Mr. St. John

by Loren D. Estleman

  Five and one-half hours had passed since St. John had entered Bitsko’s shop. Rawlings looked at Pierce mopping his slender wrists with a soaked handkerchief, hair slightly askew, face shining, like a Baptist minister at the end of a successful tent revival.

  St. John was right, thought the Pinkerton. I wish I hadn’t seen it.

  It had stopped snowing hours before. Accumulation the color of brown sugar from factory smoke made little hammocks on the lower corners of the windows, framing the deep liquid blackness of the night beyond. The single lamp burning in the room highlighted the posse members’ features, motionless behind lazily curling blue smoke from St. John’s cigar and George’s cheroot. John Bitsko lay churning and moaning on the bed, a Mexican standing on either side. Someone had suggested handing him over to the local authorities, but they had no real charge to hold him on and they feared publicity.

  “The mint,” Edwards mused. “That’s got to be a new one.”

  “It’s been tried, but not in a spell.” The old lawman tipped an inch of ash into a tray on the arm of his chair. “One bunch figured to blast their way in with nitro. They buried ‘em in one box.”

  “Captain Quantrill would’ve passed it by,” said Pierce. He was unusually garrulous after his victory. Fred Dieterle was out of his thoughts for the first time since Cheyenne.

  St. John said, “That’s the trouble with these young fellows. No one’s told them it’s impossible, so they go ahead and pull her off.”

  “We showed our hand too soon,” George complained. “We ought to have kept an eye on Bitsko, followed him wherever he went. This way all we’ve got is half a plan.”

  “We could of done it lots of ways. I didn’t hear you speak up when it counted.” St. John was irritated.

  Pierce said, “They’ll hit the train. It’d take an army to storm the mint.”

  “Yeah, but which way?” Edwards demanded. “Going in or coming out?”

  “Who cares? It’s the army’s worry.” George sucked smoke.

  “Except if the army gets the Buckners,” St. John reminded him, “I don’t get paid. And if I don’t get paid, you don’t get paid.”

  They spoke in low tones to avoid being overheard by the man on the bed. Bitsko was awake, staring up at the darkness hovering between the globe of light and the ceiling. He was badly frightened. By definition a criminal whose illegal activities demanded the cover of night and the absence of his victims, he had never pointed a gun at anyone before that day, nor had his life threatened in earnest. That man Pierce terrified him with his tales of past atrocities and his case of torture tools. His unadorned language rang of appalling truth. The ex-burglar feared him more than hanging. Much more, because he was sure St. John had been bluffing about his, Bitsko’s, culpability in Carroll’s death. He lay silent between the darkly watchful Mexicans, his injured nose throbbing, afraid to listen to the conversation, afraid not to, but most afraid of attracting attention and reminding the others of his presence.

  “If we tell the army, they’ll double the guard and scare them off,” George was saying, his voice rising into the prisoner’s narrow hearing range. “And they won’t let us ride that train without knowing why we want to.”

  “Unreasonable,” commented Edwards.

  The Indian said, “We should have held back till they got word to Bitsko. Maybe they still will.”

  St. John grunted negatively. “Bitsko was expecting Wood—Underwood, whatever—to collect him and bring him to wherever they’re hiding. Hell, they could be in Kansas or anywhere else betwixt here and where the gold is loaded.”

  “Or where the coins get delivered,” Edwards said. “They’re easier to tote and get shed of.”

  “Which is why the guard’s heavier on that route,” George pointed out. “That’s the one they expect to get hit. This bunch is too smart to do what’s expected.”

  Edwards’ laugh was short. “Maybe they’re so smart they know someone’s thinking they’re too smart to do what’s expected and go ahead and do it.”

  St. John said, “It’s like I put a marble in one fist and ask you to guess which one it’s in. Next time I might switch fists, or thinking that you expect me to do that, I might leave it where it is. Or thinking that you think I might do that I might switch anyway. You can drive yourself crazy figuring all the angles.”

  “My God, that’s Machiavellian.” Rawlings was awed.

  “‘Tain’t neither,” rejoined the old lawman mockingly. “It’s American sure as you’re standing there.”

  “No, no. Niccolo Machiavelli was—”

  “I know who he was. Politicians read too.”

  “Bitsko knows where they’re hiding. I can get it from him if you want.”

  Bitsko caught his breath. Under Pierce’s quiet voice, itself barely audible to the captive’s afflicted ears, was a tinkling of steel instruments.

  Rawlings said “What do you mean, ‘if you want’?”

  “What’s left after Testament gets through asking questions generally isn’t worth arresting,” explained St. John.

  The knocking in the pipes grew loud.

  “These aren’t the Middle Ages.” The Pinkerton’s voice cut across the stillness. “The agency I represent won’t stand for death by torture. Nor will I.”

  ” ‘…but they shall be as thorns in your sides, and their gods shall be a snare unto you.’ “

  Something metallic crackled. “Don’t throw the Bible at me, you psalm-singing hypocrite.”

  More silence. Bitsko was afraid to look.

  “I was you, I’d pull that trigger here and now.” Pierce’s statement was a quiet rattle.

  “Watch him,” St. John warned Edwards. “He packs a derringer in that pocket.”

  George said, “Make your move or make friends. Wild Bill’s arm is getting tired.”

  Cautiously, Bitsko turned his head to peer through the gloom. All eyes were on Edwards. The electric lamp blanked out his eyes behind the glasses and glowed off the barrel of the Colt in his right hand. No one had seen or heard him draw.

  “I think I know where they are,” Bitsko said.

  There was a delayed reaction. One by one in ragged order, like train cars starting forward, faces turned toward the man on the bed. The former burglar supported himself on one elbow. He was looking at St. John. His heart was pounding hard enough to shake the mattress.

  “I’m not sure,” he added hastily. “It’s just something Carroll said once in Jefferson City. I can take you there tomorrow.”

  St. John remembered the cigar between his teeth and removed it, spitting out bits of tobacco and soggy wrapping. “Put up those goddamn guns.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Rawlings’ Way

  Under a morning cloud cover so thick a casual glance outside made more than one early riser look again at the clock, the lights of Denver glittered randomly like broken glass scattered below the Rockies. The unnatural illumination, smoke-laden air, and strange loud manmade noises unnerved Fred Dieterle’ s horse, which snorted and shied when its hoofs struck unfamiliar macadam and tried to buck. But the ex-sheriff gave the reins a sideways jerk that brought blood into the animal’s mouth and it settled down resentfully, its eyes showing white. Across the city a factory clock chimed the quarter hour. It was past seven and still as black out as widow’s weeds.

  His knee throbbed under the plaster cast. He had adjusted the stirrup to accommodate the stiff leg, but even so a bolt of blue-white pain shot to the top of his skull every time a steel shoe touched earth. Worse, he was bleeding into his throat; the roadside from Cheyenne to Denver was speckled with bloody spume. That meant a visit to a doctor’s office, new stitches, fresh dressing, and delay.

  First, however, he stopped at a railroad yard, a rackety place where couplings slammed and whistles shrieked and locomotives as long as the first complete trip by rail revolved on howling bearings all night and all day. He dared not dismount for fear of not being able to climb back up and so conducted h
is interviews among the captains, off-duty engineers, and roughnecks from horseback, like a plantation owner tracing runaway slaves. No one remembered the arrival of the men he described. “Try the day shift; they come on at nine. But you better see a doc first, mister. You don’t look or sound so good.”

  He slept on a padded table, floating in and out of consciousness while a disheveled and groggy physician mopped his neck with peroxide and sewed over the places where the sutures had worked loose. When that was done and a new bandage was in place, he paid the doctor and checked into a hotel near the rail yard for two hours of uninterrupted rest. He had ridden one hundred miles in nineteen hours, and a few minutes of stupor in an hour and a half of writhing on frozen ground had not been his conception of relief. Never a fat man, he had lost thirty pounds over the past few weeks and was dangerously close to total exhaustion. His clothes hung on him like Indian blankets. He had to use both hands to steady the key before he could unlock the door to his room.

  Tugging off his boots in the sullen winter light on the edge of the mattress, numb fingers slipping on the heels, Fred Dieterle was conscious of dwindling time.

  The wash, situated twelve miles northeast of the Denver city limits, was as old as the continent itself and had a secret history known only to the men who camped there.

  It was gouged into the side of a hill in such a way that it was visible from only one angle, dead south, from where the hill looked like a half-submerged apple with a bite out of it. Glaciers and erosion had carved out a smooth upended bowl with a natural windbreak on either side and an outcropping of thick shale overhead that served as a roof. Northern Cheyenne had used it long before the coming of the white man, to corral herds of wild horses, but by that time primitive arrowheads and shards of pottery were already buried there from a civilization much older than theirs. In the 1880s cattle rustlers had employed it similarly, bottling up strays while they prepared to change their brands with running irons. Robert Leroy Parker, like Race Buckner a young cowboy turned thief, had been among the rustlers in the later days and had used the wash again for a hideout years afterward when more people knew him as Butch Cassidy. Others of his occupation had also seen its merits. Long before Carroll Underwood stopped there on his way west after the violent end of the Doolin Gang, the spot was as popular among outlaws as Hole-in-the-Wall or Robber’s Roost, only better, because it was still unknown to the general public.

  The walls were of red and black sandstone and grottoed with hundreds of chinks and depressions from which grass grew in yellow tufts and which in summer crawled with rattlesnakes, now in hibernation. There was only one way in, but a sentry posted at the entrance commanded a lordly view of the country without and plenty of time to decide whether an approaching party was worth fighting or fleeing. Scrub trees grew in the alluvial soil on the roof and stretched out jagged branches over the edge that served to break up the smoke of a campfire. When proper precautions were observed, in fact, there was no way an outsider could tell if the wash was inhabited until a bullet knocked him out from under his hat. It was the kind of resting place every bandit dreamed of, designed and built by the god of thieves and brigands.

  The Buckner gang wasn’t thinking about the convenience of the spot or who had used it before them. While Merle stood guard at the entrance with a rifle, Race sat near the dying coals of the fire splicing rope. Jim Shirley, coatless, shirtsleeves rolled up past his elbows, soaked his stumps in brine water heated in an enameled pan. Woman Watching, who after preparing the solution had cleaned and oiled Shirley’s Colt, crouched next to him working oil into the straps he used to fasten the gun to his stump.

  Race watched him out of the corner of one eye while pretending concentration on his chore with the knife. He hardly ever used ropes anymore, but he found the work relaxing and often joked that he had braided enough hemp to go twice around the world. Friends of his were always getting new ropes for Christmas and birthdays, and most of them didn’t have any use for them either.

  Finally curiosity defeated judgment. “What’s that do for ‘em anyway?” he asked Shirley, nodding toward the steaming pan in which the other’s forearms were resting.

  “Toughens ‘em up.” The cripple’s voice was tight. The water was very hot.

  “Well, it’s been eight years. They must be hard enough to bust rocks with by now.”

  “Pretty near.”

  “Straps make sores.” The squaw kneaded the leather with strong glistening fingers. “Salt heal.”

  “Salt also hurt like hell,” said Shirley, grinning quickly. He smiled as rarely as Woman Watching spoke, and almost never when he wasn’t wearing his gun. That was the only time he seemed to think of himself as crippled. Race interpreted his unaccustomed good humor on this occasion as a good omen.

  “Hey, we got company.”

  The acoustics in the wash were such that a murmured word could be heard at a distance of sixty feet as clearly as if the speaker were standing next to one’s ear. Merle’s statement, delivered with urgency from his station at the opening, brought his cousin to his feet like a purged horse. Cursing, Shirley jerked his truncated limbs from the water and without drying off motioned the squaw to strap on his weapon. “Come on, come on,” he breathed, though she was working with lightning efficiency.

  Race joined Merle, carrying his Mauser rifle.

  “A notch west of that butte yonder,” said the older Buckner, pointing south with his Henry. “Sun come out just for a second. I seen a flash.”

  “Sure it wasn’t just a reflection off snow?”

  “Snow don’t move once it’s on the ground.”

  Shirley appeared, shaking down his shirt cuff over the stationary Colt. “I don’t see anything.”

  “That’s the part I don’t like most,” Merle said.

  “Damn!”

  Standing in the mile-long shadow of the narrow butte Merle had pointed out, St. John lowered his binoculars quickly. The sun appeared briefly in a ragged crescent of sky, then vanished behind more gray cloud.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Rawlings, tugging a brown jersey glove on over his left hand. His right remained bare or it wouldn’t fit inside the lever of his Winchester when needed.

  “Goddamn sun. I think it caught the glass.”

  “Maybe no one saw.”

  “They saw.”

  Rawlings turned at the sound of Pierce’s voice. The Sunday school teacher had a thick woolen muffler wrapped around his throat under his coat collar that made his head look even smaller than it was. He was watching the entrance to the wash, from this distance a pale brown smear on the snow-topped hill.

  “If there’s anyone down there, they saw,” Pierce repeated. “That place is no good to them without a sentry.”

  “What did you see?” the Pinkerton asked St. John.

  “A hole in the side of a hill.”

  They had dismounted upon locating the wash at last. The Mexicans held the horses while Wild Bill Edwards stood guard over Bitsko, who was hugging himself and shivering despite the furs that swaddled him from head to foot. It had been a very long time since the furniture restorer had strayed far from walls and a fire. With him as guide the group had used up the better part of a day looking for the wondrous natural feature Carroll had described to his former partner and had given up and were on their way back to town when Rawlings had spotted it and cried out.

  “They’ll rabbit now for certain,” Edwards said.

  St. John was silent. Rawlings recognized the expression on his face from the soddy south of Pinto Creek when he had tried to read the gang’s thoughts. The detective spoke up, looking at Bitsko.

  “You said neither the Buckners nor Shirley know you on sight?”

  “N-not that I kn-know of.” The reply was forced through chattering teeth.

  “Forget it,” St. John said.

  “There’s no other way, short of charging the wash,” countered Rawlings. “If we do that, they’ll be in Nebraska by the time we reach the entrance.”r />
  “Then we’ll follow them to Nebraska. I been worse places.”

  “Not lately, I bet,” George muttered.

  The old lawman found himself massaging his sore right hip and stopped. “They’re expecting Underwood to be with him. How’d you explain that?”

  Rawlings said, “It’s a long ride. I’ll think of something on the way.”

  “Suppose Underwood told them Bitsko’ s bald. You going to shave your head on the way too?”

  “I’ll keep my hat on.”

  “If they don’t put a hole in it. Maybe they’ll knock you out of leather soon as you get inside rifle range.”

  “I’m willing to take that chance.”

  “I’m not. I need every man I got.”

  “The dandy’s right, Ike.”

  St. John spun on George. “What do you know about it, you ignorant heathen?”

  “I’m a Methodist and you know it. Anyway, soon as it gets dark they’re going to squirt through our fingers like hot mustard. Rawlings’ way maybe we buy time till morning.”

  “I’ve gone underground before,” said the Pinkerton. “Two years ago I infiltrated the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi, and the year I joined the agency I posed as a prisoner in a jail in Arkansas for a week to get information out of an inmate.”

  “You get it?” St. John pressed.

  Rawlings shifted his weight. “No. He hanged himself in his cell the sixth night.”

  “You should of lied when I asked you that. All I ever get from you is truth. How do I know when that bunch starts pumping you you’ll be able to make them believe you’re Bitsko?”

  “Maybe I won’t. But it’s a maybe. Their getting away tonight if I don’t try is a sure thing. What would you rather bet against, a maybe or a sure thing?”

  “I’d rather fold.” St. John extended the binoculars. Rawlings stared at them. “What are those for?”