Novel 1979 - The Iron Marshall (v5.0) Read online

  He had ridden the Maid in three more races before he grew too heavy for riding. By the time he was sixteen he was five feet nine inches, as tall as he was ever to be, and he weighed an easy hundred and sixty but looked lighter. Sometimes he sparred with Old Smoke himself, but the iron-fisted Irishman was rough, with both height and reach on Shanaghy, who learned to ride and slip punches, to bob and weave and move in and away.

  Although a middleweight in size, he had the shoulders and punching power of a heavyweight, and several times they rang him in on unsuspecting country fighters larger than he.

  Of Bob Childers or his family he saw nothing more until several months later when, emerging from the Five Points, he came upon a man who looked like Bob Childers’ son standing on a corner with two other men.

  “There’s one of them now,” one of the men said, pointing at Tom. “He rode the horse.”

  The burly young man who resembled Childers called out to him. “You! Come here!”

  Shanaghy paused. He knew he should keep going, but something in the young man’s tone irritated him. “You want to see me,” he said, “come to where I am.”

  “I’ll come, an’ be damned to y’!”

  Shanaghy was convinced this was Bob Childers’ son. He was a powerful young man, yet too heavy. Shanaghy stood waiting, watching the other two men as well. When the young man was almost to him he saw the others start, and he knew it would be not the one but all three he must fight. The first one stepped up on the curb. “You’re one o’ that pack o’ thieves,” he said, “and I’m going to teach you!”

  “Your pa bought himself a horse race and he lost,” Shanaghy said to the young man. “That’s all. He asked for it with his loud mouth.”

  “Loud mouth, is it?” The young man lifted a ponderous fist threateningly. “I’ll teach…”

  If you are going to fight, Shanaghy had learned long since, don’t waste time talking. As young Childers stepped up on the curb, Shanaghy went quickly to meet him. He smashed a left to Childers’ mouth; then swung a right into his belly. The punch caught Childers moving in and was totally unexpected. A strong young man, Childers knew little of fighting and always had much to say before he swung a fist. This time he never said it. His wind left him with an oof and he staggered and fell back into a sitting position. Shanaghy wheeled and dove into the space between two buildings, ran their length and, turning sharply, mounted the stairs to the upper story.

  This was an area he knew well. Emerging on the rooftop, he ran along the roofs, jumping the walls that divided one from the other. Soon he was blocks away. Coming down from the final rooftop, he went to his room.

  A few days later he saw John Morrissey. “Aye,” John said, “we bought ourselves a packet, lad. Bob’s a beef-head himself, but some of the money was from his brother, Eben, and that’s another thing. Eben Childers is uncommon shrewd, and a mean, mean man. The one you hit was not Bob’s son but Eben’s, so you’ve made an enemy. Be on your guard, lad, for they’ll stop at nothing until you’re killed or maimed. He believed that big son of his was unbeatable and you felled him with a blow.”

  Shanaghy shrugged it off. So he had made an enemy…Well, he had made enemies before this one. Yet it was little he knew of Eben Childers then, and he cared even less, for he had been fighting for half his life and knew nothing else.

  “He’s a hater, lad, and don’t forget it. He lost money, but worse than that he was made to appear a fool, and he’s a proud, proud man.”

  The word got around that Childers was recruiting men for an all-out war with Morrissey, and Childers had influence where it mattered. Unexpectedly, Morrissey found doors closed to him that had always been open, but Shanaghy knew little beyond the casual barroom gossip that he picked up.

  Then, one night, as he was coming up the Bowery, he was set upon by a gang of thugs who emerged suddenly from a doorway. “Break his legs!” somebody shouted. “Break his legs and his fingers!”

  Again they reckoned without his knowledge of the area, for Tom lunged suddenly, meeting them as they came, and his iron-hard fist clipped the nearest man. The man fell. Leaping past him Shanaghy darted up a stair with the men hot after him. As he topped the flight, he turned. Then grasping a rail in either hand, he swung both feet up and kicked out hard. The boot heels caught the nearest man in the face and he toppled, knocking those behind him backward down the stairs. Again Shanaghy escaped over the roofs.

  When he came warily down from the roofs, a few doors from his room, he held himself still in the doorway while he looked carefully around. He was hot and tired. He wanted nothing so much as to climb the stairs to his own room and fall on the bed, yet he was wary.

  He had started to leave the doorway where he was hidden when he caught a flicker of movement in the shadows up the street. Was it a harmless drunk sleeping it off in a doorway? Or some of Childers’ men waiting for him?

  No use taking the chance. He went back to the roofs. Almost a block further along, he descended to McCarthy’s blacksmith shop. The place was locked and silent, so he crawled into a wagon, pulled a spare canvas wagon-sheet over him and went to sleep.

  Shanaghy awakened to the clang of McCarthy’s hammer. He sat up, rubbing his eyes. The sides of the wagon were high, and he could not see the wagon-yard or the doorway to the shop. He stood up, grasped the side of the wagon and swung himself over. As his feet hit the ground he heard a rush of feet behind him. Instantly he ducked under the wagon and came up on the other side.

  A man started under the wagon after him, and Shanaghy kicked him in the head, then turned to face the two who had come around the end of the wagon.

  One of them yelled, “There he is! Get him!”

  Suddenly McCarthy was in the door of his shop, holding a hammer. “One at a time!” he shouted. “Or I’ll bust some skulls!”

  The man who came at him was a beefy shoulder-striker from Childers’ crew. It was a big, broad man with blond hair and a florid face who rushed at Shanaghy. The moment he put up his two ham-like fists, Shanaghy knew he might be good in a rough-and-tumble, but he was no boxer. The man came in, looping a wide right for Shanaghy’s chin, and Shanaghy crouched and came in whipping two underhanded punches into the bigger man’s belly.

  The two punches were perfectly timed. A right to the belly, a left to the same place and then an overhand cross to the chin, and the man went down. He tried to get up but slumped back down into the dirt.

  Turning sharply, Shanaghy hit the other man before he expected it, knocking every bit of wind out of him. As the man doubled up, Shanaghy gave him a knee in the face.

  The first one was crawling out from under the wagon, a streak of blood on his face. He held up a hand. “No! No! I quit!”

  “Be off with you, then,” Shanaghy said, “but don’t come looking for me again.”

  When they had gone, Shanaghy went into the blacksmith shop and pumped a bucketful of water from the well. He stripped to the waist and bathed his chest and shoulders, then dampened his hair and combed it out.

  “Well,” McCarthy said dryly, “it seems you can fight a little, and it seems you must. They be upon you, lad.”

  “Aye. I slipped them last night when they lay waiting at my house.” Tom dried his hands. “I think I must take it to them a bit.”

  “Be careful, lad. There’s a mean man there, that Eben Childers. He’s a hard one, and cold. And his boys…You met the least of them in Bob. There’s others…worse.”

  McCarthy watched Tom put on his shirt. “Lad, why don’t you go west? There’s a deal of land out there, and a chance for a young man.”

  “Land? I’m no farmer, Mac.”

  “Aye, that you aren’t. But what are you, then? A shoulder-striker for Morrissey? A street thug? A bum? Look at yourself, lad, and look well. Just exactly what are you? A fine broth of a lad who is nothing…Nothing, do y’ hear me? And if you stay here hanging about with thugs, cardsharps and the like, you’ll be nothing more until they pick you from the gutter some day.”
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br />   Shanaghy glared at him. “Have a care, old man.”

  “Old man, is it? Well, I’ve grown old…Will you ever? You’ll end with a broken skull some night and they’ll have you off to bury in potter’s field.

  “What are you that any bum along the street is not? There’s ten thousand like you in Five Points and they’ll all die and come to nothing. You’re young, and the land is wide. Why stay here where there’s few chances? Why not go west? You could study law, study anything, make a man of yourself.”

  “I’m not a man?” Tom doubled his arm. “Look at that. Eighteen inches of biceps. Who can say I’m not a man?”

  “Aye, you’re strong, but what else are you? Have you got the brains God gave you? Or a head fit only for butting, like a billy goat/

  “If a man is to be something, if he is to be a man, he’s got to be more than muscle. He’s got to do something wi’ himself. Get an honest trade, a bit of land, a house of your own, if it is only of sod. Here your friends pat you on the back and let you buy them drinks or whatever, but when you get old and fat and sloppy they’ll drop you for others. Men like you are born to be used and tossed aside…if you let it happen.”

  “What are you? A priest? When did you start preaching, Mac?”

  “It’s a bit of warning, that’s all. You’re a fine lad, so why become what you’re becoming? There’s a bigger, wider world than any slum, and a man only stays there because he hasn’t the guts to get out. There’s other people, other places, and you can make new friends, worthwhile friends.”

  Shanaghy stared at McCarthy with disgust. He picked up his coat and slung it over his shoulder. “Thanks for keepin’ them off me,” he said, and walked away into the sunlight.

  He strode down the street, heading for Morrissey’s nearest saloon…the Gem. Talking to himself as he walked along, he growled angry retorts at the distant McCarthy, saying all the things he had not said. But suddenly they began to sound very hollow and empty.

  What was he, after all? He’d ridden a few races but he was too heavy for that now. He’d won a few fights in the ring, but he’d no desire to make a profession of that. He was at the beck and call of Morrissey and Lochlin, who were important men, in their way. But what was he, himself?

  He shook himself irritably. It was not a subject on which he cared to dwell. McCarthy…well, what did he know? Who was he to talk?

  Yet even as Tom thought this, his good sense told him that McCarthy wasn’t worried about anybody laying for him when he came home of a night, and he was sleeping sound. Nor was he beholden to anybody for the money he made. He did his job, he did it well, and he took his pay and went home.

  Now Shanaghy remembered that time all too well. He had stopped on a street corner, thinking about it. He was no farmer, he’d considered, but still there were towns out west. And if he went to one of them, knowing what he knew, he could become a big man, as big as Morrissey or bigger.

  He had fiddled around with the idea and decided he liked it. What was that place out west? San Francisco? He’d heard of it…There was gold out there, they said.

  Maybe…he’d give it some thought.

  Two days later he approached Morrissey. “Mr. Morrissey? Have you got some kind of a job for me? A permanent job?”

  Morrissey rolled the cigar in his teeth, then spat into the spittoon. “That I have, lad.” He paused. “Did you ever do any shooting?”

  “Shooting? With a gun?” Shanaghy shook his head. “No, I haven’t.”

  “You can learn. I’ve got a shooting gallery. Man who handled it for me turned into a drunk. You learn to shoot, you get one-fifth of the take.” He paused. “You try knocking down on me, bye, an’ I’ll have your hide off.”

  “I never stole anything from anybody,” Shanaghy protested.

  “That I know, bye. That I know. I’ve had my eye on you, bye. Honest men are hard to find. Not many of them amongst my lot.”

  Morrissey took a slip of paper from his pocket. “Take this. You go along down to this address and give them this. I’ll send a man along who will teach you to shoot. Practice all you like, and when you’re good enough we’ll let you win some money for us, shooting with customers.”

  The shooting gallery was on the Bowery amid dozens of other such establishments, pawnbrokers’ shops, third-class hotels, dance houses, saloons, cheap clothing stores. Up near Prince Street was Tony Pastor’s Opera House, and further down the street the Old Bowery Theater. In between was all manner of vice, trickery, and swindling, a scattering of beggars and pickpockets alert for the unwary.

  At five cents a shot, there were prizes to be won—twenty dollars to anyone who could hit a bull’s-eye three times in succession, and knives to be given to anyone who could hit a bull’s-eye once. There was a trumpeter who, if struck in the heart, gave vent to a frightening blast on his trumpet.

  Shanaghy liked the noise and confusion. Many of the sharpers he knew by sight or by name, and the same with the girls who paraded themselves along the street.

  On the third morning an old man walked up to the shooting gallery. He was a lean, wiry old man with white hair and cool gray eyes. “How much for a shot?”

  “Five cents…Twenty dollars if you hit the bull’s-eye three times.”

  The old man smiled. “And how many times can I win the twenty?”

  Shanaghy started to say, “As many times as you…” Suddenly he hesitated, warned by the amused look in the old man’s eyes. “Once,” he said. “If you hit it three times.”

  “Down the street,” the old man said, “they let me win three times.”

  “Nine bull’s-eyes?” Shanaghy grinned. “You’re puttin’ me on.”

  The old man took up a pistol and placed three five-cent pieces on the counter. “I’m good for business, young fellow.” He placed another fifteen cents on the counter. “Six shots in here?” he asked mildly, and before he finished the words he fired. His first shot hit the trumpeter who let go with a piercing blast. People stopped and stared. Instantly, he fired again, another blast.

  “Now,” he said, “I’ll win my breakfast money.”

  Without even seeming to look or to care, he fired three bullets dead center into the main target. “There…I’ll take your twenty.”

  Shanaghy paid it out while people crowded around. “You got easy targets, boy. Never picked up an easier twenty in my life!” He half turned toward those gathered around. “I don’t see how he can afford to operate. That’s the easiest twenty I ever picked up!”

  The man turned away, winking at Shanaghy. “I’ll be back, son, when I need more money.”

  Men crowded to the counter, eager for a chance. For over an hour he was busy loading guns and handing them to customers. Once the trumpet sounded and a street-boy won a knife. It was good business, but Shanaghy kept thinking back to the old man…He had never seen anybody shoot like that, without even seeming to aim. The man just glanced at the target and fired…It was uncanny.

  On the third day the same man returned and walked up to the counter, when there was nobody around. “Howdy, son. I’m short of cash.”

  Shanaghy, who found himself liking the old man, said, “I expected you sooner.”

  “You did, did you? Well, son, it don’t pay to kill the goose. All I want’s a livin’, an’ you fellows can give it to me. Costs me only twenty, thirty dollars a week to live well enough to suit me, and I can pick up that much at one stop. There’s fourteen shootin’ galleries along the Bowery, an’ I call on each of you ever’ two weeks. This time I needed some extry.”

  He paused. “Down the street I don’t even have to take up a gun. They know I can do it, so they just pay me.”

  “Not me,” Shanaghy grinned at him. “I like to see you shoot. I never knew anybody could shoot like that.”

  “Where I come from, son, you’d better be able to shoot.”

  “How come you’re back here? Too much for you out there?”

  The man’s eyes chilled. “Ain’t too much for me anywhere, son
. I got me a sister back here. I come to visit, but there ain’t nothing I can do back here but shoot. I punch cows some, yonder. And I was a Texas Ranger for a spell—have to make a livin’ somehow. Then I found these here shootin’ galleries. I don’t want to make it hard for any of you, so I sort of scatter myself around.”

  “Come here whenever you’re of a mind to,” Tom said. “You’re good for business, and I like to see you shoot. I’d give a-plenty to shoot like that.”

  “A body needs a mite of teachin’ and a whole lot of practice. You got to get the feel for it first.”

  The old man put both hands on the counter. “This here is an easy livin’ for me. My pa used to give me four or five ca’tridges an’ I was expected to bring back some game for each loading, else he’d tan my hide for being wasteful. When it’s like that, you get so’s you don’t waste much lead. You don’t shoot until you’re sure of your target and you make sure you don’t miss.

  “It was like that for most youngsters growin’ up along the frontier. Their pa’s were generally busy with farm work or whatever, so if they ate it was the meat the boys shot…or sometimes the girls. We had a neighbor girl could outshoot me with a rifle, but the pistol was too heavy for her.”

  “You didn’t ever miss?”

  “Oh, sure! There for awhile I got my hide tanned right often.”

  “You never miss here.”

  “At this distance? How could I? A man gets to know his gun. Each one is somewhat different, some shootin’ high and to the right, some low an’ left. You got to estimate and allow.

  “But a man who knows guns, he wants the best, so he just naturally swaps and buys until he gets what he wants. There’s more straight-shootin’ guns than there are men to shoot ’em, although some of those gents out west can really shoot.

  “A good many western guns been worked over. I mean, most western men doctor their guns to fit their hands better, or to shoot better, or to ease the trigger-pull…although ‘pull’ is the wrong word. No man who knows how to shoot ever pulls a trigger. He squeezes her off gentle, like you’d squeeze a girl’s hand. Otherwise, you pull off target. More missin’ is done right in the trigger-squeeze than anywhere else.”