Will picked out the leader, a brave in his early twenties with Negroid features and hair hanging in twin plaits down his dirty white cotton shirtfront, and spoke slowly, punctuating his words with signs. "The Sioux call me Pahaska, Longhair. The white war chief your people call Bearcoat Miles has sent me to ask you to return to your home in Colorado or there will be much trouble."
"This is our home," said the Ute without signs.
"No more. You build your lodges on land that is not yours and feed off the cattle of them that own it. They are angry.
"They would destroy your people. The white chief does not want this to happen. Here the cold wind blows freely through your blankets that are not as good as buffalo robes. Your children cry for food that you cannot give them and your ponies are weak and skinny. Go home to the reservation, where you will grow fat and strong and live in warm cabins."
"No one grows fat on the reservation. The white chiefs eat meat while our children fill their bellies with water. We will stay here."
"If you stay here, bad white men will shoot your squaws and children while you are out rustling their cattle and burn your tipis."
"If the white men come we will meet them with guns." The Ute spread his blanket to expose a battered Henry resting across his mount's withers.
"If you shoot one white man, two more will take his place like always. They will shoot your squaws and children and bum your tipis."
"Maybe," said the Ute, "we will shoot you."
Now the other braves shifted positions and displayed weapons. Fulton and Beck choked up on their reins. Their mounts snorted protestingly.
Will remained unmoving. "It would not be a great victory. We are old men and our time draws short. When you have shot us, others will come and shoot your squaws and children and burn your tipis."
"What crime have our people done that we must live like slaves?" The brave's voice broke. "Your people are without honor. What is their medicine?"
"They will shoot your squaws and children," Will said, "and burn your tipis."
The Indians looked at one another, and Will could see that he had won. The leader spoke quietly, without looking the scout in the eye.
"We will go back, Longhair. Alone."
Will said that it was a decision worthy of a great chief, adding: "It would be just as well if you didn't kill any more cattle than is absolutely necessary on your way back."
The young Ute replied gravely that he would try to follow that mandate, and wheeled his pony, leading the others back into camp. For a time the white men watched as the tipis were struck and converted to travois to carry the children and couksLuff.
"Kind of hard on them, weren't you?" Hank Fulton asked Will.
"It was Pure truth I was telling them. They'd of seen through anything else."
Beck rubbed a coarse sleeve over his face, wet and shinning in spite of the cold. "Is this how it was during the Indian war?"
"Not hardly, seeing as how we're still alive."
"When they showed off those repeaters, I think I knew how Custer must have felt. Telephones and motorcars and Indian powwows just don't go together. Like dancing the minuet to ragtime."
"Poor bastards." Will gathered his reins. "Poor dumb beautiful fornicating bastards."
He no longer lived in North Platte, receiving friends and business acquaintances in the cramped cabin at Cody instead and donning an armor of inebriation in the club car on the way to Nebraska to visit grown-up Irma while Louisa, more resentful and sharp-tongued than ever since the divorce attempt, dusted off the old weapons. Each time he returned to Wyoming it took more drinking to get over his visit. Hunting expeditions into the Shoshone River country left trails of empty bottles and women's underthings while the hunters sang bawdy frontier ballads at the tops of their lungs and potted at trees, stampeding game for miles. Will sold off land and cattle to keep up with the taxes and mortgage payments on Scout's Rest, but somehow the money always went for other things: a copper and gold mine in Arizona, a printing plant for sister Helen and her new lithographer husband, grading and building on the real property in Cody, irrigation canals for both ranches. The federal government had stepped in to supervise the town's water system, relieving him of that headache, and now that the Burlington spur was in he was making money from the Irma Hotel and, at last, from settlers buying lots, but most of that went into staying ahead of interest on his many loans. Bailey had ceased to be a reliable source; like Salsbury before him, he was showing signs of weakening under the burden of managing the show, and doctors and patent medicines devoured most of his share of the dwindling profits. When the circus man arrived at the TE Ranch to begin arrangements for the 1907 season, his partner was shocked at the change in him. Bailey's graying whiskers seemed to be pulling his professional face into a gaunt mask, and his self-assured barker's bawl had become the hesitant quaver of age. One day, while his specially designed circus train was setting up the tents for another link in the endless chain of one-night stands, Bailey went to bed to sleep off a splitting headache and never got up. Within days of the funeral, Will received notice from a New York firm of lawyers that the family of James Anthony Bailey was foreclosing upon his share of the Wild West in lieu of monies owed his late business associate.
"What'll I do, John?" he asked Burke.
The publicist, up to his cottony whiskers in steaming bath water, shrugged one larded shoulder. "Retire."
Will sold Scout's Rest to a syndicate of eastern developers for a fraction of what he had pumped into it and used the money to settle a bank lien against the ranch in Wyoming. He winked and shook hands with those show members who were leaving to find work elsewhere, embraced Johnny Baker, watched the wagons and the tents and the venerable Deadwood coach roll out of the great barn for the last time, and went home. Home to Welcome Wigwam and Louisa. The cabin at Cody was too full of echoes.
"The old reprobate," said Louisa, as he was coming up the front walk.
Major Gordon W. Lillie, "Pawnee Bill," friend from the old days, an aging giant growing thick through the middle, with long chestnut locks, a modest handlebar, ornately embroidered buckskins, and thigh-length boots, himself often mistaken for Buffalo Bill, posed for photographers seated across from the original at a camp table, his pen poised over the contract merging Pawnee Bill's Far East with Buffalo Bill's Wild West. As the last flash faded and the pen began scratching in earnest, the white-haired scout's fierce scowl softened and he let his chart drop back into his belly.
"Is the show going to be as big as before?" asked a reporter.
"Bigger than ever," Lillie replied in his rumbling bass.
"Big as all outdoors."
"What about the Deadwood coach?" asked another.
"I acquired that along with everything else when I bought out the late Mr. Bailey's interest in the Wild West."
Questions tumbled over one another, among them: "Is Buffalo Bill a partner or just an employee?"
Major Lillie winked at Will, who chuckled low and said, "Boys, I've not worked for a soul save my own since '76 and I am too old to go back. I have a half interest." In fact he had been handed a partnership free and clear by Lillie, an experienced promoter well aware of Buffalo Bill's crowd-drawing potential.
"What about Annie Oakley?"
"She is touring the country independently," said Lillie. "We hope to have her with us in 1912."
"I thought this was Buffalo Bill's last tour."
"It is," said Will, mildly irritated at his being referred to in the third person.
"Tired, Bill?"
"If I thought I was to die a showman, I would go out of business tomorrow. I don't want to die and have people say, 'Oh, there goes another old showman.' When I die, I want the people of Wyoming who are living on the land that has been made fertile by my work and expenditure to remember me as the man who opened up Wyoming to the best of civilization."
"Wants to ranch," wrote the journalists.
There were many more questions, but Major Lillie, wi
th the all-encompassing eye of an entrepreneur, noted the growing strain in his partner's features and herded the reporters out with much back-patting and promises of free press passes to the opening. "You all right, Will?" he said, resuming his seat.
"I'm dandy."
"Come on, old hoss. This here is Pawnee Bill you're talking to."
"Body'd think you really came from out West to hear you talk like that." He let his face fall. "It's my bladder, Bill. It's filled to bursting all the time, but when I try to pee I can't get rid of but a few drops. I feel like a cow that needs milking all the time."
"Seen a doctor?"
"Seen several, It's something called my prostate. I didn't even know I had one till it started in giving me hell. It has to be operated on, they say."
"So have it done."
"After this season, maybe. When I got time."
"If it's a question of money, I'll advance you whatever you require."
"It ain't money. My name's on this contract, promising a full tour for half the profits. I don't sign anything or shake a man's hand without delivering."
Lillie sat back. "Well, it's your bladder."
"Wish to hell it was someone else's."
"Buffalo Bill's Last Tour," said the advance publicity. Adults who had never seen the great scout in action, and those who had sat in the gallery as children, came with their children to see him shatter the glass balls and wrestle Yellow Hand, applauding explosively as the paunchy old man rose waving the great headdress, having agreed to refrain from exhibiting the scalp any more at the special request of a women's organization. They sat in silence, tears starting the long crawl down their faces, as the old man came out under the calcium spot alone, sometimes on horseback, but more often in a phaeton as the pressure in his crotch increased, to take off the great hat one last time and say good-bye.
"This farewell visit will be my last hail and farewell to you all.."
They wept openly in Detroit and Chicago, in Wichita and above the border in Toronto, and rose to cheer the standing figure with bowed white head, the slayer of Tall Bull and Yellow Hand, the man who had saved Wild Bill Hickok's life when the Cheyennes lanced him and left him for dead, Custer' s avenger, the man who shook hands with Kit Carson and Queen Victoria and crated up the old West and sent it around the world to perform on a tabletop.
"This farewell visit will be my last. . ."
In Austin and Atlanta they gave Bum a rebel yell, closing the bloody wound opened at the Salt Creek Trading Post in 1854. A Confederate veteran of the skirmish at Westport got up from his wheelchair with the help of his grandsons to salute his old enemy.
"This farewell visit. . ."
Big Bill Taft dined with him at the White House in Washington and had his picture taken with his great suety arm lying across the scout's shoulders, Will grinning to keep from screaming at the pain of it.
"This farewell.. ."
Attendance fell off the second year. The familiar speech met dry eyes and an occasional raspberry. Major Lillie added a string of nickelodeon machines to the sideshow and sent out telegrams. Old friends joined the show in Denver, Johnny Baker with gray in his locks and Little Missy, sinewy and white-haired at fifty-two, recovered from her injuries, still breaking her old sharpshooting records with revolver and rifle before smaller crowds. A newsreel camera recorded the reunion, copper-colored figures jerking like flies on a trout line.
"Miss Oakley, is it true you once shot the end off a cigarette in Kaiser Wilhelm's mouth?"
"The wrong end."
Resting between performances at sister May's home in Denver, Will accepted an invitation to lunch in a private railroad car belonging to a large, soft man who introduced himself as Harry H. Tammen, owner with Fred Bonfils of the Denver Post and the Sells-Floto Circus.
"Yes, Annie Oakley once toured with that organization," the scout recalled, smoking one of his host's seventy-five-cent cigars amid the red plush and polished yellow brass.
"No, that was the Sells Brothers Circus," Tammen, pink and shiny with a small white smile like a fat chipmunk's, chortled and fiddled with a gold elk's tooth on his watch chain. The pair were lodge brothers. "I originally called mine the Floto Dog and Pony Show, after the sports editors on the Post, then signed a relative of the Sellses for his name. You would have blushed to hear Ringling Brothers take on, after they had gone and bought the entire Sells works to the same end. But, of course, everything was perfectly legal and aboveboard. That's the way I do business."
A colored porter served highballs, and then the two sat down to a dinner of roast beef and stuffed crabs from Alaska and caviar and red wine. Finding an appreciative audience in his companion, Will spun yarns about the frontier and acted out his first interview with the late Queen, taking the parts of Colonel Sir Henry Ewart and the Duchess of Athole and Victoria herself while his listener chortled and poured more wine into the scout's glass. At length, Tammen dismissed the porter and they retired to a pair of deep overstuffed chairs with fresh highballs in their hands.
"What can I do for you, Mr. Tammen?" Will asked, loosening his belt a notch.
The other wiped away his tears of laughter and blew his large nose into a silk handkerchief. "Rather, that might be my question to you, Colonel. I am a speculator by trade and by avocation. Communications, real property, entertainment—whichever way the winds of progress are blowing. Word has reached me that you seek an investor."
"It's news to me. The Wild West is doing better than ever," Will lied.
"Come, come, sir. I have sources."
"What are you offering?"
"What are you asking?"
The frontiersman swirled his drink. "I require twenty thousand dollars to square a number of personal obligations."
"Twenty thousand dollars you shall have, sir." Tammen drew open a drawer in the oak table at his left elbow and set a pen, a bottle of ink, and a leather-bound checkbook on top. Will watched, fascinated.
"Just like that?"
"Oh, no, no, no. Certainly not. I am not St. Nicholas, for all I am told I resemble the reverend gentleman." His speech and girth reminded the scout favorably of Ned Buntline. "I will accept a six months' note on your share of the Cody-Lillie exhibition as a gesture of good faith that payment will be received at the end of the period."
"It will be, and on time."
"I am confident that it will. But my partner, Mr. Bonfils, would insist upon collateral." He leaned forward, cradling the quivering mass under his vest between fat thighs. "I would also, separately and apart from this agreement, admire to offer you a most lucrative assignment as headline act for the Sells-Floto Circus at the close of the current season."
His guest hesitated. "Pawnee Bill is a good friend and an agreeable partner."
"He lacks my facility to properly promote your contribution. Buffalo Bill, my dear Colonel Cody, is an institution, not a sideshow freak. He should be thus presented."
"You say 'Buffalo Bill' as if he's not right here talking to you."
"He is more than one mere man, and bigger than the both of us." Tammen extended a very clean, very pink and pudgy right hand. "What say you, sir? Have we a pact?"
For a fraction of a second Will teetered. Then he clasped the hand. It felt moist and very warm.
When Major Lillie learned of his partner's decision, his showman's face sagged and the light from the electric dropcord in his tent made the dye in his moustache and hair obvious. "You've not signed anything yet?" he asked hopefully. "If you haven't I can get you clear of it, tell Tammen you're committed to this show."
"We shook hands on it, Bill."
"A thing like that doesn't mean anything to a man like H. H. Tammen."
"It does to me."
"You shook my hand, and signed a contract to boot. You sat at that very table and gave a pretty little speech about how good your word and signature are."
"A lot of other people whose hands I shook are after me for money I don't have and Tammen does."
"The Buffa
lo Bill I knew stood by his obligations."
"It's not that I'm ungrateful," the other said softly. "It's a question of surviving."
The fire died from Lillie' s eyes, leaving an ash of concern. "Why didn't you come to me first? We could have worked something out."
"You're as broke as I am. I wouldn't put you to the chore of thinking up a polite way to say no."
"You have more friends than anyone I know."
"They're not my friends, though I thought they were. If I had a buffalo nickel for every time I heard 'If you ever need anything, Colonel, just call on me,' I would not be in this fix. They are always busy when I call."
"What I've heard about Tammen isn't good. The Indians would say that he is a man without honor."
"Right now that doesn't concern me. What does is that he is a man with twenty thousand dollars."
"I hope it solves all your problems." The major's tone was glacial. "He bought you for it."
The show pulled out of Sacramento and Reno owing several thousand dollars in feed bills, ducked an advertising commitment in Portland, and limped back to Denver in July 1913 leaving a trail of angry hotel owners and indifferent crowds.
"It's the damned moving pictures," Lillie complained. "They reel in paying customers like bass, travel in cans, and you don't have to feed or clean up after buffaloes on film."
Will said, "I went to see one last time I was in New York. They're too hard on the eyes. Folks will tire of them before long."
"I hope we're still here when they do."
Tammen received Will in his private car, wearing what looked to be the same immaculate black three-piece suit and elk's tooth. The scout made three trips to the bathroom in the course of their conversation. Over highballs the speculator brought up the note. "I wouldn't mention it at all, except that it's long past due and you've not paid a cent of the interest," he added with a show of embarrassment.
"I will make good on it."
"I was never in doubt that you would." Smiling his chipmunk's smile, Tammen topped off his guest's glass and lifted his own. "To prosperity."
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