The Old Colts

by Swarthout, Glendon

  Bat pounds in elation on the steering wheel. But then, as they come within a city block, close enough to identify the heads of the four thugs, two in front, two in the rear, one of these bald, tractor and wagon pass in opposite directions and the way is cleared for the Studebaker, which spurts around the Mogul and once again extends its lead.

  “Goddammit!” rages Bat. “I told you we should’ve got a Hudson Super-Six!”

  Now they can see, down the road on the horizon, the leafy bower and elevator tower which is Garden of Eden. And now they can hear, in their rear, the keening of a siren. It is of course that of Peace Officer Harvey Wadsworth, mounted on his Indian Powerplus, in full hue and cry after the criminals. Siren screaming, he whizzes by the Tin Lizzie as though it were standing still, bending low over the handlebars and doing the factory-guaranteed seventy-three-plus mph, hat blown from his head, goggles over his eyes, the expression on his cherubic cheeks carved by wind into one of superhuman concentration. Opportunity may knock but once, young Harvey knows, and surely this is the biggest bang of his career.

  Bat and Wyatt watch as the motorcycle closes the gap. The dark green sedan seems to slow in response to the siren. There are tiny flashes of light from it—gunfire. The Indian careens off the highway and plows into a fence and through the fence, where it somersaults into corn which will be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Like a child’s toy, a jumping-jack, the rider’s body jumps twenty feet in the air on impact with the fence, then drops to earth to lie in a sprawl of blood, broken bones, and baby blue.

  This cuts the comedy. This changes the water on the minnows. Bat and Wyatt pass the remains of the peace officer, snatch glances at them, then at each other. Bat’s gray eyes glitter. Wyatt’s face is grim, his eyes a cold and lethal blue. Harvey Wadsworth wore a badge. He was what they were long ago. Now he has been gunned down in the performance of his duty, and they have failed in theirs. Progress has made it impossible for them to back his play. In the old days lawmen backed lawmen to the death. Many the time, shotguns at the ready, Bat and Wyatt and Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman and Jim Masterson and Morgan Earp covered rear doors and side streets and back alleys for each other when one was in a tight. That was another century, however, a simple century, and these two perfect, gentle knights in the Model T have lived beyond that time, into a new and unnatural. They could not have covered Harvey Wadsworth—blame it on the infernal combustion engine. But are they whipped? Not by a long shot. Are they too deef to hear the wolf howl, too mossbacked to make their own play? Hell, no. And so, full of fight, they forget the why and wherefore of the morning, the long trail by train into their past, and its purpose; they lay aside the subject of the loot. If they could not stop the taking of a life, they can at least, by God, avenge it.

  The chase continues. The road over the prairie is straight as the part in a bartender’s hair. Again the Studie and its four villains draw away from the flivver and its two-man posse. Wyatt twists in the seat, bends his angular frame over the seat back, reaches to the floor of the rear compartment, and comes up with his ancient buffalo gun, the one he had taken from its glass case in the Beeson Museum in exchange for forty dollars—the great .50-caliber Sharp’s. Standing the rifle upright, he searches a pocket, finds the single three-inch-long cartridge which had been exhibited with the gun, and loads it. With this very blunderbuss, when in his twenties, he had earned his living with feats of marksmanship and mountains of hides which had earned him, in turn, the envy of every hunter and skinner between the Arkansas and the Canadian.

  He plants his left knee on the seat, hoists himself, leans forward, lays the long barrel of the Sharp’s across the top of the windshield, shoulders the rifle, and braces himself with right foot on the floorboard and left elbow on the windshield.

  “Blow out a tire!” yells Bat.

  “I intend to!”

  Wyatt Earp takes aim. At forty mph the Ford roars and rattles, shakes and shimmies. The range is half a mile. Just then the red line on the Boyce Moto-Meter rises to “Danger—Steaming!” and a plume of steam gushes from the radiator, obscuring vision. The shot cannot be made.

  Bat sucks his breath.

  The one, the only Wyatt Earp fires.

  The report splits the eardrums.

  Half a mile down the road the sedan veers, slows, veers, slows, and wobbles. The rear right-hand tire throws strips of rubber. Then the Studebaker disappears from view in Garden of Eden.

  The Ford full-steams ahead until, as it nears civilization, Bat cuts the engine and lets the vehicle coast to a stop in the shade of the first tree. They get out of the car.

  “They’ll hunt a hole,” says Wyatt over the whistle of steam. “They’ve got a lame animal.”

  “They’re in there, all right,” Bat agrees.

  “Well, let’s find ‘em.”

  They raise hats and draw guns, then start together at a measured pace into Garden of Eden.

  It is even less than a village—half a dozen small frame houses secluded in high cottonwoods and sycamores and Chinese elms on the left side of the road. They see an old woman’s face at a window. An old man emerges from an outhouse, buckling his belt. In a front yard two children play, a boy and a girl, and, at the sight of two men striding down the center of the road with guns in hands, a comely young woman hurries into the yard and clucks her chicks into the house. Bat smiles and tips her a polite derby.

  They approach a general store with a gas pump out front on the same side of the road as the houses. They walk more slowly now, in and out of sunshine, in and out of shade, old Colts swinging at their sides. Except for blackbirds in the trees and robins in the grass they walk in silence, as though Garden of Eden, interested more in fiction than in fact, is sleeping late. It is a fair, fresh spring morning.

  “Here we go again,” says Bat, bemused. “Gathering nuts in May.”

  “Hold it,” says Wyatt.

  They stop.

  On the right side of the road, opposite the houses and general store, a hundred yards away, there are no trees. Instead, rising higher than any tree, visible for miles around, rears the tower of a grain elevator, railroad spur line running beside it at the rear. The elevator is painted pure white, and below its top, in blue capitals, is lettered “GARDEN OF EDEN CO-OP.”

  “There,” says Wyatt. “Behind.”

  “They’ve gotta change that tire,” says Bat. “Two on the tire, I bet, and two lookouts.”

  “‘Um. Let’s see if we draw fire.”

  “Okeh.”

  They walk again, toward the elevator.

  Ninety yards, eighty yards, and they are fired on, one warning round apparently from the side of the tower, and missed by a mile. They neither flinch nor falter, but walk on at a left oblique, keeping the tower between them and the men behind it.

  There are a thousand and more grain elevators in Kansas, like as peas in a pod and called, in the vernacular of the grain trade, “bins.” They are cylindrical and built of concrete, with walls eight inches thick. They stand eighty to ninety feet high. The diameter of a bin is approximately fifteen feet, the circumference forty-seven. The sole function of such a structure is storage. Wagons or trucks loaded with wheat or corn are driven from the fields to the bins and weighed at the “scalehouse” by the “scaleman” to determine the weight, hence the number of bushels, of the load. The wagon or truck is then moved over a grated pit, the sides of the vehicle are removed, and the grain is shoveled into the pit, where a power-driven “belt leg” lifts it to the top of the bin and dumps it in. The average elevator stores approximately eighteen thousand bushels, or nineteen million pounds. When orders to ship grain are received by the cooperative, boxcars are shunted along the spur line and positioned by the elevator. Car doors are slid open, “grain doors” or planks eight feet long and eighteen inches high are laid atop one another inside the open doors to prevent spillage, and the long “unload spout” of galvanized steel, built into the elevator, is swung over and down and into the car and opened. Gr
ain flows by gravity into the boxcar, which holds two thousand bushels. When the car is full, doors are shut and the next car moved to the unload spout. The bin of the Garden of Eden Co-Op is on this dramatic day in May filled to far less than its capacity with two thousand plus bushels of wheat known as “hard winter red,” the pride of Kansas and a variety invaluable in the milling of flour.

  Bat and Wyatt reach the wall of the elevator. Wyatt nods to the right, indicates that he will take the left, and revolvers raised, backs tight to the wall, they inch along the concrete, moving in opposite directions round the mighty mulberry bush.

  At the edge of his left eye Bat can perceive the rear half of the Studebaker, parked in behind the bin. It is raised two feet off the ground. They’ve had time to jack it up by the bumper, but not enough to pry off the tatters of the tire and install the spare. He squats. Under the sedan, on the far side, he spots pantlegs and a pair of black brogans. He eases erect, crosses his chest with the Colt, aims at the jack from forty feet, and fires. The jack whangs from the bumper, the car comes down with a thud, exposing a head on the far side, and Bat fires again, instantly, drilling the thug between the eyes. He crashes on his back. Astonished and delighted by his accuracy, Bat bounces toward the sedan like a boy, out and away from the protection of the elevator.

  He’d be perforated, but Wyatt, stalking round the other side of the tower, sees a man near the top of a ladder leaning against the wall aim a .38 automatic at the unsuspecting Bat, and yells. Distracted, the crook fires and misses, allowing Wyatt the split second needed to get off a snap shot which hits him squarely. The man drops his pistol. Wyatt comes out of concealment. The man on the ladder reaches into his shirt as though for another weapon, and deliberately Wyatt puts a second slug in him. Still he does not fall from the ladder. To the amazement of the two spectators, he begins slowly to descend the ladder, rung by rung.

  He is a gross crook, broadshouldered and bullnecked and bald as a hen’s egg, and, despite his agony, despite the internal damage done by the two doses of lead, he continues to come down the wooden ladder, which is at least eighteen feet long and stands against the wall with its upper end propped just below a manhole with a hinged iron cover. Bat and Wyatt stare at him. He turns his head to speak.

  “You’re not cops,” he groans. “Not your business.”

  “We made it ours,” says Wyatt. “Where’s the other two?”

  “Where’s the money?” asks Bat.

  Rung by rung Baldy descends, turning to see Bat. “Who the hell’re you?”

  “Bat Masterson. That’s Wyatt Earp.”

  “Like shit,” groans Baldy, lets go of the ladder, slides the last rungs, and hits the ground dead as a carp in a cup of spit.

  Bat and Wyatt approach the varmint, stand over him, stare down at him.

  “That’s two for Harvey Wadsworth,” says Wyatt. “Two to go.”

  “He didn’t believe us either, the dumb son-of-a-bitch,” says a scornful Bat. “Who else did he think could shoot like this?”

  They proceed to the Studebaker to inspect the yegg Bat has deceased. The hole between his eyes is neat as a pin.

  “My God, look at that!” Bat exclaims.

  “What is it?”

  “That, my friend, is a tommygun.”

  It lies beside the yegg—short stock and barrel, round steel drum attached below the point where stock ends and barrel begins, turnkey in the center of the drum. The words “Auto Ordnance Corp. Col. Thomas Thompson” are stamped into the drum.

  “I’ve never seen one, but I’ve heard of ‘em,” says Bat. “The latest thing. Developed for the Army—but crooks would have ‘em first, of course. I expect Rothstein and his hoods have a-plenty. So these guys were real pros—prob’ly from Kansas City or somewhere.”

  “How does it work?”

  “Also called a submachine gun. Forty-five caliber, spring-loaded. Well, that drum holds fifty rounds in a clip. Jam in the drum, wind up the key, hold the trigger, and you get off fifty rounds faster’n you can say Jack Robinson.”

  Wyatt holsters his Peacemaker and picks up the weapon. “Hold it like a baby,” warns Bat. “Good thing I got this bastard before he could open up. He’d have cut me to pieces.”

  Wyatt is studying the elevator and the long ladder under the manhole. “They must be inside—the other two. And the money.”

  “Or over there in the trees, on the lam.”

  “Only one way to find out.” Wyatt points. “Why don’t you shinny up that ladder and open the cover on that manhole. Easy like. If they’re in there, they’ll let you know.”

  Bat backs off. “Oh, no. I can’t stand heights. I can’t even get up on a stepladder.”

  “O.K.” Wyatt hands over the tommygun and starts for the ladder.

  Bat follows, reaching apologetically into his jacket. “Here—use this or they’ll take your fingers off.”

  Wyatt accepts the ruler with its maxim, “A Penny Saved Is A Penny Earned,” steps over Baldy’s body, and mounts the ladder.

  Bat is glad to wait and spectate. “That Millie Sughrue,” he recalls. “What a looker!”

  It is an eighteen-foot ladder. The manhole has enough diameter to admit someone to clean the bottom of the bin—presumably its purpose—and a hinged lid or cover which is open a crack, perhaps to let in light. Keeping an eye on the cover, Wyatt climbs just high enough to reach with his right arm, to insert the ruler under the cover, and with a flick of his hand to swing it open wide.

  It’s like busting a hornets’ nest. A blast of gunfire blows a spread of bullets through the hole, shredding the ruler and causing Wyatt to duck instinctively even though he’s shielded by eight inches of concrete.

  Carefully he comes down the ladder. Together, he and Bat sidle out of range at the base of the tower.

  “You were right, all right,” Bat admits.

  “Wish I wasn’t.”

  “Damn em.”

  “We’ve got a bearcat by the tail. And we don’t have time to wait ‘em out.” Wyatt frowns and rearranges some splayed hairs in his mustache. “Everybody in Dodge knows the bank’s been hit by now, and Harvey went after ‘em—this way. Any minute now, half the town’ll be here—at least whatever law they’ve got left. Maybe the county Sheriff and deputies.”

  Bat, too, studies the elevator. “Talk about holed up. How to get at ‘em, or get ‘em out. Tougher than lobster out of a shell.”

  Wyatt nods, then does a double take. “That’s it.”

  “What’s it?”

  “I know how. You just said it. Bat, we’re going up that big pecker—to the top. Look.” With an arm Wyatt follows a row of iron rungs built into the wall of the elevator all the way from ground level to the top—eighty or ninety feet. Bat goes white as a sheet. “It’s the only way,” Wyatt asserts.

  “The hell you say!”

  “Listen—on the other side of that wall are two more murdering bastards and fifty, sixty thousand dollars—d’you want ‘em or not?”

  “I know, but my God—”

  “What’d we come to Kansas for—learn how to drive a car?”

  Bat shakes his head. “Wyatt, I’d never make it,” he implores. “I’d fall. And whatta we do when we’re up there? I don’t get it.”

  “I’ll tell you on top. Let’s go.”

  “You tell me now!”

  “Trust me.”

  “Goddammit!”

  Rrrriiiippppp!

  Halfway up, Bat first, Wyatt a close second for support, the one, the only Bat Masterson rips off a tremendous fart of fear in his friend’s face.

  “Damn you,” growls Wyatt.

  “I can’t help it! I’m scared!”

  “Keep going.”

  “I just remembered—we gotta climb down!”

  “You shoot another rabbit, I’ll see to it you’re down damn fast.”

  Before starting the ascent, Wyatt had pulled his belt from its loops and belted the tommygun to his side. He’d had Bat reload both revolvers, holster
one and stick the other under his belt.

  Near the top Bat stops. “No, no, I can’t. Wyatt, I’m finished.”

  “Don’t look down.”

  “I’m weak as a cat. After last night, this is too much for me. A man my age—”

  Wyatt reaches up and raps him in the rump with a fist. “Onward and upward.”

  “Oh my God.”

  Wyatt raps him again.

  Bat moves, but slowly. “I wish I was anywhere but here—even Grogan’s.” He stops.

  Wyatt raps him again.

  Bat moves, but slowly. “How I ever let you talk me into coming way out here in the sticks I’ll never know. I could be hoisting one with the boys on Broadway, I could be safe at home with my dear wife, I—”

  “Shuddup and giddup.”

  They reach the rim of the great cylinder and crawl onto the flat top. Bat stands, sways, Wyatt holds him, and they look out over the Lord’s majestic pool table, which is Kansas. Above them, puffing along like farm implements, little white clouds till blue and heavenly fields. From this vantage they command also, it seems, the entire U.S. of A., from the Catskills over the Rockies all the way to the Sierra Nevada. They scout the black highway arrowing through verdant green from Garden of Eden, below, to the trees and church steeples of Dodge. There is no unusual traffic on the road, which means no pursuit of the bankrobbers has yet been organized. Wyatt turns Bat by an elbow toward a large open manhole near the far edge, cover lying beside it.

  “Keep your voice down,” he mutters. “See that hole? Maybe a ladder down there, inside, I dunno. Anyway, that’s my idea. Ricochet.”

  “Ricochet?”

  “You made me think of it, mentioning lobster. The night in that restaurant we were eating lobster—I recollect shell flying all over the place. Ricochet.”

  “Oh, sure.” Bat unties his bandanna and mops his brow. “That shoot-out I had in Dodge with Peacock and Updegraff, in ‘81. Ricochet took a newspaper right out of a guy’s hands reading it in Dr. McCarty’s drugstore. Slugs’ll do funny things.”