“Scruples, he called me that? Not Amanda?”

  “I think she agreed with him. She didn’t object.”

  “I thought she liked me,” I said.

  “You going to saddle up Critter and ride into the sunset?” he asked.

  “Then I’d be trash, Carboy. If he called me riffraff, then I’m gonna show that whole outfit what riffraff is. Only, I ain’t got a plan yet.”

  “Time’s running out for both of us, I’m afraid.” He sipped some of that oolong.

  “What’s he gonna do next?” I asked.

  Carboy shrugged. “Keep on mining my ore and milling my ore while he tries to line up a sale of the whole district. He got what he set out to get, which was every mine and claim in the Swamp Creek District, and he snatched the mill too.”

  “I can shut down the mill, I think, and maybe the Big Mother, too, if it’s got a boiler. Would shuttin’ it all down do any good?”

  “Well, it’d keep the gold in the ground. A mine is a diminishing asset. Some mines last just a little while. None last forever. One of the games is to tie up a mine in litigation. After years of fighting in courts, someone gets the mine—which by then is depleted. In other words, Cotton—control is everything. And Scruples controls everything.”

  “You got a little cash I could use?”

  “For what?”

  “Getting all them woodcutters to take a vacation. They was tellin’ me that without cordwood, the whole shebang shuts down real quick.”

  Carboy rose, paced the study, puffed deeply on his pipe, and then disappeared. When he returned, he had a stack of eagles in hand.

  “There’s about twenty woodcutters supplying the mines and mill. See whether an eagle apiece would persuade them to take a vacation for a month.”

  “Only ten bucks for a month?”

  “Cutting wood is hard and heavy work, Cotton. Ten bucks will look good.”

  “What does that get you?”

  “Time, Cotton, time.”

  Well, twenty eagles was two hundred dollars, and I never had so much cash in my hand in all my life. I thought two dollars was pretty hot stuff. And there I was with twenty of them little gold pieces, light as can be even though gold’s heavy metal.

  “I’ll give her a try,” I said.

  “Oh, and Cotton, find out if you can whether Scruples is putting the whole district up for sale. He’s got to start somewhere, an advertisement, or hiring a broker, or wiring someone. I have a notion that if we can find out who’s the buyer, we can maybe talk to the gentleman about a few facts of life.”

  “Seems that’d make him all the more eager to move in here,” I said.

  Carboy scowled at me. “It’s called due diligence. You want to know what you’re getting into.”

  “Not me,” I said. “I’ll just take a chance on whatever looks real good.”

  He smiled bleakly at me. I think maybe I didn’t do so good with him, but I couldn’t help it. I’m just me, Cotton, and don’t know how to be some other feller.

  I headed out to the pens to saddle up Critter. He greeted me with a friendly bite and a butt.

  “You and me are gonna travel, Critter,” I said.

  He clamped his yellow teeth into my shoulder.

  “Quit that,” I said. “I bite back.”

  He dropped some apples and let me saddle up. I rode out of there and skirted wide of Swamp Creek, thinkin’ maybe some of them toughs might want to clean out twenty eagles tied up in an old handkerchief of Carboy’s. I knew about where them woodcutters worked and let Critter run a little, since he was getting barn sour. This Swamp Creek was same as all the rest of the mining camps. Half of them start in the middle of woods, and as the town grows, the forests get cut away for firewood and boiler wood and planks and timbers. New camps, they got woods close by; old camps, you got to ride a heap to get to any forest that ain’t cut down. Swamp Creek was showing some age, with hardly a tree left standing close in. The bigger the town, the more woodcutters is needed, and sometimes there’s more of them than there is miners. It takes a lot of timber to run a mine, more to run a mill, still more to nail up all those stories and shanties and houses.

  Critter farted some to let me know he was enjoying life. He could sound like a cathedral pipe organ if he was of a mind. And after a while, we reached one of them woodcutters’ camps, with a few wagons around and a few wall-tents where them cutters can live halfway comfortable for a season.

  I stepped off the hurricane deck and waited for them woodcutters to gather around. They was a rough lot, and half couldn’t speak English, but neither could I so it didn’t matter none.

  “I suppose you heard that Scruples, he took over the mill and the Big Mother,” I said. “That Scruples, he sort of weaseled around Carboy and got a lot of armed men into them places and kicked out the managers and took over.”

  “We heard a thing or two,” said one.

  “Then I’ll get right to it. Carboy, he wants his mill and mine back, and ’bout the only way to do that is to shut ’em down tight.”

  I sort of waited, but no one volunteered nothing.

  “I mean, no more wood.”

  Now I saw a mess of frowns. I was talkin’ pay and makin’ a living.

  “If he can get near all of you fellers to take a month vacation with pay, he’d do it. He’d shell out for you to take a while off, and not deliver a stick of wood to the mill or the Big Mother. No cordwood, no planks, no mine timbers.”

  That sure got their attention, all right, but they wasn’t lookin’ like they’d go along with it.

  “How many woodcutters is working around the district?”

  “Hardly know from day to day,” one said.

  “Twenty maybe?”

  “More’n dat.”

  “Well, I’m supposed to tell you he’ll pay you each an eagle to shut down for a month. But only if you are all in it.”

  That sure sank like a rock in a pond.

  Finally, one said, “We ain’t all one crowd. Some of the others, if we took eagles to shut down, they’d just work harder and get better pay. We lay off a month, maybe we don’t get back into the wood line at the mill.”

  “You’re afeared of losing business?”

  None of them answered. This was going to be harder than I thought. “Where are them other camps? I’ll go talk.”

  They were pointing in several directions. But I finally got her straightened away. There were three more camps, several men in each, which made work easier for all. None was very far off. They all wanted to stay as close to the mill as they could get to save haulin’.

  “I’ll just ride Critter here to where they is and do a little talkin’. I’ll get back soon as I hear from them.”

  They eyed me suspiciously, and I put foot in stirrup and clambered up. Critter snorted, bucked once or twice, and settled down.

  “He don’t like it here,” I said.

  We headed for two of them camps that was up the valley a little, but not far. I rode in there about when they was scrubbing the pots after eating some elk stew, and they heard me out, but with the same look on their faces. They was mostly saying, yeah, we’ll take a month off for an eagle, but what about them others? They didn’t much care who owned the mill, or who paid them for each load of cordwood, just so long as they got some hard cash out of it. Like most ever’one else, they wanted to get along, and for men straight off the immigrant trains and boats, cuttin’ wood wasn’t a bad way to get going.

  So I wasn’t making much headway there neither. I finally climbed onto Critter, who humped his back up just to let me know I was abusing him and he wanted time off, and we took off for the next camp, which I thought was maybe half a mile up.

  It was getting along toward dusk now, pretty gray, and that’s what saved my life.

  That old rifle shot clipped my slouch hat right off my head. I felt the hat rip away before I even heard the shot. I bailed off of Critter, hit the ground hard, lots of sticks and stuff there which didn’t do me no good, and was up, my borrowed hogleg in hand, and runnin’ straight toward that son of a bitch Rudolph Costello Glan.

  Chapter Twenty-eight

  I bulled right through that brush and stuff, working up toward a ridge I knew was the place where Glan took a potshot at me. I don’t know if that was smart or not. I just was goin’ after him and plowing through all that scrub growth on the slope, dodging this way and that.

  Maybe he was up there takin’ aim, maybe not. It was getting too dark to see anything. Maybe me going after him like that was the last thing he expected, straight into the sights of his rifle. I didn’t much care, and it sure beat laying on the ground waiting for him to slide down and finish me off.

  “Riffraff, am I?” I snapped. “I’ll show you some riffraff.”

  That word still graveled me. Calling me trash, that did it. “I’ll riffraff you off that ridge, Glan.”

  But there wasn’t any reply, and I think maybe Rudy Glan, he decided to get the hell out of there while he could, because he had a mad bull dodging through that brush and he couldn’t swing a rifle fast enough to know where the target was.

  The last part of that hogback was pretty steep, but I thumped along, my heart banging in my chest, ready to shoot anything that moved. When I finally got up there, it was pretty dark, but I made sure to crouch low and not silhouette myself against the night sky. Darkness is a friend, but you gotta know how to use it right.

  He was gone. I couldn’t even find any brass. But I knew who done it, and I knew I’d be settling accounts one of these days. I also knew Scruples wasn’t ignoring me at all, and was still stalking me. I crouched around there, lookin’ for brass, and then lookin’ for a place some horse stood a while, but I didn’t find nothing.

  I started toward Critter real careful, knowing Glan might be there waiting. It was going to be a bad time, collecting Critter. But I had a thing or two up my sleeve, and when I finally got to a protected little park on the slope, I gave Critter the old whistle. I didn’t hear a thing, and whistled again, and pretty soon old Critter, he comes snorting up. I peer around sharply, and lead him under a big cottonwood where it’s dark as pitch and there’s no sky, and got on board.

  We was some distance from the valley road, and I sat real quiet, listening, and finally gave Critter a loose rein, and he pussyfooted down that slope, only snapping sticks once in a while. I was still a target. Anyone crouched along that valley road could have ambushed me, even in that dark.

  I wasn’t doing so good with the woodcutters. I wondered how come Glan knew where I was heading. Maybe he was paying for information, like everyone else around there. It were the strangest thing, everyone spying on everyone else. He must have been paying a few of them woodcutters to let him know anything interesting. So Glan had snitches and Carboy had snitches and Scruples had snitches, and about the only one I met around there that didn’t was Celia. I thought maybe I’d head into town and pay her a visit, long as them woodcutters was not interested in doing business. I thought I could park Critter on the other side of the creek and we’d be all right. I tiptoed up them wooden stairs to get to her rooms, and knocked.

  It took a while, but pretty soon she opened up, wearin’ a white cotton sleeping gown and carrying that little revolver in her hand.

  “Oh, it’s you,” she said.

  “Want company?”

  “Not tonight, Cotton. If I let you in, you’d have your way with me.”

  “Well, that’s not a bad idear.”

  “I’m still grieving for Armand, Cotton. But try me in a day or two.”

  “That’s when you quit grieving?”

  “No, that’s when I’m gonna have my way with you.”

  She smiled. Them girls pushing seventeen sure had notions.

  “Well, guess I’ll have to hold out. Don’t know whether I can last that long,” I said.

  “Go home,” she said.

  “I ain’t got one.”

  She reached forward, kissed me on the lips while that little lady revolver was pressed to my belly, and then shut the door. I stood there, half loony. You ever been kissed by a near-seventeen-year-old widow lady who also has a gun pushed into your gut? It’s an experience.

  I slipped down them wooden stairs real quiet, not wanting to wake up half of Swamp Creek, and got aboard Critter, and rode into the night. It’d be Carboy’s bunkhouse again, which wasn’t bad but didn’t hold a candle to Celia.

  I got Critter corralled and hayed and watered and brushed, and then staggered into the bunkhouse. There was someone bunking in there, but I paid no never mind and pulled off my boots and britches. I got down to my union suit, which I was thinkin’ I oughta wash in the next week or two, on a nice day, and crawled into my bunk and started to doze off.

  Next I knew, there’s this feller sitting on the edge of my bunk.

  “How you doing, big fella?” he asked in a soft voice.

  I’m outta that bunk so fast I hardly took time to get my britches back on, and about the time I’m stabbin’ feet into boots, I hear this female laughter. I turn around just when a match flares and a lamp gets lit, and sure enough, it’s a woman, and one I know, too, and she isn’t wearing more than a little white thingamabob.

  “Amanda,” I said, sort of repentant.

  “Want some company, Cotton?”

  I always want company, but I sure wanted to learn a thing or two first. “What are you doing half naked in Carboy’s bunkhouse?”

  “I came to see you,” she said.

  “Well, now you have,” I said, because I couldn’t think of nothing else to say. This last sixty seconds or so set a record for something or other, though I don’t know what. “Maybe you should pull a blanket over you.”

  I don’t know why I said that neither. Most of me didn’t want no blanket pulled over her at all. But here was the source of half my torment, the woman whose hired man Glan had tried to kill me a few hours earlier, sitting in her unmentionables in the bunkhouse of a man who didn’t much care for her.

  “Why you here?” I asked.

  “To see you, Cotton. I couldn’t get you out of my head.”

  This here business was taking a bad turn. “I’m sparking someone else,” I said, real desperate.

  “Celia Argo,” she said unhappily. “Look, Cotton, I want to talk to you.”

  “You already are,” I said. I sure was feeling put out.

  She rose, slipped into a white robe she had, and sat on the bunk across from mine. “There’s a lot you don’t know,” she said.

  “That’s what I’m learnin’.”

  “I’m trapped. I don’t like the company. I don’t like Carter Scruples. I’m a prisoner in a way. He’s got signed contracts making me a partner, and equally responsible for all that happens, including…anything bad.”

  “Well, too bad. You shouldn’t have got into it.”

  She eyed me levelly. “Cletus Carboy has a spy inside the railroad car. It’s me. I’ve been telling him what’s going to happen.”

  “You?”

  “Carter Scruples dragged me into it. I didn’t know it was going to be crooked. I didn’t know people would die. I didn’t know he’d hire killers. He talked about his business ideas, working out agreements, transactions, and sticking to them. It’s all a jumble in my mind. He was always talking about contracts and integrity and at the same time he was stealing mines, scaring people off, and using force. He’s rotten, but he’s got this surface idealism, I guess you’d say, this…talk that hides who is he and what he does. He talks like some Yale graduate. I got roped in. I’m not smart enough to see through him entirely, but I know I’m in trouble. If the law comes down on him, it comes down on me, too. He made me a partner, even if I don’t know about his decisions. Like having Glan shoot you.”

  “What’s Yale?” I asked.

  “It’s like Harvard.”

  “Never heard of it. But there’s cows called Herefords.”

  She eyed me quietly. “It doesn’t matter. Here’s what matters. He talked me into something bad. He talked about new ways to do business, and that fooled me. I’m trapped and I need you now. I’m sorry I’m half dressed this way. I thought the only way to get help was…well…you know.”

  “Transactions,” I said. That sure was some word, all right.

  She nodded.

  “You want me to get you out of it.”

  “I don’t know what I want, Cotton. I want to escape. Take me to Butte, and the railroad.”

  She was lookin’ at me so soft, I almost went for it.

  “Onliest way I know of to get out of it is to give back what’s been took. There’s nothing you can do to bring good men like Aggie Cork back, but there’s miners all around here got squeezed out, and you can’t escape until you’ve done what you could. I could put you on a nag and take you to Butte right now, and you could catch a train out, but you wouldn’t escape nothing. All that stuff, it’d still be on your shoulders.”

  She looked so desolate that I thought maybe I’d been meaner than a skunk.

  I wasn’t inclined to take her away from there and leave the whole mess she caused behind her.

  But I relented a little. “You been helpin’ Cletus Carboy, and that’s something. He still got his mine took from him, and now his mill took from him. Carter Scruples had a snitch here, so Cletus didn’t have a chance, even with what you was tellin’ him. You want a transaction? I’ll make one with you. We got to turn this whole thing around, and get them mines back to their proper owners, the ones still livin’, and find some way to stop Scruples cold. You willin’?”

  “I was hoping you’d just take me away from here.”

  “How long have you knowed about what he was up to?”

  She stared into the kerosene lamp sadly. “From the beginning. I went along with it until innocent people…you know. I wanted money, lots of money.”

  “You think Scruples knows about you?”

  “He knows someone’s talking. He knows I’m not happy with any of this. He spends hours talking about contracts and how we’ve got to meet our contracts and how I agreed to this and that, and he agreed to this and that, and we’ve got to uphold everything.”