The Thirty-Five Dollar Grocery Bill

Not that Frank James. This one had a day job. He drew wages at the Lost Horse Mine in eighteen ninety-four, and on his day off he went prospecting, and in Queen Valley he found a rich vein. Most of what comes next is Bill Keys, the old miner who ended up owning that mine, talking into a ranger's tape recorder in October of nineteen sixty-six, with a hammer going somewhere behind him the whole time. He wasn't there for any of it, so he's retelling what he was told, and enjoying it. He says cowboys riding the valley saw a big man's track in the sand, going and coming. They were keen as coyotes, he said. They followed it to the gold. "We just go back and we'll set up a scheme," Keys has them saying, "and we'll go up and kill him, and we'll get the mine." Jim McHaney and his men called James out to look at a strike, and their man Charley Martin shot him. Another telling has a forced signature first. Every telling agrees on who got the mine. Martin swore self-defense. James came at him with a knife, he said. And Martin, with rheumatism so bad he could barely walk, had backed fifty feet to reach a gun. Keys loved that one. He said Martin "went backwards so doggone fast" the knife never got past skin deep. The court acquitted him. Keys claimed the attorney Byron Waters, blind by then, told him to his face that he'd fixed the trial. That's Keys's word alone. Then came the first clean-up. Forty-seven thousand dollars in gold sponge, by Keys's count. As McHaney rode out with it, the storekeeper Tingman asked after the thirty-five dollars he owed for groceries. Let me clean out that mill trap, Tingman said, and I'll call it square. McHaney told him to go on. Tingman cleaned up six hundred dollars. McHaney paid Martin forty-seven thousand for his share, Keys says, and calls it pay for the killing. McHaney lost the mine to a bank and later went to prison for counterfeiting. James, Keys says, lies at the Lost Horse well. So here's an old man telling a ranger how a man shot his way into a third of a gold mine, then walked free on a bad leg. The ranger laughs. And behind the two of them, start to finish, that hammer keeps going.