Silver

by Graham Masterton

  ‘Well, damn it, I can’t offer you too much in return,’ laughed Holliday. ‘A greasy deck of cards, and a medicinal inhaler, and two fancy vests from .France. Hardly seems like a fair bet to me.’

  ‘Nonetheless, that’s the bet. You want to take it, or concede?’ Holliday stopped laughing and stared at Henry narrowly. ‘You mean it, don’t you?’ he said.

  Henry nodded. He felt completely unreal, as if he were someone else altogether, a man that he had dreamed about; or remembered from another time and another place. For the first time in his life, everything was on the line. Not just the diamonds, not just the mining stock, not just the houses; but all the respect which his money had earned for him; and Baby Doe, too. He had no illusions that Baby Doe would stay with him if he were suddenly to lose everything he had.

  There was silence in the Tasteful Saloon. Henry hesitated for a moment, and then tugged off his huge diamond ring and laid it on the beer-circled table. The miners and gamblers stared at it as if they expected it to do something magical, like rise up into the air of its own accord. Henry said, ‘Here’s proof. This ring represents my fortune. Here it is on the table.’

  Holliday coughed once, but sucked in his cheeks to suppress another one. He reached into his pocket and produced a small cardboard pill-box, Dr Charles Broadbent’s Famous Tubercular Lozenges. He rattled them, and put them down next to the ring. ‘There you are, Mr Roberts. This represents my fortune.’

  Henry said, quietly and immediately, ‘I’ll see you.’

  Without another word, Holliday spread out his cards on the table, and the miners gasped like women. A full house, three aces and two tens. Nothing that Henry held in his hand could top that. The odds of two hands being dealt in the same game that were both higher than a flush were something ridiculous, like ten million to one.

  Holliday raised both hands to Henry, and smiled, as if to say, ‘I’m sorry, but it was your idea.’ The miners shouted and whooped, and Holliday snapped his fingers to Ted Johnson for drinks all around. Then he reached across the table, and picked up Henry’s ring, and said, loudly, ‘With this ring, good fortune, I thee wed; and kiss poverty goodbye.’ He slipped the ring on to his finger, and then waggled his hand so that everybody could see it. There were more whoops, and somebody fired a revolver into the ceiling with a deafening bang, and they were all showered in plaster dust.

  ‘Wowee,’ shouted one miner, kicking the bar with his boot, again and again, ‘wowee, never saw the like. Never saw the darn like.’

  Ted Johnson was already coming across with a dozen brimming glasses of beer when Henry laid out his own hand of cards. Everybody in the saloon was so excited that very few of them took any notice. But Doc Holliday peered over, his hand still raised in the air to show off the diamond ring; and the transformation that went over his face was extraordinary. He looked up at Henry and his cheeks were as grey as a burned-out hearth.

  ‘Fours,’ said Henry.

  An unnatural quiet fell over the saloon. Somebody said, ‘Fours?’

  Doc Holliday held back another coughing spasm, although his cheeks kept blowing out, and his throat rattled. He took off the diamond ring, and held it out to Henry on the palm of his hand.

  ‘Keep it,’ said Henry, quietly. ‘Buy yourself some treatment. You gave me what I needed. You deserve something in return.’

  He stood up, straightened his necktie, and walked wearily out of the saloon into the afternoon sunlight. The snow was dazzling; but the thaw had already begun, and the rooftops were decorated with musically-dripping icicles.

  Henry walked all the way back to the Clarendon Hotel. Young Price was anxiously waiting for him in his suite. ‘Mrs Doe’s here, sir. She’s been here for an hour. I didn’t know what to tell her.’

  Baby Doe was standing in the window, looking out at the Roberts Opera House. There was a luncheon tray on the table, chicken breasts and salad, most of it untouched. When Henry came into the room, she turned at once and came quickly over to greet him. She was wearing an elegantly cut spring suit in beige wool, with chocolate-coloured piping, and a large feathery hat.

  ‘Henry, my sweetheart.’

  He held her close, squeezed her, smiled.

  ‘You smell of drink,’ she said. ‘You haven’t been drinking?’

  ‘A little,’ he told her.

  She said, abashed, ‘I missed you, Henry. I caught the first train from Denver this morning. Henry, I missed you. I don’t know. I was worried about you. I felt that you needed me. Is that silly?’

  He couldn’t stop smiling. He picked up the bottle of chilled white wine from the luncheon tray and poured himself a glass.

  ‘We’re going to be married,’ he told her.

  She came across the hotel room and the sun shone in the plumes of her hat as if she were a queen; or a queen-to-be.

  ‘Henry,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Henry, I love you so much.’

  Henry kissed her, and then lifted his glass of wine, and walked around the room, and smiled at her. ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘No buts. No delays. We’re going to be married.’

  He lifted his glass of wine again, in a silent toast, then he turned away and faced the window. Baby Doe hesitated for a moment; but then she came across and put her arms around his waist, from behind, resting her head against his broad back.

  She didn’t see that he was looking blindly out at the Rocky Mountain sunshine, his face wet with tears.

  Epilogue

  ‘I couldn’t believe it when I found out that you were still living here,’ said the young reporter, frowning into the darkness.

  The old woman lifted her hand, as if to say that she didn’t particularly care whether he could believe it or not. The shack was cold and sparsely furnished, and smelled of cooking-fat. The wind kept shuddering at the shutters.

  ‘Can you tell me something about your wedding?’ the young reporter asked her. ‘Do you remember it at all?’

  ‘Of course I remember it,’ the old woman said, in the dryest of voices. She was very shrivelled, and crunched-up in her chair, and her silver hair was parted in the middle, and topped with a small black bonnet, of the kind that Victorian widows used to wear. ‘It was the most spectacular wedding of the year. Even the President came.’

  ‘That would be President—?’

  ‘Chester A. Arthur, of course. He was very charming. He said that I was the most beautiful bride that he had ever seen. And I was, too. You should have seen my dress. It was white lace, layers and layers of white lace. It cost $7,000, which in those days was a fortune. I swept down the stairs—I swept down the stairs—and there was Henry, waiting for me, looking as proud as a king. Poor Henry.’

  ‘That was at—?’

  The old woman coughed thickly. ‘Willard’s Hotel, in Washington. The finest wedding that Washington had ever seen. You should have seen me. You should have seen me!’

  ‘I wish I had,’ the young reporter told her. He was beginning to grow uncomfortable. The old woman smelled very strongly of urine, and the wind kept banging at the shutter as if it was warning him that a hurricane was getting up. He was only eighteen, a cub reporter on the Leadville Herald. His editor had lifted up his horn-rimmed glasses and peered at him with a with watery eyes, and said, ‘Did you know that Baby Doe is still alive?’

  ‘Who the hell is Baby Doe?’ he had wanted to know.

  Anybody less like anybody’s baby was hard to imagine. A wrinkly old woman living in a shack by the dilapidated winding-shed of the Matchless Mine. His colleagues on the paper had teased him that he was going out to interview a ghost; so watch out—wooooo!

  The old woman said, ‘It wasn’t fair, of course; it wasn’t just. We could only stay in Washington for just a month. Henry had given those Denver party officials nearly a quarter of a million dollars, one way and another; but they sold him short. They took the money and still wouldn’t respect him. There were two vacancies for senator—one for a full term, and one just for thirty days. There were 97 ballots, but in the end
they said that his divorce weighed against him; and he lost. All he got was the thirty-day term.’

  ‘That was more or less the finish of his political career, wasn’t it?’ the young reporter asked her.

  ‘He tried again for the senatorial nomination in ’86; but failed; and then for the governorship of Colorado, in ’88, but he didn’t get that either. They kept telling him that he was too ostentatious, that he shouldn’t have married a younger woman like me, but I never believed them; I always thought that there was something else. David Moffat always used to say that it was “the Platte River” but I never understood what that meant, and he never explained it.’

  The young reporter said, ‘When did his business problems begin?’

  The old woman was silent for a long time, and then she replied, ‘I don’t know. I can scarcely remember now. It all happened so gradually. It was his political failure that discouraged him the most; and I think that after that he lost his interest in life. It was all very well to be rich, but what was the point of it, if you couldn’t have any effect on the world around you?’

  She asked then, ‘Would you care for some coffee?’

  The young reporter glanced across at the grease-caked stove, and shook his head. ‘Thanks all the same.’

  The old woman snuffled, and shifted herself in her chair, and then she said, ‘The mines began to peter out first, one after the other. He tried to finance new diggings; and he had to mortgage all of our property to raise enough money; but we never hit it rich again. Then there was all that financial panic in ’93, tom foolery, most of it, but half the banks in Denver were forced to close, and if it hadn’t been for David Moffat, we would have been wiped out then. In the end we had scarcely anything left but the Matchless, which was still producing a little silver; but then they repealed the Sherman Act in ’93, and the government stopped buying silver for coinage, and that was the finish.’

  She said nothing for almost a minute. She had recited her piece. The young reporter didn’t know what to ask next, and sat uncomfortably opposite her, watching her as she sniffed and rocked in her chair and reminisced.

  ‘Henry went through such bewilderment,’ she said. ‘He went through such pain. He kept saying, “I won this luck.”’

  ‘What did he mean by that? Do you know?’

  She shook her head, looked away, coughed. ‘He just kept saying, “I won this luck. I won it.” I didn’t know what he meant.’

  The young reporter looked down at his notes. ‘He divorced his first wife in 1883, is that right?’

  The old woman nodded. ‘She divorced him; but he forced her. He told her that he was never coming back to her; and that if she didn’t sue for divorce, he wouldn’t give her a penny. She took in lodgers for a while, to make money; but then he sent miners around to threaten the lodgers; and so she gave in. I can’t remember what the settlement was; but it was more than a quarter of a million dollars.’

  She licked her cracked lips, and said, ‘She asked the judge if she could keep the name Roberts; and the judge said of course you can, it’s yours by right. And then he said, I want to have put on record that this divorce was not willingly asked for. Then she left the court, and she was crying.’

  The young reporter scribbled and scribbled. Then he stopped scribbling, and said, ‘My editor was surprised that you were still here.’

  She shook her head. ‘No, he wasn’t; he was surprised that I was still alive.’

  ‘But what are you doing here? I mean, surely you could have found some place—well, more comfortable.’

  The old woman sat up straight in her chair. ‘Henry died in 1899, my boy; a few months before the new century began. I so much wanted him to see 1900, but he never did. But, do you know, out of everything that we were forced to sell, he always kept hold of his stock in the Matchless; I don’t know why. He said something had happened in the Matchless that changed his life. And over and over again, he told me, “Hang on to the Matchless,” “Hang on to the Matchless.” And so I did. And that’s why I’m here today.’

  The young reporter said, ‘The Matchless mine is flooded, you know; and as far as I understand it, it’s completely worked out.’

  The old woman shook her head. ‘“Hang on to the Matchless,” that’s what he told me. His dying words. Well, his last but dying words. His actual dying words were, “Who can cut my epitaph?” but I didn’t understand that, either.’

  Late in the afternoon, with the sky piled high with cumulus clouds, the young reporter left the Matchless Mine and returned to his office. He spent the rest of the day in the newspaper morgue, reading up about Henry Roberts and Baby Doe and the days when Leadville’s streets had been crowded with celebrities and millionaires and famous criminals, and a man could be shot for laughing too loud.

  He wrote a bright, human-interest story about Baby Doe; headlined ‘Silver Baron’s Widow Still Lives In Hope of Lucky Strike.’

  It wasn’t until two years later, when he was working on the Denver Times, that he came across a cutting that said, ‘Henry Roberts Denies Platte River Involvement.’ He had been working on a story about local government corruption, and he had been looking back in the files to check the last time that any Denver notables had been accused of taking bribes.

  The cutting was annotated February 8, 1885. It said: ‘Silver millionaire Mr Henry Roberts emphatically denied a suggestion made last week by the Colorado Democratic committee that he had taken $1,000 a month commission from certain unnamed parties in payment for allowing his Leadville bank to be used for the purposes of perpetrating “an extraordinary fraud”.

  ‘The Democrats accuse Mr Roberts of knowingly permitting his bank to be used illegally to disperse hundreds of thousands of dollars which Eastern and European businessmen had expected to be invested in a steamer-service on the Platte River, and a new resort city close to Denver.

  ‘Mr George Osprey, of the Democratic committee, said, “In my view, Mr Roberts should be indicted for fraud. The evidence is clear. The Platte River is not navigable, nor ever will be, not even by side-wheeler; and the steamer that was actually built for the purpose has ended up as a showboat on the artificial lake at Riverfront Park, under the mocking name of HMS Pinafore.”

  ‘Mr Osprey said that the source of his information was “unimpeachable”. He added, “You will not find a closer source of evidence on this matter; nor a truer.”’

  The young reporter vainly looked for any further mention of the Platte River affair; but there was none. The Democrats had apparently been satisfied with the effect of their allegations on Henry Roberts’ political career. No mention was made of William Byers ever having been involved; nor Henry Stanley; nor Walter von Richthofen.

  Eighteen months later, however, the young reporter’s editor called him into his partitioned office, and said, ‘Didn’t you once write a piece on Baby Doe?’

  The young reporter nodded. ‘I went out to see her. I talked to her.’

  ‘Well, here you are,’ his editor told him, pushing a telegraph message across the desk. ‘They found her yesterday, dead. Frozen solid, in that cabin of hers. The police said that she’d been dead for two weeks.’

  The young reporter took the message and left his editor’s office. He collected his coat, and his notebook, and went down in the elevator to the lobby; then out into the street. It was 1935: the year of Porgy and Bess; the year that the CIO was formed, to expand America’s trades unions; the year that the Social Security Act was passed; and that Huey Long was assassinated in Louisiana. Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire had just released their first picture together, and Walt Disney was hard at work on Snow White.

  The Leadville coroner told the young reporter that Baby Doe had been found with a notebook of poems, apparently written by somebody called ‘Agnes’. He showed the reporter the page at which the book had been left open beside her chair.

  It read:

  ‘Under the linden trees,

  When blasts of winter freeze

  Each sparkl
ing dew-drop to a pearly gem,

  The mourners slowly tread,

  And weep their loved one dead;

  While that blest word

  “The resurrection and the life”, is heard,

  And they repeat

  The hopes of those who trust in heaven to meet,

  And rest for ever at their Redeemer’s feet.’

  The young reporter read it, and then handed it back. The coroner said, ‘What do you think? Do you want to quote it?’

  The young reporter shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I don’t really know what it means.’

  The coroner said, ‘Don’t ask me. It sounds like an epitaph.’

  If you enjoyed Silver you might be interested in Last Shot by Christopher Kenworthy, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from Last Shot by Chrisopher Kenworthy

  1.

  The big bay was nervous coming down from the rim-rock and, as a result, so was Cassidy. He rode with his reins loosely held in his left hand, his right on his thigh close to the butt of the Colt and his eyes restlessly examining the countryside under the shade of the wide, black hat.

  The country, Cassidy reckoned, was worth the attention. The Mogollon Rim would make a man’s breath come short in most places in the world, and Cassidy also figured he had been to most places in the world.

  The Mogollons were a picture at this time of the year. Soaring cliffs, masses of green leaves now shading into the rich tones of the autumn, with the gold of the cottonwoods down there on the flat land shading up to the rich reds of the maples. Away, far, far away in the distance, he could see the loom of the White Mountains and between him and them, lay a huge stretch of green pines.

  A scene to take a man’s breath away, for sure. But an Apache arrow would take his breath away just as quickly and a sight more permanently, so he rode carefully, stopping in the loom of the trees before risking the clearings. Then he picked his own trail along game paths which did not follow obvious lines of least resistance.