Free Ragtime Cowboys by Loren D. Estleman Page B

good right about now.”
    She looked at Hammett, who nodded.
    â€œI’ll get them. Make yourselves at home meanwhile.” She left them, her English riding boots clip-clopping on the redwood floor.
    Hammett sat, coughing quietly into his fist, while Siringo toured the room. China settings in every design filled a row of glass cabinets. Jack London had been nearly as well-known for his hospitality as for his writings, but they looked neglected now; although not a speck of dust showed, they bore the air of objects that hadn’t left their places for weeks, months, maybe years, like books in a library owned by a semiliterate man who wanted to appear educated. The trophies on display—swords, boxing gloves, long guns and pistols, a pick worn to nubs, probably during prospecting days in Alaska—all contributed to the sensation that they were visiting a museum, or more particularly a mausoleum.
    Hammett, apparently, had been thinking along the same lines. “Scatter a few heads around and the place might have belonged to Teddy Roosevelt.”
    â€œI met him once.” Siringo lowered himself into a rocker and squirmed around on his saddle sores. “He didn’t have anything good to say about London. We shared the same opinion of radicals.”
    â€œHe’d’ve thrown me down the White House steps.” The young man looked around. Reassured, evidently, by a framed photo of London writing with a cigarette drooping from his mouth, he took out his makings. “Hell, I’m out of tobacco.”
    Siringo tossed him his pouch.
    He examined it. “What is it, horsehide?”
    â€œBuffalo.”
    â€œI thought buffalo’d be coarser.”
    â€œIt is, till you get to the balls.”
    Hammett smiled. “What happens if I rub it?”
    â€œTurns into a pair of saddle bags.”
    He laughed his snarky laugh, opened the pouch, and sprinkled some tobacco onto a paper. He was lighting the cigarette when a young woman entered. She stopped when she saw the two men, who rose, Hammett just behind Siringo.
    â€œI’m sorry,” she said. “When I smelled someone smoking, I thought it was one of Father’s old friends. I’ve missed that smell.”
    She looked just under twenty, a pretty, grave-faced girl with blond hair that curled inward at her shoulders, in a sheath dress with an unnaturally low waist, the way women her age were wearing them now. There seemed to be a good figure underneath. Her feet were small in patent-leather pumps that buttoned to the ankles.
    â€œI’m Mr. Siringo, and this is Mr. Hammett. We’re guests of your stepmother’s. I’m sorry to say we never knew your father.”
    â€œYou missed something, I assure you.” A wisp of a smile lightened her features, and Siringo saw the resemblance then. She had her father’s deep-set eyes and strong brow, but the shy upward twist at the corners of her mouth had appeared in hundreds of photographs of the oyster-pirate-turned-sailor-turned-prospector-turned-vagabond-turned-world-traveler-turned-bestselling-writer. They were very modern faces, Siringo thought; not at all the grim visages of his contemporaries, men and women resigned to hardship, who only smiled when something amused them. Very little had.
    The smile vanished then, like breath from a mirror. “You call yourself guests, but that’s no comfort. As long as I can remember, guests in this house have taken advantage of my father’s good nature. They borrowed money and didn’t pay it back, stole his ideas and sold them to other writers—one of them even left with a dozen of his silk pajamas in his suitcase. Pajamas! Death hasn’t stopped them. You’re not movies, are you?”
    â€œMovies?”
    â€œMoving-picture people. They’re the worst of all. They make away with Father’s experiences and imagination and hard work like thieves in the night.”
    â€œMr. Hammett and