The Adventures of Johnny Vermillion (23 page)

Within five minutes of his arrival, he got that first look and nearly destroyed his mission in the process.

Stepping into the dimness of the depot from the dazzling sunshine on the platform, he was blinded momentarily and banged shoulders with a man striding the opposite direction. The man was tall and well built and his momentum spun Rittenhouse halfway around, almost toppling him. Instantly the stranger caught his upper arms in two strong hands and steadied his balance.

“I beg your pardon, sir. I didn't intend to derail you.”

When Rittenhouse's pupils adjusted to the light, he found his face six inches from the regular features of a young man with fair moustaches and a well-trimmed triangle of beard in the hollow of his chin. He wore a black hat with a dramatic brim, almost Restoration in its width, and a caped overcoat too heavy for late spring, but which contributed to the dash of his appearance as naturally as the fine stick he had tucked beneath one arm. His reassuring smile was even and white. The detective, familiar only with descriptions in theatrical reviews and a crude engraving in the
Deseret News
of the actor who had portrayed Brom Bones in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow
, knew nevertheless that he was in the presence of John Vermillion.

He muttered that it was his own fault and turned quickly away out of the young man's grasp; but he knew his face had been committed to memory and that his undercover status had been compromised.

Alarm flashed through him. He darted a glance around the inside of the narrow building and was relieved to find neither of the Davieses among the pilgrims and greeters trickling toward the street and the waiting carriages. He'd managed to make a spectacle of himself at the very outset, and had they witnessed it, they'd
undoubtedly have recognized him. Even the Major was not so self-besotted as to accept an explanation that Peter Ruskin had traveled all this way merely to secure their release from the company. They would report their suspicions to Vermillion, who would abandon whatever was planned for Wichita, and possibly dissolve the association. As the old man himself was fond of saying, it was not the responsibility of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency to prevent crime or put an end to it, but to apprehend the criminals and bring them to justice, preferably in full view of an admiring press. They were in business to attract clients, and whatever personal satisfaction they might derive from running a band of brigands to cover could hardly be recorded on the black side of the ledger.

Hanging back from the street door, which stood open to give egress to those assembled inside, he spotted the Major smoking a cigar on the boardwalk, and next to him his wife, brushing nervously at creases in her costume. Plainly they awaited the return of their companion, who passed Rittenhouse a moment later carrying a carpetbag that one of them evidently had left behind on the platform. In a moment they had all boarded a handsome phaeton with the couple's oversize trunk strapped to the back and rattled off.

Rittenhouse waited a beat, then stepped outside and caught the attention of a cabman, who stepped down from his seat to take his valise.

“Never mind that. My friends left before I could find out where they were stopping. Please follow them until they alight.” He described the phaeton.

When that vehicle turned down Second Street and drew up before a hotel on the corner, he directed his driver toward a plain-faced structure that faced it at an angle, identified by a sign as the
Douglas Avenue Hotel. He did not fail to note, as he paid the fare and turned toward the entrance, that his hotel stood next to a bank, and that that institution stood directly across from the other hotel and a few doors down from the elaborate facade of a variety theater. The Prairie Rose was a most transparent enterprise—an important factor in its success so far. It was a veritable Purloined Letter, boldly concealed in plain sight.

He asked for a room facing the street, and was given one on the second floor. After unpacking and placing his things in a maple bureau, the revolver tucked between two folded shirts, he went to the window, drew down the shade, and slid it aside an inch to study the side of the Occidental Hotel across the way. He'd hardly hoped to catch Vermillion or any of his crew at a window, but instinct and experience told him the room occupied by the head of the company would face the bank.

He did not, in fact, see anyone standing at a window, nor any shades drawn with no bright sunlight striking that side to justify it, but he was contented his theory was correct. He'd been in town barely half an hour, and had spotted both his quarry and its target, leaping far ahead of where he'd been in six months of hard work. It nearly made up for his blunder at the station and the likelihood that he would have to wire Chicago and request a replacement unknown to the repertory players.

Rittenhouse sighed. Unpacking had been a waste of time as well as an exercise in foolish optimism. Common sense—and Pinkerton policy—required him to turn over his information to another agent, and with it the opportunity to trip the snare personally. He would not even get to see it happen, as the old man would undoubtedly recall him rather than take the chance of his being spotted. He'd already risked a great deal in trailing the Davieses halfway across the
continent and failing to report the action to headquarters, knowing what steps the old man would take if he knew. Now the choice had been taken out of his hands.

He was about to let the shade slip back when his eyes were drawn toward a movement in a doorway, where a common loafer—that fixture in every frontier settlement—removed his shoulder from the frame to touch his hat to a woman passing his perch along the boardwalk that ran past the Occidental.

Instantly the loafer was forgotten. Notwithstanding the fact that the detective was a confirmed bachelor, and an ugly man who had surrendered all thought of unrecompensed feminine companionship late in his adolescence, he appreciated a small waist and a dainty profile as well as any male creature. The appearance of both in a comely pearl-pink dress and clever hat under a matching parasol was compensation enough for hundreds of hours spent watching buildings and strangers and conveyances passing to and fro. His angle gave him a view of the front of the hotel as well, on Second Street, and when the apparition stepped briskly around the corner and lifted an abundance of skirts and petticoats to climb the steps to the entrance, he was certain he'd identified the member of the company who'd commanded more column inches on the part of masculine journalists than all the rest combined.

He found himself (he was loath to use a word that connoted personal weakness, but no other signified) enchanted. In the romance of newspaper work, every victorious general was handsome and distinguished, every visiting dignitary a gentleman, every actress older than twelve and younger than forty a vision, virginal and touched with stardust; the facts, that Custer looked like a basset hound, Grand Duke Alexis was a drunk, and Sarah Bernhardt had the morals of an alley cat and rather resembled one, were
things the mature subscriber assigned to harsh reality. But no hyperbole did justice to April Clay in the flesh. Even from a distance, Philip Rittenhouse understood immediately that it didn't matter how well or poorly the young lady acted as long as one could say that he had seen her. And he knew then that no other employee of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency would be the one to put her in shackles.

As long as he could remember, Jack Brixton loved to blow things up.

He'd conducted his first experiment in detonation at the age of five, removing a tablespoonful of black powder from the keg his father used to charge his squirrel rifle and mixing it with the tobacco in his pouch. When that rugged old farmer touched a match to his tightly packed corncob pipe, the powder went up with a sharp crack and a blue flash, singeing his whiskers and eyebrows and puncturing his right eardrum, leaving him deaf on that side for life. It was all very satisfying, and worth the razor-strop beating that followed, even though it made thick welts on his backside that many a woman of lewd reputation would remark upon in later years.

From there he'd gone on to blasting outhouses, rain barrels, and a bobcat that had scratched him something fierce as he held it down and slipped a collar over its spitting head attached to a snuff tin filled with powder, touched off a fuse made from packing cord soaked in coal oil, and let it go. It was his bad luck that the cat had doubled back his way.

He recovered more quickly from the burns than from the scratches, which became infected, contributing to his general disagreeability; but the memory of the close call led him to the decision to leave such technical things as timing fuses to someone more qualified like Tom Riddle, who'd blasted holes through solid rock in California looking for color. But Brixton never lost his fascination with the destructive power of a well-placed charge. He'd been known to blow up railroad tracks that could just as well have been barricaded by chopping down a convenient lodgepole pine, and to burst open safes in spite of the presence of a cooperative bank manager with the combination, just for the pleasure of the spectacle. When dynamite came to the frontier in the late 1860s, he'd celebrated by having Tom dump three tons of Rocky Mountain onto a train carrying nothing more valuable than what was in the passengers' pockets. The account of the atrocity that ran in the
Territorial Enterprise
marked the first appearance in print of the nickname Black Jack.

Train robberies were his favorite, because of the amount of explosives required to bring a charging locomotive to a halt and open the doors of strongcars with guards forted up inside. A satisfying blast, with boards and bodies and lengths of tangled rail flying and reverberations that shattered windows in towns a mile away, was often all the compensation that was needed for a disappointing haul. Breed, alone among the members of Ace-in-the-Hole when it came to speaking his mind, had once told Brixton he'd have blown up General Jackson just to see if he was really made of stone. (Brixton, in a mellow mood at the time with bits of brakeman on his shirt, had merely smiled in response.)

Now, three days' ride from Wichita, Brixton clung to the timbers of a tall trestle spanning the Arkansas River outside Fort Dodge,
watching enviously as Tom bound a bundle of dynamite to a diagonal support and smeared the twine with tar to prevent it from soaking up water in the event of a sudden rainstorm and coming loose. Tom unwound several yards of cord from a spool hitched to his belt and threw the spool underhand to Ed Kettleman, standing atop the trestle where it rested on the high bank. He waited until Ed caught it, then wet the end of the cord between his lips like a bit of sewing thread and tied it to a blasting cap. He then inserted the cap in the bundle with the delicate touch of a surgeon. Tom had fine hands for a former pick-and-shovel man, slender and spatulated at the ends like a piano player's.

“Whyn't you just tie it off and pay it out yourself when you climb back up?” Brixton asked. “If Ed missed, you'd have to climb all the way down to the river to fetch it back.”

Tom drew a sleeve across his glistening forehead. “You know much about blasting caps?”

“Not a thing. I got out of the blowing-up business myself before dynamite.”

“I used to prospect with a fellow name of Spangler. He came up with the same plan. He retired all over northern California.”

Brixton scowled at the bundle of sticks. “It don't look like it would blow up much more than a man. You reckon it's enough?”

“It ain't how much you use, it's where you put it. You could tie it to that there strut and just impress the fish, but if you put it in the right place you can blow up Ulysses S. Grant and most of the Republican Party.”

“I'd admire to do that. I would for a fact.”

“That's where you and me choose up sides. I'm a common thief, not no anarchist.”

Brixton narrowed his eyes, which never much opened wider than bullet creases to begin with. “What's got in you, Tom, apart from that Yankee banker's slug? Sometimes I think you got your brains all scrambled like Charlie's.”

Tom thought, not for the first time, of telling him about the woman he'd seen at the Wichita station. But Brixton was unreasonable when it came to that Prairie Rose crowd. His fixation seemed to run counter to Ace-in-the-Hole's best interests. Once again Tom censored himself. Above all he had to keep secret the euphoria he felt each time he drew a breath. Black Jack wouldn't understand it, and what he didn't understand he extinguished.

“War's over, Jack. General Lee's writing his memoirs and the niggers got the vote. We got to stick with what we know best: robbing folks and blowing things up.”

Brixton grinned, surprising him almost off his perch into the river thirty feet below. Black Jack just never showed his teeth except when he was gnawing on a chicken leg. “You ever blow up a bobcat?”

“You mean on purpose?”

“Well, sure.”

“No, Jack, I can't say I ever did. I blew up a cinnamon bear once, but it just happened to come along when the fuse ran out.”

“Bobcat's a mangy critter, sucks eggs and licks its privates right out there in front of God and Jefferson Davis.”

“That may be so, but I don't see the percentage in blowing one up.”

“You might try it once, I mean when you're testing a cap or somesuch. But you want to make sure and jump clear when you let go of it. You never know which way a bobcat's going to run once you got your charge in place.”

Tom chewed on that. For the first time since he was shot he wished he had a plug between his teeth, just to cover up how much thinking he was doing. There weren't any rules at Ace-in-the-Hole about thinking as such, but there wasn't any evidence of it either, beyond the engineering. Weasels put their intellectual activity on hold once they'd found a hole in the henhouse.

“Well, Jack, I consider that smart advice. If I ever do take it into my head to blow up a bobcat, I'll be sure and jump clear.”