Dead Reckoning (3 page)

When she opened her door, she smelled the aromas of tortillas and
queso
in the tiny room, and it made her smile. Some kind woman had made something for her. She lit the candle, found a flask of wine beside a basket of food.

She filled a cup. The wine would strengthen her, give her energy to stay awake long enough to eat. The first sip was like a balm, and she recalled, suddenly, the number: “fifty-six even.” Just as the land speculator in Santa Fe had said it. Had she been wise to pray so for money?

“You should be careful what you pray for,” she said to herself in English. That was strange. She hadn't spoken a word of English aloud since Santa Fe.

The wineglass slipped from Petra's hand, and she faintly heard it shattering. A blinding white light had burst into the room, consuming her. And as she floated, she felt the warm voice of God surging through her flesh, rattling her very bones:

“The cross awaits you on the mountainside.”

Three

He stood on a high roll of the grassy plains, his arms folded across his chest, cradling his Remington rolling-block hunting rifle. The sky was pink in the west, purple above him, charcoal gray in the east. He simply stared at it with his mouth open, his eyes sweeping ceaselessly across it.

Clarence Philbrick had been brought up in Vermont, where the sky was a patch of benevolent ether hemmed in overhead by treetops. But here the great void had beaten back everything and swelled to the point that Clarence felt as if he were standing naked on a liberty dime.

He stared silently, mentally composing an entry for his diary as he tried to soak in the infinity of it all. Back east, he mused, my view of the sky was like that of a trout searching the surface of his dark pool for mayflies. But here I am as a wild soaring goose, enveloped in tideless reaches of oxygen.

Clarence couldn't help thinking of things in terms of fish and game.

A ladle clanged against an iron pot down the slope, and he turned toward camp. He had built up a powerful hunger skinning buffalo all day, and now he was ready for some hump stew and that delicacy of the plains—boiled tongue. He saw the line of hunters forming at the cook's cauldron and hoped they would leave some cornbread for him.

It was getting cooler now with the night coming on, and Clarence was glad. It was hard to wear his oilskin hunting coat when the sun got high, and if he didn't wear it, he had to keep it rolled under his arm when he walked, tied behind his saddle when he rode, or pinned under his knee while he skinned buffalo. The idea was to prevent anyone from picking up his coat for whatever reason and feeling its heft. Clarence had twenty-one pounds of gold sewn into his coat, and he would just as soon nobody knew about it.

He had gotten the idea from his father, Herbert Philbrick, who had gone to California back in '49 and struck a rich placer load near Mariposa. Herbert had melted his gold dust into bars and sewn them into his coat before returning to Vermont. He had hired on as a deckhand for the homeward voyage, so no one would suspect the wealth he carried.

Clarence's father had put quite a sum of money away for him in a trust fund, which he wasn't to touch until he was thirty-five years old. “Nobody has any sense until they're thirty-five years old,” Herbert had said. “And damned little then.”

But more so than the gold, Clarence treasured the stories his father had brought back from California. He made his father repeat often how he had fought off claim-jumpers and thieves; made a fortune with a pick, a pan, and sweat; survived two trips around the Horn. The stories made Clarence anxious to go west himself, to have his own adventures, but the adventures he had in mind would require capital.

“Go on if you want to,” his father had said. “I'm not stopping you. It'll be good for you. Make a man of you.”

Clarence was twenty-five and considered himself a man already. “But I need the money,” he tried to explain.

The old forty-niner smiled and puffed on his pipe. “I left for California with three dollars and fifty-seven cents in my pocket. I'll stake you to the same amount.”

Clarence had thrown his arms in the air and flung himself against the bookshelf in his father's study. “But you've said yourself there will never be another gold strike like California. It's cattle now, and a man needs capital to buy his first spread. The panic has driven land prices lower than they've been in years. Now is the time to invest.”

He had left it there, exasperated, and stormed out of his father's study. Weeks later, his father called him back in to show him something.

“Look what Senator White gave me today, son. It's a photograph. Have you ever seen anything like it?”

Clarence had taken the large print and looked at it—like looking out through a window across the continent. Every grain was like a living atom, and the scene swept him back through all the lost moments since the shutter opened, casting him out through the very lens of the photographer's camera.

He found himself standing on high ground, the rocky grades around him devoid of life, windswept, streaked with snow. But it was the cross that made him shiver. Etched in new-fallen snow, it spanned one whole side of the highest peak in view, settling comfortably into natural time-carved crevices.

“What is this place?” Clarence had asked.

“It's a mountain peak out west. Colorado, I think. The chief photographer of the Hayden Survey made the picture. Senator White gave me his copy.”

“You see, that's why I need the money!” Clarence blurted. “I'm missing these sights! I'm missing everything!”

He had persisted, day after day, week after week, until finally his father had agreed to a compromise.

“All right, Clarence,” the elder Philbrick said, “I'll let you have five thousand dollars to get you started in the cattle business. If you lose it, that's tough. I will not, on my life, let you have one cent more until you are thirty-five.”

Herbert Philbrick fully expected his son to lose every penny of that five thousand. The boy had no business sense and no aptitude for anything besides fishing and hunting. But he thought of it as an investment in his son's education. Once the boy went broke, he would have to learn fast out there—or die.

Clarence was so thrilled the day his father offered the compromise that he ran down to Lake Champlain and went swimming, though it was April and the water was frigid. He began writing letters before he had even dried off, and within two months had found a ranch in his price range in the Territory of New Mexico. The brochure sent to him by a land speculator named Lefty Harless described the spread:

“The legendary Ojo de los Brazos League … granted by the government of Spain in 1814 … confirmed by act of Congress of the United States … nestled among the foothills of the Sangre de Cristos Mountains, flanking five miles of the Mora River … It encompasses 4,480 acres of prime grazing land, hundreds of which might be brought into a high degree of cultivation.… Surrounding the grant are hundreds of thousands of acres of free government range.… The Ojo de los Brazos League includes a Mexican village called Guajolote, which might be exploited for its peasant workforce or removed from the ranch.”

The price was six hundred dollars over the five thousand Clarence's father had promised him, so he had to sell his collection of fowling guns and fly rods to raise the remainder. The only gun he kept was his Remington rolling-block hunting rifle. To pay for the trip west, he had to sell his favorite Morgan stallion and all his riding tack. He understood that the English saddle would be frowned upon out west, anyway.

By the end of June, he still didn't have train and stagecoach fare to get him all the way to New Mexico, but Clarence could wait no longer. He wanted to be in possession of the Ojo de los Brazos well before autumn. Lefty Harless insisted on being paid in gold coin, fearing the panic would lessen the value of paper money. As there were no banks or railroads in New Mexico, Clarence had to make his own arrangements for getting the gold to Sante Fe.

“Do what I did,” his father suggested. “Sew it into your jacket.”

So Clarence converted his fifty-six hundred to twenty-dollar gold pieces—280 double eagles weighing almost twenty-one pounds. These his mother quilted into the lining of his favorite oilskin hunting jacket. She paired the coins, sewing four rows down the front, two rows in each sleeve, and six rows across the back.

“Dress like a common workman, and travel cheap,” his father advised. “Don't let that jacket get beyond your grasp, and above all, do not let anybody pick it up.”

The young Vermonter headed west on the rails in early July. He stretched his spending money as far as it would go, but arrived in Denver broke, save for the gold sewn into his coat. He met some sportsmen heading out onto the plains to hunt buffalo and hired on with them as a skinner. He had field-dressed a lot of deer back east and figured skinning a buffalo would be no more difficult.

It turned out to be a good deal more difficult owing to the size of the animals and the humps on their backs, but Clarence worked hard and learned fast. The third day of the hunt, some of the sportsmen accidentally stampeded a small herd of bison past their skinner, and Clarence killed a big cow with his Remington.

So it was that Clarence Philbrick strolled down to the camp cook's kettle now feeling like a seasoned plainsman. His clothes were bloodstained, his hands tanned on the backs and blistered on the palms. He swaggered to the end of the grub line and left his Remington leaning against a wagon box.

“See anything up there?” asked one of the hunters, a man from Illinois.

Clarence shook his head. “Sky and grass.”

The hunting guide stepped up beside Clarence holding a tin plate of stew. He wore his hair and mustaches long. “Better turn in early tonight. We leave for Denver before dawn.”

“Yes, sir,” Clarence answered.

“I'm goin' right back out with another party if you want to hire on again. You can double your wages.”

Clarence fought back a prideful smile. “Thanks, but I need to be getting on to New Mexico. I've got a job waiting down there on a ranch.”

The plainsman nodded. “I'll pay you when we get to town. You'll have about fifteen dollars comin'.”

Clarence grinned and picked up a plate. “Been a long time since I had that much money in my pocket,” he said. He held his plate out to the cook and glanced across the tailgate of the chuck wagon. “Any cornbread left?” he asked.

The cook sneered. “Some of them greedy bastards took two,” he said under his breath.

Clarence shrugged, poured himself a cup of black coffee, and went to sit on the bed of the wagon where he had left his Remington. He ran the journal entry through his mind again so he wouldn't forget it:… a trout in his dark pool … searching for mayflies … a wild soaring goose … tideless reaches of oxygen.

When he got back to Denver in a couple of days, he would have a bath and buy a train ticket as far south as the tracks went. Pueblo, he had been told. But before he boarded the train, there was something he wanted to do. It wasn't the sort of thing he would want to enter into his diary, but he was on his own out here. Who would know? Who would care? He was going to visit one of those fancy Denver whorehouses.

He remembered something the family gardener had once told him as they shared a bottle of port Clarence had smuggled out of the house: “It ain't how deep you fish, son, it's how you wiggle your worm.” He smiled. Yes, Clarence thought, angling can be made to serve as a metaphor for almost anything.

Four

The old mule was sore-footed from the long ride, but Dee Hassard awarded her no sympathy. He kept a switch busy across her rump and cussed her every time she slowed her walk. He had traded Frank Moncrief's other mule for an old saddle at Tarryall and had ridden down the South Platte toward Denver.

Now Denver was in sight below, and he was riding up to the rocky outcropping over Clear Creek where he had hidden the gold from the sale of the South Park Diamond Field. After he recovered Sam Cornelius's Fairplay dust, he would board an eastbound and live it up for a couple of months before his earnings played out.

He wondered if anybody had found Frank Moncrief's body yet. He had made a hearse of the sheriff's buckboard and left it over a hill, out of sight of the road. Even if somebody had found Moncrief by now, there was still plenty of time to get away. The news could travel no faster than a gallop.

He stood in the stirrups and stretched his neck, for the gold was close and he was looking for the place. It was just over the ridge here somewhere, he recalled. As he approached the summit and spotted the rocky point, his eyes bulged. He shifted his reins to his left hand as he pulled back on them, putting his right palm on the grip of Frank Moncrief's Colt.

A man was seated on the outcropping, his foot just inches from the hole in which the Fairplay gold lay hidden. The man had his hands inside some sort of box on a portable table. Nearby stood a fine white mule wearing a saddle. Between them and the man stood a tripod holding a black cube with a cloth hanging from it.

The man looked up, tossed his head, smiled. “Howdy,” he said, leaving his hands inside the box. His build was compact, like Hassard's. He had sad eyes, wavy brown hair, and a full beard, well trimmed.

“Howdy, yourself,” Hassard said. He glanced down into the creek valley as he heard a faint line of song. A chorus was singing some hymn down there. He spotted the tents and wagons of a campground below, then glared at the stranger with his hands in the box. “What you got in there?”

“I'm washing a photographic plate,” the man said. “I just made a view of Clear Creek with Denver and the prairies beyond.”

Hassard nodded and took his hand off his gun grip. “What for?”

“It's my job,” the man said, his beard revealing a smile. “I'm W. H. Jackson, head of the photographic division of the Hayden Survey. I'd get up and shake your hand if I could.”