Mankiller, Colorado Read online

  “Yeah, sure. You boys get crosswise with that bunch?”

  “Before I answer that, tell me…your last name wouldn’t happen to be Devery, would it?”

  The man’s face darkened with anger. The tips of his mustache seemed to bristle with outrage.

  “It would not,” he said. “My name is O’Hanrahan, Francis Xavier O’Hanrahan, and I’m no relation to those damned Deverys!”

  “It would seem that you’re no friend to them, either.”

  “You could say that.”

  “Well, neither are we,” Bo said, “and like Scratch told you, if we don’t get cleaned up, the smell of this stuff is likely to kill us.”

  Francis Xavier O’Hanrahan grunted. “It won’t kill you, but it might make you so sick you’d wish you were dead.” He lowered the rifle’s barrel. “Maybe I can help you. Come with me, if you want. Just don’t try any tricks.”

  “Mister,” Scratch said, “we ain’t got any tricks left to try, even if we wanted to.”

  That was the truth, Bo thought. He had already realized that his gun was gone, and so were Scratch’s Remingtons, along with the gun belt and holsters. Bo could tell as well that the money belt that was supposed to be under his shirt was gone. He would have been willing to bet—if he’d had anything left to wager—that the part of their stake Scratch had been carrying had vanished, as well.

  O’Hanrahan motioned again with the rifle barrel and said, “Just walk on down the bank here. I’ll be behind you with this Spencer, so don’t get any funny ideas.”

  They did as the burly Irishman said, trudging along the bank until they rounded a bend and came in sight of a rough dugout sunk in the side of the hill. A hundred yards or so up the slope yawned the open mouth of a mine shaft. Bo knew this had to be O’Hanrahan’s claim.

  O’Hanrahan stopped them and said, “Wait right here.” He went to the dugout, stepped inside, and came back a moment later carrying a bucket in one hand and the rifle in the other. He laid the rifle across the top of a barrel and went to the river with the bucket.

  “You intend to dump that over our heads, Mr. O’Hanrahan?” Bo asked.

  “Take it or leave it,” O’Hanrahan said around the unlit cigar still clenched between his teeth. “It’ll be cold, but it’ll wash some of that muck off.”

  “We’ll take it,” Scratch said. “I reckon I’d rather freeze to death than keep on smellin’ like this.”

  O’Hanrahan filled the bucket in the stream, then carried it over to the Texans. “Who’s first?”

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Bo said. “It’s going to take several buckets for each of us, at the very least.”

  “You’re right about that.” With that, O’Hanrahan lifted the bucket and upended it over Bo’s head. The river water poured down and washed over Bo, dislodging some of the mud. It was just a start, though.

  By the time half an hour had gone by, both of the Texans were soaking wet and shivering. Their teeth chattered. The ground around them was muddy from all the water O’Hanrahan had poured over them.

  As the man stepped back after dumping a bucket of water over Scratch, he motioned toward the Animas and said, “All right, I reckon you’re clean enough now you can jump in the river and finish the job. Take those clothes off and leave them on the bank. They’ll have to be soaked and scrubbed, and even that may not be enough to get them clean. When you’re done, come inside. I’ll have a fire going in the stove and some blankets ready for you.”

  “Th-th-thank you,” Bo managed to say through chattering teeth. It wasn’t all that cold. The sun was even a little warm as it shone down over the hillside. But the water from the snowmelt-fed stream had leached all the heat out of the Texans.

  They hurried over to the river, stripping off their wet, filthy clothes, and dropped them on the bank before wading out into the stream. Scratch cursed as the cold water rose on his legs. Bo just took a deep breath and went under.

  They scrubbed away at themselves for long minutes before they felt clean enough to come out again. Circling around the dirty clothes and dripping river water, they headed for the dugout.

  O’Hanrahan met them at the doorway with blankets, which they gratefully wrapped around themselves as they stepped inside. The dugout was made of stone and logs and had a thatched roof. The floor was dirt. It was simply furnished with a potbellied stove, a rough-hewn table, a couple of chairs, and a low-slung bunk with a straw mattress. A man could eat and sleep here when he wasn’t working on his mine, but that was about all.

  “Sit down at the table,” O’Hanrahan told Bo and Scratch. “I’ve got coffee on the stove. I imagine that sounds pretty good right about now.”

  “You don’t know the half of it, Mr. O’Hanrahan,” Scratch said.

  “Call me Francis.” He brought the coffee to them as they sat down. “If you’re enemies of the Deverys, then you’re friends with just about everybody else in this part of the country.”

  “‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend,’” Bo quoted. “Is that about the size of it?”

  Francis grinned. “Aye. The Deverys are well hated in these parts, except by some who try to curry favor with them. And if the truth be told, probably even they can’t stand the Deverys, either. They’re just more pragmatic about it.”

  “What makes that bunch so powerful?” Scratch asked. “Just the fact that they own some land around here?”

  “Not just some land,” Francis corrected. “They own the whole town and this whole side of the valley for a good five miles. In other words, all the land where that big vein of gold is located.”

  Scratch stared at their host for a second before he said, “Well, hell! Why aren’t they gettin’ rich by minin’ the blasted stuff?”

  Francis poured a tin cup of coffee for himself. “Because that would be too much hard work for the Deverys. They’d rather get rich by raking off fifty percent of everything the miners take out of the ground. That’s not including the hefty cut they take from all the businesses in the settlement. That arrangement is in the lease of everybody who moved in there.”

  “Wait a minute,” Bo said. “How in the world did they manage to get a jump on everybody else and claim all that land after the gold strike?”

  Francis shook his head. “They didn’t claim it after the gold strike. They already owned it. They’d been farming here for several years before anybody found any gold.”

  “Farmin’?” Scratch repeated. “This ain’t good territory at all for farmin’, I’d say. Of course, I wouldn’t really know, not havin’ done much of it in my life.”

  “Oh, it’s not,” Francis said. “Not at all. From what I’ve heard, the family just barely eked out a living, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they did a little rustling and the like to help them get by. Jackson Devery and his sons came here from Kansas, and I’ve got a hunch they pulled up stakes and moved west because the law made it too hot for them back where they came from.”

  Bo had only seen Luke Devery and his cousin Thad, but he didn’t doubt that Francis was right. Luke and Thad appeared to be brutal, vicious men, the sort who wouldn’t be above committing a crime. For that matter, Bo was fairly certain that Luke and Thad had been among the men who’d attacked them at the livery stable and robbed them, and the others had probably been members of the Devery family, too.

  He indulged his curiosity by asking, “The fella who owns Edgar’s Livery Stable in town…would Devery happen to be his last name?”

  Francis nodded. “He’s Jackson Devery’s younger brother. He came out here right after the town got started. That was before the gold strike, too. Jackson and his boys built that big house at the top of Main Street. You’ve seen it?”

  “Yeah,” Scratch said.

  “That may have been the last real work they did. After a while, Jackson sent word back to his kinfolks in Kansas, and some of them came out to join him. They started the town. Even now, you can tell an original Devery building.”

  “They look like they’re about to
fall down,” Bo guessed.

  Francis laughed. “I see you paid attention when you rode in.” He sobered. “Then a cowboy who was just passing through here found a gold nugget where there’d been a rockslide not long before, and he told people about it, and, well, you know what happened next. There was a big rush, and not just miners, either. All the sort of folks who flock into every boomtown showed up, from the gamblers and whores and saloon owners to the honest businessmen. Didn’t matter what they had in mind. When they got here, they found that if they wanted to go into business, they had to promise the Deverys a healthy share of the profits. Same was true for the prospectors, like me.”

  “You seem to know an awful lot about it,” Scratch commented.

  Francis shrugged. “I was a newspaperman at one time, and the habit of asking questions never got out of my blood. I talk to people, and they seem to want to talk to me. Most of them, anyway. Hard to get a word out of Jackson. He doesn’t come out of that old house much. But Edgar likes to talk.”

  Bo sipped his coffee, relishing the warmth of it. The chill was mostly gone from his bones now. He said, “I don’t imagine folks like it very much when the Deverys carve off half the pie for themselves without doing any work for it.”

  “No, of course they don’t. But the Deverys own the ground, so what can they do?”

  “You made it sound a while ago like the Deverys have committed crimes. You implied that they had killed people and thrown the bodies in that hog pen, the way they did with me and Scratch.”

  Francis frowned. “I don’t know that for a fact. But I do know that some of the business owners who have complained too much about the Deverys’ share have wound up missing. No one’s ever seen them again.”

  Scratch said, “Down in Texas, folks’d call in the Rangers if things like that started happenin’.”

  “This isn’t Texas. If the Deverys have broken any laws, they’ve covered it up.” A bitter laugh came from Francis. “Anyway, if you’d met our local lawman, Biscuits O’Brien, you’d know it’s not very likely he’d ever stand up to the likes of Jackson Devery and his sons and relatives. Biscuits is such a pathetic excuse for a human being that I hate to claim him as a fellow son of Ireland.”

  “We have met him. Why do they call him Biscuits?” Bo asked.

  “I don’t have any earthly idea. But it suits him, don’t you think?”

  Bo had to admit that Francis was right about that.

  “So, how did you boys get on the wrong side of the Deverys? You must’ve done something to offend them to wind up in the hog pen like that.”

  Bo felt instinctively that they could trust the burly O’Hanrahan, so he explained about the encounter at the bridge, with Scratch adding some of the details. By the time Bo got to the part about taking their horses into Edgar Devery’s stable, Francis was shaking his head.

  “You fellas really are lucky to be alive,” he said. “I’m sure when they dumped you in the hog pen, they figured you’d be out cold until it was too late to stop the hogs from eating you. You must be tougher than they thought.”

  “They took our guns and our money,” Scratch said. “Probably our horses and the rest of our gear, too.”

  Francis nodded. “Oh, yes, I think you can be pretty certain of that. I’d say that you boys don’t own anything at the moment except those filthy clothes you left outside.”

  “That’s not true,” Bo said. “Those other things still belong to us, whether the Deverys have them or not.”

  Francis looked at them and frowned. “How do you figure that? You can’t get them back.”

  “Sure we can,” Scratch said. “All we have to do is kill all them damned Deverys first.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Francis O’Hanrahan looked at them like he couldn’t believe what he had just heard. After a long moment, he shook his head.

  “I’m tempted to tell you to get the hell out of here, right now. I’m like just about everybody else around here who isn’t named Devery. I spent what I had to get here, once I heard about that gold strike. I can’t afford not to stay and try to make the best of it, no matter how bad things are.”

  Bo thought about Lucinda Bonner and her daughters running the café in town, as well as all the other honest business owners. No wonder prices were so high and yet folks were struggling anyway. They had to turn over half of what they made to the Deverys. The thought made anger well up in him. It might be legal, but it just wasn’t right.

  And if the Deverys had been getting their way through intimidation or even murder, it wasn’t even legal.

  “We can leave if you want,” Bo said.

  Francis sighed. “No, you can stay. You can wash your clothes and let them dry, since they’re all you’ve got. I’d loan you some of my duds, but I don’t have anything that’ll fit a couple of long-legged Texans like you!”

  “We’re obliged to you, Francis,” Scratch said.

  “Yeah, yeah. Just do me one favor.”

  “What’s that?” Bo asked.

  “When the Deverys try to kill you the next time, they’re liable to ask you first if anybody helped you. Don’t tell them it was me.”

  Bo nodded. “You’ve got a deal.”

  “Meanwhile, you can stay here tonight. I can feed you, help you get back on your feet before you go back to the settlement…to get slaughtered.”

  “Cheerful cuss, ain’t you?” Scratch said.

  “Just trying to be realistic.”

  Now that they were mostly dry and had warmed up some, Bo and Scratch tied the blankets around themselves like Roman togas and went outside to get their clothes. Francis had a washtub and a wash-board, as well as a chunk of lye soap. They filled the tub with water and built a fire under it, and using a couple of branches to pick up the filthy clothes, they soon had the garments soaking in the hot water. They let it build to a boil. That couldn’t hurt, and the clothes were old enough and had been washed enough times that they wouldn’t shrink.

  It took the rest of the afternoon to get the clothes clean, and even then, they still had a few stains here and there and carried a faint odor of hog pen that would just have to wear off. Scratch took that philosophically, saying, “Oh, well, it ain’t like we normally smell like roses, anyway.”

  While their clothes were drying outside, the Texans shared the supper Francis had prepared. It was salt pork, potatoes, and wild greens, and while it was a far cry from the wonderful meal they’d had in Lucinda Bonner’s café earlier that day, they were grateful for the food.

  Out of idle curiosity as they were eating, Bo asked their host, “Do you know Mrs. Bonner who runs the café in town?”

  “Lucinda?” A smile lit up Francis’s ruddy face. “Aye. Every bachelor for twenty miles around knows the lovely Mrs. Bonner.”

  That brought a scowl to Scratch’s face. He had entertained thoughts of courting Lucinda himself, Bo knew, but now it appeared that if he did, he would have a lot of competition.

  Francis went on, “It was all they could do to wait a decent amount of time after her poor husband passed away before they started showing up on her doorstep, bouquets in hand. I, uh…” He cleared his throat. “I may have paid her a visit myself. But it didn’t do any of us any good. She’s devoted to her girls and her business and hasn’t the time for anything else in her life.”

  “Maybe she just ain’t found anything else worth makin’ the time for,” Scratch suggested.

  Francis laughed. “Hope springs eternal, doesn’t it? You’re welcome to try your hand, my friend, but I doubt it’ll do you any good. Besides, once the Deverys find out you’re still alive, you’ll be so busy dodging them you won’t have much time for pitching woo.”

  “Dodging the Deverys isn’t what we have in mind,” Bo said. “We want our horses and our gear back, and somebody around here needs to stand up to that bunch.”

  “A noble goal. The first thing you should do is talk to a man named Sam Bradfield.”

  “The undertaker,” Bo said. “Yeah, we kn
ow. Sheriff O’Brien told us the same thing.”

  Francis frowned. “Good Lord. I didn’t realize I’d be offering the same advice as Biscuits O’Brien. What a mortifying turn of events.”

  It would be morning before their clothes were dry enough to wear. Francis offered them the hospitality of the dugout floor. They made beds of pine boughs and covered them with blankets. They had slept on worse in their time, but still it wasn’t a very comfortable night.

  The smell that clung to their clothes had faded a little more by morning, so Bo and Scratch were able to get dressed without wrinkling their noses too much. “When we get some money, we’d best buy ourselves some lilac water,” Scratch suggested.

  “Yeah, that’ll make us smell a lot better,” Bo said dryly. “Because lilac water and hog droppings go together so well.”

  Francis O’Hanrahan sat on a stump in front of his dugout, chewing on another unlit cigar, and asked, “What are you fellas going to do when you get back to town?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Bo said. “We can’t just walk in and confront the Deverys.”

  “We can’t?” Scratch asked.

  Bo shook his head. “No, there are too many of them, and we’re unarmed. If they’re as casual about breaking the law as they seem to be, they’ll just jump us and beat the hell out of us again, then throw us back in the hog pen. They’d probably take the time to make sure we were dead first, though.”

  Scratch looked like he wasn’t happy about agreeing, but he said, “Yeah, I reckon you’re right, Bo. Ten to one odds are too much when we don’t have guns or even knives.”

  “We’re going to have to bide our time,” Bo went on. “We’ll try to stay out of the Deverys’ way, maybe get a job and earn some money so we can outfit ourselves a little before we confront them.” He looked over at Francis. “If there are jobs to be had in Mankiller, that is.”

  “Oh, there are plenty of jobs,” Francis said. “People who own businesses can’t find enough men to work for them, because everybody who’s able bodied enough is up in the hills panning in the creeks or digging mine shafts, trying to find gold. You can probably get jobs in one of the saloons as bartenders or dishwashers. The livery stables need men to handle horses and keep the stalls clean, too.”