by Peter Bowen
“Long ways from the Sand Hills, ain’t it,” I says, by way of breaking the ice. Something was eating on him fierce.
Bill cleared his throat.
“I’m troubled about Jack,” he finally says.
“Jack was always blind drunk in towns,” I says. “They make him uncomfortable. Hell, they make me uncomfortable.”
“It ain’t that,” Bill says. “See, Jack went with me to England, and he met this titled lady there, and I am telling you she ate him up and spit out the seeds.”
“Few weeks out on the prairie will set him right,” I says. “Always has before.”
“She’s one of the party that we’re guidin’.”
“I see.”
“I wish I could get the sonofabitch jailed for a year or so,” Bill went on. “He’s crazy as a bull elk in rut, and I don’t need the lady’s husband as full of holes as one of them things you use to drain vegetables and such.”
“A colander,” I says helpfully, pouring myself some more coffee.
“So,” I went on, “at best he’s useless, at worst he could sink your backing, and by the by get himself hung for perforating a nabob. Hell of a fix. I’ll think on it.”
“I’m a real slow feller,” says Bill. “It took me all of five minutes to think of the feller who had the right sort of mind for this particular tangle.”
“Prides me right up to hear you say so,” I says. “Consider it done.” I knew exactly what I was going to do, which was absolutely nothing, and if Jack wanted to get himself hung for ventilating a gen-yoo-wine English Aristocrat, that was his business.
“I feel much better,” says Bill. “Now, the Duke’s majordomo or whatever you call it will be here sometime this week, to go over our arrangements.”
“Sounds good. Don’t seem to make much sense we do much more than shop around for a little stock, and find a few good teamsters and drovers, and if we did our recruiting slow and steady we could find good men and keep the price down.”
“I want you to find someone who will be watching Lord Tibbie every damn minute that you are not watching Lord Tibbie,” Bill says, dragging the conversation back to the trail he was still stuck on.
“I’ll look around,” I says.
“Stand you to a drink?” says Bill.
“Sure, Bill.”
Though it was only a little past two the bar was half full.
Full of the sort of portly, waistcoated thieves who like to get together over oysters and booze and figure out how to steal a bit more. I had seen the same faces on the gents who headed south after the Civil War—I doubted a one of them had put on Union blue, and here were the same faces heading west, where there was lots of cheap land and lots of dumb, honest farmers to gull.
Somehow the leeches sensed that Bill was in no mood to put up with their antics at the moment, so we got a bottle and went to a table in a quiet corner and started talking about how things were back then. Oldtimers, we was. I was twenty-seven and Bill was thirty-three. Talk turned to a lot of friends who had lost their hair, and a lot of enemies who had met pleasing ends. Then Bill got a kind of puzzled look on his face.
“You remember Wild Bill Hickok?” he asks.
“Of course,” I says. “Got his head blown off over in Deadwood.”
“Well,” says Bill, “I saw him here, in St. Louis, about three months before he got shot by Jack McCall—Jack was his half-brother, you know—and he told me that he’d just been to see an eye surgeon, and the man told him he would be totally blind within six months. Course he asked me not to tell anyone, since if that was known, every saddle-jammer in the country would be after him. I haven’t told anyone, until now.”
“We ain’t drunk enough to be talking like this,” I says. “Now tell me the route you plan to take.”
“That’s simple,” says Bill. “We go up to my place on the North Platte, from there to Denver, up to Estes Park and the Red Mountain lakes, over Two Ocean Pass to the Grand Tetons, through Colter’s Hell, down the Yellowstone to Pryor Creek, back down past the Big Horns and the Wind Rivers, and fetch up at Cheyenne, where the Duke’s party can make rail connections.”
“We’d best ship everything to Cheyenne and start from there,” I says, “because you can’t go by wagon to your place without a camphor-soaked rag over your face. The stink and the flies are hell from May on.”
“The Duke wants to shoot some buffalo,” says Bill.
“I’ll find him all the buffalo he wants up on the Yellowstone,” I says.
We were interrupted by a waxy-looking imitation of our old and true friend Texas Jack, who was of a pale clear green complexion and a shuffling gait not a bit like the springy step of the scout feared even by the great Comanche Chief Quanah Parker.
Jack let himself down gingerly, and then held his head in his hands.
“I ain’t a well man,” he says. “Would you order me some coffee?”
The coffee came, and Jack sniffed at it for a while, sort of suspicious-like, and then he managed to drink a cup.
“Bill and I have been talking,” I says, “and we decided we would take off from Cheyenne. The Central Plains are an awful thing to behold.”
“Uh,” said Jack.
“So pack your traps and head for Cheyenne,” I says, “’fore you kill yourself from whiskey.”
Jack took a minute to take that in.
“Guess I’d best be moving.”
“First thing you do when you get there is get us a cavvy of maybe forty head of good horses. We need well-broke, wind-sound, mountain horses.”
“I’ll go get him a ticket,” says Bill, dropping some gold on the table to cover our breakfast.
I took Jack up to his room and helped him pack.
We deposited Jack in a suite in the Pullman car, with a few bottles of champagne and a large jug of bromide of potash.
“I hope he don’t see snakes all the way to Cheyenne,” says Bill, as we watched the train go.
The wind had turned raw. We took a cab back to the hotel.
“Big doin’s tomorrow,” I says to Bill, “let’s turn in early.”
We had a good dinner, and did just that.
19
THE NEXT MONTH WAS a dull round of going here to order this, there to order that, interviewing drovers and teamsters. I was pretty sure that what we would find in Cheyenne was the dregs not even the hide men would take. The British Army was buying buffalo leather in preference to any other kind. It was lighter in weight and held a polish better than cow leather. The hide hunters were working the year round now, and without Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull and Gall and their braves to scare them, they would soon be after the Yellowstone herd. With the Crees and Metis having done in the Canadian herd moving south to kill off the buffalo north of the Missouri, and every ragtag-and-bobtail of the hunters from the Red River, the Arkansas, the Platte, and the Republican heading north, it wouldn’t be but a year or two before the only buffalo left would be stuffed and in a museum.
The majordomo arrived, ready to domo a moving mansion to hell and gone. His name was Oliver Johnson, and he proved to be pleasant, well spoken, efficient, and very humorous in that parched sort of British way. He was smart enough to ask when he didn’t know, and between the two of us we pretty well had everything lined out by the middle of May.
My search for reliable men took me to some of the wagon trains—there were still a few, even though the railroads were reaching out farther each year—and I was able to hire eighteen of the twenty teamsters we would need. They all looked sound, without that twitchy paleness that the whiskey-bills have. I bought tickets to Cheyenne for all of them, and told them to meet me there no later than the twenty-fifth of May.
Oliver had brought a detailed list of the supplies that the Duke’s party would require us to drag along. I doubt that the Duke had even glanced at the list. Oliver was to arrange, and god help him if the port was the wrong year or the seegars were presumptuous.
“Hmrnm,” said Oliver, a couple days
before I left, “I do believe that we have attended to everything.”
The wine and such that had been shipped from England had arrived the week previously, been placed in a boxcar which we then sealed, and sent on to Cheyenne. I wired Jack and instructed him to post an armed guard—with another armed guard to watch him—twenty-four hours a day, and further, if when I got there the seals had been broken, there would be hell to pay. The Duke’s party had enough wine, champagne, liquor, porter, stout, and seegars in that boxcar to keep all of Cheyenne very happy for several days.
Oliver reminded me of a bittern. When he was thinking, he would tilt his head back and look straight up and then make a clucking sound, a half swallow, glumpick, glumpick, glumpick, until whatever item he was searching for in his memory floated up to within reach.
“Kelly,” he says, “I would like a guided tour of the bars and brothels of this feckless American city.”
“I’m a guide, all right,” I says. “Let’s get us a good dinner and then I will find a couple places to get drunk in and get our bellropes pulled.”
“Bellropes?” says Oliver. “Oh, I see, another of your American idioms. They have the same ... uuh ... vigor as your country.”
“You should have gone into diplomacy,” I says.
“Actually, I was in the Foreign Service for a bit,” Oliver says, “but they kept posting me to beastly hot places. The Duke was kind enough to offer me a position, and I accepted.”
“What sort of feller is he?” I asks.
Oliver gave me a very hard look. “He is an English gentleman,” he said curtly. “I wonder how Mr. Cody is faring in New York?”
“Hell,” I says, “he’s holed up in the Waldorf-Astoria concocting another pack of lies with Ned Buntline. In between temperance lectures from Ned, they should have three or four dime novels’ worth by the time the party from England gets here.”
“I had thought Mr. Cody’s adventures extraordinary,” says Oliver. “Both as to substance and to sheer numbers.”
Oliver had been sitting at his desk in shirtsleeves. He was the skinniest full-grown human being I had ever seen, not counting outright starvation cases. He was shrugging himself into his coat when he burst out laughing. “Kelly,” he says, “the thing that Mr. Cody understands is that your American West has certain ... er ... mythical properties. He’s shrewd enough to understand how to sell that, using his own person. He will do very well.”
“No doubt,” I says.
“You do know that there is a book out about you?”
“I figured George Hanks of the Hartford Courant would do some damn thing like that.”
“Have you read it?”
“No,” I says, “I ain’t. And I’m not going to. Now let’s go get some dinner and then do a little serious carousing.”
We had a leisurely dinner, and lingered over brandy and seegars until well after ten o’clock. Once Oliver got a bit of ankle-walking water into him, he let loose with a damn near unbroken string of funny stories about his service to Her Majesty’s Government, and he had a lot of sly tales about growing up on a small estate in the Border Country of Scotland. I didn’t know that under English law the eldest son gets everything, and the rest of the children get whatever crumbs he chooses to toss their way.
We went to Madame Patch’s first—she was called that because she always wore a diamond-studded patch over her left eye. The whorehouse was nearby, and the girls were young and pretty.
Madame Patch greeted me with her usual warmth—I paid on the nail, you see—and after Oliver and me had plunked down our twenty dollars each the champagne commenced to flow. Madame Patch let us sit and listen to the piano player—a nigger in a silk shirt, sure played good—and then she sent down all of the girls that wasn’t occupied for us to look over.
They was all young and fresh-looking, and none of them wearing enough to wad a shotgun with. I picked out a dark little thing, she had eyes as blue as the kingfisher’s wing, and I don’t know which one Oliver took, because my little minx took my hand and hauled me upstairs before the Englishman had given any sign that he even knew the girls were there.
My chippy told me that her name was Prudence, this while she was pulling off my boots, and by the time I had shucked the rest of my clothes—she’d taken off her few wisps of things, and insisted on hanging everything up, meanwhile stretching one long leg or the other, or waggling a tit my way—I was breathing deep and so ready my pecker was throbbing like a bullfrog’s throat in courting season. We screwed like minks and I suppose it didn’t take very long. It seemed like all of my worries about the upcoming trip went out when I come. I laid there for a bit, while she washed me, and then I went downstairs and waited for Oliver. I don’t know how long it was—two big glasses of champagne’s worth—and soon here he come down the red plush stairs, adjusting his necktie and looking at his cuffs. What with his accent and his funny round black hat and cane he did look sort of out of place in a medium-good whorehouse in St. Louis.
I stood up, and Oliver came over.
“I should like to see your St. Louis,” he said. “I have done nothing since I arrived but deal with those infernal papers and even more infernal merchants.”
When we marched out of the front door, with Madame Patch’s cooing voice behind us and the traffic in front—St. Louis never really shuts down for the night—I naturally turned left, to head uphill to where the better bars and such were.
“Kelly,” says Oliver grabbing my arm, “what is down there?” He pointed downhill, in the direction of the river.
“Well,” I says, “that’s first a desperate bunch of poor white folks’ places—bucket-of-blood bars and gambling hells, cheap whorehouses with poxy whores, a couple thousand cutthroats, sharpers, and if you get through that in one piece you’re in Darktown.”
“Interesting,” says Oliver.
“Oliver,” I says, “you can get your throat cut for a few pennies down there. The clothes we are wearing say we got more than a few pennies.”
“You have no sense of adventure.”
“None,” I agrees.
“Hmmm ... then I wonder if you are perhaps the proper party to guide the Duke’s tour?”
“I don’t need the damn job, Oliver, so that ain’t going to get you anywhere.”
“Well, then,” he says, grinning, “I shall hope to see you at breakfast.” He began to walk down the hill, whistling gaily, god damn him, and he hadn’t gone two blocks before I cussed myself clean out and went after him.
And a good thing, too, because by the time I caught up with him he was in the outskirts of Hellsport. I was maybe ten feet up the hill from Oliver when a couple of dark shapes rushed out of a space between two buildings, and one of them raised a long sap high over his head.
“Look out!” I hollered. The man with the sap turned to see what was behind him. I had my gun out and I hit him hard on the side of the head with it. The street was steep, and I fell and rolled quite a ways downhill before I could stop and get up and run back. The man I had hit was on the ground, but another one had come from somewhere and the two of them was moving toward Oliver.
About the time that I’m thinking the headline in tomorrow’s paper is going to read “Duke’s Man Broke in Half,” Oliver tugs a thin sword out of his cane, slashes one across the forehead with it, so that the blood will blind him, and runs the other through. Didn’t seem to take more time than it would to strike a match.
The feller Oliver had spitted was staring down at his stomach like he couldn’t believe what had just happened—an expression I have seen many times—and then he crumpled and rolled downhill, fetching up against the one that I had hit. The man with the slashed forehead was on his knees, frantically trying to claw blood out of his eyes.
“We should summon the police,” says Oliver.
“Summon ’em all you want,” I says. “We passed the line that they’ll cross over about two hundred yards up the hill—after dark, that is. Daylight they might be tempted to come as
far as we are now, if the crime was serious and going on in plain view.”
“Hmmmm,” says Oliver. “In future, I shall listen to you, Mr. Kelly.”
We walked back to the hotel, and drank for a long time. It didn’t take any kind of hold, so we finally gave up and went to bed. I had terrible dreams which I couldn’t remember the next day.
20
OLIVER DIDN’T SHOW FOR breakfast, and I had just remembered my promise to Bill about getting a bodyguard for the Duke and a foil for Jack, if it came to that. Oliver was a brave feller, but somehow a sword against a Peacemaker 45 didn’t seem all that good odds to me.
I took a cab to a livery stable, hired a horse, and rode out toward the west of town, for no particular reason. It was late spring here, the trees had all leafed out, and everything was green.
I was loping along on a rutted country road, going nowhere in particular, enjoying being on a horse again. The air was soft. Truth to tell, I had had enough city for one lifetime, and taking it day by day I hadn’t realized how much I had come to hate it.
It occurred to me that if I was in need of a gunman I could easier find him in little Cheyenne than in big St. Louis, so I put that out of my mind for the time being and just enjoyed the ride.
About two o’clock I turned round and headed back, feeling much better for the riding and for getting away from the city stink. It was about five, I suppose, that I come up to the ferry. It was on the far side of the Missouri and still had some wagons and passengers to unload. I got down and looped the reins over a hitching post off to the side, and then sort of half-sat against the rail. I bit off the end of a seegar and lit it, and looked up at the blue sky. Soon, I thought, I will be out of this grimy mess. It was grimy, worst I’d ever seen. Ash from coalfires in thousands of homes, ash from the gasworks down by the river, ash from the steamboats, the foundries, the railroad trains, and god knows what else.