Episode 65

A Miserable Excuse

It was a half-assed operation.

That much was obvious at first glance. A half-assed operation and miserable excuse for a mine.

A hole was dug into the foot of an escarpment with an opening framed with square-set timbers. A pair of narrow-gauge tracks ran out fifty feet from the mouth of the mine. Wooden ties and rails with a slapped-together mine cart piled with ore was being pulled into the sunlight by two shirtless men. The track ended at an arrastra, a grinding stone set on a horizontal wheel and drawn around by a young girl leading a swayback horse harnessed to the turn bar. A pair of boys even younger than the girl shovelled ore onto the floor of the grinder. A man with a full bushy beard worked a rocker to separate the silver from the ore. A couple of tents and a cookfire, tended by a couple of women in drab clothing, were set at the foot of a long pile of tailings.

From their vantage point atop a mesa, Cal Spade sat his dappled gelding by Jake Ford who was on a dun mare. They watched the folks working below a while.

“Polacks,” Jake Ford said, squinting into a pair of binoculars. “Has to be Polacks.”

“Why?” Cal said, standing in his stirrups for a better look. He tipped his open crown hat back off his head to hang by a braided thong about his neck. His raven-black hair was sopping with sweat and he ran fingers back through it to get it out of his eyes.m

“Only Polacks’d dig a mine like that. Probably took their wagon apart to shore up the hole and make that cart.”

“More like they used ties they found by the rail-line. And that header over the opening is creosoted. That’s a cut-down telegraph pole.”

“Dumb Polacks. Thieves too.” Jake spat a brown stream of chaw to the ground. Jake chewed tobacco and wore his orange-red hair cut short like a Texas drover. He even sat a drover’s saddle with the thick rounded horn. All this even though he’d never herded beef or did any other brand of honest labor for even one day of his twenty-seven years.

“They only helped themselves to what the railroad left behind,” Cal said reaching out. “Let me see those glasses”

“They took what weren’t theirs to take,” Jake said in a low voice.

Cal knew that tone. He’d heard it from Jake a few times before in the year or so they’d rode together. The boy, or man as he was about Cal’s age, was working himself up to what they came here to do. According to Jake, his father was a Methodist preacher. Because of that, Jake needed to justify himself before he did the kind of work he was hired on to do. The only justification Cal required was the fifty bucks a month the railroad paid him.

Troubleshooter or regulator or railroad detective is the job they were paid for though no one ever specified their precise title. And Cal strongly suspected that the cash money paid them by Mr. Withers at the telegraph office was never entered into any ledger book.

“They ain’t Polacks,” Cal said, his eyes to the lenses and trained below.

“Bohunks?”

“Germans. Moravians maybe.”

“How can you tell?”

“Designs on the vest the old guy at the rocker is wearing.”

“Hell, he coulda bought that vest somewhere.”

“And the girl at the grind mill is prettier than any Polack girl I ever seen.”

“Let me see!” Jake snatched the binoculars back and pressed his eyes to them to search for the girl.

Cal watched as Jake’s slack lips drew closed in a twisted leer.

“Goddamn, amigo. You’re right. She is a peach.”

“Told you.”

“You can have her after I’m done.” Jake lowered the glasses to smirk at Cal, a dark and hungry look in his close-set eyes.

“Nobody’s having her. We do what we’re paid for and they do what they’re told.” Cal kept his voice level.

“Nothing wrong with having some fun while we’re at it.”

“We’ve had this talk before, Jakey. Nothing’s changed.”

The hunger in the redhead’s eyes turned to sudden anger. He didn’t like being called Jakey and Cal well knew that.

“You do what you like, greaser,” Jake said as he slapped his mare’s haunch with the end of his long reins. “But don’t you stand in my way.”

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