Brian Garfield Read Online Free

hurt.”
    Gutierrez backed into the room behind them and Boag heard the door click shut.
    â€œLord Jesus,” the clerk said. “Road agents.”
    From the set of Stryker’s dreamy smile Boag knew enough to feel sorry for the two sentries if they even thought about being brave.
    They didn’t. They let Wilstach take their guns. Stryker stood guard with his shotgun, his eyes half closed in wedges; the clerk and the two sentries sat down on the floor behind the clerk’s counter and Gutierrez held them there at gunpoint while Stryker went to the door and opened it and made hand signals in the twilight, and soon seven men came through the door and helped Boag break into the back room.
    â€œChrist,” one of them said, “I wish to hell it was greenjackets instead of that stuff. Look at how much that stuff weighs.”
    It was piled on pallets in stacks up to a man’s waist, four pallets—pyramids of gold bars stacked up crisscross like loose bricks. In the poor light it glistened. Boag’s breath got hung up in his throat.
    â€œThat’s fine,” Stryker was saying. “Nice and quiet.”
    Boag looked over his shoulder and the dockside was calm: nobody had noticed anything. Yet.
    â€œThrow all that on one buckboard, you gon bust the wagon,” Wilstach warned.
    â€œWe use two wagons,” Stryker said. “Here they come—get back from that door, hey?”
    Boag heard the splintering crackle when crowbars broke the outer padlock hasp. The outside door of the freight room yawed open and two men, sentries, backed inside with their hands in the air. Three of Pickett’s old-timers came in prodding them with guns and after they had a quick look around the room one of them went back to the door and called outside:
    â€œAll rat, brang up ’at wagon.”
    There was the loose rattle of buckboard tires against the dock planking. Stryker said, “Start heftin’, boys.” Boag reached for an ingot and went to lift it off the stack and nearly lost his balance. It was as if the thing was nailed down with railroad spikes.
    â€œJesus.”
    Stryker said, “That’s what you boys here for. Bend your backs.”
    Boag grinned at him and heaved. He got the gold bar off the stack and tucked it under his right elbow and heaved a second ingot up in his left hand and carried the two of them out the side door to the buckboard.
    But he was breathing hard when he came back for the second load.

5
    Eight of them moved the buckboard to the ship’s gangplank—Boag and two others on the yoke, pulling, and the other five at the back of the wagon with their shoulders to it, hauling up on the back spokes of the rear wheels. This was the risk part because now the whole damn town saw what was happening.
    There had been a lot of argument back in camp because Stryker and some of the others didn’t see why you couldn’t just let the Johnson-Yaeger crew load the gold onto the boat themselves. That was where it was going anyway. But Mr. Pickett had ruled that out. The gold was generally one of the last things loaded aboard the ship because it had to be one of the first things unloaded at the Yuma end of the voyage. By the time they would have waited for the express company to carry its own weight aboard, the ship would have been crowded with passengers and crew. That was no good, Mr. Pickett said. The boat had to be as nearly unoccupied as possible.
    It wasn’t just that it made a lot of sweat-work. It was that the whole town would see it happen.
    That was why, Mr. Pickett had explained, you had to have a thirty-man army to carry it off.
    Now Boag was heaving on the wagon tongue and the rest of them were yanking and shoving and the heavy wagon was creaking up the slight pitch of the gangplanks to the low-riding main deck of the Uncle Sam, and back at the shore end of the wharf Mr. Pickett’s men were strung across the pier in an armed line with