The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum

that Sheriff Garrett would remember the time he had ridden with him into New Mexico in pursuit of the Kid and a few hundred stolen head of LX cattle. The way he embroidered the tale, Charlie left the impression that not only had he been with Garrett the day the Kid had surrendered, but that the sheriff would’ve come up empty-handed if Charlie hadn’t been around.
    Pinkerton dutifully wrote down all the names and addresses. Soon as I hear back from them, we can make things official, he said. But as if to demonstrate that he considered the letters of reference a small formality, he shared what he’d been thinking since the moment Charlie had sat down.
    The agency, he revealed, had plans to open a new office in Denver, Colorado. Now that the West was growing civilized and attracting families and men of substance, it would need some serious policing. “A cowboy detective,” he said, “might be just the sort of man who can get the job done.”
    A cowboy detective? Charlie had resigned himself to working out of stuffy offices in Chicago or maybe even New York, an operative in a suit and a black homburg riding streetcars in pursuit of big-city scallywags. But now the prospect of galloping over the plains in his Texas boots and spurs, his big Colt resting on his hip, a cowboy detective, to use William Pinkerton’s immediately appealing phrase, chasing down bandits and cattle thieves, well, Charlie was near to rejoicing. This was shaping up better than he could have previously suspected. Still, he wanted to sound professional, like the Pinkerton man he hoped to become. He wanted to say something that he could imagine reading in the Police Gazette. “The East is too tame for me,” he agreed. “No doubt ’bout it. The West would better suit my wild cowboy ways.”
    And so it was settled. Once it was established that there was nothing troubling in the replies from Charlie’s references, he would begin training. Pinkerton explained that Charlie would need to learn how to tail a suspect without being spotted and how to assume undercover identities. He further expected Charlie to study the agency’s Principles, a pamphlet that outlined the rules of an operative’s conduct; for example, “the ends justified the means” as long as the actions were “for the accomplishment of justice” and that it was forbidden for a Pinkerton to take on a divorce investigation. Principles also instructed the operative on how to submit his expenses. And it made clear there was no salary, only a per diem fee while on a case. Within two months, Pinkerton predicted, Charlie would be cleared to report to the new Denver office.
    Excited, Charlie rushed back to the boardinghouse. It was only as he was playing out in his mind how he’d break the news to Mamie about their leaving Chicago and heading back west on a new adventure that something else occurred to him. Sure, maybe he had given fate a shove or two by taking it upon himself to walk into the Pinkerton offices and by having had the foresight to have secured a banker’s testimonial. But still, there was no getting around it: He was about to become a detective. And that was precisely what the blind phrenologist had predicted.
    EIGHT
    ctually, Charlie Siringo’s arrival in Denver might not have happened without Soapy Smith’s help. It seemed that months before Soapy had fled town in the aftermath of his caning of Colonel Arkins, he and his gang had put the screws to a couple of local private detectives. And it was the bloody beating of those detectives that had convinced the Pinkertons to open an office in Denver.
    Soapy, of course, had no inkling of the repercussions from his violent outburst. To him, all that mattered was that his actions were entirely justifable.
    In his world, the only man worse than a cop was a private detective. Police, whether patrolman or chief, could be bought, and Soapy had paid many a divvy in his time. He’d also put a fair share of private detectives on his