The Old Colts Read online

  “You hooked another one.”

  “Why not?”

  “How much?”

  “A hundred.”

  “Bat, you have a larcenous heart.”

  “Look, he’ll sell it tomorrow for two hundred.”

  W.E. tilted his chair. “I thought I should tell you. Reception called me a few minutes ago. Some guy was asking if Bat Masterson really works here. She said you do and did he want an appointment? But he just walked out on her. Odd.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “An outlander. Tall, she said. Lean. Your age, maybe a little older. She used the word ‘grim’—said she wouldn’t care to meet him in a dark alley.”

  They were old friends, Bat and W.E. Lewis. They had met in Dodge way back when. Lewis, then a newsman in Kansas City, had been prospecting the West for “color” for articles and wanted Bat to introduce him to the James brothers, who had just raided Northfield, Minnesota and ridden away with bloody noses and empty saddlebags. “I better not,” Bat told him. “They’ll be meaner than ever now. They’d eat you alive.” It was good advice. Later, as editor and columnist, each was in the other’s debt. It was Lewis who helped spring Bat from jail on his arrival in New York in 1902, and eventually gave him a crack at covering the fight game. In return, Bat lent Lewis’s sheet, besides the renown of his name, an honesty and a dignity in exceeding short supply.

  W.E. locked hands behind his head and studied the other over the rims of his specs. “Something’s been eating you lately. Money? You can have an advance of salary anytime.”

  “I’m having a bum streak. I’ll get lucky again. You know—feathers today, chicken tomorrow.”

  “That’s what they all say.”

  “Listen,” said Bat. “Once out in Dodge I had a badger in a barrel on Front Street and I put up a sign. I bet anybody with a dog their dog couldn’t get my badger out of the barrel. Somebody’d come along nearly every day and put up ten bucks and drop their dog in the barrel. Well, they’d go at it, tooth and claw, and tip over the barrel and my animal would take off with the dog after him and I won’t say how much I lost. But I had faith and finally got lucky.”

  “How?”

  Bat grinned, tipped his hat, turned to go, and said, over his shoulder, “Shot the damn badger.”

  That evening he sashays into a small cigar store on 43rd Street, passes the counter and wooden Indian, and pushes through a swinging door into the back room, which is a race room.

  On the walls are big boards for the tracks, with today’s results and tomorrow’s entries in chalk, and behind three desks are three bookies with eyeshades taking bets by telephone. At the rear of the room, wearing leather caps and playing three-cushion on a billiard table, are two muscular mugs who work for Grogan, and standing around considering the boards and talking about the liner Cymric being torpedoed off the Irish coast and figuring the forms are many strong men and weak, sure things in the stretch of life and longshots, men of character and men who’ll bust a piggybank to get a bet down on a nag, any nag. The race room reeks of sweat, smoke, spit, and concentration, but to Bat the smells are bugles. Being here is the next best thing to being in a box at Belmont. He shoulders through to find the Pimlico board and scowls at what he finds in the fifth.

  “Hiya, Mr. Masterson,” says somebody.

  “Masterson? Bat Masterson?” says somebody else, grabbing a bet slip and a pencil stub. “Gimme your autograph, Mr. Masterson?”

  Bat obliges, then moves in on a desk as Eddie the Cuff hangs up the phone.

  “You seen the Pimlico?” asks Eddie. “Cat’s Pajamas was out front by four lengths—past the five-eighth pole broke a leg—had to shoot ‘im—you had fifty.”

  “On the cuff, Eddie,” says Bat.

  Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t—you said you’d cough up and you ain’t, and Grogan says cash on the drum.”

  “On the cuff,” says Bat. “And put fifty on Auntie Tan in the first tomorrow at ‘Gansett.”

  Eddie shakes his head. “I can’t, Bat—Grogan’d bust our balls, yours and mine both—he says you’re into him too deep—your credit’s no good anywheres.”

  Men are listening.

  “Do it,” says Bat.

  “No,” says Eddie.

  Bat reaches, takes Eddie’s neck in one hand, lifts him from his chair, and pulls his eyeshade down over his face with the other.

  Men are watching.

  “Place the bet,” says Bat.

  “Erahh, erahh,” chokes Eddie.

  The room hushes like a church. The two mugs who work for Knuckles Grogan stop playing three-cushion.

  “Take it easy, old-timer,” says one to Bat. Men sidle silently out of the way and crouch behind desks and glue their butts to the walls.

  Hands around the bookie’s neck, Bat stares at the mugs. Pool cues at the ready, they stare at him. Something happens to Bat’s eyes.

  “Two things betokened the real man: his eyes,” Irvin S. Cobb will write of Bat in later life. “They were like smoothed ovals of gray schist with flecks of mica suddenly glittering in them if he were roused.”

  Bat’s gray eyes glitter now.

  “No, you take it easy,” someone warns the mugs. “That’s Bat Masterson.”

  A moment more. Then the mugs get smart and go back to three-cushion, and men move from the walls, and Bat loosens his grip.

  “Okeh, okeh, Bat,” hoarses Eddie the Cuff.

  He is let go. He bumps his rump down, drags up his eyeshade, adjusts his sleeve-garters, and swallows a frog of fright.

  Bat outs with a roll of singles and two fresh fifties and peels the fifties onto the bookie’s desk.

  “Now we got that straight,” says the ex-marshal, “here’s Cat’s Pajamas today and Auntie Tan tomorrow. In the first at ‘Gansett. You tell Grogan I’ll pay up when I’m damn good and ready. And tell him remember one thing. My name is my credit.”

  The rhythms of Bat Masterson’s life in New York were not dissimilar to those of his Dodge City life in the salad-and-sulphur days. There he slept late in the morning, did the paperwork attendant on his duties as a lawman in town and county, saw to the prisoners in his hoosegow, presented himself officially at trials, and took care of personal business such as playing practical jokes, betting on a badger, and daily draw-and-accuracy practice. On occasion, alone or with a small posse, he took to the saddle in pursuit of train robbers such as Dave Rudabaugh, rustlers like the Lyons brothers, and murderers such as James Kennedy, who made the innocent mistake of killing Dora Hand, a “soiled dove,” when he intended instead to eliminate Dog Kelley. Here, in the city, he slept late in the morning, strolled to the Telegraph, ground out his column, received visitors and sold guns, then went to gyms to watch fighters train, or regaled himself at the Belmont races during the season. On occasion he would handle a special assignment for Lewis, such as covering the trial for murder of Chester Gillette upstate—on which case and execution Theodore Dreiser later based his novel An American Tragedy.

  His nights were a horse of another hue.

  In Dodge, he made the rounds of saloons north of the “deadline,” the Santa Fe tracks—the Alamo, Long Branch, Occident, Hoover’s, Peacock’s, Stock Exchange, St. James, to name seven of seventeen—and the dance houses and halls south, among them the Lady Gay, the Varieties, the Comique, and the Opera House. He sat in on a hand of cards or a case of faro. He disarmed drunks. He bonked obstreperous cowboys over the head with the barrel of a Colt and dragged them off to sweet dreams behind bars. When hot blood was being or about to be shed, he came on the run, gun drawn, and did, his cold crotch be damned, whatever dangerous he had to do. Sometimes the shout of “Here comes Masterson!” was sufficient to stay the triggers and lay the dust. Sometimes, unfortunately, it was not.

  This was all very well for a young man full of piss and vinegar. To a man with a gray roof, nights in the Big Burg were more agreeable. He covered the important fights at the Stadium Athletic Club, at the National Sporting Club, at Mad
ison Square Garden. He went often to the theater. Dramas were too “down-and-out” to his taste, but he doted on musicals like the Ziegfeld Follies, starring Fanny Brice and W.C. Fields, and C.B. Dillingham’s extravaganzas at the Hippodrome, particularly “Hip-Hip-Hooray!” with its army of chorus girls parading to John Philip Sousa’s band. He most pleasured himself, however, during the hours between the fights and the shows and the coming of the dawn. He made the rounds of the bars and cabarets and clubs and restaurants of the “Roaring Forties,” that carnival of din and dazzle, that outrageous reach of Broadway between Madison and Times Squares, taking to the bright lights like a duck to water. He hobnobbed with magnates, jockeys, fight managers, financiers, agents, journalists, hookers, theatrical names, card sharks, chorines, detectives, tenors, playwrights, and bunco artists in Rector’s, Shanley’s, the Cafe des Beaux Arts, Delmonico’s, the bars of the Hoffman House, the Waldorf, the Knickerbocker, the Astor, and a dozen more. He ran into friends. He drank, and appeared to have the capacity of a camel. He talked shop and swapped scoops. He concocted practical jokes, some of which went over big and some of which fell flat as a tire. He played poker, pulling plenty of pots at times, tapping out at others. He ate a breakfast of scrambled eggs and Irish bacon and steaming coffee at Jack Dunstan’s in the wee hours and went home to bed with the milkwagons. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken!” everyone who was anyone said in the New York of 1916, and Bat Masterson was determined to hang on to the merry-go-round six nights a week the year through till he fell off and the music stopped. He wasn’t after the brass ring. He just loved the ride.

  From cowtown to city, then, from Front Street to the “Gay White Way” was for Bat a hop-skip-and-jump. The Kansas farm boy turned out to be a born New Yorker. Out there he had worn a star. Here he had star billing from the day he hit Grand Central. Out there he bullied money from a cheapskate town council. Here it came easy, from the point of a pen. Out there the price of a high old time was too often paid in death rattles, while here dollar bills did the trick. Out there, in the end, a man might be planted in a pine box on Boot Hill. Here he got a satin-lined casket and interment in green and elegant Woodlawn. And one thing for sure, along the way here he kept a hell of a lot classier company.

  His company in carouse was in the main that of other newsmen. There would have been a natural affinity in any case. Bat was a man’s man, generous, outgoing, full of fun. He was the real thing, too. Soon after his arrival in Gotham the magazine Human Life signed him to do a series of articles on the celebrated gunmen he had known, from Clay Allison to Luke Short, from Ben Thompson to Wyatt Earp, and, when the pieces ran, even the most cynical reporter recognized the ring of truth in every line. When he went to work for the Telegraph, he wrote an honest column. And so his fellows welcomed him to their charmed and bibulous circle with a grin and a clap on the back and bought him a drink.

  And he made marvelous copy. They knew he had actually slain only three men—Sergeant King and the assassins of his brother Ed—but it was they who pumped up the count to twenty-three on grounds that gore was a damn-sight more interesting to the reader than verisimilitude. It was they who expanded the Plunkett shootout into a front-page item. Some blowhard Coloradan by that moniker and a Texan named Dinklesheets were standing around at the Waldorf bar getting spifflicated and proclaiming that Bat Masterson was a fake and a fraud and his reputation in the West was lower than a snake’s hips. After several nights of this, Bat confronted the pair with a hand thrust into his pocket. “Look out!” someone yelled, “Bat’s going to flash his cannon!” There was a stampede for the exits, led by Plunkett and Dinklesheets, and when the shooting was over—there had been none whatever—and Bat was begged to put his cannon on public display, he smiled and pulled from his pocket a pack of Spuds.

  Another reason why he was much cherished by his peers was that, since he was a newsman now, and you were a newsman, a little of his luster rubbed off on you. But for accident of birth, you might have had the adventures, you might be hustled by autograph hounds, you might be a Bat Masterson—and sometimes wished you were. Not least of all, you might be able to tell the tall tales he could. His yarns enraptured. Liarly though most might sound, they were based on experience no city slicker had ever had, and hence could not disprove.

  To send cold chills up and down their spines he had only to describe in detail, for example, the killing of Levi Richardson by Frank Loving.

  To make them slap their knees, he might recollect how they put a monkey in the room at the Dodge House of a drunkard drummer who had passed out, and what happened when he revived.

  To split their sides, he could recall the amazing Prof. Geezler, the armless showman who wrote letters and rolled cigarettes and fired off a small howitzer with his toes, and prospered mightily until the night he had one too many before a performance in Wichita and blew off his act.

  Bat could also pull his listeners’ legs right out of their sockets.

  Four ayem. He was in Jack Dunstan’s, near the Hipp on Sixth Avenue, having breakfasted with Irvin S. Cobb, star rewrite man of the World; Hype Igoe, sportswriter on the same sheet, who liked to bring his ukelele to Jack’s and lead the waiters in song; Wilson Mizner, playwright and short storyist who would become, in time, screenwriter and resident wit in Hollywood; Val O’Farrell, private eye and “friend” of Peggy Hopkins Joyce; Jimmy Walker, attorney and New York State Senator who even then aspired to be mayor one day; Damon Runyon of the American; and George M. Cohan, whose Revue had just passed a hundred performances at the Astor. They were watching a flying wedge of waiters bounce some disorderly college boys into Sixth Avenue and talking about the Sailor White vs. Victor McLaglen fight, and when Bat was asked what he would say about it in his column tomorrow, he said he had advised McLaglen to forget fighting and stick to the stage.

  Just then he saw a tall man enter the place, the man in the slouch hat he had earlier encountered on 43rd Street outside the race room. Carrying the valise, the man approached the bar, pointed Bat out to a bartender, then was gone before Bat could get to the bar.

  “That tall guy,” Bat said to the bartender. “What’d he want?”

  “Asked me if that was you. I said it was.”

  “Know ‘im?”

  “Not him.”

  When he returned to the table the others were drinking coffee and chewing the fat of two subjects simultaneously: the Peck murder case in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Wilson’s dawdling and inconsistent responses to Germany’s submarine warfare on neutral shipping. After a tortuous trial a doctor named Waite had that day been found guilty of poisoning the Pecks, his wife’s millionaire parents—a verdict O’Farrell had predicted—and that day, despite the torpedoing of the Cymric, the President had declared in a National Press Club speech that the U.S. should stay out of war in order to help Europe reinstate peace. The consensus at the table at that weary hour was that no one would ever really know whether or not Waite was guilty because the evidence was too complicated, and only events would tell whether or not Wilson was playing with all his marbles because the matter of neutral shipping in wartime was too complicated.

  “Damn near as complicated as poling hogs,” opined the Telegraph columnist.

  There was a loud pause. The other seven at the table looked into their cups and settled their butts in preparation for another masterpiece of Mastersonia.

  “What in hell is poling hogs?” asked Runyon, agreeable to being straight man.

  Bat lit a Spud. “Well, in the northwest corner of Arkansas—”

  “Hold it,” said Igoe. “Just where is the northwest corner of Arkansas?”

  “Well,” said Bat, “suppose you’re in the northwest corner of Oklahoma. To get to the northwest corner of Arkansas you go east till you smell it, then south till you step in it.”

  Hype nodded.

  “I’ll begin again,” said Bat. “In the northwest corner of Arkansas there’s a lot of acorn trees, and usually the boys in a family aren’t weaned unti
l they are eighteen or twenty years old.”

  They reflected.

  “I don’t get it,” admitted O’Farrell, the ace detective. Jimmy Walker, attorney and state senator, drew on a stogie. “Now just a minute.” He addressed Bat like a witness. “Let’s separate these things, shall we? Why are the boys in northwest Arkansas not weaned until they are eighteen or twenty years old?”

  “Because the longer they’re on mother’s milk, the taller they grow, and the taller they grow, the more money they can earn.”

  They looked at each other, sinking ever deeper into the swamp, willing yet reluctant.

  “Goddammit, Georgie,” said Runyon to Cohan, “I will not play straight man all the damn time. It’s your turn.”

  George M. jumped out of his chair and leaned on its back. He was not a man who liked to sit when there was something going on, and something was. “All right, Bat,” he said on cue. “I have never played northwest Arkansas and never intend to, but how can the boys there earn more money the taller they grow?”