According to Hoyle Read Online Free Page B

the soldiers.
    Dull Knife, the ill-fated leader of the Cheyenne trying to return to their ancient homeland, had been among the first to be buried, put in the ground atop the very ridge the soldiers now searched, his grave lost to the shifting winds of the badlands.
    Stringer related all this to Alvarado, who sat listening obediently just as he always did.
    “What’s that got to do with us?” he finally asked hesitantly.
    “Well, Frank,” Stringer murmured with a small, cruel smile. “They say after he was buried, the Rosebud River started running with gold.”
    “Gold?” Alvarado repeated with a dubious lift to his eyebrow.
    “Gold,” Stringer said with a nod.
    Alvarado stared at him for a moment, then turned his pale eyes back to the soldiers laboring below them. “I don’t understand.”
    “Me neither,” Stringer told him softly. “All I know is that government man wants whatever these boys dig up, and he wants it bad. Our job is to get it for him.”
    “If you say so, Cap,” Alvarado murmured as he looked at the dozens of soldiers below.
    Stringer watched them with eyes that missed nothing. He knew his men were growing restless. He could occasionally hear the snort of a horse or the cough of a man as they waited behind the ridge amidst the cover of the ponderosa.
    But what the government man meant to pay them for whatever the soldiers pulled out of the earth would be worth the wait.
     
     
    “M R . B AIRD , I trust your end of this issue has been taken care of?” the old man asked in a weak, rasping voice.
    “I’m afraid there were some complications,” Baird reported without hesitation. “Stringer is well on his way to do our bidding, but Rose refused to work with us. He then escaped before we could dispatch him.”
    “Escaped.”
    “Yes, sir. Escaped.”
    “How?”
    “Pure luck, I assure you, sir. An earthquake, in fact.”
    “An act of God,” the old man said in his shaky voice. He raised his liver-spotted hand to scratch at his eyebrow. The gold and jewels of the rings on his fingers reflected the light in odd patterns.
    Baird fought not to be distracted by it. The silence fell heavy in the room. Dust motes floated by his head in the shaft of light let in by the frosted window. Baird merely waited for the old man to continue.
    “Very well. Can his knowledge harm us?”
    “Certainly, if ever he were to find all the pieces.” Baird knew better than to hedge his answers.
    “Will he?”
    “He couldn’t possibly, sir.”
    “You believe a man who would be so lucky as to stumble upon an earthquake when one is needed could not possibly have the good fortune to call upon another act of God?”
    Baird pressed his lips tightly together to hide his frustration. “Point well made, sir. What would you have me do?”
    “Kill him.”
    “It’s already in the works, sir.” Baird had hired two men to track Rose down and kill him. The last telegram he’d received had put them somewhere in Nebraska. Baird was confident Rose would find no earthquakes there.
    “And Stringer?” the old man asked without acknowledging Baird’s forethought.
    “He is quite capable. I have given him the bare bones of our orders and he assures me it will be done.”
    The old man smiled. His thin white hair flew in wisps around his head and his heavy eyebrows seemed to weigh down the skin of his forehead, giving him a constant impression of a man scowling. When he smiled his snaggletooth grin, he appeared quite ghastly.
    Baird smiled politely. He knew how this game was played. He’d begun his lengthy career as a Pinkerton agent during the War Between the States. He and others like him had acted as spies for the Union army, repeatedly going behind enemy lines to do the bidding of those with higher rank.
    Baird had risen quickly. After the war, when the Secret Service Department had been formed to help handle the workload of the US Marshals, Baird had been one of the first ones to be recruited. On the surface, the Secret