Ragtime Cowboys (2 page)

“You get on with folks you put in jail?”

“He didn't know I wasn't one of him till I slapped on the irons. By then we liked each other too much to turn.”

Putting his hat back on—he was still vain, no surprise there—the tall man sat on the edge of Charlie's bed, the springs braying like a donkey, and sniffed at the clear liquid in the glass. “What made a runt like you turn detective, anyway?”

“Head bumps.” Charlie grinned at his reaction. He leaned forward in his writing chair and touched his scalp through the fine strands covering it. “Phrenologist in Kansas. He gave my skull the once-over, found a bump of caution and a bump of intelligence, said I'd do all right as a stock raiser or a newspaper editor or a detective. Well, I'd worked with cows all I cared to and I can't spell, so there was just the one thing left.”

“You have to spell to write books.”

“You'd think so, but no.”

“I wouldn't let a stranger grope my head for a double eagle.”

“He had nice hands, like a barber's. Oh, he also said I had a stubborn bump big as a mule's.”

“That part I believe.”

They drank in glum silence.

Siringo wondered what the hell this was all about, but he knew from past experience his guest never answered questions, only barked orders or expressed opinions. The two adventurers had taken a dislike to each other from the first. Siringo, the affable type, had made a specialty of ingratiating himself with outlaws, worming his way into their confidence with tales of shared experiences, cowboy ballads, and the latest jokes from the burly-Q's in St. Louis and San Francisco. Earp, on the other hand, got through to them with the butt end of a Smith & Wesson. And he was half-outlaw himself, with rumors of a horse theft in his past and more recent stories of claim-jumping in the Klondike.

The former detective and the on-again, off-again lawman might have settled their differences with lead long ago, if only their immediate interests had come into conflict.

Earp looked at the shrouded typewriter. “Still scribbling, I see. I gave it a dally myself; I'd rather grade track. Fellow named Lake's been sniffing around asking to write me up. What's the pay like?”

“Oh, I'm rich as Midas. Got a bigger house on the beach with twice as many holes in the roof.”

“No good?”

Siringo shifted the conversation away from his poverty. “How's the horse-raising business?”

“I thought it was a gentleman's game, but it's just stable work without regular wages.” Earp swirled the liquid in his glass, lifted it to his lips. His Adam's apple worked twice. He shook his shoulders like a bull swarmed by gnats. “Jesus. Sure there's no lye in this?”

“You can't ever tell by the taste. Your gut can, but by that time it's too late.”

Earp wasn't listening. He seldom did unless the conversation was about him. “The ranch is what I'm here about, Charlie. I got me a hoss thief.”

Poetic,
thought Siringo, finishing his own drink. It went down like water.

 

2

“Where you got this thief?”

“That was just a way of speaking. I don't have him. That's the problem.” Earp took a deep breath and let it out. “It's Spirit Dancer.”

“That the thief?”

“Hell no, it's a horse. What kind of a name is that for a person?”

“I thought maybe it was an injun or a belly dancer, like Little Egypt.” He'd spent most of what he made in Tombstone on dinners and liquor to get to that, and when he did it was a disappointment, as just about everything was after weeks of anticipation. She'd left all her best maneuvers on the stage of the Birdcage Theater. “What's the thief's name?”

“If I knew that, I'd know where the horse is. Will you stop asking about the thief till I tell you what happened?”

“Sorry. Asking questions is a hard habit to get shut of.”

“Spirit Dancer's the prettiest filly you ever saw, and lightning on the hoof. I've been three years raising and training her: She's by Gold Dollar out of Treys-Over-Deuces.”

Siringo shrugged. “I've rode more horses than I can count. I couldn't tell you any of their names offhand. I always held it a waste of time. They don't come when you call.”

“I'm not here for the conversation, Charlie. You never used to chew the rag so much.”

“It comes from living alone. Go ahead on.”

“Dollar and Deuces are solid winners, trust me on that. I mortgaged the ranch to buy Dancer. I had her all primed for Louisville, and then some son of a bitch stole her right out from under my stable boy's nose. Which is one nose I won't have to look at anymore.”

“You fired him?”

“No, I gave him a raise and an oyster dinner at the Ambassador Hotel. Sure I fired him.”

“You should of kept him on.”

“What in Christ's name for? Shovel shit and keep an eye on the best horse in the string, that was the extent of his responsibilities. All he did was shovel shit, and he wasn't even good at that. He kept tracking it onto the back porch.”

“Did you think to ask him who paid him to look south when the filly was going north?”

Earp's face got angriest when he realized he'd made a mistake. Siringo reckoned that admitting it would bring foam to his mouth.

“He didn't have that kind of brains. When you recruit a shit-shoveler, you don't exactly go down the dean's list. This one didn't have sense enough to smoke a cigar by the cold end.”

“I spent twenty years of my life tracking train robbers and murderers, and I paid attention. It don't take brains to be a thief.”

“I tracked my share.”

And shot the wrong ones when you caught up with them;
but there was no percentage in dragging up his guest's pitiful record as a lawman.

“Keeping the peace is one thing, finding out who broke it's another. I don't reckon you know where he went after you let him go.”

“I got a wire from a ranch up in Sonoma County yesterday asking about his fitness. The son of a bitch used my name for a reference.”

“What did you say?”

“I haven't answered it yet. Josie says I should cool down before I say anything I might regret. She treats me like a horse; I'm surprised she doesn't rub me down with a piece of burlap before she puts me to bed.”

Siringo always thought Josephine was too smart for her husband.

“If I was you, I'd paint a pretty picture of the boy, get 'em to hire him on. Then you'll know where he is so you can pump him.”

Earp chewed the ends of his handlebars. Finally he nodded.

“It sticks in my craw, but sure. Only if it's me doing the pumping, I might just kill him.”

“You're too hotheaded for the job. Fists are no good in detective work. If they're tough it just makes 'em stick down deeper and if they ain't all you get is lies to make it stop. You got to oil a saddle to bring out the grain.”

“Well, I'm no hand at that sort of thing. That's why I'm here instead of out beating the brush for my horse.”

Siringo pulled on his pipe, found it had gone out. He placed it next to the typewriter to cool.

“I'm out to pasture,” he said. “Hire a Pinkerton. I'm down on the outfit since they let me go, but I guess they can still handle horse stealing.”

“You quit, the way I heard it. Seems to me I read it in that
Isms
thing you wrote, or as far as I got into it. A gentleman rancher such as myself hasn't a great deal to do but sit around and read, but that one lost me in the tall grass.”

He knew the “gentleman rancher” lived off his wife's money, but he wasn't one to judge a man for making his way however he could. Siringo had sniffed around some well-set-up widows after Mamie died, but he'd lost considerable of the looks and charm that had gotten him so far in the past. All he'd been able to throw a loop around was Lillie. That had not ended well; certainly not in riches.

“
Two Evil Isms: Pinkertonism and Anarchism,
” he said. “The Agency confiscated every copy. Anyhow, there wasn't much to do after I was fired but go ahead and quit.”

“Well, I tried the Pinks in Frisco. They wanted too much up front, with no guarantee they could even turn anything, but a secretary there told me on the Q.T. about this young fellow who sure enough quit them over principles. He had some.”

Siringo was prepared to like the man, but he couldn't see Earp being impressed. The next thing he said cleared up the confusion.

“I saw when I met him that was just an excuse. He's a lunger, like old Doc was, rest his soul in hell. The work got too strenuous on a steady basis. He's in the way of being a writer, like you, only the publishers can't see it. He's got a gal who's expecting and he intends to marry her, so he accepted my offer.”

“You're all set up, then.”

“Hold on. He's got the smarts and experience, but I suspect he's distracted.” Earp, who had set down his glass, fashioned an imaginary one from his fist and flipped it toward his mouth. “Just like Doc.”

Who was no great loss to posterity. Siringo had hung around killers, but that was all in a day's work. He found them a filthy lot, and too dumb to see they were no better off than if they'd kept the Sixth Commandment. The man sitting on his bed had always seemed to prefer their company over decent men's.

Siringo took a swig from his own glass, which was real enough.

“It happens to the best of us. Last time I got so distracted I woke up in Chihuahua three days later with my ears pierced.”

“I know you're just fooling about. You've been at it long enough to know how to walk a straight line under a load.” Earp pointed at his drink on the floor at his feet, with one sip gone. “This is as much guzzling as I've done since I landed in jail in '71; I'm a danger when I'm drunk, as much to myself as to anybody, which is why I can't ever go back to Arkansas. But I've seen you drink a party of teamsters under the table and order another round for the trail.”

“I was younger then, and the liquor wouldn't strip the hide off a buffalo. I don't know the bootleggers in San Francisco. I'm sixty-five, Earp. I haven't sat a horse in years. The last time I fired that Colt was at a biscuit tin. I missed.”

“Who said anything about riding and shooting? All I'm asking you to do is take the train to Frisco and see what he's got. I gave him everything he needed to start. While you're there maybe you can drop in on that ranch and talk to the stable boy. I'll go straightaway from here to Western Union and give 'em such a glowing report they'll want to run him for governor.”

“Don't overdo it. They might think he's too good for the job.”

“Rain's letting up, Charlie. I can't sit here all day. I got stock to feed, and I'm short-handed one man.”

“I gave you my answer.”

“I'm asking again.”

Siringo squinted up through a hole in the roof. The clouds were sure enough breaking apart; the percussion section inside had slowed to a desultory tinkle, the sound a saloon maestro made killing time until the last drunk was swept out. “When did this horse go missing?”

“Be two weeks tomorrow.”

“That's cold tracking.”

“I tried it when it was fresh, then lost it in the creek.”

“I'm even less interested now than I was the first time.”

“If you were always this picky, it's no wonder the Pinks threw you out.”

“Your horse is gone, Earp. Sold for breeding stock up in Canada or pickup races down in Mexico.”

“There hasn't been any money in Mexico since before the Alamo. You want to profit off that situation, you run her as a ringer under a fresh name back East somewhere and clean up from race to race in hick county fairs. It's a sinful waste of the best three-year-old anyone's seen this century. Next year she'll be over the hill as far as all the big gates are concerned; but without papers it's the only way.”

“Well, I don't figure to go from track to track like a tout, getting fresh with strange horses and getting bit doing it.”

“You got anything better to do, other than scratch your ass and wait for your house to fall down around your ears?”

“I just started a book.”

His guest had never been the type to pursue an argument, not to press a point or even for sport: It was his way or none. He produced a leather folder from the inside breast pocket of his damp suit coat, scribbled in it with a gravity pen, tore loose a sheet, and stuck it at Siringo.

It was a bank draft drawn upon the Marcus family account—his wife's people—in the amount of five hundred dollars.

Siringo took it, waved the ink dry. His heart did a happy little two-step. There was a new roof there, Consolidated Edison made happy, and three months' worth of grub besides. He folded the draft and put it in his shirt pocket behind the scrotum pouch.

“I don't figure it'll hurt to take a look. I'll go to the station in the morning. What's this lunger call himself?”

“Hammett. Dashiell Hammett. It's a nancy sort of a name, but growing up Wyatt didn't hurt me any in the man department.”

 

3

After Earp left, the sun came out, bright as a double eagle. It was as if the man traveled under his own portable overcast. Siringo decided it must be hell to be Wyatt Earp.

He got up, looked out the window, at the wet glisten on the big wooden letters spread across the hills. A dash of water had made startling bursts of color in the shriveled brown bushes that surrounded them; ephemeral things, doomed at birth by the desert, but gay for the moment. It was on such days the developers behind Hollywoodland chose to photograph the scene for their brochures: Salting the mines.

From under the bed his guest had sat on, Charles A. Siringo dragged an old wooden footlocker bound with iron, the name penciled on the lid belonging to a horse soldier long since dead in Nebraska. Dust bunnies stirred awake and rolled off the top.