by Gene Curry
The captain made an impatient gesture with his glass, slopping some of the liquor. “You’re on your own now.” He drank what was left in the glass. “You think you could report me for my attitude, is that it?”
I managed to keep my voice calm. “I could do that, Captain.”
Suddenly he broke into harsh laughter that spoiled the comfortable atmosphere of the big room. Hella stared into the fire, not liking any of it.
“Report all you like,” the captain said. “I have only a few weeks to go to retirement, so you can go to hell. Twelve years I’ve been in this hellhole. Twelve years. A jail sentence. A lifetime. I applied for a transfer ten times in twelve years. Always the same answer: request denied. My wife died here two years after we arrived. Pneumonia. You’d think they’d transfer me after that. The bastards posted me here because I drank a little. What man doesn’t drink? I could have straightened out. They wouldn’t give me a chance. How’d you like to be still a goddamned captain at fifty-five? Got nothing to say to that, do you?”
I hoped he might talk out his anger, then change his mind. “I wouldn’t know how I’d feel, sir.”
“Damn right you wouldn’t,” he went on. “Well, now I’m through with the army, the army is through with me. And if you want to know all the truth, here it is. I don’t want any trouble with the miners in Dulcimer because I own two claims there. I’ve got four men working for me. In a year I’ll be a rich man, a very rich man. I don’t need their stinking pension, but by God I’m going to get it. I’ve earned every miserable cent of it. That plain enough for you?”
I made one last try. “Send one of the junior officers, sir.” Lord, how I hated to ‘sir’ that mean-spirited bastard.
He gave out with that laugh again. “I’m in command here. They’d know where the order came from.”
An enlisted man, a fat soldier with an apron tied around him, stuck his head in the door. “Supper’s all ready, sir.” He ducked back and I could see how afraid he was of the overbearing captain.
The captain lurched to his feet and said with his back turned, “Make sure you shut the door good and tight.” Then he roared, “Dobson, come out of that kitchen and see to the door. Then call the sergeant of the guard and tell him I said to escort these people off the post. They are not to be allowed to enter again for any reason.” An enlisted man came running, still wearing an apron, and went outside with us. On the porch he yelled for the sergeant of the guard and he came running, too. He was a tall man with a Southern accent.
“What’s up, Fatty?” he wanted to know.
The fat enlisted man told him and he looked us over. “All right, folks, you heard what the captain said. Move along now and don’t come back.” He lowered his voice. “You got business here, come back in a few weeks. The son-of-a-bitching drunk bastard will be gone by then. I never said that, understand?”
We were at the gate. “Thanks, Sarge,” I said. Then we were heading up toward the town. The wind was rising again and there was sleet in it. For once Hella looked dispirited and I didn’t feel so great myself.
“That awful man,” she said, shouting to be heard above the wind. “Why do they let him stay in the army?”
“Must have friends,” I yelled back. “They let him stay, but they shipped him up here to get rid of him. It’s no use talking about it. We’re not going to get any help. But we can’t go on tonight, not with the weather like it is. You tired?”
“I am very tired,” Hella shouted, running behind her sled.
It was evening now and the town was going full blast. We passed the original Fort Yukon trading post, the sturdiest building in town, the one the half-breed DuSang had murdered to get. There were lights and people in it. A few men on the porch stared at us as we went by. In the short main street there were six saloons, three eating places, two hotels, if you could call them that. The sleet whipped our faces and all the dogs except my lead dog, Fox, were starting to falter. Fox, game old brute that he was, turned in the traces and snapped at the others in the team. Soon there would be a fight. Hella’s team was just as rebellious, and I knew we had to rest, humans and dogs, even if the weather improved.
“We’ll try one of the hotels,” I yelled. “If we can’t get a room we’ll find shelter and bundle up for the night.”
We got lucky on the first place we tried. Hella waited with the teams while I went inside looking for the clerk or the owner and was surprised to see a determined-looking woman reading a newspaper behind the desk. She was middle-aged, Irish, I decided. Irish was what she was, but this was no sweet, gentle colleen.
“You got a room for two?” I asked her. “My woman and myself.”
The Irishwoman laughed and put down the paper. “At least you didn’t say she was your wife. Not that it’d matter in this neck of the woods. It happens I do have a few rooms. Clean too, mister. Those yahoos dirty up my rooms they don’t get back no matter what they pay. You wonder why I have empty rooms. Well, sir, the fellers that had them left in the middle of the night. That means they got news of a strike. My name’s Bella Tanzey, what’s yours?”
I said Jim Saddler. She saw me hesitating and laughed again, a loud hearty laugh. “You’re thinking every hotelkeeper says their rooms are clean. Mine are and you can depend on it. My colored boy cleaned the rooms this morning, clean sheets on the beds, clean water in the jug and basin. I’ll be offended if you ask to look at them.”
“I wouldn’t want to do that,” I said quickly. “What’s the tariff?” I asked, not caring what it was. If the room was only half clean, it would do fine.
“One hundred dollars a night for the two of you,” old Bella said. “There’s a place for your dogs. That don’t cost nothing extra.”
I wanted to whistle but didn’t. A hundred bucks a night! No wonder she was laughing all the time. It’s always like that in a gold rush: the people who provide the lodgings, liquor, women, and supplies make the most money. I once knew a man who made a fortune running a string of boardinghouses in the Colorado mining camps, and his beds were crawling with lice, fleas and bedbugs.
“That’ll be fine,” I said.
She took the money, saying, “Ah yes, sure Fort Yukon’s a fine little settlement.”
We got the dogs put away for the night, then fed the brutes. They ate like the half-wolves they were, and growled themselves to sleep. It took us a while to do our dog chores, and when we went back into the hotel there was a man waiting by the desk. I thought Bella’s face was kind of grim, but she wasn’t giving this gent any arguments. She wasn’t talking to him either. He was a half-breed with a face like a glazed ham, as if he’d come through a bad fire at some point in his life. The reddish skin with the shiny white burn patches gave him a sinister look. Rightaway I knew he was DuSang.
He was wearing a fur hat and he tipped his finger to it when he saw Hella. “My name is DuSang. Frank DuSang, and I’m a friend of a friend of yours. Mr. Smith. You want to talk a minute?”
“Sure,” I said, giving Hella the room key. “I’ll be up in a minute.”
Hella took the key without a word, but her face was drawn with worry. The landlady picked up her paper and buried herself behind it. She was a determined old tub; it was just as clear that she was frightened of Frank DuSang.
I nodded toward some chairs against the far wall. “These will do.” I spoke quietly. “You heard from Soapy?”
We sat down and DuSang said, “Had to telegraph me about some business the other day. Said to keep an eye out for you. Give a hand if it was needed.”
DuSang opened his parka and there was a bullet-studded gunbelt under it. He was short but broad shouldered, a strong, hard man, and from what I’d been told, a vicious one. His English, except for a slight French accent, was the same as anyone else’s. The hair that stuck out from under his hat was lank and oily.
“That was neighborly of Soapy,” I said. “You know what I’m here for?”
DuSang nodded without smiling. I don’t think he could smile, not with t
hat face. Or maybe the memory of how he got the face made it impossible for him to smile.
“Then you don’t need any help?” he said. “Soapy says you’re a friend from way back and would like to see you back in Skagway in one piece.”
“Old friends are the best,” I said. “The next time you talk on the wire, tell Soapy thanks for me. I’ll see him in Skagway soon as I can.”
DuSang didn’t say anything for a moment. Instead, he studied me with black, expressionless eyes, as if trying to make up his mind about me. At last he said, “I’ll do that, Saddler.”
Then, without another word, he got up and left.
I felt as if I’d had a visit from the Angel of Death.
Chapter Eight
The sleet storm passed in the middle of the night, and we headed out for Dulcimer at five o’clock. There was no one in the street as we took the sleds over the crackling ice and followed the trail west. It was a well-traveled trail and the going was easy; there was no one following us that I could see. For once there was no wind, and if it hadn’t been for the rasp of the sled runners there would have been absolute silence. For Alaska, at the start of winter, it was a lovely morning.
The dogs were rested and fed and soon we were moving at a five-mile pace. We stayed with the Yukon River for ten miles, then swung onto Campbell’s Creek, the last stage of the long road to Dulcimer. On the creek there were no ice jams; it was flat as a floor. All moisture had disappeared from the windless air and the temperature kept dropping all the time.
I kept trying to puzzle out what was going on. Why had Sullivan and his men come after us if Soapy Smith expected me to come back through Skagway? DuSang turned my stomach, but I decided he was telling the truth when he said he’d talked on the wire to the King of Crime. If Soapy wanted me dead, why hadn’t DuSang made a try in Fort Yukon? DuSang had the men to back him up, not that he needed anybody but himself. The half-breed might be a vicious bastard, but he looked like a man who wasn’t afraid of anything. I got no answers to any of my own questions, so I gave up. The answers would come soon enough—in Dulcimer.
With still three hours to go, we rested the dogs. It was colder than it had been, but without a wind it was bearable. I made a fire and Hella made coffee and we talked about what was to come. The woman at the hotel said there was a telegraph line in Dulcimer, strung there from Fort Yukon, and I was thinking about that. Nothing definite, just an idea, and I wasn’t sure I was going to do it.
“You think they’ll try to stop us?” Hella said.
“It depends,” I said. “A few soreheads won’t mean much. But if there is one man, some hardcase jailbird with a real hate for the judge, there could be trouble. DuSang didn’t say. I guess he had his reasons.”
Hella said, “I think DuSang is worse than any of them. I only saw him for a moment, but I could tell.”
“All it takes is one look to know that,” I said. “He’d be a good man in a fight. I just wouldn’t want him behind my back. I wouldn’t want him anywhere around, back or front. We don’t have to worry about DuSang right now. He had his chance last night and didn’t take it.”
Hella looked at me with clear, direct eyes with no fear in them. “Are you sorry you got into this, Jim?”
It was a simple and sensible question, honestly put, and I’d be a liar if I said I was pleased about the situation we were in. When I started out I figured all I’d have to deal with was the Slocum brothers—maybe. They could hire their thugs, but ordinary thugs don’t bother me much. But then Soapy Smith invited himself to the party for reasons I still didn’t understand.
“I’ll ask you a question before I answer,” I said. “Are you sorry you joined up with me?”
Hella wasn’t like me: she didn’t hesitate for a moment. “Oh no, Jim. Not sorry at all. Before I met you I lived in my own world, having nothing to do with anyone. I wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody. Now I’m afraid, a little bit afraid, and I’m glad of it. I feel more human. You understand me, yes?”
“In a way,” I said. You understand, yes?” She smiled when I said that “yes” with a question mark after it. “But I’m not scared and I’m not sorry I got into this. It started out as a favor for a friend. Now I’m doing it for myself. Who the hell do they think they are, Smith and the Slocums, the rest of them?”
Hella laughed. Her laugh had a tinkling sound in the dead silence along the frozen creek. “The hell with them, Jim—we can do it.”
“Then let’s be on our way,” I said. “There’s just one more question I’d like to ask you before we start. You mind?”
Hella’s face took on a mildly concerned look. “Of course not, Jim.”
“How come you never say ‘mush’ to the dogs? All the other mushers say ‘mush.’ ”
“Mush is what you eat for breakfast, you fool,” Hella said, smiling.
We saw the smoke of Dulcimer in another two hours, and as we got close it looked worse than Dawson, worse than Fort Yukon, worse than anything I’d seen before, and that’s saying a lot. The whine of a steam sawmill greeted us: loud, screaming, hard on the ears. But it was the right kind of music for Dulcimer. The name itself was a joke. Now I don’t know what dulcimer music sounds like, never having heard it, but I’d always imagined it to be soft, soothing, sweet. The town of Dulcimer was just the opposite: hard, nervous, ugly. It straggled away on both sides of Campbell’s Creek, a disgrace to man, an insult to nature. Dawson, in its way, made some feeble pretense at being a town—Fort Yukon was the crippled stepchild of Dawson—but Dulcimer didn’t even try. There might have been uglier settlements in the world, but I doubt it.
We went up from the creek past piles of rusting tin cans and things I couldn’t put a name to. Hella wrinkled her nose. Dulcimer stank in the still, cold air. It would have smelled bad in a wind storm. And here the judge—a man with a beautiful wife and millions in the bank—had come to the end of his life.
I figured the judge’s body, if it still existed, would be at the carpenter shop that made the coffin. The shop was about two hundred yards from the beginning of the town, beyond a saloon sign. What surprised me was the high wooden fence that shut it off from the street, because carpenter shops in frontier settlements are just padlocked at night. Then I saw the crudely lettered sign over the gate that went into the place:
SEE THE BODY OF THE FAMOUS HANGING JUDGE PHINEAS SLOCUM ONLY 50C
Jesus Christ! The sons of bitches had put the old man’s corpse on display. Judge Phineas Slocum was part of a sideshow.
“Incredible!” Hella said, shaking her head in wonder. “They would do such a thing?”
“They’ve done it,” I said. “Let’s pay our fifty cents and take a look-see.”
We tied the dogs and went to the gate to be faced by a happy man with a button nose and a granite jaw. It was easy to see why he was so happy; a fair-sized nail barrel was nearly filled with money.
I gave him a dollar and he smiled with what teeth he had left. “Best show in town, folks. Yes siree, you’ll never see another like it. Over there in the shed where the other folks are standing.”
Well, I’ve seen things and I’ve seen things, but nothing like this layout. I saw it so I can say it. There was the judge, out of his coffin and frozen solid, standing—I guess they couldn’t bend him—behind a rough copy of a judge’s bench. He was propped up by a board behind him, so he leaned slightly backward; a sort of gavel had been forced into his dead hand. Behind him the wall had been covered with board and painted brown to give a paneled effect. Somewhere in this place God forgot they had found an American flag and nailed it to the fake courtroom paneling. They must have thawed the judge’s eyes and propped them open with toothpicks until they froze that way. They hadn’t made him smile; a hanging judge is supposed to look stern. All in all, he looked pretty good, Judge Phineas Slocum of the federal bench, retired.
The man with the button nose and the happy face hadn’t left out a thing. Instead of being just plain cheap pine, the judge’s coffin now sh
one with a thick coat of black varnish, and a tin plate giving the Judge’s name and his birth and death dates—no brass in Dulcimer—had been nailed to the lid. The son of a bitch had gone to a lot of trouble to make his sideshow look good. In a minute I was going to ruin his business for him. But that’s the way of the world. There’s always some spoilsport out there ready to put a crimp in your plans.
“Don’t dawdle, folks,” the sideshow man called out good naturedly to the people already there. “Give the rest of the people a chance to see the judge. Judge Phineas Slocum, folks, the man that sent more men to their deaths than any judge in the history of the world. Come on now, folks, you can always come back another day. Come back, bring your friends. In years to come, when you’re back in the States, rich and happy, you’ll be able to tell your grandchildren you saw Judge Phineas Slocum hold court. Move along now, friends, so’s I can let the others in and make some money in the doing of it.”
The yard, now filled with gawkers, began to empty out. Hella and I were last to go to the gate. The proprietor smiled at us. Two more satisfied customers, he thought.
“Get your money’s worth, did you?” he wanted to know.
“Close it down,” I said. “You’ve made your last dollar off the dead man.”
His smiled faded. “What the hell are you saying? Who the hell are you?”
“A friend of the family,” I said. “The judge’s widow sent me to bring him home and that’s what I’m going to do. Don’t look so sour. You’ve made a pile.”
“You’re just trying to start your own show.” I guess the man was thinking of all the work that had gone into this ghoulish exhibition.
Holding the rifle with my right hand, I dug inside my coat until I found the letter from Cynthia. It was wrapped in waterproof paper. I shoved it at the man without opening it.
“Read it if you can read,” I said. “It’s got the Slocum name—Mrs. Phineas Slocum printed at the top. Try to tear it up and I’ll tear you up, understand?”
