The Stranglers Page 3

  I took some long breaths. This hike on top of so many days in the saddle was starting to make the tendons in my legs twitch like guitar strings. "You don't need me there. You've got half a dozen witnesses who saw him shoot the surveyor."

  "I'm adding the murders of two deputy U.S. marshals to the original charge. You're the only witness to that act."

  "I'll get a message to the kid at Painted Rock. He saw as much as I did. More."

  "He'll be summoned. But your testimony as an expert will draw more water with the jury."

  That was that. You argued with Blackthorne only so long and then you knew he had hunkered down like a buffalo in a blizzard and wasn't going to move. His house was in sight now, a two-story whitewashed affair with a colonnaded porch that was also a balcony. The grateful citizens of Helena had built it for the man who had come to a tent city with a copy of the United States Penal Code under one arm and a presidential appointment in his pocket before there was even a jail and set up business in a room behind one of the saloons where the prostitutes took their customers at night. A hellhole when he found it, the city had been made the territory's third capital mainly through his taming influence and that of the men he had appointed to enforce the law. He hated the house, considered it pretentious, but his wife was comfortable there and though he wouldn't admit it he was flattered by the gift.

  "I lost three more deputies to the silver strikes while you were gone," he told me. "That puts us at exactly half the strength we were this time last year. And Gordon's down with the gout again." Bill Gordon was the U.S. marshal assigned to Montana. "I wired the president to appoint a temporary replacement with power to deputize help. He's agreed."

  "Who's he sending?"

  "Jordan Mercy."

  "Oh, that's just dandy," I said after a moment.

  "He's a lawman. Gordon's a paper-shuffler."

  "Mercy's a butcher, and a crook to boot. He'll deputize his brothers and cut himself in on all the gambling interests in town just like he did in Phoenix and Topeka. You'll do as well to spring Sugar Jim from jail and swear him in."

  "I didn't swear in Mercy," he said. "The president did, or had it done for him months ago. In any case you'll do well to get along with him. Washington City wired him in Bannack and he'll be here day after tomorrow."

  We paused in front of his porch steps. He never invited deputies or court employees inside, something to do with a promise he had made Mrs. Blackthorne early on about not conducting business in the house. I had started to turn away when I remembered the lynching. I turned back and told him about the two hanged men.

  His brow grew dark. "Stranglers. They've been busy lately. Last month they strung up a sheriff up in the Bear's Paw, and two weeks before that a railroad detective outside Fort Benton. Likely there are more we haven't heard about yet."

  "These two were John Does," I said. "You think it's the same bunch doing them all?"

  "It had better be." He was using the bottom step to scrape dirt off the soles of his stout walking shoes. "Or we'll be dangling a lot more men from a proper gallows than we have in a spell. Don't forget to tell Mercy about this."

  He mounted the porch and went inside. The Judge had a fiery temper, but he had learned to control it over the years. There were just two things left that could break it loose. One was any young lawyer from anywhere back East who thought he could slip a fancy courtroom tactic past the Judge's nose because they weren't supposed to know about such things beyond the Adirondacks. The other was lynching.

  I made my way back to town on throbbing legs. It was starting to fill up with horses and wagons belonging to "morning miners," prospectors who picked and panned for three or four hours and knocked off at noon to drink and lie away the rest of the day in the saloons and hurdy-gurdy houses. The faces kept changing, because it was the ones who stayed out all day and never appeared in town except maybe once a week to empty a glass and pick up supplies who made money. The others tapped out early and went home saying that the only gold and silver in Montana was in the merchants' teeth. Piano music dribbled out of bat-wing doors and the balconies were blooming red and green satin and pink parasols. The faces under the parasols were getting younger and easier to look at, which meant the strikes were still good. It was when they got old and mannish that you knew things were sour. The young ones had the energy to go where the money was and the sixth sense that told them where it wasn't any more. They were always the first to know. The prospectors were always the last. But they kept walking around with their eyes on the ground when they should have been looking up at the balconies.

  I spent an hour soaking off the dust in my favorite bathhouse, a place ostensibly run by an apple-cheeked Irishman named Faolin who had left his foreman's job for the Great Northern Railroad when a sledgehammer crushed his foot, but that really belonged to an old mandarin who knew that not many white frontiersmen wanted to wash in water provided by a Chinaman. I wasn't so particular. I got some of my best thinking done sitting in one of those scalding tubs with steam curling around my ears, shaving.

  Contrary to what you may read, the time between interesting goings-on was generally a lot longer out there than it was in the East. Even when you were with the law you went a spell without getting shot at. I liked quiet, it was a thing I looked forward to coming back to when my lungs were full up with spent powder. But just now we had a boy killer in custody, a bloodthirsty Indian running wild, gold strikes east of town, silver strikes southwest of town, a four-bit Wild West show making things noisy in town, and strangles.

  With all that, we hardly needed Jordan Mercy.

  FOUR

  Colonel Hookstratton's circus rig was still in the street when I came out in my city clothes, but there was no sign of its owner or his two companions. The mangy buffalo was still tied up at the hitching rail, its head drooping, too far gone to raise its tail and twitch off the flies buzzing around its shedding rump. It smelled like burning trash. A pair of morning miners in their twenties leaned on a porch post nearby looking at the beast. Red river clay clung to their boots and the knees of their overalls.

  "Two of him wouldn't make a respectable cow," observed one, picking his teeth with a thumbnail. His partner snickered and spat into the street.

  "Five years ago he'd have stomped your brains out through your ears if you tried to blindside him," I told the first.

  He looked at me and said, "Yeah?" but he was just being polite to an old-timer of past thirty. The big shaggies were getting scarce even then. I went on to Chicago Joe's.

  The place was half full of customers at the long back bar and at the tables opposite the varnished dance floor, their conversations brushing the rafters. The little stage where the three-piece band played was unoccupied, but their instruments were in place and there were two bartenders on duty in white shirts and red sleeve garters behind a row of brass beerpulls. A smoked mirror with a gilt frame and some tasteful advertising signs depicting sparrow-waisted young women in starched blouses and picture hats decorated the wall behind the bartenders. The familiar, wiry figure of the Duke was visible to the left, immaculate as always in white linen and black broadcloth, his gold watch chain describing a glittering arc across his waistcoat. He nodded when I caught his eye but otherwise showed no expression behind the chin whiskers that hung to his cravat. His polished British accent and dandified attire never interfered with his handling of the staff and disorderly patrons.

  I bought a nickel glass of beer and took it to a table, and two minutes later I had company. A twenty-year-old girl with a pompadour of yellow hair and ruffled lace to her neck looked down at me through a cloud of scent so thick I could see it. "My name's Jackie. Would you like to dance?"

  I glanced at the deserted bandstand.

  She said, "You could buy me a drink while we're waiting."

  I asked where Joe was.

  "She's in back. But she's old."

  I said, "She's a year younger than I am. Anyway, it's conversation I'm after. I'm just off two weeks in the company of men and you get tired of talking about guns and horses."

  "I can talk."

  "You're too young. You'd dry up too quick."

  She rustled away, ivory heels punching angry half-moons in the floor's glossy surface. I sipped my beer. It tasted of her scent.

  Twice more I fended off female companionship. I really did want to talk to Joe. Right name Josephine Hensley, she had come out from Chicago in 1867 at the age of twenty-three with a string of girls and some notions of her own about how her type of establishment should be run. She had since moved from her original log building to larger quarters, taking her clientele with her, and when you wanted to know what was happening in town you bypassed the newspaper office and went straight to her. But today she was tied up with the books or something. I was about to drain my glass and leave when Hookstratton came in with black-clad Frank Willard in tow.

  The Colonel spoke to one of the bartenders, who nodded in my direction. The pair looked over at me, Hookstratton curiously, his pet gunman narrow-eyed and dead of face. A look I knew too damn well. I made some arrangements with the Deane-Adams while they were on their way over.

  "Page Murdock?" Hookstratton's baritone had the same mellow power at this reduced distance. The Mormon hat clung to the back of his head now and he had traded his gaudy jacket for a wrinkled black tailcoat and a swollen vest with cigar ash in the creases. Up close he had tiny, protuberant eyes, glass-blue, and a little triangular tuft of white in the hollow of his chin. A pattern of burst vessels made purple tributaries on his cheeks. He smelled of tobacco and whiskey and a good six weeks since his last bath.

  I said, "Where's the chief?"

  Confusion pouched his smooth fat face for an instant, then passed. "Oh, you mean Belly. He is outside. I fear he
is not welcome where liquor is purchased and imbibed. I was not aware that we had made each other's acquaintance, sir."

  "I caught a piece of your show outside."

  "Just so. It is our humble lot to edify and to entertain."

  "And to sell Doctor Ernest's Nectar for whatever's ailing you at the moment," I added.

  He made a gesture of dismissal. "We have been carrying the same case of dusty bottles since last July. The public does not trust you unless you have something to sell. Forgive my Philistine manners. Page Murdock, Frank Wil-lard."

  I kept both hands under the table, not that the man in black had offered to shake either of them. His face was blade-thin under the Texas hat and badly pockmarked. He had a weak mouth and the intense, beady kind of stare you get from hours spent practicing in front of a mirror. For all that his eyes had a dull, empty look, and I realized that what passed for cool deliberation and lightning reflexes outside was just lightning reflexes with nothing behind them. My scalp moved.

  "What can I do for you, Colonel?" I was watching Wil-lard.

  Hookstratton made a pleasant rippling noise in his throat. "Frank, another beer for the marshal, please, and the usual for me."

  The young man in black measured me out some more of his dead glare, then removed himself, his shimmering boots making no noise at all on the floor. At the bar, yellow-haired Jackie saw something her age approaching and slunk forward to intercept him. He swept her hand off his shoulder with a vicious slash of his gun arm and kept walking.

  "Your boy doesn't like women," I said.

  With a grunt, Hookstratton planted his broad buttocks in the chair opposite mine, depositing a thick parcel swathed in ragged eastern newspapers atop the table. "He fears them. He is of the opinion they will drain him of vital energy."

  "He's right. Where'd you find him?"

  "Sweeping out the railroad station in Dodge for a dollar a week and found."

  "That before or after he single-handedly wiped out the infamous Turner gang?"

  His tiny eyes searched my face for a moment. Then he smiled, displaying a gold tooth behind his white handlebars. "One is allowed certain license in his quest for an audience. In point of fact, his only victims to date have been the occasional empty bottle and an incredible number of peach tins. So far as I am aware."

  "Who taught him to shoot?"

  "It is my understanding that he taught himself, employing an ancient Dragoon pistol whose cylinder he was forced to hold in place with his free hand in order that the hammer would strike the cap."

  "A natural gunman," I reflected, watching Willard pay for the drinks. "I heard they existed. He's the first I've met."

  "I observed him practicing behind the station, whereupon I took away his broom, gave him those Colts and that outfit, and began this tour. At the time I had but the wagon and the Indian and Caesar."

  "Caesar?"

  "The buffalo. God love you, lad."

  Willard had returned with another glass of beer and a bottle of whiskey and a shot glass for the Colonel. He set them down on the table, spun a chair, and straddled it with his arms folded over the back, his blank eyes staring at nothing in particular.

  Hookstratton filled his glass from the bottle, proposed a silent toast, and knocked down its contents. As the coppery flush came to his veined cheeks: "I'm told you brought in Sugar Jim Creel today."

  "Me and some others," I acknowledged.

  "Your modesty is misplaced. Your reputation has not eluded me in my frontier odyssey. You are often spoken of in the same breath with the late Mr. Hickok."

  I sipped my beer and said nothing.

  He topped off his glass again, drank off half of it, set it down, and undid the string on his parcel with a flourish. Parting the brittle newsprint, he thumbed something out of what looked like a stack of sawtooth paper inside and slid it across the table. It was a book with a brown paper cover, on which was drawn a crouched figure in black ink, a six shooter sneezing smoke and fire from his left hand. Sugar Jim's Last Chance, read the bold curlicued legend. By Jack Rimfire.

  "Who's Jack Rimfire?"

  He drew in his chin self-deprecatingly, sinking it in rings of suet cross-hatched with old dirt. "He is I. Or rather, I am he. The nom de plume has been made honorable by George Eliot."

  I didn't know who he was either, but didn't ask. I flipped through the rough-cut pages idly. According to what was printed on them, Creel averaged fourteen shots to a revolver without reloading and could shoot with either hand and his teeth and pluck the eye out of an ant at forty paces.

  "The style is a tad purple," Hookstratton apologized. "My readers expect it."

  I slid the book back in his direction. "I'm glad I didn't read that going in. Appears I was lucky not to have to call in the army. How long have you known Sugar Jim?"

  "We have not yet made each other's acquaintance. I was hoping to correct that situation on this visit. His arrest has greatly increased those hopes."

  "See the Judge. Creel's his responsibility now."

  "Just so. However, that is not what I am here to discuss." The musicians had returned to the bandstand and were tuning up their instruments. Hookstratton leaned forward, resting his fat forearms on the table and raising his voice above the plink-plunking of the piano and rusty squeals and squawks from the violin. "I do not intend to spend my declining years hawking medicine for the amusement of the soporific. I envision a grand prairie spectacle, re-creating under the broad blue skies the dash and grandeur of the frontier saga—mounted warriors in paint and feathers, charging ranks of cavalry, thundering herds of buffalo, the snap and rattle and bitter smoke of grim showdowns on hardpack streets between desperadoes and the guardians of law and civilization. I see souvenir hunters lining up forty deep at booths to buy signed photographs of the performers and literature telling of their real-life exploits. My vision includes performances in all the great cities of the globe, before all the leaders of the New and the Old World. A genuinely and uniquely American entertainment designed for international consumption."

  "Sounds like a circus."

  "Not the bogus vulgar inflation of the circus, but its exact and diametrical opposite: American history, retold as it happened, by the men who made it. Which brings me to you."

  "I kind of figured it would."

  "Mind you, this is not an overnight proposition. It requires patience and strict attention to detail. We will commence with a first-person account as told to Jack Rimfire of your capture of Sugar Jim Creel, a slim volume of, say, a hundred pages, but packed with action and the raw excitement of the hunt. More of your adventures will follow. Say, three months between them, to build reader suspense. Then when your name is sufficiently known we will stage a shooting contest between you and Frank in St. Louis or Denver, publicize it heavily before the event, which of course will end in a draw. Then—"

  "Save it for Toby Shingledecker's pasture," I said. "I'm not interested."

  "Wait, you have not heard me out."

  "I've heard my fill. Being a lawman makes me target enough. I have to walk on the shady side of the street now. If you make another Hickok of me I'll have to wait for sundown just to go out."

  "The Colonel ain't finished."

  I looked at Willard. He had a harsh whispery voice that cut through the music coming from the band. Joe's girls had latched on to some miners and were taking turns around the floor. They were admiring muscles and shambling footwork and didn't see the half-wit straddling the chair watching me with his hands curled at his ribs over the guns in his twin holsters. His eyes held that same burning look with only hollow skull behind it.

  "Whistle him off," I told Hookstratton, without looking away from Willard.

  The Colonel refilled his glass with a steady hand. "Frank is not offering an altogether unworkable compromise," he said. "Your demise would place the events of your life in public domain. I could then write the book and include an epilogue describing your unhappy fate. The Man Who Shot the Man Who Captured Sugar Jim is Byzantine billing, but acceptable."

  "What about The Man Who Shot Frank Willard and Colonel Aaron Hookstratton?"

  That took some time to seep in. The whiskey was dulling his brain even as it brightened his eyes. To help things along I cocked the Deane-Adams under the table. It made a noise like dried walnuts husks crackling underfoot.