by Judd Cole
Ricky bolted toward the horses.
“Rick!” Sandy shouted at his retreating partner. “Rick, damnit man, nerve up! It’s just more of Hickok’s parlor tricks—he ... Rick! Damn your chicken guts, get back here!”
But it was hopeless. Now that he was left alone, Urbanski took one last look before he, too, bolted.
~*~
“This is sickness—madness,” Charlene Durant fumed. “And now you’re simply going to dump the bodies?”
She stood beside the coach, arms akimbo, watching as Wild Bill and Joshua quickly untied the carefully propped-up dead men. She had to leap aside, gasping in revulsion, when Saville’s body landed beside her in an unceremonious heap. A dead hand flopped onto her foot, and she leaped back.
Wild Bill jerked a thumb upward, showing her the vultures already swooping in low circles. “Whatever they don’t eat the coyotes will gnaw. I got a rule, princess: Never bury the enemy unless they smell.”
He grunted hard with effort as he threw Appling off on the opposite side, dumping him like a sack of garbage. Joshua saw Wild Bill fretting at a spot of blood on his cuff. “Won’t wash out,” he muttered.
Hickok sat quietly for about twenty seconds, just listening.
“Keep a sharp eye out, Longfellow,” he said finally. “We scared ’em off, but they might rile up once their fear passes.”
Bill climbed back over to the driver’s side of the box and glanced impatiently down at the pouting woman.
“Let’s go, sugar britches, all aboard!”
But she stubbornly stood her ground. “After what you just did? Rigging up dead men to—”
“Look, sister, whatever pounds nails is a hammer. There was an ambush waiting for us here, and without Jimmy we didn’t stand a snowball’s chance. What I did worked. The point is to live on until you can win.”
“Win what?” she demanded.
The frank look Bill gave her made her flush. “Whatever’s worth winning, that’s what. Now, get inside before I put you there.”
Wild Bill suddenly cracked the whip, and she shrank back, fearful. But a moment later she got inside, and Hickok taunted her with his laugh as the battered coach rolled forward.
Chapter Twelve
There were some Indians, Wild Bill explained to Joshua as the stagecoach eked out the slow miles, who refused to return to a place within twenty-four hours after someone had just been killed. They believed the vengeful spirit had one day to find and possess a new body. Bill said plenty of whites believed the same thing—and maybe that was why there was no immediate attack. This was literally a death coach.
Two miles shy of Beecher’s Station, Joshua spotted billowing clouds of dark smoke smudge the sunset. Soon Bill, too, could discern them.
“They’ve attacked the station,” Hickok muttered. He whipped the nearly exhausted horses up to their best pace, perhaps six miles per hour. “Be ready for a set-to,” he added. “They might be laying for us.”
There was no sign of gun-throwers when they wheeled into the hoof-packed yard at Beecher’s Station. But their signature had been left everywhere, from the still-smoldering ruins of the hay barn to the charred, half-destroyed station house.
Two men waited in the yard, rifles in the crook of their arms. One was in his late thirties, balding, with a big soup-strainer mustache; the other, much younger and strong as a farmer’s bull—except, Josh noticed, there was a homemade crutch under his left arm.
“I’m Burl Leavitt, station manager,” the oldest one greeted them. “Big fella’s Yancy, a blacksmith for the Overland Line.”
“Pleased,” Wild Bill said curtly, adding: “Anybody killed?”
Leavitt, whose glassy eyes and slurred speech smelled alcohol-induced, shook his head.
“The two women who cook and clean slipped away and made a run for the next station.”
He nodded at the limping blacksmith. “Yancy was out here working when the attack commenced. He tried to put out the barn fire. But they shot him.”
“They was aiming for the dirt around my feet,” Yancy explained. “Trying to make me dance. One bullet caught my heel. It ain’t bad damage.”
He pointed to the ruins of the barn, which still gave off a pleasant heat in the evening chill. “It was some kind of fancy fire arrow. And I seen Sandy Urbanski right after, still holding a crossbow. He had his face covered, like the others, but I seen that big scar of his. He’s Gil Brennan’s crime boss.”
Wild Bill swung down off the box and stretched his back, gazing around at the damage. He stuck a slim Mexican cigar between his teeth but didn’t light it yet. Instead, he opened the door of the coach and swung down the step for Charlene, handing her down.
“He’s breathing easy,” she reported when Bill leaned inside to check on Jimmy.
“Got any medicines here?” Wild Bill asked Leavitt.
But the station manager was too drink-addled to focus on the question.
“Ask anybody knows me,” he said, as if thinking out loud more than speaking. “I came out west on account the damned lying railroads advertised it as a grower’s paradise. But dry-farming out here is a fool’s game. And those with no water for irriga—”
“Your only problem,” Yancy cut in impatiently, “is how you’re always searching for answers in the bottom of a whiskey glass. I shoulda reported you to Leland—”
“Look, have you got medicines here?” Wild Bill cut in impatiently. “We’ve got a wounded man needs surgery.”
“There’s laudanum in the kitchen cabinet,” Yancy replied for the distraught agent. “And maybe some chloroform.”
Wild Bill enlisted Josh, Burl, and Yancy to help him carry Jimmy inside the damaged station. The back half of the building, though smoke-damaged, was otherwise intact. They laid Jimmy on a leather-web bed usually used by drivers.
He had regained consciousness and stopped raving, though his face was drawn tight from fighting the pain.
“Hickok,” he said weakly, “you’re too wicked to ever be pitied. I took this bullet for you.”
“Better you than me,” Bill replied with the cynical bravado of battle vets. “Maybe I’ll get lucky and kill you digging it out.”
“Dry socks,” Jimmy muttered as he went under again.
“Man’s crazy,” Yancy said. “His socks are dry.”
“What in God’s name are we going to do?” Burl fretted from the doorway, his voice whiny, his shoulders slumped in defeat. “The road’s out at Devil’s Slope. No coaches can get through ’til it’s cleared. See? See it? I told Leland, I said it’s a bad mistake to take on Brennan’s—”
“Whack the cork,” Wild Bill snapped at him. “All your bawling won’t unscramble an egg. Leland wanted gun law, and that’s what he got. Now we’ve got to stick it out until the job’s done, that’s all. Joshua?”
“Yeah?”
“How’s that sore neck?”
“Better. What do you need?”
“Hear that, Burl?” Hickok said. “This kid’s just turned twenty, city-sired, and he’s up to fighting fettle. Kid, when we finish up here, take my rifle and climb up on top the house. Sing out if you see anybody. Burl?”
“... slaughter us like rats,” the agent was muttering to himself. Wild Bill cursed, but left him alone.
“Yancy?”
“What?”
“Besides the women, has anyone been sent for help?”
“Stock tender was sent to give a report to the U.S. Marshals at Cheyenne. But that’s still a far piece south from here. Best we can do. There ain’t nary telegraph wire strung out this way yet, there being no government to speak of in the Dakota Territory.”
Wild Bill listened, and it bothered Joshua to see that Hickok’s usual face—slightly amused, unflappable—now looked tired and troubled, showing some age and wear.
“Any way you slice it,” Bill told them, “Brennan’s bunch still have plenty of time to make their play. Soldiers out west are stretched mighty thin, and what few there are—hell, they’re
mostly tied up chasing bust-outs from the reservations.”
The men had all drifted back into the common room by now, its front wall half demolished by the fire. Charlene Durant, busy carrying a pail of water to heat on the iron stove, caught Bill’s eye. She had already torn one of her muslin chemises into strips of clean bandage cloth.
“Say!” he exclaimed. “I just remembered—your father will be expecting you, won’t he? There should be a light patrol on that Denver road once he realizes you’re late.”
She flushed and looked sheepish, surprising Joshua, who didn’t know she was capable of humility.
“Not really,” she confessed. “I didn’t tell him I was on my way. I thought it would be romantic and instructive to tour the West a little by stagecoach.”
“Romantic and instructive,” Hickok repeated woodenly.
“Well, yes. So many eastern dudes are doing so nowadays, it’s all the rage even in the ladies’ press.”
“Ladies’ press,” Bill repeated, giving her a look that made her flush deeply.
“What?” she demanded.
He ignored her. “That explains it, then. I wondered how your old man would be that stupid and let you take a stagecoach on this line.”
“He ordered me not to, actually. He’s expecting me next month—and by train.”
Bill looked at the pail. “That water for Jimmy?”
She nodded.
“Can you take the sight of blood?”
Again she nodded. “When I was just twelve I was sort of volunteered as a surgeon’s orderly for the Union field hospital at Stone’s River. My family’s home was only a quarter mile from the battle.”
Bill’s tone altered somewhat. “Well, maybe you are Jimmy’s angel. You know how to administer chloroform?”
She nodded. “There’s not much to it. But it’s risky.”
“What ain’t?” Bill retorted as he headed back into the room where they’d put Jimmy. “Bring that water in when it’s heated. Joshua, climb up on top the house. Watch yourself.”
Josh headed toward the burned-out front of the house, Bill’s .44-40 Winchester in his left hand. Charlene Durant’s voice made him pause.
“Is he always such a hard man, Joshua? I had the impression Wild Bill Hickok was more gallant.”
A dozen different answers occurred to the young journalist. How many scrapes had he shared with Hickok in the past year or so? And yet he knew so little about the man, about what he felt and thought. In truth Bill Hickok, the toast of the American press, the living legend, was a lonely, haunted man who had whipped his fear but never quite his despair.
“Gallant?” Josh finally said. “He is, in his way. Read this. It’s a rough draft for part of my next story.”
He handed her his flip-back pad, opened to a neatly written page.
“‘The decisions Wild Bill makes on this perilous journey,’” she read aloud, “‘the behaviors that strike the rest of us as barbaric—history will record them and men continue to honor them. America has reached a critical crossroads in her young destiny, and now the rule of law is on the line. If these lawless road gangs triumph over the courageous teamsters, our government may be doomed for all time.
“‘Wild Bill has little formal education, but he senses that democracy’s fate hangs in the balance—and his life is committed, as is Jimmy Davis’s, to the cause of freedom.’”
Joshua was too tired, too scared to say all that. Besides, he was jealous. She had no eyes for any man but Hickok.
Charlene looked up, her eyes shining. “Oh, Joshua, I had no idea you could write like this. It’s ... why, it’s grand, and just—just elegant!”
“Thanks,” he said, pride swelling inside him at the admiration in her tone. “I guess to answer your original question, Wild Bill is as hard as he needs to be, no more.”
He started to head outside again. She surprised him pleasantly by calling out behind him:
“Joshua?”
He turned around, and she flashed him a smile as big as Texas. “Be careful out there. You’re a very brave young man. You remind me of all those courageous boys I treated at Stone’s River.”
Joshua exulted in all this attention from such a charming beauty. However, Burl Leavitt had to upset the cart. He had been standing alone in a dark corner, muttering to himself. Now he spoke up, fear tightening his voice.
“Brave! Huh. Fool’s gold, that’s what brave is. Hickok can’t save us now, nor this tadpole neither. We’re all dead as Paiute graves.”
His words hung in the air like a rotten odor that everyone smelled but no one wanted to mention.
“When you get a chance,” Josh told Charlene, “lock up all the liquor. I hope he’s some use to us once he sobers up.”
~*~
Wild Bill and Charlene Durant proved to be an efficient and capable surgical team.
Charlene soaked a pad in chloroform and kept Jimmy under, watching him closely—the pad had to be held up only in brief doses or the patient could quickly succumb. On the other hand, too little of it and the pain could suddenly become unbearable.
Hickok quickly used a flame-sterilized wire to locate the slug. Then he bent the wire into a hook and dug the flattened lead slug out with the help of his clasp knife. A quick carbolic-acid wash of the wound was followed by an even quicker cauterization to close the wound while it was clean.
“It’ll hurt like holy hell when that chloroform wears off,” Wild Bill said wearily when the surgery was finally over. “We’ll make sure he gets laudanum for the pain. I wish we’d had morphine powder to pack in the wound.”
“You’ve cut a few bullets out in your time,” she praised him. “Including, I’ve read, one from your own leg?”
“It was only thirty-one-caliber,” he scoffed. “That’s like pulling out a splinter. Didn’t make sense to ride fifty miles just to pay a doctor two dollars. I’m going outside to wash up and look around.”
“I’ll take a quick bath and then get some food cooking,” she offered, continuing to show a new side to her personality, one brought out by adversity.
Bill stepped quietly out through the charred remains into the nighttime chill. A newly risen three-quarter moon lighted the very tips of distant mountains like silver patina.
“All secure, kid?” he called overhead as he rinsed at a hand pump in the yard.
“Looks quiet from up here,” Josh called back. “But I’m sure hungry. My ribs’re scraping my spine.”
“I’ll bring you out some hot grub shortly. Don’t skyline yourself.”
Wet and shivering in the night air, Bill dried his face and hands with a bandage cloth they hadn’t used. Then he began circling the house on foot in the clear moonlight.
Yancy, despite his wounded foot, had taken care of the team. Now he was standing guard near the corral, where nearly a dozen horses had escaped harm in the raid. They had chased off the attackers just in time.
“You won’t find their tracks, Wild Bill,” he called out. “Urbanski and them timed it so a hard rain wiped out most of their sign. I looked. They could be holed up any number of places around here. At least the rain put the fire out.”
Yancy was right. Wild Bill found a few fresh tracks of shod horses. But they washed out after a few yards, obliterated by rain runoff from the low hills around them. It would require a pure-quill Indian tracker to follow it now.
Back inside, the chloroform stink still permeated their makeshift operating room, and Jimmy was still peacefully sleeping. Wild Bill found Charlene in a front bedroom. She had hung blankets over the burned-out doorway to give herself some privacy.
“You decent?” he called from his side of the blanket.
“Yes, come in,” she called back.
A lone tallow candle cast a golden light on her as she worked a horn comb through her long, tangled tresses. Bill smelled clean skin and the faint lilac odor of her soap. She had changed into a fancy serge dress—Bill could see the frilled cuffs of the embroidered undersleeves visible benea
th the ermine lappets of the sleeves.
Those pretty blue forget-me-not eyes watched him from under long, sleepy lashes. The smile she gave him was restive, as if she harbored secret ideas.
“Interesting smile,” he greeted her. “What’s it mean?”
“Maybe it means I’m curious, Mr. Hickok.”
“About what, Miss Durant?”
“Maybe,” she said, setting the comb aside, “I’m one of those curious girls who wonders how close she can get to the fire without being burned?”
He watched how her unrestrained hair gleamed like polished hardwood. “That works out just right,” he assured her, “because I’m one of those curious fellows who wonders when there’s fire behind a girl’s smoke.”
By now only inches separated them. Wild Bill tossed his hat aside and swept her up in his arms, kissing her full on the lips. Her soft contours molded to him, and her mouth eagerly accepted his. If Bill had expected a little fight from her, he was instead surprised by the ardor of her response.
“Does that answer your question?” she teased him when they finally broke for air.
Bill, his face still hot from their kiss, picked up his hat and shook the dust from it, watching her in the flattering candlelight.
“It answers one,” he told her thoughtfully. “But it raises some others.”
“Such as ... ?”
“Mr. Hickok?” Burl Leavitt’s voice called from beyond the blanket. But Bill was still looking at Charlene with narrowed eyes.
“Such as,” he replied, “why could I swear, when I see you in this light with your hair down, that I’ve seen you someplace before?”
“I’m sure I don’t know. I’ve certainly never seen you. In person, I mean.”
“Mr. Hickok?” Burl called again.
“Be right there,” he replied in the direction of the other room. Turning to watch Charlene again, he added gallantly: “Perhaps it’s just wishful thinking on my part. Your beauty is exceptional.”
“I’m told you know something on that subject, and I’m quite flattered.”
He bowed slightly and turned to leave. He was about to sweep the blanket aside when she called his name. Hickok turned around.
