Eighteen ninety-nine.
The frontier doesn't ask who you were: it asks what you can do.
There's land to work and rivers to run, roads to ride and laws to keep.
Or to break.
Here's what you can live here.
See the worldThe server's economic overhaul was developed drawing on the principles of modern economics and on some of the models studied by respected Italian economists, among them Carlo Cottarelli, Tito Boeri and Marco Leonardi.
The goal is a realistic, balanced and sustainable economic system, where production, trade, supply and demand, the circulation of money and player progression are tightly linked. Every mechanic is designed to favour market stability, give worth to every profession and sustain a living economy that rewards strategy, effort and cooperation.
Honest work, for those who want to build something with their hands.
11The town always has something that needs doing, and asks no one for references.
You sit down beside the clerk, she barely looks at you and tells you what's needed today: a fence to set back up, some crates to haul to the storehouse, the street to sweep, water to fetch from the river. You won't get rich, but when you arrive in town without a penny and without a trade, this is where you begin.
Someone's got to gather up what others leave lying on the ground.
There's a trade no one tells of in the saloon: roaming the roads and trails, spotting a cross in the dust, closing into a box a man who no longer has a name and carrying him where the earth is soft. The wagon holds six coffins at a time, and the arms give out before the conscience does. There's no getting rich at it: you keep the frontier clean, one body at a time.
Every trade has its book, and every book has a page you haven't yet earned.
The workbench is heavy, stained, and full of marks. You set what you've gathered on it, leaf through the pages, choose. Sometimes out comes what you wanted; sometimes the fire tells you you got the measure wrong. Those who work at the ranch can make almost anything; the saloon cook and the stable hand, meanwhile, have their own private pages, and they lend them to no one.
In every town there's a man with a register and the power to give you a trade.
In every town's hall there's a board and a man who decides who ends up on it. You present yourself, leave your name, and wait for the mayor to need someone. Whoever's taken on has a trade, a rank, and someone to answer to; whoever behaves well rises, whoever makes trouble goes back on the board, this time on the other side of it.
Where the earth spits black, there's always work for those with a strong back.
The field never sleeps: the pumps beat, the barrels roll, the foreman waves you to follow him. You can spend the day shifting timber and barrels, or checking that the machines don't burst. And then there's the tanker: you set out in the morning with the load and cross half the world to deliver it to someone waiting for you, and when you come back you're filthy, tired, and paid.
The bees don't ask much: water, a bit of sugar, and a clean home. In return they make the sweet gold.
It's a trade of returns: you have to come by, check, refill, sweep away the filth before it becomes disease. Treat them well and they multiply on their own and fill the combs twice as fast; forget them for half a day and you'll find the box empty. In the woods there are wild nests to smoke out to start a colony without buying one, but those creatures aren't docile.
The crates arrive shut. Someone has to open them, weigh them, and set them in order on the shelves.
In the back of the saloon there's a table, a register, and the patience of one who counts. You deposit what you've brought, note in the ledger what you want it to become, and come back later. In Annesburg, instead, there's the fire: you throw in the raw stone and out comes clean metal. In both cases the trade is the same: waiting well.
The forest doesn't sell itself: first it must be felled, then split, then sawn, then planed.
You begin at dawn with the axe on your shoulder and finish at evening with your hands full of splinters. The trunk becomes a log, the log becomes a board, the board becomes a plank smooth as a mirror. And then there's the resin, which won't be torn free: you wait for it, drop by drop, like a prayer. Those who lead keep the books and pay the taxes; those who work keep the axe sharp.
Whoever owns the press decides what really happened this week.
A room that smells of ink, a heavy machine that must be fed by hand, and a man who decides which facts deserve a column. You gather the rumors, wait for the dispatch, and line up the truth with what little convenience serves those who pay. Then you print, head out at dawn with a bundle under your arm, and nail a copy to every post in the county. Those with a venture to announce buy the space; those with an enemy to ruin buy more. And the week after you start again, because these people's memory lasts exactly seven days.
The land doesn't lie and isn't in a hurry: it gives exactly what you gave it, but in its own time.
You bend over the furrow, drive in the spade, and entrust the seed to the dark. Then you come back, with the bucket full of river water, and wait. The hours pass, the light turns, and when you return the plant is there waiting for you, tall and heavy. No one will give you a medal for a field of yarrow, but come evening your pockets will be full and your hands dirty with an honest dirt.
From up on the rooftops you see the whole city, and no one ever looks you in the face.
The ladder leans against the wall and has smelled of soot for years. You climb, slip into the flue, and work in the dark with the brush. When you emerge you're black as pitch and the city is down there, orderly and unaware. It's a dirty trade, short and well paid, and no one asks where you come from.
The frontier gives to those who know how to look: forests, rivers, veins of ore, and trails.
11Behind the counter the butcher looks at the hide, turns it to the light, and decides what your day is worth.
A clean shot is worth twice a careless one: the beast is paid for by its condition, not its weight. Those who hunt well know it and choose the weapon before the prey. At the counter everything sells, from the whole carcass to a fistful of feathers, and in town there's always a butcher willing to make the deal.
Under a hand's depth of earth is everything someone lost, hid, or buried in a hurry.
The detector sings and you dig, and almost always you pull up scrap to sell by weight. Then, when you least expect it, out comes a watch worth more than a day of honest work. But the real hunt is another: coins and figurines circulate that someone's been collecting for a lifetime, and whoever manages to put together a whole set doesn't do it for the money.
Every beast that falls leaves three things to those who know where to set the blade.
The meat serves for eating or for baiting a trap, the part sells at the counter, and the hide is what makes the difference. On common beasts it matters little; on those that carry the name of a legend it changes everything, and the fur trader pays for them as he should. A carcass is skinned only once: whoever comes second finds only flies.
Outside the towns the horizon moves: they're manes, and they have no master.
You have to approach upwind, choose the right one in the herd, and then hold on until it stops bucking. Then comes the long part: bringing it to town without losing it and without someone deciding they like it more than you do. The dealer pays well for good beasts, far less for a mule.
Certain beasts aren't found: they're called. But they come only if you know what to put in the trap, where to set it, and at what hour.
The fur trader keeps a book with all the names in it, and that book comes dear. Whoever reads it knows the bear won't answer to corn and that certain animals move only when the sun is low. The hide of a legendary beast is worth a month of gathered herbs, but first you must survive the encounter, and the old man won't buy the finest hides from those who haven't yet come far enough.
The water asks nothing of anyone: all it takes is a hook, a worm, and the time to wait.
Every bait calls its own fish: with crumbs you take what's there, with a real fisherman's bait come the fish that fill the sack. The fight is short but must be played well, or the line snaps and you're left watching the ripples on the water. It's the trade of those with no hurry and no enemies.
Some read the frontier like a book of remedies, and know that every root has a name and a price.
With a trained eye the good plants light up amid the dry grass, and the more you study them the farther off you can spot them. Some can be eaten, others bring you to your knees: it's experience that teaches you the difference, not the look of them. Those who reach the end of the road recognize the poison at a glance and gather without even stepping down from the saddle.
Beneath the mountains lies everything men kill each other for up on the surface. You've only to dig.
It's honest work and for that reason it's hard: you buy a pick, light the lamp on your hat, and go down where the light doesn't reach. Every well-struck blow chips something from the rock, and one time in a hundred that something truly gleams. At day's end you load the donkey and head down to the valley, your back in pieces and your conscience clean.
All it takes is a tin pan and a stretch of river: the rest luck decides.
You dip, you shake, you look. Almost always only pebbles remain, and so you take a step further along and begin again. Those with the patience to set up the cradle and carry water to it double their odds and every so often pull out something red worth more than gold. The river, though, won't be worked twice in the same spot: you have to wait for it to bring something back.
In the warm mud of the bayou there are those who sink in their hands and pull out supper.
No rifle needed, no rod, only patience and the willingness to get dirty up to the elbow. The burrows are few and whoever's passed before leaves the hole empty for a while, so it's best to know them all and work them at a calm pace. Those who work them well come back to town with a bag full of what the fishmonger pays gladly for.
In the alleys behind the saloons, the city lets fall what it no longer needs.
A crust of bread, a bottle left half full, a handful of coal. And every so often, if the good Lord's looking the right way, something that glints at the bottom. It's no trade and no one boasts of it, but more than one man has gotten through the winter thanks to the bins of Saint Denis.
Those who buy, those who sell, and those who take their cut in between.
11Not everyone has time to be measured up: some outfits are already there, hung up, just waiting for an owner.
At the back of the tailor's hangs a row of ready-assembled clothes: the good Sunday suit, the traveling getup, the ensemble the town gentlemen wear. You try them on whole, with their color variations, and in a moment you're someone else. It's the shortcut for those in a hurry to make their entrance.
Those who work present the bill. Whether you pay it is another matter.
The doctor who stitched you up, the smith who set your iron right, the innkeeper who gave you a bed: all have the right to ask what their time is worth. They hand you a receipt with the name, the date, and the reason for the charge. The money goes into the coffers of their business, not into any one man's pocket, and the town keeps a record of it.
Behind the counter there's a second stockroom, the one the laborers, the seamstresses, and the undertakers help themselves to.
Butcher's aprons, saloon corsets, widow's shawls, nightshirts, holsters of every cut for those who carry more than one iron. These aren't window clothes: they're the real garments of working folk, and they cost little for exactly that reason. This is where you find the piece that makes a character believable rather than elegant.
What the shopkeeper won't pay you enough for, another man might pay you double.
Under the general market's awning the notices pile atop one another: someone's unloading a haul of hides, someone else is auctioning off a thing you won't find in any store. You can hang your own notice for a few days or a whole month, knowing that the longer you leave it there, the bigger the cut the market takes. Whoever raises the bid pays at once; whoever's outbid gets his money back, sooner or later.
The tailor's tape is cold across the shoulders, but what leaves this shop tells the whole county who you think you are.
In the dim of the back room lies a great bound book: leaf through it and you'll find drover's hats, preacher's coats, boots that smell of new leather and buckles bright as a promise. You try it all on before the mirror, turn on yourself, change your mind three times. Then you pay, and what you chose waits for you in the wardrobe every time you come back to town. When you tire of a coat, the tailor buys it back — but for less than you paid, because that's how trade goes.
A coat's color is a man's signature: and to have it dyed just as you say, the dyer skins you alive.
In the back of the tailor's shop there's one who works with the vats and the aniline, and knows how to give a garment a shade no one else in the whole county wears. It's not a service for everyone: it costs a small fortune, in hard dollars or in gold. But when you walk down the main street with that color on you, everyone knows you could afford it.
There's no sign more honest than the one that carries your name above a saloon door.
Buying it costs a lifetime of savings, and from that moment the place is both a burden and a boast: the barrels must be filled, the prices set, the books kept. Patrons come in even when you're not there, and leave on the counter just enough to make you say it was worth it. Every so often the law drops by to have a look at the back room, and the government never forgets to send its bill.
There are things you can't buy with dollars.
Behind a side door of the general store there's a counter where current money is worth nothing. You pay with what you've earned elsewhere, and on the shelves sit pieces you won't find in any provincial gun store: a Mexican revolver, a rare double-barrel, a knife someone carried from a long way off. There's a shelf further back too, and to reach it, having the means to pay isn't enough.
Money under the mattress burns; money in the bank works, or at least it doesn't run off.
Behind the brass grilles a clerk notes every figure in a ledger that forgets nothing. You can leave your savings, lock away in the vault what you'd rather not carry, sign a paper worth as much as gold if whoever receives it trusts you. And if you have an honest trade and a clean record, the bank can even front you the capital, knowing full well it'll come back with interest.
Every town has its shop, and every shopkeeper has his price of the day.
Inside you'll find bread, whiskey, bandages, and hardware; outside, a man with a sack full of fish or timber always finds someone to lighten it. Prices change from week to week and the stock really does run out: what the town has sold, the town no longer has until someone brings more. In Saint Denis, then, there's a counter that buys goods without asking where they came from.
The frontier rewards those who know what to leave behind.
A leather sack, a miner's pack, a crate that takes up both arms: the more you carry, the less you run. And if you set it down to catch your breath, remember that folk with long fingers walk these roads, and what you leave too long you don't find again.
A roof, a stable, a place to call your own.
3Plant a flag and that patch of land becomes yours. Until someone comes to take it.
A gang needs a place to come back to: a fire, a table, a storehouse, someone standing watch. You haul in what you find, you work, you sell, and at month's end you pay what you owe, because even outlaws have a landlord. But word that you've got a full storehouse travels fast, and sooner or later someone shows up with a lockpick and the patience to wait.
Every frontier man dreams of four walls no one can take from him.
From the timber shack looking out over the river to the town house with heavy drapes, here you buy the right to shut a door behind you. You furnish it as you like, you dig out a hiding place for whatever is best not shown, and you hand a key to those you trust. But the collector comes by every week, and he's not the type who likes to wait.
A few coins on the counter and the key is yours till dawn.
Not everyone can afford a house, but almost anyone can afford a night under a roof. A bed, a chest to leave what you'd rather not carry, a wardrobe to change your clothes before heading down to the saloon. Then the bill comes due, and the road takes you back.
Distances to cover, and someone to carry you across them.
7A man is judged by how he treats his horse.
In the frontier stables you choose the companion of a lifetime: the few-penny nag that carries you home all the same, or the thoroughbred that turns heads in the street. You shoe it, you train it to the toil, you teach it a trick or two to show off in the square. It'll grow old with you, and one day it won't rise again.
The river asks no questions, and leaves no footprints.
From the canoe carried on the shoulder to the steamboat with a hold able to swallow a whole cargo, the water is the road for those who'd rather not meet patrols. You can fish in peace, ferry folk from one port to another, or take on that cargo the fellow's waiting for at the landing and not ask what it holds. Sometimes at the landing it isn't only the buyer waiting.
The world turns because someone carries the crates from one place to another, and no one asks him his surname.
At the post office there's always something that has to get somewhere else. You load up, climb to the box seat, and set off. The long roads pay better, but on those roads there's also someone lying in wait, and then the choice is between the safe way and the way worth double. You need no references: you need only a wagon and the will to drive.
The whistle comes before the smoke, and the smoke before the people.
The rails hold the country together: from the hills of Valentine to the docks of Saint Denis, one ticket and a whole day of travel. In the city there's the tram, making its patient round among the buildings. Climb aboard, sit, look out. And keep the ticket to hand: sooner or later someone with a star will ask you for it.
The steam whistle is heard before the train is seen.
Those who wear the engineer's cap command a machine no horse can catch. You shovel coal, keep an eye on the boiler because pushing it too hard melts it, and carry crates from one station to another under the eyes of those waiting on the platform. On the boards, meanwhile, someone writes by hand the timetables no one will really keep.
Those who've seen the plain from up there don't tell of it the same way.
A cloth stretched over a wooden frame, a leap into the void, and the wind that holds you up. You bank, you dive, you skim the tops of the pines. Then the ground draws near and your legs go back to their work. It's not a thing you'll find for sale: someone has to put it in your hands.
Five dollars to look at the world the way the hawks do.
The balloon inflates slowly, the basket leaves the meadow, and in a moment the herds become dots and the river a line of silver. Half an hour of silence up there, and then you come back down. Those who take a liking to it can buy one of their own, and carry whoever they please into the sky.
Who you are, how you carry yourself, the face you show the world.
11A veil of powder for the dance, or a scar that tells a story you'd rather not tell yourself.
On the barber's little table sit the jars and brushes: foundation, blush, lipstick, the black for the eyes that the ladies of Saint Denis won't admit to using. Beside them, though, there's the rest too — the sun's wrinkles, the freckles, the moles, the marks the years and the knives leave behind. It costs next to nothing to change your face in here: what costs is carrying it around.
Before the first step into the mud of Valentine, there's a mirror: and it's you who decides what face will look back at you from it.
You'll choose which part of the world you come from, the cut of the jaw, the color of the eyes, the scars you've already collected before even getting here. Then you'll give this man or this woman a name, an age, and a story to tell in the tavern. Once the photograph is taken, the stagecoach will drop you at Valentine with what you chose for yourself and nothing else. From there on, the rest you'll have to earn.
A sharp razor, warm soap, and a mirror that doesn't lie: half an hour in the chair and you're a respectable man again.
You sit down, the cloth covers your shoulders, and you set to discussing how short. Hair, sideburns, beard, eyebrows, even the teeth: some come in here after three months in the mountains and leave so their own wife wouldn't know them. Ask for the pomade, try the hat on before the mirror, turn your head left and right until you're satisfied. Then you pay — in dollars or in gold, as you please — and step back out with the face you want.
Without a paper with your name on it, in town you're nobody.
At the town office a bored clerk measures you, asks the color of your eyes, and sets you before the camera. A few coins and your name enters the county register: from that moment you can buy permits, vote, be recognized. There's also one, in a house off the beaten track, who offers another road: a new name, for those with good reason not to use their own anymore. It costs plenty, and erasing it costs still more.
A trade is learned with the hands, but certain gifts must be paid for.
Strike the iron enough times and someone will end up knowing you as a smith; go down the mine enough times and the rock will start to speak to you. Every rung you climb earns you something. Then there are the gifts that aren't learned by working: the steady hand in the face of danger, the back that bears twice the load, the luck of never falling ill. Those are bought, and they cost dear in money and in time.
A torn page, two lines in pencil, and a nail to leave it where someone will find it.
Not everything is said out loud. Some leave instructions under a door, some pin a threat where it'll be read by the right person, some write a letter they'll never deliver. The pages stay where you put them, yellow, and fall apart. And if someone doesn't want a certain note to remain in the world, all it takes is a lighter.
A receiver hung on the wall, and at the other end of the wire someone waiting.
The telephone came to town not long ago and not everyone trusts it. It's in the stations, the law offices, the administration buildings, and to use it you must pay: first to place the call, then for every minute you speak. Those in a hurry speak little. Those in need pay.
You don't need the telegraph wire outside your door: all it takes is a bird and someone who can write.
You write two lines, tie the paper to its leg, and off it goes. If you've something to get to someone, you can even tuck a few dollars inside. And if you'd rather no one knew who sent the message, there's another kind of paper, and it's carried not by an eagle but by a crow.
The gray at the temples can be hidden, and some swear they were born blond.
The barber keeps the bottles in a row on the shelf: brown, raven black, copper, the blond that in the sunset light looks like gold. You can lighten your beard, darken your hair, or invent a color that doesn't exist in nature and let people wonder. It's a small touch, one no one notices at once and that changes everything.
Even an outlaw, sooner or later, has to wash the mud off himself.
A hot tub in a room above the saloon, an icy trough at dawn, a real bed after weeks in the saddle. They're the small things that divide a man from a beast, and the frontier offers few of them. Some share them with someone, and some just wash their hands before setting off again.
Certain beards no one in town wears: only the old gold prospectors and the passing preachers have them.
The barber pulls out a second album, the one he usually doesn't show: styles you see on the miners, on the sailors of Saint Denis, on the valley farmers. A Southern gentleman's goatee costs as much as a coat, two sideburns cost as much as a coffee. It's the catalogue for those who want to look like someone who really exists, not a fashion plate.
What you do when the work is done and the evening runs long.
24Those who can't take a hit shouldn't even raise their fists.
In two forgotten corners of the frontier there's a referee who, for a few dollars, sets before you people paid to lay you out. You learn to block, to dodge, to strike when the other man breathes. Then, if you've the guts, you call out someone you know by name and bring him into the ring. The rankings don't lie, and the whole town knows who's at the top.
The road is long and not everyone you meet is doing well.
Some shout from behind a bush with a pistol to the back of your neck, some haven't the guts to cross a stretch of woods alone, some stop you to ask if you happen to have a bandage or a handful of berries. No one forces you to stop. But the frontier's gratitude is measured in coins, and sometimes in something rarer: the memory of having been helped.
Twenty to one. You need only guess right once.
At the back of five taverns there's a wooden wheel nailed to the wall or set into the floor. No need to know the rules: pick a number, put down what you've got — coins, or even just an armful of firewood — and wait for the ratchet to stop talking. Those who bet low pass an evening at it. Those who bet the twenty pass a lifetime.
Seven men died without telling where they'd hidden their share. But they left clues.
Seven stone figures stand in a forgotten place, and each whispers its riddle. They point to nothing: they describe. A reflection, a shape in the rock, a place where the water does something it does nowhere else. Those who can read the landscape, and have the patience to come back a second time with the right eye, can bring back to light what time has tried to reclaim. But the keys are seven and the chest opens only once: whoever comes second will find only turned earth.
If you've something to let the whole county know, all you need is a nail and a post.
Wanted men, auctions, job notices, threats, declarations of love: the telegraph poles tell what people haven't the courage to say to your face. The sheet stays there a few days, then the wind and the rain take it. Those who pass by read. Those with an objection tear it down.
A hammer, four nails, and a sheet: and suddenly half the county knows what you want known.
The flyer sticks up wherever you please, is read up close, page after page. You can even put a price on it and sell it: there are men willing to pay to take over the spot someone else had won on the right wall. And if a notice bothers you, you've always got a hammer.
A penny's worth of paper, and for an instant you're the richest man in the county.
On the counter of every general store, beside the jars of beans, sits a stack of badly printed tickets. You buy one, run a dirty nail across it, and the world stops. Someone swears they pulled a gold bar out of one of those sheets. Most pull out only an excuse to buy another.
The blade between your fingers, and thirty seconds to find out how much you trust yourself.
In five saloons there's a table with a knife stuck in the wood and two stools facing each other. You don't play for money: you play for the face the other man makes when he speeds up and slips. It's the oldest and stupidest pastime on the frontier, and for that it never goes out of fashion.
On the frontier one speaks little: what matters is said by the shoulders, the tipped hat, the way a man walks in entering the saloon.
There's a gesture for nearly everything: sitting on the step, lighting a cigarette, writing in the notepad, playing the guitar outside the stable, clapping slow for someone who's said something foolish. And then there's the way of walking — like a gunslinger, like a greenhorn, like a man dead drunk — that tells your character before he even opens his mouth. With those beside you, you can shake hands, embrace, or hand out the slap they deserve.
The cards don't lie. The people seated around them do.
Six tables, from the rickety little one at Flatneck Station to the felt of the steamboat. Here you don't play against the house: you play against the man before you, who's trying to work out why you hesitated half a second too long. In Tumbleweed the price to sit is ten times that of Valentine, and it's no accident: there you go to play, not to pass the evening.
Two bone dice and twenty seconds to decide what your evening is worth.
The steamboat's croupier never raises his voice: the table raises it for him. You bet in layers, on the line, behind the line, on the hard numbers, and then everyone holds their breath for the time the dice take to stop. It's the table where you win faster than anywhere else in town, which also means the only one where you can end up without your coat before midnight.
A flash of magnesium, half a second of stillness, and that moment stays forever.
You carry the apparatus slung over your shoulder and frame what no one looks at anymore: the smoke of the train pulling into the station, a friend's face under his hat, the river at sunset. If you want a proper portrait you plant the tripod, strike a pose, and let the light do its work. Then the plates must be taken to the studio in Blackwater, where someone dips them in the baths and gives them back developed — with a number etched on them, because a photograph is a document, not a memory.
By night, down an alley of Saint Denis, there's someone waiting with a machete in hand.
He's no ordinary man: the bullets slide off him, or the knife doesn't scratch him, depending on which one you get. You have to work it out fast, because he works you out at once. What he carries he leaves not far off, in a bag you'll only see if you know how to look.
Up there, where the snow never melts, there are those who go down for the sheer joy of going down.
A wooden sled, a white slope, and the cold that cuts your face. There's nothing to be gained and nothing to be lost: you reach the bottom laughing and climb back up to do it again. Some things on the frontier are done only because they're worth doing.
The only place in the city where you can spend a whole evening without pulling out a dollar.
On the meadow behind the port they've pitched the fairground stalls, and come evening they all light up together. There's the carousel of wooden horses, with the phonograph forever playing the same tune and never tiring of it. There are the swing seats hung from chains, spinning until you become one with the warm air rising from the river. And there's the great wheel, which climbs slowly and is in no hurry to bring you back down: from up there Saint Denis almost looks a peaceful place, the river and the rooftops and the lights of the port, and for a couple of minutes no one's looking for you. It costs nothing, none of the three. It's the one thing in this city that costs nothing.
Your feet no longer touch anything, and for a moment neither do your thoughts.
Seats hung from iron chains, spinning until you become one with the warm air rising from the river. No ticket needed and no excuse needed: you sit down, let your head fall back, and for two minutes Saint Denis becomes a blur of turning lights.
Twenty paces, two men, a single sunset.
When the words run out and the hands begin to tremble, nothing's left but to count the paces and turn. No one keeps the count for you, no one collects the stakes: you gamble the one thing you can't put back in your pocket. Whoever stays standing takes the road; whoever falls learns the patience of the hospital.
You don't choose the number: the wheel chooses it, and it has no memory.
Three tables in three different places, from the worn cloth of the Tumbleweed saloon to the clean felt of the Saint Denis steamboat. You take your chips of one color, scatter them on the cloth like seeds, and watch the ball quarrel with the brass. Those who play red or black last a long while. Those who bet a single number have one evening of it, but remember it for years.
From up there Saint Denis almost looks a peaceful place.
It climbs slowly, the wheel, and is in no hurry to bring you back down. You ride four at a time, look at the river and the rooftops and the lights of the port, and for a couple of minutes no one's looking for you. It costs nothing. It's the one thing in this city that costs nothing.
Three darts, a cork board, and the face of a man who's just said a figure out loud.
You carry the board with you and hang it wherever you please: a saloon wall, the barn, the wall of your house. Then you find someone who believes in it as much as you do, you settle what the evening's worth, and you start counting down from a hundred and one toward zero. There's no bank, no house that profits: there's only those who can aim and those who say they can.
Five mouths of iron and brass, and every one of them is hungry.
On the steamboat's deck stand in a row the new machines arrived from California: you pull the lever, three iron wheels turn, and for an instant the din of the gears drowns out the sound of the river. Then they stop one at a time, and the third makes you wait on purpose. Sometimes coins fall into the tray and half the deck turns to see who it was. It's the most honest game on the boat, because there's no one on the other side of the table to blame.
A man is judged too by how he holds his cigarette.
Lighting a cigarette out of the wind, opening the little parasol on the riverfront, drawing out the watch and making it plain you're in a hurry, fanning yourself in the swamp heat. They're the gestures that fill the hours between one job and the next. And then there are the drawers: in the abandoned houses, in the forgotten crates, someone has left something worth taking away.
In public you shake hands. The rest is the affair of two people and a closed door.
An arm offered to cross the muddy street, a hand held under the saloon table while the others play, a head resting on a shoulder on the seat of a stagecoach, a night in a hotel room paid for in advance. They're the gestures that turn two characters into a story, and on this frontier they're worth as much as a contract: no one can impose them and no one can fake them. You ask, and the other decides whether to answer.
Twenty-one, not one more. The rest is arrogance.
Four tables scattered across Rhodes, Blackwater, Van Horn, and the steamboat: four dealers who never say a word too many. You play for a few pennies, as it's always been played in the back rooms, and it's not the money that keeps you seated: it's that moment when you've got sixteen and know you ought to stop.
People get hurt. Someone has to put them back on their feet.
4The frontier doesn't ask your leave: it asks you for food.
Every mile covered on foot drains your throat before even your stomach, and those who run pay double. The mountain cold whets your appetite, the desert sun dries your lips, and the mud on you sooner or later turns to fever. Those who learn to read their own body get by; the others drag themselves along, worn out, breathless, unable even to hold a pistol steady.
Where the bullet stops, the doctor's work begins.
Thirteen towns, thirteen surgeries, and a man or a woman with the bag ready at any hour. When a citizen falls in the dust, a pigeon carries the news and someone saddles the wagon. On the spot you look at the wound, work out whether it was a bear, a fall, or the lead of a coward, and choose the right remedy. Those who don't arrive in time will write it in the register all the same.
Every wound, sooner or later, becomes a line of ink. And the ink lasts far longer than the scar.
Those who work at the hospital don't just stitch: they open the file, note the date, the type of wound, how long you lay there and, if you care to say, who left you in that state. That file can be reopened months later, before a sheriff who wants to know how many times you've arrived on a stretcher with the same hole in the same shoulder. Some lie to the doctor for this. Some pay so a line won't be written.
Water is the only thing the frontier gives for free. It presents the bill afterward.
In the mountain streams you drink from cupped hands without a second thought; in the swamps one sip and you spend the day bent double. Those who've learned carry the means to boil it and take the time it needs, because boiled water not only does no harm: it puts you back on your feet.
And then there are those who step over the law. At their own risk.
14There's a beggar who, at night, for a few pennies, will tell you which door wasn't shut properly.
You start with the isolated shacks, where the worst that can happen is a barking dog. Then, once your hand grows sure, you move up: ranches, villas, mansions with velvet drapes and owners who sleep with a rifle beside the bed. Everything you load onto your back slows you and marks you out, and there's always someone waiting outside to buy it with no questions asked.
The dead have no more need of their rings, and cemetery soil is softer than field soil.
It's the trade of those who haven't the stomach for gunfights but haven't the scruples either. You arrive hat in hand, feign a prayer until the caretaker looks away, then you sink the spade. There are no guards to shoot you: there's only the chance that a passerby sees you and runs to town to tell of it, and then you have a few instants to decide what kind of man you are.
When you've nothing left, you've still got the hat to hold in your hand.
You sit against a wall, lower your eyes, and wait. Some pass by, some stop and let a coin fall. In the fat cities folk have more to give, but they're also quicker to call a sheriff to haul you off. The more time you spend on the street, the more you learn to get noticed without getting run out: that's a trade too, though no one would call it one.
No bank keeps your secrets better than a yard of earth and a combination only you know.
Far from the paved roads, where no one passes and no one looks, a man can entrust to the earth what he'd rather not have on him when they stop him. It takes a good spade, a spot you'll remember even in the dark, and the discipline not to come back too often. Because the earth keeps secrets, but habits don't.
A loaded stagecoach sets out at dawn, and there's always someone, in an alley of Saint Denis, who knows which road it'll take.
It's the oldest trade on the frontier: waiting on a bend, dust in your mouth, for something worth more than you to come along. The escort is many and doesn't surrender, and as long as one man stands the wagon won't open. But if the plan holds, in a quarter of an hour you're back in the saddle with heavy pockets and no one who knows where you're headed.
Every night a locomotive crosses the frontier loaded with goods belonging to no one you know.
Word can be bought, like everything else. Some know when the iron passes and what it carries in its belly, and for a few dollars they'll tell you. Then comes the hard part: stopping a running monster of steel and standing up to those who guard it, who shoot well and keep on coming. Those who survive split the load at dawn, far from the tracks.
Every town has a corner where goods change hands without anyone asking for a receipt.
It's no shop and it has no sign: it's a way of walking, a nod to the right passerby, a hand that opens just enough to show what it holds. People buy gladly and pay little, because they know full well what they're buying. And someone, every now and then, the moment you turn the corner, goes off to tell the sheriff.
Behind the polished oak window sleeps half the county's money, and the oak isn't so thick after all.
Some spend their lives chasing the golden fleece, and some decide to take it where someone else has already piled it up. It takes a steady hand, a partner you can trust, and the certainty of an open road out: the armed guards come fast and ask no questions. Those who make it walk out with a heavy sack and an urgent need to find someone who won't ask where it came from. Those who don't make it stay stretched out on the marble of the lobby.
Somewhere, far from the beaten roads, smoke rises from a shack at all hours. And no one's cooking lunch in there.
It's a trade that asks patience before courage: gathering, fermenting, waiting, distilling, and only at the end taking to the road to place the bottles. Those who buy drink gladly, but one in two is ready to tell the sheriff the moment you turn the corner. And the shack itself is never truly safe: there's always some other bootlegger who reckons your storehouse would look better as his.
It takes little, at the power station, to leave half the county in the dark. What happens next is up to you alone.
It's work for steady hands, not itchy triggers: the current forgives no haste, and whoever puts his fingers in without precaution doesn't live to tell how it went. But when the dark falls, the city goes blind and certain elegant walls are left unwatched. Then comes the slower part, and the more dangerous: finding the man who really buys that kind of goods, and getting to him before someone puts two and two together.
The dead have no more need of what they carry on them.
Those who fall on the road leave behind a few pennies, a canteen, a handful of cartridges. It's no fortune, and it won't make you a rich man: it's the small tribute the frontier pays those with the stomach to stoop and rummage. Some do it out of need, some out of habit, some don't do it at all.
Every word that crosses the county passes through a copper wire, and copper can't keep a secret.
It takes an isolated pole, a box of tools, and a willingness to take a shock that leaves your hands trembling for an hour. What you hear isn't worth a dollar: it's worth far more, if you know who it interests. But mind where you put your hands, because the pole's timber is old and the current makes no distinction between the curious and the thieving.
There's a man, deep in the desert, who sells boxes best not dropped.
Dynamite has no masters and makes no distinctions: it opens rock the way it opens safes, and it opens the same way whoever handles it badly. You set it where it's needed, unroll the wire to cover, and push the lever down. Then there's an instant of silence in which you learn whether you got far enough away.
A warning can be ignored. A handful of disturbed earth cannot.
There are men who, instead of posting a sentry before their camp, put something beneath the path that leads to it. It asks no questions, it never tires, it never falls asleep and never changes its mind: it waits, whole days, for anyone who passes. The trade is all in choosing the spot, and the curse is in remembering it: the earth doesn't tell a foe from a passing drover or the partner coming back to check it's still there.
None of what follows is confirmed by anyone. These are stories told at night, when the fire is low and the bottle is just as low, that every so often someone swears they saw with their own eyes. Take them for what they are.
2Some swear they've seen, at night, men who cast no shadow.
They tell of a dark little vial that changes forever whoever drinks it. From that moment the sun becomes an enemy and the night a home; a stranger's neck becomes a temptation, and every bite makes you a little less human and a little stronger. The law doesn't understand what's happening, but it has learned to recognize the signs, and when it sees them it comes running. Not everyone who enters this story walks out of it.
Some swear they've seen a man walk into the woods and a wolf walk out.
It's not a thing you tell in the saloon: some nights someone takes on the likeness of another, or of a beast, and walks the frontier with eyes that aren't his own. It serves the stories that someone, somewhere, takes the trouble to stage: the apparitions, the strangers passing through, the faces that don't come back. Then you return as you were, and no one asks questions.
There is a law, and there are those who enforce it.
10A signature at the foot of a page weighs more than a pistol, if it's the right signature.
There's a trade done sitting down: drawing up documents. The town hall registers sales, debts, marriages, and separations; the sheriff grants the right to carry a weapon; the marshal signs the warrants that open doors. Anyone, then, can put in writing what they've seen or report what they've suffered. The document remains, is shown, is handed over, and sometimes it's worth more than ten witnesses.
A stamped paper that tells the world what you do, you do by the book.
At the registry office you buy the permits: the one to swing a pick in the mines, the one to hunt, the one to break horses. They cost little and last few days, then they must be renewed like everything else around here. Having them in your pocket doesn't make you richer: it simply makes you someone with nothing to be reproached for.
The Government pays for the names it no longer wants to read in the papers.
Every so often a new face appears on the board: a gang leader holed up in the rocks, some wretch to bring back alive, someone to be found at the end of an alley. Some contracts close with two words and a bit of a nose for it. Others end with you alone facing half a dozen leveled rifles. The paper never tells you which of the two you've got in hand until you reach the spot.
A sheet nailed to the wood, a face printed on it, and a figure written by hand.
The station boards tell of who's stopped being a citizen. Those who wear the star pin up a name and put up the reward out of their own pocket; those with the stomach and a horse tear it down and set out. The poster doesn't say where the wanted man hides, only where someone swears they saw him pass. The rest is instinct, patience, and the will to bring him back breathing.
Everything you've done is written down somewhere, with the date and the name of whoever charged you with it.
Behind the archive counter sit the files: names, document numbers, charges old and new. An officer can open them, add a line, fix a fine, and decide how many hours you'll spend on the island. A dossier isn't erased by playing dumb: it takes someone with enough stripes to tear that page out. And it's that very page that, once signed, sends a boat to fetch you.
You don't reach Sisika on horseback. You reach it by boat, with irons on your ankles.
They land you on an island of stone and line you up with other wretches, four rifles at your back. From there on you buy your time with toil: those who work the fields, the kitchen, or the furnace watch their sentence shorten, those who raise their hands watch it stretch. In the yard, at exercise hour, you learn there's another market inside: someone's hidden a knife, someone knows the guards, someone's seen a boat. Walking out the main gate is the slow way. The other costs dear and often ends at the bottom of the river.
In four towns there's a platform the crowd knows well.
Frontier law always ends in the same place: a rope, a trapdoor, and a lever. It's not as quick as in the tales, and in the seconds that follow there's still room for a friend with a knife and steady hands. In Saint Denis they tried something more modern, with the current, and it went no better for anyone.
No need to shout who you are: just open your jacket.
The star is worn and shown when needed. The metal tells the career better than any introduction: some have a bronze one just handed to them, some carry a gold one worn down by the years. Whoever stands before you sees it, and from that moment knows exactly who he's dealing with.
A tin star, a horse, and the whole county to keep in check.
You clock in at the office, take the cuffs and your share of lead, and then the road is yours. Those who wear the star decide who spends the night on a cot and who spends it in a cell. It's not a trade done alone: without a colleague at your back, an arrest out in the middle of nowhere is just a chance to get shot. Those who rise in rank open the good armory, the armored wagons, and the right to sign the registers.
Certain bends in the road have a bad name, and not without cause.
There are forced passages where someone has learned it's worth the wait. It doesn't always happen: many times you pass and see no one. But when it happens you know at once, from the first shot that whistles by. At that point you have two choices, and neither will earn you a cent: stay and shoot, or spur on and don't look back.
The county isn't the one you'll find in the books. Whole towns have been raised back up here, abandoned houses reopened, hamlets thrown together where before there was only grass. These are the places that exist only here.
12Two towns kept alive by two different things: dust and coal.
Armadillo has recovered from the sickness and still stands on its road of sand. Annesburg lives below, in the tunnels, and above you see only the black that comes out of it. Neither is a fine place. Both have work.
The last city before the law starts becoming a matter of opinion.
Rebuilt piece by piece, with its church and the mill's ridge watching over the water. From here on the roads grow wider and the questions rarer.
The county is full of roofs that appear on no map.
Farms and cottages scattered everywhere, the oil workers' houses, a school, a treehouse, and one dug into the hillside. Then Nordheim, Ratsfork, Wapiti, and Colter raised back up, the railway that binds them, and two cellars whose entrances are best left unspoken.
Where horses are worth more than men, and rightly so.
The ranch with the manor house, and a little way on, the racetrack: hurdles, races, and a bookmaker who keeps the register of bets. It's the place where you find out whether that horse you paid dearly for is really worth it.
An island where the heat never lets up and ships arrive but rarely.
Sugarcane, Spanish ruins, and a garrison that's stopped counting the days. You get there by chance or because someone decided so, and leaving is harder than landing.
Across the river the law speaks another tongue, and often doesn't speak at all.
Chuparosa and Escalera with their low white houses, the fort in the oasis, the prison, the military post. There's a tobacco plantation, a distillery, a port, and a bridge that's the only quick way back. Torquemada watches over it all from on high.
The cotton is gone, the gentlemanly manners are not.
Caliga Hall still stands at the end of the avenue, with its white columns and the memory of what was there before. In town the doctor sees patients, and the caravans stop just long enough to set tongues wagging.
In the city you wash the mud off your shoes, but not off your hands.
A courthouse where things are settled with paper instead of lead, a theater that opens in the evening, a jeweler who weighs what you bring without asking where you got it. There's the Italian quarter, the cathedral large enough to hold the sins of the port, the undertaker who works more than he'd like. And a moored steamboat that changes trades by night, and a place at the end of a dead-end street where men break each other's faces for money.
Two addresses no one writes in the letters home.
Sisika is a penitentiary on an island, and the water around it serves better than the bars. Thieves Landing is what's left when a port stops pretending: shacks, rotting piers, and a pirate ship at anchor that goes nowhere.
The smell of resin, and of fresh-baked bread.
The mountain town rebuilt from scratch, with the bakery that opens while it's still dark. Folk live off timber and quiet, and the two get along.
The town everyone passes through and some stay in.
The main street rebuilt from scratch, the timber still pale on the facades, the homes above the shops. It's the first place most folk set foot, and for many it stays the only one they call home.
A port where nothing good comes in anymore.
Raised back up but not cleaned up: it's the kind of place where no one asks your surname. Outside town, on a rise, there's a villa the townsfolk would rather not talk about.