AT DUNCAN’S INSTIGATION a Pan-Western representative had once offered to appraise my claim, but the summer heat at the time had cooled my interest. Now that the sun had tempered its force, I wanted action, however, and not on my own account. Without aspiring to the munificence of Horace Bedlington, I still wished to make a significant contribution to Dead Warrior University, perhaps taking the form of a law library named for my Uncle Daniel.
The Pan-Western mineralogist was a stocky, dish-faced fellow, Clarence Amherst by name. He had the faculty of looking more interested than it was reasonable to suppose that he was, when he peered at me through his glasses.
“Well, does the gold go all the way through to Asia or does it stop at Hell?” I asked, when he appeared in my office and we both had our pipes going.
“You’ve got some gold,” he said. He puffed a couple of times before he made his next statement. “But I tell you what, Carruthers, your copper ore’s as rich as any I’ve seen hereabouts.”
“Copper!” In a camp dedicated to the disinterring of gold the baser metals were not highly regarded. He might as well have told me that my claim was nothing but a pile of old fish heads.
Amherst smiled with scientific detachment toward the brutalities of truth. “Copper’s a very useful metal,” he pointed out.
“Sure,” I said. “They make pennies out of it, for one thing, while I’d been counting on double eagles.” As the claim had cost me nothing, I was personally no worse off than I had been, but I sadly watched my vision of a law library float away before I spoke again. “I don’t suppose that Pan-Western buys claims stocked with useful metal?”
“No, the company’s an old California outfit, sharing your views on anything but gold and silver.” Amherst chewed on his pipe stem before commenting. “I don’t blame the directors; they make more money this way and don’t have to invest so much in order to do it. They’d be buying up copper, if Duncan had his way, though.”
Although disappointment had killed my zest for the topic, Duncan’s surprising viewpoint stirred my curiosity. “Why should he want them to fuss with that stuff?”
“For one thing, because there’s much more copper than there is of the so-called precious metals, which owe the attribute to the very fact of their scarcity.” Having disgorged that economic principle, Amherst genially considered it. “Duncan’s got grounds for argument there, you can see; but he isn’t getting anywhere with the directors of Pan-Western, who calculate that there’s enough gold and silver in the West to keep them wealthy.”
“Of course,” I said. “Think of what they’ve got right here in Dead Warrior alone.”
Having long regarded my claim as so much gold in escrow, I felt aggrieved about discovering its true nature. Two days later, though, I was given something else to think about. The word passed around the saloons was that Barringer, accompanied by Slim Sanders, Randy Sutton and a squad of lesser outlaws, had checked in at the Apache House.
The railroad had by then moved as far east as the old halfway house for our stage line. This had now been engulfed by the terminus city of which Barringer was the overlord. The movable community was due to blend with Dead Warrior in a couple of months, but Barringer had not waited.
My theory was that he had been lured by the reports of the mountainous stakes and gorgeous interiors which had been spread abroad after the reopening of the Glory Hole and the Happy Hunting Ground. Yet the question of why he had come was unimportant. What I really wanted to know was whether a renewal of the feud between us could be expected.
In the belief that Charlie was bound to turn up in at least one of the leading gambling halls that night, I shuttled between them. Dolly Tandy was dealing in the Happy Hunting Ground when I entered it the second time. For once she didn’t have the mesmerized look she affected while gambling. On the alert, she saw me step through the street door of the faro room; and I knew from her expression that she wanted to talk to me.
“He just left,” she said, when she had turned the game over to another dealer. “Just looking the town over now, I think.”
Glances locked, we traveled to Midas Touch and back. “Was he alone?” I asked.
“Not counting the four thugs that were with him, of whom one was Sanders, I think.” I waited for her to go on, and she did. “Charlie isn’t here to let bygones go chase themselves.”
“How’d he let you know that?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you in a moment.” A waiter had brought her a glass of the white wine she preferred while dealing, and she refreshed herself with a swallow. “I treated him like any other customer, naturally, and he gave no sign of recognition during the first few turns. Then he tried to see what I would do if he picked up chips he had lost. When I gave him a look at my derringer, he laughed and raised his hat. ‘I remember a town you made me leave, too,’ was what he said.”
“Pretty plain language at that,” I agreed. If Barringer held his grudge against Dolly because she had made trouble for him by reporting his activities, there could be no doubt as to how I stood with him. “Well, I’ll pass him the time of day anyhow,” I said. “That red dress is mighty becoming, Miss Dolly.”
She put her hand lightly on my chest and moved it until she could feel the gun slung under my loose tweed jacket. “That’s very becoming, too,” she returned the compliment. “You haven’t seen the colonel, have you?”
I realized then that the problem of what Droop-eye would do was causing her more immediate concern than either my safety or her own. “Not this evening. Will he start trouble?”
“No,” she said, more wearily than I had ever heard her speak. “He won’t do that, because he promised me not to; but there’s nothing to prevent him from doing things which nobody else could distinguish from taking the aggressive. Tell him I’d like to see him, if you run across him; will you, please?”
Having just missed Barringer in a couple of other places, I found him when I once more tried the Glory Hole. He and what I took to be his henchmen were bucking Blackfoot Terry’s tiger. I waited until McQuinn was collecting and paying off.
“Mr. Barringer, I believe.”
A quick man, he placed me in short order. Inevitably he had coarsened, but when he spoke, his voice and manner were still indicative of the breeding I had once remarked.
“Why it’s Carruthers, the wandering coach driver.” Bigger and taller than I had remembered him, he stared down with pale eyes that promised the death he had formerly failed to administer. “It’s a funny thing,” he went on, supporting my hypothesis that Sparks had reported to him about me when he did so, “but until recently I never connected the name with that of the local stage tycoon, whom I thought to be a more important man. We’ll ruin your business, won’t we?”
In putting it that way he was claiming partnership with the railroad, on whose business he and his gang fattened. It was, of course, true that the coming of the trains would destroy our stage and freighting trade; and Sam and I had already made plans for liquidation.
“That’s all right,” I told Barringer. “I pretty well ruined your business once.”
Involuntarily the arm broken when I shot his horse from under him twitched. Thinking he was preparing to draw, I raised my arm to the level of my solar plexus. Charlie laughed harshly.
“That’s what I call pilgrim’s progress. When we first met, you wouldn’t draw a gun without an order from the War Department. You’re Big Indian with the stranglers here likewise, so they tell me.”
“Oh, we hang people that deserve it,” I said. The killer of a store owner who resisted robbery had followed Ace Ferguson into the air. I was therefore justified in using the plural. “What’s more, when we decide to hang a man, he doesn’t get away.”
In addition to pulling that scab off him, I wished to stress the fact that I was as ready with my organization as he with his. I was turning away, with the intention of giving him time to think my words over, when a trim figure in gray entered the gambling room from the bar.
Up to that time I had not glanced at Terry, although I had been conscious of his silent interest in proceedings. Now we swiftly exchanged looks.
“I am told there is a gang leader named Barringer here,” Droop-eye said loudly, when he had lighted one of his small cigars. “Will he be good enough to make his presence known?”
Before Charlie could react, Joe Trimble, the portly owner of the Glory Hole, lumbered forward. “Not in here!” he begged, clutching Peters by the arm. With one of his own he indicated everything from the room’s luxurious carpeting to its gilded molding. “It’s all new, and I’m still paying for it.”
“Don’t be an ass, Trimble; I have no intention of creating a disturbance.” Droop-eye thrust the landlord aside. “If Barringer is here, he and I can settle our business quietly.”
Droop-eye had the malignant assurance of a scorpion as he stood there, and I was glad of not being the one who must find out what he wanted. Barringer himself was not fully at ease, I thought, but he managed a swagger when he stepped away from the faro table.
“I’m the man you’re looking for, sport.”
“The name is Colonel Peters,” Droop-eye said.
From the way Barringer held his right hand, I felt sure he carried one of his guns under the flap of his jacket. “I knew it,” he announced, “unless you’ve taken to using an alias. I was in Fort Worth when you killed Ron Tuttle.”
“In ‘seventy-five,” Peters nodded. After making that rejoinder, he peered up at the taller man. “For reasons we need not examine, I will not kill you; but stay away from the saloon where I deal, which is the Happy Hunting Ground. I have learned that you were there, and I do not wish the visit repeated.”
It was a minute before the outlaws could grasp the enormity of the words so matter-of-factly spoken. A young fellow with snake eyes and a silky yellow mustache recovered from the shock of the effrontery first. While Barringer was still gawking unbelievingly, this man glided past him.
I had already decided who he was, and departing patrons confirmed my guess. “That’s Slim Sanders,” one man whispered to another, as they hastily made for the street. “He’s killed more than Wild Bill Hickok.”
Smiling as though he beheld someone he was pleased to encounter, Sanders stopped a few feet short of the colonel. “You’re the one they call Droop-eye, eh?”
“I believe I have some such nom de guerre” Peters agreed. His cigar was in his left hand, held as he had held the lighted match that day of our first meeting in Tucson; and although he looked at the other, it was without apparent interest. “But nobody uses it to my face,” he remarked.
“Then I won’t, neither.” Still smiling, Slim drawled soothingly. “I’ll just — ”
He had started to draw as he spoke, his hand as hard to follow as a darting lizard. Yet before his gun could be leveled for action, the colonel’s had jumped into view and barked twice. The first shot staggered Sanders. The second shattered the revolver he would never live to replace.
As I backed toward a corner, watching to see whether I would have to take a hand, I saw Terry deploying in the other direction. The most fearless onlooker there wasn’t thinking about fighting, however. Frantic with the thought that damage might be done to the room’s expensive décor, Trimble sprang past the collapsing gunman.
“No, gentlemen!” he pleaded with the remaining four outlaws.
Getting between them and Peters, he might have died a martyr to the cause of interior decoration. By that time, though, Barringer had had time to appraise the situation. He had us outnumbered four to three, but we had the advantage of position.
“Easy, boys,” he ordered. “Nobody asked Slim to butt in here.” He looked from the bleeding corpse to Peters, who had stepped free of the settling cloud of black powder smoke. Then, to my surprise, Charlie addressed me. “How about it, Mr. Vigilante? What view will the upright citizens of Dead Warrior take?”
“Your man started first; everybody saw that.” Still poised to draw, I feared a trick, but Barringer nodded and spoke to the anxious Joe Trimble.
“Don’t worry about your premises. I like them myself.” Having made that observation, he at last addressed Droop-eye. “I accept the decision of the disinterested bystanders. It was self-defense.”
“I shall report as much to the magistrate,” Peters said. “I’m sorry about your carpeting, Trimble. Send me the cleaning bill, and if there’s any permanent stain, I’ll replace the whole thing.” Prior to leaving, the colonel bowed first to McQuinn and then to myself. “Thank you, gentlemen. Perhaps I can have the pleasure of a glass with you later in the evening.”
Having relit his cigar, he was puffing on it as he turned toward the men now pouring back into the room. They made way for him like minnows dodging a muskellunge. Then the corpse was the center of attention.
I had looked for excitement over the death of Sanders. I was not prepared for the emotions mixed with it. Slim was well known by repute as a hobby killer, a man who deliberately went in search of trouble, so that he could add to his prestige at the cost of somebody else’s life. His demise should have been a source of gratification, if anything; yet such was not the general reaction. Instead I found that the chief feeling was disappointment over the destruction of a legend.
What was hard for me to get straight was the difference between the accepted facts and the conclusions popularly drawn from them. It was not Sanders, the multiple assassin, that had emerged from the stories about him but Sanders, the hero because always victorious. The fact that he had achieved success while yet young also entered into it; and the combination of youth and talent cut off in their prime stirred a loose-brained sentimentality.
“It’s sure too bad,” I heard one fellow opine. “There’s no tellin’ what he could’ve done if they’d’ve give him only ten more years. He might’ve beat out Quantrill and everybody.”
From there it was an easy step to the belief that this champion could not have been downed unless unfair advantage had been taken of him. “Something ought to be done about that Droop-eye,” a member of a tongue-wagging group remarked.
I didn’t like the sound of that. Catching him by the elbow, I swung him toward me.
“Are you going to be the one to do it?” I demanded.
The mere thought of challenging Peters scared him. A glance at the others gave him new courage, though.
“Well, I still don’t think Slim had a fair chance.”
A lynching could come of such talk, I knew. Besides, the fellow’s bovine doggedness angered me.
“How the hell would you know anything about it, when all you did was to duck out of the room like a prairie dog going for its hole? I stayed here, and I saw that son of a bitch you’re shedding onion tears about go for his gun first, thinking he was taking a man by surprise. Now is that clear?”
“Well, I guess it is, if you say so, Carruthers. Of course, Droop-eye’s supposed to be pretty fast himself.”
“You can find out, if you doubt it,” I warned the fellow.
By publishing my firsthand account of what had transpired, I quashed any possible legal case against Peters. But people accepted the facts with their minds only. Their hearts or funny bones, or wherever the seat of mob sympathy may be located, remained uninfluenced.
In part this was due to a willingness to dislike Peters, whose ambassadorial bearing did not make for popularity in a frontier camp. He daunted men, besides, as a less coldly courteous killer could not, and they resented his self-sufficiency. Outside of the gambling fraternity, I was the only person in camp admitted to his companionship.
At all events, Slim’s memory continued to be cherished by men who would have taken pains to dodge him, had he survived the encounter rather than the colonel. The general attitude did, indeed, find crystallization in the work of an anonymous ballader. Mayor Jackson was too discreet to publish it in the columns of the War Whoop, but — not out of personal resentment toward Droop-eye but because the latter was a friend of mine — he printed broadsides which were distributed all over town.
This opus was remarkable for the subornation of fact to the uses of prosody, and sufficient liberties were taken with that science. The author had also equipped Slim with a doting mother and a grieving sweetheart. From listening to Sanders I would have said that he came from Texas, but Boston made for alliteration, an ornament of verse for which the poet showed some fondness.
Slim Sanders was a Boston boy
Whose heart and hair were gold;
He left his home and come out West
For a life both free and bold.
Apparently Boston mothers suspect that their sons may end up in boot hill, for Slim thought it necessary to allay maternal fears on this score.
But before he left his mother
He promised, that’s a fact,
That dying with his boots still on
Was a way he’d never act.
Slim’s prowess, his good nature, and his fundamental kindness were celebrated in the next few stanzas.
Well, when he’d wandered westward
He learned to skin a gun,
And he learned to win at faro
Though it was all in fun.
For Slim was always friendly,
But sometimes gents got sore
And he’d have to up and drill ’em
With his sure-fire forty-four.
Sanders had actually carried a forty-five, but that bit of poetic license could be forgiven a bard who was hurrying on to give tribute to the enormous magnanimity of his hero.
But every time he’d fell a foe
He’d hand the widow cash
That her man had been so rash.
Romance next raised its shopworn head, though how the Boston boy had acquired a Tennessee sweetheart was not manifest.
So the women all liked Sanders,
A gentleman clean through,
But he loved a girl in Tennessee,
And you bet that he was true.
Sanders had done most of his recent traveling on the Southern Pacific, and he had come to town by stage; but these facts came in for no mention, as he bade farewell to the inevitable faithful companion.
Oh, Slim said to his pardner,
“I’ll saddle up the mare
And ride into Dead Warrior
And beat the dealers there.”
Contrasting with this spirit of enlightened enterprise was the narrow viewpoint of Peters, here substituted for Blackfoot Terry as the presiding gambler in the Glory Hole.
Now the gambler’s name was Droop-eye,
A gunman mean and bad,
And it made him sore when Slim come in
And won the cash he had.
Well, Slim just laughed and told him,
“You’ve got to play the game”;
But Droop-eye had a hideaway
And begun to jerk the same.
Peters had put his first bullet directly through Slim’s heart; but that didn’t fit into the rhyme scheme of the ballader, moving into the tragic climax of his piece.
Well, Slim could have beat him easy,
But his gun catched in his coat,
So Droop-eye beat him to the draw
And plugged him through the throat.
Albeit lethal, this shot which the colonel had been lucky enough to get off did not prevent Sanders from making a decent settlement of his affairs before he died.
Oh, Slim he took his boots off
Like he told his ma he would,
And before he died said, “Tell my girl
That I loved her true and good.”
What confounded me was that people who had been aware of the main facts of the case soon put them out of their minds in favor of those featured by this piece of nonsense. Then, because it had happened in Dead Warrior, the newspapers of the nation picked up the tale. After that history was helpless to defend itself. The fate of Slim Sanders, the Boston knight-errant whom ill luck had brought down to defeat at the hands of a disgruntled gambler he had bested, was permanently imbedded in the story of the town.