This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  Will awoke in his tent the next morning in mid-snore to find a hand shaking his shoulder and a strange young face hovering above his own. So many cowboys had moved in and out of his and Lillie's employ in such a short time that lie had given up trying to keep track of them. "Big trouble, Colonel," this one was saying.

  Groggily, the scout, still wearing the suit of clothes he had worn to see Tammen the night before, relieved his swollen bladder into an enameled pot and stumbled outside, squinting in the harsh sunlight. Among the performers in costume and roustabouts in work clothes milling about the grounds, the four men in gray suits stood out like blisters. Three were carrying shotguns. The fourth, a stringy brown man under a gray slouch hat, spotted Will and jerked his head in that direction. The group started moving his way.

  Will swung about and grasped the young cowboy's arm. "Get the cash box from the treasury tent and off the grounds, quick."

  "It's no use, Colonel," the man told him sadly. "They have it already."

  He looked again at the four. One had his shotgun under his arm and was carrying the black strongbox in both hands. Will's fingers slackened and the cowboy withdrew his arm, rubbing circulation back into it.

  "William F. Cody?" inquired the man in the slouch hat.

  When Will nodded, the man pulled aside his coat flap to show a star on his vest. "We're from the Adams County Sheriff's Office. We have a court order directing you to surrender all property belonging to Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Pawnee Bill's Far East in lieu of sixty thousand dollars owed the United States Lithographing Company." He produced a long fold of paper from an inside pocket.

  "I wired them last Monday we'd make good on those posters soon."

  "I wouldn't know about that. I have orders to impound everything on the lot."

  "After you've done that, what?"

  "These officers will remain on the premises. Any attempt to remove property will be regarded as theft and the offender will be arrested and prosecuted." Turning away, the sheriff's man directed two of his companions to their stations and relieved the third of the cash box. That man walked beside him carrying the shotgun while the other carried the box by its handles through the Indian camp toward a new beetle-black Model I touring car parked inside the main gate with its top folded. Will walked along with them.

  "I mean, what happens to everything here? You just going to let it rot and the livestock starve?"

  "That's up to the judge. Likely he'll authorize an auction if some kind of payment isn't made within a specified length of time."

  He hoisted the box over the low door on the passenger's side and placed it on the floor. Then he got in and started the ticking engine, but before releasing the brake he looked across at Will with an expression that puzzled the scout.

  "I'm just doing my job, Colonel Cody. A job I wouldn't have except I decided to become a lawman after I read a book about Buffalo Bill when I was twelve."

  He shifted gears with a groan, backed around, shifted again, and clattered out through the gate, laying down a brown cloud of dust and sweet exhaust. The man with the shotgun moved off between tents.

  "Tammen," said Major Lillie.

  Will turned and saw his partner standing in front of his tent, watching the retreating vehicle. "It's not his doing," he replied.

  Pawnee Bill went inside after treating the scout to a long look that put him in mind of Louisa.

  The auction attracted a larger crowd than the show had seen in two years. They came from all over to watch and bid on cattle from India and camels from the Sahara and broncos and workhorses and oxen and cages and mirrored wagons ablaze in the sun. The white train was broken up, its rolling stock sold to eastern railroad interests to have its gold letters painted over and its aisles narrowed to make room for more seats. The crowd ignored Major Lillie's "buyer beware" leaflets, laughed when a bony nag was led into the arena on the heels of a breathtaking Percheron, and gasped when a tall, weathered Westerner with a short cigar clamped in his teeth bid a hundred and fifty dollars for the animal.

  "Sold to the gentleman from Lincoln." The auctioneer cracked his gavel.

  The man was Colonel C. J. Bills, a fellow rancher and old pard who had spent many lazy Sunday afternoons with Will picking buds off Scout's Rest trees at forty paces. "If I can't buy that bag of bones," he had vowed on his way to Denver, "I'll steal him." The horse was Isham, the show mount Will had ridden for years, and when the transaction was complete, Colonel Bills handed the paper to Will and arranged to have the old horse shipped to the TE Ranch.

  "In the old days we called a man without a saddle horse a farmer," he muttered, before his friend could thank him. "And, by God, I'll die before I lay eyes on Buffalo Bill behind a plow."

  Chapter Seventeen

  The late-summer sun burned color out of the tough ugly bunch grass, throwing into high relief the blood hues of the painted and bonneted Indians in the village of bright tipis and many-colored horses milling on the ridge overlooking the river. Will, in scuffed brown buckskins and a Stetson stained dark with dirt and sweat such as he hadn't worn since he'd posed for Rosa Bonheur' s painting almost thirty years earlier, shifted his seat carefully in the saddle and waited desperately for the order to move. He felt faint.

  "Charge!"

  He put spurs to the white stallion and plunged forward down the slope and into the village, firing his Colt right and left the way he had seen Wild Bill Hickok do in the Cheyenne camp the year he turned fifteen. His feathered targets yelped and fell. Finally, he drew rein before the chief's tipi just as the Indian was raising his tomahawk over the head of his white woman captive and used up his last shot, sighting down his outstretched arm. The chief arched his back, dropped the weapon, and slumped over sideways.

  "Cut!"

  Will waited for an agonizing two seconds, then slid out of the saddle. His knees buckled when his feet touched ground, but ne maintained a shaky grip on the horn until the dizzy spell passed.

  "Great job, Colonel," said the director, slapping a cloud of dust off the scout's back. "We're going to call you 'One-Take' Cody from here on in."

  He grinned weakly. "That does it for me, then?"

  "One more Shot, Colonel. I like to get at least two angles of everything."

  He tried not to groan. The director was a thickly built man in his middle years whose broad jaw and boyishly upturned nose made him resemble Bronco Bill Irving, he of the Smith & Wesson religious denomination and the steer-riding exhibition that had nearly made casualties of the visiting press at the Wild West's first opening in Chicago. This one called himself Bronco Billy, in fact, although his sole connection with the history of the plains was a flickering few moments on screen during The Great Train Robbery, filmed in New Jersey, and a series of popular western shorts starring him and produced by his company, Essanay Productions. Abruptly he turned his back on his featured player and instructed the man standing behind the hand-crank camera on the open side of the three-walled tipi where and how to set up for the new angle. The Indian chief got up, dusted off his leggings, and looked around for his tomahawk. Meanwhile the blue-clad cavalrymen with whom Will had ridden into the village led their horses back to their marks on the hill. The crew members were also dressed in cavalry uniforms to avoid spoiling a take should one of them wander into a shot.

  "Places, everyone," Bronco Billy said, turning back. "That means you too, Colonel."

  The shot required three takes. Something went wrong with the camera the first time, and on the second try Will developed a sudden excruciating cramp in his right hand and dropped the revolver just as he was getting set to fire. The blank cartridge discharged on the ground. Finally they had a print and he handed the reins over to a grip and walked back to the tent that served as his dressing room. Once inside he took down his trousers and emptied the India rubber bag he wore strapped to his thigh into a chamber pot. He could no longer control that basic function. While the prescription bag spared him embarrassment in public, it made riding an even more uncom
fortable experience than the condition itself. He was refastening the trousers when Johnny Baker entered.

  "When you going to have that operation?" chided the sharpshooter.

  "When you going to learn to announce yourself before coming into a man's tent?" Will pulled the cork out of a fresh bottle of rye and filled an oversize beer stein on the camp table. His contract with Tammen allowed him only three drinks per day. It didn't say anything about how big.

  Johnny dropped the subject and then his lanky frame onto a folding canvas stool. "Well, how do you take to the moving picture business so far?"

  "It's harder to organize and run than three circuses. Other than that I don't see a great deal of difference between it and the arena."

  "You're just saying that because it was your idea. All Tammen did was put up the money."

  Will lowered himself carefully onto his stool and drank. Waiting for the warmth to crawl up his spine, he said, "Miles giving you a hard time again?"

  "He never stopped. For a seventy-four-year-old retired warhorse, he behaves a powerful lot like a temperamental actor. Now he's insisting that all eleven thousand troops he commanded during the Wounded Knee campaign be represented when we restage the battle."

  "How many we got?"

  "Just three hundred. The Army won't loan us any more. I asked."

  "March them past the camera forty times. Nelson never could distinguish one pony soldier from another."

  "I reckon it's worth a shot." Johnny yawned bitterly and then became grave. "The Indians won't be so easy." "What's their complaint this time?"

  "Same as before, they don't want us filming the Battle of Wounded Knee on top of the graves of them that died there. Talk is they're planning to use real cartridges when we film the fight instead of blanks."

  "Iron Tail told me. I'm meeting the tribal elders here this afternoon."

  "To hear them carry on you'd think we were still at war."

  "For them it never ended."

  Wild West veterans Iron Tail, Short Bull, and No Neck came to the council, along with two younger Sioux whom Will didn't know. Their faces were dark, mouths set in brutal lines. In the dim light of the tent it was hard to distinguish the old friends from the strangers. Most volatile was No Neck, who when the dust had settled at the bloodbath at Wounded Knee was found squalling outside the smoldering tipi of his slain parents. Whenever a brown fist struck the folding table it was likely to be his.

  "You are calling this a battle," he said sharply. "It was a massacre. My people were outnumbered fifty to one. For every warrior in the village there were ten women and children and old ones too sick to fight. They came to surrender and were met with the white man's peace—fire and lead." His eyes burned in their sockets.

  "The War Department will not let us use their soldiers if we intend to place them in a bad light," Will explained.

  Iron Tail said, "This is the thing that makes No Neck's heart bad, but not ours. My people will not trample the resting place of their ancestors."

  "General Miles insists we film the event where it occurred. It was the only way he would agree to appear."

  "Bearcoat Miles is a great warrior but a stupid man," Iron Tail pointed out. "There will be trouble."

  One of the younger Sioux grunted. "He will not speak so loud when our guns talk and his pony soldiers fall down and do not get up like those who fell today. Maybe he will be with the ones that stay down."

  "That would be very unwise," Will said calmly. "If your people fire real cartridges in the sham battle, the Army will pursue them. There will be no place to hide. They will be captured and stand trial for murder. The hangman will tie ropes around their necks and hoist them into the air and they will die with their necks broken or strangle to death. The tribesmen who told their brothers to do this thing would be among the first to hang."

  A number of the Indians stroked their throats uneasily. No Neck pounded the table.

  "The white man's peace is ever the same. We will not help him to tell this lie."

  Will smacked the table openhanded. The sharp report made the Indians jump. Johnny Baker, seated off to one side, looked quickly at the Colonel. The skin of his face was drawn tight. As the silence grew his expression softened. At length he drew a deep breath and let it out slowly.

  "In the white man's world," he said quietly, "you do as you're told."

  After a long moment Iron Tail rose, closing his blanket around the spotted old flesh of his torso. "We go now."

  The Indians filed out, No Neck last, raking hot eyes over the two white men.

  Johnny was still staring at Will. Alone with him, he said, "I never heard anyone talk to an Indian like that before, Colonel."

  "I told him true."

  "That's what I mean."

  Will blew dust out of his beer stein. "Reckon we'll find out tomorrow if it took."

  Wounded Knee shook again under the beating of many hoofs, firearms crackling like a brushfire, smoke scudding across the blue and red bodies on the field. There was a pause after Bronco Billy yelled "Cut!" and then the dead rose, fumbling ready-made cigarettes out of their tunics and scowling at new rips in their moccasins and leggings. The picture, released under the hefty title The Last Indian Battles, or From the Warpath to the Peace Pipe, swept through the nation's theaters in the spring of 1914, drawing as many viewers as the Wild West's first three seasons combined to watch the great scout leaping and jerking across bed sheet screens in pancake and rouge. Will's portion of the proceeds stopped at H. H. Tammen, who loaned some of it to his star in advances against his salary as a performer for the Sells-Floto Circus. Unlike Nate Salsbury and Jim Bailey, the Denver tycoon parted with the sums cheerfully, extending as he did so more promissory notes for Will's signature. "A hundred dollars per day plus forty percent of the gross over three thousand dollars per day," he told the scout the day of the fall opening. "That makes you the highest-paid entertainer of this century. You will be in the black in no time."

  "No time" was it. Will borrowed from his employer to quiet his creditors, wired more to Hank Fulton in Cody to see about organizing the dude ranch Hank and George T. Beck had been after him to start, and sent the rest of the cash on hand to his sister Helen and her husband Hugh Wetmore, whose printing business had failed. Each entreaty to Tammen was met with the familiar rodent's grin and another note to sign. The scout's participation in the show consisted of leading the parade around the arena, picking off glass balls launched by a young sharpshooter whom in his absentmindedness he sometimes called "Johnny," and the farewell speech, always the farewell speech, made more often from the driver's seat of a phaeton because his crotch was too tender for the saddle. St. Louis, Topeka, Omaha, and most of the smaller cities in between. Another night, another city, and he seldom knew the name of the one he was in. Between appearances he rested in his tent, drinking his three stems per day and snarling at whoever poked his head inside, unless he was a fan or a child. Tammen saw that Will's picture was taken often surrounded by children.

  The clown of Denver swaggered down crowded streets in linen as white as the caps of the Rockies and trousers with a crease as sharp as a scalping knife, hailing old pards across the street with a bellowed "Hey, old hoss!" that turned heads for blocks. He gave quarters to the children following him and when he ran out of quarters he handed out silver dollars until his pockets were empty. By this time his rounds would deposit him in front of the Post; he would go in and tap Tammen or his partner, Fred Bonfils, for more. On slow news days reporters called him over to their desks and asked him questions about Wild Bill and Sitting Bull, smirking when the stentorian voice brought editors' heads popping out of their offices.

  Once on the street he met Johnny Baker, just back from his own London tour. The two pumped hands and slapped each other's shoulders and stepped into a saloon where everyone knew the old scout.

  "How are things, Colonel?"

  "Just larruping. Hearst wants me to write a series of articles for his monthly magazine and I am n
egotiating to buy the 101 Ranch show from the Miller brothers. With the war in Europe I look to put on a military spectacle that will outdraw Jess Willard."

  "You're no longer with Tammen, then?" Johnny sipped his beer.

  "Once the papers are signed for the Scout's Rest sale I will buy out my contract."

  The sharpshooter smiled thinly and nodded, but the smile died short of his eyes. The bright Colorado sunlight streaming in through the front window found strands of silver in his long hair.

  The money from Scout's Rest went to collection firms and lawyers. Major Lillie was suing Will for breach of contract. Will signed another note for Tammen.

  When Sells-Floto played Lawrence, Kansas, near the end of the 1914 tour, Will sent a roustabout to tell Tammen he wanted to see him in his tent. The speculator, imbibing wine in his private car with an attractive redhead in green satin, replied irritably that he was busy and that the scout should come see him if it couldn't wait until morning.

  "Sorry, sir. He said to tell you he's too ill with rheumatism to make the walk."

  An impatient Tammen found his star seated at the folding table. The gold- and silver-plated revolvers presented to him by the Colt Patent Arms Company lay in front of him. "Have a seat and we'll discuss my contract," Will invited.

  "I don't see what we have to discuss." But the visitor sat down opposite him.

  "I am quitting the circus when we reach Denver."

  "You are not. We have a contract."

  "After two years with you I consider my debts repaid in full."

  Tammen chortled, his chins quivering. "You have barely kept ahead of the interest. You have not so much as touched the principal. If you think otherwise, you may see my lawyers." He started to push himself to his feet.

  "When I could, I avoided killing in the bad days," Will said. "I don't want to kill you. But if there is not justice left I will."