The Fall of Abilene

by Johnny D. Boggs

  But I was already weaving to what was left of the remuda and my saddle.

  * * * * *

  Seven dollars left to my name. That’s all. I’d given Erastus maybe ten or twelve bucks to carry home. Twenty dollars a month for better than three months? I could count that in my head all too easily.

  I found Mr. A. V.’s bowling alley, reined up, and went inside, but stopped at the door and read a new posting:

  SEC. 8. It shall be unlawful to keep any billiard room, bowling alley, dram shop, or any place where liquors are sold open later at night than ten o’clock, p.m., and any person convicted of a violation of this section shall be fined in any sum not less than ten dollars and not more than one hundred dollars.

  Well, the town council had wasted no time getting around that midnight problem. There was more:

  SEC. 9. Any person who shall willfully disturb the peace and quiet of the city or of any person, family, or neighborhood, or any lawful assemblage of persons within the city, shall, upon conviction thereof, be fined in any sum not less than five and not more than one hundred dollars.

  I wondered if Hickok would enforce that. Or if the town council wanted it to be obeyed. A lot of laws seemed to be ignored in Abilene—and not just in the Devil’s Addition but up and down Texas Street.

  * * * * *

  I wandered into A. V.’s, said hello to Janice, who didn’t seem to remember me, and waited till a local in a bowler hat and string tie came up to me and asked: “Want to play?”

  I shrugged.

  “You of a sporting mind?”

  I sighed. “How much?”

  “Fifty cents a game?”

  “Why not a buck?”

  Now he stepped back. I had picked up a lot in a day, but Sam Benton was my brother, and he had taught me a few things long before I ever saw Abilene.

  Bowler Hat fished out a coin and laid it on a bench near the lane. I showed him my money.

  I let him win the first game. That I had picked up playing twenty-one with Hardin. I won the second. The third. I left before Bowler Hat got too angry, and bought him a beer, after his sixth loss. I smiled at Janice, who smiled back now, and tried to find the Applejack Saloon but couldn’t.

  Eventually, I was riding past the Bull’s Head, and toward the Old Fruit Saloon, when I saw the bold words over the towering façade of the Alamo Saloon.

  Alamo. That’s where I would find Sam Benton.

  That’s where I found more Texas cowboys than I’d ever seen.

  A man in sleeve garters and a buttoned-up vest stopped me once I’d pushed my way through the doors.

  “Check your guns at the bar, kid. It’s the law.”

  I pulled back my coat to show him I was unarmed.

  “Hell,” he said. “That’s a first. Word must be spreading.” He walked away.

  Hickok sat at a poker table, hat pushed back, tipping back and rocking on the legs of his chair. I pulled my hat down low, praying he would not recognize me, but his attention remained on his cards and the dealer.

  It took about fifteen minutes and two beers—the latter to cure that hangover and headache that kept threatening to return—before I happened upon Sam, Box Head, and a one-armed cowboy who said his name was Pain. They were drinking whiskey at a corner table.

  “Look who’s alive,” Box Head said.

  Grinning, Sam kicked back an empty chair.

  “A beer in his hand,” Pain said.

  “Half of one,” Sam corrected.

  I sat in a chair to finish off the beer. “It’s my second. Today,” I told him.

  “I’d make it your last.” Sam picked up his whiskey.

  A woman came by and asked if we’d care for another round. Box Head pointed at me and said: “It’s his turn.”

  I calculated that I could afford another nickel draught beer for myself and twenty-cent shots for my brother and his pals, and readily agreed.

  “What next?” Pain asked after the drinks came.

  I stared at my brother. He had bathed, shaved, and spent money on new duds. Box Head hadn’t. Pain I knew nothing about, except he must have known Hardin, because he looked around and asked: “Where’s Little Arkansas?”

  “Where else?” Box Head chuckled.

  My suggestion of rolling tenpins garnered blank looks. Box Head shook his head, and I still don’t know exactly how this came to pass, but we wound up leaving the Alamo; the three with their weapons. We had another drink at some other watering hole before Pain said he had to get to the herd he was keeping till his boss could sell it, and Box Head and Sam agreed that they had to start early in the morning for home.

  Sam looked at me and said: “You, too, Brother.”

  I shrugged, though I knew I would be staying for all that money Mr. Carroll would pay me and what I could make in bowling alleys and counting cards for Hardin. I figured Ma and Pa would own South Texas after what I’d bring them.

  We didn’t make it to our cow camps. Somehow, we found ourselves behind the schoolhouse, rolling dice. I knew nothing about dice, how the game was played, how bets were made and by whom, and it sure went by too quickly for me to understand. Nor do I know how the girl with the whiskey showed up, and how the man in the yellow brocade vest came into our midst, although it could be that he had the dice and invited us over.

  We drank whiskey. We bet. I think we were winning, because the man in the brocade vest started yelling. I’m sure he was drunk, because he slurred his words, and none of us understood what he was trying to say. The girl tried to calm him down but soon gave up and started hanging onto Box Head’s arm.

  The man eventually threw the dice against the schoolhouse’s wall, and he reached behind his back and pulled out an Arkansas toothpick and said he would gut us like fish. That’s when my brother brained him with the barrel of his revolver.

  The girl let go of Box Head and screamed: “You’ve killed him!”

  “He’s still breathing,” Sam informed her.

  The girl must’ve been deaf, for now she shrieked: “Murder! Murder! They’re killing him. Murder!”

  Box Head and my brother begged the girl to shut up. I turned around at a noise and almost vomited.

  “Hands up.” Wild Bill Hickok did not stop. He plowed ahead, knocked Box Head to the ground, used his free hand to slap the girl into silence, and stretched his right hand as far as he could until the barrel of his revolver stood inches from my brother’s face.

  You can’t say that Sam was threatening Wild Bill. Yes, my brother held his pistol, but the hammer was not cocked—he had never cocked it even during his short little row with the dice man—and the barrel was pointed toward the ground, not anywhere near the marshal.

  “If that Colt isn’t in the dirt by the time I finish this sentence, Miss Sue and Mr. Fancher will have their pupils scrubbing your …”

  The gun fell. My brother’s hands shot up. The moon shown in all its fullness, turning midnight, or whatever the hour, into practically daylight, and a dark stain appeared on the front of Sam’s tan britches.

  “Marshal …” the girl began.

  “Shut up.” Hickok threatened to slap her again, and as she backed farther toward the school, he said to Sam: “Give me one reason why I shouldn’t blow your head off, boy. Braining a gambler. Violating the firearms ordinance. Bringing your offensive actions to a fine schoolhouse. Causing me to mistreat a …” He looked at the woman and never finished his sentence. “You’d be fined so much you’d be working all summer for Abilene. But I’d rather just shoot you all down like the dogs you are.” The pistol in his hand never wavered.

  It seemed like a lifetime passed.

  Hickok backed up, motioning us all to stand next to my brother. For a moment, I feared he just wanted us close together for when he started pulling the trigger.

  “Hands up,” he ordered again. “If they
drop an inch, I shoot.”

  Even the girl raised her hands, and Hickok moved to the man on the ground.

  “Whose knife?” he asked.

  “His,” the girl said. “Newell’s, I mean.”

  “Well, when he wakes up, he’ll wish it wasn’t.” Hickok backed away, and looked at Sam. “You buffaloed him?”

  Sam managed a slight nod.

  “Get back to work, Mildred,” he told the girl. “If I find you working with a drunk and cheat like Newell Kennedy again, I’ll ship you off to the monastery for life. And don’t try sneaking into a saloon. You know the rules.” She vanished in an instant.

  Hickok studied Box Head, dismissed him, glanced at me, looked at Sam again, and then slowly his gaze returned to me.

  “I know you,” he said.

  “Noah,” I told him, though I couldn’t remember if we had actually formally introduced ourselves. “Benton.”

  “You didn’t heed my advice, Abilene.”

  I started to tell him I wasn’t counting cards with Hardin, but changed my mind and said: “No, sir.”

  “Where is he?”

  My head shook. “I haven’t seen Wes all day.”

  The gun waved toward Box Head. “You know him?” he asked me.

  “He was on the trail from Texas. Mr. Columbus Carroll’s herd. One of them, I mean. He drove two and …”

  “It’s a yes or no answer.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “And the one needing a diaper.”

  I saw the anger flash in Sam’s eyes and felt heat rising through my body, too.

  “That’s a question, boy. Yes or no?”

  “He’s my brother.”

  The hammer was released, and the gun returned to Hickok’s sash. “Leave what you won off Newell Kennedy,” he told us. “That’ll cover his fine. And yours. So I won’t have to spend time in court with the judge.” He stepped to the other side of the unconscious gambler’s body. “Find your mounts. Ride back to your herd or wherever the hell you’re going.” He nodded at Sam and Box Head. “If you two show up in my town the rest of this season, I’ll figure you’re wanting revenge. I’ll shoot to kill.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You don’t have to leave,” I told my brother the next morning.

  He threw the blanket on the roan, not looking at me, found his saddle, and with a grunt landed it on the gelding’s back.

  “For what Mr. Carroll’s paying, you could …”

  “Be your cook?” Sam spit out the words with venom. “Or rather, look after the herd while you’re rolling tenpins or counting cards for Hardin?”

  Jealousy. That’s what ate at Sam. That’s what I told myself. Hell, it wasn’t my fault I had gotten the offer to stay with the herd, and, by Jehovah, I wasn’t even Carroll’s first choice. I’d be riding south, too, if Jim Clements had not gone home to Texas. Sam was mad. He had always gotten the better of me, but not now. I thought about just saying: “The hell with you.”

  I wish I had.

  “I’m not the one who pissed my pants,” I told him instead.

  I never saw the fist that almost broke my jaw. In fact, I didn’t see anything until Hardin started kicking me awake.

  He grinned down at me. “I missed the fight,” he said, “but Hatley told me that you pretty much missed it, too. Hungry?”

  Rubbing my jaw, I made myself sit up and look around. I found my hat but found no one else around. My brother was gone. Everyone was gone. Erastus and the chuck wagon. All the boys who had not moved on yesterday or last night. Nothing remained of our crew except six horses for Hardin and me.

  I wasn’t hungry, but there was no campfire, no skillet, certainly no coffee to be poured by Erastus McDougal.

  “There’s nothing to eat,” I told him as I tasted the blood in my mouth. Sam could land a haymaker like a bare-knuckled pugilist, and he had not pulled his punch.

  “That’s right. But I’m drawing one-fifty from Mr. Carroll, and you’re pulling in forty a month. I say we can afford to eat like real folks.”

  Oh. I did my arithmetic again. Forty a month. Knowing my abilities, I could turn forty a month into four hundred. Or so I thought.

  “What about the herd?” I asked. “Shouldn’t one of us …?”

  “Will you grow up, Abilene? Look around.” He waved his arm. “There’s nowhere for our beeves to go, not until those chiseling carpetbaggers start putting good money on the table. If you want to stay, fine. I’ll bring back some coffee and beans, but you’ll have to cook them yourself.”

  I must have been pouting.

  “If you want to ride and catch your brother, you could likely find him long before he reaches the Canadian. Or you can stick with me. Earn a passel. Forty a month will seem like a pauper’s purse compared to what we’ll earn.”

  Which is what I had been thinking.

  “Me and you, Abilene,” Hardin said, charming me like a serpent. “Now, I’m starved. You want to come with me, or does your mouth hurt too much to fill it with beef and oysters?”

  * * * * *

  We ate our breakfast, which was more like dinner, at a little restaurant next to the Elkhorn Saloon, and got our supplies at Johntz’s Grocery, Gordon’s Butcher Shop, and a liquor store run by some fellow named Flynn. Most of our money was spent at Flynn’s.

  I stuck the meager supplies: salt pork, bacon, a few airtights, a sack of beans, a skillet, a coffeepot, two plates, two cups, bottles of porter and pilsner—“We’ll keep the beers in the river so they’re cool,” Hardin directed—and a jug of Flynn’s homemade whiskey as well as Old Overholt rye and Chicken Cock bourbon in my war bag and saddlebags, we were ready to go to work.

  Only we weren’t caring for Mr. Carroll’s herd.

  In the Devil’s Addition, Hardin found a poker game. Five-card stud. No limit. We figured out that I would sit next to him, fold unless I had a pair or ace high. I’d signal him what I was folding with my foot and hands.

  It was really complicated, and I didn’t know if I understood everything, but it was stud poker. Both elbows on the table for clubs. Left elbow only for spades. Right elbow for hearts. No elbows for diamonds. One toe tap for an ace, then progressing up by the numbers. One heel tap for a jack, two for a queen, three for a king.

  And that’s only for what I had, and on that afternoon and into the evening, rarely did I get any decent cards. Signaling him if he should fold, check, or raise proved a lot harder. I’d rub my hands, or press my fingers together, and I’d face one of the other players.

  Cheating—if you could call this cheating—was not easy at all. Nor did it always work.

  Yet we left that evening thirty-seven dollars and fifty-five cents ahead. Hardin gave me ten dollars and sent me back to the herd. He stayed for most of the night at the Devil’s Addition or somewhere along Texas Street.

  * * * * *

  We did work. Sometimes. Well, I usually circled the herd in the morning while Hardin slept in. He’d be up by noon, and I’d fix something to eat. After a week, we had to move the herd a bit beyond the river for better grazing, and during the second week, we were hired by another boss to help bring his herd into the cattle pens.

  In the third week, Hardin woke early—I mean by ten in the morning—and he said he did not want to eat the slop I cooked, that I made Erastus McDougal’s grub taste like something you could buy for two bits at the best café in Austin. So we rode into Abilene, first for a whiskey, actually three, at the Pearl Saloon, then for dinner at that little restaurant.

  The restaurant was noisier than the Pearl, and what I heard I didn’t like.

  “Who shot off your arm, Texas?” a man in a gray derby asked of Pain, the one-armed cowboy I had met at the Alamo Saloon who had joined us for a soiree or two—including the one that led to my brother’s humiliation by Hickok. “Grant? Sherman? Hooker?”


  “Nah,” said another man in a yellow brocade vest and purple cravat. “I did. I killed five hundred Rebs during the war, but I reckon my shooting was off.”

  “The problem with you Texans is that you stink,” said some other man.

  “Imagine,” said the one wearing the derby, “how much more he would stink if he had two arms.”

  “I guess we should feel blessed for that,” someone said from a table that was out of view.

  “Stay here.” Leaving me by the door, Hardin moved through the crowd, wearing his new suit and hat, his old vest underneath the coat. With all the money we were earning and winning, we had both visited P. Hand & Company’s shop and outfitted ourselves with new weapons. The only difference was that I’d left mine back at camp.

  “I can’t eat my ham and eggs,” the gray derby man said. “Texans spoil my appetite. So I think you better leave, buster. Besides, Mrs. Breckenridge doesn’t serve half-men. Oh, wait, that’s not right. Because no Texan’s a whole man. Missing that arm … that makes you maybe a third or a quarter of a man. If that.”

  The laughter faded as Pain reached for his glass of water, and Hardin, now opposite Pain’s table, said: “I’m a Texan.”

  Spinning toward Hardin’s voice, the derby-wearer and the man in the fancy vest started for their revolvers, either having been posted by the marshal’s office or breaking the firearms law. Maybe the one in the fancy vest recognized Hardin. Anyway, he stopped his draw and raised his hands toward the ceiling. The derby-wearer should have done the same, though that might not have stopped Hardin, whose Colt thundered.

  But the bullet hit Pain’s good arm, and the Texas cowboy overturned the table as he cried out and dropped to the floor. Derby’s derringer had misfired, snapping both barrels instead of just one, so he dropped the smoking hideaway gun beside Pain’s writhing body and bolted for the door.

  Hardin swung the revolver. My eyes must have widened considerably, and I dropped to my knees as Hardin’s Colt roared again. At first I thought Hardin had filled his cartridges with shot since I felt something pepper my cheek and neck. The door opened. Above the echoes of gunfire, men and women screamed.