Johnny pondered briefly the wisdom of liberating the earlybird customers of their parcels, but rejected that plan on the theory that they would contain no more than one day’s receipts on the part of Wichita’s other businesses, or possibly documents of no value to the Prairie Rose. It would be like leaving a laden banquet table with only crumbs from the floor. In addition, he had developed a keen interest in the fat manager.
The spring roundups and brandings were over. The drives had begun. Very soon, thirsty cowboys would descend upon Wichita at the heads and flanks of thousands of bawling beeves. The street would become a river of swaying horns and twitching tails, and the Longhorn vault would fill with Eastern money to buy them and the profits from the saloons and bawdy houses, stuffed to bursting with the drovers’ wages. Johnny threw up the sash and breathed in the stench of herds past; that which offended April’s delicate nostrils smelled to him like early retirement, and after only two seasons in the theater.
Then something happened that caused the image of money on the hoof and gold in his pockets to evaporate.
It started as a shudder, as of a thunderhead forming far out on the plain, or coal sliding down a chute on Michigan Boulevard. Then the sound separated into a rhythmic tramping. It was too regular for cattle, and too measured for hoofbeats. Then the first column of infantry rounded the corner from Second Street onto Douglas: blouses buttoned, caps tilted forward, a Springfield rifle on every shoulder. A master sergeant marched alongside them, chevrons blazing, bellowing cadence. Pedestrians and loafers gathered on the corner to watch them pass, merchants stood in the doorways of their shops, hands in their pockets. Two minutes passed, and half a hundred soldiers, before Johnny realized that his own heart was thumping in rhythm with their booted feet. A great deal more time seemed to have gone by before the end of the column passed beyond his view. A dog trotted behind, pausing to sniff for promising jetsam, then lost interest and scampered down the alley next to the bank to lift a leg next to a rain barrel. The pedestrians resumed walking, the loafers loafing. The merchants retreated behind their counters.
“Shut the window, Johnny. Isn’t it bad enough the whole town smells like a stockyard, without the reek getting into the linens?”
He slid down the sash and turned from the window. He hadn’t heard April entering. She wore one of the plainer outfits she’d bought in Paris, a blue cotton suit with gray suede patches on the shoulders and a hat of the same blue material. The inevitable parasol hung from one wrist by a thong.
“Knocking is a sound idea here in the provinces,” he said. “You forget we’re no longer Mr. and Mrs. McNear.”
“Not at present. Anyway, I’m an actress. My morals are already in question. You must know everything there is to know about that bank from the outside by now. Isn’t it time you paid a visit in person?”
“That time may have eluded us. Did you not encounter the Grand Army of the Republic on your way back to the hotel?”
“I’ve been back for an hour. I saw them through the cafe window: Boys. I doubt the entire company would offer a razor much challenge.” She unpinned her hat and gave her hair a push.
“It’s closer to a regiment. Do you suppose Corny or the Davieses got careless and tipped their mitts?”
“Don’t talk like a Spitalfields ruffian. You never got closer to the East End then Waterloo Station. The army doesn’t care what we’re about. How conceited you are!”
“Who have you been lunching with, Phil Sheridan?”
“I had tea downstairs with the mayor. The dear old fellow manages DeMoose’s Saloon, where I suspect he learns more from gossip than he does in his official capacity. The troops are here to reinforce an express coming through tomorrow. They’re departing for the territories and some sort of campaign.”
“Indian fight?”
“Oh, I suppose. We’re not at war with anyone else, are we? It’s so hard to keep up.”
“I wonder if there’s anything valuable aboard.”
“Now, don’t go off chasing butterflies. The mayor says the Longhorn does more business in Kansas than Wells, Fargo. He was trying to impress me, poor dear. He’s a stockholder.”
“Well, I’m impressed. Why have I been wasting time standing at this window with you in my arsenal?”
“Why, indeed?” She smiled. “Oh, Johnny, we’re such a good team. Can’t you see we must seal the partnership?”
But he was facing the window again, and the path of the infantry. “Still, a train would be a refreshing change of pace.”
19
“Don’t just stand around like a bunch of Denver whores. Get your goddamn horses before the train pulls out.”
Tom Riddle, who’d paused on the busy platform with Ed and Charlie Kettleman waiting for the crowd to thin out, watched Jack Brixton’s retreating back, headed toward the livestock car where they’d loaded their mounts in Texas. “Who the hell stepped on his tail?”
“Jack don’t sit still good,” Ed said. “It puts him off his general sociability.”
Charlie muttered something that may or may not have been a medical term.
Brixton and Mysterious Bob had their horses off the car when the three got there. The Mexicans they’d borrowed from Matagordo, looking more rumpled than usual after their trip in the freight car, stood in a knot waiting their turn. They conversed in volleys of bastard Spanish broken by high-pitched cackles and kept passing around the same hand-rolled cigarette. Tom wondered if tobacco was so hard to come by down there. Breed had some trouble with his gelding, but a swipe alongside its head with the bridle crossed its eyes and brought it into line. The bridle in place, it fixed a baleful brown eye on its master as it came down the ramp. It had never really come to terms with its surgery.
Nobody at the station seemed to pay much attention to this strange new band that had come to town. Cowboys black and white had gathered to see who was arriving and departing, harlots dressed in all the bright colors of tonics and restoratives in a barbershop patrolled the yard scouting up business, drummers in tight waistcoats and dandies in piped lapels bustled about swinging their sample cases and sticks. A tame Indian in a plug hat and a dirty blanket wandered around asking strangers for tobacco until the station agent came out from behind his window and sent him on his way with a kick in the seat. Tom guessed the man would have his hands full of derelict savages in a year or so; for a Yankee, Custer could fight.
While Ace-in-the-Hole was leading its horses off the right-of-way, the train blew its whistle and backed onto a siding to make way for another coming in from the West under a distant plume of smoke. Half the Mexican mounts, runty and earth-colored and scrawny as coyotes, had no saddles, just blankets, and hackamores instead of proper bits and bridles. They all looked like biters to Tom, who had not failed to note that most of the men who led them had pronounced limps. He bet they’d each left a piece of a haunch somewhere in the Chihuahua desert. They were the sorriest-looking bunch of road agents he’d ever seen: sallow-skinned, underweight, and bowlegged, dressed as beggars with holes in their sombreros you could pitch a jackrabbit through without touching the sides. It was no wonder the federales hadn’t been able to run them to ground in ten years of trying; they’d galloped right past them, looking for guerrillas.
He had to ask himself how they spent the gold they’d stolen in the past. He doubted cute little Fiona could handle them all, and none of the other women he’d seen in San Diablo seemed to be worth it.
While he was pondering, a hesitation in his bay mare’s gait distracted him. He knelt to examine a hoof and discovered the shoe missing. Ed agreed to take the reins, and Tom went back to see if he could find it on the cinderbed. He carried a hammer and a sack of nails in a saddlepouch for such emergencies, but spare shoes added too much weight. Black Jack would call him sixteen kinds of a son of a bitch if he had to go into town to find a farrier.
He was about to give up the search when he spotted one iron leg sticking out from under the railroad platform. Bending to pick it up
, he found his eyes on a level with a slim ankle in a black patentleather pump. Tom was a connoisseur of ankles. He steered away from thick ones, no matter how pretty the face or narrow the waist that went with it; they always meant a coarse temper, and if you forgot yourself and put the band on, a fat middle age. It was as if God had provided them with a foundation firm enough to build on later.
From there, his gaze went up a tall frame, past a bosom that reminded him of a prairie hen, to a disappointingly mannish profile, just before its owner turned away to instruct a porter who approached pushing a big trunk stood up on end on a handcart. Tom stood, forgetting the horseshoe. He’d recognized the face.
He watched her step inside the station on the arm of a fat old goat in cinderproof clothing, wearing yellow gaiters and carrying a stick with a gold knob the size of a cue ball. She didn’t seem to have seen Tom, but if she had he was pretty sure she wouldn’t place him. During their one encounter in Denver, she’d been more interested in Charlie Kettleman, who’d knocked her off her bicycle just outside Salt Lake City and stolen back the money she and her companions had stolen from the Overland office there.
Philip Rittenhouse, who seldom missed anything, did not notice the reaction of the man who rose suddenly from a crouch off the edge of the platform just as Major and Mme. Mort-Davies were leaving it; nor did he connect the wizened features with the spare description that appeared on circulars offering a reward for his capture or death, although he’d read it often. He did note in passing that the fellow was an experienced horseman, more comfortable in the saddle than on the ground, and was gratified, when at length the man turned toward the open prairie, to see him turn back and stoop to pick up a horseshoe lying loose beside the track. A drifter, from his clothes and sunburn, but not a cowboy. One of those tramps he’d seen so often during his two visits to the frontier, living on odd jobs and handouts and whatever he could steal.
Such was the train of his thoughts, and had he been able to follow it down its track he might have come very close to the truth—indeed he would have, if Ace-in-the-Hole were his responsibility and all his instincts pointed in that direction. But his concern was the Davieses and the man they had come all the way from San Francisco to meet, and whom he had crossed the country three times to see in the flesh. Tugging down his soft hat to conceal his bald head, and flipping up the collar of his duster to dissemble his reptilian features, Pinkerton’s man in Wichita turned away from the worst gang in the West and toward the Prairie Rose.
Within five minutes of his arrival, he got that first look and nearly destroyed his mission in the process.
Stepping into the dimness of the depot from the dazzling sunshine on the platform, he was blinded momentarily and banged shoulders with a man striding the opposite direction. The man was tall and well built and his momentum spun Rittenhouse halfway around, almost toppling him. Instantly the stranger caught his upper arms in two strong hands and steadied his balance.
“I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t intend to derail you.”
When Rittenhouse’s pupils adjusted to the light, he found his face six inches from the regular features of a young man with fair moustaches and a well-trimmed triangle of beard in the hollow of his chin. He wore a black hat with a dramatic brim, almost Restoration in its width, and a caped overcoat too heavy for late spring, but which contributed to the dash of his appearance as naturally as the fine stick he had tucked beneath one arm. His reassuring smile was even and white. The detective, familiar only with descriptions in theatrical reviews and a crude engraving in the Deseret News of the actor who had portrayed Brom Bones in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, knew nevertheless that he was in the presence of John Vermillion.
He muttered that it was his own fault and turned quickly away out of the young man’s grasp; but he knew his face had been committed to memory and that his undercover status had been compromised.
Alarm flashed through him. He darted a glance around the inside of the narrow building and was relieved to find neither of the Davieses among the pilgrims and greeters trickling toward the street and the waiting carriages. He’d managed to make a spectacle of himself at the very outset, and had they witnessed it, they’d undoubtedly have recognized him. Even the Major was not so self-besotted as to accept an explanation that Peter Ruskin had traveled all this way merely to secure their release from the company. They would report their suspicions to Vermillion, who would abandon whatever was planned for Wichita, and possibly dissolve the association. As the old man himself was fond of saying, it was not the responsibility of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to prevent crime or put an end to it, but to apprehend the criminals and bring them to justice, preferably in full view of an admiring press. They were in business to attract clients, and whatever personal satisfaction they might derive from running a band of brigands to cover could hardly be recorded on the black side of the ledger.
Hanging back from the street door, which stood open to give egress to those assembled inside, he spotted the Major smoking a cigar on the boardwalk, and next to him his wife, brushing nervously at creases in her costume. Plainly they awaited the return of their companion, who passed Rittenhouse a moment later carrying a carpetbag that one of them evidently had left behind on the platform. In a moment they had all boarded a handsome phaeton with the couple’s oversize trunk strapped to the back and rattled off.
Rittenhouse waited a beat, then stepped outside and caught the attention of a cabman, who stepped down from his seat to take his valise.
“Never mind that. My friends left before I could find out where they were stopping. Please follow them until they alight.” He described the phaeton.
When that vehicle turned down Second Street and drew up before a hotel on the corner, he directed his driver toward a plain-faced structure that faced it at an angle, identified by a sign as the Douglas Avenue Hotel. He did not fail to note, as he paid the fare and turned toward the entrance, that his hotel stood next to a bank, and that that institution stood directly across from the other hotel and a few doors down from the elaborate facade of a variety theater. The Prairie Rose was a most transparent enterprise—an important factor in its success so far. It was a veritable Purloined Letter, boldly concealed in plain sight.
He asked for a room facing the street, and was given one on the second floor. After unpacking and placing his things in a maple bureau, the revolver tucked between two folded shirts, he went to the window, drew down the shade, and slid it aside an inch to study the side of the Occidental Hotel across the way. He’d hardly hoped to catch Vermillion or any of his crew at a window, but instinct and experience told him the room occupied by the head of the company would face the bank.
He did not, in fact, see anyone standing at a window, nor any shades drawn with no bright sunlight striking that side to justify it, but he was contented his theory was correct. He’d been in town barely half an hour, and had spotted both his quarry and its target, leaping far ahead of where he’d been in six months of hard work. It nearly made up for his blunder at the station and the likelihood that he would have to wire Chicago and request a replacement unknown to the repertory players.
Rittenhouse sighed. Unpacking had been a waste of time as well as an exercise in foolish optimism. Common sense—and Pinkerton policy—required him to turn over his information to another agent, and with it the opportunity to trip the snare personally. He would not even get to see it happen, as the old man would undoubtedly recall him rather than take the chance of his being spotted. He’d already risked a great deal in trailing the Davieses halfway across the continent and failing to report the action to headquarters, knowing what steps the old man would take if he knew. Now the choice had been taken out of his hands.
He was about to let the shade slip back when his eyes were drawn toward a movement in a doorway, where a common loafer—that fixture in every frontier settlement—removed his shoulder from the frame to touch his hat to a woman passing his perch along the boardwalk that ran past the Occidenta
l.
Instantly the loafer was forgotten. Notwithstanding the fact that the detective was a confirmed bachelor, and an ugly man who had surrendered all thought of unrecompensed feminine companionship late in his adolescence, he appreciated a small waist and a dainty profile as well as any male creature. The appearance of both in a comely pearl-pink dress and clever hat under a matching parasol was compensation enough for hundreds of hours spent watching buildings and strangers and conveyances passing to and fro. His angle gave him a view of the front of the hotel as well, on Second Street, and when the apparition stepped briskly around the corner and lifted an abundance of skirts and petticoats to climb the steps to the entrance, he was certain he’d identified the member of the company who’d commanded more column inches on the part of masculine journalists than all the rest combined.
He found himself (he was loath to use a word that connoted personal weakness, but no other signified) enchanted. In the romance of newspaper work, every victorious general was handsome and distinguished, every visiting dignitary a gentleman, every actress older than twelve and younger than forty a vision, virginal and touched with stardust; the facts, that Custer looked like a basset hound, Grand Duke Alexis was a drunk, and Sarah Bernhardt had the morals of an alley cat and rather resembled one, were things the mature subscriber assigned to harsh reality. But no hyperbole did justice to April Clay in the flesh. Even from a distance, Philip Rittenhouse understood immediately that it didn’t matter how well or poorly the young lady acted as long as one could say that he had seen her. And he knew then that no other employee of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency would be the one to put her in shackles.
20
As long as he could remember, Jack Brixton loved to blow things up.
He’d conducted his first experiment in detonation at the age of five, removing a tablespoonful of black powder from the keg his father used to charge his squirrel rifle and mixing it with the tobacco in his pouch. When that rugged old farmer touched a match to his tightly packed corncob pipe, the powder went up with a sharp crack and a blue flash, singeing his whiskers and eyebrows and puncturing his right eardrum, leaving him deaf on that side for life. It was all very satisfying, and worth the razor-strop beating that followed, even though it made thick welts on his backside that many a woman of lewd reputation would remark upon in later years.
The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion Page 17
