Little Big Man (51 page)

Then he says: “I’m sorry, hoss. But it was fair, wasn’t it? I taught you, didn’t I? And now I’m going to carry you over to the doc, and if you are dead I’ll buy you a nice funeral.”

I figured by now he would have put away his gun, so as he bent over to pick me up, I come to life and shoved my pistol into his nose.

“Are you satisfied?” I asks. “I could have killed you ten times by now.”

Living his type of life, he didn’t have much energy to spare for astonishment. He squinted and backed up with his hands in the air. Then he let them down slowly and laughed a huge guffaw.

“Hoss,” he says, “you are the trickiest little devil I have ever run across. You know there are a couple of hundred men who would give all they owned to get a clear shot at Wild Bill Hickok, and you throw it away.”

He was laughing, but I reckon somewhere deep he was actually offended, such was his idea of himself. He would rather I had killed him than take pains to show I was basically indifferent to the fact of his existence so long as I could protect my own hide.

He tried one more thing to pry from me an admission that I was fascinated by him. He says: “I guess you can go about now saying how you put a head on Wild Bill Hickok.”

I says: “I’ll never mention it.” And I have kept my word from that day to this. I wasn’t going to give him no free advertisement of any kind. That was the trouble with them long-haired darlings like him and Custer: people talked about them too much.

His mustache drooped in disappointment, but he laughed again to keep up the hearty front, and he says: “I’m going over to Abilene to be the marshal. If you ever get over that way, hoss, why I’ll be proud to buy you a drink. But damn if I’ll ever play poker with you again.”

He shakes with me. I don’t know that I have mentioned that his hands was right small for a man his size, and his feet as well—as little as my own, almost. Then he turned and walked away down the street, straight as a die and certainly not swaying, yet with that hair hanging down his back and the long buckskin tunic descending almost to his knees like a dress, I was reminded of a real tall girl.

I stayed in Kansas City all the summer of ’71 and continued to earn my and Amelia’s living at the poker table and continued to cheat and was finally caught a time or two at it and shot once in the calf of the leg by a fellow, but it wasn’t permanently damaging, being only a derringer, and on another occasion a man took a knife after me, and I had to shoot him in the hand.

Anyway, after a few such incidents, I commenced to get a bad reputation. It got more difficult to find people to play cards with, and once I did have a game, I was watched close. If I played with any of them other able practitioners of the violent arts that was in K.C. that summer—Jack Gallagher, say, or Billy Dixon—you can be damn certain I kept my nose clean: for the more you know about gunfighting, the more respect you have for those to whom it is a specialty.

Little Amelia’s spending grew to wondrous proportions. I come back to the hotel one day and found a grand piano, made of mahogany, in our parlor-room, and along with it some elderly German gentleman with a beard and eyeglasses, come from St. Louie along with the instrument to tune it and give lessons in the playing thereof. Not only did I owe for the piano and the shipping costs, but also for this individual’s wages and his room and board—so far as he was concerned, in perpetuity, I suppose, for though in time Amelia might learn to play unassisted, the instrument would need tuning for the rest of its life.

I never did figure out whether or not he was a confidence man, but he seemed a real German all right, and sure knowed his music, except it was hard as the devil to get the bastard to play any piece as such and not just the scales over and over, in the course of which he’d get out his set of tuning forks and monkey about with the wires and hammers.

The whole bill was well into four figures, though I don’t recall the precise sum, for I blacked out when I saw it. However, when I recovered from the shock, I was really kind of proud of Amelia for her initiative. Seems she had just got the address of the piano manufacturer, sent them a letter on the stationery of the hotel saying send your best model, and by God if they never, without even a deposit, upriver from St. Louie along with that German. Lucky for me, he didn’t care nothing for the nature of his accommodations, being a pure fanatic for his music, so I had him bunk down on a cot
in the corner of my bedroom, and that was all right with him, and he lived on sausage and rye bread, when he remembered to eat at all, so I saved a little that way.

I must say though that Amelia never did learn to play the piano well. That was the one thing she did awkward, and the result wasn’t much more tuneful than had a cat got to walking on the keys. Used to drive the professor crazy, and he’d storm and yell and tear his beard, and once I recall when she was attacking a particular exercise for the ninety-ninth time and making the same mistake at every instance, the German cried like a baby.

After a couple months, Amelia come to me and says: “Uncle Jack, do you mind if I send the piano away? It has grown to be a dreadful bore.” That’s the way she talked now, sort of like an English person, with her mouth made small and sending the words through her nose. Sure classy it was.

And of course I agreed, for I wanted her to be happy, so I bought the German a return passage, a loaf of bread, and a hunk of cheese, and I hired some brawny fellows to take the piano out and crate it up and put it upon a riverboat back to St. Louie. But as it happened that boat got into a race with another craft, which they was always doing in them days, and fired up so high its boilers blowed and the son of a bitch burned right down to the waterline, the piano with it. I still owed something like $930 on that instrument, and was the frequent recipient of threatening correspondence on the subject, followed by duns wearing derby hats and carrying various types of documentation: dispossess papers and all, and when they found there wasn’t nothing to reclaim, they believed I ought to be imprisoned for it, but a lawyer I hired worked out some arrangement by which I would pay them fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life, so they eased off, and the lawyer charged me only two hundred dollars for his services.

And this at a time when I couldn’t get nobody to play poker with me. The hotel bill was run way up high again, the dress shops was sending statements around, and I owed the hairdresser, the livery stable, and two restaurants. Then too, Amelia was stuck on this idea of gaining musical accomplishment, so the next thing we had to replace that German and his piano was a huge woman with a chest on her that would have made Dolly look tubercular. She taught singing and claimed to be Italian, late of the opera in a place called Milano, according to her story: Signorina Carmella. She could sing
all right, so it might have been true. Under a full head of steam she would crack every tumbler in our rooms, and when she tackled the scales we’d get complaints from guests as far away as the fourth floor rear.

So it was just as well she was drunk most of the time, for then she’d drop her bulk on the sofa and stay right quiet while giving the beat to Amelia with a fat finger stacked with cheap rings and after a while hiccup once or twice and fall dead asleep. Then I had my choice of leaving her to sleep it off, which might take hours—for which I was charged at the rate of three dollars per—or waking her up, at which moment she would clutch at me under the illusion I was some intimate acquaintance of hers called Vincenzo. This amused Amelia no end.

As to my niece’s talent for singing, however, I am afraid it proved in no respect superior to her gift at the piano, though Signorina Carmella, unlike that German, would have been the last to admit it, I reckon with her fees in mind. It was funny to me that with such a melodious speaking voice as Amelia had developed, she would sing like a crow rather than a lark; but I guess there ain’t no connection. I didn’t think the worse of her for it. I even approved of her indomitable ambition to be musical, but when she and the Signorina announced that they figured she was ready to hire a hall and give a recital, well, I didn’t want my dear little relative to be mobbed by a crowd of irate ticket buyers after she got out one song, but I knowed that would sure happen unless we could scratch up an audience of deaf persons. So, for the first time, I says no.

Amelia didn’t cry or scream about it, she just quietly fell ill, wouldn’t eat nothing for several days, and when I come into her room, give me a sad sweet smile, her wan little hands lying still upon the coverlet, and I seen she would probably die before her time unless I relented, for she had that romantic Crabb streak in her. So at length I says O.K. and rented a hall from some lodge, had programs printed, and got some boys to go about the respectable part of town giving away tickets, for it was no use trying to sell them, and the night of the recital, I loaded up a double-barreled shotgun and took a conspicuous seat down front in case of trouble.

But I hadn’t had to worry, for only six people come, and Amelia was so nervous she hardly noticed the audience, and the Signorina, who accompanied her upon a harmonium, had belted the vino a good deal beforehand and fell off the stool a couple times and we
had more difficulty in propping her upright than with any protests from the crowd.

As I recall it, it only cost me five dollars to get a favorable review printed in next day’s newspaper, for journalists in them days was notoriously underpaid. However, that was the only bargain I got: I owed for the hall, the rented harmonium, the printer, and of course the Signorina for her services and the piano stool she broke.

But little Amelia sure got satisfaction from her concert and bought ten or twenty copies of the paper with that commendatory notice and made sure everybody around the hotel knowed it was her; so I had no regrets though my financial obligations was growing to a magnitude not far this side of gigantic. Whereas my expectations was nil, so far as poker went, for it had now reached late August and them buffalo hunters was a-leaving for the range to start their new season, so soon there wasn’t anybody left in K.C. to get up a game with, even provided that they would have played with me, which many was now disinclined to, anyhow.

Now what I intended to do was to hunt buffalo myself, for in one season from September to March a good man could clear two-three thousand dollars in hides, but to do that you had to go into it like a real business, which meant you must have a stake to start on. You needed a big Sharps buffalo rifle with a supply of heavy-caliber ammunition, a wagon and animals to pull it, and then you required a man to do the skinning, for no self-respecting hunter would touch a knife to the beasts he shot, I don’t know why: just snobbery, I reckon, but that’s the way it was. It might sound funny, but buffalo hunters considered themselves a type of aristocracy. Anyway, I just name the barest essentials. Most of the well-known hunters carried along a team of ten or twelve men, including wagon drivers, cook, fellow to tend the stock, etc., and an arsenal of weapons, on account of when you fired that Sharps a number of times its barrel would overheat, and you couldn’t wait for it to cool while the herd might get the smell of blood and stampede.

Suffice it to say my problem was solved by running into a man called Allardyce T. Meriweather, in one of the drinking establishments of Kansas City, whence I had repaired one afternoon to ponder over a beaker of the grape. Just thinking of him brings to mind his type of phraseology.

A man steps up to me while I am standing at the brass rail, and intones the following.

“Sir,” he says, “I know you will pardon my forwardness when I say that as the only two gentlemen among this clientele of ruffians, it is my opinion that we should make common cause.”

“Pardon?” I says.

“Exactly,” says he, and introduces himself.

“Crabb,” he says when he has my handle. “Is that of the Philadelphia, New York, or Boston branch of the family?”

Now I thought he was one of them Eastern swells come out West for his weak lungs or whatnot, which a tour of the prairies was supposed to correct; and right then, bothered about money as I was, it annoyed me that this here cake-eater could roam around at his ease, all expenses paid, whereas I was denied a dishonest living, so I says to him: “Philadelphia.” What the hell did I care whether he believed me?

“Ah,” he says. “My acquaintance, I fear, was with the New York and Boston lines.” I haven’t yet said what he looked like: well, he was the middle-size facing you, but in profile he was developing quite the potgut. He was clean-shaven with a blue jaw and a flabby mouth, and he wore or carried a deal of gewgaws: diamond stickpin, lapel flower, watch chain with dependent ornamentation, gold-headed cane, doeskin gloves, and the like. I reckon he was around my age.

“Which was your university?” he says. “Harvard or Yale?”

“The former,” says I.

He says: “Mine was the latter, but I had a host of acquaintance, nay, friends of the bosom, up at Cambridge in the early sixties, which must have been your years there. Did you know Montgomery Brear or William W. Whipple or Bartley “Doc” Platt, all of the Indian Pudding Club? Or Chester “Chet” Larkin; he was a Musk Ox. Or Mansard Fitch, who belonged to the Kangaroos?”

“No, I never,” I says. “I was an Antelope.”

“Well, sir,” says he, “let me shake your hand again on that. I don’t require a further bona fide. I expect every gentleman in the organized world knows of the exclusivity of the Antelopes. It is no wonder then, sir, that I was able to pick you out of the crowd: breeding will tell.”

He goes on in that vein for a time and we had another drink and while I was some amused to have put one over on him, I tired of his yapping finally and was fixing to leave, when he says: “Sir, I have no recourse but to hurl myself upon your mercy. I find myself in a
desperate condition. Alas, I have not your moral fiber. I am a bending reed, sir, and I fear the grand old firm of Meriweather, bankers, to which I shall one day fall heir, will find in me a pillar of sand.

“In short, sir, I have in two weeks squandered, in games of chance, the five thousand dollars my father put into my pocket for the first month’s expenses of my Western jaunt. I dare not wire him for more. I appeal to you as a fellow gentleman among the rabble. Twenty dollars, Mr. Crabb, a mere pittance to you, but it would save my life.