Dead Warrior

by John Myers Myers

  As I backed toward a corner, watching to see whether I would have to take a hand, I saw Terry deploying in the other direction. The most fearless onlooker there wasn’t thinking about fighting, however. Frantic with the thought that damage might be done to the room’s expensive décor, Trimble sprang past the collapsing gunman.

  “No, gentlemen!” he pleaded with the remaining four outlaws.

  Getting between them and Peters, he might have died a martyr to the cause of interior decoration. By that time, though, Barringer had had time to appraise the situation. He had us outnumbered four to three, but we had the advantage of position.

  “Easy, boys,” he ordered. “Nobody asked Slim to butt in here.” He looked from the bleeding corpse to Peters, who had stepped free of the settling cloud of black powder smoke. Then, to my surprise, Charlie addressed me. “How about it, Mr. Vigilante? What view will the upright citizens of Dead Warrior take?”

  “Your man started first; everybody saw that.” Still poised to draw, I feared a trick, but Barringer nodded and spoke to the anxious Joe Trimble.

  “Don’t worry about your premises. I like them myself.” Having made that observation, he at last addressed Droop-eye. “I accept the decision of the disinterested bystanders. It was self-defense.”

  “I shall report as much to the magistrate,” Peters said. “I’m sorry about your carpeting, Trimble. Send me the cleaning bill, and if there’s any permanent stain, I’ll replace the whole thing.” Prior to leaving, the colonel bowed first to McQuinn and then to myself. “Thank you, gentlemen. Perhaps I can have the pleasure of a glass with you later in the evening.”

  Having relit his cigar, he was puffing on it as he turned toward the men now pouring back into the room. They made way for him like minnows dodging a muskellunge. Then the corpse was the center of attention.

  I had looked for excitement over the death of Sanders. I was not prepared for the emotions mixed with it. Slim was well known by repute as a hobby killer, a man who deliberately went in search of trouble, so that he could add to his prestige at the cost of somebody else’s life. His demise should have been a source of gratification, if anything; yet such was not the general reaction. Instead I found that the chief feeling was disappointment over the destruction of a legend.

  What was hard for me to get straight was the difference between the accepted facts and the conclusions popularly drawn from them. It was not Sanders, the multiple assassin, that had emerged from the stories about him but Sanders, the hero because always victorious. The fact that he had achieved success while yet young also entered into it; and the combination of youth and talent cut off in their prime stirred a loose-brained sentimentality.

  “It’s sure too bad,” I heard one fellow opine. “There’s no tellin’ what he could’ve done if they’d’ve give him only ten more years. He might’ve beat out Quantrill and everybody.”

  From there it was an easy step to the belief that this champion could not have been downed unless unfair advantage had been taken of him. “Something ought to be done about that Droop-eye,” a member of a tongue-wagging group remarked.

  I didn’t like the sound of that. Catching him by the elbow, I swung him toward me.

  “Are you going to be the one to do it?” I demanded.

  The mere thought of challenging Peters scared him. A glance at the others gave him new courage, though.

  “Well, I still don’t think Slim had a fair chance.”

  A lynching could come of such talk, I knew. Besides, the fellow’s bovine doggedness angered me.

  “How the hell would you know anything about it, when all you did was to duck out of the room like a prairie dog going for its hole? I stayed here, and I saw that son of a bitch you’re shedding onion tears about go for his gun first, thinking he was taking a man by surprise. Now is that clear?”

  “Well, I guess it is, if you say so, Carruthers. Of course, Droop-eye’s supposed to be pretty fast himself.”

  “You can find out, if you doubt it,” I warned the fellow.

  By publishing my firsthand account of what had transpired, I quashed any possible legal case against Peters. But people accepted the facts with their minds only. Their hearts or funny bones, or wherever the seat of mob sympathy may be located, remained uninfluenced.

  In part this was due to a willingness to dislike Peters, whose ambassadorial bearing did not make for popularity in a frontier camp. He daunted men, besides, as a less coldly courteous killer could not, and they resented his self-sufficiency. Outside of the gambling fraternity, I was the only person in camp admitted to his companionship.

  At all events, Slim’s memory continued to be cherished by men who would have taken pains to dodge him, had he survived the encounter rather than the colonel. The general attitude did, indeed, find crystallization in the work of an anonymous ballader. Mayor Jackson was too discreet to publish it in the columns of the War Whoop, but — not out of personal resentment toward Droop-eye but because the latter was a friend of mine — he printed broadsides which were distributed all over town.

  This opus was remarkable for the subornation of fact to the uses of prosody, and sufficient liberties were taken with that science. The author had also equipped Slim with a doting mother and a grieving sweetheart. From listening to Sanders I would have said that he came from Texas, but Boston made for alliteration, an ornament of verse for which the poet showed some fondness.

  Slim Sanders was a Boston boy

  Whose heart and hair were gold;

  He left his home and come out West

  For a life both free and bold.

  Apparently Boston mothers suspect that their sons may end up in boot hill, for Slim thought it necessary to allay maternal fears on this score.

  But before he left his mother

  He promised, that’s a fact,

  That dying with his boots still on

  Was a way he’d never act.

  Slim’s prowess, his good nature, and his fundamental kindness were celebrated in the next few stanzas.

  Well, when he’d wandered westward

  He learned to skin a gun,

  And he learned to win at faro

  Though it was all in fun.

  For Slim was always friendly,

  But sometimes gents got sore

  And he’d have to up and drill ’em

  With his sure-fire forty-four.

  Sanders had actually carried a forty-five, but that bit of poetic license could be forgiven a bard who was hurrying on to give tribute to the enormous magnanimity of his hero.

  But every time he’d fell a foe

  He’d hand the widow cash

  And tell her he was sorry

  That her man had been so rash.

  Romance next raised its shopworn head, though how the Boston boy had acquired a Tennessee sweetheart was not manifest.

  So the women all liked Sanders,

  A gentleman clean through,

  But he loved a girl in Tennessee,

  And you bet that he was true.

  Sanders had done most of his recent traveling on the Southern Pacific, and he had come to town by stage; but these facts came in for no mention, as he bade farewell to the inevitable faithful companion.

  Oh, Slim said to his pardner,

  “I’ll saddle up the mare

  And ride into Dead Warrior

  And beat the dealers there.”

  Contrasting with this spirit of enlightened enterprise was the narrow viewpoint of Peters, here substituted for Blackfoot Terry as the presiding gambler in the Glory Hole.

  Now the gambler’s name was Droop-eye,

  A gunman mean and bad,

  And it made him sore when Slim come in

  And won the cash he had.

  Well, Slim just laughed and told him,

  “You’ve got to play the game”;

  But Droop-eye had a hideaway

  And begun to jerk the same.

  Peters had put his first bullet directly through Slim’s heart;
but that didn’t fit into the rhyme scheme of the ballader, moving into the tragic climax of his piece.

  Well, Slim could have beat him easy,

  But his gun catched in his coat,

  So Droop-eye beat him to the draw

  And plugged him through the throat.

  Albeit lethal, this shot which the colonel had been lucky enough to get off did not prevent Sanders from making a decent settlement of his affairs before he died.

  Oh, Slim he took his boots off

  Like he told his ma he would,

  And before he died said, “Tell my girl

  That I loved her true and good.”

  What confounded me was that people who had been aware of the main facts of the case soon put them out of their minds in favor of those featured by this piece of nonsense. Then, because it had happened in Dead Warrior, the newspapers of the nation picked up the tale. After that history was helpless to defend itself. The fate of Slim Sanders, the Boston knight-errant whom ill luck had brought down to defeat at the hands of a disgruntled gambler he had bested, was permanently imbedded in the story of the town.

  Chapter 19

  THE TRAGIC DEATH OF SANDERS had other aftermaths. Capitalizing on the unexpected surge of favorable emotion. Barringer gave Slim what was considered Dead Warrior’s finest funeral. Half the town attended, and most had a wonderful time wallowing in synthetic grief. The Reverend Foster also enjoyed himself, when he preached the graveside sermon. Here was a chance for dramatic oratory such as was not offered by the demise of one of his peaceful parishioners. He turned the whole epic of God and the Devil into a struggle for the soul of Sanders. And just as Heaven triumphed, Barringer dropped the boots which Slim was supposed to have removed in his dying moments on top of the coffin.

  Starting to leave, I found two other pairs of dry eyes. “Jesus, Baltimore,” Hangtown Jennie whispered, “you’d think that dry-gulching punk was a pope or something.”

  Seth Potter, whose arm she was holding, chewed on his quid. “If he’s all that good, I’d say we’d ought to keep him instead of stuffin’ him into the ground. Drop out to my shack when you get the time, boy. I couldn’t stand livin’ in town no more, so I moved out on the flat.”

  A natural running mate of sympathy for Sanders had been good will toward his associates. Quick to sense it, Charlie built upon the attitude. He and his well-turned-out companions frequented only the more respectable places of entertainment and kept out of trouble generally. As for Barringer himself, he soon gained personal popularity by making it his practice to buy drinks for the house wherever he went. He also had a genius for remembering everybody’s name, together with a way of using it in greeting which conveyed the impression of personal warmth.

  So it caused no raising of eyebrows except my own when it was discovered that he had taken over the Glory Hole. I tried without success to get the story behind the transaction. All I could find out was that Joe Trimble had left town immediately after selling his property. Trimble had never been a personal friend of mine, so that there was no reason why he should have made a point of saying farewell to me. Just the same, it did not seem reasonable that the saloonkeeper would have relinquished his enterprise precisely when it was proving most profitable.

  Blackfoot Terry stopped dealing at the Glory Hole when Barringer took over. “I quit before he asked me to,” McQuinn explained. “I’ll try the Western Empire, I suppose.”

  The saloon in question ran high-stake games, as did several others in town; but it galled McQuinn not to be dealing in either of the town’s ace gambling spots. Within a week Terry and his injured professional pride left for Tucson.

  “Your vigilante threats may have convinced Charlie that he’d better not get rough,” he said at parting, “but it won’t take me long to get back, if he changes his tactics.”

  Although they were more or less matched on the score of prestige, the Glory Hole had never been quite as successful as the Happy Hunting Ground. Now the balance started to tip the other way. Barringer’s lavish hospitality helped, but there was more to it than that. There was an undertone of talk about the coldhearted killers who dealt at the Happy Hunting Ground.

  Some of the murmuring, at least, could be traced to the veiled editorial references made by Dick Jackson. In spite of the fact that I accused him of it, I didn’t think he was personally in Barringer’s pay. What I did believe was that he welcomed contributions to his political kitty, regardless of the source, and that he delighted to make war on noncontributors. For Dick all Dead Warrior was divided into those who went along with him and those who didn’t. The Vigilante was the voice of such opposition as there was, and Ham Gay was anathema to Jackson for being one of my warmest supporters.

  At this particular time Dick was feeling very good. If I had held my own in certain other editorial duels with him, I was unable to return the fire with which he kept peppering the Happy Hunting Ground, for sheer lack of a target. Never one to make light of his own triumphs, Mayor Jackson rubbed it in whenever we met.

  “The power of the press is a fine force for good, when administered by a man of elevated principles,” he lectured me, while several of us were having appetizers at the Paradise Enow. “By encouraging a change of management, the War Whoop has rid the community of one nefarious gunman in the person of Blackfoot Terry, and is confidently looking forward to squeezing out Droop-eye.”

  “And what will you do after Barringer pays you for that?” I asked.

  I had thought to get under his skin with that insulting query. Instead he got further under mine.

  “Oh, then,” he told me, “I’ll have the impunity to moralize on the subject of female gamblers.”

  Notwithstanding the differences, here we were back in Midas Touch. Barringer had set out to control the gambling in Dead Warrior, but as the city was too big to make the direct methods he had used in other camps feasible, his object was to destroy the opposition by ruining Gay’s business. Dolly Tandy was one of the great drawing cards of the Happy Hunting Ground, to whose bankruptcy she herself would be sacrificed.

  Having worked that out in my mind, I put my glass on the bar. “No, you won’t, Dick,” I said. At the moment I was not conscious of being angry, only certain of my purpose. “No, you won’t,” I repeated.

  Talking to Sam Wheeler, Jackson already had his mind on another subject. “Won’t what?” he asked.

  “Won’t do what you hinted at,” I set him straight.

  His face showed puzzlement and then a malicious joy at the thought of having found something else to use against me. “The War Whoop is always ready to listen to reason,” he mocked my seriousness. “Would you mind explaining why you take a stand in favor of spinster faro dealers?”

  It was only then that I realized I was in a rage. “I won’t explain,” I said in a voice that shook. “But if you publish anything like that, I’ll put you where the dog hid the bone.”

  Dick began to laugh, and then wasn’t sure he wanted to. “I’ll find out where that is before I make up my mind,” he said. But my reference to boot hill brought sober looks to the faces of those within hearing.

  “Cripes,” Wheeler expostulated, “you’ve been in the West so long you’re beginning to think you live there, Baltimore. Let’s match for another round and forget the war talk.”

  “I’ll forget the war talk when the war’s called off,” I growled, spinning on my heel. “I’ll drink with you when you’re in better company, Sam.”

  My wrath glowed the more hotly the more I thought of what was being done at Barringer’s instigation. Yet I had to recognize the unsettling fact that my anger at Dick had welled from a deeper spiritual source.

  Without pressing the usual claims which a woman has the power to make against the emotions and body of a man, Dolly Tandy possessed me. The alliance between us transcended such considerations as what she might eventually be to Blackfoot Terry. She was one of my rich experiences, to be cherished like a favorite poem or any other treasure of the mind; a
nd any enemy of hers was my own.

  My gambling commonly took the form of poker, but I made a point of going to the faro room of the Happy Hunting Ground that night. The place was abuzz with excitement, and Ham Gay was supervising a swamper, busy scrubbing the carpet.

  “I suppose you heard that Dolly just winged a man,” he said, when he had taken me aside. He was more upset over the shooting than was natural for a man who had been in Dead Warrior as long as he had. “She and Bill have gone to report to the judge.”

  I wasn’t worried about the outcome of that interview. One thing about the Jackson administration which I had to admit was that it was suited to the temper of the town. Magistrate Pickering was a stickler for the fine points of frontier law, as opposed to the law of the land; and I took it for granted that Dolly had not shot without provocation.

  “All right, Ham,” I said. “Quit trying to finish that cigar in one drag and tell me what happened.”

  “Well, a bunch of cow hands come in about three quarters of an hour ago.”

  My eyes narrowed, and the saloonkeeper shrugged. “It sort of surprised me, too, as when them boys hit town they mostly head for some joint that serves girls with the drinks. Anyhow they showed up and made for the gambling room. Bill Overton was taking the early shift. Hisn was the only table going, as Dolly and Droop-eye wasn’t quite due.”

  Finding that his cigar was just about to burn his fingers, Gay tossed it into a spittoon. “Them cow chasers was rough and noisy and had guns all over ’em. After a little my regular players started leaving. They — the range hands, I mean — begun hazing Overton, who’s been there before. He told one of the waiters to bring him a glass of water, which is our signal to break out the double-barreled shotguns. Before we got the message, though, one of those fellows claimed chips he had lost. Dolly was just coming in through the street door, and she saw one of the cow hands start to sneak-draw while Bill was calling his pal to time. She clipped the boy’s gun arm, and by the time they all got over that surprise, we had the shotguns leveled.”