The Last Shootist (30 page)

Gillom Rogers! Be on the stage or train

out of Bisbee by noon tomorrow, Tuesday.

—The .45-.60

“Who wrote this?”

“The Committee of Safety. Named for our rifle cartridge loads.”

“Vigilantes.”

“Call us what you like. But me or somebody else will be watching you, round the clock, till you're gone from Bisbee. By our deadline.”

Gillom scratched a pimple he'd just found behind his ear. “This is
legal
? You're a deputy?”

“No, I'm not a deputy sheriff. But I
am
applying for the Arizona Rangers. Governor's organizing a detail of Rangers here right now.”

“Hell,
I'd
like to join that bunch. I need a job.”

The committeeman almost smiled. “Not on the best day of your life. You're already cutting your notches pretty deep, kid. At too young an age. Just leave Bisbee pronto and we'll let these bad killings pass.”

Pursing his lips, the young gunman nodded. “All right. Tell Sheriff White to come see the Tombstone stage off tomorrow, wave me goodbye.”

*   *   *

“I found her Mexican shack, Gillom, several rooms in a hovel up in Chihuahua Town. No running water or electric, just a bathtub and a woodstove, pretty primitive. Talked to Rosa, her roommate, waits tables at the Brewery. Anel hasn't been home for three days. All her stuff's still there, clothes, family photos, and Rosa doesn't know what happened to her. So she's going to report Anel missing to the sheriff tonight, like I advised.” Red Jean finished her report.

“Could she have gone down to Mexico, family emergency?” asked Ease.

“Not without some clothes, traveling money, do you think?” They were sipping Veuve Clicquot, real French bubbly, at a table in Tony Downs's Turf Saloon, their favorite Bisbee haunt.

Ease Bixler shook his head. “You've got the sweet-ass on that girl bad, pard.”

“Cupid
has
given me a couple jabs under the ribs with his dart.” Gillom nodded. “But I'm afraid Luther Goose has kidnapped her, taken Anel up to his brothel in Clifton, against her will.”

Red Jean played devil's advocate. “You don't think she might have gone up there on a whim, to check his saloon out?”

“Not without telling me or her roommate first. We're in love, Jean! Or we said we were. If she got offered better money, that's not a good enough excuse to fly the coop that quick.” Gillom looked worried.

“So what do you aim to do?” asked his buddy.

“Take the stage up to Clifton, see if she's there.”

“But, that's Goose's roost. He'll kill you if you try to take her back, if he so much as sights you again. You've burned his play in Bisbee now, and he'll want to get even. He can hire more shooters or wrestlers from the copper mines up there to put your lights out, pardner.”

“I'm just gonna sneak into town, move around at night, see if I can spot her. Then spirit her out of Clifton, if she'll have me.”

The darling of the demimonde frowned. “How romantic. And dangerous. Just like in a dime novel. Where would you flee to in the moonlight?”

Gillom sipped his champagne thoughtfully. “Oh, I guess back to El Paso. My mother wants me to come home, finish high school, get a good job, guarding if I have to, maybe join the Texas Rangers. Anel can find a better job, store clerking, but not dancing, I won't have that. My mother runs a boarding house. There's room for us there, till we both get working again.”

“Boy, this is all very fast,” worried Ease.

“
If
you find her in Clifton, bring her back down here. Give your love time to blossom,” advised Jean.

Grimly, Gillom explained his new predicament. “I can't come back to Bisbee. Got a visit this afternoon from a member of the .45-.60. Said I had to be out of town by noon tomorrow. They've got an armed vigilante watching me outside here right now.”

His two friends were stunned.

“The Safety Committee warned you out of town?” Ease sounded plaintive.

“I'm a marked man in Bisbee.”

Ease shook his head again, dazed. “Can't let a couple killings disrupt their mining.”

His friend reassured him. “I think you're okay, Ease. Your family's respected in southern Arizona, like the sheriff said. I'm the two-gun stranger they're worried about, who has to ride on.”

“This ain't right,” disagreed Jean.

“Or legal, either. It's just the mob's rules.”

“They enforce them, too,” agreed Ease. “Back in '83 during the Bisbee Massacre, the robbery of the Goldwater and Castaneda general store here, five innocent citizens were killed in that shoot-out. Our posse captured five robbers, several in Mexico, and the law tried and executed them all. The .45-.60 was formed after the head desperado, John Heath, was given a life sentence to Yuma Prison for planning the robbery. The Safety Committee didn't want to let him get away alive, so they pulled him out of jail one night over in Tombstone after sentencing, and strung him up there from a telephone pole. The .45-.60 are
very
serious citizens of ours.”

They were silent after Ease's troubling local history. The waiter arrived with their meals to break the glum spell—pork chops, ribs, and a steak to help Ease replenish his blood.

“A toast,” said Gillom. Three good friends raised their glasses. “To better times in different places.” They drank champagne to that. “
And,
it's my birthday.”

“Ohhh, happy birthday!” chortled the redheaded dancer.

“Congratulations! Which one?”

“I'm eighteen.” The birthday boy smiled.

“Nearly legal, kid,” beamed Jean. “You deserve cake.”

“I'm amazed you made it this far,” agreed Ease.

“I've grown up since hitting Bisbee. Feel like I'm making adult decisions now.”

“This rescue ride doesn't sound like one of 'em. Awfully dangerous,” disagreed Red Jean.

“I'll be in and out of Clifton before they know I've arrived.
If
she's up there.”

Ease polished off his bubbly. “Well, good luck, pardner. Hope you make it to twenty.”

*   *   *

Gillom said goodbye next morning to the landlady, Mrs. Blair. The graying seamstress stood on her porch watching, not waving, as an armed watchman appeared from up the hill to follow the young gunslinger down the long stairway from Youngblood Hill.

Gillom trudged down the Gulch's busy boardwalk a last time and back up Tombstone Canyon. He was winded from carrying his saddlebags and warbag full of accumulated gear. He hoped the man with the rifle following a discreet distance behind wouldn't be the only person to see him off.

At the O. K. Livery and Stable, the stage from Tombstone had arrived and teamsters were exchanging baggage, dumping mail in the boot, switching horse teams. Gillom bought his ticket, five dollars to ride a thirty-eight-mile loop south and then north round the Mule Mountains to the town “too tough to die.” Tombstone
was
slowly dying, though, with its nearby silver mines flooded and petering out, while copper mining was still booming in Bisbee's mountains.

Gillom slung his leather bags into the leather-sided rear boot of the Concord coach, but he was too restless to take a seat inside with the other passengers yet. So he climbed on a corral fence to wait, eyeing the watcher who was now resting against a fence pole, far end of the corral.

He saw her at a distance, trudging up the canyon road to the stable, long red hair tied up in a scarf, carrying something under a cloth. She wore men's blue jeans, brogans, and a very short-sleeved tunic which showed off the muscles in her arms and shoulders.
Good ol' Jean
. Gillom grinned.
At least someone's come to see me off
.

He eased gingerly down from the fence to greet his ladyfriend, his right arm and ribs still sore from last week's fight. “Jean, you look fetching this morning. Ready to work the mines.”

She frowned at his joke. “Ease is working, but I'm on night shift so I don't have to dress up today. I thought someone should say fare thee well on your fool's errand.” With a flourish she whipped off the linen covering two chocolate cupcakes on a small china plate. “I didn't have time to bake, so I picked these up at City Bakery. Happy day-late birthday.”

“
Swell!
Send me off in style.” They were all chocolate smiles as they gobbled the cupcakes in a few bites. Jean cleaned her fingers on the napkin while Gillom licked his.

“Make it to your next birthday, Gillom, okay?”

He nodded, not smiling now.

“Let me know if you find Anel. Post me a letter, care of the Red Light. I know you can't come back to Bisbee, at least for a while, but if you make it down to Tombstone, or Tucson, let us know. Ease and I will ride over to celebrate your survival.”

“You bet I'll do that, young lady. You let me know, too, if Anel suddenly shows up here again. Mail my mother, Bond Rogers, in El Paso.” He squeezed her hands, gave her cheek a kiss. A new driver climbed up on the coach's front seat while the liveryman checked harness on the anxious six-horse team.

“All aboard for Tombstone!”

Gillom opened the stage door to help another lady up in the coach. He swung up inside, latching the small door shut. “I'll absolutely be seein' you an' Ease again.”

The driver whistled sharply, got six horses moving in a slow left turn inside the corral as the shifty stableman threw open the wooden gate and they were off, down the dirt road through town.

“Clear the road!”
The coachman cracked his whip over the fresh horses' heads to pick up speed and put on a show for any watching townsfolk.

Sticking his head from the rear coach window, young Rogers saw only Jean waving goodbye.
To hell with Bisbee,
he groused.
There's friendlier towns to nest in.
Just for the hell of it, Gillom pointed at the vigilante from the Safety Committee and shot off his finger pistol.

 

Thirty-five

 

The stagecoach from Bisbee was nicknamed the “Sandy Bob,” and its jolting six-hour journey involved two relay stops fifteen miles apart, where horses were changed and the passengers could use the outhouse or purchase a quick snack and a drink at a ranch. In between, Gillom tried to ignore the chatting ladies inside the coach and straighten out his own jumbled thoughts.

What will I do if Anel's not in Clifton? Sure can't go back to Bisbee. Guess I'll sell these collector guns first, return to El Paso, try to work things out with the sheriff, so I don't have to do more jail time. Maybe take a slower stagecoach back to west Texas, stay off the trains. Like to see Silver City in New Mexico. Hear that's a bustling burg.

Gillom pulled down the brim of his Stetson and closed his eyes, but the hoofbeats of the galloping horses and shocks to the leather thoroughbraces snapping support beneath the heavy Concord coach only allowed him to doze fitfully.

They reached Tombstone about suppertime, but Gillom didn't go sightseeing. Scott White was sheriff of all Cochise County and had too many confidantes in town. The youth didn't wish his presence noted. So he grabbed a meal of beans and biscuits and coffee during their hour layover. The twenty-mile run up to Benson on the “Modoc” was mostly men on business, so they could catch next morning's train out of Tucson headed east to El Paso. Since this night run was nonstop, the new driver handling the ribbons up top put the six horses into their collars, never allowing them to slow to less than a hard trot unless going uphill. Their fast pace through the night finally lulled Gillom and he dozed—remembering what J. B. Books had told him about the only time he'd ever been shot.

Full of laudanum a spring afternoon behind his mother's boardinghouse, Books had rested on the back stoop atop his red satin pillow like a potentate.

“I was wounded just once, Gillom, in a restaurant in Bisbee. Two butt-ins braced me at a monte table in the Free Coinage, fancy saloon up Brewery Gulch. I won't stand for an insult, but bartenders intervened and we three took our drinking elsewhere. I ran into those two loudmouths later, don't even know their names to this day. I was having a quiet supper around midnight at the English Kitchen when those two jaspers came in, still drunk, and their insults commenced again. Only this time they drew pistols to really bullyrag me, so I had to respond, chair against the wall, right over the bone china. I killed 'em both, several bullets in each—they dropped right inside the Kitchen's front entrance. It was a helluva noisy mess inside that little restaurant, diners diving for cover under the tables, linen pulled down, dishes flying, but they gave me no choice. Never know what a drunk will do.”

Gillom Rogers was entranced. “And one of 'em plugged you?”

J. B. Books shook his head violently. “
No!
That was the crazy thing. It was some
other
thumbhead, a complete stranger who probably also had too much to drink. This joker lurched up from his meal, pulled his pistol while I was shooting the other two, drilled me right in the belly. I fell down. Stomach's a bad area to get shot in, because the shock to your nerves is immediate, paralyzes you from fighting back. Doc Hostetler was called and removed the bullet, which is why I rode in pain all the way down here to El Paso from Colorado to see him again, a doctor I trusted. I was lucky then to have a good doc patching me up. Lots of gunmen have bit the bullet from a stomach wound.”

“What happened to the guy who shot you for no reason?”

“Never saw him again. After the mayhem that shooter just wandered off, picking his teeth after a full meal and not paying for it probably.” The notorious gunman paused, troubled by the bad memory. “That's what makes gunplay so dangerous, Gillom. It's unpredictable. Too often, when weapons are pulled and working, it's some nobody, some butt-in with a secret compulsion to use a gun once in his piss-poor life on another human being or to die spectacularly, some six-fingered bastard who couldn't hit a cow in the teats with a tin cup when sober, who has the final say in the drama. I have no idea who that other sonofabitch was, but he was close and accurate enough to nearly kill me.”