Pale Rider Read online

  A NAMELESS STRANGER rides into the corrupt and explosive gold rush town of Lahood, California. His arrival coincides with the prayer of a young girl who is hoping for a miracle to end the sudden and random violence in the community. Fifteen-year-old Megan quietly recites from the Bible: “And I looked, and beheld a pale horse; and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him.” A story of confrontation in a lawless time, the nameless stranger becomes a catalyst for hope and retribution. A struggle between ruthless corporation gunmen and innocent independent miners takes on new meaning with the appearance of an enigmatic horseman. Clint Eastwood is the Pale Rider.

  SHOWDOWN ON MAIN STREET

  The Preacher slid home the last cartridge. he snapped the .44’s cylinder shut and slid the big gun back into its holster. Standing by himself in the middle of Main Street, he hardly seemed to be breathing. The distance that seperated him from Stockburn and the deputies was not not great.

  He waited.

  As if marching in time to some unheard rhythm, Stockburn’s men descended from the porch and crossed into the street.

  They stared at the lone figure confronting them as they formed a single line stretching from boardwalk to boardwalk.

  The Preacher’s hand moved ever so slightly nearer the staghorn grip of his pistol. Beneath the shading brim of his hat, his eyes narrowed. He moved to meet them.

  The distance between the one and the seven closed. To thirty-five yards, then to thirty, twenty-five . . .

  At twenty-three yards the deputy on the far right went for his gun . . .

  Also by

  Alan Dean Foster

  ALIEN

  CLASH OF THE TITANS

  THE MAN WHO USED THE UNIVERSE

  KRULL

  OUTLAND

  THE I INSIDE

  THE MOMENT OF THE MAGICIAN

  SPELLSINGER

  THE HOUR OF THE GATE

  THE DAY OF THE DISSONANCE

  SHADOWKEEP

  STARMAN

  Published by

  WARNER BOOKS

  WARNER BOOKS EDITION

  Copyright © 1985 by Michael Butler and Dennis Shryack

  All rights reserved.

  Warner Books, Inc.,

  666 Fifth Avenue,

  New York, N.Y. 10103

  A Warner Communications Company

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Printing: June, 1985

  ISBN 0-446-32767-0

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  CONTENTS

  Books

  Title

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PALE RIDER

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  XI

  XII

  For Harry Morre and Smithee,

  My two favorite preachers.

  Whose methodology is somewhat more conventional.

  I

  They called Conway “Spider” for several reasons, the foremost being that he insisted on it, his real given name being less than suitable for his current occupation. Rumor had it his parents had dubbed him Percy, but there wasn’t a man in California who’d dare say that to his face.

  The nickname fit his movements as well as his personality. Fiftyish, small in stature but wiry as an Arapaho pony, he didn’t so much dig into his claim as scuttle back and forth across it. While the majority of the other miners were content to work their Long Toms—the six-foot-long sluice boxes that lined Carbon Creek—or to sit patiently on the sandy banks and labor over their gold pans, Conway was in constant motion. One minute he’d be panning, the next he’d be using a shovel to dig up river gravel, and the third would find him scanning the larger rocks for signs of color. Burnt brown by the relentless Sierra sun, his hands and fingers flicked through the pieces of granite and schist that infested his pan. From time to time he would pause long enough to wave reassuringly in the direction of his two grown sons.

  Conway could wave with one hand and continue panning with the other. Through this unique talent he had acquired a certain celebrity. Few men possessed both the strength of wrist and delicacy of touch to pan for gold with only one hand. Somehow Conway managed the difficult balancing act.

  Used to be a time when he’d gladly demonstrate his special ability to newcomers in return for a meal. He hadn’t been able to do so for quite a while now. Not because he was unwilling. Quite the contrary. But the sad fact of the matter was that there hadn’t been any newcomers come to Carbon Canyon in several months. There was reason for this.

  Word of what was happening in Carbon had filtered out, and those miners who might’ve been tempted by Carbon’s undeniable potential had also heard about the Other Thing.

  So they called Conway Spider, and the name stuck. He made sure it stuck, because in the mining towns that lined the western slope of the Sierra Nevada the way pearls decorated the neck of Lola Montez, a sourdough named Percy wouldn’t be likely to live very long. A man can only survive so many fights, and Conway was several years the distaff side of fifty. So Spider he was and Spider he was glad to be.

  Putting aside his pan for a moment, he fumbled in his kit until he found a tin cup, and dipped it into the creek. Even though winter was still weeks away, the icy snowmelt was still cold and refreshing. Best water in the world, Conway reflected, and if you happened to suck in a little gravel with it, well, maybe you’d get your gold that way.

  The old miner chuckled, recalling the tale of the Chinaman’s Revenge. Way it had come about, down in Placerville, was that several men had refused to pay up for a whole month’s worth of laundry work by one respected Son of Heaven. Since the Chinese immigrants were not worthy of a sheriff’s notice, unless they happened to be involved in a violent altercation with a white man, it was left to the one who’d been cheated to seek recompense in his own way. This the man named Chang had done, and while he never did get his money, he certainly had his revenge.

  Somehow the rumor got started that the three deadbeats had been burying their gold beneath the outhouse on their claim, where none would think to look for it. So naturally a bunch of wild-eyed would-be thieves had snuck out there one night. They’d torn the place apart searching for the hidden lode. None of the three miners had been able to halt the assault, with the result that the disappointed and odoriferous invaders had only departed the following morning, leaving the owners of the claim to clean up the results of the unwanted excavation while clad in their ill-cleaned clothes.

  A smoke would be nice about now, Conway mused, but you didn’t smoke down on the creek. Smoking was purely an after-hours pleasure. Daylight was for panning and sluicing. The high mountains that enveloped the canyon shortened the days, and the light was too precious to waste on relaxation. Time enough for that after a man’s work was done. Sit back for a smoke and your fortune might go tumbling past your propped-up feet, right down the creek. Placer mining was not an occupation for the lazy.

  Not that hard work would automatically make you rich. Carbon Canyon still held out the promise of that first big strike. And promise there was in plenty, if not easy riches. There was plenty of color, and just enough dust to hold a man back from leaving. It was still virgin territory, untouched by the forty-niners who’d picked up the easy gold a few years back. A man just had to persevere. You had to work your way through the upper layer of gravel to get to the paydirt beneath. Everyone knew that, which was why Carbon Canyon had attracted so many good folks on the heels of Conway’s first find.

  No new arrivals for some time now, though. Conway grunted, letting his gaze wander from the fast-flowing waters of the creek up to the nearby
cluster of buildings.

  It wasn’t much of a community, but the promise was there, a different, but in its own way no less exhilarating promise than the kind the creek held. Already a few families had traded in their original tarpaper shanties and lean-tos for more solid structures of lath and log. People were setting up homes in place of camps. Smoke drifted skyward from several stovepipes as the womenfolk who’d followed their men westward bustled about their hard-won kitchens. Their presence was further proof of the incipient community’s vitality. Women didn’t settle in a mining camp unless they had thoughts of living there permanent. Their attitudes infected their husbands. It’s easy for a man to move from one claim to another, but hard to abandon a home. Such thoughts made Conway remember his own wife, remember how he’d come to lose her, and how long ago it had been.

  A deep rumbling that rose above the play of the creek and the stones forced him out of his melancholy. Frowning, he rose to stare downstream. Summer thunderstorms were common enough in these mountains, but it was a mite late in the year for one to boil up over the peaks, and he was danged if he could see a single cloud. Of course, a man could be enjoying his lunch under a clear, warm sky one minute only to find himself racing for cover the next from a deluge fit to tweak Noah’s beard. That was the way the weather was in the Sierras.

  Somewhere a mockingbird trilled uncertainly. Two Stellar jays chased each other through pine branches. Again the rumble, louder this time and sustained. Not thunder. Something else. Though it could be thunder. Spider Conway prayed it was thunder as he put his pan aside and squinted downcanyon. Was that a cloud rising from the lower elevations, or creek mist? But creek mist manifested itself only in the early morning, when the sun was still below the mountaintops. It was midday now, long past the time when such climatic conjurations occurred.

  Megan Wheeler heard the noise too. She turned to stare down the creek. Fifteen going on sixteen (some might’ve said fifteen going on twenty), Megan Wheeler was poised awkwardly between childhood and womanhood. She was blessed with a precocious beauty that reflected both the vibrant voluptuousness of her mother and the sleek good looks of her long absent father.

  She was using both hands to carry the heavy water bucket. Some of the water sloshed out as she whirled to gaze down the canyon. The dog that had been trotting at her heels also paused to eye its mistress quizzically. It wouldn’t be very big even when it was full-grown, an important fact which Megan had used to advantage when she’d argued with her mother about keeping the mutt. Like Megan, it was full of energy and curiosity, half dog and half puppy. It did not turn its gaze down the canyon, but the manner in which its ears perked up showed that it too heard the intensifying rumble.

  Hull Barret was working his sluice in the shade of the huge granite boulder that marked the center of his claim. The small mountain stuck out into the creek, forcing the flow around its immovable base. While he was momentarily glad of the shade, Barret had cursed the huge monolith from the first day he’d begun panning. The big rock squatted right where he would’ve liked to have set up his Long Tom. Nothing to do about it but begin work elsewhere, though. It takes time and money to move mountains, even small ones. Barret had little of either. So the chunk of mountain stayed where it was, a constant taunt to his best efforts. He lavished what little time and as many curses as he could spare on its smooth sides.

  There was concern on his face now as he let loose of the sluice rocker and moved slightly upslope to get a better view down the canyon. Hull Barret was thirty-five. Somehow he managed not to look any older despite a lifetime of doing everyone else’s hard work. The latter was what had driven him all the way across the continent to California and eventually to Carbon Canyon. The work he was doing now was harder than ever, but for the first time in his life he didn’t have to kiss the hem of anyone’s shirttail or bow and scrape in return for a meager paycheck. He was his own master, like the other miners in the canyon. What little he wrung from the creek belonged to him and no one else.

  By now all the inhabitants of the canyon were staring nervously downstream. A man would have to be deaf in order to be able to ignore the sound. It echoed off the canyon walls and rattled the few glass windows in the better-built cabins.

  Conway dumped the contents of his pan on the ground and prepared to run for high ground. As he turned a gleam in the pile of discarded sand caught his eye. The nugget was tiny, barely bigger than a fleck, but a nugget it was. He bent to retrieve it, and felt the weight of it as it rested in his gnarled hand.

  Now don’t that just beat all, he thought, wondering why the find failed to relieve his anxiety over the rising thunder. Apprehensively he pocketed the tiny lump and began to retreat in the direction of his cabin.

  Abruptly the source of the noise hove into view. It was neither storm cloud nor one of the rare earthquakes that occasionally rattled this part of the Sierra. Nine, ten, a dozen horses and riders were pounding up the creekbed at full gallop toward the little community. Spray flew from hooves, creating the cloud that had intrigued Hull Barret. It caught the sun and shattered it into a thousand tiny rainbows just as the horsemen were destroying the peace of the midafternoon. The spray itself was beautiful, but neither miners nor kin thought of standing their ground to admire the transitory beauty.

  “Goddamn!” Conway growled. His fingers clenched and opened helplessly as he watched the riders approach. Then he grabbed up his pan and gear and ran for his cabin.

  Everyone was running; scrambling to recover mining equipment or personal effects, racing for shelter, just trying to get out of the invaders’ path. They were full of despair, panic, and resignation. Disaster had befallen them, and the worst of it was they had come to expect it.

  Not everyone was fleeing from the oncoming horsemen. A small spotted dog chose to stand his ground, barking with feeble ferocity at the far larger quadrupeds that were heading straight for him. As a race dogs are brave but not very bright.

  “Linsey!” Megan Wheeler turned to scream at the pup. It ignored her, caught up by the overwhelming frenzy of the attack. Sharing with the dog a lack of maturity and common sense, Megan dropped the water bucket and raced downslope.

  The horsemen began to spread out to cover both sides of the creek, firing their pistols into the air, yelling and hooting, and trying to do everything possible to add to the general confusion and panic. They were not the sort of men one would invite to a genteel family function, and they were having themselves a high old time wreaking as much havoc as possible. They’d come to Carbon Canyon to have themselves a party. Only the locals weren’t laughing.

  Sarah Wheeler burst out of one of the older shanties set high up on the hillside and anxiously searched the confusion below. Her sharp blue eyes swept the slope, the creekbed, and the forest opposite without finding the figure they sought.

  “Megan? Megan?” Her eyes widened and her face turned pale as she thought she saw a familiar shape darting about in the very thick of the havoc. No one turned to her. She couldn’t make herself heard above the screams of men and women, the neighing of excited horses, and the echo of gunfire.

  None of the many bullets found flesh, however. The visitors were not interested in murder. They’d come to batter the miners’ spirits, not their bodies. A pity, too, some of the horsemen thought. There were so many easy targets, and of the best variety: the kind that don’t fight back. Orders being orders, though, the gunmen restrained their natural impulses, aware that none of the dirtscrabblers now fleeing like sheep would ever think to thank them for exercising this forebearance.

  They chased the retreating miners up the slopes until the grades grew too steep for horses if not panicky men. With the field cleared they turned their attention to the precious equipment that had been left behind. A single voice of defiance could be heard above the noise and disarray. It belonged to the only inhabitant of Carbon Canyon who still had the guts to offer some resistance, and it was a sad commentary that this voice belonged to a half-grown dog.

 
Not everyone ran all the way into the woods. Spider Conway reached his shack and stopped there, unwilling to abondon his home. Hull Barret took up a position between his precious sluice box and the onrushing horde. He gripped a shovel in both hands and waited.

  One rider came close. Barret swung, but the horse was moving too fast and the blow went awry. He overbalanced, was unable to correct for the swing, and went head over arse into the cold creek while the man he’d taken the swing at looked back and laughed.

  The two horsemen following him simply ran over and through the Long Tom, pausing only long enough to ensure that their mounts’ hooves smashed in the sides of the sluice and broke the wooden legs before riding on. Barret sat in the creek and looked on helplessly, holding tight to the useless shovel. There was nothing he could do, not a damn thing, and the knowledge of that helplessness was far more damaging to his enterprise than the ruined sluice could ever be.

  One of the marauders chose to demonstrate his skill with the lariat. The pride he took in his effort was misplaced, since his target wasn’t moving. It wasn’t hard at all to get the loop around one of the supporting legs of a cabin while the other end was fastened to the saddlehorn. A few “gee-up’s,” a quick taste of the spur, and the man’s horse did the real work. The support post pulled away cleanly, collapsing the cabin like a pile of cards. A solidly built structure wouldn’t have suffered so, but like the majority of shelters in Carbon Canyon, this one had been put together more with hope and spit than with expensive nails and good wood. Even so, up until the rider had elected to exercise his cheap skill and bad humor, it had been somebody’s home.

  Now, like much of the invaluable mining equipment that had been abandoned along the creek when the riders first arrived, it was a pile of garbage.

  Sarah Wheeler stepped down off her porch and fought to focus on a single shape running in and out amidst the mass of horsemen. There was fear in her voice.