A Grave for Lassiter (25 page)

As they ate, Lassiter spoke of the mine road. “When the weather's bad, there'll be no chance to get wagons up here.”

“Tell you how I figure to fix that. I got ore cars and tracks in the warehouse up at Montclair. You fetch the load for me. Then I'll figure the right grade for a narrow gauge like they use in all mines. I'll put tracks on that hill yonder.” He gestured to the left of the mine tunnel where the mountain made a gradual descent to the valley floor. “I'll figure the grade just right so I can use switchbacks all the way down. The cars can drop their load of ore at the bottom where you can pick it up.”

Lassiter said it sounded like a good idea.

“I've had some experience surveying,” Dingell went on, “so I'll lay out the tracks. They've got to be at just the right grade so they don't get loose an' make the cars derail.”

“How will you get the empty cars back to the mine?” Melody asked.

“A good question,” Dingell said approvingly. Each empty car would be brought back to the top by sheer manpower at the end of a long cable. “That is until I can get steam to turn a pulley. Main thing I'll need is a boiler. You can haul that for me, too, Lassiter. There's one for sale at Montclair and I'll arrange to buy it by mail. Had a look at it last time I was up. If it isn't sold, it's a deal.”

“We'll make it up the mountain with the wagons,” Lassiter said, “until you can get tracks laid.”

“Shouldn't take more'n a few weeks.”

They agreed that Northguard would pick up ore cars, tracks, and the boiler at Montclair, plus pulleys and cable. Lassiter estimated he could do the job with two wagons.

A contract, which they all signed, was drawn up at the table.

As they started back down the mountain, Melody was elated. “We did it, Lassiter.”

“You mean you did,” he said with a grin.

“Don't be silly. You did most of it.”

He wanted to change the subject. “I hope he's enough of an engineer to figure out how to get those empty cars back up the mountain by cable. The switchbacks and all . . .”

“Seems to me he's quite a remarkable man. . . .”

Chapter Twenty-six

Lassiter was a little surprised to find a new railroad rep at Montclair. Ordway, the one who had tried to get Blackshear to arrest him, was gone. The new man was Regis Boshar, a husky mustached man of middle age.

“We hope to do a lot of business with you, Lassiter.”

“Business with Northguard you mean,” Lassiter said with a smile as they shook hands. “I'm only a small cog in the gears of the freight line.”

Roustabouts from the warehouse helped load the cargo of steel rails, ore cars, and an ungainly mass of metal that was the steam boiler. In addition there was what seemed like miles of cable, and boxes and boxes of pulleys of all sizes. Plus the hardware needed to attach them to the many posts that would be needed for the long haul from the lower level up to the mine.

On the return trip to Bluegate, Lassiter was constantly on his guard, riding his black horse ahead for a mile or so, then scouting their back trail. But nothing happened. He was as edgy as he had been on the last haul to Bitterroot. But nothing had happened on that trip, de spite his worry and vigilance. And when they were within five miles or so of Bluegate, he decided this trek would be equally uneventful.

It was a clear day, the sun warm. Birds chattered in a thick grove of aspen that bordered each side of the road. Lassiter was riding twenty yards ahead of the lead wagon that Bert Oliver was driving. Sharing the seat with him was a swamper named Sid Hooper. The following wagon contained Alex Holmes and Steve Baron-ski. All good men that Lassiter felt he could depend on.

Without warning there were rebel yells from the east side of the road and the sudden thunder of hoofbeats. A bunch of horses suddenly spurred into violent movement from a standstill.

He barely had time to yank free his Henry rifle when riders swooped out of the woods. No Indian charge in history was more deadly than this. There were eight of them, firing from the backs of hard-running horses. Bullets peppered the sides of the lead wagon; the second wagon was being used as a flat bed to accommodate the bulky steam boiler. Bullets whanged into its metal sides and ricocheted. Rifle bullets threw gouts of dust into the air only an arm's length from the forefeet of Lassiter's plunging black horse as he swung the animal, at full gallop, into a widening curve.

Lassiter was firing back, as were his men from the halted wagons. He felt a twinge of agony as Ed Kiley, in the lead of the attackers, knocked Sid Hooper tumbling from the lead wagon, rolling to the center of the road where he lay still. Oliver was firing a rifle as fast as he could work the loading lever.

But it was Lassiter, closing fast on the hard-riding Kiley, who had the best chance of avenging the crumpled Hooper, now bleeding in the dust.

Kiley, mounted on a big gray, tried to ram Lassiter's smaller horse. But Lassiter's superior horsemanship en abled his mount to evade the hard-driving gray. Turned as he was in the saddle, Lassiter felt something twitch the short hairs at the nape of his neck. A bullet from Kiley's rifle had come that close to causing disaster for Lassiter. A split-second later came the roar of the big .50 caliber Sharps he was carrying.

“Damn near gotcha!” Kiley yelled with a grin.

Lassiter twisted in the saddle, swung back as Kiley was checking the speed of his gray horse. Around them was the sound of battle, the incessant rattle of rifle fire, yells, screams.

Holding his rifle in one hand, Lassiter fired it like a pistol. Kiley, turning back, lost his grin. It was replaced by a spurt of blood as the bullet took out his front teeth and a portion of his skull, just above the back of the neck. He plunged from the horse in a loose-limbed roll, still holding onto the rifle as he struck the roadway, the barrel somehow tripping up the galloping gray horse, bringing it down. Above the roar of weapons came a clear, snapping sound as of a stick breaking. The gray's neck snapped as it plunged to earth, the head twisted at an unusual angle. The left front wheel of Oliver's wagon was less than inches from Kiley's ruined skull. Everything had happened in the space of time no longer than it takes for a man to draw three good breaths.

Out of the trees came the bearded Art Blackshear. Not on a horse but on solid ground, for better marksmanship than from the saddle of a plunging mount. His horse was running back into the trees.

A bullet blew a faint breath against Lassiter's right cheek as he jerked his head around. He saw the stock of a Winchester tucked against Blackshear's hairy cheek. Knowing he was too vulnerable against a marksman with bootheels anchored firmly on Mother Earth, he quit the saddle. He slid a few feet on his knees in deep grass as momentum carried him into a patch of wild flowers. Bullets flung bits of petals and stems into the air.

“Stay still, so's I can bust one into your gut!” Blackshear yelled. He was a little over ten feet away, teeth bared through the heavy beard. Before he could shift his position to cover up the fast-moving target, Lassiter shot him twice. Blackshear came up suddenly on his toes, eyes in the bearded face looking blank. He leaned far forward as if to kiss the ground. Which he did, literally, falling onto his face.

Yelling encouragement to his men, Lassiter opened up on the remaining attackers. The remaining three members of his crew had taken cover behind the wagons, their fire so accurate that the attackers began to mill in confusion.

Bert Oliver shot Jody Marsh near the Adam's apple, which sent him tumbling backward off the rump of a roan. He struck the ground, arms and legs flopping as if barely fastened to his body. As he rolled, Oliver shot him a second time through the chest, just to make sure. Another attacker screamed and went down. That settled them. They went pounding back into the aspens that had given them their original cover.

As the sound of hoofbeats began to fade, Lassiter reloaded his Henry rifle. His mouth was dry as he looked down at Ed Kiley, whose blasted skull was nearly under an iron wheel rim of the first wagon. He seized Kiley by the heels and pulled him from under the wagon. It took the four of them to pull the dead gray horse off the road so they could get by.

Lassiter had skinned one knee when he made the fast dismount. He was limping slightly.

Blackshear suddenly regained consciousness and began to scream, rolling about in the road, trying to stem a flow of blood with his two hands. But it trickled through his fingers and down onto his belt buckle.

Marsh was dead, his mouth open. His eyes were also open. One of them was blotched by droppings from panicked birds still circling madly above the trees on either side of the road. A splattering bit of warmth that Marsh had never felt. There was no pity in Lassiter for any of the Farrell men. They had intended to murder his entire crew. As the last of the receding hoofbeats could no longer be heard and Blackshear had ceased to scream, there was a new sound arising in the eerie after-battle stillness.

Lassiter was aware of a wagon approaching from the direction of Bluegate. It was driven by a thinned-down, middle-aged man named Enos Cavendish, who ran a few head of cattle out of town. Beside him was his wife, wearing a sunbonnet, with a face browned from weather and seamed from years of hardship. Five children were standing up in the bed of the farm wagon, peering in awe at the bodies sprawled in the road or adjacent to it.

The fourth casualty and nearest the wagon, was a stranger on his back, arms outstretched as if napping on the fine spring day. A small round hole made a third eye in his forehead.

Lassiter ran down past the corpse, yelling at Cavendish to back the team up and get away, to spare the children the gory sight. But it was Mrs. Cavendish who began to scream, not the children. She pointed a bony finger. But her screeching seemed to be a signal for the children to join in. The sound in the still morning air was so horrendous that Lassiter's men looked at each other worriedly.

Never in his life had Lassiter felt more helpless than he did as the hysterical woman and her frightened children continued screaming.

Lassiter walked up to the halted wagon, arms spread wide from his body, as if that would make the woman and her brood understand. “They jumped us!” Lassiter shouted above the sounds of hysteria.

“A terrible sight for a woman to see!” Cavendish said shakily. “We heard shootin', but never figured to run into nothin' like this.”

Cavendish started to turn his wagon around in the narrow road. When Lassiter tried to help him, the white-faced rancher angrily waved him off.

“You want to blame somebody, blame Farrell!” Lassiter shouted. “They were his men!”

But by then Cavendish had his team at a gallop and he doubted if he was even heard above the pound of hooves and the rattle of wagon wheels. The children, still sobbing, clung to the low sideboards to keep from being thrown out. Soon they were hidden by a bend in the road.

Bert Oliver scrubbed a forearm across his sweated face. “Sets a man's teeth on edge to hear such cater-waulin' from a female an' her passel of younguns.”

“She couldn't have lived out here long,” said Steve Baronski in his accented voice, “to throw a fit over a few dead men.”

“I guess it was seeing five dead that got to her,” Lassiter said with a sad shake of the head.

They loaded the four bodies of attackers onto the tailgate of the lead wagon, then wrapped Hooper in a tarp and tied him on top of the load.

By the time they ground slowly up to the sheriff's office, the bodies had been spotted on the tailgate and a crowd had gathered.

The deputy, Rudy Kline, came out of the sheriff's office and gaped at the bodies.

Lassiter said sternly, “I'll pay for my man Hooper to have a decent burial. I don't care a damn what you do with the rest of 'em. Although you might ask Kane Farrell to contribute.”

This startled the onlookers as well as the deputy. Rudy Kline had a knob of tobacco in one cheek and almost swallowed it. He fidgeted from one foot to the other as Lassiter and his men unloaded the bodies and placed them along the walk.

Just as Lassiter was about to drive on with Hooper's body, Bo Dancur came striding along the walk. When the overweight sheriff saw the crowd, he quickened his pace. He thrust his way through the circle of silent onlookers and stared at the bodies laid out on the walk.

“How'd it happen?” he demanded, but his meaty face was losing color as he saw that three of the dead were Farrell men, Kiley, Blackshear, and Marsh.

Lassiter told him about the attack five miles out of town, as he had explained to the deputy.

Dancur made no comment when Lassiter had finished, just shoved back his hat and gave a deep sigh. He looked troubled.

Lassiter drove to Miegs' furniture and undertaking establishment. Miegs came out to the alley, rubbing bony hands together as he anticipated business. When Hooper's body was lowered, Miegs said, “He's been shot. The sheriff know about this?”

“He does. I want Hooper to be buried in the graveyard.”

“He got kin?”

“I don't know of any. He never talked much.”

“It'll cost you twenty-five dollars includin' a plain pine coffin. Oak'll cost you forty.”

“Make it pine. I'll spend the difference on some poor family that maybe hasn't had a decent meal in a spell.” “Reckon you're the only fella I've buried, then had a talk with, over six months later, about the price for another funeral.” He gave a wry smile and held out his small hand, palm up.

Lassiter dropped two double eagles and a five into his palm. They quickly disappeared into a pocket of his black pants.

Miegs had a helper carry Hooper's body into a shed, and laid out on planks a couple of sawhorses.

“You gonna be here for the services?” Miegs wanted to know.

“I don't know for sure.” I might not even be alive, he almost added.