But instead of shooting people everyday, Jeb found himself battling paperwork pretty much constantly. There were all kinds of things for the city to press on to him from city hall. The clerks there couldn't pen out enough of these God damn slips of past due, like they worked for the bank directly. As he sat at his desk and flipped through a few of the receipts of nonpayment and realized that even when he tried to figure out if city hall and the bank were different he couldn't tell. The city stamped everything with the same to insignias at the same time.
The phone on the wall rang. Jeb looked at it like he would a snake that he met on a desert trail somewhere. Except he couldn't have his horse trample this snake. He had to answer it. Jeb got up and slowly walked over to the shaking box on the wall, with it's strange speaker that jutted out of the box itself and the thing that he had to take off the hook and speak into.
“Hello,” Jeb said.
“Jeb, this is Herbert,” Herbert said. “There is something very important that I need you to attend to with the utmost urgency and discretion.”
“Anything you say,” Jeb said.
“Yes, well, of course,” Herbert said. “But I need you to go to the old gold mine, on the edge of the factory town that I own. There seems to be some kind of bandit activity going on there. We aren't exactly sure what is happening, but we need you to saddle up and check it out anyway. Sorry I don't have more information for you.”
“No, that's fine,” Jeb said. “Just give me a little bit of time to ride out there, scope the place out and make my way in to see what the deal is.”
“Do what you need to,” Herbert said. “You have all legal authority to get the job done. And feel free to deputize men along the way if that will help you somehow. Just take care of it, all right?”
“Sounds good, boss,” Jeb said.
Jeb went out to the horse tie off and mounted up. It would be a long ride to the gold mine if he messed around. The ride out to the mind proved to be a little more complicated than Jeb had figured it would take. His horse hadn't yet acclimated from being in Mexico and kept getting spooked really easy. Usually this wasn't such a big deal but Jeb left his office right at five o clock, when everyone was rushing home from work for the day. Eventually he got to the mine, though, and tied off his horse in a thicket about a hundred meters away from the entrance. He didn't want to take any chances. If there were bandits in the mine then they very well might have left someone to watch the entrance with a high powered rifle and some kind of scope. Jeb didn't have anything like that, and didn't even bring his rifle with him from its scabbard on the horse. It just didn't make sense to him to bring a long gone when he was going to be descending into the earth. He had a six shooter and plenty of ammo on his waist and that was enough for Jeb.
Jeb slowly made his way toward the entrance of the mine, careful to try to keep trees or some kind of obstruction between himself and direct line of sight with the mine. It was slow going. Finally Jeb found himself at the mouth of the mine. The mouth itself was wide, and had two railroad tracks coming out of it. Above the tracks the mine was bordered over fairly well, but in the boards itself a makeshift door had been cut out. It looked fresh, as if whoever was in the mine now had down it was some kind of carpentry tools. Jeb didn't know what to make of that, or the fact that people were even hiding in a mine. It didn't really make a whole lot of sense to him. And how anyone knew that people were in the mine to begin with was the what had really started to interest Jeb the more he thought about it. Herbert wasn't telling him something and Jeb knew it. Something fishy was going on, but Jeb didn't have time to figure everything out before he went in the mine. He wished he did.
The new door slid to the side for Jed and he made his way into the mine. From the mouth Jed could tell that at one point this had been a very busy mine, but from the placement geographically he could also tell they had chased a shallow vein that had seemed like the mother load of gold at first but had quickly petered out. He wondered how many people had lost their homes after investing in all of the equipment it must have taken to create the level and evenly graded pathway into the ground.
Jed wondered if he would just come down a single tunnel to find the bandits, so he walked slowly. He was careful not to make any noise or kick any dirt loose. The tunnel was dark but Jed wasn't far enough away from the opening in the earth for it to be so dark that his eyes couldn't adjust to see. But if he went much further into the ground he would no doubt in trouble He needed to locate whoever or whatever was in the mine, be it bandits or children, and tell them they needed to beat it. At least he hoped it would be that easy. Jed felt lazy though, wanting there to be nothing for him to do in the mine. Maybe he had gone soft sitting at the desk for a few months already. No, it was the way Herbert hadn't told him the whole story. Something was fishy, and Jeb knew it. He hated walking into things someone wasn't telling him everything about even though they could.
Jeb moved careful, one foot after the other down the gently sloping tunnel. Just when he was about to turn around and head back to the mouth of the tunnel with the intention of riding back to town and buying some torches, he heard a sound not too far off. Jeb squinted into the blackness trying to see what was ahead of him and could only barely make out a gentle curve in the tunnel.
“I'm telling you,” a voice said from around the bend. “We should just kill her, like we said we were going to do.”
“No,” another voice said. “It shouldn't matter that just a few of you have lost the nerve to go through with it. We blackmail him with the unborn child, become rich, and then enjoy being rich.”
“Real funny, asshole,” said yet another voice. “Here we are in this super serious situation and all you want to do is tell stupid jokes about how we are going to get rich and enjoy being rich. When really there is a good chance that the sheriff is one his way here right now.”