by Steve Frazee
Dunbar called the meeting to order by banging the poker against the side of Big John’s stove. “The way I get it, we ain’t here to consider all the hell-raising in one lump. The thing that seems” to be worrying most of us is the gold we’ve piled up since last summer.
“Most of us feel, the way things are going, it’s getting more dangerous every day to keep it here. The question is, shall a bunch of us take it out to Denver, or shall every man be responsible for his own cache, or do we take a chance and have one or two men run it to Denver for us? Who’s got some idea on the subject?”
It seemed dead simple to Cushman: let every man take care of his own gold.
Frank Eddy said, “I don’t favor a whole bunch of us making the trip. This camp ain’t going to last much longer, so I’d like to stay here and get in every day I can while there’s still something to run through my sluice.”
Handy Grimes was of the same opinion. “When I leave I aim to leave for good, but while I’m here I want to get everything I can off my ground.”
“If the whole bunch of us takes off to carry the gold into Denver, somebody is going to be working our ground while we’re gone,” Mark Allen said.
“But you do want to get your gold where it’ll be safe?”
“Damn right,” Allen said. “I’ve had men prowling around my shack several times at night, and it’s got so I spill half of every shovelful I start to put in my sluice, just from trying to watch my cabin.”
Cushman listened in silence as they talked over the propositions.
Pete Eliot said, “I move we send two men out with the gold. We can pay ’em for the time they lose. Them that don’t want to take the chance can take care of their own gold.”
“I’m for that idea,” Allen said. “I move Andy Volgamore be one of the men.”
“Second the motion!”
Volgamore was a tall, hard-jawed ex-cavalry officer. It was he who had first discovered gold on Campanero Creek. “I dunno,” he said. “I might decide to go clear to my old man’s farm in Minnesota and bury the stuff.”
“You’ll have company about that time,” Handy Grimes said, and there was a laugh.
“Let’s have one motion at a time. First, we got to get a second to having two men take care of the gold.” Dunbar looked around the room.
It took a pile of jawing to get a few simple matters settled, Cushman thought. With the rest, he raised his hand in an “aye” vote on both propositions.
Big John came into the room, pausing at the door to look back into the saloon. Dunbar explained briefly what had happened so far.
“I’ve a little dust of my own to send out,” the saloonman said. He looked at Cushman. “I’ll move to make Ed Cushman the second man.”
“I’ll back that!” Eliot said.
Cushman was surprised that Big John had named him, but it was not the first time men had tried to thrust their responsibility on him, and generally he had refused. Now he saw Dunbar looking at him in appeal, urging him to take on the task, and Big John seemed to be challenging him to accept.
They were the only ones in the room who appeared to doubt that Cushman would agree; the others acted as if the matter were already settled.
“You’ll do it, Ed?” Dunbar asked.
Cushman surprised himself by saying, “I guess so.”
They voted him into the job while he was still wondering what it was he thought he owed them.
“What about splitting the two men up?” Eddy suggested. “Each one taking half, say?”
“Hell no!” someone said. “That’s taking too big a chance that we’ll lose half the gold and I don’t want it to be the half that my sacks are in.”
The statement evoked a hot discussion about means of decoying robbers away from the gold. There were all kinds of suggestions but nothing was settled. Eddy said, “I don’t want to sit here all night and leave my cabin unguarded. Let’s appoint a committee to work out the details and then we can agree on them in the next few days. We don’t want to be making any fast moves right after this meeting anyway.”
They agreed on a committee of five, Dunbar and four others. The meeting was starting to break up when Dunbar said, “Just one more thing. Miss Drago might want to be in on this. Is it all right to ask her? She’s been sending some gold out with the Kenton brothers, but she told me the other day that they’re getting leary of carrying it.”
“Sure,” Eliot said, “if she’s willing to pay her share of the expense of Volgamore and Cushman.”
“She pays her way,” Big John said.
It was agreed that Dunbar could include Belle Drago in the project. The meeting broke up.
Dunbar caught up with Cushman in the dark outside the back door of the saloon. Lew Thompson, who had been on guard outside against eavesdroppers, said that no one had tried to get close to the back end of the building. He went to the edge of the creek with Dunbar and Cushman and then turned off toward his cabin.
“I got something to talk to you about, Ed.” Dunbar’s voice was both cautious and enthusiastic.
They were approaching Cushman’s cabin when someone ran from it and went pounding into the trees. Cushman grabbed for his pistol before he remembered that he had left it in his bunk. Dunbar was armed and he drew his pistol. Cushman saw it poised in the starlight, but the intruder had run around the west side of the cabin and into the timber so quickly that firing would have been only a gesture.
Cushman’s bunk was torn up, the cupboard door was swinging open, the ashes had been raked from the fireplace and the stones beneath turned up, and someone had probed with a pick in the floor around the bunk. Cushman threw the blankets back in place and found his pistol.
He wondered thinly why a miserable thief assumed that a man slept with his gold; Cushman’s gold was buried just outside the sill log at the door.
“He get anything?” Dunbar asked.
Cushman shook his head.
Dunbar sat down on the bunk. “You act like you wouldn’t give a damn if he had. Gold mean that little to you?”
“Not exactly. I can always use it.”
“What if he’d got it?”
Cushman shrugged. “Then it would be gone.” He found a bottle of whisky on a shelf above the fireplace. He picked up two tin cups the prowler had knocked into the woodbox.
Dunbar swirled the whisky in his cup with a circular motion of his hand. “How much dust have you got?”
“Maybe two, three thousand.”
“Good.” Dunbar went outside with the cup in his hand. Cushman heard him walk all the way around the cabin slowly. When he came back in Dunbar put one foot on a stool and took his drink “I think I’ve found the lode where the gold in this gulch came from.”
So that was it? Cushman felt a quick rise of pleasure. If anyone deserved to realize a dream, Dunbar was the man.
“I think I’m on to a big thing,” Dunbar continued. He took a piece of rusty rock from his pocket and gave it to Cushman. “Pound that up in a mortar and pan it and you’ll see a string of gold as long as your finger. The outcrop stands three feet wide on the face of the mountain — not all of it as rich as that piece, but when you get deeper it ought to open up into the biggest thing that ever hit this country.”
Cushman looked at the rock curiously. Lode mining was an expensive and long-term operation; it was not like a quick clean up of placer gold with a minimum of tools.
“I’ll figure on a smelter in time,” Dunbar said. “There’ll be a railroad up this valley and a spur will run right over to the smelter and a town will spring up — ”
“Not so fast, Jake.”
“Not all at once, of course.” Dunbar paced between the door and the fireplace. “I don’t know anything about lode mining. Who does? You’ve got to start, just like every man running a sluice here had to find out the best way he could what he was trying to do.” He grinned. “I’ve already ordered some tools, drills and black powder and a few things to get started with.”
“I hope y
ou hit it.” Cushman put the piece of rock on the table.
“How’d you like to come in on it with me, Ed?”
“Why me?”
Dunbar was surprised. “You’re my friend. What other reason do you need?”
Something turned in Cushman. He could not remember that anyone had ever said outright to him that he was a friend. It was a new, pleasant experience — and the feeling was not to be trusted too readily. “Who else is in on it with you?”
“Nobody,” Dunbar said.
“I don’t have a lot of money.”
“You told me that. I guessed about what you had anyway. I’ve got maybe twelve thousand. By the way, when you and Volgamore take the gold into Denver, I want you to bank mine and bring back three thousand in cash — notes if you can get ’em. That will get us started on the mine.”
“All right.”
Dunbar leaned forward. “Are you going in with me?”
“I was thinking of leaving.”
Dunbar nodded. “I guessed that.”
“You did, huh?” Cushman waited for Dunbar to say more. He waited for the man to ask him what he was running away from, as others had, including Billy Bodega. And there had been a woman in New Mexico who had accused Cushman of being sorry for himself. It was the cheap and easy thing to say, and it had worried Cushman, but after thinking it over for a long time he knew he wasn’t sorry for himself.
It was, rather, that he didn’t know how to change his loneliness, how to lose his suspicions that a rebuff waited him for every favor asked of life. Maybe here was the chance to make the first real move.
Cushman didn’t weigh the chances of success in the proposition Dunbar offered; he knew very little about lode mining. He wasn’t even interested in making a fortune. But Dunbar wanted him in on the deal; Dunbar was showing him proof of friendship.
“All right,” Cushman said. “I’ll go in with you.”
“Good.” Once more Dunbar showed shrewd insight into Cushman’s nature. “There’ll be just the two of us. We’ll split the profits on the basis of what each invests. Fair enough?”
Cushman nodded. “I wouldn’t want it any other way.” He felt the stirring of warmth and a new hope. Maybe settling down for a while was what he needed, fighting toward a dream, although at the moment he was not vitally interested in the dream itself. He suspicioned that Dunbar knew him very well, that Dunbar was working shrewdly to change him; but there was no doubting the man’s friendship and good intentions.
And suddenly Cushman realized, too, that he had no wish to run away from Belle Drago, even if she had turned him down. He was getting his meals at her restaurant again, passing in line with a hundred other miners, but he knew that she was aware of him; and he was very much aware of the fact that the man she now had to help her in place of Joe Kenton was one whom Big John had found for her.
“We’ve settled that, then,” Dunbar said. “In the next few days we’ll let everybody know what the committee works out on the business we talked about tonight.”
The next day the whole camp knew that a man named James Webster, a relative newcomer but a man who had a fair claim, had been robbed in the night. Several men had entered his tent when he was asleep, wrapped him in blankets and held him while they searched for his gold. They found it, five hundred dollars in dust, Webster had said.
Some of the veteran miners were doubtful about a man named Garvey, who had once worked for day’s-pay on Webster’s claim; but there was no real evidence against Garvey, he was a likable man, and he swore that he had been sound asleep when the robbery occurred The camp growled and buzzed with anger but no one was brought to justice.
Dunbar’s committee worked out their plan and kept the details secret. Those of the veterans who wished to send their gold to Denver were to bring it unobtrusively to Dunbar’s cabin, where two men would always be on guard. They would get a receipt for it and after that they would have to trust the men they had appointed.
Since he was one of the two men in whom the veterans had placed final trust in the matter, Cushman felt that he could do no less than the others. He took his gold to Dunbar’s cabin one night, and the next morning he took his turn with Andy Volgamore standing guard over the sacks for six hours.
“Tiresome as picket duty,” Volgamore grumbled. He dozed part of the time but he was trigger-sharp and awake the instant anyone came near the cabin.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
ONE EVENING while Cushman and Dunbar were sitting on Pete Eliot’s sluice box eating their supper, Dunbar said, “Meet me at nine tomorrow at the waterfall, straight up the main creek.”
Cushman nodded. He and Volgamore were going out with the gold.
Dunbar came alone to the appointed place with two horses from Stapp’s livery. One of them was carrying camping gear and tools. Dunbar led the horse into the trees where Cushman was waiting. He took the tools off the pack but left the camping gear.
“Where’s Volgamore?”
Dunbar shook his head. “That’s something else. Cut over clear beyond the west fork, Ed, and go out by way of Trout Creek Pass. Take it through, of course, but remember if you get in a bad fix — it’s only gold.”
“What does that mean?”
“Damn it!” Dunbar was nervous and unhappy. “No one expects you to get killed over it!”
“Neither do I.” Cushman gave the horses critical appraisal.
“They’re the best we could do without rousing too much suspicion,” Dunbar said. “As it was, Bert Garvey looked me over pretty close when I left camp. Maybe it was just my nerves. Unless I’m followed, I’ll stall around up here all morning. Four hours’ start should be enough, shouldn’t it?”
“Sure.” Cushman hesitated. “Is Belle sending in anything?” “Yes.”
Cushman rode away, holding to the scattered parks along the base of the mountains until he was well around the west fork of Campanero. He picked his way through the timber then and went on down into the valley. Freighters going up-river to Cache Creek or Georgia Bar or California Gulch, where men had washed out millions, were raising dust above the sage and rabbit brush.
The blue timber that hid the gulch where Victory lay fell farther upslope on the snow-patched mountains, and the brown rocks of Trout Creek Pass came closer. There was no dust on Cushman’s trail.
It was a good day.
Cushman had ridden free in wide valleys like this before, going nowhere. Today there was something solid and satisfying in the trip; he knew where he was going, and why, and he knew where he was returning to.
He did not crowd the horses. They were not the kind that could make a hard run over the long distance ahead.
After a time he decided that the horses were sorrier specimens than he had thought at first. The bay pack horse had been badly shod and now it was developing a slight limp in the right foreleg. The animal he was riding was hard-gaited. It showed a tendency to want to stop and forage.
In a grove of cottonwoods beside a cold stream he rode into a camp of freighters who were repairing a wheel tire that had worn thin and broken. He passed the time of day with them while he let his horses water. The efforts of the freighters around a rude forge they had set up against a cottonwood tree bothered him. The tire they were working on was what Sam Hildreth used to call “dish-ironed,” which meant there was a soft spot in it that wore out sooner than the rest of the iron.
Cushman watched with the nervous unease of a craftsman who sees work being badly done. The part of the splice already made in the tire had the flaky aspect of having been burned, and now they were trying to set in the other end of the section without enough heat.
Cushman walked to the edge of the grove and looked up-river. He went back to the forge. “I used to do some blacksmithing, boys. Maybe I could give you a hand.”
A hulking teamster who was scowling at the efforts of his companions as he pumped a bellows suspended from the tree quit working the pole lever and sized up Cushman, and then he grabbed the hammer from the hand
of the man who had been using it. “I’m glad to see someone who knows iron from horse manure.” The freighter whipped sweat out of his beard and gave the hammer to Cushman. “Fire away, mister!”
The bellows leaked and the iron they were using as an anvil was badly chipped, like the hammer, but Cushman forgot those handicaps when he saw the fine, even glow of good Pittsburgh forge coal. He called for a longer section of iron to set into the tire. With the help of the freighters he reheated the burned splice and cut back from it. He made the splice on that end over again, then wrapped a wet gunny sack around it and reheated the other end of the inset.
The big freighter said, “You’ve had forge soot in your snoot before, mister.”
Cushman scrubbed his work in the dirt so he could see what kind of joining he had made. It was good. It would have been neater with better tools, but it was good.
The freighters wanted him to stay for dinner. They had shot two antelope on their way from Denver and now they offered to barbecue them both and, with a keg of whisky, make a day of it. Cushman grinned and said he had to meet a man down the river in an hour.
He rode back on his trail and had another look at the hills to the northwest. They were clear of dust. He felt fine as he resumed his trip.
The first pass he had to cross was merely a low break in the hills. Horses in average condition could take it easily, but the horses he had were not even average, and there were long miles beyond the first pass. Why not go on down to the ranch and get his own horses and leave the worn-down livery nags? He had lost an hour with the freighters and he would lose more time switching horses, but he would make it up later.
The decision pleased him. There was satisfaction, too, in the ease with which he had repaired the tire. It was, he repeated to himself, a good day.
He lost a little more time than he had figured on at the ranch, because his horses were hiding out in dense willows on a creek, but at last he and the rancher caught them. Cushman took his own saddle and left the warped livery rig to be picked up on his return. Fording the Arkansas at a wide gravel bar, he went up the east bank toward the pass.