Nobody in Dodge knew Hoyt personally, but the Texans in town that week clubbed together and gave the kid a big send-off. Wyatt watched the funeral procession from a small remove. A lot of the drovers looked at him like they might try something but nobody did, possibly because Morgan had rounded up Dog Kelley and Bat and Doc Holliday to stand right behind Wyatt, just in case. Even Eddie Foy stood with them.
It was Eddie’s idea to go over to the Iowa House for breakfast after the burial, when the crowd had dispersed. Wyatt had been broody since the night he shot the kid, so Eddie spent the whole meal trying to make the event into a funny story, telling Dog Kelley about how he thought he was pretty agile, don’t you know, until he saw Bat Masterson and Doc Holliday pancake onto the dance floor when the bullets started flying. Then Eddie told about how his brand-new eleven-dollar suit had sustained a mortal wound. When he went back to his dressing room after the shoot-out, he found three bullet holes in the suit and claimed that one was still burning.
Everyone but Eddie knew that wasn’t really possible. You’d have to fire close enough to have the muzzle flare touch the cloth to make it burn, the way it did when Bat’s brother Ed got shot. Still, nobody was inclined to argue the point—certainly not Bat, who appreciated that changing a few details could make for a better story.
Eddie’s tale would get even better when he wrote his autobiography, in 1928. By then the theater looked like a giant block of Swiss cheese, holed by a thousand bullets fired by a dozen men. Wyatt himself never found humor in the affair. His version of the incident was grimly laconic decades later, even after his account had passed through the imagination of a biographer who often preferred well-dressed drama to bare-naked fact.
On the day of George Hoyt’s funeral, Wyatt pushed his plate away, the eggs cold and his toast uneaten, and waited for Eddie to shut up. Then he told the others what young Hoyt had said about being promised $1,000 to kill him, and how Hoyt expected that the Texas warrant against him would be quashed once Wyatt was dead.
Everybody got real quiet.
“Well, that narrows it some,” Morgan pointed out, after a while. “Has to be someone with a lot of cash.”
“Or someone who could give that impression,” Doc said.
“And clout,” Eddie said, serious now, for he was a Chicago boy familiar with cutthroat politics. “You need a hell of a reach to pull strings in another state.”
“Jesse Driskill, maybe?” Bat suggested. “Word is, he was plenty hot after you arrested his nephew, Wyatt.”
Dog Kelley stared at Bat, giving him a chance to add a name.
Bat looked away.
He’s bought, Dog thought. I wonder how …
“Some men never look hot, but they never forget a slight,” Dog said, leaning back to dig fifty cents out of his pocket.
“Bob Wright,” Morgan said.
Morg was always about two steps quicker than his brother.
Dog stood and left the change on the table to pay for his breakfast.
“Watch your back,” he told Wyatt. “Next time, you won’t see it comin’.”
Call
“This’s a terrible hard country for women,” Eddie Foy had told Alexander von Angensperg at the end of May. And it was none too easy on men, judging by recent events.
One by one, the Jesuits at St. Francis were succumbing to the toil and privation of life on the prairie. Decades of labor in the Kansas wilderness had at last weakened Father Schoenmakers’ heart to such an extent that he laid down the burden of running the mission in June, and could now serve only as chaplain to the Sisters of Loretto at the Indian girls’ school nearby. The loss of Schoenmakers to St. Francis was not unexpected, for his debility had steadily worsened over the years, but when a measles epidemic carried off Father Bax, along with fifteen hundred Osage on the reservation, the brawny Belgian’s death was a great shock. By late June, even the vivacious and indefatigable little Italian Paul Ponziglione had been leveled by exhaustion and illness.
Which is why, in July of 1878, it had fallen to Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg, S.J., to assume the summer mission circuit that Father Paul ordinarily rode, and to do so atop Alphonsus, the mule that ordinarily carried Father Paul.
Both of these experiences were humbling.
Paul Ponziglione was one of those bewildering creatures born with an extraordinary facility for languages. Since coming to Kansas from Italy a quarter century earlier, Father Paul had added English and German to his native Italian and to the French, Latin, and Greek of any educated person. He also spoke five Indian tongues fluently, and had mastered the nearly universal sign language of the plains as well.
The transparent joy with which Paul conveyed his own faith—and the Italian’s personal charm—had done much to bring souls to Christ from among the Osage, the Sauk, the Pawnee, the Cherokee, and the Fox.
Even nearing sixty, the spry little priest traveled relentlessly across Kansas and southward into the Indian Territory as far as the Texas line. Like that of the saint for whom he was named, Father Paul’s missionary work encompassed nascent congregations scattered throughout vast lands peopled largely by those hostile to the Faith. He had begun to reap a small but significant harvest from seeds patiently sown in his youth, and it was his policy to visit every church three times a year.
In each village, Father Paul baptized catechumens and infants or those in danger of death. He joined young couples in holy (and monogamous) matrimony, heard confessions, and celebrated the Mass. He doctored wounds as well, and danced with merrymakers, and he settled individual and public disputes. When disease and injuries took their toll, he sat by the dying and wept with the grieving.
Baptized or
Alexander did his garbled, halting best to reassure the Indians of various tribes that Father Paul was neither dead nor dying but merely much in need of rest. There was great relief when this understanding was reached, but that was followed by even more visible disappointment. Told that the sacraments celebrated by a different Black Robe were equally valid in heaven and on earth, the Indians displayed not so much skepticism as disgruntlement.
Arms crossed over chests.
Brows wrinkled.
Lips pursed in annoyance.
“I wanted Father Paul,” the bride, or the catechumen, or the dying man would say. “Father Paul is better.” And, Alexander was given to understand, he was better in all possible ways.
Father Paul spoke properly. He didn’t make confusing mistakes when signing.
Father Paul brought better presents. He was more gracious in receiving gifts.
Father Paul understood how to be polite, and he knew when to make a joke. He certainly never insulted anybody by accident.
Father Paul had kinder eyes. He was friendlier and more amusing.
Father Paul knew how to dance. He was a better singer, too.
Alexander was beginning to hate Father Paul.
Alphonsus, on the other hand, was growing on him. And that, too, was a useful measure of his own lingering vanity, for—man and boy, prince and cavalry officer—Alexander Anton Josef Maria Graf von Angensperg had owned and ridden some of the finest horseflesh in Europe.
As long as he was alone on the empty plains, Alexander could appreciate the mule’s easy gait, his surefootedness, and his calm. When a prairie hen whirred into the air, a horse might well have bolted, but the middle-aged Alphonsus merely flicked his long, expressive ears in worldly disdain, for horses are flighty animals who accumulate fears and superstitions with each passing year, whereas mules learn from experience, becoming more sophisticated as they mature. Day after day, Alphonsus picked his way through terrain that would have lamed a
