The Great Train Massacre Read online

  “She’s right,” John said. “I can’t see anything happening to her in a dress shop. And I would like to have a beer.”

  “All right,” Matt agreed. He smiled. “It’s not really that hard to talk me into having a beer.”

  Matt and John watched Mary Beth go into the dress shop, then they headed toward the saloon. They were about halfway there when they heard someone’s distressed voice coming from behind one of the buildings. It was a plea in broken English.

  “No, please! You no hit no more!”

  The plea was followed by a thumping sound.

  “You damn Chinamen come over here and think you own the place. Well, we showed you last night, didn’t we?”

  Matt hurried between the two buildings and saw three men standing around an Asian man. The Asian’s face was bruised so badly that one eye was swollen completely shut. There was blood on his lip.

  “That’s enough,” Matt said sharply.

  “Stay the hell out of this, mister! This ain’t none of your business,” one of the three men said, angrily.

  “I just made it my business.”

  Two of the men started toward Matt, but they stopped when he drew his pistol.

  “You ain’t got the guts to use that,” one of them said.

  Matt shot twice, the gunshots coming on top of each other. With shouts of pain, both men slapped their hand to their ear and blood slipped through their fingers.

  “You son of a bitch! You shot off my ear!” one of the men said.

  “No, just the earlobe. Now, I’m asking real nice for the three of you to leave.”

  The three men glared at him a moment longer, then they left.

  “What is your name?” Matt asked.

  “My name Ling.”

  “Mister Ling, you can go home now. They won’t bother you again.”

  “I no have house now. White men burn my house. White miners burn all Chinaman houses.” With that, Ling turned and walked away, going in a different direction from that taken by the three men who had been accosting him.

  “What do you think that was all about?” John asked.

  “I don’t know. I gave up trying to understand evil a long time ago.”

  Once they ordered their beers, it didn’t take long for them to learn what Ling was talking about when he had said that “White miners burn all Chinaman houses.” It was the subject of half a dozen conversations, and from listening they gathered that there had been a near riot the night before, resulting in the death of many of the Chinese and the destruction of several houses.

  “When them damn Chinamen come over here, they got to learn who is boss,” one of the saloon patrons said. “They got no business comin’ here in the first place. This here country is for Americans, it ain’t for Chinamen.”

  “Well, yeah, I can see that, Karl, but I can’t see no reason for killin’ so many of ’em, ’n burning their houses down.”

  “It taught ’em a lesson though, didn’t it?”1

  From a distance, Dan Kelly had watched Matt and John step into the Miners’ Saloon. There were three saloons in town, and, because Dan Kelly had been through Rock Springs many times, he knew all three of them. The Miners’ Saloon was the nicest of the three.

  The names Conroy had mentioned in his telegram, Hellman and Ladue, were familiar to him, because he had heard about them from his previous visits to Rock Springs. Before he contacted them, though, he realized he was going to have to do something about Matt Jensen.

  He had thought that the coups he pulled off yesterday would take care of the situation for him, yet somehow Jensen had talked his way out of the arrest. He had not only done that . . . he had managed to get back to the train.

  Kelly learned from some of the passengers in the last car what had happened. He had come in through the back door, and when a few of the more curious had checked, they saw that a detached engine had come up behind them in order to make the transfer.

  Whatever else one might say about Matt Jensen, he was certainly resourceful.

  Kelly went into the Pick Axe Saloon. If the Miners’ Saloon was the nicest of the three, the Pick Axe was the worst. Here, the beer was green and the whiskey was foul. The bar girls who worked the Pick Axe were on the last run before they wound up in a crib in the alley. But it was those very characteristics that caused Kelly to choose this saloon, a saloon that he would have never chosen under ordinary circumstances. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances; he was here for a particular reason.

  He didn’t go to the bar but chose a table in the back of the room. One of the bar girls came over to flirt with him, and this was exactly what he wanted. She smiled, but she shouldn’t have; the smile showed two teeth missing on top and one on the bottom.

  “I ain’t never seen you in here before,” the girl said.

  “Would you like to sit and have a drink with me?” Kelly invited.

  The girl’s smile grew broader. “Yeah, sure,” she said. “What will you have?”

  “Which is better, the beer or the whiskey?” Kelly asked.

  The girl looked around, nervously, before she answered. “There ain’t neither one of ’em any good, but the beer is prob’ly easier to get down.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Lil.”

  “All right, Lil, bring me a beer, and get somethin’ for yourself.”

  Kelly gave her a dollar bill.

  Lil returned to the table a moment later, carrying one beer and one small glass of what Kelly assumed to be tea. Though given Lil’s appearance and the appearance of the other girls here, it could well have been whiskey.

  Lil put the change on the table in front of Kelly.

  “You can keep it,” he said

  “Gee, thanks, mister.”

  “How well do you know the people of this town?” Kelly asked.

  “I don’t know too many of ’em. Only the ones who come in here a lot.”

  “Who do you figure is the meanest of them all?”

  Lil got a look of apprehension on her face.

  “Uh, they are all pretty nice,” she said, her voice betraying her fear at being involved in such a conversation.

  Kelly took two dollars from his pocket and held the bills on the table in Lil’s plain view.

  “I’m going to ask you again, who is the meanest person you know?”

  “Well, it might be a man by the name of Runt Logan,” Lil said.

  “Runt Logan? That’s his name?”

  “Well, I don’t think nobody knows what his real first name is. They call him Runt Logan ’cause he’s pretty much of a runt. Only there don’t nobody call him that to his face, on account of he’s just real good with a gun, and he’s got a real big temper. That’s him over there.”

  She pointed to a relatively small man, but he was wearing his gun slung low, and a bad scar caused his lip to be deformed.

  “What makes you think he’s so bad?”

  “Don’t know if you’ve heard of it yet, but last night, a bunch of Chinamen was kilt. ’N folks is saying that Logan kilt three of ’em his own self.”

  “Thanks,” Kelly said. He slid the two dollars across the table to the girl.

  “Give this to Logan,” he said, giving her an additional two dollars. “And tell him I would like to talk to him.”

  “Oh, goodness, mister, you ain’t one of them kind, are you? ’Cause if you are, ’n you’re askin’ Logan to come over here, why, he’s likely to kick your teeth in.”

  “One of what kind?” Kelly asked, confused by the direction the conversation had taken.

  “You know what kind. I mean one of them kind that likes men more ’n he likes women.”

  Kelly laughed.

  “I’m not one of those kind,” he said.

  He watched as Lil walked over to the other table, handed the money to Logan, then pointed back toward Kelly. Logan took the money, listened for a moment, glanced over at Kelly, then approached his table.

  “What do you want?” he asked. His
voice sounded like he had gargled with broken glass.

  “I want to offer you a job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I want you to kill someone.”

  “Mister, are you crazy?” Logan asked. “What makes you think I’d take a job like that, anyhow?”

  “From what I understand, you are pretty good at it. In fact, I hear you killed three men last night, and you weren’t paid anything for it.”

  “Yeah, well, it ain’t like they was regular men. These here three was Chinamen.”

  “Well, the man I want you to kill is white. And I’ll give you one hundred dollars to do the job.”

  The one hundred dollars got Logan’s attention right away.

  “A hunnert dollars?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all I have to do is kill one man?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where is this son of a bitch you want me to kill?”

  “He is here, in town. He just got off the train.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Right now, he is in the Miners’ Saloon.”

  “What’s he look like?”

  “You go in first, I’ll come in after you. I’ll go over to say something to him, and you’ll see me put my hand on his shoulder. That will show you who he is. But don’t do anything until I have left the saloon.”

  “Why are you goin’ to leave? Don’t you want to see me do it?”

  “I don’t need to see you do it. If you do it, I’ll know about it.”

  “They ain’t no if about it. If I set out to kill somebody, I get the job done. Hell, you can ask them three Chinamen I shot last night.” Logan laughed out loud. “No, come to think of it, you can’t ask ’em, can you? You can’t ask ’em, ’cause they’re dead.”

  Chapter Twenty

  Kelly waited across the street until Logan went into the Miners’ Saloon. Then, about a minute later, Kelly went in, too. He saw Jensen and Gillespie standing at the bar, and he walked over to them and put his hand on Matt’s shoulder.

  “Mr. Kelly,” John said. “Won’t you join us for a beer?”

  “Thank you, no, I can’t stay. I’m just going around town looking up all our passengers to remind them that the train will leave around midnight, and we would like ever’body to be aboard no later than eleven fifteen.”

  “All right, we’ll be there,” John promised.

  “And you’ll make sure your daughter is with you?”

  “Yes, of course, I will.”

  During the entire conversation, Kelly had kept his hand on Matt’s shoulder, and though Matt didn’t say anything about it, the intimacy made him feel uneasy. When Kelly took his hand down, Matt hunched his shoulder, as if getting rid of the touch.

  “I wonder why he thought it was necessary to tell us that,” Matt said. “We were already told that before we left the train.”

  “Probably some railroad rule, just to make sure they don’t run off and leave anyone,” John said. “That would be bad for business,” he added with a little laugh.

  At his table in the back of the saloon, Logan had watched Kelly come in and touch the shoulder of one of the men at the bar. He didn’t know who the man was, but it didn’t matter. As far as Logan was concerned, the man could be called “One Hundred,” because he was being paid one hundred dollars to kill him.

  Of course, he couldn’t just murder him. He would have to pick a fight with him but do so in a way that after he killed him, he could claim that it was a fair fight. It hadn’t been necessary for him to be so cautious yesterday. Yesterday he had killed Chinamen, and the law didn’t seem to care. But this was a white man.

  Matt saw the man in the mirror sitting at a table on the far side of the room. The man seemed to be studying him, and Matt had, long ago, developed an intuition about such things. It was that intuition, almost as much as his prowess with a pistol, that had kept him alive through the years.

  A couple of times Matt looked directly at the man’s reflection, wanting to look him in the eyes, but the man cut his gaze away both times.

  Finally, the man stood up and started toward Matt.

  “Move away, John,” Matt said quietly.

  “What?”

  “It’s just a feeling I’ve got. Go down to the other end of the bar, now!”

  Matt was insistent enough with his order that John didn’t question him a second time.

  “Mister, I want to know why is it that you’re ’a starin’ at me in the mirror?” the man who had just stood asked. He spoke the words loudly, and he put more reproach into the question than was required. It was, Matt realized, a direct provocation. It was also a dangerous one, because the man was much too small to be making any kind of a physical challenge.

  Matt turned to face him.

  “Was I staring?” Matt asked, the quiet calm of his voice in direct contrast to the feverish tone of the man’s voice.

  “Yeah, you was.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, about that. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

  “Yeah? Well you are making me damn uncomfortable.”

  “I assure you, sir, any thought that I am staring at you is unfounded. I’ll make certain not to do so in the future.”

  “What makes you think you’re even goin’ to have a future?” the man asked.

  “Logan, that’s enough!” the bartender said. “This man ain’t done nothin’ to you, and he apologized even though he didn’t do nothin’.”

  Logan held a hand out toward the bartender, though he didn’t take his eyes off Matt.

  “This ain’t none of your business, Tucker. ’N if you don’t keep your mouth shut ’n stay out of this, I’ll be takin’ care of you, right after I take care of . . . hey, mister, what the hell is your name, anyway?”

  “It’s Jensen. Matt Jensen.”

  Logan smiled, a twisted smile without mirth.

  “Reason I asked is, yesterday I kilt me three Chinamen, ’n I didn’t know the name of a one of ’em.”

  “Oh? And tell me, Logan, is it?”

  “Yeah. Logan’s the name, all right. Heard of me, have you?”

  “No, I can’t say as I have. But tell me, Logan, why did you want to know my name? Are you planning on killing me?”

  “It might come to that,” Logan said. “If you don’t apologize to me.”

  “Well, then, this disagreement needn’t go any further, need it? I’ve already apologized to you.”

  “Not on your knees, you ain’t,” Logan said.

  “Well now, Mr. Logan, while I did say I’m sorry if I have made you uncomfortable in any way, and I’m willing to say that again, I will not get down on my knees to apologize to you. So I guess this conversation is over.”

  Matt turned back toward the bar, and when he did so, Logan drew his pistol.

  Because Matt had turned away, it put him at a disadvantage, and that allowed Logan to actually draw his gun and get one shot off. The bullet punched a hole in the bar just behind Matt. But Matt had his gun out just as fast, firing at almost the same time. And unlike Logan, Matt didn’t miss.

  Logan dropped his gun and grabbed his chest, then turned his hand out and looked down in surprise and disbelief as his palm began filling with his own blood. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell back, then lay motionless on the floor with open but sightless eyes staring toward the ceiling.

  It all happened so quickly that the saloon patrons had been caught by surprise and had no chance to get out of danger. But now that the danger was over, they all began to edge toward the body.

  Gun smoke from the two charges merged to form a large, acrid-bitter cloud that drifted slowly toward the door. Beams of light from the kerosene lamps hanging from a wagon wheel suspended from the ceiling became visible as they stabbed through the cloud. There were rapid and heavy footfalls on the wooden sidewalk outside as more people began coming in through the swinging doors.

  Sheriff Barton Ames was one of the first ones to come in.

  Seeing that t
he dead man was Logan, Sheriff Ames nodded grimly.

  “I’ll be damned. Someone finally got Logan.”

  “Yeah,” the bartender said. He pointed to Logan’s body. “And if there was ever anybody who needed killin’ more than Runt Logan, I don’t know who it would be.”

  “Hell, anybody that knew him knew this was bound to happen someday.” The sheriff looked over at Matt, who had put his gun back in the holster and was now leaning casually against the bar.

  “You the one that killed him?” the sheriff asked.

  “I didn’t have much choice, he drew on me.” Matt pointed to the bullet hole in the bar. “Here is where his bullet went.”

  “Damndest thing I ever saw, Sheriff. Logan come over and started pickin’ a fight. This fella tried to calm him down, but Logan wouldn’t hear of it. This fella turned his back on Logan, ’n that’s when Logan drew his gun.”

  “You’re saying that Logan drew first, and this man still beat him?” Sheriff Ames asked, his voice expressing his surprise.

  “Yes, sir, that is exactly what I’m a-sayin’.”

  “That’s the way I seen it, too,” another patron said.

  “I tell you the truth, I’ve seen Runt Logan in action before, ’n I never thought anyone would be able to beat him,” yet another said.

  “Sheriff, if you need someone to give a statement ’bout what happened here, I mean as to who drew first ’n all that, why, I’ll be more’n willin’ to give you a statement,” the bartender said.

  “Me, too,” yet another said.

  Sheriff Ames smiled. “No need for any statements. I know how Logan was.” He turned to Matt. “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Jensen. Matt Jensen.”

  “Well, Mr. Jensen, I don’t mind telling you that you did us all a favor. But then, I reckon you know who Logan was.”

  “Truth to tell, Sheriff, I’m just a passenger on the train and a stranger in town. I’ve never heard of Logan until right now.”

  “Really? You never heard of him, huh? It’s too bad Logan didn’t live long enough to hear that. He was about the most arrogant son of a bitch I’ve ever known.”