Cheyenne Station
The Cheyenne office of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency occupied the ground floor of a new brick-front building downtown. There were electric lights and telephones and potted plants and female typists in starched white blouses and black skirts and piled hair and the rattle-bang of new black-and-silver Remington typewriters everywhere. The man who greeted Rawlings and St. John outside the door of his office was forty, going gray on one side of his longish chestnut hair, and wore a thin moustache and a prickly suit of a neat European cut. He introduced himself as Geoffrey Halloran. His accent was British and he spoke in italics.
"Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. St. John." He pronounced it "Sinjun." His handshake was firm and over with quickly. "I say, Rawlings, you're looking fit. Regular David Crockett, what?"
Rawlings murmured something noncommittal. There were few things in life he resented more than his immediate superior. The Englishman sensed this and, attributing it to the other's Scottish origins, delighted in bouncing hoary Anglicisms off him whenever they met. Rawlings would have hated him if he came from Edinburgh and wore kilts.
The visitors were fresh from a bath and shave at a hotel, St. John in his politician's clothes and the Pinkerton in his checkered suit. His beard was trimmed back to its former closeness.
"Rawlings said he called you from Pinto Creek," reported St. John. "He said you said to look in on you when we got in. We got a train to catch. The others are waiting on us at the station now, getting set to load the horses."
"This won't take long, I assure you." Halloran pushed open his office door and ushered them in ahead of him.
It was a large room, with a thick maroon leaf-print carpet and built-in bookshelves stuffed with leather-bound volumes on law and the Wyoming penal code for each of the sixteen years since the territory had achieved statehood. The works of Dickens filled the only shelf not devoted to legal matters. Indicating two black stuffed leather armchairs for his guests, Halloran hiked around his huge Empire desk and inserted his narrow buttocks into a chair with a high back mounted on a swivel behind it. In back of him a window as tall as a door looked out on the city and the plains beyond. Isolated white clouds lay like stones on a steel-blue sky.
"I love this life," said the chief Pinkerton. He opened a carved redwood humidor on the desk and offered them each a cigar. St. John declined, displaying his pipe. Rawlings didn't smoke. Shrugging, Halloran took one for himself and snipped off the end with a tiny pair of silver scissors on the end of his watch chain. "Used to work at the Yard, you know. Helped bring some of the more sensational developments in the Ripper case to light. London's ghastly this time of year. Damned strangling yellow fog. Give me the clean air out here." He finished lighting the cigar and puffed great clouds of urine-smelling smoke into the clean air.
"You didn't ask us here to talk about London." St. John got his pipe chawing.
"You're quite right. You Americans do tend to live up to your reputation for directness. Very well then. Rawlings told me you killed a man yesterday. I suppose it was unavoidable."
"If it wasn't, we'd of avoided it."
"I suppose all the others in your colorful past were equally unavoidable. Sixteen, isn't it? Or am I behind the times?"
"St. John didn't kill the man," said Rawlings, his ire rising. "It was Midian Pierce. And you knew how many men he'd killed when you suggested we engage his services."
Halloran's brows arched. They were black, a startling contrast to his reddish hair. (Rawlings had always suspected he used a grease pencil to keep them that way.) To St. John: "You appear to have made a conquest. As I recall, Rawlings was your most outspoken critic when your name first came up."
"My opinion remains unchanged." His subordinate bristled. "But I do have a strong sense of justice. St. John tried to prevent the incident from happening, as I explained to you over the telephone."
"Yes. You said he told his man to hold his fire. Is this the way all your inferiors react to your orders, Mr. St. John?"
"Let's cut through all the crap, Mr. Halloran." St. John leaned forward, speaking around the pipestem in his teeth. "Am I being fired?"
"Oh, no, no, no. I didn't mean to imply that."
"Then I reckon you'll have to tell me what you did mean to imply. It's all that clean air out here; you get used to breathing it and you get so you can't understand gibberish."
"There's no need to be hostile. I'm merely trying to establish whether or not the killing was indeed necessary."
"It was." The old lawman sat back.
"Very well. I'll accept your word this time. But if there are any more such incidents I'll have to insist that I be notified in writing, along with written statements signed and sworn to by witnesses."
"And if there don't happen to be any witnesses handy, then what?"
"My advice would be that you find some." Halloran' s expression went from firm to apologetic. "I want you to know that I have nothing to do with these strictures. The Washington office is—"
"Particular," finished St. John. "I heard."
"More so now than ever. This agency has a reputation for launching its investigations with a microscope and ending them with gunpowder. It's an image we're eager to change. A successful case finishes with an arrest and conviction. Every dead man marks a mistake."
St. John sucked on his pipe and said nothing.
Halloran changed the subject. "So you think Race Buckner is headed for Denver."
"I never said that," returned the other. "I think it's more than likely that he's not. Not dead-downtown, anyway. Not yet."
"But according to Rawlings—"
"Rawlings talks too much. I'm thinking of leaving him here this trip and letting him do his talking among friends."
Rawlings gathered his long legs under him. "Do that and you can say good-bye to that twenty thousand. I said at the start the offer was conditional that I accompany you."
"That's not quite true." Halloran's lips made popping sounds on the end of his cigar, expectorating thick beige spheres out the burning tip. "The condition was that a Pinkerton field operative go along to observe and report to this office. It needn't be you. Would you prefer a replacement, Mr. St. John? I have several capable young men not engaged at present. If you'd like I can arrange interviews."
St. John considered. "No thanks, Mr. Halloran," he said after a moment. "I'll stand pat."
For the first time the chief Pinkerton showed irritation. "Then what was all that about leaving him behind? I confess that after five years on this side of the water you Yanks still manage to baffle me."
"I just wanted to see what you'd do if I made a hole. I'd of bet my gold tooth you'd jump through it, and I'd of won. I don't think we can do business, Mr. Halloran." He put his hands on the arms of his chair.
The other started out of his own seat. "Just a moment! I'm afraid I still don't understand."
"I used to be a businessman, Mr. Halloran. It didn't take, but I was in harness long enough to learn that a man who won't stand behind his employees can't be trusted. How do I know if I deliver the Buckners and Shirley tied up with a big red bow, you won't find some excuse not to pay me the money we agreed on?"
"My integrity has never been questioned!"
"I believe that. I also believe no one ever asked a rattler if it bites."
They watched each other across the clear expanse of desk, the American stiff-jawed but calm, the Englishman red in the face and getting redder. Suddenly Halloran exhaled explosively. Rawlings smelled his ashtray breath five feet away.
"You're going directly to the station from here?" The chief's voice was subdued.
St. John said they were.
"I'll send a messenger around in twenty minutes with a cashier's check in the amount of five thousand dollars. That should buy me some of your time at least."
St. John rose, extending his hand. Halloran hesitated, then got up to accept it. His palm was moist.
"Hold on to your money till I've earned it," said the old lawman. "There isn't much call for cashier's checks where we're going."
The Englishman blinked. Then, tentatively: "You were making a hole again, is that it?"
"That's it. Only this time you went through her the right way. Keep your powder dry, Mr. Halloran. That's an American expression."
"I'm familiar with it. We never did business this way at Scotland Yard, I have to say."
"Maybe you should of. If you had, maybe that Ripper fellow would be in the ground right now with a stretched neck."
"Perhaps. . . . Oh, by the way."
St. John and Rawlings were at the door. They looked back. Halloran's posture behind the great desk was rigid. "I met with officials of the Union Pacific this morning. They've agreed to place a special train with a private Pullman at your disposal. It's at the station now, with the compliments of Mr. E. H. Harriman."
He picked up his cigar and blew smoke rings. "Settle their hash, Mr. St. John. That's a British expression."
In the hall outside the office, St. John paused to knock out his pipe on the edge of a smoking stand next to the door. A typist Rawlings didn't know glanced at them curiously as she hurried past clutching a manila folder, her skirt gliding along the rubber runner as if she had wheels under her petticoats.
"You ever ride posse before, Mr. Rawlings?" asked St. John, when a door had closed behind her at the end of the hall.
"This is my first one."
"Then here's your first lesson. Don't ever make excuses for the man in charge. If he's any good, he won't need them, and if he's not, he doesn't deserve them."
"If you mean what I said about the killing," retorted the detective, "what was I supposed to do, let you take the blame for Pierce's mistake?"
"I don't remember appointing you my keeper. And it wasn't his mistake."
"Whose, then?"
"Mine. I sent the wrong one out to help George with that automobile. I should of sent Testament and left you to guard Wood. You wouldn't of been so quick to shoot. But I didn't count on him taking Testament by surprise like he did."
"I warned you about Pierce at the beginning."
"I don't like him neither, but he's a good man in his place. You just haven't seen it yet. You will when the time comes. I hope it doesn't." He opened his pocketknife and scraped the bowl of the pipe. "Just remember who's giving the orders, and who's responsible for what happens. I know I'm an old man, but I don't require nursing just yet."
They were moving down the hall now, St. John cleaning the pipe as he walked. Rawlings nodded to the attractive redhead at the front desk, who had accepted his undeveloped pictures for processing and shipment to Washington. She smiled back. They had gone out to dinner once, but he couldn't remember her name.
Outside, the air was cooling and there was a collar of gray cloud to the west, solemnly promising rain or snow before nightfall. The street rumbled and creaked with wagon traffic hauling bricks and timber; Cheyenne was undergoing another of its periodic building booms amid the atmosphere of national prosperity. Khaki-clad soldiers bivouacking in the area loitered singly in doorways and wandered the boardwalks in pairs and groups, their dimpled campaign hats prevented from sliding forward over their freckle faces by thin black straps hugging the curve of their close-cropped heads. To Rawlings they seemed terribly young to be carrying the burden of a nation's security. He wondered if such an observation was the first sign of age.
"Now that we got our own personal train, there's time before we leave if you want to go home and see your wife or something," St. John said. He exchanged his pipe for a fresh cigar and turned into a shop doorway to light it. A gray-haired woman standing behind a counter inside glared at him. He winked at her.
"I don't have a wife."
The match went into the gutter and they resumed walking in the direction of the train station. "I reckon it's none of my business to ask how come."
"You're right," said the detective shoddily. "None of your business is exactly what it is."
Then he was telling the old lawman about the girl in Charleston who had promised to wait and who, when he came back from the war with Spain, had been six months married and gone. His association with the agency had begun soon afterward, and he had yet to find a woman who was willing to share him with the ghost of Allan Pinkerton.
"Odds are you haven't tried." St. John gave the cigar a quarter turn at intervals to keep it from burning unevenly in the slight breeze.
"Not really. I enjoy detective work. If I spend the rest of my life married to the agency, I won't think it was wasted."
"Time's a funny thing," said his companion. "You never know you're wasting it till it's gone."
They were nearing the station. A sharp odor of steam and steel reached them on a blast of arctic air as they turned a corner. Rawlings turned up his coat collar. "Did you mean what you said in there about me talking too much?" he asked.
"There you go again."
The special train consisted of a locomotive, tender and caboose, a day coach, a boxcar for the horses, and a Pullman salon car equipped like a brothel on wheels, with everything but the girls. That thought set Pierce to prowling the platform while the engineer and conductor stood outside the cab glumly waiting for the through local to pull out before leaving the siding. White steam exhaled by the champing engine moistened Testament's trouser legs as he paused to survey the knot of well-wishers gathered near the other train. His eyes lingered for a moment on a pretty adolescent girl in yellow dress and bonnet, then moved on. She was standing with an adult couple, probably her parents. There were a few other girls of various ages and appearances, all in the company of older people. But except for them, no females below the age of twenty appeared within reasonable distance. He sighed and boarded the coach.
The air inside was close and he could smell the Mexicans the length of the aisle. They sat together as always, the big one snoring with his slouch hat tilted down to his large and obvious nostrils, the thin one with the scars glancing up at Pierce, then quickly dropping his bright black eyes as if lied been expecting another photographer to take his picture aboard a train. Pierce suspected that the bandit had never ridden the rails before Kansas City and that he thought a birdlike man in black tails carrying lightning on a rod was part of the service. About what you could expect from a country overpopulated with Catholics and heathens.
Rawlings and Edwards were outside on the platform, and there was no sign of the Indian. He was most likely in conference with St. John in the private car. The Sunday school teacher remembered that they had always kept close company and wondered if some savage blood ran in the old lawman's veins. He sat down in the first seat, as far from the Mexicans as the dimensions of the coach allowed, and put his face near the open window to clear his nose of the stench of chili peppers and bean wind and stale sweat.
The whistle sounded. Edwards came in and took a seat behind Testament, followed a moment later by the Pinkerton. The conductor bawled. The engine rocked back with a sigh, then started forward. The car jolted into motion. The platform began to slide. Pierce drew out his Bible.
This time he didn't read it. He was opening it to his black ribbon marker when he spotted ex-Sheriff Fred Dieterle standing outside. Their gazes locked for a moment before the corner of the depot roof moved between them.