Most of the talk was about keeping my hands off the women. I gave him a wise nod, but he kept on talking as if he hadn’t noticed. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t going to try to ride all fifty women, but I wasn’t signing on just for the wages. The women were there, and things would happen; that’s as it should be. I’d get to them, or they’d get to me. Bedding down would be done, and not always in a bed or even on a blanket. Soft grass in a secluded place on a sunny day or a quiet night—what’s wrong with that? If you can find something sinful in it, well, then you and me ain’t never going to be friends. About his daughter I wasn’t sure. I’d never been shot at by a clergyman.
“It’s important that you pay attention to what I’m telling you,” Claggett complained after we got settled in his wagon at a hinged, fold-down table. He set a jug of spring water on the table. I wondered where the Irishman hid his whiskey.
“I’m listening,” I said.
It was hard for Claggett to get his voice out of the pulpit. I figured I’d have to get used to his way of speaking. “There is nothing so terrible in the sight of God as a fallen woman,” he said.
Since God had never confided in me, I had nothing to say about that.
“Every time a woman desecrates her body outside the marriage bed, Jesus is crucified all over again. That is why I have made it my mission in life to lead wayward women back to the path of righteousness. My God is a terrible God, but He is also a God of mercy, provided the sinner is truly repentant. My mission is the salvation, the reclamation of the fallen woman.”
I stared at the mournful old coot, hardly able to believe my ears. “You mean . . .”
“Exactly,” Claggett said, knocking back spring water like whiskey. “With the exception of my daughter, every woman you have seen here today is in need of salvation.”
“Did you say ‘every woman’?”
Claggett waved away my thoughts. “It’s not what you think,” he said impatiently. “Not all have been women of the streets or the parlor houses, though many have sinned in that way. Some have served time in prison for theft, picking pockets, counterfeiting. Others are adulteresses driven from their homes by grievously wronged husbands. Some are foreign women come to this country for reasons known only to themselves. However, it makes no difference to me—to Almighty God—what they have done, what they have been in the past. I, Josiah Claggett, will save them.”
Looking at the man, I didn’t know what to make of him. Of course he was crazy. I knew that. How crazy was what I wanted to know. How crazy was I, signing on to lead fifty wayward women across a continent? Maybe a dozen or so wouldn’t have been so bad, but fifty bad girls seemed to be stretching it. Like all gamblers, I figured the odds, and that’s what I was doing when the slim killer came up the step into the preacher’s wagon. I was about to tell Claggett to find himself another man when the killer turned bright eyes on me. All it took was one look, and I changed my mind.
“What can I do for you, Maggie?” Reverend Claggett said to her.
“Well, you want your dinner or not?” Maggie O’Hara said. “If somebody didn’t remind you to eat, you’d never do it. Here’s beef stew the way you like it.”
Maggie O’Hara, a stewpot in her hand, eyed me suspiciously as she ladled out stew for the preacher. “You’re forgetting Mr. Saddler,” Claggett said.
“I wasn’t sure he’d be staying,” she said. “Is he?” Claggett nodded, and I got a plate of stew. Mine didn’t have as much meat as the parson’s. Maggie turned to go, but Claggett called her back.
“Sit with us a while,” he said.
Maggie sat down at the table and looked at me. “You ever know a man who called himself Langdon Moore?”
“Not that I remember,” I said. “Any reason I should?”
“You’d remember Langdon,” Maggie said. “Big feller, with a droopy mustache. Was from New Hampshire and talked like it. Was a bunco artist till he started blowing tin cans. Blew one too many. Got caught in Cairo, Illinois. Used to have an advance man who sort of looked like you. I never did get a good look at him. Always coming and going through some back alley.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Old Langdon’s doing twenty years for bank robbing because of that man. They were in it together, but this man turned state’s evidence.”
I finished my stew. “Where were you at the time?”
“Maggie was in Sing Sing prison for life,” Reverend Claggett said.
I knew they didn’t give women life for bank robbery, so it had to have been murder. I wondered what kind of murder, but didn’t ask. I didn’t say a thing. Maggie didn’t either. Instead, she smiled at the preacher.
“You don’t mind if I tell Mr. Saddler, do you?” Claggett asked her.
“Hell, no!” she said, then thought better of her rough language. “Of course not. You’re the one who got me out.”
Claggett said, “Maggie worked for a certain parlor house in the Tenderloin district of New York. In the course of her sinful employment, a young man attempted to go beyond the bounds of, er, ordinary sins of the flesh. In spite of her nefarious trade, some good remained in Maggie, and she refused. This young man, God rest his wicked soul, grew violent and proceeded to beat her. They had been drinking champagne, and she killed him with the bottle.”
“They are heavy,” I said, keeping up my end of the peculiar conversation.
That got Maggie’s Irish up. Her blue eyes crackled with cold anger. “Maybe I’d better tell it, Reverend. Our friend here will understand my language better than yours.”
Reverend Claggett stared at what was left of his stew. “There’s no need,” he said.
“Begging your pardon, but I think there is,” she said. “It was like this. I worked for Big Flossie for nearly a year, and nobody beefed about not getting what they paid for. I was saving up to get married, get me? Lots of high-toned gents wanted to set me up, but that wasn’t for me, and I didn’t want to marry some flatfoot or bartender neither. So I decided to sell it for a year—a year was the limit—then I’d take my roll and maybe go south or west, where nobody knew me. I was going to catch some nice man—catch him and be a good wife to him—and what’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
Maggie wasn’t so pretty when she got angry. “I was just two months short of my year when this young son-of-a-bitch come in one night and started asking me to do things I don’t like.”
“Unspeakable things,” Claggett murmured to his plate.
“Saddler knows the names for them,” Maggie said. “Well, I just worked there and didn’t want to make trouble, so I told him to go talk to Flossie, and get some other girl who would give him his wish. But no, it was me or nothing. One more time I say no, and that’s when he got rough. My rich admirer said he’d mark me up so bad I wouldn’t be able to sell it on the Bowery. He started in to do it, and I beaned him with the bottle.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to cry, but she was past that. Claggett leaned over and patted her hand; I liked him a little better after that.
“I always did have lousy luck,” Maggie said. “I had to go and kill a politician’s son. Anybody else, Flossie could have fixed it for the police to toss him in the river. But the thought of dumping Tim Hanrahan’s son scared the pie out of her. Flossie got the police in on it, and they all decided I’d have to go down for it. Flossie wouldn’t even pay for the lawyer, which is the way it works out when one of the girls gets in trouble. I had to use every cent I’d saved. This lawyer, Grandy, tried to make a deal for manslaughter. No deal, said the district attorney, saying what Tim Hanrahan told him to say. So they made it murder, and I got life.”
I looked at her. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“So you won’t get any ideas about me because of what I’ve been. I wouldn’t kill you with a bottle, Saddler. I’d shoot you dead!”
Reverend Claggett reasserted his authority. “There will be no more of that talk,” he said. “What happened to you in New York will never be mentioned again. Now, get on with your work, Maggie. We’ll be leaving here at sunrise.”
After she left we sat in silence for a while. Then Claggett said, “I suppose you’re wondering how I got her out of prison.”
“Tell me, if you want to.”
“It won’t hurt the girl, and it will explain something about me,” he said. “To you I’m just a Bible-thumper, a Holy Joe, a sky pilot. Such names don’t bother me.”
“Get to the point, Reverend.”
“The point is, sir, I get things done. I don’t give up. Faith can move mountains. When it doesn’t, I find a way to get around them.”
“You must have pushed hard to get the girl out of Sing Sing. How did you even hear about it?”
“One of the girls the police forced to perjure herself at Maggie’s trial told me about it. I found her in McGurk’s Suicide Palace on the Bowery. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
I had. It was the last stop for whores in the final stages of disease and despair. For some reason the management didn’t seem to mind too much. Maybe the whores bought drinks for the house before they swallowed a fatal dose of carbolic acid.
“I had gone there as part of my work,” Claggett went on. “She was dying, but I rode with her in the ambulance. Before she died she told me about Maggie O’Hara and the trial rigged by Hanrahan. And”—Claggett allowed himself a wintry smile—“she told me about Tim Hanrahan himself. It seems he liked the things his dead son had liked—the beating, the cruelty. She said Flossie could tell me the rest.”
“But you didn’t start with Flossie?” I was beginning to get an odd feeling about the Reverend Josiah Claggett. I knew I had never seen him before, but he reminded me of someone. I couldn’t remember who.
“No, I started with Hanrahan,” Claggett said. “He owned a building, published a newspaper on Park Row. I went there and was told to write a letter requesting an appointment. They assured me that I would get an answer. No, I said, I didn’t have time for that. I said I’d just write a note and let them take it in to the great man. They laughed, thought I was crazy. You think I look crazy?”
“A little,” I said. “You got to see Hanrahan?”
“Indeed I did,” Claggett said. “When they let me in, he locked the door. And while I sat there he burned the note I had sent him. I had written the dead girl’s name on it, and other things I’d rather not talk about. What did I think I was doing, he wanted to know. I told him I had a signed statement from the girl at McGurk’s. I said her handwriting and signature could be verified. She had worked at one time for some lawyers on East 17th Street. Hanrahan wanted to know where this statement was. Where he would never find it, I said. He said he could beat it out of me, or have it done. I said he could try that.
He walked to the telephone on the wall and began to crank the handle. Then he changed his mind. I think God must have stayed his hand.”
“God—or something else,” I said, still trying to place this man’s face.
Claggett ignored my remark. Outside, the wagon train was coming to life, the way a train always does when the long journey is about to start. Women called back and forth, and the penned cattle bawled restlessly.
“Hanrahan asked me what I planned to do with the girl’s statement,” the preacher said, “give it to a rival newspaper? No, I said. New York newspapers are filthy rags. What I was going to do, I said, was; to print up tens of thousands of copies of the girl’s statement and throw them from the top of the highest building in the city. The wind would do the rest.”
I stared at him. “You’ve got plenty of nerve, Reverend.”
“You don’t need nerve if you’re not afraid to die. Oh, yes, he offered me money. Said the statement was a lie, but he was a businessman and had to protect himself. No money, I said. Just get Maggie O’Hara out of jail. How on earth could he do that? Find a way, I told him. Try hard, I said. That’s where we left it. I was to come back the next day at the same time and he’d let me know what could be done.”
All I could say was, “I’m surprised you’re still alive.”
“I came close enough to not being,” Claggett said. “It was getting dark when I left Hanrahan’s office. That’s a business district down there, and the streets are quiet when offices and stores close for the night. Instead of going back to my hotel, I went for a walk over toward the Brooklyn Bridge. By the time I got down to the streets below the bridge, three men were following me. The street was empty, and they walked down the middle of it. I stopped, and so did they. Then one of them said I was under arrest for the murder of a prostitute the night before. As the man spoke, he began to draw a revolver from a shoulder holster.”
The man of God paused to drink water. Then he looked at me. “I killed him first. God forgive me, I killed all three of them. Nobody saw me do it, but it convinced Hanrahan. He got the girl out.”
The man seated across the table from me was at least sixty-five years old, gray-bearded and stooped, his long narrow face seamed and burnt by the sun. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed his hands before: long and supple in spite of his age. I’m not easily surprised, but now I was.
“You can’t be Josiah Claggett,” I said. “It’s been thirty years since—”
“No need to feel awkward about it, Saddler. Most people don’t even remember the name. Most people think I’ve been in my grave for many a year, and that’s all to the good. You weren’t even born when they put me in jail. I did eighteen years before they let me out. What makes you remember me?”
“Maybe because you were the first of the fast guns.” Josiah Claggett’s career as a gunman had started before the Civil War, at a time when handguns used percussion loads instead of cased shells. They said he always carried a couple of extra loaded cylinders to give him an edge. In his time, he had been the most feared outlaw on the old Santa Fe Trail. I never did hear how he got started on the wrong road. Most badmen have somebody to blame, but then most badmen are liars. More than likely, Josiah Claggett had never felt the need to cook up some woeful tale of injustice. Not that it mattered much: he had been as bad a man as ever had lived.
“I did what I did,” Claggett said simply. “I did it because I wanted to do it. Satan had a firm hold on me in those years. I was possessed by the arrogance of the devil himself. No man could kill me, no prison could hold me, and even when they shot me full of holes and threw me in a cell, the fires of rebellion still burned bright. No matter how long it took, I vowed to break out and kill the men who had betrayed me for the reward money. It took them three years to break me. I raised a sledgehammer to brain a guard, the worst of the lot, when suddenly I felt my arms grow weak and a great peace come over me. I dropped the hammer and fell to my knees and began to pray.”
“What did the guard do?” I asked.
“He fired at me—fired twice and missed. I tore open my shirt and told him to fire again. He didn’t. Instead, he yelled that I had gone crazy, so they locked me up with the crazy men.”
“But you got out.”
“It took nearly a year before they put me back with the rest of the prisoners. For a whole year I lived with the scum of the earth, with men so vile that the other prisoners would have killed them if they’d gotten the chance—child-killers, madmen who craved the taste of human flesh, rapists, defilers of animals. But to me all were children of God. I swore that if I ever got out, I would devote the rest of my life to doing good. And—miraculously—I did get out after another fifteen years in that place. The world had forgotten me. I became a preacher and married a good woman and began my new life’s work. You’ve seen my daughter Hannah, my only daughter.”
Something warned me not to ask about Claggett’s wife. All I knew was that she had been a good woman. I wondered where she was now.
Outside, it was dark, and the cook fires were going. Looking at Reverend Claggett, I began to wish I’d gone to Kansas.