by Peter Bowen
The seegar was about half gone when a young man in homespun, wearing boots about to go bust, and carrying a little bundle of what I supposed was his entire estate, walked up to me and looked me square for a minute.
“Mister,” he said, “I’ll rub down your horse for you if you’ll pay my fare across the river.”
“Sure,” I said. I went back to looking at the sky.
The kid rubbed on the horse in a practiced sort of way, and he even lifted up the horse’s feet one by one to check them for stones.
“Fare’s a nickel, Mister,” he said. He kept looking me straight in the eye. I found it curious, usually someone who has to ask for a favor will turn away.
“What’s your name, son?” I said.
“Tom.”
“What do you want to go over there for?”
“I don’t.”
“Where do you want to go?”
“Out west.”
What was bothering me was he reminded me of Luther Kelly in 1866, carrying the army mail, and telling the postmaster that “of course I could find my way to Fort McCloud even if it did look like snow.” I was wrong. If a kindly old Cree brave hadn’t seen my tracks and followed them (he had crossed them several times since he was going in a straight line), Mrs. Kelly’s boy Luther would have been crowbait, sure.
“What are you going to do when you get out there?”
“I’m going to get me a job, and then I’m going to be a scout as soon as I can earn an outfit. Like Buffalo Bill.”
I began to laugh, and then I howled, and gasped, and it was all that I could do to keep from pitching over sideways. Young Tom was getting redder and redder, and balling his fists. “I don’t see what’s so damn funny,” he says, “and I’d sure as hell like my nickel.”
I had laughed so much that my voice was hoarse, and I was still wiping a tear away now and again.
“Tell you what,” I says, “I’ll give you a job and your passage to Cheyenne. Job will last about six months, it’s forty a month and found. I’ll advance you enough to outfit yourself, and that will come out of your pay.”
“You funnin’ me or what?” he says. He looked like he was about to try and break my jaw.
“I ain’t funnin’ you,” I says. I reached into my pocket and brought out what coins I had in there, and gave him a nickel and two fifty-dollar gold pieces. He stood there gaping at the money—and when I tipped the three coins into his hand it took him some seconds before he drew out a little leather pouch he had on a string around his neck and started to put all three inside.
“You’ll need the nickel for the ferry,” I says. The boat had started back. It was a donkey-engined sternwheeler, and had to keep its bows about forty-five degrees upstream to keep from being swept downriver by the current.
Some of the stun had wore off young Tom by the time we were halfway across the river, and he began to rattle off a bunch of questions, most of which I couldn’t hear over the belching and hissing and farting of the donkey engine.
I shook my head and pointed to the shore. He understood. When we had debarked and begun to climb the hill he started to ask just what it was he was going to need, and why couldn’t he get it in Cheyenne?
“Everything is twice as much in Cheyenne,” I said. “Now, what I want you to do is go right on up this street here, and when you get almost to the top of the hill there’s a clothing place. Get some good heavy shirts, longjohns, pants, boots, and a good felt hat big enough so you can jam it down far enough over your head so the wind won’t take it. Then look me up at the Ashley House—Luther Kelly is my name—and I’ll buy you dinner and we’ll list up what else you need to get in the morning.”
I swung up on my horse and took off uphill, leaving young Tom waving after me.
After I returned the horse to the livery I did something I had been working up to for some time. I rode a streetcar. For some reason they scared me, and it was interesting to find out that they just rocked along, like a train. The car paused in front of the Ashley House, and I hopped off and strode inside. I told O’Banion, the doorman, that a very young feller in new duds, about so high and dark, would be along looking for me, and he did have legitimate business with me, if you call guiding nabobs legitimate.
After shedding my riding duds and shucking on one of my Eastern disguises, I went in search of Oliver. He was in the bar, drinking Scotch whiskey neat, with Apollinaris water for a chaser, and eating slices of pickled buffalo tongue,
“Set for the morrow, are we?” he asks. “Do we carouse again tonight?”
“’Fraid not,” I says. “I don’t much like the idea riding the train with a hangover.” I told him what little I knew about Tom.
He shrugged. “It would have been cheaper, I suppose,” he says, “to hire someone there.”
“If there was someone there for sure,” I says. “This way I am sure that he’ll stay on for the whole trip. He’s a stubborn little bastard. All you have to do is imply he can’t do something, and he’ll do it out of orneriness, even if it does cost him both hands and feet.”
“Oh,” Oliver said, looking skyward, “before I should forget.” He handed me a slim wallet. “There is ten thousand dollars in there, for you to make purchases or hire. I shall require receipts.”
Without a word I went to the front desk and got a pen and paper, and gave him his damned receipt then and there. He folded it and placed it in his wallet, filled with similar scraps of paper, bills, and such. As an afterthought, I counted the money twice. It was there. I felt a bit foolish and a whole lot angry. Oliver was toying with me, and I didn’t like it one damn bit.
“Well,” he said, taking his weight off the bar, “I have decided to dine elsewhere tonight. See you in the morning.”
There had been a lot of times over the years when I have felt uneasy just after making camp. And when I do, I wait until it is dark, and then move off quietly a few hundred yards, after dousing the fire. Even with the city noises I felt uneasy now. I went up to my room and packed—didn’t have much, I’d sent the bulk of my gear out in the sealed boxcar. I changed into my riding gear, which was nothing more than denims and a flannel shirt, and put on my buckskin jacket and comfortable old hat. I put the ten thousand in my moneybelt, pulled on my boots, and tucked a Colt in my belt and a derringer in my boot-top for good measure. I went down by the stairs, out the back door, and around the block. I come whistling up to O’Banion and asked him if he had seen my young friend. The words was no sooner out of my mouth than I saw Tom, walking slowly toward the Ashley House, looking from side to side at the buildings and lamps.
“You didn’t see me,” I says to O’Banion, pressing a gold piece into his practiced palm.
“Not since ye came back from yer ride,” he whispered.
I hurried down to Tom and hissed, “It’s me, Kelly, come on, we have to move.”
He didn’t gape or ask any questions, just spun on his heel and fell in step beside me. He was creaking like a ship at anchor, what with the new leather of his boots and the starch in his clothes.
I hailed a cab, and had him take us to another livery stable, some blocks away from the one I had rented a horse from earlier in the day.
We crossed the Missouri and rode. I aimed to catch the train at its second stop, a little place called Catersville, about twenty miles to the west and a little north. The roads were good, and just by navigating as I was used to—the stars—we come to Catersville about three in the morning. The train station was open, and I purchased two tickets to Cheyenne. We slept on the benches until dawn, and the stationmaster directed us to a boarding house across the way, run by a widow who served breakfasts and such to travelers, though few ever stopped here, so close to St. Louis.
It was one of the best feeds I have ever had. There was fresh biscuits, ham, steak, eggs, flapjacks, home-canned peaches, coffee, and cinnamon rolls. Breakfast for the two of us (actually, four, Tom ate three times what anyone else could hold) came to forty cents. The widow lady had looked upon
Tom’s gastronomical feats with that motherly smile women save for peaked-looking young menfolk.
Full of food and tired, we just drowsed in the chairs on the station platform. We’d dropped the horses off at the local smith’s—the liveryman was sending a boy out on the train to take them back.
Right at one o’clock the train come in, and we got on, headed for Cheyenne.
And I still had the ten thousand dollars.
21
IT TOOK FOUR LONG, boring days to get to Cheyenne, with Tom pestering me with questions all the damn way. We stopped for a two-hour layover in North Platte, Nebraska, to let the fast freights through. The seats was comfortable enough, the food in the club car was all right, and I felt like I’d been nailed to a rocking chair and had a magpie on my shoulder.
The General Store was a well-stocked place, and Tom bought blankets and a canvas bedroll and a slicker and a rifle and such odds and ends as appealed to him. He paid thirty-five dollars for a used Spanish-style saddle. At the end of this buying spree he had about ten dollars left, which was fine, because where he would be going there would be precious little chance to spend money.
About the time we come to due south of the Sand Hills a fearful stench assaulted us, and flies by the millions came in the windows. Ladies screamed as the little buggers got entangled in their hair. It was impossible to eat, the flies covered the food the moment the cook put it on a plate. The wind finally veered around to the southwest, and the stench lessened.
“Before you ask me,” I says, “those are the thousands of buffalo killed last winter up north, maybe even as far as a hundred miles.” I made a note—to wire Bill and make sure that every window and door on the nabobs’ cars was tightly screened, which effort might reduce the flies to mere tens of thousands.
We steamed along for another hundred miles of prairie and a new wave of buzzing flies, and young Tom was silent the whole time.
“You sick?” I finally says, not having had a moment’s peace since we left Missouri.
“No,” says Tom. “It’s just that ever since I was a tad I have wanted to go west, and now I am beginning to think that it is going to be pretty much gone before I get there.”
There wasn’t anything I could say to that, except maybe the only thing that was worse was having to watch the Big Lonesome shorn of its buffalo, Indians, and openness. Say what you want about nesters, they are just plain damn dull. There is no such thing as a pretty fence.
“Cheyenne is only about a hundred miles,” I says. “When we get there we’re going to be working more or less around the clock. Once we have all of the gear stowed and Jack’s got his hands on the reins, you and me is going to take two weeks and do some hard scouting for game. There should be quite a bit left, but it will be in scattered places.”
The train chuffed on, and we didn’t speak much. I went back to the club car for a drink, but the twenty or so happily drowning flies in my whiskey discouraged even that, so I went back up to my seat, pulled my hat over my eyes, and went to sleep.
The slowing of the train woke me. We pulled into the station, and there was Jack, looking clear-eyed and healthy, standing in all of his Plains finery. Tom’s mouth dropped open looking at this “pretty shadow.” Not having mirrors much, the clothes-horses out here like admiring their shadows as they ride along.
The train had just stopped when I thought of something.
“Tom,” I says, “it is impolite, I know, but do you have a last name?”
Tom looked puzzled. “It don’t seem impolite. It’s Horn. Tom Horn.”
We swung down off the train and Jack ambled over to us, never looking at me once. He just kept his eyes on Tom. He was looking Tom over like you would a two-headed calf or an honest politician—something simply not to be believed.
“Luther,” says Jack, “we have been friends for a good many years, and I feel that I am entitled to an explanation. What is this here creature?”
“I found it outside a whorehouse, crying for its mama,” I says, “and I gave it a peanut and it followed me home.”
“Is it human?”
“Barely.”
“What does it do?”
“We can hang a lamp on it at night.”
“That all?”
“So far.”
Tom just stood there, and he got this big grin on his face.
“I’m Tom Horn,” he says.
“Texas Jack.” They shook hands.
“Well,” says Jack, “we got some work to do.”
Jack had brought what is called a Cape Cart, a light wagon with oversize wheels—bought to transport heads back to the taxidermist which the Duke was bringing along.
Jack had set up camp about five miles north of Cheyenne, near a little spring, with a lovely grove of cottonwoods. The flies had abandoned us at the Wyoming line, I don’t know why.
There were twenty-two freight wagons lined up, ready to put the traces and teams on, and three lighter wagons. The cavvy of horses was off down the little stream, in a pole-and-rope corral.
The teamsters would start arriving in a couple of days, and then we would begin off-loading the boxcar. Until then, all we had to do was make sure that the horses was gentled, the merchants paid, and a few hundred other petty tasks seen to.
“Tom,” I says, “you know how to ride?”
“Yessir.”
“Well, there’s eighty horses over there, and I want you to break ’em all.”
Tom looked a little puzzled.
“How many horses you broke?” I says.
“Two.”
“Time you learned,” I says, picking up Jack’s sea-grass rope.
22
JACK AND ME ATTENDED to the merchants, had the teamsters set up tents, off-loaded the boxcar, and from time to time we would go watch Tom fly gracefully here and there. Each time he’d eat dirt he’d climb back aboard, one of those who just won’t let go. Well, that was sure in his favor.
Word came from Bill that the party would be arriving on the seventh of June, a week later than we had planned. Fine by me, there was always more to do than you would have thought. Tom was getting to be a good horsebreaker. He was bruised and pulled and strained every which way, so if he made a wrong move his body immediately screamed. Best tutor in the world, pain is.
One fine day, I believe it was about the third of June, I went over to the Cheyenne Cattle Club for a drink. Nothing much to it, but I heard a lot of pistol shots coming from around back.
“What’s going on out there?” I asks the barkeep.
“Shooting contest.”
“Anybody I know?”
“Red Buck—you know he’s Charley Goodnight’s trail boss—and some sawed-off little runt Shanghai Pierce found on a Denver gooseberry ranch. I think the wager is twenty grand between the two of them, and Lord knows what the side bets are.”
Charley Goodnight and Shanghai Pierce were Texas cattlemen, and the sort of enemies who can’t get along without one another. I’d never met either of them, but I had heard the stories.
Shanghai Pierce thought very highly of himself—so highly that he commissioned a fifteen-foot-tall statue of himself. He built a bandstand and invited everybody to come and listen to his speech. After which there would be free whiskey and barbecue. So, of course, half the folks in West Texas showed up. Only one ain’t invited is Charley Goodnight. Shanghai being economical, he just sent out one un-invitation to Charley and bade everybody else come. The band played for a while, and toward the middle of their last number Shanghai rose and made his way to the speaker’s platform.
Just as the band starts to play the final bars of whatever it is they are playing, a train blows its whistle, and here comes an engine, steaming backwards, with just two boxcars. The train slows and stops at the end of Shanghai’s own private railroad spur. The whistle dies down, the boxcar doors open, and about a million pigeons fly out. Shanghai don’t know that you unveil a statue after the speech, so there all fifteen feet of him is, with clouds of pige
ons fighting to get on and take a crap. Shanghai is screaming for a Winchester by this time, but the train is pulling out, and Goodnight is hanging out of the engine, waving his Stetson.
I walked around to the back and saw about thirty gents in a group standing behind the two shooters and the thrower. The thrower was tossing glass balls about three inches in diameter as far as he could, and one or the other of the gunmen would draw and fire.
“What’s the score?” I asks a gent I don’t know.
“Ninety-six to eighty-eight.”
“Out of how many?”
“That was the ninety-seventh.”
“Didn’t know Red Buck was that good,” I says.
“Ain’t Red Buck,” the feller says. “It’s that little dwarf Shanghai found.”
I had only met Red Buck once, and he was about the most hair-trigger cowboy I have ever known. Thinking perhaps that Red Buck would probably not accept defeat graciously, I returned to the bar and had another drink, behind the club’s thick walls. A great cheer announced that the contest was over. I waited. No shots. Later I found out that Goodnight had demanded that each contestant have a pile of exactly one hundred shells in front of him, though why he thought that Red Buck wouldn’t use numbers ninety-nine and one hundred to do in the dwarf, I’ll never know.
The mob trooped in, and Charley hollered that the drinks was on him. Some of the bettors had this little feller on their shoulders, he having made them richer than they had been.
Everybody was so jovial and determined to get drunk they did indeed manage to in a remarkably short time. Little knots of men drifted off to tables, some well-wishers left, and pretty soon I was able to go up to the dwarf.
“I’m Yellowstone Kelly,” I said, sticking out my paw. “Are you in need of a job?”
He shook my hand, and then commenced to cough something awful. There was bright red drops of blood in the blue cloth of his kerchief.
“Marion Hedgepeth.” He coughed a bit more. “Is it in a dry climate?” he said, after wiping his lips.
“Yes.”
“I’ll take it.”
