I thanked him and went down to the stage station, which I figured was safe enough now. The agent was lying in a pool of gore, and great holes gaped in the thin board walls where a fellow had been mighty free with a shotgun. Well, I was standing just inside what was left of the place, thinking how it didn’t make much difference to me, on account of I didn’t have the price of a ticket yet anyway, when I heard the noise of horses outside and in busts three very nasty-looking customers, bristling with firearms.
These fellows glare at me with their red eyes and then take in that body of the dead agent, and the one who seemed their leader says to the others: “Told you we was goin’ to be late. Now this no-good bastard has done beat us.”
Then he says to me with hurt pride: “We got the one before, and we would of beat you here this evenin’ hadn’t we been occypied down the road a piece with the stage itself. We robbed it and we burned it and we kilt the driver, we kilt the guard, we kilt the passengers, but one of them was a gal, and so we all _____ her before we kilt her.”
As I say, I never had the price of a fare, anyway. What concerned me at the moment, however, was my lack of a gun, which these skunks would soon notice and then I would join the stiff on the floor. I had to make the most of my time while they was still jealously admiring how they thought I had rubbed out the agent.
“My boys won’t like that,” I says. “They was fixing to get that stage themselves, and I reckon have found it by now and turned back and will want to meet them who stole their thunder.”
“How many boys you got?” says the leader. If he ever would introduce a drop of water to his face, he might have come out fairly good-looking. He was a breed of Indian and white, with fairish hair and thin features but walnut-colored skin. Another was almost black, with straight raven hair gathered in a knot behind. The third looked pure white but was the ugliest mortal I ever seen: had a bad eye, and an old knife cut that when healing had lifted his lip on the right side so you could see his teeth there even when he wasn’t grinning or snarling though it seemed as if he always was.
“Nineteen or twenty,” says I, and turned away right insolent, upon which I knowed they would make up their mind to shoot me in the back or knuckle under. It turned out they was bluffed, for the leader commences to boast.
“I guess you have heerd of me,” he says; “Johnny Jump? I got me quite a rep hereabout for murder and mayhem. Ain’t no marshal ever laid a hand on me, though many have tried. Just last month I blowed the head off one come out of Van Buren. This yeer’s my cousin, Jim Smoker”—pointing to the black-faced fellow—“and the other we call Cockeye. He ain’t got no tongue. Had it shot or tore out. Can’t talk, but my God he is mean.”
I says: “I never heard of you small-time trash. We’re from St. Louie by way of Texas and have just stopped off in this mudhole to get tobacco money. And then on to Kansas, where we figure to cut and shoot and rob and violate from one side of the state to the other.”
Cockeye grunts some and slobbers out of his cut lip. Jim Smoker goes on outside and in a minute I hear him firing his rifle and look out and see he is taking target practice at the curly tail of a wandering hog.
“My cousin,” says Johnny Jump, “ain’t got all his buttons, but he is real useful at killin’ and stealin’. I was a-thinking maybe us fellows could join your boys. I would shore like to rob and murder and the rest of what you said up in Kansas.” He looked like a kid who was begging his Daddy to take him fishing, his eyes bright and wistful. There was something real innocent about Johnny Jump, even likable, I don’t know why. Maybe it was the Indian in him.
In at last reluctantly agreeing to admit him and his boys to my nonexistent gang, I did not intend to travel in their company any further than was necessary. I told them I was to rendezvous with my bunch twenty miles north. They could come along at their own risk.
I pretended my horse had strayed somewheres, so Johnny Jump lent me an extra animal they had took from the stage. I still didn’t have no gun, though. We rode till twilight, and then I pointed at a grove of trees and said that was the place my boys would be or come to later, and so we stopped and built a fire and ate some bacon and beans from a bag of loot they had, for as they went about the countryside this bunch would kill anyone they met and take whatever he was carrying. In fact, we had passed a little farm on this trip, and I only had kept them from pillaging it by promises of the mayhem we all would wreak after collecting the rest of my boys.
I didn’t notice that Jim Smoker had dropped behind, for he rode always in back anyway, but he was gone when we went into the grove and only showed up later while we was feeding. He wore a different hat and carried two bottles of whiskey and led another horse behind his, to which was lashed all manner of booty: bags of sugar and corn, blankets, coal-oil lamps, and even a little footstool.
Johnny Jump spoke to him in Creek and then laughs hee-haw. “My cousin just had to drap by that place we went past back a piece. He cain’t resist a thang, being a chile at heart.”
I was sorry for the poor folk what had lived on that farm, but I guess they was out of pain now, and the way it turned out, the ill wind that blowed them a sudden death saved my life. For I couldn’t have kept up the pretense of meeting my gang beyond the following morning and would have gone under for sure. But what happened instead was that Johnny Jump and Jim Smoker shared them bottles of whiskey, and after Johnny got a bellyful of liquor he commenced to turn sentimental. It seemed he was a poet in addition to an outlaw, and setting there beside the fire, with tears running down his cheeks to mingle with the whiskey leaking over his chin, he recited verse of his own composition.
The darlin’ love of all my life,
In women I never had no other,
The sweetest thang in this vale of strife,
Was always my dear Mother.
And now she is in heaven
Where the angels play them harps,
For in years it is six or seven
Since I laid away her carpse.…
There was ten or twenty more stanzas to it, which I don’t remember no more, and when he gets through he lets out a great howl of agony and picks up his rifle and shoots Jim Smoker between the eyes. Then he gives Cockeye a couple in the spine where he lays sleeping, and finally empties the rest of the magazine of his sixteen-shot Henry into the blanket roll topped by the coonskin cap which I had earlier arranged to represent myself.
After which he lays back and goes peaceful to sleep. I come back from behind the tree where I had watched all this, picked up the Henry he had dropped, got me the two best Colt’s in the bunch and all the horses, and left, heading north. I considered putting a bullet into Johnny Jump’s head and so do a lot of his future victims a favor, but in addition to my dislike for cold-blooded murder, I had developed a soft spot for him. It might have been on account of that poetry.
The next couple years I spent in transit, mainly looking for Caroline and Frank Delight, so as to get some money from them, for as I have said, I couldn’t go kill Custer as broke as I was. What I had not known when down in the Nations was that the U.P. had reached Utah and linked up with the Central Pacific around the time I left the Creek family with whom I spent the winter of ’69. The railroad was done building, that is, having spanned the continent. But with the proceeds from selling Johnny Jump’s little horse herd, which I had drove to Topeka without further incident, I rode the coaches on out west from Omaha, anyway, figuring my relations might have settled their saloon business in one of the towns that had sprung up along the line.
At every station I inquired for Caroline and Frank, with no result, but I had always wanted to take a look at San Francisco anyway, so rode on out there, by when I was sure glad to get off the railroad for a spell. That transcontinental road was a wonder of civilization no doubt, but what with stopovers I had been riding them lurching cars for a week and had swallowed an awful lot of smoke and ashes as they blowed in the open windows, and every now and again a live spark would start a little fire
in the green plush seat-upholstery or someone’s clothes. However, they said the train went twenty-five miles an hour, and I don’t doubt it.
I wasn’t in San Francisco long before I run out of my money, for everything was terrible expensive. You couldn’t get a decent meal for less than fifty cents. And I don’t know why, but them hills the town was built on commenced to depress my spirits: you feel great upon the summit, but then you always have to come down sometime and when you do, it’s like you been demoted. I had lived too long on the flat.
Nor could I locate Caroline and her husband, though I must have traipsed through every cheap saloon and bawdy house in the place, and that took me several months, for that town wouldn’t take a back seat to none in the disrespectful entertainments. When my money was gone I got work in a livery stable, forking hay, shoveling manure, and the like. It was all I could get at the time. Then one day a fellow come in from the south of California and I heard him say they was a-looking for wagon drivers down there, to haul freight from San Pedro to Prescott, Arizona, and would pay good money for it.
It was the spring of ’70 when I reached Pedro and found the man who had the hauling business. At first he doubted a man of my size and figure could handle that employment.
“This is a hairy job, my friend,” he says. “If the desert don’t get you, the Apache will, and if not him, then the outlaws. The Salton Sink is a hundred mile of fiery hell where you feed your animals in the harness and keep moving lest you shrivel in your tracks. You got twenty days to make four hundred and fifty mile, and I don’t want my mules kilt doing it.”
Suffice it to say I convinced him to take me on, and he says: “I’ll take a chance on you. Couple years back I hired a boy of seventeen and he turned out fine, though he was big for his years.”
That’s the kind of thing you have to put up with if you’re my size. But the reason I mention this is he said the boy was called Wyatt Earp. First I ever heard the name, but I remembered it because of its unusual sound, sort of like a belch.
The boss wasn’t exaggerating none about the hairiness of that run, and during the time I was making it we encountered all the obstacles he listed, but thinking it over, I’ll take heat, sand, Apache, or bandits in preference to ten mules every time. What I found toughest to manage was to refrain from getting a club and beating them animals to death. I drove mules in the grading of the U.P., but that beast’s character worsens with the kind of terrain he has to cover. Though as I guess can be said of a lot of humans, his very nastiness is what pulls him through.
Same goes for me. I stuck at it throughout most of ’70 and never got no sweeter in the process. But I earned good money, and then went back to San Francisco in the winter, bought me a fine outfit of clothes and a Smith & Wesson revolver of the model called “American” that had just come out, a beautiful .44-caliber weapon.
Then I bought me a first-class ticket on the U.P. to Omaha for one hundred dollars and two dollars a day for a sleeper on top of that, for I was going back to kill George Armstrong Custer in style.
CHAPTER 20 Wild Bill Hickok
I REACHED KANSAS CITY in the spring of ’71, which had growed considerably since I had knowed it as Westport, and if you recall, Fort Leavenworth was nearby. No sooner had I hit town when I found that none other than the Seventh Cavalry itself had wintered there, General Custer commanding. He was often to be seen over in K.C., at his tailor’s, at restaurants, and at theatrical performances, being extremely fond of the last, as might be supposed from his character. His Lady was ever by his side, and she was so pretty it was said both men and women turned around when she passed by. Of course, the General was right comely himself.
The man who told me the foregoing had long blond curly locks falling to his shoulders and a silken mustache of the same hue, was above six foot in height, slim in the waist and broad as to chest, and in clothing a remarkable dandy. He wore a black frock coat with velvet facings on the lapels, an embroidered vest, turn-down collar with a black string tie, and topped it off with a silk hat.
No, he wasn’t Custer, but blonder, curlier, warmer blue of eye, and his face was softer, with a hooking nose and short chin. He was James Butler Hickok, so-called Wild Bill after he rubbed out the man who named him Duck Bill.
But back to Custer, for whom Wild Bill had scouted on the Kansas campaign a year before the Washita. He knowed him well, and liked him and vice versa, and had a harmless crush on his wife and let her believe much exaggeration concerning himself, which Custer also believed, and so everyone was friends, as big, pretty, handsome, and powerful people always are. For everything goes their way, until some wretched, crosseyed, broken-nosed bum shoots them in the back, as Jack McCall did to Hickok in Deadwood in ’76, only two months after the Indians did in the other Long Hair.
However, that was five years into the future, and here we was on Market Square in K.C., and I was fully intending to find Custer before the week was out and do my duty. Let me say about Market Square that it was the hangout for buffalo hunters in the summer when the hides run poor, and scouts would come there when off a campaign, and mule drivers between trips, and it was where you’d go for news if you was my type of case rather than read the papers.
And that is how I met Wild Bill, who was one of the centers of attraction thereabout, having already got his reputation a year or two before as marshal of Hays City, Kansas.
During the day, Hickok generally set on a bench outside of the police station where his friend Tom Speers, the marshal in K.C., encouraged the frontier types to congregate partly because he knew and liked most of them, but also I believe because it tended to keep them out of trouble. They could palaver with one another and even hold target matches without bothering the respectable element in the better part of town, and being that Speers and his deputies was around, real fights was rare.
Not that celebrated gun-handlers ever fought each other much, anyway. Anybody who specializes in violence has the greatest respect for another such expert.
Now, as to my revenge against Custer. Well, you can go to the history books and read how he died fighting Indians on June 25, 1876, so you know I never killed him in Kansas City. If he had been a nobody, I could have kept up the suspense till the last minute, whereas the way it stands I got to admit it was near the first of April when I reached K.C., and the Seventh Regiment had been recalled from the plains in March, Custer going back East. I had missed him by a few days!
You might wonder why I did not follow him. After all, it wasn’t that he had gone to China. I already come across the western half of the country expressly to shoot him down. The image of that deed was what I had been living on for two years, ever since my vow on the banks of the Washita.
All I can say is that there was something about the Missouri River that took my drive away. Old Lodge Skins felt the same about the Platte, and look what happened to him when below it: Sand Creek and the Washita. I hoped he had now learned to rely on his instincts rather than his pride, and gone up north to stay.
In my case, I stopped right there in Kansas City, where the Missouri takes its big bend for the run to St. Louie. I looked at its muddly swirl and thought: Well, Custer’s anyway gone off the prairies; that’s the important thing. Maybe it was me who scared him off, in a spiritual or medicine sense, for it was right queer the coincidence of our comings and goings. Anyhow, I didn’t go East. I had a funny idea of that part of the country: I figured it to be cityfied from St. Louie right on to the Atlantic Ocean, and mainly slums at that, filled with poor foreigners from Europe who had pasty faces and licked the boots of powerful, glittering people like Custer. I would be at a peculiar disadvantage there.
In Kansas City I was not far from the place where the Pendrakes had lived thirteen years before, and probably were still residing, for people in their situation maintain it forever, and I thought about going over there and just riding down the street once and be done with it, but didn’t have the stomach for even that much. I tell you this, I was still in love w
ith Mrs. Pendrake as ardently as I had ever been, after all them years and battles and wives. That was the real tragedy of my life, as opposed to the various inconveniencies.
The subject came to mind now because with the news of Custer’s departure I felt more let down, despondent, and bereft than at any time since I had left Missouri years before, and naturally, in such a mood, thought of Mrs. P. was inevitable.
Well, if Custer ever come West again, I would kill him. I swore to that, but rather mechanically, for I didn’t have no hopes he would.
The central plains was all cleaned up now of hostiles. The summer after the Washita battle, troops under General Carr whipped the Cheyenne Dog Soldier band at Summit Springs, killing their chief, Tall Bull. That was the end of the Human Beings in Kansas and Colorado.
So what did I do? Well, I met Wild Bill Hickok, and knowing him become almost a profession in itself for a while. I had inquired around about Custer, and a fellow pointed out Wild Bill as having been sometime scout for the General. I had never heard of Hickok at that time, but he was the celebrity of Market Square, and I recall that when I come up to him for the first time he was showing to some other fellows a pair of ivory-handled revolvers he had been give by a U.S. Senator he guided on a prairie tour.
I pushed amidst the throng and says: “You Hickok?” He had been pointed out to me as such, but I had to say something for openers.
“I am,” says this tall, lithe man with the long fair hair and gives me but a fleeting glance from his sky-blue eyes, and then lifts the pistol in his right hand and fires the entire cylinder faster than you could count the shots, at a sign upon the wall of a saloon a hundred yards and at a slant across the square.
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