Buffalo Girls

by Larry McMurtry

  Lately Annie has been nicer to me, that’s because her husband Frank finally got here—he came on a later boat. It is a surprise to me that Frank and Annie get along so well, he was once the big star and fancy shot, not her. The first time they matched up she beat him by one shot. Few men would like that but I guess Frank Butler liked it, he gave up the business and married Annie. I’d like to see Bartle marry somebody who beat him at shooting or anything else, Blue either. I have beat men at their own games many times in my life, Janey—none of them have asked me to marry them though.

  Sometimes when I see Annie and Frank holding hands I get sad—I will never have that, Janey, it’s sad to live a life and have nothing to show. Billy just keeps me in the show for kindness, he won’t trust me on the Deadwood stage again.

  Speaking of the stage, a few days after the Queen came the Prince showed up with four kings, they all took a ride in the stage. I don’t remember what the kings were kings of, Janey—Denmark was one, I think. I have no idea where Denmark is. I don’t think Jack Omohundro cares much for kings, I think he would just as soon give them a spill. I have never seen him race around the arena so fast—the horses were in a froth and the kings plenty scared, I bet. Billy was in a rage that Jack took such liberties with the Prince and the kings. Now Jack is threatening to take his money and leave—Jack is independent, he would as soon leave as not. Also he is jealous of all the attention Billy gets.

  Billy’s name is in the papers every day—why don’t they just make him king? Bartle says. Bartle is not enjoying himself much. Jim spends all day with the beavers, and now Frank Butler is here and Bartle can’t court Annie anymore. Mostly, Bartle stays drunk—he likes the music halls. Billy likes the attention, though—he would keep us here all summer if he had his way.

  I am ready to go, Janey. I have seen enough of merry England, I still don’t know what’s merry about it. I have been put in jail three times just for cussing—of course I know I oughtn’t to cuss, my little girl would not approve, but they shove so in these music halls I forget and let her rip.

  Bartle is testy also, he says he has never felt as crowded as he feels in London. He says he might run amok if he don’t get back to the western spaces before long. If Bartle runs amok in London there will be hell to pay—they have far stricter laws here than we have out west. I have been many places in the west where there was no law at all and none on the horizon either.

  Jim is the only one happy, the man is beaver crazy. He has even talked of living his life in London so he can go to the zoo every day and watch beaver. That startled Bartle—I ain’t living mine here, he said. Well, yours is yours and mine is mine, Jim replied. Bartle almost ran amok at that point, he was so mad. I have spent thirty-five years with you and by God you had rather have the company of a beaver, I guess, Bartle said. Jim refused to argue further.

  Billy and Ned have devised a good routine for the show, it is called Pages of Passing History, it starts with just the Indians worshiping the old spirits, then come the beavermen, the cowboys, the settlers, the Pony Express, buffalo hunters, all the things that happened in the west right up till the outbreak of the Indian wars. Then you get the wars and there’s lots of whooping and scalping and it ends with Custer. After that it is just trick shooting, and Antonio Esquivel does some roping. He is a champion roper, the cowboys are jealous of his skills.

  They say forty thousand people came to see us one night, I didn’t count them but a passel comes every night, I’m surprised anyone could count them correctly. It’s never less than twenty thousand, they say. I doubt there are twenty thousand people in the whole west, Indians and all. Ain’t that strange, my dear? More people stacked up around our arena than there are in the whole west?

  The person who is most impressed with the crowds is Sitting Bull. He and I have taken to getting drunk together, we are both so rough no one else wants to get drunk with either of us. Sitting Bull is in love with Annie Oakley, he calls her his little sure shot. She had her picture made with him, he is very proud of it and shows it to anyone who will look. Of course Annie Oakley has had her picture taken with all the kings and hundreds of swells, she is everybody’s little sure shot I guess. Sometimes it seems she is even more famous than Billy. She blows kisses to the crowds, and has learned how to curtsy. I don’t say it to criticize her—Annie has lent me money. I am just surprised that a country girl like Annie has learned to do the royalty stuff so well. How did she learn? She is never nervous, if she is she doesn’t show it.

  Sitting Bull told me he had no idea there were so many whites—he is amazed. If he had suspected it he says he would have left for Canada and a good deal sooner, killing Custer was just a waste of time, as he sees it now. He says every Indian in the west could kill a white person with every step they take and the whites would not be missed. That may be an exaggeration Janey—Indians take a lot of steps. I suppose it was just his way of saying he didn’t realize how outnumbered he was. I didn’t realize it either—it sure didn’t feel that way when me and Jim and Bartle used to roam around surrounded by thousands of Sioux, we didn’t know we had all that help available over in England.

  1 hope next time I write it will be from the American shore, I don’t wish to stay here any longer than I have to.

  Your mother,

  Martha Jane

  6

  BARTLE BONE HAD HIS CRITICISMS TO MAKE OF ENGLAND—the dampness was a nuisance, and it was rare that he could even glimpse anything that could be called a sky. Sky was just something English people had to get along without. Also the smoky air was offensive. But most vexing of all was being in a town where there were such substantial numbers of policemen. St. Louis boasted several policemen, and New York contained at least a score, but London fairly swarmed with them. It made him anxious to get back west of St. Louis, where one could traipse a long way without encountering one.

  The one factor that redeemed England, in Bartle’s mind, was the women. Jim Ragg might choose his beaver, Annie and Billy cotton to royalty, Jack Omohundro flaunt his passion for gambling dens, the Indians indulge in plentiful tobacco, the cowboys dote on being stared at, Calamity enjoy her gin palaces: what he liked were the girls.

  Bartle had observed that women were like game: scarce in some places, plentiful in others. He had always particularly enjoyed redheads; it had been his despair that so few could be encountered west of Kansas. In Montana and Wyoming there were almost none. Redheads were to him what beaver had been to Jim Ragg: just not there.

  But then, here’s London. Before they had even made camp he had spotted at least twenty redheaded women. Bartle was thrilled. Let Jim waste his time at the zoo. Bartle devoted his own leisure to the hunt for redheads, ending up with a different one almost every night. They were as abundant as buffalo had been in the old days. In certain streets, at certain times of the evening, they almost ran in herds.

  At first the girls were a little afraid of Bartle. Not many Londoners walked around in buckskins, and Bartle’s were not the freshest. New outfits were available, of course—Billy had brought over a whole wagonful of costumes, including plenty of fresh buckskins, but Bartle was particular and couldn’t find anything to his liking except a nice pair of Shoshone leggings, which he took.

  In time, though, as cowboys and ropers and the other vagabonds who had come over with the troupe drifted into the streets, the girls grew less fearful, and consequently, richer. Bartle soon began to feel the expense severely. In the west he had seldom had to scrape up cash for a woman more than four or five times a year; in London he found himself scraping it up four or five times a week. He had never expected pleasure to be cheap, but had not imagined he would ever be in a place where its costs could mount up so quickly.

  It wasn’t only redheads that walked the streets and crowded the music halls, either; there were sizable numbers of blondes, too, and brunettes of every shade. Bartle once even fell in with an Egyptian; the haggle over price was strenuous, but otherwise he liked her fine.

  The
abundance of women of all shades seemed to him a very good thing; it prevented or at least reduced the likelihood of the kind of situation he had experienced in Montana with the delightful Trix. In a place like Miles City, with fewer than five women to choose from, attachments of a worrisome nature were apt to develop; along with the attachments came expectations which had either to be satisfied or disappointed.

  Bartle hated disappointing expectant women, but he had the feeling that he might hate satisfying them even worse.

  Jim Ragg had little interest in women; it was one of the frustrations of their friendship that Bartle could never get Jim interested enough even for the purposes of fruitful conversation. That left Calamity as his main source of dialogue on such matters; Calamity was not entirely satisfactory either, since, as far as Bartle could tell, she had never had much in the way of attachments.

  Lately, somewhat to everyone’s surprise, Calamity had begun to talk about a great romance she had had with Wild Bill Hickok. No one who knew Hickok could remember him having said two words to Calamity—Jim Ragg shook his head at the notion—and some were of the opinion that the two had never met, or if they had, it would only have been in Deadwood, a week or two before Hickok was killed.

  Despite this confusion, Bartle did find that he could talk about love and whatnot with Calamity more freely than he could with most people. Once they had been drinking gin in a saloon that smelled of fish, probably because it was next to a fish market, not far from the Thames, and Bartle expressed the view that he might possibly marry in his old age if he could find anyone suitable.

  Calamity looked half drunk and half awake, but the remark hit her the wrong way and her black eyes snapped.

  “What, desert Jim?” she asked.

  “Oh, no, he could have his room,” Bartle assured her.

  “Jim Ragg won’t hang around if you marry,” Calamity said. “That man’s a wanderer.”

  “You’re a wanderer, but you’ll have to stop sometime,” Bartle said. “If you don’t settle somewhere you’ll likely come to grief.”

  “What’s that mean?” Calamity asked.

  “Oh, you’ll ride off in a gully, or a bear will get you, or you’ll freeze in a blizzard, or some young warrior who don’t realize the fight is over will shoot you down,” Bartle said.

  “You’re just talking about dying,” Calamity said. “I’ve already come to worse grief than that. I guess you’ve lived so carefree you know nothing about grief.”

  Bartle briefly reviewed his life and decided she was probably right. He had used the word carelessly, but then he had been thinking of Calamity’s future, not his own past. He could recall some capital hardships, but no significant grief, unless it was the death of Lonesome Charley Reynolds, a man both he and Jim had liked enormously.

  Calamity proceeded to explain how lucky he had been.

  “You’ve had no wife to die,” she said. “You’ve had no child to die. Look at Dora—she’s borne two children, and they’re both dead. She may not have another, and that’ll be another sort of grief, I guess—dying with no one to follow you.”

  “I wish I hadn’t brought it up,” Bartle said. “A whole lot of the populace engages in marriage, though. I’m a member of the populace so I guess I could, too. I just sometimes wonder what it’s like.”

  “I ain’t engaged in it myself, so why pick me to ask?” Calamity said. “Why can’t we just sit here and get drunk? Ask Blue about marriage next time you see him. He’s probably an expert by now.”

  Then she seemed to lose her energy—she had a large face and when it fell into a sad expression there was a lot of sadness at the table.

  “You’re pesky, Bartle,” she said. “You’d do anything to satisfy your curiosity, wouldn’t you?”

  Bartle shrugged. He felt rather at fault, without quite understanding where his guilt lay. Calamity cried a few tears, snuffled back the rest, got drunk, and went to sleep. Bartle decided he would pass marriage by as a subject the next time they had a talk.

  The great unsettled question, as far as he was concerned, was what to do about suddenly rising expectations of the sort women were prone to. Stop too long with some winsome woman and the next thing you knew you’d be plowing or tending store, or something else very near the opposite of the life of a free mountain man.

  The fact was, there were some very decent women in the world—now and then he would encounter one so decent that she made the thought of taking up the plow look good. It had happened to him often, but something would always finally come up to break the spell. Jim Ragg would get a hankering for the far yonder, or Calamity would, or he would; the pangs of longing might travel with him for a while but in time they would subside, lingering only as an occasional mist in his eye.

  The troupe was only ten days from departure when Bartle went out for a little hunt in the streets one night and met Pansy. She was not even a redhead; she was a blonde, and so small he could almost have put her in his pocket. Indeed, he had been on the point of passing Pansy by, thinking she was merely a schoolgirl who had lost her way—though there was nothing beseeching in her manner, as there might have been with a lost schoolgirl.

  Bartle looked twice, and then again; on the third look he fell in love.

  “If you please, I’ll be very nice, sir,” Pansy said. Her blue eyes were the biggest thing about Pansy—Bartle could tell that even in the poorly lit street.

  Her polite manner touched him; too many women had tongues like sandpaper; very few had ever called him sir. She was neither bragging nor wheedling; she was just politely direct. Someone who would be very nice was exactly what he was wandering around looking for.

  “Well, where’s your room?” Bartle asked, a bit embarrassed to be discussing such things with someone who looked so young and prim.

  “I’ve no room, sir, I’m poor,” Pansy said. “I wish I had a room but I ain’t, yet.”

  Bartle was a little shocked; he had yet to encounter a girl who lacked a room, though most were rather poor.

  “Where do you sleep, then?” he asked.

  “In a doorway, sir, if no one will be kind,” Pansy said.

  Something in the girl’s manner touched Bartle; she seemed so decent. The whole business made him feel so awkward that for a moment he felt he should just walk away.

  “Are you an orphan?” he asked, not sure what prompted him to ask the question. The west was full of orphans; he had been one himself when he went west—his parents had died within a month of each other. Jim Ragg, too, had lost his mother and had no idea where his father might be. Calamity talked of a sister somewhere, but seemed quite vague even on the subject of her sister’s name, sometimes calling her Belle, at other times Jane.

  If a thinly peopled place like the west was so full of orphans, a great city such as London must have thousands—it was very likely that Pansy was one of the thousands.

  “No, sir, I’m from Birmingham,” Pansy said.

  “If you ain’t an orphan, why ain’t you home?” Bartle inquired. “You seem a very nice little miss.”

  “I left home because there were so many on the pallet,” Pansy said. “I’ve been gone awhile now.”

  “Oh, well then...” Bartle said, uncertain as to what he should do with this information.

  There were several lodging houses in the neighborhood; Bartle had been in some of them and knew that most were grimy and bare. After strolling along with Pansy for a while, he decided he didn’t want to take her to a lodging house.

  “I’m with the Wild West show,” he said, thinking the news might reassure the girl. “Have you seen a performance yet?”

  “Goodness, I guess not,” Pansy said, looking startled. “I have only seen the posters. I am in no position to afford shows.”

  They walked awhile, Bartle occasionally stealing glances at her. Of course, she wasn’t wealthy, but she seemed very neat. He was accustomed to far more ragged girls. However, she was barefoot, which troubled him—it was chill.

  “I hope you
’re kind, sir,” Pansy said. They had strolled quite a distance and she was beginning to feel worried.

  “Look here, you’ve sirred me enough,” Bartle said. “Just call me by my name—it’s Bartle. If you care to sleep in a tent, come with me to the campground. We’ve only five shows yet to do, but you can see all five—you’ll be my guest.”

  “It’s a good sound tent,” he added, thinking she might have worries on that score.

  Pansy Clowes had no worries on that score; the old man seemed nice, on the whole. Old men were usually nicer than young men in her experience.

  When they reached the campground the smell of all the animals was rather strong, but the tent was far nicer than she expected. It was nicer, in fact, than the hovel she had left in Birmingham; and the old man was such a kindly sort that he fixed her a bunk of her own.

  When Jim Ragg came in from a late-night visit with the beavers, he found a young barefooted English girl asleep on his bunk. Bartle Bone sat watching her, as a father might a child.

  “Here, take my bunk tonight,” Bartle whispered. “Little Pansy’s all worn out.”

  “Why, let the child sleep,” Jim said mildly. “If I’d realized you’d got married I’d have slept in the zoo anyway.”

  He took a blanket and went outside, meaning to bed down in a wagon, but Bartle followed him out.

  “Her name’s Pansy Clowes,” Bartle said, not sure Jim had heard him the first time.

  “Oh, that’s fine,” Jim said. “You can introduce us tomorrow.”