by Judd Cole
It snapped with a decisive crack, twisting off to one side and falling away. The sudden loss of forward power caught the girl by surprise. Even as the runaway wagon lurched slower, she went flying from the box in a forward somersault.
The train ground to a halt a few hundred yards farther on. Bill and Josh leaped down and trotted back to the disabled wagon.
Abruptly, Bill laughed so hard he had to punch his thigh.
“Jesus, Longfellow, look! She landed smack in a buffalo wallow!”
Josh goggled as the pretty blonde—a faded blue anchor-print dress clinging to her underweight frame—pulled herself out of the slimy, smelly muck.
“You looking for the Pacific Ocean, sailor?” Bill greeted her, still chuckling. “Or the Atlantic?”
“You go to hell!” she fired back, her cornflower-blue eyes smoky with anger. Josh saw now that she was definitely a woman, though hardly older than he.
“We was headed straight for Abilene until you stopped us, mister!” she added, glowering at Hickok.
“You leave my sister alone!” shouted a little shirttail brat who couldn’t have been more than seven years old. “You damned ignorant yahoos!” the boy added defiantly, probably imitating his pa.
“Simmer down, alla you,” Bill said, trying to keep a straight face. “You would’ve killed yourselves trying to make Abilene in that rig, dumpling. The hell you doing running all over Robin Hood’s barn without a team?”
Josh had risked the hostile stares of the children to peek into the bed of the wagon. To his considerable surprise, the bed was crowded with seedling trees. Their roots had been packed in dirt and wrapped with layers of damp burlap.
“My name is Kristen McCoy,” she informed Bill with fractured dignity, swiping gobs of mud from her dress. “The McCoys of Fort Wayne, Indiana. My father, may he rest in peace, had the finest fruit orchards in the state. We came west to file a homestead. My father intends—intended—to introduce the first fruit trees on the Great Plains. But he drowned when we forded the Arkansas River.”
“And your ma?” Bill asked.
“She died of childbed fever after my sister Jenny was born.”
Hearing all this, the mirth left Bill’s face. He looked at these orphans, noticing how thin and slat-ribbed they were. The girl, too. They’d all been through some hard slogging lately.
“What about your team?” Josh put in.
Fire sparked in Kristen’s big, wing-shaped eyes. “A litter of prairie rats stole them.”
“So you left a prosperous business in Indiana to roost out here?” Bill asked.
“My pa had him a vision,” she replied defiantly. “A vision of fruit orchards out west. And come hell or high water, I mean to make it come true.”
Bill shook his head. She was billy-goat stubborn and brash as an Army mule.
“Out here, you’ll get hell and high water, missy,” he promised her. “I advise you to book passage back home.”
Kristen’s nostrils flared. “Advise your mother to teach you some manners, mister! Nobody asked for your advice. You ain’t my husband.”
“Give me a couple minutes,” Bill boasted. “I just met you.”
“You go to hell!” she repeated. “And dream on! Ten years of begging wouldn’t get me to the altar with you.”
“The marriage bed is far enough for me,” Bill assured her. A second later Josh heard the decisive whap when she slapped Hickok hard—so hard his cigar flew three feet away.
Bill grinned, rubbing his sore cheek, as the young woman turned her back on him and stomped away.
“Miss?” called out a grinning brakeman. “We’ll gladly give you a ride to Abilene. You can hire a team and come back for your wagon. It should be safe out here for a bit.”
“Thank you,” she replied stiffly. “We appreciate that. But please keep this awful, unmannerly brute with the fancy guns”—she pointed at Wild Bill—“far away from me.”
“Yessum. He’s a bad one, all right.”
The brakeman winked at Bill, and both men grinned on the sly.
Now, thought Josh jealously, Bill’s got him a plaything in Abilene. Or thinks he has—this one doesn’t seem too damned charmed by him. But she gave me a nice smile.
Bill was still watching Miss Kristen McCoy of Fort Wayne, Indiana, as she rounded up her siblings. Hickok’s sly grin irritated Josh.
“Hey, Bill?”
“Hey what?”
“C. J.,” Josh said softly.
Hickok’s grin was gone in a heartbeat. He went white as new gypsum, and Josh saw the panic light in his eyes. The legend of the West suddenly looked helpless and scared.
“Christ,” Bill said hoarsely. “Where is she?”
“Just keeping you on your toes,” Josh replied, heading back toward the train. Now he was wearing a sly grin of his own.
Chapter Four
Martha “Calamity Jane” Burke watched, jealous bile rising in her throat, while the one and only love of her young life made a damned fool of himself.
It was soft brained enough, Jane told herself, that Wild Bill would want to spend time in any town. She hated all of them, full of blue-nosed biddies and spineless, soft-bellied clerks. But why in Sam Hill would Wild Bill Hickok—one of the few men out here with a real set on him—mingle with all these mealy-mouthed peckerwoods? And in this raggedy-assed hole full of thieves and back shooters?
“Well anyhow,” she informed the team of bays filling the traces of her buckboard. “That damned little blond hussy best not come between this dog and her meat!”
The weathered sideboards of Jane’s rig advertised DOYLE’S HOP BITTERS: THE INVALID’S ONLY FRIEND AND HOPE! The conveyance sat just inside the narrow, shadowed mouth of a north-south cross alley. It debouched onto Texas Street, the main thoroughfare in drab but bustling Abilene.
By craning her leathery and sunburned neck, Jane had a good view of the red-brick train station just east of town. The diamond stack of a newly arrived locomotive still belched smoke and sparks; hissing steam billowed from the escape valves even as the passengers detrained.
“Bill, you’re fighting your destiny, honey,” Jane said.
Our destiny, she corrected herself. Our shared destiny.
Jane turned her right hand palm up and smiled as she stared at the long, curving line that bisected the pudgy palm. She recalled, with stomach-tingling pleasure, the words of that ancient bruja down in Old El Paso: The dangerous man you love is meant to be yours alone. But the road to his heart will be long, lonely, and littered with bones.
“And blondes,” Jane spat out, staring at the mud-smeared woman and the grimy urchins clinging to her. Nose stuck in the air like she was something. But the little prissy bitch looked like she had been rolling in a pigpen. Bill usually dallied with rich women and famous actresses and such. This one wasn’t good enough to lace his boots.
Bill had not actually come near the woman since they both detrained. But Jane saw him eye-groping her, saw him giving young Joshua several gleaming yaller boys—looked like maybe forty dollars or so, la!—and Josh taking them to the woman.
Then Jane watched the two men lead their horses from a boxcar and aim for the livery stable.
“Hep!” Jane shouted to her team, slapping their glossy rumps with the reins. “Hep, hep!”
She drove in the opposite direction. Jane was banned from spending the night in most western towns. She had a slight tendency, once snockered, to liven things up with curses and bullets. But she had already located an excellent campsite near a spring-fed rill about three miles from town.
No one had told her Hickok would be returning to Abilene. But the fiddle-footed frontiersman had a way of showing up wherever the worst trouble reared its head. Sometimes he became the worst trouble.
And, of course, wherever Bill was in bad trouble, Jane made it a point to be near him. She had sent more than one yellow-bellied dry-gulcher to his grave for trying to put the quietus on Bill.
Plenty more would be trying. He
ll’s a-poppin hereabouts, Jane realized. She had seen reward notices everywhere, plastered up by the Kansas-Pacific Railroad. They solicited “any information whatsoever concerning the recent killings of KP employees in the Abilene area.”
Calamity Jane’s buckboard shuddered hard in the ruts. Abilene had changed little since the last time she was here. This boomtown had never bothered with fancy false fronts. Most of the buildings were just rough cottonwood logs chinked with mud. There stood the Alamo Saloon, where Bill had “held office” while sheriff.
And there, two doors away, stood the Drover’s Cottage.
Seeing it, Jane shouted, “Haw!” to her team. For an idea had just occurred to her. One that tugged her fleshy lips into a smile.
Why in tarnal hell, she reasoned, should Bill get off scot-free just because she loved him? That randy son of a bitch needed cold water tossed on him!
The Drover’s Cottage was a former saloon that had evolved into a rude hotel by adding a few small rooms, a board canopy, and duckboards out front to lure ladies across all the mud. Wild Bill would probably take a room there. Why not, Jane thought as a sly grin divided her homely face, have a little welcome ready for His Nibs, the lady slayer?
“Hey, bub! Over here!”
Jane whistled to a little boy passing by on the boardwalk, kicking an Arbuckle’s coffee can. “Kid! Wanna make two bits real quick?”
The kid let his can roll into the street. But he hung fire when he saw how coyote ugly the woman was. And there was a huge .44 tucked into her sash.
“Four bits, you little rat!” Jane gave in.
“You bet, lady!”
“C’mere, then. I want you to take something to the Drover’s Cottage for me.”
The livery barn in Abilene was just as Bill recalled it except for a new stone water trough. The old hostler was straight out of Genesis. Bill and Josh found him in the tack room, pounding caulks into horseshoes.
“You ain’t dead yet, Jeddiah?” Bill greeted the old-timer.
Old Jed squinted in the grainy light, his rheumy eyes slow to recognize the new arrivals.
“Well cuss my coup! Bill Goldang Hickok! You ain’t dead yet neither, gunman?”
“I’m working on it, dad. Got room for two more critters?”
“Only if you’ll touch me for luck, Bill.”
Bill gave the codger a hearty grip. Then Hickok and Josh slipped their horses’ bits and loosed the cinches, tossing the saddles onto racks in the tack room. They hung their bridles nearby on cans nailed to the wall.
Meantime, Old Jed gnawed a corner off his plug, got it juicing good, then cheeked his cud. He was too old to offer help when younger bucks were willing to work.
“This town got a sheriff now?” Bill asked.
“Ah-huh. One with a tinhorn badge and a cheese spine to match. As usual, he’s off to ‘court’ in Newton. Got him a whore over that way, or so you’ll hear folks say.”
“He crooked or yellow?”
“Both, you ask me. But nobody ever does.”
Josh watched the old man snap his quirt at a fly and squash it dead.
“Kiss for ya!” Jed gloated. “Bill ain’t the only one can aim.”
The two men led their horses into stalls and forked in some clean hay. Bill grabbed the grain scoop and helped himself, filling a nose bag for Fire-away.
“We’ll want them both curried and rubbed down every day,” Bill told the old man. “If the weather holds good, turn them out nights into the paddock.”
Bill flipped the hostler a quarter eagle. “That suit you, old roadster?”
Jed bit the coin and then grinned, flashing yellow nubbins of teeth. “Right down to the ground!”
As the two men were leaving, Jed called out behind them, “Keep an eye on your back trail, Billy! This rat’s nest has got lots worser since the days of fellas like you and Tom Smith.”
Big, red-headed, hard-fisted Tom Smith was the first man to clean up Abilene and enforce a new no-gun law. But two homesteaders finally murdered him, and Wild Bill was hired in his place. “Sure glad to see you,” Wild Bill would greet the cowboys. “But hand over those guns.” Nor did Bill debate the order—any man who balked promptly got shot.
“For nine months I was the star-man around here,” Bill boasted to Josh. “Hundreds of thousands in cold cash changed hands. But there wasn’t one holdup on my watch. And I did the only shooting.”
“I know,” Josh said. “But they’ve obviously scrapped that gun law.” Josh glanced all around. “Everybody’s armed to the teeth. Even half the women.”
But clearly Bill was aware of that. He’d kept his black, broad-brimmed hat pulled low to cover his face. And the long gray duster Bill wore to protect his suit also hid his distinctive Colts.
Josh saw Bill watching everything and everyone from the corners of his eyes like a payroll guard. At one point Bill stopped to look over a deserted shack near the livery.
“Let’s go visit the Western Union,” Bill said, hitching his shell belt. “That shack inspires me, Longfellow. We’ll lay a little diversion trap for the enemy.”
Their boot heels knocked on the boardwalk, reminding Josh of a funeral march. Cowboys were in evidence everywhere, lounging in small groups and insulting one another with rough fondness. Josh noticed that woolly angora chaps, so common up in Montana, were replaced by the flat rawhide of warmer ranges. So far, no one seemed to recognize Hickok.
Josh and Bill turned quietly through a raw plank door into a cramped cubbyhole office. A timid little bald-headed man, wearing green eye-shades and a pair of sleeve garters, sat behind a deal counter recording an incoming message as a sounder tapped it out.
He hadn’t heard anyone enter. He finished writing. Then he glanced up and spotted Hickok watching him from level, gunmetal eyes.
“Jesus, mister!”
The clerk started violently, his hands fluttering like nervous birds. “You scared the snot outta me!”
“Sorry,” Bill told him insincerely. “Just want to send a telegram to Denver.”
“Yessir. Denver it is.”
Josh watched Bill fill out the message-transmission form.
“No code?” Josh said low.
Bill shook his head. “Not this time.”
ALLAN: I’M AVOIDING THE HOTEL IN ABILENE. TOO DANGEROUS. I’M STAYING IN A DESERTED SHACK BY THE FEED STABLE.
W. B. H.
But the W. B. H. signature, Josh knew, was a code in itself. It told Pinkerton to disregard the message. All legitimate messages Bill signed with a solitary H.
“We can’t four-flush ’em forever,” Bill told Josh after they’d left the telegraph office. “But maybe we can bluff long enough to make ’em show their hand. Take a room at the Drover’s Cottage,” he added. “Better use a summer name. All the rooms are ground floor. But tell the clerk you require a window for fresh air. That’ll be my door. Anybody asks for your story, launder it.”
Josh nodded and carried out the orders. Luck was with him, and the clerk put him in the back room, its single sash window opening onto an empty lot. It was easy for Bill to step lithely over the sash without being spotted.
“I’ll flip you for the bed, kid,” Bill said, glancing dubiously at the dingy room with its fly-specked window. There was a threadbare, rose-patterned carpet, a washstand with an enameled pitcher and bowl, a beat-up highboy, and two ladderback chairs, badly scarred from spurs.
“Floor might be safer,” Bill added, noticing that the legs of the iron bedstead had been set in bowls of coal oil to keep off the bedbugs.
“You seen him yet?” Josh asked.
“Seen who?”
“The sniper.”
“Never mind,” Bill said. “The real question with him is, has he seen me?”
Three quick raps at the door killed the conversation.
“Hotel clerk, Mr. Croft. You have a message.”
Croft was the name Josh signed on the register. Bill tapped Josh’s shoulder and mouthed the words get your gun ready.
Then Hickok faded back into the shadowed corner to the left of the door.
Josh slid out his pistol, thumbed back the hammer, made sure there was a cartridge in the chamber. Then he eased open the door a crack until he saw the bushy muttonchops of the desk clerk.
“Sir? Some little kid just brought this in. Said to give it to the young fellow with . . . ahh, with the cute little dimples, sir, were his words.”
Josh flushed and accepted a folded note and a bottle of Old Taylor bourbon from the grinning clerk.
Josh banged the door shut. Bill stared at the bottle in the kid’s hand. He snatched the note from Josh and read it aloud.
“‘Some of the toughest men run from what they need most. That skinny little blonde is just a snack, Wild Bill.’”
Bill looked at Josh. “It’s signed ‘A Full Meal.’”
“Man alive, Bill! She’s found us!”
Hickok stood still as a pillar of salt, watching Josh and smoothing his mustache with one finger. Suddenly Bill laughed.
“Good one, kid! Jee-zus, you had me going there for a minute. Gimme that bottle, wouldja? ’Preciate it.”
“Bill, it’s her. I didn’t do this, I swear!”
“Look, wiseass, the joke’s gone far enough.”
But Josh had crossed to the open window. A little boy in patched jeans was visible, cutting catty-corner across the empty lot toward Silver Street. Josh whistled the kid back.
“Hey, bub? Did I tell you to bring this bottle and note to the hotel?”
The kid’s freckled face hovered just above the sash. “Nuh-un. A woman did.”
Bill paled and stepped out of the shadows. “Ugly woman?” he pressed.
The kid nodded vigorously. “Stinky one, too, mister. Phew!”
Josh shooed the kid away. Bill smacked his forehead and groaned like a soul in torment. Then he handed one of his Colts to Josh.
“Oh, Christ, Longfellow! Will that woman hound me even to hell? Damnit all, just shoot me now! Please, kid, take pity and shoot me!”
Chapter Five
