This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  When the animals were in place and all heads had been counted, Will gathered the band and had them play "God Save the Queen" for the benefit of the spectators, who applauded and whistled when it was done. Then a gang of reporters broke from the crowd and made for the star, unlimbering their pads and pencils as they walked. Will's longhairs moved forward to head them off, but Will stepped around and faced them like Custer mounting his rise.

  "Did you slay Chief Crazy Horse?"

  "No, he was killed by a treacherous agency Indian."

  "Whom do you consider the greatest Indian fighter?"

  "General Nelson A. Miles."

  "What was Wild Bill Hickok like?"

  "He was a magnificent specimen of manhood and one of the most deadly shots with rifle or pistol that ever lived."

  "What do you think of the Conservative Party?"

  "Can't say. I haven't been invited to one yet."

  The questions flew like Sioux bullets, so many and so fast that he could answer only one out of three. Asked if Annie Oakley had really single-handedly defended her Quaker family from hostiles during a day-long siege, as Arizona John and Prentiss Ingraham maintained, he advised them to put the question to her, "as she is standing over yonder." No, he wasn't planning to run for President in '88. Yes, Sitting Bull was his friend. No, he saw no conflict between that and his statement on record that he had been friendly with Custer too. They asked him what he thought of the Queen and he replied that he held her the greatest female since St. Joan and looked forward to entertaining Her Majesty at Earl's Court.

  "Small chance o' that," scoffed the gentleman from the Manchester Guardian. "The old girl 'asn't attended a public function since Albert died in '61."

  "Maybe no one's thought to ask her," Will considered.

  As the rest of the company was sitting down to dinner at trestle tables in full view of their admirers, Will donned his best linen, tails, and white sombrero, linked arms with Arta in a satin evening dress designed and made by her mother, and took a waiting carriage to Lord Gower's country estate. There the scout was introduced as "Colonel Cody" to a dizzying succession of earls and dukes and duchesses and baronets and ladies, whom he started out addressing by their titles but after wine was poured and he forgot who belonged to which he ended up hailing as "hoss" and "missy," much to the delight of everyone but a group of browned officers just back from India. The men in dress uniform kept to themselves, slinging hard glances at the Americans and not speaking until a major seated next to Will turned bloodshot eyes and a grand nose raw with burst vessels on the frontiersman in the midst of an account of the Battle of Slim Buttes and announced, "I understand you're a colonel."

  Will interrupted his story to respond politely that he had been commissioned a colonel in the National Guard by Governor Thayer of Nebraska. The other didn't appear to have heard the explanation.

  "You Yanks are dashed fond of military titles. Sir, I believe we may have to come over and give you fellows a good licking."

  "What, again?"

  Listeners the length of the table hesitated, then guffawed and beat their palms, silencing the bewildered major. The other officers grinned and proposed toasts to the scout and his daughter.

  After a nightcap of Napoleon brandy under a fierce tusked boar's head in his lordship's game room, Will yawned and shook his host's hand, reporting that dawn comes as early in England as in America, and went back into the dining room to look for Arta. He felt a strong twinge of memory when he found her in a corner pretending to listen to a young captain reliving the fight for Majuba Hill. He extricated her. In the carriage on the way back to Kensington, she commented on his unusual quiet.

  He patted her satin-covered knee. "Your papa was just reflecting on how pretty you looked tonight, and how much like your mother. You're the age she was when we met."

  She laid a hand on his, and they rode in silence through the English night, as dark as patient death.

  The Widow of Whitehall stepped down from her carriage-and-four and climbed to her box with the aid of a cane and "God Save the Queen" at her back, looking to the performers gathered with their hats in their hands on the exhibition grounds like a stout crow surrounded by cardinals, the famed black gown and bonnet cutting a somber patch of mourning out of the scarlet livery of the outriders. The imitative dark hues of the dresses worn by the royal women and the gray coats of their escorts lent counterpoint to the swirl of bunting and costumes in the arena. As Lord Gower accompanied Colonel Sir Henry Ewart up the stairs behind the royal party, someone among the Americans, accustomed by now to the comings and goings of princes and prime ministers, stage-whispered: "Why, she looks just like someone's grandmother."

  "She is, to half the crowned heads of Europe," replied Nate Salsbury.

  Will mounted Old Charlie and galloped up to the royal box alongside Sergeant Bates in cavalry dress, the scout waving Old Glory. The old woman in the center of the box hesitated, then rose with obvious difficulty and bowed. The spectators roared. Overcome, Will handed the colors to Bates, who dipped them. At that point everyone in the box stood, the women bowing, the military men saluting, while the band played "The Star-Spangled Banner."

  Watching from the end of the grandstand, Bob Haslam, friend from Pony Express days and a veteran of Captain Jack Slade's raid on the Cheyenne camp, shook his graying head and spat a brown stream of tobacco. "Everywhere that cuss goes he makes him some more history."

  The Queen came intending to stay for an hour and remained throughout the show, watching the Indian pony races and the pageant of American history from colonial days and the "First Scalp for Custer" and Annie Oakley and Johnny Baker shooting the blue glass balls and the attack on the Deadwood coach.

  Will relieved John Nelson in the driver's seat next to jolly Edward, Prince of Wales, a frequent visitor to the show's rehearsals and, like Will, a poker addict. Inside, the kings of Greece, Denmark, Saxony, and Belgium, representing their countries at the Jubilee, held on to their silk hats and the wooden sides while the coach rocked and bounced and its driver uncurled his whip over the horses' heads to stay ahead of the pursuing Indians.

  After the rescue Will helped down the chubby heir to the realm and opened the door for the flushed and chattering monarchs. "Colonel," said Edward, flicking a cinder from a flaming arrow off his sleeve, "I'll wager you've never held four kings like these before."

  The scout winked. "I've held four kings many times, but the Prince of Wales makes this a royal flush."

  Protocol dictated that female royalty extend a hand, palm down, to be kissed. Sixteen-year-old markswoman Lillian Smith, schooled in custom but overcome with excitement, shook the hand of the Princess of Wales, whose face, lined beyond its years from waiting for her husband's ascension, brightened. She matched the sharpshooter's warm grip. Unaccustomed color came to the Queen's pouched cheeks when the great scout in his white doeskins and the grand duke's diamond stickpin kissed her hand and answered questions at length about his life on the plains.

  "Tell us, Colonel, how many red Indians have you slain in combat?"

  "Well, Your Majesty, let's just say that I never killed any that didn't deserve it."

  Chief Red Shirt lowered his feathered head before "the white grandmother" with the reserved and graceful dignity of a European ambassador, explaining through a half-breed interpreter that he had come across the Great Water especially to see her. "My heart is glad within me." The monarch returned his bow, eyes shining. She complimented the women on the papooses they presented for her approval, examined a handsome silver-inlaid Winchester displayed by Miss Smith, demonstrating a keen interest in the weapon, and admired Will's gold-hilted saber, presented to him by officers of the United States Army in recognition of his services. Looking levelly at Annie Oakley, she intoned: "You are a very, very clever little girl." That evening she filled many pages of her journal with her impressions of the dashing American scout, gushing like a love-struck schoolgirl.

  Journalists wandered through the In
dian village, sidestepping snarling yellow mongrels and sketching squaws preparing meals over open fires in front of the colorful tipis. Offered a buffalo-horn spoonful of dark stew, the Evening News representative tasted it reluctantly.

  "Why, this is quite good."

  "Fat young dog best," said the woman, pleased.

  "The red man is changing every season," a seated Chief Red Shirt told the correspondent from the Sheffield Leader with the interpreter's aid. "The Indian of the next generation will not be the Indian of the last. Our buffaloes are nearly all gone, the deer have entirely vanished, and the white man takes more and more of our land." He was silent for a moment, then spoke in a rush, spitting his consonants. Haltingly, the embarrassed interpreter added: "But the United States Government is good. True, it has taken away our land, but the government now gives us food that we may not starve. They are educating our children and teaching them to farm and to use farming implements. Our children will learn the white man's civilization and to live like him."

  "Chief seems cranky," the journalist recorded.

  Will and Arta took rooms in Regent Street, where the scout lived in a white tie and received American dignitaries, matching James G. Blaine's politician's grin and shaking hands with stiff, professorial Joseph Pulitzer, ill now and too blind to edit his own New York World. ("Leise, Herr Colonel, leise, bitte," begged the raw-nerved publisher in German, shrinking from his host's bellowing speech: "Softer, softer, please.") Russia's Grand Duke Michael brought regards from his brother Alexis and confided that although he had come to London to find a bride, he was most honored to have warmed a passenger's seat in the Deadwood coach. Will mimicked Oscar Wilde's terrified expression when the Indians swept near him in that seat, compared combat experiences with Crimean and Franco-Prussian war veterans, and listened attentively to European retellings of Greek myths. "That fellow Hercules must have been a pretty good cuss," he said, pouring. "Now let me tell you about Wild Bill."

  The show wintered in Manchester, where the Prince of Wales visited almost daily, finally presenting its star with an engraved gold watch crusted with rubies. Touched, Will embraced the future king and gave him the saber with the gold hilt. At the close of the English season the following May, Will's hearty "Hail and farewell!" was answered by a ragged but thunderous chorus of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" from twenty thousand throats raw from cheering. The crowd that gathered on the quay to see the Persian Monarch off for America bearing its cargo of guns and buffaloes and weary but smiling entertainers was larger than the one that had shouted encouragement to the British troops leaving for Africa.

  "Old fellow, your journeys are over."

  Will drew a deep, shuddering breath and let it out slowly, nodding to the deckhands gathered at the gunnels, who lifted the canvas and tilted the covered, already stiffening carcass out from under the United States flag and over the side. Twenty-one-year-old Charlie, equine survivor of the war for the plains, slid into the calm water with scarcely a splash, bobbed for a moment, and glimmered away under the gunmetal surface to a rest far removed from the lands he had known.

  The Wild West came home to brass bands, gifts, and speeches and got ready for a reunion performance at Staten Island while its star entertained the famous and wealthy who came to bask in the warmth of his energy at the Waldorf-Astoria. When the run finished, he rested with Louisa and Arta and Irma—growing up now—at Welcome Wigwam and visited his sister Julia and her husband Bill Goodman at Scout's Rest, cutting chickens' throats for dinner with bullets from the matched silver- and gold-plated revolvers presented to him in New York by the Colt Patent Arms Company. He toured the ranch with Bill Goodman, planned new irrigation canals and more trees for the southwest section, and shot quail and clay pigeons with Johnny Baker. Correcting galleys for a new edition of his autobiography, he told Louisa, "I played Windsor Castle, but I'd heaps rather be home." She went on sewing without response.

  In the fall of 1888, Nate Salsbury started talking about the Paris Exposition.

  Chapter Thirteen

  "Vive Bouff'lo Beel! Vive Annee Oaklee! Vive les bock'roos et les sauvages!"

  Members of the company were recognized in costume and mufti, eating in cafés and drinking in bistros, riding in carriages and trolleys, walking along the Left Bank and the Champs Elysées (where Parisians thronged shops advertising buffalo robes and buckskin shirts and stood in line to buy hasty translations of Prentiss Ingraham's Border Romances of Buffalo Bill), and celebrated as no one had been in that city since Austerlitz. Will's graying mane and goatee were as well known as Napoleon's forelock, and those who had seen Little Missy extinguish candles on rotating wagon wheels and snatch six-guns off the ground from horseback at full gallop and then obliterate glass balls flung into the air by Frank Butler needed no prompting to gather around the quiet Quaker girl on street corners, demanding her autograph. During public appearances they pelted the company with questions in fractured English about the American West, the boldest among them running fingers down the Indians' bare arms to determine whether the red came off. The braves, many of whom had accompanied the show on its first trip abroad and recalled the reserved and polite British with affection, cared little for the earthy French.

  Will thanked Thomas Edison, visiting the exhibition with his wife, for the incandescent bulb. "If not for you we'd be doing one show per day and shutting down at dusk," he shouted into the inventor's good ear. While Prince Roland Bonaparte tried out his English on the Indians, the star uncorked many agonizing hours spent conjugating French verbs on the trip over to converse with the Vicomtesse Chardon de Briailes and showed off his swift grasp of Spanish with ex-Queen Isabella, who rode in the Deadwood coach. The Shah of Persia wedged his imperial buttocks into the same seat on another occasion, holding the experience the highlight of his European tour.

  Rosa Bonheur' s Victorian black bonnet and smock were seen in the tents and stables and on the exhibition grounds, where she sat with paints and easel, quietly and discreetly peeling years off the scout posing for her on his white horse Billy in a plain fringed shirt and water-stained Stetson from the old days. When the painting was finished and presented to Will, he had it packed carefully and shipped home to Welcome Wigwam. Within days the Bois de Boulogne was crawling with artists, sketching the Indians and the magnificent sheathed musculature of the Percheron horses that hauled the wagons and helped pull up tent stakes. From old habit the braves begged yellow and vermilion off the artists for war paint.

  Annie Oakley, who made her own costumes, commissioned several Paris gowns for fancy dress and contributed ideas to designers fascinated by the frontier attire she kept in a custom trunk that doubled as a dressing table.

  At the end of summer the company toured the South of France and then boarded a train for Barcelona. There it rained.

  "Some folks like the rain," growled Will, pouring from his steel flask into his coffee cup. Swift drops pattered the canvas overhead, and the military tent smelled like wet hides from his boots and oilskin drying next to the stove. "I never did. Seemed like there was always a message to be carried way the hell out on the prairie just when it was coming down like whores' drawers and I was the only rider handy." He held up the flask, raising his eyebrows inquisitively at Nate Salsbury, who sat on the other side of the camp table warming his hands around a steaming china mug. The manager shook his head. "Plus it reminds me of the weather that season in New Orleans," Will added, sipping noisily.

  "Frank Richmond's got the grippe." Salsbury, coming down with a cold himself, sniffed morosely. "If he doesn't get better by tomorrow we'll have to get someone else to announce the acts."

  "It's not as if he'd have anyone to announce to."

  "Things aren't as bad as all that. We've been drawing."

  "We'll be lucky to make expenses. If these Spaniards don't see a bullfight on the card they stay home."

  "Arizona John's out taking pictures of the Indians in front of a statue of Columbus he found in town. The newspapers ought to eat th
at one up. They can print pictures here now." His enthusiasm rang hollow in the mildewed air.

  Will sweetened his coffee some more. "I'm thinking we should cut our losses and go on to Italy. The weather's better there anyhow."

  "We'll stick it out here until the end of the week. If there isn't any—"

  Salsbury broke off. Arizona John Burke had ducked through the flap without announcing himself, water streaming from his hat and poncho. His broad face was blood-red and he was puffing like a broken steam pipe. "We got trouble."

  "What happened, you get your flash powder wet?" The scout's speech was beginning to slur.

  "There's a government health inspector down by the Indian village fixing to place the show under quarantine." "For what?" Salsbury was on his feet.

  Burke hesitated. "Smallpox."

  Will grabbed his outerwear.

  The three found fifteen men in comic-opera uniforms and rain capes rounding up Indians and herding them roughly toward their tipis with side arms drawn. Off to one side stood a sallow little man with a fiat-crowned black hat screwed down to his eyes and a tan slicker that hung like a tent to the tops of his shoes and dragged in the mud. He sniffed the air distastefully between himself and Will and introduced himself in heavily accented English as Dr. Miguel Razaforte of the Ministry of Public Health.