Dead Warrior

by John Myers Myers

  “I’m afraid so,” I growled.

  “So a delegation of our financially finest went up to Prescott, sweet-talked the Territorial Supreme Court into recognizing the Eastern Bible-pounder as Barringer’s legitimate heir, and the job was done. I happened to be in the bank, talking to Steve, when he received a wire from the preacher in glad acceptance of his pinchpenny offer.”

  Soured by Sam’s information, I did not alert the vigilantes after all. Instead I decided to let them come to me, as I knew they must, when the situation grew too bad for them to stand. They had to have newspaper support, or they would be afraid to go over the heads of the city administration.

  In the end, after a bloody street affray which I headlined “The Battle of the Pimps,” they did come to me. “Two men were killed in that gang fight last night, and right on Apache, the main street of the city,” Bradford said, when he and the men with him had trailed me to the site of a new school the board was planning to build.

  “Three,” I corrected him, winding up the tape measure with which I had been making rough calculations. “One of them breathed a dying pander’s last prayer this morning.”

  “Well, we ought to do something about it,” a doctor argued.

  “The police should certainly be urged to bear down a little harder,” I agreed. “I’ve tried to bring that about by editorials, but perhaps you gentlemen will have a little more influence than I have.”

  “The administration won’t do anything,” Stephen Holt asserted. “Jackson says they’re killing each other faster than the marshal could hope to, so why not leave them alone. But meanwhile bullets are flying all over the place.”

  I knew what was bothering him. There were huge windows in the old Glory Hole, now being remodeled to house the Dead Warrior Bank and Trust Company, and he lived in dread that stray shots might shatter them.

  “What would you advise, Holt?”

  “What would you advise?” he countered. “You’re the head of the vigilantes.”

  We had come to the hold I had over them, aside from their need of my paper. They were frontier businessmen, a hardy and chance-taking breed or they wouldn’t have prospered in the West. At the same time they didn’t know what was going on in the town, beyond their particular spheres of concern. Cliquish and exclusive in their social dealings, they had no means of investigating other walks of life.

  “If you’re going to hang people, you’d better know who you’re stretching and why you’re doing it.” Pocketing my tape measure, I began filling my pipe. “Have you any candidates?”

  “You find them for us,” Bradford said. “You — you know everybody.”

  What he was trying to avoid saying was that among my acquaintances were some he considered dubious characters and worse, but I nodded. “All right. And I’ll conduct the hearings, too, but I won’t do any more of the rope pulling myself.”

  “How come?” Leeming, the undertaker, wanted to know.

  Without being able to prove it, I believed that he was a vigilante in the hope of promoting business. “You won’t be the one that’ll be gunned for when I publish the stories which will justify John Lynch in riding again.” Turning from him, I jabbed a hand which still showed the scars of burning toward Bradford and Holt. “You’ve asked me to be on the firing line, and I’ve accepted. Take it or leave it.”

  The next day the Vigilante abandoned moral generalities in favor of specific accusations. With the aid of both the telegraph and the saloon grapevine I had been studying the careers of Louseville’s civic leaders. I ran biographies of two of the most vicious, adding the comment that they should be tarred, feathered and run out of town.

  That night they and three others were picked up, prowling around my house. I wasn’t in, having taken a book over to the Anything Goes. There they were brought before me for questioning, and thereafter they were hanged on a charge of intent to murder a citizen of the town.

  The multiple execution cooled Louseville down and fired up the city’s respectable element. Its members openly rejoiced at the success of their blow; and when they saw that they really had given the outlaw faction pause, they determined to clamp the screws down even tighter.

  “We should have a law against anybody using guns here under any circumstances,” Holt insisted.

  “Except vigilantes?” I asked.

  “We only carry them at night as a police measure,” he said. “We’ll be only too glad to dispense with them when we can, Carruthers; and a law like that will establish a line of cleavage that will give us the power we need. Everybody who doesn’t conform takes the consequences.”

  “And those who do can’t register valid objections, when they’re being euchred out of their property by some sort of legal shenanigans,” I murmured. Nevertheless, I saw this as a measure which had to be adopted and enforced sooner or later. Dead Warrior was a full-fledged municipality, not just a frontier camp. Like other cities, it was a hive of homes and commercial enterprises, and men were entitled to go about the business of making a living there without fear of harm to themselves, their families or their property, due to the obstreperousness of the uncurried.

  “I suppose it must be done,” I sighed. After a moment I took my gun out from under my jacket, and put it in a drawer. “You may have to bury me before the campaign is over, but it will be nice if we reach the point where I won’t have to worry about being bushwhacked.”

  Reform was the mood of the day, and I got unexpectedly swift action. Within a week of my first editorial on the subject a special election was held, and the law was placed on the books of a city administration which saw fit to lie low. For that gain to the city, though, I suffered a personal loss.

  “I’m saddling up, before I have to shoot a couple of your stranglers,” Blackfoot Terry told me the day before the election.

  “The stakes are still higher than your hat,” I argued, “and if nobody draws, you’re just as well off as the next chap.”

  “There’s no use wasting logic on a man’s feelings,” he cut me short. “I don’t blame you, Baltimore. What you’re doing makes sense for a city; but I guess I don’t like cities, and besides the place doesn’t smell right to me any more. I get a whiff of buzzard every time I step out of the Happy Hunting Ground and see that bank where the Glory Hole used to be.”

  There were others who did not take the new law so seriously. They lived just long enough to regret it. My colleagues were conducting their own reign of terror, and once they had started, it seemed to me they developed a zest for killing not unlike that which Roy Sparks had ascribed to the vigilantes of Can Can. I got black looks for robbing them of blood by insisting that a couple of their comparatively harmless prisoners should be allowed to catch the next train out of town.

  Meanwhile I had found myself caught up in other movements. The Vigilante had proved itself as the sword of righteousness, and would-be wielders of that sword flocked around me.

  It was at that time that Faith Foster came back into my life. I hadn’t seen her for months, but she swept all barriers of coolness aside when she entered my office, in the company of an older woman.

  “Mosby, I came in to tell you how proud of you I am.” She was as healthily good-looking as ever and bubbled with a warmth which suggested that we had parted but the day before. “You remember Mrs. Weatherby, of course.”

  “Oh, we’re old friends,” her companion vowed, while I was searching my memory. Finally I recalled that she was the guest of the Fosters’ who had once threatened that Apache Street would shake to the tread of Mrs. Grundy.

  Although she used different terms, she herself confirmed this recollection. “But when I was talking to you then, I never dreamed that you would be the man of the hour,” she said. “I didn’t even think that you took what I said in good part, but do you know what has happened?”

  I was wondering if she’d grant me permission to smoke but decided that the odds were against it. “No, ma’am.”

  “Why, we of the Dead Warrior Ladies’
Progressive Community Group have agreed that you’re the city’s first citizen. And now,” she went on, while I was brooding over that information, “there is one more thing we want our champion to do. We do not think there should be dance halls right on our main business street.”

  Only the day before, I had rejected such a suggestion, made by a vigilante, because I thought it was based on the common tradesman’s objection to having money spent on passing pleasures instead of concrete merchandise. “Why do you take that position?” I inquired.

  “Because a principal shopping street should be free to all,” she retorted. “Free to women as well as men, Mr. Carruthers. As it is, a woman has to hurry along the street like a horse with blinders, heading for a particular destination. If she pauses to window-shop, or even so much as glances from side to side, she is liable to be taken for one of those hurdy-gurdy creatures and accosted. That is not right. We are entitled to go about our own lawful business unmolested.”

  There was no arguing that point. “But there’s no law against the business these people are in, either,” I said.

  “Well, there should be,” Mrs. Weatherby replied, “but the Ladies’ Progressive Community Group is not taking that matter up yet. All we are saying now is that if there must be such nasty places, they shouldn’t be right in the middle of town, where they are forced on everybody’s attention. They are of interest to a special kind of citizen, and they can just as well be in a special part of town — like what you call the cribs.”

  Not liking to agree with her about anything, I yet felt forced to concede the justice of her position. “I’ll see what I can do,” I said, “but it may be nothing at all.”

  Mrs. Weatherby bowed and marched out, but Faith lingered a moment. “Is it true that you deliberately killed that Charlie Barringer in a street fight?” she whispered.

  “Well, he was in front of my gun when it went off, Faith.”

  She frowned, though in uncertainty rather than anger. “Why did you do it, Mosby?”

  I was glad to see her; but I wanted to make it clear once and for all that she would have to take me as the man I was, not the one she might hope to turn me into. For that reason I did not ring in the contributing factor that Barringer had been a far greater threat to the welfare of Dead Warrior than the combined inhabitants of Louseville.

  “I didn’t like him,” I told her.

  She saw that that was as much as I was going to say; but as I had now become popularly identified with good causes, she was ready to think well of me, where I had formerly been suspect. “He must have been an awfully bad man,” she decided. “Will you come to dinner tonight, Mosby? Father and I will be alone.”

  Moving the dance halls appeared a larger order than the matter of carrying guns, involving as it did real estate as well as the balancing of individual rights. To my surprise, there was little opposition, however. Those who were for the musical brothels did not like to publicize the fact, while those opposed were as persistently vociferous as frogs; and the public clamor frightened the public officials. Fearful of being repudiated if he did not act to cover himself, Mayor Jackson announced that both dance halls and red-light cribs must move west across the tracks.

  The cribs should not have been included, for they were not on Apache Street and already constituted a community where nobody went without a particular type of business in mind. They were on property which had become valuable with the arrival of the railroad, though, and I think Dick’s political war chest was enriched by those who had other plans for this land. At all events, when the dance halls moved to Louseville, the cribs went, too, and were replaced by trackside warehouses.

  If that didn’t add up to justice, it nevertheless made good sense, for railside locations were important for the warehouses and not for the cribs. Accordingly I had no quarrel with the civic betterment program, leaving out only the departure of Blackfoot Terry. Then the vigilantes brought in the survivor of a gun duel. It was Rogue River Pete.

  “We didn’t start this business to lynch old-timers,” I protested, when he was brought to my house. “It’s the scum from Louseville that we’re after.”

  “Not any more; the law goes for everybody,” Weaver said.

  He was a lynch lover straight out of Can Can, but I could afford to ignore him. I turned to Bradford.

  “It’s a case of nonjurisdiction,” I said.

  The merchant stared at me, a lock of his sandy hair hanging down beneath his hat. “This man may not be from Louseville, but he acts like it. He’s a gunman and a drunkard, and I don’t think he’s married to that Indian woman he lives with.”

  Believing that last the worst offense of all in puritan eyes, I allowed myself a smile. “That’s not a felony.”

  “Yes, but he killed a man, a resident of Louseville, as it happens.”

  “That’s one less of them, then,” I said. But I had stopped smiling.

  “But suppose it was this other one that had survived?” Bradford said. “Would you have said that we had jurisdiction?”

  “You can’t draw distinctions between two men in the same fight,” Holt unnecessarily reminded me.

  “Oh, shut up,” I barked. Then I stared haggardly at the prisoner. The only bareheaded man there, he had his arms tied behind him, but he still had his chew of tobacco. His jaws worked rhythmically, as he returned my look. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Well, I was drinkin’ at the Golden Beaver, and this Louseville guy got tough with me, so I got tough with him; and I see he was goin’ to draw, and he done it, only I beat him to it.”

  “Did you kill him?” Bradford demanded, before I could say anything.

  “Well, I give that guy Leeming there a job, but — ”

  “Did you kill him?” Weaver interrupted.

  “Why, sure, I killed him, but it was self — ”

  “Never mind the excuses,” Holt snarled. “You heard him admit it, Carruthers! He’s got to swing.”

  They wouldn’t have listened to anything short of Gabriel’s trumpet then. For a moment I glared from one to the other of them as though I myself were the trapped prisoner.

  “I’m sorry, Pete,” I mumbled. “You’re not supposed to carry a gun in town at all.” To illustrate, I held my coat open, showing him that I myself was unarmed. “It’s against the law. It’s against the law to shoot in town. You did, and you killed a man. They’re going to hang you.”

  At that a couple of the vigilantes grabbed hold of him, but Pete shook them off. “I got a right to say something, don’t I, Judge?”

  “Here or out there,” I said, nodding toward the mesa.

  “I’ll say it here, where I got a man I want to talk to.” For his final speech Rogue River Pete got rid of his quid, plopping it down near the feet of Leeming, who had to jump to keep from being splashed. “I always was skittish of government, which is what I come West to get along without, and hangin’ me ain’t goin’ to make me think no better of it. Of course, I know what you been tryin’ to do, Judge. You’re tryin’ to make this a decent town, and that’s a good idea if you take it by itself; but the folks you’ve throwed in with ain’t decent, to my way of thinkin’.”

  “What’s that?” Resenting the tobacco, Leeming spoke up sharply. “Who’re you casting off on?”

  “I wasn’t namin’ no names, but I’d just as lief.” Pete nodded toward Eben. “You take Eben Bradford there. He keeps a store where he sells things accordin’ to what he thinks he can get out of you instead of at a square price, and a fellow what does that is no good, accordin’ to the way I was raised. And there’s Stephen Holt; and if you borrow five dollars from him the bastard wants six back; and they wouldn’t even spit on a fellow who’d act that way in any camp I was ever at before. And there’s Irah Weaver, who tried to skin his own uncle after old Seth done everything for him.”

  “Why — ” Starting to protest, Irah remembered that I was present.

  “He did,” I said. “Go on, Pete.”

  “Well, Judge, here
these fellows is top dogs in town, and they’re goin’ to give me the deep six on account of doin’ wrong, when I been square all my life and never shot nobody that wasn’t as willin’ for trouble as I was. And I always give a man a fair break, which is what these fellows don’t want to do to nobody, if they can help it. That’s all I wanted to say. They ain’t provin’ nothin’ to me except that they got the numbers to hang me. Their idea of wrong ain’t mine, and for my money a camp where they call the turn is no damn good.”

  Chapter 23

  THEY HANGED ROGUE RIVER Pete, as they had to in their own vindication, but he finished the Dead Warrior vigilantes. I wrote an editorial commending the organization for what it had done for the city but stating that it had now outlived its usefulness and had best leave the suppression of crime in the hands of the municipal authorities. For once in my camp, Dick Jackson praised the Vigilante for its stand, and that was that. With both papers against them, they did not feel it wise to move again.

  Pete’s words haunted me, meanwhile, and for several days it was hard for me to regain my shining concept of the entire human and industrial miracle of Dead Warrior. Faith Foster tried to understand my distress, when I mentioned the incident to her, but it was impossible for her to see how an uneducated roustabout could mean anything to me.

  “But, Mosby,” she protested, “you’ve admitted that he wasn’t a close associate of yours. Why do you worry about him?”

  “There are some men that are like books in your home,” was the best I could do in the way of explanation. “You don’t have to keep rereading them. Just by seeing them around, you know what’s in them, and it makes you feel good.”