by Judd Cole
Leland Langford, owner of the Overland Stage and Freighting Company, had a dangerous but essential job, and he knew there was only one man for it—the legendary Wild Bill Hickok. Leland knew that only Wild Bill could ensure that an important gold shipment travel safely by stage from the Black Hills to the U.S. Mint in Denver. With Wild Bill as the driver, the stage had to make it through. But there was an even more important part of Bill’s mission. Bill had to break up one of the cleverest and most vicious gangs ever to terrorize the west, and send one message loud and clear—steal gold from the U.S. Treasury and you’ll face the harshest law in the west … gun law!
GUN LAW
WILD BILL 8
By Judd Cole
First Published by Leisure Books in 2001
Copyright© 2001, 2016 by Judd Cole
First Smashwords Edition: May 2016
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Our cover features You Played That Card, painted by Andy Thomas, and used by permission.
Andy Thomas Artist, Carthage Missouri
Andy is known for his action westerns and storytelling paintings and documenting historical events through history.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
Chapter One
“Damn you straight to hell, you little ink-slinger!” J. B. Hickok fumed as he and young Joshua Robinson emerged from the Bluebird Cafe and started across Denver’s busy Division Street. “I am not—”
Wild Bill snatched the newspaper out from under Josh’s arm and read out loud, “‘reluctant to fight a man if it means Wild Bill will get his clothes mussed up.’”
Hickok flung the paper back at the journalist. “Katy Christ! You make me sound like some fussing female.”
Even as he raised this objection, however, Hickok frowned at all the mud caking his new oxblood boots.
“This street’s a reg’lar pigsty,” he complained. “They need to ditch it so the water runs off.”
Hickok’s gunmetal-blue eyes stayed in constant scanning motion. The 1870s had ushered in a boom, and Denver had grown far beyond its original boundaries as a rough-and-tumble mining camp. Horses, freight wagons, drummers’ vans, buggies, and pedestrians all churned up the mud, and so many people forced Wild Bill to an unrelenting vigilance. Fame, he had discovered, was not just a fickle whore but a dangerous one.
Among the many characters in this press of humanity, a stocky man wearing a buffalo coat caught Joshua’s attention. He was thickset and tall and thumped along the boardwalk with a noticeable limp. A thick shock of silver hair hung like a curtain fringe below his flap hat.
Hickok had noticed him too. His eyes narrowed slightly.
“That coat,” he remarked casually to Josh, “seems a mite warm for September.”
Josh caught Bill’s drift. Denver, like more and more big cities in the West, had recently passed an ordinance against carrying guns in public. That’s why Hickok had on his long canvas duster—to conceal the ivory-grip Colt .44s that he refused to surrender.
By now the two friends had also reached the boardwalk. Just as they did, the man in the buffalo coat angled into the foyer of the Cattleman’s Palace Hotel, apparently unaware of the two men. They entered behind him and watched him limp toward the front desk, where two clerks in sleeve garters and silk vests waited behind the guest register.
“He’s carrying no poke, either,” Bill remarked, more curious than wary. “That limp ... He seems familiar somehow.”
But the stranger paid them no heed as he fished a silver dollar out of his pocket and signed the register. Bill seemed to lose interest in him.
“C’mon, Longfellow,” he told Josh, steering him toward the slatted batwings of the hotel saloon. “I ought to belt your head off for all that claptrap you write about me. Instead I’ll stand you to a whiskey, because you really are a talented scribbler when you ain’t telling lies about me.”
“I just hold a mirror up to nature, Bill.”
“Yeah? Hold your lips up to my ass.”
Both men laughed. They had a quick drink at the bar, where two customers recognized Hickok and immediately asked him if they could touch him for luck. He good-naturedly shook their hands—Wild Bill Hickok had escaped certain death so often, he had become the nation’s walking rabbit’s foot. The hotel barber had even begun to save Bill’s clipped hair, tying the locks up with string and selling them as talismans.
Bill took the newspaper from Josh again and read: “‘Neither the Colt .44 nor the Winchester rifle is among the three inventions that are winning the Wild West. It is barbed wire, the portable windmill, and the steel plow that are taming this rugged territory.’”
Hickok looked at the kid and nodded.
“’S’true, Joshua. Time is closing in on the old fossils like me.”
“Maybe so,” Josh said. “But stories about plows don’t sell newspapers.”
“Well,” Bill announced reluctantly after two fortifying shots of Old Taylor bourbon, “time to see if Pinkerton left a note under my door. The old skinflint has another job for me. Something about a rustlers’ camp in Wyoming.”
The Palace featured one of the new hydraulic elevators, and Wild Bill and Joshua rode it up to the fifth floor, where they each had a room.
The car jerk-bumped to a stop, and the kid operating it pulled the door open for them. The two friends stepped out, and before he could even blink, Wild Bill felt a cold gun muzzle pressing into the side of his neck!
~*~
About four hundred miles northeast of Denver, in the Black Hills of Dakota, the light of late afternoon was taking on a mellow richness just before sunset.
A sturdy Concord express coach pulled by six horses eased into a dogleg bend in the road, tug chains rattling, driver lashing the lead team with a blacksnake whip.
“Gee up!” he shouted at the fresh team. “He-yah! He-yah!”
A guard with a twelve-gauge double-barrel shotgun across his thighs sat on the box beside the driver. Another guard, armed with a Sharps Big Fifty, sat on the top seat behind them, facing the other way. This coach carried no ticketed passengers—only a reinforced strongbox containing bars of newly smelted gold.
Canyon walls marked with striation surrounded this bend in the trail. It was good ambush country, and all three men were taut with vigilance.
Swaying on its leather braces, the coach careened out of the long turn.
“God A’mighty!” the gray-bearded driver exclaimed, suddenly throwing his weight onto the brake handle. “Haw!” he roared at the team, tugging hard on the reins.
The body of a man, obviously shot in the back, lay sprawled front-down across the trail. The back of his shirt was caked with dried blood. And alongside the trail lay his likewise dead horse. Flies swarmed all over it.
“He never even seen it coming,” the guard with the shotgun said grimly as the coach pulled up just short of the human corpse. “Lookit—whoever drilled him even took his boots. Poor bastard.”
“I’ll take a look,” the driver said, wrapping the reins around the brake handle. “I pray God I don’t know him.”
Just in case the highwaymen were still lurking nearby, b
oth guards remained atop the coach, scanning the dusty bushes and scrub oaks that crowded the trail on both sides.
The driver knelt, placed a hand on one of the dead man’s shoulders, and started to turn him over. In less time than a heartbeat the “dead man” came up to a sitting position, a Smith & Wesson Volcanic spitting muzzle fire.
A neat hole appeared in the driver’s forehead, a thin worm of blood spurting out of it even as he toppled in a heap, heels scratching the dirt before he died.
Before either guard could get his rifle on bead, more hammering gunfire erupted from the bushes. One guard, heart ripped open, plummeted dead to the ground under the left front wheel. The second cried out in pain and dropped his weapon when a bullet punched into his left forearm.
The team, panicked by the gunfire, tried to spurt forward. But the shooter in the road plugged one of the wheel horses, and the dragging weight in the traces, plus the drag of the brake, held the coach after it skidded only a few feet.
A huge, barrel-chested man wearing range clothes stepped out from the screening timber, his six-shooter still emitting curls of blue smoke. The smell of spent powder sweetened the air.
“All right, mister!” shouted Sandy Urbanski, the one wearing the blood-caked shirt. “Do everything I tell you, and do it in a puffin’ hurry, or I’ll irrigate your guts.”
The guard had slapped his right hand over the wound to his arm. Blood fountained past his fingers.
“You will anyhow,” he retorted. “Neither one of you bastards has bothered to pull his neckerchief up.”
Urbanski’s gun jumped in his fist, and the guard’s wide-brimmed hat flew off his head.
“Cork it, hero,” he snarled, malice gleaming in his eyes. “Just do what you’re told. Ricky,” he added, looking at his partner, “go fetch the buckboard while our big brave hero takes that gold out of the strongbox for us.”
“I ain’t got no key for the strongbox,” the wounded man pointed out, speaking past pain-gritted teeth.
“Well, I have,” Urbanski told him. “Move it!”
The guard, favoring his wounded arm, climbed down. Urbanski flipped him the key, which he caught with one bloody hand. As the guard stacked the gold bars out in the road, Urbanski’s hard-bitten eyes of a cold killer watched everything from a weathered, cruelly handsome face. The deep, furled knife scar under his left eye was the legacy of a fight with an Apache down in Sonora.
“You goddamn fools,” he taunted the guard. “Any simple son of a bitch can put on a bloody shirt. And that sorrel horse the flies’re eating is one of your own, stole from a way station. Too bad you boys are so hawg-stupid, ain’t it?”
The guard’s eyes cut to the bodies in the road. “Whoever you are, you’ll stretch hemp for this.”
Urbanski’s smile was a scornful twist. “You think? Well now, I’m wettin’ my drawers in fear. Damn shame, though, you won’t be around to watch me dance on air, hey?”
Crushed shrubbery crackled as Rick Collins drove the hidden buckboard out beside the coach. The big man had blunt features deeply pockmarked from a near-fatal bout with smallpox.
“Load ’em up,” Urbanski ordered their prisoner.
The heavy bars were a struggle with only one good arm, but the guard finally managed to get them loaded. Collins tossed an old horse blanket over them.
“Mister,” the guard said to Urbanski, sleeving sweat off his face. “I know you’re going to kill me. Can I have just a minute to get straight with my maker?”
Urbanski put a pious look on his face. “Well, bless my soul! Our hero’s a holy man, too. You want me and Rick to sing a hymn, too?”
The guard stoically said nothing.
“Go to it, holy man,” Urbanski urged him. “We’ll wait until you’re done praying. Least we can do for a Christian.”
However, the very moment the guard lowered his head to pray, Urbanski shot him between the eyes.
“Now, ain’t that a pure-dee shame?” he asked his partner. “The poor bastard died with all his sins still fresh on him. Well, it don’t matter, because Hell ain’t half full.”
Chapter Two
“Jumpin Jehosaphat!” Joshua exclaimed, recognizing the man who had just ambushed Wild Bill in the hallway. It was the man in the shaggy buffalo coat.
“Hickok, you shouldn’t ought to be so careless,” the man warned in a voice made husky by years of strong tobacco.
“Friend,” Bill replied with remarkable calmness, “if you meant to kill me, it would be over by now. So what’s your grift?”
The man holstered his weapon, and a wide grin split his weather-rawed face. “Look close, you woman-haired, perfumed dandy. Has fame made you forget all of us no-count working stiffs?”
Josh watched his hero study the man’s face a moment.
“Well, God kiss me!” Hickok suddenly exclaimed, seizing the man’s leathery paw and shaking it. “Joshua Robinson, meet Mr. Leland Langford. When I was just a mere chit of a boy like you, he and I drove stagecoaches and freight wagons along the Old Mormon Trail to Utah.”
“Sainted backsides, but we had some wild times, didn’t we, Billy? We didn’t just raise hell—by God, we also tilted it a few feet.”
“You’ve got fat, you bucket of guts,” Bill told him bluntly.
“Huh. I’m still strong as horse radish,” Leland boasted. “Don’t even make me kick your skinny ass.”
“Let’s head to my room,” Bill suggested. “I’ve got a bottle of coffin varnish and three jolt glasses.”
The three men headed down the long hallway. Candles flickered in sconces along the walls, their flames reflected in the polish of the floor and glowing like rubescent embers.
“You still a teamster?” Wild Bill asked his friend.
“And then some, b’hoy. I’m part owner of the Overland Line.”
Hickok loosed a whistle, and Joshua knew why: Overland was a major stage-and-freight line west of the Mississippi River.
The three men stopped outside Wild Bill’s door while he fished the key from his pocket. From long habit Bill did not simply unlock the door and go in. First he studied the very top of the door, where he had fastened a short piece of string between the door frame and the door with two pinches of soft sealing wax. It was still intact.
Nonetheless, once inside the room the first thing Wild Bill did was step out onto the scrolled-iron balcony to check for intruders.
“All clear,” he announced. “Gents, let’s imbibe a spot of the giant killer.”
“Toss me the makings, Bill,” Leland said.
“I got tired of building cigarettes,” Bill explained. “All I can give you is a Mexican skinny.”
He slid a cheroot out of his vest pocket and offered it. But Leland scowled. “Christ, you have turned female on me. Never mind, I’ve got my pipe.”
Bill poured shots of bourbon all around, and the three men clinked glasses as he proposed a toast: “To dark bars and fair women.”
Josh was not a veteran drinker, and the strong liquor burned a straight line to his gut. He coughed, his eyes filming, and the other two laughed good-naturedly.
“The Philadelphia Kid here,” Bill explained to his old trail companion, “is fresh off ma’s milk. A newspaper writer who’s been to high school and parley-voos French.”
“It’s men like him who create the soul of a nation, J. B. Not to mention they make you famous.”
“There’s that,” Wild Bill conceded. “But I still like this one. He’s a fair shot, and he’s got more guts than a smokehouse. Saved my life up in Miles City.”
But Bill’s gunmetal eyes were fixed speculatively on Leland. “Let’s get down to cases, old son. What’s your trouble? You didn’t look me up just to shoot at rovers.”
Leland had already shrugged out of his heavy coat and tossed it onto the bed. Now he slacked into a chair near the door, scrubbing his face with his hands. Josh noticed that his eyes were suddenly grave.
“J. B., do you stay abreast of financial matters?”
Hickok snorted. “I know when my pockets are empty. Why do you ask?”
“Right now the U.S. Treasury is facing a real monetary crisis. You’ve noticed, of course, how eastern money is replacing gold coins.”
Hickok nodded. By “eastern money,” Leland meant paper banknotes that were backed by gold reserves, which were presently being printed in Denver.
“Most folks don’t cotton to folding money,” Leland went on. “But the government is trying to protect the country against gold-hoarding. With paper they can keep the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts from what amounts to taking over the country.”
By now Joshua was focused like a hound on point. He sensed a big story here—a story as big as America itself.
“Makes sense so far,” Bill said. “But you’re still too far north for me. How do I mix in it?”
“The Dakota Division of the Overland Line has been critical to the government. It’s been our job to get smelted gold from the Black Hills to the mint here in Denver.”
Wild Bill frowned. “But the Kansas Pacific has a spur line that pushes northeast to Rapid City. Why wouldn’t they use the rails?”
“At first they did. But after two holdups, with the tracks ripped up both times and causing derailments, the railroad barons rebelled. Twelve people were killed the last time, and it scared away passengers. Congress has no authority to order railroad cooperation except in time of war.”
Bill nodded. “Let me guess. Now Overland has had a robbery?”
“Several,” Joshua chimed in. “It’s been all over the newspapers.”
“What’s not in the newspapers, though, is word of a new government regulation,” Leland said. “From now on, the mint can’t print any paper money until the gold backing it is actually locked up in their vault. All these heists have drastically slowed down paper issue; matter fact, it’s almost been brought to a screeching whoa. If the paper-money plan fails, this great republic could someday be taken over by a gold-rich tyrant. It’s happened before in Europe.”
Joshua felt his nape tingle at the importance of what Leland had just said. America was still, politically speaking, an experiment in democratic freedom—an experiment that could still easily fail. The spirit of ’76 could end up in the ash bin of history, defeated by the same monarchic despotism the Founding Fathers defeated.
