Ralph Compton Slaughter Canyon (9781101559499) Read online

  A group of Chinese men had stopped to watch this piteous scene; then one stepped forward—and put Hattie out of her misery.

  Chapter 16

  At the Royal Arms Inn

  “We take missy,” the man said. “Nice cart. She be comfortable, you see.”

  Warful was desperate, ready to clutch at any straw.

  “Did you hear that, Hattie, my love? We have suitable transportation,” he said.

  The woman looked uncertain. “But they’re Celestials. Might they drive me off somewhere and have their wicked way with me?”

  “We’ll be right with you, my dear,” Warful said. “The Chinese are a perfidious breed to be sure, but they’ll behave in the presence of white men.”

  The Chinese bobbed and smiled.

  “Behave? Oh, sure. Missy be safe. Only cost ten dollar.”

  “That’s preposterous,” Warful sputtered. “Highway robbery, damn your Chink eyes.”

  “Ten dollar,” the Chinese man insisted. “Missy very large lady.”

  “For God’s sake, pay him, boss,” Dee O’Day said. “Or we’ll be standing outside this damned station all night.”

  “Then it’s ten dollars,” Warful said. “And be damned to you for a thieving Chinaman.”

  The Chinese man only smiled in return. “Missy enjoy ride. Go slow, enjoy sights.”

  A two-wheeled cart was produced and four Chinese youths manhandled Mrs. Warful into it. They either didn’t mind her smell or they hid their feelings very well.

  Watching, Battles decided the latter was the case.

  The rickety cart clattering along a cobbled street with a grinning Chinese on each handle and two pushing was an undignified way to travel, and Mrs. Warful gave vent to her feelings, claiming that she was “undone,” and “shamed beyond imagining.”

  As it happened, because of the thick fog that formed pink and blue halos around the gas lamps, few people paid her any heed, as though a fat woman being hauled by four Chinamen was a common sight.

  With his far-seeing, frontiersman’s eyes, Battles could make out a few of the signs that hung outside the doors of the saloons and brothels lining the street that fronted the Barbary Coast docks: THE ROARING GIMLET, THE COCK OF THE WALK, BULL’S RUN, THE RAMPANT ROOSTER, BELLE OF THE UNION.

  There was also one particularly disreputable saloon named the Scarlet Harlot boasted a painted sign that showed a woman in a red dress lying seductively on a bed.

  All were doing a roistering business, their gas lamps glazing steamed-up windows with a pale white light.

  The misty streets and alleys teemed with roaring people. Sailors, miners, slack-jawed rubes from the hills, doves, pimps, robbers, and cutthroats rubbed elbows and jostled for walking room.

  Everywhere he looked, Battles saw an ever-shifting maelstrom of licentiousness, debauchery, misery, grinding poverty, ostentatious wealth, pollution, disease, insanity from bad liquor, dissipation, profanity, blasphemy, and death. Here and there, always alone, pale-faced preachers clutched Bibles to their breasts and warned the few that would listen that hell was yawning open to receive the whole putrid mess.

  Of the local constabulary, there was no sign.

  By comparison to the other dives, Shanghai Kelly’s three-story wooden structure was a model of good taste. The Royal Arms Inn sign showed old Queen Vic in her imperial regalia, obviously not amused as she frowned down at the heaving street.

  The bar was busy, but more subdued than others, and Kelly’s doves left the premises arm in arm with their clients instead of entertaining them upstairs.

  As the Chinese slowed the cart to a stop, the air so close to the bay was even colder, heavy with dampness, and the night smells of oily, stagnant water, filthy ships waiting to be scrubbed out, and the nearby dives were more pungent than polite.

  Along the docks a forest of ship masts rose above the curling mist. A listening man could have stopped in his tracks, and, even above the cacophony of pianos and banjo bands, heard the lap, lap, lap of water against wooden hulls and the restless creak of rigging.

  The Chinese, as though to justify their exorbitant fee, helped Mrs. Warful into Kelly’s place, an operation that was overseen by the proprietor himself.

  Unlike the Celestials, Kelly wore his feelings on his face, and his nose wrinkled when he got close to the fat woman.

  “Can she get upstairs by herself?” Kelly said to Warful, eyeing Hattie’s enormous bulk.

  “No,” the man said. “She will need assistance.”

  He directed a pleading look at a few of his men who were still standing around Kelly’s lobby, the others having already made their way to the bar. He found no volunteers.

  “We help missy upstairs,” a Chinaman said. “Only cost five dollar, by golly.”

  Warful’s anger flared and for a moment Battles thought he’d go for the revolver in his waistband, but Kelly stepped between him and the Chinaman.

  He peeled off a five-dollar bill from his thick roll and handed it to the Chinese man. “Room at the top of the stairs. And for God’s sake don’t drop her. She’ll bring the whole place down about our ears.”

  For a moment it seemed that Warful would direct his anger toward Kelly at this slight to his wife’s odorous charms, but he stepped back.

  Kelly, who looked like the benign landlord of an English country pub, was in fact a skull and brass-knuckle street fighter who had killed men with both.

  Warful stood in silence as he watched the Chinese successfully carry his wife into her room, and even then he waited until they left before he said: “Is Captain Yates’s ship at the docks?”

  “Aye, she is,” Kelly said, “and on board her the scurviest bunch of rascals as ever sailed the seven seas.”

  He looked around, then leaned closer to Warful to impart a confidence, which Battles nonetheless overheard.

  “His first mate is Mad Dog Donovan.”

  Warful’s face registered shock. “I thought he was hung for a pirate a couple of months back.”

  “Only half hung. The Dutch botched the job and buried him alive on Sumatra, but Poke dug him up.”

  “And nursed him back to health?”

  “Nursed, hell. A swig of rum and Mad Dog was himself again.”

  Doubt clouded Warful’s face. “Himself again means he’ll be barking at the moon. Can we trust him?”

  “Trust Mad Dog?” Kelly laughed. “A better question would be, Can we trust Poke Yates?”

  Chapter 17

  A Ravening Sea Wolf

  Shanghai Kelly’s accommodations were less than luxurious.

  He had cots enough for twenty men split among four rooms that were once considered just large enough for a dove and her client.

  Battles shared with Dee O’Day, Lon Stuart, a man named Bates he didn’t know, and Luke Anderson, a stringbean with the eyes of a lizard who liked doves and was suspected of murdering several.

  But the bedding was clean and Kelly had thoughtfully provided chamber pots, one for every two men, a washbasin, and towels.

  To everyone’s relief, Mrs. Warful shared a room and a brass bed with her husband. The thought of them sleeping together conjured up images in Matt Battles’s mind he tried not to dwell upon.

  After breakfast on the morning after their arrival, Hatfield Warful took Battles and Durango aside.

  “Mr. Battles, I want you to come with me,” he said. “Durango, you remain here and keep an eye on things.”

  The gunman was being worked over by a hangover and readily agreed to stay behind.

  “Hurtin’, Durango, huh?” Battles said, grinning.

  “You go to hell,” the breed said, then winced as the sound of his own voice hammered through his skull.

  Warful clucked and shook his head.

  “We must all stay sober until this venture is completed, Durango,” he said, looking down at the scowling breed from his towering height. “But in the meantime, the sovereign remedy for a hangover is two raw eggs, a shot of brandy, and a generous dash of
Tabasco sauce. Mix well and drink.”

  Durango looked at Warful as though he couldn’t believe what he was hearing. His eyes bugged out of his head, and his hand flew to his mouth as his stomach heaved. Then he turned and ran.

  “Someday I’ll have to do something with that half-breed,” Warful said, more to himself than Battles.

  “Then you’ll have to stand in line,” the marshal said.

  “My plan is to visit Captain Yates and make sure all arrangements have been made for the loading of the gold,” Warful said as he and Battles left the inn and took to the cobbled street that ran parallel to the docks.

  The dance halls, concert saloons, and gambling dives were quiet, drifting in mist, as the Barbary Coast slept after yet another long night of intoxication, fornication, and homicide.

  Warful stopped and asked a passing seaman where away lay the bark Lila.

  The man jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The square-rigged scow with the eagle figurehead under her bowsprit.” The sailor was half drunk and belligerent. He spat at Warful’s feet. “And be damned to her and all who sail in her.”

  The man lurched past, then stopped and turned.

  “You tell black Poke Yates that was the hundred and eighth time that Sam Garrety has cursed him and his hell ship.”

  Battles smiled. “It seems your Captain Yates isn’t too popular around these parts.”

  “All truly great men make enemies, Marshal,” Warful said. “That is why I have so many myself.”

  Matt Battles expected Poke Yates to be a rollicking old seadog with a tarry pigtail and perhaps a cutlass scar or two.

  Instead, the man that met him and Warful on the Lila’s deck could’ve been a country parson of the poorest sort.

  Yates was small, no more than five foot six and slender, but it was the tough slenderness of a whip, not a weakling.

  He wore a black, cutaway Albert coat and pants of the same color, pegged under elastic-sided boots. A boiled white shirt, a four-in-hand tie, and a floppy broad-brimmed hat completed his attire.

  His eyes were twinkling blue, full of good humor, but his prissy, steel purse of a mouth suggested that he’d never allowed anyone to crack a dirty joke in his presence or fart in church.

  Unfortunately, appearances are deceptive and the very opposite was true.

  Poke Yates was a killer with an icy conscience—a relentless pimp and a pirate of opportunity. He was also a first-class ship’s captain who had gone to sea as a boy and was a product of Britain’s Royal Navy at a time when seamen boasted that they’d joined that harsh service for “rum, bum, and baccy.”

  Ten years before the mast had hardened Yates and transformed him from orphaned boy into a dangerous, unpredictable man who ruled his ship with an iron fist.

  In all, he was a ravening sea wolf in parson’s clothing.

  Battles stood to one side as Warful and Yates smiled and embraced.

  To the marshal it looked as if the gigantic Warful were hugging a child.

  Yates stepped back, grinning. “Damn my eyes, but it’s good to see you again, Hat,” he said. “The Coast has never been the same since the scurvy bastards ran you out on a rail.”

  “It’s good to be back,” Warful said. “At the dawn of a great and noble venture.”

  The two men spoke for a while about old times, and Battles had a chance to look around.

  The Lila looked as though she was a tight, weatherly craft. Her pine decks were scoured white, all ropes coiled in navy fashion, and Lord Nelson himself would’ve approved of her rigging and tackle.

  But what caught Battles’s eye were the two swivel guns attached to the rail of the quarterdeck. Loaded with canister, they could rain death on an unarmed ship—or sweep the Lila’s deck clear of boarders.

  Or gunfighters.

  Seamen, a surly, tough-looking bunch, came and went on the deck as Warful and Yates talked; then Battles was invited into the conversation.

  Warful introduced him as a former U.S. Marshal turned bank robber and killer, and Yates seemed impressed by his credentials.

  “Good to have you aboard, Mr. Battles,” the captain said, shaking hands. “I bet you’re anxious to ship out with us.”

  No other answer coming to mind, Battles said he was.

  “Lay to this, we’ll need every man jack of ye when we hove to on the African coast,” Yates said.

  This came as a shock to Battles and for a moment Warful seemed flustered, but then he covered up by saying: “I have not yet told my men of our coming adventure, Captain Yates. I thought I’d wait until the gold was safely aboard and we were at sea.”

  Yates nodded. “Yes, for safety’s sake perhaps that’s just as well.”

  But Battles pushed it as far as he dared.

  “We’re headed for Africa?” he said. “The other side of the world?”

  Warful glanced around him, then at the brightening sky where a few puffy white clouds were drifting inland from the bay.

  “Perhaps we should talk in your cabin, Captain Yates,” he said finally.

  “By all means,” Yates said.

  Warful looked at Battles. “You are the most intelligent of my mercenaries, and I have much to impart,” he said.

  Chapter 18

  El Dorado

  Yates’s cabin was as shipshape as his bark, its honey-colored woodwork gleaming from constant polishing.

  The furniture consisted of a mahogany desk, decorated with inlaid panels of whalebone, a huge carved Spanish chair, two smaller chairs, and a sleeping berth against an oak bulkhead that separated the captain’s cabin from the crew’s quarters.

  The cabin was relatively small, and smelled of tobacco smoke and rum, overlaid with the distant but foul odor of the as yet only partly scrubbed-out bilges.

  Yates waved Battles and Warful into the chairs and sat behind his desk. He picked up a crystal decanter and said: “A glass of rum with ye, gentlemen?”

  Warful refused, but Battles accepted, still not recovered from the shock of the captain’s mention of Africa.

  He’d been on riverboats a few times and hadn’t much cared for the experience. A long sea voyage, cooped up with almost a score of temperamental gunmen and a surly crew, promised misery at best and disaster at worst.

  Warful watched until Battles had tasted his glass of thick amber Jamaican rum, then said: “Mayhap, Mr. Battles, we should start off by having Captain Yates tell you where this craft is headed after we leave San Francisco.”

  “Aye, I can do that,” Yates said. He took time to light his pipe, then said: “It’s a port, a port of call, though there are them who say it’s an independent kingdom.”

  He took the pipe from his mouth, studied the glowing coal, and without looking up said: “The port, or kingdom, call it what you wish, of Eugene de Montijo lies between the Gold Coast and Liberia, like a pimple on the arse of French West Africa.”

  “A better name for it would be El Dorado,” Warful said.

  “Indeed,” Yates said, nodding, “it is a fabulously wealthy place.”

  “And ripe for the plucking,” Warful said, grabbing air with a clawed hand.

  He turned in his chair and said to Battles: “Eugene de Montijo is the center of the African slave trade. The continent is still being bled of its human resources and fifty thousand slaves pass through the kingdom every year, bound for the Arab lands, the rubber plantations of South America and a dozen other nations.”

  Warful’s skull face broke into a smile. “Vast fortunes are being made, Mr. Battles, millions and millions, and we can take it all by force of arms.”

  “I thought slavery had been abolished years ago,” Battles said, knowing how lame that sounded. But his brain was overwhelmed and couldn’t fully process what Warful was telling him.

  “Mr. Battles, your naiveté is charming,” Warful said, to the bellowing counterpoint of Yates’s laughter. “Slavery is still with us, and is growing.” He spread his hands and shrugged. “Of course, nowadays when darkies are sent to p
laces like South Africa where slavery is abolished, the British call them ‘apprentices.’ But the result is the same. Within a few years they’re worked to death.”

  “And you plan to take over this slave trade?” Battles said. He felt sick. But whether it was from the dark rum or Warful’s plans, he didn’t know.

  “Only the Eugene de Montijo part of it,” Warful said. “And then there are the Jews, of course. I’ll also take care of them.”

  Suddenly Yates was interested. “What about the Jews, Hat?”

  “As you told me yourself, the kingdom suffers from a major infestation,” Warful said. “The Jews control the ivory and spice trade and have become very wealthy, and many have huge estates in the hills overlooking the port. I will confiscate those estates and distribute them among my followers.”

  He smiled. “Of necessity, the Jews will have to be exterminated.”

  Yates picked up the rum decanter, offered it to Battles, who shook his head, then poured himself another glass. “Hat, when I told you about the Jews, I said they were my best customers and that I didn’t want them harmed. They ship all over the world and I need their business, lay to that. Most of them are square and I take to them like pitch, I do.”

  “You will have plenty of other business, I promise you,” Warful said, dismissing the man. “One day all the nations of earth will get rid of the Jewish problem. Until then, the world will see the pogrom at Eugene de Montijo as a start.”

  Battles detected a shift in the captain’s attitude and there was an edge of hostility in his voice as he said: “You plan to storm the palace and overthrow King Brukwe with a score of men?”

  “Yes, those, and the five hundred mounted Afrikaner mercenaries your man Marcel Toucey is bringing north.”

  “The trouble with Toucey is that he’s a rogue who should’ve been hung years ago,” Yates said. “You can’t depend on him. And you can’t depend on the Boers either. The last I heard, they’re planning a major armed revolt against the British. If that’s the case, they’ll want all their fighting men at home.”