by Howard Blum
Now it was Charlie’s turn. After tying his horse, he climbed high up into the rocks and then jumped. He landed in the arroyo on his left side. Once again there was a distinct impression in the sand. As he led his horse by its bridle back up to the trail, he dragged his left leg across the sand; he wanted to make sure the boot and horseshoe prints would be easy to follow.
Once he was back on the rocky trail, Charlie went to work on his “crippled” left leg. He pulled off his left boot and ripped the seam of his pants leg nearly to his knee. He had a pair of woolen drawers on underneath and he rolled the left leg up above his knee, making sure that it was as tight as possible. This checked the flow of blood, and in only a minute or two his knee swelled and turned red. Satisfied, he gave his “crippled” knee a harsh rubbing with dry grass before, for good measure, pouring some of the whiskey from the bottle he had purchased over the damage. Then he tied his left boot to his saddle, mounted, and rode slowly toward a large grove of cottonwood timber on the Laramie River.
IT WAS open, flat land, and at the edge of the grove Charlie spotted a clutter of log houses. Smoke was swirling out of the chimneys and rising up into a gray evening sky heavy with snow clouds. Charlie couldn’t help thinking that if anyone had a mind to shoot, he’d be an easy target.
But no shots were fired. Instead, as Charlie got closer, one man emerged from the cabin and walked to the fence by the front gate. He leaned against it nice and casual, but all the time he kept his eyes locked on the approaching rider. Soon enough he was joined by about a dozen others. Charlie held the horse to a steady, slow pace and kept riding toward the cowboys. He reeled a bit in the saddle as though drunk, but at this point it was all acting. The long row of outlaws was a sight that had sobered him up in a flash.
When Charlie was about sixty yards from the gate, he drew rein as one of the cowboys stepped forward. He was a fine-looking six-footer, and apparently he was the boss; later Charlie would learn that this indeed was Tom Hall. “What the hell are you doing here?” he barked. At the same time Hall held up a hand signaling that Charlie had gone far enough.
“Broke my leg,” Charlie explained somewhat plaintively. “I could sure use some help.”
Curious, the whole gang rushed forward and gathered round him. The next thing Charlie knew, arms were gingerly lifting him off his horse, while Hall, his voice full of concern, was asking how it had happened. They carried Charlie into the main house and seated him in front of a log blazing in a large stone fireplace. The light lit up the room, and in the glow Charlie couldn’t help noticing that each of his saviors wore a pistol on his hip.
They were suspicious. Soon as Charlie was seated, Hall crouched down to examine the damage. The tightly rolled-up long johns were keeping Charlie’s knee swollen, and in the glowing firelight Hall also noticed the long scar a large-caliber bullet had traced across Charlie’s knee years earlier. When Hall asked about it, Charlie truthfully told him, “You should’ve seen what happened to the shooter.” That brought a small, approving smile to Hall’s face.
Nevertheless, with a great concentration the outlaw continued probing and pressing Charlie’s knee. He asked Charlie to wiggle his toes, and Charlie obeyed. After all, the last thing he wanted was for them to take him to a doctor. There was some more energetic pressing of the leg muscle, along with a good deal of bending and twisting of Charlie’s knee, and in the end Hall finally came around to deciding that nothing was broken. The leg was either badly sprained or out of joint. He instructed one of his men to fetch some hot water and a towel.
As he was carefully wrapping Charlie’s knee with the towel, he continued his questioning. How’d you happen to leave the Douglas trail and find your way here? Hall demanded.
Charlie explained that his clumsy horse had stumbled off the trail. Course, he added, with some embarrassment, my having a drink or two might’ve played a part. Hall listened; his face revealed nothing. Why’d you leave Texas anyway? he went on.
“Why,” said Charlie with a sly smile, “the people of Texas tried to get me to stay. They even followed me to the Red River on the Indian Territory border, they were so determined that I stay.” The image of Charlie’s being chased to the state line by a posse got some sympathetic laughs from the outlaws.
But Hall had already dealt with three detectives, and while they surely weren’t cowboys like this stranger, they’d told some good stories, too. He still had his doubts. He dispatched two men with a lantern to examine the spot where Charlie claimed his horse had taken a tumble. Another two rode off to the Howards’ saloon to see if that part of Charlie’s story was also true.
While they waited for the men to return, Hall applied a dose of liniment to Charlie’s damaged leg and then proceeded to roll several bandages so tightly around the knee that now walking was truly impossible. And all the time, Charlie’s heart was racing. No one had removed his big Colt from the holster on his hip, but he didn’t relish the prospect of shooting it out with a pack of Texas outlaws. His only hope if things got scaly would be to nail Hall with his first bullet and then maybe the rest would lose their will. But looking at those hard faces, Charlie knew it was a hope that had no real chance of playing out. He’d just have to kill as many of them as he could before they got around to shooting him dead.
At about ten o’clock the boys returned. They’d found the tracks where Charlie’s horse had gone over the edge. Lucky he hadn’t broke his neck, they told Hall. The Howards had confirmed Charlie’s story, too. Judging by the foolish manner in which Charlie had ridden off through the woods, the saloonkeeper said, he was not at all surprised to hear about the busted leg. Hell, he’d expected to learn that the drunken cowboy had gotten himself killed.
Hall listened to the two reports, and then invited Charlie to stay until his leg healed. “If you’re a detective,” he said without a hint of threat in his voice, “you won’t be able to keep from showing it. Course, then we’ll just take you out to a tree and hang you up by the neck.”
ACCUSTOMED TO cowboy ways, Charlie settled without difficulty into the gang’s workday routine. A few of the boys, though, couldn’t put their suspicions aside. Johnny Franklin, a bowlegged Texan who had escaped from the Huntsville penitentiary, was the worst. He was always giving Charlie hard looks, waving his pistol in Charlie’s face, and warning how he wouldn’t think twice about shooting a scheming detective right between the eyes. Hall’s tact was to play foxy. He had a habit of feeling Charlie out, trying to find out more about him. Since Charlie had spent a large part of his life riding the Texas plains, he didn’t need to invent too much.
Truth was, Charlie loved the subterfuge. He’d always displayed a disregard for danger; it went hand in hand with a natural confidence that bordered on being downright cocky. He felt that living in close quarters with a gang of killers required nothing more than some careful playacting. Not that he wasn’t cautious; he slept with his Colt under his pillow and a belt loaded with bullets slung across one shoulder, beneath his long johns. But he was never agitated. And being the cowboy detective, going undercover to infiltrate a gang of outlaws—well, Charlie relished his new calling. Making his way each day on the Keeline Ranch through the tight situations gave him a measure of prideful satisfaction.
Yet there was still no sign of Bill McCoy, the fugitive who had gunned down the deputy. When the gang rode the forty miles into Fort Laramie for a ranch dance, Charlie told ’em his bum leg ruled out any possibility of his dragging a gal around the floor. Instead he bought a bottle of whiskey and checked into a hotel.
He spent most of the night writing letters. The first was his report to the Denver office. He explained that he’d infiltrated the gang and had won their confidence. But he would need more time, months perhaps, to get them to reveal the whereabouts of McCoy. Anyways, the ranch was crawling with fugitives with prices on their heads. The agency could collect some sizable reward money by the time this case was completed. He asked the superintendent to authorize an extended operation, saying he s
hould write back care of the hotel in Fort Laramie. Charlie promised he’d return in two weeks to receive the reply.
After sealing the letter, he found a new piece of paper and began, “My dearest Mamie.” His wife’s absence was the single unsatisfactory part of his new life. It pierced him, affecting him in a way he not anticipated. Bullet wounds, he knew from experience, stung like the dickens, but they had always healed. This pain lingered, flashing through his mind without warning and leaving him suddenly unsettled. Nights, though, were the worst. He also felt guilty about leaving Mamie on her own in Denver to care for their little daughter. A husband had a responsibility to be with his family. He ached to give his child bride and daughter a hug. And so he composed a letter that even as he wrote the words left him feeling that he was doing something reckless. Perhaps it was even a mistake. But he didn’t consider putting down his pen. If the consequences proved dangerous, he told himself, he and his big Colt would just have to put things right.
He instructed Mamie to take the train to Fort Laramie, along with Viola, and check into the hotel. She was to pretend that she was a widow. He’d be coming by in two weeks to the day. Either he’d have received instructions to return to Denver and they’d make the trip back home together or Mamie and the baby could stay in Fort Laramie for a spell and he’d figure out a way to visit.
With a pang of anticipation, he sealed the letter to his wife. Early the next morning, while the gang was still sleeping off its drunk, he went down to the post office and mailed the two letters. Careful to favor his supposedly crippled left leg, he walked slowly back to the hotel and his fellow outlaws. Soon as everyone sobered up, they’d be riding back to the ranch. Charlie’s mind, though, was focused on Denver and a woman with long black hair, which she brushed with a diligent one hundred strokes each night before she went to bed. It would be a long two weeks.
IT WAS little Viola who nearly gave him away. She had been instructed not to call Charlie “Papa,” but the child kept making the mistake. No one in Fort Laramie thought it strange that Charlie would be courting the pretty young widow, but when Viola called him “Papa” in the hotel dining room, a few eyebrows were raised. “Girl’s rushing things a bit, I reckon,” Charlie exclaimed with a good-natured grin, and that seemed to amuse everyone, as well as put an end to any questions.
And getting to Fort Laramie had proved to be no problem. The first time he rode off, he told Hall the truth: He was heading in to pick up his mail. Of course, he didn’t say that the letter he expected would be from the superintendent of the Denver Pinkerton office. Nor, upon reading the letter, did he he explain that he’d received authorization for an extended operation: He’d been instructed to stay undercover for as long as was required to ascertain McCoy’s whereabouts. And after Charlie had the good fortune to make the acquaintance in the hotel parlor of the pretty widow with the young daughter, none of the gang was the least suspicious about his weekly trips to town. They were simply jealous.
The hard part for Charlie was all the nocturnal sneaking about. He felt it was a funny business for a man to have to tiptoe through a dark hotel hallway to his wife’s bedroom. But he knew it would cause a scandal if he got caught going into the young widow’s room. As it was, the landlady of the hotel was advising Mamie that Charlie was part of a gang of outlaws and dance hall loafers and she would do well not to associate with him. Mamie and Charlie had a good laugh over that.
They enjoyed a lot of other laughs, too, in their days and nights together. It was as if in Fort Laramie they’d become two different people, the tough outlaw and the young widow, and all the playacting gave their time together a new spark. It was a very happy interlude. Yet Charlie couldn’t help growing a bit anxious about Mamie’s cough. She said it was just a spring cold, but it didn’t seem to be getting any better. He made her promise to consult a doctor as soon as she was back in Denver.
When he wasn’t in Fort Laramie, Charlie was leading another life back at the ranch. The gang had come to accept him as one more Texan on the run from the law. They bragged to him about the crimes they’d committed and the jails they’d broken out of. Hall confided that he had ridden with Joe Fowler, a cold-blooded outlaw who had shot a cowboy in the head in Bill Hudgen’s Pioneer Saloon and who’d wound up being hung by a mob in Socorro, New Mexico. They would’ve strung him up too, Hall explained, but his horse was too fast. And Hall finally got around to telling him about his friend Bill McCoy’s great escape. It was Hall’s plan, and it was an escapade he was mighty proud of.
Once McCoy was sentenced to hang, Hall contacted a slick jailbreaker from back east he’d come across in his travels. He paid him $500. The easterner then went off to commit a petty crime and got himself locked up in the Cheyenne jail. Which was also part of the plan, because the easterner had secreted a pair of saw blades in the soles of his shoes. Late at night as the sheriff slept, he sawed through the bars of the jailhouse window. McCoy squeezed through, and then ran to the horse Hall had left saddled for him in an alleyway. He rode straight out to the Keeline Ranch, picked up some provisions, and then hid out in the surrounding hills. There was a sheriff’s posse with one hundred men scouring the territory, but they never found McCoy. He even snuck up on their camp one night and made off with a large bay. Few days after that, Hall went on, McCoy mounted Hall’s pet roan racehorse and, using the bay as a packhorse, he rode on to New Orleans. From there, McCoy boarded a sailing ship to Buenos Aires.
Charlie didn’t know whether to believe Hall. An outlaw hightailing it all the way to South America to avoid the sheriff struck him as a pretty fanciful notion. But a week later Hall showed him a letter he had received from his old buddy postmarked Buenos Aires, and Charlie realized he wasn’t being snookered. McCoy had written to ask Hall to join him; they’d ride together like in the old days. McCoy had hooked up with some outlaws in cattle country, and he provided the name of a dentist in Buenos Aires who could lead Hall to their camp. When Hall asked Charlie if he’d like to head out with him and some of the other boys to try their luck at the rich pickings in Argentina, Charlie realized he had to act quickly.
He rode into Fort Laramie that day and told Mamie it was time to head on back to Denver. And he sent a telegram to the Denver office.
Three days later at daybreak, a large posse on horseback surrounded the Keeline Ranch. At the same time, a group of deputies had crawled up to the cabins and had their Winchesters cocked and ready. Hall considered the situation, and ordered his men to surrender. Along with the others, Charlie walked out of the cabin with his hands high in the air.
At the Cheyenne jail, though, they let Charlie go. When Hall saw Charlie walking off, he suddenly understood. He flew into a rage, screaming how he’d get even, how he’d hunt Charlie down if it was the last thing he did. He just couldn’t believe he’d been taken in by a detective.
CHARLIE SPENT a week in Cheyenne making his report to District Attorney Skoll. He had collected a good deal of information over the months, and the district attorney needed all of it to prepare his case for the grand jury.
When he finished up with Skoll, Charlie sold his horse and saddle and boarded a train for Denver. His reunion with Mamie and Viola was a happy one, and he and his wife shared a laugh about the illicit romance between the young widow and the outlaw in Fort Laramie. Still, Charlie was troubled. Mamie’s cough had grown more persistent. And now there was blood in her sputum. Whenever she coughed, her handkerchief carried a deep red stain.
NINE
uring his long months vagabonding about the West, Soapy had ample opportunity to think about his time in Denver. These memories were instructive. With hindsight, he began to understand his mistakes. Soapy decided his ambitions had been too trivial. The schemes of a circus grifter like his mentor Clubfoot Hall had been tawdry inspirations. It was no longer sufficient, he came to realize, to control a gang of petty thieves.
Like Charlie Siringo, Soapy saw that the West had changed. Certainly, people would always be fools; there’d b
e no end to the marks who’d believe they could get something for nothing. But all across the civilized new West you could also count on some snooty clique of merchants or do-gooders who’d get the ear of the mayor or the district attorney, and then life for a sporting gentleman like himself would become a continual series of annoyances, harassments, and arrests. There was only one way to guarantee real security and real prosperity: You had to own the entire town. City hall, the police, the courts, as well as the gambling parlors—everything had be under your control.
With these imperial principles occupying his mind, Soapy’s life on the run took him to a remote winding canyon high up in the San Juan Mountains, about 250 miles southwest of Denver. He surveyed the spreading assemblies of tents. He strode through the muddy main street. He heard the constant pounding of hammers and the grinding of saws. He observed the army of hopeful men crowding the narrow valley, prospectors whose dreams were inspired by glittering visions similar to the ones that filled George Carmack’s head. And Soapy knew: He’d found the perfect place to realize the culmination of all his previous endeavors. He would build his empire.
When Soapy came to Creede in 1890, there was no government, no law. There were just people flocking in, as many as three hundred every day, and money pouring out; in a month, as much as $1 million in silver ore could be mined. The town was wild and booming, and it had all started less than a year earlier with the Holy Moses.
“Holy Moses!” Nicholas Creede had exclaimed when he saw the gleaming vein of silver his pickax had unearthed. Along with his partner, he’d spent the summer working a mine above Wagon Wheel Gap, a steep, twisting river canyon, but he’d never before seen anything like this. By the time the mine was sold that winter for $75,000 to the president of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, the claim had become known as the Holy Moses, the town had been renamed Creede, a railroad bed was being laid up the valley, and prospectors were charging in. It seemed as if whenever a miner cleared away a layer of rock from any of the nearby cliffs, silver was discovered. Or at least that was the story, remarkably more truth than rumor, spreading throughout the West.
