We were returning from an inspection of the palms on the university campus at the time. I had had a few of the trees shipped in from the Coast, and they now stood in isolated grandeur on the shoulder of Beaver Lodge Butte. The water system could not be set up until Bedlington made the funds available; but I had acquired one of the old water wagons that used to serve the town, and the palms seemed to be doing well.
What I had in mind, as a capper for our drive, was supper together in a new restaurant that had opened, but Faith had a different idea. “Let’s call on your friends the Potters,” she suggested, when we were halfway back to Dead Warrior.
Startled, I glanced at her, to see if she meant it. “Would you really like that?”
Her answering smile was at once intimate and mocking. “If they’re friends of yours, of course I’d like to, and you needn’t act so surprised. I’ve already met Mrs. Potter, you know.”
That I remembered, but it didn’t seem to me that the encounters had resulted in cordial relations. I was still debating what to do when Faith dropped a remark which rocked me like a blast of black powder.
“I think Mrs. Potter is going to join our church.”
“Hangtown Jennie?” I said the name before I thought, but Faith apparently didn’t hear me.
“The Methodists and the Presbyterians have been after her, too, but Father has been talking to her, and he’s very persuasive.”
Roads presented no problem on the mesa, because the whole surface, where not marred by ledges and mining operations, was suited to vehicular travel. In stunned silence I turned the horses so that they would head for the Potter mansion.
“Is Mr. Potter supposed to be joining, too?” I asked, when we were once more rolling forward.
“No, but he must be an old dear from what I have heard.” Faith giggled as she gave the Reverend Foster’s report on his conversation with Seth. “He told Father that the medicine lodge his wife picked out could count on plenty of bullion.”
While Seth was showing Faith around the house, I took occasion to quiz Jennie about the matter. “Faith tells me that you’re thinking of getting religion,” I said.
“Well, I’m gettin’ too old to move around, and keepin’ girls ain’t the best racket here no more.” Straightening a highly colored visualization of The Wreck of the Hesperus, she flopped down into a rocking chair with red plush upholstering. “I’ve always been used to bein’ at the top of the heap, and that’s where church folks are in this camp. You likely wouldn’t notice it so much, bein’ a man, but it was gettin’ hard to find somebody that’d speak to me decent. Well, if you can’t lick ’em, jine ’em, as the sayin’ is; but it’s better to make them give you the invite, so as long as me and Seth hit it off all right, I got hitched to him.”
Rocking, Jennie picked up a pair of knitting needles, examined the half dozen or so stitches they held and put them down again. “There ain’t nothin’ like bein’ made an honest woman of by a man with a lot of rocks, Baltimore. I can’t remember that anybody in this town ever took his hat off to me except you and old Droop-eye, but you better believe they do it now; and that banker — he’s a deacon in one of these religious spreads that are after me, though I forget which brand he wears — don’t even have to touch his. It just hops off at sight of me.”
Not many days later the railway crews moved on to use a more easterly point as operation headquarters. We rejoiced to see Louseville fold and leave on the flatcars rolling toward another terminus city; but we were startled by the sudden departure of thousands of people. Dead Warrior had never lost population before. It was accustomed to talk in terms of more people and new enterprises every week. Neither the War Whoop nor the Vigilante commented on the slower tempo of the town and the emptier streets.
For Sam and myself the progress of the railroad meant the fading away of our freighting operation. The Carruthers and Wheeler stage line had long been out of business, its horses and rolling stock sold to a Phoenix concern, and its mail and express franchises transferred to the Southern Pacific.
“We might go in for ranching,” I suggested, when Sam and I were discussing how to reinvest our money.
“I veto that,” Wheeler said promptly. “It would mean spending part of our time racking around the prairie, singeing the behinds of cows that have done us no warranting injury. Besides, I’d never make it home to dinner.”
“It didn’t take long to housebreak you,” I commented.
“It was the quickest abdication from freedom since man’s best friend sneaked into a cave man’s hacienda to get warm,” Sam confessed, “but Mary doesn’t dream she’s only got a has-been frontiersman.” Pulling out one of his gray hairs, Wheeler admired it and dropped it on the floor. “Ours is a perfect mating, Baltimore, and it all comes of marrying a somewhat spinsterishly inclined schoolteacher. Actually I’ve reached the age when I don’t want to devote more than one day a week to hangovers; but the wee wife thinks she’s caught a wild man who’s sacrificing his baser instincts on the altar of as pure a love as can be expected of a ruffian, so I’d disappoint her if I didn’t have occasional lapses.”
“Well, get a lapse out of your desk,” I advised, “and tell me what you think we should do after closing up this depot.”
“Your cattle idea isn’t bad,” Sam said, when we had tossed down the drinks and lighted cigars, “but I like being at the town end of it. Now that Louseville has left our homegrown bordellos standing in lonely glory, there’s space along the other side of the tracks which could be used for a feeding and loading operation.”
“It will be so used,” I agreed, “but don’t expect me to come near it except to get reports on how well we’re doing, to publish in the Vigilante.” I smoked a moment, preparatory to introducing a new subject. “As soon as the S. P. makes connections with the Santa Fe, Dead Warrior will be a natural stopping point for good road companies moving between Chicago, St. Louis and the Coast,” I began. “What do you say we sell the Anything Goes and build a legitimate theater?”
“Well, at least it would be a place I could admit to Mary that I’ve got shares in it,” Wheeler reflected, “but where would we put it? Downtown property’s expensive.”
“It doesn’t have to be on Apache Street, Sam. East out Beaver Lodge is better for the carriage trade. I’ve already picked a lot, as a matter of fact, and — oh, hello, Jackson.”
Dick and I had eschewed each other’s company for months. Now, though, he pulled up a chair close to me, after he had helped himself to the whiskey.
“The feud’s over; and I’m sorry, because you and I had the best newspaper war I was ever in, Baltimore.” He looked both excited and dazed. “I could scoop you on one last story, but it’s too good to keep, so I’ve come over to smoke the pipe of peace before I pack up.”
Not even willing to guess what the trouble was, I held my breath while Sam did the probing. “You can’t be leaving,” Wheeler exclaimed. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that the word from Prescott is that we’re finally going to be allowed to hold our first election of officers next month; and your temporary crew of administrative highbinders look a cinch to become permanent ones, now that you’ve sold the cribs down the river to New Orleans.”
“This isn’t politics.” Dick held his hands apart and brought them together with a loud popping sound. “The balloon’s busted. The Dead Warrior Mining Company has exploited most of its gold and will now delve for copper.”
In the back of my mind things I had heard, without understanding them, stirred uneasily. I refused to give them heed.
“But they’ve got other properties,” Wheeler protested.
“Primarily copper properties,” Dick said, “and don’t ask about Pan-Western, because Bedlington’s bought out its holdings, along with those of the other mining outfits.”
I spoke for the first time then, and my tones were those of a child fighting to retain belief in a cherished myth. “But there was gold, Dick. What happened?”
“There was quit
e a lot of gold,” Jackson said wearily. “I said the things you two did when Weaver gave me the story. Then when he’d convinced me, I looked up Duncan — who’s been with Bedlington for some months, you know — and got a geological explanation.
“According to Duncan,” Dick went on, when Sam had furnished him with a cigar, “there was enough loose gold and scattered lodes of it around to keep a lot of prospectors in faro money, but there was only one big deposit — fairly broad at the top but narrowing as it got deeper, something like a pyramid upside down. Old Seth happened to kill his Indian right in the middle of it, so the Dead Warrior claim was the richest, while those right around it were rich in diminuendo. But underneath the gold, miners sooner or later came to copper. There’s still some precious stuff, of course, but it will mostly come to light bit by bit and over the years, as Bedlington works first one section and then another of his monstrous repository of base metal.”
Having made my one expostulation, I couldn’t think of anything to say, but Wheeler was still trying to puzzle things out. “Why was everybody in cahoots to keep it secret?”
“They weren’t,” Dick said. “The prospectors didn’t know, while Pan-Western and the smaller professional outfits never talked about copper, because they weren’t interested in it. Horace Bedlington had his crew keep mum, of course, but mostly not on our account. Horace was glad to have Dead Warrior advertised as a gold field, so that no other copper tycoon would get wind of his big find. As long as he was in the area, he operated a profitable gold mine, because making profits is the way financiers make their living. Mainly, though, he was waiting for the Southern Pacific to come and move on east. Q. E. D., my brave companions in grief. The price of gold is high enough to float the cost of mining it in an isolated province, but the lesser metals can’t be profitably worked without rail connections with other parts of the country.”
Dead Warrior did not look the same to me when I walked back down Apache Street to write the Vigilante’s version of the news Jackson had passed on. It was no longer an island in a sea of gold at the flood, but one from which the aureate tides were slipping away, eventually to leave it stranded.
If that was merely a sentimental grievance, others were eating me. I thought of what I might have gleaned from Bedlington’s own words, had I but been alert. He had insisted upon specifying “gold” production in the contract he had signed to save himself from Seth Potter, and I had been so infatuated with the word that I had let it stand. Now, although Seth had already made enough to guarantee Hangtown Jennie a lifetime welcome at any church of her choosing, he would get only the dribbles of money realized on the residual gold from the mining field he had found.
My next thought was for the university and Bedlington’s promise, which he knew he wouldn’t have to fulfill. Disappointed in my hopes for Dead Warrior, I was also enraged at the remembrance of how I had been hoodwinked. Yielding to the good will which the tycoon had calculated to arouse by his grand gesture of fake benevolence, I had given his company the right of way for a railroad spur across my property.
I wrote to Dr. Hatfield the next day, telling him to dream no more unless he could find a substitute patron. Then I pulled myself together and looked to see what was left of the town.
Once I had assembled the facts, I cheered up somewhat. It seemed that Dead Warrior sat in the midst of the biggest copper field that exploiters of that increasingly valuable metal had ever discovered. There would be thousands more miners than had previously been employed thereabouts, for copper had to be mined on a much larger scale than gold. There would be a gigantic hoist, its steam power fired by the coal which the railroad had made available. There would be a new industrial development in the forms of a huge smelter and refinery.
Yet if new enterprises were promised, old ones were fading. “I can’t sell the good will,” Ham Gay said, “because nobody will want the Happy Hunting Ground, after the prospectors have finished blowing what they got for their marked-down claims. Me and Bill are going up to Leadville, where I hear the stakes are beginning to pile up.”
Gambling wasn’t one of the solid assets of a city, I made myself see, though I felt myself running short of friends in a place where I had once had so many. “What are you doing about the property, Ham?”
“Bradford’s buying it, though I’m taking the frog art and statues. I don’t know as he’d dare go in it alone, if I left them naked women in the joint.”
When the Happy Hunting Ground followed the Glory Hole and the dance halls off Apache Street, that thoroughfare presented a united mercantile front, broken only by the lesser saloons. I still patronized the Paradise Enow, although it had become the favorite haunt of the new crowd of copper mining engineers. They were a pleasant lot of fellows on the whole, but engrossed in shoptalk. Dead Warrior to them was just a place where they worked until their company should see fit to send them to some other operation. My position as one of the founders and prominent characters of the town was of no more interest to them than to the foreigners — skilled professionals imported from Wales and Germany in the main — whom they sweated underground.
Good miners the latter were avouched and good men they had to be, but I never got used to them in their anonymous thousands. It was for that reason that I stopped to study a shift of them coming off duty, as I was riding out to get some production figures from Duncan one day. Slouching along in the front rank was a man who avoided my eye when I caught his.
“Short-fuse!” I called.
For a few paces he walked as though determined to pay no attention. Seeing me dismount, however, he came toward me, black with the stains of work and sullen.
“I thought you’d pulled out with most of the other prospectors,” I told him, after we had walked aside a little.
“Nope.” He still wouldn’t look at me, and I knew what was bothering him. He felt he had lost face by becoming a copper miner. Yet by the time we were seated on a chunk of rock and had our smokes going, he’d thought of a way to defend himself. “I was going to haul my freight, but this outfit asked me to help ’em out for a while. I’m a top hand with black powder, you see — that’s how I got my name — and they knowed I could save ’em a lot of time by judgin’ the fuses just right.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “The only reason I asked is because I haven’t seen you in any of the saloons.”
“Not any of the ones you go in,” he said. “Just the ones for dirty shirts.” He was silent, following that pronouncement. Then he leaned forward, his arms on his knees. “Do you remember the early days of this camp, when most everybody was friends? No, I won’t ask you that. You do, or you wouldn’t have stopped to talk to me.”
Sighting a passing centipede, Short-fuse spat toward it. “We had a fine camp then, and if a man needed help with his claim or the shack he was buildin’, you’d pitch in and help him for nothin’. Or if you was thirsty and didn’t have the price, you’d stop the next fellow you’d meet and get a buck or so from him. Then you might give it back to him or you might not, dependin’ on whether or not you remembered it when you sobered up, but nobody cared. We talked an awful lot about gold in them days, but nobody gave a damn about money.
“The place is no good now,” he echoed Pete’s words, when he had taken that look at paradise lost. “It used to be that if a fellow was all right, that’s all there was to it, and nobody counted the patches on his pants. Now it’s a place where mean squirts ride high, if they can rattle a lot of cash; and nothin’ else matters.”
“What happened to your claim?” I asked, wishing to change the subject.
“Ah, who in hell wants a lousy copper claim?” Fingering the long scar on his face, Short-fuse snorted. “I won three of ’em at poker the night the news broke — makin’ four, countin’ the one I’d had all along. Well, I lost two the next night, and sold the other two, to throw a good drunk with. Then I took this job, so I could keep the whiskey comin’.”
Rising, he clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ve been boozin
’ too much, or I wouldn’t have stayed after the place went sour, though I wouldn’t admit it to myself until I seen you just now. I’ll look you up and buy you a shot before I hit the road.”
The day Short-fuse kept his promise had been set aside for the city’s first election of officers. The abrupt resignation of Mayor pro-tem Jackson and his entire administration had jolted the civic program, however. For one thing, the about-to-be issued city charter was withheld, while the mystified territorial officers reviewed the political situation at Dead Warrior.
In an effort to get things straightened out, the interim city commission, appointed to give the town some sort of government in the meantime, had gone to Prescott. Bradford, Holt, and others with whom I had been on short speaking terms since the dissolution of the vigilantes, were members of this body. I was staying late in the office, waiting for news of their success to be brought from the telegraph office, when Roy Sparks dropped in.
He had returned to town after Barringer’s death, so his visit did not greatly surprise me. His opening question did.
“Have you got word from the boys at Prescott yet, pardner?”
The miners excepted, everyone was interested in the city charter. What I found extraordinary was his comradely reference to such men as Holt and Bradford.
“Do you mean the city commission?” I asked, to make sure we had the same topic in mind.
“Yeah. Old Steve and Eben and that crowd.”
“There’s no word yet,” I said. “I hope there’ll be no further holdup on the charter.”
“There won’t be, Baltimore.” Sparks leaned against the wall, pushed back the flaps of his fancy vest and thrust his thumbs under his belt. “They took Horace along with ’em.”
The man I assumed he referred to had recently completed one of his flying visits to observe the progress of his fabulously large new enterprise. I hadn’t seen him, but the very thought of him nauseated me. Among other reasons I had received a piteous letter from Dr. Hatfield, asking what could be done about a bill for the services of a first-line architectural firm. In reply I had asked the doctor to send it to me.
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