The Case of the Deadly Desperados (2 page)

Ledger Sheet 3

OVER AGAINST THE FAR WALL
of the cabin stood Ma Evangeline's tall pine dresser. Its shelves were about half full of books and half full of plates.

I scrambled up that dresser as fast as a squirrel with its tail on fire. When I got near the top I half turned and leapt onto one of the two big rafters of the house. I am small for my age, but I am agile.

I was up on the rafter before the door handle even began to turn, but in my haste I had set some of the china trembling. As the front door eased open I noticed a big blue & white plate rolling along the top of the dresser.

It slowed, hesitated, and then stopped right at the edge.

I breathed a sigh of relief, then froze as I heard a man's whiny voice say, “Is it safe?”

“Yeah, it's safe,” said a deeper voice. “They's still dead. Come on, you big scaredy-cat.”

“I ain't a scaredy-cat,” said the one with the whiny voice. “That woman brained me real good with the skillet. It hurt.”

I peeped over the edge of the big rafter and saw three men below me. They sounded like white men but they looked like Indians. Then I looked closer and saw they were white men dressed up as Indians. They were wearing canvas pantaloons, not buckskins, and their moccasins were clumsy things made of buffalo hide. They had war paint on their faces & turkey feathers in their greasy hair. One of the men smelled strongly of Bay Rum Hair Tonic. From up above I could not be sure which one was wearing the Hair Tonic but I guessed it was the man with three turkey feathers. He was leading the others across the room.

I held on to the roof beam & tried a trick my Indian ma had once told me about. It is called The Bush Trick. If you hide behind a small bush and imagine that you are that bush, they say you become invisible. I did The Beam Trick. I pretended I was part of that beam. I concentrated real hard & prayed my Indian ma had been right.

“I told you they wouldn't of hid it in the outhouse,” I heard the leader say. “And now they're dead. We won't get no more out of them.” He went over to my pa, looked down at him & said, “
Nothin can happen more beautiful than death.
” Then he laughed & took the hatchet by the handle & tugged. It made a sucking noise as it came out.

“Let's get out of here, Walt,” said Whiny Voice. “I don't feel so good.”

“Yeah, Walt,” said the third man. He was tall & had a raspy voice. “Whatever you're looking for, it ain't here.”

“Dang,” Walt said. (Only he used the bad word that starts with
d
and ends with
mn
.) He spat some tobacco-tinted saliva onto the floor. “It's gotta be here. I just ain't figured out where.” There was a pause and in that moment of silence I thought they must surely hear my heart thumping. Then Walt said, “Well lookee here.”

I squirmed forward a little & looked down and saw what I had not noticed before. On the table was a cake with chocolate frosting & red licorice strings on top that spelled out: HAPPY 12th BIRTHDAY PINKY. It was a layer cake: my favorite. It must have cost Ma Evangeline a fortune to get chocolate out here in the Nevada desert.

“They got a kid?” said Whiny Voice. From up here I could see the bloody patch on his head from where Ma had hit him with the skillet.

“Course they got a kid, you fool,” said Walt. “Kid's real ma was the one who had what we are looking for.”

“Maybe the kid has it,” said Raspy Voice.

“Pinky a girl's name or a boy's?” said Whiny Voice.

“Boy's name,” said Raspy. “I knew a Pinky in Hangtown. Pinky O'Malley. He was one of them Albino types. White hair and pink eyes.”

“What about Pinky's Saloon in Esmeralda?” said Whiny. “That's owned by a lady. A French lady, I think.”

Walt had taken out a fearsome Bowie Knife and was cutting himself a chaw from a plug of tobacco. He said, “Shut your traps, you two. I am trying to think.” He ate the tobacco right off that blade & chomped for a while. Then he said, “Is there a school in this flea-bitten excuse for a town?”

“Dayton,” said Raspy. “I think there's a schoolhouse down in Dayton. But I saw some kids over by the church when we rode up earlier.”

“Let's check it out,” said Walt. “We gotta find that kid.” He started towards the door & I was about to breathe a sigh of relief. Then he stopped & turned slowly back to the stove. “Wait a minute,” he said. “I reckon someone has been here since we kilt Mr. & Mrs. Preacher.”

“What do you mean, Walt?” Whiny Voice touched the bloody place on his head & brought his hand away fast.

“Something here is different,” said Walt. “Somebody has taken the milk off the heat. And I'll bet they are still here.”

Ledger Sheet 4

AS WALT LOOKED AROUND
for the person who had taken the milk off the stove, I closed my eyes & held my breath. I pretended to be part of the rafter. The blood was leaping in my veins.

I heard Whiny Voice say, “I think that might of been me, Walt.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah,” Whiny Voice said. He sounded nervous. “Ain't nobody here, Walt. Let's skedaddle. Townspeople will lynch us if they find us dressed like Indians with their dead scalped preacher & his wife.”

Walt spat again. “Flyspeck town like this, I reckon we outnumber the townspeople. And we gotta find that kid. Let's try the church.”

I heard their footsteps going out but I did not hear the door close. After a while I opened my eyes. After a while longer I wormed my way along the rafter to the wall & used the window frame to climb down from my hiding place.

Walt was right. Temperance is a flyspeck of a town here in Nevada Territory. It is on scrubland at the foot of the Pine Nut Mountains, between Palmyra & Dayton. Apart from our cabin & a few one-room wooden frame houses, there is a dry goods store, a livery stable & a small church with a half-built steeple. There is no saloon & no place to buy whiskey, so the name Temperance is fitting.

The Rev. Emmet Jones, my foster father, founded this town after a day of prayer & fasting. He said he would build a town where there was nothing to tempt a person to sin. He said it would make his job easier. That shows you how little he knew about human nature. He is probably being lowered into his coffin as I write this, with a hatchet-shaped hole in his chest.

My pa hoped Temperance would be an Oasis of Holiness in a Desert of Sin. But Temperance is not an oasis. It is a failure. The stagecoach only stops there if someone is standing in the middle of the road waving. And it usually only stops if there is room on board, or if the person flagging the lift is either pretty or rich. It is two miles to Dayton, and from there the stage goes up the Toll Road to Virginia City & all those big moneymaking silver mines on the Comstock Lode.

The 4 o'clock stage was due any minute and one way or another I wanted to be on it.

I had to get out of Temperance fast.

When I snuck out of the house that day, the day my foster parents were killed, the first place I ran to was the privy. I hoped Walt & his men would not be anywhere near there, because I needed it real bad. After I did my business, I came out at a crouch & threw myself down on the dust. I wormed my way from sagebrush to sagebrush, heading for the western end of town. With only half a dozen buildings that did not take me long.

Usually you have to wear itchy black trousers & a starched white shirt & heavy boots to school, but because it was my birthday Ma had let me wear my new attire, a set of butter-soft fringed buckskins that she had sewed herself. They were a pale gold color, so I blended in real good as I crawled through the dust. I was heading towards a big clump of sagebrush by the road.

When I got there I smelled a bad smell and saw a dead coyote with flies buzzing around it. I recoiled when I saw it & thought of moving on. But that bush was the only cover around, and it was nearly time for the 4 o'clock stagecoach. I shoved the coyote corpse under the bush with my elbow & lay there on my stomach with my heart pounding & feeling kind of sick.

Then I prayed.

When I lifted my head again, I noticed there were two horses & a mule standing behind Gould's Dry Goods. I had never seen them before. The horses were a blue roan gelding & a bay mare. The big mule was a dirty white color.

I thought, “Those must be Walt's mounts.”

I also thought, “When is that stagecoach coming?”

And finally, “What could be in my medicine bag worth dying for?”

I pushed myself up on my elbows, pulled the medicine bag out from the neck of my buckskin shirt. It was made of buffalo hide & decorated with red & blue beads in a little arrow shape. It was as big as my right hand with the fingers spread out. My Indian ma had given it to me before we set out on the wagon train west.

I had been wearing it around my neck during the massacre but I had not seen it since my foster parents put it in the hiding place under the floorboard. I thought I remembered what was in it but I wanted to make sure, so I opened the flap and spilled out the contents onto the dirt. Apart from the $20 gold coin, there were three things in there: my Indian ma's flint knife, a piece of folded paper & a brass button that belonged to my original pa.

My original pa was named Robert Pinkerton. He was around awhile after I was born but he went off to be a RailRoad Detective and never came back. I was seven when my ma got word that he had died defending a train against robbers. But I had not seen him since I was about two and I do not remember him. The only thing he left me was that brass button off his jacket. She told me it fell off his jacket the day they met & she had always meant to sew it back on but had never got around to it.

My Christian ma Evangeline loved Detective Stories & Dime Novels. When she & Pa Emmet first took me in & I told them my original pa was Robert Pinkerton, a RailRoad Detective, she got real excited. She said my pa's brother was probably Allan Pinkerton, who had established a famous Detective Agency in Chicago & coined the phrase “Private Eye.” That made him my uncle.

She told me a Detective is someone who uncovers the Truth & brings Justice.

She told me a RailRoad Detective is someone who defends passengers & goods from bandits.

She told me Allan Pinkerton was a champion of the Negro & that he employed Lady Detectives as well as men & she said a FreeThinker like Allan Pinkerton might be glad to have news of me.

So Ma Evangeline wrote to Allan Pinkerton in Chicago, to ask him if his dead brother had ever fathered a child by a Lakota squaw around the year 1850. We waited eagerly for a reply, but we never got one. We were living near Salt Lake City in Utah Territory then.

Last year, when the newspapers told how my famous uncle saved Abraham Lincoln from an assassination attempt, she wrote to him again, asking if he knew about me. But then we set out for Nevada Territory. If he sent a reply, it never found us.

Lying there in the hot dust by that sagebrush, I held my dead pa's button in my hand for the first time in two years. Now that I could read, I saw the small button had writing on it. Curved around the top was the name PINKERTON. Curved around the bottom it said RAILROAD. And right across the middle it said DETECTIVE.

I slipped the button into my pocket. It meant a lot to me, but I doubted it was what Walt & his gang were after.

The flint knife was good for skinning rabbits, but you could get a flint knife anywhere. Sometimes you could pick them right up off the ground.

I reckoned it was the piece of paper they were after.

I remembered it had been in my Indian ma's medicine bag when she gave it to me, but of course I could not read then.

I unfolded the piece of paper & examined it.

It was a Letter addressed “To Whom It May Concern.” It promised “The Bearer” several acres near Pleasant Town on Sun Peak, between the Divide & the Creek, & also “the stone cabin on Grizzly Hill & all the goods therein.” It was signed by E.A. Somebody. The surname was a scrawl. It might have started with an
O
or a
G
or even a
D
. I did not know where Pleasant Town was, or to which Divide or Creek it referred.

Then I saw the signature of the witness. It was signed Rbt. Pinkerton and it was dated Nov. 21, 1857. I had just turned seven at the time he witnessed the Letter, but I had not seen him for years. I reckon he must have been killed shortly after he witnessed this Letter because we had word of his death that Christmas.

I folded the paper carefully & put it back in my medicine bag along with my ma's knife & the twenty-dollar coin, but I kept the button in my pocket.

I figured the stagecoach was due any moment. I pressed my ear to the dirt & heard the faint rumble of horses' hooves coming in the distance.

I thought, “If I can just stay invisible for a few more minutes I will be safe.”

I tried The Bush Trick.

But it was hard to pretend to be a sage bush because the dead coyote kept reminding me of my dead ma & pa.

Something else was bothering me, too.

It was that prickly feeling I sometimes get when I am being watched.

Then I heard a voice yell, “There he is! Get him, boys!”