Value Received

Value Received

By

John J. Beach

Smashwords Edition

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Published By

John J. Beach on Smashwords

Value Received

Copyright © 2008, 2012

by John J. Beach

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License Notes:

This book is licensed for personal use only. It may not be re-sold or redistributed. If you would like to gift this book to another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it and it was not purchased specifically for you, then please purchase a copy of your own. Thank you for respecting the efforts of the author.

This book is a work of fiction; although, some of it is historically based, and, as such, contains some factual information, but no deliberate lies. References to real people, living or dead, or undead, or in that nebulous region between death and life, as well as accounts, events, places, locales, etc., have been used only to provide a sense of authenticity to the fictional stories the author has created and anecdotal evidence of the worlds the author has envisioned. Any product names, associated slogans, or other works mentioned in this book are trademarks of their respective owners and are used in this book strictly for editorial purposes; no commercial claims to their use is claimed by this author or publisher. All such references are used in a nominative fair-use manner and this book is not endorsed by, sponsored by, or connected with these owners in any way. All other characters, locations, events, dialogue, etc., have been drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

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Contents

Value Received

Chapter 1: Value Received

Chapter 2: Spirit Brothers

Chapter 3: Bar Maid

Chapter 4: Dark Dancing

Chapter 5: The Coming Flood

Chapter 6: Horse Sense

Chapter 7: Thrown Back Into Your Face

Chapter 8: Poison Extraction

Chapter 9: Food and Water

Chapter 10: Queen of the Hive

Chapter 11: Time for a New Character

Chapter 12: Weak Hand

Chapter 13: El Canal de Oro

Chapter 14: Settling Up Later

Chapter 15: Local 19, Almont Chapter

Chapter 16: Title Pending

Chapter 17: Dead Man’s Hand

Chapter 18: The Escape

Chapter 19: Like We Own It

The After Words

About the Author

Value Received

Chapter 1: Value Received

Covering their tracks had been the hardest. Even a small, wooden farm wagon, laden to overflowing with limestone, carves deep ruts into lonely trails. Such furrows were not the work of the tired, old farmer that the two different men pretended to be. And discovery of their true work would mean imprisonment (or worse).

One of these men, Tedford Teddy Theodore, did not view himself as a criminal, nor would many others not intimate with The Devil’s Own Mining Company or the inner workings of the American legal system. Besides, Teddy was good at justifying things whenever his broader, horizontal sensibilities conflicted with his vertical aspirations. For instance, he had once gambled regularly at cards, taking money from others without returning value. Teddy’s departure here from the Mormon teaching was that he believed the excitement of playing Five-Card Stud was a value received, even if a man should lose everything else.

His companion was Tanjakwunu, a Southern Paiute Indian. Raised to accept the simplest names for things, Teddy had always called the Indian TenJack. Three decades earlier (and 90 miles to the east), he had won TenJack while gambling near what would later become known as Cripple Creek. During that particular poker hand, Teddy had been dealt the Ten of Hearts face down, the Ten of Spades up. At that point, he merely bet the table’s one-dollar bring-in price. His was the lowest of the four cards facing up. His second up card then flopped down—the Ten of Diamonds. Teddy pressed down on one of his Morgan silver dollars with two fingers and scraped it slowly to the center of the table. "Pair of tens needs another dollar from you boys if you want to stay in." One of the other men—annoyed—folded and took this opportunity to get up for a piss.

The Two of Hearts came up next for Teddy. And, with no other deuces showing, he now tried to make it look as if he were buying the pot. He pushed three more of his Morgans forward. The remaining players were having none of that, and they matched his three dollars. Teddy’s final up card had been the Seven of Diamonds, and, while that hadn’t mathematically improved his hand in any way, getting a low card like that had been a blessing: both of the remaining men now thought they had him beat, and neither of them suspected his three-of-kind.

Betting grew fierce, tense. The man to Teddy’s right, convinced he had the strongest two-pair hand at the table (what looked to Teddy to be Aces over Nines), a man who wanted to raise the pot further but who was short on cash, offered up—for their consideration—the ownership of TenJack: I bought him from the Navajos for $20.

Teddy took immediate issue. "How is he possibly worth $20? And why, if I win him, would I ever want a slave? Teddy made a show of it (wanting the pot to grow as large as possible): he got up from the table and gave the teenaged Indian a once over, asked him to demonstrate his physical strength, his general health, and prove his ability to understand English. Finally, Teddy sat down, squirmed a bit but relented. Okay. If that’s all you got."

Teddy and the remaining man at the table had both called the twenty Indian dollars.

Now, considerably later into his life and skulking within the dead of a southeastern night, Tedford and TenJack strained together to heft an ironbound wooden-staved barrel off their small wagon. This, and many more like it, they had carried down to a stagnant watering hole. From the barrels, they had emptied hundreds of pounds of dirt and shattered crystalline limestone and dolomite—the worthless shards, the remnants of Teddy’s labor, what he had been able to remove by working nights (without the aid of explosives) from the ever-deepening mine shaft hidden beneath their shack.

On the return trip, TenJack followed closely on foot behind the wagon. His job was to smooth over the wheel tracks with a wooden rake. Teddy, exhausted from another week of difficult mining, sat half asleep on the buckboard steering Magic Dog, their small, shaggy horse. They had had him now for nine years, but TenJack still felt awkward around Magic Dog—and around all horses. He couldn’t get used to them. His own people (primarily food collectors and small game hunters) had never had enough resources to support large animals.

The sun still was hours from breaking as their wagon neared the shack nestled against a hill in a remote, rugged gorge. Their current homestead was just a salmon red, soft sagebrush and prickly pear cactus-covered speck of the Colorado Plateau. They lived in a weather beater, just enough house to protect them from hot, vivid blue days and cold, emery black nights. Adjoining the shack leaned a small wooden shed for Magic Dog and Lulu, a brown-and-white Alpine milk goat. And, behind this, built into a natural terrace cracked within the hill, they had structured a chicken coop for more than a dozen hens and one red rooster named Roscoe.

TenJack tended the goat, the chickens, and the farm—several small vegetable gardens he had planted in fertile locations with unblocked exposure to the southern sky. He did well here with cold season crops: asparagus, carrots, beets, turnips, potatoes, radishes, leaf lettuce, and green onions. He pan-fried their meals along with basil, sage, parsley, horseradish—whatever he could find or grow to liven up the taste. TenJack did the farming, the washing up, and the smoothing over of the water hole during the days. Teddy worked the mine in the evenings. The two men had become