He was twenty-six years old when he started life as a free man, but he felt like he was just being born. For the first time in his life, he could decide for himself what he wanted to do and who he wanted to be. He had no surname—slaves didn’t need one, being property instead of people—so his first task was to choose a name for himself. Near the house where he was staying in Chicago was the Baldwin Locomotive Company which had just unveiled its newest engine, the Lancelot Ford. Barney didn’t much care for the name Lancelot, but he liked the sound of the name Ford, and he liked the idea of naming himself after something that was going places, like that locomotive engine, so the slave boy named Barney became a man named Mr. Barney L. Ford.
The next thing he needed was an education, so he taught himself to read and write, and devoured every book he could find. He had a naturally quick mind and a hunger to learn everything all at once, and by the time the California Gold Rush started, Barney Ford was better educated than most of the white men he knew. So with the gold-fever still in his blood and that dream of a big house on a hill still in his heart, he headed west.
But going west wasn’t easy for a runaway slave in those dangerous years before the War. The trail led across Southern territory where he could be arrested and returned to his master, or hung. So he took the long way around, from Chicago to New York City, then by ship to Central America and the Nicaragua crossing. Nicaragua was a free republic and would give passage through the jungles—for a price. Barney paid the price, most of the little money he had, then took sick in the jungle and couldn’t go any farther. But he was patient, and once he recovered his strength, he opened a little tourist hotel in Nicaragua City and started saving his money for another try at the California Gold Rush. He might have even made it if Nicaragua hadn’t rescinded its anti-slave laws and forced him to flee for freedom once more.
He took passage back to Chicago and went to work for the Underground Railroad helping other slaves to freedom and making friends with abolitionist politicians. The North was full of men who wanted to show their moral fiber by being friendly with a former slave, and had Barney stayed there, he might have become one of the leading black men in the abolition movement like the fiery young Frederick Douglass.
But Barney still had gold-fever in his blood, and when the Colorado Gold Rush started in 1859, he headed west again. This time, he made it to the gold fields and did some prospecting in the diggings around Central City. Rumor had it he even found a promising strike, until he learned from an armed party of white miners that territorial law didn’t allow a colored man to file a mine claim. It was bad luck, all right, but Barney didn’t plan to give up so easily.
There were other ways to make money in a gold rush. Denver was in its first boom and almost every kind of business was turning an easy profit. Barney started out by opening a barbershop, then took the money he made from that to open a restaurant, and when the restaurant proved a success, he turned his money around again and opened a big hotel. And Barney Ford, the runaway slave, finally had a house as big as his master’s on that Virginia tobacco plantation. It was some years later that he built the first of his Inter-Ocean Hotels, when he was a wealthy man with influential friends, but it was that first hotel in gold rush Denver that was the fulfillment of his dreams.
A success like that would never have happened in Georgia, Tom McKey knew. But Colorado wasn’t like the South, tied up with traditions so old that no one even remembered how they’d started. Colorado was brand new and full of opportunity and so empty of people still that the local paper quoted an eastern editor as saying, “Colorado consists of Denver, the Kansas Pacific Railway, and scenery.”
Tom didn’t know much about the scenery himself, having never ventured up into the wall of mountains that rose to the west, peak after peak disappearing into a blue distance, but he’d heard tell of it. There were gorges up there that could swallow a wagon train whole, and forests where a man could get lost and never be heard from again. There were also gold mining towns where a man might find a fortune if he didn’t mind working for it. But Tom was content for the time being to make his money more easily, dealing the cards and betting on the games in his off-hours, profiting from the gold-dust dreams of others.
It was during one of those after-hours card games, while he was playing poker in the gentleman’s saloon at the Inter-Ocean Hotel, that Tom first met the famous Mr. Barney Ford. The Inter-Ocean’s saloon was a cut above the usual gaming rooms, with linen tablecloths and waiters serving drinks that came from the restaurant upstairs and a clientele that was expected to act accordingly. Playing cards there made Tom feel something like a gentleman again in spite of his present circumstances. But Bud Ryan, a local gambler who happened into the Inter-Ocean that same afternoon, evidently didn’t know the rules of polite society. He complained, in a voice loud enough that all the other gentlemen there could hear and words that would offend everyone, that the tablecloth was getting in the way of his cards, that the waiter was excessively slow in bringing his drinks, that the banker was slighting him on his chips—complaints which demanded an answer from the hotel staff.
The answer came in the person of Mr. Barney Ford, himself, who suggested that Ryan might be happier playing cards elsewhere.
“The Cricket Club has a card room without tablecloths, I understand, and the Lucky Break doesn’t even employ waiters. You can stand up to the bar with your fellows imbibing cheap whiskey until your boorish insides rot.”
His words were meant to be sarcasm, but seemed almost pleasant instead, coming as they were from the mellifluous voice of Mr. Ford. It was a voice that took Tom by surprise, considering the source. The slave boys he’d known, growing up in Georgia, spoke in an accent all their own: part Africa, part Appalachia, but always recognizably colored. “Nigra talk,” his father had called it, and proof that the black man could never be the cultural equal of his white masters.
But Barney Ford’s words slid off his tongue like warmed honey, rich and resonant. His carefully modulated baritone sounded something like Shakespeare and Schubert put together, poetry and music all mixed up, and if Tom hadn’t been looking right at Barney’s black face and nappy gray-streaked hair, he would have sworn the man was white. Except that he had never heard a white man who sounded so elegantly cultured— completely disproving his father’s provincial beliefs.
Bud Ryan seemed less impressed. He scowled and threw out an ugly epithet, then made the mistake of reaching into his pocket for a pistol to make his point, for in a moment he was set upon by an irate throng of hotel guests and sporting men, all scrambling to grab his handgun away. All except for Tom McKey, who found himself suddenly standing in front of Barney Ford and brandishing the Hell-Bitch like a shield, as though the beveled blade could stop a bullet in mid-air. From across the room, Bud Ryan glared at him.
It was the first time Tom had ever defended a colored man, and for the life of him he couldn’t imagine what had brought him to it. But Barney Ford accepted his uncharacteristic gesture with a half-bow.
“I am in your debt, Sir,” he said, “but you can go ahead and put that weapon away. I doubt our gambling friend will be causing any more trouble with half the Denver sporting community holding him back.”
Tom sheathed the knife, feeling suddenly foolish for his needless show of bravado.
“No debt at all, Mr. Ford,” he said with a shrug, “just hate to have my card game interrupted, that’s all . . .”
A look of something like amusement passed over Barney Ford’s dark face, then he waved a hand toward the crowd that surrounded Bud Ryan.
“Put him out please, gentlemen. This hotel will not abide riffraff.”
And as bidden, the sports gathered Bud Ryan and hustled him out of the saloon, while Barney Ford watched with untroubled eyes as though there were nothing unusual at all about a colored man giving orders to white men and having them quickly obey.
Barney Ford believed in paying his debts, as he had paid in full the first loan advanced him for his
first restaurant in Denver—$9,000 repaid with interest before it was due. So John Henry shouldn’t have been surprised that Barney Ford made a point of paying back what he considered a debt on his life to the man who had stepped between him and a gunman’s aim. But it was the way the debt was repaid which confounded John Henry. For somehow finding out where he worked, Barney Ford had a long box delivered to Babb’s Variety House, and inside it a fancy gold-headed cane and a note that said only, For doing a gentlemanly job. B.L. Ford. And John Henry wasn’t sure who was more the gentleman—himself, or the former slave. One thing he did know: Emmanuel Kahn, back in Dallas, would have been pleased to see him carrying that cane and looking downright fashionable.
He wrote to Mattie about Barney Ford, hoping that she would understand something of his own amazement. Mattie was a forward-thinker, for a proper Southern girl, but she had surely never seen a colored millionaire nor a black man who could command such instant respect. She wrote back that she would like to meet a man like Mr. Barney Ford someday, and that his rise to prominence only underscored the importance of education, for if a run-away slave could turn his life to such profitable use, what things might a white man accomplish? Their Uncle John, she pointed out, had been the first man in the Holliday family to attain a college education, and he was not only well-off but had set an example of accomplishment for his sons—and his favorite nephew, as John Henry had proven by his own professional education.
It was her mention of his education that ruined the rest of the letter for him, reminding him that he was living a life below both his own station and her expectations. As far as Mattie knew, he was still just touring around the countryside, enjoying a little adventure before returning to Texas and his dental practice there. Sooner or later he’d have to go back, or explain to her why he couldn’t go. But until he knew that the Army had given up its search for him, he didn’t dare, though at least the Pinker-tons seemed to have lost interest in him, as Mattie said they hadn’t yet returned to Forrest Avenue.
The Pinkertons had trouble enough elsewhere, that fall, in the James boys’ retribution for the murder of their half-brother. While the ex-Confederate outlaws had always before confined their train robbery and bank hold-ups to Northern businesses operating in Southern territory, their new exploit took them north of the Mason-Dixon Line where they planned to rob a bank full of hard-earned Yankee cash. Mr. Allan Pinker-ton was, after all, a Yankee supported by Yankee money, and a strike at a bank in his own country would leave a message that the James Gang was not to be trifled with—and would bring them a tidy $200,000 as well, retribution and reward all rolled together.
But they were mistaken in thinking that the mild-mannered Swedes of Northfield, Minnesota would stand aside meekly as outlaws stole the town’s hard-earned savings. While Jesse and the boys tried to get the unwilling bank teller to open the safe, the townsfolk gathered in the streets bringing whatever weapons they could find: handguns, shotguns, canes, meat-cleavers. And when one of the outlaws took a shot at the uncooperative teller, the people of Northfield went into bloody action.
Frank James caught a slug in the leg. Charley Pitts took a bullet in the ankle before a blast from a Remington shattered his shoulder. Cole Younger took a shoulder hit too, and Bob Younger was shot in the thigh and the wrist. Their brother Jim got half his upper jaw torn away. Bill Chadwell got both eyes shot out, and Clell Miller had his face blown off. Only Jesse James, himself, was left uninjured, and he led what remained of his gang on a ragged run from town and the posse that would surely be following.
Gruesome as it was, the story of the street fight seemed somehow consoling to Tom McKey as he read the gory details afterwards in the Rocky Mountain News. For if he wasn’t the man Mattie thought he was, at least he wasn’t an outlaw like Jesse James and his gang, robbing banks and waylaying trains and killing innocent bystanders for the greed of gold. He was, for the time being, just a gentleman gambler with an unlucky streak of trivial arrests and a temper that occasionally got the better of him—and the unintentioned deaths of two black men still weighing heavy on his soul.
The snows began the first of November, coming on all at once in an early-season blizzard that left the dirt streets of Denver a mess of ice and mud. Tom had seen snowy weather before, having passed two frozen winters in Philadelphia, but Denver snow was different, the flakes as big as shiny silver half-dollars, the air so dry he could hardly draw a breath. Mountain air, folks called it, and said it was bracing, but for Tom the air was too dry, leaving him with red chapped skin and burning lungs. His only recourse was staying as well-lubricated as possible, downing more than his usual daily dose of whiskey while he watched the snow pile up.
With the sudden change of climate, the streets emptied and the saloons and gambling houses filled up with sporting men coming in from the cold and making it hard to find an empty seat at a gaming table. Of course, every gambler wanted the same seat at each table: back to the wall, facing the door. No one wanted to repeat Wild Bill’s deadly mistake in having his back to the door when an enemy came along. But for Tom McKey, having his back to the door would have been better—especially when the quarrelsome Bud Ryan showed up again.
It happened on the Saturday after Thanksgiving in a Holladay Street saloon where Tom had stopped to play on his way to the parlor house. The place was crowded, but somehow he found that choice back-to-the-wall seat at a table facing the door. It was cold there, with the wind blowing snow into the saloon every time the door opened, which probably explained why the seat was free. But Tom turned his coat collar up and drank a tumbler of whiskey down and let the heat of it warm him as he joined into the poker game, quickly losing himself in the play of the cards. There was nothing like a gambling game to make a man forget everything else—even the importance of being wary in a crowded saloon.
So Bud Ryan saw him first as he came in from the cold after being thrown out of another saloon up the street. Ryan had already drunk his share of liquor, by the smell of him, and was already in a wrath when he spotted the man who had stepped between him and Barney Ford and seemed glad to have an opportunity to make amends, striding straight to Tom’s poker table.
“Damned if this day ain’t turnin’ out all right after all!” Bud said with a snarl of a smile, leaning over the other players and putting his hand to his hip. He had his pistol back, Tom could see, and was playing toward it with eager fingers.
There was a sudden clamor around the table as the other players pushed their chairs back, scrambling to be away from the coming fight. But Tom had nowhere to run, his own chair already flush against the cold wall of the saloon, his heart gone as suddenly cold as the brick. Bud Ryan’s hand inched closer to the pistol as he leaned forward, his whiskey breath hot and angry.
Tom’s heart stopped, but his body reflexed in self-defense, his hand sliding into his coat and the Hell-Bitch slicing out and up into flesh and bone. The knife flayed open neck and cheek and brow, one gaping red wound that tore across Bud Ryan’s face and nearly took out his eye as well. The gambler caught at his pistol then let it go, his hand slapping at his face as though he’d been mosquito-bit, before he realized that blood was pouring out of him. He gasped then started squealing like a butchered pig, all the fight gone out of him. The rest of the saloon had gone as quiet as a graveyard, all eyes on the man with the monster knife in his hand.
Tom started shaking in mingled horror and relief, then dropped the bloodied Hell-Bitch onto the table. There was no reason to run, and nowhere to go if he did. Everyone in the saloon had seen him knife Bud Ryan, and soon enough the Denver City police would arrive to arrest him. His only consolation was the hope that Ryan would be arrested as well for provoking the incident in the first place. Then another, more interesting thought swept into his mind. His Uncle Tom had been right when he’d first introduced John Henry to the Hell-Bitch in his boyhood days back in Valdosta. You didn’t throw a knife that big, you cut with it, cross-draw from the shoulder holster, slicing up the enemy like slaughter
ing a hog. The Hell-Bitch had, after all, started out as a meat cleaver on his grandfather’s cotton plantation, where the children used to sit in the shade of a dogwood tree and drink sweet curdled syllabub.
The memory made John Henry smile.
Justice Whittemore called the case of the Holladay Street incident into court the Tuesday following Thanksgiving, but Tom never made an appearance. Tom McKey was back in Valdosta where he belonged, living his honest and upstanding life while the man who had stolen his name made bail and took the first train out of Denver. For whatever else John Henry Holliday was, he wasn’t so low as to sully his Uncle’s good name with an undeserved jail sentence for assault with a deadly weapon. His Uncle Tom was still a gentleman, after all, and deserved better than that.
Chapter Seven
DALLAS, 1876
TEXAS MIGHT HAVE SEEMED LIKE THE LAST PLACE HE SHOULD GO WITH the Army and Pinkerton’s Detectives still looking for him, except that he wasn’t a wanted man in Texas anymore, at least according to the most recent letter he’d received from Mattie:
I have asked our cousin Robert to make some inquiries, quietly of course, and have learned that the detective agency is no longer looking for you and has closed their absurd investigation. They had to do so eventually, as it was all ridiculous and just a case of mistaken identity, I am sure. You would never have done the thing they accused you of, dear John Henry, and I am so relieved that they will finally leave us all alone. And now that I am feeling less fearful for you, I will tell you the details of what my clever sister Lucy did when they came here looking for a photograph of you. She took your portrait, the one you sent me from Philadelphia, and hid it down the laces of her corset, and the detectives would have to have made a much more thorough investigation than they did to discover it! Lucy and I laughed about it privately after they were gone, but Mother was quite unsettled by the whole affair. I have never doubted you for a minute.
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