“Hey!” Cummins shouted again. He laughed, then pointed. “If you boys want a laugh, come over here and take a look at this.”
“Take a look at what?” Emil Jackson asked. Jackson was one of Marshal Cummins’s deputies.
“Take a look at the hat on that little feller out there,” Cummins said, pointing.
The object of Cummins’s derision was a bowler hat with a small brim and a low round crown.
“What is that thing he’s wearin’ on his head? Is that a piss pot?” Moe Gillis asked. Like Jackson, Gillis was a deputy.
“What are you three laughing at?” one of the other deputies asked.
“This here fella and the piss pot he’s wearin’ on his head,” Moe said.
Soon, all the other deputies were standing at the batwing doors, looking out into the street at the smallish man who was wearing, not only a bowler hat, but a three-piece suit.
“Hey, Marshal, I’ll bet you can’t shoot that hat off his head,” Jackson said.
“Sure I can.”
“A beer says you can’t.”
“You mean you’ll buy me a beer if I shoot the hat off his head?” Cummins asked.
“Yes. But you buy me one if you miss.”
“All right,” Cummins said. “I guess it’s about time I showed you boys why I’m the marshal and you are the deputies.” He drew his pistol and aimed, then lowered it.
“What’s wrong? You can’t do it?”
“Stand here in front of me and let me use your shoulder as a brace,” Cummins said.
“Hell, no, you have to do it yourself. Or admit you can’t do it.”
“You don’t worry about me, I can do it,” Cummins said. He aimed again, then, sighing, leaned against the wall and braced the pistol against the door frame.
Cummins pulled the trigger and the pistol roared and jumped up in his hand.
“Oh, shit!” Jackson shouted.
The little man wearing the bowler hat fell back in the street. Several of the deputies ran out to him.
There was a small, dark hole in the man’s temple, and a trickle of blood ran down across his ear.
“Son of a bitch, Marshal, you kilt him!” Jackson said.
“It was an accident,” Cummins said. “You all seen it. It was an accident. I didn’t mean to shoot him.”
By now several others from the town had been drawn to the scene and they stood around, looking on in horror and morbid curiosity.
“What happened?” someone asked.
“Who is this fella?”
“Anybody know him?”
“He just got off the train,” another said. “I saw him get off, but I don’t know who he is.”
“Who shot him?”
“I did,” Cummins said.
“Good heavens, Marshal, why?”
“I didn’t shoot him on purpose,” Cummins said. “I was—uh—”
“He was showing me his gun,” Jackson said. “And it went off.”
“Damn, Marshal, you need to be more careful with that thing.”
“Yeah, I know,” Cummins said.
An hour later Marshal Cummins stepped into the undertaker’s parlor. The man he shot was lying naked on a lead-covered slab. Beneath the slab was a bucket filled with blood. Hanging from a hook over the slab was a bottle of formaldehyde, and a little tube ran from the bottle through a needle in the arm and into the dead man’s veins.
“Hello, Prufrock. How are you doing with him?” Cummins asked the undertaker.
“I’m about finished,” Prufrock replied. “Who’s going to pay me for this? The town?”
“No,” Cummins said. “I’m the one who killed him, I’ll pay the charges. I didn’t mean to kill him, but I feel like I should pay the charges anyway. Have you found out who he is?”
“His name is Cornelius Jerome,” Prufrock said. “He’s from New York City.”
“How do you know?”
“There’s a letter in his pocket to Governor John C. Fremont,” Prufrock said.
“He wrote a letter to the governor?”
“He didn’t write it, his pa did,” Prufrock said. “Turns out his pa is some bigwig back in New York. You want to read the letter?”
“Yes,” Cummins answered.
“It’s over there, on that table.”
Walking over to the table, Cummins saw, in addition to the letter, the other personal effects belonging to the man: a pipe and a pouch of tobacco, a pair of glasses, and a billfold. Looking in the billfold, Cum-min’s saw over three hundred dollars in cash. He read the letter.
To The Honorable
John C. Frémont, Governor of Arizona Territory.
Governor, I am sure you remember me as one of your most active supporters in your run for the Presidency in 1856. I also served as your adjutant in St. Louis during the Civil War. Although our paths have not crossed since that time, I have followed your fortunes with great interest.
By this letter, I want to introduce my son, Cornelius Jerome. Actually, this will not be the first time you have met him, for indeed, you often held him on your lap during the exciting days of your election campaign. It is my intention that my son make his fortune, if not in money, then by life experiences, as he sojourns through our great American West. I call upon you as an old friend to make him welcome, and to provide him with the advice you would deem necessary.
Sincerely, your friend,
Ronald J. Jerome
New York, N.Y.
“He sounds rich, doesn’t he?” Cummins asked.
“I’d say so.”
“Who would have thought that about this odd-looking little man?”
“What do you want me to do with the body?”
“What do you mean? You’re doing it, aren’t you?”
“I mean after I’m finished here. What should I do next?”
“Bury him,” Cummins said.
“Shouldn’t we send him back home?”
“How can we do that? We don’t know where he came from,” Cummins said.
“Sure we do,” Prufrock said. “It’s right there in the letter.”
Pointedly, Cummins tore up the letter. Then he took the three hundred dollars from the Jerome’s billfold and pressed it into Prufrock’s hands.
“What letter?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Prufrock replied, stuffing the wad of money down into his pocket. “I didn’t see any letter.”
By any definition of the term, Cletus Odom was an ugly man. A scar, like a purple flash of lightning, ran from his forehead, through his left eye, and down his cheek to hook in under his nose. As a result of the scar, the eyelid was now a discolored and misshapen puff of flesh. For a while, the eye had been black and swollen as a result of an encounter he’d had three weeks ago in an alley in Wickenburg. Angry over an article that had appeared in the Wickenburg newspaper, Odom had found a couple of men in the saloon there who, for the price of a drink, agreed to help him “teach the newspaper editor a lesson.”
Odom had not expected anyone to come to Garvey’s aid and was surprised when someone appeared, out of nowhere, to interrupt him.
“Instead of beating him up, I should have just killed the son of a bitch,” Odom said aloud.
But enough thinking about that. It was time to move on, and he had a plan in mind that would net him a lot of money. All he needed to implement the plan were a few men who would work with him. And he had already set about recruiting them.
Odom reached the tiny town of Quigotoa, Arizona, just after nightfall. Quigotoa was a scattering of flyblown and crumbling adobe buildings that were laid out in no particular pattern around a dusty plaza. What made the town attractive to people like Odom was its reputation as a “Robbers’ Roost,” or “Outlaw Haven.”
The town had no constable or marshal, and visitations by law officers from elsewhere in the territory were strongly discouraged. There was a place in the town cemetery prominently marked as “Lawmen’s Plot.” Here, a deputy, an Arizona Ranger, and a deputy U.S. marshal, all uninvited visitors to the town, lay buried.