by JR Roberts
“Stop worrying.”
They were approaching the hotel Clint had chosen for their stay.
Clint had been to the Bucket of Blood before when he didn’t want anyone to know he was in San Francisco. He didn’t know who owned the hotel, and the same clerk was never behind the desk when he went there. But there were never any questions asked, even when he showed up with a woman.
He registered for both of them under a phony name and got two rooms.
“Why two rooms?” she asked as they went up the stairs. “I mean, after Atlanta—”
“I’m just playing it safe,” Clint said. “We’ll sleep in one room one night, and the other room the next night.”
“Oh, I see.”
Upstairs he tossed his saddlebags on the bed. He had gotten Eclipse settled in a stable near the railroad station. He probably wasn’t going to need the horse while in San Francisco, and normally would not have brought him along, but if he had left the horse in Atlanta, he would have had to go back there for him. This way, when he was done in San Francisco, he had the option of leaving by train, or on horseback.
“What now?” she asked.
“Now,” he said, “we find Dorence Atwater.”
Chapter Eighteen
Dorence Atwater worked for a small San Francisco newspaper called The Reporter, The office was on Market Street, an area Clint knew well. The building was a three-story stone structure, pitted from years of weather. The paper had offices on the second floor. The first and third floors were empty.
“This is where the newspaper is?” Molly asked, staring up at the building.
“Maybe they’ll move sometime, but for now this is it,” he said.
“It looks abandoned.”
They went inside and up a musty stairway to the second floor. There, suddenly, the image of an abandoned building disappeared. People were rushing around, usually with pieces of paper in their hands. One young girl was hurrying by when Clint reached out to stop her.
“I’m looking for Dorence Atwater,” he said.
“Down that hall, to the left.”
“His office?”
“No,” she said as if he was crazy. “His desk.”
“Thanks.”
She continued on. Clint and Molly went down the hall. When Clint saw Atwater, he recognized him immediately. He had changed, filled out, and his hair—though still blond—was sparse, but Clint knew it was him.
“Dorence?”
“I’m a little busy—” Atwater started, but when he looked up and saw Clint, he stopped short, narrowed his eyes, then smiled.
“Clint Adams?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, sonofagun,” Atwater said, standing. He was still rail thin, as if he’d never been able to put back the weight he’d lost in Andersonville. “How the hell are you?”
The two men shook hands.
“And who’s this?” Atwater asked.
“Meet Molly O’Henry,” Clint said.
“Miss O’Henry.”
“Mr. Atwater,” she said. “Nice to meet you.”
“What brings you here?” he asked Clint.
“We came to take you out for a drink,” Clint said. “Or how about lunch?”
“How about both?” Atwater said. He grabbed his jacket from the back of his chair. “Let’s go.”
“Do you have to clear it with someone?” Clint asked.
“Believe me,” Atwater said, “nobody cares.”
He hurried down the hall and descended the stairs. Clint and Molly followed.
Chapter Nineteen
Atwater led them to a watering hole just a couple of blocks from the newspaper office. Inside, the bartender greeted him by name. He led them to a table in the back that seemed to be a regular spot for him.
The bartender brought a bottle of whiskey over, then looked at Clint and Molly.
“Beer,” Clint said.
“The same,” Molly said.
“Food?” Clint asked Atwater.
“This is my lunch,” Atwater said, pouring himself a glass of whiskey.
“I’m hungry,” Molly said.
“What have you got in the way of food?” Clint asked.
“This ain’t a restaurant,” the man said. “We got sandwiches—”
“Bring them some of your mother’s beef stew, Al,” Atwater said. “They’re friends of mine.”
The bartender, a big, beefy, tough-looking man, suddenly smiled and looked several years younger, and not so tough.
“Comin’ up!” he said.
He brought the beers over first, and then they talked while they waited for the food. Atwater had downed three drinks very quickly, and was sipping at a fourth.
“Okay,” he said, “now I feel human. How did you find me, Clint? And more importantly, why?”
“I think you know why, Dorence.”
Atwater looked at Molly.
“Has he told you where we met?”
“He has.”
“And that he kept me alive?”
“Yes”
Atwater looked at Clint.
“It’s him, Clint,” he said. “It’s Wirz.”
He finished his fourth drink, poured another. The bartender returned with two steaming bowls of beef stew, and another bowl filled with pieces of thick bread.
“My sainted mother’s recipe,” he said. “Enjoy.”
“Thank you,” Clint said.
The bartender withdrew.
“Taste it,” Atwater said to Molly. “It’s great.”
Molly took a forkful, raised her eyebrows.
“That’s wonderful.”
Clint tasted it, found it the same. Atwater poured himself another drink.
“It’s him,” Atwater said over the rim of his glass. His eyes were glazed. “It’s Wirz, damn it.”
“Wirz is dead,” Clint said. “Executed. Hanged in front of witnesses.”
“I know, I know,” Atwater said. “You think I don’t know that? But I have seen that man’s face every night in my dreams since Andersonville. And I’m telling you, Senator Harlan Winston is Henry Wirz.”
“Let’s suppose you’re right,” Clint said. “Suppose Wirz wasn’t executed, for some reason. How could he possibly become a senator? He wasn’t even born in this country.”
“Maybe Henry Wirz wasn’t,” Atwater said, “but Harlan Winston was supposedly born in Georgia.”
“Wirz had a thick accent.”
“What better way to cover up a foreign accent than with a Southern one?” Atwater asked. “A syrupy Southern accent. And don’t you see the irony of Winston claiming to have been born in Georgia?”
“Okay,” Clint said, “okay. So what do you plan to do?”
“I plan to kill him.”
“You’re going to assassinate a United States senator?” Clint asked.
“I have to,” Atwater said.
“Why?” Clint asked. “Because you were a coward in Andersonville.”
Atwater looked at Molly quickly.
“She’s heard everything,” Clint said. “From me. From Tate.”
“Lieutenant Tate?”
“Colonel, now,” Clint said.
“Colonel,” Atwater said, nodding. “That figures.”
“Dorence,” Clint said, “why don’t you just expose Winston?”
“That’s not enough,” Atwater said. “Not nearly enough for what he did.”
“But for Wirz to escape execution, change his name, and become a senator … he had to have a lot of help,” Clint said. “Who, in our government, would help the commandant of Camp Sumter, and why?”
“I don’t know who and why,” Atwater said. “That’s not important to me. I saw him, here in San Francisco, and I knew it was him. And he’s coming back. And when he does, I’ll be ready.”
“So suddenly, you’re a killer?” Clint asked. “How are you going to do it? With a rifle? You can fire a rifle now?”
“All I have to do is get close enough,” Atwa
ter said. “I’ll kill him with my bare hands if I have to.”
Suddenly, Atwater’s left hand shot out and grabbed Clint’s arm. In his right he still held his whiskey glass. “You can help me!” he said urgently. “You know what he did. You were there!”
“I was there,” Clint said. “I know what Henry Wirz did. But this … this can’t be him, Dorence.”
“What if I can prove it to you?” Atwater asked. “What if I can prove that Harlan Winston is Henry Wirz? Will you help me then?”
Clint studied Atwater for a few moments, then looked at Atwater.
“I think I’ll have a glass of whiskey,” he said.
Chapter Twenty
By the end of “lunch” Atwater was too drunk to go back to work. Clint managed to get his address from him, and he and Molly took him home. He had a small room on the second floor of another run-down building that was only blocks from his office.
They dropped him onto his bed, then Clint wrote him a note, saying they’d come back and see him the next day.
“Stay sober until you see us,” he wrote, and left the note next to the bed.
Then they left.
On the street Molly said, “You wouldn’t do it, would you?”
“Do what?”
“Actually help him kill Winston.”
“I wouldn’t help him kill Senator Harlan Winston,” Clint said.
“But would you help him kill Henry Wirz?”
“You want an honest answer?”
“I’d appreciate it.”
Clint hesitated, then said, “I don’t know. That’s my honest answer. If he proves to me that Henry Wirz is alive … I just don’t know.”
Before leaving the train station Clint had sent out a couple of telegrams. The first was to Rick Hartman, his friend and source of much information, back in Labyrinth, Texas. The second was to his friend Talbot Roper, in Denver. Roper was the best private detective Clint knew. He asked them both the same question: What did they know about Senator Harlan Winston?
He told both men he’d be at the Bucket of Blood Hotel, and gave them the name he’d be registered under. He knew he was taking a chance allowing the key operator to know this information, but he felt it was worth the risk.
When he and Molly returned to the hotel, he checked with the clerk to see if any telegrams had come in for him.
“No, sir, nothin’ yet,” the man said.
“Let me know as soon as something comes in,” Clint said, handing the man a dollar.
“Yes, sir!”
They went up to one of the rooms, the one Clint’s saddlebags were in. He intended to spend the night in the other room, though. He immediately went to the window and looked out.
“You think someone’s going to find us?” she asked.
“Somebody tried to kill me after my meeting with Tate, and somebody was in your house,” Clint said. “It’s not such a stretch to think they’d find us here.”
“I guess not. Who do you suppose they were?”
“I don’t know,” Clint said.
“What if Winston is Wirz?” She asked. “Could be he sent some men after you?”
“How would he know about me? And why me?” Clint asked. “Why not send someone after Atwater? He’s the one causing trouble.”
“And how would he know about him?”
“These may all be questions we’ll never know the answers to, Molly,” Clint said. “The important thing is to stay alive.”
“I thought the important thing was to keep the senator alive.”
“That, too.”
“Back on the train,” Molly said, “Colonel Tate said he was the only one who knew you were coming to see Atwater.”
“That’s right.”
“Do you think he’s the only one who knows about Atwater’s claim?”
“I don’t see how,” Clint said. “He has to report to someone.”
“Does he?”
Clint rubbed his jaw.
“How would Atwater have gotten to Tate without having to go through anyone else?” he wondered.
“Is that another one of those questions?” she asked.
“Maybe not,” Clint said. “That’s a question we can put directly to Dorence and find out the answer to.”
“You don’t trust Tate, do you?”
“No.”
“But I thought he was your friend.”
“We were prisoners together,” Clint said. “You could even say we … formed a bond while in Andersonville. But I don’t think you can ever say we were friends.”
“So you never trusted him?”
“I trusted Lieutenant Tate,” Clint said. “I don’t know or trust Colonel Tate.”
“Do you trust me?”
“Not completely.”
“Do you trust anyone completely?”
He thought a moment, then said, “About half a dozen people.”
“Who are they?”
“Bat Masterson, Wyatt Earp, Luke Short, a detective named Talbot Roper, a man I know in Texas named Rick Hartman...”
“That’s five,” she said, “and all men. No women?”
“Jim West,” he finished. “Women? I’m sure there have been women I trusted—”
“But you don’t want to name names?”
“You women,” he said, “you’re so much more complicated than we are.”
“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”
“It’s just an observation,” he said.
She folded her arms and regarded him from across the room. When he said nothing more on the subject, she gave up.
“What do we do now?”
“Atwater has to sober up before we get anything else out of him,” Clint said. “And then we have to keep him sober until we get what we want.”
“He’s a drunk,” she said. “It’s hard to keep a drunk sober.”
“I know it,” he said.
“What about the senator?”
“What about him?”
“Do we know when he’s coming to San Francisco?”
“In a week, I think,” Clint said. “Tate didn’t give me a date. I guess he didn’t think it was important to what I had to do.”
“Which is?”
“Stop Atwater.”
She shrugged.
“I suppose you can do that without knowing his schedule,” she said.
“But it would help,” he said, nodding. “I should have gotten that from Tate.”
“Well,” she said, “we can get it from Atwater”
“I’ll bet any newspaperman in this city would know,” Clint said.
“Do you know any other newspapermen in San Francisco?” she asked.
“I think I might...”
Chapter Twenty-One
He didn’t know a newspaperman, but he knew somebody who knew one. Duke Farrell ran a hotel just off Portsmouth Square that Clint owned a small piece of. The next morning Duke gave Clint the name of a newsman on the San Francisco Examiner.
The Examiner’s office was on Stevenson Street, in a much better area than The Reporter’s. They still had to walk up a couple of flights of stairs, though, and then suddenly the two offices looked alike, with people rushing about. Clint stopped a young man and asked for Larry Gates.
“Down the hall and to the right.”
“His desk?”
The boy looked at Clint like he was mad and said, “His office!”
Clint shrugged, and he and Molly walked down the hall to Larry Gates’s office.
“Larry Gates?” Clint asked as they entered.
The man who looked up from his desk was in his sixties, with white hair that hung down to his shoulders and a pair of wire-framed glasses on the tip of his nose.
“Can I help you?”
“My name’s Clint Adams,” Clint said. “This is Molly O’Henry.”
“You’re kidding,” the man said.
“About what?” Clint asked.
“Clint Adams?” he asked. “The Gunsmith? Just walks i
nto my office?”
“Looks like it.”
Gates stood up and put his hand out. Clint took it. The older man then nodded to Molly, but most of his attention was fixed on Clint.
“You willin’ to do an interview?” Gates asked him.
“That’s not why I’m here, Mr. Gates.”
“Just call me Larry,” Gates said. “Everybody does. So, why are you here, then?”
“I have some questions I need answered, and I thought a newspaperman could answer them. I got your name from Duke Farrell.”
“Duke? You friends with Duke? Why didn’t you say so?” Gates asked. “Come on, let’s go get a drink and we can talk.”
“The last time I went for a drink with a newspaperman, he tried to drink me under the table and I had to put him to bed.”
“I’m not a drunk, Mr. Adams,” Gates said. “I’m a beer and a sandwich man. That appeal to you?” He looked at Clint, and then Molly.
“I could eat,” she said.
“Good,” Gates said. “Follow me.”
He took them to a small restaurant a few blocks from the newspaper. It was busy, and as they walked to a table, Gates was greeted by half the people in the place.
“This is a place where newspaper people come to eat and drink and rub elbows with each other,” he explained to Clint and Molly.
It was a busy place, but there was an empty table waiting for Gates.
“Pays to have seniority,” he said. “I’ve been working on newspapers in this town for over forty years. I even worked with Mark Twain when he wrote for the Territorial Enterprise”
“I know Twain,” Clint said. “He’s a friend of mine.”
“Is that a fact?” Gates said. “You do get around, don’t ya?”
“I have some friends.”
“I’ll bet.”
A waiter came over and Gates ordered three beers and three sandwiches.
“You’ll like ‘em, I guarantee,” Gates said. “Now, what brought you to me today? You said you had some questions?”
“About Senator Harlan Winston.”
Gates frowned.
“He’s comin’ to San Francisco in about a week,” Gates said.
“Do you know exactly when?” Clint asked.
“Not offhand, but I can check when I go back to my office.”
