and also to get me a better view of the proceedings.
I steered the horse up a grassy slope and into the forest, which was so thick that afternoon turned to twilight, and I let Critter pick his way over fallen timber, which crosshatched the ground. There was no way to escape making a noise as loud as a steam engine, so I just let the nag poke along while I kept a sharp eye out for surprises.
Well, I got myself surprised, all right, when a dude in a dove-gray swallowtail coat, black trousers, and shiny shoes, and with a black silk stovepipe hat, appears from nowhere, pointing a shiny little pepperbox at me, maybe nine barrels in all. A quaint little weapon, outmoded by revolvers, but as lethal as any.
“Hands high,” the gent says, so I consider it’s my duty to obey, real careful, because pepperboxes are ornery little guns with a habit of shooting off all barrels at once.
I raised my pinkies toward the evergreen limbs above, and smiled kindly. “Just wandering through,” says I. “I’m never one to miss a good show.”
The gent looked me over and saw a young cowboy, well armed, skinny as hell, with a few acne patches on my cheeks that were some embarrassing, even if half hid by the scruffy layer of beard I’d not scraped away for a week or two. Me, I saw a smoothly shaven face, black hawkeyes, a trim gray mustache, clean white teeth, fancy dark sideburns, and soft hands that had never done a lick of log-splitting, shoveling, ax-swinging, or plow-wrestling. In short, he was some Fancy Dan. He even had one of them gold watch fobs dangling across his middle.
“Who are you?” the man asked, as if he expected a reply.
“I don’t like to spell her out,” I said. “I never was too happy with the name, so I keep her to myself.”
“Nine barrels. Shall I shoot the first?”
“Cotton,” says I, all hasty. “It’s not a name I cotton to.”
“And?”
“You plumb gonna have to kill me dead before I give out the rest.’
He smiled suddenly. “Cotton Pickens,” he said. “You’ve been hanging around Swamp Creek looking for trouble to get into.”
I flushed pure red. How anyone got ahold of my rear handle I don’t know. I never tell it to anyone.
“This is fortuitous,” he said. “I’ve been looking for you.”
Now that was a word I couldn’t pronounce, much less figure out. “Put that in words someone like me’d know some of,” I said.
“Fortunate,” he said. “I heard you are good with a gun, and I thought to hire you.”
“Well, I’m not rightly sure I’m for sale,” I said. This feller was too clean-shaven for me. My gut feeling is not to trust anyone in a swallowtail coat and a mustache. “But you can give me the what-for.”
He shrugged. “This,” he said. “We have paper giving us that mine. But that gentleman resists.”
“Paper?”
“Deed and mineral rights. We paid the back taxes and bought it at auction.”
“But he still figures possession is nine tenths of the law, right?”
“You know some law, Cotton.”
“Well, you got to read something in an outhouse, especially when you’re as slow to do your business as I am. Outhouses are plumb boring. So I read Blackstone while I’m a-sittin’.”
“Frankly, it surprises me. But yes, I’m looking for able men, and you’d fit the bill. Forty a month.”
That was a heap of money for some half-starved saddle tramp like me. But I wasn’t all that sure about this outfit.
“Now, I don’t dicker with anyone that’s pointing a nine-shot pepperbox at me. It makes me nervous. And I don’t think you’ve given me a name.”
“Sorry,” the man said, and slid his pepperbox into a slick little underarm holster, where it lay so close it didn’t show under that swallowtail.
“Carter Scruples,” he said. “I’m a partner in this enterprise.”
That sure was an odd handle. I wasn’t sure what scruples meant, but it was something you hid behind most likely.
I quit my twitching, now that the mean little lead-thrower was back in its nest.
“I’m not saying yes and I’m not saying no,” I said. “I want to see how this here business is transacted.”
He shrugged, and nodded toward the edge of the grove. “Have a look, if you want to risk a shot coming your way.”
“I think maybe I will,” I said. “But I’m going to leave Critter here, safe in these trees.”
I slid down from Critter. He objected some, laid his ears back, and I yanked the reins just in time to keep him from taking a bite out of this Mr. Scruples.
“Horse needs subduing,” Scruples said. “Either that or it needs its throat cut.”
I didn’t much care for that observation, and gave Scruples a hard look. But he just smiled pleasantly, like everything was fine here in a pine grove while his hired guns were trying to kill some mine owner.
We eased forward until we reached some brush that bordered the slope, and we could see the action above in relative safety.
“You just gonna kill him, just like that?” I asked.
“Not just like that. We gave him his chance to leave peaceably.”
“What’d he say?”
“I wouldn’t deem it proper to tell you,” Scruples said. “In any case, it’ll all be over in a few moments.”
It looked like it might be. I studied the scene real careful, and found a few gunmen creeping and dodging up that rocky grade, hiding behind talus. An occasional boom from that big Sharps kept them from rushing, but it was plain a rush was coming, and one man with one long gun wasn’t going to hold off a pack of gunslicks. Especially since now the two at the flanks were edging in, taking advantage of cover to stay out of sight.
A few of the gunslicks down below the mine head kept popping away with their carbines, just to keep the mine owner occupied, while them stalkers at the flanks was creeping along the rocky cliff getting ready for the potshot.
Then most everything happened at once. The ones in the middle upped and clambered that steep slope, while the ones at the sides opened fire, and now there were more than six in sight, maybe eight or nine, all a-jumping and dodging toward the mine head. The Sharps didn’t boom at all, and I wondered if the old boy in the mine had bought the ticket. Lotta lead flying around up there, whanging off that ore car. Then the whole lot of gunslicks whooped up that slope, and the damndest thing happened. It was sort of shocking actually.
Old miner, he let fly with a couple of sticks of DuPont Hercules with a cap and some spitting fuse wired together, and next thing I know, there was a hell of a eruption as that thing went
