Somehow, without my noticing, a troll had materialized beside our table. He was hunchbacked and wild-haired, with a scar running down one sallow cheek to disappear into a black briar patch of a beard. What one could see of his face was dark-tanned and deeply lined, and his left eye was narrowed in a perpetual squint while the right protuberated obscenely. His clothes were equally askew-baggy pants held up with frayed rope, a worn-elbowed coat that would have been skin-tight on a consumptive child, and a broad hat so floppy and stained and formless it could have been sewn together from a charwoman’s old scouring rags.
“Yes,” I said to It. “We are English.”
“Cor blimey!” the wretched creature crowed in an accent that was unmistakably Cockney. “This must be me lucky day! New ’round ’ere, are you?”
“That is correct,” I said. “We’re actors-members of Michael Sasanoff’s company. We’ll be opening the Tabor Opera House… assuming the blasted thing ever does open.”
“And you?” the Whelp asked. “You’re from London, I presume?”
“I’m from all over, guv.” The lumpy little man placed a gnarled claw on the table’s only empty chair. “May I?”
“Well… ” I began.
The gnome planted himself in the seat beside me.
“You can call me ‘Goodfellow,’” he said, throwing shifty-eyed glances this way and that. “It ain’t the name I was born wiff, but it’ll do for now.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said, and he looked over at the bar and held up a single finger.
Goodfellow hopped to his feet again, raging.
“Givin’ the man the ’igh sign, are you? A trap, is it? Damn an’ blast! I should’ve known this was too good to be-”
“I think you misunderstand, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said soothingly. “I was ordering you a drink.”
Goodfellow turned to stare at Lonnegan-who was indeed contaminating a glass with the fulvous suds of steam beer.
“Oh. Sorry, guv.” Goodfellow sat down again. “I’m a bit jumpy, bein’ ’ere. An’ I got reason to be.”
Goodfellow fell silent as Lonnegan stalked over and slapped the glass down before him, sloshing half its contents on the table. (And no better use can I think of for steam beer than cleaning furniture.) Then, as the tavern keeper stomped away, he leaned in toward us and went on in a low, hoarse murmur.
“I need ’elp, gents… an’ it’ll be worff your while to give it.”
“Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” I said stiffly. “We’re actors. If it’s a poor box you’re looking for, I suggest you try a church.”
“I ain’t no bleedin’ charity case!” Goodfellow snapped back. “Fact is, there’s a right wodge o’ wonga in this for you-a bloody fortune-if you play your cards right.”
“You’ll have to excuse my skepticism,” I sniffed, “but you don’t very much look like a man with access to ‘a right wodge of wonga.’”
“That’s ’cause I can’t get at it, mate.” Goodfellow leaned even further over the table, the looming hump of his hunched back giving him the appearance of an immense, bearded mushroom. “But you can.”
“Mr. Goodfellow obviously has a story to tell,” the Whelp said to me. “I suggest we let him tell it.”
I harrumphed and settled back in my seat-which squeaked and creaked so piercingly I almost thought it about to explode into splinters. Fortunately, the chair held as Goodfellow held forth.
After a lifetime spent “knockin’ about God’s green earff,” the man told us in a conspiratorial whisper, he’d ended up in Colorado trying to make a go of it as a prospector. His prospects, however, were more black than gold, and he soon went broke. But he did end up sitting on a pile of silver eventually-albeit another man’s silver-as a guard for Horace Tabor’s Matchless Mine. One day, he and three of his fellow guards were escorting a load of freshly milled silver down the mountain to town when they were attacked by bandits. It was a slaughter on both sides, and when the battle ended, only Goodfellow was still alive-and he just barely.
As he slumped against the wagon awaiting rescue, a bullet in his back, his face slashed, he pondered what future he had in even so humble a profession as the one that had brought him to this. The answer being none. Though he might survive his wounds a cripple, his nerves, he knew, were shattered beyond any mending at all. As gunman or laborer, he was through. Which left no future for him save starvation-a bitter irony, with so much silver so close at hand. He’d given his all for a treasure Horace Tabor wouldn’t even miss, he was already so rich.
And that’s when Goodfellow saw providence in his situation. No one but he knew how many men really had been in the gang. If he exaggerated their numbers-and said a surviving “desperado” made off with a packload of silver while he lay bleeding, feigning death-who could dispute it? Battered and bleeding though he was, Goodfellow’s prospects were looking up.
He managed to dig a hole just big enough for a single small crate. In it he placed half a dozen bars of pure silver, and with his last ounce of strength he covered it with earth and rock. He finished in the nick of time, collapsing into a faint not twenty steps from his buried booty.
He awoke the next day to learn his party had been ambushed by the infamous Whelan brothers, Mike, Ike, Spike, and Dudley. The bodies of all four had been found, and they weren’t known to ride with other bandits in the past. What, he was asked, had become of the missing silver?
Goodfellow had no choice but to stick to his plan, concocting a fifth member of the gang-a mysterious Indian who’d loaded his horse with silver before fleeing. The mine officials and law officers to whom he told this seemed skeptical, and eventually Horace Tabor himself came to his bedside to hear the story… and plainly didn’t believe it.
Goodfellow’s recovery was slow and painful and not entirely successful. (Here in the telling, he patted his hunched back.) And when it was through, he’d lost more than his youthful vigor. He’d lost his job, as well. The Matchless Mine dismissed him, and there were hints that he shouldn’t linger long in Leadville. He wasn’t trusted. He would be watched.
For six long months he’d been away, scraping by as best he could while growing his beard and weathering his features and dreaming of his silver. He’d returned just that morning, intending to hire a mule and set off up the trail disguised as an old prospector. But there was no disguise, he quickly learned, that could hide disfigurements such as his. He’d been spotted and accosted by a pair of mine guards. Their ultimatum: leave town by sundown or they’d fix his hump for him… with clubs.
So here he’d come, bereft, thinking to drown his sorrows in drink before abandoning his little hoard forever and slinking off to quietly die. And what should he overhear but two countrymen talking. Newcomers to Leadville. Men with the freedom to act.
“Us?” I scoffed. “What would you have us do?”
“Get your’ands on the swag, of course,” Goodfellow hissed. “It’s just off the road to the mine, barely a mile from ’ere. But a mile’s more than I’d make before bein’ caught. The second I’m seen anywhere near that road… ” He gave his shaggy head a slow, grim shake. “A gentleman tourist out for a constitutional, though? Nobody’d give that a second thought. Mind you, I wouldn’t set off right away-the afternoon shipments’ll be comin’ through, and the guards’ll be itchy-fingered no matter who it is they’re passin’ on the road. But as of, ooooh… four o’clock, say? Why, you’d ’ave nuffin’ to worry about.”
“And how would we find this ill-gotten plunder of yours, assuming we lowered ourselves to look for it?” I asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t simply leave it under a leaf by the side of the road.”
Goodfellow’s eyes lit up with excitement-even the squinty one, which was a neat trick, I’ll admit.