The Ballad of Dingus Magee (22 page)

Then Hoke saw Dingus see him. And still he ran, heedless, the Smith and Wesson cocked in his fist now but with that still not raised for use yet either, toward where the other had abruptly whirled, where Dingus himself now stood likewise without firing or possibly even unarmed since he made no move to withdraw a weapon from his garments, from the red frills. Probably it was incredulity more than surprise which held him, momentary incapacity at the sight of Hoke in a dress of his own and with the irrationality patent in his very headlong attitude itself, as he stumbled and tripped yet came on maniacally like some infuriated hellbent mad scarecrow and still not firing but worse, looking as if he did not intend to fire at all but instead would obliterate Dingus through the sheer lunatic inertia of the rush alone. Hoke plunged on as if to run right over him.

Dingus threw the shovel. He was at last turning to flee then, however, so that Hoke did not have to swerve or even falter as the ponderous spinning missile shot wildly past his ear. Dingus darted back toward the house, his skirts sailing. Hoke was less than a dozen strides behind him.

He had closed half of that gap when Dingus disappeared as if swallowed by the earth itself.

Hoke pitched onto his face. In less than the duration of a blink against the sun, against the flung dirt from his heels, miraculously, Dingus was gone, Hoke was absolutely alone in the field.

But Hoke was truly thinking again now after all. Or perhaps not, perhaps this too was intuition, since it came so quickly that even bafflement was precluded for more than
the first fleeting instant and after that he was up and plunging onward as before. “Because it’s jest a well,” he told himself and it was, although the mortared stones that had once encircled it had crumbled away and lay now scattered some distance beyond the pit itself. It was not wide, not four feet across. It was not deep either, clogged with earth and debris. From perhaps eight feet down Dingus was gaping wide-eyed, truly astonished—and at his own predicament rather than at the sight of Hoke now—but with his hands already braced against the shaft at his either side and posed as if to defy gravity and human capability and his own bewilderment at once, as if set to sprint back up and out again. “Now Hoke,” he said. “Now Hoke—”

Perhaps Hoke heard Belle also then, the single prohibitive outcry from somewhere behind him as she hastened across the field herself. Hoke was panting, and his chest filled and fell, but he did not wait. He did not even listen.

Steadying the Smith and Wesson in both hands, aiming with infinite deliberation, Hoke emptied all charged chambers into the narrow well.

The shots banged and echoed in the shaft, reverberating out across the low hills, repeating fitfully. Hoke Birdsill filled his lungs hungrily with the sweet warm air, with the pure cleansing taste of exoneration at last, of release. He did not look; there could scarcely be less need. With his shoulders squared as if for the first time in decades, unabashed by even the dress now, he strode back to meet Belle.

She had stopped some yards away. Nor did she move now, facing him with a kind of grim, constrained ferocity as he approached. Finally, wearily, she sobbed once. “Find it,” she said.

“What’s that, Belle?”

“What we came after, you banana-head. The safe. My money. You can use that shovel he ought to have brained you with. It shouldn’t take you more than eight or ten months to dig up every square foot of ground out here that he might have picked to—”

“But—”

She got around to hitting him then, a response he was growing accustomed to. He went down stifflegged, precisely as he had the last time, save with no wall to slump against. It didn’t hurt. He sat forlornly for a moment or two just watching while she herself gazed stolidly about, wishing remotely that he were back in Yerkey’s Hole with young Fiedler and his womenless troopers. The captain seemed intelligent, the last sort to be engulfed in such sexual maelstroms. Hoke wished advice.

“All right,” Belle was saying at last, “maybe we’ll have some luck. Maybe we’ll find fresh dirt, if the rat-holing little exhibitionist didn’t have time to disguise it proper.”

“I were digging up graves and making them look ordinary again when I weren’t but eight years old,” the voice informed them then, distantly, muffled and hollow yet hideously, sickeningly familiar. “You kin poke around from now ‘til Doomsday and you ain’t gonter find it, not unless I get drugged up out’n here first.”

Slack-jawed, Hoke had sprung to his hands and knees. This time when she hit him it was only out of relief.

“Get a ladder,” she told him disgustedly. “There must be one in the barn. If you can find the barn.”

“And git me some new boots,” the voice contributed. “You mule-sniffing blind cockroach, you done put a leak in the toe of one of’em—”

It was a cemetery in actual fact, roughly a quarter of a mile beyond the barn itself, where four rotted wood crosses marked the remains of the family whose farm it was, or had been. And he was right. The grave he had contrived for the trunk was identical with the others, undiscernible as new.

Belle stood above him with the shotgun while he performed the excavation, although Hoke had to help with the lifting. “But I weren’t never very exceptional at physical doings,” Dingus said. When they finished hoisting it aboard the surrey he turned to grin at them affably.

“Sort of a shame you caught up so quick,” he decided, “since it would of nacherly been a even pleasanter joke if’n I
dint return it fer a week or so, like I planned. Oh well, it were enjoyable anyways. But seeing as how it’s terminated, I’ll jest mosey on along then, I reckon—”

“Say your prayers,” Belle told him.

“Aw now, Belle, you’re smiling when you say that, I reckon—”

“I’ll give you three minutes, twerp.”

“But—”

Dingus studied her dubiously, then looked to Hoke instead, although Hoke had hardly anything more comforting to offer. In fact he had begun to nibble his mustache in anticipation, all the promise renewed again despite its brief debacle. He was even eyeing the shotgun greedily.

Belle merely gazed at him askance.

“Aw, shucks now,” Hoke pleaded, “them durned forty-fours jest weren’t never worth much fer accuracy to start with. But if’n I had a chance with that there scattershooter— especially it still being me he done give the heartache to fer the longest spell. On top of which I could get them rewards again, and—”

“We’ll both do it,” Belle decided abruptly. “Why, sure. A gentleman and a lady planning to get spliced, they ought to start sharing their satisfactions early anyways—”

“Married?” Dingus popped back into the conversation eagerly. “Well, say now, let me be the first to—”

“You’d put a curse on it,” Belle said. “And that’s a minute gone now. You better get to praying, I reckon.”

“Oh, I weren’t never the praying sort,” Dingus went on undeterred. “Jest sort of a old Emersonian, were all. But lookie here, I ain’t truly a bad nipper at heart. Matter of fact I doubtless wouldn’t of never wound up the way I done, if’n I’d had a mother to guide me in this life. And jest to show you there’s no hard feelings—why, here, I’d be obliged if’n I could give you a wedding present. It’s—”

The shotgun lifted threateningly as Dingus fumbled in his skirts, but it was only a watch. “Don’t keep time too hot,” he admitted, “sort of antique. But it’s all engraved right smartly too. Here, what it says, it’s
‘To my darling Ding, he rings the bell.’
It were my—”

“What?”

Belle snatched the object from his hand. Then, inexplicably, staring at it, she turned livid. “Why, you immoral, dirty-livered skunk, where’d you get this? You even went and stole this somewheres too, didn’t you? Well, hang it all, that’s the end now, the absolute mother-loving end. Because if—”

“Huh?” Dingus backed off more in perplexity than protest as she glared at him. “Now confound it, Belle, I never done stole it neither. Like I jest started to remark, that watch belong to—”

“Lissen, you lying-mouthed little pussy-poacher, I gave this identical timepiece to somebody exactly twenty years ago, before the ornery polecat went and lost me to a white slaver in a faro game and started me on the road to ruin. Here, where it says he rings the bell, it was supposed to say
Belle,
with an
e,
but the jeweler made a mistake. From me to him, my first husband. And
Ding
was short for—”

“
Dilinghaus? You?
You
done give that watch to—”

“What? Dilinghaus, sure. Of course. But how the thun-deration would you know that, you conniving little—”

“But that were my daddy’s name. That were—”

“Your da— But then—but then you’re—
not the beautiful baby son they made me leave behind? Not
the baby I’ve wept for in my secret misery for all these long, long years—”

“And then you’re my—my—”

“
My baby! Oh, my precious, precious baby!”

“Mommy! Oh, my very own, my long-lost mommy!”
Belle threw aside the shotgun. Dingus discarded the Colt he had been surreptitiously manipulating from beneath his skirts. Hoke stood amazed with the wonder of it, but already beginning to sob for a sentimental old fool himself, as they rushed to each other, as they embraced.

It was well after midnight before he was able to slip from the farmhouse. Stealthily he led one of the horses to the road.

There were no saddles, so he was still busily improvising a workable bit and reins when Dingus approached with another of the animals. For a time they gazed at each other without expression.

“All right,” Hoke said finally, “I’ll say it quick. And it ain’t even the idea of getting hitched, which maybe I done been a bachelor long enough to accept anyways. And doubtless I could even get used to you being a part of it. But not when she made me kiss your boyish brow goodnight like a daddy oughter, which is jest one step more’n any self-respecting man could take. So meantimes what’s your reason?”

“All that talking she done about the three of us turning respectable,” Dingus said. “About going somewheres that nobody knows us and living like good Christian folk. Because I been there before, with every danged relative I ever got tied to. I’ll take my chances on remaining a orphan, if’n it’s all the same.”

“How far will she chase us, do you reckon?”

Just south of San Francisco, an ill-guarded freight office supplied the price of their fares. She emptied several lethal devices from the wharf about seven minutes after the gangplank was raised, but the damage to the smokestack was nominal. They had to share a cabin with two other gentle-men, having been unexpected, and while they got on with both, it was the youth, Doolan, for whom they felt the larger affection. Rowbottom’s flatulence drove them above decks often. Otherwise poker for modest stakes occupied them until Valparaiso.

The Ballad of Dingus Magee

It was dusk that night when he rode on in

To the town of Yerkey’s Hole—

He was only a boy just turned nineteen,

Yet the gallows was his goal.

For Dingus Magee was a desperate lad,

The worst New Mex. then saw—

‘Twas plain he’d come with aroused intent

To trample on the law.

But the law in town was a sheriff bold,

Hoke Birdsill was his name,

And Hoke himself was no man’s fool

In that deadly shooting game.

So both were calm, and hard as rock,

Though bullets flew like hail,

As they staged their mortal duel that night,

In the street before the jail.

And then what occurred was an awesome thing

That cowards fear to tell—

For some say Hoke took so much lead

He sank clear down to hell.

But others remark ‘twas queerer still

For Dingus Magee, alas—

They claim he crawled off limp to die

While caressing a maiden’s knee.

Yet none can name, and name for true

The place where each was laid,

And none can judge, are heroes born,

Or are they only made?

But sometimes still, in Yerkey’s Hole,

Where Belle’s Place used to lie,

It seems you can hear the banging yet—

“That’s them!” old-timers cry.

Refrain

But sometimes still, in Yerkey’s Hole,

& Cetera.

Mrs. Agnes Pfeffer Fiedler

Yerkey’s Hob, 1885