The Spirit is Willing (An Ophelia Wylde Paranormal Mystery) (13 page)

It’s only a hundred miles from Denver to Leadville, but it seemed like a thousand. For seventeen dollars, I’d bought a ticket on the Spotswood & McClellan Stage Line (which had the government mail contract) and was assured a “smooth ride” because it was “the best time of year to travel.”

Smooth
and
best
proved relative.

For the next forty-eight hours, I was packed inside a Concord coach with eight other passengers, all men twice my size (there were another four or five clinging to the top of the coach, as well as a ziggurat of bags and trunks). I was jostled about as if I were the ball on a roulette wheel, landing first in one lap and then another. The driver pressed the six-horse team as if the devil himself were on our tail, and stopped every ten or fifteen miles to change horses at stage stops that were remarkable for their inhospitality.

We spent a few hours at a stage stop that featured a meal that was unrecognizable by any civilized standard and offered a coffin-sized tract of puncheon for a nap. I refused the meal, save for coffee, and spent the time with my back against the wall, listening to the hellish symphony made by the snores of my fellow travellers. Come dawn, there was another meal in name only, and we were packed back into our cradle of misery, where my companions declared what an easy trip it had been and that the first of July was truly the best time to cross the mountains to Leadville.

No railroad had yet reached Leadville, but in the wake of the discovery of rich lodes of silver there the year before, both the Santa Fe and the Denver & Rio Grande were fighting to see who would be the first to lay track up the Arkansas River valley to the country’s newest and richest boomtown. Another railway had begun to lay tracks west of Denver, but so far had made it less than twenty miles. Everybody wanted to get to Leadville, and fast, but for the present, my only route was by stagecoach.

The only thing that made the trip bearable was that I was ascending those mysterious and forbidding mountains I had seen from afar while on the streets of Denver. I grew up along the Mississippi, at just a hundred or so feet above sea level; Dodge City is only at about 1,200; and Denver was the highest I’d ever been. But at Weston Pass, I was higher still.

The driver said we were at an altitude of 12,000 feet. That beat the mile-high city of Denver by more than a mile. We were up above the tree line, on a barren saddle where swaths of snow still hugged the shadows, and the air was cool enough to make me glad I was inside the coach. There was only one other pass across the Mosquito Range, the line of saw-toothed peaks that was the primary obstacle to travel between Leadville and points east; the other was the impossibly high Mosquito Pass, at more than 13,000 feet, which was only passable—some of the time—on foot or hooves.

We had followed a fork of the South Platte up the side of the mountains and had been rewarded with views of crystal lakes and alpine meadows. Now that we were at the pass, things began to change; for one, there was a toll road at the pass, with the gatekeeper charging one dollar and fifty cents for each wheeled conveyance. The road here was corduroyed with timbers, to allow passage in bad weather and to keep the ruts from growing so deep as to break a wheel, but it made the ride teeth-rattling. There was so much traffic over the pass—horses and wagons and even people on foot packing bedrolls and shovels—that a constant cloud of dust marked the pass. I had never seen such a mass of mixed humanity on the move, intent on a single destination and carrying unbelievable loads, against such a vast and difficult terrain, that it reminded me of an army of ants.

In addition to affording views that would defy description to my neighbors back in Dodge, the two-day journey allowed me time to think. I had purchased the ticket on impulse, while I was still spoiling from the verbal fencing with Councilman Miles, thinking that his secret must lie in California Gulch. There had been no waiting, because the stage line ran two coaches a day to Leadville, each way, and I promptly climbed aboard one that was ready to depart.

Upon reflection, it was a logical, if risky, move (I was insufficiently prepared for the cost of the journey—I’d already spent nearly a quarter of the money that Eureka Smith had given me). If anybody could tell me the story of Angus Wright and “Andrew” Jackson Miles, it would be somebody who had been in the Leadville district from its gold rush days.

The secret had to lie in the list of names and blank lines from the library association ledger, the hanged horse thief John Shear, and the alleged self-hanging of poor Charlie Howart. It was all too coincidental to be the product of chance. But what was the connection? Why had Howart hidden the strange and haunted book,
Syrinx of the Seven Worlds
? And did he suspect that he was going to be murdered when he bought the insurance policy? Who had murdered Howart and tied the strange knot in the rope from which the body dangled?

The fact that Howart was murdered appeared more certain, considering
Syrinx
led me to the library ledger, and the ledger contained the odd entry about Shear.

It seemed reasonable to exclude any Dodge City natives from the list of suspects for the murder. He had only been in Dodge for a year, having come from Newton, where he and Molly had married some five years before. Nothing that had transpired in Kansas suggested a past that was worthy of either a haunting or a homicide.

Of the strangers in Dodge City around the time of Howart’s murder, I personally knew of only three—and all three were candidates for suspicion. There was the Sky Pilot, the mudlark, and Clement Hill.

The Sky Pilot appeared mad, but might have a reason for giving such an impression. He certainly was strong, as I had discovered when he grasped the front of my shirt, and his age was sufficient that he might have shared a past with Charlie Howart. Also, he had taken flight from the China Doll not long after the body was found.

The mudlark—Bruce Chatwin by name, the man I met on the banks of the Arkansas River at Dodge—seemed unconnected, but he did say he was bound for Leadville. If he were on a murder mission, however, why would he announce a destination that would prove connected to a greater mystery? I’m sure Chatwin was telling the truth about growing up in England, because an accent like his would have been difficult to fake, and an unnecessary bit of theater to boot. He was too young to have been a participant in the events in Denver during 1860—he would have been little more than a child—but he might have been hired by someone who was involved. But he said he hadn’t come to America until 1863, when he was hired as a draft replacement for a rich man’s son in the Union Army.

Clement Hill, the salesman for the Western Mutual Life Assurance Company, was more than old enough to have been a contemporary. He appeared to value numbers above all else, which was in keeping with the style of the library ledger, and he dealt with death (albeit in an abstract way) on a daily basis. Was it possible he could have sold Charlie Howart a policy, killed him and dressed the scene, then denied the widow’s claim by citing the suicide exemption? Perhaps, but remotely so. Also, he did not appear to be a large or fit enough man to haul Howart’s body up. It was possible, I told myself, that I was including him on the list of suspects just because I didn’t like him. But I wasn’t ready to exclude him from the list, at least not yet.

As the stage bounced along, descending into the upper Arkansas River valley, we came to a place called Rocky Point, where the road became a narrow path that whipsawed between a rock face on one side and a sheer drop on the other. Our driver, still feeling the flames of hell upon his neck, dropped a rear wheel off the edge and, for a moment, the coach seemed about to plunge to oblivion, then jerked forward to find the road—and left my stomach floating somewhere behind. We hadn’t gone more than thirty yards before meeting a coach going the other way, and I realized that only a matter of seconds separated a safe passage from a spectacular and undoubtedly fatal wreck that would have made news all the way back to Dodge City.

My first glimpse of Leadville was through a picket of pine trees. The city was strewn across the valley, a motley assortment of tents and cabins and raw-lumbered boxes, with a cluster of substantial-looking buildings going up in the center of town. Everything was new and arranged in some strange geometry, and all of it reflected the late-afternoon sun, especially the buildings of freshly sawn lumber, which shone like pale gold. The appearance reminded me of Eureka Smith’s description of the octahedral crystal he had plucked from the bucket.

As the coach descended into the valley, the view got better, or at least clearer, because there were no trees left standing. All of it had gone into the building of Leadville, or down into the mines. The valley itself seemed featureless of any natural thing, having been scoured right down to dirt and rock; even the channel for the Arkansas River, which admittedly was only a stream this close to the headwaters, had been diverted in several places, to feed the mining or smelting operations. In the places where there wasn’t a building or a mine operation, there were smoldering mounds of trash or rusting industrial debris. The effect, once having seen the breathtaking views on the other side of Weston Pass, was disorienting, as if one were witnessing the desecration of a great cathedral.

Humanity surged through the mud streets of Leadville and over her trash-strewn slopes, a mob driven by greed and ambition, while the clang of steel on rock stung the crystal air. Crude timber tripods supported the tackle for buckets that went down open shafts on hemp ropes. The ropes were wound around a wooden drum, driven by horses walking in circles, which hoisted the ore up. There were several hundred of these wooden tripods—which I later learned were called
headframes
—across the valley.

Most headframes were rough affairs, like a tripod of telegraph poles, but here and there in the valley were stout blocky frames of considerable size, the marker of a well-financed corporate operation. There was all manner of complicated equipment beside these headframes, including boilers that looked like they belonged to steam locomotives, and pipes snaking everywhere. From the shafts came the constant rumble of the ore buckets and the shriek of some kind of mechanized demon. This was the Burleigh drill, I learned, a 250-pound jack-mounted monster driven by compressed air. It could drill a four-foot hole into the hardest rock in five minutes, twenty times faster than any human being could. Into the pattern of holes bored by the drill in a rock face at the end of a drift were inserted red sticks of dynamite, universally known as “giant” blasting powder, made from a volatile mixture of nitroglycerin and gun cotton. The blasts were set off at the end of the work day so the dust and fumes would have time to settle before the broken pieces of rock, called
muck,
were cleared out and the process could begin anew. Being late in the afternoon, a few muffled
thuds
reverberated across the valley.

I stepped off the coach in the middle of Leadville with my head spinning, both from the altitude and the cacophonous chaos around me. Behind me, my fellow passengers shouted and argued about the ownership of various articles being handed down from the top of the Concord. There were some sharp words and a pistol was drawn to settle the matter, but I did not hear it fired.

Clutching the valise to my stomach, I made my way to what seemed the most respectable establishment in the camp, a clapboard building with a sign proclaiming CITY HOTEL. It appeared to be general store, saloon, restaurant, and hotel. It was in a row of buildings that approached the urban in materials and workmanship, including a small building of brick that proclaimed itself to be a bank.

I climbed the wooden steps to the hotel, stepped over a miraculously sleeping dog in the doorway, and approached the desk.

“A private room, please.”

“We have rooms for rent, but ain’t none of them private,” the man said. “We have six beds to a room, not counting sleeping space on the floor. I doubt you would be interested in sharing a room with nine or ten miners, miss.”

“No, I’ve just had a similar experience on the coach from Denver.”

“The miners wouldn’t allow it, anyway.”

“Ah, what do you mean?”

I felt insulted and deficient at once.

“They would insist on you having the room to yourself, even though they had paid,” he said. “They are a rough lot, but most will treat every woman as good as a princess.”

“That must be a waste in a city sorely lacking in royalty. Are there other hotels in town?”

“There are, but this is the top of the heap,” the man said.

“I see. Say, were you around here in the old days?”

“You mean the silver strike last year?”

“No, I mean the gold rush.”

“Nope,” he said. “I’ve only been here since May.”

“Can you think of anyone to ask about the California Gulch days?”

“What for?”

“I’m just looking for some history,” I said.

“Well, you might try Horace Tabor. He’s the mayor and postmaster of Leadville, but he started in the gulch. His store is three doors down. There’s a miner’s meeting tonight, so you’d better catch him in the next hour or so.”

I walked down to Tabor’s Mercantile, a wood frame building that had actually been given a coat of white paint. Inside, the store was surprisingly well-appointed, with full shelves and glass display cases and barrels of apples, crackers, and pickles. Against one wall, however, there was an impressive selection of mining tools, including denim work clothes, candles, chisels, picks, and sledgehammers. In the far corner, near a stove, were a couple of men playing checkers while others watched. The store was dealing with a rush of business, as the miners stopped for groceries after work, and it took me a few minutes to work my way up to the counter.

“May I get you something?” the woman behind the counter asked.

There were two other clerks at work, both men, but this woman was in obvious charge. She was forty-five, or close to it, but her hair was still dark and in ringlets around her forehead. She wore glasses, behind which were bright inquisitive eyes, and her manner was confident.