Dead Warrior (23 page)

One of the prides of Dead Warrior was the big kerosene street light which illuminated its principal crossing as soon as daylight failed. When I was almost at the corners, Barringer stepped out of the Glory Hole and into the radiance cast by the lamp. Some onlooker pointed me out to him then, and he turned toward me.

Notwithstanding the message I had sent him through Sutton, I don’t think Charlie fully expected me to meet him. I was still confused in his mind with the inept greenhorn who hadn’t known what to do with the revolver he wore in Midas Touch, and who had later escaped only through the coaching of Dolly Tandy. It was for this reason, no doubt, that he
awaited me with the gratified aplomb of a cat watching a fledgling hop near.

“You’re a little late getting out of town, Carruthers, but perhaps your watch is slow.”

I took the intervening steps, feeling the pistol in my jacket pocket thud against my hipbone. Then I was looking up at the man’s face. His lips were drawn back, like a dog watching for a place to sink its fangs, and I knew mine were also.

“I’m just passing by,” I said, raising my voice loud enough for all to hear, “but as long as we’ve met, I’d like to ask you something.”

He didn’t know quite what to make of my words, but I saw him decide to humor me. “Go ahead,” he said. “If I don’t know the answer now, I can find out and have it forwarded to your next camp.”

I had learned from Sparks that Charlie carried a gun at belt level under his jacket and a second in a shoulder holster. I watched for any indication that he might prefer one or the other.

“What I want to know,” I said, still speaking loudly, “is whether it is true that you are the yellow son of a whore who had Droop-eye Peters bushwhacked.”

Roy had mentioned one waist-high gun. What I saw when Barringer whipped back the flaps of his coat with both hands was that he had two weapons so placed. Seeing me jam my fist in my pocket, he didn’t draw the revolver in the right-hand holster, as he started to do and as I thought he must.

Partly because of the fall I had given him in New Mexico, I had never thought of him as being ambidextrous. What I now learned was that he had compensated for the injury to his left arm by carrying the gun on that side in a swivel holster, designed for firing without drawing.

Realizing that the time lost in doing so would be fatal, I
didn’t draw myself. As soon as my hand found the stock of my pistol, I thumbed back the hammer, lifted up the muzzle, lunged toward Charlie and pulled the trigger.

Almost touching him, I was sure of scoring, while my forward movement took me inside his line of fire. I heard his gun go off, as I hit him hard, to throw him off balance before he could get off another shot. From the way he staggered when my shoulder smashed into him, I thought I must have given him a serious wound. What seemed a certainty, however, was that he was still sufficiently alive to be mortally dangerous. My coat had caught fire from the powder blast, and my left leg stung; but I bulled forward, firing twice more.

Barringer fell then, and I tripped over him. The fear that he might yet be able to shoot was still uppermost in my mind. I was on my knees, trying to get at my gun again, when Rogue River Pete jerked me to my feet.

“Never mind that crow bait, Judge,” he said. “Let’s take that coat off, before you’re cracklin’s!”

It was time enough, for my no longer smoldering jacket had burst into flame. I could still think of nothing but Barringer, though, and I turned to stare down at him, as soon as I was relieved of the burning garment. As Pete had implied, the man was dead. He lay on his side, while arterial blood which had no pumping heart behind it welled out of his body and made red mud out of the dust of Apache Street.

There were people all around me, but Gay and Overton took me into the Happy Hunting Ground and locked the door.

“I’ll slip out the back and get you a doctor,” the saloonkeeper said.

“Get me a drink,” I ordered. “What the devil do I need with a doctor?”

They stared at each other, and then Bill Overton urged me gently toward one of the saloon’s great mirrors. “My God!” he expostulated. “Take a look at yourself, Baltimore.”

There was blood all over me. Somewhere in the course of the encounter I had lost my hat, so I could see the matted gore in my hair. My shirt was smeared with it, and one trouser leg was a soaking red rag.

Up until then I had had the notion that Charlie’s second and final shot had no more than given my left thigh a powder burn. Now, however, the shocked nerves recovered enough to give me a more exact knowledge of my injury. My burning hand was starting to let me know that I would be in for a bad time on that score, too.

“He gashed my leg, but the rest of the blood’s his,” I said. “Hurry up with that liquor, won’t you?”

I never took that particular drink, because dizziness wilted me, and they had to carry me to the hotel. It was a few days before I was limping around on a cane, carried in the hand which didn’t have a bandage on it.

In the meantime I had received a note. I had never previously seen the handwriting; but the unusually shaped letters, with the framing lines at once bold and delicate, told me who had held the pen before I read the missive.

Brief as it was, the message furnished me with a glow of pleasure which stayed with me on the day I made some show of returning to work. Not yet feeling up to discussing the killing which made talk for the rest of the town, I posted an employee to shoo all visitors away. One man was admitted, however, because his business was not to be denied.

“I was planning to see you tomorrow,” I told Magistrate Pickering. “I’m still a little shaky.”

Carving himself a chew of tobacco, he nodded. “I saw that shooting,” he said. “Maybe I should have questioned you about it right on the spot, but from the way you looked, I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t have drilled me, too.”

“That’s possible,” I said. Knowing that Barringer had supported Mayor Jackson’s administration, I was watching for any sign that this member of that administration was taking sides. “Well, if you were there, you know as much about it as I do, Judge.”

“There’s a neat point of law in that case,” he mused; and his look of concentration told me that my suspicions were unfounded. “If I’m not mistaken, you didn’t actually provoke a quarrel by calling the man a son of a bitch. You only inquired whether it was true that he was one, maybe wanting to know as a writer for that paper of yours.”

“That’s possible,” I said again. “My recollection of events might be colored by my excitement at the time, but I believe there were plenty of witnesses. What did they hear?”

“About the same thing I did, as far as I can find out,” Pickering answered. “So when this Barringer went for his gun, he was taking the aggressive. I don’t hold with shooting in town, or killing, either, but self-defense is not only allowable by law but essential to survival.”

It was just prior to quitting time that Dolly Tandy arrived.
The sentry I had posted didn’t challenge her. On the contrary he forgot what he was there for and hustled up a chair for her, as soon as she entered the door. This caused me no astonishment, because the sole occupation of my mind was thinking how beautiful she was.

We said little with words while the others were winding up the day’s work. Our eyes engaged frequently while we were manufacturing small talk, though. In mine I knew she could read my frank delight that she was with me, and it seemed to me that she had a matching emotion.

“We haven’t seen each other very often,” she said, when the last printer had mumbled a farewell.

That was my first intimation that I might have been in her thoughts as freely as she had taken residence in my own. “No, Miss Dolly,” I murmured.

“Terry?” she asked.

He had been the initial reason, but only that. For every tie that bound me to her in the spirit there had loomed a pragmatic wall which stood between my mind and any development of the feeling toward her, long potential on my part.

“I didn’t know,” I hedged, letting McQuinn stand as the sole explanation.

“Terry and I were as romantic as a twenty-two- and a twenty-year-old could be when hampered by the fact that they spent their evenings dealing in separate saloons. Whenever we happen to be in the same camp he thinks he still ought to be devoted to me, but he’s not. His only real love is faro.”

Rising, Dolly walked to the window and clucked to her restlessly stamping horse. Upon her return she perched herself on my desk, putting her feet on the chair I had vacated.

“The subject won’t come up between us again,” she next
said, “but if it did I’d make Terry understand that a pair of gamblers would be two more than I think a family should have.”

She had told me something. My pulse had started pounding, to the confusion of my thinking, but I went over her words, to be sure.

“Are you planning to give it up?” I whispered.

She ceased to spar then, knowing me for her own. “That’s what I came to ask your advice about. At some time I must choose between spinning forever from one town to another and stopping to make a place for myself that will not vanish when the faro stakes fade into small change. What should I do, Baltimore?”

My wounded leg hurt when I pushed myself up to sit beside her, but I paid no attention. “Stay right here,” I cried, tightening the arm I had slipped around her.

She melted as I could not have believed possible. It was as if all the tenderness she had withheld for so long was suddenly released and delighting in its freedom.

“It’ll be like giving up narcotics at first,” she said, when we were leaning back against the top of the desk. Her head had been resting on my shoulder, but she raised it to look at me before relaxing again and snuggling closer. “But I can do it for you, because I’ll love doing anything for you.”

“You darling,” I said, out of a mind cut in two. Most of it Was carried away by the wonder of a passionate adoration, given and received. A small fraction of it, however, was saying that we were not dealing in realities. “Would it be easier if we went to some other place?” I asked, in an effort to quiet this unwanted voice. “Let’s clear out, as soon as we’re married, so that we can both start our new way of life where our domesticity will be taken for granted.”

She kissed me at that, her body even more yielding to mine than before. “You’d do that for me, wouldn’t you, honey; but I won’t have it. Dead Warrior is your town. I know how much you’ve given to it, and what it means to you. It’s your creation, and I wouldn’t think of taking you away from it, especially when I will soon have my own.”

It was all too good to doubt. Although I had the feeling of a man fending the diabolics of the future from the treasure of the present, I was successful in maintaining that guard. Happiness was the element in which we had our being until she gently freed herself from my embrace.

“I mustn’t let you get too tired, though I must say that you seem to be a hearty invalid,” she said. Starting to replace the hat I had removed, she felt her hair and put her headgear back on my desk, chuckling. “What you have done to the latest in fashionable coiffures should be forbidden by constitutional amendment. I don’t suppose you have a mirror around, but I’ll have to make some sort of repairs before I step outside.”

She had transportation in the form of her horse, but I saw a way of prolonging delight. “I’ll get a rig from the livery stable and drive you home,” I said. “I’ll have somebody take care of your bronc, too, of course.”

To forestall denial, I limped quickly to the door. When I had shoved it partially open, I observed without interest that a horse was pulled to a halt a short way down Apache Street. The man astraddle looked vaguely familiar as to outline; but his hat was pulled down over his face. I had just time to note that his head came up, as I appeared in the doorway, when Dolly called to me.

“Wait a minute, sweetheart, and I’ll go with you.” She was always quick and deft. In a jiffy she had her hair pinned
trimly into place again. Then she answered my look of enraptured admiration with a laugh. “You may kiss me once more, fiancé, but with a trifle less ardor.”

When I had availed myself of the specified privilege, we walked side by side toward the door, which had swung shut again. Turning the knob and pushing, I stepped back to let Dolly precede me. She was smiling her thanks over her shoulder, when a shot was fired.

“God, I didn’t mean to do that!” the fellow on horseback cried. With the words he galloped down the street, but I didn’t watch him. Dolly was crumpling, and I had all I could do to see that her fall wasn’t a heavy one.

There was no use in asking her where she was hit. Blood from her bosom was spilling out all over her, and me, too, as I clutched her to me.

I had no words in my uncomprehending grief, but she had one thing to say before she died. “It’s all right, Baltimore, sugar. I would have tried, for you, but I never could have endured tranquillity.”

BLACKFOOT TERRY FOUND me in my house that night. Having turned up the lamp I had dimmed to discourage the would-be-helpful and the curious, he gave me the drink I hadn’t had the heart to pour for myself.

“I’ve only found one possible clue,” he told me. “Short-fuse said he saw Randy Sutton riding toward your office at about the right time.”

The glass dropped from my hand, as I pictured the horseman I had seen waiting near my office. “Of course, it was Sutton. I knew I had seen the man before, but my mind wasn’t working.” The thought that I could have prevented calamity, had I but been alert, overcame me. “It was all my fault, Terry. I
knew
his men would be gunning for me after I cut Barringer down, and I let her go first.”

McQuinn of course had no inkling of the fact that Dolly and I had been betrothed, but he could sympathize with my grief, which was in some measure his. “Take that might-have-been stuff in small doses,” he counseled. “I’ll find him, Baltimore.”

“We both will,” I said, rising awkwardly from my chair.

“You’re in no shape to go,” he pointed out. “I let Barringer be your man. Randy will be mine.”

He left me on that word, and I had no news of him until a few days after the turning of the year. Then, as I was approaching my office to start the day’s work, I saw a woman staring at a bulletin board on which were posted lost-and-found notices, to supplement those published in the paper.

“A man just left that there,” she said, pointing to a small rug of hair, pinned to the board with a knife. “What is it, anyhow?”

“Snake fur,” I told her. I took down Sutton’s scalp, preparatory to dropping it in the refuse barrel behind the building. “It’s found in dry gulches throughout the West.”

That closed the episode; but I had no joy in anything for a long time, nor did whiskey have much taste for me. Work is man’s only friend in sorrow, and I did work as I never had before. For some weeks the effort was its own sole compensation. My life seemed stranded in monotony, with nothing changing but the names and dates of the days. Then the railroad reached Dead Warrior.

Sameness departed from life with the toot of the engine which turned the town into a terminus city. All of a sudden Dead Warrior was the recreation center for the army of men who were building the roadbed and laying tracks upon it. With equal abruptness the hordes of itinerant merchants, tinhorn gamblers, half-dollar whores and the assorted thieves which had followed the railroad crews for hundreds of miles moved into town.

There was no housing problem. When the flatears halted near the depot — which was on the west side, just south of Beaver Lodge Street — the portable buildings they carried were unloaded and put together with screw drivers. Overnight this new section of the town became a fact. Its denizens set
up shop with the nonchalant efficiency of a traveling carnival crew. That done, they swarmed over the city proper like angry red ants.

Dead Warrior, which had the sophistication appropriate to a town with the reputation of being the toughest in the nation, was appalled. Its hardest citizens found themselves in the unusual position of disapproving unseemly conduct. A prompt social line was drawn between the residents of the old town and its rowdy suburb across the tracks, which was given the name of Louseville.

I myself was indirectly responsible for the failure of the city administration to take steps toward controlling this new civic affliction. Looking for an editorial issue in which to interest myself, I had started warning the town about the perils of becoming a terminus city before that took place. Reacting automatically, Dick Jackson had spoken out in favor of not only “the self-sacrificing workmen, giving their all to build steel arteries for the commerce of the nation” but also for “the bold and enterprising shopkeepers and entertainers who brave wilderness hardships so that faithful labor may not find itself entirely without reward.” Then when the
Vigilante
later excoriated the ugly fact of Louseville, Mayor Jackson used the front page of the
War Whoop
to welcome “the thousands of our new citizens who will add so materially to our prosperity by spending their well-earned dollars in our marts of trade.”

Knowing that Dick’s vanity wouldn’t let him backtrack, I saw myself forced to alert the vigilantes once more, if anything was to be done about this new and exaggerated wave of lawlessness. I was, indeed, on the verge of taking that step when Sam Wheeler dropped in.

“How’s the voice of civic conscience?” he greeted me.

“Thirsty,” I said, producing the means of curing my ailment.
I didn’t see Sam in off-duty hours any more, because he was courting one of Dead Warrior’s schoolteachers. She was a small young thing with large ideas about rectitude, and I suspected that she was steering Sam clear of saloons. He did not refuse the drink I poured for him, however.

“How is that leg wound of yours doing?” he next wanted to know.

“Oh, it doesn’t bother me any more, outside of an occasional twinge.” From the way Wheeler gazed owlishly through his glasses, I saw that he had found something which greatly amused him. “Why?” I prompted.

“Well, every time you feel that twinge,” he said, “you can comfort yourself with the thought that you risked a premature engagement with the post-mortem posse, waiting to square accounts for your earthly sinning, in the service of the Dead Warrior Bank and Trust Company.” Having said that, Wheeler let me see his grin. “Your friend, Steve Holt, is about to move his usurer’s circus into the premises formerly known as the Glory Hole.”

The front legs of my tilted chair hit the floor. After Barringer died, leaving no will, the question as to who had title to the big gambling saloon was an open one. Trimble had returned to town, upon reading the news about Charlie, explaining that the outlaw leader had scared him into selling at a very low price. However, there had been an actual sale, so the property had remained in the Barringer estate, pending court action.

“But I thought Joe Trimble was planning to buy the place back, as soon as it was put up for auction,” I protested.

“He merely planned, while Mr. Holt achieved,” Sam said. “Had it escaped your notice that Dead Warrior’s centurions of commerce have long begrudged saloons and hotels their monopoly of the Apache and Beaver Lodge crossing?”

Having frequently heard complaints on that score, I merely waved a weary hand. “Go on.”

“Well, Mr. Holt’s attorney turned up some sort of kinsman of Barringer’s, hitched to a pulpit back East. Having a low opinion of saloons, he could be counted on not to ask a high price.” Pouring himself another drink, Wheeler came to the climax of his narrative. “Mr. Holt next appealed to merchant malice against gambling houses. Each storekeeper would have hated to see a rival win to Dead Warrior’s corner of corners, but they all agreed it would be better for the city if the highballs of a saloon could be replaced by the three balls of a moneylender. Are you with me so far?”

“I’m afraid so,” I growled.

“So a delegation of our financially finest went up to Prescott, sweet-talked the Territorial Supreme Court into recognizing the Eastern Bible-pounder as Barringer’s legitimate heir, and the job was done. I happened to be in the bank, talking to Steve, when he received a wire from the preacher in glad acceptance of his pinchpenny offer.”

Soured by Sam’s information, I did not alert the vigilantes after all. Instead I decided to let them come to me, as I knew they must, when the situation grew too bad for them to stand. They had to have newspaper support, or they would be afraid to go over the heads of the city administration.

In the end, after a bloody street affray which I headlined “The Battle of the Pimps,” they did come to me. “Two men were killed in that gang fight last night, and right on Apache, the main street of the city,” Bradford said, when he and the men with him had trailed me to the site of a new school the board was planning to build.

“Three,” I corrected him, winding up the tape measure with which I had been making rough calculations. “One of them breathed a dying pander’s last prayer this morning.”

“Well, we ought to do something about it,” a doctor argued.

“The police should certainly be urged to bear down a little harder,” I agreed. “I’ve tried to bring that about by editorials, but perhaps you gentlemen will have a little more influence than I have.”

“The administration won’t do anything,” Stephen Holt asserted. “Jackson says they’re killing each other faster than the marshal could hope to, so why not leave them alone. But meanwhile bullets are flying all over the place.”

I knew what was bothering him. There were huge windows in the old Glory Hole, now being remodeled to house the Dead Warrior Bank and Trust Company, and he lived in dread that stray shots might shatter them.

“What would you advise, Holt?”

“What would
you
advise?” he countered. “You’re the head of the vigilantes.”

We had come to the hold I had over them, aside from their need of my paper. They were frontier businessmen, a hardy and chance-taking breed or they wouldn’t have prospered in the West. At the same time they didn’t know what was going on in the town, beyond their particular spheres of concern. Cliquish and exclusive in their social dealings, they had no means of investigating other walks of life.

“If you’re going to hang people, you’d better know who you’re stretching and why you’re doing it.” Pocketing my tape measure, I began filling my pipe. “Have you any candidates?”

“You find them for us,” Bradford said. “You — you know everybody.”

What he was trying to avoid saying was that among my acquaintances were some he considered dubious characters and worse, but I nodded. “All right. And I’ll conduct the hearings,
too, but I won’t do any more of the rope pulling myself.”

“How come?” Leeming, the undertaker, wanted to know.

Without being able to prove it, I believed that he was a vigilante in the hope of promoting business. “You won’t be the one that’ll be gunned for when I publish the stories which will justify John Lynch in riding again.” Turning from him, I jabbed a hand which still showed the scars of burning toward Bradford and Holt. “You’ve asked me to be on the firing line, and I’ve accepted. Take it or leave it.”

The next day the
Vigilante
abandoned moral generalities in favor of specific accusations. With the aid of both the telegraph and the saloon grapevine I had been studying the careers of Louseville’s civic leaders. I ran biographies of two of the most vicious, adding the comment that they should be tarred, feathered and run out of town.

That night they and three others were picked up, prowling around my house. I wasn’t in, having taken a book over to the Anything Goes. There they were brought before me for questioning, and thereafter they were hanged on a charge of intent to murder a citizen of the town.

The multiple execution cooled Louseville down and fired up the city’s respectable element. Its members openly rejoiced at the success of their blow; and when they saw that they really had given the outlaw faction pause, they determined to clamp the screws down even tighter.

“We should have a law against anybody using guns here under any circumstances,” Holt insisted.

“Except vigilantes?” I asked.

“We only carry them at night as a police measure,” he said. “We’ll be only too glad to dispense with them when we can, Carruthers; and a law like that will establish a line of
cleavage that will give us the power we need. Everybody who doesn’t conform takes the consequences.”

“And those who do can’t register valid objections, when they’re being euchred out of their property by some sort of legal shenanigans,” I murmured. Nevertheless, I saw this as a measure which had to be adopted and enforced sooner or later. Dead Warrior was a full-fledged municipality, not just a frontier camp. Like other cities, it was a hive of homes and commercial enterprises, and men were entitled to go about the business of making a living there without fear of harm to themselves, their families or their property, due to the obstreperousness of the uncurried.

“I suppose it must be done,” I sighed. After a moment I took my gun out from under my jacket, and put it in a drawer. “You may have to bury me before the campaign is over, but it will be nice if we reach the point where I won’t have to worry about being bushwhacked.”

Reform was the mood of the day, and I got unexpectedly swift action. Within a week of my first editorial on the subject a special election was held, and the law was placed on the books of a city administration which saw fit to lie low. For that gain to the city, though, I suffered a personal loss.

“I’m saddling up, before I have to shoot a couple of your stranglers,” Blackfoot Terry told me the day before the election.

“The stakes are still higher than your hat,” I argued, “and if nobody draws, you’re just as well off as the next chap.”

“There’s no use wasting logic on a man’s feelings,” he cut me short. “I don’t blame you, Baltimore. What you’re doing makes sense for a city; but I guess I don’t like cities, and besides the place doesn’t smell right to me any more. I get a whiff of buzzard every time I step out of the Happy Hunting Ground and see that bank where the Glory Hole used to be.”

There were others who did not take the new law so seriously. They lived just long enough to regret it. My colleagues were conducting their own reign of terror, and once they had started, it seemed to me they developed a zest for killing not unlike that which Roy Sparks had ascribed to the vigilantes of Can Can. I got black looks for robbing them of blood by insisting that a couple of their comparatively harmless prisoners should be allowed to catch the next train out of town.

Meanwhile I had found myself caught up in other movements. The
Vigilante
had proved itself as the sword of righteousness, and would-be wielders of that sword flocked around me.

It was at that time that Faith Foster came back into my life. I hadn’t seen her for months, but she swept all barriers of coolness aside when she entered my office, in the company of an older woman.