Return of Little Big Man (12 page)

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.

N
OW I HAVEN’T MENTIONED
the Cheyenne for a while—I mean, in the sense of what they had been up to since the big fight at the Greasy Grass—but that don’t mean they disappeared from the face of the earth, like many whites wanted to hear. Them and their Sioux and Arapaho friends all separated into many different bands following the Custer battle and scattered all over Montana and Dakota territories. The hostiles was not done fighting, and at one point they even come close to Deadwood at Slim Buttes, but the three generals they called respectively Three Stars (Crook), Bear Coat (Miles), and Bad Hand (Mackenzie) run them all to ground—except Sitting Bull, who ended up in Grandmother’s land (Canada)—within a year, and even the great Ogallala Crazy Horse surrendered and come into the agency, where before long he lost his life in a scuffle the explanation of which depended on not only what race you belonged to, but which faction thereof. I was not on hand for it, so have nothing to say except that the incident involved either his best friend or worst Judas, one Little Big Man. Which was not me, this person being another Ogallala and his name, though translating the same as mine, was Sioux in its original form, as mine was Cheyenne. I think I have said this before, but people don’t always listen, and get it wrong. If the distinction is hard to grasp, think of how when I went to Europe with Cody’s show (of which more to come) a French lady said “Little Big Man” as
Pertygrandum,
or thereabouts, and in Germany some mustachioed and bemedaled prince told me in his language it was, more or less,
Klynergrossman.
Same name, different lingos.