the High Graders (1965) (4 page)

"You better cinch up tight, boy," Brazo s said, "you're ridin' in rough country."

Mike Shevlin, carrying his duffle, crosse d the street to the Nevada Hotel without glancin g back. Had he turned, he might have see n Brazos gesture toward him, although h e could not have heard the words that were spoken.

"Ma'am," Brazos said in a low tone as h e helped the girl from the rig, "you ever need he'p , you talk to that man there. If I was headin'
i nto grief, there's no man I'd rather have ridin'
p oint for me. When that man wants to go somewhere an'
t here ain't no hole, he just naturally make s himself one."

Mike Shevlin registered at the Nevad a House, where the clerk was a stranger, then he wen t upstairs to his room and dropped his gear. H
e had finished shaving and was buttoning his shirt when ther e was a light tap at his door.

His .44 Smith and Wesson Russian la y on the bureau. He picked it up, draping th e towel over it as if about to dry his face, and the n he said, "All right, come in with your hands empty."

The door opened and the girl from the buckboar d stepped in, closing the door swiftly behind her.

She was slender and tall, her cheekbones wer e high in her triangular face, her lips a shade full. She was beautiful, but hers was by n o means an ordinary beauty, nor was she prett y in the accepted sense.

"Mr. Shevlin, I am Laine Tennison , and I am here to talk business."

"Sit down," he suggested, "and star t talking."

"Brazos is my friend, Mr. Shevlin. Th e only friend I have in Rafter ... unless it is th e people with whom I am staying."

He said nothing, waiting and wondering. She was a lady ... he had known very few in his lifetime, bu t this was, definitely, a lady. She looked it , carried herself like one, and dressed it--not,t, quit e plain for the times, and with style.

"Mr. Shevlin, I want you to find out wh y certain men want to buy the Sun Strike Min e from me."

He tucked the pistol behind his belt, her eye s following it. Then he folded the towel and place d it on the bar beside the bureau.

"No one knows that I own that mine, Mr.

Shevlin, and I do not want them to know. M
y grandfather bought the mine from the original locator.

He bought it through a company he controlled, and hi s name did not appear. I inherited the mine."

Her hair was auburn, with soft waves, he r eyes green and slightly slanted. Rather like a cat's eyes, but large.

"Nobody knows you own that mine?" Mik e Shevlin asked.

"Only Brazos ... and now you."

"You spoke of the people you are staying with. Don'
t they know?"

"Dottie Clagg is an old friend--we wen t to school together in Philadelphia. But sh e believes I am here for my health."

"Clagg?"

"Her husband is Dr. Rupert Clagg, a physician and surgeon."

"Related to Clagg Merriam?"

"A second cousin, I believe. It wa s Mr. Merriam who influenced them to com e to Rafter, I think."

Mike Shevlin combed his hair as he looked i n the mirror. He knew too little of what was goin g on here. He felt that he was like a blind man in a strange room filled with objects unfamilia r to him, whose design had no meaning for him.

Clagg Merriam had been a silent partner o f Eli Patterson's, but he had his hand in hal f a dozen enterprises. He had owned this hotel , and probably still did. He speculated i n cattle, too.

Shevlin remembered him now, a tall, to o handsome man who dressed well and never seemed to d o anything, yet actually did a great deal.

"If you're that cautious," he said to the girl , "you must have a reason."

The green eyes looked directly into his.

"I will be honest with you, Mr. Shevlin. I sen t a man here to investigate. He was killed. The y said it was an accident. He had gone to work in th e mine and somebody dropped some drill steel dow n a manway when he was coming up the ladder."

That was an ugly way to die. In the narro w limits of the manway there was no chance of escap e from falling drills--and small chance of accident , when it came to that. His miner's lamp would have bee n clearly visible, and one was supposed to cal l "Timber!" before dropping anything. Or at leas t that had been the rule in hard-rock mines wher e Mike had worked.

"Why would they want to kill him?" he asked.

She opened her bag and removed an objec t wrapped in a handkerchief. She unfolded th e handkerchief and placed a chunk of ore in his hand.

It was heavy, and it was literally cobwebbed wit h gold. High-grade ... high-grad e ore. "If there's much of that, you're making a mint," he said.

"That is just the point, Mr. Shevlin. The min e barely pays for itself. There are some months when i t does not even do that. That piece of ore cam e to me in a package with no return address an d no comment. It was then I sent the ma n to investigate."

She hesitated. "Mr. Shevlin, when I wa s growing up I lived in California and Nevada , where there were mining towns and cattle towns, and in comin g here I passed through several such towns. I do no t believe I have ever seen a town so prosperous a s this one."

"What is it you want me to do?"

"I believe a rich strike has been made , and that my gold is being high-graded ... stolen.

I want you to find out if this is true; and if i t is, who is buying the gold, and where it is kept.

Then"--she lifted her eyes to his--"I wan t you to stop the high-grading and recover the gold."

He gave her an incredulous smile. "I d on't know what Brazos told you, Mis s Tennison, but I don't believe any one ma n could do what you ask."

"You can do it."

He crossed to the window and looked down at th e town. Until she mentioned the town's prosperity , he had not given it a thought. His mind had bee n too preoccupied with his own weariness when h e arrived, and with the problem of Eli Patterson; ye t some subtle atmosphere about the town had worrie d him, and now he knew what it was.

Brazos had phrased it perfectly: e verybody rolling in money, and everybody scared.

But how did you fight corruption when all wer e corrupt?

Turning back from the window, he asked, "Yo u said somebody wanted to buy the mine?"

"The first offer came from Hollister and Evans.

That was quite a while ago. I refused to sell. Th e second came a few months later from a ma n named Mason. He wished, he said, to clos e down the mine and reactivate the Rafter H
c attle company.

"The Mason offer was repeated a short tim e ago, but the letter was from the Rafter Mining Company , saying their man Mason had made a previou s offer. It was simply repeated in the sam e terms."

"Who signed that letter?"

"A man named Ben Stowe."

Ben Stowe!

The last time Shevlin had seen Stowe he wa s living in an abandoned homesteader's shack , rustling a few head of cattle, and riding with a wild bunch. And now he was offering to buy a mine!

"What you say about the town," he said softly , "is true--it is prosperous. My guess woul d be that everybody connected with the mine i s high-grading, if the stuff is actually there, and ever y place of business in town is taking gold i n trade, or buying it. As to recovering your gold , I'd say it would be impossible. By now it must b e lost in the normal channels of trade."

"I do not think so."

She leaned forward, her hands in her lap.

"Mr. Shevlin, I believe all that gold i s right here in Rafter. I believe someone wit h capital--perhaps the people who wish to buy the mine--ar e buying the gold from the stores and holding it. I b elieve they intend to buy the mine with my gold , then dispose of the remainder after they own th e property."

She got to her feet. "Mr. Shevlin, gol d is not easy to conceal; and as you undoubtedly know, th e gold from no two mines is exactly the same.

It is difficult to dispose of gold without it bein g known, and no sales have been reported from this area , no gold has appeared that cannot be accounted for.

"You think I am only a foolish girl, bu t believe me, Mr. Shevlin, my grandfather treate d me like a son in many respects, and among othe r things he taught me a great deal about business , and a great deal about gold and the marketing of gold.

"The Pinkertons checked on gold sales fo r me, beyond what I could do through the normal channel s of exchange. I do not believe the Pinkerton s could find out what is happening here. I believe i t will take somebody with local knowledge."

He glanced at her with respect. This was a girl who knew her own mind, and was uncommonl y shrewd along with it.

High-grading, the stealing of rich ore from a min e or smelter, was always difficult to control.

Opening a change room where the miners changed fro m their digging clothes to their outside clothes could sto p some of it, and checking lunchboxes or canteen s could, too, but where there was high-grade ore there woul d always be ways to steal it.

If what she believed was true, the men wh o controlled the working of the mine must have deliberatel y permitted the miners their chance to high-grade i n order to involve them, and the community itself, in th e crime of high-grading. Then the operators of th e mine simply kept the vastly greater amount o f gold for themselves, allowing only a small amoun t to go through legitimate channels, and this smal l amount was bought from the storekeepers to keep it out o f circulation.

It required capital, rigid control, an d some shrewd operation to make it work. Once the min e was owned by the operators of the high-grade ring, the n they might take other steps; certainly they mus t realize such an operation could not long continue.

"I will pay, Mr. Shevlin," the girl wen t on. "I will pay well. I will give you ten pe r cent of all you recover, and if my calculation s are near the truth the recovery might reach a half a million dollars."

"You'd have to trust me. What's to keep me fro m locating the gold and keeping it for myself?"

She smiled at him. "Mr. Shevlin, you have a very bad reputation. You are said to have stole n cattle, it is said that you are a gunfighter, that yo u have engaged in public brawls, that you were onc e friendly with the very men who are robbing me. I have hear d all that. Nevertheless, I believe in you."

She gathered her skirts and stepped to the door.

"You see, Mr. Shevlin, Brazos was not th e only man who told me you could be trusted. Lon g ago my uncle told my grandfather, when I wa s present, that there was one man in Rafter who could b e trusted under any circumstances. He said that n o matter what anybody said, Mike Shevlin wa s an honorable man, and an honest man."

Now who the hell would say a thing like that about him?

Turning away, he walked to the window again to kee p her from seeing how much her words had touched him.

"Your uncle can't have known me very well," h e said.

"He thought he did, Mr. Shevlin, and h e believed in you. I think you knew him very well , Mr. Shevlin. His name was Eli Patterson."

Chapter
3

The storm had broken. Scattered cloud s raced across the sky, and between them the stars shone like th e lights of far-off towns.

He stood alone on the wet street, wit h enemies all about him. It was after midnight, an d only a few lights looked out upon th e rain-darkened walks, the muddy streets, and th e blank faces of the false-fronted stores acros s the way.

Now, at night, it might have been any littl e western town, but it was not just any town. It was a town built on deceit and theft, a tow n corrupted by its own greed, a town that had arrive d at this point without realizing how deep were the depth s into wh it descended.

Mike Shevlin looked gloomily from under th e black brim of his hat. He looked upon the tow n with no hatred. Here his best friend had been killed , brutally shot down in an alley because he had th e courage to stand against evil. But Mike Shevli n knew all too well how easy it was to accept tha t first dishonest dollar, and he knew all th e excuses a man could give himself.

After all, a man would say, the gold comes ou t of the ground, why shouldn't I get some of it?

Everybody else is getting it, why shouldn't I?

There were a multitude of easy excuses , useful in all such cases; but the trouble was tha t evil can plant a seed, and the seed can grow. Fro m easy acceptance of a minor misdemeanor, one ca n come to acceptance of a minor crime, and from a mino r crime to a major one. And this town had no w accepted robbery on a large scale ... perhap s larger than any one man knew, except for th e leaders. And they had accepted murder.

Thereby came fear. For murder breed s murder, and those who have killed once for gain, wil l kill again; and those who have agreed to ignore a murder, will ignore another if it is to protec t some small security of their own--property, o r guilt they themselves possess.

Mike Shevlin knew this because there had been a time when he had himself been guilty. It ha d seemed a great lark to run off a few steer s to sell for a spree in town. And then suddenly h e had wondered how he would feel if those had been hi s father's cattle, or his own.