IN ANTICIPATION OF THE PAN-WESTERN appraiser Duncan had promised to have call upon me, I visited my claim for the first time in weeks. Approaching, I noticed rock piled by a freshly dug shaft.
The man standing by it caught up a rifle and waited for me to dismount. “Nice day to shoot somebody what ain’t got no business here,” he observed.
Down below in the shaft the sounds of shoveling had stopped. “Well, I thought I had,” I said. “This claim happens to be mine.”
Lean and hatchet-faced, my immediate opponent looked tough, but when his eyes flickered sidewise toward the shaft, I knew his weakness. He didn’t like to act alone.
Nevertheless, he tried to face me down. “This was maybe yourn up till a few days ago. Seein’ as how you wasn’t doin’ nothin’ with it, me and my pardner done took it over.”
“Call him up,” I suggested. “I’d like to talk to him, too.”
Actually his associate was already clambering out. I could hear his feet scuffling against the wall of the shaft; and a minute later I could see his head out of the corner of my eye.
The man confronting me could not forbear to glance toward his badly wanted ally. When he did so, I knocked his rifle askew and, with the aid of my revolver, relieved him of it. The other fellow had scrambled erect by then, but as I had marked where his pistol belt was folded atop a keg of powder, I didn’t interfere.
This second man was a heavy, curly-haired knave who looked too seasoned in the wars to have blundered as his comrade had just done. He growled at the latter before he turned to scowl at me.
“I’m Baltimore Carruthers,” I said, “and I’ve had this claim since before there was a town here. Clear out.”
Neither was known to me, even by sight. There were now so many people in Dead Warrior that I didn’t know half of them, where once every face had been familiar. It was plain from their faces, though, that they knew me, or knew of me.
“We didn’t know it was your claim,” the curly-haired fellow said, “though somebody would’ve told you, when we was ready to prove on it. We’ll get off now seein’ as how this mud brain let you get the drop on us, but if you want us to stay off, you’d better see Ace Ferguson.”
This surprised me. Violence and thievery, singly or combined, had always been the products of individual enterprise in Dead Warrior. Now I found myself up against a gang and its lord.
“Where do I find Ace?” I demanded.
“Any saloon you catch him in,” I was told.
Upon my return to town Short-fuse told me that Ferguson was a former San Francisco citizen, lately come to Arizona. After trying ten other places, I located him in the Sultan’s Palace. Its main function was that of a dance hall, but there was a gambling room in the back. Ace was pointed out to me as one of those sitting in on a poker game banked by Bill Overton, who had moved his headquarters from Tucson.
At my request Overton halted the game between deals. “A couple of claim jumpers tell me you’re their backer,” I put it to Ferguson. “How’s for calling them off my property?”
He was a dark man with the long lines of his face sharpened to meanness. His look of alert suspicion was of the cast native to the city dweller, and he aggravated me by giving me a cosmopolitan-to-bumpkin glance.
“I’ll talk to you later,” he said. “I’m playing poker.”
With my left hand I swept his chips to the floor. “You’ve just quit,” I told him. “What about those men on my claim?”
He had a gun in a hip holster, for I could see the bulge it made beneath the flap of his jacket. I was also watching for him to produce some other hideaway, but his hands stayed empty as he rose to lean against the otherwise hastily vacated table.
“Let’s see; you run the stage and freight lines and a couple of more things, don’t you?” he mused. “What’s it worth to you to get your claim back?”
“I haven’t lost my claim,” I snapped. He looked so amused that I lost my temper altogether. “Draw if you don’t believe me.”
He stopped smiling, but he didn’t move. “Where I come from it ain’t nice to shoot where somebody might see you. Now if you work your claim, or sell it to some outfit that will work it, there won’t be no doubt as to who owns it. But if you want to just sit on it, you’ll have to make up your mind whether it’s cheaper to hire guards or pay me.”
That was in the morning. During the afternoon a Mr. Dan Smiley, representing a new mining brokerage, called on me. His visit seemed timely, for I felt an impulse to sell, thus getting rid of the trouble my unexploited property was causing me. The price Smiley offered, on behalf of some unnamed client, was so low, however, that I wound up by telling him not to bother me further until he was ready to talk sense.
“That’s funny,” he said, sticking his cigar into his sack-of-pudding face and cocking it at an angle. “Ace Ferguson said you wanted to unload.”
After he had gone I thought it all out. Dead Warrior was almost living up to Seth Potter’s expectations. Six lesser companies were now digging gold, and the two big ones had increased their output by working two shifts. Meanwhile claim owners were cashing in on their holdings, either by working their mines in a small way or by leasing or selling outright to the growing number of capitalists who now prowled the region.
Everybody had money. It welled up out of the earth, to be funneled through prodigal pockets into the gambling saloons and dance halls of the town. Recently, though, one faintly sour note had been struck. A limit had been placed on what had at first seemed the infinite, when intensive investigation had at length defined the scope of the ore field.
Up to that time prospectors had been selling claims on the theory that they could find replacements by scratching gravel a few miles farther out. Mining companies had no doubt had the same idea, and it was the discovery that they were wrong which had launched a race to get possession of as many of the available claims as possible.
Ferguson’s gang I could tag as one by-product of that competition. I could see something else, too. What Ferguson had told me, when declaring his repugnance to witnessed shootings, was that if I didn’t sell to one company or another I would be bushwhacked.
When I believed I understood the basic facts of the case I rode out to the Dead Warrior Mining Company to see Irah Weaver. Dick Jackson was conferring with the mine superintendent, when I reached the latter’s office. I had time to smoke a whole pipe down before Weaver called to me, where I stood watching the wood-burning steam hoist bring up gold-veined ore.
“What can I do for you?” Irah asked, when we were seated in the room where his uncle had once threatened to scalp him. My visit didn’t surprise him, as his company was a client of our freight line. “We have all the cordwood we need for the present.”
“How are you fixed for mining claims?” I asked him.
Weaver had taken on quite a bit of weight, and it showed when he shoved the flaps of his jacket back and hooked his thumbs under his suspenders. “Well,” he said, “we might be willing to make you an offer.”
“I’m not selling,” I told him, “but the funny thing is that a Mr. Smiley thought I was, too.”
Although his eyes remained blank while I related the details of the Ferguson-Smiley incident, I was convinced that I was not telling him news. He overdid the pose of ignorant indifference, and his comment was self-betrayal.
“I have nothing to do with the purchasing of property,” he said, forgetting that he had just mentioned the possibility of making an offer for my claim. “As for the other outfits, they may be up to no good, but that’s none of my concern.”
“In other words, you know your company’s buying on Smiley’s market, and you think Pan-Western and the rest do the same,” I translated. “How many men have been strong-armed out of their claims so far, would you say?”
At that he hardened his face to show that he felt there was nothing I could do about it. “Go ahead and suspect us, if you have nothing better to do. Personally I’m pretty busy, Carruthers.”
Back in town I dropped around to the War Whoop, where Jackson was engaged in looking over the issue he had just published. “Some of these mining companies are starting to crowd people out of here,” I began.
“Old stuff,” he yawned, when I had enlarged somewhat on that statement. “The War Whoop takes note of the fall of even the tiniest buzzard, so you’ll have to come around a lot earlier than you did this time, if you seek to amaze us.”
“I’m not asking you to be amazed,” I replied, miffed at his attitude but trying not to show it. “All I want is action. How about unlimbering with an exposé?”
For answer Dick opened his paper at a certain page and turned it around so that I could read. There was a large space devoted to advertising the Smiley Real Estate and Mine Development Company. Next Jackson showed me a news story on the front page, dealing with a prospector who was in despair about what to do with his claim until he had suddenly encountered good fortune in the form of the benevolent Mr. Smiley.
“I was showing Weaver proofs of those items while you were cooling your heels.” With these words Jackson put his own heels on his desk and smiled at me. “Any remarks?”
“Well, hell, Dick,” I protested, “it never occurred to me that you were honest, but I didn’t think you’d hire out to clean spittoons for a louse like Irah.”
“This is venality with a difference, Baltimore.” He pointed a pencil at me didactically, then replaced it behind his ear. “Money is not the object, nor am I anything more than the agent of the benefits to be exchanged for services rendered. Has it come to your attention that nothing has been done about our petition to be chartered as a city?”
“They haven’t hurried about it,” I shrugged. The territorial administration had, indeed, followed standard political procedure. After maneuvering us into seeking formal municipal organization, the Governor and his aides had apparently lost all interest in Dead Warrior. “But what’s that got to do with it?”
“I want Prescott to give us the go-ahead whistle,” Jackson said. “A charter won’t be forthcoming until the legislature meets again next winter, naturally; but it’s usual in these cases for the administration to authorize an interim government, with appointive officers.”
“And you want the appointment as mayor,” I stepped ahead of him. “I know all that, but — ”
“But our dilatory Governor is an appointee of a Republican national administration,” Dick interrupted, “and Horace Ainsworth Bedlington of Philadelphia is a very influential member of the party in question.”
Having concluded his explanation, Jackson beamed at me, doubly pleased with himself because I was disappointed. “So you see that the true beneficiary will not be myself but Dead Warrior, destined to flourish under my kindly but wise rule.”
Returning to my own office I spread my problem in front of Sam Wheeler. “I don’t know what to use for artillery now,” I worried. “I’d been counting on having the backing of Dick’s newspaper.”
“With blue chips floating around, you can count on our boy Jackson not to be on the side of the peanut vendors.” Sam blew on his glasses and polished them. “You were a tribune of the people at Three Deuces and Yuma. Why don’t we add a newspaper to our little flock of enterprises?”
“Hand-lettering won’t do,” I said, while turning that idea over. “It takes type.”
“Buy it,” Sam said. “There are more traveling printers than buffalo in the West now, and there are at least two in town as of today.”
The more I considered the suggestion the better I liked it. “Can you get along without me here?”
“Sure, if we hire somebody to take your place. If inkslinging means power and profits to Jackson, why we can use both of those things, too; and the town’s big enough for more than one daily rag.”
There was a bumbling weekly called the Dead Warrior Sun, published by a journeyman printer by the name of Cliff Fellowes. Carruthers and Wheeler bought into partnership with him on the understanding that he would handle composition, while I would have editorial control of the journal. This, after I had moved the plant into quarters on Apache Street, I renamed the Dead Warrior Vigilante. It took a few days to get things set up, but meanwhile I had taken the precaution of moving into the new Arizona Hotel, so that I would not have to risk returning to my house in the dark.
Having bought the paper to shoot with, I didn’t pussyfoot. In my first issue I published my suppositions as facts and flatly accused the War Whoop of pimping for the mining companies. That brought Smiley around to see me.
“That was a smart move,” he complimented me. “Now nothing may happen to you, as you’ve named too many people who might not like being suspected. How much do you want?”
When I’d put a bullet through the brim of his hat I felt better; but my journalistic efforts didn’t create as much excitement as I thought they would. Many agreed that I was on the right track, though that was as far as anyone was willing to go with me for a couple of days. Then Frank Fillmore was found dragging himself into town, blasted in the back and only just alive.
“Dry-gulched,” was all he could say before he died. “Wouldn’t sell my claim, so bastards dry-gulched me.”
This statement, which Frank wasn’t supposed to have lived long enough to make, was the foundation of the Dead Warrior Minute Men. My paper that day called for a meeting of all interested in making the town a place where they wouldn’t be shot in the back as an alternative to closing any business deal which might be proposed to them.
Prospectors were in the majority as men started trooping into the Anything Goes Variety Hall. There were quite a few businessmen, however, as well as representatives of the mining companies, anxious to prove that they didn’t condone assassination. Irah Weaver was among them, but I had no authority to exclude him, so I said nothing.
The meeting began in the manner of most uncontrolled assemblages. There was a considerable amount of flamboyant oratory, and there were resolutions which contained more dime-novel nobility than good sense; but the wind has to blow for the seeds to drift. When everybody who liked the sound of his own voice had run out of air, Hamilton Gay got to his feet. He was no longer the anxious boniface who had launched the Happy Hunting Ground without benefit of a roof. He was the successful owner of a gambling saloon, and one who had recently announced plans to build fabulously expensive new quarters. As such he was one of the important figures of the town, and when the rest quieted to hear him, he took it as no more than his due.
“Gents,” he said, “in my business I listen to a lot of big talk, so if that’s all we’re going to do, I might as well get back to work.” He waited for the laugh, and he got it. “But if we’re really aiming to do something, I’ll stay right with you till that Injun this camp’s named for comes to life again. Now how do you say we ought to begin, Seth?”
As the prospector of prospectors, old Potter was presiding. Leaning forward in his seat on the stage, he spat over the footlights at a cuspidor he didn’t miss by much.
“Who’s that son of a bitch you said we ought to stretch, Baltimore? Tell ’em about it, boy.”
To speak was to decree a man’s death, but I had already made up my mind to the necessity. “There’s more than one,” I began, “including some who do their murdering from offices in Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York.” The mining company men wriggled a little at that, and I looked them over before I proceeded. “Fellows like Bedlington are out of our reach, unfortunately, but I think that if we hang Ferguson and Smiley we’ll stop the bushwhacking.”
“You mean kill these men without bringing them to court?” Eben Bradford demanded.
It was a grave question, troubling many there, and called for an answer in kind. “Yes, because I’m lawyer enough to know that we have no case against them. All we have is the moral certainty that some of us will be killed, if they aren’t.”
He chewed his cigar over that, while I waited. “So we resort to lawlessness, acting merely on suspicion. And if our guess is wrong?”
For that one I felt myself ready. “I’d rather take a chance on being wrong than on being dry-gulched.”
It was that calculated use of poor Frank Fillmore’s phrase which hardened the collective will. After the growl it evoked, I found it easy to transform the forum into a number of searching parties.
The astute Mr. Smiley had sensed the temper of the camp, following Fillmore’s death, and had made a dash for Tucson; but Ferguson’s urban contempt for yokels had denied him that much wisdom. He was found in dalliance with one of Jennie’s girls.
I was more or less in charge of the group which seized him, but I paid no heed to his nervous questioning, as he was hustled back to the variety hall. “Well, he looks like a mean wolf at that,” Seth decided. “You say you want to ask him some questions, Baltimore? What’s the sense of that, if you’re goin’ to plant him anyhow?”
Operating on me was the same compulsion which had made Barringer give Dolly Tandy leave to speak beneath the gallows; and deep-seated feelings about the law made it impossible for me to hang a man without making some effort to justify the act in the eyes of the victim. “Bring in the witness,” I said, when everybody had reassembled.
Frank Fillmore’s corpse, still gory and caked with the blood-soaked mud of his death crawl, was brought in and dumped in front of Ferguson. That gunman had, I judged, no conscience worth mentioning. He might not have shown emotion under other circumstances, but Frank looked as if he might have been exhumed from his grave — such a grave as Ferguson himself had just been promised by Seth Potter.
Ace looked at the murdered prospector out of the bitter pride in his hardihood which was all that was left of him now. His face turned gray as he stared, but at length his head came up with a jerk.
“What do you want me to do; heal him by laying my hands on him?”
“Try it,” I urged, although it was almost as much of an effort for me to speak as it was for him. “Put your hand in that biggest hole you blasted in his back.”
The thought of doing so shook him. He gulped when he looked where I pointed. Then when his gaze lifted to mine again, he recalled something.
“I don’t know why I didn’t go for my gun when you wanted me to.”
“That day by the poker table,” I said for the benefit of the tensely listening audience. “Do you remember how you warned me that I’d be bushwhacked unless I sold my mine?”
He hadn’t put it that bluntly, yet he now hadn’t the heart to quibble. “All right,” he said, nodding slowly, as though we had both come to agreement, after considering all sides of a question. “I didn’t kill that guy, but you know damn well I got somebody to do it.” Swiftly then his mood changed to that of a trapped weasel. “A-a-h, you hicks made me sick! Get your rope so I won’t have to hear no more of your blab.”
He didn’t say another word while he was being dragged to his execution through the sour light of a ringed new moon. The chosen spot was the nearest mining hoist of a prospector, but this was not done out of any sense of poetic fitness. Unlike Can Can, of which Roy Sparks had told me, there was not so much as one tree in the immediate vicinity of the town.
Up until the moment he saw the noose being prepared, Ferguson had acted stoically indifferent. Of a sudden, however, he made a breakaway, taking everybody so much by surprise that he was almost in the clear before he was intercepted. He went down under a half dozen men, like a woodchuck being worried by dogs.
With his bound hands he couldn’t fight effectively, but his struggle raised the spirits of the crowd, which had hitherto been somberly quiet. “So the bastard wants to live after all,” somebody whooped.
“Maybe we should let him off,” the word was taken up.
“Sure, just like he did Frank Fillmore.”
It was in this mood of sardonic glee that they hoisted Ferguson aloft. Nor did it die when the hanged man did.
My idea had been to leave Ace on the gallows, where he could be depended on to wait until daylight should simplify the matter of burying him. It developed that this plan did not suit the popular fancy.
“We’d ought to wake him,” I heard Scanlan say, as I started to leave.
“Try and do it,” a jeering voice called.
“Ah, you meetin’-house Protestant,” Scanlan reproved him. “I mean we’d ought to drink him on his way.”
If New York thus spoke up for ceremony, the voice of the frontier next invoked the proprieties. “Pat’s right,” I heard Short-fuse assert, “but if we’re goin’ to drink to the skunk, we’d ought to bring him along with us.”
There were protests, but they were quickly overridden. Down the dead man came, and he beat me to town, escorted by a cheering guard of honor. I shunned Apache Street myself, sitting alone in my quarters and drinking for medicinal purposes, but Ferguson had quite a night of it. The howling and shooting which accompanied his progress from saloon to saloon could still be heard when Blackfoot Terry joined me.
“You’re knocking off early,” I observed, after I had filled a glass for him.
“Your court of justice has killed gambling for this evening,” he told me. “No mere tiger to buck could stand up against a side show like that. Did you have fun?”
In line with his principles against public interference in private matters, McQuinn himself had refused to join the vigilante movement. “Don’t take it so hard,” he now advised, when I scowled at him. “Ferguson got what was coming to him for dodging a showdown, when you gave him a chance for one.” Terry waved the subject away, to make room for a new one. “You’ve met Colonel Peters, haven’t you?”
“In Tucson once,” I nodded.
“Dolly Tandy seemed to think you had.” Terry drank with a gusto I envied and started fishing for a smoke. “Droop-eye’s down in Mexico City now, but he’s on his way north with the expectation of coming here; and when he does Dolly would like you to sit in on the welcome celebration. Have you ever eaten at her house?”
I still had no notion of how things stood between Miss Tandy and McQuinn, though I had seen them together occasionally. “No,” I said, more quickly than was necessary.
“Sometimes she has Ham Gay, Bill Overton and myself in for dinner,” Terry said, “and I’m pleased to report that she has had her usual success in furnishing her premises with an excellent cook.”
Although the two leading hotels and a couple of restaurants had good kitchens, a home-cooked meal was always something to look forward to for a bachelor. Not so pleasant was the prospect of what awaited me the next day.
Enlisting the aid of a couple of Carruthers and Wheeler employees, I went looking for the corpse. We tried seven saloons before we found Ferguson, stretched out on a bar that had no other patrons, with a corncob pipe in his mouth.
The barkeep, who had been standing as far away from Ace as possible, cheered up when he learned of our errand. “It ain’t that he don’t behave hisself,” he explained, “but he ain’t no spender.”
The Mexicans I had hired to dig a grave in Dead Warrior’s boot hill had half finished their job by the time I’d had Ferguson boxed and had brought him to the desolate cemetery. Scrub cactus and stunted weeds were growing sparsely amidst the stony soil. Gusts of wind were stirring dust devils which wound like brown ghosts between the ill-made wooden crosses. We had one such for the corpse in our charge. Ace Ferguson, Hanged by the Minute Men, 1879, it read.
Entrusting that cross to the gravediggers, I returned to take up my own task of publishing a report of the incident in my paper. It wasn’t an easy assignment, calling as it did for at once justifying the execution and excoriating many of the executioners for their subsequent conduct.
The War Whoop was under no such embarrassment, however, and — as I had foreseen — Dick Jackson made the most of the situation. “RIOTERS COMMIT MURDER!” screamed his streamer. “Irresponsible Journalism Launches Savage Orgy,” ran the subhead which warned me that I would personally be blamed for the entire affair. “Deliberately fired to inhuman rage by the virulent pen of the Vigilante’s editor, a mob fell upon a citizen of this town who stood blameless in the eyes of the law, lynched that innocent man and then frolicked through the town with his stiffening cadaver.” So began a story which ended by calling for the suppression of my paper as “a barbarous blot on the otherwise unstained escutcheon of Arizona Territory’s fourth estate.”
My chief reaction to this fustian was irritation over the fact that he had been handed such an advantage. Yet while I was still debating whether to reply to his attack or ignore it, I was visited by some of the businessmen who had participated in the hanging. A glance showed me that they were both troubled and determined.
“Well, gentlemen,” I braced them, “have you decided that you don’t like popular justice?”
“It isn’t that,” Bradford spoke for them, “but we can’t have a show made out of it, Carruthers. Some sort of local organization to keep down murder is necessary here now — I thought that out before I made up my mind to join you — but we can’t have prospectors or that kind of people in it any more, because they’ve demonstrated that they don’t know how to act. What we need is not a group like the Minute Men, that’s open to just anybody, but a committee of responsible citizens. If we’re not going to have that, you can count us out.”
The experience of the night before had justified him in taking the line he had adopted, but I turned to stare out the window before I answered him. By “responsible citizens” he meant men of a certain level of prosperity, acquired by following a limited number of pursuits. Acceptance would mean fostering stratification in a society which was all but unconscious of social divisions.
Tempted to reject their proposal, I saw the barkeep of the saloon where we had found Ferguson, walking home from his trick of duty. The sight of this man conjured up the picture of the corpse as it had been left by the ghoulish revelers, lying on the bar with its hands folded behind its head and that pipe jutting at a jaunty angle out of the dead mouth.
Whereupon I turned to face the inquiring eyes of my visitors. “Yes,” I said. “I hope we won’t need to act again, but if we do, why I guess that’s the way it’s got to be.”