The Intruders Page 3

  “And his bishop, Albert Micklewhite, with twenty percent.”

  If things played out the way Lucien wanted them to, Micklewhite would be long dead before that happened. “Yeah. You would like the sound of that, wouldn’t you?”

  CHAPTER 4

  The den in Charles Hagen’s ranch house was more befitting a king than a rancher. This had always been his intention.

  He became aware that he had acquired the title of King Hagen among the locals when he procured the last ranch next to his, making him the largest cattleman in Wyoming.

  As a child, Charles had despised nicknames, particularly the diminutive familiarity of “Charlie,” which his father used to call him. No one had called him Charlie in more than fifty years. He was King Charles Hagen now and did his best to live up to the name.

  The den in which he now sat was made of dark wood and heavy stones pried from the very land upon which his great house now stood.

  The bookcases of the den were lined with tomes of poets and philosophers from antiquity. He had made a point of reading all of them, many more than once. Forgetting the past was a dangerous enterprise in his opinion, and Charles Hagen had always considered himself a cautious man.

  The heavy desk behind which he now sat was also made from the timber that had once filled this land. His leather chair was from the hides of the cattle he had brought here to graze on it. The coal oil in his lamps came from the mines he owned close by. Everything about this house stood as a testament to the Hagen family’s will to take hold of the land and make it their own. It was a trophy of his mastery of mineral and men.

  He sat impatiently while one of the many men over whom he lorded his power thanked him for saving his life.

  “I can’t thank you enough for getting me out of that jam down in Laramie, Mr. Hagen,” John Bookman said. “It meant a lot.”

  “Yes,” Hagen agreed. “It made the difference between you spending the next ten years swinging a pick and breaking rocks as opposed to being here and working for me. Attempted murder is a difficult charge to have swept under the rug, John. You’re lucky the judge was an old friend of mine.”

  “I know that, sir,” Bookman said, “and I’m forever grateful. You had my loyalty before, but now—”

  Charles Hagen raised a hand to stop him. Supplication had its limits, even for him. Bookman was dark-haired and range lean. He was as tough as the land he rode, maybe even tougher. Seeing him grovel like this did Charles Hagen no good. “You can thank me by resuming your duties and running this ranch. You can start by telling me how many of our men are hooked on that poison my nephew is peddling in town.”

  “I’d say more than half of them have a problem with the smoke, sir,” Bookman reported.

  Charles looked at him. “How many more than half?”

  “I’d say about sixty percent of them, sir.”

  The number almost floored him. He had never partaken of laudanum himself but had seen it ruin many a man. “How did so many get infected so soon?”

  “I’d say the problem has been building up for a while now,” Bookman told him, “and it seems to have gotten worse while I was in jail.”

  “But your replacement assured me the problem was well in hand.”

  “Simon used to be a good hand, sir, but it looks like he’s got a problem with the dragon, too. He spends a fair share of his time at your nephew’s laudanum den.”

  “My nephew,” Charles spat. It felt good to finally be able to speak the truth about Adam Hagen again after so many decades of lies about his lineage.

  Adam Hagen was not his son and never had been. He had raised the boy, true, but he had never felt any more affection for him than he would feeding a stray dog that had wandered on to his property. Adam had been his sister’s boy, and he supposed he had some Hagen blood in him, not that it showed. Charles’s sister had paid for her indiscretion by dying in childbirth. The boy’s father had paid for corrupting her by having his bones scattered by the coyotes who had fed on him.

  “That would explain how they’ve all been acting as of late,” Hagen said. “They’re sluggish and half asleep most times.”

  “The pipe isn’t as bad as whiskey hangovers, but it’s making them slow-moving as hell. Some of the men who’ve been smoking longer are the worst. They’re sick a lot and they’re forgetting things. One of them left the corral open a couple of nights ago. We almost lost those fifty horses we were going to sell to the army.”

  “Fifty!” Hagen proclaimed. Such a loss would have not only affected the ranch’s finances. It would damage his reputation with the army. He had worked too hard to secure those contracts to allow anything or anyone to damage them.

  And there was only one man to blame.

  “This is Adam’s plan to ruin me, isn’t it? He has plotted against me since the cursed day he crawled back into Blackstone. Now that he knows he’s not my son, his anger has only gotten worse.”

  “It’s not just the cowhands, sir,” Bookman explained. “A fair number of the miners have started to visit the den, too. A lot of those boys have plenty of aches and pains, and the laudanum helps them feel better.”

  “At the cost of their souls.” Hagen had become a king and remained a king because he knew exactly what to do at exactly the right time. “I know you’ve just gotten out of a great difficulty with the law, but I’m going to need you to do something for me.”

  Bookman sat even straighter in his chair. “Of course, sir. Anything.”

  “I need you to take a couple of the good men we have remaining and burn down the Pot of Gold Saloon as well as the laudanum den behind it. I need you to do it tonight. We must cauterize the wound before this gangrene spreads to the rest of our operation. It’s already gone too far for too long as it is.”

  Bookman surprised him by saying, “I hate to disagree with you, sir, but I don’t know if that’s going to work.”

  Hagen looked at him. “Fire cures all ills, John.”

  “Normally it does,” Bookman admitted, “but this is different. These boys will get mighty sick if their laudanum supply burns up. Maybe the few that are new to the pipe will get over it, but the boys who are too far gone will be completely useless to us. I’ve seen what men go through when they don’t have the money for a smoke and it ain’t pretty. If they’re too sick to work your mines and tend your stock, it’ll cost us a lot in the long run. Some of them might even die.”

  Hagen was accustomed to being right, but he imagined John Bookman had a point. Hagen had never even tried the stuff and knew little about its toll on the human body.

  “Anyone who decides to take up laudanum smoking deserves to pay the price for their weakness in my book,” he declared. “But this problem seems to be far more difficult than I thought.”

  He drummed his fingers on the desk as he weighed all his options. Damn Adam and his blasted revenge!

  His anger burned through the problem and revealed a solution. “How big a piece do I own of the Crooked C in Ogallala?”

  Bookman had to think about it. “I think you own it outright, sir. I remember you bought out Calhoun lock, stock, and barrel, but you might want to check with Mr. Montague on that.”

  Hagen would make a point of doing that. In addition to being the president of the Blackstone Bank, Montague also handled all his business matters for him. In fact, he was only the bank president because of his association with Hagen.

  But there was no time to lose. “I want you to make a list of all the ranch hands who are too far gone to do us much good. Then I want you to head into Laramie and send a telegram to the Crooked C, telling them we need some of their men to come work here. We’ll increase their wages and pay for their train fare here. I’d like to know how many we can expect by the end of business tomorrow.”

  Bookman said, “I can set to writing that list right now if you give me something to write on, sir.”

  King Charles shoved some paper at him and a pencil.

  “As soon as those replacements arrive, w
e’ll show my nephew just how dangerous the laudanum trade can be.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The next day, Trammel was walking into Robertson’s General Store to buy some coffee for the jail just as Emily was coming out.

  Both stopped when they saw each other.

  Trammel touched the brim of his hat as he stepped aside. “Morning, Emily.”

  She composed herself and walked past him after closing the door behind her. “Good morning, Sheriff.”

  He could almost feel his heart breaking as she passed him without another word. He had become accustomed to her coldness to him in recent months, but on that particular morning, it hurt him deeply.

  “What happened between us, Emily?” he asked. “What made you hate me all of a sudden?”

  She stopped walking but did not turn to face him. “I don’t hate you, Buck. I don’t think I could ever hate you. But I can’t allow myself to love you either. You take too many chances. Too many risks. My husband’s death took the ground out from under me and I can’t allow myself to go through that again.”

  Trammel had heard her say that before, and hearing it again did not make him feel any better. “I can change, Emily. I really can if you’ll just give me the chance.”

  Now she turned to face him, and he saw the tears in her eyes. “You can’t change who and what you are. I wouldn’t dream of asking you to even try. This town needs you, especially with the trouble that’s brewing between the Hagens. They need you more than I do.” She looked down at her basket of goods. “You’ll always be a lawman, Buck. Whether or not you’ve got a star pinned on your chest or a gun in your hand, you’ll always try to protect people, and that means you’ll be in danger.”

  “We’re all in danger,” Buck told her. “Living out here is dangerous business.”

  “Even more so for you. And that’s too much for me to handle. I can’t go through the pain of missing someone I love again. I don’t think I’d make it next time.”

  He was finally seeing cracks in the ice that had formed between them over the long months since the Stone Gate business, and he sought to chip them to pieces. “We could leave town. We could go live somewhere else. I could do something else. Another line of work, maybe?”

  She laughed as she wiped away a tear. “Like what? Work in a saloon? Ride shotgun for the stage line? Dig coal?” She sadly shook her head. “None of that would change who you are. Besides, the town needs us. If we left, who would take our places? I’m the only doctor they’ve got and you’re all the sheriff they’ve got.”

  “Hawkeye could take over for me,” he answered. “He’s grown up a lot since he started working for me.”

  “He’s still a boy and he’ll never be you,” she said. “And if anything happened to him after we left, you’d never be able to forgive yourself.”

  He wanted to tell her that she was wrong. He wanted to tell her that he was tired of taking on other people’s burdens, tired of being alone.

  He was about to tell her all these things when a horrible shriek came from the canvas tent just behind the Pot of Gold Saloon.

  Trammel instinctively stepped between Emily and the trouble while he looked to see what had happened.

  He saw four men spill out from the tent and run toward Main Street. Two of them were shaggy and filthy and looked like they had slept in their clothes for a week. The other two were Chinese toughs paid to keep an eye on the laudanum den behind the saloon. And each of them was holding a cleaver.

  Trammel turned to tell Emily to get back in the store where she would be safe, but she was already hurrying up the street toward her house.

  Glad she was out of harm’s way, he ran toward the brawl that had broken out on Main Street.

  The Chinese were yelling and brandishing their cleavers at the two men who were just getting to their feet. One of the men was about to charge the guards when Trammel grabbed him and pulled him back.

  The sheriff stood between the two sides and kept them each at bay. “Everybody just calm down and tell me what this is all about.”

  “They took our money, Sheriff,” one of the men said. He looked familiar to Trammel, but he couldn’t quite place him. “They said we didn’t have enough to smoke and kicked us out without even giving us our money back.”

  “And we did have enough to smoke,” said the man Trammel had pulled away from the fight. “They flat-out robbed us, Sheriff. Rolled us like drunks in an alley.”

  Trammel looked the two men up and down. “From the looks of both of you, I’d say that’s exactly what you are.” Trammel realized the second man looked familiar, too. “Where do I know you two boys from?”

  “We worked the Blackstone,” the first man said. “I’m Joe Allan, and this here’s my brother, Sam.”

  Now he remembered who they were. “What are you boys doing down here? Shouldn’t you be working the ranch?”

  “We would be,” Sam said, “if Bookman hadn’t cut us loose. He paid us off for the rest of the week and sent us on our way.”

  “Yeah,” Joe agreed. “Five years of working that place and all we get for it was a kick in the pants and ordered off the ranch.” He ran his fingers across his nose, and they came up bloody. “Now we’ve got no jobs and can’t even soften the hurt with some smoke.”

  The brothers tried to rush the Chinese again, but Trammel grabbed both of them and easily pushed them down.

  He remembered these boys from a while back. They were solid workers for the Blackstone Ranch and hardly ever caused any trouble when they came to town. They had been strong, hearty men then, but now they were shadows of their former selves. Beneath the dirt, their clothes were filthy, and they looked like they had aged at least ten years since the last time he had seen them.

  “You boys had best stay down if you know what’s good for you,” Trammel told them. “Next time I won’t be so gentle.”

  He turned to face the two Chinese, who had drawn closer to the Allan boys. And they were still holding their cleavers. The blades were caked with a brownish film Trammel took to be blood and dared not think what kind of blood it might be.

  These men were not the coolies who ran around the den and cleaned up the place. They were both tall. One was bald and one had his hair tied behind his head in a queue style. Both of them sported long, droopy mustaches and looked like they knew how to use the cleavers they held for more than just cooking.

  Some men treated the Celestials as if they were different from the rest of humanity, but Trammel knew better. He had seen enough dead Chinese to know they were the same on the inside as much as any other man.

  He pointed at both of them and said, “Now it’s your turn to tell me your side of it. And don’t play like you boys don’t know how to speak English because I know you do.” He looked at the bald one. “I’ve heard you speak to Hagen as clear as I’m speaking now, so you go first.”

  “They paid,” the bald man said, “but got angry when we wouldn’t give them extra dope. We said, ‘No money, no dope.’ They said they’re good customers and lost their jobs and should get more than they paid for. Boss Lady said no, and they caused trouble. They threatened Boss Lady, so we threw them out.”

  This was exactly the kind of trouble Trammel had worried about when Hagen started selling that stuff in town. He was only surprised it had not started earlier. “They started trouble and you threw them out. That about right?”

  The man with the queue said, “That’s right.”

  Trammel had figured as much. “And what about their money? You give that back to them?”

  From behind him, Joe yelled, “You deaf, Sheriff? We already told you they didn’t.”

  Trammel ignored Joe and waited for the Chinese to answer. “Well? Did you give it back to them or not?”

  “They caused trouble,” the bald man said. “They broke things. We need the money to pay for that.”

  Trammel was beginning to see why the boys were so angry. “The place is a tent full of pillows. How much damage could they have done
?”

  The man with the queue leered at him and gripped his cleaver tighter.

  Trammel saw it, too. “Don’t do anything stupid. Just answer my question.”

  The bald man cursed in his native language as he dug coins out of his pockets and tossed them at the Allan boys. They scrambled in the dirt like dogs to pick up the money.

  “Look at them,” the bald one sneered. “Like pigs digging in their own dirt for a few lousy coins.”

  His arrogance annoyed Trammel. “Your dope made them that way. Don’t you forget it.”

  “No one made them smoke. They chose. Now look at them.”

  The man with the queue spat in their direction, but the boys were too busy gathering up their coins to notice.

  Trammel pointed at both of them again. “You two best get back inside while they’re distracted.”

  The bald one said, “They can’t come here again. You tell them that.”

  “I will,” Trammel agreed, “but if they do, you send someone to get me.” He pointed at the cleavers they were holding. “I find they’re missing or cut up somewhere, I’ll hold both of you responsible.”

  The two Chinese spoke to each other in their native tongue as they turned to go back inside the tent. Trammel did not understand Chinese, but judging from the tone of their voices, they were not singing his praises. He did not particularly care as long as they went back inside.

  Trammel was about to tend to the Allan boys when he felt a hard tug at the Colt holstered on his right leg. He looked down and saw Sam Allan trying to pull the pistol free.

  Trammel slammed an elbow hard into Sam’s face, sending him tumbling backward into the dirt.

  Joe lunged at him next and delivered a blow that caught Trammel just under the chin. The world tilted for a moment, but the sheriff kept his feet.

  “You can’t let those low-down scums treat us that way,” Joe yelled as he closed in for another punch. “They can’t just shut us out like that. We need it.”