Dead Warrior (12 page)

The way he looked at me when he said that let me know that he was aware of my responsibility for the outlaw’s broken arm. “Where do you think Barringer went?” I asked him.

Peters got his bearings from the low-lying sun and flourished the cigar southward. “Over the border, but I don’t wish to give the impression he was flying from me. He’s too bold a man by all accounts, in addition to being one who always has henchmen at his beck. I understand the territorial government took some notice of him, pursuant to a report that somebody turned in at Santa Fe, but he’ll turn up one of these days.”

If Droop-eye didn’t know who had alerted authorities, I thought I did. Dolly had gone to New Mexico’s capital for other reasons besides gambling, making things as hot for Barringer as the latter had feared she might.

While my mind was forming that conclusion, Peters spoke
again. “I have an engagement in the capacity of guest, or I would insist on the pleasure of your company for dinner. Do you reside in Tucson?”

“No, sir; I spend most of my time in a place called Dead Warrior. Possibly you’ve heard of it?”

That was local pride fishing, for I knew that he could not go any place in the Southwest without hearing talk of the great gold discovery. Gratified by the show of interest in his face, I nodded toward a nearby saloon.

“Could your host spare you long enough for you to join me in a drink?”

“What is the gambling situation there?” he asked, when we had our boots hooked on the rail together.

“It’s still small-scale by professional standards,” I had to admit. “Money’s free in Dead Warrior but not yet running wild. Up to now, you see, only the small miners, using donkey power, have had any answer to their reduction problem. However, the first stamping mill will be ready to operate next week, it won’t be long before gold floods the place, and there can be no doubt that the gambling tables will get the king’s piece of pie.”

“That should follow.” Colonel Peters sipped the brandy he had ordered in preference to whiskey. “Have you any real gaming establishments?”

“There’s nothing fancy in that line yet.” I didn’t like to dwell on the insignificance of the present, so I pushed on to the splendors of the future. “Two or three of our saloons have already moved into frame buildings, though; and I know, from having talked with the proprietors, that there’ll be first-class premises, as soon as the money’s available.”

“I won’t be back in this part of the country for some while in any case, as I have business which will take me to the Coast — and perhaps elsewhere.” There was a pause while
he evidently considered the undertaking he had mentioned, and then he turned to me again. “You’re from Maryland, I believe, Mr. Carruthers. A divided state.”

Although the shift of subject surprised me, I had no difficulty in understanding that he was referring to the war which had torn the country apart during my boyhood. “Yes,” I said, thinking of some that were dead and of the gulf which continued to separate some of the living, “and I come of a divided family.”

I had thought by that remark to forestall any further discussion of so sore a subject, but he was not to be sidetracked. “And to which division did you belong, sir?”

“I’m of the West,” I replied, “which properly belongs to neither.”

It seemed possible that my answer might displease a man of such partisan leanings as I took him to have. What appeared to happen, however, was that it diverted him to some new and by no means unsatisfactory train of thought.

“No, the West does
not
really belong to any section, or indeed any country.” About to go on, he suddenly thought to look at his watch. “I’m almost late for my appointment, but I trust we can talk of this and other matters at another time.”

I had just left town, making the Tucson run a month later, when I met a second professional gambler. This one was riding.

“Dead Warrior-Tucson,” he read aloud, after we had stopped to greet each other. “Is it the same coach, Baltimore?”

“Allowing for a wheel that had to be replaced, following a collision with a runaway ore wagon, yes. How’s Fort Griffin, Terry?”

“Vanishing with the buffalo,” McQuinn said. “I think this fall will be its last season as anything but a place for cowhands to play seven-up, so I thought I’d see if there was any basis for the Arabian Nights lies being told about the big gold find. By the way, is there a caravansary?”

“There’s a really good one being built, and a kind of hotel operating now, but there’s no need for you to languish in squalor, when there’s plenty of room for an extra bunk in my brand-new shanty.” Knowing that my passengers would be annoyed by the unscheduled halt, I clucked to my horses. “Sam Wheeler — I think you know him, but anyhow we’ve just gone into partnership — will tell you where it is. He’s at our stage and freight depot.”

Halfway to Tucson there was now a stage station where wayfarers could buy meals and other such popular requirements as tobacco, whiskey, cartridges, sheath knives and postcards featuring cancan dancers. I was watering my horses there the day of my meeting with Blackfoot Terry when a heavily loaded wagon approached.

“Good evening, Bradford,” I said.

Although our one conversation at Three Deuces had fallen short of being a pleasant one, the merchant looked glad to see me. “Why hello, there!” His greenish eyes next went to the lettering on the stage, and he became even more cordial. “I see you’re from Dead Warrior.”

“One of the oldest inhabitants and stoutest pillars of its society,” I said. “Are you headed there yourself?”

“At least to have a look. How is the place progressing, Carruthers?”

Now I had no reason for encouraging the immigration of this fellow; but my enthusiasm for Dead Warrior was so strong that I seized any opportunity to enlarge upon its advantages.
“You couldn’t do better than to start a store there,” I followed up my eulogy by stating. “It’s on its way to be
the
marketing center of the Southwest.”

While so saying I noted the changes implicit in my observation. Dead Warrior had started out by being the name of a mining claim. Then it had spread out to represent the entire local gold field. Now, although it was still so used, it was coming more and more to mean the commercial center and the concentrated settlement which was growing up around it.

Bradford had been listening to everything I said, yet with the air of a man who is going through a miscellany in search of certain objects only. “Is it actually a town?” he now demanded. “I mean is it incorporated or otherwise officially set up?”

Where everybody was excitedly watching the pot of his own fortunes come to a boil no one was interested in community affairs. Even Dick Jackson hadn’t yet tried to promote municipal organization.

“Things are moving too fast, and we haven’t had time to think about that,” I airily dismissed Eben’s query. “What does it matter if a town’s chartered or what not? The mayor won’t sweep the store out for you.”

“But I shouldn’t think town real estate would have any safe foundation,” he objected.

Sam Wheeler and I had seen to it that the streets were regularly laid out, but that was in the interests of traffic efficiency. Nobody in Dead Warrior concerned himself about title to any but gold-inlaid real estate. Land not presumed to have gold on it was common property, and it was precisely because it didn’t trespass on any of the known ore fields that the townsite had been picked.

“We don’t care who puts his shack on what patch of sagebrush,”
I asserted. “We’re having a little trouble about claim jumping, now that the area is getting more crowded, but squatter’s rights will do fine for your shop.”

Although it was obvious that he didn’t share my nonchalance concerning the subject, he let it drop. “What do you do about law enforcement?” was his next question.

He was seeking for the trammels of a protected community, and as a member of a free one I chose to be scornful of that anxiety. “Oh, a deputy sheriff from Tucson drops in to get drunk with us every now and then; but he’s a pretty good fellow, so nobody bothers him.”

He knew as intuitively as I did that we were born to see most things from opposite viewpoints, but he tried to ignore my attitude. “Do you have much real lawlessness?” he persisted.

“Not of the kind I imagine you’re worrying about.” I returned to seriousness while telling him that. “We’ve got some lively boys in camp, and there’s been some shooting in recent weeks; but there’s been very little thieving, and we’ve never had a major robbery.”

“In town,” he limited my statement. “What about on the road in and out from Tucson, where my supplies would be coming from?”

At that my face became as grave as his own. “Well, only one fellow has tried to hold up any of my stages so far, and he didn’t seem to know what to do when I speeded up instead of halting. I’m carrying Dead Warrior’s mail, of course; but I suspect it doesn’t contain too many valuables as yet, and professional bandits may suspect the same thing. I don’t know what will happen when I start carrying bullion.”

BLACKFOOT TERRY WAS OILING his revolver and I was reading
The Gold Bug
one Saturday afternoon, when Seth Potter entered my three-room cottage. Rainwater dripped from the whangs of the buckskin clothes he insisted on wearing.

“How’s the multimillionaire?” McQuinn saluted him, while I was uncorking the bottle on the table.

Such references to his wealth usually pleased the old fellow, but this one brought forth no smiles. Beyond a word of greeting he said nothing until he had downed his drink and moved to stand with his back to the little sheet-iron stove in the living room.

“A funny thing’s happened,” he said, looking directly at me as he spoke. “ ’Tain’t often this coon asks for help, but I done trapped me two polecats I don’t know how to skin.”

Terry and I exchanged glances before I looked at Seth again. There was a tie of shared experience between Potter and myself, not to mention the fact that I owed my own prospects of wealth to his loyalty.

“I’m already in,” I assured him. “Now tell me why.”

He relaxed a little. “You know my sister’s whelp that come out here from Illinois, don’t you, Baltimore?”

I had met Irah Weaver but had had no inclination to do
more than that. While he seemed generally astute and especially clever at business affairs, he was callow enough to believe that he had a monopoly on those qualities. My first thought, therefore, was that he had preened himself before the wrong gamecock.

“Did Irah get himself into trouble with somebody, Seth?”

“Yeah, he did,” the old mountain man stated. “I’m maybe goin’ to kill him and that Horace Bedlington varmint, but I figgered you might think of somethin’ better to do. Didn’t you tell me one time that you’d done some pettifoggin’?”

A glimpse of his difficulties made me crease my forehead. “I’ve practiced law a little, but if there’s a legal dispute between you and a man like Bedlington, you’ll want someone with a lot more experience than I’ve had. Just what’s happened so far?”

Before replying he opened the stove door and discharged a stream of tobacco juice which staggered the flames. “Well, so far,” he said, “they done told me that I don’t own no mines or claims or nothin’ on account of signin’ somethin’ Irah asked me to a ways back. So I throwed a gun on ’em and buffaloed ’em and hog-tied ’em and give ’em each one of his socks to chaw and come after you.”

When McQuinn and I again exchanged glances I was sure we had the same mixture of thoughts. Blended with sorrow that the old fellow had been cheated out of his properties was the resigned feeling that this was the common fate of naive prospectors who had no one to protect them from the gluttony of professional capitalists. There was anger at Irah Weaver, who was supposed to have acted as guardian but had sold out. There was contempt for Bedlington for having engineered the swindle. There was likewise delight at the thought that this financial wolf had got his tail caught in a crack he hadn’t anticipated.

“Where did you leave them?” Terry asked.

“In the company office.” Potter waved in the direction of the Dead Warrior Mining works, which stood about a mile out of town. “I knowed Irah and Bedlington was there because Irah told me they had some things to settle before t’other polecat went back to Philadelphia. Well, I see a good horse this mornin’ that I wanted to buy, so I moseyed out there to get Irah to take some money out of that iron box they stuff it in. That’s when they told me I didn’t have nothin’ comin’ but some paper things they call stock.”

“Sometimes you can swap stock for money, Seth.” Bedlington and Weaver had manifestly put a shady deal across and had wound up in complete control of the cluster of claims which Potter had staked out for himself, but it now seemed possible that they hadn’t taken everything from the old man. “Let’s go and see what the paper looks like and hear what your captives have to say.”

“After we’ve deprived them of the socks they’re chewing,” Terry said. “I’ll take your horse and bring Baltimore’s and mine from the corral, Seth.”

There weren’t many people astir, as we all three jogged along Apache Street. An occasional figure shuffled past the frame buildings of Dead Warrior’s main business section, but usually he got no farther than the nearest saloon or dance hall. Rain was felt to be an imposition in that land of sunshine; and even the Glory Hole and the Happy Hunting Ground — rivaling each other in the magnificence of their false, tin brick fronts — had a slightly woebegone air.

Two squares past Bonanza Street, on which were the cribs of the red-light girls, we came to Gully Street. Turning east, we could see the one structure which presumed to tower higher than the town’s two leading gambling saloons. That
was the steam-powered hoist of the Dead Warrior Mining Company.

Among the group of boxlike buildings around it was the shanty of the watchman, and I decided that it would be wise to interview that guardian before he made his evening rounds. “Hi, Baltimore,” he said, when I had gained entry to his shack and removed my hat to shake the water off. “I seen you around a few times, but I thought ‘What the hell, he’s probably forgotten me.’”

Peering into the freckled face, I recognized one of the stage robbers I had known at Shakespeare. The fact that he was now a custodian of property hardly made me raise my brows, however. Bygones were bygones in the West, and what he had done in another camp would not be held against him in this one.

“Oh, hello, Pinto; where are the other boys?”

“I wouldn’t know.” He made that emphatic. “So you can call me Pat Scanlan now.”

“That’s fine, Pat.” I pointed through the open door to where Terry and Seth were hitching the horses in the shelter of a shed. “You know Mr. Potter, don’t you?”

“Sure, I know the old beaver-skinner. He’s head of this gold ranch, ain’t he?”

“Well, we’re going into the office,” I informed him, “and as you’re watchman, I thought I’d tell you that we’ll be talking to Weaver and Bedlington for quite a while.”

He shrugged but looked disapproving. “Jesus, Baltimore, you’d ought to be able to find something better than that to do, even on a Sunday. I wouldn’t have drinks on the house with either one of them boids myself. Are you goin’ to tell me when you’re through?”

The financier and the mine superintendent stopped struggling
to free themselves, when we entered the office. Economically but effectively, Potter had bound them by tying their thumbs and little fingers behind their backs with whangs cut from his shirt. Their big toes were also bound with thongs which bit into the flesh at every movement.

Weaver was a blond, rawboned fellow with the look peculiar to men in transit from a rural to an industrial way of life. Except for his rumpled appearance and the lump on his head, the slim, brown-whiskered Horace Ainsworth Bedlington had the air of being the trained master of large affairs which he actually was.

“I’m Mr. Potter’s attorney,” I said, when we had them seated at the council table which was the office’s principal piece of furniture. “Where is the document which authorizes the transfer of his property to you?”

“Not to me but to the corporation of which I am president.” In spite of his headache, Bedlington looked as sure of himself as he no doubt felt. Taking the situation out of the hands of the mountain man and putting it in the lee of the law was exactly what he wanted. “At present it’s en route to Philadelphia, where it will be assigned to its proper place in the files of the company.”

I let that go for the time being. “And in return for his property, or share of it, you gave my client what?”

“Full value represented by mining stock, which your client’s signature shows he was willing to accept.” Bedlington chafed a thumb into which the blood had not yet fully returned. “Our desire was to increase operational efficiency by shifting full administrative control to those actually responsible for developing the mines.”

I had to admire that statement, which never deviated from the truth. Bedlington was reputed to have built up one of the largest fortunes in the country, out of mining properties
among many other things, and I caught sight of the qualities which had enabled him to do so.

“I don’t know as I can kill ’em, on account of Irah’s my sister’s boy,” Seth observed, while I was pausing to consider. “But I can scalp ’em, so’s I’ll have some of their property as a swap for mine.”

Weaver, who had come to know something about the frontier, took this threat more seriously than did Bedlington. The latter passed his smile from me to Terry. Well groomed and with his neatly trimmed mustache cutting across pleasing but reserved features, the gambler looked every inch a solid citizen, and I got the idea that the Philadelphian took comfort in his presence.

“Where are the stock certificates in question?” I asked.

“They will be forthcoming on receipt of the document transferring the physical control of the mines themselves,” Bedlington said. “It is not my fault if Mr. Potter has changed his mind since signing it; but you can rest assured that the terms will be met in every detail.”

Without seeing what Potter had signed or what he was due to receive, I had little to go on. “And there was no copy of this document available for your uncle?” I asked the mine superintendent.

“Why should there be?” Weaver defended himself. “I used to give him copies of everything; but he just threw them away, so I got out of the habit. He’s always said he didn’t want to be bothered with business, so that’s what I’ve been fixing up for him the best I know how. The way it stands now he’ll get all that stock and won’t have to do a thing in the world for it; and that’s why I advised him to sign that agreement.”

The only thing clear to me was that whatever was done had to be done right away. Once Bedlington got out of Dead
Warrior he would have the backing of the courts. Meanwhile it would remain an open question whether Seth had been given some trifling return for what he was forfeiting or none whatever.

“Mr. Bedlington.” I said, drawing my revolver from its holster beneath my shoulder and placing it on the table in front of me, “I’d like you to listen carefully for a moment. Having mentally thumbed through every legal volume read in the course of my vast practice, I find that the only course open to my client is replevin — an action to win the return of property unjustly withheld from the owner, Mr. Weaver. Seth, I think your knowledge of law is equal to arguing this phase of the case. Tie their thumbs behind their backs again, won’t you?”

It wasn’t necessary for me to pick up my pistol. When the conspirators rose to their feet in protest, Terry whisked out a gun which induced them to sit down again. Bedlington wasn’t overawed, however, for he still maintained faith in the protections offered silk-shirt thievery by the industrial age.

“Watchman!” he shouted.

Seth attempted to quiet him with threats but stopped when I raised my hand. “Watchman!” I roared in echo.

Potter had once more bound the hands of our captives behind him by the time Scanlan arrived. “What’s goin’ on?” he demanded. A moment later, though, his eyes grew adjusted to the gloom of the office. “At choich back in New York they always told me I’d never get in trouble for doin’ my duty,” he observed. Drawing up a chair, he crossed his legs and folded his arms. “A watchman’s paid to watch, ain’t he?”

“You’ll lose your job!” Weaver yelled at him.

“You’ve got one with Carruthers and Wheeler,” I said.

“Now, Seth,” I went on, substituting crisper speech for the formal language I had been using, “after talking with these two highbinders I think they’ve got you, cold turkey. That stock they speak of may be worth a few dimes, but I doubt it. There’s nothing else you can do about the situation, but if you still feel inclined to take partial payment out of their hides with your scalping knife, I’d say go to it.”

“The mines are gone, are they, boy? All that gold guzzled by these wolverines?” The old prospector’s shoulders sagged, but as he turned to view the men who had swindled him, they straightened again. “Well, I’ve lifted the hair of a lot of redskins just for takin’ a few beaver plews or a pony worth maybe ten or fifteen dollars; and I’ll sure want somethin’ for this.”

With the words he took the little whetstone he always carried from the case which hung from his belt and started whetting his hunting knife. Unbelieving, the financier watched him a moment. “You can’t scare me with those stage tricks, Carruthers. He wouldn’t dare.”

In place of replying to him, I asked a question of McQuinn. “How many men have been killed here recently?”

That was shop talk. Dead Warrior’s score in this respect was a matter of interest to all the town’s citizenry, and Terry showed an expected concern to be accurate.

“Well, since the first of the month, three — no, four counting the fellow Rogue River Pete plugged last night. Nobody seemed to know who he was; but Floyd Roehampton should count, because it was after midnight on September the thirtieth that I shot him; and Red Tom got Jimmie Miller along about the eighth or ninth; and Si Hoskins knifed Bronco What’s-his-name last week.”

I think it was Terry’s casual reference to his own act of
manslaughter which gave Bedlington absolute knowledge that Dead Warrior and Philadelphia had two different sets of values. He closed his eyes but opened them again, as I went on.

“None of the survivors was brought into court, Mr. Bedlington; among other things because as yet there are no courts.” After letting that sink in, I put another query to McQuinn. “Did our deputy sheriff say anything to you?”

Lighting a cigar, McQuinn found a spittoon to flip the match into before he answered. “Oh, you know Fred Andrews, Baltimore. He asked me what happened, and when I told him how Roehampton had tried to sneak a gun on me, he screwed up his face in that funny way he has when his finer feelings are ruffled and said, ‘By Godfreys, Terry, there’d ought to be a law against fellows actin’ like that.’”

By then having honed his knife to the desired keenness, Potter moved toward the men who had cheated him. The financier cast one look at the weapon in Seth’s hand, and another at me.

“You’d never let him do this, Carruthers.”