CHAPTER 5
Bo managed to keep the surprise off his
face, although Scratch stared a little. “You own the company ?” Bo
asked.
“That’s right,” the young woman said.
“I’m Martha Sutton. What can I do for you?”
“Well, I, uh, beg your pardon, miss,
but we weren’t expecting—”
“Weren’t expecting to find a
girl in charge of a mining company?” she
broke in. “You’re not the only one. Some other people in this town
seem to have a problem with that, too. That’s just too
bad.”
“I never said we had a problem with
it,” Bo went on quickly. “It’s just a little surprising, that’s
all. My name’s Bo Creel, and this is my friend Scratch
Morton.”
Scratch snatched his hat off and nodded
politely. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” he said.
The look of irritation on Martha
Sutton’s face eased a bit. She said, “Mr. Creel, Mr. Morton . . . I
ask again, what can I do for you?”
“We’re new in town, and we’ve been
hearing about the Deadwood Devils and how they’ve been holding up
gold shipments from the mines around here,” Bo explained. “Has that
happened to your outfit?”
Martha set down the pencil she had been
using and leaned back in her chair. “Not that it’s any of your
business, Mr. Creel, but yes, the Golden Queen has been robbed.
Several times, in fact. The Devils have hit us probably more than
any of the other mining operations around here.”
“Us?” Bo repeated.
“My father founded the Golden Queen and
ran it until about a month ago. That was when he died suddenly. His
heart gave out, the doctor said, possibly from worrying about the
holdups.”
“We’re sorry to hear that,” Scratch
said. “That’ll happen sometimes when you’ve got a bum
ticker.”
“At any rate, that’s why I’m running
the company now,” Martha said. “Our shipments have been hijacked
several times since then, to the point that no one wants to drive
for me anymore or hire on as guards because the others have been
killed. The company is on the verge of collapse. Is that what you
wanted to know?”
With all the bad luck that had befallen
her, Bo couldn’t blame Martha Sutton for being a little
short-tempered. He said, “You’ve got us wrong, Miss Sutton. We’d
like to help you.”
“How are you going to do that?” she
asked, wanting to know.
“If somebody could track down the
Deadwood Devils and maybe even find all the loot they’ve stolen, I
imagine it would make things look a lot more promising for the
Golden Queen, wouldn’t it?”
She regarded the Texans intently for a
moment, then said, “If you’re angling for me to hire you and your
friend as some sort of troubleshooters, Mr. Creel, I can’t afford
it. Right now I can’t even pay the men working in the mine. I owe
them a month’s back wages, and it’s all I can do to continue
feeding them.”
“If we were able to recover some of the
gold you lost, how would you feel about cutting us in for a share?”
Bo suggested.
Martha didn’t reject the idea out of
hand. Instead she considered it for a moment before finally
nodding. “We could probably come to an arrangement like that,” she
said. “Ten percent of the value of whatever gold you
recover.”
Bo didn’t like the idea of haggling
with a woman, but he said, “I was thinking more along the lines of
twenty percent.”
“Ten’s all I can afford,” Martha said
flatly.
“Well, in that case, ma’am, you got a
deal,” Scratch said before Bo could make a counteroffer. Bo glanced
over at his old friend, who was grinning from ear to ear. Scratch
never had been able to resist trying to please a pretty woman, even
one who was young enough to be his daughter, or maybe even his
granddaughter.
But to be honest, he probably would
have agreed to the ten percent, too, Bo realized. If that was truly
all Martha could afford, he wouldn’t want to try to take advantage
of her.
She stood up and came out from behind
the desk, extending her hand to each of them in turn. She said, “I
probably should have asked what your qualifications are to be
hunting down gold thieves. Are you lawmen of some
sort?”
“We’ve worked as deputies before,” Bo
explained. “Done some scouting for the army as well, so we have
experience with tracking.”
“Plus we’ve wound up in quite a few
ruckuses with owlhoots that were none of our doin’,” Scratch added.
“We don’t never go lookin’ for trouble, but sometimes it seems like
it looks for us.”
“Well, if you find the Deadwood Devils,
you can count on one thing,” Martha said. “You’ll find plenty of
trouble, too. When are you going to start searching for
them?”
Bo said, “It’s too late in the day to
pick up a trail today. First thing in the morning we’ll ride out to
the place where the Argosy gold wagon was held up today and see
what we can find.”
Martha made a face at the mention of
the Argosy Mining Company, Bo noted.
“You and the folks at the Argosy don’t
get along?” he asked, making a shrewd guess.
“That’s none of your business, Mr.
Creel,” she snapped. “You don’t have to concern yourself with
anything except finding the Devils and getting back as much of my
gold as you can.”
Bo nodded. “You’re right, ma’am, we
don’t.” He put his hat on. “Come on, Scratch.”
They left Martha Sutton in the office.
As they walked along the street, Scratch commented, “That’s a
pretty gal, but she’s a mite prickly around the
edges.”
“I’d say she has reason to be, as much
trouble as she’s had. First those gold holdups, and then her pa
dying, maybe because of them . . .” Bo shook his head in sympathy.
“Meanwhile, we’ve got to eat tonight. I reckon I’ve got just enough
money hidden away in my saddlebags to buy us a meal at the Red
Top.”
“You mean you been squirrelin’ away
dinero without tellin’ me?”
“And it’s a good thing, too,” Bo said.
“Otherwise we’d be going hungry tonight.”
The fried steaks Sue Beth Pendleton and
her cook Charlie dished up at the café were just as good as the ham
at lunch had been. As the Texans were cleaning their plates and
washing down the last of the food with coffee, Sue Beth paused on
the other side of the counter and said, “I figured you boys would
be back.”
“With food this good, where else in
town would we eat?” Scratch asked.
“And I figured you might ask me for
credit,” Sue Beth went on. “No offense, but you look a little down
at the heels.”
“We don’t much believe in credit,” Bo
said. “We like to pay for what we get as we go along.”
Sue Beth laughed. “If more people were
like you, the world would probably be better off.”
“We are runnin’
a mite short, though,” Scratch said. “But we got some work lined up
that ought to help out.”
“Well . . .” Sue Beth hesitated. “If
you wind up needing a hand, you can always get a meal here. I don’t
believe in turning away a hungry man.”
“It won’t come to that,” Bo said.
“We’ll be fine.”
“Yeah,” Scratch said. “We been makin’
it for forty years now, so I reckon we’ll get by a mite
longer.”
Sue Beth nodded. “I’m sure you will.
But remember what I said.” She smiled. “You remind me a little of
my father, Mr. Morton. I couldn’t let you starve.”
“Well, I . . . uh . . .” Scratch fell
silent for a moment before finally nodding his head and saying,
“Thanks.”
When the Texans left the café a short
time later, Bo was smiling. He waited until they were outside and
the door was closed behind them before he said, “That’s the first
time in a while I’ve seen you struck speechless.”
“I don’t know what you’re talkin’
about,” Scratch said stiffly.
“The look on your face when Miz
Pendleton told you that you remind her of her old pa . . . that was
just priceless.”
“She was payin’ me a compliment,”
Scratch insisted.
“And telling you that you’re really
old,” Bo said.
“Same age as you!”
“Difference is, I’m not denying it,” Bo
drawled.
Scratch muttered something under his
breath, then said, “Dang it, let’s just go to the livery stable,
check on our horses, and turn in.”
Bo nodded. “Sounds like a good idea to
me.”
When they got back to Hanson’s Livery,
though, they found someone waiting for them. Chloride Coleman was
talking to a stocky Mexican who had taken over as the hostler on
the night shift. Chloride raised a gnarled hand in greeting as he
saw the Texans approaching.
“I figured you fellas’d show up here
sooner or later, since you said you was stayin’ here,” he said. “I
need to have a few words with you.”
“Go ahead and palaver,” Scratch told
him.
Chloride licked his lips under the
bushy white mustache. “Talkin’ always goes better with a mite of
lubrication, if you get my drift.”
“If you want whiskey, you’ll have to
provide your own,” Bo said. “We can’t afford it.”
“Oh, well.” Chloride heaved a sigh.
“You know what we was talkin’ about earlier?”
“Which part?”
“The part about me helpin’ you fellas
track down the Deadwood Devils. You still interested in
that?”
“Maybe,” Bo allowed. “But I thought you
were going to be too busy with your new job to give us a
hand.”
“Well, as it turns out, there ain’t any
openin’s for drivers right now, so I got more time than I figured I
would.”
Based on what Martha Sutton had told
them about the difficulty she had encountered in hiring drivers for
the Golden Queen, Bo suspected the other mining companies in town
were having the same trouble. Nobody wanted to risk his life
serving as a target for the Deadwood Devils.
So the fact that Chloride couldn’t get
a job as a driver probably meant that word had gotten around town
about Davenport’s suspicions of him. Even though Bo instinctively
believed the old-timer’s story about the way the holdup had
happened, the mine owners had to be worried that Chloride was tied
in with the gang somehow. Otherwise under the circumstances they
should have jumped at the chance to hire an experienced
driver.
“We’d be pleased to have you ride out
there with us in the morning, Chloride,” Bo said. “You can help us
take a look around and point out exactly where everything happened.
But you know we can’t pay you.”
Chloride licked his lips again. “You
could maybe cut me in on whatever reward you make out of the deal,
though, couldn’t you?”
Bo and Scratch looked at each other.
Scratch shrugged his agreement. Bo said, “That’s assuming we even
make anything.”
“Sure, sure, I understand
that.”
“Do you have a horse?”
“I got a mule. Ain’t very comfortable
for ridin’, but it’ll go all day.”
“Is it here at the
livery?”
Chloride shook his head. “No, I got a
little shack up the gulch a ways. Some prospector must’ve had a
claim there back in the old days, but he didn’t find no color and
abandoned the place.” His bushy eyebrows rose as a thought
obviously occurred to him. “Say, you boys could stay there if you
want, and save a little money. You’d have to spread your bedrolls
on the floor, but I wouldn’t charge you nothin’.”
Bo and Scratch shared a glance again.
If they could get a refund from Hanson, they’d be able to eat for a
few days longer without having to accept credit from Sue Beth
Pendleton.
“That sounds like a good idea,” Scratch
said. He turned to the hostler. “What’s your name,
amigo?”
“Esteban Gonzalez, señor,” the man
replied.
“Well, Esteban, tell your boss we won’t
be needin’ to stay here after all, and we’ll be takin’ our horses
with us.”
“He can take out for the feed he’s
already given them,” Bo said, “but we’ll expect the rest of our
money back when we come by here in the morning.”
Gonzalez looked doubtful. “I don’t
know, señores. Once Señor Hanson has money in his pocket, it is
always very reluctant to come out again.”
“Just tell him what we said,” Bo
requested. “We’ll be by early.”
The hostler sighed. “Sí, señor. I will
tell him.”
Bo and Scratch saddled their mounts and
led them out of their stalls. “You can ride double with me,
Chloride,” Bo offered. He swung up into the saddle and helped the
old-timer climb on behind him.
They rode out of Deadwood with Chloride
giving them directions. Despite the town’s façade of respectability
during the day, at night it was obvious that this was still a
mining town. The saloons were all busy as the Texans and their
elderly companion rode past.
As they started up the gulch along
Deadwood Creek, Bo said, “I’ve got an idea where you might be able
to get a job as a driver, Chloride.”
“Where’s that? I tried ever’body in
town.”
“What about the Golden
Queen?”
Chloride grunted. “Except that ’un!
That’s a hoodoo outfit, boys. Bad luck all around.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Their wagons have been held up more’n
any of the other mines, and besides, it’s run by a gal! Women is
bad luck. You been around long enough, you ought to know
that.”
“The only reason Miss Sutton’s running
the company is because her father died,” Bo pointed
out.
“Well, that proves my point right
there, don’t it? Ol’ Mike Sutton just up and dropped dead one day.
If that ain’t a hoodoo, I don’t know what is.”
“Anything suspicious about his death?”
Bo asked, apparently casually.
“Suspicious?” Chloride repeated. “Not
that I ever heard anything about. Sutton was just walkin’ along the
street one day when he stopped and sorta grabbed his chest. He
staggered along a couple more steps and then fell flat on his face.
Doc said he was prob’ly dead when he hit the boardwalk. Heart gave
out.”
Bo nodded. “Yes, that’s what Miss
Sutton told us. Do you know where he’d been just before that
happened?”
Chloride scratched his beard as he
tried to remember. “Down at the bank, if I recollect right,” he
answered. “I think folks said he’d been talkin’ to Jerome Davenport
about extendin’ him some money. The Devils had already hit a couple
of his shipments, and he was already havin’ trouble payin’ the
fellas who work for him.”
“Davenport turned him
down?”
Chloride leaned to the side and spat.
“Davenport ain’t got to worry about his heart ever givin’ out. He
ain’t got one. I think there’s a poke full of gold dust where it’s
supposed to be.”
Scratch laughed. “Sounds like you ain’t
over fond of him.”
“The varmint said he didn’t suspect me
of workin’ with the Devils, but he sure made it sound like that’s
what he really thought.”
“There’s one really good way for you to
prove that’s not true,” Bo said. “Help us catch them, and everybody
in town will know you’re not crooked, Chloride.”
“Yeah, that’s a pretty good idea, all
right,” the old-timer said. “Providin’ that we don’t get ourselves
shot full of holes doin’ it!”