A Gift From Crick Read online

  A Gift from Crick

  Sailors Diggings, an isolated mining settlement, is left reeling when outlaws slaughter seventeen of the stunned population and clean out the assay office, stealing $75,000 worth of freshly mined gold. A group of vigilantes led by Don Plunkett give chase, determined to dispense some Old West justice.

  Eddie Carter is mistaken for a gang member and to escape a lynching he must go on the run, handcuffed to outlaw leader Dave Mooney, the man responsible for the death of his partner.

  In the confrontation that follows, the stolen gold disappears with an outcome that nobody could have anticipated.

  By the same author

  Revenge at Powder River

  A Gift from Crick

  John McNally

  ROBERT HALE

  © John McNally 2018

  First published in Great Britain 2018

  ISBN 978-0-7198-2813-3

  The Crowood Press

  The Stable Block

  Crowood Lane

  Ramsbury

  Marlborough

  Wiltshire SN8 2HR

  www.bhwesterns.com

  Robert Hale is an imprint of The Crowood Press

  The right of John McNally to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him

  in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved. This e-book is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights, and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  CHAPTER 1

  Let’s start with Dave Mooney. Now Dave was mean, boy, was he mean. He was a man just spoiling for a fight. He had a temper sharper than a stropped razor. A man whose life was defined by the crimes he committed and the people he killed. He’d sure kicked up some dust in his time.

  Then there was his brother Flem. Some folk said that Flem Mooney wasn’t as bad as his brother Dave but that’s like saying being mauled by a hungry bobcat is better than being bitten by an angry rattlesnake. He was still a nasty piece of work. He’d like as hit you just for stepping on his shadow.

  And Fred Cooper, twenty-three years of spite and cruelty. He had a face off the far side of ugly. He looked like he’d been trapped, part skinned and left to die. He always wore a hat because he’d got some affliction that meant his hair just grew in clumps, like the coat of a dog with mange. Now there’s an old saying that goes on about not judging a man until you’ve walked in his moccasins for two moons but you would not want to get inside Fred Cooper’s mind. No, sir, not ever. You do not want to share the thoughts and feelings that stoked the furnace that always raged in his head.

  Whatever you’ve done bad they’ve done it twice over, and then some.

  You get the picture. Hell wouldn’t know what hit it when they got there.

  Now if old Walt Hollingsworth had not dropped dead that winter then his nephew Nate might still be alive today. But die Walt did and Nate took over his claim and brought his friend Eddie Carter along with him.

  Early one morning the hidden man, Dave Mooney, stood like a dark secret in the deep pools of shadow under the trees. He looked down at the miner working by the water. A creek bed ran between two steep sided hills wet with springs and runoff that leaked out of the rocks. The miner knelt with his back to Mooney and poured water and dirt from the creek bed into an old rocker box. He rolled it backwards and forwards, sluicing the water through to separate any gold from the sand and gravel in the silt at the bottom of the box.

  His rifle lay propped against a large rock maybe four paces behind him. His blue shirt was taut across his shoulders and dark with sweat, his hat pushed low on his head to shade his eyes as he crouched in concentration. The sun blazed overhead and heat waves rippled on the horizon; he paused to straighten and stretch his back. Way down the valley he saw a small weak dust devil swirl upwards, spin across the valley floor and break apart. He went back to work. It was August of 1852 and always hot at that time of year in Del Norte County, California.

  Mooney brushed a fly out of his face with the back of his hand and waited. He glanced off to his right and studied the tent further down the slope, the canvas sun-bleached white over time, pitched by a clump of trees on a bright empty hillside where the ground sloped upwards into thick strands of pine.

  A second miner sat by a fire pit in front of the tent and poured himself a coffee from a smoke-blackened tin pot. He sat back with his legs stretched out in front of him. Mooney saw his brother Flem and Fred Cooper edge out of the undergrowth behind the tent and close in on the coffee drinker.

  The miners’ horse and mule stood tethered in the shade by the tent. The horse was a shiny black Morgan, he looked up, swished his tail, shook his head and snorted. The miner by the fire roused himself and looked back over his shoulder at the horse. Fred Cooper ran forward and whacked him on the head with his gun butt and the man slumped forward like a sack of grain.

  Dave Mooney watched the miner by the creek in front of him turn, stand up and look for his gun.

  ‘Don’t move, mister,’ said Mooney in a deep voice that rolled down the hillside like thunder. He clicked the hammer back on his rifle and the miner jerked his head up and saw Mooney, a big man with a scarred face and a dark beard walk out of the sunlight across the shoulder of the hill towards him. He wore a blue chequered shirt and black corduroy trousers. Mooney lifted the rifle barrel as he moved and said,

  ‘Don’t go for that gun. Don’t make me do what I’m thinking. Look at me, raise your hands or I’ll put you down hard.’

  Mooney could not see the miner’s expression under the shade of his hat but the man raised his arms.

  Fred Cooper shouted across, ‘This one’s out cold, Dave.’

  Mooney nodded but kept his gaze locked on his prisoner, his eyes flat and cold, saying, ‘Walk down the hill to the tent,’ and they both moved off. As they got nearer he shouted across at Cooper, ‘Why the hell did you slug him, Fred? We might need both of them to talk.’ As he spoke, he prodded his prisoner in the back with his gun barrel then he drove the stock of the rifle into the man’s kidney and knocked him to the ground.

  Fred Cooper stooped and picked up a wooden pail half filled with water. He wore a black scuffed bowler hat jammed down on his head to cover his patchy hair and a sweat stained collarless grey shirt and baggy trousers. A small man with a mountain boy face, bleak and savage with pitiless eyes, Cooper scowled. His forehead creased in a rigid knot, he said, ‘I guess I hit him because I didn’t like the way he looked at me, Mooney.’

  His eyes hollowed deep in his weathered face looked like two bullet holes in a burlap sack.

  Dave’s brother Flem spoke for the first time. ‘Take it easy, Dave, he got the job done. They know we mean business now, don’t they, Fred?’

  ‘Damn right,’ said Cooper. He swilled the unconscious miner with water, threw the bucket aside and pulled the groggy man to his feet by his hair.

  Flem Mooney stepped up, grabbed a bunch of the man’s shirt in his big calloused hand, shook him like a rag doll and forced him to his knees.

  The two brothers Dave and Flem Mooney looked alike: tall, powerfully built, dark haired with the same large round face like a pie plate. Flem wore a big brush moustache. His brother Dave had a dark thick beard as smooth and black as an animal pelt, and a long sore looking scar running down the side of his face across his cheek and into his beard. It looked like someone had sliced
his face off and stuck it back on again at an odd angle.

  In fact, his brother Flem helped Dave get the scar. Well, they were half brothers really and that caused the problem in the first place. Dave was three when his pa remarried (no one ever told him what had happened to his ma). Flem came along soon afterwards and the boys grew up fighting, each other to start with but then back to back against anyone and everyone. Their pa told folk he did his goddamn best, he beat them good every single day of their lives when they were kids but they still turned out bad. Their ma said Pa got it all wrong, he should have fetched a belt to them as well as laying into them with his fists.

  One fall, when they were young men they went out hunting bear up by the headwaters of the Rogue River, down the south side of Crater Lake if you know the area. Dave shot a black bear. Young Flem tried to look pleased but felt jealous as hell. Now that black bear was a mean old boy, he went down hard in a cloud of dust and stink but as Dave moved in, he lashed out a huge paw, dragged Dave down and started to maul him, trying hard to crush his skull. Flem raised his gun but thought better of it, brother Dave bragged he was tough so he decided to let him handle the bear. Luckily for Dave a couple of passing hunters heard the ruckus, waded in and killed the bear. Dave survived, of course, with a scar to prove it. Flem always claimed his gun jammed up but there were days when Dave looked at Flem with murder in his eyes.

  Not yet today though, it was still early, but for now he had work to do and money to make.

  A saddle creaked and two riders walked their horses out of the trees, they both rode with rifles propped on their thighs. Dave Mooney pushed his gun barrel deep into his prisoner’s back and said, ‘Don’t get your hopes up, mister; them boys are with us.’

  Flem Mooney looked irritated, he stared at his brother Dave, deep wrinkles meshed his face, and he pressed his lips together in a tight line and said, ‘Come on, Dave, let’s get to it and get gone. We’ve been in these parts too long, it’s getting too hot for us. We’ve been grubbing around, taking bits and pieces of gold off the likes of these two and got no more than a few dollars to show for it. Let’s make them squeal and move on, I hear there’s plenty of gold not far from here at a place called Sailors Diggings up in Oregon territory.’

  ‘Right,’ said Cooper, nodding. He looked at Dave Mooney and added, ‘Maybe we’ve been following you too long.’

  Dave Mooney looked hard at Cooper and took a step towards him.

  ‘Seems like you want to take charge, Fred, is that it?’

  A brittle tension grew in the silence around them. Cooper stared at Mooney, his gaze locked on his face like he was looking down the barrel of a carbine.

  ‘Maybe it’s time I did run things,’ Cooper said.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, will you two stop kicking?’ said Flem. He wore a red plaid shirt with dark sweat stains under the arms, he rolled his shirt sleeves up to his elbows, drew his Colt Walker and pointed it at the miner kneeling in the dirt, whose hair and skin was freckled with grit. To the miner he said, ‘Where’s your gold? Tell us right quick and we might let you be.’

  Flem cocked his gun with his thumb, the noise like a dry twig snapping. He scowled and his dark face smouldered with impatience, he jammed his gun barrel under the miner’s jaw and pushed his head back with it. ‘What are you going to do, mister, give it up or roll the dice? It’s your call.’

  The miner stared at the gun barrel with the look of a man hanging off a cliff edge by his fingertips, and he spoke in a dry voice as if his mouth was full of dirt. ‘We ain’t got much, it’s bagged up and covered by a big rock under the fire. Take it and go.’

  Flem Mooney smiled and said, ‘See, that wasn’t too hard now, was it?’

  They watched Cooper sweep the fire aside with his boot, lift a rock, pull a small sack out and heft it in his left hand. His eyes glittered with pleasure, he drew his own gun and shot the kneeling miner in the guts. The pain raced through the miner’s body and exploded in excruciating agony; he sat down heavily in the dust, one hand pressed against the wound in his stomach. He looked down and watched bright red blood ooze between his fingers.

  Fred Cooper laughed. ‘See, Dave, it was worth me putting a knot in his head, we got it done double quick.’ His voice hardened. ‘And listen good, I decide who I hit and who I kill, not you.’

  The gun shot raised a squall of birds out of the trees and echoed across the hillside. They heard someone shout up in the woods and another call off to their left across the river.

  ‘Come on,’ said Cooper, ‘time to skedaddle right sharp before their neighbours come down to see what all the palaver is.’

  They heard a boot scrape on gravel and turned to see the other miner make a run for the river. The two men sitting on their horses opened fire. The first rider’s shot ricocheted off a rock close to the running man, he stumbled but kept going. A second shot went high and wide as the miner zigzagged closer to the water’s edge, it looked as though he might make it. Dave Mooney swung his rifle up, pushed the stock into his shoulder and fired. The miner cried out and fell as the shot took him low in the back. He pitched forward and lay face down on the rocks.

  The two riders cantered down with the other horses and the Mooney brothers and Cooper mounted up in silence, rode up the slope and disappeared into the darkness of the woods, leaving a deathly hush on the hillside.

  Dave Mooney rode behind Fred Cooper, he always did. He’d heard stories about Cooper many times and figured the best place to keep a mad dog was in front of you. Only last week they’d run from Silver City because Cooper argued with two men in Johnny Ward’s Dance Hall. Cooper stabbed one of the men, chased the other out into the street and shot him in the neck then, sullen faced, he walked back in and ordered another drink. Mooney didn’t mind killing folk but he just didn’t trust Cooper, he was as moody as a scorpion with a belly ache. Cooper’s wildness meant they had to move three ways from Sunday most times and high-tail it before they could make any real money. Mooney felt pretty sure he’d have to kill Cooper one day soon and that thought made him feel a whole lot better.

  CHAPTER 2

  The miner by the water was still alive. He was Eddie Carter. He lay and drifted in and out of consciousness. He heard the gunmen ride off but he could not move, his back felt as if a mule had kicked him. He knew his friend Nate lay gut shot behind him and needed his help but a great tiredness seeped through his body and its heaviness pressed down on him and drained him of energy.

  He smelled the coldness of the water by his face, closed his eyes and his mind drifted back four years to the first time he met Nate Hollingsworth and how Hollingsworth saved his life.

  Back then, Carter scouted for the Army, chasing down Cayuse Indians in a mind-numbing campaign that dragged on for six months or more. They camped by a box canyon off the Hood River, forty miles or so out of the log fort at Camp Drum.

  A company sergeant, he couldn’t remember his name, told him to scout the northern ridge with another civilian scout, Nate Hollingsworth. He explained where to find Hollingsworth and told them to slip out at dusk and get the lie of the land for the morning charge.

  Carter pushed through some black gooseberry bushes and found Hollingsworth sat by a fire under a wild plum tree near the banks of the river, cooking fatback on a skillet. He looked about forty, wore a slouch hat pinned up at the front, a gloomy bag of a man with a sad leathery face and dark, deep watchful eyes. They liked each other right off and shared the food, cornbread and fried ham, and a coffee made of chicory and acorn that wasn’t half bad. They grumbled about the Army like regulars and talked into the late afternoon. Carter did not say much about himself, generally he kept tight lipped on where he had been and what he had done, he reckoned that was his business.

  They set off as the sky dimmed but it took a long time for the night to arrive, the dark seemed to come in really slowly as if it struggled against the wind. They rode out of the trees and through rocky dry ravines spiked with brush. Eventually they left their horses and
climbed a steep canyon side on foot, the high ridge silhouetted in the fading light like jagged tin.

  At the top they bellied down and peeped over the rim where the valley floor sloped down from the canyon entrance to a rock wall streaked with shadow. They saw two large fires and heard the steady thump of the Cayuse drums beating out an eerie lament. The sweat poured off Hollingsworth, his upper lip beaded in moisture; he kept wiping his mouth and nose with the palm of his hand.

  ‘We’ve seen enough, let’s get back, something ain’t right,’ he whispered. He started back to the horses without waiting for Carter. He almost ran across the clearing and pulled his horse reins off a tangled bush.

  Carter paused to look around and saw the shadow of a man detach itself from the rocks above Hollingsworth and drop like a stone. A knife blade glinted in the moonlight. Carter drew his Colt and fired in one smooth movement and the Cayuse brave crumpled without a sound. Three more shadows dashed out from the boulders as the two scouts leaped onto their horses and kicked them into action, the horse hoofs tore at the ground and threw out great clods of earth. All they could hear was the heavy laboured breathing of the horses as they whipped them up the incline to safety.

  Carter felt something solid and hard hit him as an arrow thumped into him and caught him high in the shoulder. A searing pain scorched down his arm and he grunted, swayed and almost fell from his saddle. He struggled to find his balance and his horse slowed but then he felt Hollingsworth grab his wrist, straighten him in the saddle, sweep up his reins and drag him and his horse clear. They kicked for camp, let their horses have a loose rein and rode hard enough to outrun their own shadows.

  He collapsed when they got back to camp but remembered how Hollingsworth had overcome his own fear to help him, hell, he’d saved his life. . . .