Authors: Glendon Swarthout
“Mr. Masterson?” Bat cocks an eye. “Bat Masterson?”
They came to the offices of the
Telegraph,
once a car barn at West 50th and Eighth Avenue, every week or so the year round, and for the same reason. This was a dressy, flashy, wheezy gent down from Waltham, Mass., who played with a pearl stickpin and popped sweat the second he had a gander at the weapon on the desk. A seat was proffered. He settled into it. Said it was an honor and a privilege to meet Bat Masterson. Said he was a student of the West, regretful he had never had an opportunity to partake of its adventure and romance. Said he would like to “palaver” a little about the old days. Bat said shoot. They talked about Dodge and Wyatt Earp and the killing of Sergeant King in Sweetwater, Texas, when Molly Brennan gave her life for Bat’s, and the scrap at Adobe Walls where Bat and a handful of buffalo hunters held off a horde of redskins and the rescue of the Germain sisters from the Cheyenne while Bat was a scout for General Miles.
“Earp was your friend.”
“My best.”
“He’s the other one I’d like to meet. Saw somewhere he lives in California.”
“I heard he does.”
The gent glanced at the gun on the desk, glanced away. “Don’t you miss those times, Mr. Masterson?”
“Not a damn. I’m a New Yorker now.”
“How long have you lived here?”
“Fourteen years.
“I declare, I don’t know how a rough customer like you—begging your pardon—a man with a past like yours winds up on a newspaper in New York.”
“Luck and talent.”
“Pretty tame though, ain’t it? I mean, compared to the wide open spaces?”
“I hope I never see those dreary old prairies again.”
“Er, uh, is that your gun?”
“It is.”
“Mind if I have a look?”
Bat passed it over.
The hands trembled. The cylinder was turned, the weapon hefted. A fat index finger worked its way down the grip, counting the notches.
“Twenty-three,” Bat supplied.
A wheeze, of pleasure and confirmation. “You killed twenty-three men!”
Bat shrugged.
“I must tell you, sir, I collect a few guns. On an amateur basis, of course. Mr. Masterson, I will give you fifty dollars for this gun.”
“Not that one, you won’t.”
“But I can buy one like it—identical—in any pawnshop for ten.”
“Not that one, you can’t.”
“Why not?”
Bat set the hook. “That was the gun killed Walker and Wagner after they killed my brother Ed.”
“Is that a fact?” The listener was all ears, including lobes. He knew the story by rote, but hungered for it first-hand.
Bat reeled the line in slowly but succinctly: how Ed Masterson, serving as deputy marshal, had been surrounded by six Texans outside the Lady Gay in Dodge one drunken night in 1878 and gutshot by Walker or Wagner at such close range that his coat was set ablaze; how Bat came on the run and fired four rounds from sixty feet in semidarkness; how one shot felled Wagner, who died the next day, and three Walker, who lingered a month with a hole in his lung before expiring; and how—here the narrator lowered the brim of his hat to half-mast and let his voice break ever so slightly—Ed passed on within half an hour, in the arms of his younger brother, who wept like a child. By this grand finale the gun collector had out a silk handkerchief and was bailing both cheeks.
“Mr. Masterson,” said he, “I will give you a hundred dollars for this gun.”
Derby down, Bat sat for a spell as though whipsawed by emotion and economics. “I am a little low on funds at the moment,” he muttered at length. “Let’s see the color of your money.”
“Gladly.”
Sir Waltham of Mass. extricated ass from chair and wallet from hip. Licking a thumb, he laid two fifties on the desk like aces back-to-back.
“Mr. Masterson, I can’t say—”
“Good day.”
“I assure you, I will never part with this historic weapon. It will be handed down—”
“Get the hell on your horse.”
“Yes, sir!”
Exit the gink.
Enter Sammy Taub. He was given a fiver, his usual cut of the take. He tucked it away, sucked a jujube, and contemplated his future.
“You won’t forget about Mr. Lewis, sir?”
“Not me.”
“How many guns you got left?”
“As many as you’ve got suckers.”
Exit the boy, grinning, while Bat attended to the completion of his column. It ran daily, required two hours to write on average, and was called “Masterson’s Views on Timely Topics”— which topics were invariably pugilistic. Bat had promoted fights and refereed fights and seconded fighters. He knew everyone in the game, from Jess Willard, the then heavyweight champ, to Tex Rickard, to the blind and pitiful pug who sold pencils outside Grupp’s Gym on 116th St. When he pulled his editorial pistol he meant to use it, and did, to the woe of fakers and fixers and the glee of readers, so that his column was scripture in the city and widely quoted on the sports pages of other papers nationally. His subject this afternoon was the Sailor White vs. Victor McLaglen—billed as “The Actor-Heavyweight”— fracas upcoming at the Garden. He finished, scrawled a “30,” pushed from the desk, left his office, strolled through the rivet of telephones and clack of typewriters and roar of reportorial brains that was the newsroom, dropped the pages into a wire basket on the city desk, reversed himself and would have departed for the day had he not been waved into a glassed-in office by the arm of W.E. Lewis, editor of the
Morning Telegraph.
“You hooked another one.”
“Why not?”
“How much?”
“A hundred.”
“Bat, you have a larcenous heart.”
“Look, he’ll sell it tomorrow for two hundred.”
W.E. tilted his chair. “I thought I should tell you. Reception called me a few minutes ago. Some guy was asking if Bat Masterson really works here. She said you do and did he want an appointment? But he just walked out on her. Odd.”
“What’d he look like?”
“An outlander. Tall, she said. Lean. Your age, maybe a little older. She used the word ‘grim’—said she wouldn’t care to meet him in a dark alley.”
They were old friends, Bat and W.E. Lewis. They had met in Dodge way back when. Lewis, then a newsman in Kansas City, had been prospecting the West for “color” for articles and wanted Bat to introduce him to the James brothers, who had just raided Northfield, Minnesota and ridden away with bloody noses and empty saddlebags. “I better not,” Bat told him. “They’ll be meaner than ever now. They’d eat you alive.” It was good advice. Later, as editor and columnist, each was in the other’s debt. It was Lewis who helped spring Bat from jail on his arrival in New York in 1902, and eventually gave him a crack at covering the fight game. In return, Bat lent Lewis’s sheet, besides the renown of his name, an honesty and a dignity in exceeding short supply.
W.E. locked hands behind his head and studied the other over the rims of his specs. “Something’s been eating you lately. Money? You can have an advance of salary anytime.”
“I’m having a bum streak. I’ll get lucky again. You know—feathers today, chicken tomorrow.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“Listen,” said Bat. “Once out in Dodge I had a badger in a barrel on Front Street and I put up a sign. I bet anybody with a dog their dog couldn’t get my badger out of the barrel. Somebody’d come along nearly every day and put up ten bucks and drop their dog in the barrel. Well, they’d go at it, tooth and claw, and tip over the barrel and my animal would take off with the dog after him and I won’t say how much I lost. But I had faith and finally got lucky.”
“How?”
Bat grinned, tipped his hat, turned to go, and said, over his shoulder, “Shot the damn badger.”
That evening he sashays into a small cigar store on 43rd Street, passes the counter and wooden Indian, and pushes through a swinging door into the back room, which is a race room.
On the walls are big boards for the tracks, with today’s results and tomorrow’s entries in chalk, and behind three desks are three bookies with eyeshades taking bets by telephone. At the rear of the room, wearing leather caps and playing three-cushion on a billiard table, are two muscular mugs who work for Grogan, and standing around considering the boards and talking about the liner
Cymric
being torpedoed off the Irish coast and figuring the forms are many strong men and weak, sure things in the stretch of life and longshots, men of character and men who’ll bust a piggybank to get a bet down on a nag, any nag. The race room reeks of sweat, smoke, spit, and concentration, but to Bat the smells are bugles. Being here is the next best thing to being in a box at Belmont. He shoulders through to find the Pimlico board and scowls at what he finds in the fifth.
“Hiya, Mr. Masterson,” says somebody.
“Masterson? Bat Masterson?” says somebody else, grabbing a bet slip and a pencil stub. “Gimme your autograph, Mr. Masterson?”
Bat obliges, then moves in on a desk as Eddie the Cuff hangs up the phone.
“You seen the Pimlico?” asks Eddie. “Cat’s Pajamas was out front by four lengths—past the five-eighth pole broke a leg—had to shoot ‘im—you had fifty.”
“On the cuff, Eddie,” says Bat.
Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t—you said you’d cough up and you ain’t, and Grogan says cash on the drum.”
“On the cuff,” says Bat. “And put fifty on Auntie Tan in the first tomorrow at ‘Gansett.”
Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t, Bat—Grogan’d bust our balls, yours and mine both—he says you’re into him too deep—your credit’s no good anywheres.”
Men are listening.
“Do it,” says Bat.
“No,” says Eddie.
Bat reaches, takes Eddie’s neck in one hand, lifts him from his chair, and pulls his eyeshade down over his face with the other.
Men are watching.
“Place the bet,” says Bat.
“Erahh, erahh,” chokes Eddie.
The room hushes like a church. The two mugs who work for Knuckles Grogan stop playing three-cushion.
“Take it easy, old-timer,” says one to Bat. Men sidle silently out of the way and crouch behind desks and glue their butts to the walls.
Hands around the bookie’s neck, Bat stares at the mugs. Pool cues at the ready, they stare at him. Something happens to Bat’s eyes.
“Two things betokened the real man: his eyes,” Irvin S. Cobb will write of Bat in later life. “They were like smoothed ovals of gray schist with flecks of mica suddenly glittering in them if he were roused.”
Bat’s gray eyes glitter now.
“No, you take it easy,” someone warns the mugs. “That’s Bat Masterson.”
A moment more. Then the mugs get smart and go back to three-cushion, and men move from the walls, and Bat loosens his grip.
“Okeh, okeh, Bat,” hoarses Eddie the Cuff.
He is let go. He bumps his rump down, drags up his eyeshade, adjusts his sleeve-garters, and swallows a frog of fright.
Bat outs with a roll of singles and two fresh fifties and peels the fifties onto the bookie’s desk.
“Now we got that straight,” says the ex-marshal, “here’s Cat’s Pajamas today and Auntie Tan tomorrow. In the first at ‘Gansett. You tell Grogan I’ll pay up when I’m damn good and ready. And tell him remember one thing. My name is my credit.”
The rhythms of Bat Masterson’s life in New York were not
dissimilar to those of his Dodge City life in the salad-and-sulphur days. There he slept late in the morning, did the paperwork attendant on his duties as a lawman in town and county, saw to the prisoners in his hoosegow, presented himself officially at trials, and took care of personal business such as playing practical jokes, betting on a badger, and daily draw-and-accuracy practice. On occasion, alone or with a small posse, he took to the saddle in pursuit of train robbers such as Dave Rudabaugh, rustlers like the Lyons brothers, and murderers such as James Kennedy, who made the innocent mistake of killing Dora Hand, a “soiled dove,” when he intended instead to eliminate Dog Kelley. Here, in the city, he slept late in the morning, strolled to the
Telegraph,
ground out his column, received visitors and sold guns, then went to gyms to watch fighters train, or regaled himself at the Belmont races during the season. On occasion he would handle a special assignment for Lewis, such as covering the trial for murder of Chester Gillette upstate—on which case and execution Theodore Dreiser later based his novel
An American Tragedy.
His nights were a horse of another hue.
In Dodge, he made the rounds of saloons north of the “deadline,” the Santa Fe tracks—the Alamo, Long Branch, Occident, Hoover’s, Peacock’s, Stock Exchange, St. James, to name seven of seventeen—and the dance houses and halls south, among them the Lady Gay, the Varieties, the Comique, and the Opera House. He sat in on a hand of cards or a case of faro. He disarmed drunks. He bonked obstreperous cowboys over the head with the barrel of a Colt and dragged them off to sweet dreams behind bars. When hot blood was being or about to be shed, he came on the run, gun drawn, and did, his cold crotch be damned, whatever dangerous he had to do. Sometimes the shout of “Here comes Masterson!” was sufficient to stay the triggers and lay the dust. Sometimes, unfortunately, it was not.
This was all very well for a young man full of piss and vinegar. To a man with a gray roof, nights in the Big Burg were more agreeable. He covered the important fights at the Stadium Athletic Club, at the National Sporting Club, at Madison Square Garden. He went often to the theater. Dramas were too “down-and-out” to his taste, but he doted on musicals like the Ziegfeld Follies, starring Fanny Brice and W.C. Fields, and C.B. Dillingham’s extravaganzas at the Hippodrome, particularly “Hip-Hip-Hooray!” with its army of chorus girls parading to John Philip Sousa’s band. He most pleasured himself, however, during the hours between the fights and the shows and the coming of the dawn. He made the rounds of the bars and cabarets and clubs and restaurants of the “Roaring Forties,” that carnival of din and dazzle, that outrageous reach of Broadway between Madison and Times Squares, taking to the bright lights like a duck to water. He hobnobbed with magnates, jockeys, fight managers, financiers, agents, journalists, hookers, theatrical names, card sharks, chorines, detectives, tenors, playwrights, and bunco artists in Rector’s, Shanley’s, the Cafe des Beaux Arts, Delmonico’s, the bars of the Hoffman House, the Waldorf, the Knickerbocker, the Astor, and a dozen more. He ran into friends. He drank, and appeared to have the capacity of a camel. He talked shop and swapped scoops. He concocted practical jokes, some of which went over big and some of which fell flat as a tire. He played poker, pulling plenty of pots at times, tapping out at others. He ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs and Irish bacon and steaming coffee at Jack Dunstan’s in the wee hours and went home to bed with the milkwagons. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!” everyone who was anyone said in the New York of 1916, and Bat Masterson was determined to hang on to the merry-go-round six nights a week the year through till he fell off and the music stopped. He wasn’t after the brass ring. He just loved the ride.