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Short Stories & Tall Tales
The Golden Road
Tom Sheehan
He rode into town unannounced, did not appear furtive or too inquisitive for he asked no questions of anyone, and tended to whatever business was his own, which was unknown to all of Cedar City. He had a drink at the saloon, a quick meal at Sally Fry’s Fried-to-Death Café of Sorts and finagled a sleeping spot in the loft of the livery, not a new thing in itself because others had managed the same deal with Everett Westcott, the livery owner. The thing was Westcott never said much either or asked questions other than in good natured repartee; a coin put in his hand was both insurance and trust and he made that point with his customers, upstairs and downstairs. He gained the new man’s name by slapping his horse on the rump and saying to his helper, “Shorty, this horse, this gray with one white sock, belongs to Mr. … “ who was standing right between the two men, and he let the new man answer the “half query,” as he might have called it.
The owner of the gray with one white sock wore a white-getting-gray Stetson beaten within an inch and a half of its life, a longish bandana twisted on his neck. The bandana was once red in its birth but now showed pink as ladies’ get-ups for daylight and get-downs for evening. It hung drooping over a brownish shirt tailored at the wrists, awfully wide at the biceps not even trying to be hid, tight at the belt and tucked into a thick pair of grayish pants seriously looking like old Confederate Army pants a hard-charging miner might have worn for months on end. His holsters, two of them, were finely tooled leather that cost a few months’ wages for a top cowhand and were the only outlandish part of his outfit, along with the white-handled pistols sitting with uncompromising ease in those holsters.
“Beau Jest,” the visitor said, “is his name, with a J to start it off, because he makes fun of me some times, and my name is Silas Woofby, which has started enough fights to make me expert with fists, knives, guns, repeating rifles, swords belonging to men who swing them at me and soon lose them and large rocks that fly far and hard and with ungodly accuracy when I toss them even from my knees. I fought in the Confederate cause for a time and switched over to the Union when I figured out what I was despite where I came from, which is no place special right now. You can call me anything you want, except Cheap, Card Hider, No Account or Lucifer if you believe in the Ups and Downs. If you’re asked, like in every other place of visitation, ‘Why did he come here?’ just say, ‘He’s leaving quicker than he come in so it won’t make a Hell of a lot of difference why.’”
It also said to Westcott and Shorty, as it was intended and quickly understood, that “you gents know all there is to know about me and don’t have to ask any more questions or even blab about me to others who of their own mind may bother me with more outlandish questions as blabbering men are apt to do sober or drunk.” They also learned, from that quick lesson, that Woofby knew his way around words.
That made Westcott pay special attention to what was being said between the lines. And Shorty, who was seen less than a barn mouse around the livery but heard thereabouts more than a wagon crier with bottled goods, medicine, spirits of any other account, food mixers, condiments, basting supplies, cooking tins, and hard-to-get anything, do the same. Further conversation was dropped abruptly, masked by grunts or groans or loud “achoos” or ignored outright. That might be called attention for possible survival, trade-off for future gain, or amen of one sort or another for both men.
But there was added background with Woofby; he was looking for gold. It was that simple; he wouldn’t mine it or smash it out of Mother Earth, wash it loose, pan it, or any usual enterprise bent on such labored endeavors. He was searching for what was lost, strayed or stolen and secreted or buried under any of those conditions; he was looking for the one and only Confederate treasure, at least known to him and a few confederates as last known headed this way in manifold hands and diverse methods of transportation.
Those gathered to this point in this tale were in a livery in a corner of Missouri, which had finally found out what it believed in.
The story of the “lost, strayed or stolen” treasury of the Confederacy had flung itself westward in a rush because of initial southerly and westerly directions a train carried the treasury when the war was just about over, Lee ready to end it. The estimated sum was not curious in most quarters because anyone finding it would be set for life, including their descendants from thereon.
Woofby, a good listener, never disregarded a story when it presented itself as a possible foothold for riches at the current time… without all the hard work that mining, land settling, raising beef, driving beef, or other long and torturous endeavors upon which hard labor had to be expended. One name that kept coming back to him, from many of the stories he’d heard, was Lightizer, a captain of the Confederate Navy, a graduate of Harvard, a native of Maryland and the son of a ship builder of note who brought his skills from Amsterdam. The Lightizer name fit a list of names he had collected, family names and names of places where a mysteriously-bound train(s) transported much if not all of the Confederate Treasury. That location list included Washington, GA; Danville, VA; several other points in NC, SC, GA and at the Florida line where the next stops for some of the treasury were two prominent possibilities … Cuba and the western states, and where all traces would likely vanish like fire up the chimney of the war.
Connected surnames had their own list: Hart, Adams, Dickinson, James, Benjamin, Bullock, Breckinridge, the alliteration controlling memory every now and then, like Smith, Simpson, Smeltzer, Salsman. All of them married to some part of the mystery, finding some move in it, some action at least alluded to, rumored, and/or testified in writing in a few places.
Not a word of its oral or written text escaped Woofby’s attention, and all of it made its way into his own notes. Money costs time, he might have said, whenever such notes might be exposed or used as proof of the pudding about to be found, fetched, or flayed about. “Don’t yuck my yum,” he might have said with half a smile in mixed company, the pleasantness of his manner lighting up such company. He was able to disarm people in several ways.
The last file that Woofby carried was one of images, the faces of interest he had managed to place in the back of his mind but not so deeply that he could not bring them up in a hurry. Every one of them stood out for him, each one based on a sharply ascertained facial characteristic that’d knock that face into some ready connection to the gold movement. It could be a pronounced marking, like the hair lip on Gypsy George Gregory (called Threegy), or the mole, a mole as black as a dead leg on a dead horse, on the cheek of nimble Marcus Nockery, a trainman who had twice disappeared west of Richmond, or the extra fat lips on Paul Vandernip who was adept at being around Lightizer whenever he was giving commands, as if he was bound in place to take notes for history’s sake.
Woofby’s first beer in the Big River Saloon in Cedar City, Missouri, Cedar City being on the banks of the Missouri River and once was called Hibernia, but became Cedar City this very year of 1872. And the first recalled face from his facial file previously mentioned positioned itself over the top of the saloon door showing the black mole on the cheek of a person looking into the saloon, as if seeking a friend. One fraction of a look said it was Marcus Nockery, owner of a mole that must have made a hundred girls cringe, including the working kind.
His eyes set on Woofby.
Simply put, the homely Nockery was obviously trailing Woofby and the gold hunter knew it immediately. He decided that he had to get Nockery off his trail, out of his hair, away from his business, looking for the gold of the Confederacy, his fat chance at a fat future.
Arrangements were quickly and solicitously made with Shorty at the livery, and with his aid and cover Woofby managed to slip out of Cedar City slightly after 1 A.M., the moon crawling behind a deep bank of clouds, and dimming the green-yellow eyes of the three cats that lived off the livery production, the mice active in several areas of the barn. He supposed that an owl had set up watch in the high eaves and did his fair share of catching mice too, the air off wings soft as good cloth. He was aware of the eternal, miniscule, near-silent sound of death that cut through sleep like a surgeon’s knife.
The big gray left the livery on padded feet, which were old burlap bags to get Woofby out of hearing range and sight range of townspeople, until he dared expose himself and so his adversary who was bound to follow him.
It was cut and dried, Woofby’s gun drawn and aimed at Nockery as he came around a bend in the road no more than three or four miles outside Cedar City.
“You hold it there, Mr. Ugly,” Woofby said as he showed his guns to Nockery in the slant of timely moonlight. “I want to know who stuck you on my trail. Who and when.” Those were not questions; they were demands, and when the mole man said, “Why, Jeff himself.” The I’m-on-the-inside snide edge of his voice almost sent Woofby into a rage.
“Nobody’s called him Jeff since the damned war started. Don’t think you can start now. I said ‘who and when.’”
“Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Hear me once. I won’t shoot you out here, but I’ll take you in the woods, club you on the back of the head and let the critters finish you off. Don’t wager with me.”
Nockery was adamant and stupid at the same time, saying, “You ain’t told me who you are and why you think you can bushwhack me like this. I don’t like none of this. I don’t believe there’s any gold or treasure left over from the war, but they sent me after you ‘cause you got in somebody’s cross hairs.”
“Whose?” Woofby was tired of it already. “You got ten seconds and you’ll be as silent then and as dead as you’ll ever be.”
“Jeff, just like I said. I was in Florida and he heard about you and set a bounty on you if you find anything, so I figure the bounty is worth more than the nothing that’s missing this side of plain robbery all done up by those in the know and in the right seats.”
“You think he knows anything about the whereabouts of the whole damned Treasury? You really believe that?”
“Plain as the nose on your face or this mole I’ve been carting around my whole damned life.”
That’s when two things happened, or three, or four, or more, all according to who’s asking and who’s counting: Woofby thinking really hard about the president, Nockery going for his gun, Woofby drawing quicker than ever and knocking Nockery right out of the saddle as if a minie ball had hit him, and finally and most surprisingly the frightened and alarmed cry of a young girl, who must have heard everything, leaped at him from a small wooded spot at the edge of the road.
Revelations were quickly assessed: Nockery was as dead as he’d ever be. His horse had bolted. And the cry came again from the edge of the woods.
Woofby found her from her sobs. She was about 11 or 12, a sad-eyed, dark-haired slip of a girl kneeling beside the body of a man just inside the darkest shadows of the copse. He, too, appeared as dead as he’d ever be.
“It’s all right, little darling,” Woofby said. “The man I killed was a bad man who wanted to kill me. Who’s that beside you? Is he dead?”
“Yes, he is, It’s my father. A man shot him and took his horse an hour ago and went down the road that way.” She pointed away from Cedar City. “I was hiding in the woods doing my business when he came and just shot my father and cleaned out his pockets and took from our wagon what he could stuff in his pockets and rode off. He never even saw me. I was too scared to cry.”
“Nobody else with you? Where’s your mother?”
The girl stood up and said, shaking all over, “She got killed by another robber weeks ago and me and my father buried her way back there,” and again she pointed away from Cedar City. She was in a dark half dress and some kind of homemade breeches that made her look like a boy.
Life bounced back and forth like it usually does, there on a dark road outside of a small town beside a patch of woods.
The whole power of life and death and silly trails and poor hunting and lies and pointing fingers and hopelessness and pity and anger and bushwhackers and thieves of all kinds and poor little orphans and old orphans and the sudden death of dreamers and murderous resentment flooded Woofby in a mix of nerves slamming through his whole body. His feet and his hands shared pain with his chest and rammed up through his throat and across the back of his neck and suddenly delved into his arms and into all his innards, like a sickness rushing to take him from this life.
For all the hardness and small agonies endured in his days, all his tribulations, she was just a little girl, almost new in this life and had suffered too much already.
In a flash he knew his life on the Golden Road had shifted; he could feel the shift in a fraction of that second.
When he recovered some of his moderate sense, he said, “What’s your name, child? Tell me so we can bury your father here when we bury this other fellow.”
She said, “My name is MaryBeth Connaught and we will not bury my father here. Not here. Not my father. We’ll take him back there,” and she pointed eastward, “and we’ll bury him with my mother. They have to be together forever.” Suddenly she was a bit older in her stance, in her demeanor. Her hands were on her hips and Woofby knew he’d obey her wishes.
“Can you remember where your mother is buried? Is it marked?”
“I can find it,” she said. “My father did it quickly so the animals would not get to her, and I piled a lot of rocks on top when he started drinking out of his jug. He got drunk. He’s been drunk a few times since then.”
Woofby looked around and said, “Where’s your wagon?”
“I hid it in the woods so nobody could steal it, so I could get my father back with my mother. I was waiting for someone good like you to help me. Maybe you can ride both of them back to the wagon and bury that man in the woods and then we’ll ride back to bury my father. Someone might see us out here. It’s almost dawn now.”
The old Confederate soldier, the gold searcher, figured MaryBeth Connaught was the smartest little girl he ever met. He tossed the two bodies on his horse and he and the girl walked into the woods. The wagon was under enough leaves and branches to keep it hidden from road sight. He wrapped her father in a piece of canvas and placed him in the back of the wagon, and then buried the other body.
The orphan girl made a point of saying some words over the grave, continuing to amaze Woofby. And they rode for almost a week before she said, as she pointed down into a small valley, “Momma’s down there, near that big tree, in the shade. There’s no real marker, but two big rocks we rolled together. It’s such a horrid place to end up.” But she didn’t start to cry. Not one tear did she shed when she added, “I told you, I’d come back, Momma.”
Woofby, knowing he was privy to an oath, buried Connaughton right beside his wife after some difficulty removing stones. When the task was done, MaryBeth said words over her parents, turned to Woofby and said, “Now I belong to you.” There was a long pause as she stared into his eyes and added, “If you’ll have me.”
“I can’t take the place of your father.”
“You can be my uncle. Nobody can say anything about that.” She sounded like she had been on the trail for half a regular lifetime, so full of wisdom and the ways of the world.
The older man could understand her faster and clearer than any person he’d met in this life.
She also said, with a touch of humor exceeding her years, “I’ll fix up the story so it will sound okay, including where I was born and my parents and you can be my mother’s brother. I’ll teach it all to you so it will fit you. Now I have to heat up some coffee.” She was musical with her words, as though she was keeping them to a tune, and humming too.
It was only a few moments later, from the back side of the wagon, stealth innate in her movement, that she put her finger to her lips for silence, and he heard a footstep and a click of a rifle, and another stranger, a tall, bearded man with hollow eyes, a chin slanted and pointed like some noses, his hat battered and carrying several obvious bullet holes. His rifle was leveled at her on the other side of the wagon, and he said, “What we got here, little Missy? You gonna take care of me like a good little girl? That pot for me too?”
His voice was filled with hatred and surprise at the same time, a garrulous gathering of venom from his throat that promised nothing but trouble, pain and other issues for MaryBeth. She had a coffee pot in her hand as he said, “Of course, stranger. Pull up a seat. It’ll be ready soon.”
“Oops,” she said, when she dropped the metal pot off a rock at the edge of a small fireplace.
The pot clanged. The stranger swung around the end of the wagon, saw Woofby’s gun was aimed right at his chest, brought his rifle around to shoot, and died halfway through his swing.
MaryBeth said, “That’ll teach you to fool with my uncle.”
When they finished burying the man, she looked Woofby in the eye and said, “Silas, when we get to Cedar City, if you’re looking for work, you can be a new undertaker.”
Woofby roared with laughter, knowing full well that they were bound for Cedar City.
“We can’t let this wagon get away from us,” MaryBeth interjected, “because my father has hidden gold in it someplace. I don’t know where, but we can’t wait until we get there to look for it. We have to find it now so we can buy a place for ourselves. A place that’ll be ours.”
The pair, after a thorough search, found a cache of nuggets hidden in the frame of the wagon and a bag of gold dust in an old tin can stuffed with leather waste. “He said it was his pay dirt from an old job. I never asked what he meant.” The way she said it meant that Woofby, too, would be shut out forever from knowledge of that source.
In Cedar City they were directed by Everett Westcott and Shorty to where a small ranch was for sale west of town a few miles. The pair became owners with explanations, MaryBeth started school a few days later in town, and Woofby bought a couple of horses from Westcott. On his next trip to town he purchased a few supplies at the general store where he started an account and heard the local gossip and was introduced to a few neighbors and citizens of the town. He met a charming lady, Mrs. Katy Ross, whose husband Arthur raised beef a few miles away from town, “out your way,” she said with a lovely smile, and an invitation for tea, coffee, lunch, dinner, breakfast, “or a piece of a jug, if that’s your flavor. We’re always busy except when folks call. Bring the girl by. I’d love to meet her. I’ve heard good things already, and we have none of our own.”
The odd pair, uncle and niece, highly likeable from all accounts making the rounds, went at their business of ranching, which needs a good start, some luck, hard work, good contacts with helpful folks, and more hard work.
They were proceeding nicely, according to all sources, until Arthur Ross was killed at the bank when a robbery blew up in the middle of the day. One of the robbers, part of a trio with a history of local efforts, killed Ross, the lone customer in the bank, when he reached for his own gun.
Silas Woofby, on the trail immediately as part of a posse, brought the killer, bound hand and foot, in by himself. He had him slung across a friend’s mule borrowed on the way to town, Woofby mounted on his own horse and the killer, walking ahead of him before the mule was borrowed, was soon tossed over the mule’s back for a grand entrance into Cedar City.
The trial was short, quick, and done, as was the imposed hanging. Silas Woofby became a local hero. In a short time he was a frequent visitor at the Ross ranch, Katy Ross falling in love with him. “Hurry is the key word out this way, Silas, that’s why I am proposing to you, and I hope you accept. You’ll be part owner of two places and MaryBeth can have a room at my place and keep her own as well. She’s a lovely young lady and smart as a whip, which I’m sure you realize.”
They were married and had a few good years until sickness seemed to grab Katy Woofby by the throat. She died in bed after a mere three years of marriage, Silas at her side along with MaryBeth who was just turning 16, a stark beauty of a girl who was continually driving the boys away from both ranches, and from her person when she was in town. She had her own mind on things, and was adept at many tasks. She could ride, rope, shoot, drive cows, shoe horses, darn socks, make curtains, and turn any kitchen inside out with her favorite meals. She learned quickly at any task, amazed the three teachers she had in school, and continued to grow more beautiful.
One breakfast time at the “home ranch,” when she was 17, she said, “Silas, it’s been almost three years since Katy died. Are you seeing anybody new?” She said it offhandedly.
“No, I’m too busy around here, MaryBeth. The time’ll come when I know it. I hope she’ll know it too.” With that said and out in the open, he went off to his day’s work.
On the morning of her 18th birthday, not waiting for the evening meal to make a splash of anything, she rose early and put together a fabulous breakfast meal. When Silas walked into the kitchen, he said, “Happy birthday, MaryBeth, and kissed her on the cheek, then said, “It looks like the celebration is starting early,” as he looked over the spread on the table. It was piled with everything he liked, from fruit right through bacon, eggs, pancakes, burnt fried potatoes the way he liked them best, a pile of beans from the night before, thick-bread toast, and a large pot of coffee.
When he sat down, she sat down across from him. “Silas,” she said, looking right into his eyes, “today I am 18, and you’re only twice as old as I am, and I have been dreaming of you and thinking of you ‘that special way’ since I was 14. I want to be your wife, in that way. I can’t wait any longer and I can’t wait in case another Katy comes along and grabs you. I have loved you from the very first moment you came into my life. That is the best present you could ever give me, by saying yes.”
He leaped up from the table, took her by the hand, and said, “I accept. I love you. And you best come with me to see your present.” His hand held her hand in a vise grip.
The sumptuous breakfast, not a bite taken from it, stayed intact on the table as they left the room and the house.
They saddled their horses, with a couple of ranch hands looking on, smiles on their faces caused by being privy to something really special, and he led her off across the north pasture at a trot. He said nothing as they rode, and she held her silence, hopeful for a surprise gift she had not dreamed about in a long while - once there was a palomino she thought she’d call Golden Road. The image went away quickly.
Ahead loomed the lone cottonwood tree upwards of 60 feet tall at the center of an angled fence line separating three tracts of their pastureland. The tree, with deeply fissured bark and diamond-shaped leaves, green on two sides, towered into the sky as they rode up an incline to reach it.
She gasped when she saw the tone sitting upright in the ground, a shadow at first, then a face on it, then the obvious lines of chipped text.
Her heart leaped in her chest and she jumped right from the saddle to the ground and knelt in front of the stone.
Silas Woofby, a long time in love with a special girl, said, “I had some of the boys do this for your birthday. They spent a few days back there.” He looked eastward. “I hope you like it.”
She looked up at him, still sitting strong in his saddle, as handsome as the first time she had seen him, and said, “I knew I’d love you all my life. I knew it from the first and through everything else.” Her eyes were talking, too, as she looked down at the marked stone thusly inscribed:
Robert C. Connaught March 1836 - June 1876
His wife
Alice Connaught April 1840 - May 1876
Their daughter
MaryBeth December 1865
The soon-to-be-married couple made love for the first time in the shade of the tall cottonwood tree, not very far from the Golden Road in a corner of western Missouri, the real important treasures found and all at hand.
He thought it was like knowing a woman.
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