Sweet Thunder Page 24

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

  “Excuse me? The—?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What—why—how did she get up there?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “A-S-S—”

  “No, your commanding officer’s name.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  19

  “I STILL CAN’T BELIEVE IT. It isn’t like Cutthroat Cartwright to miss out that way. He ought to have snapped up the Rough Riders story like a wolf licking his chops.”

  “Are you going to natter about that all night?” None the worse for wear—unlike me—after the day’s horseback adventures, Sandison was heartily tucking into his plateload of scalloped potatoes and veal parmigiana; stiff and sore as I was, cooking had to be done. Also for supper were the Thunder and the Post spread around on the table, more like a long wharf than ever with just the two of us docked at one end. “I don’t know what’s the matter with you. You achieve a whatchamacallit, swoop—”