The Ballad of Black Bart

by Loren D. Estleman

  They were approaching the end of the dock and the press of bodies relaxing round them—threatening to expose to scrutiny a party of three, with a man held fast in its center—when a hand gripped Morse’s upper arm tight enough to bruise the muscle. “This way,” came a harsh whisper. “The milk wagon.”

  Morse almost failed to recognize Ben Thorn without his sheriff’s star. On the other side of the trio, a younger man built as stoutly had Stone’s arm in a similar grasp. Before them, drawn alongside a berm separating the dock from a street paved with limestone, stood a wooden box mounted on bicycle wheels, hitched to a white mare wearing blinders. The legend GOLDEN STATE DAIRY was painted in bright copper circus letters on the side of the wagon. It was closed in all round and there was something suspiciously official-looking about the man in the driver’s seat, despite the white overalls common to milk deliverymen.

  Inside, there were no shining steel cans, no stacks of carrying racks filled with bottles of milk. Instead, the men from San Francisco found themselves seated on a bench facing Thorn, his deputy, and a man unknown to Morse, wearing a shirt without a collar under a rusty black suit redolent of moth powder and cedar.

  “This is Martin,” Thorn said.

  Morse knew the name. Thomas P. Martin was the miner whose cabin Hume had put into on his way from the scene of the robbery near Strawberry; the man who at first had mistaken the chief for the drifter the Company had decided was Black Bart. His face, seamed beyond its apparent years and brown, brightened when his gaze fell upon Bolton; then grew grave. He looked at Thorn and nodded.

  “This is the man who came to stay with you on the night of June fourteenth last?” The date had coincided with the robbery of the Wells, Fargo shipment driven by Thomas Forse near Little Lake.

  “Yes, definitely.”

  Bolton said, “I’ve never seen this man before in my life.” He turned his face toward the side of the wagon, as if there were a window there to look out.

  Harry Morse felt a stab of disappointment. That the man who had laid siege to the Company for eight years, vanishing each time into thin air, should say anything so predictable took the shine off his and Hume’s triumph. This was no mastermind; merely a clever felon with more than his fair share of luck.

  “Thank you, Mr. Martin.” Thorn reached back over his shoulder and rapped his knuckles against the front of the wagon. There was a flapping of lines and then the vehicle started forward, the horse’s shaggy hoofs clip-clopping with a measured tread. “We’ll put you off at your hotel. Please stay in your room until someone comes for you.”

  “How long will that be?” asked the prospector.

  “That would depend upon the gentlemen of the press.”

  “Who alerted the journals?” Morse asked the sheriff after their witness had alighted.

  “I shouldn’t like to say. I thought it politic to notify the sheriff’s offices in all the counties where Bart operated. Whom they told—” He rolled his shoulders. “These scalawags are capable of concealing a spy under some wife’s petticoats.”

  Morse didn’t believe him. The man was hanging on to his job by the ghost of his stale reputation, and this tardy show of covert action was theater, staged for the Company’s benefit. He’d be the first to cry victory.

  A mob of the scalawags awaited them in the sheriff’s office attached to the San Joaquin County Jail, a fairly new building that looked as if it had been transported there from a place of drawbridges and dungeons. The brickwork was whitewashed and there were plain chairs, a table, and a potbellied stove. Morse, appointed spokesman, turned aside questions barked out of all order and guided them through cursory details, crediting Hume with the discovery of the handkerchief and repeating several times—lest any of the cooperating agencies feel slighted—the importance of the concerted effort involving all the local authorities and the police department of San Francisco.

  “Get that thing away from me!”

  Morse had been addressing the reporters with his back to the prisoner, flanked by Stone and San Joaquin County deputies. A man—it might have been the same photographer from the dock; they all looked alike crouched behind their contraptions—had stepped from the crowd of journalists and was unfolding his tripod. Ben Thorn, standing behind Bolton, caught Morse’s eye and rolled his shoulders again; it was a signal of surrender.

  “Don’t be bashful,” said the man setting up the camera. “Lady Astor would be proud to share a shot with a gent like you.”

  Morse allowed to himself that this wasn’t far from the truth. The turnkeys in San Francisco had returned the rest of Bolton’s suit of clothes, including the bowler, and with his fine overcoat hanging fashionably open, he would not appear out of place on Nob Hill, or for that matter New York’s Fifth Avenue. Bolton appeared to consider this, turning to look at himself in a tin mirror hanging on a nail. He adjusted the angle of the hatbrim, shot his cuffs, tugged down the corners of his waistcoat, squinted at the result. Turning back, he observed the photographer filling his hod with combustible powder from a square tin.

  “Will that thing go off? Because I should like to go off myself.”

  The journalists’ chuckles drowned under the scratching of pencils.

  The man with the camera grinned behind walrus moustaches. “Don’t worry; I haven’t lost a subject yet.”

  Humor served, the pair settled down to serious business.

  Bolton sat motionless in one of the split-bottom chairs, started when the magnesium went up in a sheet of white flame followed by the rotten-egg stench of sulfur.

  “Will you stand up for another?”

  He complied. The photographer studied the erect figure, then pointed at the small diamond pin fixing the cravat to his shirtfront. “Is that part of the loot?”

  “Young man, don’t be impertinent.”

  The standing pose was the one most frequently circulated: The celebrity buccaneer in the finest tailoring, a hand resting in an overcoat pocket with the thumb outside, the stick held at his hip like a general’s baton, and the well-worn boots cut to ease his famous corns, would become an icon, reproduced in newspapers (transcribed into newsprint-friendly pen-and-ink), books, and cards de visite sold in photographic studios and general stores across the North American continent; and the legend of the Gentleman Bandit become indelible. Morse, watching Charles E. Bolton—Boles—bonvivant Charlie of Ocean View Park, the Grand Opera House, and the dining room of the Palace Hotel, but always and forever “Black Bart, the Po8”—striking the most flattering attitude, his face stern as John Pierpont Morgan’s fresh from plundering Wall Street.

  The special agent for Wells, Fargo, & Co. stifled a classic Irish grin. He was watching a monolith in the making.

  TWENTY-SIX

  This was the story of bandit Black Bart;

  who used the gold country to practice his art.

  His brush was a shotgun, his canvas the road,

  as he painted his way ’cross the old Mother Lode.

  “Got anything stronger?”

  Inmate No. 11046 looked over the tops of his spectacles at the young man dressed as he, in San Quentin’s signature vertical stripes and gripping his pillbox cap. His face was sallow, the cheeks sunken where molars were missing.

  “Sorry, son. Allen’s is the best I can do.” He slid the small brown bottle across the scarred counter. “It’s the best lung balsam on the market and will clear out some of the infernal dust from the jute mill.”

  As if reminded, the young man coughed rackingly into his fist. When the spasm passed, he picked up the bottle and looked at the face on the label. “Who’s the whiskers?”

  “Mr. Allen, ostensibly; though he bears a certain resemblance to Dr. Sloan and St. Jacob, of the rheumatism oil. Read the directions. Make sure you understand them.”

  He moved his lips over the words. “C-colds, crowp—”

  “Croup. It’s a pulmonary ailment, like yours.”

  “As-asth-th-th—”

  “Asthma.” Eleven-oh-for
ty-six lowered his voice. “Son, have you your letters?”

  Muscles stood out on either side of the young inmate’s narrow jaw. “I can write my name, if that’s what you’re about.”

  “What brought you to this place?”

  “The doc in the infirmary. He—”

  “I mean San Quentin.”

  “They said I burned down a barn.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “Only the cheap sonofabitch the barn belonged to, right in the pocketbook.” He began coughing again.

  A slim volume bound in tatters made its way from a shelf under the counter into his hands.

  He squinted at the cover. “Mug—” He blushed and fell silent, his jaw muscles flexing.

  “McGuffey. It’s a first reader. I smuggled it out of the library, just in case. The literacy level here is abysmal.”

  “Ab—”

  The mild face broke into a nest of humorous wrinkles. “You’ll learn its meaning. I used to teach school.”

  “I got no use for schoolteachers.”

  “I won’t take a ruler to you. If I do my job well and you learn to read labels and prescriptions, I will talk to Warden Edgar. I need an assistant. Unless you prefer choking in sack alley?” This was the jute mill. Without waiting for an answer, he nodded at the book. “Make what you can of it and come back an hour before lights out.”

  In the yard, pacing in a circle of men wearing identical plumage, the young inmate spoke over his shoulder to the man behind him, in a murmur stamped out by marching feet before it could reach the ears of the guards on exercise duty. “You know the pill-pusher in the pharmacy?”

  The man, twice the other’s age, replied in a grumbling bass. “Everybody knows Charlie. What about him?”

  “What’d he do, run off with the school cash box and a girl from the fifth grade?”

  “Armed robbery.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “Shut up, you!”

  The other made no reply until they’d circled far of the guard who’d shouted, pointing his truncheon. “Stagecoaches.”

  “Holy Christ.” The young convict spoke in a tone even lower than at the start. “More than one?”

  “Right around fifty, I reckon, all belonging to Wells, Fargo, and all by himself.”

  Another circuit in awed silence.

  “He’s in for a hundred years, I bet.”

  “Just six. He swore he never loaded his shotgun and they believed him.”

  “Wisht I got his jury.”

  “They were inclined his direction. He gave up the whole story—as much of it as they could prove already—and told them where they could find what he stole.” His grumble turned to gurgling amusement. “He had it deposited with Wells, Fargo, under a trick name the whole time.”

  “What’s his right name?”

  “Boles, though he prefers Bolton. Can’t say why.”

  “How come I never heard of him?”

  “Sure you did.”

  Working in the pharmacy, busying himself with reorganizing the inventory—his predecessor, paroled a month before his appointment, had employed a system, if system it was, entirely his own, mysterious to all others—serving efficiently as an orderly in the prison infirmary, and helping fellow inmates to escape the murderous conditions in the jute mill and machine shop, Bolton managed to forget himself. Alone in his cell, attempting to work up interest re-reading a classic he’d checked out of the library, he found himself dwelling upon past transgressions.

  Not his robberies; they’d been an ongoing campaign against the ruthless faceless Company that he was convinced had contributed to Davy’s death, and thus were a comfort he took to innocent sleep. It amused him further to follow the Examiner’s attacks upon James B. Hume for allowing the rival Call and the “boondock papers” he’d allowed to scoop them when Black Bart was brought at last to justice; typically, William Randolph Hearst’s organ had preferred to blame someone in authority rather than its own failure to send a correspondent to the San Joaquin Jail. Such petty injustices were small enough redress for the massive injustice wrought by Wells, Fargo. Just now the editors were pillorying Hume for the light sentence he’d received. Of the nearly threescore assaults he’d made on the gold shipments, a jury of his peers had found him guilty only of the last robbery at Funk Hill. Charged the journal:

  What is the result of this perversion of justice? A few detectives divide a few thousand [unreported] dollars and instill in the dime-novel-charged heads of ten thousand youths of this city the idea that one has to be but a bold and successful robber to force the united detective talent of the coast to intercede with judges and obtain light sentences and get two-column notices in the papers.

  The columnist conjectured that four thousand dollars of Black Bart’s booty had been “hidden in the woods near Copperopolis” and had found its way into the pockets of Company employees.

  Would that that were true; if in fact the sum total of his takings had amounted to so much. If still concealed, it would represent a comfort in his declining years. He had, in fact, spent it all, and quite wisely: on horses, fighters, the opera, fine meals, and the occasional woman.

  In the end, it had been those six-and-a-quarter ounces of unrefined dust that turned the tide; although the story of the discarded handkerchief had become so entrenched in his legend it would likely outlive all the principals.

  The regrets he saved may have been for Elizabeth and her daughters, the family he’d forsaken. His wife wrote, amazingly enough, from Missouri, having learned of Black Bart’s true identity in the wire columns, offering forgiveness and a return to the fold upon his release; but he could not find in him the courage to respond in kind. He wrote back in phrases too stiff for the standards of a celebrated poet, professing no love. Whether he was as callous as his language, or desired to spare those he’d left behind further pain, cannot be determined. Certainly something had died during that bleak return to the deserted house in New Oregon, Iowa.

  James B. Hume thought the worst of him for his flight from responsibility, and expressed only contempt for this behavior in response to journalistic romancing of the poetic bandit who forbore violence.

  Bolton found comfort in writing witty “apologies” to some of the stagecoach drivers he’d victimized, and even the shotgun messengers who’d managed to draw blood from the elusive Black Bart. He signed off:

  I am yours, dear sir, in haste.

  B.B.

  P.S. But not in quite so much a hurry as on the former occasion.

  In recognition of exemplary behavior and aid in the interest of the “reform” of some of his fellow inmates (for so the prison board interpreted the purpose of his tutoring), Prisoner No. 11046, recorded in the files of San Quentin under the name Charles E. Boles, was paroled on January 21, 1888, having served four years and two months of a six-year sentence.

  A gaggle of journalists stood on the wharf outside the prison, stamping their feet and blowing thick vapor into the cold wind coming off the slaty surface of the bay, when an upright figure came into view. They sprang to attention, as if in the presence of a foreign dignitary. The man was not as elderly as anticipated, wearing the suit, overcoat, and style of bowler fashionable five years before; but wearing them as if he’d just stepped from the pages of this quarter’s Gentleman’s Own. Clearly he had no need of the support of his gold-headed stick, which he raised—not threateningly, but in the manner of an orchestra conductor lifting his baton, to staunch the flow of queries.

  “Your pardon, gentlemen. I’m a bit deaf these days and can listen to but one question at a time.”

  “How was prison, Mr. Boles?”

  “Bolton. I should not care to repeat the experience. In addition to losing my hearing and my ability to read without spectacles, I forfeited more than four years of my life; which at fifty-five is no small sacrifice.”

  “What are your plans now?”

  “They’re indistinct. At one time I considered applying for a druggist’s l
icense; but things look different inside.”

  “What about taking up your old trade?”

  He looked at the man who’d asked the question, staring at him over the top of his writing-block. He’d identified himself as an employee of the San Francisco Chronicle. “If it’s mining you mean, I’m too old to swing a pick. If it’s teaching school, I doubt any would have me.”

  “I mean robbing stagecoaches.”

  “The question is insolent. I am through with the business of crime.”

  “Will you return to your family?” asked another.

  A whistle blasted.

  “Gentlemen, my boat approaches.”

  “Perhaps you’ll write poetry.”

  He’d turned toward the vessel crossing the bay. He swung back on the man from the Chronicle. “Young man, didn’t you just hear me say I would commit no more crimes?”

  * * *

  San Francisco looked bigger than he remembered. After an eight-by-eight cell and the narrow passages of the brick rectangle of San Quentin, even its side streets seemed as wide as boulevards, and his simply furnished room in the Nevada, a boardinghouse on Sixth Street, a suite at the Palace Hotel. He was not lonely; Mrs. Burling was an attentive landlady of some culture, who enjoyed discussing literature, music, and the theater with her new lodger, and there was always someone loitering in a doorway across the street or, more boldly, under the gas lamp on the corner below his window. One night, a man in a dark overcoat stood on the edge of its circle of illumination, his head wreathed in cigar-smoke; but Bolton couldn’t make out his features under the broad brim of his nondescript black hat. Wells, Fargo never forgets.

  * * *

  Less than a month after Bolton’s impromptu press conference on the prison wharf, Company detectives assigned to his surveillance reported that he’d vanished from the Nevada House. He was said to have been seen in Modesto, California, buying a train ticket to Madera, with a stopover in Merced. The reports could not be confirmed, and nothing else was heard after the train left Madera for Fresno.

  Nine months later, on November 20, 1888, a man wearing a flour-sack hood and carrying a shotgun relieved the Eureka–Ukiah stage—several times an old victim of Black Bart’s—of seven hundred dollars in gold coin and eleven sacks of mail. The bandit left behind only bootprints—no evidence of horse’s hooves—and a scrap of foolscap written on in coarse pencil: