Brian Garfield (2 page)

Mr. Pickett said, “All right, you've got size and a tart tongue. What else can you say for yourself?”

“Nothing until I know what kind of auction block I'm on.”

“You know who I am?”

Boag had already reviewed what little he knew about Mr. Jed Pickett. During the war Mr. Pickett had ramrodded a guerrilla column in the Border States, a stringer for Bloody Bill Anderson, but that had been twenty years ago and men got older and sometimes soft where they sat and soft where they did their thinking. Mr. Pickett didn't seem that kind, but he'd been a two-bit leader of two-bit men long enough to get arrogant. Down in Sonora they'd put a fifty-dollar bounty on Apache scalps and Mr. Pickett had been one of the gringo bounty-hunters who had made a living off that until Boag and the rest of the Tenth under General Crook had run Geronimo to ground. So Sonora had canceled the scalphunters' bounty and the Jed Picketts were out of work just like the Boags and Wilstaches. It did give them something in common and that was why Boag had come along to see about all this.

“I know who you are,” he answered.

Gutierrez said quickly, “These two both Tenth Cav, Mr. Pickett. The big one was a sergeant.”

“Then they know their way around horses and guns.” Mr. Pickett fastened his unfathomable eyes on Boag. “What do you go by?”

“Boag.”

“You?”

“John B. Wilstach.”

“Line trooper?”

“Corporal,” Wilstach said with his rowdy little grin. “Corporal five times and busted back to line trooper four times.”

“Boag, you have a front name?”

“Just Boag.” They'd called him Sergeant for a first name so many years he'd forgot about the real one. Leave it forgot, he decided; it had never done him much service.

“You both in the Sierra Madre with Crook?”

“Aeah,” Wilstach said.

It seemed enough to satisfy Mr. Pickett. He turned back to his tent and lifted the flap. “Fill them in, Ben.”

Stryker went over to a half-dying campfire and indicated a black coffeepot. “Want any?”

“If you ain't got nothing stronger,” Wilstach agreed.

“Tequila in my bedroll, you want.”

“Yeah,” Wilstach said, “yeah.”

“Boag?”

“Tequila's fine.” He hadn't had a drink in thirty days and more.

Stryker broke out the bottle and passed it around. They were all mighty friendly here and Boag suspected every bit of it.

Stryker explained about the gold bullion in the express-company office on the Johnson-Yaeger pier in Hardyville. “It's been all winter since the last riverboat made it up the river that far. They got a lot of gold waiting.”

“How much is a lot?” Boag said.

Pickett's men had drifted through all the camps above Hardyville in the hills. When they'd put all the bits and pieces together it began to look as if the camps had delivered a lot of tonnage of raw ore to the smelter in Hardyville and when you discounted exaggerations and rumors it still looked to add up to pretty near a ton and a half of bullion.

Wilstach said, “What's a ton and a half worth?”

“Say three hundred thousand dollars official price. A mite more down in Mexico.” Stryker lofted the half-consumed bottle. “Buy a good deal of tequila for a share of that kind of money, boys.”

Boag said, “All right, now you get to tell us what a share amounts to.”

“Well you boys are kind of latecomers. Some of these men been riding with Mr. Pickett ten years or more.”

“John B.,” Boag said, “I don't believe I heard the man answer my question, did you?”

“It'll be good,” Ben Stryker said. “Real good for hired-hand wages. It's just one job of work for you two boys and then you take your shares and split up. Be a few days' work in it for you, that's all. We'll be pickin' up a few more men along the line too. Mr. Pickett totes it up we'll need around thirty men to handle Hardyville and that riverboat crew.”

“John B., did the man answer the question yet?”

“If he did it must've been in some other language, Boag.”

Boag knew why Stryker was taking his time. He was sizing them both up and trying to guess how little they'd be willing to take.

Boag said, “I'll save you the trouble doing sums in your head, Mr. Stryker. John B. and me will take ten thousand between us.”

“Mr. Pickett was thinking more along the lines of five thousand.”

“Apiece,” Boag said.

“Together,” Stryker corrected.

“Thirty men, three hundred thousand dollars, that's ten thousand dollars a man. We'll take half that. Seems fair.”

“No,” Stryker said. “It don't seem fair.” He got up and left them alone with the half bottle of tequila.

Wilstach looked around the camp. Nobody was in earshot. Boag contemplated the bottle but refused it when Wilstach offered it.

Wilstach said, “I ain't eager, Boag.”

“Why? Don't you think they can get away with it?”

“Sure they can. But that don't make it right.”

“Five thousand rights a lot of wrongs, John B.”

“Apiece?”

“Together, the man said.”

“Then you're inclined to take it.”

“I guess I am,” Boag said. “What else we got to look forward to?”

“We do this, we maybe could get jerked to Jesus, Boag. You ever seen a man hanged? Flop like a fish on a hook. Man I don't aim to end up right now in Boot Hill with dirt in my face.”

“You rather herd sheep, John B.?”

“I would if I knew how.”

“Now there's the point,” Boag murmured. “What do we know how to do, except soldiering, when push comes to shove?”

Wilstach gave it thought. Finally he said, “Maybe you're right.”

When Stryker came back and saw the bottle was empty he said, “You're in, then.”

“Aeah,” Wilstach said.

“Twenty-five hundred apiece.”

“Right,” Boag said.

“I'm kind of glad you agreed to join up,” Stryker said. “Otherwise we'd of had to kill you. Couldn't have you two tracking around loose knowing what you know.”

Boag said, “That gives a man a nice warm feeling, Mr. Stryker.”

3

The Johnson-Yaeger express company had an office on the pier, at the shore end of the dock. Tickets for passage were sold here, and shipments added to bills of lading. The warehouse for shipments was on an adjacent pier but the gold was held in the first building, probably because it was easier to guard: the building was small, it was exposed on all four sides, and it had only two doors, front and east side: There were windows here and there but they were barred with heavy cast-iron grilles bolted through to the inside of the timber studs. The front door gave access to the ticket window inside; behind the ticket counter was another wall with a door in it that led through to the back room where the gold was kept. That interior door had two armed sentries on it and the outside side door had two more. But there was more of a problem than that. The armed sentries weren't all that formidable by themselves. The town was.

Hardyville was a town of armed citizens all of whom were aware of the gold in the Johnson-Yaeger office, some of whom owned shares in it, and a few of whom might be willing to die to protect it. No one could say how many would fight, but the gold belonged to the town as a whole so if you wanted the gold you had to be prepared to fight the whole town.

Johnson-Yaeger had built its express office on the pier deliberately, not only because it was the nearest place to the riverboat landing but also because it was surrounded on three sides by the bulk of Hardyville. From the office it was a seven-block gamut in any direction before you reached the outskirts. So you either had to run that gamut or swim, or use a boat. The only boats in Hardyville were the skiffs used by Californians to cross the river, and none was nearly big enough to carry a ton and a half of gold bullion. In fact all of them together couldn't carry it.

The way Mr. Pickett had it worked out, the time when Hardyville felt safest was the time when the riverboat came and collected the gold and took it away. At that point the gold was no longer Hardyville's responsibility.

But that was also the time when the gold was easiest to take.

Boag tied his mule to a rail in front of the Bella Union saloon. He left the heliograph on the saddle because he didn't expect to need it again. He had a two-pound revolver under the skirt of his campaign jacket, rammed in his belt just aside from his spine. He walked the two blocks from the Bella Union to the Johnson-Yaeger pier, not hurrying, drawing a few incurious glances from pedestrians. Traffic was light on the street but what there was of it was converging slowly toward the riverboat pier because the rumor had gone around that the boat was due in this afternoon.

There was a knot of people around the waterfront when he got there. He posted himself in some shade across the street from the Johnson-Yaeger wharf and watched the fast brown river lash itself against the pilings. The sun was west of zenith and made painful reflections on the water.

He spotted Gutierrez and Stryker in the crowd, milling aimlessly, pretending they didn't know one another. Gradually during the next half hour a dozen of Mr. Pickett's rawhiders came along singly and by twos and melted into the throng awaiting the
Uncle Sam.
Empty freight wagons began to appear, drawing up at dockside ready to unload the flat-bottom hundred-foot vessel when she berthed.

He saw John B. Wilstach come down the street on his jackass and tie up in front of the assay office. A little while later the crowd's mutter began to grow into a roar and he saw Mr. Jed Pickett walk in sight around the corner of the Inter Ocean Hotel, and that was the sign that the riverboat had been sighted from the roof of the hotel.

Wilstach was over near the express office and when he caught Boag's eye he flashed his grin, filled with its rowdy flavorings. Boag pretended he didn't see Wilstach. None of them was supposed to know any of the others.

Boag was thinking of ways to spend his twenty-five-hundred dollars. You didn't just piss that kind of money away. You went to a town somewhere where they didn't mind the color of your skin too much and you opened an establishment. A saddlery and blacksmith shop, he figured, because he'd been enough years in the Cavalry to know everything you had to know about repairing tack and mending gear and shoeing horses.

It wasn't much of an ambition but then ambitions were new to him and he was feeling his way. In the army you just did your forty miles a day on beans and hay and you let the War Department worry about ambition; once you got your sergeant's stripes you were as far up as a nigger soldier was ever going to get, but there was nothing wrong with being topkick of a good line troop of Buffalo soldiers, a man didn't need any more ambition than that.

Now he was thinking vaguely in terms of Oregon or the British Columbia country. Need to get a long way away from this part of the world after today. And up in western Canada he'd heard around the barracks that they didn't piss on black skin.

Boag was slow to hate, his temper took a long time rising, but he was getting ready to hate the army for what it had done to him.

The steam whistle shrieked across the desert and the crowd got up on its toes. The
Uncle Sam
wasn't in sight yet; there was a last bend for her to come around.

You needed manpower, Mr. Pickett had explained to them all, and you needed to time it right. There would be a point when the ship was just about completely unloaded—that would be just short of sundown—and at that point most of the ship's crew and the longshoremen-for-the-day would be ashore, and that was the point when you had to strike. It would take most of the twenty-eight rawhiders to hold back the crowd on shore while the rest moved the gold on board the boat and got the drop on whatever crew was left there.

“Moving the gold aboard,” Stryker had told Boag, “that's you new boys' job.”

It put Boag and Wilstach and the rest of the new recruits at the bottom of the gang's ladder, but Boag was willing to be nothing more than a strong back for a day, for twenty-five-hundred dollars in gold. You had to spend five years in the army to earn that much pay and you never saw more than forty dollars of it in one hunk.

The tall structure of Uncle Sam hove in sight with the paddles grinding away at the water, straining; the current along here ran pretty close to sixteen knots. Boag tipped his shoulder against the weathered clapboard wall and settled down to wait.

4

The clerk in the Johnson-Yaeger office was a weary man with his hair all wet down, a bony pale man wearing sleeve garters and an eyeshade. Boag stood across the doorway from Wilstach, looking in. Two men were booking passage on the downstream leg; the clerk was chastising them for being tardy. “Most everybody booked two, three weeks ago.”

“You got room or ain't you?”

“Deck passage only, Mister. You stand up all the way unless you can find a wagon to sleep under.”

“I'd stand barefoot on hot coals all the way to Yuma to get out of this God-forsaken country.”

The two men got their tickets and left, coming out between Boag and Wilstach. One of them brushed Boag's shoulder and turned his head quickly, ready to apologize until he saw what Boag was. Then his face tightened. “Jesus Christ. Don't you know no better'n to get in a white man's way?”

Boag lowered his eyes. The man said, “You want to learn better manners, boy,” and hit Boag in the belly.

Boag let it cave him in. He sagged back against the wall holding his stomach in both hands. “Yes sir I sure got to learn better manners sir.”

“Christ you niggers ain't worth the powder to blow you to hell.” The man turned to his partner. “You coming?”

His partner was bent over against the building because he was laughing so hard. Finally the two of them moved away.