“You didn’t ask.”
“I thought we were through with him! I thought we left him back in Texas!”
“As I recall,” John Henry replied with a yawn, “it was him who left us when he went off to Fort Worth. But he did tell me to look him up if I ever happened to be passin’ through Dodge City. Well, here I am in Dodge, and I plan to say hello. Now be a good girl and go draw the drapes. I’m gonna take a nap.” Then he took off his jacket, pulled off his leather ankle boots, and stretched himself out on the brass-framed bed, pleased to find that it had a real feather mattress and soft linen sheets. The trip from Sweetwater to Dodge City had taken five days, the trail crossing the snake-infested Canadian River and the Kiowa Indian Nation, and other than a night’s layover at Fort Supply, he hadn’t had a good bed under him in all that time.
Kate watched him for a moment in silence, then went to the window and stood staring out over the dirt streets of Dodge. “He’ll bring you nothing but trouble, you know. He’ll only break your heart one day.”
“Whatever are you talkin’ about, Kate?”
“I’m talking about Wyatt. You’re getting your heart set on the wrong friend. He’s not your kind, he’s not quality like we are . . .”
“Quality?” John Henry said with a bitter laugh. “Is that what you think we are, quality? My dear, deluded consort, you and I have not been quality for a long time. You may be a doctor’s daughter, but you are also a denizen of the lowest levels of the theatrical stage—I suppose Mr. Cox recognized you from a past sojourn in Dodge. And I, for all my fine professional education, am still a Texas outlaw. If it weren’t for Wyatt Earp’s very generous acceptance of me, in spite of my faults, I wouldn’t feel even halfway respectable anymore. The truth is, Kate, you and I have both fallen so far from grace that we may never be able to claw our way back up again. Now take off your dress and come lie down and get some rest. We’re gonna have a busy night ahead of us.”
But Kate stayed at the window, neither drawing the drapes nor readying herself for a rest.
“I don’t want to be here . . .”
“Well, it’s a fine time to tell me that,” John Henry replied irritably, “after all the effort I went through to get you here. But here is where we are, so either stop talkin’ and let me sleep or leave me be and go out street-walkin’. It makes no difference to me.”
He half expected her to fly into a rage at his cold remarks, and was surprised when she turned to him instead, her face awash with a desperate light.
“Let’s not stay here, Doc! Let’s take the train east and get away from these cowtowns once and for all! Let’s go back to St. Louis and start over again. You can open another practice there; I can find another role on the stage. Or let’s go to New York! I’ve always wanted to act on the stage there, have a real professional career . . .”
“Ah, Kate,” he said, “you really are an actress, imagining a world that can never be. I can’t go back to St. Louis. I’m too tired to go anywhere, to even think of goin’ anywhere. New York might as well be the ends of the earth . . .”
“I would go to the ends of the earth for you,” she said, her sultry voice as sincere as he had ever heard it to be. “You must know how I love you. That’s why I don’t want you throwing in with Wyatt Earp. I don’t want anything to come between us, ever.”
It was no explanation of her animosity toward the quiet-spoken lawman, but it did explain her behavior in regards to Lottie Deno. He could still see the mad look in her eyes as she had stood in that Fort Griffin whorehouse, the Hell-Bitch in hand, and ordering him out of Lottie’s bed.
“Come away or I’ll cut her open!” she had screamed, and he knew that she’d meant what she said. What would she do if she felt that his friendship with Wyatt were a threat as well? Worse: what would she do if she ever found out about Mattie? Hell would have no fury like Kate’s if she knew where his love really lay.
And fearing that she would somehow discover the direction of his thoughts, he said sleepily, “And what would we do in New York? We don’t know anyone there.”
“Who cares? As long as we’re together, we’ll make out all right. As long as you love me . . .”
He could have fought back sleep long enough to reply, but didn’t.
The Long Branch Saloon was crowded with cowboys that evening, spurs jingling on their high-heeled boots and money jangling in their jeans’ pockets as they lined up three-deep at the bar. A cattle drive had just hit town and the boys were ready to play, and Chalk Beeson, the jolly proprietor of the Long Branch, was happy to have them.
“Right this way, boys, belly up to the bar! We got plenty of booze to go around, plenty of girls, and the best games in town!”
Beeson’s Long Branch Saloon gave a nod to gentility with a six-piece orchestra on an oriental carpet at one end of the narrow room, but gave a big howdy to the Texas cowboys with the “long branched” head of a Longhorn steer mounted over the white-painted bar. And the Long Branch was only one of the Texas-themed saloons in town, along with the Lone Star, the Alamo, the Nueces, and a dozen others, all ready to help those cowboys spend their newly made trail pay.
“Make yourselves at home, boys!” Chalk Beeson said cheerfully, “just make yourselves at home!”
And the cowboys were doing just that, adding their raucous laughter to the riotous sounds of the gaming tables, where roulette wheels whirred, poker chips clicked, dice clattered, and the dealers called out the odds. “Thirty-five to one! Get your money down, folks! Eight to one on the colors! Are you all down, gentlemen? Then up she rises!” There was no place as jolly as a saloon when the games were in play.
Kate had chosen to skip the evening’s entertainments, saying that she was still tired out from the trip, though John Henry reckoned she was really just trying to avoid a reunion with Wyatt Earp. So he was on his own when he ran into an old acquaintance from Fort Griffin, a one-time buffalo hunter by the name of Jack Johnson who was just finishing off a huge plate of beef steak and fried eggs, and greeted John Henry with a belch and a smile:
“Howdy, Doc! You’re lookin’ dapper today! Gotcha a new sombrero?” he asked, nodding to John Henry’s new black Stetson.
“I do,” he answered, doffing the hat and giving it a quick brush off. Dodge was so dusty that the walk across Front Street had left him covered all over in a fine yellow powder—cow manure in the air no doubt, he thought with disgust. And though Kate said that his new hat made him look like an overdressed cowboy, her irritation made him like it even better somehow, in spite of the way it gathered dust across the wide brim and high crown. “Have you heard anything of Wyatt Earp being back in town?” he asked Jack, not bothering to make small talk.
“Not today. Only thing anybody’s interested in talkin’ about is this here writer we got amongst us,” Jack replied, and he waved his fork in the direction of the orchestra.
“What writer?”
“Some fellar named Ned Buntline. He comes in here every evenin’ when he’s not too drunk to walk over from his hotel.”
“Well, I’ll be damned!” John Henry said in amazement. “The real Ned Buntline? Why, I was weaned on his books! I must have read a hundred Buntline stories growing up, in between Shakespeare and the Bible. What’s he doin’ here in Dodge?”
“Writin’ a new book, so he claims. Says he’ll pay $50 gold to the man who can tell him a story worth puttin’ in print.”
“I don’t believe it,” John Henry scoffed. “Since when did Ned Buntline have to pay for a story?”
Ned Buntline wasn’t just some writer. He was the most famous writer of his era, making a career and a fortune out of traveling the frontier and writing dime novels about his adventures, with over four-hundred published books and hundreds of magazine articles and short stories to his credit. There wasn’t a newspaper in America that wouldn’t pay top dollar for a serialization of his latest work, and there wasn’t a reader in America who hadn’t read his stories of the exploits of the Indian scout William F. Co
dy, whom he’d dubbed “Buffalo Bill,” in his wildly successful plays and novels.
“Well, according to him,” Jack said, “they ain’t no more legends to write about. He says now they’s just ordinary fellars like you and me, and nothin’ much else. That’s why he’s payin’ the reward, if he can hear a story good enough to put in his new book. Too bad I ain’t never done nothin’ worth talking about,” Jack said with a shrug and a scratch at his scraggly beard. “I sure could use that $50 right about now.”
“You and me both,” John Henry admitted, as Kate’s first afternoon of shopping in Dodge had already set him back some. As they’d left Fort Griffin with only what was in their saddlebags, they’d both needed some new clothes after the journey—especially Kate, who’d had a harder time of the traveling, all things considered, and always found shopping a calming diversion.
“Hell, I can tell a story,” John Henry remarked. “My cousin Robert used to say I was all talk, anyhow, back in Georgia.”
“And what story are you gonna tell, Doc?” Jack asked skeptically. “No offense, but ain’t you just a dentist? What adventures have you had to talk about?”
He was only a little offended by Jack’s blunt remark. Though he’d had plenty of adventures along the way, they weren’t the kind to brag on. His own life, he knew, would never be worth writing about, but he was generally smarter than anyone else around and that ought to count for something, at least.
“Well, I reckon I’ll just have to make somethin’ up.”
“But Mr. Buntline’s only payin’ for true stories,” Jack cautioned. “Make believe don’t count.”
“And who’s gonna argue about my story bein’ true when you’re there to back me up with that big bowie knife of yours showin’?”
“Me?”
“It’s a two-man story,” John Henry replied with a conspiratorial smile, remembering a little bit of larceny he’d dreamed up on the long stage ride from Sweetwater to Dodge while Kate had been too uncomfortable for conversation. There’d been a rumor of stage robbers near the Cimarron crossing, which had all come to nothing, but had gotten him thinking about stage robbery in a theoretical sense and how one might make a profit without having to do the actual robbing. He’d never get to try the plan out, as it was at least unethical if not downright illegal, but it might make a good showing for the famous Ned Buntline.
But as he made his way, drink in hand and story playing in his mind, toward the crowd surrounding the great man’s table, he was disappointed to find that Ned Buntline, or Edward Zane Carroll Judson as he introduced himself, was in reality just a small man with bloodshot eyes and a red whiskey nose. After all the press about the adventurous author—Civil War soldier, political activist, husband to eight women and philanderer with many more—John Henry had expected someone a little larger than life and more like the characters he wrote about. The Ned Buntline who sat slump-shouldered at a small table, wearily judging the entrants in his so far fruitless story contest, looked like any ordinary saloon drunk.
“I did have a start on something once . . .” Ned Buntline was saying to his liquor glass and anyone else who would listen. “The Adventures of Wild Bill Hickok, it was going to be. I followed him all the way to Deadwood, summer of ‘76, collecting my notes. I was there when Jack McCall shot him in the back while he was playing poker, and that was the end of my story. I haven’t had the heart to write another one since. Next?” he said, looking up with sorrowful eyes at John Henry. “And what is your name?”
“Dr. J.H. Holliday,” he said, then he nodded to Jack Johnson who’d followed him along, “and this gentleman is my associate. We’re recently returned from a profitable trip to Chicago, a trip which you may find rather amusin’.”
“Doctor of what?” Ned Buntline asked, looking skeptical.
“Doctor of Philosophy,” John Henry replied breezily. “My degree came from a very reputable German institution, the Jameson Fuches Academy. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?”
“No,” Buntline said drearily, “and I very much doubt that it even exists. But go on, you’ve caught my attention, which is more than anyone else has done thus far.”
“My story begins on the Deadwood stage,” John Henry said, pulling up a chair and getting himself comfortable, “where my partner and I first met the Colorado bankin’ man who made us our fortune. We got to talkin’, as stage passengers do, and discovered that he had some money that needed investing—a happy coincidence, we told him, as we had just come into a certain amount of gold bars that needed to be reinvested, so to speak. The banking man was too greedy to care how we’d come into possession of the gold, and we weren’t inclined to explain, though we did mention that this was government gold which needed to be disposed of quickly. In consequence of this difficulty, we’d be willin’ to make the banker a good deal on the bars, if he’d take them off our hands discreetly. And all we asked in trade for this fortune of gold was a mere $20,000.”
“Go on,” said Buntline, pulling his liquor glass closer.
“As you can imagine, the banker was droolin’ by now. A fortune in gold for only a fraction of its real value! Whatever loyalty he may have felt to the Federal Government quickly melted away in greed, though he wasn’t quite ready to become a traitor to his country until he’d had a chance to check out the gold for himself. So we arranged to meet again at the end of our journey, where we showed him a sample brick from our stash and let him file shavings from it into a fine white silk handkerchief, which he then took to an isolated spot where he could apply acid to test the metal. The filings passed the test, of course, as along the way we’d exchanged handkerchiefs, making sure his silk was filled with the genuine metal.”
“A common ruse,” Buntline said, not overly impressed. “It’s easy enough to switch false gold for the real thing.”
John Henry nodded. “And so the banker himself said, demanding that we show him the entire stash of gold bricks. Which were, we told him, buried in the bottom of a mountain lake, but that he could watch us bring some of them up and test them again as he had tested the first brick. It wasn’t much trouble to bring him a few bricks and let him file shavings from them, then switch the handkerchiefs again. And soon enough, the banker’s greed for gold overtook his moral compunction, and he handed over the $20,000.”
As he told the tale, an audience of cowboys and dance hall girls had gathered and began applauding loudly, but John Henry held up his hand.
“No, gentlemen, the story isn’t over quite yet! You see, the banker was still bein’ cautious about the deal, and he insisted that one of us accompany him all the way to Chicago, where he could arrange for the safe deposit of the gold bricks into the vaults of his bank’s main office. My partner here kindly volunteered to be the man’s guardian for the journey, and all went along fine at first until somewhere past the Missouri River a bearded United States Marshal came on board the rail car, threatenin’ to arrest the banker as an accomplice in a theft of government gold. The banker was understandably terrified, so my partner suggested that maybe the Marshal could be bought off with a bribe. Well, of course, no United States Marshal would ever consider takin’ a bribe . . .” he stopped there long enough to let the crowd around him howl a little.
“But in the end, the Marshal was convinced that he should take $15,000 to let the banker go. So the banker got his gold bars and his freedom, and my partner and I . . .” he looked up at his rapt audience and smiled, “we got $35,000 for a pile of worthless gold-painted clay bricks. The United States Marshal being myself in disguise, of course.”
But before he could accept the ovation of the delighted audience, a voice of indignation spoke up from the doorway.
“And that’s the closest you’ll ever come to wearing a lawman’s badge. Do you think you’re funny, Holliday?”
“Sometimes,” John Henry replied, and as he turned to answer the question he looked straight into the cool-eyed face of Wyatt Earp.
“Well, I don’t,” said Wyatt, standing solemn
as a preacher in his black frock coat and sober tin star. “Doesn’t Dodge have enough trouble of its own without more Texas trouble like you coming along?”
John Henry sat stunned. He hadn’t expected Wyatt to greet him warmly, exactly, but he hadn’t expected to be insulted, either. If he’d had a pistol on him, if it had been any other man who had thrown those insulting words . . .
Then a shadow behind Wyatt laughed and slapped him on the back. “Hell, Wyatt, why don’t you cut him some slack? I thought it was a damn good story, even if it was a lie!” Then, moving forward into the dim saloon light with eager, outstretched hand: “I’m Morgan Earp. And you must be Doc Holliday. Wyatt’s told me about you.”
John Henry had never seen two men who looked more alike, or more different, than Wyatt Earp and his shadow, brother Morgan. They had the same broad shoulders and squared jaws, the same sweeping russet mustaches and steel-blue eyes, the same sun-bronzed faces. But where Wyatt could hardly find a smile to soften his somber expression, Morgan had a boyish grin that matched his ready laugh. And as Morgan took off his hat and shook the yellow dust from its brim, an errant lock of hair kept falling onto his face, refusing to stay neatly in place—no part of Wyatt Earp’s disciplined person would ever dare to be so disobedient as that.
“I thought it was a good story, too,” Ned Buntline said, leaning forward to refill his well-used liquor glass. “The best story I’ve heard in a long time, though undoubtedly a fabric of lies from beginning to end, and I’m only interested in true adventures. But it was literate at least. Are you a writer yourself by any chance, Dr. Holliday? Or are you even a doctor at all?”
“I am actually a dentist by profession. It’s letters I write, mostly.” Then he added with mock formality, “And have you met Mr. Wyatt Earp? One of Dodge City’s finest, if not very sociable, peace officers. And this is his brother, Morgan.”
“Men of heroic proportions,” Buntline said, giving an appraising glance up at the two Earp brothers, both of them standing a head taller than any other men in the room. Then his eyes rested on the pistol holstered at Wyatt’s side, and he laughed. “A man as big as you needs a firearm more his size, Officer Earp! That pistol looks like a child’s toy on you!”
Dance with the Devil Page 19
