The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  Over his boulder, the man in the flour sack noted that more effort had gone into the team’s selection than its burden. The Company reserved these handsome matched mounts for the first and last legs of the journey, to impress onlookers in town: One set for Point Arena, stamping and blowing before the station, another flexing its sleek, egg-shaped muscles on the way to the stable in the thriving lumber town of Duncan Mills. In between, slat-sided gluepots selected more for endurance than beauty, with few witnesses to express disappointment at their fistulas and hollow grass-fed flanks. The frugality of Henry Wells and William Fargo was nearly as infamous as their business practices.

  “The bastards,” Bolton said under his breath. He never cursed within anyone’s earshot.

  The coach began its long climb, the horses blowing from the effort, slowing as their hooves churned up earth the color of dried blood and ground fine as flour. The man in the mask bent his knees, took a deep breath, and sprang out into the middle of the road, canting his shotgun up toward the driver’s seat and thumbing back both hammers with a noise like walnut shells cracking. The lead horses shied, tossing their heads and planting their hooves in the gravel, throwing dust that drifted back over their shoulders and settled on the boots of the man gripping the lines. Instinctively he hauled back with all his weight, as if the brutes needed the incentive to stop. There followed a creaking and groaning of wood, leather, and luggage lashed to the top and stored in the boot coming to the end of their forward momentum without warning.

  The driver, milk-glass pale behind his moustaches and sunburn, wrestled with the team’s panic, sawing the lines and hissing between his teeth. The man in the flour sack gave him time to settle the horses down, then gestured with the shotgun toward the ironbound strongbox at the driver’s feet. “Please throw down the box.”

  The driver hesitated, looking down the shining twin barrels, then stooped, grasped the leather handles of the green-painted box, lifted it grunting, and threw it over the side. It struck the earth and laid without bouncing, as if it contained an anvil or something equally heavy.

  The masked man turned his head toward the top of the hill. “If he makes a move, give him a volley, boys.”

  The driver followed his gaze, toward what were certainly four rifle barrels trained on him from behind a string of boulders. He raised his gloved palms to the level of his shoulders.

  In that country, a noise from a coach suspended on straps carried as far as a crack of thunder. Flour Sack swung his shotgun toward the passenger compartment, which was packed full, just as an arm—a woman’s, from the lace at the cuff—reached through the opening on his side of the vehicle and dropped a floral-embroidered reticule into the dust. Cradling the shotgun in the crook of his arm with the barrels pointed toward the driver, the man in the flour sack bent, scooped up the handbag, and tossed it back through the window.

  “Madam, I do not wish your money. In that respect, I honor only the good office of Wells, Fargo.”

  He stepped off the road, sweeping a hand toward the top of the hill. The driver snapped his lines and the team resumed its climb. Nearing the crest, he chanced a glance toward the riflemen, but there was no sign of them, and the rifles looked suspiciously like something harmless.

  But the “rifles” and the man in the sack were no longer any of Ash Wilkinson’s concern. The veteran driver snatched his bullwhip from its socket and unfurled it over the lead horses’ heads, hell-bent for leather for Duncan Mills and the disapproving face of the stage agent there, but with his passengers’ lives—and more particularly his own—intact.

  When the jingling and rattling faded into the day-to-day sounds of the wilderness, indicating that their master had no intention of circling back, Charles Bolton swung the hatchet. Two sharp blows separated the padlock from the hasp. He wasted no time distributing three hundred dollars in gold double eagles among his various pockets; not much of a windfall as robberies went, but six months’ pay by most standards, and no one would question them in his bank in San Francisco, not from a gentleman who did regular business there and dressed accordingly to the time and place.

  A mailbag, slashed open, yielded nothing more interesting than a bank draft for a similar amount. This too he pocketed; he was loath to leave behind anything of potential value. Later he would discard the check as too dangerous to attempt to turn into cash.

  A Company waybill lay inside the strongbox. He took it out and kicked the empty box off the road. Smiling, he licked the tip of his carpenter’s pencil, stared for a moment at blue sky pushing between redwood branches far above his head, then scribbled on the back of the waybill. He read what he’d written and added a line to the bottom before picking up his shotgun and walking in the opposite direction of the way he’d come, whistling “The Wells, Fargo Line.”

  Hours later, a party of lawmen and volunteers from Duncan Mills saw paper flapping and found the note atop a blackened fir stump, weighted down with a rock.

  I’ve labored long for bread

  for honor and for riches,

  but on my corns too long you’ve tread

  you fine-haired Sons of Bitches.

  —Black Bart, the Po8

  THREE

  Thieves as a rule leave their victims bereft;

  marooned and abandoned, and with nothing left.

  But Bart wasn’t like that, to be so unfair;

  he left them a verse to help ease their despair.

  It was a trek back to San Francisco, and no mistake; a younger man with fewer physical challenges would not have attempted it. But good Samaritans spared him the worst of it, and his feet weren’t as bad as he made out for the benefit of his companions and the hotel staff in San Francisco. Better to let on that he was unequal to a long walk than for others to guess that long walks—long, long, Homeric walks—were the source of his miseries. Shank’s mare left fewer traces than iron-shod hooves, and the dense woodlands were easier for a pedestrian seeking cover from suspicious strangers than a rider on horseback; he could slide between the trees like mountain runoff. When one chose the path he had, the dangers doubled, from both the law and the ruffians who’d turned the coach roads into their personal hunting field. He didn’t place himself among that class, notwithstanding the gold coins bagging all his pockets.

  When he was relatively certain he wasn’t under immediate pursuit, he turned off the path and rested, resisting the temptation to remove his boots and massage his stockinged soles. There was nothing more preposterous than to be surprised discalced, and attempt to escape carrying his boots in one hand and yelping at pebbles, like the Other Man fleeing a bedroom in a rude joke.

  Ten miles farther on, with dusk sifting down, he turned in at a warmly lit cabin, occupied by a settler and his wife, who farmed and did a little prospecting, which they said supplemented them from time to time with a pinch of dust here and a tiny nugget there. They noted his worn boots and rough clothing and took him for an itinerant, a common sight since the Panic, who entertained them over a simple but nourishing dinner with tales he’d collected while hiking and riding the rails. He slept on a cot in the pantry—dug into the hillside to preserve potatoes and goods canned in jars—wrapped in his blanket against the cold, and was gone by daybreak.

  The desk man at the Webb—not the half-caste who stood there afternoons and evenings—recognized the weary man hobbling in at midmorning, and produced his key.

  “Out checking your holdings again, Mr. Bolton?”

  He nodded without elaborating, and asked for a bucket of hot water. The clerk made a sympathetic face; and this time the guest’s discomfort was not exaggerated.

  * * *

  James Hume grunted through his handlebars at the paper in his hand. “He’s not precisely the Bard, is he?”

  Sheriff Thorn fingered his spade-shaped beard, streaked with silver. “I wouldn’t know. It sure sticks in the craw.”

  Wells, Fargo, & Co. maintained two narrow stories of brick construction on Montgomery Street, a neighborhood which
was still referred to by longtime San Franciscans as the Fireproof Block, even though most of the city now was built of the same durable materials intended to put an end to the fires that had burned it to the ground times without number. The building, sturdy but unprepossessing, represented the nerve center of a national freighting firm as self-contained as any great city, with its own police force, telegraph offices, fleet of rolling stock and, in the person of Chief of Detectives James Hume, a Department of War.

  His office was small by such lofty standards: a cedar-paneled box with a window overlooking the constant horsedrawn traffic twelve feet below. It looked like the inside of a humidor and smelled like one, from the cedar and from cigars smoked, discarded, and replaced, as many as the ghosts of Gettysburg. Hume kept open the window and shutters, both to vent the exhaust and to encourage the intoxicating stimulation of loud industry from the noisiest city west of Chicago.

  The building was four times as deep as it was wide, extending back a city block. In the adjoining offices, rows of oaken file cases contained the records of every transaction conducted by Wells, Fargo, and every assault upon it by road agents, including three committed by a polite-spoken man wearing a flour sack over his head, but no name as yet.

  Until yesterday.

  A parchment-colored map of California’s gold country, all the towns and features lettered in copperplate, hung behind Hume’s desk in a rustic twig frame. Pins with yellow flags marked the sites of recent stagecoach robberies; the roads through California’s Mother Lode country alone resembled a daisy festival. That patch of real property was the latest and liveliest in a long line of Robbers Roosts, stretching nearly as far back as Sutter’s Mill. This Black Bart might have drawn straws with the competition for the opportunity.

  As if to remind Hume of his responsibilities, portraits of Henry Wells and William G. Fargo glowered at him from behind their full beards on opposite sides of the map. Their likenesses might have been lithographed on a tin of cough drops.

  “Same procedure as Calaveras,” Hume told Sheriff Benjamin Thorn. “That’s why I called you in out of your jurisdiction.”

  “Nevada County, too, and Cottonwood.” Thorn lifted the empty mailbag the Sonoma County authorities had recovered, with its distinctive T-shaped slash. “Same cut, same description.”

  Hume held up the waybill. “Do the journals have this?”

  “Not to my knowledge, but you never know when one of the rascals might arrange to have himself swept up in the call for volunteers. There ought to be a law requiring them to wear uniforms, so we can tell them from people.”

  “One enemy at a time, Ben. I’ll put something together when they come nosing around, and issue a reward bulletin, strictly for professionals, and hope to keep Mr. Bart’s literary aspirations to ourselves. I’ll thank you and your people to play it as close.”

  “I ain’t green, Jim. I’ve worn this star a mite longer than you did before they tapped you for this job.”

  Hume rotated his cigar, in an effort to make it burn more evenly as he puffed. His colleague in office was a first-class lawman, but as a politician his judgment was suspect; witness that colossus of brick and stone he shared with his family in San Andreas, so large and rambling the cynical electorate had dubbed it the “Thorn Mansion,” surely the most ostentatious dwelling any public servant ever maintained, honest or otherwise.

  Despite such doubts, the voters had kept him in office for fifteen years—in his profession, a lifetime west of St. Louis—demonstrating in effect a higher regard for efficiency than for probity. Thorn had grown gray in a job that turned most men out—quit, ousted, or killed—before thirty. The man delivered, rain or shine, with an eagle eye for physical evidence and the memory of an elephant: His very presence on the witness stand was as good as a conviction. Who troubled to count the number of chimney pots he owned, or cared whether they were swept clean and at what cost, so long as the peace was maintained? When such men came into Hume’s orbit, the devil take the rest.

  And there was something to be said for hunting with a terrier who was himself part weasel.

  “Mr. Valentine never stood on our side of the star,” Hume said. “He was born a superintendent, with a pencil behind his ear, and bleeds red and black ink. When he asks did I bring up the subject of public notoriety, I intend to tell the truth. He would rather take the loss than waste good men over three hundred dollars, but those press fellows get as hot and bothered as any sourdough over the slightest trace of color. If it got out that this fellow thumbed his nose at the Company—in impertinent rhyme, no less—and we didn’t crush him on the spot, we might as well issue an invitation to every road agent between Canada and old Mexico to come rob us.” He puffed a cloud in the direction of the ceiling, stained coppery with nicotine. “Trying to track one man, in all those canyons and gulches, with every journal in the country nipping at our heels? As well chase a feather in a cyclone.”

  “If one line of that poim makes its way into print, by God, I will track down the man responsible and clap him in irons.”

  “You do that, Ben, if you want to see this Black Bart plastered all over Harper’s Weekly. Those ink-slingers do circle their wagons. Come next election you’ll be taking in boarders in that palace of yours.”

  “Aw, Jim, you know I paid for it out of the commission the county pays me for collecting the tax.”

  “Ben, I don’t care. I live in San Mateo.”

  The sheriff was in no wise mollified, but let the matter drop. “I am just a policeman, with twelve deputies and a turnkey to keep the peace over a jurisdiction the size of Scotland. With Wells, Fargo at your back and your own past history, Jim, there’s no reason you won’t have this tinpot versifier behind bars before the scribbling bastards find out about it.”

  Compliments, even genuine ones, annoyed the detective. He never responded to them one way or the other, except to note that his salary had been increased from time to time. He glanced at the poem once more, then scaled it to the top of the heap of leather-bound portfolios and loose papers on his desk. “Let’s see that stick.”

  The pair shared a passion for details. Thorn’s Sonoma colleagues and volunteers had recovered one of the fir branches the bandit had arranged to gull the coachman into thinking he was sitting in the center of a field of fire. He passed it across the desk, taking care to avoid upsetting the tray of ashes and butts balanced on top of the slag.

  Hume examined each end, testing it with a thumb. “Used the hatchet he broke open the box with to cut it free, and a knife with a small blade to strip it and carve the other end to look like a rifle bore, just like the others. The man’s clever.”

  “Clever enough to overstep himself. Sooner or later he’ll brag himself up over a bottle in the Bella Union or somesuch place and we’ll snatch him on the spot. My men visit all the gin-houses in Barbary.”

  “I reckon you don’t lack for volunteers.” No smile stirred Hume’s moustaches. “I doubt it will be that easy. If he were so reckless, he wouldn’t work alone. How did he get there, and away?”

  “By horse, same as everyone else.”

  “You talked to the witnesses. No one saw him mount up.”

  “You know how it is with witnesses. Next week they’ll say he stood an Arabian on its hind legs and stitched his name into a tree trunk with a forty-four, like Deadwood Dick.”

  “So far they’ve all agreed on the description: medium height and build, straight back, soft-spoken.”

  “They did that. It suits you, Jim, as much as anyone. Where was you yesterday afternoon?”

  The detective ignored that. His sense of humor ran neck-and-neck with his regard for accolades. “He must have broke winged Pegasus to make away without leaving hoofprints. If you ask my opinion, I’d say he travels afoot.”

  “A walking bandit? Who ever heard of such a thing?”

  “It’s not so much of a stretch, Ben. Yesterday morning no one ever heard of a highwayman who writes poetry.”

  FOUR

/>   A fox is too crafty for most barnyard stock,

  so they hired a rooster what crossed with a hawk.

  Jim Hume was a hunter of men, so they say,

  more than equipped to put Black Bart at bay.

  Despite the success of its freight and passenger operations, Wells, Fargo, & Co. considered itself first and foremost a bank, and the ground floor of its building in San Francisco was typical of that field of commerce, with varnished oak cages to protect the tellers from daylight robbery—America’s fastest-growing enterprise—pens chained to inkwells, and the inevitable line of customers waiting their turn before the single cage that was open at that time of day.

  The incident here related could have happened.

  After leaving Hume’s office, Sheriff Thorn came down the stairwell and held open the street door for a new arrival. The man, of medium height and build, wearing a satin-faced chesterfield, touched the brim of his bowler in thanks and took his place in line. Thorn went out.

  The teller smiled. He was clean-shaven and balding, in a morning coat and stiff collar. “Another deposit, Mr. Spaulding? Perhaps I should buy shares.”

  Bolton smiled. It pleased him to maintain an account under a fictitious name in Wells, Fargo’s own safe.

  “I’d not, Mr. Pincus. You were in knickerbockers when I started digging. I shouldn’t wish to tot it up by the hour. Just an exchange today. Dollar notes, and a small draft.” He slid a sheet of Webb House stationery under the cage with the figure $4.25 written on it in coarse pencil.

  When the teller finished changing two twenty-dollar coins into notes and silver and drawing the draft, Bolton pocketed his cash, including seventy-five cents in change, and stepped to a stand-up desk in the corner. There he unfolded a cutting from a pocket. On thin newsprint was a lithographic image of a low-cut boot, square-toed, with elastic sides. The copy, in a bold font, read: