In the pitch black dark, Mr. Doolin stumbled back against the cave wall. The gun fell from his hand, clattering on the hard mud. His breathing was out of control. Deep and fast. Wheezing. He was gasping, desperate for a breath that would fill and calm his lungs, but his chest kept heaving. His heart pounding like horse hooves at full gallop. He clawed at his heart and slumped down the wall. Bones of the dead man rattled when Mr. Doolin’s boots bumped into the skeleton’s leg. The hard mud was cool through the blacksmith’s britches.
He laid his head back against the damp stones, closed his eyes, and counted in his head. It wasn’t until he got to thirty that his hyperventilating began to slow. He took in a healthy breath, filling his lungs with the dank air of the cave. Coughing took him, yet it quickly passed.
Another few minutes. Counting. Slow breath. Coughing.
His grip, eventually, eased on his heart and his hands fell at his sides. His breath was still short, but at least it wasn’t gasping like a fat horse ran in a round pen. He reclined there for a good while, closed eyes, feeling the musty air swell his lungs, listening to the steady dripping of water.
His calf throbbed and he pulled up his britches leg to feel it (though it took him a good minute to accomplish the effort, because his entire body ached). His long johns were wet. But that could’ve been from the pool that he waded. It sure smarted like something bit him. He noticed too that his bottom lip was swelling.
Gold was quickly becoming less and less important as he wondered if whatever had attacked him would return.
Groaning, he rolled from his spot on the wall, crawling now on hands and knees, groping blind in the dark, until he felt cold iron. The gun fired. A flash of light. A concussive bang. He swore as his ears rang. Carefully, he picked it up, checking the hammer, then tucked in its holster.
His hands fell on the scattered bones, which he knocked or threw to the side, eventually finding his lantern.
“God Almighty,” he said, cutting his finger on a shard of glass. He sucked on the injured finger as he fumbled in his pocket for matches.
He struck the match. The sound of the wooden stick scraping against the sandpaper. The rush of ignition. A little flame surging. The blinding white flare ebbing into a droplet of orange light that barely cast a shadow in the wrinkles of the blacksmith’s knuckles. He shared it with the wick and the lantern housed the flickering glow. Turning a brass knob, the flame grew, projecting undulating shadows of the splittering veins that riddled the glass fragments remaining in the framing of the housing. At Mr. Doolin’s feet, a draft swirled, flicking the folds of the dead man’s tattered black clothes. He aimed his lantern down at the skeletal remains. The bones apart, scattered about the muddy floor. The skull rocked in the draft. A draft that emanated from a hole in the wall where the dead man once reclined.
The hole was only about two feet wide, but not very tall at all. Maybe a foot. Mr. Doolin dropped back to his knees, inspecting, needing to stretch out on his belly, needing to lay his cheek on the mud with the lantern placed in the mouth of the hole so he could see inside. It opened into a narrow passageway. A low ceiling and nearby walls reflected the orange glow, while, straight ahead, darkness hung like a curtain along the bobbing perimeter of the lantern’s flame.
In the blink of an eye, Mr. Doolin had whipped out the map and was studying the arrows. That final arrow pointed right and, if he was facing the dead end, in his original direction, that hole was along the right wall.
Retrieving his bag, he took the two pound sledge, an iron stake and began chiseling at the hole. Steel on iron on rock. The metallic clangs bounced off the cave walls, growing in pitch, piercing pings and dings that resounded along the mineshaft, becoming hollow over the pool of water, fading among the stalactites and stalagmites hidden in the deep dark.
Shards of stone crumbled and fell. The hole widened. Heightened. Mr. Doolin wiped the sweat from his brow. Took a drink of water from a canteen. A few more strikes and now he could crawl through the hole and into that narrow passage. He tossed everything back into the bag, pushing it ahead of him as he, carrying the lantern, crawled through the hole.
On the other side, within the newly discovered passage, he stood up, but couldn’t straighten to his full height, for the rocky ceiling hung low. Slinging the strap of the work bag over his shoulder, he began his trek. The passage serpentined through the stony earth, like he was following in the tunnel bored out by a huge, bull-size earthworm, but the walls inched closer together and the ceiling angled closer to the ground. Compelled by the promise of gold, he twisted and crawled through the claustrophobic crevices, slipping along the damp surfaces, his clothes and bag snagging on the jagged edges of protruding rocks.
Eventually, though, the crevices led him to a large cavern. He stood to his full height, stretching his knotted up back and legs. The lantern shone on the bulbous surface of rocky pillars, illuminated stalagmites, tall as trees, that rose up from the floor, and cast a scintillating light on the blunted tips of stalactites, dangling from the shadows far above Mr. Doolin’s sweaty head. There was no clear trail. No clear path. And if he wandered far at all from where he stood, he knew he would lose all sense of where the tunnel was that he had just emerged from.
But, as he scanned, a bit of rock glittered. Aiming his lantern at the sparkling spot, he took another step, and more of the rock shimmered. A little patch and then a line. Several lines. With each step, the lantern light revealed more and more, more sparkles, more yellow twinkles amid the stone.
“Gold!” Mr. Doolin leapt and laughed and tossed his hat in the air. “Gold!”
He dropped to his knees in front of the vein, hugging the great boulder, laughing, crying. “No more dern corn nuggets. Only fine cigars.” He laid there for a minute, his cheek pressed against the cold gold. The echo of his voice fading into the surrounding dark.
Setting the lantern on a nearby stone, he dropped his bag on the ground and rifled through for his hammer and an iron rod. Taking them in his hand, he crouched near the brightest area of the vein, where the gold glittered in the brown, gray boulder. Iron rod in hand, he pressed the end into a crook of a gold protrusion. Raising his hammer, he struck the rod. The tinny echo waned in the dark cavern.
He struck again and again. The nugget cracked, and finally, with the fourth strike, a chip of sparkling gold tinkled on the ground. Mr. Doolin held it close to the lantern. His eyes got big and watered. He sniffled and his bottom lip trembled, as his smile spread ear to ear.
The only noise of that cavern was Mr. Doolin’s sniffling, well, except for another sound. A subtle sound. Still far. Somewhere out in the surrounding darkness. Mr. Doolin looked over his shoulder. Glanced over the other one. Then went back to salivating over that chip of gold in his hand.
He heard it again. The unmistakable scrape of chains, dragging over rock. Mr. Doolin popped up like a prairie dog spooked on the plain. The chains approached, trickling over the uneven ground. And there were steps, footfalls accompanying the ringing chains. The metal links rapping in the cadence of a deliberate gait. Like a hundred spurs all jingling with each step.
Cha-jink.
Cha-jink.
Cha-jink.
Mr. Doolin snatched up the lantern and dragged the revolver out of its holster, but the tinny echoes bounced off every rocky surface, the ceiling, the floor, the distant walls, the forest of stalagmites and stalactites, making it impossible to pinpoint exactly from where they emanated.
Cha-jink.
He spun in frantic circles, the gun trembling in his grip as he aimed it at the shadows moving just beyond the reach of the lantern’s light.
Cha-jink. Louder now.
“Who’s there?” Mr. Doolin’s voice trembled. But, no one should be down this far in mine. Or ought to be. If they were, they must be after the gold.
“It’s my gold! I found it!” He cocked back on the hammer.
Or they could just be plumb loco.
Cha-jink. The chains stopped dragging. Silence. Only the rattling of the small metal pits on the lantern and the gun held in Mr. Doolin’s shivering hands.
“The bird, sir,” the voice was gentlemanly. Clear. Enunciated. But, none of that left a mark at all in Mr. Doolin’s fearful mind. As soon as he heard the voice, only a few feet behind him, he spun around and shot the man.
The bullet, however, ricocheted off a thick robe of chains that draped from the man’s emaciated shoulders. The pallid skin shone like the underbelly of a diamondback rattler, except for the clouds of purple and pink bruises surrounding the shackles around the upper part of his arm and his neck. Not a hair was on his head or on his face. No eyebrows at all. Just a fleshy ridge over sunken eyes, rheumatic eyes, red and watery, twinkling as the man grinned.
“My land, that is as odd a salutation as I have ever seen,” the man’s words rolled from his mouth in a thick draw like maple syrup from the mouth of a bottle. “Perhaps if I had a gun as well I could reciprocate the greeting.”
The chains jangled as he stepped forward into the light. The iron links covered every bit of his six foot frame. They hung loose, though some were wrapped tight around his torso. A massive iron lock, rusted and open, dangled from a link there at his waist like a belt buckle. Around his slimy feet (his long, sharp toenails discolored as if by a fungal infection), the chains piled on the cavern floor and trailed behind, like the train of a king’s cape.
Mr. Doolin’s hands got to shaking something fierce, so bad that he nearly dropped the lantern and the gun. He hopped backwards, and after fumbling with the hammer, he finally cocked it back. He stammered. “Stay back!”
Cha-jink.
The Chain Man cocked his head to the side like a curious vulture. “You’re a little man, blacksmith. A little man ensnared in a far larger affair.”
“I’m warning you. I’ll shoot you.”
“Where is Cracked Beak? Or, better still, where is the famed Doctor, Cornelius Magnus?”
Cha-jink.
“I can see that you are confused,” the Chain Man said. “But frankly, sir, you don’t need to know anymore than you already do. Tell me where I can find Dr. Magnus.”
Cha-jink.
“I see that words fail you.”
“I warned you, mister!” Mr. Doolin aimed right at the Chain Man’s bald head and fired.
The smoke dissipated, yet the Chain Man remained standing there. A hole right above his fleshy brow, the beginning of a bloodless tunnel that the bullet had bore clean through the diameter of his head. The Chain Man sighed.
Mr. Doolin’s eyes were so big they were about to pop out of his face as he stared through the tunnel in the Chain Man’s head and at the glistening stalactites behind the perforated stranger.
“Why, sir,” The Chain Man asked, prodding the hole in his forehead with his finger (which were more pink than yellow, the nails long as the yellowed fangs of a wolf). “That is going to leave a mark.”
Mr. Doolin’s eyes rolled into the back of his head and he swooned, collapsing on the ground.
When Mr. Doolin came to, he laid on the ground. His head hurt. The lantern flickered nearby, and there was the Chain Man, leaning against the boulder, the chains draped over the vein of gold. In his clammy hand was the revolver, casually held. The Chain Man grinned a twinkle in his rheumatic eyes.
“What’s your name, little blacksmith?”
Mr. Doolin sat up, his mouth hanging dumb as he gawked at the hole in the middle of the man’s forehead, embedded there like a third eye.
“Your name, sir,” the Chain Man pulled the hammer back slowly, letting the series of clicks reverberate in the cavern. “I believe these bullets will have a different effect on you.”
“Jesup,” Mr. Doolin stammered. “Doolin.”
“Mr. Doolin. Is that Irish?”
“I reckon it is.”
“Mm.” The Chain Man looked thoughtfully to the side and relaxed his gun hand, though the hammer remained cocked and his finger still on the trigger. “As to the matter of our previous conversation, I must insist that you aid me in my search of Dr. Magnus.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Chain Man smiled. “I much more enjoy this side of your character, Mr. Doolin. Agreeable. Polite. I can even see us becoming fast friends.” He pointed with the revolver toward Mr. Doolin’s bag. The chains tinkled like wind chimes.
“It ain’t gentlemanly to peruse through another man’s belongings, so forgive my curiosity: Are there more bullets in the bag? As you know, there are only four in your revolver, which I must say, could deal with a little more care.” He inspected the length of the scuffed barrel.
“There are. A box.”
“Excellent. And tools, I hope. These chains are a bother.”
“Yes, sir,” Mr. Doolin stammered.
The Chain Man winked. “Well, ain’t that just a daisy.”
Cornelius Magnus drew back on the reins. The young bay tossed her head and stomped her hooves. She reared up and the huckster slid down her bare back, over her tail, his feet touching on the hard table of the bluffs. He kept a grip of the leather reins (grateful to at least have dressed the horse in a bridle before Deputy Broomstache started shooting) and if not that bay would’ve galloped off.
“Stupid brute,” he muttered, fumbling for a hold on the bridle.
It was hot. The sun beat down with all its divine wrath from the peak of the blue sky. Dr. Magnus led the stolen horse, Buttercup (her name which of course was unbeknownst to Dr. Magnus), sticking to the slivers of shade cast by massive boulders.
He started at every sound, nearly jumping out of his skin when some smaller rocks skittered down an escarpment, sure as death thinking that Sheriff Bull and his couple of deputies had run up on him, but there wasn’t a soul around. Only the horse. She kept tossing her head, trying her derndest to yank his shoulder out of socket.
Dr. Magnus popped her on the nose and she snorted, drawing her head up high and tall. The two of them glared at each other. “It’s only for a time,” he said. “Just help me lose the Sheriff and get back to town, then I will turn you loose.”
Buttercup chewed on her bit.
For a good long while, they traipsed uphill, a moderate slope climbing up to the shelf of a plateau. They were heading South, back toward Esau, after he had ridden North around the Western escarpment of the bluffs. Boulders, the color of pinto beans, littered the landscape. Varying in size, some were smaller, standing like tombstones, while others were enormous, perched on precariously narrow columns of sandstone. Dr. Magnus lingered in the shade for as long as his anxious mind would allow.
The snake oil salesman dusted off his white suit but red dirt still clung to the velvet. Sweat streaked the grime on his smooth face. Even the curlicues of his dark mustache sagged. He walked with his mouth open. Lips cracked. Tongue as dry as a pumice stone.
Buttercup could smell water. She lifted her red head. Air swooshed into her flaring nostrils. Dr. Magnus, however, ignorant of the horse’s perception, kept tugging on the bridle and when she wouldn’t comply with his mean coaxing he raised his fist to bop her on the nose. Buttercup had learned her lesson, and when saw the huckster lifting his fist, she reared up and, with a toss of her neck, flung Dr. Magnus to the ground, freeing herself of his grip, and galloped off.
However, the direction in which she fled was densely filled with juniper bushes, forcing her to move slow as she weaved through the prickly branches. Dr. Magnus sprang to his feet and chased after, cursing as the spring limbs whipped his face. He quickly lost sight of her in the green labyrinth of juniper, but soon the melody of rushing water caught his ear. Giving up on the horse (for now), he continued his trek through the juniper toward the babbling sounds, ducking and stooping, lifting and pushing the bristly branches, till at last he stumbled upon the narrow bank. Limbs of the junipers grew out over the moving water. Those pottery shards in his jacket pocket rattled and poked his hip when he dropped to his belly and drank.
As he gulped, as he swished the tepid yet clean water over his dusty gums and parched tongue, as he cupped his hands and splashed his face and ran his fingers through his scabby hair, he spied the horse, only a few feet from his left. Her head was low, the longer strands of her black mane trailing in the water alongside the reins as she drank. That large dark eye of hers glanced at him and promptly ignored him, even as he approached and gripped the bridle. She didn’t oblige the huckster, not lifting her head till she had her fill. Then he gathered up the reins and led her along the river, downstream.
The river was about twenty feet wide. Deep and fast moving. They traveled about forty yards downstream through the thickets of juniper till Dr. Magnus spied buzzards squatting patiently up in the branches of barebone trees. There were about thirteen black buzzards and the trees stood white and dead along the other side of the river. One of the carrion birds spread its wings. Another squawked. Two that were perched next to each other pecked at each other, their long naked necks coiling and striking like the bodies of snakes. Some of the buzzards gazed at the huckster and the horse across the river, but most kept their eyes fixed on the opening of a mine on their own side. Dr. Magnus, still leading the bay, stared at that mine as well, thinking immediately of Mr. Doolin.
Buttercup stopped all of a sudden, snorting, when Dr. Magnus yanked on the reins. This time, it was the man who learned something because he noticed the horse’s fixed stare on the mine, and seeing her reluctance to proceed any farther, he reckoned it best that they should retreat and hide behind a green wall of juniper.
No sooner than the branches stopped swaying where they had concealed themselves did they witness two men walk out of the mine. One of them was Mr. Doolin. The legs of his britches were darkened by water and his clothes were streaked with mud. His face was pale, the eyes big and shifty, clearly agitated, or even scared of the man that followed him. The other man was slightly taller than Mr. Doolin, dressed all in black, a sharp contrast to the spoiled butter color of his gaunt face. The black hat was pulled low on his head, snug on his brow, just above the sunken, red eyes, and the brim pressed down on his ears, folding them. Silver tips of his boots sparked in the hot sun and as they turned, following the flow of the river, heading toward the waterfall, Dr. Magnus spied the revolver in the strange man’s hand, aiming at the small of Mr. Doolin’s back.