The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  NINE

  A wolf may grow fat when the pickings are vast,

  and a man fill his purse when the money comes fast.

  But this word of warning, to one and to all:

  In life and in license, pride precedeth a fall.

  The “Sydney Duck”—as locals called the cockney refuse that had washed up from San Francisco Bay after decades of transportation to Australia for crimes bad enough to be expelled from England, but not worth hanging a man over—took note of the fine engraved pocket watch in the hand of the middle-aged swell waiting in line to enter the Hippodrome, and wiped his palms on his filthy trousers so that they wouldn’t slip when he employed them. The fellow looked fair game, straight as a cue-stick in his sporting outfit, gay but tasteful, with a quiet check, pearl-gray bowler, and gold-knobbed stick; and when he snapped shut the lid of the timepiece and tucked it into a waistcoat pocket at the end of its bright chain, a diamond the size of a cobblestone refracted green-and-violet light on the ring finger of his right hand. It was a regular spark-fawney, good for half a century in the back room of the Devil’s Kitchen. There was frost on the noggin, so he wouldn’t put up much of a fight.

  That settled the matter, as the duck wasn’t a bloke for the fracas; he earned his porridge with his fingers, not his fists. He tugged his cloth cap over his ears so as not to lose it if he had to take it on the ankles, and moved in.

  He stopped when the glittery old gent turned to the fellow nearest him and said something that made the man tip back his head and show his uppers. His laughing companion wore the blue tunic, beetle hat, and shield of the city police.

  What was a crusher doing attending an illegal prizefight? He ought to be surrounding the building with a dozen of his fellows, awaiting the signal to close in and clear it out.

  The old cove was a fly-cop, that was it; posing as a pigeon, flashing merchandise from the evidence room as bait to snare buzz-nappers like the duck. Come to study on it, he looked just like that Wells and Fargo man from the papers.

  The longer the duck watched, the more he was sure he’d spared himself a month in the clink. He stuck his dukes deep in his pockets and melted back into the safe crucible of the crowd.

  As it happened, the patrolman was under orders not to interfere with the pugilistic exhibition, regardless of the inevitable blowback from Nob Hill’s bluenoses; the word was out that Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin had come all the way up from Los Angeles to take in the fights, and it wouldn’t do an officer’s career any good to round up the state’s biggest speculator along with the mobility. A police presence was required only to see that order was maintained in the event of an upset—and to provide safe passage to the gentry when the rocks and staves came out. Like the pickpocket, he’d spotted the trappings of wealth and approached the gentleman, speaking low:

  “Your pardon, sir, but that watch and ring are like catnip in this neighborhood.”

  The man’s pale blue eyes twinkled, bright as his baubles. “Protective coloring, Officer. I thought it better they made off with brass and paste than the notes folded inside my shoe.”

  The officer tipped back his head, laughed, and strolled away, twirling his baton at the end of its strap. It was good that he was contented with his lot, with no wish for promotion to the detective bureau. The imitations had looked genuine enough for him.

  * * *

  Hiking along the familiar trail, he enjoyed the feel of worn soft wool against his skin, the smell of clean linen when he drew out his handkerchief to mop the back of his neck, the crunch of gravel under his newly broken-in boots, the suffused warmth of Indian summer on his back, like sunshine filtering through a stained-glass window. Peaches hung heavy from their branches, fat and golden as Christmas bulbs. He picked one and bit into it, spilling sticky juice onto his whiskers and obliging himself to lick it from his fingers. Just as middle age—and the first gust from the grave—ripened raw intelligence into refined wisdom, the first frost turned fruit almost achingly sweet, with the bleak awareness behind it of the dead season to come.

  Such thoughts caused a man to take stock.

  —Don’t know about you, Charlie, but I smell a bonanza.

  —I do know, Davy. Gold has no odor.

  —You’re too much of a straight thinker. I have formed the conclusion we’ll be millionaires in our twenties.

  —You aim too low, brother. There are better things than being a millionaire.

  —What are they, I should like to know?

  —Living like one.

  He looked at his surroundings. Had he and David worked this stretch? The lay bore some resemblance to the North Fork of the American, where they’d scraped up enough for a brief visit back East. It was pretty, unless you wandered far enough off the road to see the gutted earth, the forests clear-cut for cabins, sluices, and timbers, the ground scarred and puckered by unchecked erosion. In any case the brothers had spent too much time chopping and digging and washing silt from their pans, looking for bits of spark, to admire the scenery.

  They’d planned to come back and try again, but they never did; not together.

  Memories and regrets. They assayed out at a penny a ton, but one could never bring himself to leave them behind.

  He neared the settlement of Ukiah, announcing itself, after the nature of all civilization, with trash: empty tins, shattered stays, moldy newspapers, whiskey bottles, and mounds of offal, overhung with soporific flies. He changed course in order to avoid meeting anyone who might remember a stranger traveling on foot. It had been a mistake to let himself be seen the last time, without his hood. If he hadn’t been worn out from the hike and afret over his rhyme scheme, he’d have heard the wagon coming and gone to cover. The poetic conceit had gotten to be more trouble than it was worth just to needle the Company. With the town safely behind him he returned to the road, gathered more peaches in his flour sack, tied it to the barrels of his shotgun, rested the stock on his shoulder, and carried the bundle after the fashion of tramps the rest of the way to his preferred vantage point, a great boulder standing sentry by the side of the road with its back to the ocean, that body an invisible presence of salt air and walloping surf beyond pines as tall as grain elevators. He’d come two hundred miles in ten days, had depleted the last of the provisions he’d packed, and caution had prevented him from turning in to a dwelling to seek hospitality. His belly scraped against his ribs, but the peaches kept him from becoming peckish. He stretched his blanket on a bed of fragrant needles, laid out his canteen, hatchet, and shotgun, and sat, eating and tossing the pits, wrinkled like old men’s testicles, toward the racket squirrels made hop-scotching through dead maple leaves, loud shuffles a man could mistake for elk.

  There came at last a new sound, which as it increased stopped the squirrels in their tracks and stilled the voice of a bullfrog in mid-gulp in an eddy of the Klamath: a traveling symphony made up of creaking leather, joints groaning like tree branches rubbing, the merry tinkle of bit-chains, snorting breaths, and hooves thudding. It was bound south; the Arcata-Ukiah stage, and removing his hat and peeping over the top of his rock, Bart confirmed that no one shared the driver’s seat. The mud wagon and its team, shrunken by distance, hauled a plume of rust-colored dust a hundred yards long.

  Lowering himself back into cover, he returned his bowler to his head with a dandy’s flourish, popped the crown, and shook the rest of the peaches out of his flour sack, whistling under his breath his favorite air.

  * * *

  “A tall order this time, I’m afraid, Mrs. Yee.”

  Charles Bolton addressed his laundress in the same politely apologetic tone he applied to coach drivers when asking them to deliver the swag. He placed the bulging canvas drawstring sack the Webb House provided for its preferred guests on the counter with the shame-faced deference of a boy surrendering his pocket catapult to a stern headmaster. Steam drifted through the strings of beads that curtained the doorway opposite him, its damp heat felt rather than seen, laden with the fresh clean s
cents of cornstarch and warm linen.

  But the old Chinese woman was not stern with him. (How old she was, none could determine; many of her countrywomen showed faces crumpled like rice paper at the half-century mark; this one, smooth-complected as a young girl under her cap of pulled-back white hair, fine as sugar, gave the impression of having passed that point when she arrived with the first shipment of celestials in 1849.) She sorted through the shirts, collars, stockings, handkerchiefs, and underdrawers. Presently she extracted a stocking and held it aloft, the coarse wool twisted as a root and clotted with spiny seed-cases. She might have been holding up a dead rat by the tail. “You should wear gaiters, Mr. Bo-ton. I can wash and hang out the rest in the time it takes to comb out the cockleburs.”

  His eyes creased at the corners. Discussing his intimate garments with a woman he scarcely knew was tantamount to conferring with a doctor on the subject of gallstones.

  “Gaiters chafe, and are too hot besides. I cover a lot of ground inspecting my claims.”

  “You are too old to be out hiking. A gentleman who dresses like you can afford to hire someone.”

  “A lady of your experience should take her own advice. You ought to be rocking and sipping tea on some back porch instead of pressing clothes in a hotbox.”

  “Who, if not me? My husband and sons left me to work for the railroad and I can trust no one else not to scorch and use too much starch. This, Mr. Bo-ton”—she held up a soiled linen collar—“I should hate to let a fine man like you strangle like a highbinder on the gallows.”

  “I bow to your wisdom, madam.”

  And he did.

  * * *

  The first reports of the holdup near Ukiah were on Hume’s desk when a telegram arrived bearing sketchy details of an assault upon the stage from Covelo, the next day along the Potter Valley Road, less than twenty miles away from the first, and bound for the same destination. By now the local authorities were schooled enough in Black Bart’s methods to report that empty mail sacks had been found opened with T-shaped slashes in both cases.

  “No poem,” he muttered.

  Sheriff Ben Thorn snorted. “Maybe he’s dried up.”

  “Not where it counts. I can’t remember the last time anyone struck two of our coaches inside twenty-four hours.”

  “They say fortune favors the bold. I’ve not seen it myself. It leads to carelessness. I expect we’ll have him in irons by Christmas.”

  The detective watched the peacekeeper twirling the platinum crook of his new stick. “I find that observation ironic.”

  “I don’t follow you.”

  “It wasn’t important—to me.” He shook his head. “If I were to leave such things to chance, I wouldn’t take it against Valentine to give me the sack.”

  “Perhaps now Bart’s laid his pen to rest, the mongrels of the press will move on to other things.”

  “They won’t. They’re like badgers once they have their teeth in something.”

  Thorn left for San Andreas and his palace. Alone in his office, Hume laid out additional evidence from Ukiah: Six peach pits, dry but still ruddy and syrupy sweet to the nose. Bart had scraped his teeth on them; he was that close and yet as far away as ever. Jon Thacker found his employer moving the wrinkled ovals around the yellow Western Union flimsy like chessmen.

  “Someone to see you, sir. A lumberman from Yuba City.”

  “I have no business with a lumberman from Yuba City.”

  “Perhaps you have with this one. He’s come to put in for the reward on Black Bart.”

  II

  OUT IN THE WASH

  And what makes robbers bold but too much lenity?

  —William Shakespeare

  TEN

  Bart didn’t spring fully growed from a pod;

  it took many years to make him so odd.

  Many years and sharp practice made Wells, Fargo rich,

  and festered and turned Bart’s heart blacker than pitch.

  Who was Black Bart?

  For that matter, who was Charles Bolton?

  His name wasn’t Bolton, to begin with. Just why he’d chosen that nom de société, no one now knows; especially as it was so close to his own.

  Although the press got it right in the end, it could never agree on where Charles E. Boles was born, or the names of his siblings, or for that matter those of his own family, or if he had one. He was the seventh of nine children fathered by John Boles out of Maria Leggett Boles, and in spite of vigorous journalistic attempts to assign him a birth as well as a childhood ironically identical to James B. Hume’s on a farm in New York State, records in the local vicarage confirm that he was a British subject, entering the world in 1829 in Norfolk County, England, as was John in 1788.

  Charles’s youngest sister, Maria, however, had her birth registered in Jefferson County, New York, in 1832; so he must have arrived in the New World either in swaddling, or in knickerbockers at the outside.

  The details of his early life remain shrouded, which is nothing unusual to an upbringing in the country in those years. As far as the history of the man later to be known as Black Bart is concerned, he sprang forth at age twenty in San Francisco in the company of a brother, David, in the watershed year of 1849, sailing thirteen thousand miles through violent storms and stupefying doldrums round Cape Horn in the company of tommies, micks, Scots, French, Prussians, Russians, Poles, Greeks, Basques, Bostoners, fellow New Yorkers, and Philadelphians, all tumescent with the lust for gold. The two arrived seasick, homesick, and frantic to set foot on a surface that didn’t roll, pitch, or slant, with what remained of their spirits lashed to splints of banknotes stuffed deep in their stockings—expense money either borrowed or earned by hard labor—and to dreams of returning to New York someday soon, dining and attending entertainments in evening dress, escorting shining women in gems and décolletage, and tipping the fellows who seated them with double eagles.

  They found a harbor crowded gunwale-to-gunwale with trim clippers, waddling barges, and ancient tramp steamers, so close together a man could walk two hundred yards to shore without wetting his feet. The city was denser yet, tents and structures built of packing-crates and wrecked seacraft thrown up cheek-by-jowl with no regard for passage between, so that if a greenhorn missed his stop he had to circle the block to resume the quest; certainly the press of traffic behind him—foot, horse, and buckboard—prevented him from reversing directions and walking against the current. It was a reeking pile of rotten potatoes, unscrubbed flesh, last night’s slops (and also those of two weeks before), and the occasional corpse, murdered, succumbed to fever, poisoned with wood alcohol sold as whiskey, or starved, turning rancid in the salubrious California climate.

  —Don’t know about you, Charlie, but I smell a bonanza.

  David relied overmuch on his snout; their father had whipped him at age three for rooting with the hogs in the pen.

  —Do you? All I smell is shit and vomit.

  Charles was experimenting with vulgar language of the kind he’d been exposed to for months in close confinement with his fellow man. He found it distasteful and decided to abandon it as alien to his nature.

  —That’s the trouble with you, brother, David said. You lack the soul of a poet.

  Two years of back-bending labor and sharing their tent with rats and ticks netted enough glittery dust for a holiday back East, where a man could buy an egg without pawning his watch; but New York without its entertainments was little improvement over the camp, and the dust ran out like sand in an hourglass. During the return trip to San Francisco, David developed a cough and a sore throat which by journey’s end had turned into racking agony, spitting blood, chills, fever, and sudden release. Charles buried him in Yerba Buena Cemetery and returned to the fields, for the solitary reason that it was the plan they’d agreed on; neither one had thought beyond spending their wealth once they had it.

  By then, the big concerns had bought up all the good prospects and squeezed out the miners hoping to nibble a living roun
d the edges. The miners had tried banding together, but though they outnumbered the enemy, they hadn’t the reserves to weather a boycott from the freighting firms that had thrown in with the conglomerates; Wells, Fargo and its competitors simply refused to ship their ore, and starved them out as systematically as Washington did the Indians. Charles was gone by the time they gave up and went back to work for others; his heart was never in a fight that couldn’t be won. He walked away, leaving behind his tent, skillet, pickaxes, and a sack half full of beans hard and dry as pebbles, and was still walking three weeks later. The habit by that time had taken hold; he was bound for New York by way of a stout pair of legs and soles calloused thick as slabs of salt pork.

  He didn’t get that far. In Decatur, Illinois, he met and married sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Johnson, who bore him three daughters, Ida, Eva, and Frances. He supported his family by farming a patch of sorry ground he bought with the last of what he’d saved on train fare. There being no market in rocks, they went hungry most of the time. While in town to look for odd jobs, he stopped before a platform built of green pine decked with red-white-and-blue bunting, shared by a leather-lunged local politician in a striped and swollen waistcoat and a handsome young woman in a nurse’s cap and cape, offering wages of thirteen dollars a month and a basket of fried chicken to each man who stepped forward and signed on to defend the Union from southern rabble. He joined, as much for the chicken as for the wages; he’d foregone three days of meals in order to keep his girls from starvation.

  That was how Charles Bolton came to serve with Company B of the 116th Illinois Volunteer Infantry; and to regret, while fighting in Mississippi and Arkansas—and particularly while lying flat on his back in Dallas, Georgia, draining pus from a stomach torn open by a Minié ball into a white-enamel basin—a decision made on the basis of an empty belly and a light head.