But in time, along about sundown, we got Critter and ourselves fed.
“You got to git now,” Agnes said. “I don’t allow no one around here disturbing my sleep and slitting my throat. Anyone stirs around here, he gets a knife up to the hilt.”
“We’ll vamoose,” I says, eyeing his little shanty, which was the most disgusting looking dump I ever laid eyes on. If I set foot in there, I’d catch leprosy for sure. “But afore I go, you mind telling me about these claim-jumpers? They offered me forty and found, and I’m just thinking about it. Sure beats starving.”
“Oh, Scruples. And his lady friend. They got that palace car in town.”
Well, that explained something. Sitting up a slope from Swamp Creek was a regular Pullman Palace Car someone dragged overland, probably using fifty oxen and some braced up wagons. It was right fancy, purple lacquer with gilded letters on the side, and when I got a peek or two at her, I could see wine-colored velvet drapes in there, and heaven knows what, my being too dumb about all that to know a flush toilet from a two-holer.
“What about all that paper? He told me he’s got a legal right.”
Agnes cackled. “You got a few things to learn, boy. Scruples, he’s in cahoots with the mining district recorder, Johnny Brashear, and pays the old souse to find fault in a claim.” He eyed me, sizing me up for a ten-year-old. “Mining districts get born pretty casual, long before the government moves in and surveys a place and makes it legal. Miners themselves set up districts, adopt some rules about the size of a claim, stuff like that, and this gets put in a ledger and usually the government gets around to recognizing this stuff years later. But bribe a clerk or two, and you pretty much turn it all cattywumpus.”
“Your claim’s valid?”
“Bet your ass, sonnyboy.”
I didn’t cotton to being called sonnyboy, but it was better than being called Cotton, so I just glared at him a bit.
“So them in that palace car, they’re not up and up?”
Agnes Cork, he began wheezing so hard I thought he’d choke.
“How come no one’s fighting ’em?”
“It’s that woman,” Agnes said.
I couldn’t make sense of that, but it sure did make me curious about her. She was just about the first woman I’d seen in a long time that made my britches go tight. I didn’t know they made women like that. She was some better than Sarah Bernhardt. I seen a picture of her once, and thought there sure is some world out there I ain’t never seen.
“Boy, you go back to pushing cows around until you’re growed up enough to walk into a mining camp. Now, it’s getting dark, and I kill anything wandering around my mine in the dark, and I don’t ask questions neither.”
I think that was a message aimed my way, so I loaded up Critter and climbed aboard, wanting enough light so he could pick his way down that slope without busting a leg. Leastwise, I got out of there without getting shot, and Critter didn’t bust nothing.
And I wandered toward Swamp Creek wondering whether to hire on. If all sides was as crooked as it sounded, it wouldn’t matter none which one paid me wages.
Chapter Three
I was scrapin’ the bottom of my purse in that mining town, and I was wonderin’ where my next chow would be coming from. This wasn’t no cow town where I could hook up with most any cow outfit, move into a bunkhouse, and fill my belly. No, this here Swamp Creek high in the mountains was different.
It rose up mighty fast, first canvas buildings, then log, and now some sawn wood was showing up here and there and the place was looking like it might stick around a while. There was false-front stores doing a trade. They was a saloon ever’ few yards, a few whorehouses with them red lanterns rocking in the breeze, a few shacks where a miner could lie on a bedbug pallet for two bits a night, and a few little whitewashed cottages where folks lived pretty decent.
Now there’s plenty of work available in a mining town, and sometimes for two or three dollars a day, too, king’s wages, but the stuff you got to do is plain disgusting. If it’s hard-rock mines, like in the Swamp Creek district, you’ve got to go down in some black hole for ten hours, choke on fumes, hope the whole thing doesn’t cave in, and spend the whole time hammering and shoveling. The noise is so bad that you’re half deaf time you get out of that hole and breathe some real air and see some night sky.
Most of them miners, they’re big and tough. Even the little ones are big and tough. They come from all over the world, places I can’t even pronounce, and half of them got names I never heard of. Soon as the shift ends, they head for their favorite saloon and toss down boilermakers, or some such. Like most cowboys, I learned the hard way to treat ’em good. Now most cowboys, me included, we think we’re pretty tough. Sometimes we work hard, like brandin’ time. But truth is, mostly we’re just getting carried around on our nags and hardly use our muscles. But miners, they shovel sixteen tons of rock a shift into ore cars, year after year.
So the first time I got into a little punching match with a miner, he just about hammered me down a posthole. It was an education. Once, while sitting in a two-holer, I read about the Seven Wonders of the World, and the Colossus of Rhodes. I ain’t got much schooling, and most of it was sittin’ in one crapper or another. Most cowboys got educated that way. There was always something to read in there, right next to the corncobs.
This here miner I took a lick at one foolish night in a saloon, he was that Colossus of Rhodes in the flesh, and for certain the Seventh Wonder of the World, eight feet tall and five feet wide. I was laid up for a week and black and blue for a month. It might not have been so bad if I’d been alone, but there were a dozen cowboys watching me and hooting me on, and they got to see the whole show. We all thought we was tougher than a bunch of rock grubbers, but boy, did we learn fast.
Since then, I’ve been mighty smiley around them miners, because I don’t want to mop up buckets of my own blood. But now I was plumb out of money in a mining burg, and the options weren’t good. I could muck rock for two dollars a day, or I could leave town and hope to eat rabbits and squirrels on my way somewhere else. It was depressin’ to think about. I’ve been down in one of them little holes once, and that was enough. I looked at that rock above me, and wondered when a thousand tons of it would land on my head. You sort of get to appreciate
