Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  Bat kissed his young lady’s hand and gave her his courtliest regrets, then followed Wyatt to the stairs. They heard Miss Gillespie hiss at the bouncer when they went for the stairs, but they were already up them and opening the door for the office before Santilli was quite awake.

  Seated at a small desk, Faranzano was a compact, wiry man with his black hair slicked back. He was sitting with his back to them, as they came in, talking into a black, conical instrument wired to a box. Wyatt supposed it to be a telephone. When Faranzano turned to glower at them Wyatt saw a fox face with the blue-black shadow of a beard. Faranzano wore a high-collared white shirt, garters on his upper arms; he had loosened his silken black bowtie. A big diamond ring shone on the pinky finger of his left hand, and diamond studs set off his shirt cuffs. Wyatt spotted the butt of a pistol in the inside pocket of the frock coat hung up on a brass coat-tree. Faranzano could not easily reach the gun from where he sat. Success can make a man careless, Wyatt observed to himself.

  Bat closed the door sharply as Wyatt went to the single window overlooking the street and pulled the curtains. On one wall were three circular tintypes of people who might be Faranzano’s relatives, and on the opposite wall was a framed painting of a haloed saint kneeling in a ray of divine light.

  There came a hammering on the door. “Mr. Faranzano?” That would be Santilli.

  Wyatt opened his coat, put his hand on his gun and shook his head at Faranzano.

  “It’s all right, for the moment, Santilli!” Faranzano said, his Italian accent distinct. “But we will talk, after this.”

  Wyatt and Bat came closer to the desk, both with coats opened to show the pistols stuck in their waistbands. The telephone’s earpiece still in his hand, Faranzano looked at the pistols, and then at their faces. There was no fear on his own face; just a flaring of anger in his eyes, like a fire that was on the match but not yet on the kindling.

  A tiny voice, like something from a miniature human being, came unintelligibly from the telephone. Bat pointed at the telephone, put the same finger to his lips, then dropped the same hand to rest on the butt of his gun. Faranzano hung the phone’s mouthpiece on a Y-shaped bracket extending from the wooden telephone box.

  “You wish to stand there and admire me,” Faranzano said, “or is there something to say?”

  “I’m curious to see a man who buys girls from an orphanage,” Wyatt said. He didn’t think he was going to get anywhere with this man by persuasion or honeyed words.

  Faranzano shrugged. “What you want?”

  “Did he do that, now?” Bat asked, as if bemused. “I heard that Al Swearingen up in Deadwood does that. But Swearingen’s a scurrilous, foul, son of a bitch. Whereas Mr. Faranzano—why, I’d like to think you’re a man of honor, sir, according to your own lights. We will respect your honor—if you will honor us with some information.”

  Faranzano glanced at Bat’s gun. “What information?”

  “You had a girl here, Dandi LeTrouveau,” Wyatt said. “You got her from an orphanage. I wanted to know where she came from … Where the orphanage was, anything you know about her family.”

  “Who told you that I buy girls? Where you get this story?”

  “A man we met on the street,” Wyatt said. His poker face supported the lie seamlessly and Faranzano seemed to believe it.

  “What man?”

  “Never did know his name. Listen to me now … What do you do about girls, like Dandi LeTrouveau, who leave here without your permission? You send someone to make an example of them?”

  “If I can find them—sometimes. But I could not find that girl. She leaves town too quick. Now: that is all I am going to tell you. But you are going to tell me who you are.”

  And he reached under his desk, pulling a hidden lever. A bell rang in the hall.

  Wyatt shook his head. “You shouldn’t have—”

  Then the door burst in. Santilli, red-faced and puffing, shoved in past Bat, a small pistol almost hidden in the bouncer’s big hand.

  Wyatt had drawn his own pistol, when the door banged open—and he pointed it at Faranzano.

  “Wait, Santilli,” Faranzano said, nodding at Wyatt’s pistol. “I just call you to even the odds.”

  Bat chuckled. “You haven’t succeeded.”

  Faranzano looked gravely at Wyatt and Bat. “You two men, you don’t know who I am, or who is on my side, or you would not come in here like this, talking of honor but acting like roughs—like men with no honor. You will put your guns on the desk and then I am going to call someone and we will decide what to do with you. Maybe you live that way.”

  Wyatt acted as if he hadn’t heard. “This girl, Dandi—did she date a man named Pierce?”

  Faranzano shrugged.

  “Was she pregnant?”

  Faranzano turned slowly in his chair. “Santilli, when I tell you, start to shoot … This taller one first.”

  Santilli was still breathing hard. “Sure thing, Mr. Faranzano.”

  Eyes darting around, Santilli wiped at his sweat-beaded forehead with his free hand.

  Keeping one hand on his gun, Bat plucked a kerchief from somewhere, and offered it to Santilli, smiling politely. “Hard to shoot with perspiration in your eyes.”

  “Oh, thank you …” Unthinking, Santilli took the kerchief and dabbed at his head—then did a double-take, glaring at Bat.

  “Idiot,” Faranzano muttered. As he said it, he opened a desk drawer, put his hand on a derringer.

  “Take your hand from that gun,” Wyatt said.

  Faranzano shook his head. “You kill me and live, a hundred men will hunt you. They catch you, you wish never had you lived. But probably me or Santilli get you first …”

  “Just answer the questions and it won’t come to that. What orphanage?”

  Slowly and steadily, locking eyes with Wyatt, Faranzano shook his head. Between clenched teeth, he said, “Put down your gun. Maybe you live.”

  The room was quiet, for a moment, but for their breathing. Santilli waited for the order to commence shooting.

  Wyatt decided he wasn’t going to give up his gun. He didn’t think he’d come out of it alive if he surrendered to Faranzano. He had gotten himself into a fix and he was going to have to shoot his way out. He thought he would shoot Santilli first, then Faranzano. He tensed himself …

  That’s when Bat began to hum “Camptown Ladies”. The other three men looked at Bat, who was tapping his fingers on the butt of the gun. Then he made a sudden move with that hand—Faranzano opened his mouth to shout—

  And Bat drew a roll of bills from the flap of the gun holster, and pointed them at Faranzano in place of a gun.

  “Two hundred dollars,” Bat said, bowing slightly, “for a small piece of information—very small. That much for one little answer—to show we respect you.”

  Pale, hand trembling on the derringer, Faranzano looked at the money. He pursed his lips. Then he nodded curtly. “Santilli, put your gun away.” And Faranzano closed the desk drawer.

  * * *

  “What makes you think the U.S. Marshal in New Orleans is going to take much notice of you?” Bat asked, as the train started to pull out of the station for points south, the next morning.

  Wyatt leaned back in his seat, stretching. “People take notice of a telegram if you give it the official tone. I dropped my father’s name in, ‘son of justice of the peace Nicholas Earp’, said I was a ‘law enforcement officer’ in Wichita …”

  Bat chuckled. “You were rehired when I wasn’t looking?”

  “Stretching the truth a little. I am hoping the U.S. Marshall will trouble to drop by the orphanage, get the facts from them. Tell me where her family is. I can talk to her family, maybe they’ll tell me how she knew Pierce—if she was pregnant by him. Then I’ll know if I’ve got any reason to push Pierce again. I don’t want to do it, if I don’t have to. I keep hearing about how well-regarded and potent the son of a bitch is …”

  “He’s starting a town called ‘Pierce’ somewh
ere in Colorado. You’d think Wichita was called Pierce, the way they act.” After a few thoughtful moments, Bat added, “Could be Faranzano lied about the orphanage. He didn’t like us much.”

  Wyatt shook his head. “I don’t think so. That was the place.”

  “You trust that man? What that Millicent told you made it sound Faranzano had Dandi killed for running off.”

  “It crossed my mind. But how would Pierce get involved in that? He seems tied in someway. And if Faranzano had her killed, I don’t think two hundred dollars would’ve gotten us out of there.”

  Bat nodded. “True enough.” They were silent as the train began to chug, picking up speed. After a moment, Wyatt said, “I owe you—you got me out of a tight fix, back there.”

  Bat shrugged. “We were in it together.”

  “And I owe you two hundred dollars.”

  Bat shook his head. “You can stake me at cards when I run out of chips, sometime. You know, it might take a while to get word back from the Louisiana … You won’t be the first priority the Marshal there has, if he bothers at all.”

  “I expect it’s a long shot. Come spring, anyhow, I’m putting Wichita behind me—for a time.”

  “So you said. The Black Hills. You do realize they’ve got no law up in Deadwood. A vigilante hanging now and then, is all.”

  “A man stays sober and alert, he doesn’t need the law, most of the time. And they do have something else in Deadwood …”

  Bat smiled. He knew what Wyatt meant. Gold.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Winter in Wichita.

  This one was colder than most. They didn’t go outdoors unless they had to. Wyatt’s routine was a trudge from the hotel to the café, then to James’s place. With everyone crammed inside, the windows closed against the cold, the saloons smelled, as Bat said, like a cowboy’s boot after a long day. Whenever Wyatt slogged back to the hotel, his eyes were burning from the smoke of leaky pot-bellied stoves. Wood and coal were brought in by sleighs towed by unhappy oxen, their legs bloody from crusty snow. After one protracted blizzard pulled a white curtain on the rest of the world, some of the same oxen became stringy steaks. With Wichita cut off by storms, vegetables and juices were hard to come by, canned goods were running low; the town’s two physicians were noting cases of scurvy.

  Mattie was bored and irritable. She occupied herself with handwork, tatting of various kinds, embroidery; she sewed up rents in Wyatt’s shirts and her own dresses. She read old magazine serials. She sometimes supplemented their income with housework around the hotel, the hotel’s mistress complaining of rheumatism. But with the grayness of the days, the confinement, nothing seemed to suit Mattie long. Once he found her nodding over a bottle of laudanum—she claimed to have a toothache. He took it away when she’d drunk half it and she never mentioned her toothache again. She was contrite, after that, for a time. But soon she commenced complaining that Wyatt never laughed, that it was a grand occasion if he smiled. Keeping company with her went from being moderately easy, to being a chore. To Wyatt, it seemed as if her conversation was largely prattle. She liked to play rummy, which Wyatt merely tolerated.

  She could read, but not as smoothly as Wyatt, and she asked him to read to her. It helped pass the time after he came back from his work—lovemaking took only so much time, and when you had cabin fever it lost some of its appeal. But the books had to be bright and cheerful. She would hear none of Shakespeare’s tragedies—which Wyatt found astonishingly loquacious—and she made him give back a book by Mr. Poe, loaned to them by Bat, long before they’d finished it. “It gives me nightmares just to have it in the room!”

  The railroad tracks were blocked by drifts of snow, more often than not, and mail was sporadic. The few newspapers that reached Wichita from the great cities back east spoke of economic depression. Theater troupes did not visit in a hard winter and the nights were glum with a quiet broken only by the occasional gunshot. Most of the gunshots came to nothing, but every couple of weeks a body was dragged from a saloon; and one from the livery, where two men, gambling, had argued over how the dice had fallen on the muddy ground in a horse stall.

  A Chinese laundry on the edge of town burned down; Wyatt and Bat and a few others tried to save it, working side by side with the Chinamen, dumping buckets of snow on the timbers. But despite the frozen water all about it, and on its roof, it burned to a sodden black lump. The snow, however, kept the fire from spreading.

  Most of the cowboys had gone. Abel Pierce and his men had left Wichita in the Autumn. Wyatt had heard it wasn’t safe for Pierce, yet, back in Texas, as the cattleman’s legal troubles weren’t resolved. There were rumors he’d gone to Chicago, taking Johann Burke with him. Even so, when Wyatt played cards, he sat with his back to the wall. When he was planned to go outside he took a look through the window first.

  Daily he expected a letter, or a telegram, from New Orleans.

  Daily, none came.

  He worked for James and he played cards. His brother Virgil came through, between storms, with news of Newton and their father. Winter was hard in Missouri too, and Nicholas talked of moving to California once more. “The Midwest winters will put California in a man’s mind,” Virgil said.

  Wyatt made plans of his own. He tried not to argue with Mattie. A dozen times he came close to sending her away. But he could not turn her out, not in that winter.

  March came blustering in, but toward the end of the month an interval of warmth removed much of the snow, and the roads were open. Supplies poured into town, more travelers, a spurt of commerce. Wyatt thought about all that gold in Deadwood …

  * * *

  The road to Deadwood, Dakota Territory, barely deserved the term, Wyatt thought, driving his team up the ravaged track that misty dusk. The harsh Black Hills winter had rubbed a great deal of the trail away. He was regretting driving a freight wagon up into these hills. It was a long ride to a smithy; if he broke an axle he’d have a hell of a time fixing it alone.

  The team was game enough, though, stumbling now and then but never shying. He’d bought the sturdy draft horses with money saved from one very fortuitous hand of poker. His own riding horse, tied to the back of the nearly empty wagon, ambled along behind as he urged the team up an ever-steeper trail—a narrow track streaked with mud flow and studded with fallen chunks of granite.

  When they came to a particularly steep grade, Wyatt stopped the horses and looked up the rugged hillside. Maybe he shouldn’t try it till the morning. But he was hoping to get up to the hilltop and camp on the other side, at the base of the next, higher hill, where it was more out of the weather. The Black Hills forgot all about it being spring, at night.

  Looking at the bleak countryside, he wondered if he should have brought Mattie along, after all. She’d have been some company, and comfort on a cold night. But she wouldn’t have handled the wilderness very well. And she didn’t like the idea of him spending weeks, maybe months up here cutting wood, hauling it to the mining camp. He didn’t care to hear her “told you so” if it went wrong. Still, he had good information that the miners would pay a premium for a wagonload of timber for sluices, and smaller cuts for fuel; they’d scoured and clear-cut the hills close around Dead-wood. An industrious man, willing to range farther, could make fifty, seventy-five dollars a day cutting wood for placer mining alone.

  He’d given Mattie money, and promised to send for her when the stage line to Deadwood started up again. Mattie pouted, making it clear she felt abandoned—but Wyatt had to get away from Wichita for a while. He had no pressing reason to stay; he had received no reply from the U.S. Marshal in New Orleans. He didn’t know how else to pursue the case without causing a feud with Marshal Smith.

  He wished Bat had come along. Wyatt would’ve been grateful out here for Bat’s talkativeness. His own thoughts seeming to echo from the deep black valleys as he drove the team up higher and higher hills.

  It was ghostly quiet. Nothing but the sound of his horses, shifting; his riding mount snor
ting wistfully over the sewn-up bags of oats in the back of the wagon.

  He raised the reins to drive the horses onward, then hesitated, hearing other sounds echoing from the dark hills behind him: a clicking of hooves on rock, maybe, and a wind-thinned whinny.

  He turned in his seat and squinted up at the hilltops. Was that a rider, on the top of the ridge to the southeast? It was darkening back there—hard to tell for sure. But he’d thought more than once, over the last two days, that someone was pacing him; watching him.

  The rider could easily be a scout for a Sioux war party. The Treaty of Fort Laramie, drawn up in 1868, had protected the Dakota Sioux’s sacred Black Hills for a few years. But then Custer’s engineer had found gold up here and the government allowed a flood of miners into the territory. Now the Sioux were retaliating.

  The Indians could see that the booming mining camp wasn’t going away any time soon. Some of the outlying camps had been raided, settlers and miners killed, and it was said that Custer—who had started the whole thing—was taking up a punishment expedition.

  Yes, it could be Indians following Wyatt, looking for the best place to cut him down. Could be someone else too, he reckoned. He’d made more than one enemy in the last year.

  He decided that getting over the hill would give him a better shot at the rider than camping out here. Get to higher ground, find some cover. But he’d be a damned good target going up this hill, on his way to the camp—with his back to the rider the whole way.

  That ridge top was a good ways off, out of easy rifle range. Wyatt could get up the hill in half an hour, if he pushed it, before the rider got close enough for a reliable shot.

  He chuckled at himself. He was probably letting his imagination ride herd on him. Still …

  He shifted on the seat—which he’d cushioned with folded-over blankets—clucked at the draft horses and flicked the reins, starting up the steep trail.

  The going was slower than he’d hoped, with the night falling around him; the sky soon went from dark blue to charcoal, to sable. More than once he had to get down and lead the horses on foot past the touchy spots.