Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

9.

LABOR, n. – One of the processes by which A acquires property for B.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

I was sitting on my bed in my nightshirt when there was a knock, and another, very peremptory, as I started toward the door. When I opened it a man shoved in past me, breathing hard as though he’d just run up the stairs. He was the gent the watchman had called “Major” from the Consolidated-Ohio Mine. Major Copley.

He swung around to face me, no one but me to talk to this time. I felt at a disadvantage in my slippers and nightshirt. The gasjet hissed.

I asked him what he wanted.

“You are a newspaper sneak, sir!”

I had put down The Hornet as my employer when I had registered at the hotel.

“Hanging around poking and prying!”

“That is my job,” I said.

He folded his arms. He wore a blue flannel shirt buttoned at the neck, beneath his black jacket. He was a big-chested, powerful man, maybe six feet tall in his black boots.

“I know your ilk! Sniffing scandals. Sniffing and scraping for your kind of cat’s vomit tricks. Sniffing for English!”

English?

I said I was interested in the Jack of Spades Mine.

He gritted his teeth at me. “This camp was poisoned by spying and lies told and bamboozle. Spies and sneaks. I am sick of it!”

“I’m not spying on you, Major.”

He snatched from his coat pocket a nickle-plated derringer and pointed it at my forehead, squinting along the little barrel. “What do you think of that, Mister Newspaper Sneak?”

It was interesting the advantage you felt when the other fellow produced a firearm.

“I don’t think much of it,” I said.

He held the little piece aimed at my forehead, shaking it and showing me his lower teeth.

“There are abandoned mine shafts under our feet, sir!” he said. “Dead men inhabit them, sir!” He pocketed the derringer and lurched out of the room.

He slammed the door behind him.

In the night the wind came up. The curtains bellied into the room like ghosts clinging to the sash. I heard cans banging together, panes rattled. I had written up my notes for Bierce. One of the Spades, Albert Gorton, had been murdered, “clubbed” as the letter to Bierce had put it; another was named Macomber, still another was so far unidentified. One of these must have written the letter to Bierce.

Lady Caroline’s managers had cleared out her interests in the Consolidated-Ohio a year or eighteen months ago. Devers had spoken of her with affection, maybe more than affection‌—‌as “the Miners’ Angel.” That affection didn’t seem to include Nat McNair.

The Major was worried that I was spying. Spying on what? What did “English” have to do with anything?

And what did any of this have to do with the murder of two Morton Street whores and a judge’s widow, in San Francisco?

My waiter at breakfast was the dwarf, Jimmy Fairleigh. The wind whooped along the street in great wallops of dust that battered against the hotel windows like hail. Men came in, cursing and beating their hats against their clothing. I thought that Devers would not be early at the office so I made a leisurely breakfast. Jimmy Fairleigh cleared the table and brought me more coffee. His heavy, anxious face was out of scale to his frame, more old than young, I could see now. He identified the wind as a “Washoe Zephyr.”

Before he got away, I said, “I shouldn’t imagine Mr. Devers would be early at his office this morning.”

“He’ll be there,” he said. “Comes in early rain or shine. Up on B Street.”

“I’m interested in talking to anybody who knew Caroline LaPlante,” I said.

He cleared the dishes and stacked them on his arm as though he hadn’t heard me.

The Zephyr scoured B Street. Sheets of newspaper flapped through the air like seabirds, and an empty fruit can rolled and clanked. A brown dog was blown along with it, trotting obliquely with the wind pushing him. I turned up my collar and kept a hand on my hat. The wind was more of an inducement to get out of Virginia City than Major Copley’s threats had been.

Devers was visible through a window that had VIRGINIA SENTINEL painted on it. He wore a green eyeshade and sat at a rolltop desk with a hand supporting his cheek. He glanced up without enthusiasm as I came in, pushing the door closed against the wind.

“Does it blow like this a good deal?”

“It’ll blow like this awhile,” he said, nodding. “Then it will bull up and blow hard for awhile.” He indicated a chair. He looked more sickly than he had last night in the dimness of the saloon.

I told him that I’d had a visit from Major Copley in the night.

“Ah!”

“Ranted about spies and sneaks.”

Devers kept his eyes fixed on one of the pigeonholes of his desk. “They got pretty skittish about being spied on, there at the Con-Ohio.”

“What happened?”

“There was some fuss they’d just as soon didn’t get out and about.”

“What’s ‘English’ mean?”

“Well, that’s the English shuffle.”

“What’s that?”

“Way it was worked, the stock was stuck in low figures so the news got out that a drill hole had run into an orebody. Looked like a bonanza. There was a jump in the stock, and they sold out better off. But when they drifted on in there was nothing doing. It’d been salted. Major Copley took a deal of criticism, but he was as fooled as anybody as far as I can make out.”

“Why English?” I said. “Because of Lady Caroline?”

“No, no, no; Carrie wouldn’t have anything to do with truck like that. Fellow that first devised the business was an Englishman. Maybe he was named English. The way he worked it out for McNair had one more hook to it. They leak out the news there’s a strike, then nothing comes of it like it’s a salting trick, but there’s an orebody, all right. So then they buy up the shares on the cheap.”

It was difficult to sort through the convolutions of the English shuffle.

“You said you had a tintype of the Spades I could have.”

He lifted his head as though it was very heavy. “Spades?”

I reminded him.

“Oh, it wouldn’t be here,” he said. “All the files are down in Carson, I don’t have them here.”

“You promised me that tintype,” I said.

“Have to come back. I’ll be going down there in a week or so, look for it then. You’ll have to come back.”

“That tintype is worth fifty dollars to me,” I said, hoping I could convince Bierce and Mr. Macgowan that the tintype was worth such a sum. “You send me that tintype and I’ll send you fifty dollars.”

“Done!”

“In that tintype are the people I’m interested in. McNair, Caroline LaPlante, a man named Gorton and another named Macomber, and a third man. Who was the third man?”

He shook his head. A blast of wind peppered the window. “Don’t exactly remember anybody named Macomber either.”

“That enforcer of McNair’s named Klosters. Might he have enforced Gorton in San Francisco?”

“You didn’t hear that from me.”

“Clubbed him why? Something to do with the Jack of Spades? Troublesome to McNair?”

“I don’t know any of that,” Devers said. He swung full-face toward me for the first time. “Listen, young fellow. You go around asking questions like that and you will get some answers you are not going to like.”

I rose, dropped my card on his desk and said, “I want that tintype, however.”

“You’ll have it,” Devers said. “Get out of here and blow away now.”

I let myself out into a blast of wind filled with grit.

Back at the hotel I encountered Jimmy Fairleigh in the lobby. He wore a long denim apron and swabbed the tiles with a mop with a flail of soaking cloth at the end, which he slapped from side to side. He set the mop in its pail and beckoned me into the empty dining room.

“I used to work at the Miner’s Rest,” he said.

“I will pay for information.”

He indicated the table where I’d had breakfast, and I sat down. He remained standing before me, his short arms crossed on his chest, his ugly face contorted anxiously.

“I’d work for Carrie sometimes when I was just a kit, running errands and such. She is a fine woman. I will tell you I have never thought higher of a woman than her.”

He stared at me with an expression I didn’t understand, maybe defiance.

I said I was a friend of her son’s, inquiring into some matters that concerned him about his mother’s days in Virginia City.

“After Julia Bulette got murdered there was no keeping her here. Thought it was bound to happen to her.”

Who was Julia Bulette?

“Hoor. Sometimes she worked out of Carrie’s place. Frenchy bastard killed her. They strung him up!”

“How was she killed?”

“Beat on, strangled, shot. Crime of passion, they called it. She was dead. It was a fright to Carrie. There was no holding her here then. Said she’d marry one of those fellows that was always proposing to her and get out of town and out of the business.”

“Who was proposing?”

“Fancy fellows! Sharon was married, but he’d’ve set her up in style. Nat McNair, that she did marry. There was others, just about every Jim, George and Will in town.”

I asked if he knew of the Spades. “They had to do with the Jack of Spades Mine.”

“Oh, yes,” he said vaguely. “Dolph Jackson and them. McNair.”

“Did Carrie have a special gent?”

“She had her favorites. Dolph; he was a funny one, made her laugh, took her for rides in his buggy. She liked that. And the Englishman. Very high-tone! And there was the piano player at the Miner’s Rest, I forget his name.” He rubbed the back of his neck as though to revive his memory. “She was a woman any man would want to lock up in his house just for himself.”

I thought he was one who had loved her, though he had said he was just a kit.

“Macomber?”

“Sure, Eddie Macomber.”

“Al Gorton?”

He nodded his big head. “Bald fellow with a bunged-up eye.”

“Man named Elza Klosters?”

After some thought, he shook his head. “Nothing to do with Carrie.”

I took a breath and said, “Cletus Redmond?”

“Didn’t know anybody by that name. Just what is it you want, Mister?”

“So Carrie was frightened when one of her whores was murdered and decided that she had to leave town and make a good marriage.”

“She was in a family way!” he blurted.

“She was?”

He licked his lips. “Now you show me some money, Mister, or I don’t have no more to say.”

I gave him three dollars, which was all I could afford. He tucked it into a pocket inside his apron. Yes, Carrie had been in a family way. He didn’t know who the father was. Could’ve been any of several. There was nothing more to be got out of Jimmy Fairleigh, either because he knew no more, or he had already told me more than he’d meant to, or because my three dollars had not sufficed him or because his loyalty to Caroline LaPlante prevented any more discussion of her male connections.

“If you see Carrie you tell her Jimmy Fairleigh will always remember her,” he said.

In the hotel in Reno where I spent the night, I woke up with names running through my head. English. Englishman. Britain. James M. Brittain, Amelia’s father, had been a mining engineer in the Comstock. Every Jim, George and Will. I didn’t sleep any more, considering withholding this connection from Bierce, because of my attachment to Miss Amelia Brittain.