King of Spades (18 page)

“Just my darn luck.” The old prospector scratched himself. “Yep, goddam, here I am, three hundred miles from a lemon.”

“You said something about location marks. You did find some colors then?”

At that the old prospector turned shifty. “Well-I … you know … you set out stakes along a likely gulch.”

“But there are colors through here then?”

“Well-I … some ways off from here there is.”

Ransom worked his nostrils once.

“Could be the real mother lode is still farther north.”

“That's what I heard.”

“That where you headed?”

“Likely.”

“Plenty of gulches up there all right.”

Ransom fixed him with steady eyes. “This gulch of yours, what's it like?”

“What do you want to know for?”

“To get an idea how wide and how deep a gulch should be before you find gold in it.”

“Well, mine's wider'n a horse can jump. Though a hen might be able to fly across.”

“And it's deep enough for gold to start showing?”

“No doubt about it.”

Ransom stood up. “Thanks.”

“You're on your way then?”

Ransom nodded.

“Now I will be lonesome.” The old prospector got out a dirt-specked quid of tobacco and bit off a corner. “Goddam, I almost wisht the Army had'f found me.”

Ransom climbed aboard his horse. He dug out a strip of jerky and threw it down to the old prospector. “Need anything else? I can't spare you much.”

“Naw. On your way.”

“So long, Old-timer.”

Ransom had proceeded down the blue gloom of the canyon some fifty yards, when the old prospector yelled after him, “Don't peach on me now.”

“I never saw you.”

“If anybody asks after me, say you know me all right, but that you'll be damned if you'll tell 'em when or where you last saw me.”

“I never saw you.”

 

Ransom pushed northward.

Hogbacks lay across his course like a series of quarter- moons with the horns up. A couple of hours later the crests began to curve the other way with the horns down.

“It's like working your way through a bunch of ringworms one inside the other.”

There was little or no water. Prince and the packhorse sweat. Luckily some of the draws were deep with lush wet grass.

One high slough was black with ripe huckleberries. Ransom filled up on them.

At dusk he shot a blacktail drinking from a wriggling stream. “Mule deer,” he murmured to himself. “Sometimes they're pretty dry and stringy.” But this was a young doe, fat, and he had himself dripping venison broiled over a low fire. He jerked the rest of the meat and hung it up to dry.

While the horses grazed, he panned the little stream. A little mica shone in it. That was all.

During the night a storm passed to the south of them. A great wind brushed across the tops of the trees. The deep ponderosa pines moaned. He felt lonesome for Katherine and her bed back in Cheyenne. “If only she hadn't made all that money the way she did.”

The wind gusted ferociously at times across the higher crests. He nuzzled deeper into his woolen suggans. “Never heard the wind get up and howl so.”

The wind died down after a time.

He slept soundly under the great dreaming pines.

 

Daylight came as usual. He had fresh rabbit for breakfast.

By the time the sun speared down into his gulch, he'd packed his gear and was ahorse.

He worked his way along sinuous canyons. He climbed wave after wave of pinnacle and mountain. His course was wormlike. The farther he penetrated the heart of the Black Hills, the more mysterious and dark and brooding it became.

“Good place for a murder.”

The gnarly rock took on strange shapes: a warning granite finger, a forbidding granite turret, a looming granite fortress. One of the bare granite ridges even resembled an enormous sleeping lizard half-buried in mud.

He loved it all. He was lonesome, but that only made it that much the better. He had never felt so alert, so alive, in his life. His eyes picked up the smallest detail. His ears caught the call of magpies a mile off.

Occasionally Prince stopped to nibble a bit of moss off the side of a tree. Or nipped off a juniper bud. Or cropped a few leaves of buckbrush. Or tested the leaf of a white birch. The packhorse meanwhile, having a fondness for rose hips, often nosed through wild rosebushes looking for them.

He stumbled upon some animal carvings on a red wall facing the sun: deer, puma, bear, geese. One was of a huge reptile, some dozen feet long, with a terrifyingly long tongue. There were also several sunbursts and other geometric figures. The carvings were Indian and ancient.

Ransom puzzled over the petroglyphs. He tried to imagine the kind of people who might have made them. He contemplated them until they became dancing sunspots in his brain. His eyes lidded over.

In the evening he came upon another long deep gulch. Dreary patches of burned-over dead pine covered the upper slopes.

He descended into its gloom. He spotted several holes resembling the raw broken mouths of lizards dug into the sides of the gulch.

Presently he came upon a half-dozen deserted shanties
beside a fast-running stream. Wagon parts, shovels, picks, pans, and other camp debris lay around in the grass as if a tornado had ripped through the tight valley.

“Some joker done this out of pure cussedness.”

Ransom spotted a board nailed to a tree. Someone had carved an inscription on it with a jackknife. Ransom rode over for a look. Peering down from his horse, he slowly made it out.

Ransom had to smile to himself.

He spotted other prospect digs into the slopes farther down.

“No use sticking around here. The Army is sure to keep checking this place.”

He looked up toward the head of the long gulch.

“Think I'll go up this stream a ways. If the boys found gold float here, it's bound to have washed down from above.”

He let the horses have a drink. Then, in the falling dusk, he crossed over on an abandoned beaver dam and ascended the gulch.

He found the head of the stream just as it became dark. A lively spring poured out of the roots of a giant ponderosa pine. He unburdened the horses of all the gear and staked them out for the night. He had a cold supper of dried jerky, hardtack, dried prunes, and cool mountain-spring water.

He rolled out his suggans on a thick bed of pine needles and old moss. For the first time since he left Cheyenne, he undressed. He gave himself a brisk hand bath in the spring, changed to another set of red flannel underwear, and with a happy sigh of anticipation crept into his suggans. When he looked up he found that a vast hoarfrost had come out over the skies.

He missed Katherine again and her lipping kisses.

“Got to strike it big now. So she can give her bad money away to some charity somewhere.”

He nuzzled his head back and forth on his leather saddle. “Sure miss her. More than I ever missed old Sam.”

A branch cracked behind him.

Automatically his hands checked to see if his six-shooter and Winchester were ready.

“Can't be a cat. Because if it was the horses would've already been in the suggans with me. More than likely a deer.”

The spring murmured sweetly.

“Never saw such a blizzard of stars before. We must be pretty high up.”

Breathing the crisp night air was like drinking pure sweet alcohol.

“The whole West is my nut to crack and I'm going to bust her wide open. Right here in the Hills.”

He went to sleep thinking about how he would kiss away the tiny wrinkles in the corners of Katherine's eyes. She would like that.

2

He awoke about light. The horses were safe. There were no cat tracks about. Good.

He built a fire and made himself some hot coffee and fried some bacon and venison and warmed the last few biscuits Katherine had sent along with him. The sun broke over the Hills and touched his face just as he was finishing the last of his breakfast. In the clear morning light he could make out, beyond the last peaks, the prairies of the far Dakotas.

He watered his horses, gave them a good brisk rubdown, and staked them out to some new tender grass.

He studied the spot carefully. At that point the gulch wasn't too deep, with rock walls but a dozen feet high. Winds had knocked off some of the tree tips, and here and there had pushed over a few of the older ponderosa.

“No blossom rock that I can see. But then you never can tell.”

He saw where a small yellow pine had been torn out by the roots a couple of rods above his campsite. It was at the base of the wall. The little pine was dying so he went over and got it and threw it next to his gear. Later he would chop it up for fuel.

He next carefully checked the raw earth from which the little pine had been torn. He scratched through it with trailing fingers.

“No glance rock here.”

He was about to turn away, when there bloomed in him the feeling that a pair of eyes was watching everything he was doing.

He drew as he wheeled.

Nobody. All he could see were four horse eyes busy looking for the best grass.

He studied every pine branch, every shadow, every boulder, with intent care. Still nobody.

He kicked through a patch of grayish-green wolfberry. Nothing.

He stepped carefully through a thick patch of glittering green-leaved shrubs. The shrubs clung close to a slope of loose dirt. He had the feeling that something else besides leaves waited glittering in the shrubs. Nothing.

At last, shrugging, he gave up the search. There probably was nobody watching him after all. He turned to the business at hand.

He panned upstream a ways. Where the stream purled over a natural riffle, he scooped up the loose sand caught behind the riffle along with some water and began swishing it around and around in his flat pan, all the while allowing
some of the sand and the water to slosh over the sides. He flicked out the bigger pebbles with a finger. He washed and spilled it all down to a last few grains. Nothing. Not even so much as a flyspeck of a color.

He panned downstream. No colors.

He panned down the stream until well out of sight of his camp. Still nothing.

He surveyed the gulch with measuring eyes, up and down, and on both sides.

“There may not be any gold here, but it sure would make a swell spot for a cabin and a garden. Make even a great place for a little town. Water. Trees. Grand view.”

It was straight-up noon when he trudged back to camp. The sky held clear. The ground was warm with sun. The pines stank sweetly of sticky rosin. His nose worked overtime in the midst of all the fresh forest smells.

He got out his ax and reached down to pick up the little yellow pine.

The little pine wasn't there. Gone.

He turned warily on his boot heels, a hand to his gun.

Nobody.

His eyes next sought the place in the wall from which the little pine had been torn out.

That spot was gone too.

Quietly he stepped over. “By the Lord, I even worked it with my fingers for gold.” He knelt and examined the wall very carefully.

Ah. The hole had been carefully filled in, first with dirt and then with fresh sod. The sod was exactly like the sod around, except where the edges showed beneath what appeared to be a casual sprinkling of pine needles.

His spine began to tingle. Again he drew as he wheeled.

And again nobody. Nothing.

“I'll be damned. Now I know for sure there's somebody watching me. Besides the Almighty.”

He stood slightly crouched at the knees. He sent his ears
out all around. Yet all he heard was the steady cropping sound of the grazing horses.

“What the hell kind of spooky place is this?”

He took a long slow sniff, intent on catching any odd smell.

There was only the new aroma of fresh horse dung.

“Sam would say I was being notional again.”

The mystic Hills shimmered in sunshine and silence. The far-off prairies of the Dakotas wimmered a misty blue sea.

He reholstered his gun. Slowly he sat down beside what was left of his morning fire. “The biggest mystery is where that little pine tree went. And why.”

He picked up a stick and poked around in the ashes. He found a few live coals.

“Why wouldn't they let me burn it? That I don't get atall.”

He threw on a few leftover twigs. When flames spurted up and took hold, he added more wood. Soon he had a good fire going.

He got out a small iron pot and had himself boiled jerky spiced with fresh wood sorrel. The sour juice of the sorrel always brought out the true taste of venison.

“Meat's real meat, if you know how to fix it.”

He put everything neatly away. He got to his feet and stretched.

“Dammit, and why should anybody want to hide that hole in the wall? Unless'n there was something to hide?”

He gave it all another run through his mind. Then, swearing “By God,” he grabbed his spade and went to work. He first skimmed off the sod, then dug deep into the friable rock-studded wall.

He'd thrown out a dozen spadefuls, when his eye caught glitter in a curdle of dirt.

He knelt. He picked up the curdle and broke it gently in his hand. So. Well. There it was. At least a half-dozen bright- yellow bits of something the size of flakes of pepper. He got out his jackknife, edged the jackknife on the sole of his boot,
wiped it clean on his buckskin trousers, then cut into one of the yellow flakes. Soft. Next he bit into it. It gave. Finally he tasted it. By God. “Gold.”

He stared down at the yellow flakes awhile.

“Not a lot of it. But there it is. And somebody didn't want me to find it. There's probably still more and better higher up.”

He spent the rest of the afternoon digging out his prospect hole. There was always a flake or two of gold in each spadeful. But never more.