by Gene Curry
He could read all right. He knew it was real because where in hell would I get embossed stationery in the wilds of Alaska? Still, he hated to give up that moneymaking corpse. He looked over at the judge in his courtroom. I guess the judge looked as stiff-necked and solemn as he had in life.
“You mean you’re taking him back in the spring?” he said. “Of course you are. What else can you do? Tell you what. I’ll split fifty-fifty till spring. That’s a good deal, mister.”
“Put him back in his coffin,” I said. “Do it now or the Slocums will have the law on you.”
He looked surprised. “What law? There’s no law here.”
I didn’t want to start trouble, not in Dulcimer. “You think the Slocums can’t send some law after you? The Slocums could find you at the North Pole. I’d hate to have all those millions after me. Back in the coffin, all right?”
“Who’s going to pay me for all the work?”
“Nobody. You’ve been paid enough. You made the coffin?”
“Damn right I did. You going to pay me for that?”
“I’ll pay for the coffin,” I said. “How much?” I knew the cheap pine coffin was going to cost as much as a bronze casket.
“A hundred dollars,” he said. “A hundred for the coffin. A hundred for storage. I think that’s fair.”
“It isn’t fair. You’ll get fifty for everything. I could charge you instead of the other way around. Take fifty or take nothing.”
Outside the gate another crowd of fools were waiting to get in. “What’s the hold-up, Smiley?” one man called out. “You in business or ain’t you?”
“Close the gate. Tell them it’s over,” I ordered. “Talk nice or they could get mad enough to burn the place.” The crowd went away grumbling, but they went away. “All right,” I said. “Now that it’s quiet, you want to make a deal about storing the judge the rest of his stay in Dulcimer?”
“Not for no fifty dollars,” he said sourly. “You want him, he’s yours.”
“Course he is,” I said. “I don’t just want you to store him, I want you to guard him.”
“From what? Termites?” The son of a bitch thought that was funny.
“From anything. Pay is a hundred dollars. You can’t say no to that.”
“I can but I won’t.” The talk of money had restored some of his good humor. “Money in advance.”
“Half in advance. I want you to keep that gate locked until I knock on it. You got a weapon?”
“In this country? What do you think? Sawed-off, 10-gauge. I don’t figure to get shot for no hundred. You’ll be close to hand?”
I said that’s where I’d be. “Anybody tries to take the judge, fire off a cartridge then get out of harm’s way.”
“Count on that,” the man said. “You want to give me a hand getting the old boy back in his box?”
It took very little doing to put Phineas Slocum in his shipping crate. The body was stiff as a board and not much heavier, for which I was glad. I had forgotten to ask Cynthia how much the judge weighed, and I was happy to see he wasn’t one of those jowly, swag-bellied old men you often see up on the bench.
Staples, that’s the name he gave, was nailing down the lid of the coffin when Hella and I went away from there. “It is all craziness,” Hella said.
I had to agree. “So it is and we’re in the middle of it. You want a drink so we can test the waters of this muddy creek? I think I’ll have to send a message to the governor after all.”
“What message?”
“A message that won’t bring any help but might do some good: ‘Dear Governor: I’m trying to bring out the body of a federal judge and they’re making it tough for me. Send troops.’ How does that sound?”
Hella laughed on the way to the nearest saloon. “Crazy, like the rest of this. Alaska is not even a territory yet and he is not really a governor.”
“Then what is Alaska?”
“A possession of the United States.”
“That’ll do,” I said, and we both laughed.
Some of the men who had been turned away from Staples’s side show were in the saloon and they scowled at us, figuring that we had something to do with lowering the curtain. The saloon was a dirty, noisy pesthole with mud inches deep on the rough plank floor. With the door closed and the stove going full blast, it smelled as if a herd of goats lived there. Goats would have probably smelled better. Again, Hella was the center of interest; if she had been fat, warty and ugly she would have attracted attention. But... well... she wasn’t.
The man behind the bar looked like an ape with clothes on. Coarse hair grew low on his forehead; the backs of his hands were thick with the same kind of hair. He grunted at us.
“Whiskey,” I said. “Two big ones. Where’s the telegraph office?”
“How would I know?” he said. But when he came back with the whiskey his curiosity had gotten the better of him.
“It got something to do with the judge?” he asked in a voice that was very like his apish appearance. The ears of the men closest to us seemed to grow bigger. Some went so far as to stop staring at Hella.
“Could be that,” I said. “You still don’t know where I can find the telegraph office?”
“That was just a joke, mister.”
The bartender looked like the last man on earth to make a joke. He didn’t even look mean, just dumb. The eavesdroppers were all but cupping their hands to their ears.
“Then maybe you can tell me?” I said.
“Oh sure,” he said. “Down the street past a store that says Naylor’s Supplies. There’s a flag.”
I expected half the saloon to follow along when we went out. As it was, about a dozen men came out and stared after us. Hella laughed in her reckless way. “You are going to send that message the way you said it to me?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “The message will be the same but in different words. It’ll be all over town inside of an hour. Least I hope it will. I wish to hell the judge had the decency to die on the Canadian side of the line. Nobody is crazy enough to fool with the Mounties.”
We took the two teams down the telegraph office and found the telegrapher dozing over his hand-set. I guess the telegraph line had been strung to Dulcimer so agents for the big mining companies could report on how the gold strike was going. Farfetched though it seemed, a man in this cesspool of a town could talk to another man in Chicago or New York or anywhere. I just wanted to send a message to Fairbanks.
The sleepy telegrapher gave me a message form and a pencil. I didn’t ask the governor to send troops; all I asked for was an escort to see me to Skagway with the judge’s body. I said I was acting on orders from the Secretary of the Interior who had empowered me to seek any and all help I needed from federal officials in Alaska. It was all bullshit, naturally, but you should have seen that telegrapher’s eyebrows go up when he read it over.
He read the last part aloud; the last line was: WILL WAIT HERE FOR ESCORT.
“You’ll have a long wait,” the telegrapher said. “You know how far Fairbanks is from here?”
“Makes no difference, I’ll wait,” I said.
“What are you doing?” Hella asked when we got outside. “You are so full of tricks I cannot keep up with you. What do you mean—‘Will wait?’ ”
I said, “It means we’ll leave long before first light in the morning. It may work, it may not—it’s a try. Real badmen aren’t much afraid of federal law. Most other men are because it’s the one kind of law that’ll keep after you. Maybe this so-called governor, whatever he is, will send an escort, only we won’t take that chance. Let’s go see how our friend is doing, then we’ll start making plans for the morning.”
Staples was working in his carpenter shop when we got there, but there was a ten-gauge close by. He had removed the courtroom bench and the rest of the junk. All that remained now was the judge’s shiny black coffin with the name plate cut from a flattened tin can.
“I ain’t going to sit up all night with
that thing,” Staples said, waving a chisel at the coffin outside in the cold. “My charge is for guarding during the hours of daylight. You want to guard him at night, you come here and do it yourself.”
“I’ll be here,” I said, glad I didn’t have to bring up the subject myself.
Staples wanted to get back at me in some way, so he said, “And no smoking around the lumber. Burn me out and there’s not enough money to pay for it.”
“Anybody been around asking about me or the judge?” I asked.
“Nobody. You be here eight o’clock or I’ll just walk off and the hell with it. I wish to hell I’d never seen that dead man. You’re probably thinking I stole his wallet. No such thing, mister. Old boy dropped dead out on the creeks and whoever stole his poke wasn’t me.”
“Makes no matter,” I said. “I’ll be here eight o’clock on the button. Go easy with that ten-gauge when I bang on the gate.
“We’ll have to make do with the supplies we bought from Ginnis,” I told Hella. “If we start loading up now they’ll know we mean to pull out rightaway. We’ll have to shoot what we can’t trap.”
“There is enough to last us for a while,” Hella said. “It will not look suspicious if we buy a lot for the dogs.” That made sense because the usual thing was to buy hundreds of pounds of dog meat at one time. Hella said not to buy any more fish for the dogs. It didn’t give them the strength that came from meat, and naturally they didn’t like it as much.
What we did buy was a good tent that we set up not far from Staples’s place. After the dog meat was loaded on the sleds we cooked a meal and fixed up the tent with a wood floor as if we planned a long stay in Dulcimer. Men drifted by to look at Hella, but no one spoke to us. There was no sign of DuSang. Some of the men who stared at us might be working for DuSang; there was no way to tell.
“We’ll head out when it’s time and keep on going through the night.” Hella nodded her agreement. “If we can get a good start they may not be ready to follow us into the mountains.”
“It would not be too hard to follow us for a while,” Hella said. “Bad weather will be better than good if they do follow us. But DuSang looks like a man who has endured many hardships. I can tell he was not always a storekeeper. You think he will pursue us?”
I nodded. “He will when he finds out we’re not going back by way of the river. Smith thinks we are, so does DuSang. For now he does. I hope that’s what he thinks. My guess is Smith wants me to do all the work, get the body back to Skagway, then he figures he’ll take it away from me.”
“But what about Sullivan? The other men we killed?”
“Sullivan may have decided to go into business for himself. Or Smith sent him as insurance. Or he was working for the Slocum brothers behind Smith’s back.” Hella laughed. “Or what else, Jim?”
“Or nothing. I just don’t know. If we can get over the mountains to Valdez it won’t matter who’s working for who. Once we’re on an ore ship bound for the States, there isn’t a damn thing they can do. You’ll like Frisco. I know you don’t like cities. Neither do I, but you can have a good time in a city if you don’t stay too long. How long is it since you wore a dress and a pair of shoes?”
“Two hundred years,” Hella said. “I cannot remember, Jim. I think I would look funny in a dress and ladies’ shoes.”
I couldn’t see much of her, bundled-up as she was. But then I’d seen her without clothes of any kind. “Like hell you would. You were made to wear fine dresses, silk bloomers, everything.”
“Bloomers!” Hella blushed. “Do not make fun of me, Jim.”
“Just speaking the truth,” I said. “I want you to wear silk bloomers so I can take them off. I want to run my hand under your silk bloomers and see what I find underneath.”
“That would be nice,” Hella agreed. “I want to feel your hand under my bloomers.” Suddenly she looked fierce. “There will be so little time once we start to run. Oh, I hate those men for that. I think we should go into our tent now. Eight o’clock is still hours away. You think so too, yes?”
I thought so too, yes.
Dulcimer was a busy little place, but we were just as busy once we were in the tent with the flap laced and the blankets unrolled. There, right in the middle of town, with boots clumping past in the frozen street, we took off just enough clothes to make it work. But any way we did it was all right with me: in a four-poster bed with silk sheets or in a wind-shaken tent beside a dirty street. We didn’t talk at all because there was no need.
When I went outside at fifteen minutes to it was snowing hard.
Chapter Nine
Wind-driven snow stung my eyes as I headed for Staples’s carpenter shop, and there was light in the saloons but no one in the street. The hush that comes with heavy snow was everywhere; there wasn’t a sound on the creek or in the town. There was some light—thick and white.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up when I got to the gate and found it open. It creaked a little in the wind. With my back to the fence I eased around the side of the gate and then I heard the voices. The voices were muffled by the snow and wind. Underfoot the snow was soft; it hadn’t frozen yet. I rubbed snow from my eyes and stepped inside and after that I could see. Two men were moving around the upended coffin. One was splashing the coffin and the side of the building with kerosene. Even with the wind and snow I caught the pungent smell as he emptied the rest of the can and set it down without a sound. I came forward and their backs were still turned to me. They grunted and stepped away from the coffin. I was right behind them when a match flared. I smashed the one with the match in the back of the head and he went down, dropping the match. The match hissed out in the snow. The other one turned, fumbling for a gun, and his hand was inside his bulky coat when I smashed him in the face with the butt of the rifle. The force of the blow slammed him back against the coffin. The coffin crashed to the ground and the man went after it. He tried to get up and this time I smashed him in the throat. He tried to scream and nothing came out of his mouth but a rush of blood. I kicked him in the face and ground my foot into his throat until he stopped breathing. I turned the other man on his back and killed him the same way. I was sweating in the cold by the time I got through.
Inside the carpenter shop Staples lay beside the stove with his throat cut. I jacked a shell when I heard somebody coming. Then I heard Hella calling my name and I went outside and found her staring at the men I had killed.
“Close the gate,” I told her. “They were going to burn everything. We’re going to have to move out now.”
She closed and barred the gate and came back to me. Her voice was steady. “I knew something was wrong. You think they were sent by DuSang?”
I was using handfuls of snow to wash the kerosene off the coffin. Everything stank of kerosene. “Not likely,” I said. “DuSang could have burned the body any time. These men came on their own—or the Slocums sent them. Makes no difference. We have to move. You see anybody else in the street?”
“No one,” Hella said.
Hella waited with the teams in the snow-swirling street while I got the judge’s coffin up on my back and out through the gate. Down the street the saloon lights winked through the snow. I was roping the coffin to my own sled—all the supplies, sleeping bag, the rest of it—were on Hella’s, when I heard a sled coming into town. It passed us and though our dogs barked furiously the sled went on without stopping. We didn’t move until the sound of the runners died away.
“You ready?” I asked.
“Ready, Jim,” Hella said.
“In a minute,” I said. Then I went back and dragged the two dead men inside and threw them beside Staples’s body. The outside wall of the shop was still wet with kerosene. I touched a match to it and flame licked up fast. I ran to the sleds.
We had hardly reached the end of the street when the carpenter shop, with its cans of turpentine and pitch, exploded with a sound like thunder. I looked back and flames thirty feet high were shooting skyward. No matte
r how hard the snow fell the shop would burn to ashes. The dogs plunged wildly when they heard the explosion, but they settled down when there was no more loud noise.
Fighting the snow, we headed away from the creek, out toward the long valley that led, by stages, to the foothills of the Alaska Range. At least we were on our way to—what? In front of me the judge rode the sled, snowflakes melting on the lid of his coffin. The temperature had risen fast and would stay that way as long as the snow lasted. It might snow all night and all the next day and the day after that. For now the snow and the fire were giving us the cover we needed to get a jump on the first leg of the journey. It was what Alaska people call “good snow,” meaning that it was dry and powdery; snow that would pack fast and hold the weight of the sleds. But even with good snow it wasn’t possible to set more than a three-mile pace; after the snow stopped and froze we could step up the pace by at least two miles.
In two hours Dulcimer was six miles behind us and it was time to rest the dogs. Then we moved on, bearing always to the left, following a course that would take us into the Frazer Valley, still thirty miles away. Frazer Valley was nearly a hundred miles long; after it ended there were other valleys without names. Or if they had names, those names had been cooked up by mapmakers who had never been there. As far as I knew—had heard—no one had ever been there. Long before we even reached the foothills we’d be crossing completely unknown country.
With two more stops we traveled on for nine hours until the dogs began to voice their complaint with a high-pitched barking that was different from their usual trail sounds. I wanted to drive them ahead, but Hella shouted that we had to stop.
It must have been close to morning when we got a fire going and fed the dogs. The poor brutes dug their burrows in the snow and fell asleep. The snow eased off and the branches of trees took shape in the half light. Hella, dropping coffee in the pot, said she thought we had come about thirty miles from Dulcimer.
Well, that was a fair start, yet I wasn’t counting on anything. Even without sufficient food for ourselves, we were carrying fair loads on both sleds. The dogs would lighten the load by eating their way through the meat; there was nothing to be done about the judge. Sitting by the fire drinking coffee while Hella fried bacon and beans, I got a sudden mental picture of DuSang and his men starting out with hardly any supplies at all. Light sleds that would skim over the snow crust with the speed of a toboggan on a slope. They could do that, they could shoot their meat, even meat for the dogs.