The Old Colts

by Swarthout, Glendon

  Wyatt heaved his lower legs off the table and sat up on the horsehair sofa in some disgruntlement. “What’re you talking about?”

  “I’m talking about how to get the big money we both need—enough to set you up so you won’t have to live off Josie—enough to save my ass!” Bat babbled. “More than enough to put us on Easy Street!”

  Wyatt rubbed his eyes. “You’re going to sell New York back to the Indians.”

  “Goddammit, I mean it! All it’ll take is that four hundred bucks and a few days out of town. You’re leaving anyway, and I better make myself scarce. We’ll go together, okeh? Today. This afternoon. How about it? What’ve we got to lose?”

  “Four hundred bucks.”

  “An investment!”

  “Lobsters.”

  “Forget that!”

  Wyatt scratched an itch. “If this is another of your lamebrained—”

  “This is a sure thing! Wyatt, this is the most sensational son-of-a-bitch idea I ever had in my whole life!”

  Wyatt looked askance at him, recalling Emma’s remark about being married twenty-five years to a man who never grew up. He lay down again, curled up, covered himself with the quilt, and closed his eyes. “I’ll sleep on it,” he said.

  “Unless we’re too old,” said Bat, and waited.

  It worked. After a while Wyatt opened one eye. “Too old to what?”

  “Hear the wolf howl.”

  The last time Bat had used his valise was on the trip from Denver to New York in ‘02. It was no wonder, then, that he had to grub for it under a pile of these and those at the bottom of the bedroom closet. He blew off the dust and slung it on the bed.

  “Emma dear, I’m gonna be out of town for a few days.”

  This was news to her.

  “Will you throw in a few things I might need?”

  “Such as?”

  “Oh, you know. Not much. Couple of shirts and ties, BVD’s, socks, you know.”

  “Do you mind if I ask where?”

  “Not if you don’t mind my not saying.”

  “I have every right.”

  “Curiosity killed the cat.”

  “You’re on the run, aren’t you?”

  “Yes and no.” He was buttoning his vest. He winked at her. “Let’s just say, honeybunch, that I seek a more salubrious clime. Anyway, I’ll go by the office first and ask Lewis for a leave of absence. Then I’ll be back, and Wyatt and I’ll be gone geese.”

  “So will I.”

  “Do you mind my asking where?”

  “A meeting.” She opened a bureau drawer and began sorting out his things. “Where we sit around and spit and hate men.”

  “Bully. As TR says.” He harnessed himself into his shoulder holster—which she noted—put on his jacket, surveyed himself in a mirror, pulled his wallet, came up behind her, and laid two twenties on the bureau top. “Here. You’ll need some dough-re-mi. Buy yourself some pretties. See some shows.”

  She looked at the bills, then turned, suddenly, and flung her arms around his neck and drew him to her with such urgency that his breathing was obstructed by one of her rag curlers. “Oh, damn you, Bat,” she said. “Why do men do things like this?”

  “Nature of the beast.”

  “But you’re gone even when you’re here.”

  He put his arms about her bathrobe. “Em, you knew you married a sporting man. Give us a kiss.”

  She gave.

  “Bat, will you please remember to wear socks in bed at night if you’re cold?”

  “Sure thing.”

  “How long’ll you be gone?”

  “A week, more or less.”

  She pulled back and looked him square in the eye and there was a tear or two in hers. “I love you, Bat.”

  “My slopjar sweetie.”

  She gave him another.

  “One thing I’ll tell you, cupcake.” He was already adjusting his tie in the mirror over her shoulder. “When I get back, the Mastersons’ll be in clover.”

  He was back from the Telegraph in an hour. Wyatt’s bag was packed, and he held up his shoulder holster with its freight.

  “We’re leaving these, aren’t we?”

  “Oh, no. We’re packing rods.”

  Wyatt frowned. “Now you listen. If you sucker me into any more—”

  “Just till we’re out of town.”

  Bat went into the bedroom and came out with his valise strapped. Wyatt had armed himself and put on his jacket and hat.

  “You bid the lady of the house farewell, I presume, Mr. Earp.”

  “I did.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “‘Send me a picture postcard.’ I hope you told her you’re catching a train.”

  “I did.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “‘Toot-Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye.’” Bat went to the buffalo ass on the wall and gave the tail a twist for luck, then gave his grand salon a final gander, then grinned. “Choo-choo, here we come!”

  Wyatt stood like a stone wall. With a finger he rearranged some splayed hairs in his mustache, thinking. “No. Something I want to attend to first.”

  “What?”

  Wyatt told him.

  Bat whistled alarm and said, slowly, “That would be very dangerous.”

  “They’ve got it coming.”

  “I don’t care to get it going.”

  Wyatt smiled, then picked up his bag and headed for the door. “You’ll come.”

  “The hell I will.”

  “Unless you’re too old.”

  They mosey through the cigar store on 43rd Street, past the wooden Indian and through the swinging door into the race room. It is three-thirty in the afternoon and the three bookies behind desks, including Eddie the Cuff, are active on the phones and boys are chalking up results on the track boards and the room is crowded with lovers of horseflesh and vicarious participants in the “Sport of Kings.” No one pays the new arrivals any attention as they shoulder through the crowd toward the billiard table at the rear of the room where, as they hoped, the two muscular-mugs pinstripe assassins are playing three-cushion, one bent over the table assaying an angle, the other watching him and chalking his cue tip. Mr. Earp moves up behind the one standing, Mr. Masterson behind the one bent. Mr. Masterson’s eyes at this moment are a glittery gray, Mr. Earp’s a cold and lethal blue. In a single motion Mr. Earp draws his Colt and raises it high. In a single motion Mr. Masterson draws his Colt and raises it high. Simultaneously they swing down and coldcock the mugs over the heads with the antique iron of the gunbarrels. The mugs fall forward over the table without a sound and commence to slide floorward in the manner of Texas cowhands. Before they hit the deck, however, Messrs. Earp and Masterson holster revolvers and catch the unconscious crushers and hoist them onto the table and lay them out on the felt as though on a slab in the morgue, faces up, arms at sides. This event has by now drawn the undivided attention of the entire room. Bookies hold the phones. Bettors and hangers-on stand where they are and goggle. Boys at the boards lean with arms asleep. Mr. Earp steps lively to the ball rack and returns to the table with two black eight-balls, one of which he hands to Mr. Masterson. Prying wide open the mouths of the seemingly moribund mugs, they ram the eight-balls in as they might apples into the mouths of roast holiday hogs, and stand back to approve their handiwork. Approving, the great gunfighters turn then and traverse the silent room with measured pace, Mr. Earp expressionless, Mr. Masterson nodding pleasantly to Eddie the Cuff, and disappear through the swinging door, Mr. Masterson humming the sprightly “Yacka Hula Hickey Dula.”

  They were fifteen minutes early. Bat wouldn’t allow Wyatt with him when he bought the tickets—a round-trip for himself, one-way for Wyatt, upper Pullman berths. They went together then across the great Grand Central hall, giving Wyatt time for a good gawk, and down the marble stairs and onto the underground platform, where they still had ten minutes to twiddle their thumbs before boarding.

  “Let’s have my ticket.”
r />   “Not on your tintype,” said Bat. “I paid for it.”

  Being readied, the train hissed and chuffed and whined.

  Porters and conductors and baggagemen and cleaning crews were on and off, on and off.

  “I haven’t been on a real train in a dog’s age—Long Island doesn’t count,” said Bat. “Which side d’you mount from?”

  “What train is this?”

  “‘The Wolverine.’”

  “Where to?”

  “If I told you, you might not go.”

  “What do we do when we get there?”

  “I told you that, you sure as hell wouldn’t.”

  “Then I sure as hell better not.”

  “We’re gonna draw four deuces.”

  “Goodbye.”

  “Too late now.”

  “Does anybody else know where?”

  “No. I told Lewis the same thing I told Em. The two of us are dropping out of sight a few days.”

  “What direction?”

  “West.”

  Wyatt brightened. “That’s more like it.”

  Bat put down his bag. “Wyatt, tell me something. How come you pulled out of the Arizona Territory after Tombstone?”

  Wyatt clouded, and put down his bag. “They framed me—the politicians. If I’d stuck around, they’d have hung me for Stilwell.”

  “I thought so. The bastards. After all you and your brothers’d done to clean up the place.” Bat tipped his hat to a Kewpie Doll tripping down the platform. “Did you ever hear how I left Denver?”

  “Nope.”

  “I was having a drink by myself one morning at the opera house, the bar there, feeling pretty down in the dumps. I’d lost my shirt bankrolling fights. Somebody snuck up behind me and stuck a gun in my ribs. It was Jim Marshall—you remember him. The mayor and chief of police hired him to come over from Cripple Creek and do the job—they didn’t have the guts. Well, Marshall told me Denver was too up-to-date for an old gunhand like me. Said I had till that afternoon to get on a train. So I did. Sort of took the heart out of me. Came to New York.”

  Wyatt shook his head.

  “What I’m saying is, they gave us the boot, Wyatt. We were like those old Colts in my desk. They used the hell out of us, then threw us away. No damn gratitude. Well, I was thinking about it last night—that’s how I got this brainstorm. The West owes us. So if you have to know, that’s what we’re gonna do.”

  “What?”

  “Collect.”

  Wyatt thought that over, then actually smiled. Bat grinned at him. It was good to be going away together again, loaded and ready for bear. It was like old times. On the shady side of middle age they might be, true, but they had been through thick and thin together, and nothing between them had changed, personally. Bat was a little thicker, Wyatt a little thinner, that was all.

  People pushed along the platform. A whistle shrilled. Wyatt continued to smile, despite himself, and Bat to grin. The hiss and chuff and whine of the Wolverine excited them now. A bell clanged and a conductor cried “Boooooooooord!” and they swooped up their bags and almost kicked up their heels.

  DODGE CITY

  KANSAS

  The day does not dawn. The day of 3rd May is buried at birth under a crepe of cloud blacker than any in local memory. For those good folk abiding in and around Dodge City, Kansas, it is a day of portent. The Lord, they believe, is madder than a wet hen about sin or something. He may at any moment unleash His wrath in the form of lightning bolts, or floods, or tornadic winds, or quaking of the earth, or all of the above at once. But at eleven o’clock in the morning there occurs a phenomenon the causes of which can only be divine. It is as though He’s given things a think and changed His mind. It is as though a mighty hand passes o’er the heavens. The clouds roll back, as in ancient times the seas. A brilliant sun blesses His creation, set in a sky of benign blue. Some take note. A farmer, on his way to the elevator with a wagon of wheat, whoas his team in awe. Over a back fence, gossips lift their faces and their conversation to a higher plane. A minister, off on foot to console one of his flock, falls upon his knees in the middle of the street. Several of the faithful telephone the Daily Globe to inquire if the phenomenon heralds a Second Coming. Little do they know, or little reckon. But if they do not, the Lord does. It is indeed a Second Coming, and He has made a miracle in its honor. For at 11:14 exactly, the “Scout” clangs and grinds to a stop at the Santa Fe station in Dodge City, and two gentlemen descend the steps of their car to take their legendary place once more upon the plains of Kansas. They are William Barclay Masterson and Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp.

  The “Wolverine” of the New York Central had sped them overnight to Buffalo, across lower Ontario to Detroit, and on to the LaSalle Station in Chicago. Transferring to the Dearborn Station via taxi—it miffed Bat to discover Chicago as modern as New York in respect of taxis—they boarded the Santa Fe “Scout” and settled down to twenty-four hours and 789 miles of deluxe rail travel. Bat whiled away several evening hours, drinks, and dollars at cards in the club car. Wyatt looked thoughtful and read a Police Gazette and retired early.

  They whistled through Joliet and Galesburg, Ill. They snored through Fort Madison, Iowa; K.C., Mo.; and K.C., Kansas. Between Topeka and Emporia they rolled out of their uppers and shaved, and it was then, blades stropped and faces lathered, hanging on to the sink with one hand and the razor with the other, that Wyatt popped the question.

  “What time do we get off at Dodge?”

  “How in hell did you—damn!”

  The realization that Wyatt, if not way ahead of his plans, was at least keeping up, so startled Bat that he cut himself and had to apply alum liberally.

  They breakfasted, paying, through the windows of the dining car, particular attention to Newton, and remembering. Neither in his youth had put in time or trouble in Newton, and though it was no more than a wide place in the road now, it had once been, like Abilene, Ellsworth, and Dodge, the end of the rail line, and hence a shoot-down-drag-out cowtown. It had been the spitting image, in fact, of Ellsworth, and it was in Ellsworth, in 1873, that Wyatt Earp first made his mark. He had buffaloed Ben Thompson—the same rare Ben who, had it not been for Bat’s intercession, would have plugged poor Eddie Foy in Dodge five years later.

  Thompson and his brother Bill were a sweet pair, and sweeter still when under the influence. They operated a floating faro bank and shot people. Bill’s score was three, Ben’s ten times that, give or take a defunct or two. In any case, they had Ellsworth treed that typical afternoon. Bill had run his score up to four by emptying both barrels of a shotgun into C.B. Whitney’s, the marshal’s, chest. The remainder of the peace force found a hole and pulled it in after them. An unarmed Wyatt Earp, pausing for a sarsaparilla on his unwitting way to Wichita, stood in the shade between Beebee’s General Store and Brennan’s Saloon, spectating, as Ben paraded up and down the plaza on drunken horseback, brandishing the aforesaid shotgun and fouling the air with profanity and daring the town to do anything about the murder. Standing with the stranger, looking him over and deciding him a likely lad, Mayor Jim Miller pinned a star on Wyatt’s shirt and dared him to do something about it. Earp walked into Beebee’s, borrowed a brace of persuaders, buckled them on, and stepped alone into the sunshine, hands easy at his hips. A sobered Bill had hit the trail by now, but, backing his play, Ben had a happy-go-lucky group of varmints including Cad Pierce, Neil Kane, and a troop of temperamental hair-trigger Texans. Walking steadily across the silent plaza toward Thompson, who kept him under his muzzles, Wyatt stopped at fifteen yards and told him to shit or get off the pot—to make his fight or throw down his gun. After a spine-tingling minute, and to the incredulity of the town, the county, the state, and the West, Thompson opted for the latter. Deputy Earp marched him to Judge V.B. Osborne’s court, where he was fined a puny twenty-five dollars for disturbing the peace and banished to his hotel minus his weapons and aplomb, after which Wyatt returned his guns and sarsaparilla bottle to Beebee’s an
d his star to the mayor.

  On the spot, Miller offered him a cigar and the job of town Marshal at a hundred a month.

  “Looks to me Ellsworth values Marshals at twenty-five dollars a head,” said young Earp, drawing composed smoke. “So I don’t figure the town’s my size.”

  Two hours later the conductor came through calling, “Dodge! Dodge City!” They swung valises from the rack and moved down the aisle to be near the end of the car. If their hearts fluttered, if they got gooseflesh, if, in their systems, strange and almost juvenile juices began to flow again, they gave no indication. Perhaps, bending to peer through windows, they noted it an unusually gloomy morning. Perhaps they recalled the old joke about the cowboy and the conductor. When, in the roaring ‘70s, a cowboy up to the gills in alcohol was asked by the conductor for his ticket, he replied, “Don’ have no ticket.” “Well, where you goin’?” “Goin’ t’hell.” Whereupon the conductor held out his hand. “Gimme a dollar, then, and get off at Dodge.”

  At 11:14 exactly, the “Scout” clanged and ground to a stop at the Santa Fe station. Suddenly, miraculously, as though a mighty hand passed o’er the heavens, the clouds rolled back and a brilliant sun shone in a sky of benign blue. And at that very moment Mr. Earp and Mr. Masterson descended the steps of their car to take their legendary place once more upon the plains of Kansas.

  They crossed the concrete platform.

  They slowed, stopped, put down their bags.

  Where in the name of God was Dodge City?

  Where was dear old Front Street with its flies and chuck-holes and dead cats and plank sidewalks, and hitching rails cribbed half through by the teeth of impoverished ponies, and jingling spurs and popping pistols and drunks laid out to dry? Where the loafers and landsharks lounging in the shade of the overhangs? Where the whiskey barrels filled with water in case of fire? Where the town well with its sign “The Carrying of Firearms Strictly Prohibited”?

  They gaped instead at a paved thoroughfare and sidewalks and high-stepping pedestrians and electric light-poles and one buggy and one wagon and a passel of coupes and touring cars and carryalls chugging along and not one solitary human being remotely resembling a cowboy or a cowhand or a cowpoke forked up on four legs.