News of the deaths had quickly travelled throughout the Front Range mining towns; the newspaper reported that miners across the state had seen large, man-like monsters capable of ripping body parts asunder and drinking victims’ blood directly from their veins. An artist’s rendering of one such creature appeared on page five: a hairy version of a large man with strangely human features, especially around the eyes, which conveyed a sense of homicidal madness.
O’Reilly laughed at the absurdity: superstitious people would latch on to anything outlandish when confronted with a situation they were unable to explain. The real explanation was most likely simple: a robbery, even though Horace Tabor’s ownership of those mines was unquestioned and only the most ignorant of claim jumpers would attempt a takeover in that valley. Miners working the Silver Shadow told investigators they had hauled a large quantity of silver that week, but none was found at the site.
O’Reilly’s reading was interrupted by the sound of the door opening; a cool breeze elbowed its way through the lobby. Snow was certainly coming. He peered through the thin vertical bars of the teller window: a man, probably a miner, carrying two bulky, grey canvas bags in each hand.
The bank manager hadn’t heard of any large strikes in Empire or Georgetown in the past weeks; such news here in the Springs always reached him within a day. He watched with anticipation as the man hefted his bags onto the thickly varnished pine counter. ‘There’s more,’ he said quietly, and turned back towards the street, returning a moment later with four more bags. These he placed carefully on the floor.
‘Looks like y’all had a big strike,’ O’Reilly mused aloud. ‘I hadn’t heard anything around town. Which shaft did you bring this out of?’ The miner remained silent, but O’Reilly was not really surprised. There were hundreds of mines between Idaho Springs and Georgetown alone, and most of the men refused to discuss the location of their strikes for fear claim jumpers or bandits would track them back to their camps. O’Reilly didn’t press the issue.
‘Well, anyway,’ he said, looking over at the door, ‘where’s the rest of your team?’
‘I’m alone.’
‘Alone? They sent you down here alone? Which company do you work for? Do they have an account here? I mean, I can weigh this, but until it’s refined I can’t even give you credit unless you’re willing to come way down off the New York price per ounce. Your company’s probably got credit, though. What’s the name on the account?’
‘I’m alone. There is no account. I wish to open one today.’ The miner indicated the bags and said, ‘This is already refined.’
O’Reilly was silent for a moment, then he laughed. ‘Millie put you up to this? Or was it Jake? I know I had a few too many in there Thursday, but this is just too much.’ The bank manager made his way through the door adjoining the lobby and quickly crossed the floor to where the miner stood silently, surrounded by his eight large bags. They looked filled near to bursting.
He reached for one, then thought twice. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Go ahead,’ the miner replied, removing a glove from his right hand. His left remained sheathed in worn leather.
O’Reilly untied the cord holding one of the bags closed and felt his heart race. ‘Sheezus.’ It was silver, an enormous cache of silver. The refined ore still looked dirty, and he could smell the vestiges of burned quicksilver, but he knew that there must be twenty thousand dollars’-worth of the ore right here in his lobby.
His speech took on a more businesslike tone. ‘You’re alone, and you rode into town with eight bags of refined silver? You wear a holster but no handgun, and no one is with you to make certain you don’t run off with their hard-earned strike? And you tell me again you don’t work for a mining company? You just want to start up an account.’
The man stared at O’Reilly impassively.
‘Are you planning to just stand here while I spend the rest of the day and evening assaying this load?’
The man repeated, ‘I’m alone, and I’d like to start an account.’
‘Well-’ O’Reilly looked again at the bags and nodded. ‘Okay. It’ll take me a goodly while to get this together, and there are a few forms I need you to fill out. If you can’t write, I can talk you through them, and you can make your mark. But either way, we’ll get this done. And I swear I’ll be straight with you, if you want to deposit this rather than just have an assay, I’ll give you a good price against the New York standard. New York was in the paper a couple weeks ago at 132 cents per ounce. With this much silver, I can give you-’ O’Reilly furiously calculated how much the bank could make selling this at or near the New York price. ‘I can give you 122 cents an ounce. Now that’s right fair. You can head on over to Millie’s or wherever and ask any of the silver men here in town, and they’ll tell you that’s fair. It’s a bit more than I’m used to moving through here-’ which was a lie. It was the largest cache of precious metal O’Reilly had ever seen in one place. ‘But I’ll get you a good price, and you’re going to be a very rich man.’
‘I need a safe deposit box as well,’ the miner added quietly. He had not moved since placing the last four bags on the lobby floor. He stared, grim-faced, across the counter, waiting for O’Reilly to tell him what to do.
‘Well, we got those, too, but they’re a bit extra, two dollars a month.’
‘Take it out of the account.’
‘Yessir, we can do that. It’s just another form that allows me to take that money out on the first of each month. You don’t ever have to think about it, and I’m sure it’ll be the end of my lifetime before a two-dollar charge would drain this deposit to any noticeable degree.’ He went to pick up the first four bags, but they were much too heavy.
‘Christ! Oh, excuse me, but my, these are heavy,’ he gasped as he half-lifted, half-dragged the bags one by one through the door to the rear of the building. He suggested, ‘Why don’t you run out and get something to eat, and when you get back I’ll have the forms together, and I can give you an idea how much you have here. I can’t believe you carried these in alone. You must be a strong one. Me, I’ve never been in a mine. I don’t own any clothes suitable for mining.’ He chuckled, remembering how Chapman had hooked him with that same phrase.
‘I’ll complete the papers now, and I need a safe deposit box.’
O’Reilly was getting aggravated with his decidedly odd customer: the man carried hundreds of pounds of silver into the bank as if it weighed nothing, but didn’t offer to help carry it to the scales in the back. He was doing his best to be accommodating, but the miner shrugged off all his attempts to be helpful or friendly.
Then the bank manager thought again of the huge quantity of ore and swallowed his ill-humour. ‘All right, I’ll get the papers for you, and begging your pardon, but can you write, or should we go through them together?’
‘Bring me the papers. I’ll write them here now,’ was the toneless reply.
‘Sorry about that, but we have a lot come in here who can’t fill out the papers. But of course whoever you work for would send someone who had some schooling down with such a large haul.’ He had to work for a company; no one man could mine, refine and haul this much silver from any of the mines in the canyon without a team of at least twenty men.
O’Reilly produced the account and safe deposit box forms and returned to weighing the silver and calculating its net worth. Most miners or mine company representatives insisted on watching the weighing and checking the calculations themselves, but this fellow hadn’t asked, so O’Reilly didn’t offer. Let the odd bird catch hell from his foreman tonight, he thought as he struggled to lift another bag onto the pine table against the back wall of his office. He could skim quite a bit off the top of this weigh-in, and perhaps pocket a large sum for himself, but he would have trouble selling anything he stole. All the buyers who made the trip west from Denver knew he had never been in a mine in his life – and that Chapman paid him in cash. O’Reilly put the thought out of his mind.