He reserved a more sincere embrace for Ned Buntline a few nights later, when the journalist presented him with a handsome new Remington rifle at a reception Buntline gave for him. The initials "W. F. C." were engraved on the brass back strap.
"You'll not have to stand so close to your next Indian," said Buntline, visibly touched and embarrassed by his friend's display of emotion.
Will laughed. "I'll have to charge it with rock salt, or any game I bring down will spoil by the time I reach it."
The next day the rotund biographer accompanied Will via the New York Central Railroad to Westchester, Pennsylvania, where they pulled at the bell of a large brick dwelling off the main boulevard and handed their cards to the black maid who answered. She showed them into a comfortable drawing room lit by a brass lamp and asked them to wait, withdrawing on silent crepe soles.
Buntline toyed nervously with his fob. His usually rumpled hair was pomaded and parted in the exact center and his high stiff collar was plainly cutting into the folds on his neck. "What sort of fellow is this uncle of yours?" he asked his companion.
"I have no idea." Although equally cowed by the unfamiliar surroundings, Will appeared to have reached accord with his heavy winter suit and maroon necktie. He was studying a large hunting print on the wall over the mantel. "Colonel Guss married my mother's sister, but she has been dead for some years and we've never met."
"I am to be your artillery support, is that about the size of it?"
"That's exactly the size of it." Grinning.
After a few minutes, a tall man with softly graying hair brushed carefully over the tops of his long ears entered the parlor. His light-colored eyes were set in a thicket of creases carved by wind and sun, which was nearly as dark as Will's. They went to Buntline first, lingered on him for a brief, polite moment, then moved to the scout. The smile behind his military-cut moustache was reserved but warm.
"William? I'm your Uncle Henry."
They clasped hands. The older man's grip was dry and firm.
"My friend, General E. Z. C. Judson," said Will, indicating Buntline.
"General."
Buntline, preening at the promotion, accepted Guss's hand.
Their host was saying something gracious, but the nephew didn't hear his words. He stared at the young woman who had come in on the other's heels. She was a brunette of medium height in a ruffled beige dress that set off the deep brown in her eyes admirably. Will was face to face with his mother as she had looked in an old portrait that had hung in the boardinghouse for as long as he could remember. She colored under his frank scrutiny and smiled a lovely, embarrassed smile.
Guss noticed the exchange of glances and swiveled aside. "Lizzie," he said, "this is your cousin, Will. My daughter, Elizabeth."
He accepted her raised hand as if it were blown glass, saying, "I'd know a Cody anywhere."
In St. Louis, Louisa Cody looked up from their four-year-old daughter's sewing lesson and shuddered.
"I've arranged a fox hunt for later in the week," Guss told his guests. "Surely you'll stay and take part."
Will stopped looking at his cousin. "I've never heard of anyone eating fox."
"The hounds find it a delicacy. Mainly, it's an excuse for a group of otherwise sane men and women to climb on horseback and risk broken necks. If what this fellow Buntline writes about you is true, I think you'll enjoy the experience."
"Oh, he's quite a liar," remarked General Judson.
Will put on a scarlet coat and joined the hunt, tales of which a gifted storyteller could wring free drinks with to the end of his days. The newspapers devoured the spectacle of the buffalo killer riding to hounds, detailing the event as if it were a decisive battle in an important war, in the grand phrases and curling metaphors that Ned Buntline's fans had come to recognize as an art student recognizes the brush strokes and signature of his master. Buntline meanwhile depleted their host's stock of brandy and scribbled dispatches without once looking up at his inspiration.
Back in New York at the end of the week, Will presented himself in his friend's hotel room and found the journalist, collarless, suspenders hanging, rehearsing a temperance lecture in front of his dressing-table mirror. The scout's face reflected over his shoulder was visibly distressed. Buntline stopped in mid-hyperbole and turned.
"Trouble at home?" he asked.
"I've been recalled by General Sheridan, but my trouble is here." Will held out a square of paper.
Buntline hooked on a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles and studied the scrap. "It appears to be a bill from Delmonico's for six hundred dollars and change."
"I treated Commodore Bennett and eleven others to dinner last night. Where I come from you can get a meal like that for the price of a bullet. I have exactly fifty dollars with me, not counting train fare back home."
"Civilization comes dear." The journalist folded the bill. "My editors will stand to it. I am into them for my next three books, and they will hardly notice the extra."
"Thanks, Colonel. I owe you."
Buntline grinned. "You needn't worry, lad. I shall collect."
They shook hands.
"You been East too long, Will. We stopped wearing them things on the scout months back."
Jim "Buffalo Chips" White—long-haired, buckskin-clad, a mirror image of Will if the mirror were pockmarked and shrunk its reflection four inches—frowned up at his idol, the latter straddling his horse Buckskin Joe in full dress suit with tails, his silk hat tilted back on his head, thumbing the cork loose from a bottle of champagne and pouring its contents into a stemmed glass. This was certainly not the rough-hewn frontiersman Chips had been emulating since the day they had met.
Will laughed and handed him the brimming glass. "Tell that to these strawheads," he said, waving a hand at the large party of fellow scouts and pioneers who had accompanied him from Omaha to Fort McPherson, guffawing and swigging more of the champagne he had brought with him from New York. "They're the ones wanted to get a look at me in my city clothes and then went and left my traps back at the hotel. Where's General Carr?"
"In Arizona with the 5th Cavalry. We're scouting for General Reynolds this trip. He's waiting on you west of here with the 3rd." Chips put down his champagne in a gulp and belched loudly, surprising himself.
"Well, what are you doing standing around guzzling spirits? Mount up and we'll see can a party of fifty trackers find one general and a whole army."
"In them duds?"
"It's this or naked. I told you my gear's in Omaha."
"Wait while I fetch my horse," said the other, handing back his empty glass. "I missed Sam Grant's inauguration, but I sure won't miss this." He struck off toward the stables, his swagger an exaggerated copy of Will's.
In Reynolds's camp, T. B. "Texas Jack" Omohundro, round-faced and clerical-looking but for hair longer than Will's and exotic buckskins strung with Indian scalps, glanced up from the rope he was splicing at the sound of hoofbeats, stared, rubbed his eyes vigorously with thumb and forefinger, looked again. He got up from his canvas stool. The rope, forgotten, slid off his lap to the ground.
"Howdy, Jack." The silk-hatted vision aboard the familiar tan buffalo horse slouched past, trailing Chips and a motley mounted band big enough to relieve a platoon of cavalry. As the last horse filed by, an empty green long-necked bottle fell from its saddlebag and plopped into the dust at the scout's feet without breaking.
Jack got in line behind the procession. Others in camp joined him. By the time the horsemen drew rein in front of command headquarters, everyone was present but the troopers on sentry duty, who had let the bizarre visitors pass only because Chips was with them.
A goggle-eyed corporal stationed outside the tent ducked through the flap, reappearing a moment later with General Reynolds hard on his heels.
The tall, gray-bearded commander scraped granite eyes over the dandy who had swung down from his saddle to stand before him at slightly lopsided attention.
"Who in thunder are you?" Re
ynolds demanded.
Chapter Seven
Texas Jack's grin was broad under his clerkly moustache. He had his sombrero on the back of his head, revealing the pale stripe just under his receding hairline where the tan stopped. His small black was winded but far from spent, switching its tail angrily at the cloud of flies around its glistening rump.
"Horses on one side of the creek, injuns on the other," Jack reported.
"Bastards never learn." Will glanced around at the five mounted troopers with whom Reynolds had entrusted him. Their blue uniforms were dusty and fading under a white summer sun. "We're seven against thirteen. I don't know what that does for our luck, but they'll spot us sure if we head back for camp."
Jack said, "Let's get back some Army property."
They got to within fifty yards of the Cheyenne camp when a brave spotted them and let out a whoop. The others sprang to their feet and splashed across the shallow creek to where the horses were grazing, among them the mounts they had stolen from Reynolds's cavalry. Will led the charge. Blue smoke slid along the ground before a stiff wind. The Indians returned fire. The reports were hollow pops in the vast vault of the plains. One buck threw a leg over a chestnut gelding, reversing the movement almost comically when a bullet shattered his sternum in mid-swing. Will dashed through the water on Buckskin Joe and caught the gelding's hair bridle while the Indian was still falling. Five others who had succeeded in mounting fled downriver, pursued by a storm of lead. One shrieked, slumped, and tumbled off. The riderless horse cantered for another hundred yards and drifted to a halt. The rest kept galloping, out of range now.
Jack and the troopers caught up with Will. Their horses' sides heaved. One trotted on ahead to claim the abandoned mount.
"The other seven lit out west," said the other scout. "I think we wounded a couple. You all right, Will?"
"Don't I look all right?"
"Your head's bleeding."
Startled, Will put a hand to his forehead. It came back stained red. A bullet had torn a three-inch gash along his hairline.
"Damn! If there's a scar, Lulu'll have the rest of my head."
Reynolds's 3rd Cavalry continued the pursuit and captured two hundred and fifty Indians in the main camp, after which a stunned sort of peace settled like dust over that vicinity. Texas Jack braided rope and the troopers gambled and wrote letters home. The days shortened, imperceptibly at first, then shedding minutes in clumps, like buffalo hair. The first frost shocked the prairie grass from vivid green to dead yellow overnight.
Caked with sand and sweat and sporting a blade-thin scar on one side of his brow, Will returned to Fort McPherson in the fall at the end of a quiet scout to find a sheaf of messages waiting for him. One was a wire from the U.S. Senate Department informing him that he had been recommended for a Congressional Medal of Honor for his part in the skirmish that had led to the recovery of two Army horses and the subsequent imprisonment of a large band of outlaw Cheyennes. Other telegrams carried congratulations from friends in Omaha upon Will's election to the Nebraska legislature.
"When you fixing to start speechifying, Will?" asked an awed Buffalo Chips, drawing a needle and sinew through a split in the knee of his buckskin trousers.
"Never. Politics is one trail with more cactus burrs to the square inch than any I ever rode out here. But I believe I'll hold on to the 'Honorable' in front of my name. I do like an impressive title."
He opened the last envelope, containing a three-page letter written in Ned Buntline's flowing hand. For some minutes he concentrated on the journalist's grandiloquent terminology, then laid the pages carefully on his knee. "Chips," he said, "I want you to take a good look at me."
His friend glanced up from his sewing. "I'm looking."
"You see an actor?"
"I don't know. What's one look like?"
Texas Jack entered the scouts' quarters and placed his sombrero upside down on a table covered with empty brass shell casings and loose tobacco. The leather sweatband was dark. "Chips, you better see to your horse. Someone went and tied pink ribbons in its tail again."
"Tarnation!" It was as close to a real oath as the junior scout ever uttered. He'd pricked himself with the needle. "Last time he wore it clear into town." He tied off the sinew hurriedly, bit through it, dropped the needle on the table, and went out, snatching his slouch hat off the peg next to the door on the way.
"That ought to keep him from checking the stirrups I shortened for him," Jack told Will, chuckling. "He'll swear he growed an inch overnight."
Will said, "Ned Buntline wants me to meet him in Chicago and go on the stage."
"You going to?" The other hitched a leg over the chair vacated by Chips and sat down with his arms folded over the back.
"Hell, no. Can you see me painted up like a St. Louis whore?"
"Don't you owe this Buntline fellow some money?"
"I'll get it some way."
"You ought to at least try her, Will. This here work can't last forever."
"I figure to go into ranching when it's done, not playacting."
"What you figure to use to lay hold of land and stock, you can't scrape up six hunnert to pay your restaurant tab?"
Will, who had told him about the disaster at Delmonico' s, fingered a corner of the letter. "I don't reckon I'd have to stick with it long."
"I hear Wild Bill took a shot at the show business, though it didn't work out too good."
"You really think I ought to?"
"Worst you can do is make a damn fool of yourself in front of several hunnert people," said Jack with a grin.
The other scout leaned forward, his face alight. The mark on his forehead stood out dead white against the flushed skin. "I'll go if you'll go with me."
Jack's heavy-lidded eyes opened slightly. Then his grin broadened. "We can take Chips along for laughs."
Will thought about it, then shook his head. "He wouldn't make it past his first ride on the perpendicular railway. What about it?" He proffered a callused hand.
His friend hesitated, then accepted it firmly.
"Where are the Indians?" Buntline asked.
Will and Jack looked at each other guiltily. The three were standing in the lobby of the journalist's hotel in Chicago, a narrow entryway with bare yellow-papered walls, an ancient concierge snoring behind a desk with a finish like dead skin, and a broken-backed settee with a stain on the cushion. Buntline's fortunes had soured since New York. Will said, "We forgot to bring them."
"You fight them daily. How could you forget? I promised the manager of the theater twenty real Indians."
"Maybe there's some around town you could hire," Jack suggested.
"Yes, you can find a full-blooded Sioux chief operating any streetcar in the metropolis, feathers and all." The little biographer spoke acidly. Broader than ever—improvidence had a strangely contrary effect upon his girth—he had circles of sticking plaster on his cheeks and chin and his clothes reeked of moth powder and whiskey. He heaved a theatrical sigh. "Well, I am delighted to see you both nonetheless. Perhaps the discovery that this production will have two authentic prairie scouts in the cast when only one was expected will quell the protests. Have you cash with you?"
Jack said, "Why?" suspiciously.
Will placed a hand on his partner's tense right arm. "We collected our pay before we set out," he told the journalist. "What do you want with it?"
"You must prime the pump if you expect to draw water." Buntline held out a pampered right palm.
Jack inhaled. Will slid an arm across his shoulders hurriedly and led him away. They walked across the lobby whispering, Texas Jack gesticulating furiously. His friend's tone was soothing. Jack fell silent, head down, nodding from time to time. Buntline checked his watch against the clock on the wall.
At length Jack reached reluctantly into a pocket of his tight suit and handed something to Will. When they returned, the latter placed a fistful of dirty bills in the journalist's hand.
"There's three hundred
and fifty dollars there," he reported. "I reckon this makes us partners in truth."
"You'll not regret it." Buntline folded the bills into a tiny square and poked it into a vest pocket. "With the commission I made selling fire insurance this past summer, we have enough capital to launch a most auspicious venture. Come and see where you will make your debut and dramatic history."
They took a cab to Nixon's Amphitheater, where Jim Nixon, the owner and manager, greeted them in the deserted auditorium. He was a compact, energetic fifty-year-old with gray in his handlebar and very bright blue eyes like new bullets. He wrung both scouts' hands and laughed in short, hard bursts when Jack remarked that civilization smelled like buffalo guts. When the manager's mirth was spent he asked how the Indians were faring. Buntline started to explain about the Indians. Nixon's manner changed abruptly.
"No savages?" His voice quivered with rage. "You promised me savages. We've been advertising savages for six weeks. Everyone has been asking after savages at the ticket office. You'd better get me savages, by God."
"Arrangements are in motion even as we speak," Buntline said expansively. "Surely you are aware, friend Nixon, that this most cosmopolitan city fairly crawls with redskins. I was just saying something of the sort to Cody and Omohundro, was I not?" He turned to them.
Will cleared his throat. "Yes, he told us you can't hardly board a streetcar without knocking down a Sioux chief."
"Feathers and all," Texas Jack put in.
"I have yet to see one," grumbled the manager. But his anger seemed less certain.
Buntline made one of his gestures. "Come opening night I shall introduce you. The Indians of whom I speak hail from the Blue Island tribe."
"Blue Island is where the out-of-work actors hang out!" Nixon colored.
"Exactly. Dress them in braided wigs and tan costumes and none will be the wiser."
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