Calico Palace (84 page)

“Has Jenkins got any religion?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” said Troy. “At least they’re giving him a chance.”

Norman joined them at the bar. Watch in hand, he spoke to Troy. “It’s nearly two o’clock. Let’s get everybody out who doesn’t belong here, and lock up.”

“Right,” said Troy.

“Find your brother,” said Norman. Unlike Marny, he had never learned to tell the Blackbeards apart. “Tell him nobody gets in. Come on, Wilfred, and help us.”

The men went out. Marny picked up her drink and went to a front window. Opening the curtains she looked down at the crowd gathering in the plaza. Hortensia came and stood by her. They watched, saying nothing, as people and more people came from all directions. Behind her Marny heard a door open, and turned to see Kendra entering the parlor. Kendra joined them at the window.

“Are you going to watch?” Kendra asked.

“I don’t know,” said Marny.

Hortensia spoke. “We’re already watching, aren’t we?”

“I don’t want to see it,” said Marny, “and yet I do want to. Times like this, I don’t understand myself at all.”

Hortensia glanced at the drink in Marny’s hand. “That’s a good idea,” she said. She went to the bar and came back with a drink of her own.

The three of them stood there by the open window. They could not help looking. The plaza lay before them, and above was a brilliant full moon to show them all that went on.

They saw the Vigilantes approaching.

The men had marched from their headquarters to the corner of Clay and Montgomery streets, and then up Clay Street to the plaza. Heading the line was a group with Jenkins handcuffed in the midst of them, their guns ready in case his friends should attempt to set him free. Behind these guards the other Vigilantes marched two and two, their guns also ready for whatever might happen. From the window their faces were not distinct, but their attitude was plain. They were doing what they felt had to be done. These men had fought their way to California over the plains, across the Isthmus, around the Horn. Many of them, like Mr. Chase, were fathers of families; others, like Hiram, hoped to be. They had built their city and they did not intend to stand by and see it turned into a jungle.

Behind the marching Vigilantes, surged the crowd that had been waiting so long outside their meeting room. Altogether, a thousand persons or more had gathered before the place of execution. But still, as had been true all through these grim hours, the people were almost weirdly quiet. Those who spoke, spoke in whispers. From the open window of the Calico Palace, with the throng so close beneath them, Marny and Kendra and Hortensia could hear almost nothing at all.

“Social note,” said Marny. “As the papers so often observe, ‘There were many well-dressed women present.’”

“I’m sort of surprised,” said Hortensia, “to see so many women.”

“We’re present, aren’t we?” Kendra said shortly.

“Yes, I’m present,” said Marny, “and I still don’t know what I’m doing here.”

Neither did Kendra and Hortensia know what they were doing here. But they all knew they could not have gone to their own rooms and shut themselves up while this was taking place. No use asking why. They could not.

The Vigilantes took Jenkins to the old adobe building in the plaza, the one that Morse and Vernon had pointed out to Kendra as the army barracks as they rode up the hill the day she reached San Francisco. Here they halted. In response to a gun at his ribs, Jenkins halted too. Still in the midst of that curious silence, the nine men elected to perform the execution approached him. They brought a rope with a noose at one end.

Up to now Jenkins had kept an attitude of sullen defiance, as if sure his friends would come to save him. But now suddenly he seemed to realize that while his fellow criminals were not afraid to set fires in empty rooms or knock down men walking alone in dark alleys, they were not going to risk their lives by facing men ready to fight back. As the noose came near he began to bellow like an animal. In spite of his handcuffs he struggled hard and horribly. But his captors, moving with steady resolution, put the noose over his head.

Standing at the window of the Calico Palace, Marny and Kendra and Hortensia shuddered and felt gooseflesh breaking out on their skin. Still they could not move nor look away. They could not.

In the plaza, the nine executioners went about their task. Once the noose was in place they threw the other end of the rope over a crossbeam at one side of the building. While Jenkins yelled and fought, the nine men grasped this end of the rope and drew up his great brutish body.

Indoors by the window, Marny and Kendra and Hortensia quivered as they watched. They knew Jenkins’s howls were no more horrible than the shrieks of the victims roasted alive in the fires, nor his pains of death as painful as those others had been. But cold sweat trickled down their bodies and they trembled beyond control. Hortensia muttered thickly, “If only he didn’t
kick
so!”

It did not last long. In a few seconds more the body hung motionless from the beam. Now that Jenkins’s voice was stilled, in the plaza there was still no noise. Nothing but that strange chilling silence.

The body hung there for hours, guarded by relays of Vigilantes. It was the quietest night the plaza had known in a long time.

Marny and Kendra and Hortensia did not stay to watch the guarding of the body. They shut the window and drew the curtains and wondered if they could sleep tonight and decided not to try, at least not for a while. Shaking all over, Kendra dropped into a chair by Marny’s card table and hid her face in her hands. Hortensia went to the bar and poured another drink. Marny followed her. Kendra heard the clink of glass, and then felt a hand on her arm and heard Marny speak her name.

She raised her head. Marny stood beside her with a glass of brandy.

“Drink this,” said Marny. “That’s an order.”

Kendra obeyed, and the brandy put warmth into her shuddering body. Marny brought a drink for herself from the bar, and with Hortensia she came back to the card table and sat down too.

For a minute or two they sat there without speaking. Then, as Marny sipped her drink, suddenly she began to laugh. It was a strange dark laughter, almost like sobs.

“For heaven’s sake,” Kendra demanded, “what’s funny about it?”

“Nothing,” Marny returned. “But I had a funny idea. Just think—a hundred years from now, people will be calling this the good old days.”

W
HEN MARNY CAME INTO
her parlor the next afternoon the talk there was vehemently in favor of the hanging. A few men shook their heads, but only a few. Only a few, and most of these were men recently arrived, who had not lived through San Francisco’s years of unpunished crime. The others not only approved, but added, “If it had been done this time last year we’d all be better off now. Oh damn it, Wilfred, you mean there’s still no ice?”

Marny was tired today; they were all tired. None of them had had much sleep. When Marny and Kendra had finally decided to go to bed they had made up the bed in Kendra’s old room and had told each other good night. Marny did not know if Kendra had slept well; she knew she herself had not. She fell asleep and woke up, and fell asleep again and woke up again, over and over. When she finally woke up for good, about noon, and went down to the kitchen for breakfast, Lolo told her Hiram had called for Kendra earlier and they had gone home together.

Marny drank three cups of coffee. She wondered if her head was clear enough to take her through the games, and consoled herself with the reminder that few if any of the players would feel any brighter than she did.

Shortly before dark, when she went to the kitchen for chocolate, she found Hiram and Pocket waiting for her there. They stood up as she entered, and Hiram said,

“We came to ask how you feel after last night.”

Marny gave a sigh. “It was a night fraught with goings on, wasn’t it?”

Pocket poured chocolate from the pot on the stove and brought it to her. He said, “Hiram asked how you felt.”

They all sat down at the table. “Frankly,” said Marny, “I feel pretty terrible. First time I ever saw a man hanged practically in my own front yard. Or anywhere else, for that matter. I’m still on edge.”

“So are we all,” Hiram confessed. “We’re not used to this sort of thing either.”

“At the same time,” said Pocket, “I feel like a man who’s had a load fall off his back. For so long, this has been about to happen. Now it’s happening. At last we’re doing something instead of saying something ought to be done.”

“Do you think,” she asked hopefully, “they’ve been scared into good behavior?”

“Oh no,” Pocket and Hiram answered together. Hiram went on,

“We’re on our way to another meeting now. Already talk is going around, about how the hoodlums are planning to get back at us. More burglaries. Another fire. A few more murders in the street. Nobody knows what they’re going to try. But,” he added with emphasis, “we’re ready for them.”

Marny spoke earnestly. “And you’ll act again if you have to?”

“Yes,” Hiram replied without hesitation. “We will. If they aren’t convinced by one hanging, there’ll be more.”

“We mean that,” Pocket said quietly.

Marny gave them a smile. “Bad men,” she said, “so often make the mistake of thinking good men are softies. Those villains are going to be mighty shocked when they find you can be tougher than they are.”

“Thanks,” said Hiram. He stood up again. “Now it’s time to go.”

“We just wanted to see you,” Pocket said politely.

They went out, and Marny realized that she felt stronger. She went up to her room and put on her nugget necklace and pinned a saucy black velvet bow in her hair. When the Blackbeards locked up for the night her table showed a cheering profit.

The next morning the
Alta
published an editorial approving the execution of Jenkins. The day after that, the paper published the constitution of the Vigilance Committee and the names of its members.

The Vigilantes went ahead, grimly and openly. Armed groups of men guarded the wharfs, boarding incoming vessels and seeing to it that no more convicted felons were allowed to land. Other groups visited known criminals and advised them to leave town. They spoke so forcefully that some rascals hastened to board the river boats, but to the dismay of those left behind, the returning steamers brought news that the men of the inland towns were forming Vigilance Committees of their own.

The elected officials were storming. They cried in rage that the work of the Vigilantes was illegal.

“Sure it’s illegal,” Hiram remarked on a visit to Marny. “So are murder and arson and burglary. They should have thought of that.”

“Things are improving around here,” said Marny. “You boys are making the town fit to live in and the ice boats are running again.”

Hiram had come in to bring her a box of almond cookies Kendra had sent. They sat at the kitchen table, where Marny, in peignoir and bedroom slippers, was sipping her breakfast coffee.

“When you leave here, Hiram,” she asked, “will you go back to the bank?”

“Why yes. Can I attend to something for you?”

“Would you take a few minutes extra,” asked Marny, “and walk with me to the library? I want to speak to Pocket. It won’t take me long to get dressed.”

“It’s still rough walking,” he reminded her. “Wouldn’t you rather I took Pocket a message, and saved you the trouble of getting there and back?”

Marny shook her head. “Thank you, but this is a sort of personal matter. I’d like to talk to him myself. In his office.”

“All right,” said Hiram. “In that case I’ll be glad to go with you.”

“Fine,” said Marny. “One of the clerks can see me back.”

She went out, leaving Hiram reading the
Alta
and munching an almond cooky. When she came back she was wearing a dark blue silk dress and a bonnet with a matching ribbon. She carried an artist’s portfolio, the sort Bruno Gregg used for holding his sketches. If Hiram felt any curiosity he did not say so, and she was grateful to him for minding his own business.

They went into the street and began to make their way through the clutter. The fire was now six weeks past. While much of the rubble had been carted away, much of it had not, and the cleared spaces were choked with piles of brick and lumber brought in for rebuilding. The streets resounded with saws and hammers. On the Clay Street side of the plaza, workmen were breaking up the charred remains of the old City Hotel and piling the pieces into wagons.

They were sorry to see it go. San Francisco had few landmarks left from the time when this had been a scraggly little town out at the end of the world. Their memories of those days were gathering a sheen of romance. This was absurd and they knew it, but none the less it was true.

At the library, carpenters stood on ladders replacing a lintel scorched by flying sparks. Hiram led Marny to a side entrance and up a staircase to the door of Pocket’s office. He knocked, and getting no answer he opened the door.

“Wait here,” he said. “I’ll find Pocket.”

He clattered down the stairs. Holding the portfolio under her arm, Marny stepped over the threshold. As she looked around she felt a nip of surprise.

She did not know how she had thought Pocket’s office would look, but she had not expected such an air of quiet competence. Without thinking much about it, she had allowed the chaos of Pocket’s pockets to give her the impression that he was a bit of a scatterbrain. A dear fellow, of course, liked and trusted by everybody, but not a man with an organized mind. She told herself now that she should have known better. The library was not a flamboyant enterprise—compared to the Calico Palace it was a modest affair—but it was patronized by the most highly respected men in town and it undoubtedly made a profit. Locations facing the plaza were expensive. Marny well knew the rent she and Norman paid Mr. Norrington. No business managed by a scatterbrain could long stay here.

Pocket’s office was a corner room lighted by three windows. The furniture was good. Marny saw a well-made desk, with a leather chair in front of it and a lamp on a stand at one side. Near the desk was a solid-looking table across which two armchairs faced each other. On the table lay some businesslike papers, and one chair was pushed back as if Pocket had been working on the papers when he was called elsewhere. Between the windows were bookcases, and on the wall hung a lithograph of the Golden Gate and a framed street map of San Francisco. While not severely neat, the room had a general look of being in order, the workroom of a man who had a clear head and knew what he was about.