The Last Shootist (16 page)

“Weeell, all right. At least
someone's
got sporting blood.”

Gillom looked this young man, in his early twenties maybe, over. A derby hat, a tan-and-black-checked suit, soft brown leather dress boots completed this young buck's ensemble. No weapons visible. A traveling salesman of some type of flashy, unnecessary merchandise probably. The sport watched the cards move again and with a grin, fingered the red ace.

“Pay up, pardner.”

“
Damn!
You boys are bleedin' me to death.” The gambler rubbed perspiring hands across his brow, then off on his shirtsleeves, shooting his French cuffs. “But I'm a sporting man. I'll take another chance.” He paid off with a small twenty-dollar gold piece.

“Let's go fifty.” The new bettor agreed. The cards seemed to move faster now under the gambler's paws, but when he at last paused his shuffle, Gillom's eagle eye was fixed upon what he figured to be the high heart. He also noticed that one corner of that card seemed to be tipped, bent slightly upon one edge. The new player must have noticed this, too, for with a chuckle of satisfaction, he pointed to that same card. With a grumble, the gambler turned over the red ace once more.

“
Damnation!
I cannot win for losing today. You eagle-eyed, young bucks are plucking me bare.” This time he peeled off two twenty-dollar bills and a ten-spot to push reluctantly across the table to the flashy bettor.

“Double or nothin'. My last hundred.” For emphasis, the monte man withdrew a one-hundred-dollar bill from his pouch and laid it on the edge of the small table, smoothing it out with his big hand. He stared at the new bettor, but the sport in the derby shook his head.

“I don't want to take
all
your money, mister.” The sport looked directly at Gillom. “Kid wants some of this, it's his turn.”

The gambler now stared at Gillom. “Fair enough. You clipped me, too.”

A small crowd had slowly gathered to watch this table action and from it pushed an older gentleman in a blue hat and coat, a silver watch chain dangling from his vest. He took Gillom by the elbow.

“May I see your ticket, son?”

“Huh? Oh, sure.” Gillom fumbled in his pants pocket, but found the ticket and gave it up.

The conductor looked at the ticket, then steered the youth from his seat and out of the small crowd. “Come with me a moment.”

The big gambler was immediately on his feet. “
Hey!
This young man was about to bet!”

“Gamble with your own kind, Doc.” The railroad employee pointed at the young sport in the checked suit. “Like your partner there.”

“Mister, I wanted to bet that card,” Gillom protested as the train conductor pushed him to a free corner of the parlor car.

“You saw the bent corner on that ace? Well, I guarantee you that ace was about to be replaced by a bent face card instead,” hissed the older man. “That's Doc Davis, son, notorious cardsharp. Seen his sleight of hand too many times. That young bettor was his ‘capper,' helping him set you up. We can't stop 'em from buying tickets, but I
can
stop them from running that old monte ruse on our unwary passengers.”

Gillom squinted, peering back at the two cardsharps who were fuming loudly to bystanders near their table.

“I didn't realize.… Thanks.”

The graying conductor finally smiled. “The Southern Pacific is trying hard to stop card cheating on its rails.” They shook hands. “Save your money, kid. And stay away from the gaming tables.”

Gillom nodded thoughtfully and started for the front exit of the parlor car. He was hungry after his brush with poverty, so he splurged on a full dinner in the dining car, seated at a table for two with white linen and silver service, where he was served by an Ethiopian waiter in a spotless white tunic. The teenager enjoyed foods he'd never tasted before, including salmi of duck, baked veal pie, French slaw, and sweet potatoes, with mince pie, vanilla ice cream, French coffee, and a sampling of cheeses for dessert. For $1.50.

Feeling like an overfed potentate, for the rest of the train ride Gillom dozed in his coach seat and stared out the window at the two-horse towns they had to stop at to take on or put off a mailbag, boxes of goods, or a couple passengers. It was dark when the Southern Express pulled into Benson, a somewhat larger depot on the slow train ride toward the territory's biggest town, Tucson.

Gillom grabbed his saddlebags from a porter unloading the baggage car and spotted the friendly conductor, who offered a final word of advice.

“Careful with those guns you're toting, young man. I'd hate for them to put you on the night train to the big
adios
.”

The teenager waved him away, as with another shriek of its whistle, the Southern Express chugged off into the West.

*   *   *

He ambled into Benson loosening stiff legs. Because it was midweek, Gillom was able to find a spare bed at the first boarding house he came to. Their communal supper had already been served, so the landlady pointed him toward a nearby saloon. There he ordered the chicken stew, which seemed tasty until the beer slurper stooped over beside him at the long bar remarked it was actually prairie dog. Gillom immediately wished he was back on the train, fine dining.

*   *   *

Next morning, Gillom Rogers rode the 11:00
A.M.
train out of Benson with maybe thirty passengers in its two rail cars, other boxcars filled with store goods. The ticket clerk had explained that this faster express run had just been inaugurated to get the Western mail into Bisbee in time for same-day delivery.

“Business is booming in Bisbee,” the clerk told him, “so the Phelps Dodge Company built their own fifty-five miles of track when they couldn't get Southern Pacific to run a spur down there from Benson.”

So Gillom rode the small Arizona and Southeastern Railroad on its two-hour run, enjoying the scenery and conversing with a well-dressed gentleman on the seat across from him.

“Going to Bisbee on business, young man?”

“Yessir. I hope to find employment guarding the mines, banks, something in the protection line,” replied Gillom.

The gentleman had been idly blowing smoke rings from his cigar, but he now focused on his fellow traveler.

“That's necessary work, with all the money generated by the mining industry. You look a little young to be a deputy.”

“Probably. They like you to have a few years' practical experience before law enforcement will hire you.”

“As well they should. Dangerous job.” The older man blew another smoke ring and was pleased with the result. “Copper is a wondrous metal, son, and as long as its price holds up, a lot of us in mining are going to ride its glittering back to our fortunes. Copper is nearly indestructible and I know you've seen it conducting electricity through telephone wires. But it's also used in ship hulls, cookware, and roofing. Why, those pistol cartridges in that belt around your waist, every one of them contains half an ounce of pure copper in its brass.”

Gillom looked down at his belt to inspect a round. “I didn't realize.”

“The ore out here is very low grade compared to Michigan's high-grade deposits. It takes a hundred and fifty pounds of smelted copper to equal the value of one ounce of gold or fifteen ounces of silver. That's why Phelps Dodge built this little railroad, to lower their connector freight rate on smelted ore down to a dollar a ton. Beats those old mule-drawn ore wagons they used to run up to Benson by six times on price.”

“You must be a mining man?”

The businessman smiled. “Work for Anaconda Copper, the big boy up in Butte, Montana. Copper Queen Consolidated is going to shut down their old smelter in Bisbee. Copper Queen's building a better smelter down in Douglas, right on the border, twenty-three miles away. They've got more well water there and cheaper land to expand on.”

“Huh.” Gillom was impressed. “Maybe I'll look for work there.”

“You should,” agreed the equipment broker. “But they haven't found any copper around Douglas. It's all up there, hiding in those Mule Mountains.”

Gillom pressed his face to the train's window glass as he followed the mining man's pointed finger.

“See those two peaks? Think they look like two big ears on a mule?”

“Not really,” said Gillom. The buyer laughed. “How many folks live there?”

“Oh, about eight thousand, I heard.” The equipment broker leaned closer to the window, looking out across the sun-baked plains leading up to mountain crags sparsely forested with Apache pines. “They used to call this isolated place ‘the country that God forgot.' But that's certainly no longer the case with Bisbee.”

No indeed,
Gillom Rogers thought,
and I can't wait to get there
.

 

For they sow the wind, and they reap the whirlwind.

—Hosea 8:7

 

Twenty

 

Gillom steamed into the Bisbee depot the afternoon of a Thursday. Miners of three nationalities, mostly white, the American-born, the Irishmen, and the elite diggers, the Cornishmen, trudged up Tombstone Canyon, headed toward the second, late shift in the Copper Queen shafts, after the day drillers got off. These tough men looked over the passengers getting off the short Arizona and Southeastern train, especially the few women, but paid a teenager little mind. So he shouldered his saddlebags and canvas warbag and headed across the tracks up infamous Brewery Gulch.

Buying an
Arizona Daily Orb
for a nickel, Gillom stopped in the first saloon he came to at the junction of the town's two main thoroughfares, the canyon and the gulch, which split the heart of the empurpled peaks of the Mule Mountains. He was out of breath from his walk, for this isolated town built around an ore load nestled at fifty-three hundred feet. Panting a little, he was conscious of a vile odor assaulting his nostrils, but figured it was the sulphurous red-brown smoke blowing from the smelters' smokestacks.

The Bonanza was one of the bigger drinking establishments among the over-forty in town, but except for a lazy mutt soaking up some late-afternoon sun outside its batwing door, it didn't seem very crowded. After dumping his gear in a corner and joining a few men wearing callouses on their elbows at the long bar, he addressed a bartender with muttonchop whiskers framing a full browse of red hair. The young barkeep was dressed in black wool pants and a white shirt. A black string tie and black sleeve garters completed this mixologist's outfit. He looked Gillom over when he ordered a beer. He saw the kid had made a distant journey with all that gear, plus the matched pistols on his hips, so the bartender decided his new customer was man enough and poured him a mug from a keg.

“Seems sorta quiet today.”

“Give it an hour. Then the day shift gets cleaned up from the mines and the girls stroll in to entertain 'em. Oh, it'll be rippin' in here later tonight, right on through the weekend. Bisbee's a twenty-four-hour town.”

Gillom nodded as he flipped through the six pages of their daily paper, scanning the ads.

“Lookin' for a room to rent. Don't see any mentioned in your paper.”

“Town's always full. The Richelieu is right up Main Street. It's first class, expensive. Bessemer House is our biggest hotel, but they are hot-bunking that joint. One miner leaves for his shift, another just getting off work takes his same bed.”

“No, don't want to share beds. Mining's not my choice job anyway.”

“Well, a miner who lived near me just got killed in an accident, so widow Blair may have a spare room. I get off my afternoon shift at 8:00
P.M.
We can go see her then. You lookin' for work, kid? They're building the Copper Queen Hotel, just up the canyon. Forty-four bedrooms. Supposed to cost 175,000 dollars. Building it in the Italianate style, whatever that means. It'll be the fanciest hotel in the whole territory. Should bring us in some classy customers.”

Gillom shook his head as the barkeep polished a drinking glass.

“Nope, I'm not a builder, either. Interested in security, guardin' valuables.”

“Well, try our Bank of Bisbee, opened last year, just a block away, up Main Street. We've got armed messengers on our trains, security up at the mines, too. Somebody around here always needs somethin' protected. You good with them guns?”

“Try me.” Gillom smiled. “Thanks for your suggestions. I'm gettin' somethin' to eat, but I'll be back at eight. Whatcher name?” He reached across the bar to shake hands.

“Ease Bixler.”

“Gillom Rogers.” He left his new acquaintance four bits as tip.

*   *   *

Gillom needed a haircut to look presentable at job interviews, so he stopped at the City Barber Shop and got his peach fuzz shaved, too. He dropped his roady clothes off at the Warren Laundry, which was run by a couple large white women, not the usual Chinese. When he commented on that, the heavyset lady manning the cash register explained that Bisbee was a “white man's camp.”

“Celestials are allowed in during daylight hours to sell their vegetables and fruit they grow on their little farms around Fairbank, but we don't want 'em livin' in town running their laundries and chop suey houses and opium dens.”

“Or undercuttin' our miners' wages!” chimed in a laundrywoman working over a steaming tub in back.

Gillom walked out with his laundry ticket.
Bisbee is gonna be different,
he thought.
Never been around mining people, but I heard they're as tough as they come.

He ladled up greasy soup floating a few wads of maybe mule meat in a hole-in-the-wall up the gulch, but the sourdough bread was filling. Gillom didn't complain about the bad food, for he needed to make new friends in a hurry, not start by aggravating the local cooks.