This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  "Windy as hell up here," the young sharpshooter observed, huddling close to the fire on a bank of the Shoshone River. The flame wriggled and twisted in the icy gusts off the mountain.

  Will blew steam off a tin cup of coffee with whiskey in it to cut the bitter taste. "This country is so close to paradise you can feel the breezes from heaven. When the angels flap their wings the wind comes right down this valley." He paused. "I've asked Lulu for a divorce."

  Johnny looked at him over his own cup. "Oh?"

  "She won't give it to me."

  "Did you expect her to?" The younger man drank.

  "Truth to tell, yes. I thought she was as miserable as me. I signed every bit of the North Platte property over to her and offered her an annual income if she'd cut the tether. But I reckon she's dead square set on making me more miserable. I'm taking her to court."

  "Don't do it, Colonel. She'll make a prize fool of you."

  "I just got done paying off the Waldorf-Astoria for a batch of furniture she busted up last month after she called my room at the Hoffman House and Viola answered. If she can make me a greater fool than she did then, it will be worth seeing. She tried to poison me once," he added.

  "She did not."

  "I was sick for days. But it would of been kinder than what she's been doing to me all these years. She's not given me one minute's peace from her nagging since we got married. A man can take being told he's not a man only so long." He doctored the contents of his cup some more from the steel flask he carried. "Soon's I get shed of her, I'm fixing to marry Viola."

  "It will look sore as hell."

  "There's a new century coming. Divorces aren't looked down on as they used to be. People are getting more enlightened. I gave her the chance for a quiet legal separation. Now it will be war and publicity."

  "Folks are always on the wife's side in a divorce. Her lawyers'll drag out all that baggage about you and Viola and you'll lose your case. Worse than that, you'll lose your public in the bargain."

  "I'd welcome it."

  Johnny looked at his mentor.

  "As a fellow gets old he doesn't feel like tearing about the country forever," Will said. "I don't want to die a showman. I grow very tired of this sort of sham worship sometimes."

  Orange firelight crawled over the old scout's haggard features, scoring his cheeks and scooping black hollows under his eyes. As Johnny watched, something came into those eyes briefly, and he felt the cold wind from the mountain on his back. He laid another stick on the fire and lifted the smudged enamel coffee pot from the flat rock where it was keeping warm next to the flames. "Let's finish off this pot, Colonel," he said. "Get an early start in the morning."

  "As I said to Barnum, a circus is a living organism. In order to remain successful it must continue to breathe, move, grow. You can't just keep giving the public the same things and expect them to remain loyal."

  As he spoke, Jim Bailey towed his partners through the sideshow tent, introducing them to the fire king, the juggler, the mind reader, and the snake charmer in her skimpy attire with a python wrapped around her masculine body, finally having Will pose with a midget on his shoulder for one of Arizona John's photographers. "The sideshow is just that," he was saying. "The main draw will always be the Wild West, but the freaks will take care of the overhead. It's a new century, brimming with new concepts and undiscovered promises. We can't go on using the ones that worked in the last."

  "No," said the star doubtfully, "I reckon we can't."

  Salsbury said nothing. He had fainted once during a heated altercation with Bailey over the sideshow idea, but had managed to keep Will from learning of the incident for fear of upsetting the precarious balance of his confidence. The former circus man's high-handed irreverence for the ideals upon which the Wild West was founded irritated Salsbury only half as much as the awareness of his own mistake in bringing him in as a partner. It bothered him that he was too ill to fight back with the weapons he knew and that Will was too unschooled in business matters to understand that the problem went beyond approving the addition of a feature they both found repugnant. Moreover, Bailey seemed of the opinion that the show had been in trouble when he came along to "rescue" it; the happy accounts for the year preceding his involvement failed to dissuade him from this view, and the manager's suggestions were haughtily brushed aside with a speech that invariably began: "As I said to Barnum. ."

  But Salsbury, white-bearded now, his custom double-breasted jackets hanging on his skeletal frame, was in no condition to bear grudges, let alone his crushing responsibilities as manager, scaled down though they were. He missed many of the show's inaugural one-night stands, and as the company was preparing for a new European tour at the end of the 1901 season, he thrust a pale, shaking hand into Will's and informed him that he had sold the rest of his interest to Bailey.

  The old scout's face worked. "You sure this is how you want it, Nate?"

  "It's not a case of wanting. The flesh is weak."

  "Wish I was going with you."

  "You'll never retire, Colonel. The people won't let you."

  Salsbury died the next year. The news staggered Will, unaccustomed to the mortality of show people. He was doubly stricken when Salsbury's family answered his condolences with a note that made it clear whom they held responsible for his early demise. He remembered having his picture taken once with Nate and his wife and new baby and couldn't reconcile that memory with this turn. By this time the show was making money in London and Marseilles, but was drawing smaller crowds and less publicity for all Arizona John's aging efforts.

  "It's that J. T. McCaddon and his International Shows," Will grumbled. "He stuck that Wild West exhibition onto his circus just to spite us."

  Bailey agreed. "He's got you in a pincers with George Sanger's circus on the other side. As I said to Barnum, this is a jungle, not a business. Plaster your posters over your competitors', and if they complain, make what publicity you can out of it."

  "Wish to hell we had Butler and Oakley with us this trip."

  At 3:20 A.M., October 29, 1901, the second section of the white train had slammed head-on into a slow freight near Lexington, Virginia. The show was traveling in three sections that year, but no one had informed the engineer of the freight, which had pulled back onto the main line after letting the first section pass. Both crews leaped clear just before the two locomotives swallowed each other in a hell of shrieking metal and spraying splinters, but Annie Oakley was flung out of her bed against the corner of her special trunk, tearing something loose inside her. Steam poured from the torn boilers and firearms popped and crackled as uninjured cowboys saw to the screaming horses. Frank Butler carried his moaning wife to a siding where the third section had become a makeshift infirmary.

  "We lost about a hundred mounts, Colonel," Buck Taylor reported later. "Pap and Eagle among 'em. I reckon God was looking out for the people."

  "What about Little Missy?"

  "She's on her way to some hospital in New Jersey for an operation of some kind."

  "Will she be able to shoot when she gets better?"

  "I asked the doc about that." The cowboy paused.

  Will looked at him from the entrance to his tent. He had been in the first section, and hadn't learned about the accident until reaching Danville. "Well?"

  "He said he'd have to know it she's going to get better first."

  At St. Michael's in Newark the doctors performed surgery to stop the internal bleeding, set her fractured wrist, and treated her for a sprained back. Will sent flowers and had the medical bills forwarded to the show. By that time the entire staff was referring to her as Little Missy, and Butler and Oakley had announced that they would no longer be performing with the Wild West.

  "Nor with anyone else," Will confided to Jim Bailey sadly.

  Old friends to see in London and on the Continent—Edward, on the throne now, white of beard and ailing, but with a sparkle in his eye for the days of the Deadwood coach and Buffalo Bill's "royal flus
h," and Grand Duke Michael of Russia, meeting the scout in Vienna with a bear hug and a special saddle standard, a gift from his brother the Czar.

  "How old are you, Will?" Michael asked.

  "Sixty."

  "Is that all? Why, you are quite a boy yet!" They roared and Will refilled their glasses.

  Before they left England, Johnny Baker read a social note in The Times of London about Viola Katherine Clemmons and her new husband, Howard Gould of Wall Street. Shown the item, Will moved his shoulders and accepted a child's program for autographing. "I would rather manage a million Indians than one soubrette."

  Johnny quietly celebrated the end of the colonel's divorce plans

  In Italy, visiting American humorist George Ade presented the snake charmer with a candy box from which sprang a mechanical snake when she opened the lid. Her shrieks alerted the entire troupe.

  In France, glanders swept through the horse herd. Health inspectors representing the French Republic examined the stricken mounts and signaled the soldiers they had brought along, who unbuttoned the flaps over their side arms. Will stopped them and selected a firing squad from among the cowboys traveling with the show. They shot forty-two of the best horses the first day, and two hundred by the end of the week.

  "We leave here with only a hundred mounts," Arizona John told reporters grimly, wincing at each report from the corrals. "The less said the better."

  No bands or dignitaries, and only the New Yorkers and tourists who happened to be there, were waiting on the docks when the Wild West returned from its four-year European excursion. The show played a special engagement at Madison Square Garden. During the charge up San Juan Hill—a popular feature in England and France, where distrust for Spain had run almost as high as in America—Will gravely pointed out the banks of empty seats to Jim Bailey.

  "Yes," said his partner. "The Great Train Robbery is showing on Broadway."

  "Actors making believe in front of cameras." Will smoothed his hat brim with a disgusted gesture. "Why truck with that when they got the real thing here in person?"

  "I don't know, Colonel. Maybe they're tired of the real thing."

  In Cheyenne the bailiff borrowed city officers to hold back the crowds, and still the temperature in the courtroom rose from the body heat of too many people jammed onto the hard narrow benches and standing along the back wall, smelling of wool and sweat and fried chicken from the gaily covered baskets on the laps of some of the women. The standees made a path for the striking old man in his gray Stetson and three-piece black suit and the seated spectators leaned forward to hear the stout woman in mourning black occupying the witness chair.

  "William is one of the kindest and most generous men I ever knew. When he was sober he was gentle and considerate. If I had him to myself now there would be no trouble. His environments have caused him to put this upon me."

  A woman in the gallery wept loudly. Will, sitting at a table inside the railing with his attorney, didn't react to the speech or to the glares he knew he was attracting from the watchers. He wore a black armband on his sleeve for Arta—quiet, darkly beautiful, dead in Spain. "Her father's decision shattered her frail heart," Louisa had tearfully told the court. He remembered how well she rode.

  Louisa's lawyer, hitherto the family retainer, pudgy and balding, with the face of a professional mourner and flecks of gray ash on his vest, questioned her obsequiously in a hushed, reverent tone that made everyone in the room strain to hear his words, including the judge. "Mrs. Cody, your husband has accused you of repeated failure to submit to your, er, conjugal destiny. Would you care to answer that charge?"

  She flushed slightly and met Will's gaze. "I will make no answer, other than to remind him of the four children I bore him."

  "Four times in thirty-eight years," muttered the plaintiff.

  "You spoke, Colonel?" barked the judge.

  "Nothing, your honor."

  "Mrs. Cody," the attorney continued, "your husband further alleges that on a certain Christmas Day you attempted to poison him by introducing a gypsy love potion called"—referring to a paper in his hand—"Dragon's Blood into his coffee. Is this true?"

  A nervous titter rippled through the gallery, quickly silenced by the judge's gavel.

  "I admit to the act," she replied, "but not the intention he has assigned to it. It was both a vain and desperate attempt to reclaim William's love and to release him from the wicked bonds of alcohol, temperance being an advertised property of the elixir. Only a wife who is truly devoted to her husband would enter into such an endeavor."

  "We're with you, dear!" called a woman seated two rows behind Will.

  "Remove that woman," the judge told the bailiff.

  Louisa's testimony and those of her witnesses ground on for days, inexorably eroding Will's case. He sat head high and stone-faced while his affair with Viola Katherine Clemmons was examined ("I suppose he wants a young wife") and his frequent desertions of home and family were clucked over, laughing out loud only once, when a Mrs. H. S. Parker declared that Will had been "romantically involved" with Queen Victoria during his London engagements. The judge gaveled down the general mirth and instructed the court recorder to strike that statement from the transcript. The press was there to relate the events to readers across the country.

  Will's petition was denied and he was directed to pay his wife's court costs in the amount of $318. He did so glumly, and disappeared from the courtroom while Louisa's friends were congratulating the victor, knocking down a photographer who tried to take his picture on the courthouse steps. Two days later a hand on his TE Ranch outside Cody found the owner sprawled on the floor of his cabin in a litter of empty bottles and managed to force half a gallon of piping-hot coffee down his throat before the scout broke his jaw.

  Chapter 16

  Wyoming hibernated under a pewter sky, last year's slain grass lying flat under silvery leprous semicircles of crusty snow. Distant haze furred the mountains to the west, with their dead white caps. The horses' shoes clanged on iron earth as they stamped and blew clouds of milky vapor. The tight-faced cowmen in their crimped hats and reversed-hide coats with standing collars exhaled gray smoke and spat glistening brown juice that crackled when it hit the ground. Their weapons bulged obviously under their coats.

  "I don't give a standing flick whose protection they're under, least of all the goddamn U.S. Government," said the spokesman for the group, a wolf-faced rancher with a circle of black moustache and beard like a coal smudge around his mouth and tiny eyes glittering in knife slits in his brown skin. "My daddy fit the Cheyennes for this here land and I ain't fixing to let any more hair grow whilst a bunch of digger Utes is living tall off the herd he started." The others in the band murmured agreement.

  Will wrapped his piebald's reins around the horn of his saddle and cut a quarter-size chew off a frozen plug of tobacco with the knife he had used to lift Yellow Hand's scalp. He hadn't chewed in twenty years, and the bare thought of it set his remaining teeth to aching, but it was important to draw the confidence of these hard men with the taste of blood on their tongues. "This is an unofficial expedition, not connected with the government," he explained, parking the slice in his right cheek to thaw.

  "General Miles has asked me as a personal favor to talk the renegades into returning to their reservation in Colorado.

  These here are George T. Beck and Hank Fulton, pards of mine from Cody." He indicated the cherry-faced developer and blond-bearded Fulton, a fellow investor. The spokesman didn't return their silent greetings.

  "You're going to have to do a heap of talking with just one gun 'twixt three old men."

  Chuckling, Will patted Lucretia Borgia's scarred buttstock protruding above his saddle scabbard. "Indians are sensitive creatures. I am eager to avoid the impression we're looking for a fight."

  "We ain't so particular," announced one of the other cowmen. His companions grunted.

  "They're just a bunch of hungry orphans who have forgot how to live off the land th
e way their fathers did," Will said. "Many of them are women and children. You would do yourself no credit killing their like."

  "That ain't what we heard." Black Beard looked doubtful for the first time. "We was told they was blooded braves armed with new Winchesters."

  "They are not. Do you think General Miles would risk sending three old men with one rifle to talk to them if that were the case?"

  The cowmen withdrew a few yards to confer in whispers. "What do you think?" Beck asked.

  Will shook his head.

  Presently the spokesman kneed his horse back toward them. "You can talk to the bastards. If it don't work we'll let Mr. Colt and Mr. Winchester do our talking for us."

  "Hard bunch," Fulton remarked, as the trio rode away, feeling the cowmen's eyes hot on their backs.

  "They talk a good fight. Wave a wet papoose in their faces and they'd light a shuck in every direction but up." The scout leaned over sideways and got rid of the tobacco.

  At night they slept on the hard ground and awoke the next morning stiff and sore and hacking up quarts of phlegm. The cold settled in their joints, and as they rode, the saddles rubbed the insides of their thighs raw and needles pierced their backs between the shoulder blades. They found the fugitive band the fourth day out, camped on the bank of a sluggish creek with slabs of dirty ice drifting in the brown current. Their tipis were made of patched blankets stretched over squat green poles. The party of whites had been watching them from a rise for some minutes before a group of young men slipped the hobbles off a string of hollow-flanked ponies and mounted to ride out and confront the intruders.

  "Your man Major Burke should be here to see this," Beck told Will.

  "I invited him, but he said he was too rheumatic to sit a horse. Anyhow, there's little enough here for his pamphlets." The Utes wore Army blankets and balding buffalo robes over homespun. Many of them had on white man's hats with the crowns cut out so that their heads could breathe. Their squaws watched anxiously from camp as they drew rein ten yards from the newcomers. Babies cried.