Dead Warrior (24 page)

“Mosby, I came in to tell you how proud of you I am.” She was as healthily good-looking as ever and bubbled with a warmth which suggested that we had parted but the day before. “You remember Mrs. Weatherby, of course.”

“Oh, we’re old friends,” her companion vowed, while I was searching my memory. Finally I recalled that she was the guest of the Fosters’ who had once threatened that Apache Street would shake to the tread of Mrs. Grundy.

Although she used different terms, she herself confirmed this recollection. “But when I was talking to you then, I never dreamed that you would be the man of the hour,” she said. “I didn’t even think that you took what I said in good part, but do you know what has happened?”

I was wondering if she’d grant me permission to smoke but decided that the odds were against it. “No, ma’am.”

“Why, we of the Dead Warrior Ladies’ Progressive Community Group have agreed that you’re the city’s first citizen.
And now,” she went on, while I was brooding over that information, “there is one more thing we want our champion to do. We do not think there should be dance halls right on our main business street.”

Only the day before, I had rejected such a suggestion, made by a vigilante, because I thought it was based on the common tradesman’s objection to having money spent on passing pleasures instead of concrete merchandise. “Why do you take that position?” I inquired.

“Because a principal shopping street should be free to all,” she retorted. “Free to women as well as men, Mr. Carruthers. As it is, a woman has to hurry along the street like a horse with blinders, heading for a particular destination. If she pauses to window-shop, or even so much as glances from side to side, she is liable to be taken for one of those hurdy-gurdy creatures and accosted. That is not right. We are entitled to go about our own lawful business unmolested.”

There was no arguing that point. “But there’s no law against the business these people are in, either,” I said.

“Well, there should be,” Mrs. Weatherby replied, “but the Ladies’ Progressive Community Group is not taking that matter up yet. All we are saying now is that if there must be such nasty places, they shouldn’t be right in the middle of town, where they are forced on everybody’s attention. They are of interest to a special kind of citizen, and they can just as well be in a special part of town — like what you call the cribs.”

Not liking to agree with her about anything, I yet felt forced to concede the justice of her position. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “but it may be nothing at all.”

Mrs. Weatherby bowed and marched out, but Faith lingered a moment. “Is it true that you deliberately killed that Charlie Barringer in a street fight?” she whispered.

“Well, he was in front of my gun when it went off, Faith.”

She frowned, though in uncertainty rather than anger. “Why did you do it, Mosby?”

I was glad to see her; but I wanted to make it clear once and for all that she would have to take me as the man I was, not the one she might hope to turn me into. For that reason I did not ring in the contributing factor that Barringer had been a far greater threat to the welfare of Dead Warrior than the combined inhabitants of Louseville.

“I didn’t like him,” I told her.

She saw that that was as much as I was going to say; but as I had now become popularly identified with good causes, she was ready to think well of me, where I had formerly been suspect. “He must have been an awfully bad man,” she decided. “Will you come to dinner tonight, Mosby? Father and I will be alone.”

Moving the dance halls appeared a larger order than the matter of carrying guns, involving as it did real estate as well as the balancing of individual rights. To my surprise, there was little opposition, however. Those who were for the musical brothels did not like to publicize the fact, while those opposed were as persistently vociferous as frogs; and the public clamor frightened the public officials. Fearful of being repudiated if he did not act to cover himself, Mayor Jackson announced that both dance halls and red-light cribs must move west across the tracks.

The cribs should not have been included, for they were not on Apache Street and already constituted a community where nobody went without a particular type of business in mind. They were on property which had become valuable with the arrival of the railroad, though, and I think Dick’s political war chest was enriched by those who had other plans for this land. At all events, when the dance halls moved to Louseville,
the cribs went, too, and were replaced by trackside warehouses.

If that didn’t add up to justice, it nevertheless made good sense, for railside locations were important for the warehouses and not for the cribs. Accordingly I had no quarrel with the civic betterment program, leaving out only the departure of Blackfoot Terry. Then the vigilantes brought in the survivor of a gun duel. It was Rogue River Pete.

“We didn’t start this business to lynch old-timers,” I protested, when he was brought to my house. “It’s the scum from Louseville that we’re after.”

“Not any more; the law goes for everybody,” Weaver said.

He was a lynch lover straight out of Can Can, but I could afford to ignore him. I turned to Bradford.

“It’s a case of nonjurisdiction,” I said.

The merchant stared at me, a lock of his sandy hair hanging down beneath his hat. “This man may not be from Louseville, but he acts like it. He’s a gunman and a drunkard, and I don’t think he’s married to that Indian woman he lives with.”

Believing that last the worst offense of all in puritan eyes, I allowed myself a smile. “That’s not a felony.”

“Yes, but he killed a man, a resident of Louseville, as it happens.”

“That’s one less of them, then,” I said. But I had stopped smiling.

“But suppose it was this other one that had survived?” Bradford said. “Would you have said that we had jurisdiction?”

“You can’t draw distinctions between two men in the same fight,” Holt unnecessarily reminded me.

“Oh, shut up,” I barked. Then I stared haggardly at the prisoner. The only bareheaded man there, he had his arms
tied behind him, but he still had his chew of tobacco. His jaws worked rhythmically, as he returned my look. “What happened?” I asked.

“Well, I was drinkin’ at the Golden Beaver, and this Louseville guy got tough with me, so I got tough with him; and I see he was goin’ to draw, and he done it, only I beat him to it.”

“Did you kill him?” Bradford demanded, before I could say anything.

“Well, I give that guy Leeming there a job, but — ”

“Did you kill him?” Weaver interrupted.

“Why, sure, I killed him, but it was self — ”

“Never mind the excuses,” Holt snarled. “You heard him admit it, Carruthers! He’s got to swing.”

They wouldn’t have listened to anything short of Gabriel’s trumpet then. For a moment I glared from one to the other of them as though I myself were the trapped prisoner.

“I’m sorry, Pete,” I mumbled. “You’re not supposed to carry a gun in town at all.” To illustrate, I held my coat open, showing him that I myself was unarmed. “It’s against the law. It’s against the law to shoot in town. You did, and you killed a man. They’re going to hang you.”

At that a couple of the vigilantes grabbed hold of him, but Pete shook them off. “I got a right to say something, don’t I, Judge?”

“Here or out there,” I said, nodding toward the mesa.

“I’ll say it here, where I got a man I want to talk to.” For his final speech Rogue River Pete got rid of his quid, plopping it down near the feet of Leeming, who had to jump to keep from being splashed. “I always was skittish of government, which is what I come West to get along without, and hangin’ me ain’t goin’ to make me think no better of it. Of course, I know what you been tryin’ to do, Judge. You’re
tryin’ to make this a decent town, and that’s a good idea if you take it by itself; but the folks you’ve throwed in with ain’t decent, to my way of thinkin’.”

“What’s that?” Resenting the tobacco, Leeming spoke up sharply. “Who’re you casting off on?”

“I wasn’t namin’ no names, but I’d just as lief.” Pete nodded toward Eben. “You take Eben Bradford there. He keeps a store where he sells things accordin’ to what he thinks he can get out of you instead of at a square price, and a fellow what does that is no good, accordin’ to the way I was raised. And there’s Stephen Holt; and if you borrow five dollars from him the bastard wants six back; and they wouldn’t even spit on a fellow who’d act that way in any camp I was ever at before. And there’s Irah Weaver, who tried to skin his own uncle after old Seth done everything for him.”

“Why — ” Starting to protest, Irah remembered that I was present.

“He did,” I said. “Go on, Pete.”

“Well, Judge, here these fellows is top dogs in town, and they’re goin’ to give me the deep six on account of doin’ wrong, when I been square all my life and never shot nobody that wasn’t as willin’ for trouble as I was. And I always give a man a fair break, which is what these fellows don’t want to do to nobody, if they can help it. That’s all I wanted to say. They ain’t provin’ nothin’ to me except that they got the numbers to hang me. Their idea of wrong ain’t mine, and for my money a camp where they call the turn is no damn good.”

THEY HANGED ROGUE RIVER Pete, as they had to in their own vindication, but he finished the Dead Warrior vigilantes. I wrote an editorial commending the organization for what it had done for the city but stating that it had now outlived its usefulness and had best leave the suppression of crime in the hands of the municipal authorities. For once in my camp, Dick Jackson praised the
Vigilante
for its stand, and that was that. With both papers against them, they did not feel it wise to move again.

Pete’s words haunted me, meanwhile, and for several days it was hard for me to regain my shining concept of the entire human and industrial miracle of Dead Warrior. Faith Foster tried to understand my distress, when I mentioned the incident to her, but it was impossible for her to see how an uneducated roustabout could mean anything to me.

“But, Mosby,” she protested, “you’ve admitted that he wasn’t a close associate of yours. Why do you worry about him?”

“There are some men that are like books in your home,” was the best I could do in the way of explanation. “You don’t have to keep rereading them. Just by seeing them around, you know what’s in them, and it makes you feel good.”

We were returning from an inspection of the palms on the university campus at the time. I had had a few of the trees shipped in from the Coast, and they now stood in isolated grandeur on the shoulder of Beaver Lodge Butte. The water system could not be set up until Bedlington made the funds available; but I had acquired one of the old water wagons that used to serve the town, and the palms seemed to be doing well.

What I had in mind, as a capper for our drive, was supper together in a new restaurant that had opened, but Faith had a different idea. “Let’s call on your friends the Potters,” she suggested, when we were halfway back to Dead Warrior.

Startled, I glanced at her, to see if she meant it. “Would you really like that?”

Her answering smile was at once intimate and mocking. “If they’re friends of yours, of course I’d like to, and you needn’t act so surprised. I’ve already met Mrs. Potter, you know.”

That I remembered, but it didn’t seem to me that the encounters had resulted in cordial relations. I was still debating what to do when Faith dropped a remark which rocked me like a blast of black powder.

“I think Mrs. Potter is going to join our church.”

“Hangtown Jennie?” I said the name before I thought, but Faith apparently didn’t hear me.

“The Methodists and the Presbyterians have been after her, too, but Father has been talking to her, and he’s very persuasive.”

Roads presented no problem on the mesa, because the whole surface, where not marred by ledges and mining operations, was suited to vehicular travel. In stunned silence I turned the horses so that they would head for the Potter mansion.

“Is Mr. Potter supposed to be joining, too?” I asked, when we were once more rolling forward.

“No, but he must be an old dear from what I have heard.” Faith giggled as she gave the Reverend Foster’s report on his conversation with Seth. “He told Father that the medicine lodge his wife picked out could count on plenty of bullion.”

While Seth was showing Faith around the house, I took occasion to quiz Jennie about the matter. “Faith tells me that you’re thinking of getting religion,” I said.

“Well, I’m gettin’ too old to move around, and keepin’ girls ain’t the best racket here no more.” Straightening a highly colored visualization of
The Wreck of the Hesperus
, she flopped down into a rocking chair with red plush upholstering. “I’ve always been used to bein’ at the top of the heap, and that’s where church folks are in this camp. You likely wouldn’t notice it so much, bein’ a man, but it was gettin’ hard to find somebody that’d speak to me decent. Well, if you can’t lick ’em, jine ’em, as the sayin’ is; but it’s better to make them give you the invite, so as long as me and Seth hit it off all right, I got hitched to him.”

Rocking, Jennie picked up a pair of knitting needles, examined the half dozen or so stitches they held and put them down again. “There ain’t nothin’ like bein’ made an honest woman of by a man with a lot of rocks, Baltimore. I can’t remember that anybody in this town ever took his hat off to me except you and old Droop-eye, but you better believe they do it now; and that banker — he’s a deacon in one of these religious spreads that are after me, though I forget which brand he wears — don’t even have to touch his. It just hops off at sight of me.”

Not many days later the railway crews moved on to use a more easterly point as operation headquarters. We rejoiced to
see Louseville fold and leave on the flatcars rolling toward another terminus city; but we were startled by the sudden departure of thousands of people. Dead Warrior had never lost population before. It was accustomed to talk in terms of more people and new enterprises every week. Neither the
War Whoop
nor the
Vigilante
commented on the slower tempo of the town and the emptier streets.

For Sam and myself the progress of the railroad meant the fading away of our freighting operation. The Carruthers and Wheeler stage line had long been out of business, its horses and rolling stock sold to a Phoenix concern, and its mail and express franchises transferred to the Southern Pacific.

“We might go in for ranching,” I suggested, when Sam and I were discussing how to reinvest our money.

“I veto that,” Wheeler said promptly. “It would mean spending part of our time racking around the prairie, singeing the behinds of cows that have done us no warranting injury. Besides, I’d never make it home to dinner.”

“It didn’t take long to housebreak you,” I commented.

“It was the quickest abdication from freedom since man’s best friend sneaked into a cave man’s hacienda to get warm,” Sam confessed, “but Mary doesn’t dream she’s only got a has-been frontiersman.” Pulling out one of his gray hairs, Wheeler admired it and dropped it on the floor. “Ours is a perfect mating, Baltimore, and it all comes of marrying a somewhat spinsterishly inclined schoolteacher. Actually I’ve reached the age when I don’t want to devote more than one day a week to hangovers; but the wee wife thinks she’s caught a wild man who’s sacrificing his baser instincts on the altar of as pure a love as can be expected of a ruffian, so I’d disappoint her if I didn’t have occasional lapses.”

“Well, get a lapse out of your desk,” I advised, “and tell me what you think we should do after closing up this depot.”

“Your cattle idea isn’t bad,” Sam said, when we had tossed down the drinks and lighted cigars, “but I like being at the town end of it. Now that Louseville has left our homegrown bordellos standing in lonely glory, there’s space along the other side of the tracks which could be used for a feeding and loading operation.”

“It will be so used,” I agreed, “but don’t expect me to come near it except to get reports on how well we’re doing, to publish in the
Vigilante
.” I smoked a moment, preparatory to introducing a new subject. “As soon as the S. P. makes connections with the Santa Fe, Dead Warrior will be a natural stopping point for good road companies moving between Chicago, St. Louis and the Coast,” I began. “What do you say we sell the Anything Goes and build a legitimate theater?”

“Well, at least it would be a place I could admit to Mary that I’ve got shares in it,” Wheeler reflected, “but where would we put it? Downtown property’s expensive.”

“It doesn’t have to be on Apache Street, Sam. East out Beaver Lodge is better for the carriage trade. I’ve already picked a lot, as a matter of fact, and — oh, hello, Jackson.”

Dick and I had eschewed each other’s company for months. Now, though, he pulled up a chair close to me, after he had helped himself to the whiskey.

“The feud’s over; and I’m sorry, because you and I had the best newspaper war I was ever in, Baltimore.” He looked both excited and dazed. “I could scoop you on one last story, but it’s too good to keep, so I’ve come over to smoke the pipe of peace before I pack up.”

Not even willing to guess what the trouble was, I held my breath while Sam did the probing. “You can’t be leaving,” Wheeler exclaimed. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that the word from Prescott is that we’re finally going to be allowed
to hold our first election of officers next month; and your temporary crew of administrative highbinders look a cinch to become permanent ones, now that you’ve sold the cribs down the river to New Orleans.”

“This isn’t politics.” Dick held his hands apart and brought them together with a loud popping sound. “The balloon’s busted. The Dead Warrior Mining Company has exploited most of its gold and will now delve for copper.”

In the back of my mind things I had heard, without understanding them, stirred uneasily. I refused to give them heed.

“But they’ve got other properties,” Wheeler protested.

“Primarily copper properties,” Dick said, “and don’t ask about Pan-Western, because Bedlington’s bought out its holdings, along with those of the other mining outfits.”

I spoke for the first time then, and my tones were those of a child fighting to retain belief in a cherished myth. “But there
was
gold, Dick. What happened?”

“There was quite a lot of gold,” Jackson said wearily. “I said the things you two did when Weaver gave me the story. Then when he’d convinced me, I looked up Duncan — who’s been with Bedlington for some months, you know — and got a geological explanation.

“According to Duncan,” Dick went on, when Sam had furnished him with a cigar, “there was enough loose gold and scattered lodes of it around to keep a lot of prospectors in faro money, but there was only one big deposit — fairly broad at the top but narrowing as it got deeper, something like a pyramid upside down. Old Seth happened to kill his Indian right in the middle of it, so the Dead Warrior claim was the richest, while those right around it were rich in diminuendo. But underneath the gold, miners sooner or later came to copper. There’s still some precious stuff, of course, but it will
mostly come to light bit by bit and over the years, as Bedlington works first one section and then another of his monstrous repository of base metal.”

Having made my one expostulation, I couldn’t think of anything to say, but Wheeler was still trying to puzzle things out. “Why was everybody in cahoots to keep it secret?”

“They weren’t,” Dick said. “The prospectors didn’t know, while Pan-Western and the smaller professional outfits never talked about copper, because they weren’t interested in it. Horace Bedlington had his crew keep mum, of course, but mostly not on our account. Horace was glad to have Dead Warrior advertised as a gold field, so that no other copper tycoon would get wind of his big find. As long as he was in the area, he operated a profitable gold mine, because making profits is the way financiers make their living. Mainly, though, he was waiting for the Southern Pacific to come and move on east. Q. E. D., my brave companions in grief. The price of gold is high enough to float the cost of mining it in an isolated province, but the lesser metals can’t be profitably worked without rail connections with other parts of the country.”

Dead Warrior did not look the same to me when I walked back down Apache Street to write the
Vigilante’s
version of the news Jackson had passed on. It was no longer an island in a sea of gold at the flood, but one from which the aureate tides were slipping away, eventually to leave it stranded.

If that was merely a sentimental grievance, others were eating me. I thought of what I might have gleaned from Bedlington’s own words, had I but been alert. He had insisted upon specifying “gold” production in the contract he had signed to save himself from Seth Potter, and I had been so infatuated with the word that I had let it stand. Now, although Seth had already made enough to guarantee Hangtown Jennie
a lifetime welcome at any church of her choosing, he would get only the dribbles of money realized on the residual gold from the mining field he had found.

My next thought was for the university and Bedlington’s promise, which he knew he wouldn’t have to fulfill. Disappointed in my hopes for Dead Warrior, I was also enraged at the remembrance of how I had been hoodwinked. Yielding to the good will which the tycoon had calculated to arouse by his grand gesture of fake benevolence, I had given his company the right of way for a railroad spur across my property.

I wrote to Dr. Hatfield the next day, telling him to dream no more unless he could find a substitute patron. Then I pulled myself together and looked to see what was left of the town.

Once I had assembled the facts, I cheered up somewhat. It seemed that Dead Warrior sat in the midst of the biggest copper field that exploiters of that increasingly valuable metal had ever discovered. There would be thousands more miners than had previously been employed thereabouts, for copper had to be mined on a much larger scale than gold. There would be a gigantic hoist, its steam power fired by the coal which the railroad had made available. There would be a new industrial development in the forms of a huge smelter and refinery.

Yet if new enterprises were promised, old ones were fading. “I can’t sell the good will,” Ham Gay said, “because nobody will want the Happy Hunting Ground, after the prospectors have finished blowing what they got for their marked-down claims. Me and Bill are going up to Leadville, where I hear the stakes are beginning to pile up.”

Gambling wasn’t one of the solid assets of a city, I made myself see, though I felt myself running short of friends in
a place where I had once had so many. “What are you doing about the property, Ham?”

“Bradford’s buying it, though I’m taking the frog art and statues. I don’t know as he’d dare go in it alone, if I left them naked women in the joint.”

When the Happy Hunting Ground followed the Glory Hole and the dance halls off Apache Street, that thoroughfare presented a united mercantile front, broken only by the lesser saloons. I still patronized the Paradise Enow, although it had become the favorite haunt of the new crowd of copper mining engineers. They were a pleasant lot of fellows on the whole, but engrossed in shoptalk. Dead Warrior to them was just a place where they worked until their company should see fit to send them to some other operation. My position as one of the founders and prominent characters of the town was of no more interest to them than to the foreigners — skilled professionals imported from Wales and Germany in the main — whom they sweated underground.