They’re killing me!
Without conscious volition I heaved the lantern. It exploded in flames on the planks midway between the dark figure and me. For an instant I glimpsed Le Caron’s pocked skin and glittering eyes. Then he was gone, and people were swarming around.
The next hours are confused in my mind. I recall seeing my frock coat drenched with blood and thinking it was ruined. I remember being lifted bodily by Mac and Gould, being examined by a young nervous doctor—gunshots evidently weren’t his thing—and, later, just before the team left, being startled by the sight of tears in Andy’s eyes.
Jesus, I must be dying. . . .
And then feeling oddly comforted that he cared that much.
I awoke in a sun-splashed room, sweating and stiff. Pain radiated above my left hipbone.
“Shit,” I groaned.
“The eloquent voice of suffering.” Across the room, sitting in a straight-backed chair, Millar regarded me. “The club departed last night,” he said sourly. “I was assigned to stay.”
“Am I . . . ?”
“Yes, you’ll certainly survive. The bullet passed through flesh—of which you have a sufficiency—without coming near your organs.” He sounded as if he wanted to add, “Worse luck.”
In my brain Le Caron’s face flickered again in the lantern’s glow. I felt a jet of fear. “Are we still in Albany?”
He nodded. “You’re safe enough. The police department’s next door. I alerted the hotel staff not to allow anyone up here.” He stood and stretched. “I’m to put you on a train to New York as soon as you’re fit to travel.”
I began to shake, a most unpleasant sensation. They’d tried to kill me. My teeth chattered—something I thought happened only in books—and I couldn’t quiet my violent trembling.
Millar paced irritably and grumbled at not being able to write his dispatches.
I bent my legs and felt a spasm of pain. The shaking gradually stopped. “I’ll do ’em for you,” I told him. “They’re all the same: ‘Smiling George Wright, striker nonpareil of the Crimson Hose, waved his willow wand and dashed a splendid blow to the outer gardens. Making his third, he showed pluck withal by—’!”
“What’s lacking in that?” Millar demanded.
“It’s flowery tripe.”
“And of course you’re inferring that your own prose—which remains conveniently unseen—is superior?” His eyes were bright behind the steel-rimmed spectacles. “Fowler, my father covered river news around Cincinnati for fifty years. He taught me the profession. My sporting coverage has been commended by Henry Chadwick himself, so I don’t care to hear your rude—”
“Who the hell’s Henry Chadwick?”
“Who is he?” He looked incredulous. “Only the country’s foremost sporting writer, the originator of scientific scoring, the most prolific voice—”
“Okay, okay,” I said wearily. “I believe you. You’re wonderful. I’m sorry.”
He nursed me, grudgingly but well, for the next day and a half, changing the poultice on my wound, injecting me with quinine, helping me to the commode, ordering meals, bringing newspapers in, and generally keeping me company.
My body was behaving strangely. My cheek resisted healing, but the bruise on my forehead vanished almost at once. Similarly, the bullet’s passage scarcely pained me the second day; when we changed the bandage I saw the puckered flesh already beginning to congeal. The young doctor marveled at my recovery; finding no sign of infection, he said I could travel as soon as I wanted.
That afternoon, while Millar purchased train tickets, I walked slowly uptown until I saw an awning bearing the sign firearms. I’d never owned a gun in my life. Forty minutes later I walked out with a snug-barreled Remington derringer. The proprietor, a swarthy war veteran who vaguely resembled Richard Nixon, had shown me how to load its rimfire shells in the twin chambers. My fingers enveloped its rubber-grip handle; I could almost palm the whole weapon. I hefted it. Heavy for such a little thing, maybe three-quarters of a pound. Death at my fingertips. I aimed into a barrel of sawdust and pulled the trigger. A tongue of flame shot from one of the nickel-plated barrels. The sawdust jumped. There was a satisfying recoil as the weapon kicked against my hand.
“Ain’t accurate more’n a few feet,” the proprietor said disparagingly. “Gambler’s gun, for under the table. You intend on hitting something, you’ll want a long-barreled Colt. Hell, a body could damn near dodge the bullets outen that derringer, they travel so slow.”
“It’ll be fine,” I told him, wondering if I could actually fire it at anybody. “Where’s the safety?”
He snorted. “You see one?”
I didn’t. There wasn’t. I bought it anyway.
By telegram Harry wished me fast recovery and reported wins over Springfield, 80—5, and the Lowells of Boston, 29—9. In a separate dispatch Andy warned me to stay alert; somebody had been around asking about “the ballist with a bandaged cheek.”
Late that evening—Thursday, June 10, forty-eight hours after the shooting—Millar walked me to the train station. I tried to appear nonchalant, but couldn’t stop my heart thumping or my eyes darting nervously. When somebody wants you dead, it tends to dampen your faith in humanity.
I was to go directly to the Stockings’ hotel and wait for them to arrive three days later. Millar, bound for Boston, had booked me through on the Penn Central. But, fearing that line would be watched, I took a roundabout route.
By midnight I was cursing my decision. Evasion was one thing, rattling and lurching along an interminable milk run through the Catskills was another. It wasn’t until nearly one a.m. that I got off at Binghamton, the transfer point for the Erie. A long journey to Manhattan still lay ahead.
I sat glumly in the empty waiting room, debating whether to spend the night in town.
