Heck, even Old Pancake was real.
“This be our mountain and our mine and nobody digs here without our permission!”
Peter O’Riley turned beard and body to his partner, the mightily mustachioed Patrick McLaughlin, and then looked back down at the quartet of angry gnomes.
“Now, now, little friends, maybe we can work something out. What if we agreed to mine the strike for shares? Now, wouldn’t that be lovely?”
“No shares. Not lovely.” Norvalst, chieftain of the gnomes, wore suspendered pants, work boots, a long-sleeved white shirt woven of some coarse eldritch material, and a brown cap. His eyebrows were as white and heavy as his shirt, his mien uncompromising and foreboding, and his nose Herculean. His chest was broad, and downsized muscles bulged beneath the sleeves of his shirt.
O’Riley tried another tack. “We’ll take just a quarter of the diggin’s.”
“No quarter. We give none and take none.” A second gnome, stockier and even more muscular than his chief, stepped forward. He held a miniature iron pick, threateningly. “No shares. Our mountain, our mines.”
“We’ll throw in whiskey.” O’Riley leaned over as far as he could go, until his lean jeaned form was all but face-to-face with the gnomic headman. “Lots of whiskey.”
Tiny eyes nearly vanished beneath enormous ivory brows. “No whiskey!” His tone softened ever so slightly. “If you had some real brännvin, now… No! No shares! Now get off our mountain!”
And with that he brought the flat of his small but surprisingly heavy shovel down square and hard on Peter O’Riley’s right foot.
The miner stumbled back and howled as he grabbed at his insulted toes, but his yelp of pain wasn’t half as loud as that of the battle cry of the gang of tetchy little men who now surged forward, swinging picks and hammers and shovels while shouting insults in several languages, a number of which had no honest counterpart among the nations of humankind. McLaughlin running and O’Riley hopping, the two men beat a hasty retreat down the rocky, scrub-covered slope. The enraged gnomes chased them past their diggings, through their unprepossessing camp, and halfway to the river before their anger finally subsided. At that point they broke off the pursuit and, picks and shovels a blur, seemed to melt back into the very ground itself.
His heart hammering against his ribs, McLaughlin bent over and fought to catch his breath. “Well, that’s torn it. The little whoresons don’t seem half-inclined to negotiation.”
A gasping O’Riley nodded agreement. “’Tis mightily unreasonable they are bein’, Pat. I say we toast their refusal with a few cans o’ black powder and leave the sortin’ out to the Almighty.”
“Aye. But that might damage the pit. More work for us. And there be no guarantee it would loosen their grip. Or their determination to hold on to this piece of rock.” He took a deep breath and considered the dry, uninhabited landscape. “Maybe we should try and hire us some help.”
Still breathing hard, O’Riley stretched. Joints crackled like popcorn. His expression was grim, his tone washed with bitterroot. “Sure and now that’s a fine idea, Pat. We’ll just find ourselves a few of the locals and tell ’em we need their help drivin’ a tribe o’ tiny devils off our claim.” Bending over, he held one hand palm facing downward until it was a foot off the hard ground. “This high they are, an’ miners like ourselves. ’Tis naught but a wee inconvenience that we need help with.” He straightened again. “We’d be laughed out o’ the Sierras.”
McLaughlin continued to gaze down the mountainside. “That be true enough, Peter. Though… the last time we went into town for supplies, I heard tell of a gentleman lingering hereabouts who, if the whispers and tales about him are half to be believed, might be inclined to take the reality of our difficulties to heart and without scorn.”
O’Riley sniffed. “One man? Did you not see the size of the little monsters’ army? We need many guns to fight them, Pat. Guns aplenty, and men with no fear o’ the unnatural to hold them back from using them. For this be no ordinary bit o’ intervention we’re dealin’ with.”
Still looking down the raw, rugged mountainside, McLaughlin stroked his mustache, the twin points of which drooped to below his chin. “Strange as it seems, Peter, I heard somewhat the same about this particular fellow.”
“Well, good sor, we got gnomes, sor.”
Sitting by the side of the creek that hemmed the little valley as prettily as a blue ribbon around the brim of a young girl’s bonnet, the giant in the buckskins and leather puffed thoughtfully on his meerschaum as he contemplated both the stream and his visitors’ problem. A wolf’s-head cap covered but could not constrain the mad dash of black and gray hair that spilled out behind and to the sides. While McLaughlin waited patiently and O’Riley wondered if confronting this brooding accretion of undisciplined humanity was such a good idea, Amos Malone silently pondered water, greenery, rock, and infinity.
Eventually he turned and rose. And rose, and rose, until Peter O’Riley was convinced he and his partner had made a bad decision indeed. With a smile that materialized amid a vast flush of beard, Malone put them at ease.
“What kind o’ gnomes?”
The supplicants exchanged a glance. McLaughlin spoke up. “Well now, Mr. Malone, sor, we don’t rightly know, the classification of supernatural folk not bein’ among our general store o’ expertise.”
“They’re miners, sor,” O’Riley put in. “Sittin’ on our claim, they are, and won’t get off. We offered them free shares in all our takings, we did, and they outright refused, resortin’ to hostilities to force us off what’s rightly ours.”
Malone tapped the bowl of his pipe on a rock, checked the interior, then consigned it carefully to the depths of a pocket in his enormous shirt. McLaughlin could have sworn he heard the pale graven face on the pipe let out a small cough.
“Rightly yours?”
O’Riley didn’t hesitate. “That be God’s honest truth, sor. Worked that claim for weeks now, we have. Got the proper papers an’ all. Had weak luck we did until Mother Fate took pity on us and all our hard work.” He grinned, showing a miner’s typical assortment of damaged orthodonture. “About to give up on the place, we was. Abandon the claim, as it were, when wouldn’t you know we discovered that the bottom of the pit that we’d sunk merely to collect water for our rockers was layered with gold.”
McLaughlin nodded confirmation. “Enough to make us rich right quick, it is. Or was, until these little men showed up an’ drove us off our land. Off our own claim!”
“Talk like foreigners, too,” O’Riley added darkly, conveniently discounting his own transatlantic origins.
“I see.” Malone was walking toward his horse as he spoke, compelling the miners to follow. The mountain man’s mount, McLaughlin observed, was of dimensions in keeping with that of Malone himself, though for the life of him the miner could not identify the elephantine breed. “And what is it exactly you fellers want of me?”
Once again the partners made eye talk. “There’s whispering around these parts,” McLaughlin began hesitantly, “that you, sor, are conversant with certain branches and aspects of knowledge that are denied the average man. Given our distressed circumstances, it would seem that you would be the only one hereabouts in possession of sufficient education in such matters to cope with our unique difficulty.”
Malone looked back at the miner. As he did so, McLaughlin could have sworn that the mountain man’s wolf’s cap peered down at him as well.