I spent several hours with the Declaration Of Independence trying to crack the code contained in the letter I had found in Blackjack's journal. It was a daunting task, and I discovered, much to my dismay, that the code in the letter didn't appear to be based on that document. I decided to try something else.I went back and tried numbering each letter of the words, but to no avail. I needed to find another clue. The code in the letter must be based on another document. There had to be something which would lead me to the text that would unlock the key to the code. I went back to the journal to see if Blackjack had written about the second letter which Beale had promised, and what it said.
There HAD been another letter from Beale! The second letter had been hand-delivered by a young woman named Tracinda Burdette. There was no other entry in the journal concerning this event, nor the woman, and no mention of the contents of the letter.
I made another trip to the bookmobile to see if I could find any more reference material about the early days of Brisbee .... and the mysterious Tracinda Burdette.
This trip rendered far more information than I expected.After going through several volumes of an extensive manuscript on the early history of Brisbee, as written by the owner of the Brisbee Gazette, Horace Gerald Barker, I came across an item about Miss Burdette. Mr. Barker had related the story as told to him by Sourdough Duke, the cook at The Capricorn Saloon.
Tracinda Burdette was a young woman whose parents had been killed out on Deadman's Trail, one of the back-roads of Brisbee, when she was 13 and she had gone to live with a distant cousin of her mother's by the name of Demetera Woods, who was the Brisbee schoolmarm. Unbeknownst to Tracinda, or the townspeople, Demetera had once been a shill for Blackjack's card games up at Tascosa. Tracinda had first laid eyes on him in Brisbee when she was a mere 15 years old. He was a dangerous looking character and Tracinda was very intrigued with him. Thus, when a strange man had approached her at the saloon three years later and asked her to take a message to Blackjack, she jumped at the chance for a face to face encounter with the notorious outlaw.
Tracinda was cordially received by Blackjack when she entered his quarters, but she noticed a tall, sinister looking man standing in the shadows, half-hidden behind a curtain which separated the parlor from another room. She could also hear voices coming from beyond where the man was standing. Beginning to feel uneasy, she hastily handed the letter to Blackjack and began her retreat to the door. In return, he gave her a handsome tip, and a pinch on the chin.
Later that night, as she was finishing her duties at the saloon, Tracinda noticed the man she had seen earlier in Blackjack's parlor. He was leaning against the bar and staring at her with a fixed gaze that gave her goose-bumps. He approached her and demanded to know if she had read the letter. She swore that she had not, but the man was unwilling to accept her word.
The gruff man took Tracinda by the arm and led her out into the dark streets of Brisbee and she was swept away ... into the night ... in a carriage which headed out of town on Deadman's Trail!
