But for the moment I pushed such academic questions aside and whispered a command: “Wait here.”
I waved Billy Jack to the opposite side of the saloon doors. He crept off the floor planks onto the dusty street and did a crouched run to where I wanted him. No bullets ensued. I motioned for Beauregard to stay low, and he and I waddled to the entrance like well-armed ducks. We paused and listened. No sound.
I whispered across to Billy Jack, “On the count of three, we all go in. Billy Jack, you cover the left. Beauregard, you cover the right. I’ll run in and leap over the bar. One, two, three—now!” We burst in, each with revolver drawn, and I bolted for that bar fully prepared to having zinging bullets cutting the air fore and aft of me. I was so intent on my target that my mind and body registered nothing else. I expect I could have had my head shot off, and like a headless chicken continued forward. Up and over the bar went my boots, and I landed hard but stable and firm on the barkeep’s side. I thought the bottles above me might start exploding, ignited by lead. But there was silence, except for the faint creek of leather and of Beauregard and Billy Jack’s weight shifting on wood. I stood, my eyes swiveling for targets. But nothing moved. The saloon appeared deserted—its bottles and glasses, tables and chairs left just as they were after a usual night’s closing.
“Cover me,” I said, and I carefully crept around the bar and then to the stairway that led to Larsen’s office. I knew, as I mounted the stairs, that I’d make a tempting target if any hidden gunman had me in his sights. But there was no click of a hammer, no glint of daylight slanted through a window onto a gun barrel, no footfall save my own. I made it to the landing. All was quiet. I knocked on the door. No response. I tried the handle: unlocked. I stepped inside. Larsen’s chair was empty. On the giant desk were the documents, pinned there by a knife. I stepped to the desk, yanked out the knife, and a voice behind me said, “Morning, Marshal.”
I consider myself a brave man, but I concede that the hairs on the nape of my neck stood up. I turned around slowly.
In the dawn shadows, sitting in the corner behind the open door, was Dern. His boots were propped up on a waste paper basket. “Mr. Larsen asked me to stay behind, just to make sure you were satisfied. We tried to do it right and proper. As I always say, Marshal, we don’t want no trouble. I can verify his signatures; that’s me signed on as his witness.”
“Thank you, Dern; very efficient.” I shuffled through the papers. “It appears everything is present and correct. Are you looking for a job?”
“I got me a job, Marshal.”
“Telegraph’s not around anymore—and you weren’t much good at that job anyway.”
“Have you tried that telegraph, Marshal? I reckon it won’t be much use to you—Indians always knocking down the wires.”
“I’m sure we can find you another job.”
“Mr. Larsen takes good care of me. I reckon he might take good care of you too.”
I wasn’t quite sure what he meant by that. Surely he wasn’t trying to bribe me. So, I said, “Thank you, Dern, that’s all. You may go. You can tell Mr. Larsen you did your job.”
Dern emerged into the daylight of the window. “There’s more to my job than that, Marshal. Just a word to the wise, you might want to get out of town. Some folks are comin’ you’re not going to like. They’re goin’ to want a drink, and they’re not goin’ to want a marshal delivering it.”
“I appreciate the warning, but I reckon I’ll stay. Have to, anyway. As I’m sure you know, there’s a cordon around the town.”
“I could find you a way out. Not just you, Marshal, but all those girls. They don’t deserve what could happen to ’em. Some of the men comin’ here ain’t too kind.”
I gave him a long, assessing look and said finally, “Your Mr. Larsen wants me to stay; and as an investor in this saloon—a saloon that doesn’t officially belong to me, but to Miss Saint-Jean—that suits me fine; I intend to protect my investment.”
“Oh, he wants you to stay all right—let’s just say for other reasons.”
“To each his own. Goodbye, Dern. I trust you’ll pay us a visit; first drink’s on me.”
“Goodbye, Marshal—and I hope I ain’t toastin’ your funeral.”
I followed him out to the landing and watched as he descended slowly, his spurs jangling, his eyes on my colleagues.
“Goodbye, gamblin’ man,” he said to Beauregard. “Injun,” he said, tipping his fingers to Billy Jack. Then Miss Saint-Jean sashayed through the swinging doors. Dern halted. He wavered for a moment, frankly appraising her, from Robin Hood cap to spiked heel, and tarrying in between. Finally, he said, “I surely do hope Mr. Larsen looks kindly on you ma’am; I surely do.” He pushed through the saloon doors and was gone.
I needed to dispel the ensuing silence with action—and gave orders: “Beauregard, get your account book and make a tally of our alcohol, ranking it in order of inflammability. Miss Saint-Jean, these papers in my hand confirm the saloon is yours; let’s make preparations to defend it. I’d be obliged, ma’am, if your ladies learned some new dance routines—they can practice here; the sight and sound of them will inspire the men . . .”
“What men?”
“Our men.”
“You and Beauregard?”
“Well, it’s a start—and I’d be obliged if you’d form a sewing circle. I need an Indian costume. So does Beauregard. Billy Jack and Rachel can advise.” She looked exasperated. I turned with relief to Sergeant Bill Crow, a proper Indian scout and soldier, and gave some more orders: “Sergeant, take Hercules and grab every shopkeeper you can find. Tell them we’re obliged to destroy their businesses, but will give them work building a moat.”
“Oh, they’ll leap at that for sure,” said Beauregard.
“Major, you have your orders.”
“Yes, sir, and where might I find you, Yankee General, sir, if I need you—as if I didn’t know.”
“I don’t know what you mean to imply, but I’m rousting our Chinamen out of bed. Billy Jack, come with me—let’s find Hercules.”
Thus began the fortification of the Bloody Gulch Hotel, Spa, Saloon, and Theatre.
At the hotel, Billy Jack and I marched into the kitchen. There amongst the pots and pans, the dozing Mr. Smithers, and an affectionate cat, prowling for mice, we grabbed pot lids. Then through the deserted parlor, up the red-carpeted stairs, to the fourth floor where the Chinamen were boarded. Without pausing to knock, I flung open the door. “Get up, you lazy laundrymen!” I crashed pot lids together and nodded at Billy Jack to do the same. “What do you think this is? A Shanghai siesta? Sleepy-sleepy—naughty-naughty! Must wakey-wakey early-early in the morning-o, in the army-o! No rolly-cally, no breakfast! Now musty-musty doey-doey hardy-hardy labor-labor!” This I thought was a fairly good stab at the sort of Cantonese English that is the lingua franca of places like Hong Kong. I looked to Billy Jack, the linguist, for his approval. “Is that about right?”
“Right as rain, sir. In French, droit comme la pluie. In Spanish, correcto como la lluvia. In Latin, rectum sicut pluviam.”
“Hercules, get these men organized into a labor detail, savvy? Acrobatty fronty-fronty.” Hercules regarded me sullenly or perhaps uncomprehendingly, but the acrobats tumbled over each other, forming a line for inspection, and saluted.
Fu Yu did not join them. He sat on his bed, his wide magician sleeves occupied by doves cooing and waltzing.
I put my face in front of his. “Who do you think you are—you Peking prestidigitator!”
The doves scattered, but he remained calm. He reached behind my ear and pulled out a joker card.
“Get in line!” I shouted, and he hopped over to stand by his fellows.
Dramatically, I paced before the short, black-silk line of acrobats. I dropped any semblance of Cantonese and spoke the most powerful English I could muster. “Tumblers, acrobats, I am assigning you to Major Gillette. Your mission will be the most important you have had thus far. Using hammers and other
tools, you will be deployed to demolish every building in Bloody Gulch, save for the hotel, the saloon, the church, and the school. This destruction will not be the destruction of the Vandal or, perhaps more relevant to you, the Mongol. It will be the destruction we see in nature, of autumn making way for spring, of buildings coming down so that others might be go up, of dry brittle noodles, useless to you in that state, soaked in boiling water so that they might be sucked off chopsticks and provide you with nourishment.
“For to everything there is a season—a time to tumble, a time to make others tumble; a time to build up, a time to tear down; a time to bend steel bars with your bare hands,” I winked at Hercules, “a time to dance the cancan,” and I thought of Rachel and wished she were here to be inspired by this moment, “a time to deal cards; and a time to turn cards into doves,” I looked to Fu Yu, who shot a fan out from his sleeve and waved it before his face, dramatically.
“Every board and building we take down will be material for Major Beauregard to build defenses—de fences and de breastworks,” I said, smiling wryly at my little jest. “We will waste nothing. Everything that can be usefully requisitioned from the General Store will be put to good use. We are not termites, eating away this town’s foundations, we are Trojans defending Troy. For Troy—and for Bloody Gulch!” I waited for a rousing Chinese cheer. But they only stared in amazement, and I figured that was good enough. “Sergeant Bill Crow, lead them away!”
In short order, Major Gillette had them working like the Trojans I had told them they were, and the air was bursting with the sounds of harmonious hammers, rasping saws, and the lovely thunk of boards fitted on boards. We built a small and nicely arched bifurcated passageway with one corridor connecting the saloon to the hotel and the other connecting the saloon to the barnyard (I envisioned the saloon as our supply depot, to which we could evacuate the pigs and chickens and dairy cows if necessary). Beauregard erected such impediments to an aggressor’s attack that he deemed feasible, and since the telegraph was useless, we raised telegraph-wire fences to keep the enemy out just as ranchers erect barbed-wire fences to keep cattle in.
I assigned Hercules, Fu Yu, Billy Jack, and myself to digging the trench. This, I pointed out, would allow me work in the open air without a shirt, illustrating for the men, in my own muscular development, the benefits to be gained from vigorous outdoor activity. I also hoped to inspire the remaining civilians to join us after we tore down their establishments.
In that job—the job of destruction before the reconstruction—Hercules was a great help, stifling each proprietor’s protests by clasping one giant hand over his mouth and placing the other on top of the proprietor’s head, threatening to twist it off and break his neck—at least that worked with Mathis, who ran the General Store, and Llewellyn, who ran the livery stable.
With Ives, the blacksmith, it was a different matter. Big and burly, bearded and bearlike, Ives was not a man to be trifled with. Hercules couldn’t even get close to him. As the Chinese strongman approached, Ives sensed a challenge. He grabbed what looked like a sledgehammer, ready to do battle. Billy Jack fetched me to defuse the situation.
“Ives,” I said, marshal’s badge glittering on my chest, “my friends and I have come to take possession of your property. I regret this extreme measure, but as you undoubtedly are aware, Seth Larsen and the Largo Trading Company plan to turn Bloody Gulch into cinders. They want to show you and everyone else here that unless you’re willing to be slaves to the Company, they’re going to destroy you. They’ve been destroying everyone’s self-respect in this town already. We’re about to bring that to a halt.
“We intend to make a stand at the saloon and the hotel. We need to tear down your business for its lumber—so we can build more defenses. Larsen’s going to destroy it anyway. And we can put you to work—we have plenty of work for strong men—fighting men too, if you’re up to that, and by the look of it, you are.”
“This is my business, Marshal, my livelihood; I built it with my bare hands.”
“It can’t be much of a livelihood with only one customer, the Largo Trading Company. And at what cost in honor do you buy that scant livelihood? I’m a man of the law, and I’ve heard what’s happened here: your women held hostage, your children stolen from you and put to work, your comrades, your fellow men, slaves to Larsen.
“You built this business with your bare hands—so take it down the same way, plank by plank. With every plank you take down, with every sacrifice you make, you’ll be losing little but gaining much; your profits—whatever they are—will be suspended, temporarily, but your honor will be restored forever.
“Take it down, Ives, and join us. Mathis and Llewellyn already have. They’re practical men of business—the only ones left in this town—and they know there’s no future going on like this. This large Chinaman you see before you, Hercules, helped convince them of that.
“I challenge you, Ives, from all that is manly in your heart, to join us, so that from this day until the end of the world you will not hold your manhood cheap but take pride in standing with us at the siege of the Bloody Gulch Hotel, Spa, Saloon, and Theatre.”
He looked at me under black eyebrows. He lowered the sledgehammer, spat on his hands, and rubbed them together to stimulate thought, as working men do. Then he cocked an eye at me and said, slowly, in a deep low voice, “Well, Marshal, if you put it that way, I don’t have no woman and don’t have no kids, so I guess it was easy enough for me to look the other way, or just to mind my own business—which is all I’ve done. But I suppose, now that I figure it, that was kind of shortsighted, wasn’t it? I expect I should be comin’ along; I expect I should let your boys help me take this place down. I’m a handy man with a hammer and a shovel—and a rifle, if it comes to that. You can count me in.”
“Well done,” I said. I grasped the blacksmith by the hand and shoulder and welcomed him to our merry band. And so we set to work, each in his own style: Ives silent and dedicated; Llewellyn, who ran the livery stable, grumbling and spitting tobacco juice, staining the grey beard that sat on him like a bib; Mathis, the proprietor of the General Store, whose eagle-eyed gaze seemed to assess the worth of every board and every nail that we ripped up or hammered down; the Chinamen singing their highly annoying, discordant songs (oh, for a regimental band to trumpet out “Garry Owen”) or yelping like jackals when a steel hammer hit a yellow thumb; Beauregard, suave and efficient; Billy Jack, stealthy and mysterious; and I, your devoted husband, manly and strong.
Everyone did his part, though I occasionally suspected Mathis and Llewellyn of malingering, and wanted them horsewhipped. Major Beauregard persuaded me, however, that, as civilians, they could not be held to military discipline. He suggested a midday glass of beer to help them deal with the heat, which I allowed, and which Rachel and Isabel delivered from the saloon. Ives declined the beer dispensation, working diligently and soberly, and patiently instructing the Chinamen.
Beauregard, I noticed, kept a flask of bourbon handy, but never showed ill effects. For me, the beverage of choice was fresh milk, of course, my beloved “Alderney”; and I was most grateful for it. The Chinamen waved off Alderney as if it were poison. I allowed them no alcohol, so they and Billy Jack subsisted on branch water.
All in all, I have to confess, Libbie, I was having a wonderful time, working outside in the glow of the day; the cancan girls watching me appreciatively from the balcony of the hotel; evenings spent, soothing glass of Alderney in hand, watching the ladies in turn, as they perfected new aspects of their dramatic art.
Days passed in such fruitful labor and nights in such theatrical rehearsal; and every day Billy Jack scouted the enemy cordon and reported that he saw nothing—or at least nothing new: Larsen’s men occupied the outlying farms; Indian patrols kept a watchful eye on our destruction and reconstruction of the town. Behind the hotel, protecting the farmyard, we erected a five-foot-high palisade with a ten-foot-high watchtower. The trench was dug, lined in the back with tin and fi
lled, in that section, with the most inflammable spirits we could find (so not beer but whiskey). I had reckoned on a splashy pond of alcohol, but Beauregard, after experimenting with a tiny trickling rivulet (which we kept from evaporating by covering that portion of trench with wooden planks), concluded that such a pond would far exceed our supply of spirits. Better, he figured, was placing the bottles strategically in the tin-lined rivulet, like torpedoes, and stacking a supply of rocks nearby so that that the bottles could be broken and the whiskey set alight in an emergency (he and I and Fu Yu, as officers, each carried a box of matches). This, Beauregard pointed out, would also allow us to withhold a small store of whiskey for medical emergencies. What could I say but, “Well done.”
The Confederate Major devised other clever defenses as well. About sixty yards in front of the hotel and saloon we strung a telegraph-wire fence and dug a trench behind it. The fence would impede an attack—giving us more time to shoot—and the trench was a trap in which our acrobatic swordsmen could, with luck, dispatch the enemy.
I was happy with our defenses, the improved marching of our acrobats, and the fact that, after endless drilling, Fu Yu could evacuate all our livestock from the farmyard down our newly constructed corridor to the saloon in about thirty seconds, according to Beauregard’s pocket watch. Fu Yu’s driving of the animals was, as you might imagine, thrilling to witness: the dairy cows, the chickens, the porkers, all stampeding, but in good order and in near perfect safety, down the corridor. The odd chicken casualty was added to our dinner buffet.
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