CHAPTER 4
Bo thrust the ragged piece of newspaper in front of Scratch’s face. He had torn out the story about the gold strike in Colorado and used the rest of the newspaper for the purpose for which God had intended it.
“Wake up, Scratch,” he said as he shook his old friend’s shoulder. “Take a look at this.”
Scratch cracked one eye open a little. “Bo? What the hell are you doin’ up in the middle of the night?”
“It’s not the middle of the night. It’s morning. And I have an idea what we need to do.”
Scratch closed his eye, groaned, and snuggled deeper in the hay. “I was havin’ me the nicest dream. I was surrounded by a bunch of pretty little señoritas…”
“The only things surrounding you in that hay are bugs and rats,” Bo said. “Come on, wake up.”
“You’re gonna keep on pesterin’ me until I do, ain’t you?”
“More than likely.”
Scratch heaved a sigh. He forced both eyes open, rolled onto his side, and pushed himself up into a sitting position. “All right, all right. What’n blazes are you goin’ on about? It ain’t like you to be that worked up about anything, Bo.”
Bo shoved the newspaper story in front of Scratch’s face again. “Read that.”
Scratch grimaced. “My eyes are a mite blurry this mornin’. Why don’t you just tell me what it says?”
“It says there’s a big gold strike up in Colorado, at a town called Mankiller.”
“Never heard of it,” Scratch muttered as he rubbed his hands wearily over his face.
“It’s not far from Durango, according to this story.”
“Well, I still never—Wait a minute.” Scratch looked up with a frown. “Did you say gold strike?”
“That’s right. A real bonanza, the paper says. Mankiller’s gone from being a sleepy little wide place in the road to a boomtown almost overnight.” Bo shrugged. “Of course, this paper was published three weeks ago, so it’s not exactly overnight anymore…”
“So we don’t know for sure if the boom’s still goin’ on, or if the the gold petered out in a hurry.”
“No, but I think it’s worth checking out, don’t you?”
“Gold,” Scratch mused. “Seems like we just got tangled up with a gold mine down yonder in Mexico not that long ago. We could have stayed down there if we wanted to be gold miners.”
“Maybe we made the wrong decision. Things haven’t worked out that well for us since we left Mexico, have they?”
“Well…no, I reckon not.”
Bo tapped a finger against the newspaper story. “Maybe this is telling us that we have another chance. We should go to this Mankiller, Colorado, and see if we can get in on the strike.”
Scratch frowned again. “I never knew you to go chasin’ after gold before, Bo, or any other sort of wealth, for that matter. You’ve gotten downright jumpy these days. You’re supposed to be the calm, steady one.”
Bo looked out the window in the hayloft. It faced east, which meant the view overlooked the Rio Grande and the vast, arid ugliness of the Jornada del Muerto.
“Time’s running out,” Bo said.
“What?”
“You ever think about how many years we’ve drifted, Scratch? And how little we’ve got to show for it? We’re both still in pretty good health now—”
Scratch thumped his chest with a fist. “Speak for yourself. I’m healthy as a horse!”
“Yeah, but what about ten or fifteen years from now? What if we get sick? Who’s going to take care of us?”
Scratch stared at his old friend for a long moment, then exploded, “What the hell is wrong with you? The odds are that neither of us will live to be old and feeble, the way we keep runnin’ into trouble! Blast it, Bo, ever since we left Texas, we’ve worried about today, not tomorrow. We live for right now.”
Bo looked around at the hayloft. Rats scrabbled around here and there.
“Right now doesn’t look like much at the moment.”
“Our lack of dinero is just a temporary setback. We’ll get on our feet again, get us a stake built up—”
“How? We can’t even afford to buy a cup of coffee for breakfast.”
“That’s right,” Scratch said. “So how in hell do you think we’re gonna be able to go all the way to Colorado to look for gold?”
Bo shrugged. “That’s a problem, all right. But I still think we should have a goal—”
“I got a goal.” Scratch heaved himself to his feet and groaned again as he straightened his back and legs and joints creaked and popped into place. “My goal’s to make it to the outhouse. After I’ve managed that, I’ll figure out what to do next.”
Scratch went to the ladder and climbed down, grumbling and muttering as he went. Bo tucked the torn-out newspaper story in his pocket and sighed. He followed Scratch down the ladder. The silver-haired Texan had already disappeared out the rear door of the livery barn.
The elderly proprietor of the stable came out of his office running knobby fingers through a thatch of snowy white hair. “Mornin’,” he said to Bo with a nod. “How’d you fellas sleep?”
“All right, I guess.”
“If you fellas’d like to stay on for a spell, I got some other chores that could use doin’. Roof needs patched, and there are some rotten boards in the walls that ought to be replaced. Things like that. If you boys want to take care of those jobs for me, you can keep on sleepin’ in the loft.”
“How about wages?” Bo asked.
The old man shook his head. “Oh, no, I can’t afford to pay you no wages. This place don’t make that much money.”
“You’d feed us?”
The man’s eyes widened. “Do I look like a rich man? No, a place to sleep in return for the work, that’s all I can offer you.”
“Even slaves got fed,” Bo snapped.
“Don’t get testy with me now. I’m just tryin’ to help you fellas out.”
If that was the old-timer’s idea of helping out, Bo hated to think what he would do to someone he was trying to take advantage of. “No deal,” he said as he headed for the front entrance.
“Hold on just a minute.”
Bo looked back, thinking that the proprietor was going to be more reasonable.
Instead, the man said in an irritated voice, “Your horses ate some of my grain and drank my water. You got to pay me for that. I’ll take a day of roof patchin’ for what you owe.”
“What we owe?” Bo felt anger welling up inside him. He told himself to get a grip on his temper. Losing control with Big John Peeler had cost him and Scratch that job. It hadn’t been a good one, but it was better than nothing, which was what they had now. “We worked until almost midnight cleaning those stalls. That ought to be enough to care of any debt.”
“This is my livery stable, mister. I’ll be the judge of what’s enough and what ain’t. And if you don’t like it, I’ll fetch the marshal and see what he thinks about it. If you ain’t careful, you and your pard are gonna wind up behind bars as vagrants.”
If