* * * * *
The way Buckskin told the story was that he had left Fort Smith when he was around my age, made it to Pueblo, Colorado, where he played part-time for the Rovers.
When he come up to Leadville—which was hurting all them years after the Panic of ’93, whatever that was —he found something he was good at.
“I’d hunted supper with a shotgun back in Arkansas, but Pa never owned a rifle,” he said. “There was a shooting contest over the Fourth of July, and an old-timer I kinda knew loaned me his rifle. I won.”
That got him a job hunting game for hotel restaurants for a while. He found a better job doing the same thing back in Pueblo, but, this being 1899, there wasn’t no Colorado State League no more, so he didn’t play much baseball. He hunted, became a better marksman, and got deputized by marshals after two bad men escaped from the pen in Cañon City, west of Pueblo. That’s where he shot one of the escapees in the leg on the Arkansas River, which Buckskin pronounced ARE-kan-sas, because he hailed from Arkansas. Everybody else knows it’s actually pronounced Are-KAN-sas, unless you come from Arkansas.
“Well, that ain’t a bad thing, is it?” I asked, not meaning how he pronounced Arkansas but rather shooting a fellow who escaped from prison.
“Considering what the man was in the pen for, I didn’t think so,” Buckskin said. “And the marshals were pleased.”
They patched up the convict’s leg and trapped his partner on a sandbar, who give hisself up without no need for no more shooting.
The next year, though, Buckskin got hired up in Sweetwater County in Wyoming, which is where he met Tom Horn, who I never met nor heard of and never will get to meet, on account that in 1903 they hanged him—not hung him, as Buckskin told me, explaining that a man is hanged but a picture is hung.
Well, I knew they hanged him, because I’d overheard Mr. Norris say they had hanged Horn using a Julian Gallows back on the train.
They hanged Tom Horn, Buckskin said, because he shot a fourteen-year-old boy, Willie Nickle, who he might’ve mistook for the kid’s pa. Then some lawman got Horn drunk to get him talking. Horn talked, and what he said didn’t help him at his trial. The lawman who got him drunk said that Horn told him that the shot that killed the boy was done at a range of three hundred yards, and that: “It was the best shot I ever made, and the dirtiest trick I ever done.”
The jury found Horn guilty. The judge sentenced him to die, and he did die after they hanged him three years back.
I was feeling sort of sick to my stomach, even though I knew nothing about this kid who got kilt by mistake. I asked: “Did Tom Horn really kill that boy?”
I asked him that, even though I feared he was going to tell me, no, Tom was innocent, for it was I, Ulysses Howard Skinner, who murdered the boy, just as I’m going to murder you. I guess the reason that ugly idea come to mind was that I recollected that train-ride conversation where Mr. Norris said Buckskin had shot two riders dead at four hundred yards.
But Buckskin didn’t say that, and, besides, he said the kid was kilt with a .30-30, and I knew Buckskin used a .45-90. The Widow Amy DeFee owned a .30-30, but I don’t think she kilt Willie Nickel, even though I wouldn’t put it past her.
“I don’t know,” Buckskin said. “I wasn’t there.”
You see, he had up and quit that big ranch up in Wyoming that had hired him as a stock detective—which meant shooting nesters in cold blood, which went against Buckskin’s nature—so he wasn’t even around when Tom Horn, or somebody, murdered Willie Nickel, a boy two years younger than I was.
Anyway, Buckskin found hisself in the Powder River country, where nobody knew nothing about baseball. That surprised me, because you’d think that a state that thought enough to let women vote and hold office would be smart enough to play baseball. Buckskin explained that it was too windy to play baseball in Wyoming, ’cause that wind would create havoc with the ball.
Living all my life in Kansas, I figured I knew all there was to know about wind, but I’m sure glad not to hail from Wyoming.
That Powder River country job got Buckskin in trouble. He met a woman—didn’t tell me her name—who had three brothers. Those fellows didn’t cotton to Buckskin and his buggy rides with their sister, so they beat him up right bad and left him to die. ’Course, Buckskin didn’t die, and he went back to the ranch and whupped one of the brothers bad, then rode away from the woman he loved, because he didn’t want the two brothers to take out their meanness on her. But them two brothers who didn’t get whupped went after Buckskin, and when they found him, they started shooting. Buckskin shot them dead out at four hundred yards, which I had already heard on the train to Axtell from Mr. Norris.
“But ain’t that self- defense?” I asked.
Buckskin smiled. “Their father is a judge, so I didn’t take any chances.”
Another bond. The Widow Amy DeFee’s pard was a judge, too.
“Didn’t you want to take the girl with you?” I asked him.
“After breaking one brother’s nose, jaw, and the fingers on his right hand? Then shooting her other two brothers dead? Those kind of things put a damper on a woman’s feelings, kid.”
After that, Buckskin drifted, hid out, and then in August of 1903, he happened to be in Colorado Springs, Colorado, when the Keystones were playing the Bloomer Girls. That’s when he met up with Mr. Norris and come up with the name Bill “Buckskin” Compton, alias Dolly Madison. He’d been hiding out with a mostly girl baseball team ever since.
“What about that marshal you knew?” I asked when Buckskin stopped talking. “The Dalton brother … the lawman who was kin to them fellows that got shot down like dogs over in Coffeyville.”
I remembered that because Caney, where we was, weren’t no more than twenty miles west of Coffeyville, which reminded me that Caney was maybe a hundred and forty miles southwest of Pleasanton, and if Judge Brett could find his way to Axtell, which was maybe two hundred miles northwest of Pleasanton, then surely he could find Caney, especially if he’d overheard where we was going to be playing next.
“Frank Dalton?” Buckskin smiled. “I met Frank when I was a kid. Just once. I’m what … six, seven … we were playing baseball in the streets. No bats. We used our hands.”
That left me thunderstruck. No bats. Russ Waddell had told me that he used a tobacco stick when he was a kid, and I told that to Buckskin who said that Russ come from South Carolina, where they grow tobacco, and farming was a lot more profitable than what Buck’s dad done for a living. He didn’t say what kind of work his pa done, although I knew he had tried to do something with turkeys, but I reckon it didn’t make him rich.
“No baseball, either,” Buckskin continued. “We were too poor to own a baseball. We wadded up torn pages from a newspaper.”
Now, that sounded dirt poor, and it got me to thinking that the Widow Amy DeFee and my pa had bought me gloves and bats and balls and even a Hawthorne bicycle to get me to games all across southern Kansas. Though the first time I played in Caney, I’d come down by train with the Widow Amy DeFee, because she said she had some business over in Tyro.
“Frank Dalton scared the tar out of us,” Buckskin said, and he did say tar. “Well, I guess it was that badge that he wore that scared us. I had just rifled a ball into the street off of David Ward. Dalton picked it up and said … ‘Keep it up, son. Baseball will take you places.’
“Marshal Dalton walked to his horse. A clerk outside one of the stores said … ‘You boys best listen to Marshal Dalton, and watch that you don’t get hurt playing in these streets.’ ”
That’s how Buckskin learnt the marshal’s name and how come he felt sad two weeks later when the whole town mourned Deputy Marshal Frank Dalton’s murder.
That was Buckskin’s story.
After checking his watch, he said: “Your turn, kid.”
Chapter Sixteen
Daily Blade
Concordia, Kansas • June 1, 1906
Considerable opposition has arisen in some quarters to the game of baseball advertised to occur at the fair grounds on Sunday, June 10, between the local team and a so-called “Bloomer Girl” bunch, and the aid of the county peace officers has been invoked to prevent it. County Attorney Sturges can find no law against Sunday baseball games and has so informed the complainants, but, not satisfied with his opinion, a request has been made, through him, for a ruling on the question by Attorney General Coleman.
I didn’t take near as long as Buckskin had to tell my story, ’cause it didn’t cover years, just weeks. There ain’t no need to recite all I told Buckskin, ’cause if you’ve come this far in my narrative, you already know how I became Lucy Totton and joined the Bloomer Girls.
We were both on the run from evil folks, and after I’d told him pretty much everything, he nodded solemnly, leaned forward, shook his head.
“Kid, why on earth didn’t you tell the Axtell police chief ? He could’ve arrested that judge and gotten a warrant issued for your stepmother.”
My head moved back and forth, hard and fast like it does when any umpire calls a ball four inches off the plate a strike. I know I can’t let an umpire know my thoughts about his call, so I just shake my head. To the umpire it may look like that means I’m thinking—By thunder, I can’t believe I let that pitch go —but what it really means, but could never get proved, is that I was disputing the accuracy of the umpire’s judgment.
“No, no, no, no,” I kept saying whilst my head shook, giving Buckskin the pitifullest look I could muster. “Nobody’s gonna believe me. I’m sixteen years old, and you ain’t never met the Widow Amy DeFee. She ain’t like Ruth. She ain’t like that gal you took a shine to in the Powder River Country. By thunder, she’s meaner than Maggie Casey. Grown men think she’s kind and loving, when she’s the vilest, repulsivest, meanest, contemptiblist …”
Buckskin held out his hand, so I stopped talking for a maybe two seconds before I started up again.
“You ain’t never met her, Buck. You don’t know what all she can do. And maybe you ought to think about what would happen if the law found out about me and her. The newspapers, too … they’d start reporting that all of us Bloomer Girls ain’t really females.”
Buckskin grinned. “They’ve been doing that … most of them … since I joined the team almost three years ago.”
“But they’d be writing about you, too. They’d be asking you questions about me. They’d be wanting to print whatever name you come up with.”
His smile disappeared. “I see your point,” Buckskin said, though I ain’t sure he did because he also said: “Are you absolutely certain this is how you want to play this hand?”
Not being certain about nothing, I just nodded, on account that McConnell and Waddell entered the room and said that Caney, Kansas, had to be the worst town they’d ever struck. They said that you couldn’t find nothing but factories that made bricks and glass, plus smelters that smelted lead and zinc, and oil wells and wells that brung up natural gas, and that the whole county stunk worser than Sour Lake, Texas. They suggested that Kansas would be wise if they’d just cede this whole parcel of ground to the Osage Indians, for it wasn’t good for nothing, excepting holding the ends of the earth together.
But I’ll tell you something pure gospel. Caney might have stunk of oil and gas and bricks and glass and lead and zinc and goober peas, which are plumb disgusting, but the folks sure piled out to watch us Bloomer Girls play baseball against the homeboys. The gate receipts made Mr. Norris, and I quote, “happier than a pig in clover.” Being from a railroad town, I don’t know much about pigs nor clover.
Whilst my little talk with Buckskin maybe inspired me to play ball slightly better that day, all in all, we done pretty good, and Mr. Norris was real happy.
That didn’t last once we reached Concordia, where Mr. Norris learnt that the city, county, and state objected to playing baseball games on a Sunday, so Concordia refused to play us. Our quick thinking and angry manager scheduled a game in St. Paul, instead.
If you ain’t from Kansas, eastern Kansas especially, then you might not know that St. Paul, Kansas, is maybe eighty miles from Pleasanton, which ain’t as close to the Widow Amy DeFee as Fort Scott, where I joined the Bloomer Girls, but, by road, it is closer than Chanute. It was nearer than I wanted to be.
* * * * *
My worries came true, because the widow showed up at the ball game. Brung the judge with her. Took some doing, because the game weren’t played in St. Paul but at R. S. McGowen’s pasture. The fact that St. Paul had a railroad line going to it, but R. S. McGowen’s farm didn’t, might be the only reason I’m alive to write this.
We were playing the Valley Boys, and all the folks in St. Paul said they were the fastest ballists in the whole state, which might be true. But the folks in St. Paul don’t just put on a baseball game. Before I throwed the first pitch—I was taking over for Waddell, who was feeling plumb miserable and said he’d have to get better just to die—they showed off their starting nine and their muffin nine by having them run footraces. They put on what they called fat man’s races, in which their catcher and two muffins beat some old men and two younger ones who must’ve each weighed three hundred pounds. None of them ballists ran in the ladies egg race, as none of them was women, of course, but they did take part in the tug-of-war contest, they rolled ten pins in an alley somebody had erected just for the baseball game, and finally, they went to the shooting gallery. They topped it off by having refreshments, which included not only velvet ice cream from Brogan’s parlor but also ice cream freezers from C. M. Koenig’s place.
Four of their players got so sick, the umpire called the game after seven innings, which is what saved my life, because the Widow Amy DeFee, her man-killing judge, plus a couple of fellows who must’ve been hired by her, had trouble finding out where the game was being held.
They got there after the Valley Boys—the sick, the feeble, and the just plain tuckered-out players—were leaving. The grandstand and canvas fences were already down and being put into wagons. And us Bloomer Girls was preparing to ride over to the depot and take the westbound Katy.
Standing behind the wagon that held our grips, I heard the Widow Amy DeFee’s voice: “Excuse me, kind sir, but I am seeking my runaway son.” Made me almost as sick as them Valley Boys was.
I held my breath as she continued to talk, figuring Brett must have recognized me back in Axtell, after all. Heard her say: “We have reason to believe that he is pretending to be a Bloomer Girl.”
Still wearing my uniform, I figured I was dead, certain sure.
Yet luck was with me, because my grip with both my female clothing and my man duds was just inside the wagon, so I jumped into the back of it. I thanked the Almighty that the canvas tarp would allow me to get out of my Bloomer outfit and put on my suit bought back in Emporia. I left my bat and my glove and everything that would have identified me as a Bloomer Girl and hightailed it out of the wagon, trying not to act like I wasn’t about to die of no apoplexy.
“Hey, you!” the Widow Amy DeFee called out.
I kept walking but glanced back and saw she was looking at Pearl Murphy, who was about my height, had my hair color, even if hers was longer and curlier than mine. Pearl stopped, though I don’t know why she did. As she stood there, one of the widow’s gunmen strode up to her and ripped off her ball cap and pulled her hair. This made Pearl yell, made me grimace and feel ashamed to see that fine outfielder getting abused on account of me.
I would’ve stopped and come to Pearl’s rescue, but Nelse McConnell, four Valley Boys who weren’t that sick, the pasture owner, and two Osage Indians who’d come up to watch baseball and eat ice cream freezers, two deputies, and four of our crew all ran to protect Pearl Murphy. When the cur who’d manhandled our left fielder reached for the revolver he wore high on
his hip, the Widow Amy DeFee hollered: “Walt Coburn, don’t be a fool!” That stopped him, as did a deputy who had drawn his revolver and aimed it at Walt Coburn. Meanwhile, the other deputy had his gun pointed at the other fellow the widow had brought.
The Widow Amy DeFee tried to explain, but by then Maggie Casey had come up and kicked the fellow who had been rude, disrespectful, and plumb vicious to Pearl Murphy right between his legs. It took the farmer, an Osage, and one of the Valley Boys to pull Maggie off that gunman.
Though I had slowed and was glancing back every few seconds, I kept on walking, sweating till I was wetter than a bluegill. Kept walking all those miles to the depot and got on the train and knew I’d escaped certain death. The widow and her hired men were detained by the lawmen long enough that the Katy moved out, taking us to our next town.
When I told Buckskin, who hadn’t seen the ruction, what had happened, he told me I’d done the right thing by not trying to assist Pearl Murphy, because had the Widow Amy DeFee recognized me for certain, there likely would’ve been shooting, and innocent folks could’ve been hurt or even killed. Including me.
Buckskin also said: “Kid, we must get you out of Kansas.”
Did I mention that we won that game fair and square?
Chapter Seventeen
Globe-Republican
Dodge City, Kansas • July 26, 1906
Charlie Barngrover, the once-upon-a-time Dodge City baseball pitcher, has joined the “National Bloomers” and is wearing bloomers and appearing as “Lady Rupert, one of the two world-renowned lady pitchers.”
“Ed,” Buckskin asked Mr. Norris, “what have you done about scheduling games in Colorado?”
Reading over some newspapers he’d found on the seat aboard the train, Mr. Norris looked up as Buckskin and me slid into the seats across from him.
“Why?”
Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Page 12