The King Hill War
Authors: Robert Vaughan
ROBERT VAUGHAN
This book is for
Colonel Ernie Westpheling,
friend and fellow 7
th
Cavalryman.
Gary Owen, Sir.
MASON HAWKE DID NOT THINK OF HIMSELF AS A
piano player, but preferred to use the term pianist. That was because he was classically trained on the instrument, and at one time had a distinct honor bestowed upon him by the Queen of England. This honor was reported in the
London Daily Times
:
From time to time, Citizens of countries which do not recognise the Queen as head of state may have honours conferred upon them. In every case these awards are “honorary” in nature, and confer no actual peerage within British society. However, those who, by service, deed, or accomplishment are granted such honours, are entitled to place initials behind their name, if not call themselves “Sir.”
In its benevolence, the United Kingdom does not
prevent foreigners from holding such titles. The government of the United States, however, being much more provincial, and irrationally frightened of what it does not understand, has laws restricting its citizens from accepting such honours.
The fact that they cannot accept the award does not preclude Her Royal Highness from recognizing the achievement of deserving individuals, and Mason Hawke, an American pianist, is just such a person. Recently knighted by Queen Victoria, Mr. Hawke is considered by many to be one of the top two or three pianists in the world.
Unfortunately, Mr. Hawke’s European concert tour was interrupted when he returned to the United States to accept a commission in a regiment of the Confederate army. His departure will deprive many Europeans of the opportunity to hear this wonderful musician. However, Mr. Hawke is nothing if not a man of honour, and all men of good conscience will understand and respect his obligation to that honour.
Many men survived the war only to return home and struggle with grievous personal wounds. Though the wounds Hawke suffered to the psyche and the soul were not immediately visible, they were no less debilitating because they rendered him incapable of ever returning to the concert stage.
As a result of those wounds, Hawke was now a restless wanderer through the West, looking just beyond the horizon to the next town, and the next saloon where he could earn a few dollars playing piano.
The picture most often conjured in people’s minds when they think of a saloon piano player is someone emaciated,
bald, bespectacled, and with a half-chewed cigar stuck in his mouth. Hawke was the total antithesis. He was nearly six feet tall, clean-shaven, with a square jaw and penetrating blue eyes.
On this particular early spring day, Hawke was playing piano at the Saratoga Saloon in Dodge City, Kansas. As always, while he was working he dressed well, and today he wore a white ruffled shirt that was tucked down into fawn-colored trousers. A dark green jacket and gold cravat completed his ensemble.
As he finished the last few bars of “Buffalo Gals,” several of the cowboys and all of the girls in the Saratoga Saloon in Dodge City gave a loud cheer.
“Whooeee! I tell you true, there ain’t nobody in the world who can play a piano like Hawke,” one of the cowboys said.
One of the girls approached the piano and smiled sweetly at him. “Mr. Hawke, would you play one of them songs?”
“What song would that be, Connie?” Hawke asked, though he knew what she wanted.
“You know, one of them real pretty songs you sometimes play. One of them highfalutin’ songs,” Connie said.
Like most of the other girls in the saloon, Connie was a soiled dove, a twenty-two-year-old who, suddenly finding herself on her own, had turned to the oldest profession to make a living.
Hawke smiled. “You mean something like this?” He began playing Fantasie in C Minor by Mozart. The golden tones of the music silenced everyone as they listened with rapt attention. It was for that very reason, however, that Hawke played classical music sparingly, for it did have the effect of bringing to a halt all business in the saloon, which was counterproductive to his continued employment. However most of the various owners of the many saloons in
which he had played over the last sixteen years were tolerant, because they knew that his musical skills did bring in customers.
Connie Flagg was from the Ozarks of Missouri, and before coming here had never heard any music other than the Jew’s harp, banjo, guitar, and jug-playing she had grown up with. She had never even seen a piano before, but became an instant fan of classical music the first time she heard Hawke play.
Hawke was three-quarters through the piece when the kitchen door opened and the cook, Elsie Maynard, stumbled into the room. Blood ran from her misshapen nose, and her left eye was black and swollen shut. There were bruises on her face and neck. Hawke saw her before anyone else and stopped playing, the last notes of the piece still resonating as he got up from the bench and started toward her.
“Elsie!” he said.
Connie, also seeing the cook, called out in shock, “Elsie, my God! What happened to you?”
“He didn’t mean it,” Elsie said. “I know he didn’t mean it.”
“Who didn’t mean it?”
Connie grabbed a towel from one of the bar hooks, then hurried to Elsie’s side. She began wiping the blood from her face as Elsie winced in pain.
“It was Angus, wasn’t it?” Connie asked.
“Who is Angus?” Hawke asked.
“Angus is my husband,” Elsie replied, her words accompanied by a whistling sound from her broken nose.
“He ain’t your husband,” Connie said. “Not for real, that is. You ain’t never had no words spoke for you. You ain’t even jumped over a broom together.”
“He’s all I got for a husband,” Elsie said. “Look at me.
I ain’t pretty like you ’n’ the other girls. I got to take what I can get.”
“Not nobody like him you ain’t got to,” Connie said.
Once the others in the saloon saw what was going on, they retuned to the bar or to their own tables and conversations.
“Ain’t right for a man to beat a woman like that,” one of them grumbled.
“Ain’t right for a man to hit a woman a-’tall,” another said.
“Yeah, well, if you ask me, Angus Oates ain’t much of a man no how,” still another said.
The disapproving observations faded into the background as Connie and Hawke continued to tend to Elsie.
“Honey, you need to get away from that no-’count,” Connie said as she nursed the cook’s wounds.
“Where would I go?” Elsie asked.
“You could go back to the Ozarks. That’s where you come from, ain’t it?” Connie asked. “You’re a hill-country girl, just like me, only you’re from Arkansas and I’m from Missouri.”
“How’m I goin’ to get there? I ain’t even got enough money for a railroad ticket.”
“Ain’t you saved nothin’?” Connie asked. “I know you don’t never spend none of your pay. You work in here from dawn to dark. What happens to your money?”
“Angus takes it all,” Elsie said.
“Then that’s all the more reason you should leave him. Cain’t you see that he’s just usin’ you as his personal milk cow?”
“I would leave him if I could,” Elsie said.
“Would you really leave him?” Hawke asked. “I mean, you aren’t just saying that, are you? If you had the means to leave him, would you do it?”
Elsie nodded. “Yes, sir, in a heartbeat I would,” she said.
Hawke reached for the inside pocket of his jacket to pull out a calf’skin wallet.
“Do you know how much it is for train fare back to Arkansas?” he asked.
“Yes, sir, I know. I done checked it a lot of times. It’d be eight dollars,” Elsie said. “But from Little Rock I’d need to take another train on up to Boone County, and that’d be another four dollars.”
“Here are thirty dollars,” Hawke said. “That should be enough to get you home and buy your meals while you are traveling.”
“Oh, Mr. Hawke, I can’t accept this,” Elsie said, but even as she demurred, she took the money.
“Come on,” Connie said. “I’ll help you pack, then get your luggage down to the depot.”
“All right, but I got to tell you that Angus is still at the house,” Elsie said.
“You want me to go with you?” Hawke asked.
Elsie shook her head. “No need to. By now he’s more’n likely passed out drunk on the floor. He won’t even know I’m there.”
“I’m goin’ with you anyway,” Connie said.
“Connie,” Hawke said. “Look through the window before you go in. If he’s awake, come get me.”
“All right,” Connie replied.
Hawke watched as the two women left the saloon.
“That was a good thing you done, Hawke,” Ben, the bartender said.
Ben was standing toward the end of the bar, polishing a glass. He had spent an inordinate amount of time on that simple task, allowing him to listen in on the conversation.
“Anyone would have done it,” Hawke said.
“Maybe so, but it wasn’t anyone, it was you,” Ben replied.
Hawke returned to the piano and began playing again. He had been playing for about an hour when Connie returned.
“Did you have any trouble with Oates?” he asked.
“Ha!” Connie said. “It was just like Elsie said. That big dumb lummox was passed out drunk on the floor. He never even knowe’d we’uns was there.”
“So she got off all right?”
“Yeah,” Connie answered. “You should’a seen her, Mr. Hawke. She had a smile on her face as big as all outdoors when she clumb up on that train. This time tomorrow night she’ll be back in the Ozarks, and that no-’count Angus Oates cain’t never hurt her no more.”
“Good,” Hawke said as he went back to playing the piano.
“Connie, come over here, let us buy you a drink for what you done,” one of the cowboys said.
“Only if you all buy a round for yourselves,” Connie said, smiling at the cowboy as she got back to work.
It was about four hours later when Hawke looked up at the clock. The hands of the big “Regulator” indicated that it was ten-thirty, only half an hour before the saloon would close. It was one of the stranger aspects of this business, he thought, that the nearer it came to closing time, the greater the crowd. Right now, for example, there were more people in the saloon than there had been for the entire day, but even those who had not been present when Elsie came in badly beaten were aware of what had taken place, because conversations about the event continued throughout the evening.
On the top of his piano Hawke kept a bowl for tips. Tonight, he noticed, the patrons were much more generous
than on any previous night. For a moment or two he wondered why. Then he realized that this was the customers’ way of thanking him for what he had done for Elsie. That realization was borne out when one of the customers, who dropped a dollar into the bowl, said, “What you done for Elsie was a good thing.”
“Thanks,” Hawke said.
Not more than one block away from the Saratoga, Angus Oates opened his eyes. For just a moment he wondered where he was, then he became conscious that he was lying on the floor of the one-room shack he shared with Elsie. There was a sour smell all about him, and he realized that he was lying in a pool of his own vomit.
“Elsie?” he called in a slurring voice. “Elsie, you whore, where are you? Come here, help me get up.”
When Elsie didn’t show up, he rolled over. “Elsie?” he called again.
Angus pulled himself up from the floor, then reached for a bottle that was on the table.
The bottle was empty.
He went over to the chest of drawers where he knew that Elsie kept money rolled up in a pair of stockings, or she had the last time he had checked. But there were no stockings in the drawer when he opened it. There was nothing at all in the drawer, nor was there anything in any of the other drawers.
“What the hell?” he said to himself. “Where at’s all her clothes?”
Angus stepped out onto the porch and began urinating. There was an outhouse behind the little shack, but since the shack itself was in the alley, and since it was dark, he didn’t bother to use it. He had just finished when he saw two men appear out of the darkness. The Long Branch stayed open
one hour longer than the Saratoga, and he knew that people who were leaving one saloon to go to another often took a shortcut through the alley.
“Hey!” Angus called to them.
“You speaking to us, mister?” one of the two men replied.
“Was you two boys down to the Saratoga tonight?”
“As a matter of fact, we were.”
“Did you see my wife down there?”
“Your wife?”
“Elsie. She’s the cook. Did you see her down there?”
“Ah, so you’re the one, are you?”
“I’m the one what?”
“You’re the one who beat her up.”
“She’s my wife, I reckon I can do whatever I want with her,” Angus said. “So, she is down there, is she?”
“Not anymore she isn’t.”
“What do you mean, not no more?”
“She’s gone. She left town. Where was it they said she was going, Lou?”
“Arkansas, I think,” the other said. “She took the train this evening. The piano player bought her ticket. Isn’t that right, Paul? Wasn’t it the piano player?”
“Yes,” Paul answered. “And I say good for him. Mister, anyone who treats a woman like you did ought to be horse whipped.”
“I told you,” Angus growled. “It ain’t none of your business what I do to my own wife.”
“Yes, well, you won’t be doing it any longer, will you?” Paul said. “Come on, Lou, let’s walk down by the pig lot. The company is better there.”
“It’ll sure as hell smell better there,” Lou replied, and, laughing, both men walked away.
Angus stood on the front porch for a moment longer,
watching as the two men faded into the darkness. He was trying to make his whiskey-befuddled brain understand what they had said.
“The piano player,” he grumbled aloud. “That’s what they said. The piano player give her money to leave. Well, Mr. Piano Player, me ’n’ you’s about to have us some words.”
The first indication Hawke had of Angus’s sudden intrusion into the saloon was when a bullet from Angus’s gun smashed into the bowl holding his tip money. Glass flew and paper money and coins spilled from the shattered bowl, falling with a clatter to the floor.
Even before the second bullet plowed into the sound board of the piano, Hawke was off the bench and running toward the bar.