Stagecoach Graveyard Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 - It’s Just Business

  Chapter 2 - More Bad News

  Chapter 3 - Drawn into Trouble

  Chapter 4 - Outlaw Loyalty

  Chapter 5 - Back in the Manhunting Business

  Chapter 6 - Flushed out of Hiding

  Chapter 7 - Another Outlaw Bites the Dust

  Chapter 8 - Unwelcome News

  Chapter 9 - Deadly Ambush

  Chapter 10 - The Dude from Cincinnati

  Chapter 11 - Carson Shines

  Chapter 12 - Fateful Proposition

  Chapter 13 - Night Fight

  Chapter 14 - A Man-Sized Rat Hunt

  Chapter 15 - A Trip to Virginnie City

  Chapter 16 - Meet George Hearst

  Chapter 17 - Plans Are Made

  Chapter 18 - Suspicion

  Chapter 19 - Night Ride

  Chapter 20 - The Gatling Gun Arrives

  Chapter 21 - Vern Blows His Stack

  Chapter 22 - Kidnapped

  Chapter 23 - Rescued

  Chapter 24 - The Pumps Arrive

  Chapter 25 - Riding into Danger

  Chapter 26 - Who’s Ambushing Who?

  Chapter 27 - The Righteous Shall Prevail

  Chapter 28 - Good-bye

  GRAVEYARD SHIFT

  Dave Gunther was not a particularly brave or stupid man. Yet he had hired on to the Reno and Carson City stage line as a shotgun guard, knowing it was dangerous work. The last lucid thought he made in his life was that he had better start earning his salary. He grabbed the shotgun and jumped to the ground, hoping to catch the holdup men by surprise, but to no avail. The robber holding the rifle shot a round into Dave’s spine, shattering it, while a second outlaw fired a round from his .44 Colt directly into Dave’s heart. The bullet passed through Dave’s body and buried itself in the wood of the coach frame, next to the bottom step of the driver’s box.

  Squint ran around the front of the mule team, clawing at his holstered .44 and shouting, “Dave, what’s goin’ on?”

  The outlaw who shot Dave with the rifle spun on his heel and fired a hasty shot at the charging Squint before the surprised driver even got his pistol clear of its holster. . . .

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

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  First Printing, April 2009

  Copyright © Thomas Nicholson, 2009

  All rights reserved

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  To my darlin’ Sandy and

  the grandkids, Cason, Lilly, and Xander

  Chapter 1

  It’s Just Business

  “Git a-goin, ya no-good glue-factory rejects. Haw, Lucy. Put a strain on yur lines or I’m a-gonna flail the hide right offa yur butt with this here bullwhip—see if I don’t. Come on, now. Drag this here coach over the top and earn yur hay fer a change. Haw! Put yur shoulders into it. Come on, mules, let’s git a-goin’ now. Hee-haw, hee-haw, giddyup now.”

  The mule skinner spit a stream of brown juice to the side and wiped his mouth with the back of his gloved hand without missing a beat as he cursed and shouted at the six mules straining to pull the heavy Concord stagecoach up the six-degree slope and over the crest of the latest hill of the many that tormented any traveler making the perilous journey from the diggings at Virginia City, Nevada, to the southern terminus of the Reno and Carson City stage line.

  The mules pulled against the leather traces and slowly the team and stage crested the grade and reached the flat summit of the pass. As he always did on the run to Carson City from the mining camps at Virginia City, Squint Richards halted the mules and let them catch their breath before starting the long downward trail to the flatland below.

  “Good mules,” he grunted to the sweating and winded animals. “Take a blow and git yur breath back. You’re gonna need it when we hit Deadman’s downgrade.”

  Squint, who derived his name from his droopy left eyelid, the result of an encounter with a mule’s hoof many years earlier, stood and looped the reins around the hand brake of the stage. He stretched a kink out of his weary back, spit a glob of brown tobacco juice over the side of the coach, and spoke to the shotgun guard riding beside him. “Dave, we might as well stretch our legs as well. Once I get them no-account mules started down the grade to the bottom, we ain’t stoppin’ till we hit Carson City.”

  Without awaiting an answer, Squint climbed out of the driver’s box, stepped down to the axle hub of the four-foot-high front wheel, and then jumped to the ground. He stomped his feet on the rock-strewn roadway and stretched up on his tiptoes, raising his hands high above his head.

  Squint slowly walked toward the lead mules while Dave suppressed the amused smile that threatened to cross his lips. The mule skinner would have been over six feet tall if his legs had grown in proportion to his stocky torso. They had not, so the feisty driver was barely four inches over five feet and was extremely sensitive to any adverse reference to his size. Dave had seen Squint plow into some thoughtless character who ridiculed his height at a bar, even though the man towered over Squint by many inches and outweighed him by many pounds. Most of the time the rugged mule skinner would thoroughly clean the clock of anyone who uttered a disparaging slight against his stat
ure. Even when he lost, as he did the last time he got roused, by Lebo Ledbetter, the local bully, the offender knew he had been in a scrap.

  Dave set his shotgun against the driver’s seat and stood to climb off the other side of the stage. He swung his leg over the side of the stage and paused, his mouth agape. Three men, their faces covered by kerchiefs, stood at the side of the road, two pistols and a rifle pointed directly at him. For an instant, nobody said a word or moved. Then one of the outlaws motioned with his pistol for Dave to get down from the stage.

  Dave Gunther was not a particularly brave or stupid man. Yet he had hired on to the Reno and Carson City stage line as a shotgun guard, knowing it was dangerous work. The last lucid thought he made in his life was that he had better start earning his salary. He grabbed the shotgun and jumped to the ground, hoping to catch the holdup men by surprise, but to no avail. The robber holding the rifle shot a round into Dave’s spine, shattering it, while a second outlaw fired a round from his .44 Colt directly into Dave’s heart. The bullet passed on through Dave’s body and buried itself in the wood of the coach frame, next to the bottom step of the driver’s box.

  Squint ran around the front of the mule team, clawing at his holstered .44 and shouting, “Dave, what’s goin’ on?”

  The outlaw who shot Dave with the rifle spun on his heel and fired a hasty shot at the charging Squint before the surprised driver even got his pistol clear of its holster. The bullet caught Squint high on his right shoulder and spun him to his left, right off the roadway and down a steep, rocky slope toward a sheer drop-off of some two hundred feet. Squint dropped and rolled down the slope until he got all tangled up in a lone piñon bush growing out of the rocky soil. The shock of the bullet or the fall or both combined left Squint unconscious by the time his limp body wrapped itself around the bush. Squint was lucky; if he had missed the piñon, he would have rolled off the slope and fallen the two hundred feet to the bottom of the cliff, landing among the rubble of two stagecoaches and a freight wagon that had been pushed to their doom in earlier robberies.

  As the last echo of the gunfire faded across the hilltops, the man who had shot Squint pulled down his neckerchief, exposing his face. “Well,” he said aloud, “that takes care of that, don’t it?”

  The center outlaw holstered his pistol and dropped his mask as well, wiping his hand across the bushy mustache covering his upper lip. “Damn, Luke, that was some shootin’. Ya didn’t seem to aim yur rifle afore ya shot.” He stepped to the edge of the road and looked down at the still form of Squint, twenty feet below. “Ya reckon he’s dead?”

  Luke Graham jacked another bullet into the chamber of his Winchester Yellow Boy rifle. “He has to be—I hit him square in the brisket. Ya wanna climb down thar and check him out?”

  The leader of the trio shook his head. “Not me. You wanna scramble down there, Bob? I noticed ya didn’t fire a shot durin’ the whole show. What’s the matter? Git cold feet?”

  “Nope,” Bob answered, his youthful face creased in concern and worry. “Not me. ’Sides, Charlie, I don’t like the ideer of killin’ them two. I was just about to whop the guard on the noggin with my six-gun when you and Lucas filled him full of holes. Up to now we ain’t killed no one. Now we’re murderers, as well as highway robbers.”

  “Well, tough beans to the both of ’em,” Luke answered. “They was the ones who started it. If they’d had a lick a’ sense, they’da give up peaceful-like. We gotta take care of ourselves. It weren’t personal or nothin’. It was just business.”

  Charlie nodded his head in agreement. “Luke’s right, Bob. Now shake a leg. Git up thar and throw down the express box while Luke and me gets these mules unhitched. I wanna get offa this here road as quick as we can.”

  Working with practiced dispatch, the three outlaws completed their assignments and gathered around the steel express box. A heavy lock stood between them and the contents inside. Luke aimed his Winchester and blasted open the lock. Charlie quickly flipped up the hasp and lifted the heavy lid. Inside lay two leather pouches filled with gold dust and a stack of twenty-dollar greenbacks.

  “Damn,” Charlie muttered in satisfaction, “there’s gotta be two thousand here, iffen there’s a penny.” He quickly placed the loot in his saddlebags and turned to young Bob. “Grab a holt of them mules’ lines, boy. Me and Luke’ll push the stage over the side and then we’re gettin’ outa here. Luke, put the guard’s body in the stage.” Charlie positioned the tongue of the stage toward the edge of the drop-off as Luke wrestled the limp body of Dave Gunther onto the floor of the passenger compartment.

  Pushing on the rear wheels, the two outlaws rolled the stage to the edge and over the side of the roadway. As the stage tipped forward, it gathered speed and quickly rolled down the rocky scree to the sheer drop-off. It rolled over the limp body of Squint, breaking his right leg below the knee, and then sailed into space, falling in a trailing shower of dust and small rocks until it smashed into the ground two hundred feet below. The stage broke apart, scattering its shattered pieces among the worthless remains of the earlier victims.

  The three outlaws watched in morbid fascination as the dust settled and the sound of the crashing stage and falling rocks echoed from the far wall of the canyon. Satisfied, Charlie swung up onto his saddle and spoke to the others. “Let’s skedaddle. I wanna git offa this road afore someone comes along. Bob, you bring them mules along.” He rode off, not bothering to see whether his instructions were carried out. Of course they were, and the entire party headed back down the steep grade the stage had just ascended.

  About a quarter mile back down the hill, a shallow stream twenty feet wide carried runoff from the last vestiges of snowmelt across the rocky roadbed. Charlie turned his horse into the stream and was quickly lost to view from the road by the trees and brush growing along the banks of the cold, rushing water. Without comment, the others followed, nobody speaking, nobody concerned by the foulness of their evil deed. Instead, their thoughts were on the hot meal awaiting them back at their ranch hideout.

  The three horses and six mules muddied up the clear water as they splashed through the stream, following its path toward the base of the mountain, but the debris quickly washed away as if it had never been disturbed. Any evidence of their passing was soon gone. As the sound of their horses’ hooves faded in the rippling water, the area grew quiet, and forest birds began to fill the air with their twittering songs.

  All was calm for the next ten minutes. Then two men rode over the top of the hill from the opposite direction, the second in line leading a heavily laden packhorse. They stopped their mounts at the top, looking around in puzzlement. The older man, his face covered by a gray-streaked beard and sun-weathered skin, took off his sweaty hat and scratched his balding head.

  “I swear them shots had to come from here’bouts, Lem. We wouldn’t have heerd ’em if they’d been farther down the slope, yonder.”

  “Yu’re probably right, Hank. But what were it all about?” The second man, not yet in his forties, swung down from his horse and walked to the edge of the road, examining the chopped-up dirt caused by the wheels of the stage as it had rolled over the edge of the roadway. “Looks like somethin’ went over the edge here. Hey, lookie thar! Thar’s a body down thar! And down to the bottom of the cliff. Look at them wrecked stagecoaches. Gawd bless. I shore hope thar weren’t no folks on ’em.”

  Hank hurried to join Lem by the edge of the road. “Shore enough. Damned, I woulda hated to be on any a’ them stages. How ya suppose it happened?”

  “Reckon some skunk of a highwayman tried to hold up the stage from Virginia City and they ran offa the road?”

  “Three of ’em all at once?”

  “Well, one at a time, then?”

  “Naw, I don’t reckon so. These here wrecks musta happened over time. That don’t make it no better, though. It looks like a stagecoach graveyard down thar.”

  “Git yur rope, Hank. I’m gonna try and shimmy down thar and git that body afore
it falls on over the cliff.”

  Lem looped Hank’s rope around his chest and waited until the older man was settled on his saddle with the rope wrapped around his saddle horn. Carefully he edged his way over the side of the road and crabbed his way to the still form, wedged against the lone piñon growing out over the drop to the bottom of the ravine.

  Lem grabbed the limp body of the driver and called up to Hank, “Take a strain, Hank. I’ve got ’im. Pull us up.”

  Dragging the two men up the rocky slope was hard work for Hank’s horse, but eventually its efforts brought Lem and Squint to the rocky roadway, Lem gasping to catch his breath. Hank passed him a canteen of water, from which the hot, dusty Lem gulped several swallows. “Thanks, pal. I thought fer a minute I was gonna hafta let the body go over the side like the stage. I’d never a’ made it if yur hoss hadn’t done most of the work.”

  Hank rolled Squint onto his back. “What are we gonna do with this here dead fella?” He suddenly did a double take. “Whoa, now, this jasper ain’t dead.”

  Chapter 2

  More Bad News

  Colleen O’Brian walked angrily down the wooden boardwalk of Main Street in Carson City, her lips pursed with suppressed rage. She had just finished talking with Samuel Malone, the president of the Silver City Bank, and what she heard had made her spitting mad. So mad that she had stomped out of the florid-faced banker’s office and slammed the door with force greater than that which would become a refined lady. She shook her head vigorously, whipping her auburn hair around her face. “To hell with that pompous old bastard. All the business we’ve given him and he can’t extend our loan a measly thirty days.” She glanced around guiltily to ensure that nobody had heard her cuss like a drunken mule skinner.

  Fuming, she wiped a hand across the bridge of her freckled nose, then stepped over a lazy dog that lay sprawled across the boardwalk in front of Trammel’s Dry Goods Store. She paused to look at her reflection in the fly-speckled glass of the front window. Colleen O’Brian was taller than most women, with what she considered an excess of bosom and hips on an otherwise lean frame. Her mouth was wide and generous, just like her father’s, but her eyes were the emerald green of her late mother. Her hair was also the same fiery auburn of her departed mother. It spilled over her shoulders in the afternoon breeze. She did not pluck her brows as some of the girls had done back at Ms. Emily Trotter’s Girls’ Academy in St. Louis. Thus when she frowned, as she was doing now, it seemed as if she were glaring out from under a single long brow. She sniffed in derision at her reflection and headed toward her father’s office, down one more block.