his two teachers stood at attention, rarely blinking, and the teachers held rulers as though sabers at arms.
Eventually, Fallon finished his talk, and asked if anyone had a question.
A hand shot up from the blond boy with big ears on the front row. Once Fallon nodded to him, the boy stood, cleared his throat, and asked, “How does one become a United States marshal, sir?” He promptly sat down.
CHAPTER FOUR
How does one become a federal marshal?
Fallon grinned as he thought about how he could answer that question.
Well, son, first you ride herd with a cowboy with a wild streak and a taste of John Barleycorn. You’re young, going to live forever, feeling invincible, and you drink far too much one evening in Fort Smith, Arkansas. And your pal, Josh Ryker, sees a saddle in a window that he figures he ought to have, but since he doesn’t have any money, he decides to steal it. And you try to stop him, and next thing you realize is a lawman has shown up, and you’re in the middle, and then Ryker is about to kill the lawman. That’s right. Murder a man in cold blood—all because of one saddle. And while plenty of preachers and doctors and professors might tell you that only time will sober you up after a night of drinking forty-rod and cheap beer, you know for a fact that you are stone cold sober. And you stop Ryker. And suddenly you’re in jail, and the dungeon at Fort Smith is as bad as a lot of prisons. This you’ll learn. In time, you’ll become an expert on prisons.
So somehow, because you saved the life of a peace officer, and a lawman with connections, you’re standing before Judge Isaac Parker, who is offering you a job. Take the badge, pin it on, and you’ll be earning a living—if you aren’t killed—as a federal lawman. Oh, but since you’re just in your teens, you’ll just drive the jail wagon. Tend to the prisoners as the real marshals make the arrests and risk their lives. Till the deputies you’re tending jail for wind up getting cut down by cold-blooded killers, for murdering, heartless, soulless men populate the Indian Nations just west of Fort Smith. And something comes over you, and you’re not going to let them get away with it. The next thing you’re sure of is that you’re bringing in the jail wagon to Fort Smith, with the dead and condemned criminals, and suddenly the U.S. marshal, the U.S. attorney, the other deputy marshals, and even Judge Parker look at you differently.
You’re not just a kid. You’re a man. And now a bona fide deputy marshal.
So it goes. Till you meet a lovely woman. She happens to stay in the same boardinghouse as you do. And you marry her. And she brings you the joy of your life, a daughter. And you start reading law with a highly regarded defense attorney, because even Judge Parker says that a young man with a future and a wife and a baby doesn’t need to be risking his life chasing the scum of society. The West will be won by lawman, but mostly by law. And good lawyers are needed.
Sure, you still ride after the badmen, though you’re never sent against the real killers. Till one day you find yourself accused of a holdup. Not enough evidence to get you on the murder charge, but you are convicted of a crime that you did not commit. Judge Parker, though, well he thinks you’re not only guilty—since the jury found you guilty—but also a Judas. Throws the book at you and then some, but others must weigh in, and Parker agrees that sending a crooked lawman to the Detroit House of Corrections isn’t justice.
They put you in the darkness of the Illinois pen in Joliet.
That’s where you are when you learn that your wife and baby girl have been murdered.
What can you do then? Just turn hard, because you have to be hard, uncompromising, to make it out of Joliet alive. You learn what it takes to survive prison. You ask for no quarter, and you never give any quarter. Just get through one day, then live through the night, and watch it start over again. Day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year.
Until Joliet witnesses one of the bloodiest riots in U.S. history. And some guards are begging for you to help save them. You don’t care a whit for these guards, most of them no better, often a whole lot worse, than the men they’re keeping out of society. But there’s that one thing you haven’t been able to shake. Human decency. You thought you had lost it, but it comes back to haunt you. So you help the guards. Save their lives. And when the riot is over, the governor issues you a parole.
Up to Chicago, you’re told, room in a boardinghouse, work for a wheelwright—what the hell do you know about that?—and make sure you never break the terms of your parole, because if you do, they’ll ship your bruised hide back to Joliet to serve the rest of your sentence—ten years or so—in full.
But when the hack takes you to see Lake Michigan—just because you’re a partially free man and might as well do something free people can do—you’re hijacked by a hood who you arrested before, a hood called Aaron Holderman who now is an employee of the American Detective Agency, headquartered in Chicago, rival of the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.
And that’s where Sean MacGregor, a little red-headed Scot who likes smoking bad cigars and intimidating everyone, tells you a story. He knows who killed your wife and child, and he’ll help you get revenge, or justice, but only if you help him out first. It’s just a little assignment. Go to Arizona Territory—fear not, the warden and his associates at Joliet will get nothing but positive reports on your progress as a parolee—get arrested, get sentenced to the territorial pen, make friends with a brutal felon who happened to steal a fortune and cached it somewhere south in Mexico. Break out of Yuma with the cold-blooded killer. Find the stolen loot, recapture or kill Monk Quinn, and let the American Detective Agency reap the glory.
You do your job. Mostly. Survive the hellhole that is Yuma. Break out of the joint. Travel to Mexico with a hard lot of hardened criminals. And wind up back in Chicago, only somehow—because you have a sense of poetic justice—you let the Pinkertons reap the glory of returning Quinn’s fortune to its rightful owners.
MacGregor gives you another assignment, and this one is tougher than Yuma. You wind up at the Missouri state pen, more than forty acres covered in blood, and discover the perfect murder-for-hire scheme. The warden and some associates have prisoners who they’ll let slip out to kill someone. Hey, who would ever suspect a man behind bars of killing people outside of the prison? And one of the men, now deranged, you realize is the hired killer who murdered your wife and daughter. But when that assignment is over, another riot has helped in the justice department, and all of the principles are dead. Including the Mole, the man who killed Rachel and Renee, but the man who also saved your life.
But there’s one more job you need to do. One more payoff Sean MacGregor owes you. The Mole did the murder. But someone hired the Jefferson City swine to see that murder done. And that takes you to Huntsville, the “Walls,” as nasty as a prison as you’d dream in your worst nightmare.
Inside the Walls, you learn another system, you deal with the leader of the inmates, the notorious John Wesley Hardin, and then you learn about another prison scheme. They send you to one of the farms that lease prisoners from the state to do labor. Cheap labor. And in this case, under the direction of a Confederate sympathizer, who, decades after the Rebellion, wants to start a new war, form a new Confederacy, and is using convicts to help him create an arsenal and an army.
This time, though, the American Detective Agency has given you some help. MacGregor’s son, Dan, is part of the operation. So is a female operative named Christina Whitney. She’ll be posing as your wife. And Aaron Holderman has been hired as a Huntsville guard, not that you can trust Holderman.
But you survive this one, too. And you see the fiend who betrayed you, who let you read law with him, who loved your wife and wanted
