Webb's Weird Wild West. Don Webb
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thirty cents trying to help people avoid it?”
Aubrey is relieved.
Outside the tent another wooden cobble rockets into the air.
The train stops around midnight to take on water and coal near the eastern Arizona border. Henry awakens. He’s forgotten the photographer. Dammit. He’d promised John Singer Sargent pictures of the shootout. Henry wonders if they should call the whole thing off. They’ve done that too often waiting to the end of this novel or that book. Maybe they can hire a photographer in Amarillo. The train begins rolling.
Aubrey Sorrentino buys the swarthy man another watered whiskey. Four drunk cowpokes simulate a poker game near the saloon door. Aubrey shows the Romani a wad of bills. The outer bills are U.S. currency, the inner and more numerous are Confederate boodle. The Romani chai smiles and pulls a knife from his belt. He plunges the knife into a photo of Henry James laying on their wobbly table. The chai has bad teeth. Aubrey buys the man a bottle and then heads back to his hotel.
Aubrey’s sleep is fitful but no more fitful than any night since he shot Jesse. Phantoms of the remaining James brothers appear every night. Sometimes singly. Sometimes the whole gang: Frank James, William James, Henry James, Josiah Royce, Herman von Helmholtz, Ford Maddox Ford, and Doc Holiday.
They’d had their petty revenges over the years, but now they were going for hot lead. Aubrey’s cheeks still burned at the thought of Henry’s devastating review of Aubrey’s first novel Missouri Christmas in the North American Review. That review had closed publishers’ doors on two continents. He’d show them. He’d kept in shape and could outshoot all of them except maybe Frank or Henry.
The train pulls into Amarillo about an hour after dawn. The gypsy waits in the shadow of the depot. The James brothers step down. They travel light, only a bag apiece. Their eyes are as cold as an Amarillo winter. The gypsy draws his bowie knife, presses himself flat against the wooden frame of the station. The James brothers talk. William’s going to rent a room. Henry’s going to try getting a photographer. William walks southward and Henry walks northward, gypsy-ward.
The gypsy shifts slightly preparing to spring. Henry’s predator hearing informs him. Henry drops the suitcase and jumps around the depot’s corner facing the gypsy. The gypsy lunges but Henry’s gun is quicker. A bright red rose blooms in the gypsy’s chest. Henry asks the falling man if he knows of any photographers working in the Amarillo area, but it is too late. Henry pauses to cut another notch in his pistol grip.
The dining room of the Amarillo Hotel opens onto the main lobby. Aubrey sits, back against the wall, watching the lobby and shoveling down biscuits and gravy. Aubrey chokes as William walks in. William turns without breaking his stride and flashes Aubrey a huge smile. Aubrey knows how George Armstrong Custer, old Yellow Hair himself, felt when he looked up the canyon walls at Little Bighorn.
William signs in. The manager says, “Gee, Mr. James, it’s an honor to have you and your brother here. I surely enjoyed The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy.”
“Thanks,” says William.
William pages back through the hotel’s register until he finds Aubrey Sorrentino. He draws a line through the name and writes in Robert Ford. He pushes the register back to the manager. The manager’s eyes widen but he says nothing only (and almost imperceptibly) nods.
Robert Ford runs up to his room for the security of his guns. Later on he will almost shoot a chambermaid.
William makes himself comfortable in his fourth floor room. He sips on the glass of buttermilk he’d got in the dining room. About eleven Henry comes in. From Henry’s haggard hangdog look, William knows there’s not a photographer to be had.
When noon comes the James brothers go to the wide porch of the hotel. William pulls a revolver and motions everybody off the street. It’s quiet and hot. William steps into the street and shouts, “Robert Ford, I am calling you out.”
The waiting is intolerable.
Then Ford appears in an all-black outfit. His black Stetson is edged with Mexican silver. He walks calmly out of the hotel, nodding amicably to Henry who sets on a bench. He steps off the porch. His eyes lock on William with rattlesnake intensity.
He goes for his gun.
As William goes for his gun, one of the rain-soaked wooden cobbles shoots into the air between him and Ford. William shoots the cobble. He has a flash of satori concerning human cognitive processes.
Robert isn’t distracted. His bullet tears into William just below the rib cage.
Robert wheels and fires at Henry. Henry’s on his feet shooting. Robert misses. Henry doesn’t.
Henry runs to his dying brother.
Henry says, “William, you’ve got to make it.”
“I’m a goner. But we got him. We got Ford.”
“I don’t want to lose two brothers to Ford.”
“Get Frank out of retirement. Get him to take up my career so I can be remembered. In my bag I’ve got some notes on the variety of religious experience he should find invaluable.” William’s breathing stops.
Henry stands. The silence is deafening.
A NOTE TO HIS PUBLISHER
George Catlin
St. Louis
American Territory
W. O. Thule
Egyptian House
Piccadilly, London
Dear W. O.,
I am further along in writing my book than I had imagined I would be by now. So you’ll be glad to know that a copperplate of the MSS. will be coming your way in a few months. I have only one sticking point.
Something happened in the Yellowstone.
No other white man saw this. I have fought with myself for months between vowing to tell it or to keep it to myself forever. I will tell it to you because you are far away in London, and that smoky city doesn’t seem real to me as I pen these lines. Some parts of this tale will appear in my book, but those parts at the end of my tale—those things which run contrary to the “laws” of Nature—- I will tell to you alone. It begins with Wi-jun-jon.
Wi-jun-jon of the Assinneboin arrived in St. Louis from the Yellowstone, a journey of some two thousand miles by Mackinaw boat, and I was on the docks to receive him. His wild beauty I attempted to capture in paint. He was a striking figure: his leggings and shirt were of the mountain-goat skin, richly garnished with quills of porcupine, and fringed with locks of scalps, taken from enemies’ heads. Over these floated his long hair in plaits, that fell nearly to the ground; his head was decked with the war eagle’s plumes and his robe was young buffalo bull. His quiver and bow were slung and he bore war club and a par flèche shield, made of bull’s neck skin. His bearing was proud, but in the depths of his eyes were fear for what lay ahead; although I credit myself as the only white man who could read those eyes. Mr. Chouteau of the American Fur Company was on hand, and he asked me the meaning of Wi-jun-jon and I translated from the Sioux tongue, “Pigeon’s egg head” and this was the cause of much laughter.
Wi-jun-jon had a companion whose name I did not learn. But this companion sought me out in the night—I being one of the three persons out of the 15,000 St. Louisians, who could speak Sioux. Although his dialect differed greatly from the Lakota Sioux—mainly in its inclusion of Cree—it provided me with useful practice. He told me that Wi-jun-jon and himself had set out to make a census of white men. They had already met French fur traders and the German-speaking founder of the American Fur Company, Prince Maximilian of Wied-Neuwied, but they wondered at the number of the English-speaking tribe. So they began cutting notches in a pipe. There were few cabins in the first hundred miles, but as river met river they filled the pipe and began to notch his war club. Soon that too was full and they were beginning to worry at the number of notches. One night when the fur traders had tied up the boat,