by Peter Bowen
As our wars go it was damned hard to brag on it, like I said.
Theodore went off and telegraphed his mother or something because it wasn’t but about two weeks before there were transports for us down at the docks and them full of food and nurses for our sick and wounded that hadn’t died yet, and it was very few of them hadn’t, and we was marched on board, the Harvardlings having mysteriously got their voices back, and off we went, save for a hundred or so of the Rough Riders who felt the outpourings of thanks for their heroism might result in their identification and eventual trial and hanging.
Butch and Sundance was of this number.
I wished them tall grass, deep watering holes, and pretty ladies, and they said that they might try Argentina or Australia. The Pinkertons was hard after them along with Harry Lefors and Charley Siringo and some other hardcases that happened to be law abiding.
“Siringo is as fast as the Kid, here,” said Butch.
“No he ain’t,” said the Kid.
“Like I said, Argentina or Australia or something,” said Butch.
I told Teethadore I was damned if I’d waller all the way to Long Island, where he planned to muster out the Rough Riders, in one of the rusty tubs the Navy had commandeered to haul us home.
I was yelling at the top of my lungs at Theodore when McGarrigle and Deleage come in and told me to quit waking the damned dead we’d leave that very hour for “the south coast.”
“You seem to be well taken care of, Major Kelly,” said Theodore.
I just walked away. I wondered how that man slept at night or shaved himself.
McGarrigle and Deleage had some business to attend to in New Orleans, so we sailed there. Actually, we sailed to Bayou Teche, since the business was with a few dozen of Deleage’s Cajun relatives. Neither the Mick nor the Frog bothered to mention just what this business was, and being the soul of courtesy I did not ask.
My polite discretion was taken for eagerness to help them in liquidating their import-export firm. While I had been helping Theodore beat hell out of the Dons the Mick and the Frog had held a fire sale, and the last of their munitions had been bought by one or another revolutionary band at or in one or another of them tinpot countries that line the Caribbean like cheap hotels in a gaming town.
Cajuns is clannish folk, and a relative of Deleage’s named Cousin Moutard led a long line of pirogues back through the swamps till we come to an abandoned plantation. There was a huge old ruin of a house had the roof caving in and the wallpaper hanging down in long sheets from the ceilings. Snakes slithered away when you walked on the floors, which was a hard yellow pine all tongued and grooved.
The house was full of cases of rifles and ammunition and a few mountain howitzers taken to pieces. We loaded everything and Deleage set fire to the old building.
When he come to the dock where we was waiting I asked him if perhaps the plantation had been his family’s. He nodded and shrugged and we poled away into the dark swamp.
The next morning I firmly refused to go on any delivery mission down in the Caribbean. Cousin Moutard offered to take me to New Orleans to catch whatever train suited me.
They was still loading their ship with the cases of guns and bullets when me and Cousin Moutard headed away from the landing.
As the pirogue moved on the flat water, I reflected that I had come out of many adventures much worse chewed up than I was at the moment, probably because I was nearly fifty and I didn’t debate overlong with myself as to whether or not it was time to run yet.
This was an extremely dangerous time for me. America had come in to lots of new possessions and I knew who several officers was that would like nothing better than to tell me go look at ’em and look at ’em carefully.
It was a good time for me to take a quiet sneak off in some direction no one would credit, and using a name and passport no one knew at all. A very good time. Never been a better time. I thought on where and couldn’t come up with nothing.
That night Cousin Moutard and me stayed at a hotel at a steamboat landing—water was the roads here—and about midday next we come to the Mississippi.
“You can catch a ferry this evening,” said my Cajun cabman. “Good luck to you. Those two scoundrels will be in Key West in two months, if you wanted to write.”
We shook hands.
I spent the next week in New Orleans, going to the races and eating good food. I caught the train west, for San Francisco. I figured when I got there I’d look on some maps and find a safe place to go on to.
The Spanish-American War was over. One good thing about it, it was short.
5
I SHOULD HAVE BOOKED myself on an extremely slow world tour under the name of Parker but I had forgot that the way to stay alive in this world is never be regular in yer habits.
It was how I had kept myself alive when scouting and I should have knowed that it would apply to the rest of my life.
Gussie had wearied of the cosseted life of a millionaire’s widow and was playing in a perfectly godawful play which opened the day that I got there.
I was about trained out. Dirty, hungover, and reeking of seegars from the smoking coach. I got a room at the Palace and sent a bellhop to a tailor I knew over on Powell Street with a note ordering me fresh duds in the morning or even later that night. I soaked in a scalding tub for a couple of hours and ate a room service dinner of seafood and champagne.
I slept for a few hours and the tailor woke me up. He’d altered a ready-made dark blue suit and had brought all the accessories such as shirts and cravats and studs and a creamy new Monarch of the Plains Stetson and boots and linen handkerchief and small clothes. I paid him and offered him a drink, and he grinned and had one quick one neat and went out, his pigtail bobbing. Wang Chu understood English all right but he didn’t like to speak it much.
The clothes fit perfectly. For years the good white citizens of San Francisco had been passing laws making it more or less illegal for Orientals to do any sort of work but laundry or cooking, and Wang Chu had his tailor shop behind a laundry and more than one of the city’s swells gave his custom to the little Chinese tailor.
I waited at the door with the rest of the stage-door Johnnies, sort of slanchwise across the alley, tipped against the brick of another building. An earthquake struck, a mild one, and I felt the brick ripple through the cloth of my coat.
Gussie weren’t an ingenue anymore, and I was no young swain. But she spotted me before she had got all the way outside and she blew me a gay kiss.
“Oh, Luther,” she said, “is this really the wickedest city in all America?”
“No,” I said.
“What’s the wickedest?”
“Washington. Very few people die of San Francisco. Tens of thousands die of Washington every year.”
“Hmm,” said Gussie, “are you developing a conscience?”
“Hardly,” I says. “I just like to keep an eye out is all.”
“Let’s walk and walk and walk,” she trilled. Gussie had the loveliest speaking voice I ever heard, cream and sand.
So we walked up hills and down hills and we went down to the wharves and walked up to the top of Russian Hill and watched the sun come up. We went over to the Italian neighborhood and ate breakfast in a tiny place had room for only two tables out in front.
I took Gussie back to my room and we had a grand old time for aged folks like us and she went to sleep with her head on my chest and after a few minutes I slept, too.
For a few days that was our regular routine. The play was so awful I couldn’t even find the patience to sit through it once and I have mercifully forgot what the damned thing was called. Gussie was a fine actress but not up to lifting this dead hog off the floor. She laughed it off, saying when you’d been away from acting as long as she had you took what you could get and this was what she’d gotten.
We was walking in that light, misty San Francisco rain once and Gussie stopped real sudden and put a hand on my cheek.
“Luth
er,” she said, “why don’t we get married?”
“Who to?” I said. I warn’t surprised, I had been expecting this.
Gussie looked at me, smiling and sad at the same time.
“You’re right, Luther. It’s just I missed you when you left the last time.”
“Gussie,” I says, “I’m going to take you to your hotel now.”
She cracked me a good one with her handbag, the jeweled clasp cutting my cheek.
I watched her stalk off, and, no, I didn’t go after her. She needed to be alone and maybe she needed to never see me again. I would find out in time. You get into your forties having not stayed more’n a few months in one place since you were fourteen you find you don’t want the road home all that familiar. I had got used to loss. I was comfortable with it.
Times like this a feller wants a drink or eight, because Gussie was a great friend and I had had to fail her, easier to do it and get it over with than go along knowing that one day I’d have to sneak off leaving no more than a note on a pillow and my best wishes.
San Francisco was a great place for saloons and most of them open twenty-four hours a day. I found one with a few gents in it who were more or less in the same funk I was and did not wish to talk. We had ourselves a good community mope till the sun come up and we all rose at the same moment and went our separate ways.
When I picked up my key at the hotel’s desk the attendant handed me a red parchment envelope which had been sealed with black sealing wax. My full name was on the front—Luther Sage Kelly—and the letters looked rather curious, none of them was exactly curved—they was assemblies of lines.
I was as tired as Noah’s dog and I slipped the envelope in my coat pocket and went on up to my room, slipped off my coat, and flopped on the bed in my boots. I slept for a couple hours, that unhappy, drunken sleep that don’t rest you, just stretches you out thinner than you was before.
All them years of being out in bad country alone and that country full of folks who would kill me if they could has made me uncommon good at sorting out noises, and the softer the noises the quicker the sort. Half asleep, I heard the faint brushing noise of feet with no shoes on them and I opened my eye a slit and when a shadow from deeper in the room got close enough I come up off the bed with a pillow in one hand, to distract who it was as my right foot headed for a kneecap.
Wang Chu’s eyes was about as big as black overcoat buttons. I pulled my foot back and come up to my feet.
“Gaddamn it, Chu,” I says in a low voice, “I could have hurt you. You’re welcome here anytime, just knock on the damn door. If I’d have been a little more nervous I’d have had a gun to hand and you might be dead.” I was concerned as hell, even half asleep I grasped that Wang Chu must be in some trouble. Well, I liked him and I liked his clothes so I’d listen, I thought. (I ought to have known by now that noble impulses are only slightly less dangerous than scorned women.)
Wang Chu bowed and delivered a speech in better English than I got about how gracious and fine a person I was.
I told him to cut the crap and tell me what he wanted.
Chu allowed as how he appreciated my urging him to cut the crap and the problem reduced to the sorry fact that someone was trying to kill him.
“Someone is trying to kill my tailor,” I said, eyebrows raised. “Why, the nerve of the son of a bitch. We cannot have this.”
So I then asked why someone was trying to kill the good citizen Wang Chu.
Wang Chu expressed surprise that anyone would wish to kill a humble laundry owner, but having thought of not much else for days he supposed that it had possibly to do with smuggling ... since ... times ... were ... hard and ...
“And it’s every pigtailed Chink fer himself,” I says. “I think I do divine the picture. Now the real question is what are you smuggling? Opium? Girls? Coolies?”
Wang Chu shook his head vigorously. “Jade,” he said.
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, “I know where there’s tons of gaddamn jade. I know where there is a whole mountain of jade. Pink, white, green, red, yellow, any color you want.”
Wang Chu sucked his teeth for a while. “Entire mountain?”
“Yup. Big mountain, too. But why are you smuggling jade into ... you are smuggling jade into China.”
Chu allowed as how the honorable and gracious Kelly was tits-on right on that score.
“Where is the mountain?” he asked, innocently.
“Alaska,” I says.
Chu allowed as how he had heard of Alaska and heard it was a big place. Also a long ride away.
“Any jade closer?” he asked.
I allowed as how there was lots of jade much closer.
“Where?”
“Wyoming,” I said.
“How big?”
“Oh, a ton, maybe.”
“Ah, what color?” said Wang Chu.
I picked up a green sour apple from the fruit basket on the night stand. “This color,” I said.
Wang Chu’s impassiveness went missing for a moment.
“Pay two hundred thousand in gold.”
“Fine,” I says, “I’ll go fetch it. Half down, half when I bring it.”
“All on delivery.”
“Goodbye, Wang,” I says, pulling on my pants.
“Half down, I go with you to get jade boulder. Don’t worry about other problem.”
In two hours, after having swelled the bank balance of Kelly so fat the manager soiled himself at the mere sight of me, Wang Chu and Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther was going across the Bay to the train station in Oakland. We carried no baggage to speak of, and I had wired ahead to some friends telling them I required a freight wagon, stock, and a reason for driving the wagon north from Cheyenne and thank you very much. As I could have easy turned these boys in for a fat reward long ago they would not ask me any prying questions neither.
“Whole ton,” said Wang Chu.
“Yup,” I said. “And if you are smart you’ll sell it slow. Don’t want to flood your market.”
When the train pulled out we was installed in a suite with all the comforts—had half a car, study, parlor, and bedrooms—and I got into a for-blood poker game with Wang Chu. He beat me out of five grand before I gave up and rang for dinner.
We et canvasback duck, oysters, potted shrimps, and such. I had had a long night and day. As the train climbed the Sierra I went to sleep, and when I woke up late the next afternoon we was pulling into Salt Lake City. I pulled the blinds. I don’t even like looking at the goddamned place.
I went to the bar in the smoking car and got a nice big drink, and looked balefully out on the City of the Saints. I did not allow them much hope of improvement.
Chu found me, and he sipped at a glass of wine while I guzzled a tumbler of bourbon.
“How you find this jade?” he said.
I knew about the jade in the Owl Creek Mountains because I had guided one of the early geological surveys—it was hardly any problem, as the Cheyennes swooped down on the wagon hauling the specimens, run off the driver and guards, dumped out some of the sacks of specimens, and scratched their heads a moment before agreeing unanimously that anyone who filled sacks with these worthless rocks was insane and therefore sacred to the Great Spirit, and so we was left alone and never bothered—at a time when half the track crews laying the Union Pacific was in trenches fighting off raids.
I had happened on the jade solely by accident. I had tossed a fair-sized rock down in a dry wash to see if I could flush a deer or an antelope for camp meat. The rock hit a good-sized boulder and busted off a flake of it. I happened to be down in the wash the next day and I picked up the flake—a sour apple green—and took it to Professor Herndon who said it was jade, the most valuable color, and he would not mention it in his report because we must at all costs discourage Oriental immigration.
I shrugged. I hadn’t met many Chinese and didn’t care one way or another, there was always some idiot with a dislike for one or another color. People are genera
lly fairly vile, you ask me, tint no matter. So I pitched the jade off into the brush and thought no more about it—until now.
As the train began to labor off toward the pleasures of Denver I rang for breakfast and ate a lot of pancakes and bacon and eggs and I was addressing a seegar and some stout coffee when Wang Chu come in and bowed.
“Now what?” I says.
“Just being polite,” says Wang.
“It’s wasted on me,” I says.
“You Americans have abominable manners.”
“ ’Struth.”
Wang ordered a simple breakfast of melon and coffee.
“By the way,” I said, “did you not make mention of someone trying to kill you, implying that you would like to have me kill them or something?”
“Hired other man.”
“Which other man.”
“He say he know you. Thomas Horn.”
Last I had heard of Tom he was “regulating” up in northern Wyoming. A regulator shot down rustlers like coyotes, sparing the ranchers the trouble and expense of due process of law. When I’d last seen him he still looked boyish enough, which I have noticed the worst killers always does, I don’t know why, maybe it’s that sorrow and pity is not known to them.
Horn always left a pebble in the cheek of a victim. I had it on good authority that he had killed over four hundred men, maybe more.
“Well,” I says, “I would have flat refused that kind of work anyway.”
Chu nodded. “Horn said you would. I am glad that I did not embarrass you.”
We got to Cheyenne in the forenoon of the next day, and I stepped off into that damnable Big Horn wind that can pick you up and have you in Kansas in minutes. I swear I once saw a whole flock of sheep passing over a mile up.
My chums was there with the freight wagon and saddle horses and such, somewhat older than I remembered them and then I realized it was better than ten years since I’d seen them or they had seen me.
“You require that we go with you or anythang?” says Poke.
