Slocum #396 : Slocum and the Scavenger Trail (9781101554371) (16 page)

“Clement Baransky, that’s his name, isn’t it? I didn’t know he was a doctor.”

“I’m no doctor. They call me that because I know ’bout everything,” Baransky said.

“Shut up, Doc. You, too. What’s his name? Wait, don’t answer,” Plover said sharply. “Whisper it in my ear. And one of you thievin’ magpies, you go have him whisper his name in your ear.”

Slocum took a deep breath as one of the gunman came over.

“Don’t know what’s goin’ on. You kilt Ross and I want to see you dead.”

“You might have been the one that shot him,” Slocum said. Then he whispered his name, repeated it, and waited.
The gunman gave him a sour look and went to where Plover stood with his six-shooter drawn.

“You boys kill him if the names don’t match.”

“What about Baransky?” Slocum called. He played for time so Melissa could get far away. If she was anywhere close and spying, she would rush back and get them all killed.

“We need Doc, but that don’t mean we can’t put shackles back on him like we did before.” The threat meant something to Baransky because he shivered visibly. Plover motioned his partner closer. “What’s the name he gave?”

“Slocum. He said his name was Slocum.”

Plover slumped a little, then straightened.

“Matches what Doc said. There was no way they coulda arranged this ’less they knew each other before.”

“How’d Doc have any time to hire anybody? Me and Aaron never let him out of our sight when we was back in town.”

“That’s what you think,” Baransky said, laughing harshly. “You two left me in the warehouse while you went out to take a snort from that bottle in your hip pocket.”

This set off a long argument that ended with Plover kicking the man in the seat of the pants. Glass shattered and the sharp tang of whiskey momentarily filled the air.

“You didn’t have no call hiring anybody, Doc,” Plover said, dragging his boot back and forth in the dirt to get the whiskey off it. “You need something, you tell me. I’m the foreman, not you.”

“You weren’t around. Neither were they. I wanted to speed up the work. Slocum here came along, we talked, I liked what I heard.”

“I told Ross and he offered me a ride out. Then they shot him down like a rabid dog,” Slocum said, enjoying the new round of incrimination this sparked. Plover blamed Aaron and his partner, who insisted they hadn’t shot Ross. The argument turned around full circle with them indicting the other guards from the mine.

Baransky gave Slocum a broad wink.

“Shut up, all of you!” Plover fired into the air to get their attention. “The next round goes into somebody’s heart. I’d shoot you in the head, but I want to hurt you for causin’ this hash.”

“You sayin’ I don’t have no brains, Plover? I don’t take that off nobody!”

The man who had carried Slocum’s name to the foreman went for his rifle. Plover gunned him down before the barrel came up halfway to its target. The man dropped to his knees, then flopped back and twitched on the ground. Plover put a second and a third bullet into him.

“I’ve had it with you jackasses.” Plover faced down the others, who exchanged looks.

Aaron said, “It was all his doin’, Plover.”

“Get the wagon unloaded.” Plover motioned to Slocum. “You lend a hand, then we’ll have a talk.” He plucked Slocum’s Colt from his holster. Slocum moved an instant too late to stop him. Plover thrust the six-shooter into his belt.

“I’ll keep my gun,” Slocum said.

“They’ll kill you in the mine if they see you with a six-gun,” Plover said.

“Won’t matter a whit to you, will it?” Slocum pointed out. “Chances are pretty good I’d go back to town and you—and them—won’t get the benefit of my knowledge.”

“He’s tough, Plover,” Baransky said. “That’s another reason I hired him.”

“You pay him out of your cut.”

“What cut’s that?” Baransky said. “You’re keeping me as a slave.”

“I meant your rations. Food. Water. You might get more when we’re done. You split that with Slocum, too.”

Slocum thought it was time to argue a bit more. To give in now would make Plover even more suspicious and likely to shoot him in the back. The argument over pay stretched
for a minute until the foreman finally agreed to pay Slocum a dollar a day and not force Baransky to share rations.

“Better than what I expected,” Slocum said.

Baransky let out a lungful of air he had been holding, fearful of the outcome. Any shooting that went on would likely see more than Slocum gunned down. He stepped closer so he could speak to Slocum without being overheard as they slid the crates of dynamite out and began lugging them toward the mineshaft.

“Why’d you bring her?”

“She’s headstrong,” Slocum said. “I didn’t have much choice.” He would let Melissa tell her pa how she had been mistreated by Trueheart and Sally and the rest of the scavengers.

Baransky nodded, looking glum.

“Did she get away?”

“I couldn’t tell, but when I lifted the tarp, that gave her enough cover to get out of the wagon. It wasn’t that far to the edge of a ditch on the far side of the road.”

“Quit yammering, you two,” Plover said.

“I must teach him the proper way of carrying the dynamite. You wouldn’t want him to get careless and blow us all to kingdom come, would you?”

“Thought you said he knew what he was doing.” Plover prodded Slocum with the rifle butt and sent him staggering into the mine.

“He knows how to use the explosive once it is planted. He’s not used to carrying it like some beast of burden,” Baransky said.

Slocum heard how lame that sounded and spoke up.

“I set the charges, I don’t carry the dynamite.”

“So you know how to do the blasting?” Plover shoved Slocum harder and got him walking down the narrow mineshaft.

Slocum wondered what use this shaft was since it brushed his broad shoulders. For a serious mine, tracks should have
been laid for ore carts to move the tons of ore-bearing rock out to a smelter, where the precious gold could be squeezed out, ounce by precious ounce.

“I can do the blasting,” Slocum said.

“Precision blasting?” Plover pressed.

Slocum looked ahead to get some idea what was going on, but Baransky was hidden in the darkness.

“I can drill, I can tamp, I can blast. What more do you need?” His mind raced. The only reason Baransky was still alive was his knowledge as a mining engineer.

“Can you do a mining engineer’s job?”

Slocum tensed. A wrong answer meant somebody died. If he answered “no,” then he was worthless. If he said “yes,” Baransky was the likely victim. Plover didn’t seem the kind to tolerate much waste—or surplus workers.

“I need somebody like Baransky to figure out where to blast. Once he does that, I can deliver as many pebbles from a wall as you like.”

Plover fell silent. Slocum had given him reason to keep them both alive. For the time being.

They trooped on in the darkness until a faint light ahead showed. Baransky walked a little faster and so did Slocum, wanting to see something again other than blackness deeper than midnight.

They came into a large chamber lit by kerosene lamps placed around the fifty-foot circumference. What stopped Slocum was the ceiling. The light only penetrated a few yards and then was swallowed by darkness. A couple dozen men sat scattered around the large area, rifles leaning against the walls. They only glanced in Slocum and Baransky’s direction before returning to their card games and other pursuits of bored men doing garrison duty. Three men held flea races on a hot griddle not ten feet from Slocum. Four others played dice. Others took their time to whet knifes or oil six-shooters. They were more an army than a ragtag bunch of scavengers.

For that was the way it seemed to Slocum. Trueheart had moved a small army into this cave. The only reason he could think was to keep them from getting into trouble in town—or getting drunk and letting the others know what Trueheart’s plans were.

Slocum wished he knew. And then he realized he was going to find out soon enough. When he did, that likely meant he was expendable along with Baransky.

“This is a natural cave. Much of the mountainside is honeycombed with caves and tunnels.” Clem Baransky pointed to the stalactites dangling from the roof. If any came loose, they would kill a man under tons of rock. “There are damned near a dozen naturally occurring tunnels needing only a bit of work to widen.”

“Why bother?”

“Gold,” Baransky said softly. “You hardly need to dig out ore. Scraping it off the walls is easy work and nuggets are everywhere. Trueheart took a wagon load out a couple weeks ago, but they’ve been working these tunnels for months. He’s got close to another wagon filled with gold ready to take down the hill.”

“Bypassing Almost There?”

“Goes on east, nobody in town any the wiser—either town.”

“Why aren’t the men working?”

“Something’s up, something more important. He’s only got a quarter of the men here he did when they were all scraping away at the rock. Don’t know where they’ve gone but they’ve been out of here since before they brought me in to blast.”

Slocum didn’t ask about blasting near such a huge cavern. If Clem Baransky knew his job, he would decree that it was safe to blow open whatever passage Plover—Trueheart!—wanted. There had to be a mother lode Trueheart wanted revealed. But why would he get rid of three-quarters of his
men? And where were they? Slocum hadn’t gotten the feeling they were in Trueheart’s personal town and they certainly weren’t in Almost There.

“Keep going. Follow Doc. He’ll tell you where we’re gonna blast.” Plover handed them carbide lamps and pointed to a tunnel leading straight into the mountain.

“It’s quite a ways,” Baransky said. “And there aren’t any tunnels or chimneys for us to get lost in.”

“How far’s that?”

“More than a mile,” he answered. “A lot more.”

As they walked, Slocum began to struggle to breathe.

“Air’s bad in here,” Slocum said as his lungs began to strain.

“No ventilation. I want to set the charge, get away as far as I can, then blast.”

“What’s going on?” Slocum finally asked after a few more minutes of hiking. They were far enough from the large vaulted room that their words wouldn’t carry.

“Listen. Do you hear it?”

“Water? An underground river?”

“You’re right. Trueheart wants me to blow open a channel and release the water.”

“Irrigation? That doesn’t make sense,” Slocum said.

“The man’s a scavenger through and through. If my geology is right, once the rock wall we’re blasting cracks, water will flood the lower part of the goldfields. We’re more ’n halfway under the mountain, and the valley where the gold strikes occurred couldn’t be much farther straight through the rock.”

“So?” Slocum didn’t understand. Then he did. “He wants to flood out the miners.”

“Exactly,” Baransky said. “The water will destroy their camps and mines and wash them out.”

“Then he moves in and takes their claims.”

“The mines will likely remain flooded. No, he is a
scavenger at heart. He wants to steal the gold that’s already been smelted and whatever supplies aren’t ruined. He’s a carrion eater.”

“Only this carrion bird doesn’t mind killing hundreds of people to feast,” Slocum said grimly. He knew where Trueheart had sent the bulk of his gang. They were likely in the goldfields now, waiting for disaster so they could take advantage, steal what they could, and then hightail it. An army of fifty scavengers could carry off a huge amount of gold and valuable mining supplies.

Slocum and Baransky came to the end of the tunnel. Through the wall ahead he heard the deep, throaty rumble of rushing water. Break this rocky dam and untold men would die, all so Trueheart could pick their carcasses clean. And Slocum couldn’t see any way out of doing the scavenger’s bidding. Either they set off the blast and hardworking miners died, or Plover killed them and had someone else do the detonation.

“If we blast through the wall and release the water, we’ll drown,” Slocum said, looking back down the pitch-black tunnel they had just traversed.

“I’ve thought of a way to string enough fuse so we can be well out of the mine when it blows,” Baransky said. “That doesn’t change the fact I’d be killing dozens—maybe hundreds—of miners.”

“And all to steal their gold,” Slocum said bitterly.

“I have studied this wall, and there’s a chance this part of the tunnel wouldn’t flood,” Baransky went on. Slocum heard the note of excitement in the man’s voice, as if he were a small child discovering a toy for the first time. “The shock would fracture the wall downward, and that would release the water only on the other side of the mountain. The pressure—”

“We’d still be responsible, even if we survived,” Slocum said. He paused, his purple-white light from the carbide lamp falling on Baransky’s face and giving it a curious pallid appearance.

“I know,” the man said.

“What would Melissa and your son think of you killing so many?”

Baransky said nothing as he walked to the wall and pressed his hand against it. Then he leaned forward and placed his forehead against the cold rock. Slocum thought silent sobs shook the man but couldn’t be certain.

“All I wanted was to earn enough for my wife’s medical expenses. In Europe—”

“She’s dead.” Slocum saw no reason to edge into it.

Baransky swung about, eyes wide.

“What are you saying? She can’t be dead. The doctors said she had months to live, maybe a year.”

“Why do you think Melissa was in the wagon?”

“I don’t know. I’m confused. So much is happening. It surprised me seeing her, but somehow it wasn’t a shock. I mean, it was because I wasn’t expecting to see her, but she was always headstrong. She argued against me coming so I thought she might have followed to persuade me to return.”

“She and Stephen came to tell you your wife’s dead,” Slocum said, his words even harsher than before.

“Stephen, too? I can’t believe he came. Or did he escort Melissa?”

“Seems the other way around to me.”

“My children are here. I can’t believe it.”

Slocum remembered the letter Melissa had given him and reached into his coat pocket. The letter was water stained and in poor condition, but he handed it to Baransky. He opened the envelope and held the letter high in the carbide light beam. Slocum wasn’t sure but he thought the man turned even paler. With shaking hands, Baransky tucked the letter into his own pocket.