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Morning dawned clear and bright, as if nothing had changed. I decided to go right in and send the trespassers on their way. Once again I eased in so as not to offer them an advantage, but I was surprised to find them actually working the placer mine. I crossed the stream below them and eased back up to a clump of bushes that screened me well but allowed me to clearly hear them talk.
"But Dick, it ain't right. Why should we be working?"
"Oh, shut up and for once quit your whining, will you? A little work is not going to kill you, and we can make some extra money on top of our wages."
"But what if Nason doesn't like it? I tell you, he doesn't look like it, but he is a killer. We will never be safe if he finds out." Pasty Face was obviously having a very bad morning.
"He's not going to find out if you can shut your fat mouth for a change. For the last time, he asked us to take some good samples of this black sand in case this really is the spot where Clay is getting his gold. If we stash away a few ounces, for ourselves how is he going to know? If he asks we will just say that we made sure we got some good big samples for him and panned a bunch out to double check it. How can anything go wrong with that?"
Well now, first things first. Why not let them work for a while? It was my claim, and if they wanted to work it for free it was okay with me. I had no qualms about taking possession of the panned gold when the time came for it.
Even better, now I had a name to go on. Nason! I had heard the stories about him, and Pasty Face was not wrong. Nason was said to be a cold hearted killer without a trace of decency. He had been a Jayhawker, but always in the background, ready to kill his own men for a chance of a profit. He was suspected of somehow being involved with the Commanchero traders, although that involvement was never proven. Apparently he had now decided to dabble in mining investments in his own special way.
The strange thing was that nobody seemed to know what he looked like. Positive identification was an impossibility because no two people remembered the same details. I figured the guy must use disguises to leave such a discrepancy of information. One thing was for
sure; if the two men in front of me had met Nason face to face, they were among a very elite group. Probably a short lived one.
I backed off a hundred yards so that I could watch the progress without danger of detection. It gladdened my heart to see the shovels of gravel being thrown, the pans swirling in the stream, and the steadily filling sacks of ore. My ore.
The boys put in a good days work, I'll give them that. After a supper of cold beef and beans, they headed straight for their blankets. Dick gave the other the orders.
"We have got to keep a watch in case Clay comes back. You take the first one. Wake me up at midnight, and I sit up until morning." Pasty Face didn't like
it; I could see that from where I sat in the shadows, but he moved his blanket so that he could lean against a big rock. Some people never learn. I could see that he was staring into the fire.
Dick was snoring almost immediately, and Pasty Face was soon nodding. It probably didn't matter, for he would be blind as a bat from looking at the flames. His head soon tilted all the way back, and his Adam's
apple bobbed as he snored away the evening. This was easier than taking candy from a baby. When I thought of what the morning would bring, I decided it was much more fun as well.
They hadn't bothered to cache their sacks of gold, merely stuffed them in a set of saddlebags that lay at the rear of the camp. I quietly crawled up and swung the saddlebags away from the light. I didn't want any sound of scraping. Wondering if they could possibly be stupid enough to fill them again without checking, I swung the now empty saddlebags back to their original resting place. Something told me this was going to be too good a show to pass up, so I spent the night in the rocks napping once in a while, careful to rest my cheek on my hand when I did so to prevent snoring.
When shift change came, Dick was enraged, as he had every right to be. "If you were in the Army, I'd have you whipped for dereliction of duty."
"If you were in the Army you'd be a deserter." Dick took a round house swing at him when he heard this, but the swing missed. If it had connected, it would have sent the smaller man to the other side of the stream.
"Listen, you dumb jerk. Get in your blankets and be quiet. Don't say one more thing to me tonight. I don't care if you see an Indian raiding party bearing down. You don't say anything. DO YOU UNDERSTAND?" Pasty Face wisely nodded his assent.
The morning would bring three possibilities as near as I could see. The first, which I thought unlikely, was that they wouldn't notice the missing gold and continue working.
The second was that they would know they had been robbed(?) and would panic at the uncertainty of who might have done it.
I deemed the third option seemed the most likely. They would each blame the other for stealing it, and who knew where things might go from there?
When morning came the first thing they did was check the saddlebags. I was not surprised. There is something about gold that makes men want to hold it and savor its intricate value. I am not immune to this either. Many is the time I have pulled out my poke and fingered through it, even though I knew exactly how much was there. It just gives such a feeling of well being to do this that the urge is irresistible.
"So, you little twirp," roared Dick, "you just couldn't stand it, could you? You had to steal my share of the gold too."
"No, I swear, Dick. If I had stole your gold, would I have hung around and fallen asleep last night? You know I wouldn't have. Wait a second. What about you? Did you steal my share?"
"No, I didn't. Because if I did I'd tell you to your face. I don't care what I say to you, do you understand? I would just take it and be damned to you."
"Well, well..." Pasty Face got lost in his sentence because a thought had apparently entered his mind. This is not a good thing in dweebs.
"Well if we didn't, who did? Ohmygod. We're near the Outlaw Trail, and I've heard that it is haunted. You don't suppose we had a visit from..."
Dick didn't let him finish. "How did I ever get stuck working with a horse's hind end like you? Spooks and thieves. Next you'll be seeing headless horsemen."
"Oh, no, are there really such things, Dick?"
"WILL YOU SHUT YOUR STUPID TRAP YOU DIMWIT MORON?" Dick had heard all the foolishness he could take this morning, and it was barely after sun-up. "Now let's look around. If neither of us took it, then it was someone else. And it was not some stupid spook."
"Aha, look at this. Somebody stepped in this little patch of sand."
"Looks like a bear track," ventured the inane Pasty Face. Once again he was treated to a raging salvo.
"What would a bear want with gold? I ought to slap you clear into the next county just for the exercise. Where are the claw marks of this bear? No, this is a moccasin track. It was either made by an Indian or someone that wanted us to think that he is an Indian."
Hmmmm. I hadn't even thought of that. It was too bad my friend Peter wasn't here. It would have been more fun than going to a three ring circus. They tried to find more sign, but I had left none on the rocks, and when they had their backs to me at twenty feet away I figured the time had come to rid the camp of some vermin.
"Okay, boys, let's shuck the hardware." Dick was an old hand, and stoic. His gun and belt came down to earth with a thud. Pasty Face looked like a rat caught in a trap, which come to think of it, he was. "Try it if you want to, you whining little creep. I'm surprised Dick hasn't shot you by now anyway."
"Amen to that," said the black bearded man. Pasty Face dropped his rig as well.
"Now, as you two have probably guessed, my name is Jess Clay. I own the gold you mined for me yesterday, so I'm keeping it. I don't trust you behind my back with guns, so I'm keeping them. Tell me what you know about Nason and his bogus claim to my mine, and you can both ride off free and clear."
"We don't know any Nason," started in the whiner, and Dick cuffed him beside the head with his left hand.
"Can I have my gun back just long enough to shoot him, Clay?"
When I didn't answer, Pasty Face looked fearfully over his shoulder to see if I was really considering it. Actually, for a couple of seconds, I was.
"How did you know it was Nason?" I started with.
Dick was the one that responded. "I did a couple of jobs for him down in Virginia City. I was still there when he sent a telegram for me to meet him."
"How did he know about my mine?"
"That I couldn't tell you. If he hadn't of said to be on the lookout for you, I would have thought he owned it all along."
"Where did you meet him, in Salt Lake City?"
"Nope, he said to meet him in Ooray. He had changed his appearance, and I had trouble recognizing him until he spoke of the job."
"How did you ever pick up Pasty Face as a partner?"
"That is a good question. I wish I knew. My horse broke his leg in the desert one time, and this fellow came along and shared his ride with me. I figured he saved my life. Now I kind of think it would have better to have died out there rather than put up with his whining day and night."
"All right, you boys can take your horses and ride out. If I see you around here again, I'll shoot first and ask questions later."
As they started to ride out, Dick turned back to me. "Clay, you've been square with us so I'll tell you this. I think Nason is posing as a banker or a clerk. When he met us he was wearing a little cotton suit and eyeglasses, and I know he doesn't need them. When I looked past him, I could tell that the glasses are nothing but window glass. But don't forget, next week he could look completely different."
Well, well. That explained a lot. Dick had just described the man that registered my claim.
Amos Heskins was once more presented with bad news. As of yet it hadn't really
sunk in, and he paced the floor, now and again shaking his head in disbelief. Three of them! How could three men lose in a shoot out against one?
The thought that this might happen had briefly crossed his mind when he sent them on their mission, but he had dismissed it. Three men should have been able to carry out this job, even if they were blindfolded. He supposed in a way they were. Not blindfolded, but hampered. Not with lack of vision but lack of brains. Amos Heskins was not proud of a lot of the members of his clan.
Now he supposed he had to get this job finished. He felt no blinding hate or even a sense of loss, but it wouldn't do for people to think they could knock over a Heskins at will. This Jess Clay was going to have to die.
He could do the deed himself, no question about that, but he felt that as the head of this band of thieves and the grandfather of many of them, he should be sitting back giving the orders. He had paid his dues long ago in the hot dusty streets and the chaffing seat of a saddle. He had watched the blood flow and had many close calls of his own. The screams of the innocent women and children would have haunted many a man, but such memories just made old Amos yawn.
He had never known a cowardly moment in his life. That was what bothered him about some of his extended family. How some of them turned out to have such lousy backbones was beyond him. It was like a rat had somehow mated into the family. Considering some of his relatives, he decided that might be an apt description.
Well, there was no sense wasting any more of the deadwood. If this went on too much longer, he would be in danger of losing his title of king of the roost. He would send his boy Elijah.
His son was a killer, pure and simple. It was hard to tell if he took pleasure in anything, but if results were any indication, Elijah liked to kill. He wasn't a hot-blooded gunfighter, giving a fair chance in the street, but a hunter of men. His method was to find the habits of the man he was hunting, then shoot his quarry with the 45-70 trapdoor Springfield that was his favorite. He was a fast hand with his pistol as well, for a man in his line needs a quick line of defense in an emergency. He didn't bother with the weight of a Peacemaker in a gunbelt. Instead he carried a .44 Bulldog of unknown Belgium make stuffed into his hip pocket. He put in enough practice to be deadly, seeing it as part of his career rather than recreation.
For the past half a dozen years he had done a lot of jobs for strangers that heard of him through word of mouth. Ranchers needing a particular rustler out of the way, or a gang of thieves that wanted to be rid of a tough marshal; it was all the same to him. He neglected to tell his father about shooting rustlers in case the old man should take offense.
At first these requests for a killer had come through Amos, but gradually the pleas went directly to Elijah and nobody else. If this had occurred with anybody else, there would have been a ruckus, but Amos had given his boy pretty much free rein while keeping everybody else in check. Someday Elijah would be taking over his legacy, such as it was.
If his son wasn't on a job, Amos knew he would find him in one of two places—the corner table at the bar playing solitaire or at his cabin working on his guns and loading ammunition. The old man was glad to find him at home. When the boy was sitting alone drinking in the bar, it even gave his father the willies to see him. There had never been any trouble at such times, but Amos figured that was because anyone seeing him sitting there morosely staring into his glass left him alone. He was like a coiled snake that people instinctively knew to stay clear of.
"I've got a job for you, Eli," the old man said in lieu of a greeting.
"What's it pay, Amos?" Elijah had always called his father by his given name from the time he was a baby, never "Pa" or anything of that nature. The old man had encouraged it, for he felt it would make the kid grow up faster.
"This one is for the family. I want you to find and kill Jess Clay. You're better at such things than I am so I won't give any advice.
"Good." That was the only reply.
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