Paint the Wind Read online

  a bright young man if he presented his credentials in just the right way.

  Chance smiled and sauntered toward the tables. He stretched his dealing hand twice to get the blood circulating; already he could feel the tingle of excitement that always accompanied the prospect of a game. If he could talk himself into the right poker table, he knew how to be noticed. He weighed the feel of the money in his pocket and decided which of the lower-echelon tables he'd use to fatten his bankroll.

  By the end of the first hour, Chance had enough money to move on to the table of his choice; by the end of the second, he had made the acquaintance of two lawyers, a banker, the owner of a brewery, and a judge. And by the end of the third, he had the offer of a job interview at Cross, Phipps and MacKenzie, the law firm with the best political connections in Denver.

  Hart found that Here was an artist of real stature and an indefatigable teacher. He browbeat his new apprentice into demanding perfection of himself.

  "No!" he would admonish if he disapproved. "This has no life! No blood, no passion! Without passion this work is an exercise in draftsmanship. With passion it becomes art."

  Here had three loves in life, Hart soon discovered: his wife, Mercy; his engraving; and a newly invented art form called "photography," which was his obsession.

  "Mercy and I have not been blessed with children, so we have been blessed with a camera instead," he told his student proudly, unveiling the amazing contraption. It was a huge brown box with a black cloth covering, under which the little man frequently darted, and under which he could be found whenever a work-free moment presented itself.

  "I use the wet-collodipn method," Here explained. "Glass negatives produce prints on paper now, not on metal like the old daguerreotypes did." Hart could see that collodion was a syrupy solution made of gun cotton in ether and alcohol. He watched with fascination as Here first coated the glass with this vile mixture, then, in total darkness, dipped the plate into a bath of silver nitrate.

  "You can't let the solution dry," Here told him, "or the plate loses its sensitivity. So you must quickly load the wet plate into the camera, take an educated guess about the proper exposure time, then pray that the subject doesn't move and make all your efforts meaningless... Then you 'take' your picture!"

  Mercy indulged her husband in this other love, photography. She had long ago come to terms with the fact that she could have only the parts of him not consumed by his work, and it seemed to Hart, she felt that part of Here was better than all of any other man.

  Mercy Monroe was a strong-looking woman, a square-jawed, dark-haired Yankee, mighty enough of bosom to have graced the prow of a whaling ship, and long of limb. She was considerably taller than her husband, although neither of them ever seemed to notice that. She had a firm mouth, pepper-and-salt hair parted precisely in the middle and pulled back into a no-nonsense bun. Hart thought this hairdo set the tone for everything about Mercy: symmetrical, practical, scorning unnecessary adornment. Yet she was attractive once you knew her, for she was full of goodness.

  It was she who insisted that both McAllisters live with them for the duration of their stay in Denver; she who organized the evenings when all four convened in the Monroe parlor, so the boys could relearn the art of being gentlemen. The parlor was an elaborate Victorian affair, made dark by heavy velvet drapes and prim by a horsehair sofa, yet it seemed to fold its arms cozily around Hart and Chance. The bric-a-brac of Here's travels and the fruit of his artistic and photographic genius widened the small room's vistas, and the warmth of Here and Mercy put the boys in mind of their own lost family.

  Mercy would pour the tea, and Here would splash bourbon into the cups when her back was turned. They both talked animatedly of politics and foreign places, of books and art and all the knowledge that helps to civilize a man. Hart and Chance polished up the manners their mama had laboriously taught them, and learned to hold their own in heated discussion.

  Mercy would shake her head over Chance's need to gamble and tomcat, but he would bring her little presents bought from his winnings, and she generally forgave him his skylarking.

  Because of Here and Mercy, the four years spent in Denver were among the happiest the McAllister boys had known. They had a family again, they were learning things they needed to know, and they'd grown to full manhood. Yet with growth came restlessness, and a conviction they'd soon need firm plans about getting ahead in the world; without plans, nothing would come of either one.

  Chapter 17

  "Ever think of going prospecting?" Chance asked his brother one night after Here and Mercy had gone to bed.

  "Never once. Have you?"

  "Not 'til lately, bro, but half the clients at the law office made their stake in mining. I've been thinking, prospecting might be just what we've been looking for—a quick way to strike it rich. You know how lucky I am, brother." He added the last with a grin. It was a joke between them that Chance was luckier than any man alive. Hart felt secretly that this particular quality often went hand in hand with a reckless nature, but he'd never thrown that up to his brother, for some sixth sense told him Chance needed to rely on the luck.

  "Prospecting might be fine for you, Chance, but I've been giving thought to going back East to art school. Here says there's a fine new place called Yale that's the best in the country. He thinks I have talent."

  "And I suppose this Yale place takes poor boys out of charity," Chance replied cynically. "No, brother, the simple answer to both our ambitions is prospecting."

  "How exactly do you figure that?"

  "Why, it's clear as the nose on your face, bro. All we have to do is find enough gold to make me rich and to send you east to that fancy school. Two years should do it."

  "Two years is a long time."

  "Two years and then you're free to go, Hart. I give you my word on it. By then we'll be tired of each other anyway."

  Hart tried not to be taken in by his brother's infectious enthusiasm, but he had to admit there was a seductiveness to gold; every second man on the Denver streets had been bitten by the bug.

  "I'm game to find out how it all works before I say no," Hart allowed after some deliberation.

  Chance chuckled at that—he hadn't doubted for a minute that he could talk Hart into whatever he chose to.

  Chance looked up over the tops of his cards to find out if any of the other men at the table had seen what he'd seen. The dealer was a good cheat, but not a great one.

  Four of the seven players were oblivious, frowning or deadpan; they examined the hands they held in quiet concentration. One man's glance caught Chance's knowingly across the green felt. He was a prospector, and he, too, had seen the queen slipped from the bottom of the deck. The man twitched a grizzled gray eyebrow and turned his alert eyes disapprovingly in the dealer's direction.

  Chance knew the prospector's name was McBain. Folks called him Bandana because of the rolled-up red kerchief he wore wrapped Indian-fashion around his brow. Of scant five feet six inches and slender body, he had the kind of build that looked frail from afar and close up resembled iron springs.

  It was apparent that McBain, like Chance, was assessing the wisdom of calling out the dealer. Chance had no intention of brawling; he was wearing a new suit of clothes that he'd saved three months for, and besides, his brother, whom he always relied on for reinforcement, was nowhere to be seen. When last he'd seen Hart, he'd been in heavy consultation with a rosy-cheeked young lady of dubious virtue, and no doubt by now had found his way happily to her bed upstairs.

  The play continued two more rounds before the cardsharp double-shuffled and raked in another big pot.

  "I didn't much mind, the first two times you did that," McBain drawled lazily. "But I'm beginnin' to feel a mite put upon by the number of aces you got in that deck."

  Play stopped, laughter quieted, and the gambler looked up with feral eyes that flashed confidence at McBain.

  "You'd best have proof of that remark, old-timer," he replied, unworried. "Or you'
d best be a damn good shot."

  "The first card you dealt from the wrong spot was an ace of diamonds," Chance said quietly, "the second a queen, the last one an ace of clubs."

  The dealer was on his feet in an instant, his gun clearing leather as he rose. Bandana, too, was standing, but Chance's shot rang first, exploding the Colt out of the gambler's hand in a burst of blood and shattered bone.

  Men seemed to materialize from every corner of the saloon, swinging fists or chairs, as if the latent urge to break things had been set loose by Chance's gunshot. Hart heard the sound of curses and shattering glass rise from the floor below. He abandoned his pleasure with the lady and grabbed for his trousers; this wasn't the first time Hart had scrambled out of a gambling hall over the years. Chance's particular gifts with the cards had an unhappy side effect of making losers cranky, especially if they were liquored up. Hart was halfway down the stairs by the time he had everything buttoned and his gun belt tightly fastened around his waist.

  The fracas was still in full swing when he spotted his brother, a grin on his face and six-guns in both hands, backing out the door real agile, with a man about half his size at his side.

  Chance gave Hart the high sign and ducked through the swinging door to disappear into the Denver dark. Within minutes, both McAllisters and the wiry stranger were making tracks on horseback down Main Street, the pianist was once again tickling the ivories, and presumably play had resumed at the poker table. Denver tended to be a wide-open town and nobody paid much mind if a man was shot for cheating, especially if the wound wasn't mortal.

  Hart's quick assessment of the situation had turned up no dead bodies. He heard no hoofbeats of a posse on their immediate tail, so he figured nobody had died. A short way out of town, all three horsemen slowed down by mutual consent and eventually stopped.

  "McBain's the name," said the little man, sticking his hand out to Hart. "Folks call me Bandana."

  Hart saw a man of indeterminate age, his face leathered by a network of spiderweb lines and deep-gouged creases like stretched wire, all tanned to the color and consistency of animal hide. His eyes were sharp and looked to be the kind that could see a lizard move under a creosote bush at fifty paces, and laughed real easy. Hart saw a peck of mischief in McBain, but liked the strength of his handshake and the forthright way he had. Salt-and-pepper hair hung down straight from the knotted kerchief to the man's shoulder; there were waves in it, as if it was accustomed to being plaited. He had a fine straightforward nose, and the kind of toughness to his mouth and jaw that suggested stubbornness or determination.

  "Were .you getting my brother into devilment, McBain, or did he do the honors for you?" Hart asked with a grin.

  "Well, now, I'd say we get equal credit, near as I can figger. No real harm done. That saloon needed redecoratin' and now they'll have an excuse fer doin' it. I got a camp about three miles out of town; if you boys would care to let the dust settle around Mattie's Place before headin' back into Denver, you could bunk with me a day or two. I ain't got but a prospector's tent and some extra bedrolls, but the air seems friendly enough for comfort."

  Bandana talked about prospecting long into the night. He'd been on every significant dig from Sutter's Mill to the Comstock, he said; hard-rock or placer, he and Bessie, his mule, had done it all.

  "I had me two good strikes," he told them amiably, but without the typical prospector braggadocio. "First time my burro kicked up a piece of rock with ore in it, but my partner jumped the claim and left me near dead on the side of the mountain." He pointed to an old scar that started at his temple and traveled up the scalp. He had to move his bandana askew to show the evidence.

  "Second time I was old enough not to get my poke pinched so easy," he said with a small, rueful laugh, "but the lode was too deep to work without capital and I had to sell out or lose it all. I got me three thousand, and they got three million, but there's more where that all come from and the third time's the charm."

  Hart could see the excitement building in Chance. Until that moment the idea of mining had been a lark, but here was a man who could show them the ropes, and he'd dropped right out of heaven into their path, just as Chance had expected him to. There were strikes all over Colorado and the Dakotas, Bandana said, and a thousand other likely places where gold was just lying in the Rockies, waiting to be found. South in Silverton, and Telluride, east in the Black Hills and north in Utah, there was no dearth of locales in which to ply your trade. Bandana himself seemed to favor California Gulch, eighty miles southwest of where they sat.

  The Gulch had been a boomtown in 1860, he said, when a man named Abe Lee struck gold there in a stream coming down off the Mosquito Mountains. Like all such sites, it had become a rip-roaring rush town in a month, lasted a year or two until the gold ran out and the prospectors followed it, then settled into an ordinary town with nothing much to recommend it. Except maybe Jewel Mack's whorehouse, which Bandana said was a humdinger.

  McBain claimed two things that sounded interesting to the boys; the first was that those early gold miners had left too soon, without tracing back upstream to the mother lode. Second, and even more intriguing, was that gold might not be the only thing of value in those untamed hills.

  "When I was there in sixty-one, I didn't know carbonate of lead from bicarbonate of soda," said Bandana, "but what I seen on the Comstock was a funny-looking black stuff called lead carbonate that assayed out at two and a half pounds of silver to the ton. I think I seen that selfsame kind of black stuff back in the Gulch when I was there, and I aim to find out if it's silver-bearing."

  Long before morning, the decision was inevitable. Bandana knew of a cabin abandoned by a prospector friend when the gold had crapped out back in '65. It wasn't precisely where he wanted to be, but it was close enough to give them a base of operations. Three men could work a dig more efficiently than one, and Bandana's know-how could save the McAllisters months of tenderfoot mistakes.

  "You're a fool to go, McAllister," Samuel Phipps told Chance when the young man handed in his resignation. "With that quick wit of yours..."

  "And that golden tongue," Andrew MacKenzie interjected.

  "... you could go a long way in the profession of the law."

  Chance's sober expression let it be known to the two senior partners of the law firm he was leaving that he understood the generosity of their offer.

  "I appreciate your wanting me to stay, gentlemen," he replied. "But the truth is, my brother's got a yen for gold that just won't quit, and I feel duty-bound not to let him go off on such a tangent by himself. Like as not, he'll see the folly of it in a few months' time, but he's got his heart set on trying, and you know what gold fever's like once a man gets bit by the bug."

  The two older men exchanged knowing glances. From what they'd heard of Hart, and what they knew of Chance, the likelihood was that Chance was the one who was leading this precipitate expedition. Phipps pushed his wire-rimmed spectacles farther up on his nose.

  "Well, now, young man," he said with contained amusement, "if this impetuous brother of yours gets the bug out of his system anytime soon, you just hightail it right back here to Cross, Phipps and MacKenzie and get your old desk back. There's more than one kind of gold to be dredged out of Colorado."

  Chance left the office whistling. He didn't believe in ever burning a bridge that might one day need to be recrossed, but in his heart he knew that the gold must come first and then the law, and everything else he wanted would follow in its own good time.

  "I guess all New England women know how to bid a stoic farewell to their menfolk," Mercy said wryly as Hart and Chance stood in her parlor waiting to take their leave. "It's in our seafaring blood. But I've grown to love you two boys and I don't mind telling you this is a hard day for me." She looked vulnerable, Hart thought, touched by her caring.

  "At least, I suppose, there'll be little enough devilment you can get into up in those godforsaken mountains," she continued, trying to lighten the mood of the moment.
"From what I hear, any prospector worth his gold pan is so worn out at the end of a day, he's lucky he can find his own feet to take his socks off."

  Hart and Chance exchanged amused glances; now they were actually leaving, their excitement was intense. "I don't know about that, Mercy," Chance answered with a grin. "From what I hear, the life of a sourdough is just one long odyssey of sin and dissipation."

  "Then you should feel right at home, you young rascal," she shot back good-humoredly. "But what about your brother?"

  "Don't you worry your head about us, Mercy," Hart replied amiably. "You know I've got common sense and Chance is immortal."

  Mercy couldn't help but laugh at that, just as he'd meant her to.

  "You're good men, both of you," she answered. "You've got good hearts, and good brains—and even a modicum of good sense —which is more than can be said for most of your gender, but it never hurts to be reminded of what's important in this life, so I'm taking it on myself to do so.

  "I want you to promise me you'll take care of each other and use your heads for something besides a hatrack. Don't gamble too much, don't womanize too much: don't be either saints or fools. Excess of anything is dangerous. Stay truthful, most of all to yourselves. Enjoy life and say thanks if you do." She checked her mental inventory for more, then sighed and opened her arms to take both boys into her embrace; when they pulled away there were tears on her cheeks she didn't try to hide.

  "We'll be good, Mercy," Chance promised.

  "No, you won't. You'll be human. As long as you're decent, that's good enough."

  "If you're ever in trouble and need a friend," Here said, controlling his emotions with difficulty as they walked down the porch steps, "don't forget where to find us."