The Old Colts

by Swarthout, Glendon

  Where was the unbroken line of wooden, weatherbeaten, false-fronted business and entertainment establishments? Where were the landmarks of their early lives—the Dodge House, Wright & Beverly’s general merchandise emporium, the Delmonico restaurant, the Long Branch, the Alamo saloon and Occidental and Saratoga; Zimmermann’s Guns, Hardware, and Tinware; the Blue Front Store, Coffins and Undertaker’s Goods; the OK Clothing Store, Dieter & Lemley’s Tonsorial Parlor?

  They scowled instead at a solid wall of modern red-brick commercial buildings, the only exception one of white glazed brick surmounted by the only recognizable name— Drovers Bank of Dodge City—which used to be around the corner on Railroad Avenue.

  At their rear, the “Scout” pulled out. They about-faced to the south, looking over the tracks which in their time had constituted the “deadline” across which the implements of murder and mayhem could not be carried north according to municipal ordinance. Where were the town calaboose, the Lady Gay, the Comique, the Varieties, the hurdy-gurdies, or whorehouses, the corrals, the cattle outfitting and supply stores, the shacks and sod huts and stacks of bones and hides?

  They stared instead at block upon block of neat frame houses with flower gardens and nothing in the back yard, even a privy, but wash on the line and a shed for the Tin Lizzie.

  “Progress,” Wyatt intoned.

  “Shit and shame,” grumped Bat.

  “You boys tourists?”

  They swung around to meet the shifty eye of a very old gaffer who’d wheelchaired up behind them.

  “You might say,” said Bat. “We passed through a long time ago.” He gestured. “What happened?”

  “Front Street, y’mean? Hull shebang burned down in ‘85, they built ‘er up again. Brick. You dudes’ll wanta see what they call a rep-li-ca, over yonder on the hill. Tourist ‘traction.”

  He had a red nose and wore a battered ten-gallon and from the smell of him imbibed that much daily.

  “What else should we see?” Wyatt inquired.

  “Ah, Boot Hill, likely, an’ the Beeson Museum.”

  “Beeson? Chalk Beeson?”

  “Himself.”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Wyatt. “Do you have a hotel?”

  “O’Neal House.”

  “Where does a man get a drink?” Bat asked.

  “He don’t. Kansas gone temp’rance—that goddam Nation woman.”

  “A hell of a note. You lived around here long, Grand-dad?”

  “Come out in ‘71. From Kentucky. Seen ever’thin’ an’ done ever’thin’. Caught a Cheyenne arrey in m’hip in ‘82 an’ ain’t been able since. Can’t even stand up t’take a leak. But I knew ‘em all—Earp, Masterson, Luke Short—all friends a mine.

  “They were, huh?”

  The gaffer shot a glance east and a glance west and lowered his wheeze. “Come close, boys.”

  They came close.

  Methuselah reached into his shirt front and fumbled out an old Colt. “Either of you boys be inter-sted in a leetle sou-ven-eer? Belonged t’Bat Masterson—that’s a fact. He give it t’me.” He held it out butt first. “Lookee them notches! Seventeen!”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Bat. “But I heard he bragged on twenty-three.”

  “He was a born liar, Bat was. Anyhow, seem’s you boys are so sociable, you can have it cheap. Dirt. Fifty bucks.”

  “Fifty!” Bat protested.

  “How ‘bout forty?”

  “I dunno,” said Wyatt. “Only seventeen notches.”

  “Well, hell, cut yourself some more,” argued the gaffer.

  “I’ll take thirty—I need the money. Otherwise I’d sell my stones ‘fore I would this here gun.”

  “Tell you what, old-timer,” said Bat. “You around the station most days?”

  “Ever’day. Meet all the trains.”

  “Well, come time to leave Dodge, we’ll get together. We just might do business.”

  “I’ll be here.” The pioneer shoved the souvenir into his shirt. “So long, pards. Watch out for them tourist ‘tractions—don’t b’lieve half you see an’ less’n half you hear. We’ll skin the ass off a greenhorn we get the chance’t!”

  From their arrival they had been under surveillance. They were about to smash their bags across Front Street, but there, at the curb, watching them approach, waited a buster in the pink of youth and a uniform and a badge, astride a motorcycle red as a fire engine and nearly as big as a horse.

  “Good day, gents,” said he.

  “Yessir,” said Bat.

  “Welcome to Dodge.”

  “Thank you. You the Marshal?”

  “Oh we got no Marshals any more. Peace Officer Harvey Wadsworth.” And the buster put a hand to the broad brim of his hat and snapped off a salute. “At your service.”

  “Peace Officer?”

  “What we’re called nowadays. Ahem, well, gents, I hope you enjoy your stay with us and come back again. Be sure to see Boot Hill and the Beeson Museum and the replica of Old Front Street. Most folks find ‘em mighty interesting.”

  He rattled off this Chamber-of-Commerce spiel and concluded with a smile which twinkled his baby blue eyes and dimpled his cherubic cheeks. His uniform, too, was baby blue, with gold piping and gold braid around his hat, and black leather boots shined as slick as a spade’s heel, and a flapped leather holster hung on his Sam Browne belt which housed some type of nickel-plated popgun.

  Wyatt had looked him up and down. “You’ve been keeping an eye on us.”

  “Yes indeedy. I always come down to see the trains come in, see who gets off.”

  Bat was fascinated by his steed. “What kind of a cayuse you up on?”

  That rang Harvey Wadsworth’s bell. “Glad you asked. This here’s an Indian Powerplus, fresh out of the crate.” He caressed a handlebar as though it were an ear. “Lamps, generator, sireen, speedometer, and twenty-two horsepower. She’ll do seventy-three-plus miles an hour—factory guaranteed. I tell you, they don’t even have these in New York City!”

  “I’ll be damned,” said Bat. “You must catch a bunch of rustlers at that rate.”

  “Rustlers, ha. Speeders—that’s about all the crime we got.”

  “I’ll be damned—speeders,” said Bat. “By the way, where does a man get a drink around here?”

  “Sorry,” said Wadsworth. “We been dry as a bone for years. Closed the last saloon in Dodge in 1903. Oh, you can get booze in a pharmacy—but only for medicinal purposes.”

  “Hmmm,” Bat reflected. “Must be why I’m feeling so poorly lately. Well, thanks a lot, Officer.”

  “You’re entirely welcome. Say, I didn’t catch your names, gents.”

  Bat opened his mouth. He was about to say Enrico Caruso and William Randolph Hearst, but Wyatt beat him to it. “I’m Wyatt Earp. This is Bat Masterson.”

  Harvey Wadsworth’s grin spread halfway round his head. “Earp and Masterson again, huh? Funny how you gents keep showing up all the time. Well, nice to know you’re here. I get in a pinch, I’ll holler for your six-guns!”

  The young minion of the law snapped them another salute, booted the big Indian into noisy life, and galloped off in a cloud of exhaust.

  Bat was angry. “Why in hell would you tell ‘im our names!”

  Wyatt picked up his valise. “Use your head. Those are the only names he’d never believe.”

  They ran into the same identity oddity while checking into the O’Neal House. Wyatt appropriated the pen before Bat could, and signed the register for both of them, after which the whippersnapper desk clerk turned the book for a look.

  “Earp and Masterson again, huh? Our best customers—why, I bet you two sign in a hundred times a year!” If the peace officer’s grin had been innocently cynical, the clerk’s leer was downright decadent. “Bring along your wives, too, sometimes—Mr. and Mrs. Earp, Mr. and Mrs. Masterson—overnights mostly.”

  “Izzatso?” said Bat.

  “How long since you’ve been taken out to the woodshed?” Wyatt as
ked.

  The clerk colored. “Well, say, I’m sorry, gents. No offense. Welcome to Dodge and enjoy your stay. And while you’re here, be sure to see Old Front Street and the Beeson Museum and Boot Hill. Everybody does and everybody’s glad they did.”

  “Wouldn’t miss ‘em,” said Bat, hitting the spittoon with his first shot.

  They took adjoining rooms and naps because the train had tired them, and while they were washing up in the bowls preparatory to going out, Wyatt spoke to Bat through the open transom over the door between their rooms, which was locked.

  “Can you hear me?”

  “Easy. What’s on your mind?”

  “What’s on yours? You’ve been playing your cards close to the vest. What’s next?”

  “Old Front Street.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  Bat paused, towel at his cheeks. He was as well acquainted with Wyatt Earp as anyone could be. To his knowledge, Wyatt had cottoned to only two males not related to him in his lifetime—himself and Doc Holliday. He was a loner. He was taciturn and immutable. Get on his right side and he would travel with you to Timbuctoo or Kansas. Cross him, even to this day, and you walked into a buzz saw. From what Bat had seen of him in New York, he had altered little. Rather than mellowing him, the years had sharpened his edge.

  “I’ll tell you,” Bat said. “But I have to pick my time.”

  “Why?”

  “You might get mad. And you’re heeled.”

  “Sheepshit.”

  “If that isn’t a sad, son-of-a-bitching sight,” Bat groaned.

  “Sickening,” Wyatt growled.

  They had paid four bits apiece to a girl in a booth, then climbed steps to stand at one end of historic Old Front Street—the so-called “replica” thereof. Oh, there was a block-long stretch of wooden, one-story, false-fronted business and entertainments—the Delmonico restaurant, the Long Branch, a grocery store, dry goods and clothing, barber shop, gunsmith’s, a bank, etc. But they were dolled up in new paint and fancy lettering and the plank sidewalk looked as though it had just been laid. If this was history, a three-dollar bill was legal tender. If this was supposed to be a fair reproduction, Big Nose Kate was the Queen of Sheba. If this bore even the remotest resemblance to the main Dodge drag in the good old days, a turd was a chocolate eclair.

  Silently, hands in pockets, they clumped along the planks. Inside, the stores fobbed off a wide assortment of cheap doodads on a gullible public. They entered the Long Branch. Oh, it had a bar and a mirror and a buffalo head and tintypes of forgotten frontier reprobates on the walls, but all the costumed lady behind the bar could sell them was soda pop or some fizz called “Green River.”

  They took paper cups of the fizz outside and sat down in chairs under the overhang and sipped and cussed and hurled the damn Green River away and propped back against the wall and sat for some time in silence, chewing cuds of sadness and resentment. They felt like ghosts come back to find the graveyard gone.

  “Girl in the booth said the suckers start coming next month,” said Bat.

  “Um,” said Wyatt.

  “They’ll run a hundred thousand of ‘em through here in a summer, at four bits a head. You add that up.”

  “They’ve got a stagecoach and sell rides. And every couple hours they put on a shoot-out, a bunch of drip-nose high school kids all dressed up. Blanks. Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp versus a gang of Texas bad guys. Lotsa noise and ketchup and bodies. Guess who wins.”

  “Um.”

  A waning afternoon sun warmed them. No one else was about. A bit of a breeze from Colorado blew along Old Front Street, bemoaning the past and chiding the present. From their height the two gents propped back in chairs overlooked the new Front Street below and to the left, and the paved area that had once been a dusty plaza bisected by the tracks of the Santa Fe. It was in this plaza, not so long ago it seemed, that Bat had jumped from a train into a bushwhack. By the time he could jerk his gun he was being fired at from differing points of the compass by A.J. Peacock, Al Updegraff, et al. By the time it was over, Updegraff had a slug in the lung, ten pounds of lead had been expended, and Bat had paid a fine of eight dollars for “unlawfully and feloniously discharging a pistol in the streets.” It was in this plaza, a year or so ago it seemed, that Wyatt got the shotgun drop on Shanghai Pierce, the cattle baron, and his trailhands, and marched them before the magistrate.

  And it was in this plaza, only yesterday it seemed, Bat and Charlie Bassett backing his play, that Wyatt earned more immortality by bringing Clay Allison to heel. Allison had shot down six Marshals and Sheriffs. Allison rode horses into saloons stark naked and redecorated them with cartridges. Allison had drawn and killed a man while dining in a restaurant and finished his repast at leisure, smoking revolver on the table and corpse on the carpet. Allison was so touchy that once, in Las Animas, New Mexico, when he had a toothache and a dentist pulled the wrong molar, Allison tied the poor devil in his own chair and with his own forceps extracted every chopper in the dentist’s head. But in the end it was the intrepid Earp who walked up to Allison, shoved a forty-five in his ribs, and ran him out of Dodge with tail between legs and the fear of God up his ass.

  “Wyatt,” said Bat, “I’ve been thinking. I started thinking in New York—that’s how I got this idea.”

  Wyatt waited.

  “But before I tell you the idea, I want to say how I feel. I’m more sure I’m right now—now we’re here—than I was then. I mean, sure I’m right.”

  Wyatt waited.

  “But I don’t want you to get riled till you hear me out. That is, how I feel, what I’m thinking.”

  Wyatt reached into his jacket and slid the Colt from his armpit and laid it in his lap. This made Bat uncomfortable.

  “Here’s how I feel.” He began to speak rapidly. “Whatever this town is—Dodge, I mean—we made it. You and me. Look at the dough they take in from tourists—all on account of us. If it hadn’t been for us in the old days— what we did—there might not be any Dodge at all—I mean the Texans might have burned it to the ground then, two or three times over. But we saved it, Wyatt—we laid our lives on the line day and night, month in, month out. We brought law and order so the stores and saloons and all could make a hell of a lot of money and the town could grow and—well, look what it is today—thanks to us— and damn little pay we got for it and damn little thanks.”

  Wyatt raised the Colt and twirled the cylinder and this made the sun seem warmer to Bat, even hot, so that he found a handkerchief and pushed up his hat and gave his brow a good mop.

  “You remember what I said in Grand Central—I said the West owes us plenty and finally we were gonna collect.” Bat began to fan his words like a six-gun. “So that’s what I’m getting at, that’s what I’m going round the barn to say; God I wish you’d put that damn thing away, you’re making me jumpy, now my idea is prob’ly gonna burn you up, we’ve been lawmen and stood for law and order all our lives so breaking the law’s the last thing anybody’d ever expect us to—”

  Suddenly, before Bat could move a muscle in reaction, Wyatt was on his feet and hooking a shoe behind a rear leg of Bat’s chair and pulling and the chair went down on the planks with a crash and Bat’s head with it.

  He was dazed.

  He blinked.

  Wyatt was bent over him.

  “Goddamn you, Masterson,” he rasped. “When do we hit the bank?”

  “How did you know?”

  Wyatt returned the Colt to its holster. “Easy. Two and two together. We need big money, both of us. Only one place in Dodge’s got that much.”

  “That’s why you used our real names.”

  “Sure. Who’d believe it? Earp and Masterson back in Dodge after all these years—much less they’d rob the bank.”

  “And you’re willing?”

  “I am. I feel the same way about the West. We’re owed. Plenty.”

  One leaned against one side of an upright under the overhang of the soda-pop Long Bran
ch, one against the other. Bat rubbed the back of his head.

  “We better go check out the bank,” he said.

  “Too late today. Tomorrow. We’ll have a lot to do tomorrow. And one thing we get straight now.” Wyatt adjusted his slouch hat. “From here on, I call the play.”

  “You? Who says? It was my idea!”

  “I say, city boy. You called it in New York—this is my country. I’m here now.”

  “What in hell d’you know about robbing a bank?”

  Wyatt smiled. “Trust me.”

  On the way to the hotel they stopped in at the Beeson Museum, paid another 50ȼ apiece to a girl at a counter by the door, and idled through three rooms of Indian skulls, skeletons, pottery, warbonnets, bows and arrows, pioneer clothing and cooking utensils, stuffed coyotes, badgers, jackrabbits, beavers, prairie dogs and chickens, eagles, rattlesnakes, cowboy apparel and tools of the cattle trade, rifles, shotguns, handguns until, in the third room, they came face to face with themselves. On a wall was framed a life-sized blowup of a tintype made of them posed together in the ‘70s. Both were shaved and combed and slicked-up and wore white collarless shirts. Wyatt was seated, Bat stood at his right, and their looks, at the photographer then, at their later, corporeal selves now, were what those of young deputy sheriffs should be—long and level and lawful.

  “Why, you scamps,” said Wyatt.

  “My God I was good-looking!” said Bat.

  They were interrupted. A father, mother, son, and daughter wandered into the room and, as Bat and Wyatt moved aside, the tourist family took an interest in the blowup.

  “Who’s that?” asked the boy.

  The father looked below. “Says here, Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp.”

  “Who were they?” asked the girl.

  “Killers,” said her mother.

  “How many men’d they shoot?” asked the boy.

  “Hundreds.”

  “Where are they now, Ma?”

  “Dead, I expect.”

  “Serves ‘em right,” said the girl, and stuck out her tongue at the tintype.