by Judd Cole
As if on a blood scent, Urbanski sensed trouble and sank steel into his gelding, spurting closer for a better shot. Wild Bill heard the hoofs drumming faster behind them and called to Jimmy: “Heads up! He’s closing!”
Wild Bill side-armed his rifle up to Jimmy’s position, and the sharpshooter, despite using a sight adjusted for Bill’s aim, was able to drop Urbanski’s horse with his second bullet. At that speed, the rider catapulted over the animal’s head, hit the trail hard, then bounced along like a sack of rags until his momentum wore out.
“Hell, he’s still alive,” Jimmy complained, but before he could drop a bead on Urbanski, the savvy survivor scurried back behind his dead horse.
“It’s all right, you done good, Jimmy,” Wild Bill praised him. “Hell, I’m starting to enjoy this.”
~*~
Eventually realizing that Urbanski had gone down, the two men out front split wide on the flanks, circling around to take him a remount and thus losing more time.
“To hell with that,” Bill decided suddenly, tossing the reins to Jimmy again. “Haze those flankers off for me, James,” Bill added as he started down off the box. Jimmy had freed the stoppage in his rifle by now, so Bill grabbed his Winchester back.
With pursuit broken, Bill had reined in the team to blow, so it was quick work to slip behind the coach and untie the lineback dun he had selected back at Martin’s Creek Station. This horse was the natural “cow pony” of the American West, prized for its ability to dodge and cut.
Jimmy couldn’t keep those flank men off forever, so Bill hurried, not bothering with saddle or rigging, just leaping on bareback and clutching fistfuls of mane. He held his Winchester under one arm, lowering himself over the horse’s neck to reduce target.
Bill wore no spurs, but urged the lineback to a powerful gallop, breaking the line of approach by hurling his weight to right and left, sending the mount sharply swerving.
Urbanski, still hunkered behind his dead horse, kept up an unrelenting fire at Wild Bill. The lineback flinched when a slug grazed its flank, but then drove powerfully forward, lowering its weight and lengthening its stride. Now Wild Bill slid down the left side of the horse, hanging on with one arm and one leg, using just his left hand to bring his rifle up.
Bill was hurtling at his enemy, barely able to sustain a line of fire. Urbanski, his hard-bitten eyes now engulfed with panic, came up in a crouch and loosed several shots at Wild Bill’s horse.
Perhaps twenty yards out from Urbanski’s position, Wild Bill heard the sickening thud of a bullet impacting, felt the lineback shudder in midstride. To avoid being trapped under the falling horse, Wild Bill let go and pushed off with one muscular leg.
Even before he hit the ground hard, Wild Bill’s brain was calculating. He let his rifle go, and because he had already loosened the riding thongs, he remembered to clap his hands to his Colts and keep them in the holsters while he tumbled and skidded to a stop.
Skin rubbed off hard as he scraped along, but Wild Bill never even came to a full stop before he shot up to his feet, drawing his pistols.
But he never had to fire one bullet. Fear now had Urbanski by the wits. He stood up, turned, and began running desperately to stay out of short-gun range.
Urbanski’s right foot suddenly plunged into a prairie-dog hole, and he went down to the ground hard, his Winchester Yellow Boy flying from his hands and crashing down too. And thanks to that worn sear Urbanski had kept neglecting, it discharged almost point-blank in his face.
Hickok flinched when he heard the hideous screaming, saw Urbanski writhing furiously like a snake trapped under a wheel, clutching his ravaged face. When he flopped over on his back, Wild Bill winced at the damage: That high-power slug had blown half Urbanski’s lower jaw off, including most of his lower teeth.
Bill took pity and finished him quick with a slug behind the ear.
That shot also broke the back of the gold heist plot. Both men on the flanks, seeing Urbanski die like a dog in the road, split up and retreated back to the north country and the shelter of the Black Hills. They were finished—Bill knew now that Brennan must be dead. And with Urbanski soon to be colder than a wagon wheel himself, there was no one left to ramrod another gang.
Seeing Bill’s downed horse, Jimmy turned the team and went back to pick up their driver. Josh leaped out and ran on ahead.
“Bill!” he called out. “You all right?”
As Josh came up beside him, breathless from running, Wild Bill pointed over his shoulder without looking back. “I’m a sight better off than Urbanski,” he replied.
“Man alive!” Josh nattered on, so excited he could barely keep his words in order. “You were unbelievable, Bill! It was a classic charge, you—”
Wild Bill cut the kid off by raising one hand. The coach had almost reached them. Charlene’s pretty face hung out the window, worried sick.
“Tell me straight,” Bill said quickly. “You’re in love with her, are’n’cha?”
Josh started, taken completely aback, then answered Bill’s question by flushing crimson. Over the past year, Josh had developed “cases” for several of the beauties in Bill’s ample stable. But even Hickok recognized that Charlene was different.
“I’m not faulting your taste, Longfellow,” Wild Bill said as he drew the telegram from his pocket and handed it over to Joshua. “But before you start thinking matrimony, might be a good idea to read this. It’s from Pinkerton.”
The excitement of their running battle now bled from Joshua’s face as he read the disturbing news:
JAMIE: GENERAL DURANT CONFIRMS DAUGHTER NAMED CHARLENE. BUT SHE’S HAPPILY MARRIED TO A CLERGYMAN IN MONROE, MICHIGAN, NOW MRS. CHARLENE BRANDENBERG. CAUTION ADVISED.
Josh stared at Wild Bill, his face blank. “Then ... who is this woman?”
“More to the point, kid, what is she?”
“Brennan,” Joshua said, not making it a question.
“My first thought, too,” Wild Bill said. “But if she was hired by him, why didn’t she make her play and kill me? She had the chance. Now it’s too late.”
“What are you two telling secrets about?” Charlene demanded as Jimmy pulled the stagecoach up.
“Mainly,” Bill told her amiably, “we were trying to guess your real name. I make you for a Sally or maybe an Abigail?”
The woman who called herself Charlene Durant flushed deeply, staring at the telegram in Joshua’s hand.
“Who told you?” she said in a weak voice.
“Sally?” Bill pressed. “Abigail? Darlene?”
“It’s Clarissa,” she confessed. “Clarissa Charbonnet.”
“Well, God kiss me,” Wild Bill muttered, at the same time that Joshua met his eyes and exclaimed, “Man alive! It is her! The long hair fooled me.”
“That’s where I saw you before,” Wild Bill told her. “It was in St. Louis, back in ’71. A play called The Merry Widow.”
“My last public appearance,” she admitted. “Obviously both of you already know why.”
As did half the people in America. The Merry Widow, a wildly popular comedy about a gold-digging widow, had made Clarissa a household name. But when she fell in love with the leading male actor, who was married, the resulting affair and scandal got her banned from the stage. She became the favorite “painted Jezebel” of the press, hounded everywhere she went by “decency committees.”
“So you headed west to start over,” Wild Bill said. “What in the hell made you pose as Durant’s daughter? How’d you even know about her?”
“We went to boarding school together near Chicago, then later she became one of my biggest admirers, and we corresponded regularly. I was frightened to travel by myself. I hoped that claiming the general was my father might ... dissuade disreputable men from ...”
She trailed off, but her point was clear enough.
Joshua was grinning, relief evident in his face. Jimmy, completely in the dark, stared down at all of them. “We going to hold a camp meeting here?” he
demanded. “Or get this damned gold to Denver?”
Epilogue
“Exter! Exter! Read all about it!” shouted a corner newsboy as Wild Bill and Joshua walked the final block of Union Street leading to the Denver train depot. “Read all about it right heah, folks! Wild Bill Hickok defeats last Black Hills crime gang! Ter-r-rific sensation, read it he-ah!”
Joshua carried a big leather valise. Wild Bill led his beloved strawberry roan, Fire-away, by the bridle. The gelding had been stalled for weeks and kept nudging Bill impatiently, eager to get running. Everything Hickok owned was now packed into two big saddle panniers.
“Had to happen sooner or later, kid,” Wild Bill consoled him. “Hell, you’re the top newspaper writer in the country. You think they were gonna leave you out here to die among the tumbleweeds? You came out here a green-antlered dude who couldn’t tell gee from haw. Now you’re not only savvy—you’re a young Charlie Dickens.”
The praise made Josh’s cheeks glow with pride, but he still hadn’t accepted the news yet: Without so much as a kiss-me-Kate, the New York Herald had called him back. And despite the fact that he was being “promoted to the masthead” of the editorial staff, he felt he was being punished for doing excellent work.
Jimmy, however, had left much more cheerfully yesterday, collecting his pay and taking the first eastbound train. He was returning to Tupelo, Mississippi, to visit his family, who were sharecropping there for their former master. Though he said nothing about it, both men knew Jimmy was planning on turning over the bulk of his pay to them. That fact, Bill told Josh, impressed him even more than Jimmy’s shooting.
“See how it works, Bill?” Joshua fumed. “See how talent gets you in trouble?”
Hickok laughed and had to take the cigar from his mouth. “Uhh—yeah, I’ve known about that for some time, kid.”
Joshua flushed as he felt the point. “What I mean is—they’ll stick me in a ten-story building, and I’ll spend the rest of my life wearing green eyeshades and moving commas around.”
“Sure, by day. But by candlelight you’ll write great books,” Bill assured him. “Books that will make the American West practically talk to the reader, it’ll seem so alive. You were here, kid, and there’s western dirt under your nails that’ll never wash out. Don’t ever forget, you learned it all straight from the best. I took a blank slate and filled it proper.”
“Yeah! I did learn from the best, didn’t I?” Josh said, more to himself than Wild Bill. “How to ride and shoot and fight with my fists. How to find water where it ain’t and read sign like an Apache—”
“Almost like an Apache,” Bill corrected him, and they both laughed.
“You know,” Josh hinted, just probing for his friend’s reaction, “no law forces me to go back. I can quit the Herald, stay out west as a freelance stringer. That way I could keep telling your story.”
“My story,” Bill said in his usual amiable way as they came abreast of the depot, “is about to play out, Josh.”
But his tone couldn’t cancel out his meaning, and as Bill’s gunmetal gaze held the kid’s for a long moment, Josh felt his scalp tingle with a premonition of something he didn’t want to know.
“Now I get it,” he blurted out. “That’s why you wouldn’t say where you’re going. You’re headed to Deadwood, right?”
“Might head up that way, sure.”
“But why?” Josh demanded. “I mean ... Calamity Jane’s prediction, Jimmy’s dream ... ”
“So what about ’em? Since when does J. B. Hickok turn giddy when the talk goes to death and dying? Can you remember a time?”
Josh had to shake his head. “Only thing I ever saw that truly scared you to run away was Calamity Jane.”
“That much I admit, boy. She scares me foolish.”
The eyes watching Joshua did not look sad or frightened or regretful. Bill’s face was calm, at peace, the look of a man who had quit fighting his destiny—let it come, he embraced it without apology or regret.
“Josh,” he said, “I’ll tell you straight-arrow why I’m heading to Deadwood alone. You’ve been with me through hell and high water. Never once did you ever let me down when it mattered. Son, I’ve ridden with the best men in America, and I’m here to tell you: I never rode with a better man than Joshua Robinson of Philadelphia. You’re a credit to your dam.”
A huge, hard lump of pride and feeling pinched Joshua’s throat shut.
“But way I see it now,” Hickok resumed, “I just don’t want you around to see the rest of it—the part that don’t matter. Do you take my drift, kid? I don’t want that nothing part to be in your memory. You’re going to live a long, happy life, kid. You’re going to get married, bounce little brats on your knee. I want only the good times, the exciting times when your blood was thrumming and you never felt so alive—that’s what I want you to take from the time when your trail crossed Bill Hickok’s. You clear on that?”
Josh only nodded, not trusting his voice. Bill was calm and deliberate, and Josh copied him, his hero.
“The dying ain’t worth but a mention,” Bill finished up. “All I want you to remember is that Bill Hickok by-God lived more than any ten men, and he never regretted a day. You understand that, ink-slinger?”
Joshua, despite his determination, was damn close to spilling it like a blubbering schoolgirl. But he pulled himself up and grinned. “Understood.”
Wild Bill winked as he swung up into leather. “Tell you something else. Some more useful advice. You’d ought to take a later train—maybe much later.”
“Why?”
“Clarissa is registered at the Seton Arms Hotel under the name Sally Mason. She thinks mighty highly of you. I think you should stop by and see her.”
“But you two—I mean—”
“Yeah, right, I was there, kid, I remember. But that’s me and her. You and her is something else.”
Josh said, “She did seem to really like me.”
“On that pleasant note,” Bill quipped, giving Fire-away a little nudge with his knees.
Josh stood there in the dusty, busy street, watching the greatest, bravest, toughest man he had ever known calmly ride off to meet his fate.
“Hey, Hickok!” Josh shouted.
Bill reined in and slewed around in the saddle. “Hey what?”
“You are too a perfumed dandy! I think Mrs. Hickok wanted a little girl!”
“Why, you damned mouthy pup! I’d whip the snot outta you if I wasn’t wearing my new shirt!”
Both men shared a final laugh. Then Wild Bill nodded once before touching a spur to his roan ‘s flank, and Joshua watched him ride into the blood red sunrise.
“Tell me how you die,” he whispered, “and I’ll tell you what you’re worth.”
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