The Floor of Heaven (50 page)

But as soon as Sehlbrede and his group left, Soapy regretted that he had hinted at a compromise. His failure to act defiant would be viewed by the vigilantes as evidence of his weakness. To retain power, he’d need iron in his resolve. It was the committee that must back down, not Soapy Smith.

His gang, though, was apprehensive. Con men had a feel for when the mark was poised to strike back; and vengeance, experience had taught them, could unleash dangerous passions. So Old Man Tripp—who, after all, had been with Soapy through a lot of sticky situations—offered his friend a bit of prudent advice. “People are making such a stink about the job, it would be wise to give the stuff up,” he suggested.

Soapy was in no mood to take anyone’s counsel. He was beyond engaging the problem with his customary reason. He felt threatened, and that made him aggressive. In a voice loud enough for the entire bar to hear, he shot back at Tripp, “I’ll cut the ears off the first man who makes a move to give it back.”

And the four o’clock deadline passed.

SOAPY WAS drinking. A bottle of rye and a glass were routine centerpieces on his table in the back room, but Soapy rarely took more than a few sips. The liquor was a gambler’s ploy; he’d keep his head clear while others drank. But tonight he needed to drink. His instincts were telling him to run, to leave Skagway just as he’d hightailed it out of Creede and Denver and a dozen other western cow towns. Only now he was in Alaska, at the end of the world, and there was nowhere else to run. This was his last chance. For himself; for Mary; for their future. So he drank, and hoped to find the courage to do what needed to be done.

After the deadline had expired, the Committee of 101 had called a meeting in Sylvester Hall for that evening. People came out in angry droves. At first the speakers demanded “justice for John Stewart.” But then Judge Sehlbrede jumped to his feet and declared that the time had come to form a posse to arrest Soapy and his gang. The hall shook with cheers so loud that it seemed as if the log walls would come tumbling down. And as the fiery speeches went on, more and more people continued to arrive. They tried to wedge their way in, but there was no room. At last the vigilantes decided to move the assembly down the street, to the wharf. They would hold their meeting out in the open where the whole town could gather.

Sitting in his back room, Soapy received reports throughout the evening from his spies. And he kept on drinking. At nine P.M., after the crowd had surged onto the wharf, a note arrived from Billy Saportas, the reporter who was covering the meeting for both the Daily Alaskan and Soapy Smith: “The crowd is angry. If you want to do anything, do it quick.”

Soapy considered the information. There was a stillness in the room; all eyes were focused on Soapy as he struggled to come up with a plan. In the end, it was clear to him that he’d the same two choices it always came down to when things in a town turned bad: He could run or he could fight. He drained his glass, stuffed the note into his pocket, and vowed, “I’ll drive the bastards into the bay.”

SOAPY WALKED with quick, purposeful strides down Holly Street, on his way to the wharf. He had a derringer up his sleeve, an army Colt tucked in his belt, and a .44–40 Winchester leaning against his right shoulder.

His mind was set. There was no turning back.

A pack of his men followed behind him. But they kept back a good distance. Their boss’s dark mood scared them.

Soapy turned south onto State Street, and into a crowd blocking the way to the wharf. Without breaking his pace, Soapy headed straight toward the mob. “Chase yourselves home to bed!” he bellowed. They parted to let him through. No one dared to speak, or even to look him in the eye.

He continued down the block. His old friend John Clancy, with his wife and son, the six-year-old who had dressed as Uncle Sam for the parade, were waiting there to stop him. They hoped to make Soapy listen to reason.

Soapy pulled the Colt from his belt and waved it at Clancy. “Johnny,” he warned, “you’d better leave me alone.”

Clancy had no doubt that Soapy, fired up as he was, would shoot him. “You want to get yourself killed, go ahead,” Clancy said with frustration. His wife began to cry.

Soapy paid them no mind. He continued on.

He reached the dock. He could see the throng at the end of the wharf. He headed straight toward the crowd. He wanted to put an end to this once and for all.

Four men blocked the way.

“You can’t go down there, Smith,” barked Frank Reid.

Soapy knew Reid. He’d come north after shooting a neighbor back in Oregon, and had worked as a bartender in a tent saloon and as a surveyor. Now Reid had signed on with the Committee of 101. “Damn you, Reid,” Soapy cursed.

Soapy advanced toward Reid. The two men stood close to each other, only an arm’s length apart. Not a word was spoken as they waited to see who would make the first move.

Then Soapy yelled, “I should’ve got rid of you months ago.”

At the same moment, he brought the Winchester down off his shoulder. He used it as a club, slamming the rifle barrel into Reid’s arm. Reid grabbed the muzzle with his left hand, and with his free hand he drew a .38 from his pocket.

“My God, don’t shoot!” screamed Soapy.

Reid pulled the trigger. The hammer fell with a distinct click, but there was no explosion. The cartridge had been faulty.

With that reprieve, in a single moment that seemed to stretch on forever, Soapy jerked the rifle from Reid’s hand, and as he pulled the trigger, Reid fired, too. Two shots exploded, but they sounded as if they were one.

Soapy’s bullet smashed into Reid’s groin. Reid’s hit Soapy in the arm.

But the two men were still on their feet, still firing, still right on top of each other. Gun barrels flashed, once, twice, three times. The noises were rapid and large.

All at once there was silence. Reid had fallen facedown, breathing but with blood and life itself rushing from him. Soapy was on his back surrounded by a spreading circle of blood, a bullet in his heart. The king of Skagway was dead.

He lay there all night, no one daring to touch his body. It was as if the town could not bring itself to believe what had happened. Finally, just before noon old Ed Peoples, the undertaker, came by with a wagon and hauled him away.

WITH SOAPY’S death, the gang knew their freewheeling time in Skagway was over. The rubes had reclaimed control. The thieves grabbed whatever money they could, and went on the run.

The vigilantes came after them. Racing through the streets, committee members called on everyone to join the manhunt. Brandishing Winchesters, pistols, and coils of hanging rope, a mob fanned out.

The hunting was easy. Skagway was blocked by a wall of mountains on one side and endless water on the other. The Soap Gang was trapped.

Reverend Bowers and Slim-Jim were caught as they slinked through the tall timber on the way to the White Pass Trail. Old Man Tripp lived on berries in a forest outside town for two long days before he decided he had endured enough deprivation. “We should have been hanged twenty years ago,” he conceded to one of the boys before returning to Skagway to take his chances. The vigilantes arrested Tripp as he was devouring the last bites of a large restaurant meal with great satisfaction. Marshal Taylor was pulled from underneath his bed.

Within days the jail was packed with gang members. There were so many arrests that the committee had to put new prisoners in city hall. When that was full, suspects were wedged into the second-floor space above Burkhard’s hardware store.

And now the town demanded justice. “Hang them! Hang the whole gang!” nearly one thousand people screamed as they converged on the makeshift jails. People were waving ropes. Many were drinking. The situation was out of control. Violence seemed inevitable.

John Tanner, the new deputy marshal, who had been appointed by the authorities in Juneau after Taylor’s arrest, went out to face them down. “Let law and order rule,” he yelled at the crowd as he cocked his Winchester. “You want to hang someone, you’ll have to hang me, too!”

His courage was remarkable. And no one doubted his resolve. The crowd continued to mill about for a while, but his grit had dulled their mood. Soon they dispersed. By the week’s end, the ringleaders of the Soap Gang had been sent to Sitka to stand trial. The rest were put on steamers bound for Seattle. You return to Alaska, they were told, you’ll be sorry you did.

AS HIS men were rounded up, Soapy was buried. Only five people followed the cart with Soapy’s coffin to the overgrown field outside town. There were three of the lawyers who had worked on his many businesses, his mistress, and a member of the vigilante committee who wanted to make sure this wasn’t one last trick and that Soapy was truly dead. “The way of the transgressors is hard,” Reverend Sinclair reminded the mourners as the body was lowered into a small, stony grave.

SOAPY HADN’T been buried for more than a month before people in Denver were lining up to pay a nickel to view a wax impression of Soapy’s face that had been molded in the mortuary. After Denver, the promoters took the relic from town to town across the West. Paying customers pushed and shoved and elbowed their way to get a good view. The death mask was a fake, but no doubt this detail wouldn’t have troubled Soapy at all.

ary wanted proof. She refused to believe that her husband had been killed. Over the years, there had been dozen of reports of Soapy Smith’s death. He’d perished in Klondike avalanches, stormy shipwrecks, barroom gunfights—and all of these accounts had turned out to be tall tales. “Never believe I’m dead until you see me in the morgue,” Soapy had written her only weeks before she’d read the article in the St. Louis newspaper detailing the fatal shooting on the Skagway wharf. So Mary had paid it no mind. But as days passed without a letter from her husband, she began to worry. By the end of the month, his silence had become a torment. Mary decided to go to Skagway.

Accompanied by eleven-year-old Jeff Jr., she arrived in Skagway in August. Wearing a crepe bonnet with a veil that reached down her back, Mary wandered about the town asking questions. She was a polite woman and comported herself with a prim reserve. People would remark that she was nothing like her husband. They were very solicitous.

It didn’t take Mary long to establish that Soapy was dead. Dressed in widow’s black, she and the boy walked through the town to the rocky hill where her husband was buried. Mary stood by Soapy’s grave for over an hour, her head bowed. She didn’t cry. She didn’t say a word. She was lost in the rush of memories, a marriage of joys and disappointments. She was also deeply hurt. Without ever asking, she’d learned that her husband had been living with another woman. Had Soapy’s love for her, for their family, been one more false pledge in a life built out of illusions? Now she would never know. All Mary knew with any certainty was that the betrayal left a coldness in her heart as piercing as her husband’s death.

The money was gone, too. She met with one courteous lawyer after another. She appealed to John Clancy, the friend and partner who’d been appointed executor of Soapy’s estate. She confronted the men who now ran the saloons and dance halls that had previously belonged to Soapy. Each of them offered a version of the same vague and perplexing explanation: Your husband unfortunately had a gambler’s sense of economy. He spent all he earned.

But what about the businesses, the real estate? Mary demanded, her outrage building each time she found herself asking the same obvious questions. There must be something. A deed? A mortgage? A bill of sale?

Time after time, the responses were apologetic yet adamant. Searches of the town records have been conducted, the men told her. Not a single document confirming either your husband’s ownership or his interest in any business has been found. We’d like to be more helpful, Mrs. Smith, but without the necessary legal papers, our hands are tied.

But there must’ve been a bank account? Or cash? He was sending me money every month, Mary would challenge.

No one knew anything. But finally John Clancy offered some modestly encouraging news. It seemed that, yes, $148.60 had been discovered in her husband’s room.

By law, that money’s mine, Mary declared emphatically. As soon as she blurted it out, she realized she must’ve sounded terribly greedy. But she’d used her savings to buy the two steamer tickets to Alaska. She was concerned that she had no way to pay for the trip back home.

Yes, Clancy agreed, the money was rightfully hers. However, the costs for the funeral, the inquest, the autopsy, and probate had amounted to $191. The town had claimed the $148 in cash and then had ordered the sale of Soapy’s personal property to cover the remaining $42.40.

In the end, Dynamite Johnny, the steamship captain Soapy had stood with against a mutinous crew, offered his assistance. He gave Mary and the boy free passage on his ship to Seattle. She left Skagway without saying any good-byes.

As the ship bounced through the Pacific waves, Mary, dressed for deep mourning, stood by the rail. She was a small, pale woman, and the boy was by his mother’s side holding her hand. He sensed her despair, and tried to get her to talk. But Mary was locked in her own thoughts. She stared out at the vast gray expanse of ocean as if to wonder whether all the seas on the planet would be sufficient to wash away the lies that had so soiled her life.

IT WAS raining money. One after another, half-dollar coins flew out of the fifth-story hotel window. Coins bounced on the sidewalk and rolled clanging into the street. All at once streetcars came to a screeching halt, and the passengers and even the conductors jumped off to scramble after the loose change. Word spread quickly through downtown Seattle, and people flocked to the sidewalk outside the hotel. It was pandemonium. And the money kept raining down.

Tagish Charley was enjoying himself. Sitting in the hotel room with Jim and Kate, the three of them happily passing a bottle around, it had occurred to him that it would be a lark to see the white men fight over something as meaningless as money. Besides, he’d more than he needed; why not give it away? So he’d summoned the bellboy and handed him $500. Get me half-dollars, he’d instructed. And more whiskey.