4 Lives Read online

  Four Lives

  The Great West Detective Agency

  The Cloud Train

  Gus Mullins was a topnotch railroad construction foreman until the tragic accident. Who would ever want a one-armed man for anything? Who, except General Palmer?

  The Parisian Dagger

  Claudette Dupree is the lovely belle of the New Orleans social scene and . . . a bargaining chip used to keep her father's shipping company solvent. When Claudette rebels, she becomes a murderer—and worse.

  Good

  Part black, part Creek, Good drifted away from Indian Territory to a job as deputy marshal. He prides himself on tracking skills and never letting the guilty go free. When he

  fails to catch the right man, what honor he had flees.

  The Lovely Swindle

  Always on the lookout for an easy dollar, Amanda Baldridge finds herself hunted by a bank robber she had swindled. On the run, she jumps from the frying pan into the fire. Only her quick wit and beauty can save her.

  FOUR LIVES

  Jackson Lowry

  Smashwords Edition

  Four Lives

  ©2014 Jackson Lowry

  ISBN-13: 978-1499693331

  ISBN-10: 1499693338

  excerpt from

  The Great West Detective Agency

  ©2014 Jackson Lowry

  ISBN: 978-0-425-27243-5

  Cover © 2014 by Robert E. Vardeman

  Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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  Table of Contents

  The Cloud Train

  The Parisian Dagger

  Good

  The Lovely Swindle

  Excerpt: Great West Detective Agency

  About the author

  The Cloud Train

  Frigid mountain wind smothered his angry words. Augustus Mullins sucked in a deep breath and filled his barrel-chest and roared, "What do you mean the damn creosote's all used up? We had twenty barrels this morning."

  Terrence Wilkerson refused to be cowed. "Go check the supply tent, Gus. Ain't there."

  Mullins started to shout at his gang boss, then pushed past him and walked along the narrow ledge his crew had chiseled from the side of the mountain. Far south of his precarious perch, the mighty peaks of the Rocky Mountains were already covered with snow. General Palmer had offered a bonus for chipping away the rock to lay the narrow gauge railroad tracks before winter froze even this low altitude passage. Mullins felt the reward slipping away.

  The Denver & Rio Grande found only the hardest places to lay track, or so it seemed to him as he roared past the crew setting a steel rail down and then pounding in spikes to hold it on the ties. The railroad ties were soaked in creosote so the fierce weather wouldn't rot them away in a single season. He shuddered, and it wasn't from the wind. A blasting accident had killed two of his powder monkeys the week before. His lumbering team had increasing problems supplying the ties and the supply train brought the wrong inventory items. His men had grumbled when he kept them from drinking dry the twenty kegs of beer mistakenly sent when he had wanted beef and potatoes.

  Young, the clerk, looked up in surprise when Mullins yanked open the tent flap and stepped inside. The sound of the canvas walls snapping like a whip muffled his words, but his fury made the clerk drop his newspaper and try to hide it. The wind snaked past the flap and caught the sheet, wrapping it around the man's fumbling hands.

  "Boss, what can I get for you?"

  "Terry said we've run out of creosote."

  "I suppose."

  Mullins resisted the urge to grab the man's throat, squeeze and shake like a terrier with a mouthful of rat.

  "We had twenty barrels to treat the raw wood ties."

  "It's not in the supply tent. The damned tarry shit stinks so bad I keep it outside."

  "Show me."

  They walked around the tent to the rear where a head-high stack of freshly cut ties dried in the wind. After they cured for a week, the crew soaked them in creosote and let them dry for a day before using them to lay another mile of road. The process worked like a fine watch. Woodcutters supplied the planed ties, crews blasted away the rock to make the ledge on the side of a mountain while others laid tracks. If any part of Mullins' crew fell behind, the other parts of his efficient process failed.

  He had worked laying track since he was sixteen, laboring on the Transcontinental road for close to a year before General Palmer hired him away to help on his new road, the D&RG, stretching from Colorado Springs down to the steel mill at Pueblo. Mullins took pride in how he had become an assistant, just as young Wilkerson was for him, learned the best ways of going through different terrain and had finally been promoted to foreman of the main crew driving down toward Durango. He took pride in the three years he had worked for the General and had been rewarded for it.

  But he had never fought both the elements and lack of supply before. One or the other. Not both.

  "Behind the ties. You know that, boss." Young circled the stack and stopped dead in his tracks. "They were there this morning. You have 'em sent back down to the Springs?"

  Twenty barrels of the tarry creosote made quite a pile on its own. All Mullins saw was emptiness. He scuffed his boot along the rocky ground. Here and there he saw where the barrels had been rolled. He followed the trail to a drop off. He just stared at the cliff face below.

  The clerk crowded closer, braced himself against Mullins' bulk, peered over the edge and said, "You suppose the wind blew 'em over?"

  Stretching from the edge of the cliff down more than a hundred feet, a streak of sticky creosote crept down the precipice. The cold turned the creosote tacky, making its downward progress slower than if it had been in the summer sunlight only a few weeks earlier. He saw staves from the ruptured barrels already frozen into place from the brown creosote. A deep whiff caught only a slight hint of the pungent odor. Wind and cold robbed it of discovery except by staring into the abyss.

  A gust of wind caused Mullins to rock up onto the balls of his feet to keep his balance. He almost let it take him over the edge. Nothing made him happier than seeing another mile of track laid, unless it was the completion of a spur he had built himself. Him and a decent crew. But3 this job made him want to let the wind take him outward, soaring on the updraft, flying away from it all.

  Young gripped his shoulder with surprising strength and steadied him, then pulled him back.

  "You don't want to try fetching it, boss. I don't rightly know how twenty barrels got down there, but we can get more from the Springs. Don't cost much for the creosote. The barrels it's in and shipping'll cost more."

  "That'll take several days. We're almost out of cured ties," Mullins said. He shrugged off the clerk's hand. "Somebody did this. It wasn't an accident."

  "You mean sabotage? Who'd want to go and do that? I mean, we all share in the bounty General Palmer offered if we get another ten miles of track laid."

  The clerk sounded genuinely confused.

  "Could be all the trouble means the General has business rivals who don't want a road cut through until next year. That would give the stagecoach companies another year of no competition."

  "I did hear how the stage through Mosquito Pass upped their rates. My sister lives in Leadville, and the freight rates ha
ve more 'n doubled."

  "The General isn't an easy man, either. Business rivals might not be responsible. Personal enemies would delight in seeing him go bankrupt."

  "Do tell. Never thought on that." The man paused, then asked, "Are we taking a few days off when we run out of cured ties? The boys would like that for certain sure."

  Mullins held his temper and gave a message to wire back to the base station. When the clerk had faithfully recorded it and went to the telegraph key to send it along, the foreman found himself standing alone, staring out over the raw beauty of the Front Range, his mind tumbling like rocks in a polishing machine but getting nowhere. A new frigid blast warned him time was wasting. He stalked back to the end of the line. The crushed stone bed had been laid down. A half dozen men worked to set the ties into place. He beckoned Wilkerson over.

  "You were right," Mullins said. "How many ties are ready to lay?"

  Wilkerson scratched himself, hitched up his pants, considered spitting and reconsidered because of the gusty wind, and finally said, "One day, at the rate we're going. Can you get more creosote in?"

  "I've had Young send a message."

  "What happened to the creosote we had?"

  The question was open, honest and, as far as Mullins could tell, sincere.

  "Somebody doesn't want us going much farther."

  "We have to get past the summit in less than a week or we'll be stuck on this side of the hill until spring thaw."

  "Tell the entire crew there'll be as much beer as they want tonight."

  "You want the lot of 'em drunk? Is that a good idea?"

  Mullins laughed without humor.

  "I always thought I wanted to be a barkeep. Tell them. And don't let any of them take a piss unless I say so."

  "That's mighty harsh, in cold like this."

  "Do it."

  Mullins rolled out a couple barrels of the beer that had been sent mistakenly. He would gladly trade the lot of them for one more barrel of creosote. Better to slather the pitch onto ties rather than let his men suck up the bitter brew, but he had an idea.

  As darkness fell and the men finished their section of track, they drifted back to camp where Mullins stood next to the cook.

  "All the beer you can swill, men," he announced.

  "You trying to kill us, boss?" An older man spoke up, pointed to his crotch and added, "My back teeth are floating and my pecker's about to explode, and not in a good way. Wilkerson said we wasn't to take a leak."

  "Until I told you," Mullins said. "There's a barrel. Fill it up, get some beer and keep filling up the barrel. All of you."

  Several men went and used the communal wooden thunder mug, got their tin cups filled with beer and settled down to a hearty meal. The way they had worked today, they were hungry. Mullins quickly saw that they were as thirsty as he'd guessed, too. The level in the first barrel went down even as that in the second rose.

  "Want me to roll this over the cliff?" Wilkerson had his hands on the barrel filled with urine.

  "Don't spill a drop. Use it to cure the raw ties piled up out back."

  "Boss," Wilkerson said slowly, "you're out of your mind if you think this will seal the wood the way creosote does."

  "Don't care if it does. As long as it works for a spell, we can keep laying track and not have it warp from weather the second we move on."

  "I reckon a crew could come replace it next spring," the assistant foreman said. He scratched himself some, then began working on his button fly. "I need to add to the pot. If it cures leather, why not wood, I guess."

  "Drink up, too. I was going to send the beer back down, so whatever's left is at jeopardy. I want it gone tomorrow, either all drunk up or ready to ship down to Colorado Springs."

  "You have to keep the bar open until the creosote gets here," Wilkerson said. He sighed in relief as he moved around so he wasn't pissing into the wind. "By the way, has anyone from the cutting team reported in?"

  "Young didn't mention it." Mullins cursed under his breath and went to find the clerk.

  "Message sent," Young said, glancing up. He held his newspaper down with rocks on a tabletop. The canvas tent walls slapped with a savage regularity that warned of a building storm. In the Rockies, storm clouds formed and dripped inches of rain in the span of an hour, but they’d get lucky to get snow at this altitude. If luck ran against them, it would turn to sleet and freeze everything with a layer of half-melted ice.

  Mullins inhaled deeply and caught a trace of rain mixed in with the wind.

  "That's what I think, too. I've got everything lashed down, but the ties will get wet. No way around it."

  "There's hardly a week's worth in the pile. Have you heard from the woodcutters?"

  Young looked surprised. "I've been so busy with keeping records for the General, I plumb forgot them. They were supposed to be back this morning."

  "Where were they cutting?"

  "You know the canyon crossing the rails two miles back? Just before the slope up became too great and we started blasting the ledge along the mountain? That canyon goes into a meadow and wooded area that's about perfect for sturdy trees. Jake took the portable sawmill when he spotted a stream running along one edge of that meadow."

  "If he didn't have to work the saw or plane the wood by hand, why isn't there a month's supply of ties here? Jake and his crew have been gone for a week now."

  "You know how it is in the mountains, boss. The Utes aren't too friendly in these parts, not like that Ouray chief fellow down south."

  "The General got his signature on a deed giving us right of way through to Durango."

  "Ouray's not chief of all the Utes. Only the peaceable ones," Young said, shrugging it off. "If you want, I can send another 'gram back down the line and have them look for Jake. The next supply train's due in a couple days."

  "Too long," muttered Mullins. He left the tent still grumbling.

  After checking to see that the men enjoyed their beer and were dutifully trying to each fill an empty keg by his lonesome, he left Wilkerson in charge and rode in the dark down the treacherous grade to the canyon.

  He wobbled in the saddle from exhaustion, but kept going. More than the bonus for finishing the line before winter socked them in, Mullins had his pride. He had promised to get the tracks laid. His one bit of good luck was a late winter. A couple years prior, the storms would have driven his crew to Colorado Springs for the winter by now. It was always chancy predicting the weather, but he felt in his gut that he had another week, perhaps two. Most of the blasting was done. The rock was being crushed to gravel for the bed and two more miles would be all he needed to have bragging rights on the best danged railroad crew in all of Colorado.

  The best danged crew except for one. Someone had spent a considerable bit of effort rolling the barrels to the side of the mountain and pushing them over to slow progress.

  He began singing songs, bellowing out The Irishman to keep himself awake.

  "Just then the parrot began to sing

  "God Save the Queen."

  Old Pat woulda killed it then and there

  But its feathers they were green.

  He couldn't harm that color

  And his anger held in check;

  "Oh, if you were a canary bird

  I'd wring your yaller neck"

  His voice died down into a hoarse whisper from the cold air. Mullins thought back on times when he'd had it worse. An Arapahoe war party had surprised him right after he'd come to Colorado. He'd run three miles barefoot to get away. And then there was the time he had been stranded out on the prairie. Everyone in the party had died of cholera except him, and he was so weak from puking that a newborn kitten could have bested him. But he had kept going. Somehow he had boiled water and drunk it, almost burning off his tongue. But the purified water and little else had seen him through until the Central Pacific sent out a party to see why they had lost contact. In two weeks he had been back at work swinging a hammer and driving spikes with the best of them
. All he felt now was a touch of fatigue.

  Being tired was no excuse for stopping. He had to get more rail, more ties, more distance. He drifted off to sleep and laid a mile of track in his dreams. When he snapped back awake in the saddle he panicked, worried he still had a mile of track to go. Then he calmed his racing heart when he realized wood smoke caused his nostrils to flare. Instinctively he turned his horse toward the fire. When he came upon the four men huddled under their blankets, snoring as if they sawed wood in their sleep, he knew he had found his woodcutters.

  "Jake," he bellowed. The cry came out hardly more than a croak, but it was enough to awaken the man across the fire from him.

  "Mr. Mullins." Jake sat up, rubbed his eyes, then got to his feet. He stumbled over his boots, bent to put them on and then sat down heavily.

  "Where're my railroad ties? I don't see a pile of them."

  "The wagon's creaking with them." Jake pointed off into the dark.

  Mullins urged his horse to jump the fire. Embers scattered and woke the others. He trotted away from camp to where the wagon stood. To be sure, he reached over and ran his hands along the wood stacked in the bed.

  "Jake, get your worthless carcass over here. Now!"

  "Boss, it's been hard finding good wood. Nothing but stunted trees in these parts and—"

  "You've been lollygagging. You've been collecting your pay and sleeping till noon, haven't you?"

  "No, sir, we haven't done any such thing. Look at the saw blade. It's damned near worn smooth."

  Stretching, Mullins found the saw and ran his thumb along the edge. Most of the teeth were missing.

  "You're cutting wood for some reason, but it's not ending up in my work camp. What's going on? Tell me or I'll fire you and make you walk back to the Springs."