Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West

by Bill Pronzini

  “You’re no cowhand, that’s for sure,” I said. “What kind of work you do, if any? Wood-chopping? Swamping?”

  “Compositor.”

  “Say which?”

  “Typesetter. Traveling printer.” Jones flattened his hand out into a streak of sunlight to show the ink stains on his fingers.

  “The hell,” I said. “Never seen one of your kind on horseback before.”

  “I won this animal and saddle in a poker game three nights ago.”

  “That so? Appears to me you’d of been better off if you’d thrown in your hand.”

  “Well, I decided to have a look at parts of the Territory I’d never seen before, but I guess I’m not cut out for this kind of travel. Or this kind of open prairie country. Three days and nights and I’ve learned my lesson.” He showed his teeth in a lopsided fool’s grin. “I don’t plan on keeping the beast for long, just until I get someplace where I can sell him. What’s the nearest town on the railroad and how far?”

  “Box Elder. Seven miles southeast.”

  “Does Box Elder have a newspaper?”

  “It does, but I wouldn’t think about looking for work there if I was you. Will Satterlee’s the last editor you want to hire on with.”

  “Why is that?”

  I fixed Jones with a hard eye. “He’s a bullheaded troublemaker, that’s why. Made an enemy of the man I ramrod for.”

  “How so?”

  “Never mind how so. That’s none of your lookout.”

  “He sounds like a firebrand, this editor.”

  “The sort that’ll get himself burned if he don’t back off. You don’t want no part of him or his paper, not if you’re smart. Just make your sale and hop the first north or south freight out of Box Elder.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind. Mind if I ask your name?”

  “Why? You’ll never see me again, long as you get off Square G land and stay off.”

  “I like to know who’s giving me advice.”

  “That some kind of smart-ass remark?”

  “Wasn’t meant to be. I’m just curious, that’s all.”

  “Kinch. Jada Kinch.”

  “Well, Mr. Kinch, I apologize for the inadvertent trespass and I’ll be off Square G land as quick as I can.”

  “See that you are. And learn how to read a signpost proper so you don’t make the same mistake again.”

  He gave me a little salute, wheeled the crowbait around, and trotted off the way he’d come. I watched him out of sight around the bend before I rode back to where Collie and Yandle were waiting.

  “Kind of a long palaver,” Collie said. “Who is he, Jada?”

  “Nobody,” I said. “Just a half-wit tramp printer. Nobody at all.”

  R. W. SATTERLEE

  I was in the front section of the Banner office, taking notes from the widow Coombs for a Saturday church social announcement, when the long-haired, rough-dressed stranger came in off the boardwalk. A blast of summer heat blew in with him, along with the loud rumble of a Murphy wagon loaded with kegs from Steinhaur’s Brewery in Billings bound for the Occidental House across Central Street.

  He took off his hat and stood quiet, mopping his face with a handkerchief, until my business with Mrs. Coombs was done and she walked out. She cast him a sideways glance on the way, and then sniffed as if she found him odorous and disreputable. I sure didn’t. I had an idea what he was and why he was there even before he came up and gave his breed’s standard opener. I was glad to see him, and Dad would be, too—if the fellow was qualified. In a small town like ours, we had a hard time getting and keeping help.

  “How’s work?”

  “Available,” I said, “if you have experience.”

  “More than twelve years now.”

  “Then you’ll be welcome. The last printer we had, an oldster named Charlie Weems, left more than two months ago.”

  “Charlie Weems. Well, well.”

  “You know him?”

  “Sure. Not a tooth left in his head, but he still chews tobacco and can ring a spittoon at twenty yards. Only one eye, claims to have lost the other in an explosion of a Queen Anne musket. Drinks forty-rod whiskey, can recite the names and addresses of most houses of ill repute he’s ever visited, talks a blue streak while he sets type, and boasts that since he turned seventy he hasn’t spent more than a week at any job in any town.”

  “He set type pretty fast for a man his age.”

  “Fastest ever when he was young, to hear him tell it. How many pages in your sheet?”

  “Four. Only two now and then, when there isn’t enough news and advertisements to fill. We go to press early Thursday morning and circulate that afternoon. And we’re behind schedule for this week.”

  “Standard union wages?”

  “Sure. Twenty-five cents a thousand ems.”

  His gray eyes took my measure. “I’d say you’re too young to be the owner of a territorial newspaper. No offense.”

  “None taken. I just passed my seventeenth birthday. My father, Will Satterlee, is the owner.”

  “I believe I’ve heard the name. And you’d be Will junior?”

  “No. Robert William Satterlee. But everyone calls me R.W.”

  “You’ll go places, then,” he said. “Men who use their initials often do.”

  I asked for his name.

  “Jones. Artemas Jones.”

  “Give-a-Damn Jones?”

  “So I’ve been called. How do you know the moniker? Charlie Weems?”

  “Yes, sir. He mentioned you a couple of times. But he didn’t say how you came by it.”

  “Nor will I.” Short and a touch sharp, as if he were embarrassed by the explanation. “I prefer to be called Artemas. Your father on the premises?”

  “Over to the marshal’s office, hunting news about Jim Tarbeaux. He should be back before long.”

  “Who would Jim Tarbeaux be?”

  Maybe I shouldn’t have answered as readily as I did, but Charlie Weems had spoken highly of Give-a-Damn Jones and there was something about him that made him easy to talk to. Besides, it was all right there in the back issues of the Banner.

  “Man just released from Deer Lodge,” I said. “He used to live here in the basin and some folks don’t like the idea of him coming back.”

  “Hard case?”

  “Not five years ago, when he was convicted of grand theft. Just pretty wild. But he could be now, I guess. They say prison hardens a man.”

  “I’ve known one it did and two it didn’t. Mind telling me something else, R.W.?”

  “If I can.”

  “I took a wrong turn on my way here and ended up on Square G land. A fellow named Kinch advised me not to stop in Box Elder and ask for work. He said your father had made an enemy of the Square G’s owner.”

  “Colonel Elijah Greathouse,” I said. “A very important man in the basin, or used to be.”

  “Used to be?”

  “Before he lost most of his cattle the bad winter before last, along with just about every other rancher hereabouts—what folks call the ‘Great Die-Up’ or the ‘Big Die.’ The Square G is still the largest, and he’s still head of the Cattlemen’s Association, but he’s not as powerful as he once was. He can’t rebuild his herd because prices are low and he can’t get a loan, and he hates the German and Scandinavian farmers from Wisconsin and Minnesota who are taking over what used to be open grazing land.”

  “Trouble between him and the farmers?”

  “Yes.” I probably should have let it go at that, but Dad says I have a tendency to run off at the mouth, and besides, if Give-a-Damn Jones was going to work for us, he needed to know how things stood. So I went on, “The farmers aren’t squatters, the land was deeded to them free and clear, but the Colonel hates them just the same. He thinks they have been butchering cows of his that wandered through fence breaks onto their tracts, or that the nesters broke the fences themselves and have been rustling the steers. But he can’t prove it. There have been a few night r
aids on the settlers’ tracts recently—masked riders tearing down their fences, shooting a few animals and a flock of chickens. My father believes the Colonel is responsible.”

  “And has written editorials accusing him of it.”

  “Yes. Others critical of the Colonel, too.”

  I didn’t add that the editorials had been increasingly fiery, denouncing Colonel Greathouse as a hidebound despot who refused to accept the fact that Montana was changing, becoming more populated, more settled, and that the glory days of cattle ranching had ended with the devastating winter of ’86–’87. I agreed. So did a lot of other folks in Box Elder, and more importantly, so did the Territorial Legislature in Helena. Word was that we would be ratified as the forty-first state in the Union next year.

  I also didn’t say anything about how concerned I was about the escalating conflict between Dad and Colonel Greathouse. Will Satterlee is a fine man, a good father, but he has an iron will and his convictions are unshakable when he believes he is in the right. If he kept goading the Colonel the way he had been, I was afraid their feud would erupt into violence. It could happen, especially now that Jim Tarbeaux was out of prison and likely to return to Box Elder. Dad was convinced that Tarbeaux had been railroaded, and the Colonel’s harsh disapproval of Tarbeaux’s former relationship with his daughter, Mary Beth, made the hostility even more volatile.

  “Well,” I said, “now that you know how things stand, Mr. Jones—”

  “Artemas.”

  “—do you still want to work for us? We could sure use help getting out this week’s issue. And with all the job printing we’ve got piled up.”

  “You’ll have it, if your father approves my hiring. And maybe for a while after that.”

  “Oh, he’ll approve. Surely he will.”

  “Well, then. Suppose you show me around your shop while we wait for him.”

  He came through the gate at the end of the counter, and I led him into the rear section of the shop and stood by while he eyed our cranky old hand press, soapstone table, forms, type frames and cases, stacks of newsprint, and inking material.

  “Albion,” he said, nodding at the skeleton shape of the press. “Harks back to Horace Greeley’s day at the New York Tribune.”

  “Dad wants to replace it with a newer Washington press, but we can’t afford it right now.”

  Artemas examined the Albion and allowed as how it appeared to be in reasonably good shape. Then he opened upper- and lower-case type drawers and nodded approvingly at the selection of Revier, nonpareil, and agate. Another approving nod followed his study of the previous week’s issue from a leftover bundle.

  “This is tolerable good for a jim-crow sheet,” he said.

  “What’s a jim-crow sheet?”

  He grinned. “Small-town newspaper. Your father’s been in the game a while, I take it.”

  “Eight years in Box Elder. Before that four years in Laramie, and before that stints in Sacramento and Marysville, where I was born.”

  “I like working for an editor who knows his business. And who isn’t afraid to stand up for what he believes in.” Artemas paused and added with a little quirk of his mouth, “Even when I’ve been advised against it.”

  SETH JENNISON

  I like Will Satterlee, I admire his moxie, and more often than not I agree with his point of view, but sometimes he gives me a sharp pain in my hindquarters. Today was one of those times.

  He’d come in to ask if I’d heard anything more about Jim Tarbeaux coming home to Box Elder—I hadn’t, not a word since Tarbeaux’s release from Deer Lodge four days ago—and then he started in on his favorite topic, the sins of Colonel Elijah Greathouse. He’d worked himself up into a tirade, stomping around my office like a fighting cock on the strut. Fighting cock was a good description of him—bantam-sized, head bobbing, beak of a nose thrust out, jowls a-quiver, tufts of feathery gray hair poking out every which way.

  I tried to calm him down, reminding him of his high blood pressure, but he wouldn’t calm. “Greathouse is a pox on this community,” he kept saying, “and you know it as well as I do. He’s had his own way too long. Deviling those immigrant farmers, doing everything in his power to drive them off land that legally belongs to them and keep others from settling, and he’ll devil Jim Tarbeaux, too.”

  “Likely Tarbeaux won’t stay long when he comes back,” I said. “Just long enough to sell his ranch.”

  “He may decide to stay on at Keystone instead of selling it.”

  “Uh-huh. Eight months now since his pa died, and what few cattle George had left sold at auction and the money gone to pay taxes. Take money to fix it up, get it working again. He wouldn’t dare use what’s left of that fifty-four hundred dollars he stole.”

  “Don’t start in on that again, Seth. That money has been long spent, and not a dime of it by him.”

  “Have it your way. If he does put the ranch up for sale, he won’t get much the way things are now. Might not get anything at all.” A fat blowfly buzzed my ear, and I took a swipe at it and missed. Blasted flies. Worst summer for flies and mosquitoes since the blistering hot one of ’86.

  “There is another reason he might stay,” Will said. “Mary Beth Greathouse.”

  “Her still being unspoken for don’t mean she’s been waiting five years for Tarbeaux.”

  “Yes it does. Why else would she keep resisting the attentions of every eligible male within fifty miles? And I happen to know she wrote him letters the entire time he was in prison.”

  “She did? How’d she’d manage that, the way the Colonel feels about Tarbeaux?”

  “A resourceful woman can always find a way.”

  “Uh-huh. How’d you find out about those letters?”

  “I have my sources. Reliable sources.”

  “Uh-huh. And you figure her and Tarbeaux will take up again.”

  “I do. Assuming he still cares for her as much as she does for him, and I have no reason to believe otherwise.”

  “The Colonel won’t stand for it.”

  “That’s what worries me. That profane, half-senile old buzzard did all he could to break up their romance before the robbery. Now he’s doubly convinced Tarbeaux isn’t good enough for his daughter. It would never even occur to him that the man was wrongly convicted.”

  “Will,” I said, “you’re the only one still believes Tarbeaux didn’t steal that money in spite of all the evidence stacked against him.”

  “Hang the evidence. Built on foolish behavior and a string of lies. And I am not the only one who believes in his innocence. Mary Beth surely does.”

  “Maybe so, but the Colonel—”

  “Hang the Colonel, too. You know as well as I do that he’s liable to do something drastic—frame Tarbeaux for another crime or burn him out if he stays at Keystone. And if he and Mary Beth should run off together, I wouldn’t put it past him to have Tarbeaux shot.”

  “Oh, now, he wouldn’t go that far. Man’s ruthless, I grant you, but he’d never sink to murder.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that.”

  “Now, Will—”

  “He didn’t dirty his own hands during the war and he has never dirtied them here that can be proven, but he’s quite capable of stooping to any sort of crime to further his own interests, murder included. And that ramrod of his, Kinch, would carry it out.”

  “Pshaw. Kinch may be hard-nosed, but he’s no gunslick.”

  “Would you stake your life on that, Seth? I wouldn’t stake mine.”

  Much as I hated to admit it, Will had a point. About the Colonel, if not necessarily about Jada Kinch. Greathouse was a hard man with a fierce temper and questionable scruples, no getting around that. Hardly liked or much respected in Box Elder, but he still had power and political clout and most folks were chary if not downright afraid of him. I wasn’t, even though he could lose me my job as town marshal if I stepped half as hard on his toes as Will Satterlee had been doing. But that didn’t mean I could buck him without cause.
>
  He’d been a brevet colonel with C Company of the Tenth Kansas Volunteers during the War Between the States, and boastful of his war record and military record—but Will had done some investigating, found out Greathouse was disliked as a bully by the soldiers under his command, and wrote one of his editorials revealing same. The two of ’em hadn’t cared for each other before that, though civil enough when they met, but that editorial started their feud and subsequent ones just as fiery escalated it.

  I’d tried to talk sense to Will, convince him to tone down his near-libelous attacks. So had Mayor Blevins and some of the other city fathers, even a few of the smaller cattlemen in the basin who didn’t care for nesters any more than Greathouse did. But Will wouldn’t listen, wouldn’t step down off his soapbox. Who’d speak for the downtrodden if he didn’t, he said. Well, he had a point there, too, but still …

  I said, “What would you have me do? Tell Jim Tarbeaux he’s not welcome in Box Elder and he better leave Mary Beth alone, sell out, and drift? That’s what the Colonel wants. Rufus Cable, too. He’s scared to death of Tarbeaux. And got a right to be, after the beating Tarbeaux gave him at the hotel and the threat he made after the trial.”

  “Cable is a weak-minded, deceitful fool. And a thief. I still maintain his testimony was false.”

  “Well, even if you’re right, he believes Tarbeaux intends to do him grievous harm. But Tarbeaux’s paid his debt and I got no authority to keep him from coming back here if he’s a mind to, no matter his reasons or what he did and said in anger five years ago. I told Rufus that. Yes, and I told the Colonel the same. As long as Tarbeaux don’t break the law again, he can go where he likes and do what he pleases in Box Elder.”

  “Did you warn Greathouse to leave him alone?”

  “I got no authority to issue warnings outside the town limits, you know that—the Square G’s county jurisdiction. He’d throw me off his property if I tried and have every right to do it.”

  “So you intend to do nothing at all. Just let him make trouble for Tarbeaux the way he has for Hugo Rheinmiller and the other nesters?”

  My dander was up now, too. I hauled out of my desk chair and went over and looked down on Mr. Satterlee. I stand six one in my socks and the top of his rooster-feathered head come to just about my jawline. “Dammit, man, my hands are tied. Not by Colonel Greathouse, by the law. The law! Unless somebody commits a provable crime in Box Elder, there’s not a blessed thing I can do except keep the peace the best way I know how.”