The Ballad of Dingus Magee (2 page)

“They wasn’t all killed, was they?”

But the troopers were almost abreast of them now, pacing their mounts at a walk. It became evident that they had been in the field for some time, since both horses and men were grime-streaked and dusty.

“You think it’s okay if’n they see you?” Turkey thought abruptly to whisper. “I mean, suppose they read some posters like I done?”

“Who, them Fettermans? They’re too busy keeping their heads down, smelling out Apache ponyshit along the trails.”

“Apaches? I ain’t heard tell of Apaches lately a-tall.”

“ ‘Course not. They’re all down to Old Mex, pausing for
springtime papoose-producing. That’s what makes these Fettermans so brave.”

The troopers were wearily passing them then, not halting, however, with the exception of the captain, who reined to one side. He was quite young, and mud had caked at the yellow stripe of his right thigh. His name,
Fiedler,
was etched into his tooled saddle.

“Morning, Captain Fetterman, sir,” Dingus said affably.

The captain spun toward them.

Dingus was innocent. “Handsome-looking troop. I said you can’t get any
better men,
indeed. Reminds me, my chum and me, here, we cut some Apache sign this morning.’’

Lifting his unshaven jaw, the captain scowled. “Mescalero? Near here?”

“Them or Chiricahuas. Right shameful, the way that Geronimo’s still running loose. Burning folks’ homes, looting and pillaging. Why, them two wagons never had a chance.”

“Wagons?” The captain was open-eyed now. “What wagons? You saw two wagons that—”

“ ‘Bout six hours’ lazy walk, the way we jest come.” Dingus gestured gravely. “My chum and me, we buried the men, poor devils, it appeared the Christian thing to do. But there was lady’s clothing all scattered, so I reckon old Gee’mo done appropriated the womenfolk. Must be all raped bow-legged by now. You can pick up the trail, most like, if you—”

But the captain, ashen, had already spurred his mount. He shouted a command and the troopers fell into a gallop, skittering off.

—And that was Dingus Billy Magee. “Oh, you’re a belly-busting caution, you are,” Turkey told him as they stepped out. He rode now grinning from ear to ear.

But Dingus fell behind him almost at once, as was his curious habit. He rode huddled low in the saddle also, another characteristic, sitting slope-shouldered as if resigned to an incessant rain. “Tell me somethin’,” Turkey asked idly after a period. “There any special reason, we jest keep roaming on west like we been?”

For a time Dingus did not answer, coming ahead in that hunched way, and Turkey himself was still preoccupied enough with the recent prank so that another minute passed before he finally became sensible of the other’s expression. And then it was too late. “You ever wondered what kind of a commotion it would make,” Dingus was asking, “if’n a feller went and stuck a gun into each of your ears, and then squeezed off both triggers at the same time? What do you reckon them shots would sound like from inside your head?”

And this too, this abruptly, was Dingus. Hardly amused now, Turkey flopped limply about in the saddle. “Aw, now why do you want to go talking about a thing like that?”

“You reckon you’d hear two sounds, maybe? One when you was shot, and again when them two bullets met head-on inside there?”

“Aw, Dingus—”

“A feller don’t like persons to go questioning his private intentions,” Dingus said.

“Aw, Dingus—”

“Git on along,” Dingus said.

Turkey sighed as he shifted forward again, heeling up a slight incline. He rode sullenly.

So when Dingus decided to speak once more, an hour or so later, it was only to disconcert him further. “Turkey,” he asked, “now where in the copulating damn did you come by that there chapeau?”

Turkey eyed him tentatively.

“I wouldn’t give away a hat like that to a pee-drinking Injun. Shames a man to be seed riding with you. Here now, you take mine—”

Confused and overcome at once, Turkey commenced to scratch himself. “But that there’s your ‘spensive sombrero—”

“Gonter grab me up a new one right soon anyways.”

“Right soon—?”

But again Dingus did not elaborate. Content once more nonetheless, Turkey pridefully inspected the bullet hole
in the sombrero’s brim, failing to realize that the trail had forked into an actual wagon road that Dingus was indicating they should follow. Then, startled, Turkey pulled up short.

“Say, this here direction—ain’t this the direction on into Yerkey’s Hole?”

“Looks that way.”

“And ain’t Yerkey’s Hole the town where Mister Hoke Birdsill is sheriff?”

“Last I heard,” Dingus agreed.

So Turkey paused to consider that. And then he commenced to get it again, that old indomitable feeling.

“You fretted over something?” Dingus wanted to know.

“Jest over that Hoke Birdsill, is all. I reckon he sure makes it
his
business to know your face, even if them soljers never done—especially since he were forced to study on it every day when you was his prisoner that once, until you escaped on him and he vowed he’d git you.”

“Aw, that’s only old Hoke.”

“That mean it’s true what they say?”

“Depends what they say, most like.”

“That you and Hoke Birdsill was supposed to be real tender poontang-sharing chums but then he turned to being a lawman and you turned to being a desperado and so he’s gonter gun you down because it don’t look right, a lawman having a feller like Dingus Billy Magee for a old poontang-sharing chum—that true?”

“Hoke still says that, that him and me was fond chums?”

“What I hear,” Turkey said.

“Me and Hoke Birdsill,” Dingus considered. “Well now, you mean to say I dint never tell you how it come about that Hoke got to telling folks what dear chums we was?”

Turkey said nothing, but he had brought his horse almost to a standstill. For a moment Dingus gazed off into space, privately amused. “Old Hoke,” he said then. “Oh, I knowed him a little, here and yon, I reckon, but never no more than saying howdy, you understand? And then some time goes by, and there was a couple of them piddling rewards on me by then—back a spell, hardly nothing much more than several thousand dollars all told, maybe—and Hoke had got hisself a badge by then likewise. So one day I’m on the prod over this way, and I break a cinch on my saddle. Weren’t nothing, but while I’m getting her fixed I hear this other horse, and when I look up, darned if’n it ain’t old Hoke. Well, now. So he sits there a time, and I stand there a time, and then he says, ‘Howdy, Dingus,’ and so I say, ‘Howdy, Hoke.’ And then he says, ‘I got to arrest you, I reckon.’ Well, that were
his
poor misunderstanding, you see, only he dint know that yet, because there was the small matter of I’d
heard
him before he’d seed me—so what am I holding onto behind my horse but this here difficulty-equalizing old shotgun.” Dingus stroked the weapon as they moved, chuckling. “Well, old Hoke. He gets around to where he notices that, finally, and he turns the color of a shoat’s belly, I reckon. ‘Now, Hoke,’ I say then, ‘you wasn’t truly gonter arrest me, was you?’ ‘Now, Dingus,’ Hoke says. ‘You was jest tasting that there reward money, wasn’t you, Hoke?’ I ask him; ‘you was right hungry for it, wasn’t you?’ ‘Now, Dingus,’ Hoke says. Then round about that time I notice that jest under where Hoke is sitting his horse, there’s a mule or a burro been there first, you see, and it’s left a reminder. All heaped up higher’n a small boy’s first arising, and right fresh too. So I inform old Hoke, ‘Hoke, I’ll tell you what. You being so hungry, you climb on down and eat, then.’ Well, poor Hoke. A man’d do pretty near anything in this old world to stop a shotgun from going offin the very nearby vicinity of his stomach, I reckon. But wouldn’t you know—right about then, darned if’n that weren’t when the loopy-nozzled critter took to informing folks how good he knowed me. Yep. ‘Do I know Dingus Billy Magee?’ old Hoke would say,’—whyjest a short spell back, Dingus and me, we ate chow together—’”

That might have been four o’clock. Roughly two hours later, into dusk, Turkey found out what he had been waiting for. For most of the two hours he had been concentrating on it deliciously, the anticipation gripping him like a mustard
plaster. And then when it happened it was typical that for a moment he was thinking about something else altogether.

They had just turned aside from the road itself, to follow a little-used trail behind the town’s first dilapidated outlying miners’ shacks, when this other thing occurred to him. It stiffened him in the saddle. “Yerkey’s Hole!” he cried. “I plumb forgot.”

Dingus came huddling along hatless after him. “What’s that?” he asked. “Them prosty-toots. They still got all them prosty-toots here?”

“Old Turkey. Now jest what else outside of ripe titty do you reckon would make a feller ride full across the New Mex territory?”

“Huh?”

“Git along, Turkey.”

“Well, hang me for a horse-stealer.” Turkey almost kicked his mount into a gallop at the wonderment of it.

So then they shot him.

He was just passing the rear of a livery, the first imposing building in the town, and the light thrown by the single lamp near the back entrance seemed scarcely enough. So when he heard the shout, with whores still uppermost in his mind, he never thought to spur clear. “Great gawd, it’s him!” it seemed the voice said, and then a horse was clomping hard by Turkey’s ear, and then something else was being yelled that he never did comprehend. There were five or six shots, at the least.

So he had time; he might well have told himself “Turkey, it sure is happening now, it absolutely and truly is happening at that.” Instead he floated there in the saddle, actually with one hand poised to commence scratching, in fact, until something that felt like a thrown anvil nudged him in the ribs, and after that something else he was fairly certain was ground collided with his head, and so all he told himself was, “Well, if that ain’t my luck, sure enough.”

For a long while then everything was remarkably peace-fid, and remarkably quiet too, except for the soft measured
sound of dripping that Turkey was positive came from inside of him somewhere, although he was far too weary to sit up and solve it.

“Did you git ‘im, Hoke?” a faraway voice said at last.

“What do you reckon that is alaying out there, you addle-brained fool?”

“Is he dead?”

“How the thunderation should I know?”

“Ain’t you going out to see?”

“And take a chance I get my brains blowed out?”

The voices stopped then, or faded beyond hearing, so Turkey began to talk instead. “It looks like I’m kilt, boys,” he said, although not loudly. “Put it down that I were riding with Dingus Billy Magee, will you do me that little thing, boys?”

But nobody did him any little thing. Turkey could see an incarnadine sky, and the glow from the stable off to one side, but nearby nothing moved. Then the voices came again.

“You aiming to jest leave him lay there, Hoke?”

“You go, you’re so all-fired anxious.”

“Ain’t said one word about being anxious. Jest a mite curious, is all.”

“Well, shut your yap then and leave me do it my way.”

“Don’t look like much of a way, jest ducked down here back of a cow.”

So it might have been ten minutes, perhaps only five. Turkey continued to hear the dripping, which eventually slowed. Finally he was able to perceive shadows looming nearby.

“Keep me covered good, now—”

“I got dead bead on his skull, Hoke—”

“Well, keep it that way.”

The shadows came closer, with infinite slowness. Then, hovering near him, one of them paused. It hung there for a time, disembodied.

“Dead, Hoke?”

“Oh, that miserable varmint! Oh, that double-dealing, nooky-snatching, sneaky-assed skunk! I’ll—I’ll—”

“What’s that, Hoke?”

“I’ll crucify him! I swear, this time I’ll murder the little sidewinder if’n it’s the ultimate mortal deed I do on this earth! I’ll bend his mangy dong in half and stomp on it like—”

“How’s that again?”

“Ain’t him. Ain’t Dingus.”

“That’s Dingus’s red-and-yeller vest there, ain’t it?”

Turkey Doolan smiled. “He give me the hat too, boys,” he proclaimed. “We was right fond chums, me and Dingus William Magee.”

“Sure, it’s Dingus’s vest,” the voice said, ignoring him. “And that makes three blasted times in six months I done put a bullet clean through the turd-wiping thing, too—with some other hero-worshiping durned imbecile wearing it every blasted time!”

But Turkey Doolan had stopped attending. He listened to the dripping instead. There was little question, it had happened. Turkey was at ease.

2

“No, by heaven!
I never killed a man without good cause”

Wild Bill Hickok, quoted by Henry M. Stanley