“They haven’t hurried about it,” I shrugged. The territorial administration had, indeed, followed standard political procedure. After maneuvering us into seeking formal municipal organization, the Governor and his aides had apparently lost all interest in Dead Warrior. “But what’s that got to do with it?”
“I want Prescott to give us the go-ahead whistle,” Jackson said. “A charter won’t be forthcoming until the legislature meets again next winter, naturally; but it’s usual in these cases for the administration to authorize an interim government, with appointive officers.”
“And you want the appointment as mayor,” I stepped ahead of him. “I know all that, but — ”
“But our dilatory Governor is an appointee of a Republican national administration,” Dick interrupted, “and Horace Ainsworth Bedlington of Philadelphia is a very influential member of the party in question.”
Having concluded his explanation, Jackson beamed at me, doubly pleased with himself because I was disappointed. “So you see that the true beneficiary will not be myself but Dead Warrior, destined to flourish under my kindly but wise rule.”
Returning to my own office I spread my problem in front of Sam Wheeler. “I don’t know what to use for artillery now,” I worried. “I’d been counting on having the backing of Dick’s newspaper.”
“With blue chips floating around, you can count on our boy Jackson not to be on the side of the peanut vendors.” Sam blew on his glasses and polished them. “You were a tribune of the people at Three Deuces and Yuma. Why don’t we add a newspaper to our little flock of enterprises?”
“Hand-lettering won’t do,” I said, while turning that idea over. “It takes type.”
“Buy it,” Sam said. “There are more traveling printers than buffalo in the West now, and there are at least two in town as of today.”
The more I considered the suggestion the better I liked it. “Can you get along without me here?”
“Sure, if we hire somebody to take your place. If inkslinging means power and profits to Jackson, why we can use both of those things, too; and the town’s big enough for more than one daily rag.”
There was a bumbling weekly called the Dead Warrior Sun, published by a journeyman printer by the name of Cliff Fellowes. Carruthers and Wheeler bought into partnership with him on the understanding that he would handle composition, while I would have editorial control of the journal. This, after I had moved the plant into quarters on Apache Street, I renamed the Dead Warrior Vigilante. It took a few days to get things set up, but meanwhile I had taken the precaution of moving into the new Arizona Hotel, so that I would not have to risk returning to my house in the dark.
Having bought the paper to shoot with, I didn’t pussyfoot. In my first issue I published my suppositions as facts and flatly accused the War Whoop of pimping for the mining companies. That brought Smiley around to see me.
“That was a smart move,” he complimented me. “Now nothing may happen to you, as you’ve named too many people who might not like being suspected. How much do you want?”
When I’d put a bullet through the brim of his hat I felt better; but my journalistic efforts didn’t create as much excitement as I thought they would. Many agreed that I was on the right track, though that was as far as anyone was willing to go with me for a couple of days. Then Frank Fillmore was found dragging himself into town, blasted in the back and only just alive.
“Dry-gulched,” was all he could say before he died. “Wouldn’t sell my claim, so bastards dry-gulched me.”
This statement, which Frank wasn’t supposed to have lived long enough to make, was the foundation of the Dead Warrior Minute Men. My paper that day called for a meeting of all interested in making the town a place where they wouldn’t be shot in the back as an alternative to closing any business deal which might be proposed to them.
Prospectors were in the majority as men started trooping into the Anything Goes Variety Hall. There were quite a few businessmen, however, as well as representatives of the mining companies, anxious to prove that they didn’t condone assassination. Irah Weaver was among them, but I had no authority to exclude him, so I said nothing.
The meeting began in the manner of most uncontrolled assemblages. There was a considerable amount of flamboyant oratory, and there were resolutions which contained more dime-novel nobility than good sense; but the wind has to blow for the seeds to drift. When everybody who liked the sound of his own voice had run out of air, Hamilton Gay got to his feet. He was no longer the anxious boniface who had launched the Happy Hunting Ground without benefit of a roof. He was the successful owner of a gambling saloon, and one who had recently announced plans to build fabulously expensive new quarters. As such he was one of the important figures of the town, and when the rest quieted to hear him, he took it as no more than his due.
“Gents,” he said, “in my business I listen to a lot of big talk, so if that’s all we’re going to do, I might as well get back to work.” He waited for the laugh, and he got it. “But if we’re really aiming to do something, I’ll stay right with you till that Injun this camp’s named for comes to life again. Now how do you say we ought to begin, Seth?”
As the prospector of prospectors, old Potter was presiding. Leaning forward in his seat on the stage, he spat over the footlights at a cuspidor he didn’t miss by much.
“Who’s that son of a bitch you said we ought to stretch, Baltimore? Tell ’em about it, boy.”
To speak was to decree a man’s death, but I had already made up my mind to the necessity. “There’s more than one,” I began, “including some who do their murdering from offices in Philadelphia, San Francisco and New York.” The mining company men wriggled a little at that, and I looked them over before I proceeded. “Fellows like Bedlington are out of our reach, unfortunately, but I think that if we hang Ferguson and Smiley we’ll stop the bushwhacking.”
“You mean kill these men without bringing them to court?” Eben Bradford demanded.
It was a grave question, troubling many there, and called for an answer in kind. “Yes, because I’m lawyer enough to know that we have no case against them. All we have is the moral certainty that some of us will be killed, if they aren’t.”
He chewed his cigar over that, while I waited. “So we resort to lawlessness, acting merely on suspicion. And if our guess is wrong?”
For that one I felt myself ready. “I’d rather take a chance on being wrong than on being dry-gulched.”
It was that calculated use of poor Frank Fillmore’s phrase which hardened the collective will. After the growl it evoked, I found it easy to transform the forum into a number of searching parties.
The astute Mr. Smiley had sensed the temper of the camp, following Fillmore’s death, and had made a dash for Tucson; but Ferguson’s urban contempt for yokels had denied him that much wisdom. He was found in dalliance with one of Jennie’s girls.
I was more or less in charge of the group which seized him, but I paid no heed to his nervous questioning, as he was hustled back to the variety hall. “Well, he looks like a mean wolf at that,” Seth decided. “You say you want to ask him some questions, Baltimore? What’s the sense of that, if you’re goin’ to plant him anyhow?”
Operating on me was the same compulsion which had made Barringer give Dolly Tandy leave to speak beneath the gallows; and deep-seated feelings about the law made it impossible for me to hang a man without making some effort to justify the act in the eyes of the victim. “Bring in the witness,” I said, when everybody had reassembled.
Frank Fillmore’s corpse, still gory and caked with the blood-soaked mud of his death crawl, was brought in and dumped in front of Ferguson. That gunman had, I judged, no conscience worth mentioning. He might not have shown emotion under other circumstances, but Frank looked as if he might have been exhumed from his grave — such a grave as Ferguson himself had just been promised by Seth Potter.
Ace looked at the murdered prospector out of the bitter pride in his
hardihood which was all that was left of him now. His face turned gray as he stared, but at length his head came up with a jerk.
“What do you want me to do; heal him by laying my hands on him?”
“Try it,” I urged, although it was almost as much of an effort for me to speak as it was for him. “Put your hand in that biggest hole you blasted in his back.”
The thought of doing so shook him. He gulped when he looked where I pointed. Then when his gaze lifted to mine again, he recalled something.
“I don’t know why I didn’t go for my gun when you wanted me to.”
“That day by the poker table,” I said for the benefit of the tensely listening audience. “Do you remember how you warned me that I’d be bushwhacked unless I sold my mine?”
He hadn’t put it that bluntly, yet he now hadn’t the heart to quibble. “All right,” he said, nodding slowly, as though we had both come to agreement, after considering all sides of a question. “I didn’t kill that guy, but you know damn well I got somebody to do it.” Swiftly then his mood changed to that of a trapped weasel. “A-a-h, you hicks made me sick! Get your rope so I won’t have to hear no more of your blab.”
He didn’t say another word while he was being dragged to his execution through the sour light of a ringed new moon. The chosen spot was the nearest mining hoist of a prospector, but this was not done out of any sense of poetic fitness. Unlike Can Can, of which Roy Sparks had told me, there was not so much as one tree in the immediate vicinity of the town.
Up until the moment he saw the noose being prepared, Ferguson had acted stoically indifferent. Of a sudden, however, he made a breakaway, taking everybody so much by surprise that he was almost in the clear before he was intercepted. He went down under a half dozen men, like a woodchuck being worried by dogs.
With his bound hands he couldn’t fight effectively, but his struggle raised the spirits of the crowd, which had hitherto been somberly quiet. “So the bastard wants to live after all,” somebody whooped.
“Maybe we should let him off,” the word was taken up.
“Sure, just like he did Frank Fillmore.”
It was in this mood of sardonic glee that they hoisted Ferguson aloft. Nor did it die when the hanged man did.
My idea had been to leave Ace on the gallows, where he could be depended on to wait until daylight should simplify the matter of burying him. It developed that this plan did not suit the popular fancy.
“We’d ought to wake him,” I heard Scanlan say, as I started to leave.
“Try and do it,” a jeering voice called.
“Ah, you meetin’-house Protestant,” Scanlan reproved him. “I mean we’d ought to drink him on his way.”
If New York thus spoke up for ceremony, the voice of the frontier next invoked the proprieties. “Pat’s right,” I heard Short-fuse assert, “but if we’re goin’ to drink to the skunk, we’d ought to bring him along with us.”
There were protests, but they were quickly overridden. Down the dead man came, and he beat me to town, escorted by a cheering guard of honor. I shunned Apache Street myself, sitting alone in my quarters and drinking for medicinal purposes, but Ferguson had quite a night of it. The howling and shooting which accompanied his progress from saloon to saloon could still be heard when Blackfoot Terry joined me.
“You’re knocking off early,” I observed, after I had filled a glass for him.
“Your court of justice has killed gambling for this evening,” he told me. “No mere tiger to buck could stand up against a side show like that. Did you have fun?”
In line with his principles against public interference in private matters, McQuinn himself had refused to join the vigilante movement. “Don’t take it so hard,” he now advised, when I scowled at him. “Ferguson got what was coming to him for dodging a showdown, when you gave him a chance for one.” Terry waved the subject away, to make room for a new one. “You’ve met Colonel Peters, haven’t you?”
“In Tucson once,” I nodded.
“Dolly Tandy seemed to think you had.” Terry drank with a gusto I envied and started fishing for a smoke. “Droop-eye’s down in Mexico City now, but he’s on his way north with the expectation of coming here; and when he does Dolly would like you to sit in on the welcome celebration. Have you ever eaten at her house?”
I still had no notion of how things stood between Miss Tandy and McQuinn, though I had seen them together occasionally. “No,” I said, more quickly than was necessary.
“Sometimes she has Ham Gay, Bill Overton and myself in for dinner,” Terry said, “and I’m pleased to report that she has had her usual success in furnishing her premises with an excellent cook.”
Although the two leading hotels and a couple of restaurants had good kitchens, a home-cooked meal was always something to look forward to for a bachelor. Not so pleasant was the prospect of what awaited me the next day.
Enlisting the aid of a couple of Carruthers and Wheeler employees, I went looking for the corpse. We tried seven saloons before we found Ferguson, stretched out on a bar that had no other patrons, with a corncob pipe in his mouth.
The barkeep, who had been standing as far away from Ace as possible, cheered up when he learned of our errand. “It ain’t that he don’t behave hisself,” he explained, “but he ain’t no spender.”
The Mexicans I had hired to dig a grave in Dead Warrior’s boot hill had half finished their job by the time I’d had Ferguson boxed and had brought him to the desolate cemetery. Scrub cactus and stunted weeds were growing sparsely amidst the stony soil. Gusts of wind were stirring dust devils which wound like brown ghosts between the ill-made wooden crosses. We had one such for the corpse in our charge. Ace Ferguson, Hanged by the Minute Men, 1879, it read.
Entrusting that cross to the gravediggers, I returned to take up my own task of publishing a report of the incident in my paper. It wasn’t an easy assignment, calling as it did for at once justifying the execution and excoriating many of the executioners for their subsequent conduct.
The War Whoop was under no such embarrassment, however, and — as I had foreseen — Dick Jackson made the most of the situation. “RIOTERS COMMIT MURDER!” screamed his streamer. “Irresponsible Journalism Launches Savage Orgy,” ran the subhead which warned me that I would personally be blamed for the entire affair. “Deliberately fired to inhuman rage by the virulent pen of the Vigilante’s editor, a mob fell upon a citizen of this town who stood blameless in the eyes of the law, lynched that innocent man and then frolicked through the town with his stiffening cadaver.” So began a story which ended by calling for the suppression of my paper as “a barbarous blot on the otherwise unstained escutcheon of Arizona Territory’s fourth estate.”
My chief reaction to this fustian was irritation over the fact that he had been handed such an advantage. Yet while I was still debating whether to reply to his attack or ignore it, I was visited by some of the businessmen who had participated in the hanging. A glance showed me that they were both troubled and determined.
“Well, gentlemen,” I braced them, “have you decided that you don’t like popular justice?”
“It isn’t that,” Bradford spoke for them, “but we can’t have a show made out of it, Carruthers. Some sort of local organization to keep down murder is necessary here now — I thought that out before I made up my mind to join you — but we can’t have prospectors or that kind of people in it any more, because they’ve demonstrated that they don’t know how to act. What we need is not a group like the Minute Men, that’s open to just anybody, but a committee of responsible citizens. If we’re not going to have that, you can count us out.”
The experience of the night before had justified him in taking the line he had adopted, but I turned to stare out the window before I answered him. By “responsible citizens” he meant men of a certain level of prosperity, acquired by following a limited number of pursuits. Acceptance would mean fostering stratification in a society which was all but unconscious of social divisions.
Tempted to reject their proposal, I saw the barkeep of the saloon where we had found Ferguson, walking home from his trick of duty. The sight of this man conjured up the picture of the corpse as it had been left by the ghoulish revelers, lying on the bar with its hands folded behind its head and that pipe jutting at a jaunty angle out of the dead mouth.
Whereupon I turned to face the inquiring eyes of my visitors. “Yes,” I said. “I hope we won’t need to act again, but if we do, why I guess that’s the way it’s got to be.”
Chapter 16
THE HANGING OF ACE FERGUSON had divers aftereffects, both for myself and Dead Warrior. One development was that it brought Faith Foster down to see me at my office. I was just about to leave it in favor of Joe Trimble’s Glory Hole when I saw her alighting from a carriage, the latest edition of the War Whoop in her hand.
The pretty girl I had encountered on the way out of Three Deuces had become a striking young woman. Of this I was acutely aware as I walked to meet her; and yet I was aware, too, that I had not been with her as often as I might have. I had seen her with some frequency since the day of the picnic at Antelope Tank, but I was not quite so glad of her company as I had been before Dolly Tandy arrived in town.
If I did not see the latter, except when she was dealing faro at the Happy Hunting Ground, the knowledge of her presence in Dead Warrior was one of my companions. I did not imagine myself in love with her, but being conscious of her made it difficult to think of loving somebody else.
Miss Foster was a well enough bred young woman to whose way of life no exceptions could fairly be taken. Clever, energetic and efficient, she’d run a man’s home expertly, and maybe the man, too, if he wasn’t careful. That part could be handled, should my destiny make it necessary. Meanwhile there was nothing to cavil at except that she would never have Miss Tandy’s hereditary gift of luminous grace. Dolly was a gambler and a gunwoman, and I was not among those who might feel that these were desirable qualities in a wife. Yet to be with her was a solace to the spirit which Faith did not offer me.
Dead Warrior Page 20
