THE WOMAN ON the other side of the desk was small, barely taking up half of the chair. Probably in her fifties, with thin blond hair and large eyes set in a narrow, reddened face that tapered to a pointed chin. She smiled often—smile lines appeared at the sides of her mouth—exposing a row of white teeth too large for her face. “I’m Charlotte Hanson,” she had said when she walked into the office, hand outstretched. “Julia’s daughter.” The sounds of Pagliacci drifted through the air.
Father John had risen to his feet, walked around the desk, and taken her hand. The strong, forceful grip of a woman accustomed to hard work, mostly in the outdoors. He offered her a glass of iced tea, and when she said that sounded good, he went into the closet-kitchen off the back hall, poured two glasses of tea from the pitcher he kept in the under-the-counter refrigerator, and dropped in chunks of ice. He handed her a glass and sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk.
“I hear you stopped by to see my mother. Sorry she wasn’t having a good day.” Charlotte Hanson talked with her hands; the ice in her glass clinked over the notes of “O Colombina.” “Sharp as a tack some days, remembers every detail. She can tell a thousand stories. Of course I never know which ones she’s made up.” She laughed. She was used to laughing, Father John thought.
“I was hoping she might remember family stories about Butch Cassidy.”
The woman nodded. “I stopped by the site on the river where they’re filming. The security guard wouldn’t let me get very close, but I saw Butch himself riding into a camp. Takes you back in time. Made me feel like I was there, the way Butch lit up the scene and made everything seem exciting. I imagine that’s the way my great-grandmother Mary must have felt when he came around.”
“I’ve heard he hid out with Mary and her husband after a train robbery.”
“The Wilcox robbery. Mom’s told me about it a thousand times. Famous robbery in Western lore. Took place down on the Wyoming border. Stopped a Union Pacific train, blew up the mail car and the safe after the express agent refused to open the doors. The gang made off with sacks of money.” She was shaking her head, smiling, as if she were recalling an event she had witnessed herself. “The way Mom figured it, if the agent had opened the doors, the railroad would have blamed him for not protecting his precious cargo and deducted the stolen amount from his paycheck, which would have put him in hock the rest of his life. Anyway, the railroad had the memory of an elephant. They never forgot Butch Cassidy or the Sundance Kid, either. From then on, they only wanted one thing: to see them dead.”
She leaned forward. “Mom told me Butch didn’t actually take part in the robbery. Had he been there, she said, the gang wouldn’t have set explosives on a car with the agent inside. Butch didn’t go for violence. Oh, he was the brains behind the robbery. And he met up with the gang to divide the loot before they got away. Oh yes.” She stared off into space, as if the gang were riding away in front of her eyes. “I can imagine how excited Mary was when Butch and Sundance rode up after the robbery. She knew Butch quite well, you know. In the biblical sense, you could say. About 1890 Butch was running a ranch out by Dubois, and Mary Boyd caught his eye. She was real pretty. Petite with long black hair. She was a half-breed from the rez.”
The woman sat back in the chair, considering. He could see the conflict moving like a storm over her face. Eventually she said, “I don’t know if Mom would want this known. There’s no evidence, no historical proof. Just a story handed down in our family.”
“I won’t say anything.”
She shrugged. “What does it matter? It happened a hundred and twenty-five years ago, so who cares? Correct?”
Father John nodded. She was probably more correct than she imagined. So many things that had happened last year, last week, yesterday, were already forgotten. When he was a kid in Boston, adults were always talking about something important. All forgotten now, like dust blown in the wind.
“They planned to marry, Butch and Mary,” Charlotte went on. “But he got arrested for stealing a horse and was sent to prison in Laramie.” She was smiling again. “Seems he just couldn’t go straight, hard as he tried. Well, Mary found out she was pregnant. Imagine a woman with no husband, pregnant, in the 1890s. Lucky she was from the rez, because an Arapaho family took her in and welcomed her baby girl, who was also named Mary. The child grew up with the Arapahos. Mary found work wherever she could on the ranches in the area. I mean, she had to support herself. That’s how she met Jesse Lyons and married him.”
“What became of her child?”
The woman was still smiling at the memories. “She married a man from Riverton named Edward Levelts. Mom was their only child. She was still a baby when her mother died, so we don’t know my grandmother’s story. But Mom always said we were descended from Butch Cassidy. There’s no proof. Only an old family story.” She paused before she said, “Mom grew up in Cheyenne with her father’s family. Later she came back here—something about this place that draws people back—and married my father. I was born on their ranch across the border from the rez, same ranch Mary and Jesse had owned a long time ago. Of course it had gone through several owners after the bank repossessed it.”
Father John sat back. What a tangled web, the past. Lives lived in the midst of heartache and loss. Somehow the hard times—leaving a child, losing a ranch—often turned into the stories that were passed down. But what about the joyous times, the moments of sunshine and lightness? Surely they also existed. Moments of hope and love that Mary must have felt for a man she knew as George Cassidy, and that he had felt for her.
“Have you ever heard . . .” he began, picking his way. “Whether Butch Cassidy gave your great-grandmother a map that showed where he had hidden money from the train robbery?”
“The old map story.” Charlotte shook her head, looked away, and gave a different smile, quiet and inward, as if she were contemplating something impossible to understand. “Everybody around here believes Butch left behind a map. Folks have been hiking through the mountains the last hundred years with a version of the so-called original in their hands, sure they were about to strike it rich. It’s like gold fever. Rumors of gold brought thousands of people out West. Some actually struck it rich, so their stories kept people coming.”
Father John smiled. “Anybody strike it rich with Butch Cassidy’s map?”
She let out a snort of laughter. “That never kept people from trying. In fact, it encouraged them. Nobody has found Butch Cassidy’s treasure yet, so it must still be there, waiting for them. Greed,” she said, allowing the word to hang in the air. “It never changes. I heard Robert Walking Bear was looking for the treasure when he died.” She paused, forehead wrinkled in a new thought. “I’ve heard rumors he was murdered.”
“As far as I know, the FBI hasn’t concluded the investigation.”
“I suppose he had one of those bogus maps.”
Father John shrugged. “He believed it was the original, according to his wife.”
“There was no such thing.” Charlotte Hanson took a long drink of tea, then examined the glass a moment. “If Butch Cassidy did draw a map, would he have given it to anyone? I didn’t think so. Why would he do that? Then I thought, if he got caught and the posse found the map on him, they would steal his treasure. So it makes sense that he might have given a map to someone he trusted.”
“Such as your great-grandmother.” Father John could hear Eldon Lone Bear’s voice in his head: If Butch gave a map to anybody, it would have been Mary.
Charlotte shook her head and sipped more tea. “Logical, I suppose. The only problem is, logic can be wrong. Mom has never mentioned a map, not in all the stories she’s told through the years. Oh, Butch and the Sundance Kid hid out for a while with Mary and Jesse after the train robbery and helped out on the ranch. Butch may even have given Mary the money to keep the bank from foreclosing.” She gave a quick shrug. “The hard times came soon enough. Jesse died, the bank eventually foreclosed, and Mary was left alone with no way to take care of herself or her little girl, even if she had wanted to take her child from the only family she had ever known.”
“You’re saying that if Butch had given her a map, she would have used it.” The woman across from him was nodding, as if they had circled to the same place. “If she’d had the money, she could have saved the ranch and made a home for her little girl.”
“Logical,” Charlotte Hanson said again. “Butch would have wanted her to find the treasure if she needed it. But she had no idea where to find it.” She set the glass on the floor and laced her fingers together in her lap. “Butch came back in 1934, you know. Despite what the history books say. A lot of people here knew George Cassidy, and they welcomed him back. They spent days with him, reliving old times, reconnecting.”
“It was thirty-five years later. Some historians believe Butch’s friends were mistaken.”
“Folks around here? They never forget people. Butch and his friends went on a camping trip in the mountains. You ask me, Butch was hoping to find his treasure.” She looked at a point across the office. “Mary went along. She was living in Riverton then. She’d married a rancher after Jesse died, but her second husband had also died, and she was alone again. She and Butch were reunited on that camping trip. If she had kept a map all those years, never using it to help herself, wouldn’t she have given it to him? He was old then, probably could have used the money. After that trip, Butch sent Mary a beautiful ring. You must’ve seen it. Mom never takes it off. It is the only thing she has of her grandmother’s.”
Father John didn’t say anything. He tried to picture Julia, slumped in the chair, lost somewhere inside her own mind, gaze fixed on the flickering black-and-white images of an old movie, clasping her hands together and perhaps . . . Was he imagining it now? Had she been running a finger over the ring on her left hand?
Charlotte was saying something about the ring being a sign that Butch had always loved her. “He never forgot her,” she said, “and she hadn’t forgotten him. Don’t you think she would have known if he weren’t Butch Cassidy?” She lifted herself to her feet, the matter settled. “I’ll be in touch if Mom has a good day. I’m sure she would like to relive the old times for you.”
Father John stood up and walked the woman out into the corridor. She barely came to his shoulder; her boots made a soft clicking noise on the wood floor. “Do you think Julia might be willing to relive the old days for the film?” He pulled open the heavy door and waited as Charlotte brushed past and stepped out onto the stoop.
“Are you kidding?” she said, turning back. “My mother has always wanted to be in the movies.”