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Short Stories & Tall Tales
Pearl’s Diamonds
Tom Sheehan
The train sat at a water stop miles before Humphrey Station on the Dakota-Idaho Line, a rifle jammed in the back of the engineer, the conductor temporarily locked in a caboose closet, the telegraph lines already cut in a few places, and Pearl Weber’s gang holding the train for her. She was 10 minutes late coming from the hideout, the wires cut after an incoming message addressed to a “Virginia Alexandria” had included the coded line, “Mother is keeping her bed warm at home in Purchase.”
Purchase was in Idaho and the message from her brother meant her mother was dying.
Pearl Weber, all beautiful 5’ 2” of her, curvaceous in a rough outfit, was the leader of a pack of gunmen wholly admiring her precise plans for robbing banks and trains, and her advice on handling the split-up of shares as soon as possible after their generally successful robberies. In line with another of her precepts, she also planned retirement situations for those who would listen. Not many heeded such a credo, the way cowpokes came and went in those days after the Great War, old wounds, long needs and dreams of quick riches usually holding sway. Occasionally one man would plan his old age comfort because he believed Pearl knew what she was talking about, believed she had a hand touching on fate.
She had preached endlessly to those who followed her, “It’s nice out here, but it’s big time in the Big East for those who get there.” She owned an estate in Vermont holding onto the side of a mountain, a cabin nestled under trees beside a lake in the heart of Maine, a beach house in New Hampshire that drew her gaze toward Paris and London, and money in banks in Boston, New York City, and the nation’s capital.
One possession on Martha’s Vineyard, high on a bluff catching Atlantic changes, was really her dream home, a stately house of a dozen gables and a widow’s walk on high, and full of whaler’s tales, pirate stories, and sudden romance hanging inside the walls waiting to break loose. All of Spar Hill, once belonging to a sea captain who never returned from his last voyage, was hers. Only there once for a short visit, the wallpaper pattern in the great hallway kept its design in her mind as vivid as an image in a locket. That secret view caused her to say repeatedly, “Spar Hill’s where I’ll retire when all this is over and done with.”
Her arguments on safe and solid retirement continued: “How many real old men do you know?” she’d say to her gang, to those who listened, “and if you know some real old ones, ones who were in our business, what do they have to keep them going now that they can’t shoot straight, or ride for a full day, or bust out of jail once in a month of Saturday nights?”
Pearl, with a twist of blonde hair trailing from under her Stetson, presented a highly favorable look for one leading a gang of toughs. The angelic face under that Stetson set her off from many women of the west. She carried the wind, the sun and lengthy days on the run in the saddle better than most women, showing little wear and tear on her looks or in her form. A few former gang members had learned, in a crucial test of wills, that they did not fit in any way romantic with the leader of the pack, who some members referred to as The Alpha Female with the Hot Lips.
Chico Manirez, as good looking as they send up from below the Rio Grande, and a crack shot with any weapon, said, privately of course, “It was no match with Pearl. She knows what she wants and it’s not me. That’s cut and dried and I leave it there, only to think about it once in a while on a starry night knowing I’ll never make a move on her again.”
Now once more she had gathered them, the moteliest of crews, and advised them that she needed to get on board the next train west, to Purchase, but dared not board the train from a regular station on the line. She asked them to take care of it, so they did … at the point of guns. They snuck her aboard, disguised as best she could, released the conductor and the engineer after a fake robbery seemed to have gone astray, and Pearl Weber was on her way home to see her mother confined to her last bed.
The message, as said, had been sent to one Virginia Alexandria, which really was her mother’s birth place, at the Pine Hills Station, 60 miles from her mother, her brother, and their home in Idaho. It was a method of communication her brother had used several times, a device Pearl insisted on.
But her brother, in a twist of fate, had sent the message at the point of a gun belonging to Purchase Sheriff Oscar Ridlowe. The sheriff had put together a small chart of facts about Pearl Weber and her Diamonds, a distinctive and highly wanted outlaw gang. When he heard Chester Weber’s mother had been ill for a few days, he leaped at the chance to entice Pearl Weber home … and into his jail.
He had no idea how it would work out, but it was better than sitting and hoping she’d make a big mistake … like coming home for any reason on the spur of the moment and him unaware of her arrival unless he pulled the strings on it, unless he was on his toes.
When the telegraph lines had gone down after the phony message had been sent, as reported in Purchase, he knew Pearl Weber was on her way home to see and comfort her mother. The next train, due in the dusk of evening, was an obvious opportunity.
Two of the gang, before the water stop, had hailed the train from the tracks, one horse dead beside the tracks, one at a limp not far away, the saddles and equipment subsequently tossed on board the train.
When Pearl had been secreted aboard the train at the fake hold-up, she had company, at a distance, in the next car … apparently two luckless cowpokes off the trail.
Collecting fares from new passengers, the conductor suspected the woman in the heavy make-up and the Mexican-style head veil. He could tell from her bare wrists that she was nearly as white as a prairie acacia and not a darker Latin lady. There was a reason she had come aboard late, as did the two cowpokes, all three of them trying to hide something. He could have discounted the two cowpokes caught out on the trail with no horses, but one and only one woman came to mind needing such a disguise, and that was notorious Pearl Weber, the vaunted leader of Pearl’s Diamonds.
He vowed he’d do nothing rash when he was released from the caboose closet, but secretly promised he’d advise the law the first chance he had about his suspicions. When he sent a telegraph to the sheriff of Purchase from Humphrey Station, further on the line from the water stop, he had no idea that the reception at Purchase was already planned and manned.
At the command of Sheriff Oscar Ridlowe, a dozen sworn-in deputies were placed about the station in Purchase, and each man given specific orders. And regular deputy Bruce Maxler, dressed as a sporty gent from back east, with a suitcase to match, stood under a lamp at the station, ready to board the train bound further west. In a shoulder holster under his fancy jacket sat a Colt revolver, snug as a bee in a closed bud. Maxler was an expert marksman, daring, veteran of some successful posse hunts, and as smart as a lead actor.
When Maxler stepped into the second passenger car, the two “stranded cowpokes” laughed at his clothes and his manner of storing his suitcase for the ride. And at the other end of the car, Pearl Weber, catching a full look on the face of the fancy clad newcomer, felt a pull at her heart; he was a most handsome gentleman, nattily attired, setting himself off from the two laughing gang members who had no class at all in their manners, them preparing to leave the train.
When she gave the two gang members a high sign to knock off their current attitude, each man backed off as gracefully as he could, and apologies were delivered and accepted by Maxler who noted the beauty of the lone woman in the car. He hoped against hope she was not Pearl Weber, hoped that the real Pearl Weber was in the next car. But his doubts overrode his high hopes.
Pearl Weber said, in a clear and pleasant voice, not the voice of a gang leader, “Excuse me, sir, but you’re obviously from back east because of your good outfit. Where are you from and where are you heading?”
The interest in her voice was as rich as could be, and her eyes, in the light of several gas lamps, echoed the same interest.
“I’m not going very far, Ma’am,” Maxler said, the impact of her voice clearly impressed in him.
Pearl said, “I am getting off here, sir, and wish you a good journey.” Her smile was illustrious, and her two gang members were awed by the swift change in her manners.
Maxler, caught between several emotions, concerned about the two men who had been direct in their approach and quickly diverted from it, the beauty and the office of command in the voice of the petite woman, and the weight of the revolver pushing on his chest, instantly hated his job … but realized there was nothing he could do about it.
While the two gang members were caught up in their realizations, Purchase Sheriff Oscar Ridlowe slipped in behind Pearl Weber and had her twisted into manacles that bound the slimmest of wrists. When her supposed escorts saw what happened and tried to make a move, they found themselves staring into the bore of Maxler’s Colt held in his steady hand.
Before her trial was to start, several sly moves were made upon the jail at Purchase by some of her men, but Ridlowe was ready, as was his small army of deputies, and they drove off each attempt to free Pearl Weber.
The judge, a noted high bench juror summoned to sit in judgment, was not due in town for a week or more. It would be an interesting case; no person had ever been killed in one of the robberies, Pearl Weber had never been seen by a witness at any of the hold-ups. All information had surfaced as innuendo, a bit of bragging by some outlaws under the influence of drink, and rumors that galloped at times like a runaway horse and wagon.
In the meantime, at Ridlowe’s direction, Bruce Maxler was assigned as Pearl Weber’s constant jailer. It was a job he grew fond of in a short time as she told him, not about all her holdings back east, but only the stories and tales that came from Spar Hill. She danced the place into his mind with tales that gripped him long after they were told.
Maxler, young, handsome, lively and lusty in imagination from every angle, was captured, captivated, and swung by his heels by his lovely prisoner. When she smiled he melted, gloried when she held his hand, and carried her into his highest fancies. When he slept, in a corner of the jail, Pearl Weber on a cot in her cell, he dreamed of pirates and whalers and sea queens and one beauty who sailed as captain of her own frigate. The fictitious name of Captain Diamond of the Atlantic Treasure Fleet would not leave him.
As it was, possibly seen by Ridlowe, and possibly not, Pearl Weber at last had fallen in love. To address her new feelings she began to include Maxler in all of her stories, and her own person, by name or description or by whatever means she could devise, came along … with her heart attached in every case.
It was the ultimate of attractions for both parties.
In the dead of night, two days before the judge was due in Purchase, Pearl Weber, prisoner, and Bruce Maxler, jailer and deputy, slipped out of the jail in Purchase and disappeared forever from Idaho.
A small note, pinned to the wanted poster board in the jail, carried a simple message: “It’s love that did this.” There was no signature on the note.
The pair was never seen again in Idaho or any other western state, as far as Ridlowe knew. The remnants of the gang, wherever they were, or however they got on after their leader disappeared from jail, whether they had retired or not, never once mentioned to any law officer a place they knew of called Spar Hill, an historical estate on far-off Martha’s Vineyard, catching all it could hold of the Atlantic Ocean, and its storied walls at last letting go secrets held too long from the living.
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