18  

—AND RIDE THROUGH THE DOWNTOWN streets lined by a whooping crowd, with bands blaring and Fords backfiring and boys on bicycles wild as Cossacks, while simultaneously keeping track of Samuel Sandison and interviewing his Rough Rider cohorts, all of it without falling out of the saddle and killing myself, my hunch-playing editor might just as well have added to his instructions.

The Fourth of July began with the usual bangs, firecrackers going off in fusillades that added to my jumpy nerves. As parade time drew nearer, things got under way at the manse, with Sandison clomping around in his best cowboy boots, digging out his old leather chaps that shined from use and a pair of sharp-roweled spurs, and topping it all off with the Rough Rider hat. Thus assembled, he cocked a look to where I stood waiting on one foot and then the other, back and forth between dreading my horseback assignment and wanting to get it over with. “Am I seeing right? Are you going looking like an undertaker?”

Miffed, I protested that my blue serge suit, sober tie, and dove-gray vest marked me as a member of the press. “Besides, I bought a Stetson.”

“Bonnet on a rooster,” he wrote off my new hat, meanwhile lumbering to his library lair for what he said was the one last thing he needed.

He came out strapping on a gun belt with a six-shooter, the large old kind called a hog leg, in the holster.

I stared. “Where did that come from?”

“The Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut, where do you think?”

“I meant—is that a good idea? With Anaconda’s armed goons on hand? Isn’t carrying a gun possibly giving them an excuse to—”

“Morgan”—he rolled his eyes toward the bullet holes in the ceiling—“I am the one who got shot merely for hanging around with you, remember? I don’t want that to happen again. Nor,” this came with a full serving of growl and scowl, “do I necessarily want it to happen to you for hanging around with me, if some idiot with an old grudge decides to take it out on me and my riders. Anaconda or anyone else, this is to give them second thoughts.” The gun belt circling his girth like the equator, he rested his hand on the prominent handle of the Colt .45 as if it was a natural fit. “I have a reputation to uphold in this damn town,” he said, with all the austere dignity expected of the Butte public librarian. Then came the gleam of the Earl of Hell, reflected from his vigilante days. “More than one.”

•   •   •

Inasmuch as a good many of the Rough Riders shipped their own mounts in by boxcar, their encampment was down by the stockyards, where Sandison and I duly delivered ourselves by taxi before parade time. “You can just about bet most of them slept in a feather bed somewhere uptown,” he shrewdly guessed as we approached the camp, “then scuttled down here for a breakfast of beans around a campfire.” The cluster of weather-beaten tents carried the tang of both a military bivouac and a cattle roundup, as did the Rough Riders themselves, actually. Hip-sprung men of a certain type stood around fire circles talking in slow cadences and, likely as not, spitting tobacco juice onto the sizzling embers. I was itching to pull out my notepad and jot down just how their slouch hats and loosely knotted neckerchiefs—bandannas, I mentally corrected myself—and blue flannel uniform shirts made them look like exhibits from an earlier age. “A Frederic Remington museum diorama come to life,” was the phrase that suggested itself. But given the squints and odd looks aimed at Sandison and me as we passed through, him in his ranching getup of forty years ago and I in my city clothes and clean Stetson, I kept my reportorial materiel in my pocket.

There was a similar gang of blue-shirted figures ahead at the stockyards, some fence-sitting, some peering between corral poles to where horses were being wrangled with considerable commotion and dust. Lanky and akimbo and in some drawling world of their own, these hardened military cowhands or cowboy-soldiers did not look any friendlier than the set at the tents, so I felt compelled to ask Sandison a little tentatively, “Who will be our, ah, riding companions?”

“Who do you think,” he grunted in answer, stepping up his stride, his chaps flapping, as we neared the corral. “The James brothers.”

“Very funny, Sandy. I suppose Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang will be joining us later?”

“What’s funny about it?” Sandison huffed, giving me a look. “Leonard James and his kid brother, Claude, both rode for me on the ranch from the time they were green saddle punks. Had to teach the young scamps every blasted thing about cowboying.” He shook his head reminiscently. “Same with Tinsley, another pea in that pod.”

“Related to them, is he?” I took the implication to be.

“For crying out loud, Morgan, where do you get these ideas? He’s colored.”

I surrendered to the situation, whatever it was going to be, and simply stuck as close as possible while Sandison surveyed the dusty scene in the corral. He was grumbling, “I got carried away with that silly little war. Should never have let the three of them off the ranch to go fight Spaniards. Lost the whole batch to that old humbug, Buffalo Bill, afterward.”

My expression must have told him I was not keeping up with these particulars.

“The Wild West Show, dolt. After the charge up San Juan Hill and the tripe written by your colleague Cartwright”—he looked hard at me—“Bill Cody turned that cactus circus of his into Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.”

Ducking behind a corral post, I busily scribbled this down while Sandison went back to scanning the swirl of lasso-swinging wranglers and dodgy mounts.

“Heh.” The tone of that made me look up, right into those eyes the blue of glacier ice. “I don’t know about you,” although it hardly took a guess in this regard, “but I haven’t been on a horse since”—he gave me a complicit look—“that time with you.”

I swallowed hard. That excursion, in my first Butte chapter of life, had been an unforgettable one, in the valley to the west where his ranch once stretched from horizon to horizon. Not knowing what his intentions were, I had ridden in a sweat of fear as he led me to the hanging tree where his reputation as the Strangler had been earned. Where rustlers were strung up, vigilante style, by him and doubtless the same ranch hands we were to meet with today. His anguished words echoed in me yet. “What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executioner?” I am no stranger to redemption myself—possibly even a periodic visitor—but I had never witnessed a person turning his soul inside out as Samuel Sandison did that day. It all flooded back, overwhelming me again. And with that, my assignment, my presence, seemed out of place in his world of cowhands and cattle and horses and lasting consequences of decisions taken decades ago.

“Sandy,” I breathed out, “this is beyond me. I really don’t have any business intruding into your reunion with your riders, and I’ll just go back uptown and watch the parade from some convenient—”

Sandison held up a stopping hand. Casting his eyes to the heavens, he intoned, “God of fools, here is a newspaperman with an opportunity to ride with the men who made Theodore Roosevelt president of the United States, and he’s scared of a little thing like climbing on a horse. Take him now, his work on earth is done.”

Wounded, I muttered, “You don’t have to be like that about it. I’ll stay.”

“That’s better. I knew you had it in you, somewhere.” Scanning the horse-wrangling again, Sandison grunted with satisfaction. “Aha. Here come our cowboys.”

Indeed, out the corral gate and toward us came three riders, the ones on the outside of the triptych each leading a saddled horse, which, I realized with a tightening in the seat of my pants, must be the mounts for Sandison and myself.

“Good to see you again, boys,” drawled Sandison as they rode up to us.

“Sam,” the James brother introduced as Leonard acknowledged him, nodding an inch. The one called Claude, saving energy along with words, merely nodded half an inch. It was left to Tinsley, his smile a burst of enamel and gold in the dark face, to come out with, “How you been doing, boss?”

“Surviving,” the answer came as a heavy sigh, together with a weighty glance at me.

“Packing a Peacemaker these days?” Tinsley expressed the curiosity showing on all three Rough Riders, at Sandison’s prominent firearm. “Butte that tough a place?”

“You might be surprised,” Sandison responded in the same weary tone before indicating me again. “Morgan writes for the newspaper. He’s going to ride along with us and talk to you boys about your heroic exploits, heh, heh.”

Studying me for what seemed long moments, Leonard and Tinsley at last nodded; Claude did not make the effort. “Got horses for you,” Leonard said as though we might not have noticed the large animals standing practically atop us. “Prince and Blaze, from the show string. One of the boys in camp was gonna take whichever one you didn’t choose, Sam, but he’ll have to bum one somewhere else, looks like.”

“Pick a mount, Morgan.” Sandison’s booming generosity was no help. Other than the camels Grace and I posed on at the Sphinx to have our picture taken, I had not been astraddle an animal in recent times and would gladly have continued that way. In this situation, however, I was stuck with the fact that horsemanship of some degree was required. All I thought I knew about horses was ears. If the ears stood straight up, I reasoned, the equine was probably spirited. Prince was a well-named sorrel, high-headed and regal, with erect ears that twitched as though batting away flies. Spirited I did not want. That left Blaze, a bay-colored steed that appeared sleepily disinterested in us and our doings. Since the animal did not appear to be any ball of fire—more as if its flame had gone out—I was at the point of foolishly asking about its name when some fortunate tic of memory suggested that the splotch of white from the horse’s nostrils up to its languid ears was the sort called blaze face. “I’ll try this one,” I took the plunge.

“Let’s go, buckaroos,” said Sandison, swinging onto the sorrel with a painful groan before my foot even found the stirrup. Climbing as much as mounting, I scrambled into the saddle atop Blaze with the James brothers and Tinsley watching impassively, and we joined the ranks of blue-shirted Rough Riders prancing to where the parade was forming up at the west edge of the business district.

Half of Butte seemed to be there, milling into place to march down Broadway, the other half of the populace already lining the blocks ahead in joyous anticipation. The American Legionnaires at the very front in their doughboy outfits and earlier uniforms looked a bit staggered at the long, long line of marchers filling in behind them. American flags were everywhere, the air undulating with red, white, and blue. Right in with the unit of children in Uncle Sam and Miss Liberty costumes, I spotted Rab in command of our roughneck newsboys from the detention school; their newspaper bags were innocently turned inside out so the Thunder logotype could not be seen, and at their front, holding high the banner YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE, were Russian Famine on one end, giving his restlessness something to do, and on the other the angelic urchin Punky, doubtless to keep his hands out of people’s pockets.

Since horseback troupes best brought up the rear of the parade—“the manure matter,” Sandison gave all the explanation needed—we rode past innumerable contingents on the way to our position, the Daughters of the American Revolution in dowager ranks and the Grand Army of the Republic veterans lame but game beneath battle flags from Gettysburg and Antietam and other hallowed fields of conflict, and then the Hill began to make its showing, the Miners Band glorious in the green of its uniforms and the gold and silver of its instruments, the blocks-long files of miners who had served their country headed by Jared, more leaderly than ever in his Army uniform, giving me a wink of confidence as Blaze and I passed, succeeded shortly by ear-to-ear grins from Griff and Hoop in the Welsh honor guard.

But then a sight I could have done without, as we passed the Irish and Cornish and kilted Scots and approached the Italian segment of miners. The flag-bearer of their red, white, and green alongside the Stars and Stripes was none other than the damnable dynamiter, Giorgio Mazzini, doubtless chosen for height, might, and proud bearing. Why oh why couldn’t Grace’s current boarder have been some ordinary Mustache Pete instead of a Roman god?

Fortunately or not, I had little time to brood on that. “Fall in!” came the call from the gray-bearded captain of the Rough Riders, and we accordingly turned our horses and waited for the Miners Band to strike up first “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the union anthem. Impelled by a certain kind of frown from Sandison, I managed to squeeze Blaze and me between the Jameses’ mounts, the better to interview the brothers—or at least the one capable of speech—while we rode. At last came the first stirring notes of “The Song of the Hill,” the long line of marchers accordioned into motion, and we were under way.

It took me a block or so to figure out how best to handle reins, pencil, and notepad all at the same time, but finally I felt ready and, turning to Leonard, casually asked over the clop-clop of our horses’ hooves: “How is Buffalo Bill these days?”

“Still dead.”

I mentally kicked myself; the name of P. T. Barnum, long deceased, was on a circus apparently for eternity, wasn’t it. “His, ah, showmanship cannot be interred with him, of course,” I hastily accorded promotional immortality to William F. Cody as well. “I meant, how is the Wild West Show and—” I peeked at my earlier notation “—Congress of Rough Riders of the World faring?”

About the same as practically forever, Leonard allowed as how. “Can’t print tickets fast enough.” As I listened to this slow testimonial, it dawned on me how veteran he and the other two were, in all senses of the word. Up close, the seamed faces of Sandison’s “young scamps” were a reminder that more than two decades had passed since Teddy Roosevelt rallied men like these in the conquest of Cuba. Surreptitiously I wrote down crow’s-feet around the eyes while trying to think what a mounted correspondent ought to ask next. “Mmm, what is the most memorable place you’ve ever been with the Buffalo Bill show?”

Leonard considered the matter for so long I wondered if he had forgotten he was expected to answer. At last, though, he drawled, “St. Pete was a humdinger. Wouldn’t you say, Claude?” The other James brother inclined his head a fraction.

“St. Petersburg? What a coincidence! I remember it fondly myself.” My confidence as a roving reporter went up a peg, with my interview subject and me in concord about that burgeoning but oh so pleasant Florida city, where during our travel year Grace first dipped a toe into an ocean, the tropical breeze through the palms like a murmur of benediction on newlyweds. My sigh holding volumes about those balmy days and nights, I put the next question: “In the winter, I hope?”

“As wintry as it gets in St. Pete,” came the taciturn response. “Right, Claude?”

“Isn’t that climate something.” Thinking of the proximity to Cuba and the heroics of the Rough Riders in the so-called splendid little war, I asked, “Did performing there have a different feel to you, with that sort of audience?”

“You said a mouthful. People about went crazy,” the talker of the James brothers rationed out. “The big cheese hisself was there, gave ol’ Bill a toad-stabber of some kind to welcome us to town.”

Before I could ask the exact nature of the ceremonial sword, presumably presented by the mayor, the tale picked up speed.

“We put on the show like we usually done, riding and whooping and shooting in the air and making that San Juan Hill charge. Do that right at the audience, hell for leather, and it gets their attention, for sure. But those St. Peterkins, as we called ’em, was standing on their seats and yelling their heads off at every little thing we did. Never saw nothing like it, hey, Claude?”

“It must have been quite an experience,” I furnished as encouragement to keep him talking and his silent sibling nodding, meanwhile writing furiously on my pad and somehow manipulating the reins enough to remind drowsy Blaze that I still was a passenger, and also trying to keep a concerned eye on Sandison where he rode, favoring his wounded side by leaning so sharply in the saddle, it looked like his horse was tipping over. When he wasn’t wincing with pain, he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, patting his gun butt meaningfully whenever some old-timer in the crowd yelped out, “String ’em up, Sam!” or some other tribute. And the Rough Riders proved to be a popular feature as well, met by the chant that first greeted their 1898 military triumph, “The boys in blue always come through!” as we progressed. Somewhere in back of us, a Rough Rider regularly sounded the blood-stirring bugle call that echoed the famous charge up San Juan Hill. The role of mounted correspondent beginning to fit me, I brightly posed a next question to my interviewee: “So, was there anything else particularly memorable about St. Petersburg?”

Leonard thought back some more, glancing to Claude for help, evidently the telepathic sort. “Well, yeah, there was. Before we pulled out of town, people was dancing the kickapoo, right and left.”

“Excuse me? The—?”

“The Indians we had with us in the show at the time was Kickapoos, from back east around Chicago. They’d do their war dance, and the St. Peterkins had never seen nothing like it, had they. So next thing, people was dancing something like it in the nightclubs. Called it the kickapoo.”

The vision of Floridians cavorting like savages was mildly entertaining but I couldn’t see how to use it, and moved on to other questions about taking the Wild West et cetera from city to city. Before long, however, the parade was winding through the heart of the business district and I hadn’t yet interviewed Tinsley, so I turned Blaze to one side to let the James brothers pass, profusely thanking Leonard for his observations. He shrugged as though it had been nothing. It was the other one, Claude, who half turned in his saddle and laconically said over his shoulder:

“Like they say in St. Pete, da svidanya.”

Cursing myself up and down and Armbrister for good measure, I frantically flipped through my notepad and began trying to recast my supposed reportorial notes from an imagined setting of sand beaches and whispering palms to the snowy clime of Cossacks and czar.

With my haphazard grip on the reins during this, Blaze came close to joining the crowd on the sidewalk, before Sandison reached over to catch the bridle and steer us back into the parade. He gave me The Look. “I hate to interrupt genius at work, but you can’t turn things over to the horse, Morgan.”

Protesting weakly that I had merely been collecting my thoughts, I was stopped in mid-sentence by what lay ahead, past the lopsided outline of Sandison. We were approaching the public library, closed for the day, its gray granite edifice a composition of light and shadow, with a wash of sunshine on the magnificent entranceway and Gothic tower and accompanying balcony. There, alone on the balcony, Grace was poised, watching the parade like a solitary queen.

“What—why—how did she get up there?”

“Ay?” Spotting her, Sandison tipped his slouch hat as though gallantry were his middle name, and she waved back while somehow managing not to acknowledge my existence. “The poor woman needed a place to watch from, on her own the way she is. Just because you and she are on the outs, you can’t expect her to live under a rock, can you?”

That fairly closely described how I envisioned her existence without me, matching mine without her. Swallowing hard, I made no answer but tried to keep my eyes from meeting her watching ones, there on the snug balcony where the pair of us had spectated the parade in the golden time of our courtship.

“Back to work,” I croaked to Sandison as my estranged wife, stately as a ship’s figurehead, passed from view behind us. Mustering myself, I managed to navigate my drifty animal into position alongside Tinsley and his mount.

“I hope ol’ Leonard and Claude didn’t fill you too full of hooey afore I get a chance to,” he greeted me with a radiant smile. As wiry and talkative as the James boys were long on height and short on words, Tinsley had the nonchalant ease of a veteran interviewee. First name, Alonzo. Originally a buffalo soldier, which was to say, he explained at some length, a member of the colored cavalry formed after the Civil War and sent to the Southwest “to fight Apaches and Comanches and whatnot.” I wrote as steadily as he volunteered information. “Soldiering is what brung me to Montana, see. Afore I latched on riding for the boss there at the Triple S, I finished out my Tenth Cavalry ’listment as a corporal at Fort Assinniboine, up by Canada. Company C, that was,” he leaned back in his saddle reminiscently, “under ol’ Lieutenant Pishing.”

Conscientious reporter that I was trying to will myself into, I requested, “Would you spell that, please?”

“A-S-S—”

“No, your commanding officer’s name.”

“Lemme think. P . . . E . . . R . . . S-H-I-N-G.”

I stared at those letters as written down. “I don’t suppose his first name and middle initial could possibly be John J.”

“Yup, that’s the gentleman. Ol’ Black Jack, he was known as, from officering with us dark-complexioned troopers.”

I felt light-headed, and not just from the elevation of being horseback. “Corporal Tinsley. Alonzo. Are you telling me you have ridden with both a president of the United States and the supreme commander of the American forces in the Great War?”

Gold teeth flashed. “That’s about what it comes down to. Don’t know why I’m such an attraction.”

My elation at this newsworthy element of his life in the saddle was about to receive another boost. Just then we happened to be approaching the Daily Post building, a virtual front-row seat for watching the parade, and up there in a second-floor window, unmistakable among the spectating heads, was the Cutlass himself. Big as life, Cutthroat Cartwright was surveying the parade scene with that superior air of a predator looking over the pickings. My eye caught his, and he stared unremittingly as I cantered past with the Rough Riders. I could tell, he knew perfectly well what I was up to. I resisted the impulse to rub it in by tipping my Stetson to him, but my canary-swallowing smile probably did the job.

Activated anew by the smell of competition, I got busy probing Tinsley’s memory of his famous cavalry commanders. Pershing as a prairie hussar, for instance? Cool under combat as his famous icy demeanor would imply, was he? “Can’t rightly speak to that,” my buffalo soldier informant surprised me. “Combat is stretching it some, as to what Fort Assinniboine duty amounted to. It was more like herding Indians. See, ’bout all we did was scoop some loose Crees over the line into Canada. They’d get kicked out of there, we’d round ’em up, mostly women and kids, get ’em in a line of march and scoop ’em back across the border. Anyways, that happened just a number of times. Wasn’t none of it what you would call real cavalry fighting.” Chuckling, he waved his hat to cheering onlookers high in the Finlen Hotel. “’Course, San Juan wasn’t, either.”

My pencil jabbed through the paper. “Wha . . . what did you say?”

Blandly he recited that the San Juan battle had been no kind of a cavalry charge and he ought to know, he was there.

“But”—I twitched the reins so agitatedly that Blaze turned his head to see what my trouble was—“I was under the impression—”

“—the Rough Riders made some kind of yippy-yi-yay cavalry charge up San Juan Hill?” Tinsley gave an amused snort. “It beats me, but I guess there must’ve been newspapers somewhere that wrote it up that way—the ones Buffalo Bill read, at least.” He smiled slyly about the fake charge that thrilled audiences of the Wild West Show, then sobered. “Nothing against your line of work, unnerstand, but reporters was a dime a dozen in the Cuba campaign, and some of ’em worth about that, too. The one tagging along with us colored troops was so drunk most of the time, he didn’t know if we was afoot or horseback.” Would that it could have happened to Cecil Cartwright, I despaired, instead of his career-making dispatch under fire.

Dropping his voice, Tinsley glanced across to where Sandison was holding forth to the James brothers about something. “Anyways, Claude and Leonard don’t much like being teased about it, but we was all dismounts in Cuba. Yup, that’s right,” he responded to my jaw dropping further, “on foot in spite of being the First Volunteer Cavalry—I guess the higher-ups figgered the volunteer part was all was needed.” He wagged his head at the ways of the military. “Nobody much had a horse except Colonel Teddy.”

Groaning inwardly, I rebuked myself again for leaping to conclusions. Just because a military unit formed as the Rough Riders had charged the heights of San Juan did not automatically mean they had done so on horseback, sabers flashing and guidon flying, as my imagination would have it. No wonder Cutthroat Cartwright was not down here with the blue-shirted procession; he knew all the rough riding they had done was in a Wild West Show. Off the top of his head, he could write a piece about old parading cavalrymen, such as they were, that would leave mine in the figurative dust.

Swallowing my disappointment, I thanked Tinsley for his time and nudged Blaze off to one side of our clopping contingent to try to think. How did I get into this fix? Why couldn’t I be sitting comfortably at a typewriter tapping out invective about copper bosses, instead of trapped in a saddle as a mounted correspondent with no thrilling horseback tale to cap off my article? Time was running out, too. The parade had turned onto Granite Street and would soon be passing the Hennessy Building, where the Thunder photographer was set up to shoot me, as the phrasing was. Not one I liked, the less so as Sandison now rode across to where I was, leaning his wounded side in my direction, discomfort and stubbornness vying in his expression, as he wanted to know, “Getting it all down like Tennyson with the charge of the Light Brigade?”

“The plot of this is somewhat harder to follow,” I said faintly.

“Ay? Buck up, Morgan. You’ve had a good ride with the boys, you’re about to have your picture in the paper, people will read whatever folderol you come up with. What are you complaining about?”

Satisfied that he had put things in perspective, Sandison stayed stirrup to stirrup with me as, down the block in front of us, cohort after cohort of defiantly singing miners marched past the lofty headquarters of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company. What a scene that moment of the parade was as a thousand voices lifted in the verse, “Down there deep we’re all one kind, / All one blood, all of one mind / I back you and you back me, / All one song in unity.” Flags waved, pinwheels spun on sticks children held like lollipops, the sun shone bright on a Butte free of strife for the course of a day. And tomorrow, I knew even without the sage glint in Sandison’s eye, the civil war of labor and capital would resume, I would shed my temporary mantle of mounted correspondent and resume editorial battle with the Post, the calendar page would be turned, with each of us one day nearer our destiny.

But right now, my role in life was to look as presentable as possible astride a clip-clopping horse while portraiture occurred. Catercorner from the Hennessy Building, the photographer Sammy waited beside his big box camera on a tripod, gesturing urgently to make sure I saw him and was ready. Gruffly saying he didn’t want to break the camera, Sandison dropped back out of range. “Don’t forget to smile at the birdy, laddie.”

A smile became out of the question, however, as I spotted a number of bruisers strung out along the entire front of the Hennessy Building, positioned against the wall and the display windows with their hands over their private parts in the manner of museum guards and other functionaries who stand around for hours on end. Unquestionably, these had to be the extra goons making good on Anaconda’s threat to station guards at all company property, in this case merely for show around the infamous top-floor headquarters. Of a type I would not like to meet in a dark alley, the Anaconda operatives favored gabardine suits; as Hill lore had it, blood was more easily sponged off that than softer fabrics. In the holiday crowd, they stood out like gray wolves.

After my initial alarm, I realized the scene was actually peaceful, no guns on display or evident inclination toward any, and with the long file of miners having marched past without incident, apt to stay that way. Blind Heinie’s newsstand was situated right across the sidewalk from where the most prominent of the goons had made their presence known alongside the department store’s big windows, and as the sightless old news vendor entertained himself by slapping his thighs in rhythm with the Miners Band’s distant rendition of “When You and I Were Young, Maggie,” the nearest gabardined thugs were idly nodding along. Breathing a sigh of relief, I sat up tall as I could in the saddle to be ready for Sammy’s camera. The throng lining the sidewalk oohed and ahhed at the prospect of being in the picture, meanwhile making guesses about my importance. “I bet he’s some relative of Buffalo Bill’s. Look at that set of whiskers on him.” Trying to live up to all the attention, I patted Blaze’s neck, fiddled with the reins, straightened my hat. At least some of Armbrister’s hunch was paying off as, goons notwithstanding, the main display window with HENNESSY’S DEPARTMENT STORE in large golden lettering made a fetching backdrop, mannequins in cloche hats and flapper dresses indolently holding teacups, the mischievous implication there that since Prohibition had come in, “tea shops” served gin that way. Bobbing in and out from behind his viewfinder, Sammy called across the street to me, “Slow down a little, Morgie. I want to get the shot just as you pass the window.”

Blaze and I never made it past. As if in a strange dream, I still see the individual who looked like a drunken bum, appearing from the far side of Blind Heinie’s newsstand, suddenly plunge through the other onlookers and come stumbling out of the crowd to intercept us with something held like a bouquet. But no, too late I saw it was a rolled newspaper he had lit with a match, and with it flaming like a torch, he made a last running lurch and thrust the burning paper under Blaze’s tail.

Put yourself in the poor horse’s place. Driven wild by its singed hind part, my steed left the earth, and came down frantically swapping ends, bucking and kicking. His gyrations whirled us onto the sidewalk, scattering onlookers and goons alike. My panicky cries of “Whoa! Whoa!” fell on deaf horse ears. As if we were in a steeplechase, Blaze’s next jump aimed straight for the maidenly tea or gin party, as the case may have been, crashing us through the big display window.

Flappers flew, teacups sailed. Ducking falling glass, I was low as a jockey, clamping to the saddle for all I was worth. Now that we were in the store, in the ladies’ wear department to be exact, Blaze seemed not to know where to go next, very much like a baffled shopper. My repeated chorus of whoas finally having some effect, he halted in the aisle of the lingerie section, still snorting and quivering and his ears up like sharp flanges, but no longer determined to buck us both off the face of the earth. Holding the reins taut just in case, I cautiously felt around on myself and could find nothing broken. Remarkably, my hat still was on my head.

“Ride him on out! C’mon, the horse knows the way now!” The commotion in back of me was from Leonard and Claude and Tinsley, their own horses’ heads curiously poking through what had been the window. In truth, I didn’t know what else to do, and at my urging, Blaze rather delicately picked his way through fallen flappers and other window-dressing and rejoined the street as if hopping a ditch.

The scene outside the store was a shambles I gradually made sense of. What had been the parade was a blue knot of Rough Riders, whooping to one another as they caught up with what had happened. Nearer, leaning more precariously yet in his saddle, Sandison had the culprit at gunpoint, the six-shooter aimed squarely between the man’s eyes as he babbled that somebody he had never seen before paid him to play a prank, was all. The squad of goons had backed off to a discreet distance, evidently wanting no part of any trouble they hadn’t started. Policemen belatedly elbowed through the crowd. The more familiar blue uniforms of my riding companions surrounded me.

“You all right, pard? Man, we’ve seen some stunt riding, but that one takes the cake.” Tinsley and Leonard were singing my praises—and Blaze’s—while Claude mutely slapped me on the back. More to the point, I realized, was the remark from Sammy hustling past with his camera and tripod. “Got a good one of you flying through that window. Better come on, if we’re gonna make deadline.”

Somewhat worse for wear when I showed up at the Thunder office on foot—Blaze being restored with high honors to the Wild West Show string—I was fussed over by Armbrister, but meanwhile steered to my typewriter. I did my best to concentrate, to make sense of my notes, to think straight like a good reporter should, but it felt hopeless; my mind was a blur. Thank heavens my fingers seemed to know what they were doing.

Armbrister nearly wore out the floor, pacing as he waited to grab each page. After the last tap of a typewriter key, I fell back in my chair, exhausted, awaiting his verdict. Eyeshade aimed down into my story like the beak of a clucking bird, he mumbled the sentences rapidly to himself until finally swatting me with the sheaf of pages. “Terrific lede. ‘I rode with the James brothers—up to the point where my horse and I went into Hennessy’s department store.’ Let that bastard Cartwright top that! And the bit about Russians dancing the kickapoo, great stuff. That’s what a hunch can do for you, Morgie. Copyboy!”

In no time, the newsroom trembled with the start-up of the press, and we along with the rest of the Thunder staff could hardly bear the wait to see what a similar rumble of machinery was producing across town. At last our contraband early copy of the Post was rushed in. Armbrister speedily scanned the pages as only a journalist could, then, with an odd expression, he passed the paper to me to do the same.

There was not one word in the Post about the Rough Riders.