Wild Justice

by Loren D. Estleman

  In Miles City, among yet another crowd listening to yet another band playing “After the Ball”—this time more elaborately, with a second violinist and a saxophone contributing at least a variation on the usual dirge—I spotted a familiar face and beard. How Howard Rossleigh of the Montana Press Association had beaten an express train to the station became clear when he explained that he’d been engaged by W. R. Hearst of The New York Journal to cover the Judge’s last journey, and provided with a small fast former yard engine and advance telegrams to extinguish every red lantern in its path. Rechristened The Javelin, the train burned anthracite coal, which went farther than wood and made unnecessary frequent stops to restock the tender.

  I said, “I knew readers of the Eastern press ate up the Judge like licorice whips, but he isn’t any more likely to grant interviews now than when he was still kicking.”

  “It isn’t Blackthorne Mr. Hearst is interested in,” Rossleigh said. “It’s you.”

  Casting about for a hook, the publisher had lit upon me: The loyal minion, faithful all the way to the cemetery.

  A special train and the favors a man needed to call in to arrange the cooperation of the railroads seemed like a lot of expense and bother to go to over one broken-down deputy; but Hearst had more dollars than sense and had declared war on all his competitors. In two years he’d manufacture a genuine war with Spain, practically on his own, with no end but to attract more readers. No one knew it then, but that would be the end of the West except in history books. Who cared to follow the adventures of dusty saddle tramps now that all the Indians were penned up, the frontier shut down, and men charging up a hill in Cuba led by a bookworm with his eye on Washington?

  I nearly gave Rossleigh the boot there and then. It would have been easy; the caboose’s rear door was open and he stood with his back to it. But I’d had experience enough of reporters to know he’d probably double back and pester Mrs. Blackthorne for details about the bashful civil servant, so I told him some stretchers, borrowing adventures from such as Cocker Flynn, Doc Miller, and the bloody Brothers Mercy as well as the kind of claptrap Buffalo Bill spun for the rubbernecks who paid to see his extravaganza. Facing a couple of dozen veteran gunmen with only five cartridges in my sidearm, plowing hostile Indians under the hooves of my mighty steed, and capturing Cole Younger, William Bonney, and Clay Allison unassisted was sure to tip him to the truth and make him give up on me. He scribbled on another of his folds of foolscap, using what I thought was the same orange pencil stub, shorter now but with its attached eraser intact; journalists seldom edit their notes. But he wasn’t writing constantly. Most likely he was registering his impressions rather than setting down my jabber. I approved. My strategy was working.

  I thought.

  When we pulled into Glendive I saw a fair likeness of myself in the lead column of The Montana Post (Rossleigh either doubled as an illustrator or had given one a decent description; though I didn’t know I looked quite so mean) and an account of my interview with most of the balderdash left out and bales of florid prose dumped in about my undying devotion to the Judge’s memory. I’d been demoted from a rip-roaring frontier Galahad to the old dog refusing to desert its master’s grave.

  It was more of Erasmus Callaway’s mechanizations. If I had any doubt about that, it evaporated when he was quoted three times in the article. He’d wring all the attention he could out of Blackthorne’s corpse as thoroughly as Caspar squeezed his lemons. It would pay off, at least for a while. Although he would lose out for governor later that year, the race was close enough for Callaway’s name to come up when the Republican brass was considering a running mate for William McKinley. More cautious heads seized upon the bookworm from Cuba, who was a political firebrand, in order to maneuver so dangerous a character into an office that was considered a backwater (a ploy that would backfire in a Buffalo, New York, train station on September 13, 1901).

  I crossed the line into North Dakota with a bellyful of coffee and a dollop of brandy from a medicinal bottle in one of Caspar’s cupboards and the shadow of a beginning of hope for recovery. I hadn’t visited the place since before it was partitioned off from South Dakota at statehood time. In those charged days following Custer’s slip at the Little Big Horn, it was a different place, with a throttled-up brave showing up at every turn like a prairie dog hole, but it looked as bleak as ever, gridiron-flat with wind soughing through waist-high grass when we laid over and waving past mile upon mile when we resumed. It was mesmeric, blurring the vision like yellowed memories.

  NINE

  “What you reading, Page Murdock?”

  Asking the question, the young Cheyenne pasted a sneer to his well-set features, as if he thought curiosity a sign of weakness.

  I didn’t challenge him, as I was his guest; we both avoided the term prisoner, which might pitch our relationship into even more dangerous territory than it was. The year was 1878, and dangerous enough for anyone living in Indian country.

  I marked my place with a finger and closed the book; not that I needed to look at its tooled-leather cover to remind myself of its title. In my short time in the Dakota Territory village I’d learned the uniquely Indian habit of circling twice around a subject before addressing it.

  “Spenser. Published in Philadelphia in 1860.”

  “Spenser, he is the hero?”

  “He’s dead. While he lived he was a poet.” I tipped it back open to the page I’d marked and read:

  “Rehearse to me, ye sacred sisters nine,

  The golden brood of great Apolloes wit,

  Which late you powred forth as ye did sit

  Beside the silver springs of Helicone,

  Making your musick of hart-braking mone!”

  “What it mean?”

  Ghost Shirt—which was the name he took when he splintered off from the Cheyenne nation to lead a massacre, and before he broke loose of the federal penitentiary—was a poser. Like most of the white gunmen who drifted from mining camp to cattle town to border village, he’d read all the popular novels—in his case in mission school, where the agent in charge bought them by the bushel for pennies and charged the Bureau of Indian Affairs for Shakespeare—and had learned how to behave and talk like the stoic braves of Buntline, Ingraham, and the rest of the army of poetasters who’d flooded the stalls with Mother Goose tales dressed up with war paint and scalpings. His grammar was at least as good as mine. It had been hammered into him with a straightedge across his knuckles. Whether he preferred pidgin English in imitation of those paper warriors or as some kind of private joke against white oppressors, I could never decide. And he always addressed me using my full name.

  “God only knows. I know he couldn’t spell. The man I work for lent it to me with some other books to teach me to talk like an educated man instead of a muley cowhand.”

  “Why?”

  “He says he doesn’t want his marshals to embarrass him in public, but he’s had men on the job longer than me who make a Chinese bootblack sound like a St. Louis banker. They all take work on the side as saloon bouncers and tax collectors for the county sheriff, though, so I expect he can’t stand to see a man draw pay between assignments doing nothing but sitting on his butt.”

  Ghost Shirt, who was crouching on the other side of the fire in the lodge he’d had set aside for me, barked a short laugh, leaned over, pulled aside his breechclout, and smacked his own backside. It sounded like a muleskinner’s whip. I had to laugh too. It was the first moment of human warmth that had passed between us since I’d stumbled into his dog soldiers while tracking him. One week later, he was dead, wearing the manacles I’d put on his wrists.

  * * *

  A steel wheel hit an uneven joint in the tracks with a bang, shaking me out of my doze. The sleep that had eluded me in my berth had come back to claim me next day in the chair car. I’d slept too many years on cornshucks in ricks, ground pounded into granite by buffalo, and trees next to puddles that manufactured mosquitoes the way Detroit produced stoves
, to find peace on mattresses stuffed with down; yet another legacy the Judge had left me.

  The dream was pretty much the way it had happened, so far as I could piece it back together after nearly twenty years. I hadn’t thought about Ghost Shirt and his attempt to rally the High Plains tribes in a suicidal last-ditch assault on the white man. It was being back in North Dakota—just northern Dakota then, before the territory was cloven in two for purposes of management when it won its star on Old Glory—that brought it all back. I swore I’d never return. Blackthorne wouldn’t have forgotten that pledge when he settled upon me to escort his shell back to carpetbagger country.

  I finished the reading program he’d assigned me by the end of my second year with the court: the bulk of Spenser, everything available to that point from Robert Browning (the Judge had warned me against Elizabeth Barrett’s “insipid bleating”), Darwin, Burton, some of Clemens, all of Homer, and Shakespeare, who I came to appreciate when I started reading the lines aloud and that way found the trail he broke. I preferred the tragedies to the comedies, with the exception of The Taming of the Shrew, which I remembered years later when I met a woman who might have modeled for the title character. Much of it was like slogging through ropy camptown mud, slipping every third step; some of it was padlocked tight against me and my kind. I never could find tracks in Ralph Waldo Emerson, for instance; but I learned not to say “ain’t” in every conversation, and—more important—when to say it and to who. Whom. It’s come in handy setting down these memories for someone to find in my old army footlocker when I’m in the ground.

  The widow sat farther up the aisle in her backward-facing seat, contributing to her knitting at a rate slightly faster than we were moving across flat unobstructed prairie. What seemed to have started as a muffler was rapidly approaching a lap robe. The young conductor entered the car from the direction of the caboose, trailing a scent of apple-flavored pipe smoke and straight gin and carrying a yellow Western Union envelope. The train must have made a stop while I was asleep; that troubled me, as I’d depended on my instincts to alert me to any change no matter how deep I was under. Of all the enemies that would kill me, the odds were steadily improving in the favor of age.

  Mrs. Blackthorne looked up at the man touching the visor of his cap, set aside her basket, and accepted the envelope. She tore open the flap with a thumb and adjusted her spectacles to read the flimsy. She shook her head at the conductor, who had evidently asked if she wanted to reply at the next stop. When he came back toward the exit, she caught my eye and waved the unfolded paper her direction.

  She handed me the wire as soon as I was in reach.

  MRS BLACKTHORNE

  CONDOLENCES ON YOUR GREAT LOSS STOP IF YOUR ITINERARY ALLOWS PLEASE SEE ME IN SAINT PAUL STOP ADDRESS TO FOLLOW

  NIGEL MORTON ESQ MORTON WINSLOW AND MORTON ATTYS AT LAW

  “Do you know Morton?” I gave it back.

  She shook her head. “Nor Winslow either. Do you suppose they have some legal grudge against Harlan?”

  “They wouldn’t be the first. Will you go?”

  “If you will accompany me.”

  “I’m sure that’s what the Judge would advise.”

  “Now is as good a time as any to stop asking what he would advise and start relying on myself.”

  “If you don’t want to, don’t go.”

  She glared at me over the tops of her octagonal lenses. “When was the last time you did not do something because you did not want to?”

  “That would be the first day I set eyes on Helena.”

  I returned to my seat. My seat; it didn’t strike me until then that I’d been sitting in the same one all along, as if it had been assigned to me by a headmaster. On the instant I got restless. I started to rise when the conductor returned, stopping at my seat this time to bend down, turn his back partly toward where Mrs. Blackthorne had resumed knitting, and speak in a murmur. “Would you come with me, sir?”

  I studied him. Conductors were as a rule burly men, built to eject unpaid passengers. He was more wiry than stout, his head attached as by a peg to a tall narrow frame. The mouth was too broad for that face; if he were to open it wide, the top half of his skull might tip over backwards like the top of an apothecary jar.

  He seemed to be vibrating with excitation. For an instant I wondered if the Judge had kicked off his covers. Nodding, I stepped into the aisle and followed him through the door at the rear of the car, the largely wasted space in the sleeper, and on into the caboose, where the absurdly unprepossessing box lay as it had, at a shallow angle on the braided rug and the lid nailed shut. The car, always the steadiest regardless of the train, clung tightly to the rails, swaying but little and making only tiny ripples in the ink in the well of the rolltop desk.

  “See the door, sir.” He pointed unnecessarily; with the door we’d just come through at our backs, the one at the rear was the only one visible.

  At first I saw only a door. Then the train rattled over a joint and daylight appeared at the edge opposite the hinges, disappearing again as the door jostled back into its frame.

  “I keep it bolted when we’re in motion,” the conductor said. “I made sure it was bolted after the messenger delivered a wire for Mrs. Blackthorne in Stanton. When I got back from the day coach, the bolt was drawn.”

  “Could a movement of the train jar it from the socket?”

  “Shoot it yourself and see if it could.”

  I stepped around the coffin, took hold of the bolt, heavy brass almost as big around as my thumb, by the knob and slid it into the tube, brass also, screwed to the door frame. It was fitted tight to the recess and moved stiffly, like the bolt on a single-shot rifle, slamming home with a sharp click. There was some give in the frame; a knife in a determined hand might have moved the bolt from the outside.

  “Could anyone have boarded when the train was back in motion?”

  “I went to deliver the telegram as soon as we started. We were probably doing about fifteen then. It’s possible; but he couldn’t have gotten past me once I was in the coach. Tramps!” he spat. “They’ve gotten bolder since the Panic. Used to be they contented themselves to riding the rods; now they’re staking out parlor cars like the gentry.”

  “Maybe.” I turned away from the door and drew the Deane-Adams. “We’ll check the sleeper.”

  The conductor slid a steel coupling-pin from a rack bolted to the wall of the caboose, slapped the end against the palm of his free hand, making a satisfying smack, and pointed it toward the door leading to the adjoining car, indicating I should take the lead. In that moment he took on a few more years in my estimation.

  I took the upper berths, he the lower. I grasped the partitions in one hand, prising myself up with a foot on the bottom bunks and sweeping aside the curtains with the barrel of the revolver, while the conductor did the same below with his coupling-pin.

  It was monotonous work, and the greatest danger was boredom and complacency. The more empty berths a man encountered, the more he thought chances of finding anyone hiding in one were remote; whereas the opposite was true. But we got from one end of the car to the other, both sides, with nothing to show for our vigilance but a spider riding the rails without a ticket. The conductor put that to rest by squashing it against the birch with the end of his pin.

  I alit from the last upper and waited for him to straighten from his stoop across the aisle. “Could he have jumped off?”

  The conductor frowned, the muscular movement drawing the ends of his comical moustaches nearly together. “We slowed for the grade. He might have swung off then. I guess he took fright of discovery. The bastards are a lot tougher with each other than with us shacks.”

  “If he were that timid, why didn’t he stick to the rods instead of coming inside?”

  “Who can say how this rot thinks? If they had brains they’d make a living instead of stealing rides from the N.P.”

  “We have to ask what the point was of boarding us in the first place,” I said. />
  “I’m open to suggestions.”

  “Testing, maybe.” I touched the sight of the revolver to my lip, then spun it back into leather. “We won’t bother Mrs. Blackthorne with this. Let me know if anything else takes your interest.”

  TEN

  After the ball is over;

  after the break of morn,

  After the dancers’ leaving,

  After the stars are gone …

  The Bismarck Volunteer Fire Brigade contributed strings to its performance, two fiddles and a bass viol that squatted on the platform looking like a pregnant sow. Before that I didn’t think the song could sound more insipid. The station was new since I’d visited last, but the city beyond looked the same, apart from the addition of more brick buildings among the frame, strategically placed to create firebreaks. The traffic was still predominantly waterborne: A floating second city made of shallow-draught stern- and sidewheelers stuck their stacks up against the horizon, staining the underside of clouds black with smoke. A whistle blew, sounding like a croupy rooster; a brazen bell rang.

  I got my first glimpse of Hearst’s Javelin parked on a siding. Its name was painted, in gilt Olde-English letters like the masthead of The New York Journal, along the entire side of the train. The little switch engine and the train itself looked runty compared to ours. It consisted of one car besides the tender and caboose, a private coach from the look of it, albeit not as ornate as some I’d seen; the Pullman company was democratic, catering to millionaires at every level. I spotted the reporter standing in a small crowd of scribblers from my position in the vestibule of the dining car. He was the only one of the vultures who’d bothered to uncover his head throughout the serenade. He was also the only one not taking notes. Our eyes met, and I had the unsettling feeling his were probing behind mine all the way to the brain.