The Savage Gun Read Free

stockings, nor as muscular, for Ollie was all muscle and hard bone, but he, too, was big and wide in the shoulders, with arms that could crush a hardwood keg into matchsticks. Both men had dark flint eyes and heavy caterpillar brows. People thought they could have been brothers, but they were, in fact, cousins, so the resemblance came natural. They had grown up together and both had learned how to backshoot a man at an early age. Neither one of them was born with a conscience, so killing came easy to them, as easy as stealing or any other crime, for that matter.
    â€œYeah, Dick,” Hobart said. “He’s due to pull out for Pueblo tomorrow. Last time he was down, a month ago, he cashed in so much dust he blinded the clerk at the bank.”
    â€œWe gonna hit this Savage this morning, right?” Mort Anders said. He, like the others, hadn’t shaved in a week, and his face was shadowed with beard stubble. He was in his thirties and wanted for murder in at least two states, perhaps three. His pale blue eyes were as cold and dead as a three-day-old mackerel.
    â€œSoon as Pete and Luke get back from glassing Savage’s camp and tell me the fog’s done lifted,” Hobart said.
    â€œShit, I hate this damned waiting,” Fritz Schultz said. He was sitting on a deadfall pine log, digging up the ground with a stick he had whittled to a sharp point. He was wanted for bank robbery and murder back in Kansas.
    â€œHell, it’s free gold, Fritz,” Red Dillard said. He was the youngest, at twenty-five, and he had at least five notches on his gun by the time he was eighteen. Red was a small-time thief with an itchy trigger finger. His eyes were blue, also, but blue as the sky and they were never still in their sockets. The man had a nervous tic right below his left eye and he was constantly twitching the other cheek as if to balance things out.
    â€œNot exactly free,” Hobart said. “But that bastard Savage and his crew are like beavers on that creek. They’re pulling gold out of Cripple Creek faster than old Bob Womack can make it to the assay office in Colorado Springs.”
    All the men laughed at Hobart’s reference to Bob Womack, who had started the gold rush to Cripple Creek in 1890. He hadn’t hit it big yet, since he first found some gold up one of the creeks back in ’78. But in October 1890, after filing a lot of small claims, he took ore down to Colorado Springs from a new claim. That El Paso lode panned out at $250 the ton, but nobody believed him when he started bragging about it. Men around Denver and El Paso had heard it all before.
    But a man named Ed De La Vigne, a mining man, believed Womack, and the following spring, in April of 1891, he formed the Cripple Creek Mining District and Womack got the credit for starting the gold rush.
    But Dan Savage had listened to Womack, too, and did some exploring of his own, and Hobart had seen him in El Paso cashing in dust and nuggets. Cripple Creek was choked with prospectors, but few knew about Dan Savage and his claims. Savage wasn’t one to brag, as Hobart found out.
    â€œHow much dust do you figure Savage has?” asked Army Mandrake, the oldest man in the group. Mandrake was almost fifty and he’d been on the wrong side of the law since he was fifteen, when he murdered his father so he could buy a horse. He’d been on the run ever since, having left Ohio shortly after the murder, and he’d left many a man buried in boot hill because Mandrake didn’t believe in working for a living. He had once killed a man for fifty cents. It didn’t make any difference to him. He’d sooner kill a man over a bowl of soup than struggle to fulfill his needs. He had coal-black eyes buried deep in his skull and their gaze had chilled many a man at the business end of his Colt.
    â€œIt’ll be in the thousands,” Ollie said. “More than he had the first time. He’s got more men working