Buffalo Girls (14 page)

“Yeah, but how do you make it once you get to one?” Bartle wondered.

“We dress up and put on our show,” Billy said. “I know the show might be thought a little silly, especially by old-timers and folks who came to the west early. But the crowds
love
to see our show—the riding and shooting and Indians and the rest.”

“It might be too silly for me,” Jim said, though in a friendly voice. He saw no reason to be critical of Billy, who, after all, had traveled a long way to find them—and had brought them a feast, to boot.

Billy Cody wasn't offended. It was the kind of statement he met with every day from old-timers such as Jim Ragg and Bartle Bone.

“Boys, you've got to look at it from the point of view of the younger generations,” he insisted. “The whole eastern part of the country is civilized now, and the plains are filling up with towns. California is mostly settled, thanks to the gold rush. Colorado will be civilized soon—look at Denver! It won't be long before the only chance people have to see riding and shooting will be in a show.”

There was a long silence. Lumpy Neck carefully sliced off a piece of St. Paul cheese. Doc Ramses was trimming his nails.

“I blame it on the Indians,” Bartle said. “They gave up too soon. You're partly to blame, Billy. You're the one made a great name killing buffalo—next thing we knew they were all killed and the Indians were too starved to fight. If we had just kept the buffalo I believe the whole business would have lasted my lifetime,” he added.

It was a theory he had been refining for years. What a monstrous mistake it had been to popularize buffalo hunting. Millions of them had roamed the plains—it still seemed hardly credible to men who had seen the great herds in their glory that so many animals could be killed in only three years. But it had occurred: it weakened the Indians, armies had marched, brave men had died, and now they were down to expositions.

“Yes, I regret that myself now,” Billy said. “I've been buying them, you know—I buy every buffalo I see. I'm gonna try and bring them back. I have more than a hundred already, grazing on my ranch. I just sold ten to Quanah Parker—he's going to try and get them started again on the south plains.”

“What was the most you ever killed in a day, Bill?” Lumpy Neck asked. His curiosity was mildly perked.

“I confess it was four hundred,” Billy said lamely. “Of course I didn't often kill that many.”

“What's our part in the exposition?” Jim Ragg asked. What Billy had just said about the buffalo interested him—he had never imagined that he would hear of anyone
buying
buffalo. But he had just heard it, and it gave him a sudden, mighty inspiration. If people could buy buffalo, why couldn't they also buy beaver?

Suddenly, rising clear as the moon, was the solution that had eluded him for years. Buy beaver! Spread them around in the creeks and ponds—let them breed! If Billy and Quanah could restore the buffalo, why couldn't he and Bartle do the same for the beaver?

Jim was glad it had grown dark. He felt he would have had a hard time concealing the excitement he felt. Of course, it would not do to reveal his plan to an astute businessman like Billy Cody—Billy would march off and beat him to it. After all, he had beaten everybody in the west to the notion of the Wild West show. He would surely be quick to see the profit in beaver farming, if that was what it ought to be called.

“What part would we take in the exposition?” Jim repeated, startling Bartle considerably. It had not occurred to him that Jim Ragg would even consider being in a Wild West show, much less an exposition.

“Well, you're mountain men, almost the last,” Billy said. “What we plan for the Queen is to do the whole west, from start to finish.”

“We may take it all the way back to Coronado,” Doc Ramses said. The entrance of a few
conquistadores
seemed to him the perfect way to start the pageant. He had history on his side too; but it sometimes took more than history to sway William F. Cody.

“Now, I don't know about Coronado,” Billy snapped, a little
annoyed that Doc was so quick with his ideas. “He was Spanish and I don't know that we ought to bother with the Spanish part—it ain't what people want to see.”

Doc Ramses let it pass—clearly, now was not the time to advance his argument for starting with Coronado. He was not giving up, though. It might be possible to insert the idea into Billy's head in such a way as to make him think it had been his to begin with. If he decided it had been his to begin with, then the
conquistadores
might still lead the parade.

“I see you two as Lewis and Clark,” Billy said to the mountain men. “After all, that's when the west started—with their expedition. And you men are perfect to play them. You'll be my stars, boys!”

Jim's mind was still on the wonderful prospect of buying beaver—perhaps some could be purchased in Canada. Working for a bit in Billy's exposition would no doubt be the easiest way to make enough money to get things going.

“I'll do it,” Jim said. The Lewis and Clark part hardly mattered; getting money to buy beaver with was what mattered.

“How about you, Bartle?” Billy asked. “Here's your chance to outshine your young cousin in New Mexico.”

“I told you he wasn't no kin,” Bartle said, more than a little put out with his old partner, Jim Ragg. For years, ever since the Custer battle, he had been trying to get Jim to consider a new line of work; now Billy Cody had ridden up and seduced him with a hunk of cheese and the promise of a lead role in what was, after all, just a glorified medicine show.

Calamity Jane would have fainted had she been there to witness such a disgusting turn of events.

“Lewis and Clark are no heroes of mine,” Bartle said stiffly. “Anyone can walk to Oregon.”

“Don't you be stubborn,” Jim said. “Lewis and Clark will do. Who do you want to play—Custer?”

Bartle was astonished. Now Jim was reprimanding him for
his
reluctance to be in a medicine show.

“Boys, don't quarrel, just say you'll do it,” Billy said. “It's easy work and you'll get to see the sights. You'll come back so rich you can buy a white mule like Doc's, to carry your equipment around.”

Bartle looked at Jim, who fixed him with the murderous glare he commanded when out of sorts.

“Oh, well, was we quarreling?” he asked mildly. “I don't care if we go. It might do the Queen a passel of good to meet a fresh fellow like me.”

I
N THE MIDDLE OF A WET, COLD
M
AY, THE YOUNG WOMAN
named Ginny died. Dora would have judged her to be not more than twenty-two. She had been poorly all winter—indeed, had been poorly most of the two years she had worked at the Hotel Hope—and before anyone could do much about it she took a cough and succumbed. They buried her on the first really warm day of the year, a beautiful sunlit day, the prairies looking glorious and the sky vast and blue. The boy Teat dug the grave, weeping; he had a soft heart, and had developed a quiet fondness for Ginny.

“If she had only seen this pretty day,” Dora remarked sadly to Calamity. “A few sunny days like this one might have pulled her up.”

Calamity had had no luck making conversation with Ginny—the girl spoke so low you had to strain to hear her—and watched her burial with no great grief. Dora had the great grief, and getting
her
pulled up would be the first task.

“Dora, maybe it's better,” she said. “She was not a happy girl, and it wasn't because she hadn't seen the sun shine. If life just don't suit you maybe it's best just to cough and fade out, like she did.”

Dora's heart was wrenched; the death of the young had never
been a thing she could bear. She trembled and held Calamity for support.

“She wouldn't have had to be a whore forever,” she said. “She might have met a cowboy.”

Calamity hugged her friend, as Dora cried. Ginny had already met quite a few cowboys—and still she was dead. This death, added to Dora's troubles with Blue, was a bad development. Dora had never been the healthiest woman in the world herself. She had abundant spirit but less than abundant energies; she had never been robust that Calamity could recall.

Calamity had to help her into the buggy, while Teat and No Ears filled in the grave. Trix and Skeedle, who knew Ginny better, had not been up to coming to the graveyard; Doosie was back at the hotel, cooking everything she could find to cook. Cooking was Doosie's response to death.

No Ears had been fond of Ginny, too. She had had a light appetite, and she often gave him the remains of her meals. In his view her light appetite was the clue to her early demise. It meant that her soul, too, was light, and not well weighted in her body. He himself was not a large man, but he took care to finish his meals.

After a wait, they had buried Ginny without a ceremony—the preacher had been too drunk to find his Bible. Dora had bravely sung a hymn, all alone, and that was it. Calamity was shy about singing unless drunk.

“I'm not having no luck here in Montana, Martha,” Dora said on the ride back along the river. “Now Ginny's died. Maybe I ought to sell out and move on.”

The thought made her weary, though; she liked the little hotel—her bedroom window offered a fine view of the plains. Of course, almost every window on the plains offered a fine view of the plains, but she liked hers better than any she had seen. Soon the prairie flowers would bloom and fill the horizon from end to end.

“Move where?” Calamity asked. “You've been moving around this old west ever since I've known you. Where is there left to move?”

“Lots of places, you know that!” Dora said. Calamity loved to contradict her. Even after a funeral she was contrary.

“Where is there that's any different, I meant,” Calamity said. “You should have gone with Billy if you wanted to move—that man's a constant mover.”

“I might just move to Deadwood,” Dora said. Thoughts of Billy Cody made her all the more sad—though she didn't want to marry him she missed him keenly. He had come every day and cheered her up; he could talk about anything, and he kept her laughing. Now he was gone, and the laughter too.

The customers, few of whom had cared much for Ginny, got the benefit of Doosie's cooking anyway; there was a modest wake, Calamity got quite drunk, and Dora retired early to cry all night. She could think of little to look forward to; and, from a business point of view, she was down to two girls and might have to go spruce up and go back to work herself unless someone younger and prettier could be found.

Looking at herself in the mirror the next morning, it seemed to Dora it should not be hard to find someone younger and prettier. She was forty, an age she hadn't reached without struggle, often a hard struggle. Her face was beginning to carry time's tracery, and it seemed to her she was getting too thin. Doosie thought so too, and often scolded her about it. “Fat lasts longer than skinny,” Doosie commented.

“I may look skinny to you, but I'm fat compared to what I used to be,” Dora insisted, remembering her starved childhood on the Kansas prairies. Her father and mother had scratched away their lives trying to raise food for the children. There had been little at any time and less once the war came. Every time they would get a pig, a calf, a few chickens, the first troop of soldiers that came by would take them. Her father finally dug a hole in the creek bank to conceal potatoes in; it worked for potatoes, but you
couldn't hide a pig or a calf in a hole in the creek bank. For two years it seemed they had nothing but corn—hard corn at that, and not much of it. Her mother died, her sisters died, her brothers left; Dora stayed with her tiring father, helping him scratch at the resistant ground. When her last sister died, Dora was almost too tired to care—looking at her sister in her bare coffin, she had an almost overwhelming desire to change dresses with her; the dress that was being lost in the burial was far better than the rag she wore.

When her father died, Dora took his shoes—otherwise she would have had to walk into Abilene barefooted. At the door of the first house where she stopped to look for work they mistook her for a starving Indian, so dark was she burned from having worked in the sun. They treated her like an Indian, too—Dora felt she might have died from loneliness if the cowboys hadn't come that summer.

Once the cowboys came, life in Abilene flowered, and, little by little, Dora flowered too—she filled out, lost her burnt look, became for a time a local beauty. It was that summer that she met Blue; their love began with an act of hasty commerce in a room above the Old Glory saloon. Far from being led reluctantly into the sporting life, Dora jumped into it. The last year with her silent father in the cold cabin on the plains, the rest of the family dead, the prospects hopeless, hunger the one certainty, seared away what those who could afford them called morals. The cowboys up from Texas who loped into Abilene and winked at her didn't have to wink twice. For a time, Dora couldn't stand to be alone; she would go with anyone—when she was solitary even for a few hours, memories of loneliness and misery overwhelmed her. Better to drink and sing and hoorah with the cowboys, the steady stream of youths who for twenty years filled the plains with their laughter and their need. Dora loved the laughter and was touched by the need, so different from the constant hunger for food that had been her childhood. Even after she was comfortable, living in places where there was food all around, the
strength of her fear of hunger surprised her sometimes, attacking her so in her sleep that she would have to leave the bed of some snoring cowpoke—Blue, often enough—and go find a piece of cold beefsteak and eat it, to put the memory down.