White Desert Read online

  When I looked up, the expression on his face scared the hell out of me, until I realized he was smiling. It was a good enough specimen of a smile, nothing out of the ordinary—Ernst Kindler’s graveyard grin had it beat for sheer sinister quality—but I’d never seen one on that face, and it gave me a turn. If the sun had risen out of the pit behind the Highland Meat Market where they threw away the bones and gristle, the effect would have been the same.

  “I have a rifle for you,” he said. “A carbine.”

  “I’ve got a carbine.”

  “Not like this one.” He went through a door at the end of the workbench and came back carrying a lever-action carbine with a nicked stock that had been varnished and revarnished many times.

  I said it looked like a Spencer repeater.

  “Looks ain’t is.” He thumbed aside a sliding trap in the brass butt plate, exposing an opening the size of a half dollar. “That’s the end of the magazine. The tube extends all the way to the receiver. Holds thirty-four rounds. You load her on Sunday and shoot all week.”

  I took it from him. It was as heavy as a full-size rifle. I peered at the engraving on the receiver. “Who’s Evans?”

  “Company in Maine.”

  “What’s it take?”

  “Forty-four centerfire. Two-twenty-grain bullet with thirty grains of powder. This is the 1877 model. They goosed up the range since they came out with it in ’71.” He paused. “Buffalo Bill owns one.”

  “That’s no recommendation. Every time a company comes out with a new weapon they present one to him for the publicity. He must have more guns than Harpers Ferry.” I shouldered it and drew a bead on the Winchester advertisement tacked to the back wall. “It’s like hoisting a hodful of bricks.”

  “All those extra rounds. If they weren’t there you’d be carrying them in your saddlebags. It’s yours for twenty-five.”

  I lowered it. “Why so cheap?”

  “Company went out of business last year. No replacement parts.”

  “If it’s so good, how come nobody bought one?”

  “Too heavy, I suppose. Ladies’ guns are the thing now. Muff pistols and hideouts.”

  I swung the lever forward and back. It moved smoothly, sliding a round into the barrel with a crisp chunk. “How much to try it out?”

  “Twenty-five. I don’t rent weapons.”

  “Gold or paper?”

  “Gold if you got it.”

  “I don’t.” I pulled three notes out of my poke and laid them on the counter.

  He made a face at the presidents. “How much ammo can I sell you?”

  “One round ought to do it.” I added a penny to the stack.

  4

  The weather broke during the middle of January. The overcast thinned and shredded, letting the sun through, and the mercury in the thermometer on the front porch of the Nevada Dry Goods stirred itself and climbed hand over hand above freezing. There were floods and drownings—cattle and people, including both cowboys sharing a line shack on the Rocking M south of town when the Missouri jumped its banks and swept away the log structure overnight. Butchering crews hired by the ranches set to work to process as many as possible of the beef carcasses piled in the bends of rivers before they began to rot. Steaks and roasts were cheap at the Highland Meat Market and in the restaurant of the Merchants Hotel. A cured leather hide in fine condition could be bought for the price of oilcloth.

  After the thaw came the rains to batter down the drifts and transform the roads and Helena’s main street, already saturated by departing frost, to ropy mud. I spent this period eating cheap tenderloin, watching teams of mules and workers hauling wagons out of the soup, and waiting for the next cold snap to make the roads passable. My greatest challenge was to avoid catching the eye of Judge Blackthorne, who not counting felons hated nothing so much as the sight of a federal employee collecting taxpayers’ wages with his thumbs in his belt. He was quite capable of offering my services to the county jail as a turnkey just to get me out of his sight. I didn’t mind the work, but I hated the smell of such places, the stenches of disinfectant and human misery, and as I figured to get my fill of them in Deer Lodge I restricted my loafing in public to the hours when the Judge was busy in court.

  After a week the mercury started back down, although the sky remained clear, and the syrup hardened into ruts and ridges that broke axles and chipped teeth. I bought a shaggy gray from Ernst Kindler for my prisoner to ride, packed my bedroll and saddle pouches with supplies and provisions, threw a spare saddle and roll on the gray, and slung the new Evans over one side of the snake-faced sorrel, balancing it with my Winchester on the other. On my way to the jail I stopped in to see Blackthorne in his chambers.

  “Are you taking a pack animal?” Since the brutal trek that had brought him there from Washington City, he had traveled rarely, but he was always fiercely interested in the details of departure.

  “Not for this leg,” I said. “After I drop off McInerney, I’ll reprovision in Deer Lodge and use the gray.”

  “You’re traveling through the Rockies. Can you carry enough for two men on only two animals?”

  “Prisoners are easier to manage if you keep them hungry.”

  “All the other deputies are right, Page. You’re a mean bastard.”

  Since he only addressed me by my Christian name when he was feeling tender toward me or wanted something, I didn’t take the comment to heart. He scribbled a note to the head turnkey to release Sloan McInerney to my custody and I went to the door. He called my name again. He had taken down his book on Montana territorial law—ridiculously thick in view of how little time had passed since the first settlers had wandered in, but then, a lot of laws had been broken—and was bent over it, following the dense columns with the butt of his cigar.

  “You will want to tread lightly around those Canucks,” he said. “Some of them are still fighting the Revolution.”

  McInerney turned out to be entertaining company. A short Irishman, with powerful forearms and black muttonchop whiskers of the type they called “buggerlugs” in the British Army, he’d been recruited under another name into the Union infantry in County Limerick, only to learn when his ship dropped anchor in New York Harbor that Lincoln was paying for volunteers. He dived overboard, swam to shore, and signed up again, using the name McInerney. His intention was to desert and open a saloon with his recruitment money, but he lost it all at cards the first night and wound up fighting in three major battles, collecting a ball in his right leg at Chancellorsville that still gave him trouble when it rained or snowed. He confided to me that he was still wanted in Virginia under his original name for an indiscretion he had committed while drunk following Lee’s surrender, but he neither identified the nature of the charge nor told me the name. The incident was serious enough to drive him west, where he’d made his living as a bullwhacker, muleskinner, and finally Overland stagecoach driver, in which capacity his weakness for Mammon had placed him at Judge Blackthorne’s mercy. He told these stories on horseback and across campfires with a light in his eye and a good ear for dialect that shortened the trip through the pass into the Deer Lodge Valley. He regretted nothing, in-eluding the prospect of spending the last good part of his life behind bars. For this reason I took pains to inspect his manacles often and stretch a rope from his ankle to mine when we slept, to awaken me whenever he stirred. He was too cheerful to have ruled out escape.

  He made his move three days out of Helena. We’d stopped to water the horses in a runoff stream, and he squatted in a stand of scrub cedars to move his bowels. I’d been watching his hat for a couple of minutes before I realized he wasn’t wearing it any more; he’d slipped it off while I was distracted by the animals and propped it up on a branch.

  I backed the horses onto the bank, hitched them to a cedar, and squeaked the Evans out of its boot. He’d left a clear trail in the snow—not because he was clumsy or stupid. I followed it for a while, letting him think he’d outsmarted me, then cut back through the t
rees and shot off his bootheel while he was trying to mount the snake-faced sorrel. He went down on one hip and curled himself into a ball. I went over and gave him a kick.

  “You make a better impression than you thought,” I said. “You didn’t convince me you were empty-headed enough to make your break on foot in mountain country.”

  He stood up, brushed off the snow, and scowled at his ruined boot. “You’re good with that trick rifle.”

  “I’ve been meaning to take a practice shot since we left town.”

  “You mean that’s the first time you fired it?” He was staring at me with his eyebrows in his hairline. “How’d you know the sight wasn’t off?”

  “It is, a little. I was aiming higher.” I handed him his hat.

  He didn’t make a second try.

  Deer Lodge was a ranching town, the harness shops and feed stores built of logs on perpendicular log foundations like rafts, with a main street wide enough to turn a wagon around in and the usual assortment of loafers in pinch hats and spurs holding up the porch posts in front of the saloon. The penitentiary, altogether a more substantial construction, occupied twelve acres outside the limits. Three years and fifty thousand dollars in the making, it was built entirely of native granite up to the pitch-pine roof, with bars in the windows made of iron imported from the States, wrought and set by skilled workers brought in from as far away as California. The additional cost had restricted the facility to fourteen small cells, in which at present some twenty-four men were serving out their time stacked on top of one another like ears of corn in a rick. The stink of so much humanity encased in clammy stone reached to the office of the warden, a young Irishman named McTague, whose sober dress and dour face suggested he’d come from an entirely different part of the island from his newest prisoner, whose aborted escape attempt had done nothing to dampen his affability. As I signed off on McInerney I wondered how long all that formidable construction material would hold his unquenchable spirit.

  When the captain of the guard had removed McInerney, I showed Judge Blackthorne’s letter to the warden. McTague read it with a frown.

  “Swingtree is a recalcitrant,” he said. “Last month he bit a guard during a fight in the exercise yard. He’s been in the hole four weeks.”

  “How is the guard?”

  “The stitches come out tomorrow, but I fear he’s ruined for the work. I can’t let you see Swingtree until he’s finished his time in the hole.”

  “How much time did you give him?”

  “Two months.”

  “I can’t wait that long. I’m expected in Canada.”

  “The regulations are clear in a case like this.”

  I tapped the letter on his desk. “Judge Blackthorne is a presidential appointee. He has seniority over the governor in this territory, and he certainly has authority over you.”

  “My instructions come from the governor. He can take it up with him.” He pushed the letter toward me without expression.

  After a pause I picked it up and refolded it. “I hope you’re this determined when a hundred or so more convicts show up at your door from the court in Helena.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t understand.” But his eyes said he did.

  “Blackthorne’s an old political in-fighter. He can look at a situation from all sides and decide whether a suspended sentence or a hundred and eighty days in Deer Lodge serves the public better, or if a murderer is to hang in Helena or die of old age in the territorial prison. Which way he leans might have serious bearing on your problem with overcrowding. I understand you missed a major riot by a hair a few years ago.”

  A tiny vein stood out on his left temple; aside from that he might have been deliberating over whether to visit the barber today or put it off for a week. “Are you speaking for Judge Blackthorne or yourself?”

  “I’m an officer of his court.”

  A silent moment crawled past, during which the stench from the cells entered the room like a third party. At the end of it he held out his hand. I laid the letter in it and he spread it out and scribbled beneath Blackthorne’s signature: OK. T. MCTAGUE. He handed it back. “Go to the end of the hall and knock on the door. Captain Halloran will take care of the details.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I hope you’re careful in your responsibilities, Deputy. It’s a sad thing whenever a former law enforcement officer enters this house in chains. They are in for a bad time of it from the inmates as well as the guards.”

  5

  Halloran, the captain of the guard, was a short, thick hunk of carved maple with his head sunk between his shoulders and the look of a prizefighter beginning to go to seed. His belly had started to loosen, cinched in with his belt, and bits of steel gray glinted where he had shaven his hair close to the temples. His faded blue eyes had all the depth of tacks holding up a wanted poster.

  His lips moved behind his handlebars as he read Judge Blackthorne’s letter and Warden McTague’s brief addendum, then without a word he stood aside from the iron-reinforced door for me to pass through into the corridor that led to the cells. He locked it behind us with a key on a brass ring as big around as a lariat and led the way between walls of sweating granite, lit by barred windows set eight feet above the floor and fifteen feet apart. The place held the dank, earthen smell of a neglected potato bin.

  At length he unlocked another iron-bound door and let me into a tiny room containing only a yellow oak table carved all over with initials and a pair of split-bottom chairs that might have come from different hemispheres for all they matched. A dim shaft of gray light fell through yet another high barred window I could have covered with my hand onto a dirt floor trod as hard as bedrock.

  “I’ll have your sidearm,” Halloran said.

  I hesitated, then unholstered the Deane-Adams and offered it to him butt first.

  “Sit on this side, with your back to the door.” He shook the cartridges out of the cylinder into his palm, pocketed them, and threaded the revolver’s barrel under his belt. “Off to the left is best, out of the crossfire.”

  He went out and shut the door. A key rattled in the lock.

  I was alone long enough to wonder if an old warrant that was still out on me in Dakota had found its way to the warden’s office. I fell to calculating how much time had to pass before the Judge realized I hadn’t made it to Canada and traced me to Deer Lodge; my head was full of arithmetic when the key rattled again and the door sighed on its hinges.

  John Swingtree was smaller and more frail-looking than his reputation suggested; but then, the recent amputation of an arm might have had something to do with the latter. His head was shorn so close I could see the muscles working in his scalp, his ears stuck out. The hollows in his cheeks and the deep set of his eyes left nothing to the imagination about the configuration of his skull. The skin stretched over it was the color of terra cotta, the only visible inheritance from the Creek side of his family.

  None of this meant anything in relation to what he was and what he had done and could do if given his freedom. For that I looked to the hardware that accompanied him. An iron belt encircled his waist, secured with a padlock the size of a stove lid, with a manacle attached that prevented him from bending his left elbow. The manacle on the other side was empty; the vacant sleeve of his striped tunic was folded and pinned to the shoulder. A pair of chains clipped to the belt hung to iron cuffs welded about both ankles and linked together with another length of chain that forced him to walk with a shuffle, the thick soles of his shoes rasping the floor with the chain dragging between them; the sound set my teeth on edge, like someone sliding a coffin. The arrangement put me in mind of a Bengal tiger I had seen pacing its cage in a traveling show in Denver. I’d thought at the time that I’d have been less impressed with its savagery if we’d met face to face in the woods, without all that iron standing between us. It didn’t mean I wasn’t grateful for the iron.

  Halloran, who came in behind him, had acquired a hickory truncheon since we’d part
ed, two feet long, three inches thick, and polished to a steel sheen. He steered the prisoner around the table with the stick resting on Swingtree’s right shoulder—it would be the most sensitive—and applied pressure as if the push were needed to seat him in the chair opposite mine. Only then did he withdraw the truncheon. He stepped out into the corridor and swung the door shut with enough force to dislodge a stream of dust from the seam where the rock wall met the pitch-pine rafters. The lock clunked. There was no sound of footsteps going away. I could feel him watching us through the square barred window in the door.

  A sour smell of unwashed flesh filled the room. There were no bathtubs in the hole, just an open latrine and the sound of one’s own pulse. And absolute darkness; even the weak light we were in made the man in chains blink. His coarse cotton uniform was clean, so he had probably spent the last four weeks naked as well. When they chose not to hang you, they made you be good.

  “Your name is John Swingtree?” The question broke a silence as hard as the granite that surrounded us.

  Another silence, just as hard, filled the break. His vocal cords were rusty.

  “Not in here,” he said.

  A swelling around his left eye gave his face a lopsided look. Nearly a month had passed since his tussle with the guards and he still hadn’t healed completely. I could only guess how many welts and bruises were concealed by the uniform.

  “I’m Murdock, deputy United States marshal. I’ve got a badge if you care to see it.”

  “Why’d you lie about a thing like that?”

  I searched the gaunt face for some sign of amusement. It looked like a place where smiles went to die. I asked him if he wanted to talk about Butte.

  “Nice town,” he said. “Up to a point.”

  “The point where you got shot?”