This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  Will folded his napkin and laid it down beside his scraped plate. "Let's shoot." Excusing himself, Johnny Baker, who had been looking for that familiar gesture, got up from the table and went out to fetch the Winchester '76 carbine Will had given him, narrowly avoiding a collision with little Irma, who was helping her sister and the maid clear away the dishes. On his way outside with the weapon he stopped as always to thank Louisa for the meal. She nodded without saying anything and herded her daughters into the sewing room for their evening lesson. Johnny was never sure if she approved of his spending so much time there. He was too young to suspect a mother's doubts about a boy in his early teens hovering near her girls, and in any case, five-year-old Irma and seventeen-year-old Arta were both beyond his grasp even if he cared to reach. Firearms were his interest, had been since he was ten and happened upon one of Ned Buntline's Buffalo Bill stories in a North Platte general store. When the Wild West was wobbling and jerking along under the Cody-Carver partnership, the boy had presented himself at the ranch and begged for an unpaid spot with the show. He had brought along his squirrel rifle, and when the scout hesitated, he had showed him how he could drive nails into a fence rail at thirty paces. Declaring that he showed promise, Will had engaged him to toss the glass balls he had substituted for Doc Carver's nickels, meanwhile tutoring him between performances in what he called "the manly art of triggernometry." With a little help from Annie Oakley and Frank Butler, the boy was fast becoming the youngest crack shot on the fading frontier.

  They rode out from Welcome Wigwam to Scout's Rest Ranch, Will aboard Old Charlie, Johnny on a fleet sorrel mare, another gift from his mentor and surrogate father. As always the boy's heart grew big in his breast as they passed through the gate onto the four-thousand-acre spread with its thousand acres of alfalfa shrugging in the wind and as much planted in corn twelve feet high, green as emeralds to the horizon, beyond which grazed cattle and buffalo and, in the great stands of trees grown for Arta's sake, bull-throated elk and deer whose soft brown eyes Will had once admitted he could never look into and pull a trigger at the same time. Here he and Texas Jack and Buffalo Chips and Wild Bill and Billy Comstock, who had competed with Will for the title Buffalo Bill, had chased and been chased by the wild Plains Indians who were now growing tattered and toothless on reservations. It all seemed like something that had happened a long time ago, and yet in the boy's own lifetime the prairie had gone from warriors to corn.

  They stopped in at the castle-like headquarters building to pay their respects to Will's sister Julia and her husband Bill Goodman, supervisors of the ranch, and found ox-shouldered, honest-faced Goodman rubbing down his lathered chestnut in the stable.

  "It's been awful dry," complained the brother-in-law after greetings had been exchanged. "I'm thinking we'll lose the northeast hundred and sixty if it don't rain soon."

  "Irrigate," said Will.

  "The Platte's down. It'll cost."

  "It'll cost more to lose that much alfalfa."

  "I don't know, Will. You put more into irrigation than you take out, and every time it gets to look like we might show black you add on, and then that has to be irrigated too."

  "The show grossed a million this season. I can stand it."

  "Colonel," Johnny put in apologetically, "we're losing the light."

  They said good-bye to Goodman and rode out toward the south pasture, past corrals containing some of the fifteen hundred horses Will raised, the half-grown colts running in circles and tossing their dished heads, their unshod hoofs kicking up clods of earth and manure. Will ground-tethered the mounts in the open and walked away carrying a spring trap and an armload of clay pigeons. After a hundred yards he glanced back to see if Johnny was ready, then loaded the trap and swung it back and brought it swooping forward side-hand, launching one of the black and yellow disks in a high wide loop. Johnny nestled his cheek into the Winchester's stock and led the pigeon for fifty feet before pressing the trigger. The carbine pushed at his shoulder and a piece flew off the target. The rest of it wobbled to the ground while the report shattered against the distant hills.

  "Sorry, Colonel!" He levered in another cartridge.

  "A hit's a hit. Let's try another."

  This time his bullet struck the projectile square in the center, blowing it to bits. Will's whoop echoed the joy in the boy's heart.

  Four more pigeons flew, the last two at once. He burst the first two, got a piece of the third, and missed the last entirely. It completed its arc with impudent grace.

  He reloaded and tried again. The next set of doubles exploded obligingly, then a single, then a triple. Will varied the pattern cunningly, but Johnny had swift reflexes and a good eye. He finished with a score of seventeen for twenty. Then it was Will's turn while the boy acted as second. The scout started with Lucretia Borgia, the converted Springfield needle gun that had seen him safely through the Indian wars, then switched to the repeating Winchester for the multiple shots. He missed twice at the beginning while he was still getting used to firing bullets instead of sand, as he did in the arena. Glass balls were harder to hit than clay pigeons, and he was one of the few sharpshooters in the world who would admit privately that they were not as good as that female phenomenon Annie Oakley. While reloading he told of Hickok's putting ten shots through the 'o' in a saloon sign at a hundred paces and piercing a knothole in a tree trunk while galloping past on horseback.

  Johnny loved this last hour of daylight, when school was out and ranch business was finished and there was nothing for the men to do but shoot and tell stories. He wished he had his own to tell, and was acutely conscious that at his age Will had slain his first Indian, been ambushed by Mormons, and ridden Pony Express, but an evening with Colonel Cody was worth a year on the changing plains. He dreaded mealtimes, dominated by Arta's troubled silences and the tensions between Will and Louisa. It was a little better with Arta now that she was seeing that young Mr. Boal, but as she blossomed, the gulf that separated her parents seemed to broaden and deepen with the unspoken inevitability of ancient erosion. Shooting, there was just a man and a youth and targets to be destroyed, simple goals and instant satisfaction. Thus they spent the hour when the man-made forests to the west caught fire in the sinking sun and night hammocked down purple from above, and thus they spent the days of mellow reflection between the exhausted rage of summer and the narrow blind glimmer of winter. To breathe alfalfa on the Nebraska wind and shoot clay pigeons with Buffalo Bill: What other ambition could a boy have?

  Winter came and stayed and blew itself out. Will and Johnny, wrapped in cowhide coats with the fur reversed, rode the snow-swept ranch and helped pull shivering heifers out of holes in the river ice, the scout cursing white vapor and recalling similar duty for Alexander Majors the winter he turned twelve. Nate Salsbury came to Welcome Wigwam often to discuss the coming season, those discussions usually taking the form of classroom instruction as the manager showed Will wardrobe sketches and equipment plans and new scripts already decided on and paid for out of net profits. At these times Johnny thought that the man for whom the exhibition was named looked more like an employee than a decision maker, nodding automatically at the other's recommendations as if they were commands. It bothered him to see his idol behaving in this meek fashion, like an idiot child in the presence of his master, and he generally excused himself from these meetings. The earth warmed.

  May, 1886

  A white train, painting a ghostly streak through the cities of night, its mother-new cars shrieking BUFFALO BILL'S GREAT WILD WEST in arrogant gold and carrying 240 performers, bookkeepers, scribblers, and strong backs, a complete power plant, livestock, a painted canvas mural depicting a Wyoming mountain-scape, band instruments, trunks of wardrobe, lumber, and enough weapons to wage a new war for the frontier. St. Louis; Terre Haute; Dayton; Wheeling; Washington, D.C.; New York City. A new feature making its debut on Staten Island on the tenth anniversary of the annihilation of the 7th Cavalry, the Battle of the Little Big Horn: ululating r
edskins and wailing bugles and plunging horses, hissing arrows and stinging blue smoke, Buck Taylor standing six foot five in borrowed blond curls among the tightening ring of savages, then the final heart-shattering report and deadly silence while the naked white shaft of the spotlight followed Buffalo Bill onto the field carpeted with blue-clad bodies, head bowed, while the solemn legend TOO LATE flashed on the canvas backdrop.

  The patriotic New Yorkers hurled insults at Chiefs Red Cloud and American Horse when they rode next to the star during the parade up Eighth Avenue and flocked around the feathered former warriors for their pictographs, stylized drawings of a cloud and a horse in place of signatures.

  Fifth Avenue hotels put up the attractions, technicians, and roustabouts—suites with views for the Indians now, no more roasting in unpopular rooms next to the kitchen. Will and his party commanded a floor of the old Fifth Avenue, where he and Nate Salsbury received aristocratic Governor Hill, Mark Twain with his cigar and white suit, P. T. Barnum, limping and half blind, old jealousies forgotten, long-haired Henry Irving (Arizona John introduced the visitor, a decade away from knighthood, as "a British actor of no little note"), and Brazil's Prince Dom Augusta, whose battleship was anchored in the harbor near the blazing copper newness of the freshly erected Statue of Liberty. The dignitaries completed with a steady stream of bellhops heading for the presidential suite with chilled champagne and coming away with five-dollar gold pieces. Meanwhile the famous and obscure packed the Staten Island ferry to watch Buck Taylor invent bulldogging and hear Con Groner tell how he took Jesse and Frank James off the train in North Platte.

  A month before the Madison Square Garden opening, Will, in his underwear and pinstriped pants, greeted Salsbury at the door of his suite. The manager frowned at the glass in the scout's hand.

  "Steady, Nate," boomed his partner. "I'm not working today, remember?"

  Salsbury shrugged and came in past him, removing his derby. His dark hair had begun to recede at the temples and his beard was powdered with gray. Three years of fourteen-hour days had aged him and made inroads on his iron constitution. He sniffed the air.

  "I like your cologne. Lavender, isn't it?"

  Will grinned sheepishly. "Come on out, missy," he called.

  A girl in her middle twenties entered from another room. Her red hair was pinned behind her head and her pleated russet dress swished and rustled when she walked. Salsbury interested himself in a framed painting on the wall while his partner helped her into her wrap and saw her out the door.

  "They're getting younger," the manager observed as the elevator doors clanked shut in the corridor outside.

  "No, you're just getting longer in the tooth." Will uncorked a bottle on the serving cart.

  Salsbury said, "If that's for me, no thanks. It's still daylight."

  "It's not for you." Will topped off his own glass.

  They sat on the satin-covered couch and discussed the Manhattan show. Salsbury was planning a "Drama of Civilization" that would chronicle the nation's development from the Pilgrims' landing to the present day. "We'll go deeper into American history, that being what they'll pay to see when we get to Europe."

  "Europe?" The scout was coming back from the cart after a fresh refill. The famous physique was much in evidence under the thin cotton of his underwear shirt, but without the restraint of a broad leather belt his belly was beginning to stick out. He was forty and looked a few years older, but in a way attractive to women, with laugh wrinkles at the corners of his eyes and flinty threads in his hair and goatee.

  "Yes, we sail for England in the spring. We've discussed this before. A fellow named Robinson in Yorkshire is putting together an American trade exhibition, and I'm sending Arizona John over to iron out the details for including the Wild West. It will be the only truly American offering at Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee."

  "It will be a feat getting all those Indians and animals aboard a boat. Noah had it easy."

  "It's just a big ferry like at Staten Island," said Salsbury, and allowed himself a rare grin. "The State of Nebraska. I think that's appropriate."

  "I like it." Will drained his glass a third time and sprang up, no less steady than when he had admitted his partner. "Damn it, Nate, we've got to drink to it or it won't be any good."

  The manager fingered the seat of his burgeoning ulcer uncertainly. "Oh, all right," he said at last. "The sun's down in England."

  Attendance records shattered at the Garden, when the Park Avenue elite plunked down fifty cents a head to sit next to butchers from Brooklyn and watch Steele MacKaye's wind machine blow down an Indian village and hurl the Deadwood coach across the arena like a toy boat in a pond. Many of them were on hand in the Battery the following spring when Buffalo Bill's Wild West boarded the State of Nebraska for England while the band played "Oh! Susanna" and streamers flew like late snow. Some of the eighteen buffaloes in the hold bellowed a terrified response to the harsh stridency of the steam whistle.

  The equinoctial gales struck in mid-ocean. The vessel pitched and yawed on a foaming sea, its decks slick with salt water. Buck Taylor—greenish, his shoulder-length hair hanging lank and wet, flannel shirt and jeans stiff—tapped on the door of Will's cabin and let himself in without waiting for an answer. He found the scout sprawled in his captain's chair with a glass in one hand and a bottle in the other. A Rochester lamp swung from the ceiling, slinging lariats of shadow up alternating bulkheads. Taylor, his long frame bent almost double under the low ceiling, gripped the door handle for balance.

  "Colonel, the injuns is all sick as curs. I'm thinking they're getting set to throw theirselves overboard soon's they find where that is."

  "Tell 'em to line up behind me." Will upended the bottle into the glass.

  I may walk it, or bus it, or hansom it; still

  I am faced with the features of Buffalo Bill;

  Every hoarding is plastered from East End to West

  With his hat, coat and countenance, lovelocks and vest.

  Londoners accustomed to seeing the soot-blackened masonry of Piccadilly and Whitehall papered over with Arizona John's riotous posters chuckled at the newspaper doggerel and chanted it on the Royal Albert docks at Gravesend, when helmeted bobbies pressed back the crowds while a tug towed the Nebraska toward shore. A small local band on board the tug struck up "The Star-Spangled Banner" and was answered by the Wild West ensemble with "Yankee Doodle," the result being an ecstatic and incoherent collision of brass. Will, in cocked Stetson and a chamois leather coat with a white fox lining, a quart of whiskey holding down his storm-tossed insides, stood waving among a colorful collection of green Indians and pale cowboys at the railing. The tribesmen swayed a little under their feathers. Chief Red Shirt, resplendent in a warbonnet whose train dragged the deck, leaned heavily on his lance, his faith in Sioux tradition restored. Superstition held that evil would befall those braves who dared to cross an ocean. Indeed, High Heron and Has-No-Horse had already given away their possessions so that they might enter the Land of Shadows without earthly encumbrance, and Sergeant Bates, late of the Bluecoat Army, had stopped talking about his part in the white man's Civil War (or about anything else) for the first time in living memory, preferring to remain below decks with his bottle and a bucket handy. The chief's skull rang with the exploding strains of the unfamiliar marches and the incessant yammering on shore. It seemed that the white man was noisy in all his lodges.

  Mercifully, the music came to an end, uncovering the rusty squeaks of seagulls and whooshing crowd noise. When the gangplank was in place, Arizona John Burke, broad as a board fence in a ruffled white shirt and a ten-gallon hat, bounded aboard accompanied by a group of bewhiskered men in morning coats and silk toppers. Wringing Will's hand, the publicist introduced the directors of the American trade exhibition led by Lord Ronald Gower.

  His lordship, tall and thin with a Vandyke beard like Will's, but jet black and waxed to a wicked point, shook the scout's hand warmly. "I welcome you on behalf of Her Majesty's gove
rnment to the British Empire. Special permits have been issued to allow you to land your animals, and there is a boat train waiting to convey you and your company to the Earl's Court grounds in Kensington." He smiled engagingly, steely British nobleman's teeth glittering behind the waxed moustache, and the officiousness went out of his tone. "I should also be supremely honored if you would consent to sup with me at my estate this evening."

  Will's grin reflected his. "Your Lordship, I can't think of anyone I'd rather strap on my first feedbag with in England." He introduced Nate Salsbury, turned out for the occasion in silk hat and cutaway, and ticked off the names of the longhairs in frontier finery standing around him. Buck Taylor cut a swath of winces among the welcoming party as he worked his way down the line of outstretched hands with his steel-corded grip. Presently, they were joined by a tall, dark-eyed woman with auburn hair done up becomingly on top of her head, in a blue silk gown that caught and threw back the light. Will touched her elbow gently. "My daughter, Arta Cody."

  Lord Gower doffed his hat and declared that he was charmed. Still looking at her but speaking to Will, he added that she would of course accompany her father to dinner.

  Beaming, Will replied warningly that she was spoken for back in the States. Arta colored and shot him a glance that reminded him uncomfortably of her mother.

  Earl's Court was a third of a mile in circumference, with open grandstands for twenty thousand spectators, sheltered stands for another ten thousand, and standing room for ten thousand more. The American trade exhibition occupied a row of long, covered buildings, with the rest of the area reserved and equipped, at a cost of $130,000 thus far, for the Wild West. All day, to the intense interest of gawkers and journalists from as far north as Edinburgh, cowpokes riding lathered mounts harangued and prodded queasy, frightened and stumbling livestock down a reinforced ramp into the arena toward special stalls, the Texas longhorns glaring red fire at the hooting East Enders lining the way. Chimney sweeps and lamplighters admired the richness of the Americans' profanity. One of the ten elk caused a minor panic when it sprang toward the crowd, nostrils quivering, sunlight glinting off the points of its antlers, but it rejoined the herd when a cowpoke cantered in and fetched it a sharp blow across the muzzle with his quirt. After that the watchers called him Disraeli. They cheered the "red Indians," and some of the braver souls asked Buck Taylor for his autograph, mistaking him in his long hair and drooping moustache for Buffalo Bill. He obliged, cheerfully signing "James Butler Hickok."