Dead Warrior (2 page)

“That’s just about right, Sam; and it’s one reason I’m not stringing along. I’ll finish out my term here, as long as I’ve accepted the post, but I won’t inflict my ignorance on the court of any other town.”

My Uncle Daniel himself could hardly have made that pronouncement with more dignity. Wheeler took off his glasses, polished them with his handkerchief, then examined me through them.

“Could have sworn we’d met somewhere before,” he said, counting out enough chips to call me. “What’ve you got?”

My queens proved as good as they were beautiful, but while I was scooping in their bounty Dick Jackson rose. “Keep the game running,” he urged. “I’m going to write the obituary for Three Deuces. I’ll be back later to wind up civic affairs, though.”

The fact that a decision had been reached left the others
free to play poker, and I no longer had things all my own way. Nevertheless, I was still somewhat ahead when Dick rejoined us.

“Read all about it.” He tossed copies of a broadside on the table. “Cato couldn’t have done a better job of calling the turn on Carthage.”

“Strike of the Ages Found on Powder Keg,” I read. Beneath the big black letters were several lines of boldface, upside down. As I turned the paper to find out what was hidden by this printer’s blunder, I had a vision of hundreds of others, all being trapped by the same curiosity.

“For a last service to the people of Three Deuces,” I was then informed, “the
Democrat
breaks the secret of a fabulous treasure west across the Sliding Stone range and up the Powder Keg. Prompt action now will enable our citizens to reach this new mother lode before the rest of the world is aware of its existence.”

By turning the broadside around again, I learned that “Prominent Citizens Make Plans for Immediate Departure.” I read the statements of well-known prospectors with growing astonishment.

“Are these fellows really leaving?”

Jackson looked at me indulgently. “You’ve never seen a town break up, but you’re about to. Have you come to the part where it says The Mayor declares his intention of resigning, feeling that he will no longer have a community to serve’?”

“It won’t be official until I write it down in the book.” City Clerk Wheeler pushed back his chair. “Take my deal, Jim, while I go out to get a bottle and have supper sent in from the Chinaman’s. By the time we’ve eaten, we can get a pretty good idea of how things are moving.”

As we stepped out in the street for the suggested tour of
inspection an hour and a half later, I could hear voices indicative of excitement. Most of them were coming from saloons, but by no means all. A storekeeper two doors down from city hall was moving things from his shop to an already half loaded wagon. There were other packers in sight, and people were hurrying back and forth, calling to them as well as each other.

“Are you all set to go?” I heard one demand.

“Nope,” he was answered, “but I will be by sunup.”

All this shook my confidence. Yet it was when we filed into the Rinkatink Palace that I became convinced that the plan to assassinate Three Deuces would be successful. Our entrance was a moment of political triumph; or at least Dick’s entrance was.

“There’s the guy who found out about it,” one miner shouted his welcome. “Here’s to good old Jackson!”

“I’m buying for the square shooter who didn’t keep it to himself,” another announced with the solemn hospitality of half-seas over. “Give the other boys what they want, too.”

“Your turn don’t come till the house has bought,” the barkeep said. He lowered his voice as he put the whiskey before us. “I ain’t askin’ what you’re figgerin’ on doin’, Dick, but let me know if you want my vote when we get to Powder Keg.”

What I couldn’t get over was how delighted everybody was at the idea of moving. This wasn’t a wake for a dead town, it was a celebration of the one to come. The lid of human burdens was removed from all spirits, leaving them in a joyous state wherein the cares of the present were dropped and only confidence in a wonderful future remained.

I only saw one person who showed disgruntlement over the wreck of the status quo. At the Bucket of Nuggets we found our way blocked by the massive figure of the town’s
leading madam. The false front of her hennaed hair had slipped a little, but she was in good voice.

“Dick Jackson,” she boomed, waving the glass in her hand for emphasis, “the bitch ain’t been whelped that’s low enough for you to be the son of.”

“What have I done now, Jennie?” Dick wanted to know. “Have a drink with us while you tell me about it.”

“Sure, I’ll drink with you; I ain’t got nothin’ against snakes.” Hangtown Jennie switched around to show the ample bustle of which Wheeler had made mention, and we followed it to the bar. “But just remember,” she warned, as she hooked her foot over the rail, “that I hate your guts for puttin’ me out of business.”

“You’ll be opening at Powder Keg, won’t you?” Tom Cary asked while Dick was calling to the bartender.

“Not till you get it built up I won’t,” she told him. “I’m too old to get a boot out of tent cities, and I’ve got too much jack to need to scratch nickels out of love among the wigwams. I’m puttin’ my girls on their own while I go to Denver for a while.”

Leaving Jennie to her consolation drinks, we returned to city hall. “Let’s get business attended to before we finish the game,” Sam said. When he had lighted the lamp which hung above the table, he went to the desk in one corner of the room and fished out the city clerk’s minutes book.

“Mayor Jackson,” he went on, “there has been a rumor to the effect that you are resigning.”

“I confirm it,” Dick said, looking at his watch. “It’s 9:30 post meridiem, and you are mayor, by the authority of constitutional successions, as of this minute.”

Wheeler noted as much. “My first act in office,” he then announced, “will be to declare a dividend of the city’s treasury.
There are five hundred and twenty-eight dollars and seventy-one cents in the municipal kitty. As there’s no other use for it, and as it would be a sinful waste to leave this many rocks behind, I will allocate it to table stakes.”

We had never played for blood in our Wednesday poker sessions. The treasury of Three Deuces gave us leeway for more sizable bets than we were accustomed to, and the pace of the game picked up.

Canny though he was about a good many things, Jackson was not a good poker player. In the first place he was too fond of juggling circumstances to have patience with such an inflexible thing as odds. His refusal to make truce with them tripped him now. After two expensive bluffs misfired, he tossed the few chips he had left into the middle of the table.

“I’m packing up for that gold-paved town I created out of poor Fred Wilkins’s mail.” He rose, looking down at me, as long and thin as a whooping crane. “You won’t be going, Baltimore?”

If he hadn’t looked so smug about his coup, I might have changed my mind. A few drinks helping, some of the fever of the stampede had infected me, too. But Jackson, under whom I worked as a newspaperman as well as a member of the municipal staff, had always treated me with a condescension which didn’t allow me to forget my tenderfoot ignorance. Irritated over the plot to ruin the town, and the success it had achieved in the face of my skepticism, I came to a decision. If I went to the Powder Keg or anywhere else with these fellows, it would be as the tail of Dick Jackson’s kite, and I had had enough of that.

“I’ve spent my last winter freezing in Colorado,” I replied. “I’m heading for where it’s warmer.”

Wheeler was the best hand at poker in our crew, but his
luck was off duty that night. After backing a straight against a flush, and four sixes against four nines, he reached for the minutes book again.

“It’s eleven forty-eight, and I am resigning. Parliament never got around to covering this case, so we’ll play the shot on office seniority. You’re mayor, Jim.”

Powers lasted a half hour longer. “I won’t bother to write it down,” he declared, when we had cleaned him out. “You’re the only city officer left, so you get both my jobs.” Removing the marshal’s badge from his shirt, he pinned it on mine. “You ain’t too big, Baltimore; you better start packin’ a gun.”

Because the reference to my size grated a little I was quick to have an answer for him. “That one you’ve got on is city property,” I reminded him. “Hand it over, or you’ll spend your last night here in jail.”

“I always liked my Smith and Wesson better anyhow,” he said, as he unbelted the weapon. Next he threw down a key to land on the table beside it. “I’m glad you mentioned the clink. You’ve got a prisoner there.”

“The devil I have.” I buckled on the gun, but left the key on the table, so I’d be sure not to forget it. “Who’s that, Jim?”

“Rogue River Pete. You sentenced him to stay in the jug until he was sober. He ought to’ve been out days ago, but that Ute squaw of his keeps passin’ him bug juice through the window.”

When Powers had gone, Tom and I settled down to see who would get the pile. I was way ahead, having held good cards most of the evening; but he had better than a hundred dollars’ worth of chips until he thought I was bluffing, when I actually did fill a straight after splitting jacks to make the try.

Cary had no margin of capital with which to buck me then. I was ready for the kill on the next hand, especially when I drew two aces. Tom, after looking at his own cards, slowly put them face down in front of him.

“I tell you what I’ll do,” he said. “The stage won’t be no good to me until Powder Keg amounts to somethin’, which’ll take a little time. The outfit’s worth a lot more; but I’ll bet the coach and team against what’s on the table, draw and show down.”

His offer was a sufficient warning of his strength. However, I still liked my aces. A pair of them pack a lot of power in a two-handed game, and I had the feeling that my luck had not run out.

“Give me two,” I said. One of them turned out to be a third ace. I was shaken, nevertheless, when Cary dealt himself but one card. He could have begun with four of a kind, or filled out a full house, a straight or a flush.

Whatever he had, it made him smile. That was more than I could do when he nodded to indicate that I was in the position of having to put my hand down first.

“One, two and three,” I counted my aces as casually as pounding pulses would permit. “Can you beat ’em?”

His face showed me he could not, even before he spilled a hand showing three kings. “How about loanin’ me your pony?” Tom inquired.

THE DOORS TO OTHER ROOMS of the Golden West Hotel were open when I finally got around to leaving mine the next morning. In passing I caught sight of abandoned belongings and open, empty closets. I saw no one until I went downstairs, where the rotund landlord was checking inventory.

“It looks like I’m going to have to move before you pull the hotel out from under me,” I said. “Would you like to get paid, Harry?”

“I would, kind of,” he grinned. “Your stuff will be safe till you’re ready to haul freight, though; there’ll be nobody much to steal it.”

He didn’t grumble at the complete loss of trade. On the contrary his face showed the same cheerful pleasure at the new state of affairs as had all the others. “Dick Jackson and Sam Wheeler left about an hour ago. They said to tell you ‘so long.’”

“I’m a lot more interested in knowing whether your cook has left or not.” I fished out a fifty-cent piece. “Any chance of getting breakfast?”

“They’re packing up, but you can get something if you
don’t mind eating in the kitchen. Take it easy, Baltimore, in case I’m not around when you’re through.”

Three passing riders waved to me, when I left the hotel a half hour later. The bar of the Rinkatink Palace was being loaded on a freight wagon, but the Bucket of Nuggets was still in the process of shooing away trade.

“But, Jennie,” the bartender pleaded. “We’ve got to pack our stock.”

“Look here, son,” she checked him. “It’s first drink time after a hard night of doin’ the right thing by Three Deuces. Stand out of the way or get blasted out of the way.”

“But Ollie told me to shut everybody off,” the barkeep insisted.

“Damn Ollie, and if the polecat’s got any friends, damn them, too!” By the time Jennie had said that, I had drawn near enough for her to catch sight of me. It was evident that she took note of my marshal’s badge and gun, for she made an appeal to my authority. “Baltimore, I want you to arrest this varmint for resistin’ a customer.”

It was not so much concern for her rights which halted me as the fact that she had reminded me of my own future necessities. “The best thing to do is to hand her out a pint,” I told the bartender. “Here, bring one for me, too.”

Having shoved the flask in my hip pocket, I continued with my errand, which was to make sure that some stampeder hadn’t moved off with my transportation. Whitey Bannister was glad to see me, when I walked into his livery stable.

“I was just about to hunt you up,” he said. “We’re fixing to take off, and I wanted you to know that if anybody lifted your nags it wasn’t me.”

The fact that he had used the plural showed that Cary had explained the transaction of the night before. “Is the coach back by the corral, Whitey?”

“Yep, and Tom took your pinto. It sounded crazy to me, but you sure wasn’t getting hurt in the deal, so I let it ride.”

With the feeling of being one of the last survivors of a dying civilization, I walked back upstreet. The rooms behind some of the windows had been emptied of furniture, but in the rest everything had been left standing. The fixtures of stores were in place; only the stock and the owners were missing. I observed, too, that the frugality of the Rinkatink Palace’s landlord had not been imitated by the proprietors of several other saloons. The bars still remained, already gathering the dust which would deepen with the days, weeks, months and years of disuse to come.

Letting myself into city hall, I put my feet on the clerk’s desk and considered the events of the past eighteen hours. Associations I had come to look upon as more or less permanent had vanished in an explosion of excitement. It was true that I had previously seceded from my way of life in the East, but there was a difference between the two revolutions. Maryland was still there, complete with the people I had known, to return to if I wished. Three Deuces, on the other hand, was a shed snakeskin of a town. The residents had all moved out of my sphere of knowledge, and my chances of seeing them again were as remote as the possibility of getting back the horse which Tom Cary had borrowed.

At the same time another feeling kept popping up, to stir excitement rather than wistfulness. Having gone first to Denver and the job which political pull had secured me there, I had kissed both good-by in order to try my luck in Three Deuces. That was the sum of my frontier experience, while before me now lay the vast semicontinent of the West.

The night before, I had told my associates that I would try a warmer section. As that course still seemed as wise as any, it followed that I would leave by way of Chuckwalla.
From there I could head either south toward New Mexico or southeast toward the boom camps said to be springing up in the Texas Panhandle. Tossing a coin, I found that I would go to Texas.

A little personal business remained to be taken care of first. Unlocking a desk drawer, I started to collect my winnings of the night before and heap them on a bandanna I had brought along for the purpose. Halfway through this congenial task I paused with a frown of dismay, though. Amidst the hard coins and bills, with which I had apparently scooped it up, was a key. What with one thing and another, I had forgotten all about poor Rogue River Pete, languishing in the calaboose.

The city owed him a breakfast as well as his freedom. Remorsefully but fearing it was too late, I hastened upstreet to see if any food was to be procured from store, restaurant or individual. People were still straggling out of town, but it was obvious that they weren’t in the catering business. A couple of merchants, their packing nearly finished, merely shook their heads when I appealed to them. It wasn’t until I trotted back down the street that I found a store which was open for business. Its owner was a newcomer whose name I couldn’t remember. To my surprise he hadn’t even started to move, nor did he show any signs of being in a hurry as he served a tardy but impatient stampeder.

“Let’s see,” he said. “Twenty-five pounds of flour — twenty-five dollars.”

“Twenty — say, how do you figure that?” his customer demanded. “It’s only fifteen cents a pound.”

The storekeeper looked up. He was a stocky, blond fellow of about my age, with a face which succeeded in looking at once flat and sharp. Just now its expression was one of polite disinterest.

“Not in my store. It’s a dollar.”

“That’s robbery,” the prospector announced. “Why, damn it — ”

“Why don’t you go to some other shop?” the merchant asked him. “I think my prices are the lowest in town, but perhaps I’m wrong.”

The stampeder got the play then. His mouth opened twice, a silent hollow in his beard, before he spoke.

“I’ll take ten pounds of flour and couple of pounds of beans, if they ain’t no more’n a jitney apiece.”

When the fellow had gone, I made the effort to put things on a friendly plane. “I’m Baltimore Carruthers.”

“Judge Carruthers,” he corrected me. He eyed me like a fish that has seen bait too often to be fooled by it. “It looks like you’re marshal now, too.”

“And mayor,” I smiled. “Sorry I can’t recall your name.”

“It’s Eben Bradford, but there’s no reason you should have remembered it. I never went to the Rinkatink Palace.”

There was the merest suggestion of ant-to-wastrel-grasshopper primness in the remark. Otherwise he was still waiting me out with cool patience, so I had to take the plunge.

“I’m staying on to wind up city business. Among other things I’ve found that Three Deuces has a prisoner who’s got breakfast coming to him.”

“You’ll just about be owing him a lunch, too,” the storekeeper observed. “How are you fixed for food yourself?”

I hadn’t thought of that. It now occurred to me that I would not only want lunch but some sort of a snack to sustain me on the drive to Chuckwalla. While that realization was dawning, Bradford continued to watch me. He no longer looked like a wary fish but like a bird sure of its worm.

It was useless to haggle with him, even if I could have brought myself to do so. I plunked my load of money on
the counter, untied the bandanna and picked out two twenty-dollar gold pieces.

“Poker was good to me last night,” I said, knowing instinctively that the information would grate upon him, “so the prisoner and I will have nothing but the best. Give me a couple of your ten-dollar steaks, a loaf of bread, a big box of crackers and two pounds of cheese. If there are a couple of bucks left over, keep the change and buy yourself a cigar.”

Angry protest pleased his vanity, which didn’t feel so good in the face of contemptuous overpayment. “I make the prices here,” he informed me, handing me a bill which was somewhat smaller than I had expected. Then he even went so far as to explain himself. “I played it smarter than anybody else by staying open, so I’ve got the right to cash in.”

The single stone building in town, the jail was a two-cell-and-office affair, some fifty yards in back of city hall. There was no sound from Rogue River Pete as I approached it. When he heard me in the office, however, his voice rose, hoarse and angry.

“It’s about time you got here, Jim. The judge said to ease off on the nose paint, but I wasn’t sentenced to be starved to death.”

Pete had never got into serious trouble at Three Deuces, although it was said that he had killed two or three men in other camps. He was big and sounded mean, wherefore I made sure my revolver was in working order, after I had dumped my assortment of bundles. Then I stepped in front of his cell, holding the key in my left hand.

As the sentencing magistrate, I didn’t look for cordiality, but at sight of me the prisoner broke into a grin. “Howdy, Judge; you come to watch me reform? Stick around, because I’m sure doin’ it.”

The reek of stale booze made a liar out of him. As for me, I took the precaution of studying him prior to breaking my news. His tall, angular frame looked powerful, and as much of his face as I could see above a matted red beard was battle-scarred. His eyes continued to regard me benevolently, though, and they made a discovery.

“What’re you doin’ with Jim’s badge, Judge?”

“Jim’s gone,” I replied. “About everybody’s gone but you and me. There’s a new gold stampede to somewhere up the Powder Keg, and they skipped out of Three Deuces like fleas from a scalded pig.”

“So that’s why Joe wanted Meadowbloom.” Pete spat on the floor and shook his head. “I might’ve knowed that somethin’ like that was happenin’.”

“What’s meadowbloom?” I inquired, slipping the key in the lock while he was giving his attention to the problem of Joe’s departure.

“That squaw I had, Judge. Joe Severn bought her last night; I suppose so’s he could have her to cook for him on the trail. He cheated me on the price, me bein’ in jail and all, but I was just as glad to get rid of her. She was waterin’ my liquor and chargin’ me for high-class tarantula blood.”

By that time I had turned the key. “You mean the liquor you were sobering up on?” I asked, as I stepped back from the door.

“I was soberin’ up on the watered half,” Pete told me. “You ain’t goin’ to stay in town just to keep me in the hoosegow, are you?”

“You’re free now,” I said. Going into the office, I waited until he had joined me. “You have a meal or so due you, and the city of Three Deuces is squaring accounts by giving you a steak and some cheese.”

“That’s right nice.” While I was undoing the parcel, with a view to giving him his share of the food, he alarmed me by pulling a revolver I hadn’t noticed from where it hung from a nail. “Jim kept this safe for me,” he remarked, sticking the weapon inside the waistband of his trousers. “Yes, sir; I’d say you was both the right kind of gents.”

Giving him some matches, I parted company with him. There were still live coals in the kitchen range when I returned to the Golden West. Building up the fire, I cooked my steak on a stove lid. When I had eaten as much of the half-charred, half-raw result as I needed, I wiped my pocket-knife on a chunk of bread, dumped the refuse on the dying flames and went upstairs to pack.

The engineer in charge of the Glow Worm, the town’s biggest mining operation, was leaving his room as I strode down the hall. “Hello, Duncan,” I said. “Are you joining the stampeders?”

He put one of his bags down, so that he could take the cigar from his mouth. He was a lean chap, sporting auburn sideburns that emphasized his sturdy seriousness. Just now he looked disgusted.

“I’m not joining their fool stampede, but I’m leaving just the same. I haven’t got any crew.”

Most of the diggings around Three Deuces had been owner-operated. The problems connected with the larger mines had not previously been brought to my attention.

“Well, you’ve still got gold there; some, anyhow. Will you just leave it?”

“That depends on what they say when I wire Pan-Western. Maybe they’ll want me to go to Powder Keg, which may turn out to be really big, for all I know.”

“But what will you recommend?” I persisted. “Would you like to come back here and finish up?”

He put his cigar back in his mouth just long enough to make sure that it remained alight. “I’m a company man, Carruthers. What I like or don’t like hasn’t much to do with the case. Of course, they’ll hold onto the property, and of course it’ll be mined out eventually; but I hope the home office will understand that there isn’t a chance of my getting another crew unless they send in immigrant professionals. I’ll never find any American miners who’d be willing to stay here.”

“Why not?” I asked. “A job’s a job, you know.”

“Not to these people.” He shook his head at a fact he detested but recognized. “They don’t want to make money; they want excitement. We’ll say I returned with the hundred and ten men I need. Well, in a week five of them would be shot and the other hundred and five would leave when they found that there weren’t enough of them to draw ace gamblers and grade-? whores.”

He was on his way again when I remembered that I was the proprietor of a public transportation system. “The stage is leaving for Chuckwalla in about an hour if you need a lift, Duncan.”

“I’ve got a buckboard outside,” he called back. “The postmaster was asking about the stage, though.”

As my sole possessions were clothes, a few books, a sheath knife and a rifle, it didn’t take me long to prepare for the road.