The Six Messiahs

alone on the edge of the circle round the bonfire.

'You talk to him, Denver,' said Slocum Haney. 'You worked with Chinamen before.'

Denver Bob Hobbes commanded universal respect from his peers based on his longevity on the bum and a habit of straight talk; in the egalitarian world of the hobos, he held an unofficial post of elder statesman emeritus. He'd been a working stiff once, came west from Ohio pounding rails on the transcontinental back in the sixties, when one day picking potatoes in Pocatello, Idaho, twenty years ago he saw the light and vowed never again to lift his hand in the service of another man's profiteering.

Denver Bob had kept that promise and studied himself into an authority on the economic exploitation of the working man. He'd marched on Washington with Kelly's Industrial Army in '93 to protest the industrial workers' plight—and besides there was nothing like political demonstrations for free food and good company. Bob claimed to have met Walt Whitman once, always carried with him a dog-eared edition of Leaves of Grass, and he could talk about the nobility of poverty and life on the open road to a complete stranger until all the oxygen in the neighborhood was depleted. If the presence of this Chinaman was upsetting the harmony of the camp, then Denver Bob saw it as his responsibility to set things right.

'You get cold snaps like this in October here in the desert,' said Denver Bob, setting his plump butt down on an empty copper wire spool beside the Chinaman. 'Most men start moving toward California around this time of year but it seems to me you've just come from there.'

He offered the man a swallow of the homemade raisin jack they'd brewed the night before. The man shook his head and kept his eyes straight ahead. Denver Bob wasn't used to people turning down his generosity—he was big and round and with his thick, white beard and apple cheeks he looked like Father Christmas—but it didn't set him back. Not much did.

'This camp's been here ten years now, ever since they opened the line from Los Angeles. Hundreds of men pass through these yards every season.' The shanty camp occupied the outskirts of the switching yards at Yuma, the major interchange between Los Angeles and the Arizona Territory, on the banks of the Colorado River. 'Do you speak English, my friend?'

The man looked directly at him for the first time; Denver Bob felt a chill scamper over his scalp. Not that there was any overt threat in those dull black eyes. There was just... nothing. No personality, submission, false good humor. No Chinaman he'd ever known looked or acted anything like this.

'I am looking for work,' the man said.

'Work? Well, that feeling comes over a man from time to time,' said Denver Bob, bringing his well-oiled geniality to bear. 'He don't know whether to shit or wind his watch; it's like a fever, see; best thing is to lie down, have a drink, and wait for it to pass.'

'I work with explosives,' said the man, immune to Denver's merry creed of sloth.

'Is that a fact?'

'Demolition.'

'Yes, I follow you. So you're a working man.' Whatever else he might be, this fella was no tramp. Didn't seem much like a railroad hand neither for that matter; too self-possessed, independent. Maybe a miner who just lost his stake. No matter: Everything about the man gave Denver Bob the willies; if there was anything he could say or do to get him out of camp and on his way, it couldn't happen fast enough.

'Where do I find this work?'

'As a matter of fact, brother, I can tell you exactly. They're still putting in the spur line between Phoenix and Prescott through the Pea Vine; I hear tell there's tunnels to dig and canyons to trestle aplenty, enough to keep a double shift crew working round the clock for another year.'

'Where?'

'North-northwest. You can hop a night freight to Phoenix over yonder near the swing bridge, leaves around midnight, have you there by morning.'

'The Santa Fe Prescott and Phoenix Railroad.'

'That's the outfit; you'll find their offices right there at the Phoenix rail station. Sure they can set you up nicely—work's scarce most places these days, but a fella with a handy skill like yours is always in demand. Here's wishing you and your ancestors good fortune.' Denver Bob raised his tin can of hooch and drank a toast, thinking: You got your marching orders, friend, now remove your spooky ass from my yard.

The man offered no acknowledgment or gratitude and directed his look back to the bonfire. Then something speared the man's attention; he sat up stiff as a bird dog on a scent.

Before Denver Bob could react, the night air around them split with a chorus of piercing whistles; that could only mean one thing, and the cry went up throughout the shantytown.

'Bulls!'

Railroad cops and Pinkerton men had been running rousts through the hobo camps since the Pullman railroad strike in Chicago that previous May; violent, head-busting rampages, setting fire to the shanties and scattering whatever bums they didn't toss in prison to the winds. Through the summer, the bulls had worked their way down through St. Louis and along the tracks out toward the western camps, preceded by survivors' eye-popping accounts of the indiscriminate and malicious mayhem directed at their brothers. No more free rides, that was the new company policy. Seemed the railroad barons wanted their rails and stations sanitized so as not to offend the refined sensibilities of the middle-classers migrating westward and upon whose traveling dollar the Trust had decided the future fortunes of their railroad depended.

Fifty tramps basking in the numb glow of an alcoholic haze and the bulls burst in from behind a line of boxcars before a single one of them could reach his feet. Twenty head-busters, sneaking in like thieves; an ambush, nightsticks and sawed-off baseball bats in their hands, and they go right to work— most of these bums had endured a brick yard beating or two in their day but this was a whole new game. These boys meant business.

Two cops with torches set fire to the tinderbox shacks; the bulls had made their rush from both flanks, stampeding the hobos into the center of the yard, falling, colliding over each other, trapped as minnows in a net. Most knew enough to go to the ground, shelter their heads and absorb as much trouble as they could with the meat of their backs. Any man who tried to run was cut down around the knees and pummeled viciously. Scalps split open, collarbones cracked, blood flowed into pools.

Denver Bob fell at the first whistle, wrapped himself around the spool he'd been sitting on and waited for the blows to rain down on him. He looked back at the Chinaman, ready to yell and tell him to grab some dirt but the man was gone.

A big yard-bull raised his bat to swing at the tramp standing by the handcar, holding on to his long bundle. The bum gestured as the bat arced down at him and the blow never connected. The bull looked down in surprise; he clutched only the handle of the bat in his hands, sheared off, a clean cut just above his knuckles. As he looked up, the bum swung his arms around again—a chink, fer Christ's sake—and the bull felt something go haywire with his left leg; he tried to take a step and the leg split in two above the knee; his whole leg from foot to mid-thigh tipped away from him and flopped onto the ground; an instant later, the man's balance gave out and he toppled like a felled pine.

This makes no sense, thought the bull. The chink has a sword in his hand. No pain yet but he couldn't breathe. He looked up and saw the sole of the chink's boot screaming toward his face.

Kanazuchi had no time to offer a prayer for the dead guard as another one charged up quickly behind him, weapon raised high. He dipped, back-kicked, and the out-of-control guard flipped over him and fell heavily; Kanazuchi grabbed the man's wrist and with a single twist removed his shoulder from its socket. A single blow across the bridge of the nose from the stick the guard had wielded drove a splinter of bone into his brain and silenced the man's screams.

Kanazuchi looked around, instantly analyzing the scene: Although they possessed far greater numbers, the men in the camp offered no resistance. None of the other attackers yet taking notice of him or the damage he'd done, preoccupied with the beatings. More of them darting in between the rail cars to his right. Fires flaring dangerously in the burning shacks in front of him. A cold, treacherous river at his back.

Cornered. Capture, overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of these men, carried a high probability.

Kanazuchi settled his breathing, remaining alert, wishing for nothing, escorting the fear from his body with every measured exhale.

There it was—an opening. A narrow gap in the attackers' formation under a water tower led to the rail bridge heading east. He would need to depend on the darkness and the chaos in the camp and keep the Grass Cutter out