By the Neck Read online

  Within days, Rollie had gotten word that the meek clerk and father of six had sliced open his wrists and bled out in his holding cell rather than endure his lengthy prison sentence. Sad and spineless, Rollie had thought then and still felt that way, leaving his large family to carry on without him.

  And the oldest of the children, Delia, was in Boar Gulch, telling him . . . what? “Why are you here, Delia?” Rollie’s eyes narrowed and he felt his heartbeat speed up.

  “For a man who is regarded as being what the old-timers call some smart, you really are a dullard, aren’t you? Why, I’m here for you, Stoneface Finnegan!” She reached out and playfully touched the bar near his coffee cup.

  Rollie stared at her, an unbidden sneer pulling his mustache downward.

  “Let me catch you up on what’s happened to my family. Or as I like to call us, your victims. Let’s start with me, okay? We all know that my father held a respectable position.”

  “He was an embezzler who got caught, Delia. Case closed.”

  “Oh shut up! Now where was I? Oh yes, you see,” she shifted on her bar stool and smiled over at Pops and Wolfbait.

  The old man had dropped any pretense of helping Pops and was watching the girl as if he were in the front row at a stage play. Pops, on the other hand, was working on the chair leg, quietly puffing on his corncob pipe, but Rollie knew the man was hearing every word. He also knew from the way Pops had seated himself that he could be counted on in the speed of a finger snap to break out the little hideout gun he wore under the bib of his coveralls.

  “My life was about perfect, and it was set to become even more perfect a week before Daddy’s trial. But of course, there was Percy, my disgustingly wealthy fiancé, did I mention I was engaged to marry Percy Tibbs, of the Tibbs Brewery family? Yes, it was all set to happen. We were to be wed at the family estate in Bentonville. There was going to be an orchestra and hundreds and hundreds of white doves and a children’s choir and . . .”

  As she waxed on about the wonders of the wedding that never took place, something clicked in Rollie’s mind and he somehow knew for certain what he’d only guessed at moments before. She was the one who had placed the notice in the newspaper.

  “Are you listening to me, Stoneface? Good, because I am far from through. So you see, dear, sweet, charming, wealthy Percy Tibbs dropped me from his life when he found out my father was branded a criminal. I bet it was his mother, Martha-Louise Tibbs, a more spiteful prude you’ll never find.” She sighed. “Then my mother, poor, desperate, weak Grace Holsapple.

  “She never was much in the way of strength. Father liked to say she had the core of an oak, but I think he only said that because it made her smile at him with her bedroom look. They spent far too much time in that room, I can tell you. Before the trial she was a wreck, during it, she was a weepy mess, and then Father killed himself in desperation and she took to laudanum like a duck to water, and in short order became a true drugged fiend, useless for anything save drooling on herself and glugging more laudanum.”

  Delia glared at Rollie, her cheek muscles bunching. “I did my best to tend the little ones, as I always had, but I also had to earn money. Let me tell you something, Stoneface Finnegan, if you are a young woman with five mouths to feed, clawing and dragging at you all hours a day, the whimpers and sobs from the poor little wretches asking for food, for warmth, why, you will do the only thing you can do to earn money.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “And no, it’s not sewing hems at a dress shop. I tried that and all it did was give me bloody fingertips and bad eyesight and precious little pay. It was piecework. No, you do the one thing pretty young women the world over have done since time began. To earn money you sell yourself all night long. And during the day, you tend to your laudanum fiend of a mother and her whimpering brood.”

  Only then did her features falter. Her bottom lip quivered. “Still, it wasn’t enough, and soon my mother’s habit got the better of her. We buried her at the poor farm, not with my father, because that wasn’t allowed. The state took his body away, and I don’t know where he lies for all eternity. Despite my efforts, my waifish siblings became scattered/ Taken away, they drifted from me like chaff from the stalk in a hard breeze.”

  Rollie wanted to say something, even though her weepy story didn’t bother him at all, but she plowed on ahead.

  “The one bright spot in all this was learning I was good at something besides being a money earner for children. Without my mother and the children to tend to, I was able to sleep during the days and get food to eat. I worked for a woman who made certain I made money. She took her cut, to be sure, but I made enough to do the one thing I needed to do. And do you know what that is, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan?”

  He shook his head, certain she was going to tell him. He was also not inclined to think this conversation was going to end well.

  “No? I’ll tell you then. I made enough money to do lots of things, things I felt needed doing. One of them, I will admit now, was a premature mistake. Like hiring a man to . . . well, almost a mistake. Oh, but you see, I am talking in riddles aren’t I? I kept a close eye on you, sir. And I was so disheartened to hear you were laid low in Denver City. And then I was so happy to hear you had not died from that sad episode in that alleyway. So relieved. Not as much as you, ha, but I was pretty happy, mister. Yes, I was.”

  She said this in a singsong way, and it annoyed Rollie almost as much as seeing her sitting in his saloon. Almost.

  “But I kept abreast of your situation while you were healing. I had friends, if you can call people you pay for information friends. Maybe they are ticks, leeches, but I had them report to me with progress of your convalescence. Do you remember Nurse Cherborn? The one you called the major because she was so strict? I don’t blame you, really. Between you and me, I wouldn’t have wanted her for a nurse. She was frightening to look at. She even had a mustache. Nothing to rival yours, but on a woman it was something to see. She told me something curious. She told me how you had begun asking for the newspapers, how you would circle with a pencil every single mention of a new gold camp called Boar Gulch. Coincidence? I think not. My father may or may not have embezzled money, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan—and yes I see now how you earned that name, staring at me, not saying a thing, but oh, if your eyes were weapons, mister, I’d be dead right now.”

  Yes, thought Rollie. You bet.

  “Where was I?” she said.

  “You was telling about that ugly nurse and Boar Gulch and all,” said Wolfbait, who was apparently enjoying what he was hearing.

  Rollie thought maybe the man was smiling. Pops nudged the older man with a boot. Wolfbait caught his eye and looked down as if he’d been caught peeking into a window. Rollie hated to admit it to himself, but he wanted to know how she found out where he was.

  Delia Holsapple laughed. “That’s right. I put my mind to work and got to thinking, and while I was doing that I also learned that you, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan, had been let go by the only employer stupid enough to hire you, the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Yes, I did learn that much. And then do you know what I did? I came up with an idea. I figured if you were now a free man, though nearly dead, and with no job, you might want to make some money and quick, or else you’d end up as a swamper in a runty little saloon somewhere.

  “Oh, pardon. I see you have aspired to that very position. But where, oh where would you go? And then it came to me. Why the very place you’d been so interested in finding out more about in the newspapers. Boar Gulch, of course. What does all this have to do with anything? Well, you see, I saved all the money I’d made working at night, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan.”

  If she thought such talk would shame him, she was mistaken. Pity wasn’t even in his mind.

  “And do you know what I did with it? Well, back in Denver City I hired somebody to kill you, for one thing, but when that didn’t work, and you lived, I said to myself, ‘Delia,’ because I always call myself Delia. ‘Delia, you need to look on his survival as
a gift! You have the chance to savor his long, slow comeuppance for a long, long, long time to come.’” She giggled and it almost sounded genuine to Rollie. Almost.

  “And do you know how I plan on doing that? Why, a few months back, with all that money I saved, I took out notices, advertisements of all size and shape in every major newspaper in the West. And I explained how you were relocating yourself to Boar Gulch and how you would simply love to have the company of all those people whose lives you ruined for all those long years you worked as a Pinkerton Detective. Why, after such a long, illustrious career, I expect you’ll be ass-deep in outlaws for years to come! Unless one of them holds a grudge, that is. Then all bets are off, as they say. I don’t gamble much, by the way. But when I do, I go for the sure thing.”

  She slid off the stool and walked to the door. “Oh, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan, thanks for listening. It’s been a long time and I am glad to finally get all that off my chest. And thanks for the coffee. It’s been nice catching up with you. I’ll be around, though. You see, you ruined my life, Mr. Stoneface Finnegan, and I must do no less to you. Oh, all this excitement is going to be so much fun to watch.”

  Rollie listened to her boots clunk the boardwalk out front, then down the steps, and the softer sound of her footfalls as she walked up the street. Something inside him that he used to have—a rod of iron that kept him stern, straight, and lean but had been missing since the alley attack—was back. He felt its presence as surely as if someone had driven it into him with a hammer through his head.

  He needed to think.

  He didn’t doubt anything she’d told him. She may have exaggerated here and there, about the glories of her wedding that never was, for instance. Because it made sense for it to be so, he knew that she had been behind the attack in the alley.

  She had hired someone to kill him. That alone made her a criminal. But he had no proof. She hadn’t really said that’s what she did, had she? Even if she had, what good were the testimonies of Pops and Wolfbait? In a court of law, neither would be considered a qualified witness.

  He could not touch her. And she knew it. He couldn’t touch her legally, anyway. But then again, he knew he wouldn’t do anything to her that was illegal. No matter how much he hated her. And he didn’t think that hatred would do anything but grow. She knew that, too. She was a clever one, was Miss Delia Holsapple.

  But then again, so was he.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Boar Gulch was doing exactly what Rollie hoped it would—attracting more people each day. Squawks and squeals harkened their arrivals, their wagons’ axles screeching for grease as they rolled into town from each end, the rough route he’d taken months before could only have become a more rutted, nearly impassable mess with each gully washer of a storm that passed through. They seemed to have had more than their share of rainstorms this season. Considering he didn’t have much to compare it with, Rollie shrugged and lived with it.

  Yes sir, it all seemed to be working in his favor. But if all those newcomers meant money, then why wasn’t he happier? Why was Rollie Finnegan annoyed with himself? He knew the answer, even before the question rattled itself into being in his skull. That foul, whining woman, Delia Holsapple. The notion of blaming others for one’s problems in life had never set right with Rollie. He’d had plenty of setbacks and thumpings over the years, but he knew he was to blame for them. Or at least to blame for not getting a leg up and over them in due course. But that Holsapple woman nurtured her self-pity and revenge as if it were a precious child.

  The way he looked at it, he could tuck tail and run, which he wasn’t about to do, or he could stick to his vague plan of staying put in Boar Gulch, making what money he could by mining the miners. And handle each situation as it arose.

  Trouble was, the Gulch didn’t have so much as the whiff of a lawman to tame the terrors Rollie knew were only beginning to bubble to the surface of this place fertile with ore, some of which he was responsible for, just by being there. It was up to him to lay low the coming swarm of rats seeking cold revenge for bringing them to justice through the years. Retirement, he thought. Could anyone ever really retire from enforcing the law? It did not matter if he had worked for a private agency or held a public office, the law was the law.

  Then again, he reasoned, he wasn’t strictly in the law business any more. He was in the stay alive and make a dollar business.

  Rollie sighed. Had to be the mountains. Sometimes when sleep kept itself hidden from him, he would drag a chair out onto the meager front porch of The Last Drop. With his feet up on the railing, he would watch the night sky. Purple over the distant peaks, it would become lacerated with great jags of lightning like the ghostly white of old scars.

  Most of the time those storms never drew any closer. Heck, most of the time they amounted to mammoth displays of heat lightning with little more to offer than a passing rainstorm. Bold and slashing and silent, it became a far-off skirmish that would whisk Rollie back to the battlefields of the war, when men and horses screamed together in their private agonies, only to be drowned out by the piercing whistle of cannon fire and explosions that erupted like angry volcanic rents in the earth.

  He would sit, sipping whiskey and smoking his briar pipe, lost in the past, watching but not watching the storm, farther away in his mind than the past that never died. Sometimes a purple dawn would find him still there, asleep and twitching in the last of a dream’s dredged agonies.

  Sometimes he heard the sounds of miners coughing up gouts of phlegm as they stretched and yawned like skinny, hairless cousins of grizzlies, scratching their way into another day. Hopefulness bloomed anew with each sunrise. That very day may well be the day they, among all the other rock grubbers and dirt hounds, would sink their pick and tug it free, dislodging a clot of soil and gravel. The simple act might reveal true sign of that most precious thing they wanted above all else, the thing that drove them to uproot whatever lives they had known, often lives of safety, of comfort, of predictability.

  After all wasn’t that why they were there? For the promise of untold wealth even though the wealth itself may never come. And the allure of the search. Few of them, Rollie knew, ever thought that deeply about it. Or if they did, they hid such thoughts in a bottle. For that’s what he heard each night—the promise of ore.

  “I’m guessing from the dew dripping off your hat you been out here all night again, huh?”

  Rollie looked up to see Pops emerge from the bar with two steaming cups of coffee. He handed one to him.

  “Thanks.” Rollie sipped and made the gratified sound men the world over make every morning after their first sip of the day. “Something about coffee,” he said.

  “Yep,” said Pops.

  They sipped a few minutes longer, watching the sun squeeze its way skyward, carving everchanging rivers of slow-moving light. The colors of fire shifted from black to purple to blue-gray and cut through with red flares of matches blooming to orange that finally became the mild disappointment of full daylight once more.

  “You ever wonder if it’s nothing more than greed that brought us all here, Pops?” Rollie didn’t look up, but he knew his friend had heard him and was, in his usual way, considering the notion before giving voice to his thoughts on the matter.

  “Way I see it”—Pops paused to set fire to his first pipe of the day and get it going like a train steaming up an incline—“greed’s the mask over it all. Take you for example—you didn’t come here to be rich.”

  Rollie chuckled. “News to me.”

  “Naw, naw, now listen. You opened this can of peaches. We’re going to eat every damn one. I’m thinking you came here to figure out some things for yourself. You ended up here because you need to be here. At least right now, for this time. If you make money, that’s all well and good, a bonus if you like, gravy dripped over the steak and taters.”

  “What happens when I figure out whatever it is I need to figure out? Will the gravy dry up?”

  Pops shrugged. “Ho
w do I know? I look like a fortune-teller to you?” He laughed his deep, raspy chuckle.

  “How about the rest of them?” said Rollie, gesturing outward, toward the surrounding hills where their customers were greeting the day.

  “Oh, all as different from each other as they can be, I reckon. Some want adventure, some running fast from whatever they thought they hated back wherever it is they come from—Ohio or Kentucky or England or Ireland.”

  Rollie nodded. “And you?” Again, he was met with the silence that meant Pops was chewing over his thoughts.

  “I tell you what. You never asked much about what I am, where I come from. I appreciate that, Rollie.”

  “You don’t ever have to tell me anything, Pops. I wasn’t prying open the lid on anything.”

  “I know, and I appreciate that. I do things in life because I want to do them, because I need to do them. If I tell you something, it’s because I choose to.” Pops drew on his pipe again in silence. A lengthy silence.

  Rollie wondered if he’d stepped over some line with his partner that he hadn’t known was scratched into the ground in the first place. He was about to change the subject when Pops spoke up.

  “Some time ago, I had a wife and a daughter. That was back before the war. We were slaves, which I believe I have mentioned and which I am certain does not surprise you anyway. Near as I can tell my wife is dead. Things got tight for the colonel who owned the farm where we lived. That’s because he was an idiot, couldn’t gamble to save his ass. He began selling off his moneymakers, the slaves. I reasoned that my wife was safe, safe as any of us could be anyway.

  “She had skills, knew three languages and could read them all, too. I figured that would put her in good with the big house. Turns out she was the first of us to get dragged off. I needed to go after her, but she’d made me promise to look after our daughter. Our little girl needed me worse. I heard the caravan my wife was in was set upon, and whoever did it killed all the slaves. Every single one of them.”