Ragtime Cowboys (7 page)

“You yonkers take electricity for granted. All part of your education. How much do you know about phrenology?”

“I learned just enough to break up a fortune-telling ring in Sausalito.”

“It's science, not palmistry. I wouldn't have been a detective without it.”

“It was just a paycheck to me.”

“How'd that work out?”

Then, for no reason worth examination, both men broke into bunkhouse guffaws, ending in three minutes of coughing on Hammett's part. While he was catching his breath, Siringo did the honors, emptying a Mason jar into their glasses, just enough to float the ice.

 

8

“How's your head?”

“My bump of regret's pounding fit to bend my hat,” Siringo said. “How's yours?”

“No complaints. The thing I don't get about drys is how can a man wake up knowing that's as good as he's going to feel all day long. Did you remember to pack some hair-of-the-dog?”

Siringo patted the new bedroll strapped behind the cantle of his hired saddle. Hammett grinned, excavated the flask from inside his whipcord coat, and helped himself to a swig. His companion shook his head when he offered it. “I'd go slow, too. No sense making things easier for this eel character.”

“I think we're safe this trip. I never heard where he had any equestrian leanings.”

The proprietor of the livery, an elderly Chinese in traditional dress garnished with yellow rubber boots to his knees, had placed the money they gave him under his mandarin's cap and brought out a dappled mare and a blue roan gelding for their inspection. Siringo checked both from teeth to fetlocks, pronounced them sound, and selected the mare for himself. The two detectives rode them to the Golden Gate ferry, paid the fare, and loaded them aboard. Leaning on the railing, they smoked and watched a luxury liner steaming north where the Pacific met the sky, pouring black smoke into the latter. Siringo had thought the
Titanic
would have put an end to all that, but folks were restless.

“They say they're going to build a bridge across the bay,” Hammett said. “The bill's in the legislature. That'll make a cozy retirement for Clanahan and every other tinhorn politician in town.”

“Ain't interested. Talk about something else.”

“That'll be a challenge. I don't go to church and I gave up baseball when Chicago threw the Series. I can't impress you with my detective stories. Politics is all that's left.”

“I ain't voted since Taft. When I saw what we got I figured I didn't qualify to make that decision.” Siringo shifted his weight from one foot to the other. They'd only ridden a few blocks and already his backside was as sore as his head.

“I cast my ballot for Debs.”

“There was a vote wasted. You can't go from the hoosegow to the White House.”

“If Doheny gets his way it may go the other way around.”

“Better a crook than a radical, I say.”

“They jailed Debs for speaking out against the Espionage Act. Wilson was using it to open his opponents' mail. If that makes Debs a radical, what was Thomas Jefferson?”

“Change the subject before we end up drawing down on each other.”

Hammett coughed and spat over the railing. “What's this lie you called Earp out on?”

“Ancient history.”

“Oh. A gentleman.”

Siringo chuckled around the stem of his pipe. “That's one accusation nobody never made before. I don't own a stick and I'd rather cut my throat than put on a stiff collar.”

“Prettiest man I ever saw in a dinner jacket cut up his wife and shipped her to Boston in a trunk. It isn't a question of dress.”

Siringo had on the new Stetson he'd bought with Earp's money to replace his disreputable old one, his canvas shooting coat with cartridge loops on the breast over his ribbed trousers, stovepipe boots without spurs; he'd left them at home under the impression his riding days were behind him. Hammett wore a slouch hat, old work boots, and the bottom half of a retired pinstripe suit, worn shiny in spots. He carried a .38 Smith & Wesson revolver with a four-inch barrel in one deep coat pocket and a set of brass knuckles in the other, the material sagging under their weight. They had five guns between them and Siringo's mare, which was having trouble making peace with the scabbarded Winchester slung from the saddle. It kept trying to reach back and bite through the strap, but couldn't get inside range, like a man with an itch in the middle of his back.

“Why be coy about Earp? He didn't hold back on your account.”

“I done my damage. No use raking it up again.”

“I thought all you old-timers were braggarts.”

“I strangled the truth around my share of campfires, but I growed out of it. Earp never did, and that's one of the differences between us.”

“Well, then, tell me about Billy the Kid.”

“He's dead. Anything you hear to the contrary's horseshit. He ain't selling dry goods in Chicago and he wasn't seen last year in South America wearing a plug hat and smoking a cigar. He never left that hole they dumped him in down in Fort Sumner.”

“You met him, though.”

“I was the first to call him Kid.”

*   *   *

Siringo was riding fence for the LX Ranch in the Llano Estacado. He spotted a cut in the wire, the ends still shiny, and followed fresh hoofprints to where he found the Kid rounding up LX strays inside Palo Duro Canyon. He wouldn't have thought anything of it except for the cut fence and the fact that he'd never seen the slender youth around the bunkhouse.

The Kid was seventeen then, and the pistol on his hip was largely there for ballast. Alone and concentrating on the uncooperative longhorns, he wasn't aware of the twenty-two-year-old ranch hand's presence until he rode right up on him, threw his lasso over his bony shoulders, and jerked him out of the saddle. Siringo dragged him twenty or thirty yards to take the fight out of him, then disarmed him, bound his hands to the horn of the Kid's own saddle, tied a lead, and towed him into town and passed him over to the marshal.

He'd never known a pleasanter journey. The Kid was affable, remembered every joke he'd ever heard, told it with just the right pauses, sometimes in dialect—he had an ear, Billy had—and sang in flawless Spanish in a bell-clear tenor, interrupting himself in mid-lyric to insert a piece of conversation:

“You snared me good, cowboy. When I was in the air I thought I was struck by lightning. You must've been born with a lariat in your hand.”

“I was for a fact. It made all the medical journals.”

“My name's Henry. What do they call you?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie, you reckon you can teach me how to throw a loop like you?”

“I'd admire to, kid, if they don't put the rope on you first.”

“Every ranch started with somebody else's beeves. They can't hang you for that.”

“Can and have. Also that horse you're riding wears the LX brand.”

“I got a bill of sale somewheres.”

“I believe you, kid, I really do; but that saddle's got my boss's initials carved in the fender.”

*   *   *

“Why'd he give you a false name?” Hammett asked. “I never heard where he skulked.”

“He didn't. He was Henry McCarty. I reckon he lived to regret changing it. What politician worth the graft would bother to put a price on somebody called Henry the Kid?”

“Hard to believe he was good company. I thought he was blood simple.”

“I can't answer for what come of him later, though I rode down two good horses going after him for the reward. I'd of brung him in, too, instead of shooting him in the back in the dark. I do know the first time he was arrested it was for stealing clothes from a Chinese laundry.”

“Gooseberry lay, no kidding? I didn't read that in your book. It was all shoot-outs and midnight rides.”

“It'd be a shame to write a whole book and not make one sale.”

“Did you know Pat Garrett?”

“His letter got me into the Agency, though I never liked him. He was tall as Abe Lincoln but not half so honorable. He became a tax collector after he assassinated the Kid. He got himself shot by nobody knows who while he was pissing on the side of the road.”

“Were you there?”

“Not guilty. But folks will talk, and I'm a good listener.”

“I'm starting to think everything I ever read about the West got it all backwards.”

“Not everything. But when they say it's both true and authentic, you can bet it's neither.”

“I thought writing was honest work. It's why I left the Agency.”

“No wonder you can't find a publisher with a flashlight and a map of New York City.”

“It's worse than dishonest. It's a waste of experience.”

“Experience is like rhubarb. You got to add sugar to make a pie.”

“Huh.” Hammett threw his cigarette overboard and started rolling a fresh one. “How'd the Kid get away from that town marshal?”

Siringo grinned.

“Shinnied up the jail chimney and lit out black as Old Joe for New Mexico. He was skinnier'n your boy Feeney. They never made a pair of cuffs that fit him.”

“Was he as ugly as his picture?”

“That wasn't him. He wasn't any longer on brains than most outlaws, but he was smart enough not to get his picture struck with paper out on him all over New Mexico Territory, like them dumb sons of bitches in the Wild Bunch. Some slick photographer paid a tramp to pose with a prop pistol and carbine, made plenty of copies, and sold 'em like French postcards. The Kid had nice teeth and he was generous with them. That's what made all the señoritas wet their drawers the minute they laid eyes on him.”

“I'm beginning to see what you mean about rhubarb. The truth may not be ugly, but it can always use a boost.”

“I'll make a writer out of you yet, Mr. Hammett.”

 

9

The Sonoma Valley was as alien to an old plainsman like Siringo as a lunar landscape—which may have served as Jack London's inspiration to call the location of his ranch
The Valley of the Moon
—with strange bare rounded hills standing shoulder-to-shoulder. Riding up one side, down the other, and up the side of the next grew monotonous in a bluetick hurry. Even the horses were bored.

“When do you calculate this country'll get tired of jumping up and down and stretch out?” he asked.

But Hammett was unresponsive. A sidelong glance showed a pallid and sweating rider hanging on to his saddle horn as if it were a life preserver. His slouch hat was soaked through, and although he'd shrugged out of his coat and secured it behind his cantle, his shirt lay plastered to his chest. Siringo could practically count his ribs.

“You ain't fixing to die on me, are you? 'Cause I ain't packing your carcass back over these goldarn hills.”

“Don't worry about me, old-timer. I'm sandier than I look.”

“You'd have to be, or I'd have you half-buried by now. What possessed a man with your affliction to set down in a wet place like Frisco?”

“I tried that desert air in Los Angeles, but Hollywood just made me sicker. What they're doing to Fatty Arbuckle shouldn't happen to a dog.”

“Think he's innocent?”

“He's guilty of throwing a party that got out of hand. If you're asking me did he rape that girl with a Coca-Cola bottle, the answer's no. It's just an excuse to throw him in jail so the studios won't have to pay him his high salary.”

“I'd expect a Marxist would say he got what he deserved for being a capitalist.”

“Well, I don't make a religion of it.” Hammett fortified himself from his flask. His color improved.

It was well past noon when they mounted a hill between rows of staked-out grapevines. The smell of the ripening fruit was overpowering. It made a man woozy.

“Reckon they're for grape juice?” Siringo asked.

“Oh, that and the Catholic Church. You can't feed a worshipper three-two beer and tell him it's the Blood of Christ.” They topped the rise. Hammett drew rein. “There it is, Beauty Ranch.”

“You don't say. I never would of figured it out on my lonesome.”

Beyond the base of the hill, the furrowed road passed under an arch fashioned from among the redwoods that lined it, the wood carved in a twisting configuration spelling the single word
BEAUTY
.

“We'll put on our best behavior from here. It's a female household since Jack's death. Not that you might think so when you meet the widow.”

“Which I take it you have.”

“Oh, she's a force of nature. You can't miss her when she's in town.”

“Then what in thunder was that Walter Noble Burns business? She'll know you by sight and have us both thrown off the spread for imposters.”

“I'd read in the
Examiner
she was in New York, dealing with Jack's publishers. That's what I get for believing everything I read.”

“What makes you think she ain't?”

Hammett was rolling a cigarette. “Because that's her coming this way.”

Siringo saw a lone rider approaching the gate from the other side at full gallop. The figure wore riding breeches, a white shirt and broad-brimmed hat, and knee-length boots. He drew his spyglass from the bedroll, snapped it open, and focused on the horse and rider. “Holy jumping Jesus, it
is
a woman.”

“What'd you expect when I said ‘her,' a sow bear?”

“I never seen a woman ride straddle.”

“The better you know Charmian, the more things you'll see you never did.”

“I don't figure we'll get on, then. I don't burn tobacco in a woman's presence and I expect the same sort of decency from her.”