Dead Warrior (3 page)

Leaving my duffel in the lobby, I stopped at the post office on my way to the livery stable. George Volney was technically on duty, but he was engaged in sorting fishing tackle rather than mail.

“I’ve taken over the stage from Tom Cary,” I said. “Have you anything to go, George?”

Pulling his glasses down from their roost above his eyebrows, he found a mail sack. “Most of them didn’t take time
to notify their loved ones that they had went. You ain’t coming back, I suppose.”

“No.” He looked contented, but I thought I ought to make the offer. “I’ll wait a little, if you want to ride out with me.”

“Thanks, but not a chance, Baltimore. Why, I’m being paid by the Federal Government, which is counting on me to be faithful to my sacred trust.”

“That’s a mighty fine thing to be,” I acknowledged, “but how are you going to manage it without a post office?”

“But I’ll have one for most a year,” he beamed. “It’ll take Washington six months to find out that this town has fallen into a mine shaft at Powder Keg, and another six for the P. O. Department to get around to closing this office up. I’ll ride my mule in to pick up my pay at Chuckwalla once in a while. In between times I’ve got some fishing to catch up on, and I’ll try a little prospecting myself. So long now.”

As a boy visiting the plantations of sundry relatives I had learned how to handle teams. Later on I had raced two- and four-horse rigs against those of other Maryland young bloods. A stagecoach was a little outside my experience, but I harnessed my two blacks, my two grays, and two chestnuts in the confidence that I would pick up whatever new tricks were necessary.

Having rounded the livery stable, I was wheeling along Bullion Street when I heard a shot behind me. It dismayed me to see Pete dashing my way with his six-shooter in his hand, but he promptly let me know that his intentions weren’t hostile.

“I want a ride,” he shouted. “Meadowbloom done stole my cayuse.”

“This coach takes passengers,” I said, when he had caught up with me, “but I’m not going to Powder Keg.”

“I ain’t neither, Judge.” Food had tended to sober him,
without completing the job. “I couldn’t make it without a horse and outfit, and beside it’d be just my luck to get Meadowbloom back.”

He wanted to climb up on the driver’s seat with me, but I was afraid he’d get sleepy and fall off. “The rules of the line say passengers ride inside,” I explained.

He complied without protest but dismounted when I did so in order to pick up my luggage. His purpose was not to assist me, however. He started poking around the empty rooms of the hotel, and while I was loading the boot with my bags he emerged with a quart bottle of whiskey, over half full.

“There’s always some chicken head that gets so worked up over a stampede that he puts his pants on backwards or forgets his liquor,” Pete observed. “One for the road, Judge?”

“A good town marshal never drinks on duty,” I said. Unpinning my badge of office, I looked around for a closed window to throw it through. “Ask me after I’ve resigned.”

When I had attended to that formality, as well as the one Pete had suggested, I thought we were ready to leave. It was then that I heard a frantic shriek.

“Hey! Wait for me, Tom!”

It could not be said that Hangtown Jennie was making good speed toward us, but she was doing as well as her weight, billowing skirts and the bag she was carrying permitted. “That was — close!” she said, when I relieved her of her burden. “I fell — asleep on — the bar at the Lucky Miner. Then — when I — waked up — I couldn’t find — nobody nor nothin’. Even the rats — have pulled out — for Powder Keg.”

Discovering that she had a small trunk at her lodgings, I solicited Rogue River Pete’s aid. By the time we had stowed the trunk away, her nerves had become restored to their usual robust good order.

“Sure, I think we ought to drink to Three Deuces,” I heard her bawl, as I urged the team into action. “It was a good old town in its day, even if it ain’t no more use now than a played-out plug of tobacco.”

In truth it looked sad enough. Clouds had closed over the little valley, bringing to early afternoon the soft gloom of twilight. A cool wind blew down the Little Buck, raising the ghosts on Bullion Street. Doors which nobody had bothered to close swung crazily back and forth. Windows with nobody behind them rattled, and the eaves responded with low moaning, in undertone to the flap of loose shingles.

Past the empty Bucket of Nuggets we went, and the abandoned city hall and another deserted building with a sign which boasted that the Three Deuces
Democrat
was “the newspaper of the West’s fastest growing city.” I could not muster a smile. It looked like the end of the world to me, with desolation where I was and nothing to hope for when I moved to other parts. And that mood stayed with me until Jennie raised her voice high in song.

The words were new to me but not to Rogue River Pete. His bellow supported Jennie’s hoarse soprano as we neared the end of the street.

Turning into the stage road, I cracked the whip. The horses broke into a trot, and we sped past a welter of old diggings, piles of tailings and makeshift hoists to where trees overhung the gorge of the Little Buck. There was no sense in looking back, and Jennie’s song, whose tune I was now beginning to hum, advised me that I was in a region where the past was not a subject for elegiac reflection.

It had started to rain a little, but I pulled my hat down and grinned at the road ahead. It would lead me, as I was being reminded, through a land where men were as much at home in space as whales in the ocean. Perforce I hauled in on the reins as we neared the rickety bridge across the gorge. Once we were beyond it, though, I pushed the team until the road started its zigzag ascent of the Rinkatinks.

We left the rain in the valley, climbing in a silence which
was only broken by the thudding of hoofs, the grating of metal rolling over earth and the creak of the great leather bands on which the coach rolled with the bumps. My passengers had given up song, and I took it that they had fallen asleep. For hours before I breathed the team at the crest of the pass, I heard no voice but my own, cursing when a wheel jarred into a particularly deep rut.

Darkness had already taken over in the pass, and the wind which reached me had first blown over the snowdrifts yet to be found in the high forest around us. Congratulating myself on the forethought which had led me to buy a pint, I put a lining of whiskey in my stomach to make a good home for the crackers and cheese to follow. It was while I was wrapping up what was left of this refreshment that Jennie stuck her head out of the coach.

“Are we there, Baltimore? This looks awful dead, even for Chuckwalla.”

“We’ve got a ways to go,” I told her. “Another three or four hours should see us there, I think.”

Lowering the leather curtain she had lifted, Jennie settled back again. “I’ll get some more shut-eye,” I heard her rumble.

No doubt she did, but she was awake again about an hour later. We were passing a large clearing known as Burnt Cabin Meadow when she burst forth with another stanza of her threnody for lost towns.

My first thought was that the voice which interrupted was an echo. But it shrilled again, and I halted the team.

“I’m coming as fast as I can,” the voice called. “Wait there, please.”

It was the nature of the voice rather than the words which left me hardly believing my ears. Jennie had made the same interpretation that I had. As I peered into the mist which rose above the meadow her comment smashed the silence.

“Christ on a raft, Pete, that’s a girl! She won’t do no good around here.”

THE FIGURE WHICH STRUGGLED out of the waist-high growth of the clearing was undoubtedly feminine. A moment later the woman was peering up at me, holding a rifle.

“Is this the Three Deuces stage?” Although agitated, it was a clear, young voice.

“When it’s heading the other way,” I said. There was nothing to be made of the face through the veil of the night. “Would you mind not pointing your gun this way?”

“I really wasn’t aiming it, but I’m not used to carrying weapons.” To my relief she used the rifle to point back whence she had come. “Would you go with me to see if you can help my father? He isn’t well.”

My passengers had alighted, so I asked Pete to hold the horses. “What’s the matter with your old man?” I heard Jennie ask, while I myself was dismounting.

“I’m so glad there’s a woman here,” the girl said. “Do you know anything about medicine? Father’s had some sort of a spell.”

“I’ve made a lot of medicine in my day,” Jennie informed her. “If he’s a man, I guess I can tell whether he’s worth keeping or ready for the bone yard. Where’s he at?”

“Over by the spring behind the old burnt cabin.”

During this exchange I busied myself lighting the lantern which was a standard part of stage equipment. The young woman’s clothes showed that she had been through a lot that day. The expensive traveling dress extending below her cape was torn in a couple of places and the lower half of the cape itself was soaked from pushing through the dew-damp grass. There was nothing wrong with the fine, fresh complexion, however, nor with the wavy fair hair around it. I judged her form to be as pleasing as her face, though the folds of the heavy cape denied any exact knowledge. About twenty and tall for a woman, the girl was no more than a couple of inches shorter than myself.

“How did you manage to get stranded out here?” I asked, as we made for where the beaten-down grass marked her route of passage from the spring.

“It was silly of us,” she declared, “but when we got off the train we were told that the stage only ran every other day. We didn’t want to wait in Chuckwalla — ”

“I don’t blame you for that,” Jennie broke in. “They have livelier times in boot hill.”

“So we decided to hire a team, although all we could find was one mule,” the girl continued. “You see, we weren’t sure Three Deuces was just the right place for us, and we were in a hurry to look it over, so we could decide whether or not to have our heavy baggage sent on from Pueblo. Well, we’d hardly reached the edge of this clearing when the biggest bear I’ve ever seen and two cubs — ”

Stopping, I swung the lantern and held it so we could all see each other. “A grizzly or a cinnamon?” I said. “Did it charge you?”

“It didn’t get a chance,” she answered. “That mule took
one look and went tearing off the road, over bumps and hollows and everything. We simply couldn’t hold him.”

“Mules make swift decisions and stick to them.” I could imagine that wild ride and the jarring of the careening buggy. “Did he throw you out?”

“He stopped when we came to the trees, but he was still acting terribly nervous. Father thought the best way to calm him was to unharness him and let him graze a bit.”

“And then you never could catch him again,” I finished the story. “He’s back in Chuckwalla by now, so they’ll send out for the rig in the morning. How did your father get hurt?”

“He isn’t injured; he just collapsed. We followed that mule for hours, and then we gathered up our luggage, which had been dumped out while he was escaping from the bear. By then Father was complaining that he wasn’t feeling well, and by the time I found the spring behind the cabin, he was too ill to do anything but lie down. I heard at least one rig go by a couple of hours ago; but it was getting dark, and I didn’t know precisely who we might meet on a road like this. I was just as glad that the driver didn’t seem to hear me call.”

That would have been Duncan, and I smiled at the probable thoughts of that careful citizen, when he heard a woman’s voice hailing him. “I don’t blame you for being cautious, but what led you to chance running out to meet us?”

“Oh, when I heard her singing,” the girl said, “I knew it would be all right. As long as a woman was with you, I could count on you being safe, respectable people.”

“On behalf of Rogue River Pete, I thank you,” I murmured. “As for your father, I imagine the whole trouble is that he chased around after the mule before he’d become used to this altitude.”

I decided that I had guessed right when we came to where
her parent was stretched out on a mattress made of their combined wardrobes. The long coat with which he was covered made it impossible to see anything but his well-made shoes and his face, which was that of a professional man in his middle forties. He was awake, but his only response to our inspection was to stare back with questioning, troubled eyes.

In my hip pocket I had the all-purpose medicament of the West, but something told me that the mention of whiskey would not be welcomed. Setting the lantern down where it would not cast light enough to make the label legible, I drew forth the flask.

“The stage line always provides medicinal brandy,” I announced. “There’s nothing to beat it for fainting spells.”

With the assistance of the girl, I propped the man in a sitting position and applied the bottle to his lips. He coughed a little but didn’t refuse a second dose. While it was burning its way down and spreading out inside him, he closed his eyes. A moment later, though, he opened them again.

“I’ll be all right now, I think. That brandy was certainly what I needed.”

“I could use some of that myself,” Jennie said. “This high country gets me, too.”

By the time I had helped the invalid to his feet and rescued what was left of my liquor from Jennie, the former was ready for further conversation. “I’m the Reverend Lansing Foster, and this is my daughter, Faith. To whom do I owe this timely aid?”

Having introduced Jennie and myself, I cleared my throat. It seemed a shame to hit him again, just when he was recovering from the first blow, but I could see no alternative.

“If I correctly understood your daughter, you were driving to Three Deuces when you ran into difficulties. There’ll be no
use in going on, because the town doesn’t exist any more.”

He was unable to do more than stare. It was the girl who protested.

“But you told me that you were actually on the Three Deuces-Chuckwalla stage.”

“Making its last trip, Miss Foster. You’d find a postmaster at Three Deuces, if he hasn’t gone fishing, but nobody else at all.”

“But that can’t be so!” the minister exclaimed. “I don’t like to dispute your word, but it was not two weeks ago that I received the assurance of no less an authority than the editor of the
Democrat
that Three Deuces was the fastest growing city — I’m sure he used the word ‘city’ — in the entire West.”

“That maybe wasn’t too much of a stretcher when he wrote it,” Jennie put in. “Last night, though, a stampede started which took all the booze and left only the bottle. You could outpreach Moses on his good days, and you still wouldn’t hear no nuggets rattlin’ on the collection plate. There just ain’t nobody to kick in.”

“But — but it seems impossible that this could happen,” Foster mumbled, “when I took precautions to find out what the situation was. This editor even went so far as to indicate that my services would be greatly appreciated. I had asked him, you see, whether there was any other Unitarian church in town, and in reply he told me that I would be filling the one real gap in the community.”

I was afraid Jennie would tell him that there had been no churches at all in Three Deuces since the town’s one member of the cloth had been knifed in a quarrel over a dance-hall girl, but all she said was: “You couldn’t hang him for that. Dick Jackson never told a lie in his life, unless he got paid for it.”

The minister seemed too dazed to do anything but marvel over the depopulation of a town which had been so warmly recommended to him, so I turned to the girl. “If you’ll pack your things, I’ll carry out your bags. You can find lodgings of sorts in Chuckwalla, and you can make up your minds tomorrow as to where you wish to go from there.”

While I was putting the Foster luggage in the boot, Faith stepped behind the coach to join me. “I don’t think you should have given that old woman any brandy,” she whispered. “I think it has made her a little drunk.”

“I forgot to ask her if she was used to it,” I admitted. “She won’t make any trouble, though.”

“Just the same, I’d rather not sit with her,” the girl said. “Would it be all right for me to ride with you on the driver’s seat?”

“If you wrap up.” Her clothes wouldn’t dry under a buffalo robe, but at least she would be guarded against a chill. I made her as comfortable as possible, waited until Pete had climbed back into the coach, and cracked the whip.

“I didn’t quite hear your name,” she said, when we had gone a little ways.

“Mosby Carruthers, ma’am, usually called Baltimore hereabouts, because nobody in the West can be bothered to say Patapsco Court House, where I actually come from.”

There was a pause during which she apparently gave my words consideration. “You don’t talk like a stage driver.”

“Is there a special language?” I smiled at her, partly to rob my words of any sting she might otherwise find in them and partly because it was a pleasure to look at her now that she was close enough for her features to be more or less visible. “I suppose I should learn it.”

She laughed, but she didn’t let go of her train of thought.
“What I mean is that you speak like a man of education.”

“The line won’t hire anybody that isn’t.” Her voice sounded like New England to me, so I tacked on a sentence. “I nearly didn’t make the grade, when they found out I had only graduated from St. John’s instead of Yale, but I squeezed in by passing a special examination.”

“Stop it,” she ordered. “I know I’m green here, but I can tell salt from sassafras wherever I am. You could find something better to do than to hold six in hand on a country road.”

Her pert rejoinder made me aware of her personality, which had previously seemed only that of a proper young lady in need of a helping hand. Looking at her once more, I found this stronger impression emphasized by the jut of her chin, tilted in my direction.

“Generally speaking,” I said, “nobody ever came West to do anything in particular. People just leave the East to avoid doing something, or because they had done something and were caught at it, or because they couldn’t do something well enough.”

“That isn’t why
we
came,” she declared.

“I guessed as much,” I soothed her. “Taking them by and large, though, people never came West, no nor left Europe for America to begin with, if there was any popular demand for them at home.

“The Duke of What Ho never saw any fault with the state of affairs in England. That clarity of vision belonged to his younger brother, kicked out of the castle with five shillings in his pocket. It never occurred to the Lord Chief Justice that it would be a fine adventure to try his luck in the New World. The fellow who beat him to that inspiration was an otherwise undistinguished lawyer without clients enough to keep him eating regularly. It wasn’t the Archbishop of Canterbury
but only the hedge parson who grew concerned about the spiritual welfare of pioneer settlers.”

I had forgotten for the moment that her sire was also a divine. It took her no time at all to remind me of the fact.

“Father is no desperate failure. He had the biggest church in Hartford.”

I refrained from asking her why he had left it for no church at all, but she supplied the information. “You see, he had done as well for himself as was possible in Connecticut, and he thinks the West is the most promising section of the country now.”

By using the language of practical values where I had been thinking vaguely in terms of a spiritual calling, she left me stranded. “I don’t know how well he’ll be able to do for himself out here,” I hazarded. “We’ve got a pretty high ratio of sinners, I suppose, but most of them move around so fast that salvation would have a hard time keeping up with them. It might be pretty difficult to get a prosperous church started.”

“Oh, Father says that the first thing to do is to get the prosperous cities started; after that the churches will take care of themselves. That’s why he was so disappointed about Three Deuces. It seemed such a coming place, to judge by that editor’s description of it.”

“I’ll bet it did.” She had a charming profile in soft outline against the blackness of the forest through which we were passing. “How did your father happen to be corresponding with Jackson to begin with?”

“That awful story about a judge being killed by some horrible outlaw was in all the papers back East. After that Three Deuces was well known, and there were some magazine articles about the town, which made it seem like a good place in which to invest.”

This girl had the knack of being where I least expected to find her. “Invest?” I echoed.

“Father’s a very shrewd man,” she told me. “He says that the Lord has a right to expect one of His servants to handle his affairs at least as carefully as any other man.”

“Well, if a minister doesn’t know what the Lord expects I reckon nobody does,” I conceded. “Hang on tight.”

The left front wheel had found a hole in the road, and I knew that the stage would roll like a ship when the rear one followed. Grabbing for my arm, Faith leaned against me until the emergency had passed but instantly withdrew from this moment of intimacy.

She hadn’t shrieked or otherwise expressed dismay, and I thought about that. It took something extra in the way of fortitude to go through a day such as she had experienced without showing nervous strain. At the same time she had seen but one facet of the frontier, and that by no means the roughest.

“How do you think you’ll like the West yourself?” I asked.

“Because I’m a woman?” She was swift to pick my thought. “The West is a land of infinite opportunities for us as well as for men. The only difference that I can see is that a lot of the men haven’t got the gumption to do anything but take what’s handy.”