He’d already been told French Sarah was over at the undertaker’s, and he figured the dentist and druggist who examined more dead folks than he did knew when a gal had been strangled or shot. So he headed up to the mining operation to examine the scene of the crime.
He walked as far as a barbed-wire fence and a posted gate, where a shotgun-toting C.C.H. man told him all the property beyond was his outfit’s private property, damn it.
Longarm flashed his federal badge and explained he’d come friendly for a look around that ore-stamping mill, or else he’d be back directly with a search warrant and an armed mob. So the guard let him through, and even pointed the way to where they’d found that dead gal.
Longarm would have found the stamping mill in any case. It was three stories high, sending up a lot of coal smoke, and making a dreadful racket near the tracks running through the dusty confusion of tippies, sheds, and such between him and the mine adit set in the bare side of a mineral-rich young mountain.
He found a dusty denim-clad work crew running pulverized and high-graded ore into an open gondola car the same gauge as Widow Farnsworth’s little railroad. A lot more worthless spoil was being piled up, and up, between the stamping mill and a head rill of Mudpuppy Creek. If they didn’t want a little lead with their mud, it was tough shit as far as C.C.H. cared. Old T.S. Nabors would likely declare he shipped as much of it as possible to the smelters down in Golden.
Once he’d read Longarm’s identification papers and figured what he wanted, above the ear-splitting thunder of the steam-powered ore-crushing machinery, the straw boss led Longarm to a nearby office shed, where they could hear one another better behind the closed door.
The straw boss poured them a couple of snorts from a bottle filed under B for Bourbon and told the sad tale of French Sarah about the way Longarm had already heard it.
He was able to explain why the killer or killers had been forced to dump her body where it had been found in time after all. Sipping his own whiskey, the mining man said they’d been working short daylight shifts and added, “Nobody could have ever climbed the open stairs with a body if the mill had been manned and running.”
Longarm said he’d already figured that, and asked if a killer with a knack for mining machinery could have started the mill up, with or without permission, once he’d dropped the poor gal in the hopper up above.
The straw boss pursed his lips and decided, “It’d be possible but tough. We naturally leave a banked bed of coals under the boiler all the time. Takes hours to start a steam engine up from stone cold. But I doubt there’d have been enough steam up to run her and that ore she lays on through the mill. Not without poking and stoking the firebox and waiting for a good head of steam, leastways.”
Longarm tried to picture the scene. It was not a pretty picture no matter how you drew it. He said, “They might have been anxious to leave. They could have slipped both ways through that three-strand fence in the dark, whether the gate was guarded or not.”
The straw boss said, “Some other lawmen scouted for sign along that pesky fence. We never needed one when we were mining high-grade for real gents instead of rag-pickers. They found nothing to say how that dead gal came on the property, dead or alive.”
That notion painted a really ugly picture. Longarm reached in a pocket as he said, “We only know of one local gent she’d been seeing and he’d have been dead when she left the Farnsworth mansion to see someone else.”
He produced the boot heel and cigar band, asking, “Can you think of anyone with business on this site who smokes this brand of cigars or stomps around a mining operation in cowboy boots?”
The straw boss shook his head, observing, “I know them claros from Cuba cost more than this child can afford. The big boss, Tough Shit Nabors, smokes Havana Perfectos. I’d say your claro smoker pampers himself a mite, whether he can afford to or not. Claros are mighty mild as well as too expensive for an honest workingman.”
He added he’d never seen anyone mining hardrock in cowboy boots, but that some of the company police thought they were Wild Bill in the flesh. Longarm had been afraid he’d say something like that. It left that ball way in the middle of the air.
He figured asking company police in high-heeled boots whether they’d just been shooting at him in an aspen grove might be a waste of time. So he handed the straw boss a cheroot in exchange for the drink and they parted friendly.
He could see the tin roof of that railroad roundhouse down the slope from the C.C.H. tracks. So he strode down along them, noting in passing how easy it would have been to walk or carry French Sarah up to the stamping mill by that unguarded route.
He found the whitewashed company cottages and some extra tarpaper shanties near the roundhouse, where old Edward had said he might. A couple of colored kids were playing mumbly-peg in the dirt with a jackknife. When he asked the way to Mammy Palaver’s, one ran away, but the other pointed at a slot between two cottages and warned him the Obeah woman might turn him into a horny toad or gopher snake.
Longarm allowed he’d take his chances, and strode over to find the apparent gap between whitewashed cottages was the entrance to a sort of smoke-filled cavern, improvised from scrap lumber and flattened out coal-oil cans. The smoke smelled more like smoldering herbs than firewood. As he hesitated in the low overhang, a cheerful voice called out, “Well, don’t just stand there, child. Come on in and tell Mammy what you want her to make better!”
He went on back to where he could barely make out a once pretty and still friendly-looking colored lady dressed in a white cotton smock, with a purple head cloth and a whole lot of small bones and big beads strung as a triple necklace. She was smoking a long pale cigar. When Longarm started to identify himself she laughed, took the cigar from her lips, and said, “I knew you were coming to John Bull before you got here. I told the chillun how you saved that colored rail-yard man from a mighty ugly bunch of hobo boys that time. I’m telling you now, ain’t none of us colored folk been up to no good in these parts!”
Longarm gravely nodded and declared all the suspects on his list so far seemed to be white folks. He asked if she knew Ute Mary over at the Double Seven, adding he’d just been by there and that the cook had tried to shut her mistress up.
Mammy Palaver said, “Ute Mary been to see me for some love potion. Ain’t no Indian medicine men left in these parts. She ain’t the one who wants to hide her romance with Buck Lewis, the white foreman down that way. He’s the one who’s ashamed to take a full-blood gal to dances in town. I told her she didn’t need no potion for that white boy. He ain’t been fooling with the other gals on that spread, because all but Miss Amanda are true to their husbands, and Miss Amanda thinks she’s too high-toned for raggedy hired help.”
