Port Hazard

by Loren D. Estleman

  The doctor noticed. “You can take that with you, if you like. It’s one of God’s miracles. Maybe next time you’ll think twice before you blow a hole through it.”

  “Talk to Mr. Murdock. I ain’t shot nobody since the army.”

  “I was thinking about my own circulatory system when I shot him,” I said. “What about the other one?” I gave the doctor the letter I’d found folded in Worth’s shirt pocket. A little blood had trickled onto it from the hole in his head, mixing with the yellow-brown ink.

  He glanced at it, handed it back. “I knew Charlie. I never worked on him, but he kept me busy, wiring shattered jaws and patching up holes. He liked to pick fights with Yankees. You’d think he served with Robert E. Lee himself, except he was only twelve years old when the war ended.”

  “Local recruit.” I put away the letter. “His friend didn’t lose any time looking him up. He must have come in on the same train as me, maybe all the way from Helena.”

  “If I were you, I’d take the next train out. You, too,” he told Beecher. “Charlie had friends.”

  “Yankee baiters, too?” I asked.

  “I doubt they had a creed. In every place, there’s an element that falls in behind the man with the loudest manners. They run with the pack because no one else will have them.”

  “Being part of something that’s bigger than themselves?” I was looking at Beecher.

  “Ain’t the same thing.” He’d turned away from the chart.

  The doctor rubbed his bloodshot eyes. “I agree with your man. Any group they join is as small as its least-significant member. That’s what makes them dangerous.”

  Beecher said. “I ain’t his man.”

  We went from there to the city marshal’s office, which was laid out more like a parlor in a private home than a place of business. A fussy rug lay on the half-sawn logs of the floor, tables covered with lacy shawls held up bulbous lamps with fringes on the shades, homely samplers and pictures from Greek myth hung in gilt-encrusted frames on the walls, which had been slathered with plaster and papered to disguise the logs beneath. The marshal, a basset-faced forty with an advancing forehead and Louis-Napoleon whiskers lacquered into lethal points, sat behind a table with curved legs he used for a desk, examining my deputy’s badge for flaws and tugging an enormous watch out of the pocket of his floral vest every few minutes to track the progress of the hands across its face.

  “There’ll be an inquest,” he said. “You’ll both have to give evidence.”

  I said, “We can give you statements right now. I need to be on my way to San Francisco tomorrow.”

  “No good. You can’t ask questions of a written statement in open court.”

  “Wire Judge Blackthorne. An attack on a deputy U.S. marshal is federal business. It’s only your jurisdiction if you want to oppose him.”

  “I don’t expect to go to hell for it. He isn’t God.”

  “Put that in your wire. He might even pay you a personal visit.”

  “What about the colored man? He federal business?”

  Beecher was seated in an upholstered rocker next to an open window, through which the noise of crickets sounded like thousands of violins having their strings plucked. I guessed he’d chosen the spot for the fresh air. The smell of fust in the room was strong enough to stand a shoe up in. “I is with the Northern Pacific, boss. I belongs to the right-of-way.”

  “Beecher’s a civilian employed by Blackthorne’s court,” I said. “He’s U.S. property same as me.”

  “Gold Creek isn’t Tombstone or Deadwood. We’re an incorporated city, with a charter and two churches. The local chapter of the Grand Army of the Republic meets in the basement of the Unitarian. When two men are killed, the incident is investigated and adjudicated. This is a civilized community.”

  I said. “According to the doctor, killing is daily business. Do you seriously intend to claim two more when Helena is offering to take them off your hands?”

  “My appointment’s up for review at the end of this year. I don’t want to be accused of stuffing something behind the stove.” He didn’t appear to be listening to himself. Washing his hands of the thing appealed to him, but there was a gilt-edged Bible in plain sight on his desk. No Christian wants to be compared with Pilate.

  “Blame it on de gub’ment, boss,” Beecher said. “Everybody else does.”

  The marshal pulled on his whiskers. His neck creased like a concertina. “I don’t recall asking you for counsel, boy. I can’t see any time I would.”

  Beecher shrugged and inhaled air from outside.

  However, the argument was through, and it was his suggestion that finished it. The marshal wasn’t going to let things look that way, so I changed the subject, to give him time to form the conclusion independently.

  “Did you get to meet General Grant?”

  The creases disappeared. He held up a set of red and swollen knuckles. “Right here’s the hand that shook the hand. When I told him I served with the quartermaster corps, he thanked me for the boots that took him all the way from Fort Henry to Appomattox.”

  “He could probably use a new pair. I hear the business world hasn’t been kind to him.”

  “Me neither, comes to that. I ran a mercantile in Albany, best in town. I closed it up and came out here to sell picks and shovels, and I sold plenty, all on credit. I figure to be a rich man just as soon as all those markers come in. Meanwhile, I break up fights and shoot rats and stray dogs to put meat on my table.”

  “What’s a rat taste like?” Beecher asked.

  I bulled ahead before the marshal could pull his chin back in. “Everyone I talk to came out here to make money off miners. Didn’t anyone come for the gold?”

  “They’re still out digging.”

  The weapons we’d taken off the men at the caboose lay on the marshal’s blotter. Worth’s was a short-barreled Colt. The stranger had fired a wicked-looking revolver at me, equipped with a second barrel whose bore was larger than the one on top. I pointed at it.

  “I’ll be taking the Le Mat with me,” I said.

  “That’s evidence.”

  “Blackthorne would just send someone to collect it. I’ll save him the trouble.”

  “What about the Colt?”

  “I don’t need the Colt.”

  “What do you want with a Confederate piece?”

  “They didn’t lose the war because their weapons weren’t good. They just didn’t have enough men to carry them. I’ll give you a receipt.”

  He shoved it across the table at me. “Anything else I can do for you, seeing as how all’s I got pressing on my time is a town full of drunken Easterners?”

  I checked the load. There were four live .42 cartridges in the cylinder, someone having taken the trouble to convert it from cap-and-ball, and a 20-gauge shell in the shotgun tube. He’d fired one cartridge and kept an empty chamber under the hammer. I was grateful he’d chosen not to use the buckshot on me. “You can direct me to a gunsmith’s.”

  “How many weapons does a man need?”

  “No more than he has hands, but guns aren’t much use without ammunition.”

  “You want Joe Hankerd at the Rocky Mountain General Merchandise, only he’s closed now. I don’t know if he carries anything for a rebel gun.”

  “Both sides used the same calibers.”

  We got directions. It took five minutes of door-kicking to bring down a red-faced runt in handlebars and a nightshirt, and two more to get him to lower his sawed-off double-barrels and let us in. He charged me twice the going rate for two boxes of shells, one for each of the Le Mat’s firing features, and locked up loudly behind us.

  “Frontier’s famous for its hospitality,” Beecher said.

  “That’s just from sunup to sundown.”

  We were still towing a percentage of the local population, but they thinned out as we left the saloons behind and continued walking toward the mountains. The only light ahead of us belonged to the lanterns and campfires of the
mine sites in the distance. Our breath frosted a little in the crisp air of coming autumn. Beecher asked where we were headed.

  “Away from the crowd.”

  We lost the last straggler to a hotel whose latecomers were camped out on the floor of the lobby. Shielding the movement with my body, I handed Beecher the Le Mat and the two boxes of ammunition. “Keep them out of sight. A Negro with a gun can draw a lot of hell most places.”

  “I told you I’m no good with a pistol.” He held the items in both hands like a balance scale.

  I took back the revolver, adjusted the nose on the hammer, and returned it. “That fires the shotgun round. Scatterguns were designed with you in mind.”

  “I ain’t said I’m throwing in with you.”

  “You threw in when you threw that chair. By this time tomorrow, every depot lizard from here to the Pacific will know about the colored porter who helped kill two men in Gold Creek. You’re branded either way.”

  He touched the scar on his cheek with the Le Mat’s muzzle. “I reckon I am.”

  “I didn’t mean that.”

  “I know. But a nigger with a scar has a hard time blending in with the black crowd.”

  “Getting out of that uniform will help. Got any civilian clothes?”

  “In my duffel. In the caboose.”

  “We’ll collect it in the morning. It’ll just be another caboose by then. A couple of killings won’t draw attention long with Grant in town.”

  “That’s what’s been stinging me. I couldn’t think. If these new Johnny Rebs want to make a stir, why choose you? Grant’s the bigger target.”

  “That’s the reason. Too many people around him. These boys aren’t interested in making themselves martyrs for the cause. Getting away’s as important to them as hitting what they aim at.”

  His teeth caught the light from a window. It was the first time he’d shown them. “If that’s the case, they didn’t think it through where you’re concerned.”

  I didn’t smile back. “My odds just got a little shorter. Meanwhile, we’ve got eight hundred miles to cover before San Francisco.”

  “You ain’t asked me why I threw that chair.”

  “I didn’t figure you gave it any thought. That cavalry training dies hard.”

  “I ain’t no trick dog.”

  I blew air. “Are we going to have this conversation all the way to California? Because if we are, I’d just as soon we rode in separate cars.”

  “We probably will anyway.”

  “That’s between you and Mr. Hill. Do we leave this conversation here or not?”

  “I reckon,” he said after a moment. “I don’t see any sport in it.”

  “I didn’t get around to thanking you for throwing that chair.”

  “No need. I didn’t give it any thought.” He stuck the revolver under his belt and the boxes in his pockets. “Where we sleeping tonight?”

  “Take your pick.” I swept a hand along the weak lights wavering in the foothills.

  “Them miners’ll likely shoot us as claim-jumpers.”

  “They might, if their claims were worth the filing fees. That’s the thing about frontier hospitality. The poorer a man is, the more he’s got of it.”

  I started off in the direction of the fires. Beecher caught up, his pockets rattling like a peddler’s wagon. We weren’t sneaking up on any prospectors that night.

  7

  The first train had pulled out with General Grant aboard by the time we got to the station the next morning. There were no seats on the second, so I bought a ticket on the third—Beecher showed his employee’s pass—and we ate breakfast at a place called the Miner’s Rest while waiting for departure. The proprietor sent us around to the kitchen, whether because of Beecher’s color or the clothes I’d slept in up in the hills, I didn’t know. In his corduroy coat, cotton twill shirt and trousers, flat-heeled boots, and slouch hat, my companion looked the more respectable member of our party.

  The conductor, a stranger to Beecher, directed us to separate coaches, assigning the Negro to a twenty-year-old chair car well back of the Pullmans containing the dignitaries, most of whom required a porter’s assistance to climb the steps from the station platform through a haze of whiskey and stale perfume. I recognized some of them from the train I’d come in on; promoted from fourth to third to fill vacancies left by those who’d taken the express back East.

  I started to say I’d take the chair car, too, but in response to an infinitesimal shake of Beecher’s head I asked for a pencil and paper, and when they were brought by a porter I scribbled a message and gave him a dollar to send a wire. Beecher and I separated. I lowered a window against the stink of cigars and digested barley, swung down the footrest, and got to work catching up on the sleep I’d lost lying on the iron earth under a borrowed blanket in the hills. Ten years more and I’d need a featherbed. Just plain surviving is fatal in the end.

  Shortly after the train started moving, a fat fellow with a bad sunburn plunked himself down next to me, introduced himself as a reporter with a New York newspaper, and asked if I’d heard anything about a double shooting in Gold Creek. I said I hadn’t.

  “Someone said there was a renegade nigger involved,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “Late night last night. I slept right through it, didn’t catch wind of it till the train was pulling out. Any Indian trouble along the line?” He sounded eager.

  “Not anymore. They’re all on reservations.”

  “What about train robbers? I understand they’re thick as fleas in Montana.”

  I said I didn’t think the fleas in Montana were thicker than anywhere else, but he didn’t take the hint. When he started in on grizzlies I changed seats.

  In Deer Lodge, the porter I’d asked to send my wire shook me awake and handed me a Western Union envelope. I read the telegram and made my way back through the snoring payload to the ancient chair car, where I found Beecher jammed in between a mulatto in a valet’s livery and a Chinese with a wooden cage on his lap containing a sitting hen. The car was so hot the flies were asleep in midair. I told Beecher to join me up front. He started to shake his head again, then thought better of it, got up, took down his duffel from the tarnished brass carrier, and followed me.

  Five minutes after we sat down in the Pullman, the conductor appeared. He had a drinker’s face, shot through with broken capillaries, and cardamom on his breath. Why anyone west of Chicago was in any business other than drumming whiskey was a puzzle.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” he said. “I guess I didn’t make myself clear in Gold Creek. The other, er, gentleman—”

  I stuck the telegram under his nose. It read:

  DEPUTY MURDOCK

  BE ADVISED EDWARD ANDERSON BEECHER NEGRO OFFICIALLY ASSIGNED DUTIES DEPUTY U S MARSHAL EFFECTIVE THIS DATE STOP ENTITLED SAME CONSIDERATION AUTHORITY ALL OTHER DEPUTIES

  CHESTER A ARTHUR

  PRESIDENT

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  He sawed the flimsy back and forth, caught the focus, and paled a little behind the magenta.

  “How do I know this is real?” Pricklets of sweat stood out like boiler rivets on his upper lip. He fanned himself with the paper, without any visible effect. “Anyone can send a wire and call himself the King of Prussia.”

  I showed him my deputy’s star. “Wire him back. He ought to be sitting down to dinner with General Sherman about now.”

  For all I knew he was having his toenails painted by a harlot sent by the New York Port Authority, but the conductor knew even less than I did. He handed back the telegram and left the car, wobbling on his sore feet.

  Beecher asked to see the telegram. I gave it to him. He read it and looked up. “Arthur really send this?”

  “It’s doubtful, but you can ask Judge Blackthorne next time you get to Helena. If he’s in a generous mood he might even give you a straight answer.”

  “What did you tell him?”

  “You’re the only thing kee
ping me alive.”

  “He set this much store by all the help?”

  “A good carpenter takes care of his tools.”

  He read the flimsy again. Then he returned it. “My luck, it’ll be this same train I work when I get back. I’ll be emptying spittoons come the new century.”

  “I wouldn’t brood on it. If we make San Francisco, chances are we’ll both end up on the bottom of the bay.”

  “That being the situation, I believe I’ll ask one of these here colored boys to bring me a cigar.”

  “Open a window if you do. I’d as soon sit next to a chicken.” I put the telegram in a safe pocket. I had an idea I’d be drawing it as often as the Deane-Adams.

  Part Two

  The Hoodlums

  8

  Three days and as many train changes later, we rolled into San Francisco aboard the Southern Pacific through a swirling mulch as brown as brandy and nearly as thick, a combination of fog from the harbor and coal smoke from a thousand chimneys. The globes of the fabled gas lamps, their posts obscured, lay like fishermen’s floats on its surface, glowing dirty orange. On the depot platform the porters wheeled trunks and portmanteaux with lanterns balanced atop the stacks toward waiting hotel carriages; the lanterns illuminated little but themselves, but they gave passengers something to follow and avoid stepping off the edge and breaking a limb. Telegraph Hill was an island in a dun sea, pierced here and there by the odd church spire and the tall masts in the harbor.

  Beecher and I were looking for a porter to direct us to a hotel that didn’t care which colors it mixed under its roof when a dandy materialized out of the mist in front of us. He was thirty or younger, with longish flaxen hair curling out from under a Mexican sombrero, wearing an olive-colored frock coat over an embroidered vest that looked as if it had been cut out of the carpet in the lobby of an opera house. His trousers were fawn-colored and stuffed into knee-high boots and he was carrying a walking stick too short to lean on, made for swinging when he walked. It was all good material but needed cleaning; and had for some time, from the smell of him. The stick, however, had been polished recently, gleaming in what light there was like the tongue of an exotic reptile.