The Fire of Greed by Bill Yenne

fuss, too. Went back up there with a mule train to haul the stuff out.”
    â€œAnd . . .”
    â€œDisappeared without a trace. Never seen again.”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with the Dutchman?”
    â€œWord is that he knows where the Dearing Diggings is, but won’t take nobody in there on account of he likes to work alone.”
    â€œSo the fellows that were talking in here last night are gonna try’n get the Dutchman to take ’em there?” Cole asked.
    â€œGet him to
tell
’em,” the bartender clarified. “The story is that he’ll
tell
you where to go, but he won’t take you. The Dutchman works alone.”
    â€œWhy you figure those other fellas told all this to the two strangers last night?”
    â€œApaches,” the bartender explained succinctly. “Four’s better than two if you’re riding into Apache country. The Chiricahua are still up in those mountains. As the story goes, there’s more gold at the Dearing Diggings than any two men can carry, so sharing it is a small price for being able to get in and get back out
alive
.”

Chapter 7

    TWO MEN HAD BEEN ESCAPING THE LAW WITH A $9,000 payroll, sufficient money to set two men up comfortably for a long time—even in California.
Then
, on the verge of vanishing across the line that could have realistically been expected to keep them safe from the law forever, they had met two men with a story.
    Suddenly, the success of their escape was not enough. The $9,000 was not enough. They had been shown the promise of even greater riches and had succumbed to its siren call. It was like the man who wins magnificently at the tables, and pushes it back onto the table, rather than walking away to relish the fortune that is already in hand.
    Greed is the fuel that feeds the fire of greed.
    Somehow, this is an undeniable aspect of human nature, perhaps not found in all, but certainly not a rare affliction.
    However, the hotter the fire burns, the more likely it is to consume the finer qualities of rational thought, and to tip the greedy toward the cauldron of madness.
    * * *
    BLADEN COLE REACHED LUERA AT NIGHTFALL.
    It was a forlorn little collection of adobe buildings, with a tiny Spanish mission church at one end of town and the inevitable cantina at the opposite end, as though the two were squaring off in a contest over the souls of men.
    If Santa Rita was “damned far from everywhere,” Luera was at the very end of the earth.
    In Santa Rita, the bartender was a man with a proclivity for talk. In Luera, the bartender was a woman of few words. She was a hard-looking character of indeterminate middle age with a leathery face and her hair tied in a knot at the top of her head.
    â€œDo you for?” she asked.
    â€œA shot from that bottle with the orange label over there would brighten my day,” Cole answered. His third in one day when the sun was still up was a record for him, but by the looks of the deep orange light streaming in the cantina’s single window, it was close to being
not
up.
    She poured his whiskey without a word. She may have looked mean and miserly, but Cole noticed that she was not quite so given to cutting her whiskey with branch water as had been the proprietor in Santa Rita.
    â€œYou lookin’ for the Dutchman?” she asked.
    â€œWhy do you ask?” Cole asked.
    â€œMost strangers who come in here
are
lookin’ for the Dutchman,” she explained. “Figured I’d get that out of the way. He ain’t here, but he may come in later.”
    â€œHeard there was some fellas comin’ and lookin’ for him this morning,” Cole said, relishing the closer-to-full-strength whiskey.
    â€œFriends of yours?”
    â€œFriends of friends, sort of.”
    â€œWon’t ask what that means,” she said skeptically. “They’re a bunch of fools. Most who come lookin’ for the Dutchman