Prodigies

Young Mr. Segal stepped toward Lily and announced to the crowd. “Now I’m going to examine my subject to ensure that she has fully emerged from her trance. This is a process that requires a careful observation of the pupils.”

He leaned forward with his nose inches from Lily’s and tilted his head so that his lips were hidden from the audience and his head blocked the view of her face.

“What’s the problem?” he whispered.

“A man. A very bad man. In the audience.”

“Big guy in the back? Came in during your act?”

She nodded. “I can’t talk to my dogs when he’s here.”

“Then let me take care of everything.”

At that, Segal smiled at Lily, then turned and addresses the crowd.

“Ladies and gentlemen, while we’re waiting for Lillian to completely recover from my mesmeric spell, I would like to introduce you to my good friend, the Bulldog Kid.” Segal pointed to a thin youth in the front row, who began to shake his head and mouth words of resistance. “You may know the Bulldog Kid from his amazing feats of marksmanship at Wild West shows and Chautauquas from Virginia to Montreal. Bulldog and I recently set off for California to launch our own show in the Golden State and, on a whim, we made a detour to your fine community so we could see what the fuss was all about. Now, surprisingly, for the fastest gun on either side of the Mississippi, Bulldog is shy. But I am certain we could entice him to provide us with a demonstration of his shooting prowess if we all put our hands together.”

Segal began to clap, slowly and gently, and increased both the force and rate of his applause as the audience members joined in. The thin youth, one eye nearly obscured by a loose strand of his long blond hair, his writs poking out from the cuffs of a worn coat he had outgrown, took the stage.

In her years with the circus, Lily had heard a great many discussions of other acts on the circus. Trick shooters were not uncommon, and in fact Uncle Stanislas had proposed prior to the trip west that a shooter would be a good addition to the show. But she had never heard of a skinny, young, fast-gun artist known as the Bulldog Kid, nor a mesmerist named Segal.

Lily could see Uncle Stanislas watching the two young imposters. He took a step out when the Bulldog Kid began to ascend the stage, then appeared to change his mind. He stopped and turned to restrain Mr. Szabo from entering the ring. Apparently, his businessman’s instinct to end this unexpected and unrehearsed interruption lost out to his showman’s desire to see magic in the moment.

“Kid, show ‘em the Bulldogs,” Segal said.

The thin youth glared at Segal and reddened, either in anger or embarrassment or both.

“What? Are you waiting to be mesmerized?”

A gasp rose from the audience when they realized the Bulldog Kid now sported a short snub-nose revolver in each hand, though none had seen the hands reach into holsters or pockets. At the same moment, Segal produced a deck of cards from his inside coat pocket.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, I am going to give you just the briefest indication of the remarkable shooting talents of the Bulldog Kid.”

Riffling through the deck with the deftness of a card shark, he produced a pair of face cards and flourished them to the audience. He handed the cards to Lily. Then he returned to the side of the Bulldog Kid, asked his friend to follow him, and led the young gunman to a place on the back bench beside the wolfer.

“In a moment, ladies and gentlemen, I will return to the middle of the ring to provide the Bulldog Kid with a target. Don’t worry, we have not recruited the lovely and talented Miss Lillian to undertake this hazardous task.”

From the distance, Lily could see Segal and the Bulldog Kid engage in a short stare-down, after which the tall youth stepped to his left and placed his lips next to the ear of the wolfer, still standing in the back row. The wolfer turned quickly to look at Segal and the young gunman. But any confrontation was prevented when Segal turned and ran back to the ring.

“I gotta tell you, ladies and gentlemen, I’ve been trying to teach Bulldog to play poker and it’s been kind of like trying to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time and it annoys the pig. It was enough of a challenge just teaching him to identify the different kinds of cards.”

At this, he produced the deck from which he had removed the two cards he’d handed to Lily. He quickly pulled the other ten face cards from the deck and held them up, fanned out, toward the audience with one hand. With the other, he reached for the two cards Lily held.

“Those of you seated in the front row will see that Lillian here was holding the two one-eyed jacks. And I am now going to shuffle them in with the remaining face cards to create a deck of twelve cards: kings, queens, and jacks. Lillian, if you would like to place these twelve cards in any assortment you would like, facing up, on the ground here in the ring, that would be most appreciated. I will block the Bulldog Kid’s view of the cards. He will have no way of knowing where the various kings, queens, and jacks have been placed.”

Lily was becoming intrigued by the impromptu performance and could see that the audience’s attention was riveted. One way or another, they were in for something unexpected. Either they’d see a great feat of marksmanship, or a ridiculous fraud, which in its own way they might find even more entertaining.

Segal removed his coat and held it out like a cape and directed Lily to lay out the cards in the area below and behind it where the trick shooter would be unable to see them. When Lily finished, Segal directed her to move to the side. He asked audience members seated directly under the path a bullet would take to move to either side.

“On the count of three I am going to move out of the way so that the Bulldog Kid can see these cards. He will then shoot the two one-eyed jacks, but only the one-eyed jacks, and he will do so immediately after I move. Audience, are you ready? Bulldog, are you?”

The Bulldog Kid, a revolver in each hand, let out a sigh that was audible throughout the tent, otherwise quiet as a tomb. Segal stepped aside, and immediately a pair of gunshots echoed through the tent, prompting a chorus of gasps and several shrieks. With a cloud of gun smoke drifting through the air of the tent, Segal bent and picked up two cards. He handed them to an audience member in the front row, then bent and picked up the remaining cards.

“Can you tell the audience which cards the Bulldog Kid hit?”

The audience member stood, held out the cards, and said, “The jack of hearts and the jack of spades.”

“And those are the one-eyed jacks?”

“Guess so.”

Segal turned to the audience, lifted the cards aloft so all could see the hold driven through the face in each, then directed his right hand toward the marksman and announced, “Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the one and only Bulldog Kid.”

When the applause died down, he stared pointedly at the wolfer and said, “I tell you folks, I’m glad he’s my friend. I wouldn’t want to be his enemy. Or the enemy of a friend of his.”

The wolfer glared at Segal and Lily and crept out of the tent. Lily heard the barking of his hounds recede into the distance. She looked to the side of the tent, saw Uncle Stanislas beaming, looked at the smiling and astonished faces in the audience, and mouthed her thanks to Segal and his dangerous friend. Then she publicly thanked the great mesmerist, Myron Segal, and his colleague, the Bulldog Kid, opened her mind to her dogs, and closed the show with a well-executed round of canine baseball.

She still had an enemy in Deadwood, but she had made a friend. Two of them. And Deadwood seemed to be a place where you needed friends.