“Water moccasins.”
“I didn’t think we had water moccasins in Montana.”
“Benetsee’s got everything in it. Except gold.” He opened a mouth with no teeth in it and let out air in a death rattle of a laugh.
“Maybe you just spread the story around to protect your beer.”
The mouth clapped shut, then opened a quarter-inch. “Maybe I is a liar in your eyes.”
“No, sir. Just a good businessman.”
A full little silence followed, like a fire gulping air. A drop of sweat wandered down my spine, stinging like molten lead. I had five cartridges in my revolver and thirty-two pairs of eyes on me, if the dusty mirror strung from a nail behind the bar wasn’t missing anyone in the shadows. Then someone laughed, a shrill, bubbling cackle, with no irony in it. A hand smacked the bar, hard enough to create a tidal wave in my glass.
“He’s snared you, Danny.” This was a voice I recognized. “I’m so scared of snakes in general I never once thought you was bluffing about them water moccasins. What you need now’s a wolf trap. Man’s got to be thirstier’n Christ on the cross to trade his fingers for a sip of that piss you stir up in back.”
Another silence, shorter than the first. Then someone else laughed. That started a rockslide. The room shook with guffaws. I extracted a fistful of coins from my pocket and laid them on the bar in a heap.
“Pour each of these fellows a beer,” I said. “If there’s anything left, you can put it toward that wolf trap.”
Danny joined the others this time, showing his pink gums. “I’m thinking bear. You don’t know these boys when they’s parched.” He scooped the coins into a box with Pallas Athena on the lid and started pouring.
I picked up my glass and moved to the end of the bar, where a gap had opened in the rush to take advantage of my generosity. Edward Anderson Beecher leaned there on his forearms with one hand wrapped around his glass, a cigarette building a long ash between the first two fingers. He had on his porter’s outfit, the cap tilted forward and touching the bridge of his nose—a violation of the Northern Pacific uniform code. The scar on his cheek looked like a curl of packing cord caught in fresh tar. He was smiling into his beer, his lips pressed tight.
I said, “Prefer to buy your own?”
“Don’t take it as an insult. Two beers and I’m a bad risk. If it gets back to Mr. J. J. Hill I even showed up in a place like this in my working clothes, I’ll be back shoveling horseshit.”
“You railroad men all talk about Hill like you’ve met face to face.”
“Could have. One white man in a beard looks pretty much like all the rest.”
I drank, spat out a hop. I hoped it was a hop. “Thanks for the shove. That could have gone another way.”
“I come here to drink, not see my friends kilt. I seen how handy you are with that iron.”
“You make friends quick. Or is Gold Creek home?”
He dragged in smoke, the ash quivering but not falling, blew twin gray streams out his nostrils. Shook his head. “I know all the places at all the stops, is all. Spokane’s home. I ain’t been lately. Last time I was I had a wife.”
There was nothing there for me. At forty-two, I was one of the oldest deputies in Blackthorne’s string, but the younger ones had given up trying to tell me about their dogs and women. Sooner or later, all confidences were regretted; resentment set in, and always when you needed the disgruntled party to deal you out of a bad hand.
Then there was the chance of getting to like one of them. Given my choice, I’d bury a stranger.
“How was the ride out?” I said.
“Better than some. That General Grant sure can put away the rye.”
“Lincoln asked him what brand he drank so he could send a case to all his generals.”
“I heard that. You reckon it’s true?”
“Likely not. I understand Honest Abe wasn’t born in a log cabin, either.”
“I was born between cotton rows myself. Maybe I ought to throw my hat in the ring.”
“I’d set my sights lower to start.”
“I started out a slave. What’s lower than that?”
I wasn’t going to get a better invitation. I fished the deputy’s star out of my shirt pocket and laid it on the bar between us.
5
He shifted his tight-lipped smile from his glass to the star, then put two fingers on it and slid it back toward me, as if he were anteing up.
“We had this conversation before,” he said. “I’m a porter, not a deputy.”
“I’m not offering that. I don’t have the authority to deputize anyone. That was just for show.” I returned the star to my shirt pocket. “It’s posse work; fifty cents a day and four cents a mile.”
“Last time you said I got free burial.”
“You still do. Of course, if you kill anyone, his burial comes out of your pay.”
“That’s backwards. Cheaper to get kilt than stay alive.”
“Isn’t it always?”
He parted with his cigarette ash finally, in a peach tin set on the bar for that purpose. He took one last pull and tipped the stub in after it. “Who you hunting?”
“It’s not a who. It’s a what.” I turned my back on the man to my left, tall and thin with an Adam’s apple that measured his swallows of beer like the stroke of a steam piston. He was eavesdropping without making any effort to hide it. “Is there a quiet place to drink? I’ve got a bottle of Hermitage in my valise at the hotel.”
“You found a room?”
“Just for the valise. Looks like I’m sleeping at the train station tonight.”
“You want to use the floor. It’s softer than them benches.” He emptied his glass and pushed away from the bar. He didn’t invite me, but I followed him out.
When I turned in to the hotel for the whiskey, he told me to get my valise. I came out carrying it and accompanied him to the station, but we didn’t go into the building. I followed him to a siding, where he gripped the rail on the back of a caboose and swung himself onto the platform without using the steps. I used them. Inside was a potbelly stove with a cold coffeepot on top, a pair of cots made up neatly, military fashion, three folding chairs, a water crock with dipper, a table holding up a checkerboard, and a brass cuspidor the size of an umbrella stand with N.P.R.R. embossed around the rim. The car smelled of hickory and tobacco juice and cigars and felt like the parlor of a private club. Which it was: the most exclusive in the egalitarian United States, open only to members of the railroad fraternity. Here the conductors retired to put up their sore feet, and the porters and brakemen gathered to play cards and checkers and read newspapers and complain about unreasonable passengers.
There was a checker game in progress on the table, although the players were absent. To avoid disturbing the pieces, Beecher removed a pair of tin cups from a built-in cupboard and set them on the stove to fill from the bottle I took out of my valise.
“What’s Mr. Hill say about drinking on railroad property?” I asked.
“What you expect. I’m supposed to have a room, but Chicago kind of forgets how to count where the colored employees are concerned.”
“You sleep here?”
“Just till one of them checker players shows up and boots me out. But I figure they got better games to play in town. You can take the other cot. If anybody asks we’ll tell ’em you’re on railroad business.” He picked up one of the cups and sat down on a chair.
I got mine and took another chair. “I thought you were a bad risk after two beers.”
“That’s why I stopped at one. This stuff drinks like milk.” He poured down half his cup in one draught. “This what you’re after, that ain’t a who; it got anything to do with that fellow you kilt?”
I nodded, and told him about the Sons of the Confederacy.
“I never made it to Frisco,” he said. “I know some who did. They say Dan Wheelock’s the man to see there if you got a misery. I can’t feature doing that. I likes to keep my m
iseries close to home. I’m not good as a spy. Can’t even bluff at poker.”
“I’ll do the spying. I just need somebody to stand behind me on the trip out.”
“I ain’t your man. I don’t even own a pistol.”
“Got anything against them?”
“Only that they don’t hit what I aims at. I ain’t so bad with a rifle, but it’s been years.”
“Any shooting you’re likely to do will be at close range. I know some pistols where marksmanship doesn’t count so much.” I took my first sip, a dainty one. Good liquor affected me quicker than the watered-down slop you found in most saloons.
“Why pick me? Ain’t you got no friends?”
“A friend can be as bad as an enemy when it comes to staying alive. I liked the way you carried yourself on the train. Also it occurred to me you wouldn’t approve of the Sons of the Confederacy any more than the man I work for does.”
He shook his head and drank. “I don’t fight old wars. Anyway, I got a job. It pays a pension and I can’t remember the last time anybody got kilt doing it.”
“I can’t match that.”
“All right, then.” He got up, topped off his cup, and plunked himself back down. “You like your job?”
“Some parts. Getting killed isn’t one. How about you?”
“It’s as high as I can go, mister. I disremember your name.”
“Page Murdock.”
“Scotchman?”
“My father was. He came here when there wasn’t anything between Canada and Denver but a lot of Blackfeet and Snake. I was raised by him and a quarter-breed Snake who may or may not have been the bastard granddaughter of Merriwether Lewis, who may or may not have been my mother. Now you know more about me than I do about you.”
“I doubt it. That I does. I don’t know who my grandfather was. When I was little, I liked to think he was a chief in Africa. He was likely a slave like all the rest.”
“You’re a little more than that. The Tenth Cavalry didn’t step off the boardwalk for anyone.”
“I stepped off plenty since.” This time he drained the cup in one gulp.
“Ever miss it?”
“Some parts.”
I drank a little more. The stuff was already softening the sharp edges. I choked back a yawn. I didn’t sleep well on trains. They were always taking on and dropping off cars, and making all the noise of Shiloh as they went about it. I might have dozed off. I stirred when he stood to refill his cup, and again when he lit the wick on a lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. The ends of the caboose were dark.
“…scalped a man once,” I heard him saying at one lucid point. “A boy, really. Shames me now to think on it. He was a Cheyenne brave, maybe fourteen, scrawny but a scrapper. Raped his share of white women, I expect. Still.”
“Not one of the parts you miss.”
“I was young and full of piss and corn liquor. Custer weren’t cold yet, so I considered it personal. It weren’t as if that long-haired hard-ass wouldn’t of had me flayed if I kicked one of his damn greyhounds for stealing my rations.”
“That happen?”
“Not to me. You hear stories when you’re on sentry duty. It could of, though, if I ever got closer to him than three hundred miles of prairie. I don’t like dogs or officers. Straw bosses in brass buttons.”
“What parts did you like?”
He tapped his fingers on the side of his cup. It was a rolling rattle, like a military tattoo. “Parade.”
“Parade?”
“Yeah. Most times you’re bored, or your feet hurt, or some white officer’s giving you misery on account of your galluses is showing. Everybody’s bellyaching about something. On parade you ain’t got time to think about all that. You’re too busy keeping your chin up and your back straight and your horse from shying, and so’s the man next you and the man next him, all the way from the head of the column to the rear. All that counts is keeping the line straight. So long’s you do that your color don’t matter.”
“Parade’s one of the things I left the army to get away from.”
“Your color don’t matter whatever you do. I’m talking about being part of something bigger than you.”
“If you miss it so much, why’d you quit?”
“Last fight I was in, we raided a Arapaho village. It was on Buffalo Creek, down in Wyoming Territory. Don’t bother looking it up, it weren’t the Rosebud. When the main column took out after them that got away, I was left behind with some others to burn the lodges and shoot the ponies. Them ponies never done nothing to me. When my enlistment run out I run out with it.”
“You like horses?”
He shook his head. “Sons of bitches bite. I reckon I would, too, somebody tried to throw a saddle over me. I wouldn’t shoot one because of it.”
“You might have to, if you’re outnumbered and you need something to hide behind.”
“I done that, only not at Buffalo Creek. We was the ones doing the outnumbering.”
I remembered my whiskey and drank. It had grown warm from the heat of my hand gripping the cup; I hadn’t been so insensible I’d dropped it. “Well, I can’t offer anything like parade. I don’t care if your chin’s in your lap, so long as you keep me alive.”
“I’m thinking that’s a twenty-four-hour hitch.”
“And no time off on Sunday. The Barbary Coast isn’t the First Baptist Church.”
“Even Mr. Hill knows a man’s got to sleep.”
“Your job will be waiting when you get back. The man I work for will write him a letter.”
“If he ain’t J. P. Morgan I don’t know how it’d help. Mr. Hill wouldn’t change the way he runs his road for anybody less.”
“You’ve never read one of Judge Blackthorne’s letters.”
He smiled, again without showing his teeth. I was beginning to realize it wasn’t connected with anything like amusement on his part. “You ride for Hangin’ Harlan?”
“He prefers ‘Your Honor.’”
The floor shifted slightly. Someone had mounted the platform outside the door. Beecher said, “Somebody’s done come back to finish out that game of checkers. I reckon I can’t offer you that other cot after all.”
The caboose shifted again, this time closer to the opposite end.
“Douse the light,” I said.
He got up without hesitating, raised the chimney on the lantern, and blew out the flame. In the sudden black I stood and drew the Deane-Adams.
The door at the rear swung open and banged against the wall. I fired at the silhouette I saw in the gray rectangle of doorway and swung the other direction, far too slowly, because that door had opened just behind the first, and just as violently. The man on that end fired. My shot was a split second slower, but his missed because Beecher had swept the chair he’d been sitting in off the floor and hurled it the length of the car, striking the second man and throwing off his aim. My bullet snatched him out of the doorway. I pivoted again, but that one was empty also, except for a heap on the platform. The inside of the car stank of brimstone. It had lost its club atmosphere all at once.
Beecher relit the lantern and strode over to cover the second entrance, armed only with the light, which he held out from his body. I kept the revolver in my hand and went the other way.
“This one’s still breathing,” Beecher called out.
“Get his gun.”
The man on the rear platform sat with his back against the railing and one leg pinned under him. He had on a canvas coat, too heavy for the mild early-autumn night, but long enough to cover a firearm, which came away from his hand with no effort when I bent to take it. There was no need to feel for a pulse. In the light from the station, there was a glistening cavern where his left eye belonged. I’d still been coming up from the chair when the door flew open, and had fired high. I couldn’t tell if he was young or old. A face in that condition doesn’t offer much to go by.
I knelt in front of him and went through his clothes. I felt something an
d pulled it out.
Beecher called out again. “Three chances what I found in this one’s pocket.”
“One’s all I need.” I was looking at the gold coin glinting on my palm.
6
The man I’d killed at the back of the caboose was named Charles Worth, if the letter in his pocket signed, “Your loving sister, Wilhelmina,” didn’t belong to someone else. I’d never heard of him or his sister. The letter was mostly about the fine weather in Baltimore, but it told me more about him than I found out about his partner, whose punctured lung filled with blood and drowned him before the doctor could get inside. He looked to be in his early thirties and had nothing on his person to identify him; even the labels in his ready-made clothes had been ripped out.
The doctor, a young man himself but with the broken look of a professional who had come west hoping to make his fortune off the anemic wives of wealthy miners only to find himself pulling bullets out of prospectors shot in drunken duels, came out of his examining room wiping his hands with a towel. He scowled at the faces pressed against the windows of his office—bearded and clean-shaven, scrubbed and filthy, locals and visitors—and drew down the shades. The core group had followed us there from the train station. The rest had been growing up around it for twenty minutes.
“He didn’t say anything,” the doctor said. “You don’t when your throat’s full of blood and mucus. My work would be a great deal less messy if you fellows would aim for the heart.”
I said, “Mine would be, too, if they’d give me time. Did you know the man?”
“I never saw him before, and I know all the residents here at least by sight. He probably drifted in with this new mob. This is my fourth shooting in two days.”
“It’s them politicians.” Beecher was studying a diagram of the human circulatory system on a chart tacked to the wall.
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