Telegraph Days: A Novel Read online

  “I doubt there’s an Indian who could get the best of you, Bill,” I told him.

  Bill Cody smiled.

  “Thousands could get the best of me,” he said frankly. “I’ve been lucky out here on the plains for fifteen years. But it only takes one bullet or one arrow to change all that permanently.

  “It’s why I want to stop fighting them and start hiring them,” he added. “It makes sense, don’t you think?”

  “I suppose it does, but it’s not very daring,” I told him.

  “Who said I was daring? In fact, I’m the soul of caution,” he retorted, before he went into the jail to seek his whiskey.

  4

  WILLIAM FREDERICK CODY turned out to be no easy man to predict. When he announced that he was coming to Rita Blanca to interview Jackson, I expected him to hire Jackson and attempt to seduce me. Instead he hired me, showed no interest in Jackson, and seduced nobody, although I thought I had made it clear when we kissed that I would not have resisted more serious advances.

  After dinner Mrs. Karoo offered him a room for the night but he told her that he had formed the habit of sleeping out, and he did sleep out, over by Mrs. Karoo’s cistern.

  When I found him in the morning he was sitting on a basket, riffling through the telegrams I had made him take the night before.

  “Go here, go there!” he said, sounding annoyed. “Track Crazy Horse, track Sitting Bull. Track the Sioux, track the Cheyenne. Track Geronimo.”

  Though clearly vexed by the telegrams, he got a merry twinkle in his eye when he saw me coming—he heaved the sheaf of telegrams over his shoulder into the morning wind, which soon scattered them over a wide stretch of prairie.

  “It might be more fun, Miss Courtright, to track you for an hour or two and see where that takes us,” he said. Then he laid me down on the pallet and we kissed more or less to our hearts’ content. I say more or less because Bill’s kisses, though fairly passionate, were not as passionate as Zenas Clark’s had been. My susceptibility was acting up again, and Bill Cody was not unaffected. I could feel his big bullwinkle stiffening up nicely; and yet the man’s mind was not really on the matter at hand.

  “If it’s more privacy you want you could consider tracking me down to Joe Schwartz’s hay barn,” I whispered. “Up there we could copulate as much as we please.”

  Bill Cody didn’t seem to hear me—he had the habit of not hearing things that threatened to distract him from whatever he really felt like thinking about at the time, which in this case wasn’t me, although he did free up my bosom and seemed mighty pleased by the heft and haft of my titties.

  “Oh, I expect we should save copulation for when we meet in North Platte,” he informed me casually.

  “For when we meet in North Platte?” I said—I was more or less stunned. The man had a stiffie the size of a post and he wanted to save copulation until we got to someplace I had never heard of. I wasn’t even sure it was a place! And he was idly fondling one of my breasts even as he said it.

  “Here’s the point, Nellie,” he went on—I don’t think he noticed that I was as shocked as I was. “I can’t afford to be reckless about the generals, not just yet. Some of them are rich, and even if they ain’t, they know rich men—bankers and railroad magnates and press lords and the like. I’m going to need some well-heeled investors if I’m to get my Wild West going, and the generals can lead me to the rich men and persuade them to listen.”

  “I suppose that’s true, but why is that a reason to postpone copulation?” I asked him. Here I was, half undressed, and Bill was acting as if he was sitting in a banker’s office, explaining the terms of a loan.

  Of course, he didn’t bother to answer my question. The point, which I only figured out after working for the man, was that Buffalo Bill Cody was a one-thing-at-a-time sort of man. Just at the moment, getting his Wild West going was the first thing on his mind; copulation was way down the list somewhere.

  It wasn’t that Bill Cody didn’t like copulation—I think he liked it well enough, when he could fit it in. I was never his mistress, but for a good many years I was probably the most dependable woman in his life—and one thing I learned was that if any man had an orderly mind it was William Frederick Cody. An aspect of his orderly mind was a strict list of priorities, and on that list copulation probably came in at about seventh or eighth, but no higher. I’d put it just before visits to his tailor—this showed that he did like carnal relations because Cody knew quite well that his splendid appearance was half his act; he did not stint on visits to his tailor. In my long years with him I never saw him appear in public other than beautifully dressed—though he didn’t really ever become dandified to the extent that Billy Hickok did.

  That morning, though—a young woman half naked on a pallet behind a cistern on the plains of No Man’s Land—I had not had time to figure all this out. I wanted him right then and there, and could not hold back tears of frustration when I realized there was little likelihood that I could coax this irritating fellow up in the haybarn to finish what we had started.

  “Here’s my decision,” he said, and he said it with kindness, because he knew quite well that I was, at the moment, a disappointed young woman.

  “I’ll head for the Yellowstone and give the generals one more month,” he told me, wiping away my tears with a fine white handkerchief. “Crook plans to hook up with Terry, so I suppose that’s where I’ll head.”

  “You won’t get shot, will you?” I asked. I suppose I was more than a little in love with him by this time.

  “Why, who would shoot me?” he asked. “No Indian would be fool enough to hang around where Crook or Terry might spot them. I’ll carry a few messages and maybe shoot a buffalo or two. Then I’ll catch the steamer Yellowstone and meet you in North Platte, Nebraska, one month from today.”

  “What are you going to do about Jackson?” I asked. “He’s the hero of the Yazee affair, after all.”

  “I think we better just leave Jackson here—I expect he’ll make a real good deputy,” he said.

  I suppose I felt slightly wounded, on behalf of my brother.

  “Why don’t you want him?” I blurted.

  “Lacks flair,” Cody said in his kindly tone.

  Then he looked at my titties again.

  “Whereas you’ve got flair to spare,” he said, with a broad grin.

  “Maybe more flair than you can handle, Mr. Cody,’ I said, still piqued.

  “Doubtful, Miss Courtright,” Bill Cody said.

  5

  TO THE END of his days Bill Cody looked better on a horse than just about anybody else in the world—it was one of the secrets of his great success in show business. When he mounted up that day and got ready to leave Rita Blanca he looked so handsome and dashing that the McClendon sisters poured forth fountains of tears, and old Mrs. Thomas began to sob as well, although she was blind and had never seen Cody.

  Happy as I was to have this dashing fellow admire my young bosom, Bill did just about as many things to annoy me as he did to please me. He seemed to assume that if he just spread a little charm around, pretty soon everybody would be agreeable to doing things his way. In no time, working on that assumption, he had the whole town in a tizzy.

  When he got ready to leave he found me at the telegraph office, making a start at teaching my sister-in-law, Mandy Williams, how to operate a telegraph key. Not only was Mandy bright, but she was thrilled to death to have a chance at a paying job that didn’t involve dealing with the male stiffie. Still, telegraphy is not something you can learn in five minutes, a fact that Bill Cody, who got at least a dozen telegrams a day, seemed to be slow to learn.

  After glad-handing his way around the village and signing a few more autographs, he seemed to be shocked to find me settled in with Mandy.

  “I thought you’d be packed and saddled up by now,” he said. “What’s the reason for the delay?”

  “I don’t know why you’d think that,” I told him. “I have no intention of leaving to
day.”

  “But I’m leaving,” he said, with a trace of bewilderment on his face—over the years I was to see that look many times in the future. The look appeared when, perversely, life would refuse to align itself with his firm expectations.

  “But I hired you—I thought we’d travel together,” he said.

  “You did hire me, but then you said you planned to chase Indians for a month,” I reminded him. “You said we’d meet in North Platte. I see no reason to hurry on up to Nebraska to sit around for a month when in fact I’m still needed here. Surely you didn’t expect me to leave Rita Blanca in the lurch in order to twiddle my fingers in North Platte.”

  “I don’t know what I expected, but if I did expect something, it wouldn’t happen, not if you were involved,” he said. He sounded irritated, though he was favoring Mandy with one of his famous Cody smiles.

  “Go chase your Indians, Mr. Cody,” I ordered. “I’ll be in Nebraska when I’m due.”

  Bill Cody was not a man who enjoyed arguments. He often got mad but he couldn’t stay mad very long. I suppose he thought I’d jump at the chance to be with him every minute, but when he found I wasn’t, he merely gave a little shrug and went on to the next thing. In this case the next thing was to hand me a big wad of paper money, which he plucked out of a saddlebag.

  “Expenses for you and Hungry Billy,” he said. “I believe I’ve persuaded him to come be the Wild West’s photographer.”

  “I suppose I can put up with Billy as a traveling companion—as long as I don’t have to depend on him for directions,” I told him. “He’s famous for getting lost, you know.”

  “Uh-oh,” Cody said. He had never been lost in his life and probably didn’t realize that many prairie travelers spent much of their time in that unhappy state.

  “Surely you can find your way to the train station in Dodge City, can’t you?” he asked.

  “I am expert on the route to Dodge City, but I prefer to avoid the place on account of the Earp brothers,” I informed him.

  “Those clodhoppers,” he said, with evident scorn.

  “I suppose they are clodhoppers, but one of them has already proposed marriage to me,” I said.

  “Marry an Earp? Perish the thought,” he said.

  “My reaction exactly—however, it does make the matter of traveling through Dodge City a little tricky.”

  “The young one, Warren, ain’t so bad—was it Warren who proposed?” he asked.

  “Nope, it was Virgil.”

  “He would, the skunk,” Cody said.

  He pondered the question of my relations with the Earps for a while, slapping his leg with his glove impatiently. It was clear that he wanted to be on his way.

  “I’ll have a word with Josh Teck, the mail rider,” he said. “I met Josh in Pony Express days. I reckon he can get you past the Earps.”

  “He could if he were available,” I told him. “But the fact is, Mr. Teck is in Omaha and is not expected to return with our mail anytime soon, which is why it’s all the more important to keep the telegraph office functioning properly.

  “Without the telegraph office, Rita Blanca would be completely cut off,” I emphasized.

  “I doubt that would be any big loss,” Cody said. “What in hell is Josh Teck doing in Omaha?”

  “He’s pursuing a lady,” I told him simply.

  “Josh Teck is pursuing a lady?” Cody asked, in astonishment.

  “Why yes, men often do,” I reminded him.

  “Are you sure this information’s fresh?” he asked. “Josh is eighty if he’s a day. I wouldn’t have thought he possessed the sap to be pursuing women in Omaha, Nebraska.”

  My information was fresh. I got it from Ripley Eads, the barber, who was Josh Teck’s best friend and kept up with his love life, such as it might be.

  “You said yourself you were tired of being a shuttlecock for the military,” I reminded him. “I only need a week to get Mandy Williams trained up. Then you and me and Hungry Billy could travel together.”

  “A week in Rita Blanca would be seven days too many,” Cody said. He was becoming more irritable by the moment.

  “Nobody said you had to spend the whole week in town,” I mentioned. “Aurel’s about to go on a hunt—I’m sure he’d enjoy your company. Maybe you could even catch the buffalo.”

  “A white buffalo?” Cody asked, perking up immediately.

  “A white buffalo would be quite an attraction at your Wild West,” I mentioned.

  In fact I had just made up a bold lie, spawned by the fact that Moby-Dick was my father’s favorite book. If there could be a white whale, why not a white buffalo? Actually the nearest I had come to hearing about a white buffalo was Ripley Eads, the barber, who mentioned that a cowboy had reported seeing a yellow buffalo down on the Big Wichita River, which Ripley seemed to think was in Texas.

  It was my inspiration to turn this yellow buffalo the cowpuncher had seen into a white buffalo that Bill Cody might want to catch. My motive was to keep Bill Cody in the vicinity for a few days so I could finish training Mandy—then I could travel with him to the mysterious North Platte. I knew Bill Cody liked me. He admired my bosom and was impressed that I was an organized woman, but there was an out-of-sight, out-of-mind quality about the man that would be folly to ignore. If I let him saunter off to chase around with a bunch of fat generals for a month he might forget me completely. I did not intend to abandon a steady job as the telegraph lady of Rita Blanca in order to be ignored in Nebraska.

  So I told my little lie and it certainly caught the attention of my customer, Buffalo Bill Cody. He was looking as excited as I’d ever seen him, and I was the woman who had caused his bullwinkle to stiffen up, though not to much purpose, I had to admit.

  “Where’s this white buffalo supposed to be?” Cody asked. A minute ago he had been impatient but he was all ears now.

  “Somewhere along the Big Wichita River, I believe,” I said, leaving the rumor a little vague, as rumors should be.

  “Well, that’s interesting,” he said. “Aurel’s always claimed that the country south of the Rio Rojo had not been hunted out.”

  “So am I right?” I asked. “You would like a white buffalo for your Wild West?” I asked demurely, whereupon I was nearly smothered with Cody’s kisses.

  “You’re so right I’m giving you a raise before you even start, Miss Nellie,” he said. “If I had a white buffalo I’d soon be way ahead of all the other shows and circuses that are out and about.”

  Then he leaned close and whispered in my ear—Mandy had stepped away for the moment, which was sensitive of her.

  “Don’t yap about this, Nellie,” he cautioned. “Don’t mention it to anyone. I don’t want this prize to get away.”

  Then he loped off to the hide yard to look for Aurel Imlah.

  “He sure looks good on a horse, don’t he?” Mandy said. “Are you his mistress yet?”

  “No, but I’m trying,” I told her.

  6

  BY LATE AFTERNOON the mere fact that Bill Cody had departed Rita Blanca seemed to push the whole town down into the dumps. It was a curious thing, the gift Bill Cody had for making life seem to sparkle. His own spirits were mostly so high that they seemed to lift the spirits of everyone around them.

  He was full of jokes and witticisms and could make simple things like eating pudding or pitching horseshoes seem, for the moment, the best fun in the world.

  But when Bill left he took his bounce with him. Late in the afternoon, after Bill had left on his quest for the white buffalo, Ripley Ead’s shack of a barbershop caught on fire. The bucket brigade was so slow to organize itself that the little shop burned to the ground. All Ripley managed to salvage were his scissors, combs, razors, and a certain amount of hair tonic.

  The loss of the barbershop was only one of the calamities that befell Rita Blanca that afternoon.

  While the barbershop was burning, a horse thief snuck into the livery stable and stole three horses, fortunately not includ
ing my roan.

  Then the McClendon sisters’ milk cow ate loco weed and began to try to trample the chickens. Bertha liked the chickens better than she liked the cow, so she shot the cow, which displeased her sister Melba, who had the odd habit of taking milk baths.

  Throughout the long afternoon calamities continued to occur, most of them as unexpected as snow in August. The blacksmith smashed his thumb with a hammer, and Doc Siblee came down with gout. Pete and Pat, Mrs. Karoo’s two Choctaw girls, got homesick and ran off. Two drunks took advantage of the total absence of law in Rita Blanca—Teddy and Jackson were chasing the horse thieves, of course—to enjoy a shoot-out in the street, in which both were badly wounded and an innocent ox killed. The freighter whose ox got killed was indignant that no lawmen had been there to protect his valuable beast.

  Despite these distractions I did my best to field incoming telegrams, most of which, of course, were for Buffalo Bill.

  “Gosh, I’m glad I’m not that popular,” Mandy said. As a telegrapher she was making rapid strides.

  “I like a little time to myself,” she added.

  Just as we were about to close, Ted Bunsen and my brother, Jackson, rode in, their mission having obviously failed. Teddy rode grimly on to the jail but Jackson, who was clearly in a sulky mood, stopped to greet his fiancée.

  “Hi, Jackson,” Mandy said. “How’s my honey bunny?”

  Jackson didn’t at first acknowledge this tender greeting, which I confess took me aback. Honey bunny? Mandy seemed to have lost her wits.

  “I might be a honey but I ain’t a bunny,” Jackson told her.

  Meanwhile he was glaring at me—it was me he was mad at, not Mandy.

  “I guess I know why Buffalo Bill didn’t like me,” he said, going right to the kernel of his grievance.

  “Who says he doesn’t like you?” I inquired.

  “I said,” Jackson went on. “He hired Hungry Billy and never spoke hardly a word to me.”