The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  In a minute I saw Ed Masterson come out of the Lady Gay, and I stepped over to him.

  “Say, Ed,” says I, “I been working on a business idea for a time, and saving my money towards it, too, but I ain’t got quite enough yet to go it on my own.”

  Ed favored Bat in appearance, with the same dark hair and mustache, but his features was a little finer, and there was always a look in his eye that could be called somewhat sad.

  “What I got in mind,” I went on, “is opening a place of my own, with the usual games of chance, drinks, eats, women naturally, but the main attraction will be the entertainment. I swear that’s the coming thing, but you got to get real talent to put it over, which means you got to bring it in from quite a ways, from back East or San Francisco.” Ed was listening carefully, as was his manner. “Now what I thought I’d mention to you is if you might want to go in with me on this here idea, for I require at least one partner.”

  He smiled slowly. “It’s Bat you ought to talk to. He’s the one with the head for business.”

  What I hadn’t said was I already talked to Bat, who didn’t care for the idea, maybe because he already had the Lone Star and regarded my place as competition, or he didn’t think I could handle it. I have to admit Bat still thought of me as a kind of character.

  “Bat’s got plans of his own,” I says. “Look, just keep it in mind is all I’m asking. And I wouldn’t expect a big investment from you personally, but your good name and fine rep in this town would help out in getting a loan from the bank.”

  At this point Nat Haywood walks briskly out of the Lady Gay and he tells Ed, “Walker didn’t check the gun. He give it back to Jack Wagner.”

  Ed shook his head, but he wasn’t all that disturbed. “One of Alf Walker’s hands was wearing a loaded shoulder holster,” he told me. “I took the gun away from him and gave it to Alf to check. He ought to know better.” He and Nat headed back into the Lady, and I returned inside to my own job behind the bar.

  A few minutes later somebody yelled something through the Lone Star door, but the noise near me was such I couldn’t hear what was shouted and didn’t take no alarm from it, for yells was routine in the saloons of Dodge and unless they employed the term “Fire” did not attract much attention. But next this person or another runs in with enough commotion that the crowd quietened a little, and I could hear, “—so close his clothes was burnin’!”

  “Who?” I yells back.

  “The marshal, goddammit. Ed Masterson! He’s dyin’.”

  I dropped the bottle I had been lifting, and it broke when it hit the floor, drenching my boots with whiskey. I run out of the Lone Star, ramming my way through the drinkers, and reached the street, where there was another crowd, everybody talking about the fight inside the Lady Gay and giving different versions thereof.

  “Where is he?” I yells. “Where is Ed?”

  “He walked away,” somebody says. “He crossed the tracks!”

  I felt some better. That a dying man could of walked two hundred yards across the plaza was unlikely. He was heading for the marshal’s office. “Why did they say he was a goner?” I asked nobody in particular.

  A tall cowboy shifted the wad in his jaw and says, “If’n he ain’t, no man ever was. He’s got a hole in him big enough to put your fist through. Ed tried to take Jack Wagner’s gun, but Jack shoved it right against him and pulled the trigger. The blast set Ed’s coat on fire.”

  “Yet he walked away?”

  “Sure did,” said another man. “I don’t know how he stayed on his feet. First he gut-shot Wagner, and when Alf Walker tried to horn in, Ed put a round into his lung and two in the arm.”

  Another voice says, “I seen Ed go into Hoover’s.”

  Which was another of the well-known Dodge saloons not in the red-light district. I run over there, across the tracks, and entered the place.

  Ed Masterson was laying on the floor. There was still some wisps of smoke coming from his coat. The bartender, George Hinkel, was crouching beside him.

  I bent down. I says, “Ed...”

  He looks at me with them sad dark eyes. “I’m done for, Jack” was all he said, and then he passed out, never to come to life again.

  Jack Wagner soon died too. But Alf Walker, the trail boss, managed in time to survive his wounds. Nat Haywood’s excuse for being of no help to Ed Masterson was that Walker kept a gun on him. Some said Nat had just proved yellow and run out, but in things of that nature you don’t know the truth unless you was on the spot and maybe not even then. In any event Nat left town right away, which meant there was two openings in the police department. A well-known figure of the time, Charlie Bassett, replaced Ed Masterson as chief marshal of Dodge City. As for Nat Haywood’s assistant marshal job, it went to a fellow name of Wyatt Earp, and that was the highest rank Wyatt ever held as peace officer at Dodge, irregardless of all subsequent lies told by him, his arse-kissers, or both.

  You might wonder about Bat Masterson’s reaction to his brother’s murder? Lots of lies has been told about that too. Bat sure grieved for Ed, but he didn’t go berserk with rage and gun down a lot of people. He didn’t shoot nobody over this matter. When Alf Walker got well enough to travel, he was allowed to go home to Texas in peace. Whether or not he held a gun on Nat Haywood couldn’t be proved, as Nat had run off and most of the witnesses worked for Alf, and so he weren’t charged with any crime. Jack Wagner had paid with his own life for what he had done, so the book was closed on the sorry event. Bat was the duly elected sheriff of Ford County and as such had to uphold the law. Still, it might be considered funny that one of the most feared gunfighters of his time would not of been vengeful, but as I have said, Bat Masterson was a man of reason. Besides, he always thought his brother run too many foolish risks. If Bat himself had took a gun off Jack Wagner, Wagner wouldn’t of dared to put it back on. Wyatt Earp would of coldcocked Wagner at the outset, and Wild Bill would of killed him right away and got it over with.

  So obviously my thought of getting Ed to go in with me on my business idea was at an end, and anyway before long Bat’s old partner Ben Springer opened the Comique, which I swear was a lot like what I had had in mind, and not long thereafter Ham Bell’s similar enterprise, the Varieties, started up in competition, luring away the Comique’s Dora Hand, reputed to be the most beautiful woman west of the Mississippi, who supposedly come from a high-class Boston family and sung opera before the crowned heads of Europe, and it might well of been true a dozen men got killed for competing for her favors, for women like her was uncommon in the cattle camps.

  Now maybe I was not being strictly literal when I might of given the idea a while back that I abstained from all traffic with the opposite sex at this phase of my life: what I meant was I didn’t do so any more than was necessary for my health. That warrior society amongst the Cheyenne called the Contraries was undoubtedly right in not losing any power to sexual activities when preparing to go to war, but though living in a fairly violent part of the world, I myself was notably a man of peace while living in Dodge City. I carried a hidden derringer, so as not to be totally helpless if I encountered someone too drunk or crazy to handle with talk, but went otherwise unarmed, relying on all them famous local gunfighters to do their job. Let me say this: a sense of ethics kept me from being a customer where I worked, so I never had any but a professional association with my female fellow workers at the Lone Star, except for what you might call a brotherly sort of affection for the two girls I mentioned whose troubles I listened to.

  What I had never had in my adult life thus far was what you could call a real romance. I mean, I had white and Indian wives, and while I was real fond of them, being married was a kind of practical matter, making sense for a home and family, which I had had in both white and Cheyenne worlds, and it was events, and not me nor my wives, what brought them marriages to an end. I had loved but had not been in love in the way them men who got killed over Dora Hand had apparently been to have gone that far. I wasn’t itc
hing to die similarly, but thought when I first heard her sing I might be missing something, and I commenced to get a big crush on her. Now this had happened before, when I was a boy, with my white foster-mother Mrs. Pendrake and then again, and ongoing, was what I had for Mrs. Libbie Custer, but in both cases unrealistic and in the latter, notably remote. Dora Hand was here and now, and I was grown up and well employed, being at this point head bartender of the Lone Star, which meant I could give myself time off so as to frequently attend her performances.

  Now I sure wasn’t alone in my admiration for the lady. Not a wildflower remained on the prairie for miles around Dodge, all having been plucked out and sent backstage for Dora, and for a time the fancy boxed candies from back East was all sold out in the stores, along with yew-de-cologne or whatever it’s called, lace hankies and other fineries, though nothing naughty like satin garters, for what was maybe Dora’s greatest distinction was her regular Sunday presence at services in the little church on the respectable north side, where her sweet singing of hymns was admired by the other ladies of the congregation, the wives of the better element of merchants, who did not resent her, as they would of others for being young and beautiful, on account of she was showfolk, then and now a special category.

  There wasn’t nobody in Dodge City did not admire Miss Dora Hand, and most men, included yours truly, downright adored her. She was an ideal specimen of the fair sex, the sort of lady who makes the average fellow think he has got a high odor even after taking his annual bath (which was true of some of them cowboys), and I knowed men who claimed to change their underwear for the first time in months just to go watch her sing, and even buy a pair of socks.

  There was never no one more awkward around a lady than the rough kind of fellow of that place and time, who would sooner shoot it out with a murderous enemy of his own sex than try and talk to a decent female, though according to the sporting women at the Lone Star, pretty much the same was true of them with harlots, except in the latter case they was not apologetic. Did I want to deal with smut, I could pass on some of the stories told me by them girls, who got a mostly unflattering impression of men, but it never discouraged them from eternally looking for a good one, not always without success: anyway, they usually got married sooner or later and insofar as any men ever admitted to marrying a former working woman, he invariably swore they made the best wives.

  I don’t say I had the oily tongue of a lounge lizard or big-city masher, but my childhood experience of living under the same roof as Mrs. Pendrake and being read poetry to by her give me a definite advantage over most of the other men in Dodge. I was also smarter than most, and willing to make a greater sacrifice. I went pretty far: namely, I begun to go to church of a Sunday, something I hadn’t done since being obliged to listen to the Reverend Pendrake’s endless sermons as a boy, the only compensation for which was sitting next to Mrs. P. and inhaling her flowered scent.

  It took me a few Sundays before, using not dissimilar skills to those I had learned from the Cheyenne in hunting game, I could devise a way of getting next to Miss Hand in her pew, for being she was a celebrity, as many women as men wanted to be near her, but eventually one Sunday I managed to get on her immediate left, though to do so I had to jostle several of the regular churchgoers, incurring an un-Christian enmity.

  I waited until the second of the hymns was finished before, in the brief interval we was sitting back down, to apologize for my own croaking rendition.

  “Oh,” Miss Hand said prettily, from under her big bonnet, turning her sparkling eyes on me, “all voices are sweet to the ear of the Lord.”

  “Praise God,” I says. I don’t want you to think I spoke sacrilegiously, for just because I seldom found myself in a church don’t mean I was an unbeliever any time in my life. We all have a Maker, who will take us back one day, and him who has never had a home in life will be assured one Over There.

  Having said as much, however, I wouldn’t have been in that pew or anywhere else in church had Miss Dora Hand been elsewhere. And I didn’t much listen to the sermon even so, for religious lingo never appealed to me. I had heard too much of it from my Pa and the Rev. Pendrake. The Catholics have a lot of sense, using Latin which nobody understands and therefore seems more like a language God would speak rather than even the loftiest old-fashioned English.

  What I was doing instead was thinking of other ways to get acquainted with Miss Hand without arousing her suspicion that my motives wasn’t pure. I come up with an approach I considered perfect. I acted like I didn’t know she was famous. This immediately distinguished me from everybody else she had met in Dodge. I went even further: I pretended to disapprove of professional entertainment of all kinds.

  “Oh,” says she, with a beautiful little pout of her soft pink lower lip, “you are very stern, sir, I must say.”

  We was walking out together after the service. I had managed to fend off the others who tried to get to her, thus earning more dark looks. I was misguided to believe my conspicuous large donation when the collection plate was passed would make up for the bad feeling I had aroused: there are times when I had been too cynical about money. For example, Miss Hand, who probably earned more at this time than the richest merchants in Dodge, did not come to church for mercenary reasons.

  Anyhow, I says to her now, pursing my lips in the sissified manner of the holier-than-thou, “Better to err on the side of righteousness than on the side of laxity.” This was on the order of something I hope I recalled correctly from the Reverend Pendrake’s spiel.

  “It is true that the arts,” says she, lowering them feathery eyelashes, “or should I say the performers thereof, have acquired a reputation for immorality, one that may not always be undeserved. But there are those of us who do what we can to redress the balance.”

  “Do I rightly gather from your comments,” I says, surprising myself with the genteel elevation of speech, “that you have some connection, distant no doubt, with entertainment?”

  “I’m afraid I must confess I do,” Miss Hand replied. She proceeded to raise her little parasol against the glaring Kansas sun without halting or losing a step, in the way persons like her do on the stage while singing. “I do so hope you won’t be shocked to hear as much.”

  “Already I have began to reconsider,” says I, and we exchanged introductions. “It might well be,” I went on, “mine has been a limited life, confined to them, uh, those who purchase the Good Book.”

  “Do you sell Bibles, Mr. Crabb?”

  Suddenly, there on the church path, I was conscience-struck and reluctant to lie further, so I says, in truth, “I am a parson’s son.”

  Some old biddy, waddling up behind, could no longer tolerate my monopolizing of Dora Hand, and she gets her hefty figure, all gussied up in her Sunday best, in between, and she says, “Dora, will we see you at the Ladies’ Aid?”

  Miss Hand smiles graciously. “Of course you will, Martha. Have I ever missed?”

  She allowed me to walk her home, which turned out to be not far away, in a little house tucked away behind the Western Hotel.

  “Miss Hand,” I says, “I am so pleased to of had this real pleasant conversation. I wonder if I go too far in hoping we might talk again, after next Sunday’s service. I would like ever so much to know more about your career as an artist.”

  Her smile was quite different from what she had shown to the church lady. It might be called a smirk, except I couldn’t see any malice in it. “Meanwhile, Mr. Crabb, will I continue to see you every night in the front row at the Varieties?”

  I laughs and stamps my foot, being both embarrassed and thrilled. “How do you like that! You mean from up there, back of them footlights, you can see people in the audience?”

  “I’d have to be blind to miss you, Jack, with the commotion you make after every number.”

  “Miss Hand, I’m overwhelmed. Let me just say I wasn’t lying about being a preacher’s son, but I don’t sell Bibles. I’m chief bartender over at the Lone Star, whic
h by your lights must be a pretty lowdown place. But I really will go to church again if I could just talk to you afterwards.”

  “Jack,” says she, and she actually grazed my sleeve with her slender fingers gloved in dove-gray. “I don’t think we should make a deal about going to church. But naturally I will always be happy to see you there.”

  You couldn’t call it a real social engagement, but it was good enough at that point, and I tell you I waited all week for that upcoming Sunday service, which was a unique anticipation for me, who used to dread the same thing when living with the Reverend Pendrake even more than I hated school.

  But the unhappy fact is that I never set eyes on a living Dora Hand again.

  I didn’t go to the Varieties all week long, owing to the embarrassment I still felt on her catching me in that misrepresentation. I really intended, in whatever connection me and her would have in the future, no matter how slight on her part, that it should bring out the best in me. I resolved to listen to the sermon next Sunday and not show off with how much I put in the collection plate, also not to be rude to other people in the congregation. That might of been just the beginning of my transformation into a better person, or so anyway I thought at the time.

  Now I got to take what might seem a detour but will prove otherwise. Amongst the Texas troublemakers who come to the Kansas cattle camps of the time was one Jim Kennedy, and excuse the language but there ain’t a fitting name for him but rotten young son of a bitch. He hung around with the plain cowboys, but his Pa, Mifflin K., was partner of Richard King of the King Ranch, the biggest such in the world, then and now, with more acreage than some little countries. Being rich, young, and good-looking, Kennedy did pretty much what he wanted, and if anybody objected he would shoot them when they was unarmed or, preferably, with their back turned to him. He had done this elsewhere, but when he showed up in Dodge wearing a gun in defiance of the law, I got to commend Wyatt Earp for once: Wyatt pistol-whipped and then arrested the cocky bastard, and a month later Marshal Charlie Bassett arrested him again, for disorderly conduct.