by Gene Curry
“You mean you crossed the mountains?” he said after he put a dollop of whiskey in my coffee. “And you brought this judge—what was that name?”
I said Phineas Slocum.
“Never heard of him,” McWilliams said. He slapped the table with a calloused hand. “God Almighty! You brought a coffin and a body over the mountains. I swear I never heard of such a thing in my whole life.” McWilliams was a lonely man by choice, but like all such men he talked a blue streak once he got going. He kept plying me with food and coffee until I was ready to bust. What was going on in the rest of Alaska? he wanted to know. Was it true that the Mounties were expelling Americans from the Yukon? What did I know about the new gold strike to the far north that was rumored to be bigger than anything in the Yukon?
The man was so starved for news of the outside world that I tried to give him civil answers, but all the while my head kept nodding, craving sleep. Finally, I fell forward with my head on the table. I was through talking for a while.
I must have slept for eighteen hours because when I woke up again it was the next night and McWilliams was beside my bunk with a plate of food and a pot of coffee. The knot of tension had faded from my head and I was able to see him straight for the first time.
“Feeling better?” McWilliams asked. “I guess you are. Stay as long as you like. I’m glad to have the company. I just fed your dogs and they’re in fine fettle. If you don’t mind me asking, what would your name be?”
I told him and we shook hands.
“How far is Valdez?” I asked.
“About eighty miles, give or take a few,” he said. “That’s the distance near as I can make out, though I don’t go there any more than I have to. I trap my furs and mind my business. You want some whiskey to open your eyes?”
The Scotchman’s whiskey opened my eyes and the floor felt solid when I put my feet on it. McWilliams had made a lot of breakfast for both of us, and not much talking was done until I had eaten all I could hold. I asked him about Valdez and he said the ore ships made regular calls there.
“They ought to be able to accommodate you and the judge,” he said. “Seeing as how he was so important and all. You’re going to be famous, Saddler.”
“I’d just as soon not,” I said.
“They’ll make you famous whether you like it or not,” McWilliams said. “Nothing you can do about it.”
“I can hide,” I said.
That was exactly what I planned to do when I got back to Frisco. If Cynthia wanted to talk to the press that was all right with me, but I didn’t want any part of it.
The long sleep and McWilliams’s good food had revived me and now I just wanted to get the rest of the journey done with. This, I sincerely hoped, would be my last trip to Alaska. From now on, barring some strange turn of fate, I was going to stay in the sun as much as possible.
McWilliams loaded me up with supplies for the rest of the journey to Valdez. I insisted that he take a hundred dollars. If he hadn’t been there I wouldn’t be writing this story. To get to Valdez all I had to do was follow a frozen creek that wound its way to the sea. Valdez wasn’t much of a place, McWilliams said, but I could find just about anything I wanted there. He said I might have to wait for a while before an ore ship pulled in, but there was a boardinghouse run by a man named Webberly.
“Tell him I sent you and he’ll look after you,” McWilliams said. “Wish you could stay on here a few days. It’s been nice talking to a human after so long.”
I said goodbye to McWilliams and headed out. The dogs had recovered from their ordeal and I was feeling a lot better myself. It would be a while before I got back to what you’d call normal. That wouldn’t come until after I delivered the judge.
There was no hurry now and so I didn’t hurry the dogs. Following McWilliams’s directions I picked up the creek and followed it. There was no snow, and so close to the sea the cold was much milder than it had been on the other side of the mountains. Fifteen miles from McWilliams’s place I passed another cabin with half-breed Indians living in it. They came out to stare at the coffin, but didn’t speak. I guess the shiny black coffin frightened them a little.
It took me three days to get to Valdez. I could have made it in two, but there was no need to hurry. I camped out for two nights and reached the outskirts of the town at dusk on the third day. I smelled the sea long before I came to the town. It looked slate gray in the gathering darkness. The town itself wasn’t much more than one street, with warehouses taking up most of it. Long piers had been built for the loading of the ore ships; right then there was no ship in the harbor.
I went to look for the boardinghouse operated by McWilliams’s friend. It was a small building overshadowed by a huge warehouse; on the other side of it was a saloon called Blackie’s. Not being a gold town, Valdez was quiet, nothing like Skagway or Dawson. Men came out of the saloon and gaped at me as I went by with the coffin. It must have been quite a sight. The funny thing is that I didn’t think anything about it. By now hauling a coffin around seemed the most natural thing in the world.
I found Webberly, a short round man, eating his supper in the kitchen. “You what?” he said, all but dropping his knife and fork. That was the reaction I would get from a lot of people in the days to come. At first Webberly was inclined to get mad at me, thinking it was a joke; the only way I could convince him was to take him outside and let him look at the coffin. But he balked at letting me bring the judge into the house, saying that he’d do fine in the woodshed at the back of the house. That suited me fine because I didn’t want the judge to thaw out.
Webberly made me an offer for the team. It wasn’t as much as I’d paid in Dawson, but I didn’t feel like arguing about money. I put the judge away and was glad that I was nearly done with the whole business. Webberly said there was an ore ship due in three days. It would stay in port for two days, then sail back to the States. It could take me as far as Seattle; there I would have to switch to another ship. For the moment there was nothing to do but wait.
I walked around the town and didn’t see anything out of the ordinary. Word had spread about me; I guess the judge’s coming was the most interesting thing that had happened in Valdez for a very long time. There didn’t seem to be any rowdy element in Valdez. It had the look of a workingman’s town. I guess the mining companies owned the town and most of the country around it. All that was fine with me. The last thing I needed was more trouble.
I dropped into the saloon and even got into a very low stakes poker game with some men who were waiting for the ship to arrive. They wanted to know all about the judge and I told them some of it, leaving out Hella and DuSang. As far as I was concerned, it was all in the past. It was good to be back in civilization, that is, if you could call Valdez a civilized place. Whatever it was, I was happy to be there, drinking fair whiskey and whiling the time away in penny-ante card games.
After playing for four hours I was twelve dollars ahead and I told the bartender to spend it on whiskey for the men I’d been playing with. I had a drink with them before I went back to check on the judge. Nobody had disturbed the old geezer, so I went to bed.
I thought I didn’t have a worry in the world.
Chapter Twelve
The next day was just as quiet, with nothing to disturb it but the rattle of ore wagons making their way to the dock. That woke me early, but I slept through the rest of it. Webberly gave me breakfast and a month-old Seattle newspaper. Webberly said there was no need to check on the judge. He said he’d done it already. I guess he didn’t have any idea why I kept checking on the judge. To him, as to the other men in town, he was just an old man in a coffin, on his way home. Like I said, this was a workingman’s town and no one there had ever heard of Judge Phineas Slocum.
I hoped to keep it simple: to wait out the days and be gone forever from Alaska. The newspaper took me through a long breakfast, and when I finished I went to the saloon to look for a game, but there was nobody there with any time to play. Men who w
orked for the mines came in and went out after their morning eye-opener. It started to rain and kept on right through the day. The frostbite patches on my face were beginning to heal; the bartender, a runty Irishman, gave me some salve that helped a lot. There were a few whores working at Blackie’s Saloon and I thought why not try one or more of them to while away the time I had to wait. I knew Hella wouldn’t have minded. Anyway, she was dead. I still felt sad about her, but there was nothing to be done about that. The girl I took upstairs with me was young and slightly hard-bitten. But her hard smile softened when I gave her extra money that didn’t have to be split with the proprietor. She put her heart into it because of the money. I fucked her in a small, bare room feebly heated by an old kerosene stove. After I came she fed me whiskey and a little later she sucked me off. It was nothing like it was with Hella, but it was all right. She had pretended to come, but I knew she hadn’t. That was all right too, because after it was over I had gotten rid of a lot of the tension.
The rain kept up, turning the one street of the town to ankle-deep mud. All day and far into the night the huge ore wagons rumbled down to the dock. The second day passed like the first, meaning that nothing happened, and sometimes there was nobody in the saloon but myself and the runty Irishman, who drank about as much whiskey as he sold across the bar. So we drank together and I half-listened to his endless stories about all the places he had worked before he scraped up enough money to open a place of his own. How he had come to own a saloon in Valdez remained one of those mysteries, for he talked about everything but that. Somehow, though, I got the idea that he had a nagging wife back in the States. Not everyone in Alaska goes there to dig for gold.
There was no trouble in sight, but I cleaned my guns just the same. Anyway, working on my guns is something I like to do. I still bad DuSang’s bolt action English rifle and I worked on that, too, not that there was very much need. But I cleaned all my weapons and then I cleaned them again. It gave me something to do.
I got up early on the last day, hoping to see the ore ship when I went down to the dock wearing a yellow slicker I had borrowed from Webberly. Too early, a man on the dock told me, so I went to the saloon and drank whiskey with the Irish proprietor, who never seemed to sober up completely.
“The boat’ll be along sometime today,” he said. “Unless of course it got sunk on the way. But don’t you fret, Mr. Saddler. And if not that boat, there’s sure to be another real soon. Drink your drink now and don’t get too anxious.”
I wasn’t anxious at all: I just wanted to get the hell out of Valdez. Bringing the judge home had taken too much out of me. I had been too long with the dead and I wanted to start living again.
The bartender and I were playing Liar’s Poker, that is, matching the numbers on dollar bills, when a man came in and said there was a steam yacht coming into the harbor.
“Big damn thing, fast-looking thing,” he said. “Cuts the water like a knife. What the hell you think it’s doing in Valdez? Give me a quick big one so’s I can go back and see for myself.”
He had gulped his drink and was turning to go when I grabbed him by the arm. “What color is this steam yacht?” I asked him.
“What?” he said. “Oh, sure. It’s bright yellow. Sort of like a canary bird color. Come on down and take a look if you’re so interested.”
I didn’t have to look at the fast steam yacht to know that it belonged to Soapy Smith. I had seen it in the harbor at Skagway—the only boat of that color—and Soapy had boasted about it during our conversation on the first day I arrived in Alaska.
There was nothing I could do but make a fight of it. After all I’d been through I wasn’t about to give up the judge no matter what. All I had was my belt gun and I ran back to the boardinghouse to get the rest of my weapons: the Winchester and DuSang’s big rifle. The judge’s coffin hadn’t been disturbed and I laid it flat and covered it with cordwood before I went upstairs. Webberly was alarmed when I came running in and I told him to get the hell out of the way because there was big trouble on its way. I didn’t explain but he ran like a bastard.
I filled my pockets with ammunition for the Winchester and the bolt action, still not knowing what I was going to do. There could be any number of Soapy’s men on the boat. If there were enough of them I didn’t see how I stood a chance.
There was a backstairs to the boardinghouse and from the top I could see the harbor and the sleek yellow steam yacht sliding up to the dock. I made too good a target in the yellow slicker so I threw it away. The rain beat down on me as I went down the stairs, still not knowing what I had to face. All I could do was fight them as best I could. Use everything I had learned in fifteen years of staying alive when the odds were bad. I wasn’t brave, but I was ready to die—there’s a difference. I hoped Soapy had come along so that I could kill him. I didn’t know how likely that was; Soapy liked to stay in the warmth and safety of his back room in Skagway.
I stuck the Winchester through my belt and climbed a muddy hill that looked down on the back of the boardinghouse, and when I got to the top I could see the woodshed where the coffin was. I bolted a round into the chamber of the English rifle and lay in the mud, waiting for them to come. I could see the dock and even before the yacht was secured five men jumped off and came up toward the town carrying rifles. They spread out over the dock and then one of them turned and waved another man to come ashore. I knew that it had to be Soapy, careful as always, wanting to cover all his bets. I’m pretty sure I could have shot him at that distance, but that would just make the rest of them run for cover. Then I’d be in for a siege that could end only one way. What I was hoping to do was to get two or three of them after they crept up on the woodshed, after they asked questions at gunpoint and learned where the coffin was.
While I watched, Soapy’s men closed around him, a wall of men that would prevent anything but a head shot. They moved up from the dock, walking fast with Soapy in the center of his bodyguard. The King of Crime had come to Valdez to claim what he considered his.
I lost sight of them for a while. First there was the huge ore dump and after that came a string of warehouses. I pulled the Winchester from my belt and put it beside me in the mud, laying it down carefully so the action wouldn’t get fouled. I saw them for a moment when they came out from the cover of the warehouses. Past that point I couldn’t see them at all.
Five minutes passed and then I felt rather than heard them coming up the street. The rain pelted down harder than ever; a bone-chilling rain that made all the world look gray and dead. I pulled back from the crest of the hill, cold and wet and covered with mud. Then I saw the first of them, just a face at the corner of Webberly’s house. It looked out and ducked back. There was no sign of the others and I wondered if they had figured out where I was—where I was planning to shoot from. The face looked out again and I held my fire, because killing one man wouldn’t get me anywhere.
Two men ran forward and another followed. I let them get into the woodshed. The third man stood with his back to the wall of the shed, looking up the hill without seeing me. I let the first two bring out the coffin before I opened fire killing the guard with a bullet in the head. The others dropped the coffin and tried to make a run for it. I killed one man and the other nearly made it to safety before I killed him with a traveling shot that brought him down hard. He tried to get up and I had to shoot him again.
Now they knew where I was and Soapy’s last two men opened fire from the corner of the boardinghouse. Soon just one man was shooting at me and I knew the other was trying to work his way around behind me. Soapy—smart man—didn’t show himself at all. So far he hadn’t, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get into it, if he got desperate. Getting off that hill was foremost in my mind, so I left the bolt action where it was and let myself roll in the mud until I reached the bottom, and I stopped just short of the deep pit where Webberly dumped his trash. Rusty tin cans scraped against my legs as I went into the pit, inch by inch, trying to make as little noise as p
ossible. Hunkered down, I heard Soapy’s gunman coming up the other side, running and bent over, trying to show no more of himself than he had to.
He made an easy kill when he straightened up and waved. I shot him in the side and shot him again while he was clawing at the wound, and when I fired again I missed him because he was already falling. Just then the steam whistle of the ore ship sounded. It echoed across the harbor and far back into the hills. One more bullet came at me and that was all. Now it was my turn to go on the offensive and I came out of there like a man who knew what he was doing.
I rounded the corner of the boardinghouse and Soapy was running fast for a man of his age. The last gunman alive turned and fired at me, throwing bullets at me with the desperation of a man who knows he’s going to die. He fired fast and wild and even when I threw myself flat he kept on firing. I fired at him and brought him down with a bullet in the leg. His rifle went flying into the muddy street and before he had a chance to crawl after it, I was all over him like crabs in a basket. Soapy was gone, but I wanted some answers from the man I was going to kill.
He was reaching into his coat for a handgun when I stomped on his arm, breaking it like a stick. I took the revolver from his pocket and threw it far away. Then I slammed him against the wall of a building and back-handed him across the face until he was bleeding from the mouth.
“What’s been going on, my friend?” I said in a dull, tired voice. “Tell me what you know—your only chance to live. I mean that, friend.” I put the muzzle of the rifle under his chin, to show how much I meant it. “Start with Sullivan.”
He spat blood before he spoke. “Sullivan knew Soapy wanted to kidnap the judge’s body and wanted it for himself.”
“Kidnap the body?” I said.
“For a million dollars,” the gunman said. “Soapy was going to send a message to the Slocums and the widow. Sullivan planned to beat him out of it. Sullivan left Skagway and hasn’t been heard from since. The Slocums sent their own men. Nobody knows what happened to them. That’s the truth as I know it. I swear it, Saddler. I just work for Smith. You can’t shoot me for that, can you?”