Dead Warrior (22 page)

That was when the ball began. A couple of blocks south of Beaver Lodge, a loaded ore wagon was drawn across the street. Trying to edge around it, the leading rider had his horse shot out from under him.

Discovery of ambuscade turned the raiders in the other direction. Looking past where McQuinn and I waited, they could see a load of hay being backed out of a livery stable. Really hurrying now, they whirled around the corner into Beaver Lodge and the trouble which confronted them there.

“They’ll scatter now,” Terry said. “Let’s see what we can pick up.”

Shots told us that the invaders had tried to fight their way past the third barrier. We heard the yells of wounded men and the screams of injured horses. Next we heard the galloping of hoofs moving in all directions. True to McQuinn’s prediction, the enemy was trying to escape by sifting through the side streets and alleys.

Having trotted east two squares, we found three men charging toward us. We turned them with a volley, and then swung back.

“One’s heading down the next street,” I cried.

A rider spurted out of it just as I spoke. We couldn’t have missed him at that range; but we were after men who could talk, and if we had shot his horse, running at full tilt as it was, the fellow might have foiled us by breaking his neck.

I wasn’t sure just how we were going to capture him, but McQuinn said something in Blackfoot, as he sometimes did when excited. “Here’s where I count coup,” he called, wheeling his horse and giving it the spurs. “Cover me when I dump him!”

Partly from taste and partly because he never knew when he might have to leave any given place in a hurry, Terry always rode the best of horses. The man he now chased had a good mustang under him, yet it was no match for the racing pace of the gambler’s steed.

The fugitive, a long, lithe hellion who’d grow a better beard when he got a few years older, turned his red whiskers over his shoulder when he heard McQuinn’s horse pounding nearer. “He’s going to shoot!” I yelled, jumping Spanish Monte over a box someone had tossed into the alley.

I raised my own gun, as I saw the raider’s revolver swinging back toward us, but neither he nor I got off a shot. Terry fired instead. The gun which had menaced him dropped. The
man who had been holding it yelped with pain and turned once more to urge his horse onward.

It was a futile attempt. Feeling McQuinn’s horse running up his back, the raider swerved his mount to cut him off. To execute that maneuver, he had to slacken speed a second and Terry swept up on the other side.

What the red-bearded fellow expected was death at point-blank range. Unable to switch the reins to his maimed right hand, he dropped them and was using his left to reach for a second pistol when the gambler caught him from the saddle with an Indian whoop of triumph.

“Drop him!” I shouted, slowing to avoid running over the fellow.

Blackfoot Terry obeyed me. He had slowed himself, meanwhile, so that his captive did not have too hard a fall. The man tumbled over but rose, still minded to use that second gun of his. By that time, though, I was afoot and on top of him.

Bringing him back to the roundup on Beaver Lodge, we found four other more or less healthy prisoners, two in no condition for questioning and one dead man, his back broken when his horse fell with him. Half of the invaders had escaped, but we had caught enough for our purpose.

We made no delay. It was all but hot upon the mesa when the fitful December wind wasn’t blowing. When it did blow, it raked our bones and made the old mining hoist from which we had hanged Ace Ferguson creak.

After a lariat was suspended from it, I held the noose in my hand, as I stepped before the prisoners. “You men are guilty of entering our city not as fellow citizens of this country but as an armed foe. You have willfully destroyed property and the means by which some of us make a living. You have
fired bullets both promiscuously and with aim. wounding two men today and endangering the lives of many more.”

“We was just havin’ some fun until you fellows started shootin’ at us,” a skinny, scar-faced man muttered.

“Probably you won’t think it fun to be strung up,” I said, “and we won’t enjoy the stringing. But we’ll go through with it unless you tell us who put you up to this raid and those other two, during which one resident of this town barely escaped being killed, while another was actually murdered.”

“Aw, we was never in your damn camp before,” another of the outlaws protested.

“How about it, Ham?” I asked.

The saloonkeeper inspected each in turn. “I remember you from the second time,” he stated, jabbing a finger at the scar-faced chap. “You was one of the ones that stayed out to cover us while your pardners went in the gambling room to get Droop-eye.” Gay turned to me. “That’s all I’m sure of, Baltimore, though I think this half-breed was along one of the times.”

“That’s good enough.” I took my stand in front of the scar-faced fellow. “Tell us who paid you or hang.”

“And if we snitch, you’ll kiss us and let us go,” he sneered.

“No, we won’t do that,” I admitted. “We’ll turn you over to the county on charges that ought to land you in Yuma Penitentiary for a while, but you’ll get out again.”

Watching his expression, I felt sure that he knew more about the inside of prisons than I did. I saw him weigh all values and make his decision.

“I ain’t talkin’,” he said. “I got a sore throat.”

“It’ll be sorer,” I vainly warned him. He merely looked over my head, as though I were not there.

I hated to give hardihood such a poor reward, but up he went. After steeling myself to cast a cool eye on the hoisting,
I spent the brief rest of his life eying his colleagues, to see which would turn greenest. It was the young fellow Terry had captured; yet while I was having him hustled forward — to be grilled away from the moral support of his associates — the one Gay had referred to as a half-breed spoke up.

He had had such a stolid bearing that I had passed him over as my hardest nut to crack. In point of fact he was still stolid when he abruptly voiced his philosophy.

“I’ll take my chance shootin’ it out with any son of a bitch, but I ain’t goin’ to hang for no guy’s fifty skins.”

“Who’s the guy?” I demanded.

“Some buck that lives in this camp. I don’t know his name, but I seen him while he was confabbin’ with Spike — the man you just stretched.”

The outlaw wasn’t skilled at word pictures, but whoever had talked to Spike was certainly not Barringer, being much too short. Actually I hadn’t expected to find that Charlie himself had passed money to any of the range gangs, and the informer had the same general idea.

“I’d say this guy I saw wasn’t the top man but only his dog,” he observed.

At that I kicked myself for not having realized that his description fitted Roy Sparks. “Will you have them taken to jail?” I asked Gay. “I think this fellow has told us as much as any of them can.”

THE NEXT DAY I SAT DOWN to begin the public prosecution of Charlie Barringer in the columns of the Dead Warrior
Vigilante
. All I did in my first article, however, was to report the testimony of the informer, coupled with the insistence that the real culprit could only be the man in the best position to profit by the outrages which had lately wracked the town.

The ensuing issue carried a front-page story which dealt with Barringer without declaring any connection between him and what had been taking place in the city. Instead I gave his history, as I had learned it at first hand or as I had found it reported in news stories and Western gossip. Passing over the fact that he had created no established act of lawlessness since reaching Dead Warrior, I cited his penchant for cornering the gambling in any given camp by forcing his leading rivals out of business.

Inasmuch as this item had no current angle to warrant its appearance, it was a gratuitous attack, yet of such a nature that it would only make things worse for Charlie if he took public notice of it. Still I anticipated repercussions and wasn’t disappointed. Roy Sparks came swaggering into my office.

He had returned to Dead Warrior following Barringer’s acquisition of the Glory Hole, but with his chief in town the
friendship he had professed for me in front of Dwight Lewis was not apparent. The few times we had met, he had cut me off with a curt nod.

“How are you, Roy,” I now greeted him. “You know, I’d been about to go looking for you.”

Full of his message, he hardly heard me. “I come around just for old time’s sake, to try to get you out of bad trouble, pardner. Charlie Barringer didn’t like that story you run today, and when he don’t like somethin’ he don’t just go find his grandma and get his tears wiped.” Leaning over my roll-top desk, Sparks pointed his toothpick at me for emphasis. “He was agoin’ to send somebody else around, but I says, ‘No, Charlie; I’ll handle this, as old Baltimore done me a pretty good turn one time, and I’d hate for us to have to shoot him, if we can fix things up any other way.’”

The only service I had ever done this fellow was to save him from the man whose carrier pigeon he now was. “I’ll do you one more good turn,” I said, staring at him bleakly. “I won’t tell the vigilantes that you were the one who gave the boys who’ve been raiding this town their instructions and pay.”

He looked as if something had caught in his windpipe. He talked like a man so afflicted, too.

“Who’s sayin’ I done that?”

“Barringer will think that
you
said it, if I have to run a story on the subject, though I won’t if you’ll lay down the facts.”

A Carruthers and Wheeler freight wagon left, eastbound, an hour later. As Sparks was hidden amidst its dummy cargo, he was not in town when I ran an interview with Ham Gay. Reviewing the numerous raids on his premises, the saloonkeeper pointed out that he had had no such trouble while the Glory Hole was owned by Joe Trimble.

Gay’s discussion of his woes evoked a sympathetic interest which it would not have been accorded a week earlier. Public feeling had lost track of the fact that it had been holding the landlord responsible for his own misfortunes. Pity began taking the place of censure while gossip looked around for a new scapegoat to explain the uproar in Dead Warrior.

Finding a villain to substitute for Gay was not hard, as my newspaper articles had opened the way for Barringer’s candidacy. The
War Whoop
railed at my deliberate destruction of a worthy citizen’s character, but in vain. People stopped saying what a good fellow Charlie Barringer was, and there was speculation as to why Trimble had given up his gambling gold mine.

In protest at the success of my propaganda Barringer sent a messenger of a different sort. Randy Sutton was reckoned a formidable gunman, ready to shoot a man coming toward him or going away.

His chief features were a hulking build and oyster-colored eyes in a solemn face. I judged him to be one of those fellows who was a bad man simply because that was his occupation. He took rapine and murder seriously, but he would have devoted the same sober thoroughness to teaching school.

As though looking for something necessary to my work, I opened a desk drawer when he came in. I withdrew some copy paper, which I transferred to my left hand, but I didn’t close the drawer.

Upon entering my office, my visitor slid his back along the wall so that he couldn’t be taken from the rear. “You’re Carruthers,” he told me.

“Always have been.” I feigned scribbling something with my left hand. “Anything I can do for you?”

Sutton nodded. The open desk drawer hadn’t escaped his notice, but he couldn’t see into it.

“Quit writin’ things,” he growled, when he had temporarily given up trying.

“That’s my business,” I explained. “It’s what you do on a newspaper.”

Craning his neck again, he edged a little nearer. “Well, quit writin’ things you might get shot for,” he advised.

He was so absorbed in investigating that drawer for armament that he ignored other possibilities. I turned away from him to shout some sort of question to Clint Fellowes, back in the composing room. When I swung back the outlaw was gazing into the empty drawer instead of at the gun I had whipped from beneath my jacket.

As Randy was left-handed, it was that arm which jerked, but he instantly thought better of it. “This revolver is nickel-plated and has ivory butt plates,” I pointed out, when he was giving me his full attention. “On one of them its original owner engraved ‘C. B.,’ standing for Charlie Barringer.”

The gunman had evidently not known his chief in the days when the latter had owned the weapon. “He never give it to you,” he decided. “He hates your guts.”

“Right both times,” I said. If I hadn’t really bested Charlie in a duel, a straight report of the facts would imply as much. “Now you listen to me, Sutton. The last time Barringer tried to run me out of a town, he had to be carried home, and I took this gun away from him. Tell him I’ve still got it, will you?”

Randy’s cloudy eyes were full of doubt, but I felt sure that he’d carry back my story, thus saving me from having to guard my back any longer. What I hoped, in other words, was that my defiance would so put Charlie’s personal prestige at stake that he would lose caste with his own men if he avoided the issue between us by having me assassinated.

Not that I thought Barringer had any fear of me personally.
What I did think was that the last thing he desired was to strengthen the force of my indirect accusations by giving up his pose of being a peaceable saloonkeeper. By lying low, he had a chance of regaining public favor as rapidly as he had lost it. Openly, it followed, he would not willingly take the aggressive. That was what I next had to make him do, abiding the consequences as best I might.

It was in the mood of a man loading a gun for battle that I composed a fourth article the day after Randy Sutton’s call. This time I flatly accused Barringer of setting out to ruin Gay with a view to dominating the gambling in a city where the man who could do so had a fortune in his fist. All the incidental acts of vandalism, including those I had paid Pat Scanlan to arrange, I charged off as screening for Charlie’s main endeavor.

I had hardly read proof on that item when Dr. Orestes Hatfield entered, with a slender young man in tow. “And how are things in the West’s cultural capital?” he asked, when we had shaken hands.

“Oh, fine,” I said. It took me a moment to shift from the role of grim prosecutor into that of a genial university trustee. “Splendid, I should rather say. I’ve got a campus site picked out which I believe will meet your full approval.”

“This is Thaddeus Anderson.” The doctor indicated his companion. “There are still some things we have to borrow from the East, and one of them is architectural genius. The great New York firm of Stevens and Debrosses have sent us their brightest star, a Prix de Rome two years ago, by the way. Mr. Anderson will design the university’s buildings, but before he can make his plans he must first examine the terrain.”

Anderson looked such a correct product of university training
as to be a piece of architecture himself. He won me, however, by his enthusiasm for the site I had selected.

“Level, solid rock to build on, and the view is magnificent,” he said, following his appraisal of the southern shoulder of Beaver Lodge Butte. “What can we do about trees, Mr. Carruthers?”

“There’ll be water for as many as you wish,” I assured him. I had given the matter of trees some thought myself, and I now undertook to make a suggestion. “Of course, I don’t know how this would fit in with your architectural scheme, but it had occurred to me that palms would be suitable for this warm and arid climate.”

“Yes,” he said. Half closing his eyes, he looked about once more. “I can see a line of them stretching across the approach to the campus, with a Moorish-style administration building in the background. Very effective.”

After arranging for a survey to be made and forwarded, they left late that afternoon. I on my part went to the Paradise Enow, to see what the talk of the saloons was.

“You done smoked out your wolf,” Rogue River Pete informed me. “Nah, I don’t want your money, and I ain’t even goin’ to soak the house for it. This one’s strictly on me.”

Pete’s summation turned out to be accurate. Seeing that he had to act or get out of town, Barringer finally took notice of my attacks in the
War Whoop
of the following morning. Jackson’s paper carried a story in which the outlaw leader categorically denied my allegations. Issued at the same time as this printed matter was a verbal ultimatum, which was also town news in no time at all. This was to the effect that if I did not leave Dead Warrior by the early sundown of that season, Barringer would stand ready to avenge the defamation of his character.

Having delayed the appearance of my own paper, I filled
a hole I had reserved on the front page with a boxed item, set in large, boldface type. “Anyone anxious to interview the editor and publisher of the Dead Warrior
Vigilante
will find him at Apache and Beaver Lodge at five o’clock, by which time the sun will be set.”

To escape the anticipated rush of people, eager to discuss the forthcoming duel, I then saddled up and rode out to see old Seth. He never read the papers, and took less and less interest in the city of his founding, which had outgrown both his expectations and desires. “It’s all right for beavers and Injuns to live that close together,” Potter had once complained to me, “but white folks should ought to know better.”

I hadn’t seen him since Barringer’s purchase of the Glory Hole, and I stared incredulously as I approached Seth’s property. When I had last been there the richest man in Dead Warrior had been living in a plank cabin with a stovepipe sticking through the roof. Now there were a dozen men working on a framework with the dimensions of a mansion.

The shack was still there, though, and the old prospector was seated in its doorway, watching the hammering and sawing, when I turned Spanish Monte into his corral. “Hello, boy,” he greeted me, “where’ve you been keepin’ yourself?”

Content at having found the one place where Barringer wouldn’t be mentioned, I sat down beside Potter. While he was reaching into his shanty for a bottle, so handily placed that he didn’t have to move, I once more watched the carpenters.

“I thought this was all your land, Seth.”

“ ’Tis.” Working the cork out, he looked at me sidewise. “Doin’ a bit of buildin’.”

“You are for a fact.” The longer I gazed the more I was impressed with the size of the edifice. “Who’s going to live in all that space; your horses?”

“Gettin’ married, Baltimore.” He tried to look nonchalant. “Jennie and me.”

“Hang — ” Deciding that bald astonishment was not the proper reaction, I accepted the bottle. It was good liquor, but I drank sparingly. “Why that’s fine, Seth.”

“Sure.” He seemed relieved at my pronouncement. “Of course, marriage ain’t nothin’ new to me. I’ve had up to three squaws at a time — one bought, one stole and one I got for slickering a buck at that game Injuns play with sticks — but I never had a white one before.”

While he was drinking in turn I had time to adjust my mind to the new state of affairs. “When’s the wedding to be?”

“As soon as the house is built, boy. Jennie says that the man who found the bonanza should have the best teepee.” Potter waved a buckskin-sheathed arm toward the mansion in the making. “Women like foofaraw, and I got the skins, so what the hell?”

“Yes, but will she like living this far out of town?” I inquired.

“Says she will,” the old mountain man nodded. “She read somewhere that everybody in the East is doin’ it, and the more trouble it is for you to get to town the better off folks know you are. Funny, ain’t it?”

I stayed with Seth until I could make my deadline without hurrying. Picking my way through alleys, I reached the rear door of our stage and freight office, on Beaver Lodge Street. There was nobody in the building, and I smiled grimly. I knew where downtown Dead Warrior was assembling, even before I heard the buzz of voices from the corners where I was due to keep an appointment.

I made only one preparatory adjustment. For the sake of convenience I normally carried my gun in a shoulder holster,
but I had found that I could actually draw it faster from the capacious and flapless side pocket of my tweed jacket. For this emergency I transferred the weapon to the handier position.

In spite of the fact that everybody was watching for me, I walked unobserved through the dusk. The office of the
Vigilante
was on Apache Street, and the spectators — perched on the rooftops and false fronts, out of the possible line of fire — were peering to see whether I would emerge from that direction.

I have a hazy recollection of being discovered and pointed out when I had negotiated most of the block which separated the Carruthers and Wheeler depot from my destination. The one part of that march which I recall vividly is that I couldn’t seem to avoid walking jerkily. I resented that, because I thought everybody would notice it and unjustly interpret it as a sign of nervousness. The truth is that nervousness about a coming event is begot of thinking about it, and I had put that behind me. I wasn’t even making decisions in terms of the present. All that my actions represented was a reflex of a decision made in the past.