Wyatt in Wichita

by John Shirley

  Wyatt found the sheriff reading a dime novel at his desk: Wild Bill, Slayer of Badmen. Sheriff Purcheson was a balding, pot-bellied man in a rumpled brown suit, with side-whiskers that merged into his mustache, and a bulbous, broken-veined nose.

  “I’m Earp, deputy from Wichita,” Wyatt said.

  “Are you?” said Purcheson, putting the dime novel aside with a sigh. “Must you be indeed? I reckon you must.”

  “There was a shooting on the train—or close to the train, when we made a stop. Two men shot dead.”

  “Speak up, all the caterwauling from them cattle is soaking up your voice. You say a shooting? What’s the particulars?”

  Wyatt gave him the story he and Ben Thompson had agreed on, saying “some gunman with a grudge” had shot the two outlaws down, probably someone from the train; the gunman didn’t step forward afterward to claim credit, perhaps fearing retaliation from Blackburn’s gang.

  Wyatt didn’t mention Thompson. The story wasn’t exactly a lie—Thompson had gotten onto the train, later, after all. As it happened, shortly after arrival in Medicine Lodge, the plainsman on the train took credit for the killings; holding forth in a saloon, he described his gunfight with the outlaws in hair-raising detail, and afterwards was widely regarded as a dangerous pistolero.

  “Why was you on the train?” the sheriff asked, rubbing his eyes.

  “I sent you a cable saying why.”

  “Oh, so you did. You’re looking for Abel Pierce. Well …” Purcheson shrugged. “Pierce was here. But I could not detain him without a clear-cut reason. And the fact is …” He bit off a plug of chaw, chewed it for awhile, staring into the distance, while Wyatt waited, quietly steaming, for the rest of the story. Finally Purcheson completed his sentence. “… and the fact is, Mr. Pierce left about an hour ago, maybe more. Rode out on his horse, with his traveling bags strapped behind him. I figure he’s far from town, by now. Might’ve headed south, or east, I ain’t sure.”

  “He ‘left’? You mean you let him go,” Wyatt said icily. He knew it wasn’t politic to put it that way, but he couldn’t keep it in.

  “I had to let him go—” Purcheson said, spitting at the cuspidor and missing. “Damn! Now I got to get that squaw in here to clean that up. Now as to Pierce—he’s an important … he’s a citizen with rights and you had no … well, you didn’t give me no clear and legalized reason to hold him.”

  “I cabled you that he was to be questioned about a murder. That’s reason to hold a man for a day at least.”

  Purcheson worked on the rest of his plug, meditating his reply.

  Wyatt didn’t wait for it. He turned and walked out of the office. There was no use wasting more time with a bribed Sheriff.

  At the train station Wyatt was told that no train had left in the last hour nor would one depart for another several hours, the engineers having to turn the bodies of the outlaws over to the coroner, and sign affidavits. The stationmaster said that Pierce had taken a big, black horse from the holding corral used by the train station. “I assume, sir, that it was his own horse.”

  Wyatt retrieved his own mount and set off southward, galloping as long as he felt his mount could take it. The Sheriff had seen Pierce leaving town on horseback—and south was likely the way he went.

  * * *

  The sun was dipping behind the poplars and pines, and the weather was cooling off considerably when Wyatt caught up with Abel Pierce. The cattle baron had stopped to water his horse at Chance Creek. When Wyatt rode up, the water was striped by the rouged shadows of the poplars lining the stream.

  Pierce was just standing up from filling his canteen; even before seeing Wyatt he had a dour, put-upon look on his face, probably stewing over having to ride out early to avoid a mere Assistant Town Marshal.

  Seeing Wyatt canter up, pistol in hand, Pierce dropped his hand to his side and said, “Boy, you have vexed me one time too many. You better have a damned good reason to point that pistol at me.” His voice was guttural with barely-controlled anger.

  “It’s in case you get ambitious with your own weapon, Mr. Pierce.” Wyatt turned his horse so he could keep his gun leveled at Pierce as he dismounted. “Drop your gun belt and move away from it. Sit on that little rock over there, and we’ll have a talk. I have a letter to show you …”

  * * *

  “It was long ago,” Pierce was saying,” when I was young. Belle LeTrouveau was a little slip of a girl, not much more than eighteen … I fell for her hard, first time I saw her, in Baton Rouge …” He broke off, again squinting at the letter from the U.S. Marshal in Louisiana. “It don’t say much about her. But see here, boy—I don’t see what you’re followin’ me for. How is this the law’s business?” He tilted his head back, giving Wyatt his best imitation of a judge looking down at him from the bench.

  Wyatt felt it was best to holster his gun, for the moment, so that Pierce would feel he was talking freely and keep on. But he kept his hand on the holster, in easy reach of the gun butt. “Mr. Pierce, I expect you know the girl who was killed in Wichita was Belle LeTrouveau’s daughter. I can prove you were there, in the building, the night Dandi was killed. I have a witness.” Mostly he was bluffing, since Henry had left town. “Too much of a coincidence, your being her father, you seeing her that night, then she turns up dead. Maybe you took her for a whore, since she was in a whorehouse. And you didn’t want a whore around calling you daddy.”

  “You’re accusing me of her murder? You got no real proof of that.”

  “If I poke around a bit more … it’s at least enough to get it in front of a jury. Could be they’d acquit you. But you wouldn’t like sitting in front of that jury. If you’ve got another story, better tell me now.”

  Pierce looked at the letter, then at the stream. He seemed on the fence about whether to talk. Finally he turned fiercely to Wyatt, firing the words like bullets from a Gatling gun: “I’m too damned big a man to scare that way! I’m a big, wide man you couldn’t ride across in twenty days!” He stood, and commenced pacing up and down, crumpling the letter in his fist, his voice getting shriller, his face redder. “Why if you was to say Pierce Country instead of Texas, people’d know you meant Texas! I’m as much as I want to be and that’s ten times more than any other man! I am kin to John Alden and President Franklin Pierce! I am a laird of the land! Damn your impertinence!” His eyes glittered, the pupils sharpened to points.

  The hint of madness in those eyes reminded Wyatt he did have one more card to draw. Something Dudley had mentioned. “Mr. Pierce … maybe you’d like to take a moment and think about it. Maybe—say a prayer.”

  The cattle baron stopped pacing and blinked at Wyatt in angry confusion. “A prayer!”

  “Or—ask advice. Some folks like to ask advice of those who’ve gone on before …”

  Pierce’s eyes went distant, glassy. His lips moved without sound. It seemed to Wyatt that he was saying, Uncle Fergus …

  “Maybe … Maybe I will take a turn up the stream, and think a bit …” Pierce allowed.

  Wyatt reached out and gently took the letter back from Pierce, nodding affably. “You go ahead, sir,” Wyatt said, careful to sound respectful. It seemed smart, just now. “I’ll watch your horse for you. Just stay where I can see you, if you please.”

  Pierce snorted. “If I please! Or even if I don’t!” He stuck his hands in his trouser pockets and went stalking up the bank of the stream, muttering.

  Asking advice, Wyatt figured, of Uncle Fergus.

  * * *

  Time passed. The creek slipped endlessly by, chuckling at human vanity. Somewhere overhead, a red-tailed hawk keened to its mate that here, here is meat to be had; a fat ground squirrel, a mouse. The sun eased itself a little lower yet …

  Maybe half an hour went by, before Pierce returned. He sat on the little boulder on the edge of the creek; Wyatt sat on a tussock of earth and grass nearby. Wyatt’s gun was not pointed at Pierce but it was under his hand, laid flat across his right knee, and it’d be but th
e work of a split second to take aim and fire. Though Pierce had settled down to talk, appearing ready to relieve his mind, Wyatt didn’t trust him.

  “Where do you want me to start, Deputy?” Pierced asked at length.

  “How about all the way back. Right at the beginning … With Belle LeTrouveau.” Wyatt reasoned that if Pierce got involved in his story, he’d have less chance to work up a lie.

  “From the beginning?” After a long moment, Pierce sighed, and nodded, and went on, “Well, Belle LeTrouveau, she was a respectable girl, but her family had died on her … She had no money left. She thought a man might save her. A good marriage …”

  He paused, and Wyatt thought of Mattie. Her family had died on her too. There was all too often no one there to help when a woman lost her family. Maybe Mattie had fallen too quickly into prostitution. Pierce’s Belle had tried something a little better—anyhow, a “huckleberry above a persimmon better”, as Wyatt’s mother would say.

  Pierce licked his lips, and continued, “Belle was down to what I suppose was her last two dollars. She went to a spring dance—I expect she was there to angle for a husband. Now I was in Baton Rouge on my way to New Orleans, with a friend of mine from Louisiana, a party-loving body who’d been working the cattle with me. I was just a poor drover, but I’d had a stroke of luck—I won me five hundred dollars in one night in a hot poker game. Nearly got shot out of that game, but I got away with my skin and the pot. I bought myself a nice suit, and went to the dance. Then I met Belle … and like as not she danced with me the first time just to be on display out on that dance floor. Little thing, she was, but the eye took to her and she knew it. Her interest perked up some when I flashed my roll of bills, sort of by accident, mentioning I was staying at the Crystal Hotel. That was the best hotel in town, a pricey place. In fact I had rented no room there—but I figured I could get one. I let on like I was … oh, like I was the man I am now. A man of property. I always said, if you believed it enough, and you fought for it, you got there. That’s what my … what an uncle of mine told me. You got any liquor in that saddlebag, boy?”

  “No sir, I don’t. So she figured you were a high roller before you were one?”

  “She did. I confess I deceived her. But she liked me, I could tell, so I calculated to clear it up later once we were good and truly tangled up. I took her with me to New Orleans—but she wouldn’t share a bed with me, not at first. She said we could be ‘genteel traveling companions, like friends in the philosophy of Plato’.” He chuckled at the memory. “She let me kiss her once or twice, nothing more. We got to New Orleans and I took her any place she wanted to go to. I bought her a seventy-five dollar necklace—worth a deal more than that too, but I bought it from a man who’d lifted it somewhere himself—and I wined and dined her, but she made fun of me, saying I’d come into riches knowing nothing of cultured things. Seems my cultivation in Rhode Island was sparse. Still, she seemed to like me, so it happened that the night I was about to run out of money she had a glass of champagne too many and she let me into her room … And she gave herself to me.” Pierce smiled unhappily, his eyes unfocused. “The next day …” He paused to swallow, to clear his throat. A moistness gleamed in his eyes. “… the next day she wasn’t feeling so good and asked me what my intentions was. I had to admit I was just a poor cowboy, and was now broke. I expect she had been stringing me along to be a husband, waiting for me to come out with the question. I come out with it right then but she just laughed in my face. Why, a lady like her couldn’t hook up with me, a man who stares at the rumps of steers all day, nothing but holes in his pockets. She would soon enough meet a rich man, she said—and in the meantime she had an offer to work in a hotel of class, in New Orleans, supervising the housekeeping.

  “I could not persuade her to go with me. I was embittered too, with her laughing at me. So I walked out and took the first coach to Texas. Then I got caught up in the war. I heard no more of her, till after the war I chanced to be in New Orleans. I heard that the hotel she’d worked for had been swallowed up in the Reconstruction by some carpetbagger, and a man who’d worked with her said she’d been put on the street. So now Belle was living with a daughter somewhere, and had taken to drinking. She was taking in laundry and such. I might’ve had an uneasy feeling about that daughter. The age was right. But I remembered Belle laughing at me when I asked for her hand. Still and all … sometimes I’ve wished …” He shook his head. “What it comes to is, I didn’t look her up. I went back to Texas … and heard no more of her till that night in Wichita.”

  “When you met Dandi,” Wyatt prompted.

  “That’s when I met Dandi,” Pierce agreed, his voice soft. “The only time … Now, I like to bed a certain kind of woman, and the younger the better. Why, as young as thirteen’s not too green for me. Johann described what I liked to Bessie Earp—he used the name Johnny Brown. So he makes the appointment and I go to that place in Delano where she has her women working—I guess your brother James can’t have his little bit of a casino on the respectable side of the river if she works her girls up there—”

  Wyatt shifted uncomfortably at all this talk of his brother’s connection to whoring. He suspected that Pierce was dwelling on it to encourage that discomfort. Maybe to send a message: You’re no better than me, Earp. If Pierce heard about the gunboats, he’d crow over that too.

  “—Anyhow, Johann Burke and I went there to have us some girls. Ol’ Johann—why, to tell you the truth, he has started to give me the skeeries. Some as said he’s a ‘raw-head-and-bloody-bones’ monster, and I laughed at it, for he’s a handy man to have, but he takes too easily to killing. Enjoys it. Me, I do it when it’s got to be done, but …”

  Pierce fell silent, for a few moments, perhaps sensing he was in danger of saying too much. Staring into the darkening creek, he broke a poplar twig from a fallen branch, began to shred the twig into small pieces, as he went on. “Anyhow, I was in your sister-in-law’s place waiting for a girl, and in comes Dandi. She seemed reluctant to get to it, nor was she dressed like a whore. I was staring at her, seeing a ghost: the eyes were different, but most ways she’s the spitting image of her mother. Johann is there with me and he says ‘Seems like she’s got you smitten right off, Mr. Pierce.’ And the girl’s eyes get wide and she says, ‘Then it is so—you are Mr. Abel Pierce!’ I blurt out yes, I am, and she seems like she can’t make up her mind to speak. Finally she tells me that I’m her …” He broke off again, clearing his throat to hide the hoarseness of emotion. “… her papa. She reaches into one of those little bags a woman wears on a string around her wrist, pulls out a rolled up photograph of me and her mother together … I thought I’d jump through the ceiling. ‘Papa!’ she says again. Insisting, do y’see. ‘It’s me—I’m your daughter!’ She goes on with a speech about how she never thought to see me in such a place, but she would not judge me because here she was herself. Perhaps, she said, I was only there to find her. She had only just commenced to work here—a man had bribed a lady in Louisiana for her, and taken her to Kansas City, she says, and then she run off to Wichita, because some cowboy in Kansas City—that was Choppy Blanchard, whom I fired first chance—Choppy had told her he worked for Abel Pierce. And Abel Pierce, he tells her, is in Wichita. So she goes with Bessie Earp, and comes looking for me. A great weeping speech she made about it. She insisted she had done no whoring but she had to come here only because someone said Mr. Pierce was here. I could see she didn’t want to be in that whorehouse.” Pierce had to break off to keep from tears himself. He didn’t entirely succeed.

  Wyatt waited. Cattails waved in the increasing breeze; frogs commenced to call out.

  At last Pierce wiped his eyes, and went on, “Deputy, I was filled with horror. I had suspected that girl of Belle’s was mine and I had not gone to look into the matter and—now she was in a brothel, and housekeeper or not—how long before she became a whore? I suppose I should have taken her out of there. Maybe if I’d had time to think about it, I would have. I r
eckon so. But right then I says, ‘No, girl, maybe you’re the daughter of a woman I once took to bed, but she mocked me, and there could have been other men, there’s no telling I’m your father—and I deny you, and will have none of you!’ Yet I know she was my daughter—I could see it in her. She has my mother’s eyes. And you just know your kin … I did not believe she was not a prostitute in that place—and it tortured me to know my daughter was a whore. Later, I heard that it was true, she was but a housekeeper …” He let out a long, slow breath that whistled softly as it came.

  “There’s more, I believe,” Wyatt prompted, gently as he could manage. His hand still on the gun.

  Pierce scratched his chin. “Believe it or not, Johann Burke suggests, right then and there, that I could still bed Dandi anyway—I nearly hit him, but it would’ve been worth my life to do that, so I just turn and walk out. She’s back there weeping, and weeping. I can still hear it …” He threw the twig in the creek, watched it float downstream, his eyes glistening. Then he took another deep breath and went on, “So Burke and I go outside—then Burke, who’d been drinking absinthe, an indulgence of his, he says he’s going back in, to have a run at one of the other girls, and I said do whatever you damned please. I couldn’t quite bring myself to leave yet—I’m just standing shufflin’ my feet outside for a little while, in that dirt track out behind the place. Maybe thinking I ought to go in for her, after all. I’m not sure how long I was out there—just pondering and pondering, feeling lost. Standing in the smell of the outhouse and feeling like I was smelling my own soul. Finally I make up my mind. ‘Maybe I can do something for her. I don’t want folks to know my kin’s a whore, or about to be a whore—but I can send her to a finishing school, far away somewhere. Get her out of that life. Maybe someday she can come and see me and I’ll feel all right about it …’ Then Burke comes out and says, ‘Mr. Pierce, that girl killed herself. She’s twisted the sheets up and hung herself. I took her down but she’s beyond saving.’ Then …”