The Slavers Read online

  “Wait, I’ll give you a hand,” Long John said to me.

  I climbed into the wagon bed and got a hold on the coffin. Long John caught the other end and I pushed and he pulled. The mules, being mules, stood where they stopped.

  The lid of the coffin had nails driven partway in. Long John took the feet and I took the shoulders. I guess the stable-keeping coffin-maker’s clients usually came in the short Mexican size; we had to push hard on the big dead Indian to get him into the box.

  The Marshal was at the end of the wagon. “You see a hammer in there?” I asked him.

  Long John felt with his hands and shook his head. “A shovel, no hammer,” he said. “We’ll use a rock. I’ll ride along if you got no objection.”

  Long John climbed on his horse and I got up beside Elbert and took the reins away from him. “Where to?” I asked Long John.

  “You follow,” the Marshal said.

  It was after one o’clock in the morning, and except for the American saloons and the Mex cantinas Santa Fe is a town that shuts down early. Marshal Buckman rode ahead of the wagon, waved for me to turn the wagon when we got to the plaza. After that we went back down Bedoya Street—no faces showed but they were there. Long John waved me to turn the wagon again, into the street that took us past the cathouse where I had relieved the fat cattle buyer of his bankroll.

  Out past a long street lined on both sides with freight sheds and stables, Long John turned in his saddle to say that was far enough. We were on a long dark hill that sloped away from the last houses of the town. There was some light reflected from the center of town. Enough light to see piles of shiny cans turning to rust.

  I carried my end of Ganado’s pine box until Long John told me to stop. Moving like a man much older than the Marshal, Elbert got down from the wagon and followed us.

  “This’ll do,” Long John said.

  I got the shovel and started to dig; Long John spelled me after I got two feet down. I know six feet is the regulation depth to plant a body, but that hill was more rock than dirt. We called off the digging after about four feet.

  We let Ganado down easy as we could, but there was a drop after we let go. The coffin, the lid hammered shut with a rock, fell to the bottom of the grave.

  I grabbed the shovel. Long John stopped me. “You know any words to say over an Indian?”

  I could hardly recall what you said over a white man.

  Long John spoke to Elbert. “You, Masters?”

  Elbert woke up a bit. “Nothing that matters,” he said.

  Elbert walked back to the wagon and climbed up and sat there. Long John waited while I shoveled dirt and rocks on top of the coffin. I finished and told him thanks for the help.

  Before he went to his horse, Long John said: “Part of the job, Carmody. No thanks needed. Leave town while you can. I’d hate to bury you.”

  I drove the wagon back to Olivera’s stable. Olivera looked like a good man—good because he was making money. And like all good men and good businessmen afraid of losing his good business, he was scared. It was a cooler night than most in Santa Fe, but Olivera had sweat on his saddle-colored, flat face. Olivera was a good man, torn between his friendship for Elbert and his fear of McKim. Olivera had provided the coffin and the wagon; he hadn’t come along for the funeral.

  Elbert was back and Olivera was trying to explain the way things were, using many words, some Spanish, to explain that he was a good man who didn’t want any trouble. He was in Senor Masters’ debt for all Senor Masters had done to help the Mexican people—but.

  “Get some whiskey, Olivera,” Elbert said. “Then go to bed.”

  Olivera said, no whiskey. “Plenty of tequila, Senor Masters. Anything for you.”

  “Get it,” Elbert ordered him.

  Olivera gave me the two bottles of tequila and I followed Elbert down the street and up the stairs to his dirty room. Elbert sat behind the desk and pulled the cork out of one of the bottles with his teeth.

  He set the bottle down and looked at me. A quarter of the bottle was gone.

  “You feeling all right?” I asked.

  Elbert didn’t answer that. “You remember what Buckman said. I think Buckman was right. I sit up here with the law books and let other men do the fighting and the dying.”

  I didn’t like the way Elbert looked and was carrying on. “Buckman is a scared old man,” I said.

  “He’s that and he’s still right, Carmody. What’s the longest you ever been in jail?”

  Elbert’s mind surely did wander. “The longest, I guess, five months of a ten-year sentence. I let myself out.”

  Elbert tilted the bottle again and, Lord, how that tequila went down.

  I was thinking of Ganado buried on that trash-littered hill and Long John Buckman and rancher McKim—in no special order.

  Elbert’s thumb was making thocking sounds in the neck of the bottle. The look in his face was far away and long ago. “I got handed the same sentence, ten years,” he said. “You did five months and I did five years. You always knew you’d break out, not me. I figured I’d do the full ten. I figured maybe I’d die in there, but I swore if I ever did get out I’d make something of myself.”

  Too much talk for me. “You did all right,” I said.

  “I thought I did, Carmody. I thought I’d master the same law put me where I was. The first years I figured every way there was to escape. They caught me the first escape I tried and added two years to my sentence. Then I bunked in for a while with an old lawyer in for forging somebody’s will. That old boy was the one got me started reading law.”

  I was lying on the bed but not sleepy. “You want to sleep?” I asked.

  “Then they let me out with a pardon,” Elbert said. “Five years study, I knew more than the lawyers. I didn’t have to scratch for the law books. Uncle Zack saw to that. Sent books, sent money, used influence—all a waste of time. You were right, Carmody.”

  I propped myself on an elbow. “What about?”

  “Everything, my friend. “You took on that gunman because I wasn’t wearing a gun. Then you took a beating at the fort, and it should have been me. Then, safe behind my Goddamned law books, I let you and Ganado ride out to take on fifteen killers. Today, Ganado decided to settle it the way it should have been settled all along. With a gun.”

  “Turn loose that shotgun,” I said. “Put it down, Elbert.”

  Elbert had a lot of booze in his belly by now; that wasn’t what was making him brave. “You fetched the shotgun, Carmody. Told me to use it. Well, that’s what I’ll do. One barrel for McKim, one for Jessup.”

  Elbert broke open the weapon, checked the double loads, and snapped it shut.

  “Then what happens, Lawyer Masters?” I asked. “You’re dead and McKim and Jessup are more in the slave business than ever. Or you get lucky and down both of them. Then they hang you in the Territorial Prison. Don’t even think about it. It’s the middle of the night. Go to sleep, so I can sleep.”

  Elbert wasn’t listening. I got up fast and put myself between him and the door.

  “Stand aside,” Elbert roared.

  I shook my head and Elbert tried to turn the stock and hit me in the belly. I grabbed the barrel with one hand, drew my handgun with the other. Still gripping the shotgun, Elbert tried to pull back. He wasn’t fast enough, and I put him to sleep with a firm but gentle tap of the Colt .44. I put Elbert on his own bed. He was wearing a dirty silk necktie, and after I tested it for holding power, I used it to bind his wrists together. Before I belted his ankles with his own belt, I pulled off his only pair of pants and threw them out the window. That was taking what they call drastic steps, but I know of no man who will go on the warpath minus his pants.

  I had slept enough, so I sat behind the desk and drank the last of Olivera’s whiskey.

  Elbert was still snoring when the sun came up.

  Chapter Nine

  Two days after that Elbert still had a sore spot on his thick head, but there was no more wild tal
k about that shotgun and Thatcher McKim. The grub was all used up, and I was fresh out of ideas about where to look for more eating money. Well, no, I had plenty of ideas; the trouble was that all my ideas involved some kind of gunplay.

  I guess Elbert knew what I was thinking, and he warned me away from it. Judge Gratz, that fine old gentleman, was back from Alamogordo and fixing to hold court Wednesday morning, two days away.

  It was hard to see Elbert behind the piled-up law books on the desk. Four or five times, he said he was finished preparing his case. Now he said it again—and that made six or seven. He looked over a pile of books and waved yellow papers at me. There sure was a lot of crumpled lawyer’s paper on the floor.

  “Gratz can’t rule against me and still call himself a judge,” Elbert said. “I dug back through the books and found that some of the Indians taken by the slavers aren’t wards of the Government, so called, but honest-to-God United States citizens. Some of the tribes were Mexican nationals before the War of 1846. After the War all Mexican nationals who remained in the Territory automatically became U.S. citizens. Maybe the Indians who are citizens don’t even know it, but they are. So my case, more or less—Abe Lincoln rides again. Maybe they can bend the law to ignore Indians without citizenship, not the others. If Gratz says no I’ll go to Washington. But Gratz knows better than that.”

  Flat on the bed, hands locked behind my head, my attention was split between Elbert’s talking and my belly’s rumbling. My belly was telling me that no man lived by reheated coffee and cigarettes alone.

  Elbert was telling me some of the things Judge Gratz might say.

  “Having heard the arguments of learned counsel,” I said, “I have come to an overwhelming decision in favor of beefsteak with onions on top. By any chance does counsel for the plaintiff party have something he could sell?”

  Elbert was burned at me. “You been hinting I sell my watch all day. No, sir, I won’t do it. You take that shotgun and sell that. No need for that after Wednesday.”

  “Maybe not,” I said. “The shotgun stays.”

  “I won’t sell my watch. Damn it, man, it isn’t the watch. A lawyer about to argue a big case doesn’t sell his watch.”

  “Does it have your name in the back of the case?”

  “I saw you looking at my watch, Carmody. You know it doesn’t.”

  I got off the bed. Grinning, I said, “If it’ll smooth down your dignity, I’ll have my own name inscribed before I sell it. You got lard enough to live off for a week. I’m just a skinny Texas feller.”

  “No watch,” Elbert said.

  “You’re no friend of the white men,” I said.

  Elbert got so mad, he couldn’t find the right pocket.

  “On the desk,” I said, grinning. “We’ll use the town clock.”

  Elbert threw the watch at me and I started for the door. I turned and asked him if he wanted anything special.

  Elbert was grinning, too. “Just to say thanks, you mean son of a bitch. About the other night, I mean.”

  “Go thou and sin no more, my son, as the Spaniard priests say.”

  Elbert tried to throw a law book at me, but it was too heavy to lift with one hand.

  I went out with the watch.

  Wednesday morning, Elbert got up long before I did, because there wasn’t a whole lot I could do to impress Judge Gratz. The day before I told Elbert he should get Mrs. Chavez to clean his pants and coat with benzene, a fairly new thing town people used to clean their clothes, but Elbert wouldn’t listen.

  I lay in my blanket on the floor and watched while first he hacked at his hairy face with a rusty scissors—trimming his beard was what he called it. Then he spilled water from a bucket onto a rag and cleaned one of his two celluloid collars. He had it cleaned fine when he dropped a spark from his cigar and the collar caught fire like a flash. Elbert got his fingers burned and the citizens up at that hour heard some hard cursing.

  It was as good as a tent show, watching Elbert.

  The necktie I had used to tie him with was wrinkled worse than a Yankee missionary’s face. It was wrinkled and it hadn’t been clean for some time. Elbert rubbed it down with the wet rag, then put it between the pages of a stale newspaper— and jumped on it. He used the same rag to scrub at the stains on his vest and coat lapels, to wipe the dust off his boots.

  He caught me grinning at him from the floor.

  “Well, what about it?” he growled.

  “Good enough to sell clothes in a catalogue,” I said.

  I made coffee and fried bacon. After I held my head out the window and spilled water over it, we walked down Bedoya Street and across the plaza to the old Mexican Governor’s Palace, where the American Governor lived now—where Judge Gratz held court.

  It was early but they were there: General Brewster C. Waycross, McKim and, naturally, his foreman, Jessup. Even Long John Buckman was there, sitting by himself. The spectators drifted in and, naturally again, there were more white people than Mexicans. Most of the spectators looked more like McKim’s working gunmen than casual spectators. A few women were there. I spotted my old friend Captain Pendergast. Leaving out the judge, who hadn’t benched himself yet, it wasn’t a friendly gathering.

  The clerk got off his chant, a door opened and Judge Elmer Gratz bustled in. The courtroom was quiet but Judge Gratz knocked with his wooden hammer and demanded quiet.

  The Judge was an old man not too steady in the legs, maybe not so steady in the head. His face was a clipped white beard and flashing eyeglasses, a red nose knobbed like an old red potato.

  A short man in a baggy frock coat got up and spoke to the Judge. That would be the lawyer for the Territory. I sat with the gun-heavy spectators; Elbert was up front at a long table. I couldn’t hear what the short man was saying.

  “I object,” Elbert said, raising his backside off the chair. “The court has jurisdiction.”

  Judge Gratz bashed his eyeglasses at Elbert like a medicine man laying a curse. “I will decide that, Mr. Masters.”

  Gratz, after fumbling a bit, decided that he had jurisdiction.

  Elbert got up and began his argument. He sounded pretty good going into all that stuff about the Bill of Rights and what Abe Lincoln said about slavery being abolished forever in ’63. He knocked about the fact that some of the Indians talked about were, as U.S. citizens, equal with the oldest Pilgrim or the newest naturalized clodhopper arrived from Europe.

  The law was clear, Elbert said. All American citizens must have the full protection of the law, and so on. White, black, brown, red—the law was clear on that point.

  “The Governor is the President’s agent here,” Elbert finished. “In his absence the Acting-Governor must be directed to act. I demand that this court order him to protect the lives and well-being of these abused American citizens.”

  “No demands,” Judge Gratz said, flashing his eyeglasses. “Argument has not been completed.”

  Elbert sat down and the other feller got up. I got the feeling that the Judge leaned more his way. The other lawyer talked on, the Judge nodding his head, liking what he heard. Among other weasely things, the lawyer for the Territory read long and fast from a law book. He argued that our deal with the Mexicans—making some of these Indians U.S. citizens—had been pushed through in the unsettled days after the Mexican War by politicians, good men in their way, eager to make that war stay stopped. He said the same went for the anti-Peonage Law of 1868.

  President Lincoln was but three years in his honored grave. The anti-Peonage Law, this short feller argued, was nothing but a hasty and cloudy law passed by a Congress dominated by Yankee Abolitionists or men sorrowing for the dead President and his ideas on slavery.

  The short lawyer said: “Though I am a South Carolinian born and bred—as you are, your honor —no man holds the martyred President in higher esteem, yet I respectfully argue that Mr. Lincoln, in issuing the so-called Emancipation Proclamation, listened to the clamor of the times rather than to his own personal convict
ions.”

  Judge Gratz was much more polite to the lawyer for the Territory than he was to Elbert. “I have listened to learned counsel with great interest,” he said. The Judge lay back in his leather chair and let the wind leak out through his mouth.

  “A Territorial judge has wide latitude,” he droned. “Mr. Masters says the law is clear—but is it? In theory, the law is the same—but is it? Are we to have one simple law for the peaceful Vermont village and the violent towns of the frontier? I think not. Conditions vary as men do. Mr. Masters cites hastily enacted and heretofore untested laws. I am inclined, however wrong I may be, to agree with counsel for the Territory.”

  Elbert was on his feet, shouting.

  Judge Gratz wasn’t bothered, with four federal deputy marshals to back him up.

  “Sit down, Mr. Masters,” he said. “Sit down or be sat down.”

  Elbert sat down. I looked around and Jessup was grinning and McKim looked happy and mad at the same time. General Waycross was somewhere in between.

  “Let the courts decide—but not this court,” Judge Gratz said, smiling some for the benefit of his admirers, and there were a lot of them in that courtroom. “You must take your Constitutional arguments to a higher court, Mr. Masters. I decline to rule on the arguments.”

  I expected Elbert to get up and call Judge Elmer Gratz a lying, white-faced son of a bitch. All Elbert said was: “I’ll do more than that. I’ll go to Washington. No more courts—I’ll see the President.”

  Judge Gratz purpled a bit, but he got up without an answer. The clerk said some stuff and the Judge passed out of there like a heavy cloud before a storm.

  The only thing left to sell was Ganado’s horse. Olivera didn’t argue when I said the animal was worth at least a hundred dollars.

  Back at the room, Elbert was throwing things into a scarred leather grip. There wasn’t much to throw: two shirts boiled clean and ironed by Mrs. Chavez upstairs, some socks, yellow paper, a steel pen, a bottle of ink, cigars for the trip.