Dead Warrior

by John Myers Myers

  “You wouldn’t wonder where it lies if a mob of toughs was shooting up your bank,” Gay snapped.

  “That’s exactly what I’m getting at,” Holt responded. “They are not bothering my bank, or any of the stores, or even any of the other saloons.”

  “And what are you trying to make out of that?” Ham asked.

  “Nothing, really.” The banker must have suddenly remembered that the saloonkeeper was a prosperous patron. “All I meant was that we — er — ought not to be hasty.”

  “What he really means,” Eben Bradford said, “is that there must be some reason why you can’t keep an orderly house. This new fellow, Barringer, right across the street from you, doesn’t seem to have any trouble.”

  “It apparently has something to do with the people you employ,” a lawyer put in, while Gay was glaring at Eben. “At least that’s what I’ve been reading in the newspapers.”

  “You didn’t read that in the Vigilante,” I protested.

  “No, but you’re a friend of Ham’s and a lot of the gambling crowd.” Irah Weaver was glad of a chance to snap a shot at me. “What it looks like to us is that you’re trying to get us to pull chestnuts out of the fire that Dead Warrior had better see burned, if it wants to be a progressive city.”

  “I’m not asking you to do anything but lay traps for men riding into town bent on murder.” I looked at Bradford, sure that he would respond to a sensible argument, if I could find one on his level of awareness. “Not to mention the harm done to a man’s business,” I added.

  “I’m not sure,” Eben said, after first taking time to weigh his words, “that it’s the kind of enterprise which I for one wish to have protected.”

  “What’s the matter with my business?” Gay challenged.

  “There’s nothing personal in this,” Bradford answered, “but the time is at hand, I think, when this city should put more emphasis on legitimate trade and less on institutions which promote the wanton waste of income.”

  The murmur of assent from several quarters showed that this was a general sore point. The merchants resented the fact that the gambling tables got the first whack at most men’s pay. Of this resentment I had been dimly conscious, but I was chagrined to have the matter brought out into the open at this time.

  “See here, gentlemen,” I said, “how the people of this town spend their money is their own concern; and the purpose of a vigilante group is supposed to be the curtailing of outlawry, not the suppression of any business recognized as lawful.”

  The principle of my thesis was not disputed, but it found no honor in practice. The several saloonkeepers stamped out of the meeting, leaving the rest in a mood of united stubbornness.

  Looking them over, I decided there was nothing to be done until I had thought of a way of circumventing this unlooked-for obstacle. “Fellow vigilantes,” I announced, “I won’t be interested in meeting with you again until the members of this body show that they have civic improvement in mind rather than the desire to profit at each other’s expense.”

  Some of them looked sheepish as I left them on the heels of that rhetoric. I knew they hadn’t changed their minds, though. My first effort to attack Barringer had therefore failed.

  Blackfoot Terry returned the day of Droop-eye’s funeral. “The trouble is,” I told him in the course of our luncheon together, “that these shopkeepers and so forth don’t care, as long as they themselves aren’t bothered.”

  McQuinn cut, forked and swallowed a piece of steak before he commented. “Wouldn’t it be possible to bother them, Baltimore?”

  It took me a moment to read his meaning in the blank innocence of his eye. “Almost anything is possible,” I conceded. Cheering up, I became as swiftly downcast. “But where could I find anybody to do the job? All the range outlaws belong to Charlie’s crew.”

  “Oh, no, they don’t; you’re magnifying the size of Barringer’s empire.” Peering into a large mirror on the other side of the hotel dining room, Terry made sure that his tie was in place. “What you have to imagine is a situation much like the one which had Rustlers Roost for a firing pin. There are all sorts of free lances moving into the new cattle country of Arizona and away from places where it wasn’t safe to stay. They’ll do anything from stocking a ranch with rustled steers to murdering somebody; but like a blacksmith or any other vendor of services, they’re not in any one man’s employ.”

  “?-m, yes,” I said. “And you think they have some such hangout as Alexander Hamilton kept?”

  “Probably several,” Terry replied, “and it shouldn’t be too hard to find somebody who knows where one of them is.”

  The next day I waited for Pat Scanlan to drive his stage into town. He and I had not discussed Smith’s death, but now I brought the subject up.

  “I wish it hadn’t happened that way, but it can’t be helped now,” I said. “It was just one of those things.”

  “It was,” Scanlan agreed. “When he took a job like that, he knowed others might want their toin at shootin’.”

  I took no notice of this admission that he had known Smith was in the vicinity, but he wanted to get the record straight. “If he’d been tryin’ to bother the line, I would have told you,” he said. “You know that, Baltimore.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said, holding a light for the cigar I had given him. “Look, Pat; do you think it’s fair that a good gambling joint — and one that’s kept by a friend of mine, too — should be hoorahed, when nobody bothers some of the stores in town at all?”

  “And some of them,” Scanlan reflected, “kept by stuck-up dudes who wouldn’t have taken a drink at Christ’s last supper.” He moved the cigar to one corner of his mouth and gazed past me into the distance. “What’re you thinkin’ about?”

  “I’m not really thinking; I’m just wondering,” I told him. “For instance, I was wondering what some bunch of fellows might want for riding their horses into Bradford’s store; his, anyhow, and maybe a couple of others. Is there a regular rate for that kind of work?”

  While I was talking I pulled several hundred-dollar bills out of my pocket. “It would be a good idea if they picked a saloon or two also, leaving out both the Happy Hunting Ground and the Glory Hole. Or do you think they’d mind?”

  “I don’t know them guys, so I couldn’t guess how they’d figger.” Scanlan put four hundred in one pocket and the fifth bill I handed him in another. “They wouldn’t do a thing like that just any day, if they was to do it at all?”

  “Well, if I had anything to say about it, I’d pick four or five days from now, Pat.”

  Now that Blackfoot Terry had returned, I felt free to take my eyes off the current situation momentarily. That night I let it be known that I had business in Tucson, and the next day I did go there. It was a city where I had many acquaintances, dating from my stagecoach-driving days. One of these was a fellow called John Phelps, who worked for the Tucson Citizen, and I arranged for him to keep me posted about news wired in from Dead Warrior.

  On the morning of the fourth day following my conversation with Pat, I dropped in to see Phelps on my way to a late breakfast. He was busy but raised his lean face from a mass of copy he was checking over.

  “There was a little excitement in your town yesterday afternoon, Carruthers. A bunch of cow hands shot up some stores, just for devilment apparently. I never knew them to pick on much except saloons before.”

  “Dead Warrior’s different from other places,” I explained. “What paper did you get the wire from?”

  “Both the War Whoop and your Vigilante, but neither seemed to know what started it.”

  “Maybe I can find out,” I said.

  Back in Dead Warrior, my first act was to see how Dick Jackson had treated the incident. There was nothing intrinsically amusing in his account, but I chuckled as I read it. For once out of his depth, Dick hadn’t been sure whether this latest raid had been conducted by hirelings of his constituent, Charlie Barringer, or not. Contrary to practice, the War Whoop had th
erefore run a strictly factual story, while its editorial page had omitted any comment.

  The Vigilante had also failed in that respect, but I now set myself to supply the deficiency. Yet it was not upon the obstreperous visitors that I heaped my cant. It was on the citizenry of Dead Warrior, who, I averred, had brought this on themselves by their indifference, their shameful neglect of duty, their utter failure to assume community responsibility. I singled no group out, but I was pointing the finger of Cicero at the Catiline of my fellow vigilantes; and every man who had been at their last meeting would know it.

  It was with some difficulty that I kept myself industriously writing after the paper had hit the street. It was with even greater difficulty that I looked surprised when Bradford, Holt and a couple of others entered my office. Eben was embarrassed, yet he wasn’t the man to let a thing like that stand in the way of what he had to do in order to get what he wanted.

  “You were right and we were wrong,” he said, smashing the ice with a thoroughness I couldn’t help admiring. “These fellows aren’t just cowboys celebrating a holiday. Furthermore, the recent incident disallowed my theory that the Happy Hunting Ground was the only target. These rascals are a threat to the prosperity and welfare of the whole town, and one which we can’t expect the marshal and his handful of deputies to handle.”

  “What do you think we should do?” I asked.

  Bradford and those with him looked at one another. “At that meeting last week,” Holt reminded me, “I thought you indicated that you had some plan yourself. Didn’t you say something about trapping them?”

  “Just what was I about to suggest then?” I wondered aloud. “Oh, yes. Maybe one of you will have a better idea, and if so, I’ll be for it; but this is what occurred to me after I watched them make their getaway at the time Peters was murdered. They dashed south down Apache Street, which I’m told is the way they came. My idea is to keep watch for any body of approaching horsemen, standing ready to block the street behind them with a loaded hayrick or something.”

  “But suppose we block off a peaceful party of cow hands?” Bradford asked.

  “Then they won’t have any trouble with us,” I said.

  Although he disliked the vigilante movement, wherever found, McQuinn approved of my scheme also. “This once I’ll play along with your stranglers,” he promised me, “because it seems the only way of rounding up the back-shooters who got Droop-eye. How soon are they due again, do you think?”

  “Any day,” I said. “My guess is that Barringer will capitalize on the show Scanlan staged and will try to wreck Gay’s joint this time. Probably they’ll try to kill you, too, now that you’ve taken the colonel’s place.”

  It was in both our minds that the outlaws might not boggle at shooting Dolly, but neither of us mentioned that. “You’re probably not popular with them yourself,” McQuinn said, after a moment’s pause.

  Our fears for Dolly were groundless, as the raiders came in the morning, when she was seldom abroad. I was helping Sam check receipts at the Anything Goes, when one of our horse boys dashed in. He had been posted on the roof of the Arizona Hotel, which was the highest eminence in town, barring a church steeple or so.

  “There’s a mob riding toward Sometimes Crick, south of town,” he cried. “Sixteen, Mr. Carruthers.”

  I sent the word around, although it might well be a false alarm. Cow hands were always riding in and out of town, and they had a tendency to go in packs when on holiday. Nevertheless, my hunch was that this was the enemy, attempting to catch us off guard by picking such an early hour.

  Terry was out of bed when I went to the Apache House, in order to arouse him, but he annoyed me by insisting on shaving. “We’ve got plenty of time,” he said. “Have the bar send me up a drink when you go down to see about our horses, will you, Baltimore?”

  There was plenty of time, just as he had said there would be. McQuinn and I had finished checking arrangements ten minutes before the whooping and shooting began. When it did, we rode down an alley feeding into Apache Street, though not with the intention of interfering. What we had agreed upon was to let them fire off as much ammunition as they would.

  From our vantage point at the mouth of the alley we could see that the invaders were doing a good job of imitating cow hands making roughly merry. Twice I saw groups riding into stores, waving bottles and yelling like panthers before the whole push rambled toward the crossing of Apache Street and Beaver Lodge. Here, where four corners were splendid with the Arizona Hotel, the Glory Hole, the Apache House and the Happy Hunting Ground, was the heart of Dead Warrior.

  The invaders betrayed their true purpose by ignoring Barringer’s place and making in a body for Gay’s saloon. Not finding it open, they shot out the big front windows and splintered the door; but the fact that the saloon was locked must have suggested to some of them that they were expected. At any rate, a cease-fire order was given, and with a final chorus of howls they turned to speed back along Apache.

  That was when the ball began. A couple of blocks south of Beaver Lodge, a loaded ore wagon was drawn across the street. Trying to edge around it, the leading rider had his horse shot out from under him.

  Discovery of ambuscade turned the raiders in the other direction. Looking past where McQuinn and I waited, they could see a load of hay being backed out of a livery stable. Really hurrying now, they whirled around the corner into Beaver Lodge and the trouble which confronted them there.

  “They’ll scatter now,” Terry said. “Let’s see what we can pick up.”

  Shots told us that the invaders had tried to fight their way past the third barrier. We heard the yells of wounded men and the screams of injured horses. Next we heard the galloping of hoofs moving in all directions. True to McQuinn’s prediction, the enemy was trying to escape by sifting through the side streets and alleys.

  Having trotted east two squares, we found three men charging toward us. We turned them with a volley, and then swung back.

  “One’s heading down the next street,” I cried.

  A rider spurted out of it just as I spoke. We couldn’t have missed him at that range; but we were after men who could talk, and if we had shot his horse, running at full tilt as it was, the fellow might have foiled us by breaking his neck.

  I wasn’t sure just how we were going to capture him, but McQuinn said something in Blackfoot, as he sometimes did when excited. “Here’s where I count coup,” he called, wheeling his horse and giving it the spurs. “Cover me when I dump him!”

  Partly from taste and partly because he never knew when he might have to leave any given place in a hurry, Terry always rode the best of horses. The man he now chased had a good mustang under him, yet it was no match for the racing pace of the gambler’s steed.

  The fugitive, a long, lithe hellion who’d grow a better beard when he got a few years older, turned his red whiskers over his shoulder when he heard McQuinn’s horse pounding nearer. “He’s going to shoot!” I yelled, jumping Spanish Monte over a box someone had tossed into the alley.

  I raised my own gun, as I saw the raider’s revolver swinging back toward us, but neither he nor I got off a shot. Terry fired instead. The gun which had menaced him dropped. The man who had been holding it yelped with pain and turned once more to urge his horse onward.

  It was a futile attempt. Feeling McQuinn’s horse running up his back, the raider swerved his mount to cut him off. To execute that maneuver, he had to slacken speed a second and Terry swept up on the other side.

  What the red-bearded fellow expected was death at point-blank range. Unable to switch the reins to his maimed right hand, he dropped them and was using his left to reach for a second pistol when the gambler caught him from the saddle with an Indian whoop of triumph.

  “Drop him!” I shouted, slowing to avoid running over the fellow.

  Blackfoot Terry obeyed me. He had slowed himself, meanwhile, so that his captive did not have too hard a fall. The man tumbled over but rose, still minded to use tha
t second gun of his. By that time, though, I was afoot and on top of him.

  Bringing him back to the roundup on Beaver Lodge, we found four other more or less healthy prisoners, two in no condition for questioning and one dead man, his back broken when his horse fell with him. Half of the invaders had escaped, but we had caught enough for our purpose.

  We made no delay. It was all but hot upon the mesa when the fitful December wind wasn’t blowing. When it did blow, it raked our bones and made the old mining hoist from which we had hanged Ace Ferguson creak.

  After a lariat was suspended from it, I held the noose in my hand, as I stepped before the prisoners. “You men are guilty of entering our city not as fellow citizens of this country but as an armed foe. You have willfully destroyed property and the means by which some of us make a living. You have fired bullets both promiscuously and with aim. wounding two men today and endangering the lives of many more.”

  “We was just havin’ some fun until you fellows started shootin’ at us,” a skinny, scar-faced man muttered.

  “Probably you won’t think it fun to be strung up,” I said, “and we won’t enjoy the stringing. But we’ll go through with it unless you tell us who put you up to this raid and those other two, during which one resident of this town barely escaped being killed, while another was actually murdered.”

  “Aw, we was never in your damn camp before,” another of the outlaws protested.

  “How about it, Ham?” I asked.

  The saloonkeeper inspected each in turn. “I remember you from the second time,” he stated, jabbing a finger at the scar-faced chap. “You was one of the ones that stayed out to cover us while your pardners went in the gambling room to get Droop-eye.” Gay turned to me. “That’s all I’m sure of, Baltimore, though I think this half-breed was along one of the times.”

  “That’s good enough.” I took my stand in front of the scar-faced fellow. “Tell us who paid you or hang.”