Ralph Compton - Bounty Hunter

“Each of these six stacks contains a thousand dollars,” Sprague said. “You will receive one of these every time you successfully perform a certain task for me.”

“And the seventh?”

“That stack is higher than the others, as you can see. That’s because it contains twenty-five thousand, the amount you will get from Luther when all six undertakings have been brought to a conclusion satisfactory to all concerned.”

Sprague opened a cedar box on his desk and proffered it to Tone. “Cigar?”

Tone took one, bit off the end and Sprague lit it for him. Through a cloud of smoke he said, “What are these tasks?”

“Each stack of bills represents one man. You will seek out and kill all six of them.”

Tone’s chair creaked under his weight as he leaned forward. “Mr. Sprague, I’m a bounty hunter, not a hired killer.”

Sprague smiled. “I don’t quite see the distinction.”

He opened a drawer again, brought out a slip of paper and slid it across the desk to Tone. “Those are the six wanted men and there on the desk are their bounties.”

“They’re not wanted by the law.”

“No, but they are wanted by me. You said earlier that some men deserve killing, and those six do. Each of them, many times over, is a murderer, robber and rapist. Vicious, dangerous cutthroat rogues, every man jack of them.”

“Why do you want these men dead?”

“That is my business.”

“And killing men is my business, is that it?”

“Surely you know the answer to that question better than I do.”

Tone picked up the list. “Where do I find these men?” he asked.

Chapter 6

Lambert Sprague waved an indolent hand, as though he was already getting bored. “Tell him, Luther.”

“All six of the names on your list currently reside in Virginia City,” Penman said. “They grew rich off the sweat of the Comstock miners—”

“The hell they did,” Sprague snapped, suddenly angry. “They grew rich from blackhearted piracy on the high seas. Many a fine ship and brave sailor lad they sent to the bottom, aye, and wench too if the truth be told.” The man shook his head, a small act of contrition for past sins. “And God help me, for seven long, bloody years I was one of them.”

Tone looked up from the list of names he’d been memorizing. “Then these six men were your friends.”

“Friends? No, not my friends. I was their captain.”

Sprague turned his head to look at the lawyer. “Luther, bring the decanter.”

“I’ll get it,” Tone said, half rising to his feet.

“You stay there,” Sprague said. Then louder: “Luther, the decanter!”

As the lawyer stepped to the liquor cabinet, Sprague said to Tone: “As long as you are on board this ship, don’t ever countermand an order of mine again. Why would I keep a dog like Luther Penman and do my own barking?”

Again Tone sensed the latent cruelty in Sprague, and the steel. Sitting behind his desk, his iron gray hair cropped closed to his great nail keg of a head, he looked indestructible, a hard man to kill.

Sprague was talking again. “We got our start in the late War Between the States after I bought the twenty-gun sloop Devonshire from the British navy. She was laid up in ordinary at the time in a dry dock at Ports-mouth and her masts, rigging, sails and guns had been removed. I had a crew, but no money to refurbish her.”

Penman poured bourbon for Sprague, then refilled Tone’s glass.

“Luckily, that first year of the war, British sympathies were with the Confederacy,” Sprague said. “I had a letter of marque as a privateer signed by Jefferson Davis himself, and that convinced the Admiralty to refit the sloop, provided I changed her name. That I did, and when we finally sailed she was the Tuscaloosa .”

As though warming to his story, Sprague sat forward in his chair. “We ran the Union blockade for two years, carrying arms and goods from England, doing our bounden duty for the South, you might say. Then, in the spring of 1863, we chanced on a fat French merchantman loaded to the gunnels with wine and cognac, bound for Boston town.

“Well, we took the ship, cut the throats of the crew and tossed them overboard. Then we loaded the cargo onto our own ship and scuttled the Frenchman in the middle of an empty ocean and not a soul the wiser.

“It was then, Mr. Tone, that we decided there was more money to be made from piracy than blockade running. The risk was less, so long as we stayed out of the way of Union frigates, and the rewards were enormous.”

Sprague looked behind him at Penman. “Isn’t that so, Luther?”

He turned to Tone again. “Luther handled our first cargo, then all the others. He invested heavily in San Francisco and the Barbary Coast and by the time the war was over I was a rich man, and so was Luther. He always made sure to take his pound of flesh.”

“As the Bible says, the laborer is worthy of his hire, Mr. Sprague,” Penman said.

“Aye, and you’ve been worthy, Luther, a born crook like me and the six on my list. You can tie up to that.”

“I’ll ask you again, Mr. Sprague,” Tone said. “Why do you want these men dead?”

“The short answer is because they want me dead.” He nodded to the paper in Tone’s hand. “Those men were my ship’s officers, and like me, they were rich when the war ended. Luther is right—they moved to the Comstock and bought saloons and hotels, providing what the miners wanted: gambling, whores and whiskey. All six of them are good with guns, and very few other hard cases in Virginia City were willing to challenge them. Those that did ended up dead.

“They also sank money into the Barbary Coast, and now that the Comstock mines are played out and the miners moving on, their San Francisco holdings have suddenly become very important to them. They want more of the liquor and prostitution business along the Barbary and the one person standing in their way is me, their old cap’n. I already own most of the waterfront and I’m not selling and I won’t be pushed out.”

“So you want me to kill them before they kill you, is that it?”

“Exactly. And you’re being well paid for your trouble.”

Tone smiled, the bourbon helping him mellow. “There’s law in Virginia City. At least five police precincts as I recall. You just don’t walk up to six men in the street and gun them.”

“You won’t need to go to Virginia City, Mr. Tone,” Sprague said. “Once the word gets around, and it will, that you’re working for me, the six will come after you.” The man’s smile was wintry. “Depend on it.”

Sprague looked at Tone, his face like a hunk of hewn granite. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“Damn your eyes, man, will you take on the task I’ve offered ye?”

Tone nodded. “It’s my business, and money talks.”

“Aye, it does. It speaks every tongue on earth.” Sprague turned to Penman. “Get Blind Jack and tell him to bring Tom McGill. Then administer the oath.”

After the lawyer left, Tone said, “Administer the oath? To me or to Blind Jack?”

“It is you who will take the Pirate’s Oath, Mr. Tone.”

Tone smiled. “I’m not a pirate.”

“Nor am I, at least no longer. Being a gentleman of fortune was an honest trade once, but now it’s gone forever. The oceans are full of ironclads carrying guns that can shoot for miles and there’s nowhere left, on land or sea, for even a lively pirate lad to hide. You’ll meet Black Tom McGill soon. He was one of the greatest pirates of them all, until a Brazilian ironclad blasted his sloop out of the water east of Barbados not a dozen years since. Black Tom couldn’t see that his day was over, and in the end it done for him.