Текст книги "LITTLE BIG MAN"

Автор книги: Томас Бергер (Бри(е)джер)

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All this she had worked out on her own, for them ain’t the kind of things you can teach a person, and God knows I am hardly an instructor in deportment. But my experience with Mrs. Pendrake had give me at least this: I know class when I see it, and insofar as was within my power I could encourage Amelia when she headed in the right direction, which meant I had to maintain that flow of money, which in turn kept me cheating at cards.

Which brings me back to Wild Bill. I didn’t want to play against him, and some evenings managed to elude his company. But he’d come looking for me from saloon to saloon, and when he caught up, would run one of the three other fellows out of their chair, take it, and proceed to lose. It was strange, too strange for my stomach, and I got to not using the mirror-ring after he set down-while making the most of it before he showed up, so the evening would still show a profit.

Now what that ring done, it never gave me better cards than the next, but rather the knowledge of what hands the other fellows held and then only when I was dealer; it was not nearly so dishonest as palming an ace, say; a certain skill was still required, and pure luck determined what cards a man would get from the deal. I can’t say my luck either improved or worsened when using the ring. But here’s the oddity, whenever Bill set down and I refrained from employing the tiny mirror-played square, that is, my luck commenced to run extreme and fantastic. Flushes, straights, three of a kind, pairs: they flowed to me as if by magic.

Bill played doggedly on. And always we went to breakfast afterwards and then out to our range; and other than that queer look that come over him when I took my first pot of the evening and never left it till I walked from the saloon to meet him in the street outside-for he continued to leave first-he did not display anything that could be termed bad feeling, suspicion, spite, or envy.

As to the shooting lessons, I figure they served him as an exercise in pride, reminding me directly after every poker session that, whereas he had lost, he was pre-eminent in the more serious game of chance in which the stakes is life and death-for though we was shooting at dimes and corks, you could not overlook their similar diameter to that of the human eye.

However, I believe that when Wild Bill Hickok faced a man he looked at his opponent’s eye as if it was a cork.

I was getting real good with my weapon against them inanimate objects, and I was fast. Though speed itself was of lesser concern than accuracy, for as Bill said what mattered was putting your bullet where you wanted it to go. He had seen a fast man fire three shots before a slow man got off one; but the three missed, whereas the laggard’s struck the quick man dead center.

’Course, he says, there’s where the personality come in; whether fast or slow, there was one perfect shot for each occasion, and you killed or died according to how close you come to achieving it. Once arriving at your decision to fire upon a man, your mind become a blank, and your will, your body, and your pistol merged into one instrument with a single job. It was as if the gun growed out of your hand, your finger spat lead and smoke. Indeed, that was the technique of aiming: like you was pointing to make emphasis in a argument. On such an occasion the ordinary person is naturally accurate: notice next time, he says, when you are in a verbal quarrel; if your opponent’s finger was a gun, you’d be dead.

One morning we set up twin boards with dimes protruding from slots in them, and both me and Wild Bill went back twenty paces and fired. We both split our bullets perfect on the dimes’ edge, and the two shots sounded as one explosion.

“Hoss,” says Hickok, looking down at me over his hooked nose and blond handlebars, “I have taught you all that can be learned out here. The rest is to be had only from a target that shoots back.”

“That must have been luck,” I says. I meant it. He could have repeated that performance all day; whereas I knowed I couldn’t have done it more than say twice out of five: you can tell that about yourself. I also had the definite feeling he had not used all the speed of which he was capable.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he answers, and his voice was like the cracking of a whiplash. But he drops the subject then and appeared his old self on the ride back to town.

Wild Bill Hickok had devoted friends and sworn enemies. Mention his name anywhere in Kansas during the ’70’s and you could get a sharp reaction on one side or the other, and there might have been more men killed in arguments about him than he himself ever sent under. There was some people, I suppose out of envy, who even insisted he was a second-rate shot as well as a coward, and of course that greater number who had him doing impossible feats.

So in the face of all that I submit this experience of mine with the man in Kansas City in ’71. It wasn’t everything he done that period by a long shot; he even played poker with others and won. But I’m saying what I knowed of him personally. When I weigh all the pros and cons he comes out even.

He learned me about the precision handling of a revolver. However, had I never met him it was likely I could have got on right well without that specialty, which was not the necessity you might imagine for surviving in the West. Take the incident with Strawhan’s brother: if Wild Bill had not been expert at gunfighting he would have got killed; but if he had not been a gunfighter, Strawhan’s brother would not have been after him in the first place. So what did Hickok actually do for me? Show me how to save my life? No, rather he give me a new means by which to risk it.

I felt a curious relief when them lessons had ended, and somehow I got to believing that I wouldn’t see him no more across the poker table, either. Nor did I for a night or two, and a fellow told me Hickok had been offered the marshal’s job in Abilene, which was one of them new towns on the railroad to which the Texas men drove up their cattle for shipment East and when they got there the cowboys collected their pay and went wild till they was broke, drinking and whoring and shooting, and not long before had killed the then marshal, Bear River Tom Smith, who had enforced the law with his fists. So now Abilene wanted to hire a gunfighter.

“Reckon he’ll take it?” I asked.

“Sure do,” said that fellow. “He ain’t killed nobody since Strawhan’s brother.”

This was a typical opinion about Hickok: that he enjoyed sending people under. So many of them who admired him liked this idea, for in any white population there is a vast number of individuals who have murder in their hearts but consider themselves too weak to take up its practice themselves, so they substitute a man like Hickok. A Cheyenne enjoyed killing, but not Wild Bill: he was indifferent to it. He had barely looked at the corpse of Strawhan’s brother except to check whether it would draw on him again. In fact, I don’t think Hickok enjoyed anything. Life to him consisted of doing what was necessary, endlessly measuring his performance against that single perfect shot for each occasion. He was what you call an idealist.

Well, it appeared a day or so later that my assumption he had left town was erroneous, for we had just started up our nightly poker session when Hickok’s big form swung into the saloon, and he stepped aside so his back would not be in a direct line with the door while he sized the place up as was his custom. He wore a new outfit; no longer the frock coat, but a beautiful soft deerskin shirt that fell to his knees, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with fur and a four-inch fringe hung from the hem. At his waist was tied a sash of red silk, with fringed tassels dangling from the knot. Into this, above both hips, his ivory-handled sixguns was thrust butts forward.

I knowed he was looking for me; there weren’t no point in trying to hide, so I give him a holler, and he come and set in, and of course I won all night as usual, perfectly honest, not using my ring, and along about dawn he called me for a hundred dollars and showed an ace full house.

At which I says: “I got two pairs.”

It was unusual to see Wild Bill grin, but he did now and tugged at the end of his sweeping mustaches, and he says: “Well, I finally did it.”

And I says: “Two pairs of queens.”

However, he just kept smiling as he pushed the money over, more than I ever took off him in the past at one setting, and he even bantered a bit with the other men, and then followed them out. I don’t know why I had toyed with him like that: it was mean to let him think for a moment he had at last beat me. But it had been instinctive on my part. I ain’t the first or last man to needle an individual who presents his weakness so obviously.

Well, I left the saloon myself finally, last man in the place, and the barkeep yawns and bid me goodnight, and I get to the porch and there of course is Wild Bill standing in the street at a range of twenty paces. It struck me that had been the distance in our gun practice, for when you have trained so much, your eyes gauges them things automatic.

I says: “You want to go to breakfast, Bill?”

He says: “No.”

I comes down into the street, and he backs up for the same distance, hands hanging loose at his sides.

I says: “Something wrong?”

He says: “You have been cheating me.”

“No, I ain’t,” says I. “Maybe that first night we played, but never since. And I’ll refund what I won then.”

“Don’t go for that pocket,” he says.

“You can see my gun,” I points out, “here in the belt.”

“I think you have a hide-out derringer in that vest.”

“I swear I have not, Bill.” I’ll tell you a funny thing: I wasn’t scared now, whereas I believe he was. I wasn’t, because I had no intention of shooting it out with Wild Bill. As to him, he could hardly worry much about our respective talents at gun-handling; he was scared of some treachery or other, especially now that I had admitted cheating him that once. Few men of that time would ever admit anything even when caught in the act.

“Go for it if you want,” he says.

“I don’t want,” I says.

“God damn it,” says he, “I taught you everything I know. You saw you were as good as me. It’s fair, ain’t it?”

I never answered.

“Well, ain’t it?” he repeats, sort of pleading. “Look here, hoss, nobody cheats Wild Bill Hickok. If you wanted money, all you had to do was ask.”

“I said I never cheated you but once.”

“Then,” he says, “you are also a liar, hoss. And nobody lies to Wild Bill Hickok.”

Now there was two things to note about this colloquy. One was that he referred to himself like he was an institution: personally, he didn’t care so much about these supposed outrages of mine, but he could not let the noble firm of Wild Bill Hickok, Inc., be loosely dealt with. You know, like you’re supposed to say “Your Honor” not to the person setting up there, but to the office of judge.

Secondly, he was getting gradually more abusive, adding “liar” to “cheat,” both of them shootable insults in the West at that time though they seemed to have lost their force as the years have went on. I reckoned he would eventually get to “son of a bitch,” the ultimate, except for “horse thief,” which wasn’t appropriate here.

If you was called any of them names in public, you was expected to do something about it. However, lucky for me there wasn’t yet another soul along the street to hear my degradation in the fresh light of the rising sun. Them other fellows from the card game had gone on, and the barkeep left the saloon by the back door on the alley.

But somebody might show at any moment; and before they did, I had to decide on whether to choose quick death or lingering shame. I think I have made it clear that I didn’t like to draw on Wild Bill. However, I wouldn’t want my backing down to be general knowledge. If it so became, my poker playing was at an end. Not only would everybody soon know I had been cheating, but would take me for a coward who from then on could be pushed around with impunity. It was really the last-named that mattered, for cheating was no rarity at that time. Everybody tried it, but I was just cleverer than most. Hickok himself would occasionally sneak looks at the discard in a poker game, what they called the “deadwood.” You couldn’t tell what a man was holding by that means, but you could learn a good deal by seeing what he throwed away. Therefore the practice was frowned on to the degree that if you was caught at it, you could get your head blown off. Except that Hickok usually played cards with men who was afraid of him.

So he didn’t stand on no firmer moral ground than me, and in addition, he was talking about fairness, but he had no idea of how I cheated him, was prosecuting me for murder without a corpus delicti. I tell this so you won’t have too hard an opinion of me when you hear what followed.

The next moment, I seen a wagon coming way up the street, as yet too far for the man driving it likely to realize what we was about, but he would within another hundred yards. I had moved my position so it lay due west of Wild Bill, which meant the rising sun was just above his head and consequently shining at my eyes. Ordinarily, I would have reached to pull down the brim of my planter’s hat, but facing a man like Hickok you don’t make the most innocent move.

So I commenced to squint. “You claim I am a cheat, do you?” I asks.

“That is right,” says he.

“And a liar?”

“Yes you are.”

I says: “I want to lower my hatbrim against the sun. I’m a-going to use my left hand.”

“Make it real slow,” he says, and hooks his thumbs into that red sash just forward of the white gun-butts on both sides.

My left hand crawled upwards like a caterpillar on a wall, caught the brim, and depressed it an inch. Then I turned my palm forward and flung open my fingers.

At the same time I went for my gun with my right hand. For a particle of a second I didn’t know what Wild Bill was doing; if you remember, he had trained me to concentrate on myself at the instant of action. So I didn’t rightly see him draw, but I sure saw the muzzle of his Colt’s spit lead and smoke directly at me.

CHAPTER 22 Bunco and Buffalo

I SURELY WOULD HAVE BEEN KILLED had I not employed a trick.

I caught the sun in my mirror-ring and reflected its glare into Hickok’s eyes, then dived to the ground. Though momentarily blinded, he drew as efficiently as always and sent two shots a-roaring through the space occupied by my head a scant instant before. But he couldn’t see nothing but green spots for a time, I reckon, for he next lowered his sixguns and stood there blinking. He looked right pathetic, now that I think of it, for all his six foot of dressed deerskin, trimmed with fur.

I laid quite safe there in the street, under his fire, but I daren’t speak a word on account of he could then have sighted on the sound of my voice. I had my own pistol out, and could have killed the great Wild Bill at that point and gone down in history for it.

Well, the moment of silence wasn’t any longer in reality than the moment of gunfire, and then Bill says: “All right, hoss, you whipped me again. Blast away.” I don’t answer. He says: “I tell you you better fire, because in a second I’m going to kill you if you don’t.”

That fellow with the wagon had pulled to the side of the street and crawled under his vehicle, still several blocks distant. But two shots wasn’t enough to wake anybody out of bed in them days, especially that early of a morning, so we as yet did not have no other audience so far as I knowed.

“You trying to play me for a fool?” says Bill, right exasperated, and he sent three more hunks of lead blowing through the air that I had lately vacated, then does that so-called border switch, the flying transfer of his guns. And his vision cleared some by now, so I guess he could make out I was laying on the ground, and he come over and prodded me with his boot and says: “Oh, I got you anyway,” taking me for dead and wounded. I laid there with my eyes closed.

Then he says: “I’m sorry, hoss. But it was fair, wasn’t it? I taught you, didn’t I? And now I’m going to carry you over to the doc, and if you are dead I’ll buy you a nice funeral.”

I figured by now he would have put away his gun, so as he bent over to pick me up, I come to life and shoved my pistol into his nose.

“Are you satisfied?” I asks. “I could have killed you ten times by now.”

Living his type of life, he didn’t have much energy to spare for astonishment. He squinted and backed up with his hands in the air. Then he let them down slowly and laughed a huge guffaw.

“Hoss,” he says, “you are the trickiest little devil I have ever run across. You know there are a couple of hundred men who would give all they owned to get a clear shot at Wild Bill Hickok, and you throw it away.”

He was laughing, but I reckon somewhere deep he was actually offended, such was his idea of himself. He would rather I had killed him than take pains to show I was basically indifferent to the fact of his existence so long as I could protect my own hide.

He tried one more thing to pry from me an admission that I was fascinated by him. He says: “I guess you can go about now saying how you put a head on Wild Bill Hickok.”

I says: “I’ll never mention it.” And I have kept my word from that day to this. I wasn’t going to give him no free advertisement of any kind. That was the trouble with them long-haired darlings like him and Custer: people talked about them too much.

His mustache drooped in disappointment, but he laughed again to keep up the hearty front, and he says: “I’m going over to Abilene to be the marshal. If you ever get over that way, hoss, why I’ll be proud to buy you a drink. But damn if I’ll ever play poker with you again.”

He shakes with me. I don’t know that I have mentioned that his hands was right small for a man his size, and his feet as well-as little as my own, almost. Then he turned and walked away down the street, straight as a die and certainly not swaying, yet with that hair hanging down his back and the long buckskin tunic descending almost to his knees like a dress, I was reminded of a real tall girl.

I stayed in Kansas City all the summer of ’71 and continued to earn my and Amelia’s living at the poker table and continued to cheat and was finally caught a time or two at it and shot once in the calf of the leg by a fellow, but it wasn’t permanently damaging, being only a derringer, and on another occasion a man took a knife after me, and I had to shoot him in the hand.

Anyway, after a few such incidents, I commenced to get a bad reputation. It got more difficult to find people to play cards with, and once I did have a game, I was watched close. If I played with any of them other able practitioners of the violent arts that was in K.C. that summer-Jack Gallagher, say, or Billy Dixon-you can be damn certain I kept my nose clean: for the more you know about gunfighting, the more respect you have for those to whom it is a specialty.

Little Amelia’s spending grew to wondrous proportions. I come back to the hotel one day and found a grand piano, made of mahogany, in our parlor-room, and along with it some elderly German gentleman with a beard and eyeglasses, come from St. Louie along with the instrument to tune it and give lessons in the playing thereof. Not only did I owe for the piano and the shipping costs, but also for this individual’s wages and his room and board-so far as he was concerned, in perpetuity, I suppose, for though in time Amelia might learn to play unassisted, the instrument would need tuning for the rest of its life.

I never did figure out whether or not he was a confidence man, but he seemed a real German all right, and sure knowed his music, except it was hard as the devil to get the bastard to play any piece as such and not just the scales over and over, in the course of which he’d get out his set of tuning forks and monkey about with the wires and hammers.

The whole bill was well into four figures, though I don’t recall the precise sum, for I blacked out when I saw it. However, when I recovered from the shock, I was really kind of proud of Amelia for her initiative. Seems she had just got the address of the piano manufacturer, sent them a letter on the stationery of the hotel saying send your best model, and by God if they never, without even a deposit, upriver from St. Louie along with that German. Lucky for me, he didn’t care nothing for the nature of his accommodations, being a pure fanatic for his music, so I had him bunk down on a cot in the corner of my bedroom, and that was all right with him, and he lived on sausage and rye bread, when he remembered to eat at all, so I saved a little that way.

I must say though that Amelia never did learn to play the piano well. That was the one thing she did awkward, and the result wasn’t much more tuneful than had a cat got to walking on the keys. Used to drive the professor crazy, and he’d storm and yell and tear his beard, and once I recall when she was attacking a particular exercise for the ninety-ninth time and making the same mistake at every instance, the German cried like a baby.

After a couple months, Amelia come to me and says: “Uncle Jack, do you mind if I send the piano away? It has grown to be a dreadful bore.” That’s the way she talked now, sort of like an English person, with her mouth made small and sending the words through her nose. Sure classy it was.

And of course I agreed, for I wanted her to be happy, so I bought the German a return passage, a loaf of bread, and a hunk of cheese, and I hired some brawny fellows to take the piano out and crate it up and put it upon a riverboat back to St. Louie. But as it happened that boat got into a race with another craft, which they was always doing in them days, and fired up so high its boilers blowed and the son of a bitch burned right down to the waterline, the piano with it. I still owed something like $930 on that instrument, and was the frequent recipient of threatening correspondence on the subject, followed by duns wearing derby hats and carrying various types of documentation: dispossess papers and all, and when they found there wasn’t nothing to reclaim, they believed I ought to be imprisoned for it, but a lawyer I hired worked out some arrangement by which I would pay them fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life, so they eased off, and the lawyer charged me only two hundred dollars for his services.

And this at a time when I couldn’t get nobody to play poker with me. The hotel bill was run way up high again, the dress shops was sending statements around, and I owed the hairdresser, the livery stable, and two restaurants. Then too, Amelia was stuck on this idea of gaining musical accomplishment, so the next thing we had to replace that German and his piano was a huge woman with a chest on her that would have made Dolly look tubercular. She taught singing and claimed to be Italian, late of the opera in a place called Milano, according to her story: Signorina Carmella. She could sing all right, so it might have been true. Under a full head of steam she would crack every tumbler in our rooms, and when she tackled the scales we’d get complaints from guests as far away as the fourth floor rear.

So it was just as well she was drunk most of the time, for then she’d drop her bulk on the sofa and stay right quiet while giving the beat to Amelia with a fat finger stacked with cheap rings and after a while hiccup once or twice and fall dead asleep. Then I had my choice of leaving her to sleep it off, which might take hours-for which I was charged at the rate of three dollars per-or waking her up, at which moment she would clutch at me under the illusion I was some intimate acquaintance of hers called Vincenzo. This amused Amelia no end.

As to my niece’s talent for singing, however, I am afraid it proved in no respect superior to her gift at the piano, though Signorina Carmella, unlike that German, would have been the last to admit it, I reckon with her fees in mind. It was funny to me that with such a melodious speaking voice as Amelia had developed, she would sing like a crow rather than a lark; but I guess there ain’t no connection. I didn’t think the worse of her for it. I even approved of her indomitable ambition to be musical, but when she and the Signorina announced that they figured she was ready to hire a hall and give a recital, well, I didn’t want my dear little relative to be mobbed by a crowd of irate ticket buyers after she got out one song, but I knowed that would sure happen unless we could scratch up an audience of deaf persons. So, for the first time, I says no.

Amelia didn’t cry or scream about it, she just quietly fell ill, wouldn’t eat nothing for several days, and when I come into her room, give me a sad sweet smile, her wan little hands lying still upon the coverlet, and I seen she would probably die before her time unless I relented, for she had that romantic Crabb streak in her. So at length I says O.K. and rented a hall from some lodge, had programs printed, and got some boys to go about the respectable part of town giving away tickets, for it was no use trying to sell them, and the night of the recital, I loaded up a double-barreled shotgun and took a conspicuous seat down front in case of trouble.

But I hadn’t had to worry, for only six people come, and Amelia was so nervous she hardly noticed the audience, and the Signorina, who accompanied her upon a harmonium, had belted the vino a good deal beforehand and fell off the stool a couple times and we had more difficulty in propping her upright than with any protests from the crowd.

As I recall it, it only cost me five dollars to get a favorable review printed in next day’s newspaper, for journalists in them days was notoriously underpaid. However, that was the only bargain I got: I owed for the hall, the rented harmonium, the printer, and of course the Signorina for her services and the piano stool she broke.

But little Amelia sure got satisfaction from her concert and bought ten or twenty copies of the paper with that commendatory notice and made sure everybody around the hotel knowed it was her; so I had no regrets though my financial obligations was growing to a magnitude not far this side of gigantic. Whereas my expectations was nil, so far as poker went, for it had now reached late August and them buffalo hunters was a-leaving for the range to start their new season, so soon there wasn’t anybody left in K.C. to get up a game with, even provided that they would have played with me, which many was now disinclined to, anyhow.

Now what I intended to do was to hunt buffalo myself, for in one season from September to March a good man could clear two-three thousand dollars in hides, but to do that you had to go into it like a real business, which meant you must have a stake to start on. You needed a big Sharps buffalo rifle with a supply of heavy-caliber ammunition, a wagon and animals to pull it, and then you required a man to do the skinning, for no self-respecting hunter would touch a knife to the beasts he shot, I don’t know why: just snobbery, I reckon, but that’s the way it was. It might sound funny, but buffalo hunters considered themselves a type of aristocracy. Anyway, I just name the barest essentials. Most of the well-known hunters carried along a team of ten or twelve men, including wagon drivers, cook, fellow to tend the stock, etc., and an arsenal of weapons, on account of when you fired that Sharps a number of times its barrel would overheat, and you couldn’t wait for it to cool while the herd might get the smell of blood and stampede.

Suffice it to say my problem was solved by running into a man called Allardyce T. Meriweather, in one of the drinking establishments of Kansas City, whence I had repaired one afternoon to ponder over a beaker of the grape. Just thinking of him brings to mind his type of phraseology.

A man steps up to me while I am standing at the brass rail, and intones the following.

“Sir,” he says, “I know you will pardon my forwardness when I say that as the only two gentlemen among this clientele of ruffians, it is my opinion that we should make common cause.”

“Pardon?” I says.

“Exactly,” says he, and introduces himself.

“Crabb,” he says when he has my handle. “Is that of the Philadelphia, New York, or Boston branch of the family?”

Now I thought he was one of them Eastern swells come out West for his weak lungs or whatnot, which a tour of the prairies was supposed to correct; and right then, bothered about money as I was, it annoyed me that this here cake-eater could roam around at his ease, all expenses paid, whereas I was denied a dishonest living, so I says to him: “Philadelphia.” What the hell did I care whether he believed me?

“Ah,” he says. “My acquaintance, I fear, was with the New York and Boston lines.” I haven’t yet said what he looked like: well, he was the middle-size facing you, but in profile he was developing quite the potgut. He was clean-shaven with a blue jaw and a flabby mouth, and he wore or carried a deal of gewgaws: diamond stickpin, lapel flower, watch chain with dependent ornamentation, gold-headed cane, doeskin gloves, and the like. I reckon he was around my age.

“Which was your university?” he says. “Harvard or Yale?”

“The former,” says I.

He says: “Mine was the latter, but I had a host of acquaintance, nay, friends of the bosom, up at Cambridge in the early sixties, which must have been your years there. Did you know Montgomery Brear or William W. Whipple or Bartley “Doc” Platt, all of the Indian Pudding Club? Or Chester “Chet” Larkin; he was a Musk Ox. Or Mansard Fitch, who belonged to the Kangaroos?”

“No, I never,” I says. “I was an Antelope.”

“Well, sir,” says he, “let me shake your hand again on that. I don’t require a further bona fide. I expect every gentleman in the organized world knows of the exclusivity of the Antelopes. It is no wonder then, sir, that I was able to pick you out of the crowd: breeding will tell.”