And happy Father's Day to all of the dads out there!
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Jake heard the gunfire echo throughout the confined space –
even thought for a second that it was coming from some adjacent shaft in the
mine somewhere – but then the pain filled his eyes with a deeper darkness than
the ill-lighted caverns afforded him and his company of hard scrabble men.
He
collapsed on the ground, blacking out, and immediately, his mind flashed back
to the saloon in the town of Diablo Canyon, where he heard again the voices of
men arguing over the mine and its hidden veins of pure silver.
“You
can’t get to the treasure,” a wily old timer with an unruly grey moustache
proclaimed. “You can’t get to it on
account of the ghost that haunts the mine!”
“There
are no such things as ghosts,” a solemn Navajo in Western dress responded. He wore a dark pinstriped suit, with a
crimson vest, a black bow tie and carefully polished riding boots. His hair was tied back in a satin ribbon of a
color that matched his vest.
“You
would know,” Jake said, walking over from the bar, carrying a beer in a crystal
stein.
“Good
evening Jacob,” the Navajo turned and greeted him. “Keeper of unsavory legends and robber of
women’s virtues.”
“That
woman didn’t have any virtue left to claim,” Jake answered. “And she was the one pouring the drinks, not
me.”
The Navajo
patted him on the shoulder. The pain was
unreal and it whipped him back to a conscious state, brought him back to the
unsettling darkness of the dusty mine shaft.
The bullet had torn through the upper part of the pectoral muscle going
in, and shattered the scapula in the back coming out. Jake used his other arm to pull himself up to
a sitting position.
Tuh-wang! Another bullet whizzed by his head and he
shimmied his seated body back behind an ore car rolled over on its side just
off the rail way in the center of the shaft.
Jake shifted his Colt .45 to his left hand and returned fire. A barrage of gunfire answered his small
volley. He looked right and motioned at
his German counterpart, Wilhelm Schliemann, holding up three fingers to signal
the number of gunmen, then pointing across the open space at a spot in the
darkness behind a barrel where the gunfire originated. The German raised his rifle, a Dreyse needle
gun and aimed down the top of the long barrel, slowly applying pressure to the
trigger.
The flash blinded them both for a
half-second. The recoil kicked up a
faint cloud of dust. The body fell out
from behind the barrel and Jake and the German were now facing only two
assailants. It was the same situation back
at the saloon with the Navajo when an Englishman took exception to his presence
there at the bar with the other immigrants.
“You clean up well for a savage,” Henry
Waldegrave proposed between sips of whiskey.
The Navajo made a move to respond,
but Jake placed his hand on his friend’s arm and pushed his body forward into
the Brit’s space.
“You oughtta watch how you talk in
here, mister.”
“And why is that?” Waldegrave said
in return, his heavy accent lingering over the last two words for added
emphasis.
“Because I’m not liking your tone,”
Jake answered, closing the distance between them so that the stubble on his
cheek almost brushed the side of the clean-shaved gentleman’s face.
“You’re as uncultured as your
native friend,” Waldegrave added, backing away.
“No sir,” Jake responded. “I’m a lot wilder than he is.”
The Englishman drew his pistol, but
never fired a shot. Jake grabbed
Waldegrave by the shirt with his left hand and thrust a knife up under the
man’s ribs with his right hand. The
Englishman gasped for air. Jake removed
the blade and wiped it on the man’s coat before letting him fall on the dusty
ground in front of the bar.
But Waldegrave was not alone....
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