Flying Eagle

by Tim Champlin

  “I knew where Wright’s ranch was, but I was fearful of going there in the daylight, so I waited for darkness. I didn’t see anyone around, and didn’t know what to do next.

  “We were locked in the woodshed,” Jay inteijected.

  “I wish I had known that. Anyway, I didn’t see any lights, even in the bunkhouse, so I settled down, just out of sight, to wait. I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew, it was morning, and I was just able to slip away without being seen as two men came out of the house. I didn’t know what else to do, so I got the wagon where I had hidden it and started toward Rawlings to get help. About fifteen miles away, I ran into a cowboy riding toward Wright’s place and was able to capture him with my rifle. I guess I scared him into thinking I was really going to shoot him on the spot, me looking so wild-eyed at him and acting about half-crazy and all.” He grinned and winked at them. “But he was riding back from Rawlings and told me everything I wanted to know—that you were captives at Wright’s and that the rancher was planning to maroon you in that cave. Well, I had no idea where this cave was, so I just brought him along to show me. We took a roundabout way, and it was away after dark before we got to where the road climbs up this ridge. We stopped there for the night and I tied him up good and tight to the wagon wheel while I slept. Told him I’d cut his throat if he made a sound, although he could have yelled his head off and nobody would have heard him where we were. Anyway, we started up this way at first light and I left him with the wagon and came on up on foot. That’s when I saw you fall. It almost made me sick. I thought you were dead at first.”

  Just then they came down the steep slope into an open meadow and Jay stopped suddenly, staring at the sight of Rafe Coyote-face sitting on the grass, his arms behind him, tied to a wagon wheel. The team of horses was standing patiently in harness, munching on the sparse grass around them. As one moved a step to get a fresh mouthful, the man was saying, “Whoa! Whoa there, boys. Don’t move now. That’s a good fella. Whoa!”

  Gorraiz grinned under his dark beard. “He doesn’t know that team’s perfectly trained to be ground-reined and won’t move more than a couple of feet in any direction. He’s afraid if something spooks them, he’ll be thumping around on that wheel with a broken neck and legs. It’s to his best interest that the team stand still and he remain quiet.”

  Coyote-face saw them. “Damn you, untie me from this wheel.” He was nearly lying on his side as the wheel had turned.

  Gorraiz quickly released him, and handed his rifle to Jay to keep the man covered while he retrieved the long lines from under the horses’ hooves.

  A rifle shot blasted the morning stillness and a slug splintered the corner of the wagon box.

  Gorraiz grabbed the heads of the rearing horses.

  “Hold it right there!” Jack Bowlegs shouted, stepping out from behind a giant fir tree twenty yards away. They all froze in their tracks. Rafe Coyote-face sprang away from them and snatched his pistol out of Gorraiz’s waistband while the shepherd was still clinging to the headstalls of the plunging horses.

  “Now then,” Bowlegs said as the team was calmed and Gorraiz was able to release them, “we’ll take a little walk back up that ridge. It’s a damn good thing I came back up here to make sure this morning. That’s why I’m the boss’s right-hand man. Neither of us likes to leave anything to chance. This time I’ll make sure that all of you have a fatal fall from that cliff. And then I’ll find a way to get that wagon and team up there and run it off, too, so it’ll look like you all went over by accident.” He motioned with the rifle. “Get going or I’ll shoot you where you stand. Doesn’t matter to me. By the time anyone finds your bodies, they’ll be picked clean by wolves and buzzards and it’ll be hard to tell if a bullet killed you or the fall did.”

  With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, Jay turned to join the other three as they faced back up the hill.

  But he had taken only three or four steps when a shot cracked behind him and he whirled around to see Bowlegs stagger and fall. Coyote-face’s pistol spat smoke and flame again and Jack Bowlegs screamed in pain as he grabbed his lower leg. Rafe sprang forward and snatched the wounded man’s rifle and threw it into the wagon bed as the horses jumped and plunged away, stepping on their own reins, until they came to a halt a few yards away.

  “What are you doing?” Jack screamed.

  “That’ll hold you until we get far away from here,” the shooter replied, calmly, but with his eyes blazing. “I’ll not be a party to murder. All I wanted was the money, and you wouldn’t even let me take that. Well, damn your hide and Wright’s too!”

  He turned to the four who were standing, dumbfounded, at this scene. “I’d go with you and tell the sheriff what I know, but I’m in no hurry to see the inside of the Territorial Prison, myself. So I’ll just take his horse and ride outa here. I think I hear some greener pastures calling me.”

  He waved the gun barrel at the man on the ground. “Don’t worry about him. He’ll live. I was hired because I’m an expert pistol shot. I clipped his collar bone and put a hole in the fleshy part of his calf. He’s all yours.”

  With that he backed away into the shade of the trees on the far side of the mountain meadow, then turned and ran. A few seconds later they heard the thudding of hoofbeats receding.

  Jay’s head was still reeling from his sudden change of fortune, as Gorraiz led the horses up close and they loaded the bleeding, groaning man into the back of the wagon, after searching him for hidden weapons and confiscating a sheath knife. Then Gorraiz untangled the lines and they climbed aboard. The herder clucked to the team and they rattled down the slope toward the road, leaving dust hanging in the still, morning sunlight.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  “I’m still wanted for escaping jail in San Francisco,” Marvin Cutter said as the four of them sat in the hotel dining room in Rawlings that afternoon.

  “I’ll talk to Fred Casey and see if there’s any way the judge will give you a lighter sentence,” Jay said, trying to chew a piece of antelope steak around a tongue that was still very sore and swollen. After he had said it, he wondered why. Cutter probably did not deserve a lighter sentence. But he dismissed the thought and concentrated on the food—the first he had eaten in two and a half days. In spite of his hunger, he was surprised at how quickly the meat and potatoes were filling him up. Apparently, his stomach had shrunk. “Just don’t try to get away from me now,” he continued. “I’ll have the sheriff here deputize me so I can take you back under arrest.”

  “You are a lucky man,” Gorraiz said, glaring across the table at Cutter. “If my hands had been on your throat two days ago, you would not be sitting here, healthy and eating.”

  The other three silently turned toward the shepherd whose deep, brown eyes smoldered under the heavy brows.

  “But now—huh! I wouldn’t dirty my hands on the likes of you,” Gorraiz concluded, wiping his mouth and pushing his chair away from the table with an air of finality.

  Bowlegs, whose real name turned out to be Jack Larsen, had been turned over to the sheriff who had called for the doctor to treat the man’s wounds in his cell. Jay, Fletcher Hall, and Vincent Gorraiz poured out their story to the lawman.

  It turned out that the posse that had been sent to look for them and for the train robbers had returned the day before, saddle-sore and empty-handed, having found only the big balloon tangled in the treetops on the mountainside. They had somehow missed Gorraiz’s flock, but had been led to the remains of sheep carcasses by the flocks of circling vultures. The sheep had been eaten, scattered, and decomposed so much that the posse only suspected they had been killed by humans.

  The posse, composed of about a dozen men—railroaders, merchants and cowmen—and led by only two full-time professional deputies, stopped at Wright’s ranchhouse to inquire if the rancher or his men had seen anything. But the rancher had been on his best behavior and professed total ignorance of any strangers in the area or any strange goings-o
n. He had even invited them in for a drink, but they had politely declined and ridden away, none the wiser.

  The main line had been cleared of the disabled locomotive. It had been pulled to Rawlings and now rested in the Union Pacific shop being repaired. A temporary wooden trestle had quickly been constructed by a work crew and the tracks relaid across the wash. Another locomotive had been dispatched to drag the blasted express car out of the way and then had coupled onto the train to haul the delayed and shaken passengers on to Chicago.

  As soon as the sheriff heard their story, he sent his two deputies to Wright’s ranch to find and arrest the rancher and his men.

  The man who had been shot in the raid on the sheep camp lay in a Rawlings hospital, unconscious, with a bullet in his lung. The doctor was giving no assurances of his recovery. The cowboys who had brought him in two days before had told the story that he had shot himself while cleaning his gun.

  After leaving the sheriff’s office, Jay had gone directly to the Western Union office and sent a telegraph message to Wells Fargo in San Francisco, notifying the home office of his own safety and that of the contents of the express box. Then he had written out a message for the telegrapher to tap over the wire to Fred Casey about the death of Julian Octavian Brown, in case the police did not already know it. He briefly told of the connection between Brown and the stolen gold from the mint.

  “If the detectives haven’t already made the connection between Brown and that gold, that ought to shake them a little,” Jay commented as he paid the telegrapher.

  Afterward, the four of them had headed for the hotel dining room and some much-needed food.

  When they had finished eating, they all repaired to a local bathhouse where they soaked away the grime and sweat while a Chinese coolie ran their clothes next door to his laundry for a good scrubbing.

  Two hours later they emerged, their clothes nearly dry in the windy, dry air, and headed for a tonsorial parlor where all but Gorraiz got shaved. When they came out, smelling of bay rum, Jay felt as if he had rejoined the human race. Even though he was moving very carefully, the pain in his left side had become more severe, so that he could hardly draw a deep breath. It took little persuasion from Hall for Jay to stop by the doctor’s white clapboard office. The doctor, James Davis, examined him, feeling gingerly of Jay’s side.

  “Four broken ribs,” was his diagnosis. “Lucky one of them didn’t puncture a lung. I want you to take it easy for at least two weeks. You look young and strong. Those ribs should knit fine if you do as I tell you. No unnecessary exertion,” he ordered as he finished wrapping clean, white bandages tightly around Jay’s rib cage. Jay paid the doctor and left, counting what money he had left from what he had been carrying in his billfold.

  “I have enough left for two hotel rooms and about two more meals,” he said to Gorraiz as the four of them emerged onto the windswept street once more. “Stop overnight at the hotel with us, and I’ll ride back tomorrow to get the two sacks you hid for me.”

  But the Basque shook his head. “I’m not used to sleeping inside. The wagon will do for me. I would appreciate it if you’d cover the livery stable bill for the team, though.”

  “Done. And, I don’t know about the rest of you, but there’s a beer down the street here that has my name on it.”

  Ten minutes later they sat around a table in a nearly-empty saloon.

  “This whole thing is just about cleared up, except for that note nobody can figure out,” Jay said, leaning back in his chair.

  “I wonder what I can salvage of my balloon,” Hall said, almost to himself.

  “What were the four words on that note?” Jay continued, ignoring Hall’s comment.

  “‘Palace Windsor Twelve Oaks’,” Cutter replied, quoting the cryptic message.

  “Any idea what that means?” Jay asked.

  They looked blankly at each other.

  “Something about the old man’s estate, I guess,” Cutter said.

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Brown’s estate was known as Twelve Oaks.”

  Jay sat up in his chair, ignoring the stab of pain in his side. “Why didn’t you say so before?”

  Cutter shrugged. “Never thought of it until just now. Besides, that’s a big estate. I don’t know if it means the gold is on the estate.”

  But Jay was like a hound on the scent now. “Think, man! What could ‘Palace Windsor’ mean? Did Brown have a private railroad car or something that had that name?”

  Cutter shook his head, firmly.

  “‘Palace Windsor’,” Jay repeated. “Sounds like something British.”

  They sat thinking and sipping at their foamy mugs.

  “You worked at the estate for a few months,” Jay said to Cutter. “Did you ever see that name on anything?”

  Cutter thoughtfully took another gulp and wiped his mouth. “I pretty much had the run of the place, even the main house, but I don’t remember that name on anything . . .”

  “Did he have a safe in the house that maybe had that brand name?” Hall prompted.

  “No.”

  “I guess they surely would have searched anything as obvious as a safe.”

  “What about a piece of furniture?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Has he got any kin in England?”

  Cutter thought a minute. “He never mentioned it. But then, he never said anything to me about his personal life.”

  “Could it have anything to do with the Palace Hotel in San Francisco? Does he have a suite there called the Windsor?”

  No one answered the speculation.

  The three of them fell silent once more. Jay was beginning to feel sleepy after his dinner, hot bath, shave, and beer. But he could not let go of this puzzle.

  “You know,” Cutter finally said after a long silence, “now that I think about it, there was a big, nickel-plated hard coal burning base-burner in his cellar. It was a beautiful thing. Big, fancy. And it had some sort of brand name on it. I remember the letters across the front of it, but I can’t remember what they were.”

  Hall sat up in his chair, suddenly animated. “A base-burner. A base-burner. By God, that’s it! I’ve seen those nickel-plated burners. That’s an expensive, fancy model base-burner called Palace Windsor. They’re made in a foundry near Buffalo, New York. I remember because there’s one of those that heats the depot waiting room at Omaha. I’ve spent many an hour warming my rear end at it, waiting for trains delayed by blizzards.”

  “But if that’s what the note means, what does it mean?”

  But Jay McGraw was already out of his chair and halfway to the door. “I’ll telegraph San Francisco,” he said over his shoulder.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  “You still having nightmares about snakes?” Fred Casey asked.

  “Only twice since I got back,” Jay answered. “I guess it’ll pass with time.”

  It was two weeks later, late on a Sunday morning. Jay and Fred Casey had come directly from church to their favorite restaurant. A chill autumn rain had blown in off the Pacific and was slashing at the windows as they looked out onto the street. Jay’s ribs were still wrapped, but he was feeling much better after being given a three-week leave of absence from his job by Wells Fargo.

  “That telegram you sent couldn’t have come at a better time,” Fred said, recounting the details of his amazing discovery. “It almost cost me my job. I rousted the chief out and dragged him back out to that estate, even though his men had been over it with a fine-tooth comb already. We found that base-bumer in the cellar all right, and it had the name, ‘Palace Windsor’ on it, but there was nothing in it or around it. The chief was pretty disgusted and had some harsh words for me. Said I’d play hell making the detective squad if I chased up every blind alley I came to. Then he took off back to town. I was so disgusted, I picked up a chunk of hard coal off the pile and threw it at the stove. I missed, but the coal knocked a chip of paint off the platform the stove was resting on. And
, by damn, there was a speck of gold winking at me from under that dull gray paint. I chipped away a little more and I nearly fainted. That old man Brown was as wily as they come. The platform that base-burner was resting on was solid gold! All of it in one big hunk. Brown had used his furnace to somehow melt that million and a half in double eagles and poured the liquid gold into a wooden mold, let it cool, and painted it gray and set the base-burner on top of it. Probably had the help of the old Chinese house­man who was killed later by the tong. Well, as you know, that not only put me back in good graces with the chief, but I’m now a member of the detective squad. No more walking a night beat in Chinatown for me. And the pay is better, too.”

  “Not to mention the headlines you’ve gotten,” Jay added with a grin.

  “You know, between the two of us, we’ve helped account for the recovery of the whole three million that was stolen from the mint about eighteen months ago,” Fred said. He spread some grape jam on a piece of bread, popped it into his mouth, and leaned back in his chair.

  “What happened to the gardener who brought the message to the Wells Fargo office?” Jay inquired after a few moments.

  “He never turned up. Just vanished. Brown’s cook told us he was a young fellow named Otto Anderson who was from Missouri. No family here that anybody knows of.”

  “Could be he’s hiding out if he’s afraid. Or maybe he left town.”

  “More likely at the bottom of the bay if the tong got hold of him. And they must have caught up with him because they found out what he did with the message.”

  “It’s strange how things turn out. He’s probably the real hero in all this, but we may never know anything more about him than his name.”

  “Never found Julian Octavian Brown, either,” Casey said. “Can’t start a murder investigation until we know for a fact somebody’s been killed. No bodies; no witnesses. You can bet if the tong’s responsible, their bodies will never be found.