A sign on a low adobe building in the center of town said: Bootstrap Town Hall. Marshal’s Office. Jail. MacLaurin stayed with Sundance until he had dropped the Appaloosa off at the livery, watched the big stud roll in the corral behind, given strict instructions that he was not to be watered for another half hour. Then a quart of oats, a leaf of hay, no more, no less. The mayor watched as Sundance shouldered two big bullhide parfleches, panniers, that had been slung behind the saddle. One was long, cylindrical, the other round, a yard across. Both were decorated and fringed in Indian fashion. “What’s in those things?” MacLaurin asked curiously.
“Gear that’s important to me,” Sundance answered tersely. Carrying them to the livery office, he dumped them in one corner. His eyes were cold as he looked at the stable man. “I’ll hold you responsible for these, you hear? See that nobody tampers with ’em. They do, it’s your hide.”
The livery man swallowed. “Yes, sir. I’ll keep ’em safe.”
“Good.” Sundance flipped him a five-dollar gold piece. “Okay, lead on,” he told MacLaurin, and they crossed the street to the adobe building.
The man named Orin was there, rifle cradled in his arm. “Mercer’s locked up in the jug.” He jerked a thumb. “Back yonder.”
“Much obliged. Now, you go on down to the Bootstrap Bar and have a drink on me. Sundance and I’ll palaver here a spell.”
Orin nodded, went out. Sundance looked around. The room held a desk, a gun-rack, a couple of chairs. The gun-rack was full of Winchesters and shotguns. A door at the rear apparently led to the jail where Orin had put the youngster.
“This is the marshal’s office,” MacLaurin said. “Only we got no marshal. The last two we had, the Big Fifty Sniper cut down. Shot each one square through the badge. So, me, sometimes I’m the marshal, too. The mayor’s office is in the room next door, but this’ll do. Sit.”
Sundance dropped into a chair, but not before turning it so that his back was to a blank wall and he could watch the front door. Sitting behind the desk, MacLaurin noticed that and grinned. “Take no chances, eh?”
“Only when I get paid to.”
MacLaurin opened a drawer of the desk, brought out a bottle and two glasses. “Not the best whiskey in the world, but it won’t rot your gut. Drink?”
“Sure.”
MacLaurin drank, sighed, rubbed his eyes as he settled back in his chair. He was, Sundance judged, in his late forties, ten years older than himself. He had a long, lined face, and there were dark bags beneath his eyes, put there by worry and overwork. “Damn,” he husked, “it’s been a rough two months, Sundance. It’s almost like ... like the wrath of God has been visited on Bootstrap. This sniper. The Paiutes claim he’s not a man at all, he’s an evil spirit. Me, I’m damned near ready to believe it. Well, you’ve seen how he operates—no rhyme or reason. Just sudden, unexpected, vicious death.”
Sundance sipped his drink, savoring its bite. “I’ve been around a long time and I’ve never run into anything like it. When did it start, how many has he killed?”
“Started about two months ago. And ... let’s see.” He opened his desk drawer, took out a sheet of paper. “Seventeen, so far, that we’ve found and know about. There may be more, out there in the desert or up in the Skull Mountains that we don’t. The first killing was our Marshal, then, Luke Buckley. He was headin’ east out of town on horseback, was just clear of the outskirts. One of the Paiutes that live over there in hogans at the edge of town saw it happen. Bullet just picked him up right out of the saddle. We had a doctor here, then, and he dug the slug out—fifty caliber. But we ain’t got a doctor any more. He was comin’ back from a call out at the Bit and Bridoon ranch when the sniper got him, too. He plugged Tom Delahanty, took Luke Buckley’s place, while Tom was investigatin’ the doctor’s murder. He shot down two women hangin’ out their clothes on the edge of town. The Paiutes go out huntin’ rabbits in the brush, you know, and he’s plugged four of them. The other seven were shot here and there—prospectors in the hills, cowboys on the Bit and Bridoon, travelers comin’ in and out of town.” He gestured wearily. “No pattern—just like a mad dog bitin’ at anything that moves.”
“You’ve tried to track him?”
“The first few times. But we got nowhere. Then, after a few more killin’s, nobody would go out against him. The Paiutes wouldn’t help us track him, couldn’t raise a posse. Who wants to ride out when he never knows whether a shot from nowhere’ll blow his head apart the next minute? I tell you, Sundance, we’re in a state of siege. And if it keeps up, it’ll ruin my town.”
“Yours?”
“Well, I’m its founder. I laid it out, promoted it here.”
Sundance’s mouth quirked. “A hell of a place to put a town.”
“Not as bad as it looks like. West of here there’s good range, several large ranches. Josh Middleton’s Bit and Bridoon is the biggest. Then there’s minerals up in the Skulls: a couple of silver mines. They ain’t no Comstock Lodes, but they’re fair small producers, and they need a supply point. And then ... Well, I was gambling, too, on the Lost Pistol mine.”
Sundance sat up straight. “The Lost Pistol?”
“You’ve heard of it?”
“Hell, yes, everybody’s heard of it. Like the Breyfogle and the Lost Gunsight … ”
“Right. About twenty years ago, a party of emigrants got lost down here, and wandered up into the Skulls. One of ’em’s pistol dropped out of its holster while he was riding, and he went back to look for it. It was laying up against some funny-looking black rock. There was more of it all around. He had a hunch, packed it in his saddle bags, carried it on to California with him without saying anything to anybody. When he got there, he had it assayed, and it turned out to be damned near pure silver. He went back to try to locate it and maybe he did, he claimed he did —but the Injuns got him. He was wounded bad, rode out hard and fast, finally come up with a wagon train bound out southwest. A man named Clayton and his family looked after him, and he, knowing he was dying, gave Clayton a map, told him about the mine. After Clayton’s outfit got to California, he organized a syndicate, they came back searching for it. But they never did find it and they fell out among themselves and had a gunfight and Clayton got shot to death. Since then copies of the map have circulated and people swarm all through here year round lookin’ for that mine. It ain’t been located yet, but someday it will be, and when it is, it’ll make the Comstock Lode look like a penny-ante poker game. There’ll be a real silver boom then, up there in the Skulls. And when there is, Bootstrap will do just what its name implies—pull itself up by its bootstraps and become a city, maybe the biggest one in Nevada, maybe bigger than Denver. When that happens, I’ll be on the inside.”
He poured another drink, a kind of fever in his eyes, a fever Sundance recognized. He’d seen it often enough in his time—not just mineral fever, but the obsession of the treasure-hunter, the lost-mine fanatic. They were sprinkled across the West, full of get-rich-quick fever, trading maps, mounting expeditions, always sure that next time they’d find the pot of gold, the vein of silver, at the rainbow’s end. And that fever infected high and low alike: desert rats and sober businessmen. Once you had it, there was no cure for it. Carefully, Sundance said, “You believe in the Lost Pistol mine, eh?”
“You’re damned right I believe in it. And that’s why I built this town. It’s hangin’ on by its fingernails, but when that mine is found, it’ll be a boom town. Got to be, there’s not enough water up in the Skulls to support a town; if there’s to be one, it must be here, right here.” He hit his desk. “Bootstrap!”
He saw the way Sundance looked at him. “You think I’m crazy, eh? Well, in a way I am and in a way I ain’t. I’m not crazy enough to go scramblin’ around up there in the Skulls lookin’ for it. I’ll let somebody else do that, find it and take the profit. Me, I’ll make my fortune out of this town. If there still is a town when that damned sniper gets through!”
“That’s right,” Sundance said. “Every strike I ever heard of, it wasn’t the miners that got rich. It was the merchants that supplied ’em.”
“Exactly.” MacLaurin smiled strangely. “But you still think I’m batty. Well, I’m not, and I’ll tell you why. The Lost Pistol does exist, and it’s as rich as it’s claimed to be. I know, Sundance. And the reason that I know —” he leaned across his desk “—is that I was the assayer that checked out the ore that hombre brought to California in his saddlebags! And it was rich—the richest silver ore I’ve ever seen. And it’s still up there waitin’— ” he swept out an arm “—for the lucky man. And when he finds it, he’ll be a millionaire— and so will I!”
~*~
He broke off, and except for his harsh breathing there was, for a moment, silence in the office. “But the sniper,” he said at last, “has got to be disposed of first. Whoever the bastard is. And we don’t have a clue. Sundance.”
“Yeah.”
“I said I’d heard of you. Most of what I’ve heard’s about you and Indians. As I said, there was talk that you were stirring up the tribes, years ago. Cheyenne, Sioux, all the Plains Indians. Leadin’ them against the whites. They even say that you were at Little Big Horn when Custer got wiped out—and you were on the Indian side.”
“I can’t help what they say,” Sundance answered. He stood up, held out his glass, and MacLaurin poured another drink. “I didn’t stir up trouble, I tried to damp it down. But … ” his voice was bitter “ … I got nowhere.”
He faced MacLaurin. “I’m half white, half-Cheyenne. My father was an English remittance man who came to live with the Cheyennes. He married a Cheyenne woman and he became a trader among the Indians. All the tribes knew him and trusted him, from the Crees up in Canada to the Yaquis down in Mexico. Growin’ up, I lived with my parents among all the tribes, learned to speak a lot of languages and dialects, got adopted into a lot of bands. I know a lot of Indians and a lot about Indians—”
“More than any other man alive, I’ve heard,” MacLaurin said.
“I don’t know,” Sundance answered. “I was a Cheyenne warrior, a Dog Soldier, yeah. But I’m half white, too. My father gave me a white man’s education himself, and he taught me the white man’s ways even while I was learning Indian ways. All right. I could listen to and understand both sides of the story — the white man’s and the Indian’s. So when hell broke loose on the frontier after the Civil War, I was caught in the middle.”
He paused and now he was the one who was breathing hard. “Goddlemighty, it looked to me like there was room enough out here for everybody! Whites and Indians alike, I couldn’t see why they couldn’t respect each other’s ways, learn from each other, divvy up the land! That was what I worked for, MacLaurin! A square shake for both sides. When I thought it would bring it about, I scouted for the whites, and Sherman and Sheridan used to ask my advice—and take it when they pleased. And for the same reason, sometimes I fought on the side of the Indian people, too, against the whites—I make no secret of that now. And sometimes in between, I hired out at whatever job I could find to make some money—a lot of money.”
“I’ve heard that, too. And there’s a crazy story that most of it goes to some lawyer back east in Washington—to lobby for the Indians.”
Sundance knew he was talking too much. It was the whiskey. He couldn’t handle whiskey, that was the Indian in his blood. Which was why two drinks were his limit: more than that and he got ugly; by the fourth or fifth drink he’d hand-wrestle a grizzly bear or shoot up a town. Now, having drained his glass a second time, he shook his head when MacLaurin tried to refill it.
“That story’s right,” he said. “There’s a big, powerful lobby against the Indians. Somebody’s got to oppose it. Me, I’m the one. So I do have a lawyer back east.”
“Which takes a lot of money. Okay. I don’t give a damn about Indians one way or the other. What I do give a damn about is Bootstrap and—this sniper.” MacLaurin paused. “Sundance, how would you like to make some money—a lot of money?”
Sundance whirled, looked at him.
“It’s already posted,” MacLaurin said. “Ten thousand dollars for the man who brings in the Big Fifty Sniper. I’ve put up some, other townspeople part, and the ranchers and the miners have contributed. So far, we might as well have spit into the wind. But ... the money’s there, if you want to try for it.”
“Ten thousand,” Sundance said. He was silent for a moment. Then he said, “It’s not enough.”
“My God!” MacLaurin sat up straight. “It’s a fortune!”
“Maybe to a shirt-tail rancher or a barkeep. Not the way I figure things.” Excitement was beating high in Sundance now. He needed money for the lawyer, needed it bad. The Nez Percés, the Poncas, so many Western Indians dispossessed, and he’d been bound for Arizona on the rumor of a sheep and cattle war that might pay his kind of fee. But maybe he didn’t have to go to Arizona; maybe he could pick up what he needed here. “Make it twenty, MacLaurin,” he said, “and I’ll bring you the sniper’s head on a silver platter.”
MacLaurin’s jaw sagged. “Twenty thousand dollars.”
“That’s it. Take it or leave it. You pay me five to bind the deal, and there’ll be a written contract.” His mouth twisted. “One that’ll stand up in a court of law. I find that white men are damned forgetful sometimes when it comes to dealing with a half-breed. Twenty thousand, five down, and I’ll kill the sniper.”
“Sundance, we don’t have that kind of money ...”
“You can raise it,” Sundance said. “Town, ranchers, miners, they put up an extra thirty-three hundred apiece. Split it up and they’ll hardly feel it.”
“Good God. We figured ten thousand would bring in every bounty hunter in the West—” MacLaurin rubbed his face. “Until you came along, we were gonna pay it to Wolf Hargitt for taking Billy Mercer. It was due just after the hanging.”
Sundance stiffened. Now he knew why Wolf had been his instant enemy. Then he shrugged. “Suit yourself. Pay Wolf or call in your bounty hunters. You’ll get a bunch of gunfighters, yeah: Colt artists. A Colt that’s accurate at forty yards ain’t much against a big fifty at a thousand. And they’ll be white men, huntin’ him the white man’s way. If he’s an Indian, they’ll never catch him. Me, I’ll catch him no matter what he is.”
MacLaurin’s face hardened. “How soon?”
“Two weeks,” Sundance said. “If I don’t, you get back the five and all bets are off. We’ll put it in the contract.”
MacLaurin leaned back in the chair, looking at Sundance with half-hooded eyes. “Two weeks,” he said. “My God, if in just two weeks a man could walk the streets, ride out or into Bootstrap without worrying about getting a Sharps slug through him ... If this town could just lead a normal life again ... It would be worth that kind of money. All right, Sundance. You stick around. I’ll have to call a meeting of the selectmen and the businessmen. I’ll do it right away. You’ll have your answer by sundown.”
“And the money,” Sundance said.
“And the money.”
“And one more thing,” Sundance said. “I want Billy Mercer, that kid you were about to hang. Turn him loose in my custody.”
MacLaurin bit his lip. “That I don’t know about.”
“He’s not the sniper. That was proved this afternoon.”
“Maybe not. But he could be the sniper’s accomplice. He did have those two unfired Big Fifty rounds in his pockets—illegal rounds. And don’t let his looks fool you. He may look like an angel, but he’s a damned hydrophobia skunk, and greased lightning with his guns. I told you before, he’s killed two men since he hit Bootstrap three months ago, one of ’em Wolf Hargitt’s brother. The other hombres were supposed to be fast, but neither of ’em had a chance against Billy. The kid’s got no friends, he’s a pure loner, and flat mean. What you want him for?”
“Mainly,” Sundance said, “to show me where he claims to have found those cartridges up in the Skulls. That’s a place to start. Second thing is, if he is mixed up with the sniper somehow, he might drop some information. He owes me somethin’ for savin’ him today, and if he knows anything, I’ve got a better chance of gettin’ it out of him with just the two of us alone, out in the hills, after maybe I’ve won his confidence, than anybody has questioning him in a cell and threatening him with a rope. Anyhow, he’s a lead, and I’ve got to have him.”
“Well, that’s something else to be cleared with the selectmen. All right, Sundance. I’m for taking up your proposition and I’ll push it hard. Write out your contract—” he shoved pen and paper across the desk “ —and go have yourself a drink and come back here before the sun goes down and you’ll have your answer.”