Brian Garfield Read Free Page B

good line troop of Buffalo soldiers, a man didn’t need any more ambition than that.
    Now he was thinking vaguely in terms of Oregon or the British Columbia country. Need to get a long way away from this part of the world after today. And up in western Canada he’d heard around the barracks that they didn’t piss on black skin.
    Boag was slow to hate, his temper took a long time rising, but he was getting ready to hate the army for what it had done to him.
    The steam whistle shrieked across the desert and the crowd got up on its toes. The Uncle Sam wasn’t in sight yet; there was a last bend for her to come around.
    You needed manpower, Mr. Pickett had explained to them all, and you needed to time it right. There would be a point when the ship was just about completely unloaded—that would be just short of sundown—and at that point most of the ship’s crew and the longshoremen-for-the-day would be ashore, and that was the point when you had to strike. It would take most of the twenty-eight rawhiders to hold back the crowd on shore while the rest moved the gold on board the boat and got the drop on whatever crew was left there.
    â€œMoving the gold aboard,” Stryker had told Boag, “that’s you new boys’ job.”
    It put Boag and Wilstach and the rest of the new recruits at the bottom of the gang’s ladder, but Boag was willing to be nothing more than a strong back for a day, for twenty-five-hundred dollars in gold. You had to spend five years in the army to earn that much pay and you never saw more than forty dollars of it in one hunk.
    The tall structure of Uncle Sam hove in sight with the paddles grinding away at the water, straining; the current along here ran pretty close to sixteen knots. Boag tipped his shoulder against the weathered clapboard wall and settled down to wait.

4
    The clerk in the Johnson-Yaeger office was a weary man with his hair all wet down, a bony pale man wearing sleeve garters and an eyeshade. Boag stood across the doorway from Wilstach, looking in. Two men were booking passage on the downstream leg; the clerk was chastising them for being tardy. “Most everybody booked two, three weeks ago.”
    â€œYou got room or ain’t you?”
    â€œDeck passage only, Mister. You stand up all the way unless you can find a wagon to sleep under.”
    â€œI’d stand barefoot on hot coals all the way to Yuma to get out of this God-forsaken country.”
    The two men got their tickets and left, coming out between Boag and Wilstach. One of them brushed Boag’s shoulder and turned his head quickly, ready to apologize until he saw what Boag was. Then his face tightened. “Jesus Christ. Don’t you know no better’n to get in a white man’s way?”
    Boag lowered his eyes. The man said, “You want to learn better manners, boy,” and hit Boag in the belly.
    Boag let it cave him in. He sagged back against the wall holding his stomach in both hands. “Yes sir I sure got to learn better manners sir.”
    â€œChrist you niggers ain’t worth the powder to blow you to hell.” The man turned to his partner. “You coming?”
    His partner was bent over against the building because he was laughing so hard. Finally the two of them moved away.
    Wilstach simmered. “I had my druthers—”
    â€œForget it, John B. It don’t mean nothing.”
    â€œTomorrow,” Wilstach said in anger.
    â€œAll right, tomorrow.” Boag watched the two men walking away. Not walking; swaggering. Wilstach was right. Tomorrow.…
    Ben Stryker approached in his clawhammer coat. “Smart,” he murmured. “All set? Come on—it’s time.” And the three of them went into the office, Stryker pulling a shotgun out from under his coat and talking softly to the clerk and the two guards on the interior door. “All right, don’t get notions. Stand still and nobody gets theirselves