by Gene Curry
“A little lower,” I told her. “About Bart, a man doesn’t get good just because he gets old. Nothing meaner than an old man. Nothing meaner than a poor old man. How does Bart get on with the other brother?”
“Not too good. Better than he got on with Phineas, I guess. You’ve got all these doubts, Saddler. Make up your mind. You going to Alaska or not?”
I got out of the tub although I hated to. But the longer I stayed, the more doubts I would have. Somehow Cynthia wasn’t the same careless, good-hearted woman I had known back in Colorado. I wasn’t sure how she had changed, but there was a foxiness about her that I didn’t like. It had taken too many questions to pry the truth out of her, when all the time she could have just laid it on the line. I don’t ever expect to get the whole truth from anyone—a woman least of all—but Cynthia and I went back a long way, and she could have made a stab at it.
“Well, are you going?” she said again.
“When I get ten thousand dollars—cash—and a picture of the judge, I’m going. I’d hate to travel all that way and come back with the body of some poor drunk that died behind a saloon. If your brother-in-law is as tricky as you think he is, he might try just that. Another thing. The ten thousand you give me is for bringing out the judge’s body. Everything else is extra. The fare on the boat. Supplies. A dog sled and dogs. Whatever else. Agreed?”
“Agreed, you stingy son of a bitch.” Cynthia began to towel herself dry. “I get the feeling that you don’t like me anymore, Saddler. Is that true?”
I grinned at her. We were getting it straight now. It wasn’t true that I didn’t like Cynthia. Not altogether true anyway. It would be hard not to like Cynthia. But I’d come close to losing my life because I liked and trusted people too much. That was in the past; it hadn’t happened lately. You have to look out for yourself.
Seeing my grin, she flared into quick anger. “I’m better than you are, Saddler.”
“Maybe so, but that isn’t saying much. Now why don’t you give me the money and the judge’s picture and I’ll be on my way.”
“You don’t have to like me to fuck me,” Cynthia said, coming up close to me. “You know that’s true, no matter what bad feeling has turned up between us. If you say no, there will come a time when you wish you said yes.”
“I always say yes to a beautiful woman,” I said. And we climbed back into bed for some friendly fucking.
Chapter Two
That last session with Cynthia was so good I thought I would start for Alaska on my hands and knees. But as it turned out, I was in pretty good shape when I left the Slocum mansion with twelve thousand dollars and the judge’s photograph in my pocket. We had agreed that I wouldn’t see her again before I took a coast boat for Alaska. I went down the back stairs and was walking away from the bottom when something—I don’t know what—made me look back at the house and I saw Travers staring at me from a third-floor window. He jerked his head back when he saw me looking, and when I looked again there was no sign of him.
I knew nothing about the departure times of the boats to Alaska. Neither did Cynthia. All I knew was they sailed from San Francisco, pulled in at Seattle, then went on to Skagway from there. I didn’t know how long it would take me to book passage. It could be a day, it could be a week. The big gold rush of some years later hadn’t started yet, but all of California and other parts of the country were getting all heated up about the recent gold strikes along the frozen creeks. The mines and creeks in northern California were all played out; the Far North was the coming thing, everybody said. It seemed that otherwise sensible men were selling all their worldly goods in a wild rush to get to the land of forty below. San Francisco, always a bustling town, bustled more than ever in that year. In the streets there was more excitement than there had been during the California gold rush of nearly forty years before. Everywhere there were posters tacked up by steamship companies, promising luxurious accommodations to the stupid or the unwary. All these companies guaranteed the same thing: a lot for a little. None of the steamship posters stated there were gold nuggets to be found in the streets. But all suggested that the gold-seeking pilgrim had only to dig a little.
There was a drift of mankind toward the docks. Some women too. And I went along with it. There were dumb farmers with all the money they possessed sewn in the lining of their coats; discharged soldiers jostling with deserters; there were the runaway apprentices, whores, gamblers and shifty-eyed thieves. All hoping to get to Alaska, where all a man had to do was buy a shovel to get rich.
The first place I tried to buy a ticket north was the Columbia Inland Passage Company, and when I elbowed my way to the ticket window a sallow man with a waxed mustache laughed at me for my foolishness, saying I must be new in town to think I could get to Alaska just like that. I pushed a hundred-dollar bill across the counter and told him that wasn’t part of the fare. It took another hundred on top of the fare, before he said he could get something for me, and he smiled so nicely when he said it that I wanted to break his jaw.
“Steamer sails noon tomorrow,” the ticket-seller said.
“Name is the Falmouth. What’s the name ... sir?”
I gave him my right name. Why not? I wasn’t going to Alaska to rob a bank.
After I got my ticket, I went to look for a place to stay the night. It wasn’t that hard because everybody was pulling out of town. I got a fairly clean room in a hotel down by the Embarcadero, and after I paid the room clerk in advance on my way upstairs, a dish-faced youngster came into the lobby, hawking the evening edition of the Chronicle.
The kid was yelling the news about the death of Judge Slocum, and after I bought a copy there was my own name right under the judge’s. At least the newspaper didn’t have a picture of me, and for that I was thankful, but there was more about me than I wished to see, and more than I wished other people to see. At first I thought of that sneaky butler Travers when I saw the story. But then I decided that the story might have come from someone else. According to the newspaper, the judge was a very important man in San Francisco. The paper said he had been a stem but eminently fair jurist, and would be mourned by all. I had my doubts about the last part, but I read on, and what I read I didn’t like one bit. The story in the Chronicle said too much about me: it said what I looked like, how old I was. It said I was going to Alaska to bring the judge’s body back. So it looked like it was Travers, after all.
I had sold my horse, but I still had my single-action Colt .44 and Winchester. Upstairs, I lay on the bed and, with the Colt close to my right hand, I read what there was left to say about Phineas Slocum. There was some information, a lot of it, about Phineas Slocum’s career as a judge of military tribunals during the Civil War and after it. I smiled at the rubbish about Cynthia—the beautiful bitch. The newspaper said she was the only daughter of a mine-owner in Colorado. I liked that part best of all: the closest Cynthia had come to mining was fleecing miners of their pokes. I didn’t like what was written about me. I was too well described. Maybe the whole thing was just newspaper guff, and I would have liked to believe that, but I didn’t. My outermost thought was to pick up the judge’s frozen corpse and deliver it to San Francisco, and yet there remained the suspicion that I’d been had.
I kept the Colt handy during the night, but not one thing happened, except there was a lot of noise from drunks coming in late. A whole bunch of them must have clung together and fallen down the stairs. When it happened—whatever it was—it sounded like a wagon falling to the bottom of a cliff.
After that it was quiet.
During the night I didn’t sleep so well, but by morning there had been no attempt to murder me, and so when I got up at first light I didn’t feel too bad and was hungry. It was foggy and I heard boats hooting in the harbor.
Downstairs a grim-faced Chinaman who ran a restaurant complained in Chinese as he fried a steak for me with two eggs on top. I ate the steak and eggs and thought of Cynthia sleeping in her warm bed, which is where I should have been. Or
maybe not asleep but just thinking of money. Or fucking some other man—maybe.
After I finished a second cup of the Chinaman’s bad coffee, I walked down to the docks to make sure the steamer hadn’t sailed without me, for it was well known that now and then the shipping companies sold more tickets than they had room for passengers. But the Falmouth was still there, and so was a burly man with a Winchester lever-action shotgun who waved me off when I tried to come on board.
“You got to wait till the purser gets back from the whorehouse,” the watchman growled, then went back to scratching under his armpit.
Well, I wasn’t about to argue with a 10-gauge repeating shotgun. A few blasts of that thing and there wouldn’t be enough left of me to make a sandwich.
All along the dock there were people gawking at the ships; the Falmouth got the most attention because it was the biggest and because it had brought half a ton of gold from up north. I guess a lot of people there didn’t have the price of a ticket, or anything else, but the Falmouth was a link to the Promised Land.
Early though it was, all the dockside stores were open, and there were signs warning one and all to get their goldfield supplies while they lasted. Fur coats, sheep-lined boots, trousers with fur seats were selling as fast as the clerks could take in the money. So were sleeping bags, miners’ tools, rifles, compasses and canned goods. I bought a fur coat, fur boots, a sleeping bag, a compass, and a pair of mittens.
I went to a saloon to drink beer until the boat sailed. Earlier it had been raining and the muddy-floored saloon had the musty smell of men in damp clothes. The air was full of tobacco smoke and talk of gold. Everybody in San Francisco talked of gold. One old man with a white beard and no teeth claimed to have been to Alaska and was bumming drinks on the strength of his experiences. His tales grew wilder as he knocked back beer and whiskey; after a while the faces of his listeners took on a doubtful look, but nobody went so far as to call the old gent a liar—they wanted to believe. A sailor from one of the Alaska ships came in and took all the attention away from the old man.
I was still at the bar when a man in a sack suit and a derby hat came in and stood next to me. He had quick eyes and a watch chain that probably had a good watch at the end of it. After he got a mug of beer, he turned and gave me a friendly nod.
“Going north, are you?” he said casually, one early drinker to another. “Looks like the whole country is going up north.”
“That’s where I’m going,” I said.
“Well, good luck to you,” he said and went out without finishing his beer. That was all the conversation we had, but I got the feeling that he had been sizing me up, and maybe identifying me for somebody else. I knew who it was when I spotted a hard-faced man looking at me in the mirror, and when he saw me watching him he pretended to be checking if he needed a shave. He was dressed for the north, in a fur coat and a beaver hat, but he didn’t look like a working man to me. Hardass was written all over him, but he had a capable look that said he wasn’t just any gunman or skull buster. His hands gave him away when he looked in the mirror and rubbed his chin. Real professional gunmen always take good care of their hands; some go so far as to rub them with com oil to keep them supple. A good leather valise stood at his feet.
He opened his coat and picked up the bag with his left hand before he started to leave. I kept my back to the bar and waited for him to make his play, whatever it was. He stopped when he got to me. The way he pretended to recognize me wasn’t very good, but he gave it a try.
“You’re Jim Saddler, am I right?” he said, doing his best to smile, and that wasn’t very good either. Whoever he was, he didn’t have the face for it. He had the dead eyes of a man who killed for money.
“Do I know you?” I said. I knew I didn’t.
“Guess you don’t remember. Why should you? We weren’t introduced.” he said. “Ben Trask is my name and we sort of met down in El Paso. When I say ‘met,’ I mean you were in a big poker game and I was at the bar. You sure cleaned them out that night.”
“Best way to play cards,” I said.
“Never was that good at it myself,” Trask said. “Buy you a drink? I’m surprised the newspaper boys haven’t been following you about. Saw a mention of you in yesterday’s Chronicle.”
The bartender gave us beers. “That damn thing,” I said.
Trask said, “You really going to Alaska to bring back Judge Slocum’s body? I thought maybe that was just something the Chronicle dreamed up.”
I was inclined to tell him to go to hell, but you don’t learn if you don’t listen. “Mrs. Slocum hired me to bring it back.”
“One Texas man to another, you may be in for more than you can handle.”
“Don’t doubt it. That’s hard country up that way.”
“I wasn’t talking about the country.”
I knew he wasn’t. “What were you talking about, Trask?”
“The old judge was one of the most hated men in the country. Sent too many men to the gallows. Men that should have got jail got hung. Men that should have got five years got twenty-five. I wonder that old man wasn’t shot long ago. Lord knows there were plenty of men wanted to do it.”
I said, “Too late for that. They can’t kill him twice.” Trask sipped his beer. Maybe he didn’t drink at all, and I find it hard to like men like that.
“It’s going to stick in a lot of craws if you bring the judge back to Frisco. I used to be a detective here and still hear a lot of things.”
“Such as?”
“The judge wasn’t just hard on small men. Here in Frisco some big politicians still hate his insides. Nine years ago there was a big graft scandal and he sent some big men to jail for a long time. A few of them are still behind the walls. What I hear is these big men don’t want to see the judge honored. Too many old hates will get stirred up if you bring back that old man’s body. Big men—small men too—want the judge left where he is. Gone and forgotten, is what they want.”
It was ten o’clock and I was getting sick of Trask. “Sorry I’m going to have to disappoint them,” I said. “They’ll get used to the idea after they think about it.”
“Might as well tell you the rest of it,” Trask said. “The word I get is it could be dangerous for you to try. That’s how determined these men are. I just don’t like seeing another Texas man get shot for nothing.”
“Not for nothing,” I said. “I wouldn’t do it for nothing. I’m obliged for you telling me all this business about the judge. Really appreciate it, one Texas man to another. What part of the state you from?”
“All over.” Trask’s eyes were completely dead.
“It’s a big state,” I said. “It’s been nice talking to you, and maybe we’ll meet up again.”
“If you’re sailing on the Falmouth we’ll meet up all the time. I decided to try my luck in the goldfields. You might do worse, Saddler. That’s good advice.”
“Thanks again, but I already got a job. See you on board.”
“Sure,” Trask said, going out. He turned at the door. “There’s not many places to hide on a boat.”
Well, I could have provoked a fight, and probably killed him, but they don’t like that kind of gun-work in Frisco. It was different in the old days when the gangs were running wild. All that came to an end when the Vigilance Committee started stringing up gunmen from balconies, telegraph posts and hay-hoists. That’s gone too, but mindful of their bloodstained past, the citizens are very strong for law and order. And what the citizens want, the police and the courts provide.
Anyway, there was nothing to be gained by killing Trask; if they were out to stop me, there would be other Trasks. He had been fairly direct in the warning he gave me. Now the question was, who was behind it? The Slocum brothers might be pulling the strings, or indeed it might be possible that there were men who hated the dead man so much, that they wanted to deny him the honor of burial in his adopted city. That part of it I found hard to believe, not being a determined hater myself, and
yet I’d heard of crazier things.
Men were hurrying down to the Falmouth dock when I left the saloon. Frisco might be a law and order town, but it was no guarantee that I wouldn’t get a rifle bullet in the back before I reached the gangplank. A man in a window could get me with one shot. There was so much noise it might not even be heard. But nobody shot at me, and I got aboard without having to bribe anybody else.
The Falmouth was the damnedest ship you ever saw; a flat-bottomed stem-wheeler about ninety feet long. There was a one-story deckhouse with three-tiered bunks. Everybody except the captain and crew slept in that one big bunkhouse. It didn’t take long to see that the ship was grossly overcrowded. The dining saloon and ship’s galley were also enclosed by the deckhouse. I looked for Trask and didn’t find him. I wondered how long it would take to reach Skagway, or if we’d make it at all. There were two life-boats for about sixty men.
In the bunkhouse the noise was deafening and the stink was bad enough to make you blind. The boat hadn’t sailed yet and already men were fighting over nothing. Those not fighting eyed each other suspiciously; men without enough equipment were looking for what they could steal. I could see that few of them knew a damned thing about gold mining, though there were some old-time prospectors among them, men who had searched for gold all over the world and were on the prowl again.
The Falmouth was truly a coastal boat. If it didn’t hug the coast, it would sink like a stone in the open sea. After we left Frisco there were great banks of fog, but the sea was calm enough. I saw Trask a few times, and that was all. The Falmouth followed every nook and bay, took advantage of every sheltering point of land. The engines were old and didn’t push the ship at more than ten miles an hour, and when there was any kind of strong sea running, the stern wheel raced powerlessly in the air.