So Brave, Young and Handsome

by Leif Enger

  “Where are they, the women and youngsters?” Siringo inquired. In fact, no women or youngsters were in sight—only a few stunned men standing in their trousers, murmuring through the ashes.

  “We put ’em on wagons and hauled ’em to Gruver,” Napoleon reported.

  “Who was the boy?” Siringo asked.

  “What boy?”

  “The one who rousted you out of the hall.”

  “I don’t know. I’d sold him some gasoline, earlier,” said the bald Odd Fellow. “That was my petroleum station yonder. You would think the pump would explode, but it only had a flame on top like a candle. That boy had a pretty car—a pretty girl too.”

  “Curly-headed youngster?” Siringo asked.

  “Yes, sir. Curly and pale. Went and got sick on himself, the poor whelp, the fire scared him so.”

  “And the girl was Mexican,” said Siringo.

  “That’s right.”

  I kept an eye on the old vulture now, for he stooped and swayed in deliberation.

  Napoleon mused, “He wasn’t a Spigot boy, but a good lad. He gave us the warning, though it didn’t help much. He carried buckets. We owe that young man something.”

  At this Charles Siringo straightened and pronounced, “You do indeed. You owe him one swift trial and ten feet of rope, for he set the fire that killed your Felix Fly.”

  Well, that enlivened the Odd Fellows! Nothing lights up a party like a surprise accusation of murder—not that it surprised me, for I’d observed Siringo long enough to know he trusted his hunches, and to trust some of them myself. But I doubt it had occurred to these men that the Great Spigot Fire might’ve been caused by anything more malicious than a tipped candle, a wayward cigar.

  “The little shyster!” cried Janssen.

  “However,” Siringo said, “I am already traveling in straight-line pursuit of a desperate fugitive. Your greenhorn arsonist is not my charge.”

  “But if he killed Felix—”

  Siringo said, “It is worse than you know, for he is on the run after murdering a famous actor of the screen at the Hundred and One Ranch.”

  “Why, then, you’ve got to help us. He can’t be far away!”

  “Contact the Texas Rangers. People here put stock in them,” Siringo replied, with polite disdain.

  “By the time a Ranger shows up, this ruthless boy will be dancing in Mexico,” complained Napoleon.

  But Siringo held his ground. “It is not a job I can take on frivolously.” Plainly, he wanted to be clamored for. Moreover, he had accurately recognized in these Odd Fellows his very favorite audience: men with a pure faith in officers of the law, in sheriffs, in Texas Rangers, in Pinkertons. Here followed several minutes of the most abject supplications which I have wiped purposefully from my memory. I can tell you that during this simpering display the Odd Fellows seemed to shrink in height by several inches while Charles Siringo rose and shone and regained a significant measure of what must’ve been a notable prime.

  “Well, he did burn a whole town,” he reflected at last, catching my eye. “These days it usually takes a marching army to make that much fire, though the Comanches used to do it without much exertion.”

  “Felix Fly is dead,” said the bald lieutenant, hopefully, “and probably Langston Cree too.”

  “Two dead and a burnt town, on top of that killed performer back in Oklahoma,” said Charles Siringo. Oh, his cup was overflowing! He heaved a deliberate sigh and concluded, “It ain’t convenient, but he seems a serious lad after all. I’m a servant of the law, gentlemen. Which way did you say that he went?”

  8

  Spigot is now an open field with a road through it, though I am told the well is still there if you know where to look, and that the water in it is still cold and of high quality. In compilations of Texas history you mainly find mentions of Spigot in connection with its ruin by fire—the Roberts Fire, it is sometimes called, for Siringo’s intuition turned out correct.

  Hood’s intentions in Spigot seem to have been innocent. Presumably he wanted to send a telegram, though to whom we were never to learn because the operator recognized him from a description wired from Alva. The operator, James Pell, did not look refined but had great curiosity and discernment. Charlie Siringo disliked Pell instantly for what he later called “the man’s warped gaze,” though I suspect it was actually Pell’s straightforward speech that rankled.

  “You’re singular old, for a Pinkerton,” Pell said.

  That set Siringo on his heels. He had set up shop in the Odd Fellows hall and was conducting interviews of anyone still lurking around Spigot; most of them were tired as ghosts, but here came Pell rolling in like a sailor, sneering round the stem of a lit pipe, a red bandanna tight to his scalp.

  “Old or not, you still have to answer my questions,” said Siringo, who nevertheless seemed reduced by Pell’s discourtesy. “I’ll trouble you to start with the first appearance of the boy, Hood Roberts.”

  As Pell told it, he had endured a long day at the telegraph box. He was bored and had gout in his feet, which is why he walked like a sailor. He knew that a white boy and a Mexican girl had stolen a car and some money up in Alva; when Hood Roberts entered his telegraph office, James Pell nodded to him and looked out his window. Sure enough, a beauteous Mexican girl sat craning round in an almost-new Locomobile. Hood tapped on the counter and said he wanted to send a wire.

  Pell nodded. After obliging the young outlaw, he thought he might send a wire himself, to the Texas Rangers. Spigot had no law officers of its own, and it rarely had trouble, either; Pell had sent telegrams out of Spigot for more than twenty years, but he had only once before sent one to the Rangers. It had given him a small thrill at the time. Pell said, “Where and to whom, son?”

  Hood was silent a moment. “You know me, don’t you?”

  Pell didn’t answer right away. For one thing, he wasn’t at all intimidated by this curly cherub.

  “That’s why you looked out your window,” Hood said.

  Pell replied, “You are the young man who stole the automobile in Alva.”

  At this Hood leaned over the counter, picked up the telegraph bug, and threw it hard to the floor.

  This offended James Pell, who said, “You little milk toast, that’s hardly broken—that won’t buy you ten minutes.”

  Hood looked at Pell in disbelief, then kicked the bug across the floor, where it smacked a wall and came into pieces.

  “How about that?” Hood asked. “Can you fix that?”

  “You want to wager on it?” said the furious Pell.

  Hood then walked over and jumped on the telegraph bug with both feet until it was like a puddle. He said, “What about now?”

  And Pell replied, “The thing is, Milk Toast, I am reasonably handy.”

  Then Hood said some bad words, and tore a lantern off the wall and waved it about; next thing we hear there is a fire in the telegraph office, a dry structure built in the very shadow of the livery, with its straw bedding and thirsty shingles.

  As I think about it, it was probably the James Pell interview that prompted Siringo to go after Hood Roberts full steam. James Pell was unconvinced by Charles Siringo. He did not fall at his feet as the Odd Fellows had done. James Pell in fact was not an Odd Fellow but a cranky Texan from San Antonio. Probably he longed for the old Republic. At any rate he wanted the Texas Rangers to catch Hood; he was unimpressed by Pinkertons. They hadn’t caught Butch Cassidy, had they?

  “Butch is dead,” growled Siringo.

  “Really? Has somebody got him then?”

  “Butch died in a storm of gunfire in Bolivia seven years ago.”

  “Begging your pardon, Butch came through Spigot December last. He had an automobile with a canvas tent folded up in back. He had a limp you could hang your hat on. He stood at my window and sent a telegram to his baby sister up in Wyoming.”

  Siringo was not a stammering man, but this seemed to cost him his footing. He said, “If he was here, why didn’t your darlin
g Rangers catch him?”

  “I don’t know about that. I am only saying he was here.”

  “I am not going to debate Butch Cassidy with you. I am tired of Butch Cassidy. This Roberts boy has killed three men. Tell me anything else he said.”

  After Pell, nothing else remarkable came to light. Siringo talked with another half-dozen char-stained men while I looked out the second-story windows of the Odd Fellows lodge. I saw where the telegraph office had stood, and the livery, and a dark little crater where the general store had been. It was a dent in the earth, like Janssen had said. I got out my pencil and paper and wrote, Dear Susannah, there is nothing I miss so much as you.

  9

  In Siringo’s mind, he never left off the pursuit of Glen Dobie. Though we changed course after the Spigot fire, following Hood and Alazon toward Mexico, Siringo still spoke of Glendon as his primary quarry and even as his rival. I asked him once what attraction Glendon held, to be worth hounding still.

  “It ain’t attraction, it’s attrition,” was his gruff reply. “He’s among the last from those rough days. We’re all that’s left, you see.”

  “Then why go after Hood?” I asked.

  “For the bounty,” Siringo said. He meant the reward, but also the gain in eminence. The death of Ern Swilling and the burning of Spigot had put Hood in the newspapers. A new memoir was in the making. To that end we bounced along in the ailing Packard through village after village toward the Rio Grande.

  I will credit Hood Roberts with some of Glendon’s outlaw talents. He could, for example, seem to vanish. On that dusty journey we crossed the lovebirds’ trail half a dozen times—they’d stolen rice from a grocer, blankets and a plump ham from a farmstead, grease and gasoline in Doyletown. Never did we see the vaunted Texas Rangers or encounter any sign of their pursuit. “Supposed to be such bloodhounds,” jeered Siringo, who viewed the Rangers as though they had jilted him in his youth. At any rate we were on Hood’s very heels while the adored Rangers were nowhere in sight. Twice Siringo thought we had the boy pinned down: once at a smithy where Hood had an axle hammered straight, again in a rooming house outside which we sighted the stolen Locomobile. A day and a half we waited for Hood to come out of that bleak-windowed place, but he never did; Siringo finally realized Hood had given up the car and proceeded by other means. Hours later we learned of a rancher named Pompey who had a horse and mule stolen the previous night, along with riding tack for each. People in town spoke wearily of this fitful Pompey—thirty years old and still roaring to get his way. He had hired a local man of skillful reputation to track and retrieve the animals. It measures Siringo’s grit and the warp of his ambition that we sought out this disagreeable rancher and rented two horses ourselves. Pompey was suspicious of the arrangement even when Siringo said we would leave the Packard with him as collateral.

  “What corrupt security is this?” cried Pompey. It’s true the car smoked a lot as we stood beside it on the brown grass.

  “I see that you don’t know how to drive,” said Siringo. His voice was cracked and quiet and lent him something fearsome.

  “I drive,” said Pompey uncertainly.

  “Then you will recognize this Packard as a foremost machine,” Siringo replied.

  “It’s a shipwreck,” said the rancher, but conviction had deserted him. In the end Pompey supplied us with two decent nags, also saddles and tack and canteens and enough of his wife’s bricklike bread to see us through a thin week. These horses were small and knobby with the flat eyes and cloaked aptitude of Indian ponies. I was startled at their paltry appearance, but Siringo went to the one that had caught his fancy and waved his hat in friendly style at the side of its face. The beast didn’t shy but took the hat from his hand, lipped it a moment, and dropped it to the ground.

  “All right then,” Siringo said.

  This was just north of the town of Columbus, New Mexico. I won’t forget my dread in scrambling onto that ribby paint, for I was never a good rider. Nor will I forget the crooked way Siringo sat his dun gelding. He was tipping always one direction or another and resembled an effigy or rigored cadaver strapped to a horse by pranksters. His every moment aloft seemed a lucky coincidence, but he never fell and in fact commented several times on the comportment and soft gait of the brute he rode.

  In this teetering manner we followed the tracker up into the hills. Pompey had told us the man’s name, Ericsson, and his specialty, which was not chasing dangerous fugitives but recovering animals lost during storms or stampedes. It seems Ericsson was well liked: a quiet single fellow nearing fifty who maintained a fastidious home in the hope he would one day attract a comely wife or even a plain wife. He sewed leather hats and sheepskin gloves, which provided his living but took a toll on his eyesight and spine. Saturday nights he crouched over a Ward’s crystal radio, and he had a cool cellar in which he maintained a cache of orange soda.

  We dry-camped in a rocky wash. The moon had set early and Siringo could not make out the trail by stars alone. Under his guidance I hobbled the horses with lengths of hemp. The horses didn’t seem tired and whickered to each other for company. We’d traveled at such a deliberate speed on those rented animals I couldn’t imagine we were catching anyone.

  “Tracking’s always slow,” said Siringo. “You’re generally moving more slowly than the person you’re after. However that person stops now and then, while you keep moving as long as it’s light, sometimes longer.”

  “We aren’t moving now.”

  “Are you griping about that?”

  “No.”

  “You think I’m tough, and I am. But I’m old too. Moreover, here is this bullet hole—it’s still making me a little sick,” Siringo replied. “The moon will be up two hours before the sun. When it rises we’ll start again.”

  Under that weary prospect I got out some of Mrs. Pompey’s bread for a cold supper—it was unleavened and hard as a salt lick. Siringo gnawed the piece I handed him but soon gave up and surrendered the damp remainder to his horse, who bit it and dropped it and walked away but kept returning until it was gone. Siringo lay down in his blanket, twisting about as though the rigid earth surprised him; I could hear him breathing with his porous lungs. Clearly, a punishing day for the old sinner. Embarrassed by his suffering he said, “When you’re eleven you don’t ever think it’ll change.”

  That’s when he’d gone off cowboying, of course—I recalled his recitation from the opening chapter of his memoir.

  “You must’ve been homesick, though,” I said.

  “I scarce remember.”

  “You remember.”

  He made a noise in his throat. “I suppose I was homesick. Gladys helped me out of it.”

  “Gladys who?”

  “A girl, Becket. What did you think?”

  “Eleven is young to have a girlfriend.”

  “She wasn’t a girl as you’d think of. A paid companion is what she was. She told me that straight out but I didn’t know what it meant. She was a girl to me.”

  Siringo left it there and I listened to his settling lungs and tried to fall asleep. But instead of sleeping I imagined him eleven, with curiosity and expectation written in his round face, along with neglect and ignorance. He suddenly continued. “I suppose I was in love with her, young as I was. She had blonde hair. She’d hold my hand while we walked. We used to walk beside the train tracks outside Bay City and she’d tease me about hanging around with a paid companion.”

  His speech tonight was different. This was no poised recitation. “We liked to play cards. Five-card and monte and gin. Men’s games. She had a pretty cockleshell necklace and unstrung it and we used the cockles for money. She was not a good player.”

  “Why, you remember her well.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered what she asked me. My answer would’ve been yes.”

  “That’s a dangerous position.”

  “I was a boy. She didn’t ask much.”

  “Tell me about your wife,” I said.

&nbs
p; “I don’t scarcely remember.”

  “You said she couldn’t see you,” I reminded him.

  “At first she saw me fine. It was only later.”

  “What happened?”

  He said, “That’s the mystery, ain’t it, Becket.” A snort. “She was incompatible with my profession.”

  “You were gone too much,” I said.

  “It was more than gone. Lot of men are gone and their wives happy enough. It was what I did gone. As I’ve said my talent lies in pursuit. Therefore it fell to me to befriend the worst of us. Robbers, anarchists. Stranglers. Wouldn’t you know it I got along with them well. I have drunk the most putrescent rotgut with companions fresh from the bombed-out homes of policemen. I have raised toasts in their honor and more or less meant it, but it was always work to me and when the time came to call them down I never slacked or stayed my hand. I was a good detective.”

  I said, “Most men never have the chance to be both things at once, the hero and the devil.”

  “That is ignorant. Most men are hero and devil. All men. That is what ruins it with wives.”

  “She wanted just the hero?”

  “Bad man or good she would’ve had me either way. She couldn’t endure both, however. She said to pick one and to be that thing only so that she might trust me until the day of Jesus. It disturbed her that I could work up a friendship to a man, eat at his table, pattacake with his babies, bury myself under the surface of his life for six months or a year and then call him to account. She feared its effect.”

  I said, “It sounds like costly work.”

  “All work is costly. I quit a few times and came home and lived like she wanted. We bred horses and some redbone hounds I couldn’t sell on account I was well-spoken and had all my teeth. We speculated here and there on riverfront and ranch land. Miserable work. There’s your costly job! I wrote some newspaper editorials that paid by the word, and I did enjoy that. Opinions come easily to me. And yet I had this history, Becket. I am not a regular man. What is history if you don’t own to it? She knew this at the altar. There was not a doubt in her mind she was marrying a man whose name would carry beyond his own time.”