Chapter One

 

Marshal “Duster” Kendal really had no great desire to see the death scene. He stepped off the wooden porch of the Dewey Hotel and moved his six-foot frame as slow as he could down the dry dirt of the Main Street of the tiny town of Dewey, Idaho. With each step his boots kicked up a small cloud into the hot, morning air.

Lately he’d seen far too many deaths and he had a hunch this one wouldn’t look much different than the other two he’d seen here and others he’d seen over the last year.

Things seemed to be unraveling. He knew the signs.

This time he had met the dead guy two nights before in the Benson Saloon in Silver City. It was one thing to see a body of a stranger. Another to look on the dead face of a man Duster had watched poor drinks for two hours.

The morning sun beat down through the clear August sky with such force, Duster could almost feel it like a weight on his shoulders, pressing him down into the dirt of the street. The day would be a scorcher before it was finished.

People thought him odd to wear his light, oilcloth duster even on hot summer days, but he had learned while in the Arizona territory a long, long time ago that it actually kept him cooler in the hot sun. His wide-brimmed Texas cowhand hat kept the sun off his face as well.

Wearing the long, brown coat had gotten him the nickname “Duster” and he had no intention of changing that now. He actually had grown to like the name and the coat. Both fit him like a comfortable old pair of boots.

He wore his gray and brown hair long and streaming out the back of his hat to cover his neck and his face and chiseled features gave away very little of his actual age, which was north of forty-five now. Only his bright green eyes let his intelligence shine through and he was known for the intensity of his gaze. Sometimes he could stare a man down enough to kill a growing problem.

Today he had no plan on being out in the sun much longer than he needed. If this death followed the pattern of the others, he wouldn’t need to be out long.

And this morning just maybe he might figure out what was causing these men to die.

Or at least why.

He had a hunch he knew, and with no train due back in the valley for six days, he had time to find out if his hunch was right and set everything on the correct path again.

In his years of wearing a badge, he’d never seen anything quite like this. Of course, no place else in the west, or in the world for that matter, was like the Owyhee Mountains. They had been mostly ignored by the huge rush on the Oregon Trail close by in the 1860s and if it hadn’t been for the gold found in the streams and deep veins here, Duster doubted anyone would be in this hostile place.

And if no one had come here, he wouldn’t be here either.

These deaths by train were the reason he was up here from Boise in the mining district of Silver City. The only law in the valley was a constable in Silver City named Ben and his deputy. The poor guy had called for help after the first death. Ben’s job was to break up bar fights, not figure out why someone died under the wheels of a train.

What bothered Duster even more was that there didn’t seem to be anything going on in the town that would cause this. No fights beyond drunken brawls, no mine-labor disputes beyond normal. Yet four men in three weeks had been run over by slow-moving freight trains just down the hill from Dewey, Idaho.

Dewey was a silver-and-gold-mining boomtown tucked in the bottom of a valley leading up between War Eagle and Florida Mountains in the Owyhee Mountain Range in Southern Idaho. The town straddled Jordon Creek like it couldn’t decide which way to step.

The main attraction of the town beside the huge twenty-stamp ore mill and the Blaine tunnel was the Dewey Hotel. Colonel Dewey had built the hotel tucked up against the west side of the narrow valley. Two stories and as plush as anything Duster had seen in San Francisco or back east. Colonel Dewey himself lived in a large house beside the hotel and seemed just as upset at all the deaths as everyone.

Maybe more. Colonel Dewey had brought in the railroad in the first place. He knew that if the deaths didn’t stop soon, there wouldn’t be a person left in the valley to work his mines. This was scaring everyone and Colonel Dewey had offered Duster extra to solve this fast.

Duster had turned him down, of course.

If Colonel Dewey actually knew how fantastically rich Duster was, and where he actually came from, he would have never offered. But Duster played the roll of marshal well, even though he always stayed in the best hotels when he traveled and only ate at the best restaurants and drank the finest brandy.

Duster felt that just because he worked as a marshal didn’t mean he couldn’t fully live life as well. And no one really questioned the money he spent and he didn’t offer an explanation.

The railroad had put a spur line up the valley to the Dewey Mill in 1881. All the oar from Silver City and all the mines farther up either had to be hauled out over forty miles by wagon down to Murphy or taken the short three miles down to Dewey in the summer months when the train could get up the valley. In a few months the snow would start flying and the train wouldn’t return until late spring.

If it returned then.

The town of Dewey was dying. Duster had seen it before around the west. Towns sprang up and then vanished, often within years. In a hundred plus years there wouldn’t be anything left here but a bend in the road.

Silver City, the county seat three miles up Jordon Creek above Dewey wasn’t in much better shape. He had no doubt that the winter would kill most everything in this valley and the mines that were marginal wouldn’t open again. And after the snow started flying the train wouldn’t be back.

Plus, with the Bank of California going down a few years back and payrolls for most of the mines in this area being lost, people were already not trusting anyone.

The valley had a few more generations in it as it slowly died, but not much beyond that.

And now the deaths of four good men weren’t helping.

This area was about to go down and would become a ghost town.

Duster just needed to figure out why people kept dying under the wheels of slow-moving oar cars so he could get back to his wonderful suite in the luxurious Boise Hotel.

He really wanted to get back to the life he had picked and the restaurants and the women in Boise as well. Everyone knew how Duster loved his food and his friends wondered how he could eat so much and stay so rail thin. He had his secrets he would say.

Duster had a lot of secrets.