This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  "What's this about smallpox?" Will demanded. The rain lancing in under his hat brim steamed on his flushed face.

  "The smallpox, the influenza, what else God knows. Your people they are very sick. It is my duty to protect my countrymen from the sickness you bring."

  The scout placed a hand on the arm of a Sioux brave being prodded past. "Bad Heart, is anyone sick in your lodge?"

  "Wife of my brother Dog no get up. He beat her, still no get up. Bad spirit climb in through her mouth when she sleep." He hurried off, wrapped in a soaked stinking buffalo robe.

  "Six of your Indians have the influenza," rapped Razaforte. "Much vomiting, purging, fever. Your man Richmond has it also; he will die before the week is out." He went on, ignoring the stricken look on his listeners' faces. "One of your laborers, your trabajadores, your—" He struggled for the word, his fierce black moustaches twitching.

  "Roustabouts," Burke provided.

  "Si, roustabouts. He has the pox. There are many sick in Barcelona, señores." He waved a small nervous hand in the direction of a group of ragged vagrants, Spaniards not connected with the show, huddled in the warmth near the mess tent entrance. "It is a bad thing that you allow this filth in here. Someone should have warned you they breed disease."

  Salsbury made an involuntary shift away from the wretches. "Are you shutting us down?"

  "It is my duty. No one goes in or out for six weeks. Longer if there are deaths."

  "Six weeks! Just sitting here is costing us four thousand a day."

  "That is not my concern. These men have orders to shoot anyone who tries to leave." His black eyes were impassive. "I shall arrange for medical help and disposal. You will of course be billed for everything, including cost of cremation. Welcome to Barcelona, señores." He bowed smartly and left.

  Enraged, Will swung to face Arizona John and almost lost his balance, which made him madder. "It's your job to ride herd on the Indians. How come I didn't hear about this before?"

  "It's news to me, Will." The publicist shrank back slightly. "They're always complaining about something, it's in their nature. How was I to know there was anything behind it this time?"

  "You're paid to know."

  "Have you dealt with influenza and smallpox?" Salsbury asked the scout, seeking to draw his wrath. He was genuinely afraid his partner would strike Burke.

  "Some." It was working; Will's brow knitted in thought. "Find out which Indians are sick and separate them from the rest. Post guards at their tipis and see they don't leave, but for Christ's sake don't let the guards touch anything. Get some sulphur fires going. Burn gunpowder. I want everyone in the show to stand in the smoke five minutes each day. It helps to kill the miasma. No exceptions, Nate; that means you and me and John too."

  Salsbury and Burke saw to the arrangements, rounding up cowboys to serve as reluctant guards at the contaminated lodges while the healthy Indians pitched their tipis several hundred yards upwind, the squaws and children with relatives in the quarantine camp wailing. The stricken roustabout was moved to a cot in the tent where the light equipment was stored. Soon he was joined by another, and then two more came down with rashes and fever. Frank Richmond, the ringmaster, seemed to rally the second night, and died the following morning. By that time the first roustabout was dead and two others were delirious. Meanwhile, from the Indian village rose the rhythmless death chant that had never failed to lift the hairs on the back of Will's neck after bloody skirmishes on the plains.

  "How many dead now?" He raised his voice over the roar of water lashing his tent. The rain had turned into a gale. Through the open flap he could see performers and roustabouts struggling to secure canvas torn loose by the mounting wind. Lightning shattered the lamp-black sky.

  "Two from smallpox," Salsbury shouted back, "and eight Indians from influenza. I don't hold any hope for the others."

  Panic haunted the whites of the manager's eyes above the gauze wrap he had taken to wearing around the lower half of his face. He was a lifelong hypochondriac, and terrified of death. Will had never thought higher of his partner than in the past few days, during which he had come into daily contact with his chief fear and yet still continued to function. Now the scout recognized the first cracks in the façade.

  "We got to get out of here, Nate. Smallpox wiped out the Mandans and damn near did for the Pawnees. If we stay here we'll all die."

  "How? The government's doubled the guard. They'll shoot to kill."

  "Either way we're dead. This way we got a fighting chance." Seeing the fear sharpen in the manager's eyes, he chuckled reassuringly. "It won't come to that. I listen to you in matters of business, Nate, but now we're in my jurisdiction. I've not been just sitting here drinking while you and the others were lighting fires and separating sick from well. I got passage for the whole company aboard a tramp steamer for Italy."

  Salsbury tore aside the gauze. "But how are we going to get on board? No one gets past those guards."

  "Don't insult me. I once snuck a band of gunmen into a Cheyenne camp without so much as waking up a dog. I can ride clear through these thick-eared Spaniards a hundred times out of a hundred and they won't hear anything louder than my shadow."

  "When are we leaving?" After six years of listening to tall tales, Will's partner was still dubious. But he wanted to believe.

  "Tonight."

  "Tonight? In this?"

  "Maybe you'd rather go at high noon on a nice bright day with the whole Spanish fleet sunning itself in the harbor."

  "It's too risky. Even if we don't sink, how do you plan to smuggle two hundred and fifty-odd people past all those soldiers?"

  "Not just people. We're taking along the livestock and equipment. We'll need it when we play Naples."

  "Damn it, Will, this is a poor time to uncork that famous backwoods sense of humor." Salsbury's fury bordered on hysteria.

  The scout was tugging on his boots. He stamped the carpeted tent floor with a sharp report that startled the manager into silence. Will stood. The two were the same height, but the scout's two-inch heels gave him an edge. "I wasn't always a showman, Nate. You forget that sometimes. Listen. Go to the treasury tent and draw two thousand in tens and twenties. Tell Jule Keene I sent you and sign for it. Bring it here. Then go find Arizona John and Buck Taylor and Johnny Baker and any ten roustabouts you can get hold of and tell them to break camp. Leave up the tents and tipis with the sick in them, and leave the sick for doctoring here. Everything else is to be loaded in the wagons and ready to roll in two hours. There's no telling how much longer this thing will blow. Got all that?"

  Salsbury nodded. "What's the money for?"

  "Phil Sheridan once told me you can't mount an attack without the proper weapons."

  Responding dopily to their handlers' cursing, hoofs skidding in ropy mud and water to their hocks, the great Percherons snorted and whinnied and pulled down the tents, which were swiftly folded around the poles and fed into the beds of creaking wagons in total darkness. White flickering flashes bleached out roustabouts bucket-brigading trunks and crates into the waiting vehicles while thunder splattered and rain slashed their faces. Members of the troupe, allowed one piece of luggage each, climbed into ambulances and buckboards, their oilskins rustling like sheets of tin. Thunder-shy buffaloes and longhorns mooed and milled restlessly in their respective corrals.

  "John, can't you get those Indians to move any faster?" Salsbury prodded the publicist, who was supervising the dismantling of the tipis.

  "Not when they're working and looking back over their shoulders at the same time. They think their slain enemies come looking for revenge at night. The ghosts' powers are strongest when the sky is angry, Red Shirt says."

  "They haven't seen Will."

  In the downpour they waited, a train of wagons and animals half a mile long across a plain of bare mud that had been a city of tents two hours before. The horses stamped and shivered. Then Will, mounted on a black mare near the head of the column, shouted to the lead drive
r, who flipped his reins and started his team forward. The others fell in behind. Light-fling illuminated the remaining tents and tipis as they rolled past, washing out the grim watching faces of the families who had chosen to stay behind with their sick. Then darkness poured back in and they were gone.

  Johnny Baker, privileged to ride the colonel's white horse Billy, rode with the cowboys, flicking his quirt from time to time at the ears and rump of straying buffaloes. A white bolt blasted a tree two hundred yards off, and in that instant of blinding clarity the youth found himself staring into the wooden face of a uniformed Spaniard standing close enough to touch his mount with the end of his rifle. In the blackness that immediately descended he waited, frozen, for the guard's reaction. Would he cry out, or shoot without warning? Johnny jumped at a deafening report, then realized that it was just thunder. There was no reaction, and he decided that the man had been too dazzled to see. The boy hadn't been told about the two thousand dollars Will had instructed Salsbury to draw from the treasury.

  The livestock were driven and the cargo was carried up a reinforced gangplank onto the slanting deck of a rotting freighter, rolling and creaking on a wild sea while Will shouted in English and Spanish and exchanged gestures with the black-bearded captain on the bridge, eventually settling the dispute by shoving a fistful of cash into the other's sooty grasp. Deckhands and cowboys rigged a network of ropes between decks to prevent the tense animals from falling, and the ship cast off without running lights into the roiling blackness of the Mediterranean.

  "Look!" exclaimed Johnny, pointing over the railing. Nate Salsbury watched the uniformed Spaniards spilling onto the dock, Razaforte in his soaked hat and shining slicker shaking his fist in the light of a raised lantern and shouting soundlessly into the gale.

  "Gentlemanly of him to see us off." The manager went below.

  Will shared the first mate's cabin with Arizona John, who dragged in and dropped with a squish and a howl of strained bolts onto the edge of his bunk. The cramped quarters stank sourly of coal oil and stale sweat.

  "Everything square?" The scout lay in the top bunk composing a letter to Arta in the light of a swaying lantern.

  "The Indians are chucking buffalo jerky all over the hold, and the longhorns are doing their level damnedest to gore each other to death from fright. Aside from that I'd swear we were safe on Staten Island. I believe I'll stay home next trip. I'm getting too old and fat for all this European luxury."

  Throughout the night the Wild West climbed oily waves and slid down the other side.

  Naples glittered under a fat sun, blue Vesuvius standing in for the superfluous Wyoming mural while the Indian pony races and the "Drama of Civilization" played themselves out against its smoking backdrop. When a brawl broke out in the stands over reserved seats, Salsbury ordered a check of all tickets and learned that one of the city's notorious confidence men had counterfeited and sold some two thousand over capacity. He averted a riot by sending Johnny Baker and Will's nephew Ed Goodman among the angry ticketholders with free passes for later performances. The Neapolitan police came and wrote down his complaint in their little leather-bound notebooks and tipped their absurd caps and went home. But the jammed shows quickly made up all losses. From there the exhibition went on to attract huge crowds in Milan and Verona and Venice, where Will had his picture taken aboard a gondola with four worried-looking braves and smoked cigars with Red Shirt in St. Mark's Square while Venetians and pigeons flocked around them. In Rome the American cowboys, challenged by the Duke of Sermoneta to tame his fierce stallions, made short work of the mankillers, to the intense disappointment of the watching Romans, who had come anticipating a bloodbath. Some of them booed. To placate them Will challenged the Italian horse handlers to try the broncos. The Americans laughed good-naturedly when the would-be riders were thrown, but Will put a stop to the contest when the terrified horses started bleeding from the irons and chains of local custom. He inspected the Coliseum, sighed, and chose a sturdier arena for the show's performances. The Indians, unnerved by the vaulted echoing splendor of the Vatican and Arizona John's strict lectures on protocol, hooted at the Swiss Guards in their striped pantaloons but looked on in awe as Pope Leo XIII was borne between their colorful ranks in his high tiara and yards of white satin and cloth of gold. Christian braves knelt with some of the cowboys and Burke to receive the pontiff's blessing. A pregnant woman fainted. Non-Christian Indians murmured superstitiously as a Sioux holy man stepped forward to attend her. That night another woman died in the village. The holy man painted himself and danced and threw phosphor in a fire.

  "White holy man bad medicine," a tall Oglala with gray hairs in his roach told Arizona John: "Kill woman."

  "Nonsense. The woman was frail before we left Spain. It's a miracle she survived the voyage across the Mediterranean."

  "We go home now. Nine Oglala, four Miniconjou, some Cut Fingers." He made the sign indicating Cheyenne. "Some women and papooses. No more Europe."

  "You can't just come and go when and where you please. You're wards of the United States Government under the Wild West's guardianship. Colonel Cody will be heap angry when he hears what you're planning. His heart will be bad."

  "You tell Cody. We go home now." The Sioux turned away.

  Arizona John found Will conversing animatedly with a uniformed customs official in his tent, augmenting his crash course in Italian with broad gestures. He heard the publicist out, then said, "Once an Indian's mind is made up, no white man can change it."

  "You're not going to just let them up and go!"

  "They're our charges, not our captives. But they'll go nowhere unless someone arranges their passage. Tell them to stick it out till Germany and if they still want to go I'll send someone back with them."

  "If they leave, all the rest will go with them."

  Will sighed. "John, you've spent more time with Indians in the past fifteen years than I did in all my years on the plains. Haven't you. learned anything about them by now? They don't just all take off like birds leaving a telegraph wire because some of them are homesick. It took them twenty thousand years to get together for a few hours at the Little Big Horn. Do you really think they'll do it again for the sake of one dead squaw?" Burke didn't answer. The scout nodded as if he had. "Now go tell them what I told you and let me get back to some serious bribery. This poor excuse for local authority wants me to pay an entrance duty by weight on every animal in the show before he'll let us perform in Florence." He returned to the discussion. The dark little man had sat through the Americans' conversation with olive eyes darting back and forth between the speakers, uncomprehending. The towering Oglala received the publicist's message without expression.

  "I have heard you," he said when it was finished. Then he turned and went back into his tipi, leaving Arizona John standing outside, wondering. But the Indians stayed through the German tour.

  In Germany the painted red men and their mock foes seized and held Berlin's Kurfürstendamm for a month while a generation reared on Karl May's tales of the frontier followed the action as informed as any of the audiences in New York and Chicago, counting each falling brave with guttural exhalations like a team of Prussian master sergeants calling cadence. Fat burghers in feathered headdresses strutted down the Wilhelmstrasse, their distended vests strung with their orders of office and tomahawks in their hands.

  Between performances, Will inclined his head politely to a Junker in a tight black uniform and monocle, who shot to stiff attention, snapping his heels and dipping his bearded chin in salute. He had a drawing board in one hand and a charcoal pencil in the other.

  "He doesn't look much like the artists I saw in Paris," Will remarked to Arizona John, watching as the officer sketched with quick deft strokes the trainers feeding the horses.

  "He's Colonel von Something-or-Other of von Hindenburg's personal staff. You can't spit around here lately without hitting a uniform. They seem damn interested in how we feed and move the personnel and livestock."

>   "Maybe they're fixing to put on a show of their own."

  "That's what worries me."

  Rheumatic Joseph William Louis Luitpold, uncle of mad King Otto and Prince Regent of Bavaria, visited the show with his grown daughters at Munich, and returned to inspect Annie Oakley's guns and watch her plug a tossed coin in the arena. While he was wandering around, a bronco the cowboys called Dynamite broke loose and charged him. Annie shouldered the Prince Regent out of the way. Throughout her stay with the Wild West, the markswoman wore a gold bracelet engraved with the crown and monogram of Luitpold, a gift from the grateful future monarch. Prentiss Ingraham wrote up the incident for the pamphlets.

  The company train loaded in Munich and wound through the Alps, its teakettle whistle echoing among the snowy peaks. Will weaved his way back from the club car and thudded into the seat beside Nate Salsbury, who was sitting with his eyes closed and a ledger open on his lap. "You all right, Nate?"

  "Just tired." He spoke without stirring.

  "Comes as no surprise. I don't know when you sleep."

  "I don't."

  "It ain't healthy, pard."

  "It's been a busy couple of years. Your cut alone from this run figures out to a million. You can write Louisa and tell her you finally made good on your promise." Salsbury had heard about his partner's town-building venture in Kansas in 1869.

  "I'll need it. Arta's getting set to marry that Boal fellow. I cabled them a bank draft from Munich." He paused, watching the sunlight glittering silver in the dapper manager's braid. His cheeks had a sunken look and there were dark leeches under his eyes. "You sure you're fit?"

  He nodded and closed the ledger. "Getting old."

  "You're my age."

  "Not if you count time spent adding up columns of figures while everyone else is sleeping or out having a good time." He paused. "There's a fellow I want you to meet when we get back home. His name's Jim Bailey."