Gunslingers Don't Sing or Dance, Mike Marino [classic romance novels .txt] 📗

( A Pinkerton Dime Novel Detective Serial Segment by Baxter Dooley

Soon after the Lincoln assassination I left my job with the  Washington Metropolitan Police force.  I had been invited by my good friend, the ego driven Allan Pinkerton of the famed detective agency to join him as an independent operative along with a determined gun toting posse of Canada’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police known in these parts as  Scotland Yard on horseback. Our mission was to track down the nefarious and notorious French Canadian gun totin’ killer and train robbing varmint, Monty Debauchery. He had already robbed ten  trains from Montreal to British Columbia relieving the passengers of jewelry and cash along with three payrolls of the Yukon Mining Company;   he has killed one railroad policeman in Montreal and some say 12 men because he didn’t like the way they looked or he just felt like blowing off steam by filling someone with a load of .45 caliber Colt ammo.

He has been eluding the Mounties who always get their man, except in this case, having crossed the border into New York and is now on the run in the United States and an international posse was hot on his trail to bring him to the gallows to swing in the breeze.

We learned from one of the jailed James Gang members that Pinkerton knew, that Monty had made his way by train to Missouri and booked passage on a riverboat in St. Louis  for a gangland reunion in New Orleans with other escaped outlaws of the Montreal gang  who had already fled the long arm of the Canuck law. We surmised they were up to no good and would institute a reign of terror on American soil in Cajun country where a deafening cacophony of patois and pistoleros already existed.

We booked passage as a group in what can only be called a close call in the nick of time on the same Tom Sawyerish riverboat, ‘The Natchez River Queen’  posing as gaming sports  intent on gambling our poker nights away to the very mouth of the mighty Mississippi in the roiling wake of Mark Twain’s literary Mickey Finn riverboat pirates.

The Wild West. A time of Conestoga wagon trains of adventurous seekers of land and a new life creaking across the high plains racing the iron horse across Indian and buffalo lands once the preserve of Cheyenne, Pawnee, and Utes.

While wagon trains and the railroads absorbed the land, river boats were churning up the Mississippi in a paddlewheel frenzy rolling down the river avoiding shallow shoals as the experienced pilots avoid the danger of floating logs from Illinois   The Manifest Destiny of James Monroe sent the country on a binge of westward expansion and soon small towns cropped up. Snake oil salesmen set up traveling snake oil medicine shows with dancers, singers, sharpshooters and jugglers to help soften the masses before fleecing them of their hard earned greenbacks.

The riverboats too were havens for gambling and drinking along with singing and dancing, some of it risque where women with full skirts would lift it up so the men would whoop it up with the first sign of female flesh in the form of thigh and a hint of what lay just below the navel. They were called "leg shows" and every cowpoke fresh off the trail would mix with the Eastern dandies in rooms choking with tobacco smoke, the smell of horse permeated chaps, and the unwashed cowboys trying to mask the musk with violet scented water.

In this era and it’s riverboat atmosphere of deplorable decadence we kept an eagle  eye on Monty’s shipboard movements. One night while he was on deck alone watching the moonlight sparkle  on the muddy night river waters like the flash of pistols  firing bullets in an ambush outside a whorehouse in Dodge City, I was alone on deck at the time and realized we were a half hour to docking  in New Orleans. The game would soon be up as I  knew  he would be on shore disappearing into the cover of a New Orleans dawn. I then decided to act drawing my Colt.

“Don’t even go for your gun, Monty. Yes, I know who you are.”

“Copper, eh? OK, you got me, now what?”

“I’m arresting you and you have some RCMP friends here who want to take you back to Montreal to stand trial.”

He turned around slowly as I kept a watchful eye on him as sure as one would watch a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike  “I have a deal for you,” he said with a French inflection. “How would you like to find a lost city of gold in Old Mexico? As partners of course.”

He reached slowly into his waistcoat pocket and produced a torn tattered piece of linen with what appeared to be a map of some sort, in Spanish. “Not interested,” I replied. “Out of curiosity though, and purely out of curiosity what is that?”

“This my friend is a map to riches in Mexico. Not the fabled lost cities of Cibola Coronado and others have  spent centuries trying to locate. This is a city with buried Spanish  treasure. Enough to buy a small country.”

I noticed he only had half a map. “Oh that, the other half is here in New Orleans. A young Creole girl has it. Her father was given it by a dying Confederate soldier who came across it in Texas looting a home owned by a Mexican padrone. We were going to be partners. He gave me half when we were in Montreal and he kept the other. We were to meet in New Orleans where  we would raise financing for  our expedition. Unfortunately he died suddenly, some bayou typhoid or malaria or some damn swamp thing.  His daughter, Isadora, who I hear tell is  voodoo priestess or something to do with spells, curses and the undead refused to give the other half up after repeated letters and telegrams. So I am here now to get it back..by reasoning or other means.”

“Why should I help you? Why don’t  I take your half of the map and find her and team up if she’s willing, and leave you out in the cold?”

Monty laughed. “Because you’re an honest lawman  and you’ve got me over a barrel, and I need someone and you do too who’s good with a gun if we’re to this.  Mexico and gringos don’t go together very well. Bandits will kill you for a pair of leather boots, and the Federales require bribes of US currency to keep from murdering you in the name of the law. We go as prospectors. They laugh at all gringos searching for stakes of gold so we won’t be taken seriously. What we really want is the gold of the Spanish conquistadors.”

Now I was interested. Monty continued. “After they had wounded the Aztec emperor, Montezuma, whom they had taken prisoner, Cortez and his Spanish soldiers were besieged in Tenochtitlan or what we now call Mexico City by Aztec soldiers led by an Aztec priest. After days of  fighting, the Spaniards attempted to retreat from the city during the night  with the whole treasure of Montezuma. When day dawned over Lake Tezcuco, surrounding Tenochtitlan, was filled with the bodies of dead Spainards and on its bottom rested the great treasure of Montezuma that was thrown into the lake. gold and silver ornaments, and an immense quantity of jewels. The ornaments had been reduced to gold bars by the Spaniards, and were also cast into the lake.

According to legends, when Cortez took siege of Mexico City in 1521, the Aztec Indians secreted their treasure hoards in and around the Lake of the city and, in particular, in a cave in the nearby hillsides surrounding the city. A rich treasure is said to be hidden in the vaults under the church of San Geronimo por la Santissima Virgen in Mexico City.”

I was mesmerized by visions of massive treasure. Enough to start my own ranch in Texas which had always been my dream. I was in a dream state but not for long. One of Monty’s henchmen came up from behind and let me have the barrel of his Colt on the back of my head knocking me out cold. I found out later they had rowed out in a boat to rescue Monty who now had escaped in the small boat heading for New Orleans in the dawn’s early light.

When Pinkerton came on deck he found me out cold. I Ttold him he was about to escape when  I stopped him but someone from behind had gotten the better of me. I failed to mention the map, the gold and treasure in Mexico and the girl with the other half of the map.

Once we docked Pinkerton and his Mountie friends would search for Monty scouring the city. I would part company, claiming other urgent business and search for this Isadora. Maybe she would agree to team up with me….or perhaps put a spell on me and turn me into one

(Baxter Dooley & Isadora Lavolier)

Personal Journal Entry July 27, 1867 I parted company with Pinkerton and set about finding Isadora Lavolier who was in possession of one half of the map leading to hidden  treasure in Mexico. Half a map is useless, yet better than no map at all,  but I knew Monty Debauchery would do anything, including murder to obtain the other half that was in the care of Isadora. Find Isadora, and I’ll find Monty and the other half of the linen puzzle. I also had to convince her I wasn’t a misanthrope out for mere adventure, although the hint of engaging in a dangerous enterprise got my blood rushing in torrents of anticipation.  

I started my search in New Orleans Chinatown. My current mindset was a visionary jumble of Mexican pinatas, silver jewelry, ancient Toltec  kings forcing young  virgins to be sanctified through sacrificial rituals of heart extraction known only to High Priests wearing plumes and loincloths as incense burned slowly around the stone altars  of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan. The Aztec gods were thirsty it seems.

The search for Isadora would require inquiries and time, so decided to get settled into a room in the Latin Quarter and immerse myself in the opium dens of Chinatown. If I’m going to have visions let them be ones that would transport me to the time of the Tang Dynasty. After a few pipes of smoke I’d be floating on a Chinese paper boat  along a mystical river in space and time past the Five Dynasties and Ten Kingdoms of this ancient Oriental land guided by seven veiled female attendants.

I entered one called the Celestial  Moon. There were upper class men and women, Orientals and Occidentals together imbibing in the long stems reclining in repose waiting for the oil lamps to heat the drug until it was vaporous. Inhaling the heavenly spirit of