The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  As it happened we ended up staying a few days around North Platte, for apparently the Ogallala folks decided not to pursue Billy Thompson, who could recuperate in one place as well as another, so long as he wasn’t bumped around and even when that happened he survived, having the usual endurance of the worthless, and Cody begged us to stay till a party of foreigners, German dukes and the like, arrived to experience his version of the West, hunting whatever game could be located, wearing sombreros and chaps, meeting some harmless Indians, and of course listening to Buffalo Bill’s stories. Now Bat was not the sort to turn down such an invite, besides which Cody promised him the loan of a brand-new phaeton carriage he had lately purchased for his gracious wife, and a horse to pull it, so we could eventually return to Dodge in comfort.

  When the European bunch arrived, we all headed out into the open country after a good deal of liquid refreshment, so much indeed that Cody found it difficult to mount his horse and therefore went to sleep in the accompanying mess wagon, being driven by Bat, who was also the worse for wear, to the degree that, missing a turn in the trail at one point, the wagon got turned over, throwing Bat clear, but Cody was buried underneath it and the heavy load it toted, mostly bottled and jugged goods.

  The scare sobered everybody up on the spot, and we dug frantically in the pile of spilled cargo, fearing the worst, but when he was finally uncovered, Buffalo Bill sat up, shook his long curls, found and donned his hat, which hadn’t seemingly been creased or smudged, and grinning, says, “Let’s drink to that!” I’ll tell you another remarkable fact: I never seen one bottle that got broke.

  When we reached where we was camping for the night and had a big meal of local specialties, buffalo and antelope and prairie chicken, washed down by the usual drinkables plus countless bottles of champagne brung by them foreigners, Cody give a memorable performance of riding, on a horse as tricky as any you seen in a circus, and of marksmanship with both a Colt’s and the fifty-caliber Remington buffalo rifle he called Lucretia Borgia, using champagne bottles as targets. He invited Bat to shoot as well, but the latter had suffered a sore lip in that wagon crash and weren’t at his best, so begged off. Cody offered me my choice of guns, but as I hadn’t discharged a firearm in some years I didn’t want to serve as a bad example now in front of them Europeans, so I too declined. Nor did I open my mouth when Cody’s stories included his old friends Wild Bill Hickok and General Custer. By the way, he got to calling me “Captain,” and like Bat I took the title as one of courtesy.

  Now after this brief glimpse of Buffalo Bill we’re going to leave him for a spell, after I say I never laid eyes on the often-mentioned Mrs. Cody, whose new buggy we borrowed to carry Bill Thompson back to Dodge, and without her knowledge according to Bat. And one more item: when we shook goodbye with Buffalo Bill he says to Bat that he was about to put one of his traveling shows together and would admire to have Colonel Masterson join him as partner and featured attraction, and he says kindly to me, “And you can be sure we’ll find a prominent role for yourself, Captain.” Which I thought was real generous of him, since he hadn’t seen me do anything but drink, but maybe that was enough.

  The trip back turned out not to be as comfortable as we expected, heavy rain falling for the entire two hundred mile, and Mrs. Cody’s phaeton didn’t have no top, so we was all soaked with water and splashed with mud, with Billy whining and cursing the whole way, plus under them extreme conditions we run out of liquor sooner than usual, on a stretch of open prairie where it couldn’t be replenished.

  But miserable as his state was, Billy’s first act on reaching Dodge was not a meal or a drink or a visit to the doctor to change his filthy bandages or, it not being Christmas in a leap year, a bath. What he had to do before anything else was go to the telegraph office and wire a jeering message to the sheriff of Ogallala about how he put one over on him.

  For me things went back to normal. I resumed a job at the Lone Star, though no longer as head barkeep. I moved back into the same hotel but a different and shabbier room with worse cracks in everything breakable like the window, the washbowl, and the thunder mug. There wasn’t no pitcher despite many threats to the series of shifty-looking persons at the so-called front desk, a packing crate with some key hooks on the wall behind, each of which denied being the owner. Now wouldn’t you think I could at least have afforded to buy a pitcher of my own? The truth was I had fell into a depressed state of mind after that episode at the Indian school, the main effects of which was postponed by the rescue of Billy Thompson, but the heavy drinking I got into on that trip, first I had done in years, maintained after returning to Dodge, made me even more melancholy than I would of been otherwise.

  Four decades of age, and what did I have to show for it? It was not exactly a new problem, but it recently got worse. Even Cody was younger than me, and I had been hearing about him for years. Everybody older, like Custer and Wild Bill and most of the Indians I had been close to, was dead. By steady work I had accumulated that sum of money I thought of as a nest egg but in truth was maybe only a couple hundred dollars, which hadn’t even earned the 2 percent interest offered by Amanda Teasdale’s Pa’s bank, on account of I had kept it under a floorboard in my room, fearing a bank holdup despite the presence of them famous gunfighters on the Dodge police force. But then I had spent it all on the legal defense of Wild Hog and his pals. Earning it back would take a long time and wouldn’t amount to that much when done. How in the devil could I make some real money? For I become convinced that money was the answer. If I had money I would of gotten more respect from Amanda, even though she thought she disapproved of that which was material. Money might attract hate to them which has it, but never results in disregard.

  One idea I never much entertained was getting rich through gambling. I had stopped playing poker after one time in Kansas City when I now regret to say, owing to a pressing need for cash, I cheated in a game with Wild Bill Hickok and come close to being shot by him, and I never tried anything else like “bucking the tiger” at faro, Bat’s favorite game, but while frequently winning at it you didn’t notice Bat becoming wealthy, and the same was true of Wyatt Earp. Business was the way to do that, I was convinced: providing goods and/or services at a price beyond what it cost to provide such. It was simple in principle, but fairly difficult to bring about successfully, else, though it seemed easier to do in the U.S.A. than anyplace other, everybody would of been rich. Or so anyhow it’s easy to say. But giving the matter considerable thought over many decades, I now believe that if everybody had a million, it stands to reason millionaires would be called poor.

  I didn’t gamble because I wanted to save my luck for continuing to survive the catastrophes from which I had had so many close escapes.

  Trouble was, whenever I’d get to planning my next move, my mind needed a little warming up, so I’d take one drink, which wasn’t enough, and then one more, which might of been adequate once it kicked in, but I was too impatient to wait that long, so I’d have a third, which was the first step on the road to definitely too much, but by then I would of begun to feel pretty good about myself and able to handle anything, including keeping at that edge without falling over, which I found was the most delusionary state known to man, for when you’re there you’re already drunk but don’t realize it and won’t till you’ve gone too far to recover.

  Anyway, I was in a corner so to speak when once again it was Bat Masterson who pointed the way out. He had went away again, this time to Kansas City, where, what a surprise, he played faro, but he came back to Dodge around the first of that year, which was, let me see, ’81.

  Now Wyatt Earp had been awhile, as aforementioned, with his innumerable brothers, down in Arizona Territory at a boomtown which had sprung up from sheer desert owing to the discovery of silver there a couple of years earlier by a prospector name of Ed Schieffelin, who was told all he’d find in the area was his tombstone, hence the name he give the place, and by 1880 a couple thousand people lived there, most of them having
to do with silver mining and the needs of them who did it, which included entertainment of the same type as that provided for cowboys in Dodge.

  Silver differed from gold in that individuals didn’t go with a pan to a stream and look for nuggets. Silver can’t be taken just by picking it up or even digging, but by chemically testing the rocks in which it is always combined with other elements, and if they contain sufficient ore, then a big operation is necessary to get it loose, involving big-scale crushing and processing mills. The Earp brothers went down there to turn a profit on such sideline opportunities as the presence of mines and mills offered, starting out with a familiar idea whenever a new strike in precious metals generated the birth of a new town, as for example Deadwood and the projected enterprise of Colorado Charley Utter and Wild Bill: a stage line from the new place to the largest nearby town already in existence, which in the case of Tombstone was Benson.

  But somebody else had beat them to it, so Wyatt, who never liked to dirty his hands at any real work, once again become a law-enforcement officer, as did his older brother Virgil, the former as deputy sheriff of the county and Virge as a deputy U.S. marshal.

  But I am getting ahead of myself, for I was still at Dodge with no thought of Tombstone and, as you are aware, no love for Wyatt Earp, when two events occurred. One was that not long after he come back to town again, Bat invited me to accompany him on another of his jaunts.

  “Tombstone?” I asks. “Heat and sand and Apaches? It ain’t an attractive thought, Bat.”

  “Drink enough and you won’t notice the first two,” says he with a snort of laughter. “And I thought you were a great friend of the Indian. Anyway, the Apaches have pulled in their horns. Tombstone’s the up-and-coming place for opportunity.” He went on about striking while the iron was hot: think the Earps would have gone there if it wasn’t the place to be?

  “I’m the wrong fellow to ask,” I told him. “I only know Wyatt, and I’ve generally been unfortunate in that.”

  “Come on,” Bat says, blue eyes twinkling above that big black mustache, “Wyatt thinks the world of you.” Bat was one of them friends who can’t believe you ain’t as fond of their friends as they are, even though he himself never liked Doc Holliday, Wyatt’s pal. “Look,” he goes on, “didn’t we have a good time with Bill Cody?”

  “Yeah, but that was only a few days, and it ain’t so far away. How long’s it take to get to Arizona Territory? That’s to hell and gone. I been in New Mexico, years back.” I poured him a refill. This happened so often I don’t bother to mention it. I wasn’t drinking, myself. I never did while on duty, being a professional.

  “You haven’t kept up with the times, Jack.” He pointed with his free hand in the direction of the railroad. “You take the train to Trinidad, where you transfer to the new Santa Fe line going south. Nothing could be more convenient. We’ll travel in comfort.”

  “That was supposed to be the idea with Mrs. Cody’s phaeton,” says I. “I’m still picking the mud out of my teeth.”

  He shrugs and grins. “Look at it this way, Jack: Have you really got anything better to do?”

  That got to me. It hurt my feelings some, but only because it was true. So I agreed, never knowing what I was letting myself in for. But now it’s so far in the past, I’m glad I did, for otherwise I would not of been able to add still another historical episode to a life uncommonly rich in them. That I was almost killed in so doing only adds to the interest, though at the time I didn’t see it in them terms.

  Before we headed for Tombstone, a couple days later, this other thing happened which was real unusual. Around dawn one morning I was woke by the sound of pistol fire outside the hotel. A gun shot will always bring me to life immediately though I have been asleep only a couple hours, as was the case then, but after I was awake I remembered previously, while sleeping, the persistent barking of a dog. I can hear certain sounds when asleep that don’t wake me up, but I register them all the same. I learned that when living with the Cheyenne: you hear a pony whinny, but it’s a different type of noise than the animal will make when being stolen by a Crow who has sneaked into the herd in the dead of night, so you don’t bother to get awake. But if you hear the one that says, “Grandfather, don’t let me be taken by this bad person, for I belong to a Human Being,” you jump up, grab your knife, run out, and sink it in the Crow’s heart, unless of course he’s too fast and does the same to you.

  But I had lost some of this sense, else I would of reacted right away to the barking dog, there on the dirt road out front, though I might be excused in part by the fact that my room was at the rear of the building.

  Ordinarily when you heard shots in Dodge, you did better to stay where you was so long as it weren’t in the line of fire, for onlookers often took strays or ricochets—and as bad as it might be to get shot by an intentional enemy, for my money it’s worse to get hurt by chance in somebody else’s fight—but that sixth sense that failed me in not being roused by the barking now come into play, and quick pulling on a pair of pants so I wouldn’t be caught again as at the Indian school (though now, in January, I was wearing longjohns) and putting on my boots, I run out in the street, where believe it or not who did I see but old Pard, that dog I left behind in Cheyenne several years before!

  It was lucky I got there when I did, for the drunk who had been shooting at him but missed was about to try again. This fellow could hardly stand up let alone point a gun accurately, but he wanted to keep trying and when I objected he allowed as how he’d be as happy to kill me first before doing so to this damned mutt.

  “Hold on,” I says. “I’m on your side. I can’t sleep for that barking. But you’re a little under the weather. Let me do it for you.”

  I held out my hand for his gun, but a man in that condition never believes he has a weakness, so he didn’t give it to me. But he hesitated slightly before turning it back on Pard, and I grabbed the weapon off him, kicked him in the shins to bring his face down, and smashed the heavy barrel of the pistol, Earp-style, on his head, crushing the hat and knocking him down and out, there at the edge of the street.

  Having unloaded what was left in the cylinder, I dropped the gun into the standing water of the nearest fire barrel and went back to where Pard was waiting with wagging tail and dangling tongue.

  “Pard!” I says. “You old son of a gun! How’d you get here?” You know how people talk to dogs, as if they’re going to get an answer, but I wanted to distract myself from the guilty feelings I had about leaving him at our camp outside Cheyenne, which, the way these things go, was worse now that I seen him again than when I did it.

  Now if you know only the kind of pets ladies keep indoors, or even sporting hounds, and so on, you might expect old Pard to make a greater display than he done when he seen me for the first time in more than three years, having tracked me over hundreds of miles, but just as he weren’t the type to bear a grudge, thank goodness, he had lived the sort of life in which the interests of survival tended to hold down emotional demonstrations, in which he reminded me of myself, so we never hugged or anything, but I was real glad to see him, a feeling which alternated with amazement at his feat, which exceeded anything I had heard of at the time, though in the many years since, now and again dogs have somehow followed their families at greater distances on foot while the humans used the motorcar, so when I tell about Pard it might be easier to believe than the experiences I relate concerning historical personages, though all are equally true.

  Anyway, I says, “I’m sure glad to see you, partner. You’re looking real well.” Which was a polite lie, for the tip of one of his ears was missing, with a ragged edge indicating something had chawed it off; his left eye he kept squinted almost shut; his hide was a shade lighter and redder owing to a coat of dried mud; and he limped bad on his left forefoot. Add a few burrs, and a streak of black-green at his neck from some cowflop he had rolled in, as dogs do, and you had the picture. Owing to the last-named, he had an even higher odor than usual, bringing
him to almost the stink of that drunk, who now indicated with a groan that he was, unfortunately, alive, so when a deputy marshal showed up in response to them shots, I told him about the illegally carried weapon, now in the fire barrel, and took Pard to a pump back of the nearby stable, where I drenched him with several gallons of water and washed off the filth though it was right cold and him and me was both shivering, but when he had shook hisself, wetting me further with the spray, and I dried him with an old horse blanket, he looked 100 percent improved. I judge that was the first real bath Pard ever had, and he didn’t like any part of it. I reckon at that moment he might of regretted tracking me down over all that time and distance, but I made it up to him by buying him a big breakfast heavy on meat.

  Now that he had a smell not so high as most of the people thereabout, I had no hesitation in giving him a home in my room, and though the management wasn’t too keen on this, it was the off season, the cattle drives generally taking place only during the warmer months, and the extra, and exorbitant, fifty cents a week I paid for Pard’s rent was welcome. But I never took him to work with me, even though the Lone Star too was in its quieter season: it was not the place for a decent dog. Anyhow he was an outdoor animal, so he roamed free while I was working, out in the countryside if I knew him, but by the same means by which he had tracked me throughout the years, he always knowed what time I got off even when I put in part of an extra shift if some other barkeep never showed up, and was waiting outside.