Sundance 32: Gold Strike (A Jim Sundance Western)

By Peter McCurtin

Riding through Nevada, Jim Sundance came across one of the biggest gold strikes the Territory had ever known. A lucky break, the gunman thought ... until he went to nearby Orono to stake the claim. Millionaire miner Jackson Selby, who ruled the mining town with an iron fist, got wind of the half-breed’s strike and wanted in on the action. But Sundance wouldn’t sell, even though he knew the consequences. So Sundance and a band of die-hard prospectors and drifters dug in at the mine and prepared to face Selby’s marauders. Death would determine the ownership of this gold mine!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Piccadilly
• Release date: Jan 1, 2024
• ISBN: 9798215240434

Peter McCurtin

Peter J. McCurtin was born in Ireland on 15 October 1929, and immigrated to America when he was in his early twenties. Records also confirm that, in 1958, McCurtin co-edited the short-lived (one issue) New York Review with William Atkins. By the early 1960s, he was co-owner of a bookstore in Ogunquit, Maine, and often spent his summers there.McCurtin's first book, Mafioso (1970) was nominated for the prestigious Mystery Writers of America Edgar Award, and filmed in 1973 as The Boss, with Henry Silva. More books in the same vein quickly followed, including Cosa Nostra (1971), Omerta (1972), The Syndicate (1972) and Escape From Devil's Island (1972). 1970 also saw the publication of his first "Carmody" western, Hangtown.Peter McCurtin died in New York on 27 January 1997. His westerns in particular are distinguished by unusual plots with neatly resolved conclusions, well-drawn secondary characters, regular bursts of action and tight, smooth writing. If you haven't already checked him out, you have quite a treat in store.McCurtin also wrote under the name of Jack Slade and Gene Curry.

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Riding through Nevada, Jim Sundance came across one of the biggest gold strikes the Territory had ever known. A lucky break, the gunman thought … until he went to nearby Orono to stake the claim. Millionaire miner Jackson Selby, who ruled the mining town with an iron fist, got wind of the half-breed’s strike and wanted in on the action. But Sundance wouldn’t sell, even though he knew the consequences.

So Sundance and a band of die-hard prospectors and drifters dug in at the mine and prepared to face Selby’s marauders. Death would determine the ownership of this gold mine!

SUNDANCE 32: GOLD STRIKE

By Peter McCurtin

Copyright © 1979, 2024 by Peter McCurtin

This electronic edition published January 2024

Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

You may not copy, store, distribute, transmit, reproduce or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by means (electronic, digital, optical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book

Text © Piccadilly Publishing

Editor: Kieran Stotter

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Chapter One

SUNDANCE WAS SCOURING the frypan with rough creek sand when he saw the gold. If he had turned away while he threw out the water he wouldn’t have seen it at all. But there it was, just a few flecks in the bottom of the pan, dropping to the bottom as he swirled the water. It was a bright morning in early summer and the Nevada hills were bare in the sun. The creek ran down from the mountain and miles below it emptied into a small blue lake. Rimmed by rocks and spruce, the lake was clear and deep and birds made ripples on the mirrored surface.

Sundance scoured the frypan until it was shining clean and dug the rim into sand and gravel. After picking up the pebbles, he swirled the water in the pan, then tilted the pan and poured it out, and there it was again: gold! The brownish-yellow metal that men dreamed of, killed for. The stuff of murder and betrayal and despair. He emptied the pan and moved up along the creek and tried another panful. Gold glittered again, not in the bright way of the newspaper stories or in the tales of back-room prospectors, but there it was. This was just a trace, but it was the heaviest he had seen for a long time. If he had been a white man he might have whooped at his good fortune, but Sundance merely went back to his campfire and drank another cup of coffee.

Eagle grazed along the edge of the creek, tearing at the lank yellow grass, stopping now and then to drink, then moving on. A squirrel ran up a tree and down the other side, ducking its head out to look at the tall, buckskinned man hunkered down by the fire. Sundance dug into his food bag and threw a handful of dried apples to the squirrel.

It was more than a trace. He knew it. If there was gold down here, there had to be more higher up. He looked up at the hills that flanked the creek. Up there, and maybe not so close to the creek. This was no Sutter’s Mill and he didn’t expect to find any nuggets. But there was gold up there waiting to be taken out. He wondered how they had missed it, for this part of Nevada was gold country. A day’s ride from where he was lay Orono, second biggest gold camp in the territory, a tough mining town famous all over the West for the handful of men who had grown rich there.

He tossed another handful of apple slices to the squirrel. Another squirrel showed up and they started to fight. Maybe they had missed the gold here because they hadn’t looked in the right place. Gold was everything they said it was: faithless, tricky, elusive as a good woman. You could pan miles of a creek or a shallow river and find nothing, not a speck of color. There were so many stories about gold; even a few could be believed. It was said that old Frank Finney, now a millionaire, was ready to give up prospecting when his ancient dog died. Old Frank dug a hole to bury the dog and found gold. Sure as hell, he had found it somewhere.

Panning the length of the creek wouldn’t yield that much, Sundance knew. Working the creek wouldn’t pay more than pretty good wages, and maybe not even that. There would have to be a mine, a sluice to be built, a lot of hard work shoveling and dumping. The loudmouths always talked about a vein of gold; how thick the vein was depended on who was telling the story. There were such veins, but he had only heard of them; gold you could pick up off the ground usually wasn’t gold. Mostly, gold gathering took time and long months of work, even some money if you wanted to do it right.

It looked like he was going to be in Nevada for a while. There was too much gold to ignore, but that’s what he would have done if it hadn’t been for the battle he’d been fighting half his life. It took more than bullets and blood to fight for the Indians; some cases couldn’t be won with a gun and had to be thrashed out in the courts. That lawyer in Washington was a good man but he couldn’t fight the Indian Ring with promises. That took money, always more money, and he hired out his gun to get it. It was an uphill battle and the victories didn’t come close to balancing the defeats. Other men spent their lives in the pursuit of money or power or fame. Sundance could have had all three, and more, but getting a square deal for the Indians was what he cared about more than anything else.

That’s all I got left, scrounger, Sundance said to the squirrel. He didn’t want to work in any damn gold mine no matter how much he took out of it. It went against the grain to be stuck in any one place for too long. The long days of backbreaking work was the smallest part of it. As soon as he figured where to start a shaft he would have to ride into Orono and register the claim. Then came all the buying of supplies and equipment: lumber, pickaxes, shovels, some dynamite. And as soon as he registered the new claim he could expect the hills to be flooded with prospectors ranging from runaway store clerks to grizzled old sourdoughs who had dug for the yellow metal all the way from Mexico to Australia. If he took the time to listen, they would burden him with offers of partnership backed up by everything but hard cash. It had been his experience that men who talked of fast, easy millions seldom had the price of a night’s lodgings.

After he stowed his gear away, Sundance walked up along the creek. Past a solid rock shelf where the creek dropped a few feet, he tested another pan of sand and found nothing and didn’t expect to. He climbed a slope that ended in a tall bluff above the creek. It went up fairly straight for about a hundred feet, broken in places and tangled with thorn brush. There had been a rock slide during the last few years and the exposed roots of dead trees stuck out of the side of the bluff.

When he reached the bluff he ran perished rock fragments through his fingers. This was where he would stake his claim; nothing would be lost if it didn’t turn out as rich as it looked, as he hoped. He cut a green stick with the Bowie knife, split it partway from the top, then wrote his name and where the claim was on a sheet of paper. It had to have a name so, smiling, he wrote The Three Stars Mining Company. Smiling, he knew that General George Crook, his oldest friend, known to the Indians as Three Stars, would not be flattered, not even pleased, but he did it anyway. He folded the paper and placed it in the cleft in the stick, then bound up the open end with a strip of rawhide. The ground was hard so he had to anchor the claim marker with a pile of stones.

It was time to go to town.

Orono was in a long, wide valley that ran for miles, and what once had been a river ran through the middle of it. Above the town it was dammed and a steam pumping station had been built for the mines. On both sides of the town the hills were bare and brown where they weren’t gouged by the digging of men and machines. The town ran along on both sides of the river, with wooden or iron bridges here and there. The town had two streets or one very wide main street if you didn’t consider the river as a divider. Both streets were lined with saloons, boardinghouses, stores, eating places. Some of the buildings were new raw-red brick with the cement showing white in the cracks. The bank was brick and so was the Wells Fargo depot, and out past the town, mostly made up of unpainted frame houses, was the straggle of a tent city. Smoke from the town mixed with the smoke and steam from the mines. The mines dominated the town and the valley; the great squat shapes of the mine buildings dwarfed everything else, even the denuded hills on which they were built.

Sundance didn’t like anything about the town of Orono. It was the kind of place he had avoided all his life. An ordinary town was bad enough, with people crowded too close together, all the spite and viciousness, but Orono could hardly be called a town. Other than the gold in the hills surrounding it, it had no reason for being. And when the gold was gone, when the big steam crushers and separators had extracted the last ounce, then the mines would close, the machinery would be moved away, any worth the cost of moving, and the town would die. Iron would rust, wood would rot, and the sun and wind would do the rest.

The thunder of the crushers boomed all along the valley and far into the hills. Sundance heard it long before he caught sight of the town. Powered by steam, the great driving wheels clanked and banged day and night, filling the valley with noise. It would be the same winter or summer, and at night the treeless hills would glare with naphtha lights. It was still morning but the saloons and eating places were crowded with men from the mines, men from everywhere. Mechanical pianos jangled under the burden of noise that seemed trapped between the town and the dirty brown sky that lay over it. Men turned to stare at Sundance as he rode in, at the tall copper-skinned half-breed with buckskins and yellow hair, shoulder long and stirring in the breeze. The men of the town were drab like the town itself, canvas-coated, wearing muddy miner’s boots, sullenly aware that this stranger on the great stallion was like no other man they had seen before. They made way for him and they gaped, a few muttering their resentment of the man and his appearance.

The claims office was beside the bank, a sturdy one-story frame building with a wide porch and a sign over it. Men stood on the porch trading mining talk or arguing in loud voices. Talk stopped abruptly when Sundance climbed down and threw a hitch on the rail and went inside. Before he opened the door the men on the porch were already gathered around his horse, commenting on the saddle, the fact that there was no brand of ownership. Eagle whinnied and Sundance turned to set them straight.

Don’t get too close, men. That animal doesn’t take to strangers. Leave him be, a favor.

One of the prospectors was mostly drunk and maybe he considered himself a wag. What would he do if we didn’t let him alone? Looking into Sundance’s hard blue eyes, he added, Just asking is what I am.

He be likely to kill somebody, Sundance said. Be neighborly now. Leave him be.

In the claims office the air was rank with sweat and smoke, and there was one long room with a smaller one behind it. The floor was rough plank, dirty and boot scarred, and on the other side of a long counter two men in their shirtsleeves were yelling for order. One of them wore a green eyeshade to cut down on the glare of the hanging lamps. He was middle-aged and fat and short, took himself and his job seriously, and was having trouble making himself heard because he had a high, thin voice.

I told you and I told you, he piped irritably. Just because you’re in a hurry makes no matter to me. If somebody steals your claim before you get back, that’s your business, mister. Every goddamned week you’re in here with the same goddamned story, always in the same goddamned hurry. Now line up with the rest of them. Form a line there, you men. No business will be conducted in this office till you fellows form a line.

The man he had been yelling at was old, bent backed, dressed in a dirty wool coat with patches all over it. The seams on his face were so deep they looked as if they had been done with a knife. His hands had no more shape than lumps of seasoned stove wood.

Didn’t I just tell you I’m sitting right on top of it this time, he bellowed. If you wasn’t such a fool you’d know my business here is mighty pressing. You want to beggar me afore I get started.

You been a beggar all your life, don’t go blaming me for it, the fat man said, winking over the top of the old sourdough’s head.

Some of the others joined in, tipping the old man’s hat over his eyes, tapping him on one shoulder, then on the other. A big, bearded man with a belly like a bass drum elbowed the old prospector away from the counter and banged his fist on it. The old man would have fallen if Sundance hadn’t caught him. One of the men reached out to snatch the old man’s hat and his laugh died when Sundance caught him by the wrist and held it in midair until the man turned red in the face.

You don’t want his hat, you got a hat of your own, Sundance said. Now, sir, he said to the fat man behind the counter! I believe this man has business with you. Do him a favor, see to it."

The fat man sensed the force in Sundance and he retreated into bluster. He’ll have to wait his turn, whoever you are. Don’t be telling me my job. Anyhow, no claim of his is worth a damn.

Break the rules just this once, Sundance said. He was at the counter, but he got pushed.

The bearded man turned quickly for all his size. You want to start up with me? You saying I pushed this old rat? That’s right, I did.

"That’s right, you did, you