Free The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum Page A

Mrs. Mary Smith was summering with her three children in Idaho Springs under false pretenses. The families in this pleasant summer colony believed that the popular Mrs. Smith was the wife of a prosperous Denver businessman. However, the reality, Arkins gleefully revealed, was that she was married to the notorious Soapy Smith.
    As soon as he read the story, Soapy flew into a rage. He immediately rushed over to the newspaper and went directly to the colonel’s office. Without a word of explanation, he raised his walking stick and hammered it into the startled editor’s skull with so much force that the impact could be heard outside in the newsroom. A punishing fusillade of blows rained down before the astonished pressmen could hurry over and, with some trouble, drag off a wild Soapy. Arkins lay motionless and prostrate on the floor, blood streaming down his face. But he was not dead.
    Soapy was arrested and charged with attempted murder. After a little politicking, this was reduced to assault. He was freed on a $1,000 bond. As soon as he got out of jail, Soapy took Mary and the children to the Union Depot and bought them tickets to St. Louis. They would stay with her mother. As he watched the train pull away from the station, he realized with a resigned practicality that his carefully constructed life in Denver had collapsed all around him. He left the city the next day, not bothered at all about jumping bail.
    ON THE run, accompanied by members of his gang who still had faith in his resourcefulness, Soapy drifted through the smaller cow towns. They tried to get scams going in Cheyenne, Salt Lake City, and Ogden. But after Denver, the pickings seemed very small.
    Pocatello, Idaho, though, held out a bit of promise since it was a railroad company town and that meant workers would be flush with weekly wages. Yet as soon as the Soap Gang hit town and settled down in a Main Street saloon, the Rincon Kid and his crew came looking for them. Pocatello was his turf, and he had no intention of sharing it. Shots were fired, and two men were killed. In a letter to Mary, Soapy tried to laugh at the incident, joking that he nearly “got his moustache shot off.” “The smoke of the pistol blinded me for a moment, but I returned the fire and shot both my assailants. One through the thigh, and the other through the calf of the leg and the heel.”
    The next day the sheriff escorted the Soap Gang to the station. With a gambler’s doggish philosophy, Soapy boarded the first train without protest. Yet he was uncertain of where he was going. He silently longed for the opportunities he had found in Denver, and the comforts he had enjoyed there, too.
    SIX
    eorge Carmack, meanwhile, had already embarked on his own journey. It had been a rough fifteen-day voyage through choppy ocean waters, but unlike his fellow seasick marines on the USS Wachusett, George didn’t complain. Day after day he would lean against the rail on the rolling deck of the three-masted ship and look out over a whitecapped, gunmetal-gray sea toward the horizon. It was February, a season when the North Pacific was a heavy curtain of dense fog and pelting rain; nevertheless, George’s eyes strained against the darkness as if at any moment he would be rewarded with the first sighting of land. He was unsure about what he could expect once his platoon disembarked, but he could not help feeling a building excitement. He was on his way to Alaska.
    On orders of the secretary of war, George and the contingent of marines on board the sailing ship were being deployed on a peacekeeping mission to the coastal harbor town of Sitka, the commercial trading and shipping center of the Alaska Territory. Of course, the War Department did not seriously believe that a small garrison of young marines could effectively put down another Tlingit Indian uprising, rein in the rum and whiskey smugglers, enforce the laws protecting the extermination of walruses, whales, seals, and sea otters by