The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  But while a man could run away from such things, half a continent was not far enough. Either it would come after him, peeping under bridges and scouring every house and barn, or he would go looking for it himself; and from himself he could not hide.

  He stopped before the place where he’d lived for two years, and the shame of his leaving struck him like a dash of ice water in the face. The house was a squat single story with a cratered slant roof and the siding rubbed down to gray clapboard, with not a flake of color left to tell a stranger what shade it had been painted.

  Pale yellow, he recalled, with blue trim; Wilson’s had been overstocked with those at the time, and every third house in the area had sported one or the other or both; the others he’d passed on this trip had all been redone in conventional white. This one bore no sign of a fresh coat in many years. Behind it and to the side, a barn constructed along identical lines still showed traces of red, the traditional rusty hue caused by iron oxide in the paint.

  A rail fence separated the burnt-out front yard from the road, the gate hanging at a steep angle from a single strap hinge. He vaguely recalled cutting it from a piece of harness and nailing it in place. (“What good is a fence, Charlie, without a proper gate?”) He reached for the top rail, withdrew his hand, then grasped it and eased it open. He remembered a row of flagstones leading to the front porch, sunken now and covered with hardpack earth, if they were still there. The porch roof was swaybacked, and a corner post leaned out forty-five degrees. The boards were spongy underfoot. Something stirred underneath when he stepped up off the ground.

  The door, vertical planks reinforced with two more describing an X, was locked, to his surprise. It had had only a latch and string when he’d lived there. An iron plate had been added, with a keyhole into which he could fit his little finger.

  He set down his valise, stepped to the end of the porch that was still supported by a relatively straight timber, leaned against a dirty, sun-bleached window, rubbed a hole in the grime, and leaned against the pane, cupping his hands around his eyes. When they adjusted to the gloom inside, watered down by sunlight poking through the holes in the roof, he looked at a bare iron bedstead sagging drunkenly toward a missing leg, a rocking chair with its upholstery in tatters, broken crates, and piles of rubbish, here and there shredded and balled into nests by creatures to which a locked door presented no obstacle. A lithograph print of George Washington’s farewell address to his troops hung crooked in its pasteboard frame on the wall next to a chipped enamel wash basin. He remembered the print vaguely; it had been part of a set, with the Delaware crossing and Valley Forge hung alongside. All these things would be steeped in a stench of mold, rodent droppings, and dry rot; the fetor not of defilement, but of neglect.

  The house might have gaped empty for half a century instead of the decade and a half he’d been gone; or more likely less. Lizzie and the girls would have hung on until hope, too, deserted them. In even the happiest of homes, life on the plains was like a dog’s, aging seven to the year. Had the home been happy, even for a little while? He couldn’t remember.

  The daughters should be married now, if diphtheria or consumption or cholera or scarlet fever hadn’t intervened, or any of the myriad other evils that threatened youth and age indiscriminately. These horrors had helped to make of him a coward where the full force of the Confederacy could not, and driven him, as decisively as George W. Hackett’s lead slug, into flight. If it was marriage, Lizzie may have gone to live with one of her new families. If it was death, the ghosts alone would have driven her away.

  He made no attempt to enter, but retrieved his valise and tramped back into town. One thing had been added in his absence: In Wilson’s store, where pipes, tinned tobacco, and gentlemen’s watches had been on display (and had attracted more dust than attention), a lady’s dress shop shared the floor, with a row of frocks hanging from a pipe rack, four shelves of gingham and calico in bolts, and a square table where a young woman with freckles the size of dimes stood cutting fabric with a large pair of shears.

  “Boles?” she replied to his query; and turned toward a thick-waisted woman of forty draping scraps of material on a dress form on an iron pedestal, a thing of curved and jointed plates like medieval armor. “Boles?”

  The older woman turned her head to peer at the visitor through rimless spectacles. “The widow?”

  His heart fell. Yes, that was the story Lizzie would put about to forestall inconvenient conversation; or how she may in fact think of herself. He nodded.

  “Gone.” She busied herself again with her swatches.

  “Where?”

  “Where do they all go? Back East.”

  “And the daughters?”

  She turned her head again, not quite far enough to meet his gaze: Shrugged.

  He went back outside. He’d heard it said that members of small communities fettered themselves in the close bonds of Christian brotherhood. He had never known such to be the case in practice.

  He reached in the pocket where he’d placed a folded sheaf of notes—an amount sufficient to support a family of average size for a year—and put them back in his wallet. Then Charles E. Bolton, né Boles, more lately Black Bart, turned and began retracing his steps toward the Pacific.

  SEVENTEEN

  Now, a bird with a sprinkle of salt can be caught,

  and a fly with molasses its fate can be bought.

  Though a man is the craftiest creature of all,

  the smallest of trifles can bring on his fall.

  Despite Wells, Fargo’s reputation for privacy and discretion, Jim Hume would sooner place his secrets in the hands of a ladies’ sewing circle. Everyone he encountered, from the brass buttons who opened the door for him to the hardworking Jon Thacker when he entered his office, greeted him with the same question:

  “Did you get your elk?”

  And Hume provided the same answer:

  “I believe I have.”

  He was lean and tanned, his freshly barbered hair and moustaches bleached white against the brown of his face, and he walked at a brisk clip, throwing this remark over his shoulder as he went straight to his station. Halfway there he stopped.

  “Who in God’s name plundered my desk?”

  He’d thought at first that someone, acting out of some notion of benevolent reward, had replaced the item of furniture with a newer, sleeker model. It had been so long since he’d seen its top, leather stretched like the skin on a drum and fixed with bronze tacks around the edges, that he failed to recognize the pilot’s bridge from which he’d directed the Company’s security operations for more than ten years.

  His secretary leapt from his chair. “I did, sir; at Mr. Valentine’s direction. He thought your, er, substitute—”

  “Replacement, you mean. Has this new arrangement brought him any closer to Black Bart?”

  “No, sir, but he—that is, Mr. Valentine—”

  “You can tell Mr. Valentine—no, I’ll tell him myself directly. When I return, I want everything back as it was, in the order in which I left it.” His indignation ebbed in the presence of his assistant’s blanched face; in point of fact, his elation over the discovery he’d made during his “holiday” would not bear anger of any duration. He smiled thinly, the equivalent in him of a barn-door grin. “As near as you can come; there’s a good fellow. My pack rat system isn’t pretty, but it has method.”

  The superintendent beamed at him from behind his own desk. “You’re brown as a nut, Jim. Did you get your elk?”

  “A trophy buck.” He took the soiled handkerchief from his pocket, held it up by the corners, and let it unfurl like bunting.

  “Well?” he said, when Valentine made no remark.

  “I’m waiting for you to produce a white dove from the folds.”

  “Give me a week at the outside and I shall.”

  “I am all ears.”

  “You are aware of the fact that professional laundries advertise their services by staining the items they clean w
ith the name of the establishment in some unobtrusive spot, or a symbol unique to it, in India ink?”

  “I am. I am also aware that the earth revolves from west to east, and that my wife is incapable of leaving her dressmaker’s without spending at least fifty dollars. Is Wells, Fargo going into the laundry business now? I must check my mail more often.”

  “I am, if it is not. See for yourself.”

  Valentine took the proffered item and peered at the corner his chief of detectives had indicated with a finger. He slid open the belly drawer of his desk, excavated a brass-framed magnifying lens with a bamboo handle from the clutter inside—unlike Hume, the superintendent preferred to keep the day’s detritus out of sight—and studied the smudge of ink through the glass, oscillating it between his eye and the square of dirty linen until the edges sharpened. It was a row of letters followed by a numeral:

  F.X.O.7.

  “I can’t make out the meaning. Why must they use a code? I thought the whole point was to advertise the establishment.”

  “I shall ask the proprietor when I make his acquaintance.”

  “You think this belongs to Black Bart?”

  “It belongs to us now.” He related the circumstances of its discovery. “There is blood on it. In his distress after being wounded, he became careless and left it behind.”

  Valentine deposited the handkerchief on his desk; scowled at the filthy thing upsetting the tidy symmetry of his arrangements, scooped it up, and returned it to Hume. “I find it difficult to raise a ruckus over a souvenir. Place it with your peach pits, apple cores, and whatnot, and we’ll put it on display when we have our man.”

  Hume kept his patience. Expecting his superior to have developed an imagination in his absence was feckless.

  “Peach pits can’t be traced. I intend to show it to every laundry in town.”

  “My God, man, this is San Francisco! There must be a hundred—”

  “Ninety-one, to be exact. I stopped at City Hall on the way here and spent an hour in the records office.”

  “Too thin, Jim. No law forbids a man from tending his injury. Even if you succeed in tracing that rag to Bart, it won’t prove he committed a robbery, let alone—what’s the tally, now? I disremember.”

  “Twenty-five, if we accept Little Lake. Thacker has informed me of the Redding and Cloverdale runs. Bart seems to have been eager to make up for time lost while he recovered from Strawberry.” He folded the handkerchief along its creases, returned it to his pocket, and patted it. “We’ll worry about tying Bart to his wicked deeds once we have him in manacles. Unless he’s been spending like Ben Thorn, he’s stashed the money somewhere he can get to it; and so can we.”

  “Tell me, Jim, did you spend any part of your holiday not on Company business?”

  “I smoked a couple of dozen cigars.”

  * * *

  The chief had wearied of conducting an on-foot investigation. Bart’s peripatetic ways did not suit him. He was more comfortable seated at his desk, letting his eyes wander through reams of written reports; his sojourn in City Hall’s dusty cellar, studying the list of licenses assigned to laundering establishments, had been a pleasant return to his normal habits. Matching the cryptic mark to its place of origin, however, required a different kind of patience, one in which only one man in his experience excelled all others.

  On reputation alone, Harry Morse had seemed everything that Jim Hume and John Valentine wished to avoid in associating a man with the Company. At the age of forty-two, he’d served Alameda County as sheriff for fourteen years, during which he’d collected adventures enough to crimson the paper covers of any of the sensational publications that poured off the eastern presses like entrails from a belly wound. When he took office, a blight of Mexican bandits had terrorized the jurisdiction for years, in numbers to rival the pirates of the old Spanish Main. By the time he was offered a post with Wells, Fargo, they were few and in constant flight.

  In a later day, critics would excoriate the lawman for persecuting a particular group while ignoring white felons. Hume knew not if Morse held any personal distaste for Mexicans; he seemed simply to have broken the code of behavior peculiar to criminals from that stratum of society. He’d slain Narrato Ponce, a cattle rustler and killer, after a long chase on lathered mounts through the spires of Pinole Canyon, with a single rifle ball fired from a pitching saddle. Jesus Tejada slaughtered five people in a store for a treasure that amounted to forty dollars American, but when he found out who was pursuing him for the atrocity, surrendered himself without resistance. Narcisco Bojorques paralyzed the population for months, leaving his mark on his victims by driving a stake through their skulls, until a round from Morse’s pistol found him.

  “That one doesn’t count,” the sheriff had told a reporter. “I only winged him. Someone else put a bullet through his heart in a saloon over a disagreement of some kind. A wizard bit of marksmanship, given the size of the target.”

  “Is it true you’re the man who killed Joaquin Murieta?” asked the disappointed journalist.

  “It was not Joaquin. If that’s his head in a jar in Frisco, I never saw it in life. I merely killed the man who committed most of the murders that were assigned to him.”

  Perhaps it was this remark, widely quoted, that had decided Hume to invite the man to Montgomery Street back in 1876: It combined a lack of swagger with a passion for accuracy, two things the detective chief held dear.

  He made a favorable impression from the start. Instead of the long-haired dandy that journalists expected of a blood-and-thunder gunman, a clean-shaven Irishman with bright eyes and a wide, humorous mouth stepped into the office, carefully barbered and wearing a collar as stiff and white as a plumb line in chalk. He looked several years younger than he was, and except for the yellow bone handle belonging to a long-barreled Colt that revealed itself when he spread his tails and sat down, his tailoring would not excite comment in the lobby of the Palace Hotel.

  Hume had asked him about none of his exploits; he’d read all the accounts, adjusted them to allow for newspaper fuddle, and framed his questions to determine whether the man possessed any detecting skills. The answers impressed him, and he hired him, just as Valentine (who for all his plodding intelligence was at least a shrewd judge of character) had appointed Hume. Both the chief and this new recruit were modest to the point of irritation when offered a compliment.

  Now, seven years later, Special Agent Morse showed few of the signs of aging that had thinned Hume’s temples and scored lines in his brow since Black Bart had come to his attention. A solid record of accomplishments and a true passion for his work had managed to preserve that first impression of a merry son of Erin.

  “Good morning, Harry. It was good of you to come so promptly.” Hume rose to grasp the hand offered by his visitor, a thing strung with wire and calloused as thickly as a canvas glove.

  Harry Morse smiled and took his old seat.

  “Wild horses couldn’t keep me away once I saw Black Bart’s name in your wire.”

  The desk between them (after some adjusting by its owner) had returned to its customary condition of dishevelment. Atop the stack was the badly used handkerchief, forming a sort of tent.

  The detective chief snatched up the handkerchief and tossed it into Morse’s lap. “This is the first solid clue to his identity we’ve come up with. I found it myself by pure chance; and his description the same way.” He related the details of his overnight stay in the very cabin where Bart had spent a night, adding uncomfortably, “Evidently he and I share some common physical characteristics.”

  Morse, studying the item, made no comment. Whether the cause was discretion or professional preoccupation, Hume was grateful.

  “It’s not the golden key, not yet,” he said. “It will take a great deal of legwork before anything comes of it; but you’re used to that. At the very least it’s an opportunity to get all your cleaning done at the expense of the Company.”

  The special agent stood and p
ocketed the handkerchief. “I’m out of luck as always. I just had mine done.”

  III

  BALLAD’S END

  A man cannot be too careful in his choice of enemies.

  —Oscar Wilde

  EIGHTEEN

  Bart traveled the Lode with his feet on the ground.

  He thought by this trick that he’d never be found.

  ’Twas then that one of the men on his trail

  stepped out of leather and put him in jail.

  The old ways were drawing to a close, casting long shadows toward the east. They were playing stickball on Pacific Street, on stones stained yet with the blood of vigilantes and hoodlums, and Hop John’s old opium parlor in Chinatown hosted mah-jongg parties on Saturday night. There were times when one could actually feel the earth throbbing, like a powerful engine inexorably in motion.

  It will take a great deal of legwork before anything comes of it, Jim Hume had said; but you’re used to that.

  Harry Morse wasn’t, though, if one took “legwork” literally. The word was new to him; he suspected it was Hume’s own coinage. He’d run down most of his game from horseback, galloping balls-out across the flats and sliding forefoot first down mountainsides smeared with loose shale. But seven years in San Francisco had shown him the future of law enforcement: Equestrianship would play a diminishing role on the cusp of a new century. Residents traveled by cable car and trolleys pulled by docile beasts that had never been whipped up above a trot. A man riding astraddle was getting to be rare enough to attract interest. How long before curiosity gave way to derision?