The Old Colts (19 page)

“I didn’t used to.”

“
Psssssssst!
”

It was a man in dire straits at the transom over the door between the rooms.

“Will you excuse me, young lady?” asked Wyatt.

“Sure, Mr. Earp,” said Birdie. “Just don’t leave me up the creek.”

Wyatt climbed out of bed, moved to the door, and stepped up on the chair.

Standing on the chairs, their voices low, their bare, moonlit, legendary asses displayed to the admiring maidens as though in a museum, the two gentlemen chewed the rag through the transom.

“Who the hell’s idea was this!” Bat demanded.

“You and your history,” Wyatt reminded.

“We shouldn’t take advantage of these girls.”

“A kind heart never helps at poker.”

“Goddammit!”

“Aren’t you up to it?”

“Damn right I am! But I’m saddle-sore!” Bat hissed. “And we’ve got a big day tomorrow!”

“You know what they say in New York.”

“New York?”

“‘It’s a great life if you don’t weaken.’”

 At five minutes before ten o’clock in the morning of 5th May they park the Ford Touring Sedan at the curb on Railroad Avenue a few feet from the corner. Both are crabby as bears with sore paws this morning after, and a difference of opinion flares. Mr. Earp orders his driver to leave the engine running. Mr. Masterson objects that a car parked with the engine running is sure to attract notice. Mr. Earp counters that he, Mr. Masterson, based on his performance yesterday, has as much chance as a snowball in hell of starting the car fast enough for a successful getaway. Mr. Masterson declares that he is the driver, he will make all decisions relative to the car, and his decision is to cut the engine. Mr. Earp reminds him that he, Mr. Earp, is calling the play, and the term “play” as used in the West is all-inclusive—therefore the engine will be left running. Mr. Masterson asks if he, Mr. Earp, would care to have an ebony eye. Mr. Earp replies that if he, Mr. Masterson, cannot recall his, Mr. Earp’s, prowess with his fists from their early buffalo-hunt days he, Mr. Earp, will be only too glad to escort him on a trip down Memory Lane. Mr. Earp then turns and strides around the corner. After a minute of meditation Mr. Masterson follows, allowing the Ford’s four cylinders to continue functioning.

“Not sure I’m up to this,” Bat grumbles.

“You better be.”

“What a night!”

They wait across the street from the Drovers Bank of Dodge City, its white glazed brick facade sparkling in the morning sun.

“Well,” says Bat, “you tried ‘em both. Which one wins the Bible?”

“Bible?”

“In bed, I mean. Birdie or Dyjean?”

“We’ve got work to do.”

This morning three men and a woman wait at the doors for the bank to open.

“Slip your gun,” Wyatt mutters. “Make sure it draws easy.”

Reaching under jackets, they slip guns out of and back into holsters.

“You take the left side, the tellers,” Wyatt orders. “I’ll handle the right—and get Beanstone out of his office. Masks on as soon as we get through the doors.”

“I say a toss-up.”

“What?”

“Birdie and Dyjean. Sweet patooties, both of ‘em.” They’d bought bandannas at a drygoods store, tying them round their necks under jackets, ready to raise. “Last chance to change our minds,” says Bat.

“Your mind.”

Bat angles his derby up and down, this way and that. “I’m in. We drew aces last night—never leave the game when the cards are coming, I say.”

“No shooting unless we have to.”

“Okeh.”

“But if you have to, hit something.”

“Okeh.”

Tempus fidgets. The local yokels before the bank doors bustle a bit. The doors are unlocked. The yokels yank them open.

“Let’s go,” says Wyatt.

“Leave a light in the window, Mother, I’ll be home late tonight!”

They cross the street.

They climb the steps, open the doors.

They enter the bank. People moving, people standing, people sitting, people looking. They reach under jackets to raise bandannas.

At this instant there occurs the one thing, the one event, the one coincidence that no one sane of mind in the world would have expected or predicted or believed could possibly occur.

Behind them, a gun goes off.

Plaster showers from the ceiling.

Behind them, simultaneously, a shout— “Everybody on the floor! This is a holdup!”

Incredibly confounded, W.B. Masterson and W.B.S. Earp fall in slow motion to the floor.

“Goddammit, we said on the floor! That means you and you—and you! On the floor and you move and we’ll blow your goddam heads off!”

A gun goes off again.

Faint cries, from women and from men.

On his side, facing W.B.S. Earp, lies W.B. Masterson. The expression on his phiz is indescribable.

On his side, facing W.B. Masterson, lies W.B.S. Earp. The expression on his phiz is indescribable.

The Drovers Bank of Dodge City is being robbed this morning, this minute, by someone else.

The sound of shoes, running. Voices. Of a woman sobbing hysterically. Drawers being hauled open. A metal box dropped. Something, a wastebasket perhaps, overturned. Voices hollow in the vault.

W.B. and W.B.S. turtle heads. There are two men, maybe three. Bareheaded. One is bald. Denim workshirts and pants, and across their mugs, narrow strips of black leather with holes for eyes. Professionals. They carry handguns, small-caliber and snub-nosed.

A shout—“All right! You-all stay on the floor and don’t move for five minutes—five minutes or you’ll be goddam sorry you did!”

A gunshot for an exclamation mark.

Plaster showers.

The front doors bang.

Three ticks of a clock.

Lungs let loose.

Men shout.

Women shriek.

Furniture crashes.

An alarm bell rings.

Amid the commotion W.B. Masterson and W.B.S. Earp rise and make rapidly for the doors.

“We’ll get ‘em!” yells W.B. Masterson.

They tear out of the bank just in time.

Around the corner a dark green Studebaker Touring Sedan, its top down, two men in front, two men in the rear, lurches out of sight, evidently headed east.

They leg it across the street and round the corner toward the faithful Ford.

“‘We’ll get ‘em!’” pants a furious Wyatt. “What in hell did you say that for!”

“Damifino!” pants a bewildered Bat. “Habit!”

“I know why I said it!”

“Yeah?”

“We gotta get ‘em! They got our money!”

They roar and rattle, shake and shimmy down the narrow macadam road running east from Dodge, the same road they had taken yesterday for driving and target practice, hats jammed down over ears, Bat bent over the wheel in imitation of Barney Oldfield, Wyatt on the edge of the seat holding on to the windshield frame. Spark and throttle levers are advanced to the utmost. The needle of the Stewart speedometer stands at forty mph, full speed. The red line of the Boyce Moto-Meter on the radiator has risen to “High Efficiency.”

Gradually, however, the prey draws away. The 1916 Studebaker has been endowed this model year with a new four-cylinder, 3
7/8
bore x 5-in, stroke engine which, according to newspaper advertisements, endows the car with “Brute Power.” Horsepower has been upped to forty— double the brute power of the Model T—and top speed to sixty mph. And so the Studie draws away, half a mile away, three-quarters of a mile away.

Then a lucky break. It must slow to a crawl behind a lumbering Mogul tractor, cannot pass on the right because the shoulder is too narrow, nor on the left because a farmer with a wagonload of agriculture bars the passing lane.

Bat pounds in elation on the steering wheel. But then, as they come within a city block, close enough to identify the heads of the four thugs, two in front, two in the rear, one of these bald, tractor and wagon pass in opposite directions and the way is cleared for the Studebaker, which spurts around the Mogul and once again extends its lead.

“Goddammit!” rages Bat. “I told you we should’ve got a Hudson Super-Six!”

Now they can see, down the road on the horizon, the leafy bower and elevator tower which is Garden of Eden. And now they can hear, in their rear, the keening of a siren. It is of course that of Peace Officer Harvey Wadsworth, mounted on his Indian Powerplus, in full hue and cry after the criminals. Siren screaming, he whizzes by the Tin Lizzie as though it were standing still, bending low over the handlebars and doing the factory-guaranteed seventy-three-plus mph, hat blown from his head, goggles over his eyes, the expression on his cherubic cheeks carved by wind into one of superhuman concentration. Opportunity may knock but once, young Harvey knows, and surely this is the biggest bang of his career.

Bat and Wyatt watch as the motorcycle closes the gap. The dark green sedan seems to slow in response to the siren. There are tiny flashes of light from it—gunfire. The Indian careens off the highway and plows into a fence and through the fence, where it somersaults into corn which will be knee-high by the Fourth of July. Like a child’s toy, a jumping-jack, the rider’s body jumps twenty feet in the air on impact with the fence, then drops to earth to lie in a sprawl of blood, broken bones, and baby blue.

This cuts the comedy. This changes the water on the minnows.
Bat and Wyatt pass the remains of the peace officer, snatch glances at them, then at each other. Bat’s gray eyes glitter. Wyatt’s face is grim, his eyes a cold and lethal blue. Harvey Wadsworth wore a badge. He was what they were long ago. Now he has been gunned down in the performance of his duty, and they have failed in theirs. Progress has made it impossible for them to back his play. In the old days lawmen backed lawmen to the death. Many the time, shotguns at the ready, Bat and Wyatt and Charlie Bassett and Bill Tilghman and Jim Masterson and Morgan Earp covered rear doors and side streets and back alleys for each other when one was in a tight. That was another century, however, a simple century, and these two perfect, gentle knights in the Model T have lived beyond that time, into a new and unnatural. They could not have covered Harvey Wadsworth—blame it on the infernal combustion engine. But are they whipped? Not by a long shot. Are they too deef to hear the wolf howl, too mossbacked to make their own play? Hell, no. And so, full of fight, they forget the why and wherefore of the morning, the long trail by train into their past, and its purpose; they lay aside the subject of the loot. If they could not stop the taking of a life, they can at least, by God, avenge it.

The chase continues. The road over the prairie is straight as the part in a bartender’s hair. Again the Studie and its four villains draw away from the flivver and its two-man posse. Wyatt twists in the seat, bends his angular frame over the seat back, reaches to the floor of the rear compartment, and comes up with his ancient buffalo gun, the one he had taken from its glass case in the Beeson Museum in exchange for forty dollars—the great .50-caliber Sharp’s. Standing the rifle upright, he searches a pocket, finds the single three-inch-long cartridge which had been exhibited with the gun, and loads it. With this very blunderbuss, when in his twenties, he had earned his living with feats of marksmanship and mountains of hides which had earned him, in turn, the envy of every hunter and skinner between the Arkansas and the Canadian.

He plants his left knee on the seat, hoists himself, leans forward, lays the long barrel of the Sharp’s across the top of the windshield, shoulders the rifle, and braces himself with right foot on the floorboard and left elbow on the windshield.

“Blow out a tire!” yells Bat.

“I intend to!”

Wyatt Earp takes aim. At forty mph the Ford roars and rattles, shakes and shimmies. The range is half a mile. Just then the red line on the Boyce Moto-Meter rises to “Danger—Steaming!” and a plume of steam gushes from the radiator, obscuring vision. The shot cannot be made.

Bat sucks his breath.

The one, the only Wyatt Earp fires.

The report splits the eardrums.

Half a mile down the road the sedan veers, slows, veers, slows, and wobbles. The rear right-hand tire throws strips of rubber. Then the Studebaker disappears from view in Garden of Eden.

The Ford full-steams ahead until, as it nears civilization,
Bat cuts the engine and lets the vehicle coast to a stop in the shade of the first tree. They get out of the car.

“They’ll hunt a hole,” says Wyatt over the whistle of steam. “They’ve got a lame animal.”

“They’re in there, all right,” Bat agrees.

“Well, let’s find ‘em.”

They raise hats and draw guns, then start together at a measured pace into Garden of Eden.

It is even less than a village—half a dozen small frame houses secluded in high cottonwoods and sycamores and Chinese elms on the left side of the road. They see an old woman’s face at a window. An old man emerges from an outhouse, buckling his belt. In a front yard two children play, a boy and a girl, and, at the sight of two men striding down the center of the road with guns in hands, a comely young woman hurries into the yard and clucks her chicks into the house. Bat smiles and tips her a polite derby.

They approach a general store with a gas pump out front on the same side of the road as the houses. They walk more slowly now, in and out of sunshine, in and out of shade, old Colts swinging at their sides. Except for blackbirds in the trees and robins in the grass they walk in silence, as though Garden of Eden, interested more in fiction than in fact, is sleeping late. It is a fair, fresh spring morning.

“Here we go again,” says Bat, bemused. “Gathering nuts in May.”

“Hold it,” says Wyatt.

They stop.

On the right side of the road, opposite the houses and general store, a hundred yards away, there are no trees. Instead, rising higher than any tree, visible for miles around, rears the tower of a grain elevator, railroad spur line running beside it at the rear. The elevator is painted pure white, and below its top, in blue capitals, is lettered “GARDEN OF EDEN CO-OP.”

“There,” says Wyatt. “Behind.”

“They’ve gotta change that tire,” says Bat. “Two on the tire, I bet, and two lookouts.”