Slocum's Silver Burden Read online

  Montague rode up, then jumped into what remained of the car. By the time Jackson reached the torn-off rear of the car, Montague had opened the vault.

  “How’d you do that so fast?” Jackson hopped up. “I reckoned it would take us an hour to open the vault if the mail clerk wouldn’t do it.” He snorted. There wasn’t any way the mail clerk would open anything, including his own coffin lid.

  “It was smashed open.” Montague’s voice was small, tiny, timid.

  “What’s wrong? The vault empty?” Jackson pushed past his partner and stared. “Oh, sweet Jesus.”

  Drury and Baldy joined them. They all stared at the take, then at each other.

  “There must be a ton of silver there,” Baldy finally said. “We’re rich. Dammit, we’re rich!”

  He began dancing around, whooping, hollering, and swatting his floppy-brimmed hat against his thigh.

  “Why’re you so quiet? Both of you?” Drury went to the safe and ran his fingers over the silver bars stacked inside. “I know metal. This is the real thing. What’s wrong?”

  “There must be a couple hundred bars there,” Montague said. “How are we gonna take it all?”

  Jackson sucked in his breath. This was an embarrassment of riches he had never expected. From what Tamara had said, the shipment would be good, maybe a few hundred dollars. He had hoped for a thousand. But this?

  “What’s your problem? We struck the mother lode,” Drury said, happy for the first time.

  “You got a pack mule with you? No? Well, neither do I. None of us expected to be starin’ at so much silver.”

  “Must be three, four hundred pounds,” Montague said, moving the bars and judging the weight, then doing a quick count in the huge vault. “More like half a ton.”

  “So?”

  “So how are you going to strap on an extra two-hundred pounds of silver bars and ride your horse, too? The horse’d die under you before we reached the bottom of the hill.”

  “We can take what we can carry,” Montague said. Then he and Jackson locked eyes.

  The same thought went through both their heads. Jackson wasn’t going to leave so much as a speck of silver dust behind. Montague had the same feeling. They had risked their lives for this and wanted to get as much as possible.

  But his horse barely carried him at a hundred and twenty pounds. More than doubling the weight would make it bowlegged within a mile and dead from strain in two.

  “We can’t leave it. That’s just not . . . right.” Montague sucked in a deep breath. “What are we gonna do, Jackson?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You said we ain’t got much time. The engineer’s gonna find a telegraph wire alongside the tracks and send a message.”

  It was a risky job climbing a telegraph pole and hooking a loop around the strung telegraph wire. Somehow this made a connection so a man who knew Morse code could send along a warning. Jackson had tried to find out if anyone on this train knew the technique. Even if they did, they had to send a coded message. As malingerers, telegraph operators were about the worst. They had a valuable skill and seldom got fired, no matter how bad their misdeeds. Even if the operator received a message about the train robbery, it might be a spell before the information got passed along to the law.

  Or it might be in the hands of a sheriff right now.

  Jackson eyed the mountain of silver bars. A dozen ideas flashed through his head.

  “We can toss the bars over the cliff and come get them later,” he said.

  “Like hell I will,” said Drury. “What’s to keep you from getting there first and taking it all?”

  “Or you?” said Baldy. “You and a dozen pack mules would be more ’n up to the chore.”

  “You haven’t looked over the side,” Montague said. “That’s a sheer drop. You got any notion how to reach the bottom?”

  “I don’t, and even if we figured it out, we couldn’t heave the silver out far enough to get all the way down. There’d be silver strewn the whole way down for the railroad dicks to recover.”

  “We don’t have much choice, not if we want to take it all.”

  “What’s your plan, Jack?” Baldy looked eagerly at his boss.

  “We load our horses with as much as they’ll carry, get down the mountainside, then split up. Hide the silver wherever you like or try to make it away with your horse loaded down. Whatever we do, we scatter to the four winds.”

  “You want to know where I’m gonna hide my share?” Baldy frowned as the other three glared at him.

  “Don’t tell us,” Jackson said. “Keep it a secret. If one of us gets caught, the other three’s stashes will be safe.”

  “What if all of us are caught?” Drury thrust out his chin belligerently.

  “Then you’ll get a chance to shoot it out, like you been itchin’ to do. Or we can all watch one another get our necks stretched. Men died in this robbery.”

  “We didn’t kill ’em,” protested Baldy. “They jumped on their own. ’Cept the ones Montague shot.”

  “I’m not going to argue that with a jury,” Montague said. He bent to the task of moving the silver bars to the edge of the car.

  Jackson saw him fetch his horse and begin working to use the saddle blanket and his duster as a way of keeping the metal bars on his horse’s back. Montague had started back for another load when Jackson joined in. He said nothing as Drury and Baldy began moving their share of the silver, too.

  Every second dragged like an eternity. He expected the sound of a steam whistle on a train bringing the railroad bulls.

  “I can’t load the rest,” complained Drury. “My horse’s belly’s about draggin’ on the ground.”

  Jackson tugged on his horse’s reins.

  “Do what you want.”

  “See you in hell, Jackson!” Drury shouted, then returned to the final few silver bars still in the vault.

  Jackson saw that Montague and Baldy were already ahead of him, heading down the hillside. He reached the level spot where a couple canyons branched away. Montague had already disappeared down one. With luck he wouldn’t follow the one the other man already had. Or he could keep moving and hunt for a different place to go, but this looked chancy. Baldy had stopped and eyed him, as if waiting for orders.

  Deciding it was for the best, Jackson motioned for Baldy Wilson to take one of the routes away. He kept going for another couple miles, his horse increasingly tired by the heavy load. Jackson tried to guess how much he had piled on. It might be as much as two hundred pounds. He thought he had three thousand dollars’ worth of silver bullion bouncing along a couple feet away.

  His anxiety at being found by the railroad bulls finally wore him down. He found a railroad way marker, then cut across country to find a spot to bury the silver for later retrieval. As he went, he drew a map for Tamara. He didn’t mind splitting his take in half with her since what remained was ten times what he’d expected to steal.

  It was almost dawn when he found a decent spot to begin burying his treasure. Jackson slept until noon, had a meal, finished his map, and then cut across country away from the railroad tracks to find a way to San Francisco that wouldn’t expose him to what might be the biggest posse in the history of California hunting for the silver.

  He didn’t know for certain if the engineer had even sent out the news of the theft, but it made him feel better thinking he was the biggest, baddest outlaw ever.

  1

  John Slocum took a step back, brought up his fists, and took the measure of his opponent. The man moved like a bull and looked like one, only uglier. His eyebrows grew together, giving him a fierce look when he squinted. His dull brown eyes darted about, not studying Slocum as much as the men gathered in a ring around them. When Slocum saw the man’s interest was more on the bets being placed than the fight, he moved fast. With two quick steps, he shoved his
shoulder into the bull man’s, knocking him off balance. As the man tried to regain his feet, Slocum launched a short punch to the heart that traveled less than six inches.

  He felt the impact all the way up to his shoulder. Slocum swung his left hand up and over the man’s flailing arm and crushed his fist into an exposed temple. Like a bull shot behind the ear, the man’s eyes rolled up in his head as he crumpled to the dock, where he lay twitching feebly.

  The crowd had been cheering and jeering. It went utterly silent now that the favorite had been vanquished so quickly.

  “You took out Bully Boy with one punch,” the man holding the bets said in a choked voice. “Ain’t nobody ever done that before.”

  “I hit him twice,” Slocum said. He faced the man and plucked the greenbacks from his fist.

  “Wait, you can’t—” The man swallowed hard and went pale under the caked grime that had turned his face almost black from weeks of not bathing.

  Slocum counted out the money he had been promised and held up the rest for the crowd to see.

  “Who bet on me?”

  For a long second no one said anything. Then one man in the back held up his hand. Or what remained of it. Three fingers were missing, leaving only his index finger and thumb.

  “Come get your winnings.” Slocum waited for the man to push through the crowd. Grumbles were muffled but grew when Slocum handed all the money to the lone winner.

  “First time I was smart ’nuff to back a winner,” the man said, taking the money between thumb and forefinger. He stuffed the money into his pocket.

  Slocum waited for the trouble to start, but having the man beside him changed the way the crowd acted. Still grumbling, they slowly drifted away until only the gambler and the winner remained.

  “You owe me. I set up the fight,” said the gambler.

  “You owe Bully Boy,” the man beside Slocum said. “This the first time he’s been beat, ain’t it?”

  “Me and you, we can make a boatload of money,” the gambler said to Slocum. “Lose the next one and set up for a rematch and we’ll clean the lot of them out of every dime they’ve ever earned or stole.”

  “Not interested,” Slocum said, turning away.

  “Hell, you could get rich. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you like the idea of winnin’ so much money?”

  The gambler saw Slocum’s expression and snorted in disgust, then went to the fallen fighter and kicked him to see if he got any response. The fighter moaned, and his eyelids flickered. He was still out like a light. Then the gambler bent, grabbed Bully Boy by the shoulders, and dragged him to the edge of the dock. Panting from the exertion, the gambler tipped his fighter over the edge to land with a loud splash ten feet below in San Francisco Bay.

  “Why’d you do that?” Slocum asked.

  “He lost. He ain’t no good to me now. I hope he gets et by the fishes.”

  The man beside Slocum laughed.

  “More likely, he’ll pizzen the fishes.”

  The gambler started to ask Slocum once more to fight for him, then saw the answer etched in every line on his angular face. Without looking back, the gambler stalked off, muttering to himself about having to go back to three-card monte to make a living.

  “You do handle yourself with aplomb,” said the two-fingered man.

  “What happened to your hand? You a fighter?” Slocum asked.

  The man held up his finger and thumb and wiggled them.

  “Bein’ a sailor’s a right dangerous way to live. I got all caught up in rigging and fell off a slippery spar. Part of me hit the deck. Some of me stayed aloft in the rigging.”

  The man studied Slocum hard, then said, “I ain’t up for a job I heard about, but you got the look of a man who can handle himself if I put in a good recommendation.”

  Slocum shrugged. He had hunted for work along the Embarcadero for a week and hadn’t turned up anything. Shipping was light at the moment, and the dockworkers who had jobs protected them jealously. The foremen weren’t inclined to take on new workers when they couldn’t keep their old hands busy.

  He had come to San Francisco on a horse that had died under him as he rode into Portsmouth Square. His fortune had gone downhill from there. The dives along the Barbary Coast were death traps he had wisely avoided. Nobody unknown to the barkeeps or owners escaped without getting their gut filled with Mickey Finns before being spirited off to the ships anchored in the harbor. There might not have been much call for dockhands but the ships’ captains had an insatiable appetite for new deckhands. Once aboard a ship, the shanghaied landlubber found himself impressed into service for two years or better. Once the drug from the drink wore off, a shanghaied sailor had a long walk back.

  Rather than drink there, Slocum had stayed closer to the center of town. He had passed by Russian Hill once, had taken a look at the Union Club on Nob Hill, and watched the fancy carriages with their well-dressed men and beautiful women decked out in jewels rattle by. Footsore and down to his last nickel, Slocum had considered a robbery to get back on his feet. Not a one of the carriages didn’t also have a pair of armed guards riding close behind.

  Slocum had eventually come to the docks and gotten into the fight. The gambler had taken one look at his rangy, emaciated frame and had thought he would be an easy opponent for Bully Boy. For ten dollars, Slocum would have let himself get pounded on, but a glance at the other fighter had revealed more muscle than skill.

  “My name’s Underwood. Julius Underwood, late of Boston and other points north in New England.”

  “You’re a ways from home.”

  “You are, too. I got me a good ear for accents. South Carolina? No, wait, Georgia.”

  “Why’d you bet on me?”

  “Odds. The longer the odds, the bigger the payoff.”

  Slocum laughed at this. Underwood had no confidence in his abilities but put money down on all the longshots in the hope of getting rich quick. Slocum wasn’t averse to making such a bet himself, but he needed more than a ghost of a chance to win. He had to see some talent, some hope, have a tad of conviction to place such a wager.

  Had Underwood seen that in him, in spite of what the two-fingered sailor said?

  “Wish I had money to bet on myself.” Slocum touched the ten dollars in his vest pocket. “Time for me to get some food.”

  “I’ll buy you a drink if you’ll listen to me for five minutes.”

  Underwood was sturdy, but he had other injuries besides his hand from the way he dragged his left leg just a mite. Additional evidence came in his cough, deep and rattling. When he spat, bloody phlegm hit the street.

  “You’re the one who looks like he needs a drink.”

  “That I do. Good thing my employer don’t mind if I knock back a shot or two while I’m workin.”

  “You’re on the job?”

  “You can say that. You’re no sailor or stevedore. I been on or by the sea long enough to know that. No, I make you out to be a cowboy. A wrangler down on his luck.” Underwood peered around to Slocum’s left hip, where his Colt Navy was slung. “Or maybe from the way you fight and the worn grips on that hogleg, you might be a shootist.”

  “Not that. If you’re looking for someone to kill for you, keep hunting.”

  “Not that, no, sir, not that. My job’s to recruit, it’s true, but for a real job. A good one with the railroad.”

  “I’ve done some work on a railroad, but not around here. Not in California.”

  “We got plenny of them Celestials to do the hard work. You ever see any of ’em at work? I do declare, they’re scrawny little things, and they do the work of three men. Each of ’em, eatin’ nothin’ more ’n a bowl of rice a day. I was up in the hills when they was goin’ across Las Trampas Ridge in the early days. They got a way of swingin’ down sheer rock walls in baskets and chiselin’ out a roadbed. Damnedest thing you
ever did see.”

  “I haven’t heard of any railroads being built around here.”

  “Nope, you wouldn’t. We got all the track laid we need for another fifty years. It’s not that kind of job I’m recruitin’ for.”

  They went into a restaurant a few blocks from the Embarcadero on Market Street that didn’t look as if it would poison them. Slocum settled down and realized how tired he was. Walking wore on him. He wished the horse hadn’t upped and died. If it had been necessary, Slocum could have sold the old nag for a few dollars to keep him going. More likely he would have turned back south and headed for San Diego. Prospects there had to be better than here. Better yet, San Diego was warm while San Francisco was cold and wet all the time.

  Slocum ordered, drank a cup of the bitter coffee, and felt better for it. By the time the pork chops with greens and boiled potatoes arrived, Underwood had begun his sales pitch. Slocum had heard the buskers around Portsmouth Square and had learned to ignore their songs and lectures. He ate with grim determination to fill his belly, and only when he’d finished some peach cobbler did he settle back and let the other man’s words work their way into his head.

  “I’m what you call a recruiter for the Central California Railroad.”

  “Never heard of it,” Slocum said.

  “Don’t matter. It’s a good line, short line for the most part, working out of the goldfields in Virginia City and comin’ ’cross the Sierras to Sacramento ’fore chuggin’ on into the Oakland depot.”

  “Across the Bay?”

  “The ferry service is good ’twixt here and Berkeley. Most of the railroad owners prefer to have offices in San Francisco, though heaven alone knows most of ’em never seen their depots other than to step into a Pullman car. But Mr. Collingswood’s different. He’s worked ’bout every possible job on the line. Worked his way up from haulin’ water fer the coolies to foreman and then to director.”

  “He’s a director of the Central California Railroad?”

  “Director and a vice president in charge of special freight. Or somethin’ like that.”