The Fire of Greed (5 page)

Chapter 6

BLADEN COLE CAMPED ON A HILL ABOVE THE HAMLET OF
Sabino and crossed the ford at first light, observing for himself the rocks, rapids, and sandbar that were the reason for the young man's caution.

He was in the nearest west shore town, a place called Alamillo, before most people there had awakened. A handful of chickens were scuttering about, ignoring an abrasively crowing rooster who was wandering back and forth across the street like a tippling dandy.

The first human inhabitant Cole saw was a middle-aged Anglo shopkeeper who was sweeping the accumulation of trail dust from the boardwalk in front of his wagon-stop general store.

“You're up mighty early,” the man said in the warm and friendly way that a good shopkeeper—who treats
everyone
as a potential customer—greets said potential customers.

“Yep,” the bounty hunter agreed. “Lost time is not found again.”

“That is a maxim by which an efficient and successful man might live his life, sir,” the man said and smiled.

“You wouldn't be able to sell a man a cup of hot coffee, would you?” Cole asked.

“Got a pot on at this very moment,” he said, putting his broom aside.

Relishing his coffee, Cole reached the point in their interaction where it was time for conversation, and used the moment to make his inquiry about the men and their pack mules.

“Just so happens I
did
see those fellows, yes sirree,” the man acknowledged. “Thought it strange that they were trailing a
saddled
horse. Fellows out for a long ride often trail a spare saddle horse, but I don't reckon you often see someone trailing a
saddled
saddle horse.”

Cole nodded and took another sip of coffee.

“They friends of yours?”

“More that we have friends in common who want me to convey a message,” Cole replied vaguely. “Did you see which way they were headed?”

“Thataway,” the man said, pointing north and west.

“What's out there?”

“That's the Sierra Magdalena Mountains country,” he said, using both the Spanish and English word for “mountains,” as Anglos often did. “Nothing up there unless they're headed over to the valley over around Luera. People headed up into the Magdalenas usually stop in here for supplies, but by the looks of their mules, I'd say they were pretty well provisioned for a long ride. That's a good thing, because they ain't gonna be able to get much at Santa Rita.”

“Where's Santa Rita?”

“Hour or so's ride up yonder and well into the mountains. I reckoned that was probably where they'd be planning to make camp last night. You might be able to catch 'em. You figure that they're headed over by Luera?”

“I believe so.” Cole nodded, feigning knowledge of Luera.

“Makes sense they'd be headed that way, otherwise they'd have gone south to Socorro and over that way.”

“I couldn't agree more; they would definitely not have gone through Socorro,” Cole said with a smile, taking out some coins to pay for his coffee, and for some beans and cornmeal that he figured he would need. “I'm much obliged for your help.”

* * *

CLIMBING OUT OF THE RIO GRANDE VALLEY, WITH ITS
small cultivated fields of corn and squash, took a traveler back into the same dry, arid desert landscape that existed to the east of the river. The only difference was that the terrain now grew steeper and more rugged. Several days' ride in the distance, deeper into the wilderness, there were taller mountains, wooded with ponderosa like the Rockies of Colorado and Montana, but in the interim, a traveler was still in the desert.

Here and there along the lightly traveled trail, Cole detected the tracks of the two men and their livestock, and he could see that their pace had slowed considerably. Either they had come to feel that they had eluded all potential pursuers and had grown more relaxed, or they were becoming gradually more tired. Probably, Cole reasoned, it was a combination of the two.

Gradually, their urgency and their alertness was waning. Several boring days on the trail does that to a man, whether he realizes it or not. Like the two men whom he had pursued south of Durango, these two had started out edgy, certainly edgy enough to spitefully murder two of their own. Gradually, though, that edge was being worn down.

As he paused to water the roan at a trickle of water coming off the slopes of the Magdalenas, he imagined the bandits looking back, and perhaps seeing him. Unless they had seen him following them over the past few days, he guessed that they would not be unduly wary of a single man on an existing trail. They could catch their breath up there wherever, confident that the imagined posse had been successfully eluded.

As he climbed the trail, Cole took the two Denver & Rio Grande passes out of his pocket and studied them. They were standard issue railroad passes such as he had seen from time to time. All railroads issued them to employees to use for official business and for personal use as part of their compensation. It was clear that either these were the property of the deceased, or they had been left on the bodies deliberately.

* * *

SANTA RITA WAS A LARGER SETTLEMENT THAN HE HAD
imagined, even boasting a small cantina.

Cole studied the few horses tied at the hitchrails. He had not expected to see three saddle horses tethered near a pair of mules, and he was not disappointed. He was pleased, however, to see no horse at all tied at the cantina, despite its rail being situated in the inviting shade of a cottonwood. This meant that his conversation with the bartender would be uninterrupted.

“Howdy,” the proprietor said, greeting Cole from his position in a chair near the bar. “What can we do to brighten your day?”

“A whiskey would work itself a long way down the road of making that happen,” Cole said, packing more words into the sentence than was typical of his usual greeting. It was his intention to establish himself as a conversationalist.

The man stood, swatted at a fly, and went behind the bar.

“You're a long way from home,” the man said, taking his own turn to establish himself as a conversationalist.

“How'd you guess?” Cole asked.

“Because you ain't from around here,” the man said with a crazed chuckle as he poured two fingers of inviting amber liquid into a glass. “And Santa Rita is damned far from
everywhere
.”

Cole could not help but smile as the man laughed boisterously at his own joke. Cole guessed that it was not the first time he had used that line.

“You guessed right,” Cole said, savoring the welcome taste.

“Where you headed?” the man asked.

“West,” Cole answered, nodding in that direction. “Thought maybe I'd take a buck and smoke me some venison. Get a jump on winter. California's a long ride.”

“They'll be in the high country this time of year,” the man said, offering hunting advice.

“Yep,” Cole agreed. “It'll be cooler up there.”

“What takes you out to California?”

“Woman.”

“Either love or money,” the bartender proclaimed. “Anybody who tells you there's a third thing that drives a man's intentions, he's either a fool or a liar.”

“Ain't
that
for sure.” Cole nodded.

“She know you're coming . . . ? Not that it's any of my business.”

“She ran off with a gambler,” Cole explained, adding an element of fact to his fable. “I've come to figure that she'd be getting tired of him. I was just thinking . . .”

“You want to be there at the right time.”

“Yeah, I was just thinking that,” Cole said. It was true that he had been unable to push Sally Lovelace out of his mind completely, even though it had been the better part of four years since she had run off to San Francisco with J. R. Hubbard. It was
not
true that he had entertained any plans of going after her.

“The reason I asked . . . not wanting to pry into your business . . .” the bartender continued, “was that I had been wonderin' if you were with those boys who were headed over to Luera.”

“Guess not. What boys?”

“Two boys who was in here last night. They was all loaded up with a couple of mules like they were headed for somewhere.”

“They were headed for Luera?”

“Not till they heard about the Dutchman.”

“Who's the Dutchman?”

“He's a fellow over in Luera who knows a lot about the old Spanish gold strikes up in these hills round about.”

“Do tell,” Cole said, nodding to an empty glass as if to say that hearing the fellow's yarn about this Dutchman called for a refill.

“There's stories,” the bartender said. “There's stories that he's found a lot of gold, and stories that he hasn't. People see him around Luera, and then he disappears for weeks or a month or so. People have seen him with gold, but he doesn't seem to live beyond his means. There's stories that he takes it over to Socorro or some place and puts it in a bank.”

“What made these boys take an interest in the Dutchman?” Cole asked. “Were they going over to Luera to rob the man?”

“No, they were drinking in here last night, and they got to talking with a couple of other fellows who
were
headed over to see him.”

“What about?”

“They were gonna try'n get the Dutchman to tell 'em how to find the Lost Dearing Diggings.”

“What's that?”

“Fellow name of Dearing came in through here back in the fifties, just before the war I guess it was,” the bartender began, relishing his role as storyteller. “He was a cowboy from over in West Texas who had some kind of scrape with the law. Came out here to get away. He rescued this half-breed Mexican kid from a bunch of Apaches. The kid was real thankful as you can picture, so he showed Dearing this place way up in yonder mountains where there was gold nuggets the size of wild turkey eggs just laying around.”

“I've heard variations on that story before,” Cole said truthfully. The barrooms and backcountry of the Southwest abounded in such tales.

“Dearing showed up in Mesilla with a bandanna full of these nuggets,” the cantina owner insisted. “He said he'd go back in there and get more, but that he was scared off by the Apaches. He got some others to go with him.”

“They find the place?”

“Yup. They sure did. They caused quite a fuss, too. Went back up there with a mule train to haul the stuff out.”

“And . . .”

“Disappeared without a trace. Never seen again.”

“What does that have to do with the Dutchman?”

“Word is that he knows where the Dearing Diggings is, but won't take nobody in there on account of he likes to work alone.”

“So the fellows that were talking in here last night are gonna try'n get the Dutchman to take 'em there?” Cole asked.

“Get him to
tell
'em,” the bartender clarified. “The story is that he'll
tell
you where to go, but he won't take you. The Dutchman works alone.”

“Why you figure those other fellas told all this to the two strangers last night?”

“Apaches,” the bartender explained succinctly. “Four's better than two if you're riding into Apache country. The Chiricahua are still up in those mountains. As the story goes, there's more gold at the Dearing Diggings than any two men can carry, so sharing it is a small price for being able to get in and get back out
alive
.”

Chapter 7

TWO MEN HAD BEEN ESCAPING THE LAW WITH A $9,000
payroll, sufficient money to set two men up comfortably for a long time—even in California.
Then
, on the verge of vanishing across the line that could have realistically been expected to keep them safe from the law forever, they had met two men with a story.

Suddenly, the success of their escape was not enough. The $9,000 was not enough. They had been shown the promise of even greater riches and had succumbed to its siren call. It was like the man who wins magnificently at the tables, and pushes it back onto the table, rather than walking away to relish the fortune that is already in hand.

Greed is the fuel that feeds the fire of greed.

Somehow, this is an undeniable aspect of human nature, perhaps not found in all, but certainly not a rare affliction.

However, the hotter the fire burns, the more likely it is to consume the finer qualities of rational thought, and to tip the greedy toward the cauldron of madness.

* * *

BLADEN COLE REACHED LUERA AT NIGHTFALL.

It was a forlorn little collection of adobe buildings, with a tiny Spanish mission church at one end of town and the inevitable cantina at the opposite end, as though the two were squaring off in a contest over the souls of men.

If Santa Rita was “damned far from everywhere,” Luera was at the very end of the earth.

In Santa Rita, the bartender was a man with a proclivity for talk. In Luera, the bartender was a woman of few words. She was a hard-looking character of indeterminate middle age with a leathery face and her hair tied in a knot at the top of her head.

“Do you for?” she asked.

“A shot from that bottle with the orange label over there would brighten my day,” Cole answered. His third in one day when the sun was still up was a record for him, but by the looks of the deep orange light streaming in the cantina's single window, it was close to being
not
up.

She poured his whiskey without a word. She may have looked mean and miserly, but Cole noticed that she was not quite so given to cutting her whiskey with branch water as had been the proprietor in Santa Rita.

“You lookin' for the Dutchman?” she asked.

“Why do you ask?” Cole asked.

“Most strangers who come in here
are
lookin' for the Dutchman,” she explained. “Figured I'd get that out of the way. He ain't here, but he may come in later.”

“Heard there was some fellas comin' and lookin' for him this morning,” Cole said, relishing the closer-to-full-strength whiskey.

“Friends of yours?”

“Friends of friends, sort of.”

“Won't ask what that means,” she said skeptically. “They're a bunch of fools. Most who come lookin' for the Dutchman are.”

Without further elaboration, she left him to savor his whiskey and went about her chores, rattling about with her glassware and moving things in a small pantry.

What passed for a back bar was cluttered with an odd collection of artifacts that had apparently been found in the desert. There were deer antlers, a coyote skull, some old rusty pieces of iron, and a rusted pistol with its handgrip rotted off. And naturally, there were strings of dried chilies.

There were also several dried birds which would have been an embarrassment to any taxidermist, including a raven that seemed to be looking straight at Cole. He guessed that this had been the bartender's intention when she placed it in that spot. At the top, in a place of honor, there was an old brass helmet of the kind the Spanish conquistadors wore hundreds of years ago.

“I see by that sign that you sell suppers,” Cole said as he saw her stoking her stove.

“Yep,” she said without elaboration.

“What's your specialty?”

“Beans and rice on a tortilla with some chicken thrown in.”

“Sounds good.”

“You want eggs on top?”

“They fresh?”

“You seen all them chickens runnin' around in the street this afternoon?”

“Yeah, I'll have a couple of eggs.”

Maybe it was the aroma of the cooking, and maybe it was their force of habit, but as she began cooking, three other men wandered in, bought whiskey, and asked for supper. It was soon evident that the woman's specialty was her
only
. Everything she cooked was a variation on beans and rice on a tortilla with some chicken, as well as a handful of dried red chilies, thrown in.

Cole studied the newcomers, wondering if one of them might be the Dutchman.

He imagined that none of them looked the part, but then realized that he really didn't know what a Dutchman was
supposed
to look like.

As he ate, Cole thought back to his last store-bought meal, the
carne asada
at the Refugio del Viajero in Santa Fe. His thoughts naturally also went back to Nicolette de la Gravière, with her graceful movements, her long dark hair, and her lips the color of dried red chilies.

Just as Santa Fe and Luera were opposite poles on the scale of civilization in this territory, Nicolette de la Gravière and tonight's hostess were opposite poles on the scale of womanhood. Cole imagined the bartender when she was as young as Nicolette de la Gravière. He imagined Nicolette in twenty or thirty years, and wondered whether those years would be as unkind to her, or if she would retain that sort of timeless, regal beauty that women such as her mother seemed to preserve.

Naturally, being a man, he had imagined himself as part of Nicolette's life. He knew that he could not tire of a face like that, or of a smile like that. He had thought of the similarity of that face to the face of Hannah Ransdell, the woman of about that same age he had met last winter up in Montana Territory. Hannah was quick and perceptive—and she could ride and shoot as well as most men. She was naturally, and almost perfectly, beautiful, but the little threesome of freckles on her nose added a humanizing touch, softening the classical perfection of that beauty.

He often thought about Hannah, and he thought often of Natoya-I-nis'kim, the Blackfeet woman with the long black hair who had saved his life, and he thought about several other women he had met in the years since Sally Lovelace had left him.

It seemed that it all came back to Sally.

She had changed his life by turning a wandering man into a man who could think about settling down. She had changed his life
again
through the revelation that
she too
wished to wander, but
without
Bladen Cole.

It all came back to Sally.

She had not so much cursed his life as she had painfully exposed the curse that had been there all along. Cole was meant to be a man who would not, indeed
could
not, stay long in one place.

“Guess you didn't like your supper,” Cole's hostess said, clearing his nearly spotless plate and interrupting his thoughts. “If you were lookin' for the Dutchman, you don't need to be waitin' no more.”

She nodded toward a place in the corner of the room, and his eyes followed her as she delivered a glass of whiskey to the table.

The Dutchman was a stocky, powerfully built man with close-cropped gray hair and a large gray mustache cut short on the two sides. He had sharp eyes, which instantly picked up on Cole's looking at him.

Cole tossed several coins on the bar and stood. The Dutchman watched as the bounty hunter approached his table.

“Evening, sir,” Cole said politely. “I hear that you're the man they call the Dutchman.”

“
Ist Deutsch
, not ‘
Dutch
,' but most people call me the ‘Dutchman.' Ist my nickname, as it were,” he said without smiling.

“I'm Bladen Cole,” he said, extending a hand.

“Otto Geier,” the German said, taking Cole's extended hand in his firm grip. “Please sit.”

“Thanks. I'm told you may have seen a couple of men I'm looking for.”

“You are a bounty hunter,” the Dutchman asserted. “You have that look.”

“What look?”

“The look of a bounty hunter. What men are you seeking?”

“Two men with a pair of pack mules,” Cole explained. “They're riding with a couple of others they met over in Santa Rita yesterday.”

“What are they wanted for?” Geier asked. Screened through the sieve of a thick German accent, his English words were precise and clearly articulated.

“Robbery . . . and murder,” Cole said, deliberately not mentioning the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe.

“Where?”

“Up toward Santa Fe.”

“Not a few of those who come to Luera are escaping such deeds,” the Dutchman said, shaking his head.

“Have you seen 'em?”

“
Ja
. The men you describe were here today. They asked about the Dearing Diggings. They were not the first, and they will not be the last.”

“What did you tell them?”

“I told them where to look.”

“Where?”

“In the Mogollons,” he said, nodding his head toward the southwest. “Across the mountains, into the Sierra Blanca, in the headwaters of the Gila River. Are you looking for the men or the gold? You seek the men to fulfill your contract, but your imagination ist tempted by the lure of treasure.”

“I'd be a liar to deny it,” Cole admitted. He knew that his expression betrayed the desire that engulfs all men when they are offered stories of nuggets the size of turkey eggs.

The Dutchman smiled the wry smile of someone who knows more than he tells.

“Is it real?” Cole asked. “Do the Dearing Diggings exist?”

“Ja
.
”

“You're sure?”

“I have with my own eyes seen this gold.”

“Why haven't
you . . . ?

“Only two kinds of men imagine that they will come back from the Dearing as rich men . . . dead men and fools.”

“Apaches?”

“Apaches and terrain,” the Dutchman said soberly. “
Und wolves . . .
angry packs of wolves which will tear a man apart. I barely escaped with my life. I will not go back.”

“Did you explain this to the four men?”

“Naturlich.”

“Guess it didn't stop them.”

“They believe that there ist safety in numbers.”

“Well, I guess that I'll be needing to ask you for the same directions,” Cole said. “I believe I'll take a chance on catching up before they get to the part of the trail that's patrolled by wolves.”

“Who was it that was murdered?” Geier asked.

“Just a man who was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Cole explained, again shying away from mention of the railroad. “They had no grudge, didn't even know him. He was unarmed. That happens in robberies. There were originally four robbers. These two killed their partners. One got it in the back of the head at close range. The other was shot in the back as he ran.”

He watched the German shake his head in anger.

“Do you have provisions for the mountains?”

“Some,” Cole said. “I'll be buying more in the morning.”

“I will meet you at the general store at precisely eight o'clock,” the Dutchman said. “I will lead you.”

“I thought you said you'd never go back.”

“
Nein
, never,” the Dutchman said emphatically. “Not the
entire
way, but there are many miles between here and there.”