Steele had taken cash, of course. Fargo had pulled it from his pocket, handed it over. “Wait a minute,” Steele began. “We need a written agreement—”
“No, we don’t,” said Fargo. “I always keep my word.”
“How do you know I will?”
Fargo smiled. “If you don’t, I’ll find you and take the money out of your hide.”
“But don’t you even want to know the details?”
“All I want,” Fargo said, “is for you to write me at General Delivery, El Paso, when you’ve made your strike. It may take a while before I’m in town to get the letter, but if I don’t catch a slug somewhere, I’ll get it sooner or later.”
He got to his feet. “I’m tired, going back to the hotel and get some sleep. Write me when you’ve hit it rich, Steele.” v
Sandy Steele sprang up. “Mr. Fargo—”
He turned. “Yes, ma’am?”
Her eyes met his. He saw something in her face. It was a good thing for her, he thought, that Lily had completely fixed him up. “You haven’t had your coffee,” she whispered.
“It would only keep me awake,” Fargo said. He put foot in stirrup, swung up. “Let me know in El Paso when our ship comes in, Steele. So long, Miss Sandy …” Then he spurred the horse and galloped off through the immensity of the high desert and the enormous sky.
~*~
Since then he had lost the twenty thousand, or what had remained of it, gambling; had drunk it up, wenched it away, or peeled off part of it to the vast network of Mexicans who provided him with intelligence of affairs along the border. He had had a dozen women and had been in two gunfights. He was dead broke. He could use the twenty thousand or more that Steele claimed to have found at Eden.
It was past three o’clock, and the heat had abated a little. Fargo watered the animals sparingly, drank sparingly himself, pulled the picket pins, and swung into the saddle, gathering up the mule’s lead rope.
He spurred off across the alkali flats, hat pulled low over his eyes. Ahead loomed the bulk of Paiute Mesa. Behind and around it roiled high, scrub-clad mountains. Off to the left of the Mesa lay the ghost town of Eden. Maybe, if he were lucky, he would make it by nightfall.
As he rode across the baking flats into the gathering purple shadows, Fargo’s hand went up from time to time to caress the shotgun. With its breech behind his back, he could not trace out the inscription worked into the intricate engraving: To Neal Fargo, gratefully, from T. Roosevelt. But he knew it was there, worked into the iron of his favorite weapon. The man who had presented it to him had been his Colonel in the Rough Riders, later President of the United States. What Fargo had done to earn the shotgun was a secret between the two of them, but it had been a crucial and important task.
Fargo shifted the shotgun from his right shoulder to his left. It made no difference which shoulder it rode on: he had been born ambidextrous, capable of using either hand with equal facility and speed. It was a gift that had more than once stood him in good stead, even saved his life.
By the time the sun slanted low, the mountains were near. Presently, in twilight, he began to climb. He rode up draw after draw, gulch after gulch, following an ancient, almost obliterated wagon road, the one trace that the town of Eden had been connected with civilization.
Just before last dark, he reached it.
It was an eerie place, a scatter of decaying shacks and empty houses in a narrow valley. The old mine that had provided its reason for being was located at the valley’s head. Its buildings were still intact—in this country, wind was the enemy, wind and sand, not rot. He saw the huge scattered pile of its tailings as he entered the single street of the deserted town.
Ghost town. It was an apt name. On either side, doors swayed in wind, slammed and opened, and shutters banged. Crumbling adobe, falling-down wood, sightless windows, deserted alleys, horseless hitch racks. A tumbleweed rolled across the street like some scuttling, living thing. A jackrabbit took off in huge bounds from beneath a porch.
Once this place had seethed with life; only thirty years ago, it had been a brawling boom town. Now, hemmed in by mountains, it was as desolate as the moon itself.
Except for that house up there near the mine. In the gathering dusk, Fargo saw the wink of lantern light. He spurred the dun, and the mule came after as he galloped up the street.
He reached the house—formerly that of the superintendent—at the foot of the gouged face of the hill where men had wrenched wealth from earth. He did not dismount, but unslung the shotgun, held it tilted toward the door. “Hello, the house!” he cried.
The door cracked. Then, in the last light, he saw the face of Sandy Steele, “Who—? Fargo!” She flung the door wide, turned. “Dad, Fargo’s here!”
There was a hitch rack. Fargo swung down, looped the dun’s reins and the mule’s lead rope around it tightly. Through the door, Mac Steele strode out onto the rickety sidewalk, a gun strapped around his waist, his face more thickly bearded than Fargo had last seen it. His eyes lit, his mouth curled. “Fargo! Damn, I’m glad you’re here!” He ran forward, half-embraced the tall man.
Fargo shook his hand. Then Sandy came around her father’s body shyly, and he took her hand. Her fingers clung to his as he greeted her. “We’re so glad to see you,” she whispered, gray eyes meeting his. Fargo waited for her to pull her hand free of his; she did not do it immediately.
But at last she pulled loose. Up and down the street, doors flapped in the ceaseless wind, and at this altitude it was cold.
Steele said, “Well, Fargo, I’m glad you made it. Sandy and I have been working like bastards. We’ve upped the ante by ten thousand apiece easy since I wrote that letter to you.”
Fargo surveyed the deserted town. “How? Damned if I can see how.”
“Come inside.” Steele chuckled. “I’ll show you how.”
Fargo followed the Steeles into the big house. It was empty save for their sleeping gear in separate corners, pots and pans around the fireplace in which embers glowed, and the table on which the lantern sat.
Steele went to the fireplace. His hands trembled as he pried up the mud bricks of the hearth. “Fargo,” he whispered, “look at this.” There was a big cavity underneath the bricks, and from it Steele lifted leather bag after leather bag.
Fargo took the first one, opened it, stared down into it. Sandy held the lantern above his head. In its light, what glittered up at Fargo was gold dust, pure and floury.
“Christ,” he whispered, awed. He hefted the bag. It weighed at least five pounds. And was worth, he knew, nearly three thousand dollars. “Where’d you get this?”
Now all the bags were out of the hole. Steele neatly ranked ten of them on one side of the hole, ten on the other. He laughed. “This is left-overs.”
“Left-overs?”
Steele pointed in the direction of the shaft and tailing pile at street’s end. “Hard rock mining. They stamped the ore, extracted all they could and dumped the tailings. But their methods were primitive, Fargo. They took eighty per cent of the gold out, left twenty in the waste. And the waste was chewed up fine. That’s where this gold came from; I took it out of the stamp-mill tailings by placer mining.”
Fargo looked at the fortune spread out before him. “I don’t believe it.”
Again Steele laughed. “It’s true. And there are thousands more there. Fargo, they were fools, amateurs. They skimmed the cream; what they didn’t realize was that the milk was worth a fortune, too. They used chemical methods to retrieve the gold; it never occurred to them that if they would wash the tailings they could take out another fortune.” Fargo stroked a plump bag. “There ain’t enough water in these mountains to wash the tailings.” Sandy grinned happily. Steele said, “For God’s sake, man, what did you think I wanted that five thousand for, beans and bacon? The shafts are full of water; that’s why these people quit. I used that five thousand to buy a strong pump I could haul in on mule back and thousands of feet of rubber hose. That was all I needed. Millions of gallons of water down in that mine—plenty to sluice the tailings through Long Toms and rockers. All I’m doing is placer mining the left-overs—and getting rich!” He shook his head. “All they could think of was pick-and-shovel mining, high-grading. They had no knowledge of scientific methods. Fargo, the tailings run about thirty dollars a ton, and I can wash and work six tons a day—just me and Sandy and the things I’ve rigged. But the ore here was running two hundred dollars to the ton, and thirty seemed like small potatoes to them. It didn’t even occur to them that they could pump the water to wash it out from their own shafts.”
He sobered. “It wasn’t their fault. Twenty-five years ago, when this digging’s closed down, they didn’t even have the high pressure pumps that would bring the water out. And besides, the company had richer diggings in Arizona to concentrate on.”
“And so their claim’s voided?”
“It’s expired,” Steele said, “and they didn’t take it up again. And I’ve superseded them. Fargo, there are hundreds of thousands of tons of tailings up there, and all the water in the world to wash the gold out of them. The people before us took five million out of here; we’ll take two ourselves.”
He began to thrust bags at Fargo. “Now we’ve got capital, we can expand. More pumps, more workmen. We’ll be gorged with gold in another year. But first we’ve got to get this out.”
“Your letter sounded like you were expecting trouble,” Fargo said.
“I’m not expecting anything. All I know is that when you haul sixty thousand in gold outside, you don’t take any chances. Nobody comes through this hell anymore; Sandy and me ain’t seen another living soul in three months. But a man never knows. That’s where you come in. I know all about mining gold, but I’m no fighting man.”
“Well,” Fargo said, “I am.”
“Yeah,” said Steele. “And I’m ready to go outside, now. Come tomorrow, let’s strike out with all this gold. I’ll buy the equipment, hire the help we need—and then we’ll really dig into our first million, Fargo.”
“That suits me,” Fargo said. “As long as I don’t have to do the digging.”
~*~
It was all that money that made him restless, woke him up in the middle of the night.
Thirty thousand dollars; that was just enough to edge him up, despite his weariness. When he rolled into his soogans on the floor of the superintendent’s house, with Steele between himself and Sandy, for some reason two amounts kept echoing in his head. Thirty thousand; a million. A million was rather frightening. Thirty thousand he could get rid of in a few months of wild, high living. But a million—to spend that would take some doing. Ownership of a million dollars in gold could make a man fat and slow. He couldn’t spend it fast enough to keep it from having its effect on him. A little afraid, Fargo tried to sleep. But it was no use for a while yet, so he rolled out of his blankets, picked up the shotgun, slipped the pistol in his belt, and padded out to the rickety veranda of the house.
The raw night wind was cool on his face; overhead, the sky swam with stars above the jagged mountain tops. He took out makings, and leaning against a rickety post, built a cigarette. He lit it, then snapped out the match. From his pocket he shoved a fat, gold watch, the kind used by railroad men, always accurate. It told him that it was nearly two.
Fargo stepped off the porch, looked up and down the empty street, the Fox cradled in his arms. Nothing moved.
Then he heard the squeak of a rotten board behind him.
When he whirled, it was with fantastic speed, and the shotgun was pointed. Then he lowered it.
“You,” he said.
“Me,” murmured the girl, Sandy. She came down the rickety steps. “Dad’s sawing wood, but I couldn’t sleep, either. I don’t know why. Maybe because you’re here.”
“Me?”
She nodded, her face, washed by moonlight, grave and lovely. “I’m twenty-five years old,” she said. “I’ve spent—how many years?—traipsing through the desert with Dad while he chased his rainbow.” She gestured, in a way that took in the whole wild jumble of terrain, the forlorn, empty, rotting town. “Most of these past few years spent in places like this, lonely places. I’m … not used to men. Especially men like you.”
Fargo smiled faintly. She was a lot of woman, and he wanted her. But her father was his partner, millions of dollars were at stake, and this kind of thing in a place like Eden did not mix with gold. He said, “Well, Mac’s found his rainbow now. You’ll be rich. No more lonely places for you. You’ll have the big cities, fine clothes, all the men you can handle.”
She moved closer to him. “Will I? Do you really think so? Maybe I’m not pretty enough—”
“You’re pretty enough,” Fargo said. “Don’t worry about that.” Then, because it was what she wanted, needed, he bent and kissed her, not hard, briefly, on the lips. Straightening up, he said, seriously, “Now, get back to your bedroll. Come morning, we’ll pull out of here, head for Tonopah. Then, I reckon, to El Paso or Los Angeles. Big towns. When we get there, I’ll show ’em to you.” She took his hand. “That’s a promise?”
“It’s a promise,” Fargo said and meant it. He liked this girl. And there was a lot he could teach her. But not here, not now... He and Steele had a lot of desert to cross together; and he did not want to make that journey with a man who might have a grudge against him for fooling around with his daughter.
“I’ll hold you to it,” Sandy whispered. Then she went back into the house.
When she was gone, Fargo was still restless. Something gnawed at him, a sixth-sense nagging. He had learned not to ignore that. Occasionally it misled him, but it had, in the past, served him well, that kind of warning bell ringing in his head, trying to alarm him to the fact that all was not right.
Loosening the Colt in its holster, he struck out to take a turn around the town. He walked down the deserted street cautiously, keeping in the shadow. The animals—his horse and mule, Steele’s and Sandy’s mounts and string of burros—were penned in an old corral at the street’s end where the hill’s flank towered high. The first thing was to reassure himself that all was well with them.
They drowsed in moonlight. Above them was the huge pile of tailings, like a landslide on the slope; at its foot was the complex of sluiceways and rockers Steele had built to placer mine them. Fargo moved past the corral, walked among the boxes marveling at all the work Steele and his daughter had put in. Steele had earned his wealth.
He turned to go, convinced now that his hunch had been wrong. He circled around the network of sluices and rockers close to the foot of the great pile of tailings. Amidst its sand and mud, rejected from the stamp mill, there were enormous chunks of rocks that had been blasted from the mountainside to open the shaft. As he skirted a tower of this rubble higher than his head, they jumped him.
He heard a tick of sound above him, whirled, brought up the shotgun just in time to see a body leaping down at him from that rock pile like a hunting panther. An instant more and he would have pulled both triggers, blasted it to nothingness, but he lacked a necessary fraction of a second. Before he could fire, the body struck him hard, its weight knocking him backward. Simultaneously, even as he fell, he saw three more dark shapes boiling from the rock pile.
Another face was close to his, rank breath in his nostrils. Hands pinned his arms as his head struck the stony soil with a force that dazed him. A boot clamped down on the wrist that held the shotgun; Fargo did pull the triggers then, and the gun spumed flame and shot from both barrels, but its charges whined off into space harmlessly.
Somebody rasped, as he arched his body with all his strength, “Hit the sonofabitch, Clint! He’s strong as a goddam bull!” Fingers gouged for his eyes; Fargo rolled his face aside, tried to grasp the .38’s butt. Two hands seized his wrist, wrenched. Somebody snarled, “No, you don’t!” The first voice yelled, angrily, as the man sought to keep Fargo pinned, “I said hit him!” Fargo kicked out with a booted foot, felt the heel crush soft tissue and there was a moan. But they were all on him now, and, though he used every ounce of strength, he could not rise. Then something gleamed across his vision, shining in the moonlight: a Colt’s barrel. It chopped down across his skull; the world seemed to explode in a great roar. It was a long while after that before he knew anything else.