Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West
Page 17
On behalf of the healthy and harmonious teeth of Box Elder, I opened up the petty cash box and paid Doc Christmas his three dollars.
WILL SATTERLEE
It took R.W. and Artemas Jones half a day to gather up all the spilled types and quadrats, repair the damaged trays and frames and forms, sweep out the debris, and put the office back into a semblance of working order. Fortunately Jada Kinch had not had time to damage the Albion press.
While they were thus engaged, I stayed home and wrote furiously—long accounts of the vandalism, emphasizing the fact that Kinch had been acting on Colonel Greathouse’s orders; the near-devastating fire set by Rufus Cable and his motive in doing so; and the parts Artemas Jones had played in bringing the miscreants in both cases to justice. I also rewrote my editorial to reflect these recent events. Whether or not the Colonel went to prison, his true colors had been revealed beyond any doubt and he would no longer be a powerful force in the basin. And whether or not Cable confessed to the theft of the Kendall money—Seth and I both thought he would eventually—his actions last night clearly established his guilt, thus restoring Jim Tarbeaux’s good name and leaving Jim free to marry Mary Beth no matter what her father or anyone else thought of the union.
As soon as I finished the copy, I took it to the Banner office. Jones and R.W. were almost done with their cleanup. I gave the copy to Artemas, who immediately took up his typestick and setting rule and went to work at his usual astonishing speed.
There had been so much eventful news since last week’s issue that for the first time since my purchase of the Banner seven years ago, this week’s special issue would run to six pages. The front page had to be completely remade, of course; Elrod’s Patch’s demise was no longer of primary importance. I decided that the fire and its aftermath should be the lead story, under full four-column banner and subheads, with the assault on our shop as the secondary lead. Together, the stories would take up the entire front page, with continuation on page two. That page and all except what would now be page six needed to be remade as well, and the two additional pages added. My account of Doc Christmas’s self-defense shooting of Patch, as it turned out, was relegated to page three.
When Jones finished setting the two lead stories, he said somewhat ruefully, “You sure did give me a lot of ink, Mr. Satterlee, much more than I deserve.”
“Not to my way of thinking. If it hadn’t been for you, Kinch would surely have created even more havoc here, perhaps irreparably broken the press, and Jim Tarbeaux would be in jail instead of Rufus Cable.”
R.W. chimed in, “Now we know firsthand how you earned your nickname, Artemas.”
“Earned it? Blind luck, if you ask me.”
The three of us worked tirelessly the rest of that day and half the next. It was necessary for me to somewhat alter my account of the criminal trespass—which I did with great satisfaction—when Seth Jennison delivered word that Colonel Greathouse had been arrested by the county sheriff on a charge of suborning the wanton destruction of private property. The press run was our largest ever, three hundred copies instead of the usual two hundred.
Well-wishers interrupted us now and then, and more came around to shake Jones’s hand and pat him on the back. He seemed embarrassed by all the attention. I judged it was because he was a private man who shunned the limelight, and that he was uncomfortable in a hero’s role. “Give-a-Damn” was certainly an appropriate moniker, as R.W. had stated, but it was my impression that Jones considered it less a badge of honor, as most men would have, than a cross he was forced to bear.
This was borne out the day after the Banner’s special issue appeared. Upon closing the office the night before I had paid Jones his week’s wages, including a bonus of twenty-five dollars which he accepted gratefully and without reluctance. I learned later that he spent most of it that night, playing stud poker at the Free and Easy saloon, and in Tillie Johnson’s parlor house—activities which under normal circumstances I do not approve of. Profligacy was not the reason he failed to show up at the Banner office in the morning, however. Sometime in the dawn hours he had packed his bindle and departed on a Great Northern freight for parts unknown.
He said nothing to me, nor to R.W. to the boy’s chagrin, about moving on. He was not a man for good-byes, any more than a man for praise or conceit or sentiment. There one day, gone the next. True to himself, his calling, his pleasures, and his principles in every way.
I had known that he would leave soon, but I was sorry he was gone. Tramp printers are a dime a dozen, and none before had left me with a feeling of regret when they departed. But Give-a-Damn Jones was no ordinary itinerant typesetter, and I—and R.W. and not a few others in Box Elder—would not soon forget him.
ON THE ROAD
OWEN HAZARD
It was more than a year and a half before my path crossed Give-a-Damn Jones’s again. That happy occasion took place in Dubuque, Iowa, a town known for lead mining, lumber mills, and Mississippi River traffic, where I happened to be hand-pegging for the Telegraph. The paper had a deserved reputation as a haven of refuge for itinerant typesetters, none of our breed ever having been refused work in its composing room.
It was said on the road that the citizenry of Dubuque were always ready for fight, frolic, or footrace, and I was finding that to be true. The town was nowhere near as wide open as Butte and some others, but there were plenty of the usual kinds of amusement, plus horse racing at Lake Peosta and prizefighting at Eagle Point on the Wisconsin side of the river. The favorite watering hole of printers was a saloon in Bee Town owned by a gent named Nick Denney, whose brother was in the trade. All you had to do to get a drink there was lay a printer’s rule on the bar. I was in Nick’s place one evening, playing euchre and drinking beer, when Jones walked in.
Well, he was sure a sight for sore eyes. I’d heard plenty about him since we’d parted company in Butte—a legend on the road growing grander all the time, that was Give-a-Damn Jones. Still attracting trouble like a dish of honey attracts flies and doing his good deeds everywhere he went, big city and small town. According to the grapevine he’d foiled a bank robbery in Kansas City, shot a card cheat in St. Louis, saved a widow from losing five thousand dollars to a confidence man in Peoria, and had a whole passel of adventures while working on a jim-crow sheet in eastern Montana not long after leaving Butte.
Some of that was surely exaggeration, if not fabrication—no man, not even Jones, could have done all those good turns without a dime novelist such as Ned Buntline finding out about it and writing a book or three about his exploits. But after watching him in action in Butte, the night he’d stopped the drunk from beating up the Chinese prostitute, I had no doubt that some of all that was said about him was true to one degree or another.
He was as glad to see me as I was to see him. He hadn’t changed a bit, far as I could tell, except for a few more lines etched into his craggy face and a touch of gray in his yellow hair. He was looking for work, so I took him over to the Telegraph and introduced him to the composing-room foreman. The foreman had heard of him—hell, who in the printing trade hadn’t?—and handed him a rule on the spot.
Jones and me took up where we’d left off a year and half ago, doing some carousing in Nick’s place, the other saloons, a couple of bordellos, and up at Lake Peosta. Naturally we traded yarns about our days on the road since we’d last seen each other, but he was still reticent about discussing his penchant—he called it his “curse”—for trouble. I was too curious about the latest batch of rumors to let ’em be for long—especially the one about his experiences in that eastern Montana town, Box Elder. So one night in Nick’s, after we’d both downed half a dozen glasses of applejack, a tipple I’d learned to like and Jones found just as palatable and that has a way of loosening tongues, I brought up the subject kind of roundabout.
“Tell me, Artemas, you win any more horses in poker games?”
“Hell, no. I’ll never place another bet when there’s anything but money in the pot. I’
m all through with horses.”
“Heard you rode the one you won in Butte to a town called Box Elder and got mixed up in all sorts of wild doings there.”
He scowled at me over the rim of his glass. “Just what exactly did you hear?”
“That you did so much for the folks there they all but put up a statue in your honor. Captured an arsonist, saved their newspaper office from being torn apart, brained the town bully and then maybe had a hand in him getting shot in self-defense, and cleared an ex-con’s reputation so he could marry his sweetheart.”
Give-a-Damn’s scowl got even darker. “Didn’t I tell you once not to believe everything you hear about me, that most of it’s sheep dip?”
“Not all that happened in Box Elder, though.”
“No? What makes you think not?”
“Pop Cowan—you remember him—he showed me part of a special issue of the Box Elder Banner he got somewhere that told all about it. Your name might as well have been writ in boldface.”
“Listen here, Owen. A traveling dentist named Doc Christmas shot the bully in self-defense, just like it said he did. I wasn’t anywhere near, didn’t have a thing to do with it.”
“What about the rest?”
“Exaggeration, plain and simple. Paper’s owner, Will Satterlee, was prone to writing with a pen dipped in hyperbolic ink.”
“That doesn’t answer my question,” I said. “Did you brain that bully with a beer glass before he got killed, saving the life of a farm boy the bully was about to break in two?”
Give-a-Damn snorted. “Big oaf swung an arm at me while the two of them were fighting, I swung back. That’s all there was to it.”
“Capture an arsonist that set fire to half the town?”
“No. And it wasn’t half the town that burned, it was four buildings.”
“Save the newspaper office from being destroyed?”
“No again. It was mostly torn up by the time I got there, and Satterlee’s son and I were lucky not to’ve got shot by the fool that did the damage.”
“Clear the ex-con’s reputation so he could marry his sweetheart?”
“Didn’t happen. I only met him once, and never laid eyes on the woman.”
“Well, then. So you weren’t a hero in Box Elder after all.”
“Hah.”
“Didn’t keep finding yourself in the right place at the right time?”
“Wrong place at the wrong time. And no, I wasn’t any hero. I’d give a year’s pay never to be called one again.”
“What about the time you were working in Kansas City? Word is you foiled a bank robbery there.”
“Sheep dip!” Give-a-Damn said, and hollered to Nick for another round of applejack.
BOOKS BY BILL PRONZINI
THE NAMELESS DETECTIVE NOVELS
Endgame
Zigzag (collection)
Vixen
Strangers
Nemesis
Hellbox
Camouflage
Betrayers
Schemers
Fever
Savages
Mourners
Nightcrawlers
Scenarios (collection)
Spook
Bleeders
Crazy Bone
Boobytrap
Illusions
Sentinels
Spadework (collection)
Hardcase
Demons
Epitaphs
Quarry
Breakdown
Jackpot
Shackles
Deadfall
Bones
Double (with Marcia Muller)
Nightshades
Quicksilver
Case File (collection)
Bindlestiff
Dragonfire
Scattershot
Hoodwink
Labyrinth
Twospot (with Collin Wilcox)
Blowback
Undercurrent
The Vanished
The Snatch
CARPENTER AND QUINCANNON MYSTERIES
By Marcia Muller and Bill Pronzini
The Bughouse Affair
The Spook Lights Affair
The Body Snatchers Affair
The Plague of Thieves Affair
The Dangerous Ladies Affair
By Bill Pronzini
The Bags of Tricks Affair
STAND-ALONE NOVELS
Give-a-Damn Jones
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
BILL PRONZINI has been nominated for, or won, every prize offered to crime fiction writers, including the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America. The Detroit Free Press said of him, “It’s always nice to see masters at work. Pronzini’s clear style seamlessly weaves [story lines] together, turning them into a quick, compelling read.” He lives and writes in California, with his wife, crime novelist Marcia Muller. You can sign up for email updates here.
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
GIVE-A-DAMN JONES
Copyright © 2018 by Pronzini-Muller Family Trust
All rights reserved.
Cover art by Michael Koelsch
A Forge Book
Published by Tom Doherty Associates
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First Edition: May 2018
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Butte, Montana
Owen Hazard
Box Elder, Montana
Jada Kinch
R. W. Satterlee
Seth Jennison
Hugo Rheinmiller
Will Satterlee
Rufus Cable
Jim Tarbeaux
Mary Beth Greathouse
Will Satterlee
Ned Foley
R. W. Satterlee
Colonel Elijah Greathouse
Rufus Cable
Will Satterlee
Jada Kinch
Seth Jennison
Jim Tarbeaux
Doc Christmas
Mary Beth Greathouse
Seth Jennison
Rufus Cable
Homer St. John
Elrod Patch
Abner Dillard
R. W. Satterlee
Jim Tarbeaux
Al Yandle
Colonel Elijah Greathouse
Mary Beth Greathouse
Sam Benson
Will Satterlee
Rufus Cable
Homer St. John
Seth Jennison
Jim Tarbeaux
Will Satterlee
Jada Kinch
Doc Christmas
R. W. Satterlee
Jim Tarbeaux
Seth Jennison
Will Satterlee
On the Road
Owen Hazard
Books by Bill Pronzini
About the Author
Copyright
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Bill Pronzini, Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West