“Please tell your friends that I really don’t know where the treasure is or even if it exists.”
He chuckles. “I know that, Nellie. Those bloodthirsty Aztec warriors would have sent you back as a sackful of skin, like they did Howard, if you knew where they’re sitting on their gold.”
“Are you going to be okay with your, uh, pals?”
I posed the question because he had schemed to double-cross them, and regardless of how much they fear his prowess with a gun, there are too many of them for him to take on.
“Yeah, don’t you worry about it; we’re tight. None of us trusted Thompson, so when he approached me with the notion of going it alone with Howard, the boys all agreed that I would play that hand. In the end, it would have been Thompson who got cut out.”
He gives me a big hug and I hold him tightly. I know that there is something about that big grin and eyes that tease and tempt a woman that I will not soon forget.
“Sundance, do me a big favor.”
“Anything you want.”
“Stay out of trouble. If you want to go into banks, get a job in one rather than robbing them.”
* * *
ROGER IS WAITING UNDER THE SHADE of a tree. Thompson’s shot did not hit him, but getting out of the way had sent him sprawling.
“You planning on riding off into the sunset with that cowboy? I saw the way you were looking at each other.”
“I’m not planning on running off with anyone. I’m married to a job as a newspaperwoman. I’m just grateful for his help.”
“I suppose you think he would have let you have the lower berth.”
“Oh, Roger, I don’t just think that; I know it. Sundance may have his faults, and he may end up on the wrong end of a rope someday, but he is a gentleman and knows how to treat a lady.”
He gives me one of his big sardonic grins. “I just treated you like the independent woman you are.”
Touché. “You’d be surprised how much an independent woman appreciates a man’s help when she’s attacked by a were-jaguar and a treasure-hunting thug.”
He beams with pride. “Well, the two men I came here to bring to justice back home, Thompson and Don Antonio, are now dead. Guess that’s for the best. Saves taxpayers the cost of a trial, not to mention that I would never have managed to get Don Antonio out of the country.” He grins. “I think you know I’m not very good at pretending to be a historian.”
You’re not very good at remembering you carry a gun, either, I think but I let that pass. “You truly need a different undercover identity; your history skills are shaky. You dodged the question about Cortés’s last big battle by passing it to Gertrude and flubbed when she asked you about the Louisiana Purchase.”
“I think Don Antonio was testing me, wondering if I really was a student of Mexican history. He was suspicious of me from the start. But I think he finally accepted me at face value when he found out we were sharing a compartment. It wasn’t something an investigator would do.”
Nor a lady.
“Are you coming back to the city with us? Gertrude is waiting with the carriage.”
“No, I’m going to stick around and speak to whatever Mexican policeman shows up. Let them know what happened, so everything dies here. You realize you’ll be contacted by them when you get to Mexico City.”
I had already thought about that, and I knew that I would be exported pronto if I didn’t agree not to use the story in a dispatch home.
“I’m going to miss you, Nellie Bly. I don’t know what I will do when I don’t have you picking on me.”
“Oh, you’ll find someone. A handsome man like you won’t have any trouble finding a woman who wants to order him around.”
“You were right, by the way. I almost had one up to the altar, before she got scared and ran. Or came to her senses. How about you? When will you be ready to settle down and marry?”
“As my brothers would say about themselves, after I sow my oats. But in my case, it doesn’t mean being wild, but carving out a career for myself in this man’s world.”
“Not to worry, Nellie Bly, you’ll succeed.”
And then he does something I’m not expecting: He gives me his book by Edgar Allan Poe.
“I marked a poem for you so that you won’t forget me.”
* * *
JOINING GERTRUDE IN THE CARRIAGE, my eyes are a bit misty. I will miss Roger and always wonder what might have been.
Gertrude hands me a handkerchief.
“There’s a poem, Nellie dear, one that I love dearly. It’s relates how a young judge stops to ask a farm girl for a drink of water. Both the judge and the girl are smitten with each other, but they go on with their lives, he marrying a socially prominent woman who loves him only for his money and power, and she marrying a simple farmer and living a life of drudgery.
“The poem has one of the most telling and poignant lines in our English language. It goes like this.” She looks up at the sky as she says:
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen,
The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’”10
I make good use of her handkerchief.
* * *
WHEN WE REACH MY HOTEL ENTRANCE, Gertrude and I part with hugs and promises to keep in touch. She is returning immediately to Oxford.
“I would have had to anyway,” she tells me, “but now that poor Don Antonio died so horribly, I can’t stand to stay a moment longer.”
As for me, my next quest will be off to Puebla, a large city southeast of the capital, and a visit to Cholula, which is near Puebla. Cholula is the largest pyramid in the world and I want to report about it.
I am halfway across the lobby when I hear an exclamation. “Well! It’s about time!”
“Mother!”
“Oh, you remember me? The old woman you abandoned when she fell weak and sick?”
That isn’t exactly true, but I don’t care. I’m just happy to see her.
CAST OF CHARACTERS
ARCHAEOLOGIST, SPY, WRITER, explorer, and adventure traveler are just some of the labels pinned on this incredible woman.
Born Gertrude Margaret Lowthian Bell in 1868, she grew up headstrong, with a willful desire for independence and obtaining knowledge. After graduating from Oxford, she just didn’t go into the world, a “man’s world”; she charged into it. Like Nellie, she gave no quarter in the battle to succeed in a man’s world.
GERTRUDE BELL VISITING ARCHAEOLOGICAL EXCAVATIONS IN BABYLON, 1909.
(Wikipedia Commons)
She took on challenges and achieved accomplishments that few men had. She went to Egypt and Arabia, learned the languages, and traveled by camel to places no Westerner had set foot upon. She spoke Arabic, Persian, French, German, Italian, and Turkish.
During World War I, she used her knowledge of the deserts to guide British troop movements in battles taking place in the Middle East.
After the war, she and T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) were instrumental in the creation of the present-day countries of Iraq and Jordan. She was also the driving force behind the creation of the great archaeological museum in Baghdad.
People described her as a woman with loads of energy—too much; very intellectual, with a lot of drive and determination; arrogant; imperious; ruthlessly ambitious; sharp-tongued; someone who expressed authority in her manners and voice; high-spirited and possessing extraordinary self-confidence and an urge to debate. However, there were three things she did not excel in—spelling, music, and cooking; and it was because these were of no interest to her that she didn’t see the importance of them.
But Gertrude had a love for clothing. She dressed extravagantly, and when meeting her for the first time, people would comment on her “Mayfair manners and Paris frocks.”
Another of her great loves was reading. Her nose was never out of a book, and she said she escaped through them. “They are my magic carpet.”
While in college, she liked going places alone and thought it extremely unf
air that boys could go without a chaperone. Not only was this frustrating but it angered her, as well. Given that even a museum visit required an escort, she complained, “I wish I could go to the National, but you see there is no one to take me. If I were a boy, I should go to that incomparable place every week, but being a girl to see lovely things is denied me!”
Unlike Nellie, Gertrude never married. Instead, she had an unconsummated affair with Maj. Charles Doughy-Wylie, a married man, with whom she exchanged love letters.
On July, 12, 1926, she died. She was fifty-seven, the same age that Nellie Bly was when she died.
She had been born wealthy, but after her father passed away, there were family money problems. In Baghdad, ill from pleurisy, she took an overdose of sleeping pills. No one knows if it was accidental or intentional, because the night she took the pills, she asked her maid to wake her up at a certain time the next morning.
* * *
POOR NELLIE! SHE THOUGHT Lily was a beautiful swan and that she was an ugly duckling. And as the world judged beauty, a woman who captured the hearts of audiences on the stage and the beds of princes offstage outranked a wannabe foreign correspondent who traveled across a continent (and eventually around the world) carrying a single carpetbag.
LILY LANGTRY, 1885 (National Archives)
Lily was born Emilie Charlotte Le Breton in 1853, on Jersey, a British island in the English Channel.
She had a number of prominent lovers, including the future king of the United Kingdom, Edward VII. In 1877, when he was the Prince of Wales, he arranged it so that he could sit next to Langtry at a dinner party given by Sir Allen Young May. Her husband was conveniently placed at the other end of the table.
Their affair lasted from late 1877 to June 1880. Some say it was because of Lily’s spending habits. Edward once complained to her, “I’ve spent enough on you to build a battleship,” whereupon she tartly replied, “And you’ve spent enough in me to float one.”
Being brought up with six brothers, just like Nellie, Lily had no problem speaking her mind to anyone. Because she was a challenge for her French governess, Lily was put with her brothers’ tutor and became better educated than most women of her time.
At twenty, she married Edward Langtry, an Irish landowner and widower. They knew each other because his wife had been the sister of the wife of one of Lily’s brothers. It was not the happiest of marriages, and Lily went on to have numerous affairs.
Like Gertrude Bell, Lily loved fine clothes, but she preferred to wear a simple black dress. She didn’t need anything else—her beauty outshined anything she wore.
She soon became close friends with Oscar Wilde and Sarah Bernhardt, and it was because of their encouragement that she embarked upon a stage career. Her debut was in London at the Haymarket Theatre, in a play called She Stoops to Conquer.
It is no coincidence that Nellie knew about Lily. Lily toured the United States many times, first in 1882, and even though the critics didn’t give her the best of reviews, the audiences loved her. The roles she appeared in included Pauline in The Lady of Lyons and Rosalind in As You Like It.
It wasn’t until 1882 that Lily became involved with Frederic Gebhard, who was a well-known New York City millionaire. He introduced her to the sport of Thoroughbred horse racing, which Lily embraced so wholeheartedly that together they took a stableful of American horses to race in England. Their relationship lasted nine years.
When Nellie mentioned to Lily that a town in Texas was named after her, Nellie was not correct. The town of Langtry was named for a railroad supervisor. However, Judge Roy Bean, a notorious hanging judge of the Old West, lived there and was in love with Lily from afar. He even built an opera house in hopes that one day she would perform in it.
Of the three women in the book, Lily, Gertrude, and Nellie, Lily lived the longest. She died in 1929, at the age of seventy-five. However, before her death she basically was a lonely woman. She had married a man much younger than she and he lived in another house. They would see each other occasionally, but her closest companion was her maid.
* * *
HISTORY HAS GIVEN LILY LANGTRY many more pages than her lover Frederic Gebhard, but in his day he was a wealthy, well-known playboy and owner of some of the best racehorses in the country. He also had a deep interest in Mexico and in encouraging U.S. trade with that country.
His obituary in The New York Times, September 9, 1910, summarizes a life of luxury and leisure, his every whim satisfied … until it caught up with him:
FREDERIC GEBHARD DIES IN GARDEN CITY
One of Best Known Men in New York 15
Years Ago—Suffered Breakdown Last Spring.
HIS INCOME ONCE $80,000
Racing and Yachting enthusiast and Member
of Many Clubs—Former Friend of Mrs. Langtry.
Frederic Gebhard, fifty years old, one of the best known men in New York some fifteen years ago, the uncle of Mrs. Reginald C. Vanderbilt and the brother of Mrs. Frederick Neilson, died yesterday morning at 8 o’clock in the Garden City Hotel, in Garden City, L.I. Early in the year Mr. Gebhard suffered a breakdown that developed into a dangerous case of pleurisy. In April, with two doctors and two nurses attending him at the Stratford House, 11 East Thirty-second street, where he had been living for some time, his friends did not expect him to live ten days.
He recovered strength, however, and two months ago was moved to Garden City, on the advice of his doctors. His sister hurried to his bedside three days ago from Sandy Point Farm, near Newport, and Mrs. Vanderbilt started for Garden City Wednesday night. His second wife, who was Marie L. Gamble, had been in constant attendance at his bedside since early in the Spring.
FREDERIC GEBHARD
(Library of Congress)
Mr. Gebhard’s father left, upon his death, an estate valued at $5,000,000. Frederic Gebhard early came into an income of about $80,000 a year. The newspapers of many years ago said that he was the best-dressed man of the times. He gave himself up to answering the calls of society, went in for racing and yachting, and lived generally the life of the accomplished, leisurely man about town.
One of his earliest interests outside of ballroom and clubs was horse racing. He owned the famous runner Eole, and paid $10,000 for the filly Experiment, which he renamed Louise in honor of his first wife. Volunteer II, and Olinda, the famous high jumper, were also property of his. For a while he was in partnership with A. W. Hunter in the management of a string of racers.
For several years after he met Lily Langtry, the famous beauty, who was termed the “Jersey Lily.” It was reported that they were to be married. They bought adjoining ranches in the West, both giving it out that they were going to lead simple lives. The stage called her back, and he could not escape Broadway and Fifth Avenue. They drifted apart in 1893.
The following year he became engaged to Miss Louise Hollingsworth Morris, then perhaps the best-known beauty in Baltimore. The wedding was on an elaborate scale. Friends of the two families came from all parts of the world to attend it. The couple were divorced in 1901 in South Dakota, Mrs. Gebhard later marrying Henry Clews, Jr.
Again free, he took up the old life that he had followed years before. In the latter part of 1906 it was announced that in January of that year he had married Marie L. Gamble, an actress. The Rev. Henry Marsh Warren performed the ceremony at his home, 48 West Ninety-fourth Street, and kept it a secret until the end of the year. It was said at the time that Mrs. Gebhard before her marriage had speculated luckily in Wall Street and had made $750,000.
She was the daughter of a Washington business man. At the age of sixteen she eloped with a clerk named Urimstatt in the Government Printing Office, but the marriage was unhappy and they were divorced.
The year after his second marriage it was said that at last Mr. Gebhard had come to the end of his resources. Mrs. Neilson, his sister, obtained a judgment against him for $72,159, which he had borrowed, it was alleged, in 1905. He paid the judgment in January of 1907. In July of th
at year he and Waldo Story, a sculptor, went into trade at 547 Fifth Avenue under the name of the Ritz Importation Company of America, Canada, and Cuba, selling wines, coffees, and spices.
Mr. Gebhard was born in this city. He belonged to nearly every club in the city at one time and another, including the Metropolitan, Union, Coaching, Knickerbocker, Racquet, New York Yacht, Larchmont Yacht, Tuxedo, and the Westminster Kennel.
* * *
WHEN NELLIE CONCLUDED that Sundance was born to hang, she was right.
Harry Alonzo Longabaugh, alias the Sundance Kid, went west from Pennsylvania on a wagon train when he was just fifteen years old, in 1882. He soon earned his outlaw handle by stealing a horse, saddle, and gun from a ranch in Sundance, Wyoming.
Sundance was fast with a gun and became known as a gunslinger. He eventually became a member of the Wild Bunch gang with Butch Cassidy and pulled off the longest series of successful bank and train robberies the country has ever seen.
He and Butch are the best-known outlaws in American history, thanks to the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford. The film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
It is believed that in 1908, Sundance and Butch Cassidy (his real name was Robert Leroy Parker) were killed in a shoot-out with the law in the South American country of Bolivia. However, no one knows for sure if they were killed. Modern DNA tests were conducted on bodies interred after the fight, but these DNA samples did not match the DNA of either man’s descendants.
FRONT ROW LEFT TO RIGHT: HARRY A. LONGABAUGH (ALIAS THE SUNDANCE KID); BEN KILPATRICK (ALIAS THE TALL TEXAN); ROBERT LEROY PARKER (ALIAS BUTCH CASSIDY).
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