“Why do you suppose Inman Walker sent me here to check up on you guys?” Rock asked. Inside his unbuttoned coat, his thumb slid over the hammer of his Remington.
Shaner’s rifle lowered an inch.
“What?” he asked, not trying to hide his surprise.
“You heard me,” said Rock. “Are you stupid enough to believe I just dropped in out of the blue? Walker sent me.” He stopped and said, “Or am I wasting my time? You don’t even know who Walker is?”
“Oh, I know Secretary Walker is our setup man in the mint,” said Shaner. “I’ve met him in person.” His rifle lowered another inch.
Information verified…, Rochenbach told himself. Now to get out of here alive.
“Then you know why I’m here,” he said. “I’m here to find out why Walker didn’t get his cut from the Denver-Platte Canyon ore train robbery last month.”
Shaner looked puzzled and lowered his rifle a little more.
“You’re talking crazy,” he said. “We didn’t rob that train last month!”
“Maybe you and your pals here didn’t,” said Rochenbach. “But Grolin did the job. He had men from somewhere helping him. Maybe he held out on you and others. But it doesn’t matter. Walker expects to get his cut—so do I.”
“Damn!” said Shaner. “I don’t know whether to believe you or not, Rochenbach.” He lowered his rifle all the way to waist-high, the barrel pointing down at the floor.
Rochenbach stepped sideways to him. The Remington slid from his belly holster inside his coat, cocked at arm’s length.
“It doesn’t matter now,” he said quietly. He squeezed the trigger; the hammer fell. A streak of blue-orange fire belched from the open car door. The explosion caused the six horses to jerk against their tied reins. They whined and snorted fearfully in protest.
“Settle down, fellows,” Rock said to the skittish animals, walking toward them. “We’ve got a long ride ahead of us tonight.”
Along the seasoned loading platform, the sound banged like a forging hammer on steel and echoed off through the woods.
Two hundred yards up the winding rocky trail, Grolin jerked his galloping horse to a halt and swung in around on the trail.
“That was a pistol shot,” said Spiller, sliding to a halt, turning his horse beside him.
“Lionel Sharp?” Grolin called out to the new man.
“Right here, boss,” Sharp said, proud to hear Grolin call his name.
Grolin budged his horse over to him and said, “Where is that pistol I gave you to hold for me?”
Sharp patted his pocket and realized the Remington was gone. Uh-oh…!
“I don’t have it, boss!” he said, his voice already trembling.
Grolin stared back into the darkness.
“Want me to go back and see what…?” Spiller said, his rifle in hand.
“I already know what,” Grolin said. “Adios, Shaner,” he said in the direction of the depot. He looked Sharp up and down, turned his horse and rode away. Sharp started to turn his horse, but Spiller grabbed its reins.
“Not so fast, fool,” he said. “This is as far as you make it.”
Chapter 19
Rochenbach pulled the gold ingot bar from his boot well and looked at it in the glow of the lantern light. The two-inch-by-three-and-a-half-inch shipping ingot glittered in the flickering light. He knew that the only purpose of an unmarked shipping ingot was its ease of transport and handling until it reached its final destination. There it would be resmelted, weighed, marked and stamped respectively.
He hefted the ingot in the palm of his fingerless leather glove. It looked right; it felt right. Yet… He reached down, pulled a knife from a sheath on the dead outlaw’s gun belt. He carved a corner of the soft metal, making the cut large enough to see into the core of its quarter-inch thickness.
He studied the ingot closely, noting to himself that for all its weight and glitter it was nothing more than a gold-plated utility slug—a bar useful for weight balancing and exhibition, nothing more.
Turning the plated ingot in his palm, he felt a sense of relief. It was good to learn that he hadn’t opened the big safe door and allowed hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of gold to fall into the hands of thieves.
This was the reply to his telegraph. Without receiving his identification code at the end of his message, the Denver field office chose the safest and most reasonable action. They had replaced the gold shipping ingots with gold-plated slugs. How had they done that without Inman Walker knowing?
Who knows? He shrugged. He wasn’t the only Secret Service agent operating west of the Missouri.
But why tonight? he asked himself. Why not Thursday—the night he’d told them the robbery would happen?
That was something he would have to resolve later for himself, he thought, squeezing the sliced corner of the ingot back together and gripping it in his gloved hand. Right now, Grolin and his men still had to be stopped, real gold or not. They’d taken a train by force, held its engineer hostage and stolen a shipment of U.S. gold en route from one federal mint to another.
You’ve had a busy night, Grolin, he said to himself. Shoving the shipping ingot into his coat pocket, Bryce Shaner’s rifle in hand, Rochenbach led the six horses out of the freight car onto the loading dock.
With a coiled rope he’d taken down from a wall peg in the freight car, he strung the horses into a line. He led the string single file across the platform to where Shaner’s horse stood waiting at a hitch rail for its rider to return. The lone horse piqued its ears at him and the unfamiliar string.
Rock checked Shaner’s rifle and shoved it down into the empty saddle boot. Then he unhitched the horse and stepped up into the saddle.
Leading the horses down the wide ramp and off the loading platform, he turned onto a narrow path running parallel along the rails. He followed the trail through the grainy purple darkness onto a wider trail that wound through the pines and down over a long wooded hillside.
Once he’d cleared the pine woodlands, he rode at an easy gallop. He kept the long dark ribbon of rails in sight over his right shoulder; he searched and listened intently as five miles slipped beneath the horses’ hooves.
Staying parallel to the winding black rail clearing, he rode a mile farther before he slowed his horse and the string to a halt and stared down onto the black rails snaking beneath him.
There they are. He watched as a row of dark figures on foot crossed along a rolling edge of land against a stretch of purple starlit sky.
The posse…? Yes, he was sure of it, he told himself. Now the trick would be to get their horses to them without either blowing his cover or getting his head shot off. He’d spent too much time establishing himself as an outlaw, a long rider who would do most anything for money. He wasn’t about to throw all that away—ruin my bad reputation, he thought with a wry smile.
Besides, he’d learned from experience that if he told them he was an agent for the U.S. government, they wouldn’t believe him anyway.
But here’s something they will believe…, he thought to himself, nudging his horse, leading the string behind him.
On the rail tracks, Captain Boone halted his men with a raised hand in the darkness.
“I heard it too, Captain,” Sergeant Goodrich whispered, a step behind him.
The six turned in the dark, their carbines in hand, and searched the treed hillside to their right as the sound of hooves moved closer.