Silver Threads Read online

  Wild Rose City, Dakota Territory. Eliza and Lily Sowren ran the town with a fist of iron. Eliza, tall and bony, Lily, short and far – both as tough as nails. On the surface, they were both pictures of elderly virtue, but beneath something altogether different … As Jed Herne found out, when the sisters called on his special talents to protect their silver mine from an unknown gang of thieves and murderers …

  HERNE THE HUNTER 11: SILVER THREADS

  By John J. McLaglen

  First Published by Transworld Publishers in 1979

  Copyright © 1979, 2015 by John J. McLaglen

  First Smashwords Edition: April 2015

  Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Cover image © 2014 by Tony Masero

  This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

  Series Editor: Mike Stotter

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  With thanks for all their efforts, this one is for Mike Stotter and Dave Whitehead—a couple of desperadoes waiting for the train.

  ‘Darling, I am growing old,

  Silver threads among the gold,

  Shine upon my brow today

  Life is fading fast away … ’

  From Silver Threads Among The Gold by Eben Rexford, 1848-1’16

  Chapter One

  Wild Rose City, in the Dakota Territory, in the late spring of 1885, was one of the most beautiful places in the whole of America.

  Centered on its main street that ran parallel to the foaming Clearwater River, its neat frame houses rose primly towards the crest of the hill, where the graveyard spread among shady trees, the orderly white markers in rows along tended paths.

  The silver mine that had brought prosperity to that part of the Black Hills was situated at Mount Morgoth, a couple of miles to the west of the town. The mining camp was at the base of the waste tip, with its saloons and its wild women.

  There was nothing like that in Wild Rose. Of course there was a saloon. The Rich Nugget it was called, and it was run by an ex-cavalry sergeant called Quincannon. Though no lady ever went there, naturally, she would have been quite safe. It was a most respectable establishment, and perfectly reflected the moral tone of the entire town.

  Nor were there drunken whores dangling over balconies flaunting their naked bodies to try and tempt innocent youth from the paths of righteousness.

  Since it was recognized that there were occasions when some men needed to go to a private place and relieve there the beastly tensions that they could not insult their dear wives with, there was a house of assignation in Wild Rose. A neat house on a side road off the High Street, like the other neat houses. The only clue to its aura of discreet immorality the muted crimson oil lamp that burned at the side of the porch during the evenings. Only to be promptly extinguished at midnight by order of the town council.

  If you were sober and orderly then Wild Rose City welcomed you. If you weren’t then by thunder but you’d better just be passing through!

  Sheriff Daley could be seen most days sitting in a worn rocker outside the jail, boots rested on the rail, watching to see if he could be of assistance to any lost child or elderly lady who wanted someone to help her across the dusty street with a load of shopping. He was a tall man, slightly running to fat. Little eyes like black beads almost buried in the doughy wrinkles of his face.

  Most folks smiled when they passed Sheriff Daley.

  It was a good thing to do.

  Sheriff Daley liked folks who smiled at him.

  ~*~

  The country had been Republican since the War, and Wild Rose City was no exception. Abe, and Andy Johnson. Ulysses S. Grant and Rutherford Hayes. Poor murdered James Garfield and on with the current President, Chester A. Arthur.

  Republican through and through.

  Sheriff Daley was a Republican.

  He was also the nephew of the Misses Sowren. Miss Lily Sowren. And her younger sister, Miss Eliza Sowren. And they were the power behind Wild Rose. Their father had found the lode with its rich silver veins spreading through the Dakotas. Opening up Mount Morgoth before the War. Keeping it going through the fighting. Starting to build Wild Rose to give decent folks somewhere nice to live away from the stench and death of the mine and its brawling workers.

  Dying quietly in his sixties while reading the lesson in church. Handing the whole town over, lock, stock and barrel, to his daughters. Lily and Eliza.

  Liza had been married for a couple of years, but there wasn’t anyone in the town could recall much of the husband. He’d been a Mr. Springstein. A pale little man from New Jersey. He’d come west, bringing money to help the Mount Morgoth Mine out at a time when it needed capital. He’d lived in the big Sowren house up on the top of the hill, overlooking that neat cemetery. Eliza had duly been delivered of three children. All male. One dead and two living. After that it seemed as if Mr. Springstein had done all that God intended him to do. He succumbed to a fever in 1856 and was buried in an imposing tomb overlooking the slopes of the small town and the white ribbon of the Clearwater.

  Despite her marriage folks carried on calling Eliza Sowren ‘Miss Sowren’, just as if the marriage had never happened. Miss Lily and Miss Eliza ruled the town.

  On this particular Sunday morning they were walking together. Promenading steadily homewards from church, nodding to those of their acquaintances among the town’s people that merited their recognition.

  The sun was baking down from a sky of cloudless blue, and it was possible to hear the distant rumbling of the river as it dived and whirled among the rocks, carried to their ears on the back of a gentle wind.

  ‘It is a most beautiful morning, Sister Lily,’ said Eliza.

  ‘Indeed it is, Sister Eliza,’ replied Lily Sowren, adjusting the angle of her parasol so that the rays of the sun didn’t strike directly on her pale cheeks.

  They were an odd couple. Almost humorous to look at. Not that anyone in Wild Rose City would ever have laughed at them. Not when you considered that Eliza’s eldest son, Joab, ran the bank, and held mortgage deeds on just about all the properties in the town. And that her other son, Gawain, owned the hardware store. And the dry goods store. And the livery stable. And the food stores. In fact Gawain Sowren owned all the stores, and he sold a lot on credit.

  Any newcomers to the town used to wonder how it was that Miss Sowren could have two sons, and why they were called with her surname rather than the father’s. But when you encountered the Misses Sowren you didn’t wonder any longer.

  Their influence didn’t end with their sons. There’d been their father’s brother, Myron Sowren. He’d lived away from town for most of his life and it had been a surprise when three tall young men appeared in the town. Myron had had a daughter, who’d married a man from Vermont named Daley. There’d been three boys born before cholera had wiped out the parents while they were on their way west with a wagon train to start a new life.

  Destitute and with no other kin, the boys had come to their aunts in the Dakotas. Charity didn’t flow through the town streets like milk and honey, and there were a few privately raised eyebrows when the sisters took the boys in. Built them a house not far down the hill from their own and set about establishing them in business on their own account.

  That had been long years back, and those tall young men were now middle-aged. Sturdy, and still tall, but all three running to fat.

 
Sheriff Matthew Daley.

  Marcus Daley, who ran The Rich Nugget saloon.

  And there was Julius Daley, fattest of the three, and nominally owner of the discreetly run house with the red lamp outside. Julius was also the mayor of Wild Rose City.

  The rest of the town council was easy enough to work out. Miss Lily Sowren, Miss Eliza Sowren, Joab Sowren, Gawain Sowren; Matthew Daley and Marcus Daley.

  Surprisingly there were a couple of people on the council that weren’t kin. Doctor George G. Hillman was the town physician. A position of such status that it guaranteed him a place on the council.

  There were tongues that wagged in private—very much in private—and said that if there had been a Sowren or a Daley with any kind of medical qualification, then Doctor Hillman wouldn’t have got within a hundred miles of the council.

  The other person on the council was the mine manager. Robert Zimmerman. A skinny, curly-headed man from Hibbing, Minnesota. A brilliant mining engineer who had been brought in by the ladies when there was a whisper that the Mount Morgoth lode was running thin. Under Zimmerman’s guidance the rumor had remained just a rumor.

  But everyone else in Wild Rose was just a bit-player compared to the ladies.

  Strolling home through the Sunday sun.

  Their shadows on the swept sidewalk revealing the grotesque contrast in their appearances. One shadow that was round and squat, like a huge ball. The other like a shadow in late evening when the sun sinks low in the west. An elongated shadow, looking like a bundle of narrow sticks thrown carelessly together to make a human shape. Stretched and thin.

  Lily was the fat one. Grossly fat, her body wobbling like a vast milk pudding, barely contained in her expensive clothes. You could almost hear her stays creaking with the strain of holding in such a bulk. Her face was a succession of layers of chins, cascading down her dimpled cheeks like the terraced slopes of an Asiatic village.

  Despite her size, Lily was always immaculately dressed, in the latest fashions. Copied from smart papers from back East, adapted for her by a little woman who specialized in dressmaking. Pink was her favorite color. And that Sunday morning Miss Lily Sowren was clothed from top to toe in pink. Her parasol was pink, fringed with pink lace and tassels. Her silk dress, with flounced sleeves and lace at the bosom, was also pink. The palest of coral pinks. Except for the darker patches spread around both armpits. Despite all of their wealth and power there was nothing Lily could do to stop herself sweating. Her shoes were pink, tied with pink ribbons. Their toes peeking coyly out from underneath the shapely tent of her dress. Not that Lily could see her toes. Except for an occasional glimpse in a mirror, Lily Sowren hadn’t seen her own toes for better than thirty years.

  Just as Lily resembled an elegantly costumed whale, so her sister was like a smartly turned-out xylophone. Apart from their mutual desire to always look respectable, they were complete physical opposites.

  Lily was short and stout.

  Eliza was a prim streak of nothingness. She topped six feet in height, but if she stood sideways on to you it was hard to see her. Behind their closed doors folks in Wild Rose said she had to run around in the shower to get herself wet.

  Her nose was like a steep slice of granite, sharp enough to cut through cheese, with her eyes perched uneasily on either side of it, glinting at the world from her towering height. Her favorite hue was purple, and her parasol to the tips of her buttoned boots were all shades of that color.

  ‘Here comes Father McGonagall, sister,’ said Eliza, Squinting under the dangling lace of her purple parasol at the approaching figure.

  ‘Looks to be in something of a rush, sister,’ replied Lily Sowren, stopping in her tracks, reaching up with a pink-gloved hand to wipe away a trickle of perspiration from the shadow of a moustache that adorned her upper lip.

  The priest of Wild Rose City was a willowy young man, barely in his twenties. The son of a merchant banker from Des Moines, Father Angus McGonagall had preferred the idea of being a poet, but his verse had met with little enthusiasm back in Des Moines. So it had been the clergy as the only other possibility. His father had helped to build the church part way up Main Street on the condition that his son should inherit the living in perpetuity. The Misses Sowren were not ladies to look gift horses in the teeth and had accepted gladly, seeing in the pliable fabric of the young priest nothing that would check their tight hold on Wild Rose City and everything and everyone in it.

  And Banker McGonagall had thought it a small price for him to be rid of his whining son for good, pattering his own prayer each night that nothing would happen to make Angus give up his vocation and quit the Dakotas. He need not have worried. The priest was incapable of ever making such an important decision for himself.

  ‘Miss Lily. Miss Eliza. Beautiful morning, is it not?’

  He had the habit of greeting people from a great distance, necessitating the need to reply long before you were within normal range. This frequently meant that by the time you were actually face to face with him, you had exhausted the topic of conversation.

  ‘Morning, Father,’ chorused the two elderly ladies.

  ‘Hope it isn’t something too taxing for us, sister,’ muttered Lily.

  ‘Of course, dear,’ replied Eliza. ‘You want to get home so that you can retire to your room and pursue your private literary task for Sunday.’

  The fat face wrinkled into an expression that might almost have been anger. If it had been possible to imagine why such an innocent remark between sisters could have produced that feeling.

  ‘Have you heard the news, ladies?’ shouted the young priest, flushed from having pursued the sisters all the way from the church.

  ‘What news could that be, Father McGonagall?’ asked Miss Lily Sowren.

  ‘Not bad news, I trust,’ added Miss Eliza Sowren, glaring at him down her pointed beak, like a vulture considering whether there was enough meat on its victim to justify bothering with an attack.

  He was coming closer, battling up the dusty hill while the Misses Sowren waited patiently for him, waving away an errant mosquito that didn’t realize what exalted flesh it was trying to attack.

  ‘Another robbery,’ he yelped, running out of breath while still thirty paces off.

  ‘Another, Father McGonagall? Why, that is too awful to even contemplate.’

  ‘Indeed it is, Sister Eliza,’ wheezed Lily. ‘I pray to the sweet Lord Jesus that it was not one of our consignments and that no soul was hurt.’

  The hot breath burning in his throat like stretched wire, the priest at last joined them, enabling them all to carry on the conversation in something approaching a normal tone of voice.

  ‘It was awful, I am told. I learned it from the son of Mr. Hempstead, the clerk at the dry goods store. He’d been riding out to visit his married sister, Lee-Anne. The girl who was wed in my own church to the eldest boy of...’

  Lily held up a hand so fat that it resembled a bunch of stumpy pink bananas and checked the garrulous young man.

  ‘That is enough, Father McGonagall. My sister and I truly have no wish to stand here on this most beautiful morning and listen while you allow your conversation to ramble unchecked along the highways and the byways. Kindly adhere only to the facts.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Miss Sowren,’ turning to face the other sister, squinting up at her great height. ‘I’m sorry, Miss Sowren.’

  ‘Get on with it, Father McGonagall,’ snapped Eliza, irritably.

  ‘Of course. Of course.’

  It was a sadly familiar story.

  A story that was being repeated every few weeks or months at many of the silver mines that dotted the Dakota Territory.

  In the late summer of ’84 there’d been the first. The Crippled Star Mine, thirty miles to the north of Wild Rose. Seven weeks later came the second. The Old Number One Mine at Clarkstown, just eleven miles west. Wind Creek Mine and Thunder Creek followed. The attacks on the wagons separated by only nine days.

  And every time the at
tacks followed the same pattern. A wagon, often well guarded, picked off at a place where it should have been safe. Always stopped in its tracks, despite its being escorted by as many as eight armed men. Never much sign of resistance. It was damned odd. Almost as if they’d been stopped by friends and then gunned down in cold blood.

  But nobody knew what happened.

  Dead men don’t do a whole lot of talking.

  There was talk that it was ghosts. That maybe the old Dutchman had come gibbering up from the lost mother lode of the Superstitions, hunting men down for revenge. But there’s not a ghost around could make off with something in the region of one hundred and ninety thousand dollars worth of the finest silver ore in the Dakotas. In eight different raids, spread over six months.

  The local sheriffs had done what they could. Sheriff Daley had ridden out himself with a posse to lend a hand. There’d been a federal marshal drafted in. Even a couple of boys from the Pinkerton Detective Agency. Despite their motto of being ‘The eye that never sleeps’, the Pinkertons came and went and the robberies continued. It was one of their few failures.

  The Reverend Angus McGonagall stammered out the story of the latest robbery under the watchful eyes of the two ladies. The same as the others. Five men shot down. Bringing the total death toll up to over thirty. It was becoming difficult for the owners of the silver mines to find men prepared to ride shotgun on the wagons any more. Even up at Mount Morgoth there was a distinct shortage of volunteers for the job.

  ‘That all, Reverend?’ asked Lily, swatting away a swarm of small flies.

  ‘Well...’ he said, hesitantly.

  ‘Well what, Minister?’ said Eliza, peering down at him with the sort of expression that is normally reserved for something you find on the bottom of your shoe.

  ‘We ... that is ... me and a few other folks ... was wonderin’ if we ought to try and do something before our silver gets hit as well.’

  The sisters looked at each other for a moment, and the priest had the feeling he’d had before with the Misses Sowren. The feeling that they somehow managed to talk to each other without speaking a word.