The Bold Frontier (5 page)

“Little or no crime in White Pass. Never has been,” old Jeffords assured him. Truthfully. After Jeffords died of a stroke three years ago, Lou Hand didn’t think very long about town council’s offer of a promotion.

Over and above his experience, one work-related incident of heroism made Lou Hand the logical candidate. While Lou was a deputy, a jobless man named Jocko Brust had held up the now-defunct Merchants and Miners Bank of White Pass. Chancing to walk by at the precise moment, Lou Hand heard screams inside, then saw the culprit come backing out the door wearing a bandanna up to the bridge of his nose, as if that would possibly conceal his identity from anyone who knew him.

It was a sunny spring day, full of hope and the gurgle of melting snow; the time of year when some men left their wives or hung themselves. Lou was in fine spirits, however, and he jumped Jocko without thought. Jocko shot him, a grazing shoulder wound. The bank manager ran out with a heavy cuspidor and nearly beat out Jocko’s brains, leaving him bleeding and washed with tobacco-colored water.

People hailed Deputy Hand as a hero. Pastor Humphreys lauded him from the pulpit of the Methodist chapel (he was told). Lou Hand had nightmares for months after, realizing what could have happened if the bullet had traveled a little more to the left.

Still, he didn’t deliberate long before he accepted council’s offer and put on the sheriff’s star. The incident of Jocko Brust (he went to prison) was unusual, not to say unique, for White Pass. Never once in all his years as deputy had Lou Hand fired his pistol in anger, and he’d only drawn it half a dozen times, to cow noisy but harmless Saturday-night drunks. The same proved the case during his tenure as sheriff.

But now someone purporting to be the notorious Bob Siringo was staying at the Congress …

“You’ll be careful,” Jesse said. “I wouldn’t want to lose my boarder and card-playing companion …” The words trailed off, and Jesse impulsively touched his sleeve. Lou rested his hand on hers and gazed into her eyes, realizing again how much he cared for her. That affection had grown almost unconsciously over the months and years he’d lived under her roof. He wanted to say something to her … something meaningful and important. The desire had come on him several times before, usually in the evening, by lamplight. But he was a shy man. Told himself there was always another time. Plenty of time.

The kitchen door banged open and Will Pertwee jumped through. “Say, that drummer’s hollering for more flapjack syrup, Mrs. Thorne.”

“All right, tell him to keep his britches on.” She reached for the crockery pitcher while Will danced past her, fairly jigging on the old linoleum in front of Lou Hand.

“You going after Bob Siringo, sheriff?”

“Not unless he gives me cause.”

“But outlaws, gunfighters, they always do, don’t they? That’s why they’re outlaws.”

He couldn’t refute Will’s bloodthirsty logic. It angered him. He grabbed Will’s shoulder and shoved him aside so hard, the boy exclaimed, “Ow!” Jesse gave him a startled, alarmed look as she prepared to take the full pitcher of syrup to the dining room. Lou tramped through the dining room and up the stairs, strange leaden pains deviling his belly all of a sudden. Though fully dressed, he was freezing.

On the stair landing he paused by the lace-curtained window and stared at the vista of the Sierras with the sun above their icy peaks. The sun was a pale yellow-white disk, clearly visible in blowing misty clouds. Wish I could shoot down that sun, he thought. Shoot it down here for some warmth.

Or go back to Florida. Why didn’t I have the gumption? There were so many mornings I could have turned in the star and said, “That’s it, I resign.” Any morning up till this one …

He trudged on up the stairs. He hauled his gunbelt off the bedpost and cinched it around his expanding middle. He re-settled the Frontier Colt in the holster, and as he did so his eye grazed the yellowed news clip with the admonition from Mr. Greeley. Lou Hand made a face.

“You damn fool,” he said.

He walked past the Congress Hotel, but on the opposite side of Sierra Street. He saw nothing more alarming than Regis, the colored porter, emptying last night’s slopjars in the street.

White Pass smelled of woodsmoke this morning, and horse turds in the street, and the cold-metal stink of deep winter through your half-stuffed nose. Lou Hand shivered and stuck his gloved hands deep in the pockets of his sheep-lined coat. Under the slanted brim of his flat hat, he saw the main drag of White Pass for what it was: a pitiful excuse for a town. It was a way-station on the California stage route—one through coach a day, each day, when the passes were open—but the mines in the neighborhood didn’t produce much ore any more, and the White Pass Reduction Mill filled the morning with a slow
chump-chunk
that had a lugubrious rhythm of failure about it.

Reaching his one-story office on the corner opposite Levering’s Apothecary
(CLOSED PERMANENTLY
said the crude paper sign in the window), Lou Hand drew the door key from his pocket. When he put it in the lock, the door swung in. Lou felt his heartbeat skip.

“Come on in, it’s me,” said a voice he recognized. Then Lou Hand smelled the vile stink of his caller’s green-wrapped nickel cigars. The visitor was installed behind Lou Hand’s desk, his tooled boots resting up on the blotter. “I let myself in with the council’s key.”

“Perfectly all right, Mr. Mayor,” Lou Hand said, shutting the door and shucking out of coat and hat.

Marshall Marsden ran the livery, one of the few businesses in White Pass that wasn’t failing or up for sale. He was a slight, bald man with eight children, all of whom were named Marshall Junior or Marcella or Marceline or some other M-variant of his own, apparently-revered name. The mayor loved off-color stories. This morning, however, there was no trace of humor in his small brown eyes.

“Did you hear about Bob Siringo?”

Lou Hand pulled the dodger off its tack on the bulletin board. The illustration was one of those pen-and-ink sketches of infinite vagueness: the bland features, staring eyes, and mandarin mustaches of the desperado could have belonged to any number of innocent-looking young men.

“I heard about some guest at the hotel who
looks
like Bob Siringo.”

Marsden jerked his boots off the desk and landed them on the floor with a bang. “Well, it’s him, he’s making no secret of it.”

“Is that right.” Lou Hand had dreaded some such confirmation. He began tossing kindling into the stove. His hand wasn’t steady as he lit the match.

“That’s right,” Marsden said, and Lou Hand noticed a glint of perspiration on his brow despite the chill of the tiny office. “And what I’ve got to say to you, sheriff, is short and sweet. Get him out of town.”

Lou Hand lit a third match and finally got the kindling started. The warmth was small, of no use against the mortal chill that had invaded his heart and soul after he woke from the frequently repeated dream.

“Why?” Lou Hand said to the mayor.

“We don’t want his ilk here. He was down at the livery first thing this morning, talking to Marcy. Trying to find a new horse. She said he made—lewd suggestions.”

Lou frowned. “Is she positive he meant—?”

“You calling my own daughter a liar? I want him out, Lou. As elected mayor of White Pass, I’m officially telling you to get him out of town.”

“I surely hate to push something like that if there’s no …”

“I’m
ordering
you to push it, in the name of town council. Why do you think we pay you? Hell, this is the first time you’ve ever faced something this serious.”

And the last?
he thought, with a strained, almost wistful look at the dodger tossed onto the desk.

“Time you earned your wages,” Mayor Marsden exclaimed as he grabbed his derby and put it on with a snap of his wrist.

“If he hasn’t got a horse …” Lou began.

“No, and Marcy refused to sell him one. She was scared to death, but she stood up to the little slug. If a woman can do that—”

“I hear you,” Lou Hand interrupted, beet-faced and furious all of a sudden. “But you hear me for a minute. If it’s Bob Siringo, and he doesn’t have a horse, he can’t get out of here until six
P.M
., earliest, when the Sacramento stage comes through.” The eastbound presumably had cleared the way station at half past five, while Lou Hand was still enmeshed in his dreams of Red Fish Pass at high noon. The place he never should have left.

Mayor Marsden sneered. “It’s a convenient excuse for stalling all day. But all right, six p.m.’s your limit. See that he’s gone.”

Marsden slammed the door and Lou Hand listened to his boots tap-tap quickly away on the plank sidewalk. The sheriff felt heavy and old and doomed as he walked to the potbelly stove, yanked the door open and swore. For the kindling had gone out, and what wafted against his upraised palms from the black ashy interior was cold; just more cold; a brush of air that seemed, to his worried imagination, cold as the breath from a grave.

Lou Hand fooled around the office all morning. It was his custom to stroll back to Jesse Thorne’s for his big meal at noon, and he started in that direction but gave up the idea after walking one block. His stomach hurt, too severely for him to eat so much as a mouthful of Jesse’s usual: pot roast with horseradish on the side; boiled or mashed potatoes and a gravy boat almost big enough to float a Vanderbilt yacht.

He leaned his hip against a hitchrack and squinted over the swayed back of an old gray looking half dead from the weight of its saddle. Diagonally in the middle of the next block, opposite, Lou Hand had a fine view of the portico of the Congress Hotel. As he studied the hotel and chewed on his lower lip, a recognizable figure walked out jauntily, almost colliding with an old woman in a bonnet and faded cloth coat.

Lou dodged back, into the shadows of the entrance alcove of Weinbaum’s Hardware, boarded up and plastered with
To Let
notices. The man outside the hotel wore a stained tan duster and boots with very high heels. When he bumped the old woman, knocking a parcel out of the crook of her arm, he immediately snatched it from the dirty snowbank into which it fell, presented it to her, then swept off his tall loaf-crowned hat with a deep bow. In a sorry place like White Pass, that kind of bow should have brought a snicker, but somehow, the man made it look not only graceful but proper.

Mollified, the old woman patted the man’s stained sleeve and went on. The man watched her go, then started walking, cutting left into an alley beside the hotel and there disappearing.

But not before Lou Hand had a clear look at the pale cheeks and mandarin mustaches under the tall hat. No mistaking the features from the dodger. It was Bob Siringo, or his twin.

Where was he going? In search of a horse? He wouldn’t find any but plugs in White Pass, that was probably the problem Lou thought. He glanced at the icy disk of the sun, still mist-shrouded, and noticed his own faint shadow fading in and out as he walked slowly back to his office. There he shut the door and sat bundled in his coat in the chill silence, wondering—asking himself—how long he could wait before he carried out Mayor Marsden’s charge.

The sun vanished behind threatening clouds of dark gray that rolled over the mountains from the northwest about four o’clock. Hungry and bone-chilled, Lou Hand stared at the ticking wall clock and realized he couldn’t procrastinate any longer— principally because he could no longer bear the nervous pain torturing his gut. He checked his Colt once again, and set out on what he fancied might be his last walk anywhere.

Sid Thalheimer, the hotel clerk, was scratching a pen across some old bills at the counter of the Congress. Lou pushed back his hat.

“Sid, I hear you had a Mr. Bob Siringo registered. Is he still here?”

Sid caught the hopeful note and gave Lou Hand a sad, even pitying look. “He was upstairs taking a nap. Came down ten minutes ago. He’s in there.” Sid’s thumb hooked at the connecting door to the hotel’s saloon bar.

“Say anything about checking out today, did he?”

“No, he’s staying one more night.”

Lou swallowed back a large lump in his throat. “No he isn’t, you can have the room.”

Without waiting for a reaction, Lou Hand pivoted on the scuffed heel of his boot and walked across the old Oriental carpet to the batwings in the archway, and the incredible pregnant silence that seemed to be waiting in the dim room beyond. Lou’s boots sounded loud as the trampling of a mastodon; at least they sounded that way to his inner ear.

He unbuttoned his coat before he pushed the doors open. Clarence, the day barkeep, flashed him a look from behind the long mahogany, then quickly found some glassware to polish at the far end. The Congress saloon bar held but one customer, standing up in front of an almost untouched schooner of beer that had lost its head. Like everything else in White Pass, the saloon bar looked dark; grimy; cold.

“Bob Siringo?” Lou Hand said from the entrance, hoping his wild inner tension didn’t show.

“I am, sir,” said the young man, taking off his loaf-crown hat and smoothing his thinning oiled dark hair with his palm. The desperado’s smile was polite but wary.

“I’m the sheriff.”

“Yes, sir, so I figured,” Bob Siringo said, in a tone that revealed nothing.

“Lou Hand’s my name.”

“Pleased to meet you. May I invite you for a drink?”

Lou Hand’s cold nose itched. Was this some trap? He took three steps forward, between the flimsy stained tables, and paused by the upright piano whose keyboard resembled a mouth of yellow teeth with several missing. From there he had a better look at Siringo’s eyes. Pale and keen in their awareness not only of the sheriff but all the surroundings of the room—even, somehow, the barkeep behind Siringo’s back, furiously polishing glassware near the hall leading to the rear door.

“Yes, that’d be all right.”

“Over there?” Bob Siringo said, picking up his schooner and gesturing. He didn’t leave any room for Lou to answer one way or another. He’d chosen the round table in the corner at the front of the bar.

He dropped a coin,
ka-plink,
on the mahogany, and said to Clarence, “Give Mr. Hand anything he wants, please.” Then Siringo walked quickly to the table and slid around to the corner chair, dropping his hat in front of him. Where he sat, his back was fully protected, and he could observe not only the room but, on his immediate right, a good portion of Sierra Street beyond the streaked and dirty front window.