The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery)

by Max McCoy

  “Oh, so much?”

  “I wish it were less, for your sake,” she said, “but Leadville produces wealth, not food. Most of everything has to be hauled in, some of it a hundred miles up the mountains in freight wagons, and our cost isn’t cheap. And, dear, this is a boomtown.”

  I smiled and paid her.

  “I’d love to chat, but—” she said, indicating the line of men behind me.

  “Of course,” I said, gathering my purchases.

  “Perhaps I could call on you later, and we can chat about local history. It’s pleasant to have another woman in town who is interested in something other than relieving miners of their wages,” she said. “Where are you staying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, moving toward the door. “It seems a challenge to find a private room.”

  “Stay here,” she said. “Come back at eight.”

  I turned and gave her a smile.

  On the street, I searched for a place to sit and eat my dinner, but there were even more men than before, and they were all in a hurry. It was difficult to navigate in such crowded conditions, so I stopped at the first place that afforded a bit of room, a flat-topped rock between two buildings. The rock was about the size of my desk back at the agency, and had apparently been used to try out some drilling equipment, because it was peppered with bore holes that ranged in depth from one inch to a foot. I climbed on the rock, sat cross-legged, and spread my meal before me. I tore a piece of bread from the loaf with my hands, but wished I had a knife for the cheese, which I was forced to mangle with my fingers. I added a pocket knife to the list of things for my detection bag. I would need the knife to sharpen pencils anyway.

  I ate and immediately felt better, but soon wished I had something to drink. There were rain barrels at the corners of the businesses, many with cups or ladles attached by a piece of string, but I wasn’t thirsty enough to use a public utensil. I packed up the rest of my food, stowed it in my valise, and started for a saloon across the street—The Parisian—when I heard a voice I knew.

  “Friends! Thirst not for wickedness, but for every word that falls from the Savior’s lips. Come away with me to the river, and we will bathe in the waters of righteousness.”

  The Sky Pilot was standing in front of The Parisian, arms outstretched, Bible in hand. The book seemed a few chapters lighter. His clothes and beard were filthy. He wasn’t as painfully thin as he had been in Dodge, but his eyes were just as wild.

  I stepped back, into some shadows cast by the corner of a building, but kept watching.

  “Sir,” he said, grasping the sleeve of a workingman who was about to enter The Parisian. “You will find no joy inside, only the heartbreak that is at the bottom of every bottle of hard drink.”

  “For the love of God,” the man said, shaking himself loose. He continued inside, shaking his head.

  “You, then,” the Sky Pilot said, grasping another patron by the elbow. This man looked as if he were a driller or a driller’s helper, and his biceps coiled beneath his greasy shirt. “Renounce drunken—”

  The man drove his right fist into the side of the Sky Pilot’s jaw. The sound was like that of a bat stroking a leather-covered baseball, and the preacher’s head snapped around as if hit by a bat as well. The big man laughed as the Sky Pilot staggered for a few steps and then dropped to his knees.

  Then, slowly, like a ship capsizing, he dropped and rolled over onto his back, the Bible clutched to his chest.

  The crowd of men in the street pressed on, as if nothing unusual had happened. They didn’t even break their stride. Nobody stopped to help the preacher, or to inquire about his health. Those bound for the saloon simply stepped—or jumped—over his body in their haste to get inside the door.

  A trio of young boys had been watching from the side of the road, and now they ran out and leaned over the Sky Pilot. The oldest boy was ten or twelve, and he stared so intently at the preacher’s face that I thought for a moment that he was going to help him. But then the boy drew his right foot back and kicked the preacher in the ribs, laughing like a little jackal. The other boys soon imitated their leader, little brogans being driven repeatedly into the side of the poor man.

  “Stop that!” I shouted, making my way across the road. “Boys, stop!”

  The kicking ceased, but they stood their ground and stared at me defiantly.

  “Where are your mothers?” I asked.

  This was not the right question to ask.

  “Forget you,” the oldest boy said, although the word he used was not forget. “My mother’s a whore.”

  “Yeah,” another of the boys said.

  “You’re hurting him.”

  “I’ll stop if you give me a dime,” the older boy said.

  “And give you an incentive to hurt him, so next time you can ask for a quarter to stop kicking him?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “How would you like being kicked by somebody bigger than you?”

  “I’m smaller than him,” the boy said, confused.

  “Yes, but I’m bigger than you,” I said. “And if I catch you abusing somebody like this again, I’m going to kick the living snot out of all of you until somebody pays me fifty cents to stop. Now, scram.”

  The boys took off.

  I grabbed the Sky Pilot by the back of the collar and dragged him over to the side of The Parisian’s porch, enough out of the way so he wouldn’t get stepped on. I knelt and made sure he was breathing. His eyes fluttered as I put the book beneath his hands.

  “Suffer the little children,” he said.

  “Suffer, indeed.”

  “Don’t I know you, sister?”

  He reached out and grasped the lapel of my jacket.

  Alarmed, I knocked his hand away.

  “Don’t do that,” I said. “I’m not helping you again.”

  I opened the valise, took out the loaf of bread, and tore off a hunk.

  “You eat this,” I said. “Not pages from the book. This.”

  I placed the bread in his right hand.

  “I’m not helping you again,” I said. “You’re on your own.”

  No response.

  “Do you understand me, Martin?”

  He blinked.

  “Is that my name?”

  “I have it on good authority,” I said.

  I gathered my things in the valise and was about to stand, then hesitated.

  “You’re not a killer, are you?”

  “We’re all sinners,” he said.

  “No, I mean literally. Did you kill Charlie Howart?”

  “Who?”

  “Howart,” I said. “Charles Howart.”

  He shook his head.

  “You’re not just pretending to be crazy, are you?”

  “No,” he said slowly. “There are still moments when, as if the scales have fallen from my eyes, I know I am quite mad. But those moments are forgotten in the rush and everlasting glory of God’s word. I am a voice crying in the wilderness.”

  I stood.

  “When those moments come,” I said, “try hard to remember where home is. Return to your family. No more preaching until then, please. Go home, or you’re going to die in the wilderness.”

  25

  The mercantile was closed, but through the window I could see the glow of a lamp at the back of the store. Augusta Tabor was sitting beside the lamp, concentrating on some material before her, a pencil in her hand.

  I rapped gently.

  She came forward and unbarred the door.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said.

  “I’d be sleeping on the street if I didn’t,” I said.

  “You’d freeze in those clothes,” she said. “It can get a little chilly here at night, even in the middle of summer.”

  “It will be a nice change from Kansas,” I said. “I can hardly sleep, it’s so hot at night.”

  She replaced the bar after I’d entered and then led me toward the back.

  “I was jus
t going over some accounts,” she said. “It never ceases to amaze me how much work is involved in running a store, and this is our third—we have one in Oro City and another at Buckskin Joe, another mining camp. Horace has a talent for making deals, but when it comes to the books, I prefer to do it myself. My head is better for numbers than his.”

  She leaned over and blew out the lamp.

  “Sleeping quarters are above,” she said, leading me up a flight of stairs that already had a light at the top. The stairs opened on a sitting area that was tastefully arranged, with a little table and padded chairs and the other things one would expect in a comfortable home.

  “We have a home nearby,” she said, “but business has been so brisk that I seldom get to it, so I make do here. There’s a sleeping room just on the other side there, nothing fancy, just a bed and a nightstand. Horace is quite the politician and is always putting up some visiting official or another, and bragging to them about how he wants to build an opera house in town. An opera house, can you imagine? So, it’s my turn to show a little kindness to a new friend.”

  “Thank you again,” I said.

  “Horace is still at the miner’s meeting—there is at least a crisis a day in a boomtown—so it will be just us. Would you care for a cup of tea?”

  We sat in the padded chairs and drank tea, and she told me about life in California Gulch in 1860.

  At the time, she said, the area was still Kansas Territory. It is strange now to think of a Kansas gold rush, but that’s what it was. A series of strikes, beginning in 1858 with the Pikes Peak rush, brought fortune hunters ever higher into the mountains, and in 1860 they began prospecting for gold in the highest valley of the Arkansas River. In April, a tough old character named Abe Lee, after shoveling and sifting tons of frozen gravel, found a few grams of gold in his pans. It was enough to suggest there was sufficient ore in the ground that a mining district could be formed, and in a bit of wishful thinking harking back to the most famous gold rush in history, they named it California Gulch.

  Newspapers carried exaggerated stories about news of the strike, and within a few weeks 4,000 had ascended upon the gulch, forever forcing out the Ute Indians who had called the place home. A city—Oro City—sprang up, and along with it came the usual birthing pains of any booming mining camp, from the whiskey-fueled violence to the gamblers and other predators who fed on the honest labors of others.

  About this time, Horace Tabor—a twenty-nine-year-old Vermont native who had abandoned his latest failure, a miserably unproductive farm on the Kansas plains—had arrived in the Kansas Territory gold fields, seeking his family’s fortune. After a stopover in Denver, he went to Idaho Springs, and then Central City, and finally to the seven-mile-long California Gulch. With his wife and sixteen-month-old son in tow, he staked one of the last claims available, in May 1860.

  Mining season at this altitude was six months, from the time the ground thawed and the spring snowmelt put enough water in the rivers and creeks to fill the wooden, hand-shaken sluice boxes, to the time the water stopped flowing in the fall and winter came again. Tons of gravel was shoveled into the sluices, which resulted in buckets of black sand, which then was panned out by hand in the numbingly cold water. The worst of it was the heavy black sand, which nobody could rightly identify, and which hid the gold and made the panning harder than it should have been. But if you were lucky, a day’s work would be rewarded by a few grams of gold, or perhaps more. For Horace, there was enough gold in his pans at the end of the day to keep going, and to put a little money aside.

  While Horace did the backbreaking work of placer mining, Augusta had a business washing clothes, baking bread, serving meals, selling milk, sorting the mail, and taking in boarders at their little cabin in Oro City.

  By January 1861, Kansas had become a state in its own right and relinquished its claim on the gold fields, which were now officially a part of the new Colorado Territory. The Civil War began in April, but it seemed very far away to the miners along the upper Arkansas, waiting for the spring runoff so operations could commence. When mining began, strikes were being pushed ever higher up California Gulch, until gold was not just being teased from the heavy black sand, it was being found as lodes in milky white quartz outcroppings. This gold could be seen, and chipped and hammered away.

  During the mining season of 1861, more than a million dollars in gold ore was taken from California Gulch. Many grew rich, but the man who prospered most was Horace Tabor.

  Another was Jackson Miles.

  “You knew him?” I asked.

  “Only too well,” she said. “We all knew each other in the gulch, by necessity, but Miles was different. He wasn’t calling himself Andrew Jackson Miles yet, but he was a born politician. Sort of like my Horace, but with a mean streak.”

  “Did Miles have a partner?”

  “Yes, for a time,” she said. “They both came in the spring of 1860, but by the time Miles announced his strike, the partner was gone.”

  “Can you remember the partner’s name?”

  “It was such a long time ago.”

  “Please, try,” I said. “It’s important.”

  While I drained the last of the now-cold tea in my cup, Augusta looked over my shoulder, as if she were trying to read the name on the wall above me. She squinted and rubbed her temple and finally said, “Angus Wright.”

  I uttered a cry of relief.

  “You knew already,” she said.

  “I suspected, but I needed confirmation.”

  I opened my valise and took out the list I had copied from the library ledger.

  “Look at the name under entry thirteen,” I said, handing her the papers. “It is our Angus Wright. When I confronted Jackson Miles with the name, he claimed to have never heard of the man.”

  “He’s lying,” Augusta said.

  “But I don’t know why.”

  “Where did you get such a curious list?” Augusta asked.

  I told her.

  “It is curious that they would note that one of the members was hanged as a horse thief.”

  “What I find curious are the blank lines scattered about,” she said. “Look, they’re all primes. Numbers 59 and 61, for example.”

  “Primes?”

  “Numbers that can only be divided, without a remainder, by themselves and one,” she said. “All of the blanks are primes, but some of the primes have names, such as number thirteen, Angus Wright.”

  “What would that mean?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “But look, Jackson Miles, twenty-three—a prime.”

  “What about John Shear, the horse thief ?”

  “Twenty-nine. Prime.”

  “Prime numbers must have been used to designate a hidden membership within the general membership of the library association,” I said. “There was a connection among Miles, Wright, and Shear. Exactly what is unclear, but it must have been something worth keeping secret—and considering Shear’s violent death, I’ll bet they weren’t engaged in charity work.”

  “Fascinating,” Augusta said.

  “But why use blank spaces at all?” I asked.

  “It’s a result of the imperfect ratio of legitimate members to secret ones,” she said. “You couldn’t expect the pace of the regular membership to exactly match that of those joining for other reasons. As the months wore on, the non-primes filled up quicker than the primes, so you have the last seventeen prime numbers left blank.”

  “Augusta, you are now approaching sainthood in my eyes.”

  “Hardly,” she said. “It’s just schoolgirl math.”

  “Well, you can keep my books anytime,” I said.

  “You can’t afford me, dear.”

  “I’m sure I can’t. How many primes are there in the first hundred and twenty-five numbers?”

  “Thirty,” she said.

  I again counted the blank spaces.

  “There are seventeen blanks, so that gives us thirteen members of this syndicate,” I said.
“We can assume three—Miles, Wright, and Shear—so that brings the number down to ten.”

  I tapped the list.

  “We are now down to ten names, instead of ninety-nine. The size is becoming manageable.”

  “Make a new list,” Augusta said. “Of the first thirteen primes.”

  I started with one.

  “That’s not a prime,” she said. “It has to be greater than one.”

  “So, tell me,” I said.

  She rattled off the list, and I wrote down the names that went with the numbers:

  2. A. C. Ford

  3. Samuel Blalock

  5. Ben Hollister

  7. Samuel Drew

  11. Butch Jones

  17. Allen Gregory

  19. Jasper Arnold

  31. Glen Lewin

  37. Ethan Smith

  41. Cade Harland

  “You can draw a line through A. C. Ford,” Augusta said. “He was an attorney who was taken from a coach outside Denver and later found shotgunned to death. I clearly remember hearing about it, and reading it in the newspapers, because we were passing through about that time on our way to the gold camps.” “This was about 1860?”

  She nodded.

  “I should have recognized Shear’s name as well, but it’s been so long ago. The papers said he was killed by the same group of vigilantes, some sort of secret tribunal.”

  That’s what Patterson, the library association treasurer, had told me as well.

  “Do you know what prompted the killings?”

  “There had been an epidemic of horse and cattle thefts around Denver City and Auraria, hundreds of animals stolen, and eventually a man was caught in possession of several of the stolen horses,” she said. “He was hanged at the head of Cherry Creek, but in an attempt to save his own life, confessed to being part of a vast criminal network. He named the attorney, A. C. Ford, as the boss of the local chapter, and said Shear was his lieutenant. So, there were three executions—two hangings and a buckshot firing squad—within a few days.”

  “No wonder the library association closed down so quickly,” I said. “All of its prime members were being killed. Do you know who any of the members of the vigilance committee may have been?”