Read White Desert Online

Authors: Loren D. Estleman

White Desert (3 page)

BOOK: White Desert
2.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads
At the door I looked back at the mustang. It met my gaze, tossed its black mane, and grinned its hangman's grin.
“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,
he 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.
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.
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 trees 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.”
BOOK: White Desert
2.38Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

Other books

Grandmother and the Priests by Taylor Caldwell
The Pastor's Wife by Diane Fanning
My Booky Wook 2 by Brand, Russell
A Son Of The Circus by John Irving
Just Like a Musical by Veen, Milena
Dark Chocolate Murder by West, Anisa Claire
Saving Stella by Brown, Eliza
Touching the Past by Ilene Kaye