This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  The speculator tried his small, toothy smile. But it was dead in his doughy face. He had frozen in mid-rise. "You can't threaten me."

  A quaking old hand slid toward one of the revolvers. Tammen spoke swiftly.

  "Where do you think you are, you old fart, still on the frontier? I'll haul you into court for attempted extortion. I'll break you!"

  "You've done that." Will's fingers closed around the butt of the nearest Colt.

  Tammen rose the rest of the way and took a step backward. His pale eyes rattled in their sockets.

  "All right!" he said, releasing his breath with a shudder. "All right, you've got what you wanted. I am releasing you from your contract. But that means your money fountain has dried up. Think about that a minute. What will you do when your creditors eat you alive?"

  "Wait for them to cough me back up, I reckon, like you just done." He was pulling back the hammer now with both thumbs. His visitor left.

  After a full minute, Will poured what was left in his bottle into the stein. The neck jingled wildly against the edge of the glass.

  When the time came to buy the 101 Ranch he hadn't the money, and so Will joined the show as a salaried performer. This time Johnny Baker was along to hoist him into the saddle and help him off at the close of his act. The urine bag sloshed.

  "You going to have that operation soon, Colonel?" Johnny raised his voice. Years of exposure to loud reports had callused the old man's eardrums.

  "The doctors tell me it's too late to fix it."

  When winter came he accompanied The Last Indian Battles in a jouncing automobile across the continent, painfully mounting the stages of converted opera houses and lecture halls to talk about Little Phil Sheridan and Cump Sherman and Curly Custer and the duel at Warbonnet Creek while the projectionist threaded the film into the machine. Then spring, and another tour with 101 and Johnny. As the summer wore on, fear crept in to join the pain he saw when he shaved. "I'm afraid of dying out there in front of all those people, Johnny. I dream about it." The sharpshooter tried to josh him out of these moods, and changed the subject when it didn't work. He scarcely went to the bathroom anymore, and when he looked in the mirror, he saw the yellow jaundice in his eyes, as if his urine had backed up to his skull. He made his last farewell speech in Portsmouth, Virginia, with the November cold gray in his joints and shook Johnny's hand when he was back in his tent. The old grip was still there.

  "You stay in touch, hear? I'm stopping in Chicago on my way back home to see some men about backing a new show and I'm going to need all the crack shots I can scrape together. Annie Oakley too."

  "It'll be just like old times, Colonel."

  They stood shaking hands until Johnny realized that it was an effort for the old man to remain standing. When they released grips, a skirl of air too cold for Virginia came in under the wall of the tent and touched the younger man's bare palm, chilling him. He said good-bye again and left.

  In Chicago, where General Sheridan had introduced him to society the winter he turned twenty-six and where the Wild West began its first successful season in 1885, Will postponed the meeting with his potential backers, pleading a touch of the grippe. His groin was on fire, his lungs full of fluid, and he hadn't the strength to climb a low flight of stairs. He slept on board the express to Denver over rails once ridden by the white train. Noting the alarm in his sister May's face when she saw him, he gently turned down her invitation to stay with her "I'll feel better among my mountains." He did improve for a dinner held in his honor at the Irma Hotel in Cody, where he compared accounts of Captain Jack's one-night Cheyenne campaign with Bob Haslam and raised a glass with an aging fellow victim of the Mormon wagon train raid in memory of Alexander Majors, apologizing with a broad wink heavenward for the hard liquor in the glass. The guests grasped his pale hand and laid hands on his bony back and looked in his eyes and went home saddened. When Ned Frost, the foreman at the TE Ranch, hesitated to drive his employer around the grounds in his new Dodge, Will fetched him an astonishingly healthy blow on the shoulder and joshed, "You needn't worry, Ned. I have said too many times I'll not be caught dead riding in an automobile on my own ranch." The foreman complied, at the colonel's request stopping and turning off the engine from time to time while the old man rubbed frost off the windshield with the heel of his hand and looked out over the endless acreage slumbering under blue-shadowed drifts.

  "Getting dark, Colonel," said Frost, when they had been parked at the top of a hill long enough for hard ice to form on both sides of the glass. The snow had rusted over and was going gray.

  "It is that," Will agreed, and told him to drive back to the cabin.

  By morning those hours in the cold had thickened his congestion, and as he took his seat on the morning train, coughing with a deep rattle and sniffling, the passengers sitting near him moved to the opposite side of the aisle. In Denver he took to a bed in May's house, missing another appointment with possible investors. Young Dr. East examined the whites of his eyes and took a blood sample and diagnosed uremic poisoning.

  "What can you give me for it?" Will asked.

  "I? Nothing." The doctor closed his bag with a final snap. "There are mineral baths in Glenwood Springs that may make your time easier. I'll make an appointment for you with Dr. W. W. Crook there. He has a reputation for miracles."

  "That's what it's going to take, is it?"

  Dr. East adjusted his black-ribboned spectacles. "Colonel Cody, from what I've been told of your habits, I would say you've been running on miracles alone for ten years."

  He toppled over in Dr. Crook's office at the springs. When he came around smelling ammonia on the examination table, the miracle worker, a very tall man with fine black hair and puffs of white like mortar smoke over his ears, told him to go home. "I will accompany you."

  Will asked no questions.

  In the sleeper on the way to Denver he dreamed. Wild Bill in buckskins with a pistol in one hand and his reins in the other, plucking the eyes out of standing prairie dogs along the road from Horseshoe Bend to St. Louis, where Old Mountain had lost by a hair to a flat-running Illinois mare. Carson and Bridger arguing at Fort Laramie over the way a Northern Cheyenne mimicked a screech owl. Ned Buntline swilling pure trade whiskey out of an Army canteen on the back of Powder Face without missing a beat in his oral history of rum's degradations. The light in Sitting Bull's odd gray eyes when Will handed him the dancing horse's reins. Custer galloping up to empty his revolver into a young buffalo bull, his hair flying behind him, glowing like coals in a copper pot under a bright steel sky. Grand Duke Alexis, teeth liquid white behind his sleek moustache, blue eyes childlike, watching Spotted Tail's braves dance while the firelight crawled over their glistening bodies. Yellow Hand crossing Warbonnet Creek on his lean paint, feathers fluttering, lips peeled back in a leer of challenge against the black and vermilion on his face. Johnny Baker's features splitting into a broad grin when his bullet shattered a clay pigeon. Little Missy flushing to her bangs when Queen Victoria told her she was "a very, very clever little girl." Dust and black-powder smoke in Wyoming and a big shaggy dropping within spitting distance of the excursionists from St. Louis to beat Billy Comstock' s score by twenty-three.

  The horses, almost as famous as he was. Old Mountain, swift as thought in the Wyoming crags. Powder Face, the warrior, responding to bugle calls like a thirty-year man. Brigham and Buckskin Joe, buffalo hunters born and bred, ungorable. living just for the mad dash into the herd and Lucretia Borgia's deep bellow and the quick red blood, sharp and musty in their nostrils. Old Charlie and Billy, graying veterans submitting moodily to circus life and voyages in the stinking tween-decks of ships. Isham and McKinley, the born performers, hamming it up from New York to San Francisco, growing fat on oats and applause. All bones but the last, wintering with the rest of the 101 stock and awaiting his next rider.

  Winter on the Great Plains. A sheet of blinding white stretched taut between horizons, wind peeling off the top layer and hurling the hard g
rains like hot sparks against exposed flesh, needles in the nose, the spent breath of horses and mules and men mingling in thick clouds. Wild Bill turning raw red hands over a tiny blue fire.

  "Down's the easiest direction there is. Run down, slide down or fall down—just get down."

  "You're dreaming, Colonel. Calm yourself."

  He opened his eyes, focusing on Dr. Crook's goat-like face. The physician was seated next to his bunk in the sleeping compartment. Pale sunlight fluttered on the wall opposite the window. Will asked his companion if he was any relation to General George Crook, who ran into a buzz saw with his troops on the Rosebud a month before the Little Big Horn. But he fell asleep again before hearing the answer.

  Louisa and Irma were waiting at the station with a carriage to take him to May's house, his daughter approaching middle age gracefully, with laugh lines like her father's at her eyes and pewter dust in her dark hair, Lulu's face grown broad and scored from years spent squinting at close needlework. Will grinned at her weakly.

  "I told you I'd quit, Mama, when I got too old for the other."

  Her lips parted in puzzlement. She didn't remember.

  There were reporters and photographers on the station platform, slinging questions like Sioux arrows and popping bulbs in his face as he leaned on the doctor's and Irma's arms and tried to look like he was not leaning. Whatever happened to flash powder? The first time he ever saw the stuff go up, his heart bounded against his teeth. Now any idiot with one eye and a finger could make pictures. Old Fire-in-His-Hand would turn over in his box.

  "How you feeling, Bill?"

  "Ask yourself that one when you're seventy."

  "You fixing to retire?"

  "Hell, no. Come spring I'm starting up with a bigger and better show than Mr. Griffith could rig for all his cameras and fancy tricks."

  "Buffalo Bill Arrives in Denver Too Ill for Removal to Wyoming," intoned the Post. Tammen had instructed his editors to play up the story to its finish. Reporters camped on the front lawn of May's house, eating fried chicken from greasy sacks and washing it down with whiskey from hip flasks, their coat collars turned up against the bitter January wind. They glanced up toward the second-floor windows and bought numbers in the pool at a dollar a throw.

  The old man lay in fat sunlight, dimly aware of Dr. East's birdlike movements at his bedside, awake but dreaming. Editor Stringfellow's mad eyes and open mouth scooping angry holes in his hairy face, damning abolitionists. Big Isaac Cody, Will's father, a rock in the torrent until the knife's white arc released a scarlet fountain and the rock crumbled. The Mississippi Jaeger pushing Will's shoulder, and a lone Indian tumbling down and down, rolling like a loose bale of rags into the muddy Platte. The charter citizens of Rome, Kansas, lifting rifles and six-guns to rattle a salute to the founder and his young wife. Red-hot picket pins hissing in cups of beer rerouted from Evans's cavalry. The giddy stench of pure alcohol in a close room, Wild Bill wounded and howling, his shoulders heaving under Will's hands. Ned Buntline in the alcoholic throes of creation, pantomiming scenes from Scouts of the Plains in a flyblown hotel room. The curtain going up and Will with it, his lines as gone as George Washington's horse. Kit's girlish face and blond locks in the balcony. Good house, Papa! Will dancing with Little Missy to Sergeant Bates's banjo in the aisles of the white train while scenery streaked past in a blur of green and yellow. Audiences mangling his name in French and German, Italian and Swiss dialect. Arizona John Burke, wide as a buffalo's behind in fringed and beaded buckskins, teaching the Indians how to genuflect for the Pope and struggling back to his feet like a cow caught in river mud. Breaking ground for the Irma Hotel in Cody and knocking the necks off champagne bottles to celebrate. Nelson Miles pulling his seventy-four-year-old frame into a saddle for Bronco Billy's cameras. A baby's warm breath on his weathered cheek; Arta's? No, Orra's. Both with Kit now. A man shouldn't outlive his children. Scorched canvas tickling his nostrils, the secret satisfaction of burning "William Frederick Cody" into a clean wagon sheet. Who slew Abel? It wasn't me, sir. McCarthy looking from the dead Indian to the boy with the smoking rifle and scratching his beard.

  "He hasn't long now. I can scarcely feel a pulse."

  I never believed any of it, Pa. Even when the show was netting a million a year and there was talk of running me against Cleveland I never took a word of it for gospel. "God never made a worse fool than a man who's a liar to himself;" you said. But you never said it would be so much fun, Pa. I reckon maybe you didn't stay around long enough to learn that part.

  The oblong of butter-colored sunlight shortened, sliding off the counterpane. Dr. East, timing the patient's pulse by his pocket watch, felt an abnormally strong throb in the thick vein on the underside of the pale wrist at 12:05 P.M. and waited for the next. After ten seconds he pocketed the timepiece. The patient's eyes, half open, grew soft and moist, like wet brown velvet. The family, Irma and May holding the other hand, May's husband Lew Decker and Louisa standing next to the doctor looking at everything but the man on the bed, weren't aware of the change yet; the moment was one of those in a doctor's life that are filled with secret knowledge. As he chose his words, Dr. East reflected with mild surprise that the tiny hall bedroom seemed much bigger than it had a moment before.

  When Johnny Baker read the telegram in his North Platte home his reaction was exactly the opposite. Without telling his wife what the wire was about or where he was going, he stamped his heels into a pair of fur-lined boots and put on his padded canvas jacket and selected an old Winchester from among the many newer and more reliable rifles in his arsenal and saddled up his favorite horse and went riding. The air was sharp under a dull metal sky. Brown grass stuck up through retreating patches of snow, painting the flat countryside the color of freshly cured buckskin. When he had ridden out far enough he dismounted and pulled a spring trap and a stack of yellow disks out of a saddlebag. He spent some minutes loading the trap on a low rise and paying out string while the horse nuzzled for new grass in the snowless spots. Then he loaded the carbine, levered in a round, and pulled the string. The first disk described a lazy yellow arc against the overcast. His bullet shattered it forty yards out.

  For the next hour he shot clay pigeons while the man-made forests to the west caught fire in the sinking sun and night hammocked down purple from above.

  POSTSCRIPT

  This Old Bill is a fable, distilled from fact and legend, based on the life of William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody—buffalo hunter, scout, Pony Express rider, stagecoach driver, rancher, developer, showman, and liar. Because of his love for tall tales and his shrewd sense of self-aggrandizement, and because many who knew him were only too glad to promote their own interests by going along with the joke and at times bettering it, the researcher's task as regards this remarkable American is doubly difficult. Implausibility, normally a useful tool in separating truth from fiction, is of scant assistance when what is known about the subject is every bit as outrageous as what has been proved spurious. Such is the case with Buffalo Bill, and such is the reason for this book.

  Hence the fable. Some of the distortion in these pages is deliberate, and made in the interests of pace and entertainment, the telescoping of Cody's first two wagon train trips and of the Wild West's two separate performances before Queen Victoria in 1887 being the most notable examples. In other cases, faced with two or more conflicting accounts of the same incident with no clear historical indication as to which is correct, the author has chosen the most believable. In still others, upon encountering a flat plausibility and a romantic unlikelihood, he has opted for romance at the expense of accuracy. It is his book, after all, and the reader who has come this far may be expected to agree at least partially with this decision.

  One final note seems appropriate. While preparing this book, the author had the pleasure of meeting a most vibrant elderly gentleman who as a small boy met Buffalo Bill during one of his late tours, and of shaking the hand that shook the hand that shook the hands of Kit Carson, Wild
Bill Hickok, George Armstrong Custer, Sitting Bull, and Queen Victoria. In this manner is the living wheel of American history ever turning.