Denver Strike (3 page)

“Lomela! I met your father! I met Robert Carthay, and he told me about the silver mine. You have nothing to fear now. The men who were after you are gone.”

A warm light bloomed in the cabin windows, but now Hawker seemed unable to walk. He felt dizzy; he felt nauseous; his legs seemed unable or unwilling to move away from the beauty of the mountain valley frozen in moonlight. If he could only sit for a while, rest for just a bit, then he could travel.

Hawker leaned toward the ground, and the ground rushed up to meet him. He hit with a thud, then all was cold and fuzzy as a rapid darkness took his brain.

three

Hawker was aware of a great radiant warmth moving through him, a wonderful feeling of heat that embraced his entire body.

Then he was sitting bolt upright, staring into the flames of a hearth fire. He lay in front of the fire with a goose-down comforter over him. The woman stood peering at him, fire-shadows flickering across her brown face.

He lay on the plank floor of the cabin. There were deerskins over the windows, and a kerosene lamp cast a yellow circle of light, showing a wood stove, cane-backed chairs, a hand pump, stacked dishes, and a door that opened into a darkened room.

Hawker felt a dull ache in his left arm, and he remembered the fight he had had with the man with the knife. He used his right hand to rub his bleary eyes. “How long have I been unconscious?”

The woman stared at him, unmoving. There was a blanket across her lap, and her hands were beneath the blanket. “An hour. Maybe longer. You were delirious off and on; you came and went. How do you feel now?” Her voice was too high, too countrified to fit the no-nonsense, almost handsome quality of her face. It was like hearing Ingrid Bergman speak with Minnie Pearl's voice.

“I feel like I've been hit over the head with a sledge,” Hawker said, straightening himself. The blanket slid down over his chest, and he saw that his arm had been neatly bandaged and that he wore only his underwear. “Did you get me in here all by yourself?”

“You helped some. You half-walked, half-crawled. You lost a lot of blood. What happened? Did you get shot?”

“Stabbed. There were four men in the hills. I—chased them away. The fourth man got me with his knife.”

“Do you really mean you chased them away? Or did you kill them?” The woman's dark eyes were totally without emotion or mercy as she asked the question.

Hawker said slowly, “I killed them. All of them. That's what they wanted to do to you, isn't it? You or your kids—it didn't matter to them. Just as long as they had at least one of you alive to use as a bargaining tool.”

“They'd do anything for my daddy's silver mine, wouldn't they? They'd kill, kidnap, lie—anything.”

Hawker nodded. “That's right. And don't forget it.”

The woman let the blanket slide off her lap so that now the vigilante could see the long-barreled revolver she held tightly in both hands. It had been aimed at him the entire time. “Not much chance of me forgetting it, Mr. Whatever-your-name-is,” she said coldly. “Those men were shooting down here without a care in the world at my two babies, who haven't done a lick of harm to any creature on this earth. Men as mean as that don't deserve a trial nor words. All they deserve is a bullet in the head. Now you tell me right now why I shouldn't put a bullet through your head.”

“Because I'm not one of them, Lomela,” Hawker said calmly. “I was sent here to help you. I already told you that. Tom Dulles sent me. Isn't Tom a friend of yours? He was worried about you. He knows how badly Bill Nek wants your father's mine. He knows Bill Nek will stop at nothing.”

The woman seemed unconvinced. “You could have got Tom's name anyplace. You could be making the whole thing up. It's not like I can get on the telephone and give Tom a call. The nearest phone in these parts is thirty miles over rough country.”

“I know that you and Tom were lovers, Lomela. I know that he was in love with you before his wife recovered and made it—implausible—for you and him to continue as man and woman. He told me how badly he felt about it all.”

The woman was silent for a long moment of appraisal before she finally said, “He purely did feel bad; both of us did.” There was a touching, faraway quality to her voice as she continued. “His wife had those brain operations, and then she was in the coma for more than a year, and you couldn't hardly call him still married. There didn't seem to be nothing at all wrong in Tom and me finding each other and falling in love. He took good care of his wife, and I took good care of him. He was a wanting, needing man, filled with loneliness and hurt. But he also knew what was right and what was wrong. And when his wife woke up one day, he knew we couldn't go on.”

“He still cares about you,” Hawker said gently. “That's why he sent me.”

The woman stood and placed the revolver on the mantelpiece above the fire. She stooped and fitted another log onto the grate. Her baggy cotton blouse was tucked into her jeans, and Hawker could see her heavy breasts silhouetted against the fire. “I know he still cares. But it's not like the old way we cared for each other. Now we're more like kinfolk who are friendly to each other, that kind of caring.” The woman turned and looked at Hawker. “I believe Tom sent you. And I surely do thank you for killing those men. Are you going to get in a lot of trouble for it? Or are you a policeman?”

The vigilante almost smiled at the girlish naïveté of her question—as if a cop or anyone else could kill four men without almost certainly getting into some kind of trouble. “I'm not a policeman,” Hawker said. “And, come morning, I'll make sure the bodies of the men aren't found. Unless you talk, there's not too much chance of my getting into trouble.”

The woman nodded, satisfied. “Good,” she said. “I kind of knew someone was up here. I felt it all day. I don't know how I knew, but I did.”

“I was the only one up here all day. The other men got there about two hours before you heard the shots.”

“You watched me and my babies all day long without saying a word?” The woman raised her eyebrows, impressed. But then she realized something. “So you was up there when I took my afternoon bath?”

Hawker nodded. “I watched you through binoculars”—he smiled—“and a very nice bath it was, too. You had quite an audience. The men were there then, too. Actually, you helped draw them out. When you started taking your clothes off, they came out of hiding.”

The woman nodded with emphasis. “Good. Then it was worth running around stark naked in front of a bunch of strange men. I'd do it again if I thought it would help keep my babies safe.”

“Where are your children, anyway?”

The woman motioned toward the darkened room. “In there, asleep. They purely have had some time of it, dodging bullets and worrying about being attacked. There was a time when I used to think that getting divorced from their daddy was the worst thing that could happen to them. I didn't know how wrong I was.”

“Things get a lot more complicated when you're rich,” Hawker said.

The woman only shrugged as she poured tea from a kettle into a mug. She handed the cup to him, then took a seat beside him on the rug. “I just hope we all live long enough to get a chance to enjoy it,” she said without bitterness. “It's a long story; a hard one to understand.”

“I've already heard the story,” said James Hawker. “And I already understand.”

What Hawker understood was that, by rights, Lomela and her family should have already been enjoying great wealth for many years. God knows, her father, Robert Charles Carthay, and his partners had worked hard enough. Yet only one of them ever prospered.

Sitting in the plush lounge of the Slope Hotel in Denver, Carthay had told Hawker all about it.

It had all begun more than fifty years ago, in Denver, when four young men had decided to live out the alluring dream: to strike it rich as silver prospectors. Carthay was the thinker among them, the born leader. Jimmy Estes was the sprite, the camp clown. Chuck Phillips was darkly handsome and mercurial. Bill Nek could be moody, brooding, brilliant, or hilarious, depending on his mood.

For the first years, just the excitement of their rough-and-ready lives was enough for these men. They had the mountains, fresh air, good food, and an occasional bottle of whiskey, and they had their friendship. It was a very close friendship, for the four men had signed an agreement—a covenant—to share all finds, whether discovered individually or together. But they found little silver to speak of, just enough to stake them again to more months in the Colorado wilderness.

But then Jimmy Estes did make a find. He struck a moderately rich vein of silver within spitting distance of the old railroad tracks that filed through Gore Range, high in the Rockies.

The four men celebrated. They went to Denver, where they drank, they ate, they had women—and the first man up and in the claim office the next day was Bill Nek, the brooding one, and he took it all for himself.

Over the years, Nek parlayed that stolen vein into one of the greatest mining fortunes in Colorado. He became known regionally as the Silver King—tarnished silver, some said, because his methods of acquisition were often brutal and illegal, though always carefully concealed by a masterly and expensive use of the law.

Conversely, Robert Charles Carthay, Jimmy Estes, and Chuck Phillips remained poor prospecting desert rats, making just enough money to get by on. As the years went by and they kept up their fruitless prospecting, the local stories about them became wilder and wilder. To Colorado's New Guard (moneyed Easterners who contrived Western accents and wore cowboy hats in Vail's plush watering holes), the three old men became comic figures, legendary buffoons who represented the shaky social makeup of most old-time Coloradoans. “Loony” was the most charitable description.

Jimmy Estes and Chuck Phillips never married; Robert Carthay took a Hispanic and Indian mixed-breed as his long-term companion. The woman who now sat beside Hawker by the fire was the attractive result.

The story could have ended right there—one more tragic tale of prospecting in the West. But it didn't end there because Carthay, Estes, and Phillips never gave up their search for silver. Finally, three years ago—more than fifty years after the four partners had signed the covenant—they found it. They found what they had always dreamed of finding but had never really expected to find at all: a vein of silver so wide, so rich, that it was far beyond any of their wildest expectations. As safely and as secretively as a combined 150 years of prospecting experience allowed, they registered their find, calling the mine the Chicquita, in memory of Carthay's eldest daughter, who'd died tragically when she was only ten. They had commenced mining operations, gradually extending and building a mine. Yet before they had realized any profit, Bill Nek, the Silver King, arrived on the scene demanding that they sell him the mine.

He was wasting his time, of course. The mine wasn't for sale, not for any price, and certainly not to him. But Nek was a rich man, not used to taking no for an answer. He began to apply pressure, trying to grind the old men down. But Carthay and Estes and Phillips hadn't survived for fifty years in the mountains by being soft. They told Nek to go to hell more than once—and maybe once too often: the three of them were kidnapped.

Nek had his hired guns take them to an abandoned mine in the high mountains. There they were kept. Nek couldn't simply have them killed because their joint will would transfer ownership of the silver mine to Lomela through a complex trust that made the mine virtually untouchable. So the Silver King had the infuriating task of keeping his three old partners alive while breaking them to the point where they would sell the mine to him. The old men were tortured, but never beyond the point of endurance, for Nek couldn't take the chance of killing any one of them.

Finally, Robert Carthay escaped. He found Lomela and warned her; she told Tom Dulles, a Denver cop and her former lover. It was clear that Nek would stop at nothing to get Carthay back and make him sign over the papers. And Nek had the money and the hired gunmen to do it.

Dulles realized that it was an extraordinary situation—and that it called for extraordinary measures.

Like most of the cops in major cities around America, he had heard rumors of a lone auburn-haired stranger who feared nothing for he no longer had anything to lose.

Dulles sent Lomela and her father to separate hiding places, then turned his attention to getting in touch with the world's deadliest vigilante.

Hawker was impossible to find. But by now he had such a complex network of sympathizers around the nation that it was just as impossible for people in need to remain beyond his hearing.

The vigilante heard about Carthay and his plight. He was on a plane out of Miami the next day, bound for the Mile High City.

“That's the story your father told me two days ago in Denver,” Hawker said, finishing the mug of tea. “Tom Dulles brought him in to talk to me. It was a short meeting. Your father wore a big Western hat and glasses, a kind of disguise so he wouldn't be recognized. Apparently Nek has spies everywhere. Money buys even the most unlikely spies. Dulles told me where your father was being hidden and where you were hiding. I decided that Nek was most likely to send his goons after you. If he got you and maybe killed one of your children, then he would have plenty of blackmail leverage on your father and his two partners.”

The woman laughed softly. “You know what the really strange thing is? All those years after Bill Nek double-crossed him, my daddy still wouldn't say anything bad about that man. My daddy was fierce loyal, and he just couldn't bring himself to say anything bad about a man who had been a partner of his.”

“Come to think of it,” said Hawker, “he didn't have much bad to say about Nek two days ago when I met him.”