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

county?”
    The clerk nodded and slid open a wide, flat drawer, saying, “I know what you have in mind. Other marshals have been studying the same crazy situation. You won’t find the siding everyone’s looking for. Half of the old narrow-gauge tracks up there have been pulled up for scrap.”
    Longarm spread the map on a nearby table and ran his finger along a red line between Manzanita and the Big Valley. He mused aloud, “If there’s unused track laying around up there to be claimed by any junkman, it wouldn’t be impossible for somebody to build his own siding in some wooded stretch of canyon.”
    The clerk shook his head. “The other lawmen have been all up and down the line. Besides, the train crews say they’ve never stopped or been stopped between the mine tipple and the mills down here.”
    â€œWhat about this other fellow, Hearst?”
    â€œGeorge Hearst? He lives in Frisco. Ain’t heard about him missing any gold. Like I said, they crush their own ore up at Sheep Ranch and ship it almost pure. They send it down in freight wagons, under guard. The way I hear tell, nobody wants to tangle with old Hearst. He’s in politics in the city and thick with the Big Five. This young MacLeod likely don’t have as many friends who’d back his play against high-graders.”
    Longarm smiled thinly. “He has the U.S. government in his corner. He contracted with the treasury to deliver his gold to the mint. Where does this Hearst jasper send his gold?”
    The clerk shrugged. “Same place, of course. Nobody else buys gold in quantity on this coast.” He saw Longarm’s puzzled frown and asked, “Did I say something important, Deputy?”
    â€œMaybe. These robberies have added up to a mess of gold, no matter what the quality of the stolen ore might have been. But you’re right. You can’t sell a real pile of gold to anyone but Uncle Sam—not without attracting a lot of attention.”
    â€œMexico?” the clerk suggested.
    The marshal tugged at a corner of his mustache. “Doubt it. For sure, they couldn’t haul it that far as ore. They have to have a refinery we don’t know about. If MacLeod’s extracting with the cyanide process, it can’t be just some backwoods stamping mill, either, You say the Hearst mine has its own mill?”
    The old man shook his head. “Wrong tree, Deputy. The mill in Sheep Ranch is just a simple crusher that runs the slurry over mercury beds. They boil the mercury out of the results and wind up with rich dust. If the Lost Chinaman’s ore needs cyanide to leach it from the rock, the Hearst mill couldn’t extract it worth mention.”
    â€œHow about those other ghost towns up there, like Angel’s Camp?”
    â€œThey ain’t quite dead, for one thing, so you’d have witnesses. There ain’t no cyanide mills, either, so you’d get no gold.”
    â€œTry it this way. What if MacLeod’s wrong? The ore might be rich enough to run through an old-fashioned mill and settle for half, letting whatever gold the cyanide might get out stay where it is?”
    The man scratched his wispy-haired pate vigorously. “Well, high-graders is called high-graders ’cause they skim the cream. You could get some gold out of nigh
any
rock with a pan and running water. They’re going to a lot of effort if that’s their play, though. MacLeod’s ore is marginal. Wouldn’t be worth digging if they hadn’t come up with new methods in the past few years. Hell, if
I
was up there high-grading, I’d rob George Hearst’s mine. It’s a third richer in color.”
    Longarm thanked the clerk and left. He went next to the offices of the
Sacramento Bee
, where he found another friendly cuss who was more than willing to jaw about the newspaper’s back files.
    He knew he was wasting time asking about the high-grading. If the case could