The Ballad of Black Bart Read online

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  SIZES AND HALF SIZES, 5 TO 11

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  For postage rates, see page 4.

  Per pair,

  $2.75.

  He confirmed the $1.50 shipping charge scribbled in the margin, enclosed the cutting and the blank on which he’d written his shoe size and hotel address, sealed them with the draft in a Webb envelope, dipped a pen, and addressed it to Montgomery Ward & Co., 246-254 Kinzie St., Chicago, Ill. Then he walked down the street on run-down heels to stamp and post it.

  * * *

  On the second floor—a dozen feet above Black Bart’s head, if we accept the foregoing as truth—James Hume lit a fresh cigar and took a typewritten sheet from Jonathan Thacker, his aide and secretary, who shared the small office, with his Remington Visible Writing Machine propped on a plain table placed strategically to allow room to pass between it and the detective chief’s desk and to avoid being bumped by the door when it was opened. The copy was neat, with no strike-overs:

  $800 Reward!

  ARREST STAGE ROBBER!

  On the 3rd of August, 1877, the stage from Fort Ross to the Russian River was stopped by one man, who took from the Express box about $300, coin … On one of the Way Bills left with the box the writer wrote as follows:

  Black Bart’s impudent poem was centered.

  More details were included.

  Hume, a methodical man, read through it twice, top to bottom, then off-loaded a pile of papers to another stack, exposing a brass inkstand from which he drew a horsehair pen and added to the top of the page in a hand nearly as tidy as the typed characters:

  Agents of W., F. & Co. will not post this circular to the public, but place it in the hands of officers and reliable citizens in your region. Officers and citizens receiving them are requested to preserve them for future reference.

  “I’ll leave it to their discretion to decide reliability.” He returned the sheet to the young man in shirtsleeves and green velvet sleeve protectors. “The trail’s muddy enough without an army of bounty rats trampling it further.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come back with a galley sheet as soon as it’s ready. The printer is not to proceed until I initial it.”

  The secretary smiled. “We can’t have him select a nine instead of an eight from the typecase. Bad enough we’re offering five hundred more than the ruffian took in cash.”

  “I’ll thank you not to question the methods of your betters.”

  The young man flushed deeply and departed, leaving the door open to the exhilarating din from outside.

  Immediately upon his exit, Hume’s face lightened a shade.

  Millions for defense, he thought, drawing on the cigar, but not one cent for tribute. What Mr. Wells and Mr. Fargo saved on way-station horses they spent to discourage predators. He couldn’t see any fault in the practice, so long as he himself continued to deliver on it. In its way it was a testament to his efficiency, as well as a guarantor of his dismissal should he fail to live up to his reputation. A man is only as good as his most recent success.

  Better and better. He’d feared growing roots in his present position.

  Still and all, he thought—excavating Bart’s snatch of doggerel from the disorganized (or so it seemed to the uninitiated observer) rubble on his desk—the fellow promised to deliver him from the run-of-the-mill chase. He could scarcely blame the sensation-mongering press for seizing on such dash when it was allowed to fall into their hands; it smacked of Dick Turpin and the Penny Dreadful, and thousands in circulation. Almost by the week, Hume spent his wits on sloths too overcome by inertia to draw wages in the accepted manner, and too feeble-minded to keep themselves to themselves when the deed was done; dulling his well-honed senses as he plodded along the tracks they left, as obvious as those laid down by the Union Pacific.

  They led, like as not, to a bathhouse on Pacific Street or a filthy divan in Chinatown, and a fugitive too stupefied on whiskey and opium to make a fight of his capture. Most investigations started in those places and ended there. Trust a bloodhound like Ben Thorn to make a beeline in that direction.

  Well, give him that, and spare Hume that particular drudgery. Let a bloodhound like Thorn lust after barroom braggarts to do half his job for him, impressing lewd women with the details of their exploits and broadcasting greenbacks like wheatseed; the sooner he had them by the ear, the sooner he got back to his thirteen rooms, his grand piano, his spoiled wife, and his pack of overprivileged brats, feet propped up on his gout stool and a tanker of English Port in his fist; or whatever was his quaff of choice. For James B. Hume, a greyhound trained to track wolves, a cold supper and a flat belly were his reward and also his tools.

  He was born in the Catskill Mountains of New York State, a wild country then, as gaunt and untamed as Oregon before the migration. He’d farmed there and in Indiana, prospected in California, and served as sheriff in that same gold country, where a man’s life was sold for as little as a few dollars’ worth of dust in his poke. He’d learned that frontier justice was as rough as represented by the eastern press, with gaps like those in a corn rick: A coroner’s jury could consider the case of a man shot from behind and assign cause of death to a mishap, because he should have known better than to turn his back on his killer.

  Hume would have none of that in his jurisdiction. He’d sent to the state capital in Sacramento for up-to-date penal codes, studied them in the light of tallow candles in reeking tents and by greasy daylight in wayfarers’ inns, until he’d learned enough to pass the bar and plead before the bench—if he’d care to take that route.

  Which he didn’t. Some men are born to bloviate in dusty courtrooms, others to hunt other men. He held no animosity toward lawyers, by and large, but he’d testified in too many trials to pin his hopes on whether the man on the bench approved of his taste in collars; one judge had actually found an attorney in contempt for the color of his cravat. A case built on rock—heelprints, dependable eyewitnesses, and possession of incriminating contraband—trumped the prejudices of the most pettifogging political appointment. In his capacity as an elected peace officer he’d brought a string of criminal careers to an abrupt end; which was how he’d come to the attention of a beleaguered Wells, Fargo, and eventually to their employ.

  It was soon after his recruitment that James B. Hume engraved his name in Company legend. Over and above the strenuous objections of Henry Wells and William Fargo, the detective chief commissioned a headstone to be erected over a bandit slain during an attempted holdup of a Company stagecoach, with an epitaph that afterward became part of frontier lore. Steeply engraved into the limestone, it read:

  WELLS, FARGO NEVER FORGETS

  He himself was vague on the details of the event. He’d been asked about it so many times it was possible he’d come to accept a myth as fact. But it sounded like something he might have done, so he let the story stand, without either confirming it or denying it. In the end, it served the same purpose as a genuine stone.

  “No, Mr. Black Bart,” he said, letting a mouthful of cigar smoke drift thick as cream from between his lips toward his tobacco-stained ceiling, “I don’t intend to forget you.”

  FIVE

  Bart liked the high life the Golden Gate had:

  music, fandangos, and roe of the shad.

  ’Twasn’t his fault to enjoy such delights

  he had to keep Jim Hume from sleeping at night.

  In the scarlet history of frontier justice, James B. Hume’s method of tracking desperadoes was hardly material for Ned Buntline’s Own or Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, with their breathless accounts of ambidextrous gunplay, midnight rides, and sudden sweeps of fire and steel, accompanie
d by Goyesque images inked in blood and pressed on brimstone, to quicken the hearts of passersby and separate them from their nickels. Files, not six-guns, were his weapons of choice. The cabinets containing this armory formed twin rows eight feet high and a block long, leading from the front entrance to the rear exit of the Company’s Montgomery Street headquarters, broken only by lath-and-plaster partitions erected between offices. By daylight and coal oil Hume pored over typeface and pencil scrawl, burning cigars by the box, so that a century later the thumb-stained onionskin sheets still yielded the rich, peaty odor of the blend of tobacco he shared with President Grant. Sometimes in person, more often with the cooperation of local peace officers and citizens’ committees of vigilance, he collected details—an apple core here, a broken match there, and rung by rung assembled a ladder that would inexorably lead to arrest and punishment.

  Wells, Fargo never forgets.

  But having begun to form a definite opinion of Black Bart’s likes and dislikes based on the evidence, he would have been chagrinned to learn that his quarry enjoyed the look, sound, and smell of well-bred horses racing one another round a track. Had the detective known this at the early gathering stage of the manhunt, he might have assigned something other than prejudice to the man’s insistence on traveling afoot. He would not have ruled out broadening the investigation to include spectators at racing events, and possibly have brought the saga of Black Bart to a close much sooner and with less embarrassment to the Company.

  Side-by-side with the fighting ring, Ocean View Park was Bolton’s venue of choice: The powerful, egg-shaped muscles rolling under sleek coats, the explosive snorts of breath spent on the stroke with pounding hooves, the intoxicating blend of clean sharp sweat, fresh manure, and salt breeze from the Pacific tinged with fish, brought a physical reaction to his testicles he found otherwise only at ringside and in the act of love. Together with the crisp rustle of paper and green-ink smell as he exchanged banknotes for cardboard tickets at the bettors’ window, the sensuous image was as close to complete as anything he’d experienced in the curtained balconies in the Bella Union, emblematic of the Barbary Coast.

  He had no special dislike for horses as transportation. He merely eschewed the business of saddling and straddling one of the beasts on his excursions after Wells, Fargo gold; swift as they were, they left prints as indelible as Bertillon measurements of ears, noses, chins, and the space between the eyes that the Pinkerton National Detective Agency had employed to identify known miscreants; and in the West, where men’s faces were less noted than the set and gait of a particular horse, one’s transportation of choice was as damning as an indiscreet boast whispered into the ear of a lady hostess in Portsmouth Square. Bootprints, as shallow as a man’s own weight and as anonymous as a thousand pairs of ready-made soles, were no more traceable than clippings on the floor of a barbershop.

  But give Charles E. Bolton a small man aboard a muscular specimen of horseflesh, ten dollars of William Wells and Henry Fargo’s money on how they finished, and he was as happy as Adam before the Fall, win or lose.

  He placed, as it turned out; on Lee’s Choice in the third. New Yorker that he was, he held a sentimental sympathy for such lost causes as the Confederacy; and for that matter with the rebels and brigands of history, harkening back to Robin Hood and the Thief on the Cross. For all his disapproval of Jesse James’s brand of brutal outlawry, Bolton owned that the man had put his guerrilla experience to work chivvying Big Railroad, whose barons were the latest in a long line of desk-bound pirates who preyed on the independent without so much as drawing a gun and placing themselves at risk.

  The clerk at the window, recognizing him, smiled. “You’ve the luck of the Irish, sir, and no mistake.”

  Bolton noted the young man’s red hair and fair skin. “You must take care not to let it rub off on strangers. There may come the day when you’ll need it in a time of urgency.”

  “Bless you.” The clerk exchanged the customer’s ticket for twenty-five dollars in gold notes; backed, to Bolton’s intense satisfaction, by Wells, Fargo, & Co. of San Francisco.

  Hume, brooding before his open window, pressed the efficient Jon Thacker to maintain a close watch on sudden spenders in the region, particularly in the wake of each assault upon a Company stage. “These fellows are not in it for a comfortable retirement. Easy come, easy go, and the easier it comes the swifter it goes.”

  “In San Francisco, sir?”

  “In San Francisco, and what of it?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  In his wake, Hume lamented the man’s lack of gumption in the presence of a superior. Anyone could see the fallacy of his course of action in that city, where honest money evaporated at the same rate as ill-gotten gains. But better to keep his staff alert and their minds on Black Bart, rather than cede the initiative to an unpredictable brigand on his field of choice. Waiting was both the detective’s best weapon and his worst enemy.

  * * *

  “What is your secret, if I may be so bold?”

  Bolton frowned at the woman who’d spoken, from third place in line at the bettors’ window at Ocean View; for he certainly thought the query bordering on brazen. But his countenance relaxed in the presence of a comely—if comfortably upholstered—lady of ripe years decked out in yards of brocade with an aviary of plumes nested in the curled brim of a hat mounted at an angle he found insolent; but a man who subsidized his pleasures at gunpoint was not necessarily put off by such airs. She was accompanied by a mousy woman half her age, in a gray cotton dress and a plain straw hat and under it the face of a sheep.

  “A youth dogged by misfortune,” said he in response to her question, tipping his bowler. “I seem to be making up for it in my crepuscular old age.”

  “Not so decrepit as that, certainly. However, if your sunnier years have manufactured what is vulgarly referred to as a ‘hunch’—?” Her smile was white, and quite obviously porcelain.

  He turned her aside and whispered the name of a horse that had an admirable history of performance on a muddy track, and since a drizzle had commenced ten minutes before, confided she might do worse than two dollars.

  No stranger, she, to a “hunch,” as she demonstrated by ceding her place to the person behind her and approaching the ten-dollar window, where no one was waiting.

  Bright’s Dream paid off at five to one, and thus began a friendship.

  She was the forty-seven-year-old widow of a tinpan miner who’d expired of alcohol poisoning in a tent saloon called (ironic though it may seem, but appropriate if one knew the miners’ parlance of the time) the Dry Place. “He was a bibulous man,” the widow professed, “wanting in every refinement: But, oh, my!” And—on the gospel—she fanned herself. She seemed to have stepped directly from the pages of Jane Austen, cheerfully unaware of the irony intended by the author; yet he found her company entertaining, if only for the giddy joy of anticipating the next gust of confidence on her part, and the exposure connected.

  They saw what was almost certainly the thousand-and-first American performance of East Lynn at the Metropolitan Theatre, partook of pâté and the filet de boeuf in the dining room of the Palace Hotel, and attended Fra Diavalo at the Grand Opera House; always with the ovine companion—a hired convenience, as it turned out—in tow. Bolton, who kept a running account of his finances, marveled at the accelerated rate of their decline under certain social circumstances, particularly with the extra baggage factored in; should this whirlwind continue, another withdrawal from the bank of Wells and Fargo would soon be necessary.

  “Isn’t that Governor Stanford?”

  The trio was descending one of the pair of staircases that swept to the opera house’s tiled lobby, lock-stepping along with the throng in evening dress eager for refreshment, discourse, and a smoke during intermission. Near the base of the stairs opposite moved a tall, heavy, immaculately bearded man of about Bolton’s age, one hand gripping a gold-knobbed stick similar to his own, his thick neck reddening where it met his stif
f butterfly collar. On his arm was a plump pink woman, presumably his wife, girdled with diamonds.

  “Yes, that is he.” Bolton slowed a bit more, allowing the former mining-supply merchant, Central Pacific Railroad president, and Republican governor of California sufficient time to lose himself in the crowd. This spared him an awkward excuse. Although he knew Stanford and his set well enough to pass a few words in greeting, he avoided further colloquy with those familiar enough with the details of harvesting gold to catch “mining speculator” Bolton in a blunder.

  Two days later, during his ritual dinner with cattleman Matt Leacock and whaling magnate Alec Fitzhugh, he turned the conversation away from his windfall at the track (everyone, it seemed, was convinced he’d stumbled upon a foolproof wagering system, or was somehow privy to inside intelligence) toward Fra Diavalo: “You have seen it, of course?”

  “Wild horses couldn’t drag me.” Leacock’s broad face was flushed. The milk-to-brandy ratio in his goblet had tipped in favor of the latter. “I understand that in your case it took only two fillies to manage the thing.”

  Bolton kept his expression even; inwardly condemning Nob Hill’s network of spies to scandalmongers’ hell. “Friends, who share an interest in music.”

  “Liszt, no doubt?” Fitzhugh’s leer was in keeping with his table manners; his watch chain had dipped into his chowder not once but twice in the course of the meal. The Hungarian composer’s airs were rumored to excite unladylike passions in his female listeners.

  Bolton found the drift of the exchange becoming distasteful. He wondered what it said about a man that he considered his friends tiresome.

  That had not always been the case; but those had been associations of an entirely different sort. Sometimes he wished—but, no; he had long ago cut loose his team from the wagon of Regret and hitched it to Action.

  “Come, come, fellows. I’m past all that.”