CHAPTER ONE: FIGHT IN FRISCO
In the hazardous life of Joshua Dillard a sudden departure was no extraordinary occurrence. And a gunfight was often the indicator that it was time for him to vamoose, light out, ride on. Disappear.
Regardless of the inherent rights and wrongs of the particular situation, staying around after a shooting affray could be unhealthy. Along would come not only the vengeful associates of the deserving recipients of Joshua's lead, but also reputation-hungry kids eager to prove themselves quicker on the draw, more accurate in placing a killing shot; the ones who lusted to inherit his unwanted gunfighter mantle.
Thus it befell that Dillard was obliged to quit San Francisco one late summer morning several days before his scheduled departure.
Though he'd been down on his luck, things had been looking brighter. Confident of having an assignment lined up which promised to replenish his severely depleted purse (a not-unusual circumstance), Joshua had been determined to enjoy his last few days in the city.
Safely putting aside his railroad fare for Greeley, Colorado, via Cheyenne, Wyoming, he'd carefully counted out the last coins and bills in his poke and set forth to sample the pleasures of a metropolis regarded by its eulogists as America's Paris on the Pacific — rich, cosmopolitan, cultured, sophisticated.
He walked the streets of the city and saw sideshows of gymnastic monkeys and howling dervishes, fortune-tellers and patent medicine dealers. Oriental carpets and Chinese brocades lent alien colour to shop windows.
Joshua hadn't seen fit to afford accommodation at hotelier William C. Ralston's showy new Palace, built at a cost of $6 million. 'Seven-hundred-thirtysome rooms, every other with a private bath. A glass-roofed Palm Court, fountains and Doric columns, statues and all. Now that's what I call a hotel,' he'd lamented.
But he could therefore spare the dinero to go calling at an august Frisco parlour house, said to cater for the more discerning gentleman. Long a widower and not addicted to casual dalliance, Joshua Dillard was nonetheless a red-blooded male. He took a hack from Market Street to the Russian Hill section, just north of Nob Hill where the high-society folks lived.
On a street with commanding views of the bay, Joshua glimpsed flags of many nations flying from the masts of ships tied up alongside the wooden wharves and jetties. The hack driver dropped him off outside an imposing, three-storey red-brick mansion surrounded by a low wall and pillars of the same brick supporting wrought-iron railings painted a glossy black. A red lantern hung discreetly in the front porch.
'Elegant, civilized,' Joshua thought.
To his mild disappointment, the decor inside the house was a little too sumptuous, too lavish for the nicest of taste. Shiny varnish had been applied to all panelling and doors, probably rubbed down with pumice between the several coats to give a mirror finish. The upholstered furniture was over-stuffed and the walls throughout covered with a flock-paper. The paper's large repeating pattern, deep-pink fleurs-de-lis, would have put a client a few decades later in mind of cotton candy.
Looking-glasses, of which there were disconcertingly many, were framed with ornate, gold-leafed scrollwork.
But the decadent surroundings didn't distract Joshua from taking his pleasure with 'Louise', a petite and willing blonde of eighteen, allegedly French but with a distinctly Irish accent. She employed the arts she'd learned and the delights nature had bestowed upon her with attentive enthusiasm. Joshua was rapt.
His thoughts were less favourable an hour or so later. 'Well, I'll be a sonofabitch!' he growled.
'Indeed it is ye'll be a frisky colleen's ruin,' the blonde, spread and spent, said from the well-braced bed in the adjoining room. 'What would be the problem, boyo?'
'I've been cleaned out is the problem, sweetie. Robbed.' Someone with fingers more nimble than Louise's had gone through the pockets of his clothing — discarded carelessly beside the still-steaming zinc tub of scented bath water where their transaction had begun with a tantalizing mutual lathering using a versatile bar of slippery pink soap.
The thieves had reduced his roll of greenbacks by half, craftily re-rolling the bills less tightly. They'd also taken some coin and other small, tradeable items, including a clasp-knife, though not his gunbelt and .45 Colt Peacemaker. The gun was well-worn and scarred by a crack in the blackened right grip.
Now the clasp-knife held considerable sentimental value. It had been a gift from his wife, who'd later been murdered in San Antonio, Texas. The day the Wilder gang had come calling, wrecking their home, snuffing out the warming flame of her beautiful young life, was the day that had put Joshua Dillard onto different trails forever.
He'd been possessed by an obsessive hatred of lawbreakers, which inclined him to recklessness. He'd resigned his position as an operative of the famous Allan Pinkerton Detective Agency. He'd become a free agent; a soldier of fortune. Ready to take chances; ready to kill those who offended his sharpened sense of justice.
When he saw that his wife's present had been taken by petty thieves, Joshua saw red. Too many things had been taken off him in this life. Big things, little things. Sometimes he had trouble in discriminating one from the other, but not this time.
Once dressed, he stormed down the sweeping staircase to the parlour house's rococo ground-floor entrance hall and into the madam's office.
'Right, you old cow,' he said, flinging back the highly varnished oaken door with a crash. 'I want to know who sneaked into Louise's dressing-room and pilfered my belongings.'
At a guess, it wasn't the first time the woman had been faced with this situation, but Joshua's ferocity was of a singularly savage order.
A maturing, roly-poly woman, much done up in paint, red satin, Brussels lace and fake jewellery, she pulled herself to her feet. Her gown's shiny fabric stretched and heaved over her bosom; her rouged cheeks quivered. 'Pilfered? Here?' she huffed. 'I never heard of such a thing!'
'You're a lying toad,' Joshua said.
Though clearly an intelligent woman in the operation of her successful business, and possibly an exciting and glamorous figure earlier in her professional life, she had the stamp of something besides the ravages of a past sensuality on her now. Greed? Fear?
Off to his left, Joshua's keen eyes spotted the surreptitious movement of a beringed hand, hidden from his direct view by the bulk of a mahogany desk, but revealed in one of the many mirrors that supposedly multiplied the establishment's visual delights. Distantly, he heard the muffled peal of a bell.
Consequently, when two men ghosted up behind him, one with gun in hand, he was ready for their intervention seconds before it was signalled in another of the tell-tale mirrors.
'How dare you, sir!' the madam was saying. 'I've never heard the likes of such a insult. Despicable. I'll have you know this is an orderly run house.'
But Joshua was turning from her and her shrill objection with the speed of a striking snake.
'Throw the bum out!' shrieked the madam. She didn't know how different he was from the pathetic suckers who were the normal run of her bawdy house clients.
Joshua beat down the surprised first bouncer's gun arm, grabbed the wrist and twisted it. At the same time, he rode the man back into his companion, sending the pair of them crashing into the opened door.
The men were big fellows, real toughs of prizefighter build. The door buckled and slammed against the pink flock wall. The whole building seemed to shake. The drawn gun fell simultaneously from suddenly nerveless fingers. The safety was off and it discharged ear-splittingly in the close confines of the room.
The madam screamed. Elsewhere in the house, other females raised a wailing chorus like scared cats.
The second man recovered first. He lammed a punch at Joshua's mouth which split Joshua's lips and jerked his head back as though it was attached to a neck of rubber.
Joshua's wits were shaken for but a moment. Dropping under the following punch, he rammed the top of his head under the assailant's jaw and sunk his fists, one-two, into the fellow's belly, which put him out of the fight, gasping for breath, near-senseless.
The first tough dived toward his dropped gun. Joshua jumped on his back, smashing him face down on the carpet. He stomped a second and third time. Right foot, left foot. The prone man writhed in agony. 'Stop it, fer chrissakes,' he moaned. 'Yuh'll break m'back.' Mad with pain and the fear that he was permanently crippled, he, too, was done fighting.
Joshua's head carried on ringing — from the blow he'd received in the face or from the women's screaming, he didn't know which. Yet luck was still with him.
For when a third man sneaked up on him, he wasn't taken by surprise, but again saw the threat coming like it was converging on him in several of the mirrors. This man had the mark of the other pair, but was older and somehow more intelligent and smarter-clothed and groomed. He was also hauling out a revolver, and his index finger was about the trigger, whitening, tightening. All this in not more than deathly split-seconds.
The whole thing was over in instants. Joshua drew his Colt with a speed the newcomer didn't know was possible. Tongues of flame spat from the muzzles of both guns. Two shots crashed out. A mirror exploded in a shivering cascade of glass shards. The room filled with the acrid reek of swirling gunsmoke.
And through it Joshua saw the blood spurting hideously from a punctured artery in his victim's neck like a grotesque red fountain as he toppled backwards, firing his gun a last time by some dying reflex of his trigger finger.
More screams rang through the house.
'You've killed Victor Porteous, you crazy bastard!' the madam cried.
'Now you'll be for it. He's a big wheel in this city. They'll hang you for sure.'
A man of his rugged
world, Joshua knew that most of the West's parlour house
women were in debt to somebody. The girls were in debt to
the madams who boarded them and clothed them in their
finery; the madams were in debt to the vice lords who
owned their properties and sometimes themselves. The dead
man was this madam's principal no doubt, forced to
take an active hand by his hired thugs' incompetence.
'Ain't no more than a dead Barbary Coast pimp in my book,' he said.
Then he blew the smoke from his Colt, holstered it and strode out.
A chill morning fog, with the barest hint of daybreak, found Joshua Dillard riding the Union Pacific Railroad out of the city. Ahead of the train lay the ascent of the Sierras and the suggestion in the east of a fierce sunshine and brilliant sky inland.
Safely aboard the passenger car, Joshua lifted the broad flat brim of the black hat that had partly concealed his hard, unshaven face during a hasty walk through the San Francisco streets to the railroad depot.
In fact, no one had paid him more than scant attention at that early hour. The sidewalks had been heaped with market produce — thousands of water melons and cantaloups, cucumbers and squashes, as well as crates of tomatoes, grapes, peaches, pears and apricots, all of enormous Californian size. He'd dodged between stack and pile while other early-risers had been taken up with earning their livelihoods.
From a pocket in his shabby black coat, he drew out his last letter from a Leigh Jordan in New York City. Jordan had unspecified business in the less-established reaches of the new state of Colorado. Dillard's name had been recommended by former Pinkerton comrades as a suitable companion for travels in a wild and rugged country where civilized settlement was sparse.
Dillard, it was said, didn't balk at the unorthodox. It was also implied that he wasn't beyond stretching or ignoring points of law, and that if a matter should give rise to physical conflict, there was no better man to have at your side.
Joshua previewed as best he could from the few details the letter divulged the possibilities of his latest adventure in the 'gun for hire' business. Well, why not, he thought. He'd looked after tenderfeet in the West before. The touring French actress Gisèle Bourdette came to mind.
Before that there'd been dime novelist Clem Conway and others. He'd served them all well, though usually the financial reward had barely covered his expenses. Maybe this time would be different. He seemed to recall reading the name Jordan in connection with valuable real estate holdings on Manhattan Island. . . .