Sherlock Holmes In America

EXCERPTS FROM AN UNPUBLISHED MEMOIR FOUND IN THE BASEMENT OF THE HOME FOR RETIRED ACTORS by Steve Hockensmith

Steve Hockensmith is the author of the popular Holmes on the Range mysteries about Sherlock Holmes-worshipping cowboy brothers “Big Red” and “Old Red” Amlingmeyer. The first book in the series was nominated for the Edgar, Shamus, Dilys, and Anthony awards in 2006, and since then, St. Martin’s Minotaur has released several sequels. Hockensmith’s first published crime story, “Erie’s Last Day,” won the Short Mystery Fiction Society’s Derringer Award and appeared in Best American Mystery Stories 2001. Today, Hockensmith is a regular contributor to mystery magazines and anthologies, and his short fiction has been nominated for almost every major award in the field. Hockensmith and “Big Red” Amlingmeyer share a blog at www.stevehockensmith.com.

S herlockian lore is replete with tales of dusty manuscripts in musty vaults that, when found, shed surprising new light on the Great Detective. I myself have enjoyed reading many such “discoveries,” even while (no offense to the discoverers) finding their provenance highly suspect. If there really were so many heretofore unknown Holmes chronicles floating around, there could hardly be a cellar, attic, or cupboard in the world that wasn’t home to at least one, if not several.

I am no longer skeptical, however. Here’s why.

In June of this year, I received in the mail a most remarkable (and rather dusty and, yes, musty) manuscript that-really and truly!-sheds surprising new light on the Great Detective. It was being sent to me, a cover letter said, because of my own small successes in the world of Sherlockiana. Perhaps I could act as literary agent for the party who’d unearthed it (who wished, for reasons I can’t go into, to remain anonymous)?

The timing was fortuitous-practically miraculous, really-as I’d just been queried about a possible submission to this very collection. And here one was! And one of incalculable value to historians, as well, for it backs up one of William S. Baring-Gould’s most interesting claims in his classic biography Sherlock Holmes of Baker Street: that Holmes once trod the boards, and in America, no less.

Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately, as you will see), space does not permit us to present the manuscript in its entirety here. Not by a long shot. The verbiage is lush, thick, and, at times, tangled, and I had to hack my way through it like Jungle Jim through darkest Africa.

I think it was worth the slog, though. I hope you agree. If you don’t, I would suggest this: Take a look in the attic. There’s a good chance you’ll find something there you like better.

– Stephen B. Hockensmith

Alameda, California

August 9, 2008

From What a Piece of Work! My Life in the Limelight

Chapter Fifty-Nine

“Some Notable Shame”

Oh, St. Louis, St. Louis-if only there were anything saintly about you. Anything heavenly, anything worthy of veneration. Anything not spackled with filth! But, no, alas. Praise for you I must limit to this: You are not Indianapolis.

And this, too, I will add upon further reflection. Your odors may have assaulted me, your citizens may have insulted me, your “theatre” may have been an insult to the theatre, yet at no time whilst walking your dung-paved paths (I cannot grace them with the appellation “streets”) did I feel myself in danger of mortal harm… excepting, of course, that which I might inflict upon myself in order to escape you the quicker.

No, for that honor-the privilege of experiencing a fright worthy of Madame Tussauds Chamber of Horrors-I have Leadville, Colorado, to thank.

Leadville, of course, wasn’t on the original itinerary for Sasanoff’s tour of America. If it had been, I never would have signed on with the man’s company. One glance at a map and I’d have seen that he was leading us deep into that infamous “Wild West” from which tales of savagery and death routinely gush like geysers of blood. At the time, the martyr Custer was but three years in his shallow prairie grave, and I certainly would have had no desire to become his neighbor. St. Louis was both as west and as wild as I ever intended to experience.

A few days before our engagement there was due to end, however, Sasanoff gathered the company to make an announcement. New Orleans would not be our next stop, as had been planned. There would be a “brief detour” to Colorado, where our Twelfth Night would help inaugurate “the grandest theatre west of the Mississippi.”

Never mind that there was no such thing as a “brief detour” to Colorado from St. Louis, the journey from one to the other being nearly one thousand miles long. As for us opening “the grandest theatre west of the Mississippi,” this was rich indeed given that we had yet to see anything approaching grand east of it, the stages of St. Louis, Chicago, Indianapolis (Oh! How my hand trembles to write that accursed word!), Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Hartford, etc., etc., being no more grand than an East End public house water closet.

The long delay in visiting New Orleans would be a bitter blow to the troupe, too. Most of us found American “culture” so woeful we were actually looking forward to the influence of (God help us) the French.

But Sasanoff quashed any hint of mutiny quickly, reminding us that we had all signed contracts that explicitly gave him, the acting manager, authority to add and drop tour dates-and company members-as he saw fit. If we didn’t fancy a little jaunt westward, we could always remain behind… and make our way back to England alone.

This was an unveiled threat to most of us, of course. But I had the feeling it was intended for one of us-He Who Shall Not Be Further Canonized by My Pen-as more of an invitation.

[First introduced in Chapter Fifty-Six (“The ‘States’ of America-Filthy and Repulsive”), He Who Shall Not Be Further Canonized by My Pen is never definitively identified. Even the most casual Sherlockian scholar should recognize him, however. To facilitate ease of reading, he is henceforth referred to wherever possible by the author’s other nickname for him: “the Whelp.”-S.B.H.]

Our leading man’s relations with the Whelp had continued their deterioration, and though the two rarely argued about the proper approach to acting any longer-a byproduct of not speaking to each other-Sasanoff had seen fit to demote the young dilettante. No longer was the Whelp our Malvolio. He was now Priest and Musician #1 and Sailor #2 and other assorted nonentities a step up from scenery.

Yet the Whelp, with his usual arrogance, put up the pretense that he was thankful to be a mere spear carrier.

“I’ve played Malvolio for months,” he said to me. “There was nothing more to learn from the part. Blending into the background in so many new guises, on the other hand-that’s a challenge I look forward to.”

As if it requires skill to not be noticed! It took all my own considerable powers as a thespian not to laugh in his face.

Unfortunately, much as it would have relieved us to be rid of him, the Whelp didn’t rise to Sasanoff’s bait, and our manager was still reluctant to sack him outright. When we set off for Colorado a week later, the company was intact.

I’ve written much already about the peculiar torments of American rail travel, so I won’t dwell on them again except to say this: [Approximately three thousand words have been omitted here in the interest of (perhaps unattainable, given the source) brevity.-S.B.H]

All that was but preamble to the real tortures ahead, however. Leadville, it turned out, was a mining “boom town” not even two years old. No rail line had yet reached it, and the last hundred miles up from Denver required us to transfer to a pair of privately engaged coaches.

And when I write of traveling up, I do not mean we went north. Leadville actually lies to the southwest of Denver. It was further up into the snow-peaked mountains we had to go. And go and go and go. Mr. Verne and the other dreamers may assure us man will soon master fantastic flying machines, but if the like of Leadville is all we’ll find in the clouds, I say it’s not worth the bother.

After enduring nerve-racking rides along gaping gorges on rocky, hole-pocked roads plagued (the cackling drivers delighted in telling us) by both bandit gangs and bloodthirsty bands of Native warriors, we finally arrived at our destination: Gomorrah in the Alps. Or so it struck me at first. I would revise my estimation-downward-the longer I was there.

Surrounding the town on all sides were shoddily built shacks, tree stumps without number, and the yawning black mouths of the silver mines. Closer in was a fringe of tents-lodgings for newly arrived fortune hunters and the businesses (mostly “saloons” and drafty bagnios) that catered to them. And then at last we entered the city proper (if one could apply either word to Leadville) and found ourselves rolling down actual streets… broad ones comprised entirely of dirt and bracketed on both sides by only slightly sturdier variations on the canvas-topped groggeries and maisons de joie we’d just passed.

“To such a place as this we’ve brought the Bard,” Sasanoff said with an incredulous shake of the head.

Only I was on hand to reply, Sasanoff having granted me the honor of sharing his private car while the rest of the company crammed themselves into the other coach like so much meat into an overstuffed sausage.

“Indeed,” I said, and I reached out and gave little Master Sasanoff a hearty slap on one of his Lilliputian shoulders. “Dr. Livingstone himself couldn’t have claimed to do more for the spread of civilization!”

Sasanoff’s expressive features curled into a smirk.

“Nor could he have claimed to profit so handsomely by it,” he said.

I chuckled through gritted teeth, for Sasanoff had favored me in another way, as well: by sharing an explanation for our presence in Leadville. The American silver magnate Horace Tabor had offered five thousand dollars for a week’s run in the town’s newly built opera house. Being under contract, of course, none of the players would see a penny’s extra profit. The windfall would be Sasanoff’s alone.

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown, however, and Sasanoff’s wee little head was soon uneasy indeed. Construction of the Tabor Opera House (the tycoon, with the usual humility of his ilk, had named the theatre after himself) was behind schedule, and our premiere there delayed at least a week. It had been hard enough for Sasanoff to put off our engagement in New Orleans. If we tarried too long, our run there-and our subsequent appearances in Atlanta, Richmond, and Washington-might be cancelled. The second half of the tour could collapse like a row of dominoes.

Predictably, the days that followed saw Sasanoff in the blackest of moods, and most of the company-terrorized by both their illtempered acting manager and the town he’d marooned them in-barricaded themselves in their hotel rooms. The Whelp, on the other hand, was rarely to be found in his: he quickly took to disappearing for hours at a time. In one of my few forays into Leadville’s mud-splattered fray, I entered a low tavern (drawn, of course, by simple curiosity) and spotted him standing alone at the bar, watching all around him as if it were some great drama unfolding upon the stage. He seemed to be invisible to the ruffians infesting the place, yet upon me their attention seized instantly with hungry-eyed insolence. My ample frame and lordly bearing always served me well on the boards, but here it put me at a distinct disadvantage.

“Ho ho ho! Lookee who just walked in!” cried a miner so blackened with soot he looked like he bathed in cinders as the rest of us do water. He reached out a hand and took the obscene liberty of patting my stomach. “It’s Santa Claus a whole month early!”

“If you please,” I said, brushing away the man’s grubby paw. But before I could utter another word in protest, the saloon erupted with more shouts.

“Where’s yer sleigh, Santa?”

“Why ain’t ya in yer red suit, Santa?”

“What’d ya bring us, Santa?”

Miners, “muleskinners,” layabouts, even the lewd women such rough-hewn rustics consort with-all were jeering and laughing at me.

I turned to flee the raucous uproar. Before I could make my escape, however, I locked eyes, for just a second, on the Whelp. He was regarding me coolly, in that detached yet deeply probing way our fellow company members found so disquieting. And I could have sworn the young rascal was smiling.

I immediately relayed the incident to Sasanoff, taking an actor’s license to give myself a more flattering exit line (“I would give you bounders lumps of coal, only I see it’s smeared all over your filthy faces already!”).

“He’s the lowest utility player, consorting with rabble… yet he still thinks himself superior to us all,” Sasanoff mused darkly. “I should have sent him packing weeks ago.”

“Yes,” I said. “You should have.”

Sasanoff glowered at me-and a fine glower it was, too. The man may have been little taller than an overgrown squirrel, but he was undoubtedly one of the great Richard IIIs of his time.

Of course, Richard would have shown an impudent knave like the Whelp considerably less mercy than Sasanoff had, and why our otherwise irascible manager tolerated the stripling’s cheek was a matter of much conjecture in the company. It had to do with an incident early in the tour, some whispered-a predicament the Whelp freed Sasanoff from with his sharp mind and even sharper tongue. Whatever the reason, even I, Sasanoff’s closest confidante in the troupe, had not been made privy to the truth.

“Yes, well… you’d all better be on your guard,” Sasanoff snarled at me now. “I’m in a foul enough temper to dismiss the whole company-myself included!”

I soothed his savage breast with the sweet music of gentle (feigned) laughter, then changed the subject to something more mutually amusing: the latest broadside in Catherine P____________________ and Thomas B____________________’s ongoing battle for the affections of Louis H____________________.

[A short passage has been excised here by request of the B____________________ estate.-S.B.H.]

My rendering of these inanities d’amour lightened Sasanoff’s spirits considerably. And just in time, too. Horace Tabor and his wife were hosting a reception for the company in the hotel’s paltry ballroom. It was time to kiss the backer’s backside.

Tabor himself I found to be the epitome of the American ideal: a “selfmade man.” Alas, what he’d made of himself was vulgar in the extreme, and the making of him seemed to involve little more than a layer of dumb luck slapped over a foundation of slavering avarice. But, for all that, selfmade he was. God certainly would want none of the credit.

The other town notables who turned out to greet us (and drink Tabor’s flat champagne) I have even less to say about, except that they were “notable” only for their wretched clothing and abominable manners.

Still, let it never be said I couldn’t play to the groundlings, and I was, as always, the darling of all. Sasanoff, as was his way at soirees, stuck close to the hosts (and the money), and I swooped in from time to time when it looked as though the conversation could use a little enlivening. Which was frequently. Tabor was the sort of man who grew forlorn and bewildered if the talk strayed far from commerce, while his wife… well, she made such a faint impression I can’t, at this late date, recall her at all. In fact, I could barely remember she was present even when she was speaking to me.

I was giving the Tabors a comical foretaste of my performance as Sir Toby Belch, alternately huzzahing and haranguing as only the great old reprobate can, when I noticed Sasanoff scowling at something behind me. I glanced back to find the Whelp sauntering in a full hour late.

Usually, one might expect a sense of decorum-or, at the very least, self interest-to discourage public sniping between a leading man/ manager and his supporting players. Yet (as exhaustively chronicled in previous chapters), Sasanoff and the Whelp had clashed at one gathering after another, and always on the same tiresome subject.

To wit, acting. That, so far as any of the troupe knew, the Whelp was a nobody from nowhere hadn’t stopped him from airing his foolish views on proper dramatics. Sometime after leaving London, it seemed, he’d been infected by that always-fatal (to good acting) disease known as “Naturalism,” and he’d increasingly insisted that Truth demanded the avoidance of “stylized bombast” (his phrase, not mine) and scrupulous attention to realistic detail. Sasanoff (and I, when sufficiently provoked) quite rightly countered that audiences don’t care two figs about Truth. They crave Big-big characters, big emotions, big laughs, big tears. Any actor who chooses to be Small is also choosing empty houses over full ones. To which the Whelp invariably replied that he hadn’t taken up the study of acting in order to enrich himself with money. Which was fine, it was always pointed out in return, because his approach to the craft would surely leave him penniless.

Round and round it ever went, and I certainly had no desire to see the circuit run again. Yet Sasanoff, sadly, couldn’t resist a dig-the first, it turned out, in what would soon become a very deep hole indeed.

“Let me guess,” he said to the Whelp. “You were studying your lines and lost track of the time.”

The Whelp replied with a tight smile and a “touché” nod.

“I apologize for my late arrival,” he said, addressing Mr. and Mrs. Tabor. “But I did indeed lose track of the time-while exploring this most intriguing community of yours.”

I only barely stifled a roll of the eyes, but the Tabors (apparently afflicted with the same baseless provincial pride I’d encountered everywhere in America) grinned and cooed and practically adopted the Whelp on the spot.

“Think nothing of it!” Mr. Tabor said. “Why, there’s so much to see around here, so much to do, I can understand a man getting a little lost in it.”

“To be honest, I was surprised any of you were on time,” his wife added with what I’m sure she imagined was coquettish levity. “Aren’t actors always supposed to make a dramatic entrance?”

“Only the great ones,” I said with a censorious sniff.

The Tabors just kept grinning idiotically, my point blunted by the impenetrable thickness of their plebeian skulls.

Mr. Tabor turned to Sasanoff.

“And what role will we see our young friend here playing come opening night?”

Sasanoff begrudgingly provided proper introductions, dismissively presenting the Whelp as “one of our junior utility players.”

“What Mr. Sasanoff means,” the Whelp said, “is that you will see me in a variety of roles. You won’t, however, do much hearing of me. The parts are very small.”

“Oh, that seems like a shame,” Mrs. Tabor simpered. “You’re such a striking-looking young man, and your voice is so-”

“It takes more than pleasing looks and stature to make an actor,” Sasanoff declared, puffing himself up to his full height… which almost brought him even with the Whelp’s chest. Of course, the woman hadn’t mentioned the Whelp’s height at all, but poor Sasanoff could never stop measuring himself against other actors-literally. I think that’s one of the reasons he tolerated me. I was five times the man he was side to side, but toe to top of head he was nearly my equal.

“There’s a deportment, a regality that sets the truly fine actor apart,” Sasanoff went on. “Goliath himself would have made a poor player if he lacked presence.”

“Indeed!” I chimed in. “Just look how little David upstaged him!”

My bon mot-and the quick change of subject to the weather I had planned-might have defused the situation if the doltish Mr. Tabor hadn’t relit the wick.

“Well, son,” he said to the Whelp, “you just keep studying Mr. Sasanoff here, and I’m sure one day you’ll be a leading man just like him.”

“Good heavens, I hope not,” the Whelp replied. And then sensing-correctly-that he’d gone too far this time, he chuckled and tried to explain away his effrontery. “I find I prefer the small parts, Mr. Tabor. Roles sized to human proportions. I was drawn to acting as a way of better understanding how and why people act-which is to say, behave-the way they do. I was searching for the reality behind the artifice. Unfortunately, I’ve found it’s almost impossible to see anything real when blinded by the limelight. So I’m happy to leave center stage to those who crave it. Truth, I believe, you’ll more often find lurking in the wings.”

Though he’d started out trying to soften the sting of his words, the Whelp had instead packed salt upon the welt, and even he knew it.

“Please forgive me,” he told the Tabors with another light, self-mocking laugh. “You’re not here to listen to the ramblings of a ‘junior utility player.’ My eminent associates here are the ones who should be sharing their wisdom. When it comes to acting and stagecraft, they’re full of it.”

And with that he excused himself and fled to the refreshments table-which was certainly no refuge for a sane man to seek.

[A five-hundred-word aside on the supposedly life-threatening inedibility of “hinterlands victuals” has been cut here.-S.B.H.]

At any rate, with the dazed expressions a pair of sheep might wear at a performance of King Lear, the Tabors watched the Whelp go to his culinary doom. They could sense that something was happening before their very eyes yet lacked the powers of perception to understand what it was.

There was nothing sheepish about the look on Sasanoff’s face, however. It was so wolfish, in fact, I feared the man would bare his teeth and growl.

“So,” I said, “is it always so beastly cold this time of year? The scenery here is beautiful-beautiful-but one risks frostbite with each pause to admire it!”

Predictably, the Tabors responded with a gushing rivulet of drivel about the incomparable splendors of a Colorado spring. And, as always at such moments, the actor’s craft served me well, for I managed to project rapt interest, though I heard not a word after the first few bleatings about streams of fresh-melted snow sparkling in the sunshine of a golden-bright May morn, etc., etc.

Sasanoff’s performance, on the other hand, wasn’t nearly so convincing. He nodded and grunted out impatient Hmms and I sees more or less at random, all the while shooting dark scowls at the Whelp. At first opportunity, he found some pretext to extricate us from our hosts and drag me away to a quiet corner of the “ballroom” (which, in the interest of accuracy, I should report was hardly big enough for a pas de deux, let alone a proper ball).

“I’ve endured that amateur’s slights for the last time.” Sasanoff nodded over at the Whelp, who’d not only struck up a conversation with a rough-looking fellow chipmunk-cheeked with half-masticated hors d’oeuvres-some sort of local constable, we’d been told-but actually seemed to be enjoying it. “It’s high time I taught him a lesson, wouldn’t you say?”

“I not only would say, I’ve been saying it for weeks. So you’re going to cashier the overweening rogue at last?”

Sasanoff’s expression turned sneeringly sly, and he fed me one of my own lines from Twelfth Night.

“Wouldst thou not be glad to have the rascally sheep-biter come by some notable shame?”

I replied as per the Bard.

“I would exult, man.”

“Then this is what we shall do… ”

And Sasanoff proceeded to lay out a plan of such diabolical ingenuity I hardly could believe he’d hatched it in a mere ten minutes. Yet I knew he’d done just that, for it had as its inspiration an anecdote Horace Tabor shared with us shortly before the Whelp arrived.

I myself had but one concern, every actor’s first and foremost: the size of my role.

“What part do I play in all this?”

“Why, the most important of all,” Sasanoff said. “You will be the audience. For what good is a great performance-or a great humiliation-if no one is on hand to witness it?”

I offered Sasanoff as deep a bow as my magnitude would allow.

“It shall be my honor to serve, thou most excellent devil of wit.”

“It’s settled, then. We must prove once and for all who the master actors are here.” Sasanoff grinned as he again quoted Twelfth Night. “We will fool him black and blue, shall we not?”

The next midmorning, we attempted our first full dress rehearsal in the still-unfinished opera house, but it was a hopeless effort all around. [A lengthy account of the rehearsal-including critiques of various company members’ performances and personal foibles, complaints about the “drafty cow barn about to be passed off as a theatre,” and a condemnation of the “loutish workmen” who made concentration impossible by “hammering away at Art more successfully than their nails”-has been removed here.-S.B.H.]

Eventually, Sasanoff saw the futility of it all and released us for the day. He’d seemed remote and distracted anyhow-and only I knew why.

The Whelp disappeared almost immediately, and I braved another outing into the town to seek him out. I found him in a little den of iniquity that was, difficult as this was to believe, even more iniquitous than the one I’d seen him in the day before. Instead of rotten boards for a floor, this one had only dirt liberally garnished with sawdust, and puddles I made it a point not to study at length. The clientele were of a sort to inspire the same policy, and between avoiding their surly, suspicious gazes and ignoring the repellent plashes at my feet, I practically had to navigate the place staring at the ceiling. That I made it to the Whelp’s side without bumping into some thug’s beer and sparking a “shootout” I count as a miracle.

“May I join you?” I said.

The Whelp was at a table in the corner, alone, his back to the rickety, warped-wooded wall. There were empty seats to either side of him, but given relations between us in the past, there was no guarantee he’d allow me to make use of one.

“If you wish,” he said with more curiosity than cordiality. “But first, I would advise you to see Mr. Lonnegan there about a drink.” He nodded at a grimacing old villain behind the bar, then down at an untasted beer on the table before him. “The price of admission, as it were.”

I did as the Whelp suggested, purchasing a glass of frothy beer (I didn’t think it wise to inquire about port) before returning to his table and taking a seat. My chair-constructed, it appeared, from pasteboard and old kindling-squealed alarmingly beneath me, but after a moment’s protest, it seemed to accept my ampleness.

I celebrated with a sip of beer… the celebration grinding to a halt the second the taste of it reached my brain. It took immense effort not only to swallow the stuff but to keep it swallowed.

“‘Steam beer,’ it’s called,” the Whelp said. “Vile, isn’t it?”

I put the glass on the table and pushed it away to the edge furthest from my nose, for I’d noticed too late the swill’s sour-milk aroma.

“You could have warned me,” I said.

“And deny them their fun?”

I looked up to find the dive’s other denizens chuckling gleefully at my distress. Seeing a gentleman’s dignity assaulted obviously was, to them, the very apex of entertainment.

“Why do you keep coming to these filthy places?” I asked the Whelp in a whisper.

“The same reason I took up acting-a simple desire to better understand my fellow man. And I daresay I usually learn more in one saloon than any dozen theatres.”

“Really? I wouldn’t think such people as these would be so eager to advance your education. In fact, I’m surprised some ruffian hasn’t thrashed you by now.”

The Whelp picked up his beer and peered down into it, squinting at the stagnant yellow brine as if it were some laboratory experiment gone awry.

“Oh, several have tried,” he said blandly. “I did go to a real college, you know. And the most valuable thing I learned there was boxing.”

Several of the brutes around the saloon were still staring, and the Whelp raised his beer, saluted them with it, then took a long, glugging pull. When he’d managed to gulp it all down without retching, our grubby audience guffawed and turned back to their own, no-doubt sinister, business.

“So,” the Whelp said, setting his now-empty glass beside mine, “you wished to speak with me?”

“More than that,” I said. “I wanted to warn you. About Sasanoff, and the way you keep antagonizing him. I don’t think you realize how close he is to dismissing you.”

The Whelp shrugged, face impassive.

“I don’t think you realize how close I am to giving notice.”

“You don’t fear being stranded in this godforsaken wilderness?”

“Do I look fearful?” The Whelp answered his own question with a carefree smile. “Leaving England, exploring a new land, a new people-and yes, new dangers. It’s forced me to look at everything differently. I’m like an actor who steps down from the stage so as to finally see the play from the other side of the proscenium. Before, all I knew were my own little entrances and exits, my own marks. But now I see so much more. The whole stage, the whole theatre. The whole world.”

I nodded as the Whelp babbled, all the while thinking him a fool. All the world’s a stage, it goes without saying, but the opposite should be true for any real thespian: the stage is all the world. And upstage center-that’s the only place to be in it.

“Yes, yes… I see your point,” I lied. “But don’t you understand that-?”

“You’re Englishmen?” a croaky voice cut in.

Somehow, without my noticing, a troll had materialized beside our table. He was hunchbacked and wild-haired, with a scar running down one sallow cheek to disappear into a black briar patch of a beard. What one could see of his face was dark-tanned and deeply lined, and his left eye was narrowed in a perpetual squint while the right protuberated obscenely. His clothes were equally askew-baggy pants held up with frayed rope, a worn-elbowed coat that would have been skin-tight on a consumptive child, and a broad hat so floppy and stained and formless it could have been sewn together from a charwoman’s old scouring rags.

“Yes,” I said to It. “We are English.”

“Cor blimey!” the wretched creature crowed in an accent that was unmistakably Cockney. “This must be me lucky day! New ’round ’ere, are you?”

“That is correct,” I said. “We’re actors-members of Michael Sasanoff’s company. We’ll be opening the Tabor Opera House… assuming the blasted thing ever does open.”

“And you?” the Whelp asked. “You’re from London, I presume?”

“I’m from all over, guv.” The lumpy little man placed a gnarled claw on the table’s only empty chair. “May I?”

“Well… ” I began.

The gnome planted himself in the seat beside me.

“You can call me ‘Goodfellow,’” he said, throwing shifty-eyed glances this way and that. “It ain’t the name I was born wiff, but it’ll do for now.”

“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said, and he looked over at the bar and held up a single finger.

Goodfellow hopped to his feet again, raging.

“Givin’ the man the ’igh sign, are you? A trap, is it? Damn an’ blast! I should’ve known this was too good to be-”

“I think you misunderstand, Mr. Goodfellow,” the Whelp said soothingly. “I was ordering you a drink.”

Goodfellow turned to stare at Lonnegan-who was indeed contaminating a glass with the fulvous suds of steam beer.

“Oh. Sorry, guv.” Goodfellow sat down again. “I’m a bit jumpy, bein’ ’ere. An’ I got reason to be.”

Goodfellow fell silent as Lonnegan stalked over and slapped the glass down before him, sloshing half its contents on the table. (And no better use can I think of for steam beer than cleaning furniture.) Then, as the tavern keeper stomped away, he leaned in toward us and went on in a low, hoarse murmur.

“I need ’elp, gents… an’ it’ll be worff your while to give it.”

“Perhaps you didn’t hear me,” I said stiffly. “We’re actors. If it’s a poor box you’re looking for, I suggest you try a church.”

“I ain’t no bleedin’ charity case!” Goodfellow snapped back. “Fact is, there’s a right wodge o’ wonga in this for you-a bloody fortune-if you play your cards right.”

“You’ll have to excuse my skepticism,” I sniffed, “but you don’t very much look like a man with access to ‘a right wodge of wonga.’”

“That’s ’cause I can’t get at it, mate.” Goodfellow leaned even further over the table, the looming hump of his hunched back giving him the appearance of an immense, bearded mushroom. “But you can.”

“Mr. Goodfellow obviously has a story to tell,” the Whelp said to me. “I suggest we let him tell it.”

I harrumphed and settled back in my seat-which squeaked and creaked so piercingly I almost thought it about to explode into splinters. Fortunately, the chair held as Goodfellow held forth.

After a lifetime spent “knockin’ about God’s green earff,” the man told us in a conspiratorial whisper, he’d ended up in Colorado trying to make a go of it as a prospector. His prospects, however, were more black than gold, and he soon went broke. But he did end up sitting on a pile of silver eventually-albeit another man’s silver-as a guard for Horace Tabor’s Matchless Mine. One day, he and three of his fellow guards were escorting a load of freshly milled silver down the mountain to town when they were attacked by bandits. It was a slaughter on both sides, and when the battle ended, only Goodfellow was still alive-and he just barely.

As he slumped against the wagon awaiting rescue, a bullet in his back, his face slashed, he pondered what future he had in even so humble a profession as the one that had brought him to this. The answer being none. Though he might survive his wounds a cripple, his nerves, he knew, were shattered beyond any mending at all. As gunman or laborer, he was through. Which left no future for him save starvation-a bitter irony, with so much silver so close at hand. He’d given his all for a treasure Horace Tabor wouldn’t even miss, he was already so rich.

And that’s when Goodfellow saw providence in his situation. No one but he knew how many men really had been in the gang. If he exaggerated their numbers-and said a surviving “desperado” made off with a packload of silver while he lay bleeding, feigning death-who could dispute it? Battered and bleeding though he was, Goodfellow’s prospects were looking up.

He managed to dig a hole just big enough for a single small crate. In it he placed half a dozen bars of pure silver, and with his last ounce of strength he covered it with earth and rock. He finished in the nick of time, collapsing into a faint not twenty steps from his buried booty.

He awoke the next day to learn his party had been ambushed by the infamous Whelan brothers, Mike, Ike, Spike, and Dudley. The bodies of all four had been found, and they weren’t known to ride with other bandits in the past. What, he was asked, had become of the missing silver?

Goodfellow had no choice but to stick to his plan, concocting a fifth member of the gang-a mysterious Indian who’d loaded his horse with silver before fleeing. The mine officials and law officers to whom he told this seemed skeptical, and eventually Horace Tabor himself came to his bedside to hear the story… and plainly didn’t believe it.

Goodfellow’s recovery was slow and painful and not entirely successful. (Here in the telling, he patted his hunched back.) And when it was through, he’d lost more than his youthful vigor. He’d lost his job, as well. The Matchless Mine dismissed him, and there were hints that he shouldn’t linger long in Leadville. He wasn’t trusted. He would be watched.

For six long months he’d been away, scraping by as best he could while growing his beard and weathering his features and dreaming of his silver. He’d returned just that morning, intending to hire a mule and set off up the trail disguised as an old prospector. But there was no disguise, he quickly learned, that could hide disfigurements such as his. He’d been spotted and accosted by a pair of mine guards. Their ultimatum: leave town by sundown or they’d fix his hump for him… with clubs.

So here he’d come, bereft, thinking to drown his sorrows in drink before abandoning his little hoard forever and slinking off to quietly die. And what should he overhear but two countrymen talking. Newcomers to Leadville. Men with the freedom to act.

“Us?” I scoffed. “What would you have us do?”

“Get your’ands on the swag, of course,” Goodfellow hissed. “It’s just off the road to the mine, barely a mile from ’ere. But a mile’s more than I’d make before bein’ caught. The second I’m seen anywhere near that road… ” He gave his shaggy head a slow, grim shake. “A gentleman tourist out for a constitutional, though? Nobody’d give that a second thought. Mind you, I wouldn’t set off right away-the afternoon shipments’ll be comin’ through, and the guards’ll be itchy-fingered no matter who it is they’re passin’ on the road. But as of, ooooh… four o’clock, say? Why, you’d ’ave nuffin’ to worry about.”

“And how would we find this ill-gotten plunder of yours, assuming we lowered ourselves to look for it?” I asked. “I’m guessing you didn’t simply leave it under a leaf by the side of the road.”

Goodfellow’s eyes lit up with excitement-even the squinty one, which was a neat trick, I’ll admit.

“There’s a map,” Goodfellow intoned portentously. “Drew it from memory soon as I was out of me sickbed and away from pryin’ eyes. In case me memory went ’iggledy-piggledy. It’ll lead you straight to the spot.”

The Whelp hadn’t said a word in minutes, and I turned to face him fully now. He was staring at Goodfellow like a man mesmerized.

No-I should rephrase that. There was nothing dulled or sleepy about his look. He was more like a man enchanted.

His eyes flashed with exhilaration, amusement, the thrill of danger. In all his slumming, he’d done little more than watch the riffraff flounder in the gutter. And now he’d been invited in for a wallow-and the idea excited him.

“Surely,” I said to him, “you wouldn’t involve yourself in something so… so… ”

“Sordid? Perilous? Foolhardy?” The Whelp dismissed any such concerns with a casual shrug. “My curiosity is piqued.”

As was his greed, it seemed.

“What would be my reward for helping you?” he asked.

Goodfellow stroked his beard and rolled his eyes.

“One bar,” he said. “And before you try any ’agglin’, just remember that’d be enough to get you back to England in style, and it’s me what’s paid the price for-”

“Done,” the Whelp said. “Do you have the map with you now?”

“Strewth! I did walk into the right saloon, di’n’t I?” Goodfellow gleefully groped beneath his grimy coat for a moment… then froze, his expression turning wary. “’Ang on a tick. ‘Ow do I know you ain’t gonna fiddle me out of me dosh?”

The Whelp regarded him coolly.

“You have my word, I have never fiddled with anyone’s dosh.”

“‘’Is word,’ ’e says. Ha! I’ll need a lot more than that before I ’and over me map. Why, you could scarper with the whole boodle and leave me with nuffin’ but me bloody ’ump! No, no… a security, that’s what’s called for. To show your good faith.”

“What sort of security are you talking about?” the Whelp asked.

Goodfellow looked him up and down, then pointed a knobby finger at the watch fob looping from the Whelp’s vest pockets.

“That watch, let’s say.”

“My father gave me that.”

“And I’ll give it back… when you give me the silver.”

Slowly, reluctantly, the Whelp pulled out a gold pocket watch and placed it on the table.

“Smart lad,” Goodfellow said. After furtive glances left and right, he produced a scroll of paper and unrolled it on the tabletop just long enough to show it was, indeed, a crudely sketched map.

The Whelp swept the map off the table.

Goodfellow slipped the watch into a coat pocket.

“You stayin’ at the Clarendon?” he asked.

The Whelp nodded.

“Alright, then,” Goodfellow said, “I’ll meet you behind the ’otel at nine o’ clock tonight to do the divvy. Till then, I’d best keep out of sight.”

He pushed away from the table, then paused before turning to go.

“Pleasure doin’ business wiff you, guv,” he said, and he gave the Whelp a wink with his bulging-wide right eye.

“I can’t believe even you would sink so low,” I said to the Whelp as the hunchback hobbled away.

As usual, my disapproval seemed to amuse the insolent jackanapes no end.

“Neither can I,” he said with a smile. “Well… I suppose I should go, too. I shan’t be leaving for another hour or so, but in the meantime I’ve preparations to make.” He tugged at the sleeve of his black frock coat. “I’m hardly dressed for an expedition. Shall we return to the Clarendon?”

“You go ahead,” I said. “Suddenly, I find I actually prefer the company here.”

My show of pique merely gratified the Whelp all the more, and he headed for the door with such a jaunty spring to his step I wouldn’t have been surprised had he started whistling.

I sat there alone, pretending to drink my steam beer so as to keep the saloon keeper at bay and avoid the curious (and hostile) stares of the other patrons. After a few minutes, however, I had company again: a hunched figure appeared in the doorway and came sidling toward me.

I greeted him with applause as he retook his seat.

“Bravo. A masterful performance.”

My companion shrugged modestly.

“I had a receptive audience,” said Sasanoff-for, as you’ve surely long since guessed, he and Goodfellow were one and the same. “He’s so eager for adventure he would have believed me had I appeared to him as Admiral Lord Nelson. Now… what say we properly fortify ourselves for the cold?”

What I said was “yes,” of course, and soon we were stoking up warmth with a surprisingly serviceable whiskey Mr. Lonnegan had on hand. Eventually, however, Sasanoff drained his glass and stood up.

“Come,” he said. “All must be in readiness for the denouement.”

I followed him out of the tavern with no little reluctance. Certainly, I wanted to see him deliver the coup de grâce with my own eyes. Yet by necessity he’d be doing it out of doors, while I very much wished to remain safely behind closed ones… preferably beside a roaring fire with a glass of port close at hand.

I knew better than to deny Sasanoff his audience, however, and soon we were hustling up the road toward the mine. Quite a sight I’m sure we made: Richard III and Falstaff side by side, both of them huffing and puffing in the thin, frigid air of the mountains. Though Sasanoff had given us plenty of time to beat the Whelp-the reason for his warning about the “afternoon shipments”-he still insisted on a forced march so swift it soon had my back slick with perspiration that would turn to icicles the second we stopped.

And worse was yet to come, for Sasanoff had selected a hiding place that required us to crawl on all fours into a dense copse of prickly bramble. Of course, frames such as mine are not proportioned for easy concealment, so we had to wriggle our way into the thickest of the thicket, briers tearing at my topcoat (and my pride). Sasanoff nearly lost his false beard in one particularly dense tangle, but after some struggling he managed to free himself, whiskers intact. I’d suggested he relieve himself of his disguise, but he accused me of lacking panache. (A charge that had never before been leveled against me!) A dramatic unveiling, he insisted, was key to the whole thing.

Once we were finally in place, I could see why Sasanoff had picked the spot he had, trying though it had been to reach. We may as well have been in box seats, for we had a perfect view down into the rocky basin in which the final act of the farce would soon play out.

Perhaps forty feet from us was a mound of loose stones piled up that morning by Sasanoff himself. Beneath it was a shallow hole just deep enough for the battered locker that had, not long before, housed my own little treasure: my clippings. I’d volunteered it when Sasanoff outlined his plan. Now it held but a single slip of paper, upon which had been scrawled these words:

YOU’RE SACKED!

– M.S.

The plan was this: We would wait for the Whelp; we would watch him unearth the box; we would witness his dismay upon discovering its contents; we would stand and announce our presence; we would reveal the true identity of “Mr. Goodfellow”; we would gloat; we would leave.

Curtain.

As it was, however, the first scene of our little production-the waiting-ran long. Every quarter hour or so, Sasanoff would pull out a watch and glumly mutter, “Any minute now… any minute, I’m sure.” It heartened him considerably when I pointed out that the watch he kept consulting was the Whelp’s own.

Just as my fingers and toes were going numb with the cold, we heard something moving toward us from the road.

“At last,” Sasanoff whispered. “The fly enters the web.”

And then someone finally stepped into the clearing below us… a mustachioed, bow-legged someone wearing a droopy, round-brimmed hat and rough clothes and mud-splattered boots.

In his hands was the map Sasanoff himself had drawn that morning-the one he’d given to the Whelp.

Hanging from the holster at his side was a revolver the approximate size of a small cannon.

“Who in God’s name-?” I murmured.

Sasanoff shushed me.

The man moved slowly at first, glancing down and up, down and up, from the map to the glade before him. But when he spied the pile of stones (marked, but of course, with a thick-inked X on the map) he charged forward, cackling. When he reached the rocks, he began tossing them wildly aside.

Sasanoff ’s web, it seemed, had snared the wrong fly. And now it was about to snare two more.

As the man tore at the stacked stones, he glanced up, eyes darting this way and that. He was grinning madly, giggling, yet he seemed anxious, almost frantic, as well.

And then his giggles stopped, his grin wilted.

The man was staring directly at us.

Surely, he couldn’t see us, I told myself. We were crouched low amidst a thick layer of shadow-eaved brush, and the afternoon sun had long since given way to the gray of approaching dusk.

Yet his gaze didn’t waver. We might as well have been caught in the blinding light of a follow spot.

“Who’s there?” he called out.

We said nothing.

“I know you’re there, dammit!” the man bellowed. “I can see your breath!”

His right hand hovered over the butt of his gun.

“The better part of valour is discretion,” I’d often said onstage as Falstaff. And I believed it and even lived by it, for “Run away!” I’d often said offstage as myself.

There would be no screwing of courage to the sticking place. I possessed no courage to screw.

I stood up with my hands held high.

Or tried to, at any rate. The thorns and vines clawed at me as I arose. When I was finally standing straight, I found Sasanoff on his feet beside me, face scratched, beard pocked with clinging thistles.

“Ummm… could you point us back to the road?” he said. “We appear to be lost.”

“So lost you end up creepin’ around the bushes?” the man spat back in an American accent as coarse and thick as his handlebar moustache and muttonchops. “Ha!”

“Oh, we were just looking for my… poodle,” I said. “He slipped his leash when we were walking him, and-”

“Get down here,” the man snapped. “Now.”

Sasanoff and I scrambled down the steep embankment side by side, kicking up dirt and stumbling over rocks and rotting logs.

“So,” the man said when we were finally lined up before him, “who are you two workin’ for? Tabor or yourselves?”

“I don’t know what you mean,” Sasanoff said. He was not so much a hunchback now as a hunchbuttock: his hump had slipped down so low it looked as though he had a third cheek at the base of his spine.

The American took an angry step toward him.

“Are you mine police or bandits?” he demanded.

He was a tall man, obviously well built despite his bandy legs, and Sasanoff and I shrank back from him as one.

“N-n-neither,” I said. “We’re actors.”

The American barked out a bitter laugh.

“Actors? Oh, I’ll say you are! Bad ones, too, ’cuz I see right through you.” He jutted a lantern jaw at me. “Judgin’ by them lavender duds of yours-” he jerked his head at Sasanoff, “-and the rags on you? And you both talkin’ all hoity-toity? I’ll bet you’re Pinkertons set after the missin’ silver. Well, congratulations, boys. You done found it. You just ain’t leavin’ with it. I am.”

“I assure you I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Sasanoff said with as much stiff-spined dignity as a man with a false beard and an extra rump can muster.

“Sir… if I may,” I began, a whole new wave of sickly dread churning to life in the pit of my stomach. “How did you come to have that map?”

The American flashed me a smile sour enough for a Malvolio.

“You may not… but I’ll tell you anyhow. I took it off a feller I followed outta Leadville. Word around town was he’d got his hands on an honest-to-God treasure map. So I caught up with him along the trail and, well… ” He patted the butt of his gun. “I persuaded him to hand it over.”

I could see Sasanoff go pale even beneath his grease paint. His performance back at the saloon had been too good, it appeared. It wasn’t just the Whelp he’d convinced-it was all the eavesdroppers, too.

“Was your persuasion… fatal?” he asked.

The American shrugged.

“I didn’t wait around to find out. Now, unless you want some of the same persuasion-” He backed off a few steps and nodded down at the mound of rocks nearby. “Get to diggin’.”

“But-” I began.

“Dig!” the American finished for me.

So dig we did, rolling aside the last of the stones covering the low hole in which my little trunk rested. I briefly considered turning and telling the brigand behind us that there was no stolen silver; it was all just a ruse we’d concocted to teach a much-needed lesson to a prattling malapert. I had the distinct feeling the man wouldn’t see the humor in it, though. Best to feign ignorance and hope he’d take disappointment well.

Of course, I had the feeling he wouldn’t do that either.

“By God,” the American mumbled to himself as Sasanoff and I lifted the chest up out of the ground. “It was true. I’m rich!”

“Not necessarily,” I said, trying to soften the blow before it fell. “Who knows what’s inside?”

“Quite right,” Sasanoff threw in. “Someone might have beaten you to it, then reburied the strongbox.”

“Like who?” the American growled. “You, maybe?”

“Oh, no! I just meant-”

“Open it.”

“But-”

“Open it!”

I let Sasanoff kneel down and do the honors. I wanted to keep my distance from that box both literally and figuratively.

Sasanoff reluctantly lifted the creaky-hinged lid-then stared down into the chest in stunned befuddlement.

“I-I-I don’t understand,” he stammered.

I leaned in close enough to peek over his shoulder, yet I couldn’t see what had astonished him so.

There were the rocks he’d put in to give the box weight. There was the note he’d put in to give the Whelp his comeuppance.

But then I wasn’t just glancing at the note to confirm its presence. I was reading it. And that’s when my own eyes nearly popped from their sockets.

Instead of this:

YOU’RE SACKED!

– M.S.

I saw this:

I QUIT!

– S.H.

We both turned to measure the American’s reaction to all this-and found the man gone. In his place was the Whelp.

In his clothes, too. The Whelp had simply stripped away moustache and muttonchops, and there he was, the transformation complete.

The Whelp swept off his hat and bowed deeply, as if our shock was an ovation for him to accept from the stage.

“But… how?” I said.

“Acting, of course,” the Whelp replied blithely as he straightened up again. “Aided by the sort of quick change one must master as a utility player with four different costumes in the first act alone.”

When this explanation did little to lift our dangling jaws, the Whelp went on.

“Instead of going to the hotel after leaving the saloon, I followed the map straight here to see what sort of burlesque you had planned for me. Once I’d made my own little alteration to the script, I returned to town, facilitated the necessary wardrobe change with the help of a local pawn shop-the same that supplied you with your costume, Mr. Sasanoff-then stopped by the opera house to avail myself of our makeup box. Et voilà.”

He spread out his hands, inviting us to appreciate his makeshift disguise. Seeing him without his false whiskers, his legs no longer bowed, floppy-brimmed hat no longer drooping over his prominent brow, I was amazed that we’d ever been duped. The makeup hadn’t been that heavy, really. He’d made little effort to conceal his features. No, much as it pains me to admit-and I’m sorely tempted to strike these lines out-it was the man’s superior acting that had carried the day.

[The above paragraph was, in fact, inked out with a heavy hand, and the content of the expurgated section was only discovered after painstaking X-ray analysis of the original manuscript.-S.B.H.]

“I assume Mr. Tabor told you about the lost silver map swindle at the reception last night,” the Whelp said. “It certainly couldn’t have been one of the other guests, as you took such pains not to converse with them. I myself heard of the scheme in an altogether more direct fashion: in the course of my explorations of Leadville, I was approached by not one but three ‘confidence men’ plying variations on the tale. They were all most admirable thespians in their own way, and more convincing than many an Iago or Shylock I’ve seen. In fact, for all your successes in the theatre, Mr. Sasanoff, I daresay you wouldn’t last a second as a buttoner in a public house. Your ‘Mr. Goodfellow’ had about him far too much of the actor’s West End and not nearly enough of the Cockney’s East.”

This slap was, at last, too much for Sasanoff, and his surprise boiled away with the searing heat of rage.

“You arrogant pup!” he thundered. “I’ll see to it you never appear on the stage again!”

The Whelp shrugged mildly.

“As you like it.” He turned to go, then stopped and glanced back over his shoulder. “Oh, and by the way-you may keep the watch. I bought it in Indianapolis for a dollar.”

And with that, his long legs carried him up the brushy incline slanting down from the road.

I never saw him again. Nor did I hear him spoken of until years afterward, and then in an entirely different (and eternally irritating) context.

For his part, Sasanoff refused to acknowledge the Whelp’s existence or even his absence after that day. Queries from our fellow actors he answered with icy stares and silence. It was as if the man had never been with our company at all.

“You will not reveal what happened here. Ever. To anyone,” Sasanoff growled as we trudged back to town in evening’s gathering gloom.

I placed my right hand over my heart.

“I will never tell another living soul,” I vowed solemnly.

It was, if I may allow myself a moment of immodesty, the finest performance of the day.