The Old Colts

by Swarthout, Glendon

  “Unh-huh.” Dudley is rapidly working up a dander.

  “Sir, if you don’t mind my saying so, there’s something fishy about all this. The Sheriff still hasn’t found the bank money, and neither’s anybody else. I intend to get to the bottom of things.”

  “Good for you.”

  Dudley has a long nose. He gives it a petulant pull. “Now I expect you to answer my questions, old-timer. First off, I want to hear in your own words exactly what happened over at Garden of Eden this morning.”

  “Come here, Dudley.”

  “What?”

  “Come close.”

  Dudley hesitates. Wyatt yanks him by both arms so close that they could rub noses.

  “Now take your hand and put it inside my coat, up by the left shoulder. See what you feel.”

  Slats does. And when he touches the steel, when his fingers shape the butt of the big .45, his face turns pale yellow, as though he’s coming down with some fearful, fatal malady.

  “Now listen, Sonny,” says Wyatt into the other’s nostrils. He freezes his eyes and grims up like a storm. “One of two things. Either you remove your proboscis from my business and get your skinny, snoopy, sorrowful ass out of here—or.”

  “Or?” whispers the youngster.

  “Or I’ll take what you’re touching and whap you over the head with it the way Wyatt Earp used to do and two weeks from now you’ll still be on ice.”

  Dudley Robison withdraws his hand very slowly and backs off and turns around and moves very slowly across Front Street as though he’s just been vouchsafed the deepest, darkest secrets of sex.

  After that he feels full of beans again. The sun is shining low in the blue sky and it’s a late and loamy afternoon in May and he can hear his train now, the “Trooper,” clanging into Dodge westbound for the City of Angels. He rigs his hat and tie. The “Trooper” hisses in, brakes squealing, couplings clunking, and as he is about to pick up his valise he is accosted by a butcher boy. The kid is twelve or so, freckled and bright as a dollar, with hair which needs a comb and cheeks a scrub and stockings a hoist up to his knickers. Hung by a cord around his neck is a wooden tray on which is arrayed his meager stock in trade.

  “Last chance to buy, Mister. Chewing gum, candy bars, apples, cigars—you name it, I got it.”

  “How about a Mexican Commerce?”

  “Nope. They’re too stinky. How ‘bout a Havana Grand— two for a quarter?”

  “A quarter? That’s too dear.” Wyatt rearranges some splayed hairs in his mustache. “A butcher boy, huh? What do you calculate to do when you get some long in your legs?”

  “Gonna be a peace officer—ride a motorcycle and catch crooks. Baroom! Baroom! Bang! Bang!”

  “You could get shot, too.”

  “Aw, not me.”

  Wyatt nods. “Tell you what—you skin across the street and bring me back a couple Mexican Commerce. I’ll watch your tray. Give you a dime for the smokes and a nickel for the trip.”

  “Let’s see the money, Mister.”

  “Let’s see the cigars, Buster.”

  Boy and man appraise each other. The man evidently passes muster, for after a moment the boy bangs his tray down by the station wall and scoots off across Front Street like a scared rabbit. The man watches him, thinks about him, then stoops, selects two Havana Grands, puts them away in a pocket, reaches under his coat, pulls out an old Colt, and lays it on the tray among the apples. He picks up his bag and strides down the platform past several cars and stops at some steps. Wyatt Berry Stapp Earp has one last look at Dodge, inflates his chest to get full benefit of his Marshal’s badge, then climbs aboard humming a tune he’s picked up from Bat, a snappy ditty called “Yacka Hula Hickey Dula.”

  Author Note

  There it was, Bat’s tall and thrilling tale, in his own authenticated hand—but what the devil was I to do with it? I was in a barrel with my own badger, and I did not know which of us would get out alive.

  As I have said, I locked away the four pages in 1970 and busied myself writing novels. In my spare time, however, I pondered the miracle of the movement of the Masterson MS. from Bat’s pen to my own safe-deposit box—a journey covering fifty-four years—and eventually explained it to my satisfaction. Before parting with Winchell that afternoon in Scottsdale (I never saw him again), I chanced to ask if Damon Runyon had told him anything more about the transaction between himself and Emma Masterson. He had. According to the lady, Runyon said, Bat wrote out the four pages with his Parker in their living room in the early morning hours of May 7 in 1916 on his return to New York (from whence his wife did not learn till later), woke her, and confessed he was sorry he had never had his life insured. But now, he said, to compensate, he was stashing this thing he’d just written in a strongbox at their branch of the Bowery Bank, and giving her the key. She was not, absolutely not, to open the box and read it until after his death and that of his old sidekick Wyatt Earp, which she would see in the papers when Wyatt went because much would be made of him. She was then to take the pages to a newspaper or a library and offer them for sale. They would, if he was any judge, fetch her a goodly sum, as much as any insurance policy he could have afforded. All this, Winchell said, had required Runyon half an hour and several cups of coffee to scribble laboriously on a copy pad that night in 1945 in the Stork Club.

  (It tallied. I had seen with my own eyes, in the Masterson Collection in Topeka, a letter from Emma Masterson to her niece sent shortly after Bat’s death in which she mentioned, besides the fact that “his feet were so cold... he wore wollin [sic] stockings in bed at nights,” that “Your Uncle Bat never believed in life insurance.”)

  For a writer of fiction, the rest was easy to reconstruct. Five years later, the old gambler cashed in his chips. For seven more, his widow waited. She may have needed money, but she was a woman of spunk, a suffragette, she’d been faithful to her marriage vows and still loved a man who, she was sure, had been a model of fidelity. So she waited, bless her, and watched the papers. And when, on January 13, 1929, the passing of Wyatt Earp made front pages, she made a beeline for the Bowery Bank, opened the box—and like Pandora wished to hell she hadn’t. The Ginger Sisters? Birdie and Dyjean Fedder? Bat Masterson a would-have-been bank robber? Wyatt Earp his willing accomplice? Lord have mercy! Poor she might be, but she’d sell her body to the highest bidder before she’d hang such scandalous linen in Times Square!

  Poor she was, indeed, and each year her widow’s mite became a mite less. By 1931 she was desperate. Swallowing her pride, she went to Damon Runyon with the four shameful pages. He read them, was as shocked as she, and unwilling to have his friend and a towering folklore figure take a tumble should they be made public, offered her a thousand dollars for them plus his word that they would never see a typesetter. She accepted with relief. Emma Masterson died at seventy-five, on July 12, 1932, in a small room at the Hotel Stratford, certain, I expect, that her spouse would approve what she had done.

  Perhaps he did, perhaps he didn’t. And whether or not he approved Runyon’s bequest of his manuscript to Walter Winchell in 1945, and the latter’s gift of it to me in 1970, there is no point in speculating. With the death of Winchell in 1972 I became the last man in the line—and I was trustee now not only of Mr. Masterson’s reputation but that of Mr. Earp as well.

  I was whipsawed. To a writer, I have earlier remarked, ink is more potent than strong drink, print a prospect more interesting than sex. But I had given my word, and every time I was tempted to break it, Winchell’s irascible shade put a finger to its lips. Yet every time I steeled myself, Bat’s ghost, and Wyatt’s, hoglegs in hands, poked me in the ribs with them, and dusty voices in my ear urged, “Shoot the works, Swarthout! Have some fun!”

  In the end they won. I succumbed. And just as coincidence had concealed their intended robbery of the Drovers Bank of Dodge City, so that they came out of it smelling like roses, luck let me perceive in time a way to wriggle out from between rock and my hard place. I could publis
h their story after all. I could publish it not as fact but as fiction. I could write a novel based on it, a kind of “Eastern Western,” and in so doing have the fun they urged me to have. And I had other, unselfish, excuses. If, in their heyday, Bat and Wyatt had looked upon the wine when it was red, a book about them set in 1916 would demonstrate that even in decline they could still cut the mustard as marvelously as men half their age. It would constitute their terminal hoot at eternity. And they might sleep the better for such a book, these dear old Colts. Confession in hardcover would get a last incredible caper off their chests.

  I cleared my desk. In 1981, after eleven years of slugging it out with guilt and ego, I sidestepped ethics and got to work. (Many kind souls assisted, although I kept the subject close to my vest. Carolyn Lake, for example, daughter of Stuart N. Lake, Earp’s official biographer, granted gracious permission to reproduce the tintype I have placed on the back jacket. It was made in 1876, when Bat, standing, was twenty-three and Wyatt twenty-eight and both were deputy sheriffs of Ford County.) I stuck like Luke McGlue to the skeleton of their adventure as Bat had set it down, using his names and dates but shifting scene and embellishing incident to put my own brand on the story—the rustler’s wont, the novelist’s prerogative. I finished The Old Colts last year, having ballooned Bat’s few hundred words into seventy-five lovely thousand, and sent it off to my publishers.

  There was a gasp. They were as dubious as I had been in the beginning. They asked to see the four-page MS. and whatever supporting correspondence I had. These I provided, and after long silence my editor informed me that based on their own authentication, by manuscript people at the Morgan Library and the New York Historical Society, it was their decision to publish. They loved the book, he apologized, but surely I could understand their dumbfoundment on first reading, their incredulity on second. I could.

  I sat back then and awaited the book with an alloy of anticipation and apprehension. Critics and historians would charge me at the least, I was warned, with trying to whittle Earp and Masterson down to my own insignificant size. I would be called in print a liar, an asshole, a sensationalist, a traducer of character, a slinger of mud at sacred American myths. Should the assaults become too vicious, however, I had a derringer up my sleeve. I had what Bat Masterson himself had written, in brownish ink on yellow paper, with authority to back my play, and should push come to shove, I would draw and fire.

  I had it then. God’s blood, I do not now. Some months prior to the appearance of The Old Colts there occurred a tragic concatenation of events, as tragic as the call for a boxcar of wheat to be unloaded from the elevator in Garden of Eden before the eyes of our hapless heroes. I had the four holograph pages spread out on my desk one day. It was a balmy morning in Scottsdale, the windows were open, and I was unexpectedly called away from the house. Since my wife was also absent, the premises were shared by our cleaning woman and a stray, wild cat we had recently adopted and christened “Bat.” I can only surmise that a ruffian breeze wafted the pages to the floor; that the cat, which we were trying to paper-train because it turned up its nose at the litter box, used the pages for its natural purposes; that the cleaning woman disposed of them in the garbage can out front; that the garbage men came by on their appointed rounds; and—the reader knows the rest, and may imagine the magnitude of my loss, not to mention the loss to the literature of the West.

  Some will sneer, I suppose, that this served me right. Others will whisper that it was neither fate nor a feline, but Bat and Wyatt, jealous of their legend, reaching out of the mists to larrup me over the head with gunbarrels, lug me away, see me tried for slander and sentenced to life in a calaboose of shame and futility. In any case, I am inconsolable. What a calamitous, cat-shit conclusion!

  Wyatt Earp, 1928

  “The greatest consolation I have in growing old is the hope that after I’m gone they’ll grant me the peaceful obscurity I haven’t been able to get in life.”

  William Jerome’s poetic farewell to his friend

  in the Morning Telegraph.

  Goodbye, Bat.

  They never heard you blat

  About the things you did out West—

  You wasn’t built like that.

  That great big golden heart of yours,

  It wouldn’t harm a cat.

  Sweet as a “gal,” so long old pal,

  Goodbye, Bat.

  Bat Masterson & Wyatt Earp

  Dodge City, Kansas, 1876.