Dead Warrior (17 page)

“Gents,” he said, “in my business I listen to a lot of big talk, so if that’s all we’re going to do, I might as well get back to work.” He waited for the laugh, and he got it. “But if we’re really aiming to do something, I’ll stay right with you till that Injun this camp’s named for comes to life again. Now how do you say we ought to begin, Seth?”

As the prospector of prospectors, old Potter was presiding. Leaning forward in his seat on the stage, he spat over the footlights at a cuspidor he didn’t miss by much.

“Who’s that son of a bitch you said we ought to stretch, Baltimore? Tell ’em about it, boy.”

To speak was to decree a man’s death, but I had already made up my mind to the necessity. “There’s more than one,” I began, “including some who do their murdering from offices in Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York.” The mining company men wriggled a little at that, and I looked them over before I proceeded. “Fellows like Bedlington are out of our reach, unfortunately, but I think that if we hang Ferguson and Smiley we’ll stop the bushwhacking.”

“You mean kill these men without bringing them to court?” Eben Bradford demanded.

It was a grave question, troubling many there, and called for an answer in kind. “Yes, because I’m lawyer enough to know that we have no case against them. All we have is the moral certainty that some of us will be killed, if they aren’t.”

He chewed his cigar over that, while I waited. “So we resort to lawlessness, acting merely on suspicion. And if our guess is wrong?”

For that one I felt myself ready. “I’d rather take a chance on being wrong than on being dry-gulched.”

It was that calculated use of poor Frank Fillmore’s phrase which hardened the collective will. After the growl it evoked, I found it easy to transform the forum into a number of searching parties.

The astute Mr. Smiley had sensed the temper of the camp, following Fillmore’s death, and had made a dash for Tucson; but Ferguson’s urban contempt for yokels had denied him that much wisdom. He was found in dalliance with one of Jennie’s girls.

I was more or less in charge of the group which seized him, but I paid no heed to his nervous questioning, as he was hustled
back to the variety hall. “Well, he looks like a mean wolf at that,” Seth decided. “You say you want to ask him some questions, Baltimore? What’s the sense of that, if you’re goin’ to plant him anyhow?”

Operating on me was the same compulsion which had made Barringer give Dolly Tandy leave to speak beneath the gallows; and deep-seated feelings about the law made it impossible for me to hang a man without making some effort to justify the act in the eyes of the victim. “Bring in the witness,” I said, when everybody had reassembled.

Frank Fillmore’s corpse, still gory and caked with the blood-soaked mud of his death crawl, was brought in and dumped in front of Ferguson. That gunman had, I judged, no conscience worth mentioning. He might not have shown emotion under other circumstances, but Frank looked as if he might have been exhumed from his grave — such a grave as Ferguson himself had just been promised by Seth Potter.

Ace looked at the murdered prospector out of the bitter pride in his hardihood which was all that was left of him now. His face turned gray as he stared, but at length his head came up with a jerk.

“What do you want me to do; heal him by laying my hands on him?”

“Try it,” I urged, although it was almost as much of an effort for me to speak as it was for him. “Put your hand in that biggest hole you blasted in his back.”

The thought of doing so shook him. He gulped when he looked where I pointed. Then when his gaze lifted to mine again, he recalled something.

“I don’t know why I didn’t go for my gun when you wanted me to.”

“That day by the poker table,” I said for the benefit of
the tensely listening audience. “Do you remember how you warned me that I’d be bushwhacked unless I sold my mine?”

He hadn’t put it that bluntly, yet he now hadn’t the heart to quibble. “All right,” he said, nodding slowly, as though we had both come to agreement, after considering all sides of a question. “I didn’t kill that guy, but you know damn well I got somebody to do it.” Swiftly then his mood changed to that of a trapped weasel. “A-a-h, you hicks made me sick! Get your rope so I won’t have to hear no more of your blab.”

He didn’t say another word while he was being dragged to his execution through the sour light of a ringed new moon. The chosen spot was the nearest mining hoist of a prospector, but this was not done out of any sense of poetic fitness. Unlike Can Can, of which Roy Sparks had told me, there was not so much as one tree in the immediate vicinity of the town.

Up until the moment he saw the noose being prepared, Ferguson had acted stoically indifferent. Of a sudden, however, he made a breakaway, taking everybody so much by surprise that he was almost in the clear before he was intercepted. He went down under a half dozen men, like a woodchuck being worried by dogs.

With his bound hands he couldn’t fight effectively, but his struggle raised the spirits of the crowd, which had hitherto been somberly quiet. “So the bastard wants to live after all,” somebody whooped.

“Maybe we should let him off,” the word was taken up.

“Sure, just like he did Frank Fillmore.”

It was in this mood of sardonic glee that they hoisted Ferguson aloft. Nor did it die when the hanged man did.

My idea had been to leave Ace on the gallows, where he
could be depended on to wait until daylight should simplify the matter of burying him. It developed that this plan did not suit the popular fancy.

“We’d ought to wake him,” I heard Scanlan say, as I started to leave.

“Try and do it,” a jeering voice called.

“Ah, you meetin’-house Protestant,” Scanlan reproved him. “I mean we’d ought to drink him on his way.”

If New York thus spoke up for ceremony, the voice of the frontier next invoked the proprieties. “Pat’s right,” I heard Short-fuse assert, “but if we’re goin’ to drink to the skunk, we’d ought to bring him along with us.”

There were protests, but they were quickly overridden. Down the dead man came, and he beat me to town, escorted by a cheering guard of honor. I shunned Apache Street myself, sitting alone in my quarters and drinking for medicinal purposes, but Ferguson had quite a night of it. The howling and shooting which accompanied his progress from saloon to saloon could still be heard when Blackfoot Terry joined me.

“You’re knocking off early,” I observed, after I had filled a glass for him.

“Your court of justice has killed gambling for this evening,” he told me. “No mere tiger to buck could stand up against a side show like that. Did you have fun?”

In line with his principles against public interference in private matters, McQuinn himself had refused to join the vigilante movement. “Don’t take it so hard,” he now advised, when I scowled at him. “Ferguson got what was coming to him for dodging a showdown, when you gave him a chance for one.” Terry waved the subject away, to make room for a new one. “You’ve met Colonel Peters, haven’t you?”

“In Tucson once,” I nodded.

“Dolly Tandy seemed to think you had.” Terry drank with
a gusto I envied and started fishing for a smoke. “Droop-eye’s down in Mexico City now, but he’s on his way north with the expectation of coming here; and when he does Dolly would like you to sit in on the welcome celebration. Have you ever eaten at her house?”

I still had no notion of how things stood between Miss Tandy and McQuinn, though I had seen them together occasionally. “No,” I said, more quickly than was necessary.

“Sometimes she has Ham Gay, Bill Overton and myself in for dinner,” Terry said, “and I’m pleased to report that she has had her usual success in furnishing her premises with an excellent cook.”

Although the two leading hotels and a couple of restaurants had good kitchens, a home-cooked meal was always something to look forward to for a bachelor. Not so pleasant was the prospect of what awaited me the next day.

Enlisting the aid of a couple of Carruthers and Wheeler employees, I went looking for the corpse. We tried seven saloons before we found Ferguson, stretched out on a bar that had no other patrons, with a corncob pipe in his mouth.

The barkeep, who had been standing as far away from Ace as possible, cheered up when he learned of our errand. “It ain’t that he don’t behave hisself,” he explained, “but he ain’t no spender.”

The Mexicans I had hired to dig a grave in Dead Warrior’s boot hill had half finished their job by the time I’d had Ferguson boxed and had brought him to the desolate cemetery. Scrub cactus and stunted weeds were growing sparsely amidst the stony soil. Gusts of wind were stirring dust devils which wound like brown ghosts between the ill-made wooden crosses. We had one such for the corpse in our charge.
Ace Ferguson, Hanged by the Minute Men
, 1879, it read.

Entrusting that cross to the gravediggers, I returned to take
up my own task of publishing a report of the incident in my paper. It wasn’t an easy assignment, calling as it did for at once justifying the execution and excoriating many of the executioners for their subsequent conduct.

The
War Whoop
was under no such embarrassment, however, and — as I had foreseen — Dick Jackson made the most of the situation. “RIOTERS COMMIT MURDER!” screamed his streamer. “Irresponsible Journalism Launches Savage Orgy,” ran the subhead which warned me that I would personally be blamed for the entire affair. “Deliberately fired to inhuman rage by the virulent pen of the
Vigilante’s
editor, a mob fell upon a citizen of this town who stood blameless in the eyes of the law, lynched that innocent man and then frolicked through the town with his stiffening cadaver.” So began a story which ended by calling for the suppression of my paper as “a barbarous blot on the otherwise unstained escutcheon of Arizona Territory’s fourth estate.”

My chief reaction to this fustian was irritation over the fact that he had been handed such an advantage. Yet while I was still debating whether to reply to his attack or ignore it, I was visited by some of the businessmen who had participated in the hanging. A glance showed me that they were both troubled and determined.

“Well, gentlemen,” I braced them, “have you decided that you don’t like popular justice?”

“It isn’t that,” Bradford spoke for them, “but we can’t have a show made out of it, Carruthers. Some sort of local organization to keep down murder is necessary here now — I thought that out before I made up my mind to join you — but we can’t have prospectors or that kind of people in it any more, because they’ve demonstrated that they don’t know how to act. What we need is not a group like the Minute Men, that’s open to just anybody, but a committee of responsible
citizens. If we’re not going to have that, you can count us out.”

The experience of the night before had justified him in taking the line he had adopted, but I turned to stare out the window before I answered him. By “responsible citizens” he meant men of a certain level of prosperity, acquired by following a limited number of pursuits. Acceptance would mean fostering stratification in a society which was all but unconscious of social divisions.

Tempted to reject their proposal, I saw the barkeep of the saloon where we had found Ferguson, walking home from his trick of duty. The sight of this man conjured up the picture of the corpse as it had been left by the ghoulish revelers, lying on the bar with its hands folded behind its head and that pipe jutting at a jaunty angle out of the dead mouth.

Whereupon I turned to face the inquiring eyes of my visitors. “Yes,” I said. “I hope we won’t need to act again, but if we do, why I guess that’s the way it’s got to be.”

THE HANGING OF ACE FERGUSON had divers aftereffects, both for myself and Dead Warrior. One development was that it brought Faith Foster down to see me at my office. I was just about to leave it in favor of Joe Trimble’s Glory Hole when I saw her alighting from a carriage, the latest edition of the
War Whoop
in her hand.

The pretty girl I had encountered on the way out of Three Deuces had become a striking young woman. Of this I was acutely aware as I walked to meet her; and yet I was aware, too, that I had not been with her as often as I might have. I had seen her with some frequency since the day of the picnic at Antelope Tank, but I was not quite so glad of her company as I had been before Dolly Tandy arrived in town.

If I did not see the latter, except when she was dealing faro at the Happy Hunting Ground, the knowledge of her presence in Dead Warrior was one of my companions. I did not imagine myself in love with her, but being conscious of her made it difficult to think of loving somebody else.

Miss Foster was a well enough bred young woman to whose way of life no exceptions could fairly be taken. Clever, energetic and efficient, she’d run a man’s home expertly, and
maybe the man, too, if he wasn’t careful. That part could be handled, should my destiny make it necessary. Meanwhile there was nothing to cavil at except that she would never have Miss Tandy’s hereditary gift of luminous grace. Dolly was a gambler and a gunwoman, and I was not among those who might feel that these were desirable qualities in a wife. Yet to be with her was a solace to the spirit which Faith did not offer me.

But it was Faith who was with me now, the prettier for being stirred up, and I smiled at her appreciatively as I took her hand. “Out shopping?” I asked her, knowing very well that such was not the case.

“Out looking for rabble-rousers,” she answered, with the directness I admired in her. Without further explanation she thrust Dick Jackson’s scarehead under my nose. “Is it true that you started the disgraceful riot which ended in having that poor man’s body dragged all over town?”

Not liking to be condemned by a friend without a hearing, I stared aloofly back at her. “It’s so, if you wish to believe it,” I said.

Her expression told me that I had thrown her off balance, putting her on the defensive, where she had thought to find me. Unfortunately for my position of quiet dignity, though, Hangtown Jennie passed along the walk just then.

“Howdy, Baltimore.” Sober, she might have recognized Faith. Suffice it to say that she did not, although her eyes took the girl in. “You’re sure gettin’ some swell-lookin’ actresses in that joint of yours.”

“This is Miss Foster,” I said hastily. “You remember her, Jennie.”

“Hell, Baltimore, I can’t remember all your girls,” she reminded me. “What’s her act; trapeze, cancan?”

“She’s not on the stage,” I blurted. “She lives here.”

“She does, eh?” This time regret was mixed with the look of interest Jennie bestowed on Miss Foster. “I wish she was on my string. Well, I’ll be seeing you, pardner.”

“That’s the woman who was on the stage when we rode into Chuckwalla,” I said, before Faith could ask any of the questions I saw forming in her mind. “She’s getting a little old and her eyes aren’t what they were; otherwise she would have recalled you.”

“I see.” Faith was watching Jennie, as the latter rolled on down the street. “Why, look; she’s going into a saloon!”

“Is that right?” I marveled. “Well, well; she’s quite a frontier character, you know.”

“You seem to be on very good terms with her,” Faith observed. “What did she mean by — ”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I said, taking the copy of the
War Whoop
from her. “Now let’s get back to this business of Ace Ferguson.”

Safely on that ground, I was doing well with my exposition of the true facts, when Dolly came cantering along, riding sidesaddle and facing our side of the street. I hadn’t seen a rattlesnake on Apache Street since the early days of the camp; but when Dolly was about forty yards short of us her horse reared, as a sidewinder wriggled out from under the boardwalk. While her mount had two feet in the air, a gun appeared in Miss Tandy’s hand. With it she blew the reptile’s head off.

“That’s shootin’!” a passing man applauded.

Acknowledging that tribute, as she urged her horse ahead, Dolly brightened her smile when she caught sight of me. “How about an editorial asking people to keep their rattlers chained or muzzled?” she called.

I chuckled reservedly, Miss Foster not at all. “I wonder if
that’s the young woman Laura Slater was telling about,” she said. “Is she a frontier character, too?”

Dolly was nothing if not that, but I didn’t like the way Faith said it. “She is a lady of my acquaintance,” I replied, looking at her steadily but feeling sorry for myself at the same time. It seemed hard lines to be in difficulties with a girl I was more or less courting over one whose company I was more or less avoiding. “Her name is Miss Tandy.”

It took a moment for Faith to realize that I was referring to the town’s celebrated female gambler.
“Dolly Tandy?”
she finally gasped. “I didn’t think she’d look like that.”

“I imagine not,” I said, reflecting that the church social gossips had probably envisioned something on the lines of Hangtown Jennie, amplified with horns and a tail. In spite of my uneasiness, I couldn’t restrain a twitch of the lips at that train of thought. It was this involuntary action which pulled Faith from her horrified daze.

“If you’re looking for somebody to laugh at,” she glared, “stay with the sluts you bring to your vile variety hall. And as for that Dolly Tandy — ”

Seeing my face stiffen with a look of disinterest, she broke off. “I just don’t like the people you associate with,” she finished, “and I’m not going to be one of them from now on.”

Sorry about the matter, I shrugged it out of my mind as best I could. There were no polite events on my social calendar then until McQuinn told me that Dolly’s indefinite invitation had been made a specific one.

Unable to visualize Miss Tandy in any state of domesticity I had wondered what her premises would be like. When Terry and I stepped inside her house, however, I recognized the inevitability of what I saw. Dolly herself flashed strong colors which walked an inch inside the line of good taste.
Her house was like that. Having talked with her, I was not surprised at the bookcase or the quality of the volumes it held. Seeing her dressed as a hostess for a formal occasion, it was not hard to believe she could play the piano which occupied one corner of her living room.

Colonel Peters was there, trim and handsome in the black and white dinner clothes which matched the ones worn by McQuinn and myself. We made a deceptively civilized appearance, in view of the circumstances. As Droop-eye strode forward to shake hands, I could detect the outlines of the gun beneath his coat. Blackfoot Terry would no more have stepped abroad without a revolver than he would have dispensed with his trousers, and I was armed, too.

“You took longer to get here than I thought you would,” McQuinn said, when we had sipped the sherry which accompanied the soup course. “It didn’t seem like you to pass up the highest stakes east of ’Frisco, Colonel.”

“I have had to move pretty far afield,” Peters told him. “I was in San Francisco itself, for one thing, going from there to the Sandwich Islands and returning by way of Mexico City.”

“How is the gambling there?” I inquired. Not caring in the least, I was only making polite conversation, but he cast me a sharp look before the lids came down over his eyes again.

“I certainly had no complaint on the score of the stakes at issue,” he said. Here he took a sip of wine as a turning point for a change of subject. “I understand that you had much to do with the founding of this place, Mr. Carruthers.”

“Purely in the way of accident, but yes,” I said. “Incidentally, if you’ve heard anything about my powers of divination, don’t believe it.”

“The things I have heard are mainly about the camp itself, which seems to have had an interesting history.” Peters
moved his arm to permit the removal of his soup plate by Dolly’s Mexican maid. “Word of the Duchy of Dead Warrior sifted down to Mexico City while I was there, for instance.”

In response to my own and Terry’s reminiscent chuckles, Droop-eye smiled, though gravely. “I realize that the declaration of independence was in this case made in a spirit of buffoonery, yet that need not always hold true.”

Glancing at Dolly for a cue as to what value to put on that statement, I caught her in the act of shaking her head at Peters. The latter did not notice the signal, however. Absorbed in his thoughts, he stared at the embroidered tablecloth as though he were conning a map.

“It is the sort of thing that could well take place,” he said in a low, brooding voice. “It is not right for this imperial domain of ours to be no more than a satrapy of the United States.”

“Have you heard that Ham Gay won’t have the new incarnation of his place ready before next fall?” Dolly asked, and I knew she was trying to divert Droop-eye from his topic.

“Joe Trimble’s postponing the grand opening of the re-glorified Glory Hole, too,” I said, trying to help her out. “It seems that one heard the other had decided to have pictures and statuary imported from Paris — the one in France — and neither is willing to be outdone.”

“I will have the gambling concession in the Happy Hunting Ground when I return,” Colonel Peters remarked.

“Are you leaving us so soon?” I inquired.

“Unfortunately I have appointments elsewhere, Mr. Carruthers.”

“I think I’ll arrange for a misfortune that will get me out of the heat here during the summer, too,” Terry laughed. “Will a disaster befall you, too, Dolly?”

“During July, August and September,” she affirmed. “Won’t you carve, please, Colonel?”

After the coffee and brandy Dolly played for us. At first there were some classical pieces which she rendered with a certain slapdash competence; then, at Terry’s insistence, she sang a few songs. Most were familiar but one for which McQuinn signified favoritism by calling for several encores was not. It dealt with a man astride of a meteor, and even Peters swayed slightly to the drawling, plains-rider rhythm of it.

Alone in my quarters that night, I tried without success to figure out the relations between my three dinner companions. Whatever the tie between Dolly and the hauntingly familiar-looking Droop-eye, I judged it not to be emotional. As to McQuinn and Miss Tandy, I was of two opinions. At times theirs seemed the ease of old friends, while at others Terry seemed possessed of an almost boyish eagerness to please her.

Try as I would, too, I could make nothing of the colonel’s words relative to the defunct duchy. He was entirely right about the extent and intensity of its fame, however. That, together with the hideous romp which had capped Ace Ferguson’s execution, had not only captured the imagination of American journalism but stimulated it to remarkable flights of fancy.

Originally famous as a bonanza of huge dimensions, Dead Warrior had come to be known as the human Jack Horner pie of the West, the tough and zany cornucopia from which newspapermen could draw copy when all the rest of the world failed them. Going through newspaper exchanges for anything I myself could use, I now constantly ran into stories about Dead Warrior which began where history ended. Every shooting was reported as the blood feud of the two best
gunmen on the frontier. Every practical joke — real or invented by the reporter — was magnified into the horseplay of titans.

“To drink with Ace Ferguson” was the new national synonym for hanging. There were vaudeville jokes, such as the one about the bride’s biscuits that thought they were tough until they came to Dead Warrior. Poetasters didn’t neglect the camp, either. Appearing in one of the leading magazines was an effort signed by that popular versifier, H. Randolph Cain. Insofar as I am aware he had never been to Arizona, but he knew something about the bandits who now and again harried the passengers of the Carruthers and Wheeler stage line.

As the poem progressed, all the things that could happen to a tenderfoot on the frontier befell the unhappy visitor to the Duchy of Dead Warrior, which Cain had revived for the purposes of his work. Moreover, he had at least one experience that was unusual.