Hornswogglers, Fourflushers & Snake-Oil Salesmen (43 page)

The chased man tried to rise, but rough hands were already on him. He heard gasping breaths, smelled the rank reek of old food and whiskey and rot, all clouding at his face, and he struggled to clear the mud from his eyes.

But it was too late. A fist, big and bony, drove into his cheekbone, snapping his head sideways. He felt something crack deep in his head, in his neck, and a numbness built in him. There was blood, and there were faces everywhere, the laughing faces of drunks looking out the windows of the saloon. Now he saw them, the two who had been chasing him.

And he recognized them as the same men who had warned him, the same ones who told him he would be given no second chance to give them the money. Money he didn't have and would never have. But on their faces he saw more than their greedy desire for money. He saw anger. No, it was more than that, he saw disgust and he knew this was only because he was Mexican. These were gringos who had fought in the war, and none of them he had ever encountered felt anything but anger toward Mexicans.

They were dragging him toward the alley, the dark angle of space to the side of the saloon. More sound rushed into his ears, loud, as if he were hearing for the first time. At the same time he felt strength returning to his arms, his legs. He willed them to move, thrashed with them as hard as he could, for he knew he had nothing to lose.

He sensed they were not after his ears or nose or fingers. He had angered them too much. Now these men were after his life, if only to feed their hatred of him.
Fight
, he told himself.
Fight or it will all end and you will die shamed. Fight
.

And he did, kicking and thrashing and flailing and shouting, and they pummeled him again and again in the face with their big fists. He fought long past the point where he felt something low on his side pop, then hot pain like lightning flowered inside him. It washed all over, as if he had been tossed into a vat of hot coals. He screamed, still kicking, for there was nothing else to do.

Again and again he felt the popping and knew it was a knife driving deep into him, over and over, his life's blood leaking out into the mud of this filthy street in this filthy city. And all for money. He should have listened to his sister, to his grandfather, the only ones of his family left back in Mexico. But he wanted to make money to help them, and now they did not even have him.

It all came to a head in 1849 when more than two hundred local men, tired of giving over their hard-earned money, formed their own gang, the Regulators, and retaliated. This new militia clashed with the Hounds in their den in the Barbary Coast. The Hounds promptly tucked tail and scattered, running for parts unknown. But the militia's work had barely begun. For a more entrenched and thriving collective had set up shop in 1849, and these newcomers were no mere striplings. They were boatloads of hardened criminals from Australia.

Calling themselves the Sydney Ducks, they moved in, took over established businesses, and proclaimed it Sidney Town. They looted without impunity throughout San Francisco, setting fire to entire blocks of vulnerable wooden structures a half dozen times by 1851. While the fires raged, the Ducks pillaged, raped, and murdered unseen.

Once again the common citizens could take no more and the militia that had run the Hounds out of town re-formed, stronger and more organized this time. They called themselves the Vigilance Committee, and merely running the Ducks out of town was not on their agenda. They had had enough and wanted a more permanent solution to the growing plague of crime in their midst.

The vigilantes made quick work of rounding up two men, Robert McKenzie and Samuel Whittaker, men they knew to be guilty of participating in the recent spates of arson and looting. A quick trial was held and the two men were hanged. This stunned the brazen Ducks, and it wasn't long before the rest of them waddled out of San Francisco. At last, the Vigilance Committee had secured a period of relative calm. It lasted for two years before a newer, more insidious entity rose up, and this time it came from within the ranks of paid city officials.

In 1852 corruption at the highest levels became exposed. The spider at the heart of this web of graft and corruption was state senator David Broderick. Others may have held positions of seeming importance in Frisco, but Broderick called the shots. Whenever anyone assumed public office, he demanded they split their earnings with him, ill-gotten or not, right down the middle. The city's own bank accounts had become threadbare, caused by bloated salaries and kickbacks from projects that never saw fruition.

Public anger ran higher with each day, but it would take the murder of a lone voice of reason before San Franciscans were forced to act. . . .

“King!”

James King stopped in his tracks, one hand resting on the doorknob of his newspaper office. He was in a hurry, late in fact, to get this latest slice of misfortune inside to be typeset for the paper. The last thing he needed was another interruption.

His eyes clapped on the man who'd shouted and King instinctively sneered. He curled a finger around the damp cigar stub jutting from his mouth. “James Casey. I've been wondering when I might again have the displeasure of addressing Senator Broderick's lapdog. What do you want? I'm a busy man.”

Casey stepped closer, his hands holding back the sides of his unbuttoned frock coat, his hands resting lightly on his waist. “Oh, I know you're a busy man, King. Busy spreading lies and rumors about the good senator. And it has to stop.”

King took a step toward Casey. “Are you threatening me, Mr. Casey?”

By then a number of people had paused in the street, regarding the rising voices of the two known enemies.

“You know what I am doing. I am telling you to stop maligning Senator Broderick, King, or you'll find I'm not so nice.”

King felt his face redden, and he poked the air before him with a rigid finger. “Now see here, Casey.” He bulled forward, savoring any moment he was able to tell anyone at all just what a filthy, lying thief Broderick really was.

“No sir, your words will not stand!” Casey's face had reddened considerably, and quick as lightning he shucked his sidearm and raised it level with King's chest. The newspaperman spat disgustedly and took another step toward Casey.

Casey thumbed back the hammer and, without waiting, fired a shot at King's chest, then another. King spun to the side, slamming his back against the door of his beloved newspaper office. The cigar stub had dropped from his mouth, and he slumped to his side, one leg bent beneath him. The sheaf of papers he had been carrying splayed across the sidewalk and down the steps.

It took seconds for Casey to be subdued, strong-armed to his knees by a handful of men, while others eased King against the wall.
He is still alive
. . . murmurs rippled through the rapidly growing crowd.

“Let me go! Broderick won't like this! Let me go, I tell you!” Casey writhed, but the men holding him told him to shut up, that he was going to jail. Some said he would swing for killing the only true voice the citizens of San Francisco had on their side.

Minutes later, whistles and shouts parted the crowd and two policemen arrived. They took in the scene, shouted that someone needed to get Mr. King to the hospital. But that had already been addressed. The crowd was waiting on the arrival of the doctor who lived around the corner.

The police manacled Casey, took the revolver with them as evidence, and hustled him to the jail, not far away. A growing crowd surrounded them as they pushed Casey along. By the time they arrived at the jailhouse, the crowd had grown to one of the largest either officer had seen.

“This ain't no good, Dudley. Keeps up we're going to have to join in or get on outta here.”

“Nothing doing, Peters. We'll hold them off until he gets a meeting with the judge.”

“You can't let them—”

“Shut up, Casey. Nobody told you to speak.”

The shooter ignored them. “You send word to the senator, tell Mr. Broderick I have been unfairly arrested. Do you hear me?”

They tossed him in a cell without responding. What a mess, thought the guards. This cannot end well. And it didn't.

Barely two hours later a crowd of ten thousand irate citizens of San Francisco surrounded the jailhouse, pressing close and shouting in a frenzied mass.

“You guards in there!” A big fellow with a tidy suitcoat spoke for the crowd. “If you don't give Casey up, we're coming in, and we won't have any trouble taking him from you. You go along now and it will all be better for you. Trust me, boys!”

They didn't need to be told twice. The handful of jail guards backed off and the crowd's representatives moved forward, snatched the keys from the hand of one guard, and jerked the key in the cell lock until the steel door squawked open. Casey was still manacled inside the cell. But instead of the blustering shooter of an hour before, here was a man whining and cowering as he retreated to a back corner of the cell.

“This isn't right! Senator Broderick will hear about this! It's not right! I know you—and you! I know you all, and I say he had it coming, just like you all will if you don't unhand me!”

A storm of voices shouted him down, told him to shut up, that he'd get what they doled out and like it. Finally they jerked him forward, men to either side of him, and dragged Casey stumbling and unsteady out of the cell, down the long hallway, up the stairwell, and out onto the front steps. The rest of the crowd roared its approval and venom all at once, and Casey shrunk in on himself, did his best to dodge the angry groping hands and slamming fists. He'd never seen so many people, hundreds, perhaps thousands! All of whom bellowed for justice—an eye for an eye, they shouted.

Casey pleaded with his captors to listen to reason.

Finally one man turned on him and snapped, “Reason? The way you gunned down Mr. King? And on the steps of his own newspaper! You will get what you deserve, Casey.”

“But . . . this isn't right. . . .”

“Not right? Now then, what did you think was going to happen, Mr. Casey? Did you think that you were going to get away with murdering the one man in this town who had the nerve to call that rascal Broderick on the carpet for all his swindling ways?”

By the time the man finished his brief diatribe, his face shook, high color rose in his cheeks, and spittle flecked his lips. With that he turned away and the crowd roared even louder as they hustled Casey toward the waterfront.

He spent his time manacled and shivering in a makeshift cell in what his captors called the new headquarters of the Vigilance Committee. They gave him bread and water for nearly a week. Then on the sixth day, a grim-faced man stood before the cell. “James King died in the night, Casey. You will be tried for murder.” He left before Casey could think of what to say.

That day they began what the man on the stand, a judge of some sort, called James Casey's trial.

“This is a farce!” shouted Casey, straightening in his chair.

“No more so than the murder you committed.”

“We have laws in this city! In this country!” Even as he shouted it, Casey knew how absurd that would sound. He had shot a man in front of dozens of people on the street, after all. He slumped back in his chair and waited for what he knew would soon happen.

He was worn down, regretting the entire affair. He still harbored a deep hatred of James King, the so-called journalist, and his foul newspaper. He figured he had a right, no, an obligation to defend the senator from the scurvy-ridden newspaperman and his foul rag. But it had all gone off in a direction Casey could not have foreseen. How could all these thousands of people be so deluded by the journalist?

He ground his teeth tight together, half wished that King had not given up the ghost. Maybe then Casey could live, too, to fight another day. But that was wishful thinking, and he barely heard when they pronounced his sentence, a sentence he knew was coming.

Before the fifteen thousand people who attended the journalist's funeral could file past King's coffin, the Vigilance Committee had tried, convicted, and stretched the neck of Mr. James Casey.