by Lou Cameron
Hickman’s plan to arm the tribes was monstrous, but hardly without precedent. And when the tribes were raised, the war would spread far beyond the borders of Utah; tribes in other territories would take to the warpath and no one would be safe. Hardest hit would be the remote settlements, the hamlets, the farms. My head was filled with gloomy thoughts. I was so close to the making of history and yet I felt so small; nothing I did or didn’t do would make the slightest difference.
Drowsing, I half heard footsteps in the corridor, then a knock came on my door and I was instantly awake. I reached for the pocket pistol and cocked it before I swung my feet off the bed. The knock came again and by then I was to one side of the door. “Who’s there?” I called out.
“Fitz,” was the reply. “Miss Mason sent me.”
I unlocked the door but Fitz didn’t come in. He was dressed as he had been at dinner. He hadn’t even loosened his tie, and yet it was after three o’clock. He looked at the gun in my hand. “Miss Mason would like to see you in her rooms.”
“At this hour?”
Fitz said, without interest, “That was the message. The number is fourteen and it’s on the next floor. You want me to wait?”
“No. Tell her I’ll be up in a minute.”
Fitz went away and I followed him immediately, but if he heard me he gave no indication of it. What the blazes was she up to? I knocked lightly and she opened the door herself and, unlike Fitz, she was ready for bed. She wore a nightgown of some thin material, and she smiled her knowing smile and said, “Come in, Forbes. It took you a long time to get back even though you left before I did.”
“I was talking to Rockwell,” I said, irritated by my own answer. Why should I have to explain?
She had two rooms, a bedroom and a sitting room; was this the bridal suite? The bed was a four-poster with a canopy, much fancier than my Spartan couch. Everything was fancier: the Montreal Daily Mail was much more generous than the Sun. I yawned and rubbed my eyes.
“Were you sleeping in your clothes?” she asked. “Men have such nasty habits. Go in the bathroom and wash your face, for God’s sake. Take a bath while you’re at it. There’s the bathroom. You’ll like it better than the one down the hall.”
“You woke me up so I could wash my face?”
Her hair was damp as if she had just come from a bath; she smelled of lilac soap. “Tell me what you and Rockwell talked about and I’ll tell you about my talk with the holy man. I don’t think he’s such a holy man.”
“He was offering you wine when we left.”
“Or if I wanted something stronger, I could have had that too. I had brandy and soda. What about Rockwell?”
I wasn’t about to give away any confidences. “We talked about the war, that’s all. Actually, we talked about the first war, the one that Johnson lost for the United States.”
She almost laughed at me. “My! My! Such a general subject. Don’t be so cagey, Forbes. Anything you tell me won’t be repeated if that’s your condition. Rockwell was very quiet tonight, but I sensed that he was disturbed. I’d always heard he was the iron man of the Mormons. I know he doesn’t like Hickman. I could tell. Maybe he hates him.”
“Hickman isn’t too popular,” I admitted.
“The Prophet must like him.”
“He’s a man of God. He has to like everybody. That’s the rule.”
“He thinks you’re a man of principle.”
“I’d vote for him but I’m not a citizen of Utah.”
Cynthia Mason came close to me and touched my face. “You’re so tense, Forbes. Why? This isn’t your war. If you stay in this trade—I say ‘profession’ when I’m in polite company—you’re going to see bigger wars than this pipsqueak business. What you need is a big drink and a warm bath to loosen you up.”
“So I’ll give you information? I’m not much for drinking.”
“You’ll have to learn to drink now and then. Medicinal drinking, I call it. I’ll make you a nice weak brandy and water with plenty of ice in it. Did you know the Mormons have the finest ice making plant in the West? Every Mormon I meet tells me that. Now come over here and sit down.”
The drink I got wasn’t weak, but I was in no mood to refuse it, and I lay back on the lumpy horsehair sofa and sipped it while she ran water in the tub. Well, it was better than lying half asleep in my clothes.
When I came out of the bathroom buttoning my shirt she was under the covers and the nightgown hung from the back of a chair. “You put your clothes on,” she said. ‘Take them off again and get in here with me. I didn’t invite you here just to ask about Rockwell.” And after I got in with her, she added, “Rockwell can wait.”
To tell the truth, I thought I might get some information out of her, but that could wait, too. Cynthia Mason had been in bed with many men. Hers was not the youthful lustiness of Abby but the know-how of the experienced mature woman; in a ballroom she’d be the woman who knew how to dance better than any man. At the moment, I didn’t mind that because I was tired, content to let her take the lead. There was no affection between us, none at all. Sometimes that can be more exciting than any amount of billing and cooing, if such a term is appropriate for what we were doing. She wasn’t lusty, she was mechanical, like a well-oiled machine. She was inclined to patronize me, even in bed, but that is one place where it hardly ever works. I was bigger than she was, after all, and I pinned her to the mattress and thrust home again and again until she was gasping, no longer the Montreal sophisticate but simply a woman. Then she lay with her eyes closed, breathing heavily, as content as her waspish, abrasive nature would let her be.
She asked me to get her a brandy and water, then arranged the pillows against the bolster so that she could drink without spilling. “What were you trying to do tonight?” she asked. “Do yourself out of a job?”
“Please explain, Mason.”
“All that peace talk. Not that the holy man will take your advice, or anyone’s. Don’t you know wars sell newspapers? Peace is dull.”
“Next time I’ll bring a drum and bugle,” I said while I began to get dressed. I suppose I could have stayed the night, but I didn’t want Fitz serving me breakfast in bed.
“You didn’t sound much like a newspaperman,” Cynthia Mason went on. “Are you?”
My eyebrows went up. So that was it. Had the Prophet asked her to make inquiries? “What do you think I am?”
“You could be working for Washington,” she suggested.
“A spy.”
“A spy. You give it the name.”
“Why don’t you telegraph Mr. Greeley and ask him? He’ll tell you. My uncle, Silas Forbes, works there too. Didn’t Fleming tell you that the Mormons had me checked by their people in New York?”
“That didn’t come up. You know what interests me, Forbes? What interests me is why they sent someone as young as you on a job like this. You are very young; your experience is fairly limited. The Sun should have sent someone with more experience.”
I got my boots on. “Sorry I can’t be fifteen years older,” I said. “On the other hand, an elderly man of thirty-eight might not be—how shall I put it—so active.”
“You want me to throw this glass at you, Forbes?” Her anger might have been real. Women are odd. “There’s no need to make suggestive remarks.”
“Goodnight, Mason,” I said. “You want to have lunch with me later?”
“I’ll have to think about you before I say yes,” Cynthia Mason said, smiling.
Just then a flurry of gunshots sounded some distance away. “What’s that?” she said. “There was shooting last night.” The shooting started again. “But not as much as that.”
“Some local Gentile having fun,” I said without interest. “You can be sure it isn’t a Mormon. Waste not, want not, is what they live by.”
“Blow out the light, there’s a good boy,” Cynthia Mason said, turning over on her side.
~*~
The shooting went on through the hours of darkness; somet
imes an entire cylinder of bullets, sometimes an occasional shot. There was nothing really unusual about the shooting except that there was so much of it. I knew it wasn’t a prolonged gun battle; there seemed to be only one gun and it sounded like a revolver of heavy caliber. What surprised me was that Rockwell hadn’t come from the jail to stop it. Then I recalled his intention to get drunk; otherwise this disturber of the peace would have found himself lodged behind bars and made to pay in the morning, or if he couldn’t pay, to be set to useful work such as road mending. (Only the serious offenders were sent to the Mormon-owned mines in the hills.) But such is life in a frontier metropolis; with my loss of interest came sleep.
By lunchtime I was dressed and hungry, but I was undecided as how to proceed with my colleague from Montreal. Should I knock on her door and risk being snubbed? Or should I wait in my room and hope she would knock on mine? Hungry, I decided to wait in the dining room for fifteen minutes and no more.
On the way in, mildly curious, I asked the day clerk if he knew what last night’s shooting was all about. It was an idle question, but he reacted peculiarly, as if I had asked him something personal.
“Not me, Mr. Forbes,” he said hastily. “No sir, not me. I don’t know a blessed thing about it. You’ll have to ask others if you want an answer to that.”
Others? What in blazes did he mean? Did he think I was going to walk up and down the streets of Salt Lake saying, “Say there, stranger, what do you know about last night’s gunfire?” Irritated, I found a table and prepared to wait for Cynthia Mason.
My waiting time expired and I ordered a hearty lunch and ate it while I plowed through the infinite dullness of the Deseret News. News of Cynthia Mason’s arrival in Salt Lake appeared on the front page. Described as a “distinguished journalist” and “our neighbor from the North,” she had come to Utah to counteract the lies that were being spread about the Mormons in the American press. I smiled when I came to the world “gentlewoman,” something she was not, which she would have been the first to admit. Oh, she might have started out “gentlewomanly” enough; somewhere along the way the gentleness had been lost.
Dawdling over dessert and the hysterical Salt Lake Tribune, the badly printed anti-Mormon newspaper owned and edited by J.G. Grant, I was startled and then amused to find an attack on myself in the form of an editorial. It was titled: AN OPEN LETTER TO MR. HORACE GREELEY:
It has come to our attention that one of your employees, William Forbes, dispatched here by you to report on the insidious activities of the Mormons, has instead, and quite openly and without shame, become the boon companion and drinking partner of the murderous Danite chieftain, Orrin Porter Rockwell. On the night of his arrival, Forbes was for many hours seen with Rockwell in McSorley’s Saloon, a rowdy drinking establishment on Kimball Street. Not only did Forbes become highly intoxicated, also he was completely incapable and had to be assisted to his hotel, which is owned by one of Rockwell’s fellow “Saints.”
The editorial went on and on in this wild fashion. The killing of the would-be assassin (“this blameless stranger”) was recounted very much to my disadvantage; it ended by demanding that I be arrested by United States marshals and put on trial for murder alongside Rockwell, or, failing that, dismissed from the Sun.
Dear Mr. J.C. Grant, I mused over my peaches and cream, I ought to sue you for something. It didn’t matter: the true story of the killing was part of my telegraphed dispatches. And I felt sure my drunkenness would be forgiven if I appeared properly contrite. Besides, anything to get a good story.
I was ready to leave when Cynthia Mason came in, followed by the faithful Fitz. “You didn’t want to have lunch?” I said.
“I had a late breakfast,” she replied. “Did you know your friend Rockwell has been shooting up the town?”
Chapter Twelve
“You seem pleased by it,” I said.
Her triumphant smile faded. “Why should I be? Fitz was out early and heard about it. Your friend went on a tear and decided to mix target practice with his drinking. Street lights, gingerbread ornaments, anything that caught his fancy. He killed a cigar store Indian many times over. Nobody tried to stop him.”
“That was wise,” I said.
“Looks like he’s resting up,” Cynthia Mason said with elaborate unconcern. “Is he often like this?”
I didn’t want to answer any questions about Rockwell. “Why don’t you send Fritz to ask him? You could go yourself.”
That angered her as I had hoped it would. “Why don’t you go, Forbes? You saved his life. Now you can play Florence Nightingale and fetch iced champagne for his morning head. I’ll come along if you like.”
I didn’t like her that morning. “No, you stay here and make up more funny things to say later.”
“Forbes,” she called after me, but by then I was heading for the jail, and it must have been a new experience for her to be left standing with her mouth open.
At the far end of Kimball Street I saw the first signs of Rockwell’s depredations, a bullet-riddled sign with every letter in it neatly drilled through in an almost straight line: nice shooting for a man with a skinful of whiskey; for that one he would have had to reload twice. Then I saw the murdered cigar store Indian, still stoic despite his many wounds. No windows had been shot out; my wild friend was selective with his targets; at least no one had been killed or Cynthia Mason would have mentioned it. There was malice in her but whether directed toward me or Rockwell I could not decide. Perhaps toward the world.
At the jail, Rockwell’s man welcomed me with a guarded grin and allowed as how he didn’t know where Rockwell was at that particular moment. “I know he ain’t here, is all I can tell you. You don’t believe me, you can look in his cell.”
I did just that. It was scrubbed and clean and empty. On one wall was a photograph of his family, solemn faced as all photographic subjects were. Decorating another was a printed copy of The Ballad of Porter Rockwell framed behind glass. Vanity, I thought; all is vanity.
“Do you think he went back to the ranch?” I asked the reticent turnkey, who was strapping a broken chair leg with copper wire. Other furniture shattered beyond repair was piled in the hallway. A pail was filled with broken glasses and bottles.
The jailer didn’t even look up. “I told you I don’t know where he is. Where Port goes is his business. I don’t ask. But I doubt that he’s at the ranch. Don’t tell him I said that.”
Rockwell’s horse was in the stable behind the jail, so I knew he had to be somewhere in the city. But where? I knew the hardest part of finding him was getting people to give me information. Thinking that he might take it in his head to come and see me, I went back to the hotel and asked Findlay if Rockwell had been in. He said no.
Cynthia Mason and Fitz were at a table in the dining room and she waved me over. “Has the wild man of the woods turned up?” she wanted to know.
“I wasn’t looking for him,” I answered. “Any coffee left in that pot?”
She laughed. “That’s what I said when we met. Our anniversary, for want of a better word. You look worried, Forbes. You think the bad man will get himself into trouble?”
“Rockwell can take care of himself.”
“Of course he can. What news from the battle-front?”
“None that I know of.”
“There were a lot of men marching around this morning. Mounted men too. Artillery. Some artillery. The mounted men were riding south. Aren’t you interested in all that? It’s news.”
“I’ll be attached to Rockwell’s irregulars,” I told her. “As if you didn’t know.”
Fitz might not have been there. Fitz never said anything.
“I know,” she said. “It would seem to me that Rockwell has picked an awkward time to kick the gong. What must the Prophet think of him?”
“It’s too hot for comic turns,” I said.
I was leaving the hotel when I saw the jailer, Joseph, coming as fast as his elderly legs would take him. “Hold on th
ere, Mr. Forbes,” he called as I was turning away, thinking he was on some errand of his own. The man was rattled and out of breath.
“What is it?” I asked.
People were passing and he drew me aside and whispered hoarsely and conspiratorially. “It’s about Port,” he said. “Old Dan—that’s the general—sent word for him to come right over to the armory. Urgent, the message said. So he’s got to be there, Mr. Forbes.”
“What do you want me to do?” I asked. “You told me you don’t know where he is.”
The idiot winked at me. “Ah yes, Mr. Forbes, but that was different then. There was nothing happening then, don’t you see?”
“Then you do know where he is?”
“Well, yes and no. I have a good idea where he might be. I’d go there looking for him only he might get real mad at me. One time I went there and he chased me with bullets. I don’t think he’d do that to you. Port likes you, Mr. Forbes.”
I was losing my temper. “Damn it, man, will you stop jabbering and tell me where I can find him?” Obviously, some sort of council of war was about to be convened; if Rockwell didn’t make an appearance, Hickman would use it against him.
“Twenty-two Jordan Street,” the jailer said abruptly. “I think you’ll find him there. It’s a . . .”
“It’s a what? A saloon?”
“It’s a . . . It’s a whorehouse, Mr. Forbes. Twenty-two, that’s the number. It’s down by the river. First you come to the News printing plant and then you’ll see a big slaughterhouse. The slaughterhouse is on Baxley Street. Jordon Street is the next street after that, more like an alley. Don’t tell Port I thought he’d be there, will you, Mr. Forbes?”
“Go on about your duties and keep quiet,” I ordered him roughly. “If he isn’t there, where else?”
The jailer grinned feebly. “Ten to one that’s where he’ll be. If not there, then I don’t know. Twenty-two Jordan Street.”
