The Last Shootist

by Miles Swarthout

  The Copper Queen’s jumbo smelter and two smaller ones hissed escaping steam and the young men heard the deep thrumming of the blowers in the smelters. The furnaces roared as white hot metal flowed under the glare of electric lights.

  “Yup. The Calumet and Arizona mining company’s just been formed and they’ve struck a rich ore body on their Irish Mag claim, so there’s gonna be two big mining rivals in town. The Electric Age has dawned and the world cries out for copper!” Ease yelled, leaving both young men grinning. “There’s even talk the town may incorporate, become official. Hell, the Improvement Company’s extending electric and telephone lines all over town, and they’re starting to dig wells south toward Naco to pump us up fresher water, put an end to our deadly epidemics. Our air will still be smoky, but the rest of Bisbee will be fully civilized, damn it.”

  “I met a man from Anaconda Copper on the train. He said Phelps Dodge is building a bigger smelter down in Douglas, gonna shut these smelters down.”

  “That’s what I hear,” agreed Ease. “But these companies will remain close to where their ore, their money, is and that’s around Bisbee.”

  “Me, too,” puffed Gillom as they tramped up a long, three-stage wooden stairway to a small wooden house on the southern hillside across the canyon from the smelters.

  “You like our endless stairs?”

  “You do get your exercise.”

  “Indeed! Sheriff’s rule is, a drunken miner gets three chances to climb the stairs home before being taken to jail for the night.”

  Gillom laughed. “How’d you get your nickname?”

  “Oh, as a kid I’d always figure the easiest way of doin’ things first, before doin’ my schoolwork or chores.”

  “Or not at all?”

  Now the young barkeep laughed. “That, too. So the name stuck.” Ease Bixler stopped on the stairway near a small, whitewashed house to catch his breath.

  “This is Missus Blair’s. Widow dressmaker, has her little millinery above the bank, downtown.” The lanky bartender pointed through the darkness toward more lamplit dwellings farther along the hillside. “That’s my house up there, third one over. Nothin’ fancy in this neighborhood, Youngblood Hill.”

  He rapped loudly on the front door and it was opened by a middle-aged woman in a fancy dress of crimson silk, with streamers of pinned black lace dangling loose from its neck and sleeves.

  “Who’s banging on my door at night?”

  “Pardon, Missus Blair. It’s Ease Bixler, from three doors over.” He pulled his new pal forward into the dim light. “This is Gillom Rogers. Just in from El Paso. I thought after what happened to poor Mister Peavy, your spare room might be available?”

  “It is. Come in. Pardon me, boys. I am tacking trim on this dress for a customer.”

  “Very pretty,” agreed Ease. Peering around the lamplit front room, the youths observed lace scraps on her rug, and scissors and sewing boxes lying in front of a full-length glass mirror, which tilted on wooden hinges.

  “Sorry to bother you at night, ma’am,” added Gillom, removing his Stetson.

  “I’ve got a two-room cottage out back, up the hill. Use my privy, too, but you have to buy your own stovewood and water off the burro trains. Linens provided, but you gotta wash ’em and keep the place tidy. Twelve dollars a month. In advance.” She didn’t appear to be in the mood to negotiate, so Gillom agreed, sight unseen.

  “I don’t want any short-timers. Mine is not a hotel. Couple months’ stay at least.”

  “He intends to get a job, Missus. Bank guard or somethin’ respectable,” interjected Ease.

  “Let’s go see it then.” Handing her neighbor a coal oil lamp, the woman, still dangling lacework, pulled sheets and several worn towels from a chiffonier, handed a quilt to Gillom, and led them through her kitchen and out her back door.

  “Ain’t fancy, but it’s suited several miners just fine.” She unlocked the door to the two-room shack, reached inside to strike a match, and lit another lamp. The boys followed to look in the moving lamplight. The only standing furniture was a bench and rocker in the front room. Two single bunk beds, cupboard, settee, and chest of drawers were built into the wooden walls. The wood-burning stove in the smaller kitchen also had a wooden table to eat off of bolted to the wall, several pine chairs, and a big tin washbasin perched atop two sawhorses. Cups, glasses, and cooking utensils were stacked in another built-in cupboard.

  “Nothing much here to destroy, all built-in. Since you know Mister Bixler, I’ll let you stay tonight for free, see how it suits. I’ll take my twelve dollars first thing in the morning.”

  Gillom nodded. “Probably be fine, ma’am. See you first thing. Oh. Where’s the—”

  “Privy’s right up the hill. No peeing in the bushes, or late-night cards, or entertaining women all hours. I know how young men like to do, but I live right next door. Like my peace and quiet.”

  Neither Gillom nor his new buddy met her stern eyes. She’d embarrassed them. Mrs. Blair merely nodded, dropped her sheets on one of the bunks, took her lamp back from Ease, and swept from the room.

  Gillom put down the old quilt, pulled a mattress up on its side for several hard bounces and a shake to see what might be living inside.

  “Thought I’d left my mother back in El Paso.”

  Ease chortled. “She’s just puttin’ you on notice, sport. Bark’s worse than her bite. Get a job, start makin’ money, you can find somethin’ more suitable, maybe bunkin’ with one of our painted cats, up the Gulch.” He winked.

  The teenager didn’t take his bait. “Thanks for the help, Ease. I owe you a good dinner, anytime you’d like.”

  The redhead grinned. “Tomorrow night then. When I get off my shift. Friday night always jumps. Show you some of our high life.”

  “You bet.” They shook hands again at the door. “Need a light?”

  “No, this is my neighborhood. Don’t slip on a dog turd in the gully, I should make it home all right.”

  “See you tomorrow night about eight at the Bonanza then.”

  After his new pal disappeared into the dark, Gillom kicked his saddlebags into a corner, quickly tucked in the sheets, pulled off his boots and pants and cotton shirt. As he blew out his lamp, he pulled the quilt up over his long johns and dirty socks with a sigh. I’ll make the best of this, even if I do miss my mother and Bee and Ivory and even ol’ Johnny Kneebone, just a little bit.

  Twenty-one

  He paid Mrs. Blair next morning. She warmed to the feel of his two gold eagles. He left her dobie silver dollars from his change to pay the Mexican burro drivers on their daily rounds with supplies of firewood and twenty-five-gallon canvas sackfuls of fresh water, to get him started stocking supplies.

  As he sat in the outhouse taking his morning ease, peeling off his merino wool underwear, separate top and bottom, he was pleased to discover no other house guests had come out of his thin mattress to bite him in the night. Maybe I should try the stage line first? Gillom wondered. That could be an exciting job, stagecoach guard, fighting off armed robbers and the occasional Apache.

  So, even if he still smelled a little ripe in his roady clothing, Gillom clomped down the long, almost vertical flights of wooden stairs from his new home atop Youngblood Hill. He stared around at the warrens of wooden houses with their gingerbread trim the residents had gouged and blasted out of hillside ledges. One neighbor’s roof was perched just below another’s front door. He looked over the twisting dirt trails, steep stairways, and tortuous streets connecting these homes, the big mines across the canyon and the businesses downtown. In the sparse foliage woodcutters hadn’t stripped clean, Gillom could hear mockingbirds, wild canaries, and linnets spraying melodies in the thickets of red oaks along Mule Pass Creek as he strode into the heart of Bisbee.

  His first stop was up Mule Gulch at the Warren Laundry, where the white ladies let him change out of his dirty duds in back and leave them behind, wearing the clean set they’d just ironed. By asking, he learned th
ese were the widows of foreign miners who’d been killed on the job, and the town traditionally supported them by letting them do their washing.

  Gillom walked farther up Mule Creek deeper into the canyon, where he could hear an Arizona canary singing as he approached the O.K. Livery, Feed, and Sales Stable, right next to the O.K. Harness shop, whose sign proclaimed “We’ll hitch you up right now!” A heehawing burro was one of several being shoveled grain in a feed trough in a corral. He approached the hefty teamster wielding the shovel.

  “Howdy, mister. I’m looking for a job on the stage line comes in here.”

  The rough-looking man with a pockmarked face spit tobacco juice.

  “Might use some help muckin’ stalls.”

  “I’d like to be a stage guard, preventing robberies.”

  The big animal handler laughed. “Kid, we don’t hire guards no more. Our stages only go where the train don’t, like over to Tombstone. Our wild Apaches have all been shipped to Florida and stage holdups are a problem mostly of the last century’s. It’s 1901, son. Gangs are going after bank express cars these days. Them big Wells Fargo safes on the trains. That’s where the smelted gold and money rides now.”

  Gillom frowned. “I didn’t realize.”

  “Yeah, you look a little young. Try the train depot.”

  It was the same story at the Arizona and Southeastern office. The railroads had hired most of the experienced stagecoach shotguns to ride as gun guards inside their express cars at a pay bump to twelve dollars a day. They were an easier ride than a bumpy stagecoach, with better, regular meals on the trains, too. Wells Fargo’s heavy traveling safes were a more secure way to move serious money and valuables faster and cheaper. Under twenty, Rogers was too wet around the ears for such dangerous work. Sorry.

  Gillom was a mite discouraged as he walked back down Main Street to the two-story Angius building. The bank was right next door to the busy Copper Queen Mercantile, the “Merc,” the miners’ company store.

  A small crowd idled on the one bricked street Bisbee had been able to pave so far. They were admiring the town’s first automobile, parked not far from an iron hitching rail. It was a white 1901 Locomobile, powered by a small steam engine in a wood-framed compartment under its two-passenger leather seat, with a retractable cloth top folded down behind. Gillom had never seen anything like this vehicle and wondered how it had even gotten all the way to isolated Bisbee.

  “Okay, M. J., fire it up.” A hawk-faced gentleman in a brown three-piece suit issued the order. The younger driver adjusted his straw boater and swallowed hard. The small steam boiler inside had a pilot light lit by a blow torch, so it was always ready to move as long as steam was built up. There was no ignition key for the Mason two-cylinder gasoline engine. The driver released the foot brake and shoved it into forward gear, holding on to the metal steering tiller in front of him, which turned steering rods attached to the front wheels. With the chuff-chuff of a steam engine, the lightweight little car jerked forward as the buzzing crowd stepped back. Twenty-eight-inch spoked white rubber tires spun on the slick bricks, then grabbed traction as the seven-hundred-dollar runabout was off down Main Street at a gallop—twenty miles an hour!

  “Cunningham’s fleeing with our money!” yelled the bespectacled man in the suit to appreciative laughter. As the automobile disappeared, so did the crowd. Gillom caught up with the gentleman as he climbed the bank’s steps.

  “Sir, excuse me! Who would I talk to about a job as a bank guard?”

  “Me. I’m this bank’s president.”

  “Oh. Gillom Rogers, sir.” He extended his hand but the president just looked at it. “Just got into town from El Paso. Looking for security work, which might make use of my gun skills.”

  The older gentleman pulled a handkerchief to polish his wire-rimmed spectacles.

  “We already have a uniformed guard inside. But, well, a couple weeks ago, one of our town butchers, big guy, too, was robbed right up the gulch there, trying to walk down here with a late deposit from his till. I’ve been thinking, maybe if we did offer private guard service, to our better customers, for a small fee, they would feel safer.”

  “I can bodyguard anybody.”

  “You look young. What guard experience have you had?”

  Gillom leaned back on his bootheels to make himself taller. “None, sir. Just out of high school. But I make up for that with my gun speed and friendly countenance.” He smiled wide.

  “Prove it.”

  They were standing on cement steps underneath the bank’s granite columned portico, and Gillom stepped down to let a customer enter. Slowly withdrawing his right-hand Remington .44-.40, he opened its nickel-plated cylinder and pulled one brass cartridge. Resnapping the cylinder into place, he made sure there were two empty chambers now in his six-shooter, one under the hammer and an empty one for the next rotation. He reholstered his weapon. Placing the spare cartridge on the back of his right hand, he stuck it out in front of him. Gillom looked at the bank president, who was watching curiously.

  “Don’t blink.” Yanking his right hand out from under the bullet, Rogers fast drew his pistol, thumb-cocked it, and pulled the hair trigger, dry-firing the big pistol before the bullet hit the ground. Click.

  The banker licked his lips. “I think we might find use for you, young man. For twenty-five dollars a week.”

  Gillom bent to pick up his bullet. “Need a little more than that.”

  “What! You’re just starting. If you get along well, become known around town, you can probably pick up extra work nights, escorting some of our gamblers and their winnings safely home.”

  “Later. Maybe.” The young gunslinger looked the banker directly in the eye. “Some of these miners make twenty-five dollars a day now.”

  “But that’s hard work, digging and blasting ore. You’re just going to be babysitting some of our merchants, walking them to and from their stores.” The banker was becoming frustrated, suddenly in a negotiation he hadn’t expected this morning.

  Gillom drew both pistols in an instant, threw in two forward rolls, a pinwheel transfer with each Remington revolving one full turn while crossing in midair, caught them in opposite palms and concluded with double reverse spins back into both holsters. Perfectly.

  “All right, all right! Fifty dollars a week.”

  “To start,” added the young shootist.

  “To start. First thing Monday morning, 8:00 A.M. I’ll send customers letters over the weekend. See if extra protection doesn’t stir up some new business after that last robbery scare.”

  They were distracted by the Locomobile chuffing back down the street and skidding to a squeaking stop on the brick pavement nearby. The banker frowned at the showoff.

  “That’s my cashier. Have to tell him to put you on the payroll.”

  The banker started to walk up the steps to enter, but Gillom stuck out his hand again.

  “Thank you, Mister…?”

  The bank president hesitated, finally stuck out his hand to shake with the teenager.

  “Sumner Pinkham. Your new boss.”

  “Much obliged, Mister Pinkham.”

  “Cunningham! Leave that toy automobile alone and get the hell in here!”

  * * *

  Gillom celebrated with a breakfast of eggs and bacon and a rasher of potatoes at a small café, then started back up to his hillside home, a bounce in his bootsteps, puffing less from this elevated hike. The birds trilling in the bushes along the creek below certainly sounded sweeter this fine afternoon, saluting him.

  He discovered two stacks of firewood and a half-filled water barrel beside his kitchen door. While he unpacked his limited possessions, Gillom lit his Franklin stove and heated several buckets of water. He dumped the hot water into his big tin tub he’d placed on the wooden floor, threw in some Gold Dust washing powder he’d found on his shelves, grabbed a bar of Ivory soap and a pig bristle brush, and treated himself to a refreshing scrub.

  Dressed in his black wool p
instriped pants, his black-and-silver-threaded shirt, and brown calfskin vest with the silver conchos, Gillom was back in the Bonanza before 8:00 P.M. Ease was behind the long bar cleaning up from his day shift. The barkeep smiled and poured his new pal a free beer.

  “Sleep well, pard?”

  “Dandy. Landlady took a shine to my money this morning, so it looks like I’ll be there awhile. No bedbugs, either.”

  “Good! Makes me as daffy as a duck lost in Arizona to have a new friend handy just across the hillside. Just don’t pee in her bushes!”

  They both laughed. Ease took off his apron and checked out with the senior bartender, before drawing himself a beer and joining his young friend on the other side of the hard wood.

  “Welcome to the Golden West, where a few folks have more money than they can spend in the daytime!” They clinked pint mugs.

  “Appears that way tonight.” They looked around the big saloon, where the gaming tables were filling and tarted-up women were filtering in to flirt with the amateur gamblers and entice them to drink.

  “Well, long as your ore holds out and the price of copper stays up, Bisbee’ll keep booming,” Gillom agreed.

  “You betcha! And we’ll make our fortunes here along with her. I intend to own a saloon better than this someday.” The boys clinked glasses again, but were interrupted in their mutual admiration by a slap from the tables that resounded like a firecracker’s report. They turned to see a big man in a black suit rising from one of the faro tables to confront the dealer behind the felt layout.

  “You’ve got that squeeze box rigged!”

  Threatened, the gray-suited dealer shoved his right hand forward like he was shooting a starched cuff, but the big customer grabbed his wrist and twisted it, pushing a hideout gun from the spring mechanism inside the dealer’s suitcoat’s wide sleeve. The din died down due to the confrontation and the boys could hear the gambler growl.