Ragtime Cowboys Read online

  He spent a pleasant hour plugging trunks and branches, a clod of earth and grass flung high, which made a satisfying burst when he connected, like Bill Cody’s blown-glass balls in the arena, not as pretty but just as easy to mark your progress. He’d hoped to spot a coyote or a rabbit, some moving target to measure his skills against, but they weren’t cooperating that day. He speared the sheet of waxed paper from the sandwiches on the end of a ponderosa branch where it caught the breeze, paced off a hundred yards, turned, fired at it first with the Winchester, then with the Colt, standing with that weapon sideways to the target with the barrel parallel to his arm and shoulder, until he’d exhausted his rounds. His ears rang and his hand throbbed.

  When he went back to inspect the result, he was dissatisfied. It was possible he’d put a few rounds through the tears he’d opened earlier, but as many as he’d spent, the piece of paper should have been obliterated. Raw yellow wounds showed in branches above and below where he’d fired wide.

  Well, there wasn’t likely to be shooting in the thing. Horse thieves were cowardly types, ready to leave a man on foot in hostile country, but not so quick to trade fire when there was a hole big enough to crawl into handy. Which was why you hung them when taking them into custody was inconvenient. He didn’t reckon turning the century had made any modern improvements in their cojones. Siringo himself had never made much use of his ordnance other than the ornamental. He’d shot to cover himself and others, hurling swarms of lead more hazardous to the indigenous wildlife than the opposing parties, and when there wasn’t a less valuable bludgeon within reach he’d made use of the handle end, but an assumed name and a good line of gab had always been his weapons of choice.

  Jesus Mary, though, a man was reluctant to acknowledge he’d lost ground.

  It wasn’t his eyes, just rust. Rust and the old-man shakes and too much thinking. You could scrape off the first through practice and conquer the second with determination, but when the bump of intelligence grew so big it got in the way of your target, there wasn’t much you could do about it except drink, and that would put a big dent in the travel expenses.

  4

  He stuck his ticket inside his sweatband and smoked his pipe on the bench in the station waiting. On one side of him sat a couple with a little girl dressed all in yellow with an enormous bow on top of her head and on the other a thickset Mexican in overalls holding a fat hen on his lap. Siringo wondered if he’d had to buy a ticket for the chicken.

  His train arrived on time, and he rode to San Francisco reading the Los Angeles Express, watching the scenery, and eating a bean sandwich he’d packed to save the expense of the dining car. The Mexican with the hen got off in Santa Barbara, where an even thicker-set woman greeted him on the platform with four children in tow and a rooster under one arm. Siringo reckoned he’d witnessed the beginning of a poultry empire.

  In San Francisco he made his way to the post office and found a telegram waiting for him in care of General Delivery. He’d sent a wire that morning to an address Earp had given him, and here was the reply:

  LOOKING FORWARD TO OUR COLLABORATION STOP ADMIRED TWO EVIL ISMS

  HAMMETT

  His relationship with automobiles was tenuous, and he rode the high old Daimler taxi with both hands on the blanket rail. The driver spat tobacco out the side of the car and kept up a running commentary on how far San Francisco had gone to pot during his residency.

  “You can’t buy a Chinese girl off the street corner anymore, that’s for sure.” Siringo slid to the middle of the seat to avoid the backsplash.

  He got useful information finally when he asked if there was a hotel near his destination. The driver said the St. Francis was two blocks from it. “The bellhops know some good bootleggers.”

  They came to the hotel first. He had the cab wait while he checked in and carried his valise and scabbarded carbine up to his room. Before going back down he unstrapped the valise and swigged from one of the jars of moonshine he’d packed. Then he took out the Colt, grabbed a pillow from the bed, stuck the revolver inside the slip, and put pillow and weapon on top of the walnut wardrobe: an inadequate precaution, but better than none.

  The address Earp had given him, 120 Ellis Street, belonged to a narrow frame house that looked as if it had been there since before the earthquake; so did the landlady, who directed him to Hammett’s room. He climbed two flights of outside stairs and knocked. From inside he heard the familiar chopping sounds of a typewriter. A bell rang and then a board creaked on the other side of the door. A tall, narrow-gauged man opened it.

  “Mr. Siringo. You’re a foot shy of your reputation.”

  “I’m short, but I don’t cost much to feed.” Siringo took the hand offered. The grip was firm and dry. “You’re older than I thought.”

  “Don’t let the white hair fool you. I’m twenty-six, going on a hundred.”

  He saw the truth of the statement then. Hammett’s sandy moustache was a shade darker than his hair, very thick and swept back from a high forehead. The hair, and his sunken cheeks, were not the result of age, but chronic illness. He remembered that Earp had said he suffered from consumption. The young ex-Pinkerton wore shirtsleeves and slacks, held up by a pair of suspenders, and silk socks without shoes. He smelled strongly of whiskey—in the middle of the afternoon—but the whites of his eyes were clear.

  “Sorry you had to wait. I spent the morning tracking down a word and I didn’t want to spend the rest of the day looking for it all over again.”

  “They will give you the slip. I’ve run down mail robbers that were easier to catch.”

  “Me, too.” Humor glinted in the young ex-Pinkerton’s eyes, falling short of his mouth. He stepped aside to let his visitor in and closed the door behind him.

  Hammett seemed to live the way he dressed, orderly and simple. There was no rug on the polished oak floor, and a worn leather armchair and rocker comprised the leisure appointments. A straight-back chair stood before a small table with a Remington typewriter on it, beside a stack of yellow paper and a bottle of Old Log Cabin. An electric hotplate took the place of a kitchen and a twin bed on a painted iron frame showed beyond a half-open door. Books and newspaper sections scattered the floor.

  “Snort?” Hammett lifted the bottle.

  “Little early for me, thanks.” He didn’t like to confess to weakness in the presence of a stranger.

  “It’s later where I stand.” Hammett coughed and topped off a smeared glass with amber liquid.

  “It’s none of my business, but you know that’s no good for you.”

  “You’re right, and this isn’t your business either.” Hammett built a cigarette from scratch and lit it with a match he struck off a thumbnail.

  “Oh, hell. Give me a glass.”

  Something like a smile touched the young man’s lips. “Better. I don’t trust a man who drinks by the clock.” He got a coffee cup out of a cupboard. “Hope this is okay. I live alone and a fellow only needs one glass at a time.”

  “When I’m alone I drink from the bottle.” Siringo stepped forward and filled the cup. “I was hoping you’d be better company than Wyatt Earp.”

  “He didn’t have anything good to say about you, either. What’s the story there?”

  “I caught him in a lie once and it got into print.”

  “That’ll do it. He’s a sour old cob. If I ever had a horse I’d be grateful I had it for as long as I did instead of bitching about it when I didn’t. You can’t pack a horse in a suitcase.”

  Siringo nodded. “The Pinks will move you around.”

  “Anywhere’s jake with me, so long as it isn’t Butte, Montana.”

  “Make it Gem, Colorado, and I’m with you.” Siringo lifted the cup and drank. It was smoother whiskey than he was used to; he made a mental note to go easy on it.

  “Forget that crack about advice,” Hammett said. “Everybody you meet’s a doctor when you’re sick.”

  “That, or whatever they had was worse.” He made a
dismissive gesture with his glass. “I talk too much. It happens when you spend all your time with just your own company.”

  “Not me. I never learned anything talking to myself.”

  “Well, you won’t be alone much longer. I hear you’re getting set to put on hobbles.”

  “Jose is a good old gal. I don’t suppose she’ll put up with me for long, but when a man sets out to follow his dick he has to do it all the way.”

  “That sounds like a rule wrote by a woman.”

  Hammett laughed, a sound made almost entirely through his nose. He was cynical for his age; for any age. Siringo put it down to his disease. “With my luck, it’ll be a girl. I’ll be surrounded.”

  “I’ve had both. One sasses you and the other smells.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “The girl married and went back East. The boy’s mother took him when she left. I ain’t seen him since.”

  Hammett changed the subject. “I never heard of Gem.”

  “You’re a lucky man. It’s not there no more and the world’s better for it. I had to saw a hole in a floor and drop down through to keep from getting massacred. That was during the Coeur d’Alene strike.”

  “The old-timers were still talking about Coeur d’Alene when I hired on.” Hammett drank off half his glass in one jolt. “The Agency had me strikebreaking in Butte. That’s where I found out I was on the wrong side.”

  “Any side’s better than the anarchists’.”

  “I heard it was Marxists in Coeur d’Alene.”

  “Marxists, socialists, anarchists, revolutionists: If it’s got an ‘ist’ on the end it’s no place for a decent man.”

  “I got that impression from your book. I didn’t get the impression it was Marxists you were talking about. I read The Communist Manifesto back to front and couldn’t find anything in it that didn’t make sense.”

  “Not if you don’t mind sharing your paycheck with John D. Rockefeller.”

  “Rockefeller’d be sharing his with me, don’t forget.”

  “I seen men blowed up by men who thought like that. It’s a yellow-belly way to make a point. You and I might not get along, Mr. Hammett. And here I thought we had something in common.”

  “We do, Mr. Siringo. We’re both fed up with the Pinkerton National Detective Agency.”

  “Hope it’s enough.”

  “Two horses don’t have to like each other to pull the wagon one direction.”

  “Well, it’s good we’re talking about horses. I lit out of Chicago first chance I got to avoid long meetings.”

  Hammett nodded. “Three men go into a room and come out an hour later with three different ways to go about the same thing. It’s one of the reasons I chose writing.”

  The young man’s drinking had slowed down. That first taste seemed to have been medicinal, and his guest relaxed a little. He thumped a jug with the best of them, but he worried about partners who couldn’t control their thirst. They got jumpy staking out places and made all the wrong decisions when the ball started.

  Siringo pointed at the stack of yellow sheets. The one on top was typewritten, with addenda penciled in the margins. “You can’t plow a straight furrow when you’re writing your memoirs. I kept remembering things that happened in Salt Lake City when I was writing about Prescott.”

  “I wouldn’t know how to go about writing my memoirs. I’d rather fold them into a good yarn, where everything makes sense.”

  “Publish yet?”

  “Hell, no. They all want that bird Galsworthy or a fair copy.”

  “With me it was Ned Buntline. Bill Cody kilt more injuns in one chapter than he ever saw in life. You ever kill a man?”

  “I came close when I turned over an ambulance full of our own wounded during the war; haven’t driven a car since the Armistice. You?”

  “I don’t even like riding in one.”

  “I meant did you ever kill a man.”

  “Maybe, though not my own. I throwed some lead in my time, but others was throwing it too. You don’t stop to sort it out after. I like to think I didn’t. Look what it did to Earp.”

  Hammett refilled his glass, tilted the neck of the bottle Siringo’s way. He shook his head. Hammett twisted the cap back on. “Well, we’re burning his money. Might as well earn some of it.”

  When they were both seated, Siringo in the leather armchair at his host’s insistence, the other in the rocker, Siringo filled his pipe and lit it. “Earp says his stable boy come to rest up in Sonoma County.”

  “That’s new. When I asked him why he didn’t pump him, he said he didn’t know where he wound up.”

  “I asked him the same thing. No wonder he got so irritable. He got a wire from the ranch day before yesterday asking for a reference.”

  Hammett’s ghost of a smile returned. “I bet that got his back up.”

  “He was born with it up.”

  “Of course you told him to give the boy a good write-up.”

  “What else?”

  “What’s the name of the spread?”

  Siringo drew out his memorandum book. “Beauty Ranch, in a place called The Valley of the Moon, if you can feature it. Know it?”

  “I sure as hell do. I’m surprised you don’t. I drew the conclusion from your books you’re a well-read man.”

  “What the hell’s reading got to do with horse-stealing, I’d like to know?”

  “Something, in this case. Beauty Ranch in The Valley of the Moon is Jack London’s old spread.”

  “The writer?”

  “Just about the most famous since Dickens. Earp’s dictating his own life story, you wrote yours, I’m eating up more paper than a goat. If this stable hand is guilty, between us three he’s got to be the most literary horse thief in history.”

  5

  Hammett, leaning a little on the banister—not because of the liquor in his system, Siringo thought, so much as because of his illness—led the way to the ground floor, where he gave the landlady a coin and used the wall telephone in the foyer to place a call through the long-distance operator. Once the connection was made, he stuck his finger in his ear and raised his voice. Ellis was a busy street and the neighborhood liked its chain drives and Klaxons.

  “Mrs. Shepard, is it? My name is Walter Noble Burns.”

  After that, Siringo heard only snatches of the conversation and couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  Hammett pegged the earpiece. “That was Eliza Shepard, London’s stepsister. She’s managed the ranch since before London died. She hired the boy—Abner Butterfield, his name is—on Earp’s recommendation. She says we can come see him tomorrow.”

  “He’ll bolt for sure when she tells him.”

  “I asked her not to, so he wouldn’t form any preconceived notions before I talked to him.”

  “Who’s this fellow Burns?”

  “Historian of some sort. I did some snooping for him just before I left the Agency, tracking a couple of saddle tramps he wanted to talk to. He was writing a history of the Old West, he said; personally I think he was trying to dig up blackmail. I don’t know what ever came of it, but he was keen on the Earp brothers.”

  “She ever hear of him?”

  “No. I didn’t expect her to, but a lie gets off the ground quicker when there’s some truth under it. She thinks I’m writing Earp’s biography and I want a worm’s-eye view from a former hand.”

  Siringo felt himself grinning. “Promise her a footnote?”

  “Her name in the acknowledgments. And a signed copy of the book, of course. You approve?”

  “It’ll serve. If I was your age I’d turn on the manly charm. A woman’s heart is a fine soft place to look for sign.”

  “My experience is different. All women are dark to me.”

  A strange observation.

  “This place reachable by taxi?”

  “That’d be dear, but I’d rather not hire a car.”

  “What about a livery? You ride?”

  “Not since I
broke up the Wobblies in Butte. I don’t guess they’ve gotten any easier on the ass.”

  “It’s been a spell for me too. I never could feature how sitting on something stuffed with hay raises blisters.”

  “Alcohol’s best. Applied internally.”

  “I got to line my belly first. Where’s a good place for chow?”

  “John’s Grill. I’ll get my hat and coat and join you. John’s particular about dress, if not about who he serves.”

  *

  John’s, across from a fleabag called the Golden State Hotel, advertised steaks and seafood on an electric sign. Inside, it was pleasant enough, cedar-paneled like the inside of a humidor, with waiters in ankle-length aprons serving the predominately male clientele seated at linen-covered tables. It was noisy as a Dodge City saloon, but instead of a tin-tack piano and random gunfire the racket came from clattering crockery.

  “Two setups, Gus.” Hammett hung his hat and topcoat on a clothes tree next to a booth upholstered in worn leather.

  The waiter, who looked as if he’d slammed face-first into the caboose of a train he was running to catch, nodded and went away. Moments later he returned and set two glasses on the table with ice cubes inside. He waited, looking bored, while Hammett slid a large pewter flask from inside his suit coat and floated the cubes in whiskey.

  Hammett looked up from his leather-bound menu. “How are the chops today?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m a vegetarian, remember?”

  The young detective smirked at Siringo. “Gus gave up eating meat after he killed Sailor Dumphrey in the sixth round in El Paso.”

  “Juarez,” corrected Gus. “Governor Culberson banned prizefighting in Texas, so we took it across the river. It was the fifth, not the sixth. How was I to know he had a bad appendix, I ask you?”

  Siringo said, “I was at that fight.”

  The waiter’s scarred face was unimpressed.

  “You and half the forty-six. If everybody that says he was there was there, the gate would have been millions.”