Free Black Hats by Patrick Culhane

conversation too much trouble. Wyatt watched the bustling burg go by and understood, suddenly, Bat’s Stetson talk—hard to stand out in a city of six million.
    Though Wyatt had wound up on the West Coast and Bat here on the East, their paths had been much the same. Both had ridden every trail the frontier had to offer, bucking the odds in high-stakes games, going to the aid of friends and family, troubleshooting with and without a badge in cow towns and boomtowns and assorted hellholes of every stripe.
    Bat’s luck, like Wyatt’s, had run hot and cold and back again, again and again…but by the time adventuring and drifting had lost its appeal, each man had enough of a stake built up to settle in one spot.
    Times Square, just after six o’clock, was in all its electric glory, the sun having set to turn the illumination job over to Edison. Already Manhattan was taking a blazing bath—lights of blue, green, yellow, red, even white, letters whirling and tumbling and encouraging this soda pop and that candy bar, painting flashy, flashing tributes to Wrigley’s Chewing Gum and White Rock Water and assorted cigarettes and tires and toothbrushes and automobiles and even a laxative or two, electric placards extending from buildings, sometimes at angles, in a modern geometry at once exciting and garish.
    Bat saw Wyatt taking it all in and the New Yorker’s smile had smug pride in it. “Twenty-thousand electric signs in this space,” Bat noted. “Twenty-five million candle power….” Then Bat’s expression turned a shade melancholy, as he added, “Still, it’s not as bright as it used to be.”

    Between the blinking billboards were the marquees of movie palaces and theaters, sometimes sharing the same names, as film stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Fatty Arbuckle were currently trodding the Broadway boards.
    “Seems bright enough to me,” Wyatt said.
    “In any case, you should be comfortable here.”
    “Yeah?”
    “Broadway started as a cowpath.”
    They were let out on the east side of the Square between Forty-third and Forty-fourth Streets in front of a long low-slung yellow structure whose electrical sign, oddly, bore no name, just some hybrid creature, half lion, half eagle, flapping its lighted-up wings over the pavement.
    “What the hell’s this?” Wyatt asked, glancing up.
    “That’s a griffin. Mythological beast—you know, like the Western gunfighter. The restaurant is Rector’s, which I imagine even an uncouth dweller from the hinterlands like yourself has heard of.”
    A grandly uniformed doorman holding back a nonexistent crowd undid the velvet rope for them and allowed them to pass.
    As Bat led him into a revolving door, Wyatt said, “Thought for a minute there you joined a lodge.”
    But the interior was no Moose or Elks hall, rather a spacious expanse made to seem more so by floor-to-ceiling mirrored walls; the walls were gold and green brocade, the Louis XIV
    decor elegant under the sparkle of endless crystal chandeliers.
    Wyatt had of course heard of the famous restaurant, and was surprised to see it barely half-filled, supper hour, Friday night. Further, the crowd did not seem terribly distinguished, running largely to older businessmen with young well-rouged women who could have carried their skimpy clothes in their handbags, except for the bulk of an occasional silver fox or mink jacket.
    At their table with its linen cloth and fine china and sparkling silverware (all bearing that
    “griffin” symbol), Bat was in the midst of polishing off a dozen oysters, indulging in a side serving of nostalgia.
    “Not long ago,” Bat was saying, between oyster slurps, “you’d see Lillian Russell gliding down that aisle with a long train behind her, layers of whispering silk. Gypsy band would be playing. Unforgettable.”
    “Hmm,” Wyatt said, in the process of putting away half a dozen soft-shell crabs.
    “Right over there, you could see Diamond Jim Brady, an oversize napkin stuffed in his