BUFFALO BILL RETURNED FROM England as the “Hero of Two Continents,” so called in the papers, and most everybody in the troupe felt so good about our success in a foreign country that when he said he wanted to open right away at Erastina on Staten Island, they all was real keen to do so except for some of the Sioux who was homesick and went back to the reservation, though more stayed on.
My friend Annie Oakley had left B.B.W.W. after the London engagement and her and Frank went over to Berlin, Germany, where she performed for the German version of the Prince of Wales, namely Crown Prince Wilhelm, the same who later become Kaiser Bill and fought against us in the First World War. But that was in the future. At the time of which I speak, the Butlers come back on their own to the U.S.A. and Annie went on Tony Pastor’s vaudeville circuit, doing her shooting act in various theaters around the East.
All I knowed was that they had fell out with Buffalo Bill, I figured on account of Lillian Smith, though they never said so and I didn’t ask. After that tour Annie even joined the competition, in the form of a rival show run by a fellow name of Comanche Bill and then switched to that managed by Pawnee Bill Lillie, our old friend from B.B.W.W.
Now Pawnee Bill already had a lady sharpshooter, who happened to be his own wife, but the Lillies was shrewd enough to give Annie top billing.
When in New York, Annie and Frank stayed at the apartment they had rented opposite Madison Square Garden, and I visited them there on occasion, as did Mrs. Libbie Custer, though not at the same time, and by my request—which was out of respect for the lady.
Now, as to my plans for getting in touch with Mrs. Agnes Lake Thatcher Hickok, I hadn’t yet done so, for I wanted before making any monetary payment to determine how much cash I had accumulated in the North Platte bank to which a certain portion of my Wild West earnings had been sent from time to time. More of that later. Right now I’m going to get to the subject of a closer connection.
We had been back on Staten Island only a month or so when after one of the daytime shows I was in Cody’s tent, having a drink with him and Arizona John, sitting in a camp chair facing away from the entrance, when behind me comes a voice I recognized immediately but with feelings that couldn’t of been more mixed, so I won’t even try to name them all even if I could, aside from the one that made me want to hide.
“Colonel Cody, I should like to speak to you about an important issue.”
Buffalo Bill lowered the glass and rose to his feet. “By all means, young lady. Please do come in and sit down. Captain?” The last was for me to vacate my chair, for there wasn’t any other except that occupied by the ample rear end of “Major” Burke. “And may I offer you a glass of iced lemonade?”
“Thank you, no, Colonel, but I’ll accept the chair.”
All this while my heart was pounding, and not only in fear. I kept my head lowered as I got up from the canvas chair and moved over to the side of the tent, not holding the seat for her nor even looking in her direction.
I guess she waited till she sat down before saying the next. I wasn’t looking. “Colonel Cody,” she says in that cool voice I remembered so well, though it had now been ten years since I last heard it. “My name is Amanda Teasdale, and I am director of the New York chapter of Friends of the Red Man.”
Cody always put on formal airs when encountering respectable members of the opposite sex, and I expected him now to make the introductions, but he didn’t even introduce Burke, which was considerable relief for me. The stern tone in Amanda’s voice had took him by surprise. Remember, he had just returned from England, where Queen Victoria had fell all over him—by which I don’t mean what Lulu accused him of but rather that Her Majesty had been real flattering.
So all he says was, “Yes, Miss.”
“I don’t know whether you are familiar with our work,” Amanda says.
Cody had recovered to the degree that he could say, “And invaluable work it is.”
“I’m delighted to hear you say that, Colonel. Frankly, I had assumed perhaps unfairly, that you would be hostile to our organization.”
“Young lady,” said Buffalo Bill, now back at full strength, “as I am myself both an admirer of the fair sex, and I expect one of the original best friends of the American or, as our British cousins say, Red Indian, I assure you that the combination of the two names is one to which I pay the greatest honor.”
And Burke, silent until he got the cue from his boss, chimed in with, “Hear, hear,” another expression picked up in England.
“Oh,” Amanda says, “I thought your first claim to fame was as an Indian-killer.”
If when fighting redskins Buffalo Bill was as cool as he showed himself under this kind of fire, he done a good job at it. “Miss,” says he, “with all respect, you may be mistaking me for others. Far from killing our red friends, I give them gainful employment, with higher wages than many white men receive for hard and brutal labor, chopping at a vein of coal a mile under the earth, breathing noxious vapors, or in hazardous employment in some foundry, splashed by molten steel, or in a manufactory—”
At this point Amanda interrupts him. “Please spare me the rhetorical flourishes, Colonel. I of course refer not to your show but to your boastful accounts of killing Yellow Hand.”
“My dear young lady,” Cody says, in just the tone to annoy her, whether he knowed it or not, which is to say a kind of pitying patience, “I was defending myself. He was shooting at me.”
“Indeed? Yellow Hand had come to seize your home?”
John Burke spoke up at this point. Ever the press agent, he says, “Miss Teasdale, I am setting aside a block of tickets for yourself and any number of members of your organization. Lately the delightful term ‘Annie Oakleys’ has been coined for such free passes, taken of course from the name of the little lady who has brought nothing but honor to your sex. Let me explain the derivation of the term—”
“I have just seen the show,” said Amanda. “A large part of it consists of shooting at Indians and having them play dead. It’s the most degrading spectacle I have ever seen.”
Cody spoke in courteous exasperation. “It is not a show, miss, but rather an exhibition of great historical and educational value. We have made every effort to be absolutely accurate in our depictions, and we have been rewarded by universal commendation from those who participated in the actual or similar events.”
She spoke sneeringly. “How many Indians have been heard from?”
“You must recognize the name of Sitting Bull,” said Cody. “Once the most implacable foe, he was happy to join our company two years ago and stay an entire season, profiting handsomely in both money and acclaim. A pity he’s not at hand to correct your mistaken impressions. But a number of Sioux remain. You are free to go back to their encampment and speak with them without any supervision from myself. If you are not fluent in Lakota, Captain Jack here will be pleased to interpret.”
So the moment had come. I turned and said, “Good day, Amanda.”
She had started out real comely ten years before and only got better-looking in the interim, rather than the usual reverse, at least in them days when time took its toll quicker, her hair a richer and older gold, her eyes of an intenser blue, her features more clearly defined without getting harsh, and she had filled out some without putting on an ounce in excess. Also she was now real fashionably dressed in the fashion of Mrs. Libbie Custer though in livelier colors, in her case a lavender dress and a fancy hat. You could see why Cody had started off not as glib as usual. I only wondered why he hadn’t stayed that way longer, but as you know, I was always at a disadvantage with that girl.
She now gives me a glance of little regard and asks, “Do I know you?”
“Well, it was some time ago,” I says, “and I—”
“Move out of the shadow, please,” says she, squinting.
So I did as asked, and I took off my hat. “I got more forehead now and also this mustache. Name’s still Jack Crabb.”
“Why, Jack,” says she. “Of course it is.” And she smiles nicely, something I don’t recall seeing her do much if any back then as a real serious young woman, which in fact was my crude fashion of telling a respectable girl from one who wasn’t, if appearances was otherwise deceiving: the former didn’t have much humor, whereas you could always get a laugh out of a harlot.
Now you recall how I left that Indian school, in a fairly disgraceful style, and though Wolf Coming Out had told me he explained to the Major that I had not been at fault, he didn’t know no English, and the Major no Cheyenne, and that would of been a complicated thing to convey in sign language, so despite Amanda’s nice manner I remained uneasy. I also considered it quite possible she didn’t remember me, for I didn’t know why a person on her high level would of done so. I had gotten to having a high idea of myself, the way I went over with not only Prince Bertie but also with his old Ma the Queen, but all it took was one sight of Amanda to lower myself in my own eyes.
Not wanting to remind her of the school, I asked, “How’s your folks? They still live in Dodge?”
“My parents are no longer alive.”
I expressed my regrets, and Cody and Burke done so as well, but Amanda was finished with that topic. She stood up from the camp chair in one graceful motion without apparent effort, and in that fitted satin dress she was as stately as any of them titled females I seen in Great Britain and a good deal handsomer than all.
“I’ll take you at your word, Colonel,” says she. “Lead me to the Indian camp, Jack.”
Now Cody returned to the surprise he begun with. “Then you really do know our friend here?”
I have just been saying how small my opinion of myself was when in Amanda’s presence, but when Cody agreed with it I was irked, and raising my nose says, “Miss Teasdale and me was colleagues at an Indian school.” And then of course could of bit my tongue.
But she never batted an eye at the reference, just inclined her head at Cody, ignoring Burke to whom she had not been introduced, and swept out of the tent with a swish of attire as majestic as any I heard at Windsor Castle.
I caught up with her outside. “Amanda, we’ll meet the Sioux directly, but I just want to explain how I happened to leave the school the way I did.”
She walked as fast as she had when younger, on them longer legs than mine, but with a more conscious sense of herself, and a number of the cowboys from the troupe was hanging about and didn’t fail to gawk at her, though they would of been scared to say anything aloud, for she was obviously a lady of high class. But I knowed I’d get kidded next time they caught me alone.
Amanda glanced at me now and said, “I believe it was self-explanatory.”
You might think that remark relieved me, but it was so indifferently spoke it made me question whether she had any idea what I was talking about. So I persisted. “I was just worried about what you might of thought, with all that commotion.” She made no response to this, so I tried a more general approach. “The Major is a mighty fair man, I’m sure of that.”
“The school closed some years ago,” Amanda says. “The missionary fund ran out of money and Government policy changed, for the better in my opinion. Religious bodies were really at a disadvantage in dealing with the problem, as demonstrated by the Major’s experience, for by no means could he be personally blamed for every difficulty.”
She might of got more beautiful over the years and finer dressed, but she had acquired a way of speaking like somebody who sat in an office and talked only to others of their own kind.
We had went past the tents of the white performers and was approaching the Indian camp, and that’s what Amanda’s attention was fixed on right now.
She stopped for a moment and shook her head. “Must it be so shabby?”
“If you ever seen a real village in the old days, you’d call this luxurious,” I says. “There ain’t no scalps hanging from a lodgepole, and everybody’s got plenty to eat, good beef, not dog, and they’re getting paid for just being Indians, not doing anything that could be called work, not to mention that white people buy tickets to watch them.”
A lot of this was hypocritical, for having lived with the Cheyenne I didn’t have no horror of scalps, and in the days when there was plenty of buffalo and we could get to them, the periods of hunger wouldn’t be long, and as for dog, it was good eating and done only on special occasions. Finally, Indians never needed money till the white man took over. But I was giving the arguments Amanda could understand, having been educated.
However, she did not. Like most people with a cause she heard only herself giving her own side.
“They’re treated as animals!” says she, tossing her hatted gold head in indignation.
“Come on, then,” I told her. “Let’s talk to some of them and hear what they got to say.”
I led her to the tepee where Two Eagles lived, on account of he had a real nice wife named White Bear Woman who was a good cook if you liked Indian grub, and I did and ofttimes had a meal with them, for I also enjoyed the company. I’m not saying only Indians appreciated their vittles—you should of seen the Prince of Wales tying on the feedbag!—but they applied themselves to food with the wholehearted focus of them who even in the midst of plenty allowed for the possibility of future want.
White Bear Woman had a fire going in front of the lodge and a pot of something already cooked and placed at the side of the hot coals to keep warm while she made fried dough in a skillet.
She was a plump woman with a round brown face, and she smiled at me when I greeted her and said the most frequently repeated phrase in any Indian language I ever heard of: “Do you want to eat?”
I says to Amanda, “She’s inviting us to supper.”
Amanda was staring real sorrowful. To me she says, “Can you find some polite way to refuse? Please don’t hurt her feelings.”
I told White Bear Woman that Yellow Hair thanked her but was at that time of the month and didn’t have no appetite.
Just as I expected, this Indian female says, “But that’s the best time to eat, to replace the strength that is lost! She is too skinny to begin with.”
The Indians never had that theory about feeding a cold and starving a fever: there wasn’t any disorder they didn’t treat with grub if they had any.
“I don’t want her to think I am spurning her food,” Amanda says, now smiling nervously down at White Bear Woman, who wasn’t looking up but rather testing the hotness of the skillet with a fingertip she quick withdrawed and sucked the heat from in her lips.
“You can be sure that would never occur to her,” I says, “for she thinks she’s eating better than you do.”
Now White Bear Woman’s several kids had begun to collect for the meal, but though they had been with the Wild West for a time, the littlest having in fact been born during the first season when Sitting Bull was with us, they had been brung up to be polite and not pester white visitors unless of course the latter wanted to buy the pictures of themselves and their offspring which the Indians sold.
Which didn’t mean they wasn’t staring at Amanda.
Now let me give her credit for not acting like many white women who visited the Sioux encampment: she never exclaimed about how cunning the little girl looked in the fringed dress and beaded headband or spoke to them in “Indian”—me give heap wampum, and so on—or worst of all, talked like they wasn’t there, for by now all the Sioux could understand some English words, especially when applied to themselves.
On the other hand, Amanda was stuck with the idea she brung with her that these people was being misused, so the presence of them kids made her feel worse.
“I see that we’ve come at an inopportune time,” she says.
“It wouldn’t be if we sat down and fed with them.”
Amanda frowned. “Let me explain. It’s not that I think I’m too good to eat with them, nor is it I have a distaste for their diet. I’ll take your word they have food they enjoy eating and in sufficient quantity. But if I joined them, I would be certifying that I believe their being here is right.”
“You put more meaning in a pot of stew than it warrants,” I says. “Indians deal a lot with the spirit when the situation calls for it, but I never knowed them to be anything but direct when it comes to food. They eat whatever is available, for you got to eat to live, and you got to live to die. That last might sound idiotic on the face of it, until you realize that for them life is a circle.”
“That may well be,” Amanda says, “but you are speaking of the past. The Indian’s situation was changed altogether by the coming of the white man. Whether or not that was deplorable, it took place and we must deal with it as a fact. Putting the red man on display as a performer is not the solution to his plight. Instead, it maintains him as a hopeless anachronism, by celebrating the savagery he must put behind him else he has no future whatsoever.”
You couldn’t doubt her sincerity. After all, Amanda had been at this work of saving the red man for years, a cause that had little interest for most whites and none at all for many. It’s just that if you knowed Indians at all and how personal they was, by which I mean they was actually human, talking of them only as a problem, even when you was watching them get ready to do the most essential thing anybody living can do, namely eat, seemed to miss the beginning point.
Right now we had to move upwind of the skilletful of hot lard, in which the raw dough was sizzling away under a cloud of steam and spitting grease drops at us.
White Bear Woman looks up from her squat and says, “You ought to get a healthier woman to sleep with. You could cut yourself on Yellow Hair’s sharp bones.”
“You have too keen a tongue. Two Eagles should give you a good beating.”
I got to explain that me and her was kidding one another, and I had mentioned her husband, to which she said he’d get hurt bad if he tried it. Sioux women wasn’t easily mistreated.
Amanda didn’t get any of this, of course, and might not of understood even if she had spoke Lakota. I reckon it was a coincidence that she now asked about the head of the family.
“I reckon he’s inside the tepee or playing cards someplace and will show up when the food’s all ready to swallow,” I says. “The cooking is not his business.”
Amanda looked around at the rest of the camp. There was females in front of the other lodges, doing the same as White Bear Woman, and kids as well, and where the meal was ready, the whole family including the menfolk was sitting on blankets, eating.
“It’s real homey when you get onto it,” I told Amanda. “This is pretty close to a real village. It’s more comfortable than it might look. If the weather was wet, they’d all move indoors and make the fire there. The smoke goes up and out the top, where the lodgepoles cross.”
“It is all very quaint,” Amanda said, “but is this how people should live in the United States of America at the end of the nineteenth century?”
“They’re Indians, for heaven sakes. They always lived like this and don’t see nothing wrong with it.”
“But they can’t continue to do so,” says she, her chin firm and her eyes fixed, “except in a show like this. It’s all make-believe. Their old way of life is dead and gone.”
She was right, no doubt about it, when it come to the long run, but I had learned by that time in my own existence to take what advantages was offered by the short run while waiting for the long to come about, else you might end up without nothing, and if anybody was skilled at making the most of what lay at hand, it was an Indian, just as it was whites who specialized in the future. I seen myself as a mix of the two, though better accommodated to the redskin way of making the best of what was available, for there was no getting away from the fact that it was less complicated.
“Amanda,” I says, “if we hang around much longer we’re gonna have to eat.”
“There was no point in my coming here,” said she. “Colonel Cody simply wanted to evade a discussion of the issue. That these people might stoically accept their lot or even think it’s better than some is beside the point.”
I expressed my regrets to White Bear Woman, who had just flipped the fried dough over on the other side, with less spattering this time, for it had soaked up most of the grease, which is what made it so tasty. The smells of that and the stew, as well as the roast meat being cooked over the fire in front of a neighboring tepee, had set my mouth to watering.
“Speaking of eating,” I told Amanda, “I want to do it someplace. We don’t have a performance tonight. Would you want to eat supper with me?”
Now this might not seem so earthshaking an event, until you understand I had never before in my whole life asked a woman out in the city sense of that term, I mean, I had ate many a meal, under various conditions, with various females, including of course my white and Indian wives, but never asked any on a “date,” as such, and I was a man of forty-seven years!
I reckon I was fortunate she never took me up on it, for though I had hung around with the likes of the Prince of Wales, I had never doubted my position was as an entertainer and it didn’t matter if my manners was bad, but I sure wouldn’t of wanted to give Amanda any more reason than she already had to look down on me by not knowing how to feed in a fine New York eatery.
Now till this moment Amanda had been so distant that I still doubted she remembered me, or anyway I preferred that doubt to thinking it didn’t mean much to her whether she did or not, but all of a sudden now she saw me as a person.
She even produced one of her rare smiles. “I’m sorry, Jack. I’ve been preoccupied. Yes, let’s eat together, but not at one of those over-priced restaurants.” I had an impulse to tell her price was no object, in case she thought I couldn’t afford it, but was checked by the suspicion that her real reason might of had to do with my manners or appearance. She went on, “And they are much too noisy for conversation. Why don’t you come home with me to my flat? I’ll make a meal, if you don’t mind something simple.”
“Why, Amanda,” I says, trying to be easygoing about it, “that’s real neighborly of you.” But I was in a state of great feeling. I won’t say excitement as such in case you might believe I mean indecent, which wasn’t it at all. If I never before asked a lady out to eat, neither had one ever invited me to her house: that the first such turned out to be Amanda was the kind of thing I never could of imagined.
By the standards of a later day it took a long time to go anywhere at that time, but relative to that era, moving around New York was swift. We steamed across to Manhattan on the ferry and then took the elevated railroad uptown. I didn’t marvel that a girl from Kansas knowed her way around the city, for Amanda always had a natural authority when it come to civilized matters, but she told me it had took her a while to get on to the best way of handling herself in New York, where it was more than a simple thing of avoiding the areas and persons who seemed un-respectable as in Dodge, for there was too many of both here and ninety-nine percent of the people you encountered was strangers and didn’t care what nobody thought of them.
The style that seemed to work best was to act at all times like you knew what you was doing and nobody else did. She says that both parts of that was necessary for it to be successful: neglect one, and you left a gap for somebody to ride through and trample you down—the language is mine, but that was her theory, and I expected she was right but thought it too bad a young woman of such refinement had had to become so cynical here in the East.
It seemed to me her flat wasn’t too far from Mrs. Custer’s, though I never was sure where I was in any city, even Manhattan, where north of the Wall Street area the streets was regular as a gridiron. I could find my way across untracked prairie or forest where I had never previously been, but I needed a guide when in New York or London or Chicago, where I was distracted by the presence of so many people, vehicles, and buildings higher than two stories, and when you got traffic, you had a lot of noise: cursing and the cracking of whips, and whether you was on that elevated railway or anywhere in its vicinity, you was made deaf to any other sound. How any human person could stand to live permanently in such a place was beyond me.
I thought the outside of her building was ugly, being covered by a scaffolding of iron fire escapes, but Amanda’s flat was real nice, with bright gaslight and pictures on the walls of the parlor and thick-holstered furniture in green plush.
“This is real comfortable,” I says, instead of complimenting her on the furnishings, which I thought was nicer even than Mrs. Custer’s but I was afraid she might think worse of me if I said something dumb about them.
I was wise not to go further, for she says with disdain, “It is certainly ugly.” It turned out she had rented it in the furnished condition. I guess she didn’t spend much time there, at least not in the sitting room. The surprise to me, though, was she proved to be a good cook, producing as fine a plate of scrambled eggs and ham as I had tasted, and I mean no faint praise in saying as much, for that was a dish I ate a lot at cafes all over the country, and too often it was like a leather glove, but Amanda’s was fluffy as a cloud.
We ate in the kitchen, which was my idea as being more homey, but Amanda with a skillet and wearing a plain apron over her finery was still not in the least domestic—unlike Annie Oakley who was, wherever her and Frank hung their hats, but was also a lousy cook, so though she done a lot of needlework at home, they ate most of their meals out.
Amanda’s coffee weren’t bad either, though I would of preferred it boiled a little longer on account of that was the way I had drank it all my life, cooked down real bitter and then dosed with as much sugar as it would soak up, and I’d spoon out whatever residue was too thick to drip onto my tongue, holding the cup over my mouth. Which I mention, though I never done it in public even in some of the dumps I ate in out West, because it was all I could do to keep from doing it here, so warm did I feel being with Amanda, and while I was aware she was friendlier than I had ever known her, she was a cool customer, I reckon by nature rather than upbringing, for her Ma if you recall was a woman who believed she might even at that late date have a career in singing in a music hall in Dodge City. Her Pa had been a banker who she accused of frequenting the Lone Star harlots. I guess in Dodge he was well-to-do but in New York, where Bill Cody had friends like J. G. Bennett who owned the Herald newspaper and sent Stanley to find Livingstone, and Leonard W. Jerome who lived on Madison Square and was grandpa to an energetic, talkative English boy who come to see the Wild West when we was in London, name of Winston Churchill, why Mr. Teasdale wouldn’t of been of so high a place as to warrant the putting on of airs by his daughter. I had to conclude she was just born that way, with a sense of her moral superiority, in which she was by no means alone, for Wyatt Earp was like that, except with him it was for selfish ends, whereas so far as I could see, Amanda had little interest in personal gain or possessions. Later I found out that satin dress didn’t come from any of the fashionable places along the Ladies’ Mile but rather from a cut-rate drygoods shop downtown: it just looked like a million dollars on her.
Since leaving our encampment she hadn’t talked any more about the Indians and had not volunteered any personal details, nor asked after mine, but just offered observations on New York, of which she was a harsh critic for somebody who wasn’t compelled to live there.
But when I pointed that out, with all respect, she says, “This is where the money is.” Meaning, not in the sense of making a living, which was why Mrs. Custer came there, but rather in getting people to contribute to the Friends of the Red Man, which like Annie with her initials for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West, Amanda generally shortened to F.R.M. “But we have ferocious competition from every other organization of social betterment.”
“I can’t rightly speak for him,” I says, “but if I know Cody, he will give you a nice contribution. Despite what you think, he ain’t against Indians.”
“How could that be accepted in good conscience?” Amanda asked. “Would it not be like accepting in the fight against Negro slavery funds that had been made by selling cotton picked by slaves?”
She had a real fine mind, no question about it, to come up with such a twist. “I guess you could look at it that way, but you could also see it as turning to the good some of the money which in your opinion is at present going only to a bad cause.”
“Let me clarify the point, Jack. We don’t begrudge the Indians the wages paid by Colonel Cody, or for that matter his earning a personal profit from a business enterprise. The issue here is not about money as such. What is so objectionable about the Wild West show is its presentation of Indians as savage and primitive. Paying them to be so actually makes it worse. Without pay they would not degrade themselves. They would settle down on their acreage and join American society, and educate their children in proper public schools. The Indian will never be civilized until the importance of the tribe is diminished.” She opens her eyes wide. “I know that might sound heartless, but what alternative is there?”
Here was a reverse of the usual, with the woman representing reason and the man, namely me, being the person dominated by feeling, but much as I admired Amanda for strength of character and even suspected deep down she was probably right from the historical point of view, I knowed the tribe was the best thing the fighting Indians had going for them, and if you was ever part of one, like I was during my formative years, and then went on to another way of life, with nobody to rely on but yourself, you tended to be lonely, and I had been white all the time.
But the fact was Amanda and her bunch really was trying to do some good for people who needed a hand, whereas for all my regard for Indians they was benefiting me more than I was them, which happened to have been true since I first hooked up with any, aside from maybe paying for the defense of them Cheyenne charged with murder back in Kansas.
Now you might be able to see from this little account of my meeting with Amanda again what never occurred to me at the time, and that is that my thinking on this subject now, which I previously avoided doing because of its hopelessness, had more to do with my personal infatuation than with sympathy for the red man considered as a cause.
“I don’t want to pry into your private life,” I says while she was pouring me more coffee. “But I was wondering what you done after the Major’s school closed.”
“I went back to Dodge City,” she said in her crispest voice, “where my father’s bank failed because he had embezzled money from it, but before he could be tried he shot himself to death, and my mother died the following year, probably from shame. One of my sisters married a cattle broker and moved to Topeka. The younger one followed a man to San Francisco and has not been heard from since, which means reality fell short of her expectations, otherwise I would have heard from her. I think it’s more likely she’s walking the streets.”
I was sorry I asked, unhappily reminding her of these matters. There was deep feeling behind the slightly resentful yet cool manner Amanda had always displayed since I first met her. She just had the self-control not to advertise it to others. Sometimes she could get too harsh, but maybe that was protection against being weakened by sadness.
It was not good manners to ask a spinster if she ever come close to being married, so I did not do so, though I would of liked to know about that more than anything else. “I’m sure sorry to hear of all the troubles you been through,” I says. “I admit I used to think of you as a rich girl.”
Amanda’s reactions never could be predicted, at least not by me. “Yes,” she said, “I suppose so, relative to the place and time. But all of a sudden I had no source of income but what I could find on my own, and I refused to get married to acquire financial security. I might have taught school, but no local positions were open, and any employment associated with the church was out of the question after my father’s scandal.”
I just wished I had knowed about her difficulties, as I could of helped her out, but on what basis? It sure could not look like she was a kept woman. In case you ain’t reached that conclusion on your own, I might say Amanda was a real difficult person to know how to deal with, especially if you was uneducated and her social inferior.
“Necessity forced me to review the lady’s education to which I had been subjected. I assumed it would be a vain effort to find anything of practical potential, but wonder of wonders”—her eyes sparkled—“I actually found something! I had received years of piano lessons. Of course, that meant Scarlatti and Chopin, but I wasn’t talented enough to give public performances of such music. However, I was sufficiently gifted to play in a saloon.”
“You didn’t,” I says.
“I did,” says she.
“Which one?”
“The Pink Horse.”
Which was pretty much of a whorehouse, pure and simple. I don’t think they had any other entertainment than that battered old jangly piano. Nobody even went there to gamble. I tell you I almost choked at that point, which was easier than saying something.
Amanda had elevated her chin defiantly. “It was an excellent job. In addition to my wages, I got tips, sometimes lavish if the men were drunk enough. The requests were more often than not for songs of a sentimental sort rather than what I would have expected in a place of that kind, but the women who serviced our customers told me many men were sentimental in the bedrooms. Of course, some were brutal. What surprised me most however was the deference with which I was treated by these cowboys. I kept a revolver on top of the piano, and a knife in my clothing, but in my time there I never had cause to use either one. Not only was I never touched, but only rarely was I ever asked if I might be hired for a private performance, and even then it was put so discreetly I could have interpreted it to refer only to music.”
“They was scared of you,” I says.
She shrugged. “Oh, I doubt that.”
“To them kind of fellows anybody with a musical talent is real special. A man in that job is always called the Professor. A fine lady playing the piano would be a wonder.”
I had suspected it but now it was proved: Amanda could walk through a mud puddle not only without getting besmirched but not even being interested in why. So she says, “Be that as it may, it was profitable employment and as honorable as anything else I might have done, perhaps even more than most. I was also given an opportunity thereby to make the acquaintance of prostitutes.”
I hastily says, “Well, there are all kinds,” and hoped to change the subject, being discomforted by the association, Amanda having represented for me that which was exalting, as far as possible from saloons and harlots.
“To try to find,” she went on, “just what attracts men to them.”
“It’s just that they’re there.”
She didn’t take no account of what I had said, but continued. “What I found was that these women for the most part avoided reflecting on their profession in a general way, though being ready enough to give particular experiences in detail.”
Hoping to steer her away from getting into the subject of sex, if that was where she was heading, I says, “Looking at things according to a theory is done only by educated people, on account of only they know how.”
“I can’t say I learned much,” said Amanda, “except that most of these women neither particularly liked or disliked what they did, and that their predominant feeling about men was that they, the men, were foolish, and that they, the women, believed they were in the dominant position because men paid them. There is a great difference between this and the way nonprostitute women look at the issue.”
“Yes,” I says, trying to sound intelligent, “I have found that to be the case, myself.” I was hoping she’d get off the matter. “So when did you get back to the Indian problem?”
“I had not lost my faith in the social gospel,” Amanda said. “The church may have its hypocrites, but its aims are noble. I am no longer religious in the doctrinal sense, if I ever was, but I believe more than ever in working for justice. Ironically, the immediate reason for my returning to the cause was the cleaning up of Dodge City, led by the forces of respectability. The saloons became soda fountains!” She had a way, at least with me, of acting as if I wasn’t present and she was addressing herself, but now I was real pleased by an acknowledgment of my presence by name. “You wouldn’t recognize the town, Jack.”
“It could use the improvement,” I allowed, and I was sincere. I might not of been part of it, but I thought normal life was the right thing for the country. I just wished it didn’t call for the mistreatment of the Indians, but I didn’t have no idea of what was the best way to avoid this. Hiring all of them to perform with B.B.W.W. and the other imitations thereof, like Pawnee Bill’s, now that Cody had proved so successful, might not be possible, but the Indians who was hired seemed to like it, which is more than could be said by most who tried what the Government thought up for them.
It wasn’t no use telling this to Amanda, however, who after playing piano in a whorehouse out West, come East to get back to doing good and took up with the people around Philadelphia, mainly church folk, who had an interest in the plight of the red man, and applied pressure to the federal Indian commissioners and Congress till that Dawes Act got passed. Now the same folks, in organizations like this one she had started up in New York, was trying to get the Indians out of show business.
So that was the outline of Amanda’s story since I last seen her, but what was missing altogether was anything pertaining to her private life, by which I mean men friends of the personal type, not just the old preachers she had worked with on the order of the Major. Though I had never knowed her exact age when we was at the school, I figured she would now be in her early thirties, an old maid by the standards of that time and living until recently out West, where women was usually at a shortage. But ladies as beautiful and smart as her was not in great supply anyplace on earth, at least not where I had been, and by now I had been a few places.
Well, I’ll tell you this: if she didn’t have no suitors it did not pertain to her appeal to men or lack thereof. It was due to her low opinion of the opposite sex. I guess what Amanda had seen of men give her little respect for them, but it probably never occurred to her she only looked at the wrong ones or that there was part of everybody human that maybe should be overlooked as long as it wasn’t actually criminal. But for that matter it’s the way of the world that them who don’t run it find fault with them who do: it’s a way of getting even. Still, it’s too bad if only that.
But all this was just supposition, for I never knowed anything about Amanda’s private associations, and you didn’t inquire into the subject with a lady. I did allow for other possible surprises, judging from the one I had gotten on hearing about the whorehouse piano-playing, and I decided there wasn’t no need to learn more. The important thing was I had re-established a connection with her, and I didn’t intend to squander it.
Sitting there across the kitchen table from her, drinking only that real weak coffee, here in the heart of New York City where I always felt so out of place, especially when visiting Mrs. Custer, but even at the Butlers’ flat, I got the first feeling of intimacy I had had since old Pard died, and I don’t mean no disrespect to Amanda for bringing up the memory of my dog, given the closeness between me and him and the way we took care of one another.
“I’m going to quit Buffalo Bill’s Wild West,” I told her now, “and work with you folks.”
If you think I had at last gotten Amanda’s attention, you would be wrong. I don’t know what I expected, certainly not that she would gather me to her bosom, but maybe it would occur to her that for her sake I was putting myself out of the best job I ever had.
You see how besotted I was when it come to that girl. It wasn’t till a long time later that I could see she would of disapproved had she believed I was doing it for her and not from a sincere belief in the rightness of the cause.
So all she says now was “I’m happy to hear that, Jack. I do hope you understand that the F.R.M.’s budget usually doesn’t cover our expenses as is, and most of those who work with us do so as volunteers.”
“Oh,” I says, digging the hole deeper in my elation, “I meant to make it clear I wouldn’t take no wages under any condition.” Now that I wouldn’t have no current income whatever, my worldly wealth consisted of them savings in the bank at North Platte, which I hadn’t totaled up in a while but expected was a couple hundred dollars, not exactly a fortune even in them days but enough to live on for a time even in New York, where you could eat breakfast for a dime and free lunch with a nickel beer. However, at that moment I never had a practical thought in my head: I was just occupied with how I looked in Amanda’s eyes. Which is why the next thing I done was seemingly contrary to my interests in being close to her.
I got up and thanked her for the supper and said I had to be going.
If I was hoping for her to urge me to stay longer, it didn’t work, but in fact, though I might of liked to hear her say as much, I really did want to get out before overstaying my welcome, and I intended to demonstrate that though we was a male and a female together in a private place, I wasn’t the sort of fellow who could take that to mean she was a loose woman.
Anyway, she gets up from the table soon as I did and politely leads me to the front door. Then she says something I figured explained why she hadn’t been more pleased by me wanting to join her bunch.
“It has been very nice to see you again. Jack. Perhaps it will be hopeless, but I would be grateful if you continued to remind Buffalo Bill of this issue.”
She either hadn’t heard or didn’t believe me when I said I was going to quit B.B.W.W. in favor of F.R.M. I took the blame for not making myself clear and tried again.
“Amanda, I aim to leave Cody’s show and join your bunch if you will have me. He’s been real good to me, and I want to give him notice and not just walk out before he can find another interpreter. If you’ll tell me where to show up and what to do, I’ll be there soon as I can.”
She was smiling. “Good for you, Jack. I was giving you an opportunity for second thoughts.”
She went away for a minute and come back with a card that had a street address on it and also another number, and she says I could telephone the latter to make sure when she was in.
Now I hadn’t never yet used a telephone, though that device had been around for a while in the larger cities. In fact I had thus far been scared to try lest I electrocute myself, so it was just as well I had never had a need to do so. But I realized if I was to gain the respect of Amanda, I would have to get up to date in modern life, for her theories as to Indians could also be applied to myself: it was time I got civilized.
Speaking of which, I now had to ask her how to get back to the Staten Island ferryboat, which would of been hard enough for me to find in the daytime, but it had gotten dark by now, and them streetlamps, being all alike, only confused me. I wasn’t fond of braving that city at night and maybe having to tangle with a gang of toughs or drunks lurching out of a saloon or, worst, a bunch of foul-mouthed Bowery juveniles, for how would it look if I was fighting with some kids even if outnumbered. I’ll tell you, I would rather of wandered horseless and unarmed in Crow territory while wearing Cheyenne paint than be by myself at nighttime on certain streets in New York.