Chapter 3

I woke up on my second morning in El Paso to bright sunlight pouring through the south-facing window of my corner room. I yawned and stretched contentedly after a very good nights sleep. The horsehair mattress beat the heck out of sleeping on the ground, once you pummeled the lumps in it into submission. I stood up and stretched some more. I felt gloriously alive, as I pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed and took care of some pressing business.

After relieving my bladder, I moved over to the dry sink and tipped some water out of the ewer into the basin. I think the morning routine was the thing about the twentieth century that I missed most. Instead of a nice hot shower, I had to content myself with washing my face in the basin.

One thing I had been pleasantly surprised with during my trip to the general store yesterday, was finding a toothbrush and a form of toothpaste. The brush was made out of boar bristle attached to a carved whalebone handle, while the toothpaste (Dr. Sheffield's Creme Dentifrice) came in a small jar. The toothpaste tasted like chalk, but it cleaned my pearly whites pretty well.

After brushing my teeth, I looked at myself in the small mirror above the basin and debated shaving. Uncle Ty didn't have much to shave yet, but I was a creature of habit in my morning routine. I looked at the shaving mug, brush and straight razor for a minute and decided that I'd spend a dime at the barbershop and let a trained professional take care of my peach fuzz.

I was dressed and down in the lobby in fewer than ten minutes. As I hit the desk, I checked the big Railroad Regulator Clock that was mounted on the wall behind the clerk's station. I was happy to find out it was only eight fifteen and the restaurant was still serving breakfast. I detoured into the dining room and took the same seat I'd sat in yesterday. I had the entire place to myself. Unlike for the evening meal, there were no menu choices for breakfast. That was okay with me though, because I was so hungry, my big intestines were eating my little ones.

I had a different waitress this morning. She resembled the one from last night, but was a few years older. I greeted her pleasantly.

"Good morning beautiful, I'd like breakfast and coffee, lots and lots of coffee."

She did not appear to be amused by my banter, as she rather abruptly nodded her head and retreated towards the kitchen. When she returned, another woman about the same age was with her. The surly girl poured me coffee while the other one started clearing off tables. After giving me a curt nod when I thanked her, the waitress went over and started talking to the other woman in Spanish.

"That is the hombre Maria was talking about last night. I should poison him so that he can't do to her what that bastard did to me!"

As you can imagine, her little spiel had my full and undivided attention. The other woman gave me a hard look as I pretended to be looking elsewhere.

"He is a handsome gringo, Juanita, and Maria is ripe for the plucking, but maybe she learned something from your shame."

"Maybe," Juanita allowed dubiously, "but she is a Lopez, and all the women in our family have passionate natures. If he is as smooth a talker as he is handsome, I'm afraid I won't be the only one with a baby and no husband."

The other woman laughed good naturedly, as they walked back towards the kitchen.

"So we are calling it a passionate nature now eh, Juanita?" she teased.

Since my whole intent since I arrived here was to avoid dying, you can see that Juanita's plotting to off me for the sake of her sister's honor was disconcerting. There was also something else rattling around my brain too. That something had to do with Juanita's last name. My sainted grandmother was named Isobel Lopez McGuinn. Her mother's maiden name had been Lopez. My great-grandmother married my great-grandfather, Calvin McGuinn, in El Paso in 1893. Hell my middle name was even Lopez back (forward?) in 1977. Things here were too weird already to take a chance that I wasn't somehow related to Juanita and her family. When she came back with my ham, eggs and grits, I said my piece in a language she could not help but understand.

"Your sister's virtue is safe with me, Juanita, so save your murderous plots for the next Anglo you meet," I said angrily in Spanish.

Juanita's eyes, already big and round, almost did that cartoonish popping out of the head thing. She turned a dusky pink color from the top of her head down to where her high-necked dress fastened at her throat.

"I'm sorry," she mumbled as she fled from the table.

To her credit, Juanita had the courage to come back out and refill my coffee cup. Since the restaurant was empty, I coaxed her into taking a seat at my table. Her first real question was how I'd learned to speak Spanish so well. I told her the truth.

"My grandmother was half Mexican, she raised me from the age of eight. When my mother died, she moved in with my father and me. She insisted I learn to speak Spanish and know our culture, just as she had with my father."

My story fascinated Juanita and before I departed the restaurant, I accepted her invitation to attend church with her family on Sunday. After church, I was going to have Sunday dinner with her family, too. I didn't realize it at the time, but Juanita's new plan was to seduce me before her sister could.

From the hotel, I meandered over to the barbershop for a shave. The trip to the barbershop became an almost daily ritual for me from then on. If you wanted to know about anyone in El Paso, all you had to do was drop in to the barbershop and let Clem fill you in.

After a leisurely shave and some gossip with Clem, I went over to the livery stable and checked Melosa. It made my day when it was apparent that she was happy to see me. I fed her an apple I'd cadged at the restaurant and petted her some before I ambled back to Pickett's Mercantile to see if he had a watch for sale.

Turns out he had a couple that he had taken in trade. Mr. Picket took me to his office and pulled the watches out of a strongbox he had chained to the leg of his desk. He tried to sell me this fancy Waltham-American, but I opted to pay him six dollars for a nice silver cased pocket watch with a hunting scene carved on the front. The fob and chain for it cost me another dollar. The watch was made by the Elgin National Watch Company.

I was setting the watch against Mr. Pickett's, when I spotted a set of books sitting askew on a shelf by the window. I strolled over to them and found they were an eight-volume set of the 'Laws of the United States and the Great State of Texas'. With another eerie sense of déjà vu, I inquired about the set.

"Sad story, those books," Mr. Pickett said, shaking his head. "They belonged to a young chap not much older than you. He was a dandy, but he was likeable enough. He opened an office here about six months ago. He was shot down outside his office not three months later. He called himself Chet Benton, and he hailed from New Orleans. Missus Dean sold me the books. She said she took them to pay his back rent at her boarding house."

Actually, his name was Chesterfield Bovis Benton. I knew that because I'd read it on the flyleaf of volume one, when I was ten years old, and those books were in my father's office. After my father, a Captain with the El Paso Sheriff's Office, was killed in the line of duty, they ended up in the law offices of Raymond J. McGuinn, Jr., Attorney at Law. RJ McGuinn was my older brother.

I had been in my third year of college, a pre-law major at UTEP (University of Texas-El Paso) when my father was run over by a drunk driver during a routine traffic stop. After his death, I went on a three-month bender that resulted in me getting kicked out of college and losing my student deferment. I was drafted and spent two years as a clerk for the Army Judge Advocate General of Okinawa.

I didn't go back to school after I was discharged; instead, I fell in love with Stella Wright, wife number one. Stella was a barrel racer on the rodeo circuit. She was blonde, beautiful and thought sex with me was better than sliced bread. To be near her, I signed on with the rodeo and eventually became a bull rider for lack of any other skills. After three years, Estella left the rodeo and me for a wealthy oilman. It's funny, but the year after she left was my best on the tour.

So anyway... I had a feeling these books were sitting here waiting for me, and I suddenly knew what I was going to try to do for a living besides play poker. I knew from college that there were no formal law schools in Texas until the late 1880s. Lawyers learned from other lawyers and from books, or they attended school out of state. That's why attorneys out here were men who 'read the law'. To practice law before a court, you simply had to convince the presiding judge of your knowledge. Out here on the western frontier, how hard could that be?

He made a face about it, but Mr. Pickett accepted ten dollars in Union Pacific Railroad Script for the books. I grabbed up my purchases and headed back to the hotel.

After lunch at the hotel, I went walking around the town. I was looking for a place to live and one to hang my shingle, preferable at the same location. El Paso of 1877 wasn't really a town per se; it was an amazingly diverse collection of five adjoining towns located on the north side of the Rio Grande, and El Paso del Norte (Modern day Juarez) on the Mexico side. It was a little confusing that El Paso del Norte (north) was on the south side of the Rio Grande but the explanation was fairly simple. When Mexico ceded all lands north of the Rio Grande to the United States, El Paso de Norte was on both sides of the river. The Texans dropped the del Norte tag but the Mexicans didn't.

San Elizario was the largest of the northern border towns and was the county seat of El Paso County. Even though the individual towns had names, everyone called the conglomeration of them El Paso. The population of El Paso was a mixture of Mexican and Anglo, and unfortunately, the two cultures often clashed.

I had some luck finding a place in which I could both live and work. Ironically, it was the same place that the ill-fated Chet Benton had found. It was on a side street off the eastern end of the main drag that ran through the center of El Paso. The El Paso Grand hotel was at the other end of the strip, closer to the railroad station. The locals called the three-block area Sin City. In Sin City, prostitution and gambling were both legal, and it seemed every other building was a saloon. The population of El Paso had exploded when the railroad arrived a couple of years earlier. Sin City was the politicians' way of controlling the wilder of the new arrivals.

I checked out the rooms of the boarding house and looked over the office space. I could live with both. I talked for a few minutes with Molly Dean, the owner of the building, but I didn't fork over any money. I wasn't all that sure how this lawyer idea was going to work out, until I presented myself to the court. Before I stood before the bar, I needed to hit the books I'd just bought. I had a feeling that I would be moving to Miss Molly's rooming house regardless, though. It was a nice clean place, the price would be half of what I was paying at the Grand, and Molly Dean was a peach of a woman.

I spent the afternoon reading and napping in my room at the hotel. It took me a while to get the hang of reading the wordy, flowery language of the law books. I knew immediately that just reading the books wasn't going to accomplish that much, because there were so many more Latin words and phrases than the law used in the twentieth century. My second start was with the glossary section of the last volume, as I started memorizing Latin legal terms. If you ever need help falling asleep, I highly recommend that exercise.

Included with the law books was a large ledger bound with a green cover, a steel nibbed writing pen and a bottle of India ink. That very day, I sat down and started keeping a journal of my experiences here in 1877. It took a while to get the hang of writing with the pen and dipping it into the ink but soon I was scribbling away.

I have to admit that I was excited later that evening, when I dressed for my dinner date with Liz. It felt as if it had been a hundred years since I dressed up fancy to take out a woman. Hmmm, I guess if you counted travel time from 1977, it had been. She only kept me waiting ten minutes in the lobby, before she breezed in, a refreshing five minutes early.

Elizabeth was dressed to the nines, wearing what I assumed was haute couture in West Texas. She had on a long, shimmery, indigo gown with a square cut bodice, a slight bustle and short puffy sleeves. Her auburn hair was piled on top of her head with little ringlets hanging down over her forehead, and she wore a dainty black hat perched on top. The dress was form fitting to the extreme, and showed off her magnificently impressive accoutrements without being tawdry.

I held out my arm for her and told her how beautiful she was. She took my arm with a smile, as I escorted her into the dining room. The evening was better than I hoped it would be, as Liz and I exchanged details of our pasts. Talking to her was my first real chance to recount the history I'd invented for myself. I told her some truth and a bunch of lies to account for my life to date. One of the lies was that I was a graduate of Baylor Baptist University (college lasted two years back then, and Baylor was the only college I knew for sure was around in 1877). I told her I was struggling to start a law practice and gambled to make ends meet until then.

Liz was twenty-two, and as far as she knew, still married to the man she'd ditched in New York. She was well educated for a woman of the times, and very bright. A man could do a lot worse than Elizabeth Claremont. Since I knew that money or bravado didn't impress Liz even a little bit, I decided on a different tack. I asked her to help me bone up on my law books. She was intrigued but skeptical.

"How in the world could I help? I don't know anything about the law."

"You would be a tremendous help. For instance, right now, I am reviewing Latin words and phrases. The law uses a lot of Latin, because our laws are based on English common law that was derived from old Roman law. Of course I think they kept the inkhorn Latin just to impress the laymen also."

Liz laughed at my little joke and said she'd try it, but if she didn't think she was really helping, or that it was a ploy for something else on my part, she'd stop instantly. I agreed immediately. Oh yeah, it was partly a ploy, but the help would still be much appreciated.

I insisted on walking Liz back to the women's rooming house she shared with the other dancers from the Gold Nugget, since it was after dark. After a hug and a soft kiss on my cheek from Liz, I wandered around for an hour, checking the action at a few more saloons. I was leaning against the back wall of the El Toro Cantina, when I saw my first example of El Paso justice.

I had been watching the poker table at El Toro carefully, because it looked like a game I would enjoy. El Toro's owner was one of the card players at the table, and he was a sharpie. He was almost impossible to read; the only tell I'd figured out so far was a slightly different grip on his cards when he was bluffing. I was second in line for a seat at his table, when a cowboy who'd been losing his shirt, suddenly jumped up from the table. He spit out a few words about a cheating polecat and was tugging at the pistol tucked into his waistband. He had barely pulled the old cap and ball revolver when a man on the balcony with a shotgun blasted him in the chest with a barrel full of double-ought buckshot.

Unlike in the cowboy movies, they didn't just drag the poor bastard out the door. Instead, someone was sent to the sheriff's office and returned with a deputy. The deputy interviewed a couple of witnesses, then called for the undertaker. The undertaker was just as I imagined him - tall, gaunt and wearing a porkpie hat. The deputy handed the undertaker a note and what looked like five dollars.

"Ezra Jacobs, cowhand, shot in self defense," the deputy told the undertaker.

The whole matter from gunshot to dragging off by the undertaker took fewer than fifteen minutes. Hell, the music didn't even stop. The man at the card table who appeared to own the place, stood up, shook the deputy's hand, and sent him to the bar for a free drink. The man was surprisingly short, maybe five three or five four, but he carried himself with a grace that made him seem bigger. Sort of like the cowboy star Alan Ladd from my old life. As soon as the deputy hotfooted it to the bar for his free shot, the man turned towards me and gestured at the card table. When I looked around, the two other men waiting for a seat had hotfooted it out of the saloon.

"There seems to be a sudden opening at our table, my good man, care to join us?" he asked in an aristocratic English accent.

I accepted his offer and dragged a chair over from another table to replace the late Ezra's blood splattered one.

And that's how I met H. Pennington Smythe, the third and youngest son of the Duke of Cornwall.