The Case of the Petrified Man (18 page)

I looked at Jace.

Jace was blowing smoke out & slowly shaking his head. But he had a soft look in his eyes.

“What’s the matter, Brose?” said he. I had never heard him use that name before.

“My pard Tiny used to do the sewing.” Stonewall’s
big head was down & big tears plopped on his mending. “But Tiny got shredded at the Battle of Shiloh.”

“Was it bad?” I asked. “Fighting in the war?”

Stonewall lifted his big head. “That is like asking if burning in H-ll is bad,” he said. “Everybody told me it would be all trumpets and glory, but it turned out to be mud and blood and minie-balls and bits of flesh and men begging to go home. But Shiloh made the other battles look like paradise.”

Stonewall gazed at the wall. His eyes pointed two different directions but he did not seem to be looking at anything. “They say the rout started because of a lieutenant in one of our other companies. They say he was Petrified. Petrified with Terror. I don’t know his name but it was his first battle. They say he stood there like a statue while men dropped on his right and on his left. Then his men turned and ran. They swept us along with them.”

Stonewall hung his head. “We ran past a regiment of Tennessee boys and they called out taunts after us: ‘Flicker, flicker! Yellowhammer!’”

“What does that mean?” I asked.

Stonewall shrugged. “Yellowhammer is the State Bird of Alabama,” he said. “We call it the flicker. I guess those Tennessee boys was saying we were scared like birds. I guess they were calling us yellow.” He looked down at the needle and thread in his lap.

“War can make people animals,” said Jace. “Not everybody stays to fight like a bear. Some freeze like possums and some flee like flickers.”

“Well, I was a fleeing yellow flicker,” said Stonewall. “If I
could of flown I would of. But I had to walk. I set my face west and did not stop except to eat and sleep.” He looked up at me. “Took me a month and a half to get here. Jace told me I should’ve come earlier. Wish I had.”

I looked at Stonewall’s sad & ugly face and wondered how I would behave in a battle with men getting shredded around me. Would I fight like a bear? Or flee like a flicker? Or freeze like a possum? I reckoned I would freeze, too, because when the Shoshone attacked us two years ago, I found myself sitting on the grass by dead bodies and burning wagons and I do not remember anything that happened before that. It was all a blank.

“What happened to the man who froze?” I asked. “The lieutenant of that other company?”

Stonewall shrugged. “I reckon he is dead. Those minie-balls was so thick they sounded like wasps buzzing around us. If those waspy bullets didn’t get him,” he said, “our firing squad would of.”

“Your own people would’ve shot him?”

Stonewall nodded. “They shoot cowards and deserters as a lesson to the rest. Specially officers.”

“Did you ever kill anyone?” I asked Stonewall.

“P.K.,” said Jace, “do you always interrogate people like this?”

“What do you mean?”

Jace leant forward. “I mean you can’t just ride a Question straight at somebody like that. It is just like a battle. They will either throw up their hands and flee, or freeze, or they will fight back.” He drew on his cigar. “That may well be why this Hamm person beat on you.”

I did not know what to say, so I said nothing.

“You got to come at them from the side,” he said. “A flanking maneuver is what they call it in the army. Weave your way round to the question. If you want to know where somebody was on Friday evening, ask them if they ever go to the Melodeon or the Dog Fights of an evening.”

“There are Dog Fights here in Virginia?”

“That ain’t the point. Do you understand what I am trying to tell you?”

I nodded. “Yes, sir,” I said. “Don’t charge straight at them but come around sideways.”

Jace sat back and tapped some cigar ash in the ashtray. “I suggest that you continue to interview the suspects on that list of yours, but try out this new method on them. Sideways, not direct.”

I looked at Jace. He sat relaxed & calm & smoking his cigar. He had taught me more useful lessons about Human Nature than I had learned in the previous 12 years. He was helping me with my Murder Investigation & even advising me on how to Interview a Suspect.

It was time for me to do something for him in return.

It was time for me to help him play poker.

STILL WEARING MY BLANKET
Indian disguise, I went out the nondescript C Street exit of the International Hotel and wove my way through crowds to the Virginia City Saloon on B Street. I did not want to arrive before Jace, so I wandered up & down for a few minutes, making sure that nobody was “shadowing” me.

Confident that I would not be recognized in my disguise, I went past the Flora Temple Livery Stable. Torchlight showed that some carpenters were already at work replacing the south wall. I saw Sissy, Sassy and some other horses in the corral, and the skinnier of the two stable hands dozing against a
wall, with a scatter gun across his knees. I heard a soft nickering and turned to see the buckskin mustang with his head raised and his ears pricked towards where I loitered. Had he recognized me? Even in my disguise? That was one clever horse.

I resisted the impulse to go over & stroke him. Instead, I made my way back up to the saloon on the west side of North B Street.

When I enter a saloon, I generally enjoy bursting through those swinging doors, if they have them. The Virginia City Saloon has them, but on this occasion I ducked under so as to enter unnoticed. The room was full of cigar smoke, whiskey fumes, men’s voices & the entrancing sound of a banjo.

It was not the first time I had been to the Virginia City Saloon. Less than a week before, a couple of desperados had tried to fill me full of lead there. I was certain nobody would try such a thing again. They say lightning rarely strikes in the same place twice and on that other occasion I had been wearing Disguise No. 3—a pink calico dress and bonnet.

Today I was in a different getup.

Wrapped in my Paiute Blanket and rattling my begging cup, I attracted a few glares but nobody complained outright. It was up to the barkeeper whether Blanket Indians and other undesirable types were allowed to frequent the place. I guess Jace had probably already had a quiet word with the barkeeper, because he just gave me a little nod.

I quickly glanced around and saw Jace already seated at a round table covered with green baize. As usual, his back was
to the wall and the brim of his hat cast a shadow over his eyes. I sat where I could see him as well as the feet of the four other men at his table.

My Indian ma taught me to always look for the exits in a room in case you need to make a hasty escape. There was the front door with its swinging butterfly doors. There was a normal wooden back door over near the banjo player. There were also stairs leading to an upper walkway, with numbered rooms of the Virginia City Hotel and a door at each end of the walkway. I myself was flanked by a spittoon on my right and the faro table on my left.

The Virginia City Saloon is pretty well lit, with oil lamps on the wall and a big chandelier with glass globes hanging from the ceiling. There were half a dozen tables with men gambling. A few hurdy girls in low-cut dresses were leaning against the wall or lingering near the bar.

I turned my attention to Jace’s table. There were four other men playing cards with him. Two of them had big droopy mustaches and one had a waxed one. The fourth man was Absalom Smith. The reason I recognized him was thanks to his pipe tobacco, the same as Pa Emmet’s, and his eyebrows, which almost met over his eyes. I was surprised because I thought he would have been performing at the Music Hall. Then I saw the clock said midnight so I guessed the show at Topliffe’s had finished.

“What is put on the table and cut, but never eaten?” Absalom Smith was posing conundrums.

“Undercooked potatoes?” suggested someone at the table.

“No,” laughed Absalom Smith. “A pack of cards!”

Over the next hour or so his puns got worse as he got “tighter.”

About halfway through the fifth hand Absalom Smith said to the man with the pointy waxed mustache, “Ain’t you going to see my raise? Or are you yellow?” His Southern accent was more noticeable, probably because he had been drinking.

“I’m sinking,” said the man with the waxed mustache. It took me a moment to realize that he was a foreigner and that he meant to say he was “thinking.”

“Flicker, flicker. Yellowhammer,” drawled Absalom Smith.

Whenever someone tells me a new expression or word, I suddenly hear it everywhere. I remembered Stonewall saying these very words just a few hours before.

I looked over at Stonewall, who was hunched over the bar. But he was lost in his cups & had not heard.

“What zee h-ll is ‘flicker yellowhammer’?” said the man with the pointy waxed mustache. I guessed his accent was French.

“I believe he’s calling you a poltroon,” said Droopy Mustache No. 1.

“What zee h-ll is ‘poltroon’?” said the Frenchman.

“It means a ‘big coward,’” said Droopy Mustache No. 2.

The Frenchman looked from one man to another, then folded his cards facedown on the table. “I finish with zis game!” he said.

“Flicker, flicker. Yellowhammer,” said Absalom Smith again.

“You shut your mouth or I shut her for you!” said the Frenchman, leaping to his feet.

“Now, boys,” said Jace in his deep voice. “Let’s keep it civil.”

The Frenchman stood for a moment, breathing heavy, then spun on his heel & stalked out of the saloon.

Jace watched him go & shook his head & took a suck of his cigar. “You in?” he asked the others.

They all nodded and finished betting.

“Read them and weep, gentlemen,” said Absalom Smith as he spread his cards out for all to see.

His hand must have been good because everybody sat back except Absalom Smith. He leaned forward to rake in the pile of coins.

“Mind if I join you?” asked a familiar voice. It belonged to a tall, slender man with a blond goatee. He spoke with an English accent, like Ma Evangeline’s. It was not until he sat down in the Frenchman’s recently vacated chair that I recognized him by the small circular scar on his cheek.

It was Langford Farner Peel, the new Chief of the Comstock.

YOU HAD BETTER NOT
call this fellow a coward or a poltroon,” said one of the men to Absalom Smith.

“Or tell him any more of your bad puns,” said the other. “He is a famous shootist from Salt Lake City, ain’t you?”

“I just want to play a little poker,” said Farner Peel, puffing his pipe.

“You are welcome to join us as long as you play fair,” said Jace. “My name is Jason Montgomery but everyone calls me Jace.”

“They call him
Poker Face
Jace,” said Absalom Smith in a loud voice. “So you’d better watch out.”

Farner Peel turned to Absalom Smith, the smile still on his face. “And what, if I may ask, is your name?”

Absalom Smith gave a little bow and said in his Southern drawl, “I am Absalom Smith: actor and punster extraordinaire. Singer, too, sometimes.” And he began to sing, “‘Oh, I’m the fool of the family, and people do what they like with me…’” They were the words to the song I had heard him whistle once or twice.

Mr. Jasper Leeky, the barkeeper and proprietor, brought a bottle of whiskey and a fresh glass for Peel to the table. “Compliments of the house,” he said.

Suddenly I saw Mr. Jasper Leeky’s chest swell & his nostrils flare, just like Jace warned me about. But he did not throw down on Peel. He extended his hand & said, “It is an honor to meet you, sir.”

Peel shook his hand & Mr. Leeky filled each man’s glass.

I guess Mr. Leeky just needed that breath for courage to shake the shootist’s hand.

Everyone took a sip of their drink except Jace, who was dealing.

The saloon fell quiet for a few minutes. I think people were waiting to see if Farner Peel intended to pull out his six-shooters and start blazing.

But he played cards quite amicably & soon the buzz of conversation in the saloon was back to its normal level.