“I know. I’m asking if you can identify it.”
“To what end?”
Hume took out his commission papers and his badge, shield-shaped pewter with WELLS, FARGO, & CO. engraved in arching letters on the top third and DETECTIVE across the center. It irked him that the dry-goods man gave only cursory reference to the former and concentrated on the latter. The papers were signed by the partners who’d founded the firm and notarized by a legal secretary in the governor’s office in Sacramento. The embossed seal alone was more difficult to counterfeit than a scrap of metal.
“Is it Black Bart?”
Hume felt his face darken another shade. Despite all the measures he’d taken to maintain the bandit’s anonymity outside his office, the name was too melodramatic to remain in-house. How soon before street talk made it into print, and Bart’s verse leapt into the lead column? His jabbery staff was in for a thunderous shaking-out.
From another pocket he drew a drawstring bag and spilled out its contents next to the shotgun shell. There were sixteen, each the size of a cherry pit and made of blackened lead. Some were squashed and flattened by contact with cartilage and bone, but most retained their original spherical shape.
“A sheriff’s posse dug them out of a horse slain on the Redding road. That shell was found at the scene.”
“It’s buckshot, sure enough. Whether these came from that—”The shopkeeper pointed from the leaden pellets to the paper tube. He rolled a beefy shoulder.
Hume had come away from the office with his pockets sagging. He held up another shell similar to the first, except the end opposite the ferrule was crimped and sealed, heavy with shot, the brass shone bright yellow, and the red dye was as vivid as the pip on the ace of hearts. The same information was stenciled on the paper. “We confiscated this from a man currently in custody.” He broke it in half egg-fashion and dumped the unfired shot like coriander seeds beside the spent rounds. Some of them rolled off the edge of the surface and tap-tap-tapped on the cedar plank floor.
Callahan retrieved a square of slate-colored emory cloth from a shelf under the counter. He dropped a piece of the spent shot onto it, rubbed it vigorously inside the cloth, separated it, and examined it in the strong sunlight coming through the plate-glass window facing the street. He grunted, then picked up one of the shiny bits from the fresh shell, but this time he didn’t use the cloth. He held it up and compared it to the shot recovered from the slain horse; grunted again.
“I sell this kind. The manufacturer alloys the lead with copper; see it shine like gold when it’s new, and the same when it’s old and you polish it. Lead’s soft, butchering the flesh it hits; but the copper, being harder, bounces off bone and makes more mischief as it strays off course. That’s the story they give me to tell, and excuse the price.”
“A moment ago you weren’t so certain you could match it.”
“I wasn’t sure how far you intended to take the matter. A man has to protect his customers. What difference does one horse more or less make to me?”
“A man died as well. A load of shot like this one blew open his head like a melon. I would just as soon hang a man for keeping his mouth shut as for pulling the trigger on another. What difference does one storekeep more or less make to me?”
The Irishman’s face didn’t change. His father had been the first to break away from a long line of tenant farmers schooled by generations of behavior to refuse lord and Mother Nature the satisfaction of showing displeasure at their treatment; misery expressed led only to more torment. “I’m not the only one in town carries it.”
“The others said the same thing. They all kept records of the people they sold it to.”
Callahan grunted a third time and hoisted his account book onto the counter.
Hume came away with his evidence, but in a sourer mood than when he’d stepped into the shop. Snaring the wretches with their muzzy heads brazenly resting on stolen mail sacks had been enough to deny them their freedom; matching the buckshot to its purchasers merely gave the judge less of an excuse to turn them back into public congress earlier. It was running in place, is what it was, and scarcely a deterrent to others who would quite naturally consider themselves too clever to stumble so easily into capture. There were times when the job seemed less a matter of fighting crime than keeping a record of it. Bart, especially, would smirk; he’d already proven to belong to a different species from the garden-variety bush-ranger. Such as they who preyed on the Redding stage were men “the Po8” would not allow to lace his well-worn boots.
But, happier thought: Did Hume really wish for his man to take alarm and leave off pillaging entirely, never to be heard from in this life? That would be as unsatisfactory as tossing a feather down a well and waiting forever to hear the splash. Let the fellow grow bolder and bolder yet, and stack brick upon reckless brick until the structure collapsed out from under him. And God willing and the Company didn’t sack him, Hume would be waiting at the base holding a net.
Against his predictions—and, considering the result, to his intense displeasure—the Yreka-Redding stage robbery would not be buried on the inside pages of the Examiner and the Bee among the testimonials for St. Jacob’s Oil and genuine marble monuments. Instead it had the effect of catapulting Wells, Fargo, & Company’s chief of detectives into public notice. His scientific method of narrowing down the supplier of the bandits’ ammunition (for it was Dail Callahan, as confirmed by his account book) had added fresh seasoning to the stale subject of stage-road skullduggery, and for the first time the name of James B. Hume appeared prominently in print. It scarcely mattered that the man himself turned away all requests for interviews, and when he could not avoid them dampened their queries with monosyllabic responses (as opposed to driving them off with a stick). The knaves made up what they liked, and no one to catch them at it before the damage was done.
One man who found the items of interest read them in detail in his room in the Webb House, waiting for the steaming water in his basin to soak away the miseries of his feet. At that period in journalism, coarse newsprint would not accept a photograph. But staff artists, working mainly from descriptions supplied by observant reporters (“Mount Vanderbilt’s bald dome on R. B. Hayes’s face;” “Remove Horace Greeley’s eyeglasses and shave off his Mormon’s whiskers; that’s the fellow”), rendered fair likenesses of persons of celebrity, to be etched into zinc and transferred to the page as faithfully as the ruff round Lydia Pinkham’s neck.
Hume’s three-quarter profile sprang out at Bolton, causing him nearly to upset the basin in which he was soaking his feet. He thought he’d been found out, so close was the resemblance to himself. The caption steadied his pulse.
He settled himself down to a close study, like a Union general committing to memory the features of his Confederate counterpart, in order to know him from the outside in. He read of the detective’s discovery, by scientific method, of the source of a robber band’s ammunition; of the long roll of his past successes in bringing criminals to justice; amused himself with the legend of the headstone and the inscription that had since become the Company’s credo.
He read to the end of the column, then looked again at the face of his nemesis. The corners of his moustaches twitched upward. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Hume.”
Thereupon he toweled off, pulled on his stockings, and rose to retrieve his new walking boots from the wardrobe.
It was July 1878; nearly a year since Black Bart had made his last appearance.
EIGHT
Poets come in every sort,
bad, middling, and terrific;
but give them paper, time, and sport,
they’re apt to be prolific.
The owner of a walnut grove situated outside Yuba City piloted an elm wagon drawn by four laboring Percherons through the up-and-downest portion of Butte County, bearing a load of logs toward the sawmill at Berry Creek with a Winchester shotgun at his feet, one barrel loaded with salt, the other with Champion double-o bu
ck. Good hardwood was valuable in a country where towns sprang up like thistle, and he little thought bandits in that stretch would scruple against snaring a load of lumber, should they get bored while waiting for a stagecoach.
The horses, stout as they were—their bloodlines stretched back to the armored steeds of medieval jousts—slung strings of lather as they pulled the ponderous load through the summer heat, which despite the thinness of the mountain air was stifling. The bark on the logs drew clouds of gnats that clustered in their nostrils and the corners of their eyes, and deer flies attacked that particular delicacy, the back of a sweating man’s neck, to be swatted with a curse, rolled into pellets, and flung aside to make room for the next siege; but his oaths were halfhearted. He was saving the really profane kind for flightless vermin of the two-legged variety. If the sting of the salt didn’t discourage them, the lead pellets in the second barrel would settle the matter.
Thus, when he caught the rare sight of a stranger in a soiled linen duster seated on a boulder alongside the road, he leaned closer to the scattergun. They were near enough to the mill to smell the clean sharp scent of fresh-cut wood, and the road itself was paved so heavily with yellow chips it could pass for a slab of longhorn cheese.
The pilgrim looked up from the square of foolscap he was writing on with a thick carpenter’s pencil, touched the brim of an incongruous bowler hat, and returned to his scribbles. On the ground beside the boulder lay a bedroll, the blanket faded from its original red-and-black check to a dirty pink under a skin of dust. From the look of its lumpy contours, the lumberman assumed it contained all of the fellow’s possessions, and assigned to him the somewhat more common character in those parlous times of a vagabond drifting from one odd job to another. He straightened in his seat, leaving the weapon on the footboard. True, many of these tramps were far less inoffensive than popular lore painted them; but this one’s whiskers were tipped with gray, and his sagging features and the defeated slope of his shoulders made him more worthy of pity than fear. Certainly he made no move toward whatever was in his bundle. The scrap of paper braced on his thigh commanded all his attention. Had the light not been fleeting, and the grove owner in a more Christian mood, he might have tossed a handful of coppers the fellow’s way.
When, two hours later, he finished helping to unload in Berry Creek and the sawmill operator rubbed his hands at the quality of the delivery and estimated the profit to them both, he felt bad that he hadn’t been charitable; but the wastrel was gone by the time he headed back home along the same road.
Instead the man was asleep, swaddled in his blanket in a cedar copse fifty yards off, resting in preparation for a busy day beginning in the morning. Beside him lay his abbreviated shotgun, and in a pocket of his overalls was folded the piece of paper he’d been writing on earlier. The legend ran:
Here I lay me down to sleep,
to wait the coming morrow.
Perhaps success, perhaps defeat,
and everlasting sorrow.
Let come what will I’ll try it on,
my condition can’t be worse;
and if there’s money in that box
’tis munny in my purse.
—Black Bart, the Po8.
* * *
“Blast and damn!”
The curse was vehement, but not loud. After all, a man who persisted in working with his windows open to a busy street could not afford to be overheard spitting blasphemies like a drunken oaf in Sydneytown.
It was not commonly known, but Wells and Fargo placed only second behind the Pinkerton National Detective Agency in the employment of spies. Its operatives and informants burrowed deep into locations where they were least expected—not only in criminal gangs, silently recording the illegal enterprises in which they themselves performed as accomplices, but even in law enforcement, where they enforced the statutes they were appointed or elected to defend while furnishing regular reports to Jim Hume regarding persons and events exclusively of interest to the Company. One of these sub rosa agents, a paid-up member of the Printers Guild, had toiled for years in the press room at the Eureka, a San Francisco newspaper with a mammoth circulation.
“Is it extravagant?” John Valentine had complained. “Intelligence from lawmen and outlaws is one thing, prevaricating journalists another. To what gain? An hour’s start on every farm wife and harness maker with two coppers in his pocket?”
“And on the thieves who scavenge our shipments, don’t forget,” Hume had replied. “A good horse moving at a brisk canter travels ten miles in sixty minutes, trailing men who don’t know what we know, and so are advancing at an easy walk.”
“Evidently, you and I are acquainted with an entirely different breed of horse.”
Hume stepped around this disgruntled reference to the superintendent’s own experiences betting in Ocean View Park. “In any event, printers are not journalists. It’s an honest trade.”
Valentine, a man without imagination, but an able administrator, who spent Company money as if it came from his own purse, could be brought round, had one but the endurance to wait out the snail’s pace of his reasoning process. The expenditure had been authorized, and here was one result.
Hume studied the sheet the Eureka man had brought. Its size, nearly as large as a linen tablecloth, obliged the chief of detectives to rise from behind his desk in order to unfurl and read it.
It represented the front page of that day’s number, printed on one side only, and fresh from the screw press used for proofs; some of the ink had smeared in the process of rolling it up and smuggling it out of the shop beneath the printer’s knee-length ulster. It bore the newspaper’s Old English–style masthead, motto, an advertisement for a wringer-washer, and not one, but both of Black Bart’s contributions to poesy, set in bold type, the first above the second, in the left column, preceded by an explanatory paragraph under the heading BLACK BART BOLD AS BRASS, and followed by a reasonably accurate accounting of the villain’s outrages beginning with Funk Hill in July 1875.
It was somewhat more commonly understood that newspapers, to all intents and purposes, held the patent on domestic espionage. The enemy had penetrated the Company, or at least that group of outsiders it had taken into its confidence. Hume came to this conclusion in the five minutes it took him to read to the end of the column.
He managed to avoid crumpling the expanse of fresh limp paper into an angry ball, folded it unevenly, and asked the man who’d brought it if anyone had seen him enter the building.
“Possibly so, sir; but I told the foreman I had to step out to cover a draft, and I have a small account with the Company, as you directed. I stashed the sheet under the press table, replaced it, and rolled a fresh proof without anyone knowing what I was about, so they’ll never miss this one.”
“Don’t make a habit of the excuse. Those rogues you work for are liars themselves, and can smell a falsehood under a pile of offal.”
When the man had left, Hume bellowed for secretary Thacker, who unfolded the galley sheet and frowned. “They even got the misspelling in the last line.”
“More of Bart’s chicanery. He got it right the first time. If there’s one word he knows how to spell, it’s ‘money.’ Pull the file.”
“Which one?”
His superior gave him a wooden-faced look. The man colored and stepped to the drawer containing what they’d gathered on Black Bart. He handed the portfolio to Hume, who jerked loose the tie and rummaged through the familiar contents, coming up at last with the original poems retrieved from the last two robberies, each line written in a different hand. New as the science of calligraphy was, the man was aware of it. He returned them to the pouch and handed it back to Thacker to re-tie and re-file it. The detective was almost disappointed. Proof that evidence had been removed and given to the press would have provided him with the release of turning his staff on the spit, identifying the culprit, and drumming him out.
Here entered a new phase in the history of pillage along the coach roa
ds. What had become tiresome to report was transformed, by a dozen lines of doggerel, into romantic legend. The editors of telegraph columns as far as the Atlantic coast, their snouts turned continuously into the prevailing winds from the West (where when things happened they happened as suddenly as a boiler bursting), picked up the scent and sprayed it throughout Denver, St. Louis, Chicago, New York City, and Boston, enabling columnists of a literary bent to compare Black Bart to Dick Turpin, Robin Hood, and Spring-heeled Jack.
“Manners, by thunder!” This time, Hume mangled the general-circulation edition into a mass and hurled it into a corner. “Because he says ‘if you please’ instead of threatening to blow their heads off their shoulders with both barrels aimed straight at them! What has Mrs. Astor to say about that?”
Three hundred seventy-nine dollars in coin had come away with Bart from the Berry Creek road, along with a twenty-five-dollar watch and a diamond ring estimated at two hundred dollars; this tally, at least, remained the exclusive property of Wells and Fargo. Hume found comfort in that, as it indicated his own people were innocent of disloyalty. He’d shared those details with them, but withheld them from the bulletin that had gone out to Company representatives and peace officers; the leaky barrel was not in his building.
But it proved a failure as well. Carving digits off the actual losses—a gambit Hume himself had introduced in order to discourage sensation and turn potential thieves away from the risk—did not in this case repel interest; the hoggish public, and the scalawags who ladled out its slop, were more enchanted by the frilly trimming than the size of the bounty. An account alleging that Scribner’s Monthly had offered Bart twenty-five dollars against earnings for first serial rights to a book of poetry was denied by the magazine’s editor; but not quickly enough to prevent the report from affixing itself permanently to the bandit’s mythos; or for that matter before “the Po8” had committed three more robberies—disappointingly failing to add anything new to the slim volume of his verse.
The Ballad of Black Bart Page 5
