four days.”
Longarm jammed the cigar back into his mouth. “Tell me your big problem and don’t exaggerate, as usual.”
Billy massaged the small of his back for a moment as he circled the room. Physically, he was the exact opposite of Longarm. He was short, heavyset, and slightly balding. He looked soft and bookish, but Longarm knew that he was really quite strong, and had distinguished himself in the field as an honest and fearless deputy United States marshal before he had been promoted to a paper-pushing desk job.
Billy stopped at his office window and gazed out across Denver toward the distant snow-capped Rocky Mountains. “Man, oh, man,” he said, “every time I look up at those magnificent peaks, I think about the time that I chased Cut-Faced Jack Hoolehan and his gang.”
“Billy,” Longarm told him, “I’ve heard that story about ten times and I’m just too damned tired and hungry to sit here and listen to it again. Okay?”
Billy turned away from the window. He wore a hurt expression. “Ten times? I doubt that.”
“All right,” Longarm conceded, “seven or eight. What’s the tough job?”
Billy flopped back down in his desk chair. “Did you ever hear of a town called Helldorado?”
“Yeah.” Longarm’s brow knitted. “I believe that’s in Arizona, isn’t it?”
“Not even close. It’s in western Nevada. About fifteen miles east of Carson City.”
“Okay,” Longarm said. “I know the lay of that land. But the last time I was through there, I remember a town called Dayton, and then a few miles east of that you come to Fort Churchill.”
“Helldorado is south of them both.”
“Now that,” Longarm said, “has just gotta be hard, dry country.”
Billy nodded. “That’s about the only kind of place you’ll find any gold or silver strikes anymore. All the scenic or even hospitable country has been mined to death. You can’t find much ore up in the Rockies or the Sierras because they’ve already been prospected so heavily.”
“Tell me about Helldorado,” Longarm said.
“it used to be a booming town. At least on the surface that’s what it appeared to be.”
“What does that mean?”
“They did strike gold and silver there. A couple of hundred thousand dollars worth, I’m told. But as quickly as the boom started, it went bust.”
“Borrasca,” Longarm said.
“What?”
“It’s a Spanish word the Mexicans on the Comstock Lode use for mines that won’t pay or suddenly go bust. It kind of means ‘bad luck’ or ‘barren rock.’ Borrasca is the opposite of bonanza, ‘a rich strike.’”
“Thanks for the Spanish lesson,” Billy said cryptically. “Now, can I go on with the story of Helldorado?”
“I quiver with eagerness to hear it,” Longarm said with a touch of a smile.
“All right. Helldorado apparently went borrasca a few years ago. The town withered, and it was bought by a man by the name of Matthew Killion. Heard of him?”
“Yeah,” Longarm said, “he’s owned some big mines on the Comstock. At least, they looked big on paper. But I heard that Killion was far better at mining the pockets of stock market speculators than he ever was the mines themselves.”
“That’s true. I’ve been told that the man is totally unscrupulous. When Killion and his boys ran out of suckers, they started an extortion ring that put the pinch on the remaining merchants in Helldorado.”
“What about the town marshal?”
“He was said to be either in cahoots with Killion and his boys, or else just too afraid of them to do much about it. The upshot of the thing was that a vigilante committee was formed with the express purpose of lynching Killion and his gang of thieves. I guess that Killion has two sons and the older one is lightning fast with a six-gun.”
“And the younger?”
“He’s probably just as bad. I’ve always said that snakes beget snakes.”
“Sure,” Longarm said. “So what happened? Did Killion and his crowd run for their lives?”
“That’s right,” Billy said. “they bluffed and threatened but, when it became obvious that half the town was ready to lynch them, the Killion gang vanished like smoke in the wind. Rumor has it that they robbed a few trains and stagecoaches over in California and roosted for a while in San Francisco.”
“That’s a wild enough town for men like that,” Longarm said. “They could get away with a lot over there before they got people riled up enough to stretch their necks.”
“Well, they did and people almost did,” Billy said. “Vigilantes came for them one night in San Francisco too, but they all got away again and they went straight back to Nevada. By that time Helldorado was damn near deserted. They drove everybody else out of the place and made it their headquarters. They’ve been raising hell ever since. We think they robbed the Union Pacific Railroad just east of Donner Pass and got away with about ten thousand dollars.”
“Wow!” Longarm said with a whistle. “Any witnesses to identify them?”
“No,” Billy said. “It was an inside job. They must have bribed one of the guards, because he got the jump on the others and had them lie face down on the floor of the mail car while the gang boarded and cleaned out the safe and all the federal money orders.”
