Comstock Lode

by Louis L'Amour

After a moment there was a tap on the door, and he lifted the bar. “Come on in,” he said, and stood back to look at the man as he entered. A stranger, a sallow-faced man with shifty eyes.

  “I brung a message. You’re to pay me.”

  Waggoner stared at him. He had an idea about the kind of payment needed.

  He took the message. It was obvious to him the message had been opened and resealed. He looked at it, then looked up at the messenger and met a sickly grin.

  Miss GR has shares.

  Offer usual terms before stage reaches VC.

  Rumor Pot Joe. Also specialist Jacob.

  Deal the high card to Jacob.

  Usual 3, delivery later.

  “Usual terms” meant he was to steal those shares. Pottawattomie Joe was a known outlaw, specializing in stage and wagon holdups, what was known at the time as a road agent.

  Specialist Jacob, deal the high card—What sort of specialist? A killer?

  Waggoner scowled. He knew of no one named Jacob. Still—

  He looked up at the messenger. “I’m to pay you? I can do that, or you can lend a hand and make yourself a nice piece.”

  “How?”

  “You read this?”

  Teem hesitated, then shrugged. “Why not? A man better know what he’s carryin’ these days. There’s a war on.”

  “You know what this means?” Waggoner held up the letter.

  “Seems to say what it means.”

  “Seems to, but doesn’t. ‘Miss GR has some shares’ don’t mean nothin’ like that. Chances are there’s somebody on that stage with them initials, but that there’s a code that tells me there’s to be ten thousand in gold on that stage.” He was lying, but he could use this man—for awhile. “I’ll need a man to help.” He jerked his head toward the town. “There’s those down there would jump at the chance but you’re here. Saves time.”

  “How much?”

  “If we take the ten, you get twenty-five hundred. I got to give that much to my spotter, too.”

  “Half?”

  “Not a chance. This here’s my deal and I make the cut. You’re in or you’re out.”

  “I’m in.”

  “You got a travelin’ horse?”

  “I have. He’s come a far piece.” He had used Pony horses all the way over, horses rented from the spares the Pony Express kept. That enterprise was about over now and the hostlers were out to make every dollar.

  “No matter. There’ll be other horses.” He was lying about that, too, but this joker would never know the difference. When the word was to pay him, Waggoner needed no interpreter.

  * * *

  —

  Albert Hesketh did not like to kill, but only because killing left one open to be killed. He had never thought of himself as either a brave or an unbrave man. He simply did what had to be done if anybody got in his way.

  He knew very well that he was riding into danger. Jacob undoubtedly had instructions from Zetsev to kill him, and was probably among those already on the stage. If not he would join it further along.

  Had Jacob been paid? Or was he expecting to be paid later? Maybe if this Jacob knew that—

  “There was a killing in San Francisco,” he said suddenly, “a man I’d been doing business with. Named Marcus Zetsev. He sold equipment to mine owners, freighters, theaters, and such. The Hounds killed him, they think. They looted his place.”

  “I knew of him,” Manfred said. “Tom Maguire bought gear from him, backstage stuff, canvas for scenes, ropes, pulleys, that sort of thing.”

  “That’s the man. He always sold at a good price, so we’ll miss him.”

  Now, if Jacob was aboard, he knew his employer was dead, and if he had not paid, he would not and could not.

  There was talk about the Sydney Ducks and the Hounds and what ought to be done, then the conversation drifted into silence.

  Hesketh was considering the road ahead. He had been over it many times, and his guess was that any holdup would come after Placerville, and probably after Strawberry. He was thinking carefully, coolly, of what he could do.

  If Jacob was with Pottawattomie Joe, that would be one thing. If he was in the stage, he would have to bring about a shooting so he could kill Hesketh under cover of the firing. Yet that left open too great a chance that Jacob himself might be killed.

  His hunch was that Pottawattomie Joe would wait until the last minute. There were trails up Fay Canyon and there was one cut-off from Carson Canyon. Joe could be back in his usual hangouts before anybody knew he was gone.

  Waggoner could beat them to it, he must. It was good to know about men like Waggoner. They could save a man a lot of trouble.

  The stage bounced and jolted, rocked and swayed, swung around precipitous cliffs and down into hollows, plunging through shallow streams. Several times they pulled out around tongues of floodwater that had pushed back up some hollow or ravine. Dust sifted over their clothing.

  Grita Redaway felt again for her derringer. It was there.

  There were occasional mud-holes, but the higher parts of the road had dried out fast, and the usual dust was there, as if the rains had never been. At the top of a rise, the driver suddenly pulled up. Leaning over, he called to the passengers.

  “If y’all want to stretch yer legs, now’s the time! Got to rest my team!”

  It was a small clearing on a knoll in the forest with pines all about and some great boulders and many fallen trees, their trunks lying parallel as though deliberately placed.

  “Blown down,” somebody said. “Wind comes down these canyons sometimes, flattens trees like they was grass!”

  The stage driver, whip in hand, came over to them. He touched his hat to them. “Hope the ride isn’t too rough, Miss Redaway. They are improvin’ this road all the time, but the traffic’s fierce! You should have seen it at first! Ma’am, you could no more get this stage over it than I can fly! A man had to go afoot or on horseback. Later they’d get wagons over it, but they’d often have to stop and almost build the road theirselves. It was sure enough rough!”

  “Have you been here long?”

  “Well, not so’s you’d speak of it. I come out from West Virginny with my folks. That was in fifty-one. Lost my pa to cholera and ma, she set up a boardin’ house over at Rough ’n Ready.

  “We moved camp to camp there for awhile, along with ever’body else. I made the run to the Fraser an’ like to got drowned up there, then got m’self trapped in a snowslide. Trevallion found me when I’d about give up—”

  “Trevallion?” Manfred said. “I’ve heard stories about him.”

  “You’ll hear aplenty of them. He’s the kind of man who makes stories wherever he goes, and without tryin’, too. I mean, he minds his own affairs.”

  “Does he have another name?” Grita asked.

  “Never heard any other.” The stage driver spat. “He don’t need any other, ma’am. Folks just say Trevallion an’ ever’body knows who they mean. They ain’t another like him in the goldfields.”

  Grita turned to Hesketh, who stood near. “Have you met him, Mr. Hesketh?”

  “No. I have had no occasion to meet him. He is a miner, I hear, and they say he is a good one. I hire miners occasionally, my foreman does. I rarely meet them.”

  Hesketh turned his back and walked back to the stage. The driver chuckled. “I reckon he don’t like Trevallion none,” he spoke softly, “kind of stole a march on him, Trevallion did.

  “There’s a mine,” he explained, “called the Solomon, rich as all get out. Hesketh there, he was bookkeeper for Will Crockett, who owned it, or thought he did. All of a sudden his bookkeeper turned up with a controlling interest, and he kicked his boss right out.

  “Kicked him out of his own mine, and he taken over. Seems all the time he was keepin’ books for Will, this Hes
keth was workin’ to take over.

  “Then all of a sudden one morning Hesketh goes to his mine and finds that Trevallion had moved in the night before and staked a piece of rich ground, maybe the richest, that Hesketh thought belonged to the mine. Trevallion staked it in his name and Crockett’s, although I don’t think Will knows a thing about it. So you can see why Al Hesketh doesn’t care much for Trevallion!”

  He looked around. “All right! Board up, ever’body! We got a long run ahead!”

  “Driver?” Grita asked suddenly. “This man Trevallion? Did they ever call him Val?”

  “No, ma’am, they never. Not that I heard of. He’s just Trevallion. Called so by one and all.”

  CHAPTER 31

  The passengers were boarding the stage. The driver turned away but she put a hand on his arm. Surprised, he turned. Speaking in a low tone she said, “Be careful. I am afraid there will be trouble.”

  He had started to step up on the wheel, now he put his boot down. “What d’you mean, ma’am?”

  “There are people who want something I have. I am sure they will try to get it before we reach Virginia City.”

  He took his time, knocking some mud from his boot against the wheel. “You got any indication of that? I mean, that there will be trouble?”

  “There have been several attempts to rob me. In San Francisco they broke into my flat, and I was attacked in the theater there.”

  “You got any idea who’s after you?”

  “I do not. Richard Manfred, who is an actor in our company as well as stage manager, knows of it. So does Mr. Hesketh.”

  “What’s Hesketh got to do with it?”

  “Nothing that I know of. Except, well, he has been paying me a lot of attention.”

  The driver smiled, his blue eyes amused. “Now, ma’am, that can’t come as any surprise. Most any man would pay his respects to you, given the chance.”

  “Thank you, but I suspect he has other interests.” She turned toward the stage where the last passenger was stepping in. “I wished you to know as I want no one to be hurt.”

  “If they get what they’re after, they’ll—”

  She turned. “Please understand me. I do not intend to be robbed, now or ever.”

  She got into the stage and the driver stared after her, swore softly, then climbed to his seat and took up the reins.

  There was forest about them now, gathering clouds above. Under the trees, patches of snow; on the shaded side of the road there was a bank of snow. The air was crisp. A few lingering aspen leaves brushed their pale brown palms together in wistful memory of past beauty. The air smelled of pines.

  “More than five thousand wagons working this road now, six to eight horses to the team, sometimes more.”

  They climbed steadily, the stage horses at a walk.

  Hesketh had his eyes closed and seemed to be sleeping; Grita was sure he was not. A cold, methodical man, precise in his ways and movements, he gave her the impression of a man who walked a ragged edge, of a man somehow brittle.

  What she knew of acting she had learned by observation. First there had been her natural instincts, followed by suggestions from her aunt and friends of her aunt, then a word here or there from an old-timer, and then studying other performers. Yet most of what she knew she had learned by observing people, picking up their mannerisms, gestures, and expressions. By watching people who were self-conscious, assertive, dogmatic, or conniving.

  From the first she had the impression that the face Hesketh turned toward the world was in no way the true man. Always he seemed in control, in command. His decisions were quick, sharp, definite. His workers, she suspected, were afraid of him, and she detected, or believed she detected, a streak of cruelty under it all. Yet even that cruelty took second place to his contempt for all about him.

  Now he seemed asleep, but there was no repose in his hands and their subtle, unconscious movements. His right hand he kept near the opening in his coat. Without doubt he had a gun.

  The stage rumbled and rattled over the hard road, slowing occasionally for a patch of sand or a slight grade.

  “Getting deeper into the wilderness,” Manfred commented, and Grita knew she was being warned. She needed no warning. Several times her fingers had touched the derringer.

  “Better let me handle it,” Manfred said, quietly.

  “It would not be fair. The trouble is mine.”

  “You are a woman.”

  “If women can be killed, women can fight. My own mother was murdered. She had no chance to fight.”

  “You never told me.”

  “There was no reason to tell anyone. It was a long time ago, in Missouri.”

  Albert Hesketh opened his eyes. Suddenly she was sharply aware of his attention. “In Missouri?” he said.

  “We were starting west. My father had bought a covered wagon, and we were ready to go.”

  His eyes were unblinking, but his lips smiled a little. “You are sure it was murder? After all, you must have been very young.”

  She looked right into his eyes. “It was murder. I was there.”

  They were all looking at her now. The heavy man in the brown suit shifted a little. “Ugly,” he said, “an ugly experience for a young girl. It is fortunate you were not killed, too.”

  “I would have been if it had not been for a boy who was with me. He hid me.” And held me, she thought.

  For the first time she really looked at that memory with all her attention. He had held her. Held her tight, shielding her eyes, whispering to her. For the first and perhaps the only time in her life she had felt completely safe, completely secure, protected. Her parents had been killed but he had been there, holding her, calming her, and he had lost a mother, too.

  It was absurd to have such a memory after all these years, but of all her memories it was the most vivid. She remembered the scuffling in the wagons, the muffled cries, the thud of blows, and all the while those strong young arms holding her.

  “You were lucky not to be killed. There were several of them?”

  “Yes. They were renegades, scum that lived along the river, stealing whatever they could.”

  “You were lucky,” the man in the brown suit repeated, “they would not have wanted a witness to be left for a crime as vicious as that. A rope is too good for men like that.”

  Hesketh turned his head to look out the window, and suddenly she remembered where she was and what was about to happen. She felt in her purse for the derringer. It was there, cool and strong to the touch.

  “How far is it to Strawberry?” she asked him.

  He glanced at her. “A long way yet,” he said.

  They overtook a long line of wagons, rolling up clouds of dust. The driver cracked his whip over the horses, and they raced on by to reach a small roadside station before the teamsters. The stage pulled up, dust sifted over them and past them. There were several horses at the hitching-rail and an Indian sitting down against the wall of the station.

  Hesketh avoided her at the station, walking off by himself, but among the trees and away from the road. The driver came over to her. He jerked his head to indicate Hesketh. “There’s an odd one. Keeps to himself.”

  He spat. “Canny, though. If I was some of them around Virginia, I’d look to my hole card. Will Crockett isn’t the only one he’ll have up a tree.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “He’s hungry, that one. Hungry like a wolf who will eat until he busts, almost. Just takin’ the Solomon from Will won’t be enough. He’ll want it all, and if I’m any judge, he’s fixing to get it all.”

  “From what I hear he won’t get far with men like Mackay and Fair. Or Sharon, for that matter.”

  “He won’t try, yet. He’ll just eat up the small fry. He hates Sutro. He wanted to get in on that tunnel idea of Adolph’s, but
no matter how much Sutro needed money to get on with it, he would have no piece of it from Hesketh. He never actually turned him down, just avoided him.”

  “If there is a holdup,” Grita asked, “where do you think it will happen?”

  He shrugged. “Somewhere between Strawberry and Hope Valley. If it’s Pottawattomie Joe, who knows this country, he’ll figure us to not use the Hope Valley route. Sometimes we go that way when the snow’s deep, but I’m fixin’ to turn north and go by way of the Kingsbury Grade.

  “Plenty of trails where a rider can cut across country so they can pick their spot. There’s a lot of places where a team can’t travel no faster’n a walk, due to the grade.”

  With fresh horses they moved on at a good speed. Hesketh had returned to the stage and was the first man aboard. The man in the brown suit had buttoned his coat despite the fact that it was warm inside the stage. He now sat with his back to Grita and half-facing Hesketh. Manfred observed the change but offered no comment to her.

  Now the trail became steeper, winding steadily upward. The snow under the trees was deeper. The air was chilly outside, but inside the stage it was close and warm. After a bit she dozed from time to time, absently wondering about Richard Manfred.

  She knew nothing of him, nor did anybody on the show. He made vague references to companies in which he had worked in the South, was an intelligent and versatile actor and a better than average stage manager. Seemingly he thoroughly understood his business.

  He was a man of medium height who looked taller, with dark hair and a dark, hawklike face, even white teeth and was attractive without being in any way handsome. His wardrobe was modest. He was quiet, unobtrusive, but not communicative about himself or his affairs.

  He was especially good in the olios that followed the last act, in which each of the performers did some kind of specialty act, dancing, singing, or comedy. He seemed to do everything with equal ease, yet where he came from, his age, education, or background remained a mystery. Where some of the actors suffered from self-doubt and insecurity when offstage, Manfred was completely assured.