Sweet Thunder (28 page)

But then a sight I could have done without, as we passed the Irish and Cornish and kilted Scots and approached the Italian segment of miners. The flag-bearer of their red, white, and green alongside the Stars and Stripes was none other than the damnable dynamiter, Giorgio Mazzini, doubtless chosen for height, might, and proud bearing. Why oh why couldn't Grace's current boarder have been some ordinary Mustache Pete instead of a Roman god?

Fortunately or not, I had little time to brood on that. “Fall in!” came the call from the gray-bearded captain of the Rough Riders, and we accordingly turned our horses and waited for the Miners Band to strike up first “The Star-Spangled Banner” and then the union anthem. Impelled by a certain kind of frown from Sandison, I managed to squeeze Blaze and me between the Jameses' mounts, the better to interview the brothers—or at least the one capable of speech—while we rode. At last came the first stirring notes of “The Song of the Hill,” the long line of marchers accordioned into motion, and we were under way.

It took me a block or so to figure out how best to handle reins, pencil, and notepad all at the same time, but finally I felt ready and, turning to Leonard, casually asked over the
clop-clop
of our horses' hooves: “How is Buffalo Bill these days?”

“Still dead.”

I mentally kicked myself; the name of P. T. Barnum, long deceased, was on a circus apparently for eternity, wasn't it. “His, ah, showmanship cannot be interred with him, of course,” I hastily accorded promotional immortality to William F. Cody as well. “I meant, how is the Wild West Show and—” I peeked at my earlier notation “—Congress of Rough Riders of the World faring?”

About the same as practically forever, Leonard allowed as how. “Can't print tickets fast enough.” As I listened to this slow testimonial, it dawned on me how veteran he and the other two were, in all senses of the word. Up close, the seamed faces of Sandison's “young scamps” were a reminder that more than two decades had passed since Teddy Roosevelt rallied men like these in the conquest of Cuba. Surreptitiously I wrote down
crow's-feet around the eyes
while trying to think what a mounted correspondent ought to ask next. “Mmm, what is the most memorable place you've ever been with the Buffalo Bill show?”

Leonard considered the matter for so long I wondered if he had forgotten he was expected to answer. At last, though, he drawled, “St. Pete was a humdinger. Wouldn't you say, Claude?” The other James brother inclined his head a fraction.

“St. Petersburg? What a coincidence! I remember it fondly myself.” My confidence as a roving reporter went up a peg, with my interview subject and me in concord about that burgeoning but oh so pleasant Florida city, where during our travel year Grace first dipped a toe into an ocean, the tropical breeze through the palms like a murmur of benediction on newlyweds. My sigh holding volumes about those balmy days and nights, I put the next question: “In the winter, I hope?”

“As wintry as it gets in St. Pete,” came the taciturn response. “Right, Claude?”

“Isn't that climate something.” Thinking of the proximity to Cuba and the heroics of the Rough Riders in the so-called splendid little war, I asked, “Did performing there have a different feel to you, with that sort of audience?”

“You said a mouthful. People about went crazy,” the talker of the James brothers rationed out. “The big cheese hisself was there, gave ol' Bill a toad-stabber of some kind to welcome us to town.”

Before I could ask the exact nature of the ceremonial sword, presumably presented by the mayor, the tale picked up speed.

“We put on the show like we usually done, riding and whooping and shooting in the air and making that San Juan Hill charge. Do that right at the audience, hell for leather, and it gets their attention, for sure. But those St. Peterkins, as we called 'em, was standing on their seats and yelling their heads off at every little thing we did. Never saw nothing like it, hey, Claude?”

“It must have been quite an experience,” I furnished as encouragement to keep him talking and his silent sibling nodding, meanwhile writing furiously on my pad and somehow manipulating the reins enough to remind drowsy Blaze that I still was a passenger, and also trying to keep a concerned eye on Sandison where he rode, favoring his wounded side by leaning so sharply in the saddle, it looked like his horse was tipping over. When he wasn't wincing with pain, he seemed to be thoroughly enjoying himself, patting his gun butt meaningfully whenever some old-timer in the crowd yelped out, “String 'em up, Sam!” or some other tribute. And the Rough Riders proved to be a popular feature as well, met by the chant that first greeted their 1898 military triumph, “The boys in blue always come through!” as we progressed. Somewhere in back of us, a Rough Rider regularly sounded the blood-stirring bugle call that echoed the famous charge up San Juan Hill. The role of mounted correspondent beginning to fit me, I brightly posed a next question to my interviewee: “So, was there anything else particularly memorable about St. Petersburg?”

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?”