But his companions were not. Leacock, who was anything but ungenerous with his hoard of rumor, filled him in on the popular history of his Ocean View Park acquaintance. Her late husband, it was suspected, had succumbed to the Demon before he got round to filing a claim on his bonanza. A miners’ court held that his signature on a late-found document in Sacramento was valid, and his heirs assured.
“There you have it,” said Bolton. “However do these things get started?”
“Possibly it’s because every other bit of paper endorsed by the dead man bore an X instead of a full signature.”
“A man can learn to read and write.”
“Perhaps. I should think busting rocks from first light to moonrise on hardtack and water would leave a fellow too broke down for books and schoolwork. But you know the life, and I do not.”
Providentially, their waiter arrived to refill Bolton’s water glass, providing him the opportunity to change the subject; but he was troubled by Leacock’s revelation, and in solitude returned to it from time to time.
He considered taking money face-to-face with an empty gun in wild country a more straightforward enterprise than doing it with a full pen in a parlor; but the woman was comely, if a bit hefty from the rich San Francisco cuisine, and generous with female pheromones. He continued the relationship, escorting her to museums, galleries, and other entertainments, chaperoned by her companion; and when the time came for him to slip the key to his quarters under the table in the little tea room off the foyer of the Webb House, it was the companion who transferred it to her reticule and climbed the back stairs to his floor.
SIX
The hound and the fox, they are rarely at peace;
one chasing, one fleeing, will they ever surcease?
Yet would they stop running, and examine their place,
they might see they’re each just a dog in the race.
“Is this the item you’ve been expecting, sir?”
The postal clerk laid the parcel, wrapped in brown paper and bound with cord, on the counter. He was a doughy man in his twenties whose cravat would not be restrained by the bib of his apron, a chronic disorder and a source of mild nuisance to Bolton, who forbore to remark upon it.
The customer examined the package, plastered with stamps and bearing a Chicago postmark. “It is indeed.” He thanked the young man and touched the brim of his bowler.
A man who left nothing to chance, he took the bundle back to his room before opening it and trying on the contents, standing on the throw rug to avoid scratching the soles on bare floor, should the fit prove inadequate and require returning. When he lifted the cover from the pasteboard box, a puff of new leather came out; not quite as inebriating as ground grain in a sack-turned-mask, but pleasing as fresh-ground coffee beans.
Fastidiously, he transferred the protective nest of excelsior—shredded remnants of pages from the Montgomery Ward catalogue—to the trash basket, removed wads of Chicago Sun from the toes of the boots nestled yin-yang fashion inside the box, and inspected each. They were a somewhat disconcerting shade of yellow, offending both his sense of gentlemanly dress and his fears of easy identification; but the dust of the road would take care of that. The soles were reassuringly thick, the V-shaped elastic inserts on the inside of the shanks pliable. He tugged them on with little resistance, stood, and stamped his heels inside. They slipped a little when he walked in them, but that was good; his old feet had suffered enough from too-close contact with stiff animal hide over long distances. He circled the room, leaving the shelter of the rug, and approved.
The true test was still a way off. When the arrangement the widow (and the paid companion) ended with her decision to trade northern California’s fog and damp for a season in Denver, the expense of entertaining gentle company departed with them, and he discovered that his cash reserves would support his quiet masculine lifestyle through the following spring and, if he forewent the races and fights, a month of summer.
This decision was precipitated less by common frugality than caution. He read with interest an editorial in the Union of Yreka, California:
We learn the Shasta and Redding Stage was stopped on Thursday morning near Shasta by highwaymen and compelled to give up the Wells, Fargo Company’s express.… This makes the third time within a week that highwaymen have stopped the stage within Shasta County and the fourth time within two weeks. This is getting somewhat monotonous for the people of Shasta County and we expect to hear about the next thing, that some highwaymen have been seriously hurt.…
If the publisher of a journal, whose livelihood was founded on subscriptions, was growing weary of road agentry, then so were his readers. That a shipment should be waylaid was no longer just a possibility, but an event to be taken for granted. This was a perception the Company could not afford to be broadcast. Bolton placed no credence in the editor’s suggestion that Washington be petitioned to supply an escort of U.S. Cavalry to a civilian enterprise—it had steadfastly resisted every call to interfere in domestic matters since the bad old days of vigilantism—but arms were inevitable. Black Bart had been scrupulous to avoid encounters with trained shotgun messengers by preying upon modest shipments, but the zealotry of his competitors might inspire additional recruitment and deployment across the board. Patience was the soul of discretion, and he was confident that Wells and Fargo’s native parsimony would reassert itself once the cost of prevention outdistanced that of plunder. Give them some victories, or a lengthy dry spell while the red ink mounted and the black ink remained static, and the hired guns would be seeking other employment.
Meanwhile, Black Bart would take a piece of his retirement the way most pensioners did, by dining simply, doling out his pleasures, and counting pennies. He returned the marvelous new boots to their box and placed it behind his collection of bowlers on the top shelf of the wardrobe, humming to himself.
Oh, there was Major Thompson, turned up the other day.
He said he would hold ’em up or the devil’d be to pay.
For he could hold a rifle and draw a bead so fine
on those shotgun messengers of the Wells, Fargo line.
Jim Hume, who ordinarily drew fuel from the din of Montgomery Street, shut his windows against a drunk singing “The Wells, Fargo Line” as he passed the building. The tune was getting to be as popular as “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” but a damn sight more irritating; the fellow could not be unaware of his audience. The day was coming when Black Bart would command a quatrain of his own.
Meanwhile Hume took bittersweet solace from the death of a “flour sack bandit” at the hands of a fearless Company messenger whose ten-gauge shotgun had taken off both the man’s mask and his head on the Redding run at four o’clock on a frosty morning in December. A hastily convened posse had tracked his two companions to a bed of pine needles, where they were engaged in sleeping off a celebratory drunk, using stolen mail sacks for pillows. The report of the slain badman quickened the detective’s heart, but he was disillusioned to learn that the stage’s lead horse had been slain in the first round of gunfire at the scene of the robbery. Although he clung to his belief that Black Bart held the animal in contempt, his behavior on four previous occasions predisposed him against violence directed at man or beast. Plainly, Bart’s preferred method of disguise had been preempted by an admirer. If, God forbid, Bart’s predilection toward poetasty became general knowledge, Robbers Roost would be paved with couplets, sonnets, and dithyrambs, and the publisher of the Yreka Union would forget his jade and engage James Russell Lowell to edit.
Apart from the satisfaction of having checked three predators off the Company’s roster, Hume took little comfort from the capture of a trio of blundering comic-opera scoundrels; he flattered himself he could have done the thing himself by way of Western Union, without leaving his desk, and anticipated no more than a paragraph in the columns to commemorate the affair, what with range wars in New Mexico, silver-strike fury in Arizona, and Jesse James sightings everywhere burning out pres
ses across the continent. He wanted this Black Bart, for no especial reason apart from the challenge. Then let the rapscallions of the press make what they want of the thief’s idiosyncrasies. Not for Hume’s own aggrandizement; certainly not for that. He cared not a whit for the glory the association might bring; truth to tell, he disliked seeing his name in print, and wholeheartedly detested being called upon to discuss the details of his own activities on behalf of his employers. As well ask a dry-goods merchant how many overalls he’d sold; what did it signify, so long as he was still in business at the end of the year? A man could afford to be magnanimous in victory, that was all.
So the two men sat in their respective lairs—literally around the corner from each other; they had more than once passed on the street, without so much as noticing another stranger among the hundreds who swelled the population daily. One man faced east, the other west, their profiles beak-nosed and high-browed, like obverse sides of a two-headed coin; neither knowing how much he resembled the other: seeker and sought, in a tale that might have been told by Poe, in which one destroyed his double, and in the act destroyed himself. Neither knew how closely their lives matched. Hume, like Bolton, enjoyed laying wagers on contests of skill and speed; both took pride in keeping meticulous records, the bandit of his finances, the detective of his investigations. They preferred a four-in-hand knot over the half-hitch; crossed their t’s with a bold stroke, forming a dog-trot roof across most of the word; each had been reared in rural New York State, a continent and also a world away from bawdy San Francisco, two years apart, and moved to the Midwest to farm. Both had arrived in the gold fields in the fall of 1850, and met with scant success. It was not impossible that they had drunk ice-cold water from the same stream, passed each other on the way to and from their claims, and staked them in Sacramento within days of each other.
In 1877, James B. Hume knew nothing about Black Bart except the vague (and oftentimes contrary) descriptions left by confused passengers and defensive drivers, his devious dressing-up of his robbery sites, his courtly conceit when demanding his booty (as if “please” gave the drivers the option of refusal), the Calvary-cross shape left by his knife upon slashing open a mail sack, his shotgun (never fired, even to instill fear), his soiled duster, his “Ku-Kluxer” headmask, his hatchet, and his singular method of transportation for a criminal undertaking, which generally depended on the briefest of confrontations followed by the swiftest possible exit, commonly aboard a reliable horse; this one depended on his feet. The detective placed his faith in the duster and flour sack, the hatchet and the gun, the tools of Bart’s trade—things the witnesses all seemed to agree upon—and his bootprints in the dirt, unaccompanied by the marks of shod hooves. The scrap of doggerel he’d left at the scene of his latest atrocity was frosting only, but volatile stuff should it fall into the laps of the accursed journalists. It was just the sort of shiny detritus they fell upon, like crows on foil.
Charles E. Bolton knew even less about his adversary—nothing, in fact, owing to Hume’s abhorrence of notoriety. His name had not yet appeared in the newspapers in connection with the case. That would not be the situation much longer, thanks to the insatiable appetite of the carrion-birds of the press.
How Hume loathed them; their filthy bowlers, yellow collars, tattered topcoats, shrill, overlapping queries, and constant scribbling in their writing-blocks, picking over the juiciest morsels left to rot in the sun, reeking and aswarm with flies, to serve them up to their eager readers like the pheasants the Palace Hotel imported from England, packed in dry ice and roasted to a golden turn. A brigand in California, a railroad magnate caught with his thumb in the till, a ship lost in the Atlantic, preferably packed with dead passengers; they throve on disaster.
Down in the street, the drunk had resumed his taunt, the rise and fall of his atrocious chant penetrating window and shutters. But no, Hume reasoned, as he flung up the sash to rid the room of its tobacco fog, and heard only the usual clatter and bang from the pavement below; it was just his imagination run riot. The double panes had snuffed out most of the cacophony of the calamitous city, and the bothersome brute had long since migrated to the next gin-house, to spread his poisonous rhyme throughout the establishment. The blasted air had tunneled its way into Hume’s brain like a burrowing insect, playing over and again, like a hurdy-gurdy on Pacific Street grinding out its wheezy refrain. It was one of those ditties, which, like “Sweet Betsy from Pike,” took on a new stanza with each listener; and each chorus a nail in Hume’s coffin with Mr. Valentine, the superintendent, and a most impatient man, who knew nothing at all of the quiet perseverance required of the hunt. Popular music-hall fare had a permanence that history itself, and human memory, lacked; give an event the proper blend of horror and romance, add in rhythm and lilt, and it became as much a part of vulgar culture as Johnny Appleseed and Guy Fawkes. A detective was only as good as his most recent arrest, just as a bandit was only as good as his most recent robbery; and a man as clever as Black Bart, who with nothing more than a handful of sticks had worked out the problem of acting alone—thus eliminating the danger of betrayal by a loquacious accomplice—might go on stinging the Company long after his pursuer had lost his place.
The chief of detectives, who prided himself upon the scientific process, eschewing emotion, could not know that by the following August, the game he’d entered into would turn into something more personal than any of the others, and that in addition to Bart’s mere apprehension he would long to mount his head on his office wall, stuffed with sawdust and with a plaque underneath reading:
WELLS, FARGO NEVER FORGETS
Perhaps that would drive the troublesome tune out of his skull.
SEVEN
Now, the fox seldom sees the face of the hound;
when the dog bays, he scurries to get underground.
But Bart got a look at his hunter by chance;
it was then they went into the highwayman’s dance.
Dail Callahan had emigrated from county Kilkenny with his parents to San Francisco a year after the first color surfaced at Sutter’s Mill, father Fergus having sold his plows, sacks of manure, and stacked Surcoat brand overalls, along with his shop, to pay for steamship passage and outfit himself for prospecting.
He found no gold; at least not in its raw state.
“Come too late to the ball,” he told those who asked.
Disdaining to tot up his losses, he’d followed the lead of visionaries who’d spun dross into dollars by unloading their equipment to fellow hopefuls at a steep profit and investing the proceeds in other enterprises. He established a dry-goods store on Mission Street, in a building then under construction on the site of a Chinese laundry burned out by Denis Kearney’s vigilantes.
It was a generation before the Callahans found themselves in circumstances superior to those they’d left behind. Dail, Fergus’ principal heir, now supplied his customers with all their daily necessaries, including picks and shovels, cultivators, cloth goods, ladies’ Parisienne hats, bone china, Pears soap, licorice twists, stem-winders in gold, silver, and pewter, Kidney-Wort, hair restorers for men and women, a brass Babcock fire extinguisher the size of a fireplug, and a fine array of firearms (“The best selection west of Denver”) and boxes of ammunition stacked ten feet high on shelves behind the counter, graduating from light birdshot at waist level past Smokeless Sporting Rifle and Military Cartridges to buffalo rounds accessible only by ladder or with the handy tool he’d inherited from his father, with a clamp on one end connected by a spring to a trigger on the other.
Pressed for details, Callahan allowed as how no one had actually come in to purchase the heavier artillery since the big shaggies had been hunted clean out of existence. However, he ceded the valuable space it took up because the oblong crate and its ominously stenciled DANGER—HIGH EXPLOSIVES furnished a topic of conversation that frequently led to a transaction, especially among pilgrims conditioned by spectacular accounts of Russian imperial bison hunts and sharpshooting e
xploits by homegrown frontiersmen of the Bill Cody sort, inflated sufficiently to bring a flush to the cheeks of Natty Bumppo. The longer a curious party remained in conversation, the more likely the sale.
For himself, the proprietor wasn’t any great shakes as a “conversator,” claiming not only that he’d never kissed the Blarney Stone, but he’d not heard it so much as mentioned until he came to America; “nor leprechauns nor shamrocks neither, come to that,” he’d added, for he prided himself upon his Presbyterian practicality as opposed to Dublinesque Roman Catholic mysticism. Apart from that subject—which came up whenever a customer commented on his taciturnity—he let others discover the stout container on the top shelf with its Pandora’s-box warning and ask what it contained. Then he would affirm that the caliber and manufacturer had been endorsed in advertisements by none other than Buffalo Bill, he of the Wild West exhibition, and did nothing to discourage assumptions that the famed frontiersman was a frequent patron. He’d found exploiting a Yankee mythology more beneficial to his commercial interests than sprites and four-leaf clovers.
“I’m not interested in that eyewash,” Jim Hume told the merchant, barely into his account of the Battle at Warbonnet Creek. In truth the detective chief’s gaze had wandered ceilingward only because it was his custom upon entering any public place to look all about him. “This is what I came in for.” He produced a cigar-shaped object from a pocket and placed it on the counter.
Callahan looked at it without picking it up. It was made of stiff paper, hollow and faded red, with a brass ferrule, pitted by weather, and the manufacturer’s name stenciled on the paper. Finally he took it between thumb and forefinger and sniffed at the open end, his nose wrinkling away from burnt sulfur and saltpeter. He turned it to peer at the stamping on the flanged metal end, confirming what he’d already determined. He put it down.
“Ten-gauge buck,” he reported, in the lilt he’d brought over at age sixteen and brushed up in Corktown every Saturday night.
The Ballad of Black Bart Page 4
