Piccadilly Doubles 2

by Lou Cameron

  “Miss MacKay told me all about it,” Connor said. “An unusual man, that Rockwell.”

  ‘Unique is more like it,” I said.

  “You like him, don’t you?”

  “Respect him too. I came here expecting to find a monster. Instead, I found a man. With all respect for your abilities, it’s a good thing you didn’t have to fight him.”

  Connor wasn’t offended. “Yes, I sensed that he would have made a formidable enemy. But I would have beaten him, in the end. You must know that as well as I do?”

  “It wouldn’t have been so easy, General.”

  “I didn’t say it would have been easy, Mr. Forbes. I just said it could—would—have been done. We’re all just men—finally. I am imperfectly educated—read, is more like it—but I know that everything passes. Men, heroes in their time, are now no more than footnotes in history. Some not even footnotes. For most of us, it all comes to that.”

  “Are you satisfied with what I told you about Rockwell?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “I was thinking there might be some movement, some agitation, to put him on trial for the sins of all the Mormons. An atoning Christ figure, if you will.”

  ‘“That is a blasphemous thought, Mr. Forbes, but, yes, there have been some suggestions along that line.”

  “From the holy man and his bishops, General?”

  “Let us say certain men in high places. But there is no need to worry. I listen to everyone, then I make up my own mind. I am satisfied that Rockwell may have pulled the trigger, but he didn’t do it on his own accord. So there will be no trial.”

  “Is that what you told these men in high places?”

  “I told them that putting Rockwell on trial would be like opening Pandora’s Box. I had to explain what that meant to some of them. When they came to understand what I meant they agreed with me.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “Thank you very much.”

  “It’s Rockwell who should be thanking you,” Connor said.

  “No,” I said. “Rockwell doesn’t owe me a thing.”

  Next morning I telegraphed Horace Greeley that I was giving up my position in Salt Lake City, with or without his permission. By noon there was an economical reply: REBELLION BREWING CUBA GO THERE VIA NEW YORK. There were no congratulations on a job well done, but that was all right with me. I had not been to Cuba, had never been out of the country, in fact, and though I looked forward to my new assignment I felt a certain sadness at the thought of leaving Utah, for a reporters first big news story has a special place in his memory. I wanted to depart as soon as possible, but first I must have one last talk with Rockwell. Unable to find him in the city, I rode out to his ranch in Skull Valley, and there he was in the corral with his beloved horses. It was a fine bright day with a warm breeze rustling the leaves of the shade trees that grew close to the house. The horses whinnied when I came close.

  “Hello there, William,” Rockwell said. “Come in the house where it’s cool. I have the place all to myself. The missus and Mary are off picking berries.”

  We sat at the table in the kitchen drinking spring water, and there was an awkwardness between us that hadn’t been there before. Rockwell, it seemed, had a very good idea of why I had come. But nothing was said about it, not just yet.

  “How are things in the city?” Rockwell began.

  ‘Peaceful,” I said. “Connor has everything under control. You’d hardly know there was an army camped a few miles away. It’s business as usual in Salt Lake.”

  Rockwell took a drink of water. “Sure,” he said. “Business as usual. Well, maybe it’s all for the best. Only time will tell that. The church has survived many trials. I just hope ‘business as usual’ won’t be the death of it.”

  “A strong church can survive anything,” I said.

  “We’ll see,” Rockwell said, then lapsed into a strange silence that had nothing to do with anger or resentment.

  “What will you do now?” I asked, feeling that I had to say something.

  “Work my ranch, sell horses from the stable here in town. It won’t be a bad life, so don’t feel sorry for me. Some of the diehards are planning to go to Mexico and set up colonies there. The Mexicans have promised them they won’t be bothered about how many wives they have. I could go with them, but it’s too late to start over. Anyway, the diehards never did like my drinking. So here I am and here I stay. Like I told you, it won’t be a bad life. I’ll be fifty in a few months, time for me to settle down. Settle down as much as I can.”

  I looked at Rockwell, my old companion in murder, if you want to call it that. We had been through so much in such a short time. I thought of that first night in Salt Lake when he got me drunk and I tried to knock him down because he insulted Old Glory; and I thought, too, of little Abby Brimmer now moldering in the sandy soil. Though still very young, some of the sadness of life had bruised my soul, but I wouldn’t have taken back any of it, for it is only by experience that we learn about life, and if we don’t learn, we are deficient in something.

  “What will you do, William?” Rockwell asked. “Something tells me you won’t want to stay on here.”

  “I have telegraphed Mr. Greeley that I’m coming back to New York. He is sending me down to Cuba, and when I am finished there, there will be other places. I am not cut out for the settled life, Port.”

  Rockwell smiled. “I always knew that. You will write to me from time to time, from these far places?”

  “You’ll be hearing from me,” I promised. “If there’s ever anything I can do for you. . . ?”

  Rockwell was gracious about my fumbling attempt at affection. “Well, you never know, William, and if you’re ever in bad trouble I’ll come and I’ll bring my gun.”

  “So long, Port,” I said.

  “It’s been nice knowing you,” Rockwell said. I never saw him again. Over the years (he died in 1878) I heard reports of him, and it seemed that he had left violence behind. After I left Utah the Sun sent a permanent correspondent to replace me, and it was from this man that I learned most of what I knew of Rockwell’s last years. My friend from the Sun wrote: “I never got to know him well, but I saw him nearly every week, when he came in from his ranch to attend to his horse trading and to get drunk. He never came to town drunk and he always went home sober. I don’t know if he still carried that famous cut-down Colt of his. If he did, I never saw him display it. He grew shabbier in appearance and his drinking bouts became more protracted; his favorite tipple remained Mountain Fog.

  “Men still feared him, but I am sure he would have been murdered from ambush if not for General Connor’s protection, for it is well known that Connor issued a secret order that anyone who at-temped to molest Rockwell would have him to deal with, and as we all know, Connor was a man of his word. Oddly, the two men became friends, often going on hunting expeditions into the mountains. During the last trouble with the Indians Rockwell acted as General Connor’s chief scout, and though well along in years, he gave a good account of himself.

  “Stripped of his powers, he was avoided by the Mormons, and only a few old friends ever came to see him. He had defied the Prophet, you see, and so he had to be punished. But this ostracism weighed lightly on Rockwell, or seemed to, and he continued to whoop it up as he had in the days of his fame. Sometimes, carried away by an excess of Mountain Fog, he would ride his horse into some saloon, and while still in the saddle would order drinks for the house. Yet for all his ribaldry I sensed a deep, melancholy in the man, as if mourning a time that was no more.

  “He was an anachronism and he knew it. The railroad came, the city expanded far beyond its old limits, and Rockwell was well aware how out of place he was. The increasingly prosperous Saints would have preferred to forget him, this reminder of their uncouth and bloody past, but there he was, with his wild appearance and his bottle of Mountain Fog. The children loved him, and it was strange to see this homicidal St. Nicholas dispensing coins to a horde of grinning kids with absolut
ely no fear of him. Stranger still was to see him coming out of Rice’s Book Store with a stack of weighty tomes under his arm. He continued to ‘read’ to the very end, and when his wife died the job of reading to him was taken over by his daughter.”

  As I said in the beginning, I was not in the United States when Porter Rockwell went to the Mormon hereafter; and in a way it was just as well that I wasn’t there to see his sparsely attended funeral. None of the great men of Salt Lake were there (Brigham Young had died the year before); only Patrick Connor and a few old friends came to pay their last respects. Sometime later, Connor wrote to me in New York; the letter reached me in Lisbon. By then Connor was the most admired Gentile in Utah; a retired businessman long recognized as the man who saved the Mormons from “Ugly Abe’s vengeance.”

  Connor wrote: “On June 8 [1878] Port attended a performance of Joshua Whitcomb at the Salt Lake Theater. His daughter Mary accompanied him and he seemed to be in his usual good health. He was even sober. However, after the play he took his daughter to her home in the city, then returned to a saloon at Main and First South Streets and spent several hours drinking with a few disreputable ‘American’ friends. The party broke up about one o’clock in the morning and Port went back to the stables he used as a headquarters for his horse trading. There on the morning after he was found in a state close to death. Dr. Douglass was called for, but there was nothing he could do. I came too, as soon as I heard, and just before he died Port whispered, ‘Pat [we were Pat and Port by then], I want you to write to William Forbes and tell him I went out game. That young man was the only one that ever understood how it was with me.’”

  Connor concluded his letter: “We buried Port with few honors, but as you know, he never gave a damn for honors of any kind. Now that he is safely dead, the jackals feel free to attack his character. But we know better, don’t we?”

  Yes, I think we did.

  The Bandit of Hell’s Bend

  Edgar Rice Burroughs

  Chapter One – Opening the Campaign

  “Well, gentlemen, if that is the best rate you can offer us, then we’ll drive the cattle. My boys have all been over the trail before, and your figures are no inducement to ship as far as Red River. We are fully aware of the nature of the country, but we can deliver the herds at their destination for less than you ask us for shipping them one third of the distance. No; we’ll drive all the way.”

  The speaker was Don Lovell, a trail drover, and the parties addressed were the general freight agents of three railroad lines operating in Texas. A conference had been agreed upon, and we had come in by train from the ranch in Medina County to attend the meeting in San Antonio. The railroad representatives were shrewd, affable gentlemen, and presented an array of facts hard to overcome. They were well aware of the obstacles to be encountered in the arid, western portion of the state, and magnified every possibility into a stern reality. Unrolling a large state map upon the table, around which the principals were sitting, the agent of the Denver and Fort Worth traced the trail from Buffalo Gap to Doan’s Crossing on Red River. Producing what was declared to be a report of the immigration agent of his line, he showed by statistics that whole counties through which the old trail ran had recently been settled up by Scandinavian immigrants. The representative of the Missouri, Kansas, and Texas, when opportunity offered, enumerated every disaster which had happened to any herd to the westward of his line in the past five years. The factor of the International was equally well posted.

  “Now, Mr. Lovell,” said he, dumping a bundle of papers on the table, “if you will kindly glance over these documents, I think I can convince you that it is only a question of a few years until all trail cattle will ship the greater portion of the way. Here is a tabulated statement up to and including the year ’83. From twenty counties tributary to our line and south of this city, you will notice that in ’80 we practically handled no cattle intended for the trail. Passing on to the next season’s drive, you see we secured a little over ten per cent. of the cattle and nearly thirty per cent. of the horse stock. Last year, or for ’83, drovers took advantage of our low rates for Red River points, and the percentage ran up to twenty-four and a fraction, or practically speaking, one fourth of the total drive. We are able to offer the same low rates this year, and all arrangements are completed with our connecting lines to give live-stock trains carrying trail cattle a passenger schedule. Now, if you care to look over this correspondence, you will notice that we have inquiries which will tax our carrying capacity to its utmost. The ‘Laurel Leaf’ and ‘Running W’ people alone have asked for a rate on thirty thousand head.”

  But the drover brushed the correspondence aside, and asked for the possible feed bills. A blanket rate had been given on the entire shipment from that city, or any point south, to Wichita Falls, with one rest and feed. Making a memorandum of the items, Lovell arose from the table and came over to where Jim Flood and I were searching for Fort Buford on a large wall map. We were both laboring under the impression that it was in Montana, but after our employer pointed it out to us at the mouth of the Yellowstone in Dakota, all three of us adjourned to an ante-room. Flood was the best posted trail foreman in Don Lovell’s employ, and taking seats at the table, we soon reduced the proposed shipping expense to a pro-rata sum per head. The result was not to be considered, and on returning to the main office, our employer, as already expressed, declined the proffered rate.

  Then the freight men doubled on him, asking if he had taken into consideration a saving in wages. In a two days’ run they would lay down the cattle farther on their way than we could possibly drive in six weeks, even if the country was open, not to say anything about the wear and tear of horseflesh. But Don Lovell had not been a trail drover for nearly fifteen years without understanding his business as well as the freight agents did theirs. After going over a large lot of other important data, our employer arose to take his leave, when the agent of the local line expressed a hope that Mr. Lovell would reconsider his decision before spring opened, and send his drive a portion of the way by rail.

  “Well, I’m glad I met you, gentlemen,” said the cowman at parting, “but this is purely a business proposition, and you and I look at it from different viewpoints. At the rate you offer, it will cost me one dollar and seventy-five cents to lay a steer down on Red River. Hold on; mine are all large beeves; and I must mount my men just the same as if they trailed all the way. Saddle horses were worth nothing in the North last year, and I kept mine and bought enough others around Dodge to make up a thousand head, and sent them back over the trail to my ranch. Now, it will take six carloads of horses for each herd, and I propose to charge the freight on them against the cattle. I may have to winter my remudas in the North, or drive them home again, and if I put two dollars a head freight in them, they won’t bring a cent more on that account. With the cattle it’s different; they are all under contract, but the horses must be charged as general expense, and if nothing is realized out of them, the herd must pay the fiddler. My largest delivery is a sub-contract for Fort Buford, calling for five million pounds of beef on foot. It will take three herds or ten thousand cattle to fill it. I was anxious to give those Buford beeves an early start, and that was the main reason in my consenting to this conference. I have three other earlier deliveries at Indian agencies, but they are not as far north by several hundred miles, and it’s immaterial whether we ship or not. But the Buford contract sets the day of delivery for September 15, and it’s going to take close figuring to make a cent. The main contractors are all right, but I’m the one that’s got to scratch his head and figure close and see that there’s no leakages. Your freight bill alone would be a nice profit. It may cost us a little for water getting out of Texas, but with the present outlet for cattle, it’s bad policy to harass the herds. Water is about the best crop some of those settlers along the trail have to sell, and they ought to treat us right.”

  After the conference was over, we scattered about the city, on various errands, exp
ecting to take the night train home. It was then the middle of February, and five of the six herds were already purchased. In spite of the large numbers of cattle which the trail had absorbed in previous years, there was still an abundance of all ages, anxious for a market. The demand in the North had constantly been for young cattle, leaving the matured steers at home. Had Mr. Lovell’s contracts that year called for forty thousand five and six year old beeves, instead of twenty, there would have been the same inexhaustible supply from which to pick and choose. But with only one herd yet to secure, and ample offerings on every hand, there was no necessity for a hurry. Many of the herds driven the year before found no sale, and were compelled to winter in the North at the drover’s risk. In the early spring of ’84, there was a decided lull over the enthusiasm of the two previous years, during the former of which the trail afforded an outlet for nearly seven hundred thousand Texas cattle.

  In regard to horses we were well outfitted. During the summer of ’83, Don Lovell had driven four herds, two on Indian contract and two of younger cattle on speculation. Of the latter, one was sold in Dodge for delivery on the Purgatory River in southern Colorado, while the other went to Ogalalla, and was disposed of and received at that point. In both cases there was no chance to sell the saddle horses, and they returned to Dodge and were sent to pasture down the river in the settlements. My brother, Bob Quirk, had driven one of the other herds to an agency in the Indian Territory. After making the delivery, early in August, on his employer’s orders, he had brought his remuda and outfit into Dodge, the horses being also sent to pasture and the men home to Texas. I had made the trip that year to the Pine Ridge Agency in Dakota with thirty-five hundred beeves, under Flood as foreman. Don Lovell was present at the delivery, and as there was no hope of effecting a sale of the saddle stock among the Indians, after delivering the outfit at the nearest railroad, I was given two men and the cook, and started back over the trail for Dodge with the remuda. The wagon was a drawback, but on reaching Ogalalla, an emigrant outfit offered me a fair price for the mules and commissary, and I sold them. Lashing our rations and blankets on two pack-horses, we turned our backs on the Platte and crossed the Arkansaw at Dodge on the seventh day.