Helldorado (22 page)

Severin turned, leaving young Encina staring after him, the smile fading from the young banker’s face like fresh paint in a sandstorm, and knocked on the older Encina’s office door.

“Come,
por favor
!” came the friendly command from inside.

Severin shoved the door open and peered into the small but well-appointed office filled here and there with trinkets and mementos of Jose Encina’s home country, including a puma-hide couch trimmed with black-and-red-striped cloth and a statuette of Our Mother of Guadalupe hanging on the wall behind his leather-covered desk.

“Ah, mi amigo,” the banker said, returning an ink pen to its holder and removing his steel-framed spectacles as he sank bank in his cowhide chair. “The gold must have made an appearance.”

Severin moved into the room and closed the door behind him. “I’d say we got time for one cigar.” He plucked two cigars from the breast pocket of his black, clawhammer coat and held them up with a cunning grin.

The banker, whose thinnning, pomaded hair was liberally touched with gray, returned the expression. “And a brandy?”

“Got some of that fine Spanish brandy?”

“Of course, mi amigo. Would I serve you anything less?”

“Well, then,” Severin said, sinking into a leather-upholstered, walnut-armed visitor chair angled in front of the desk, “why the hell not?”

Chuckling, Jose Encina rose from his own chair and walked over to a table under a framed map of Chihuahua, Mexico, and poured out two brandies from a cut-glass container. He brought the snifters back to his desk, set one in front of the sheriff, the other in front of his own chair where Severin had laid one of his cigars.

Sinking back into the chair, the banker said with a weary sigh, “How do you do this fine day, my friend?”

“I reckon I’m old and gettin’ older.” Severin slid a match across the desk to Encina, who’d picked up the cigar to sniff one of the Cubans that the town tamer regularly ordered in from Denver. “Ain’t no stoppin’ that.”

“No, there is no stopping it. I, too, grow old. Older than you by ten years, and I have to tell you, I think it is time for me to turn the bank over to my son.”

“I thought you had done that, Jose.” Severin was holding the match flame to his cigar, puffing smoke out his lips and nostrils as the flame danced in front of his washed-out blue eyes.

“Miguel is the president,
si
. But I still keep an eye on the books and do most of the hiring and firing. It is time now, though, to turn it all over to him. He has learned well these past two years, and my shoulders and hips make it hard for me to come into the bank every day.”

“Got the chilblains, do you? Or
burseritas
? Me, too.” Severin blew out the match with a puff of smoke and cast it into a glass ashtray beside the banker’s pen-and-ink holder. “Sitting around too many cold cow camps on them frigid New Mexico winters up high in the mountains is what I’m reminded of every time I try to heave myself out of a chair. Damn feet bark like dogs of a mornin’, soon as I set ’em on the floor.”

“You, as I, Hiram, need a woman to warm them.”

Severin thew back half his brandy and sighed, his eyes watering from the burn. Chuckling, he sank back in his chair, crossed his legs, and puffed the stogie, sucking half of each puff into his lungs and letting it slither out his broad, pitted nostrils. “I ran the last one off the year before I came here. A Ute girl with the biggest tits you ever saw. Couldn’t keep the house for shit, though, and took to drink.”

Encina drew deep on his cigar, blew a little smoke into his brandy snifter, then sipped the liquor and threw his head back with a sigh of satisfaction as he swallowed the amalgam of smoke and brandy. “I ran my last one off, as you say, a long, long time ago. She ran off on me, rather. Leaving me to raise Miguel alone in Mejico. The daughter of an American cavalry captain.”

Encina formed a bitter expression and shook his head, taking another sip from the snifter in which a couple of small snakes of smoke still slithered. “She got restless and tired of the ranch. It was a hard life down there, the Apaches always a threat and running off my horses. She wanted to take Miguel, but I wouldn’t let her. She wrote a few times from Fort Worth, but then I heard she married again, and the letters stopped.” He wrinkled his nose, and his brown eyes darkened. “She was a harlot. Once, I caught her visiting my
segundo
’s sleeping quarters.”

“You fix that?” Severin wanted to know.

“The bullwhip for them both. I had the
segundo
dragged off the hacienda with his own horse and rope. I made Alexandra watch, and I thought that would put an end to it. A few months later, she told me she would either leave or kill herself. I had my suspicions about her possibly continuing to visit the bunkhouse, so I told her to leave without the boy, and I’d see her in hell!”

Red-faced, Encina threw the rest of his brandy back and puffed the cigar.

Severin shook his head and let the story sink in. He’d known Encina had married a gringa, but he’d never gotten the details. “About the boy, Jose,” he said after a time, haltingly. He wasn’t sure how to say what was on his mind. “Are you sure he’s ready to take over the bank? Run it completely on his own, without the benefit of your supervision?”

Encina frowned across the desk. “As you always say, mi amigo, chew that up a little finer for me, will you?”

Severin grunted and squirmed in his chair, turning the cigar in his fingers. He wasn’t sure how to tell the man that, when he got down to brass tacks, he wasn’t sure that he trusted his son. Not with as much gold as passed through the bank via the gold mines in any given year. And the town was growing, the bank acquiring more and more depositors. It needed to be run by a trustworthy, professional man like Jose himself. A man with years of experience.

But if Jose couldn’t see that his son may not be quite as good as he seemed, there was little Severin could do to make him see it. After all, the sheriff had no firm evidence to support his suspicions that Miguel might possibly be every bit the ringtail he’d always been. He wasn’t sure he entirely believed it himself. After all, people can change for the better. Maybe he was just too damn cynical.

Nervously, frustratedly puffing his stogie, Severin shook his head and threw out a dismissive hand. “Never mind, Jose. You know how it is with an old mossyhorn like me. Just hard to see times change. I’m sure Miguel’ll handle things just fine around here.”

Severin himself would make sure he did, and he’d have his deputies keep an extra-close eye on the younker. Maybe he’d even get a spy in the bank somehow, working one of the teller cages.

The sheriff killed his brandy and rose creakily from his chair. “I reckon we best go see about that gold, eh?”

“Si, si,”
said Encina, sticking the cigar in a corner of his mouth and gaining his feet with a wince, his old bones popping like distant pistol shots. “Let’s see about the gold!”

HELL-BRINGIN’ HIRAM WALKED out of the bank into the crisp, damp air of a coming storm. The sun was still shining, but a purple, wedge-shaped thunder-head was building in the southwest, capping the southern ridge. Distant thunder rumbled.

The sheriff was still puffing the Cuban stogie and casually rolling it between his lips with his fingers. Jose Encina walked out behind him, also puffing a cigar while dipping his free hand in the pocket of his fawn wool vest. The two men stood appraising Severin’s deputies, four of whom were positioned at various points around the street fronting the bank, all holding rifles either in the crooks of their arms or resting on their shoulders, ready.

Frank Dryden stood in the middle of the street directly in front of the bank. There was no traffic because he and the other men had cleared it for two blocks in all directions. There was no one on the boardwalks, either; those, too, had been cleared by the deputies.

Chase Appleyard stood over by the back of the opera house, sucking on a matchstick, his hat pulled low over his eyes. The black man, Brink Moffett, who had once worked for the Pinkertons, had taken up position to Severin’s right, fifty yards away on the boardwalk fronting a harness shop.

Giuseppe Antero stood across the street from Moffett, in front of the bathhouse, leaning slightly back against one of the posts that held up the bathhouse’s porch roof, his boots casually crossed. Smoke dribbled from the brown paper cigarette wedged in a corner of the Mexican’s mouth that was capped and framed by a long, drooping mustache.

According to Sheriff Severin’s dress code, all five deputies were as well attired as most prominent businessmen. Well-groomed, too: hair, beards, and mustaches neatly trimmed. Even to Severin the tailored garb stood out in sharp contrast to the men’s hatchet, cold-eyed faces. But to the sheriff’s way of thinking, lawmen dressed in rags were given little respect and deserved even less.

“Here it comes,” Encina said as the wagon came into view from the east, rolling along the main street behind the two beefy mules.

Orrie Hitt rode slumped in the driver’s seat, on his red velvet pillow, his boots on the dashboard, elbows on his knees. The big man clucked to the mules, hoorawed them toward the bank. Three other riders rode along behind—Brewster, Casol, and Sawrod. Flanking them at thirty or forty yards, rode Severin’s fifth deputy, Jim Horn, who’d scouted the wagon from Ute Ridge. Horn, a thickset man with a high-crowned cream Stetson and sand-colored handlebar mustache, stopped his horse in the middle of the street, east of the bank, and cradled his rifle in his arms.

Behind Severin and Encina, the bank door rattled open, and Miguel Encina stepped out, positioning his crisp brown bowler hat with both hands. “We get any more gold out of the mines this month, we’re going to have to rent out a room for it at the Golden Slipper.”

The elder banker chuckled as he puffed his stogie and eagerly watched the wagon angle toward him. “There’s always room for gold, son. Always room for gold.”

“When’s the next shipment leave for Denver?” the sheriff asked, his spooked eyes roaming the eastern edge of town for Prophet and Bonaventure.

“Not till next week,” Miguel said. “But, like Pa says, we always got room for gold.” He wrapped an arm around his father’s shoulders, dimples deep and shadowed. “Ain’t that right, Pa?”

The elder Encina’s shoulders jerked slightly as he laughed, envisioning spending next winter, the first one of his retirement, in Monterrey. “You’re learning, my boy. You’re learning. . . .”

All three men stepped forward as Hitt swung the wagon in front of the bank, about ten feet from the boardwalk. A gun roared. Severin’s hand dropped to his Peacemaker’s ivory grips as he looked over the mules’ backs to see a burr-laden collie dog turn on a dime with a startled yip and run back toward the alley mouth it had slunk out of, tail between its legs.

Laughing, Giuseppe Antero triggered another shot at the dog, blowing up dust behind it. The dog yelped louder, kicked its back legs, and disappeared into the alley. Frank Dryden laughed, as did Severin’s other men around the bank.

Severin gritted his teeth, slowly lowered his hand from his Peacemaker, glanced at the startled Encina, and shook his head as if to say, “Sometimes, you gotta take the horns with the hide. . . .”

Orrie Hitt, too, was chuckling as he kicked the wagon’s brake. Severin said, “Where’s Prophet and Miss Bonaventure?”

“Ah, Jesus,” Hitt said, running a gloved paw across his bristled, pudgy cheek. The other guards sat about ten feet from the wagon, their dusty, trail-weary horses hanging their heads. “Bad news about them,” Hitt reported. “You know Lost Canyon about ten miles north?”

Encina frowned, nodding, absently puffing the stogie. His son’s eyes were expressionless. Severin just waited, his craggy face implacable.

Hitt had wrapped the reins around the brake handle. Now he crawled over the back of the driver’s seat into the wagon box, and was fishing the lockbox key out from under his sweat-soaked shirt. “Well, they was both ridin’ our back trail, keepin’ an eye out for bushwhackers, don’t ya know. There was a rock slide. You know how easy them slides get started in there, with all that talus. They got caught in the middle of it, nowhere to run to. They tried hightailin’ back but the rocks overtook ’em, buried ’em under enough rock for one o’ them big Egyptian temple things.”

Hitt poked the key in the lock.

“That’s impossible,” Severin said, scowling at the big, sweating, dust-caked gold guard. “I don’t believe that for a minute.”

“Why not?” Hitt asked amiably.

“That does sound odd, Hitt,” Encina growled. He poked his cigar at the big guard, who was now removing the padlock and unwrapping the chains from around the box. “You men didn’t have something to do with that slide, now, did you?”

“Maybe because you resented Prophet being hired as ramrod?” Severin added, dropping his right hand once more over his Peacemaker’s grips.

Hitt looked up at the sheriff and ground his jaws angrily. He glanced over his shoulder at the three other guards, who stared insolently across the wagon at Severin. As Hitt turned back to the sheriff, the wagon driver allowed a humorous light to reclaim his eyes, and his lips spread away from his large, square teeth.

“Hell,” he chuckled with a menacing edge, “I’d never kill a man over a tinhorn job like that.” He laughed again, then lifted the lockbox’s lid.

Severin glanced uneasily at Encina, who’d moved up closer to the side of the wagon, his eyes bright and waiting. “How much did you bring back?” the banker asked, a thickness in his voice.

“Not as much as some trips,” Hitt said, reaching into the box and lifting out a gold ingot about a foot and a half long. “More than others. Lookee there, Mr. Encina. How do you like the way that shines?”

Encina’s chest rose and fell heavily, and his eyes glowed as though he were having a vision of the Mother Mary. He stuck his stogie between his teeth, and while Severin continued to glower at Hitt and the other three riders, the banker reached over the side of the wagon for the ingot.