Lawless

by John Jakes

  True, old Fowler had warned her all that was a sham. How right he’d been. She’d never seen anything so callous as the shooting of Lute Sims, unless it was Kane’s behavior afterward.

  The anger faded at last, once more replaced by pity. The coach rolled on toward Custer, passing majestic stands of sweet-smelling pine. She saw only Kane’s white-streaked hair. Dark, sad eyes. Cruel mouth.

  The civilizing tide of settlers, schools, churches, stores, town councils, and police forces was sweeping westward with great speed. She’d seen that on her three journeys. Soon even freewheeling camps like Deadwood City would disappear, and the men who populated them—the parasitical men who contributed nothing, built nothing—would have no haven except the big city slums. Is that where a Jason Kane would ultimately go?

  And what could a man of his stamp look forward to except having his own life cut short as brutally as he’d ended that of the miner? What did the Bible say? Live by the sword, perish by the sword.

  An almost occult feeling gripped her for a moment. It was as if she knew that the end of Kane’s life had already been ordained.

  She wondered whether he knew it. He struck her as unredeemable. Unworthy of compassion. Yet she couldn’t be completely unforgiving. She hoped he didn’t sense what was waiting for him. A man’s awareness of his own inevitable movement toward a violent death would, in itself, be a destructive force in his life. And worse punishment for his sins than anything a court of law could devise.

  Thank God, Kane only reminded her of Gideon in a superficial way. It would have been unbearable for someone as humane as Gideon to have a doomed brute like that for a brother.

  CHAPTER IX

  House of Anger

  i

  IN NEW YORK, that spring began as a particularly exciting one for Gideon. There was an important family celebration to anticipate—Eleanor’s birthday on May thirty-first. He could also look forward to being with Julia again; sometime during May, she was due back from her western tour.

  And beyond those personal considerations lay a public one. It was the spring of the Centennial.

  Despite the gloom generated by recent events, the nation’s one hundredth birthday seemed to infuse the country with a new sense of pride and confidence. Virtually every citizen who could afford it planned to attend the great Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. President Grant was scheduled to open the exhibition on the tenth of May.

  In Gideon’s view, enthusiasm over the exhibition, and over the celebration itself, would help to offset the widespread disillusionment which had been chiefly caused by those in and around the Federal government. If many of the nation’s leaders had failed to live up to the standards of honorable conduct envisioned by the founding fathers—and they had—at least the standards themselves had survived; that was one encouraging message of the Centennial.

  Grant s aura of heroism had failed to carry him successfully through two terms. The man himself remained relatively untainted by the assorted disasters and scandals of the past seven years. But his once-lauded talent for administration, and for selection of first-rate subordinates, had been proved a myth. His powers of judgment had been found wanting again and again.

  The attempted ’69 gold corner and the Credit Mobilier scandal of ’72 had been followed by the Whiskey Ring revelations of ’75. Two hundred and thirty-eight people—distillers and bureaucrats including Grant’s own personal secretary, General Orville Babcock—had been indicted on charges of conspiring to defraud the government of alcohol tax revenues.

  The current year had brought another bombshell—the discovery that Secretary of War Belknap had been taking bribes in return for awarding trading post franchises in the Indian Territory. Belknap had been impeached in the House on the second of March and had resigned on the same day to avoid trial in the Senate.

  All in all, the President’s tenure had been marked by unprecedented corruption. Gideon suspected the former general might be enshrined, if that was the word, as the worst chief executive to date, even though few ever claimed he was personally responsible for anything but his own blindness to the cupidity around him.

  Gideon believed Americans wanted to celebrate the Centennial, not only as an antidote for the corruption in Washington, but for the country’s continuing economic woes. The panic of ’73 touched off by the collapse of Cooke’s had spread into the worst depression in American history. People who had managed to hold on to their jobs had now returned to a reasonably good standard of living. But at least a million men were still unemployed. And millions more existed on starvation wages as employers ruthlessly cut costs to keep the doors of factories and offices open. Only on the farms was there any prosperity.

  In the cities, hard times had revealed—and swollen—a dark, diseased underbelly of society. Month after month, thievery and murder increased in every major population center as unemployed men resorted to crime to keep their families from starving. The slums grew increasingly restive.

  They were spawning a new and vicious phenomenon—gangs of adolescent criminals who roamed at night, searching for victims to rob or terrorize. New York’s worst youth gangs were the Forty Little Thieves and the Baxter Street Dudes.

  In the open country between the overcrowded cities, unemployed men roamed the roads in search of work at any wage. Those who lived in remote areas locked their doors after dark, for like their urban cousins, rural dwellers saw a potential danger in the tramps, as the wandering workers had been christened.

  What bothered Gideon most, perhaps, was the havoc the depression had caused in the labor movement. All the trade and craft unions together barely had fifty thousand members left. Competition for a shrinking supply of jobs had destroyed union solidarity and, very nearly, the movement itself.

  Protectionist organizations such as the Knights of St. Crispin had been swept away. So had all attempts to improve the relationship between owners and workers. There had been a notable one in ’74. Mark Hanna, an enlightened owner of a bituminous coal mine out in Ohio, had realized it was far more productive to sit down and struggle for an agreement with his workers than to refuse to negotiate, and thereby pave the way for strikes, violence and shutdowns that produced neither coal nor pay envelopes. Hanna had persuaded his fellow mine owners in the Tuscarawas Valley to join him at the conference table. But the negotiations had taken a turn he didn’t expect. The other owners voted to reduce the miners’ pay. And that was the end of a brilliant idea.

  The union movement had received another devastating blow because of the Molly Maguires. The secret, pro-labor society operated in the Pennsylvania anthracite regions. It was supposedly an offshoot of Ireland’s Ancient Order of Hibernians, the organization which had fought so hard against the British landlords. In Pennsylvania, the Mollies had been accused of everything from beating up mine owners to dynamiting the mines themselves. No one was ever sure how many acts of terror members of the Mollies were responsible for, but the society’s reputation loomed larger than the facts. People everywhere shuddered when they spoke of the “murderous Molly Maguires.” After a turbulent strike in late ’74, the Pennsylvania mine owners decided the Mollies had to be rooted out and destroyed.

  The instrument was at hand in the form of a private agency run by Allan Pinkerton. Its purpose was to provide “industrial protection” for businessmen. The term was really a code for organized spying and anti-union terrorism, with Pinkerton supplying the thugs and undercover operatives. He selected his best agent, an Irish Catholic named James McParlan, to go into the coal fields under an assumed name and infiltrate the Mollies.

  On McParlan’s evidence, twenty-four alleged Mollies had been arrested and indicted. The Union reporter who covered the trial was no partisan of the labor movement. But even he said McParlan’s testimony linking the defendants to acts of terrorism and, at the same time, to the secret society was flimsy and unsupported.

  That didn’t prevent guilty verdicts—or the hanging of ten of the defendants. There was serious doubt that
all of them were guilty, but even if they were, they’d been convicted on slim evidence. Such cavalier justice enraged Gideon, and he said so in an editorial.

  The editorial was clearly counter to the mood of the times, however. The night after the piece ran, the Union’s, office was stoned. And a couple of days later, at one of the clubs to which Gideon belonged, he bumped into Charles Dana of the Sun. Dana was just going in to dinner with two other members. He paused long enough to say gruffly, “Read your editorial on the Mollies. Fine prose but a false premise. Dynamite throwers don’t really deserve justice, do they? Reading what you wrote, a person might suppose you’d sold your stock in your paper and joined the anarchists.”

  The implication that Gideon was a traitor to the class of men who owned newspapers stung and depressed him for days afterward.

  Yes, the last few years had indeed been troubled and disillusioning. Yet as Gideon examined America’s past and speculated about its future, he saw many bright aspects, not the least of which was the essential honesty, decency and common sense he found in most ordinary citizens.

  Again and again, he wished he could also find some tangible way to express his positive feelings about America. His faith in the worth of the principles on which it was founded; his belief in the goodness of most of its people; his confidence in its future despite the turmoil of the immediate past.

  He wrote a Centennial editorial on the subject, but it wasn’t one of his better efforts, and it didn’t satisfy his craving. He asked Payne for ideas, but since Payne didn’t know precisely what he was after, the editor could be of little help.

  Well, Gideon didn’t know what he was after either—except that he wanted a way to make a positive and personal statement about his homeland. Good ideas about how to do it continued to elude him as the spring wore on.

  ii

  By age thirty-three, Gideon had acquired a few gray hairs at each temple and a reputation as one of the rising talents on Park Row. As the encounter with Dana had shown, his fellow owners disapproved of his loyalty to the labor movement. But no one denied that Theophilus Payne had taught him the trade, and done it well.

  Working in tandem with Payne, Gideon had slowly begun to exert a stronger and more personal influence over the Union. When asked whether his paper supported the Republicans or the Democrats, he liked to answer, “Sometimes one, sometimes the other, but we always support those who have nobody else to support them.” Daphnis Miller and Sime Strelnik were usually in his mind when he made the remark.

  The Union’s masthead now showed him to be the publisher, and he occupied a cubicle next to Payne’s. He supervised newsroom policy, watched over the paper’s financial condition, wrote editorials and from time to time traveled out of town to cover a key story and, not coincidentally, meet Julia.

  During the past year, he and Payne had begun experimenting with the paper’s makeup. They had tried expanding the headline area of important stories to two or even three columns. That wouldn’t have been possible in the days when the actual type went on the press in a curved form. Then, the individual columns had to be held in place by vertical rules. But stereotyping, a process borrowed from the book industry, replaced the form with a solid metal plate that reproduced the type exactly. With the vertical rules gone, stories could be expanded beyond one column just as advertisements had been.

  Illustration was becoming more important on daily papers. The Union began to run two or three pictures a week, each drawn by the staff news artist. To supervise production of the pictures Gideon hired a Frenchman who had experience with the zincograph process perfected in Paris in the late fifties. Line cuts, acid-etched on metal, were much faster to prepare than the older wood engravings, which had to be laboriously hand carved. Woodcuts remained better suited to the illustrated weeklies, which had longer deadlines.

  In the matter of news policy, Gideon had a reputation for being much more of a radical than he actually was. Despite tiresome jokes about the name of the paper, he hadn’t turned it into a labor sheet. Certainly his sympathies still lay with the movement. But guided by Payne, he had begun to see that all causes, from the eight-hour day to female suffrage to matters of political partisanship, had to be subordinated to a newspaper’s one supreme cause—the pursuit of truth.

  Of course he retained a certain inevitable interest in railroads, and a bias against railroad owners, perhaps the most powerful class of industrialists in the country. He hadn’t seen Thomas Courtleigh since 1871, and had long since stopped worrying about the man’s threats. He wasn’t even sure the harassment of late ’71 could be laid at Courtleigh’s door; there had been no repeat incidents.

  Gideon continued to live in the mansion at Sixty-first and Fifth Avenue only because his children lived there. Will was now a stocky, brown-haired and rather phlegmatic boy of seven. He struck Gideon as timid, unwilling to try anything new for fear he’d upset his mother, with whom he spent most of his time. On Sundays, Gideon took his son on jaunts into the country or down to the piers. But a father was no substitute for an older brother with whom a boy could exchange confidences, and Gideon knew it.

  Eleanor was his pride. She would be fourteen on her birthday. Her figure was filling out, and many people mistook her for a girl of eighteen or nineteen. She was enrolled in Miss Holsham’s Academy for Young Ladies, Margaret’s insisted-upon alternative to a public school, but she despised it.

  Further, she had taken a fancy to things theatrical. She’d been in a playhouse only once, four years before. Gideon had taken her. From that time on, Margaret had raised objections about the godlessness of the theater—another of the peculiar ideals generated by her drinking.

  To keep peace, Gideon bowed to her wishes and never again invited his daughter to a play. But there continued to be friction on the subject. Eleanor’s slightest reference to it would send Margaret into a tirade. Her daughter would have nothing to do with the theater! She’d better resign herself to accepting the traditional role of wife and mother! She was to prepare for it by enrolling in Vassar Female College in Poughkeepsie at the proper time. Eleanor stated just as firmly that she would not. There the impasse rested.

  Gideon’s reaction to Eleanor’s interest was ambiguous. He was not particularly scandalized by the Bohemianism of actors and actresses—but he did not want a child of his, especially a daughter, drawn into that kind of life. Once when he tried to express his confusion to Theo Payne, the editor laughed and, said he understood perfectly.

  “Men worry about daughters more than they worry about sons. It’s the nature of the creature, I think. Being father to a growing girl, and wondering what sly seducer lurks in your parlor, turns any man into a conservative. I speak from experience thrice over.”

  So while Gideon never would have denied Eleanor permission to attend a matinee if Margaret had agreed, something in him feared her developing a passion for plays.

  Gideon and Margaret hadn’t slept in the same bedroom, or done more than touch in a perfunctory way, for nearly five years. Lately he’d even started to think Will and Eleanor were growing less fond of him. Less demonstrative. He wondered whether Margaret had a hand in that.

  Sometimes he considered his suspicions despicable as well as far-fetched. At other times he didn’t. His wife hardly resembled the girl he’d courted and wed in Richmond. She had put on thirty pounds, seldom wore anything except the plainest of dresses, left the house only when absolutely necessary, had no friends, and—most annoying of all—refused to keep her hair neat. He didn’t exactly know why that outraged him, but it did. Perhaps it was because it called attention to her slatternly state.

  Repeatedly, he had urged her to see their physician and ask him to help cure the drinking that had now become an integral part of her life—and her means of flight from its problems. Repeatedly, Margaret denied she drank to excess, though she could no longer claim she didn’t drink at all. Her erratic step, slurred speech, and occasional outbursts of bizarre thinking were evident to all those in the househol
d. Even the children.

  Gideon continued to feel responsible for her state. Sometimes he wished he could give in to her demands. Could leave the Union and become a business dilettante, uninvolved and unconcerned about the world. It was what she wanted as proof that she was the dominant partner. It was the one thing he could not give.

  He didn’t know whether she suspected his liaison with Julia. He did his utmost to keep it secret. He no longer loved Margaret, but he couldn’t bring himself to hurt her intentionally. She needed no one’s help in order to suffer, he often thought sadly.

  But he saw Julia as frequently as possible.

  In April of that year a new and disturbing element intruded into Gideon and Margaret’s relationship. It first manifested itself one evening at dinner. He was home, seated under the gaslights at one end of their enormously long dining room table. Margaret was at the other end. Spring rain tapped the windows overlooking Sixty-first Street, to their right. In a few minutes Gideon planned to drive back to the paper and finish an editorial objecting to the government’s de facto theft of the Indian treaty lands in the Dakota Territory.

  He sipped at the hearty red Bordeaux which Matt ordered for him, and shipped from London in case lots. Matt’s paintings of American life, done from memory, were finding their way into an increasing number of prestigious exhibitions and private collections. He’d shown canvases at the last three Paris Salons, and had submitted another for the collection of American art to be displayed at the Philadelphia exposition. The painting—his largest yet—had been accepted.

  Matt’s wretchedly spelled letters referred to a procession of mistresses in London, and only rarely to Dolly. She was apparently prospering as a teacher in India, and continued to bear the responsibility for raising their son Tom.