This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  "If he thinks we've one of his freaks, he's free to buy a ticket like everyone and see for himself."

  "What about the rumors that Annie Oakley is really a man in disguise?"

  "Highly unlikely," said Will with a twinkle. "She shoots better than any man I ever knew."

  He finished the interview after a few more questions by thrusting a mug of beer into the reporter's hand while Arizona John poked a fistful of cigars into the man's breast pocket and, drunk with generosity, handed one to each of the men in the group. Turning away, he almost bumped into a tall Arapaho wrapped in a red blanket and stepped back involuntarily. In ten years of dealing with Indians he had never been comfortable in one's presence. Although as an accomplished liar he was adept at concealing his unease, the brave's stern copper features and lashless black eyes were not calculated to relax him.

  "Good smoke?" inquired the savage.

  "The best." Burke patted his pockets automatically. "I've run out, but I'll bring you heap big cigars when I get back from town this afternoon. A whole box."

  Salsbury said, "He can have mine." He gave it to the Indian and lit it. The Arapaho withdrew, nodding and puffing great blue clouds.

  "Grateful chap," remarked the manager dryly.

  "The Indians have no word for thanks." Will shook hands heartily with the young journalist and drew Arizona John aside. The famous baritone sank to an earnest murmur, his breath redolent of whiskey. "Whatever you do, don't forget those cigars. Maybe you didn't mean it, but don't ever promise an Indian anything without delivering. Get a box of cigars in town and charge it to me. Don't forget."

  "I won't."

  "I hope not. If you break a promise to an Indian, you'll be no good to me or the show."

  Burke pondered this advice on board a train across-country a few weeks later.

  In a pleasant, book-lined office smelling of tobacco and leather bindings and sunlight at Fort Yates, D.T., James McLaughlin fingered his cold pipe thoughtfully and finally laid it in a brass ashtray with a buffalo embossed in the bottom. A clean-shaven man with very white hair and gray eyes whose lids turned down sadly at the corners, the Indian agent met Arizona John's gaze with the kind of directness that disconcerted the publicist almost as much as the nearness of the Indians themselves.

  "You have to understand that he's coming on sixty if he isn't there already, which among the Sioux is very old, and difficult to deal with. He has the respect and fear of every brave on the reservation, and that makes him dangerous. Also he's as slick a swindler as you're likely to meet this side of St. Louis."

  "An entire generation brought up on the legend of Custer is well aware of that," Burke replied. He tapped a thick forefinger on the letter he had placed on McLaughlin's desk, indicating the official seal. "But I have Secretary of the Interior Henry M. Teller's permission to exhibit the chief, and instructions from my employer, the Honorable William F. Cody, to secure him for the Indian Village portion of our entertainment."

  "He's a medicine man, not a chief," McLaughlin corrected automatically. "As agent in charge of the Standing Rock Reservation all I can do is grant you an interview, as he is a ward and not a prisoner of the United States Government. If he doesn't want to go he can't be made to."

  "That's fair."

  "He'll be difficult to persuade. Last year Colonel Alvaren Allen came to him with a letter just like this and promised to arrange an audience with the President in return for his cooperation. He agreed, and got no closer to Washington City than a New York wax museum, where he was placed on display with the Napoleons and Simon Girtys. His memories of the experience are bitter."

  "I shouldn't wonder. Breaking a promise to an Indian is unforgivable."

  McLaughlin looked at the fat man in dandified scout's garb with new respect. "That's right. You've dealt with them before?"

  "I'm an old campaigner." He pushed himself grunting to his feet and tugged the hem of his fringed shirt over his paunch. A ruby cuff link glittered in a sunbeam slanting through the window behind the desk.

  The agent got up and reached for his hat. "Just take care while you're talking to him he doesn't relieve you of those fancy studs."

  A grim escort of Indian police on Army mounts accompanied Arizona John's buckboard on the half-day ride to Grand Camp, their features burnished copper under broad-brimmed campaign hats and their braided black hair hanging down the front of blue tunics, cleaving a raw gash between two worlds. The bleak scenery made the publicist sick at heart. Stories of blue-pine mountains in Montana and startling eruptions of raw color in the deserts of the Southwest hadn't prepared him for the sterile, treeless bar top that was southern Dakota Territory, baking dirty yellow under a June sun. The oven heat parched his lungs and made shimmering black ghosts of the false buttes on the horizon.

  "Is it like this all summer?" he asked the agent.

  "No, it starts getting hot around the end of the month."

  At first, they passed many tipis with Sioux women and children sitting in their shade grinding corn and sewing cotton patches on old buckskin, the men in floppy hats tending burned-out gardens in back; when the Indians recognized McLaughlin riding with Burke they waved and called out affectionate greetings to "Father Whitehair." Then the signs of habitation grew sparse and finally vanished, and the visitor wondered if they had taken a wrong turn. But in a little while they drew within sight of the barely running stream that was Grand River, and the agent pointed out one of a pair of squat log cabins on the opposite bank.

  An Indian boy of about twelve stood in front of the cabin, watching the small procession splash across the river. Naked except for a breechclout and moccasins, he had a man's strong features and the beginnings of adult muscles in his hairless chest and shoulders. His ribs showed clearly.

  "Hello, Crow Foot," McLaughlin said, when they had come to a stop before the building. The escorts' mounts stood shaking off water and pulling at spidery clumps of dead grass poking through cracks in the hard earth. "This is Major Burke. He would like to speak with your father."

  The boy studied the stranger without speaking, then turned and went inside. Waiting, Arizona John became conscious of eyes on him, and looked around at the graven faces of Sioux braves surrounding the party. Some of them sported glistening white scars like worms on their brown arms and torsos.

  "They came down from Canada with the old man when he surrendered," explained McLaughlin quietly. "Most of them were at the Little Big Horn."

  Burke's clothes felt clammy.

  Three women swathed in blankets came out of the cabin, the third wearing a white man's Stetson with a butterfly pinned to the crown. Crow Foot followed on her heels.

  "Seen-By-Her-Nation and Four Times," the agent murmured, removing his hat. "His wives."

  Arizona John followed his lead. The air felt cool on his scalp with his hair plastered to it by sweat. "Who's the squaw with the hat?"

  "That's not a squaw. That's Sitting Bull."

  The revelation startled him. He looked closely at the Hunkpapa medicine man whose vision of soldiers falling upside down into the Indian camp had united the Sioux, Cheyenne, and Arapaho nations and led to Custer's massacre nine years before. Sitting Bull was small and slight, with hair dangling in graying, unadorned plaits and the puffed eyelids and fallen features of an old Chinese woman. He shuffled a little when he walked.

  McLaughlin made introductions—the Indians looked at the stranger without speaking—and the two stepped down and followed Sitting Bull and his son into the cabin. The women stayed outside. Dismounting, the Indian police stood sentry at the door while the suspicious braves loitered out front. Inside, gray light fell on surprisingly handsome furniture and straw pallets on an earthen floor. There was a black iron stove, and the air smelled of wood smoke and stale grease. Still taking his cues from the agent, Arizona John sat cross-legged on the floor across from the Hunkpapa, ignoring the various chairs. Sitting Bull spoke briefly in guttural Sioux.

  "My father wishes me to speak for him in
the white man's tongue that I have learned in the mission school," said Crow Foot, when the old man had finished. The boy chose his words with care. "He says that Longhair Cody is welcome in his house."

  Burke, whose hair was indeed as long as his employer's now, corrected the error in leisurely fashion. "You have to be patient when you talk to Indians," Will had tutored him.

  "They take a long time coming to the point and they hold it rude when you try cutting corners." He complimented the medicine man on his family and fine dwelling and agreed that it was hot outside, but not as hot as the year of the brown grass, and expressed delight that his host had dreamed of a gentle rain that would swell the Grand River and paint the fields as green as moss on the mountain pines. Crow Foot translated, betraying neither pleasure nor embarrassment at the publicist's comment that he was a handsome young brave.

  Finally he broached the subject of his visit, for punctuation opening a box the size of a cigar case to display its contents and explaining that there were many more such boxes and many red blankets in the wagon outside, gifts for the great Sitting Bull.

  Will had decided that hard candy was best. "It holds up in the heat and even if the chief hasn't any teeth, as Indians seldom do past the age of thirty-five, he can still suck on it.

  They generally favor sweets ahead of women and horses." Arizona John set the box on the floor between them and waited for the boy to finish interpreting, searching the medicine man's oriental face anxiously for a reaction, but in vain. There was a brief pause, and then he spoke at length. Crow Foot translated simultaneously, in bursts of English.

  "The day has gone when the red man will be bought with blankets and candy. The white father in Washington has said that the red man must learn to live in the white man's world. I have seen the white man's world, and know that money speaks there with the voice of eagles. If I am to live in that world, I must speak with this voice. With it I may buy all the blankets and candy I will ever want or need."

  "I was coming to that. We are prepared to offer fifty dollars a week and living expenses to the great Sitting Bull if he will agree to tour with the show for four moons." Burke felt himself on firm ground now. Dealing with Indians was getting to be like dealing with everyone else.

  "Here it comes," said McLaughlin.

  The other white man glanced at him. The warning was so low he was about to ask him to repeat it when the old Hunkpapa started talking again.

  "In your city of Bismarck I met Bluecoat Grant and took part in a ceremony to open a new trail for the iron horse," relayed Crow Foot for his father. "Photographs were made of me and the man who made them asked me to write my name on them. He said people would pay much money for them and promised to share the money with me. His tongue was straight; I came back to Standing Rock with much silver in a cloth bag. I will join Longhair Cody's show if he will promise me all the money from selling photographs of me. I will have this in writing, as words on paper are the only words the white man heeds."

  Arizona John deliberated. The photograph concession was one of the Wild West's more lucrative sidelines. Nate Salsbury would be livid. But Will had been adamant about signing Custer's executioner. Finally he nodded. "I will add such a clause to the contract."

  Before his son could translate this, Sitting Bull smiled broadly for the first time, showing naked gums and substantiating Will's conjecture about his teeth. In English he said, "We have a bargain, Major Longhair Burke."

  Burke wired the news to Will, who put Prentiss Ingraham to work on press releases, and by the time the pair boarded an eastbound passenger train with a band of braves selected by Sitting Bull, they were engulfed by reporters, who noted the contrast between the publicist's portly cheer and the grave taciturnity of the Indians. He handed out cigars and metaphors by the bushel.

  The great Sioux and the famed scout met cordially in Buffalo, and if Will was disappointed by his new attraction's unprepossessing appearance he concealed it skillfully, actor that he was. Sitting Bull told more reporters through an interpreter that Buffalo Bill was a sincere man and recounted again the story of Custer's death: "The longhair stood like a sheaf of corn with all the ears fallen around him, and he laughed." Crowds in Buffalo booed him for the Little Big Horn when he appeared before them astride a sleek white stallion larger than any Indian pony, and again in Boston, but they packed the stands to see him and bought thousands of autographed prints of the medicine man in an impressive headdress of bleached eagle feathers Will had given him. When his hand grew sore from writing his name, the show's photographer demonstrated how he could reproduce the signature on prints and save him effort, and for this the grateful Indian dubbed him "Fire-in-His-Hand," a name the flashpan-using artist wore proudly throughout his association with the Wild West. During rehearsals Sitting Bull watched for hours while Annie Oakley practiced her marksmanship, standing on the back of a galloping horse and shooting doubles from a speeding bicycle. He called her Little Sure-Shot—a nickname not lost on Arizona John, who saw that it found its way onto posters—and adopted her as his daughter. Having discovered a new taste in Boston, he thereafter extorted oyster stew from Nate Salsbury along with the usual candy, meanwhile giving whatever cash he had on his person to newsboys and orphans he encountered on the lot and in the streets. In the society where he had come to manhood, there was always a place for homeless children; he himself had raised eleven of his own and yet still found room for others. Some journalists who had witnessed these flights of generosity expressed doubt in print that this was the same fiendish mind that had plotted the greatest defeat of American arms in their history.

  Spectators cheered him in Canada, where a flattered Sitting Bull posed in feathers and brocaded shirt next to a towering Buffalo Bill while the photographer held a candle to the touchhole in his pan and the little heap of magnesium powder ignited in a burst of blue-white light.

  "Caption it 'Enemies in '76, friends in '85,'" Will instructed Fire-in-His-Hand. He was wearing a very wide Stetson and a black silk shirt beautifully embroidered in gold by Louisa, his slightly spreading middle cinched by a belt with a big square buckle. Thigh-length black leather boots creaked when he shifted his weight.

  The group of reporters, lacking the technology to reproduce pictures on newsprint, contented themselves with numerous questions about the disastrous campaign of 1876.

  "Did you ever meet Sitting Bull in the field?"

  "I don't think so. He was not much of a chief but more of a medicine man."

  "Sitting Bull, do you feel any regret at killing Custer and so many whites?"

  "I have answered to my people for the Indians slain in that fight. The chief that sent Custer must answer to his people." This through an interpreter.

  Added the frontiersman, "The defeat of Custer was not a massacre. The Indians were being pursued by skilled fighters with orders to kill. For centuries they had been hounded from the Atlantic to the Pacific and back again. They had their wives and little ones to protect and they were fighting for their existence. With the end of Custer they considered that their greatest enemy had passed away."

  "Defends slaughter," scribbled the journalists.

  In St. Louis, traditional final stopping place for Will's tours since Scouts of the Plains, the star was approached in the midst of hectic arrangements in the hotel lobby by a stout, gray-bearded man with thinning hair and skin the color and texture of leather chaps left hanging on a corral fence, dressed in evening clothes. Will shook his extended hand, then recognized him and embraced him, roaring, "Come meet an old enemy." With a hand on the other's back he swept aside the crowd of reporters and autograph hounds clustered around the medicine man. "Sitting Bull, this is General E. A. Can, late commander of the 5th Cavalry. It's high time you two old warriors shook hands."

  "I'm proud to make your acquaintance under happier circumstances," said Can, offering his hand.

  The Hunkpapa looked at him from under the brim of his butterfly Stetson and kept his hands folded under his blanket. After a
quiet moment Can lowered his. He said something cordial to Will and withdrew.

  "Chief snubs general," the reporters wrote.

  A living waxworks exhibit, Sitting Bull bore the hisses and catcalls one last time and retired to his tent after watching Annie Oakley's act, a silent man insulated by his circle of loyal Sioux from his fellow players.

  At a little ceremony on the exhibition grounds that was closed to the press and public following the last performance, Will led the white charger the Indian had ridden throughout the season into the calcium-lit arena and handed the reins to Sitting Bull, saying: "Mind you hold on tight if there is gunfire nearby. He is trained to rear and dance on his hind legs at the sound of it."

  Sitting Bull's gray eyes glittered. For a moment he remained unmoving, the reins slack in his hand. Then he grasped the scout's forearm with the other, pressed and let go. Annie Oakley, her face still flushed from performing, came forward and threw her arms around the little warrior. Then one by one the other members of the troupe filed past to grasp his hand and wish him luck. When farewells had been said all around, the stallion was tethered to the back of a wagon stacked high with blankets and boxes of candy and tinned oysters and a driver climbed up beside the Hunkpapa and they left for the railroad station, surrounded by braves on horseback. Sitting Bull never turned around.

  "Sure wish we could have talked him into another season," remarked Arizona John, watching the departing band.

  Will said, "One more like this one and he could of bought back Manhattan."

  The roustabouts struck the tents and booths for shipping back to the barns at Scouts' Rest and Will shook the men's hands and kissed the women's cheeks and said he'd see them back there in May, then went home to his family, bringing along Johnny Baker, whom Arta and Irma had come to accept as a brother. Louisa no longer came into town to bring her husband back.

  Chapter Twelve