Diana and the Three Behrs

by Fleeta Cunningham

  “I can see how you’d be reluctant and more willing to go along with Elmsford’s elaborate scheme to get you away, out of Gunn’s reach.” He came across the room and put his arms around her. “I do think you’re safe here, my love. I believe, with all my heart, once Trey and your sister and the others come, we’ll be able to bring your sojourn to an end, get the miscreants behind bars where they belong.” He stepped back. “Oh, besides wanting to kiss you, I had another reason to come by. Papa said Pete was in Bindler’s this morning when he and Elizabeth went to have breakfast. Pete’s old sidekick, the reformed outlaw, is in the county. He came for his nephew’s wedding. Pete said to tell you he should be able to get you with the old boy sometime later in the week. Maybe Friday night. The old-timers, drovers and the like, are getting together out at the Hempstedts’ place.”

  “Pete thought his friend could be persuaded to talk to me? Perhaps he’d sit down and reminisce about a certain elusive holdup artist?”

  “Pete thought his old comrade would be more likely to talk to you out at the Hempstedts rather than come here. If that can be worked out, I’d drive you out there.”

  “You don’t have to, Adler. Surely Pete would take me.”

  “You fancy riding Pete’s pack mule twenty miles in the July sun? That’s the only transportation Pete trusts. His mule and the pack animal.” He dropped a quick kiss on her forehead. “I think you’d be more comfortable in the Packard, and I’d feel more certain about you getting there and back if I were along.”

  All thought of Pete and his mule vanished. A long country drive with Adler? I could get Frau Hepple to put up a picnic basket. I’ll bet the old oak trees out in the country are even bigger than the ones in town. And the chance to get some actual evidence to prove Dr. El’s theory is worthwhile. It would even be worth that mule ride. An afternoon with Adler? I may not be able to be his girl forever, but I’ll take an afternoon if that’s all there is.

  “The Packard and a private driver has it all over a mule any day. Will Pete be able to get word about his friend’s arrival in time to make arrangements with Papa Behr? I’ll need to make sure Fred and Otto have work to do, too. I’ll need to tell Frau Hepple if I won’t be back in time for dinner.”

  “I think we can manage to take care of things. Now that Pete’s in touch with his friend, everything should work out well.” He took her hand. “Could I convince you to abandon all this exciting secretarial glamour and come have lunch with me? Papa and Elizabeth were invited to Frau Hepple’s so she can show Papa what a suitable meal for a child ought to be. You and I should tactfully go elsewhere.”

  “I’d be most pleased to support that idea.”

  “The thought of having lunch with me isn’t totally abhorrent?”

  Diana felt the rush of blood to her face. “Not totally,” she murmured demurely.

  ****

  Adler’s notion of courtship, Diana found, was as proper as any nineteenth-century book of etiquette might have decreed. He came by in the evenings with candy or a nosegay of flowers. He invited her to take a walk or a drive in the Packard in the cool of the evening. He held her hand, kissed her goodnight, and bade her sleep well. All very sweet, even charming, but not at all what Diana, with her city upbringing and modern ideas, expected from a man who said he was in love with her. She’d read Flaming Youth, the scandalous novel that supposedly told the true state of twentieth-century morals, she’d seen all of Valentino’s movies, and somehow she’d expected more…more passion from a man who claimed he was in love with her. She wasn’t at all certain she’d know what to do if Adler suddenly exhibited the smoldering looks of The Sheik or the lust of a Carey Scott, but somehow she was quite sure she’d welcome a little of that intensity. If she would be leaving Pfeiffer in a few weeks, she wanted to take memories to warm the long nights ahead with her. Adler’s kiss was sweet but about as intimate as a pat on the head from a favorite uncle. He spoke to her in much the same manner as he talked to little Elizabeth, gently and with deep affection, but after that first kiss at the dance, she’d not felt any heat of desire.

  Still pondering the enigma, Diana automatically prepared the meeting room for the afternoon instruction. Both men were doing well, and she felt confident that by the time her work for the professors was done, Fred and Otto could take over any assignment Adler wanted to hand them. Otto actually seemed to relish the longer reports and pages of meeting notes Diana had begun to give him. Fred turned out neatly done correspondence, and he was faster and more confident than Otto.

  The door to the meeting room opened and Diana looked up, expecting to see Fred, who often came early to practice. Adler hurried into the room and glanced around as if checking to see if she was alone.

  “No old cowboys filling your head with wild tales?”

  “Not for several days. I’m afraid your papa has run out of leads.”

  Adler grinned. “Not quite. Pete’s back in town. I tried to get him to come over and give you the news himself, but he was anxious to get back. It’s a long ride on that old mule of his. He said tell you Hooper, the man you’ve been wanting to talk to, agreed to meet with you at the Hempstedts’ place tomorrow around mid-afternoon. He’ll be camping at the old cabin by the river, if you still want to visit.”

  Diana leaped to her feet. “If I still want to? Of course, I do. Are you able to take me?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t hold me back. Do you need to do anything for Fred and Otto tomorrow? Or can you leave early in the afternoon? It’s not a long drive, but I’d rather get back before dark. The road is a washboard and has some nasty curves.”

  “I’m free tomorrow, unless Mr. Behr the banker has letters for me. I can set up some practice exercises for Fred and Otto and leave them alone. They’re both going to finish all the lessons I’ve devised before long. Then practice and getting familiar with the various forms will make them proficient. There’s very little more I can teach them.”

  “Then I’ll come by for you around two tomorrow afternoon, and we’ll drive out to see this mysterious Mr. Hooper and find out what he knows.”

  “I can’t wait to see if there’s a grain of fact in Dr. El’s fancies.” Diana opened the drawer where she kept her notes from the interviews she’d had with Papa Behr’s cowboy acquaintances. She’d want to go over that first meeting with Pete before she met his friend. Pulling the file out, she glanced up at Adler. “This could make all the difference to him.”

  “I’ll leave you to it, Diana. Would you like to walk down to the drug store this evening? I saw a sign going up this morning that said ‘Banana ice cream,’ and I remembered you like that flavor.”

  “Lovely. It’s my favorite.” She remembered another item she’d planned if the meeting with the stranger did come off. “Would you like for me to ask Frau Hepple to put up a picnic basket for us? It sounds as if we’re both going to miss dinner tomorrow night.”

  “Oh, I know Lotte Hepple’s picnic baskets from summer socials in my childhood. By all means, ask the lady if she’ll do one, and mention her spritzkuchen. It’s something like a doughnut, only better, and she’s a master.”

  Diana handed him a sheet of paper from her notebook and a pencil. “You’d better write it down. I’d never say it right.” Then remembering his deplorable handwriting, she added, “Maybe you should print it.”

  Carefully forming large, printed letters, he wrote on the page and handed it back. “See you around seven? For ice cream?”

  “Yes, around seven.”

  He leaned down to leave a quick kiss on her forehead and hurried out the door.

  “I might as well be wearing Mary Janes and hair ribbons. Or be wrapped in tissue paper,” she said to his departed self, snapping her pencil in two in exasperation. She tossed it into the trash can beside her table. “I’m not ten years old; I’m a grown up, flesh-and-blood woman, Adler Behr. Kiss me like you mean it.”

  Chapter 16

  Hooper wasn’t as old or as reticent as Diana had expected. Looking fi
fty, but likely not that old, his absent teeth and a face seared with weathered wrinkles added years. He squatted against a tree stump, a plug of tobacco stretching out one cheek.

  “Pete says you wanna know somethin’ about ol’ Butch and Sundance. Why does a purty little lady want to know about two galoots ever’body thinks prob’ly got theirselves kilt down to South ’Merica? Ain’t relatives a yours, I know that.”

  Glad she’d chosen her oldest skirt and a slightly frayed blouse for the outing, Diana sat with care in thick leaves under an aged tree. “I work for a history professor who is doing research on the two of them, trying to find a few clues about their last days in Texas before they went south. Pete said you might know why they came to Fort Worth and what they did there.”

  “Raised hell, mostly, I reckon. Wal, Sundance did, anyhow. He did like to kick up his boots and make a racket.”

  “Why come to Fort Worth? They weren’t known there, but there must have been a dozen places where they could go without being recognized, places more convenient, anyway.” As unobtrusively as possible, Diana took out her notebook and pencil.

  Hooper slanted a look up at Adler under shaggy eyebrows. “She’s a nice little thing, ain’t she? Don’t know if she’d ’preciate some of the things I might tell her. Too ripe for a lady’s ears, mostly.”

  Adler shifted so he was leaning down to the older man. “She grew up about a mile from Hell’s Half Acre. Her father was a blacksmith in the Acre. I don’t think you’ll tell her anything to give her palpitations.”

  Hooper took a second look at her. Diana could feel his appraising gaze. “Wal, since you’re hidebound to know it all.” He spat a stream of tobacco juice into the brush. “Here ’tis. I rode with the Bunch a little. Still a kid myself, just turned eighteen, but thought I’s a man growed. Doggone excitin’, too, takin’ on the Pinkertons and shaking Fancy Dans loose from their diamond stickpins. Gang changed from time to time, you know. Not always the same boys ridin’ with us. We’d have some hotshot for a spell, then he’d veer off on his own, and pert’ soon ’nother’d come on. I came in late in the day and only in on two deals. Neither one amounted to much. I’d run off from home, knocked around long enough to get hungry, and buddied up with a guy what rode with Butch off and on. Not sayin’ which feller, but I thought he ’as the smartest, slickest hombre ever come down the river. He’d known Butch a while and rode with the Bunch when they needed somebody with a smart horse to set up the getaway. Told me about their early days and made it sound like a big adventure, so I rode along.”

  “You said he’d known Butch Cassidy for a long time?”

  “Good while. They ’as sorta family some way. Cousin or somethin’. Butch, he come from a whoppin’ big family, Mormons they wuz up Utah way, with kin from hell to breakfast.” Hooper stared into the distance for a moment. “Think he’d be the reason the Bunch come down to Fort Worth the first time.”

  “You mean they’d come before, not just when the Wild Bunch broke up and Butch Cassidy left for South America?”

  “Yeah, they’d come now and again, but they didn’t publicize it. Ever’ time there’d be a hold-up, Butch, he always had a plan, a way of dodgin’ the law. He’d plan it to the last second, and have the escape all worked out. My pal and me, we’d have the fast horses waitin’. Butch, he’d have meet-up points planned, even a bolt hole in case of trouble. My old sidekick, that feller from Fort Worth, always headed back that way when he was flush. Butch got in the habit of follerin’ him down from time to time.”

  “Oh, Butch Cassidy used Fort Worth as one of those meeting-up places?”

  “No, ma’am, he did not. That wuz one place he’d never use after a hold-up. It wuz sorta his private restin’-up place, and he had a few other reasons for being down that way.” Hooper tossed a wide-brimmed hat aside, squirmed up so he sat on the stump, and leaned his arms across his knees. “Butch, he weren’t like most of the others. Didn’t hardly carry a gun. Never shot a man, not one. Didn’t drink much, neither. The others, they wuz crack shots, drank anythin’ that came in a bottle, and chased the gals, any gals, in the saloon or the whorehouse, on the street, wherever they happened to find a willin’ filly. Then they’d move on. Sundance, now, he kept to the one he brung for a stretch, but after a while, he’d go his way and she’d go hers, no bad feelin’s on either side. Not Butch. Nossir, he didn’t have a mean thought in him, just full a high spirits and general cussedness. Didn’t fight, hardly gambled at all, and not keen on the ladies, for the most part. But some time or other, when he’d been down to Fort Worth, he run across a filly he just couldn’t get over. A little church-goin’, Sunday-dinner-with-the-folks kind of gal. And she fell for him like a passel of ripe peaches. But she weren’t havin’ no part of his kind of life.”

  “Then they parted?”

  “Oh, kinda yes and kinda no. My old sidekick told me ever’ time Butch could get hisself to Fort Worth, he made a beeline to that little gal’s door. She’s mighty happy to see him—that is—happy till she realized he hadn’t changed his ways. Guess she kept hopin’ he’d come her direction, and he sorta thought she’d give way a little to his. Didn’t happen.”

  “The last time he came to Fort Worth was to see her?”

  “Yeah, that’s the way of it. And you never saw a man so broke up. Came back to the hotel where we’d hung our hats. You could tell by lookin’ he’d gone as far down as a man can get and not be crawlin’. We all figgered she’d just turned him down again, but that weren’t it. She done told him he had no reason to come back to see her again. She’d gone and married another feller.”

  “Then he went to South America?”

  “Wal, not right off.” He spat another stream of tobacco. “You know about that fool pitchure him and some of the boys had took?”

  Diana nodded. “Yes, that Swartz photograph that went all over the country and got several members of the Wild Bunch put in jail. I’ve seen it.”

  “Butch, he knowed that piece of silliness weren’t a good idee. But the others, they’s drinkin and cuttin’ up, and they thought it a grand joke to get their pitchure took. See, they didn’t ever think about that man what took it could make all the copies he wanted to, not just the ones he gave the boys. My sidekick, he wuz off chasin’ a full house, with me holdin’ his stake so he didn’t go plumb broke, so we missed all that, but the boys, they went on and done it. Butch coulda talked ’em down, most times, ’cause he wuz boss and he wuz smart. But about that time, Butch, he jes’ didn’t care. Lost his one love and ever’thin’ else wuz just palaver. They got the dang thang made, and the upshot of it—they all got rounded up, jailed, shot, or found themselves dancin’ the hangman’s jig.” He grinned. “All ’cept Butch and Sundance, and that gal what wuz sweet on Sundance. They headed up north, Boston or some such, I forget which. Then lit out for South ’Merica. Some says they died down there. But some…some says different.”

  “You think Butch Cassidy might still be alive?”

  Hooper grinned, a slow, sly grin. “Wouldn’t know one way or t’other, miss. Wouldn’t want to bet against it. Do know that I heard talk of a lady in Fort Worth what got married, then about ten years back, she’d become a widder. Not too long a widder, how-some-ever. Seemed like she got married again purty soon, to a feller name of Parker, George Parker.”

  George Parker! Diana dropped her pencil in excitement. She knew from her work with Dr. Elmsford that the outlaw had used the alias “George Parker,” a close variation of his legal name, Robert Leroy Parker, on more than one occasion. Could it be the same man?

  “Was George Parker a different name for someone she’d known before?”

  “I wouldn’t say yes and I wouldn’t say no, miss. Never met her or the gent she married. But I know ol’ Butch wuz hell bent to marry the only woman he ever looked at twice. My sidekick, now, he’d know fer sure, but he got hisself caught between a rancher and a cow they both claimed, and earned a place in the cemetery fer his trouble. I cain’t rightly state an ans
wer.”

  Diana’s pencil flew over her page as she tried to capture every word, every hint, Hooper offered. “Did you ever know the woman’s name, the one Butch Cassidy came to see?”

  Hooper nodded slowly. “I do, but I don’t think it’s gonna do you a lot of good. She wuz Mary, Mary Smith. All I know for sure is she’s a member in good standing of the First Methodist Church, the big one in downtown Fort Worth.”

  Diana was scarcely able to contain her excitement. What a wonderful bit of history to hand over to Dr. El when he arrived. Though she questioned Hooper intently for additional details, it soon became apparent he’d told her all he knew. He could offer names of no one else who might know more of the story. He didn’t know if Smith was the woman’s married name or her original family name, but he was firm in what details he did know. Butch Cassidy had loved a girl in Fort Worth. He’d lost her to another man and fled to South America to avoid Pinkerton men and the law. Mary Smith had become a widow but remarried a man named Parker who might, or might not, have been the outlaw, returning to his only love, and using a familiar alias.

  ****

  The place Adler had chosen for their picnic couldn’t have been more perfect. Rainlilies made a green-and-white carpet down to the edge of the river, and tiny blue flowers, so small they were barely patches, peeped between the rocks. Pretty as it was, it could have been dry desert for all the attention Diana was giving the scene. Bending low over her notebook to catch the fading light, she added a word here and there to the details of her conversation with Hooper. The picnic basket, now empty, held down a corner of the quilt Adler had spread for her.

  “I don’t suppose there would be time for Dr. El to go back and check the marriage records in Fort Worth. Or see if anyone at the church could shed light on a marriage ten years back, or maybe even longer than that. And Mary Smith? Why did she have to be Mary Smith? Of all the impossible names to have to search. Hundreds of girls in Fort Worth are named Mary Smith. We don’t even know if she was Smith before she married the first time or after. So close to finding answers, and every kind of clue to follow, but Dr. El can’t possibly have time to do it.” She scribbled another note in the margin. “Just think, Butch Cassidy might still be alive. The accounts of whatever happened in South America are all different, nothing definite. Hooper’s story ties in with what little the bartender told us. If Cassidy is alive, he’d only be in his late fifties now, I think. If he did come back, and he and Mary Smith…” She stopped as she looked up and saw Adler glaring, his Horned Owl façade in full force. “What? Isn’t it fascinating? It’s worth looking into.” A more cautious thought struck her. “You don’t think Hooper was making it all up, do you? Just spinning a yarn for the visiting city girl who wouldn’t know any better?”