The Man from Pinkertons and the Gunrunners

Chapter 3

Whenever a large group of men get drunk, there is the possibility of violence and in the case of The Girl of the Period saloon in Pilgrim’s Crossing, this possibility was greatly enhanced by the nature of those drinking there. The town attracted all manner of types who were on the make in one way or another; often operating beyond the bounds of legality. Some of those who gravitated to the place were gun runners, others were bootleggers, not a few were on the scout and there was also a sprinkling of prospectors, drifters, snake-oil salesmen, card sharps, mercenaries on their way to Mexico and many other unsavoury types. These men habitually went armed and did not hesitate to resort to deadly force at the least excuse. This was how Seth Brown had met his death, at the very moment that he was revelling in the triumph of having vanquished and set at naught a man who had set out to bully and defraud him.

As he fired at Luke Martin, a man standing near at hand, who was almost stupefied with liquor, had formed the wholly erroneous impression that he was himself the focus of Brown’s aggression. Seeing a man blazing away with a pistol and sending what seemed like a hail of shot and shell in his general direction, this man had drawn his own weapon and despatched Seth Brown swiftly with a single shot, smack between his eyes. Having done so, and even in his befuddled state realised that there might be consequences to the casual murder of a man who might have friends of his own present to avenge him, the man who had killed Brown simply slipped from the saloon in the general hubbub and stayed away from town for a couple of days.

It was later agreed by everybody that the brief gunbattle could hardly have had a more satisfying outcome and was one unlikely to provoke a blood feud or revenge killing. In the confusion of the moment, it had seemed to most onlookers that this had been a quarrel between two men, both of whom had in consequence died. There was nobody else to blame and so the matter was ended.

Seth Brown had been an awkward and argumentative type, always on the lookout for causing a row about some fancied slight or other and the melancholy truth was that neither Edward Stannard nor any of the men who rode with him were all that grieved to see the back of the man. It left a vacancy though in their ranks and they had already been feeling the lack of numbers in some of their activities. Brown’s death left just Stannard himself and five others. Bearing in mind that that in less than forty-eight hours the intention was to try conclusions with a troop of US cavalry which might number ten or twelve men and it will readily be seen that the odds had shrunk to such a point that plans might need to be refashioned. It was after Stannard and the others realised that Seth Brown was dead that their eyes turned to Kyle and some of those at the table began sizing him up and wondering if he might make a suitable replacement for their dead friend.

Once the fuss over the shooting had subsided somewhat, Stannard said to Kyle, ‘Well, let’s lay down and see what we have, hey?’

‘Suits me well enough.’

‘Me and the fellows here,’ said Stannard carefully, ‘Are currently engaged in a piece of work which is apt to turn pretty lively, if you take my meaning.’

‘How lively?’

Edward Stannard eyed the younger man carefully and then decided that a simulation of honesty and openness would best serve at this point. He said, ‘There’s likely to be shooting and we’re taking on a body of ten or twelve men.’

Kyle thought this over for a space and then said, ‘You fixing for to kill these men or take something from them or what?’

‘We aim to kill every mother’s son of ‘em. You want in? The gains are likely to be great enough.’

‘I won’t be a party to ambush-killing without giving warning. I’ve no use for such tricks.’

‘Ah, one of those boys who still sticks to the rattlesnake code, hey? Very honourable too, I’m sure. But seriously, this is business. You’ll be made for life if you throw in with us.’

Jethro Kyle now knew two things. The first was that these men had it in mind to shoot down a bunch of men without warning or defiance first being given. This meant that they would stick at nothing and would very likely shoot him too in the back once he had done his part in whatever it was they were up to. The second piece of intelligence which he gained was that these fellows were aiming to ride against a military detachment. Whoever spoke of neat, even numbers of adversaries in that way, except men gauging the likely strength of an enemy unit? Ten or twelve men, indeed! He stood up and said, ‘Happen I’ll pass on this offer, but I wish you luck with it.’

Stannard looked at him as though he were some rare, natural curiosity in a freak show. He said, ‘That’s it? Your precious honour won’t even let you listen to the deal?’

‘No, I reckon not. I won’t fire on anybody without warning and there’s an end to the matter.’ He nodded courteously to the six men gathered around the table and then walked off. Kyle knew that he was making the smart move, even had he not been revolted by the idea of taking men unawares and killing them. All his life he had followed the rattlesnake code; it was a bare and irreducible standard in Kyle’s life. Never had he fired on a man or attacked him without indicating that he was about to do so. Nor had he smiled at a man towards whom he meant harm, nor broken bread with him either. Like the rattler, real men always signalled their aggression before acting.

In this case of course, there was a little more to the case than merely Kyle’s honour. He was nothing to these men and once he had helped them overcome a larger force, doubtless one of them would shoot him in the back, seeing no further use for him. As it was though, the whole exchange, both the offer and his refusal, had been exceedingly useful. It had told him that here was a band of ruthless and determined men who were very likely planning to spring an ambush on an army patrol. Why would a group of bandits do such a thing? Gold was one possible motive but given the rumours which had caused Pinkertons to send him down here, guns were a more likely prize. But why try and steal rifles or pistols from the army, especially since they were outnumbered by two to one, if what Stannard had said about a group of ten or twelve men were a true bill. There must be more to the case than first met the eye.

Engrossed in his thoughts as he walking away from The Girl of the Period, Kyle almost bumped into a nondescript little man wearing eyeglasses who was making his way in the opposite direction. ‘I beg pardon,’ said Kyle, ‘I nearly knocked you over there!’

‘Quite all right, quite all right,’ said the man in a fussy and self-important way, ‘I’m just getting a little exercise. Tired of being cooped up in a room all day, you know.’

It seemed to Kyle that he had seen this man before and so different did he appear to the rough customers whom Kyle had so far encountered in Pilgrim’s Crossing, that he enquired casually, ‘You staying in town for long?’

‘Oh no, I shouldn’t think so for a moment. I’ve been engaged for a big job, away over in Mexico. This place is by way of being a staging post, as you might say.’

‘Mexico? You don’t say so?’ exclaimed Kyle, his interest quickening, ‘What line of work are you in, you don’t mind me asking?’

The little man seemed keen to talk and saw no reason at all to be cautious about his business. He said, ‘The president there, in Mexico that is, has it in mind to build a railroad line stretching from one coast to the other. All the way from the Atlantic to the Pacific. He needs experts, so he engaged an agent in the United States to recruit people. Though I say it as shouldn’t, I’m by way of being the best in my field and when Colonel Stannard said that he could offer me the task of superintending the difficult sections, I jumped at it.’

‘Colonel Stannard? Would that be Colonel Edward Stannard?’

‘Why yes! You know him?’

‘We’ve met. So what is your specialty, sir? Surveying or something of the kind?’

‘Good heavens, no. I’m a chemist, not a mathematician or anything like that.’

‘I guess you’ll think me pretty stupid, but I don’t rightly see what a chemist would be doing working on building a railroad.’

‘Well, you see, I’ve been working in the California Powder Works. You’ve heard of nitro, of course?’

‘Nitro-glycerine? Yes, I had some experience of it during the war.’

‘Well, it’s the very devil to handle, it’ll go off if you so much as sneeze near it. So, a fellow over in Europe, he came up with the idea of soaking it into something, makes it more stable and easier to handle, you see.’

In truth, Kyle was not really one with the patience as a rule to listen to idle chatter from men talking about their work in this way, but the fact that this man was connected in some fashion with Stannard seemed to him to be good and sufficient reason to hear what he had to say. It might have some bearing on gun running, although it was not plain to Kyle what possible connection there could be.

There were few people in the street, other than men heading for or leaving one or other of the saloons. All that Kyle really wanted to do was retire to the snug little room which he had rented above The Lucky Man, but then again, he was being paid to find things out, so felt duty-bound to hear any more that the little man was inclined to tell him. He said, ‘I seem to remember hearing something of this. That is to say a means of making nitro safer to handle. You say you worked on the idea?’

‘Yes, me and the men I worked with developed our own version of what they’re calling dynamite. The stuff in Europe, well they make that by soaking nitro-glycerine into a kind of porous clay, you see. We came up with a better idea though, we used black powder to absorb it. Marketed it as Black Hercules. The strong man from Greek mythology, you know.’

Kyle didn’t know, and nor was he overly interested in myths. He was about to ask a little more when two men came up to them. One of them said to the little man, ‘Mister Johnson, the colonel sent us to find you. He begs the favour of a few words with you.’

The man turned to Kyle and said, ‘Well, it was nice chatting with you. Perhaps we shall meet again.’

‘It may be so, sir.’

The two men who had come in search of the man to whom Kyle had been talking gave him a hard and suspicious look. He recognised them as two of those he had sat near in the saloon, before the unfortunate shooting incident. He nodded politely to them and walked off. Although he did not glance back, he felt sure that they were staring at his back and wondering what he had been talking about to Mister Johnson.

As he took a turn around the streets before going to his room, Kyle thought about what he had so far discovered. In the first instance, a former Colonel in the Confederate army was planning to attack an army patrol or something of the kind, presumably with the intention of stealing something from them. This same man had invited a railroad engineer to go to Mexico with him for some reason. This was all very interesting, but did it have bearing upon what he had been given the task of investigating? A proper fool he would look if after wasting all this time on Stannard and his affairs, it should turn out that the real gun runners were an entirely different set of men! This was a disconcerting notion and made Kyle feel uncertain in his mind whether he might be altogether on the wrong track. In this discontented and uneasy frame of mind, he made his way to The Lucky Man, where he was staying, and, after saying his prayers, retired for the night.

***

Peter Johnson was by no means favourably impressed with the Girl of the Period, when once he had been conducted there by two of Stannard’s men. He was a Methodist by religious inclination and a strict temperance man into the bargain, who had in his youth sworn a solemn oath, eschewing intoxicating liquor. As he was guided through the crowded and smoky room, he could see that many of those present had been drinking to excess, which caused him to purse his lips primly.

The aftermath of the shooting was still in evidence. The owner of the place had insisted that the two corpses be removed at once from his bar, such things tending to discourage the cheerful atmosphere which he did his best to cultivate. Nothing was more likely to discourage folk from drinking freely, dancing and having a good time than such reminders of their own mortality. He had also ordered the boy working in the kitchen to fetch a pail of water and a rag to erase the blood which had pooled on the floor. There would probably be some kind of investigation the next day by the town’s vigilance committee, but there were enough people to vouch for the fact that only the two dead men were involved in the matter that any enquiry was likely to be superficial and brief.

Colonel Stannard rose courteously to his feet when he saw Peter Johnson approaching his table. This was a man upon whom much hinged and maintaining his good will was vital to the enterprise in which Stannard was now engaged. ‘Mister Johnson, I hope that you find your quarters comfortable? My men treating you correctly as well?’

‘I’ve no complaints, Colonel. This is deuced smoky place though in which to carry on our business.’

Stannard tried, and largely succeeded, to look regretful about the surroundings; contriving to appear like a man who felt a profound distaste for saloons. He said, ‘I know sir, I know, but this is only a brief stopping point on our journey. I do assure you that once we cross the border, we shall be moving in more refined circles.’ At which point, one of the men at the table was overcome with an apparent fit of coughing. His neighbours suspected strongly that he had begun to burst out laughing at hearing of the ‘refined circles’ in which they would be moving and hastily converted the guffaw into a cough.

Stannard continued smoothly, ‘You’ve brought with you of course the samples of which we spoke?’

‘Yes, indeed. Five pounds of Black Hercules, as you requested. Once we reach our ultimate destination, there will be adequate supplies of the raw materials for me to work with?’

‘My apprehension, Mister Johnson, is that all necessary goods are ready and waiting for us, across the border. You will have a busy time of it.’

‘I thrive on hard work, Colonel Stannard. Did not the blessed Saint Paul write that he who does not work shall surely starve?’

‘He may well have done,’ said Colonel Stannard, whose knowledge of scripture was anything but extensive, ‘Perhaps my fellows can go with you now to collect those samples? Then we can all meet up somewhere a little more salubrious tomorrow.’

‘You’ll take good care of my stock, I hope,’ said Johnson anxiously, ‘It would be a great misfortune were anything to befall those two jars.’

A shadow crossed Colonel Stannard’s face and he said, ‘But you can easily prepare more of this commodity, can you not?’

‘Why yes, as much as you wish.’

‘And the nitro is perfectly safe to transport in this form?’

‘As safe as a jar of sugar. Why you would need to fire a bullet directly into the Black Hercules to detonate it, short of that it’ll be fine.’

At that point two more of Stannard’s companions were overcome and began to make choking sounds, although whether through suppressed mirth or because they were suffocating on the smoky atmosphere, it would have been hard to say.

After the two men had gone with Peter Johnson to pick up his samples, Stannard turned savagely on the men who had been coughing or laughing and addressed them fiercely, saying, ‘You damned jackasses! You want to give the game away or what? It’s worse than working with a bunch of foolish children.’ Then he relented and smiled, saying, ‘Mind, when he said that about firing a bullet straight into the nitro, I almost smiled myself.’