The Note on the Door

You're climbing into Johnny Lang's country. What would you give for a seam of gold? He offered Dutch Frank Diebold one thousand dollars, if it proved out. It proved out, and that was the start of his troubles. Lang had come out of Texas in the early eighteen nineties with his father's cattle, and the gold bug bit him. He took in partners to hold the claim against the cowboys, and on December twenty-ninth, eighteen ninety-three, they located what became the Lost Horse Mine. You ought to know who's telling you this. It's Bill Keys, who didn't arrive until about nineteen ten, more than fifteen years late, so he was passing on what he'd been told. One historian called storytelling his "sustenance, a reprieve from a sentence of almost permanent loneliness." Keys said J. D. Ryan came to suspect Lang of swiping gold amalgam from the plant, and hired a detective, who "got the goods." One evening in the cookhouse Ryan laid it out. Take several thousand dollars for your share, or go to jail. Lang sold. The land records may not back that up, but the story that stuck is his. Lang didn't go far. When the mine went quiet he came back and moved into that same old cookhouse, with his stove on a boxed-in stand of earth and his bed alongside. Whenever he got hungry, he went out and shot one of Barker's cattle. And he dug. Keys swore Lang had buried stolen amalgam around the millsite. Lang said his gold came honest out of his arrastre, his own little ore mill. Keys said nobody could pull over forty dollars a month from that thing, and he ought to know, because he'd bought as much as nine hundred dollars of that gold himself. He admitted it unblushingly. By nineteen twenty-five, Lang couldn't keep himself fed. One January day, nineteen twenty-six by most accounts, he put a note on his cabin door and set off for town. About two months later they found him wrapped in his bedroll, and they buried him where he lay. Keys set up a white headboard, eighteen fifty-three to nineteen twenty-six. Later he swapped it for a rough granite slab and, for some reason, changed the last date to nineteen twenty-five. I can't tell you what was on that note. I keep turning it over. An old man alone, weak with hunger, and he stops to leave word on the door. Then he pulls it shut and starts down the road, like a man expecting company.