Hard Money by Luke; Short Read Free Book Online Page A

man, had named his man and left him to fight it alone. If Seay won this time, there were other fights. When he lost one, he would go the way Barnes went, and the way of the other five superintendents. It was a hard game Bonal played, and it took hard men to back his hand.
    Seay turned away from the box, smiling a little to himself. He paced slowly around the room, his restlessness kindled by the knowledge that this box on the desk held failure for him—failure before he started. Still, if he could meet tomorrow’s pay roll and the next, still ramming this tunnel on and on into the Pintwaters, he knew that Bonal would not fail him. All Bonal wanted was a man who wouldn’t let him down.
    Seay turned his head abruptly and looked again at the box, his breath held. Then he turned to the safe, rummaged inside it and brought out a canvas sack. It was the work of only a few moments to stuff these bank notes and gold into the sack, put the empty box in the safe, lock the safe, blow out the light and lock the building behind him.
    Tober was waiting outside, leaning against the bunkhouse, smoking in moody silence.
    â€œHave a horse saddled for me, Reed,” Seay said and walked past him and into the bunkhouse. Tober stood motionless, watching Seay’s back. Then he smiled into the night, his thin, secret smile, dropped his cigarette and headed for the corrals.
    Inside the bunkhouse, Seay turned up the overhead lamp and went over to his bunk in the corner. From underneath it he dragged out his small trunk and lifted it to the bunk. A moment later he drew out a Colt .44, spun its chamber and felt its loaded weight under his fingers and rammed it into his hip pocket and went out, his heavy boots curiously soundless on the scuffed floor.
    From the low pass over the Pintwaters between Tronah and the tunnel, Seay could look down on the sprawling camp below him; its lights drifted across the slope in a careless swarm. Beyond it, closer to the flats, he could pick out the reduction mills, their great chimneys lifting flame up into the night. Raised a pitch above the murmur of the town’s activity was the rhythmical pounding of the stamps in the reduction mills. Night and day, this hungry camp was slowly gutting the earth of this mountain, packing out and sorting its treasure with that stubborn patience of which only men and ants are capable.
    Seay reined up and regarded it, and he felt a swift and impersonal pride in all this; and he looked beyond it to the star-shot void of the desert, and he was humble then.
    Above him and far to the left on the invisible mountains were pin points of light from the mine offices. Occasionally he could catch the flicker of dim lights descending the mountain, and he knew these were the ore freighters, with lanterns on the collars of the lead mules.
    Later, he found Tronah teeming as usual, its streets rowdy with its life. Stabling his horse at a feed corral on the edge of town, he moved up the jammed sidewalk.
    At Jimmy Hamp’s Keno Parlor he left the street and went inside. The reek of beer and whisky and tobacco and smoke and sweat and cheap perfume was rank and clamorous, and as it hit him he winced, patiently working toward the bar. This was the miners’ saloon, as frank and big and bawdy as its roughest patron. At the crowded bar he waited, a high, quiet man, for his drink and when he was served by the harried barkeep asked after Jimmy Hamp. Hamp was back at one of the tables, the bartender said.
    A dance-hall girl at a table saw Seay and waved, and Seay nodded, knowing it was useless to try and speak above the din. Somewhere in the rear, on the edge of the dance floor, a piano ground out an insane din that nobody listened to.
    Jimmy Hamp was watching a poker game, his swart, utterly bald head beaded with drops of perspiration. He had most of a cold cigar chewed up into a ball which he cuddled in his mouth, and its fetid stench settled around him like an aura. He saw Seay and