IT WAS PAYDAY in the mines, and the men who worked the night shift had money in their pockets; the saloons that lined Main Street and the side streets were going full blast. On the other side of the river, dirty as a sewer, were the whorehouses and a few more saloons. Two church steeples stuck up like a reproach to all this sinfulness.
A light spring rain clouded the lower Rockies off to the west; the misty air was heavy with coal smoke from the ore crushers and the huge steam shovels out at the mines. The copper company had the biggest mine, the biggest everything. Its open pit was the biggest mining operation in the West. It was the biggest employer; it had the biggest private police force; its owners were the biggest sons of bitches in the world, the miners said. There were other mines in Butte—gold, silver, lead, zinc—but copper was king.
The night before, his first night in town, Gatling heard a drunken Irish copper miner sounding off about how they were digging a new Grand Canyon out there past town. “And when the copper runs out,” the man shouted, “when there’s no more money to be made, when they’ve worked us to the bone, they’ll bury us in that great hole. At the very least they’ll turn us out to starve. And you think our great union leader, Michael Patrick Kane, will lift a hand to stop them? My aching balls he will! For he’s as big a bastard as they are, and that’s no word of a lie.”
That was in a saloon packed with copper miners from the twelve-hour day shift. Some of them cheered the complaining drunk; others looked nervous. Gatling knew, had been told, that Butte was full of spies. The mine operators had their spies; so did Michael Patrick Kane, boss of the Western Labor League. Gatling had an interest in Kane. He had come to Butte to kill him. But he hadn’t been there long enough to make any kind of plan. It might take a week, a month, maybe even longer than that. All he knew was he wouldn’t leave until Kane was dead.
Now it was the next morning and the saloons were still racketing as noisily as ever. There was never a quiet moment in Butte; the mines worked night and day. At night, the huge carbide lights threw a white glare on the stony hills outside town. Sometimes the lights burned all through the day because the smoke and dust were so thick. The yellow smoke stung the eyes and made men cough. It was worse when the swirling mists came down from the lower Rockies. The fog mixed with the smoke and the dust, making Butte a bad place for lungers.
Gatling was up at first light. Early though it was, Main Street was already loud with saloon sounds, the rumbling of wagons. The horsecars hadn’t started running yet; when they did they would add clanging bells and shouting drivers to the din. Down the street a man in miner’s duds was being bounced out of a saloon and into the muddy street. Another man, not a miner by his looks, came sailing after him. The bouncer, a brute of a man with the bellow of an Army noncom, shook his fist at them, daring them to come back into the saloon before they learned how to drink like gentlemen. The two men staggered to their feet and went off in different directions.
Gatling’s business sign said he was ETHAN TAGGART GUNSMITH & GUN SALES. Despite the shortage of store space in Butte, where real estate was booming, he had managed to get a one-year lease on a one-story brick building that had been the town’s assay office in the early days when men were scratching up the first traces of gold and silver. When the boom came, the assayers moved to larger quarters. The windows were barred and the outside iron door was still in place. The door could be bolted from the inside, padlocked from the outside. A small back room could be used for storage or sleeping. There was a cast-iron stove.
The guns for sale were already on the shelves, which had been built by a man hired by the real-estate agent. Everything had been arranged through the mail. Gatling had sent a hefty deposit and paid the balance after he looked at the place. It was about thirty years old, but was still in good shape because it had been occupied until recently. It suited him just fine. He liked the iron door and the barred windows.
A few wagon drivers glanced at him as he climbed the stepladder and nailed the sign into place. Nothing much to look at: just a man starting a new business. Butte was full of new business. On one side of him was a clothing store run by A.R. Nathan; on the other an undertaker named Cyrus Findlay. They weren’t open yet.
Gatling was still holding the hammerax—a hammer with a small hatchet blade on one side—when a big man came pounding down the plank sidewalk, a much smaller man trotting behind him. The big man put Gatling in mind of a dressed-up trained bear he’d seen once in a circus. But the big man was bigger than the circus bear, and far from tame. He was quick on his feet, for all his size, and people got out of his way. The belt gun he carried looked small on his thick middle. Stubble-faced and crop-headed, he wore a green eye-shade pushed up on his forehead, but Gatling knew he was no clerk.
The big man stepped down from the sidewalk, then backed off so he could get a better look at the sign. Beside him, the small man looked more at Gatling than at the sign. He wore a cloth cap and a pistol with a hard rubber handle stuck out of his pants pocket. Far from mean-looking, he was doing his damnedest to look as mean as his burly companion. He laughed dutifully when the big man said something out of the corner of his mouth. Always ready for a sideshow, a crowd of gawkers began to gather.
Still grinning for the crowd, the big man pointed to the sign. “You fixing to set up shop, is that it?” he asked Gatling. “You think you can just waltz in here and start a gun business?”
Gatling said, “That’s what the sign says.”
The big man threw a sideways grin at the small man. “The sign says wrong. I don’t like that sign. I think you should take it down. Take it down, Ethan, or I’ll tear it down.”
A murmur ran through the crowd; this was pretty good, so early in the day. It was better than watching the grass grow. “You tell ’im, Bigger,” an old man called out. That got a laugh. Thinking to get another one, the old man said, “Bigger’s still fighting drunk from last night.”
Gatling said, “What don’t you like about the sign, mister? You got something against gunsmiths?”
“Guns are my business,” the man called Bigger said. “Bigger Zell is who I am, the one and only gunsmith and gun dealer in Butte. Have been that for more’n ten years. Have built up a nice business with hard work and long hours. People know me. I’m part of this town. Nobody knows you. You’re part of nothing. I’ll tell you a secret, stranger. I don’t like competition.”
Gatling wished to hell he had a gun close to hand, but why should a man need a gun to put up a sign? Not wearing a gun had been a deliberate choice. He hoped it would mark him as a gun merchant, not a gunman. “It’s a free country,” he said.
Bigger Zell laughed. “Don’t believe everything you hear, Ethan. There’s all kinds of freedom. Look at it this way. You’re free to open a beanery, a saddle and harness store, even a stable, but not a gunsmithing business. You got to get that through your thick head, Ethan. Now you got two minutes to right that ladder and take down that sign. You don’t do that, I’ll rip down the sign and bend it over your head.”
Trouble with a bullying business rival was something Gatling hadn’t foreseen. But there was no way he could walk away from it. If he meant to get the job done, he had to have something to hide behind, and the gun store was it.
“Why are you still standing there, Ethan?” Bigger Zell said. “Maybe you’re deaf in one ear and blind in the other. Just don’t get me mad or you’ll be sick and sorry. You want me to count out the time you got left?” Bigger Zell had the red-veined eyes of the steady drinker, and he might have a big head from the night before, but he wasn’t drunk now. Gatling had never known a drunken gunsmith. He figured the small man was the gunsmith. Bigger Zell just sold guns.
Gatling stood his ground. “I’ll have the law on you,” he said. “You can’t do this to an honest businessman.” He spoke to the crowd. “Somebody fetch the police. You see I’m not armed.”
Bigger Zell laughed and so did some of the gawkers. This was as good a show as they’d seen in a coon’s age. “No need to send for the law,” Bigger Zell said. “I’m kind of a lawman. Special deputy, the Rainbow County Posse, that can be called out in times of fire, flood, bank robbing, or insurrection. You’re lucky I don’t arrest you for trying to operate a gun business without a license.” Gatling knew he didn’t have much time left, but he tried to drag it out in the hope that one or more city policemen would happen along. So far there were none in sight.
“What license?” Gatling said. “Nobody said anything to me about a license. You have a license?”
“Sure I do, Ethan. It’s in the back pocket of my Sunday trousers. Joking aside, you got to get started on that sign. Your time’s long up, but I’ll give you another minute or so. You don’t move by then I’ll have to shoot you.”
Still no patrolman in sight. “You’d shoot me dead in front of witnesses?”
“Not dead, Ethan. I’ll probably shoot you through the palms of your hands. That’s it. That’s what I’ll do. Witnesses won’t remember it ever happened.”
Instead of answering, Gatling picked up the stepladder from where it stood folded against the wall. Zell started to move in from the street. He was still moving when Gatling spun around and hit him square in the face with the ladder. Zell was still staggering back, clawing at his torn, bleeding face, when Gatling jumped off the sidewalk and knocked the little man cold with the handle of the hammerax. Bleeding all over his shirt, Zell got his gun out and fired one wild shot before Gatling kicked him in the balls. The gun flew out of his hand and landed in the mud. Zell dived for the gun and his hand was still clawing at the handle when Gatling chopped down with the hatchet side of the hammerax and cut it off at the wrist. Zell howled with rage and despair as he held up the bleeding stump of his right arm. Gatling didn’t want to finish him off. He held back a moment too long, and by then Zell had grabbed up the gun with his other hand. He fired two wild shots. Gatling jumped him before he could fire a third and they rolled over and over in the mud. Gatling’s fingers dug into Zell’s wrist, trying to shake the gun loose, while the bloody stump beat at his face, but Zell was the stronger man and with one last surge of strength he threw Gatling off and away from him. Gatling sprang at him, but failed to bring him down. Zell staggered back, his life blood gouting from severed arteries, and tried to level the gun. Gatling jumped to one side and chopped the hammerax into the side of his head, taking off the top half of his ear. Zell screamed but stayed on his feet. Gatling raised up and sank the hatchet blade into the top of the other man’s skull. His brain stopped working, his eyes glazed over, and he fell down.
There wasn’t a sound from the crowd, then the old man cackled. “Tell it to St. Peter, Bigger. We’ll not see your like again and a good thing for that.”
This time nobody laughed.
The little man that Gatling took to be a gunsmith was coming back to life. Gatling took his unfired gun away from him and pressed him down in the mud with his boot. He lay there blinking, a little man completely out of his depth. Gatling wondered why he was there at all. “What’s the matter, tiger?” the same old codger called out, laughing and wheezing at the same time. “You ain’t going to turn tail and meow, are you?”
A Scandinavian-looking woman hit the old man over the head with her umbrella and he shut up. Two city policemen in blue uniforms were coming down the street. Gatling threw the hammerax on the sidewalk and waited. Some of the gawkers moved away, but most of them stayed. Maybe this was the best part of it, how the patrolmen handled it. Still leaking blood and brains, the dead man lay where he had fallen. Muddy and bloody, almost unnoticed, he was no longer a player.
Gatling turned to the crowd. “You’re all witnesses to what happened.”
No one answered him.
The policemen looked Irish. One was in his twenties, the other man, a sergeant, in his forties. They pushed their way through and the sergeant looked at the dead man, then at Gatling. “Did you do that?” he said, jerking a thumb at the muddy corpse.
Gatling said, “Self-defense, Sergeant. There was no other way. That man Zell wouldn’t let me. He said he’d shoot me if I tried to open up my business. Him and this other man here, they had no right to do that, did they? All I had to defend myself was that hammer there.” Gatling pointed at the bloody hammerax lying on the sidewalk.
The young patrolman whistled, the sergeant didn’t. “You killed him with that?” the sergeant said.
“I did. I didn’t want to kill him, even do him harm.” Gatling wasn’t sure how it would go. He was a stranger in town. Zell had been in business there for ten years. Gatling tried hard to sound like an outraged citizen. “He was threatening to shoot me in the hands, maybe worse. These people saw what happened, how it was. How could I have let him shoot me for no reason?”
“Calm yourself, Mr. Taggart,” the sergeant said, looking at the sign. He turned to the little man, who was standing by looking scared, not knowing what to do. “Is that how it happened, Herman? Tell the truth now.”
The little man squared his narrow shoulders. “Cousin Bigger and me was just having fun with him and he went wild. You know how Bigger likes his fun.”
“He used to,” the sergeant said.
“Bigger wouldn’t of shot him,” Herman said. “That was just scare talk. Not knowing how to take a joke, this man up and kills him. You got to arrest him, Sergeant Fallon.”
The sergeant glared at him. “Don’t be telling me my job. And what call have you to be throwing scares into people? You see where it got the both of you, picking on the wrong man?” He turned to the thinned-out crowd. “Somebody speak up. Did it happen like Mr. Taggart said it did?”
Nobody said anything at first, then a man who looked like a storekeeper said, “The gunsmith is telling the truth. Zell and this man here started their bullying. The gunsmith kept saying he wanted no trouble, but they wouldn’t let him alone. Zell said he’d give him two minutes to take down the sign. Would shoot him in the hands if he didn’t. The gunsmith hit him with the ladder and then knocked out this other man. Zell lost his hand to the hatchet blade, but wouldn’t give up. The gunsmith had to kill or be killed. My name is William Browder, in case you don’t know who I am. Browder’s General Store over on E Street.”
The sergeant nodded. “Anybody else got anything to say?”
The woman who hit the old heckler with the umbrella had plenty to say, so much so that the sergeant had to cut her off. But she got her name in several times. Mrs. Jim Bangs.
Sergeant Fallon ordered the crowd to disperse; two witnesses and the dead man’s cousin were to come along and talk to the Chief of Police.
“Cover the body with something till it’s taken away,” he told the young patrolman. Then he turned to Gatling. “You’re all over with blood, Mr. Taggart. You want to come like that or change your shirt and coat? Wash off your face and hands? On the other hand, maybe it’s best the Chief sees you as you are.”
Gatling nodded his agreement. “You’re right,” he said, thinking this was one hell of a way to get started in Butte. Now the name Ethan Taggart would be in the newspaper—and all he wanted to do was put up a sign.
The two witnesses signed statements and were dismissed. Mrs. Jim Bangs had to sign hers with an X. Herman Zell was locked up for disturbing the peace. The bloody hammerax lay on a newspaper on the Chief’s desk in his office on the first floor of City Hall. Chief Boyd looked at it with distaste.
The Chief was a big round man who looked like he did all right at the dinner table. Now he leaned back in his chair and said, “It looks like you’re in the clear, Mr. Taggart. You’re clear with the law, that is, but I’m afraid your troubles are far from over. Sergeant Fallon?”
Fallon sat beside Gatling in front of the Chief’s desk. “I’m afraid you’re right, sir.”
“There’s a whole clan of Zells out in the county,” the Chief told Gatling. “A shiftless, dangerous bunch. They settled here before the mines came in, when Butte was just a collection of shacks. Used to have a lot of land but sold it off piecemeal and spent the money. Originally from Pennsylvania, but turned into poor white trash as low-down as any in the Southern mountains. I guess this country turned them wild the way it has others. Got about thirty acres of bad land left. About twenty men, women, and kids living in a couple of ramshackle houses. Maybe more than twenty. Never was a real close count. They make moon out there and are suspected of stealing horses in the next county. None of my business, not my jurisdiction. I’m just telling you how dangerous they are.”
“Like the one I killed?”
“That’s right, Mr. Taggart. Just like Bigger. They’ll see it as murder no matter what the law says. And if you don’t have trouble with the Zells, which no doubt you will, you can expect to get some from the Rainbow County Posse.”
“The county sheriff’s posse?” Gatling hadn’t counted on trouble from two sides.
“You tell him, Sergeant,” the Chief said. “Sergeant Fallon keeps tabs on the dangerous elements hereabouts.”
Fallon turned in his chair. “They’re no kind of real lawmen, though they have helped the county sheriff whether the help was wanted or not. Mostly what they are is a bunch of men with money and land that like to ride roughshod over everybody else. That don’t like farmers or foreigners, anybody they don’t see as belonging to their crowd. Bigger Zell belonged to the Posse before he sold off his share of land and moved to town. The Zells were here before most people, so he remained a member. He made good in the gun business, so he remained a member in good standing. A man with some position, so to speak.”
Gatling thought it was time to protest. It might not look good if he didn’t. “But he forced the fight on me. He must have been known as a bully.”
The Chief took over. “Can’t you understand what we’re telling you? Bigger Zell was a dangerous hooligan. He beat and bullied many the man, but nobody dared to bring a charge against him. Too scared. Most of his hooliganism and worse was done out in the county. Most of the Posse are as bad as he was. They’re great for lynching and rope-dragging. They horsewhipped a Jew peddler and burned his wagon. Accused him of selling whiskey to the Indians. What Indians?”
“Bigger bragged of being in on that bit of work,” Sergeant Fallon said. “They’re a bad lot, Mr. Taggart.”
The Chief pointed to the hammerax. “Too bad you didn’t use the blunt end of that thing. But that’s water over the dam. It would have been better if you’d shot him, though.”
“I can’t help how it looks,” Gatling said. “I’m a gunsmith, not a gunman. I have a business in Kansas City. Out here I have money in the bank. I’ve never been arrested for anything. I vote Democrat. I hope that isn’t a crime in Montana.”
The Chief smiled. “I’m a Democrat myself, Mr. Taggart.”
Gatling didn’t return the smile. “You can check back on everything I’ve said.”
“I’ll do that, Mr. Taggart. Butte is a wild town, but I try to keep the lid on. The miners are the biggest troublemakers. Too many of them are Irish and they’re the worse pain in the ass known to man. And I’m not just talking about union trouble. What I’m talking about is drinking and fighting and wrecking saloons and whorehouses. Last St. Patrick’s Day one of my men had to kill an Irishman that came at him with a broken bottle. Sergeant Fallon is an Irishman himself and he’ll tell you how bad they are. Sergeant Fallon?”
The sergeant had been sitting still in his chair. Now he stirred himself. “They give the decent Irish a bad name. What the Chief said ... five or six hundred of them went on a rampage after the man with the bottle was killed. Set fire to buildings, threatened to burn down the city. We deputized every man could use a gun and managed to stop the riot with the help of mine police. The judge sent more than fifty to state prison. Long terms. But they haven’t forgotten. Anything at all could set off another riot.”
After glancing at Fallon, the Chief said, “Most of them are half wild, straight off the bogs. That’s got nothing to do with you. I’m just telling you what this town is like. The Welsh and Cornish are the least trouble of all. Go to church, a lot of them. Got their own chapel, as they call it, their own lay preachers. But mostly we got the wild Irish and a good mixture of other wild men: wops, Polacks, some Russians. The wops are fond of knife work. They all hate one another and the only thing they got in common is their hatred for the mine operators, their superintendents and foremen.”
Gatling said, “Begging your pardon, Chief, I’m more interested in my own problems. Can you give me protection from the Zells and this so-called Posse?”
“Only if they try to get at you inside the city limits. I have a deal with the Posse. Which is they can come into town, but not in a bunch. The county sheriff, Laidlaw, lets them run wild, but I won’t have it. Laidlaw is more a politician than a lawman. Fact is, he’s pretty well off—has a fine horse ranch—but likes being sheriff. Guess he’d like to call himself judge, but there’s no way he can do that. Keeps getting elected because he gives the best barbecues in the county, all the free beer you can drink. As a lawman he’s next to useless.”
“Then what should I do?” Gatling asked.
“In your shoes, I’d pack up and get out of town.”
“Why should I? I haven’t broken any law.”
“I’m just giving you good advice,” the Chief said. “God’s truth, I can’t see Butte as a place to set up any kind of business. Never know from one minute to the next when the town’s going to explode. Giving you protection won’t be easy, especially if there’s another strike, which there have been rumors of. If that happens my men will have more pressing duties. Now you take Denver. That’s where I’d set up if I had the money to start a business. Was on the force there, patrolman, but too many ahead of me for promotion. Yes, sir, Mr. Taggart. Denver always looked pretty good to me.”
Gatling stood up abruptly. “The hell with Denver. Here I am and here I stay. I’ll be open for business as soon as I get cleaned up.”
The Chief shrugged. “Well you can’t say I didn’t warn you. Just one last word of advice. Better start wearing a gun.”