Cape Hell (3 page)

“What about women?”

“Savages, who'd mate with you and cut your throat in the moment of ecstasy; so I'm told.” He flushed a little, although over the bloodshed or the carnal implication, I couldn't tell.

“I could get the same at Chicago Joe's, and save the expense of travel. Why Cape of Lies?”

Here he was on more comfortable ground.

“Legend says Cortes promised to deliver Montezuma to the natives who were rebelling against him, in return for directions to all the gold mines in the region. They delivered, he didn't. You won't find its other name on any map: Cabo Infierno; lyrical, don't you agree?”

“Cape Hell. It's practically a sonnet.”

“In 1519, the disgruntled Aztecs captured several Conquistadors there and put them to death by pouring molten gold down their throats. Clearly, the concept of irony is as indigenous to the New World as the potato.”

“Let's hope it hasn't survived as well. I can't swallow even a jalapeno without regret.”

“I rather think Captain Childress is at least partially responsible for the endurance of the name. The Pinkerton's report cites rumors of soldiers beheaded for desertion and their bodies turned over to cannibals.”

“He got into the tequila. Indians aren't man-eaters.”

“I suspect Childress circulated the stories himself. He's established in the local cane sugar trade—that's public record—and when it comes to discouraging competition there's nothing quite as effective as tales of massacre.”

“Planting sugar for profit makes sense, if he is raising an army. The kind of men he needs don't fight for love of country.”

“That isn't all,” he said, helping himself to an unprecedented third helping of spirits; his Presbyterian leanings counseled against them, and he wasn't a hypocrite in practice. “The federales say he grows poppies between the rows.”

“Opium.”

“The climate is ideal.”

I emptied my glass a second time. “The Civil War's starting to be the least interesting part of his biography.”

 

FOUR

The cashier in
the Miner's Bank read the draught signed by Judge Blackthorne, then rolled mud-colored eyes above his pinch-glasses to see if I wore a bandanna over my face. I got out the badge I carried in a pocket, showed him my appointment papers signed by U.S. Marshal J. S. Sweeney, waited while he retired behind a door with
PRESIDENT
painted in black letters on the pebbled glass, pasted on an angelic expression when the man who belonged to the office stuck his head out and studied me head to foot, and walked out a half-hour later, leaving behind my signature on a receipt and carrying two hundred dollars in double-eagles in a canvas sack. I could have robbed the place in half the time and gone off with ten times as much.

Black Dan Stuart ran a stagecoach stop on the Bozeman, supplying the horses himself from his small (five hundred acres) ranch a mile outside Helena. He wasn't any more black than I was: He claimed service with the Scots Highlanders, also called the Black Watch, in the Crimea. I had my doubts, and they were shared; but when he took it into his head to man the way station personally, he greeted dusty travelers in a kilt and tam-o'-shanter, warping their eardrums with a set of bagpipes.

The costume wasn't suited to the local climate in summer, and Marshal Whitsunday had offered to fine him the next time he squeezed his bag of wind within earshot of Helena, so I found him in ordinary canvas and blue flannel and the straw planter's hat he wore when the sun hammered down. He had a mouth somewhere, but the only evidence of it was the almost unintelligible brogue that came out from behind his red muttonchop whiskers, stirring the silvered tips.

“What's that you're r-r-r-riding, lad?” He stood on his rickrack porch, thumbs hooked inside the cinch he used to hold up his trousers. “It's too big for a sporting girl and too pr-r-r-retty for a horse.”

I stepped out of leather and smacked the pinto mare's neck. It rolled an angry eye my way; I'd yet to make a good first impression on anything that burns hay. “It belongs to Judge Blackthorne's wife. She's too fat to ride it anymore, and too stubborn to sell it. It's a loan until I take possession of that thoroughbred he says you're holding.”

“I hesitate to let go of it; but he pr-r-r-romised to let me play at the Independence Day dance.”

I thanked God I'd be a thousand miles away by the Fourth.

It was a sound enough beast, a bay with one white stocking and a crescent-shaped blaze. He'd named it after a character he said was in
The Arabian Nights,
but there were a lot of
r
's in it and he was still rolling them when I left, leading the pinto. Chances were I'd have to shoot it sooner or later and I wasn't about to take time to carve its name on a cross. I swear it: As I topped the first hill, I heard the old fraud serenading me with a wheezy interpretation of “Amazing Grace.”

My next stop was the Montana Central yard, and my home-on-rails for the foreseeable future.

At first glance,
El Espanto
disappointed; on a siding near one of Broadwater and Hills' two-story-high locomotives, the engine looked small and quaint, although shiny as bootblack with red trim and its name painted in italics on the wooden cab just beneath the opening where the engineer propped his elbow. It hauled four cars only: the tender heaped with wood, a Pullman parlor car, a stock car, and caboose. No sign of the saloon car Blackthorne had teased me with; he jibed as he ruled in court, without fear of consequences.

At second glance the outfit passed muster. It was short but sturdy, mounted on wheels disproportionate to its size, built to churn their way through floods of muck and mud and blizzards above the tree line, with wicked-looking iron spikes on the cowcatcher, stout enough to impale a buffalo bull and carry it along with all the ease of blown chaff. The
Ghost
it was called, but the name was the only ethereal thing about that outfit.

A caterpillar scampered up my spine then. I was riding the rails into a place called Cape Hell, aboard a train equipped to enter the original.

A squat Indian sat on the edge of the cab with his feet dangling, eating a sandwich and washing it down with something from a canteen; I'll call it water. His hair was cut short, mission-style, and he wore overalls and a checked shirt with a filthy bandanna around his neck, but there was nothing European about his black eyes or blunt features, which looked as if they'd been hacked out by a sculptor who hadn't gotten around to smoothing the edges. I never saw him wear a hat, come driving rain or pounding sun, in all the time I knew him; and as it turned out, I knew him longer than most of the men I called my friends.

“Your pardon, Chief,” I said. “Where's the fellow who runs this train?”

“I'm not a chief, Chief. Just the fireman.” His English was as good as anyone's, drenched though it was in Spanish pronunciation. “He's in town, getting drunk on anything but mescal, and a bite if there's time.”

“I'm your next passenger.” I showed him the scrap of tin, which based on his expression had all the effect of Monday turning into Tuesday. “Mind if I look around inside?”

“I'm not paid to mind anything but the firebox.”

“Page Murdock,” I said, since it looked as if we'd be in close association for a while. “What should I call you?”

He showed me his eyeteeth. “Call me your next of kin.”

His name, as it happened, was Joseph. He said he'd snatched it at random from an open book of Scripture when he'd been asked to sign it to a manifest.

The parlor car was as plush as the bedrooms in Chicago Joe's, paneled in sweet-scented cedar (I can't abide the smell to this day) with lace curtains on the windows and armchairs upholstered in supple pigskin. You could lose a boot in the figured carpet. Just for safety's sake I moved the most inviting chair out from under a crystal chandelier, but decided not to get used to it until we were under way; I had enemies in town, and too much comfort tended to dull the fine edge. Behind a gnurled cabinet door I found a dozen bottles of Blackthorne's own label secured by leather straps, with all the accouterments in leaded glass; the old man could be as hard to take as Dr. Pfister's Spirits of Castor Bean, but he was as good as his word.

A dry-sink mounted a mahogany pedestal, lined in mother-of-pearl, equipped with a badger brush, pink Parisian soap, and a pearl-handed razor with a Sheffield-steel blade. Bay Rum to lay the skin to rest. I pulled the cork from the bottle. The contents smelled like an explosion in a field of lime; my eyes watered.

It was my brand, to take the edge off the trail. The Judge had done his homework. In any other case I'd have been flattered.

Another cabinet contained a gun rack stocked with a .45-70 Whitney rifle, a British Bulldog revolver, and a Springfield trap-door shotgun. The first was a dandy long-range weapon, and the belly gun sufficient for close-up work when my Deane-Adams wasn't handy, but the Springfield was available only in 20 gauge, enough to annihilate a jackrabbit but not enough to stop a determined man beyond a hundred feet. I saw Ed Whitsunday's hand in that; town law seldom had to engage the enemy more than the length of a barroom. Worse, the scattergun had only one barrel, which doubled the odds against the man behind it. But since I hadn't even brought up the subject of a scattergun, I didn't plan to kick.

A drawer contained all the ammo I'd need to conquer Mexico, for whatever that was worth. Every time we took it, we seemed compelled to give it back.

Not that I cared for the food. You can do only so much with beans and ground corn, and I'd sampled it all a hundred times over before I traded my lariat for the badge in my pocket.

With that in mind, I flipped up the lid on the zinc larder, and looked at tins of tomatoes, peaches, shredded beef, sweet peas, and baby potatoes. I saw Mrs. Blackthorne's hand in
that
. She was a good enough cook to recognize that importing beans to the Halls of Montezuma was like shipping Studebaker wagons to Detroit. She didn't care for me any more than she did the rest of her husband's crazy-quilt crew, but she was as good a Christian as they came.

More tins, big square ones of coal-oil, lashed inside a cabinet lined in lead. They'd have lit the lamps of China through the next dynasty.

I snatched open other doors. Dozens of jugs of water, drawn from Montana wells, proof against parasites; laudanum, in quantities that would ease the pain of hundreds; yards of gauze, enough to patch the wounds of a regiment; a gallon of iodine, another of alcohol. A leather case, glittering with scalpels, forceps, syringes, and bone saws:
bone saws
. Cold Harbor had been less prepared for casualties. I'd been there, and seen the tent.

I looked, but found no sign of a surgeon packed in salt. Blackthorne had missed a step there.

A pattern was emerging; one I didn't like half so much as the one in the carpet, which had come halfway across the world to settle on a portable floor in Old Mexico.

I investigated further. The stock car had straw and sacks of oats sufficient to feed a string, let alone one thoroughbred. The caboose was a cozy affair, equipped with a bentwood rocker, a ticking mattress on an iron frame, and a rolltop desk, with several decks of cards and a bandbox-new checker set in the drawers.

From food to artillery to medical supplies to diversions, the train was stocked halfway toward the twentieth century.

I made a mental note to bring along
The Odyssey
for entertainment; it might last me to the last stop, if I read it in the original Greek and played a few thousand games of checkers.

I thought I'd snookered the old man out of a case of Scotch whisky and two hundred dollars in gold, but by the time the thing was through I figured I'd be lucky to clear a nickel an hour, not counting doctor's bills, with nothing left to drink but warm beer distilled through the bowels of a burro.

The Honorable Harlan Blackthorne always had the last word. I fancy I hear it whenever I lay flowers on his grave.

 

FIVE

If I'd learned
nothing else during my time with him, I knew better than to expect explanations once I'd accepted an assignment. He'd only give me one of those toothless tight-lipped cat's smiles and say no intelligence was as useful as the kind I found out on my own; Washington jargon for what I didn't know couldn't hurt me. Which was a bald-faced lie, as I'd found out on my own more times than I could count.

So I went over his head, literally: straight to the attic.

Blackthorne had lost patience while the local, territorial, and federal authorities were arguing the details of constructing a courthouse, and had set up shop in the headquarters of the
Herald
building, arranging recesses to coincide with when the presses in the basement began their daily rumble. He'd had the attic cleared of stacks of old numbers of the newspaper to make room for records and evidence, turning it into a combination file room and Black Museum. Trial transcripts rolled and bound with cord stuck out like ancient scrolls from floor-to-ceiling pigeonholes, clamshell boxes stood cheek-by-jowl on freestanding shelves open on both sides, and wooden cases contained case files in leather folders amidst a thicket of edged and percussion weapons hung up like heraldic arms. The collection bore nightmare tales of beheadings, back-shootings, and duels fought at such close range the combatants' shirts caught fire; these, too, dangled from pegs, singed and stiff with old blood, reeking of stale smoke and charred flesh. It all added up to some ten thousand years at hard labor and a potters' field of necks broken on the scaffold.

The curator and headmistress of all this sat at a student desk, her erect back supported by whalebone wrapped in black bombazine and a rimless monocle behind which swam a brown eye swollen all out of proportion, like a fish in a bowl. Just where Electra Highbinder spent the hours of darkness added color to the conversation in Chicago Joe's. Depending on which story you bought, she slept on a cot among the stained broadaxes and jars of poisoned livers or sipped green tea from a translucent cup in a room above the Gans and Klein Clothing Store at Main and Broadway furnished in the Federal style, all carved mahogany eagles and rich leather bindings inside blown-glass presses; this on the authority of the man who'd delivered her four-poster bed from Montgomery Ward.