Ragtime Cowboys Read Free Page B

overcast. Siringo decided it must be hell to be Wyatt Earp.
    He got up, looked out the window, at the wet glisten on the big wooden letters spread across the hills. A dash of water had made startling bursts of color in the shriveled brown bushes that surrounded them; ephemeral things, doomed at birth by the desert, but gay for the moment. It was on such days the developers behind Hollywoodland chose to photograph the scene for their brochures: Salting the mines.
    From under the bed his guest had sat on, Charles A. Siringo dragged an old wooden footlocker bound with iron, the name penciled on the lid belonging to a horse soldier long since dead in Nebraska. Dust bunnies stirred awake and rolled off the top.
    From the dry-rotted interior he drew a bedroll wrapped in a canvas cover, which when he unbuckled the straps and spread on the bed exhaled a gust of cedar. That smell never failed to catapult him back to Matagorda County, Texas—place of his birth—with the restless cattle bawling all about, the sun lying like a hot flat rock on the back of his neck, dust drifting fine as flour and settling on his sweat, turning his skin to sandpaper. And with the cedar came the stench of scorched hair and singed flesh as the iron burned the Rancho Grande brand onto yet another bovine haunch.
    *   *   *
    â€œOh, there you are, Charlie,” said his boss, eyes peering down at him from a tangle of beard like a tumbleweed stuck to his face. “You ought to wear a bell. I near stepped on you.”
    â€œNo need, Mr. Pierce. I heard them clod-busters coming the second you stepped off the front porch.”
    Abel Head Pierce—“Shanghai” to his intimates, ever since one of them had compared his six-foot-five-inch frame in Spanish dress and huge Mexican rowels to a Shanghai rooster—threw back his head and roared with laughter.
    *   *   *
    Siringo smiled sourly at the memory. Built on the slight side, with narrow hands and a way of appearing neat in his clothes even after six weeks trailing herds to Kansas, he’d always suspected the rancher kept him on just to serve as his personal court jester. Never mind that he worked as hard as any man in the outfit, and rode up right alongside when Pierce led a party after a gang of rustlers—sometimes straight into an ambush in his rage and eagerness for a fight.
    The rancher liked the ruckus so much he’d charge in, pistols blazing, when the easiest thing to do was surround the thieves while they were busy changing the brands and round them up without firing a shot. The lazy bastards always stopped at the first level place and built a fire whose smoke could be seen as far as Houston. There was no detecting in the work, not back then.
    Fortunately, Pierce was too big to sit a mustang, and when rich living made him a burden even to his big studs and he took to a buggy, he’d come to see finally that things managed themselves best when he stayed behind, confining his battles to his wife and Mexican servants, who picked fights with him knowing he’d fire them, then hire them back at double wages when he sobered up. It wasn’t long after Siringo took charge that the night riders shifted their operations to outfits less likely to dangle them from their own lariats.
    People had been underestimating Siringo his whole life. It stung a man’s pride, but he acknowledged it had seen him through the fire into old age, when others who stood a head taller and lived twice as loud had been fertilizing the earth for fifty years.
    He opened the blanket, its black-and-red checks faded to gray and pink and raddled with moth holes, exposing first his other Colt, a showpiece with gold plate and nacre grips, the mother-of-pearl rubbed by handling to a high finish. He set it aside, to return to its place after he got out what he wanted. The revolver had been presented to him by James McParland, the legendary superintendent of the