Black Hills (9781101559116) (19 page)

Cormac was wishful of seeing a real city. Being only a few years old, Cheyenne was still one step above a railroad camp and of little interest. “Denver,” said the stable hostler when Cormac put up the horses, “is a few years older and thriving.”

A pile of potatoes and gravy and three thick pieces of fresh bread filled Cormac's stomach right up . . . mostly. A piece of pie and three cups of coffee took care of any corners that had been missed. Maybe Cheyenne was a glorified railroad camp, but they knew how to feed a hungry man. Next stop . . . Denver.

“Four days, if you're pokey and only make about twenty-five miles a day, three if you're in a hurry and watch the sun rise and set from the saddle,” said the hostler when Cormac claimed the horses the next morning and asked how long it would take to ride to Denver.

Four days later found Cormac riding Lop Ear into Smith's Livery & Blacksmith Shop in Denver, Colorado, with Horse trotting freely alongside. Her not wanting to be anyplace where he and Lop Ear wasn't made keeping her on a lead rope as pointless as it was for Lop Ear to be led when Cormac was riding Horse.

Although Denver was more city-like than Pierre or Cheyenne, it didn't quite live up to his expectations. There were the stables, churches, general mercantile stores, saloons, clothing stores, a blacksmith shop, a red-light district, and banks, just more of them, but they were all busy; he had to give 'em that. And there were a lot of people, all going and doing.

A passerby said Denver was only about ten or twelve years old, give or take, but was growing by leaps and bounds, what with the railroad bringing in more people every day and all. People were buying and selling and investing, and money was being made.

In answer to his question, one of the saloon's three bartenders directed Cormac to the First National Bank on Fifteenth Street, while he drank his first beer ever. “The bank's existence was pretty iffy,” said the bartender, “but they put a guy named Moffat in charge, and he's turned it around. They got a safe now as big as a house they claim is impossible to break into, but nobody has tried nitro yet, so time will tell.”

Cormac had been getting nervous about the money he was carrying since the incident with the horses in Omaha; six hundred dollars was a lot of money. He found the place easy enough and twenty minutes later he had a piece of paper stating that Cormac Lynch had a bank account with five hundred dollars he could withdraw upon demand. It felt pretty darned good. Now he just had to figure a way to start earning more before it ran out.

Having no idea how to even go about looking for a job, he returned to the barkeep at the Trailhead Saloon and had his second beer ever. He could get to like this stuff, he thought. When Cormac had been in the first time, he had seen Chinese and Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, and whites, businessmen in suits, miners and farmers wearing the same bib overalls as he, cowboys and railroad workers and all dressed in more different styles of clothing than Cormac had ever before seen, most of them wearing guns, either out in the open or concealed about their person as he could tell from lumps under their clothes and pieces of guns protruding in various places.

Some were standing at the bar, others leaning against upright columns; some tables had card games in progress, and still others had two, or three, or six people in serious discussions, likely conducting business of some sort. The saloon seemed to be the town meeting place. He figured if anybody knew of a job available, the barkeep would be the one to ask what was going on around town.

According to Patch, the bartender, The Trailhead Saloon had once been only a tent at what had been the track end of the Denver & Santa Fe Railroad. The railroad had sold the site to Patch's boss, Doc Mason, for a share of the action. The location turned out to be centrally located and an excellent place for a saloon, and as the city grew, so grew Trailhead's business. Inside of five years, Doc Mason bought them out for an ungodly sum of money. The railroad didn't want to let it go, but Doc Mason had been smart enough to get an option to buy out their share put in the contract.

The barkeep was called Patch because of the patch on his left eye, which had been poked out in a fight as a kid. The other kid had been bigger and stronger, he said, and always picked on him. The barkeep told Cormac the eye-poke was deliberate and made him furious. He said he had whupped the bigger kid within an inch of his life, and only stopped when some people pulled him off. After that, he beat on him again anytime he seen him and could catch him, all the while knowing full well his own ole man was going to give him what for for doing it. The other kid's family finally accepted nothing was going to make him quit and moved out of town.

The patch put Cormac in mind of Baldy, the old swaybacked plow horse his pa had let him use when he was first learning to ride at five years old. With her being blind in her left eye and shy in her good right eye, Cormac, riding bareback, had learned to quickly grab a handful of mane to stay on top of her. Whenever anything moved unexpectedly on her right side, she was just naturally goin' to shy left every time, and that's just all there was to it.

“Can ya use that hog leg?” the bartender wanted to know.

“I do okay,” Cormac answered. “Why?”

“Well, most stagecoaches got replaced by trains, riverboats, and the like, but Butterfield still makes a spanker run back and forth between here and Boulder and sometimes they pick up gold for the bank. The only way to get to Boulder is a horseback or the stage, and they need someone to ride shotgun. It pays mighty good—twenty-five dollars a trip, if you're interested. Their local manager just left here so I know the job is still open. If you tell him I sent ya, he'll probably hire you on the spot.”

“What's a spanker, and what's it mean to ride shotgun?”

“Boy! In those bib overalls and farmer shoes, I thought you looked like you just left the farm, but you really did, didn't you?”

Six rough-looking cowboy toughs had bellied up to the bar to stand with one foot on the rail, and stare impatiently at Patch. In a voice intended to intimidate, one of the toughs called, “You gonna wait on us or what?” He stared first at Patch, then at Cormac.

Cormac met his gaze.

Unperturbed, Patch ignored the tone of voice. “Hold your horses, friend. I'll be there when I get there. Wait a minute while I wait on these tough guys before they have a fit,” he told Cormac.

After serving Cormac another beer upon his return, Patch told him, “Riding topside on a stage is no picnic to begin with, but a spanker is a rough ride over rough roads.” The beer had Cormac beginning to feel more cheerful than he had been. “They have to make the trip up and back in one day. The road is rough, and the driver hits it hard. It'll relocate your intestines for you.”

He stepped away to give an amiable newcomer in new-looking duds a double shot of whiskey and came back.

“Riding shotgun means you're along for protection. Your job is to sit up on the seat beside the driver with a shotgun and keep the outlaws and road agents from holding up the stage. It's a rough ride, and it's dangerous; that's why it pays so good.” Cormac ignored the tough who was still glaring at him and looking for trouble.

“My object is to make some money,” Cormac said, feeling his beer. “I guess I can handle a little danger. Where's the stage office?”

Cormac drank the last of his beer and stared back at the tough. If he wanted trouble, he sure as hell came to the right place. One more beer and Cormac Lynch just might take it to him. But he opted against it and set out in search of a job.

Patch was right and the Butterfield Stage Line manager, a plump, well-fed individual, did little more than ask his name after hearing Patch had sent him before giving him the job. After putting up Lop Ear and Horse in the Butterfield stable, Cormac took a room at Mrs. Colwell's Board and Room, a freshly painted two-story house with a new roof, a new front door, and new furniture in the parlor; business must be good. Money was in evidence everywhere in the city of Denver, Colorado.

The Butterfield hostler was doing his job; the next morning, Lop Ear and Horse were munching contentedly on a generous helping of grain in their feed bags. Cormac petted and talked to them for a few minutes before digging out and strapping the .44 long-barreled Colt on his left side and climbing up onto the stage carrying their double-ought-buck-loaded double-barreled shotgun. He was loaded for bear, his pa woulda said. The driver looked at the Colt as Cormac settled down onto the seat beside him. “Can you hit anything with that thing?”

“Nah! Probably not,” Cormac answered. “But just the seein' of it should scare off the boogers.”

In the event of his demise, he made out a paper to carry in his pocket tightly wrapped in oilcloth stating that the reader would receive fifty dollars from the First National Bank of Denver for notifying them of the event. Upon receipt of such news, the bank was to honor the reward from his funds and then have somebody go find Lainey Nayle in the Dakota Territory northeast of Pierre and give her whatever was left of his money, if she would take it. If not, they were to give it to the newly formed Red Cross of which he had recently heard. Lainey was also to be given the opportunity to buy his horses and other possessions for two hundred dollars from the deliverer. Failing that, they would become the possessions of the deliverer. It was signed:
Cormac Lorton Lynch 1875
. Slapping the long reins across the team's rumps, the buckskin-clothed, grizzled old driver called Cactus spit out a strong stream of tobacco juice, wiped off his chin, and let out a war whoop that would wake the dead. The team laid into their harnesses with enthusiasm, taking them out of there on high.

Cormac remembered the excitement he felt watching the stage as a kid, and now he was part of the action. At a time when many were content to make fifteen dollars a week, Cormac Lynch had a job making twenty-five dollars a day, three days a week. His life was off to a good start. Feeling the excitement, he couldn't restrain the urge to yell and promptly did so . . . at the top of his lungs.

The stage bounced, the three passengers complained loudly, and Cormac held on for dear life. The road was just two wagon ruts, but Cactus knew it well and managed to hit every rut and every bump—the big ones he hit twice, thought Cormac. It was easy to understand why it was called a spanker. His rear end was taking a beating, and his intestines did feel like they were getting relocated, as did his spine. The bouncing had him wishing he had visited the outhouse one more time before they left.

The driver alternated the horses walking with running to rest them from time to time, but they kept moving nonstop until mid-morning when the driver suddenly hauled back on the reins and called, “Whoa!” The stage came to a stop.

“We'll take a ten minute break for the horses,” called out the driver. “Men to the right, lady to the left. Be back on the stage in ten minutes or get left here, and I ain't foolin'.” Then to Cormac, “You go use the bushes if ya got to, then come back and I'll go. I don't want to leave the stage alone.” Then in a lowered voice while climbing down, he said, “You don't have to be too watchful on this trip. If anybody has holdup ideas, it will be on the back leg, but today we won't be carrying any gold.”

The men made it back on time, but they had to wait for the lady. “Lady, we'll pick you up on the way back,” the driver called, and gave a half-hearted holler at the horses. “Hiyah.”

She came running out of the bushes, straightening her skirts. Cormac noticed the driver had his foot solidly on the brake and the reins taut. They weren't going anywhere. As her door clicked shut, Cactus took his foot off the brake, loosed the reins, and yelled for real, “Hiyah!” The horses knew the routine and were ready. They hit the end of the traces that connected them to the stage running. Thinking back on it, Cormac realized the horses had been expectant of stopping and had already begun to slow down just before the driver had yelled whoa. Cormac figured it to be their regular stop.

The country they were traveling through was thick with bushes and pine trees of which he was ignorant of the names, but it was a beautiful ride and the smell of pine was springtime-strong. Cactus slowed for a particularly bad bump, and Cormac glanced up at the mountain on his left in time to see a person on foot disappearing over the top. Why a person was on foot in the wilderness, coincidentally right above a bad place in the road severe enough to force the stage to slow was a question that rode suspicious on his mind. Since his job was to guard the stage, Cormac looked for a holdup man behind every bush.

In Boulder, they left the stage at the livery for a fresh team and went next door to the Stage-Stop Café, where they had the strangest-tasting liver and liver gravy he had ever eaten, and he loved liver. Becky used to make liver for him, but his mother wouldn't. It was the only thing she drew the line at. She had helped in the breech birth of a calf while his pa had been helping a neighbor, but she thought liver was slimy.

They returned to the livery as the traces were being reconnected. Remembering the man on foot, Cormac rechecked the loads in the scattergun and loaded the normally empty cylinders on both pistols. Cactus looked at him questionably with his eyebrows raised. “Just playin' it safe,” Cormac told him. Cactus shrugged and climbed up into his seat.

The midday shadows were short when they walked the stage to pick up two men and two women from the hotel. One of the women was a not unattractive blonde about Cormac's own age, who was making eyes at him while he put down the step and held the door open. Cormac smiled politely and climbed back up to his roost. He had no time today for nonsense; he had a job to do, and he was getting twenty-five dollars a day to do it.