The jury found the Widow Amy DeFee guilty of every indictment, numbering sixteen, and while Judge Larry DeFee of Breckenridge had requested the widow be extradited back to the State of Colorado after the Kansas trial so she could be tried for kidnapping and graft and a slew of other charges, Judge Wheeler said there wouldn’t be no need for that, since he was sentencing the Widow Amy DeFee to be hanged—actually, he said hung, but nobody, not even Buckskin, corrected him—by the neck until she was dead, dead, dead.
That’s when the Widow Amy DeFee got ashen-faced, and swooned, and her lawyer cried out: “J-J-J-Judge, you ca-ca-ca-cannot hang a-a-a l-l-lady.”
The judge hammered his gavel a few times and said: “Counselor, I’m not hanging a lady.”
Buckskin reckons they’ll likely commute the sentence to life, but that life in Lansing ain’t no life at all.
* * * * *
Buckskin and me rode the Frisco down to Baxter Springs for the Bloomer Girls baseball game. We weren’t decked out like girls, and we even had to pay two bits each to get into the new grandstand that the rehired old crew had put up, ’cause the new Bloomer Girl taking tickets didn’t know who we were.
Maggie Casey coached the girls and still played right field, at least up until she got thrown out of the game by the umpire. Ruth Eagan did a fine job at first base and started the rally in the last inning, just after Maggie Casey got tossed by the deputy sheriff who was umpiring. Louis Friedman was there taking notes for some article he’d be writing for the Sporting News or Variety or whoever might pay him, even though he didn’t need no money ’cause his family owned about half of Topeka. We sure owe his family a pile of gratitude. Especially, for the money from his family that allowed Friedman to take over the National Bloomer Girls of Kansas City and buy a new portable grandstand and canvas fences. Mr. Norris ain’t been seen or heard from since he never showed up in Greeley. He’s suspected of disappearing into Mexico. I hope he eats some bad oysters.
After that ball game, the Bloomer Girls and the Baxter Springs boys shook hands and they were all in high spirits. As I stood there watching, Buckskin asked me if I wanted to go down and say hello or good-bye to the girls.
But I didn’t want to. “I’ve said my good-byes,” I told him, and watched Louis Friedman and Ruth Eagan hold hands as they left the field together while the crew took down the equipment.
* * * * *
Buckskin and me took another train to Kansas City, where I reckon this story sort of started back in 1897, when I first taken notice of baseball as a seven-year-old. There, Buckskin told me we were heading out again, though I wasn’t sure where we were going.
As the train rumbled along, Buckskin said: “I think Maggie will do a good job.”
“She kicked dirt all over home plate,” I reminded him.
He nodded.
“Over the umpire’s shoes,” I added.
Another nod.
“Then after the umpire warned her, she went back to the bench, grabbed a bucket of baseballs, and dumped them all over home plate.”
“Yeah,” Buckskin said. “That’ll be some story in the Sporting News.”
“What Maggie done wasn’t nice.”
“Kid, baseball isn’t always about being nice. Maggie wasn’t doing that because she thought the umpire was an idiot. She did it to throw some fire into the bellies of the Bloomer Girls. And it worked. Four consecutive singles followed. Baxter Springs fell apart. The pitcher lost control. The Bloomer Girls couldn’t lose after that, and Baxter Springs had no chance of winning. All of that was Maggie’s doing. She’ll be some manager and coach. I’ll have to remember that when we get to Salida.”
“Salida?” I asked.
Grinning, he reached into his coat pocket and showed me one of them yellow telegraph papers. Salida, I read, had offered Buckskin the job of managing their team, and since we were on a westbound train, I figured he’d taken the job. And iffen that telegrapher didn’t make no mistake, I don’t blame him for accepting. The amount they were willing to pay him seemed mighty fine.
“Ain’t Salida where they lynched the fellow who had been coaching their team?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Don’t that make you nervous?”
He chuckled. “He wasn’t hung for losing ball games. And I don’t plan on robbing any store.”
“Hanged,” I told him. “Not hung.”
“Nice job, kid. I was testing you.”
The train clicked along the rails. I felt myself getting sleepy.
“By the way,” he said, “I need a second baseman.”
At those words, I felt wide awake.
“Ain’t Salida where them geese was in the outfield?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“That was a pretty town,” I recollected.
He told me what Salida paid its ballists, which weren’t as much as I’d gotten with the Bloomer Girls but considerable more than the Widow Amy DeFee had ever allowed me to keep. I leaned back and pictured that waitress in Salida who’d talked to me about geese and trout and had come to the ball game and cheered us on the same that she did the Salida players. She sure was sweet and pretty, meaning the waitress in Salida, and not Ruth. I even began hoping that Louis Friedman would make Ruth happy.
“You got yourself a second baseman,” I told Buckskin.
Buckskin held out his hand, and we shook.
Then he said: “There’s just one more thing, kid. Get your hair cut. I won’t have any player on my club who looks like a girl.”
THE END
Author’s Note
Emporia Gazette
Emporia, Kansas • August 20, 1906
An Emporia boy, whose name is withheld because it is his first offense and also on account of his parents, is playing baseball in another state with the Boston Bloomer Girls!
The epigraphs, like the one above, along with most of the names of the Bloomer Girls, are about all that’s true in this novel.
History records that most Bloomer baseball teams had a few male players disguised as women when they played town teams, not just across the American West but the entire United States. Kansas City fielded just one of many “National” Bloomer teams.
The idea for this novel came about while reading Gerald C. Wood’s Smoky Joe Wood: The Biography of a Baseball Legend and from watching Billy Wilder’s 1959 movie comedy Some Like It Hot too often. Wood was a young teen when he played for the Kansas City Bloomer Girls in 1906. Other sources include Women in Baseball: The Forgotten History by Gai Ingham Berlage and Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers by Debra A. Shattuck. The Bloomer Girls’ final comeback in Breckenridge is a not-quite-literal though fairly faithful recreation (except for the setting and the snow) of my favorite Little League baseball victory as a coach. My wife says she had never seen me look so happy when I ran and hugged the boy who scored the walk-off, winning run. If you could’ve seen the smile on the boy’s face, you’d understand why.
I should also thank the Colorado State Library; Denver Public Library; Kansas State Historical Society; Missouri State Historical Society; University of Maryland Archives; the Giamatti Research Center at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York; and Newspapers.com and NewspaperArchive.com.
For any reader who played really close attention, I tip my Kansas City Royals cap to Jack Schaefer and Charles Portis, master writers who helped point me on this career path, and sprinkled in a few other names of Western writers. And a deep thanks to all the Little League parents who trusted me with their ballplayers as a board officer, coach, and umpire. Finally, heartfelt appreciation to my literary agents, Vicki Piekarski and the late Jon Tuska, for putting up with me for twenty years, for their eagle eyes and wise counsel, and for letting me write—for the most part—what I wanted to write.
Johnny D. Boggs
Santa Fe, New Me
xico
About the Author
In 2019, Johnny D. Boggs won his eighth Spur Award from Western Writers of America—the most in the nonprofit association’s sixty-six-year history. Booklist has called him “among the best Western writers at work today,” and Publishers Weekly said: “Boggs’s narrative voice captures the old-fashioned style of the past.”
A native of South Carolina and former newspaper journalist in Texas, Boggs has written historical Westerns (Greasy Grass ; Hard Way Out of Hell ); traditional novels (The Big Fifty ; MacKinnon); comic novels (East of the Border ; Mojave); baseball Westerns (Camp Ford; The Kansas City Cowboys); Civil War novels (Wreaths of Glory; And There I’ll Be a Soldier); Colonial/Revolutionary War novels (The Cane Creek Regulators; Ghost Legion); Western mysteries (the Killstraight series); young-adult fiction (Doubtful Cañon; South by Southwest ; Taos Lightning ); and nonfiction ( Jesse James and the Movies ; Billy the Kid on Film, 1911-2012; The American West on Film); along with short fiction and short nonfiction. His Spur Awards came for his short story “A Piano at Dead Man’s Crossing” (2002) and for his novels Camp Ford (2006), Doubtful Cañon (2008), Hard Winter (2010), Legacy of a Lawman (2012), West Texas Kill (2012), Return to Red River (2017), and Taos Lightning (2019). He has also won the Western Heritage Wrangler Award from the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum for his novel Spark on the Prairie: The Trial of the Kiowa Chiefs (2004); the Arkansiana Award for Juvenile/Young Adult from the Arkansas Library Association for Poison Spring (2015); and the Milton F. Perry Award from the National James-Younger Gang for his novel Northfield (2007).
Boggs has also written for more than fifty newspapers and magazines, and is a frequent contributor to Wild West and True West magazines.
He lives with wife Lisa and son Jack in Santa Fe.
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