This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  "There's forty or fifty of them in camp," reported Will when the thudding stopped. His face was a smoky uncertainty two feet from Slade's. "Corral's west about a hundred yards."

  "Shit." Slade wasn't a Majors man. "I wasn't counting on them odds. I fold my hand at four to one."

  Others in the party murmured agreement.

  Hickok said, "I never have. Let's split up, half to the corral and the rest to camp. Hot things up a mite while the others get the horses."

  When the superintendent hesitated, Will spoke up. "Indians aren't natural organizers, Captain. Once you surprise them, they stay surprised. But we got to move fast."

  "Well, seeing as how we come this far."

  Slade, Hickok, and Will rode with the group that was to attack the camp. They walked their horses in downwind of the dogs that were to be found wherever there were Indians, untied the rag bundles from their hoofs for maximum speed and noise, mounted, and at a low whistle from the corral they thundered between tipis, whooping and shrieking and snapping caps at the targets that flashed in the firelight. Blue and orange flames spiked the darkness. Hickok's gray whinnied and lunged, its eyes rolling over white, while its master hammered away first on this side, then that, with a Navy Colt in each hand and his reins clamped between his teeth. Most of the party, Will included, was shooting just to make noise, but the former constable seldom missed. A brave would make a dash for the horses in the corral and before he got five steps, a hole the size of a ten-dollar gold piece would open in his forehead and he'd flop on his face. One unarmed Cheyenne plucked a flat rock from the ground and hurled it desperately at Hickok. The first bullet sent the projectile spinning into the night. The second tore through the brave's throat. Will wounded an Indian in the leg with a ball from his Dragoon colt and plunged through a cloud of stinging smoke into the clear, and then they were swinging east to join the men who had stolen back the horses. Dogs were yapping in camp. The whole raid had taken less than thirty seconds.

  "Who's hit?" Slade demanded breathlessly when after two miles they stopped to blow the horses.

  There was a general patting of limbs and torsos. No one spoke up.

  "Damned heathens never could hit the obvious side of a buffalo in broad daylight. Slow now. We don't want to bust any of these bastards' legs after we went to so much trouble to get 'em back."

  They resumed at a walk.

  "That horse of yours is pretty fast," Hickok told Will.

  "Old Mountain?" He patted the big stallion's steaming neck. "He can beat anything on four legs."

  "I believe you're right. You ever been to St. Louis? They race for money there, but I bet they ain't seen nothing like your mountain runner."

  "I'd like to see St. Louis," Will said.

  St. Louis swam in summer heat, the air like raw silk. A man and a youth walked along the levee, eyes on the ground, ignoring the pumpkin-shell high wheelers paddling down the Missouri trailing dirty cotton smoke, two hundred miles downriver from the spot where a child and his wounded father had crossed into hiding seven years before.

  "You got any money at all, Jim?"

  Hickok turned his head and spat into the water. The white spittle bobbed on the steamers' wake. "They cleaned me out too. Goddamn skinny mare from Peoria. I always did hate that town."

  "Flat country hereabouts. Old Mountain favored the high ground. We shouldn't of bet him too."

  "'Shouldn't of' don't change what's past."

  "Where to now, Jim?"

  He shrugged. "There's war back East. I'm thinking I might join up, see the elephant."

  "Which side?"

  "How many sides can an elephant have?"

  "You know what I mean."

  "I'm Yankee to the bone. What about you?"

  "Me too. My father was an abolitionist. I might just join up myself."

  "If your ma lets you."

  Will stopped walking. "What's that mean?"

  "Means I was fifteen once too."

  "Not for long, I bet." The boy sprinted to catch up.

  "Don't say 'bet.'"

  Will's laugh was as deep and hearty as a man's.

  Chapter 2

  "Louisa Frederici, William F. Cody."

  She spread her skirts, taffeta and lace rustling loud enough to spook a band of Sioux or stop a Confederate charge, and offered up a plump hand, over which he bowed neatly, touching her palm with sandpapery fingers. Her rather coarse features were dominated by thick, arched brows and she wore her dark hair piled carelessly on top of her head and lanced in place with pins. Her speech was throaty and frenchified.

  "Are you just back from the fighting, Mr. Cody?"

  The tall young man in blue dress uniform said something about hospital duty in St. Louis, while Louisa's cousin, having performed his gentlemanly duty, drifted away unnoticed. Voices droned in the large room as the first truly fine social gathering of the postwar period gathered fine social dust. Private Cody was saying something now about General Sterling Price and the rebel rout at Westport, but as usual when the conversation turned to the war, she wasn't listening. He had the features her mother liked to call classic and brown hair with a thread of auburn gleaming through it, although it was a little long for St. Louis, and as he talked, very white teeth flashed behind his well-kept moustache. She liked to hear his mellow baritone even if she wasn't paying attention to the words. Local tone ran toward phlegmy French and nasal American.

  ". . . killed my first hostile Indian. Have you ever been West, Miss Frederici?"

  "West?" She hesitated, wondering how he had got to Indians from Westport. "Heavens, no. Is that where your people are from?" Her heart dropped a little as she searched his face for savage characteristics.

  "I was born in Iowa. But my father and mother took my younger brother and five sisters and me to Kansas when I was seven."

  "Do they live there yet?"

  "My brother and four sisters do. My father died eight years ago and my mother followed him last November. My sister Martha also preceded her."

  "I am so sorry. But six children! Do you support your brother and sisters as well as yourself?"

  "There were eight originally. My older brother Samuel was killed when a horse fell on him in Iowa. I try to send money home, but that hasn't always been possible on a soldier's salary. I have a chance to become an Army scout when my enlistment is up. The pay is much better."

  "But isn't that terribly dangerous?"

  And then he was telling another story, about stolen horses and Cheyennes and a person named Hickok. It was all very boring after four years of war news, but she kept her eyes on him, widening them instinctively at just the right moments even as the details slid through her grasp, taking her cues from the expression on his face. He had doe-brown eyes with little gold flecks in them.

  "Surely you will adopt some steady vocation eventually?" she put in when he paused for breath.

  "Well, yes"—thoughtfully—"I suppose I'll have to, when I get too old for the other."

  They were married the following March, after he had carried dispatches through Cheyenne country for General Sherman and driven stagecoach in Kansas. When he returned, she almost didn't recognize him in his frontier trappings, hair to his shoulders now and the beginnings of a goatee showing red on his chin. But his manner remained courtly and she forgave him the affectation. For the ceremony at her parents' home the twenty-year-old bridegroom donned bleached doeskins trimmed with ermine and fringe and soft winter moccasins decorated with porcupine quills dyed red and white, the whole topped incongruously by a conventional collar and tie. Louisa felt pride and a twinge of jealousy at the other than familial glances her tall plainsman drew from some of her female cousins at the reception, but he was preoccupied with her and appeared not to notice. Although she found his sisters cordial (his young brother Charles had died within a year of his mother), she was disappointed to see them looking at her with her husband's eyes and speaking with his mannerisms, as if something that she'd thought was hers alone had turn
ed out to be just another in a line of ready-made items available to all. She dismissed the feeling as part of the inevitable letdown at the end of a long period of anticipation, and didn't come back to it for years.

  Will was a surprisingly good dancer, graceful on his feet even if some of the steps he knew were foreign to St. Louis (he blamed them on his sister Martha's nonconformist teaching), and the applause that greeted the couple upon the completion of their first turn around the floor brought the blood to her cheeks. The hasty embraces and frantic farewells when they left were just delirious features of the same fevered dream.

  It was on board the river steamer Morning Star for their honeymoon trip up the Missouri to Leavenworth that she first heard Will explaining to an interested party from New Hampshire that they had met when her bridle rein parted during a morning ride and he caught the runaway horse. When they were alone, she asked him why he had lied.

  "Easterners expect it," was the only answer he would give.

  In Salt Creek, scene of his father's stabbing and the abrupt end of his own childhood, Will put an arm around his bride's waist, familiar territory now, and watched the boy he had hired tapping nails into the new sign over the door of his mother's old boardinghouse: THE GOLDEN RULE HOTEL, lettered in bright gilt with curling serifs.

  "Well, Lulu, you married a businessman."

  "I couldn't be prouder if you owned your own railroad."

  "Maybe someday I will. Wear a stovepipe hat and travel in a private car."

  "You don't regret your promise to me?"

  "Regret!" He spun her around, laid his other hand on her waist, and lifted her off her feet. "I gave up the word when I gave up scouting!"

  "Put me down, please, William."

  "What you doing, Will, guessing her weight?" This from a gray-bearded trapper in otter skins standing on the boardwalk.

  "Light as a feather!" he bellowed, and whirled her around, sending her skirt and petticoats flying.

  "William!"

  Roaring with laughter, he set her down gently on the boardwalk. She adjusted her clothes with a hurried glance around at the small crowd they had attracted. Her face was flushed and angry.

  "No luck, Rufe?" Will asked.

  The trapper paused with one moccasined foot on the hotel threshold and shook his head. He was carrying a bale of pelts slung over one shoulder. "Getting a fair market price out of Gunderson's like prying a Texas leech out of your behind. Beg pardon, Miz Cody. Sure am obliged to you for waiting on the rent, Will."

  "Take all the time you need."

  Louisa looked sharply at her new husband, but he was admiring the new sign.

  The Golden Rule had a new name but the same old black dirt in the damp corners where sow bugs dwelt, fluffy brown cobwebs hammocking from the ceilings, and yellow rivulets of calcified grease striping the black iron stove. Louisa hired a fifteen-year-old colored girl whose husband had been killed fighting in the 10th Cavalry, and together they scrubbed the windows and scoured the walls and polished the floors until the building glistened from attic to basement. They hung curtains and spread rugs over the dented floorboards, and when Will timidly ventured back inside after being chased out for the twelfth time by furious womanhood and a dust mop, he wandered from room to room with a handkerchief wrapped around his hand to avoid smearing the gleaming china doorknobs.

  Bookkeeping was her next big project, although she had had no training in it and thus was forced to develop her own system based on information obtained from local merchants who were only too glad to help out the caretaker of what they deemed Salt Creek's future in the face of peace and westward expansion. When after four weeks in business she learned that Will had yet to write down a single transaction, she tramped down to the mercantile and bought two large ledgers bound in brown buckram with brass corners and a bottle apiece of red and black ink and came back and cleared the roll top desk in Will's study of black powder and cartridge-loading paraphernalia and set to work to reconstruct the finances of the past month. She was lighting the lamp after two hours at this labor when Will came in carrying an armload of wood and dumped it into the coal scuttle next to the fireplace. Dust rolled out, settling unheeded over the figures neatly inked into the ruled columns.

  "Good news, Lulu! Dingle says he saw a team of surveyors working east of town this morning. You know what that means."

  "More guests to stay here free of charge, no doubt." She re-dipped her pen.

  "Means the railroad's coming just like we heard. When it gets here, we'll be turning guests away."

  "That's because by then you'll have given away all the rooms."

  "Now, Lulu."

  She slapped down the pen, spraying scarlet tadpoles across the creamy page. Dull fire glowed in her eyes. "Understand me, William," she said. "I think it admirable that you've invited your sisters to live here at no charge. Your Christian good fellowship in allowing every prairie rat for a hundred miles to come in and partake of the famous Cody hospitality without concern to his pocketbook is above criticism. I am certain they sing your praises around the campfire. But it's no way to run a business. In the past four weeks we've paid out more for food and room maintenance than your mother laid down for the entire building, and we've not taken in a Confederate dollar. Will, we're running out of money."

  "When the railroad comes—"

  "It will just bring more freeloaders faster. Soon we'll be applying for charity to carry on our good works. We certainly are not operating a hotel."

  "These people are my family and friends. What am I supposed to do, just up and turn them out?"

  "If your friends don't pay, yes. Your sisters can stay."

  "A man survives upon the goodwill of his friends. There's no telling when it might mean the difference between a close call and your fingers swinging from a thong around some buck's neck."

  She lowered her voice. "I've asked you not to speak of such things."

  "Sorry, Lulu. I forgot."

  "Anyway, those days are over. You promised me a conventional life."

  "I have no intention of going back on my word."

  "It would carry more conviction if you made an effort to look like a hotel keeper. That hair, and those clothes. Even the lowliest trapper puts on a dusty suit when he's in civilization."

  He glanced down at his buckskins. "I was dressed this way the day you married me. I didn't hear you complain then."

  "We weren't alone then. But if I'd thought it was permanent, I would have. Your hair is longer than mine."

  "If I cut it off now, everyone will think I'm afraid of having my scalp lifted."

  "Stop that! Stop talking like that!" Angry tears burned her cheeks. "I am tired of hearing about scalps and savages and horses and killing! Every time you come together with your horrible friends, that's all you talk about! Isn't it enough that I left my family and my friends in St. Louis and came out here to live with animals? Must I put up with your interminable horror stories as well?"

  Her speech broke into bitter sobs. They were standing very close now, and Will's arms went around her automatically and drew her face into his chest. "There, there, Louisa," his voice rumbled. It was as if he were soothing a skittish mare. Deep inside she felt a trickle of doubt, like the first rusty water entering a rain barrel from a gutter on the roof.

  On the surface they prospered. Advance men for the railroad came to compare sites and stayed at the hotel asking Will hundreds of questions about the terrain to the west and the Indian situation, then moved on, followed by surveyors and graders, their pockets full of eastern money. Behind them came men in suits and derbies to scout the high ground above the river for stores and restaurants. Will would register them and give the proceeds to Louisa, who would put it in the cash box and record the transaction in her ledgers. But when she went to take money out later for shopping or improvements, she would find less there than before she had put it in. Confronted, Will would shrug and say that he had used it to entertain his guests, that he had been meaning to tell
her but hadn't got around to it. She would scold him and he would drop his eyes and promise not to repeat the offense and the cycle would start all over. At the end of six months they owed every merchant in town and the bank was threatening to foreclose on a mortgage she hadn't known existed unless the couple either sold out or gave permission to appoint a business manager. Neither Will nor Louisa had ever heard the word "receivership" before, but its sibilant sound repelled them both.

  Coming up dawn in Leavenworth. Orange light slid between rows of new buildings, pushing ahead September shadows that chilled like ice water when they touched bare skin. Helen Cody, almost twenty, with Isaac's sturdy frame and her mother's erect bearing, saw Will to her door and paused on the threshold. He was nearly a foot taller than his sister now, broad across the chest and lean of hip, a long, hard board of a man who moved like clear water spilling over a bed of rocks. The sun at his back accentuated his massiveness. He was too big to keep indoors.

  "What I got for the hotel ought to stand her keep till I can send more," he said. "I'm obliged to you for putting her up, Nellie."

  "You never left any of us dry yet when you weren't dry yourself."

  He slid the brim of his slouch hat through his hands. "Reckon you think I'm not much of a husband, dumping her off on you this way."

  "I don't know what much of a husband is, Will. Pa was always off someplace in hiding or fighting secessionists."

  "I'll make it up to her when I get back."

  "How long will you be away this time?"

  "Long enough to shake six months of civilized living out of my hair. Melt off the tallow. I hear the railroad's hiring at Sauna."

  "Good luck, Will. Write when you can."

  He nodded and started to turn, stopped, glanced up at the windows on the second floor. "Tell her how it is with me, can you? Maybe coming from a woman she'll see."

  "She sees right enough."

  The door closed. He stood on the porch a moment, then stepped off and returned to the buckboard, putting on his hat.

  Junction City, Kansas. Cowhands and railroad rowdies and cavalrymen and buffalo runners trailing clouds of flies. Fresh lumber and beer and manure, growth smells. The drunk at the back table in one of the busier saloons slumped in dusty buckskins, fighting the weight of his eyelids, his cards leaning in his clumsy left hand and almost exposing their faces.