Sliphammer

Three

The train brought him up a green valley at dawn, with the sky brightening cobalt and full daylight just cresting the westward peaks, dazzling the snow caps. Up ahead, green meadows ran up curving slopes into forests of aspen and pine. Here and there on the mountains he saw the thick columns of mill and smelter smoke.

The train threaded a field of brown-eyed yellow daisy buds and made a long, easy bend. Past the high, narrow locomotive he saw signs of civilization by the tracks: a dairy farm, a few houses, a deep-rutted ore wagon road, wooden mailboxes at graveled intersections. The train curled past a brewery and a small paint factory and a cement mill covered with gray powder. Sidings of polished rails began to proliferate beside the main line. Through the trees ahead he could make out the packed buildings of end-of-track Gunnison town. The bank of the river pushed close against the railroad yards; the train sighed and clanked and eased into the station gingerly.

Gunnison was a new town: two years ago it hadn’t been here at all. Trees grew thick everywhere there wasn’t a building because there hadn’t been time to clear land that wasn’t needed for immediate use. A few trees even grew in the streets.

Sliphammer Tree jumped down before the train had come to its full stop; he walked across the depot platform with a carpetbag in his right hand and a sheepskin-lined mackinaw under his arm. The sun’s rim sat on top of a mountain saddle. His lank, tall, striding body threw a long, skinny shadow.

He went around to the front loading deck, built as high off the ground as a freight wagon’s tailboard. Four steps, cut into the platform, let him down onto the street. He looked both ways before he went on.

The town was crowded together by trees and by the knees and elbows of mountains. It seemed without regular pattern; the center of activity seemed to be a few blocks north of him, signified by a cluster of two-story buildings with pitched roofs. He went that way. Sidewalks appeared, guarded by glassed-in gaslights on posts. He passed stores, an opera house, saloons, the Globe Theater, even a bookshop. Obviously the city fathers had foreverness in mind. The buildings were sturdy, some of them enormous, with the shambling, graceless opulence of Victorian splendor. The only giveaway that most of them had been thrown up hurriedly was that they were built of green lumber, already starting to warp and yaw.

It was cool; a few pedestrians were abroad; a water wagon trundled along, spraying the street to keep the dust down. Here and there shopkeepers were opening their establishments. Smoke came from a Chinese cafe’s kitchen and hunger drove him that way.

Procrastinating, he sat by the front window at a table hardly big enough for a plate and two elbows, wondering what Wyatt Earp was like. Steak, eggs, and coffee came; he knocked the flies off and began to eat. It was fresh-killed beef, not aged, and he had to work his teeth on it; the coffee was the chuckwagon variety-“If you put a horseshoe in it and the horseshoe sinks, it ain’t strong enough.” He paid for the two-dollar breakfast and wondered how long he would be able to survive these boom-town prices; gathered up his carpetbag and coat, and went out. The streets were busier than they had been. He threaded his way across the street through a traffic of ore wagons and buckboards and solitary horsemen, into the narrow lobby of a small hotel; awakened a drowsing night clerk and signed “Jeremiah R. Tree” in his crabbed hand; and found his way back to a first-floor room with a six-foot ceiling that made him stoop. The room was hardly big enough to accommodate the iron-frame, straw-tick bed and the commode. He filled the pitcher at the hallway pump,” washed in the commode basin, left his carpetbag and coat in the room, and locked the door when he left. Three paces down the hall his boot scuffed a hard object in the accumulated dust of the floor and he stooped to pick it up-a tenpenny nail. After a moment’s speculation he returned to the door of his room and wedged the nail between door and jamb, at a distance below the top that matched the length of his forearm from fingertip to bent elbow. If anyone opened the door, the nail would fall out, and even if the intruder noticed it and tried to replace it, he would not’ know exactly where it had been.

It was habit, he thought; not that he owned anything worth stealing. But he didn’t want to be caught by surprise by someone waiting inside the room.

By the time he reached the street the traffic was intense. Dairy and egg wagons crowded past huge ore rigs and ten-team freight outfits with riding mule skinners who whooped and cursed. Standing above the dust and din, he put the pipe in his mouth and struck a match to it, and squinted along the street, wondering which one of the buildings housed Wy att Earp and company.

A block away, on the same side of the street, two men stood outside a doorway. They were looking at him. He stared back. One of the men pointed at Tree, spoke to his companion, received the man’s nod, and went away. The man who remained was tall, lean, and white-haired. He lifted a long arm and beckoned.

Tree looked behind him, but there was no one else the man could have been signaling. With one eyebrow cocked, he left the hotel porch and walked upstreet toward the white-haired man, who waited without a smile, stirring slightly so that he came into the bladed edge of the sun falling past the corner of the building. A badge on his shirt picked up the light and lanced it into Tree’s eyes.

Tree was still half a dozen paces away when the white-haired man spoke; the voice was deep and curiously well modulated: “I’ve got a pot of fresh coffee inside if you’d care to join me.”

Without waiting an answer, the white-haired man turned inside. It was, Tree saw now, the sheriff’s office; a little shingle sign above the door said GUNNISON COUNTY SHERIFF: O. J. McKESSON.

When Tree went inside, the white-haired man was standing by a black iron stove whose chimney pipe staggered back to the ceiling corner in a series of steplike elbows. It made the room look more like a foundry boiler room than an office. A corridor of jail cells lay past an open door at the back of the room. There was a rolltop pigeon-hole desk against one wall, flap open and cluttered; there was the obligatory locked rack of guns; and there were three chairs and a spittoon. Otherwise the room was bare, uncluttered, and scrupulously clean, reflecting the careful dress and manicured appearance of the white-haired man himself. It didn’t remind Tree of Sheriff Paul’s office in Tucson, where every day for the past year and a half Tree had had to pick a path through an incredible litter.

Tree absorbed it all in the time it took his alert eyes to sweep the room once. When he let the screen door slam behind him on its spring, the white-haired man was holding up a coffee pot andpouring into two tin cups both of which were hooked to one finger. The coffee steamed as it flowed out of the pot.

The white-haired man put the pot on the stove, set one cup on a corner of the rolltop and gestured toward it. “Help yourself. You’re Tree?”

“Yes.”

“I’m McKesson.” The white-haired man offered his hand. The fingers were long and brown; his handshake was hard and brief. Up close, the elegance of his face was marred by the rough pitting of an old skin disease.

“Have a seat-let’s talk.” McKesson sat down, blew across his coffee, and watched Tree from under thick, white brows. He was obviously aware of the impressive effect of his suntanned face against the bright white thick hair. Every body movement was made with self-conscious poise. He had hawked, predatory features, fingers like the claws of a bird of prey, gleaming violet eyes that missed nothing.

Tree said, “You know who I am, then you know why I’m here.”

“I had a wire from Sheriff Paul.” McKesson had large white teeth; they formed an accidental smile when his lips peeled back from the too-hot coffee. He lowered the cup and licked his lips and said conversationally, “Personally, I’d advise you to forget it, young fellow.”

“Forget what?”

“Wyatt Earp. He’ll destroy you-he’ll swat you like a fly, if you get in his way.” Absently, he made a face at the coffee and put the cup down to’ cool. He leaned back, crossing his legs and hooking one arm over the back of the chair, and in a sleepy way he added, “You’ll never get him out of this town if he doesn’t want to go.”

“Funny way for you to talk,” said Tree.

“Why? Because I wear a badge and you and I are supposed to be on the same side?”

“You might say that.”

“I might, but I won’t. You see, I’m an elected official with a duty to the constituency that voted me into office.”

“What’s that got to do with Earp? He didn’t vote for you.”

“His friends did,” McKesson murmured, smiling a little. He was being deliberately mysterious and it irritated Tree.

Tree said, “All right, since you want me to ask. What friends?”

It made McKesson laugh. “Very good. I’m glad to see you’re not the usual kind of bumbling half-assed farmer they use for deputy sheriffs down in Arizona.”

“Spare me the kind words, Sheriff. Get to the point, if you’ve got one.”

One bushy white eyebrow went up, a warning sort of expression that might have been accompanied by tongue-clucking. “Easy, young fellow,” McKesson said. “You haven’t got so many friends in his bailiwick that you can afford to alienate me.”

“I didn’t know we were friends.”

“I’m doing my best to be friendly,” McKesson answered. “I’m trying to give you some advice that may save your skin. What could be friendlier than that?”

“You said something about Wyatt Earp’s friends.”

“Friends,” the sheriff echoed. “Everybody’s somebody’s friend.” His hard smile did not give him the disarming appearance it was evidently intended to provide.

Patiently, Tree reached for the coffee and tasted it. It was a far cry better than the Chinese cafe’s.

McKesson said, “You’ll have to forgive me. I like to act as if I’m absentminded and vague-as if I’m not aware of events. It’s often an effective pose-it puts people off their guard, which makes it easier to get around them and cut them off. I should warn you I’m an overeducated old fart but I’m not as slow as I appear.”

“I’ll bear it in mind.”

“You do that. Now, about Earp and his friends. You arrive here one bright sunny morning all by yourself, evidently expecting to be able to do single-handed what a small army couldn’t do. In the interests of keeping the peace, which is what I’m hired to do, I feel it’s incumbent on me to alert you to the realities of the situation you’re in. You’ve been posted up here to keep surveillance on the Earps until you get word from Denver that Governor Pitkin’s signed the extradition papers. At that point you’re supposed to arrest Wyatt and Warren Earp and take them back to Arizona in custody. Is that right?”

“Sure.”

“Do you think you can do that? If you do, you’re a fool. How do you expect to pull it off?” McKesson looked as if he were genuinely curious.

Tree gave him a long scrutiny, trying to see past the mask of wordy pomposity. Clearly McKesson was, as he said he was, a lot faster than he appeared: if he wasn’t, he wouldn’t have this job. A mining boom camp was no place for an addle-headed old law man.

Tree decided it might be profitable to play McKesson’s own game. And so he said, “Let’s put it this way. If I don’t have a plan, I’d be stupid to admit I was that much of a fool. And if I do have one, I’d be stupid to tell you what it is.” And he smiled.

The white eyebrow went up again. “Smart,” McKesson commented. “Smarter than I took you for-and coming from me that’s both a compliment and a confession. I rarely fail to size a man up correctly at first crack. You took me by surprise twice. Either I’m slipping or you’re a damned clever young man.”

“Uh-hunh.” Tree was beginning to enjoy the game; he would have enjoyed it more if it hadn’t been for the looming shadow of Wyatt Earp, which lay dark in the back of his mind and colored every thought and deed.

McKesson said, “I do like you. You size up like a man. I think you deserve a free lesson in politics-it may save your life.”

“I thought we were talking about friends.”

“We are. To a man like Wyatt Earp, friends and politics mean the same thing.”

“All right. You’re in a mood to lecture-I’ll listen.”

“Smart,” McKesson remarked again, and then he chuckled. “If you’d known me longer you’d know I’m always in a mood to lecture. Lately I haven’t had many good audiences, though, unless you count the drunks I gather into the fold every night. All right, young fellow, settle back and enjoy your coffee and try to appreciate my wisdom as much as it deserves. I’ll tell you about Gunnison and I’ll tell you about Wyatt Earp, and his politics, and his friends.”

McKesson was smiling-but his eyes were at odds with his lips. He spoke with a flat down-East accent, Tree noticed.

McKesson said, “We’ve got a tough Httle town often thousand tough people here. It’s a new mining region but it’s rich as hell. If you’ve seen the town, and you couldn’t have helped that this morning, then you’ve seen that — it’s a spectacular monument to what unlimited money and baroque bad taste can achieve. That ought to tell you something about the kind of men who built this town-the men who still own it. There are about fifty of them all told-strike-it-rich millionaires. Two years ago almost every one of them was a down-and-out prospector. They’ve got all the money in the world but they’ve got no traditions, no education, no taste, and not a hell of a lot of good sense. I’ve seen two of them sit in the lobby of the Inter Ocean Hotel during a cloudburst and bet fifty thousand dollars on which of two raindrops would first reach the bottom of a windowpane.”

The sheriff sipped coffee and cleared his throat. “Now, these old boys made their strikes just in the past couple of years, and big-money mining’s changed a good deal since the old days when they used to pan and sluice. The fortunes that are being made in these mountains are coming out of deep shafts in the ground, not out of creek-bed gravel. It takes a lot of manpower to dig a thousand-foot mine shaft and drag ore out by the thousands of tons and wagon it down into the smelters and mill it down into pure metal. A hell of a lot of manpower. For every overnight millionaire in Gunnison there are a couple of hundred hardscrab-ble miners working for day wages. Or more-some of these mines carry payrolls of six or eight hundred men. Nowadays a lot of these miners think they aren’t getting paid enough or looked after well enough. We’ve got a troublesome little bunch of loudmouthed agitators frdm back East calling themselves Knights of Labor trying to form strike unions. Maybe you’ve heard what happened in Leadville and Creede when they tried the same thing-a lot of heads were smashed.”

“I heard,” Tree murmured, lulled by the rambling run of the sheriff’s voice. “What’s this got to do with me?”

“I’m coming to that. Let’s look and see what we’ve got here. We’ve got a handful of lucky millionaires who want to stay rich and get richer, and we’ve got thousands of unhappy miners being stirred up by radical agitators, and into the middle of this comes a big man with handlebar mustaches and two revolvers and a big-gun reputation that’s made him as much of a legend as Wild Bill Hickok. This is the man who licked the Clan tons in Tombstone, the man the dime novels call the Lion of Tombstone.”

McKesson paused to see what effect his speech had taken. Tree was lighting his pipe. He was thinking about Wyatt Earp, a man he had never met, wondering how it would be, not liking the possibilities.

McKesson said, “The people who own this town gave him the key to the city.”

It made Tree look at him. “What?”

McKesson nodded. “They’re treating Wyatt Earp like visiting royalty. Given over the whole Inter Ocean Hotel to him and his wife and his brother.”

“Why?”

“Two reasons. First, these ore barons of ours are like kids when it comes to celebrated visitors-they’d do the same thing for an actress or a senator. And second, these Yankee millionaires of ours know it was the Earps who whipped hell. out of the Johnny Reb Texans in Kansas, and they respect a case-hardened man above all ethers. They’ve got a good use for Wyatt — Earp, you see. Just the fact that he’s holed up in the Inter Ocean is enough to give pause to these radical agitators. The miners know Earp’s on friendly terms with the owners, and nobody wants to get into a fracas where he may find himself staring down the wrong end of Wyatt Earp’s gunbarrels. Do you begin to see what I’m driving at?”

“Yeah.”

“Good. The point is, you’re supposed to arrest Earp and take him out of Gunnison. The millionaires aren’t going to like that. Earp’s doing them a favor by being here, and they’re doing him a favor in return.”

“What favor?”

McKesson’s smile, again, was colder than it should have been. He said, “I’d have thought you’d have figured that out by now. This is a mining state-the men who own the mines pretty much control the politics. It’s for sure they control the governor’s office. You can’t arrest Earp unless Governor Pitkin signs the extradition papers. Now do you see? Earp’s friends are trying to persuade the Governor not to sign the extradition papers.”

Tree’s pipe had gone out; he found a match and lit it. When he looked at the sheriff, the long-clawed hands were spread in a gesture that meant, So there it is. McKesson’s smile was small and almost apologetic. “Friends,” McKesson said, “and politics. Earp stays in town to intimidate the agitators, and in return, the owners protect him against extradition.”

“You think they’ll persuade the Governor not to sign?”

“Who knows? My private opinion is it’s a tossup. But whatever happens in Denver, your problem’s right here in Gunnison, and nobody here will give you any help. The only men in Gunnison who’d be tough enough to join you going up against the Earps are the owners’ hired strike-breakers. They’re a pack of thugs but they have a purpose-they help me keep the peace by keeping the lid on ten thousand miners. Point is, of course, the strikebreakers are Earp partisans because they’re all on the same side, against the miners and agitators. You won’t get any help there.”

McKesson had finished his coffee. Now he stood up. “So you see the whole city’s united against you. Regardless of what happens in Denver, you haven’t got a chance.”

Tree said, “What about you?”

“Me?”

“If the Governor signs the extradition, where does that put you?”

“In a rather uncomfortable spot, I’m afraid. I’m a county official, of course, not a state employee, so there’s some question whether I’d be bounden to obey instructions from Denver unless martial law was declared.”

Without comment, Tree stood up and knocked the bowl of his pipe into his hand. He stooped over the spittoon to dump ash into it, pocketed the pipe and rubbed his hands. He gave McKesson a dry look.

McKesson said, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m a coward.”

“What word would you prefer?”

For the first time, McKesson flushed. But he regained composure quickly; he said, “Realist. I prefer realist. I happen to know which side my job’s buttered on. I’m a hired hand, you know, and if you eat a man’s bread then you’re obliged to sing his songs.”

“Thanks,” Tree said, “for telling me where you stand.” The tone, if not the words, was without sarcasm.

“Think nothing of it.”

“I will,” Tree replied, and saw it take effect; he added, “Just one other thing.”

“Name it. I’m always anxious to be of service to a friend.”

“Aeah. If I have to arrest him will you try to stop me?”

McKesson’s pitted face was too animated ever to be blank, but he held it now in stern, guarded repose. “Probably not. I’ll have to wait and see.”

Tree tugged his hat down, feeling dismal; he said, “Listen, I’ll fight you too if I have to.”

“Will you, now. You’re talking as if you had a chance of winning.”

“No point in acting as if I’d already lost.” Tree managed a cool smile.

“You have, you know,” McKesson breathed. “You can only get killed.”

“You can’t always go by that.” Tree went outside into the morning sun and heard the screen door slap shut behind him. He squinted. The brilliant light was not in keeping with his bleak mood. Belly churning, he went up the street.