Free Legend With a Six-gun (9781101601839) by Tabor Evans

it?”
    He laughed and started moving. “Hell, lady, if you didn’t want it he-man style, you never should have started it.”
    â€œI didn’t start it. Oh, stop talking like a fool and
do
it!”
    The fireflies were back again and the room was spinning like a merry-go-round, but he knew he wasn’t going to black out. He gritted his teeth and muttered to himself,
Listen, God. I’m likely to take it personal if you don’t let me do it right this time.
    This time, God listened.
    *   *   *
    Sylvia couldn’t ride to Manzanita in the stage with him because her brother was meeting her at trackside in the mountains. So they kissed goodbye as the boat docked in Sacramento the next morning, and Longarm promised to look her up when he arrived in Manzanita.
    He went to the Wells Fargo office and bought a ride to Manzanita. The agent told him he had a couple of hours to kill before the stage hauled out for the High Sierra. He had most of the background material he needed, but Marshal Vail and the treasury boys might have missed a thing or two, so he moseyed over to the land office to refresh his memory.
    Longarm introduced himself to an elderly clerk as a deputy U.S. marshal, without mentioning what district court he worked for. The clerk was a friendly sort who didn’t even ask to see his badge, which was just as well, since some son of a bitch had it up in the hills somewhere.
    As he started pawing through the files, the clerk said, “I can tell you just about anything you’ll find in there, Deputy. I came out here in ’49.”
    â€œI’m interested in the Lost Chinaman claim, up in Calaveras County.”
    â€œHell, son, I was washing color in the headwaters of the Stanislaus when Mark Twain wrote that fool story about the frog.”
    â€œYou ever meet the frog?”
    â€œNope, but I met Mark Twain and Bret Harte when they was just starting to tell all them lies about us. You see, the gold rush started down here in the low country, when they found color washed down off the Sierra in the creek beds.”
    â€œI know about the gold rush, old son,” Longarm told the man.
    â€œNo, you don’t,” the old clerk contradicted him. “Not if you been reading Harte and Twain. Like I said, we started washing color in the low country. By the fifties, we’d followed the gold up the streams and found the Mother Lode—a big, wide belt of gold quartz running a couple hundred miles up there. The color we’d found in the creeks was just what had washed out of the real lode. It was the hard-rock miners who had the capital to move mountains to get at the good stuff.”
    â€œHow many mines are still in Bonanza up in Calaveras County, pop?” Longarm asked.
    â€œBonanza? Not a one. Most of the veins petered out some time ago. A man named Hearst has a working claim in Calaveras, a mine called Sheep Ranch. But he’s hauling low-grade out these days. Hearst is a big shot who got in on the big Virginia City strike, on the other side of the Sierra. He’s got the capital to crush his own ore. Angel Camp’s about dead. Murphy has a low-grade mine nobody’s interested in these days. They had a copper strike up there a while back, but it never amounted to much. Copper’s too cheap to haul over all them ridges and they just couldn’t compete with Arizona Territory.”
    â€œSo let’s talk about the Lost Chinaman. I understand the owner is a man named MacLeod?”
    â€œThat’s right. Nice young jasper, for an Easterner. Him and his pretty little wife bought the mine for next to nothing. It seemed to bottom out a good six or eight years back, but MacLeod’s some sort of geologist and he hit a vein the others overlooked. They say he’s been shipping tolerable ore.”
    â€œHe may be shipping it,” the deputy agreed. “It’s not getting anywhere, though. You got a railroad map of the