by Lou Cameron
There was an uneasy murmur. Then the stubby Trevor stepped away from the bar with his frock coat hanging open to expose his gun grips as he asked with a scowl, “And then what might you know about hard-rock mining that we don’t, look you?”
Stringer left his right boot on the brass rail, his own gun clear, and met Trevor’s scowl with a thin smile as he replied in an even tone, “Oh, the mastermind had to know more than me about mining. It’s taken me all this time to figure out what he was up to. But, of course, I was sent to cover Indian trouble and might have never paid any attention to less interesting rocks if the slicker hadn’t made my life so interesting. That’s the trouble with trying to be a slick crook. It can lead a man to making a heap of sneaky moves that just inform the intended victim that some fool game seems to be going on.”
Trevor growled, “Suppose you tell us what this game you speak of might be, instead of beating so about the bush, look you.”
Stringer said, “I wish you’d stop hovering your gun hand like that, old son. It makes you a nervous man to talk to.”
Behind Stringer, Tim McCoy put a thoughtful hand on one of his own .45s and announced, “This is a private conversation between my deputy and Taffy Trevor. I don’t want anybody else butting in, and I mean what I say.” Then he said, “Go ahead, Stringer. Only get to the point. For any man has the right to draw on another who’s accusing him without any proof, as I hope you know.”
Stringer asked Trevor if he was fixing to draw. The pudgy Welshman put his gun hand on the bar and demanded to know why on earth he’d want to do a thing like that. So Stringer continued, “Once upon a time there was a cinnabar outcrop nobody knew about but some Indians who only used it for medicine paint. Then a white prospector found it and sold his claim to the big mining company most of you might still be working for. We all know how it was being mined and processed. Only the mastermind thought to test the ore for other metals. He no doubt knew, and was afraid I knew, that some mercury ores here in the Sierra contain gold as well as mercury.”
That certainly seemed to get everyone’s undivided attention. Stringer held up his gun hand for silence, not too far above his gun, and said, “Mercury amalgamates, or mixes, with other metals. Gold is immune to most acids but melts like ice into mercury. The rascal behind all this bullshit knew how to test for gold by using prussic acid, or cyanide. He spilled one hell of a lot of it up around that heap of spent ore. So when a little girl bit into a tasty wild bulb spattered with cyanide, it killed her. But nobody knew why until this evening. Swensen was trying to keep me from gathering ore samples. He—or the sneak he worked for—didn’t want it assayed as laced with either cyanide or gold.”
In a far corner, Lem Crocker glared at Trevor and reached for his old Patterson conversion.
Tim McCoy drew, threw down on him, and said, “Don’t. I know how you feel. But stay out of it.”
Trevor was looking green around the gills now as he protested, “You’re mad as a loon, look you! Are you accusing me and my smelter crew of boiling mercury out of the ore and casting the tailings aside with higher-temperature gold still in it?”
Stringer said, “Hell, it wasn’t hard. You just said gold has a much higher melting point. You must know that’s not how you extract gold to begin with. Gold extraction is a cold chemical process. The old-fashioned way involves running pulverized gold ore mixed with water over a bed of mercury. Nothing but the gold sticks to the mercury, and separating them’s easy enough. You just said mercury boils off and leaves the gold behind, in this case still in the rock.”
“We knew nothing of any gold in that ore, look you!” Trevor almost wailed.
Stringer added, “The newer and best way is to grind the ore as fine as face powder and mix it with cyanide, or prussic acid. The acid only dissolves the gold and leaves the grit solid. You strain the gold-cyanide liquor out and kill the acid with lye so the gold can settle as pure metal. The process is cheap, quiet, and can be done on a small scale in just about any ghost town. The mastermind meant to let the company pay for most of the mining, and, once they abandoned the site, a mere handful of confederates could extract the gold from all that industrial waste they thought they were leaving behind.”
Trevor shook his head wildly and protested, “But I am on record as wanting to keep mining, look you! From here the company is sending me down near San Diego to mine more cinnabar! So how could I be this mastermind of your grand Scotch imagination, you see?”
“I never said you were. It was Porter. They never made him overall boss of a mining camp because he was dumb about mining. He kept talking about the gals in San Diego long before you and your blasting crew reached the bottom of the vein up here. I reckon he liked gals to the point of its being injurious to his health. He should have worried more about poor old Watson than me. But Watson’s young wife was pretty and more than willing to screw a snake if only someone would hold its head. So we know how that turned out, sort of.”
Jimbo called out from one side, “Could Watson have been in on that other stuff with the boss, MacKail?”
Stringer replied sadly, “Nope. Porter didn’t even tell the poor old gent he was screwing his wife. If Watson had been anything more than a dupe we wouldn’t be having this conversation. For a crook with the local law in his hip pocket wouldn’t have had to mess around with hired guns and sneaky Indian ladies to stop me. He’d have just had me gunned down here in Quicksilver for spitting on the boardwalk or whatever. Once I made it to the center of his web, the sneaky spider had to play a two-faced game and hope like hell I was as dumb about colloidal gold as the rest of you.”
Trevor snapped, “Bite your tongue! It’s an experienced hard-rock man I am, and the Taffs I hired myself to work the smelter know a thing or two about mining too, you see!”
Stringer sighed and said, “Shit, I thought I’d just explained that. Everyone here was hired by Porter to begin with. He made sure everyone working under him was simply trained to blast and process any ore they were told to, not to assay it.”
Trevor growled, “Thank you very much for calling me a sucker, but since your mastermind is dead and the company has ordered us to abandon the site, I see little profit in further discussion of the matter, look you.”
Tim McCoy said, “The man has a point, Stringer. All’s well as ends well, and the county law can worry about any loose strings, right?”
“Wrong,” said Stringer soberly. “Porter was just the crook who put it together. Watson killed him for another reason entirely. I don’t see how a dead boss could have ordered Swenson to make sure I didn’t help myself to any ore samples this evening, either.”
Jimbo grinned wolfishly and said, “Hot damn! I follows your drift! With Clem Watson dead as well as the boss crook, I’d say that means I get to arrest his segundo, who must have took over the operation, right?”
Stringer nodded but continued to face Trevor as he told the dumpy Welshman, “As senior company official here, you’d have wanted Jimbo to carry on in Watson’s place until you packed up and hauled out, right?”
Trevor hesitated, then said, “I would have. Now I’m not at all sure the company will want anyone leaving. Certainly not before we run all the rock we’ve dug through a more advanced reduction process.”
Stringer nodded. “You’ll want to appoint some men you really trust as company police, then. We’re talking about gold and a two-faced deputy who just shot his own boss in the back.”
Jimbo went on grinning vacantly as he went for his gun. But Stringer had been keeping an eye on Jimbo in the mirror behind the bar with just such a move in mind, so he dropped to one knee and spun on it as he whipped his own gun out, and though Jimbo drew faster than anyone who looked so dumb had any right to, it was Stringer who fired first. His first round hit just above the treacherous Jimbo’s belt buckle and jackknifed his head down to take the second round in his still grinning mouth.
Stringer’s bullet shattered teeth and sent them out the gory exit wound at the base of Jimb
o’s skull as Tim McCoy shouted, “Stringer! Down!”
Stringer dove forward into the sawdust as Trevor fired—but not, as it turned out, at either Stringer or McCoy. McCoy put a second round in the member of Swensen’s blasting crew who’d drawn on Stringer. That one fired the short-barreled .32 he’d had under his overalls into the sawdust between himself and his intended victim before he followed in a stiff-legged fall and never even twitched after he hit with a dull thud, like a tree cut off close to the roots.
By this time one of Trevor’s fellow Welshman was blocking the doorway with his own gun out and a stubborn set to his jaw. The older and fatter Trevor shouted something in Welsh and then repeated in English, “The next man who moves a muscle dies like a dog, look you!”
So nobody moved a muscle. Stringer just lay there, smoking gun in one hand, as Trevor snapped, “That’s better. Now we want everyone but MacKail and McCoy to slowly unbuckle their gunbelts and step clear of them when they hit the floor, you see.”
Nobody argued about that, either. So once he’d disarmed the whole crowd, the new boss of the site began to sort the sheep from the goats with the help of his Welsh pals. Trevor had seen the list made up by the late Porter, and so, as Stringer had hoped, he had a good handle on those who had been “fired” to stay behind with the gold. Most of the men there were honest miners, of course. But Trevor said he felt sure the eight sheepish men his boys had penned in one corner would just love to tell the county sheriff as much as they knew, as soon as the otherwise useless county lawmen arrived.
One of the exposed confederates didn’t seem to want to wait that long. He whimpered, “You boys got all the serious ones old Porter recruited, Taffy. I, for one, didn’t know half as much as I do now thanks to Stringer. Old Jimbo never told us he shot Watson, and it was him and Swensen as tried to bushwhack Stringer and that gal with arrows.”
Trevor cocked an eyebrow at Stringer to ask, “How did you know Jimbo murdered Watson?”
McCoy chimed in with, “That’s right. I was there too when the three of us found the three of them dead. Who told you Jimbo was the one who finished off old Watson after he gunned his woman and her sneaky lover?”
Stringer dusted sawdust from his denim as he rose all the way and commenced to reload, saying, “The sneaky lover told me. Porter had three rounds in his chest, fired point-blank as he rolled off Watson’s cheating wife. Did you really think it was possible for a gent in such distress to get to his own gun rig, hanging over a chair across the room? Jimbo was making his rounds and responded to the sound of old Watson’s shots. He no doubt found the old man just standing there, gun in hand but heartsick and bewildered. Jimbo simply shot him and had the time to arrange the bodies more artistically by the time you and me got there, see?”
“I do now,” McCoy said. “Are you saying you read it that way right off?” Stringer answered with a weary nod, “Suspecting wasn’t proving. I figured that once he was free to do as he liked, with nobody left in charge of him, he’d feel free to show his true colors. How was I to know he’d been taught to act two-faced so well?
Old Trevor shot a keen glance Stringer’s way and said, “You do know a thing or two yourself about trickery, don’t you? Had not you tricked Jimbo into going for that gun, you’d never have been able to prove anything, look you.”
Stringer didn’t answer. So Trevor put some men to work at cleaning up the mess while Stringer led McCoy outside.
“It looks like we’re stuck here until the county can send someone to take our depositions and such,” Stringer said. “But, hell, we’ve got bedrolls on our saddles and it’s not quite winter yet.”
“I’ll be camping a good ways out, then, alone,” McCoy answered. “We don’t know we got every last one of the gang, and the two of us in one place might make a mighty tempting target.”
Stringer shrugged. “The game is up for any we missed. They know they’ll never be able to refine the secret gold in those tailings now that it’s not a secret anymore. The plan was to extract it sort of private. But now anyone we missed will just have to work for a living like the rest of us.”
“I know. But I’m sorry you had to spill the beans about that gold. The last thing my Indians need right now is a gold rush. It was bad enough as it was.”
“You won’t know they’re anybody’s Indians unless they’re still around come the spring thaw. This valley has been ruined for the Yana in any case, and they might just know some other gathering grounds our kind hasn’t managed to fuck up yet.”
As they approached the corral and tack shed he added, “There won’t be a serious gold rush, with one big mining outfit having claim to all the color for miles.” Then they went inside the dark tack shed and groped about in silence for a spell.
Stringer found his Mex saddle in the dark and untied his bedroll. “I’ll take the north slope if you’d rather sleep closer to your Indians.”
McCoy grumbled, “Bullshit. You want the warm morning sun, and we both know it.”
Stringer chuckled sheepishly. “All right, I’ll take the shady slope and you can sunbathe, then. I’ll see you back in the saloon come morning.”
The Indian agent didn’t argue.
Stringer hoisted the bedding to his shoulder and headed across town in the dark, jumping the ditch of dirty water along the way. He passed just a few shacks and headed on up the slope. About where the grass began to give way to chaparral he stopped and spread his roll. Then he sat on it to smoke and ponder some.
He had a pretty good feature for his paper, once he strung it together sensible and cut it down to say two columns. What to leave out was always harder to figure than what to put in, for a newspaperman. He knew a lot of his personal part in the saga was unprintable, even if he’d thought it was anyone else’s damned business.
He’d built and smoked three cigarettes before he had things about right in his head and undressed to turn in. He’d only been bare under the top blanket a few more minutes when he heard someone creeping through the dry grass.
He frowned thoughtfully and eased a bare arm from under the blanket to quietly haul his six-gun from the rig he’d nested in his overturned hat. As a point of lamplight from the settlement below winked out and then on again, he had his hitherto invisible target pretty well located. He trained the muzzle of his .38 on it and growled, “That’s close enough. I’m not in the market for any magazine subscriptions. So what’s left?”
A familiar female voice called back, “Oh, there you are. I thought it might be you, lighting one cigarette after another up there. What on earth are you doing up here, darling?”
As he lowered his gun with a puzzled frown, Stringer told her, “I was planning on spending the night here. Have you and old Nat Robbins asked for your dad’s blessings yet?”
She moved closer and dropped to her knees on the edge of his bedroll. She laughed lightly. “Good heavens! Would you want poor Father to suffer a stroke?”
“Not now. I did suspect him of being even crazier on the subject of Indians for a spell. But we just found out who was causing all the trouble around here.”
“I know. We just heard. I expected you to return to our camp for some… coffee. Is that why you’re sulking up here? You thought I was more interested in Professor Robbins?”
Stringer shrugged a bare shoulder and said, “He sure seemed interested in you. I reckon it’s a lady’s constitutional right to flirt back.”
She began to unbutton her blouse as she replied, “I’ll have you know that when I shack up with a man it’s never a man who spends more time talking about Indians than Father! I’m interested in the subject, to a point. But I’m not about to take it to bed with me! I like Nat. He’s interesting to work with. But I fear he’d be an awful bore in bed.”
She must not have thought Stringer was, judging from the way she shucked the rest of her duds and climbed in with him as if she’d been invited.
But he didn’t feel like evicting the sassy little thing. So as he took her nude body in h
is naked arms she hugged him back and purred, “Oh, this does feel cozy. Now suppose you tell me all about that showdown in the saloon, and how you ever found out who the mastermind was, you clever soul!”
Stringer kissed her, rolled her on her back, and told her, “Later. Right now I’ve more important things on my mind.”
THE END
YOU CAN FIND ALL OF LOU CAMERON’S STRINGER SERIES AVAILABLE AS EBOOKS:
STRINGER (#1)
STRINGER ON DEAD MAN’S RANGE (#2)
STRINGER ON THE ASSASSIN’S TRAIL (#3)
STRINGER AND THE HANGMAN’S RODEO (#4)
STRINGER AND THE WILD BUNCH (#5)
STRINGER AND THE HANGING JUDGE (#6)
STRINGER IN TOMBSTONE (#7)
STRINGER AND THE DEADLY FLOOD (#8)
STRINGER AND THE LOST TRIBE (#9)
STRINGER AND THE OIL WELL INDIANS (#10)
STRINGER AND THE BORDER WAR (#11)
STRINGER ON THE MOJAVE (#12)
STRINGER ON PIKES PEAK (#13)
STRINGER AND THE HELL-BOUND HERD (#14)
STRINGER IN A TEXAS SHOOT-OUT (#15)