The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (18 page)

In June 1875, the nation—or at least that part of it not engrossed by the scandals of the Grant Administration, or preparations for the American Centennial celebration to take place in Philadelphia a year later, or the surrender to U.S. forces by the Comanches at Fort Sill, or in converting to Christian Science after reading Mary Baker Eddy's
Science and Health
, or following
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
—thrilled to sensational accounts in the press of the destruction of one of the West's most notorious outlaw bands in the sleepy hamlet of Spanish Trot, Colorado Territory.

The James and Younger brothers were still at large, and would continue to commit depredations to the entertainment of Eastern readers weary of the dismantlement of the Tweed Ring in New York City for another year, when a similarly spectacular end awaited them in Minnesota. It was not them, then, who completed their bloody cycle in Spanish Trot, nor the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang; but the Turkey Creek Outfit, who would fade from history in the shade of Northfield, Little Big Horn, and the assassination of Wild Bill
Hickok, all in 1876. (“I see no mystery in that,” Bernard DeVoto would comment, two generations later. “Spanish Ridge, yes; perhaps even Spanish Fly. But Spanish
Trot
? I think I had a touch of it in Juarez.”) There is no accounting for the choices made by posterity, as witness the inexplicably enduring legend of Billy the Kid, who in his only surviving photograph looks like the offspring of an incestuous relationship in the Appalachins, wearing a silly hat.

For a season, however, Turkey Creek in extremis offered all the active ingredients necessary to create an American myth: a daring daylight raid on a bank, the murder of an employee who in confusion transposed two digits in the combination of the vault, and a headlong plunge by the gang out the front door into a maelstrom of lead supplied by a determined citizens' committee that had been anticipating the visit for weeks. Interestingly, the information had come courtesy of the same gang member who had lost three fingers to a premature explosion of dynamite during the assault on the Santa Fe Railroad near Bitter Creek, Wyoming Territory, one month before, and who at the time of the bank disaster was recovering from his injury in Cheyenne. George Adam Cedarcrest, normally a fair hand with a powder charge, was an operative in the employ of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency. According to conventional wisdom, his conflict of interest had played an important part in his carelessness on that occasion. It also spared him his life, as Allan Pinkerton had turned over his intelligence to the local authorities to avoid tying up his agents for an indefinite period, and citizens' committees were not known to discriminate between friend and felon in the heat of fire.

Cedarcrest, whose maimed hand, together with his brief fame, had rendered him unsuitable for undercover work, was assigned to the file room in the San Francisco office, where he stayed until his
retirement in 1891. Twenty-five years later, he died in the midst of negotiations with Famous Players-Lasky to adapt his self-published memoirs to the screen. The film was never made, and thousands of unsold copies of the book went back to the pulp mill. The rest of Turkey Creek found longer lasting recognition of a sort in 1974, when Time-Life Books published a picture of their corpses, arranged on planks for purposes of identification in Chicago, in its series on the Old West. The caption referred to them merely as a “bandit gang, ambushed by vigilantes in Colorado.” (Black Jack Brixton, who saw the shot displayed in the window of a photographer's studio in New Mexico sometime after the disaster, noted a dirty toe poking out of a torn stocking, and laid in a supply of socks. He determined never to embark on another robbery without putting on a fresh pair.)

The other big story of that quarter, although it failed to inspire exclamatory headlines in the first column, proved more nourishing over the long run, in the form of journalistic speculation on slow news days. The disappearance of the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang, after a busy decade, puzzled authorities and was said to have created tension between Allan Pinkerton and the heads of all his Western field offices, who reported with palms spread that none of the sporadic episodes of rapacity that had taken place since the removal of one of their members from the jail in Table Rock bore their signature, and that nothing useful had been heard from any of the confidential informants they depended upon to keep track of itinerant marauders. A staple of frontier outlawry seemed simply to have floated off into outer space; a most unsatisfying end to an investigation that had claimed years and dollars far in excess of the amount Brixton and his followers had removed from banks, railroads, and express companies going back to the sack of
Yale, Kansas, on April 10, 1865, twenty-four hours after the surrender of the Confederacy.

Pinkerton ordered a relentless search of all the gang's known haunts, beginning with Denver. An army of grim-faced men in bowlers invaded Nell Dugan's Wood Palace with mauls and axes, punching holes in suspicious-looking walls, splintering locked doors, and demolishing a pump organ large enough to conceal a man behind its front panels, which it did not. Nell and her ladies of easy reputation followed the agents from room to room, slashing at their cigar smoke with Chinese fans, derogating their efforts in language colorful and cutting, and energetically attempting to seduce them away from their mission, with some success; three of the searchers did not report back to the Denver office until the next day, when they were summarily suspended for a month without pay.

Eventually the trapdoor in the back parlor was discovered, and laying down their tools in favor of pistols, the Pinkertons descended into the basement quarters, where they found all of the beds stripped except one, their mattresses rolled, and no one in residence except a vagrant known and loved by the citizens of Denver, all of whom were aware of his sad story of impoverishment after the vein of gold he'd been mining had thinned to nothing and his first flush of prosperity had been squandered at the Palace and its competitors. He explained, at gunpoint, that Nell had employed him to conduct odd repairs and given him shelter. In the six weeks of his stay, he insisted, none but he had appeared below ground except the Negro maid who came to change the sheets once a week. After some difficulty over a heavy chest of drawers that had been inadvertantly pushed over the trapdoor, sealing them in the basement, the agents departed empty-handed except for the tools they'd brought with them.

Altogether the damage to private property came to fifteen hundred dollars and change, which a judge of the First District Court of Denver County ordered the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to reimburse to Nell Dugan. The
Colorado Rocky Mountain News
denounced the decision in a fiery editorial that quoted liberally from Revelations and the Reverend Doctor Eccles Monsoon's multiple-volume history of the white slave trade in North America. The
Denver Post
, with whom Nell advertised the more wholesome entertainments of her establishment, celebrated it in half a column, pointing out that the Pinkertons had spent more money in the Wood Palace in one day than all its other customers combined spent in a week. The wires acquired this item and enlivened the telegraph columns of the Eastern press for weeks.

“Do we not do business with the
Post
?” demanded Allan Pinkerton, crumpling the copy of the Denver paper that had come by rail under Philip Rittenhouse's subscription.

William Pinkerton, seated in his father's office, recrossed his legs and tugged down the points of his waistcoat. Unlike the old man, he was inclined to be stout, as was his younger brother Robert, and to bring dignity to his jowls wore coarse whiskers that twisted like rusted wire. “We have a standing order of two columns, three days a week. The Wood Palace buys half a page every Saturday. Miss Dugan may have the edge.”

“Cancel the order. What in thunder has become of Ace-in-the-Hole?”

“Possibly they were frightened by what happened at Spanish Trot. Were I in their place, I'd consider it an object lesson.”

“You're making the mistake of thinking like a detective and not like a criminal. Lessons are lost on them. They'll see it as a blow to the competition, and redouble their efforts to fill the vacancy.”

“Evidently not, or we'd have heard from them before this. Outlaws have been known to return to the straight and true in the past.”

“Not these outlaws. In Brixton's case, it would be no return. He killed his first man at the age of twelve.”

“Ten, according to Ned Buntline. If this keeps up, he'll have been too young to stand up to the recoil.”

“This isn't a subject for jest. If you spent more time studying case files and less time reading rubbish, you'd be a greater asset to this agency.”

William pressed his lips tight.

“It's a conclusion with no payoff,” said the old man. “If it is a conclusion, which I choose to doubt. They must be planning something hor-r-rendous.”

“Perhaps your confidential informant has gone over to the other side.”

“His silence explains nothing. These fellows have a way of calling attention to themselves.” He picked his cigar out of the tray on his desk and puffed, apparently unaware it had gone cold. “I'm tempted to call in Rittenhouse from San Francisco. He knows more about what's afoot in the Gr-reat Desert without stepping outside his office than all the men we have on the spot. Certainly his talents are wasted in the field. I should not have let him talk me into letting him go.”

“You indulge him. One would think he was your own blood.”

In this, William echoed the whispers of all who hated and feared the Reptile, a society which included the heir apparent. It was a transparent canard. While it is possible to father a bastard at thirteen, at that age the old man was still in Glasgow, working day and night to support his mother and younger brother; he had not had time for a liaison of that kind. In any case, there was nothing
of the Scot about Rittenhouse, who was Prussian in his meticulous method and disconcertingly American in the way he spoke out. But William never missed an opportunity to undermine his authority with Allan.

For his part, the old man gave no indication that he knew anything of the rumors. He was the world's foremost detective when it came to crime and the densest of men when it came to the office intrigue all about him. “If that were the case,” he said, “I'd never have given him leave. I treat you and Robert no differ-rent from anyone else in my employ.”

“Excluding the Rep—Rittenhouse,” William corrected himself. He lit a cigarette to conceal his agitation.

Alerted by this gesture to the status of his cigar, the old man struck a match and reignited it, drawing smoke deep into his lungs. He blew a ring without thinking, and scowled at it. He disliked ostentation. “Who do we have in Mexico?”

“On the payroll, or under the vest?”

“Both.”

“Well, Horton's the field man in Mexico City. We've a
federale
captain in Nogales and some informants masquerading as bandits or vice versa in Chihuahua. I can get their names.”

“When you do, wire them descriptions of Brixton and his men, and have Denver and San Francisco send photographs and sketches. It's been my observation that whenever a band of brigands vanishes, it's to Mexico they've gone.”

“Not Canada? It's a closer ride to where they were reported last.”

“They're smart, or they'd not have lasted this long. They won't flee the Eye to risk the Mounties. I dislike dealing with the arrogant redcoats myself, but there's no denying they're effective. Perhaps if we had a queen in this country we'd have the same free hand.”

“We're too close to Independence Day for that kind of talk.” William scowled. “While I'm about it, do you want me to recall Rittenhouse?”

The old man smoked, shook his head. “No. We'll let him have the bit a while longer. I've a hunch the apprehension of the Prairie Rose would make a fine subject for a case history. It may even tell better than Ace-in-the-Hole.”

Philip Rittenhouse, who unlike most detectives never laid claim to any sense beyond the five God had given him at birth, was oblivious to the discussion of his subject in Chicago. As it was taking place, he sat in the squeaky captain's chair in his furnished office above a Chinese laundry on Washington Street, with a view through the streaked windows of three of San Francisco's best-known shops of iniquity: Gilbert's Melodeon, Bert's New Idea, and the Adelphi. The Bella Union, more famous than all the rest, stood on the side of Portsmouth Square to which he had no window, only a patchwork quilt of playbills advertising extinct entertainments pasted over cracks in the yellow plaster.

He was conscious of it nevertheless, as a farmer in Nebraska was conscious of the Department of Agriculture in Washington and an architect in Buffalo was conscious of the Taj Mahal at Agra. But then they hadn't the thud of brass instruments in the soles of their feet to remind them, nor the
baroom
of a remote kettledrum in
their ears whenever a dancer in pink tights executed a split. As Peter Ruskin, proprietor of the Ruskin Dramatic Arts Agency (est. 1875), he thrilled to the proximity of that splendid showcase of theatrical talent, and as Philip Rittenhouse, an operative with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency, he had the comfortable sensation of knowing that as long as places like the Bella Union existed, his work would always be in demand; for it drew thieves and murderers the way an abandoned carcass drew vermin, and the prices it charged for admission, as well as for the diversions inside, discouraged its clientele from honest occupations and the spare living most of them offered.

He'd been there, of course, as he had to its competitors. For three weeks he'd divided the rest of his time between the wormy cylinder desk, its pigeonholes stuffed with decaying programmes, telegraphic pleas for money from stranded artists, and bottles of whiskey that smelled like the sinister brown wax women used to remove unwanted hair—items left by the previous tenant—and his sweaty little quarters next to the coal furnace in a rooming house on Kearney Street built of old packing cases and green timber. For authenticity's sake, he'd traded his usual nondescript dress for a flowered waistcoat, green glass stickpin, tan bowler, and yellow garters, and chewed licorice to cover the scent of alcohol on his breath, of which actually there was none; he was a confirmed teetotaler, and there were only so many things a man would do to support his disguise. All these things he kept track of in his expense book in his personal code, as well as the cost of the advertisement that ran twice weekly on an inside page of the
San Francisco Call
, which we here insert, in its proscenium-arch border: