Telegraph Days: A Novel Read online

  “She could have dropped those goggles,” Charlie Hepworth suggested. “My missus is always dropping things.”

  “That Indian hasn’t harmed any of us,” I pointed out. “Maybe he did find Ros’s goggles and returned them the best way he could.”

  “Oh now! That’s a stretcher,” Zenas said loudly, annoyed that I made so bold as to interfere with the work of serious journalists.

  I was pleased to be able to annoy him a little.

  “Ros Jubb looks after her tack,” Zenas continued. “If she’d dropped something, one of her sepoys would have picked it up.”

  “Anybody can lose something, sepoys or no sepoys,” Charlie Hepworth insisted. Charlie was willingly yielded a point.

  “I wonder if the Indian got Joe Schwartz,” Jackson said.

  “Why would you think that, Deputy?” Ted asked.

  “I hid in his loft all morning and no one came in to feed the livestock,” Jackson said.

  “It’s just one more damn thing to worry about,” Teddy remarked. Then he went back into the jail.

  “What a fool he is,” Zenas stated—it rubbed me the wrong way.

  “How dare you criticize our hardworking sheriff!” I told him stiffly.

  “Why would you care?” Zenas asked.

  “Because he was my fiancé until you came along,” I told him. “Just go easy on my old boyfriends until I know you better.”

  Zenas Clark just grinned.

  16

  I DON’T SUPPOSE there ever was a hero who proved a bigger bust at milking the market than my brother, Jackson. Sit him down in front of a reporter with a notebook and Jackson was about as talkative as a stump. Charlie Hepworth could get little out of him—likewise Cunningham Calhoun. And the rest of the troupe, with their stubby cigars and their whiskey-stained cravats, could get nothing out of him at all.

  They all worked at it for the better part of an afternoon while my mulish brother sat on a chair and uttered scarcely a word.

  My dreams of riches soon melted away. I possessed only a smattering of the famous Courtright scruples, but even I was not crook enough to charge ten dollars apiece for interviews that didn’t really happen.

  Once we got better acquainted, I found that, on the whole, I liked the newspapermen. I liked their general messiness and their eagerness to run one another down. Cunningham Calhoun, once he unbent a little under the influence of Mrs. Karoo’s rum, told me in secret that Charlie Hepworth was such a bad speller that his paper had employed a spelling expert just to handle his copy. Charlie Hepworth, for his part, told me that Cunningham Calhoun was such a wild fornicator that he had to wear a disguise when he went to New York, to throw off all the husbands who wanted to shoot him, not to mention all the mistresses who wanted to blackmail him.

  None of the reporters seemed particularly worried about the Indian, if there was an Indian. Most of them were too drunk to notice the threat posed by this mysterious aboriginal who left a lance in the main street of Rita Blanca with Ros Jubb’s goggles hanging from it. What I noticed was that most of them had one-track minds: they couldn’t get too excited by the fate of Ros Jubb when they still hadn’t closed the Yazee story. The Yazee fight was what they wanted to hear about and they would have preferred to hear it from the hero, Jackson Courtright, but since he had fallen mute they agreed to accept it from me. They didn’t acknowledge me in their dispatches, of course: I slipped out of the Yazee story just as my picture had slipped off the cover of my booklet; but that’s merely the way of the world, which is a man’s world for sure. I remembered to put in the detail that Jackson was barefoot when he shot the Yazees—that was just the kind of detail reporters like, though it was not the kind of detail my brother, Jackson, wanted revealed. He stayed half mad at me for several years because of what he considered embarrassment: it made him seem like a deputy who was so slovenly he couldn’t even remember to put his boots on.

  I charged the bunch of newsmen a good round of fifty dollars for my trouble, which they considered fair enough. It also rendered them more or less free to leave.

  What I learned that afternoon was that I could spin out lies as well as any other yarn spinner. I slipped several fibs into my report and did it so convincingly that none of the reporters ever questioned them.

  Then I worked the telegraph like a demon, seeing that all the stories I had just made up got filed with the various august newspapers, while the reporters wandered off to the general store to replenish their stock of cigars.

  To my annoyance Zenas Clark had wandered off with his colleagues. I told Aurel Imlah about my aunt Ros and he went loping off with his two Poles to see if he could spot her or maybe track her down.

  I myself rarely track down men—I consider it their duty to track me down, if they’re interested. But I made an exception in Zenas’s case—why should he be allowed to waste time in the Wheless store, reading some dime novel, when we could be finishing what we had started that morning in Joe Schwartz’s loft?

  As for Joe himself, he had been discovered sleeping off a drunk in his own bed. Jackson fed the livestock for him, which left the field—that is, the loft—clear for Zenas and me.

  “I hate to think I’ve engaged myself to a man who’d rather read than kiss me,” I told Zenas when I discovered him with a dime novel in the back of the general store.

  Zenas gave no indication of being flustered by the remark.

  “Nine days out of ten I’d rather spark you than read,” he said, “but this happens to be the tenth day.”

  I snatched the book away from him—it was yet another dimer about Buffalo Bill. If the picture on the cover looked anything like the real Buffalo Bill, then the famous hunter and scout was a very handsome man—perhaps too handsome to warm to in real life. One of the things that got me about Zenas was those snaggle teeth. They gave him an animal look that was hard to resist.

  “You might like Mr. Cody, if you met him,” Zenas said mildly. “All of us reporters like him—and the girls just won’t let him alone. He’s a fine fellow, I tell you.”

  “I suppose I won’t mind being the judge of that, if I ever meet the fellow,” I said. Frankly I was bored silly by all this talk about Buffalo Bill.

  “Why do you look so sulky?” Zenas asked.

  “Why wouldn’t I be sulky, sir—I was interrupted in my pleasures and that’s a major cause of sulks among us females.”

  “Okay, let’s go buy a blanket and have a picnic.”

  The comment showed what a sly fellow Zenas was. I had pointed out to him already that hay had its prickly qualities—a quilt or a blanket or even a long coat would come in handy if one planned to copulate in a hay barn.

  Cousin Templeton himself had rarely been without a long coat.

  Zenas was generous enough to buy the blanket himself, and he was vigorous enough, once we got back to the hayloft, to take most of the sulk out of me. I say most, because copulation, if done right, can sometimes fool a girl into thinking that the fellow she’s tupping with is actually nicer than may turn out to be the case.

  In this case I insisted that Zenas let me be the rider most of the time. I don’t believe he was used to letting girls sit astride him, but he didn’t protest. It’s a sweaty thing, copulation, particularly in hot weather—I’d rather be on top, sweating on Zenas, than to just lay there like a ninny, letting Zenas sweat on me.

  Our night together seemed to go quick; it was the kind of night that builds an appetite—the next morning we were up early and were at Mrs. Karoo’s, eating a hearty breakfast, when who should show up but Sheriff Teddy Bunsen. At first I supposed he was following me out of jealousy, but for once I was wrong. He was there looking for Jackson, who seemed to have disappeared.

  “He slept in the jail, like he always does, but he ain’t in the jail now,” Ted informed us. “I thought he might be up here, putting on a feed.”

  Right away I thought of the Indian—and I got pretty agitated. I didn’t want any Indian to get my aunt Ros and my brother too.
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  Fortunately Aurel Imlah, who had had no luck finding Ros Jubb, had up-to-date information on Jackson.

  “I saw him this morning,” he said. “Jackson was back of the saloon, gathering up beer bottles and putting them in a sack. I believe I saw him mosey off toward the river, not long after that.”

  “Why would he gather up beer bottles?” I asked. “Who needs an empty beer bottle?”

  “Targets,” Aurel said. “He’s probably just gone off to take some shooting practice. If I was the deputy sheriff of this town I’d see to it that I got in plenty of shooting practice.”

  Then I remembered the jackrabbit and the yearling—I had a feeling that Aurel was right.

  17

  I SUPPOSE EVEN experts do need to practice. I was never really expert on the French horn, but for a year or two, I practiced assiduously, to the discomfort of everyone else in the house.

  There was no reason why a pistol shooter shouldn’t practice too.

  Nonetheless, to my irritation, Zenas Clark immediately pricked up his ears. He prided himself on his reporter’s instinct, of course—I already knew that. But why did he need to exhibit it at the breakfast table?

  “But surely he’s a crack shot!” Zenas said. “Why would a crack shot need to sneak around gathering up bottles behind a saloon? He’s got half the reporters in America at the moment. What he ought to do is put on a shooting show.”

  “My brother is a good deputy,” I told Zenas sharply. “He’s hired to subdue the criminal element in No Man’s Land, not to put on expensive exhibitions for a bunch of scribbling drunks.”

  “He’s out of step with the times, then,” Zenas said. “Shooting shows are all the rage and there’s big money in it, you bet! I suppose a top shot can make fifty thousand a year. If your brother would move east and get in a few contests he’d soon have his fortune made.”

  Fortunately a fresh plate of flapjacks arrived just at that time—it distracted Zenas’s attention for a bit. I hadn’t really done a thing to make Zenas suspicious of Jackson’s shooting, and yet he was suspicious—I could tell. The more I defended my brother, the more suspicious my fiancé would become.

  What I needed was a smooth change of subject, but just at the moment, thanks to all that copulation, all I could do was stuff pancakes in my mouth and feel stupid.

  Aurel Imlah came to my rescue.

  “If you don’t mind my saying so, Mr. Clark, there’s another story in these parts that’s just about as good as the Yazee story.”

  “What other story?” Zenas asked. “There’s not much that interests readers as much as outlaws do.”

  “What I was thinking of was the Mountain of Bones,” Aurel said. “It’s a big hill of buffalo bones about fifteen miles from here. They say there are more than a million bones in that mountain.”

  “A Mountain of Bones, you say?” Zenas asked. I noticed that he had not been slow in getting his reporter’s notebook out.

  “How high is it?” he asked.

  “About eighty feet at the highest point,” Aurel told him.

  “A pile of buffalo bones eighty feet high?” Zenas said. “I’d sure like to get a picture of that—maybe Billy Wheless would loan me a camera for a day.”

  “Oh surely,” Aurel said. “I’ll be glad to take you.”

  Mrs. Karoo was looking at Aurel in her usual dreamy way—I supposed they were lovers but I could not yet be sure, and what business was it of mine, anyway?

  “Let me interrupt a minute,” I said. “Isn’t it dangerous to go traipsing off to the Mountain of Bones with this Indian in the vicinity?”

  Nobody said anything to that. Aurel just tapped his pipe.

  “What about my aunt Ros?” I went on. “Why would the Indian tie her goggles onto a lance and stick it in the middle of the street while nobody was looking?”

  “I suppose he just wanted us to know he’d paid us a visit,” Aurel speculated. “As far as I know the Indian’s never harmed anybody. I think Mr. Clark and I will just skip off and take a look at the Mountain of Bones—it’s no riskier than anything else in this part of the country.”

  It didn’t satisfy me, but to a newspaperman like Zenas a Mountain of Bones was a pretty good story, and anyway, when men decide to do something there’s not much point in their womenfolk trying to interfere.

  “If you ain’t back by suppertime I’m going to be worried,” I told Zenas, who paid the comment no more attention than if it had been made by a horsefly. It was clear that, having temporarily had his fill of me, he was happy as a lark to go loping over the prairie to inspect a million buffalo bones. The man was so cocky I wanted to kick him, but instead I watched the two of them ride off and headed for the stables myself, meaning to go see if I could find my missing brother.

  18

  LONG BEFORE I came in sight of the Cimarron River I heard the pop-pop of Jackson’s pistol. I was astride the big roan horse that had once been Bert Yazee’s, and I was plenty nervous—about the Indian, not my brother, Jackson. The last thing I needed was for some giant Indian to jump out of the weeds and grab me.

  Jackson didn’t look a bit glad to see me when I rode up, and it was easy to see why he wasn’t. There was no sign of broken glass anywhere near the log where the beer bottles were lined up.

  “Who invited you, by God!” Jackson asked, when I dismounted.

  “Jackson, there is no need to blaspheme,” I told him. “How many expensive cartridges have you fired off since you hit one of those bottles?”

  Jackson made no immediate reply.

  “I’ve never shot a pistol,” I mentioned. “I wonder if I could hit a bottle from where you’re standing.”

  “Of course you couldn’t,” Jackson barked, exposing his petulant side. I suppose many younger brothers have a petulant side.

  “Be a sport—let me try!” I insisted.

  Reluctantly he handed me the pistol and I promptly emptied it, hitting two bottles out of six. It wasn’t crack marksmanship by any means but the fact that I’d at least hit a bottle when he hadn’t put Jackson in a fury.

  “Goddamn you, I just wish you’d go back where you came from!” he yelled, coloring up.

  I ignored this hurtful comment because I realized that Jackson was desperate. How long would it be before some reporter discovered that he couldn’t shoot? In no time it would be all over town and then all over the world. Teddy Bunsen would probably fire him, and then how would he pay all the bills he had run up?

  Then a hopeful thought occurred to me.

  “Specs!” I told him. “Specs … I bet all you need is specs.”

  “Leave me alone, you fool—I can’t be wearing specs!”

  “Jackson, it’s no crime to be nearsighted,” I insisted. “Remember how nearsighted Billy Hickok was? He was too vain to admit it and go get himself proper specs, and now he’s dead.”

  “I expect I’ll be dead pretty soon myself—at least once I’m dead I won’t have to listen to you yap,” Jackson declared with some vehemence.

  A big sister is only obliged to take so much lip from a younger brother, and I had taken quite enough from Deputy Sheriff Jackson Courtright that morning, so I handed him back his pistol and was soon loping back across the prairie toward Rita Blanca.

  I had plenty on my mind too. My famous little brother couldn’t shoot, which likely meant his fame would curdle pretty soon; he’d be exposed as a fraud and would likely be out of a job, though, to be fair, Jackson had not been hired for his shooting. Maybe Ted Bunsen would want to keep him around for his skill with the broom and paintbrush rather than the gun.

  Jackson was one problem, and Zenas Clark was another. I was enough in love with Zenas that it boded ill for my mood if he decided to leave, and why wouldn’t he? He was a reporter—what was there to keep him in Rita Blanca except me?

  Aurel Imlah had been kind enough to lure Zenas off on a trip to the Mountain of Bones, but that was a stopgap measure at best.

  Meanwhile I had begun to suffer a few doubts
about my own morals. None of the Courtrights were prudes but few of them were as oversusceptible as I seemed to be. I had flopped down on top of Zenas Clark on the basis of a very slight acquaintance, and was very likely to do it again once he showed back up. I was in the habit of considering myself engaged to whatever fellow caught my fancy—but somehow Zenas seemed a little more serious as a prospect. Would he want me to leave with him, when he left? Would I go if he did?

  On top of that, I had the telegraph office to consider. I was the telegraph lady of Rita Blanca, and though it was a small town, I had an important function to perform. My office might be small, and full of bull snakes, but it was mine and I didn’t particularly want to give it up. I was proud of being the only woman telegrapher in the whole of No Man’s Land: Charlie Hepworth mentioned that it was so unusual to find a woman telegrapher that he was thinking of doing a story just on me! I liked that, I can tell you—I was already getting tired of watching reporters write up stories about my little brother.

  Charlie also mentioned that I was exceptionally speedy.

  “I’m in and out of telegraph offices all the time,” he told me. “But I’ve not seen anybody who can rattle the keys as fast as you do.

  “And you can even spell!” he added, as if that were the rarest of qualities in a telegrapher.

  “I can’t spell a lick, myself,” Charlie admitted. “The paper offered to provide me with a dictionary, but do I look like the kind of man who would carry around a dictionary?”

  As usual, as soon as I got the office open for the day, Bertha and Melba McClendon showed up. They were usually my first customers, the reason being that there were six other McClendon sisters scattered around America—naturally the eight McClendon girls spent the day firing off telegrams to one another, many of which started with me.

  This morning, when what I mainly needed was a little time to think, Bertha hit me with a corker.

  “So I understand you and Sheriff Bunsen have finally set the wedding date,” Bertha said, fixing me with her little henlike eyes.