When the Judge and I entered Whitsunday’s office from the cells, the marshal was sitting in a captain’s chair on a swivel with a pitcher of chipped ice at his elbow to ease the pain of his missing teeth. His big face behind its waxed moustaches looked like raw meat; but that was a chronic condition, having nothing to do with our recent difference of opinion.
“I’m sorry,” I said, when he got up to fetch my gunbelt. “I only wanted to break your nose.” It had already been twisted into so many configurations I didn’t think one more would offend him; in another incarnation he’d tried his hand at prizefighting under the company name Paddy O’Reilly, and displayed with pride a rotogravure of himself in tights on the wall next to the gun rack. It had been my hard luck, when it came down to cases, to choose fists over firearms; although the butt of his shotgun had seemed too much in his favor. But then the Marquess of Queensbury couldn’t pass a bank draught in the territories.
“Your aim hasn’t improved since Butte, I guess,” Whitsunday said.
I’d nothing to offer for that. Even in this age of telegraphy I’ll never understand how news travels faster than a man on horseback; I’d thought my arrangement with Lefty Dugan less important than the cost of a wire. But a tale’s a tale, which is how history gets written. I spend my leisure time reading Scripture instead. No one can argue with the Word and win.
I stopped at my hotel only long enough to grab my town clothes. At the Cathay Gardens I soaked off the sweat of two horses seasoned with forty miles of tableland and caught a shave in the King Alexander Tonsorial Parlor, making use of Minos Tetrakokis, the Judge’s personal barber; charging both bills to the court, with a nickel tip. Evidently I was still employed.
The room Blackthorne used for his chambers was a stuffy varnished-oak box with a tattered Mexican flag tacked to the back wall, a large-scale map of the territory plastering the one adjacent, and the cracked and thumb-worn legal books he’d carried on his back over the Divide piled on his leather blotter. He scowled when he smelled the Parisian soap they used at the Gardens, and at the evidence of Tetrakokis’ art on my pink cheeks; but he took his revenge.
“I understand they never found your bullet,” he said. “It passed through his brain, down the alimentary canal, and out through the seat of his trousers, true as the Katy Flyer.”
I worked the mechanism of his mahogany-paneled cabinet—a Chinese box it had taken me a year to figure out—and poured us each a tumbler of the twelve-year-old whisky he imported from San Francisco by way of Aberdeen. I handed him his and put down half my portion in a gulp. “I killed a man. A friend. He pulled me out from under a mare in the Yellowstone and pumped a half-gallon of river water out of my lungs. You came that close to losing the best deputy marshal you ever signed on.”
“That would be Cocker Flynn; but point taken. I always wondered just where you developed your antipathy to our noblest beast of burden. Now I know.”
“You’re thinking of those civilized geldings tied up to that circus wagon you ride here in town. You can’t know how it feels to be outsmarted by a creature with a pecan-size brain and a heart like stove black. That damn buckskin cheated me out of half a year’s wages.”
He sipped from his glass, carving deep hollows in his cheeks; the Steinway-ivory choppers were stored securely in the iron safe in the corner.
“With one breath you eulogize a friend, and with the next you complain about losing the bounty on his head. Have you any code of behavior, apart from your continued survival?”
I slid the travel-weary pocket Bible from inside my frock coat and laid my palm on the limp leather cover.
“That’s your fault, your honor. You sent me to Texas in a clerical collar, purely as a pose, but it got under my skin. I had to read the book to quote from it.”
He switched subjects like a yard engine.
“Are you aware of the name Oscar Childress?”
“‘Women and Children’ Childress?”
“An unfortunate sobriquet, possibly unearned. However, he’ll most likely bear it to the grave, alongside the innocents slaughtered in Springfield, Missouri.”
Legend said Childress—who’d given up a colonelship with the United States Army in order to serve as a captain under Jefferson Davis—had stopped a trainload of civilians just outside Springfield and ordered his men to shoot them all as enemies of the Confederacy. After the war he’d led a company of volunteers into Mexico to fight alongside Juarez. This time he won. But instead of being named to high office, he’d dropped out of sight. Some said El Presidente himself had had him executed as a threat to his own job.
“He’s resurfaced,” I said then.
For the second time in an hour I’d made the old man jump. “In the Sierras,” he said; “an almost impenetrable place. Once again I ask, what have you heard?”
I savored the Judge’s fine whisky, knowing how bitter the chaser was bound to be. He saved the best for the men he wanted to seduce into something they’d never agree to sober.
“I’ve been six weeks breathing nothing but Montana topsoil,” I said, “and hearing no news, short of how the wheat crop’s doing. I made a joke about Mexico, which put your bowels on edge, and figured out Childress is back among the living, because you brought him up. Why bother otherwise? With respect, your honor, I’d admire to get you in a hand of poker.”
He drained his glass and set it down with a thump.
“I find it interesting you should bring up the game,” he said. “It’s a form of war, purer than chess because of the element of chance involved.”
“Not the way I play it.”
“Precisely. The expedition I’ve in mind has no place for straight shooting and fair play. War is what I said, and war is what we’re looking at if Oscar Childress and our invidious State Department has their way. He’s raising an army to capture Mexico City.”
“Again? That country changes hands like a Yankee dollar.”
“This time he’s doing it for himself. Once he has control, he intends to add the Mexican Army to his band of irregulars and rekindle the Civil War.”
“Oh, that.” I drank.
“Pardon me, Deputy Murdock, but am I boring you with this latest threat to the union?”
“We don’t know if it’s the latest until tomorrow morning. Every time I open a newspaper, someone’s fixing to bring back Fort Sumter. John Wilkes Booth was seen riding a cable car in San Francisco just last week. I read about it in the barbershop.”
“Some important people are taking this one seriously. I’ve had wires from the District, each one a brighter shade of yellow than the last. I can only assume the authorities in the border states receive them in greater frequency; however, I take it a compliment to my record that I’m included at all. No doubt there’s an ambassadorship for me, in some Godforsaken country on the other side of the world, if I capture Childress.”
“You mean if I do.”
He unstopped the bell jar containing the bullet-shaped cigars he ordered from Cuba for six bits apiece and set one afire.
“How’s your Spanish?”
“Better than my Greek. I picked up some French on the Barbary Coast, but all that did was snarl up what little Mexican I had.”
He blew a smoke ring. “You’re trying to talk yourself out of an assignment.”
“Without success.” I finished my whisky and got up to pour myself another. It was clear I wouldn’t be drinking anything but tequila for a long time.