Ralph Compton West of the Law

by West, Joseph A. ; Compton, Ralph

  ‘‘Hold your horses, Theo,’’ the waitress yelled. ‘‘You’re not the only customer in the place, you know.’’

  ‘‘A delightful girl, just delightful,’’ Leggett muttered. He waved at Mattie again. ‘‘And bring a raw beefsteak with the coffee.’’

  The two men sat in silence for a few minutes, Leggett smiling slightly as he studied McBride’s face. Miners came and went, each one aiming a measuring glance at McBride as he passed.

  Mattie brought the coffee and laid a raw steak on the table. Leggett reached into his pocket, produced a pint of bourbon and held it up to McBride, his face framing a question.

  McBride shook his head and Leggett asked, ‘‘No?’’ then shrugged and poured a generous dollop into his own cup. ‘‘The beefsteak is for your eye, you know.’’

  ‘‘I don’t think I want to sit here holding a chunk of beef to my face,’’ McBride said.

  ‘‘Afraid these men will laugh at you? Trust me, after what you did to the late, unlamented Jim Nolan, they won’t.’’ Leggett picked up the steak. ‘‘Now, here, hold that to your eye. It will help with the swelling.’’

  McBride looked around the restaurant, then held the steak against his eye. ‘‘Thank you,’’ he said.

  ‘‘No trouble at all, my boy.’’

  ‘‘You still haven’t told me why you’re here.’’

  ‘‘Here? Why, to drink coffee. Later you and I will take a little stroll. I want to show you something.’’

  ‘‘A bit late for a stroll, isn’t it?’’

  Leggett laughed. ‘‘My dear boy, the night is young. It’s not yet midnight and High Hopes is only now hitting its stride.’’

  McBride started to rise, leaving the steak on the table. ‘‘Well, Theo, if it’s all the same to you, I believe I’ll pass on the stroll.’’ He grinned. ‘‘And the steak.’’

  Leggett’s eyes lifted to the tall man. ‘‘Even if a walk in the dark is the means of saving your life?’’

  ‘‘I don’t understand,’’ McBride said.

  The older man glanced around him. ‘‘Not here. There are too many ears. We’ll talk when we’re outside.’’

  Leggett insisted on picking up the bill for McBride’s meal, waving off his protests, then led the way to the door. They walked along the boardwalk until Leggett suddenly stopped under a hanging sign that said, TRAVIS RAMSEY & SON— GUNSMITHS.

  As though the sign had stirred something in his mind, the old newspaperman looked directly into McBride’s face and said, ‘‘You can’t beat Hack Burns in a gunfight, you know. He’ll put two or three bullets into you before you even shuck your gun. He’s the best around, maybe the best there is.’’

  ‘‘I have no intention of meeting Burns in a gun battle,’’ McBride said. ‘‘I’ve got nothing to prove.’’

  ‘‘He’ll come after you. You’ll have to prove yourself then.’’

  McBride felt trapped. The logical thing to do was to catch the first train out of town and go somewhere else. But his stiff-necked pride would not let him run away again. He knew it was a weakness in him, his pride, but he acknowledged it and accepted the limitations it placed on his future actions. And then there was Shannon. His feelings for her also conspired to keep him in High Hopes. There was no escaping that. What she was and what he hoped they might become was holding him in place, like a butterfly pinned to a board.

  ‘‘Leggett, what do you want from me?’’ McBride asked, his patience with the man wearing thin.

  ‘‘Soon. Trust me, I’ll tell you soon.’’ Leggett’s shrewd eyes made a study of McBride, from his battered plug hat to the dusty toes of his boots. He tapped the side of his nose with a forefinger. ‘‘Do you know what this is, John? It’s a nose, a nose for news, and right now it’s telling me that you’re a lawman of some kind. A Pinkerton maybe?’’

  ‘‘I’m not a Pinkerton,’’ McBride said. This old man was no fool.

  ‘‘But a policeman nevertheless. Or you were. From back East somewhere, Boston or Philadelphia perhaps, but more probably New York.’’

  Leggett read McBride’s startled expression and raised his arms above his head. ‘‘Yes! Formosa facies muta commendatio est! For those among us who know no Latin . . . ahem . . . that means, ‘Your handsome face is a silent testimonial.’ ’’

  The old man cocked his head to one side, his eyes as bright and inquisitive as a bird’s. ‘‘Look, no notebook, no Faber. Do you want to tell me about it?’’

  ‘‘I was a police officer, in New York, as you guessed.’’

  The boardwalk had cleared as the miners crowded into the saloons and the more respectable sort of townspeople had sought their beds. The moon was riding high in a starless sky, hazy from the rising heat, and out on the rolling plains the coyotes were talking.

  Leggett had stirred McBride’s memory. My God, had it been only a few short weeks? It already seemed like a lifetime ago.

  Strange, that . . . very strange . . .

  The Honey Heaven had been the worst kind of brothel in the Four Corners, one of big Sean Donovan’s lesser establishments where he sent his worn-out whores to be finally worked to death. Only the poorest, most drink-sodden male denizens of the slums that made up Hell’s Kitchen ever went there. The women’s cheeks were pockmarked, their skin mottled, cavernous canker sores all over their toothless gums. Their rented lovers took them in beds crawling with lice, bedbugs, crabs, fleas and other vermin. The men kept their shoes on lest the gibbering rats chew on their toes before they were finished, and the brothel stank of ingrained filth, vomit and disease and the stench of the rank barrels placed outside the doors of the rooms to collect human waste. Among all this ran swarming, naked children with the sly, feral eyes of wild animals, starving, their ribs showing in bodies covered in sores and as white as the bellies of fish.

  Here, one dark, rainy night, young, handsome Patrick Donovan came to collect his father’s dues. He flashed his diamonds, pretending not to notice the vile hell around him. As his father had told him many times, ‘‘Money doesn’t stink.’’ Patrick himself believed in that implicitly.

  Here too, that night, came Detective Inspector Thomas Byrnes, Detective Sergeant John McBride and a dozen uniformed officers. They had come to raid the place, the shot, stabbed or just plain dead bodies thrown on the sidewalk outside the Honey Heaven most mornings having finally become too much for even the most hardened residents of the Kitchen.

  Perhaps when young Patrick Donovan spotted McBride and drew his gun, he believed, as the son of a rich and influential man, the big cop would quail before him and let him go. In this he was wrong. Fatally wrong. McBride, a man who was fond of children and was already incensed at how they were abused at the Honey Heaven, saw Donovan slide the .44 Colt from a shoulder holster and fired, instinctively, without thought. His bullet smacked into the middle of Patrick’s handsome forehead and the young man suddenly looked old and he dropped. Inspector Byrnes later noted, with grim satisfaction, that he had been dead when he hit the ground.

  From that moment on, big Sean Donovan, ravaged by grief and possessed by a terrible rage, declared John McBride a marked man, saying that he would bestow riches on the one who brought him his ears.

  ‘‘Why did you leave the city?’’ Leggett asked.

  ‘‘I killed a man,’’ McBride told Leggett, the details of that night a lifetime ago lingering like ghosts in his memory.

  ‘‘And you had to flee New York.’’

  ‘‘Something like that. The father of the man I killed put a price on my head. I was given a leave of absence and told to head West and lie low.’’

  Leggett laughed. ‘‘You just killed a known gunman and you face another at noon tomorrow. John, my boy, you have a strange way of lying low.’’

  ‘‘That thought has occurred to me,’’ McBride said, irritated at the man for telling him something he already knew.

  ‘‘Let’s walk,’’ Leggett said.

  ‘‘I don’t think—’’

 
‘‘It’s not far.’’

  They walked to the edge of town, past a scattered collection of tar-paper shacks and tents, to the spot where the town lights faded and the darkness began. Here the stars were visible and the air smelled cleaner. The moonlight touched the crests of low, rolling hills with a silver sheen, pooling the hollows with purple shadow. There was no wind and nothing moved or made a sound.

  ‘‘Not much farther,’’ Leggett said. ‘‘In fact I do believe we’ll soon see the lights of the place.’’

  McBride, a man of the city, found the darkness disturbing. ‘‘Where are we going?’’ he asked.

  ‘‘Hell,’’ Leggett said.

  Chapter 7

  After a quarter of a mile, Leggett led McBride along the bank of a narrow creek that curved to the west and then opened up to a width of about ten feet, a few scrawny cottonwoods growing along its bank. Beyond the bend McBride saw the lights of a large cabin glowing dimly in the gloom.

  ‘‘This place used to be a stage way station before the railroad got here,’’ Leggett said. ‘‘Now it’s owned by Gamble Trask.’’

  They walked to the door and Leggett asked, ‘‘Shall we enter?’’

  The man looked suddenly older than his years and a strange, yellowish tinge clouded his face. There was a dark air of despondency about Leggett that took McBride by surprise. For a talkative man he had been oddly silent since they’d left the outskirts of town and now he seemed strained, like a man shuffling through yesterday’s memories.

  ‘‘I used to know this place well,’’ Leggett said. ‘‘There are times when I still wish I did.’’

  The old man opened the door and McBride followed. Immediately his nostrils were assailed by a sweet, corrupt odor, like the stench of rotting flowers. He recognized it for what it was—the smell of opium smoke.

  Had Leggett brought him all the way out here just to show him an opium den? New York was full of such places, though the authorities were cracking down on them because of the social costs. It was mostly the poor who smoked, seeking to escape lives of degradation and misery, but the toll among families was terrible. Many men spent all their wages on opium, preferring the drug to alcohol, and often the result was that their wives and children died of starvation. Workingmen addicted to opium did not eat and their bodies wasted away until they were living skeletons. Men like that could no longer perform hard manual labor and again it was their families that suffered.

  McBride had always hated opium dens and the men who profited by them. Leggett had said that Gamble Trask owned the cabin. In addition to his saloon, was he also in the opium business? McBride could give the man the benefit of the doubt— maybe Trask just rented out the cabin. But he did not believe that, even as the thought had come to him.

  The door opened on a long, hastily constructed corridor, and there was a window just beyond the door where addicts could buy the drug. A cheerful young Chinese man wearing a round black cap on his head grinned knowingly at Theo and said, ‘‘Good evening, Mr. Leggett.’’

  Leggett waved, his face gray in the light of the single oil lamp that hung from the ceiling. ‘‘Good evening, Chang.’’

  ‘‘You dream some dreams tonight?’’

  ‘‘No.’’ Leggett shook his head. ‘‘No more of that for me, Chang.’’

  The man called Chang scowled. ‘‘Then why the hell you here? This place busy. Very busy.’’

  ‘‘My friend may be interested in a pipe or two,’’ Leggett lied smoothly. ‘‘He wishes first to inspect the . . . ah . . . premises.’’

  ‘‘Clean place,’’ Chang said to McBride. ‘‘Very clean place, you see.’’ He waved toward a closed door at the end of the corridor where shadows gathered. ‘‘Take look, then come back and talk to me.’’

  Leggett made a bow and extended his hand. ‘‘Shall we, Mr. Smith?’’

  The door opened onto a large room, the darkness kept at bay by a few lamps that cast a troubled amber light. A sweet-smelling vapor hung in the air and the only sound was the soft gurgle of water pipes. Two Chinese men, both incredibly wrinkled, yellow and old, moved around silently on padded feet, now and then bending to check on the dozens of men sprawled on the floor like stone statues, pipes to their lips. As McBride and Leggett passed between them, the opium smokers neither moved nor looked up, their eyes either closed or frozen wide open as they drifted like phantoms through their demented dreams. Others smiled, the vague, empty smile of the living dead.

  Leggett pointed to a couple of young girls who lay side by side on the floor. They were almost skeletal, skin drawn so tight against the bones of their faces that their cheeks were sunken, mouths open wide in a permanent, painful grimace.

  ‘‘Look at their arms, John,’’ Leggett whispered, like a man in some dreadful church. ‘‘See the track marks? Heroin addicts.’’ His smile was without humor. ‘‘There are quite a few of those in High Hopes.’’

  ‘‘Who are they?’’ McBride asked. He’d seen what heroin could do to addicts, but the sight never failed to affect him.

  ‘‘Does it matter? They’ll be dead soon, or so Dr. Cox says.’’ Leggett sighed. ‘‘They’re twin sisters, Hannah and Margaret Collins. At one time they worked for Gamble Trask at the Golden Garter, but not anymore. They sell themselves to any horny rooster who will give them enough money to come here.’’ The old man shook his head. ‘‘It’s sad really. They’re fourteen and they should be married and keeping their own houses by now. Instead . . . well, you can see the instead for yourself.’’

  ‘‘Leggett—’’

  ‘‘Theo, my boy, please.’’

  ‘‘Theo, why did you bring me here?’’

  The old man was silent for a few moments, as though collecting his thoughts. ‘‘John,’’ he said finally, ‘‘all this, this hell, is owned and operated by Gamble Trask. It’s a steady moneymaker and he needs money, lots of it, to finance his ambitions. Trask doesn’t intend to remain in High Hopes and see his dreams confined by the wooden walls of a hick town. He has his sights set on Washington, the honorable senator from Colorado, and maybe higher. Trask is a man who desires power every bit as much as he does wealth, and believe me, that he craves like the poor creatures you see around you crave opium.’’

  Leggett led the way to the door, then stopped, his eyes shadowed. ‘‘Trask has other ways of making money’’—he waved a hand around the room— ‘‘just as dirty as this. He traffics in young Chinese girls out of San Francisco, then ships them to the big cities back East. Out here the services of Chinese whores don’t bring a premium price, but they do in New York and Boston and other places. They’re marketed in big-city brothels as ‘exotics,’ and are always in demand. Trask’s Chinese girls, or slaves or whatever you want to call them, are anywhere from twelve to fourteen years old and when they reach the brothels their life expectancy is about two to four years. They die quickly from grief, disease or opium, and usually from a combination of all three.’’

  McBride remembered the Chinese girls being herded into the alley behind the Golden Garter. Shannon had told him they were visiting a fortune-teller. Was she a part of Trask’s schemes? He refused to believe she could be party to anything so vile, and he said as much to Leggett.

  ‘‘Not here,’’ the man said. ‘‘Outside. If I stay here much longer, I’ll start to get my old urges again.’’

  The Chinese man was not at the payment window when McBride and Leggett passed. Just as well, McBride decided. After seeing what was inside, he wasn’t feeling inclined to be sociable. He followed Leggett through the door into the clean, dark air of the night and the two men walked to the cottonwoods beside the creek.

  McBride gulped fresh air and Leggett, watching him, smiled. ‘‘There was a time I loved such places,’’ he said. His eyes sought McBride’s in the darkness. ‘‘John, have you ever heard of Wild Bill Hickok?’’

  ‘‘Yes, even in New York. He’d make the newspapers every now and then, usually after he killed a man, and he was in all the dime
novels.’’

  ‘‘Bill and his friend Colorado Charlie Utter introduced me to opium when I was running a paper in Deadwood,’’ Leggett said. ‘‘Ah, those were good days, smoking opium with Bill and Charlie for two, three days at a time, dreaming the dreams.’’

  ‘‘He’s dead now, isn’t he?’’

  ‘‘Hickok? Yes, shot in Deadwood. That was a few years back.’’

  ‘‘Theo, you were going to tell me about Shannon Roark.’’

  ‘‘No, I wasn’t, because there’s really not much to tell. She arrived in High Hopes with Gamble Trask and Hack Burns two years ago. After he built the Golden Garter, the biggest and best saloon in town, Trask put her in the place as a dealer. That’s all I know about her.’’

  ‘‘She’s beautiful,’’ McBride said. ‘‘The most beautiful woman I ever saw. I can’t believe she’s mixed up with Trask.’’

  Leggett shrugged. ‘‘From all I hear, the lovely Miss Roark is fond of money herself, as she’s not averse to a bottom deal when it means relieving a drunk miner of his poke. She keeps a suite at the Killeen and dresses in the latest Paris fashions. That takes money.’’

  ‘‘It doesn’t mean she’s a part of Trask’s crooked dealings.’’

  ‘‘No, it doesn’t, my boy. But she has Trask’s ear and I’d step wary of her if I were you. Especially if you agree to my proposition.’’

  ‘‘What is your proposition, Theo? I know it’s got to be part of the reason you brought me here.’’

  Leggett leaned his back against a cottonwood trunk. ‘‘John, Gamble Trask must be stopped. He’s getting rich on opium and slave girls and he couldn’t care less about the human suffering he causes.’’

  McBride opened his mouth to speak, but Leggett raised a hand to silence him. ‘‘Hear me out. It’s no accident that Trask chose High Hopes for his base of operations. The town is at the junction of two railroads, the Union Pacific and the Santa Fe. Raw opium and the Chinese girls are smuggled into San Francisco, then shipped to him on the Union Pacific. He then sends opium and girls east via the Santa Fe to New York, among other cities. I believe Trask has someone back East who pays him well.’’ The old man searched inside his coat, found a cigar and thumbed a match into flame. ‘‘John, you were a policeman in New York. You know what this kind of trade in drugs and girls can do to a town.’’