Of Grave Concern

by Max McCoy

  The Panic of 1873 came the September after the Bender murders were discovered. Even now, the country still remained on its knees from the collapse of the investment banks on Wall Street. Thousands of men were out of work and hitching rides in, or under, or on top of, boxcars from town to town. But the newspapers chose to ignore the obvious (the papers were owned by wealthy men, after all) and called these unfortunates a great and threatening “tramp army.” These were men, the editors said, who had learned to forage and bivouac as soldiers during the Civil War and who now chafed at the bonds of work, home, and family. It was all merde, as my Tanté Marie would say.

  “Is he badly hurt?”

  “He’s not too busted up,” Tom said, locking the door behind him. “At least as far as I can tell, but he hasn’t said a word to me. Stubborn, I guess. I reckon he’ll be black-and-blue for a few days, but nothing worse.”

  The tramp moaned.

  “Is there nothing you can do for him?”

  “I’ll bring him dinner directly,” Tom said. “Yours too.”

  “Is it that late?”

  “It’s getting along to five,” Tom said. “Have you been asleep?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said.

  Tom left and I stared at the poor tramp. He was curled on his side, knees drawn to his chest, his face turned to the wall.

  The world is unfair, life is pain, but to retreat is a mistake.

  “Take heart,” I said.

  No response.

  “Empty words, you’re thinking, but I know what you’re feeling right now. I have been beaten down, many times, both physically and emotionally, and the trick is to refuse to allow them to convince you that you’re worthless. That’s what they do best, getting us to defeat ourselves.”

  He was listening, I could tell, because he had slowed his breathing.

  “I’m sorry about what they did to you, but sorry won’t help. I don’t know what’s going to happen to either of us, but I promise that if I can be of some help to you, I will. And I expect the same in return.”

  More silence.

  “Another thing—I suspect that you’re not unwilling to talk, you’re unable. You’re mute, and they did not give you enough time to write your name.”

  He turned and looked at me.

  “Enough talk,” I said. “Take your rest.”

  9

  Bartholomew Potete, Esquire, looked like a grizzly bear that somebody had stuffed into Sunday clothes. He was also drunk as Falstaff. When Tom opened the door of the jail for him, the big man could hardly stand. He took a few staggering steps inside, got his bearings, then launched himself toward the row of cells. He grabbed a double handful of bars and then hung there until Tom brought him a stool.

  “Thanks, my boy.”

  No trace of a slur.

  “You may go, Tom. I should talk to my client alone.”

  “Really?” Tom’s voice was thick with disappointment. “But what about the tramp?”

  “He will be no bother, as he appears to be asleep.”

  “Oh, all right,” Tom said. “I was going to go outside and roll me a Durham’s anyway.”

  He banged the door behind him.

  “Miss,” Potete said, turning his florid face toward mine. His breath was like a barroom floor, and I put a hand over my nose to keep from choking.

  “I apologize for my breath,” he said. “I have been celebrating.”

  “Celebrating what?”

  “Wednesday,” he said. “Now, they tell me that Counselor Sutton suspects you of being the notorious Kate Bender. Is this true?”

  “It’s true that he thinks I am.”

  “While I will concede there are certain superficial characteristics that you share with the description of the infamous murderess of the prairie—you are mysterious and pulchritudinous—that does not mean you should suffer for her crimes. Now, I have an important question to ask.”

  “Go on.”

  “Have you any money?”

  I was not offended. This was a conversation between professionals.

  “Not at the moment,” I said. “But I will pay whatever you require.”

  “How?”

  “I have means,” I said. “I will send you the money from Colorado.”

  “I think not,” he said. “Payment is due promptly upon services rendered. Is that a bird in a cage there, or am I seeing things?”

  I assured him the bird was real.

  “I am a Spiritualist and medium,” I said. “Arrange my release and I will present in two days the greatest spook show ever convened on Kansas soil. You will share in the profit.”

  “It sounds like a risky proposition. This town has a poor history of tolerating humbug.”

  “The risk is mine,” I said. “If anyone is to be run out of town on a rail, or dogged by humiliation to the next town, it will be me. You are an officer of the court and safely insulated from accusations of fraud.”

  “Equal shares?”

  “No,” I said. “The risk is mine.”

  “It is difficult to risk anything behind bars,” he said.

  There was silence between us for perhaps half a minute.

  All I wanted to do was leave Dodge City. Why did everyone have to make it difficult?

  “All right,” I said finally. “But I want the sleeping man released with me.”

  “The tramp? Why?”

  “I need him.”

  “He’s a vagrant,” Potete said. “He must be able to demonstrate visible means of support before Judge Frost will allow him to remain in town.”

  “Then say, truthfully, that the man is now in my employ.”

  “Very well,” Potete said. “We must now go upstairs before Police Judge Frost.”

  “Frost will hear the writ of habeas corpus?”

  “No,” Potete said. “That will be for the district court to decide. But Frost is the city’s police judge, and he has jurisdiction over this establishment. I will petition him for your release, pending your charges being heard in district court.”

  “You believe he will release me, just like that? Isn’t he afraid that I would make a run for it?”

  Potete smiled.

  “Miss,” he said. “Dodge City is an island of civilization in a vast ocean of grass. I will guarantee your appearance to the court—and inform the depot master that you are not to be allowed to board any train. The stage comes only once a week. Unless you are prepared to walk by yourself into the trackless plain, or tag along with some buffalo hunters or freighters bound for the Indian reserve, I am afraid you are stuck here.”

  I nodded in resignation.

  “Now, is there anything else I should know about you?” Potete asked.

  “I come from Chicago,” I said. “If—if a man by the name of Armbruster comes looking for me, be wary. Tell him nothing.”

  “A domestic matter?”

  “A serious matter.”

  “Just what happened in Chicago?”

  “It is of no concern to Dodge City.”

  He smiled, then rubbed the stubble on his chin with the back of his paw.

  “If you say so.”

  Then Potete shouted for Tom the Jailer.

  “That’s all?” I asked. “Don’t you want to know my name?”

  Potete rose unsteadily to his feet. He turned his great head and regarded me with bloodshot, ursine eyes.

  “Would it matter?” he asked.

  10

  Upon our release from the city jail, I again took to the muddy streets with Eddie, in his cage, to find lodging on the north side of the tracks. I had just stepped onto Bridge Street, south of the depot, when I encountered an approaching juggernaut of hooves and wheels that made me shudder.

  It was a train of freight wagons, pulled by perhaps three dozen oxen with great horns. Each of the tall-sided wagons was bigger than a railway car. The rear wheels were taller than a man, and every wagon was heaped full of untold thousands of buffalo hides. The lead oxen were struggling, mu
d flying from their churning hooves. Their eyes were wild and their necks strained against the load, while the bullwhackers cursed and whipped the team onward to keep the wagons from becoming hopelessly mired.

  The bullwhackers—a colorful frontier name for those men who drive the oxen—were a filthy lot, in clothes made of hides and buckskins, with wild rolling eyes and tangled hair. They loped alongside the oxen, snarling and cracking their fearsome whips, seeming altogether like a pack of animals instead of men. The lead bullwhacker, a tall man with billowing gray hair, was astride the ox nearest the starboard front wheel. He was perhaps fifty years old, with hollow eyes and a hard jaw covered with stubble. Every time he opened his mouth, a stream of profanity issued that would have made Satan blush.

  Then a front wheel of the lead wagon fell into a hole and must have found a boulder, because the wheel splintered, the axle turned, and the wagon lurched precariously to the side, driven by the momentum of the tens of thousands of tons behind.

  “Brakes, goddamn it!” the lead bullwhacker, the old one with the gray hair, shouted. “Brakes!”

  The train came to a shuddering stop, with the lead wagon balanced over the wheel, which was submerged in mud nearly to the axle. Then the great wagon swayed the other way, righting itself with a crash.

  “One month and a hundred and eighty goddamn miles from Texas and we drop a wheel two son-of-a-bitching blocks from the hide lot!” the bullwhacker shouted. He jumped off the back of the ox, popped his whip, and kicked mud at the nearest subordinate whacker, who yelped and dashed away.

  “You’d better run, you dog!” the master bullwhacker shouted. “I’m leading a crew of animals. You don’t have the sense God gave a spaniel, and I pay for it every goddamned day.”

  A man in a black satin shirt, peppered with dust, came riding up on a black horse to the lead wagon and began laughing. He was obviously with the train, perhaps as protection. He carried a big rifle butt-first in a saddle scabbard beside his left knee, and there was a bone-handled skinning knife strapped to his right thigh.

  He was a young and handsome man, with long brown hair, piercing brown eyes, and a strip of beard beneath his lower lip. He stopped a few yards from me, leaned forward in the saddle, and gave me a wink.

  “Old Shadrach could find a rock in a feather bed,” he said.

  The buttons on the black shirt were iridescent swirls of color in the sun. Abalone shell or mother-of-pearl, I thought. He was missing the button over his breast pocket. His jeans were tucked into black boots with wicked spurs that had rowels that looked like saw blades.

  “My, look at you,” he said, in that manner that some men have when they are convinced women are starving for any scrap of attention. “Here’s a girl dressed for a funeral in men’s vest and britches and carrying a bird cage. Where in the world did you come from?”

  “East,” I said. “What is this caravan?”

  “Just returned from Fort Elliott on the Canadian,” he said. “We supply the garrison and bring back hides. Five years ago, you could shoot all the buffalo you want just a day’s ride from town. Now you have to go all the way to the Texas Panhandle.”

  “And what will you do when they are all killed?”

  He shrugged. “Not my business,” he said. “I’m into spirits.”

  He pulled a bottle of whiskey from his saddlebag.

  “This is next to worthless here,” he said. “You can buy the cheap stuff, the kind that white men won’t drink, for fifty cents a bottle. But a hundred miles below the Arkansas, it’s priceless. A thirsty Indian will trade everything he owns, including his lodge and his woman, for just one bottle.”

  “As in the days of Noah,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I’m sorry, I have pressing business.”

  I walked on.

  “No need to be unfriendly!” the man shouted after me.

  I put my head down.

  Then I collided with something that knocked my breath from me.

  It was a figure in a buffalo robe and an old-fashioned beaver top hat, a square man, with dark eyes under heavy brows. Cinching the robe was a wide leather belt, and tucked into the belt was an antique pistol, the kind that reminded me of the dueling pistols my father had.

  The creature had stepped out from behind the lead wagon. When we collided with each other, it seemed his hand drove deep beneath my breastbone and clenched something just below my heart. This was silly, of course. You’ve had the wind knocked out of you and felt the same, I’m sure.

  I fell back, struggling for breath, while colors swam before me, pulsating blue and yellow and violet. Then, as darkness smudged the edges of my vision, the sparkling colors seemed to swirl into a tight ball and drop to the ground. I was on the verge of blacking out when I finally gulped a lungful of air in a spasm that shook my body.

  “Madam,” the strange man said in an accent impossible to place, “forgive my haste. How careless of me. Are you intact?”

  He pulled me up with a gloved hand. In the other, he held Eddie’s cage, and the raven was making a furious racket beneath the cloth. His fingers felt cold through the glove, and I hastily removed my hand from his. I took the cage from him, brushed mud from my backside, and picked up the valise from the ground.

  “Your spectacles are broken, sadly,” he said. “But you are unhurt?”

  “I’m fine,” I stammered. As I removed the glasses, shards of one lens fell to the ground. “Just lost my wind.”

  “Ah,” the strange man said. He removed the glove from his right hand and bent down to pluck a marble from the ground in his pale fingers. He held it up, where it caught the rays of the setting sun, and beneath the mud the marble swirled blue and yellow and violet.

  “A prize,” he said, again speaking in that accent that was vaguely Old World. He took a leather bag from his belt, opened it, and dropped the marble in with the others, where it grated with the unpleasant sound of glass on glass. “I must have dropped it.”

  I gave him a tight smile.

  “It is a childish habit, but I have become a collector,” the strange man said. “The days are many and my diversions few.”

  As bad as Dodge City smelled, this man smelled worse, like a dead mouse that has been in a wall for three days. I thought I was going to be sick. My vision was narrowed, as if I were looking down the wrong end of a spyglass.

  “I am Malleus,” he said.

  “Charmed,” I said weakly.

  Who wears a heavy coat and gloves on a warm spring day? I asked myself. No wonder he smells.

  Also, he was perhaps the ugliest man I had ever seen, with features pale and protean. I tried to soothe Eddie, but he was furious.

  “I own this modest freight enterprise,” he said. “You must accept money for the broken spectacles and bruises, I implore—”

  “‘Nevermore!’” screeched Eddie.

  “The birds speaks,” Malleus observed without inflection.

  The whiskey trader in the dusty black shirt rode up.

  “Everything okay, boss?”

  “Go,” Malleus said. “Help Shadrach.”

  The whiskey trader looked uncertain, seemed about to say something, and then thought better of it. He turned the horse and rode back.

  I took a deep breath, trying to clear my head. It was as if a mist had shrouded my mind. My hand still felt cold where the odd man had touched it.

  Malleus shoved his hand in his pocket and came out with some tarnished silver dollars.

  “No,” I said. “The train . . .”

  “As you will,” Malleus said. “Safe travels.”

  Then he tipped his hat and grinned, revealing rows of teeth the color of tusk.

  11

  The Dodge House dominated the southeast corner of North Front Street and Railroad Avenue, just across from the depot and not far from the jail. Not only did it seem to be the biggest concern in town, but it also appeared the neatest, with a broad porch and steps affording the best refuge from the Ganges of mud flow
ing through town.

  “It’s not the Palmer House,” I told Eddie, “but it will do.”

  Police Judge Frost had agreed to the terms of my release, as outlined by Potete, pending the hearing in district court. However, Frost did not consent to release the injured tramp to my employ. The city would have its five-dollar fine for vagrancy first, Frost said. I objected, saying that if a man were fined for having no money, the city was compounding the crime. I declared on principle that I would not contribute to such insanity. Of course, my principle was based on not having the five dollars to begin with.

  I registered at the Dodge House, but made a fuss about having to inspect the rooms first, so as to think I was doing them a favor by reluctantly staying there. Of course, we’d settle up the bill later.

  I chose a corner room, with windows that looked south and west. When I took a glance, my heart sank.

  Potete had been right—the grass, which was rippling fiercely in the wind, seemed to roll on forever. Bisecting this field of green was the railroad, which shot like an arrow to the west. Southward, a trail led out of town, crossed a wide toll bridge spanning a creek, then disappeared into a series of low green hills.

  I placed Eddie’s cage on a table next to the bed, then lifted the cloth. He scrambled about and regarded me with a black seed of an eye that was decidedly critical.

  “Don’t worry, love,” I said. “Another tight spot, I know. But we’ll get ourselves out of this one, and then—”

  “‘Nevermore!’” quoth Eddie.

  The sun was red in the west and the town was beginning to stir in anticipation of the night to come. More cowboys were about, and music was drifting from some of the saloons. Already I could hear an argument over a card game had spilled out the front door of the Saratoga Saloon into the muddy street.

  A teamster straddled a cowboy and was attempting to cut the other’s right ear off with a Bowie knife, but the cowboy was jerking his head so vigorously, the teamster couldn’t get a good angle on the fleshy prize.

  The teamster was a big man, well over two hundred pounds, and little of it was fat. He wore buckskin and denim, and his long brown hair flowed over his shoulders like water.