“Take it or leave it,” O’Hanrahan said around the unlit cigar still clenched between his teeth. “It’ll be cold, but it’ll wash some of that muck off.”
“We’ll take it,” Scratch said. “I reckon I’d rather freeze to death than keep on smellin’ like this.”
O’Hanrahan filled the bucket in the stream, then carried it over to the Texans. “Who’s first?”
“It doesn’t really matter,” Bo said. “It’s going to take several buckets for each of us, at the very least.”
“You’re right about that.” With that, O’Hanrahan lifted the bucket and upended it over Bo’s head. The river water poured down and washed over Bo, dislodging some of the mud. It was just a start, though.
By the time half an hour had gone by, both of the Texans were soaking wet and shivering. Their teeth chattered. The ground around them was muddy from all the water O’Hanrahan had poured over them.
As the man stepped back after dumping a bucket of water over Scratch, he motioned toward the Animas and said, “All right, I reckon you’re clean enough now you can jump in the river and finish the job. Take those clothes off and leave them on the bank. They’ll have to be soaked and scrubbed, and even that may not be enough to get them clean. When you’re done, come inside. I’ll have a fire going in the stove and some blankets ready for you.”
“Th-th-thank you,” Bo managed to say through chattering teeth. It wasn’t all that cold. The sun was even a little warm as it shone down over the hillside. But the water from the snowmelt-fed stream had leached all the heat out of the Texans.
They hurried over to the river, stripping off their wet, filthy clothes, and dropped them on the bank before wading out into the stream. Scratch cursed as the cold water rose on his legs. Bo just took a deep breath and went under.
They scrubbed away at themselves for long minutes before they felt clean enough to come out again. Circling around the dirty clothes and dripping river water, they headed for the dugout.
O’Hanrahan met them at the doorway with blankets, which they gratefully wrapped around themselves as they stepped inside. The dugout was made of stone and logs and had a thatched roof. The floor was dirt. It was simply furnished with a potbellied stove, a rough-hewn table, a couple of chairs, and a low-slung bunk with a straw mattress. A man could eat and sleep here when he wasn’t working on his mine, but that was about all.
“Sit down at the table,” O’Hanrahan told Bo and Scratch. “I’ve got coffee on the stove. I imagine that sounds pretty good right about now.”
“You don’t know the half of it, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” Scratch said.
“Call me Francis.” He brought the coffee to them as they sat down. “If you’re enemies of the Deverys, then you’re friends with just about everybody else in this part of the country.”
“‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Bo quoted. “Is that about the size of it?”
Francis grinned. “Aye. The Deverys are well hated in these parts, except by some who try to curry favor with them. And if the truth be told, probably even they can’t stand the Deverys, either. They’re just more pragmatic about it.”
“What makes that bunch so powerful?” Scratch asked. “Just the fact that they own some land around here?”
“Not just some land,” Francis corrected. “They own the whole town and this whole side of the valley for a good five miles. In other words, all the land where that big vein of gold is located.”
Scratch stared at their host for a second before he said, “Well, hell! Why aren’t they gettin’ rich by minin’ the blasted stuff?”
Francis poured a tin cup of coffee for himself. “Because that would be too much hard work for the Deverys. They’d rather get rich by raking off fifty percent of everything the miners take out of the ground. That’s not including the hefty cut they take from all the businesses in the settlement. That arrangement is in the lease of everybody who moved in there.”
“Wait a minute,” Bo said. “How in the world did they manage to get a jump on everybody else and claim all that land after the gold strike?”
Francis shook his head. “They didn’t claim it after the gold strike. They already owned it. They’d been farming here for several years before anybody found any gold.”
“Farmin’?” Scratch repeated. “This ain’t good territory at all for farmin’, I’d say. Of course, I wouldn’t really know, not havin’ done much of it in my life.”
“Oh, it’s not,” Francis said. “Not at all. From what I’ve heard, the family just barely eked out a living, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a little rustling and the like to help them get by. Jackson Devery and his sons came here from Kansas, and I’ve got a hunch they pulled up stakes and moved west because the law made it too hot for them back where they came from.”
Bo had only seen Luke Devery and his cousin Thad, but he didn’t doubt that Francis was right. Luke and Thad appeared to be brutal, vicious men, the sort who wouldn’t be above committing a crime. For that matter, Bo was fairly certain that Luke and Thad had been among the men who’d attacked them at the livery stable and robbed them, and the others had probably been members of the Devery family, too.
He indulged his curiosity by asking, “The fella who owns Edgar’s Livery Stable in town…would Devery happen to be his last name?”
Francis nodded. “He’s Jackson Devery’s younger brother. He came out here right after the town got started. That was before the gold strike, too. Jackson and his boys built that big house at the top of Main Street. You’ve seen it?”
“Yeah,” Scratch said.
“That may have been the last real work they did. After a while, Jackson sent word back to his kinfolks in Kansas, and some of them came out to join him. They started the town. Even now, you can tell an original Devery building.”
“They look like they’re about to fall down,” Bo guessed.
Francis laughed. “I see you paid attention when you rode in.” He sobered. “Then a cowboy who was just passing through here found a gold nugget where there’d been a rockslide not long before, and he told people about it, and, well, you know what happened next. There was a big rush, and not just miners, either. All the sort of folks who flock into every boomtown showed up, from the gamblers and whores and saloon owners to the honest businessmen. Didn’t matter what they had in mind. When they got here, they found that if they wanted to go into business, they had to promise the Deverys a healthy share of the profits. Same was true for the prospectors, like me.”
“You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Scratch commented.
Francis shrugged. “I was a newspaperman at one time, and the habit of asking questions never got out of my blood. I talk to people, and they seem to want to talk to me. Most of them, anyway. Hard to get a word out of Jackson. He doesn’t come out of that old house much. But Edgar likes to talk.”
Bo sipped his coffee, relishing the warmth of it. The chill was mostly gone from his bones now. He said, “I don’t imagine folks like it very much when the Deverys carve off half the pie for themselves without doing any work for it.”
“No, of course they don’t. But the Deverys own the ground, so what can they do?”
“You made it sound a while ago like the Deverys have committed crimes. You implied that they had killed people and thrown the bodies in that hog pen, the way they did with me and Scratch.”
Francis frowned. “I don’t know that for a fact. But I do know that some of the business owners who have complained too much about the Deverys’ share have wound up missing. No one’s ever seen them again.”
Scratch said, “Down in Texas, folks’d call in the Rangers if things like that started happenin’.”
“This isn’t Texas. If the Deverys have broken any laws, they’ve covered it up.” A bitter laugh came from Francis. “Anyway, if you’d met our local lawman, Biscuits O’Brien, you’d know it’s not very likely he’d ever stand up to the likes of Jackson Devery and his sons and relatives. Biscuits is such a pathetic excuse for a human being that I hate to claim him as a fellow son of Ireland.”