He had no intention of hunting elk, even if he enjoyed the sport or had a taste for venison; and not just because Valentine had pulled the suggestion out of the air and expected him to follow up on it. Hume deeply resented having been put out to pasture, even if the situation was temporary; which he suspected may not be the case. The division he commanded was filled with ambitious whelps who, entrusted on loan with his responsibilities, would spend every day of his absence undermining him, with the object of making his position theirs; such was the risk inherent in hiring clever men. But the superintendent had underestimated him, thinking that by depriving him of his desk and files he could force him to leisure; forgetting that he had spent years on horseback, crossing and recrossing a county as large as some states in pursuit of outlaws.
Not that his backside welcomed its first contact with a saddle in many months. The roan he drew from the Company stables was sufficiently muscled to negotiate the broken terrain of the Mother Lode, which made it as easy on Hume’s own thighs and haunches as straddling a cord of wood; one that was always in motion. He faced the fact that he wasn’t the man he’d been when he’d ridden that country in quest for gold; but then that sprout wasn’t the man he was now.
Wells, Fargo’s chief of detectives did not take holidays.
Like those veterans of the Rebellion who made it a practice to revisit the battlefields where they’d exchanged fire with the enemy, he stopped at most of the scenes of Black Bart’s robberies. Some he’d seen before, in company with Sheriff Thorn and others, but many were familiar to him only in the reports that had filled his cabinets, forcing older portfolios into storage in the Montgomery Street basement; he had a clerk’s horror of destroying even those documents that predated his appointment to the Company. With the exception of the single foray into Oregon, which he did not trouble to investigate on this trip, they had all taken place within twenty square miles of one another.
Several times he came near his old prospecting attempts, but didn’t bother to go even a few hundred yards out of his way to relive that past. It had become so remote it might have belonged to someone else’s experience. He slept in the open, and when it rained—with the explosive suddenness of everything else that took place in that country of mountainous trees and lush growth, including sunrise and sunset—he made a tent of the canvas covering his bedroll, supporting it with tree branches and sheltering his upper half. In the morning he awoke soaked to his knees. He hung his stockings on limbs, rolled up his cuffs, and kindled a fire to dry out his boots, which smoked and cracked as surely as Bart’s must have time and again. (Hume had not overlooked canvassing all the haberdasheries and booteries in San Francisco and its neighbors, hoping to make contact with someone who remembered selling a particularly stout pair to a customer whose description he might furnish, but it appeared that his quarry had either put as many miles between his home and his sources or ordered by mail.)
Now and again he came across a discarded peach pit or apple core, brown and crawling with ants, and the sensation that Bart had nourished himself on these was so strong he began to believe in fortune-tellers. His man seemed to live mainly off the land, like Napoleon’s armies.
Hume did the same, supplementing the provisions he’d packed with snowshoe hare, Canada goose, and squirrels, targets enough for his light rifle, even though he missed nearly as often as he scored. He’d never enjoyed a sterling reputation in sharpshooting circles, in fact pointed with pride to the dearth of gunfire in his career as a peace officer; but whatever skills he’d possessed hadn’t improved through neglect.
There wasn’t a report of Bart’s activities that he hadn’t committed to memory. He stopped at the place where one of the trackers had lost the trail, nearly sixty miles from where the investigation had started. The ground was trampled no longer with the confusion of prints that had ended the pursuit, but Hume identified it by a dead poplar blasted and branded by lightning, and across from it a great bowl-shaped depression, filled now with brackish water and reeking of rotted vegetation, where buffalo had wallowed for centuries before hunters had wiped them out. (He insisted on such detail in all reports intended for his eyes.) The legs of the ancient runner of Marathon had had nothing on Bart’s.
When he stopped at the spot near Strawberry where Bart had nearly come to his doom, the sensation of personal proximity became overpowering. This most recent atrocity was electric with “the Po8’s” presence. Bedding down, Hume drew out the flour-sack mask, stiff with the blood of his bête noire, glanced around himself guiltily, and drew it over his head. It retained an essence of the grain that had come with it, and also a faint scent of salt-and-iodine: Bart’s life-force; it was a wonder there was no trace of brimstone. It was almost like standing face-to-face with his prey, and his pulse quickened.
He awoke hours later with a sense of suffocation. He’d fallen asleep still wearing the hood. It had been a clear night, the stars in that high country within groping distance, and he’d slept exposed to them. Had anyone come upon him, helpless and wearing this emblem of villainy, he might have been shot dead where he lay. Sheepishly he snatched it off and stuffed it back into his pocket.
Two things of miraculous property took place within the next twelve hours.
As he was leading his horse away from the site of Bart’s encounter with the shotgun messenger, his toe caught something on the ground and he stooped to pick up what he thought was a scrap of brown wrapping-paper. It was a man’s handkerchief, made of fine lawn linen, soiled with the mud from several rains and stained with something more sinister.
Once again his heart thudded. He had no doubt that it was Bart’s own, which he’d used to stop his bleeding. It was nearly a mile away from the attempted robbery, and must have been where he’d stopped his flight; it was only by native luck that Hume had quite literally stumbled upon such promising evidence. He rubbed the corners with a thumb, scraping away dirt and crusted blood, and found what he’d hoped for—faded almost to invisibility, but there beyond doubt. He gave up trying to make it out in the unfavorable circumstances of that wilderness, then folded it carefully and tucked it among the other valuables in his wallet.
At dusk, worn thin by the journey and the excitement of his discovery, he spotted a light in a cabin and stopped to ask for a berth for the night; his aging bones were begging for a tick mattress and a proper roof over his head. The man who opened the door—a man near his age, and a prospector, from the condition of his overalls—peered at him for a long moment, then broke into a welcoming grin.
“You’re back!” he said. “I thought you’d be many miles away by now. It’s been months!”
James B. Hume had never laid eyes on the man before; and by the time the man realized he was mistaken in his identity, the second miracle was as a thing confirmed.
SIXTEEN
The Chinese strike off on a thousand-mile trek;
and sailors cross seas at the risk of a wreck.
But those who are curs’d with the craving to roam
know the longest of tramps is the great journey home.
He’d traveled by ship, train, and horse, but the experience was so far removed from the present it seemed as much a figment of fancy as the universal dream of flying by the flapping of one’s own arms. His jaw ached from clenching, and his buttocks too, from gripping the edge of the seat in the Pullman car. When the train stopped to take on more doomed souls he had to pry his fingers from the padded armrest; it was a marvel they weren’t burst and bleeding round the nails.
Stopping was the worst.
A man continued moving forward when the Westinghouse brakes were applied—continued moving with a sickening lurch—and it took little imagination to predict what would happen if some force from outside compelled the locomotive to come to a sudden halt; bodies flying from as far back as the caboose to as far forward as the tender, where faces met cast iron at the rate of forty miles per hour.
Then the train started up again.
Starting was th
e worst.
The cars might have been connected with India rubber bands, so that each was jerked forward uneven to the others, leaving a man’s inwards behind him in the next coach down. If another train using the same tracks overran its schedule and slammed into the back of this one—which happened, if the journals could be relied upon, on an almost daily basis—he would race his own entrails, smash through the caboose’s rear door, and go tumbling back along the cinderbed, end over end, the ties flaying him alive.
This was how it would be all the way to Des Moines.
He made it as far as Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory.
In that dusty hamlet, stinking of cowshit and green whiskey, he alighted. On the platform, a seated Indian wrapped in a dirty blanket, a soft black hat with a tall crown and a wide brim screwed down to his eyes, a feather stuck in the band, looked him up and down, but before he could scramble to his feet to ask for a handout from the neatly dressed traveler carrying a valise, Bolton had hurried past, wobbling on his land legs and intent on his mission.
He entered a saddlery, heavily scented with leather and bright with sunshine shoving its way through the plate-glass window. The clerk, a man a few years his junior, wearing smoked glasses against the glare, showed him to the racks of boots. Declining an offer to help, he tried on the only pair he could find in his size with heels he didn’t fear would topple him onto his face, put his dress pair in the valise, and paid for them with a note that emptied out the clerk’s cash box for change. From there the visitor went to a mercantile, where he bought tins of beets, apricots, and tomatoes, and jerked beef in a twist of greasy paper. A dry goods next, for a stiff pair of overalls, four flannel shirts, and four pairs of thick socks, into which the proprietor allowed him the use of his storeroom to change.
His last stop was a pump in the town square, where he filled his canteen, then struck off east, with a sense of freedom and personal control that made him lightheaded and caused him to sing:
And there was still another
who well did play his part.
He’s known among the mountains
as the highwayman, Black Bart.
He’d walk those mountain passes,
to him it was but pleasure.
He’d hike the trail both night and day
for the Wells and Fargo treasure.
No law forestalled a man from contributing to a popular air; not that laws proved a barricade to one such as he. Should it make its way onto the circuit where such things flourished, no one but him would know that it was Bart’s last fling at rhyme.
The liberty of exploring new territory was as inebriating as strong drink, without the unpleasant aftermath. Here on the plains, the Scourge of the Company was no more than a legend, dismissed as easily as the fabulous adventures of Locksley, Turpin, and Rob Roy; there was none but would suspect a weary passer-through of anything worse than a plea for a night’s lodging, and possibly a hot meal, paid for with an amusing anecdote from his passage through history, and when there was no way around it, some chopping of wood. Many a soddy or bunkhouse would carry the memory of the personable chap who graced it with his brief presence, and few to fill the columns of the Dime Library with a fresh tale of Black Bart. In such manner he dined on simple but satisfying fare: flapjacks and honey, fritters, fried potatoes and onions, rashers of side pork, and gallons of coffee, piping hot and strong enough to float a stove lid. He slept on feather mattresses, bare springs, straw, and rope hammocks, left only footprints, and took only glad tidings.
Winter came in Nebraska; where winter came with the wrath of Jupiter, piling snow as high as a man’s hat against barn sidings and drift fences, coming not down but across, as if a string of boxcars filled with the stuff had stopped long enough to slide the doors open on both sides and let the wind blow bitter flakes across a landscape as flat as a griddle, the icy crystals stinging exposed skin like a plague of yellow jackets and turning fingers and toes into things dead as dominoes.
On the north bank of the Platte, having seen not so much as a stick of civilization in twenty miles, he wrapped himself in two sets of Union suits, duster, blanket, and Chesterfield coat, stuffed with everything pliant from among the smallclothes in his valise, wrapped his head round with one of his flannel shirts after the fashion of a man suffering from an impacted tooth, jammed his bowler down to his ears, dragged his collar up to the brim, and put himself to sleep with the chattering of his teeth on the lee side of a cottonwood as broad in the trunk as a medieval oak from his English birthplace, but not much more shelter than a corn rick. He awoke once during the night to find that the snow had drifted on top of him deep enough to make his supine form indistinguishable from a frozen steer or a ferry run aground; but although disturbed by the possibility of suffocation, he troubled not to shake himself free, clearing only a space to breathe through, so much insulation from the outer-space cold as the snow provided. He’d read somewhere that sled dogs in Alaska burrowed themselves into such drifts in order to survive till morning. Surely he was as intelligent as a dumb brute.
He survived, this night and all the others that followed, or our story would come to an end here.
And he made no complaint, either aloud or in thought. He was made of sterner stuff than that.
As much as he loved the social life of San Francisco, abuzz with cultured conversation, sweet with the odor of roasted brisket, poached salmon, good cigars, and French perfume, entranced with the trills of Italian tenors and Swedish Nightingales, and alive with cable cars chiming their way up and down Telegraph Hill; warmed upon occasion with close contact with pliable women, Charles E. Bolton was a man who throve on challenge, whether it be from man or the elements.
But not beasts.
He shunned all things four-legged. When in bustling Omaha a parti-colored entertainer connected with a medicine show sashayed down the boardwalk, driving before him with a bamboo stick a black bear draped in green-and-yellow motley and brass bells, he crossed to the other side. In his prospecting days he’d come within audible distance of a grizzly panting its powerful way up a heap of slag perpendicular to him, not so far upwind he failed to catch its sweaty, suety stench, redolent of the creatures it had devoured raw. He took refuge in the shaft he’d dug with brother Davy, not venturing out until he was sure the thing was miles distant. For weeks afterward he’d scanned the landscape for its bulky shape before returning to his digs.
Something about the way this trained beast lifted itself onto its hind legs, bawling, in a grotesque parody of a child learning to walk, chilled him to the spine. Better to face a hundred James B. Humes than one bruin, however debased by human trappings. To him, horses, bears, pumas, and the dragons of myth were symbols of terror. Betting on one horse against its peers was as close as he ever cared to come to their savage world; he never placed a wager without hoping one would tumble, shatter a canon, and cause itself to be shot to death in full view of the spectators. His father had not known what he’d wrought when he read Gulliver’s Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms aloud to him in his infant bed. His terror, no doubt, had contributed to the obstreperous nature of the pack animals he’d been forced to make use of in the goldfields; they were sentient things, and crueler than Herod when they detected weakness. The image of a civilization commanded by the unfeeling creatures still visited him in nightmares.
He’d been making steady progress for four hundred miles, but shortly after crossing the Iowa state line, he became suddenly reluctant to set off on the last short leg of his odyssey, and put up in Council Bluffs for a week. He took lodging in a boardinghouse run by the widow of a railroad baron who’d died of apoplexy less than a month after building the crazy-quilt mansion of turrets, gables, bow-windows, and spires on a hill overlooking the city. She’d spent everything he’d left, realizing belatedly that most of it had gone into the construction (and incidentally the pockets of the general contractor and his cronies), and now eked out her existence letting rooms to strangers and feeding them with the aid of
her Negro cook. Her litany of misfortune was the chief topic of conversation during most meals, and stewed tomatoes the feature on the board. He could put up with his hostess’ personal tragedy, but loathed the slimy consistency of the dish; however, he made no remark that might draw negative attention. He spent his days reading in his room (novels exclusively; his taste for poetry had tapered off to a great extent) or exploring the streets, retired early most nights, and whiled away one evening in the local opera house watching an uninspired selection from Shakespeare performed by indifferent actors recruited from the community. He missed the cosmopolitan pleasures of San Francisco. It occurred to him then that he was homesick, despite the fact that he’d set out from there to return to the place most would call home.
He left early one morning, while the rest of the household was in bed; all but the cook, who seemed to subsist on two hours’ sleep after supervising the girl who washed the dishes and cleaned the kitchen and before rising to prepare breakfast. If she took notice at all of the boarder walking past the open door, dressed for hiking and carrying his valise, she didn’t acknowledge him, and went on seasoning her skillets.
The farming village of New Oregon struck him as smaller than he remembered. When he’d settled there, his experience of great, brawling centers of population had been limited to St. Louis and New York City, and the memories of those places blurred behind the fog of war. Even San Francisco had been little more than a rough mining camp when he’d left it the second time. His intimacy with the metropolis it had become made the prospect of a life confined to two stores and a stable surrounded by furrowed acres depressing. Such people as he encountered looked as if they’d been left out in the weather, the men’s faces faded to match their homespun shirts, their dungarees blown out in the knees, the women’s plain dresses hanging like sandwich boards from their bony shoulders. There was no life in their faces. The thought that he might have remained until he was like them, praying for merciful weather—praying out of habit, not hope—and socializing once a month around a potbelly stove in Wilson’s General Merchandise, softened any regret he’d felt for abandoning his family responsibilities and answering the siren call of California. There, it had been easy to think of that chapter in his life as something from a book he’d tried to pound into the goat brains of students in Sierra and Contra Costa counties before that life, too, had palled.
The Ballad of Black Bart Page 10