David Markson - The Ballad of Dingus Magee

“Hey?” Anna Hot Water said.

“Sure. And I reckon you never rode in no stagecoach before, neither. Git on down there quick, now.”

Hoke galloped off. There was no trail where he angled toward the road below, and his horse skidded several times, raising dust, but with the instinct of his years as a cowhand he yanked his kerchief about his mouth and nose. It had already occurred to him that a stage might not make an unscheduled stop in Indian country, but he had decided that his personal emergency would warrant halting it with a gun. Because he truly meant to buy a ticket for as far away from Yerkey’s Hole as his last few dollars would take her.

But then the coach surprised him by pulling up even before he had done any more than wave with his Buntline.

As a matter of fact it seemed the driver had begun to brake before that, when he had still been slipping down the hillside.

“Howdy there,” Hoke shouted from a distance, heeling toward them. “I thank you kindly—”

But then they were to puzzle him even more. Because there were no passengers, apparently, and of the two men in the cockpit only one looked like an ordinary hand. The other, who should have been carrying a shotgun, was not only unarmed but quite elderly, and far too handsomely dressed for his situation. It was he who began to shout:

“Don’t kill us! Don’t! We’re carrying nothing — no mail, nothing. Here’s my wallet! There’s three hundred dollars in it, and—”

“But—”

And then the man actually did toss a wallet toward him. Hoke gaped at it where it dropped into the dirt. “But I jest wanted to—”

The older man clutched at his breast then, gasping. “Oh, don’t shoot!”

“But look, I’m jest trying to tell you—”

“Lissen, mister, lissen.” It was the driver this time, leaning down to speak almost confidentially. “That’s all we got with us, honest. This here’s Mr. Fairweather, the owner. He’s jest taking a private ride, you see. And he’s got this weak heart, so I’m under orders not to put up no resistance. So if—”

“Well, sure,” Hoke said. “Anyways, all I want is—”

Still confused, Hoke happened to lift a hand to his face. That was when he realized he had not put away his revolver. Nor had he removed his kerchief.

So he was just about to rid himself of both, grimacing at his stupidity, when the rest of it happened. Anna Hot Water came panting along the trail behind them. “What you say?” she called. “It all set now, Dean Goose?”

“Dean Goose?” the driver muttered. “Dean Goose?”

“Dingus Billy Magee!”

Hoke’s horse shied at the abrupt lurching of the vehicle, rearing high. Probably he could have caught them if he tried, but he was still simply not thinking well. “Yaaaa!” the driver screamed. “Yaaaa!” The coach jerked and skidded, rocking wildly down the road.

So the new circular on Dingus reached his office only a day after he himself got home (with Anna Hot Water plodding inexorably after him). It was for three thousand dollars, posted by an organization named the Fairweather Transportation Company, and it bore a facsimile signature of one Hiram J. Fairweather, President, who personally guaranteed payment. Hoke shoved the announcement into a locked drawer, along with the wallet. He sat for long hours, brooding over it.

Two weeks later, in a town called Oscuro where Dingus was believed to have previously committed certain felonies, several mail sacks containing federal papers were stolen from a post office. The postmaster who reported the theft also produced a crumpled piece of paper on which a scrawled note read Dingus, the best time to steel them bags is after mid-nite. A week after that, in another small town in the same area, certain ranch deeds and water titles were removed from a land office, and this time a kerchief was discovered on the scene, embroidered with the initials DBM. No cash money was involved in either larceny, according to the official circulars which subsequently crossed Hoke’s desk, but each governmental department announced it was adding one thousand dollars to the over-all bounty nonetheless.

That still left Dingus five hundred dollars shy of the original ten thousand about which he and Hoke had spoken. “But he can go and manage the last of it hisself,” Hoke decided, burying the mail sacks and sundry other evidence. “Meantimes this’ll teach the critter to promise Hoke Birdsill a train and then not rob one, I reckon!”

But that had only been desperation. And anyway, it was over now. Now even the crowning public indignity of Turkey Doolan did not matter, especially since the loafers who had seen Hoke dragging the unconscious Dingus from Miss Pfeffer’s to the jail had quickly spread word of the new capture. (It had occurred essentially as Dingus himself suspected, of course. After escorting Miss Pfeffer to the doctor’s, Hoke had lurked beneath her rear window for some moments first, to make certain that the snoring was authentic. What he’d hit Dingus with had not been a pistol, however, but a handy fty pan.) Hoke had explained the episode with modesty, if with a certain vagueness becoming characteristic in such situations, and then had arranged for his letter about the reward to depart with the morning stage. Now, still exultant, enthroned in his office he brushed the dust from a mail-order catalog, ready to consider the first possible additions to his wardrobe in the six long months since Dingus had been his prisoner before.

“Yep,” he speculated aloud, “might even git me some Colts with gutta percha handles this time, like I seen that feller Bat Masterson wearing once, up to Dodge City.”

Dingus merely snarled. Hoke had removed his handcuffs, but he continued to pace the cell like an abused animal, kicking at the spittoon one moment, at the slopbucket the next. The welt behind his ear was reddening also, which did not fail to compound Hoke’s sense of gratification.

Much as he savored the moment, however, it occurred to him that he ought to look in briefly on Miss Pfeffer. “You reckon you won’t start to weep for lonesomeness,” he asked Dingus, “if’n I leave you in there by yourself fer a spell?”

“Go pee down a rattlesnake hole, you pistol-whipping mule-sniffer,” Dingus told him.

“Poor old Dingus,” Hoke chuckled. “You jest ain’t got no sporting attitude, is all.”

Nor could a confrontation with Miss Pfeffer’s continued indisposition dampen his spirits either. When he had led her to the doctor’s earlier she had been speechless, and in reply to questions about Dingus she had only wailed piteously; now, with the sound of Hoke’s solicitous inquiry from her front door, she commenced to wail all over again.

The doctor was just emerging from her bedroom. “Sure does rend your heart, don’t it, Doc?” Hoke commented.

“Rends something, I reckon,” the doctor said ambiguously, whereupon Miss Pfeffer wailed anew.

“Hang it now, Agnes, it jest ain’t all that tragic,” the doctor called across his shoulder. “It’s happened a couple times in history before, you know.”

“Sure,” Hoke contributed expansively, speaking toward the bedroom. “Lots of ladies has been terrorized by desperadoes. How about all them fair damsels got carried off by wicked dukes and such, as we had in school, only they was rescued by knights in shiny armour? Or in Mister Fenimore Cooper’s writings, where—”

This time it was the doctor who seemed to moan, starting out.

“Well, say, you don’t jest aim to leave her here alone?” Hoke asked (it had just come to him, if obliquely, that he did owe Miss Pfeffer a certain debt of gratitude).

“I got a sick team of oxen to look after, up to Denny Cross’s place,” the doctor said. “Man’s got to make a serious living somewheres.”