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Synopsis
Welcome to Dead Broke, Colorado. Where all that glitters is not gold—it’s silver. Where miners and grifters get rich or go broke. And where the money flows like blood . . .
JOHNSTONE COUNTRY. COLORADO OR BUST.
The town got its unusual name when a pair of brokedown prospectors accidentally dropped a stick of dynamite in the Rockies—and unwittingly unearthed a massive vein of silver. One of the two men dropped dead from excitement. The other one named the place “Dead Broke” in honor of his dead broke companion and declared himself mayor of a brand-new mining town. Mayor Allane Auchenleck—better known as Nugget—put Dead Broke on the map. But when the silver market takes an unexpected nosedive, the bustling boomtown goes bust . . .
And all hell breaks loose.
Almost overnight, Dead Broke turns into a lawless hotbed of angry out-of-work miners and out-for-blood merchants. In desperation, Mayor Nugget considers a few hairbrained schemes like bringing in mail-order brides, building ice castles to attract tourists, even planting other minerals in the mines to fool investors. But Dead Broke needs law and order, so Nugget sends for top gun Mick MacMicking. Of course, a notorious gambler named Connor Boyle has other plans—and with his band of hired guns he plans to blow Dead Broke off the map to get what he wants.
For this town to survive, Nugget, Mick, a drunken lawman, and a woman gambler will have to put the dead back in Dead Broke . . . and some cool-hand killers in the ground.
Live Free. Read Hard.
williamjohnstone.net
Release date: April 1, 2025
Publisher: Pinnacle Books
Print pages: 416
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Dead Broke, Colorado
William W. Johnstone
But then, most wastrels on This Side Of The Slope would have pointed out that Allane Auchinleck was seldom sober any morning, any afternoon, any evening. Any day of the year. Since he had barely found enough gold in Colorado’s towering Rocky Mountains to pay for good rye, he brewed his own whiskey. It wasn’t fit to drink, other miners would agree, but it was whiskey. So they drank whatever Allane Auchinleck was willing to sell or, rarely, share.
Auchinleck charged a dollar a cup—Leadville prices, the other miners would protest, but they paid.
After all, it was whiskey.
And in these towering mountains, whiskey—like anything else a man could buy or steal in Denver, Durango, Silverton, or Colorado Springs—was hard to find.
Besides, Auchinleck usually was so far in his cups that he couldn’t tell the difference between a nickel and a Morgan dollar. For most miners, one cup usually did the job. Actually, two sips fried the brains of many unaccustomed to a Scotsman’s idea of what went into good liquor. Two cups, a few men had learned, could prove fatal. Auchinleck held the record, four cups in four hours—and was still alive to tell the story.
Although, it should be pointed out that those who had witnessed that historic drunken evening would swear on a stack of Bibles—not that a Good Book could be found this high up—that Auchinleck’s hair, from topknot to the tip of his long beard, wasn’t as white, but had been much thicker, before he passed out, not to awaken for three days. That had been back in ’79.
But then, Auchinleck was accustomed to forty rod, and it was his recipe, his liquor, his cast-iron stomach, and his soul, the latter of which he said he had sold to the devil, then got back when Lucifer himself needed a shot of the Scotsman’s brew.
On this particular glorious August evening, with the first snow falling at eleven thousand feet, Auchinleck was drinking with Sluagdach. Most of the miners had already started packing their mules and moving to lower, warmer—and much healthier—elevations. Some would head south to thaw out and blow whatever they had accumulated in their pokes. Many would drift east to Denver, where the heartiest would find jobs swamping saloons or moving horse apples out of livery stables. Others would just call it quits as a miner and find an easier way to make a living.
But not Allane Auchinleck. “Mining is my life,” he told Sluagdach, and topped off his cup with more of his swill.
“Aye,” Sluagdach said. “And a mighty poor life it has been, Nugget.”
Nugget had become Auchinleck’s handle. There are some who say the Scotsman earned that moniker because of his determination, and not for his lack of profitable results. More than likely, the moniker had stuck to the miner like stains of tobacco juice because Nugget was a whole lot easier to remember or say than Auchinleck.
That was the year Sluagdach came in as Auchinleck’s partner. It made sense, at the time (though Sluagdach was a touch more than just fairly inebriated) when such a partnership had been suggested in a tent near the headwaters of the Arkansas River.
They both came to America from Scotland, Auchinleck had pointed out. They could enter this deal as equals. Nugget still had his mule; Sluagdach had had to eat his. Sluagdach had a new pickax, while Nugget had been the first to discover that Finnian Kuznetsov, that half-Irish, half-Russian, had run into a she-bear with two cubs and had not been able to raise his Sharps carbine in time. The she-bear won that fight, and the cubs enjoyed a fine breakfast, but Nugget had given the Russian Irishman a burial and taken the shovel and pack, and a poke of silver, and Kuznetsov’s boots and mink hat. Although he did not let his partner know, Nugget had also found the dead miner’s mule (lucky critter, having fled while the she-bear and cubs enjoyed a breakfast of Kuznetsov), which is how come Nugget brought a mule into the partnership, his own having been stolen by some thief, or having wandered off to parts unknown while its master slept off a drunk.
“I said,” Sluagdach said, raising his voice after getting no response from his drunkard partner, “that a mighty poor life it . . .” But the whiskey robbed his memory, as Nugget’s whiskey often did.
“Who can be poor when he lives in this wild, fabulous country?” Nugget said, whose tolerance for his special malt had not fogged his memory or limited vocabulary. “Look at these mountains. Feel this snow. God’s country this is.”
“God,” Sluagdach said, “is welcome to it.”
That’s when Nugget, against his better judgment, reached into the ripped-apart coat that he had also taken from the dearly departed dead miner and pulled out the poke. By the time he realized what he was doing, the poke had flown out of Nugget’s hand and landed at Sluagdach’s feet.
The muleless miner stared at the leather pouch, reached between his legs—he did not recall sitting down, but that Scotsman’s liquor had a way of making men forget lots of things—and heard the grinding of rocks inside. It took him a few minutes for his eyes to focus and his brain to recall how to work the strings to open the little rawhide bag, and then he saw a few chunks fall into the grass, damp with snow that hadn’t started to stick.
No matter how drunk a miner got, he was never too far gone not to recognize good ore.
“Silver,” he whispered, and looked across the campsite at his partner.
“That’s how Leadville got started,” Nugget heard himself saying.
“Where was his camp?”
After a heavy sigh, Nugget shook his head.
“Best I could tell,” he explained, “he was on his way down the slope when ’em cubs et him.”
“To file a claim.” Sluagdach sounded sober all of a sudden.
Nugget felt his head bob in agreement.
One of the nuggets came to Sluagdach’s right eye. Then it was lowered to his mouth, and his tongue tasted it, then it went inside his mouth where his gold upper molar and his rotted lower molar tested it. After removing the bit of ore, he stared at his partner.
“This’ll assay anywhere from twenty-two to twenty-five ounces per ton.”
No miner on This Side Of The Slope and hardly any professional metallurgist from Arizona to Colorado would doubt anything Sluagdach said. No one knew how he did it. But he had never been more than an ounce off his predictions. Sluagdach had never made a fortune as a miner, but his good eye, teeth, and tongue knew what they saw, bit, and tasted.
Unable to think of anything to say, Nugget killed the bit of whiskey remaining in his cup, then belched.
“Where exactly did that ol’ feller got et?” Sluagdach asked. His voice had an eerie quietness to it.
Nugget’s head jerked in a vague northeasterly direction. Which he could blame on his drunkenness if Sluagdach remembered anything in the morning.
Finnian Kuznetsov had met his grisly end in a grizzly sow and her cubs about four miles southwest.
“Think this snow’ll last?” Sluagdach asked.
“Nah.” It was way too early, even at this altitude, and, well, twenty-two to twenty-five ounces per ton had to be worth the risk.
They set out early the next morning, finding the hole where Nugget had rolled Finnian Kuznetsov’s remains and covered them with pine needles and some rocks, which had been removed by some critter that had scattered bones and such all over the area. Then they backtracked over rough country, and around twelve thousand feet, they found Sluagdach’s camp.
Two months later, they had discovered . . .
“Not a thing,” Sluagdach announced, although he used practically every foul word that a good Scot knew to describe that particular thing.
By then, at that altitude, winter was coming in right quick-like, and their supplies were all but out. This morning’s breakfast had been piñon nuts and Nugget’s whiskey. Sleet had pelted them that morning; Sluagdach had slipped on an icy patch and almost broken his back, while Nugget’s mule grew more cantankerous every minute.
“We’ll have to come back next spring,” Sluagdach said.
With a sad nod, Nugget went to his keg of whiskey, rocked the oak a bit, and decided there was just enough for a final night of celebration—or mourning—for the two of them.
It was a drunk to remember. Sluagdach broke Nugget’s record. “Shattered it” would have been a more accurate description. Five cups. Five! While Nugget had to stop drinking—his own whiskey—after three.
It wasn’t because he couldn’t handle his wretched brew. It was because he now saw everything. He saw that Sluagdach would dissolve the partnership. Sluagdach would come back to these beasts of mountains and find the Russian mick’s discovery. Sluagdach would go down in history. Allane “Nugget” Auchinleck would be forgotten.
Auchinleck. What a name. What a lie. He remembered way back when he was but a lad, living near the Firth of Clyde in the county of Ayrshire on Scotland’s west coast and his grandfather, a fine man who had given Nugget his first taste of single malt when he was but four years old, had told him what the name “Auchinleck” meant.
“A piece of field with flat stones,” the old man had said.
It had sounded glorious to a four-year-old pup of a boy, but now he scoffed at it all. A piece of field with flat stones. Oh, the stones were here all right, massive boulders of granite that held riches in them but would never let those riches go. And flat?
He laughed and tossed his empty cup toward the fire.
There was nothing flat on This Side Of The Slope.
That’s when Allane Auchinleck decided it was time to kill himself.
He announced his intentions to Sluagdach, who laughed, agreeing that it was a fine, fine idea.
Sluagdach even laughed when Nugget withdrew a stick of dynamite in a box of dwindling supplies. Laughing? That swine of a Russian mick. No, no. Nugget had to correct his thinking. Sluagdach was a Scot. The Russian mick was Finnian Kuznetsov, dead and et by a Colorado she-grizzly’s cubs.
“I’ll speak lovingly of you at your funeral,” Sluagdach said, and he cackled even harder when Nugget began to cap and fuse the explosive.
It wasn’t until Nugget lit the fuse by holding the stick over the fire that Sluagdach acted soberly.
For a man who should, if the Lord was indeed merciful, be dead already, or at least passed out, Sluagdach moved like a man who really wanted not to be blown to bits.
He came charging like that she-bear must have charged the old Russian mick, and the next thing Nugget recalled was his ears ringing and the entire ground shaking. Somehow, Sluagdach had knocked the dynamite away, and it must have rolled down the hill toward that massive rock of immovable stone.
Nugget could not recall the explosion, but his ears were ringing, and he felt stones and bits of wood and more stones raining down upon him. They would cover him in his grave. Peace of earth. God rest this merry gentleman.
“You ignorant, crazy, drunken fool.”
That was not, Nugget figured out eventually, the voice of St. Peter. He sat up, brushing off the dust, the grime, the mud, the sand, and looked into the eyes of his equally intoxicated fellow miner. His partner.
He didn’t think anyone would call him sober, but he realized just how drunk he was—and how close to death, real death, he had come.
“Oh . . .” however, was about all Nugget could muster at that moment.
“Oh.” His partner wiped his bloody nose, then crawled out of the rubble and staggered toward the smoking ruins of part of the camp they had made.
“Mule!” Nugget remembered.
The brays gave him some relief, and as smoke and dust settled, he saw the animal through rocks and forests about three hundred yards away. It appeared that the tether had hooked like an anchor between some rocks and halted the beast’s run for its life. Otherwise, the mule might be in Leadville by now.
Maybe even Omaha.
He started for the animal, but Sluagdach told him to stop. “Come up here!” his pard demanded.
Well, Nugget couldn’t deny the man who had stopped him from killing himself. He climbed up the ridge, where he looked down into the smokiness.
He could smell the rotten-egg stench of blown powder. And he could see what one stick of dynamite could do. It had created a chasm.
And unveiled a cave.
“Get us a light,” Sluagdach said.
Somehow, the campfire still burned, and Nugget found a stick that would serve as a torch, so they walked, slipped, skidded, and slid down into the depression and toward the cave.
“Bear,” Nugget remembered.
“If a silvertip was in there, it would be out by now,” Sluagdach argued.
They stopped at the entrance, and Nugget held the torch into the opening.
The flame from the torch bounced off the left side of the cave. Slowly the two men staggered to that wall, and Nugget held the torch closer.
“The mother lode,” Sluagdach said.
He didn’t have to smell and taste the vein of silver to know that. What’s more, when they moved fifty yards deeper into the cavern, the torch revealed something else. At first, Nugget thought it was an Egyptian mummy. He had seen an illustration in one of those newspapers he could not read.
But this wasn’t a mummy. He held the torch higher, praying that it would not go out. At least there was no wind here to blow it out.
“It’s . . .” Nugget could not find the words.
“The biggest . . . chunk . . . of silver . . . I ever . . . did . . . see.”
I am dead, Nugget thought. Or I’m dreaming.
His partner stuck his dirty pointer finger in his mouth, getting it good and wet, then touched the gleaming mummy that was a statue of precious metal.
The biggest nugget Allane Auchinleck had ever seen. The biggest one anybody had ever seen.
Maybe he was dead after all.
Sluagdach brought his pointer finger, sloppy with his slobber, and rubbed it on the giant nugget. It was shaped like a diamond. A diamond made of pure silver.
Sluagdach then put his finger back in his mouth.
His eyes widened.
“It . . . I . . . I . . . aye . . . aye . . . It . . .”
That’s when the wind, or something—maybe Sluagdach’s giant gasps at air—blew out the torch.
And Sluagdach collapsed in front of the silver diamond.
Nugget never knew how he did it, but he found his pard’s shoulders and dragged him out into the fading light of the camp. The old man stared up. But his right hand gripped the coat above his breast, and the eyes did not blink.
“Your ticker,” Nugget whispered.
Yes. The sight of that strike . . . it had been too much for a man, even a man who had downed five cups of that lethal brew.
That meant . . .
Nugget rose. “No partner.” He ran back to the campfire, found a piece of timber, part of the suicidal destruction he had reaped, and stuck it in the coals till the end ignited. The wood must have been part pitch, because it blazed with a fury, and Nugget raced back down, past his dead pard, and into the cave, where he held the blazing torch again.
It was no dream. No drunken hallucination. It was . . . real . . . silver . . . the strike of a lifetime.
He ran back, ready to mark his claim and get his name onto a document that made this . . .
“All mine.”
When he stepped outside, it was dark. He walked slowly, using the timber as his light, and stopped in front of the body of his poor, dead pard.
“I won’t forget you,” he whispered to the unseeing corpse. And in a moment of generosity, he proclaimed:
“You’re dead, and I was broke, but Colorado will remember us forever, because I’m naming this mine and the town that’ll grow up around it ‘Dead Broke.’ That’s it.” He felt relieved.
“Dead Broke, Colorado.” He nodded. The flame seemed to reflect in the dead man’s eyes, and maybe it was because of the light, but he thought Sluagdach nodded in agreement.
“Dead Broke, Colorado,” he said again. “Because who would want to work and live in a place called Sluagdach Auchinleck?”
From The New York Daily Comet
“The town of Dead Broke, Colorado, high in the fabled Rocky Mountains, was burying two miners, a lady of the night, a gambler, and a city policeman when I exited the stagecoach on a crisp autumn day.”
That’s what I wrote in my tablet as soon as I learned from Slick Gene, the constable of this vibrant—and, as you readers likely have deduced, violent—town after stepping out of my conveyance, which the citizens in this remote town call a city.
Slick Gene went on to explain that the two miners got into a fight over who would buy the first drink for the lady of the night, the gambler decided to bet on the miner with the pearl-handled derringer, and the city policeman stepped inside, either to drink the special mixture of gunpowder, egg shells, one plug of chewing tobacco, and grain alcohol that was aged ten days in an oaken bucket and then sifted through a straw hat, or to collect his payment from the owner of the establishment, who happened to also be the betting gambler.
What happened next won’t be positively known until we find the dearly departed in the afterlife—as the only persons inside the establishment at the time of the, perhaps, misunderstanding, were the gambler, one John Smith, owner of the appropriately named Smith’s Place; the raven-haired sporting woman, known as “Raven”; Sweet’s mine employee Sean “Irish” O’Rourke; Granite Mine Company employee Mac “Scott” O’Connor; and city policeman John Jones.
Slick Gene says that John Smith was shot four times, stabbed twice, and that his head was bashed in by a heavy spittoon. Raven was shot twice and stabbed four times. Irish was shot five times, and Scot the same; Jones was beheaded with an ax.
“This will be some funeral, and your gravedigger will be quite busy,” I comment.
“Well . . .” Slick Gene offers me a cigar, which I accept, and he takes another for himself and lights both fine smokes. “It ain’t the record. Seven got kilt last year, but that wasn’t contained to one bucket of blood, as it spilt out onto the street and ended in Chin Lee’s Bath House.”
He stops to remove his hat as Raven’s coffin passes, Slick Gene being a gentleman.
“As far as the gravedigger”—his hat is returned to his curly black hair—“Jenkins the undertaker owns the lot where we plant ’em, and he has graves dug six at a time. So they’s ready. Kids like to play hide-and-seek all the time there.”
He sees the perplexed look on my face.
“Orphans,” he explains. “And come fall, we’ll have about twenty graves dug. Can’t dig graves after the hard freezes come. And hard freezes come early this high up on This Side Of The Slope.”
The last coffin passes.
Well, it is not a coffin. The only coffin was Raven’s. Wood is not scarce, though many trees have fallen to be turned into cabins and homes and businesses and privies, but most bodies are wrapped in bedrolls or sheets or the heavy winter coats of the deceased. Newer residents who have found rich veins of silver are now building frame homes, and bricks and stones are being freighted in from Greeley, Denver, Pueblo, and Colorado Springs. The mayor of Dead Broke paid for the lady’s coffin, which was brought in from Denver. It was originally bought for a mine owner who died of natural causes, but the delivery was delayed.
“We had us a hot spell,” the lawman says. “Rare for us. And Mr. Albany started to ripen up, so we just used the best quilt he had. Mr. Albany was a generous fellow. Just ask any of those on his payroll. So we figgered he would have donated his casket to that handsome woman. He sure did like the ladies.”
A boy beats a drum as he follows the last of the dead and a handful of mourners.
Slick Gene and I smoke our cigars for a moment, then the lawman says, “You’ll be wanting to see the mayor.”
It is not a question. “That would be most helpful.”
“I figgered,” Slick Gene says. “That gal from Denver wanted to talk to him. So did the scribes from Harper’s, Frank Leslie’s, San Francisco, Tombstone, Colorado Springs, Boston, London, Paris, Omaha, Cheyenne, San Francisco—no, I already said San Francisco—Salt Lake City, Denver—but that Denver inkslinger was a man, not the woman who come first—New Orleans, and Kansas City. Well, Nugget ain’t shy. He likes to talk. I’ll take you over to his place.”
Nugget is the duly elected mayor, and the miner whose strike led to this bustling, if somewhat rowdy, city two miles above sea level.
His name is Allane Auchinleck, but in this rapidly expanding boomtown, he is called Mayor “Nugget.” The nickname comes from one of the geological wonders of our Western territories and, indeed, the world.
Roughly one year ago, Nugget found one of the richest silver veins—in a cave that was unearthed by a stray stick of dynamite. The mayor gladly allows me inside his home, a three-story masterpiece of wood, where his den houses the great miracle of silver—a nugget, shaped like a diamond, that weighs 1,776 pounds. On occasion, Nugget says, he used to chip some off when he was short on cash, but now that his mine is working shifts around the clock and his company has expanded into three other mines that aren’t as productive as Dead Broke No. 1 but certainly bring envious looks from less fortunate operators, his credit is good across Dead Broke, Colorado, and, indeed, our entire United States.
“If I ever wanted to see England or Germany or Africa, I guess my credit would be good in them places, too,” he says. Then grins. “And if it wasn’t no good, I’d just buy the country for myself.”
The gem is one of the wonders of the world. Four guards, each armed with four pistols, a shotgun, and a Winchester repeating rifle, are on duty every minute of every day. Six men have been killed trying to steal this fortune, three killed outright, and three more hanged after a speedy (three minutes is indeed speedy) trial on the front porch of the wonderful home of Mayor Nugget.
Dead Broke, dear readers, is far from broke.
As I sip fine bourbon on the covered and screened porch of Mayor Nugget’s home, the peals of hammers, the whines of saws, the snorts of oxen, the squeaking of heavy wheels of wagons, the songs of workers, and the curses of mule skinners come from all directions. Dead Broke constantly grows. More and more people arrive, some to seek their fortune in the rugged mountains, others to take their fortunes from men and women who live and work here.
My first sight of a bloody and ghastly shootout is far from all one finds in this magnificent city. Although I stopped counting the number of saloons at 43 and the number of brothels and cribs after 69, I have found three theaters—Othello was being staged on my first evening by a troupe from London at the Camelot, while a reading of Milton was scheduled at the Paramount and a burlesque attracted a standing-room-only crowd at the Dead Broke Entertainment Hall. One can find the usual beef houses and cafés with checkered curtains, but there are six Chinese restaurants, three places serving spicy chow from south of the border, a French bistro, four German names, and Jake’s Italian Q-Zeen. There are four doctors, two dentists, nine undertakers, three cobblers, sixteen livery stables. The population is 9,889, Mayor Nugget tells me.
One of the guards beside the Diamond Nugget clears his throat.
“Them five that got kilt yesterday,” he points out.
Our fine, bearded, rail-thin mayor laughs, and he faces me. “How many folks was on that stagecoach you rode in on?”
“Twelve inside,” I say, “three in the boot, six up top. Plus me.”
Nugget looks back at the guard who had spoken.
“Take away five, that’s ninety-eight eighty-four. Plus twenty-one . . . Hey, Nugget, we’ve topped ten thousand. Not even counting the inkslinger, since he’ll be going back East.”
“That’s cause for a celebration,” Nugget says, and he takes me to the Paramount for a performance—and no one cares to hear my argument that Dead Broke is still ninety-five living residents short of ten thousand.
But aged bourbon and a wonderful ballet make me forget about such picayune thoughts. The air is fresh when we depart the theater, the skies so close one can almost touch the stars, and even at ten in the evening, Dead Broke is alive and well. Banjos and tinny pianos play all across this city.
Slick Gene is killed the next day. Shot in the back.
“Dagnabbit!” Mayor Nugget roars. “Now we’re below ten thousand. That’s it. I’m bringin’ real law to this city! I’m sendin’ fer Syd Jones.”
“Syd Jones!” I cry out.
Syd Jones, the lawman who tamed Denver. Who tamed Laramie. Who cleaned up Tucson and Dodge City. Who shot it out with the Jones Gang in Prescott, Arizona Territory, and buried all four of them. The hero of fifty-nine dime novels—of which I penned four of the liveliest and best-selling, and highly recommend Slick Syd; or, The Silver Star’s Chase After the Dirtiest Scoundrel in Arizona Territory—and the man who could light a match in a woman’s mouth from forty-four paces with a single shot, blindfolded, and fired over his left shoulder without peeping.
“That’s right . . . we’re bringin’ law and order to Dead Broke, so folks will stop writing that ‘Dead’ is what Dead Broke is all about.”
Yes, Dear Readers, Dead Broke is changing. Dead Broke is losing its roughshod, violent ways. Syd Jones will tame this town. And as the silver keeps coming in. . .
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