Lawless (54 page)

Terrified, Julia realized that her attempt to create a diversion had only enraged Sims to the point of total irrationality. Something close to glee shone in his eyes. He licked wet lips and went on. “I knew that. But I wanted you to admit it”—the shotgun came up, leveling at her stomach; men and women dived for the dirt floor—“so I’d have justification for blowing you to—”

“Shut up and turn around, you son of a bitch,” said a voice from the dark behind him.

For a moment Lute Sims acted confused, as if he couldn’t believe he’d heard correctly. Then the voice sounded again, pleasant yet with a hard edge to it.

“I said turn around. You’ve annoyed these good people long enough.”

Slowly Sims pivoted, straining to see into the darkness. By then Julia had recognized the voice. Jason Kane took two steps forward, into the light.

His right hand held back the side of his coat so the butt of his revolver was in the open. Kane hadn’t left out of boredom, she realized, but because Sims had shown up and he wanted to get around behind the miner—exactly as she’d hoped Oates would do.

She was immensely thankful, then abruptly disturbed by the amusement in Kane’s dark eyes. His body was tensed, hunched slightly forward. And by contrast, Sims no longer looked menacing, just scrawny and pathetic. He even seemed to handle the shotgun clumsily, as if he were unfamiliar with it. He tried to intimidate the younger man.

“Who the hell are you?”

“Name’s Jason Kane.”

Several of the miners and chippies obviously knew the name. So did Sims. He nearly dropped the shotgun. His Adam’s apple bobbed and sweat broke out on his forehead despite the breeze. As soon as Kane reached out and disarmed him, the danger would be ov—

Julia’s hand flew to her mouth. Kane’s right hand was moving with fluid grace toward the ivory grip of his holstered gun. Sims gaped, fumbled with the shotgun and stained the crotch of his jeans pants all at the same time.

“I want you to remember the name when they ask who sent you to hell.” Kane smiled, the revolver out and aimed from the hip.

The shot missed.

Sims yelped and dropped his shotgun into the mud. Kane’s face contorted with anger. Sims ran. Two staggering strides. Three.

His face almost as maniacal as his victim’s, Kane shot.

Shot again.

Again.

Sims shrieked, lurching to the left, then to the right as the bullets hit. Kane’s revolver kept roaring. Finally Sims fell face-first, a torrent of blood pouring from the holes in the back of his work shirt.

Jason Kane lowered the revolver. His hand was shaking. His eyes had a peculiar glint. It faded, and the cruel set of his mouth softened. He took one deep breath and looked around, waiting for the crowd to come to him with congratulations.

He was disappointed. Perhaps it would have been different if his first shot had hit the mark. But the miners and the women were subdued by the sight of Sims’ corpse with four wounds in its back. The people left the tent in silence and passed Kane without so much as a word. Only Oates went to his side, stepping on Sims’ shotgun and then his outstretched arm, half submerging both in the mud as he pumped the young man’s hand.

Men streamed from the street, drawn by the noise of the fusillade. Myrtle Oates was the last to gain her feet. She dried her eyes with the worn lace at the wrist of her gown, then extended her hand to Julia by way of apology. But Julia was hurrying toward Kane. When he saw her coming, he shoved Oates aside to be ready to receive a compliment.

He failed to get it.

“I don’t mean to sound ungrateful, Mr. Kane, and I suppose I will. We do owe you our thanks for stepping in when you did. There’s no telling what that man would have done with that shotgun—”

“Quite right, Miss Sedgwick.” He sounded testy; he saw no friendliness in her eyes.

“But he was beaten. He was running. You didn’t need to shoot him in the back, did you?”

She was shocked at the way he shrugged and said, “He was worthless. Besides, I enjoyed it.”

She could smell the gin on him. And something worse. Corruption. He had no comprehension of what he was saying.

“Enjoyed
it? How is that possible? Were you angry because your first shot missed?”

From his sudden scowl, she knew she’d inadvertently struck the truth. She retreated a step, fearful he might take his hand to her. Or his revolver.

Fear—that must be why he’d done it, she thought. Kane had a reputation similar to Hickok’s. Missing an easy target would probably be frightening to him. Might make him wonder whether his prowess was fading. Might goad him to prove it wasn’t.

Still, that couldn’t justify cruelty. And she didn’t care for the way he’d reacted to what she said.

“Don’t look so contemptuous, Mr. Kane. I’m not the one who did the shooting. What kind of man are you?”

Red-faced, he said, “Obviously not the kind who’s good enough to be a friend of yours. I hoped we might get better acquainted. I had some questions I wanted to ask about—about conditions in the East. I won’t waste my time. Good night, Miss Sedgwick.”

He spun away, waving and shouting, “I’ll buy the first round!”

A crowd of miners surrounded Sims’ corpse. At first none of them responded to Kane’s offer. Finally, one man with the look of a derelict separated from the others and tagged along, a sycophantic grin on his face.

“Sure enough, Mr. K., sure enough—it’ll be my pleasure to join you.”

In the crowd around the corpse, someone muttered, “Leroy drinks with anybody.”

Julia didn’t know which of her emotions was the more powerful—the loathing she felt for Kane as he swaggered off with the shabby man, or the pity. How could someone ever take pleasure in killing? How could a man bring himself to shoot an unarmed man in the back?

Slowly, the miners and the chippies and the merchants’ wives straggled away. Oates began to extinguish the lamps in the dining tent. Canvas snapped in the night wind, like echoes of Kane’s revolver.

Through a break in the crowd, Julia saw him glance back at her. A scathing glance at first. Then it softened and, for a moment, grew sad. He faced away again. Clapping his arm over the shoulders of the derelict, he vanished out beyond the Miner’s Rest. That was the last time she saw him in Deadwood City.

Oates attended to the removal and burial of Sims’ body. The following evening Julia repeated her lecture for a larger audience, completing it without incident. The women and a few men who’d come in from other camps along the Gulch listened politely, and gave her a solid round of applause at the end.

Next morning she descended from her canvas-walled cubicle on the second floor of the Miner’s Rest, said goodbye to the owner, and departed on the regularly scheduled southbound stage. Just before she took her seat in the Concord, she heard the driver say to his shotgun messenger, “—the drink’s besotted him, Joe. They say he missed with that first bullet, and then shot his victim the coward’s way. If it’s true, Jason Kane ain’t the man he once was.”

As the coach got under way, she couldn’t get the killing—or Kane—out of her thoughts. Kane’s voice bore an uncanny resemblance to Gideon’s, but that was merely a distracting coincidence. What preoccupied her—angered her—was Kane’s character, and her own failure to read it correctly. She felt deceived, defrauded by his initial politeness and seeming gentility.

True, old Fowler had warned her all that was a sham. How right he’d been. She’d never seen anything so callous as the shooting of Lute Sims, unless it was Kane’s behavior afterward.

The anger faded at last, once more replaced by pity. The coach rolled on toward Custer, passing majestic stands of sweet-smelling pine. She saw only Kane’s white-streaked hair. Dark, sad eyes. Cruel mouth.

The civilizing tide of settlers, schools, churches, stores, town councils, and police forces was sweeping westward with great speed. She’d seen that on her three journeys. Soon even freewheeling camps like Deadwood City would disappear, and the men who populated them—the parasitical men who contributed nothing, built nothing—would have no haven except the big city slums. Is that where a Jason Kane would ultimately go?

And what could a man of his stamp look forward to except having his own life cut short as brutally as he’d ended that of the miner? What did the Bible say? Live by the sword, perish by the sword.

An almost occult feeling gripped her for a moment. It was as if she knew that the end of Kane’s life had already been ordained.

She wondered whether he knew it. He struck her as unredeemable. Unworthy of compassion. Yet she couldn’t be completely unforgiving. She hoped he didn’t sense what was waiting for him. A man’s awareness of his own inevitable movement toward a violent death would, in itself, be a destructive force in his life. And worse punishment for his sins than anything a court of law could devise.

Thank God, Kane only reminded her of Gideon in a superficial way. It would have been unbearable for someone as humane as Gideon to have a doomed brute like that for a brother.

I
N NEW YORK,
that spring began as a particularly exciting one for Gideon. There was an important family celebration to anticipate—Eleanor’s birthday on May thirty-first. He could also look forward to being with Julia again; sometime during May, she was due back from her western tour.

And beyond those personal considerations lay a public one. It was the spring of the Centennial.

Despite the gloom generated by recent events, the nation’s one hundredth birthday seemed to infuse the country with a new sense of pride and confidence. Virtually every citizen who could afford it planned to attend the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. President Grant was scheduled to open the exhibition on the tenth of May.

In Gideon’s view, enthusiasm over the exhibition, and over the celebration itself, would help to offset the widespread disillusionment which had been chiefly caused by those in and around the Federal government. If many of the nation’s leaders had failed to live up to the standards of honorable conduct envisioned by the founding fathers—and they had—at least the standards themselves had survived; that was one encouraging message of the Centennial.

Grant s aura of heroism had failed to carry him successfully through two terms. The man himself remained relatively untainted by the assorted disasters and scandals of the past seven years. But his once-lauded talent for administration, and for selection of first-rate subordinates, had been proved a myth. His powers of judgment had been found wanting again and again.

The attempted ’69 gold corner and the Credit Mobilier scandal of ’72 had been followed by the Whiskey Ring revelations of ’75. Two hundred and thirty-eight people—distillers and bureaucrats including Grant’s own personal secretary, General Orville Babcock—had been indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud the government of alcohol tax revenues.

The current year had brought another bombshell—the discovery that Secretary of War Belknap had been taking bribes in return for awarding trading post franchises in the Indian Territory. Belknap had been impeached in the House on the second of March and had resigned on the same day to avoid trial in the Senate.

All in all, the President’s tenure had been marked by unprecedented corruption. Gideon suspected the former general might be enshrined, if that was the word, as the worst chief executive to date, even though few ever claimed he was personally responsible for anything but his own blindness to the cupidity around him.

Gideon believed Americans wanted to celebrate the Centennial, not only as an antidote for the corruption in Washington, but for the country’s continuing economic woes. The panic of ’73 touched off by the collapse of Cooke’s had spread into the worst depression in American history. People who had managed to hold on to their jobs had now returned to a reasonably good standard of living. But at least a million men were still unemployed. And millions more existed on starvation wages as employers ruthlessly cut costs to keep the doors of factories and offices open. Only on the farms was there any prosperity.

In the cities, hard times had revealed—and swollen—a dark, diseased underbelly of society. Month after month, thievery and murder increased in every major population center as unemployed men resorted to crime to keep their families from starving. The slums grew increasingly restive.

They were spawning a new and vicious phenomenon—gangs of adolescent criminals who roamed at night, searching for victims to rob or terrorize. New York’s worst youth gangs were the Forty Little Thieves and the Baxter Street Dudes.

In the open country between the overcrowded cities, unemployed men roamed the roads in search of work at any wage. Those who lived in remote areas locked their doors after dark, for like their urban cousins, rural dwellers saw a potential danger in the tramps, as the wandering workers had been christened.

What bothered Gideon most, perhaps, was the havoc the depression had caused in the labor movement. All the trade and craft unions together barely had fifty thousand members left. Competition for a shrinking supply of jobs had destroyed union solidarity and, very nearly, the movement itself.

Protectionist organizations such as the Knights of St. Crispin had been swept away. So had all attempts to improve the relationship between owners and workers. There had been a notable one in ’74. Mark Hanna, an enlightened owner of a bituminous coal mine out in Ohio, had realized it was far more productive to sit down and struggle for an agreement with his workers than to refuse to negotiate, and thereby pave the way for strikes, violence and shutdowns that produced neither coal nor pay envelopes. Hanna had persuaded his fellow mine owners in the Tuscarawas Valley to join him at the conference table. But the negotiations had taken a turn he didn’t expect. The other owners voted to reduce the miners’ pay. And that was the end of a brilliant idea.

The union movement had received another devastating blow because of the Molly Maguires. The secret, pro-labor society operated in the Pennsylvania anthracite regions. It was supposedly an offshoot of Ireland’s Ancient Order of Hibernians, the organization which had fought so hard against the British landlords. In Pennsylvania, the Mollies had been accused of everything from beating up mine owners to dynamiting the mines themselves. No one was ever sure how many acts of terror members of the Mollies were responsible for, but the society’s reputation loomed larger than the facts. People everywhere shuddered when they spoke of the “murderous Molly Maguires.” After a turbulent strike in late ’74, the Pennsylvania mine owners decided the Mollies had to be rooted out and destroyed.