Buckskin, Bloomers, and Me Read online

  Buckskin Compton told me: “When you’re on the train, you can call Nellie McConnell ‘Nelse.’ He’s a good Irish lass.” That last sentence Buckskin said in a humorous Irish accent.

  Only I wasn’t laughing.

  “I can work out a payment arrangement with your folks,” Mr. Norris said, but by that time I was pulling my pack up over my shoulders and getting ready to pedal those ten miles home before it got dark.

  Suddenly, Mr. Norris blurted out what he would pay me, and if I’d taken up the habit of chewing tobacco, I would’ve likely swallowed juice and chaw and gotten sicker than a dog right then and there.

  I shouted: “A week?”

  Which almost caused Buckskin to swallow his tobacco as he got to laughing so hard.

  Mr. Ed Norris chuckled a mite, too, and corrected me. “A game.”

  Chapter Three

  Fort Scott Tribune and Monitor

  Fort Scott, Kansas • May 21, 1906

  It developed at the ball game yesterday, between the Fort Scott Athletics and the National Bloomer “Girls,” that the girls were men of the Lilliputian type and that they wore wigs to conceal their identity. However, there were two women on the team, the second baseman and the center fielder, neither of which got their hands on the ball at all. The fact is, they were afraid of the ball, and when it came near them, they would get out of the way of it. There were three other girls that did not appear in the field at all. They played the bench. It was a novel game to hoodwink the people, and it worked to perfection.

  Sometimes, you don’t realize how lucky you are. What I’m saying is that all my life, I wanted a horse to ride, and would’ve settled for a pony or even a mule. But, living in town, or right next to town, and what with my pa working for a railroad when he actually worked, I always got lectured that I didn’t need no horse. Then the Widow Amy DeFee give me this bicycle, which wasn’t brand new, I don’t think, but I had seen one just like it in the Montgomery Ward & Co.’s catalog that cost sixty-five dollars, which was more than most folks paid for horses in these parts. I also always wanted a dog. Never get one, though.

  But here’s what I mean when I say how lucky I was by not getting what I’d dreamt of getting.

  Had I been riding a horse, the Widow Amy DeFee and Judge Kevin Brett would have heard me trotting up to our house. Had I owned a puppy dog, it would have barked as I pedaled up. Or had I even dickered around about the money and what all I was to be doing for the National Bloomer Girls baseball team, I likely would have had to light up my lamp and them two might have seen the light shining in the dark and knew I was almost home. Turns out it was just getting dark as I pedaled up to the house out on the edge of town, and bicycling is a quiet way to travel.

  Still, I wanted to shout and let them hear the news that I was about to become a professional baseball player—even if I was going to be playing on a girls team that had three men wearing wigs and bloomers already.

  But first, let me tell you about the deal I’d struck up with Mr. Norris.

  “I ain’t gonna wear no wig,” I told him.

  “Your hair’s long and curly enough as it is,” he assured me. “And you’re fair-skinned. Nice complexion for a Kansas farm boy.” I didn’t let him know that I wasn’t raised on no farm but come from a town—a city, by grab—so I just glared.

  My face got red again when Nelson “Nellie” McConnell come up and said: “I thought he was a lovely little lass when he first come to bat.” He talked Irish, but he wasn’t faking it like Buckskin had done earlier. “Says to myself, I say … ‘Why, the good people of Mound City wanted to give us a chance, playing a girl against an all-girls team.’ Ain’t that a bloody laugh. You got any chawing tobaccy, Ed?”

  “Criminy,” Ed Norris said, and found another plug in his pocket, which he tossed to Nelson McConnell. Then the manager looked at me. “Can you catch?”

  “I can play anywhere you put me,” I let him know. And I would—for what he was going to pay me.

  “Well, go get your folks. We can get this done in a hurry. Have to.”

  A train whistle screeched, and then Ed Norris blowed his top.

  “There’s no time now,” he said, and strung together just about every dirty word I’d ever heard and even a couple I’d never heard even whispered on a dare on any baseball diamond. “Can you get to Fort Scott for tomorrow’s game? Starts at two-thirty.”

  “Tomorrow’s Sunday,” I reminded him.

  “Yeah. Baseball’s church to some of us. Can you get there?”

  He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Listen, if you can’t get there by then, fine. I can play Ruth again. She gets tired of selling programs anyway, and her ma would appreciate it.”

  “She’s not that bad of a player,” Buckskin said, which made Nelson McConnell snort and spit juice between Buckskin’s baseball shoes.

  “Thinks you,” McConnell said.

  “Shut up,” Mr. Norris said. “If you can’t get to Fort Scott on time, our next game’s Monday in Galesburg. If you aren’t there by Monday, I’ll figure you’ve decided you’d rather slop hogs and milk cows and pick taters than make a fortune with our higgledy-piggledy.”

  He shook my hand, as did Buckskin, and the three walked toward the bus of lady ballists. I stared at them, wondering which other ones had flimflammed me into thinking they was actual girls. Then I settled into the saddle on my Hawthorne bicycle and started pedaling for home, thinking along the way about how I might higgledy-piggledy the Widow Amy DeFee into thinking that I wasn’t going to be making nowhere near the kind of money I’d actually been promised.

  Pretty much out of breath, I reached our shack, and leaned my bicycle against the fence, which could barely hold it up, the fence being in mighty poor condition. I took out the money the Widow Amy DeFee expected me to pay her, hoping she hadn’t learnt how much money I had been paid, and moved toward the front door. I’d seen the judge’s buggy and could tell from the horse’s panting and the lather on its neck that the judge had just got there and that he had drove real hard. He lived on the other side of town, in the fine section, but Pleasanton ain’t that big of a burg, so the judge had drove his rig fast and worn out his horse something awful.

  I just about got to the porch when the Widow Amy DeFee’s voice brought me to a dead stop.

  “A will? What do you mean he left a will?”

  “Land sakes, Amy, quiet down,” Judge Brett told her. “A clerk in probate found it. I didn’t know. You didn’t know. Nobody knew.”

  “And nobody has to know.” The Widow Amy DeFee said some other things that weren’t very ladylike.

  The judge whispered something.

  I started again for the porch, but then whatever the judge had told her must have set off the Widow Amy DeFee’s fuse, on account she shrieked again. “A newspaper. You let a newspaper reporter see the will?” She give the judge an earful.

  “What could I do?” he pleaded.

  “He’s leaving everything … to … that … boy?”

  “It’s not like he had much.”

  “He would have had less, if we hadn’t forged that life insurance policy,” said the Widow Amy DeFee, followed by cursing and stomping. “Now that half-wit who’s good for nothing except baseball gets my fortune.”

  “Please settle down, Amy,” the judge pleaded.

  I felt cold, on account that once the sun had gone down, I’d sweated an awful lot pedaling my way back home as fast as I could. Dumb and ignorant as I was, my legs again started taking me to the porch, and likely would’ve done just that had I not heard the next words of the Widow Amy DeFee.

  “You have to kill him.”

  The judge let out a gasp, which was a good thing, because I done that exact same thing.

  “My word … he’s a boy,” the judge cautioned.

  I wasn’t walking no more, but sweating, feeling sick, and w
anting to vomit.

  “You’re the one who bungled this …” she said.

  “It’s not my fault.”

  “You have to kill him.”

  “I’ll do no such thing.”

  “You killed him.”

  Right then I felt like I’d misplayed a line drive and the ball had caught me right under the sternum, ’cause now I knew that my wicked stepmother not only wanted to murder me, but that she and Judge Brett had murdered my daddy, which hurt most of all, because Pa hadn’t gotten drunk and swallowed his tongue like the sheriff ’s deputy and the doctor and all the newspapers and gossips and friends and railroad workers had said.

  It’s a hard thing to take in, especially after being happy about playing a good baseball game and beating a team of women—yes, and a few men—and then getting an offer that a kid like me only ever dreamt of getting. And in spite of riding ten miles back and forth that day across southeastern Kansas and not having had much to eat the whole day after a measly breakfast of corn mush and buttermilk, I was so excited at how my life was turning out.

  But as I listened to what they was saying, I knew that if I didn’t get out of this town, my life was gonna turn out dead.

  “They can hang you for one murder, Kevin,” the Widow Amy DeFee told the judge. “Or they can hang you for two. Or you and me can be rich and get out of this wretched West.”

  Right then I started wishing for things other than a pony or a puppy dog. I wished we had neighbors. I wished it wasn’t Saturday night and that the sheriff wasn’t over at that house that nobody ever talked about unless they was working for the railroad. But then I thought that since the sheriff ’s deputy had said my daddy had gotten drunk and swallowed his tongue that maybe he was part of this crime, too, ’cause the Widow Amy DeFee knew how to lure good men astray. I couldn’t go to the law, anyway, because who would believe a sixteen-year-old kid over a twice-widowed woman and a judge who thought he was mighty important in this neck of the prairie?

  Fort Scott.

  That’s what I thought. Fort Scott. That was my only chance. Mr. Norris said I’d be called Lucy Totton and not nothing else iffen I took to playing for the National Bloomer Girls, so none of my friends—not that I had any—would ever know or figure out that I was playing as a woman on a Bloomers baseball team. He told me that no one could know unless my folks told them. There was a clause—that’s what Mr. Norris called it—in the contract that said nobody was to know that there was men playing, and that iffen they let that fact slip out, they were in violation of the contract which could be torn up. The violators would even have to pay back all the money they’d been paid by the Bloomer Girls.

  It was twenty-five miles to Fort Scott. Almost a straight line south. Good roads, a whole lot better than the one to Mound City. All I had to do was walk back to the fence and get on my Hawthorne. And that’s what I was doing when I knew I was found out.

  “It’s the kid! It’s your chance to kill him!” I heard the widow shout.

  “Lord have mercy,” the judge said. “What if he heard what you said?”

  “What I said? You’ll swing before they spring a trapdoor on me, you idiot. Shoot him. Don’t let him get away, you ignorant …”

  I heard the door open, but I didn’t listen that closely after that, because the gunshot reminded me of that ball Lady Waddell smashed in the fourth inning that plowed into the canvas fence in center field earlier that day. But the bullet that whistled past my head was a whole lot scarier than the fastball the southpaw hurler had thrown at me in the first inning.

  “Give me that carbine,” the Widow Amy DeFee snapped at the judge, which got me pedaling real hard as I leaned low, because I knew how well she could shoot a Winchester.

  But there weren’t no more gunshots, and I didn’t hear the hammer go click on that .30-30, but I did hear the Widow Amy DeFee scream: “Why isn’t this thing loaded?”

  Likely I would be dead, and you wouldn’t be reading this narrative, and the judge, jury, lawmen, and newspaper reporters would never have heard my testimony, neither, if that gun had been loaded.

  I leaned to my right, held out my leg, felt the sand kicking underneath my shoe, straightened the Hawthorne, and just kept pedaling as hard as I could. Keep right along the road that would take me to Fort Scott. And at the rate I was working them pedals, I figured I might even beat the Missouri Pacific train that was taking the National Bloomer Girls baseball team there, too.

  Chapter Four

  Chanute Tribune

  Chanute, Kansas • May 25, 1906

  The Kansas City National Bloomer Girls ball team was billed to play the local team on the Thayer diamond on Tuesday. The game was timed to begin at three o’clock, and the players were ready, a large crowd was in town in anticipation of the event, when just at the time for the game, it began to rain, and the game had to be abandoned. But the Bloomer Girls say they will play the Thayer team at some future date … There are only four or five girls on the team, the rest being young boys.

  I got to Fort Scott in time for the game. Well, no, I arrived long before the game even started. Pedaling so hard to avoid getting murdered got me there before daybreak, and I hid in a barn at a dairy farm, fearing the Widow Amy DeFee or that murdering, lying, no-account judge was tracking me down.

  Later, it come to me that maybe they weren’t yet following me. After all, the judge had run his horse real hard in that buggy to bring bad news to the widow, so that horse wouldn’t be good for more than a mile or two, and, it being dark, they wouldn’t have no inkling where I’d run off to. I prayed they might think I’d find me a sheriff or marshal or Pinkerton man, and that being as they wouldn’t want to get hanged by the neck till they was dead, they would flee Kansas and disappear somewhere down in Cuba or South America.

  Fort Scott used to be a right thriving town, but then the army had figured there wasn’t nothing worth protecting no more, so it pulled all them soldier boys out ages ago. ’Course, some of the soldiering buildings is still standing. So, as I said, I hid at a dairy farm. Once it got around dawn, I knew the farmer would be out to check on his cows, on account that farmers get up earlier than ballists.

  Fort Scott was still fair-sized, with railroads and brick buildings and some pretty homes. I just kept my eyes open for anybody who resembled the widow or that rotten judge. When I finally determined that them killers weren’t around, I went looking for Mr. Norris and the Bloomers. My Hawthorne would be a dead giveaway, I thought, and regretted using the word dead in my thinking, so I affixed—that’s another word from Buckskin—my bicycle to a hitching rail at the corner of Crawford and Tenth with my chain and lock. I took my bag and my bat with me.

  As there was still plenty of hotels in Fort Scott, I walked back and forth on the boardwalks, waiting to see some ballist or Bloomer I might recognize. Nobody paid attention to me, ’cause the businessmen and farmers was all busy talking about important matters, like what rates was C.C. Nelson & Co. charging, and how bad had Mrs. Beatty’s catarrh got, and was the ManZan Pile Cure as good as Mr. Konantz said it was. I stopped out front of the Lockwood House, not because I thought the Bloomers might be lodged in that place, but on account of the smells that came out of the dining hall. It smelt like bacon, and it struck me that I hadn’t eaten nothing since breakfast yesterday, unless you counted some peanuts I crunched on during the ball game. Pains in my stomach stabbed me so bad, I had to hurry away.

  That’s what I was doing when I ran right smack into a gent in a nice suit as he was coming out of Cottrell’s Bookstore. Didn’t knock him over or even make him lose the books he was carrying. He turned and stared, first at me, then at the big bat I had in my left hand. I wasn’t threatening him, nor would I, unless I learnt that he had been hired by the judge or widow to kill me. He looked at my face and pushed back his bowler.

  “You’re …” he began.

  “You’re Dolly Madison,”
I said, figuring out who he was first, even though it took me a while to recognize him, as he wasn’t wearing no bloomers nor no blonde wig.

  “Buckskin,” he corrected. With a grin he stuffed the books underneath his left armpit and held out his right hand. “Don’t tell me your folks broke down and agreed to let you take Ed’s offer.”

  “My pa’s dead,” I told him, and wished I hadn’t, because it made the smile vanish off Buckskin Compton’s face.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.

  “Ma’s dead, too.” I think that was the first time I really understood that I didn’t have no parents no more. I wasn’t lying.

  “That’s rough,” he said to me.

  Well, we stood on the boardwalk, making folks walk around us, because I learnt that when you say something like that, just blurt out rotten news, it pretty much stops a conversation.

  But another fellow come up behind Buckskin and changed everything.

  “Good morning, I’m Sheriff J. C. Commons.”

  Now, my first inclination—that’s another four-bit word Buckskin taught me, and from here on in you can figure that just about any big word I use come from him—was to tell the sheriff that my ma, though she weren’t really my birthing ma, and a judge but not a judge in Bourbon County, which is where I was, were out to murder me. I wasn’t sure if judges’ duties was restricted to towns or counties, like sheriffs, or if they could work statewide, being as we was still in Kansas. But I didn’t get no chance to figure it out, on account that Buckskin Compton did the strangest thing. He reached inside his fancy coat and spun on a heel like he was pivoting to try to turn a double play.

  But the tall gent beamed like Pa used to after he had a few nips and them hot dice started rolling the dots he wanted, and he announced: “Or I will be sheriff … if I can count on your vote.”

  Buckskin stopped his pivot, but his hand stayed inside his coat as the tall fellow continued.