Gunsights

1

White Tanks: May, 1889

Moon and four Mimbre Apaches were whitewashing the agency office when the McKean girl rode up on her palomino. They appeared to have the job almost done-the adobe walls clean and shining white-and were now slapping the wash on a front porch made of new lumber that looked to be a recent addition.

The McKean girl wore a blue bandana over her hair and a blue skirt that was bunched in front of her on the saddle and hung down on the sides just past the top of her boots.

Sitting her horse, watching, she thought of India: pictures she had seen of whitewashed mud buildings on barren land and little brown men in white breechclouts and turbans-though the headpieces the Apaches wore were rusty red or brown, dark colors, and their black hair hung in strands past their shoulders. It was strange she thought of India Indians and not American Indians. Or not so strange, because this place did not seem to belong in the mountains of Arizona. Other times looking at Apaches, when she saw them close, she thought of gypsies: dark men wearing regular clothes, but in strange, colorful combinations of shirts made from dresses beneath checkered vests, striped pants tucked into high moccasins and wearing jewelry, men wearing beads and metal trinkets. The Mexicans called them barbarians. People the McKean girl knew called them red niggers and heathens.

Moon-he was saying something in a strange tongue and the Apaches, with whitewash smeared over their bare skin, were laughing. She had never heard an Apache laugh, nor had even thought of them laughing before this. Coming here was like visiting a strange land.

One of the Apaches saw her and said something to Moon. He turned from his painting and came down from the porch as the Apaches watched. He looked strange himself: suspenders over his bare, hairy chest, his body pure white but his forearms weathered brown, like he was wearing long gloves. He was looking at her leg, her thigh beneath the skirt, as he approached.

She expected him to pat the mare and pretend to be interested in her, saying how's Goldie. But he didn't. He looked from her leg up to her face, squinting in the sun, and said, “You getting anxious?”

“It's been seven months,” Katy McKean said. “If you've changed your mind I want to know.”

“I've been building our house,” Moon said.

The McKean girl looked at the whitewashed adobe, and the stock pens, the outpost on the barren flats, dressed with a flagpole flying the stars and stripes. Like a model post office.

“That?” she said.

“Christ, no,” Moon said. “That's not a house, that's a symbol. Our house is seven miles up the draw, made of 'dobe plaster and stone. Front porch is finished and a mud fence is being put up now.”

“You like front porches,” the McKean girl said. “Well, they must've given you what you wanted. What do you do in return?”

“Keep the peace. Count heads. I'm a high-paid tally hand is what I am.”

“Tell them jokes, like you were doing?”

“See eye to eye,” Moon said. “A man catches his wife in the bushes with some other fella-you know what he does? He cuts the end of her nose off. The wife's mother gets upset and tells the police to arrest the husband and punish him and the police dump it in my lap.”

“And what do you do?”

“Tell the woman she looks better with a short nose-I don't know what I do,” Moon said. “I live near them-not with them-and try not to change their customs too much.”

“Like moving to a strange heathen land,” the McKean girl said, unconsciously touching her nose.

“Well, Christian people, they caught a woman in adultery they used to stone her to death. Customs change in time.”

“But they never do anything to the man,” the McKean girl said.

“Ask your dad, the old philosopher, about that one,” Moon said. “Ask him if it's all right for you to come live among the heathens.”

“When?”

“Next fall sometime,” Moon said. “October.”

“Next month,” the McKean girl said, “the third Saturday in June at St.John the Apostle's, ten A.M. Who's gonna be your best man, one of these little dark fellas?”

The wedding took place the fourth Saturday in June and the best man was Brendan Early: Bren looking at the bride in church, looking at her in the dining room of the Charles Crooker Hotel where the reception was held, still not believing she had chosen quiet Dana Moon. It wasn't that Bren had sought her hand and been rejected. He had not gotten around to asking her; though it had always been in the back of his mind he might easily marry her someday. Right now, as Dana's wife, she was the best-looking girl he had ever seen, and the cleanest-looking, dressed in white with her blonde hair showing. And now it was too late. Amazing. Like he'd blinked his eyes and two years had passed. They asked him what he was doing these days and he said, well (not about to tell these industrious people he was making a living as a minecamp cardplayer), he was looking into a mining deal at the present time-saying it because he had in his pocket the title to a staked-out claim he'd won in a $2,000-call poker game. Yes, he was in mining now.

And told others on the Helvetia stage-pushed by a nagging conscience or some curious urge, having seen his old chum settling down with a wife he thought he would someday have. Time was passing him by and it wasn't the ticket for a gentleman graduate of the U.S. Military Academy to be making a living dealing faro or peaking at hole cards. Why not look into this claim he now owned? He had title and a signed assay report that indicated a pocket of high-yield gold ore if not a lode.

Starting out on that return trip to nowhere he was in mining. Before the stage had reached its destination Bren Early was in an altogether different situation.

2

The Benson-Helvetia Stage: June, 1889

Three very plain-looking ladies who had got off the train from an Eastern trip had so much baggage, inside and out, there was only room for Bren Early and one other passenger: a fifty-year-old dandy who wore a cavalry mustache, his hat brim curved up on one side, and carried a cane with a silver knob.

Bren Early and the Dandy sat next to each other facing the plain-looking, chattering ladies who seemed excitable and nervous and were probably sweating to death in their buttoned-up velvet travel outfits. Facing them wasn't so bad; Bren could look out the window at the countryside moving past in the rickety, rattling pounding of the stagecoach; but the Dandy, with his leather hatbox and travel bag, lounged in a way that took up more than half the seat, sticking his leg out at an angle and forcing Bren Early to sit against the sideboards. Bren nudged the Dandy's leg to acquire more room and the Dandy said, “If you don't mind, sir,” sticking his leg out again.

“I do,” Bren Early said, “since I paid for half this bench.”

“And I paid in receiving a wound to this leg in the war,” the Dandy said. “So, if you don't mind.”

The ladies gave him sympathetic looks and one of them arranged her travel case so the Dandy could prop his leg on it. The Dandy had a cane, yes, but Bren Early had seen the man walk out of the Benson station to the coach without a limp or faltering gait. Then one of the ladies asked him whom he had served with.

The Dandy said, “I had the honor of serving with the Texas Brigade, Madam, attached to General Longstreet's command, and received my wound at the Battle of the Wilderness, May 6, 1864. Exactly twenty-five years ago last month.”

Bren Early listened, thinking, Ask him a question, he gives you plenty of answer. One of the ladies said it must have been horrible being wounded in battle and said she was so thankful she was a woman.

“It was ill fate,” the Dandy said, “to be wounded in victory while giving the enemy cold steel, routing them, putting to flight some of the most highly regarded regiments in Yankeedom. But I have no regrets. The fortunes of war sent a minié ball through my leg and an Army wagon delivered me to the hospital at Belle Plain.”

“Whose wagon?” Bren Early said.

The Dandy gave him a superior look and said, “Sir?”

“You are only half right in what you tell these ladies,” Bren Early said. “You did meet six of the most respected regiments in the Union Army: the Second, Sixth and Seventh Wisconsin, the Nineteenth Indiana and the Twenty-fourth Michigan. You met the men of the Iron Brigade and if you ever meet one again, take off your hat and buy him a drink, for you're lucky to be alive.”

“You couldn't have been there,” the Dandy said, still with the superior look.

“No,” Bren Early said, “but I've studied the action up and down the Orange Plank Road and through the woods set afire by artillery. The Iron Brigade, outnumbered, fought Longstreet to a standstill and you, if you were taken to Belle Plain then you went as a prisoner because the Confederate line never reached that far east.”

The Dandy looked at the ladies and shrugged with a weary sigh. See what a wounded veteran has to put up with?

Bren Early had to hold on from grabbing the mincing son of a bitch and throwing him out the window. With the ladies giving him cold-fish looks he pulled his new Stetson down over his eyes and made up his mind to sleep.

Lulled by the rumbling racket of the coach he saw himself high on a shelf of rock against a glorious blue sky, a gentle breeze blowing. There he was on the narrow ledge, ignoring the thousand-foot drop directly behind him, swinging his pick effortlessly, dislodging a tremendous boulder and seeing in the exposed seam the glitter of gold particles imbedded in rock, chunks of gold he flicked out with his penknife, nuggets he scooped up from the ground and dropped into canvas sacks. He saw a pile of sacks in a cavern and saw himself hefting them, estimating the weight of his fortune at $35 an ounce…$560 a pound…$56,000 a hundred pounds…He slept and awoke to feel the coach swaying, slowing down, coming to a stop, the three ladies and the Dandy leaning over to look out the windows. The driver, or somebody up above them, was saying, “Everybody do what they say. Don't anybody try to be brave.”

The ladies were now even more excitable and nervous and began to make sounds like they were going to cry. The Dandy gathered his hatbox and travel bag against him and slipped his right hand inside his waistcoat.

The voice up top said, “We're not carrying no mail or anything but baggage.”

And another voice said, “Let's see if you can step off the boot with your hands in the air.”

Shit, Bren Early thought.

His revolvers were in his war-bag beneath his feet, stowed away so as not to upset the homely, twittery ladies, and, for the sake of comfort. What would anybody hope to get robbing this chicken coop? The only important stop between Benson and points west was Sweetmary, a mining town; and he doubted a tacky outfit like this stage line would be entrusted to deliver a payroll. No-he was sure of it, because there was just the driver on top, no armed guard with him, not even a helper. Cheap goddamn outfit.

A rider on a sorrel came up to the side of the coach, Bren seeing his pistol extended, a young cowboy face beneath an old curled-brim hat.

“You, mister,” the young rider said to the Dandy, “let me see your paws. All of you keep your paws out in plain sight.”

Another one, Bren Early was thinking. Practiced it and it sounded good. Times must be bad.

Looking past the sorrel Bren could see two more riders beyond the road in the scrub, and the driver standing by the front wheel now, a shotgun on the ground. The rider on the sorrel was squinting up at the baggage, nudging his horse closer. He dismounted then and opened the coach door to look in at the petrified ladies in velvet and the two gentlemen across from them. Someone behind the young rider yelled, “Pull that gear offa there!”

Making him do all the work while they sit back, Bren thought. Dumb kid. In bad company.

The young rider stepped up on the rung and into the door opening, reaching up to the baggage rack with both hands. His leather chaps, his gunbelt, his skinny trunk in a dirty cotton skirt were right there, filling the doorway. Bren thinking, He's too dumb to live long at his trade. Hoping the kid wasn't excitable. Let him get out of here with some of the ladies' trinkets and the Dandy's silver cane and think he's made a haul. Bren had three twenty-dollar gold pieces and some change he'd contribute to the cause. Get it done so they could get on with the ride.

Sitting back resigned, letting it happen, Bren wasn't prepared-he couldn't believe it-when the fifty-year-old Dandy made his move, hunching forward as he drew a nickle-plated pistol from inside his coat and shoved the gun at the exposed shirt-front in the doorway, pointing the barrel right where the young rider's shirttail was coming out of his pants as he reached above him.

Bren said, “No!” grabbing at the Dandy's left arm, the man wrenching away and coming back to swat him across the face with his silver-tipped cane-the son of a bitch, if that was the way he wanted it…Bren cocked his forearm and back-handed his fist and arm across the man's upper body. But too late. The nickle-plate jabbed into the shirtfront and went off with a report that rang loud in the wooden coach. The young rider cried out, hands in the air, and was gone. The women were screaming now and the Dandy was firing again-the little dude son of a bitch, maybe he had raised hell at the Wilderness with his Texas Brigade. He was raising hell now, snapping shots at the two riders until Bren Early backhanded him again, hard, giving himself room to get out of the coach.

He saw the young rider lying on the ground, the sorrel skitting away. He saw the driver kneeling, raising the shotgun and the two mounted men whipping their horses out of there with the twin sounds of the double-barrel reports, the riders streaking dust across the scrub waste, gone, leaving the young rider behind.

Kneeling over him, Bren knew the boy was dead before he touched his throat for a pulse. Dead in an old blood-stained shirt hanging out of his belt; converted Navy cap-and-ball lying in the dust next to him. Poor dumb kid, gone before he could learn anything. He heard the Dandy saying something.

“He's one of them.”

Bren Early looked up, seeing the driver coming over, reloading the shotgun.

“I had a feeling about him and, goddamn it, I was right,” the Dandy said. “He's the inside man. Tried to stop me.”

Bren said, “You idiot. You killed this boy for no reason.”

The driver was pointing his shotgun at him, saying, “Put your hands in the air.”

3

Sweetmary: June, 1889

Mr. and Mrs. Dana Moon got out of the Charles Crooker Hotel in Benson after two honeymoon nights in the bridal suite and coming down to breakfast to feel everybody in the dining room looking at them and the waitress grinning and saying, “Well, how are we this morning, just fine?” They loaded a buckboard with their gear, saddles, two trunks of linen, china and household goods, and took the old stage road west, trailing their horses. Why stay cooped up in somebody else's room when they had a new home in the mountains with an inside water pump and a view of practically the entire San pedro Valley?

In late afternoon they came to Sweetmary, a town named for a copper mine, a town growing out of the mine works and crushing mill high up on the grade: the town beginning from company buildings and reaching down to flatland to form streets, rows of houses and business establishments-Moon remembering it as a settlement of tents and huts, shebangs made of scrap lumber, only a year before-the town growing out of the mine just as the hump ridges of ore tailings came down the grade from the mine shafts. LaSalle was the main street and the good hotel was in Congress. One more night in somebody else's bed. In the morning they'd buy a few provisions at the company store and head due north for home.

During this trip Moon said to his wife, “You're a Katy a lot of ways; I think you'll always look young. But you're not a bashful girl, are you? I think you're more of a Kate than a Katy, and that's meant as a compliment.”

In the morning, lying in the Congress Hotel bed with the sun hot on the windows, he said, “I thought people only did it at night. I mean married people.”

“Who says you have to wait till dark?” She grinned at him and said then, “You mean if you're not married you can do it any time?”

“You do it when you see the chance. I guess that's it,” Moon said. “Married people are busy all day, so it's become the custom to do it at night.”

“Custom,” Kate said. “What's the custom among the Indians? I bet whenever they feel the urge, right? You ever do it outside?”

Moon pretended he had to think to recall and Kate said, “I want to do it outside when we get home.”

“I built us a bed.”

“We'll use the bed. But I want to do it different places. Try different other ways.”

Moon looked at this girl lying next to him, amazed. “What other way is there?”

“I don't know if we can do them in the daylight, but I got some ideas.” She smiled at him and said, “Being married is fun, you know it?”

Moon was getting dressed, buttoning his shirt and looking out the window, when he saw Brendan Early. He said, “Jesus Christ.” Kate came over in her bloomers to look too.

There he was, Moon's best man, walking along the street in a file of jail prisoners carrying shovels and picks, the group dressed in washed-out denim uniforms-the letter “P” stenciled in white on the shirts and pants-being herded along by several armed men on horseback.

“Jesus Christ,” Moon said again, with awe. “What's he done now?”

When Moon found them, the work detail was clearing a drainage ditch about two miles from town, up in the hills back of the mine works. Mounted, he circled and came down from above them to approach Bren Early working with a shovel, in his jail uniform, his new Stetson dirty and sweat-stained. There were four guards with shotguns. The one on the high side, dismounted and sitting about ten yards off in the shade of a cedar stand, heard Moon first and raised his shotgun as he got to his feet.

“Don't come no closer!”

Now Bren Early straightened and was looking this way, leaning on the high end of his shovel. He watched Moon nudging his buckskin down toward them-not knowing Moon's game, so not calling out or saying anything.

“I said don't come no closer!”

This man with the shotgun was the Cochise County Deputy Sheriff for Sweetmary. His name-Moon had learned in town-was R.J. Bruckner. Moon said it now, inquiringly.

“Mr. Bruckner?”

“What do you want?”

There did not appear to be any warmth or cordiality in the man.

He was heavy-set and mean-looking with a big nose and a florid complexion to go with his ugly disposition. Moon would try sounding patient and respectful and see what happened.

He said, “My, it's a hot day to be working, isn't it?”

“You got business with me, state it,” Bruckner said, “or else get your nosey ass out of here.”

My oh my, Moon thought, taking off his hat and resetting it low against the sun, giving himself a little time to adjust and remain calm. The plug of tobacco in his jaw felt dry and he sucked on it a little.

“I wonder if I could have a word with one of your prisoners.”

“God Almighty,” Bruckner said, “get the hell away from here.”

“That good-looking fella there, name of Early. His mama's worried about him,” Moon said, “and sent me out looking.”

“Tell his mama she can visit him at Yuma. That boy's going away for twenty years.”

“Can I ask what he's done?”

“Held up the Benson stage and was caught at it.”

Bren Early, standing in the drainage ditch, was shaking his head slowly, meaning no, he didn't, or just weary of it all.

“Has he been tried already?”

“Hasn't come up yet.”

“Then how do you know he's getting twenty years?”

“It's what I'll recommend to the Circuit Court in Tombstone.”

“Oh,” Moon nodded, showing how agreeable he was. “When is the trial going to be?”

“When I take him down there,” Bruckner said.

“Pretty soon now?”

“When I decide,” Bruckner said, irritated now. “Get the hell away from here 'fore I put you in the ditch with him.”

R.J. Bruckner did not know at that moment-as Moon's hand went to his shirtfront but stopped before going inside the coat-how close he was to being shot.

Back at the Congress Hotel Moon said to his wife, “I have never had the urge like I did right then. It's not good, to be armed and feel like that.”

“But understandable,” Kate said, “What are we gonna do?”

“Stay here another night, if it's all right.”

“Whatever you decide,” his wife said. She loved this man very much, but sometimes his calmness frightened her. She watched him wash and change his shirt and slip on the shoulder holster that held the big Colt's revolver-hidden once his coat was on, but she knew it was there and she knew the man, seeing him again standing at the adobe wall in Sonora.

After supper Mr. and Mrs. Moon sat in rocking chairs on the porch of the Congress Hotel-Kate saying, “This is what you like to do, huh?”-until the Mexican boy came up to them and said in Spanish, “He left.” Moon gave the boy two bits and walked down LaSalle Street to the building with the sign that said DEPUTY SHERIFF-COCHISE COUNTY.

Inside the office he told the assistant deputy on duty he was here to see a prisoner, one Brendan Early and, before the deputy could say anything, laid a five-dollar piece on the man's desk.

“Open your coat,” the deputy said.

Moon handed the man his Colt's, then followed him through a locked door, down an aisle of cells and up a back stairway to a row of cells on the second floor. Moon had never seen a jail this size, able to hold thirty or more prisoners, in a dinky mining town.

“You know why,” Bren Early said, talking to Moon through the bars-the deputy standing back a few paces watching them-“because the son of a bitch is making money off us. The mine company pays him fifty cents a day per man to work on roads and drainage and this horse fart Bruckner puts it in his pocket.”

“You talk to a lawyer?”

“Shit no, not till I go to trial. Listen, there're rummies in here for drunk and disorderly been working months. He thinks I'm a road agent, I could be in here a year before I ever see a courtroom. And then I got to face this other idiot who's gonna point to me and say I tried to rob the stage.”

“Did you?”

“Jesus Christ, I'm telling you, I don't get out of here I'm gonna take my shovel and bust it over that horse fart's head.”

“You're looking pretty good though,” Moon said. “Better'n you did at the wedding trying to drink up all the whiskey.”

Close to the bars Bren Early said, “You gonna get me out of here or I have to do it myself?”

“I have to take my wife home,” Moon said. “Then, after that.”

“After that, what? I'm not gonna last any time in this place. You know it, too.”

“Don't get him mad at you,” Moon said. “Say please and thank you or else keep your mouth shut till I get back.”

“When-goddamn it.”

“You might see it coming,” Moon said, “but I doubt it.”

This jail was hard time with no relief. Chop rocks and clear ditches or sweat to death in that second-floor, tin-roof cell. (The Fourth of July they sat up there listening to fools shooting their guns off in the street, expecting any moment bullets to come flying in the barred windows.) Bren Early could think of reports he'd read describing Confederate prisons, like Belle Isle in the James River and Libby's warehouse in Richmond, where Union soldiers rotted away and died by the thousands. Compared to those places the Sweetmary lockup was a resort hotel. But Bren would put R.J. Bruckner up with any of the sadistic guards he'd read about, including the infamous Captain Wirz of Andersonville.

One day after work Bruckner marched Bren Early down to the basement of the jail and took him into a room that was like a root cellar. Bren hoped for a moment he would be alone with Bruckner, but two other deputies stood by with pick handles while Bruckner questioned him about the stage holdup.

“One of your accomplices, now deceased, was named Pierson. What are the names of the other two?”

They stood with the lantern hanging behind them by the locked door.

“I wasn't part of it, so I don't know,” Bren Early said.

Bruckner stepped forward and hooked a fist into Bren's stomach and Bren hit him hard in the face, jolting him; but that was his only punch before the two deputies stepped in, swinging their pick handles, and beat him to the dirt floor.

Bruckner said, “What's the names of your other two chums?”

Bren said, “I never saw 'em before.”

“Once more,” Bruckner said.

“I'll tell you one thing,” Bren said.

“What is that?”

“When I get out I'm gonna tear your nose off, you ugly shitface son of a bitch.”

As with J.A. McWilliams, killed in Florence a year before while calling Bren Early some other kind of son of a bitch, did he say it all or not? Bren did not quite finish before Bruckner hit him with his fists and the deputies waded in to beat him senseless with the pick handles. Dumb, wavy-haired know-it-all; they fixed him. And they'd see he never let up a minute out on the work detail…where Bren would look up at the high crests and at the brushy ravines and pray for Moon to appear as his redeemer.

“You might see it coming, but I doubt it,” Moon had said.

Moon brought six Mimbre Apaches with him: the one named Red and five other stalkers who had chased wild horses with him, had served on the Apache Police at San Carlos and had raised plenty of hell before that.

They scouted Bruckner's work detail for three days, studying the man's moves and habits. The man seemed reasonably alert, that was one consideration. The other: the ground was wide open on both sides of the drainage ditch where the twenty or more prisoners had been laboring these past few days. Clearing a ditch that went where? Moon wasn't sure, unless it diverted water from the mine shafts. A slit trench came down out of a wash from the bald crest of a ridge. There were patches of owl clover on the slope, brittlebush and stubby clumps of mesquite and greasewood, but no cover to speak of.

Moon and his Mimbres talked it over in their dry camp and decided there was only one way to do the job.

Seven A.M., the seventeenth morning of Bren Early's incarceration, found him trudging up the grade with his shovel, second man in the file of prisoners-herded by four mounted guards, Bruckner bringing up the rear-Bren's eyes open as usual to scan the bleak terrain, now reaching the section of ditch they would be working today, moving up alongside it until Bruckner would stick two fingers in his mouth and whistle them to stop, jump in and commence digging and clearing.

Bren didn't see Moon. He didn't see the Mimbre Apaches-not until he heard that sharp whistle, the signal, turned to the trench and saw movement, a bush it looked like, a bush and part of the ground coming up out of the ditch, Christ, with a face made of dirt in it, seeing for the first time something he had only heard about: what it was like to stand in open terrain and, Christ, there they were all around you right there as you stood where there wasn't a sign of anything living a moment before. The Mimbres came out of the drainage ditch with greasewood in their hair, naked bodies smeared with dirt, and took the four deputies off their horses and had them on the ground, pointing revolvers in their struck-dumb faces before they knew what had happened. There were yells from the prisoners dancing around. Some of them raised their shovels and picks to beat the life out of Bruckner and his guards. But Moon and his stubby shotgun-Moon coming out of the ditch a few yards up the grade-would have none of it. He was not here in behalf of their freedom or revenge. They yelled some more and began to plead-Take us with you; don't leave us here-then cursed in loud voices, with the guards lying face down in the sand, calling Moon obscene names. But Moon never said a word to them or to anyone. Bren Early wanted to go over to Bruckner, but when Moon motioned, he followed. They rode out of there on the deputies' horses and never looked back.

Bren Early went home with Moon, up past the whitewashed agency buildings, up into the rugged east face of the Rincons. He saw Moon's stone house with its low adobe wall rimming the front of the property and its sweeping view of the San Pedro Valley. He saw Moon's wife in her light blue dress and white apron-no longer the McKean girl-saw the two cane chairs on the front porch and smelled the beef roast cooking.

“Well, now you have it, what do you do?” Bren said.

Moon looked at his wife and shrugged, not sure how to answer. “I don't know,” he said, “get up in the morning and pull on my boots. How about you?”

“We'll see what happens,” Bren said.

He rode out of there in borrowed clothes on a borrowed horse, but with visions of returning in relative splendor. Rich. At rest with himself. And with a glint in his eye that would say to Moon, “You sure you got what you want?”

4

Sweetmary: January, 1890

They were having their meeting in the stove-heated company office halfway up the grade, a wind blowing winter through the mine works: Bren Early, bearded, in his buffalo coat; Mr. Vandozen, looking like a banker in his velvet-lapeled Chesterfield and pinch-nose glasses; a man named Ross Selkirk, the superintendent of the Sweetmary works, who clenched a pipe in his jaw; and another company man, a geologist, by the name of Franklin Hovey.

Mr. Vandozen stood at a high table holding his glasses to his face as he looked over Bren Early's registered claims and assay reports. He said once, “There seems to be a question whether you're a miner, Mr. Early, or a speculator.”

It wasn't the question he was waiting for, so Bren didn't answer.

Mr. Vandozen tried again. “Have you actually mined any ore?”

“Some.”

“This one, I'll bet,” Mr. Vandozen said, holding up an assay report. “Test would indicate quite a promising concentrate, as high as forty ounces to the ton.”

“Three thousand dollars an ore-wagon load,” Bren said.

And Mr. Vandozen said, “Before it's milled. On the deficit side you have labor, machinery, supplies, shipping, payments on your note-” The LaSalle Mining vice president, who had come all the way from New Mexico to meet Bren Early, looked over at him. “What do you have left?”

Not a question that required an answer. Bren waited.

“What you have, at best, are pockets of dust,” Mr. Vandozen said. “Fast calculations in your head, multiplying ounces times thirty-five, I can understand how it lights up men's eyes. But obviously you don't want to scratch for a few ounces, Mr. Early, or you wouldn't be here.”

Bren waited.

“Our geological surveys of your claims are”-Mr. Vandozen shrugged-“interesting, but by no means conclusive enough to warrant sinking shafts and moving in equipment. Though I'm sure you feel you have a major strike.”

“Gold fever, it's called,” the geologist said. “The symptoms are your eyes popping out of your head.” He laughed, but no one else did.

Mr. Vandozen waited longer than he had to, following the interruption. When the office was quiet and they could hear the stove hissing and the wind gusting outside, he said, “We could give you-you have five claims?-all right, five thousand dollars for the lot and a one half of one percent royalty on gold ore after so many tons are milled.”

“How much on all the copper ore I've got?”

The shaggy-looking prospector in the buffalo coat stopped everyone cold with the magic word.

It brought Mr. Vandozen's face up from the reports and claim documents to look at this Mr. Early again in a new light.

“You're telling us you have copper?”

“If your geologist knows it, you know it.”

“It was my understanding you were only interested in gold.”

“I'm interested in all manner of things,” Bren said. “What are you interested in, besides high grade copper?”

Mr. Vandozen took off his pinch-nose glasses and inspected them before putting them away, somewhere beneath his Chesterfield.

“How much do you want?”

There, that was the question. Bren smiled in his beard.

“Ten thousand dollars for the five claims,” Mr. Vandozen said. “A two percent royalty on all minerals.”

Bren shook his head.

At the fifty-thousand-dollar offer he started for the door. At one-hundred thousand, plus royalties, plus a position with the company, the shaggy-looking miner-speculator stepped up to Mr. Vandozen and shook his hand. That part was done.

When the company superintendent, who was under Bren now in all matters except the actual operation of the mine, brought out a bottle of whiskey and said, “Mr. Early, I'll drink to your health but stay out of my way,” Mr. Early looked at him and said:

“You run the works. There's only one area I plan to step into and I'm going to do it with both feet.”

This shaggy-looking Bren Early entered the Gold Dollar with his buffalo coat draped over his left shoulder, covering his arm and hanging from shoulder to knee. He wore his Stetson, weathered now and shaped properly for all time, and his showy Merwin & Hulbert ivory-handled revolvers in worn-leather holsters. Business was humming for a cold and dismal afternoon, an hour before the day shift let out. The patrons, tending to their drinking and card playing, did not pay much attention to Bren at first. Not until he walked up behind the Sweetmary Deputy Sheriff who was hunched over the bar on his arms, and said to him:

“Mr. Bruckner?”

As the heavy-set man straightened and came around, Bren Early's right hand appeared from inside the buffalo coat with a pick handle, held short, and cracked it cleanly across the deputy sheriff's face.

Bruckner bellowed, fell sideways against the bar, came around with his great nose pouring blood and stopped dead, staring at Bren Early.

“Yes, you know me,” Bren said, and swiped him again, hard, across the head.

Bruckner stumbled against the bar and this time came around with his right hand gripping his holstered Peacemaker. But caution stopped him in the nick of time from pulling it free. The left hand of this shaggy dude-standing like he was posing for a picture-was somewhere beneath that buffalo cape, and only the dude and God knew if he was holding a gun.

Bruckner said, “You're under arrest.”

It was strange, Bren admired the remark. While the response from the Gold Dollar patrons was impromptu laughter, a short quick nervous fit of it, then silence. Bren was thinking, They don't know anything what it's like, do they?

He said to Bruckner then, “Wake up and listen to what I tell you. You're gonna pay me eight dollars and fifty cents for the seventeen days I spent on your work gang. You're gonna pay everyone else now working whatever they've earned. You will never again use prisoners to do company work. And as soon as I'm through talking you're gonna go across the street and get my Smith forty-fours and bring them to me in their U.S. Army holsters. If I see you come back in here holding them by the grips or carrying any other weapon, I'll understand your intention and kill you before you get through the door. Now if you doubt or misunderstand anything I've said, go ask Ross Selkirk who the new boss is around here and he'll set you straight.”

Bruckner took several moments to say, “I'll be back.”

Let him have that much, a small shred of self-respect. The son of a bitch.

As the batwings swung closed, Bren stepped to the bar, lifting his buffalo coat and laying it across the polished surface. The patrons behind him stared and nudged each other. Look-both his revolvers were holstered.

Brendan Early had come to Sweetmary.