Read The Book of Murdock Online
Authors: Loren D. Estleman
The Book of Murdock (10 page)
Owen, Texas, was
ten years old, older than Wichita Falls by five years and ancient by frontier standards, which had seen pick holes sprout into metropolises in six months, then blow away six weeks after the veins played out, and roaring end-of-track towns dismantle themselves and reassemble under different names farther down the everexpanding line. Such places were as transient as Indian villages and left only piles of offal behind to mark their passage. Owen had kept the offal but refused to budge.
ten years old, older than Wichita Falls by five years and ancient by frontier standards, which had seen pick holes sprout into metropolises in six months, then blow away six weeks after the veins played out, and roaring end-of-track towns dismantle themselves and reassemble under different names farther down the everexpanding line. Such places were as transient as Indian villages and left only piles of offal behind to mark their passage. Owen had kept the offal but refused to budge.
Increase Owen, scion of an old New England family and a putative former army major who had either resigned or been cashiered by Ranald MacKenzie at the end of the Red River Indian War in 1874, had built an adobe store on a tributary of the Canadian River called Wild Horse Creek, selling whiskey and provisions and ammunition to parties of buffalo hunters. On occasion he'd bartered for hides, and at the end of the first winterâand they were as cold in the panhandle as the summers were unbearably hotâwhen the
stack of stiff green hides behind the building began to reek, he sold them to a tanner, who paid the market rate. This amounted to ten times what he'd taken in on all his other merchandise since opening his doors, wiping out cost of construction and stock. At that point he entered into a partnership with the tanner. With the Eastern demand for lap robes and doctors' coats and leather belts to drive the gears in Industrial Age manufactories at its peak, he might have retired in five years to a life of leisure and fine things if the buffalo had just held out.
stack of stiff green hides behind the building began to reek, he sold them to a tanner, who paid the market rate. This amounted to ten times what he'd taken in on all his other merchandise since opening his doors, wiping out cost of construction and stock. At that point he entered into a partnership with the tanner. With the Eastern demand for lap robes and doctors' coats and leather belts to drive the gears in Industrial Age manufactories at its peak, he might have retired in five years to a life of leisure and fine things if the buffalo had just held out.
They didn't. By then a little community had sprung up around the store, made up of gunsmiths, knife sharpeners, wheelwrights, crib girls, faro dealers, plank-bar saloons where busthead whiskey was sold and consumed by the jug, and all the other bluebottles that feed on a going concern. Owen had had the foresight to obtain a deed to a hundred acres on the creek and the knowledge to have it platted for town lots, but also the poor judgment to do it all on credit. When the great herds vanished and his debtors caught up with him, he shot himself with the Army Colt he'd carried in the Battle of Palo Duro Canyon; or had stolen from a sutler's after he'd been stripped of his weapons and rank, depending upon which story you preferred. Generally there's truth in everything that's said about a person, and if you took all the rogues out of the rotation the country would still belong to the Indians, who had rogues in plenty but not enough to check the press from the Atlantic coast.
Its founder's misfortune and death would have been the end of the city of Owen in the normal course of things, but the West was no normal place. The creek, which slowed to a
trickle during droughts, never quite dried up, and the grazing was ideal for fattening herds of longhorns and Herefords being driven from the ranches down south to the Kansas railheads in Dodge City and Abilene. Tent saloons popped up like mushrooms, to be replaced quickly by frame buildings where brand whiskey was served in bottles on proper bars and brothels with parlors replaced the cribs. There were shootings, brawls, and the odd mysterious disappearance of a lucky poker player after he left the scene of his success, but nothing to compare with what was going on up north, where the cowhands were paid their full trail wages and had more to spend. Owen boasted the first hotel in the panhandle, and soon a Catholic church, attended mainly by Mexican masons and carpenters and their families. In 1878, a sheep rancher named Vallejo wedded the eldest daughter of one of them before its altar and was buried from there three months later after he was shot by an unknown assassin and his flock scattered. No one was ever brought to trial for his murder; just as well, as it was commonly accepted that no Texas jury would find against the cattle interests, which benefited most from discouraging the sheep trade in that state.
trickle during droughts, never quite dried up, and the grazing was ideal for fattening herds of longhorns and Herefords being driven from the ranches down south to the Kansas railheads in Dodge City and Abilene. Tent saloons popped up like mushrooms, to be replaced quickly by frame buildings where brand whiskey was served in bottles on proper bars and brothels with parlors replaced the cribs. There were shootings, brawls, and the odd mysterious disappearance of a lucky poker player after he left the scene of his success, but nothing to compare with what was going on up north, where the cowhands were paid their full trail wages and had more to spend. Owen boasted the first hotel in the panhandle, and soon a Catholic church, attended mainly by Mexican masons and carpenters and their families. In 1878, a sheep rancher named Vallejo wedded the eldest daughter of one of them before its altar and was buried from there three months later after he was shot by an unknown assassin and his flock scattered. No one was ever brought to trial for his murder; just as well, as it was commonly accepted that no Texas jury would find against the cattle interests, which benefited most from discouraging the sheep trade in that state.
That was the beginning of Owen's ranching phase. By the time I arrived, relations between cattleman and shepherd had settled into a low simmer. Residents credited the uneasy truce to the appearance of Richard Freemason, whose eight-hundred-acre ranch on the other side of Wild Horse Creek was the largest in the region, and whose determination to raise sheep placed him on the side of one of the most oppressed groups on the prairie. He was the first rancher to encircle his spread with barbed wire. Three of his fence riders
(who when questioned on the stand revealed a deeper knowledge of gun handling than posthole digging) were tried for the murder of a cowhand surprised in the act of cutting the wire to drive some strays across the spread instead of riding a mile out of his way to use the public gate, and convicted after forty minutes of jury deliberation. Freemason appealed the decision. It was upheld and the three were condemned to hang until Governor Ireland issued a full pardon, citing the right of a property owner and his trusties to defend it from trespassers and vandals. He made special note of the relative proximity of the gate and the minor nature of the inconvenience to the cowhand of obeying the law.
(who when questioned on the stand revealed a deeper knowledge of gun handling than posthole digging) were tried for the murder of a cowhand surprised in the act of cutting the wire to drive some strays across the spread instead of riding a mile out of his way to use the public gate, and convicted after forty minutes of jury deliberation. Freemason appealed the decision. It was upheld and the three were condemned to hang until Governor Ireland issued a full pardon, citing the right of a property owner and his trusties to defend it from trespassers and vandals. He made special note of the relative proximity of the gate and the minor nature of the inconvenience to the cowhand of obeying the law.
The precedent sent shockwaves from the Canadian to the Rio Grande. Prominent supporters of the cattle trade pronounced it a license to commit murder, but since that had been the effect of earlier decisions on the side of Big Cattle, few paid them any attention. Anyone who didn't believe the tide was changing took a ruder hit a few months later when a bill was introduced in the capital to make fence cutting a crime punishable by jail and a stiff fine. Freemason's single-minded crusade on his men's behalf was considered instrumental in this development, and as one public servant after another came forward in favor of the bill, it seemed likely to pass.
I got part of this history from the attendant who took my money and handed me a towel at the bathhouse and the rest from the clerk in the freight office, who took my valise for safekeeping and gave me a ticket to reclaim it. There is something about a clerical collar that brings out the tour guide in
everyone. I was clean and close-shaven, but unbrushed. I'd played the impoverished preacher over whether to order the extra service at the launderer's where the bathhouse man had offered to take my clothes while I was soaking, then decided I'd make a better impression in a clean shirt and a white collar and a dusty suit than I would in a brushed one and yellow linen; for I'd chosen to pay a call upon my benefactor as soon as I was presentable. When the collar came back, the helpful launderer had put in enough starch to slice cheese with it.
everyone. I was clean and close-shaven, but unbrushed. I'd played the impoverished preacher over whether to order the extra service at the launderer's where the bathhouse man had offered to take my clothes while I was soaking, then decided I'd make a better impression in a clean shirt and a white collar and a dusty suit than I would in a brushed one and yellow linen; for I'd chosen to pay a call upon my benefactor as soon as I was presentable. When the collar came back, the helpful launderer had put in enough starch to slice cheese with it.
Finding the house required no directions, although the clerk and the attendant, both proud citizens, had been eager to point it out. It stood on the only high ground in town, a conical hill erected with spades and dredges from level plain that brought the gables in line with the steeple of the Catholic church at the opposite end of the main street. The construction was a delirious arrangement of spires, grilles, turrets, and fretwork, with fishscale shingles and more shades of paint than a tart caught outside in daylight. A quartet of mature cottonwoods provided shade on all four sides at what must have been considerable expense; trees don't grow in such accommodating symmetry and so had to have been brought in after the house was built.
On my way there I passed the First Unitarian church, a much simpler affair of whitewashed wood with a squat bell tower, common unstained windows, and its name painted in block letters on the lintel above the door. A squat woman with her hair in a bun quit sweeping the front steps to watch me pass in my working uniform. When I touched my hat, she stopped leaning on her broom and got back to business.
A long flight of steps cut from native limestone and sunk into the hill led to the front porch of the house. The porch was semicircular, with fluted Greek columns supporting a gothic roof and a shark's-mouth transom above the front door in the Queen Anne style. It was a crazy sort of house until you realized its architect had sought the effect of an ancient English castle that had acquired new additions in many styles over hundreds of years. Then you remembered you were in Texas and it went back to being a crazy sort of house.
The compass-and-square symbol of the Ancient and Honorable Fraternity of Free and Accepted Masons was carved in the center of the paneled mahogany door. I found a blue china bell pull and used it. The ringing on the other side was barely audible. Whoever had constructed the walls and door had built them to withstand a battering ram.
A fine-boned Mexican of around seventy, small as a boy, with white hair and dressed in a loose white cotton shirt and trousers, opened the door. His feet were brown and bare in woven-leather sandals and his face was the color of dark honey and every bit as smooth. Mine had more wrinkles.
I took off my hat and gave him Sebastian's name. “I think Mr. Freemason is expecting me.”
“Please come in.” No accent accompanied the words.
He closed the door behind me, took my hat, and left me standing in a baronial foyer with a fourteen-foot ceiling, wainscoted with polished walnut six feet up, and furnished on either side with a bench and a chair with high straight backs that looked as inviting as iron maidens. The windows were equipped with wooden shutters that could be swung shut
and bolted from inside, with gun ports that would assume the shape of the Swiss cross when the shutters were closed. Either the owner of the house was a fiend on the subject of security or he'd come prudently prepared to defend himself during sheep wars.
and bolted from inside, with gun ports that would assume the shape of the Swiss cross when the shutters were closed. Either the owner of the house was a fiend on the subject of security or he'd come prudently prepared to defend himself during sheep wars.
In a little while the old man returned, his sandals making no sound at all on the parquet floor, and led me past a cantilevered staircase and down a hall hung with English hunting prints to another paneled door and swung it wide. He held it while I went through the opening and pressed it shut behind me with a faint gasp of a click. The room was an office large enough to contain two of Texas Rangers Captain Jordan's and the post office next door. There were panels on the walls, dark and ancient, a row of oaken file cabinets, several tables scattered with newspapers and Eastern periodicals, and a gargantuan desk six feet tall that opened out into rows of compartments and drawers for letters, stationery, rolls of paper, and ledgers, with a hinged writing surface and scrolled architectural features that probably doubled as secret niches revealed only by hidden mechanisms known only to the cabinetmaker and the owner. When closed, the fixture would assume the appearance of a chifforobe built to shelter a foppish collection of gentlemen's suits of clothes. It was made of cherrywood, deep red and glistening, with burled-walnut insets; an office in itself, redundantly contained within an office.
It impressed me more than anything else I'd seen since I'd spotted the house on my way into town. This marvel of nineteenth-century business machinery was only the third one I'd seen; the others had stood in the private office of the
president of the biggest bank in Louisiana and a brokerage firm in Chicago, and they had not been as ornate, the median model geared for less extravagant budgets. I'd heard J. Pierpont Morgan had one in his New York City mansion, but this was my first personal experience of one in a private house.
president of the biggest bank in Louisiana and a brokerage firm in Chicago, and they had not been as ornate, the median model geared for less extravagant budgets. I'd heard J. Pierpont Morgan had one in his New York City mansion, but this was my first personal experience of one in a private house.
The man seated in front of it, in a padded leather chair swiveled to face me, was somewhat less impressive physically, but then the dimensions of the house and his reputation had prepared me for a large man on the order of Grover Cleveland or Jumbo the elephant; one of those notorious trenchermen who ate a bucket of oysters for breakfast, sides of pork for dinner, and blew their noses into silk handkerchiefs the size of bedsheets. Richard Freemason was not a small man in comparison to his Mexican manservant, but compact, with slender hands adorned only with a Masonic ingot on the left little finger and a narrow torso in a snug waistcoat of figured silk, small feet in calfskin shoes that gleamed like polished mahogany, and a sandy Vandyke beard trimmed by a barber who ought to have been making violins or miniature portraits in enamel. The only thing large about him was his forehead, which bulged out from the bridge of his nose like Lawrence Lazarus Little's, but with a lower hairline and a sharp widow's peak that made him appear more lupine than leonine. A dedicated phrenologist would have coveted that head, shaved and pickled and marked out in ink like a butcher's chart, the choice cuts labeled Reason, Aggression, Strategy, and Logic. Humor and Fear would occupy the tiniest compartments, like the ones reserved for wire brads in the Brobdingnagian desk.
Tightly packaged men are restrained as a rule, preferring to let the other fellow make the first gesture. Richard Freemason appeared to exist outside the rules. The moment the door snicked shut, he sprang from the chair and strode the distance between us in half the time of a long-legged man, seizing my hand in a grip that was not so much ironclad as electric; when we broke contact, I still felt the tingle to my fingertips.
“Damned glad to see you!” His tenor voice was clipped, telegraphic, with a British edge that might have been affected, but was too narrow to expose as outright fraud. “I hope you'll pardon the blasphemy, but between the kneelers and the Scotchmen and the poured-in-the-mold Dutch Reformed I've been on the defensive longer than the Jews. Do you know the Baptists say that both my blessed parents and ninetenths of the world are in hell merely because they didn't embrace Christ as their savior? Surely the devil's ship is sunk to the gunnels.”
It was the most succinct description of the Catholic, Presbyterian, and Calvinist faiths I'd heard, including Eldred Griffin's. The Baptists always summed up quickly.
“All paths lead to God,” was all I could think of to say.
“A most Christian sentiment.”
“Actually it's Buddhist. I studied the world's religions for purposes of comparison.” Which was true of Eldred Griffin, whose apostasy had sent him in various directions searching for a substitute.
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