William Diehl: Eureka

Down the street, Ben’s horse bolted and reared up at the flat smack of gunshots. Ben leaned forward in the saddle, hauling in the reins, but the horse was totally spooked. It began to back down the hill. Brodie dashed into the muddy road, grabbed the bit on both sides of the horse’s mouth, and held tight.

“Easy, boy, easy,” he whispered in the stallion’s ear. “It’s okay, it’s all over.” Without taking his eyes off the spooked horse, he asked Ben, “What’s his name?”

“Jericho.”

Jericho started to bolt again, lifting Brodie’s feet out of the mud, but he pulled him back, still whispering, staring into the fiery, fear-filled eyes.

“Easy, Jericho, easy. It’s all over. Calm down, son. Calm down.”

The horse grumbled and started to back away but Brodie had him under control. He gently stroked the horse’s nose.

“Got him?” Brodie asked.

“Yeah, thanks. I don’t think he’s ever heard a gunshot before.”

“Must not spend a lot of time in Eureka.”

Ben held his hand out. “M’name’s Ben Gorman.”

The younger boy shook the hand. “Brodie. Brodie Culhane.”

They decided they deserved a soda. Ben rode his horse slowly up the street to the pharmacy while Brodie clomped beside him on the wooden decking that passed for a sidewalk, shaking the mud off his boots.

“Sorry about your shoes,” said Ben.

“They was brought up in mud,” Brodie answered.

They got to the pharmacy, and Ben jumped off Jericho and tied him to the hitch rail. They both looked up the next block on the other side of the street, where a crowd had gathered around the two bodies.

“I never saw a shooting before,” Ben said with awe.

“Happens once or twice a month. Sometimes I pick up a dime for helping Old Stalk stuff them in the box.”

“You touch them!” Ben’s eyes were as round as silver dollars.

Brodie laughed. “They’re dead; they don’t bite.”

“Two sarsaparilla sodas,” Ben said and reaching in his pocket took out a handful of change and smacked four pennies on the small round table as they sat down. “My treat,” he said.

As they sat down to drink their sarsaparillas, Brodie’s mitt fell from his pocket, and Ben snatched it up, admiring it for a moment before handing it back.

“You a baseballer?”

“I play a coupla times a week.”

“Where?”

“They got a diamond down toward Milltown. Kids from the school play sides-up there. One side or the other always picks me. I ain’t much at catching but I can knock the ball clean out of the field if I get a bite at it. How about you?”

“No,” Ben said, shaking his head and looking down at the floor for a moment. “I’m from up there,” he said, jerking his thumb toward the Hill as if embarrassed to admit it. “Aren’t enough kids in our little school to get one team together, let alone two. But I practice pitching. I throw at an archery target.”

“You any good?”

“I can pitch a curve. I’m not much at batting but I can sure pitch.” He paused a minute, and said, “Think they’d let me play?”

“Sure, ‘specially if you can pitch. Pitchers are hard to come by. I usually go on Thursday and Sunday. I get off those days. I gotta work Saturdays.”

“How old are you?” Ben asked.

“Fourteen comin’ up. How about you?”

“I turned fourteen in September.” They sipped their drinks for a minute or so and then Ben asked, “Where do you work?”

“I wrangle horses for the railroad. Up at end-o’-track. Get outta school at one, go to work from two ’til six. But it pays good-twenty-five cents a day.”

Ben almost swallowed his straw. His weekly allowance was more than Brodie made working five days a week.

“How do you get to the ball field? Must be three, four miles over there?”

“I walk.”

Ben thought for a moment, then said, “Tell you what, I’ll meet you up at the ridge road at two on Sunday. I’ll bring an extra horse.”

Brodie smiled a cautious smile.

“Yer on,” he answered.

Almost four years and they had been as close as brothers ever since.

“We’re gonna catch it if Mr. Eli finds out we come down here,” Brodie said, as the horses slogged through the mud.

“Then we won’t tell him,” Ben answered with a brazen smile.

“Yer old man knows everything.” He paused and rephrased the thought. “Mr. Eli’ll know we were in town before we get home. No way we can lie to him, Ben.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah.” Ben reached over and slugged Brodie’s arm. “Gotta live dangerously once in a while.”

They reached the edge of town.

Eureka was the unfortunate legacy of a robber baron named Jesse Milstrum Crane. In 1875, Crane, a con man and gambler, escaped west to San Francisco with a trunk containing close to a million dollars, leaving in his wake a dozen irate investors in a defunct railroad line pillaged by him, one of many cons that had earned him his fortune. The heavyset, hard-drinking, womanizing swindler saw new opportunities in the wide-open western city. He bought an impressive house on Nob Hill, joined the best club, opened accounts in several of the city’s biggest banks, and planned his grandest scheme yet-a railroad down the coast to Los Angeles, which he called the JMC and Pacific Line-and he offered his rich new friends an opportunity to buy into the company. His two biggest investors were Shamus O’Dell and Eli Gorman. As the tracks were laid south down the rugged coast, Crane was busy behind the scenes, scheming to steal every dollar he could from the company.

He might have succeeded, except one night his past caught up with him. As he was walking up the steps of his opulent home, a figure stepped out of the fog, and Crane found himself face-to-face with an eastern businessman he had cleaned out five years earlier.

“You miserable bastard,” the man’s trembling voice said. “You ruined my life. You stole everything I had…”

Crane cut him off by laughing in his face. “You whining little.. ” he started-and never finished the sentence.

The man held his arm at full length a foot from Crane’s face and shot him in the forehead. The derringer made a flat sound, like hands clapping together. Crane’s head jerked backward. His derby flew off and bounced away in the fog. A dribble of blood ran down his face as he staggered backward against an iron fence and fell to his knees. He looked up at the face in the fog, tried to remember his assailant’s name, but there had been so many…

The second shot shattered his left eye. Crane’s shoulders slumped and he toppled sideways to the sidewalk. He was dead by the time his killer fired a third shot into his own brain.

Accountants quickly discovered Crane’s embezzlement, and Gorman and O’Dell took over the company, which included the sprawling San Pietro valley, ten miles west of the track and a hundred miles north of the growing town of Los Angeles. It was their decision to build a spur to the ocean and build estates on the surrounding heights. But the spur also brought with it “end-o’-track” and a raunchy honky-tonk, ten miles west on a Pacific bay, that serviced the roughnecks who did the harsh job of laying track and who settled arguments with fists, guns, or knives.

With them came the gamblers and pimps.

And with the gamblers and pimps came a hard-boiled young gangster who had learned his trade on the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. His name was Arnie Riker and he soon ruled the small town with a bunch of young toughs he had brought in from the big city.

As Ben and Brodie came down the road, their horses reined in, Arnie Riker was sitting on the porch of his Double Eagle Hotel, which commanded the southeast corner of the town. It was the largest building in town. Three stories, nearly a city block square, and badly in need of a paint job. It also housed a whorehouse, boasted the town’s largest bar and gambling emporium, and had a pool table in the lobby. Riker’s chair was leaning back against the wall of the hotel, his feet dangling a foot off the porch floor. Riker was a dandy. He was dressed in a light tan vest and pants, with a flowered shirt open at the collar, his feet encased in shiny black shoes and spats.