“I swear they’re talking about me most of the time,” muttered St. John, offering George a cigar and charging a pipe for himself. They shared a bare patch of ground on the other side of the fire. Rawlings and Edwards had retired and Pierce was watching the horses.
George said. “They bother me as much as Testament. They weren’t much help in the saloon.”
“That wasn’t a true test. We had the locals outgunned with or without them. These bandit types don’t waste much energy. We’ll see how they behave when it counts.”
“That may be too late.”
“That’s just what Heck Thomas said the day I hired you.”
“Times were different then,” argued the Indian. “Good men were hard to find. You had to make do with what you had. It could just as well have worked out different.”
“Good men are scarce any time.”
George gathered his legs under him and added a stick to the fire. His backside was cold from its contact with the frozen groundâcolder than he remembered from the last time he had camped out in the snow. He settled back down, puffing smoke.
“I’ve been meaning to ask, Ike. How’d you find me?”
“Pretty damn good.”
“You know what I mean. It’s been ten years.”
“I ran into Black Joe Brooder. He said he saw you with Tom Clay’s show in Chicago. I sent the wire there and I reckon someone forwarded it.”
The Indian looked at him. Orange firelight erased the cracks and pouches in the posse chief’s face, peeling away twenty years. “Black Joe’s dead,” George said. “Someone buckshot him when he was marshaling in Arizona two, three years back.”
“Two. I had a drink with him in Phoenix in ought-four. That was when he mentioned you.”
“How’d you know I’d still be with Comanche Tom?”
“I didn’t, for certain. But what else do injuns do these days, except sell pots in the Nations, or Oklahoma, or whatever they’re calling it now? I couldn’t picture you squatting by the road looking for tourists.”
“Well, you sure surprised me. I heard someone named St. John was stumping for office out Missouri way, but I never fitted it to you on account of I remembered what you always said about politicians. I thought you were dead.”
“Others thought so too, looks like.” The reply was flat.
“What made you do it?”
The old lawman puffed up a great cloud of gray smoke before answering. “I got the rheumatism in my legs, for one thing. Got so I couldn’t sit a horse for more than four hours at a stretch.”
“You put in lots more than that today.”
“Saddle sores kept my mind off my legs,” he said, and he might have chuckled. “Anyway, there wasn’t much call any more for freelance law, and the permanent jobs were all took. I tried my hand at business for a spell, built up a fair trade buying and selling real estate off the Northern partners run out and left me with fifteen hundred acres that hadn’t been paid for. Near wiped me out, but I took what capital I had left and sunk it in mining equipment to sell to prospectors on their way to Alaska from San Francisco. Then the boom went bust. In between there I hauled freight over the Divide in Idaho, but the railroads squeezed me out. That left just jail and politics. I been to jail.”
“Who backed you for Congress?”
“Some fellows I did business with in St. Louis when I was in real property. Told me I was the West’s great hope for the twentieth century. Turned out they just wanted someone to give the Republicans a fight and set the party up for a solid candidate in 1908. They had him all picked out, a lawyer from Michigan. I disappointed them, though.”
“It appears we wasted a lot of years running down the wrong outlaws,” commented the Indian.
“What the hell, Wild Bill was right. What would someone like me do in Washington? Be like inviting a wolfer to a ladies’ ice cream social.”
Neither man laughed. George flipped his cigar into the fire. “I heard you got married.”
“That’s not all.” Brightening, the other rummaged through his pockets and came up with a tintype not much larger than a postage stamp, which he handed to his companion. A boy of about five dressed in a suit like a man’s looked seriously out at him from in front of a painted forest. He had blond hair and his face was round rather than rectangular, but his eyes and the set of his jaw were perfect copies of St. John’s. The image was orange and wrinkled and beginning to fade in one corner.
“He looks fine, Ike,” George said, handing it back. “Where is he now?”
“Rock Springs, I reckon. I haven’t seen him or his mother in two years.”
“I take it the marriage didn’t work out.”
“Might have, if we ever had one. Her mother moved in right after the ceremony. She was dying, Fern said. Woman can’t run out on her mother when she’s dying. When I finally lit out, the old crow was seventy-eight and healthy enough to call me a guttersnipe one time too many. She’s eating my food, sleeping under a roof I paid for, and she calls me a guttersnipe. I don’t even know what a guttersnipe is, but I sure as hell know when it’s time to raise dust.”
“You just up and left?”
“Took everything that was mine but five hundred dollars to feed and school the boy and rode out. Didn’t amount to much more than a horse and gear. That’s when I found out for sure about the rheumatism.” He knocked out the pipe against his heel. Sparks showered to the ground in a miniature display of pyrotechnics. “I never heard where you took a wife.”
“Did, though. She died.”
St. John hesitated before laying the pipe aside to cool. “That’s a heap worse than having to leave,” he said quietly.
“Maybe.” George watched the fire, spotty now among the failing embers. He made no move to feed it. “What about these kids, the Buckners and Shirley? Where you figure they’re headed?”
“Can’t say yet. Don’t have a handle on them. Testament thinks that bartender was telling it true when he said they rode north with the twenty thousand, and I trust Testament in matters of criminal thought. They’ll steer clear of Denver and Cheyenne; Rawlings says the U.P.‘s got shinplasters out on Race all over those towns. There’s nothing for them in Nebraska. I’m for keeping on going the way we have been.”
“We’re three days behind them,” George said. “Picking up their trail depends on how far up it’s snowed since the robbery and if we don’t miss it by a hundred miles when we come out. Who says this posse duty is so tough?”
St. John blew through his pipe and grinned. “Why you think I’m paying such good wages?”
Pierce, muffled to the ears in a beaver coat presented to him by the God-fearing citizens of Platte’s Bend, Nebraska, stamped circulation back into his feet. Nearby the horses wickered and milled restlessly as far as the pickets would allow. He had recognized the voices of St. John and George twenty feet away and for a time had cocked an ear in that direction, but they were speaking too low to be understood. Discussing him, most likely, that atheist and his heathen lost-child-of-Israel friend. But he was used to the ridicule of infidels. Their attitudes would change come the Day, or if the Day was too long in arriving, some day for certain. For faith and industry held equal positions in his regard.
The gusty wind picked up handfuls of grainy snow that felt like ground glass against his face and unprotected hands. Cursing, he turned his back to it. When he was younger he had accepted such discomforts as part of the price of forsaking Eden, but that was before he had lived long enough to learn that not all men shared its cost. He could not welcome pain that others did not feel.
He blew on his hands. It was at times like this that he missed his gold candlestick.
Chapter Nine
Layover in Kansas City
Dusk sifted like gray ash through the window, settling imperceptibly over the hotel room’s furnishings and its single occupant, stretched out fully clothed upon the made bed. Behind it, dim light from the meeting hall across the street fanned out gradually acr
oss the papered ceiling. Shadows as pale as a tenth carbon created a magic-lantern effect in the fan. Fred Dieterle sipped from his pocket flask and watched the phantom show without seeing it. The alcohol burned his torn and healing throat.
His train was scheduled to leave the station next door in thirty minutes. He had checked in only eight hours earlier, ample time to ask questions and determine that a man answering Midian Pierce’s description had left Kansas City the day before yesterday aboard an express bound for Denver in the company of Irons St. John and five other men. The former sheriff had no idea what the connection was between his quarry and Judge Parker’s famous deputy marshal, nor did he spend time puzzling it out. The fact that they were together meant only that he would have to exercise greater caution.
The doctor back home had strongly disapproved of his traveling so soon after the operation, or of his even leaving of his shredded and sutured vocal cords was a real danger, and the cast on his leg wasn’t designed for much walking. As if he would ever again be able to bend the knee or speak like a normal man. He had left his position to his deputy and driven the recovered Winton one last time to Lincoln to see if he could pick up Pierce’s trail before it grew cold. The county could sue him for the gasoline and mileage. His wife, twenty-six years old and three months pregnant, hadn’t understood either and had threatened not to be there when he returned, if he returned. But he was too full of painkillers and delayed shock and Midian Pierce to care.
It was women who remembered the dapper Bible-thumper; plump, starry-eyed matrons who went on about his polished manners and silvering hair, and from whom, once Dieterle had assured them he bore no ill will, he learned, piecemeal, of Pierce’s movements since leaving the lawman in a pool of blood on the schoolhouse floor. Men either found him unrelievedly bland or didn’t remember him at all. As he lay there absently stroking his mined knee, the ex-sheriff thought that he had never known a man so thoroughly wicked who affected people in such mild ways.
Considering the impression Pierce made on ladies, it had been something of a shock when his trail led to a brothel on the Kansas side of the river, until Dieterle found that the establishment specialized in underage girls. The madam directed him to a twelve-year-old with yellow hair and the eyes of a woman of thirty. He gave her money, explaining that information was all he required. Under questioning she said that “Uncle Mid” had been gentle and charming, given to quoting at random from “that funny book,” but had revealed nothing of his future plans. When she began a detailed account of their time together, Dieterle had thanked her abruptly and left.
It was almost completely dark out now. The fan of light was a frivolous yellow splash on the ceiling, the shadows trapped inside solid and sharp at the edges and moving like bugs in a jar. Metallic, unrelated tones penetrated the window from a piano in a saloon nearby. The city was pausing for breath between the day’s hard labor and the evening’s hard fun. The train whistle tore through the moment like a bullet through a man’s throat.
Immediately there was a gentle rapping at the door. “Mr. Dieterle?” He recognized the bell captain’s voice. “It’s twenty past five, Mr. Dieterle. You asked me to rouse you.’
He wasn’t sure he’d been heard. His voice was a wheezy whisper, air forced through a windpipe with a two-inch section removed from the middle and the ends stitched together. The effort of speaking abraded all the raw nerve ends inside; to cough was agony born of hell. But he heard the bell captain’s footsteps moving away down the hall and got up, leaning on his cane.
A spasm seized his shattered leg. He leaned his forehead against the clammy frosted window, waiting for it to pass. When it did he was drenched with cold sweat under his clothes.
He drank again from the flask, capped it, and put it away in his hip pocket. He picked up his carpetbag at the door and moved out into the hallway, floorboards groaning beneath his feet and the out-of-rhythm afterthought of the cane. The bag was heavy, mainly because of the horse pistol he had packed to back up the Smith & Wesson on his belt under the Prince Albert. That was one lesson he had learned from the man he was going to kill.
Chapter Ten
The Philosopher’s Stone
The Army reminded John Bitsko of a wealthy dowager he had once met at a party in St. Louis. Encrusted with diamonds from her bull’s neck to the curve of her enormous bosom, she had begun every conversation, even with strangers, by asking the other person to guess how much she was wearing in dollars. If the partygoer thus accosted paused to reflect on this bizarre icebreaker or declined to take part in the game, she would trumpet out the answer in a bellow that carried to every ear in the room and set the chandelier clanking.
Hardly less subtle was the manner in which his government shipped gold ore from its mines out West to the Denver mint. Under a drooling sky, the spur spiking from the public railway onto federal grounds was flanked by diagonal yellow stripes bristling out from the cinder bed across the new macadam like the fletching on an arrow, beyond which, warned signs bordered by more diagonals, nonmilitary personnel would be shot. To add teeth to the threat, a sentry was posted in full uniform every thirty yards along the right-of-way with a Springfield rifle on his shoulder. Unblooded troops mostly, thought Bitsko, studying their smooth, sometimes pimpled faces through binoculars from the window of his room over a children’s dance studio, but troops anyway, young and eager with the blue edge of training still glittering in their erect postures and spotless leather gaiters. The whole arrangement was such an obvious dare, it was a miracle the attempt to rob it wasn’t made more often. He placed his stopwatch on the window sill and shifted his weight into a more comfortable position on the chair. Waiting.
Bald at forty-four and slightly hard of hearing, Bitsko made his living repairing and restoring furniture, but in another life he had been a burglar. That was before some idiot on the St. Louis Post-Dispatch dubbed him “the Kissing Bandit” for no good reason other than to increase circulation, and the ensuing publicity put pressure on the local law to arrest the perpetrator. They got him in his boardinghouse with a jemmy in his possession and five hundred dollars in marked bills stuffed into the toe of a boot in his closet. He had drawn a year in Jefferson City and had hated paper money ever since.
His cellmate had been a talkative old goat starting the second year of a twenty-six-month sentence for receiving stolen horses, who had bored him with wild stories about his outlaw past. But he had young ideas and Bitsko liked him. When the horse thief was released weeks after his own term had expired, the pair broke into a boxcar parked on a siding in the railroad yard in Springfield, Missouri, loaded six crates of women’s hats onto a stolen buckboard, and sold everything but the horses to the proprietor of a mercantile store in Arkansas for three hundred dollars. With the money they went to Denver and opened the business that became Bitsko’s by default when his partner chased a troublesome customer out of the shop with an upholsterer’s knife and was forced to flee to avoid arrest. This morning’s wire was the first Bitsko had heard from him in almost a year. The horse thief’s name was Llewellyn Carroll Underwood. Bitsko called him Carroll.
There were worse-things than staying honest: recycling furniture was profitable, what with the business boom and prices on the rise, the hours were good, and being one’s own boss had few drawbacks when one considered the alternative. For a long time, in fact, Bitsko had wondered why he disliked it so. Carroll’s telegram, carefully worded but unmistakably referring to something they had discussed many times in the shop when no customers were present, had carried the answer: he missed the criminal life. Without hesitation he had closed the shop, packed a lunch and his binoculars, and gone hunting for a room that looked out on the mint. His wife was twenty years dead and he had remained celibate ever since, so there was no one to make excuses to except himself, and he was long past that. John Bitsko had rediscovered his true calling.
He was eating a hard-boiled egg sandwich, lifting the binoculars between bites to look down the tracks, when he heard the
train whistle. G000ld! it hooted. New g000ld! He chewed rapidly, washed down what was in his mouth with steaming coffee from one of those new vacuum bottles, and activated his stopwatch. He focused in on the far end of the siding. A sergeant consulted his pocket watch and said something to a corporal standing nearby, after which the latter and a private grasped the vertical switch lever and leaned into it, cutting off the through run and connecting it with the spur. Moments later the train hurtled past, the locomotive’s oily black boiler glistening like a gun barrel, thorny with men and rifles from a flatcar coupled in front to the end of the caboose. Between them rumbled the tender, a coach presumably containing more soldiers, and three steel-reinforced express cars carrying, it was rumored, anywhere from six to ten million in government gold for refining and coining inside. He couldn’t hear the brakes squeal from where he sat, but rubbing frost from the window he saw the steam squirting between the wheels, saw the orange sparks spray and vanish before the train slid into the mint’s gray depths, its slipstream lifting the soldiers’ waterproof capes. It was gone too soon for ten million dollars, and jaded Denver went on about its business as if the freight were so much grain.
Bitsko stopped his watch and read it. Two minutes, fifty-four seconds from the first whistle blast until the train was inside. There would be another shipment next Tuesday, and again the following Thursday. By then he should have an average.
Two o’clock, plenty of time to go back and get some work done before closing. He crumpled his sandwich wrapping, tossed it into the wicker basket, put on his coat, and stashed the watch, binoculars, and empty vacuum bottle in the various pockets. On his way out he whistled, pausing to don his hat and inspect its angle in the clouded mirror mounted next to the door.
A follower of Hellenistic thought, Bitsko reflected that the alchemists were wrong. The true philosopher’s stone had always been the lowly six-shooter, transforming base lead into gold.
Mr. St. John Page 7
