In a Deadly Vein by Brett Halliday Page A

joints open?”
    “No more big ones like these city fellers’ve put up for the festival. Slot machines around most everywhere, an’ there’s a poker game runnin’ down to the pool hall. Small stakes, I reckon.”
    “Bryant wouldn’t be interested in small stakes,” Shayne told him. “He’s a plunger.”
    “Tell you what.” Strenk lowered his voice and tugged at Shayne’s sleeve. “I heard talk about a backroom game bein’ mebby open tonight. Not for no charity. Regular ol’ time gamblin’. It’s sorta secret-like, but I reckon you’re awright—not bein’ the real law.”
    “Hell, no. I’m not the law. Haven’t even a private license in this state.”
    “It’s down the street here—couple of buildin’s past Windrow’s store.” Strenk’s flapping jeans led the way past the old bank building on the corner, across Eureka Street and east, past the dark fronts of shuttered buildings on the north side of the highway leading in from Black Hawk.
    “Right acrost yonder,” Strenk pointed south across the bottom of the canyon to the steep barren slope rising beyond, “is our ol’ cabin—Pete’s an’ mine. You can see it in the daytime, settin’ there all by itse’f—”
    He stopped abruptly, sucking in his breath. “Looks like a light up there right now. That’s what it is. See it yonder?”
    His voice and his pointing finger shook with excitement.
    Shayne saw a light flicker like a will-o’-the-wisp a couple of hundred feet up the opposite slope and some distance east. It flickered out as he looked.
    “Ghost lights,” Cal Strenk whispered, awed. “Nobody up there now with Ol’ Pete dead. Ghost lights. That’s what. Ha’nting our ol’ cabin.”
    The light appeared again in the cabin high on the slope. It shone steadily.
    “That’s a flashlight,” Shayne scoffed. “Ghosts aren’t that modern. How do we get up there?”
    “They’s a path right acrost the street here. Leads over the end of the flume an’ up the hill. What you reckon—”
    “I don’t reckon,” Shayne said curtly. “I want to take a look.”
    He started across the street.
    Strenk loped ahead of him, past a gasoline pump and down the sharp slope to the bottom of the ravine where the wooden flume emptied into the gulch east of town.
    Their shoes thumped hollowly on the flume, mingling with the rushing sound of water that snarled downward; then they were following a narrow path angling up the rocky, precipitous incline.
    The old miner went steadily, bent forward at the waist, as sure-footed and long-winded as a mountain goat. Shayne strained to keep pace with him. His heart pounded mightily and his lungs worked like bellows, striving to draw in enough of the rarefied atmosphere to keep him going.
    They were halfway up the hill when the sharp report of a pistol spanged through the high stillness from the cabin above them.
    Cal Strenk stopped abruptly and Shayne stumbled into him. The echo of the single shot continued to reverberate between the rocky walls of the gulch for a long time. There was no light in the cabin now. It was cloaked in darkness and in silence.

 
CHAPTER TEN
     
    “SOUNDED LIKE A PISTOL SHOT,” Cal Strenk faltered. His hunched figure looked shrunken.
    Shayne demanded, “Is there another trail away from the cabin?”
    “Nope. You can mebby slide down an’ ford the crik to the road on the other side if it ain’t flooded too high from that rain in the mountains. You got a gun, Mister?”
    The pistol Shayne had taken from one of Bryant’s men sagged in his coat pocket. He drew it, gave Strenk a light shove.
    “Go ahead. You know the trail. Drop to the ground if we meet anyone.”
    Strenk hunched his body for balance on the steep slope and moved upward as silent as an Indian. Shayne followed clumsily, straining his ears for further noise from the cabin. The only sound in the thick silence was the rumble of floodwaters from Clear Creek below them, and an occasional echoing shout from the lighted