Oakley Hall - Ambrose Bierce and the Queen of Spades

By the early ‘70s the SP had succeeded in controlling the movement of freight to and from California and within the borders of the state. The roads it did not own in California numbered five, with a total of fifty-nine miles of track.

The Southern Pacific’s rate-schedules are dictated by “all the traffic will bear. “Rates are set to the maximum that shippers can afford, those on agricultural products based on current market prices. Rates are low where there is competing water transport, higher where there is no competition, and freight is cheaper across the country than between San Francisco and Reno.

By the time the people of California realized that they were trapped in the arms of the Octopus, the railroad had come to control the legislature, the governor, the state regulatory agencies, city and county governments, often the courts, and wields power in the National Congress.

Anti-railroad candidates are voted into office, bills empowering the State to fix railroad rates are passed into law, but they are never enforced. Always the Southern Pacific manages to frustrate legislation‌—‌by the governor’s veto, by challenging the laws in the courts, and by controlling the agencies responsible for putting the measures into effect.

Railroad gangs break up Antimonopoly meetings. Railroad opponents are punished, public officials bribed, newspapermen intimidated, protesting farmers, whose claims on Railroad agricultural lands were not honored, are shot down by hired gunmen. Although Californians raise a continual wail of complaint and vituperation against the Octopus, Mark Hopkins‌—‌the only member of the Big Four of whom it was said, a man might cross the street to wish him a good day‌—‌having gone to his reward in 1878, Charles Crocker, Collis Huntington and Leland Stanford take their ease in their magnificent mansions atop Nob Hill, overlooking San Francisco beneath a cloudless sky.

Bierce did point out that he, for one, had not been intimidated by the Railroad.

6.

OPPORTUNITY, n. – A favorable occasion for grasping a disappointment.

–THE DEVIL'S DICTIONARY

The third Morton Street murder took place that night. The victim this time was no whore but a middle-aged well dressed woman who was strangled but not slashed, although her skirts were flung up over her head as though the murderer had been interrupted in his processes.

The body was found in a pile of rubbish in a stub of alley off the street, and the three of spades marked the victim, although it was not deposited in the open mouth this time.

I observed this third body on the slab at the Morgue in Dunbar Alley, the swollen, agonized features, gaping mouth and bruised throat. She was a woman of about fifty, stout and graying, a mole on her chin. Her skirt and jacket were black, her hands well kempt, uncalloused, neat nails. She wore a gold wedding band and a large ruby circled by tiny red stones. There was nothing to identify her, no witnesses this time.

Bierce and I met Sgt. Nix at Dinkins’s. Dick Dinkins called from behind the bar, “Hear he got him another one, Mr. Bierce. This yob’ll scare all the hoors back to Cincinnati!”

Bierce saluted but did not reply. Men at the bar observed us in the mirrors or peered over their shoulders in the pleasant sour stink of beer. Sgt. Nix sat with his boots spread out and his helmet in his lap.

“Our suspect was at a dinner party at some Nob Hill folks named Brittain,” he said.

“His fiancée, whom you know,” Bierce said to me. He sipped his beer and swabbed at his mustache with a forefinger.

I felt a queer mix of relief and disappointment.

“A different strangler?” Bierce said.

“A copycat getting an advantage out of a trey of spades. She weren’t slashed, no innards spilled. It is possible.”

“A ditto-maniac,” Bierce said. “No idea who the victim is?”

Nix shook his head. “We’re checking hotels in case she’s out-of-town. The Captain thinks she is.”

“Because he didn’t recognize her? He is supposed to be infallible.”

“What he likes to claim,” Nix said. Dinkins brought him a beer.

“She was wearing black,” Bierce said. “Mourning?”

A deduction! “Maybe so!” I said.

Nix looked interested. “We’ll find out who she is,” he said. “One thing she’s not is some Morton Street dove. That is one spooked pack of women, over there.”

We were still at the table when a policeman came in and handed Nix a folded slip of paper. He stood beside the table until Nix had perused the note and signaled for him to depart. Nix put the paper down on the table between us.

“She was staying at the Grand. Mrs. Hiram Hamon. That’s Judge Hamon. He died about a month ago. She was up from Santa Cruz. Judge Hamon retired down there from the Circuit Court.”

Bierce had straightened. “Mrs. Hamon had made an appointment to see me this afternoon,” he announced grimly.

Nix and I stared at him.

“What about?” I asked.

“Her letter only advised me that she had information that was important and I would be interested.”

“Well, now, that is something, ain’t it?” Nix said.

“Allow me to extrapolate,” Bierce said. His face was keen as a hawk’s. “If she wanted to see me, it was probably something to do with the Railroad. My feelings about the Railroad are well known. Judge Hamon and Judge Jennings‌—‌before he got elected to the State Senate‌—‌sat on the Circuit Court. Aaron Jennings presided over the trials of the Mussel Slough farmers, if you will remember, and his every decision went against them and for the Railroad. At the time there was talk that Judge Hamon was very disturbed, and he retired soon after. And Jennings went straight into the State Senate with the Railroad blessing.”

“The Railroad at last,” I said, grinning at him. “The Senator from Southern Pacific.”

“Girtcrest,” Nix said.

“How would you like to make a trip to Santa Cruz, Tom?” Bierce said. “To see if Mrs. Hamon had a son or daughter, or a neighbor she confided in.”

The train looped down to Watsonville and back up a ledge along the coast. From the car the Pacific looked deep blue with sparkles of white and gold, the bay bounded by the Monterey Peninsula to the south. A ship with stacked white sails sat motionless in the middle distance. Further out a steamer trailed black smoke. Opposite me a stout, big-hatted gent in a black suit and a face hard and pocked as granite sat gazing out my window at the maritime vistas that had opened. His eyes caught mine once, as blank as glass. In front of me a young lady in a poke bonnet perused a novel, whose title I had not managed to spy out. Two drummers had a card game going, slapping cards down on the seat between them. The tracks wound toward Santa Cruz through tan fields.

I descended at the station and took a room at the Liddell House, before strolling around the plaza to familiarize myself with the place. A soft breath of salt air came off the Bay. The post office was in the general store on the corner opposite the plaza. The gray-haired postmistress, with pencils protruding from her coif like a cannibal headdress, gave me the Hamon address, down toward the water, second right, third house on the left, a brick chimney and a covered porch with ferns in pots. Mrs. Hamon’s right-hand neighbor was a Mrs. Bettis.

When I started toward the waterfront I could see smoke rising, a thin pencil of it fattening into a boa. The bell of an engine company shrilled. In minutes the engine rolled past me behind a fine team of heavy-hammed horses, three helmeted firemen hanging off the back. The smoke was flattening and spreading out. I knew it was the Hamon house before I turned the corner.