Free The Killings of Stanley Ketchel by James Carlos Blake Page B

crowds.
    Sometimes he and Kate took dinner in the Finlen Hotel, which she informed him was the swankest to be found in all of the West between Denver and San Francisco. Sometimes they ventured into the sizable Chinatown to regard the Celestials and wonder at their catlike speech, the mysterious orthography of their signs and posters, the peculiar odors permeating the neighborhoods. They dined on fried rice and egg rolls and savory exotic dishes whose ingredient meats Kate advised him it was best not to inquire into, considering the rumors of what so often became of cats and dogs in Chinatown.
    They attended the theater and delighted in the vaudeville acts,in the comic skits and acrobatic dogs and jugglers and magicians. At the Broadway he saw his first moving picture, a short film featuring a locomotive that sped head-on toward the camera and sent spectators scrambling from their seats to get out of its way. When The Great Train Robbery came to town the theater was packed every night, and Ketchel was hardly the only one who attended its every showing. No dime novel he’d ever read roused such vivid images in his head as were projected onto the white sheet screen for twelve thrilling minutes. At the end, when one of the outlaws pointed his six-shooter at the audience, some among them gasped and Ketchel felt the room’s collective cringe, and when the gun discharged with a puff of smoke he flinched too. Even on subsequent viewings, each time he stared into the bore of the bandit’s revolver he felt the same exhilarating dread.
    A few days after the movie left town, he looked into the muzzle of an actual pistol, cocked and aimed at him across a span of some ten feet as the crowd in the Copper Queen parted from the line of fire. It was the first time a real gun had ever been pointed at him, and yet the situation felt somehow familiar. The man with the gun was a miner with a grievance regarding a dance girl but perhaps was neither so cold-blooded nor so drunk as to be oblivious to the consequence of murder. Maybe that was why he hesitated to pull the trigger. Or maybe it was simply a paralyzing disbelief as Ketchel walked up to him without a word or blink and snatched the gun aside so abruptly the man inadvertently squeezed off a round through the front window and into the side of a passing dry goods wagon. Ketchel wrenched the gun from his grasp and backhanded him with it, opening his cheek to the bone and knocking him to his knees. Then dragged him by the collar to the door and slung him into the street.
    The ejected miner never returned nor made claim for his six-shooter, so Ketchel kept it. A single-action .45-caliber Frontier model Colt. And Kate Morgan, who’d grown up the only girl among five brothers on the family ranch and learned much about guns from an early age, taught him how to shoot it.
    They went to the garbage dump outside of town and fired upon numberless cans and bottles. He was elated to discover he had a knack, and he laughed like a happy child when she called him a natural-born deadeye. He stood poised with the gun tucked in his waistband and stared narrowly at an empty bottle of James E. Pepper whiskey atop an empty oil drum and said with low menace: “I told you this town wasn’t big enough for both of us, Bad Jim.” Then yanked out the Colt and fired, reducing the hapless Bad Jim Pepper to shattered glass.
    “I’m Jesse James!” he shouted. “I’m Bob Dalton!”
    “Yes, yes, you are!” Kate happily yelled.
    A rat emerged from a pile of scrap and rose on its hind legs as if to have a better look at the cause of all this clamor. Kate spotted it. “Bushwhacker on your right, Jesse!”
    Ketchel whirled and fired at it and missed, the bullet ringing off a rusted axle. The rat remained upright and staring. It had been shot at more times than Ketchel could know and it had grown confident in its long experience with poor marksmanship. It twitched its whiskers.
    “Bedamn if the rascal’s not funning