Some men cheered. A few nudged their horses closer and leaned out of their saddles to shake Dooley’s hand.
Buffalo Bill Cody then asked someone, “Now, what brings you fine men, heavily armed, out on this road so early in the morn?”
The leader answered. “We knew Chester was due yesterday. As road agents have been plaguing the road between here and Denver, we called our vigilance committee to investigate. Alas, we should have ridden out yesterday.”
“Then,” Cody said, “I would not have a new fine story to tell . . . or be indebted to this fine, upstanding young American frontiersman for the rest of my life.”
They were staring at Dooley once again.
“Don’t mean to be rude, mister,” said a short man with spectacles and a muffler around his throat. “But I’m editor of the Leadville Ledger. Might I have your name and permission to print this story in next week’s edition?”
Dooley shrugged, shook the journalist’s hand, and said, “Reckon I can’t stop a free press. Just tell the story factual, if you could. My name’s Dooley. That’s D-o-o-l-e-y. Monahan.” He spelled that, too.
“Hello, Dooley,” said the waddie who had been staring at him all the while when most eyes had been upon Buffalo Bill Cody.
Dooley looked at the youngster. He had red hair, almost as long as Buffalo Bill Cody’s, practically down to his shoulder. But it was winter. And hair did keep a fellow’s ears warm, Dooley figured.
“Remember me?” The boy smiled. “Howdy, Blue,” the redheaded waddie said.
Blue wagged his tail.
“Been a long time,” the cowhand said.
Dooley remembered. Then he grinned widely.
He had first worked with the boy years back, too many to count, Dooley almost figured. That had been on the Circle D up in Utah. Dooley had barely said hello to the cowhand that time and had then stopped the boy from getting his head stoved in by the hooves of a mean bronc. They might have become saddle pals then, but that had to wait because Dooley was going up to a line shack for the winter, and come spring, the boy had moseyed off down the trail to find another job.
Years later, probably three, maybe four, their paths had crossed again. That had been just after Dooley had found poor Blue, his family waylaid by Indians, and the kid had arrived with the sheriff out of Tempe . . . Yes, that’s right. That had been in Arizona Territory, back when Dooley had found that clipping and was bound and determined to get to that gold camp in Alaska.
After the Indian attack, the redheaded cowhand and Dooley had drifted across the territory, with Blue tagging along, and the Baylor boys—not, Jason, the one Dooley had killed, or the cousin he would kill sometime later, but Dev and Alf, as low-down curs as the West had ever seen—were hot on Dooley’s trail.
The boy had been with Dooley when they came to that old Indian hideout, a cave in the foothills, and had fetched that little girl, a pretty little thing, and she had joined the troop, too.
“Butch Sweeney,” Dooley said. That was the redheaded cowhand’s name, not the girl’s. She was . . . Dooley had to remember. Julia Alice Cooperman. He wondered what she had grown up to become. He could tell Butch Sweeney had not gotten cowboying out of his blood.
They shook hands.
“You know this man, Butch?” asked the journalist.
“Indeed, I do.” Butch Sweeney straightened in the saddle. “He saved my life many years ago.”
Dooley shook his head. “Wasn’t nothing,” he said, embarrassed at all the attention now on him.
“That means you and I have something in common,” Buffalo Bill said, “for he saved my life, as well.”
Somebody handed Dooley the jug of whiskey, but he shook his head.
Sweeney swung out of the saddle and handed the reins to a man with a mustache and goatee and some furry, dead animal on his head as a hat.
Dooley took his hand, shook it hard, then pulled the youngster—though Butch Sweeney had done a lot of growing up in the years—into a warm embrace.
“What the heck happened to you?” Sweeney asked. “I mean, we were in San Francisco and you just up and disappeared. So what happened?”
Dooley’s head began to ache.
“Gentleman,” Buffalo Bill said, “I proposition that we move our reunion and reconvene our tales at the closest saloon in Leadville.”
That motion was unanimously approved.
* * *
The First Chance Saloon was not the fanciest watering hole in Leadville, but it was, as its name implied, the first chance a man had to get liquored up once he turned the corner and entered the bustling town.
Dooley sat at the corner table near the fireplace—he wondered if he would ever warm up—as Butch Sweeney brought a bottle of red-eye and two glasses from the bar, his boots crunching the peanut shells that carpeted the floor. Buffalo Bill Cody stood at the corner of the long bar, one boot on the brass rail, the other on the floor, waving his hands and using all sorts of movements to enhance his story of the grizzly bear attack, again.
After Sweeney filled the glasses and sat down, Dooley told him what little he could remember about that incident in San Francisco.
They were supposed to be boarding a ship the next morning and taking out for Alaska—Dooley, Butch, Julia, and George Miller, another old acquaintance of Dooley’s—and find their fortunes in the gold mines in that wonderful, wild north country.
“Well?” Sweeney asked after toasting and downing his shot in a swift, burning gulp.
“Butch,” Dooley said. “I don’t know what happened.”
Oh, he explained, he remembered some of it now. He could even still taste the chocolate mousse he had eaten for dessert after the scrumptious meal at Morgan’s Fine Dining. He had gone to the livery to check on General Grant.
“The lights went out,” Dooley said, and touched the back of his head that still ached hard and painfully just from the memory.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“When I came to,” Dooley said, and refilled the empty glasses on the table, “I didn’t know who I was, where I was, or anything else.”
“Amnesia.” Buffalo Bill Cody had joined the table. He was eating peanuts he had taken from the bar. “I have heard of it, read about cases in various journals, but I don’t believe I have ever met someone who ever suffered from it.”
“Oh.” Dooley tossed a peanut into his mouth, threw the shells on the floor as appeared to be the custom at the First Chance Saloon, and sipped his whiskey. “I certainly suffered.”
He remembered waking up with the most miserable headache he had ever known, or thought he had known. He brushed hay off his clothes and saw General Grant in the stall staring at him.
“For the craziest reason, I recognized my horse,” Dooley said. “I knew him, and he knew me.”
“Robbery?” Cody asked. “You seem to have a knack for getting robbed.”
“Wasn’t robbery.” Dooley shook his head. “I opened my billfold, hoping I might find some clue as to who I was, but I found only one thousand dollars.” He smiled. “I remember thinking that I must have been a rancher who had just sold a fortune in livestock.”
He ate another peanut.
“And I also thought that maybe I was a gambler. Somehow, I must have let that notion take over, and I pretty much became a gambler.”
He hoped in retelling the story that he might remember a few things, like why somebody had tried to bash in his brains. Maybe he had seen the cur, though the way his head hurt and where it hurt, he knew he had been clubbed from behind.
“I knew General Grant’s name was General Grant. But I couldn’t tell you my own name. Then I heard a dog barking, and here came Blue, wiggling his butt and his bobtail, and I remember asking the dog, ‘You mine?’ and Blue seemed excited, and licked my face, and wagged his tail more, and I recall saying something silly like here I was in a barn, awake for maybe ten minutes, and I had a lot of money, a good horse, and a good dog.”
“A man with a good horse and a good dog and a
lot of money is a lucky man indeed,” Colonel Cody said.
Butch amened that. Dooley nodded his agreement.
“I threw my traps onto General Grant and rode out of town. Didn’t even know I was in San Francisco until I saw a few signs. I just thought . . .” He rubbed his head again. “. . . thought that, well, I needed all these cobwebs to clear till I could think straight again. So I rode east.”
“Did you know your dog’s name?” Butch Sweeney asked.
“Not till I found his food bowl,” Dooley said. “His name was carved in that.”
“So how come,” Sweeney asked, “do you reckon you knew General Grant’s name?”
“It was the last thing he saw before he suffered that horrendous blow to his skull,” Buffalo Bill said, and explained. “As I’ve already mentioned, I have read about such things in medical journals and newspapers and magazines.”
Dooley nodded. Butch refilled the glasses.
“When did you regain your faculties?” Buffalo Bill asked.
Dooley studied, decided what Cody meant by faculties, or guessed at it, and said, “Bits and pieces came back over time. Out of the thin air, sometimes. Then it all come back to me in Cheyenne up in Wyoming where I sat down to play some poker.”
* * *
Vanwy’s Gaming House on Fifteenth Street happened to have room at the hitching rail for Dooley to tether General Grant, and he had walked inside, had a whiskey at the bar, and made his way to the poker tables. This cowpuncher at the table had stared at Dooley and peppered him with questions like, Did you ever work in Arizona? to which Dooley had answered: “I don’t know.”
Around midnight, after Dooley beat the cowhand for a nice pot, the waddie asked Dooley if he would mind telling him his name. Since that was one thing Dooley could remember, he did.
The rest of the scene replayed through his mind like some nightmare.
“You the same Dooley Monahan who killed all the Baylor boys?”
“I don’t know.”
“They was cousins of mine. FIRST cousins.”
And Dooley had remembered how to survive a gunfight.
* * *
“Everything came back to me as I kept fanning that hammer,” Dooley said, and made himself eat another peanut.
Shaking his head, Butch Sweeney sighed. “My, oh, my, Dooley, and here Julia was, probably while you lay in that livery with your brains all a-twisted, saying that you was probably just out doin’ Dooley stuff.”
Dooley swallowed the peanut. “Dooley stuff?” he asked.
Sweeney grinned. “I asked Julia the same thing. She said it was doing things you figured we were too green to handle, or none of our business, or”—he shook his head—“as she put it, ‘too hard on our tender eyes or ears.’”
Dooley sipped another whiskey and decided this would be his last one. He could usually hold a lot more liquor than this, but he had eaten little except peanuts and the jerky one of the townsmen had given him, and being two miles above sea level also, he was learning, affected not only your breathing but how much red-eye you could hold.
“Well, a fine story, Dooley,” Cody said, and scraped his chair legs across the floor as he polished off his drink. “I am hanging my hat at the Hotel Tabor. You will do me a favor by dining with me in the hotel tomorrow morning. Say one thirty?”
“In the morning?” Dooley asked.
“Afternoon, my good man. But it’s morning for me after a night on the town. Right early, at that, too.” He grinned, shook hands, and left Dooley alone with the redheaded cowhand.
Dooley found the pause awkward. He wanted to ask about Julia, what had become of her, and tried to imagine her all grown up now after, what, four years or so, maybe five. Yet he couldn’t bring himself to ask anything. Not even about Alaska.
That had been his dream. See the goldfields of Alaska. Strike it rich. Most cowboys always wanted to see the elephant, as they called it. It meant see what’s over on the far side of the hill. Something new. Different. Something adventurous.
Alaska.
Spilt whiskey.
“Where you staying, Dooley?” Butch asked, and corked the bottle, even though they had polished off all the whiskey.
Dooley laughed. “Well . . .” He wondered how cold it would be to sleep in a wagon yard or livery again.
Butch Sweeney had grown up in those years. He wasn’t the greenhorn cowpuncher anymore. He understood Dooley’s predicament.
“Come on, Dooley. My digs ain’t gonna be as fancy as where Colonel Cody’s sleeping in over at the Tabor, but the bed ain’t ticky, and it’s fairly quiet—by Leadville standards. Besides, there’s a café right next door. We can take our supper there. It is getting late. And you need to find a livery that ain’t full up for General Grant.”
The fresh air—now filled with gently falling flakes of snow—seemed to do Dooley some good. Oh, the cold and the altitude would take some getting used to, but Dooley swung into the saddle and followed Butch Sweeney down Poplar Street, turned on Seventh, then down Harrison, and finally to Front Street.
It struck Dooley then that he did not need to have seen Alaska. All these years he had dreamed of finally hanging his hat in some gold town, but he seldom had gotten to experience that. He had been bound for Deadwood, up in Dakota Territory, just a short while back. He hadn’t made it to Deadwood, either. But here he was . . . in Leadville, two miles high and full of riches and noise and all the wonders of a wealthy gold camp.
The Silver Saloon was crowded.
The Silver Palace was rowdy.
The Silver Café was packed.
The Silver, Gold, Lead and Dead Funeral Parlor was busy, too, with the bodies of four dead outlaws and one heroic old stagecoach driver to prepare for burial and funeral at Evergreen Cemetery on the other side of town up north.
The Silver Assay Office was the only place closed.
Which caused Dooley to remember. He wasn’t in a gold town. Silver was king in Leadville.
That didn’t matter. He was here. Granted, with no money, but he had been reunited with a good friend who had ridden with him across Arizona and all the way to northern California. He had his horse, his health, his dog.
They were lynching two men at the Silver Carpentry Shop.
Yes, this was some town.
At the edge of town, they found space at the Loomis Livery for General Grant. Butch Sweeney paid the fee for a week.
“I’ll pay you back,” Dooley promised.
“Pard,” Butch told him, “you don’t owe me a thing after all you’ve done for me.”
“I’ll pay you back,” Dooley told him.
This time, Butch nodded, as he led his own mount into the stall.
“Stay here, Blue,” Dooley told his dog, who went into the stall with General Grant.
Dooley and Butch walked just across the street and found another café and grabbed a table. Dooley ate his ham and eggs and drank his milk watching out the window at all the commotion. The clock on the wall told him it was four thirty in the afternoon, but it looked like . . . well . . . Dooley had no idea. Snow kept falling, men and women bustled about on the boardwalks on both sides of Front Street. Wagons came by. Men rode horses. A whistle blew at some mine, signaling the end of a shift. He could hear banjos being clawed and the ivories and ebonies of pianos being banged at the hundreds of saloons they had passed since the First Chance on Poplar Street. All that noise, that wonderful noise, and yet Dooley had not heard one gunshot.
Despite the road agents that had spoiled their entrance into this fair city, Dooley found it peaceful. The two men being lynched down the street had deserved it, Dooley knew, because even the widow woman with her gray hair in a bun had said so before she had begun leading the Maple Street Methodist Church Choir in a song to send the wrongdoers to their just reward and then to the Silver, Gold, Lead and Dead Funeral Parlor for even more business.
The waitress brought dessert, even though Dooley had not ordered any dessert, and when Dooley saw what was put
on a plate before him, he could not believe it.
He looked up at Butch, who grinned and thanked the young waitress.
“Chocolate mousse?” Dooley asked.
“Remember?” Butch said.
“Of course.” Sweeney had wolfed down strawberry shortcake on that last night in San Francisco, and Julia had eaten some ice cream. Old George Miller had managed to finish off his lemon meringue pie. That had been after beef tenderloin and lobster. Lobster. How rich that had been. How rich Dooley had been.
He sighed, and ate. Butch Sweeney just had a lemon cookie for dessert.
“Full?” Butch asked.
“Yeah.” Dooley shook his head.
“Hotel’s just down the street. It’s the Georgia Gulch Inn.”
They walked there, crossing the street in the snow, raking the mud off their boots on the first step, then stamping off the rest on the mat in front of the main door, and walked inside.
Dooley looked up, expecting to find Julia Alice Cooperman standing there, looking lovely and much older, more mature, a real woman instead of just a girl. Instead, he saw a burly man with a twisted mustache and slicked-back hair.
“Good evening,” the man said in a most unpleasant voice.
“This is Dooley Monahan,” Butch Sweeney said. “He’ll be bunking with me for a spell.”
“Then I shall adjust your bill,” the man said. “And . . .” His eyes widened. His face paled.
“The Dooley Monahan?” the man said. “The famed gunman and bounty hunter who has rid the West of some of the foulest killers on the frontier?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
“You want to what?” Dooley managed to get out of his mouth after finally swallowing the bit of bacon that had been stuck in his throat. It was good bacon, too, not burned, not raw, with a hint of maple-wood smoke and apple to it. And a thick slice, as well. He had never tasted bacon so good.
“Grubstake you,” Buffalo Bill Cody said.
It was a bit early in the morning—well, afternoon, really—and Dooley had not known the colonel long enough for Cody to start funning him, or play some practical joke on him. Yet the more Dooley stared across the table in this fancy café the more it seemed to him that William Frederick Cody was not funning, not joking, and not playing Dooley for a fool. But Dooley had to be certain.
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