Brian Garfield Read Free Page A

more. But there was more of a problem than that. The armed sentries weren’t all that formidable by themselves. The town was.
    Hardyville was a town of armed citizens all of whom were aware of the gold in the Johnson-Yaeger office, some of whom owned shares in it, and a few of whom might be willing to die to protect it. No one could say how many would fight, but the gold belonged to the town as a whole so if you wanted the gold you had to be prepared to fight the whole town.
    Johnson-Yaeger had built its express office on the pier deliberately, not only because it was the nearest place to the riverboat landing but also because it was surrounded on three sides by the bulk of Hardyville. From the office it was a seven-block gamut in any direction before you reached the outskirts. So you either had to run that gamut or swim, or use a boat. The only boats in Hardyville were the skiffs used by Californians to cross the river, and none was nearly big enough to carry a ton and a half of gold bullion. In fact all of them together couldn’t carry it.
    The way Mr. Pickett had it worked out, the time when Hardyville felt safest was the time when the riverboat came and collected the gold and took it away. At that point the gold was no longer Hardyville’s responsibility.
    But that was also the time when the gold was easiest to take.
    Boag tied his mule to a rail in front of the Bella Union saloon. He left the heliograph on the saddle because he didn’t expect to need it again. He had a two-pound revolver under the skirt of his campaign jacket, rammed in his belt just aside from his spine. He walked the two blocks from the Bella Union to the Johnson-Yaeger pier, not hurrying, drawing a few incurious glances from pedestrians. Traffic was light on the street but what there was of it was converging slowly toward the riverboat pier because the rumor had gone around that the boat was due in this afternoon.
    There was a knot of people around the waterfront when he got there. He posted himself in some shade across the street from the Johnson-Yaeger wharf and watched the fast brown river lash itself against the pilings. The sun was west of zenith and made painful reflections on the water.
    He spotted Gutierrez and Stryker in the crowd, milling aimlessly, pretending they didn’t know one another. Gradually during the next half hour a dozen of Mr. Pickett’s rawhiders came along singly and by twos and melted into the throng awaiting the Uncle Sam. Empty freight wagons began to appear, drawing up at dockside ready to unload the flat-bottom hundred-foot vessel when she berthed.
    He saw John B. Wilstach come down the street on his jackass and tie up in front of the assay office. A little while later the crowd’s mutter began to grow into a roar and he saw Mr. Jed Pickett walk in sight around the corner of the Inter Ocean Hotel, and that was the sign that the riverboat had been sighted from the roof of the hotel.
    Wilstach was over near the express office and when he caught Boag’s eye he flashed his grin, filled with its rowdy flavorings. Boag pretended he didn’t see Wilstach. None of them was supposed to know any of the others.
    Boag was thinking of ways to spend his twenty-five-hundred dollars. You didn’t just piss that kind of money away. You went to a town somewhere where they didn’t mind the color of your skin too much and you opened an establishment. A saddlery and blacksmith shop, he figured, because he’d been enough years in the Cavalry to know everything you had to know about repairing tack and mending gear and shoeing horses.
    It wasn’t much of an ambition but then ambitions were new to him and he was feeling his way. In the army you just did your forty miles a day on beans and hay and you let the War Department worry about ambition; once you got your sergeant’s stripes you were as far up as a nigger soldier was ever going to get, but there was nothing wrong with being topkick of a