He was sitting there like that when the door burst open, and people rushed into the room. Hesketh was dead, lying at Teale’s feet.
CHAPTER 60
Only John Santley stood at the graveside when Albert Hesketh was laid to rest.
“I never liked him,” he told Ledbetter, “but he was my employer.”
“What about his piece of the Solomon?”
“He left no will. I don’t believe he ever expected to die. Once I mentioned a will to him, and he just gave me a blank, unbelieving kind of stare.
“He had parents, I believe, but he did not write to them. With a search they might be found, and of course, they must be. There will be dividends.”
Trevallion was waiting at the foot of the stairs as Margrita descended. He held out his hand to her. “You are like a princess,” he said, “you have the grand manner.”
She smiled. “Of course. Don’t forget, Mr. Trevallion, that I am an actress. An actress or an actor is taught to play roles, and do it in a very convincing manner. But because a man plays a king superbly well does not mean that he would make a good king. The chances are he would make a very bad one.
“We all have learned to smile on cue, to be sincere when it is necessary, and to be most convincing at whatever we do. We are a lot of children playing games for grown-ups.”
He drew back her chair for her, then sat down opposite. “I really don’t believe that of you,” he said.
“To tell you the truth, I’m not much of an actress either, although I believe acting comes more naturally to women than to men. Most little girls begin acting as soon as they are aware of anything at all.”
“Well, you’ve a new role. You own a mine, and a very rich one. It needs to be managed.”
“I know nothing of mining. I never so much as saw a mine until we went to the Solomon, and that’s something I’d rather forget.”
“You’re doing very well with your theatrical company, and you can do just as well with the mine. The secret is to hire the right people, and learn enough to know what they’re talking about.
“Will Crockett paid me to do a quick study of his mine, and I drew up a tentative plan for its development which I never got a chance to discuss with him. You can have that plan, and if you wish I’ll help you find a good man to operate it, somebody who knows men as well as ore.”
“Val? If you can find the time, would you do it for me? I’ve problems enough with my company. Maguire has finished building his opera house, and it’s simply beautiful. I’d love to work there, and I must discuss it with him.”
She glanced toward the door. “Here comes Bill Stewart.”
Trevallion gestured to a chair. “Join us, Bill. What’s happening? You’ve met Margrita?”
“Yes, I have.” He grinned. “But I met her too late.”
He was a tall, strongly made young man. With a quick glance around, he said, “Trev, I need your help.”
He ordered a drink, and when the waiter had gone, he said, “I’ve never forgotten how you came to court when Sam Brown came to make trouble.”
“You certainly needed no help.”
“The point is that you were there, and I might have. I might have.
“That’s past. The point is that I need your help now. We’re making a move toward statehood, and we have to get out the vote. I want it to be a smashing victory to impress Washington. There’s a lot of people back there who say we don’t have enough people for a state. They say we’re just a mountain at the edge of a desert with a handful of people. So we’ve got to make this election as impressive as we can.”
“You’ll have no trouble. Everybody I know wants statehood. Then we can have some decently regulated courts and some representation in Washington.”
“Not everybody, Trev. There’s quite a strong group, some of them representing powerful mining interests, that do not want statehood at all. They’ve teamed with some of those who are afraid of our vote on the Emancipation issue.
“Frankly, Trev, I am working with the President on this. He needs the vote Nevada can give him. He needs our support.”
“What do you want from me?”
“You can be a very real help. We’ve two fiercely partisan groups here, and we all know how they will vote. There are also a lot of newcomers and fence-sitters. The fence-sitters haven’t made up their minds, and the newcomers don’t understand the issues.
“Whether you realize it or not, Trev, you’ve the reputation for being a solid character. You’re one of the best mining men around, and you are liked and respected. They respect your opinion.”
He chuckled. “Now, Bill, the fact that I know something about mining doesn’t make me a judge of anything but ore and the lay of the land. However, if you just want me to say what I think, I’ll do it.”
“That’s what I want. Just say it often and in as many places as possible.”
He paused. “There’s one other thing. One of these days very soon I’ll be riding to the telegraph station. It is going to take me quite awhile to get the message off, it’s a long one, and there may be some who would like to stop me. So I’d like you to come along, packing a gun.”
He stood up. “Thanks, Trev. I’ll not bother you any more tonight.” He bowed to Margrita and left.
“Will there be trouble, Val? I was hoping that was all over.”
“I think he’s just being careful, that’s all, and I’m glad to help. Sometimes a show of force can prevent trouble.”
There was a low murmur of conversation from about the room, the tinkle of silver and the rustle of garments of the people passing. Yet it was quiet, and it was pleasant.
“I like this,” he said, after a minute, “and I don’t want it to end, not ever.”
“It needn’t, Val.”
“What about the company?”
“We’ve two shows scheduled, and we’ve done them both, many times. The Betrothal and The Colleen Bawn. After that we will close down.”
“What about your people?”
“Manfred is staying here. He and Mary are getting married. It has been coming for a long time.”
“He’s a good man. Why don’t you hire him to take Santley’s place?”
“He could. He’s been handling most of the details for me ever since he joined the company. He’s a good bookkeeper, and I know he’s honest.”
“The others?”
“They’ll have no trouble. Dane likes it here and he may stay.”
Behind them somewhere there was music, coming softly from one of the other rooms. They spoke quietly of matter-of-fact things, the little details of their lives falling into place to leave way for what was to come.
“There are things I must do,” he said, “there’s a timber claim I have in the Sierras. There’s a need for heavy timber now since all the mines are using square-sets. I must open it and put a man in charge.”
He stood up. “Grita, come on! Let’s go over to the bakery. I want you to meet Melissa, and maybe Jim will be there.
“There’s something I want to tell him, but I want you to be there.”
“You’ve already told me, Val. You’ve told me all I need to know.”
“This is something else.”
The crowds were thinning out, the big ore wagons had delivered their loads, the night was growing more still. Up the street a drunk leaned against a post and tried to sing an Irish ballad.
Trevallion turned to her suddenly. “I can tell Jim when we get there. What I wanted to say is, I struck it today. I’m into bonanza.”
“Bonanza?”
“A while back I started to run a short drift to the outside, just to get a better circulation of air, and to have another way out if it was needed. Well, I cut into a vein of almost solid silver. Not the richest on the Comstock, but rich.
“Tomorrow they wi
ll be saying I’m the canniest mining man on the lode, but believe me, it was pure luck. I put in a round and spit the fuses and left it, and when I went in this morning there was silver everywhere. The vein is so wide I can’t see top or bottom of it, and it dips right down toward the richest part of the Comstock. I’m a rich man.”
They stopped at the bakery. “I’ve got to tell them.” He peered within. Jim was there, at Melissa’s table. Christian Tapley was there also. He opened the door for Margrita.
“Trevallion?”
He knew by the sound what the voice meant. He saw passersby stop suddenly, and stare. Margrita’s lips parted and she started to speak.
“Go inside, honey,” he said gently, “it seems there’s always something left undone.”
It was the Ax.
He was standing there, feet apart, flamboyant as always, poised and ready.
“Why, hello, Ax,” Trevallion said gently. “Are you getting lonely, Ax?”
“Lonely?” He was surprised by the unexpected question.
“Why, yes, Ax. They’re all on Boot Hill. Are you wanting to join them, Ax?”
This was not happening as Ax had planned. All the speeches he had ready that were to be repeated afterward no longer fitted. It was his turn to reply and he was on the defensive.
“They’re all gone, Ax, all that cozy little bunch of river rats and scoundrels who were your friends. A pretty shoddy bunch, Ax, just like you.
“Nothing daring, nothing heroic, just a bunch of murdering scum. Just like you, Ax.”
Ax was furious. The coolness on which he prided himself didn’t seem to be there.
“Come on, Ax. They call you the Clean-Cutter. Now that’s a pretty name. What did you ever do that was clean, Ax? When you killed two women back there on the Missouri? Or when four of you murdered my father and came hunting me, when I was a boy?
“I’m not a boy any longer, Ax. They tell me you’re very good with that gun. That you’re fast with it.”
The Ax was trembling. He was so crazy with anger that he was literally trembling with fury. His hand was poised, ready.
He wanted to kill. Never in his life had he wanted to kill anyone so much.
“You know what I’ve got here, Ax? It’s your gun. The gun you lost when you were running away. Running, Ax. All you bold, daring thieves, you were running and you dropped your gun.
“See? It has your name on it. I’ll show you.”
He drew and fired, beating the Ax by a hair.
The Ax took a slow backward step, his gun going off into the dust of the street.
Trevallion took a step closer, ready for a second shot. “Being fast, Ax, is not always enough, is it? I’m sorry, Ax. I didn’t come looking for you. I could have tracked you down, Ax, but you came to me.”
The gun slipped from the Ax’s fingers. He started to speak, turned away, and fell.
There was a faint acrid smell of powder smoke, the lights of buildings shining out on the dark street, and on the darker, sprawled body of the Clean-Cutter, Mr. A.X. Elder.
Somewhere a woman laughed and a piano started a jangling tune. There was the distant pound of stamp-mills and compressors.
Trevallion turned and walked into the bakery. Grita caught his arm. “Val? Are you all right?”
“I’m all right,” he said as he reached to hold her. “I’m all right now.”
To Joseph and Shirley Wershba
WHAT IS LOUIS L’AMOUR’S LOST TREASURES?
Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures is a project created to release some of the author’s more unconventional manuscripts from the family archives.
Currently included in the project are Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures: Volume 1 and Volume 2. These books contain both finished and unfinished short stories, unfinished novels, literary and motion picture treatments, notes, and outlines. They are a wide selection of the many works Louis was never able to publish during his lifetime.
In 2018 we released No Traveller Returns, L’Amour’s never-before-seen first novel, which was written between 1938 and 1942. Additionally, many notes and alternate drafts to Louis’s well-known and previously published novels and short stories will now be included as “bonus feature” postscripts within the books that they relate to. For example, the Lost Treasures postscript to Last of the Breed contains early notes on the story, the short story that was discovered to be a missing piece of the novel, the history of the novel’s inspiration and creation, and information about unproduced motion picture and comic book versions.
An even more complete description of the Lost Treasures project, along with a number of examples of what is in the books, can be found at louislamourslosttreasures.com. The website also contains a good deal of exclusive material, such as even more pieces of unknown stories that were too short or too incomplete to include in the Lost Treasures books, plus personal photos, scans of original documents, and notes.
All of the works that contain Lost Treasures project materials will display the Louis L’Amour’s Lost Treasures banner and logo.
POSTSCRIPT
By Beau L’Amour
Though my father spent much of his career writing about characters who were ranchers, gunfighters, and military men, a great deal of his personal connection to life in the American West was through his experiences farming, logging, and, in particular, mining. His longest period of employment underground was at the Katherine Mine near Kingman, Arizona. While sitting over lunch or waiting for the elevator “cage” at the end of a shift, Dad had the opportunity to overhear numerous stories about the heyday of American mining in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. In an introduction to the short story “Dead End Drift,” he wrote:
Those were great times for me, as many of the older miners had worked the boom camps such as Tonopah, Goldfield, Rawhide, Cripple Creek, Leadville, Central City and Virginia City.
In the spring of 1927 he and three other men from the Katherine even participated in what was possibly the last gold rush in the continental United States. Here’s a quote from Education of a Wandering Man, where Dad describes the Weepah Hills rush:
Four of us took time off and drove to Weepah, Nevada, not far from Tonopah, another famous mining boom town. The rush to Weepah was made largely by car, Fords, Chevys, and a car briefly popular, the Star. Others rode horseback or drove in buckboards or wagons. By the time we arrived to stake our claims much good land was gone, but each of us found a spot, and I chanced on one that had been over-looked. By the time my ground was staked I had little confidence in Weepah as a “great discovery” so when a man came along with a fat roll of bills and no judgment I promptly sold my claim. I was the only one of the four of us who even made expenses on that trip. I sold out for fifty dollars, as I recall. Down in the center of “town” there were the usual gamblers, several tents in which ladies were entertaining gentlemen, and several bars selling moonshine whiskey. The miners with whom I had made the rush were canny when it came to ore and they were not pleased with what they saw.
In a letter to his sister written in the late 1970s, Louis added a bit of humor to the account:
We stayed only a few days. Water was too hard to come by and food was expensive if you did not bring enough with you. We rushed up from the Katherine and a few days later, rushed back. It was a bleak place in the desert, windy and when we were there, cold…early spring, if I recall correctly. Weepah must have meant littler spring [compared to Tonopah, which means “Little Spring”] because it was so dry you had to prime yourself to spit. A guy fainted down there and they had to throw dust in his face to bring him to.
My own experience visiting Weepah was similar to my father’s. It was dry, cold, and so silent that, if I wasn’t making some noise or moving around, it seemed as if I had gone deaf. There had been several attempts to mine the area, but when I visited almost nothing remained to i
ndicate human occupation. Histories tell us that, like the ore body in some parts of the Comstock, the Weepah gold came in pockets and interrupted veins. Though some ore was assayed at $70,000 a ton, miners had only limited success in the area.
Dad returned to central Nevada in April of 1950, riding along on a car trip with a friend of his, Ed Ross. They drove to the ghost town of Bodie, California, and spent some time visiting with the Scanavino family, farmers who had supplied much of the produce for the nearby miners.
After camping overnight, they crossed the border into Nevada, going to Aurora (another ghost town) and then to Carson City. The next morning, they hit Silver City and Virginia City before turning south. They had dinner in Beatty and slept under the stars along the edge of the road through Death Valley. This was likely the first time Louis was in Virginia City.
By the 1970s my father was pushing himself to take on larger novels with more significant historical elements and themes. At some point in that decade Dad typed out the following set of notes, the earliest we have on the story that eventually became Comstock Lode:
DAN TREGO:
His father a Cornish miner, his mother Scottish. Born in Cornwall and into the mines at nine. Mines closed because of water, came to America with parents. At age 12 they start across the plains to California; his mother dies en route; father a morose, bitter man is hard on him, loves him but has no idea how to show it. His baby sister has died on the ship coming across.
Crossing the plains and the Forty-Mile Desert is unbelievably hard. They have to throw out some gear, oxen die. They reach the Carson. There for a few idyllic days Dan has children to play with, and makes friends. They go on across the mountains and his father is killed trying to protect him.
Dan herds cattle, learns from Indians, becomes a printer devil, listens to printer recite when drunk. He tries placer mining with no luck; drifts to new diggings, among others, to the Fraser. Yet he builds a reputation for being a tough, strong man and a good miner. He knows ore and miner’s geology, and he is an honest man.
Comstock Lode Page 45