Spur: Nevada Hussy

by Dirk Fletcher

  Mark Wilkes dropped out of the profession then, took odd jobs, moved around, but in almost every large city, someone knew him, and if they chanced to spot him on the sidewalk or in a shop, the eventual contact would be made.

  The next two blackmailers he simply beat into a bloody mess and let them go, but the fourth one he killed with a shot from a pistol. He had no remorse, no bitterness, no recriminations. Such was the role that the casting director had given him to play, and he would play it out as long as there were lines for him to give.

  Now, he was wondering if the lines indeed were about to run out. He was in Denver, and had made the mistake of slipping into a presentation of Hamlet being performed by a traveling troupe, only to find that the theatre was a small hall with bad lighting on stage. One of the actors recognized him from the back row, and the all too familiar scene took place.

  Mark Wilkes looked at the body now and hardly remembered his name, Phil something. A man in his forties who should have known better. He bent and found the light purse and change in the man's pockets, then tipped him out the window into the alley, and covered the bloodstains on the floor with a small rug. Mark checked out and headed west again.

  The farther the better. He bought a ticket to Reno, Nevada. Surely no one would know him there. Yes, Reno would be his haven.

  In those first few years he had taken a variety of names, anything that was different enough from that of the assassin of President Lincoln, the infamous John Wilkes Booth. For ten years Mark Wilkes Booth had used the stage name of Mark Wilkes, as his brother had used John Booth. Now he shunned even his middle name and adopted a variety of names, each picked to fit the part he had selected in the community where he attempted to blend into the background.

  Somehow it never worked.

  Mark Wilkes Booth picked up his carpetbag and walked to the desk where he checked out and hurried to the train station. There was a train heading west in half an hour. He took it. He was well out of town before the maid discovered the blood. Then they found the body dumped in some weeds in the alley. They telegraphed ahead to the next station, but there was no one on the train by the name of Mark Masterson.

  A deputy sheriff stared at each of the male passengers critically, but found none that even remotely matched the description given him on the telegram. He let the train continue.

  A rather large woman with horn-rimmed glasses harrumphed at the delay. When the train continued, she retired to the woman's room where she quickly removed makeup and changed herself back into a man, only this time with a full beard, moustache and black hair. Mark Wilkes grinned at his new reflection. He was sure no one would be checking the train again and if they did he would still fool them. He hadn't been an actor and a wizard at makeup for fifteen years for nothing.

  Reno was a small town but still it looked too big to Wilkes when he landed there. He took the small branch line train with one coach heading for Virginia City. It was a mining town, people said. He could work at his second profession, gambling, which was half acting. Yes, he would be safe and secure in Virginia City. In time he would grow a moustache and beard of his own. Now what should he do for a name? He needed a new one, a Western name with some dash to it. A gambler's name!

  By the time the little train rattled nearly thirty miles up the tracks and then north to Virginia City, he had his new name. He would be Monty Jackson. It had a nice western ring. And the game of three card monte was a favorite out here in no man's land. It would be a good alias for him.

  Monty Jackson wasted no time in settling in once the train arrived at the rough, unkempt, bawdy and roughhouse village of Virginia City that he was told boasted over eighteen thousand residents. He had worked the new town routine many times before. He checked in at the first hotel he came to, paid for a week's room in advance and asked where the best gambling house in town was located. He checked in at 12:15 p.m. on that second day of October in 1874. By 1:30 he had obtained a table at the Westward Ho Gambling Emporium, and dealt his first hand of five card draw poker to three miners who insisted the game have a dime limit per bet.

  Monty Jackson sighed. He would move up in the gambling world as soon as he could.

  He did. By suppertime he had a game going with one merchant, a foreman of a mine and a mining stock salesman. There was no limit on the betting. He had just won an honest hand with over fifty dollars in it. He watched critically and saw the stock salesman dealing off the bottom of the deck.

  Monty looked at his cards, threw them in and stood up. "I'm out of the game," Monty said.

  "You got a lot of my money," the dealer said.

  "And you're dealing off the bottom."

  The other two men at the table stopped talking.

  The dealer stood up, his hands limp at his side. "You say I'm cheating?"

  "I sure as hell am."

  The other two men at the table backed away. Men at tables and at the bar behind both men moved quickly to each side.

  Both men looked hard at each other. "Might as well draw on me right now, cheater," Monty said. "That way I won't have to watch my back all day and all night."

  The mining stock salesman snarled and darted his hand into his jacket for the derringer that rested there.

  Monty had spent three weeks selecting and learning how to shoot a pistol before he started west on his gambling run five years ago. He had kept in practice. He smoothly drew a five shot .32 caliber revolver from his belt holster under his jacket. The Adams pocket revolver was only eight and a half inches long. He had it out and trained on the other man before the other man found the butt of his derringer.

  "Apologize and live," Monty said.

  "Damned if I will!" the man shouted and tried to draw the weapon.

  Monty shot him in the heart and he died as he staggered backwards a step, crashed over a chair and tumbled to the floor.

  Monty sat down and put his pistol away. "Gentlemen, I think the game is over for today. I'll be involved for several minutes with the police who I'm sure will have some questions. I would appreciate it if both of you would stay and swear that this was self defense."

  "I saw him cheating, too," the shorter of the two men said.

  "So good of you to call him on it," Monty said with a good deal of scorn and turned as a sheriff's deputy came in wearing his strange uniform of blue and his little billed cap.

  The police asked questions, took statements from witnesses and had Monty swear on paper that it was self defense. He didn't even have to go to the sheriff's station.

  Monty went to the bar and had two quick shots of whisky, and started to carry a third one to a table when he saw a man stride into the gambling hall and start a quick scan of each person in the room.

  The back of his scalp tingled and he turned, went past the bar and out the back door into the alley.

  Monty Jackson, also known as Mark Wilkes, leaned against the back of the gambling hall and shivered. He had not seen the man for nine years. But there he was, his hard eyes searching, just as they had been searching in Virginia so long ago.

  The man was Spur McCoy, of the United States Secret Service, one of the men assigned to try to piece together the whole plot behind the assassination of President Lincoln. Four times McCoy had talked with John Wilkes Booth's brother, Mark. Four times they had agreed that Mark knew nothing that would help in the investigation. Mark had demonstrated his loyalty many times to the nation. He had been loyal to the North, and said he was not aware that his brother had such strong ties with the South.

  Four times, Mark Wilkes Booth had played the part of an unjustly accused man, and four times he had convinced the young investigator. His acting skills at least had not forsaken him. Then there was to be a fifth meeting. A friend had warned Booth that he had been compromised, one of the plotters had given evidence to the government with the promise that he would be set free.

  Mark Wilkes Booth had taken the next train south, then west, and he had used three disguises to outwit those who had followed him. For a year
various government agencies had tried to trace him. Then they had given up.

  Now Spur McCoy was back on his trail.

  He must kill the government agent.

  He must have a different disguise for the role of the killer.

  Quickly Monty Jackson walked back to his hotel, going in the side door and up to his room. From the special case in his carpetbag he took out his makeup materials and went to work. In a half hour he became an old man, with gray beard, a balding head, thick eyebrows and puffy cheeks achieved with cotton balls.

  Downstairs he found a young lad and gave him a job. He tore a five dollar greenback in half and gave one part to the boy of sixteen.

  "Son, if you can find out where Spur McCoy is staying, and his room number, I'll give you the other half of this five dollar bill. Men work all day in the mines for four dollars. He'll be at one of the better hotels. Can you do it?"

  The youth nodded vigorously and hurried away. There were only five hotels where strangers stayed. He could go over their registration books in a half hour.

  As it turned out the young boy found Spur McCoy's name and room number on the second try, and rushed back with the information to where the old man sat outside the hardware store in a wooden chair tilted back against the building.

  "You sure, son?"

  "Absolutely. I asked the clerk. He came in yesterday, and is looking all around town. Claims he's looking for somewhere to set up a law practice."

  "Sounds right." Monty gave the boy the other hand of the five dollar bill. "Look sharp at that bill, son. It's not real. Stage money somebody passed on me. But I do have a genuine greenback."

  "I'd rather have a silver dollar, sir," the youth said.

  Monty laughed, tossed a silver dollar in the air and the youth caught it and ran off toward his home. It was the most real money he had ever earned in his whole life! He had no idea it was blood money.

  Monty moved slowly toward the New Frontier Hotel. He touched the pistol under his coat. Nobody would notice an old man going into a hotel, or wandering around looking for his room. Old men were tolerated, because every man knew that someday he would be in the same situation.

  He walked into the hotel and up to the second floor. At room 202 he listened carefully. No one was moving around inside. It was early. McCoy might be out testing the fancy ladies of the town. Monty could wait. He would kill McCoy and the old man would vanish. Tomorrow afternoon Monty Jackson would be back at his table in the gambling hall, and once more his life would be secure, even if for only a few weeks or months.

  He sighed as he waited. Perhaps his brother, John Wilkes Booth, had known what it would be like; perhaps he had made the better choice when he killed himself with his own pistol nine long years ago.

  Perhaps.

  Then Monty scowled and gripped the pistol. Someone had started up the wooden steps. At first he saw nothing. He had slumped against the corner of the hall next to the stairs. Slowly the man came higher and Monty could see a low crowned brown hat and then the penetrating eyes. The man was Spur McCoy.

  The Secret Service man was about to die!

  BIG GAME HUNTERS, Indians, some farmers attuned closely to the ground, and certainly men constantly on the run from lawmen and bounty hunters, all have one trait in common: they can smell danger and threat as if it were an angry skunk with its tail up ejecting its protective fluid.

  Spur McCoy had learned the art of self preservation through several years of hunting men, and being stalked himself, and now as he came up the stairway to the second floor of the New Frontier Hotel the vibrations pounded at his consciousness and he ducked down below the floor level of the second landing.

  At precisely the same time he dropped, the disguised old man waiting for Spur on the second floor, pulled the trigger of his Adams pocket revolver, sending two rounds through the dimly lit rectangle of space where his enemy had so recently stood.

  Monty Jackson knew he had missed. He eased backward into the vacant room behind him. Closed the door quietly and walked to the window. His escape route had been carefully scouted. Even before he heard movement in the hall, he had raised the window and stepped out on the narrow band of roof around the second floor. This led to the first floor slanted roof near the back of the hotel on the alley side and a short drop to the ground.

  Long ago he had made it a rule never to jump more than four feet. He knew all too well what a broken ankle could do to a man on the run. He completed the drop and was out of sight before he heard cursing at the open window above. He figured it was the window he had just escaped through, and the Secret Service man was making all the noise.

  Inside the hotel stairway, Spur McCoy had his .45 cocked and ready as he edged up to the top of the stairs and looked down the second floor hallway.

  No one was in sight.

  He saw several doors on both sides of the familiar passage. The bushwhacker could be behind any of them waiting for him to come down the hall. There was no chance that Spur could watch six doors at the same time. He waited, his eyes barely over the hallway's floor level, hoping the attacker would make one more try.

  He listened. Footsteps? Where? A moment later he heard what could only be a window sliding upward, but from what room? To his right were the alley windows. Those on his left opened on the street. It would be the alley side for an easy and unobserved escape. Which room? The second one for the best shot. He ran to the room, tried the door. Locked. Maybe the first door. He tried it.

  Unlocked.

  He thrust it open and dodged against the hall wall. There were no shots. He looked inside the room. Unoccupied. Thin curtains blew out an open window. Spur rushed to the window in time to see a man lowering himself in the shadows of the first floor to a hanging position, then drop to the ground. There was no chance for a shot. No way to know who he was.

  Spur went to his room, packed his bag and moved two doors down to an empty room. He pocketed the key and went downstairs. At the clerk's desk he spoke softly.

  "Somebody just bushwhacked me but missed. I've moved down the hall two rooms. Leave me registered on your books in the same room. I'll pay for the other room when I move out. If anybody finds out from you what room I'm in, I'll rearrange your face."

  The clerk nodded. "Yes, sir. I've still got you on my books in that room and I'll mark the other one held for repairs."

  Spur nodded and continued into the dining room. He had just sat down when one of the young waiters came up to him with a note. Spur opened it and read:

  "Sir. I hate to eat alone. Would you do me the honor of being my guest at dinner? I have the small, private dining room at the rear."

  He looked at the waiter. "Who sent the note?"

  "I'm not supposed to say."

  Spur handed him a silver dollar. The young man, who was not over sixteen, grinned.

  "The lady's name is Tracy Belcher, Mrs. Tracy Belcher, widow of one of the big mine owners. She still helps run the company with the original three other partners. She is quite a lady. Eats here three nights a week because the hotel hired away her chef. Antonio likes to cook for everyone, not just her. She usually asks someone to eat with her."

  Spur did not hesitate. A mine owner. It would be a good contact if nothing else. He nodded to the boy who led him through the dining room to the slatted door at the end. The waiter knocked, then opened the door and stepped aside so Spur could go in.

  The room was about fifteen feet square, with a table for twelve in the center. Two places were set at one end. The chairs were upholstered and of fine design and workmanship. Around the sides of the room sat more overstuffed furniture. The walls had delicate oil paintings, and the ceiling was covered with an intricate pattern of varnished wood paneling.

  At the side of the table sat a woman of about thirty-five, who had been carefully made up, and her soft blonde hair combed precisely. He guessed that she was not slender from the generous size of her arms and shoulders. The dress she wore was low cut politely showing a touch of cleavage, but n
ot enough to be vulgar.

  She held out a delicate hand with nails covered with some clear kind of decoration.

  "Good evening. My name is Tracy Belcher. I'd be pleased if you would have dinner with me tonight. I am a widow and an extremely forward person, my partners tell me. They say I act more like a man than most men. Does that frighten you?"

  "Certainly not. I'm Spur McCoy, some people think that I am a bit too aggressive myself, but I don't listen to such talk. I would be delighted to have dinner with you. Someone said you know the chef."

  She waved him to the chair opposite her and stared into his eyes.

  "Yes, dear Antonio, money means nothing to him. But we can talk about him later. Let's talk about you. I'd say you're about six feet two, and right at a solid two hundred pounds. Reddish brown hair that usually won't stay combed, and a big moustache to match. I adore moustaches! The mutton chops aren't bad, but could stand a trimming. Bright green eyes and a sun-browned face. You spend some time out of doors."

  "Some," Spur said.

  "Don't worry about ordering. I always order a day in advance. Our dinner will be along presently. Tell me about yourself."

  "Not much to tell, ma'am. I'm reading the law and looking for a place to set up a practice. I was Harvard class of fifty-eight."

  "A Harvard man! Well, our little town is at last getting some class. And call me Tracy. Do you know what I do in town?"

  "Yes, ma'am, Tracy. You and your partners run the Belcher Number One and two silver and gold mines. And I hear that you do most of the running."

  She smiled, her blue eyes sparkled. He saw that her skin was unusually soft and clear. "And you disapprove of a woman doing that?" her brows went up and he saw she was ready to defend her stand.

  "Not at all. I figure a woman's got the right to do anything she wants to, dig ditches, run a steam locomotive, work in a mine, even raise a family."