The Last Shootist

by Miles Swarthout

  “I’ve grown up since hitting Bisbee. Feel like I’m making adult decisions now.”

  “This rescue ride doesn’t sound like one of ’em. Awfully dangerous,” disagreed Red Jean.

  “I’ll be in and out of Clifton before they know I’ve arrived. If she’s up there.”

  Ease polished off his bubbly. “Well, good luck, pardner. Hope you make it to twenty.”

  * * *

  Gillom said goodbye next morning to the landlady, Mrs. Blair. The graying seamstress stood on her porch watching, not waving, as an armed watchman appeared from up the hill to follow the young gunslinger down the long stairway from Youngblood Hill.

  Gillom trudged down the Gulch’s busy boardwalk a last time and back up Tombstone Canyon. He was winded from carrying his saddlebags and warbag full of accumulated gear. He hoped the man with the rifle following a discreet distance behind wouldn’t be the only person to see him off.

  At the O. K. Livery and Stable, the stage from Tombstone had arrived and teamsters were exchanging baggage, dumping mail in the boot, switching horse teams. Gillom bought his ticket, five dollars to ride a thirty-eight-mile loop south and then north round the Mule Mountains to the town “too tough to die.” Tombstone was slowly dying, though, with its nearby silver mines flooded and petering out, while copper mining was still booming in Bisbee’s mountains.

  Gillom slung his leather bags into the leather-sided rear boot of the Concord coach, but he was too restless to take a seat inside with the other passengers yet. So he climbed on a corral fence to wait, eyeing the watcher who was now resting against a fence pole, far end of the corral.

  He saw her at a distance, trudging up the canyon road to the stable, long red hair tied up in a scarf, carrying something under a cloth. She wore men’s blue jeans, brogans, and a very short-sleeved tunic which showed off the muscles in her arms and shoulders. Good ol’ Jean. Gillom grinned. At least someone’s come to see me off.

  He eased gingerly down from the fence to greet his ladyfriend, his right arm and ribs still sore from last week’s fight. “Jean, you look fetching this morning. Ready to work the mines.”

  She frowned at his joke. “Ease is working, but I’m on night shift so I don’t have to dress up today. I thought someone should say fare thee well on your fool’s errand.” With a flourish she whipped off the linen covering two chocolate cupcakes on a small china plate. “I didn’t have time to bake, so I picked these up at City Bakery. Happy day-late birthday.”

  “Swell! Send me off in style.” They were all chocolate smiles as they gobbled the cupcakes in a few bites. Jean cleaned her fingers on the napkin while Gillom licked his.

  “Make it to your next birthday, Gillom, okay?”

  He nodded, not smiling now.

  “Let me know if you find Anel. Post me a letter, care of the Red Light. I know you can’t come back to Bisbee, at least for a while, but if you make it down to Tombstone, or Tucson, let us know. Ease and I will ride over to celebrate your survival.”

  “You bet I’ll do that, young lady. You let me know, too, if Anel suddenly shows up here again. Mail my mother, Bond Rogers, in El Paso.” He squeezed her hands, gave her cheek a kiss. A new driver climbed up on the coach’s front seat while the liveryman checked harness on the anxious six-horse team.

  “All aboard for Tombstone!”

  Gillom opened the stage door to help another lady up in the coach. He swung up inside, latching the small door shut. “I’ll absolutely be seein’ you an’ Ease again.”

  The driver whistled sharply, got six horses moving in a slow left turn inside the corral as the shifty stableman threw open the wooden gate and they were off, down the dirt road through town.

  “Clear the road!” The coachman cracked his whip over the fresh horses’ heads to pick up speed and put on a show for any watching townsfolk.

  Sticking his head from the rear coach window, young Rogers saw only Jean waving goodbye. To hell with Bisbee, he groused. There’s friendlier towns to nest in. Just for the hell of it, Gillom pointed at the vigilante from the Safety Committee and shot off his finger pistol.

  Thirty-five

  The stagecoach from Bisbee was nicknamed the “Sandy Bob,” and its jolting six-hour journey involved two relay stops fifteen miles apart, where horses were changed and the passengers could use the outhouse or purchase a quick snack and a drink at a ranch. In between, Gillom tried to ignore the chatting ladies inside the coach and straighten out his own jumbled thoughts.

  What will I do if Anel’s not in Clifton? Sure can’t go back to Bisbee. Guess I’ll sell these collector guns first, return to El Paso, try to work things out with the sheriff, so I don’t have to do more jail time. Maybe take a slower stagecoach back to west Texas, stay off the trains. Like to see Silver City in New Mexico. Hear that’s a bustling burg.

  Gillom pulled down the brim of his Stetson and closed his eyes, but the hoofbeats of the galloping horses and shocks to the leather thoroughbraces snapping support beneath the heavy Concord coach only allowed him to doze fitfully.

  They reached Tombstone about suppertime, but Gillom didn’t go sightseeing. Scott White was sheriff of all Cochise County and had too many confidantes in town. The youth didn’t wish his presence noted. So he grabbed a meal of beans and biscuits and coffee during their hour layover. The twenty-mile run up to Benson on the “Modoc” was mostly men on business, so they could catch next morning’s train out of Tucson headed east to El Paso. Since this night run was nonstop, the new driver handling the ribbons up top put the six horses into their collars, never allowing them to slow to less than a hard trot unless going uphill. Their fast pace through the night finally lulled Gillom and he dozed—remembering what J. B. Books had told him about the only time he’d ever been shot.

  Full of laudanum a spring afternoon behind his mother’s boardinghouse, Books had rested on the back stoop atop his red satin pillow like a potentate.

  “I was wounded just once, Gillom, in a restaurant in Bisbee. Two butt-ins braced me at a monte table in the Free Coinage, fancy saloon up Brewery Gulch. I won’t stand for an insult, but bartenders intervened and we three took our drinking elsewhere. I ran into those two loudmouths later, don’t even know their names to this day. I was having a quiet supper around midnight at the English Kitchen when those two jaspers came in, still drunk, and their insults commenced again. Only this time they drew pistols to really bullyrag me, so I had to respond, chair against the wall, right over the bone china. I killed ’em both, several bullets in each—they dropped right inside the Kitchen’s front entrance. It was a helluva noisy mess inside that little restaurant, diners diving for cover under the tables, linen pulled down, dishes flying, but they gave me no choice. Never know what a drunk will do.”

  Gillom Rogers was entranced. “And one of ’em plugged you?”

  J. B. Books shook his head violently. “No! That was the crazy thing. It was some other thumbhead, a complete stranger who probably also had too much to drink. This joker lurched up from his meal, pulled his pistol while I was shooting the other two, drilled me right in the belly. I fell down. Stomach’s a bad area to get shot in, because the shock to your nerves is immediate, paralyzes you from fighting back. Doc Hostetler was called and removed the bullet, which is why I rode in pain all the way down here to El Paso from Colorado to see him again, a doctor I trusted. I was lucky then to have a good doc patching me up. Lots of gunmen have bit the bullet from a stomach wound.”

  “What happened to the guy who shot you for no reason?”

  “Never saw him again. After the mayhem that shooter just wandered off, picking his teeth after a full meal and not paying for it probably.” The notorious gunman paused, troubled by the bad memory. “That’s what makes gunplay so dangerous, Gillom. It’s unpredictable. Too often, when weapons are pulled and working, it’s some nobody, some butt-in with a secret compulsion to use a gun once in his piss-poor life on another human being or to die spectacularly, some six-fingered bastard who couldn’t hit
a cow in the teats with a tin cup when sober, who has the final say in the drama. I have no idea who that other sonofabitch was, but he was close and accurate enough to nearly kill me.”

  J. B. Books fixed his young worshipper with a solemn eye. “Yes, speed, aim, and deliberation are all critical in a gunfight, but you’ve also gotta have an awful lot of luck to live long as a shootist. It’s not an occupation to aspire to, son.”

  * * *

  Gillom Rogers woke in a cold sweat from his dream. Tipping back his silverbelly Stetson, he saw the other passengers across from him were dozing, too. The eighteen-year-old roused to pull aside the leather curtain next to his back seat. Outside, sagebrush and sand flashed by under a new moon and he shivered.

  They arrived in Benson around midnight, so Gillom recovered his saddlebags and unlimbered stiff legs down to the train depot. He decided to save money instead of looking for a flophouse. He found an empty wooden bench outside near the end of the train platform, put his warbag up for a pillow, pulled his wool coat over on top of him, and gradually fell asleep.

  So here I am exactly where I was four months ago, sleeping outdoors with no job and no good prospects. And even more bastards looking to snuff out my candle. What a life!

  * * *

  A wagon pulled up after dawn to drop off luggage and freight. Gillom opened an eye on dusty sunshine. He hit the washroom to splash water on his face and armpits. He was starving, so stashed his coat and bags in the freight office and hurried into Benson for a fortifying breakfast of steak and eggs. Wasn’t much to see, since Benson was a trans-shipment point for people and equipment and supplies moving south to the mines. Cattle, sheep, and horses were penned here, too, by Arizona ranchers, for shipping east in freight trains returning from the West Coast. The big dollar item was the tons of smelted copper coming up from Bisbee and soon Douglas, Arizona.

  Gillom bought a two-dollar ticket to Bowie, the next depot east. The Tucson train wouldn’t arrive until 10:00 A.M., so the young man spent time writing his mother. He wrote he was pleased her boardinghouse was back in business. He missed Bond and his school pals and guessed he would return to El Paso in a few weeks when his affairs in Arizona were concluded, before school began again in the fall. Gillom kept his words to Bond Rogers enthusiastic and brief, neglecting to mention being out of a job, killing three more men and being run out of Bisbee. His mother was turning gray and had enough to worry about him already. Instead, he included a photograph of himself and Anel, saying he had a new girlfriend. But it wasn’t the photo of them kissing. He wasn’t quite sure how his mother would take to his dating a Mexican girl.

  Gillom mailed his letter and caught the eastbound train. He was only hitching a ride on the Southern Pacific for a couple hours, sixty-odd miles, so he kept his bags with him in the second-class car and spent the time oiling his old brown leather holster and cleaning his .44 Remingtons, admiring again their balance, custom grips, and nickel-plated beauty. He deserved these precision weapons. He’d killed six men with these revolvers! Now J. B. Books’s six-guns truly belonged to him.

  His gun work caught the disapproving eye of a middle-aged woman seated across from him, as well as the fascinated attention of her young son. Gillom Rogers paid neither any mind. This might be the last chance to do his gun care on a stable surface before he reached Clifton. If there was to be a showdown with Luther Goose, he’d better be prepared.

  * * *

  As Gillom stood atop the train’s steps at Bowie depot, he could see old Ft. Bowie up on a hill to the south, twelve miles away. He stepped down and walked toward a waiting Wells Fargo stagecoach. The teenager paid the driver, climbed aboard, and the six-horse team was soon rolling north up the trickling washes off San Simon Creek through the valley of the same name.

  Gillom figured it would take them until evening, with two stops at relay stations to reach another town, Solomonville. He realized he’d be exhausted by the time he got to Clifton, so he pulled his Stetson down again. The two other men inside the stagecoach were excited, though, about riding into Apache country, as Gillom dozed.

  * * *

  Solomonville was another small dusty town with one Valley National Bank, the gateway to trading at the San Carlos Apache reservation way to the northwest, or the booming copper mining country around Clifton and Morenci to the northeast. Gillom didn’t need to see its limited sights, so he gobbled a restaurant dinner and retreated to bed in a tight room in Solomonville’s only hotel. His ribs ached, his right arm still twinged, his butt was sprung, and his head was confused, full of worries. Somehow he fell asleep, but it wasn’t restful.

  * * *

  Young Rogers rode another Wells Fargo stagecoach early next morning, heading up a valley along the Gila River, which ran down from Clifton’s higher elevation forty-five miles northeast of Solomonville in the Gila Mountains. This toll road had no bridges or culverts, so was prone to washing out during storms as it ran alongside the Gila River. Gillom looked out his window at the Peloncillo Mountains to the south, but no rain clouds were to be seen.

  Two relay station stops lay along this route, so the eighteen-year-old had more time to reflect on his two magic nights with Anel in his moonlit cottage, having sex during that deluge, the smell of her wet, naked body when she came back to bed from outside in the rain. Such thoughts aroused him. He prayed she wasn’t a prostitute now, ensnared in Luther Goose’s promiscuous web. He couldn’t conceive she’d done that willingly, sold herself in a strange town, leaving all her clothes behind in Bisbee on a risky lark. But who could tell with young women, although Anel Romero hadn’t struck him as flighty. Not after she’d had the guts to pose as my silhouette girl!

  Hours later they hit another stage road as they made the left turn up to isolated Clifton, nestled between mountains twelve miles north. Gillom emerged from his dark thoughts to engage a rough-looking passenger seated across the coach wearing a tired flannel shirt and old denim jeans, who he thought might be a miner.

  “Sir, what’s the railroad out there?”

  “That is the Arizona and New Mexico line. They’re expanding it this summer to standard-gauge, three-foot rail. Arizona Copper, which owns the railroad line up in Clifton, will make two daily freight runs down to Lordsburg faster and cheaper with bigger trains soon. They make connections in Lordsburg with the Southern Pacific, to ship our smelted ore through El Paso to the east coast for more refining. Copper business is booming, boy. We’ll set another production record this year, easy.”

  Gillom pointed out the coach door’s little window. “What’s that river there?”

  “That’s the San Francisco River, whose water we gotta have to keep our smelter furnace jackets cool, from all that heat refining our copper. Water’s more drinkable north of town, for we’ve got salty hot springs around town and we dump our mine tailings in that river, too, so it doesn’t taste so good down lower.”

  Out their stage window Gillom could see the approaching town nestled in a deep canyon walled in by rock and chalk bluffs, two to three hundred feet high. The hillsides were gray and brown, treeless, austere, but the air was cooler, due to their increasing altitude.

  “What are those two mountains?” he asked the gabby local.

  The man craned around in his front seat, stuck his head out the side window for a good gander. “That’s Clifton Peak to the north, and Mulligan Peak, another thousand feet higher, to its right. You obviously haven’t been here before, kid, so I’ll tell you Clifton’s only got three streets, one each side of the river and another along Chase Creek, which has cable bridges across it.” The miner pointed and Gillom stuck his head outside, too. “You can see one bridge up there. They wash out every spring melt. The Mexicans have burrowed into the hillsides along that lower creek, cheaper land, but they’re the first to be washed out when our summer rains come.”

  Both men pulled their heads back inside for easier discussion. “Are there a lot of Mexicans in Clifton? There weren’t that many in Bisbee.”

  �
�Yes, many of our miners are Mexican, but not the shift bosses, like me.” The muscular roughneck snapped his suspenders with pride. “You from Bisbee?”

  Gillom nodded. “Worked as a bank guard down there.”

  “Well, Bisbee’s a white man’s camp, more organized. Clifton’s so remote, we have to go down to the Mexican mines in Sonora to recruit many of our copper diggers. The Mexes are hard workers, I’ll give ’em that, and they get paid fairly equal. But they stick to themselves, got their own cantinas and cribs.”

  “What about Chinamen? Do they work the mines, too?”

  “No sir. We won’t let ’em undercut our wages. But celestials do own the laundries in Clifton and some restaurants, have their own tong societies and secret hop joints. They stick to themselves, too.” The mine boss pointed out the window again at the acreage planted in vegetables the stagecoach was passing along either side of the dirt road.

  “That is Metz’s Flat. Chinamen rent this old stableland to grow their vegetables they sell in town. Shannon Copper’s just raising its new smelter down here, too, so we’ll have three copper companies competing round these parts. Should keep wages decent. You lookin’ for work, son?”

  “No sir. Just up here visiting, looking for a friend.”

  “Don’t like to get your hands dirty, uh?” The workman grinned as he spit out the window.

  Thirty-six

  The Wells Fargo stage rolled into Clifton early afternoon. Gillom put his lightning-striped boot down from the coach and walked into yet another dusty Western town. He pulled his cowboy hat down low, hoping he wouldn’t be recognized. He checked into the Clifton Hotel under another name, for all the good that would probably do him. Built in the 1880s and still the only hotel in town, the two-story frame building was notorious for its resident scorpions who had moved in during construction and still held regular dances there, nights. After washing off road dust, Gillom took a nap in his two-dollar-a-night room to catch up from his restless sleep in the stagecoach.