Novel 1981 - Comstock Lode (v5.0) (15 page)

“What’s that mean?”

“My name is Trevallion, and there are some thieves around who don’t like me. They might come hunting for me.”

Dane Clyde shrugged. “Wake me up when the shooting starts,” he said cheerfully. “I’m so tired it would take a war to wake me up once I hit the mattress.”

Trevallion barred the door and shielded the light, then hung his coat on a peg. “Had anything to eat?”

“Not much, lately.”

Trevallion made coffee and hunted through the cupboard. It was very neat, as he would have expected, for until she became too ill, MacNeale had lived here with his wife. He found a slab of bacon from which some slices had been cut and in the breadbox some baking-powder biscuits that were several days old.

“It isn’t much,” he said, “but we’ll get along.” Then, turning to look at Clyde, he said, “What’s an actor doing in Virginia City?”

“I heard there was a boom, or about to be one. I figured the town could do with some entertainment.”

“You could be right. What can you do?”

“Act, sing, impersonations, play almost anything there is in the way of an instrument.” He removed his tie and collar, carefully placing the collar button on the table where it could be immediately found. “Actually, it’s the only thing I wish to do. My father insisted on an education. He was a scholar of the old school.”

“Where you from?”

“Dublin, Ireland. My people were transplanted English, and like many of them, we became more Irish than the Irish themselves.”

Trevallion put a twenty dollar gold piece on the table. “That’s a loan. You can sleep here.”

“Say, that’s decent of you! I am obliged.”

“Forget it, and pay me when you can. You say you can sing? Tell Lyman Jones, you might sing down there and let them put money in the pot. There’s not much entertainment here, as you guessed.”

“There will be in the spring. I know of two or three companies who are thinking of coming up here to play. Is there a theater?”

“No, they’ll have to play in a corral or an inn-yard, like Shakespeare did.”

Clyde glanced at him. “You know about that, do you?”

T
REVALLION WAS SITTING over coffee in the bakery the following morning when Will Crockett came in.

“When are you going to work for me, Trevallion?”

“I’m not. When are we going to be partners, Crockett?”

Crockett laughed. “I don’t need a partner. There’s scarcely enough for one.”

“Maybe that’s why you need a partner.”

“What? What’s that mean?” Crockett’s good humor was gone. “I am doing all right.”

“No doubt, but is ‘all right’ good enough? I’ve seen some of your ore, and it’s just what you said. It is all right. Who manages your operation, Crockett?”

“I do, why?”

“How many tons are you getting out? Right now, for example?”

“Now? We’re closed down. Al Hesketh had to go to the coast on business, and as some of our miners pulled out, we decided to close down for the winter.”

“If you’ve got the capital to pay miners, you should be working, piling up ore to ship when spring opens the trail. At least, that’s my feeling.”

Will Crockett stared out of the window, obviously irritated, less by what Trevallion had said than by thoughts developed from it.

“I need a mining man over there. Al’s against it, says we are doing well enough and he has plans, but he doesn’t know much more about mining than I do, although he’s a top businessman. Knows exactly what he’s doing all the time.”

“Maybe you should listen to him.”

“Why don’t you come over and have a look? Tell me what you think?”

“I will do that, but it will cost you fifty dollars.”

“Fifty dol—” Crockett’s face flushed. “You want fifty dollars just for walking through a mine? Take you no more than thirty minutes?”

Trevallion finished his coffee. He got up. “See you later, Melissa.”

When he was gone, Crockett slammed down his cup. “Confound the man! Fifty dollars? That’s preposterous!”

“You asked him, Will. He did not come to you. He never comes to anyone…at least not to ask for anything. He will go out of his way to help someone. He helped me get started here, and when Jim Ledbetter did not come in on time, he went looking for him.”

“Damn it, the man’s a miner! I’ve had a dozen people tell me that Trevallion knows more about mining and about getting the ore out than anybody they know. I need him.”

Melissa smiled. “Will, if you need him, you’d better make up your mind to pay him. One thing you have to understand, Trevallion doesn’t seem to
want
anything. If he really cares for anything or anybody, I don’t know what it is.”

Crockett sat quietly for a few minutes. “Melissa, you’re a good woman. You’re also a calming influence. Whenever I come here, I feel better when I leave.”

She smiled. “It’s the coffee, Will. I make a good cup of coffee.”

They were silent for a few minutes, and then she said, “Will? If you do have Trevallion look at your mine, don’t tell Al Hesketh.”

He stared at her. “Don’t tell Al? Why not? Why, I never make a move without Al! He’s my right hand!”

“Did you ever suggest having Trevallion look at the mine?”

“I suggested hiring him. As near as I can recall Al didn’t think it was necessary.”

“Will, if I were you I’d pay Trevallion to look at the mine, and I’d listen to what he had to say, and I wouldn’t even mention it to Al Hesketh.”

Crockett took out a cigar and bit off the end. He stared at it for a minute, then lighted it. Melissa refilled his cup. “A lot of men are going to get rich here, Will. You could be one of them. You’re in on the ground floor like George Hearst, and you can do well, but you’re too trusting, Will, much too trusting…of me, of Al Hesketh, of everybody.”

“Maybe,” he muttered, “maybe.”

Trevallion went to work on the MacNeale claim, mucking out rock that had already been shot down and sorting it for that worth shipping. He crushed some of the richest-looking fragments and panned out what gold he could find. It was a piddling operation, but it added a little to his supply of ready money as well as giving him an idea of the ore’s potential.

The lode seemed to dip to the west, but he distrusted it and spent a good bit of time wandering over the side of the mountain or sitting on the slope below the town, just studying the roll of the hill and the convolutions of what exposed strata he could see. Several times he encountered others doing the same thing, but none seemed to have any idea what they were looking for. Probably they hoped to find an outcropping of gold ore thrusting itself up at them.

There was no sign of Waggoner.

Two weeks after the return with Ledbetter, he got his first lead. It came from Langford Peel.

He was having coffee at the bakery when Peel entered. He crossed the room and sat down, and Melissa brought them coffee. “I was in Genoa a few days ago,” he commented, “and there was a man in there with some blankets for sale. A bundle of them. Now there hasn’t been a pack train over the mountain in a couple of months, and I just thought you’d be interested.”

“Know the man?”

“I do. As I once suggested, he trails around with Sam Brown. The name he’s using is Kip Hauser, but when he was around Corinne awhile back, he was using another name.”

“I think I’ll go see him.”

Peel nodded. “Want me to come along?”

Trevallion smiled. “Now that’s kindly of you, Lang, it really is, but I think we feel just alike on that score. That every man should saddle his own horses and fight his own battles.”

“But this is Jim Ledbetter’s fight. I like Jim, and he’s laid up.”

“I’ll handle it. But, thanks.”

Peel finished his coffee and glanced over at Melissa. “Thanks, ma’am. That was right good coffee.”

When he had gone Melissa looked after him. “So that’s the fabled Farmer Peel, the Chief of the Comstock! He seems such a nice man.”

“He is. He was a fine soldier, too. He was a bugler at first, survived many Indian battles and was noted even then for his skill with weapons. He’s not a man who looks for trouble.

“As a matter of fact, few of the men who are noted as gunfighters are trouble-hunters. It’s been the custom from the beginning of time for men to settle their difficulties with weapons. It’s not a policy I advocate, Melissa, but that’s the way it is, and the way it has been.

“By the time a man has won two or three such arguments, he has a reputation. If a man is drawing a gun on you, there’s not much choice but to shoot him, if you can.”

He sat over his coffee, thinking it out. If Hauser was peddling blankets, they were almost certainly some of those stolen from Ledbetter’s mules. Every available blanket in town had been sold long ago, and as Peel said, no mule trains had come in.

He remembered Hauser somewhat vaguely as a man seen around Gold Hill. He was a lean, tired-looking man with watchful black eyes, but his tired looks were deceptive. Trevallion had seen him win considerable money in a jumping contest when he had seemed the least likely jumper in the lot.

Hauser knew him by sight, and as Clyde entered the bakery the solution became obvious. “Sit down.” He gestured to Melissa. “I want you to meet Dane Clyde. He’s an actor, and a friend of mine.”

Later, he described Hauser. “You can do something for me, but I don’t want you in trouble. At the first sign that he has recognized you as someone he has seen before, quit. He’s a dangerous man.”

“What do you want to know?”

“Who he hangs out with, and if possible, where he goes.

“He doesn’t know you, and I want you to keep away from me until this is over.” He explained about the robbed pack train and what he suspected. He also described Sam Brown. “Avoid him, he’s deadly. He needs no excuse to kill.”

“I’ll be careful.”

Clyde was a pleasant man, easy to talk to and a good listener. “My last job was in Frisco,” he explained. “I’d come out with a company from New York. Came around the Horn. Before that I played in Dublin, London, Paris—wherever there was a good role.” He smiled. “And often enough where there was any kind of a role!

“But I worked a season with Rachel Felix, and then went on tour with Miss Redaway in
Ticket Of Leave Man
.”

“Who did you say?”

“Miss Redaway, Grita Redaway. You wouldn’t have heard of her. She’s new, but very good. She was with Felix for a season or two as an ingenue, but she’s just been coming up this past year or so. Good notices, very professional.”

“Unusual name.”

“It is, you know? She’s a Yank, too. American, I mean. Played some through the South when very young.”

“Attractive?”

“More than that. She’s beautiful, a very rare beauty. That was why she and Rachel parted ways. No hard feelings you understand, Rachel just told her she was too beautiful and was drawing attention from her, from Rachel, that is.

“I heard it, myself. Rachel just told her, ‘Honey, you’ve got it, use it.’ But they’re good friends.”

“How old would she be? This Miss Redaway?”

“Young, just a girl, actually. I doubt if she’s twenty. In fact, I am sure she isn’t.”

Dane Clyde drifted away and Trevallion finished his coffee. An uncommon name, certainly, but unlikely, very unlikely.

He remembered that night all too well, remembered holding the trembling child in his arms, frightened himself but braver because he was needed, because she needed him. Her need had made him stronger, helped to bring him through what followed.

It was, he reflected sourly, the only time anybody had ever needed him, the only time he had ever felt that need to protect, to shield. Grita had given him, in those few moments, something priceless, something he had been a long time recognizing.

His father had had his mother; whom did
he
have?

Chapter 17

W
HEN THE WINTER came he stayed in the cabin, warm against the threat of wind and snow. The fires in the sheet-metal stove blushed its sides with heat, and the rooms were snug against the storm. Trevallion heard the wind and remembered old rocks upon the Cornwall coast and the sea against them, and the cold rain falling.

He read a little from the few books MacNeale had left, and by day he worked in the drift, deepening it, and finding a little more width to the vein. He took the gold from the best rock and put the silver ore to one side.

From his hillside he could look down upon much of the town and see it scattered along the streets, if such they could be called. Snow turned white the hills, and the Washoe zephyrs filled the air with it, moaning about the eaves of the cabin and prying with ghostly fingers to find a way to the warmth inside.

On a Monday night when the snow fell, Dane Clyde came up the hill and tapped on the door. Trevallion opened for him with a gun tucked behind his belt, and Clyde went to the stove, slipping off his mittens and extending stiff fingers to the heat.

“I found where the blankets are kept, and all the rest too, aside from what they’ve eaten.”

Trevallion waited, and he said, “It’s a cabin, not where we thought, but in a canyon about a mile above Cedar. There’s a trail. Do you know it?”

“I do.”

“The cabin’s about two hundred yards up. Nobody lives there, but there’s a corral and a shed. The cabin’s mostly dug-out.”

“Anybody there?”

“No. They come and go. Mostly it’s empty.”

“Good.” He turned to the coffeepot. “Sit down. It’s almighty cold out there.” He filled his cup. “Did they see you?”

He shrugged. “Maybe. I started the story that I was getting over an illness, and the doctor had told me I must walk. I started walking each evening a different direction, and finally, I think, they got used to me and paid no attention.”

“I hear you’ve been singing a bit down at Lyman’s.”

“I have. But elsewhere too. It’s the old Irish songs they like best, but I’ve a lot of amusing ones from the music halls. It’s a living.”

He was quiet for a moment. “You’ve not been down for a few days?”

“No.”

“Sam Brown killed a man. Cut him with a bowie knife, ripped him wide open, then shoved the body under a table and went to sleep on it, his hands still bloody.”