Black Hills Hellhole (A Wild Bill Western Book 6) Read online

  “Mining ain’t for nervous nellies, Mrs. Nearhood. It’s dangerous work.”

  “Mmm. Especially around here.”

  “How so?” Bill asked, keeping his voice only casually curious.

  Elsie sniffed. “Well now, Benjamin Lofley, I’m not one of these ingrates who mean-mouth the company while growing fat off it. Harney’s Hellhole has made Deadwood a boomtown for everybody. My lands, even the Chinee and the Mexer can afford fripperies these days. Still … ”

  Elsie glanced around the parlor as she handed him his receipt. Though they were alone, she lowered her voice.

  “Still … there’s some as think they’re gods. Gods made of gold. And now that nice Owen McNulty’s been murdered. Oh yes, mining is dangerous work. And so is defying those who run the mines.”

  Elsie hushed herself up, realizing she was being indiscreet. But Hickok felt a little jolt of shock move through him when she pronounced the name of McNulty. Murdered! The Indian agent’s name had been on the very short list of local contacts Pinkerton said Bill could trust.

  Just then Hickok realized Elsie was scrutinizing his face, her blunt features squinched in concentration.

  “You sure do look familiar,” she mused.

  Only now did Wild Bill spot it, tacked onto the faded, rose-pattern wallpaper behind Elsie: his own mustachioed face and gunmetal blue eyes, staring off the cover of Harper’s Weekly.

  Elsie caught him staring at it.

  “That’s Wild Bill Hickok,” she informed him proudly. “He stayed here once, back in the sixties after the war. We all called him J. B. then.”

  “Do tell? Hickok, huh? You know, I hear he’s quite the fashion dandy.” Bill said this to emphasize his own drab, workaday appearance.

  “Dandy? Huh! Why, he was downright womanish about his appearance,” Elsie insisted. “And perfumed? My hand to God, the man smelled like a French you-know-what.”

  Bill barely stopped himself from frowning. He did tend to favor some fine colognes. “That bad, huh?”

  “Ben, he smelled like a woman. And from behind, he looked like a woman. All them blond curls, lordy! Made me wonder if maybe Mrs. Hickok had wanted a daughter stead of a son. Maybe raised him up to be a gal-boy?”

  The heat of indignation came into Bill’s face. Steady, hoss, he warned himself.

  “Now Elsie, he must be all man and then some,” Wild Bill argued, forcing the defensiveness from his tone. “I mean, I hear he’s always with a beautiful woman.”

  “Why sure, that’s how he gets his perfumes,” Elsie pointed out. “I have my doubts about him, famous or no. A man should look like a man.”

  Why, you old bat, Bill thought. But Hickok decided not to push his luck with any more questions. He quickly stowed his gear in his tiny room, cleaned up a little, then searched out a cafe and enjoyed a steak dinner with all the trimmings.

  But as he lingered over berry pie and coffee, Elsie Nearhood’s words echoed in memory: There’s some as think they’re gods. Gods made of gold.

  ~*~

  Toward the middle of the afternoon, Bill inquired where to find the mine’s hiring office. Even with his sheathed scattergun in one hand, Bill felt naked without his sidearms. He followed a well-worn path toward a tarpaper shack. The single word JOBS had been whitewashed over the door.

  The noise grew louder as he ascended. Steam pumps steadily clanked and hissed, keeping down the water level in the underground stopes where the miners labored.

  The days of easy panning and hydraulic mining were gone. All color now was deep down in the bedrock. Here and there Bill saw shaft-houses rising up from the ground like big outhouses. These contained the skips that took men down into the stopes.

  Bill watched a group of miners pile onto one of the skips. All of them had unnaturally pale skin and wore clothing streaked red with clay and pigments. Their helmets had fat candles mounted in front.

  A bell clanged, the hoist man hit a lever, and steam escaped in an airy sigh. The huge hoist wheel turned and down they all went, as if swallowed by the bowels of the earth.

  “Form a straight line, you flea-bitten shitheels!” a man’s voice brayed out nearby. “If you’re drunk, get the hell outta here! No cripples and no men over forty-five! You must also pass a lifting test to check for hernias.”

  Outside the hiring office, Bill saw a big, barrel-chested man with a star pinned to his rawhide vest. He was built like a granite block. Part of the company’s private security force. Bill eyed the blacksnake whip he carried coiled in his left hand. A Borchardt 44.40 with a metal back strap bulged from his hand-tooled holster.

  “I said a line, not a goddamn cluster!” he roared out. “You’re a mob! You want a job here, you best learn to take orders.”

  Bill took his place in line. It moved along fairly briskly. Every two minutes or so another man emerged from the shack. Most of them, Bill noticed, clutched a new hiring contract. Again he recalled Elsie’s words: That old hellhole kills men about as quick as the big nabobs can hire them.

  Bill glanced at the bullyboy with the badge. It’s not just the mine that’s killing them, he speculated.

  Unfortunately, the thug looked right at Bill before he could avert his eyes. The big man charged Bill’s position.

  “You sweet on me, mister?” the man demanded. “Hey? Are you?”

  “No, sir,” Bill snapped back.

  His “sir” seemed to mollify the bully somewhat. Or so he pretended, thought Bill.

  “Then don’t be staring,” he said in a quieter voice. “And when you step inside, you leave that smoke pole by the door.”

  “Yessir,” Bill responded with military precision.

  The bullyboy took in his relatively clean grooming and noticed there was no liquor smell on this applicant’s breath.

  “Mind your pints and quarts around here,” the man confided in an almost friendly tone, “and you’ll move up fast. You look like a man with some mettle in him.”

  The security man moved off, while Bill inched up steadily closer to the door. The afternoon waned and the shadows began to lengthen. From where he stood he could see how the surrounding slopes were chockablock with more tar-papered shacks—provided by the company for the married miners.

  Finally it was Bill’s turn to step inside. He grounded his weapon, then took up a respectful parade rest position in front of a crude deal desk.

  A skinny man, with impatient eyes and a cigarette dangling from his lips, sat behind the desk. A powder keg served as his chair. Not only was there an American flag in a standard behind him, but another on a little pin in his lapel. The bullyboy outside wore one too. Patriotism, Bill reminded himself—the last refuge of a scoundrel.

  The hiring officer gave Bill a quick once-over.

  “Ever worked in a gold mine before?” he demanded.

  “Yessir. Up on the Comstock.”

  Bill meant the Comstock Lode, a rich deposit of silver and gold ore discovered near Virginia City, Nevada, by Henry T. P. Comstock. Bill did indeed work there for a year, but as a guard for the ore trains.

  “What job?” the hiring boss demanded.

  Bill almost grinned at the irony. In fact it was the security forces that Bill hoped to infiltrate. But he dare not request such an-assignment—not with three other Pinkertons known to have done the same.

  So Bill lied through his teeth.

  “I started out as a toss man on the slusher line, sir. Worked my way up to crew chief in seven months.”

  This news seemed to chase the impatience from the other man’s eyes. The slusher line was an important part of any mining operation. High-grade ore formed veins in rocks, veins that could be detected by a trained eye. A “toss man” had the tough and dangerous job of riding along on the huge slusher buckets, the receptacles that held the waste materials mucked out from the stopes below. He had to quickly sort through the material and toss out any valuable ore before it was dumped into a waste pit. The job was important and paid more than most mining jobs.

>   The hiring boss sized up Bill again.

  “You ain’t a specially big man, Ben. It’s usually big fellers on the slusher line. Let me see you lift that.”

  He pointed toward a good-sized boulder that rested to the left of his desk. Men were required to lift it as proof they did not have debilitating hernias—a serious problem on the frontier.

  Bill squatted and lifted it with evident ease.

  The boss’s strong stern face cracked into a smile. “Hell, you’re strong as horseradish, fellow! Say you know the business, hanh?”

  In truth, Wild Bill Hickok would rather face great danger than hard physical labor. He had never actually worked in a mine.

  But he paid close attention, and he had learned plenty of key terms like “angle of repose” and “ore gradients.” Hickok was a quick study with other details, too. Now he was able to talk about stopes and drifts and tipples, pumps and ores and underground surveying, with the appearance of some knowledge.

  As a result he was hired on as a crew chief, his salary two dollars and seventy five cents per day instead of the usual two bucks even for common labor.

  “The job pays in Eastern money,” the mining official explained. He meant paper banknotes instead of gold or silver coins. “Any problem with that?”

  Bill shrugged. “No, sir. Some don’t trust paper, but I figure it all spends the same.”

  “You got a healthy attitude, Ben,” the other man praised, chuckling. “Most of them whine like women.”

  Since he had to start work at sunup tomorrow, Bill knew he’d better make sure to meet up with Josh later tonight at the Number 10. He needed to find out if the kid got hired and where he was staying.

  “Merrill?” the hiring boss shouted while Bill was signing his contract.

  The big security man with the whip poked his head inside. “Yeah?”

  “Merrill, this is Ben Lofley. He’s going to be taking over the slusher crew, starting tomorrow. Ben, meet Merrill Labun. He’s next in line after our security chief, Earl Beckman. You’ll meet Mr. Beckman and the rest of the mine officers in good time.”

  Bill and Labun exchanged nods.

  “A man who keeps himself squared away,” the hiring boss added, “can find himself eventually rolling in it. This mine has almost surpassed the Homestead Mine in overall production. In fact we’d hold the record if not for the ore we’ve had robbed, which doesn’t count in production figures.”

  At this last remark, Labun glanced out the door. Bill could have sworn the man started to smile. Hickok’s eyes fell to the fancy metal back strap on Labun’s .44. That was a special issue gun for Cavalry NCO’s.

  “But I should also warn you, Ben,” the hiring boss said, “that Merrill and his boys run a tight ship around here.”

  Labun met Bill’s eyes again and nodded. “That’s right. Good workers got nothing to fear. But any nail that sticks up will get hammered down hard.”

  Chapter Four

  Bill returned to his shoebox-size room, dropped the bar across the door, and slept the sleep of the just for the next few hours. He woke up too late for the evening meal provided by Elsie. So he decided to wait and grab something at the Number 10 when he met Josh.

  Except for the saloons, most Western towns folded up at sunset. But the booming mine employed night crews to load ore wagons. Even at nine p.m. Bill was forced to dodge wagon traffic when he crossed the street. Golden light spilled out from the crowded Number 10, along with a jumbled racket of shouts, laughter, curses, and a tinkle of player-piano notes.

  Hickok settled the floppy-brimmed plainsman’s hat lower on his head, casting much of his smooth-shaven face in shadow. He couldn’t help a queasy churning of his stomach as he approached the batwings of the Number 10.

  Foolish superstition or not, the prophecy of his own death made Bill look at the place differently. And right now he was virtually defenseless—he had left even his scattergun in his room.

  However, before he even went inside, Bill spotted Josh in the street outside the saloon. He milled among a growing throng of men and boys gathering around a huge conveyance drawn by a pair of mules. The team was festooned with garlands of papier-mâché flowers.

  The vehicle was completely enclosed like a paddy wagon. Light from the Number 10 splashed on its gaudily painted sideboards: SEE THE MIRAKULUSS ROLLING ROCK!!!

  “Step right up close, gentlemen, that’s the ticket!” barked a hatchet-faced man wearing a straw boater. He stood on the rig’s board seat. “Friends, for a mere five cents you can view the very stone that covered our Lord’s tomb! On loan to me by special arrangement with Saint Peter ‘s Basilica in Rome, Italy.”

  Bill sniggered, immediately recognizing the same grifter he had once seen working a scam in Sioux City. Only, that time, the con man was selling numbered chunks of wood “from the very cross on which the Lord was crucified.”

  “That’s it, chappies, and don’t be afrighted when you see how it glows in the dark. It is merely radiating the spirit of the Nazarene himself! Just one-twentieth of a dollar, gentlemen, to witness a bona fide, by-God miracle!”

  Shaking his head, Wild Bill watched Josh pay his nickel and file into the wagon. And that kid bragged about going to high school!

  Hickok slapped the batwings and entered the Number 10. The place was so busy that three bartenders were kept hopping behind the long, S-shaped counter.

  Keeping his eyes slanted toward the floor, yet carefully studying the interior, Hickok began nudging his way toward an open spot at the bar. Already he had spotted big Merrill Labun, matching shots of whiskey with another man at a table along a side wall.

  Bill ordered a shot of Old Taylor bourbon, a schooner of beer to chase it, and some boiled eggs to quell the hunger gnawing at his belly. He was peeling the second egg when Josh, pretending to ignore him, pushed into the spot beside Bill. Like Bill, he lifted one foot onto the brass floor rail that ran the length of the bar.

  Hickok spoke low without turning his head. “Get your nickel’s worth outside, chawbacon?”

  “Ahhh.” Josh’s tone was embarrassed. “I knew it was all a hoodwink. But how does he make that stone glow in the dark? It really did. I saw it.”

  “I’ve seen this scam before. The stone’s coated with dust from a spot near Taos in the New Mexico Territory,” Bill replied. “Indians call the spot Burning Sands. Nobody knows why, but this dust gives off a green glow in the dark. Some think it’s a new ore we don’t know about yet.”

  Bill slid a cheroot from his shirt pocket, still ignoring the kid. “How’d you make out today? Get a job?”

  “Man alive, did I ever. You were right, Bill. Clerks are scarce out here. When I told them I can translate French and German, they hired me at twice a common miner’s wage. The mine is an international concern, and they need a foreign correspondence clerk. That’s me.”

  Twice the common wage, Bill thought with a sting of envy. That meant Josh was getting four dollars a day! A buck and a quarter more than he himself was getting as a crew chief.

  “Get a room?” Bill asked.

  “They told me not to stay in town. I guess clerks get roughed up a lot. The clerical staff are provided a clean bed in a worker’s dormitory the company runs. I can come and go as I please during off hours. I work the same hours as the miners, sunup to sunset five days a week with two thirty-minute meal breaks. Half a day on Saturday, Sundays off.”

  While Josh spoke, Bill had idly been watching a big knot of bettors crowd the faro table. Now, as the knot momentarily parted, he realized what the big attraction was: the beautiful blonde with the huge, sea-green eyes who was dealing.

  Now she’s right out of the top drawer, Hickok told himself, suddenly alerting to a quality female like a hound on point.

  “I been asking some questions without being too obvious,” Josh said. He spoke with his glass held to hide his lips and looked straight ahead into the back-bar mirror. “Deke Stratton is lots more than just a mine operator. He owns controlling interest i
n almost every business in Deadwood. He also controls the town site charter.”

  “Yeah, I figured that out already. That’s why the mine’s private police force also serves as the only legal authority in town. I noticed when I rode in: No sheriff’s office or jailhouse or courthouse.”

  Josh nodded.

  “You know what Stratton looks like?” Bill asked.

  “I met him briefly when they were showing me the front offices. Seemed friendly enough. He’s got real facility with a cliché. He could get on in politics. He’s here tonight, by the way.”

  “Don’t point, you soft brain,” Hickok snapped. “And don’t turn around. Use the mirror.”

  “Oops, sorry. He’s the tall, well-dressed one among the three at the table in the back,” Josh explained. “Earlier, the faro dealer joined them for a drink. Stratton’s pretty free about touching her.”

  “Interesting,” Bill muttered. “But not surprising.

  He studied all three men. They were somewhat distorted in the smoke-filmed, warped mirror.

  “Who’re the other two?” Bill asked.

  “The bald fellow with the lumpy chin is Keith Morgan, the Mine Captain. He’s also an expert in demolitions. One of the accounting clerks told me he was a famous sapper with Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He—”

  Bill suddenly swore, interrupting Josh. “Morgan, you say? Well, cuss my coup, kid! You must mean the Reb devil we called ‘Boomer Morgan’. We named him that ’cause his explosions were always big and loud. Christ, he once tunneled up under an infantry company and blew away two hundred men in their sleep.”

  “No kidding? Well, judging from his manner today, Morgan is a pig,” Josh reported bluntly. “But the other fellow, Earl Beckman, wasn’t a bad sort. He’s the Security Chief. When he found out I read French, he started discussing—quite intelligently—the novels of Balzac.”

  Bill snorted beer foam out his nose. “Balzac, my sweet aunt! Listen, I’ve met rapists who can quote Shakespeare, kid. Don’t confuse learning with decency. If Beckman is the security chief at Harney’s Hellhole, I’ll guarantee you his hands are bloody.”