Holmes asked if he’d been convicted.
“The town’s just a mining camp with no authority. They can’t hold a trial till the circuit judge gets here. That could take days or months, and these get-rich-now prospectors aren’t inclined to be patient. Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three, and the other two didn’t dislike him enough to go up against a bunch of tin-panners with guns and a rope over the likes of Doc. I ask you now, does that look like a party that’d sit on its hands when hemp’s so cheap?” He inclined his head towards a group of men in muddy overalls hunched at the end of the bar, drinking straight whisky and taking turns looking over their shoulders towards our table.
Holmes kept his eyes on Earp. “I noticed them when they came in. The former teamster is their leader. He is the only one who hasn’t looked our way.”
“What makes him a teamster?” Earp asked. “They all look the same in them Tombstone tuxedoes.”
“Such muscular development as his is a common result of swinging a pickaxe or handling a team of mules or oxen. Since by calling them ‘tin-panners’ you suggest they haven’t yet advanced beyond the stage of panning streams for nuggets, I must conclude they are not ‘hardrock’ miners. That serpentine scar coiled round his neck ending at the corner of his jaw could only be the consequence of an accident with a whip—a hazard of the trade, based upon my observations since St. Louis. ‘Bull-whackers,’ I believe the men are sometimes called.”
“You’re a detective, for a fact. I’m glad to see the scribblers got it right for once. That’s Elmer Dundy, Hank Littlejohn’s old partner. When they got here, they quit the freighting business to find their fortune in the hills.”
“Holmes, he’s coming this way.” I slid my hand into my pocket.
“Hold, Doctor. We can’t shoot them all.”
Elmer Dundy was burned the color of the native sandstone, with a great bald head sunk between shoulders built for a yoke. His eyes were tiny black pebbles above a broken nose and a thick lower lip that sagged to show a row of brown teeth and green gums. He’d been drinking whisky from a beer glass, which he held by its handle in a fist the size of a mutton roast.
“So you dug up some friends,” he told Earp in a Londonderry brogue—filtered, it seemed, through cactus spines. “They don’t look like the killers you run with regular. What’s the matter, they fly the coop?”
Holmes intervened. “You’ll pardon my speaking without invitation, but I’m unaccustomed to being discussed in the third person when I am present. If you wish to address a question to myself or my companion, be kind enough to do so directly.”
Dundy regarded the speaker. Holmes was stretched languidly in his chair with one arm slung over the back and his stick resting alongside his legs, crossed at the ankles. “English!” The former teamster spat viciously, splattering the floor an inch from Holmes’s boot, and swung the heavy beer glass at his head.
What happened then took place in less time than I can describe it. Holmes seemed merely to shift his grip on the handle of his stick, the ferrule end flashed so swiftly it was a blur, and dropping one shoulder and twisting the handle slightly, he inserted the stick between the oaf’s ankles and sent him crashing to the floor.
Only when the building shook beneath this impact did I claw out my weapon, but before I had it free, Wyatt Earp scooped out his enormous revolver, thumbing back the hammer and leveling the barrel at Dundy’s friends, stopping them in midcharge.
Belatedly, as it seemed, Dundy’s beer glass, released as he fell, struck the floor with a thump. The gaggle of miners stared at it comically.
“Drag him out before he gives the place a bad name.” Earp’s tone was as hard and cold as steel.
“Wait.” I got up to examine the insensate man. I asked the bartender for brandy.
That fellow had come around from behind the bar with a length of billiard cue in his fist, only to find the drama ended. “Busthead’s all I got,” he growled.
I looked to Earp for a translation, but it was Holmes who supplied it. “Whisky, in the regional argot; I’m assembling a glossary. The term may be ironic in the current context, but the spirits should prove more than strong enough, though the flesh be weak.”
The remedy was produced—“Bill it to Dundy, when he’s perpendicular,” Earp instructed the bartender—and in a little while we were quit of the miners, who needed no further encouragement to conduct their friend outside.
Earp shook his head. “I must tell Doc. Your partner’s slow on the draw, but I doubt even Doc would think to pull a bad tooth from a man I buffaloed. I’d hire you both in a minute, but apart from my interest in the faro game here in the Mescalero, I haven’t a cartwheel dollar to pay you for your trouble. My luck’s gone sour since the fight at Fly’s.”
Holmes finished his beer at a draught. “I shall play you for my fee when the thing’s done, and accept your promise of payment should I win. When may I speak with Holliday?”
We placed our bags in the bartender’s charge, with a warning from Earp to look after them as if they were his own, and repaired to the jail. The town’s only building of substance was constructed of stone around an iron cage transported from some wild railhead that had been dismantled the last time the tracks moved westward; American civilization, I learned, was a portable thing in that rapidly developing wilderness. A gimlet-eyed deputy bit down upon Holmes’s pound sterling, inspected the result, and gave us five minutes with the prisoner.
I have remarked frequently upon the ascetic gauntness of Sherlock Holmes, but he appeared well-fed in comparison with Dr. John Henry Holliday. Holliday was an exemplar of the attenuated Southern aristocrat, saffron in color, with the skull plain under a crown of pale thinning hair and a lank set of imperials blurred by days without a razor. He sat in a six-by-eight-foot enclosure on a cot, with a deck of sweaty pasteboards laid out on the blanket in a game of patience. A dirty collarless shirt, wrinkled trousers with the braces dangling, and filthy stockings, of good quality notwithstanding, comprised his entire costume.
“I detest this game,” he said in lieu of salutation. “It’s like making love to a mirror, with the prospect of humiliating yourself through failure.”
“If it’s the latter you wish to avoid, I should move the queen of clubs from the king of spades to the king of hearts.”
The prisoner corrected the error with a throaty noise of self-disgust that turned into a paroxysm of coughing. He stifled it against a sleeve, which bore away with it a pink stain. His gaze, bright and bloodshot, took in Holmes. “God’s wounds, an Englishman. Is business so good we’re importing hangmen now?”
Wyatt made introductions. Holmes began his interrogation before Holliday could form another ironic comment. “Your friend said Hank Littlejohn was well-liked by all but three. Who, pray, are the other two?”
“Algernon Woods and Jasper Riley. Woods stopped playing poker with Hank for the same reason I did, and Riley got into a dust-up with him on the road here over a sporting woman they both liked in Bisbee; but I wouldn’t waste my time trying to pin it on either one.” He coughed and turned up another card.
“Are their alibis so sound?”
“Jasper’s is. The Chinaman who runs the opium concession here swears he was in his establishment smoking up dreams the night Hank got it. Being a celestial, he’s got no friends in town and no reason to lie.”
“Lies don’t always need reasons. What about Woods?”
“Algernon says he was working late in his shop alone. He’s not your man, or even half of him. He’s a dwarf, and fat besides. No one would mistake him for me even on a dark night, and there was a moon out big as a pumpkin.”
“You said he has a shop. He is a merchant?”
“He’s a combination tailor and undertaker. I was his customer once and it looks like I will be again.”
“Where were you when Littlejohn met his fate?”
“Sleeping off a drunk in Mrs. Blake’s boardinghouse. Whisky’s a thief, but if I was to start kill
ing poker cheats, I’d never be quit of it, and I’m a lazy man.”
“Thank you. Dr. Watson and I will do what can be done.”
Holliday chuckled, coughed, placed a red ten on a black knave. “I’d get to it directly. There’s another big moon tonight, dandy for tying a knot and finding the right tree.”
“I cannot understand such a man,” said I, when we were outside the jail.
Wyatt Earp dropped his cigar and crushed it under his heel. “You get used to that honey-and-molasses drawl. The Wester he goes, the Souther he gets.”
“I was referring to his character. My training tells me he’s a consumptive in the tertiary stage, but that’s hardly a reason to joke about hanging.”
“Life’s a joke to Doc. What part of it he’s got left is too small to take serious.”
“It’s not so small to you, however,” Holmes observed.
“Nor mine to him neither, comes to that. He’s innocent.”
“Of that I have no doubt. A man who’s so willing to accept death would sooner lie and say he’s guilty.”
“It’d stick in his craw.”
“Let us see if this Chinese opium seller suffers from that condition. There is no such thing as a watertight boat or an ironclad alibi.”
Earp led us to a large tent pitched upon a slope so steep it would flood during rains and collapse before a mild rockslide. The moss growing upon it made it as dark as a cave inside, lit only by greasy lanterns suspended above rows of folding campaign cots, some occupied by men mostly insensible. Evil smoke fouled the air. Earp slid his bandanna over his nose and mouth while I buried mine in my handkerchief. Holmes took in a deep breath and let it out with a contented sigh.
“Wantee pipee?”
This invitation came from an Oriental in a black silk robe and mandarin’s cap, round as Buddha and no taller than a child, albeit plainly in his sunset years. Gold shone in a wicked smile.
“No wantee pipee. Wantee straight talk, and not in pidgin. I know an Oxford accent when I hear it.” Holmes held up a gold sovereign, snatching it back when a yellow claw grabbed at it.
The old man shrugged and folded his hands inside the sleeves of his robe. “The missionary who taught me was a retired don. If you are here on behalf of a wife or mother, you may browse among these wretches for him who is lost. I do not insist upon introductions and so am ignorant as to their names.”
“If that is the case, how were you able to identify Jasper Riley among your customers the night Hank Littlejohn was killed?”
“I did not say I never pay attention to faces. In election years, many of my former colleagues in San Francisco went to jail because they failed to recognize the same undercover policemen who had arrested them before.”
“Did Riley pay you to say he was here all night?”
“Had he been here and made the proper offer, I should have accepted; but honestly, do you think a common teamster could meet my fee for such a risk? I bring in more in a night than he sees in a month, and it is nothing to hang a Chinaman here.”
“Very well. Here is your sovereign.”
The old man left his hands folded. “That is not the coin you showed me. You are not the magician you fancy yourself.”
Holmes grunted as if put out, slipped the coin into his waistcoat pocket, and produced another from inside his cuff. This the opium seller took with a mocking bow.
We went out, where Earp and I drew in great lungfuls of fresh air. Holmes chuckled, without mirth. “My good luck piece benefits me yet again. I took it from a German ironmonger who thought to ingratiate himself with Chancellor Bismarck by devaluing the British currency. Our educated friend inside is neither a liar nor a myopic. His price would exceed Littlejohn’s ability to pay, and it’s a very good counterfeit.”
“Then we’re licked,” Earp said. “I met Woods. He’s short as a rooster and fat as a hog. No one would confuse him with Doc with the moon out.”
“I should like to see the scene of the atrocity.”
We followed Earp to an open area a hundred yards from the nearest structure, barren but for rocks and scrub and grading downward from the mining camp, our guide reminding us to be alert for rattlesnakes. The dry earth was scored and spotted with wagon tracks and complex patterns made by overlapping hoof prints.
“A train of supplies and provisions came in from Tucson that night,” Earp said. “Littlejohn and Dundy came out to visit, and the teamsters sat around passing the jug. They say Doc came in to the top of that rise, coughing and cussing and calling for Littlejohn to show himself. When Littlejohn got up from the ground, Doc plugged him in the belly. That’s the story they told, anyway, to the last man.”
“Where was Littlejohn standing when he was shot?”
“Right where I am.”
“Doctor, will you stand where Mr. Earp indicated that Doc Holliday stood?”
I went to that spot.
“Mr. Earp, could you mistake Dr. Watson for Holliday under these circumstances?”
“No, sir. A bat wouldn’t. Watson’s a head shorter and twice as thick through the chest.”
“What about at night? Disregard for the moment his mode of dress.”
“The moon was just shy of full that night. What clothes he had on don’t feature. You can make a skinny man look fat in the right clothes, pillows and such, but you can’t make a fat man skinny, nor a short man tall, without a pair of stilts.”
“I think it’s time we met Mr. Woods.”
A crude wooden placard hung suspended by twine above the open flap of a tent with wooden framework, reading Tailor’s Shop & Undertaking Parlor, A. Woods, Prop. in whitewash. We ducked inside and were greeted by a man who rose from a canvas chair. The fellow was neatly dressed in a striped waistcoat, black garters, and grey flannel trousers, but the first thing one noticed was his unnaturally brief stature—four feet two at the outside—and cherubic roundness. He was highly colored and close-shaven, with clear blue eyes, and were I his physician I might have treated him for obesity, but never consumption. His welcoming expression became a frown when he saw Earp.
“Mr. Algernon Woods? I am Sherlock Holmes. This is Dr. Watson, my associate, and I believe you know this other gentleman.”
“We’ve met.” His voice, astonishingly deep for the size of its chamber, had a harsh edge. “He accused me of hiring someone who looked like Holliday to kill Littlejohn.”
“I considered and rejected that hypothesis in the case of Jasper Riley. Youngblood is small and lightly populated as yet. Any local resident who resembled Holliday would be certain to fall under suspicion, and no stranger could fail to be noticed and questioned. In the absence of other suspects, I must conclude that one of three men is a murderer.”
“Your man’s in jail.”
“I understand Holliday made use of your tailoring services.”
“He’s particular. Grey coats, never black, and he likes his shirts colored. I doubled the size of my scrap pile with the stuff he rejected.” He indicated a heap of odds and ends of cloth between trestle tables covered with bolts of material.
“A man of distinction,” Holmes said.
“A man who likes to stand out.”
“In his condition he can hardly hope not to. As undertaker, did you conduct a post-mortem examination upon Littlejohn?”
“I dug for the slug, but it passed on through.”
“Hardly thorough. Has he been interred?”
“Buried? Not yet; he’s in back. What are you, Pinkerton?”
“I am merely a visitor who desires justice. Would you object if Dr. Watson examined the corpse?”
Woods began to speak, but at that moment Wyatt Earp spread his coat casually, exposing the handle of his revolver. The small man closed his mouth and led us with a waddling gait around the edge of a canvas flap bisecting the tent.
I won’t belabor the reader with the clinical details of my examination. At Holmes’s direction I probed the ghastly wound, then covered the naked body with a sheet and wip
ed my hands.
“Downward trajectory through the abdomen,” I said. “Thirty degrees.”
“Holliday was taller than Littlejohn,” Woods said. “It’s natural he would fire at a downward angle.”
Holmes didn’t appear to be listening. “Mr. Earp, would you say the ground sloped thirty degrees at the scene of the crime?”
“About that. I worked on a track gang once and learned a thing or two.”
“Thank you. My compliments, Mr. Woods, upon your reconstructive skills. With rouge and wax you’ve managed to make Mr. Littlejohn appear in excellent health. Would you allow me to buy you a whisky at the Mescalero Saloon, to apologize for having wrongly suspected you?”
“I won’t drink with Holliday’s friend. I don’t trust him.”
Holmes took Earp aside. The pair spoke in low tones. At length the frontiersman left, but not before casting a dark glance back at Woods over his shoulder. “Mr. Earp understands and has recused himself from our celebration,” Holmes said.
One whisky became three, then four. I am not a man of temperance, but neither am I bibulous, and I measured carefully my ingestion while marveling at the little man’s capacity and Holmes’s. Their speech grew loud, their consonants less crisp. I had not seen my companion in a state of inebriation and felt embarrassed for him and for my country. I became distinctly ill at ease as darkness fell and the saloon filled with teamsters and miners, all of whom seemed to share my tablemates’ fondness for spirits. I remembered what Holliday had said about a bright moon being ideal for a hanging. The guard at the jail could not withstand them all.
Holmes was insensitive to the danger. He suggested we walk Woods back to his establishment, but in truth, when he rose he was as unsteady on his feet as was our guest. I kept my hand in my revolver pocket as we walked through that den of smoke and evil plans, feeling very much upon my own.
My fears for my companion’s clouded faculties were realized when he steered Woods in a direction opposite the path to his tent. “Holmes, this isn’t—”
Sherlock Holmes In America Page 12
