“Well, you’ll have plenty of time to think of a good reason. As I believe an educated man ought to be able to change his ways when he sees the error of them, I am setting your trial for one year from now to give you a chance to improve your habits before coming back into this courtroom. In the meantime, you’ll be under bond and under my watch as well. And if I see you back in this criminal court before that time, you can put your money on this: your sentence will not be light. Bond set at $100. Have you a surety to stand for you?”
“That’d be me, Judge,” a voice spoke from the spectator gallery. “Thomas M. Miers of Miers and Caldwell, Wholesale Dealers in Foreign and Domestic Liquors and Cigars, Sir. Elm Street at Poydras, Your Honor.”
The judge peered at the portly storeowner, then looked back at John Henry with a sigh. “Is this the best you can do for yourself, Dr. Holliday? A liquor dealer? Have you no more reputable acquaintances to bring on your behalf?”
“No, Sir,” John Henry replied heavily, “not anymore.” And his own words condemned him more than any judgment the court could have given.
Chapter Four
DENISON, 1874
THE TOWN ON THE ROLLING HILLS SOUTH OF THE RED RIVER WAS SO new that most of the inhabitants still lived in tents, drawing water from communal wells and cooking over open campfires. The only real business was the meat packing plant alongside the tracks of the Kansas & Texas Line Railway, and even the tracks were new, laid the year before when the K&T had planted Denison and contracted with the American & Texas Refrigerated Car Company to ship beef from there across the Indian Territory to markets in the east.
The closeness of the Indian Territory, only four miles north on the other side of the Red River, gave a thrill of danger to the place. For although the Five Civilized Tribes of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, Creek, and Cherokee who occupied the land north of that part of Texas were generally peaceful, the Southern Plains tribes farther to the west were not. The Cheyenne and Comanche had refused to retreat to their Government ordered reservations, and the Army was fighting a war all along the Red River to keep them contained. As the booming of Denison proved, civilization was moving west and the savages must make way for it.
Denison looked more like adventure than civilization to John Henry, when he arrived that summer after the embarrassment of his trouble in Dallas. Though his arrest hadn’t even made the back pages of the Dallas Herald, somehow everybody knew about it anyway. It seemed to him that everywhere he went folks suddenly looked at him differently. Walking down Elm Street, he saw ladies to whom he used to tip his hat now cross to the other side of the street, pretending not to see him. Even the supposedly charitable members of the Dallas First Methodist Church shunned him, stepping aside as he walked into church two days after his bond hearing—and him only trying to set himself straight with God. Well, God was everywhere, so his mother had told him, and he could do his repenting just as well in Denison as in Dallas.
He still had no intention of trading his dental tools for a butcher’s knife, however. What brought him to Denison was the news that there were five small hotels along Main Street, three passable restaurants, and a twenty-four hour post office—and not a single dentist as of yet. So he packed up his things, left word at the Dallas County Bank that he was relocating elsewhere, and took the train north to Denison for another fresh start at being a professional man. And he was pleased to find, soon after his arrival, that the owner of the Alamo Hotel needed some dental work done and would be willing to trade a month’s rent for a couple of extractions, so all he needed was a paperboard sign hung in the window to announce that J.H. Holliday, Dentist was in business again.
But he only stayed in his hotel room dental office until mid-afternoon each day before turning his sign and heading down to Skiddy Street, the shallow ravine behind Main Street where most of the saloons and gambling dens were located. For although he’d sworn off Keno, he had no intention of giving up on other games of chance. Betting money on cards and watching them come up winners still gave him a thrill that drove away all his other worries.
Denison was a dark town by night as gas hadn’t yet come to that part of the country. The only illumination came from candlelight and kerosene oil, yet for John Henry, the darkness had something like a familiar feel to it. Valdosta had been dark at night, too, with no streetlights and surrounded by tall over-reaching pines that shadowed the moonlight. Even the smell of the place reminded him of Valdosta: a mix of wood smoke and outhouse and a green dampness from off the river. But where Valdosta’s dark nights were silent except for the sound of katydids chirping, Denison was raucous all night long. In the open-windowed heat of August and Indian summer, families said their prayers to the sound of dance hall pianos, and children were lullabied by the God-profaning curses of gamblers. And now and then, shots rang out in the darkness as some of the boys got out of hand, and Red Hall, the town marshal and former Texas Ranger, would step in to calm things down.
It was the darkness that brought John Henry his best, if not most pleasant patient—a butcher from Dallas who’d come to work at the slaughterhouse next to the meat packing plant. His name was Charlie Austin, a small man with a big opinion of himself, and he had better things in mind than butchering. Charlie wanted to be a saloonkeeper, pouring drinks across the bar in some fine establishment—not that there were any such places in Denison. He planned on going back to Dallas once he’d made some good money at the slaughterhouse, though first he’d have to pay a chunk of his earnings to John Henry.
“Damn Injuns!” Charlie said, when found his way to the dental chair after being assaulted outside one of Denison’s groggeries. He’d need several new teeth to replace the ones he’d lost and make himself presentable again; pricey work that the only dentist in town was happy to oblige.
“What makes you think it was Indians?” John Henry asked as he inspected the result of Charlie’s midnight run-in with an unseen assailant. If the butcher had been passable-looking before the attack, he wasn’t anymore with his torn and swollen lip and toothless grimace. “Did you hear any whoopin’ or hollerin’?”
“Didn’t hear nothin’ once I got hit on the head,” Charlie said, whistling through the bloodied space in his mouth. “Who else would slip up so quiet and slip off without nobody seein’? Comanche braves, mor’n likely, scoutin’ the town. And likely back across the river by now. Colbert’s too damn easy with who he lets on his ferry boat.”
John Henry knew the man Charlie was talking about, as he’d taken Ben Franklin Colbert’s ferry across the river himself just to say he’d been in the Indian Territory, though there was nothing much to see but more empty land and switch grass and the flat waters of the Red River. The Indians weren’t allowed off their reservation and generally kept themselves to their own towns out of sight. But white men could enter to trade or cross over to Kansas or Missouri, and for them, Colbert kept a general store on the south side of the river near the ferry landing. He called his place the “First and Last Chance”: first chance to buy a drink coming down from the Territory and last chance to buy a drink before crossing into the Territory, as it was against the law to sell alcohol to the Indians. But the Indians got the liquor somehow, just the same.
“But the wild Indians aren’t even on this part of the river,” John Henry said reasonably. “It’s Choctaw near here. The Comanche and Cheyenne are up in the Panhandle fightin’ the Army. I doubt they’d bother comin’ this far. What’ve we got here that Indians would want?”
“Beef, I’d say,” Charlie Austin replied with a grunt. “They’re starvin’ half the time, now they’ve lost their buffalo huntin’ grounds. Let ‘em starve, damned red heathens, knockin’ me on the head!”
Which brought John Henry back to the real question at hand:
“So what did these mystery assailants take from you, other than your good looks? You didn’t happen to have any beef on you, I reckon.”
“Just my poker winnin’s, damn ‘em,” Charlie said, wiping a drool of blo
ody spittle from his mouth. “Money I was gonna use to buy me a whore for the night. Ought to pay Colbert to take me over to the Indian Territory so’s I can use a squaw instead. Teach ‘em all a lesson.”
Though John Henry shared some of Charlie Austin’s distrust of the Indians, he didn’t think raping their women would solve anything. That kind of lesson might just bring on the Indian attacks Charlie was already imagining and overwhelm Denison’s little police force of Marshal Hall and his three deputies. The police were mostly for show, not staving off Indians, dressed as they were in their brass-buttoned blue uniforms and wide Panama hats, and spending their time breaking up saloon fights or collecting the $5 per week license fees from the brothels.
“So can you fix me up?” Charlie asked, as John Henry finished the exam and wiped his soiled hands on a waiting piece of toweling. “Can’t be ‘Champagne Charlie Austin’ lookin’ like this. That’s the name I’m plannin’ to use in Dallas once I get myself a saloon job there: ‘Champagne Charlie,’ just like the vaudeville song. Suits me, don’t you think?”
He could fix Charlie’s teeth for a price, but it would take more than fancy dentistry to turn Charlie Austin into anything finer than corn liquor.
He wrote to Mattie, of course, telling her that he had moved his practice to booming Denison, though he didn’t mention the embarrassing circumstances of his leaving Dallas. Mattie would be distressed to know that he’d been arrested, even for something as inconsequential as betting money on a gambling game. So it was good to have a patient like Charlie Austin who needed several visits and some careful dentistry to straighten out the mess of his teeth, and giving John Henry something interesting to say in regards to his professional life. Since being fired by Dr. Seegar and not finding much work on his own in Dallas, his letters of the past months had been mostly travelogue, avoiding the subject of how he spent his days. But although he chose to keep some parts of his life from her, he still found that he could talk to Mattie more easily than he’d ever been able to talk to anyone else, and for the hour or so that he spent writing each letter, recounting the colorful atmosphere of the Texas frontier and the fine work he was doing in Denison, he didn’t feel so very far away from her.
It was one thing doing expensive dentistry, however, and another thing entirely getting paid for his efforts, as he discovered too late. For once Charlie Austin had teeth in his mouth again, he suddenly forgot that he still owed money to his dentist—John Henry’s fault, partly, for allowing Charlie to pay for the work in installments as he collected his own pay from the slaughterhouse. And though John Henry didn’t want to go collecting the money at gunpoint like some swindled gambler, he didn’t want to give his services away for free, either. But before he could call on Marshal Hall for assistance with the matter, Charlie Austin was gone, taking his new teeth and leaving John Henry unpaid and unsatisfied.
Charlie’s skipping town was just the start of the trouble, for as the sultry Texas summer cooled at last into fall, the noise of Denison disappeared, silenced by the same depression that had sucked the life out of the rest of the country. The American & Texas Refrigerated Car Company, whose eight-acre meat packing plant beside the railroad tracks had been Denison’s major industry, lost its financial investors and went bankrupt. There would be no more big cattle drives into Denison, no thousands of head of livestock loaded onto the railcars or thousands of pounds of slaughtered Texas beef shipped out on the Kansas & Texas line. And without the cattle business, there was little to keep Denison alive, and it quickly turned from the last boomtown of Texas to yet another victim of the Panic of 1873.
The personality of the place changed almost overnight as the thousands of single young men who had come to work on the railroad or at the slaughterhouse drifted off to greener pastures. By Christmas, the only folks remaining in town were the homesteaders and the depot workers, as well as a few sporting men and bawdy house girls, though most of the bawdy houses had closed down, too. And maybe because of the sudden quiet, or because of the sudden lack of whorehouse license fees, even Marshal Red Hall packed his bags and left Denison behind. The fact that even the law wasn’t interested in Denison anymore only proved the point that the town was drying up.
There was no reason to stay in a town that couldn’t support a dentist. So by New Year’s Eve, John Henry was back in Dallas in time to watch the fireworks over the Trinity River and the First Texas Artillery shooting off cannonades from the fairgrounds, the festivities seeming more a celebration of the old year ending than of the new one just coming in, considering how bad 1874 had been for most folks. And seeing the old year go, John Henry had hopes that his own hard times of the past few years were finally behind him.
It was a sign of good luck and better times to come when he started the new year by opening the Dallas Herald and finding Charlie Austin, as the advertisement for the saloon at the new St. Charles Hotel read: Champagne Charlie is a rollicking fellow who fixes up the smiles and hands them out smilingly. What the advertisement didn’t mention was that it was John Henry who’d put Champagne Charlie’s smile back together again and who was still owed more than he’d been paid.
The saloon took up the entire first floor of the St. Charles Hotel, and it was already crowded with cowboys and farmers up from Cleburne and Tyler and Waxahachie when John Henry stepped in out of the January cold still coughing from the smoke of the train trip and a little foggy from his New Year’s Eve drinking of the night before, but looking forward to collecting on that Denison debt. If he were to try his hand at dentistry in Dallas again, he’d need some money to get himself set up in business, and Charlie’s payment would help.
But Charlie Austin didn’t look like he was in the mood for discussing finances as he muttered to himself and poured the drinks.
“Cowhands are one thing,” Charlie was saying to one of the saloon girls as John Henry approached him through the crowd. “They’ve been around some at least. But these farmers, they don’t even know how to handle the liquor. Serve ‘em and souse ‘em, that’s all I do, then call the bouncer to throw ‘em out if they don’t puke on the floor first, which I have to clean up.”
“Howdy, Charlie,” John Henry said affably. “I see you found your true callin’.”
Charlie looked up at him with surprise, then narrowed his eyes. “What are you doin’ in Dallas?”
“Same as everybody else, I reckon, enjoyin’ the festivities. Thought I’d stop by and have a visit with my old friend from Denison. At least, I thought we were friends. You didn’t even bother sayin’ goodbye when you left town.”
“I got a job offer,” Charlie said gruffly. “Didn’t see as that was any of your business.”
“I disagree, since it was your job offer that hurt my business. You owe me some money, Charlie, and I mean to collect.”
“Go to hell,” Charlie said.
“I well may, someday,” John Henry replied, “but there’s no cause for angry words just now. I only want what’s rightfully mine. And considering it’s partly my work that got you this job, I’m probably entitled to more than what you owe. But I’m willin’ to settle for what’s on your tab.”
“Well, I haven’t got it. The slaughterhouse closed up before makin’ the last payroll on account of the Refrigerated Car Company goin’ bankrupt and not payin’ them. So take a number and you can get your money when I get mine.”
“I won’t be dissuaded, Charlie,” John Henry said, standing his ground. “It’s the principle of the thing . . .”
But Charlie Austin had a laugh at that, showing off his new teeth and saying to the crowd of rowdies around him: “Did you hear that, boys? This man’s got principles!” Then he pulled something from beneath his apron and said: “Well, I’ve got a pistol. Let’s see who wins.”
He should have left the saloon then and come back later when things were quieter. He should have left and never come back at all. But there was something infuriating about being laughed at like that, at gunpoint and in front of a whole saloon, and
him only trying to make things right. And with that righteous indignation rising in him, John Henry pulled the Colt’s Navy revolver from his own pocket and leveled it at Charlie Austin.
“Pay me for my work or lose it,” he said, taking aim at Charlie’s fading smile.
“What the hell are you doin’?” Charlie asked in surprise. “Customers aren’t allowed firearms in the saloon, you know that!”
“I’m not a customer. I’m a debt collector. Or the angel of death, maybe. You choose.”
He cocked the hammer of his revolver and the pistol in Charlie’s hand wavered.
“You plannin’ to kill me over a dentist bill?” Charlie asked, incredulous.
“Not yet,” John Henry replied. Then he took aim at Charlie’s hand and fired a shot that sent the bartender’s pistol flying and discharging into the board ceiling.
Charlie screamed, the saloon girls screamed, then a gruff voice commanded:
“Drop it! You boys are both under arrest.”
Of course, there were police patrolling the saloons on the day after New Year’s Eve. The police were always around when they weren’t wanted.
“Me?” Charlie cried as the deputy stepped forward to take them both into custody. “Why me? He’s the one did the shootin’. He could have killed me!”
“I could have, if I’d wanted to,” John Henry said under his breath, as he grudgingly turned his pistol over to the officer. “But you’re not worth repentin’ over, Charlie. And you’re sure as hell not worth goin’ to jail for.”
As for getting paid for his work, that was probably never going to happen. The Dallas City Jail had been uncomfortable lodgings when he’d spent a long spring week there the year before. But with the bitter winter wind of a Blue Norther blowing in through the unplastered chinks in the log walls, it was dangerous as well. A man could catch his death of chill there, even if he’d had strong lungs before he started. But John Henry had already been through two winters of pneumonia and taken a glancing blow from the Yellow Fever, and his health wasn’t up to spending any more time in jail.
Dance with the Devil Page 6