The Old Colts

Primus

DONALD I. FINE, INC.

New York

Copyright ~ 1985 by Glendon Swarthout

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. Published in the United States of America by Donald I. Fine, Inc. and in Canada by General Publishing Company Limited.

Dedication

Author's Note

300 West 49th Street

Dodge City, Kansas

Author's Note

Wyatt Earp, 1928

I met Walter Winchell one fine afternoon in October of 1970.
I was introduced to him by a barber while having my hair styled at the O.K. Tonsorial Corral in Scottsdale, Arizona.

We chatted. That I was a novelist interested him in general, that my subjects had sometimes been shoot-’em up in particular. His shave and manicure completed, Winchell donned a snap-brim hat of black straw, waited, and when my barber concluded his ministrations, invited me to his home for a drink—a chance at which I jumped. (I had lived in Scottsdale eleven years. The ex-big-name-columnist-broadcaster had long maintained a residence in “The West’s Most Western Town” for his wife, whose respiratory problems were alleviated by the arid climate, and he lived alone there now, in retirement.)

I followed him in my car to his home. We had a drink. (He wore a shroud-colored cashmere jacket with black pocket square, white shirt, black four-in-hand, black shantung slacks, slip-on shoes of black alligator, and did not remove his black hat—the rig was as funereal as the atmosphere of the house.) At seventy-two, Winchell was but the casing of the bullet he once had been. His wife had passed away the preceding year. His son had suicided the Christmas before that. His relationship with his daughter was cat-and-dog. Cancer, and a broken heart, would kill him soon, in February of 1972, and there would be only two mourners at his burial site in Greenwood Memorial Park, Phoenix.

“You ever heard of an old Western character named Bat Masterson?” he asked, his voice scratchy.

“I surely have.”

(I had indeed. The life of William Barclay “Bat” Masterson was about as I’ll-be-damned as any ever lived by an American. He was sheriff and marshal in wild and woolly Kansas, ranked with Wyatt Earp among the most mythical lawmen of their lawless day. But he was also buffalo hunter, Indian fighter, army scout, gambler, shootist, and prizefight promoter in the West before absquatulating in his middle years to — of all places, with a derby hat on his head and the six-gun at his hip which promptly got him thrown in the jug — New York City. Here, too, his career was a jaw-dropper. In a gilded age of journalism he won his own celebrity as sports columnist for the
Morning Telegraph.
He became a friend of the famous, as welcome at the Waldorf-Astoria and the White House as he earlier had been at the Long Branch Saloon in Dodge City. For two decades he glowed as incandescently as the Edison bulbs along the “Gay White Way.”)

“I’m a Bat buff, in fact,” I went on to Winchell. “Read everything in print about Earp and Masterson and the Dodge City days. I know the Lake and O’Connor biographies by heart.” (Lake, Stuart N.,
Wyatt Earp: Frontier Marshal,
Boston, 1931; O’Connor, Richard,
Bat Masterson,
New York, 1957.) I was curious of course. “Why do you ask?”

“I’ve got something of his,” was the response. “Kind of a true story he wrote down in his last years.”

“Masterson? In his own hand?”

“You heard me. And I have to trust it to somebody—I’m not long for this world.” At my demur he pushed up his hat. “I should know, shouldn’t I?” This came with a bit of his old belligerence. “Here.” He bent, took a manila folder from a cabinet beside him, and stood with it in his hand. “Would you like to own it?”

“Would I!”

“Will you swear never to publish it?” I hesitated.

“Shit or say yes, Swarthout.”

“Yes.”

“Okay, you got it.”

I laid the folder in my lap. If I was dizzy, it was not the drink. That I was in the company of Walter Winchell was improbable. That he should make me a gift of holograph pages purportedly composed by Bat Masterson was impossible. I sparred for time and a clear head.

“How did you come by this?”

He sat down again. “Damon Runyon. One night— 1945 I think it was—Damon and I were in the Cub Room at the Stork. Sherm Billingsley had left our table to make the rounds and we were alone. Runyon couldn’t talk then—he was dying of throat cancer—had to write everything out on a pad. So he gave me the four pages in that folder and wrote out whose they were and how he got ‘em and asked me not to print ‘em after he was gone.

“Why you?”

“Because I was his best pal. He was divorced, he had nobody to leave anything to. He was in the same sad shape I am now.”

“Why not a library?”

“You’ll see when you read—it’s kind of a true confession by the old boy. The Western history big shots see it and they’d blow their stacks. Also because Masterson and I both used to work for the same paper, the
Telegraph,
believe it or not. He was before my time, but later, in the late Twenties, I was trying to get out of my contract with the
Graphic
—they were paying me peanuts—and Gene Fowler, editor of the
Telegraph
then, let me write an unsigned column so I could make some more dough. I called it ‘Beau Broadway.’ Anyway, Masterson and I both worked for the same rag, at different times. Colleagues, you might say. So Runyon knew I’d take good care of this thing.

I had to ask. “He took your word you wouldn’t print, ever?”

His eyes flashed with their former fire. “If I told Damon I wouldn’t, I goddamn wouldn’t.”

I nodded an apology.

“Well, you gonna read or not?” he challenged.

“One more question, Mr. Winchell. How did Damon Runyon get these pages?”

“What’s it to you?”

“How do we know they’re not a forgery?”

He glared at me. “Runyon bought ‘em in 1931. For a thousand bucks. From Emma Masterson, the widow.”

“Mrs. Masterson herself?”

“Runyon never lied to me in his life.”

“I see.” (It was plausible. I had read that one reason Runyon and Masterson, despite the age difference, became fast friends in New York was because both were western in origin. Bat, the plainsman, reminded Runyon of his father, a frontier editor whom he idolized. Al Runyon had been born and raised in Colorado, and did not take the name Damon till he gravitated east from Denver in 1911. Bat was a boy in Kansas, and during his gunpowder period gambled and kept the peace in such Colorado mining camps as Creede and Trinidad in addition to boomtown Denver. Such bosom buddies were they that on Bat’s death on October 25, 1921—suddenly, at sixty-eight, of a heart attack, at his pigeonhole desk in the
Telegraph
offices—Runyon sat up all night beside the casket while hundreds of the high and low filed through Campbell’s Funeral Parlor. It was logical Mrs. Masterson would go to the newsman with a legacy of this sort. And the year 1931 satisfied the chronology. I knew Bat and his missus had occupied an apartment at 300 West 49th Street until the old gunfighter kicked the bucket, and that Emma Masterson lived out a pinched and lonely widowhood until her own demise in 1932.)

“Well?” demanded Winchell.

“I’m ready,” I replied. I genuflected to the gods, girded my intellectual loins, and took up the folder.

To this day I wish to God I had not. To this day I wish I had spurned the gift. I did not have then, nor have I now, any desire to cut a notch in anyone’s reputation. I delight in the “Bat” of legend. I should be honored to meet the Masterson of fact. But what I now owned, and what I was about to read, was a document so shocking that it spun the mind like the cylinder of a revolver. It smashed to smithereens. It turned Mr. Masterson, at least temporarily, into a total stranger. Should it be the real thing, I realized at once, it had surpassing historical significance. In order to possess the document, however, I had just promised Winchell never to publish it. I had therefore sentenced myself to sit in agony for the next fourteen years astride the longhorns of a dilemma. If I kept my word to him, would I not throttle a truth which should be told? Rob the bank of American history? If I broke it, on the other hand, if I succumbed to the scholar’s temptation and let the cat out of the bag, would that not make the memory of a remarkable American character into a cuspidor? Desecrate a hero’s grave?

(To some of us, I am ashamed to say, ink is more potent than blood, and publication a lure more irresistible than lust. In the end I would succumb.)

I opened the folder. There were four pages of lined foolscap, torn evidently from a copy pad of the sort available in any newsroom. The paper was yellow, the ink a faded brown, the script neat and entirely legible. I looked first at the fourth page. It was signed at the bottom “W.B. Masterson,” his habitual signature, which anyone might have duplicated, and was dated “May 7, 1916,” which signified nothing. But the first page was headed “300 W. 49th St.”

The palms of my hands damped. I closed my eyes, opened them, tried to quell my pulse and put a lid on my blood pressure, then began to read.

Halfway down the first page I encountered a name which took my breath away. I looked up at the waiting Walter Winchell.

“My God!” I gasped.

“I told you so!” he scratched.

When I had finished the four pages I looked up again, around the room, out the windows at the milky distant mountains, as though to establish my own time and place and credibility.

“I’ll be damned,” I said.

I thanked Winchell profusely that day in 1970, promised a second time never to go to press with the Masterson manuscript, took my leave and the precious pages home in palsied hands.

I was in a fever to authenticate them. That very evening I masked all but ten lines of page one, photocopied them, and sent them with an urgent request to Joseph W. Snell, Executive Director of the Kansas State Historical Society in Topeka, a friend and the country’s ultimate authority on the Mastersons, Bat and his brothers Ed and Jim. Would he please have these ten lines checked against whatever he could find in Bat’s hand immediately if not sooner?

His response was weeks in coming, but he is a scholar and a gentleman and my heart leap’d up when I beheld his verdict: Yes, irrefutably, based on both internal evidence (personal and topical references only Bat could have made) and on the science of calligraphy, this was William Barclay Masterson on paper. Not only had the Society’s handwriting expert compared it with the signatures and lines extant on writs and pay vouchers surviving in the official records of Ford County, Kansas (which Bat served as sheriff in the late 1870’s), but he had sent it on to the Connecticut State Library, where is preserved the 1885 letter by Bat to the Colt company ordering a special pistol “easy on Trigger,” and calligraphists there, after close comparison, declared my ten lines good as gold.

Joe Snell was understandably excited, and buckshot me with questions. What had I stumbled on? Where? How? What was its length? Was there a book in it? When would I publish? I must know that such a find was a priceless piece of Americana. I must recognize that rumors of the discovery would create a ruckus in the Western historical community.

I sent him sad news. My lips were sealed.

But like murder, rumor will out, and in the next year or two I had hot letters of inquiry from curators, archivists, librarians, collectors, dealers, paperback amateurs, and leather-bound professionals. I made no reply whatever. I let them stew in their own jealous juices. I kept my word to Walter Winchell, hence his to Damon Runyon, and Runyon’s, probably, to Emma Masterson. I locked the four pages in my safe, where they ticked away like a detonative device.

“Mr. Masterson?”

Bat cocks an eye.

“Guy to see you.”

“Collector?”

“You can smell ‘em a mile away—so I set him up.” The copy boy is sixteen and Lower East Side and his name is Sammy Taub.” Told him you’d never sell it—not for love or lucre.”

“Attaboy.”

“Say, Mr. Masterson, would you put in a good word for me with Mr. Lewis? I don’t wanna be a copy boy all my life.”

“What do you want?”

“A beat. City Hall, PD, maybe sports, like you.”

“Okeh. You get a little fur on your upper lip and we’ll see. Now send the gink in.”

“Yessir. Same split?”

“You got it.”

Sammy’s head snaps from the doorway as though by rubber band and Bat opens a deep drawer in his pigeonhole desk. It contains an arsenal of old Colt revolvers. Taking the one on top, closing the drawer, checking the grip for notches, he lays the Peacemaker on the desk in museum view and resumes, with Parker pen on yellow copy pad, his journalistic labors.