Scratch said, “That’s fine, Lieutenant. Don’t get your hopes up too high, though. This is a smart bunch. They ain’t gonna be easy to find.”
“Well, we won’t find them if we don’t look, will we?” Holbrook said crisply. He walked off before Bo or Scratch could say anything else.
Scratch rubbed his jaw and mused, “We’ve run across shavetails like that one before.”
“Yeah, and they usually wind up in trouble,” Bo said. “We may have our work cut out for us, partner.”
“We usually do,” Scratch said with a smile.
The little caravan arrived at the mine in the middle of the afternoon, as Bo predicted. Andrew Keefer was surprised to see the cavalry, and so were the other men. Holbrook shook hands with the mine superintendent and asked, “Any sign of those outlaws in the past two days?”
Keefer shook his head. “No, but that’s to be expected. They don’t bother the mines themselves. They just hold up anybody who tries to get any gold out over the trail to Deadwood.”
“We’ll soon put a stop to that,” Holbrook promised with a curt nod. He looked at Bo and Scratch. “We’ll rest the horses for a quarter of an hour and then pull out. Do you have a plan as to where we’ll begin the search?”
“I’ve been thinking on it,” Bo said. He turned to Keefer. “Do you have a map of the area in your office?”
“Several of them. Do you want to have a look?”
“I wouldn’t mind.”
Scratch said, “You go ahead, Bo. I’ll tend to the horses and make sure they get watered.”
“You’ll have to break the ice in the trough,” Keefer warned. “It keeps freezing over.”
Scratch nodded and led the mounts toward the corral. Sergeant Gustaffson was already making sure the enlisted men cared for their horses.
Bo went into the superintendent’s office with Keefer. Lieutenant Holbrook followed. Bo would have preferred to study the maps without Holbrook being there, but he couldn’t very well send the officer away. Even though he and Scratch were civilians, technically they were under Holbrook’s command at the moment.
Keefer cleared off his desk, took several maps from a map case on the wall, and unrolled one of them on top of the desk. All three men gathered around it. It was a topographical map, and Bo had no trouble picking out Deadwood Gulch, Whitewood Gulch, and the numerous smaller canyons.
“Where are all the big mines?” Bo asked.
Keefer pointed them out with a blunt finger. “The Homestake . . . the Father De Smet . . . the Argosy . . . the Golden Queen right here, of course . . .” He named off half a dozen others and tapped their locations on the map.
“All the mines are located in the gulches instead of on top of the ridges,” Bo said.
“Well, yes,” Keefer agreed. “It’s not necessarily easier to dig a shaft horizontally than it is to sink one vertically, but it’s easier to get the ore out of the horizontal shafts. Plus the pockets of gold-bearing quartz tend to run horizontally, although they can take off at strange angles in some cases.”
Bo leaned over the map and paid particular attention to the locations of the Argosy and the Golden Queen relative to each other. The Argosy was on the southern slope of Deadwood Gulch, while the Golden Queen was on the northern side of the smaller canyon. That meant there was nothing between the two mines except a ridge that was about a mile wide.
He filed that information away in his head and used a finger to trace one of the ridges. “What’s up here?” he asked.
Keefer frowned. “You mean on top of that ridge?”
“I mean on top of all the ridges.”
“Not much of anything, as far as I know. Trees and a lot of rocks.”
“So there’s no reason for any of the miners to go up there.”
Keefer shook his head. “No. All our work is down in the gulches.”
Lieutenant Holbrook said excitedly, “I know what you’re thinking, Creel. You believe that the outlaws are hiding on top of one of these ridges.”
“It’s a possibility,” Bo said. “The gulches are pretty heavily traveled, or at least they were until the Devils started, well, raising hell.”
“Most of the slopes around here are pretty steep,” Keefer pointed out. “It would be hard getting horses up and down them. A lot of places it would be impossible.”
“There wouldn’t have to be a lot of places you could reach the top on horseback,” Bo said. “Just one good one.”
“Then that’s where we’ll start,” Holbrook declared. Bo tapped the map and asked Keefer, “Any chance we can take this with us?”
The superintendent nodded. “I’ve got others, so you’re welcome to that one.”
“Is there a place around here where we can get up on the ridge? I didn’t see any between here and Deadwood Gulch.”
“Keep going up the canyon,” Keefer said. “The slope gets a little easier after about a mile.”
“Excellent,” Holbrook said with a nod. “Thank you, Mr. Keefer.”
“My pleasure. I hope you find the scoundrels and deal harshly with them when you do.”
