“The Mason offer was repeated a short time ago, but the letter was from the Rafter Mining Company, saying their man Mason had made a previous offer. It was simply repeated in the same terms.” “Who signed that letter?” “A man named Ben Stowe.” Ben Stowe!
The last time Shevlin had seen Stowe he was living in an abandoned homesteader’s shack, rustling a few head of cattle, and riding with a wild bunch. And now he was offering to buy a mine!
“What you say about the town,” he said softly, “is true–it is prosperous. My guess would be that everybody connected with the mine is high-grading, if the stuff is actually there, and every place of business in town is taking gold in trade, or buying it. As to recovering your gold, I’d say it would be impossible. By now it must be lost in the normal channels of trade.” “I do not think so.” She leaned forward, her hands in her lap.
“Mr. Shevlin, I believe all that gold is right here in Rafter. I believe someone with capital–perhaps the people who wish to buy the mine–are buying the gold from the stores and holding it. I believe they intend to buy the mine with my gold, then dispose of the remainder after they own the property.” She got to her feet. “Mr. Shevlin, gold is not easy to conceal; and as you undoubtedly know, the gold from no two mines is exactly the same.
It is difficult to dispose of gold without it being known, and no sales have been reported from this area, no gold has appeared that cannot be accounted for.
“You think I am only a foolish girl, but believe me, Mr. Shevlin, my grandfather treated me like a son in many respects, and among other things he taught me a great deal about business, and a great deal about gold and the marketing of gold.
“The Pinkertons checked on gold sales for me, beyond what I could do through the normal channels of exchange. I do not believe the Pinkertons could find out what is happening here. I believe it will take somebody with local knowledge.” He glanced at her with respect. This was a girl who knew her own mind, and was uncommonly shrewd along with it.
High-grading, the stealing of rich ore from a mine or smelter, was always difficult to control.
Opening a change room where the miners changed from their digging clothes to their outside clothes could stop some of it, and checking lunchboxes or canteens could, too, but where there was high-grade ore there would always be ways to steal it.
If what she believed was true, the men who controlled the working of the mine must have deliberately permitted the miners their chance to high-grade in order to involve them, and the community itself, in the crime of high-grading. Then the operators of the mine simply kept the vastly greater amount of gold for themselves, allowing only a small amount to go through legitimate channels, and this small amount was bought from the storekeepers to keep it out of circulation.
It required capital, rigid control, and some shrewd operation to make it work. Once the mine was owned by the operators of the high-grade ring, then they might take other steps; certainly they must realize such an operation could not long continue.
“I will pay, Mr. Shevlin,” the girl went on. “I will pay well. I will give you ten per cent of all you recover, and if my calculations are near the truth the recovery might reach a half a million dollars.” “You’d have to trust me. What’s to keep me from locating the gold and keeping it for myself?” She smiled at him. “Mr. Shevlin, you have a very bad reputation. You are said to have stolen cattle, it is said that you are a gunfighter, that you have engaged in public brawls, that you were once friendly with the very men who are robbing me. I have heard all that. Nevertheless, I believe in you.” She gathered her skirts and stepped to the door.
“You see, Mr. Shevlin, Brazos was not the only man who told me you could be trusted. Long ago my uncle told my grandfather, when I was present, that there was one man in Rafter who could be trusted under any circumstances. He said that no matter what anybody said, Mike Shevlin was an honorable man, and an honest man.” Now who the hell would say a thing like that about him?
Turning away, he walked to the window again to keep her from seeing how much her words had touched him.
“Your uncle can’t have known me very well,” he said.
“He thought he did, Mr. Shevlin, and he believed in you. I think you knew him very well, Mr. Shevlin. His name was Eli Patterson.”
CHAPTER 3
The storm had broken. Scattered clouds raced across the sky, and between them the stars shone like the lights of far-off towns.
He stood alone on the wet street, with enemies all about him. It was after midnight, and only a few lights looked out upon the rain-darkened walks, the muddy streets, and the blank faces of the false-fronted stores across the way.
Now, at night, it might have been any little western town, but it was not just any town. It was a town built on deceit and theft, a town corrupted by its own greed, a town that had arrived at this point without realizing how deep were the depths into wh it descended.
Mike Shevlin looked gloomily from under the black brim of his hat. He looked upon the town with no hatred. Here his best friend had been killed, brutally shot down in an alley because he had the courage to stand against evil. But Mike Shevlin knew all too well how easy it was to accept that first dishonest dollar, and he knew all the excuses a man could give himself.
After all, a man would say, the gold comes out of the ground, why shouldn’t I get some of it?
Everybody else is getting it, why shouldn’t I?
There were a multitude of easy excuses, useful in all such cases; but the trouble was that evil can plant a seed, and the seed can grow. From easy acceptance of a minor misdemeanor, one can come to acceptance of a minor crime, and from a minor crime to a major one. And this town had now accepted robbery on a large scale… perhaps larger than any one man knew, except for the leaders. And they had accepted murder.
Thereby came fear. For murder breeds murder, and those who have killed once for gain, will kill again; and those who have agreed to ignore a murder, will ignore another if it is to protect some small security of their own–property, or guilt they themselves possess.
Mike Shevlin knew this because there had been a time when he had himself been guilty. It had seemed a great lark to run off a few steers to sell for a spree in town. And then suddenly he had wondered how he would feel if those had been his father’s cattle, or his own.
There comes a time for a man to draw a line, and Mike Shevlin had drawn his, and he had ridden away from Rafter, from Gib Gentry, Ben Stowe, and all the rest of them. And now he had come back to a changed town. The old, easy friendship was gone. The hospitality of the West was no longer here. This town was alive with fear, with suspicion, and with hatred, and he, of all people, would find no welcome.
For surely every man here, and every woman too, was his enemy. What he had been asked to do and what he wished to do were bound together. If he found the man who had killed Eli Patterson, he would also expose the plot to high-grade gold; and if he did that the prosperity of this town would end.
What was right, and what was just? Had he the right to come into th place and shatter its prosperity? Here people dressed better, lived better, had better houses than in other such towns. There was more money spent over the bars, more money in the stores; but with the prosperity there would be, for some men, a sense of power. The leaders of all this, the men who created and planned it, had won acceptance of corruption, and now there was no limit to what they might ask and force the town to accept–or was there?
There must be people here, good people, restless with what was happening, people who wanted to be free of fear. But he did not know these people, and had he known them he knew they would not trust him, not Mike Shevlin.
What he did he must do alone. And now he stood there pondering on it.