The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum Page B

fast-growing city like Denver that helped convince William Pinkerton and his brother, Robert, that they’d found the perfect location for a new branch office. In fact, when they discovered that the old Glasson agency offices were available and, since they were a bit worse for wear, could be rented on the cheap, the brothers quickly signed the lease for the second-floor suite. Fresh paint, new furniture, and the Pinkerton name on the door—they were confident that this would make all the difference.
    “LET THIS Mr. Soapy Smith come calling,” Charlie Siringo told his new boss, William Pinkerton, after he was informed of the events leading to the abrupt shuttering of the Glasson Detective Agency. “He wants to make a war dance, he’ll find himself a partner.” But by the time Charlie and his family had taken a Pullman sleeper out of Chicago and arrived at Union Station in Denver, Soapy, with the assault charge on Colonel Arkins hanging over him and a shoot-out in an Idaho train depot giving him further concerns, was on the run. And anyway, Charlie was too busy to give him much thought.
    That winter Charlie rented a house on the other side of town from the Pinkerton offices, and Mamie began to unpack and order fabric for curtains. William Pinkerton had instructed the superintendent of the Denver office to break the new operative in slowly, to get him accustomed to acting and thinking like a detective. So Charlie was assigned to investigate a ring of streetcar conductors who were suspected of duplicating their punched tickets. The practice allowed the shady conductors to pocket an extra ten to twenty dollars each day—until Charlie, riding the horse-drawn streetcars across Denver for weeks while all the time keeping watch with a keen eye, documented how the conductors worked the scam.
    Of course, riding streetcars wasn’t Charlie’s idea of high adventure. But he did his best to show enthusiasm and to be tolerant of this tutelage. He was confident the agency would have more challenging cases in store for him once he proved his mettle. So he did what he was told; bided his time; and in secret proceeded with a plan of his own that was much more to his liking.
    Charlie’s first step was to give himself an alias; he didn’t think a Pinkerton operative should attract attention by taking part in what he had in mind. On the Texas cattle ranges, his nickname had been “Dull Knife.” The boys had settled on it because when they borrowed his pearl-handled bowie knife, the blade was barely sharp enough, they complained, to slice a fried breakfast egg. Charlie would explain that he used the bowie to kill rattlesnakes. Perched high on his saddle, he’d hold the point between his thumb and forefinger, then throw it down at the snake. He’d pin the snake, but he’d also wind up burying his knife in the ground, too. It was a practice that was certain to dull a blade, he told the boys. After a demonstration, they believed him. But the nickname still stuck. So now, when he was searching for an alias to use when registering for the Cowboy Tournament at River Side Park in Denver, it popped into his mind.
    He entered the steer-roping and wild-horse-riding contests, and he gave the crowd quite a show. A newspaper reported: “When Dull Knife rode in armed with pearl-handled pistol and knife, a gold embroidered Mexican sombrero on his head and mounted on a beautiful, quick-reined, white pony he was such a perfect and graceful type of Texas cowboy that the audience gave one spontaneous Ah-h-h! of admiration.”
    Charlie was the only man that afternoon to succeed in roping and throwing his bronco on horseback, and he wound up winning a $15 check for “Skillful Cowboy Performance.” But more important to Charlie than the crowd’s cheers or the money was whom he had become in his own mind. As if in an instant, he’d finally shed all the lingering embarrassments and melancholy of his merchant’s life. Galloping on his white pony, lasso