Read Chapter 3: A Drunk's Confession

The saloon sat at the crooked end of Goldvein’s main street like a tooth that had rotted in the jaw. Eli pushed through the batwings and let the noise wash over him—piano notes hammered off-key, glasses rattling on tables, the laughter of men who had struck dirt and men who had not yet learned what it meant to lose.

He ordered a bottle of rye and took it to a corner table where the lamplight didn’t reach. Then he waited.

Men came and went. Miners, traders, two whores sharing a cigarette by the stair rail. Eli watched the door, patient as stone, until the man he wanted stumbled through it an hour later.

Jenkins was easy to spot. He wore the remains of a suit that must have been fine once—circa the first year of the boom, before whiskey had eaten the shape out of him. His hands shook as he ordered something cheap at the bar. The barkeep slid him a glass without asking for money, which told Eli everything about the man’s credit.

Eli caught the barkeep’s eye and gestured to Jenkins’s glass. A moment later a fresh bottle appeared in front of the shaking man. Jenkins looked at it like it might bite him.

“From the gentleman in the corner,” the barkeep said.

Jenkins turned. His eyes were rheumy, his face cratered with broken capillaries. He squinted at Eli, trying to place him, found nothing, and shrugged. Men bought him whiskey for many reasons. Most of those reasons had to do with questions he’d once been paid not to answer.

He carried the bottle to Eli’s table and sat without being invited. “You want something,” he said. Not a question.

Eli poured whiskey into the man’s empty glass. “I want to hear about Calvin Cross.”

Jenkins’s hand stopped halfway to the glass. “I don’t know nothing about Calvin Cross.”

“You knew him before he was rich. Before he owned the bank and the timber mill and the sheriff.”

“I knew a lot of men before they was rich.” Jenkins took the glass anyway, downed it in one swallow. His throat worked. “That don’t mean I know them now.”

Eli poured again. “I heard you were his partner. In the early days.”

Something flickered in Jenkins’s face—a door closing somewhere behind his eyes. “Partner’s a strong word. I was a man with a mule and a map. He was a man with a plan. That made us partners for a season.”

“And then?”

Jenkins laughed, but it came out hollow. “And then he didn’t need the mule no more.” He drank again, slower this time. “You ask a lot of questions for a man I never met.”

“I ask about what interests me.”

“What’s your interest in Cross?”

Eli let the silence stretch. Men who drank to forget were usually willing to trade memory for whiskey, but they needed to feel safe first. He made his voice low, confiding. “Looking to buy into his operation. But I don’t jump without checking the water first.”

Jenkins stared at him. “You want to buy in with Calvin Cross?”

“I heard he’s the man to see in this town.”

“He’s the man to see if you want to be buried in it.” Jenkins picked up the bottle and poured his own this time. “Listen, stranger, I’ll tell you what I tell everyone. Cross built Goldvein on a foundation of other men’s graves. You dig around him, you’ll find yourself in one of them.”

Eli’s pulse quickened but he kept his face still. “Graves like the ones up on Deadman’s Ridge?”

Jenkins’s eyes snapped up. There was a moment of pure, animal alertness in them—the drunk burned away for half a heartbeat. Then it was gone, drowned under the familiar fog.

“Who are you?” Jenkins whispered.

“Nobody. Just a man with questions.”

“Questions about Deadman’s Ridge will get you dead.” Jenkins went to stand. Eli grabbed his wrist.

“Sit down. I’m not finished.”

Jenkins pulled but Eli held him easily. The man had twenty years and a bottle of whiskey on Eli, but Eli had been hauling rock for two decades, and the muscle had never quite left his arms.

“Let go,” Jenkins said.

“I will. When you tell me what I want to know. About the deed.”

The word landed like a blow. Jenkins went still.

“What deed?” he asked, but his voice cracked on it.

“The one that was never signed.”

For a long moment, Jenkins just stared. His mouth opened and closed like a fish gasping. Then he laughed—a strange, broken sound. “You think you know something. You don’t know nothing.”

“I know there was a claim on Deadman’s Ridge. I know three men worked it. I know they found the Mother Lode.” Eli leaned forward, his voice dropping to a razor’s edge. “And I know they never signed anything—because they were dead before the ink dried.”

Jenkins’s face went pale as tallow. “You’re talking about something you don’t understand.”

“Then make me understand.”

The whiskey was doing its work. Jenkins’s resistance was crumbling, piece by piece. He looked around the saloon as if checking for ears, then leaned in close. The smell of him—sweat and sour mash and fear—was thick.

“There was a paper,” he said, voice barely audible over the piano. “A partnership agreement. Cross had me draw it up—I was a clerk back then, good with words. Three names. Stone. Hartley. Cross.” Jenkins paused. “And mine, down at the bottom, as witness.”

Eli’s chest tightened at the sound of his own name. He forced himself to breathe.

“When the others died—when the accident happened up on that ridge—Cross brought me the paper. Said we’d burn it. No record, no claims, no questions. The claim belonged to the man standing, he said. That was the law of it.”

“But you didn’t burn it.”

Jenkins shook his head slowly. “I kept a copy. I don’t know why. God forgive me, I kept a copy.”

“Where?”

“In the bank. Calvin’s own bank. He’s got a box there—the big one, the one shaped like a coffin at the back of the vault. Nobody touches it but him. He keeps his secrets in it.” Jenkins’s hands trembled. “The deed’s in there. The real one. The one he never signed. And I’ve got a letter I wrote to Amos Hartley’s widow, begging her forgiveness for what I witnessed. Calvin found out about that letter.”

“What happened?”

Jenkins’s laugh was a death rattle. “He found me in a back room of the saloon, six years ago. He didn’t kill me. That’s not his way. He made me watch as he took my daughter to Denver. Gave her a job in one of his friend’s houses there.” Jenkins’s eyes were wet. “I ain’t seen her since. Every year on her birthday, I get a letter from her, telling me how well she’s doing. And every letter is written by someone else’s hand.”

Eli sat back. The whiskey sat untouched in front of him. The noise of the saloon felt distant, like it was happening in another world.

“Who runs the bank?” he asked.

“Moreau. But he don’t run nothing. He just holds the key and does what Calvin says.”

“Which key?”

“The one to the vault.” Jenkins looked up at him, something desperate in his eyes. “You understand now? You see what kind of man you’re dealing with?”

Eli stood. He left a coin on the table for the whiskey. Jenkins grabbed his sleeve.

“You ain’t going to buy in with him, are you? You ain’t going to tell him about this conversation?”

Eli looked down at the broken man—at the shell of a man who had once been young, once been decent, once been foolish enough to think he could stand beside Calvin Cross and survive it.

“I’m not going to tell him,” Eli said.

Jenkins sagged with relief. He reached for the bottle, but his hand was shaking too hard. He drank and coughed, whiskey staining his shirt.

Eli stepped out the back door into the alley. The cold night air hit his face. Above him, the stars were out, indifferent as they’d always been.

The deed. The letter. The box.

He knew where Calvin Cross kept his sins now. He’d been looking for a way in, and Jenkins had just handed him the lock and the key.

Behind him, he heard a thud followed by nothing. Jenkins had collapsed at the table, unconscious before his head hit the wood. No one would get a word out of him tonight.

Eli turned and walked into the darkness toward the bank, the pickaxe handle heavy against his back, the initials E.S. burning in his memory like a brand.