As he understood it, there were three pedals in the floorboard under the wheel—clutch to the left, reverse in the center, and brake on the right—or was it the other way round? And there were nine lever settings on the notched quadrant on the steering post—spark to the left, throttle to the right—or was it the opposite?
He pushed the clutch pedal halfway down, which was neutral, advanced spark and throttle levers a couple of notches, pushed the clutch to the floor, simultaneously and confidently hit one of the other pedals, and with a grind of gears and a crunch of metal bucked them backward into the brick wall of the garage.
“Hey, hey! How’m I doin’?”
His passenger did not respond.
Ooooo-gah! Ooooo-gah! Bat banged the hand-operated brass-belled Klaxon horn.
His passenger did not respond.
“I love it! I could ride this flivver till the cows come home!”
His passenger did not respond. Hands gripping the top of the windshield, Wyatt sat rigid on the edge of the seat as though the Twentieth Century were a muzzle and he was staring into it.
They chugged along at ten mph, according to the Stewart speedometer attached to the dashboard, on a narrow macadam road headed east out of Dodge. Instead of a cap, the radiator was crowned by the latest accessory—a winged brass Boyce Moto-Meter, faced with glass and inset with a red-level temperature gauge scaled from “Good Average” to “High Efficiency” to “Danger—Steaming!” The red line stood at “Good Average.” With the top of the touring sedan down, the morning breeze was fresh in their faces. A sign informed them that four miles down the road lay the village of Garden of Eden, but without the grain elevator which stuck out above the flatland like a sore thumb, they would never have known there was a village. Habitations and inhabitants were hidden in trees.
“Stop!” shouted Wyatt.
“Why?”
“Stop!”
Bat found the clutch and brake and stopped. Wyatt opened his door, dismounted, closed the door, looked up and down the road. Except for a wagon a mile or more away, it was clear. Wyatt stepped clear of the car.
“All right, let’s see you back ‘er up.”
“I don’t know how.”
“I know that. But there’s nothing out here for you to back into. You better know how.”
“Why?”
“In case you need to tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Bat changed the subject. “Speaking of that—whatta we do after the bank? We can’t sit in the car on Front Street and count the loot. I s’pose you’ve got that planned, too.”
“I have. We’ll drive out this way as far as that town—” Wyatt pointed down the road at Garden of Eden— “then turn north a couple of miles, then drive west a few miles, then south to this road, then come into Dodge again from the west. Sort of a big square. Then right down Front Street to the hotel as though we’ve just been out for a spin.”
“Now who’s dotty?”
“Not me. Who’d ever believe it? That anybody’d rob a bank and get away and drive right back into town, big as life? Same principle as our names. Nobody believes those either.”
“Okeh, then what?”
“Simple. We hang around Dodge the rest of the day as though nothing’s happened. Tomorrow night we have supper at the Popular, say goodbye to the girls, split the cash, and get a good night’s sleep. Next morning we go to the station and wait for our trains and kiss goodbye. You go your way, I go mine.”
Bat was dubious. “I dunno. Sounds too easy.”
“That’s the beauty of it. Anyway, quit talking me in circles. Let’s see you back this contraption up.”
“I said I can’t.”
“I say you can.”
“I’m not sure which pedal. This damn thing really takes three legs.”
“Go ahead, try it.”
“Goddammit, no. Bat Masterson and Wyatt Earp never back up!”
“No guts.”
That did it. Bat shoved at the spark and throttle levers and jammed at least two pedals and the Tin Lizzie roared and bucked and began to back down the road faster and faster yet.
“Whoa!” cried Bat. “Whoa!”
But it was only after jerking levers and playing the pedals like those of an organ that he stopped the car eventually, at the same time stalling the engine.
An expressionless Wyatt walked to the automobile, slid into the passenger seat, closed the door, and propped a foot up at ease on the dashboard.
“Get cranking,” he said.
Bat set his jaw. “Go to hell.”
“No ambition.”
“You crank!”
His friend considered, then said, “Let me remind you. The last night in New York you said it was time to pick our peaches—and you knew how. How to get rich. You’d just had the most sensational son-of-a-bitch idea you ever had in your whole life.”
Bat considered, then set the levers, got out, hung his derby on the Moto-Meter, and began to crank.
After another half-mile of motoring, Wyatt directed his driver to slow down and turn off and stop before a gate in a fence. He got out, opened the gate, waved the driver through, told him to cut the engine, then took the two empty quart oilcans from the rear seat compartment and set them atop two fenceposts.
“How long since you fired a gun?” he asked. “I’m not talking about blanks.”
“Oh my God,” admitted Bat.
“Likewise.”
Bat got out of the Ford and they paced off approximately twenty yards from the posts and took places and unbuttoned jackets.
In his article on Wyatt Earp in Human Life, Bat had stated flatly that “Wyatt’s speed and skill with a six-gun made almost any play against him with weapons ‘no contest.’ Possibly there were more accomplished trick-shots than he, but in all my years in the West at its wildest, I never saw the man in action who could shade him in the prime essential of real gun-fighting—the draw-and-shoot against something that could shoot back. In a day when almost every man possessed as a matter of course the ability to get a six-gun into action with a rapidity that a later generation simply will not credit, Wyatt’s speed was considered phenomenal by those who literally were marvels at the same feat. His marksmanship at any range from four to four hundred yards was a perfect complement to his speed. On more than one occasion I have seen him kill coyotes at the latter distance with his Colt’s, and any man who has ever handled a six-gun will tell you that, while luck figures largely in such shooting, only a past-master of the weapon could do that.”
Wyatt’s right hand swept under his jacket toward his left shoulder. He drew, and as his gun-hand dropped, he fired at the oilcan sixty feet before him on the fencepost and missed.
Bat made no remark. He believed, and had been so quoted, that the three qualities a man needed to rank as an expert with a revolver were courage, skill at handling his weapon, and, not least, the ability and coolness to make the first shot count. He had been even more specific, writing once that “A lot of inexperienced fellows try to aim a six-shooter by sighting along the barrel, and they try to shoot the other man in the head. Never do that. If you have to stop a man with a gun, grab the stock of your six-shooter with a death-grip that won’t let it wobble, and try to hit him just where the belt buckle would be. That’s the broadest target from head to heel. If you point at something, you don’t raise your finger to a level of the eye and sight along it; you simply point, by instinct, and your finger will always point straight. So you must learn to point the barrel of your six-shooter by instinct. If you haven’t that direction instinct born in you, you will never become an expert with the six-gun.”
Bat’s right hand swept under his jacket toward his left shoulder. He drew, and as his gun-hand dropped, he fired at the oilcan sixty feet before him on the fencepost and missed.
Wyatt made no remark. He said only, after he had replaced his weapon, “Let’s get to it.”
They drew together, and fired again together, and missed.
“It’s these
damn shoulder holsters,” said Wyatt after a moment.
“You’re right.”
“I’m used to hardware on my hip.”
“So’m I.”
“And shooting from there.”
“Me, too,” Bat agreed. “Tell you what—the hell with the holsters. Let our guns hang down and pretend we’re drawing. Just like the old days, only no holster at all.”
They positioned themselves, and this time let the old Colts hang at their sides, then suddenly raised them and fired at the two oilcans and missed.
Each examined his six-gun in silence.
“I’ve had enough,” said Bat.
“Likewise.” Wyatt took a box of bullets from a coat pocket. “Let’s not forget to reload—we did that once.”
They reloaded in silence.
“Right shoulder bothers me when I raise my arm,” said Wyatt. “I told you—arthritis.”
“Emma’s been after me about glasses,” said Bat. “Nearsighted.”
They put pistols away.
“Oh, well,” said Bat. “We don’t want to shoot anybody anyway, do we?”
They meandered back to the automobile. Bat climbed behind the wheel, but instead of mounting up, Wyatt sat down on the grass in front of the car.
“Bat, I’ve been thinking. You recollect what Mr. Roosevelt said about us?”
“What?”
“You know—that we’ll be legends someday. They’ll write a lot of books about us. He said if we’re famous now, just wait’ll we’re dead and gone. Tell me— you think it’s true?”
Bat got out of the car, came round to the front end, and with a grunt sat down beside him. “Why not? I’d say we’re damn good material.”
Wyatt reflected. “Well, so far so good. But we’ve got to do this job right tomorrow. We can’t throw any lead and we’ve got to get away clean. If we’re caught, we lose everything—and I don’t mean just the money. Our names’ll be mud.”
“I’ll go along with that.”
Bat lit up a Spud. Wyatt lit up a cigar. He’d been pleased to find one thing in Dodge unchanged: a good Mexican Commerce cigar was still 5ȼ. He took off his hat and laid his head back against the acetylene-gas headlamp. Bat took his off and used the other lamp.
“You feeling squeamish about tomorrow?” he asked.
“Some.”
“Why? We’re owed.”
“Even so, we’ve never been on the off side of the law before.”
“You scared?”
“I wish my shoulder was better. And my knee. And your eyesight. And we were ten years younger.”
Bat tried a smoke ring. “‘Where do we hold the horses?’ Talk about a dumb thing to say. It’s just hard for me to get used to so much change all the time. Why, Dodge is so different I don’t even recognize it. And look at this.”
He gestured at what lay before them. They sat on grass by the fence on one side of a pasture. As far as the eye could see—which seemed at least as far as the LaSalle Station in Chicago—fields of spring wheat succeeded fields of short corn, all fenced and neat and fertilized and tractored and farmered. Where, every half-mile, a clump of trees flawed country that had once been bare as a billiard ball, there was a farmhouse, and where, every three or four miles, a grain elevator towered, there was a village tucked away in more trees like Garden of Eden. Forty years before, this had been pristine prairie. Buffalo in their millions had fed and fought and dropped calves and wallowed. Cheyenne and Comanche in their thousands had fed and fought and reproduced and danced. Wagon trains of pilgrims in their hundreds had fed and fought and found, at the end of the trail, freedom. And now look at it.
This they did. And the longer they looked, the more clearly they saw. It was what a day in May was designed to be. The land was as illimitable as ever, the blue sky as boundless. There were long low rises, and folds between, and the fields were green as ever the lonesome prairie once had been. The trees, planted as breaks against the scything winds of winter, were tamaracks and cottonwoods and Chinese elms and sycamores. The song of meadowlarks in the sky was lovely. And the longer they looked at what was once called “Bloody Kansas,” the more clearly they saw what this new and husbanded place could be at peace. If Kansas had been beautiful then, when they were young, it was beautiful still, the way their hearts were youthful still, and would be till they beat no more.
“All that wheat,” said Bat, embarrassed by sentiment. “Breadbasket of the world.”
“Yup.”
Then Bat said what he really wanted to say. “By God, Wyatt, it’s still beautiful. God’s country.”
“It is that.”
“I’d forgotten. New York’s swell, but this is—well, special. I wouldn’t even mind being planted out here someday, would you?”
“Nope.”
Bat stubbed his Spud in the grass. “Most of us gunarounds already gone, you know. Luke Short, Charlie B., old Mysterious Dave.”
“Doc. Ben Thompson. Clay.”
“The James boys, all the Daltons but one.”
“Hickok. Hardin. Doolin.”
“That’s a hell of a long list, Wyatt.”
“J.B. Books, too. You hear what he did?”
“No”
“Well, he was down in El Paso. Had a cancer, and but a few weeks left,” Wyatt related. “So he sent word to three of four of the hard cases around to show up in a saloon and he’d be there with his guns on. They did and Books was. Killed ‘em all, by God, and got put out of his misery himself. Cleaned up the whole town.”
“I’ll be damned. A great way to go—do some good while you’re at it.”
“And my brother Morg. That’s about the worst thing ever happened to me, Bat.”
“I know. Like my brother Ed. I can still get blue about that. How’re your other brothers?”
“Jim’s all right. Virg went ten years ago—natural causes. What about the Mastersons?”
“Tom’s still on the farm. Jim and George both dead.”
“Sorry to hear that.”
“Anyway,” Bat said, “we must be about the last with our boots on. Us and Bill Tilghman. Makes you think.”
“Sure does.”
They thought for a while.
“Fifty, sixty thousand in that bank—that’s what you figured,” said Bat presently. “Twenty, thirty, apiece. What’ll you do with yours?”
“Stop being a squaw man.” Wyatt drew deeply on the Mexican Commerce. “I mean, Josie gives me money when I ask for it, but I hate like sin to. I’ll pay her back every penny.”
“I’ll pay Grogan off first thing I get home. Waltz in there and throw down the cash—damn his socks. Then see about some life insurance—never believed in it. You have any? Life insurance?”
Bat looked over. Wyatt was taking a cat nap, cigar burning between his fingers. He had an idea. Carefully he got up off the grass, carefully sneaked around the T to the Klaxon horn near the steering wheel, placed a palm over the plunger, and rammed it down.
Ooooo-gah!
“Ya-hoooo!”
Bat whooped and waved his derby as though he were breaking a bronc and riding high. He’d shoved the spark and throttle levers up to full-speed position, and the Touring Sedan yipped along the road toward Dodge like a mutt with a tin can tied to its tail. Hat jammed down to his eyes, Wyatt clung to the windshield like a drowning man to a straw. They passed a Diamond T truck as though it were standing still. Then over the clamor of the car they heard the siren, and who should roar alongside but Peace Officer Harvey Wadsworth, who waved them down and, when Bat had pulled off, parked his Indian Powerplus up ahead and walked back to them with pride in his stride.
“Good day, gents. Well, well, if it isn’t our great gunfighters. Where were you going—to a fire?”
“Just seeing what this crowbait would do if I put the spur to ‘er,” smiled Bat.
The P.O. shook his head. “You old boys are hell on wheels, all right.” He took pad and pencil from a pocket and began to write. “You were doing forty�
��I clocked you—and thirty-five is as high as she goes in Kansas. Gonna have to give you a ticket.”
“To what?” Bat inquired. “The Policeman’s Ball?”
“To an appearance before the town magistrate. Speeding. It’ll cost you ten dollars.”
“Ten dollars!” exclaimed Bat. “How in hell am I supposed to know the speed limit in Kansas?”
“Ignorance of the law is no excuse,” said Wyatt, butting in and raising his hat.
“You know who we are!” Bat appealed. “How can Dodge City charge Bat Masterson?”
Harvey Wadsworth stayed his pencil.
“An ex-Marshal breaks the law, that’s the lowest,” said Wyatt. “Book ‘im.”
“Goddammit, Wyatt, shut up!” cried Bat. He pulled an importunate face. “What if we don’t have the funds?”
The P.O. beamed and twinkled as he tore off the ticket. “Pass the hat. Who wouldn’t help Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson around here? I’d ante up a dime myself.”
Bat folded the ticket. “Well, hell, all right. I’ll get my ten bucks back from the town one way or another. Tell me, d’you pass out many of these?”
“How d’you think they pay my salary?” The long arm of the local law sobered up and saluted. “Good day, gents. And take it easy.”
“Yes, sir, Ossifer,” said Bat. “I’ll tie ‘er down to a trot.”
They moseyed into the Long Branch Pharmacy on Front Street. Two big glass globes hung from the ceiling down over the counter, both containing liquid, evidently, one blue and one orange. Before the turn of the century, these had been used as retorts in which to percolate herbs and medicinal substances—peppermint leaves and alcohol, for example, produced peppermint oil; digitalis leaves and other chemicals, digitalis for heart patients. Now they survived as eye-catchers.
“Something I can do for you?” asked the pharmacist in white jacket and long nose and rimless specs.
“I want to buy some whiskey,” announced Wyatt. “Two pints—easy to carry.”
“Medicinal purposes?” asked the pharmacist.
“You could say so.”
“I sure need it,” added Bat. “Just got a speeding ticket.”
The Old Colts Page 13
