The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  “To what value? It would only stir up the hornets. The description favors half the male population of the state.”

  The other glanced down at the sheet he’d written on. “It favors you, if you take no offense to that.”

  Hume’s moustaches, noticeably whiter in recent weeks, stood out against the deep scarlet of his face. “Then arrest me, you damn pup, and see if you can collect.”

  “Very sorry, sir.” He returned to his station. It was unlike Hume to lose his temper over an idle remark. However much or little Bart had stolen from the Company, he’d taken a significant bite out of the chief’s thick hide.

  * * *

  John J. Valentine pulled a face at the foreign object squatting in the center of his Brussels carpet. He prided himself on keeping a tidy office, never going home at the end of the day until his desk was clear of everything but a crisp new green blotter sheet and the glob of bronze inkwell Wells and Fargo had presented him with on the occasion of his fifth anniversary with the Company, and which he used for a paperweight; he dictated all his communications to his secretary, who transposed them from Pitman shorthand to a Remington type-writing machine, and always brought in a gravity pen for his employer to sign them. Before turning out the lamps, the general superintendent squared all corners, glanced about, and pronounced himself satisfied.

  The intruder, a homely box bound with strap iron, was clean enough, but its unabashedly utilitarian appearance—twenty inches long, twelve inches wide, and ten inches deep, secured with a hasp and padlock, and painted Wells, Fargo’s trademark deep green shade—belonged in the counting-room downstairs, awaiting filling with coins or notes and transfer to the front boot of a mud-wagon, and not in the room where Valentine spent all of his working day. Nothing like it had ever presented itself above the ground floor. The yoke-shouldered teamsters his chief of detectives had enlisted to carry it up the stairs stood back from it now, breathing heavily and sweating in sheets.

  This was the same room where six years before a somewhat less well-fed executive had interviewed a somewhat less grizzled applicant for the security job; and while this was not the first time Valentine had felt a twinge of doubt about his choice—there was the affair of the “Never Forgets” headstone that had made his own distant employers bilious, and the business of inviting the creatures of the press into the ranks of the Company’s undercover agents—it suggested to him that perhaps Hume’s preoccupation with the atrocities committed by Black Bart had unhinged his usually sanguine powers of reason: Recent witnesses claimed Bart had begun telling drivers farewell and to “Give my kind regards to Jim Hume,” in place of a poem. It was enough to bring a flush to the face of the man in the moon.

  “What does it signify?” Valentine asked. “Do you imagine this is the first time I’ve set eyes on one of our express boxes?”

  “You’ve never set eyes on one like this. What do you reckon it’s made of?”

  “Oak, of course. I authorized the expenditure myself, against the advice of the owls who keep the accounts, who pressed for pine.”

  “And what persuaded you?”

  “Jim, you stretch my patience. Hardwood’s stouter, more difficult for bandits to break into, and so heavy as to be cumbersome to carry away on horseback.”

  “It was a sound decision; and an inspiration to me, when I commissioned this one.”

  “Is it your responsibility? I should think you’ve enough to attend to without interfering in the gear-and-pulley end of the operation.”

  Hume, standing beside the box, leaned down and rapped the lid with his knuckles. It made a deep gong. The oak had never sprouted that could manage that knell. Valentine blew out his whiskers.

  “A strongbox built of iron? Shall we crack the back of every driver with the line?”

  “Not if he takes his time about loading it. The men who would relieve him of it haven’t that luxury. John, we’ve had this conversation: A minute lost to the thief is a minute won for us. It can take as much as forty for him to break free the booty from this box, and that’s a mile to the good.”

  Valentine chuckled. “Why not furnish the coach with a proper safe, and pounce on the beggars while they’re still at it?”

  “That was to be my next suggestion, on routes involving substantial cargo in coins and bullion, bolted to the floor.”

  “You would have us spend a thousand dollars to prevent the loss of a hundred.”

  “We do that every time we offer a bounty five times in excess of what was stolen.” Hume kicked the box, eliciting another hollow boom and moving it not at all. “The cost will diminish in direct ratio to the loss. Inside of six months, a robbery in sourdough territory will be as rare as an honest man in Sacramento.”

  The superintendent, who on occasion played cards with Governor Stanford, winced at the suggestion inherent in that remark. “I would dislike to dismiss with the services of Mr. Ayer. He has served us since the beginning, and his cabinetry skills are superb.”

  Joseph William Ayer, San Francisco’s most celebrated cabinetmaker, had been commissioned to design and construct the boxes from early days.

  “I’ve heard him complain often about repeating the same project over and again,” Hume said. “It’s not like building a custom desk or lady’s dressing-table. In any event, the traffic from Panama will require him to hire additional apprentices just to keep up with the demand for rocking chairs and mahogany banisters. He’ll never miss us. Meanwhile any old man who can manage an axe or a hatchet can open a wooden crate in a single swing.”

  Hume’s thoughts were still on the description the lumberman had given him of the weary traveler on the Ukiah road. He’d found it more credible than he’d let on to his secretary, but of only nebulous use in the conduct of the investigation. The picture of a predator from whom youth was fleeting, however, had led him to the concept of a container for transporting valuable shipments that would challenge the strength of a middle-aged man. He’d engaged the services of the forger who supplied the iron straps for Ayer’s boxes, paying for the materials and labor out of his own pocket. The unimaginative Valentine was nearly impossible to convince with words alone.

  Now, as he watched the superintendent hoist himself from his high-backed swivel, circle his desk—which unlike his own was bare enough to set out a twenty-piece tea service—and bend down against the pressure of his spreading paunch to sound his own knuckle-note on the box, he knew the argument was won.

  But the victory was only slightly less hollow than the reverberating sound from inside the empty vessel. In the time the item was under construction, Black Bart had thrown down his damned shotgun on three stagecoaches three weeks apart—and he’d broadened his operations across the line to include Oregon. He was now wanted in two states, as much as ever was Jesse James, and more than Billy the Kid.

  THIRTEEN

  When a man robs another, he bargains his life;

  agrees to pay interest in personal strife.

  The bill when it’s due takes a terrible toll:

  the robber must close out the debt with his soul.

  On June 14, 1882, Thomas Forse dug his bootheels into the footboards, hauled back on the lines, and set the brake, his heart tum-tum-tumming like a kettle drum in his breast. The horses snorted and tossed their heads, annoyed at the sudden interruption. The stupid beasts, which shied at so much as a blown page from a discarded newspaper, made no connection with the figure who’d stepped into their path and mortal danger. That his head was covered by a flour-sack hood and he was pointing the twin muzzles of a sawn-off shotgun at the man on the seat meant no more to them than a shift in the wind.

  The spot was three miles from Little Lake; the stage had come just that far on its way toward Ukiah, a name that in the journals had come to be followed almost exclusively by the modifier “robbery.” Forse’s own brother, Harry, a fellow driver, had been stopped within hailing distance of that location only six months before, by a man similarly masked and armed. It occurred to him in the
moment that his family had been singled out by dark faith and Black Bart.

  “Please throw down the box”; had he actually heard the words, or had he supplied them himself from his imagination based on Harry’s report? Not wishing to risk his skin on a misunderstanding, he spoke:

  “I can’t.”

  The front of the flour sack caved in and bellied. The man who wore it had drawn in and expelled his breath in sharp exasperation. “Throw down the damn box or I’ll blow your goddamned head off!”

  This could not be Bart, whose cordial good manners were as notorious as his nickname. A wave of fresh panic overtook Forse like the ague.

  “It’s bolted d-down, I meant t-to say.” He stammered on the dentals. As if to prove his claim, he lifted his feet from the boards, where no box could be seen. “In the back.”

  The head inside the sack rotated a quarter-turn that direction. There came a moment when the man who belonged to it appeared to be studying the scales: on one side, salvation, on the other, a tug on the triggers and a burial plot arranged through the generosity of Wells, Fargo, & Co., with all the obsequious trimmings.

  The bastards.

  “Step down.”

  Forse’s legs were nearly useless: They’d gone to sleep or, more accurately, fallen into a swoon. Steadying himself with a hand on the wing of the seat, he lowered his weight to the ground carefully, lest he stumble and startle the man into discharging a round into his face. At last he stood, still using the support of the mud wagon. His thighs and calves stung as if he’d waded through a field of nettles.

  The shotgun—an extension of the bandit’s arms—lifted. It took the man in front of it a full second to grasp the grim certainty: The bandit had decided to make good on the threat of decapitation. He squeezed his lids shut, expecting the blast: Would he hear it? None had returned from the Beyond to furnish the intelligence.

  He didn’t hear it; but only because it didn’t come. The gesture meant only that his hands must be raised.

  Forse complied, chilled and enfevered from equal parts relief and dread, and stood quivering as the gunman freed a hand from his weapon and slid it under the sheep lining of the driver’s jacket, sliding his palm down the right side of his torso, around his waist, and up the other side. The side-by-side bores of the shotgun remained steady, so close to Forse’s face the sharp scent of oil sizzled the hairs in his nostrils. From time to time the eyes showing through the holes cut in the sack—pale blue they were, cold as nickel steel—shifted toward the passengers, who remained still, their harsh breathing audible for yards. The voice of insanity whispered to him to sweep his own hands down, grasp the barrels, and wrest the gun free. He’d be alive, to begin with, and a hero to boot, sure as—

  Custer.

  The voice of sanity bellowed to him to remain still, adding, “You shit-brained fool!” loud enough to be heard outside his skull.

  A century he stood thus; one second more and he might have thrown in on the side of lunacy, the way a man with no particular reason to end his life might yield to the tingling temptation to let himself fall forward off the edge of a precipice.

  Or so, for the rest of his days, he summed up the course of his reasoning to anyone who gave him an ear. In fact, the decision had come down to the simple fact that as an employee of the Company, the coins and notes in the iron box meant no more to him than Confederate graybacks. Let Wells and Fargo stick out their own necks for something to which he had no title.

  The passengers, three men and two women, were murmuring among themselves; at a motion of the weapon, they fell silent, with a tiny squeak from one of the women; or just as likely from one of the men. Another gesture and they alighted, hands raised without being ordered.

  “Unhitch the team.”

  Forse hesitated, then gathered the lines, unbuckled the straps and traces, and led the horses forward by the left lead’s bit-chain. The brute tried to jerk loose. Fear and rage brought it a forearm blow across the cheekstrap from its master. It wall-eyed him, but complied. When Forse stopped, Flour Sack made a sweeping motion with the shotgun, which the passengers interpreted correctly as a command to join the driver.

  “If any of you is armed, surrender your weapon now. I won’t ask again.”

  Clothing rustled. A long-barreled Colt and a pocket pistol raised puffs of dust from the earth, followed by a derringer from a lady’s handbag. Forse prayed there were no holdouts.

  “Now walk down the road, all of you, and around the bend. Bring the team. If you come back in less than an hour, you’ll have no more need of horse or coach.”

  The highwayman stood with his back to the empty vehicle, the shotgun level and braced against a hip. Not a word rose from the group as they accompanied the horses toward a bootjack some thirty yards in the direction of Ukiah.

  Bolton waited a minute—by his fifty-dollar gold watch—after he could no longer see them, then lowered his gun, and stepped around the boulder he’d hidden behind. He swept off his hood and stuffed it in his pocket. From his tattered blanket roll he extracted an iron maul and a steel bar with a chiseled bit. He’d read in the Herald of the Company’s improved security measures and had come prepared.

  Rather than bother unbolting the iron box from the rear boot, he mounted the metal step provided for the laborers who loaded the baggage and went to work, the blows of the hammer against the butt of the wrecking bar ringing off the firs and hardwoods walling the road. It was backbreaking work, burning his muscles and slicking him with sweat from his hairline to the soles of his feet in their stout boots. It took the better part of the hour before the box yielded anything more than its shape; he had to work swiftly then, and hang his fatigue.

  He’d had to shift the extra load from one arm to the other throughout his long hike; the effort, and the anticipation of the burden that awaited him, had been as much responsible for his uncharacteristic discourtesy, and this, too—his abandonment of the lessons associated with good breeding—had compounded his impatience.

  The harvest was decent, two hundred and change in double eagles, cartwheel dollars, and promissory notes, plus another substantial draft in the mail pouch (which he left; he’d been too cautious the last time to enter a bank in the person of Charles E. Bolton or his alias, T. Z. Spaulding, and attempt to convert it to cash); but the physical effort involved was little better than assaulting rock-hard ground with pick and shovel for paltry returns, and he was no longer as young as the piss-and-vinegar farm lad who’d tried his luck thirty years ago. He hastened away from the battered box before the others could return, and hadn’t the sand in him even to hum his favorite air.

  He rested in the mountains, soaking his feet and his aching body in streams, brewing coffee in the same tins he’d emptied of beans, and eating them cold and foregoing hot drink when he sensed someone was near and might investigate the smell of a fire and cooking. He did not miss San Francisco’s entertainments during this sabbatical; the bare business of maintaining a camp left him drained. He’d be poor company at dinner or in the balcony at the opera. At night he lay on his back, eyes open and picking out the constellations he knew the names of until his lids grew heavy and he slept. In the mornings his muscles retained the memory of each protrusion in the earth. Summers can be cold in high country: His breath smoked most mornings and his fingers stiffened, the knuckles swollen and red. Nearly a month passed before he arose feeling a tiny bit better than he had the day before.

  On July 13, refreshed at last, he rolled his necessaries inside his blanket and descended once again to the coach roads.

  He stopped the LaPorte-to-Ortonville stage near Strawberry, and saw at once that the pickings were good. There was a shotgun messenger—one George W. Hackett, the Herald later reported—and Wells, Fargo’s frugality permitted the expense only when the risk of loss was high. The giddy anticipation of a major triumph got the better of Bolton’s native caution. When the driver lost his grip on the express box, dropping it with a report to the boards, the noise took his eyes a
way from the armed man. The shell in the barrel Hackett fired first was a slug; it tore Bolton’s hood and ploughed a furrow across his right temple. It burned like a blacksmith’s iron and dumped blood into his eye; he thought himself blind. He swung about and ran.

  Ran for what seemed miles, swiping away blood with the sleeve of his duster, before panic gave way to exhaustion and he sank to the ground. His heart was trip-hammering.

  Why? Did the dunderpate not know it wasn’t his money? The world had turned over onto its head.

  When he’d managed to staunch the bleeding with his handkerchief, he got up, retraced his steps, and found his blanket and gear undisturbed where he’d left it. The coach was gone, and with it his flour sack, to join a handful of dried peach pits in Jim Hume’s collection.

  For the first time in twenty-three outings, Bolton had been forced to flee for his life, and with only a gash in his scalp to show for the ordeal.

  Useless to doubt it: The outlaw life had commenced to lose its poetry.

  FOURTEEN

  Years of success in his chosen black art

  had pumped up the legend of Mr. Black Bart;

  years of vain labor by Hume and the law

  had rubbed and worn their character raw.

  “Jim, will you for the love of God leave the blasted thing alone? You’ll wear it out and it will be no use as evidence.”

  Sheriff Ben Thorn sprawled in the Morris chair in the parlor of his palace in San Andreas, scowling at James Hume and turning a tumbler of Kentucky rye around and around inside his fist. His square-booted feet were planted on a Turkish rug in a large room that seemed small because of all the furniture his wife had managed to stuff into it, leaving only narrow avenues of passage between pedestal tables, music box, china cabinet, grand piano, settees, and a thousand-year-old bust of a prosperous Roman merchant on a pedestal. The place he’d been so proud to bring his bride home to in 1859 had begun to suffocate him.

  James Hume ignored his protest, toying with the flour sack recovered from the robbery attempt near Strawberry, poking his fingers through the eyeholes and stroking the crust of dried blood with the ball of a thumb. He’d taken to carrying it about with him everywhere he went, like a magic talisman that must lead him eventually to the man who’d worn it. “Do you suppose he perished up there?”