He looked me up and down as though he had seen crackpots before. “If that is true, why are you standing right here in front of me?”
Think of the thousand things I could’ve said that might’ve burst his cobwebs: I’ve escaped! My assailant is upon us! Take me to the police! But frustration muted me, and when I found words at last they were doubtless the most futile in our wide language.
“I’m a writer from Minnesota!” I cried.
At this the door opened and a woman came in—young and yellow-haired, lacy sleeves and large eyes.
“Wilfred,” she sang out.
“Hello, Trudy. Meet Mr. Becket, down from Minnesota.”
Trudy said, “Hello, I need to place an advertisement.”
While Wilfred hunted a pencil to scratch down her twenty words, I noticed a copy of the local newspaper lying on the counter.
Slap on Page One was Hood Roberts, in deepening trouble.
He had come into Alva the previous week, stolen a nearly new Locomobile belonging to a well driller, and fled with a single passenger, a Mexican girl.
Of course neither Hood nor Alazon was named in the hasty article, but Hood’s face had been ably reproduced by a local sketch artist. That artist was clever—he even caught some of Hood’s natural shine, the faintly impudent eyebrow, the flair of the young immortal.
I said, “Could either of you direct me to the telegraph office?”
“Bank building, down the street,” Wilfred said, and I stepped out the door.
4
It was a natty little bank with pressed tin on the walls and ceiling and proud black marble at the tellers’ counter. I approached an oak desk in the corner where a man in baggy charcoal was writing with a fountain pen. There was a chair in front of the desk and I sat with as little clanking as possible.
“I’d like to send a telegram.”
He didn’t look up but said, “I’m not the operator,” while continuing to write.
“Where is the operator? Will he return soon?”
“Mr. Terrell is his name. Mr. Terrell is over at the café.” The pen scratched away. This fellow made beautiful script.
“Do you know when he’ll return?”
At my insistent presence the man exhaled wearily and stood from the desk. He saw the manacles and said, “What are those?”
“I have been abducted.”
He replied, “Then you won’t mind going to the police about it.”
It was tiresome, but I suppose I wouldn’t be any different—you see a man cuffed, unaccompanied, a wary look on his face; the word police must feel like checkmate.
“I’d like that above all else,” I declared.
My eagerness to meet with law officers gave my tale of kidnap a measure of credibility and the penman decided to take charge of me himself; out we went, him with lifted chin and me rattling beside him. He assured me Alva employed three municipal officers and that the sheriff and several deputies would also be available if help were needed tracking down my kidnappers.
“There is only one kidnapper, and he’s right here in town. We had just come from the café when I slipped away from him,” I said, allocating myself a little unearned credit. We were going through town at a fast walk and he had hold of my elbow in a proprietary manner. To encourage a more companionable mood I said, “Thank you for this. I tell you it’s been a harrowing time.”
And he did believe me, I would swear it, for he lessened his stride and asked a question or two about my captivity and treatment and my place of origin. He seemed a very decent fellow after all; I would say we reached the police station on nearly equitable grounds. But my new standing was temporary, for when the door swung open there sat Charles Siringo, tilting back in a Windsor chair. He was holding a sheath knife by the tip, preparing to throw it at a pine plank tilted against the wall. The target was a jack of hearts and the riveted audience of six were all police or deputized citizens. Siringo’s arm whipped forward and his knife struck the jack straight on the ear. What whistles! What fraternal hoo-hah! I stood helpless while my new friend the penman reached for the sleeve of the police chief, whose name I remember was Dick Speed.
“Dick, this fellow just came into the bank. Says he was abducted but has got away.”
Only now did Siringo look up. He registered no surprise but smiled gently as though to welcome back my prodigal self. He didn’t rise from his chair or act like any kind of authority, but turned expectantly to Mr. Speed.
“Well, Charlie,” said this Speed, “you called it. Here is your specimen safe and sound.”
“Hello, yes, that’s him,” Siringo replied. “I’ll admit I was skeptical, but you’ve proven your point; a confidence artist doesn’t get far here in Alva.” Standing he shook the hand of the surprised penman. “Sir, you’ll be recognized for this. A public decoration at the very least. I cannot promise remuneration, though I see what you’re thinking—the money ain’t the point. Are you a deputy here as well?”
“No—no, I just work at the bank—” and though I willed the penman to look my way, he was in fact already useless to me.
“An ordinary citizen!” Siringo brimmed with admiration. “It’s what I tell the schoolchildren when performing lyceum shows: The path of duty is the way to glory. Old man Tennyson.”
“I thank you, sir—thank you,” said the penman, handing me over like a leashed mutt. More hoo-hah! A banner day for law enforcement in Oklahoma! I had time for one candid appeal and Dick Speed was my man.
“Would you hear my story before giving me wholesale into this man’s custody?”
Speed met my eyes. I sensed a chance. “Go on,” said he.
“I am Monte Becket. My home is in Minnesota, where many people will vouch for me if you take the trouble to send one telegram. Send another, and you will learn that the famous Mr. Siringo is a lone operative supported by no authority but his own. I am being held unlawfully by a bold fraud. That is as plain as I can say it. I petition your conscience.”
During this speech Siringo watched me with an expression of gravity from below his hooded lids. Somewhat belately I noticed that Speed was holding a copy of Siringo’s Pinkerton memoir. So were several of the others. No doubt these precious articles were personally inscribed.
Then Dick Speed said, “What is your profession, Mr. Becket?”
“Why, I’m an author,” I replied, blinking.
At this Siringo looked down with an expression of modesty, and Dick Speed turned to him saying, “You fellows best be on your way,” as though my answer had instantly negated my solemn plea.
“No,” said Siringo. “No, indeed. Dick, if you have one doubt in this matter you must follow it up. Here,” he added, “is the telephone number of the Pinkerton office in Denver. I will wait while you place the call.”
But Dick Speed only shook Siringo’s hand saying, “I wouldn’t detain you a moment longer—no doubt Monte here’s got a book to write! No doubt he’s got a deadline!” which put everybody in slick spirits.
My confusion at this response was only dispelled once we were on the road, where Siringo revealed his stratagem: he had described me as an oily academic confidence man who arranged to write old folks’ biographies for an up-front fee, then fled with the money.
“Author,” Speed said again, as we left the police station. “You be careful with him, Charlie, he’s a greasy one.”
“Oh, I’ve had worse company,” said Charles Siringo. “All the same, it’s a good thing you boys got tougher minds than widows and shut-ins.” He shook his head. “They used to give me more interesting jacks than this to chase. Read that book of mine, you’ll see.”
5
“Tell me about the boy,” said Siringo, as I knew he would.
“What boy?”
“Hood Roberts, your recent companion who stole that couple’s automobile. It’s all those Alva rubes could talk about.”
We were well out of that handsome town, and Siringo had not made one peep of remonstration with me for tryi
ng to slip away—he was probably gratified to see I retained a small reservoir of unruliness, even if I had no “medicine.”
I said, “I don’t know much about him. Just a kid anxious to be away from home.”
Siringo rolled his eyes joyfully. “You’re feeble, Becket! I know you picked him up in Kansas. I met his old boss Lewis. I know all that. I know he took up with that señorita at the Hundred and One, and I know what else he did there. What I don’t know is whether he’s worth my time. Worth deviating from the prime objective.”
“He’s just a boy.”
“Billy McCarty was a boy. Tom Pickett was a boy. Cross the wide sea and Ned Kelly was a boy. Goodness, Becket, boys are trouble everywhere.”
“I thought it was Glendon we were after.”
“Hood Roberts is not his real name, did you know that?”
“He’s a romantic.”
“That may be. I only want to know whether he is serious or playing at this.”
It was a fair question. Once I’d have said earnestly that Hood was playing. Now I didn’t know. “He’s no outlaw, Mr. Siringo. He’s just good on a horse.”
“Good on a horse ain’t all it used to be, but it’s still handy,” he mused. “Of course he’s got other talents. He broke that actor’s neck: Swilling. You ask the girls in that boardinghouse they’ll tell you it was a serious thing.”
“Accidental. I saw it happen.”
“You go to the Swilling home next Christmas Eve, they might feel it was a serious matter.”
I said, “You’re giving the directions. I’ll drive wherever you say, Mr. Siringo.”
He turned stiffly in his seat. His soreness had him for the moment and his breathing was shallow. He said, “I’m going to sleep awhile. Can I trust you?”
I didn’t reply. That he could trust me was my own disgrace. I didn’t need to say it.
6
In this way I drove, and Siringo slept, through nearly a week of infinite days; of course he’d been shot and was recovering, but he was also an older man with a sluggish rebound, a fact that seemed strange—he was so competent, so concise. Yet old he was, and it showed in ways I began to see as we traveled toward California. His large joints hurt him, his knees and shoulders. He began to make certain his Colt’s was near his hand at all times, and to go off suddenly into alarming coughing spells; they might last only a minute but sometimes refused to let off for a quarter hour or more. Sometimes jellied blood came up. These vile frogs he would spit with rage into the ditch, after which he would be in stormy humor, swearing or saying nothing or digging in his grip for the whiskey he never otherwise touched. I saw—and he saw—that his coughing represented a door to me. There were times it immobilized him so strictly he seemed near his final rigors. With right timing I might simply walk away or strand him beside the road.
In the meantime I tried to remain pleasant company. He loved talking about books, especially his own, and his other favorite, Ecclesiastes. That treatise with its severe rhetoric—“all is meaningless”—he had by heart, often enlisting its author, Solomon, in his arguments against bothersome ideas like altruism and honor and clemency.
“That’s the failure of most people,” he declared. “They don’t want the bad news. Everything’s got to be good news! So they’ll subscribe to the Proverbs, which feel nice and hopeful, and ignore Ecclesiastes, where old Sol is wiser than ever and has finally figured out what all those instructions of his are actually worth. They couldn’t save him, could they? They were no comfort to him in his final years! He wrote those Sunday school lessons but perished anyhow and went to dust.” Nothing disgusted Siringo more than the necessity of perishing and going to dust. He was completely nonplussed at mortality, despite having had sixty-odd years to get used to it.
“All the same,” I ventured, “since we haven’t a choice but can only make the best of things as given, I would rather live among people who try to uphold the Proverbs.”
“And why is that,” he inquired, “unless you believe in a hereafter?”
Having no wish to launch Siringo on the topic of the hereafter, I suggested that regardless of eternity the Proverbs seemed a reasonable-enough recipe for a pleasant life in this world.
“Well, then, bully for you,” he said. “Yours is the prevailing notion of a weak and feminized generation. Let us see how it holds up.”
You may notice how many of Siringo’s pronouncements have the ring of the last word. That is because they usually were. He felt entitled to the last word and would have it at all costs.
“Listen, Siringo,” I sputtered, but he stood suddenly and looked at the westward sky. It was a starless and moonless night, quiet except for our modest campfire—but now from afar rose the faintest orange on the clouds. There was a distant percussion or series of percussions, and I thought too that I heard something like a cry or wail, though my mind may have added that particular. Certainly the pale orange made for an eerie sky—a wail or two would’ve seemed at home.
Siringo walked a short distance from the glare of our little blaze and stood looking up and out. When I joined him he said, “Something large is on fire.”
“How far away?” I asked.
“Fifteen miles, seventeen.”
“Is it the prairie?” I had heard about prairie fires—how they got to their feet and raced along under wind of their own making, easily catching your lathered horse as you galloped toward the river and safety.
But Siringo, gauging the pale cloud, said, “No. No, that ain’t grass, Becket. That’s a town burning.”
7
Like old Israel we rose in the morning to follow a pillar of smoke. I didn’t want to head for that oily ghost, but we did—it was due west of us and seemed to twist off the vanishing point of our narrow road. As for the road it never veered left or right. Mile by mile the ghost grew and warped, the sun leaned hard on our heads, my hands got slicker on the wheel; meantime Charles Siringo tipped forward in his seat and peered around, glittering. No nap this day for Charlie! Instead he talked, talked as though his mind were rekindled, making observations on the sere landscape and the brown spines of cacti and the sorry graze and cattle we passed, so thin their eyes jutted like blisters. He talked of crossing the Mojave on a mule in 1880 pursuing Billy the Kid, who as it turned out was in his final months of life. Siringo was still excited by those ancient events. His sentences grew short and hooked. It galled him that the Kid, whom he called Billy McCarty, had eluded him. It stung that the youngster had been a favorite of certain spicy girls whose attributes Siringo minutely recalled, and he summoned down eloquent blights on young Billy and also on Patrick Garrett, the sheriff who had stepped armed into a darkened hut and ended the chase forever. This stream of talk discouraged me. The smoke stood up over us with a hundred smells in its clinging scrim. A pit opened inside my ribs. The nearer we came to the burnt place, the heartier Siringo appeared.
The pile of cinders we eventually reached was called Spigot—Spigot, Texas, subsequently absent from maps. Never a large town, Spigot until last night had hosted several bustling concerns including a general store, a livery, a telegraph office and a petroleum garage. Now it was black rubble emitting vines of grease smoke amid which people stooped picking items out of the char. One building only had escaped the fire so we parked near it, a brick foursquare bordered by a sodden moat of ankle-deep mire. The letters I.O.O.F. were mortared into its pediment. Three men in brass buttons sat on a bench in its shade. Charles Siringo stepped out of the Packard like a general, wiping his hands together—even among strangers he assumed authority—and said, simply, “Well?”
“Well, what,” replied the shortest man on the bench. He had a sullen aspect but let us allow him his exhaustion. He matched the others in his burgundy coat and white sash. One wore a plumed bicorne hat like Napoleon’s; the other two had similar hats but had removed them in the heat and placed them on their knees.
“Quite a little barbecue,” said Charles Siringo.
The fellow we
aring the hat stood wearily and said, “Your levity is misplaced, my friend, there is death here today.”
“I guess you’ve got no monopoly on that,” Siringo remarked. “Who’s died?”
“Who is asking?” the short man demanded.
“Charles Siringo of the Pinkertons,” was the ready reply, which carried, as I’d learned, far more weight than it should’ve. “Tell me who’s died.”
“Felix Fly or Langston Cree.”
“You don’t know which?”
“We ain’t sure. Janssen here found a hand,” said weary Napoleon.
“It’s Felix Fly’s hand, his left hand; I told you that,” said the sullen one, Janssen. “I done played baseball with Felix Fly. He had a fastball to drop a sow. I know that hand.”
“General store sells black powder in the ten-pound kegs,” Napoleon explained. “Felix and Langston lived above the store. Janssen, tell where you found the hand.”
“A good ways out on the prairie,” said Janssen. “Sitting upright. Like it climbed out a badger hole to have a look around. There’s nothing where the store was but a dent in the ground. My nephew got gashed by a falling teakettle. Every window in Spigot went bust.”
Siringo looked up. “These windows look fine.”
“But this is the Odd Fellows Hall,” Napoleon said. “These windows are stout.”
“Odd Fellows build things beefy,” added the bald lieutenant.
“Spigot was founded by an Odd Fellow,” Napoleon informed us. “He dug the well himself, hauled the bricks from Galveston. Look,” he added, nodding at a stocky little well house attached to the building. A dripping iron pipe poked from it at knee height. “Yonder’s the town namesake—best water in a hundred miles.”
“Any other dead?” Siringo asked.
“Not as we know about. It started at the telegraph office. We were in session here at the hall when the cry went up. A boy ran in yelling. We fought it at the livery, fought it at the houses, but after the store blew we had to see to our families.”