Chapter 16 #2
Things were now clear in Goldie’s mind. She knew what was happening.
Charles Banyan was buying up houses on the Eggleston side of Falcon Drive to obtain mineral rights to the land.
And what was under that string of houses was tunnel “22” of the old Maynard mine.
A tunnel he believed still held a valuable silver vein.
But how, she wondered, was Banyan’s attention drawn to that particular tunnel?
Within another minute, she discovered the answer.
She turned away from the model of the town and started to examine the antiques displayed in the glass cases on tables that nearly outlined the entire floor of the society.
There were pistols, canteens, mining hats, pickaxes, and mixed in among them was a booklet of some kind.
There was a handwritten date on its cover that read May 10, 1882.
“What’s this?” Goldie asked.
“That’s one of the society’s newer acquisitions.
It’s the final geology report done by Maynard’s engineers.
Maynard Mining went out of business in 1930, and we obtained this from one of their former employees in late ’39.
Maynard shut everything down in Sparkledove in June of 1882.
There wasn’t anything left in the mine. The yields had been getting smaller and smaller for some time. ”
“Do you mind if I see that report?” she asked.
“I’m sorry, dear. But the mayor has strict rules about the artifacts. He’s actually the only one who has the key to the case. But I could ask him about it if you want?”
“No,” Goldie waved off, downplaying it. “It’s not important. I was just curious. But—the yields getting smaller and smaller, the mayor told you this?”
Harriette nodded. “Oh, yes. He was fascinated with the report. Read it over and over again when we first got it. He’s quite the authority. He told me everything at Maynard was played out.”
Yeah, Goldie thought. Everything except for tunnel “22.”
Just then, the two women heard what sounded like a gunshot and a woman screaming on the street outside.
“What was that?” Harriette wondered, looking out the front window.
They heard what sounded like another gunshot, then somebody ran by the front picture window going in the opposite direction from the sound.
“You better stay here,” Goldie said. “I’ll go check it out.”
As she stepped outside onto River Street, she saw two more people across the street running away from the sounds she’d heard.
In another couple of seconds, she understood why.
On the same side of the street where she’d seen the people running, but a block down, was a man in his early thirties standing on the plank sidewalk.
He had a few days’ growth of black beard, was wearing a winter coat, and was aiming an old-style Winchester repeating rifle at a pretty but frightened woman crouched behind a car on Goldie’s side of the street.
The woman was about the same age as the man, wearing an open overcoat, and was taking cover behind a 1938 green Dodge sedan parked in front of Miller’s General Store.
“Horace? Put that damn thing down!” Deke Miller angrily yelled, poking his head out of the store’s front door. “Alice? Come here, dear,” he ordered the woman, extending an arm. She was only about seven feet away from the front door.
Just then, Charles Banyan came out of the realty office without his winter coat to see what was happening.
Across the street, and running toward the man with the rifle, he saw Stu Frey hurrying down the sidewalk toward the shooter.
Banyan then glanced behind him, saw Goldie watching this unfold twenty feet away, and muttered, “Oh, shit.” Meanwhile, the woman named Alice behind the green Dodge took a crouching step toward Deke Miller.
But the man with the rifle quickly cocked it, took aim again, and fired.
The glass in the driver’s side window suddenly shattered from the .
40-caliber shell, and Alice shrank back behind the car as if being pulled by a magnet.
A second after that, Deke retreated inside and shut his store door.
Two seconds after that, the man named Horace with the rifle abruptly turned and pointed it at an oncoming Stu Frey.
“Stop or die!” he ordered.
Stu halted his advance but shook his head disapprovingly at the man with the rifle.
Turning his attention back to the Dodge, Horace stepped off the plank sidewalk and onto the street. There were only a few cars on the street at the time, and all of the drivers saw what was happening and stopped.
“Horace Mason!” a voice authoritatively yelled.
Eli Johnson appeared from one of the cross streets a block away on Goldie’s side of the street and walked onto River Street. He wore his usual jacket and uniform and limped slowly but steadily past the stopped cars toward the man with the gun. He was also, as usual, unarmed.
“What’s all this about, Horace?” he asked calmly.
“Stay back, Sheriff!” the gunman warned, turning the rifle toward Eli.
“Now you know I can’t do that,” the blond-haired, blue-eyed lawman smiled, still coming. “Look yonder up the street. The mayor’s watching. You don’t want to get me in trouble with my boss, do ya?”
Horace quickly cocked his rifle again.
“You take one more step and I swear I’ll shoot you down!”
Eli stopped and raised a conciliatory hand. “Well, if you’re going to shoot me. Can I at least know why?”
“That slut of a wife of mine,” Horace said, taking another step toward the green Dodge. “I just found out she’s been sleeping around with Benny Hudson.”
“Uh-huh,” Eli said. “So, naturally, that means you should shoot me.”
“I will if you try to stop me. I’m gonna kill her!”
Horace suddenly turned and fired another round at the Dodge. Alice screamed. The front driver’s side tire burst, hissed, and the car listed to the left.
Immediately after that, Horace cocked the Winchester again and pointed it back at the lawman.
“She’s gonna die and you ain’t gonna stop me,” he growled.
“Okay,” Eli nodded. “You go ahead and shoot her. But, in a way, she’s already dead.”
“What’re you talkin’ about?”
“In about ten minutes, everybody in town is going to know what she did. So, her reputation will be as shot up as Ed Peterson’s Dodge over there.
Her life in Sparkledove will pretty much be over.
Who’s gonna trust a person who doesn’t keep their word, Horace?
That Jezebel reputation will follow her.
‘Course, if you shoot her now, it’s over in a second.
She’ll be free, and you’ll go to prison for life. That doesn’t seem like justice to me.”
Horace’s angry eyes squinted, considering what Eli had said.
“You’re just sayin’ this so I won’t shoot you.”
“Well, there is that,” the sheriff agreed. “But that doesn’t make what I said any less true.”
Horace’s eyes started to get moist. He stiffened his chin, looked toward the Dodge, then back at Eli.
It was right at that moment that Goldie noticed the barrel of a second gun; a Sedgley Springfield hunting rifle was poised over the hood of a 1937 maroon Olds parked on her side of the street about a block and a half away.
The barrel was pointed at Horace Mason’s heart, and Paul McCaw, in his earflap cap, was crouched behind the Olds, ready to fire.
A few seconds later, Stu saw the barrel, too.
“You don’t know what it’s like to be rejected like that,” Horace said quietly.
“By a wife? No, sir, I don’t,” Eli said, just as quiet. “But, by a woman? Yes, sir, I do. You remember a girl who used to live in town named Lila Hemmings?”
Horace thought for a moment. “Heard the name, don’t know the family,” he said, keeping an eye on the Dodge.
“Lila was my age,” Eli explained, taking a limping step toward the gunman. “We met in junior college, and I fell hard. Far as I was concerned, she was it. But I also wanted to be a pilot. So, I joined the Army Air Corps.”
“What happened?” Horace asked, interested but still aiming the rifle at him.
“Math,” Eli said, taking a couple of steps and speaking confidentially so others wouldn’t hear. “See, when you’re a pilot, you’ve got to be good at math. Calculating fuel consumption, armament weight... I was pretty good, but not good enough. I failed the math requirement. Didn’t get my wings.”
He took another few steps toward Horace.
“Wound up being a mechanic, working on planes instead of flying ‘em. Got sent to Pearl Harbor and actually worked for a squadron where some of the pilots were guys I went to flight school with. Talk about embarrassing! They were now officers and up there in the clouds, and I was a grunt changing their oil and filling their tires.”
“If it wasn’t for the math, you could still fly with that leg?” Horace wondered.
“Oh, I had two good legs back then,” Eli explained, taking another step.
“But that all changed on December 7th last year. As you know, Japanese planes attacked Pearl. I was at Hickam Field, and pilots were trying to get their planes into the air to fight back. One plane got shot up pretty bad just as it was rolling out of the hangar. The plane caught fire, the pilot’s canopy stuck, and I ran out to get him.
I got the canopy opened and pulled the fella out, but Zeros were strafing the field.
He got cut in half by machine gun fire, and I took a round in the leg. ”
Eli rubbed his bad leg for effect and took another couple of steps toward the gunman.
“Boy, some days it still hurts terrible… Lila was disappointed enough that I wasn’t an officer and a pilot.
But when I got that bum leg, that was the straw that broke the camel’s back.
She wrote me and said she didn’t want a—well—she didn’t want me no more.
By the time I got discharged and came back here, she was gone. Moved to California, they said.
“So, no, Horace. I don’t know what it’s like to be rejected by a wife. But I do know a thing or two about rejection. By the Air Corps, by a woman, and I promise you, I promise, there is life after the hurt goes away.”
He was now close enough to the shooter to extend an arm.
“You still want to shoot me? Or, can I please have the rifle now?”
Horace looked at the Dodge again, then slumped his shoulders and handed the gun to Eli.
“Oh, hell. I suppose I ain’t no First Prize at the country fair, myself. But I was never untrue to her.”
“To be continued,” Eli said, slipping his right arm around Horace’s left. “But not out in the middle of the street.”
Goldie looked down the street and saw Paul McCaw stand from his crouched position behind the Olds and raise his rifle barrel. Then, he walked down to the next side street, turned, and disappeared.
As Eli walked Horace back to the sidewalk on the opposite side of the street from Goldie, he called, “Alice? Go inside Miller’s, get a cup of coffee or a soda, and sit by the stove. Don’t talk to anyone about this, and I’ll be back directly as soon as I’ve taken care of Horace. Deke?”
The elderly Miller stuck his head out of his front door. “What do you need, Eli?”
“Keep Alice warm and undisturbed until I come fetch her. And I do mean undisturbed.”
“Okay, Sheriff.”
“You know where Ed Peterson is?”
“Yeah. He’s inside the store. He was doing some Christmas shopping.”
“Okay. Tell him I’ll call him this afternoon about his car.”
Charles Banyan watched Eli walk Horace to the sheriff’s office, which was at the opposite end of town from the covered bridge. Goldie slowly came up to stand beside him, and both watched as Eli and Horace passed by. Eli glanced at both of them but didn’t say anything.
“That’s the bravest thing I’ve ever seen,” the mayor conceded, referring to the sheriff’s actions.
“He’s got a pair. I’ll give ‘im that,” Goldie agreed.
“What was Eli saying to him out there? I couldn’t hear.”
“Me, neither,” she said, now moving past him and continuing down the sidewalk toward Miller’s.
“I, uh, I-I hope this unfortunate incident won’t impact your article about how special Sparkledove is at Christmas,” Banyan called.
“Relax, Mayor,” Goldie replied over her shoulder. “Shit happens.”
Banyan looked at her, surprised, having never heard the expression before or a woman being so blunt. But he got the gist and was visibly relieved.
Within another two minutes, Goldie had walked down to the side street where she’d seen Paul McCaw disappear.
She spotted him stowing his rifle in his parked Chevy flatbed pickup.
His brother Saul was there too. The bed of the pickup was filled with cut Christmas trees.
Goldie and Stu Frey approached the brothers at the same time, coming from different directions.
“I saw what you were ready to do,” Stu began.
“Oh, hey, Stu,” Paul said straight-faced.
“Me, too,” Goldie confirmed.
“Hey Goldie, Stu,” Saul acknowledged, equally deadpan. “We got trees for the Boy Scouts to sell. Then we’re gettin’ jerky.”
“You wouldn’t really have shot Horace, would you?” Goldie asked.
“If I thought he was going to shoot the sheriff? Dead as a doornail,” Paul replied.
“It’s the mountain code,” Saul explained.
“The mountain code?” she asked.
“Ya can’t shoot an unarmed man,” Saul said. “No matter what.”
“Well, Alice was unarmed!” Goldie reminded. “Why didn’t you stop him from shootin’ at her?”
“Wives is different,” Paul justified.
“Oh, good lord,” Stu said, rolling his eyes.
Goldie looked at the brothers, then expelled a reconciling breath. “Well—in your own weird way, you were tryin’ to help. So…” she reached out and patted the dirty arm of Paul’s coat.
“You’re a good man.”
Paul’s expression didn’t change, but he stood up straighter and his chest puffed outward a little with pride.
“That’s me,” he agreed. “A silent sentinel on a mission to do good.”
“And get jerky,” Saul added.