“I’ve got some call for it, if you’re willing.”
“Could be,” she said, and then forgot her pert good taste. She pulled a gold case from her purse and Bob lighted her cigarette. A man who worked for Bob barged inside the saloon, swinging ice between his legs with iron tongs. He saw the cigarette in her fingers and stopped long enough to pepper the floorboards with waterspots and make a happy face at Bob, then lunged back into the storeroom.
Bob asked, “You know who I am?”
She nodded a little too eagerly, like a girl slightly in love with her teacher. “Bob Ford.”
He recrossed his legs and gazed at the flooring. “The man who shot Jesse James.”
“I’ve seen your picture.”
He glanced at her with suspicion. “So you were lying.”
“Excuse me?”
“You said you were expecting somebody old and ugly, when you knew, just what I looked like.”
She wasn’t sheepish, she didn’t look into her lap or pout or pretend to be embarrassed. She said, “I was making conversation,” and was especially pretty with him.
“How much of that is true, about the orphanage and the Sisters of Mercy and the mining engineer?”
She blew cigarette smoke and said, “Hardly any.”
He glared at her with a cocked eyebrow that betrayed how engaging he thought she was. “Do you have a given name or do you just generally make something up?”
“Dorothy,” she said.
“You can sing though, can’t you?”
She got up and glided over to the upright piano, putting her cigarette in a tin cup there. She sang “Only a Bird in a Gilded Cage” and “Home, Sweet Home” and Bob gave her a job at higher pay than the other girls’.
She garnered attention in Pueblo with gaudy clothes and brazen, unblushing displays of her body; she sang serenades on street corners as riders lingered their horses, teamsters looked on from their wagon seats, and young clerks forgot their shops to gaze with delight and longing; her picture was on a poster that read; “Prizes like this may be captured nightly at Bob Ford’s Saloon.” She brought in enough new customers to greatly augment Bob’s earnings, but she could have justified her wages with only her generous attentions to Bob. She was deeply interested in Bob’s overpublicized life with Jesse and listened almost rapaciously, sitting absolutely still as he spoke, showing no expression beyond that of rapt absorption, her mind seeming to accept his words as a mouth does water.
It was only with Dorothy Evans that Bob spoke revealingly or plainly, and it was with her that he spoke of things he didn’t know he knew. He told her about playing poker with Thomas Howard in the dining room of the cottage. Jesse would flap his bottom lip with his thumb and smack his fist on the table with every card he played. He’d folded on one or two winning hands and never caught on to Charley’s bluffs. He rubbed his teeth with a finger, Bob said, he nibbled his mustache, he purified his blood at night with sulphate of magnesia in a glass of apple cider. Bob told Dorothy that he had no real memory of the shooting and its aftermath: he could remember lifting the gun that Jesse had given him and then it was Good Friday and he was reading about the funeral proceedings as if they’d happened a long time ago. He explained that he’d kept the yellowed newspaper clippings from April 1882 and
repeatedly pored over them, each time feeling aped, impersonated, cruelly maligned by the Robert Ford that the correspondents chose to put into print. He’d acted lightning-struck and stupefied, mechanical and childish. He was ashamed of his persiflage, his boasting, his pretensions of courage and ruthlessness; he was sorry about his cold-bloodedness, his dispassion, his inability to express what he now believed was the case: that he truly regretted killing Jesse, that he missed the man as much as anybody and wished his murder hadn’t been necessary.
“Was it?” Dorothy asked.
Bob looked at her without comment.
“How I mean it is: why was it you killed him?” There was a gentle tinkling to her voice that Bob had grown accustomed to in actresses.
Bob said, “He was going to kill me.”
“So you were scared and that’s the only reason?”
He sipped from a German stein of beer. “And the reward money,” he said.
“Do you want me to change the subject?”
Bob reset the stein and glanced at her in a calculating way. He asked, “Do you know what I expected? Applause. I thought Jesse James was a Satan and a tyrant who was causing all this misery, and that I’d be the greatest man in America if I shot him. I thought they would congratulate me and I’d get my name in books. I was only twenty years old then. I couldn’t see how it would look to people. I’ve been surprised by what’s happened.”
IT WAS AROUND THIS TIME that a cowpuncher and prospector named Nicholas Creede began producing great amounts of silver ore from the Holy Moses and Amethyst mines in the San Juan Mountains of southwest Colorado. A tent town in the gulch of Willow Creek was given the man’s name and a spur of the Denver and Rio Grande narrow-gauge railroad was rapidly developed to join the camp to Wagon Wheel Gap in the east, and only deep snows in the high canyon passes prevented many thousands of miners from swarming over the mountains. They waited impatiently for the spring thaw in Pueblo, bringing good profits to the saloons and hotels and boardinghouses where they slept three or four to a room. Bob Ford was not exempt and put in with him in the Phoenix Hotel was a man named Edward O. Kelly, making a very unhappy pairing.
Kelly was from Harrisonville, Missouri, just twenty miles south of Cole Younger’s farm in Lee’s Summit, and he gave even friends the improper opinion that his sister was married to one of the Younger boys. He was a child of a physician who’d given him a good education and he was employed as a policeman in Pueblo, but by 1890 the man had the mean, scrawny, unintelligent look of the regularly intoxicated. He forgot to shave or change his clothes, his shirts and coat were much too big for him, his green eyes showed no glint of humor, he had only repugnance for women, and he thought Bob Ford was a disgrace to the good name of Missouri.
They generally said nothing when in the room together, they glanced everywhere but at each other, they even hung up a flagged string in order to split the room area and separate possessions. And then one day Bob was rummaging through his belongings in search of a four-hundred-dollar diamond ring that he was going to present to Dorothy as a sign of their common-law marriage. Bob saw Kelly sniggering and saying words to himself and he jumped to the wrong conclusion, charging Kelly with stealing the ring.