Six out of aurora, p.4
Six Out of Aurora, page 4
Castor looked between Adams and Bill, then to Esparza, who didn’t seem as confused as he felt. “How do you know that?” Castor asked, feeling like a fool having to ask.
“We don’t,” the sheriff said mildly.
Bill clicked his tongue, clearly annoyed, but didn’t argue with that. “Eugene’s all learned now,” he said, and reached for his cards. “So can we play?”
* * *
* * *
The next morning, they struck out again. Following their trail wasn’t hard, especially with Esparza, who had keen eyes unlikely to miss a trick; Castor thought even Bill could have done it.
Midmorning, they found what was likely the place the outlaws had spent the night, two nights before. A fire, flattened grass, scorched remains of meals . . . It looked like a place where people had waited. Castor looked over at Esparza to see what he made of it. He was speaking quietly to the marshal, who was nodding along. He’d picked up on it too, then. They’d made camp here, and spent most of the day waiting. Castor wondered why.
It was just after noon when they came to the wagon road. The trail led them right to it, and the horses’ tracks continued onto the road and down it. When Esparza pointed them out, Bill clapped his hands together and looked over at the marshal. “See, Adams? What’d I say?” He gestured west. “Believe me now, Marshal?”
“They’re headed west for certain,” Adams said, but even Bill was clever enough to hear that he hadn’t actually said he believed him.
Bill took off his hat and ran a hand through his hair. “How long ago you reckon they came through here?” he asked Buller.
But it was Castor who answered. “Yesterday afternoon, most like.” Bill flashed a narrow-eyed, skeptical look, and Castor shrugged, despite the sting. If the likes of Bill Herbert didn’t want to believe him, who was he to argue?
“Yesterday afternoon,” Esparza agreed, though he didn’t seem to like it. “Less than a day behind.”
Bill grinned at Dr. Herriot. “We’ll catch up right quick, and then you’ll get to see some excitement.” His smile didn’t fade even though she didn’t return it. He just shifted the look over to Buller, whose face was as impassive as ever, and then started to ride.
It was easier going on the wagon road. They moved at a good clip, but not fast enough for Bill, who complained twice about the speed.
“I’ve seen wagons laden with our lumber moving faster than we are now,” he said.
But Adams wouldn’t let them quicken the pace. Esparza kept an eye on the edges of the road, in case the outlaws had broken off the road again and started their zigzagging once more.
The sun beat down from directly above them when they reached the settlement. It wasn’t properly a town, just a collection of buildings down near Cold Springs, but Adams wanted to take the opportunity to ask whether anyone had seen their outlaws. Bill let out a thin groan, but other than that, didn’t complain. Adams took Geneva with him. Maybe he thought a pretty face would get his questions answered easier.
Off the side of the wagon road, a spire of stones jutted out of the earth, like God had decided the woods beyond needed a watchtower, or more likely, they’d been dredged up and piled here when the locals cleared the area for the road. But they offered a measure of shade, and the rest of the posse congregated there to wait, horses nearby.
A night on the hard ground and Castor wouldn’t have thought he’d feel as good as he did. The stone was warm against his back and he felt freer than he had in months. His eyes drifted closed. Funny how even broken fences—maybe especially broken fences—could hem someone in.
“Now where’s he off to?” Bill grumbled.
Castor’s eyes opened and he skimmed the area. It was Esparza that Bill was talking about, and he was disappearing into the field bordering the road, tall grasses up over his knees. Castor followed.
He knew what Esparza had been thinking as soon as he saw it. A group had clambered off the road, heading south. It had probably been sometime yesterday. Castor caught their trail alongside Esparza’s. Could be their outlaws breaking off the road again.
But the tracks dead-ended at the high embankment of a creek. Someone had carved steps into the hard-packed ground, tall ones that a grown man would nearly have to leap down, and Esparza stood on the last one, his hand holding an old frayed rope that was strung up over one of the tall trees that shaded the creek. Oak leaves rustled above him, rattling like a snake.
Twigs cracked under Castor’s feet. He wasn’t trying to be quiet. Esparza turned his head, the only hint of alarm in the way his shoulders tensed just before he saw Castor.
“I caught sight of some tracks,” Esparza said. “Thought it might have been our outlaws.”
“I saw those too,” Castor offered.
Esparza let the rope go without further comment. A duck darted out from under the embankment below them, as if realizing all of a sudden it wasn’t alone near the water. It waddled up the bank across the creek, the greenish waters still rippling in its wake.
“Can I ask you a question?” Castor asked. Esparza nodded in the affirmative, and Castor said, “You seem a fair tracker—”
Esparza cut him off before he could say anything else. “A fair tracker?”
Castor supposed he’d offended Esparza with that, though how was he supposed to know elsewise? “I’m only saying, you’ve followed that trail with ease, and anyway, these ain’t no masters of hiding their tracks.”
Esparza acknowledged that with a dip of his head. “So your question?” But he looked like he already knew what was coming.
“How’d you not pick up their trace two days ago? You and Buller and Bill?”
“Mr. Herbert’s foreman sent us off on the wrong track,” he said. “Completely wrong direction. By the time I figured it out, we’d run into a rattler and the horses got spooked. The deputy got thrown, and I couldn’t leave him out there with that busted ankle.”
That was one mystery solved at least.
Esparza made no move to leave, but he didn’t speak more either. Castor, who rarely wanted to talk, found himself compelled to by Esparza’s quiet. He gestured to the rope. “We had a swimming hole over near Silver Creek. My pa strung up a rope like this when Bill and I were near ten. We’d swing out over the middle and drop.”
Esparza raised a brow, questioning, and Castor guessed the question had to do with why Castor was bothering to tell him that at all. He wasn’t one to fill silence with yammering. Esparza started to climb back up the embankment and Castor stuck out a hand without thinking.
Esparza hesitated for just a moment, barely long enough to call it a hesitation, but it was almost enough for Castor to withdraw. But before he could, Esparza’s hand clasped his, and Castor hauled him to the top.
“It seems to me this rope was not used for that sort of swinging,” Esparza said, and started walking back to the group.
* * *
* * *
No one in Cold Springs had seen Biggs and his outlaws, or if they did, they weren’t saying so. The posse continued on down the wagon road. By the time sunset drew near, they’d gone a long way, passed a sawmill, and gotten not one hint that they were catching up to their quarry. Adams was the one to call for them to stop for the night, saying it would be harder for them to see any sign of the outlaws breaking off the road as it grew dimmer.
They settled for the night, and shadows swallowed the area around their camp. It was a flat area near a bend in the road, sparse trees but with enough wood that they made a fire quickly. Esparza broke out the hardtack and jerky, and they passed it around.
When it got to Buller, he didn’t take anything, because his hand was already reaching for his pistol. That made Castor reach for his as well, looking out into the night to see whatever Buller had seen.
“You want to come into the light, folks?” Adams called, though he didn’t seem to have even looked up from where he was poking at the fire.
Three of them stepped out of the shadows. Two men and a boy, not more than thirteen. All groups have a leader, and this group’s leader was obvious: he was tall, thickly built around the shoulders, with a jagged scar running into his hairline. “We’re travelers headed east,” he said. “Mean no harm.”
“Don’t be sneaking when you mean no harm,” Buller said, but he put his gun away.
“Would you mind terribly if we shared your fire?” the leader asked.
“Feel free,” Adams said, a kindly smile on his face as warm as the fire the man was asking to share.
Both the men were armed, of course, but Castor saw no sign they wanted anything but what they claimed, to share in the fire. The group had approached even though they were fewer in number than the posse. More willing to trust than most would be, that was for sure. Adams had his badge tucked away, so it wasn’t that, though Castor always thought it was obvious he was a lawman even without the badge. The men settled around the fire, and introductions went around with a bottle of liquor one of the travelers produced.
The group was coming from where they were going, heading east along the wagon road, looking to cross into Nevada. They asked about the road, conditions up ahead. If the leader thought the other group odd, he didn’t say so. He did ask what they were about, the six of them on the road.
“I’m city marshal out Aurora way,” Adams said. “We’re tracking down a group of outlaws.”
“Outlaws,” the leader said. “Sounds dangerous.” He looked deliberately toward Geneva, but didn’t say anything else.
“That’s why we brought a doctor,” Adams said, with his own look Geneva’s way. “Where are you headed?” Adams asked.
“Heard about a good bit of mining country southeast,” the man said. “We’re gonna stake ourselves a claim, find some gold.”
He looked so happy about it. Castor could hardly remember being so hopeful, though it wasn’t five years before that he’d headed off to his own claim. To strike it rich. He hadn’t struck anything. Just tapped into a wide vein of disappointment.
“Eugene here was a miner,” Bill said. He sounded as happy at the prospect of humiliating Castor as the prospector did at his gold.
“Hardly,” Castor said.
“Come on, Eugene. You have any wisdom for them? Helpful insights?”
His voice was so full of scorn, Castor wasn’t sure how the miners missed it, but the men were looking at Castor as though he might actually have something helpful to say.
Castor stood up. “Turn back and go home.”
No one came after him when he wandered out into the dusk. He was glad of it. Why had he even come? For Adams, he reminded himself. But even so, he wasn’t sure why. Bill would poke and prod and laugh, but he would do no harm. Adams might not trust him completely, but he wouldn’t be any sort of liability out here. What could Castor do that the rest of them couldn’t?
The answer was nothing.
Their town, their Aurora, not a speck on the map Castor had bought when he headed east to prospect in Colorado, had been named for a mining town in Nevada. That town had died. Old Man Herbert’s big house was made from bricks stripped from the town’s desiccated corpse. Sometimes Castor wondered what that town looked like, a place where gold had been plentiful and the streets had been booming, until the gold ran out and the only thing left to mine was used bricks.
Gold ran out. Silver, copper, they all eventually ran out. That was what Pa said whenever Eugene heard of a claim and asked why the Castor family wasn’t following rumors of precious metals to inevitable wealth. His father wanted to make a home independent of metals dug up out of the ground. And he had. He’d done well for himself and for his family, and if they didn’t have the life they might have had back East, where Jamison and his wife had hailed from before following Arthur Adams out West . . . well, the life they had was a good one.
But Eugene wanted more. He thought of it now, and wished he could give his younger self a shake. After his mother had died, each rumor of a claim, each word of precious metals just waiting in the earth to be discovered, felt more and more like something out there just waiting for him. That led to fights with his father. And eventually he stopped fighting the urge, stopped fighting his father, and left, like a thief stealing away in the middle of the night. He’d hoped he’d have enough to buy passage east and a claim in Colorado, where they said everyone was finding hordes of silver, just like the miners in ’49 had found gold in California.
People were still finding silver in Colorado. But he hadn’t found any.
He’d been suckered. It was as simple as that. He’d heard a rumor, followed it, and then struck a claim on a parcel of land where the only silver was the way the white bark of the aspen trees looked in the moonlight. The claim hadn’t even been legal. Land grants and fraud were spoken of interchangeably, someone had told him back in Colorado. He couldn’t remember who, but he wished he would have met them before losing everything.
So these men would go seek their fortune. Maybe they’d have better luck than poor Eugene. Maybe not. But either way, Castor couldn’t say a word to stop them.
* * *
* * *
The night before, Geneva had set up her bedroll a ways off from the men. With the miners coming to camp with them, Castor had expected her to come closer. But when he returned to the camp, he found her sitting cross-legged on her bedroll, her small lamp lit, just as far away from them as the night before. She was squinting down at a piece of paper, a pen in hand. She looked up at him when he got closer and called, “Did they mine silver here in Amador County? Or just gold and copper?”
He couldn’t escape mining tonight, could he? “Some silver,” he replied. “Can’t say that’s what the place is known for.” It would always be known for gold, even though copper had given its name to a city and a railroad both.
She nodded, looked back down, and started scratching at the paper with the pen.
“Who you writing to?” he asked, crouching beside her bedroll.
“My brother,” she said, looking up at him with a small smile. “I can’t say he approves of my coming west, but he’s always liked a good adventure story. Figured I could mail it at Antelope Springs. They have a post office there.”
Castor wondered how much she was telling her brother. He didn’t have a sister, but if he did, he couldn’t quite imagine letting her run off across the country and chase outlaws.
“Why’d you come west? If he didn’t approve?”
She tapped the pen against the paper, then seemingly gave up on her missive. “Thought it might be easier to set up a practice out West.”
“Has it been?”
She looked away and didn’t answer. “What about you? Why did you come west?”
“I was born here. In Aurora,” he said. He wasn’t used to telling people facts like that about himself. He’d lived in Aurora for his first seventeen years, and the ones that followed . . . Well, he couldn’t remember volunteering any information about his past. He couldn’t remember anyone asking.
“Well, yes, but you left,” she said. Her voice was so matter-of-fact that it took him a moment to even realize what she’d said. “And then you came back. Why?”
“My father was here,” he said. It came out automatically. Maybe it was her tone, the lack of arch judgment in her voice, that made him say it. But as soon as he did, he wanted to call it back. Because the next logical question was, why did he stay when his father was gone? He rushed to speak before she could even think to ask it. “And I’m not one for adventure. Good enough for me to stay on the ranch in peace.” Alone, he didn’t say, but he was sure she could hear it.
Sure enough, she said, “You can be alone anywhere.”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure you should. Ought to sleep closer to the others.”
She raised a brow. “I said I have a brother. I can’t say I need another one.”
He scowled. “I’m not looking to be your brother. I just thought . . .” He trailed off but his eyes darted to the miners just the same.
“I’m in no danger from them,” she said. “Besides, you all will be right there. Surely I’m safe with you so close.” The light from her lamp touched her skin with its gold and glinted off her hair. Her smile was as bright as the light, however mild it was.
“Have it your way,” he said, and headed back to his own bed.
Geneva’s lamp flickered out after a while, and long after that, Castor lay looking at the stars, thinking about what she’d said. You can be alone anywhere, he thought. Ain’t that the truth.
* * *
* * *
In the morning, the sky matched the smudges of smoke from their fire. The sun likely wouldn’t show itself for an hour or two. The green of the fields and trees looked strange against the gray.
Castor craned his neck until it cracked. He’d slept strangely, with dreams he couldn’t quite remember, but he knew they took place in a mine shaft driving down into the earth where silver and gold were less likely than gas fumes and death. He shrugged into his vest, his back sore, like he’d been driving a pickax through stone all night instead of sleeping.
An apple landed on his lap. Castor looked up. Buller and Bill were saddling their horses, Adams and Geneva talking to the miners. Esparza sat close by with his little leather book in hand.
“Thank you,” Castor said. Esparza gave a short nod.
Castor took a bite of the apple—a little too tart—and watched him.
Every few minutes, Esparza’s eyes flicked up, then back down to the page. He’d done that last night and the one before, and both mornings since they’d left. He was always packed up first, and dug out his little book while he waited for the rest of them. He wasn’t writing, like Geneva had been. This was something else.
