Hang Him Twice

by William W. Johnstone

  Miller started to defend another gunman, but Dooley could tell by the expressions on the faces of everyone in the room—except Miller, the Telegram liar, and the bribe-taking federal lawmen—that he would find no defenders of the cutthroat Boone in this room.

  “We have lost our best mercantile,” Miller pointed out.

  To which the mayor rose from his desk, walked to the window, and tapped against a pane.

  “Have you not noticed the tent being erected? Men worked all yesterday and through the night carrying off the ruined timbers, shoveling out the ashes, hauling the ruined merchandise to the dump. Now a tent is going up and a new building—made of brick, by thunder—will be erected soon. Our great mercantile will be stronger, better, and more profitable!”

  “At what expense to . . . ?”

  Dooley stopped him. “No expense,” he said. “Except to me.”

  Miller looked as if he had taken a blow from a poleax to his noggin. He gripped the back of his chair for support.

  The mayor explained: “Marshal Monahan is paying to rebuild that great business, and restock the merchandise. We are certainly lucky to have as our marshal a man with charity in his heart. If only our other silver barons had such decency.”

  Miller still looked stunned, but the lying little scribe from Denver found another attack. “So your marshal admits his guilt.” He grinned as if he had unearthed fodder for ten more articles of lies to be printed in the Telegram. “Why else would Marshal Monahan spend his own riches? Or have you negotiated a deal where the mercantile won’t charge you a penny for all you buy there?”

  “I rarely even doing my shopping there,” Dooley said. “It just seemed like the right thing to do.”

  “Right?” the journalist scoffed.

  “I have more money than I could spend in a lifetime,” Dooley said.

  “Well, if you’re that generous, why don’t you build a church? A school? An orphanage?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  Mr. Pinkerton sat down.

  The councilmen applauded Dooley’s generosity.

  But George Miller had recovered, as Dooley knew would happen, and found another way to attack Leadville’s marshal.

  “You fail to see the point,” Miller said. “You don’t understand how the hiring of this man”—he pointed the finger Dooley really wanted to snap off—under Dooley’s nose—“. . . how this man will lead to the utter destruction of Leadville, Colorado. For I—and I don’t think I am alone in this belief—know that if Dooley Monahan remains our marshal, Leadville will see more violence, more destruction, and possibly—nay, I shall say with all certainty—its horrible demise as a town worth living in.”

  He had the floor. He had the councilmen’s attention.

  “We have seen several gangs of vermin attack Leadville, but do not believe they rode into our great city to rob a bank—or even two banks. They didn’t ride here to destroy a mercantile, to blow it to smithereens. They came here for one reason.” Again, he stuck his finger in Dooley’s face. “This is the reason. This is why our city is doomed. As long as Dooley Monahan wears a star and owns a mine and lives in Leadville.

  “You hired him as a lawman, but he is no man of justice. He is an infamous bounty hunter. He kills for his own profit. He shoots men down for he feels as though he is prosecutor, jury, judge, and executioner. He answers to no one. He is as cold-blooded as the victims he brings in, strapped over a saddle, the bodies still dripping blood—and from grievous, mortal wounds likely to be found in their backs.”

  Dooley fantasized about drawing his Colt and putting a .45 slug through George Miller’s brisket. He had actually ridden with this horse’s arse? He had actually maybe even thought of George Miller as a friend, or at least, as an honest acquaintance? He had somehow bollixed everything up so that a sweet kid like Julia Cooperman could have married this cad?

  But he did not pull the revolver from his holster. He just stood there and let George Miller, the liar, have his say.

  “We need law and order in Leadville, my good friends, my fellow citizens.”

  Mr. Pinkerton was busily writing all this down in his notepad, his pencil scratching furiously, even though he would likely rearrange George Miller’s words into something even more inflammatory for the Denver populace—and even beyond Denver and Colorado. The Telegram was just a paper in a far-off Western state, but the editors had access to the telegraph, and eastern and California papers had a tendency to reprint many articles from the Denver Telegram. So did, Dooley had heard, papers in England.

  “But when you hire as your head peace officer a man with Dooley Monahan’s nefarious reputation, you bring in gunmen. Killers. The worst renegades in the West. That’s why, I believe in all my heart, that we have seen murderous rogues ravaging our streets, dynamiting legitimate businesses, ruining every business in town except those of undertakers, coffin-makers, and gravediggers. If we keep Dooley Monahan as marshal, our streets will continue to run red, until our streets are flooded with blood, and we know what happens when rivers flood in these Rocky Mountains.

  “Foundations,” George Miller continued, and if he had not prepared this one, he was sure a smart thinker and fast talker on his feet, Dooley realized, “are unearthed, washed away with walls and merchandise and floors and ceilings. Buildings collapse. Lives collapse. Nothing will be left of Leadville except the graveyard in Evergreen Cemetery. The graves, I must remind you, filled with men who have been shot full of holes by your gallant, your notorious, your cold-blooded fiend of a town marshal.”

  He found his hat, said, “Good day, gentlemen, and thank you for your time. I hope what I have said, what I have warned, will sink in.” He jerked open the door. “Before things are too late. For you. For Leadville.”

  Leaving the door open, he thundered down the hallway toward the stairs. Marshal Blue rose, nodded, and followed. Pinkerton, the lying snob of a reporter, scribbled over two or three more pages in his notepad before he stuck his pencil over his ear, closed his notes, shot out of his chair, and hurried out the door.

  The editor of the Leadville Ledger switched the legs he had crossed and closed his notepad, too, but he had not written as much as Mr. Pinkerton.

  “The Denver Telegram will print all that,” the editor said, “and it won’t be good for us.”

  Dooley waited for the mayor and even Mr. Wolfe to suggest that he, Dooley Monahan, tender his resignation and light out of town in a hurry.

  But the mayor said, “I stand behind Dooley Monahan.”

  Mr. Wolfe, leader of the vigilantes, nodded his agreement. “As do I,” he said.

  Dooley didn’t exactly feel relieved, or vindicated. They said they would stand behind Dooley. Which to Dooley’s way of thinking meant:

  So that I’ll catch the first bullet.

  CHAPTER FORTY

  Dooley didn’t know if Paul Pinkerton actually got his pack of lies published in the Denver Telegram. Nobody in town mentioned it, and things sort of became close to normal in Leadville over the next few weeks. At least, no gangs of ruffians charged down Front Street trying to shoot Dooley dead or blow him to bits with dynamite.

  The new mercantile slowly began to take shape as masons began doing their magic with bricks and mortar. Stagecoaches made their runs. Mine whistles blew. Dooley spent most of his nights merely guiding drunks to the Jail Tree and shackling them to a limb for the night, or just letting them bed down and sleep it off. Jarvis brought him some papers to sign, and every now and then he would pass Julia Cooperman on the street. She would smile, he would smile, and they would both keep walking. That proved to be the hardest part of those weeks.

  Until August rolled around, and the first stagecoach braked to a hard stop outside the bank and Dooley’s marshal’s office.

  Jarrod Dickinson was driving the stage, one of the new ones that had started up, making triweekly runs to Silver Plume and back. He was climbing off the old Concord, cussing up a storm, when Dooley came out onto the second-story landing.
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  “Marshal!”

  Dooley saw the blood leaking from Dickinson’s scalp just below his battered gray slouch hat.

  “Some sons-a-curs held up my stage.”

  A plump, middle-aged woman bolted out of the Concord’s door, her eyes red from crying, and holding a handkerchief drenched in tears. “The swine stole my brooch, the one my dearly departed husband gave me on our tenth anniversary.”

  Dooley started coming down the stairs. A gambler stepped out of the open stage and closed the door. He reached inside his pants pockets and pulled them inside out. “And all my winnings, as well.”

  Then everyone started talking at once, and Dooley raised his hands and started asking them to be quiet, to speak one at a time, that he needed a few questions answered. No one listened. Dooley saw Paul Pinkerton, that miserable scribe for the Denver Telegram, standing on the corner in front of the general store that was being built—at Dooley’s expense and at Leadville prices—and frowned. The reporter was scribbling into his notepad again.

  “Shut up!” Dooley snapped, and the citizens obeyed. Quickly Dooley apologized to the widow who had lost her brooch but explained that he needed some information and needed it in a hurry.

  He looked at Dickinson.

  “Where did it happen?” Dooley asked.

  “Right at Chalk Creek.” The old jehu took off his hat and allowed a prostitute—up early, Dooley thought—dab his head wound with a handkerchief that was not wet with tears.

  Chalk Creek. That was the boundary of Dooley’s jurisdiction, according to the papers he had signed and what the city council members had told him.

  “Which side?”

  “The fer side,” Dickinson answered.

  “Which way did they go after they held you up?”

  “Away from here.”

  “On the road, though?”

  “Yeah.” He pointed to his shoulder and told the prostitute, “I fell on my shoulder, honey. It hurts here, too.”

  “Toward Silver Plume?”

  The prostitute stuffed the blood-specked piece of cotton into her bosom and began massaging Dickinson’s shoulders, the one that hurt, and the one that didn’t.

  “Yeah.” Dooley guessed that the jehu was answering his question, but he might have been reacting to the woman’s touch.

  “How many of them?”

  “Five,” answered the gambler.

  Dooley turned to him. “Did you get a good look at them?”

  The man twisted his mustache and shook his head. “They wore flour sacks over their heads.”

  “Horses?”

  The gambler shrugged. “No brands I could make out. Bays. Browns. Blacks. But I did not notice if they were geldings, stallions, or mares.”

  “Clothing?”

  “Dusters. Spurs. Nothing that stood out.”

  “What are you gonna do, Marshal?” Dickinson asked. The prostitute had stopped rubbing his shoulders, and moved on toward one of the houses as more and more respectable men and women gathered on the street corner.

  “How much money did they get?” Dooley asked.

  “Five hundred or so from me,” the gambler answered, “and a nickel-plated pocketknife, my Remington over-and-under derringer, and a fine hunter’s watch of solid gold that once belonged to a young miner’s grandpappy before he bet on his two pair against my three fours four nights back. A Seth Thomas,” the man said, meaning the watchmaker and not the unlucky miner.

  “The brooch, ma’am?” Dooley had turned to the woman who had stopped bawling. “Could you describe it?”

  She did, in detail, peppered with memories of her dearly departed husband and why she had found herself in a lawless town like Leadville. Dooley saw the pencil Paul Pinkerton held move faster.

  “They also,” the woman said, “took my purse, which contained fifty-four dollars and thirteen cents and a carte de visite of my poor, poor Seth.” Meaning, Dooley guessed, her dearly departed husband and not another pocket watch.

  “Jarrod?”

  The stagecoach driver shook his head, grimaced, and gently touched the knot on his head that no longer bled. “Nothin’ from me. I had just crossed and one of them rascals fired from the woods. Grazed my noggin. I managed to keep my mules from running off. Then they was all around us.”

  “What do you plan on doing about this heinous crime?” Paul Pinkerton, the low-down dog, had stopped writing in his notebook and had crossed the street. “Why aren’t you forming a posse?”

  Dooley sighed. “I’m going to ride out to the site of the holdup and see what I can find,” he said. “After I send a telegraph to the marshal and county sheriff in Silver Plume. But I can’t go chasing bandits after they cross Chalk Creek. That’s out of my jurisdiction.”

  “Well, don’t that beat all!”

  Paul Pinkerton had someone else to back his play, Dooley realized, and he turned to see the bribe-taking federal deputy, Richard Blue, leaning against a column in front of the bank.

  “A lawman with sand, I see. Sending a telegraph instead of a posse.”

  “I don’t see you volunteering to lead a posse,” Dooley fired back.

  The man seemed unfazed. “I’m a federal lawman. I lack authority in this matter.”

  “I lack authority once they cross Chalk Creek,” Dooley said. “In fact, going out there to look for sign is outside my jurisdiction, too.”

  “How convenient.” The marshal turned on his heel and walked back down the boardwalk.

  Looking around, Dooley found Adam Wolfe in the crowd. “Mr. Wolfe,” he said, “could you do me a favor? Butch Sweeney, as you know, is on the stage coming in from Denver.” He stopped, thinking, wondering, worrying if those owlhoots might try to hold up the Denver-Leadville stage, too. Yet there was nothing Dooley could do about that now. “If you could take down statements of these witnesses, I’ll saddle up General Grant and ride out to see what I can find, after I send a telegraph to Silver Plume, Georgetown, Idaho Springs.” Would they go west? Perhaps, Dooley thought. “And Glenwood Springs.”

  “Sure,” the vigilante said.

  “What do you expect to find at the scene of the crime, sir?” Pinkerton was on his soapbox again. “Other than a cold trail?”

  Dooley wanted to punch that horse’s hiney in his mouth, but he refrained. “They nicked Jarrod with a rifle. I might find the shell casing, see what they were firing.”

  The reporter snickered. “A spent brass casing is sure to send those culprits to the prison at Cañon City.”

  “Maybe it’s a rare rifle,” Dooley countered. “But if it—and it likely is—came from a Winchester or Henry, well, hammers strike cartridges at different points. That’s a long shot, but it might become evidence in a court of law. But horses leave signs. Shod horses. Unshod. I can see what tracks the shoes left. A chip. A line. Or how a horse happens to be stepping. That’s something I can telegraph lawmen across the state. And, most likely, they were waiting in the woods for a while. It was cold this morning. Cold for August, anyway. Maybe they dropped something. Likely they were smoking cigarettes. Maybe chewing tobacco. They might have even camped there overnight. And maybe I’ll find nothing. But I’ll definitely look for something.”

  He thought he sounded pretty good, like he knew what he was doing, even if he didn’t. Yet he did know horses. And he could read sign pretty good when it came to horses. He left Paul Pinkerton with his notebook filled with lies, the witnesses, the crowd, and the victims of a routine stagecoach holdup. He sent telegraphs out, even one to Denver, hoping that might make its way to the Telegram’s next edition before Paul Pinkerton could file some outlandish piece of fiction. Then he rode out of town to Chalk Creek.

  Those men were pros, though. Apparently, they had put canvas or burlap wrappings over their mounts’ hooves to reduce any tracks, or signs. Either the gunman who had winged Dickinson had picked up his shell or had never cocked his rifle. They certainly had not camped, at least nowhere in the woods or general area, as far as Dooley could find. A
nd had they smoked cigarettes, they smoked them down to nothing. Had they chewed tobacco, they swallowed their quids.

  Even after all that, Dooley rode up and down the road for two miles, trying to figure out if the bandits had stopped to undo the bindings that hid their trail. At length, though, he gave up. Still, legally and ethically, Dooley figured he had done all he could do. He rode back to town, found the statements that Mr. Wolfe had taken and left on his desk. When the circuit-riding judge returned to Leadville, Dooley figured he could turn those over to him to get to the county solicitor at the county seat.

  He gave General Grant some extra oats and a good rubdown, took Blue for a walk on his evening patrol, ate some Chinese food for supper, and, seeing things were quiet this evening, he retired early.

  He got up, early, too, because someone was banging on the door and Blue was barking his head off.

  It was the editor of the Leadville Ledger, but he wasn’t here to get a story. He had news himself.

  “Marshal. The Breckenridge omnibus has been held up!”

  Dooley had just enough time to pull on his britches, boots, and a shirt. Back to his office he went, where he saw Jesus Gabaldon, the wiry one-time vaquero who had started the line that ran folks from Breckenridge to Leadville, and vice versa, one run one way once a week.

  At least they hadn’t shot Jesus. But old Gabaldon had been carrying six passengers, and none of them was happy at having their wallets and watches taken. No brooches, but no women had been on this wagon. The whiskey drummer had the biggest loss. The bandits had taken his case of samples.

  The good news was that it was way too early for Paul Pinkerton to be standing on the corner, scratching his pad with his pencil, and thinking of new and devious ways he could make Dooley look bad.

  “Did they take any mail?” Dooley asked.

  “No, señor.” Jesus Gabaldon’s head shook. “Me no carry letters.”

  “Yeah,” Dooley said, and muttered a curse under his breath. Those bandits were too smart to take any mail and have the deputy marshals on their trail.

  They had hit the stage before the sky had even started to lighten, and the moon was new, so the only light came from the lanterns hanging from Gabaldon’s coach. As an old vaquero and experienced cowboy and frontiersman, Jesus might have been able to tell more about the horses had there been more light. Still, Dooley felt certain of one thing.