Doc

His family had an interesting story, and Johnnie thought it was true. His daddy had told him over and over, “Don’t you forget this, boy. You tell your children and granbabies every word I say.” So Johnnie listened hard every time, though the story was always the same.

“Daddy was a Black Seminole,” he told Doc. “Seminole ain’t a tribe. It’s a word. It means ‘runaway’ in Indian. Seminoles was rebel Creeks, and Muskogee and Yuchi, and some was fugitive slaves. None of them would bow down. Daddy said that was important: the ancestors wouldn’t never bow down. Seminoles lived way off deep in the swamps of Florida. Florida is a jungle, like Africa, with deadly snakes and gators. Gators’re big lizards,” he informed Doc helpfully, “longer than a man stretched out.”

Johnnie’s grandaddy was named Yusif and he came from Africa, so he knew all about jungles and wasn’t scared. “Yusif could read and write Arab, Daddy said. I don’t know if readin’ Arab is the same as bein’ Arab. What do you think, Doc?” he asked, and he was a little disappointed when “Not necessarily” was the best the dentist could do.

“Granny Sal was a Georgia slave what run off,” Johnnie told him. “Her daddy was white and he tried to get her back because she was worth a lot of money, but she joined up with the Seminoles.” Sal married Yusif and taught their children the English that Johnnie learned from his father, which accounted for the boy’s accent. Johnnie said he’d cleaned up his grammar at St. Francis, a mission school near Wichita that he’d attended until recently. Time spent among the illiterate here in Dodge had evidently undermined the improvement some.

“My daddy didn’t get no schoolin’,” Johnnie told Doc, “but he could talk Mexican and Creek, and some Arab from Grandaddy Yusif. Daddy always told me, ‘You come from educated people. Don’t never believe white folks tell you Africans was ignorant.’ ”

The Spanish and the English and the Americans all sent armies into Florida to fight the Seminoles. Georgia slave owners sent militia in, too, hunting fugitives like Yusif and Sal. “Didn’t matter a lick who they sent to Florida,” Johnnie said. “White folks’d get lost, or die of sicknesses, or get killed by Seminole warriors.”

“Remember the names, boy,” his daddy always said. “They had Andrew Jackson and General Gaines and General Jessup and Zachary Taylor, but we had Billy Bowlegs and Osceola and Wild Cat and John Horse. And we was always tri-un-fant.”

That’s how his daddy said it. Tri-un-fant.

At some point, Wild Cat and John Horse led their people from Florida to Mexico. Johnnie was a little hazy about that part, but he was sure that Texas hunters started raiding into Mexico, thieving livestock and dragging Black Seminoles back to sell them for slaves in America.

“They was a war about it,” Johnnie told Doc. “Daddy said Seminoles fought twenty battles ’longside the Mexican army and whipped them Texans every time.”

As far as Johnnie knew, the only thing that ever beat the Seminoles was smallpox. Smallpox carried off his Granny Sal and two of his uncles and his aunt, who Johnnie never got to meet, and it had marred his daddy’s handsome face.

When slavery was done in the United States, it was John Horse who led the Black Seminoles into Fort Duncan in Texas, where the menfolk joined the United States Army. “They was called the Seminole Negro Indian Scouts,” Johnnie said, head high. “They was four thousand of them, Doc! They could track anybody, they could fight anybody, and they was—”

“Always tri-un-fant,” Doc finished with him, smiling.

The Scouts patrolled the Rio Grande borderlands, and they took on all comers. Comanche, Apache, Kiowa. Confederate renegades. Cattle rustlers—Mexican and Texan, both. The Scouts wore uniforms, like white soldiers, but they didn’t much care for their West Point officers, who wanted them to line up straight and do as they were told.

Johnnie was of the opinion that the Scouts had more in common with the cagey desert Indians they fought. His daddy would always wink when he said, “Sometimes we’d get together with them Indians. Your mamma’s people was crazy gamblers—all them Indians was. They’d bet what buzzard’ll fly off first! Stake their horses and wives and tents on any kinda race. I won your mamma that way. Her Indian husband was a damn fool to gamble her.”

Which is how Johnnie came to be.

“See? I am a mixed multitude all by myself,” he told Doc. “African, and white, and Indian, and maybe Arab, too.”

“That is a wondrous story,” Doc said. “Somebody should write it all down. I could help you with that, if you like.”

“Oh, I can write,” Johnnie assured him. “I can read and write better than most white folks. I learned myself before I got to St. Francis, but Father von Angensperg made me better at it.”

Doc asked how the Sanders family wound up in Kansas after being down in Texas, and that was when Johnnie realized he didn’t know. And he had his own questions, too. Like: How did his daddy get the name Sanders? And was there some special reason Johnnie himself was named after John Horse?

“You could ask next time you visit,” Doc suggested.

“Too late now,” Johnnie said. “My folks was killed when I was twelve.”

He went quiet for a while.

“All them ancestors,” he said thoughtfully. “And I’m the only one left to remember.”

Show Cards

That evening Doc tried to put the boy’s dead, burnt body out of his mind, but circumstance conspired against him. Kate had found him a moderately interesting poker game and he sat in, but all anybody talked about was the fire. Much of the commentary centered on how capacious the Famous Elephant Barn had been. Word was, Hamilton Bell had already ordered lumber and a crew of carpenters, and he intended to rebuild, bigger than ever. There was a good deal of speculation as to what Ham might name the new stable. What was bigger than an elephant?

Nobody seemed inclined to inquire into Johnnie’s death. It wasn’t that folks didn’t care. Everybody seemed to have liked him, but Johnnie was just a colored kid, after all, and kin to no one. Bat Masterson was telling everyone that it was an unfortunate accident. That quickly became the common wisdom.

There was no mention of how much money the boy had taken at his faro table in the past few weeks. Apparently no one else had noticed how steadily those winnings had accumulated. Even Doc tried to forget his suspicions that first night. None of my affair, he thought. Why borrow trouble?

Two hours into the game, Kate leaned over to whisper sotto voce into his ear, “Viens coucher avec moi, mon amour.”

Her arms were wrapped around his shoulders. Her voice was throaty. Her French required no translation. The other players nudged each other, looking down her dress. This was the desired effect, for she was giving Doc an excuse to cut his losses. He knew she was right. His concentration was shot and he was playing poorly, but he waved her off.

She straightened. “You don’t want me? You want that girl back home? I ain’t good enough?”

When he failed to rise to that well-chewed bait, Kate cursed him roundly and declared, “All right, then. One of us has to make some money tonight! I’m going to Bessie’s.”

“Suit yourself,” he said.

He played three more hands, lost two, and quit the game. Back at the hotel, he tried to read, but The Aeneid was no better than the poker game as a distraction.

Beloved Troy is in flames … The roar of the fire grows louder, the seething flood of flame rolls closer …

He skipped ahead to Carthage. That was more successful.

Here Aeneas dares to hope he has found some haven and, after all his hard straits, to trust again in better times …

On John Henry Holliday’s best days—when he’d slept well; when a freshening breeze from the northwest cleared the air; when his cough was just a nuisance he could almost ignore—on those days, his mood lifted and soared. On one such day, he had written to Martha Anne, Western Kansas appears to have a good