Dead Warrior (14 page)

To cover my hesitation, I slowly drank my whiskey and then the chaser. In doing so I was aware that Dick had a hand on one of Evalinda’s shoulders. Meanwhile he had stooped to peer at me over the other. To this nearness Miss deVere responded by biting him on the ear, shaking her head and growling.

There had been other signs that her devotion to the principle of monogamy had run its course as far as I was concerned. When I lowered my glass to the bar, I did it with a rap bespeaking decision.

“I won’t bet you money,” I said, talking loudly in my turn. “And as you’re challenging me, I’m the one to call the stakes. Put up your newspaper.”

The unexpectedness of the proposition gave him pause, but he promptly rallied. “That’s crawfishing, man. You can’t put
up one of your own businesses without getting Sam Wheeler to come in with you. What would you bet against the
War Whoop?
”

The whole bar had quieted to listen. Betting was Dead Warrior’s favorite sport, and a wager which involved anything at once as valuable and as concrete as the plant of the daily newspaper which Dick now published had everyone agog. I pretended to pay no attention, however, while I removed Dick’s hand from the girl’s shoulder and drew her to me in sign of possession.

“You’ll have to give me boot,” I announced, “but I’ll bet you Evalinda for the rest of her stay in town.”

It was the only time that I ever saw either Dick or Evalinda mumchance. The former grabbed my hand to signify acceptance, as soon as he had recovered from his astonishment, but he couldn’t make himself heard above pandemonium.

With a whoop Short-fuse pulled a gun out from under the bar and fired it at the ceiling. Others imitated him or shouted applause, stamping and pounding each other on the back.

The wild delight over it was what won Evalinda both to acceptance of the bet and forgiveness of myself for risking such a prize. Here was a sensation which was rocking the town, and she herself was the core of it. After the first startled moment, she was beaming as though she had thought of the idea herself.

“Who’s going to hold the stakes?” she kept asking the prospectors who swarmed around to shake hands with her and offer almost tearful congratulations for her magnanimity in being a party to such a stunt.

The news spread swiftly to the other saloons, whose patrons had to hear the rumor confirmed through personal conversation with what was soon known as “the prettiest stack
of chips in Arizona.” Evalinda had a wonderful evening, and I was not ill-content myself. We had had a fine frolic together, but she was ready to have another pair of trousers draped over the foot of her bed. Here was an out for both her and myself which would prevent a sour ending for a good time.

Insisting on looking after Spanish Monte personally the next day, I let him have all the water he wanted. It wouldn’t make him sick in a quarter race series, but I calculated that it would slow him down after the first heat. That attended to, I picked up Evalinda, complete with her baggage, depositing it and her at the finish line.

Sober, Dick wasn’t quite so sure that a reversal of form could be brought about by substituting one untrained Mexican boy for another. He feigned great confidence, however, and had a rig brought for the advertised purpose of carrying Evalinda to his quarters.

It was supposed to be a working day, but everybody — including the employees of the Dead Warrior, the Pan-Western and the several lesser mining companies — knocked off in the middle of the afternoon. There were loud cheers when Spanish Monte and Masthead walked to the post, louder ones when Dick and I took our stations at either side of Miss deVere’s baggage, and loudest of all when Sam Wheeler sat down in a chair I had provided. Those cheers were not for Sam himself, though, but for the occupant of his lap. Perched on it was Evalinda, in full traveling gear, with a sign pinned to her marked “stakes.”

Spanish Monte gave both Dick and myself a bad scare by taking the first two heats. The water awash in his bilges let Masthead edge him the third time, however, and in the last two races he lost by a length.

Jackson and I weren’t the only ones satisfied with the outcome.
Had I won, the thing everybody was looking forward to — the actual transference of human property by wager — could not have taken place. Evalinda, too, would have been denied a dramatic moment. She was not, and she made the most of it.

“Good-by, my love,” she sobbed, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief. “Hello, my love,” she next chortled, running into Dick’s waiting arms.

Because I had had to lose for everybody else to enjoy the occasion to the full, I emerged as the lion of a grateful town. After I showed up with a mourning band on my sleeve, my money wasn’t good in any saloon on Apache Street. For three days I was known as “Bet-a-gal Baltimore.” Then the first successful holdup of a bullion stage gave Dead Warrior something else to talk about.

For myself the event created a disturbing problem. Wells Fargo Express had the contract for seeing that the locally processed ingots reached markets on the Coast, but the Carruthers and Wheeler stage line had the contract for carrying all Wells Fargo shipments as far as Tucson.

After one would-be robber had been killed by the shotgun guard which Wells Fargo always supplied as cargo insurance, we had had no further trouble. I had in fact about convinced myself that I had been worrying without cause when I received the report of the theft from one of our drivers.

“Did you get much of a look at the men who did the job?” I asked him.

Jim Bolton only had one eye, but he was an experienced frontiersman, and I counted on him to see more with it at night than most men could with a pair. He straddled his bowlegs and shoved his hands in his hip pockets as he nodded.

“They picked a place where the road runs through a thick
mesquite patch, but I see them pretty good, Baltimore. There was one regular-size fellow and one long, thin galoot. They rose up quiet in the shadow and had guns on us before we knowed where we was at. When the tall fellows says, ‘Light down, pardner,’ the Wells Fargo guard done it, and I think I would have, too.”

Because they were the only stage robbers of my acquaintance, I thought of the gang I had met near Shakespeare. None of them had been remarkably tall, but there was the possibility that such a recruit had replaced Pat Scanlan.

The latter shook his head, when I quizzed him. “I quit stage robbin’, because I wasn’t gettin’ no real fun out of it, and that’s the end of what I know about the business.”

“Well, have you any idea as to whether I’m dealing with old friends or new enemies?” I persisted. “If it’s Smith and his crowd, I won’t make any trouble for them if they’ll quit making it for me. Is that fair enough?”

“Why sure,” Pat agreed, “but you ain’t spreadin’ any news by tellin’ me about it. All I’m doin’ is workin’ for you and keepin’ my nose clean, and anyhow I’m only small change out here in the West. Look, Baltimore, if you really want to know what’s going on around here, you’re closer friends to big fish than you are to me. Why don’t you ask one of them?”

I was still pondering his meaning when another stage was held up. My driver on that occasion had been so frightened that he could tell me little, but the raging Wells Fargo guard had seen the two robbers before. The holdup had been marked by the same quiet efficiency as its forerunner, and once again a tall, thin fellow had acted as spokesman.

The deputy sheriff assigned to Dead Warrior organized a posse just as he had the first time. I was a member, but we didn’t get anything out of the ride besides fresh air and exercise.
The trail was lost in the rocky fastnesses of a range to the southwest.

This greatly diverted Blackfoot Terry, with whom I had dinner upon my return. He chuckled at my rueful account of the way in which the tracks had vanished.

“It looks like a real lobo has moved into the country,” he commented. “Fred Andrews hasn’t got what it takes to track a plainsman of parts.”

It was then that I thought I understood Scanlan’s advice, and I decided to take it. “Who’s the lobo, Terry?”

The question took him by surprise, but he was ready for me in a moment. “Just in case I should be asked exactly that query, I’ve made it a point not to know.”

“There’s a grapevine running to all the gambling houses in the West,” I said. He was lighting his cigar, and I leaned forward to share the match. “You fellows know what happens in Laramie and Butte before Dick Jackson can get it by newspaper exchange. Could you change your tactics and make it a point to find out? This is important to me.”

“That fellow’s life is probably important to him,” McQuinn suggested, “and I’ve been chased by the law too often to be its willing finger man. Wells Fargo is the one that has to pay, so let them worry about it. How about a game of billiards before I start dealing?”

A couple of weeks had intervened between the first and second robberies. I let ten days go by before I brought the subject to Terry’s attention again.

“Have you heard the rumor that another gold shipment is due to go out in a couple of days?”

We were standing at the bar of a saloon called the Paradise Enow. He slipped a drink under his mustache before he replied.

“Some canary at Pan-Western or the Dead Warrior Company must like the sound of his own voice. You ought to find where the leak is and put your foot in his mouth.”

“I asked to have that leak sprung,” I told him.

McQuinn looked at me sideways but said nothing. “If that slick, tall boy doesn’t bite the first time, he will the next or the one after that,” I said. “It’ll cost me money, but he isn’t going to be able to snake potatoes out of the fire again without getting his fingers burned.”

“I’ll read about it in the
War Whoop
.” Terry flicked a dust particle from his otherwise immaculate black coat. “Is Wells Fargo sending a trouble shooter?”

“One’s promised, if there’s a recurrence.” I shrugged disgustedly. “These big companies are all alike; they spend money on everything but getting the job done. San Francisco will dispatch one detective who’ll need six months of education before he can find his way around Arizona. In the meantime the stages will have one shotgun guard, and if he’s killed they’ll give me another.”

“If they gave you more, you’d be crowded for passenger space,” my companion said.

“There won’t be any passengers on the bullion stages until I have a clear road,” I told him. “I’m carrying a coach load of shotgun toters, and any two highwaymen who think all they have to do is to stick up the man beside the driver aren’t going to live long enough to admit they made a mistake. Of course, I may not live, either. I’m going to drive.”

Following a minute of silence, Blackfoot Terry sighed. “I’ve tried to keep out of this, but I see I can’t. I wouldn’t want either one of you to get hurt.” There was a pause then while he balanced an eagle on the bar. “Keep your cannoneers home this time, and the gold, too. I’ll go along instead.”

The other two holdups had been made at lonely distances
from Dead Warrior. I was therefore not yet fully on guard when we passed under a big cottonwood only a few miles from camp.

“Reach!” cried a man who had slipped down onto the roof of the coach behind us.

“Rein in,” McQuinn ordered. “I didn’t really think that was a panther stretched out on that branch. How are you, Ed?”

“Put up the rifle, Steve,” Ed called to the fellow who had materialized from shadow to menace us from the road. “We’ve been captured by Injuns, though I don’t know why yet. You ain’t got a drink on you, have you, Terry? I didn’t skin up the tree till I heard the creak of your axle when you swung around the bend yonder, but it’s pretty cold up there these nights.”

“Well, let’s start a council fire,” McQuinn said, as he climbed down to the road. “There’s kindling in the coach, and just for instance, I brought along a quart of pretty fair liquor, too.”

Even before the flames started beating the darkness back, I had determined that the tall, lean bandit was Ed Whittlesey, formerly sheriff of Borro County, New Mexico. “Sure, I remember Baltimore,” he said, while Terry was pulling the cork, “but I never knowed he was such a big operator. It looks like no matter which side of the law I’m taking a look at, the stage I see wheeling down the road belongs to him.”

McQuinn passed the bottle first to Steve Hawley, a lithe, quick-smiling plainsman who let Whittlesey speak for both. “Baltimore’s got the contract for carrying the bullion as far as Tucson,” the gambler said, “and furthermore he’s got the idea that it ought to get there.”

“Embarrassin’,” Ed murmured. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his sleeve and took a good pull before he
handed it to me. “What do you figger we should ought to do?”

“Well,” Terry said, “he’s ready to ride a shotgun army instead of passengers, so unless you and Steve get more men you wouldn’t have a chance. You made a couple of pretty good hauls, didn’t you?”

“Somebody did.” Whittlesey feigned wariness. “I ain’t talkin’.”

“He won’t peach.” Terry indicated me with one hand while reaching for the whiskey with the other. “He won’t, if you make a bargain to clear out, instead of making a damned fool of yourself by crowding your luck, that is.”

“You can’t do good at stud when everybody knows what your hole card is,” Whittlesey mused. “Is Baltimore a reliable fellow, Terry? I’d just as soon fight Wells Fargo right here as to have ’em on my tail, wavin’ extradition papers every time a man fixes to get dug in comfortably.”

“He’ll forget he ever saw you,” McQuinn promised. “And that goes for Steve, too, of course.”

“I’ll be seein’ you around some camp or other then,” Ed said, following an exchange of glances between Hawley and himself. “Maybe we’ll go join the Texas Rangers for a while. We was talkin’ about it just the other day.”

EARLY IN MARCH THE WIND blew the frost out of the mountains and into our bones. The temperatures didn’t get low by the standards of non-Arizonans, but we were used to still air and mildness. The strong nor’easter made itself at home in our summer-style buildings and brought the dust with it. Everybody walked around with hunched shoulders, fidgety and irritable.

It was to find an anodyne for the cruelty of the elements that a few of us convened in the Paradise Enow during hours normally dedicated to work. While we stood there, with little to say to each other, a prospector called Frank Fillmore rode his horse through the door.

“Hi, Sam; hi, Terry; hi, Dick; hi, Baltimore,” he said. “Give me a quick one, Pete.”

Tending bar there, Rogue River Pete looked disapproving. “Don’t you see that sign?” he challenged.

There was a piece of paper tacked on one of the walls which had a bearing on the case, and all of us turned to reread its message.

“The son of a bitch ain’t ordered, and he ain’t got no pants on,” Pete pointed out. “How’s he on Injun talk?”

“I couldn’t leave him standin’ out there,” Frank explained. “He’s a stallion, and if I’d’ve wanted a geldin’ I’d’ve had a vet fix him. Freezin’ ’em off ain’t the right way.” While waiting for Pete to reach him his drink, Fillmore looked down from the saddle at me. “How’d you like to be mule skinnin’ in this weather, Baltimore?”

As I took pleasure in reflecting, I had not been on the driver’s seat of a freight wagon or a coach for quite a while. When not engrossed with other work connected with the Carruthers and Wheeler enterprises, I was preparing to defend our interests in a negligence-accident suit brought against us by a citizen of Tucson who claimed he found himself under the wheels of one of our vehicles while perfectly sober.

“I can stand the separation, if the mules can,” I told Frank. “You’ve been back in the hills, haven’t you? How did the ore look where you were?”

“Not as good as the stuff on my claim right near here,” he admitted. “Thanks, Pete. I’ll pay you the next time I drop around.”

Fillmore left us, but we were shortly joined by someone almost as out of place in a saloon as Frank’s horse. “Hello, Bradford,” Dick Jackson said. “Haven’t you got enough customers without coming in here to drag us from the one solace we can afford, after we’ve been squeezed to support a wealthy merchant class?”

The Bradford General Emporium was the most successful store in Dead Warrior, due in part to the owner’s hard-bargain shrewdness, though in equal measure to his endless capacity
for work. Eben didn’t like Dick’s bluff reference to his close dealing, yet he was pleased by the mention of his prosperity. He managed a smile which reflected his mixture of feelings, as he drew forth some money.

“I have something to talk over with you, and I was told I might find you here, Carruthers; but I’m glad your partner and Jackson are present, too.” Then Bradford looked at Pete. “I’m not having anything, but how much will it cost to give them what they want?”

“A live one,” Sam commented. “What are we supposed to do in exchange?”

The merchant had no answer until, as host, he had persuaded us to leave the bar for a table. “I don’t know whether McQuinn will be interested in this, but the rest of you should be,” he said, when he had lighted his cigar, “because you’re among the leading businessmen in town. Gentlemen, I think it’s time that Dead Warrior was organized.”

Previous efforts in that direction had amounted to nothing, because — as I had told Bradford when he first brought the subject up — the driving energies of Dead Warrior had found too many other outlets. Dick, who liked to buttress his newspaper with direct political power, had been astute enough to see that the town was too big and sprawling to eat out of his unaided hand. Men like Wheeler and Bradford himself had not made civic concerns theirs, being absorbed in catching opportunities on the wing. In their default and my own, a group of petty rogues had formed a government which no one took seriously.

“Why see here; we’ve got a provisional board of aldermen,” I told Eben, “and we had a mayor until he heard that a Pinkerton detective was on a still hunt here.”

“I mean formally organized,” Bradford said. “Chartering’s best, because it gives a city more prerogatives; but let’s do it
somehow, so that we’ll have official standing that will entitle us to recognition by the rest of the world.”

“We’ve already got that,” Jackson observed. “Just last week I received a London newspaper that carried an item about the Ophir of Arizona; and if you asked a New York bootblack what was the greatest bonanza ever discovered, he’d say ‘Dead Warrior’ without missing a stroke of his brush.”

“Yes, but I like what Bradford fished out of the headcheese,” Wheeler declared. “I admit chartering is commonplace, but as things stand, there’s no basis for taxes, and without taxes how are we going to have the graft I’m counting on to support me in my rapidly nearing old age?”

“It needn’t be entirely commonplace,” Terry pointed out. “We don’t
have
to charter ourselves as a town or a city, do we?”

“Of course we do,” Bradford argued, “if we’re going to get permission to be organized under the territorial laws of the United States. What other forms of government could there possibly be anyhow?”

“Why should we have to ask for permission?” I wondered, after ordering another round. “Let’s charter ourselves as a separate territory, or state even.”

“We’d have to get permission from Washington to do that,” Dick objected, “and the lobbying would cost too much. We’d be better off if we make Dead Warrior a separate country.”

“Why that’s treason!” Eben exclaimed.

“Only until after the revolution,” Wheeler said. “Can I be head of the treasury department?”

“We can’t give out any patronage until we have an administration,” Jackson demurred. He leaned forward and glanced from one to another of us, his eyes gleeful. “The first step is
to decide what kind of country we’re going to be, and the first question is, shall we carry it to the people before or after the decision?”

Although we had started in merely to annoy Bradford and as a relief from our own boredom, these impulses were no longer needed. “Let’s not start things off with a plebiscite,” I cautioned. “Because if we’re not going to be a democracy, it’ll only be setting a bad precedent.”

“The Republic of Dead Warrior.” Blackfoot Terry turned to wave Pete on with the bottle again. “No, I don’t like that. The Kingdom of — No. How about the Duchy of Dead Warrior?”

“I’m not having anything to do with this foolishness,” Bradford growled. Nobody watched him leave.

“Duchy, eh? I like the alliteration,” Dick decided, “but what are we going to use for a duke?”

“Seth, of course.” I turned to Wheeler, who was clever at sketching. “You can fix him up a coat of arms, Sam, with an Apache scalp gules and a beaver tail rampant on a field d’or; but that can wait a little, I should say. I think our best political brains should get busy drawing up a proclamation and a constitution in time for Dick to print them in this afternoon’s
War Whoop
.”

To say that the citizens of Dead Warrior took to the idea of national autonomy would be less than sufficient. All of the vitality dammed by the recent depressing weather broke loose, and all the spirits soured by the turning of spring in a predominantly stag camp were sweetened into joyousness. There may have been such a wave of patriotism following the Declaration of Independence, but that’s debatable.

Provisionally the new government established its headquarters at the Anything Goes Variety Hall, and the
War Whoop
had not been on the street an hour before the Capitol overflowed with public-minded citizens offering suggestions on anything from the immigration quota from Turkey to the importance of having a ducal navy yard on Sometimes Creek.

At nine o’clock that night Duke Seth the First was crowned with a coronet beaten out of bullion. The old fellow was delighted, as always, to be the center of attention, and it must be said of him that he was equal to the occasion.

“Men,” he said, with a simple dignity which won every heart, “I ain’t had much practice bein’ a duke; but there ain’t nothin’ too tough for an old mountain man to tackle, so if you want me to be chief of the tribe, I’m your huckleberry. I just got one more thing to say, and that is my government’s put up the money for hooch on the house at all the saloons in town tonight, which is a better deal than you can get from any other goddam country. Let’s have a cheer for Dead Warrior!”

The mines had to shut down, as nobody worked at anything but national affairs. By the second day we had three political parties, of which one was royalist and one revolutionary, while the third seemed chiefly concerned with declaring war on the Shah of Persia. This last group used up its energies on parades, mass meetings and practice cavalry charges down Apache Street; but the royalists nearly wrecked the Glory Hole when they elected to drive the sans-culottes from that stronghold.

A military force had been organized by then, but the red-light girls had been unwontedly ignored during the period of political foment, so Hangtown Jennie had encouraged trade by offering the brave troops special rates. This made it difficult to establish martial law, though it did weaken the forces of the rioters, many of whom decided to join the army.

It should not be inferred, however, that the whole history of the Duchy of Dead Warrior was one of internal dissension. The peaceful arts flourished, and social progress was made.

As Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sam designed the Dead Warrior doubloon. For heads there was the image of a ferocious-looking tiger of the sort found on faro layouts and for tails a high-kicking dance-hall girl. Worth twenty-five dollars, or five pounds sterling on international exchange, the coins were struck out of pure gold at a blacksmith shop.

Prime Minister McQuinn, aided by myself, as Minister of the Interior, had meanwhile lost no time in allotting everybody to one of the four classes of society which flourished under His Grace, Duke Seth the First. The nobility, a surprisingly large group for one so exalted, were called the Dependables. These could be relied on to get a skinful every day. Those of some social pretensions, although definitely relegated to the status of commoners, were the Corkbacks. They drank regularly but with the stigma of moderation. The Corkbacks looked down on the Weekenders, nevertheless, for these members of the bourgeoisie only drank after six days of sober toil had been performed. The serf class, a water-drinking proletariat largely recruited from the residential areas developing around the town’s several churches, was known as Wash-swillers.

The need of a national anthem had early been recognized, and Dink Flinders had been drafted to compose one. He in turn called for the assistance of a touring song-and-dance team, which presented it to a deeply moved populace, assembled in the Capitol the night after the coronation.

The singers had been capering through an illustrative charade, but they now paused in mid-stage to remove their hats and present their canes in salute.

Concurrently with these steps forward, Jackson had been faithful to his duties as Minister of Foreign Affairs. The approach of the railroad, moving west from Yuma, had lately brought us within the orbit of telegraphic communication. Dick had employed this utility to let all the large newspapers of the United States know that a new sovereign power was sharing the continent.

Some of the notified journals had remained dourly silent, but a number had wired congratulations; and the New York
Sun
had wanted to know whether our intentions toward the U. S. A. were peaceful. To this Foreign Minister Jackson replied: “We prefer to deal with other autocracies, but we’re not necessarily hostile to republics if they behave themselves.”

This and other messages relative to international policy were evidently given wide circulation. On the fifth day of the duchy’s existence Prime Minister McQuinn lurched into the Capitol trailed by a group of strangers.

“I was on the way back with this bottle,” Terry said, “when I ran into these fellows. I think we’re being invaded.”

One of the newcomers, I realized after I had blinked at
them a moment, was Deputy U. S. Marshal Bill Gunn, but the rest weren’t dressed as plainsmen. In addition to a man in the uniform of a captain of the United States Army, there were three fellows in formal town attire.

“I’m Interior,” I reminded McQuinn. “You or Foreign Affairs there ask ’em what they want.”

At that Bill Gunn, who had been looking on in a mixture of amusement and embarrassment, spoke up. “This is a delegation from Prescott, Baltimore.”

The territorial capital had by then moved from Tucson to the more northerly city. Wheeler’s comment was to snore from where he sat slumped in a chair; but Terry, Dick and I exchanged looks, as Gunn went on. “The Honorable Oscar Balcom here is the Governor’s personal representative.”

Mr. Balcom was a tall man of affairs with a face ringed by bushy whiskers. He removed his stovepipe hat with a ceremonial flourish but dropped something of his dignity when he had to shift several glasses aside in order to find a place for his headgear on the ducal council table.

At precisely this juncture Seth raised his head from his arms. “Set down, Oscar,” he invited. “Hell’s fire, man, don’t stand there like you had an egg in your pants pocket.”