Silver Dreams (18 page)

One of the men glanced in Max's direction. Their eyes locked for just an instant before he stepped further back into the shadow, coaxing his companion with him. If they're on the Rio Grande train, they definitely bear watching, Max decided. He didn’t believe in coincidence.

Chapter Nine

The two big apes from Manhattan weren't on the Denver and Rio Grande train. Max searched every car and concluded that either the men would arrive in Central City by other means, or they were headed to other destinations. He would keep his guard up just in case however. He knew they'd all had a good look at each other that morning, and if the big men were indeed following the Sheridan party, they would be careful to stay hidden from now on.

Searching the train had been easy. Each of the three coach cars was only half full. All but the most dogged prospectors had loaded up their gear and headed to richer fields leaving hastily constructed buildings to rot in the sun as ghost towns around Central City.

The scarcity of passengers was even more conclusive proof to Max that Dooley's fortune did not exist, but it didn't seem to be a concern to any member of the Fair Day party. Ross spent the short journey reading his notes. Dooley slept with his head against the window frame.

Betsy was an image of bundled energy, crossing every few minutes from one side of the car to the other. Max couldn't understand what held her attention so intently since there were no towns in sight, and the only vegetation was low scrub bushes and struggling prairie grass. A few scrawny aspen trees, turning gold in the cool October air, poked their slender trunks out of rocky outcroppings in the barren land. Nevertheless, Betsy penciled her impressions in a tablet, apparently finding something to write about in the bleak landscape.

Once she breezed by Max, who was in a losing battle with the wind over who would gain dominance of the
Denver Post
. She grasped the top of the newspaper with her thumb and index finger and tugged it away from his face. "Aren't you taking notes?" she asked.

"On what?" he said, giving up the attempt to read and trying to fold the fluttering paper to a manageable size.

"Why, the scenery of course. It's all so...well, earthy. Mother Nature at her unspoiled best, unpruned, untended, and growing wild in the Colorado wind. Magnificent really. And this train...so rustic and utilitarian, symbolic of the rich history of the west, unencumbered by the cold materialism of society."

The corner of his mouth crept up toward a skeptical, narrowed eye. "If you say so."  He squirmed uncomfortably on a wooden bench. "It's just giving me a sore backside."

She cocked her head to the side and waggled the end of her pencil at him. "You know what your problem is, Max?"

"Yeah, I just told you."

"You're jaded. You think if someone's not getting beat up, or losing their money in a crap game..."  She gave him a smug little grin. "...or if some upstanding citizen isn't suddenly worthy of a story in your tell-all gazette, then there isn't a story at all."

"Your point, Betsy, if there is one?"

"My
point
is that all of this is story."  She swept her arm in a grand arch that was meant to encompass the entire state of Colorado. Instead the gesture was halted in mid sweep when a flying insect landed in her palm. "Oh!"

"Watch yourself, Betsy. All that rich history comes with eight legs and wings."

"You're impossible, Cassidy!" She sauntered down the aisle, shaking the bug off her hand.

Max pulled his hat down over his eyes, settled back into the lumpy comfort of his satchel, and smiled.

The D & RG train arrived in Central City shortly after noon, and the Fair Day party boarded a roofless hire coach to take them to the center of town. If Max expected the economic depression that had attacked the rest of the eastern Rockies to have affected Central City, he was wrong. At one time called "the richest square mile on earth," Central City was as vibrant and exciting as it ever had been, claiming a number of fine hotels and rooming houses, a grand opera, and several glittering saloons and gambling parlors.

Since many of the original wooden structures had burned to the ground in 1874, the town planners had elected to rebuild using brick and stone. The result was a city of stylish square-front masonry buildings climbing wide curving streets. Each of the two and three story structures on Main and Lawrence Streets boasted narrow, sturdy windows and bold entrances enhanced by regal Victorian lintels.

Most of the buildings were crowned with painted cornices, giving the town the look of an elaborately decorated birthday cake. It was clear that, while other mining towns had withered in the winds, Central City was alive and well and living off the fat of her prosperous citizens.

Most of the well-to-do inhabitants lived in grand residences on the numerous side streets or in gingerbread mansions on the hillsides at the edge of town. In the business district, fancy carriages and buggies sat outside emporiums and restaurants, their groomed horses nose to nose with shaggy, long-eared burros.

When the hire coach reached the center of town, Max took his first notes, observing that while Manhattan was certainly the melting pot of diverse cultures, Central City was a small but just as varied microcosm of class structure. The very rich ambled sidewalks alongside the dirt poor. Occasional breaks in the rows of buildings gave Max a view down narrow side streets to clusters of ramshackle cabins and even temporary canvas structures proving that not all Central City hopefuls had struck it rich.

The hills sloping away from town were pockmarked with the crumbling remains of mines long since abandoned. Max wrote in his notebook, "The desolate, gaping holes in walls of unforgiving rock, like the toothless grin of an old prospector, tell the story of the heyday of gold and silver with humbling realism."

Many of the mines were closed off, ragged sections of wood nailed across lumber-reinforced entrances. But occasionally a lone miner, not yet resigned to the fact that his forbearers had stripped the hills of all their glittering treasures, walked wearily out of a working mine.

"As the sun descends over the Rockies," Max wrote, "the man, bent nearly double with his day's backbreaking labors, comes down off the mountain again, his sacks empty, his burden heavy."

"What a place this is," Betsy exclaimed from the seat in front of Max. She had been writing and sketching since they'd left the train, and had produced several commendable drawings of the main streets of Central City.

She tended to see only the gilded trappings of Central City while he concentrated on the sadder underbelly. But one fact was definitely true...it
was
quite a place. This little city, a living testament to good luck and bad, was a tantalizing display of man's excesses and failures.

Once the wagon reached the center of the business district, Ross asked the driver to recommend the best accommodations in town.

"Why, that'd be the Teller House on Eureka Street," he said. "Even has running water on every floor, pumped all the way up from Prosser Gulch."

"Running water on ev'ry floor? Gawlee! That's the place fer us, ain't it, Lizzie?"

"Ross, stop it," Betsy said to stop his ridiculous mimicking. "The Teller House will be just fine," she told the driver.

"'Course it's a pretty steep fee to stay there," the driver went on. "Costs three dollars a night, but worth every penny. Some real notables have bunked there over the years."

"Then by all means, drive on, good man." Ross looked around the wagon to make sure everyone was aware of his clever banter. "What's a mere pittance like three dollars when we can immerse ourselves in the luxurious ambiance of your fair city?"

The driver stared at Ross and tightened up his features as if to say he didn't understand a word the young man had said, and what's more, didn't want to.

Max leaned toward Betsy and whispered, "Class will tell all right. That brother of yours is a charmer. He'll have these people eating out of his hands."

Betsy shot him a warning look but, for once, didn't argue.

The Teller House lived up to its reputation, including the driver’s tale of twenty-six silver ingots. The citizens of Central City, in order to impress their most famous visitor, Ulysses Grant, laid bricks of solid silver to form a pathway for the general to walk to the entrance of the Teller House. Ross was the first one down from the wagon, and he made a quick but surreptitious perusal of the simple red bricks currently leading to the door of the hotel.

"They're not here now, son," the driver said. “Nobody'd be stupid enough to think those blocks would still be left in plain view in the sidewalk. We're not idiots who live here, you know."

"It's a good thing those ingots are gone, Betsy," Max chided. "Otherwise I think Ross might be down here in the middle of the night trying to pick them out with his pocket knife."

"Very funny." Betsy tossed a piece of her luggage to the sidewalk."What are you waiting for, Max?" she said. "Get your bag."

"You'll have to count me out," he said. "This place is a little too fancy for my tastes. The driver told me about a rooming house up the street, and I think it suits me better."

"Or suits his wallet," Ross muttered.

Was it Max's imagination, or did Betsy actually look disappointed that he wouldn't be staying at the hotel? She started to say something, and he sincerely hoped she wasn't about to offer him a loan. Her brother cut her short before she got the words out.

"Forget about it, Liz," he said. "Let the man do what he wants. I'm sure Max will find a comfy bed and a plate of warm vittles to see him through the night."  He gave Max a private look meant to convey the enormity of class differences between them. It was all Max could do to refrain from jumping off the wagon and adjusting Ross's attitude with a sample of the only worthwhile lesson old Seamus Cassidy had ever given his son.

"All right," Betsy said. "If that's what you want, Max. We'll see you later then."  Responding to her brother's coaxing, she went into the hotel.

Elizabeth delighted in her third floor bedroom which overlooked a charming back garden and trickling fountain.

Comfortable wingback chairs flanked a marble fireplace fronted by a deer's head screen. Elizabeth placed her toiletries on a polished mahogany bureau and hung the gown she'd chosen for dinner in an armoire with bisons' heads carved in both doors. She sat on the double bed and fingered twisted fringe which hung down a full twelve inches from the silk canopy overhead. Long draperies in coordinating fabric framed the two windows and puddled onto the floor.

When Elizabeth peeked behind an ebony dressing screen, she found the very item she had been yearning for...an oak and porcelain bathtub. A thick towel hung over the side, and a basket of soap and scented oils sat on the floor. Not wasting a moment, she turned the bell knob next to her door and rang for a bellman to bring buckets of hot water. She definitely knew where she wanted to spend the next hour...or two.