This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  He visited his sisters in Leavenworth, shaking hands all around with the husbands and introducing them to Arizona John and a new partner, Major Gordon W. Lillie, "Pawnee Bill"—yet another Cody imitator in silken tresses and magnificent handlebar—who was currently negotiating with tribal elders in Oklahoma Territory for Sioux supers to use in the show. Helen—married now, Cody-eyed but in posture and deportment the image of their mother—came to see the play afterward and found the star combing greasepaint out of his beard in his dressing room, with Burke standing by looking fat and preposterous in his scout's getup. Members of the Buffalo Bill entourage tended to dress and look alike.

  "Oh, Nellie," Will said, catching sight of her in the mirror, "don't say anything about the show. If God will forgive me for this foolishness I promise to quit it forever as soon as this season is over."

  "What will you do, Will?" The question was resentful. She had enjoyed the play.

  "Take the prairie and the Indians and everything else East. There's not room on a stage to do anything worthwhile. But there would be on a big lot where we could have horses and buffaloes and maybe the old Deadwood coach. That'd be something they'd never seen before. That'd be showing them the West!"

  Burke rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. He had heard all this before.

  "But didn't you once tell me Hickok tried the same thing and failed?" his sister reminded him.

  "Wild Bill was my friend. But he knew guns and very little else."

  That subject depressed him. With Hickok's murder and the death of Buffalo Chips White at the hands of the Sioux at Slim Buttes that same bloody summer ("Oh, my God, boys!"—blood pumping between the fingers clasped over his breast—' 'Good-bye, Will!"), the frontier was swiftly becoming a place without old friends.

  "Well, call on me if there is any spelling to be done," said Helen.

  But there were more seasons, other dramas. In the summer of 1877—still waiting on a son from Louisa—he took time out to clasp hands with one of the few remaining links to his recent but fading past, Major Frank North, he of the impish sense of humor who had foisted Ned Buntline off on the youth sleeping under a wagon at Fort McPherson, over the ownership of a vast cattle ranch at North Platte, Nebraska. Together they rode over the thousands of acres where they had once tracked Cheyennes, discussing irrigation now instead of Indian signs.

  "Too expensive," said North of Will's plan to divert some of the Platte onto the ranch.

  Will said, "Let me worry about that part."

  Gone were the flamboyant locks and dress of the major's scouting past; his hair was cropped close about the ears and combed across his forehead to cover the thin spots, his moustache trimmed in a conservative droop. He wore a black suit like a banker's. Next to him Will felt painfully conspicuous for the first time since his initial New York visit—out here, where he grew up, and where long hair and buckskins had always been as common as bunch grass.

  "I was stuck between floors once on the perpendicular railway," he muttered. "I'm commencing to feel like that all the time now."

  Red Right Hand, or Buffalo Bill's First Scalp for Custer, Will's first attempt at playwriting, opened in New York with the 1877-78 season, recreating Custer's Last Stand for the first time on any stage and climaxing with the scout's victory over Chief Yellow Hand at Warbonnet Creek. To avoid confusing the audience he substituted buckskins for the theatrical costume he had actually worn that day. Many years later even eyewitnesses to the duel would remember it only as it appeared in the theaters, including General (formerly Lieutenant) Charles King, whose account would be immortalized on canvas by an artist who had never traveled west of State Street. The few balding veterans of the skirmish who recalled the absurd tight vaquero pants and plumed hat would tell their stories in the dark on front porches to snickering grandchildren.

  A castle-like headquarters building rose on the Cody estate, dubbed Scout's Rest Ranch, and in town a great ridiculous Victorian jungle of gables and spired turrets dripping with gingerbread like white frosting made its presence known under the name Welcome Wigwam. The design was Louisa's.

  Will moved his family to Scout's Rest from Rochester while the house in town was under construction. Immediately upon arrival, Arta fled inside the house and one week later had not ventured out. When her parents asked what was wrong she made no answer. Asked to help bring in the wash or fetch water from the well in back, she would complain that it was too hot out or that the bucket was too heavy for her to carry.

  "Why can't the maid do it?" she whined. Will said the child was spoiled and should be punished. Louisa demurred. Then she observed that Arta left the room hurriedly whenever a blind was raised in the morning, and confided to Will that their daughter was terrified of the featureless Nebraska terrain. She had grown up around buildings and felt naked and vulnerable in the empty vastness.

  "She'll have trees," he decided.

  He put Bill Goodman, his sister Julia's husband, in charge of landscaping. After experimenting with several varieties of trees, Goodman shipped in cottonwoods and box elders by the carload and hired laborers from North Platte for the massive project. The trees flourished, and as the ranch acquired a skyline, Arta's fears subsided. Against her mother's wishes, she took her first riding lessons from Will—Louisa, familiar with the fate of young Samuel Cody, crushed under a rolling mare, gnawed her nails—and soon the workers digging and lowering the bagged roots into the holes grew accustomed to the sight of the little girl astride gentle, aging Buckskin Joe, led by her proud father. But they never saw her smile.

  While her sister rode, Orra grew from a sickly baby to a sickly child and died at the age of five. Texas Jack, starting his own family now, sent roses.

  The year of mourning had not ended when the wild corners and stairwells of Welcome Wigwam rang with the cries of another Cody. The unsettled argument between Will and Louisa over whether to name their son James proved unimportant; the child was a girl. Will overcame his disappointment and christened her Irma. Arta, no longer a grave little girl but a grave young woman of thirteen, was by this time a better rider than a seamstress. When school ended she would race home and change into her riding clothes and saddle the pinto her father had given her for her twelfth birthday, canter off across the ranch, and not return until sunset. Will told Louisa, who considered this curious behavior for a girl, that he had done the same thing at her age. It was a mild fib; he had been a Pony Express courier at thirteen and paid to spend hours in the saddle.

  Meanwhile, readers across the nation who had given up waiting for Buffalo Bill's autobiography to return to the library formed lines to order copies at bookstores. White Beaver was then establishing new records on tour, with Will fighting real Pawnee braves onstage. And still hating it.

  His corps of female players had expanded from one to several, and every one of them in love with the star. His thirties were running out on him, but he was tall and straight and when he smiled his teeth shone and his eyes crinkled becomingly. His rough maleness excited the younger actresses resigned to effeminate leading men, and his naughty boyishness, which manifested itself in outrageous practical jokes on his fellow performers to ease tension, made the older women want to mother him. One small brunette, a bit player with one line, teased him mercilessly all through the season until after the last performance at the end of the run in Omaha, when she ran into him by a carefully contrived accident in a hotel corridor. Without saying anything he took her arm and steered her down the hail into his room.

  They kissed good-bye in the open doorway. She traced the white scar on his forehead with her fingertips. "That must have been nasty." She had a stage-trained pseudo-English accent her friends in the company had worked hours with her to eliminate for the purpose of her brief speech.

  "Cheyenne bullet. It bought me the Congressional Medal of Honor."

  He kissed her again, as no one had done in the troupe since the day Wild Bill Hickok drank too much whiskey before his love scene with Mlle. Morlacchi. When Will s
traightened, he saw Louisa watching him from the end of the hall.

  She had come from North Platte to take him home. Oddly, her emotion as she turned on her heel and hurried toward the stairs was neither hurt nor anger, but satisfaction, even relief. She had not worried away the past fourteen years in vain. He caught up with her on the landing, panting and talking at a pace that made his sentences run together without pause the way they did when he wrote. Theater people are close, he said. I can see that, she retorted. No, you don't understand, he explained; you don't live and travel with someone for six months and then just say good-bye, it's been fun. You don't, apparently, she said. He spoke to her on the way down the stairs and across the lobby and in the carriage on the way back to North Platte, forgetting his luggage, but she didn't pretend to be listening.

  She said nothing more to him all that summer, and she gave him no more children.

  "Mr. Burke?"

  Arizona John Burke—Major Burke now, according to the advertising sheets waiting for him at the printers whenever he could get up the cash to ransom them—sat slumped in his rolls of fat, Buntline fashion, in the first row of seats at the New Orleans racetrack, moodily contemplating the drizzling rain stitching up a puddle the size of a small pond in the center of the grounds and Captain A. H. Bogardus's rifle-barrel back heading toward the exit. The crack shot had quit the show a few days short of the scheduled opening.

  Burke looked at the couple standing at the railing. The man who had addressed him was well built and compact under a shining oilskin and hat with a curled brim. The woman, standing a bit behind him lifting her skirts clear of the wet grass, was small and plain, her cape soaked through, bonnet wilting. The man held a rifle. More auditioners, thought the publicist sourly. "I'm Burke."

  "My name's Frank Butler. This here's my wife, Phoebe Anne. We just left the Sells Brothers Circus because we heard you was hiring. We're trick shots."

  "'We'?" Arizona John studied the woman. Her shy, serious expression under the dark hair plastered to her rather bulbous forehead put him in mind of Will's daughter Arta.

  Butler said, "She's as good as me. If you got a minute, we'll show you."

  She was far better than he, as Burke saw when he had escorted them reluctantly to the target range where young Johnny Baker, Will's new protégé, was practicing. Butler hit the bull's-eye as often as his wife, but she was surer of herself and took less time aiming. When he finished reloading after his turn and handed her the rifle, her hands went to the grip and forepiece like young animals to their mother's teats and she worked the lever and fired as fast as anyone Burke had ever seen—maybe even faster than Will when he shattered the blue glass balls Johnny tossed into the air during rehearsal—and he fired sand, not bullets. The boy's face as he watched the exhibition was all eyes and open mouth.

  "What do you say, Mr. Burke—Major?" asked Butler, while the echo of his wife's last shot was fading. His grin was open and infectious, like Will's when he watched his daughter exercising her pinto. The air stank of spent powder.

  "Mr. Butler, if I thought I could pay you, I'd hire you both right here." He scraped mud off his heel on the edge of the plank the young woman was standing on. He'd been debating with himself whether they were entitled to the truth; now he made his decision. He told them how the show was jinxed. At Hartford, Connecticut, Major Frank North, whom Will had persuaded to put aside ranching temporarily for a spot with the show, had been badly broken up when his horse trampled him after a fall; he had died at Scout's Rest, the victim of a joke he'd played fourteen years before. Then unseasonably cold and wet weather had forced the company south, only to find the same conditions prevailing there. Then the riverboat carrying the animals and equipment down the Mississippi had sunk, taking with it all but the horses, the Deadwood coach, and the band wagon. When last heard from, the locals were still fishing debris and drowned buffaloes out of the river. "Right now Buffalo Bill and his new partner, Mr. Salsbury, are in town trying to raise money enough to pay those we have on salary. Come see us in Louisville in the spring and we can talk business then."

  The disappointed couple exchanged polite farewells with Burke and left. Mrs. Butler's hesitant speech displayed a slight Midwestern twang. Johnny and Arizona John watched them picking their way through the puddles on their way out.

  "Sure hope we see them when we get to Louisville," said the boy.

  "I hope we still have a show when they get there," said Burke.

  Smarting as he was from his sudden demotion from partner and publicist to just plain publicist, Arizona John didn't know he was selling his energetic replacement far short.

  "The goddamnedest thing about Nate Salsbury," one of his many friend-enemies once remarked, "is you can't never tell whether the bastard's eating wallpaper paste or shitting diamonds."

  And it was true. Down to his last copper or sitting on a billfold thick enough to fall from and hurt himself, the natty new manager of Buffalo Bill's Wild West was always turned out in spotless charcoal-gray with the jacket buttoned almost to his starched white collar and an immaculate derby set square on his handsome head, black beard trimmed and brushed to perfection, and a shine on his patent leathers that someone else once said could cause a buggy accident on a busy street in bright sunlight.

  But he was as prosperous as he looked the day he swung his gold-headed walking stick onto the exhibition grounds in Louisville, Kentucky, leased from the money he had managed to raise from friends and family. The performers and roustabouts were paid and happy and for the first time there was cash in the strongbox in the wagon Salsbury used for an office. He paused in jaunty mid-whistle to watch Phoebe Anne Butler target practicing with her husband.

  She was wearing a western outfit of pleated dress and white Stetson with yellow gaiters on her boots, her rather flat bosom crusted over with county and state sharpshooting medals. She held a plain hand mirror in front of her with her rifle barrel resting on her right shoulder and pointing backward. Butler, standing thirty paces behind her, asked if she was ready. "Ready!"

  He rotated his right hand, feeding out string in an ever-widening circle, the blue glass sphere attached to the other end whistling faster and faster, the pitch heightening as it orbited, a flashing blur describing a circle ten feet in diameter. When the shrill whirr was almost too much to bear, the rifle cracked. The golf-ball-size globe exploded in a shower of glittering dust.

  Salsbury applauded, joining the others who had witnessed the spectacle. The performers flushed. The manager transferred his stick from his armpit to his left hand and approached them, removing his hat. He introduced himself, shook Butler's hand, and touched his wife's small gloved palm. She was barely five feet tall.

  "Where did you ever learn to handle a rifle like that?" he demanded.

  "I used to shoot game on my father's farm in Ohio." She spoke quietly, her eyes meeting his for an instant, then darting away. "I never thought it was anything special till they asked me to take part in county turkey shoots."

  "A born markswoman! Tell me, can you shoot from horseback?"

  "I have."

  "At dead gallop?" Dubiously.

  She nodded, looking him in the eye now. She wore her dark hair brushed behind her ears, and her serious expression impressed Salsbury.

  Butler said, "Annie, don't brag. She can hit anything from anywhere. Her specialty's splitting a playing card at fifty paces."

  "Annie?"

  "She don't like Phoebe."

  The manager stroked his beard. "Well, Annie, we'll not have you splitting anyone else's playing cards while I'm in charge of this exhibition."

  "I thought Buffalo Bill was in charge," said Butler.

  "On the plains, yes. Come with me to the mess tent." They were getting comfortable at one of the long tables when the show's star entered, accompanied by three men with long hair like his, dressed in less expensive imitations of his best yellow buckskin jacket with Louisa's needlework on the front and a red silk handkerchief knotted at his throat and fix
ed with the grand duke's diamond buffalo-head stickpin. Arizona John was one of the three. A pair of Sioux Indians on loan from the Standing Rock Reservation in Dakota, squatting at the rear of the tent, glanced up at the newcomers briefly, then returned their attention to the game they were playing with the bones of some small animal at their feet. Will swept off his Stetson in a graceful bow before Mrs. Butler, who blushed prettily. She looked tiny standing in front of him.

  "They told me about you, little missy," he said. "We're glad to have you."

  The papers were signed then, on that table in that tent. The new act was billed as "Butler and Oakley," but from that moment on Annie was Little Missy to everyone who knew her.

  DENVER, COLORADO

  June 3, 1917

  The old man is dead. With the dead's infinite patience his body has been awaiting burial since the simple funeral services were held in the Elks' Lodge in January, the bronze casket cluttering the vault of Olinger's Mortuary while crews hired by Harry H. Tammen, owner of the Sells-Floto Circus and Buffalo Bill's last contract, blasted a steel crypt into Lookout Mountain west of Denver, the walls doubly reinforced to discourage rival promoters from stealing the remains. Although Cody's will has requested interment at Cedar Mountain overlooking the Wyoming town named for him, Tammen has opted for Denver, home of the circus and his own Denver Post. As he is paying for the burial, Louisa, the widow, has voiced no objections.