Dead Warrior (21 page)

“Are you the one that got me, Baltimore?”

In turn I perused his features, but their contorted pallor stirred no chord of recognition. “Shakespeare,” he reminded me. “I’m Smith, or that’s who I said I was after you’d saved our necks from the Apaches. We had a good time that night, didn’t we?”

I didn’t find it easy to ask help of a man who knew I had given him his mortal wound, although he seemed to be past the point of bearing hard feelings. “Who paid you and the rest to kill Droop-eye?” I demanded.

“Was that his name?” Even sliding into the grave, Smith didn’t abandon the code of thieves. “You know it wouldn’t be square to peach.”

That denial, which he would doubtless have worded more carefully under other conditions, told me what I wanted to know. By then several had discovered that all of the raiders had not got away. Sending one man for a doctor, I went to see how Peters was doing.

The colonel wasn’t doing; he was done. He, too, had been shot in the back, the powder burns suggesting that a gun had been held within inches of his body. Having ascertained that much, I pushed through the crowd around the corpse. Without knowing how she would take to the offer, I had to see whether the dead man’s partner was in need of any assistance.

She was seated at her faro table, shuffling and reshuffling a deck of cards, while Gay hovered near uncertainly. “Should I send for your carriage, Miss Dolly?”

Her shoulders, which had been held unnaturally stiff, relaxed at the sound of my voice. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said, without looking up.

“And may I call on you, after I’ve made arrangements with the undertaker?”

“Please do,” she murmured.

Dead Warrior’s leading undertaker, a fellow named David Leeming, surveyed the bodies of Peters and Smith, then lying side by side, with professional interest. “Neither one shot in the face or hands,” he remarked with satisfaction. “I can make ’em look good.”

Lacking his enthusiasm for his craft, I merely nodded. “But you’re going to let the town marshal look at them first?”

“Oh sure. We team up like beer and pretzels,” Leeming declared. “Who’s paying for them, Mr. Carruthers?”

“Smith is my responsibility,” I replied. “Although I imagine the estate will take care of the colonel’s funeral expenses, I’ll guarantee them, if that’s what’s necessary.”

“It’s all I wanted to know,” the undertaker said. “Come around to the parlor tomorrow afternoon, and I’ll show you two of the best-fixed-up corpses in Arizona Territory.”

My first stop was at the bar, where Gay poured me a half tumbler full of whiskey. Several men tried to buzz questions at me, but the landlord shooed them away.

“Baltimore don’t feel like talking now,” he told them. He watched me gnaw at the liquor, which was soon dispatched. “You need another, old-timer?”

“One will carry me as far as I’m going, Ham.” Giving him an appreciative slap on the shoulder, I left for my next port of call.

Faithful to his habit, Magistrate James Pickering was playing poker with a few cronies in the back room of the Gold Beaver. He threw in his hand when he saw me enter, and rose to meet me halfway.

“I’d heard about it,” he said.

Pickering was a lank man with shrewd eyes in a face which was otherwise that of a country gawk. The questions he asked might differ from those put by magistrates elsewhere, but I was prepared to answer them as earnestly and carefully as I would those of any other officiating jurist.

“What would you like to know, Judge?” I asked.

“Let’s see what I already know.” He looked around for a cuspidor and got rid of surplus tobacco juice. “They got Droop-eye and you got one of them; but this wasn’t self-defense, the way I get it, as nobody was gunning for you. What would you say was your intent?”

“I didn’t have any,” I answered, “at least as far as this particular fellow was concerned. It was like shooting ducks, Judge. I fired at a whole bunch of them, as they were squeezing out the door, and one of them dropped.”

“It couldn’t have been personal malice, as you didn’t know
who you was hitting,” he mused. “Was Droop-eye a friend of yours, Carruthers?”

I thought before I answered. There was much about the colonel that I had found difficult to understand, yet I had also found much to like and admire.

“Yes, I’d say that we were pretty friendly.”

“So when your pardner dropped, you had a natural instinct for reprisal.” Pickering nodded. “Well, I can’t think of any good reason why you wouldn’t.”

Dismissed by the court, I was at last free to proceed to Dolly’s house. She was dressed in white rather than the dashing costume she had worn at the Happy Hunting Ground. I thought she had been crying, but she was now composed enough to talk without strain.

“I’ll see about having the will probated, if the colonel left one,” I offered. “Do you know about that?

“Yes,” she told me. “I am executrix.” Not astonished, in view of their known partnership, I nodded. On her part, Dolly smiled sadly. “I don’t believe the terms of his will can be carried out, since he left all his money to what would be regarded as a treasonable enterprise. Will you get us each a pony of brandy, Baltimore?”

After I had poured from the decanter in readiness on a small table, she went on. “If you’ve thought about it at all, you may have imagined many reasons for the association between the colonel and myself without hitting on the right one. To begin with the simple part of it, I was his niece; and to confuse you absolutely, both he and I have been the secret operatives of a nonexistent nation.”

Now knowing why Peters had always looked familiar, I wondered why I hadn’t observed the family resemblance. Next my mind flashed back to my original meeting with the colonel, when he had tried to sound out my politics.

“Good Lord! The Confederacy?”

“Not in the old sense, but in the form of a new Jeffersonian empire, where its traditions could somehow be perpetuated. He was a young regimental commander whose heart cracked at Appomattox. His head cracked, too, but it took me some years to find that out.”

Many of the things which had puzzled me about the colonel were thus explained, but the master clue was lacking. “What gave him such an absurd idea, anyhow?”

“There are men who die without a cause to die for,” she said. “But he would probably have found a more normal answer for his need, if he hadn’t come West. The sight of so much unused land gave him the idea that he could be a combination of William Walker and Moses, an archfilibuster, seizing a country where conquered Southerners could raise their heads anew.”

Seeing a chance to find answers for some of the questions I had long wanted to ask about Dolly herself, I let embryo empires lie. “How long have you been out here?”

“Since I was orphaned at seventeen.” Dolly looked back into time. “As my mother’s brother, the colonel was my closest relative, and he came to see what I wanted to do. I had a choice between taking shelter in somebody else’s home or of taking a chance with him in the West.”

Her use of the word “chance” cued my next question. “But how did you happen to take up dealing?”

“So I could serve the cause instead of being a tag-along. Having always been good at cards, I was convinced that you didn’t have to grow a beard to bank faro.”

Thinking how correct and chivalrous Droop-eye had always been, I shook my head at the incongruity. “Didn’t the colonel object?”

“He did until I brought up Belle Boyd and other feminine
patriots. After that the idea appealed to him, and he agreed to teach me what I had to know, including the use of weapons.” Once more Dolly’s smile was one of rueful reminiscence. “The only stipulation was that there was to be no nepotism. As an operative of the organization, I was a soldier not a niece, and all mention of our kinsmanship was banned.”

Asking permission, I helped myself to more brandy. “I still don’t see what gambling has to do with such a plot as you mentioned,” I told her.

“It takes a treasury to make a nation,” she reminded me, “and nothing but gambling gives such quick returns and freedom of movement. Our winnings — over and above our considerable living expenses — went into a war chest, which in turn was mostly spent on the endless meetings between my uncle and other dedicated souls, or the soldiers of fortune or downright cranks they were able to enlist. They’d meet in New York or San Francisco, and once even in Hong Kong. I made that trip myself, and we returned with the assurance of some other adventurer that the British Empire was eagerly awaiting the chance to recognize the new country.”

“Did it have any contours outside of dream?” I asked. “Where was it to be?”

“There were dozens of plans; but after hearing about your duchy he definitely settled on the Southwest, which he was convinced could not be defended from a small but determined band of revolutionaries. You would have to meet as many ‘My sword is my fortune’ wanderers as I have to understand that. They live on hope as butterflies do on mites of nectar. Nothing really happens; but there’s always good news, with events being masterfully shaped toward the right time to strike. Oh, the poor dear!”

“I’m thinking about what his niece went through,” I said.

Dolly waved that away. “She had a wonderful time, being noble and secretive all at once, which is a delicious combination. I worshipped the colonel and his purpose, being full of war and reconstruction bitterness myself — almost as full of those things as I was of ignorance.” Draining her glass, she rose to place it beside the brandy decanter. “It took some years for all three to wear off,” she remarked, when she was again seated beside me on the divan.

There was no need for me to ask about the money with which Terry had once entrusted me. It had something to do with the Peters organization, whose details were not a proper subject for my curiosity.

“And you couldn’t let your uncle know.” With a troubled face, I thought of what it must have been like to discover that all her effort and idealism had been lavished on a madman’s fantasy. “I don’t know that I think your uncle’s patriotism was any more wildly quixotic than your devotion to him, after you’d separated fact from mirage, Miss Dolly. What have you got out of it, or what will you do now?”

“Deal faro,” she said. She didn’t like the shifting of sympathy from Droop-eye to herself, and the note of pensive sorrow was gone from her voice. “Gambling’s what I got out of it, and I love it. It’s not just because I’m a woman with some claims to good looks that I can make my way in any camp where the stakes are high enough to bother about. Everybody in the West knows that I’m as good a dealer as there is; and nobody ever bamboozled me or stole my bank, either, except that one time when I bet on the wrong side in a gamblers’ war.”

While she was talking her violet eyes glinted with competitive fire, enabling me to glimpse the insatiable lust for exerting skill and matching wits which I had noticed in Blackfoot
Terry and other professional dealers. After her reference to Midas Touch, however, her face chilled, and I knew she was going to ask the question I had been expecting.

“Was it Barringer, Baltimore?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can’t prove it, yet, but I know.”

“He mustn’t beat us,” she said; and I knew that with her the will to triumph barely ran second to a desire for evening accounts. Jumping up, she paced the floor, then stopped and shook her head in frustration. “But is there a way to get at him?”

Such an appeal from her to me was something new between us, and my voice deepened as I answered. “I have the means,” I said.

THE TOWN’S TWO DAILIES were again at odds, this time over the passing of Droop-eye Peters. Dick rubbed the cobwebs from all the proverbs which reprove a life of violence and hung them up to mark the passing of the frontier. The colonel, according to Jackson’s summation, was a symbol of the bad old days of the West which were being put out of date by the rise of such great cities as Dead Warrior. “The era of the gunman-gambler, and all he stands for in the way of feckless recklessness must and shall,” the
War Whoop
concluded, “give rise to the serene and enlightened day of unlimited commercial prosperity.”

The best I could do was to write of Peters as one of the picturesque characters who had helped to make the West synonymous with adventure. In the main, though, I was writing for an uninterested public. Dick’s “unlimited commercial prosperity” phrase got home to the very people whom I had previously been able to count upon.

I found that out when I called a meeting of the vigilantes that evening. What I asked was action to stop the raids conducted by gangs riding in from the range. I got nowhere.

“We shouldn’t have trouble like that.” Stephen Holt, president of the Dead Warrior Bank and Trust Company, pulled
at his long sandy side whiskers, as he always did when making obviousness do duty for an important pronouncement. “In my opinion, nevertheless, we should first find out just where the fault lies.”

“You wouldn’t wonder where it lies if a mob of toughs was shooting up your bank,” Gay snapped.

“That’s exactly what I’m getting at,” Holt responded. “They are not bothering my bank, or any of the stores, or even any of the other saloons.”

“And what are you trying to make out of that?” Ham asked.

“Nothing, really.” The banker must have suddenly remembered that the saloonkeeper was a prosperous patron. “All I meant was that we — er — ought not to be hasty.”

“What he really means,” Eben Bradford said, “is that there must be some reason why you can’t keep an orderly house. This new fellow, Barringer, right across the street from you, doesn’t seem to have any trouble.”

“It apparently has something to do with the people you employ,” a lawyer put in, while Gay was glaring at Eben. “At least that’s what I’ve been reading in the newspapers.”

“You didn’t read that in the
Vigilante
,” I protested.

“No, but you’re a friend of Ham’s and a lot of the gambling crowd.” Irah Weaver was glad of a chance to snap a shot at me. “What it looks like to us is that you’re trying to get us to pull chestnuts out of the fire that Dead Warrior had better see burned, if it wants to be a progressive city.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything but lay traps for men riding into town bent on murder.” I looked at Bradford, sure that he would respond to a sensible argument, if I could find one on his level of awareness. “Not to mention the harm done to a man’s business,” I added.

“I’m not sure,” Eben said, after first taking time to weigh
his words, “that it’s the kind of enterprise which I for one wish to have protected.”

“What’s the matter with my business?” Gay challenged.

“There’s nothing personal in this,” Bradford answered, “but the time is at hand, I think, when this city should put more emphasis on legitimate trade and less on institutions which promote the wanton waste of income.”

The murmur of assent from several quarters showed that this was a general sore point. The merchants resented the fact that the gambling tables got the first whack at most men’s pay. Of this resentment I had been dimly conscious, but I was chagrined to have the matter brought out into the open at this time.

“See here, gentlemen,” I said, “how the people of this town spend their money is their own concern; and the purpose of a vigilante group is supposed to be the curtailing of outlawry, not the suppression of any business recognized as lawful.”

The principle of my thesis was not disputed, but it found no honor in practice. The several saloonkeepers stamped out of the meeting, leaving the rest in a mood of united stubbornness.

Looking them over, I decided there was nothing to be done until I had thought of a way of circumventing this unlooked-for obstacle. “Fellow vigilantes,” I announced, “I won’t be interested in meeting with you again until the members of this body show that they have civic improvement in mind rather than the desire to profit at each other’s expense.”

Some of them looked sheepish as I left them on the heels of that rhetoric. I knew they hadn’t changed their minds, though. My first effort to attack Barringer had therefore failed.

Blackfoot Terry returned the day of Droop-eye’s funeral.
“The trouble is,” I told him in the course of our luncheon together, “that these shopkeepers and so forth don’t care, as long as they themselves aren’t bothered.”

McQuinn cut, forked and swallowed a piece of steak before he commented. “Wouldn’t it be possible to bother them, Baltimore?”

It took me a moment to read his meaning in the blank innocence of his eye. “Almost anything is possible,” I conceded. Cheering up, I became as swiftly downcast. “But where could I find anybody to do the job? All the range outlaws belong to Charlie’s crew.”

“Oh, no, they don’t; you’re magnifying the size of Barringer’s empire.” Peering into a large mirror on the other side of the hotel dining room, Terry made sure that his tie was in place. “What you have to imagine is a situation much like the one which had Rustlers Roost for a firing pin. There are all sorts of free lances moving into the new cattle country of Arizona and away from places where it wasn’t safe to stay. They’ll do anything from stocking a ranch with rustled steers to murdering somebody; but like a blacksmith or any other vendor of services, they’re not in any one man’s employ.”

“?-m, yes,” I said. “And you think they have some such hangout as Alexander Hamilton kept?”

“Probably several,” Terry replied, “and it shouldn’t be too hard to find somebody who knows where one of them is.”

The next day I waited for Pat Scanlan to drive his stage into town. He and I had not discussed Smith’s death, but now I brought the subject up.

“I wish it hadn’t happened that way, but it can’t be helped now,” I said. “It was just one of those things.”

“It was,” Scanlan agreed. “When he took a job like that, he knowed others might want their toin at shootin’.”

I took no notice of this admission that he had known Smith was in the vicinity, but he wanted to get the record straight. “If he’d been tryin’ to bother the line, I would have told you,” he said. “You know that, Baltimore.”

“Yes, I do,” I said, holding a light for the cigar I had given him. “Look, Pat; do you think it’s fair that a good gambling joint — and one that’s kept by a friend of mine, too — should be hoorahed, when nobody bothers some of the stores in town at all?”

“And some of them,” Scanlan reflected, “kept by stuck-up dudes who wouldn’t have taken a drink at Christ’s last supper.” He moved the cigar to one corner of his mouth and gazed past me into the distance. “What’re you thinkin’ about?”

“I’m not really thinking; I’m just wondering,” I told him. “For instance, I was wondering what some bunch of fellows might want for riding their horses into Bradford’s store; his, anyhow, and maybe a couple of others. Is there a regular rate for that kind of work?”

While I was talking I pulled several hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket. “It would be a good idea if they picked a saloon or two also, leaving out both the Happy Hunting Ground and the Glory Hole. Or do you think they’d mind?”

“I don’t know them guys, so I couldn’t guess how they’d figger.” Scanlan put four hundred in one pocket and the fifth bill I handed him in another. “They wouldn’t do a thing like that just any day, if they was to do it at all?”

“Well, if I had anything to say about it, I’d pick four or five days from now, Pat.”

Now that Blackfoot Terry had returned, I felt free to take my eyes off the current situation momentarily. That night I let it be known that I had business in Tucson, and the next day I did go there. It was a city where I had many acquaintances,
dating from my stagecoach-driving days. One of these was a fellow called John Phelps, who worked for the Tucson
Citizen
, and I arranged for him to keep me posted about news wired in from Dead Warrior.

On the morning of the fourth day following my conversation with Pat, I dropped in to see Phelps on my way to a late breakfast. He was busy but raised his lean face from a mass of copy he was checking over.

“There was a little excitement in your town yesterday afternoon, Carruthers. A bunch of cow hands shot up some stores, just for devilment apparently. I never knew them to pick on much except saloons before.”

“Dead Warrior’s different from other places,” I explained. “What paper did you get the wire from?”

“Both the
War Whoop
and your
Vigilante
, but neither seemed to know what started it.”

“Maybe I can find out,” I said.

Back in Dead Warrior, my first act was to see how Dick Jackson had treated the incident. There was nothing intrinsically amusing in his account, but I chuckled as I read it. For once out of his depth, Dick hadn’t been sure whether this latest raid had been conducted by hirelings of his constituent, Charlie Barringer, or not. Contrary to practice, the
War Whoop
had therefore run a strictly factual story, while its editorial page had omitted any comment.

The
Vigilante
had also failed in that respect, but I now set myself to supply the deficiency. Yet it was not upon the obstreperous visitors that I heaped my cant. It was on the citizenry of Dead Warrior, who, I averred, had brought this on themselves by their indifference, their shameful neglect of duty, their utter failure to assume community responsibility. I singled no group out, but I was pointing the finger of Cicero
at the Catiline of my fellow vigilantes; and every man who had been at their last meeting would know it.

It was with some difficulty that I kept myself industriously writing after the paper had hit the street. It was with even greater difficulty that I looked surprised when Bradford, Holt and a couple of others entered my office. Eben was embarrassed, yet he wasn’t the man to let a thing like that stand in the way of what he had to do in order to get what he wanted.

“You were right and we were wrong,” he said, smashing the ice with a thoroughness I couldn’t help admiring. “These fellows aren’t just cowboys celebrating a holiday. Furthermore, the recent incident disallowed my theory that the Happy Hunting Ground was the only target. These rascals are a threat to the prosperity and welfare of the whole town, and one which we can’t expect the marshal and his handful of deputies to handle.”

“What do you think we should do?” I asked.

Bradford and those with him looked at one another. “At that meeting last week,” Holt reminded me, “I thought you indicated that you had some plan yourself. Didn’t you say something about trapping them?”

“Just what was I about to suggest then?” I wondered aloud. “Oh, yes. Maybe one of you will have a better idea, and if so, I’ll be for it; but this is what occurred to me after I watched them make their getaway at the time Peters was murdered. They dashed south down Apache Street, which I’m told is the way they came. My idea is to keep watch for any body of approaching horsemen, standing ready to block the street behind them with a loaded hayrick or something.”

“But suppose we block off a peaceful party of cow hands?” Bradford asked.

“Then they won’t have any trouble with us,” I said.

Although he disliked the vigilante movement, wherever found, McQuinn approved of my scheme also. “This once I’ll play along with your stranglers,” he promised me, “because it seems the only way of rounding up the back-shooters who got Droop-eye. How soon are they due again, do you think?”

“Any day,” I said. “My guess is that Barringer will capitalize on the show Scanlan staged and will try to wreck Gay’s joint this time. Probably they’ll try to kill you, too, now that you’ve taken the colonel’s place.”

It was in both our minds that the outlaws might not boggle at shooting Dolly, but neither of us mentioned that. “You’re probably not popular with them yourself,” McQuinn said, after a moment’s pause.

Our fears for Dolly were groundless, as the raiders came in the morning, when she was seldom abroad. I was helping Sam check receipts at the Anything Goes, when one of our horse boys dashed in. He had been posted on the roof of the Arizona Hotel, which was the highest eminence in town, barring a church steeple or so.

“There’s a mob riding toward Sometimes Crick, south of town,” he cried. “Sixteen, Mr. Carruthers.”

I sent the word around, although it might well be a false alarm. Cow hands were always riding in and out of town, and they had a tendency to go in packs when on holiday. Nevertheless, my hunch was that this was the enemy, attempting to catch us off guard by picking such an early hour.

Terry was out of bed when I went to the Apache House, in order to arouse him, but he annoyed me by insisting on shaving. “We’ve got plenty of time,” he said. “Have the bar send me up a drink when you go down to see about our horses, will you, Baltimore?”

There was plenty of time, just as he had said there would
be. McQuinn and I had finished checking arrangements ten minutes before the whooping and shooting began. When it did, we rode down an alley feeding into Apache Street, though not with the intention of interfering. What we had agreed upon was to let them fire off as much ammunition as they would.

From our vantage point at the mouth of the alley we could see that the invaders were doing a good job of imitating cow hands making roughly merry. Twice I saw groups riding into stores, waving bottles and yelling like panthers before the whole push rambled toward the crossing of Apache Street and Beaver Lodge. Here, where four corners were splendid with the Arizona Hotel, the Glory Hole, the Apache House and the Happy Hunting Ground, was the heart of Dead Warrior.

The invaders betrayed their true purpose by ignoring Barringer’s place and making in a body for Gay’s saloon. Not finding it open, they shot out the big front windows and splintered the door; but the fact that the saloon was locked must have suggested to some of them that they were expected. At any rate, a cease-fire order was given, and with a final chorus of howls they turned to speed back along Apache.