Dead Warrior (16 page)

IN ANTICIPATION OF THE PAN-WESTERN appraiser Duncan had promised to have call upon me, I visited my claim for the first time in weeks. Approaching, I noticed rock piled by a freshly dug shaft.

The man standing by it caught up a rifle and waited for me to dismount. “Nice day to shoot somebody what ain’t got no business here,” he observed.

Down below in the shaft the sounds of shoveling had stopped. “Well, I thought I had,” I said. “This claim happens to be mine.”

Lean and hatchet-faced, my immediate opponent looked tough, but when his eyes flickered sidewise toward the shaft, I knew his weakness. He didn’t like to act alone.

Nevertheless, he tried to face me down. “This was maybe yourn up till a few days ago. Seein’ as how you wasn’t doin’ nothin’ with it, me and my pardner done took it over.”

“Call him up,” I suggested. “I’d like to talk to him, too.”

Actually his associate was already clambering out. I could hear his feet scuffling against the wall of the shaft; and a minute later I could see his head out of the corner of my eye.

The man confronting me could not forbear to glance toward
his badly wanted ally. When he did so, I knocked his rifle askew and, with the aid of my revolver, relieved him of it. The other fellow had scrambled erect by then, but as I had marked where his pistol belt was folded atop a keg of powder, I didn’t interfere.

This second man was a heavy, curly-haired knave who looked too seasoned in the wars to have blundered as his comrade had just done. He growled at the latter before he turned to scowl at me.

“I’m Baltimore Carruthers,” I said, “and I’ve had this claim since before there was a town here. Clear out.”

Neither was known to me, even by sight. There were now so many people in Dead Warrior that I didn’t know half of them, where once every face had been familiar. It was plain from their faces, though, that they knew me, or knew of me.

“We didn’t know it was your claim,” the curly-haired fellow said, “though somebody would’ve told you, when we was ready to prove on it. We’ll get off now seein’ as how this mud brain let you get the drop on us, but if you want us to stay off, you’d better see Ace Ferguson.”

This surprised me. Violence and thievery, singly or combined, had always been the products of individual enterprise in Dead Warrior. Now I found myself up against a gang and its lord.

“Where do I find Ace?” I demanded.

“Any saloon you catch him in,” I was told.

Upon my return to town Short-fuse told me that Ferguson was a former San Francisco citizen, lately come to Arizona. After trying ten other places, I located him in the Sultan’s Palace. Its main function was that of a dance hall, but there was a gambling room in the back. Ace was pointed out to me as one of those sitting in on a poker game banked by Bill Overton, who had moved his headquarters from Tucson.

At my request Overton halted the game between deals. “A couple of claim jumpers tell me you’re their backer,” I put it to Ferguson. “How’s for calling them off my property?”

He was a dark man with the long lines of his face sharpened to meanness. His look of alert suspicion was of the cast native to the city dweller, and he aggravated me by giving me a cosmopolitan-to-bumpkin glance.

“I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “I’m playing poker.”

With my left hand I swept his chips to the floor. “You’ve just quit,” I told him. “What about those men on my claim?”

He had a gun in a hip holster, for I could see the bulge it made beneath the flap of his jacket. I was also watching for him to produce some other hideaway, but his hands stayed empty as he rose to lean against the otherwise hastily vacated table.

“Let’s see; you run the stage and freight lines and a couple of more things, don’t you?” he mused. “What’s it worth to you to get your claim back?”

“I haven’t lost my claim,” I snapped. He looked so amused that I lost my temper altogether. “Draw if you don’t believe me.”

He stopped smiling, but he didn’t move. “Where I come from it ain’t nice to shoot where somebody might see you. Now if you work your claim, or sell it to some outfit that
will
work it, there won’t be no doubt as to who owns it. But if you want to just sit on it, you’ll have to make up your mind whether it’s cheaper to hire guards or pay me.”

That was in the morning. During the afternoon a Mr. Dan Smiley, representing a new mining brokerage, called on me. His visit seemed timely, for I felt an impulse to sell, thus getting rid of the trouble my unexploited property was causing me. The price Smiley offered, on behalf of some unnamed client, was so low, however, that I wound up by telling
him not to bother me further until he was ready to talk sense.

“That’s funny,” he said, sticking his cigar into his sack-of-pudding face and cocking it at an angle. “Ace Ferguson said you wanted to unload.”

After he had gone I thought it all out. Dead Warrior was almost living up to Seth Potter’s expectations. Six lesser companies were now digging gold, and the two big ones had increased their output by working two shifts. Meanwhile claim owners were cashing in on their holdings, either by working their mines in a small way or by leasing or selling outright to the growing number of capitalists who now prowled the region.

Everybody had money. It welled up out of the earth, to be funneled through prodigal pockets into the gambling saloons and dance halls of the town. Recently, though, one faintly sour note had been struck. A limit had been placed on what had at first seemed the infinite, when intensive investigation had at length defined the scope of the ore field.

Up to that time prospectors had been selling claims on the theory that they could find replacements by scratching gravel a few miles farther out. Mining companies had no doubt had the same idea, and it was the discovery that they were wrong which had launched a race to get possession of as many of the available claims as possible.

Ferguson’s gang I could tag as one by-product of that competition. I could see something else, too. What Ferguson had told me, when declaring his repugnance to witnessed shootings, was that if I didn’t sell to one company or another I would be bushwhacked.

When I believed I understood the basic facts of the case I rode out to the Dead Warrior Mining Company to see Irah Weaver. Dick Jackson was conferring with the mine superintendent,
when I reached the latter’s office. I had time to smoke a whole pipe down before Weaver called to me, where I stood watching the wood-burning steam hoist bring up gold-veined ore.

“What can I do for you?” Irah asked, when we were seated in the room where his uncle had once threatened to scalp him. My visit didn’t surprise him, as his company was a client of our freight line. “We have all the cordwood we need for the present.”

“How are you fixed for mining claims?” I asked him.

Weaver had taken on quite a bit of weight, and it showed when he shoved the flaps of his jacket back and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “Well,” he said, “we might be willing to make you an offer.”

“I’m not selling,” I told him, “but the funny thing is that a Mr. Smiley thought I was, too.”

Although his eyes remained blank while I related the details of the Ferguson-Smiley incident, I was convinced that I was not telling him news. He overdid the pose of ignorant indifference, and his comment was self-betrayal.

“I have nothing to do with the purchasing of property,” he said, forgetting that he had just mentioned the possibility of making an offer for my claim. “As for the other outfits, they may be up to no good, but that’s none of my concern.”

“In other words, you know your company’s buying on Smiley’s market, and you think Pan-Western and the rest do the same,” I translated. “How many men have been strong-armed out of their claims so far, would you say?”

At that he hardened his face to show that he felt there was nothing I could do about it. “Go ahead and suspect us, if you have nothing better to do. Personally I’m pretty busy, Carruthers.”

Back in town I dropped around to the
War Whoop
, where
Jackson was engaged in looking over the issue he had just published. “Some of these mining companies are starting to crowd people out of here,” I began.

“Old stuff,” he yawned, when I had enlarged somewhat on that statement. “The
War Whoop
takes note of the fall of even the tiniest buzzard, so you’ll have to come around a lot earlier than you did this time, if you seek to amaze us.”

“I’m not asking you to be amazed,” I replied, miffed at his attitude but trying not to show it. “All I want is action. How about unlimbering with an exposé?”

For answer Dick opened his paper at a certain page and turned it around so that I could read. There was a large space devoted to advertising the Smiley Real Estate and Mine Development Company. Next Jackson showed me a news story on the front page, dealing with a prospector who was in despair about what to do with his claim until he had suddenly encountered good fortune in the form of the benevolent Mr. Smiley.

“I was showing Weaver proofs of those items while you were cooling your heels.” With these words Jackson put his own heels on his desk and smiled at me. “Any remarks?”

“Well, hell, Dick,” I protested, “it never occurred to me that you were honest, but I didn’t think you’d hire out to clean spittoons for a louse like Irah.”

“This is venality with a difference, Baltimore.” He pointed a pencil at me didactically, then replaced it behind his ear. “Money is not the object, nor am I anything more than the agent of the benefits to be exchanged for services rendered. Has it come to your attention that nothing has been done about our petition to be chartered as a city?”

“They haven’t hurried about it,” I shrugged. The territorial administration had, indeed, followed standard political procedure. After maneuvering us into seeking formal municipal organization,
the Governor and his aides had apparently lost all interest in Dead Warrior. “But what’s that got to do with it?”

“I want Prescott to give us the go-ahead whistle,” Jackson said. “A charter won’t be forthcoming until the legislature meets again next winter, naturally; but it’s usual in these cases for the administration to authorize an interim government, with appointive officers.”

“And you want the appointment as mayor,” I stepped ahead of him. “I know all that, but — ”

“But our dilatory Governor is an appointee of a Republican national administration,” Dick interrupted, “and Horace Ainsworth Bedlington of Philadelphia is a very influential member of the party in question.”

Having concluded his explanation, Jackson beamed at me, doubly pleased with himself because I was disappointed. “So you see that the true beneficiary will not be myself but Dead Warrior, destined to flourish under my kindly but wise rule.”

Returning to my own office I spread my problem in front of Sam Wheeler. “I don’t know what to use for artillery now,” I worried. “I’d been counting on having the backing of Dick’s newspaper.”

“With blue chips floating around, you can count on our boy Jackson not to be on the side of the peanut vendors.” Sam blew on his glasses and polished them. “You were a tribune of the people at Three Deuces and Yuma. Why don’t we add a newspaper to our little flock of enterprises?”

“Hand-lettering won’t do,” I said, while turning that idea over. “It takes type.”

“Buy it,” Sam said. “There are more traveling printers than buffalo in the West now, and there are at least two in town as of today.”

The more I considered the suggestion the better I liked it. “Can you get along without me here?”

“Sure, if we hire somebody to take your place. If inkslinging means power and profits to Jackson, why we can use both of those things, too; and the town’s big enough for more than one daily rag.”

There was a bumbling weekly called the Dead Warrior
Sun
, published by a journeyman printer by the name of Cliff Fellowes. Carruthers and Wheeler bought into partnership with him on the understanding that he would handle composition, while I would have editorial control of the journal. This, after I had moved the plant into quarters on Apache Street, I renamed the Dead Warrior
Vigilante
. It took a few days to get things set up, but meanwhile I had taken the precaution of moving into the new Arizona Hotel, so that I would not have to risk returning to my house in the dark.

Having bought the paper to shoot with, I didn’t pussyfoot. In my first issue I published my suppositions as facts and flatly accused the
War Whoop
of pimping for the mining companies. That brought Smiley around to see me.

“That was a smart move,” he complimented me. “Now nothing may happen to you, as you’ve named too many people who might not like being suspected. How much do you want?”

When I’d put a bullet through the brim of his hat I felt better; but my journalistic efforts didn’t create as much excitement as I thought they would. Many agreed that I was on the right track, though that was as far as anyone was willing to go with me for a couple of days. Then Frank Fillmore was found dragging himself into town, blasted in the back and only just alive.

“Dry-gulched,” was all he could say before he died. “Wouldn’t sell my claim, so bastards dry-gulched me.”

This statement, which Frank wasn’t supposed to have lived long enough to make, was the foundation of the Dead Warrior
Minute Men. My paper that day called for a meeting of all interested in making the town a place where they wouldn’t be shot in the back as an alternative to closing any business deal which might be proposed to them.

Prospectors were in the majority as men started trooping into the Anything Goes Variety Hall. There were quite a few businessmen, however, as well as representatives of the mining companies, anxious to prove that they didn’t condone assassination. Irah Weaver was among them, but I had no authority to exclude him, so I said nothing.

The meeting began in the manner of most uncontrolled assemblages. There was a considerable amount of flamboyant oratory, and there were resolutions which contained more dime-novel nobility than good sense; but the wind has to blow for the seeds to drift. When everybody who liked the sound of his own voice had run out of air, Hamilton Gay got to his feet. He was no longer the anxious boniface who had launched the Happy Hunting Ground without benefit of a roof. He was the successful owner of a gambling saloon, and one who had recently announced plans to build fabulously expensive new quarters. As such he was one of the important figures of the town, and when the rest quieted to hear him, he took it as no more than his due.