Boag was thinking of ways to spend his twenty-five-hundred dollars. You didn’t just piss that kind of money away. You went to a town somewhere where they didn’t mind the color of your skin too much and you opened an establishment. A saddlery and blacksmith shop, he figured, because he’d been enough years in the Cavalry to know everything you had to know about repairing tack and mending gear and shoeing horses.
It wasn’t much of an ambition but then ambitions were new to him and he was feeling his way. In the army you just did your forty miles a day on beans and hay and you let the War Department worry about ambition; once you got your sergeant’s stripes you were as far up as a nigger soldier was ever going to get, but there was nothing wrong with being topkick of a good line troop of Buffalo soldiers, a man didn’t need any more ambition than that.
Now he was thinking vaguely in terms of Oregon or the British Columbia country. Need to get a long way away from this part of the world after today. And up in western Canada he’d heard around the barracks that they didn’t piss on black skin.
Boag was slow to hate, his temper took a long time rising, but he was getting ready to hate the army for what it had done to him.
The steam whistle shrieked across the desert and the crowd got up on its toes. The Uncle Sam wasn’t in sight yet; there was a last bend for her to come around.
You needed manpower, Mr. Pickett had explained to them all, and you needed to time it right. There would be a point when the ship was just about completely unloaded—that would be just short of sundown—and at that point most of the ship’s crew and the longshoremen-for-the-day would be ashore, and that was the point when you had to strike. It would take most of the twenty-eight rawhiders to hold back the crowd on shore while the rest moved the gold on board the boat and got the drop on whatever crew was left there.
“Moving the gold aboard,” Stryker had told Boag, “that’s you new boys’ job.”
It put Boag and Wilstach and the rest of the new recruits at the bottom of the gang’s ladder, but Boag was willing to be nothing more than a strong back for a day, for twenty-five-hundred dollars in gold. You had to spend five years in the army to earn that much pay and you never saw more than forty dollars of it in one hunk.
The tall structure of Uncle Sam hove in sight with the paddles grinding away at the water, straining; the current along here ran pretty close to sixteen knots. Boag tipped his shoulder against the weathered clapboard wall and settled down to wait.
The clerk in the Johnson-Yaeger office was a weary man with his hair all wet down, a bony pale man wearing sleeve garters and an eyeshade. Boag stood across the doorway from Wilstach, looking in. Two men were booking passage on the downstream leg; the clerk was chastising them for being tardy. “Most everybody booked two, three weeks ago.”
“You got room or ain’t you?”
“Deck passage only, Mister. You stand up all the way unless you can find a wagon to sleep under.”
“I’d stand barefoot on hot coals all the way to Yuma to get out of this God-forsaken country.”
The two men got their tickets and left, coming out between Boag and Wilstach. One of them brushed Boag’s shoulder and turned his head quickly, ready to apologize until he saw what Boag was. Then his face tightened. “Jesus Christ. Don’t you know no better’n to get in a white man’s way?”
Boag lowered his eyes. The man said, “You want to learn better manners, boy,” and hit Boag in the belly.
Boag let it cave him in. He sagged back against the wall holding his stomach in both hands. “Yes sir I sure got to learn better manners sir.”
“Christ you niggers ain’t worth the powder to blow you to hell.” The man turned to his partner. “You coming?”
His partner was bent over against the building because he was laughing so hard. Finally the two of them moved away.
Wilstach simmered. “I had my druthers—”
“Forget it, John B. It don’t mean nothing.”
“Tomorrow,” Wilstach said in anger.
“All right, tomorrow.” Boag watched the two men walking away. Not walking; swaggering. Wilstach was right. Tomorrow.…
Ben Stryker approached in his clawhammer coat. “Smart,” he murmured. “All set? Come on—it’s time.” And the three of them went into the office, Stryker pulling a shotgun out from under his coat and talking softly to the clerk and the two guards on the interior door. “All right, don’t get notions. Stand still and nobody gets theirselves hurt.”
Gutierrez backed into the room behind them and Boag heard the door click shut.
“Lord Jesus,” the clerk said. “Road agents.”
From the set of Stryker’s dreamy smile Boag knew enough to feel sorry for the two sentries if they even thought about being brave.
They didn’t. They let Wilstach take their guns. Stryker stood guard with his shotgun, his eyes half closed in wedges; the clerk and the two sentries sat down on the floor behind the clerk’s counter and Gutierrez held them there at gunpoint while Stryker went to the door and opened it and made hand signals in the twilight, and soon seven men came through the door and helped Boag break into the back room.
“Christ,” one of them said, “I wish to hell it was greenjackets instead of that stuff. Look at how much that stuff weighs.”
It was piled on pallets in stacks up to a man’s waist, four pallets—pyramids of gold bars stacked up crisscross like loose bricks. In the poor light it glistened. Boag’s breath got hung up in his throat.
“That’s fine,” Stryker was saying. “Nice and quiet.”
Boag looked over his shoulder and the dockside was calm: nobody had noticed anything. Yet.
“Throw all that on one buckboard, you gon bust the wagon,” Wilstach warned.
“We use two wagons,” Stryker said. “Here they come—get back from that door, hey?”
Boag heard the splintering crackle when crowbars broke the outer padlock hasp. The outside door of the freight room yawed open and two men, sentries, backed inside with their hands in the air. Three of Pickett’s old-timers came in prodding them with guns and after they had a quick look around the room one of them went back to the door and called outside:
“All rat, brang up ’at wagon.”
There was the loose rattle of buckboard tires against the dock planking. Stryker said, “Start heftin’, boys.” Boag reached for an ingot and went to lift it off the stack and nearly lost his balance. It was as if the thing was nailed down with railroad spikes.
“Jesus.”
Stryker said, “That’s what you boys here for. Bend your backs.”
Boag grinned at him and heaved. He got the gold bar off the stack and tucked it under his right elbow and heaved a second ingot up in his left hand and carried the two of them out the side door to the buckboard.
But he was breathing hard when he came back for the second load.
Eight of them moved the buckboard to the ship’s gangplank—Boag and two others on the yoke, pulling, and the other five at the back of the wagon with their shoulders to it, hauling up on the back spokes of the rear wheels. This was the risk part because now the whole damn town saw what was happening.
There had been a lot of argument back in camp because Stryker and some of the others didn’t see why you couldn’t just let the Johnson-Yaeger crew load the gold onto the boat themselves. That was where it was going anyway. But Mr. Pickett had ruled that out. The gold was generally one of the last things loaded aboard the ship because it had to be one of the first things unloaded at the Yuma end of the voyage. By the time they would have waited for the express company to carry its own weight aboard, the ship would have been crowded with passengers and crew. That was no good, Mr. Pickett said. The boat had to be as nearly unoccupied as possible.