Snake Oil Read online

  Whether it was Jack Morton’s testimonial or just that the crowd had been put into a good humour by watching young Jim Bannister make such a fool of himself, there was a brisk demand for Abernathy’s wonderful elixir. They stayed all day in Fishers’ Landing and by nightfall, when they harnessed up the van and were back on the road, fifty-eight bottles of snake oil had been disposed of.

  ‘There,’ said Abvernathy as they rattled along the track leading away from the town. ‘Twenty-nine dollars for a short day’s work. What do you say to that? You’d earn a dollar a day as a cowboy. I think I’ve proved my point. Now, what do you say? Two thousand dollars for the whole caboodle?’

  ‘And you’ll let me in on the secret of making the stuff? It sounded kind of complicated from what you said back in Fishers’ Landing.’

  ‘Complicated? Oh, you mean touching upon boiling up rattlesnakes and such? That’s only for the rubes. Here, reach me out that jar.’

  ‘What, the one with that ground-up rattler?’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  When Morton handed him the glass jar Abernathy astonished him by upending it and tipping the disgusting contents out into the road.

  ‘You got something to learn,’ Abernathy said, seeing Morton’s look. ‘Snake oil’s got nothing at all to do with snakes. That’s all part of the show.’

  Chapter 2

  Professor Murgatroyd’s rattlesnake oil proved to be a mixture of turpentine, mineral oil, beef fat and red pepper. According to Abernathy it cost no more than a couple of cents a bottle if you brought the ingredients by bulk, as he advised Morton to do. At Abernathy’s urging Morton rubbed a little on his arm and felt a distinct warming sensation.

  ‘That’s the pepper,’ Abernathy said when he mentioned this. ‘It’s the same as you get in liniment for rubbing down horses. Who knows, it might even help some poor soul suffering from the rheumatics.’

  ‘So why pretend it’s got snake oil in it?’ asked Morton curiously. ‘Couldn’t you just tell folk the truth?’

  ‘You think they’d rush to buy bottles of ordinary camphor, the way you saw them do today? The show is what makes them think they’re getting something mysterious, with unknown powers. I’m telling you for now, they wouldn’t shell out fifty cents a bottle for camphor with a dash of pepper.’

  ‘Why snakes, though? That’s the bit I don’t get.’

  ‘It started with the coolies. They really did use to make stuff from snakes. They did it back home in China and then, when they came over here, they tried making the same concoction. Everybody thought it sounded grand and so now people expect to find snake oil in their medicines. It doesn’t do any harm to believe it.’

  The next day Jack Morton and Abernathy parted company on good terms after $2,000 had changed hands. With a few final tips on keeping the tame rattler harmless and how to catch the snakes needed for the show, Abernathy went off and Morton never saw him again.

  He never did learn what it was that the man had needed all that money for, nor why he’d suddenly given up the snake oil business.

  So, a year and a half down the line, Jack Morton, also known as Professor Cornelius Murgatroyd, was carrying on the trade of snake oil merchant and, by and large, finding it to be a satisfying and financially rewarding undertaking. Just as Abernathy had promised, in a good week he could net $200 and, because his living expenses were low, Morton found himself able to save a little. It was a vast improvement on the hand-to-mouth existence that he’d led on the riverboats.

  One refinement that Morton had added to his persona as Professor Cornelius Murgatroyd was to grow a neat little goatee, which gave him something of the look of a youthful Jefferson Davis. He had invested, too, in an elegant white linen suit. Though he said it himself, Jack Morton felt that he had improved in no small measure upon the act that he had inherited from Abernathy.

  Although he had no overall plan of campaign in mind, Morton had over the last year been heading further and further west. After taking on the snake oil business he had travelled through Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas. Now, he had moved into northern Texas and was vaguely moving towards New Mexico. The towns in Texas were further apart than down on the Louisiana coast, but then again, the further west he travelled, the fewer competitors he encountered.

  He had heard tales in Arkansas of rival snake oil salesmen coming to blows over those who encroached upon what they saw as their territory. In one incident, a van and all the stock contained in it had been wantonly burned and the owner put out of business permanently. There didn’t look to be anything of that nature in Texas: at least as far as Morton had seen so far.

  The next town along the road was called Endurance. From what Morton could gather around 2,000 souls lived there. There was probably no chance of using shills, so he would be forced to rely entirely upon his own blandishments. Well, that was fine; it wasn’t the first time and would be unlikely to be the last.

  As was his custom Jack Morton halted his van some half a mile from the town and scanned the place carefully. It didn’t look too prosperous, but that needn’t necessarily be a bad sign. Sometimes poor people were more gullible and easily tricked out of their money than the shrewd and well-to-do. In fact, it was those who were hard up and ill-educated who were often most eager to believe the tales that he spun about the wonderful properties of his rattlesnake oil. These were people who could not, in general, afford to pay a doctor and so were dependent upon patent medicines like his if their child fell ill or they themselves developed some physical affliction that interfered with their lives. Yes, he had high hopes for Endurance.

  The trouble started next day, almost as soon as he began his spiel. The most annoying and ridiculous aspect of the thing was that it all had nothing at all to do with him, notwithstanding the fact that it almost cost him his life.

  There was a bunch of especially rough cowboys in town, evidently hell-bent on raising Cain. Why, he didn’t know. Howsoever, the sight of many of the townsfolk gathered around his van acted like a magnet. These men from out of town came up behind those listening to Morton and began jostling and shoving. Nor did they restrict their attentions to the men; in next to no time there was pandemonium when the accusation was made that somebody’s wife had been assaulted. The affronted husband drew on the cowboy who, he said, had taken this liberty; then, unbelievably, the shooting began.

  Morton was used to hearing occasional gunfire late at night, when drunken men would make whoopee by shooting out somebody’s window or even firing at another drunk who had insulted them. But this was ten in the morning!

  There were three or four shots, then a pause as his audience scattered and sought cover: either diving to the ground or hiding behind trees. Then there was a final crack, which echoed back and forth between the nearby buildings. No sooner had he heard it than Jack Morton felt a sharp pain in his side and realized in amazement that he had been shot.

  ‘Ah, shit!’ he muttered, then sat down at once on the driving seat of the van.

  Morton tried to calm down and slow the frantic beating of his heart. He knew that terror causes the heart to pump faster and the blood to flow more freely from a wound. It was important to find out how badly he was hurt.

  The pain was in his left side, on the ribs, right where his heart was situated. Fearfully he removed his jacket and saw that a ragged hole had been torn through it at the breast. Then he looked down and saw the slowly spreading crimson stain.

  He unbuttoned his vest and removed it, discovering as he did so that that too had a neat round hole in the left-hand side. Despite his efforts to remain calm, Morton was aware of his heart pounding and the blood singing in his ears.

  He was now ready to examine the wound itself. Slowly, he unbuttoned the shirt and moved it aside. Looking down, he could see that a long, narrow groove had been gouged across his ribs. He took a huge gulp of air in relief and immediately felt a stabbing pain in his side. Presumably the ball had cracked one of his ribs. But that was all right: he could live wi
th that.

  It was an awkward and undignified procedure, stripping to the waist in public and checking himself for mortal wounds, but there it was. He wasn’t going to die of a little embarrassment. If he bound up that rib tight, he would do well enough. It wasn’t the first of his ribs to be broken and he knew what to expect. The ball must have gone through his clothing and then caught him a glancing blow, skidding off the rib, its force being dissipated in that way. A fraction of an inch to one side and it would have driven straight into his heart. There could hardly have been a narrower escape.

  Now that he knew that he would live Jack Morton was more vexed by the damage to his white linen suit than he was by the injury to his rib. That suit had cost him plenty and he was grieved to see it ruined. Sure, he had some rough work clothes in the back of the van, but that white suit was part of the act; it conjured up Professor Cornelius Murgatroyd and brought him to life. He would have to replace the clothing as soon as he was able.

  Having established to his own satisfaction that he was not about to expire on the spot, Morton began to take an interest once again in the terrestrial scheme of things. He saw, and not with any great surprise, that judgment was about to be executed upon one of the cowboys who had disturbed his sales pitch.

  A thing that Jack Morton had noticed over the years was that people like him: drifters and ne’er-do-wells, habitually underestimated the passions of those who lived settled and orderly lives. In his more whimsical moments, Morton liked to think of himself as a predator, preying upon the vulnerable folk who lived in these little hick towns: a wolf, moving among sheep. Others felt the same way about the citizens of burgs like Endurance. Probably those cowboys had much the same view of the matter, thinking that they could push people around and generally act like they owned the place.

  Every once in a while though, characters like Morton and the cowboys would learn the hard way that the men living in and around out-of-the-way towns and hamlets were just the same as them, really. Specifically, they could be every bit as hard and ruthless. As he pulled his shirt back on it looked to Morton as though the men, who had a few minutes earlier been prospective customers of his, were now engaged in settling a score in the most brutal and direct manner imaginable.

  There were only a half-dozen of those cowboys, for all that they had been making so much of themselves. Now that it was plain that they were so vastly outnumbered by the men of Endurance they had stopped their blustering and were trying to slip away without any fuss. The only thing was, there was a man lying dead on the ground, shot through the head. He was somebody who had been known to all those living in the town, and it looked to Morton as though the dead man’s friends and neighbours were determined that there should be a reckoning for this pointless killing.

  Fascinated, despite the repugnance he felt at what he guessed would be the final outcome, Morton jumped down from the buckboard and joined the throng of angry men and women who were now surrounding the cowboys who had provoked the bloody confrontation. The men in the crowd had all drawn their guns and it must have been plain to the cowboys who now faced the wrath of the town that there was little chance of breaking free by main force, so they were adopting a pacific attitude, designed to placate the anger of the crowd.

  ‘Hey, sorry about that, but he drew on us. We didn’t start it,’ said one man. Another tried unobtrusively to detach himself from his fellows and get free. He was detected in this attempt and shepherded back to the other five.

  There were further protestations of regret, innocence and sorrow at the outcome of the little bit of friction that had erupted. Nothing, however, could explain or excuse the dead man lying there in the road; Morton was sure in his own mind that there would swiftly be a deadly reckoning for this.

  He was right.

  Endurance, like so many small towns at that time, did not have a sheriff, relying instead upon the services of a vigilance committee, which kept order in and around the town. Word was sent to the head of this committee, who was working over on the other side of town. When he arrived it was obvious that he took a very dim view of fatal shootings on the streets of the town, which he had pledged himself to keep safe for decent people.

  ‘Who started this?’ asked Terrance Drake, whose regular job was running the livery stable. ‘Let’s hear from those as live here first.’ There was a clamour of protest from the six cowboys.

  ‘You boys’ll get your turn later,’ Drake told them.

  ‘Those fellows were pushing and shoving at us while we was watching the show over yonder,’ said one man. ‘It was them as started the trouble.’

  ‘Show?’ asked Terrance Drake. ‘What show would this be?’ Somebody pointed to Morton’s van with its gaudily painted advertisement emblazoned on the side.

  ‘Oh,’ said Drake. ‘Snake oil man in town, is there? Where might I see that gentleman?’

  Jack Morton was not all that keen on drawing attention to himself, but some members of the crowd pointed him out. The leader of the vigilance committee eyed him coldly.

  ‘We don’t encourage men like you in this town,’ he said. ‘I’ll speak a word or two to you later.’ Then he turned his attention back to the shooting. ‘You Tom, and you too, Patrick,’ he said to men nearby, ‘bring me the pistols of those men, one at a time.’

  When the first gun was brought to him Drake sniffed delicately at the barrel.

  ‘This ’un ain’t been fired lately,’ he announced. ‘Whose gun is this?’ When the owner was identified Drake said: ‘Put him to one side.’ He repeated the process with all the pistols, finding that only two had been fired recently.

  Morton was struck with admiration for the fair way that the investigation was being conducted so far. There were towns where those men might just have been beaten up so badly that some of them died. Here there was at least the semblance of justice, albeit of a rough and ready variety.

  Having found that one or other of the two men had been responsible for killing a man known to him, who had lived peaceably in the town for many years, Terrence Drake was not minded to waste too many words on the affair. He addressed the two cowboys thus: ‘I don’t enquire into who drew first, nor anything of that kind. It’s plain from what’s been said that you boys came causing trouble today and that’s on your own heads. From all that I am able to collect, one of you touched the dead man’s wife in a lewd way and, like any decent husband, he was angry. Only thing I want to know now is, which of you killed him?’

  Neither of the accused men seemed disposed towards making a confession, so Drake concluded by saying: ‘I don’t much care if we hang one or both of you. You can argue the case out between yourselves for . . .’ he glanced up at the clock on the church, ‘ten minutes. If after that time you’re both obstinate, then you hang together. Some of you take them over to the store there and let them talk. Make sure, though, as they don’t escape.’

  Although he didn’t really care for such spectacles, Morton found that he was unable to tear himself away and go about his business. All other considerations apart, he wanted to see if the murderer would own up in order to spare his partner from also being hanged. He’d never come across such a strange situation before and the very novelty of the thing kept him rooted to the spot.

  After ten minutes the two cowboys were brought out of the store and thrust before Terrance Drake, who stood there like some Old Testament prophet about to call down the wrath of God.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘Either o’ you two got anything to say?’

  ‘It was me that shot him,’ mumbled one of the two men. ‘But he drew on me first. It was self-defence.’

  ‘Nobody cares a damn about that. You started the trouble, interfering with a man’s wife. You had your fun, now it’s time to pay for it.’ Drake called over to somebody standing near the store. ‘Tom, you know what to do.’

  Right up until this moment Morton had had the impression that neither of the two cowboys really thought that they were in peril of their lives. Perhaps they thought th
at the aim was to give them a shock, warn them off and get them to leave town at once.

  After all, if the man who had admitted the killing was telling the truth and the dead man had drawn on him, then by all the rules of fair play that Jack Morton had ever heard tell of it was indeed a case of self-defence. Maybe they would just knock the fellow about a bit before sending the six troublemakers on their way.

  That was the way that Morton’s thoughts were tending and evidently the killer too had been reasoning along those same lines, because when he saw the man, Tom, emerge from the store with a coil of rope in his hand he made a bolt for it, all of a sudden apprehending that his very life was now to be forfeited for a moment’s wildness.

  ‘I don’t know your name and to speak plainly, I don’t much care what it is,’ Drake told the cowboy, who, after his attempt at running, was now being grasped firmly by three or four stalwart men. ‘In this town, you kill a man, you pay with your life.’ He turned to the men holding the condemned killer. ‘Hang him,’ he said.

  As he was being dragged across the dusty street to where an oak spread its branches outside the forge, the cowboy tried to dig his heels into the ground like a mule. The scene sickened Jack Morton, who was put in mind of a beast being taken to slaughter. As the struggling group came closer to the fatal tree the man redoubled his efforts to break free and then began screaming in terror.

  A noose had already been fashioned and slung over a branch. Somehow or other, in spite of his frantic endeavours, the man’s hands were lashed behind him with a rawhide thong and the noose placed around his neck. There was little point in prolonging matters; as soon as the rope was secure willing hands took hold of the other end and hauled the man into the air. It was a mercifully swift death, with the victim’s kicks ending after only a minute or less.