East of the Border by Johnny D. Boggs

Author:Johnny D. Boggs
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781428502222
Publisher: Dorchester Publishing

Chapter Thirteen

The drama has scarce the shadow of a plot and is like an animated dime novel with the Indian-killing multiplied by ten, but for all that it was enjoyable and heartily enjoyed, and the bloodier the tragedy the broader was the comedy.

Morning Dispatch, Erie, Pennsylvania

November 15, 1873

The sickness caught up with me in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, after completing our stands in Pittsburgh, Johnstown, and Williamsport. By sickness, I don’t mean the cold that had been plaguing me since around Pittsburgh, but homesickness. Everybody around these parts talked about the Wyoming Valley, and the name alone got me to thinking about, and longing for, Cheyenne. Or Fort Fetterman. Or some other place on the Great Plains where men of my class frequented gambling dens and buckets of blood, not highfalutin’ academies of music and opera houses. Pennsylvania’s Wyoming Valley is pretty, I guess, a lot greener than the prairies that I frequented out West, but it wasn’t home. Not to me. And it was damned hard to find a whorehouse there.

Folks at the opera house and hotel on Hazel Street said we could have all the beer we could drink, on the house, compliments of a famous and wealthy local brewer named Charles Stegmaier, which was all well and good. But after Cody, Texas Jack, and me had consumed a keg or two, I got to hankering for female companionship. When I asked the fellow at the hotel’s front desk for directions to the nearest brothel, he turned white as linen, stammered, and quickly disappeared without giving me so much as a suggestion as to where I could find a soiled dove.

Mind you, I do not like whores. Don’t trust them, especially the Kansas species, but it seemed that every night I was bunking next to Texas Jack and his wife, or Billy Cody and either a strumpet or an actress—I’ll give you a dollar if you explain the difference to me—who had become enraptured with the great scout. Sumbitch, you would think the carpenters would make the walls a little thicker in a cold place like Pennsylvania, but the noises proved distracting. I reckon I could have wooed Jennie Fisher again, or risked my manhood and flirted with Rena Maeder, but I had grown sick of my comrades by now, so, after enduring two and a half hours of foolishness, murdering supes, speaking idiocies, and playing the fool one more time on the night of November 28th, I went whore hunting.

I don’t know what those poor blokes mining anthracite coal, or the factory workers, or the mill workers, or any man in Wilkes-Barre do in the way of horizontal refreshments, but it would take a great scout to find the tenderloin in a Pennsylvania burgh. They hide their prostitutes better than a Kansas cardsharper can conceal the tools of his trade. It started snowing, turned downright miserable walking along those cold, dark streets. Didn’t help my cold, either, and I thought I’d practically die of pneumonia before I found a

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