In a Deadly Vein

MICHAEL SHAYNE said, “So this is what we’ve waited a week to see.” He stood in the doorway of the historic Teller House in Central City, and let his eyes roam pleasurably over the scene.
“I told you it would be worth coming all the way to Colorado to see.” Phyllis stood on tiptoe trying to see over the heads of the crowd swarming over walks and street.
By mid-afternoon of opening day of the annual Play Festival, Central City was beginning to look like the hell-roaring town it would become by nightfall. Since early morning tourists and natives and first-nighters from Denver had been streaming into the ancient mining village wedged between the steep walls of a gulch high in the Rockies — a town built more than sixty years before by rugged pioneers in a ravine so narrow that the creek flowing along the bottom had to be flumed over with stout boards to make space for the business district.
For a pleasant, dreamy week Michael and Phyllis had watched the old town slowly stretch itself and come to life again. Vacationing in the high country had been perfect, with July nights icy, and long, lazy, sunny days for hiking into the mountains pockmarked with tunnels and scarred with placer mines which had produced tons of gold in the Sixties.
A rising tide of excitation was rushing toward a climax of frenzied activity today. Ghost stores were refurbished and opened; small shops that barely eked out an existence eleven months of the year glistened with fresh paint, and counters were replenished with merchandise. All week, miners had been drifting in from the hills, getting their whiskers trimmed and donning new overalls for the Festival. Two deserted buildings on Main Street were transformed into gambling casinos to re-create the spirit of the Sixties and to raise money for charity.
Up and down the steep walls of Eureka Gulch the shuttered homes built by pioneers were opened by new owners who would keep open house during the three weeks of the Festival, and since early morning progressive cocktail parties were the order of the day.