Dead Warrior
Authors: John Myers Myers
by
John Myers Myers
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
TO —
ERNEST JEROME HOPKINS
who has not only seen but
ridden the elephant
A Town Sought
1
FIRST THERE WAS THE STAMPEDE to Powder Keg, which I did not join. It emptied out Three Deuces, though, leaving me the choice between going elsewhere and staying on as resident hermit of a ghost town.
Three Deuces was an eight-saloon camp on the right bank of the Little Buck, just below where it cut through the granite cliffs of the Rinkatinks. Civic boosters claimed it to be the biggest town in that part of southern Colorado. As there was no other town to speak of within a hundred miles, the claim stood unchallenged.
The news of the Powder Keg bonanza was brought to us in May of 1877. A Wednesday afternoon, it must have been, for I was meeting my duties as city magistrate by playing poker with the mayor, the city clerk and the town marshal. Sometimes there were other municipal obligations, and if so they were attended to. The ritual of the Wednesday afternoon poker game made it certain that we would all be on deck to do so.
I had been in the West less than a year. It was thus a matter of pride to me that in Three Deuces I was a figure of modest importance. This good fortune had come my way, my greenness notwithstanding, for two reasons. One was the quick
eye of Blackfoot Terry McQuinn, who had caught my predecessor in the act of moving chips from a losing card on the faro layout to a winning one. The other was the poor judgment of Magistrate Cadwallader Brown, who had thought he could beat the dealer to the draw.
Inquiry had turned up the fact that I was the only surviving resident with any legal training. I had in fact, and under duress, once read law for nearly three months. It was sufficient in Three Deuces, where I had learned to pronounce judgment in the off-the-cuff way of Solomon rather than with the technical precision of Coke and Bacon.
On the afternoon in question the deal had gone around several times when Tom Cary kicked the door of city hall open. He dropped his overcoat on the floor before taking a chair. In May the snow hadn’t vanished from up in the Rinkatinks, and driving stage over them was cold work.
Cary was an unofficial member of the city hall crowd by virtue of being our chief link with the outside world. Twice a week he drove in from a jerkwater supply point called Chuckwalla, bringing the mail and whatever else in the way of news the railroad or telegraph line might bear. At sight of him we laid down our hands and waited. This was Tom’s big moment, and we knew from experience that he would not be hurried.
One of the advantages of being city officials was that we never had to go to the post office for our letters. Cary, who helped sort the mail at Chuckwalla, held out correspondence directed to any of us. There were letters sticking out of the pockets in his broad stretch of flannel shirt, but there was no chance of getting them until he had jammed a plug of tobacco into his wind-reddened face. When he had softened the chew to the point where he could speak with comfort, he drew forth the letters, while we held our breaths.
“And one for you, Baltimore,” he finally said.
Mail was always a disappointment to me. I looked forward to the arrival of letters as eagerly as anyone else. The trouble was, though, that I had no correspondents from whom I was anxious to hear. The girls I had known in the East had either got married or found somebody to dally with who was there to handle the job. An occasional old crony still wrote to tell of business affairs and field sports in Maryland; but I had never been interested in the first and no longer had shares in the second. The only other possibilities were relatives of the generation old enough to take family ties seriously.
The handwriting told me that this letter came from my dead father’s older brother. Because he seemed to hope for so much from me, with all the stubbornness with which lost causes inspire some high-minded gentlemen, he had the power to move me to gloom. He did so now in a note that showed how far apart two people with friendly feelings for each other can be.
M
Y DEAR
M
OSBY:
We were all greatly gratified to learn of your elevation to the bench. It was my first intimation that you had followed up your legal studies, a pursuit in which I had thought you insufficiently interested, although I never doubted your capacities, once you had made the decision to apply yourself.
The confidence shown in you by your fellow citizens is ample proof that you have found your proper calling. May I say, however, that I hope you will not limit your talents to the narrow sphere of municipal politics. A prolonged association with politics on any level lower than that of a member of Congress — which I think might fairly be your next goal — is a handicap to an attorney, who marks himself as being considered unfit to deal with large affairs.
Do not take this word of caution as belittling your progress
to date. For a young man of 27, who had but the merest smattering of law when you left here last year, you are doing remarkably well.
Affectionately,
D
ANIEL
C
ARRUTHERS
P. S. I understand that your mother is well.
The postcript made me grimace. Although now remarried, my mother had never forgiven my uncle for surviving the late war, in which he had served the Union cause, while my father had given his life for the Confederacy. As a divided state Maryland was in some ways an unhappier place than the ruined deep South, which was one reason I had been moved to get out of it.
Stuffing the letter into a jacket pocket, I took note of my colleagues. As editor of the Three Deuces
Democrat
, for which I myself worked on a part-time basis, Dick Jackson had more mail than anyone else. His long, sharp nose was still pointed at one of several communications when Cary spoke up again.
“When the mail come to Chuckwalla yesterday I spotted a letter for Fred Wilkins.”
“You’ll have a hard time delivering it,” I said. “The grizzly that walked off with part of Fred and the wolves that got the residue didn’t leave any forwarding address.”
“That’s what I know. Three weeks ago, wasn’t it?” Tom milked his quid and let fly out the window. “Well, I figured that if a man had took the trouble to write a letter somebody ought to read it, so I did.”
He had so clearly found something he thought of general interest that nobody interrupted him with questions. “It was from Mike James, who used to be a prospectin’ partner of Fred’s,” Cary went slowly on. “He said to keep it secret, but
he had made a big strike up by the falls of the Powder Keg.”
That didn’t excite me, but the others came to the alert like pointers that have just spotted quail. “Anything to it?” asked Sam Wheeler, the city clerk. He fiddled with his drooping mustache, blond where it didn’t show traces of gray, the way he always did when in earnest. “I mean have you heard anything but a squeal of ‘Eureka’ from one hunch-drunk prospector? If there’s really bullion in the rock, he’d yell loud enough to start an echo, anyhow.”
“The train engineer had heard somethin’ from a chippie he was with in Pueblo the other night.” Cary spread out his booted feet and tipped his chair back. “Them things’ll never be secret until prospectors stop tomcattin’ when they hit town.”
“Is it supposed to be big?” Town Marshal Jim Powers knocked his stack of chips over when he leaned forward to put his elbows on the table, and he started picking them up with his thick, blunt fingers. “Of course, I know the strikes all sound like there’s gold clear through to China, when you hear about ’em, but what do you think?”
“I go by what Mike James said in his letter more than anythin’ else,” Cary answered. “Mike’s seen too many diggin’s to get excited for nothin’ at all.”
“Let’s play poker while we think it over,” Wheeler suggested. “How many chips are you buying, Tom?”
They played with a lack of zeal that puzzled me, but from which I profited. I had just raked in a pot on the strength of one pair and a lot of gall when Mayor Jackson spoke musingly. “This camp wouldn’t last much longer anyway.”
“They’re still mining plenty of gold here,” I protested.
“Yes, but it’s getting so they have to work up a sweat for it,” Sam remarked. He fed the pot and peered at Cary. “Going yourself?”
“Well, I got a stage line, but it’s no good if there ain’t no town to serve,” Tom told him. “That’s what I thought I’d find out about when I brung the news.”
“We ought to face the fact that we’ve been going downhill for some while,” Dick pursued his train of thought.
“That’s right,” Powers agreed. “The gamblin’s fallen off.”
“I don’t see how you make that out,” I said, as I signaled for two cards. “We’ve got eight saloons, and six of them run some sort of game every night.”
“There should be eight,” Wheeler declared. “What’s more, the stakes are shrinking like drying rawhide. Not being an alarmist, I hadn’t wanted to bring the subject up until we’d spotted a better town to run, but it’s been a matter of deep civic concern to me for some while.”
“The real indication that we’re slipping is that the top-notch dealers no longer give us time.” Dick shrugged slim shoulders. “We haven’t had a real headliner since Blackfoot Terry lit out after making a carcass of the Honorable Cad Brown.”
“You used to have a string of them,” Cary said. “Why you even had Droop-eye Peters and Dolly Tandy.”
There was brooding silence as I raked in chips for the second time in a row, and the deal passed to the mayor. “Dolly Tandy,” he murmured, closing his eyes over a vision he evidently found choice. “You weren’t in camp when she was here, were you, Baltimore?”
I had heard a great deal about the beauty, charm and cleverness of this female gambler, but not much I was inclined to believe. More fascinating were the two queens Dick proceeded to deal me.
“No,” I said, peeling a couple off my stack of blue chips. “She and Peters were both before my time.”
“We should have known we were on the skids when they
left,” Dick continued. “I’m not ringing Miss Tandy into a rat-and-sinking-ship parable — or if she’s a rat, I’d take pleasure in being a well-acquainted rodent of the opposite sex — but these real high-rolling dealers are the first to smell carrion when a camp starts to die.”
“All that’s needed to knock out the props is a short-fuse blast about a new find,” Wheeler said dreamily. “Are you going to put it in your paper, Dick?”
“Of course he won’t,” Jim said. “There’ll be enough ahead of us as it is.”
If I hadn’t just drawn a pair of sevens to go with my queens I would have paid more heed to the implications of his words. As it was, my attention didn’t leave the game until Dick spoke, a couple of minutes later.
“The
Democrat
doesn’t have to be the Three Deuces
Democrat
. It could serve truth and the public just as unflinchingly in Powder Keg.”
“What’s wrong with Three Deuces all of a sudden?” I demanded. My query was not unreasonable, as up until the past twenty minutes Jackson had been the town’s most vociferous advocate. “As for this other place, it doesn’t exist. All you’ve got to go on is a rumor picked out of the dead-letter office.”
Nobody seemed to think my objection worth noticing. “I’ll put out an extra this afternoon,” Jackson decided.
“Anybody want to buy a stage line?” Cary asked.
Powers was as displeased as I was, but for a different reason. “You’re loony, Dick. How’re we goin’ to get ahead of the rush, if you tip off a lot of gents that maybe have faster broncs than ours?”
“How’re we going to be sure of getting elected, unless there are enough people around the new joint whose votes we can count on?” Jackson wanted to know. He put his cards down and laced his hands behind his mop of dark hair. “We’ve got
a complete slate here. I figure we could organize the town, if we follow the precept of the rebellious but sage General Forrest and get there first with the most.”
“They’ll be grateful to Dick for letting them in on the ground floor, and we can coast in on his coattails,” Sam commented. “Some will drift to other places when this burg breaks up, but we can count on keeping the hog’s share of our enfranchised stud.”
Like Jackson, he was all but in a town which as yet had no known inhabitants but Fred Wilkins’s former partner. Gazing at the rest, I read the same news. They didn’t want to believe there was anything further to be said for the place where they were. They were as avid for change as women for new fashions, and nothing else would suit them.
That much I saw. I was still so ignorant of the West as to doubt that their feelings would be shared by the remaining townspeople. I myself did not share them, being well content where I was. Three Deuces was the first place I had ever been where I had been accepted on terms at once agreeable to myself and to society.
“I’m staying here,” I growled. “Is anybody going to see me?”
“Loyal but lonesome,” Dick said. “There won’t be anybody here
to
see you pretty soon. You’d better come along, Baltimore.”
“We need you on the ticket,” Sam declared. “You look like the kind of fellow who would know something about law, even if you probably can’t tell a mandamus from Hangtown Jennie’s bustle.”
His words nailed down a curious fact about me. Below brown hair that usually managed to stay neatly in place I had a set of noble-Roman features which poorly represented nine tenths of my character. I appeared so like the ideal young
professional man that some members of my family could not be persuaded that my tastes were in general those of an inquiring opportunist. It was largely to escape the resultant difficulties that I had gone West.
Yet it was the odd tenth of my nature, a moral strain which sometimes rose up to plague me, which found itself responding to the present situation. To begin with, it had been stirred to life by my uncle’s letter. My appointment as magistrate had struck me as a huge joke, and I had spread news of it in the faith that others would be as amused as I. The reaction of Daniel Carruthers, himself a distinguished member of the bar, had reminded me that other people did not find judicial responsibilities funny.
Wheeler’s appraisal of my legal knowledge hit upon this sore spot before it had had time to heal. In place of giving the counterthrust he had every right to expect, I looked at him glumly.