The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  “You look a new man, signor.” The barber brushed him off with gusto.

  “Hardly that; but it is an improvement. Is there a good tailor in the neighborhood?”

  The Italian enthusiastically endorsed one of the dearer establishments within walking distance. It was at the top of a flight of stairs open to the street with the shop’s services painted on the risers. The tailor, dour and basset-faced—the opposite of the cheerful barber—fitted him with good worsted, two dress shirts, a collar, a green silk cravat, and a pearl-gray bowler; he stocked no footwear, but sent Bolton’s boots out to be cleaned and polished, and as business was slow agreed to cut the suit while he waited; in return for an emolument, of course.

  He mounted a velvet-covered stand and inspected the results in a tri-fold mirror framed with cherubim. A businessman in tasteful dress looked back at him, the curled brim of his hat set square across his brow. The boy who’d blacked his boots had managed to dissemble the cuts Bolton had made in the toes to accommodate his corns.

  A new man indeed, he thought; or at least only slightly shopworn.

  “Shall I bundle your other things so you can take them with you?”

  He turned to consider the garments he’d worn, clay-stained and dusty in a sorry heap on a chair. “Dispose of them. I shan’t have need for them again.”

  Feeling more than respectable, he strolled down to the train station, where he braved a Pullman ticket to Reno, Nevada, just across the state border, for once dozing most of the way, and spent two days and nights in one of the better hotels. No one there knew him, as Boles or Bolton, and the gold roads were far enough away for stories of Black Bart to serve only as a diversion. The city had diversions of its own in plenty, with strangers arriving and departing by the carload. Questions as to the background of yet another visitor were not asked. He had no need to keep up the pretense of mining speculation, with such pitfalls of professional argot and details of the trade to watch out for.

  It was a friendly place, then; especially for a man who enjoyed taking a plunge on the occasional game of chance. Gambling was rampant, despite state law; some years before, when a proposition appeared on the ballot to consider ejecting tinhorns from the city, all the betting places in town shut down for days; the eerie calm (and dead halt to business both legitimate and otherwise) led to a landslide defeat of the measure. Bolton wagered modestly on Faro in a well-appointed parlor called the Louvre, and came out ahead. More importantly, he exchanged the chips he’d bought for banknotes, which were less showy than gold coins. He splurged on a late squab supper in the restaurant upstairs, all snow-white linen and sterling silver, with a Grecian wraith plucking a harp.

  The next morning, after dining on kippers and black coffee in his room, he went to the telegraph office and sent two wires: one to the owner of the Webb House, asking his room to be made ready for his return, the second to Thomas Ware in Bush Street, asking him to hold his laundry until he came to call for it.

  TWENTY-TWO

  Now, West isn’t East, a poet once said;

  and oceans apart must make up their bed.

  But as night touches day, and present meets past,

  Jim Hume and Black Bart faced each other at last.

  “I’ll have somebody’s head for this. I’ll grind his bones to make my bread!”

  “Colorfully fabulistic,” Hume said. “But perhaps it won’t be necessary.”

  “Necessary?” John J. Valentine slapped his palm on his bare desk with a smack so loud his chief of detectives felt the sting. “By God, I’ll bring an embargo against any more shipments from that country if the agents don’t start posting shotgun messengers! Has it escaped you that this time the devil made off with more swag than from any of the past twenty-seven? Twenty-seven!” He flashed the number with spread fingers, opening and closing his hands three times. “And don’t crank that hurdy-gurdy again about him showing the white feather after seeing the color of his blood! That’s what Ben Thorn said the first time someone got the drop on him, and here he is again. While we’re on that subject, when was the last time these fellows took target practice? Flesh wounds on both occasions, at a distance of yards! My grandson could have brought him down at that range with a pocket catapult.”

  “I can get him closer than that.”

  Whereupon James B. Hume put the general superintendent’s mind at rest regarding his detective’s almost supernatural calm.

  It required diplomacy, as Valentine must never question why two men in his employ should take it upon themselves to keep him in the dark. He would be in danger of letting something slip to the journalists who hounded him every time Black Bart struck; and considering the man’s present choleric state, Hume was content that he and Morse had made a wise decision.

  The man in charge of the line wasn’t the half of it, came to that. Somewhere in the long loose chain of communication between headquarters, station agents, and peace officers working the case, everything Hume hoped to keep out of the grasping hands of the press had spilled forth like spring runoff. One man could keep a secret; two, if one of them were Harry Morse. Captain Appleton Stone of the San Francisco Police was an unavoidable risk; his cooperation was vital, and he was at least a veteran who knew the rules. Thomas Ware, the tobacconist and Bolton’s launderer, had had to be let in on the secret before he learned on his own why the men were so interested in his mining friend. (The newspapers might at any time drag Hume back onto the front page.) A party who thought he’d been played for a fool was twice as likely to tip off the target. Ware was under constant watch by Stone’s officers, themselves ignorant of the identity of the man whose description they had committed to memory. Running to the boss before the trap was sprung could turn out to be a blunder as bad as what the Pinkertons had done in Clay County. Still, there was the danger of offending him, as if he were a man with little discretion. Which he was.

  To Valentine’s credit, however, he did not attempt to pump Hume for details. After a brooding circuit about the office, hands locked behind his back in a stranglehold, he nodded at the wisdom of silence. Hume formed a new respect for the man who’d hired him. Anyone who could surprise him after spending all these years with only a thin partition separating them was someone who deserved his loyalty.

  “Henceforth I shall pay more heed to laundry marks and such truck,” he said. “I congratulate you, Jim.”

  “It was luck; but that can be a skill. Harry did the hard work, and played Ware like a prize fish.”

  “Our fish still swims, remember. We must approach this one on tiptoe. No law prohibits a man from strolling the road or losing his handkerchief. Even if those witnesses who have met a man very like Bolton come forward, all we have is a traveler who put in for a night’s lodging and a man sitting on a rock writing.”

  “Similarly, no law prohibits one man from drawing another into conversation.”

  “And if he slams the door in your face?”

  “In the place I have in mind, there will be no door between us.” Permitting himself one of his scarce smiles, Hume drew forth a Western Union flimsy, wired from Reno, Nevada, to Thomas Ware at the Bush Street branch of the California laundry.

  * * *

  A dense November fog ringed the city like a moat at dawn. Streets, bridges, residences, and buildings of commerce were submerged, leaving only stone steeples and the Maypole arrangement of cable cars atop Telegraph Hill. They gave the impression of floating or, less substantially, shimmering; things that vanished at a blink.

  Alighting from the train, he bought a copy of the Herald from a stand and read of Black Bart’s latest assault on W. F. & Co. The party of officers and volunteers had recovered yet another flour-sack mask and this time a black bowler, and reported finding spots of blood in the path the robber had broken through foliage, confirming a report that he’d been wounded by gunfire, possibly fatally; but the journalist’s account cast doubts on the evidence that the man himself had made his escape and that there were no signs of severe bleeding
.

  He loitered over the columns until he was alone on the platform, then peeled the sticking-plaster he’d applied to the back of his right hand to forestall infection. The burnt-orange scab was less conspicuous against tanned skin than the white gauze he dropped in an ash can.

  The morning man was behind the desk of the Webb House. He handed Bolton his key with a smile. “You’re looking particularly well turned-out today, sir. New clothes?”

  “A reward for a wise investment. The books were especially healthy this trip.”

  “Do you need help with your valise?”

  “Please send it up. I have an errand to run.” He lifted it onto the desk.

  Outside, the fog was lifting, curling now around the tops of trees with the mellow-gold autumn sun sliding underneath. It warmed the air, and he whistled “The Wells, Fargo Line” as he strolled, swinging a new stick. The notes he’d exchanged the coins for in the Louvre clung to his ribs with the warmth of a mustard plaster.

  “Mr. Bolton! How was Reno?”

  Mrs. Yee was not present. Thomas Ware had stepped in from his tobacco shop to manage the laundry. He sounded less than his amiable self; perhaps the old Chinese woman had left him to a busy morning.

  “Rowdy, I’m afraid.” The customer raised his brows at a man standing on his side of the counter, facing the newcomer rather than the proprietor: An Irishman from the look of him, but no Corktown ruffian. He wore a suit of clothes with a quiet check and an amiable expression.

  “A man who wishes to meet you,” Ware said. He made the introductions, adding: “Er, Mr. Hamilton is also in mining.”

  Although he’d formed a picture of his man based on his description, Harry Morse thought him an unlikely villain in the flesh. Broader across the shoulders than expected, straight-backed, and immaculately dressed in a gray suit cut to his measure with a double-breasted waistcoat, green cravat, and a pale gray bowler. His heavy moustache and chin-whiskers, both shot with gray, were neatly trimmed and he gripped an ebony stick by its gold knob, but not in a defensive gesture. The ferrule rested on the floor and there was no telltale bulge in the side pocket in which his other hand rested. He could be taken for a high-ranking military officer retired before his usefulness was spent. His boots, although well-polished, were slashed round the toes; a fact that set all Morse’s cells vibrating.

  Did those clear blue eyes sharpen at the prospect of meeting a man who knew more about the science of mining than the average? Difficult to tell. The former sheriff and longtime detective was adept at reading suspicion on the faces of men who themselves warranted suspicion; but in these mild features, the cheekbones high and the brow prominent, he saw nothing more than curiosity in the presence of an interested stranger.

  And by God, if Morse hadn’t worked as closely with Jim Hume as he had for seven years, no creature on earth would have found fault with him for mistaking the two.

  Bolton, for his part, allowed himself a small smile, and it was genuine. Although he avoided intimacy with so-called colleagues in the trade, he knew enough about it from physical experience and applied study to pass himself off on casual acquaintance. The successful miners he’d known rarely talked shop, preferring to blend in with the civilized peoples of San Francisco society rather than discuss the earthy origins of their fortunes; a word about hydraulics, a phrase of working jargon dropped into a bit of conversation about something else, and then the discourse moved on to safer subjects: horse racing, the fights, the opera season. He took his hand from his pocket and gave the man as good a grip as he got; and if Mr. Hamilton’s glance flicked toward his scratch; well, hadn’t his new acquaintance just returned from a tour of his operations in the Mother Lode?

  “I wonder, Mr. Bolton, if you could spare a few moments? I have a business proposition that I think will prove beneficial for us both.”

  Did a muscle twitch in a bronzed cheek? Morse could be sure of nothing about Bolton. He tightened his grasp. The other appeared not to notice this, and hesitated only briefly before nodding. “If Mr. Ware will oblige me by keeping my goods a few moments more.”

  Ware could; and if air gushed from his lungs when the pair turned toward the street door, it might have been the weary sigh of a man resigned to resuming his work.

  Pedestrian traffic was picking up. It became a busy crowd when they turned from Bush onto Montgomery, but the two men’s business dress and steady stride opened a path that led all the way to the front door of the headquarters of Wells, Fargo, & Co.

  Furtively (he hoped), Morse pressed closer to his companion as they neared the building. If his man bolted, taking to the cover of the crowd the same way he slid between trees from the site of a robbery, he wasn’t likely to resurface. Black Bart did not belong to the simpleton race that normally ran to his profession.

  But Bolton kept his easy pace as they entered the lobby. “Have you an office here?”

  “I’m borrowing one from a friend. I hope you’re not one of those people who distrust banks.”

  “Not at all. I sometimes do business here.”

  The revelations kept piling up, each more astounding than the one before.

  They went through a door and up a steep flight of steps. The air was thick with the smell of stale cigars. The odor, and the smoke that created it, grew tangible as they entered a glass-paneled door that stood open to the hallway at the top of the landing. A young man sat at a small writing table facing a desk heaped high with shabby leather portfolios. Another man, close to Bolton’s age, build, and general appearance rose from behind it.

  “Mr. Charles Bolton,” said the polite Mr. Hamilton—and for the first time his voice wobbled a little—“Mr. James Hume.”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Two cocks in a circle will dance a ballet,

  an old bull and a young one will square off to slay.

  The contest’s as ancient as Heaven and Hell,

  with challenged and challenger ’waiting the bell.

  The two middle-aged men shook hands, their opposing profiles matching so closely they might have shared the same blood. Morse took Bolton’s hat and hung it on the halltree next to Hume’s unprepossessing slouch. The guest preferred to keep his stick, and sat when Hume did, facing the desk with his feet flat on the floor and his hands folded on the knob. Morse closed the door, scraped round a spare chair, and seated himself. From here on in he was content with the role of spectator, with the omnipresent Thacker taking notes.

  He and the chief had discussed this. Some men subjected to questioning crumbled in the crossfire, others sealed themselves shut the moment they felt themselves outnumbered by the enemy. In the same instant, both detectives had seen in which category Charles E. Bolton belonged.

  Hume began by unstopping a fat jar containing a dozen bullet-shaped cigars standing on their blunt ends and tilting it toward his guest, who raised a polite palm and shook his head. The chief’s brows lifted questioningly; the palm turned over in a conciliating gesture, and Hume selected a cigar, bit off the end, spat it into his waste basket, and set fire to it with a square wooden match, blowing gales of smoke toward the ever-widening gyre on the ceiling. For full a minute and a half after the men had sat down, not a word had passed between them.

  “Have we met, Mr. Bolton?” Hume opened. “I have a talent for remembering faces.”

  “I think it likely, Mr. Hume. As I told Mr. Hamilton, I sometimes have business downstairs.”

  “Indeed. Do you conduct all your business here?”

  “No. The Panic taught me not to place all my eggs in a single basket.”

  “A sound policy. I recognized you at once as a cautious man.”

  Bolton’s eyes glinted. “As are most men, once they get to be our age.”

  “Perhaps the Company has had the privilege of transporting some of the profits from your mine; or is it mines? Mr. Ware wasn’t specific, according to Hamilton.”

  “We’ve never discussed my activities in detail. I maintain a full interest in several operations, a
nd a partnership in a number of others.” He unfolded his hands from his stick and refolded them the other way. “I’d not be surprised that my managers have made use of your services, although I could not say for certain. I’m no longer involved with the day-to-day operation. I trust such details to the good office of the men I’ve placed in charge.”

  That phrase, “the good office,” echoed in Morse’s ears. In that respect, I honor only the good office of Wells, Fargo. The special agent had committed all of Black Bart’s reported remarks to memory. This was the first fissure in the marble façade; not that anything in his appearance indicated he was aware of having stepped wrong. Hume’s own countenance remained seamless.

  “I can provide that certainty, if you’ll tell me where the mines are located.”

  “They’re in the Lode country. I confess to ignorance as to the specific counties. It’s been many years since I filed.”

  “Did you come out here in forty-nine?”

  “Fifty.”

  “The same year as I, although things didn’t break for me the way they did for you. I broke even the first year, then went even broker the second.” Hume smiled apologetically at this weak attempt at wit. “The Lucky Lucy, that was what I called my claim. I can see now that was begging the issue—or rather the lack of it. How do you call yours?”

  “I never assigned them names, only numbers.”

  “I wish I’d thought of that. It’s best not to place much sentimentality in something that may not return the affection.”

  “So I’ve found. I’ve sunk an empty shaft or two in my time.”

  “You filed under the name Bolton?”

  “I did not.”

  This response, as final as it was calm, bore out what Morse had learned from Ware. He would hate to sit across a poker table from Bolton.

  Hume, of course, would relish it.

  Once again, the visitor rearranged his hands on the stick. Was this a sign of restlessness at last? “Mr. Hamilton mentioned something about a proposition.”