Dragon Teeth

by Michael Crichton

  “What do I do about my stolen money?”

  “That is a problem,” Perkins agreed. “You been here three days now, you owe six dollars plus your dinner tonight, that’s a dollar more. And you stabled your horses with Colonel Ramsay?”

  “Yes, down the street.”

  “Well, he’s going to want two dollars a day, so that makes six or eight dollars more you owe him. I reckon you can sell him your wagon and team to square it.”

  “If I sell my wagon and team, how can I leave with my bones?”

  “That is a problem,” Perkins said. “It surely is.”

  “I know it is a problem!” Johnson began to shout.

  “Now, Mr. Johnson, keep a cool head,” Perkins said soothingly. “You still intending to go to Laramie and Cheyenne?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Then that wagon is no good to you, anyhow.”

  “Why not?”

  “Mr. Johnson, why don’t you come downstairs and allow me to pour you a drink? I suspect there’s one or two facts that ought to make your acquaintance.”

  The facts were these:

  There were two roads to Deadwood, north and south.

  Johnson had driven into Deadwood unmolested only because he had arrived from the north. Nobody was ever expected from the north; the route was bad and there were hostile Indians in the north, and consequently the road was unattended by brigands and highwaymen.

  On the other hand, the road to Laramie and Cheyenne ran south. And that road was thick with thieves. They sometimes preyed on emigrants coming up to seek their fortune, but they especially preyed on anything moving south out of Deadwood.

  In addition, there were marauding bands of Indians, assisted by white bandits, such as the notorious “Persimmons Bill,” who was said to have led the savages responsible for the massacre of the entire Metz party in Red Canyon earlier that year.

  The stagecoach line had started up that spring with a single armed guard, or messenger, riding shotgun up with the driver. Pretty soon they laid on two messengers, then three. Lately there were never less than four. And when the Gold Stage went south once a week, it traveled in a convoy with a dozen heavily armed guards.

  Even then, they didn’t always make it through. Sometimes, they were driven back to Deadwood, and sometimes they were killed and the gold stolen.

  “You mean the guards were killed?”

  “Guards and passengers both,” Perkins said. “These highwaymen just naturally kill anyone they come across. It’s their way of doing business.”

  “That’s appalling!”

  “Yep. It’s bad, too.”

  “How am I going to leave?”

  “Well, this is what I’ve been trying to explain,” Perkins said patiently. “It’s a good deal easier to come to Deadwood than to leave.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Well, come spring, things should cool down a bit. They say Wells Fargo will start a coach line, and they have experience cleaning up desperadoes. You’ll be safe then.”

  “In the spring? But this is September.”

  “I believe so,” Perkins said.

  “You’re trying to tell me I’m stuck here in Deadwood until spring?”

  “I believe so,” Perkins said, pouring him another drink.

  Life in Deadwood

  There was a good deal of gunfire during the late hours, and Johnson spent a restless night. He awoke with an aching head; Perkins gave him strong black coffee, and he went out to see what he could do to raise funds.

  The snow had melted during the night; the street was now ankle deep with stinking mud, the wooden buildings streaked with damp. Deadwood looked especially dreary, and the prospect of remaining there for six or seven months depressed him. Nor were his spirits improved when he saw a dead man lying on his back in the muddy street. Flies buzzed around the body; three or four loungers stood over it, smoking cigars and discussing its former owner, but no one made any attempt to move the corpse, and the passing teams of horses just wheeled past it.

  Johnson stopped. “What happened?”

  “That’s Willy Jackson. He was in a fracas last night.”

  “A fracas?”

  “I believe he engaged in disputing with Black Dick Curry, and they settled it outside in the street.”

  Another man said, “Willy always did drink overmuch.”

  “You mean Dick shot him?”

  “Ain’t the first time. Dick likes to kill. Does it when he can.”

  “You just going to leave him there?”

  “I don’t know who’ll move him,” one said.

  “Well, he’s got no relatives to fret over him. He had a brother, but he died of dysentery about two months back. They had a small claim couple of miles east of here.”

  “Whatever happened to that claim?” one man asked, flicking his cigar.

  “I don’t believe it amounted to nothing.”

  “Never did have luck.”

  “No, Willy never did.”

  Johnson said, “So the body will just stay here?”

  One man jerked a thumb to the store behind them. The sign read kim sing washing and ironing. “Well, he’s in front of Sing’s place, I reckon Sing’ll move him before he gets too ripe and ruins business.”

  “Sing’s son’ll move him.”

  “Too heavy for the son, I imagine. He’s only about eleven.”

  “Naw, that little ’un is strong.”

  “Not that strong.”

  “He moved old Jake when the carriage ran him down.”

  “That’s so, he did move Jake.”

  They were still discussing it when Johnson walked on.

  At Colonel Ramsay’s stables, he offered his wagon and team for sale. Cope had purchased them in Fort Benton for the inflated price of $180; Johnson thought he could get forty or perhaps fifty dollars.

  Colonel Ramsay offered ten.

  After a long complaint, Johnson agreed to it. Ramsay then explained Johnson owed six already, and plunked down the difference—four silver dollars—on the countertop.

  “This is an outrage,” Johnson said.

  Silently, Ramsay picked one of the four dollars off the counter.

  “What’s that for?”

  “That’s for insulting me,” Ramsay said. “Care to do it again?”

  Colonel Ramsay was a hard-bitten man well over six feet tall. He wore a long-barreled Colt six-shooter on each hip.

  Johnson took the remaining three dollars, and turned to leave.

  “You got a mouth, you little bastard,” Ramsay said. “I was you, I’d learn to keep it shut.”

  “I appreciate the advice,” Johnson said quietly. He was beginning to understand why everyone in Deadwood was so polite, so almost preternaturally calm.

  He next went to the Black Hills Overland and Mail Express, at the north end of the street. The agent there informed him that the fare to Cheyenne was eight dollars by regular coach, and thirty dollars by the express coach.

  “Why does the express cost so much more?”

  “Your express coach is pulled by a team of six. Standard coach is pulled by a team of two, and it’s slower.”

  “That’s the only difference?”

  “Well, of late the slow coach hasn’t been making it through regular.”

  “Oh.”

  Johnson then explained that he had some freight to transport as well. The agent nodded. “Most folks do. If it’s gold, it’s one and a half percent of appraised value.”

  “It’s not gold.”

  “Well then, it goes at freight rate, five cents a pound. How much you got?”

  “About a thousand pounds.”

  “A thousand pounds! What on earth you got weighs a thousand pounds?”

  “Bones,” Johnson said.

  “That’s highly unusual,” the agent said. “I don’t know as we could accommodate you.” He scratched figures on a sheet of paper. “These, ah, bones can ride up top?”

  “I guess they can, if they
’re safe up there.”

  At five cents per pound, Johnson figured, the cost would be fifty dollars.

  “Be eighty dollars, plus five dollars loading fee.”

  More than he expected. “Oh, fifty for the freight and thirty for the express. Eight-five in all?”

  The clerk nodded. “You want to book passage?”

  “Not right now.”

  “You know where to find us if you do,” he said, and turned away.

  As Johnson was leaving, he paused at the door. “About the express coach,” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “How often does it get through?”

  “Well, it gets through mostly,” the agent said. “It’s your best bet, no question of that.”

  “But how often?”

  The agent shrugged. “I’d say three out of five get through. A few of them get ventilated on the way, but mostly they’re fine.”

  “Thank you,” Johnson said.

  “Don’t mention it,” the agent said. “You sure you don’t got gold nuggets in them boxes?”

  The agent wasn’t the only one who had heard about the boxes of bones. All of Deadwood had, and there was plenty of speculation. It was known, for example, that Johnson had arrived in Deadwood with a dead Indian. Since Indians knew better than any white man where the gold was in their sacred Black Hills, many people figured the Indian had shown Johnson the gold, and then Johnson had killed him and his own partner and made off with the ore, now disguised as crates of “bones.”

  Others were equally sure the crates didn’t contain gold, since Johnson hadn’t taken it across the street to the assayer, which was the only sensible thing to do with gold. But the crates might still be plenty valuable, containing jewels or even cash money.

  But in that case, why didn’t he take them to the Deadwood bank? Here, the only possible explanation was that the crates contained some recognizable stolen treasure that would be identified at once by the bankers. What that treasure might be was hard to say, but everybody talked about it a great deal.

  “I think you might want to move those bones,” said Sam Perkins. “People are talking. I can’t guarantee they won’t get stolen from the storeroom.”

  “Can I carry them up to my own room?”

  “Nobody will help you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  “I wasn’t asking that.”

  “Suit yourself. You want to sleep in the same room with a lot of animal bones, nobody will say nothing.”

  So that is what he did. Ten boxes, up the stairs, stacked carefully against the wall, more or less blocking all the light from his one window.

  “Course everybody knows you moved them upstairs,” said Perkins, tagging along. “That makes them look even more valuable.”

  “I thought of that.”

  “The posts in that wall are good, but anybody could bust open that door.”

  “I could build a thick timber slide lock on the inside, same as a stable door.”

  Perkins nodded. “That keeps those boxes safe when you are in the room, but what about when you ain’t?”

  “Cut two holes around the post, one in the wall and one in the door, use a chain with a padlock.”

  “You got a good padlock?”

  “Nope.”

  “I do, but you got to buy it from me. Ten dollars. Came off a Sioux City and Pacific boxcar door that caught fire. Heavier than it looks.”

  “I would be much obliged.”

  “You would be further obliged, financially speaking.”

  “Yes.”

  “So I expect you’ll have to get a job,” Perkins said. “You need to raise over a hundred dollars, plus what you owe me. That’s a good deal of money to come by honestly.”

  Johnson didn’t need to be told that.

  “Any work you can do, useful work?”

  “I dug all summer.”

  “Everybody here can dig. That’s the only reason folks come to the Black Hills—to mine. No, I mean can you cook or shoe horses or do carpentry, anything like that. A skill.”

  “No. I am a student.” Johnson looked at the crates of fossils. He rested his hand on one, touched it. He could leave the fossils here. He could take the stage from Deadwood to Fort Laramie, and from there cable home for money. He could tell Cope—assuming Cope was still alive—that the fossils had been lost. A story formed in his mind: they had been ambushed, the wagon had overturned, fallen over a cliff, all the fossils were lost or smashed. It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped.

  Anyway, he thought, these fossils weren’t so important, for the entire American West was full of fossils. Wherever you dug into a cliff, you found old bones of one sort or another. There were certainly far more fossils than gold in this wilderness. These few wouldn’t be missed. At the rate Cope and Marsh were collecting bones, in a year or two these would hardly even be remembered.

  Another idea came to him: leave the fossils here in Deadwood, go to Laramie, wire for money, and with proper funds return to Deadwood, collect the fossils, and leave again.

  But he knew that if he ever got out of Deadwood alive, he’d never come back. Not for anything. He must either take them now, or turn tail and run without them.

  “Dragon teeth,” he said softly, touching the crate, remembering the moment of their discovery.

  “What’s that?” said Perkins.

  “Nothing,” Johnson said. Try as he might, he could not diminish the importance of the fossils in his mind. It was not merely that he had dug them with his own hands, his own sweat. It was not merely that men had died, that his friends and companions had died, in the course of finding them. It was because of what Cope had said.

  These fossils were the remains of the largest creatures that ever walked on the face of the earth—creatures unsuspected by science, unknown to mankind, until their little party had dug them up in the middle of the Montana badlands.

  “With all my heart,” he wrote in his journal,

  I wish to leave these accursed rocks right here in this accursed town right here in this accursed wilderness. With all my heart, I wish to leave them and go home to Philadelphia and never think again in my life of Cope or Marsh or rock strata or dinosaur genera or any other of this exhausting and tedious business. And to my horror, I find I cannot. I must take them back with me, or stay with them as a mother hen stays with her eggs. Damn all principles.

  While Johnson was examining the fossils, Perkins pointed to a jumble of material under a tarp. “This yours, too? What’s all this?”

  “That’s photographic equipment,” Johnson said absently.

  “Know how to use it?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well then, your troubles are over!”

  “How’s that?”

  “We had a man who made photographic pictures. He took his camera out on the road south out of town last spring. Just him and a horse, to take photos of the land. Why, I do not know. Ain’t nothing there. The next stagecoach found him on his back, with the turkey vultures on him. That camera was in a thousand pieces.”

  “What happened to all his plates and chemicals?”

  “We still got them, but nobody knows what to do with them.”

  The Black Hills Art Gallery

  “How quickly can one’s disadvantages be turned to profit!” Johnson wrote in his journal.

  With the opening of my studio, the Black Hills Art Gallery, my every character flaw is perceived in a new light. Before, my Eastern habits were seen as lacking masculinity; now they are proof of artistry. Before, my disinterest in mining was viewed with suspicion; now, with relief. Before, I had nothing that anyone wanted; now, I can provide what everyone will pay dearly to possess—a portrait.

  Johnson rented a location in the south bend of Deadwood, because the light was stronger there for more of the day; the Black Hills Art Gallery was located behind Kim Sing’s laundry, and business was brisk.

  Johnson charged two dollars for a portrait and later, as demand increased, raised his prices
to three. He could never get used to the demand: “In this rude and bleak setting, hard men want nothing more than to sit as like death, and walk away with their likeness.”

  The life of a miner was backbreaking and exhausting; all these men had come a long and dangerous way to seek their fortune in the rugged wilderness, and it was clear that few would succeed. Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swiftly changing and uncertain world.

  His business was not limited to portraits. When the weather was bright, he made excursions to placer mines outside town, to photograph men working at their claims; for this he charged ten dollars.

  Meanwhile, most of the businesses in town hired him to portray their establishments. There were moments of minor triumph: on September 4, he tersely records:

  Photograph of Colonel Ramsay Stablery. Charged $25 because of “large plate required.” He hated to pay! F11, at 22 sec., dull day.

  And he was apparently pleased to become a full citizen of the town. As the days passed, “Foggy” Johnson (a contraction of “photographer”?) became a familiar figure in Deadwood, known to everyone.

  He also acquired the frustrations of commercial photographers everywhere. On September 9:

  Broken Nose Jack McCall, a notorious gunman, returned to complain of his portrait made yesterday. He showed it to his inamorata, Sarah, who said it did not flatter him, so he was back to demand a more sympathetic version. Mr. McCall has a face like a hatchet, a sneer that would kill a cow from fright, a pox-scarred complexion, and a wall-eye. I told him politely that I had done the best I could, considering.

  He discharged his pistols in the Art Gallery, until I offered to try again at no charge.

  He sat once more, and he wanted a different pose, with his chin resting on his hand. But the effect of his pose was to portray him as a pensive, effeminate scholar. It was wholly unsuited to his station in life, but he would hear no disagreement about the pose. Upon my retiring to the darkroom, Broken Nose waited outside, allowing me to hear the clicking of his pistol chambers as he reloaded his revolver, in anticipation of my latest effort. Such is the nature of art critics in Deadwood, and under such circumstances, my work surpassed my own expectations, although I lost a deal of sweat before Broken Nose and Sarah pronounced themselves satisfied.