the High Graders (1965) Read Online Free PDF Page B

r guilt they themselves possess.
    Mike Shevlin knew this because there had been a time when he had himself been guilty. It ha d seemed a great lark to run off a few steer s to sell for a spree in town. And then suddenly h e had wondered how he would feel if those had been hi s father's cattle, or his own.
    There comes a time for a man to draw a line, an d Mike Shevlin had drawn his, and he ha d ridden away from Rafter, from Gib Gentry, Be n Stowe, and all the rest of them. And now he had com e back to a changed town. The old, easy friendshi p was gone. The hospitality of the West wa s no longer here. This town was alive with fear, wit h suspicion, and with hatred, and he, of all people, woul d find no welcome.
    For surely every man here, and every woman too, wa s his enemy. What he had been asked to do and wha t he wished to do were bound together. If he found the ma n who had killed Eli Patterson, he would als o expose the plot to high-grade gold; and if h e did that the prosperity of this town would end.
    What was right, and what was just? Had he the righ t to come into th place and shatter its prosperity? Her e people dressed better, lived better, had bette r houses than in other such towns. There was more mone y spent over the bars, more money in the stores; but with th e prosperity there would be, for some men, a sense o f power. The leaders of all this, the men who created an d planned it, had won acceptance of corruption, an d now there was no limit to what they might ask an d force the town to accept--or was there?
    There must be people here, good people, restless with what wa s happening, people who wanted to be free of fear. Bu t he did not know these people, and had he known them h e knew they would not trust him, not Mike Shevlin.
    What he did he must do alone. And now h e stood there pondering on it.
    Across the street and down a few doors, a man stepped out to the edge of the walk and looked acros s at Shevlin. Mike knew that look, tha t attitude. The man was suspicious.
    To be a stranger in this town, an unaccounted-fo r stranger, was enough to excite fear. Mik e Shevlin's every instinct warned him he was in danger , danger increasing with every minute. These people had bee n parties to theft and had turned their eyes from murde r ... and they would turn their eyes from another.
    There were too many pairs of new boots, to o many expensive saddles here; too many men ha d ivory- or pearl-handled guns. Somebody ha d been shrewd enough to let a whole community get it s fingers sticky. By simply looking the other wa y while the miners high-graded a little gold, the me n who operated the mines had made the townspeopl e accomplices to their own theft.
    Each buyer of high-grade, each tradesma n who accepted it over a counter, took a portion o f profit from the transaction, and because it was known by al l to be stolen gold, they took a higher profi t than usual.
    Eli Patterson and Jack Moorman wer e dead, and they were men Mike Shevlin ha d respected. Each in his way had been kind to th e lonely, half-starved boy who rode hi s crow-bait of a horse into town. Each in his ow n way had helped to make him a better man tha n he had any right to be. ... Some things Mik e Shevlin had told no man.
    It was true he had worked with his uncle on a mining claim, but it was a miserable claim that mad e them a living, no more. And then there had come the da y when the roof caved in, burying his uncle under th e mountain.
    The boy who was Mike Shevlin had walke d away, leading his horse down the mountain because it wa s in bad shape to carry him over the rough terrain.
    The mine tunnel was a fitting grave for hi s uncle, and he lay buried there with the hopes h e had never quite lost.
    Of his father, Mike had never talked. He ha d been killed out on the plains by men who found hi m selling whiskey to Indians. His mother had died a few years later in a miserable shack on the edg e of town, a far-away cow town. But she ha d taught him a