Sheriff’s Runaway Witness

Prologue

From the memoirs of Sierra Sam Malone:

I never thought I would live so long. For the fact that I have done so I must give credit to the Man Upstairs, I suppose, but also to three beautiful women, all of whom loved me a sight more than I deserved. Lord knows I never did right by any of them, but maybe there is still time before I die to make up for some of the wrong I did. I sure do mean to try.

Telling the story-the whole truth…well, I reckon that’s as good a place to start as any.

Part One-Elizabeth

That day outside of Barstow when the railroad bulls beat me senseless and threw me off the train and left me to die in the desert wasn’t the first time Death came for me and went away empty-handed. Not the first time, but I thought for sure it was the last, and my last day on earth before I’d even reached the ripe age of eighteen. It would have been, too, if not for a bit of crazy dumb luck…and a sweet bit of a girl named Elizabeth.

I don’t recall much of that day, and even if I did I wouldn’t bore anybody to death telling about it. I do recollect that it was April, and the desert was blazing hot in the daytime and freezing cold when the sun went down. I know I walked when I could and crawled when I couldn’t walk anymore, and tried to take shelter in the heat of the day underneath any kind of bush big enough to offer a morsel of shade. I know I got more prickles than comfort from that effort, and that I was plain fool lucky I didn’t try to share some rattlesnake’s midday napping place.

For some reason-instinct, I reckon, or Divine Guidance, or maybe it was just because, being a mountain boy born and bred from the green hills of West Virginia, and I had no wish to die in the desert-I didn’t try to follow the tracks back to Barstow but instead kept stumbling my dogged way toward the mountains I could see off in the distance. Could just as well have been a mirage, but it wasn’t. It was mountains, real ones, and something in me told me there might be water there, somewhere.

Well…if there was water in those barren hills it eluded me, and I knew the sands in my hourglass were fast running out. I won’t die like a dog on my belly in the dirt, I told myself, and with my last ounce of strength, rose to my feet to shake my fist at the heavens and that terrible killing sun. And as if to punish me for my defiance, at that moment the earth fell out from under my feet, and down, down I fell, rolling and tumbling in a torrent of rock and sand…down, down until I fetched up finally in the bottom of a gully, skinned up and bloodier than the railroad bulls had left me.

Once I’d shaken the cobwebs out of my head and the sand out of my whiskers, I saw something in the side of that gully that nature hadn’t put there: a hole, it was. A hole big as a man is tall. A hole dug by men. And in that part of the country, there was only one thing it could be, and that was a mine.

Now, as I said, I’m from the hills of West Virginia, and I know a thing or two about mines. One thing I knew was that a lot of the time there’s water to be found in those mines, water that can take life as well as give it.

Well, I didn’t hesitate. I scrambled up the side of that gully like a madman, clawing my way with bleeding hands. When I got inside the cave and the blessed shade enveloped me, I could smell it. I’d heard tell of animals-horses and cattle and such-being able to smell it, though I’d never thought it had much of a smell, myself. But in that moment I knew it did.

Water.

Yes, sir, I could smell water somewhere in that mine tunnel, and I stumbled my way toward it like a crippled moth fluttering its feeble way to the flame. Deeper and deeper into that tunnel I went, until it was too dark to see my hand in front of my face. I felt my way along the walls, and when my feet got wet I fell to my knees, then flat on my face in that blessed pool. An underground spring, it was, and it had flooded that mine, as water has a way of doing, often to the woe of the miners unlucky enough to get trapped by it. But that day it saved one poor soul, and that was yours truly, Sam Malone.

I drank my fill and then must have passed out for a spell, and when I opened my eyes next I thought I’d died after all. There was light where there shouldn’t have been, a soft, golden glow, and I recall thinking, Lord, I don’t know how or why but I made it to Heaven! Because where that light hit the water and the walls of that mine tunnel, it gave back a sparkle, a shine I’d only heard about in the stories men told around the fires in the hobo camps alongside the railroad tracks. I understood, then, the madness that drove men to leave everything they knew and the kinfolk that loved them, throw it all away to follow the lure of the gold.

Could it be? In awe, almost in a trance, I dipped my hand into the pool of water and held it up to my face and stared at the flecks that stuck to my skin. Yep, no doubt about it-it was gold.

Before my brain could get to understanding what had happened to me, before I could think what kind of miracle I’d stumbled across, the light moved and sent my shadow dancing long and crooked across the tunnel wall. And a voice spoke to me from the blackness behind the light.

“You’re trespassing.”

That is how I found my first treasure. Her name was Elizabeth.

She had the face of an angel, but any notions I might have had about being in Heaven went flying straight out of my head when I saw, by the light of the lantern in her hand, the shotgun she carried cradled in one arm and leveled straight and true at my heart.