On Thursday morning, Aunt Tilly insisted Burnie attend school. She reprimanded Dorothea for allowing him to play hooky the day before.
After breakfast Auntie spirited the lady of the house up to the nursery and laid down severe instructions to spend the day in silent observation of Sissy and Fanny’s re-training.
Left blissfully free to do the job they came to do, Jemmy and Hal set off on a mission. They sallied forth to cover pre-event festivities. When the Wild West blew into town, each and every village, burg, and city celebrated. City fathers congratulated themselves for bringing in the show and for bringing in free-spending showgoers.
On the Third Street trolley, Hal told Jemmy about his photo excursion of the day before. He had ridden Burnie’s bicycle west on Broadway toward Kansas City to photograph one of the huge posters pasted on the side of a barn.
“An old man fixing fence told me Cody’s advance men held a bill-posting contest one Saturday about six weeks ago.”
Jemmy jotted down the specifics in her notebook.
“The winning team could put up a thirty-two-sheet poster in ten minutes flat. He said a feller working alone would take at least a half hour to unfold and paste-up, and another half hour to paper a billboard. Each one of those big posters costs four dollars—and Buffalo Bill bought a thousand for this season alone.”
“Four thousand dollars on nothing but paper.” Hal shook his head at Colonel Cody’s spendthrift ways.
He drew a rectangle in the air to show Jemmy the size of a single lithograph. “That’s the size of each one of those poster pieces—two and a half feet by three and a half feet. The fence feller seemed to know all about them. He owned the barn you see, so he had the right to know everything about the pictures.
“He said printers had to lay them down just perfect four times—one for each color. He said Buffalo Bill spent a hundred thousand dollars on posters every year. Can you imagine? Enough money to buy twenty grand mansions in St. Louis.”
Hal gushed out information too fast for Jemmy to write down. Her usually neat letters now sprawled big and loopy in her notebook.
“If I could take some really good pictures, do you think Cody would use them on some posters? I’d be famous. I’d have enough work so I wouldn’t have to put up with you.”
Jemmy stuck out her tongue.
“Just wanted to see if you were listening.”
“I’m listening. Go on.”
“The man said two train cars of advance men came in town a couple of weeks ago to rent advertising space and to stick up thousands of smaller posters. They also had to get parade permits and order food for the workers and the livestock and such.”
Jemmy had stopped taking notes.
Hal’s voice burst with impatience. “Say, are you listening to a single thing I’m saying?”
She surreptitiously snapped off her pencil point, then held it up. “My pencil lead broke.” She handed the yellow stick to him as she balanced her satchel on her knee to unfasten a strap. “I’ll see if I can find another. Whittle this one with your pocket knife, will you?”
“You might say ‘Please.’ ”
Jemmy could tell Hal intended to be touchy.
She batted her eyelashes at him, “Will you please sharpen my pencil, Mr. Dwyer? I would be eternally in your debt.”
Hal gave a disgusted sigh, but dutifully opened his pocket knife. “Why don’t you get one of them mechanical pencils—the kind you stick more lead in if it breaks.”
Jemmy could be touchy, too. “I’m so grateful for the advice. It’s the very first thing I’ll buy with the million dollars I’ll soon make writing articles for the Illuminator. A mechanical pencil—solid gold—on a lon-n-ng gold chain to wear around my neck.”
In silence, Hal sent gouges of yellow paint, wood, and graphite into the street. Jemmy could see this was apt to be a trying day. He handed her a pencil sharpened to a fare-thee-well, but barely half as long as when she gave it to him.
By the time they reached Ohio Street, the pair had calmed down. Neither apologized. Jemmy tried to get her bearings while Hal checked his wooden case for broken plates.
Hal hoisted the tripod to his shoulder with the camera head sticking over his back. “Where to?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute.”
Hal set the tripod back on the board sidewalk and put one impatient hand on one impatient hip. Jemmy lifted her head and sauntered into the druggist shop without gracing Hal with so much as a backward glance.
The shop smelled pleasantly of camphor and vinegar. Jemmy assumed folks would gather at the courthouse. She asked the druggist where to find it.
He chuckled. “Cain’t miss it. Big-time Missouri senator out speechifyin’ today. Walk out the door and follow your nose to the right. You must be blind, you poor thang. ’Taint more than a block away. You can see it from the front winder, but you got to open your eyes first.”
As red crept up her cheeks, she half lied and half told the truth, “Thank you, kind sir. Being nearsighted as well as deaf in one ear is such a burden. I hope you never suffer similar disabilities.”
The man cast his eyes down in a suitably contrite gesture.
Jemmy brushed out the door past Hal, who hastened to take up his burdens. After walking a short block past storefronts, they paused to survey Courthouse Square from across Ohio Street.
Pettis County’s civic pride rose aloft in the midst of green lawn and white graveled walkways. Its lantern tower soared twenty feet or more above the second story. The building loomed altogether more prepossessing than Jemmy had expected.
The two St. Louisans were properly impressed by the Courthouse, a handsome Italianate edifice of gray limestone with columned porticoes between pavilions at each corner.
With elections six weeks away, a bombastic politician gesticulated wildly from the west steps as he stumped to win office.
Jemmy could hear a few words as he harangued a crowd.
“I promise you if I am elected . . .”
Jemmy had a good idea of what the politician meant. He made campaign promises he would forget as soon as the vote count became final.
Hal set up his camera to memorialize the scene. Before he could get a plate from his trunk, commotion broke out in the politician’s audience. Reporter and photographer dashed across the street to capture the action.
They narrowly missed being run down by the Ohio streetcar. The conductor clanged his warning bell and shook his fist. Hal returned a shrug for the conductor’s pains.
Jemmy tried to make sense of the melee. Apparently, some disgruntled soul had lobbed a brown missile—perhaps a clod of dirt or a batch of something even less fragrant—at the speaker. The crowd made little attempt to contain its snickers and guffaws. Pale-skinned ladies under wide-brimmed hats and lace parasols hid their giggles behind white-gloved hands.
The speaker sputtered as his face turned red. He evidently failed to see humor in the event. He sicced his ward-heelers on the knee slappers. Naturally, they protected themselves. The onrush of the politician’s henchmen led to a brawl. The set-to sent ladies scattering like cottonwood fluff. They hid behind trees surrounding the square.
Seeing females flee waved a red flag at every red-blooded man within shouting distance. They came a-running and quite happily joined the fracas until the whole west lawn became a boxing ring.
Hal set up his camera in record time. He was so intent on capturing the action, he trod on Jemmy’s foot without offering a single word of apology.
Something else caught Jemmy’s eye. A show wagon had drawn a crowd to the street behind the courthouse. She tugged at Hal’s sleeve to tell him where she planned to go. He brushed her hand away as if it were a pesky mosquito.
Jemmy left the courthouse lawn with a single backward glance. Hal’s head and shoulders disappeared under the black cloth flap of the camera.
She examined the scene in the street behind the courthouse as she walked.
A tall man with skin the color of an oak table stood behind a plank on two sawhorses. He peddled brown bottles of Kickapoo joy juice to the masses.
Jemmy knew those bottles were more likely to give the user a hangover than a cure. Here was just another of the many tricksters who found a semirespectable way to sell liquor to rubes.
Emblazoned on the wagon’s side, a placid Indian sat cross-legged on a painted blanket. The painted Indian smoked a sacred pipe by the orange flames of a painted campfire. Arching over his head were the words ELIXIR OF THE RED MAN—KICKAPOO SAGWA—TO PURIFY THE BLOOD.
On a drop-leaf stage in front of the canvas sat a real live Indian maiden. She wore a beaded headband with a feather in it. Multi-colored beads depicting corn stalks decorated her fringed buckskin dress.
The plump dark girl sat cross-legged on a pile of animal furs. She looked heavenward as she plaited her dark straight hair in fat pigtails and tied them with buckskin thongs.
A banner hanging from the stage boasted the legend CURES ALL DISEASES OF STOMACH, LIVER & KIDNEYS, and in smaller letters, SALMASIUS SCALAGER, ESQ. PROP.
Naturally, when a better show erupted in front of the courthouse, the hawker lost his audience. With a bang of his fist on the plank where he displayed his wares, Salmasius Scalager, Esq. pulled the Indian girl to her feet in mid-braid. The pair left an assistant to guard the merchandise while they disappeared behind the canvas into the wagon.
The assistant interested Jemmy. The fellow had an uncommonly swarthy face, but something in his slender frame seemed familiar. As she walked toward him, she became more and more convinced she had seen this same person at the Maple Leaf Club and on the train.
The story she sought might be locked inside a person counting bottles on a board not ten feet away.
She struck up a conversation. “If you want to go on the minstrel stage, I recommend burnt cork. I understand professionals use cork to blacken their faces.”
When he jerked his head up, Jemmy had to bite her lip to keep from laughing. His face was the color of acorns with globs of other colors added. It looked as though someone had chewed tobacco and used his face for a spittoon several dozen times.
In spite of nervous flutters of his eyes, he put up a good front. He gave her a quizzical stare and said, “Ho mo mo jo.”
Jemmy laughed. “ ‘Homomojo’ to you, too. Do you really think some brown muck on your face is going to fool anybody into thinking you’re an Indian—a blue-eyed Indian?”
He wavered, then turned to go inside the wagon.
Jemmy raised her voice. “I would stay here and talk to me if I were a train robber who had been found out by a St. Louis journalist.”
He appeared more curious than frightened when he turned back to talk to her. “How could you tell it was me?”
Jemmy folded her arms and produced a sarcastic grin. “Let me think. Who would choose to look the way you do? Would it be a handsome young man seeking a pretty companion during the excitement of the Wild West show coming to town? No, I think it would be a low-down miserable excuse for a crook hiding his bruises under a thick coat of whatever it is you have on your face.” She tapped her jaw with an index finger. “That’s what I think.”
“Did I ever harm you? I tried to be nice to you—took you to hear Scott Joplin play.”
“After you tried to rob me.”
“You think I tried to rob you?”
“You tried to rob Aunt Tilly. You would have robbed me next. The only reason you didn’t rob me was an old lady stopped you before you had the chance.”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about. I never planned to rob you.”
“I suppose you were going to propose marriage to me.”
“No, but I planned to kiss you.”
Jemmy batted her eyes in disbelief. “Kiss me?”
His injured tone said she must have hit a sore spot. “I don’t think that’s funny. You’ve heard of Black Bart, the Gentleman Bandit of California. I don’t see why I couldn’t be the Kissing Bandit of Missouri.”
“Oh, you’re the infamous Bussing Bandit.” She put the back of her hand to her forehead like a frail heroine in a melodrama. “Shall I swoon now or later?”
“Are you going to turn me in?”
“Why don’t you turn yourself in? You’re in the right place for it.”
She pointed to a redbrick building behind the show wagon. In bold letters the sign over the front door read PETTIS COUNTY JAIL. Underneath in smaller letters were the words J. C. WILLIAMS, SHERIFF.
The skinny crook opened his eyes wide. His pupils bulged like robins’ eggs stuck in a loaf of pumpernickel bread.
Jemmy stopped her banter as the expression on the boy’s face told her the show wagon’s location behind the courthouse was no accident. Scalager had parked in front of the jail not for business business, but for monkey business. She stood stock still in thought.
He urged between clenched teeth, “Well?”
“I might turn you in . . . unless . . .”
“Unless what? What do you want?”
“Your story.”
“My story?”
“Why a nice boy, probably from a nice family of Missouri farmers, would become a dastardly outlaw.”
“Who says I’m a dastard?”
“I do.”
“I’ll have you know my mother and father were married in the Baptist Church in Sweet Springs.”
Jemmy giggled as she said, “The word you think I meant starts with a B. The word ‘dastard’—”
A voice interrupted from behind. “Damn me. You’re a cheeky piece. Calling a fellow names right to his face.”
She whirled around to see the acne-scabbed face of Marma-duke Koock.
“You might at least wait until he’s out of earshot. I shudder to think what you might be saying about me behind my back.”
She stood on tiptoe so she could be eye level with the disgusting fellow. “Mr. Koock, I wouldn’t bother talking behind your back. What I have to say to you I would say right out on the courthouse steps. I might even put it in the paper.”
As she turned on her heel and marched off, Jemmy muttered, “Why of all people did the Koock boy have to butt in when I was about to—”
A new realization stopped her in her tracks. Why, indeed? Why would he take it into his ugly head to speak to me? After all, he must know I was with Hal and Burnie when they dragged his sorry carcass out of the Maple Leaf Club.
Duke Koock had no reason at all to seek Jemmy’s company. In fact he had every reason to avoid it. She turned back. Both boys had disappeared. She scanned the street to discover their whereabouts. They had no time to go anywhere but behind the wagon or inside it.
She pondered the meaning of it all. Why does Duke hobnob with crooks? Why did criminals set up a medicine show wagon in the most unlikely place—right in front of the county jail?
Lost in thought, she walked toward the nearly deserted front steps of the courthouse. As she ambled toward the columns, she realized she had not seen Hal. She trudged up the steps to the portico and turned to survey the scene. Hal was gone. Gone were camera on tripod with black flap waving off the back. Gone was Hal’s wooden box full of glass plates.
Hands on hips, she tapped her toe in impatience. Where did that impossible freckle-face go?