Port Hazard (3 page)

Then there was the chance of getting to like one of them. Given my choice, I'd bury a stranger.

“How was the ride out?” I said.

“Better than some. That General Grant sure can put away the rye.”

“Lincoln asked him what brand he drank so he could send a case to all his generals.”

“I heard that. You reckon it's true?”

“Likely not. I understand Honest Abe wasn't born in a log cabin, either.”

“I was born between cotton rows myself. Maybe I ought to throw my hat in the ring.”

“I'd set my sights lower to start.”

“I started out a slave. What's lower than that?”

I wasn't going to get a better invitation. I fished the deputy's star out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the bar between us.

He shifted his
tight-lipped smile from his glass to the star, then put two fingers on it and slid it back toward me, as if he were anteing up.

“We had this conversation before,” he said. “I'm a porter, not a deputy.”

“I'm not offering that. I don't have the authority to deputize anyone. That was just for show.” I returned the star to my shirt pocket. “It's posse work; fifty cents a day and four cents a mile.”

“Last time you said I got free burial.”

“You still do. Of course, if you kill anyone, his burial comes out of your pay.”

“That's backwards. Cheaper to get kilt than stay alive.”

“Isn't it always?”

He parted with his cigarette ash finally, in a peach tin set on the bar for that purpose. He took one last pull and tipped the stub in after it. “Who you hunting?”

“It's not a who. It's a what.” I turned my back on the man to my left, tall and thin with an Adam's apple that measured his swallows of beer like the stroke of a steam piston. He was eavesdropping without making any effort to hide it. “Is there a quiet place to drink? I've got a bottle of Hermitage in my valise at the hotel.”

“You found a room?”

“Just for the valise. Looks like I'm sleeping at the train station tonight.”

“You want to use the floor. It's softer than them benches.” He emptied his glass and pushed away from the bar. He didn't invite me, but I followed him out.

When I turned in to the hotel for the whiskey, he told me to get my valise. I came out carrying it and accompanied him to the station, but we didn't go into the building. I followed him to a siding, where he gripped the rail on the back of a caboose and swung himself onto the platform without using the steps. I used them. Inside was a potbelly stove with a cold coffeepot on top, a pair of cots made up neatly, military fashion, three folding chairs, a water crock with dipper, a table holding up a checkerboard, and a brass cuspidor the size of an umbrella stand with N.P.R.R. embossed around the rim. The car smelled of hickory and tobacco juice and cigars and felt like the parlor of a private club. Which it was: the most exclusive in the egalitarian United States, open only to members of the railroad fraternity. Here the conductors retired to put up their sore feet, and the porters and brakemen gathered to play cards and checkers and read newspapers and complain about unreasonable passengers.

There was a checker game in progress on the table, although the players were absent. To avoid disturbing the pieces, Beecher removed a pair of tin cups from a built-in cupboard and set them on the stove to fill from the bottle I took out of my valise.

“What's Mr. Hill say about drinking on railroad property?” I asked.

“What you expect. I'm supposed to have a room, but Chicago kind of forgets how to count where the colored employees are concerned.”

“You sleep here?”

“Just till one of them checker players shows up and boots me out. But I figure they got better games to play in town. You can take the other cot. If anybody asks we'll tell 'em you're on railroad business.” He picked up one of the cups and sat down on a chair.

I got mine and took another chair. “I thought you were a bad risk after two beers.”

“That's why I stopped at one. This stuff drinks like milk.” He poured down half his cup in one draught. “This
what
you're after, that ain't a who; it got anything to do with that fellow you kilt?”

I nodded, and told him about the Sons of the Confederacy.

“I never made it to Frisco,” he said. “I know some who did. They say Dan Wheelock's the man to see there if you got a misery. I can't feature doing that. I likes to keep my miseries close to home. I'm not good as a spy. Can't even bluff at poker.”

“I'll do the spying. I just need somebody to stand behind me on the trip out.”

“I ain't your man. I don't even own a pistol.”

“Got anything against them?”

“Only that they don't hit what I aims at. I ain't so bad with a rifle, but it's been years.”

“Any shooting you're likely to do will be at close range. I know some pistols where marksmanship doesn't count so much.” I took my first sip, a dainty one. Good liquor affected me quicker than the watered-down slop you found in most saloons.

“Why pick me? Ain't you got no friends?”

“A friend can be as bad as an enemy when it comes to staying alive. I liked the way you carried yourself on the train. Also it occurred to me you wouldn't approve of the Sons of the Confederacy any more than the man I work for does.”

He shook his head and drank. “I don't fight old wars. Anyway, I got a job. It pays a pension and I can't remember the last time anybody got kilt doing it.”

“I can't match that.”

“All right, then.” He got up, topped off his cup, and plunked himself back down. “You like your job?”

“Some parts. Getting killed isn't one. How about you?”

“It's as high as I can go, mister. I disremember your name.”

“Page Murdock.”

“Scotchman?”

“My father was. He came here when there wasn't anything between Canada and Denver but a lot of Blackfeet and Snake. I was raised by him and a quarter-breed Snake who may or may not have been the bastard granddaughter of Merriwether Lewis, who may or may not have been my mother. Now you know more about me than I do about you.”

“I doubt it. That I does. I don't know who my grandfather was. When I was little, I liked to think he was a chief in Africa. He was likely a slave like all the rest.”

“You're a little more than that. The Tenth Cavalry didn't step off the boardwalk for anyone.”

“I stepped off plenty since.” This time he drained the cup in one gulp.

“Ever miss it?”

“Some parts.”

I drank a little more. The stuff was already softening the sharp edges. I choked back a yawn. I didn't sleep well on trains. They were always taking on and dropping off cars, and making all the noise of Shiloh as they went about it. I might have dozed off. I stirred when he stood to refill his cup, and again when he lit the wick on a lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. The ends of the caboose were dark.

“…scalped a man once,” I heard him saying at one lucid point. “A boy, really. Shames me now to think on it. He was a Cheyenne brave, maybe fourteen, scrawny but a scrapper. Raped his share of white women, I expect. Still.”

“Not one of the parts you miss.”

“I was young and full of piss and corn liquor. Custer weren't cold yet, so I considered it personal. It weren't as if that long-haired hard-ass wouldn't of had me flayed if I kicked one of his damn greyhounds for stealing my rations.”

“That happen?”

“Not to me. You hear stories when you're on sentry duty. It could of, though, if I ever got closer to him than three hundred miles of prairie. I don't like dogs or officers. Straw bosses in brass buttons.”

“What parts did you like?”

He tapped his fingers on the side of his cup. It was a rolling rattle, like a military tattoo. “Parade.”

“Parade?”

“Yeah. Most times you're bored, or your feet hurt, or some white officer's giving you misery on account of your galluses is showing. Everybody's bellyaching about something. On parade you ain't got time to think about all that. You're too busy keeping your chin up and your back straight and your horse from shying, and so's the man next you and the man next him, all the way from the head of the column to the rear. All that counts is keeping the line straight. So long's you do that your color don't matter.”

“Parade's one of the things I left the army to get away from.”

“
Your
color don't matter whatever you do. I'm talking about being part of something bigger than you.”

“If you miss it so much, why'd you quit?”

“Last fight I was in, we raided a Arapaho village. It was on Buffalo Creek, down in Wyoming Territory. Don't bother looking it up, it weren't the Rosebud. When the main column took out after them that got away, I was left behind with some others to burn the lodges and shoot the ponies. Them ponies never done nothing to me. When my enlistment run out I run out with it.”

“You like horses?”

He shook his head. “Sons of bitches bite. I reckon I would, too, somebody tried to throw a saddle over me. I wouldn't shoot one because of it.”

“You might have to, if you're outnumbered and you need something to hide behind.”

“I done that, only not at Buffalo Creek. We was the ones doing the outnumbering.”

I remembered my whiskey and drank. It had grown warm from the heat of my hand gripping the cup; I hadn't been so insensible I'd dropped it. “Well, I can't offer anything like parade. I don't care if your chin's in your lap, so long as you keep me alive.”

“I'm thinking that's a twenty-four-hour hitch.”

“And no time off on Sunday. The Barbary Coast isn't the First Baptist Church.”

“Even Mr. Hill knows a man's got to sleep.”

“Your job will be waiting when you get back. The man I work for will write him a letter.”

“If he ain't J. P. Morgan I don't know how it'd help. Mr. Hill wouldn't change the way he runs his road for anybody less.”

“You've never read one of Judge Blackthorne's letters.”

He smiled, again without showing his teeth. I was beginning to realize it wasn't connected with anything like amusement on his part. “You ride for Hangin' Harlan?”

“He prefers ‘Your Honor.'”

The floor shifted slightly. Someone had mounted the platform outside the door. Beecher said, “Somebody's done come back to finish out that game of checkers. I reckon I can't offer you that other cot after all.”

The caboose shifted again, this time closer to the opposite end.

“Douse the light,” I said.

He got up without hesitating, raised the chimney on the lantern, and blew out the flame. In the sudden black I stood and drew the Deane-Adams.

The door at the rear swung open and banged against the wall. I fired at the silhouette I saw in the gray rectangle of doorway and swung the other direction, far too slowly, because that door had opened just behind the first, and just as violently. The man on that end fired. My shot was a split second slower, but his missed because Beecher had swept the chair he'd been sitting in off the floor and hurled it the length of the car, striking the second man and throwing off his aim. My bullet snatched him out of the doorway. I pivoted again, but that one was empty also, except for a heap on the platform. The inside of the car stank of brimstone. It had lost its club atmosphere all at once.

Beecher relit the lantern and strode over to cover the second entrance, armed only with the light, which he held out from his body. I kept the revolver in my hand and went the other way.

“This one's still breathing,” Beecher called out.

“Get his gun.”

The man on the rear platform sat with his back against the railing and one leg pinned under him. He had on a canvas coat, too heavy for the mild early-autumn night, but long enough to cover a firearm, which came away from his hand with no effort when I bent to take it. There was no need to feel for a pulse. In the light from the station, there was a glistening cavern where his left eye belonged. I'd still been coming up from the chair when the door flew open, and had fired high. I couldn't tell if he was young or old. A face in that condition doesn't offer much to go by.

I knelt in front of him and went through his clothes. I felt something and pulled it out.

Beecher called out again. “Three chances what I found in this one's pocket.”

“One's all I need.” I was looking at the gold coin glinting on my palm.

The man I'd
killed at the back of the caboose was named Charles Worth, if the letter in his pocket signed, “Your loving sister, Wilhelmina,” didn't belong to someone else. I'd never heard of him or his sister. The letter was mostly about the fine weather in Baltimore, but it told me more about him than I found out about his partner, whose punctured lung filled with blood and drowned him before the doctor could get inside. He looked to be in his early thirties and had nothing on his person to identify him; even the labels in his ready-made clothes had been ripped out.

The doctor, a young man himself but with the broken look of a professional who had come west hoping to make his fortune off the anemic wives of wealthy miners only to find himself pulling bullets out of prospectors shot in drunken duels, came out of his examining room wiping his hands with a towel. He scowled at the faces pressed against the windows of his office—bearded and clean-shaven, scrubbed and filthy, locals and visitors—and drew down the shades. The core group had followed us there from the train station. The rest had been growing up around it for twenty minutes.

“He didn't say anything,” the doctor said. “You don't when your throat's full of blood and mucus. My work would be a great deal less messy if you fellows would aim for the heart.”

I said, “Mine would be, too, if they'd give me time. Did you know the man?”

“I never saw him before, and I know all the residents here at least by sight. He probably drifted in with this new mob. This is my fourth shooting in two days.”

“It's them politicians.” Beecher was studying a diagram of the human circulatory system on a chart tacked to the wall.

The doctor noticed. “You can take that with you, if you like. It's one of God's miracles. Maybe next time you'll think twice before you blow a hole through it.”

“Talk to Mr. Murdock. I ain't shot nobody since the army.”

“I was thinking about my own circulatory system when I shot him,” I said. “What about the other one?” I gave the doctor the letter I'd found folded in Worth's shirt pocket. A little blood had trickled onto it from the hole in his head, mixing with the yellow-brown ink.

He glanced at it, handed it back. “I knew Charlie. I never worked on him, but he kept me busy, wiring shattered jaws and patching up holes. He liked to pick fights with Yankees. You'd think he served with Robert E. Lee himself, except he was only twelve years old when the war ended.”

“Local recruit.” I put away the letter. “His friend didn't lose any time looking him up. He must have come in on the same train as me, maybe all the way from Helena.”

“If I were you, I'd take the next train out. You, too,” he told Beecher. “Charlie had friends.”

“Yankee baiters, too?” I asked.

“I doubt they had a creed. In every place, there's an element that falls in behind the man with the loudest manners. They run with the pack because no one else will have them.”

“Being part of something that's bigger than themselves?” I was looking at Beecher.

“Ain't the same thing.” He'd turned away from the chart.

The doctor rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “I agree with your man. Any group they join is as small as its least-significant member. That's what makes them dangerous.”

Beecher said. “I ain't his man.”

 

We went from there to the city marshal's office, which was laid out more like a parlor in a private home than a place of business. A fussy rug lay on the half-sawn logs of the floor, tables covered with lacy shawls held up bulbous lamps with fringes on the shades, homely samplers and pictures from Greek myth hung in gilt-encrusted frames on the walls, which had been slathered with plaster and papered to disguise the logs beneath. The marshal, a basset-faced forty with an advancing forehead and Louis-Napoleon whiskers lacquered into lethal points, sat behind a table with curved legs he used for a desk, examining my deputy's badge for flaws and tugging an enormous watch out of the pocket of his floral vest every few minutes to track the progress of the hands across its face.

“There'll be an inquest,” he said. “You'll both have to give evidence.”

I said, “We can give you statements right now. I need to be on my way to San Francisco tomorrow.”

“No good. You can't ask questions of a written statement in open court.”

“Wire Judge Blackthorne. An attack on a deputy U.S. marshal is federal business. It's only your jurisdiction if you want to oppose him.”

“I don't expect to go to hell for it. He isn't God.”

“Put that in your wire. He might even pay you a personal visit.”

“What about the colored man? He federal business?”

Beecher was seated in an upholstered rocker next to an open window, through which the noise of crickets sounded like thousands of violins having their strings plucked. I guessed he'd chosen the spot for the fresh air. The smell of fust in the room was strong enough to stand a shoe up in. “I is with the Northern Pacific, boss. I belongs to the right-of-way.”

“Beecher's a civilian employed by Blackthorne's court,” I said. “He's U.S. property same as me.”

“Gold Creek isn't Tombstone or Deadwood. We're an incorporated city, with a charter and two churches. The local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic meets in the basement of the Unitarian. When two men are killed, the incident is investigated and adjudicated. This is a civilized community.”

I said. “According to the doctor, killing is daily business. Do you seriously intend to claim two more when Helena is offering to take them off your hands?”

“My appointment's up for review at the end of this year. I don't want to be accused of stuffing something behind the stove.” He didn't appear to be listening to himself. Washing his hands of the thing appealed to him, but there was a gilt-edged Bible in plain sight on his desk. No Christian wants to be compared with Pilate.

“Blame it on de gub'ment, boss,” Beecher said. “Everybody else does.”

The marshal pulled on his whiskers. His neck creased like a concertina. “I don't recall asking you for counsel, boy. I can't see any time I would.”

Beecher shrugged and inhaled air from outside.

However, the argument was through, and it was his suggestion that finished it. The marshal wasn't going to let things look that way, so I changed the subject, to give him time to form the conclusion independently.

“Did you get to meet General Grant?”

The creases disappeared. He held up a set of red and swollen knuckles. “Right here's the hand that shook the hand. When I told him I served with the quartermaster corps, he thanked me for the boots that took him all the way from Fort Henry to Appomattox.”

“He could probably use a new pair. I hear the business world hasn't been kind to him.”

“Me neither, comes to that. I ran a mercantile in Albany, best in town. I closed it up and came out here to sell picks and shovels, and I sold plenty, all on credit. I figure to be a rich man just as soon as all those markers come in. Meanwhile, I break up fights and shoot rats and stray dogs to put meat on my table.”

“What's a rat taste like?” Beecher asked.

I bulled ahead before the marshal could pull his chin back in. “Everyone I talk to came out here to make money off miners. Didn't anyone come for the gold?”

“They're still out digging.”

The weapons we'd taken off the men at the caboose lay on the marshal's blotter. Worth's was a short-barreled Colt. The stranger had fired a wicked-looking revolver at me, equipped with a second barrel whose bore was larger than the one on top. I pointed at it.

“I'll be taking the Le Mat with me,” I said.

“That's evidence.”

“Blackthorne would just send someone to collect it. I'll save him the trouble.”

“What about the Colt?”

“I don't need the Colt.”

“What do you want with a Confederate piece?”

“They didn't lose the war because their weapons weren't good. They just didn't have enough men to carry them. I'll give you a receipt.”

He shoved it across the table at me. “Anything else I can do for you, seeing as how all's I got pressing on my time is a town full of drunken Easterners?”

I checked the load. There were four live .42 cartridges in the cylinder, someone having taken the trouble to convert it from cap-and-ball, and a 20-gauge shell in the shotgun tube. He'd fired one cartridge and kept an empty chamber under the hammer. I was grateful he'd chosen not to use the buckshot on me. “You can direct me to a gunsmith's.”

“How many weapons does a man need?”

“No more than he has hands, but guns aren't much use without ammunition.”

“You want Joe Hankerd at the Rocky Mountain General Merchandise, only he's closed now. I don't know if he carries anything for a rebel gun.”

“Both sides used the same calibers.”

We got directions. It took five minutes of door-kicking to bring down a red-faced runt in handlebars and a nightshirt, and two more to get him to lower his sawed-off double-barrels and let us in. He charged me twice the going rate for two boxes of shells, one for each of the Le Mat's firing features, and locked up loudly behind us.

“Frontier's famous for its hospitality,” Beecher said.

“That's just from sunup to sundown.”

We were still towing a percentage of the local population, but they thinned out as we left the saloons behind and continued walking toward the mountains. The only light ahead of us belonged to the lanterns and campfires of the mine sites in the distance. Our breath frosted a little in the crisp air of coming autumn. Beecher asked where we were headed.

“Away from the crowd.”

We lost the last straggler to a hotel whose latecomers were camped out on the floor of the lobby. Shielding the movement with my body, I handed Beecher the Le Mat and the two boxes of ammunition. “Keep them out of sight. A Negro with a gun can draw a lot of hell most places.”

“I told you I'm no good with a pistol.” He held the items in both hands like a balance scale.

I took back the revolver, adjusted the nose on the hammer, and returned it. “That fires the shotgun round. Scatterguns were designed with you in mind.”

“I ain't said I'm throwing in with you.”

“You threw in when you threw that chair. By this time tomorrow, every depot lizard from here to the Pacific will know about the colored porter who helped kill two men in Gold Creek. You're branded either way.”

He touched the scar on his cheek with the Le Mat's muzzle. “I reckon I am.”

“I didn't mean that.”

“I know. But a nigger with a scar has a hard time blending in with the black crowd.”

“Getting out of that uniform will help. Got any civilian clothes?”

“In my duffel. In the caboose.”

“We'll collect it in the morning. It'll just be another caboose by then. A couple of killings won't draw attention long with Grant in town.”

“
That's
what's been stinging me. I couldn't think. If these new Johnny Rebs want to make a stir, why choose you? Grant's the bigger target.”

“That's the reason. Too many people around him. These boys aren't interested in making themselves martyrs for the cause. Getting away's as important to them as hitting what they aim at.”

His teeth caught the light from a window. It was the first time he'd shown them. “If that's the case, they didn't think it through where you're concerned.”

I didn't smile back. “My odds just got a little shorter. Meanwhile, we've got eight hundred miles to cover before San Francisco.”

“You ain't asked me why I threw that chair.”

“I didn't figure you gave it any thought. That cavalry training dies hard.”

“I ain't no trick dog.”

I blew air. “Are we going to have this conversation all the way to California? Because if we are, I'd just as soon we rode in separate cars.”

“We probably will anyway.”

“That's between you and Mr. Hill. Do we leave this conversation here or not?”

“I reckon,” he said after a moment. “I don't see any sport in it.”

“I didn't get around to thanking you for throwing that chair.”

“No need. I didn't give it any thought.” He stuck the revolver under his belt and the boxes in his pockets. “Where we sleeping tonight?”

“Take your pick.” I swept a hand along the weak lights wavering in the foothills.

“Them miners'll likely shoot us as claim-jumpers.”

“They might, if their claims were worth the filing fees. That's the thing about frontier hospitality. The poorer a man is, the more he's got of it.”

I started off in the direction of the fires. Beecher caught up, his pockets rattling like a peddler's wagon. We weren't sneaking up on any prospectors that night.