The Fall of Abilene

by Johnny D. Boggs

  “We lost the balloon,” the widow said. “It busted on us. In Nebraska City, back in May. A supporting pole fell, struck a patron, smashed his head, but the poor soul never knew what killed him.”

  Our eyes widened. Those within hearing distance had similar reactions.

  “The coroner,” she added, “completely exonerated the Hippo-Olympiad and Mammoth Circus of any blame.”

  It took a moment for Hickok to start up again. “Well,” he said. “Well, this is a … a … first-class circus.” I gather he had this vision of a support pole falling before a balloon was to take off and striking someone, him or me, and smashing our heads before we even got to see the lion tamer or the slack-wire artist. “It’s this way.” He found his voice. “This town isn’t going to charge this lady one penny. She’s not having to pay for any license. And if anyone dares to attempt to stop her show, they’ll have me to tussle with. That’s my ruling.” He concluded his speech by resting his hands on the Navy Colts.

  Mayor McCoy bowed. “We look forward to seeing your show, Mrs. Lake.”

  “I shall leave complimentary tickets for the afternoon show … usually the most enjoyable … for you three gentlemen and this handsome, if taciturn, young man.”

  Kilpatrick and the mayor shook the widow’s hand before they hurried from the depot.

  “Where are you staying, Mrs. Lake?” Hickok asked.

  She nodded across the street at the two-story Merchants Hotel, a fairly new building of whitewashed frame but already covered with mud and grime.

  “I’m not sure a hotel filled with Texas cattlemen and cowboys is safe for a lady and a widow.”

  “I run a circus, Marshal Hickok. I am sure …”

  He bowed but took her arm in his. “Allow me, Mrs. Lake, to show you a respectable boarding house. I know a drummer who was staying there has departed …”

  He would know, since he had run the sharper out of town the night before.

  “Marshal,” she said, and they stopped before he had led her more than a couple of feet.

  “I would be honored,” Hickok told her, “if you allowed me the privilege of showing you Abilene.” I felt certain the Devil’s Addition would not be part of his tour. “And if your schedule allows, to escort you to supper.”

  “Marshal …” she said.

  “I know you have a busy schedule, Mrs. Lake, what with your show on Monday.”

  Two days.

  “I would be honored, Marshal,” she said. “But only if you call me Agnes.”

  “Agnes.” He began walking her to the boardwalk. “A beautiful name.”

  “Might I call you Wild Bill?”

  “Please, call me James.”

  * * * * *

  Mike poured a cup of coffee for me and dragged a bottle of Jameson out of the bottom desk drawer and filled his mug with about two fingers of Irish.

  “She isn’t pretty,” I sipped after I commented.

  “She is to Jim.” He shot down his whiskey in one swallow.

  “Maybe she’s just trying to slicker him, get him to quit marshaling here and go after that bad-eyed man who killed her husband.”

  Mike looked at me and opened the drawer again for more Jameson. “I don’t think so.” He poured.

  “Maybe she wants him to help run her circus.”

  “Jim?” He laughed, shook his head, corked the bottle, and dropped it back into the drawer. “I can’t see Wild Bill Hickok running a circus. There’s this fellow up somewhere in Canada, Niagara Falls I want to say, that has been trying to get Jim up there to be a master of ceremonies of some fair or carnival. Jim keeps putting him off.”

  The front door opened, and Hickok himself stormed through. Those love-smitten eyes shone with nothing but pure hatred, and I wondered what the widow had said to rile him so. Mike leaped from Hickok’s chair, moved to the stove, and topped his Irish off with coffee.

  “Jim …” he started.

  Hickok made a beeline to the gun cabinet. He meant business, for he pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and it wasn’t a muzzle-loader like Pa carried down in Texas but one of those newfangled breechloaders that used center-fire shotshells. With a loud click, the barrels tipped forward, and Hickok loaded both chambers, snapped the weapon shut, and grabbed a handful of shells that he shoved into the pocket of his coat.

  “Jim!” Mike raised his voice. “What is it?”

  “That son of a bitch,” Hickok muttered, came to the desk, opened the top drawer, and grabbed a derringer, which he dropped inside his empty coat pocket. “I should’ve set his sun when I first took this job. He’s embarrassed this town, this office, and me for the last time.”

  Hickok slammed the door behind him.

  Mike moved to the long guns, grabbed a shiny Winchester Yellow Boy, pulled on his hat, and started for the door. “Stay here,” he told me.

  I wasn’t about to. The prisoners in the cells would be all right. Licking my lips, feeling my heart start racing, I moved to the rifles and shotguns, settled for a big-bore buffalo rifle, and went after Mike and Hickok.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Over the years, I have read in newspapers and magazines, some respectable, and overheard men bantering in saloons that the troubles between Wild Bill Hickok and Phil Coe started over a woman. Sometimes she is even given a name and described as a soiled dove, harlot, or dance-hall girl. I have never recognized any of those names.

  I believe the woman was Agnes Lake, who was no soiled dove.

  Despite all that has been reported by newspapers, magazines, Beadle & Adams, barbershop gossips, and walking whiskey vats, it really wasn’t a woman, at all, that led to the inevitable. It was a bull. One artistically explicit bull. Painted on the façade of one of Abilene’s most notorious buckets of blood.

  We now found ourselves facing the artist’s masculine interpretation, eyes shining and its manhood …

  Hickok leveled the Greener at the closed doors as folks began gathering on the other side of the street. Flanking Hickok’s left, Mike frowned as I came trotting along the street with that heavy rifle in my hands. Mike whispered something to Hickok, likely telling him that I’d joined the party. Hickok said nothing, just kept waiting with those big-bored barrels trained at the tavern’s entrance.

  Eventually, Phil Coe stepped outside, and slowly opened his plaid coat to show that he wore no gun—or at least one that Hickok could see. Spreading his arms apart, he smiled. “Can I do something for you, Bill?”

  Hickok’s head moved up just slightly, a nod at the bull painting. “I’ve told you to get rid of that … obscenity.”

  Coe chuckled, saying: “But Bill, we used you as the model. I thought you’d be flattered.”

  “When’s Thompson coming back?” Hickok asked.

  Coe’s smile faded. “He isn’t. Wrecked his buggy down in Texas. His wife was with him. She lost an arm, I hear. He’s pretty banged up.”

  “Then I guess you’ll be painting over that atrocity.”

  The gambler straightened, stepped onto the street, his smile returning, his arms still outstretched. A few feet from Hickok, he turned and gazed up at the painting. While he did that, another man stepped out of the Bull’s Head. He was a cowboy, slim, wiry, and wearing no revolver, but seeing Hickok’s shotgun and Coe, he eased just a few feet away, leaned against the wooden wall, and began rolling a smoke.

  “You have no appreciation of art, Bill,” Coe said. “You’d probably think the Mona Lisa shows off that girl’s tits too much.”

  The cowboy laughed, slapped his thigh, which sent most of his makings fluttering in the breeze.

  Neither Hickok nor Mike nor Coe paid the young Texan any mind.

  “Kids walk past this piece of filth on their way to school,” Hickok told Coe. “I’ve warned you for the last time. It comes down. Now!”

  “Bill.” Coe’s hea
d shook slowly, and he clucked his tongue. “School ended in June. Read in the paper that the fall term don’t start till the eleventh. And by the time the winter term commences, I’ll be back in Texas and not freezing my arse off here.”

  That’s when I understood what had riled Hickok. The widow had seen this bull, which would have embarrassed her and fouled Hickok’s mood. The circus owner was nowhere around. Later Mike told me she had gone to the boarding house and then to the circus tent.

  “The decent folks here are tired of looking at it,” Hickok said. “Castrate it. Now.”

  Phil Coe turned back to Hickok. “You’ll have to take that up with the owner, Bill. I sold my interest to Tom Sheran.”

  “I’m taking it up with you. You and Ben put that up. Get rid of it. Or I’ll burn the whole place down.”

  Coe’s hands moved toward his sides. “You do that, and you’ll be dead before the first frost.”

  The shotgun came up. Hickok braced the stock against his shoulder.

  “Noah.”

  It took a moment for me to understand Hickok had called my name. My heart just about leaped into my throat, and I said: “Yes, sir?”

  “You know where Seely and Northcraft’s market is?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Get over there. Get three gallons of paint. Tell them to bill the city for it. And get four brushes. And get back here pronto.”

  I leaned the rifle against a hitching rail and took off running. When I came back, I had a gallon of paint in one hand and two paintbrushes in the other. The rifle remained by the rail, and that gave me much relief. I had feared someone might steal it.

  “Mr. Northcraft says he’s sorry,” I told the marshal, “but he didn’t have much in the way of paint or brushes in stock. Too late in the year, what with the cattle season winding down. He’ll have more come spring.” I set the paint can on the dirt, laid the brushes on top, and moved toward the buffalo gun.

  The cowboy had finished his cigarette, but he remained where he was, leaning against the wall, one leg crossing the other, hat tilted back, grinning like a baby that had just broke wind.

  “It’ll have to do,” Hickok said. He took a step toward Coe.

  “I’ll be damned if I’ll even stir a can of paint,” Coe said icily.

  The cowhand cackled again.

  “You wouldn’t do a good job, Phil.” The Greener’s barrels moved away from the gambler and found the cowboy, who stopped laughing and stood up straight.

  “You,” Hickok said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Go over to the Alamo. Tell Friendly that I sent you for the ladder in the storeroom. Bring it out, and put it up against the wall. And if I have to come prod you along, there’ll be hell to pay.”

  The cowboy took off.

  “Noah,” Hickok said, “get the lid off and start stirring.”

  Once again I had to put the big rifle aside. Another cowboy tossed me a stick that folks used to scrape mud and dung off their boots before going inside one of the nicer businesses on Texas Street.

  “You’re a self-righteous prude,” Coe told Hickok, before turning to leave.

  “No, you don’t,” Hickok said.

  The gambler whirled. “I’m not painting a damned thing.”

  Hickok did not grin. “No. But you’re going to stay right here. And watch.”

  The cowboy called himself Trey. That’s about all I learned from him as we castrated that bull with the paint. Trey asked me why the hell was I, a Texan, helping a damnyankee lawman, but I said I was working off a fine for drunk and disorderly. He said: “Damned if I’d ever allow that to happen to me.” I said: “Then what the hell are you doing up here with me? You haven’t even been arrested.”

  After that, we worked in silence, sitting precariously on a perch on the façade of the building, a gallon of whitewash between us, slopping paint over a bull’s dick.

  “Just cover that abomination!” Hickok called up to us. “The rest of the bull can stay.”

  Coe said nothing, but even from my perch high above Texas Street, I knew that he would never forgive Hickok for such an affront.

  We didn’t stop till the bucket was empty and the brushes were pretty much dry. I tossed the can and brushes to the dirt, and came down the ladder first. Trey followed, and we returned the ladder to the Alamo, where Hickok did most of his gambling. By the time we were back at the Bull’s Head, Phil Coe was gone, and the crowd had thinned out. Mike stood in the middle of the street.

  “Where’s that John Law?” Trey demanded.

  Mike held the rifle I’d borrowed in his left hand and his own in his right. He did not answer but stepped up to the cowboy and said in a tight, harsh voice: “If I were you, I’d light out for home. Season’s practically over now, so there’s no sense in getting killed.”

  “Damnation,” Trey said, but he walked toward the stables. “This town has got religion. Folks were a hell of a lot more sociable when that redheaded Irish law dog ran the show.”

  Mike handed me the big-bore rifle. “Put this back where you stole it,” he said. “And don’t let me catch you with a gun in your hands again.” He frowned at the tavern.

  I gave the newly doctored bull a glance and tried to make a joke. “I guess I’ve done my part in improving the civic …” I couldn’t think of how to finish the sentence, and it didn’t seem like Mike was paying attention to me anyway.

  “I got a bad feeling,” he whispered.

  “About what?” I asked.

  He heard but just shook his head and sighed. I followed him down the street toward the jail.

  * * * * *

  It was quiet for a Saturday. The cells remained practically empty. Hickok must have been dining with the widow or playing poker at the Alamo, for we did not see him that night. I reread the Chronicle for yet another time.

  “You notice anything?” Mike said from Hickok’s desk, where he sipped coffee while cleaning his Dean & Adam’s revolver.

  “Where?”

  “In the paper,” he answered, without looking up.

  I looked at all that type and the ink that had smeared onto my fingers. “Like what?”

  “Like news.”

  I shrugged. “Nothing’s changed since the mayor brought it in. That Farmers’ Protective Association’s still complaining, just like they were doing when the mayor said to give the marshal the paper and make sure he read that piece, and just like they were doing when Marshal Hickok came in and read it, and just like they’re likely still doing.”

  “And?”

  “The county fair’s coming up next month.”

  “And?”

  “Cattle market’s … dull. That’s what the paper says.”

  “That’s been the case all season. What else?”

  “Nothing. Boring stuff going on that I have no interest in, in places I’ve never been to, never plan to go to, and mostly never even heard of. A lot of folks haven’t picked up their letters for them at the post office. Most of it’s just advertisements for things I can’t afford.”

  “Advertisers keep the Chronicle in business.” Immediately, he changed the subject. “I’ll be glad when this season’s over.”

  “Why?”

  He didn’t answer, but in time he grinned. “So I can show you Kansas City.” That wasn’t it at all, but Mike kept talking. “End of the season, let’s make a deal. I mentioned this before, but let’s make it official. You and I’ll take the eastbound to Kansas City, I’ll show you my place, my wife, and a jolly good time in a great city. Then I’ll send you home. Deal?” He shoved the pistol in his holster, offered me his hand.

  Grinning, I shook with him.

  “Now,” Mike said, springing out of the chair, “let’s go see what the reaction is to that doctored-up bull.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  “Oh
my heavens,” I said. Would Hickok make me paint over the certain part of the anatomy of that bull again? I had already come close to falling off that façade a couple of times.

  Deputy Gainsford was already there, standing in the street, rubbing the back of his neck. Spotting me, he asked: “You sure there wasn’t any other paint in that store? At least something other than … white?”

  “I didn’t see any,” I told him. “And Mr. Northcraft even went to the backroom after I told him the marshal wanted it. And to charge it to the city.”

  Darkness was coming by that time, the doors were open, the hitching rails full up, and the noise of laughter and boisterous comments came from inside the tavern.

  “Could we find paint in another store?” Gainsford asked.

  “Doubtful,” Mike said. “White’s the color of choice here. And paint’s not in demand.” His head shook. “Hell, you do your painting in spring, after the last hard freeze and snowfall.”

  Phil Coe saw us from inside. He strutted through the open doors like a bantam and pointed up. Gleefully, he clapped a hand on my shoulder and spoke with delight. “You, lad, are an artist. You and your painting partner can come inside the Bull’s Head any time till I leave. Beer on the house.” He gave me a drunken push, and looked at Mike. “Where’s your beau, our dainty marshal?”