Ragtime Cowboys

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I spent twenty years of my life tracking train robbers and murderers, and I paid attention. It don’t take brains to be a thief.”

  “I tracked my share.”

  And shot the wrong ones when you caught up with them; but there was no percentage in dragging up his guest’s pitiful record as a lawman.

  “Keeping the peace is one thing, finding out who broke it’s another. I don’t reckon you know where he went after you let him go.”

  “I got a wire from a ranch up in Sonoma County yesterday asking about his fitness. The son of a bitch used my name for a reference.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I haven’t answered it yet. Josie says I should cool down before I say anything I might regret. She treats me like a horse; I’m surprised she doesn’t rub me down with a piece of burlap before she puts me to bed.”

  Siringo always thought Josephine was too smart for her husband.

  “If I was you, I’d paint a pretty picture of the boy, get ’em to hire him on. Then you’ll know where he is so you can pump him.”

  Earp chewed the ends of his handlebars. Finally he nodded.

  “It sticks in my craw, but sure. Only if it’s me doing the pumping, I might just kill him.”

  “You’re too hotheaded for the job. Fists are no good in detective work. If they’re tough it just makes ’em stick down deeper and if they ain’t all you get is lies to make it stop. You got to oil a saddle to bring out the grain.”

  “Well, I’m no hand at that sort of thing. That’s why I’m here instead of out beating the brush for my horse.”

  Siringo pulled on his pipe, found it had gone out. He placed it next to the typewriter to cool.

  “I’m out to pasture,” he said. “Hire a Pinkerton. I’m down on the outfit since they let me go, but I guess they can still handle horse stealing.”

  “You quit, the way I heard it. Seems to me I read it in that Isms thing you wrote, or as far as I got into it. A gentleman rancher such as myself hasn’t a great deal to do but sit around and read, but that one lost me in the tall grass.”

  He knew the “gentleman rancher” lived off his wife’s money, but he wasn’t one to judge a man for making his way however he could. Siringo had sniffed around some well-set-up widows after Mamie died, but he’d lost considerable of the looks and charm that had gotten him so far in the past. All he’d been able to throw a loop around was Lillie. That had not ended well; certainly not in riches.

  “Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism,” he said. “The Agency confiscated every copy. Anyhow, there wasn’t much to do after I was fired but go ahead and quit.”

  “Well, I tried the Pinks in Frisco. They wanted too much up front, with no guarantee they could even turn anything, but a secretary there told me on the Q.T. about this young fellow who sure enough quit them over principles. He had some.”

  Siringo was prepared to like the man, but he couldn’t see Earp being impressed. The next thing he said cleared up the confusion.

  “I saw when I met him that was just an excuse. He’s a lunger, like old Doc was, rest his soul in hell. The work got too strenuous on a steady basis. He’s in the way of being a writer, like you, only the publishers can’t see it. He’s got a gal who’s expecting and he intends to marry her, so he accepted my offer.”

  “You’re all set up, then.”

  “Hold on. He’s got the smarts and experience, but I suspect he’s distracted.” Earp, who had set down his glass, fashioned an imaginary one from his fist and flipped it toward his mouth. “Just like Doc.”

  Who was no great loss to posterity. Siringo had hung around killers, but that was all in a day’s work. He found them a filthy lot, and too dumb to see they were no better off than if they’d kept the Sixth Commandment. The man sitting on his bed had always seemed to prefer their company over decent men’s.

  Siringo took a swig from his own glass, which was real enough.

  “It happens to the best of us. Last time I got so distracted I woke up in Chihuahua three days later with my ears pierced.”

  “I know you’re just fooling about. You’ve been at it long enough to know how to walk a straight line under a load.” Earp pointed at his drink on the floor at his feet, with one sip gone. “This is as much guzzling as I’ve done since I landed in jail in ’71; I’m a danger when I’m drunk, as much to myself as to anybody, which is why I can’t ever go back to Arkansas. But I’ve seen you drink a party of teamsters under the table and order another round for the trail.”

  “I was younger then, and the liquor wouldn’t strip the hide off a buffalo. I don’t know the bootleggers in San Francisco. I’m sixty-five, Earp. I haven’t sat a horse in years. The last time I fired that Colt was at a biscuit tin. I missed.”

  “Who said anything about riding and shooting? All I’m asking you to do is take the train to Frisco and see what he’s got. I gave him everything he needed to start. While you’re there maybe you can drop in on that ranch and talk to the stable boy. I’ll go straightaway from here to Western Union and give ’em such a glowing report they’ll want to run him for governor.”

  “Don’t overdo it. They might think he’s too good for the job.”

  “Rain’s letting up, Charlie. I can’t sit here all day. I got stock to feed, and I’m short-handed one man.”

  “I gave you my answer.”

  “I’m asking again.”

  Siringo squinted up through a hole in the roof. The clouds were sure enough breaking apart; the percussion section inside had slowed to a desultory tinkle, the sound a saloon maestro made killing time until the last drunk was swept out. “When did this horse go missing?”

  “Be two weeks tomorrow.”

  “That’s cold tracking.”

  “I tried it when it was fresh, then lost it in the creek.”

  “I’m even less interested now than I was the first time.”

  “If you were always this picky, it’s no wonder the Pinks threw you out.”

  “Your horse is gone, Earp. Sold for breeding stock up in Canada or pickup races down in Mexico.”

  “There hasn’t been any money in Mexico since before the Alamo. You want to profit off that situation, you run her as a ringer under a fresh name back East somewhere and clean up from race to race in hick county fairs. It’s a sinful waste of the best three-year-old anyone’s seen this century. Next year she’ll be over the hill as far as all the big gates are concerned; but without papers it’s the only way.”

  “Well, I don’t figure to go from track to track like a tout, getting fresh with strange horses and getting bit doing it.”

  “You got anything better to do, other than scratch your ass and wait for your house to fall down around your ears?”

  “I just started a book.”

  His guest had never been the type to pursue an argument, not to press a point or even for sport: It was his way or none. He produced a leather folder from the inside breast pocket of his damp suit coat, scribbled in it with a gravity pen, tore loose a sheet, and stuck it at Siringo.

  It was a bank draft drawn upon the Marcus family account—his wife’s people—in the amount of five hundred dollars.

  Siringo took it, waved the ink dry. His heart did a happy little two-step. There was a new roof there, Consolidated Edison made happy, and three months’ worth of grub besides. He folded the draft and put it in his shirt pocket behind the scrotum pouch.

  “I don’t figure it’ll hurt to take a look. I’ll go to the station in the morning. What’s this lunger call himself?”

  “Hammett. Dashiell Hammett. It’s a nancy sort of a name, but growing up Wyatt didn’t hurt me any in the man department.”

  3

  After Earp left, the sun came out, bright as a double eagle. It was as if the man traveled under his own portable overcast. Siringo decided it must be hell to be Wyatt Earp.

  He got up, looked out the window, at the wet glisten on the big wooden letters spread across the hills. A dash of water had made star
tling bursts of color in the shriveled brown bushes that surrounded them; ephemeral things, doomed at birth by the desert, but gay for the moment. It was on such days the developers behind Hollywoodland chose to photograph the scene for their brochures: Salting the mines.

  From under the bed his guest had sat on, Charles A. Siringo dragged an old wooden footlocker bound with iron, the name penciled on the lid belonging to a horse soldier long since dead in Nebraska. Dust bunnies stirred awake and rolled off the top.

  From the dry-rotted interior he drew a bedroll wrapped in a canvas cover, which when he unbuckled the straps and spread on the bed exhaled a gust of cedar. That smell never failed to catapult him back to Matagorda County, Texas—place of his birth—with the restless cattle bawling all about, the sun lying like a hot flat rock on the back of his neck, dust drifting fine as flour and settling on his sweat, turning his skin to sandpaper. And with the cedar came the stench of scorched hair and singed flesh as the iron burned the Rancho Grande brand onto yet another bovine haunch.

  *

  “Oh, there you are, Charlie,” said his boss, eyes peering down at him from a tangle of beard like a tumbleweed stuck to his face. “You ought to wear a bell. I near stepped on you.”

  “No need, Mr. Pierce. I heard them clod-busters coming the second you stepped off the front porch.”

  Abel Head Pierce—“Shanghai” to his intimates, ever since one of them had compared his six-foot-five-inch frame in Spanish dress and huge Mexican rowels to a Shanghai rooster—threw back his head and roared with laughter.

  *

  Siringo smiled sourly at the memory. Built on the slight side, with narrow hands and a way of appearing neat in his clothes even after six weeks trailing herds to Kansas, he’d always suspected the rancher kept him on just to serve as his personal court jester. Never mind that he worked as hard as any man in the outfit, and rode up right alongside when Pierce led a party after a gang of rustlers—sometimes straight into an ambush in his rage and eagerness for a fight.

  The rancher liked the ruckus so much he’d charge in, pistols blazing, when the easiest thing to do was surround the thieves while they were busy changing the brands and round them up without firing a shot. The lazy bastards always stopped at the first level place and built a fire whose smoke could be seen as far as Houston. There was no detecting in the work, not back then.

  Fortunately, Pierce was too big to sit a mustang, and when rich living made him a burden even to his big studs and he took to a buggy, he’d come to see finally that things managed themselves best when he stayed behind, confining his battles to his wife and Mexican servants, who picked fights with him knowing he’d fire them, then hire them back at double wages when he sobered up. It wasn’t long after Siringo took charge that the night riders shifted their operations to outfits less likely to dangle them from their own lariats.

  People had been underestimating Siringo his whole life. It stung a man’s pride, but he acknowledged it had seen him through the fire into old age, when others who stood a head taller and lived twice as loud had been fertilizing the earth for fifty years.

  He opened the blanket, its black-and-red checks faded to gray and pink and raddled with moth holes, exposing first his other Colt, a showpiece with gold plate and nacre grips, the mother-of-pearl rubbed by handling to a high finish. He set it aside, to return to its place after he got out what he wanted. The revolver had been presented to him by James McParland, the legendary superintendent of the Pinkerton office in Denver, for his first five years of loyal service, and while Siringo appreciated what it represented, it was only good for the Independence Day parade. Out in the open it caught the sun from every angle and attracted unfriendly fire.

  Next he came to his Winchester carbine in its leather scabbard, its brass painted black to cut down on reflection and walnut stock shiny as an outhouse wall where everybody leaned his hand when he pissed. This he propped up in a corner for cleaning, oiling, and loading.

  He placed the cleaning kit in its rosewood case and the cardboard box of cartridges on the nightstand, drew the bowie from its chamois sheath, inspected the twelve-inch blade for rust, resheathed it, and laid it on his pillow. The folding spyglass, brass compass, and his lucky rabbit’s foot, attached by a cinch ring to his little Forehand & Wadsworth hideout pistol, he laid next to the knife. Then he folded the circus revolver back into the blanket, stowed it and the footlocker back under the bed, locked up, and went to the bank.

  The hollow-cheeked clerk behind the wooden cage peered through his spectacles at the draft, holding them like a magnifying lens. He asked him to wait and went through a pebbled-glass door behind the counter marked PRIVATE. Siringo didn’t begrudge him for seeking a second opinion; he’d bounced a couple of drafts drawn on the bank in the past.

  Waiting, he turned and rested his elbows on the counter, overhearing murmured conversations among customers and employees; memorizing noses, ears, moles, visible scars, and postures; noting the time on the big Regulator clock and even the date on the calendar with its steel-point engraving of the bank’s Chicago headquarters, corner foremost like the prow of a big solid dependable ship—he’d known an open-and-shut case to fail in court because the detective on the stand got confused and gave a date that didn’t match the day of the week. He did all this without thought, and when he realized he was doing it, it annoyed him, like a retired farmer waking up automatically at four a.m. when there were no cows to milk and no hogs to slop.

  *

  “Once a detective, always a detective.” Jimmy McParland smiled. “You know, one day last month I jumped out of bed and was half-dressed when it came to me the breakfast appointment I was dressing for belonged to a Molly Maguire who died in prison five years ago.”

  *

  Jimmy Mac. He wondered what he was up to. Dead, most like, and no wire column to announce it to readers not yet born when he was saving the lives of their grandparents, and who wouldn’t recognize the name. It seemed to him most of the addresses he’d written among the floor plans and pornographic doodles in his dilapidated memorandum book should be forwarded to the cemetery. Who was left to lug his own coffin from the parlor to the planting ground?

  Then again, wasn’t that the idea?

  “Thank you for your patience, Mr. Siringo.”

  The clerk’s spectacles were back on his nose where they belonged and his tone had gone up a hitch or two in the cordial department: A single telephone call to Earp’s bank had wiped out all past transgressions. If the last century had been built on determination and individual initiative, this one was constructing itself on net worth. Siringo, watching the sickly little man deal notes onto the counter, was not inclined at the moment to question the system.

  He kept out a hundred for expenses and deposited the rest. Folding the notes into a shirt pocket, he remembered the streetcar. “Dollar in change, please.”

  The man obliged. “Please come again.”

  “I hope to.” He touched the brim of his Stetson and caught the car out front just as it was starting away from the curb.

  The motorman scowled at him from his tractor seat. “Don’t be so impatient, old-timer. Next time you might leave a grease trail clear to the Valley.”

  Siringo said nothing, dropping his nickel into the slot and unconsciously committing the man’s lobeless ears and turnip-shaped nose to memory.

  *

  Back home, he unscrewed the socket from an electric lamp that needed rewiring, stuffed the banknotes into the cavity, and replaced the socket. Then he traded his moccasins for a pair of calf-length Kip boots, thrust his Colt under his belt, hung the Winchester in its stiff scabbard on his shoulder by the strap, and went out the back door with a handful of .44 shells in each pocket next to his pipe, matches, and tobacco. He brought along his canteen and bean sandwiches wrapped in waxed paper and stashed inside his shirt.

  The scrubby brush was still wet, and by the time he reached the base of the HOLLYWOODLAND sign his boots were soaked, but the thick lumber
man’s socks he wore underneath kept his feet warm and dry. He’d learned from experience to take especial care of his feet. The cowboys he’d ridden with in early days had been contemptuous of their lower extremities, considering them no fit transportation for a man broken to the saddle; but horses gave out, often before men, and a fellow who bore up under conditions of thirst and hunger and heat and cold and exhaustion folded like a canvas bucket at the first blister.

  His bad knee grieved him worse as he climbed. He limped under the best of conditions, but he was usually able to dissemble it with his rolling prairie walk. He stopped from time to time and stood like a crane with the leg bent a little until the throbbing flattened out, more or less.

  He pulled himself up the last few yards to the top by grasping fistfuls of grass and the trunks of firs, then unslung the scabbard, took off his hat, and mopped the leather sweatband with his bandanna, chugging like a locomotive and listening to his heart walloping in his chest. It skipped every fourth beat; but it had been doing that since he was a yonker. The sawbones who plastered his splintered knee in Texas had told him his “unpunctual heart” would do for him before he was forty. He drew the same bad hand from the doctor who stitched him up after he got bucked into barbed wire at Longmont. According to medical science he’d been dead a quarter-century.

  He sat in the grass, dry now where the sun beat down on it, unwrapped his lunch, and ate beans between thick slices of coarse bread, washing them down with water from the canteen. Then he smoked his pipe, gazing down at the back of the eyesore sign and Ciudad de Los Angeles creeping out in every direction from its dusty little start, the good homely adobe missions blending into stucco and red tile, concrete and macadam poured over ancient bones. The swimming pools of the picture players looked like turquoise chips scattered by a careless jeweler. Trust a New York City cowboy like Bill Hart to come to the desert for a swim.

  The sun was still high above the ships moored off Santa Monica, but when it slipped this side of the hills he would be making his way back down in the dark. The bones were too brittle for that. He knocked out his pipe, got up, opened his fly, and let water onto the glowing ash, then buttoned up and thumbed fresh loads into the revolver and carbine.