The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion

by Loren D. Estleman

  “Yahoo!” cry his subordinates, galloping out of the dense stand of trees on the other side of the tracks. More bullets fly.

  As several men board the train to pacify the paying customers, the rest take charge of the engineer, his fireman, and the fat conductor. They are herded out onto trackside and Brixton threatens at the top of his voice to blow their heads off if the guards in the mail car fail to open the door by the count of five. On “four,” hammers click. The door slides open then and the guards emerge with hands high. Foolishly, one lunges for the revolver in his holster. Brixton shoots from the hip. The guard snatches at his abdomen, drops his weapon, and tumbles to the cinderbed.

  A bundle of dynamite makes its appearance. A match flares; the fuse is ignited. The spark travels ten feet and the door flies off a black iron safe embossed with a gold eagle. Sacks of coins, bars of bullion, and bales of banknotes—big, square, elaborately engraved certificates, much more impressive-looking than our modern bills—vanish into canvas bags and saddle pouches. More cheers and shooting as the horsemen clatter away.

  These are a few minutes in a day in the life of the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang, infamous in newspapers in both the East and West and in a flood of cheap novels printed in Chicago and New York City. Somewhere in a cattle camp or saloon or velvet parlor with a piano, an uncertain baritone is singing its ballad to a melody plagiarized from “Blood on the Saddle.”

  Like so many others of his day, Jack Brixton’s story began in Missouri, where he rode with the Bushwhackers, holding up Union trains, blowing windows out of banks filled with Yankee gold, taking target practice on Jayhawkers, and generally giving civil war a bad name. Witnesses say he left that crew because he considered Bloody Bill Anderson too lenient.

  Accounts of how he spent the years between the end of the conflict and the spring of 1874, when his trail crossed with Johnny Vermillion’s, are mostly hearsay. He’s said to have rustled cattle in Texas, hunted Apache scalps in Arizona, shot a couple of dozen Mexicans south of the Rio Grande, and introduced the sport of lynching to Wyoming Territory. It was about the time the Wyoming story got around that people started calling him Black Jack.

  It was a name no one called him to his face. Transients and newcomers to the gang found that out right away, at the butt of his Smith & Wesson .44 American, a weapon endorsed also by Jesse James and Wyatt Earp for use as both a firearm and a bludgeon. Brixton had a superstitious horror of nicknames. Frank “Hole Card” Handy, the gang’s original leader and also the inspiration for its name, had been so called because of the Butterfield derringer he carried for emergency use in a special holster sewn inside the crotch of his trousers. Drawing it one night during a dispute over a hand of poker, he shot off the end of his penis and bled to death before he could be brought to a doctor. His successor, Apache Jim Weathersill, who was no part Indian but had been rechristened to avoid confusion with the better-known Jim Weathersill of the Turkey Creek Outfit, took a double load of buckshot in the belly from a pimp who’d mistaken him for the original Jim, and Redleg Johnson, the most athletic of the Ace-in-the-Hole boys, miscounted his coaches while loping along the top of the Katy Flyer looking for the mail car and ran off the end of the caboose to a broken neck. Brixton had come to the conclusion that living up to one’s professional name involved ceasing to live at all. He considered it bad luck to pass one of his wanted posters without slowing down to obliterate the “Black” with a fusillade of lead.

  In addition to his daring, ruthlessness, and bad temper, Black Jack Brixton was notorious for his escapes from the law. He’d been captured in Missouri by McCulloch’s cavalry, by the sheriffs of several counties in Kansas and Colorado, by a succession of town marshals (which he didn’t count), and by a deputy United States marshal in the Indian Nations, and had wriggled free every time, a phenomenon he credited to his talent for dislocating both wrists. No matter how tight the manacles, he had only to slip his bones out of joint to slide them over his hands and off. He’d employed this trick so many times his wrists had a habit of slipping out on their own, often at inopportune moments, as when his gun arm gave out under the weight of his big American in a bank in Grand Junction and he shot Mysterious Bob Craidlaw, his best man, in the foot. After that, he’d acquired a pair of Mexican leather cuffs with brass studs and buckled them on tight before going to work; Mysterious Bob acquired a permanent limp.

  Bob kept his own counsel to the extent that no one in the bank apart from Brixton and himself knew he’d been shot until the gang reunited in a line shack twenty miles from the scene of the robbery, when he pulled off his boot and poured out a pint of blood. The suddenness of the report, in fact, had startled Tom Riddle into shooting a cashier, which raised the reward for his capture to fifteen hundred dollars.

  There was nothing secretive in Mysterious Bob’s past. Much of it was public record, and his list of criminal accomplishments filled a paragraph in his circular going back to age twelve. He just never talked about himself. Although he’d spent three years with Brixton in the service of Missouri guerrillas—an opinionated group, who punctuated their arguments with gunfire—none of the men who slept and ate and rode with him had ever been able to determine just where he stood regarding slavery and states’ rights. Arch Clements, his immediate superior, thought he was a mute. When Brixton, who knew otherwise, asked Bob point blank why he never set Clements straight, the quiet man let a full minute pass, then said, “I reckon he didn’t ask.” He made his best remarks with his Winchester, and like his tongue he never used it until he was certain of the effect. He never missed.

  Tom Riddle did enough talking for them both, and for that matter all the rest of the crew. Short and compact where Bob was tall and lanky, he’d once spent most of a week stuck in a badger tunnel in California, where he’d been sent by his prospecting partners, larger men all, to look for color. He’d survived on roots and earthworms, talked to himself the whole time to keep from going loco, and acquired a taste for his own conversation, if not for earthworms and roots, which he frequently and at length compared to the meals they were forced to eat on the trail. He also avoided going into vaults and other tight places. Tom was a good man with dynamite, and a little deaf from the explosions; his speech was loud as well as incessant. “Shut up, Tom,” was a phrase repeated wherever the group bedded down, usually in chorus.

  In enterprises of this nature, there is in all likelihood a man called Breed, who demonstrates the less fortunate traits of his white and Indian ancestors. They wear their hair unfettered to their shoulders, resist hats, and clothe themselves in fringed leather vests and striped cavalry trousers stripped from the carcass of some unlucky trooper like the skin of a slain animal. Ace-in-the-Hole’s Breed spent his leisure hours curing the ears he’d sliced off bartenders who refused to serve him whiskey and stringing them on the buckskin thong he wore around his neck during robberies, which had a dampening effect upon individual heroism. He had Mother tattooed in a heart on his right bicep and Father encircled by serpents on his left, and prized his big Bowie knife above all other weapons. Brixton, who had balked at Bloody Bill’s “spare the women and children” policy, found Breed’s company distinctly unpleasant.

  The Kettleman brothers, Ed and Charlie, had fled Texas one step ahead of the Rangers, who sought them for running guns to the Comanches, and of the Comanches themselves, who were eager to talk to them about the quality of their merchandise. They’d commandeered a wagonload of Springfield rifles with rusted actions and broken firing pins on its way from Fort Richardson to the Fort Worth scrap yards and traded them for a total of four thousand dollars in buffalo robes. They were businessmen who always got the best price for bonds, bullion, and other items that could not immediately be converted into cash, much of which they won back off their companions at poker. In action, they worked in perfect union, as if they shared one brain, and also at the table, where each had a sixth sense for what cards his brother held in his hand. They were the least popular members of the gang and the most indispe
nsable. Identical twins, slack-jawed and skinny as rails, they looked in life very much as they did in a picture the Pinkertons took of them in 1875, propped on a barn door with seventeen mortal wounds between them.

  These five formed the unchanging center of Black Jack Brixton’s band of desperadoes; ten thousand dollars on the hoof to the bounty hunter foolhardy enough to dream of capturing them. The authorities and outraged commercial interests responsible for this reward were parsimonious, as always. Acting separately and in concert, the wanted men had looted a quarter of a million from legitimate concerns and circulated it back into the economy by way of saloons, women of casual character, and the army of camp followers who supplied them with arms, ammunition, horses, and shelter. Counting temporary help and onetime alliances with other gangs, a million dollars had passed through the hands of between twenty and thirty individuals associated with Ace-in-the-Hole. It was never at a loss for recruits, because in the bleak aftermath of the Panic of 1873, banditry was the fastest-growing cottage industry in America. Bicycle sales placed a distant second.

  The bold daylight robbery of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific Railroad near Council Bluffs, Iowa, which we have witnessed, removed sixteen thousand dollars from the hands of its rightful owners, the robber barons of New York City and San Francisco. When word reached civilization, the sheriff of Pottawattamie County—rock-ribbed and sunburned, dumb as salt pork—assembled a posse of the usual hotheads who convened in the Boar’s Neck Saloon to burp up pickled eggs and damn the Republican administration. They mounted up, milled around the town square making speeches and terrifying the horses, and rode out, whooping and waving torches and shooting up private property.

  By the time they reached the stranded train, Black Jack Brixton and his companions had been gone for hours. The sheriff’s men followed their tracks half the night, stopping briefly to set fire to barns and smokehouses along the way, and wound up back at the train; whereupon they straggled back to town and wired the Pinkerton office in St. Louis.

  Ace-in-the-Hole, meanwhile, had scattered like so many cards.

  Anticipating a hot reception to so successful a raid, they sought bolt-holes as far south as Louisiana and as far west as California. The Pinkertons, who lost no time in identifying the train robbers, were just as quick to declare the trail cold, and counseled waiting until Brixton’s men struck again. The board of directors of the Chicago, Rock Island & Pacific howled at the delay, and bumped the reward up a hundred dollars per man.

  Money won in the course of a few minutes’ work, however intense and fraught with peril, spends quickly in sinful Barbary and the deadfalls of New Orleans. Fifteen men had taken part in the raid, and sixteen thousand divided so many ways melts like grease in a skillet. As winter broke up beneath the heavy rains of early spring, six men in shining slickers waded their horses through the muddy streets of Denver and tied them to the rail in front of Nell Dugan’s Wood Palace. Inside, Brixton, Mysterious Bob, Tom Riddle, Breed, and the Kettlemans took their pleasure out of what funds they had left and blocked out a plan to rob the Overland office in Salt Lake City.

  That same day, the Prairie Rose Repertory Company commenced rehearsals of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow at the Salt Lake Theater, directly across the street from the Overland.

  8

  Salt Lakers who happened to be looking out across the flats that morning saw a half dozen men on horseback, small as clothes-pegs and shimmering through ribbons of heat; a few swore they heard ghostly flute music, but that was probably just the Denver & Rio Grande blowing its whistle.

  By noon the riders appeared no closer. Then suddenly they had passed Temple Square and were clattering down Main Street, using their reins as quirts and sending Mormons and Gentiles alike scrambling for the safety of the boardwalks. Elder Sterne, who’d been expecting revenge for Mountain Meadows for twenty years, dove into Browning’s gun shop and had to be subdued by three employees to prevent him from running back out with a Whitney double-barrel.

  They saved his life. Rounding a corner onto State Street, the riders surprised a dog into lunging at their horses’ legs and pumped eleven bullets into it in a group no larger than a man’s spread hand.

  Daniel Oberlin, who managed the Holladay Overland Mail & Express Company office across the street from the theater, thought at first the men in dusters with bandannas over their faces were fellow members of the Zion Club come to play a trick on him; nobody in the history of the company had been robbed twice in twenty-four hours, and it was just the kind of low humor he expected from that society. He changed his mind when the man with the words, a big fellow with eyes as empty as the safe, backed him to the wall behind the counter and stuck the muzzle of his big revolver against the bridge of Oberlin’s nose.

  “Open the safe or I’ll open your skull.”

  Oberlin opened the safe.

  “Where the hell’s the money?”

  “I gave it to a fat fellow last night. He had a gun as big as yours.”

  “Kill the son of a bitch.” This in a hissing tone from one of the other gunmen, who wore his black hair long like an Indian.

  “I swear it’s true! All he left was the petty cash in the box.”

  “Hand it over.”

  He gave the man the tin box he kept on the shelf beneath the counter. It contained forty-five dollars and seventeen cents.

  On the way out of town, the Ace-in-the-Hole Gang registered its disappointment by shooting out windows in several establishments, including the temple, where city commissioners and church elders were meeting to discuss forming a citizens’ vigilance committee to deal with outrages such as the freight office robbery the evening before. (The motion passed unanimously after the dignitaries crawled out from under the table.) Mysterious Bob Craidlaw entered the lobby of the Deseret Hotel without bothering to dismount and removed six hundred dollars from the safe at the point of his Winchester, and one of the Kettlemans separated an employee of the Salt Lake Theater from his right index finger as he was taking down a bill advertising last night’s performance by the Prairie Rose Repertory Company. Breed had to be restrained from going back and slicing off Daniel Oberlin’s ears.

  They’d left provisions and fresh horses at a disused Butterfield stage stop ten miles east of town, where they stopped to divide their small gain.

  “I got more’n this out of that badger hole in Sacramento,” said Tom Riddle, fingering his shallow stack of banknotes.

  Breed said, “I still want the ears off that son of a bitch. I bet he stole it himself when he heard us coming.”

  “He’d of said it was a dozen men,” Brixton said. “You don’t make up one fat man with a pistol in your face.”

  “It wasn’t the James boys.” Ed and Charlie Kettleman spoke in unison. Ed, older by two minutes, continued when his brother fell silent. “This is a piece off their range.”

  “The Renos neither,” Riddle said. “They always work in a bunch.”

  “Turkey Creek,” suggested Breed.

  Brixton shook his head. “They always leave a dead man behind. That’s how you know it’s Turkey Creek.”

  Riddle said, “We sure as hell left a dead man behind at Council Bluffs.”

  “He committed suicide.” Brixton threw a fistful of pennies against the wall, knocking a piece out of the adobe. “When I find out who the fat bastard is, I’ll skin him and use his belly to carry away the cash.”

  “I bet he’s local,” Riddle said. “It costs them Mormons plenty to take care of all them wives. What you figure makes a man want more than one?”

  “Maybe he done it to get out of the house.” Once again, the Kettlemans spoke together, and fell to wrestling playfully. Breed put an end to it by sinking his Bowie up to its hilt in the rotten wood of the tabletop.

  “One of us ought to go back into town and poke around.”

  Five pairs of alkali-reddened eyes swiveled toward Mysterious Bob. They were the first words he’d spoken since Denver.

  “It’s still all in on
e place,” he said. “One man’s easier to stick up than a whole freight company.”

  Nearing the middle of a spartan but comfortable bachelor’s life, spent almost entirely within a brief streetcar ride of the house where he was born (which, like him, had stood through the fire among others that had not), Philip Rittenhouse discovered to his surprise that he quite liked traveling.

  It posed its challenges. In the weeks since Allan Pinkerton had assigned him to investigate the robbery of the Wells, Fargo office in Sioux Falls, the bald man with the carrion-bird profile had put out fires in his clothes ignited by sparks from a dozen locomotives, cracked a tooth jouncing over the Bozeman Trail in a succession of stagecoaches (none of them the fabled Concord “Rocking Horse of the Plains”), been bitten by species of bedbugs unknown east of the Mississippi, and lost a valise containing his best suit to a thief in the train station in St. Louis. He was peeling from sunburn, shivering with the ague, and a suspicious fungus had begun to grow between the second and third toes of his right foot. A woman uglier than he, in a dirty satin dress, had called him “Phizzle-Face” when he’d declined her advances on the street in Kansas City, and an attack of food poisoning had forced him to crouch over a chamber pot all through the night he’d spent in Omaha. It was a splendid adventure. He intended to ask the old man to assign him more fieldwork once he’d lain this case to rest.

  He’d been more bored in Chicago than he’d let on, even to himself. For years, those brief few moments of satisfaction he’d experienced upon the successful closing of an investigation had more than compensated for the hours, days, and weeks spent at his desk, clipping items out of newspapers, reading reports and telegrams, drafting responses, and maintaining stoic patience in the presence of minds slower by far than his own—turtle-brains, to be blunt; William Pinkerton, Allan’s second son, was particularly chronic in this regard—but of late, as he’d come to realize that half his span was behind him, the prospect of merely repeating himself throughout the second half depressed him deeply. For the first time, he understood the motives of the men he’d brought to justice who had thrown over decades of good behavior for the lure of a dollar unstained by the sweat of honest labor. It amused him to consider that he, who turned down such harmless temptations as a free meal for his part in exposing a thieving restaurant employee, might have turned highwayman but for this opportunity.