Slocum #396 : Slocum and the Scavenger Trail (9781101554371) (17 page)

“You have to prevent Trueheart from carrying through with his scheme.”

“How?” Baransky turned away and muttered, “My children came after me. And she’s dead. She’s dead.” He spun back, eyes hollow and haunted. “You’re lying, Slocum. I don’t
know why. You’ll do anything to keep me from carrying out Trueheart’s orders. This letter is a fake.”

“Was that Melissa in the wagon?”

“Why, yes, but—”

“That ought to be all you need to know. If Trueheart wipes out the mining camp, there’s no reason to keep you around. Or your children.”

“How’d she get into town to even climb into the wagon?”

Slocum spent a few minutes explaining how Melissa and her brother had hired him to find him. Baransky looked thunderstruck.

“I never meant for them to come with me. But Clara’s dead. She shouldn’t be. If I’d found the money earlier, if only—”

“There’s no reason for Melissa and Stephen to stay with your wife’s body. She’s in a cemetery now. What did you expect them to do?”

“Stephen could have gotten a job and Melissa, well, she is a lovely girl. Marriage…” His voice trailed off.

“If you want to save them, you have to avoid setting off the dynamite,” Slocum said.

“But the explosive is here. A lot of it. If we don’t do it, Trueheart will find someone who can. The town must be full of prospectors who know something about detonations and bringing down rock in a mine safely. All he needed me for was the geological survey. Somehow, he had figured out for himself that he could loot the goldfields if the river was diverted from its subterranean channel.”

“He’s a clever one, I’ll grant him that. But he doesn’t care about the safety of anyone but himself. All he wants is the destruction so he can scavenge.”

“What can we do, Slocum?”

There didn’t seem to be much of an answer.

“Can you rig the dynamite to go off but not cause the damage Trueheart wants?”

“I don’t think so. From all I can tell, any explosion against
the rock face will cause the shock to pass down and through the river and blow out the far side of the mountain. It’s not too far, I don’t think, so the crack would spread fast and wide.” Baransky put his hand against the cold wall again and shook his head. “This wall will surely be destroyed, too.”

“Flooding the shaft all the way out through to the mouth of the mine,” Slocum said. He thought hard on this. “Can you set the charge so that the water only comes this way?”

“Risk killing ourselves so those nameless, greedy miners can live! I won’t do that! Not when my daughter is at risk from such a harebrained scheme!”

Slocum picked up a stick of dynamite and tossed it from hand to hand, as if getting the feel of it before hurling it.

“No, you can’t do that. I know what you’re thinking, Slocum. You want to toss a few sticks of dynamite into the chamber and kill Trueheart’s men.”

“That has occurred to me.”

“We’d be trapped inside if the cavern roof collapsed. And it might.”

“So we walk to the other side before lighting the dynamite and tossing it into the chamber. That would give us a straight run outside.”

“Plover is no fool. He won’t let either of us, much less the pair of us, cross the chamber. Trueheart’s men are guards intended to keep me inside the mine.”

Slocum touched his empty holster and knew that Plover would never have allowed him to keep his six-shooter under any circumstances. Even with a couple sticks of dynamite, it would be him against a small army.

“Why’d Trueheart put so many of his men into this cavern?”

Baransky shrugged, then said, “He’s saving them. These are his elite fighters, the ones he culled from the dregs in town. I suspect he intends them to be the ones to get down the mountainside and guard the loot after the destruction.”

“It’d take a week or more to cross Desolation Pass,” Slocum said. Then he realized that it wouldn’t matter how long it took. Trueheart controlled the western slope of the mountain so he could take his sweet time sending in these men to help the rest bring down the gold stolen from the mines.

“He has a self-financing operation,” Baransky said. “He steals enough to keep the town going and provide supplies for his men. Selling equipment and mules he doesn’t need down in Almost There provides money, but he keeps the food and anything else his scavengers need for this project.”

“He doesn’t even have to pay to have food or gear shipped halfway up Desolation Mountain,” Slocum said. “The prospectors bring it to him, then he kills them.”

“We can’t get away,” Baransky said.

“Damned right you can’t get away,” came Plover’s angry voice. “I came to see how you were coming with the dynamite. You ain’t started yet. You thinkin’ on talkin’ that rock wall down?”

Slocum reached for his six-gun, then checked himself when he saw movement in the darkness behind Plover. Even if it had rested in the cross-draw holster, he would have died trying to clear leather. At least two guards had come with him, maybe three. With him and Baransky at the end of the tunnel, backs against a rock wall, they’d fall easy victim to even one gunman since they had nowhere to run or take cover.

“You missed part of what Baransky said,” Slocum explained. “We can’t get away using so little dynamite. We need another crate, maybe two if this is going to work. Use too little and that might jinx the entire blast.”

“Like hell. I’m no expert but I know bullshit when I hear it. We got all the dynamite you’d need. Which of you do I shoot?” Plover lifted his rifle and positioned it between
Slocum and Baransky. A simple twist one way or the other would select his target.

“I told you before, you need us both,” Slocum said.

“People will die if we blow up this wall,” Baransky said.

“Like I care.”

“How long do you want the fuse to burn?” Slocum asked, a plan working its way into his brain. “You need to get all the men back there cleared out, or do you intend to kill them?”

This caused a stir among the three gunmen with Plover.

“He’s just tryin’ to drive a wedge between us, boys,” Plover said loudly. “We’ll all be out of the mountain ’fore the blast.”

“Fifteen minutes? Twenty?”

“It’s damned near a mile back to the chamber,” Plover said. “If you run real hard, you can make it in ten minutes.”

“Let’s call it thirty minutes of fuse,” Slocum bored on. “The air’s mighty close in here. Hard to breathe.”

“You have thirty feet of fuse?”

“More than enough,” Slocum said.

“Set it for thirty. Me and the boys’ll be back in an hour to make sure you’ve done the work.”

Slocum and Baransky both threw up their arms to protect their faces when Plover fired his rifle. The report in the enclosed space was deafening and the slug bounced off a couple walls before spending itself in a side wall. Chunks of rock had splintered. Slocum touched his cheek where a razor-sharp piece had left a shallow cut.

“Just to get you workin’,” Plover said, backing off. When he was far enough away, he spun, his men leading the way to the central chamber.

“What do we do now?” Baransky asked.

Slocum couldn’t think of anything that would get them free, so he picked up a hammer and held it out to the mining engineer.

“You want to hold the chisel or swing the hammer?”

Slocum ended up using the ten-pound sledgehammer as Baransky positioned the bit at the spots he thought best. An hour later, they sank to the floor, covered in sweat and panting with effort. The lack of air made them both dizzy. For his part, Slocum found it hard to lift his arms after the hard work of using the hammer. The ring of steel on steel filled his ears and made thinking harder.

“We’re going to die in here,” Baransky said in a neutral tone, showing he was giving up. “Melissa and Stephen are safe, though. They have to be or this isn’t worth it.”

“Did you figure to get rich prospecting?” Slocum asked. He mopped his face with his sleeve, then ran his fingers over his empty holster. There had to be something he could do without needing a six-shooter.

“I wanted the money for the operation. In Europe,” Baransky said in his dull voice. “We didn’t have much since the last coal mine I worked for went out of business. The owner stole the money and lit out for California.”

“You were on his trail?” Slocum perked up. This would show more determination in Baransky than he had seen.

“He died somewhere on the bank of the Red River. Got word of his body floating north into Canada, but I never saw it. But what does it matter if I ever found him? The money he owed me would be long spent.”

“You really believed you’d get lucky?”

“Lucky? Mining’s not about luck. Attention to details. Knowledge. Having a bit of intuition to know when to make a bigger gamble and when to back out. I’m a good engineer, not some wild-eyed prospector thinking he’s the one who’ll get rich when the rest around him starve.”

Slocum looked at Baransky with new admiration. The man understood both the lure of mining and how to approach it for a better chance to make decent money.

“You didn’t buy a treasure map or anything foolish like that?”

“I have a few photographs. Oh, not on me. In my luggage.
They
were
with my gear, but I don’t have any notion what happened to them.”

“Photographs?”

“Of the rock structure near the gold strike. If the locations are accurate, the prospectors are going away from the mother lode, not toward it. Such an opportunity! I could get enough for my wife’s surgery.”

“So you were broke?”

Slocum read the answer in the man’s bleak expression.

“I had to do something, and there wasn’t a job to be had near Philadelphia. Nowhere in Pennsylvania, in fact. Why not roll the dice and go for the big strike? Clara needed the operation. Poor, poor Clara.”

“Poor you, especially since you think you can read where the gold is in the photographs,” Slocum said dryly. Secret treasure map, photograph, it didn’t matter. To Slocum they were one and the same, though the photos might be cheaper since they could always be tacked on the wall for decoration after they proved worthless.

“Didn’t say I found gold there, only a better place to look. I’m an engineer, Slocum. The science I employ gives better odds but not a surefire find.”

That made some sense. Hunting for blue dirt increased the odds of finding gold. Slocum had seen this work more than once for the old-timers while the greenhorns made their claims based on nothing more than a gut feeling and a dream.

“We’ve got the holes drilled,” Slocum said. “Do we actually set the charges?”

“Plover will check. If we don’t, we’re goners.”

Slocum got to his feet and began sliding sticks of dynamite into the three-foot-deep holes. It felt as if he’d stuck his head into a noose as he tamped the holes shut after crimping a blasting cap and attaching a length of black miner’s fuse to each charge.

He exchanged a silent look with Baransky, then began splicing the black fuses sticking out of the rock wall to a single one that he unrolled back into the tunnel, walking toward the miles-distant rock chambers where Plover and the rest of Trueheart’s gunmen waited.

“Hold it right there,” came the cold words. Slocum looked over at Baransky, the intense carbide light turning his face into shadows and planes. He might have been a ghost he appeared so pale. In his gut Slocum worried that they’d both be real ghosts soon enough.

“You sure they set the charge right?”

Slocum turned his light past Plover, who blocked the way with his rifle leveled, and saw Trueheart. The man was dressed like a peacock, in a flashy green cutaway, purple vest, and striped pants. All that was missing was an appropriate hat but the tunnel ceiling was too low for that. Slocum had to walk hunched over to keep from banging his own head against rock. Trueheart matched his six-foot height and then some.

“It’s properly planted,” Slocum said when he saw that Baransky was too frightened to speak. He knew what Trueheart showing up now meant.

“Then light the fuse and let’s run like hell.”

“Boss, wait,” Plover said. “We’d better head out first, then have them light the fuse when we’re clear of the tunnels.”

“Where’s the fun in that? Race you!”

Slocum and Baransky exchanged looks. Trueheart was as crazy as he dressed. His plan matched his looks and behavior, but Slocum remembered the flood of equipment into his personal town and how the scavenger king had sent out bands of men to plunder along the trail over the pass. And then there was Sally and her whorehouse. He might act crazy, but he was a cold-blooded killer.

“You want it lit? Give him a head start,” Slocum said, pointing at Baransky.

“All for one, one for all. Light the fuse.” Trueheart’s words came out cold and precise.

Slocum reached into his vest pocket, found his tin of lucifers, and lit one. It flared pale and almost invisible in the glare of the miner’s lamps. He inclined his head slightly to warn Baransky, then he put the burning tip to the fuse. It sputtered for a moment, then the magnesium in the waxy black fuse flared.

“Yee haw!” cried Trueheart. He pounded down the tunnel, followed by Plover and two guards.

Slocum didn’t know if he could run a full mile in the stuffy tunnel, but he had no choice unless he pinched off the fuse. To do that would bring Trueheart back—Trueheart and his murderous henchmen. While he ran, Slocum heard Baransky behind him, huffing and puffing, cursing now and then as he slipped, but keeping up. The run stretched to eternity, taking on an eerie quality in his carbide light, which bounced around as his head bobbed.

Then he burst into the huge cavern. Trueheart’s men had already left. From the gasping and occasional curses, Slocum knew that Plover had fallen behind his boss by some distance.

“Can you make it the rest of the way?”

Slocum looked back down the tunnel in the direction of the charges they had planted, then knew he could never get back before the explosion. He had measured off somewhere
between twenty and thirty feet of fuse. That gave twenty to thirty minutes before the detonation.

“Keep goin’,” gasped Baransky. “I’ll keep up.”

Slocum got his arm around the man’s shoulders and herded him forward. How long had it taken for them to get this far? He didn’t know. He ought to have measured the fuse better, checked his watch to know the time of detonation.