Canyon of the Long Shadows

by Carl Dane

  She rolled her eyes and blew out through pursed lips and gave me that look that implied I will never understand her, which is completely correct.

  “It’s not that,” she said. “Not completely. I can’t make judgments because I didn’t see it. Maybe they were out to hurt you, like you claim, or maybe, like Mr. Gillis says, they were lawfully trying to take a stand.”

  “Shit,” I said. “He’s got you brainwashed to the point where you’re even talking like him. You saw that bunch prying themselves off the road. Did any of them look like Henry David Thoreau?”

  She didn’t follow.

  “Why? Who’s that? Is he wanted for something?”

  I went from walking carefully to tiptoeing through the conversation. Elmira is a sharp businesswoman, but is as deaf to sarcasm as she is to musical pitch. She also displays a dogged persistence in taking things literally. Once, after a few too many whiskeys we got into a heated disagreement about somebody I believed had duped her and I asked her if she knew the word “gullible” was not in the dictionary.

  We don’t have a schoolhouse in Shadow Valley, much less any dictionaries, but a couple months later she was on a trip to Austin, found herself near a library, and checked.

  When she returned, she matter-of-factly informed me I was wrong. I let it pass.

  The moral is that I have to be careful of what I say.

  “Thoreau was a guy who didn’t believe much in government,” I said. “And he didn’t believe you had to obey the law if the law was wrong. He wouldn’t pay taxes he thought were going to unjust causes. Wrote a book about it – ‘Civil Disobedience.’”

  “Sounds sensible.”

  “I agree, though there have to be limits and common sense. If Mr. Thoreau were about to have his brains beat in by a gang of hired thugs, I’m sure he’d pony up his tax money to pay a marshal. There are people like him who sit in a cabin and write, and there are people like me who keep squatters from stealing his cabin. It’s all a part of the grand scheme of things.”

  She nodded and said uh-huh and I could see this conversation was going nowhere.

  “My point is that there are bad people in the world who pretend to be good people. Gillis is not a good person. He’s trying to put you out of business, for one thing.”

  “He never said that,” she said, covering the bread with a napkin. “He said that the town bylaws called for the electorate to determine the number of drinking and gambling houses. Right now, it’s set at one. But we can obviously change that. That’s what he said; I don’t want to put the Full Moon out of business any more than Eddie wants to put me out of business. But maybe two should be the limit. If there’s too much competition, everybody goes out of business, and then there’s no business.”

  The Full Moon was owned by Eddie Moon, hence the name of the joint. We’d had dealings with Moon, an amiably ruthless sort of fellow who had a quick smile but would put his own mother out of business if she happened to own a competing whorehouse.

  He was back East visiting family now, and normally he would be first on my list of suspects who were complicit in the goings-on, but I’d heard him mention the planned trip more than six months ago and I doubted anybody around here hatched plots with that long a gestational period.

  “But don’t you see?” Elmira continued. “If Mr. Gillis cleans up the town government we can set the limit on bars at two. That’s what he promised. That’s fair.”

  She left out discussion of her other product line, but it was understood.

  “You know what happens in these types of towns,” she said. “Somebody with a lot of money swoops in.”

  She accentuated the word by sweeping her hand through the air.

  “Swoops in and sets up a place overnight. It’s not hard to do. Steals everybody else’s business, milks the town dry, and moves on. What Mr. Gillis wants to do, well, it may not seem like it, but he explained it and he says it’s for my own good.”

  I wondered for a moment whether someday some very smart scientist would invent a machine that could somehow sum up the vast total cosmic damage inflicted under the banner of he says it’s for my own good.

  She put her hands on her hips.

  “But he can’t do anything locked up in that tiny little cell,” she said.

  I picked up the basket.

  “I’ll drop it off. I have to head over to the office anyway. I torture the political prisoners every day at noon.”

  Elmira tended to take things literally, and for a second I thought she believed I was really going to do it.

  For a second, I might have considered it. But only for a second.

  Chapter 10

  Tom Harbold walked into my office right after I’d given each prisoner a separate outhouse break, listened to their complaints, and deposited Elmira’s food basket on the cot for them to fight over.

  “The little guy still has his robe on,” Harbold said.

  “Long story. Let’s take a walk.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I held the door for him.

  “I’m not a ‘sir’ any more, Tom. In the grand scheme of things, you probably outrank me now. ‘Deputy State Constable.’ Pretty impressive.”

  “It’s not a bad job, Lieutenant.”

  I saw no point in correcting him again.

  “And I get this nice uniform, a regular salary, and a cavalry-trained horse.”

  “And the chance to travel to beautiful little havens like Shadow Valley to straighten out problems involving jailed judges.”

  “There is that,” Harbold said.

  We stopped. We’d reached the end of town, no one was in earshot, and the scenery wasn’t worth a trip back.

  Harbold retrieved some tobacco and rolling papers. He offered me one, but I declined. I’m not opposed to tobacco in principle and indulge on occasion, but it cuts my wind. Harbold rolled it with one hand, making it seem effortless, as he did with most things.

  Medium-tall, he was lean and had wavy blonde hair and that air of unflappable poise that made him popular both with commanders and subordinates. He was a tough guy and looked the part: His eyes were blue and cold and his face, while good-looking in the conventional sense, projected unconscious disdain for those less handsome and fashionable.

  He was, therefore, catnip to the ladies, and given my current icy relations with Elmira I thought better of inviting him to the Spoon for a drink so as not to be unjustly accused of jealously should she hover around him like a moth.

  “Major Munro says you’ve really stepped in it this time, Sir. The little asshole actually is sort of a judge. He was appointed to make rulings in cases involving land disputes and railroad and telegraph lines, things like that. Mind you, he’s supposed to sit in an office and fill out forms. Nobody expected him to go freelance and set up court like he did here, apparently with the intent of issuing some rulings on the land rights of your lady friend. Whether he can really do that and hold people in contempt, most notably you, is something that’ll have to be kicked up the totem pole. Meanwhile, your ass will be in the wind while it’s being decided. And I don’t have to tell you it’s all about roaches going after crumbs from the railroad project.”

  “Who appointed Weed?”

  “Nobody and everybody,” Harbold said. “These commissions and magistrates and territorial rings and the like come out of nowhere and are justified by fine print in laws that are enacted by statues that created commissions that wrote new regulations setting up new bureaucracies, and…well, you get the picture. One big circle with no beginning or end. Guess the government is us, though. We create these things and have to live with them. Remember, that whole litany of complaints I just spouted is coming from a well-paid ‘deputy constable.’ I get a hell of a nice horse, too. Did I mention that?”

  I laughed, but he didn’t. It wasn’t his style, as he was too sophisticated to smile at his own joke. And it made me laugh harder.

  He stubbed out his smoke and gave me the look that indicated he was no longer p
retending to be serious, but was now seriously being serious.

  “Major Munro – Senator Munro – says he can make it all go away if you can do something. Not for him, but for a big-time Austin judge who’s politically connected up the ass. The major says he’d clear you in a second if he could, but this is out of his control. But the judge can fix it.”

  Harbold rolled another cigarette. He liked creating suspense.

  “And,” he said, puffing, closing one eye against the coiling smoke, “in case you’re worried, you’re not being asked to do anything illegal. The major says it’s the right thing to do. Lives are in danger. It’s an emergency. It has to be handled fast and handled in secret.”

  “Why me?”

  Harbold shrugged. “For one thing, this judge who needs a favor specifically asked for you. He knows the major and knows the major knows you. You’ve got quite a reputation, even up in Austin. I read that story in the paper about how you shot the revolver out of that gunfighter’s hand.”

  For the record, someone I once knew who nursed an old grudge ambushed me and I drew wild and got off a panic shot. The round very well could have gone into the ceiling or the floor. Or into my leg, and I sort of wish it had. Instead, it most improbably hit the tip of his gun barrel and tore the weapon out of his grasp.

  Harbold knew that no one could shoot a gun out of someone else’s hand, at least on purpose. Anyone who knew anything at all about weaponry knew it too. But your average drunken cowboy might not and could think twice about trying to shoot me, so while I like accuracy in journalism, I am not above a little self-serving propaganda if it keeps me from getting ventilated.

  “Also,” Harbold said, “in addition to the fact that you can do magic tricks, the major knows you’ve got your tit in a wringer and he can bargain away your judge problem because the person who needs your help is the guy who handles matters involving the judiciary. In other words, he judges the judges.”

  I nodded, knowing there was more.

  “And while I hate to phrase it this way,” Harbold said, “he knows you’re crazy enough to take on a job knowing it’s very likely to get you killed.”

  I agreed to the assessment of my mental health but said that I still needed to know what the hell was going on before I committed.

  Harbold told me. When he finished, I asked him to tell the major I’d handle it.

  “Yes, Sir,” Harbold said, mounted his gleaming, seventeen-hand-high horse, and saluted.

  “And Tom, please don’t call me ‘sir.’”

  “Is that an order, Sir?”

  “I can’t give you orders.”

  “Then you can’t tell me not to call you ‘Sir,’ Sir.”

  He had me on that one.

  He rode off.

  Chapter 11

  Harbold had talked with the only witness who had escaped and relayed the story to me.

  It all started when the stage to Austin was halted by a fallen tree blocking the road.

  Stagecoach drivers know that ninety-nine times out of a hundred when a tree blocks the trail, it’s because the thing fell down because of wind or a lightning strike.

  But they’re not stupid, and they understand that there’s always the one percent of the time when it’s an ambush.

  Smart drivers usually handle it by stopping the stage far enough away from the impediment that they can turn and head back the way they came if need be. The shotgun rider surveys the area as best as he can and he and the driver, both armed and alert, approach the tree on foot. Sometimes the driver, with some help from the guard and the passengers, is able to move the obstruction. But trees are heavy, and there’s no room on a stagecoach to carry timber saws, so sometimes you just have to surrender and find an alternate route.

  On this particular stage there were a driver, a guard, and three passengers. The guard, named Burnell, was too smart for his own good. He told the driver that the best course of action would be to avoid possible trouble and a backache from trying to clear the tree; backtrack a mile or so up the steep hill they had just descended, he advised, and take the trail a little to the south. It was a little rougher but would rejoin the main road well before the post where they’d change to a fresh team of horses.

  The driver didn’t like the idea of prodding the tired team up the steep incline but liked the idea of trying to move the tree a lot less.

  The driver, guard, and passengers relaxed as much as they could in a jolting, creaking contraption that somehow seems designed to spew dust in faces and pulverize tailbones. It was slow going back up the steep hill and the horses were only moving about as fast as a slow man could walk.

  Four men with rifles were upon them with shocking suddenness, and shot the driver and guard before either could react. There were no threats. No demands to toss down the money box. Just quick, matter-of-fact kill shots.

  The coach jolted as the horses shied but the team didn’t bolt.

  The surviving passenger, a banker named Knowlton, was facing forward and leaned out the window and saw a man holding the reins of the front two horses. The man was clearly experienced with teams and managed to calm them in a few seconds.

  And then Knowlton was dragged out the window, which on this coach was wide and deep, with the bottom of the window at the same level as the top of the rear wheel.

  The man sitting to Knowlton’s left was apparently some sort of salesman, judging by the fancy wooden cases he’d had tied on to the top of the coach. Knowlton never got his name, and remembered the man as taciturn, perhaps saving his breath for sales pitches. In fact, Knowlton only remembered the man saying one word the whole trip.

  It was “please.”

  But it didn’t matter. They dragged him through the opposite window and shot him as he lay in the dust.

  Lydia Davis had the rear-facing seat to herself. She was in her mid-twenties and wore expensive clothes, though she did not act like a high-society girl. She had told Knowlton that while she was on her way to visit her father, a judge in Austin, she was not happy about it because, as she put it, her father was an asshole.

  The judge had summoned her on some important but undefined request. Maybe the asshole is dying, Lydia had mused to Knowlton.

  Lydia didn’t seem to mind at all the dirt and dust and smell of sweat that seeps into the pores of the wood and the cracks in the leather seats of coaches everywhere.

  She never complained even though she got the worst of the flying grime in the rear-facing seat because the wheels, turning clockwise as the coach moved forward, propelled it in her direction. She had tried drawing the curtain but realized that she could cut down on the infiltration only at the expense of slow suffocation, so she said “fuck it” and took a nap.

  The bandits let Lydia keep her seat. Two of the men, dressed like trail hands but wearing bandanas over their faces, carrying rifles and wearing holsters slung low in the style of gunfighters – or men who want to be taken for gunfighters – sat facing her.

  She punched one in the nose and so they tied her up.

  The other two, also masked, were methodically changing the horses.

  They’d brought their own fresh team.

  One of the men, a stocky, dark fellow with enormous jet-black eyebrows, asked Knowlton if he had anything to write with. Knowlton had a pen in his pocket and paper in his briefcase and he carefully took down what Eyebrows dictated.

  Eyebrows rifled through Knowlton’s briefcase, found a business card, read it, and tucked into his breast pocket. He then pointed down the road and told Knowlton to follow it on foot. It would be about a four-hour walk to the stage post, and he advised Knowlton to walk carefully because he didn’t want to turn an ankle on such an important mission. But don’t dawdle, he warned, because there was no stage scheduled until tomorrow and it was highly unlikely any riders would pass this way, and if he was still walking in the dark it was easy to get lost or fall prey to wolves or both. Sunset was in eight hours.

  From the stage post, Eyebrows instructed, Knowl
ton would arrange transportation to the nearest telegraph office in the town of Twin Ridge and wire State Supreme Court Justice Gates Davis that it would cost ten thousand dollars to get his daughter back alive. Knowlton was to provide Judge Davis with the detailed instructions for paying the ransom.

  If Knowlton didn’t do as directed, Eyebrows said, the girl would die.

  He fished the business card out of his pocket.

  And since they now knew his name and work address, Knowlton would also die, Eyebrows added. Along with his family, if he had one. And his dog, if he had one.

  With that, Eyebrows hoisted himself up the driver’s seat and snapped the reins. He was followed by one other rider who led the horses. They all headed, at a brisk pace, down the road to the spot where the fallen tree had lain.

  It was gone now.

  A lot happened those ten minutes or so, Knowlton had noted. These people knew what they were doing.

  Chapter 12

  Harbold asked me to sign a receipt for the money.

  “I’m going to have to trust you,” I said. “It would take me all day to count it.”

  “They demanded small denominations. So you’ve got a thousand greenbacks. All tens.”

  I never much understood nor trusted paper money. During the war we’d seized property and paid for it with currency that as far as I could determine was an abstract representation of a worthless promise to pay someday, somehow, maybe. Sometimes transactions were made with bank notes, often drawn on banks the receiver had never heard of, and which sometimes didn’t exist. I would guess that during and after the war about half the bank notes in the country were phonies.

  No one could really tell for sure, except for the cashier at the bank named on the front of the note, and by that time it got that far, if the note were fake it was too late to do anything about it.

  The pile of money in front of me now was in “legal tender notes,” which were supposed to be good as gold even if they weren’t backed by anything except the promise of the government. On these bills it was grandly spelled out on the back in bright green ink that, “Tens notes is a legal tender for all debts public and private except duties on imports and the public debt.”