by Gene Curry
A man like me can make good money on a train though. I didn’t mind the Indians and the outlaws as much as the people I’d have to deal with in the train. Sure as hell, with this old buzzard leading it, it had to be a band of the godly and the saved. All friends of Jesus! Bosom friends of the Lord! I don’t sneer at religion; I just keep away from it. I thought of the prayer meetings I’d be urged to attend. Hatchet-faced old ladies would make me presents of worn Bibles. They’d pray over me so loud I’d find it hard to sleep. And, Dear Lord, the monotony!
Hannah Claggett suddenly spoke up shyly. “Fifty young women are depending on you!”
Fifty young women! Hannah’s pale blue eyes fluttered coyly behind her gold-wired glasses as she spoke. I knew she had taken my measure. I don’t know what she thought of me, but I liked what I could see of her. It was warm in Missouri, but she was dressed for a blizzard, clothes on top of clothes—swathed in modesty from throat to toes. Not even a well-turned ankle was in evidence, as they said in the pink pages of the barbershop magazines. But, for all the fearful, father-frightened manner she presented to the world, I knew there was a lively and lusty woman there, yearning to be free.
Reverend Claggett silenced his daughter with a glare that would have intimidated Lucifer himself. I wondered how the old Bible-thumper had gotten a bone on long enough to sire a daughter, but I was pretty sure he’d prayed for forgiveness the instant he rolled off his wife. That was the kind of man he was. Anything that made you feel good had to be wrong.
“What my daughter says is true,” Claggett intoned. “Fifty young women were on their way to a better life before you killed Danner.”
“What’s stopping them now?”
He snorted. “I thought I made that clear. All the best men have been hired by other trains. The ones left—I can’t pay the wages they want.”
I liked Hannah Claggett, so I didn’t tell her old man to go hang his Bible in an outhouse. “What you’re saying is, I’m not one of your best men, so I’ll be willing to work cheap. Why should I work at all?”
Claggett fixed me with a stern eye, completely sure that the Lord was right behind him. “Because it’s your duty,” he said. “Danner’s life belonged to fifty young women, and you took it away. You have to do it for them.” Hannah blushed when I said, “I don’t know that I’d be up to handling fifty women.”
“I don’t like your tone, sir,” the man of God said.
“Why don’t you climb down out of your pulpit?” I said. “Maybe I’ll take the job, maybe I won’t. Before I say yes or no, I’d like to take a look at your outfit. I know about the fifty women. Who are they, and where are they going? California is a long state. What part? North or south? The men you have, what about them?”
Claggett snapped his fingers at his daughter. I hated him for that. “Let’s go take a look,” he said.
Claggett’s wagon park was about three miles outside of town, and they didn’t call the big wagons prairie schooners for nothing. With the wind ruffling their white canvas tops, they looked like ships about to set sail. The difference was, this was the shoreline of a sea of grass. It stretched out beyond what the naked eye could see, beyond the power of the biggest telescope. I counted about fifteen wagons. Other wagons were drawn up some distance away. I guessed they belonged to the Claggett train. Oxen wandered slowly inside rope corrals; cattle were penned in other enclosures. In the distance was another, bigger wagon train already on the move. Dust boiled up from the cow-cropped prairie grass. There was power and majesty in the size of the moving train and, no doubt, plenty of tough men with guts, yet it wasn’t always the biggest outfits that got through.
Out there was some of the most dangerous country in the world: a terrible land of floods and prairie fires that could sweep through a train with the speed of the wind. Indians friendly one week were hostile the next. Renegades, white and red, prowled the limitless plains and lay in wait in mountain passes. Thrown together, burned and chilled, sick of the sameness of the food—when there was food—people’s tempers flared and factions formed. No less than in any village, people took sides; old hatreds were revived, new ones created.
Reverend Claggett hadn’t lied about the women. They were all over the place. A few men moved among the wagons. I counted five before I turned my attention back to the ladies. Claggett saw me counting and told me I could stop.
“I said fifty, and fifty it is,” the preacher said. “I don’t include my daughter.”
Hannah darted a shy glance at me. “I’ve been saved for a long time,” she said. I wondered how long it would take to unsave her. Call me a bad man if you like, but I think she needed to be unsaved, and needed it badly. She knew it, and so did I. When the time came, it would be good for both of us.
Claggett told her to go about her business, and she did. After that, the preacher and I walked around. Some of the girls bobbed and nodded at the old son-of-a-bitch, wanting to stay on the good side of him. Maybe old man Claggett was giving them a new start in life, but it was plain that few of them really liked him. It was easy not to like Mr. Claggett; for him the milk of human kindness had all gone sour. I kept telling myself not to be a horse’s ass, and to climb up on my horse and head for Kansas. The whole thing smelled of trouble and I was going to be smack in the middle of it.
On the other hand, as I looked at those women, I wondered if my business in Kansas was all that pressing. Kansas wasn’t going to blow away, and wherever men gather at a table, they gamble. It even came to me, as I walked around with Reverend Claggett, that I was good and sick of gambling. You sat at a table for seventy-two hours at a stretch, gulping boiled black coffee laced with whiskey, taking time out only to piss and eat. You bolt down plates of ham and eggs or eggs and ham because steak-eating is frowned upon during big games—takes too much time—and the nervous gamesters can’t hold down all that meat.
A big Irishman was working on a busted wheel, and we traded grunts when Claggett said our names. The Irishman stank of whiskey. I guess the reverend put up with the boozing because the man was a hired hand, not one of the redeemed. He had big, nimble hands and handled his tools well, a man who knew his job. His name was Culligan. He looked like a bull buffalo wearing a derby hat instead of horns.
Yes sir. I decided. Kansas could wait. Out there on the Great Plains I would become a better man. I’d breathe in good, clean prairie air, work hard and sleep sound. For once I would be doing a real man’s job. Had they known about it, my folks back home in Jonesboro, West Texas, would have been proud of me.
We reached the last wagon, and Reverend Claggett turned to look at me, waiting for my answer.
I nodded. “I’ll take the job.”
Claggett frowned; with a face like his, that wasn’t easy. “Remember,” he said, “there can be no pulling out at the last minute.”
Washing clothes in a tub nearby, a pretty, dark-eyed girl of about nineteen hiked up her skirt to keep it from getting wet. She had lovely legs, strong and slender.
To the preacher man I said, “You can depend on me, sir. When I’m in, I stay in till the job’s finished.”
“Then we have much to talk about,” he said.
Chapter Three
Most of the talk was about keeping my hands off the women. I gave him a wise nod, but he kept on talking as if he hadn’t noticed. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t going to try to ride all fifty women, but I wasn’t signing on just for the wages. The women were there, and things would happen; that’s as it should be. I’d get to them, or they’d get to me. Bedding down would be done, and not always in a bed or even on a blanket. Soft grass in a secluded place on a sunny day or a quiet night—what’s wrong with that? If you can find something sinful in it, well, then you and me ain’t never going to be friends. About his daughter I wasn’t sure. I’d never been shot at by a clergyman.
“It’s important that you pay attention to what I’m telling you,” Claggett complained after we got settled in his wagon at a hinged, fold-down table. He set a ju
g of spring water on the table. I wondered where the Irishman hid his whiskey.
“I’m listening,” I said.
It was hard for Claggett to get his voice out of the pulpit. I figured I’d have to get used to his way of speaking. “There is nothing so terrible in the sight of God as a fallen woman,” he said.
Since God had never confided in me, I had nothing to say about that.
“Every time a woman desecrates her body outside the marriage bed, Jesus is crucified all over again. That is why I have made it my mission in life to lead wayward women back to the path of righteousness. My God is a terrible God, but He is also a God of mercy, provided the sinner is truly repentant. My mission is the salvation, the reclamation of the fallen woman.”
I stared at the mournful old coot, hardly able to believe my ears. “You mean . . .”
“Exactly,” Claggett said, knocking back spring water like whiskey. “With the exception of my daughter, every woman you have seen here today is in need of salvation.”
“Did you say ‘every woman’?”
Claggett waved away my thoughts. “It’s not what you think,” he said impatiently. “Not all have been women of the streets or the parlor houses, though many have sinned in that way. Some have served time in prison for theft, picking pockets, counterfeiting. Others are adulteresses driven from their homes by grievously wronged husbands. Some are foreign women come to this country for reasons known only to themselves. However, it makes no difference to me—to Almighty God—what they have done, what they have been in the past. I, Josiah Claggett, will save them.”
Looking at the man, I didn’t know what to make of him. Of course he was crazy. I knew that. How crazy was what I wanted to know. How crazy was I, signing on to lead fifty wayward women across a continent? Maybe a dozen or so wouldn’t have been so bad, but fifty bad girls seemed to be stretching it. Like all gamblers, I figured the odds, and that’s what I was doing when the slim killer came up the step into the preacher’s wagon. I was about to tell Claggett to find himself another man when the killer turned bright eyes on me. All it took was one look, and I changed my mind.
“What can I do for you, Maggie?” Reverend Claggett said to her.
“Well, you want your dinner or not?” Maggie O’Hara said. “If somebody didn’t remind you to eat, you’d never do it. Here’s beef stew the way you like it.”
Maggie O’Hara, a stewpot in her hand, eyed me suspiciously as she ladled out stew for the preacher. “You’re forgetting Mr. Saddler,” Claggett said.
“I wasn’t sure he’d be staying,” she said. “Is he?” Claggett nodded, and I got a plate of stew. Mine didn’t have as much meat as the parson’s. Maggie turned to go, but Claggett called her back.
“Sit with us a while,” he said.
Maggie sat down at the table and looked at me. “You ever know a man who called himself Langdon Moore?”
“Not that I remember,” I said. “Any reason I should?”
“You’d remember Langdon,” Maggie said. “Big feller, with a droopy mustache. Was from New Hampshire and talked like it. Was a bunco artist till he started blowing tin cans. Blew one too many. Got caught in Cairo, Illinois. Used to have an advance man who sort of looked like you. I never did get a good look at him. Always coming and going through some back alley.”
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
“Old Langdon’s doing twenty years for bank robbing because of that man. They were in it together, but this man turned state’s evidence.”
I finished my stew. “Where were you at the time?”
“Maggie was in Sing Sing prison for life,” Reverend Claggett said.
I knew they didn’t give women life for bank robbery, so it had to have been murder. I wondered what kind of murder, but didn’t ask. I didn’t say a thing. Maggie didn’t either. Instead, she smiled at the preacher.
“You don’t mind if I tell Mr. Saddler, do you?” Claggett asked her.
“Hell, no!” she said, then thought better of her rough language. “Of course not. You’re the one who got me out.”
Claggett said, “Maggie worked for a certain parlor house in the Tenderloin district of New York. In the course of her sinful employment, a young man attempted to go beyond the bounds of, er, ordinary sins of the flesh. In spite of her nefarious trade, some good remained in Maggie, and she refused. This young man, God rest his wicked soul, grew violent and proceeded to beat her. They had been drinking champagne, and she killed him with the bottle.”
“They are heavy,” I said, keeping up my end of the peculiar conversation.
That got Maggie’s Irish up. Her blue eyes crackled with cold anger. “Maybe I’d better tell it, Reverend. Our friend here will understand my language better than yours.”
Reverend Claggett stared at what was left of his stew. “There’s no need,” he said.
“Begging your pardon, but I think there is,” she said. “It was like this. I worked for Big Flossie for nearly a year, and nobody beefed about not getting what they paid for. I was saving up to get married, get me? Lots of high-toned gents wanted to set me up, but that wasn’t for me, and I didn’t want to marry some flatfoot or bartender neither. So I decided to sell it for a year—a year was the limit—then I’d take my roll and maybe go south or west, where nobody knew me. I was going to catch some nice man—catch him and be a good wife to him—and what’s wrong with that?”
“Not a thing,” I said.
Maggie wasn’t so pretty when she got angry. “I was just two months short of my year when this young son-of-a-bitch come in one night and started asking me to do things I don’t like.”
“Unspeakable things,” Claggett murmured to his plate.
“Saddler knows the names for them,” Maggie said. “Well, I just worked there and didn’t want to make trouble, so I told him to go talk to Flossie, and get some other girl who would give him his wish. But no, it was me or nothing. One more time I say no, and that’s when he got rough. My rich admirer said he’d mark me up so bad I wouldn’t be able to sell it on the Bowery. He started in to do it, and I beaned him with the bottle.”
For a moment, I thought she was going to cry, but she was past that. Claggett leaned over and patted her hand; I liked him a little better after that.
“I always did have lousy luck,” Maggie said. “I had to go and kill a politician’s son. Anybody else, Flossie could have fixed it for the police to toss him in the river. But the thought of dumping Tim Hanrahan’s son scared the pie out of her. Flossie got the police in on it, and they all decided I’d have to go down for it. Flossie wouldn’t even pay for the lawyer, which is the way it works out when one of the girls gets in trouble. I had to use every cent I’d saved. This lawyer, Grandy, tried to make a deal for manslaughter. No deal, said the district attorney, saying what Tim Hanrahan told him to say. So they made it murder, and I got life.”
I looked at her. “Why are you telling me all this?”
“So you won’t get any ideas about me because of what I’ve been. I wouldn’t kill you with a bottle, Saddler. I’d shoot you dead!”
Reverend Claggett reasserted his authority. “There will be no more of that talk,” he said. “What happened to you in New York will never be mentioned again. Now, get on with your work, Maggie. We’ll be leaving here at sunrise.”
After she left we sat in silence for a while. Then Claggett said, “I suppose you’re wondering how I got her out of prison.”
“Tell me, if you want to.”
“It won’t hurt the girl, and it will explain something about me,” he said. “To you I’m just a Bible-thumper, a Holy Joe, a sky pilot. Such names don’t bother me.”
“Get to the point, Reverend.”
“The point is, sir, I get things done. I don’t give up. Faith can move mountains. When it doesn’t, I find a way to get around them.”
“You must have pushed hard to get the girl out of Sing Sing. How did you even hear about it?”
“One of the girls the police forced to
perjure herself at Maggie’s trial told me about it. I found her in McGurk’s Suicide Palace on the Bowery. Maybe you’ve heard of it?”
I had. It was the last stop for whores in the final stages of disease and despair. For some reason the management didn’t seem to mind too much. Maybe the whores bought drinks for the house before they swallowed a fatal dose of carbolic acid.
“I had gone there as part of my work,” Claggett went on. “She was dying, but I rode with her in the ambulance. Before she died she told me about Maggie O’Hara and the trial rigged by Hanrahan. And”—Claggett allowed himself a wintry smile—“she told me about Tim Hanrahan himself. It seems he liked the things his dead son had liked—the beating, the cruelty. She said Flossie could tell me the rest.”
“But you didn’t start with Flossie?” I was beginning to get an odd feeling about the Reverend Josiah Claggett. I knew I had never seen him before, but he reminded me of someone. I couldn’t remember who.
“No, I started with Hanrahan,” Claggett said. “He owned a building, published a newspaper on Park Row. I went there and was told to write a letter requesting an appointment. They assured me that I would get an answer. No, I said, I didn’t have time for that. I said I’d just write a note and let them take it in to the great man. They laughed, thought I was crazy. You think I look crazy?”
“A little,” I said. “You got to see Hanrahan?”
“Indeed I did,” Claggett said. “When they let me in, he locked the door. And while I sat there he burned the note I had sent him. I had written the dead girl’s name on it, and other things I’d rather not talk about. What did I think I was doing, he wanted to know. I told him I had a signed statement from the girl at McGurk’s. I said her handwriting and signature could be verified. She had worked at one time for some lawyers on East 17th Street. Hanrahan wanted to know where this statement was. Where he would never find it, I said. He said he could beat it out of me, or have it done. I said he could try that.