Ragtime Cowboys

by Loren D. Estleman

  “I hit pay dirt. There must have been right around a hundred thousand in that satchel, all tied up in neat bricks of C-notes.”

  “Let’s divvy it up and retire.”

  “I left it there, the satchel, too. It came to me Kennedy might miss it.”

  “There goes South America and all its charms. What else might he miss?”

  Siringo scooped something out of his inside pocket and flipped it into Hammett’s lap.

  It was a small notebook bound in green leather.

  Hammett put out his cigarette and opened it, flipped through several pages.

  “I can’t make head nor tail of it,” Siringo said. “Maybe he had a stroke.”

  “It’s a number-to-letter cipher. If you gave me a year I might work it out.”

  “You got an hour.”

  “Why so specific?”

  “That’s when the next train leaves for the north country. I don’t see no reason to dillydally, do you?”

  “Go for a walk and take that stink-pole with you. I need to concentrate.” Hammett got up from his armchair and sat down at the little writing desk.

  *

  When Siringo came back, the room was hazy with smoke. He opened a window. “You burn that camel shit and you beef about my pipe? What’s the doc say about them coffin nails?”

  “I got a second opinion in Carson City. He was against it.” Hammett found a place to grind out his butt in the pile in the ashtray and tossed the hotel pad at Siringo. He caught it against his chest, opened it, and read:

  A. M. Fall: $10,000

  S. P. Clanahan: $5,000

  Harry F. Sinclair: $15,000

  Edward F. Doheny: $50,000

  There were other names Siringo didn’t recognize. “Who’re the rest?”

  “Search me. Punk players, by the amounts. Fall’s got money problems, they say, so he’ll take less than the oilmen. The bigger sums to Sinclair and Doheny are likely down payments. Those birds stand to make millions out of Buena Vista and Teapot Dome. Whatever Kennedy’s got planned, he’s in it for the long run, straight up to the cabinet.”

  Siringo lit his pipe; taking his time. He shook out the match and contemplated the charred end.

  “I don’t suppose it come to you we’re in over our heads.”

  “Why should we be any different from the enemy? What do you think’ll happen when Kennedy misses his account book?”

  “He’ll turn Frisco inside out looking for Peter Collins.”

  “Thanks for blowing my best alias. I was hoping to use it on a couple of stories I’m not too sure about.”

  “I couldn’t use Charlie O’Casey. That would take him straight to Ahearn and Muldoon. No sense making things too easy.”

  “He’ll trace it to my wire.”

  “Couldn’t be helped. I’ve found it’s easier to keep your lies straight if you hold them to a minimum.”

  “There’s where we part company. You don’t write fiction.”

  “You think not? When Pinkerton came down on A Cowboy Detective, threatening to break me in the courts, I spent weeks changing the name of the Agency and everyone I had anything to do with in its service. I paid back most of the advance to cover the extra typesetting. Whoever said a lie can’t live never had to deal with lawyers.”

  “And you wonder why I’m an anarchist.”

  “I thought you said you was a Marxist.”

  Hammett shook his head. “I can’t figure why you’re not in public office.”

  Siringo pointed at the notebook. “That’s why. It makes a man sentimental for the days of back-shooting in broad daylight.”

  “Another place where we see eye to eye.”

  “If you’re waiting for a hug, I wouldn’t advise it.” The old detective puffed up a cloud of sour-smelling smoke. “Anyways, it’s all the more reason to light a shuck north.”

  Hammett grasped his bamboo cane and levered himself upright.

  “Arrange the tickets. I’m going home to pack.”

  “I wouldn’t, unless you want to put the eel back on our trail. He’ll default to your billet for want of nothing else. Pick up what you need on the way.”

  “Swell. Don’t forget to pack the shine.”

  Siringo scratched at the stubble where he’d trimmed his moustaches. “What about that jug you was fixing to bring back from Carson City?”

  “That bootlegger I told you about was Pete Durango. I blew him up at the hospital in Carson City. It was my getaway stake. I’ll buy you a case of Jack London’s best from Becky.”

  “Interesting how you went straight to her instead of Charmian.”

  “I won’t seduce her till you give me the office. If you want to arrange it with her stepmother, you’re a free man.”

  Siringo’s pipe had gone out. He knocked it into a dusty basket of fruit courtesy of the Golden West. “In the old days, I’d horsewhip you.”

  “In the old days, you might try.”

  The old detective’s face went black. Then it lightened by degrees. “I don’t feature riding on the outside of a train’s any picnic.”

  “If I’d seen it coming, I’d’ve packed a wicker basket.” Hammett smiled then. “You weren’t kidding when you said you’ve got luck in store. I guess you spent a deal of it when Clanahan and Kennedy weren’t in residence when you ran those bluffs.”

  “I know it.” Siringo looked sour. “From here on in I’m running on my wits and nothing else.”

  “In that case we’re boned.”

  “Go to hell.”

  Hammett scooped up Kennedy’s notebook and the notes he’d made.

  “What you fixing to do with ’em?” Siringo asked.

  “Keep the notes for show and rely on the good old U.S. Mail for the book.”

  “God help us all.”

  “He’s had plenty enough on his hands just looking after us. I’m putting the rest in the hands of Uncle Sam.”

  “I just wisht the nephew wasn’t Warren G. Harding.”

  Down in the lobby, Hammett got an envelope and a stamp from the clerk, put the notebook in the envelope, started to write P. Collins on the outside, made a wry face, crossed out what he’d written, wrote S. D. Hammett instead, added General Delivery, San Francisco Post Office, sealed the envelope, and dropped it in the chute. Then he went back up to find Siringo packed and dressed in his old outfit with the damaged Stetson on his head. His big Frontier Colt sagged in its holster on his hip. He was holding his Winchester by its scabbard strap.

  “How’d you get your ordnance back?”

  “Sent for it by way of a friend; the hat, too. You might know him. Will Rogers?”

  “I never liked a man I didn’t meet. I thought you’d’ve bought a new hat by now.”

  “It’s got us this far. I’ve run clean out of my own luck. From now on I’m borrowing from my haberdashery.”

  “You’re putting your faith in a hat?”

  “I figure I got all I can expect from faith in Gem, Colorado. But if I’m going to die over somebody else’s wine, I’d just as soon do it dressed like myself.”

  26

  This time they took the train to Sonoma County. There was no one waiting for them at the station. It was late and there were no cabs at the stand.

  “If you hadn’t burned up Peter Collins, we’d have transportation,” Hammett said.

  Siringo shook his head. “It don’t signify. Clanahan’s bound to have somebody intercepting all the wires to Beauty Ranch. He’d of had a man here to meet whoever come off the train no matter what name we used. This way we slide in with the drunks from Frisco.”

  There was no shortage of them: men largely well-dressed but disheveled, many of them carrying bottles wrapped in paper sacks and walking with exaggerated dignity toward waiting personal vehicles. The detectives had blended in, with their coats buttoned wrong and hats pushed back to their crowns. Hammett had gotten rid of the bandage on his head, leaving the square of gauze stuck to the shaved patch with sticking-plaster.

 
Siringo watched him leaning on his cane. “You know, you’d get along better on crutches.”

  “You see to your bum leg and I’ll see to mine. Where’d you get it, by the way?”

  “Stepping into somebody else’s business. We’ll put in here and start out first thing in the morning.” He pointed with his cheap suitcase at a four-story frame building across the street with a sign reading RAILWAY ARMS.

  They entered the meager lobby, Hammett leaning heavily on his unsteady companion, both of them singing:

  “Oh, see the train go ’round the bend,

  Good-bye, my lover, good-bye;

  She’s loaded down with Pinkerton men,

  Good-bye, my lover, good-bye.”

  The clerk, standing almost directly beneath an enormous moose head mounted high on the wall behind the desk, pasted a smile on his pale face. “You gents miss your ride?”

  “We done that,” Siringo said, slurring the words. “My young friend here’s a newlywed. His wife ain’t broke in just yet.”

  “She said if I got in after midnight, I could walk. On this leg!” Hammett indicated his bandaged foot.

  “Women will be unreasonable.” The clerk spun the registration book to face them, dipped a pen in the inkstand, and held it out. “What happened?”

  “I bet him six bits he couldn’t kick the top off a fire hydrant.” Siringo took the pen and signed Tom Horn, Cheyenne, Wyoming.

  Hammett said, “They make ’em stouter than where I came from.” When his turn came he wrote Booth Tarkington, Indianapolis, Indiana.

  “Will that be two rooms or one?”

  “One,” Siringo said. “My treat. I’m six bits to the good.”

  *

  “Sam, I don’t know what I can say to convince you I never throwed a wide loop in my life.”

  “That ain’t what I heard, Charlie. Goodnight says a quarter of the LX stock is his and you put in more time on his spread than you ever did on Pierce’s.”

  “He never. Bring him here and we’ll see if he bears false witness. He’s been taking the wrong advice from the wrong people.”

  “Well, he’s sure enough paid me to fix your wagon, you stump-sucking bastard.”

  Which was as much warning as Siringo got before a bullet intended for his heart smashed his knee. Sam Grant was a sufficiently bad shot when he was sober, and after six hours sucking on a bar rag waiting for Siringo to show, the safest place to stand in Texas when he hauled out his Schofield—a brand new model nobody had any experience with yet—was in New Mexico.

  Six weeks in splints, the better part of a year learning all over again how to walk, and a lifetime of reminding whenever he sat still long enough for the leg to stiffen up like a fencepost.

  But the worst upshot of that affair was Siringo decided to give up the various life and limp into Kansas to open a mercantile.

  *

  “Charlie, wake up! You’re chasing rabbits in your sleep.”

  He shot straight up in bed and had his hand on the Colt on the cracked nightstand before he realized he was in a hotel room in California and not the Lucky Seven Saloon in Tascosa, Texas. He left it where it was and sat back against the iron bedstead. Hammett, sitting in the room’s only chair with his bad foot resting on Siringo’s suitcase, was staring in the moonlight coming through the window.

  “You okay? You were cussing fit to be tied.”

  “Forget it. And next time you call me Charlie I’ll show you I’m a better shot than Grant.”

  “Who’s Grant?”

  He opened the drawer in the stand, took out his bottle of aspirins, swallowed four, and washed them down from the Mason jar on the top. His leg was throbbing as if he’d just come out of the laudanum the first time. “Just a fellow they hung in Waco after his aim improved.”

  *

  In the morning they breakfasted in a little restaurant patronized by farm laborers, whose conversation was predominately Spanish and Russian. The walls were redwood planks hung with Indian blankets and old farm implements. A tin sign with a pig painted on it advertised a brand of overalls that wore like a hog’s snout.

  Siringo found the Mexican food on a par with Los Angeles’, and painfully inferior to Texas’. The cornbread tasted like cow patties soaked in axle grease.

  Hammett, drinking coffee laced with Scotch from his flask, said, “How can a man eat beans and peppers in the morning? I can’t face a fried egg before eleven.”

  “I never skipped a square meal on purpose in my life. You never know where the next one’s coming from.” He pointed with his tortilla. “I’d advise you to lay off that busthead before we go out to the ranch. Women can smell it on a man for a country mile.”

  “If you’re such an expert on women, why aren’t you back East letting your daughter take care of you?”

  “Why ain’t you in Montana, saying ‘I do’?”

  Hammett stopped up the flask. “On second thought, I think I’ll try the liver and onions.”

  *

  “Yes?”

  As their cab rattled off, Siringo and Hammett took off their hats for the benefit of the woman standing in the open door of the cottage. She looked sixty, but was probably younger. Jack London’s large, melancholy eyes and well-developed forehead, prominent in photographs and well represented in his daughter’s features, were even more pronounced. The woman wore her graying hair in a chignon and a black bombazine dress clasped at the throat with a cameo brooch. She appeared to be in bereavement.

  “Good morning, ma’am. I’m Dashiell Hammett and this is Charles Siringo. Mrs. London may have mentioned us.”

  “Yes.” The word sounded even more guarded when not presented as a question.

  “She ain’t expecting us, but it’s important all the same,” Siringo said.

  “Yes?”

  “We should be writing this dialogue down,” Hammett told his partner.

  “It’s all right, Eliza.”

  Charmian, appearing behind her, wore a flannel shirt in a buffalo check and a suede skirt split for riding.

  “Mrs. Shepard, gentlemen. Jack’s sister.”

  “How do.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

  “Yes.” The woman withdrew.

  “Talks your ear off, don’t she?” Siringo grinned.

  Charmian’s eyes smiled.

  “She practically raised Wolf. She’s still looking after him even in death. We had an awful row after I told her about you. You lied to her at the start, and that’s the story on you as far as she’s concerned. You could push her out of the path of a runaway wagon and her impression would be the same.”

  “Can’t say as I blame her. Telling her he’s a historian was Mr. Hammett’s notion, and I was darnfool enough to go along with it. I apologize for any unpleasantness.”

  “You have news?”

  Hammett spoke up. “No. So far all we’ve been able to dig up is more questions.”

  “Can we talk inside? I’m worried about the hands. They worshipped Jack. They might do something rash if they overheard us.”

  “They got bark on ’em, that’s certain,” Siringo said.

  “Your foot, Mr. Hammett. Did you have an accident?”

  “No, ma’am, I didn’t.”

  She hesitated, then stepped aside from the doorway. “We’ll use Jack’s den. These days it’s the only place on earth where I feel safe.”

  When they entered the small room off the dining room/parlor, Siringo saw why.

  It was a comfortable clutter of curling papers and lopsided books spilling off homemade shelves onto the surfaces of a small writing table and rolltop desk, and from there onto the bare plank floor; some of the stacks of sheets were tied with string—manuscripts, Siringo guessed—while others were loose, those not weighted down with native rocks, pine knots, sextants, and compasses stirring like cats awakening in the breeze through the curtained windows. Examples of the late owner’s handwriting occupied the desk with a straight-back chair drawn up to it, and a portab
le typewriter with celluloid-inlaid keys in a battered wooden case with Jack London’s name on the lid stood on the table facing a wooden swivel. It felt very much like a den belonging to a large and friendly bear, close and cozy and masculine. It smelled of cigarette smoke, sunk deep into every porous surface.

  “Where’s your luggage?” Charmian asked.

  “Back at the hotel. We’re traveling light.” Siringo leaned the scabbarded Winchester in a corner. “This is a crackerjack room for a man.”

  “We’ve kept it as he left it, except for dusting and sweeping. Eliza insisted. I thought it best to donate everything to a museum—a shrine can be a discomforting thing to live with—but I came around to her way of thinking. Sometimes it seems as if he’s just stepped out for a walk, and will return in a few minutes burning with ideas.”

  Hammett said, “I heard he was having trouble coming up with them in the end.”

  “You mean because he bought them from struggling writers? That was just his way of helping them out without insulting them with charity. He had so many ideas of his own, he gave them away to other writers. Sometimes I think it annoyed him when he had a new one. They burned holes in his pockets like money, and he was haunted by the premonition he wouldn’t live long enough to see them through.”

  “I know how he felt,” said Hammett.

  “I don’t,” said Siringo; “but I don’t make stuff up. I write what happened, and I’m running out.”

  Charmian shook her head. “I can’t join your argument. I’m not a writer myself, although I typed some of Jack’s manuscripts, on a horrible invisible typewriter I had to roll up the platen on to see the mistakes I’d made. All I can say is, I feel nothing bad can happen to me when I’m in this room.”

  “I’d keep the curtains closed,” Siringo said.

  27

  “What does it mean?” Charmian looked at them over the tops of her reading glasses. She sat in the swivel chair with her back to the writing table, holding the notes Hammett had made from the green leather notebook.

  Siringo, seated at the desk with an elbow resting on the blotter, said, “Hammett thinks they’re payouts. I agree. Since I found them in Kennedy’s locker, it stands to reason he’s the one doing the paying. Question is what he’s buying, and where’s the money coming from.”