“Bo! Bo, you all right?”
That worried shout came from Scratch, who came running down the street from the livery stable with both Remingtons in his hands. Bo motioned for him to slow down. “Friend of mine, Marshal,” he told Peterson. “Nothing to get alarmed about.”
“Well, tell him to put those fancy hoglegs up,” Peterson snapped. “I don’t like people waving guns around in my town.”
“Pouch those irons, Scratch,” Bo said as his friend came to a stop in front of the bank. “The trouble’s all over.”
Scratch hesitated, then slid the long-barreled revolvers back into leather. “What in blazes happened?” he asked. “I go off to commune with nature for a spell, and when I come out, the fella at the livery stable tells me you’re down here fightin’ the Battle of San Jacinto all over again.”
“Somebody tried to rob the bank,” Bo explained.
Scratch looked at the legs hanging out the broken window. “I reckon he saw the error of his ways?”
“You could say that.”
Mosely took hold of Bo’s arm. “Come inside, Mr. Creel,” he invited. “Come inside. I know it’s awfully early in the morning, but I have a bottle of brandy in my desk, and I think this occasion warrants breaking into it.” He looked at Peterson. “Ralph, you’ll see about getting the undertaker down here to, ah, clean up this mess?”
The marshal nodded. “Looks like you need to have the sawbones take a look at your head, too, Frank. I’ll send for Doc Holmes. You’ll need the carpenter to board up that window, too, until you can replace it.”
“If you’ll tend to all that, I’d appreciate it.”
“Sure thing,” the lawman agreed. The town banker was one of the most important men in any settlement, and most folks liked to stay on his good side, even the local star packer.
“Come along,” Mosely said to Bo. “Your friend, too.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Mosely,” Bo said, “I think we’d rather have some coffee and something to eat instead of that brandy.”
Scratch grinned. “Now, Bo, don’t go offendin’ the man by turnin’ down his offer of a drink.”
“Once we’ve settled the matter of that reward, you’ll have plenty of money for coffee and breakfast,” Mosely said.
Scratch licked his lips and repeated, “Reward?”
Bo said, “Grab that money bag and bring it in, Scratch. I want to find out what stopped the first shot of mine.”
As it turned out, there was a smaller pouch inside the bag, packed tightly with double eagles. The .44-40 slug from Bo’s Winchester had struck the coins as such an angle that it penetrated several of them before its force was finally spent. The rest of the bag was full of greenbacks.
“He didn’t actually clean out the vault,” Mosely said as he sat at his desk, looking at the spot on the floor just inside the window where the dead robber’s body had sprawled until the undertaker arrived to remove it. There was a dark stain on the highly polished wood. “But he got enough that it would have been a severely damaging blow to the bank to lose it.”
The doctor had shown up as well and cleaned and bandaged the gash on Mosely’s forehead. The local handyman had swept up the broken glass and was now measuring the window so he could see about nailing up some boards to cover it.
A short, squat glass with a little brandy in it sat on the desk in front of Mosely. Scratch held a similar glass and sipped the amber liquid in it. Bo had turned down the drink.
Mosely picked up some bills from the pile he had dumped onto the desk from the bag. “I want you to have this,” he told Bo as he extended the cash across the desk. “You deserve it for saving the bank’s money…and my life.”
“He probably wouldn’t have killed you,” Bo said. “But with all that lead flying around, you might’ve gotten hit by a stray bullet, especially if he’d made it back into the bank with you as his hostage.”
Scratch reached out and took the bills. “What Bo means to say, Mr. Mosely, is thanks. We’re much obliged to you for your kindliness and your generosity—” He stopped and let out a low whistle as he riffled through the money. “There’s five hundred bucks here!”
“A small price to pay for a man’s life,” the banker said solemnly.
“That’s not depositors’ money, is it?” Bo asked.
Mosely shook his head. “I’ll replace it from the bank’s operating fund. Don’t worry, Mr. Creel. None of the depositors will lose a penny today…thanks to you.”
“In that case…” Bo nodded. “Thank you.”
Marshal Peterson came into the bank carrying a piece of paper. As he walked over to Mosely’s desk, opening the gate in the railing along the way, Bo recognized the paper as a wanted poster. The marshal placed the paper on the desk and asked, “Recognize this gent?”
Bo looked at the harsh, beard-stubbled face drawn on the reward dodger and knew good and well where he’d seen it recently. “That’s the fella who tried to rob the bank.”
“Yep. Bill Page, sometimes called Indiana Bill. Wanted in three states and four territories for bank robbery and murder. There’s a five-hundred-dollar reward for him, dead or alive. I thought I’d seen the jasper before.”
“Five hundred dollars?” Scratch said with a frown. “That’s all he’s worth, charged with all them robberies and killin’s?”
The marshal shrugged. “I guess they were small banks and he didn’t kill anybody all that important. Anyway, five hundred dollars is nothin’ to sneeze at.”
“Especially when you combine it with the reward I’m paying,” Mosely put in. “You have a nice cool thousand dollars coming to you, Mr. Creel. What are you going to do with it?”
Bo rubbed his chin. “Well, we still haven’t gotten that coffee and breakfast, and there’s a little debt to settle up with the fella who owns the livery stable…”
“Johnny Burford?” the marshal asked. “Watch yourself around him. He’d steal pennies out of a blind man’s cup.”
“What about the other nine hundred and ninety-five dollars?” Mosely asked.
“Scratch and I were thinking about taking a little trip up north,” Bo said.
CHAPTER 6
“So that’s it,” Scratch said as he and Bo reined their horses to a halt atop a ridge a couple of weeks later and looked down at the settlement below them. “Mankiller, Colorado.”
Durango lay a day’s ride behind them. Off to the left, the Animas River snaked its sparkling course through a narrow valley. Farther to the northeast towered snowcapped Mount Wilson and Lizard Head Pass. A number of other rugged peaks in the San Juan range loomed all around them. It was pretty country, no doubt about it, but Bo and Scratch were more interested in what lay below the surface.
Gold.
They had heard in Durango that the boom was still going on in Mankiller, and even if they hadn’t, they would have been able to tell that much from what was happening in the streets of the settlement. Wagons, men on horseback, and more men on foot clogged those streets. The boardwalks were equally crowded, although without the wagon and horse traffic.
Bo wouldn’t have been surprised to see some drunken miner ride a horse right up onto the boardwalk, or even into one of the numerous saloons that lined the street. In Durango, the Texans had also heard about how Mankiller was wide open and lawless. Saloon shoot-outs, rampant prostitution, lynchings, and murders were the order of the day. In this boomtown, getting killed was as easy as plucking a dandelion.
Mankiller sprawled over a hillside, surrounded by pine trees. Other trees had been cleared to expand the town; stumps were still visible here and there in the streets. The three main streets ran upward for several blocks, starting at the base of the slope. Side streets were laid out across the slope.
Most of the buildings were frame structures, made from rough boards probably whipsawed out of the trees that had been felled to make room for them. There were still some tents and tar paper shacks, though, and they were probably some of the original dwellings in town. At the other end of the spectrum were several solid-looking brick structures that appeared to be built to last. Someone, at least, believed that Mankiller would have a life beyond this gold-fueled boom.