Ralph Compton - Bounty Hunter

He knew he’d never wear it.

The time of the bounty hunter was almost done and would soon go the way of the buffalo and the Indian. He realized that. The growth of cities, better law enforcement, the telegraph and the newfangled telephone were shrinking distances even across the vast western lands and, like his own, the days of the roaming outlaw were surely numbered.

But the West was a beautiful, mysterious woman singing her siren song to Tone. She was calling him home to the aloof mountains, the quiet forests and the limitless plains, seductively reminding him what it was like to watch the smoke of his fire rise like incense to pay homage to the stars. He recalled the play of sunlight on a trout stream, the rustle of aspens and the sigh of tall pines in the wind.

He could not turn his back on her. Not now, not ever. To do so would be to spit on his life.

The path he had chosen was one of flame-streaked violence and sudden death. He knew that one day he would end up with his face in the sawdust of a sod saloon in a one-loop town somebody had named Who-Gives-a-Damn. But that was his choice and he would accept its consequences.

Tone rose and dressed in his peacoat and watch cap. Langford had cleaned and loaded his guns and he dropped them into his pockets. He stepped quietly to the kitchen, hearing the cop’s soft snoring from the other bedroom.

Tone found pen and paper and wrote: Thomas, if you’re ever in Reno . . .

He had no need to write more. Langford would know.

Tone walked to the front of the house, stepped outside and quietly closed the door behind him.

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the City of San Francisco and its police department for their valuable insights into the life and times of Sergeant Thomas Langford and his role in policing the crime- and violence-ridden Barbary Coast in the 1880s.

I’m indebted to Thomas Asbury for his wonderful book The Barbary Coast , published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1937. Also to Colonel Albert S. Evans’ Sketch of Life in the Golden State (1871) and to Frank Soule and Dr. John H. Gihon for The Annals of San Francisco (1855).

According to a 2005 article in Britain’s Manchester Guardian newspaper, Jack the Ripper may have been a merchant seaman who arrived in England aboard the cargo vessel Sylph in July 1888, just before the murder of his first victim, Mary Ann Nichols. The Sylph returned to the Caribbean on September 22, two weeks after the gruesome killing of prostitute Mary Kelly. In January 1889, six prostitutes were murdered in Managua, the capital of Nicaragua. Police later said the victims “were mutilated beyond all recognition, their faces horribly slashed.”

Jack may have returned to England and murdered Whitechapel prostitute Alice McKenzie on July 17, 1889. Although never officially listed as a Ripper victim, the woman was strangled, her throat slashed and her body mutilated.

Jack may have then left England and murdered and mutilated a woman in Hamburg, Germany, on October 18, 1889, before vanishing into the fog for the last time.

Was Jolly Jack a seaman or a paying passenger, say a rich lawyer? In the Ripper saga, all things are possible.

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First Printing, October 2009

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eISBN : 978-1-101-14068-0

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