The Gunfighter

Luke Jackson
Western
38,274 words

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Chapter 1

 

A jarring ride on hard wooden benches, an endless rattle, scorching cinders that

 

blow in the windows and attack the eyes whenever the train rounds a curve: his

 

train trip West had not been a pleasant one.

 

"Shut the window," holler half a dozen passengers, several ladies among them.

 

Despite a facade of gentility, the ladies holler the loudest, for they are the most

 

concerned about the appearance of their clothing.

 

"No," shouts back the fat balding salesman who sits in the seat behind Arthur

 

Marsall. The salesman sweats continuously and the odor of his sweating body is

 

reason enough to keep the window open.

 

Arthur says nothing. He cares little for his fellow passengers, save one Mary

 

Ellen Mills who sits four seats back en route from St Louis, while the open

 

window represents Arthur's only relief (and that merely partial) from the odor of

 

salesman and the scorching heat of the train. With luck, Arthur can feign sleep

 

until the train has passed through the curve. At worst, some would-be-gentleman,

 

anxious to ingratiate himself with the womenfolk, will slip past Arthur's prone

 

figure and attempt to lower the frame. The man will fail, of course, for the train

 

windows tend to stick fast. He will rouse Arthur from his make-believe slumber

 

and ask for his aid. "It's the women, you see," the man will explain, "messes up

 

their clothes," though the man himself will be rubbing at tearing eyes. Arthur will lend a reluctant hand. At the exact moment the window comes

 

crashing downward, the train will curve in the opposite direction and Arthur will

 

be left to his own devices to try to force the window up again.

 

"Avoid the Summer's heat; let the Union Pacific take you through cool Northern

 

breezes." the railroad's brochures promise. But in summer, the train routes across

 

the great North American prairie are pretty much the same: whether south, south

 

central, central, or north, they are hot, hot, and more hot.

 

Just as the prairie itself is pretty much the same, dull and more dull, like riding

 

forever through a golden brown meadow. Oh, one will see Indians, and an

 

occasional herd of buffalo, but Arthur suspects the Indians have been hired by the

 

train company—white men with a coat of red-gold paint, and the buffalo are

 

probably some tame herd the railroad keeps just for show.

 

For two days now, since the train crossed the Mississippi, life aboard has been

 

almost insufferable, hot and dull, a noisy company that Arthur doesn't particularly

 

care for, (and, he suspects, doesn't care much for him), and the endless rattle of the

 

train.

 

I want to see scenery, thinks Arthur, waterfalls, tall trees, and jagged mountain

 

peaks, new, exciting places. Why did I risk imprisonment if the life around me is

 

going to be as monotonous as it was back home? But all he sees besides the

 

endless brown meadow are the irritated faces of his fellow passengers.

 

Once in a while, the whistle blows as they slow for a boxcar station in the

 

middle of nowhere: A railroad-owned grain elevator, a few farms, bright green in

 

the sea of golden brown, pigs and chickens by the railroad track, a barking dog, some geese. Men and women, children too, walking up and down the train aisles

 

selling meals at ruinous prices. But a few minutes later, the trainman hollers

 

"booard," and they are off through monotony again.

 

At that very moment, the candy butcher, a steady affliction since St Louis,

 

comes down the aisle parading his wares: Candy, overcooked corn on the cob; the

 

Sioux-City newspaper—all one page of it; Indian trinkets—useful as souvenirs if

 

one is heading back East, but hardly of value on the prairie, and tea-makings, the

 

candy butcher's best buy—tea leaves, hot water, sugar, lemon, and, sometimes,

 

fresh cream.

 

Arthur knows them all, has inspected them all two or three times and knows he

 

cannot afford them.

 

He fingers the coins in his pocket; for despite the heat, he would really like a

 

cup of tea. But his few remaining funds must last until his arrival in the Wyoming

 

Territory, four tedious days and nights away, when he will be able to change bills,

 

he hopes, without being charged a premium.

 

Candy butchers must be the richest people in creation, he thinks. Even that best

 

buy, a cup of tea, cost of tea-makings and bringing the water to a boil included,

 

must represent something like a four hundred percent profit.

 

A glance is enough for Arthur, a bookkeeper by trade, to compare the value of

 

the candy butcher's stock at purchase with its appreciated value at the time of sale.

 

The long green fields of corn by the river's edge appear to him as tall rolled-up

 

dollar bills and, the cattle, gazing absently at the passing train, can be priced automatically at so much on the hoof, so much profit added when the rancher

 

brings them back East for sale.

 

Only a few short weeks ago, Arthur began to divert his employer's money to an

 

account of his own. Oh not much, just a few dollars here and there, it would have

 

added up, eventually. He'd have had a real stake, in time.

 

But he hadn't had the time. They had switched managers the previous Thursday

 

without a word of warning. The unctuous Mr. Thompson departed for the head

 

office and a new man was placed in charge, a second cousin once removed, they

 

said, of the President of the line.

 

"There'll be an audit, of course," the chief clerk told him, looking off abstractly

 

into the distance, as Arthur, knees shaking, halted in mid stride to give his

 

supervisor his full attention. "Nothing to do with us, of course; standard policy

 

when there's a change. Do you mind working a bit late?"

 

"Not at all," Arthur replied though he meant just the opposite.

 

If only he'd had another two weeks or even another two days! But he hadn't.

 

He'd had to cut and run.

 

Arthur touches his money belt. No, he does not have as much cash as he'd like,

 

but there is enough, he hopes, to give him a fresh start, to buy some land, some

 

farm tools, and maybe a few head of cattle.

 

How many times has he counted these imaginary cattle of his, watched as they

 

put his ranch's brand on the new calves, seen those calves grow in turn into

 

breeding stock . . . . And once again, he begins to plant the crop in his mind, to

 

harvest and sell, to reinvest the profits in new land. "Tea?" The candy butcher wakes him.

 

Arthur needs a cup of tea: his mouth is parched, his throat cottony, and his head

 

aches from another night of fitful sleep on the bumpy train. If only... if only he'd

 

had another week to plan and prepare his departure. Again he fingers his few

 

remaining coins: "No," he says. Chapter 2

 

Arthur Marsall has been in Benton for almost a week. Waiting. And still hasn't

 

figured out what he is going to do for a living or how he is going to pay his hotel

 

bill.

 

Not that it is much of a hotel, though it is Benton's best and only

 

accommodation—tiny, stuffy rooms with two soiled sheets, a blanket and a hard

 

wooden bed Arthur has to make up himself.

 

Nothing in the town is as the railway promised. The "rich, lush farmland" is

 

largely stones. The "beautiful scenery"—no denying its existence, not with a line

 

of mountains on the western horizon—cannot take the place of a steady living. For

 

the mountains are only a few million years old and have barely begun to be

 

covered with topsoil. In some places, huge sheets of rock protrude through the

 

ground, and the farmers, a patient lot, mainly from Sweden and Norway though a

 

few are Quakers from England and Germany, simply work around them.

 

The town itself is little more a strip along the railroad track. "Benton's a big

 

town, as towns go out there." But this isn't very big at all. Say, three blocks long

 

by two blocks wide.

 

Arthur soon knows each of Benton's six and a half blocks by heart. He walks

 

them steadily each morning and each evening for want of anything else he can

 

afford to do. He knows he has to get a job, if only to pay his continually mounting

 

hotel bill, but what jobs can a man find in the Wyoming Territory if his only skills are with accounts and ledgers. As for Arthur’s dream of owning his own ranch,

 

with a huge, ever-growing herd of cattle, that was just a dream, wasn't it?

 

Arthur arrived in Benton with little more than the clothes on his back, two clean

 

white shirts, half-dozen fresh collars, and a second pair of shiny corduroys he'd

 

already worn too many days on the train. He has a small stack of bills, the sole

 

proceeds of the embezzlement, but these won't last long. Simple things like shirts

 

and shoes are far more expensive here than in Philadelphia or Chicago.

 

The white shirts he packed so neatly mark him as a gambler rather than a ranch

 

hand, and have earned him only hard looks. He wore an old faded blue work shirt

 

on the train, a shirt his father had worn before him. Now, washed by hand in the

 

very same water he bathes in, it is all he has left to wear.

 

With the money Arthur took from the cashier's drawer, he was able to ride first

 

class from Philadelphia to Rock Island, coach from Chicago to St Louis, and then,

 

his "fortune" reduced to a small, half-inch stack of bills, was happy for just any

 

kind of seat on a train.

 

The candy butcher who came aboard at Iowa City made constant fun of him—

 

"Guy here takes the free cream and sugar, but won't pay for the tea. Says he works

 

for the railroad. Can you imagine?"

 

Arthur writhed in embarrassment each time he heard the candy butcher's call.

 

Once, Arthur was sitting with Miss Mary-Ellen Mills, a schoolteacher from St

 

Louis, who was on her way to Wyoming to accept a position in Happy Valley,

 

somewhere to the west of his own destination. Lost in conversation, Arthur hadn't

 

noticed the candy butcher creep up on them. "Do you want something, Miss?" the vendor asked and, when Mary-Ellen indicated Arthur might want something too,

 

continued gratingly, "Not him of course, he hasn't got the cash."

 

Well, Arthur had worked for the railroad, once, had a future there they told him,

 

though his progress had been slow enough. I'm a pauper, he thinks, unable to buy

 

a girl a cake and a cup of tea—much less buy one for myself. Embarrassment and

 

shame flood through him once again.

 

If Arthur had little money with him on the train, he has even less by the end of

 

his first week in Benton. His hotel bill, only partly paid, his one bath shared with a

 

pair of pants and his workshirt, and the too few, too small meals devoured more

 

than half of his remaining funds.

 

The prices in the saloon next door are as high or higher than those on the train.

 

The food is plentiful, good and tasty, but a man can spend almost as much at that

 

plain table as in the finest restaurant in Philadelphia.

 

Can he afford another, a final beer? The day has been a hot one. His throat is

 

as dusty as his clothes, for he spent the day trudging from store to store, asking

 

unsuccessfully for work. "A beer," he orders, though his heart sinks even as he

 

takes the first refreshing draught. He plucks a final handful of coins from his

 

pocket and slowly, reluctantly places the largest on the counter.

 

"My treat," says a voice in his ear and the coin is flipped backwards toward

 

Arthur's deadened fingers. "A whiskey and a beer here for the winner," says the

 

voice, "and I'll cover the beer here for my friend as well."

 

"Thanks," stammers Arthur, and would have babbled on in gratitude. But the

 

cowboy, his name is Fleming, Arthur learns shortly, pushes off with a friendly thumbs-up gesture, grasps the nearest dance hall girl by the arm and leads her off

 

toward a room upstairs.

 

In the days that follow, Arthur often sees Fleming standing just outside the

 

saloon joking with his friends. A tall cowboy with bad teeth and an ever-present

 

smile, the dome-shaped hat that he wears indoors as well as out with his long hair

 

streaming down in a pony tail beneath it sets him apart from the other men. The

 

top two buttons of his shirt are always open, displaying a silver locket resting

 

against his neck. The locket is a woman's, topped with a filigree of rosebuds, but

 

Arthur sees no one there cares to joke about it. Other men in the saloon may

 

appear more dangerous, like the two full-bearded mountain men who often sit at

 

Fleming's faro table, or a slick gambler called Graham whose silver-handled

 

derringer can be glimpsed each time he reaches inside his vest pocket for a

 

cheroot, but Fleming alone commands universal respect.

 

I would like him to be my friend, Arthur thinks, although the truth is that apart

 

from a certain innate generosity and a perhaps-not-altogether-traditional sense of

 

right and wrong, Fleming is not much better or worse than the other men around

 

him. If Fleming makes his living today with a deck of cards rather than a gun, who

 

is to say how he'll earn his keep tomorrow.

 

I wish I were a gambling man, Arthur thinks, just maybe I could win the money

 

I need. But he isn't a gambler; and the prospect of losing his few remaining coins

 

keeps him from the gaming tables. Still, the dreams of winning keep Arthur

 

coming back again and again to the doorway of the saloon. He has sketched it all out in his mind, a dozen times, as he sits in his room or

 

walks through the streets of the town:

 

The draw of the cards, his slow casual raising of the stakes. . . . One after the

 

other, the men at the table drop out of the pot, until only one opponent remains.

 

This man seldom has a face; he is, if anything, more like one of the clerks Arthur

 

knew back in Philadelphia, than like one of the dusty, all-too-real ranch hands with

 

tobacco-stained teeth who sit playing cards hour after hour in the saloon. In the

 

final betting round, Arthur is the winner. He gathers the bill-filled pot toward him

 

across the table. "The pot against the dance hall," he hears himself croak, or, in

 

another variation of his dream, "your farm against the pot." Another draw from the

 

deck, and there he is—the winner! Deed in hand! Fleming is the first guest at his

 

new ranch, and Mary-Ellen Marsall prepares supper in the kitchen.

 

Many times after dreaming this dream, Arthur gets up from his narrow hotel

 

bed, extracts the last dollar certificate from the depths of his suitcase, and is

 

halfway out of his hotel room before the dread hits him: what if I lose it all?

 

And men did lose; he'd seen this through the crack in the dance hall shutters,

 

men with farms, men who'd worked for a month or a season to get the money lost

 

in a night of gambling. But if Arthur cannot find work, what else can he do but

 

trust to luck?

 

Once again that evening, Arthur sets out on a long aimless walk that takes him

 

to the edge of town and out into the country. He follows the trail the stage

 

followed before they’d built the railroad, a trail maintained only because those who

 

came from the East to farm settled along it. About a mile from town, the road splits into two. To the north, the road soon

 

ends in a heap of rubble where the railroad construction workers piled the

 

unwanted rock. The remaining branch circles west toward the hills from farm to

 

farm, part boundary, part gateway. Soon, tomorrow perhaps, Arthur will have to

 

set out in this direction, hat in hand, to ask for work. He does so to occupy the

 

time this evening, walking for several miles, and passes only a single farm along

 

the way.

 

He walks until the sun disappears behind the western hills and the last light

 

flees from the graying sky. For an instant, the tall peaks to the north are bathed in

 

an orange-red glow. Then Arthur is immersed in a total, all-embracing darkness,

 

for the stars are hidden behind a thick bank of clouds, the lights of the town few

 

and distant. What am I doing here, he asks himself. And slowly, carefully, a tree

 

branch held before him like a blind man's cane, he makes his way back along the

 

trail.

 

Just at the edge of town, a single point of light marks where the lamp outside

 

the livery stable burns. He stops for an instant in the circle of its radiance and

 

recalls ruefully how he once told someone back home, jokingly, "Well, I can

 

always work in a livery stable."

 

And he could, if he knew something about horses, if he knew the right way and

 

the wrong way to rub them down after a ride, knew how to mix their feed, and

 

wasn't afraid to slip the feed bag over their enormous tooth-filled heads. He'd been on top of a horse exactly once in his life, a Saturday afternoon outing

 

with other men from his company—rented horses in the park, sedate horses,

 

already saddled, that walked one after the other in a line.

 

Not that he has the money to rent or buy a horse now. He curses his poverty,

 

his lack of foresight. For a moment, just one, he thinks, I shall kill myself, and

 

then he puts that thought away.

 

For an hour or more that evening, Arthur lay on his narrow hotel bed, with only

 

his black thoughts for company. At eight, he left the hotel and set out on his final

 

walk of the day; he had no particular destination in mind; really, this walk like his

 

first was just a way of escaping the voices and the music in the dance hall below.

 

This time, his route takes him to the eastern edge of