Chapter 5

            When Tom called a halt, the moon hung low in the sky, but enough light remained so they could unsaddle the horses and picket them, gather dead wood for a fire and lay out their bedrolls.  Tom sent Dove Ed to look for a stream nearby and refill their canteens, then told Cash to light the fire.

            “We oughtn’t to have a fire,” Cash said.  “Anybody behind us, they’ll see it or find the embers in the morning.”

            “No one’s behind us,” Tom said. 

Cash thought he took too much for granted.  “That Putney, he’s a disputatious son of a bitch.  He’ll be coming back at us, once he pulls himself together.”

“Are you going to light that fire or not?”  Tom stretched out, propped against his saddle, and started pulling off his boots.  Cash looked at him a while, then knelt by the stack of brushwood they had collected and set to building a fire.

As he lit a match and touched it to the tinder he said, “You knew him before, in Montana?”  The fire licked at the wood, growing brighter and wider.  Cash waited, but the flames were starting to crackle before Tom answered.

“Never met him before today,” he said. 

Cash swiveled his head to see Tom reclining, his eyes shut and his stocking feet stretched toward the flames.  The firelight still dazzled Cash’s eyes somewhat, but he thought he spied a smile playing around the corners of Tom’s mouth.  He suspected that Tom enjoyed making people look like jackasses, and he resented it.  After Vicksburg fell, Cash spent some months as a prisoner of war; Tom’s attitude reminded him of the Yankee soldiers who walked guard duty at the camp.  “Then what did you mean, saying ‘innocent’ back and forth?  Looked to me like you was old friends.”

From out in the darkness they heard a stumbling step, the clatter of canteens, and a curse in Dove Ed’s odd contralto accent as the boy missed his footing.  A moment later the boy himself appeared in the firelight and handed back their canteens, now full.  Cash accepted his without taking his eyes from Tom’s face, but Tom thanked Dove Ed and drank deep, in no hurry to reply.  Cash seethed, restraining the impulse to take Tom by the lapels of his mackinaw and shake him till the answers came loose, opting instead to outwait him.

Eventually Tom raised up on one elbow and looked around at his companions.  “Did you boys never hear of Henry Plummer?”

“I did,” said Dove Ed.  “I thought the Vigilantes hanged him years ago.”

“They did.  But before that, he ran a gang of road agents and bushwhackers in Bannack, Montana, called ‘The Innocents’.”  Dove Ed looked confused, and Cash felt the same way, though he wasn’t about to let it show.  “It was a joke, you see?” said Tom.  “There was too many of us to remember who was in the gang, so when you met someone, you’d ask ‘Innocent?’”

“Is that what Putney was doing?” Cash said.

Tom nodded.  “He thought you was one of us, but he didn’t recognize you.”

“He didn’t recognize you, either.”

“No.  We never did a job together.” 

Cash and Dove Ed sat mulling this over for a time, until Dove Ed said, “What about the deputy?”

“Who?”

“The deputy you said you killed on Putney’s orders.”

Comprehension dawned on Tom’s face, but he grinned and shook his head.  “Bill Dillingham.  I had nothing to do with that, though Putney believes I did.  Better still, Putney believes I would turn him in to save my own neck—and I would, too.”

Tom settled back on his saddle and said, “That’s why he won’t come back on us, Cash.  He knows if he does, I’ll come back on him.”  Before pulling his hat over his eyes and folding his hands on his chest, he added, “Best get some sleep.  We’ll start again at first light.” 

Cash watched as Tom’s breathing became regular and even.  In moments, snores issued from under the hat.  He looked at Dove Ed, who shrugged, then wrapped himself in his blanket and composed himself for sleeping.  Cash rose and turned his back on the fire, staring hard into the night the way they had come.  They were far enough from Corinne that he could see no sign of the half-destroyed town, and he heard no sound of pursuit in that direction over the pop of the branches in the fire, the snorts of the horses on their picket ropes, the wail of coyotes calling to one another across the desert.

He stood that way a long time, thinking, unwilling to trust Tom’s blithe assurances, but at last his fatigue got the better of him.  He made his way back to the fireside, now burning low, rolled himself into his blankets, and slept.

            The kick at his foot came sooner than Cash expected, and he gazed through gummed lids at his tormentor.  Tom Mulvehill stood at the foot of Cash’s bedroll, the cold gray light of dawn behind him, and kicked Cash’s foot again.  “Reveille, soldier,” he said through a grin, which widened at the curses he earned in response.  “Saddle up.  We’re riding north.”

            “What for?”

            Tom slewed his head around, his eyebrows raised.  “What for?  Last night you didn’t want to stop and this morning you don’t want to start!  Make up your mind, boy!”  He stomped off toward his mount, hefting his saddle on his shoulder.  Dove Ed was there already, cinching his saddle onto his horse, a farm animal that had seen better days pulling a wagon or plow.  Cash sat up, stiff and cold and hungry, and blinked at the world to clear the cobwebs from his mind.

            By the time he had risen and donned his boots and gunbelt, the others were mounted and waiting.  Tom seemed amused; Dove Ed, eager and apprehensive.  The boy wore Putney’s Navy Colt tucked into the waist of his trousers and Cash figured he would wind up shooting himself in the leg if he wasn’t careful.  They both watched as Cash dragged his saddle over to his mount and began to cinch it up.

            Tom ribbed him to pass the time.  “If you don’t step a little more lively, Cash, I swear I’ll let Dove Ed take target practice on your feet.  He needs to get used to his weapon.” 

Dove Ed snickered at that.  “At least his feet are a bigger target than Jacob Putney’s heart.”

Cash took his time, ignoring the banter.  During the night, he had reached a decision, and he wasn’t sure how to tell Tom of it.  Instead he paid undue attention to his travel preparations, adjusting a stirrup here, fidgeting with his bedroll there. 

At last Tom could stand no more and said, “Damnation, Cash, if the law was after us we’d be standing trial in Corinne already.  Mount up, or by God I’m going to leave you here.”

There it was.  Cash swung up into his saddle, settling himself comfortably before he looked Tom full in the face and said, “Maybe that’s best.”

“What?”

“I said, maybe it’s best if we part ways here.”

Thunderstruck, Tom groped for words.  Cash enjoyed seeing him speechless for once, but he had forgotten Dove Ed, who said, “You’re not coming, Cash?”

Cash shook his head.  “What for?  Y’all don’t even know where you’re headed.”

“North,” said Tom.  “I told you.”

Cash’s face hardened.  “That’s right, I guess.  You told me.  Well, I ain’t taken orders since I left the Army, and I don’t aim to take any now.”

“Who said anything about orders?”  Utter surprise colored Tom’s every word.  “This ain’t orders.  It’s just common sense.”

“How do you figure?”

Tom gestured in opposite directions, encompassing the rising sun and its evening destination.  “West, there’s nothing but desert and the Salt Lake.  East, there’s a stagecoach with an empty strongbox and a lot of people who know our faces.”  He pointed expansively back in the direction they had come, indicating Corinne and beyond.  “South,” he said, “There’s Ogden, and Salt Lake City.  Big towns, brimming with people and life.  No place for civilized folk like us.”  Dove Ed snickered again, and Cash found himself quirking his mouth as well.  Tom went on, “What’s that leave?”

Even as Cash admitted to himself that Tom had a point, he chafed at the notion of giving in, of letting Tom continue to think he was in charge.  “I came this way because you said you had a job for us.  That’s up in smoke.”  He knew Dove Ed hung on every word and hesitated even now to let the boy know what manner of work they had planned to do in Corinne.

“We’re lucky it did,” Tom said.  “Considering what happened to those other fellows.”

“Point is, there ain’t no other job, is there?”

Without a ready answer, Tom avoided Cash’s gaze.  There seemed to be nothing more to say, so Cash made to turn his horse away, although he hadn’t decided where he was going either.  He drew up short when he heard Dove Ed say, “What about the stagecoach in Malad City?”

“What?”

Dove Ed regarded them both, stammering as though they might reprimand him for speaking out of turn.  “You said you robbed a stagecoach, didn’t you?”

Cash thought back, trying to remember just what they’d said in the boy’s presence.  He believed he had kept that under his hat, but he couldn’t recall everything Tom had said.  The unexpected question, though, stirred Tom’s wits back to life.

“So what if we did?” said Tom.

“There’s plenty of stagecoaches through Malad City, carrying money and gold to and from the mining camps.  Must be three a day.”

“Where the hell is Malad City?” Cash said.

“North.  Idaho Territory.  I thought that’s why Tom wanted to go that way.”

Tom sat taller in his saddle, triumph radiating from him.  It made Cash a little ill to see him looking so smug, and to know that they would all be riding north together.

Despite Tom’s blithe reassurances as they rode out, Cash turned in his saddle at regular intervals, craning his neck to watch behind them.  They were passing through the flat desert country and into rising foothills, affording a broad view of the land and the road at their backs.  Cash felt no surprise when he turned for what seemed like the hundredth time and caught sight of a plume of dust on the road, coming toward them from the direction of Corinne.  He called to the others, and they halted to watch the thin cloud approach.

“Posse?” Dove Ed asked, a slight hitch in his voice.

Tom scoffed at the notion.  “Morning stage, more like,” he said.  “Didn’t you say there was three a day?”

Abashed, Dove Ed fell silent for a moment, then perked up.  “Why don’t we take it?” he said, and now he sounded eager, excited.  But when Tom slapped his knee and roared with laughter, anger clouded the boy’s face.  “What the hell’s so funny?” he said.  Almost as an afterthought, he dropped his hand to the butt of Putney’s pistol, still stuck in his belt.

Cash sympathized with him; Tom Mulvehill could be a damned know-it-all when he wanted.  Softly he said, “Take it easy, Dove Ed.”

Tom ignored the implied threat and wiped his eyes of tears.  “I ain’t laughing at you, Dove,” he said.  “I admire your enthusiasm.  But you’ve got more to learn about the road agent business than Cash here.”

Dove Ed kept his hand on the gun.  “For instance?”

“Look at the stage, yonder.  Which direction is it coming from?  South.  Where are the gold camps?  North.”  He used a patient tone, as though he were explaining to a toddler why not to touch a hot stove.  “That stage will be carrying mail, supplies, and passengers—workers for the camps, mostly.  Probably no rich tycoons or bankers, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Cash could see the flush of embarrassment spread over Dove Ed’s fair cheeks.  The dust plume had drawn closer, and even at this distance they could make out the team of six horses and the coach behind them.  The Overland line was notorious for overstuffing their stages, and Cash thought he could see people clinging to the roof of the vehicle.  Even so, Tom’s attitude griped him.  He said, “There might could be payroll aboard, Tom.” 

Tom nodded, eyes still on the approaching dust.  “Maybe.  But even if they’ve a roll that would choke a buffalo, the time ain’t ripe.  We don’t have enough men, for one thing.”

“What do you mean?  You took the stage in Lemhi by yourself.”

“That was just a pissant little spur line, not a main route to the gold fields.  The boys who drive these rigs would never fall for such rank trickery.  Just watch.”

Events soon proved Tom right.  The three men pulled off the road and waited, letting the coach overtake them.  Long before it drew even with them, they could all see the driver urging the team to greater speed and beside him the guard, shotgun at the ready.  Amid the baggage atop the coach were four dust-coated men, passengers, each keeping hold to the roof with one hand and gripping a weapon with the other.  The shades on the windows were open, allowing glimpses of the passengers inside, no doubt similarly armed.  All but the driver watched Cash and his friends for any sign of belligerence.  Cash made sure to keep his hands away from his own pistol.

As the swaying, rattling coach swept by, Tom touched the brim of his hat in greeting, then said, “They’ve got a rear guard as well.”  Cash and Dove Ed followed his gaze to the man sitting on the boot of the coach.  He too was armed with a shotgun, which he kept pointed in their direction until the coach disappeared behind a small rise in the road.  The three listened for a while as the clatter of the team and the iron-shod wheels diminished in the distance.  The dust from its passage swirled around them, settling over them like snow.  Finally Dove Ed broke the silence.

“God Almighty,” he said.

“They was carrying payroll all right,” Tom said.  “No telling how much.  Maybe ten, twenty thousand.  Maybe more.”

“Dollars?” said Dove Ed, and his voice cracked.

Tom grinned, and in spite of himself Cash did too.  “It’s a poser, ain’t it?” said Tom.  “How do you get that much money away from that many boys intent on keeping it?”

“I’ll bite,” Cash said.

“There’s ways.  First off, you pick your spot.  Not open, like this, but somewhere you can lay in wait close to the road.”  Tom climbed back into the saddle and guided his mount back onto the road.  The others followed as he continued, “Also, you got to choose your target.  One without so many guns aboard.”

“I liked getting shot at even less than I liked taking orders,” said Cash.

Tom chuckled as some thought occurred to him.  “In Montana we had it down to a science,” he said when the others looked over.  “The drivers and shotgun riders would warn us when a rich run was coming up, then take a cut as payment for not shooting when we stopped them.  And Henry Plummer would make friends with the mine owners and bankers passing through town.  When they boarded the stage, he would see them off and make them a present of a woolen scarf—so that when we held up the stage, we would look for the fellow with the scarf, because he was the one with the biggest roll!”

Cash and Dove Ed shook their heads in frank admiration of such audacity.  “I don’t reckon we’ll get such help in Malad City,” Cash said.

“No, more’s the pity,” Tom said.  “Still, it’s easy to guarantee that the shotgun guard won’t give you any trouble.”

“How?” said Dove Ed.

“Shoot him,” said Tom.  “Once he’s dead, or even just hurt real bad, everybody else thinks twice about putting up a fight.  Speaking of which, how good are you with a revolver, Dove Ed?”

“I hit Putney, didn’t I?”

“I know you can wing a man at arms’ length.  I want to know if you can hit a man fifty feet away from horseback.”  Tom looked around, then pointed upslope to the right, at a good-sized boulder a few yards off the road.  “See that rock?  Put a bullet into the middle of it.”

Dove Ed pulled Putney’s revolver from his belt and thumbed back the hammer.  He took careful aim at the rock and pulled the trigger.  Cash saw him flinch in anticipation of the shot, squeezing his eyes shut and turning his face slightly away from the pistol.  That alone would have caused him to miss, but the pistol failed to fire.  Instead it gave a hiss and emitted a puff of blue smoke.  A tiny jet of flame spurted from the rear of the cylinder.  Without thinking, Dove Ed turned the pistol sideways to look at it, saying, “What the hell…?”

“Hang fire,” Cash said.  Somehow the percussion cap had not ignited the powder completely, most likely due to wet or sand in the load.  The blue smoke warned Cash that it was still cooking; once it burned through to good powder it could discharge any time. “Don’t…”

At that moment the pistol went off.  It wasn’t the sharp bang Cash expected, more of a round pop, but the sudden recoil put Dove Ed off balance.  Furthermore, his horse, unused to such noises, shied away, and the boy fell heavily to the ground.  Cash and Tom ducked, even though the gun had been pointed nowhere near them.  They straightened up and looked at each other, then at Dove Ed, who sprawled on the ground gasping for breath.

“You okay, boy?” said Tom.

Dove Ed sat up and nodded.

“Well, I believe we’ll hold off stage robbing until you’ve learned to change the loads in your pistol once in a while.”

Cash got down and helped Dove Ed rise to his feet.  Then he retrieved the fallen revolver and set about showing the boy how to clear and reload the cylinder.

Their northward progress slowed somewhat after that as they instructed Dove Ed in the fundamentals of shooting.  It was frustrating work; the boy was eager enough, but could not consistently hit a man-sized target.  Part of the problem was Dove Ed himself, who kept trying to incorporate dime-novel dramatics into his technique.  He scowled at the rock or tree trunk selected as the target.  He tried to quick-draw the pistol from his belt and nearly shot himself in the crotch.  He fired from the hip, rather than aiming. 

Part of the problem was Tom.  Having carried a weapon all his adult life, he seemed to have forgotten how he had first learned to shoot it.  Nor was he a patient tutor, berating and browbeating his pupil for his failures and making him even more self-conscious and tense.  “Damn it, Dove,” he said after another round sailed high, wide, and handsome past a gnarled tree stump on the hillside.  “You keep this up and we won’t have any more pistol balls left.  They’ll all be in Malad City waiting for us!”

Cash wasn’t much help.  He had his own misgivings about the entire enterprise, not least of which was the prospect of shooting an unsuspecting man from ambush.  In principle he agreed with Tom that they hadn’t enough men to take a heavily armed stagecoach, but he balked at the idea of out-and-out murder.  With no alternatives in mind, he pushed his concerns to the back of his thoughts, where they were apt to spring forward and ruin his concentration at inconvenient moments.  Instead he said to Tom, “Suppose we manage to take one of these gold-toting stages.  What do we do then?”

“I been thinking about that,” said Tom.  Dove Ed’s pistol boomed and Tom shouted yet again, “Squeeze the trigger, don’t pull it!  You pull it and the barrel jerks up.  Squeeze it and the barrel stays steady!” 

He lowered his voice to continue, “If we rob it and ride out right away, we’ll have the law after us the whole time.”

“And nowhere to go, as you pointed out,” Cash said.

“Right.”  Boom.  “Damn it, Dove Ed, squeeze!”

“I thought I was!”

Tom shook his head in despair and let it go.  “Reload.  Hey Cash, you still got that dime-store watch you took from the Lemhi stage?”

Cash dug in his pocket for the tarnished brass watch.  “It don’t work.  The glass is cracked.”

“Perfect.  Come on.”  Tom marched toward the tree stump while Dove Ed reloaded his pistol.  The stump, all that remained of a tree long since chopped into firewood by passing wagoneers, had been hit two or three times by pistol balls.  “Only wounded,” Tom said.  “Not one fatal.”

He took the watch from Cash and hung it by the chain from the stump, then started back toward Dove Ed.  “I figure we get ourselves a hideout near Malad, like a camp or something.  A place we know where nobody else goes.  We stash our take there, then stay in town until the heat blows over.  Then we collect our takings and ride out calm as you please.”

Cash thought that over while Tom pointed out the dangling watch to Dove Ed.  “There you go,” he said.  “Putney’s heart.  See what you can do.”  Dove Ed grinned with savage glee and hurried to fit percussion caps in the cylinder, obviously pleased at the idea of plugging Jacob Putney, even if only by proxy. 

“I don’t know, Tom,” Cash said.  “Seems to me if we stash the take somewhere, and the law tracks us to it, they’ll search till they find the loot.”

“We could hide it in a cave,” said Dove Ed.  Tom and Cash looked over at him.

“What did you say?”

“A cave, back in the hills?  I know about a dozen near Da’s old farm.”

Tom grew animated.  “Hell, that’s thinking, Dove!  That’s exactly what I mean, Cash, a cave where we can hide the take, maybe even hide out for a while!”

“But that don’t answer my question, Tom.  If they track us there, they’ll find the cave, and even the stupidest sodbuster could find the stash inside a cave.”

Tom stalked to and fro, his brow furrowed in thought, chewing his lower lip.  Cash wondered if Tom had even heard him.  Dove Ed finished priming his revolver but instead of firing at the pocketwatch he paused, fascinated at the sight of Tom so engrossed in the problem. 

“Well, suppose we bury it.  No, they’ll just dig it up.  I know!  We block off the cave entrance with a boulder!  No, then we can’t move it.  And if we can move it, they can move it.  We need a lock, a lock and key.”

“Oh, that’s brilliant,” Cash said.  “We rob the stage and put the money in the bank.”

“Not a bank, a safe.”

“A safe.  In the cave?”

“Yes!”

“If we can drag a safe out to the cave, why can’t they drag the safe back?”

Tom threw his hands up in the air.  “All right then, we make the whole cave a safe!  We put a door on the cave, lock it up tight.  Then even if they find the cave, they can’t get in!”  His face fell as his racing thoughts kept going.  “Except a wooden door wouldn’t stop them for more than a few minutes, even oak.”

His shoulders slumped and he stopped his pacing and turned to Dove Ed.  “Go on,” he said, waving at the pocketwatch fifty feet away.  “Kill me that timepiece.”

Even as inspiration left Tom Mulvehill, it struck Cash Joyner like a rifle bullet through a hat.  “No, wait,” he said.  “Suppose they do track us.  And suppose they find the cave where we stashed the loot.”

“I already supposed that.”

“Yes, but then suppose they walk up to that cave and find a door, a locked door, made of iron.  What do you suppose they could do then?”

Tom and Dove Ed stared at him, thunderstruck, their mouths hanging open.  Dove Ed’s pistol still half-pointed at the pocketwatch, but like a compass needle it swung southward as the three men turned together to look back down the road the way they had come, back in the direction of Corinne.  Back in the direction of the burned out bank, and its metal cage of a vault, with its flame and smoke-scarred iron door.

They were silent for a long time, pondering their next move.  Then Tom said,  “We’ll have to watch out for Putney.”

Dove Ed said, “This for Putney.”  He took careful aim at the pocketwatch with the big revolver, cocked it, and fired all six rounds as quickly as he could pull the trigger and cock the hammer.  When the last round was spent the three friends stood in a grey-blue cloud of sulfurous smoke, rapidly wafting away on the breeze.  Dove Ed lowered the weapon and together they strode forward to examine his handiwork.

They stopped three feet from the stump and regarded the pocketwatch, dangling untouched from the chain, turning slowly and glinting in the sunlight.  Only two fresh bullet scars marked the ground near the stump.

Cash said, “Maybe you ought to wait for us outside of town.”

“Yeah,” said Tom.  “We’ll bring you back more powder and shot.”