Telegraph Days (28 page)

The fact that such a big crowd turned out for the Wild West in Omaha convinced Bill Cody that his idea had been sound, despite the fact that this first effort was imperfect in Cody's eyes. He needed Indians, he needed a stagecoach, he needed a trick roper or two and a sharpshooter with some crowd appeal.

At this time Bill Cody was possessed of boundless energies—he'd work all day and all night, training a horse, auditioning ropers, or doing whatever else it took to improve the program of the Wild West. In only two years, by a process of trial and error, he formed a troupe that was the equal of any that had ever been fired in the Hippodrome or any other arena. Annie Oakley, a petite woman who soon put all the other sharpshooters deep in the shade, became his biggest star—but he found quite a few others. Pretty soon he partnered with a fine manager, Nate Salsbury, to organize the travel and secure the dates, and a press agent named John Burke to stir up interest in the newspapers and bring out the crowd.

All the while, as Bill Cody's Wild West became the talk of America, I sat in my office in North Platte and dealt with the problems of at least a dozen enterprises that Bill had started up or invested in or something. Now and then Lulu arrived and inspected her lucrative real estate. I had been buying up Nebraska at a steady pace, a fact which delighted Lulu Cody. We never had a quarrel. Sometimes Bill would show up, with Jesse and Texas Jack; sometimes Mr. Salsbury and Major Burke, as the press agent was called, would visit between tours. I liked them both but left them to their own devices. I was not fool enough to suppose either of them would be content to take orders from a woman. They ran the Wild West, I ran everything else, and the arrangement worked fine.

When Zenas Clark left my company that fateful day, I realized that I had accidentally trapped myself. Zenas was just the first to see it. I was not Bill Cody's mistress—I was never his mistress—but for several years, there was always the possibility that I might become his mistress if the circumstances were right. Bill was rarely fully sober—when we were together in North Platte there was always the chance that the fever might overcome us. Bill might decide he wanted more than a few kisses, or a look at my titties.

It never happened—but it might have happened. Lulu Cody knew it and chose to leave it alone. Jesse Morlacchi knew it and didn't care. Who did care were my suitors, beginning with Zenas Clark. Zenas had a certain confidence, but not enough to allow him to suppose he could compete with Buffalo Bill. I doted on Zenas Clark, and had from the moment I met him. He was a fine, devilish lover and we might have had a lot more fun if Zenas could just have got Bill Cody off his mind. And yet I couldn't really blame Zenas for feeling as he did. Bill Cody was a force of nature—he was one of the largest personalities of his time. He had done much of what he claimed to have done—been a frontier scout for fifteen years, ridden with the Pony Express, and been under fire from some hot, formidable Indians. He wasn't bogus, and few young men would have felt up to competing with him for a woman or anything else, but especially for a woman.

In North Platte I was the main woman.

Bill Cody left two days after Zenas and I had our fight. Over time I forgave Zenas for his hasty departure, but if he had just waited Cody out we could have had a lot more fun.

It was not the end of Zenas Clark in my life. We would meet again in a distant desert—when we were together we were thick as thick. In a way I was grateful to him even while I was missing him: he did more than anyone to show me what a tight trap I had caught myself in by agreeing to be Bill Cody's majordomo.

I
WAS TRAPPED
, in a sense, but fortunately I am too active a woman to accept permanent entrapment. I had signed on with Bill Cody for a term, but I hadn't signed on for life.

You wouldn't think it, but I had even begun to miss Rita Blanca. Jackson and Mandy had not been idle: they had two toddlers, both girls, and another on the way, so, besides missing Aurel Imlah and Mrs. Karoo and my little telegraph office, I was even missing out on being an aunt. I slowly began to realize that I had more that was my own in Rita Blanca than I was ever likely to have in North Platte, where I was a well-kept vassal but a vassal nonetheless.

As the telegraph lady of Rita Blanca I worked for myself while performing a service for the whole community.

In North Platte I worked only for Bill and Lulu—mostly Bill—and I am too independent a woman to spend my whole life writing someone else's letters and paying someone else's bills. Of course, as Cody's representative, I was in the thick of civic life in North Platte, such as it was. I sat on all the councils, advised the Major, headed the school board, had the preacher to Sunday lunch, and did all the responsible things a pillar of the community is supposed to do—it left me bored. Of course, the civic fathers greatly preferred me to Lulu, who mainly gave them the back of her hand. The women envied me, for pleasures I never had, and the men envied Bill, just because he was Bill.

The first person I told, when I decided to quit, was Ripley Eads, my old chaperone, who had prospered greatly in North Platte. He owned a nice little clapboard barbershop and cut so much hair that he had to hire a second barber to assist him. He had married a lively little Cheyenne woman and was in the process of developing a sizable family.

“Ripley, do you ever miss Rita Blanca?” I asked, with my usual directness.

“Nope, can't say I miss the place,” Ripley said succinctly.

“I miss it. I'm thinking of quitting Cody and heading back.”

Ripley looked stunned.

“Quit Cody?” he asked. “Why?”

“Boredom,” I told him. “The fact is that I'm bored.”

“But you're said to be the highest-salaried woman in Nebraska, which is a good old state, in my opinion.”

“It may be a good old state, but I'm leaving it,” I announced. “Since we're old compañeros, me and you, I thought I'd ask your opinion.”

“Which you got.”

“Yes, which I got, and it's about as useful as a mud sandwich,” I told him.

Then I went straight to the telegraph office and sent Cody a cable giving sixty days' notice. He was in San Francisco at the time, and the troupe was rolling in money, from all reports. Jesse Morlacchi wrote me, mentioning that they had sold four thousand dollars' worth of tickets in one night, which is fine box office in anybody's town.

Of course, when Bill Cody got my wire he went through the roof and immediately sent me this wire:

DEAR NELLIE YOUR TELEGRAM WAS A BITTER BLOW STOP YOU HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MY FAVORITE DARLING STOP I LOVE YOU LIKE A DAUGHTER STOP IF THE PAY IS TOO LOW I'LL RAISE YOU STOP PLEASE RECONSIDER STOP COMPANY PROSPERING LOVE BUFFALO BILL

I immediately wired him back:

DEAR BILL I LOVE YOU TOO STOP BUT I'M LEAVING NORTH PLATTE IN FIFTY SEVEN DAYS STOP DO NOT BOTHER UPBRAIDING ME BECAUSE MY RESOLUTION IS FIRM LOVE NELLIE

Two weeks later he stepped off a train in North Platte. He hadn't told me he was coming but I was not surprised. He did his best to sweep me off my feet and got red-faced and flustered when it turned
out that my resolution was firm. The man, of course, was very used to getting his way.

“But, Nellie, you're all I've got,” he declared, several times. “You're my steady anchor. Without you I'll be ruined in a week.”

“Tosh, all tosh,” I told him. “You've got Mr. Salsbury, who's a capable man.”

Then the fool pretended to cry—he'd mastered the trick of crying on demand in his acting life. If so, he hadn't learned it well, because he wasn't really crying—he snorted into his handkerchief while pretending to boo-hoo.

“If you can't act any better than that I'm surprised people come to see you,” I told him. Even Gretchen and Sigurd were amused by his weak performance.

“Oh, folks don't come to see me because I can act,” he said, giving up on the crying. “They come to see me because I'm Buffalo Bill.”

Then he dropped the histrionics and became the friendly man who had won my affection three years ago in Rita Blanca.

“I suppose the real trouble is that you can't find a suitable boyfriend, living way out here,” he said.

I didn't bother lying.

“You're right, I can't find a suitable boyfriend,” I admitted. “Give or take a cowboy or two, I might as well be a nun.”

“It's because they all think you're my gal—am I right?” he asked.

It irritated me to admit it—but of course it was true.

Bill Cody looked me in the face for a very long time. I believe he was trying to decide whether to let himself fall in love with me. There we were, a private pair, in a big house full of comfortable beds. He kept looking at me and I began to feel that maybe this was the day—maybe the man was finally going to seduce me. He had already kissed me several times. My susceptibilities had begun to stir. Would he take the final step?

“Oh, Nellie, I think we better not,” he said, “though you're the peach of peaches and the fairest of the fair.”

I was disappointed, but I held my tongue and didn't reproach him.

“I'm a better friend than anything else, Miss Nellie,” he said, in his fondest voice.

Then he sighed a heavy sigh.

“You're right to leave—I just hope you'll allow me to call on you from time to time, in big emergencies,” he added meekly.

“What I need, you see, is a friend for life,” he added. “I reckon that's you, if it's anybody.”

“It's me, Bill,” I said. “You'll find me a steady friend.”

Then Bill did leak a tear or two, a genuine tear or two, and I did the same.

Then and there Bill Cody wrote me out a check for two thousand dollars—no small amount of money in that day and time. We exchanged a good tight hug and that was that.

Y
EARS LATER, WHEN
I started writing my popular romances for the ladies' magazines, I learned about the suspense and how you're supposed to keep the reader guessing about certain matters until the very end. Who gets the girl is the main thing you try to leave up in the air as long as possible, since that's apt to be the one thing the reader really wants to know.

But I wasn't yet a writer when I left North Platte, and my normal tendency was to blurt out everything and let the feathers float where they may.

I worked out my full sixty days, got myself packed, booked our train for Dodge City, and made provisions for a wagon and horses to await us there. Cody assigned Lanky Jake and grumbling Sam, the Dismal River cowboys, to escort me back to Rita Blanca. Jakey and Sam fully approved of me because I had managed to sell that worthless cow operation, whereupon the third cowboy, Ned, disappeared, but he crossed my path again many years later, when I was making a sightseeing trip to Death Valley.

Jakey and Sam had been working for me in North Platte anyway, tending Bill Cody's diverse and unruly menagerie, which included buffalo, elk, antelope, longhorn cattle, and even a llama. Nobody liked the llama and the llama liked nobody.

Of course the town gave me a big send-off: there was a farewell dinner in which most of the civic fathers got drunk and wept all down their white shirts when they tried to make speeches about how much I had contributed to the growth of North Platte, Nebraska.

Bill Cody had showed up for my farewell dinner, of course. He made a long speech about how brilliant I was, and what a treasure.
Then the band played and Cody and I waltzed all alone on the stage. He was wearing his best white buckskin suit, and looked fine as ever.

When the waltz was over and the cheering quieted down Bill clapped his hands and a little brown man about the size and color of one of Ros Jubb's sepoys came tripping out carrying a velvet box on a satin pillow. He made a deep bow and offered the box to me.

I got mighty nervous.

“Oh my Lord, what have you done now, Bill?” I asked.

Bill bent and kissed me tenderly—there were tears in his eyes. One of his most winning attributes was his ability to get swept away by his own showmanship.

“It's the Duleep pearl,” he told me. “It's the largest pearl in the world and I'm giving it to you because you're my favorite darling!”

I opened the box as carefully as if it contained a cobra. But there was no snake, just the lustrous white pearl. I couldn't at first believe that such a thing of beauty could be mine. It was large enough to be a pendant and hung from a tiny silver chain. Bill slipped the chain around my neck and there I stood, wearing the Duleep pearl. The crowd was as awed as I was—they fell silent for a second—until I whirled on Bill Cody and gave him a big smacking kiss, at which point the crowd went wild.

So I had my farewell party—by the next morning, when I actually left, both Cody and the town of North Platte had gone on about their business. Cody had ridden off to the Red Cloud Agency, to try and persuade the old Bad Face to lease him some Indians for his Wild West. Ripley Eads was cutting hair and the blacksmith was shoeing horses. A young couple at the depot busied themselves with flirting. Only my two Finnish maids actually came to see me off. Little Pickle, Gretchen's son, waved me bye. Fame is brief, unless you're Annie Oakley, Bill Cody, or one of the world's natural stars.

When we got to Omaha later in the day I was surprised to see my picture on the front page of the Omaha paper. There I stood, wearing the Duleep pearl, and there was Buffalo Bill, with his arm around me, looking pleased as punch. Tears came to my eyes. I suppose I did love Bill Cody, in my way, and now he was gone to lease some Indians while I headed back to Rita Blanca. Would I ever see that handsome man again?

Lanky Jake and grumbling Sam were mighty impressed to discover that they were traveling with a woman who had her picture on the front page of the Omaha paper.