Shawn touched his hat. “I’ll heed your advice, ma’am,” he said.
After the woman was gone, Shawn glared at Sedley and snorted, “Laundry list!”
“Well, you can bully Burt Becker all you want, but lay off the Chinese folks who do my shirts,” Sedley said.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“You look like you’ve just been hit by a runaway freight train,” Sheriff Jeremiah Purdy said.
“You should see the other guy,” Shawn O’Brien said.
“I did. He’s in bad shape.”
“Becker called it, Sheriff,” Shawn said.
“Yes, I know.”
“I’ve got a question to ask,” Shawn said.
“Ask it,” Purdy said. He looked uncomfortable.
“Who is Jane Collins?”
“If you ask that question, you know who she is.”
“You and she were walking out together.”
“We were . . . are . . . engaged to be married.”
“Where is she?”
Purdy tried to find a way out, but found none. “I don’t know,” the young sheriff said.
“Burt Becker has her. Isn’t that right?”
“No,” Purdy said. Then, after a moment he hung his head and said, “Yes. Becker has her . . . somewhere.”
“And that’s how he keeps you in line?” Shawn said.
“If anything happens to Becker, anything at all, my fault, somebody else’s fault, Jane dies.”
“Where is she?”
“I don’t know. If I knew where she was I’d go after her.”
“Would you?”
“Of course I would. I’m a man, not a boy.”
“Purdy, in my opinion you don’t stack up to being any kind of a man. I reckon all you do is sit in that chair and plan your future political career. Well I have news for you. Our country doesn’t need leaders like you. We have enough of your kind already.”
That last struck a nerve. The young man slammed to his feet, anger staining his cheekbones. “Damn you, O’Brien, Jane is my fiancée and the woman I love,” he said. He shoved his glasses higher on his nose. “I’d die for her if that’s what it took to free her.”
“Where is she?” This from Hamp Sedley who was eyeing the sheriff with little enthusiasm.
“I told you, I don’t know.”
“Then get up off your ass and go look for her,” Sedley said. He glanced at the .32 on Purdy’s desk. “And take along a bigger gun.”
Purdy sat again. He was no longer mad.
“I have looked for her, all over the country and around town. Jane is nowhere to be found.”
“Did you search the Chinese encampment?” Shawn said.
“Yes, I did. She wasn’t there, either.”
Sedley was not a man to mince words. “Maybe she’s dead already,” he said.
Purdy nodded, his face bleak. “I’ve faced that possibility. If Jane is dead, Burt Becker won’t leave Broken Bridle alive.”
“You’ll need a bigger gun,” Sedley said.
“It’s not the caliber of the gun that counts, Mr. Sedley, it’s the caliber of the man using it,” Purdy said.
Shawn and Sedley exchanged glances but left their thoughts unspoken.
“I promised to give you the help you needed, Purdy, and I’ll live up to that promise,” Shawn said. “Hamp and I will scout around town and hunt for your girl.”
“If we find her we’ll tell you and you can rescue her,” Sedley said. “Be her knight in shining armor, like.”
“Hamp, let him be,” Shawn said. “He’s got things to think about.”
Sedley raised his voice. “Think about! Why—”
The door slammed open and a man poked his head inside. “Sheriff, it just happened! A man rode through the Chinese camp and killed two men and wounded a woman.”
“A white man?” Purdy said, rising from his chair.
“As you and me,” the messenger said.
“Mind if we tag along, Purdy?” Shawn said.
“Suit yourself,” the sheriff said.
He grabbed his pouched revolver and shoved it into his pocket.
The railroad companies, constantly losing skilled men to the gold camps, had in 1866 desperately recruited Chinese laborers to lay their tracks. To everybody’s surprise the Chinese turned out to be excellent workers, swinging picks and shovels with a strength that belied their slender frames. The Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri Valley Railroad had recruited their Chinese labor from San Francisco and Sacramento, then directly from China.
Now, fueled by alcohol and opium, the Orientals felt that the company had abandoned them, and the tent city was a volatile mix of resentment, poverty, restlessness, and suppressed rage.
All this had gone mostly unnoticed by the white community of Broken Bridle, but as sheriff, Jeremiah Purdy was better informed and more aware of the seething cauldron that was Chinatown.
When Purdy arrived he was met by an angry mob that formed a wall of men, women, and children around the small bodies of the murdered men. There was no sign of the wounded woman.
A mob is a many-headed, savage beast, and when the yelled threats and hoarse cries for revenge die away to a low threatening growl a peace officer knows he’s in big trouble.
And Jeremiah Purdy knew it now.
The young sheriff then did something that surprised Shawn O’Brien.
He pulled the .32 from his pocket and fired a shot into the air.
It was a calculated risk, but it paid off. The crowd quieted, seemingly stunned.
Purdy knew no Chinese but in English he yelled, “Somebody talk to me!”
A tiny, wrinkled old woman stepped forward. She wore an oversized coolie hat that made her look like an overripe mushroom. “What do you wish us to say?” she asked. Her voice was fragile, her accent decidedly English, the result of a missionary school.
“Can anyone describe the men who did this?” Purdy said.
The old woman turned to the crowd, a sea of angry faces.
She spoke in rapid Chinese that to the Western ears of Shawn and the others sounded like the discordant twanging of an out-of-tune banjo.
A man replied, drawing pictures in the air with his hands.
When the man finished—and spit at Purdy’s feet the period at the end of his last sentence—the old woman said, “There was only one murderer, a big man on a brown horse. He was a white man.”
“Taimu,” Shawn said, using the Chinese honorific for Grandmother, “where did the white man go?”
“That I saw myself,” the woman said. She pointed northeast, in the direction of the Rattlesnake Hills.
Purdy shoved his revolver back into his pocket and said, “Tell your people I will find the murderer and bring him to justice.”
A man, tall and broad for a Chinese, stepped forward. He carried a heavy spike maul, a knife in his waistband, and a chip on his shoulder.
“You will bring him here to face our justice,” the man said. He wore a battered plug hat and his English was perfect.
“No. Whoever this murderer is, he’ll be treated according to the law of the United States,” Purdy said.
The big man grasped the twelve-pound maul tighter and took a step forward. Then another.
Shawn O’Brien tensed. The Chinese had gotten himself within swinging distance, and the spike maul could crush Purdy’s skull like an eggshell.
“You will bring him to us,” the man said. He pointed to the two dead men. “Chinese blood is on his hands and the right of vengeance is ours, not yours.”
Behind him, the mob growled its approval.
Things were getting out of hand fast, but Purdy seemed oblivious.
“If he is found guilty, you will see him hang,” he said. “I promise you.”
Sedley, looking uneasy, whispered to the back of Purdy’s head, “Hell, boy, you ain’t one for backing up, are you?”
The big Chinese man’s face was a mask of fury. Using a very fast motion he readied the hammer for a swing
.
Shawn didn’t think. He reacted. He drew and fired...
Not at the man, but at the steel head of the spike maul.
Bullets are mighty capricious, but the big .45 behaved better than Shawn had dared to hope. The lead spaaanged! off the maul, turned almost at a right angle, and hit the brim of the big Chinese man’s plug hat. The hat, spinning, was blown off his head, spiraled a couple of feet into the air, and then, like a stricken bird, fell to the dirt.
“The next one goes right between your eyes, Chinaman,” Shawn said.
It was an empty threat, a desperate, box seat play when he could think of no other. Shawn knew if he killed the Chinese, in its present mood the mob would tear him apart.
But it had been an incredibly lucky shot and it took the fight out of the big Oriental. He stepped back and examined the head of the maul with wide eyes, a thin trickle of blood running from his hairline.
Purdy seized the moment.
He told the old woman to translate for him, then said, “I promise that after I bring in the murderer, we will talk again.”
It was a risky throw of the dice and for a moment the situation hung in the balance, the crowd drawn tight. But it was a bad time for Dave Grambling, the restaurant owner, to show up with half a dozen of his heavily armed vigilantes.
Beside him, Shawn heard Sedley whisper, “Get ready. The ball is about to open.”
“We’re right behind you, Sheriff,” Grambling said. “Just say the word.”
Then, an instant later, he heard the flat statement of Grambling’s shotgun hammers clicking to full cock, a sound that stirred the nervous crowd as though a rattlesnake had been cast among them.
“No! I don’t want that!” Purdy yelled, swinging around to confront the man. But he was a split second too late.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Dave Grambling was a man of volatile temperament and deep prejudices, and he had a tendency to violence. He triggered his shotgun at random into the crowd. Two Chinese men fell.
Cursing, Grambling threw his Greener aside and pulled his Colt.
“Pour it into them, boys!” he yelled.
The vigilantes opened up with rifles and revolvers, and two more men and the old woman who’d translated for Purdy went down.
Then the Chinese closed, wielding axes, cleavers, clubs, and knives, screaming war cries that no one understood but them.
Shawn O’Brien watched the group of vigilantes, half of them veterans of the war, stand like a rock until a wave of humanity crashed over them.
Halos of blood erupted above the vigilantes as meat cleavers and axes thudded into bone and flesh.
Above the shrieks of men dying in pain amid clouds of kicked-up dust, Shawn shouted at Hamp Sedley to fall back before they were overwhelmed. Guns in their hands, Shawn and Sedley gave ground. So far neither had fired a shot since the attack began. But soon that had to change.
A section of the mob had noticed the retreat of the two white men.
Screaming, brandishing their bloody weapons, at least two dozen men and a few young women descended on Shawn and Sedley.
“Oh my God,” Shawn yelled. “Not this!”
But suddenly he was in a fight for his life and rational thought gave way to the instinct for survival.
The Colt in Shawn’s fist hammered dry. Beside him Sedley fired steadily, his face grim as he beheld the slaughter he and Shawn were inflicting on the Chinese.
Unable to stand against such sustained fire, the survivors broke and ran. Seven bodies lay sprawled on the ground, one of them a young woman.
“What have we done?” Sedley said, his face anguished.
Shawn made no answer. He watched Dave Grambling. Instead of making a run for it, the big man stood firm and tried to reload his revolver. He never made it.
Grambling was engulfed by Chinese and, kicking and screaming, dragged away.
Then suddenly it was all over. The mob, out for blood, followed after Grambling. His end would not be quick or painless.
Shawn reloaded his Colt and shoved it back in the holster.
White and Chinese bodies littered the ground, and two of the dead vigilantes had been beheaded. Close by, Jeremiah Purdy, on his hands and knees, spat blood into the dirt.
Somewhere in town a frightened dog barked endlessly.
Shawn O’Brien stepped to Purdy and took a knee beside him.
He put his hand on the young man’s back and said, “How badly are you hurt?”
Purdy turned his head, revealing a bloody mouth.
“Took an elbow from somebody,” he said. “That’s all I remember.” Then, “Help me to my feet, O’Brien.”
After the sheriff stood, he looked around him. He’d managed to keep his glasses, and behind the thick lenses his eyes were wide, unbelieving, shocked by the carnage that had taken place.
Now it was a time for widows.
Wailing, sobbing women, both white and Oriental, moved among the dead or lay prostrate in grief beside the bodies of husbands and sons.
One new widow, young, blond, and barely out of childhood, cradled her husband’s decapitated head in her lap. She made no sound, already in a midnight place from where she would never return.
Worse, or some might say better, was to come.
Dim drums in the distant Rattlesnake Hills pounded into the dying day, adding to the tension and fear in Broken Bridle. But the drumming took the knife-edge off Dave Grambling’s agonized shrieks, though his cries were still raw and primal, the screams of a man dying a hundred small deaths.
Hamp Sedley, a man not easily shaken, looked at Shawn with frantic eyes. “We can’t let that happen to a white man,” he said. “Let’s go get him.”
“No,” Shawn said. “We’d have to go in with guns and there’s been enough killing in this town already.”
“What about you, sonny?” Sedley said to Purdy. The gambler’s anger and frustration showed.
“Grambling brought this down on himself,” the sheriff said. “There’s nothing we can do for him now except pray that he dies soon.”
“Well, be damned to both of you for cowards,” Sedley said. “I’m going after him.”
Purdy’s little revolver came out of his pocket with admirable speed.
“Mr. Sedley, if I have to I’ll put a bullet in your brainpan right here and now,” he said. “I will have no more Chinese killed or white men, either.”
A crowd gathered around the three men, watching.
Sedley stared hard at Purdy. “Damn you, you mean it,” he said.
“Don’t try me, Mr. Sedley,” the sheriff said. The Smith & Wesson was rock steady in his hand.
And for the first time Shawn O’Brien realized that a fighting man with bark on him lurked under the callow boy.
Distant drums . . . screams . . . a barking dog . . . the widow wails of women . . .
These sounds seemed to penetrate Sedley’s fevered brain.
He blinked and his hand dropped from his holstered Colt. “I need a drink,” he said. “I need a lot of drinks.”
Then he turned and walked away.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Dr. Thomas Clouston was livid, in a killing rage. His plan to goad the Chinese into revolt and destroy Broken Bridle had failed miserably.
The town still stood, a thorn in his side, and no doubt the lowlife Burt Becker was well and plotting more mischief.
But then, he hadn’t met his straw men yet. Despite his anger, a smile touched Clouston’s lips. Lord, how he’d like to be there and see Becker’s reaction. It would be exquisite.
He turned his attention back to business.
“Tell me again,” he said. “I want all the details. Don’t go crazy on me.”
The man he addressed was a malodorous, scar-faced brute who went by the name of Nate Tryon. He had a reputation as a killer and that was why Clouston had chosen him for the task of inciting the Orientals.
But the man had bungled, the damned fool.
“I done what
you asked,” Tryon said. “Damn it all, I done everything you asked.”
“You’re surly, Nate,” Clouston said. “I can’t abide surly. I saw enough of surly among the stinking, insane paupers who hung around the gates of my clinic.”
“Sorry, boss,” Tryon said.
“Tell me again.”
“I rode through them like you tole me, guns a-blazing an’ a whooping an’ a hollering like a demon. You recollect that you tole me to make like a demon.”
“How many did you kill?”
“Oh, five, six, maybe.” Tryon grinned. “One of them was a woman.”
“The gender of the dead is unimportant,” Clouston said. “The woman you killed was probably insane, led astray by all that Confucian nonsense. After the raid you promptly rode out of town. Am I correct?”
“I sure did. And then I took up a position on a hill like you tole me. I could see the whole damn burg through that there spyglass you gave me.”
“And you saw, exactly what?”
“I seen the Chinese charge at a bunch of white men who came to see what had happened. Then all kinds of shootin’ started, and by and by the Chinese all ran away, leaving their dead on the ground.”
“How many white men went down?”
“I don’t rightly know, boss. Things was real confused down there in town, folks shootin’ an’ runnin’ an’ raisin’ dust an’ all.”
Clouston was silent for a while. He sat in what he called, with bourgeois primness, his parlor. He smoked his S-shaped pipe and his battle-ax lay at his feet, hidden by the blanket that covered his knees.
“You made no effort to return and infiltrate the Chinese mob and tell them that they must take terrible vengeance on the town?”
“Boss, you’re joking, right?” Tryon said. “They would have recognized me straight off an’ pulled me off my hoss and done fer me right there and then.”
“I never joke. I never speak in jest.”
“But you know they would have recognized me. Hell, I’d just rode through them, killing.”
“You could have changed your appearance, taken off your coat and hat perhaps. The Chinese would have been too agitated to notice.”
“But they’d have sure recognized that snowcap Palouse hoss of mine and this”—he traced a forefinger down the terrible scar that ran from the corner of his left eye to his mouth—“is a dead giveaway.”
Shawn O'Brien Manslaughter Page 9