Yellowstone Memories Read Free

the ceiling open. Wyatt looked up through frosty wire-rimmed glasses, holding his breath, and saw starlight.
    A rough stone staircase led down to the old root cellar, its chilly interior dank with age. Lantern light splashed down the uneven steps in bright slants, glowing against old broken barrels and glass jars. The bright red hairs on the back of his neck tingled with the eerie sensation of being watched—and yet he saw no one, heard no breath or movement.
    Wyatt swiped the lantern back and forth, making shadows slant and bend, but the root cellar remained wordless and clammy. Gravelike and silent.
    And then—a bump, a sound. A scurrying.
    He froze on the last step, motionless. Stilling the squeaking lantern handle and swinging globe with his free hand.
    But as he swiveled around, his wobbly lantern beam illuminated nothing but empty, dusty shelves. Old barrels and feed sacks in the corner. An ancient pair of boots. Wyatt kicked one, and a mouse darted out of the boot and into a crevice in the wall.
    Wyatt shuddered, jumping back in disgust.
    An abandoned Smith & Wesson revolver gleamed back from an empty shelf, which lay sticky with cobwebs, and Wyatt picked up the revolver in surprise. No dust on the barrel, and the stock looked well kept and polished.
    Why had it been left behind? A relic from a gold digger a few years past, forgotten? It couldn’t have been Crazy Pierre’s. Not in such good shape, with no dust or rust.
    No matter. There was no time for speculation. Not now, when he stood so close to the box that had eluded him for years.
    Wyatt dropped the revolver back on the shelf, feeling his fingers tremble with excitement. He counted the rotten oak shelves, measuring over exactly two feet, and then pried out a loose board from the floor below. Then another. The next board split in his hand, crumbling with a tinny sound onto something beneath the boards.
    His heart stood still as the lantern beam illuminated a dusty box.
    An ancient wooden box with rusty metal braces and a lock just the right size to fit a key in Wyatt’s hand.
    Wyatt knelt down, his hands shaking so much he nearly dropped the precious keys in his sweaty fingers, and inserted the first key into the lock. This key ring was nearly as valuable as the gold; he’d found it with the infamous initials carved in the rough metal: PDL.
Pierre DuLac
. Or in local Wyoming vernacular, Crazy Pierre.
    A rusty key ring to match the coffer. The missing link everybody’d been looking for. Men would kill for this.
    He tugged and jiggled, but it held fast.
    He pulled out the key and tried another and then another, but still the lock refused to budge.
    Wyatt tried each of the keys again, one after the other—grunting and straining at the lock.
    And … nothing.
    Wait a second. Wyatt jerked up the key ring and shook it in the light. Three keys? He thought there were four.
    Weren’t there …?
    Wyatt counted again, feeling the color drain from his face.
    At that exact moment, he heard a sneeze. A distinct bump, coming from the dank recesses of the room behind the cluster of barrels and feed sacks.
    Wyatt scrambled to his feet, stumbling twice, and pulled his Colt from its holster.
    “Come out now,” he ordered, trying to make his voice sound sterner than he really felt as he cocked the hammer. “Or I’ll blow all those barrels to bits.”
    Silence.
    Wyatt moved closer, his boots shuffling on the hard-packed earth. A cobweb tickled his neck, and he slapped at it, trying to keep his teeth from chattering. Kirby Crowder was probably crouching back there with his posse, waiting to pump him full of lead and gunpowder.
    Men had died over gold. Ezra Kind’s whole group of prospectors back in 1834, including a Crow scout, had probably been murdered by the Sioux in an attempt to keep the gold in the Black Hills. And the likes of the Crowder brothers—and whatever scum they’d dug up from bars and gambling outfits—sure wouldn’t think twice about slitting