Protecting Hickok

by Bill Brooks

  Bangs had given him a hundred dollars cash money for expenses, a dossier on James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok, and instructions on how and when to stay in contact with the home office to file reports.

  “Keep good record of your expenses,” Bangs said. “Allan’s a real stickler.”

  Then, when he was set to go, Bangs said, “I’m assuming you carry a pistol,” and Teddy showed him the double action Colt Lightning, with its bird’s head grips, he’d bought in Abilene—just like the one old John Sears carried, but without the same history to it as old John’s had.

  Bangs smiled and said, “Good. Let’s pray you’ll not have to employ it.”

  “Employ it?” Teddy said. John would have laughed his ass off and probably said that the only thing that would be getting employed if he pulled his gun would be the undertaker.

  The train would take him first to Denver, where he’d switch and take one up to Cheyenne, a place he heard, now that Abilene had been tamed, was about the wickedest place a man could spill some blood—his own or somebody else’s.

  He couldn’t do any good in this place, he told himself; he might just as well go back out there to that country where it felt like he’d left his soul.

  An hour outside of Chicago it started feeling a lot like freedom again, and he watched out the window as the shadow of the train moved across empty harvest fields as though it were chasing the sun. And he liked the feeling it gave him.

  Chapter 4

  Colorado Charley Utter felt fateful the day he met Wild Bill. Charley’s wife had sent him atop the roof to shovel snow, afraid the early autumn storm would cave in the ceilings and kill her and the children. She was a nervous woman to begin with, and took on a regular basis Doc Johnson’s Bitters, which always left her a little more listless than Charley would have liked on certain occasions when he was feeling most romantic. Such was the case when she sent him up on the roof to shovel snow.

  “Heights make me nervous,” he said halfway up the ladder. But she held no compassion in her glazed eyes.

  “Would you have the roof cave in and kill us all in our beds?”

  “No dear.”

  It was while shoveling and looking off toward Pike’s Peak and thinking of the gold that had at one time been discovered up there that a hansom pulled up out front of Charley’s Denver house. He heard the horses snort and saw emerging from within the cab a rather tall, handsome cuss with ringlets of russet hair falling from under his big sombrero. This feller wore a fur cap and a cape and checkered trousers stuffed down inside his boots. Charley had paused to catch his breath anyway—forgetting how hard real work could be, and how heavy the first snow always was.

  “Howdy,” he called down to the stranger.

  The man looked around, and Charley noticed that he right away let one of his hands go under his woolen coat, where Charley suspected there might be a pistol or three.

  “Up here,” Charley said, and the feller looked up, shading his eyes with his free hand—the one not going under his coat.

  “What are you doing on the roof, there?” the feller said.

  “Shoveling snow off it so it don’t cave in and kill my family.”

  “You reckon it might?”

  “No, but my wife does.”

  The feller looked around, then back up. “She must be the nervous type,” the feller said.

  Charley knew right away he and this feller had some common ways of thinking about life and those in it. “Might I ask your business, sir?”

  “You might. I’m looking for one Colorado Charley Utter. I heard this is his house.”

  “Might I ask why you’d be looking for him?”

  “Might you be him?”

  “I might be if I knew the reason you’re looking for him. Or I might not be.”

  “I reckon you are him or you wouldn’t be up on that roof shoveling snow down off it to keep your kin from getting killed by the weight.”

  Charley climbed down, and the feller stuck forth his hand and said, “Name’s Hickok. James Butler, but most call me Wild Bill. You ever heard of me?”

  “I’d be the only one in this country that hadn’t and a liar if I was to say no.”

  “I’ve heard of you too. I heard you were an enterprising fellow.”

  “I don’t like grass to grow under my feet, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I don’t either. You a drinking man?” And when Charley acknowledged that he was, Bill invited him to take a drink or three with him at the nearest, nicest saloon.

  “It’s not so much I’m particular about my whiskey as I am where I swally it,” Bill said.

  “I have been known to hold a particular notion or two myself,” Charley replied, before going in the house to tell his wife he was off to the Rocky Mountain Oyster Club with one Wild Bill Hickok himself.

  “He’s a thoroughly dangerous sort,” she said. “You be careful, Charley.”

  “Oh,” said he, giving her a kiss on the cheek. “I’d never put myself in harm’s way for fear of missing your sweet warmth in my bed at night. I’m feeling kinda tangy, if you must know.”

  She blushed at such bold talk but took no real offense when Charley patted her haunch through the many folds of her skirts.

  “I shall be back,” he said with a wink. “I hope you’re feeling a bit tangy too.”

  So that’s how they became pards—deciding they’d take a wagon train of adventurers up to Cheyenne before winter set in hard. And then when spring broke, take ’em on up to Deadwood, where they could all make their fortunes in the goldfields. Them that didn’t get shot or stabbed in card games, kilt over some prostitute, had their heads bashed in for their poke or wagon, or got themselves scalped by the Indians Custer and his bunch failed to corral.

  Charley was a natural organizer with a good business sense, the way Bill heard it. And of course having a chap with Wild Bill’s reputation signed on for protection would naturally make the pilgrims feel safe. Some might even feel safe enough to take a wife or a consort of the feminine variety along for company in a place that was likely not to have many decent free women available to them.

  After several hours of coming to agreements on exactly how and when they’d form the intended wagon train, how much they’d charge, and how long it would take getting from Denver to Cheyenne—considering the possible vagaries of weather that time of year, what sort of supplies they’d need, and how they were going to advertise the expedition—the two shook hands.

  All this took place near the middle of September. And by the time Charley got everything organized and sojourners signed up, it was almost the end of September and he was getting restless, and Bill was too.

  “I wish you’d not go off to such a godforsaken place,” his wife said the night before their scheduled departure.

  “Oh dear, everything will be just fine. I’ve a good feeling about it all. I feel like we’re headed for glory, Bill and me.”

  “What if it snows while you’re gone and the roof falls in and kills me and the children?”

  “I’ve hired old Ned to come and shovel the roof whenever it snows,” Charley said soothingly. “Why, you know I’d never let anything bad befall you or the children.”

  She felt his cold searching fingers there under the blankets and knew Charley was feeling tangy again, as he always felt whenever he was about to leave off for somewhere for an extended period of time, or whenever he worked at something overly hard, or whenever he drank too much champagne, or whenever the sunset, or a hundred other things that would put him in such a mood. Still, she couldn’t think of herself of ever loving anybody but Colorado Charley Utter.

  And they left that very next morning, and now had been in Cheyenne for the better part of yet another month.

  Charley was taking his morning bath when Bill walked in out of the sun.

  First it was hard to tell who it was. Then when he came closer, Charley could make out that it was his pard under that broad sweep of a hat with those near reddish curls hang
ing down to his shoulders.

  Bill took off his hat and combed his hair with his fingers. The air was cold yet in that high country, and Charley could see Bill’s breath, just as he could the steam rising from the hot water the chink had filled his tub with.

  “Awful cold to be bathing,” Bill said.

  “Never start my day without a bath,” Charley said, scrubbing his shoulders with a horse brush.

  “I guess someone wanted to assassinate you, it’d be easy. Like shooting one big fish in a barrel.”

  Charley noted how much Bill seemed to dwell on somebody always getting assassinated. Usually it was Bill himself that Bill referred to.

  “I doubt anybody with an ounce of decency would shoot an unarmed man in a tub of water,” Charley said.

  “I’ve known some that would….”

  Charley preferred not talking about death before breakfast. “I been thinking,” he said.

  “About what?”

  “About we oughter go up to Deadwood Gulch and strike it rich, like we said.”

  “I been thinking the same thing,” Bill said. “In the spring.”

  Charley lathered the soap through his hair; he too had long hair, though not as curly as Bill’s and several shades darker.

  “Just one thing you oughter know before we throw in together,” Bill said.

  “What’s that?”

  “I’m married.”

  The soap ran down into Charley’s eyes and he did his best to knuckle out the sting. “When’d you get married?” he said.

  “About a month before I saw you on that rooftop, shoveling snow. Me and Agnes Lake.”

  “The circus lady you tole me about?”

  “That’s the one.”

  The chink came over with another bucket of water and poured it over Charley’s head, washing out most of the soap and clearing his eyes.

  “You want more water Mr. Charley?” the chink asked.

  “No, that’ll do.”

  Bill sat passively on the upturned pail, watching the traffic that ran past the barbershop—miners and gamblers, whores and gun artists, all of them waking up from whatever hell they’d fallen into the night before. Charley’s camp was just one of a few dozen or so tents and wagons set up on the outskirts of Cheyenne—a place everyone referred to as Tent City. The hotels were full up with men waiting for the weather to break so they could head to Deadwood and up into the Black Hills. Some had already gone—to what end or fate, nobody knew. The Army patrolled the hills—Custer and the Seventh. They’d warned the whites to stay out, that the Indians were more than willing to take whatever white scalps they were offered. Reports had come back daily of some miner being found shot so full of arrows he looked like a porcupine, or found with his skull bashed in, a bloody patch where his hair had once grown.

  But it didn’t stop those who wanted to get an early jump on the gold rumored to be in those Black Hills.

  “She wanted me to run the circus with her,” Bill said. “I told her my show business days were over with. Cody about ruined me on all that.”

  Charley stepped out of the tub. He looked white as fish belly except for his hands and face, which had been permanently chafed umber by wind and sun.

  Bill averted his eyes. He didn’t care to look at another man without clothes on. Charley didn’t seem to care if the whole town saw him naked. He sometimes walked around camp that way saying how it was good for the constitution to let all his parts air dry, how natural it was for a man to go naked in the world the same way he’d arrived in it. Some of the whores coming out of their nearby tents would see him and giggle and call to him, “Hey, Charley.” He was plump and round as a fat hen. He didn’t care.

  Finally he crawled into a fresh set of buckskins, ran a Mexican comb decorated with abalone shell through his hair, and trimmed his moustaches with a pair of dainty scissors in one hand and a small mirror held in the other.

  “Wasn’t you already married?” Charley asked.

  “No,” Bill said. “I never was—leastways legal.”

  “The stories you tole—I thought you was married to Squirrel Tooth Alice…or was it Indian Annie?”

  “Neither one,” Bill said. “I never married nobody officially until I married Agnes.”

  “Calamity is going all over the camps saying how you and her got married…”

  “You know that’s about a dang lie and a half.”

  “I know it.”

  “You want to go get some breakfast?”

  “I could eat me a whole entire buffalo hump, couldn’t you?”

  “Say, did you ever eat dog?” Bill said as they left the barbershop and headed for one of the cafés.

  “No. You?”

  “No, I never could even consider it after Abilene. I used to shoot them for two bits a piece to keep the population down—just the strays, though, nobody’s pets or anything.”

  “I know it,” Charley said. “You’ve mentioned it a time or two.”

  “Oh, I guess I forgot I told you already.”

  “I ate turtle once. You?”

  “No,” Bill said. “I never did think I’d care much for it.”

  Over breakfast of Spanish eggs and antelope steaks they talked about all the things they ate and all the things they didn’t eat over the years. Bill said he once ate a blue heron out on the plains when he’d gotten lost in that country and nearly starved.

  “I never thought I’d eat anything nearly as tall as I was, but you’d be surprised what you will eat if you get hungry enough.”

  “I once ate a garter snake on a dare. It wasn’t but about this long,” Charley said, holding his fingers apart six inches.

  “I don’t think I never would eat a snake of no kind for no reason,” Bill said.

  “I wouldn’t eat another,” Charley said, ordering another glass of buttermilk.

  Charley could see Bill’s eyes were troubling him. He could see how red they were around the edges and how often Bill swiped at them with his forefinger and how often he blinked.

  “You know, I seen a pair of glasses over at the mercantile is made to keep the sun out of your eyes,” Charley said somewhat casually, for he knew Bill to be vain about his appearance and reputation.

  “I wonder how a fellow would look wearing dark glasses if he didn’t need them for reading?” Bill said.

  “I think he’d look all right wearing ’em.”

  Bill dabbed at his eyes again. “You don’t think nobody would see it as some sort of a weakness or being prissy, would you?”

  “I think it might set some sort of new style or something. I seen folks wearing ’em down in Denver already.”

  Several people stopped at their table and introduced themselves to Bill and said what a pleasure it was to meet him and how they’d read about his exploits in DeWitt’s Dime Novels and Harper’s Weekly.

  Bill took it all in stride, glad-handed them and didn’t shy from the attention.

  “You and Cody are about two of the most famous men in America,” Charley said.

  “It’s kindy nice in a way,” Bill said. “But it brings with it problems too. There’s a goodly number of fellers that would be happy to make their reputation off me. Shoot out my lights and say there were the one who killed old Wild Bill.”

  “Ah, you oughter not think in them terms.”

  “Sometimes when I to the chink’s I experience what death is like,” Bill said. Charley could see how forlorn the look in his eyes was.

  “You can’t know nothing from smoking that opium, Bill. It’s its own kind of madness. Hell, I’ve known fellers that smoked it then went and laid out and stared at the sun till they went stone blind thinking they were looking into the face of God. I know one feller who rode his horse off a cliff from smoking it and another who shot his mother.”

  “I don’t know, Charley. What I seen wasn’t all that bad.”

  Wanting to change the subject because he knew it would make Bill more morose, Charley said, “What’s the most interesting thing
you ever ate?”

  Bill smiled, said, “Beaver pelt.”

  “Beaver pelt?”

  “Belonged to that gal I knew back in Abilene named Squirrel Tooth Alice.”

  “Oh, that, you mean…” Charley laughed, and Bill did too.

  It was later that very week when Charley got the letter from Agnes, who obviously knew of him through Bill. She said she wanted him to promise not to mention it to Bill or nobody else. She went on to write about how she’d hired Allan Pinkerton’s detective agency and that they were sending a man to protect Bill from would-be assassins. Charley felt a bit pie-eyed stunned by such revelations. Bill would be ashamed to learn his new bride had taken such measures.

  I hear you are Bill’s best pard, she wrote. He’s told me a lot about you. Don’t let vanity, his or yours, blind the eyes I pray will watch over him. Please telegraph me your promise. Mrs. Agnes Hickok.

  It troubled him a great deal she would do such a thing, and he wished she hadn’t done it, but understood in a way why she had. By now he loved old Bill Hickok like a brother and he’d do anything for him. But he sure hated keeping secrets from him, even if the secret was meant to protect him.

  Agnes had included the man’s name Pinkerton was sending. Teddy Blue.

  Charley ran the name through his mind.

  He concluded he never had met or heard of anyone named Teddy Blue.

  Later that evening in the Gold Room he said to Bill, “You ever heard of a fellow named Teddy Blue?”

  “No, I never did hear that name. Why do you mention it?”

  “No reason.”

  Bill didn’t seem concerned about it one way or the other, and won fifty dollars that night playing poker while Charley was upstairs with a girl named Lilly Rose, getting what he liked to call “waxed.”