by Judd Cole
Hobert sneered. “Don’t surprise me none. If you ever shot a man, it’d be in the back.”
A drunk cowboy, eager to liven things up with some gunplay, unbuckled his gun belt and placed the rig on the table near Bill. “There’s six beans in the wheel,” he said.
“That’s called a gun,” Hobert told Bill. “A man wears one all the time. Strap it on, mouthpiece.”
“Don’t think I will,” Bill told him, and Josh alone knew why: Hickok was not eager to reveal his true identity, not in this den of potential killers. Not even to kill low-life pond scum like Hobert. Too, it would ruin Bill’s useful cover as Liam O’Brien.
“It’s past choosin’, mister! Either you strap on that iron, or I’ll cut you down where you sit!”
Trapped, Bill shrugged, stood up, and did as told. “I’ll give it a try,” he said uncertainly. “Who goes first? Do we draw straws?”
This drew a contemptuous laugh throughout the saloon. Hobert snorted.
“I won’t go for my gun until you make your play,” the tough assured him. “Ladies first.”
Bill nodded as if that sounded fair to him. Josh and Gladstone drew out of the line of fire.
Josh saw Bill discreetly glance into the chamber, making sure there was a bullet under the hammer. He strapped on the belt, fumbling a bit as if unused to the task.
“Well?” Hobert demanded. “The hell you waitin’ on, Christmas? You damned coward, I’ll . . . Jee-zus!”
One moment Hickok’s hand dangled two feet from the holster; the next, a six-shooter filled his fist with steel-blue authority. No one saw any movement—not even a blur.
“Just a dry run,” Bill apologized politely. He holstered the weapon again. “You ready now?”
“Jeezus,” Hobert said again, scared sober now. He ran the tip of his tongue over his lips. “I—uhh, that is to say, I’m—well, now that I think on it, Mister O’Brien, mayhap I was a mite quick to rise up on my hind legs. I just thought I saw a marked card, is all.”
“Mistakes happen,” Bill conceded.
“Why Christ!” said the bar dog suddenly, leaning over the deal counter to stare closer at Bill. “Ain’t that Bill Hickok?”
“Bernie,” said another man, “you been grazing locoweed? If that was Bill Hickok, Mister Hobert would already be shoveling coal in hell. It ain’t Hickok’s way to clear his holster without shooting.”
“’Sides,” someone else tossed in, “Hickok wouldn’t be caught dead in them filthy workin’ rags—no offense, O’Brien. Hickok’s a prissy when it comes to clothes, almost womanish.”
“That’s right,” Josh said, biting his lip to keep from laughing as Bill frowned. “Wild Bill is a bit of a peacock.”
“Does this mean I win the gunfight?” Bill said uncertainly, and the room exploded in laughter.
Chapter Ten
“Lads!” shouted Taffy Blackford. “An honest pagan is better than a bad Catholic! And by the Lord Harry, I’m an honest pagan! I live on bachelor’s fare: bread and cheese and kisses, aye!”
The men riding on the railroad flatcar exploded with laughter at Blackford’s foolish antics. Taffy was entertaining and likable, a redheaded Welshman full of youthful vitality. Men like Taffy were welcome on railroad labor crews. They made a long work shift pass quicker and the time off more enjoyable.
The birds were still celebrating sunup when the work train—crowded with new hirelings—pulled out of Abilene at the first dull, leaden light of dawn. By now it had turned into a fine day, cool and clear, the sky a deep, bottomless blue like a gas flame.
Nonetheless, Josh noticed how Wild Bill—still Liam O’Brien to their fellow workers—kept his worried eyes focused in the distance. These men were vulnerable because work trains were made up of just a locomotive and tender, one boxcar for animals, and an open flatcar for the men. And some of the men were drunk as Davy’s saw.
“Lads!” Taffy called out. “Always top an ugly woman in the dark. For you see, a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse!”
More laughter, whistles, and cheers. A bottle of cheap mash made the rounds. Even Josh took a nip to offset the morning chill.
“It just doesn’t seem right,” Josh remarked to Bill, “that two men can stop an entire railroad.”
“Grass can push a stone over,” Bill reminded him. “It just needs time, is all.”
Bill was under increasing pressure from Pinkerton. The Kansas-Pacific, delayed almost two months now by the sniper, was on the verge of giving this new line up as a bad job.
“Drink life to the lees, boys!” Taffy roared out. “Eat the whole of the meat and none of the parsley! Give over fretting, stout lads! There’s whiskey to be drunk, women to be had, songs to be sung!”
The train rumbled on toward end-of-track, through night-frosted meadows of timothy and clover. As the day warmed up, Josh could see the first mud daubers active in the puddles beside the tracks.
Bill’s steady, gunmetal gaze never left the distant terrain.
“Think they’re out there this early?” Josh asked him.
Wild Bill lifted one shoulder. “How long is a piece of string? Damned if I know.”
Taffy was still at it. He accepted the bottle from another man and hoisted it high in a toast.
“More power to your elbow, lads!”
Taffy drank a sweeping-deep slug.
“Aye, that’s medicine! Boys, these temperance biddies say them who drink whiskey will think whiskey! But that’s cow plop! I say them who drink water will think water!”
Everyone laughed, including Josh and Bill.
“He’s a caution,” Josh said.
“His mouth runs like a whippoorwill’s ass,” Bill replied. “But the fellow is entertaining. And clowns like him are generally hard workers, too.”
And so it went as the work train rolled closer to end-of-track. About fifteen minutes from their destination, Josh saw Bill abruptly stiffen like a hound on point.
Later, when it was too late, Bill would explain to Josh that he had glimpsed a brief glint—as if a rifle scope had momentarily reflected sunlight.
“Everybody cover down!” Wild Bill roared out. “Cover down now, damnit!”
But no one heeded his warning in time. O’Brien was an aloof stranger to them; who the hell was he to give orders? Besides, many of the men were drunk and failed to heed the urgency in his tone.
Josh heard a thuck sound like a rock punching into mud. The man next to him keeled over backwards, blood blossoming from his chest.
Thuck! A second man tumbled off the flatcar and hit the ground like a parcel of bouncing rags.
Thuck! And Taffy Blackford grunted hard when his breastbone shattered.
The three bullets arrived only a second or two apart. Because of the clattering noise of the train, no one ever heard the gunshots. The frightened men finally pressed down as flat as possible. With good targets thus eliminated, the sniping ended, at least for now.
Nonetheless, Wild Bill rushed forward, scrambled over the tender, and told the engineer to fire his boilers to full pressure. The faster they could roll, the quicker they’d be out of effective range.
Two men, Josh realized, were already stone dead. And Taffy Blackford lay at death’s threshold by the time Bill made it back.
“Don’t look so sad, boys,” the game Welshman managed to say, blood and spittle frothing pink on his lips. “The journey . . . the journey is long, but this world isn’t the end. Not on your Nellie! It’s . . . it’s just a station stop.”
Josh, his face pale as moonstone, watched death shudders seize the redhead.
“I only joked about b-b-being a pa-pagan,” he managed. “I’ll suh-suh-see you all in pa-paradise!”
The final moments were gut-wrenching for all who witnessed it. Taffy choked in his own blood and called pitifully for his mother. Then, with a final violent shudder, his head rolled to one side, and he gave up the ghost.
The death stunned every man to silence, including Bill. Josh had read
a hundred deaths described in dime novels, but never one like this. It left him feeling as if he’d been drop-kicked in the belly.
“It’s ’Bama Jones,” Wild Bill said, as if speaking to convince himself. Josh had never seen Bill look as helpless, angry, and frustrated as he did right now.
“Damnit, kid,” Bill added. “I’m quitting the Pinkerton Agency.”
But Bill took one last, long look at the dead Welshman. Then he added in a tone of willful determination, “After I air out that scum-sucking Jones.”
Not surprisingly, the work train returned—after dark—to Abilene with many of the new workers onboard. Most had seen enough and had quit the same day. But Wild Bill and Josh sprang their horses from the boxcar and remained behind. For Hickok had decided on a nighttime tracking mission.
“Darkness,” he informed Josh, “is the only damn defense we have against shooters like ’Bama. Even that may not be enough. Here, kid. Gop some of this on your face.”
Josh followed Bill’s lead and smeared his face with mud to cut reflection.
“I’m going to dog those bastards from now on,” Bill vowed. “Stay on them like ugly on a buzzard. They’ve had it too easy, just plinking at targets of opportunity. Let’s see if they can eat what they dish out.”
“My editor thinks this is a great story,” Josh said. “Newspaper circulation is up since I started covering you. But after what I saw today, I’d rather sling hash for a cow outfit.”
“You were hungry for glory,” Bill reminded him, “when you first looked me up in Denver. Sounds like you’ve got a belly full of it now.”
“Yeah,” Josh agreed. “No glory in it. Just coldblooded murder.”
It didn’t take long, searching under the light of a star-spangled sky, to find the exact spot where ’Bama and his companion had set up their deadly ambush camp atop a low rise.
A blind man could have followed the ruts of the big bone wagon they’d left in. It bore due south, away from the KP tracks.
“Following them ain’t the hard work,” Bill commented. “Getting close to them is the tricky part. Well, at least we seem to’ve lost Calamity Jane for a while. That’s almost worth getting killed for.”
On and on the two men trekked while the stars thickened and the moon crept toward its zenith. They kept their horses to a canter, which Bill favored because they made good time but spared the animals.
Another hour passed. They rode into a low, marshy swale, the horses’ hooves making slow sucking noises. As they rode out and crested a low ridgeline, Bill suddenly reined in.
“Jesus! Watch your skyline,” Bill warned tensely, swinging out of the saddle. “There they are. Back the horses up.”
The two men retreated back behind the ridge and hobbled their mounts foreleg to rear with strips of rawhide.
“We go in slow,” Bill told Josh. “It looks deserted, but that could be a lure. Stay well behind me, stay low, and only move when I give the high sign. Stop when I signal. Kid, for Christ sakes, don’t play the hero. Don’t forget that ’Bama’s got a trick-shooter with him. These boys don’t throw lead, they aim it.”
Josh nodded, trying to ignore the ball of ice in his belly. Bill palmed both cylinders to check his loads. Then he went back over the ridge, low-crawling this time.
Josh kept Bill’s boot heels in sight, crawling only when Bill waved him on. Ants and mosquitoes bit at Josh’s skin, gnats plagued his eyes to tears. Each yard forward made Josh recall how this might be a trick—how they might be in a gun sight even now.
He poured sweat, and the cold night wind cooled him to chills. Finally Bill waved him off, and Josh waited for all hell to break loose as Bill moved on in. The bone wagon loomed big in the moonlight, the oxen tethered nearby and taking off the grass.
Finally, after an interminable wait, Josh heard Bill cuss out loud.
“Well, shit! C’mon in, Longfellow. They’ve flown the coop.”
The big wagon, bones gleaming a dull white in the bed, had been deserted. The ashes of a small campfire still gave scant heat, but no light. Bill estimated the two men had left perhaps two to three hours ago.
“There’s two of them, all right,” he confirmed, quickly reading the signs. “You can see where they cut two horses loose from the wagon’s tailgate. And look—they rode due east. Straight toward Abilene.”
“Look,” Josh said, pointing toward the wagon seat. “They left something.”
It was a leather musette bag, tied closed with a rawhide whang. Bill untied it, reached inside, then cursed violently and leaped backward, almost knocking Josh down. Josh saw the vicious fangs of a three-foot-long rattlesnake sink deep into Bill’s right hand. The reptile was so close Josh could clearly see the green spackles on its back.
Bill drew his left-side Colt, shot the snake off his hand, and had his case knife out in seconds.
“Bastards bamboozled me good, kid,” he said, grimacing in pain. “Old Indian trick. See how they cut the rattle off?”
“Jesus,” Josh said. “Jesus, Bill! What should I do?”
But Hickok remained calm and worked quickly Never flinching, he cut two deep slices in a cross shape over the fang marks. Then Bill sucked and spit several times, spewing the venomous blood from his mouth.
When Josh almost got sick to his stomach and had to sit down, Hickok grinned at him in the moonlight. He spit more blood and poison out. Then he said, “Just be glad it didn’t bite me on the ass, kid, or you’d be doing this for me.”
Bill took the bottle of Old Taylor from a saddle pocket, washed out the wound, then ripped a strip from his shirt and bound it.
“I might run a fever,” he explained, “but I got most of the venom out in time. I could taste that nasty crap.”
Bill stared in the direction of Abilene, his face pensive.
“That town’s an old whore that keeps calling me back,” he said softly. “And she definitely means to kill me.”
Bill shook off his mood and walked close to the team, shooting each ox in the head. Then he said briskly, “C’mon, kid. Lets torch that damn wagon. At least we’ll destroy their cover and make it harder for them to hide.”
“Yeah, but then what?”
“Whad’ja think? We dust our hocks back to Abilene and hunt those two dry-gulchers out, that’s what. I want them dead, kid. Dead as last Christmas.”
Chapter Eleven
“Hows ’at, boys?” Ansel Logan demanded, slapping down a stack of freshly printed handbills onto the raw-wood bar of the Alamo Saloon. “Ol’ Hickok flummoxed everybody at first. But he won’t be laughing up his sleeve for long.”
’Bama Jones and the bounty hunter named Jay Hobert each picked up one of the flyers.
NOTICE!!! TO ALL WHO WOULD LIKE TO BE $10,000 RICHER!!! JAMES BUTLER “WILD BILL” HICKOK IS PRESENTLY IN THE ABILENE AREA, MINUS HIS LONG HAIR AND MUSTACHE.
“Christ Jesus!”
Hobert knuckled his shot glass aside and aimed a popeyed stare at the sketch of Hickok. It was a good likeness made from a popular portrait of him in Harpers Weekly. But it left off the distinctive long hair and mustache.
“You sure this is Hickok?” Hobert demanded.
“Sure as the Lord made Moses,” Logan replied. “’Bama recognized him this morning on the work train.”
“Well, I’ll go to hell,” Hobert said wonderingly. “I played poker with that son of a bitch yestiddy! I never once twigged his game.”
“Hickok,” ’Bama declared, his mouth full of boiled egg, “is a fox-eared bastard, all right. Shiftier than a creased buck.”
“Well, give over fretting, porky,” Logan said. “These handbills will settle his hash. I’m posting ’em all over Abilene. He’ll wish he’d died as a child.”
“Bill Goddamn Hickok,” Hobert repeated, still staring at the black-ink likeness. “Ten thousand dollars, three feet away from me all night, and me just sittin’ on my prat.”
Hobert filled his glass with rye, picked it up between thumb and forefinger, and tossed it b
ack. He slammed the glass back down. His eyes went dark with brooding.
“Can you hold off a bit on postin’ them notices?” he asked.
Logan shook his head. “Sorry. First come, best served.”
“Well, then, you can post all the notices you please,” Hobert told his two new drinking companions. “But I mean to put paid to it first.”
“Have at it,” Logan said. “I could use the money myself. But mainly I just want the bastard cold— cold as a fish on ice, if you take my drift.”
Logan was too preoccupied with other matters to care about competing for the first shot at Hickok. He was already making plenty from the Santa Fe Railroad. And Kristen McCoy’s pure white skin had become an obsession with him since that damned guttersnipe brother of hers had laid Logan’s skull open with a rock. The tender swelling beside his ear had just begun to recede.
But Logan didn’t scare off that easy. Not where fine woman flesh like the McCoy gal was the prize.
’Bama finished his sixth boiled egg, then tied into a bowl of pickled pig’s feet.
“Finish feedin’ your face,” Logan told the sniper. “Then we’ll plaster up these notices. Hickok could be coming back any time now. He weren’t on the work train when it come back to town. I checked.”
“In that case,” Hobert said, flipping a silver dollar onto the bar to cover four drinks, “I’ll be heading outside to take up a good position. The man who means to plug Hickok first will have to make his play quick.”
The word about Bill Hickok’s new disguise spread through Abilene like grease through a goose. Bill and Josh, exhausted after their night scout west of town, emerged from the hotel about an hour before sundown.
Immediately, they spotted one of the handbills on the front of the mercantile store.
“Ho-ly smoke!” Josh exclaimed. “There must be a hundred of ’em up!”
But Wild Bill merely shrugged, admiring the likeness.
“Jesus, I’m a handsome man,” he complimented himself.
“Want me to rip ’em down?”
Bill shook his head. “Nah, don’t bother. Won’t help now.”
