So Brave, Young, and Handsome (21 page)

“Well, what,” replied the shortest man on the bench. He had a sullen aspect but let us allow him his exhaustion. He matched the others in his burgundy coat and white sash. One wore a plumed bicorne hat like Napoleon’s; the other two had similar hats but had removed them in the heat and placed them on their knees.

“Quite a little barbecue,” said Charles Siringo.

The fellow wearing the hat stood wearily and said, “Your levity is misplaced, my friend, there is death here today.”

“I guess you’ve got no monopoly on that,” Siringo remarked. “Who’s died?”

“Who is asking?” the short man demanded.

“Charles Siringo of the Pinkertons,” was the ready reply, which carried, as I’d learned, far more weight than it should’ve. “Tell me who’s died.”

“Felix Fly or Langston Cree.”

“You don’t know which?”

“We ain’t sure. Janssen here found a hand,” said weary Napoleon.

“It’s Felix Fly’s hand, his left hand; I told you that,” said the sullen one, Janssen. “I done played baseball with Felix Fly. He had a fastball to drop a sow. I know that hand.”

“General store sells black powder in the ten-pound kegs,” Napoleon explained. “Felix and Langston lived above the store. Janssen, tell where you found the hand.”

“A good ways out on the prairie,” said Janssen. “Sitting upright. Like it climbed out a badger hole to have a look around. There’s nothing where the store was but a dent in the ground. My nephew got gashed by a falling teakettle. Every window in Spigot went bust.”

Siringo looked up. “These windows look fine.”

“But this is the Odd Fellows Hall,” Napoleon said. “These windows are stout.”

“Odd Fellows build things beefy,” added the bald lieutenant.

“Spigot was founded by an Odd Fellow,” Napoleon informed us. “He dug the well himself, hauled the bricks from Galveston. Look,” he added, nodding at a stocky little well house attached to the building. A dripping iron pipe poked from it at knee height. “Yonder’s the town namesake—best water in a hundred miles.”

“Any other dead?” Siringo asked.

“Not as we know about. It started at the telegraph office. We were in session here at the hall when the cry went up. A boy ran in yelling. We fought it at the livery, fought it at the houses, but after the store blew we had to see to our families.”

“Where are they, the women and youngsters?” Siringo inquired. In fact, no women or youngsters were in sight—only a few stunned men standing in their trousers, murmuring through the ashes.

“We put ’em on wagons and hauled ’em to Gruver,” Napoleon reported.

“Who was the boy?” Siringo asked.

“What boy?”

“The one who rousted you out of the hall.”

“I don’t know. I’d sold him some gasoline, earlier,” said the bald Odd Fellow. “That was my petroleum station yonder. You would think the pump would explode, but it only had a flame on top like a candle. That boy had a pretty car—a pretty girl too.”

“Curly-headed youngster?” Siringo asked.

“Yes, sir. Curly and pale. Went and got sick on himself, the poor whelp, the fire scared him so.”

“And the girl was Mexican,” said Siringo.

“That’s right.”

I kept an eye on the old vulture now, for he stooped and swayed in deliberation.

Napoleon mused, “He wasn’t a Spigot boy, but a good lad. He gave us the warning, though it didn’t help much. He carried buckets. We owe that young man something.”

At this Charles Siringo straightened and pronounced, “You do
indeed. You owe him one swift trial and ten feet of rope, for he set the fire that killed your Felix Fly.”

Well, that enlivened the Odd Fellows! Nothing lights up a party like a surprise accusation of murder—not that it surprised me, for I’d observed Siringo long enough to know he trusted his hunches, and to trust some of them myself. But I doubt it had occurred to these men that the Great Spigot Fire might’ve been caused by anything more malicious than a tipped candle, a wayward cigar.

“The little shyster!” cried Janssen.

“However,” Siringo said, “I am already traveling in straight-line pursuit of a desperate fugitive. Your greenhorn arsonist is not my charge.”

“But if he killed Felix—”

Siringo said, “It is worse than you know, for he is on the run after murdering a famous actor of the screen at the Hundred and One Ranch.”

“Why, then, you’ve got to help us. He can’t be far away!”

“Contact the Texas Rangers. People here put stock in them,” Siringo replied, with polite disdain.

“By the time a Ranger shows up, this ruthless boy will be dancing in Mexico,” complained Napoleon.

But Siringo held his ground. “It is not a job I can take on frivolously.” Plainly, he wanted to be clamored for. Moreover, he had accurately recognized in these Odd Fellows his very favorite audience: men with a pure faith in officers of the law, in sheriffs, in Texas Rangers, in Pinkertons. Here followed several minutes of the most abject supplications which I have wiped purposefully from my memory. I can tell you that during this simpering display the Odd Fellows seemed to shrink in height by several inches while Charles Siringo rose and shone and regained a significant measure of what must’ve been a notable prime.

“Well, he did burn a whole town,” he reflected at last, catching my eye. “These days it usually takes a marching army to make that much fire, though the Comanches used to do it without much exertion.”

“Felix Fly is dead,” said the bald lieutenant, hopefully, “and probably Langston Cree too.”

“Two dead and a burnt town, on top of that killed performer back in Oklahoma,” said Charles Siringo. Oh, his cup was overflowing! He heaved a deliberate sigh and concluded, “It ain’t convenient, but he seems a serious lad after all. I’m a servant of the law, gentlemen. Which way did you say that he went?”

Spigot is now an open field with a road through it, though I am told the well is still there if you know where to look, and that the water in it is still cold and of high quality. In compilations of Texas history you mainly find mentions of Spigot in connection with its ruin by fire—the Roberts Fire, it is sometimes called, for Siringo’s intuition turned out correct.

Hood’s intentions in Spigot seem to have been innocent. Presumably he wanted to send a telegram, though to whom we were never to learn because the operator recognized him from a description wired from Alva. The operator, James Pell, did not look refined but had great curiosity and discernment. Charlie Siringo disliked Pell instantly for what he later called “the man’s warped gaze,” though I suspect it was actually Pell’s straightforward speech that rankled.

“You’re singular old, for a Pinkerton,” Pell said.

That set Siringo on his heels. He had set up shop in the Odd Fellows hall and was conducting interviews of anyone still lurking around Spigot; most of them were tired as ghosts, but here came Pell rolling in like a sailor, sneering round the stem of a lit pipe, a red bandanna tight to his scalp.

“Old or not, you still have to answer my questions,” said Siringo, who nevertheless seemed reduced by Pell’s discourtesy. “I’ll trouble you to start with the first appearance of the boy, Hood Roberts.”

As Pell told it, he had endured a long day at the telegraph box. He was bored and had gout in his feet, which is why he walked like a sailor. He knew that a white boy and a Mexican girl had stolen a car and some money up in Alva; when Hood Roberts entered his telegraph
office, James Pell nodded to him and looked out his window. Sure enough, a beauteous Mexican girl sat craning round in an almost-new Locomobile. Hood tapped on the counter and said he wanted to send a wire.

Pell nodded. After obliging the young outlaw, he thought he might send a wire himself, to the Texas Rangers. Spigot had no law officers of its own, and it rarely had trouble, either; Pell had sent telegrams out of Spigot for more than twenty years, but he had only once before sent one to the Rangers. It had given him a small thrill at the time. Pell said, “Where and to whom, son?”

Hood was silent a moment. “You know me, don’t you?”

Pell didn’t answer right away. For one thing, he wasn’t at all intimidated by this curly cherub.

“That’s why you looked out your window,” Hood said.

Pell replied, “You are the young man who stole the automobile in Alva.”

At this Hood leaned over the counter, picked up the telegraph bug, and threw it hard to the floor.

This offended James Pell, who said, “You little milk toast, that’s hardly broken—that won’t buy you ten minutes.”

Hood looked at Pell in disbelief, then kicked the bug across the floor, where it smacked a wall and came into pieces.

“How about that?” Hood asked. “Can you fix that?”

“You want to wager on it?” said the furious Pell.

Hood then walked over and jumped on the telegraph bug with both feet until it was like a puddle. He said, “What about now?”

And Pell replied, “The thing is, Milk Toast, I am reasonably handy.”

Then Hood said some bad words, and tore a lantern off the wall and waved it about; next thing we hear there is a fire in the telegraph office, a dry structure built in the very shadow of the livery, with its straw bedding and thirsty shingles.

As I think about it, it was probably the James Pell interview that prompted Siringo to go after Hood Roberts full steam. James Pell was unconvinced by Charles Siringo. He did not fall at his feet as the Odd Fellows had done. James Pell in fact was not an Odd Fellow but a
cranky Texan from San Antonio. Probably he longed for the old Republic. At any rate he wanted the Texas Rangers to catch Hood; he was unimpressed by Pinkertons. They hadn’t caught Butch Cassidy, had they?

“Butch is dead,” growled Siringo.

“Really? Has somebody got him then?”

“Butch died in a storm of gunfire in Bolivia seven years ago.”

“Begging your pardon, Butch came through Spigot December last. He had an automobile with a canvas tent folded up in back. He had a limp you could hang your hat on. He stood at my window and sent a telegram to his baby sister up in Wyoming.”

Siringo was not a stammering man, but this seemed to cost him his footing. He said, “If he was here, why didn’t your darling Rangers catch him?”

“I don’t know about that. I am only saying he was here.”

“I am not going to debate Butch Cassidy with you. I am tired of Butch Cassidy. This Roberts boy has killed three men. Tell me anything else he said.”

After Pell, nothing else remarkable came to light. Siringo talked with another half-dozen char-stained men while I looked out the second-story windows of the Odd Fellows lodge. I saw where the telegraph office had stood, and the livery, and a dark little crater where the general store had been. It was a dent in the earth, like Janssen had said. I got out my pencil and paper and wrote,
Dear Susannah, there is nothing I miss so much as you
.

In Siringo’s mind, he never left off the pursuit of Glen Dobie. Though we changed course after the Spigot fire, following Hood and Alazon toward Mexico, Siringo still spoke of Glendon as his primary quarry and even as his rival. I asked him once what attraction Glendon held, to be worth hounding still.

“It ain’t attraction, it’s attrition,” was his gruff reply. “He’s among the last from those rough days. We’re all that’s left, you see.”

“Then why go after Hood?” I asked.

“For the bounty,” Siringo said. He meant the reward, but also the gain in eminence. The death of Ern Swilling and the burning of Spigot had put Hood in the newspapers. A new memoir was in the making. To that end we bounced along in the ailing Packard through village after village toward the Rio Grande.

I will credit Hood Roberts with some of Glendon’s outlaw talents. He could, for example, seem to vanish. On that dusty journey we crossed the lovebirds’ trail half a dozen times—they’d stolen rice from a grocer, blankets and a plump ham from a farmstead, grease and gasoline in Doyletown. Never did we see the vaunted Texas Rangers or encounter any sign of their pursuit. “Supposed to be such bloodhounds,” jeered Siringo, who viewed the Rangers as though they had jilted him in his youth. At any rate we were on Hood’s very heels while the adored Rangers were nowhere in sight. Twice Siringo thought we had the boy pinned down: once at a smithy where Hood had an axle hammered straight, again in a rooming house outside which we sighted the stolen Locomobile. A day and a half we waited for Hood to come out of that
bleak-windowed place, but he never did; Siringo finally realized Hood had given up the car and proceeded by other means. Hours later we learned of a rancher named Pompey who had a horse and mule stolen the previous night, along with riding tack for each. People in town spoke wearily of this fitful Pompey—thirty years old and still roaring to get his way. He had hired a local man of skillful reputation to track and retrieve the animals. It measures Siringo’s grit and the warp of his ambition that we sought out this disagreeable rancher and rented two horses ourselves. Pompey was suspicious of the arrangement even when Siringo said we would leave the Packard with him as collateral.

“What corrupt security is this?” cried Pompey. It’s true the car smoked a lot as we stood beside it on the brown grass.

“I see that you don’t know how to drive,” said Siringo. His voice was cracked and quiet and lent him something fearsome.

“I drive,” said Pompey uncertainly.

“Then you will recognize this Packard as a foremost machine,” Siringo replied.

“It’s a shipwreck,” said the rancher, but conviction had deserted him. In the end Pompey supplied us with two decent nags, also saddles and tack and canteens and enough of his wife’s bricklike bread to see us through a thin week. These horses were small and knobby with the flat eyes and cloaked aptitude of Indian ponies. I was startled at their paltry appearance, but Siringo went to the one that had caught his fancy and waved his hat in friendly style at the side of its face. The beast didn’t shy but took the hat from his hand, lipped it a moment, and dropped it to the ground.

“All right then,” Siringo said.

This was just north of the town of Columbus, New Mexico. I won’t forget my dread in scrambling onto that ribby paint, for I was never a good rider. Nor will I forget the crooked way Siringo sat his dun gelding. He was tipping always one direction or another and resembled an effigy or rigored cadaver strapped to a horse by pranksters. His every moment aloft seemed a lucky coincidence, but he never fell and in fact commented several times on the comportment and soft gait of the brute he rode.