MOST OF WHAT YOU ever heard about Dodge City took place along a couple of blocks of Front Street, which run parallel to the Santa Fe tracks: the Alhambra Saloon, another of them combination barroom-gambling-hall-eateries, this one owned by Pete Beatty and “Dog” Kelley, formerly called “Hound,” both names coming from the greyhounds he raised; the Dodge House hotel; the famous Wright and Beverly general store; the Long Branch and Alamo and Lady Gay saloons, and the Opera House. This was the fancy side of the tracks. On the south or wrong side was the lowdown part, consisting of rougher kinds of saloons and gambling joints, cheaper hotels, and of course whorehouses, one of the more famous of which, from the colored glass in its doorway, giving its name to the type everywhere else, namely, the Red Light.
Now in the late ’70s the cowboys had the town to themselves or would of had not the local businessmen decided that though they desired the money of them Texans just in off the trail and thirsty and in need of entertainment, they wanted it to be handed over peaceably and not accompanied by the lethal exuberance of earlier times, so the lawmen hired or elected included at one time or another many of the noted names with the exception of Wild Bill Hickok: Bat Masterson and his brothers Ed and Jim, Charlie Bassett, Bill Tilghman, Mysterious Dave Mather (supposed to be a descendant of some preacher named Cotton who burned witches back in Massachusetts in the old days), and to be sure, Wyatt Earp, though the last-named while getting most of the subsequent attention of history was probably the least of the bunch, never killing a soul while he was in Dodge and never holding a higher job than assistant town marshal, but his accomplishments was usually greatly exaggerated by them who wrote about him on the basis of his own claims.
Now Bat was good as his word, and when him and Ben Springer opened up their Lone Star Dancehall, they give me a barkeep’s job, and I wore a striped shirt with sleeve garters and sprouted a handlebar mustache, which come out slighter redder than my naturally ginger hair. The Lone Star, as could be told from the name, was designed to attract the cowboys that come up from the state of that designation. Not every single man who herded cattle for a living was a native Texan—and amongst them you could find Mexicans, Indians, breeds, and even some colored fellows what had been born slaves—but it was a convenient handle for all concerned, and sometimes them who had originated someplace else was more sentimental about the Alamo, Sam Houston, and suchlike than those with a natural right to be so, especially if they was drunk, which of course is more or less the only way you seen them if you worked in a place like the Lone Star. They also tended, ten years after the fact, to be still displeased by the outcome of the War Between the States, and as usual not all of them with such strong feelings had even been involved in it.
Bat had gotten some ideas from the McDaniels in Cheyenne, and the Lone Star was one of the more ambitious of the establishments south of the tracks, offering a big dance floor, all kinds of gambling games, a stage for variety shows, an orchestra stand decorated with bunting, and quite a number of girls who might dance on the stage, showing their garters, or with the customers on the floor, and/or entertain privately in their rooms on the second story. Though whoring was not a requirement for a female who worked there, you might say it was a recommendation and the only way to make a decent income. But what I mean to say is, there wasn’t no compulsion or white slavery.
There was those who disapproved of the selling of flesh as a degradation of the fair sex. Aside from preachers, it was a rare man who held this opinion unless it come to his own daughter, sister, wife, or mother. Out West in the time of which I speak, there was the usual distinction between good girls and bad, but if you didn’t consort with a soiled dove you might never have no women at all, there being not that many of the respectable type. So Wild Bill Hickok, Bat Masterson, and most of the others had intimate associations of more than a night at a time with sporting women, and the same was true of Wyatt Earp.
Working at the Lone Star, I come to know the girls on the premises well enough, and not all was what if you enjoyed full sight you could call pretty, but all seemed to know how to appeal to a man, and this was sometimes most true of them who was the least attractive in feature or form, like Cockeyed Kitty, Iron-Jaw Tillie, and Liz Big Bottom, for a turn at any of who there might be a waiting line. I expect they could make a fellow live up to a better idea than he normally had of himself, and you can’t ask more of a woman than that.
I was making a nice income tending bar at the Lone Star, where in addition to the wage, a cowboy who had won at faro or chuck-a-luck might ask you to drink on him, and you’d swallow from a glass of cold coffee but credit yourself for what he was paying for whiskey, and there’d be some who would tip generously if you would listen to how they was a-going to skin alive the next greaser they encountered because one cheated them on the sale of a horse, or how no Yankee lived who could put a head on John Wesley Hardin, a famous Texas gunfighter of the day, though I do believe he were in prison down in Texas at this time, so he never had the chance to lock horns with Bat or Wyatt, though there was a claim by Hardin’s admirers that once in Abilene, years before, he had got the drop on none other than Wild Bill “Heycox,” as they called him. If so, that was the first I heard of such, but I’m not saying it couldn’t of happened, not having been at that scene, which was the only way you could test the truth of anything you heard by way of gunfighting. You’d hardly get it from some whiskeyed cowboy with his talk of “John Wesley,” like he was his best friend.
Back to the Lone Star girls, I guess the ones most popular was them that would make a fellow like this think maybe, for as long as he were in bed with them, he was J. W. Hardin or maybe his cousin Manning Clements, another with a big rep as a troublemaker.
There was some girls pretty enough to make you wonder why they was doing that, until you considered how good the money was and then the alternative, marrying some sodbuster like their Pa and between childbearing and all the heavy-labor chores, dying young, or staying in a city tenement (for some was Irish from Boston and New York, come West for new opportunities), ditto as to disadvantages as well as breathing bad air. The Lone Star, under Bat Masterson’s ownership, was not the kind of place where a man no matter how much he spent could abuse or mistreat a member of the fair sex just because he was hiring her favors.
I was on good terms with all the girls, and even had a couple I felt especially friendly towards, one because she was so young-looking and the other on account of she seemed so old and tired (though as it turned out, the little one had turned thirty and the other was only two years older and eventually had put by enough money to open her own brothel down the road), and to either of them two I might direct a cowboy who had not yet spent his roll at the bar or in a game of monte or poker. These women seemed more like sisters to me than persons towards who I felt lustful, so for a while there I was amidst all that carnality, being a teetotaller in flesh as well as in alcohol, for pouring all that whiskey, I couldn’t stand the smell when it came to drinking any myself. I reckon I was cleanest of all indulgences there for a while as I ever been my life long, a-working in a den of same, drinking only coffee and with enough money to eat good beef and pay for a nice lodging, I instead lived at a leaky-roof shack of ten rooms, in the red-light district, calling itself a hotel, and unless I could grab a free meal at the Lone Star, I ate hog-and-hominy, as if I was near down and out. I was saving my money for better things.
I decided if I was ever going to make anything of myself, it was more than time, else I’d continue to wander around the country from one plight to the next, as I’d been doing all my life up to that point, with nothing to show for it, meanwhile civilization was settling in. At ten years younger than me, Bat Masterson was half owner of a thriving business. He also run for sheriff of Ford County in the fall of ’77 against Larry Deger, who had been town marshal, a real mean three-hundred-pounder who had arrested him once when Bat sided with some little fellow Deger was beating up in the street. Here was another example of how Bat handled himself the smart way, instead of what a hotter-headed man might of done: the revenge he got on Deger was not shooting him but whipping his fat arse in an election.
These was the years when Dodge was the cattle capital of the West, with the drive of ’78 setting a record at better than a quarter million longhorns, drove up from the Texas range by fifteen hundred men. Crowds like that could mean trouble, not only as to the unruly cowpunchers, but the money they brung to town was alluring to real criminals. Having said which I should add that with a lot of miscreants of them days the situation was real complicated. A fellow might be a thief and even a murderer at one point, but then at another, and by different people, be thought a credit to the community. For example there was a man named Dave Rudabaugh, who had a rep as a desperado and robbed some trains, for which Bat and a posse tracked him down. Rudabaugh escaped punishment by informing on the other members of his gang, after which he swore he was going straight, and he removed to Las Vegas, New Mexico, where he up and become a policeman! But then he turned bad again a little later and lived a life of crime till, down in Old Mexico, an outraged mob cut off his head and mounted it atop a pole in the town square.
Bat was sheriff of the whole of Ford County, which included Dodge, but the primary job of keeping peace in the town itself was that of head marshal, formerly fatso Deger, but just as Bat had beat him for sheriff, Bat’s brother Ed got the marshal’s post when Deger was fired, and as his younger brother Jim was an assistant marshal, law enforcement was pretty much dominated by the Masterson family when Dodge was at its height, and not Wyatt Earp, the way you might of heard.
When he worked as only another assistant marshal, Wyatt was best known for beating up disorderly cowboys, either with his fists or by bending the barrel of his Colt’s over their head (like he done to me that time on the buffalo range). But no doubt that was better than killing.
Another thing I want to set the record straight on: given all the commotion that could be caused by big crowds of rowdies under conditions like those, during Bat Masterson’s time in and around Dodge, only seven homicides occurred. Them showdown gunfights happening every few minutes in movie versions of the frontier begun with the make-believe of Eastern scribblers like Ned Buntline, a confidence man, and in fact the tradition has continued ever since by more or less the same type. But you take people like Wyatt Earp, they ain’t going to object when they’re made heroes in print, and a Bill Cody will know how to build a profitable business on it.
Having said as much, I should make it clear that every once in a while there was real bloodshed and somebody got hurt, and now and again they died, but never as the result of a fair and equal draw. Take my word for it, when what’s at stake is one life or another, fair and equal don’t play no part.
Now I’m going to tell you about two of the violent deaths that took place in Dodge during my time there in the late ’70s, for they affected me most personally. Once I become an employee of Bat’s, and especially after he got to be sheriff, I didn’t hang around with him as much as I done in Cheyenne, for he had better things to do, and for a time I saw more of his brother Ed, who was a year older than him and real easygoing. As assistant town marshal and then chief, Ed was one of them genial policemen who smile at passing kids and stop to chew the fat with the storekeepers on their beat. Everybody liked Ed, but that would be better in a place run for the sake of decent women and children, like Dodge City not so many years later, when temperance came and the saloons was turned into soda fountains, if you can believe it, about 1885.
In the Dodge of ’78 it was preferable to be respected over being liked—and for that matter, over being feared, because if a man is scared of another he might get drunk enough to take him on, and someone will get hurt. Whereas if you was held in high respect, like Bat, nobody knew what you was capable of; you had imagination going for you, and a normal man’s fantasy except for sex is mostly about force: who’s got it and who ain’t.
There was a few rules regarding public conduct in Dodge. No horses allowed on the sidewalks, and none could be rid onto the premises of a business, namely into a saloon; firearms could not be carried by anybody not a peace officer or on Army duty, unless they was entering town, when all was obliged to check their weapons at the first place of call, saloon, shop, hotel, et cetera, or after picking up their guns on the way out of town. The public discharge of firearms was prohibited except on the Fourth of July, Christmas, New Year’s Day, and the eves thereof. Public intoxication was taken seriously only if a man in that condition tried to reclaim his weapons or committed an offense against order and decency, like taking a leak in one of the whiskey barrels full of water kept at intervals along the wood sidewalk in case of fire.
If you was to break one of these ordinances after calling Ed Masterson’s attention to it, he would surely do something, but unlike some peace officers, he never went about looking for an excuse to make an arrest. Ed was a live-and-let type of fellow, in a place that was kill-or-be. He ended up shedding more blood, of his own and others’, than did his brother Bat, who nevertheless is the famous one, while Ed has been forgot, and you will see, the same was true with Virgil Earp and his brother Wyatt.
Ed Masterson dropped in frequently to the Lone Star, both on his marshal rounds and off-time, and I got to know him well enough, by which I mean we talked about the usual subjects men cared for, the old days of buffalo hunting, the latest gold or silver strikes, horses, firearms, whiskey, and women.
As to the last-named, you might gather from my previous remarks that every single female to be found in Dodge was a harlot. Now with regard to Deadwood, that wouldn’t of been far wrong, but there was others in Dodge City. It’s just that in my situation it was not usual to run across the trail of schoolteachers and church-women, who didn’t patronize saloons. Respectable females of that time was not supposed to like strong drink or know much about sex even after having ten kids. And a man wasn’t supposed to enjoy himself with them: for that there was whores.
Now on the particular afternoon in question, a fellow name of Bob Shaw stood in the Lone Star, accusing one Texas Dick Moore of taking forty dollars off him by some dishonest means, and what made this a troublesome matter was that Shaw was not only in the state of drunkenness in which the rest of the world is also guilty for his grievance, but he was also brandishing the pistol which by law he should of checked on entering the premises. Under the bar I kept a club and a double-barreled shotgun, but I didn’t want to kill or even maim him badly. On the other hand I also didn’t like the idea of clubbing him enough to make him madder but not enough to knock him out. So I quietly asks a man named Frank, further along the bar, to go fetch Marshal Masterson to come before this thing got out of hand.
Meanwhile I pushed a bottle in Shaw’s direction, telling him to drink on the house, for free whiskey will sometimes calm a man down temporarily. But the offer only riled Shaw further, and he waved the muzzle of his pistol from Texas Dick over my way, advising me in abusive language to horn out unless I wanted my own case of lead poisoning.
I was delicately fingering my way along the underbar towards the scattergun, without moving that part of my person that could be seen by Shaw, when Ed Masterson arrived.
In his nice way Ed asks Shaw to just hand over the weapon.
“I aim to kill thish sson of a bish,” Shaw says, meaning to my relief Texas Dick, on who he again directed his gun, “and if you try to sstop me, I’ll kill you, you sson of a bish.”
At this, Ed draws his own pistol, steps up and hits Shaw in the head with the barrel.
I had knowed what I was doing when I decided against trying to club the bastard: just as I feared, Shaw had too thick a skull to be dented, and the blow served only to increase his grudge. He turns and shoots Ed almost point-blank, right under the shoulder blade, putting Ed’s whole right arm out of action, to say the least. That shot might of killed anybody not a Masterson. But as he falls bleeding to the floor Ed coolly swaps hands with his Colt’s, and with the left he puts two rounds into Shaw, arm and leg, dropping the man, though not before Texas Dick takes a slug near the crotch, and Frank, what had fetched the marshal and stayed outside, a-peeping in the door, catches Shaw’s last wild shot in the left arm.
If you ever heard two .45s discharge multiply at the same time under a roof, you know the reverberations ring inside your head for some minutes thereafter, and with the black powder then in use, there was so much smoke it could of been from a roaring fire, and I admit I was stunned for a minute, not reacting as quick as I did after Wild Bill’s murder, but in fact Ed didn’t need no help, being still in control of the room. Laying there in his own blood, he continued to cover the likewise fallen Shaw, who had not been killed, as well as a few of Shaw’s nearby friends, who might otherwise have been seeking revenge.
To show you further what kind of man Ed Masterson was, after only a couple weeks off, he did the rest of his recuperating back on duty.
Not long after this Ed was appointed chief town marshal. Dodge City entered the years that gave it its subsequent fame, as I have said, but for me what made the place so special was the entertainment and I don’t mean the low order available elsewhere, but the high-class type come from back East, headed by the great Eddie Foy, famous the country over, who could sing and dance better than anyone else alive and was so funny with his costumes and antics your belly would ache from laughing so much. The hall he performed in was called the Comique, which naturally was pronounced to rhyme with “stew” by the ignorant louts (like myself at that time) who packed the place. This was my first exposure to what come to be known as show business, and it made a permanent impression on me, and in time I’ll be telling you of my own career in another form of it.
But let me get back now to Ed Masterson, who returned to marshal’s duty long before the wound he got from Bob Shaw had healed, and he was just as friendly and easygoing as ever though having been almost killed. Unlike his brother Bat, Ed often managed to get hurt while keeping the peace. Even in court this could happen, like the time one Jim Martin was charged with stealing a horse and at his trial got mad and beat up the city attorney, broke a lot of courtroom furniture, and cut Ed’s nose before being coldcocked with the barrel of the marshal’s .45.
The Lady Gay was another of the popular saloons of the time, right near the Lone Star, and in fact was where the political meeting was held that had nominated Bat for sheriff the year before. On their rounds, Ed and Nat Haywood, an assistant marshal, come into the Lady Gay one night in April of ’78, where a half a dozen hands from the same outfit was swallowing a lot of drink and making normal noise, which for cowboys tended to be louder than that made by a convention of preachers, but nothing wrong with that, though it wore you out some having to hear it all night, and in fact I stepped outside the nearby Lone Star, to get a little relief as well as a breath of fresh air free of tobacco smoke, whiskey fumes, and sweat.
In a minute I saw Ed Masterson come out of the Lady Gay, and I stepped over to him.
“Say, Ed,” says I, “I been working on a business idea for a time, and saving my money towards it, too, but I ain’t got quite enough yet to go it on my own.”
Ed favored Bat in appearance, with the same dark hair and mustache, but his features was a little finer, and there was always a look in his eye that could be called somewhat sad.
“What I got in mind,” I went on, “is opening a place of my own, with the usual games of chance, drinks, eats, women naturally, but the main attraction will be the entertainment. I swear that’s the coming thing, but you got to get real talent to put it over, which means you got to bring it in from quite a ways, from back East or San Francisco.” Ed was listening carefully, as was his manner. “Now what I thought I’d mention to you is if you might want to go in with me on this here idea, for I require at least one partner.”
He smiled slowly. “It’s Bat you ought to talk to. He’s the one with the head for business.”
What I hadn’t said was I already talked to Bat, who didn’t care for the idea, maybe because he already had the Lone Star and regarded my place as competition, or he didn’t think I could handle it. I have to admit Bat still thought of me as a kind of character.
“Bat’s got plans of his own,” I says. “Look, just keep it in mind is all I’m asking. And I wouldn’t expect a big investment from you personally, but your good name and fine rep in this town would help out in getting a loan from the bank.”
At this point Nat Haywood walks briskly out of the Lady Gay and he tells Ed, “Walker didn’t check the gun. He give it back to Jack Wagner.”
Ed shook his head, but he wasn’t all that disturbed. “One of Alf Walker’s hands was wearing a loaded shoulder holster,” he told me. “I took the gun away from him and gave it to Alf to check. He ought to know better.” He and Nat headed back into the Lady, and I returned inside to my own job behind the bar.
A few minutes later somebody yelled something through the Lone Star door, but the noise near me was such I couldn’t hear what was shouted and didn’t take no alarm from it, for yells was routine in the saloons of Dodge and unless they employed the term “Fire” did not attract much attention. But next this person or another runs in with enough commotion that the crowd quietened a little, and I could hear, “—so close his clothes was burnin’!”
“Who?” I yells back.
“The marshal, goddammit. Ed Masterson! He’s dyin’.”
I dropped the bottle I had been lifting, and it broke when it hit the floor, drenching my boots with whiskey. I run out of the Lone Star, ramming my way through the drinkers, and reached the street, where there was another crowd, everybody talking about the fight inside the Lady Gay and giving different versions thereof.
“Where is he?” I yells. “Where is Ed?”
“He walked away,” somebody says. “He crossed the tracks!”
I felt some better. That a dying man could of walked two hundred yards across the plaza was unlikely. He was heading for the marshal’s office. “Why did they say he was a goner?” I asked nobody in particular.
A tall cowboy shifted the wad in his jaw and says, “If’n he ain’t, no man ever was. He’s got a hole in him big enough to put your fist through. Ed tried to take Jack Wagner’s gun, but Jack shoved it right against him and pulled the trigger. The blast set Ed’s coat on fire.”
“Yet he walked away?”
“Sure did,” said another man. “I don’t know how he stayed on his feet. First he gut-shot Wagner, and when Alf Walker tried to horn in, Ed put a round into his lung and two in the arm.”
Another voice says, “I seen Ed go into Hoover’s.”
Which was another of the well-known Dodge saloons not in the red-light district. I run over there, across the tracks, and entered the place.
Ed Masterson was laying on the floor. There was still some wisps of smoke coming from his coat. The bartender, George Hinkel, was crouching beside him.
I bent down. I says, “Ed...”
He looks at me with them sad dark eyes. “I’m done for, Jack” was all he said, and then he passed out, never to come to life again.
Jack Wagner soon died too. But Alf Walker, the trail boss, managed in time to survive his wounds. Nat Haywood’s excuse for being of no help to Ed Masterson was that Walker kept a gun on him. Some said Nat had just proved yellow and run out, but in things of that nature you don’t know the truth unless you was on the spot and maybe not even then. In any event Nat left town right away, which meant there was two openings in the police department. A well-known figure of the time, Charlie Bassett, replaced Ed Masterson as chief marshal of Dodge City. As for Nat Haywood’s assistant marshal job, it went to a fellow name of Wyatt Earp, and that was the highest rank Wyatt ever held as peace officer at Dodge, irregardless of all subsequent lies told by him, his arse-kissers, or both.
You might wonder about Bat Masterson’s reaction to his brother’s murder? Lots of lies has been told about that too. Bat sure grieved for Ed, but he didn’t go berserk with rage and gun down a lot of people. He didn’t shoot nobody over this matter. When Alf Walker got well enough to travel, he was allowed to go home to Texas in peace. Whether or not he held a gun on Nat Haywood couldn’t be proved, as Nat had run off and most of the witnesses worked for Alf, and so he weren’t charged with any crime. Jack Wagner had paid with his own life for what he had done, so the book was closed on the sorry event. Bat was the duly elected sheriff of Ford County and as such had to uphold the law. Still, it might be considered funny that one of the most feared gunfighters of his time would not of been vengeful, but as I have said, Bat Masterson was a man of reason. Besides, he always thought his brother run too many foolish risks. If Bat himself had took a gun off Jack Wagner, Wagner wouldn’t of dared to put it back on. Wyatt Earp would of coldcocked Wagner at the outset, and Wild Bill would of killed him right away and got it over with.
So obviously my thought of getting Ed to go in with me on my business idea was at an end, and anyway before long Bat’s old partner Ben Springer opened the Comique, which I swear was a lot like what I had had in mind, and not long thereafter Ham Bell’s similar enterprise, the Varieties, started up in competition, luring away the Comique’s Dora Hand, reputed to be the most beautiful woman west of the Mississippi, who supposedly come from a high-class Boston family and sung opera before the crowned heads of Europe, and it might well of been true a dozen men got killed for competing for her favors, for women like her was uncommon in the cattle camps.
Now maybe I was not being strictly literal when I might of given the idea a while back that I abstained from all traffic with the opposite sex at this phase of my life: what I meant was I didn’t do so any more than was necessary for my health. That warrior society amongst the Cheyenne called the Contraries was undoubtedly right in not losing any power to sexual activities when preparing to go to war, but though living in a fairly violent part of the world, I myself was notably a man of peace while living in Dodge City. I carried a hidden derringer, so as not to be totally helpless if I encountered someone too drunk or crazy to handle with talk, but went otherwise unarmed, relying on all them famous local gunfighters to do their job. Let me say this: a sense of ethics kept me from being a customer where I worked, so I never had any but a professional association with my female fellow workers at the Lone Star, except for what you might call a brotherly sort of affection for the two girls I mentioned whose troubles I listened to.
What I had never had in my adult life thus far was what you could call a real romance. I mean, I had white and Indian wives, and while I was real fond of them, being married was a kind of practical matter, making sense for a home and family, which I had had in both white and Cheyenne worlds, and it was events, and not me nor my wives, what brought them marriages to an end. I had loved but had not been in love in the way them men who got killed over Dora Hand had apparently been to have gone that far. I wasn’t itching to die similarly, but thought when I first heard her sing I might be missing something, and I commenced to get a big crush on her. Now this had happened before, when I was a boy, with my white foster-mother Mrs. Pendrake and then again, and ongoing, was what I had for Mrs. Libbie Custer, but in both cases unrealistic and in the latter, notably remote. Dora Hand was here and now, and I was grown up and well employed, being at this point head bartender of the Lone Star, which meant I could give myself time off so as to frequently attend her performances.
Now I sure wasn’t alone in my admiration for the lady. Not a wildflower remained on the prairie for miles around Dodge, all having been plucked out and sent backstage for Dora, and for a time the fancy boxed candies from back East was all sold out in the stores, along with yew-de-cologne or whatever it’s called, lace hankies and other fineries, though nothing naughty like satin garters, for what was maybe Dora’s greatest distinction was her regular Sunday presence at services in the little church on the respectable north side, where her sweet singing of hymns was admired by the other ladies of the congregation, the wives of the better element of merchants, who did not resent her, as they would of others for being young and beautiful, on account of she was showfolk, then and now a special category.
There wasn’t nobody in Dodge City did not admire Miss Dora Hand, and most men, included yours truly, downright adored her. She was an ideal specimen of the fair sex, the sort of lady who makes the average fellow think he has got a high odor even after taking his annual bath (which was true of some of them cowboys), and I knowed men who claimed to change their underwear for the first time in months just to go watch her sing, and even buy a pair of socks.
There was never no one more awkward around a lady than the rough kind of fellow of that place and time, who would sooner shoot it out with a murderous enemy of his own sex than try and talk to a decent female, though according to the sporting women at the Lone Star, pretty much the same was true of them with harlots, except in the latter case they was not apologetic. Did I want to deal with smut, I could pass on some of the stories told me by them girls, who got a mostly unflattering impression of men, but it never discouraged them from eternally looking for a good one, not always without success: anyway, they usually got married sooner or later and insofar as any men ever admitted to marrying a former working woman, he invariably swore they made the best wives.
I don’t say I had the oily tongue of a lounge lizard or big-city masher, but my childhood experience of living under the same roof as Mrs. Pendrake and being read poetry to by her give me a definite advantage over most of the other men in Dodge. I was also smarter than most, and willing to make a greater sacrifice. I went pretty far: namely, I begun to go to church of a Sunday, something I hadn’t done since being obliged to listen to the Reverend Pendrake’s endless sermons as a boy, the only compensation for which was sitting next to Mrs. P. and inhaling her flowered scent.
It took me a few Sundays before, using not dissimilar skills to those I had learned from the Cheyenne in hunting game, I could devise a way of getting next to Miss Hand in her pew, for being she was a celebrity, as many women as men wanted to be near her, but eventually one Sunday I managed to get on her immediate left, though to do so I had to jostle several of the regular churchgoers, incurring an un-Christian enmity.
I waited until the second of the hymns was finished before, in the brief interval we was sitting back down, to apologize for my own croaking rendition.
“Oh,” Miss Hand said prettily, from under her big bonnet, turning her sparkling eyes on me, “all voices are sweet to the ear of the Lord.”
“Praise God,” I says. I don’t want you to think I spoke sacrilegiously, for just because I seldom found myself in a church don’t mean I was an unbeliever any time in my life. We all have a Maker, who will take us back one day, and him who has never had a home in life will be assured one Over There.
Having said as much, however, I wouldn’t have been in that pew or anywhere else in church had Miss Dora Hand been elsewhere. And I didn’t much listen to the sermon even so, for religious lingo never appealed to me. I had heard too much of it from my Pa and the Rev. Pendrake. The Catholics have a lot of sense, using Latin which nobody understands and therefore seems more like a language God would speak rather than even the loftiest old-fashioned English.
What I was doing instead was thinking of other ways to get acquainted with Miss Hand without arousing her suspicion that my motives wasn’t pure. I come up with an approach I considered perfect. I acted like I didn’t know she was famous. This immediately distinguished me from everybody else she had met in Dodge. I went even further: I pretended to disapprove of professional entertainment of all kinds.
“Oh,” says she, with a beautiful little pout of her soft pink lower lip, “you are very stern, sir, I must say.”
We was walking out together after the service. I had managed to fend off the others who tried to get to her, thus earning more dark looks. I was misguided to believe my conspicuous large donation when the collection plate was passed would make up for the bad feeling I had aroused: there are times when I had been too cynical about money. For example, Miss Hand, who probably earned more at this time than the richest merchants in Dodge, did not come to church for mercenary reasons.
Anyhow, I says to her now, pursing my lips in the sissified manner of the holier-than-thou, “Better to err on the side of righteousness than on the side of laxity.” This was on the order of something I hope I recalled correctly from the Reverend Pendrake’s spiel.
“It is true that the arts,” says she, lowering them feathery eyelashes, “or should I say the performers thereof, have acquired a reputation for immorality, one that may not always be undeserved. But there are those of us who do what we can to redress the balance.”
“Do I rightly gather from your comments,” I says, surprising myself with the genteel elevation of speech, “that you have some connection, distant no doubt, with entertainment?”
“I’m afraid I must confess I do,” Miss Hand replied. She proceeded to raise her little parasol against the glaring Kansas sun without halting or losing a step, in the way persons like her do on the stage while singing. “I do so hope you won’t be shocked to hear as much.”
“Already I have began to reconsider,” says I, and we exchanged introductions. “It might well be,” I went on, “mine has been a limited life, confined to them, uh, those who purchase the Good Book.”
“Do you sell Bibles, Mr. Crabb?”
Suddenly, there on the church path, I was conscience-struck and reluctant to lie further, so I says, in truth, “I am a parson’s son.”
Some old biddy, waddling up behind, could no longer tolerate my monopolizing of Dora Hand, and she gets her hefty figure, all gussied up in her Sunday best, in between, and she says, “Dora, will we see you at the Ladies’ Aid?”
Miss Hand smiles graciously. “Of course you will, Martha. Have I ever missed?”
She allowed me to walk her home, which turned out to be not far away, in a little house tucked away behind the Western Hotel.
“Miss Hand,” I says, “I am so pleased to of had this real pleasant conversation. I wonder if I go too far in hoping we might talk again, after next Sunday’s service. I would like ever so much to know more about your career as an artist.”
Her smile was quite different from what she had shown to the church lady. It might be called a smirk, except I couldn’t see any malice in it. “Meanwhile, Mr. Crabb, will I continue to see you every night in the front row at the Varieties?”
I laughs and stamps my foot, being both embarrassed and thrilled. “How do you like that! You mean from up there, back of them footlights, you can see people in the audience?”
“I’d have to be blind to miss you, Jack, with the commotion you make after every number.”
“Miss Hand, I’m overwhelmed. Let me just say I wasn’t lying about being a preacher’s son, but I don’t sell Bibles. I’m chief bartender over at the Lone Star, which by your lights must be a pretty lowdown place. But I really will go to church again if I could just talk to you afterwards.”
“Jack,” says she, and she actually grazed my sleeve with her slender fingers gloved in dove-gray. “I don’t think we should make a deal about going to church. But naturally I will always be happy to see you there.”
You couldn’t call it a real social engagement, but it was good enough at that point, and I tell you I waited all week for that upcoming Sunday service, which was a unique anticipation for me, who used to dread the same thing when living with the Reverend Pendrake even more than I hated school.
But the unhappy fact is that I never set eyes on a living Dora Hand again.
I didn’t go to the Varieties all week long, owing to the embarrassment I still felt on her catching me in that misrepresentation. I really intended, in whatever connection me and her would have in the future, no matter how slight on her part, that it should bring out the best in me. I resolved to listen to the sermon next Sunday and not show off with how much I put in the collection plate, also not to be rude to other people in the congregation. That might of been just the beginning of my transformation into a better person, or so anyway I thought at the time.
Now I got to take what might seem a detour but will prove otherwise. Amongst the Texas troublemakers who come to the Kansas cattle camps of the time was one Jim Kennedy, and excuse the language but there ain’t a fitting name for him but rotten young son of a bitch. He hung around with the plain cowboys, but his Pa, Mifflin K., was partner of Richard King of the King Ranch, the biggest such in the world, then and now, with more acreage than some little countries. Being rich, young, and good-looking, Kennedy did pretty much what he wanted, and if anybody objected he would shoot them when they was unarmed or, preferably, with their back turned to him. He had done this elsewhere, but when he showed up in Dodge wearing a gun in defiance of the law, I got to commend Wyatt Earp for once: Wyatt pistol-whipped and then arrested the cocky bastard, and a month later Marshal Charlie Bassett arrested him again, for disorderly conduct.
This kind of treatment seemed real unfair to Kennedy, who had gone through life thus far without opposition to his wishes, and he protested bitterly to the mayor, the aforementioned Dog Kelley, who was also proprietor of the Alhambra Saloon in the busiest block of Front Street. Dog had no respect for Kennedy, who made his hands call him Spike, like he was a hard case instead of being as yellow as they come, and told him next time he got out of line in Dodge the peace officers wouldn’t take it so easy on him.
Kennedy was too cowardly to stand up to anybody he thought his match, but he went at the older and slight-built Dog with his fists, and the result was Dog whipped his arse so bad he could hardly limp out of town, swearing to get even.
Suffering from some ailment having nothing to do with this minor event, the mayor went over to the Army hospital at nearby Fort Dodge for a time, and while he was there he let two featured performers of the fair sex borrow his little cottage, and they was Miss Fanny Garretson of the Comique and Miss Dora Hand, and that was where I had walked home the latter after church, to bring the subject back on track.
At about four in the morning of the following Friday, them living in the Western Hotel, unless too drunk to come to life, was wakened by four blasts of gunfire in the street behind. Wyatt Earp and Bat’s younger brother Jim Masterson was on police patrol duty, and they rushed to the scene.
The door to Dog Kelley’s little house was shot full of holes. Just inside, Wyatt and Jim found Fanny Garretson on the floor in her nightgown, shaking and weeping. In Dog Kelley’s bed was Dora Hand, killed with a shot to her soft bosom.
Some night owl up at that hour, hearing the gunfire, seen Jim Kennedy riding hell-bent out of town. It had been him all right, out to kill Mayor Kelley, shooting through the door in the middle of the night, never knowing Dog was not in residence but the girls was there instead.
I won’t go into my feelings on getting this terrible news next morning, except to say all impulses I had towards improving myself in a moral way was forgot with the death of this lovely, godfearing, churchgoing young lady. All I cared about was shedding Kennedy’s blood, but in that aim I had a lot of competition. The entire male population of Dodge was pleading with Bat to include them in the posse he was organizing, but as he already had Wyatt Earp, Charlie Bassett, and Bill Tilghman, he was resisting the pleas of lesser men.
To mine he says, with the usual slight smile he showed me even at a moment like this, “Sorry, Jack, this is a job for professional lawmen.”
“You can deputize me!”
“Look, Jack,” Bat says, “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but whatever you did before I met you, since you’ve been in Dodge you’ve only poured whiskey. Do you even own a weapon? Or a horse, for that matter? Kennedy’s hands are going to want to help him. A couple dozen of them are in town, and somebody said they are saddling up.”
“I don’t care if all of Texas tries to save that skunk,” I says, breathing fire. “This ain’t the Alamo. The lady he killed was a personal friend of mine.”
Bat squints with his right eye. “Well, Jack, a lot of fellows can say that.”
I just hoped he never meant she was common. I wouldn’t of taken that from Bat Masterson himself. “Goddammit, Bat,” I says, “I got to go after him.”
Bat stopped smiling. “Jack,” says he, “you’re not going.”
What should I of done then? To this day I regret not having borrowed or stole a horse (though you could get hanged for the latter) and gone after Kennedy and killed him, preferably in a fashion not so merciful as a shot to the head. For what happened was Bat and that posse of famous gun-fighters did track the bastard down and captured him, with no worse damage to Kennedy than a shot that smashed his armbone. They brought him back for a hearing before a judge, who proceeded to let him go for lack of evidence!
You will remember Jack McCall, what murdered Wild Bill in cold blood, was let go by his first jury, and Walker, who gave Wagner the gun used to kill Ed Masterson, was likewise allowed to go free. So if you think justice was better served in the Old West than in your own time, whatever it is or will be, you are wrong.
Jim Kennedy’s rich dad come up and hauled him back safe to Texas, where he was protected by an army of cowboys, and he lived to shoot more people in the back till finally his number come up and somebody, unfortunately not me, rubbed out the no-good son of a bitch.
Dora Hand’s funeral was the biggest in the history of Dodge.
By now I had had enough of the place, for sure, and was fixing to move on again, though I didn’t know to where—I had accumulated a little nest egg, which by rights I should of took to Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher Hickok, in Cincinnati, to replace that lost roll Bill had give me, but I wasn’t yet ready to do that, think worse of me if you will—when Bat Masterson did give me a special job, which led to a change of direction once again, this time taking me back to the Indians.