by Bill Brooks
“Good trip out?” Dog said.
“Uneventful.”
“You don’t talk like no frontiersman.”
“Does that make a difference to you?”
“No sir, it don’t at all. Fact is, I admire a man with a good education. A smart man thinks before he acts, and that’s exactly the sort of man I need currently. But I need one willing to act once he’s thought through what needs doing.”
“You want to tell me why you need a Pinkerton?”
Dog sipped some of his beer and fingered his chin whiskers, touched them like he’d just discovered they were there.
“I want to keep this about who you are and what you’re doing here a private matter,” he said, looking about. “Ain’t nobody knows about you except me and the Mastersons. It’s got to stay that-a-way too. Word gets out on you, you’re no good to me. We clear on that?”
“This isn’t my first day on the job, Mr. Kelly. Lay it out for me what the problem is.”
So Dog told him about the rumors, about his personal suspicion that the rumors were true—that there was an element in town set on assassinating the Mastersons.
“Meaning…” Dog said, “They’ll probably hire out to get it done.”
“Why not just do it themselves?” Teddy said.
“They ain’t of that ilk, I’m guessing. Dog enjoyed using a fancy word like ilk ever since he’d heard Bat use it once. “If they tried and failed, they’d either wind up dead or arrested. Knowing the Mastersons, it’d probably be the former. Either way, it would defeat their purpose. They hire an out-of-town gun to do it, they’ll keep clean hands in the eyes of the law unless it can be proved otherwise.”
“You got a name of the conspirators?”
Conspirators. Dog made a mental note of the word. He liked it.
“Nothing solid. It’s all just rumors floating about. I’m working on it. But now that you’re here, maybe you can find out a lot better.”
“Any ideas where I should start to ingratiate myself?”
Dog smiled. This feller had as many fancy words in him as did Bat.
“Anyplace south of these tracks. There’s three or four in particular that run establishments that wouldn’t be unhappy to attend the funeral of the Mastersons. Angus Bush, who runs the Black Cat; Frenchy LeBreck, who operates the Paris Club; and Bone Butcher, who owns both the Silk Garter and the Dream Palace, a dope den. They’d be the most likely candidates. You could start with them.”
“I’ll need to get a room and meet the Mastersons.”
“Try the Dodge House up the street, tell ’em I sent you. Meeting Bat and Ed might take a day or three—they’re out chasing down some low types.”
“I need to report into my boss as well,” Teddy said.
“Telegraph’s just down the way. Everything you need, Dodge has got. And if we ain’t got it yet, either you don’t need it or we will have it soon.”
“Including assassins?”
“Hope is, you’ll make sure that’s one thing we won’t have long if we got ’em. Like lice, not something you want.”
Teddy stood and picked up his valise.
“Just so you know,” Dog said. “Bat and them ain’t real happy about me sending for help from the Pinkertons.”
“Well, when you see him, tell him there’s lots of other places I’d just soon be myself.”
“You’re kindy young for this sort of work, ain’t you?”
Teddy drew back his coat far enough to show Dog the shoulder holster and the Colt Lightning that hung from it.
“My birth certificate,” he said, and let the coat fall over the rig again before walking out.
He went and sent a telegram to George Bangs.
Have arrived in Dodge this day. Met with one of the principals. Will begin work immediately.
T. Blue.
The room he took at the Dodge House overlooked Front Street. It had a good bed, tall ceiling, two windows and a back stairway. He unpacked his valise, placing his extra shirts in the top drawer of the bureau that stood against one wall. Socks too. He placed his razor atop the bureau next to the washbasin. This complete, he felt the unsettling sense of being without companionship for the first time since leaving Mexico. He wondered how John was making out.
The light outside was a mixture of sunlight and grayish blue, the sky uncertain whether it was bringing in a storm or something less troublesome. He noticed a hardware store across the street with the words GUNS AMMUNITION KNIVES painted in large black letters on an oversize wooden rifle mounted on a pole out front. Next to the hardware was a butcher shop with two men in white aprons standing out front talking and smoking cigarettes. Their white aprons had bloodstains on them. A wagon pulled up and one of them went inside and came back out again with a slab of beef over his shoulder that he heaved into the back of the wagon, his cigarette dangling from his mouth.
From his vantage point, Teddy could see where the town ended and the prairies began. And as far as he could see, there wasn’t a distraction for the eye except one thing: a cemetery. There was always a cemetery, a place to bury the dead, both the good and bad together. Death made everyone equal—the same as Sam Colt’s pistols. The graveyard looked like a garden of wooden crosses and stone markers. It looked somehow out of place. Farther out still, he could see a lone tree that had been lightning struck, whose branches and trunk were black.
Teddy wondered what it was that possessed the first man to have stopped in this place. To say to himself, I think I’ll start a town here.
The son of a bitch must have busted an axle on his wagon and just couldn’t go any farther. For there was no indication why this particular latitude and longitude would attract a man other than by sheer accident.
Teddy pulled off his boots and stretched out on the bed.
There wasn’t much use to go looking for trouble until after dark—not if Dodge was like every other frontier town he’d ever been in.
Darkness and trouble just naturally went together, and so too did the men who feasted upon them. Assassins and such.
Chapter 5
The weather had cleared after two stormy days. Sun broke through the treacherous skies warm enough to melt the ice that coated the prairies and Dodge. Bat and Ed had grown restless and were itching to get after Dirty Dave Rudabaugh.
During the stormy lull, Bat had told Ed about Dog Kelly’s suspicions that there were going to be some serious attempts on their lives and that he had further sent for a Pinkerton.
Ed said, “I reckon we can handle ourselves.”
“That’s what I told Dog Kelly.”
“Maybe we ought to just cross over them tracks and shoot every son of a bitch looks cross-eyed at us.”
“That would sure put the word out we meant business and weren’t going to run scared.”
“Hell, I don’t care if Dog sends for the goddamn United States Cavalry.”
“At least what’s left of ’em after that Custer debacle,” Bat said.
They were saddling their mounts with high hopes of running Dirty Dave to ground this time.
“Yeah,” Ed said. “I guess he learned them Cheyenne and Sioux weren’t so easily whipped.”
Bat’s smile was sardonic; he’d known Custer and didn’t care for him much. Most like Custer—full of bluster and overly confident—ended up in early graves.
“You ever stop to think,” Ed said, tying his soo-gins to the back of his saddle, “that if it weren’t for certain fellers who figured they could get away with just about anything, me and you wouldn’t have a job?”
“There will always be those types, Brother Ed. I just wish we didn’t have to ride so far to bring some of ’em to justice.”
“I don’t guess Dirty Dave and his type is just going to ride into town and give himself up for our convenience, do you?”
“No. But it would sure be considerate of him if he did.”
Ed came around and put a foot in a stirrup and said, “You reckon we’re still going to need these oil
skins?”
“I don’t feel any rain in me, so I guess we might not. But we better wear mackinaws, it could turn cold enough to maybe snow. Weather out on these prairies is moodier than most women.”
“Maybe we can get our money back from Harry for ’em. We only wore ’em just that once.”
Bat looked at him, said, “You always was more Scotch than me.”
They had ridden out of Dodge the very day the train carrying the Pinkerton man arrived.
Bat was still irked that Dog Kelly had seen it necessary to hire a Pinkerton in the first place. “He must think we can’t handle ourselves in a pistol fight if it comes down to it,” Bat said as they rode along.
“I may be more Scotch than you, but you was always a hotter head than me,” Ed said.
They rode toward Liberal, Bat saying about Dirty Dave and his confederates, “Their ilk is of a lazy nature and they may well hang around in a place like Liberal instead of riding all the way down to the pistol barrel of Oklahoma.”
Ed did not dispute Bat’s instinct for tracking or for knowing a man’s nature—especially the nature of outlaws. The brothers, along with their other sibling, Jim, had hunted plenty of buffalo when there were still buffalo to be hunted, and it was Bat who always found the largest and fattest herds. Ed reckoned Bat could track a fish through water if he set his mind to it. And it was Bat who talked him into becoming a peace officer, Bat saying, “We don’t have to be geniuses to outwit most of the lawbreakers, we just have to be brave.”
They saw a pair of red-tailed hawks wheeling through the skies.
“It’s like they’re dancing,” Bat said.
“I wish sometimes I had wings so I could get places faster.”
“I don’t want to end up dead someday out in this country, do you?”
Ed looked at his brother. He’d never thought much about death, being the young man that he was. “I don’t guess it makes a difference to me where I end up dead at. Dead’s dead, far as I’m concerned. I reckon being dead in Kansas is about like being dead anywhere else.”
“That’s not what I’m referring to. I’d like to believe that I have more of a future to me than ending up in some prairie grave and never making a real name for myself. I’d like to do something bold before it’s all said and done, wouldn’t you?”
“I’d settle just for meeting a pretty gal and getting married and maybe wear a fine suit and become president of a bank or something. This is a good-enough place for young fellers like us to make a name for ourselves—to have a future in, Bat.”
They rode for a good long way, thinking about life on those prairies, future prospects, death, living, and red-tailed hawks. Then they realized how far they’d ridden and what lay just ahead of them.
“Let’s not ride past the Dutchman’s,” Ed said. “I don’t want to have to see that place and be reminded of what we found there.”
“We’ll ride wide of it.”
They could still see those shadowy lumps inside the soddy, the small ones and those of the Dutchman slumped there at the table and his wife lying on the small bed.
They rode on in silence for a time after they knew they’d well skirted the Dutchman’s.
“You ever bed that Foster woman?” Ed said at last.
Bat blinked.
“Lydia, the one who ran the hat shop?”
“No, the schoolteacher back in Sedgewick.”
“Why would you ask me something like that?”
“I have always just been curious is all.”
“You?”
“No, she was a lot older’n me. I thought about it, but I never did.”
“Well, I never did either.”
“I think she had eyes for you.”
“I never had any for her.”
“She might have been all right, the more I think about it.”
“I don’t see how you could think about something like that.”
“She had a nice way about her, even though she wasn’t very attractive, if you know what I mean. I bet she was close to forty, wouldn’t you say?”
Bat chose not to think about old schoolteachers he and Ed had been taught by and attributed Ed’s meandering mind to the sheer boredom that comes with long rides across featureless land. Bat would rather concentrate on the job at hand: catching Dirty Dave Rudabaugh.
They arrived in Liberal well past dark their third day out. They had spotted that little town by the lights of its saloons, twinkling in the distance, and were glad to finally see it. They rode on in and tied off at the first liquor establishment they came to: a place called Zel’s.
Ed stopped short of going in, said, “How you want to take ’em when we find ’em?”
Bat was two years younger than his brother, but Ed most generally deferred to Bat on matters of confronting trouble. Bat was fearless.
“We’ll ask them to disarm, tell ’em we’re arresting ’em for the robbery. Like we’d do with anybody.”
“And if they don’t go easily?”
“You still got your mind on pussy?”
“No, why do you ask?”
“Because you’re talking like we never done this before, like you got your head somewhere else.”
“I just didn’t know if you wanted to shoot Dave if it come to it. He’s not that bad a sort, really—just stupid and dirty.”
“We’ll leave it up to him if he wants us to shoot him or not. How’s that?”
“That’s fine by me.”
They went in, their hands inside their coat pockets where they carried their pistols. They’d done this sort of work before, like Bat had said.
The air was smoky, and there was a good deal of drinking and gambling and conversation going on. Men stood along the bar, others sat at tables, and some played roulette and some buck the tiger and some stud poker.
Bat and Ed ordered whiskeys to warm their blood and get it going in the right way in their veins, and they looked around cautiously to see if Dirty Dave Rudabaugh was among the clientele. They didn’t see him.
“What now?” Ed said.
“I swear, you still got your mind on that old schoolmarm. Drink up and let’s go.”
They walked down to the next saloon and went in and didn’t see Dave there either. They continued their search for him, and when they walked into the fourth liquor parlor, there he was, sitting at a table with three others: men in slouch hats. Low types, anybody could see by their manner of dress.
“That’s him,” Bat said, nodding to Ed as they walked to the bar.
“Four of ’em,” Ed said.
“I can count.”
“Which side you want?”
“It don’t matter.”
“I’ll take the right side then.”
“Okay.”
“Now?’
“No, let’s have another whiskey first.”
“It might make you a little slow.”
“It ain’t never before. Besides, if things go bad, it might be the last chance I get to take a drink.”
“Hell, I guess I never thought about it that way.”
They ordered two whiskeys, drank them while watching Dave and his bunch in the back bar mirror. There was several mounted heads of buffalo over the bar with lonesome glass eyes staring down on the unsuspecting patrons. Ed was looking at them.
“You remember old Bill Jackson?” Ed said.
“What about him?”
“How he had that glass eye…”
“So?”
Ed pointed with his chin up to the mounted heads.
“Wonder where all them glass eyes come from?”
“Jesus,” Bat said. “Let’s go do this.”
Dave was saying something to one of the men at his table when Bat stepped out of the shadows with a Colt Peacemaker in his hand and said, “Rudabaugh, I’ve come to arrest you and these others for robbing the Katy flier.”
Then Ed stepped out of the shadows from Dave’s right and showed him the Smith and Wesson in his hand, and showed it to the
others too.
“I expect you boys know how this is supposed to work.”
Dirty Dave had grimy features, like he’d been down in a pit shoveling dirt all day.
“You fucking Mastersons just don’t quit, do you?”
“No, we don’t,” Bat said.
Dave looked at his companions, said, “I told you boys we should have kept riding till we crossed the damn state line.”
Bat ordered them to stand with their hands up.
“Slow,” Ed reminded them as they scraped back their chairs.
One moved too fast to suit Bat and he stepped in close and brought the barrel of his pistol down hard enough to flatten the crown of the man’s hat and the skull that rested under it, and knocked the man senseless.
“Next one gets shot. Hell, it will be a lot less trouble if you boys just provoke us into shooting all of you. We’ll rent a wagon and haul your carcasses back like a load of wood.”
“Jeez Christ, boys,” Dave moaned, “we’ve had it.”
Bat tossed a bucket of beer on the one he’d coldcocked and ordered the others to help him to his feet. Once they marched outside, Ed hauled leg and wrist irons from his saddle pockets and tossed them at the feet of the prisoners. “Put ’em on, boys. Do it careful, like they were snakes you handling, ’cause brother Bat here gets nervous when felons move too quick.” They covered the four with their pistols until they’d snapped on the irons, then marched them in a shuffling gait down to the local law-enforcement office.
A big-bellied deputy locked them in a cell when Ed and Bat explained the situation.
“We’ll come and pick ’em up in the morning,” Bat said.
Back out on the street again, they found a hotel and rented a room and went up and pulled off their boots, both weary from the long ride they’d had and the thought of what a long ride it would be to return to Dodge.
Ed flopped down on the bed and said, “I’m about wore to a nub.”
Bat took a small book from his pocket—a collection of poetry by Sir Walter Raleigh—and opened it as he took a seat by the lamp.
“You always had a more curious mind than me,” Ed said, feeling the burn behind his eyes.