White Desert Read online

  What’s more, they enjoyed it. Thirty or forty dead was the official estimate of the human cost of their spree before the mess on the Saskatchewan, but when you figured in the amount they’d stolen, it came to less than three hundred dollars per corpse. Even the medical students in Chicago were offering better than that.

  I began my preparations for Canada by arranging transportation. I enjoyed this just a little more than I did the idea of spending the winter north of Montana. Shoot me, I hate horses. I had bite scars on my backside that were older than some of the deputies I rode with and a broken leg going back to my cowpunching days that still gave me hell whenever the weather turned; and on the frontier it turned faster and more often than a jackrabbit. If my contribution could speed up the Great Northern’s efforts to lay track across the territory and give me the chance to trade my saddle for a first-class Pullman ticket, I’d have been on my way to the Dakota line with a sledgehammer over my shoulder a long time ago.

  Ernst Kindler ran the livery, but he only reported to work three days out of the week. He wasn’t lazy. It hadn’t taken him long to learn that he did his best business when one of his part-timers took his place. Ernst had been Judge Blackthorne’s hangman until he laid down his ropes for his first love, which was tending livestock. But a lot of people were superstitious; those five years of service on the scaffold had put something in the old man’s eyes—or taken it out, no one was sure which—that made them decide they could get along without a horse or a trap for another day or two until Lars Nördstrom or Cracker Tom Bartow reported for work. I was under no such constraint. I trusted Kindler’s knowledge of animals as I did Blackthorne’s understanding of statute, and anyway there were people who said the same thing about my eyes that they did about his. Also I liked to watch him tie knots.

  I found him doing just that next to the barrel stove in his reeking little office. It took him all of five minutes to enter his day’s transactions in the ledger, giving him the rest of the twelve hours to pluck his prodigious eyebrows, read the Bible—he was not God-fearing, but during his tenure as executioner he had made it a point to attend every trial that might end in hanging, and claimed that nothing but Kings I and II could compare to the testimony he’d heard for sheer harrowing detail—and practice his sailors and squares. Today he was sitting stooped over in the burst horsehair swivel next to his cracked desk, putting the finishing touches on a Gordian masterpiece nearly as big as his head. It must have consumed ten feet of tarred hemp.

  “You wouldn’t even have to put that around his throat,” I said in greeting. “Just hit him in the head with it, and his criminal days are over.”

  He looked up with that dead gaze under his thatched brow and grinned. Those customers who got along all right with his eyes tended to lose their resolve when he smiled. It wasn’t that he had bad teeth; in fact, he took better care of them than most men in the higher professions, which may have been why they made you think of bleached white bones half hidden in the wiry tangle of his beard. The starched white collar he insisted upon wearing even when he cleaned out the stables contributed to the overall impression of a dressed corpse.

  “Good morning, Mr. Murdock. I thought at first you was a half-growed bear standing there. They only come into town when they’re starved.”

  I didn’t resent the bear remark. I had on a bearskin I’d taken off a big black I shot in the Bitterroots in ’77, with a badger cap pulled down over my ears. It was the “half-growed” I didn’t care for. You can only be told you’re not as big as Jim Bridger so many times before it starts to tell on your good disposition. “Why do you bother to keep in practice, if you don’t intend to go back to work for the Judge?”

  He sat back, turning the great twisted ball around and around in his hands. He had long, elegant fingers with callus between them; the fingers of a painter or a concert pianist. He had been an artist in his way, never having had to hang a man twice because it didn’t take the first time or left one to strangle slowly. The neck had snapped each time, clean and crisp as a shot from a carbine. “You can always trust a knot if you tie it right,” he said then. “Knots ain’t people.”

  I told him I needed a horse.

  “You got a horse. You owe me two weeks’ board on that claybank you brought back from New Mexico.”

  “That’s a desert horse. I need to trade it for one that’s good in snow. You know you can count on me for the bill.”

  “No horse is good in snow. What you need is one that ain’t as bad as most. I got a mustang I can let you have for the claybank and fifty bucks.”

  “How is it a short-legged animal like that comes so high?”

  He grinned and started pulling apart the knot. “I got it and you don’t.”

  “How much mustang is it? I need a horse with bottom.”

  “Oh, it’s a regular mongrel. Fellow I got it from said if he had his choice he’d be buried with it, because he was never in a hole it couldn’t get him out of.”

  “Why’d he part with it?”

  “He sunk every cent he had into a shaft that turned out to be full of water. Traded me the animal for the board he owed on it and ten bucks, took himself a room at the Merchants, and blew his brains out with a Sharps pistol.”

  “Let’s have a look.”

  He set the ball of rope on the desk, got up, pulled on a stiff canvas coat, and led the way to the stalls, where a barrel stove identical to the one in the office glowed fiercely with each gust of wind that knifed its way through the chinks in the siding. The horses standing between the partitions stamped and blew clouds of steam in the lingering chill, but the fumes from the fresh manure and the animal heat itself kept the temperature above freezing. We stopped before a stall containing a scrawny-looking sorrel with a squiggly blaze on its forehead that reminded me of a snake. It had a black mane and a red glint in its eye I didn’t like by half.

  “Fellow called him Little Red,” Kindler said.

  “If I called it anything I’d call it Snake. But I don’t name horses and mosquitoes.” I took a fistful of its mane to steady it and peeled back its upper lip. In a lightning flash the mustang broke my grip and snapped at my hand. I snatched it back in time to avoid losing a finger, but the beast took off the top of a knuckle. “Son of a bitch.”

  “Teeth are fine,” said the old hangman.

  The horse nickered and showed its gums. Its grin reminded me of Kindler’s.

  I dug my bandanna out of the bearskin and wrapped it around my hand. The blood soaked through the cotton immediately. “I’ll give you the claybank and ten. We’ll forget about what Doc Schachter’s going to soak me for the lockjaw treatment.”

  “You won’t get lockjaw. He’s clean. Fifty’s the price.”

  “I suppose it’s gelded.”

  “I don’t traffic in stallions. I like to keep the boards on my stalls.”

  “Twenty.”

  “Talk around town is you’re headed north,” he said. “You can’t take an ordinary horse up there this time of year unless you figure to cook and eat him when he lays down on you. An animal that will fight you is an animal that will save your life.”

  I looked at him. He was heartier than his gaunt frame and lifeless eyes suggested. He seldom shook hands with anyone because all those years working with ropes and counterweights had made his fingers as strong as cables, and he was afraid he’d forget himself and crush bone.

  “You’re selling hard for the price,” I said. “If you’re that keen on getting rid of it, you need to budge.”

  He looked away. That never happened; it was always the other person who lost in a staring contest. He ran a finger down a fresh yellow post holding the stall together. It hadn’t been up more than a few weeks. “Bastard knocked down a partition last month and killed my best stepper.”

  “Not the gray.”

  “It was Parson Yell’s favorite. He ain’t been around to rent the calash since. Thirty-five, and I’ll throw in what you owe me on the claybank’s board.”
br />   “Done.”

  He turned back toward the office. “Let’s splash some whiskey on that knuckle.”

  At the door I looked back at the mustang. It met my gaze, tossed its black mane, and grinned its hangman’s grin.

  3

  “Sloan McInerney, have you anything you wish to say before this court passes sentence upon you?”

  “Yes, Your Excellency.”

  “‘Your Honor’ is sufficient.”

  “I wish to say that if I wasn’t drunk I wouldn’t of done it and that I have gave up the Devil Rum for good and all. It is strong drink that has brought me to this sorry pass.”

  “That’s a fine sentiment, but if you were truly repentant, you would tell this court what you did with the money you stole from the Wells Fargo box in your charge.”

  “I spent it, Your Excellency. I said that at the start.”

  Judge Blackthorne hooked on his spectacles and thumbed through the stack of sheets on the bench before him. “At six forty-five P.M. on Thursday, November twenty-fourth, 1881, you told Marshal Pendragon that the Overland stagecoach you were driving had been waylaid by three masked men ten miles east of Helena and that you were forced at gunpoint to surrender the strongbox containing eight hundred sixty-eight dollars and thirty-three cents. At half-past three the following morning, acting upon information supplied by an unidentified party, Marshal Pendragon arrested you in a room at Chicago Joe’s Dance Hall and charged you with grand theft. A search of your person and rooms failed to discover more than eleven dollars and thirteen cents in cash. Do you intend this court to believe that in less than nine hours you managed to spend the sum of eight hundred fifty-seven dollars and twenty cents on women and whiskey?”

  “I bought a cigar at the Coliseum.”

  Blackthorne gaveled down the roar from the gallery. When the last cough had faded he folded his spectacles and rested his hands on the bench.

  “Sloan McInerney, having been tried and found guilty of the crime of federal grand theft, it is the decision of this court that you will be removed from this room to the county jail, until such time as you can be transported to the territorial prison at Deer Lodge. There you will be confined and forced to work at hard labor for not less than fifteen, nor more than twenty-five years. If upon your release you take it upon yourself to recover the money you stole from wherever you have it hidden, you will be satisfied to know that you sacrificed half your life for a wage of slightly more than one dollar per week.” The gavel cracked.

  As the jailers were removing McInerney, I waved to catch the Judge’s eye. He crooked a finger at me and withdrew to his chambers.

  It was the room where he spent most of his time when he wasn’t actually hearing cases, and he had furnished it with as many of the creature comforts as an honest man could on a government salary. Walnut shelves contained his extensive and well-thumbed legal library as well as a complete set of Dickens and his guiltiest pleasures, the works of Mark Twain and Bret Harte, with space for his pipes and tobacco and cigars in their sandalwood humidors. The black iron safe where he kept petty cash and the court officers’ payroll supported a portable lock rack in which his cognacs and unblended whiskeys continued to age patiently between his rare indulgences. The scant wall space left by his books and the window looking out on the gallows he had decorated with a small watercolor in a large mahogany frame of a French harbor and a moth-eaten, bullet-chewed flag on a wooden stretcher to remind him of his service in the Mexican War. He read for work and recreation in a well-upholstered leather swivel behind his polished oak desk while his visitors squirmed on the straight-backed wooden chair in front.

  “Fifteen to twenty-five seems stiff,” I said, when he had traded his robes for his frock coat and we were seated across from each other. “You gave Jules Stoddard less than that when he stuck up the freight office for twenty-five hundred.”

  “Stoddard didn’t work for the freight company. I haven’t a drop of mercy for traitors. Are you packed for Canada?” He never spent more than thirty seconds reviewing a judgment.

  “Oskar Bundt said he’d have those new grips on my Deane-Adams by tomorrow. I’ll be ready to go as soon as the weather breaks.”

  “I hope you lose that English pistol in a drift. All the other deputies carry Colts and Remingtons and Smith and Wessons. Six-shooters. The time will come when you wish you had that extra round.”

  “If five won’t do it I might as well haul around a Gatling. You’ve just got a thistle in your boot about the English.”

  “Port drinkers and sodomites.” He clacked his store teeth, shutting off that avenue of discussion. “Inspector Vivian replied to my wire. His office is in Moose Jaw. He’s reserved a room for you at the Trappers Inn there.”

  “I’m sure it’s full up this time of year. This is the rainy season in Paris.”

  “You will of course leave such observations this side of the international border. I intend to press for Bliss and Whitelaw’s extradition and would rather not bog down the process in a petty cultural squabble.”

  “If I were you I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it until your best deputy manages to capture them both alive.”

  “My best deputy is in Fort Benton picking up a prisoner. In any case your responsibility is to advise the North-West Mounted Police and to offer your assistance in the fugitives’ apprehension. You are not to behave as a one-man committee of public vigilance.”

  “When did Tim Rourke become your best deputy?”

  “When you stopped listening to me. Did you hear what I just said?”

  “I heard. Bliss and Whitelaw’s scalps have nothing to fear from me. I didn’t know any of their victims.”

  He leaned back in his chair, retrieved a cigar from the humidor on the bookshelf, and used the platinum clipper attached to his watch chain to nip off the end. “That’s the reason I selected you for this mission,” he said. “All the men I can count on to follow my instructions to the letter have some personal stake in this manhunt. If they’re allowed to go on much longer, there won’t be a lawman west of St. Louis who isn’t related to or familiar with someone they’ve killed or robbed or set fire to.” He lit the cigar with a long match and blew a thick plume at the ceiling. “I’d offer you a smoke, but I know you don’t indulge.”

  “I’m saving myself for that eight-hundred-dollar brand at the Coliseum.”

  “McInerney.” He frowned through the smoke. “I hope Rourke doesn’t take long getting back when the weather breaks. I don’t trust the county jail to hold a hard-time prisoner for long.”

  “If all you need is someone to take McInerney to Deer Lodge, I’m your man.”

  “You have business in Canada.”

  “I’m not going after Bliss and Whitelaw knowing just what’s in the papers. There’s a man in Deer Lodge who knows more about them than anyone.”

  “If you mean John Swingtree, he won’t talk. He’ll die in prison.”

  “He might talk if I promise him a commutation.”

  “I can’t offer that even if I wanted to. Only Governor Potts can do that.”

  “I didn’t say I’d keep the promise.”

  He drew on his cigar, watching me, then propped it in the brass artillery-shell base he used for an ashtray and slid a sheet of stationery bearing his letterhead from the stack on the desk. “You’ll need a letter from me before they’ll let you see him.” He dipped his pen.

  The next day I went to see Oskar Bundt. A glum pack of city employees was at work in the street, shoveling the heavy snow into piles alongside the boardwalks. The sky was iron colored but looked less oppressive than it had for a week. We were in for a thaw.

  The gunsmith, Bundt, was Scandinavian, but he could seldom get anyone to believe it. He was Finnish on his mother’s side, and the line went straight back to the squat, swarthy Huns who had fled north to escape Rome’s retribution after the death of Attila. That was his story, anyway, and since no one else in Helena except perhaps Judge Blackthorne had read all of Gibbon, h
e never had to argue the point. His low forehead, sharp black eyes in sixty-year-old creases, and cruel Mongol mouth didn’t invite conflict in any case. I found him behind the counter in his shop, gouging a two-foot curl off a block of walnut that was beginning to resemble a rifle stock in the vise attached to the workbench. The tidy room with its pistols and long guns displayed on the walls and kegs of powder stacked on the floor smelled of sawdust and varnish and the sharp stench of acid. NO SMOKING signs were everywhere; one spark and the entire local shooting community would have to go all the way to Butte to have its firearms repaired. Every tool in the shop was made of brass.

  When he saw me, he put down the gouge, wiped his hands on his leather apron, and took my five-shot revolver from a drawer. I took it and inspected the new grips. He’d hand checked them and stained the wood so that it matched the brown steel of the frame. “It doesn’t look as if anything was done to it,” I said.

  “That was the idea. Five dollars.”

  I paid him in gold as expected. If I’d used paper, it would have cost me eight. In addition to being the most expensive gunsmith in the territory, he was the most suspicious; whether because he thought the notes might be counterfeit or the government was going to fall and make them worthless, I was never sure. He was also the best at his craft in three territories.

  He watched me load the chambers from the box of cartridges I’d brought, nodding approvingly when I filled the fifth. Neither of us had ever actually known anyone who had shot himself for failing to keep one empty under the hammer.