Thursday, April 20, 2017
King News by Moses Koenigsberg: Chapter 1 Part 3
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| Moses Koenigsberg |
King News by Moses Koenigsberg
Published by F.A. Stokes Company, 1941Chapter 1
Murder with a Carom Shot (conclusion)
link to previous installment link to next installmentAustin’s pagan jubilation over Ben Thompson’s escape from the gallows gave impetus to the inter-city vendetta. The law-abiding residents of both communities disparaged the feud. They denounced it as a mere figment put forth by the criminal elements in extenuation of law-breaking activities. But the quarrel derived stature from an epic rivalry in finance. It was waged between Joseph Nalle and George W. Brackenridge, foremost capitalist of San Antonio. Miscreants borrowed from it the color of civic implication for stark criminality. For months, there were few defendants in felonious-assault cases, either in San Antonio or Austin, who failed to plead entanglement in inter-community vengeance.
All
this was mere poppycock to the City Marshal of Austin,
who held himself aloof from mass movements of every sort. He was above
everything an individualist. If any gangs came from another city to vent
their
spleen on Austin,
he would welcome them in his own way. He made no other comment
concerning San Antonio, though he did inquire at every opportunity
about the operation of the Crystal
Palace.
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| Ben Thompson |
Mention of Joe Foster was to him like the scent of a quail
to a bird hound. It brought him to the point.
“That’s the thief that ‘rolled’
me,” Thompson would snap in a venomous burst that contrasted startlingly with
his habitual drawl. It was Foster who had repelled his charge of a crooked game
as a “cheap try at welshing.”
And Joe Foster was still alive, the active symbol of the
most devastating humiliation of Ben Thompson’s career. It was true that Billy
Simms, the other partner of Jack Harris, remained one of the owners of the Crystal Palace,
but Billy had been a protege of Ben Thompson before he moved to San Antonio and he had
preserved his friendship with his former patron through all the blistering
trials it suffered. He had promptly disavowed any share in the “gambling
parlor” imbroglio and he had made his peace with Thompson after the murder of
Jack Harris. So, the incurable canker in the soul of Ben Thompson festered anew
at every mention of Joe Foster’s activities.
Twenty months passed. March 11, 1884, arrived.
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| King Fisher |
Fisher was dapper and suave, with many of the manners and
some of the apparel of a Parisian boulevardier. As a member of the notorious
Bill Bruton gang, he had ranged up and down the Rio Grande, a veritable terror. Fifteen
Mexicans were assigned by unofficial count to his “private graveyard.” The
reputation thus gained for daring and marksmanship had commended him to the
cattle barons of the Southwest for the task of cleaning out the lawless
pillagers who infested the section.
Horse thieves and cattle rustlers with their cohorts had continually
raided the long stretch from Castroville to the Rio Grande. Fisher drove them out. In the
course of his campaign, several of the marauding interlopers moved too slowly
or in the wrong direction. They joined the list of “necessary fatalities” in
Fisher’s personal record.
So, the reunion of Ben Thompson and King Fisher did not make
the social columns of the Austin Statesman. It was, however, the subject of
animated gossip in other quarters. This was an ominous massing of
potentialities for sudden tragedy. Still, there was no show of public agitation
until the pair were seen boarding a train for San Antonio.
Then
there was real alarm. Thompson and Fisher together
represented a merger of lethal facilities calculated to make the heart
of any
peace-lover skip several beats even in an amiable social gathering. On a
train
bound for San Antonio
the combination spelled the certainty of dire consequences. Hadn’t word
come
repeatedly that Thompson would be mobbed if he ever again set foot in
the Alamo city? Even if the danger of a public uprising were
exaggerated, was it possible that the mere presence of Ben Thompson in
San Antonio, accompanied
by one of the most widely known killers of the time, would fail to
provoke a
critical outburst of violence?
The good citizens of Austin
were deeply disturbed. They owed a duty to law and order. Telegrams of warning
were flashed to police officials and to important friends in San Antonio. Then, in chagrin and foreboding,
Austin sat back
to await the inevitable.
The ride to San
Antonio—the trip required three hours—was a grotesque
gambol. Thompson behaved like a schoolboy on a spree. His boisterous pranks
kept the passengers in trepid turmoil. The chief butt of his antics was the
Negro porter. Thompson slashed the darkey’s cap into droll shapes and forced
him to march through the train wearing each ludicrous design. Indiscriminate
badinage, frequent swigs at a whiskey bottle and gruff whoops to startle
cowering travelers alternated with rougher capers.
Two tight-lipped men swung aboard the train before it
halted. They sought out the conductor. Evidently he gave them good news
because, when the Southwestern Flyer drew up at the station, they waved “the
high sign”—the O. K. notice—to several waiting watchers. These were scouts
detailed to report the arrival of Thompson, to trail him and to keep police
headquarters advised of his actions.
The train conductor felt Thompson’s visit was not hostile.
The City Marshal of Austin, he explained, was merely accompanying King Fisher
to a performance of Lady Audley’s Secret at the Turner Hall Opera House on Houston Street. The
play had been performed in the Austin Opera House the night before. As city
marshal, Thompson collected the license fee exacted from theatrical troupes,
and in the course of official duty he had met Ada Gray, the star.
He wanted to see the performance again and he wanted to
present King Fisher to the leading lady. Perhaps he was flipping a sly jest at
providence when he insisted that history would be incomplete without a meeting
between the Beau Brummell of gunmen and the exquisite lady of the theatre.
Thompson and Fisher did attend the play.
King Fisher never met Ada Gray. The omission was not fortuitous.
It could have been explained by Tom Howard, manager of the opera house.
Thompson and Fisher made frequent excursions from the auditorium to the
adjoining bar. Howard was always at hand. Proposals for a back-stage visit were
skilfully shunted off. It was with a sense of supreme deliverance that Howard
bade the two men goodnight at the close of the performance.
One block south across the St. Mary’s Street bridge brought
the swaggering pair to Commerce
Street. Two blocks farther west was the Crystal Palace. Between St. Mary’s Street and Main Plaza
were several saloons. As Thompson and Fisher made their way past, a figure
detached itself from the bunch of loiterers in front of each resort and,
stepping into the street behind the passing twain, wigwagged a signal.
Billy Simms was standing in front of the Crystal Palace.
He greeted both Thompson and Fisher with the cordiality of a pleasantly
astonished friend. The trio entered the saloon. John Dyer, the same bartender
who had served Thompson on the tragic evening twenty months before, was again
on duty. He exchanged grins with Ben. Thompson’s smile was tauntingly flippant.
Dyer’s was plainly wry and nerve-taut.
Simms sparkled with persiflage. Dyer knew he was “putting on
a play” and tried to help. His misplaced snickers of applause would have
challenged the attention of an alert observer; but Thompson and Fisher seemed
to have laid aside their characteristic vigilance.
Simms was unable to persuade the pair to join him on a jaunt
“across the creek.” It was his purpose to lure them away from the arsenal of death-loaded
malice in which they were dallying. “Across the creek” was the vernacular
designation of the red-light district that lay west of San Pedro Creek. Simms believed he had offered the most
alluring diversion he could conceive for the delectation of these visitors.
It was with real despair that he finally yielded to
Thompson’s insistence on “seeing the show from the balcony.” Simms led the way
upstairs, carefully threading a course as far as possible from that part of the
house in which Joe Foster sat.
The Crystal Palace—which had come to be better known as Jack
Harris’ Vaudeville—was of the conventional pattern of the variety theatres or
honkytonks of that era. The lower part of the auditorium lay on a level with
the downstairs bar. The orchestra or pit was filled with folding chairs cleated
to movable planks. When the show closed, these seats and boards were slapped together
and stacked on each side of the hall with the same celerity and precision that
attends the striking of a circus tent. The operation uncovered a dance floor.
Overhead, on either side of the auditorium, stretching from the
proscenium to the balcony balustrade, was a row of boxes with curtains
adjustable at the will of the occupants. One could remain in complete seclusion
in these draped stalls. In fact, they were engaged chiefly for pursuits that in
more modern circles would have been described as petting parties. They were
designed to facilitate the exercise of feminine suasion toward wine consumption.
On the night of March 11, 1884, not one woman was in any of these boxes.
None of the occupants was visible to Ben Thompson or King
Fisher from their positions in the balcony. But details as minute as Fisher’s
tiny watch-fob or the cleft in Thompson’s chin were plainly discernible to
anyone peering from behind the curtains. And each box was occupied.
The female members of the theatre staff were hired as
actresses. Between turns on the stage they moved among the audience in short
skirts and red stockings. It was their chore to capture the attention of
sociable patrons and to intimate with more or less subtlety their readiness to
accept a drink.
To many a callow rambler from the cattle ranges, these approaches
were roseate bids to romance. A smitten cowhand “rode the herd hard” in the
gilded hour of conquest and his tipple mounted quickly from beer to wine. With
each drink the waiter handed the girl a brass check, token of her sales
commission. There was no pretense of concealment. Yet this crude routine of
commercialism seemed only to fan the flare of flirtation. In such moments, the
curtained boxes were most desirable. Nevertheless, on this night they were
rigorously forbidden to the “drink hustlers.”
Jacobo Coy had joined the party when Simms ushered Thompson
and Fisher into the balcony. Still a member of the police force, he had become
an attache of the Crystal
Palace by special
license. He stood at Thompson’s right.
Waiters moved back and forth serving whiskey to Thompson and
Fisher. The point of snapping nerves was at hand for Simms when Ben finally
decided to accept the invitation for “a run across the creek.” The party moved
toward the head of the staircase leading downstairs. Halfway, Thompson halted.
“I want to see Joe Foster before I go,” he announced.
Instantly Simms abandoned his pose of nonchalance.
“Don’t do that, Ben,” he pleaded with genuine anguish in his
voice. “It’s crazy. You know Joe doesn’t want to talk to you. He sent you word
to keep away from him. Let us get out of here without trouble.”
The depth of Simms’s anxiety was dramatized by the simple
word “us.” It linked him with Ben in a crisis involving his own partner.
Thompson was unmoved. “To hell with all that,” he growled.
“I want to shake hands with Joe. I want to make up with him. Where is he?” And
craning his neck, he sighted Foster near the front row of the balcony.
“Hello, Joe!” he called.
Foster arose. Adjusting his pince-nez he made his way toward
the man who had hailed him, puckering his eyes intently as he approached.
At that moment, Thompson stood in the unobstructed vision of
everyone in the theatre. Foster came almost within arm’s length of Ben before
he recognized him. Coy moved closer to Thompson. Simms stepped back a pace.
Fisher, standing beside Ben, seemed mildly amused. Neither noted that, except
for Jacobo Coy, they were alone in the center of a space that a second before
had been crowded.
Every eye in the balcony was riveted on that spot. There was
none to detect the moving of the curtains in the boxes.
“Joe,” Thompson spoke in a tone of obviously affected
friendliness, “I want to shake hands with you.”
Foster appeared cool and in complete mastery of himself. He
answered in a firm voice: “Ben, I have told you that there is room enough in the world
for both of us without our paths crossing and I will not shake hands with you.”
Thompson seemed to consider this for a moment. “Then come
and take a drink with me,” he said, with an awkward effort at a smile.
“No,” Foster answered, “I will not drink with you, either.”
“Then take this!”
A revolver was in Thompson’s hand before the last word left his
lips. It was a feat of legerdemain, but Jacobo Coy moved with almost equal
quickness. A dozen other men, with tightened nerves, had been waiting for hours
for that fateful instant. They acted as if by common command.
A fan of ribbed flame swept across the auditorium. A dozen
bolts of fire resounded as one blast.
Thompson and Fisher went down as if felled by a single
cleaver. Foster, though struck first, toppled a second later.
Fisher’s left leg crumpled under him and his head lay across
Thompson’s chest. The desperado dandy died with empty hands.
Though Jacobo Coy had grabbed Thompson’s gun arm, he did not
save Joe Foster’s life. Ben fired one shot. His aim was deflected by Coy’s
tackle, but the bullet found fatal lodgment.
The triple tragedy passed into the legends of the Southwest,
more frequently the theme of bitterly disputed details than the subject of
righteous review. There were many to deplore the passing of King Fisher as
sheer assassination. Uvalde
County seethed with
indignation over the ambuscade of its most picturesque citizen.
It was pointed out that before the fusillade had ceased to
echo, City Marshal Shardein rushed into the theatre at the head of a police
squad. Why, it was asked, did he happen to be waiting in front of the Crystal Palace with so large a force of men? How
did he explain the smoking revolvers he saw in the hands of Jacobo Coy and
Billy Simms? Why, when he took charge, did he permit all save a few selected
witnesses to disappear?
Why was no autopsy held? Was the omission designed to hide
the fact that Thompson had been riddled with seventeen bullets, that Fisher’s
body showed a dozen mortal wounds, that both men had been shot through the left
eye and that a half-dollar would have covered two punctures in Thompson’s heart?
Weren’t the theatre boxes reserved for men armed with carbines,
asked the partisans of King Fisher? Didn’t all the circumstances prove that
it was an ambush organized with such thoroughness that each man had been
assigned the very spot on the victims’ heads and bodies at which to fire?
All these questions were disposed of by a brief editorial in
the San Antonio Express. It served as the community’s answer to the critics of
that day and of the years that followed. It appeared in the issue of March 12,
1884. It was headed: “A Good Night’s Work.”
It was the journalistic practice to play down stories of
lawless violence. Reviewers of a succeeding generation would have found
abundant warrant for charging the newspapers of that period with truckling to
the advertiser. They represented “the vested interests”—the business circles and
property-owners. They demanded a “soft pedal on desperadoism.”
All this was to preserve the bait for tourists and new
settlers. Newcomers would not flock to a region where popping guns and slashing
knives were the fashion. They must be coaxed with alluring pictures of the
romantic hospitality of a people flourishing in a plenitude of nature. So,
there was great applause for the advertiser’s arguments against newspaper
emphasis of those incidents that “retarded substantial growth.” And if the
publisher, in response, was more paternalistic than journalistic, it must be
said in his behalf that his readers, in the main, approved his policy.
Perhaps there was a prevalence of editorial strabismus. It
might be traced to overstudy of the advertiser’s meretricious philosophy.
Adequate publicity would have incited public measures for sterner law
enforcement. The repression of news contributed contrary effects. It was
generally interpreted as reflecting a common acceptance of a policy of laissez
faire. Thus, while the journalist substituted the role of the promoter for his
duty as a publisher and salved his professional conscience with the spurious
anodyne of “greater public service,” the gun and the knife of the desperado had
continued to flash hourly contempt of the law. The press of the day, muffling
its columns, muffed one of its greatest opportunities to serve the very
purpose for which they were blunderingly muffled.
A condensed account of the murder of Jack Harris was presented
by the San Antonio Express on the morning after the tragedy. It was relegated
to the back page. In sharp contrast, several months later, was the Express’
extended description of Austin’s
delirious jamboree welcoming Ben Thompson home. It apppeared on the first page
under a “top head.”
.
No episode of several years had commanded such keen public attention
as the wiping out of Ben Thompson and King Fisher. It was not the mere killing
of two adventurers. It was a massacre of desperadoism. Full newspaper pages
would have been devoured by avid readers. But on the day after the spectacular
slaughter, the San Antonio Express dismissed the epic story with less than a column
on the last page. The heading was: "Jack Harris Revenged.” And the Express was
then, as it has continued to be through succeeding generations, the foremost morning
paper of the section, with a faithful devotion to its readers’ interests.
While the classic chapter of news bestirred only a modicum
of professional enterprise, it yielded to me the first inspiration for
journalism. I sensed the call during the inquest conducted by Justice Anton
Adam.
Again resting on my father’s shoulder, I sat in the window
opening from the patio into Justice Adam’s courtroom. The scene was quite
unlike the picture presented at the arraignment of Ben Thompson for Jack
Harris’ murder. Afterward, it was explained that the permission for my presence
was a sentimental concession to my share in that evening twenty months before.
There was a good deal of confusion to me in the fact that
while the solemn proceedings concerned the same man, it was the nature of his
absence that occasioned them. But I understood clearly that I was never again
to see the big fellow who gave a whole bunch of bananas to the boy that had
escaped a thrashing.
The men in the courtroom seemed altogether different. It was
more than the change from gaslight to sunshine. These men., though very grave,
were not at all nervous. They were extremely quiet, as if eager not to miss a
word spoken by each of the men who swore to tell the truth.
As the procession of witnesses moved in and out of the chair
to which they were led, a young man in a loose white shirt, with sandy hair
and a wee yellow mustache, asked their names, where they lived, how old they
were and what they did for a living; and he wrote it all down. He was scarcely
more than a boy, but he seemed to be the only person in the courtroom with work
to do.
Justice Adam told each witness when he might leave his
chair, but it was the blond young man who asked them to repeat words and
sentences. There was another man who put questions to the witnesses, but no one
except the boy with the little mustache seemed to have the right to stop what
was going on whenever he wanted to.
It was very puzzling. How could a young fellow, only half
the age of anyone else in the room, be so important?
“That’s John R. Lunsford,” my father explained. “He’s a newspaper
reporter. He works on the Light."
There was never again any doubt in my mind as to what I
would be when I grew up. Other boys could dream of being policemen, circus
clowns, drum majors, firemen, broncho-busters, Indian scouts, street-car
conductors and even calliope players; but all those seemed foolish beside a
newspaper reporter.
Years later, when Lunsford was a star on a metropolitan newspaper
staff of which I was city editor, I learned the real inwardness of his
extraordinary activity that day in the courtroom in Veramendi Alley. Justice
Anton Adam had no clerical staff. Ordinarily, he acted as his own clerk,
transcribing in script such minutes as he deemed necessary. But the inquest into
the killing of Ben Thompson and King Fisher was fraught with so many political
and other complications that he wanted a more comprehensive record than his
own memory might assure. Lunsford was present to report the hearing for his
newspaper. Justice Adam delegated him to set down the testimony for the
official records.
So, it was the functioning of a recording clerk instead of a
newspaper reporter that captivated my juvenile enthusiasm for journalism.
Labels: King News
