Carter.

  ‘See you in hell then. Tell them to bank those fires up, hell ain’t hot enough for the likes of me.’

  Mooney took a deep breath, swayed and let Carter fall.

  But he did not go far. Carter collided with the ground immediately, he twisted and saw Don Plunkett holding Mooney. Plunkett had pulled him back from the edge and Mooney had dropped Carter onto the rocks just short of the fall into the river.

  Mooney and Plunkett faced each other, they stood toe to toe and some primitive, instinctive challenge passed between them. They measured each other up. Mooney was the taller of the two, his triangular back and his biceps bulged with power from the slabs of thick muscle across his chest and arms. Plunkett had a solid body, a neck as wide as his head, a barrel chest with a thick stomach to match and a back like a bull, forged from the heavy lifting and the daily hard labour in the mines of the West.

  They moved around each other warily, Mooney shot out a hard right looking for Plunkett’s chin but Plunkett slapped the blow aside and drove a pile driver like a jack hammer into Mooney’s guts, snapping a rib.

  ‘You’ll have to do a whole lot better than that,’ said Mooney but he wheezed as his voice outran his breath.

  He smacked a fist into Plunkett’s face and the chain from the handcuff whipped across and burst Plunkett’s nose, throwing a mess of blood down his beard. Plunkett blinked and rolled forward, and he pummelled Mooney’s body with a barrage of jolting blows. In desperation Mooney wrapped his arms around Plunkett’s solid body and squeezed until the muscles in his arms stood out as thick and banded as wire cable. Plunkett simply head butted Mooney in the face, crunching his nose, then he swung both arms out wide and boxed his ears. Mooney coughed a deep harsh bark that ripped through his chest. His eyes glazed over and the energy and strength washed out of him. He tried to claw at Plunkett’s eyes but a big roundhouse blow that he never saw coming caught Mooney on the hinge of the jaw by the ear, a humming noise filled his mind and he felt himself sink into a pit of mist. Mooney backed away blindly, swaying on the edge of the cliff, his legs seemed boneless. In panic he reached out and grabbed the front of Plunkett’s shirt with the last of his ebbing strength. They stood locked together on the lip of the cliff like a couple of dancers in a last embrace. Mooney stumbled towards the sheer drop and dragged Plunkett with him.

  Carter lay on the floor behind them, he scrambled forward on all fours and clutched Plunkett’s legs and wrapped his arms around them and dragged him to a halt. Plunkett looked straight into Mooney’s blazing eyes, pushed his thick arms upwards and broke Mooney’s hold. He put a big hand over Mooney’s face and pushed. Mooney stepped backwards into nothing, he screamed in terror and fell from sight, he cartwheeled down the sheer drop and crashed into the rocks below.

  ‘Don, will you quit messing about with him, my back’s hurting something awful,’ said Carter. Plunkett smiled and hauled Carter to his
feet.

  They both leaned out and saw Mooney’s body, laid like a puppet that someone had grown tired of and thrown into a corner. The river water lapped underneath him, making it look like his arms moved.

  ‘We’d best go down and make sure he’s dead,’ said Carter.

  To their astonishment, Mooney shook his head and slowly struggled to a sitting position. Carter walked off, picked up Plunkett’s rifle and strode back without speaking. He pulled the hammer back, tucked the stock up to his cheek, sighted down the barrel and squeezed the trigger and shot Mooney. Mooney fell back and his blood billowed and floated in the cold river like a red cloud.

  ‘That’s the last nail in his coffin,’ Carter said.

  ‘You’re an unforgiving man, Eddie,’ Plunkett said.

  ‘He don’t deserve any mercy, downright bad needs to be paid for somewhere down the line.’

  ‘I’m with you on that, partner, I’m right glad we got it done. Mooney looks small and mean now he’s dead, don’t he?’

  The two men stood side by side and gazed past the overhang and out across the sweep of land below them.

  ‘You know, Eddie,’ said Plunkett, watching the horizon, ‘one mistake and either of us could be down there with him. Life sure feels good right now, don’t it?’

  ‘Ain’t that the truth.’ The two friends enjoyed the unblemished sunshine, the clear ceramic blue sky, the thickly wooded mountains and the tangled grass on jumbled hills crisped to a fine summer gold. The land at their feet burnished like a lake of sunshine. They heard footsteps and turned as Garrett Baird and Milton Shine came across the open ground towards them.

  ‘It’s settled then,’ said Shine.

  ‘It is,’ said Carter. ‘Mooney’s dead at the bottom of the rock face down yonder.’

  Shine did not bother to look, he turned and hobbled back to the camp to tell the others. Baird had collected Mooney’s horse and led Carter and Plunkett down to the river to collect the body. They slung Mooney over the back of his horse and walked back to the camp in silence.

  They packed up and prepared to leave. They took their time, cleared the fire away and brought out the gold. The bags were charred and burnt through in parts but they repacked them in a couple of spare burlap sacks.

  Roof looked from the gold to Mooney’s dead body and said, ‘If he hadn’t been greedy and come back for the money he might have got clean away.’

  ‘No, sir,’ said young Floyd. ‘With Mr Carter and Mr Plunkett on his tail, it was always going to end this way.’

  ‘Listen,’ said Carter as they threw the last sack onto the wagon boards with a dusty thud. ‘It would sure stick in my throat just to give this gold back to Crick. I talked it through with Don there,’ he nodded across to Plunkett, ‘and we’d like to hold on to it and share it out amongst the families of those killed by the Mooney gang.’

  Plunkett nodded and said, ‘See, Crick was willing to do a deal with Mooney, he was ready to pay him to get his gold back and let Mooney go. I don’t hold with that. He won’t help those folk that are suffering in the settlement. And don’t forget, he’d’ve killed Eddie here without a second thought.’

  ‘I’m for it,’ said Grandpa, ‘but there’ll be a heap of trouble when Crick hears about it.’

  ‘He won’t hear it from us. We tell no-one. We stick together. Out here we’re all we’ve got,’ said Carter. ‘Crick must never know.’ He plucked at his ear lobe. ‘Remember, we say nothing, not ever. We head back with the body and the story is we killed Mooney but we never found the gold. Hell, we tell them we never even looked for it, we just wanted Mooney dead. Crick can keep searching if he wants to.’

  Plunkett sat back on the tailboard of the wagon and said, ‘Here’s how I see it working. Back at the settlement, me and Garrett will organize things so that the gold is sold off a bit at a time. It won’t take too long. Crick’s assay office sees plenty of colour through every week.’ He hefted a sack of gold in the back of the wagon. ‘There’s thousands of placers working claims in these parts. We pretend to work the claims of the folk who got killed. We take gold from these sacks a bit at a time and say we panned it. The families take it to Crick’s assay office and sell it to him. It would be a sight quicker if Milt would help out, we cain’t tell no-one else.’

  He glanced at Shine and raised his eyebrows.

  ‘I ain’t against it,’ said Shine. ‘Goddamn it, for a minute there I had over $75,000 in gold, I was richer than possum gravy.’ He pretended to flick a coin in the air. ‘And then I just agreed to give it away. It’s a grand idea, boys, the families get help and Crick buys back his own gold. It’s like a gift from Crick. I like that, I like that a lot.’

  And that is exactly what they did. It worked out fine.

  CHAPTER 18

  These days there’s a plaque by the side of the trail that includes the following:

  In 1852 English sailors jumped ship in Crescent City to go east in search of rumoured gold strikes and found colour here at what became known as Sailors Diggings. By 1856 this had become the town of Waldo, the first territorial seat of Josephine County. As the gold played out, many of the residents drifted away. The town was levelled by the giant hydraulic water cannons of the placer mines. The dreams of its residents now gone, only the occupants of the hilltop cemetery remain to watch over the once thriving community.

  Horace Crick is buried in that cemetery. The loss of the gold changed him, he was never the same again. He wasted a lot of money searching the land around Sailors Diggings. He hired men to look for clues, caves, anything that would help him find his missing gold. They reckoned it sent him plumb crazy, in the end he used to walk the streets and mutter to himself. Folk never felt any sympathy for him though, there was still that something about him that people could not abide. He never found his gold of course. He would have been a whole lot crazier if he had known that he bought the missing gold back again when the families brought it into his assay office. The stolen gold ended up back in his strong room.

  Young Floyd grew up and moved on, he went on to own three stables including a livery and horse corral out in Arizona Territory, in a place called Tombstone. He did right well out of it. The corral fronted Allen Street with a rear entrance lined with horse stalls on Fremont Street, he named it Old Kindersley after his grandpa but everyone just called it the OK Corral. You may have heard of it. There was a gunfight up that way one time.

  Ulysses S. Grant remembered Garrett Baird and he sent for him during the Civil War. Baird worked for him throughout that bloody conflict and stood at the Appomattox Court House in April 1865 when the confederate Robert E. Lee surrendered to Grant as Union Commander. Baird mustered out as soon as he could and went back and worked for Floyd for the rest of his life.

  Quincy Roof spent his summers trading through Oregon and California for a couple more years. The good news was that the waster his daughter married turned out fine in the end; he knuckled down and made a decent job of helping Quincy run his store in Marysville.

  Sad news about Don Plunkett though, after all the good work he did in Sailors Diggings. True to his word, he used all of the gold over the next year or so to see that the families of those killed were looked after properly. He moved on. A few years later, he worked the silver mines of the Comstock Lode in Nevada. A tunnel collapsed and Plunkett and two others went in to rescue the trapped miners. They sent six survivors to the surface but there was a second cave-in and Plunkett and the rest never came out.

  Later, Carter heard that one of the men who went down with Plunkett was a cheerful feller with a limp, but he also heard that someone saw Milton Shine across the border in Canada, married with two children and farming in a place called Saltcoats. Carter hoped that was true.

  When he heard about Don Plunkett’s death it hit him hard, he went down there and laid a stone in the local graveyard even though they never found Plunkett’s body. The inscription read:

  You could do worse than have a friend like Don Plunkett.

 
As for Eddie Carter, well, he met up again with the feller who almost burned his eye out, Hillard Packett, but that’s another story.