by Lou Cameron
Stringer knew better than to ask a member of the Colorado National Guard why anyone who wanted to start or join a mine union had to be an anarchist. He settled for saying, “The Molly Maguire trouble was a mite before my time. But your point’s well taken that a professional sneak tends to behave more sneaky than that surly son of a bitch just acted. I reckon I’ll just have to ask him next time we meet, and it’ll be up to the judge and jury to decide whether the winner was in the right or wrong.”
The corporal said, “Don’t bet on that, MacKail. For openers, the only criminal courts in operation up this way, until further notice, are courts martial. General Bell don’t hold with juries or, come to study on it, any formal proceedings worth mention. Under the rules of martial law, the constitutional requirements of a speedy trial don’t apply. So why bother? You get your ass busted in or about Cripple Creek, Feather Merchant, and you can figure on suffering Durance Vile until the emergency is over, or until General Bell gets good and ready to court martial you or cut you loose, see?”
Stringer grimaced and replied, “I do, now. Remind me not to get myself arrested by you boys as I wend my weary way through this neck of the woods.”
The corporal of the guard smiled pleasantly enough, as he warned Stringer, “I thought I just did, MacKail.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Sunsets were tricky in the Colorado high country. For, while the late afternoon sun had soaring crags to hide its fool self behind, it was still high enough above the true horizon to bestow a long lavender, crimson and burnt orange gloaming as, all up and down the rolling gold fields, mine whistles announced it was time to come to work or go home to supper. Men working the day shift could go years without ever seeing broad daylight. Yet, it was the boys who worked the suppertime to midnight shift who demanded and usually got that extra two to six bits. For unless they were married, and happily at that, they missed a heap of the pleasures Cripple Creek had to offer after dark.
Stringer was regarding some of them with mild interests as he lounged against one end of the bar in the Cousin Jack Saloon. He’d long since booked himself a single at the nearby and now-fireproof Palace Hotel. He’d eaten some chili con carne under fried eggs, followed by coffee and cake, so now all he had to worry about was getting tired enough to turn in, alone.
He knew an overnight or even a weekend stranger in a mining town infested mostly with hard-up males was no place to scout for True Romance and he’d always been just too romantic-natured to pay for it. The two gals dancing on the small but lit-up stage at the far end of the bar made it easier for him to consider a night of celibacy. While the cancan they were canning to a merry but off-key ragtime tune was no doubt meant to inspire the male libido, one of the dancing gals was too skinny, the other was too fat, and both were about as kissable as the north end of a pig headed south. As their dance got dirtier Stringer felt even more depressed and shifted his gaze out the grimy plate glass he stood closer to. He didn’t see anyone out yonder he wanted to kiss any harder, but at least none of the mining men made him taste that recent chili as they strode by with their lunch and toolboxes, some more tired looking than others, but nobody looking downright pissed.
Unlike the coal miners just to the south, around Florence and on down to Trinidad, the hardrock miners of the Cripple Creek area looked about as clean coming up out of the mountains as they had going down into them eight or more hours before. Telluride ore was tough to bust and sharp as busted glass to work with, but the work was still cleaner in a hard rock mine and most hard rock men felt a cut above coal miners, who tended to get killed even more often for even lower wages. None of the gold miners passing by looked fresh as petunias, of course. The temperature rose as the shafts went down and there was no way to sweat that hard without the gray dust sticking some. But he knew they’d look clean enough at the supper table after no more than a quick shower or, hell, a good splashing over the wash basin out back, and what the hell, they were making three times as much as an average ranch hand and few ranch hands would allow a miner worked harder. So Stringer wasn’t too surprised to see the main streets so lightly guarded despite all the roughly-clad mining men striding up or down it at the moment. He had seen troopers, plenty of them, positioned more cleverly than obviously on strategic corners and even sandbagged rooftops as he’d prowled about, some, after his odd run-in just outside the telegraph office. But despite that noncom’s dire remarks about martial law, or even the posters saying much the same thing from many a Cripple Creek wall, neither the workers out yonder nor the other patrons of this particular saloon seemed to notice or care that the town had a heap of Krag rifles and even heavier weapons trained on it.
He’d found it impossible to strike up an interesting conversation about the strike that was supposed to be raging in the gold fields at the moment, either here at the Cousin Jack, or earlier at the chili parlor. Everyone he’d asked had either said his particular mine hadn’t been struck, that he didn’t work in any infernal gold mine, or that it was none of Stringer’s beeswax where he worked or how he might feel about such bullshit. Stringer assumed those old boys likely knew a mite more about the trouble, if there was going to be any trouble. So far, the news tips about blood and slaughter in and about the gold fields hadn’t panned out any more exciting than Jack London’s tip about mad scientists blowing out fuses in the flatter country to the east with semidomesticated lightning bolts. That was the trouble with news tips. There was often little or nothing to them and when there was some basis for the tip it tended to pan out, in the end, that rumors of a dray of watermelons overturning had been based on someone dropping a jar of olives. Poor old Jack and even Vania the Russian agent, bless her overactive ass and imagination, had been led down the garden path by little more than butter-fingered wiring, and the clumsy attempts of drunks or tyros to cover up their mistakes without really knowing what they were supposed to be doing.
The big emergency here in Cripple Creek seemed to be turning out even dumber, inspired by little more than half-ass labor agitation and memories of that earlier, more violent strike. Now that he’d been on the scene for a while, it seemed hardly anyone wanted any part of the radical W.F.M. and, even if half the miners had signed up with the union, the mine owners still seemed to hold all the high cards in the game this time, as they’d had the last. It was small wonder Big Bill Heywood and even the sinister Harry Orchard were forced to do their plotting miles away in Colorado Springs. There was hardly any way to get anywhere near the mining area without military permission, and if the Pinkertons hadn’t furnished the mine owners and military with the names and descriptions of all the important union organisers by now, the Pinkertons hadn’t been earning their usual handsome fee for such activity. After all, the agency had been founded by the same old sneak who’d organized the U.S. Secret Service for Lincoln during a time of far more serious strife.
Stringer was sorely tempted to just chuck it in and head back to Frisco via The Springs, where good old Vania still might like him just as much. The tale of Nikola Tesla inventing a better wireless telegraph system for the Czar Of All The Russians had Sam Barca’s notion of strikers and strike breakers lobbing dynamite at one another beat all hollow. But at the rate things were going, neither lead was going to result in even a Sunday Supplement feature and, hell, he was encouraged to lie like a rug for the Sunday Supplement.
These days, old Jack London hardly wrote for anything else and he sure got a lot of mileage out of warning the white race of the yellow peril and the days to come when wars would be fought in the sky by daredevils in flying machines. Old Jack’s tales of impending doom were a caution. But, meanwhile, an honest newspaperman was supposed to either file the truth or admit he had no infernal story worth printing.
He finished the last of his beer and turned his back on the dirty but ugly cancan dancers. There had to be something more interesting to do, even in Cripple Creek, and he was stuck up here at least until his boss, Sam Barca, agreed with his assessment of the true situation.
He knew what Sam would think of a follow-up in the mysterious winking lights down in Colorado Springs, but he figured he’d at least have a word with that Hotwire Hamilton and, of course, old Vania, as he waited for a train back to less confusing parts.
He’d noticed a Nickelodean catty-corner across from that chili joint he’d stopped by earlier. He hoped they’d have some moving pictures he hadn’t already seen more than once. But here in the wilds of Colorado, he doubted it. Even on Market Street back in Frisco they kept running the same dumb scenes of railroad locomotives rushing right at you, Little Egypt doing her bumps and grinds right at you, or that singularly unattractive couple kissing, over and over, as if any man, even as ugly as he was, could get the least enjoyment out of swapping spit with such a fat and mannish old gal. Stringer had tried to be fair about it, the second time he’d had to sit through it, but in truth the old gal had looked as if she shaved as often as the old bird slobbering at her and he’d been mighty bewildered to learn over the wire service how Anthony Comstock, the moral crusader who’d tried to have the painter of September Mom arrested, had declared that footage a dire threat to the moral fiber of These United States.
He felt sure that was why every Nickelodean in the country kept showing those idiots kissing, as he stepped out into the soft gloaming to head toward the Nickelodean.
He didn’t find out that night whether they were offering The Kiss, Little Egypt, or The Great Train Robbery. For he’d barely left the Cousin Jack before a wispy dark phantom fell in beside him in the tricky light to whisper, “There’s someone who would like a word with you, Mister MacKail. If you’ll but walk this way I’ll show you the way, and it’s not at all far, you see.”
It was a tired joke, but Stringer still had to reply he couldn’t walk that way on a bet, since he’d noticed the small stranger’s voice was female as well as accented in a delightfully fey way.
Her coal black hair had been swept up more Tumble-weed than Gibson Girl, and her cheap summer shift seemed about the color and texture of tent-worm webbing. But she was a rather pretty little waif and he felt sure she and her pals knew it as she took him by the left elbow and tried to steer him around the next corner, assuring him once more that they didn’t have far to go. But Stringer kept going the same damned way as he informed her in a good-natured growl that it had been his great-great-grandad, not himself, who’d gotten off the ship from Glasgow, and added, “The first time a pretty lady I’d never seen before extended me an invite to go roaming in the gloaming into parts unknown, her accent was more Mexican than Welsh and I was just sixteen years old. So that time I had some excuse for being so dumb.”
She murmured something in a lingo Stringer found even harder to fathom than the Gaelic he at least knew how to cuss in and insisted, “It’s important, you see! It’s the saving of yourself from trouble and not the causing of it we desire, look you!”
He chuckled fondly down at her and answered, “I was big for my age and there were only two of ’em waiting for me and my gringo boots in that back alley, that time. I don’t know what I’d have done if that sweet Señorita had set me up for three or more of her kith and kin. So suffice it to say, I vowed then and there that if the Good Lord let me make it to seventeen I’d never act that stupid again.”
“Then don’t you want to hear our well-meant warning?” She protested as she tried once more, in vain, to steer his bigger and stronger form away from the straight and narrow to his brighter-lit and brick-walled chosen shelter for the night. But his natural nose for news naturally prompted him to tell her, “I’m checked into the Palace. Anyone who wants to talk to me can ask for me at the desk. They have telephones in every room and I’ll be proud to come down to the lobby and jaw with anybody about most anything, agreed?”
She sniffed rather grandly for a lady with the scent of boiled cabbage in her hair and demanded, “Do you really think the likes of me and mine would be allowed in the lobby of the grand and glorious Palace of Cripple Creek?” To which he could only reply, “Why not? They let me sign in, didn’t they? This is America, Taffy. American room clerks are more interested in the color of your dinero than the old school tie you might or might not be wearing. This is a rough and ready mining town, not Saint Lou or Colorado Springs, where all the big shots keep their wives and daughters safe from rude whistles. You tell anyone who wants the loan of my ear that I’ll hear ’em out at my hotel, with my back to a brick wall instead of the cold night air. If they don’t want to powwow with me under those conditions, well, I’m not so sure I want to meet up with ’em to begin with.”
They were now within sight of the well-lit hotel entrance. She didn’t tell him whether she was taking his message to anyone or just avoiding the light. One minute she was tagging along and the next one he was striding along alone, so he just kept striding, his back itching under his blue denim jacket until he was in the fern infested lobby and no sore losers had pegged a parting shot at him after all.
As a seasoned traveler, Stringer had naturally hung on to his room key after paying the infernal bellhops for it the first time. So he would have simply gone on up to his single if the desk clerk hadn’t called him over to tell him, “They’re expecting you in the billiard room, straight back and to the left of that bookcase with the moosehead over it, Mister MacKail.”
Stringer frowned and muttered, mostly to himself, “That was fast. Too fast, as a matter of fact. Who on earth are we talking about, landlord?”
The clerk looked surprised and said, “Mister Murdstone and the others, of course. I thought you knew you were supposed to meet him here this evening.”
Stringer smiled thinly and replied, “I do now. I take it old T.S. is a guest here, too, this being the best, if not the only, hotel up here amid the pup tents?”
The clerk sniffed and assured him there were at least a dozen lesser establishments in Cripple Creek, provided one didn’t mind coal oil illumination and crapping down the hall. Stringer said he’d heard as much and ambled toward the back of Cripple Creek’s answer to Denver’s Brown Palace.
Like its namesakes in Denver and Frisco, the Cripple Creek Palace had been wired for electricity as well as fitted out with modern plumbing. Stringer hadn’t tested the flush commode in his room upstairs, yet, but he assumed it’d work when and if he pulled the chain. The electric lighting might have been just a mite different if they’d consulted Stringer on interior decoration. Though he’d seen moose heads with orange light bulbs glowing from each and every antler prong before, he’d never developed much of a taste for the sight.
He heard his name being hailed as he circled around to the billiard room, where the light bulbs were whiter and shining down on the green felt from a more natural looking chandelier of mule deer antlers. The cuss who’d called out to him was, naturally, T.S. Murdstone in the ample flesh. Most of the other middle-aged and well-heeled-looking gents were about as portly. They’d peeled off their fancy frock coats to play billiards, as shooting pool was called by such fancy dudes, in their shirtsleeves, brocaded vests and diamond stick pins. When Murdstone invited Stringer to join the game, he hauled off his rough rider hat to show he might be staying a spell, but allowed he’d just watch until he figured out how you shot pool without any pockets for the infernal balls to drop into.
As Murdstone introduced him all around, Stringer shook friendly but didn’t recall whose face went with which name, for the most part. There were almost a dozen and most of them didn’t seem all that impressed with Stringer, either. He perked up when he was introduced to Bert Carlton, having heard the name not all that long before. The new ramrod of the Mine Owner’s Association didn’t look or talk all that tough, but there was a quiet firmness to both his handshake and the set of his jaw that made Stringer glad he hadn’t come up here to shut down any of old Bert’s mines.
He perked up even more when he was introduced to the older and more reckless looking J.H. Hammond, asking, “Aren’t you the mining magnate who, a few years ago, backed Nikola Tesla’s experi
ments with man-made lightning?”
Hammond looked more sheepish than famous as he replied. “I’m more a mining engineer than a magnate. I just show the boys how to get the rock out and refined. They’re welcome to the financial anguish of staking and proving claim one. As to that lunatic, Tesla, my lawyer and my oldest boy, John Junior, got me into that fiasco. Both me and old George Westinghouse had used Lenny Curtis as a patent attorney. Lawyer Curtis is good at that and holds an interest in the Colorado Springs Electric Company.”
When Stringer asked if Hammond’s lawyer was connected with the power company here in Cripple Creek, the older man shrugged and told him, “I neither know nor care. I can tell you the juice works better up this way thanks to those experiments they never recovered from, than down by The Springs. My son, John Junior, met Tesla through our mutual lawyer. Curtis has filed more patents in Tesla’s name than one can shake a stick at. My boy knows more about electricity than me. Or at least he’s more interested in the subject. Betwixt him and Curtis, I was talked into persuading my friends on the county board into letting the maniac set up shop in that cow pasture, gratis. Lenny Curtis talked his own pals at the Electric Company into providing power for Old Nick’s experiments, all he needed, free.”
T.S. Murdstone butted in with, “Never mind that long-gone and crazy Croatian. It’s time to settle who’s betting for or against my young pal, here.”
Stringer blinked in confusion and demanded, “Hold on, T.S. Who said anything about my betting anything? I just told you I don’t know much about shooting pool without pockets.”