The Savage Gun (3 page)

Hobart's plan appealed to all of them, and once they had learned how much gold Savage was taking out of the creek, their greed took hold and they followed Hobart like a pack of pups chasing after a pork chop.

The two men took turns checking the camp with the binoculars. As they waited, the fog slowly began to thin and dissipate. The sun rose high in the sky and they even saw an eagle flying lazy circles far up the mountain, sailing on invisible currents of air like some majestic feathered lord of the skies.

“What do you think, Pete?” Luke asked, after another half hour had passed by.

“Let's give it the better part of an hour. I can see most everybody now, but the tents are still fogged in. I didn't see the little gal or the woman yet. Did you?”

Luke shook his head.

“That little girl sleeps late.”

“Yeah, but her mother ought to be hauling a pail down to the creek to dip water out so's they can wash their pretty faces.”

“Well, I'll keep lookin'. I don't see that them two are going to make much difference.”

“They will to Ollie, Luke.”

“Yeah. They will.”

Forty-five minutes later, the fog had lifted and they could see the tents, the prospectors lining the bank, some at the water's edge swirling gravel in their pans. Two men were working a dry rocker, which made a lot of noise, and four others were working two sluice boxes, shoveling in gravel and washing it down the chute, then putting the gravel in pans and swishing water until the yellow gold gleamed at the edge of dolomite.

“Let's go, Luke,” Pete said. “It's time.”

“Yep.”>

The two slid backward off the rock. Pete slung the binoculars around his neck and led the way back to their horses. The sounds of the mining camp began to subside as they left the rock pile behind. The horses whickered. Luke smacked his horse across the nose to shut it up. The horse bared its teeth and tried to bite him, but Luke thumped him on the lips and the horse backed down, laying its ears flat.

“That horse is going to take a chunk out of you one of these days, Luke.”

“If he does, he'll be one sorry horse, I tell you.”

Pete mounted up.

Together the two made it back to the outlaw camp where Ollie and the others were waiting.

“Clear?” Ollie asked.

“Clear as a bell,” Pete said. “Them boys is working their asses off.”

“Let's saddle up, then, and take it slow,” Ollie said. “Check your weapons. We don't want no misfires.”

They all checked their pistols and rifles. There was the sound of snapping and clicking as they worked the actions, reloaded ejected cartridges, spun cylinders on their six-guns.

“You all wait for my signal when we get there,” Ollie said. “Just like we practiced. A solid line of us hits that creek. Then we open up on 'em. You boys on the left take the ones of them on the left and those on the right, take the right. And us in the middle will take out all the runners and crybabies and whiners.”

All of the men nodded in assent as they walked to their horses.

After they were all mounted up, Ollie looked them over.

“One thing,” he said, “before we go.”

They all waited to hear what Hobart had to say.

“Kill 'em all. Ever' damned one of 'em. No witnesses left behind.”

“That mean the little girl and her ma?” Luke said.

“Everybody, Luke. You shoot any damned thing that moves. And you all shoot until nothing nor nobody moves.”

One of the men swore under his breath, but Ollie couldn't tell who it was.

And he didn't care. He knew the men would do what he wanted them to.

They were as greedy as he was.

3

DAN SAVAGE WOKE UP A FEW MINUTES AFTER HIS SON, JOHN, crawled out of the tent. His wife, Clare, stirred, but she was still asleep when he put his boots on and crawled out into the open air. Little Alice was still sound asleep, her rag doll clasped in her arms, her little cherubic face partially covered by her golden ringlets. He touched her forehead and she didn't stir.

Dan turned and looked up into the trees where smoke and dust hung in the air from Ben's blasting. The sky in the east was ablaze with dawn. Long loaves of clouds burned a brilliant red like the sumac and maple leaves in fall. He had never seen such a magnificent sunrise, he thought, and stood there, as if mesmerized, for several moments. The glory of the sky filled him with a reverence he had seldom felt in his life and he wished Clare and Alice were up to see it. He smelled the pines and the acrid smoke as it drifted down from the mineshaft and exulted in the wonder of it all, as if he had been witness to creation itself.

He stretched and adjusted his galluses, then ran fingers through his hair, pulled on his full beard, then stroked it twice as if to arrange the hairs so that they came to a point. They didn't. He needed a trim, but he would get that done in Pueblo. Clare liked to fuss over him that way, snipping at his hair and beard, but she would be far too busy cooking and packing for the trip on the morrow.

Dan was almost as tall as his son, John, but John had grown an inch or two since they filed their claims several months ago. He was lean and muscular, with a slightly sunken chest, his face and wrists browned by the sun in the clear mountain air. His hazel eyes and aquiline nose gave him a serious look, and with the beard, he might have been taken for a college professor in any eastern town. When he stuck his empty pipe in his mouth, the professorial illusion seemed complete.

Dan walked behind the Marquis tent that was his domicile, over to the bank just above the beach and relieved himself, shooting a yellow stream against the pebbles, small roots of grass, and sand until some of the soil broke loose and joined the small rivulet that flowed down to the sand and soaked in. He and John had built an outhouse in the woods, less than a hundred yards away, but he had no need of it then. They had built it for Clare and Alice, for privacy, but he and the other men used it, too, when they had to perform more complicated functions.

He buttoned his fly and fished a pouch of tobacco from his back pocket. He filled his pipe, spooning tobacco into the bowl with his index finger. A slice of dried apple lay embedded in the loam of the tobacco inside the pouch, imparting a freshness to the rough-cut leaves. He tamped the tobacco with his thumb, slid the pouch back in his pocket, and filched a box of wooden matches from his shirt pocket. He looked for a dry stone, saw one, and struck the match across its rough surface. The match flared and he touched the flame to his pipe, drawing breath through the stem until the small spark ignited. He puffed until the smoke was thick in the air and in his mouth and lungs. Then he walked over to another tent, opened the flap, and peered inside.

The three men inside were just barely awake, their grizzled faces protruding from the heavy woolen blankets that cocooned their bodies. The tent reeked of sweat and tobacco smoke, the fruity scent of dried apricots, apples, and peaches, the lingering aroma of fried bacon and sautéed onions that clung to their stiff soiled clothing.

“Rick, time to turn out of the kip,” Dan said to his brother, Richard Savage. “Donny, come on. You, too, Lee.”

Donny was Donald French, Clare's brother, and Lee was Leland Russell, Ben's younger brother. They all had shares in the Savage claim, all were in their mid-twenties, not much older than his son, John.

“Is there fog out there?” Donny asked.

“Not as much as there's going to be,” Dan said. “We're going to be smothered by a big cloud here pretty quick. Shake it out, boys.”

“Damned dynamite woke me up,” Rick said. “Lee, your brother ain't got the sense God gave a ball-peen hammer. I swear.”

“Ben can smell gold up in that rock,” Lee said, tossing his blanket aside like a magician flourishing his cloak.

Dan yelled across the creek to the men in the other tents, friends he had taken into partnership because he knew there was plenty of gold to go around. These were men he trusted, like Gary Whitman, Lou Finley, Jesse Ward, Pat Jensen, and Dale Snider, all single and in their thirties. Good, honest, hardworking men he had hunted with most of his life. Men who thrived on adventure and were at home in the wilderness. All of them were from Arkansas, hillfolk who had originally come from Kentucky with their families, several years after the war.

“Roll out, boys,” Dan hollered. “Don't let a little fog bother you.”

The tents moved as men's feet flailed against the walls. The fog was moving in, rising from the creek, thickening. But Dan could still see the ground. He picked up a pan and squatted next to the water. He scooped up gravel and sand, began to tip and wobble the pan. Prospecting was like a disease now. He loved the thrill of discovery. He knew the gold was in there, probably deeper than they had been digging and panning.

“This claim will make us rich,” he told Clare when he first brought her to Cripple Creek. “Where I'm panning, the creek takes a wide bend and I figure a lot of the gold settled there, over centuries. You'll see.”

She had seen. She was even more excited than little Alice when he showed her the first flakes of gold in his pan, like goldenrod dust, shining bright in the sun.

Clare had been raised in the hills of the Ozarks, so she was right at home in the Rocky Mountains. She was strong and in good health, didn't mind roughing it. She had grown up on a hardscrabble farm, toting water from the branch for her folks, planting taters, and plowing just like her father and brothers. A man couldn't ask for a better wife, a more loyal companion. And they had two fine children to show for twenty years of marriage.

Dan swirled the gravel in the pan, sloshing out the pebbles, adding more water when he needed it. The water was muddy and it took some delicate balancing to swirl out the larger stones and leave only gravel at the bottom. The men across the creek emerged from their tents, went into the woods at various places to pee in private. Dan heard the clatter of a shovel and the groan of a sluice box as Gary and Pat lugged it down to the water's edge.

“Whoeee, look at that sandbar,” Gary said, pointing out to the middle of the stream, just this side of the bend. “It done growed during the night.”

“You know something,” Pat said. “This here crick pans gold even while we catch forty winks.”

“You're in a good mood, Pat. Must have had sweet dreams.” Gary grinned as he let down the front end of the sluice box.

“I always have sweet dreams. Thinkin' about Julie Belle back home. She'll light up like a Christmas candle when I put a gold bracelet on her wrist.”

“Heck, she'll probably marry old Willard Perkins and have two kids by the time you get back.”

“No, siree, Julie Belle promised me she'd wait.”

Dan listened as all of the men got to work, some on the dry rockers, the others on the sluices. They would work up an appetite by the time Clare called them to breakfast. He swirled the water in the pan. Most of the gravel was gone and now he could see sand. Still no signs of gold yet, although he always imagined he could see it flickering in tiny yellow buds, but he knew that was only his imagination. He sloshed the dirty water from the pan, added a small amount and continued tipping the pan while he moved it in a circular motion. Around and around the water swirled, and out splashed the brownish water until finally he saw the black sand of the dolomite.

He heard the tent flap rustle behind him, turned, and saw Clare and Alice emerge and promptly disappear as they stepped into the fog bank. He heard the crunch of their shoes on the rocks as they made their way to the privy, and in the mountains he heard the screeching of blue jays, the camp robbers, announcing that the cook was up and they could soon fly down and steal crumbs from right under the noses of the humans. The jays were a raucous bunch, Dan thought, but Alice liked to feed them and he liked to hear her laugh when she threw them bits of bacon or biscuit.

Swirl and swirl, the water clearing now, the black dolomite spreading at the lower end of the pan, and then, Dan saw the gold dust begin to cling to the black sand. He moved the pan more gently, letting the gold find its way along the rim of the dolomite and it glowed rich and bright even in the shroud of fog that blotted out the sun.

The fragrance of evergreens wafted down to him as he set the pan down. There was hardly any water left in it. Just the gold and the dolomite. He pulled a small spoon and a small tobacco sack from his pocket. Gingerly and delicately, he spooned the dust from the pan and shook the spoon inside the sack, holding the waxed sides tight against it to scrape away every particle of dust. He parafined the sack so that the dust would not filter through the cotton fibers, a trick he had learned from an old prospector he met in Cripple Creek. Finally, he finished spooning out all the gold dust, sat down and rubbed the small of his back. Panning was hard work, hard on the back, wearing on the eyes. He rubbed them now, but the haze was the fog and the mist that swirled around him, blocking his view of the men working on the other side of the creek, and the boys on his side, who had gone downstream with shovels when last he had seen them.

He heard the clatter of the cooking irons and the clunk of wood as Clare got ready to build a fire. He could hear Alice running back and forth from the tent, bringing skillets and lard and such that her mother asked her for in her sweet, low voice that barely penetrated the cloud that clung to him now, so thick he could barely see his boots.

Up at the mine, he heard the creek of the wheelbarrow and then the clatter of rocks as Johnny dumped it near the big, flat stone he used to smash the ore with one of the mauls. It was a comforting sound. He didn't expect Ben to find any lodes up there, but he had taken Johnny under his wing and Dan thought the older man was a good influence on his son. Ben knew something about hard-rock mining, and they didn't really need either him or Johnny to work the creek. They were sluicing and panning better than a hundred dollars a day by Dan's figuring, some days more, some days slightly less. And they had more than two months of dust in sacks lying in a strong box in Dan's tent.