The Old Colts (8 page)

Bat bowed to Wyatt to precede him and, waving his permit at the Commissioner, toddled out humming “Be My Little Baby Bumble Bee.”

“Jehu,” said Wyatt. “Must be a lot of cowboys in town.”

“I buy ‘em,” said Bat. “Ten bucks a throw, any pawnshop.”

They were looking into the drawerful of Peacemakers in his desk at the
Telegraph.

“Why d’you want so many?”

“I sell ‘em. These tinhorn collectors come through every week. I’ve cut twenty-three notches in the grip and I lay it on the desk and tell ‘em I won’t part with it—I pull a long face and say that was the very gun killed Walker and Wagner after they did Ed in. Well, that’s red pepper in the pee.”

“They believe it?”

“One born every minute. Take your pick.”

They laid out an assortment of iron and began hefting for balance and squinting down barrels and turning cylinders and trying trigger pull and ejector rods.

“Feels strange, don’t it, handling these old thumbbusters again,” Wyatt mused.

“Like old times.”

They grinned at each other.

“This one’ll do.” Wyatt pushed the weapon under his belt.

“I’m all set.” Bat belted his choice. “But we can’t carry ‘em this way, not in the city.”

“How, then?”

“I know—shoulder holsters. We’ll go down to Bannerman’s downtown. They’ve got a line of everything, they can fit us special. Say, you ever used a shoulder holster?”

Wyatt shook his head. “No. Some did, though. Gamblers, mostly. But Hickok did, too, now and then. He told me so.”

Bat was trying to ease the Colt out of and under his belt. It did not ease. “I must have put on a few pounds. I didn’t know you knew Hickok.”

“I didn’t, not well. But I saw a lot of him the summer of ‘71, around Market Square in K.C.—the summer before I ran into you. I was just a kid, and he showed me some things.”

Bat was interested. “You never told me. Hickok was a shooter, was he?”

“Sharp as ever I saw. I saw him drive a cork into a bottle at sixty feet. Split a bullet on the edge of a dime.”

“Tricks.”

“Try ‘em.”

Bat was piling the rest of the revolvers into his desk drawer. He winked. “Hickok couldn’t sing and dance, though.”

Wyatt was not amused. “Glad you mentioned it. I mean it, Bat, I’ve had a crawful. I didn’t come clear across this country to sing or dance or drink four-dollar champagne or allemand left with your fancy chippies. I told you, I’m down to my train ticket. If I can’t make a stake, that’s one thing, but I’m not going home in a damn barrel.”

“Stop fussing. I was worried about Grogan, that’s all. Now I’m not. Now we’ve got guns, we’ll get the money.”

“Easy said. But where do we go from here?”

“Bannerman’s. Let’s ride.”

Bat had hold of the doorknob when Wyatt said, “Wait a minute. You recollect Doc Holliday?”

“Sure.”

“He was a lunger, you know—died in Colorado. I heard he asked for a glass of whiskey and drank it down. Then he said, ‘This is funny,’ and cashed in.”

“So?”

“Well, that’s funny, too, what you just said. Stop to think about it, that’s the way it was back then. Still is, I guess.”

“What?”

“Guns first, then the money.”

They buttoned jackets over the pistols under their belts
and left the newsroom and were passing through the reception area of the paper when Bat was pointed out by a clerk to, and accosted by, a matronly dame with a kid in tow.

“Oh, Mr. Masterson!” she gushed. “This is my son Wayerly—he’d be thrilled to meet you!”

They stopped, Bat to offer a man’s hand to the kid. “Howdy-do, Waverly.”

Waverly might have been twelve, had an evil eye, and a hand fresh out of the Fulton Fish Market.

“Would you give him your autograph, Mr. Masterson?” implored the dame. “He’d be thrilled!”

She provided paper, Bat his Parker, and while signing was put this question by the kid: “Did you really kill thirty-six men?”

Bat finished “W.B. Masterson” with a flourish, looked gravely at the kid, and lowered his voice. “Forty-six,” he confided.

“Horsefeathers,” said Waverly.

“Oh, thank you, thank you!” shrilled his ma, snatching the paper before the ink was dry. “We’re ever, ever so grateful, aren’t we, Waverly?”

“Aw, he’s old,” said the kid.

“My pleasure, ma’am,” said Bat, tipping his hat and fighting the temptation to cauliflower the little turd’s ear, and moving on with Wyatt.

They had just reached the front door when the room rang with a loud bang.

Mssrs. Earp and Masterson whirled, fumbling under jackets and hauling away at Peacemakers until, faces red as lobsters, they identified the cap-pistol Waverly waved at them.

“Har! Har! Har!” sniggered the squirt.

Wyatt wanted to walk to Bannerman’s, which was located
on lower Broadway at 10th Street. Bat was aghast. Walk forty blocks? Wyatt reminded him of his offer to show him, Wyatt, the sights. Bat suggested the subway, which had just been completed to downtown Manhattan, arguing that every out-of-towner must ride a subway. Wyatt reminded him that he had never hunted a hole in his, Wyatt’s, life and was not about to. Bat suggested the Fifth Avenue bus, transport aboard which was available for ten cents. Wyatt reminded him that he, Wyatt, was broke. Bat suggested the nickel trolley car. Wyatt’s response was in the negative. Bat suggested that a hike practically to the Panama Canal would be bad for his, Wyatt’s, gimp knee. Wyatt reminded him that walking would be good for his, Bat’s, cold feet and circulatory problems. Backed into a corner, Bat suggested they take a taxi, offering to pay the shot himself. Wyatt said Bat could ride and he would take shank’s mare. He was an outdoors man and needed exercise and so, by all indications, did Bat, who was getting slow as a cow with a full bag. They looked hard at each other. Bat recalled: when Wyatt made up his mind on a matter, he was adamant as a Missouri mule. Wyatt recalled: Bat had always been as slippery as a hoop snake. Try to pin him down and he would slither this way and slather that and eventually stick his tail in his mouth and roll away out of sight. Bat suggested they toss a coin. Wyatt reminded him of his luck of late. Bat spat and got out a penny.

They hoofed the forty blocks, Bat on condition that they use a public conveyance on the return. The day was late April and lovely. Acting as guide, Bat pointed out to the tourist a variety of metropolitan attractions. Women beautiful enough to knock your eyes out, and gussied up in the height of fashion. Gents dressed ditto: The giant electric signs around Times Square advertising Uneeda Biscuits and C & C Ginger Ale and Studebaker autos. Streetsweepers in white uniforms picking roadapples. The Metropole Hotel, gone but not forgotten, in front of which Herman Rosenthal, the gambler-gangster, was mowed down, and for whose murder five men including a police lieutenant were fried in the electric chair. The choke of two-way traffic, a motley of hansom cabs, carriages, and bicycles, but mainly gas-powered now, sedans and touring cars and limousines and open-top buses. Policemen directing that traffic at the centers of intersections. A moving picture house showing “Hell’s Hinges,” the latest starring vehicle of Bat’s pal William S. Hart. The green trees of Union Square. So-called “skyscrapers”— the Flatiron, the Metropolitan Life, the Singer, the Woolworth, etc. Saloons with side doors through which you could slip, if perishing of thirst, on Sundays. And finally, as they got downtown, the streets torn up to replace cobblestones with Belgian blocks.

“That’s the trouble with New York,” griped Bat the boulevardier. His dogs were killing him and the gun under his belt weighed a ton. “Always tearing down and putting up. I’m sick and tired of change—  I like things to stay put. Getting on, I guess.’”

“Likewise.” After thirty blocks Wyatt steamed along like the Staten Island ferry.

“I wonder what Dodge looks like now. I don’t expect it’s changed much.”

“I dunno. Slept through it on the train.”

“I’ll take New York no matter what. Dodge is one burg I never want to see again.”

“Likewise.”

They were put into a private “fitting room,” and what they found was that the shoulder holsters in stock at Bannerman’ s were designed for small-caliber, more compact weapons, the new automatics usually, not the old-time .45’s they proposed to carry. The guy who helped them, however, a guy named Abel, said Bannerman’s had workmen on the premises, and what they’d do, they’d remove the holsters on these rigs and sew on the right size taken off a pair of old-time cartridge belts. Said to make themselves comfortable, the job could be done in a jiffy. Bat said fine, and when he brought back the merchandise, bring a few boxes of bullets, too.

“What’s wrong with our belts?” Wyatt asked when Abel had gone.

“Too obvious. My friends’d fall down laughing. And I’d be stopped and bullyragged by every flatfoot on the force. I’d wear my permit out showing it. I told you—the NYPD’s had it in for me a long time.”

Wyatt considered, rearranging some splayed hairs in his mustache. “You sure we need iron at all?”

Bat set him straight on the birds and the bees. “Look. We got beaten up, didn’t we? That was the first warning—pay up pronto, Masterson. Last night was supposed to be the second. If those crushers had caught up with us, we’d be in a hospital ward today, smelling flowers Lucca sent with his sympathy. They’d have used brass knuckles, or sapped us with lead. We’d have broken bones. Maybe we wouldn’t even know who we were.”

He took off his shoes and while massaging his feet tried to make it clear that the two mugs were only front men for Grogan, and Grogan was only a front man for somebody else—real, honest-to-God gangsters. They ran the gambling and the whore business and other sweet stuff in this town. They carried automatics in their armpits and called it “packing a rod.” They put cement overcoats on people and let them see if they could swim in the East River. They had Irish and Jewish and Italian names but no faces. “I tell you, the cowchasers we used to bash over the heads, the rustlers and trainrobbers we ran around after from hell to breakfast, the mean two-gun sonsabitches we had to stand up to—they were small potatoes compared to the boys trying to collect from me. Well, yesterday they had the edge. Today they don’t. Let ‘em pack rods. We got artillery.”

Abel brought in the goods. Shoulder straps were given final adjustments, the old Colts fitted into holsters made for them in the first place, coats were donned, and the buyers tried, looking a little foolish, a fast draw or two. Bat paid Abel with a fifty-dollar bill, which Wyatt noted, and while the salesman was gone for change, they loaded up the guns.

“I see you’re flush,” said Wyatt.

“Gives me a funny feeling, filling up one of these old boomers again.”

“I see you’re flush.”

“Got paid today at the paper.”

“Must be nice.”

“The cat’s whiskers. And not for the reason you think, Earp. My theory is, it takes money to make money. Okeh, I’ve got a hundred simoleons to spare—so tonight I’m gonna invest it.”

“In what?”

“Pasteboards.”

Wyatt put a testy pistol under his arm. “You mean I came three thousand miles to watch you play cards?”

Bat grinned. “A lot of ginks have paid for the privilege.”

“You’ll lose.”

“Poker’s my middle name. I’ll run that hundred into a bundle.”

“Unh-huh. I wonder how old you’ll have to be before you learn.”

“Learn?”

“How many peas you can hold on a knife.”

Wyatt kept shifting in his seat.
“Can’t get used to this load on my left side.”

“Be glad you got it.”

“I never thought I’d see you hurrahed.”

“I’m not. I was, but not now.” Bat stuck a hand under his jacket. “Not with this, and you here, too.”

“Don’t depend on me. Half the man I was.”

“Who isn’t?”

Bat pulled on a Spud and cogitated. They had taken rear outside seats on the top deck of a Fifth Avenue omnibus— the only seats in which smoking was permitted—for the ride uptown-so that Bat could have a coffin nail and Wyatt could rubberneck. As the bus started again and they neared St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the smoker leaned to his friend’s ear.

“Listen! Maybe we’re half the men we were—okeh! Put your half and my half together and you’ve got one hell of an individual!”

“Till he comes up against a cap-pistol!”

“Anyway,” said Will Irwin of the
Sun,
“I thought what Pershing said to the press was damned good. ‘You may announce, gentlemen, that we have Pancho Villa surrounded on three sides.‘”

“It won’t play in Peoria,” judged Pete Dailey, star comedian at the Music Hall.

“Generals don’t have to be funny,” said Runyon.

They were talking about Pershing’s cavalry chase into Mexico after Villa, who had shot up several soldiers and civilians and the town of Columbus, New Mexico, in March.

“Jimmy here should be down there running the Army,” said Bat, gesturing at James J. Johnston, pugilistic impresario known as “The Boy Bandit.” “What would you say to the troops, Jimmy?”

“Stick out your hand and belt ‘em out!”

Laughter.

“Hey, I just realized,” said Runyon. “No wonder nobody’s getting anywhere these days. We’ve got too many guys with J.J. initials. John J. Pershing, James J. Johnston, John J. McGraw—all losers.”

Laughter at Johnston’s and McGraw’s expense. Jimmy wiped foam and a grin from his mouth. He’d just lost his lease of Madison Square Garden to Tex Rickard. McGraw looked glum. The Giants had gone three years without a pennant, and the sports scribes were turning out a lot of copy about his tenure as manager.

There were eight present—Bat, Runyon, Irwin, Dailey, Johnston, McGraw, William S. Hart, who was in town from the West Coast to hoopla his new movie, and Wyatt, who’d been introduced by Bat as “Mysterious Dave” Mather, a friend from Kansas, the mystery being how he made a living. They were bellied up to the bar in Toby’s Slide, a watering-place at 50th and Seventh Avenue just west of the Garden Cabaret. You slid downstairs, everyone said, and crawled up, but it was popular with the nocturnal crowd because for 75 cents you could get a shot of good whiskey and a full tankard of Fidelio beer with which to neutralize the effect of the whiskey.