Tripwire

Brian Garfield

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Perhaps Handy McKay will

understand why this is

for Don Westlake

When the riverboat came in sight at the bend of the river Boag got up and kicked Wilstach awake.

Wilstach grunted and sat up grinding black knuckles into his eye sockets. “The hell, Boag.”

“That yonder’s the Uncle Sam.” Boag pointed down to the mud-colored river.

Down past the shelf of the bluff the Colorado moved along heavy, swelled with the spring runoff. The riverboat churned along with a good deal of racket and effort but it was barely making headway against the current. Boag had a good view of the sturdy shape of the captain up on the Texas deck; it was near half a mile downstream but the sun was hard as brass and all the shadows had black edges.

“Let’s go along,” Boag said. “Saddle your jackass.”

“Want my coffee first.”

“John B., I swan.”

“Hell Boag, we got plenty of time. She can’t be making three knots.”

“Saddle your jackass.” Boag turned to the portable heliograph. “I ain’t about to miss out. We show up late in Hardyville, Mr. Pickett won’t likely wait for us.”

He squinted against the sun to set the heliograph mirror at its proper angle. The mule and the jackass kicked their hobbled feet against the hardpan. There was no wind; the dust settled just where it was kicked up. Boag was coated with the fine powder as if he had been lying for days like Lazarus in an open grave. It was a fine silver grit in the pores of his dark skin and the threads of his cavalry-blue pants. It was abrasive in his teeth and eyes. It made the heliograph’s shutter scrape when he flicked it open and shut.

He flapped the handle half a dozen times for dots and dashes. Wilstach was saddling the jackass, muttering about his coffee. After a little while Boag saw the glimmer of the answering signal from the mountain twelve miles northeast of the river, and he batted out the coded flashes for U-S-A-M. He got his winking acknowledgment from the mountain and began to pack up the heliograph.

Wilstach had the jackass rigged. He was throwing the saddle onto the mule. “All I got to say is, that gold better be there.”

“You think maybe it flew away someplace all by itself?”

“Boag, you ever seen that gold with your own eyes?”

“.… No.”

“Well then.”

“It’s there,” Boag said. “Close to a troy ton.”

“Because Jed Pickett said so?”

“Because they keep four armed guards in shifts on that express-company pier.” Boag strapped the heliograph case and heaved the instrument up onto the cantle of the mule’s saddle. The thing weighed eighty pounds; he lifted it with one hand. He was big enough to do that.

Wilstach went to the jackass and cut its hobbles. Boag climbed astride the mule. “Come on, you lazy nigger, let’s go steal that gold.”

It was a fifteen-mile ride to Hardyville and it would take Boag and Wilstach close to three hours; Mr. Pickett and the rest of them had a couple of hours’ head start but Boag wasn’t worried. The gold wasn’t going anywhere until the riverboat reached Hardyville and that wouldn’t be until the middle of the afternoon. He set a pace that would conserve the animals.

It was all broken wastes on both sides of the river up here, the country buckling and creasing up toward the Black Canyon Gorge a little way above Hardyville, and the Grand Canyon beyond that. The Colorado River came down a thousand miles through the Rockies from somewhere in Wyoming and by the time it got to this point in Arizona it was moving fast and carrying a great deal of mud. It had another four hundred miles to cross between here and the Gulf of California; those were the navigable four hundred miles, and even so the Johnson-Yaeger riverboat fleet only made it up as far as Hardyville during the high water of the spring thaw and the fall rains. The rest of the time the town withered beside a half-dry riverbed and had occasional contact with the rest of the world by way of the Jackass Mail on its way across the Mogollon route from Santa Fe to California. Pretty soon the railroad would reach the Colorado—end-of-track was already as far west as Prescott—but right now Hardyville was about as alone as you could get, between river-boats.

There were a dozen gold camps in the mountains, inhabited by fools who didn’t know the hardest of all ways to earn gold was to mine for it. Hardyville was smarter than that. Hardyville let the miners sweat the ore out of the ground; Hardyville just smelted it and stacked it up on the pier and shipped it out to the banks three or four times a year on Johnson-Yaeger paddlewheelers. For performing that service Hardyville made more money out of the gold than the miners did.

Hardyville was a clever hard town that wasn’t going to make it easy for Jed Pickett to steal its bullion. Boag had known that from the outset. He hadn’t been too eager at first.

That had been six weeks ago in Ehrenburg. The town was building a road to somebody’s chicken farm and had adopted Boag and Wilstach the day they arrived there: ten dollars or thirty days, apiece. Boag had a gold eagle in each boot, the last of his mustering-out pay, but he wasn’t ready to spend his last twenty dollars on fines for the both of them. They elected jail where the town would feed them. Then they found out about the road.

Good luck it had been early March. Ehrenburg in the middle of the summer would have cooked a man on the road.

On the chain gang they had met Gutierrez, who was a crickety little Mexican with a dewlappy face. Gutierrez let them walk into it all by themselves. He didn’t say much of anything at first, he just let Boag and Wilstach complain themselves right into it:

“Boag, what we gon do when we get off here?”

“Cross the river to California.”

“Then what? Go back to busting horses for six bits a head, busting our own black skulls in the bargain? Dig graves for a quart of whiskey a corpse?”

“We’ll do better’n that. We’re soldiers.”

“Fine Boag, you just show them your sergeant’s stripes and they gon make you the head of the bank.”

“We can get jobs riding shotgun.”

“Boag, you been in the Cavalry too long. How many white men you know gon trust a nigger to guard their money?”

Gutierrez insinuated himself quietly. He didn’t make a big show of his sympathy, “You both got discharged out of the army, hey?”

Wilstach said, “Well we run down Geronimo for them and since then they ain’t had enough Innuns to go around. I guess the War Department decided it was easier to feed an Innun than fight him.”

“You both in the Tenth Cav, hey?”

Boag said, “That was a lot of miles ago.”

“So they just used you up and threw you both out like an old shoe.”

“Boag here had fourteen years worth of hashmarks. You see the stitch-marks on his sleeves there.”

“How about you?”

“Me I only done six years in the Buffalo soldiers.”

“You both kill a lot of Inyuns, hey?”