Skeleton Lode Read online

  “Compton writes in the style of popular Western novelists like Louis L’Amour and Zane Grey … thrilling stories of Western legend.”

  —The Huntsville Times (AL)

  ON THE RUN … UNDERGROUND.

  They looked over the edge.

  “Lord,” said Kelly. “That’s a long way down.”

  “You and Kelsey won’t be going down.” Arlo said. “That’ll be up to Dallas and me.”

  Kelsey spoke up. “We’ve come this far, and we aren’t about to be left out at the finish.”

  “You won’t be,” Arlo reassured her. “But remember what a hell of a time we had following Death’s Head trail to this cave? Well, if that bunch of scoundrels was anywhere in sight, they saw right where we went.”

  “Then we’d better move out,” Dallas said. “If Davis and the rest aren’t already searching the tunnels, they soon will be.”

  “Let’s hustle, then,” said Arlo. “This may be our last chance to move freely. ’Cause once we find the gold, we’re gonna have to fight to keep it.”

  SKELETON LODE

  Ralph Compton

  A SIGNET BOOK

  SIGNET

  Published by New American Library, a division of

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  First published by Signet, an imprint of New American Library,

  a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Printing, November 1999

  First Printing (Updated Edition), June 2011

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Copyright © The Estate of Ralph Compton, 1999

  All rights reserved

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  Printed in the United Stales of America

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  Table of Contents

  Author’s Foreword

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Author’s Foreword

  Jacob Waltz, a German immigrant, came to Arizona Territory in the early 1860s as a homesteader. But farming was as unappealing as it was unrewarding, and Waltz was soon stricken by gold fever. He packed his few belongings and headed into the rattlesnake-infested Superstition Mountains. For two decades the old man and his pack mule roamed the mountains east of Phoenix.

  Occasionally Waltz would show up in the little towns to trade gold for supplies. He was often followed by men seeking the source of his gold, but they were never successful. By the late 1880s Waltz was back in Phoenix, and there’s no evidence that he ever returned to his mine. It is suspected that he drew from several caches of gold ore he had hidden. Waltz was later buried under a cotton-wood tree in a cemetery near the state capitol.

  Legends about his wealth abound. Some claim that Jacob Waltz had no mine, and that he had found a lost treasure that had once belonged to Jesuits, or that he and another man killed two Mexicans and stole the claim to the mine they were working. Still others believe Waltz’s gold came from the Goldfield Mountains, near the Superstitions, or from the Vulture mine, at Wickenburg. A man named Adolph Ruth, in some of his letters, claimed to have found Waltz’s mine, but somewhere in the Superstitions Ruth disappeared. Later his bones were found, a bullet hole through the skull.

  After Jacob Waltz was dead, a box of high-grade ore was discovered under his bed. Tests at the University of Arizona School of Mines later proved that the ore wasn’t from any known mine in Arizona. After more than a century, there is no record that the mine—now called the Lost Dutchman—was ever found.

  In the Superstitions there were no trails, little water, and too damned many Apaches. Men rode the rocky slopes and the desolate canyons seeking gold but finding only death, and those who courted Lady Luck discovered she could be—and usually was—a bitch.

  After more than a century, the Superstitions remain as secretive, brooding, and mysterious as ever….

  Prologue

  Los Angeles, California, March 15, 1857

  “This could be the easiest haul we’ve ever made,” said Arlo Wells. “Three hundred and forty miles back to Phoenix, with the Colorado the only river we have to cross.”

  “I wish I was as much of an optimist as you,” said his partner, Dallas Holt. “I don’t aim to even think about all them miles between here and home. Tonight I’m goin’ to sleep in an honest-to-God bed and eat grub we ain’t cooked in a skillet over an open fire. Tomorrow, after our wagons is loaded with that barreled whiskey, I’ll think about the trail ahead.”

  Arlo and Dallas had begun punching cows in south Texas while in their teens. Finally, after winning a stake in a poker game, they had ridden west and taken up residence in Tortilla Flat, an undistinguished little town near Phoenix. They had invested their stake in a pair of freight wagons and two teams of mules. For a while, their two-wagon rawhide freight line wasn’t much better than punching cows, with unprofitable short hauls to Tombstone,
Yuma, or Tucson. But then their luck seemed to take a turn for the better. The owner of Tortilla Flat’s Gila Saloon, Joel Hankins, engaged them to haul two wagonloads of scotch whiskey from the docks at Los Angeles. The journey west took them twenty-one days.

  Morning came all too quickly, and after a breakfast of fried eggs, ham, coffee, and hot biscuits, the Texans got their teams of mules from the livery and set out for the docks. Each loosed the pucker of his wagon canvas and checked out the load. The whiskey came in fifty-gallon kegs, upright and well loaded. The dock foreman presented Arlo with the bills of lading, which he signed.

  “My God,” said Dallas, looking at the bill, “Joel paid near a thousand dollars for these two loads of booze.”

  “Bite your tongue,” Arlo replied. “This ain’t just booze. It’s scotch booze, and it’ll go for six bits a shot, even in Tortilla Flat.”

  Arlo’s optimism seemed justified, for the return took only twenty-one days, too, and there was no trouble to speak of. The partners breathed a sigh of relief as they approached Phoenix, but even Arlo’s confidence suffered a jolt when they reached Tortilla Flat.

  “By God,” said Dallas, “if them boards nailed across the windows and the door mean anything, the Gila’s closed.”

  “That can’t be!” Arlo exclaimed. “What in tarnation are we goin’ to do with all this whiskey?”

  “I reckon we can drink it,” Dallas said gloomily. “Without the money Joel owes us, we’re broke.”

  “Well, hell,” said Arlo, “we might as well find out what’s happened.”

  Jubal Larkin owned the combination livery and blacksmith shop, and having heard the wagons coming, he had stepped out into the dirt street. Arlo and Dallas reined in their teams and it was Arlo who stated the obvious.

  “The Gila’s boarded up”

  “Yep,” Jubal said. “You fellers wasn’t gone hardly a week. Joel didn’t open up, and I went to see about him. Found him dead in his bunk. The doc came, rode out from Phoenix, and said his heart just called it quits. Sheriff Wheaton done some askin’ around, and decided old Joel either didn’t have no living kin, or they was so far away, he’d never find ’em. So we buried him behind the Gila.”

  “I don’t aim to speak ill of the dead,” said Arlo, “but he’s left us in one hell of a mess. We hauled these two wagonloads of whiskey all the way from Los Angeles, and now we got nobody to pay us.”

  “Anything owin’ on the whiskey?”

  “Not that we know of,” Arlo said.

  “Then you can claim the whiskey for charges owed,” said Jubal.

  “That makes sense,” Dallas said, “but what are we goin’ to do with it? We’ll have us a shot on the Fourth of July and at Christmas. This would last us five hundred years.”

  “Sell it,” said Jubal. “Open up the Gila and sell it across the bar.”

  “It ain’t our saloon,” Arlo answered.

  “It could be,” said Jubal. “Joel owned the place and the patch of ground it’s on, but Sheriff Wheaton says it goes for taxes at the end of the year if somebody don’t pay.”

  “We can’t pay, either,” Dallas said.

  “It ain’t but twenty-five dollars,” said Jubal, “and you got seven months to get the money together.”

  “I don’t know, Jubal,” Arlo replied. “I reckon we’ll have to talk to Sheriff Wheaton, if we got to claim this whiskey. You got a couple of horses and saddles we can borrow? I’m fed up to the eyeballs with jugheaded mules.”

  “Sure,” said Jubal. “I wish you’d consider takin’ over the Gila. Hell, all Tortilla Flat’s ever had was my livery, Silas Hays’s general store, and the Gila. Scratch the Gila, and one third of our town is gone. I bet Silas will grubstake you until you can afford to pay.”

  “I’m not promisin’ any thin’ until we talk to Sheriff Wheaton,” Arlo said.

  Tortilla Flat was twenty miles east of Phoenix and ten miles north of the Superstition Mountains, and the main street was its only street. It had no sheriff, and that accounted for the Gila Saloon’s popularity among the cowboys and miners of Gila County. County sheriff Harley Wheaton secretly approved of the arrangement, because it kept most of the hell-raisers out of Phoenix. He never bothered riding to Tortilla Flat for anything less than a killing. Now he listened as Arlo and Dallas explained their circumstances.

  “Way I see it,” he said, “you’re entitled to the whiskey. That’s a hell of a lot of firewater. What do you aim to do with it?”

  “I reckon we’ll sell it,” said Arlo.

  “By the barrel or by the drink?”

  “By the barrel,” Arlo said. “Why?”

  “You could make ten times as much sellin’ by the drink,” said Wheaton. “For the tax money you can pick up the Gila. Why don’t you do that?”

  So the two itinerant cowboys sold their freight wagons and mules, bought a pair of horses and saddles, paid the taxes, and went into the saloon business. They knew nothing about the running of a saloon, but they found it required little skill to slop whiskey from a barrel into a glass. What they did understand—and what required considerable skill—was gambling. They put their profits back into the business and added a second floor to the building for living quarters. Soon Tortilla Rat’s Gila Saloon became a mecca for gamblers, and Arlo and Dallas seemed set for life—until that fateful night in April 1859.

  “You slick-dealin’, tinhorn bastard!”

  The grizzled miner kicked back his chair and went for his gun, but he didn’t have a chance. The gambler in the derby hat palmed a derringer, and it spoke just once. The miner’s chair went over backward and the gambler made a break for the door, but a hard-flung chair caught him in the back of the head. He fell facedown on the sawdust floor, and half the miners in the Gila Saloon piled on top of him. The rest began throwing bottles and glasses and shooting out the hanging lamps. The proprietors fought their way out from behind the bar, Arlo with a four-foot-long wooden club and Dallas with a shotgun. They were immediately beaten senseless, and the brawl went on. Some of the struggling men shrieked as flaming coal oil from the shattered lamps set their hair and clothing afire. The exploding lamps splashed oil on the resinous, pine-paneled walls, and the flames soon took hold.

  Dallas sat up, coughing. The place was filled with smoke, but even though he couldn’t see the flames, he could feel and hear them. His and Arlo’s days in the saloon business were coming to an ignominious end. His head hurt, and when he mopped the sweat from his eyes, he found it was mostly blood. He felt around and got his hands on a full quart bottle of whiskey. It would serve as a club, if he needed one. Then it dawned on him that the fight was over. Not only had the dirty sons of bitches destroyed the saloon, they’d left him and Arlo to the mercy of the flames. Where was Arlo?

  “Arlo!” he shouted.

  There was no answer. Dallas knew Arlo wouldn’t have deserted him. His friend and partner must still be somewhere in the burning saloon. He suddenly remembered that the money—what little they had—was in the upstairs office! Could Arlo be up there, overcome by smoke? On hands and knees, Dallas began crawling toward the stairs, keeping low to the floor, where the smoke wasn’t as dense.

  “Dallas?”

  “Over here. Arlo.”

  “I ain’t run out on you, pard,” said Arlo from the stairs. “The Gila’s a goner, but I didn’t aim for us to lose our last dollar along with it.”

  Dallas got shakily to his feet, and the two men headed for the back door. Just as they reached it, part of the ceiling caved in. The gaping hole created an updraft and the flames roared to new life. Dallas and Arlo made their way around to the front of the saloon, to what passed for a main street. A crowd—as much of one as Tortilla Flat could muster—had gathered to watch the fire.

  “Look at ’em,” growled Dallas. “Like a flock of damn buzzards, all waitin’ for somethin’ to die.”

  Tortilla Flat couldn’t claim more than fifty souls within riding distance, but twice that number now gathered before the burning saloon.
In the light from the fire, the partners saw that the now dead gambler and the miner he had shot had been dragged from the burning building.

  “Mighty considerate of you folks,” said Arlo, “draggin’ them dead hombres out, but leavin’ me and Dallas in there to roast like Christmas geese.”

  “Them as lives by the sword dies by it,” said Old Lady Snippet, who despised drinking, gambling, fighting, and men in general.

  Somebody laughed, and she look that for encouragement.

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” she said, loudly jubilant, as though the Almighty had wrought the very vengeance she had called down.

  Arlo and Dallas had kept their horses and saddles at Jubal Larkin’s livery during the two years they’d owned the saloon.

  “We might as well go out to your spread and settle up,” said Arlo to Jubal, who now stood beside the partners, looking at the wreckage sadly. “I reckon we got two hundred dollars.”

  “Just call it even,” Jubal said. “It’s my way of helpin’ a little. Hell, we might as well fire the rest of old Tortilla Flat too. With the Gila gone, there won’t be enough business to sneeze at.”