The Old Colts Read Online Free

nights a week the year through till he fell off and the music stopped. He wasn’t after the brass ring. He just loved the ride.
    From cowtown to city, then, from Front Street to the “Gay White Way” was for Bat a hop-skip-and-jump. The Kansas farm boy turned out to be a born New Yorker. Out there he had worn a star. Here he had star billing from the day he hit Grand Central. Out there he bullied money from a cheapskate town council. Here it came easy, from the point of a pen. Out there the price of a high old time was too often paid in death rattles, while here dollar bills did the trick. Out there, in the end, a man might be planted in a pine box on Boot Hill. Here he got a satin-lined casket and interment in green and elegant Woodlawn. And one thing for sure, along the way here he kept a hell of a lot classier company.
    His company in carouse was in the main that of other newsmen. There would have been a natural affinity in any case. Bat was a man’s man, generous, outgoing, full of fun. He was the real thing, too. Soon after his arrival in Gotham the magazine Human Life signed him to do a series of articles on the celebrated gunmen he had known, from Clay Allison to Luke Short, from Ben Thompson to Wyatt Earp, and, when the pieces ran, even the most cynical reporter recognized the ring of truth in every line. When he went to work for the Telegraph, he wrote an honest column. And so his fellows welcomed him to their charmed and bibulous circle with a grin and a clap on the back and bought him a drink.
    And he made marvelous copy. They knew he had actually slain only three men—Sergeant King and the assassins of his brother Ed—but it was they who pumped up the count to twenty-three on grounds that gore was a damn-sight more interesting to the reader than verisimilitude. It was they who expanded the Plunkett shootout into a front-page item. Some blowhard Coloradan by that moniker and a Texan named Dinklesheets were standing around at the Waldorf bar getting spifflicated and proclaiming that Bat Masterson was a fake and a fraud and his reputation in the West was lower than a snake’s hips. After several nights of this, Bat confronted the pair with a hand thrust into his pocket. “Look out!” someone yelled, “Bat’s going to flash his cannon!” There was a stampede for the exits, led by Plunkett and Dinklesheets, and when the shooting was over—there had been none whatever—and Bat was begged to put his cannon on public display, he smiled and pulled from his pocket a pack of Spuds.
    Another reason why he was much cherished by his peers was that, since he was a newsman now, and you were a newsman, a little of his luster rubbed off on you. But for accident of birth, you might have had the adventures, you might be hustled by autograph hounds, you might be a Bat Masterson—and sometimes wished you were. Not least of all, you might be able to tell the tall tales he could. His yarns enraptured. Liarly though most might sound, they were based on experience no city slicker had ever had, and hence could not disprove.
    To send cold chills up and down their spines he had only to describe in detail, for example, the killing of Levi Richardson by Frank Loving.
    To make them slap their knees, he might recollect how they put a monkey in the room at the Dodge House of a drunkard drummer who had passed out, and what happened when he revived.
    To split their sides, he could recall the amazing Prof. Geezler, the armless showman who wrote letters and rolled cigarettes and fired off a small howitzer with his toes, and prospered mightily until the night he had one too many before a performance in Wichita and blew off his act.
    Bat could also pull his listeners’ legs right out of their sockets.
    Four ayem. He was in Jack Dunstan’s, near the Hipp on Sixth Avenue, having breakfasted with Irvin S. Cobb, star rewrite man of the World; Hype Igoe, sportswriter on the same sheet, who liked to bring his ukelele to Jack’s and lead the