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

  “Good day, gentlemen,” she called out in a friendly tone. She gave them a quick and uncertain smile—a little bold, a little shy, a little sly. In that moment, Josh fell head over heels in love; Hickok, too was impressed. But his thoughts were a bit less sublime than the kid’s.

  She looked at Bill. “My name is Cassie Saint John. I’m not sure you remember me, Mister ... ?”

  “Lofley. Ben Lofley. Yes, ma’am, I do recall you from the Number 10.”

  Josh almost snorted at Bill’s low-key response. Recall? Why, lord, a woman like her stood out, in that hole, like a sleek Yankee Clipper in a harbor of barges.

  “Mr. Lofley,” she said, “I noticed how you ... handled that bully, Danny Stone. You seem like a very capable and confident man.”

  “Thank you, Miss Saint John.”

  “Nonetheless, I would like to offer a very friendly word of advice.”

  She paused, unsure.

  “I’d welcome it, ma’am,” Bill encouraged her. “I’m flattered, actually.”

  “Mr. Lofley, this bunch at Harney’s Hellhole ... well, let me just suggest that it might be wise to avoid antagonizing them. ‘Accidents’ tend to happen around here.”

  “Mining is dangerous work,” Bill said, as if missing her drift.

  “No. I mean accidents such as the one that killed my friend Owen McNulty.”

  “I heard that was murder, Miss Saint John, not an accident.”

  “My point exactly.”

  Bill touched his hat again. “I will indeed think about your advice, ma’am. And I do thank you sincerely. I’m not one to seek trouble.”

  Josh watched a little glimmer of amused doubt spark in her green eyes. “I wonder about that, sir.”

  “I lost your drift there,” Bill confessed. “Why would you wonder?”

  “Mr. Lofley, I have this rare old photo in my room. It’s a rather faded tintype of one James Butler Hickok.”

  She paused, and Bill did a great job—Josh thought—of maintaining a poker face.

  “If I was Mr. Hickok,” he suggested gallantly, “I’d be quite flattered to know you keep it. As it is, I confess I’m slightly jealous. We common men can hardly hope to compete with fame.”

  She smiled at his clever dissembling.

  “What makes it rare,” she pressed on, “is that it’s one of the few known photographs where he’s quite clean-cut.”

  Oh, man alive, Josh thought. We’re cooked. This woman was Deke Stratton’s concubine!

  However, if anything, Hickok only played it even cooler.

  “Is that a fact, Miss Saint John?”

  “Yes. And compared to his usual hirsute style, he appears almost … stern and unbending. Still handsome, but less roguish. Your own face puts me in mind of that tintype.”

  “’Preciate that, ma’am. No one’s ever compared my face to a famous man. Why, you’ll make me prideful and conceited.”

  Again that amused glimmer was back in her big, almond-shaped eyes.

  “I think it’s too late—you’re already prideful and conceited, Mister … Lofley. Good day, gentle men.”

  As her buggy clattered off, sending up dust plumes, Josh groaned.

  “Aww, crimeny, Wild Bill! All our efforts shot to blazes. What do we do now?”

  “Nothing,” Bill replied calmly, clucking to his horse.

  “Nothing? But she’s close to Stratton.”

  “‘Close’ is a loose word, kid. I know women— at least, her kind of woman. An ambitious female out here has no choice when she’s on her own. Either she cottons up to the head hounds, or she gets bit. As long as I don’t threaten her own plans, she’ll live and let live. In fact … ”

  A little smile tugged at the corners of Bill’s lips. “If she knows who I really am, she surely knows why I’m here. And just maybe she wants to see me succeed. That was no chance remark when she mentioned McNulty was her friend.”

  “She’s sure pretty,” Josh opined. He visualized her flawless mother-of-pearl skin.

  “Mm,” Bill agreed, his eyes scouring both sides of the trail. “Deadwood’s only a few miles now. Kick your horse up to a canter, Longfellow. I want you and me to arrive separately.”

  Even before Josh could carry out the order, the sound of a high-power rifle cracked in the distance. It was not close enough to threaten them. But it startled both men into careful attention.

  Several more shots boomed out—at least three different guns, Wild Bill’s trained ear quickly detected.

  “Hunting rifles or target guns,” he told Josh. “South of here. It’s just sport shooters.”

  Josh’s face regained some of its color. But as he pushed on ahead, Wild Bill called out: “Joshua?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Don’t forget—around here, anyone can become part of the ‘sport.’”

  ~*~

  “That’s holding and squeezing, Deke,” Earl Beckman praised his friend. “You dropped it at three hundred yards!”

  The sage grouse Stratton had just shot flumped to the ground.

  “You want the bird, Mr. Stratton?” called back a half-breed kid who was out ahead of them, beating the bushes for game.

  “Leave it for the turkey vultures, Tommy,” Stratton replied. “Go on ahead and see if you can scare up some four-legged game.”

  The youth moved obediently forward. Stratton, Keith Morgan, and Earl Beckman followed at a leisurely pace, rifles muzzle down. Cassie Saint John had just joined them in a huge, brush-filled meadow adjacent to Stratton’s horse-breeding ranch. She carried a pongee parasol against the brutal rays of the sun.

  “You know, Earl,” Deke remarked casually as he thumbed cartridges into the ammo well of a silver-trimmed Swiss Vetterli rifle. “This new crew chief, Ben Lofley—he whaled the tar out of O’Riley. I never saw any man stand up to that big mick bully. Lofley’s got sand. He could be useful to you in security.”

  “He’s got sand, all right,” Beckman agreed. “But I’m not quite as sanguine about him as you are, Deke. The man’s a blank slate.”

  “Most men are, out West.”

  Earl said nothing to this, at first, only looking around at Deke’s spread as if appraising its value.

  Besides this twenty-thousand-acre breeding ranch, Stratton owned a magnificent estate in Virginia’s hunt country as well as his own private island in the Gulf of Mexico. Financially speaking, he considered himself a forward-oriented man, if not quite a visionary. Thus, he’d even begun speculating heavily in European art masterpieces. Art was a prime investment because the real stuff could only gain in value.

  Finally Earl decided to reply.

  “Yes, most men are blank slates out here. But ‘most men’ can’t whip Brennan O’Riley.”

  Stratton considered Beckman’s remark and frowned, deciding the man was being coy with him again. Deke did not disdain subtlety in a man—but he never let it slow him down, either.

  “You want to spell that out plain, Earl?”

  “All right, I will. When I was in the war, I learned to read men’s eyes. A gunman—a true gunman who lives and dies by gun law—has a different look from other men.”

  Cassie, who appeared to be occupied in picking a bouquet of wildflowers, was in fact hanging on to every word.

  “And you’re implying that Ben Lofley has that look?”

  Beckman nodded.

  “Not implying. I’m giving it to you plain with the bark still on it. He’s a hardened killer. Harder, in his way, than any man on your payroll. Myself and Merrill included.”

  Stratton mulled this, his thin lips pressed in a grim frown. He wasn’t convinced. Still, it all made perfect sense.

  After all, as he himself knew, the job of power was to disguise true motives with deceptive rhetoric. Thus it was that a small, elite group of powerful men ran the world. Their private lives were completely unlike what the rabble imagined. Through fraud and illusion and comfortable lies, the masses could be controlled. So why couldn’t a clever killer employ the same tric
ks on the power brokers?

  “More smokestacks and businessmen,” Deke finally said. “That’s what the American West needs. Not these strutting-peacock gunmen romanticized in dime novels.”

  “Ho!” Keith Morgan shouted. “Lookit, boss!”

  Tommy’s efforts in beating the bushes with a boat oar had suddenly produced a prize: A tawny bobcat was startled out from hiding. It tore off across the huge clearing, bearing for a woods about two hundred yards off.

  Stratton lifted the butt plate of the rifle into his shoulder socket, drew a quick offhand bead, and squeezed off a round. The bobcat leaped straight up, somersaulted in midair, and landed dead in the parched grass, hind legs twitching a few times.

  Tommy pulled a curved skinning knife from his sash, ready to take the animal’s pelt.

  “Just leave it, Tommy,” Stratton shouted. “I’m in a hurry today. We’re heading back to the house.”

  Cassie spoke up.

  “Don’t you even want the hide? Or is it just the killing you three crave?”

  “Just the killing,” Morgan said bluntly—he despised Cassie almost as much as she despised him.

  Deke, however, contradicted this remark.

  “It’s not the kill we’re proud of, sweet love. It’s the kill that proves a man’s good aim. These animals are just moving targets.”

  “That’s right,” Beckman concurred. “Targets that move even faster than humans.”

  Chapter Eight

  Like the miners, the clerks employed by Harney’s Hellhole were required to be on the job shortly after sunrise. But supervision was more lax, and less brutal, among the “paper collars,” as the laboring men called them with contempt. And perhaps a little envy, too. These weak but learned men were treated with some visible signs of respect from the company.

  “Mr. Mumford,” called out the head clerk, and Joshua immediately became politely attentive.

  “Yes, Mr. Baxter?”

  Supervisor Stanley Baxter was assigning jobs for the morning work stint. He was small and slightly bowed, yet radiated an Episcopalian gravity that lent him authority.

  “Mr. Mumford, the mailbag came in last night from Rapid City. Eventually, you are to answer any letters from our French or German partners.”

  Baxter paused to push his bifocals up higher on his nose. He studied Josh intently across the big room. “But as usual, you must first submit English translations of these letters to Mr. Beckman’s office.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You will then be supplied with responses, in English, from Mr. Beckman. You will carefully translate those responses into French or German and send the replies overseas. Understood?”

  “Yessir. Clearly.”

  Josh had not yet translated any important or urgent letters. But he had studied copies of some on file. The overseas investors were naturally deeply concerned about profit losses from the recent robberies of ore wagons. What Josh knew, and even Deke Stratton did not, was that these same foreign investors had secretly employed Pinkerton’s Agency.

  Baxter droned on, parceling out work for about a dozen clerks and copiers. They occupied one wing of the sprawling framework structure. A few of the clerks were discreetly eating bear-sign, the local name for doughnuts.

  By claiming a slight nearsightedness, Josh had landed a desk near the inner wall with its bracket-mounted lamps. This was crucial because the adjoining room was Earl Beckman’s private office. And only a cheap flock board wall separated it from Josh.

  For the next two hours Josh labored at translating a long letter from Berlin. He was forced to constantly consult a dictionary, and several times he could only guess at the proper verb tenses. However, it was only routine correspondence about financial and accounting matters.

  Josh found his task difficult because his thoughts kept drifting to Cassie Saint John. Not just her spun-gold hair and ocean-green eyes. But also to the danger she now represented. She knew that Ben Lofley was really Wild Bill Hickok!

  Bill, however, seemed to find that fact amusing. Almost as if it were a game between him and Cassie. And with that thought came another: That’s exactly what it was—a seduction game and both Cassie and Bill were willing players.

  That’s just like Hickok, Josh realized. For him, sex and danger went hand-in-hand: the kill and the conquest. It was as if, for Hickok and a certain rare kind of woman, the normal rules of courtship were far too tame.

  Josh’s thoughts were rudely interrupted by a boom-cracking explosion that rocked the entire building. But no one showed much reaction—it was only another of Keith Morgan’s powerful underground demolitions, opening up a new stope.

  About an hour before the first break, Josh heard someone knock loudly on Beckman’s door. He was bid enter.

  Moving inconspicuously, Josh leaned right as if merely shifting his position on the chair. But now his ear was pressed against the thin flock board wall.

  ~*~

  “Come in, Merrill, come in,” Earl Beckman called out in his polished tones soft as southern magnolias. “How’d the blast go this morning?”

  Labun closed the door with his heel. Then he eased his huge bulk into a chair.

  “Deke’s got him a grin from ear to ear. Says it exposed a whole new lode of rich ore.”

  Beckman, too, smiled to show his satisfaction. He steepled his fingers together and rested his chin on them. Despite his elation, however, a frown soon ousted the smile.

  “I have a couple of reasons for calling you in,” he told Labun. “One is to remind you about this new crew chief, Ben Lofley.”

  “You still worried he’s a Pinkerton, boss?”

  Beckman’s fox-terrier face sharpened even more in concentration.

  “If he is,” the security chief conceded, “he’s not the usual caliber of Pinkerton man. What do you think? You see more of him than I do.”

  Labun considered the question, picking at his teeth with a match.

  “He don’t size up like no Pinkerton to me neither,” he finally replied. “Still … there’s something about him that won’t tally.”

  “My point precisely. Deke doesn’t see that so clearly as we do, and it worries me. Now, the second reason I called you in, Merrill, is that other matter we spoke of.”

  “What other matter would that be, boss?”

  “Do you remember our little discussion about the Indian lovers in Congress?” Beckman prompted his minion.

  “You mean—how they’re starting to scream blue murder? Stuff about how ridiculous it is to claim Indians would steal gold ore?”

  “Exactly.”

  Merrill nodded. “When you want it done?”

  “As soon as possible. In fact, tonight would be excellent.”

  “Oh yeah? Why’s that?”

  “The Rapid City Express will be transporting some ... prominent folks from Boston.”

  Labun nodded, then hove his weight out of the chair. “Then tonight it is, boss.”

  ~*~

  The popular stagecoach route between Rapid City and Casper originated in the rugged Black Hills. But after a slow, often uncomfortable two-day start, the coach fairly flew across the flat, open terrain of Wyoming’s Thunder Basin.

  There had been no serious Indian trouble along this route since the 1860s—and the crackdown by the U.S. Cavalry after Custer’s Seventh was massacred. Now only the Apaches under Geronimo still ran free, and they were way down south in the Dragoon Mountains.

  During the quarter of the full moon, the Rapid City Express traveled day and night, stopping only at designated stage-relay stations to change teams and grease the axles.

  “Cheyenne Crossing’s coming up soon,” Ned Pollard called over to his shotgun rider, a young newcomer named Andy Hanchon. “That’s our last stop in the hill country. Come dawn, we’ll be hauling ass across the flats. Haw there, you four-legged devils, haw!”

  Ned reined in hard and pulled back mightily on the brake handle. The wildly rocking Concord coach slowed for a sharp elbow bend at the
bottom of the mountain slope.

  “Sir!” protested a sharp, cultured female voice from a window behind and below the two men. “Must you drive so recklessly? My husband has ... regurgitated his supper all over us!”

  Ned Pollard slapped a fat thigh. His right elbow dug into Andy’s ribs.

  “You hear that, Andy? That fat preacher from Boston regurgitated his supper all over his blue-nosed, horse-faced wife and them soft-mouthed missionaries. Re-goddamn-gurgitated? Well, that caps the climax, mister!”

  “Sorry, ma’am!” he barely managed to shout. “Got to keep the schedule!”

  Both men hooted in mirth under a placid, moonlit sky alive with glittering stars. Ned was stout, middle-aged, a bit hound-doggy in the jowls. Half his age, Andy was dark and lean. A Winchester repeater lay across his thighs.

  The Concord, rocking on its leather braces, careened through the sharp turn. Someone thumped on the roof of the coach in protest. Ned laughed like a hyena as he cracked his whip over the team, urging them to go faster.

  To hell with that soul saver! If they hurried, Ned knew they’d all be just in time for hot biscuits, bacon, and beans at Cheyenne Crossing.

  “My God, sir, take pity!” groaned the high-pitched masculine voice of the preacher. “I shall surely die in this infernal contraption!”

  “Go ahead and croak,” Ned joked, knowing only Andy could hear him. “Leaves more eats for me.”

  Thwap!

  The arrow point embedded deep in the box only inches from Ned’s hip. In that generous moonlight he could see the shaft quiver as it spent its deadly force.

  A painful cry rose from Andy’s side of the box. Ned, fear hammering in his temples, glanced right and felt his gorge rise: Andy was still alive, but arrows protruded from him like quills! Two in his right thigh, two more in his upper right arm, one high on his back.

  Even as Ned laid into the lash, an ear-piercing scream rose from the interior of the coach.

  “Oh, good heart of God! Roger! Oh, Roger, Esther’s been hit with an arrow!” shouted a female voice, almost drowned out by the wounded woman’s repeated screams of terror and pain.