by Judd Cole
“And just how does one determine quality, Mr. Hickok?”
“Well, in the case of a horse, Miss Kinkaid,” Bill said, his voice thick with innuendo, “one ride is generally sufficient.”
Josh watched Nell blush to her earlobes. She hadn’t meant to get in this deep. Trapped now, she dug herself in even deeper. “One ride? But what if you’re bucked off?”
Bill nodded, thoroughly enjoying himself now. “Even better. I like spirit... in a horse.”
Josh was starting to blush, himself, when Elmer finished his discussion and rolled back to join the others. While he spoke with Nell, Bill had been eyeing a long shelf on the back wall. It was heavy with trophy cups, all awarded for superior marksmanship. Elmer saw Bill studying the shelf.
“My boy’s handiwork,” Elmer said scornfully. “Johnny’s a gun-slick and proud of it. Practices drawing and shooting every day, has since he was twelve. Boy’s won him over a dozen shooting matches. It’s hogwash! A cattleman don’t even need a short gun ’cept to kill snakes ’n’ such.”
Bill shrugged. “Snakes come in many sizes, Mr. Kinkaid.”
Bill rose and Josh followed suit. “’Preciate your time,” Wild Bill told Elmer. “I’ll speak with Hansen and have a good look around, see which way the wind sets. I’ll get back with you, Mr. Kinkaid.”
“Pleasure meeting you, Wild Bill. Just a warning: You’ve been jumped once already, and it’ll happen again. There’s plenty hereabouts who know about the open reward on your hide. You cover your ampersand.”
“Yes,” echoed Nell Kinkaid as she escorted both men to the door. She lowered her voice so Elmer couldn’t hear when she added, “Now that I’ve tempted you with an apple, Mr. Hickok, it would be a shame if you don’t return to visit Eve in her garden.”
Bill started to reply, but Nell only smiled mysteriously before closing the door in his face.
Chapter Four
Late in the afternoon, the three of them met in an isolated line shack at the extreme northern boundary of the Rocking K property: Johnny Kinkaid, Jarvis Blackford, and Barry Tate, foreman of the Rocking K.
“Confrontation is not the way,” Blackford insisted in his city-cultured voice. “Not with Hickok. Have you forgotten what he did to the McCandles gang in Kansas? Or that he single-handedly pacified Hays City—a wide-open cow town with twenty-two saloons? Hickok has more kills than John Wesley Hardin. At least forty.”
“Jarvis may have struck a lode,” Tate chimed in. The foreman was around thirty, a blunt-jawed, hawk-nosed man with thick red burnsides. “Me and some of the boys gave Hickok a little welcome outside of town. That bastard tossed a mineful of lead back at us!”
Johnny’s expressive mouth twisted in scorn. “An old woman can toss lead! How much of it scored any hits, huh? Fear the man, not the dime novels. Hickok always keeps a newspaper reporter in his hip pocket. That’s how come men get snow in their boots around him.”
Blackford, neatly turned out in a three-piece suit, shook his head. “Johnny, you’ve got enough guts to fill a smokehouse. And I, for one, think you might even be faster on the draw than Hickok. But you’re a hothead. Wild Bill is also wily Bill. He hasn’t just got speed and skill on his side. The man also has excellent instincts and nerves of Toledo steel. He shoots first and he asks questions later.”
Johnny scowled, but as usual he showed some deference to the older man. Jarvis Blackford might be a bit of a dandy, but then so was Wild Bill Hickok. Jarvis didn’t make it to the top in the tough railroad business by being weak or stupid.
“If he’s got such ‘excellent instincts,’” Johnny suggested, “then ain’t you paring the cheese mighty close to the rind, Jarvis? I mean, becoming the man’s poker buddy? Ain’t you worried he’ll find out you’re a big nabob with the Burlington instead of just some hardware drummer?”
The dilapidated line shack had a rammed-earth floor with an old Franklin stove hunkering in the middle of the only room. A skunk-oil lamp with a rag wick and the packing crate it sat upon were the only furnishings besides a crude shakedown bunk in the back corner.
Jarvis, busy clearing the stem of his fancy rosewood pipe, scoffed at Johnny’s suggestion. “Nonsense, stout lad. I really was a hardware drummer at one time. I know the business. Besides, no one else in town but you two know my real position. So long as we three make sure to meet secretly, the risk is acceptable. Fortune favors the bold, my friend.”
“Besides,” Tate added, “this way we can know, at least sometimes, exactly where Hickok will be. Like tonight—Hickok’s playing five-card with Jarvis at the hotel starting around eight o’clock. That leaves the coast clear for us to visit Hansen.”
“My point exactly.” Blackford nodded, testing the draw on his pipe. “Johnny, your passion is practicing with your pistols. Hickok’s is cards. Once that man is riding a streak, he’d skip his own mother’s funeral. In fact, gambling is his one weakness—that and his fondness for pretty women. Hickok told a reporter he’ll likely die at a poker table.”
“Now, that ain’t a bad idea,” Johnny said. “Pop the son of a bitch while he’s counting his winnings.”
“My point,” Jarvis insisted, “is that the more I convince him he’s on a streak, the less likely he’ll be to leave that hotel nights.”
A frown had divided Tate’s bluff face at the allusion to Hickok’s “fondness for pretty women.” The foreman had been worried for hours about that skirt-chasing bastard being in the same room with Nell Kinkaid. She was too pert to resist. And Barry was bound and determined to slap his brand on her first.
“Well, I ain’t one to take the long way around a barn,” Johnny said. “But you’ve made a good offer, Mr. Blackford. And you must know what you’re talking about or you wouldn’t be in a position to make that offer. So we’ll play it by your rules for now.”
“Good man. For right now, it’s best to keep up the appearance that we’ve got a classic war between the farmers and the ranchers, with the farmers egging it on the worst. That keeps the local law effectively out of it. Sheriff Waldo is supposedly neutral. But he knows it’s cattle revenues that pay county salaries, not foreclosed mortgages on dried-up cornfields.”
“There’ll be more blood soon,” Johnny warned. “Hansen is pushing—pushing hard since Barry shot that German preacher out on Grass Creek. We damn near hugged yesterday in town.”
Jarvis nodded, cheeks caving in as he drew at his pipe. “Blood usually comes with a war.”
“And Hickok’s blood,” Barry reminded them, “is redeemable for ten thousand dollars. I made sure that every nickel-chaser in the territory knows he’s here. It’ll get warm for Mr. Hickok. Mighty damn warm.”
“Dogs!”
Martha “Calamity Jane” Burke cursed and drew back on the reins as she cleared a stand of ponderosa pine and spotted three horses tethered in front of the shack.
“Dogs!” she repeated in a grating voice like pebbles caught in a sluice gate. “Sun going low and no supper. Tarnal blazes!”
Jane was stout and strong, with a homely, careworn face. She wore her greasy hair tied into a heavy knot that dangled under an immaculate gray Stetson—the only clean item she wore besides the Volcanic pistol tucked into a bright red sash around her waist. She drove a dilapidated buckboard with gaudily painted sideboards advertising DOYLE’S HOP BITTERS: “THE INVALID’S FRIEND AND HOPE.”
Doyle’s was one of the most popular patent medicines in the country. As a curative it was worthless. But its heavy dose of alcohol left the patient too drunk to care. Jane always drank what she couldn’t sell— and often drank what she should have sold.
From a long habit of solitude, Calamity Jane always talked to her team of swaybacked bays as if they were old friends.
“I knew that line shack wouldn’t stay deserted forever,” she complained to them now. “But I figured another couple weeks before any punchers moved in.”
Jane had been staying in the shack since arriving in Kinkaid County two days earlier. She knew such
line shacks were occupied only after the cattle had been driven farther from the grass-scarce winter ranges, up here into the high-country summer pastures. She had left the shack for an hour or so to check on her rabbit snares. Now she was undecided what to do—wait here a spell, or go and pitch a camp somewhere before sunset?
“Them ain’t all cow ponies,” Calamity Jane told her team, noticing the fancy, silver-trimmed Mexican saddle on that big claybank. The other two horses definitely belonged to cow nurses. Jane could tell this from the saddles—their high pommels and narrow cantles, designed to accommodate slim-hipped cowboys. But that third horse belonged to an outsider.
“Now, ain’t that uncommon queer?” Jane asked her team. “Or is it? Seems as how Bill Hickok’s arrival in a territory always draws outsiders like flies to syrup.”
And concerning flies, Jane had learned a motto from Bill, the love of her young life: Kill one, kill a thousand.
Jane had lost her heart to Wild Bill Hickok exactly four years earlier, in the spring of 1868, when she first laid eyes on the garish cover of Ned Buntline’s sensational Wild Bill, Indian Fighter. But that handsome, wild-eyed Army scout depicted on the cover paled before the beauty and savage masculinity of the real man himself.
A love struck Jane had visited a famous palm reader in Old El Paso. The old abuela read Jane’s deep-seamed palm for almost an hour, declaring that her destiny was meant to converge with that of “un hombre famoso, guapo, y muy, muy peligroso”—a famous, handsome, and very, very dangerous man.
That description fit Bill Hickok like a second skin. And from that day forth, Jane had found her purpose in life: to go where Bill went, to protect him with her own life, if need be. That man meant more to Jane than the breath in her nostrils.
There was a minor problem, of course. Bill hadn’t realized—yet—that the two of them were separate halves of one unified destiny. But that day was coming, Jane’s love line promised it.
In the meantime, she thought as she studied those three horses, she had to keep her reckless man alive.
“You sons of bitches can rob a bank or heist a stage,” Jane muttered. “Steal a damned steamboat, for aught I care. But you draw down on Bill Hickok, you filthy pond scum, and you best pray he kills you before I do.”
Dave Hansen batched in an old sod dugout located near Turk’s Creek. After getting directions from Elmer Kinkaid, Wild Bill and Josh set out across the rolling grass flats. They took their time, for Bill was interested in surveying the area and making a mental map of the terrain.
They were further delayed when a sudden thunderstorm boiled up. Gray sheets of driving rain forced them to take shelter under a trap rock shelf. The sudden deluge left patches of mud as thick and sloppy as gumbo. As the two riders resumed their trek, flashes of heat lightning illuminated the darkening landscape. Now and then a mighty clap of thunder rocked the ground.
Turk’s Creek, actually a small river in spring, was only one of several major water sources in Kinkaid County. It was also the area most settled by farmers. As the sun set, Wild Bill and Josh followed the creek’s meandering course for several miles. And now the other destructive side of the Kinkaid County War was evident.
“Fences down and crops ripped right from the ground,” Bill told Josh. He dismounted and pointed to a fence post. “Look—somebody deliberately pulled all the staples out and took them so it would be harder to put the fences back up. And look there—”
The sudden crack of a rifle shot split the evening silence with commanding authority. Josh barely had time to tense before Wild Bill had shoved him face-first into the mud.
Another shot, a third, sent columns of muddy water into the air only inches from Josh’s head.
“Hansen!” Bill roared out, raising his long yellow curls out of the mud soup. “Stand down, you damned fool! We’re not nightriders! My name is Bill Hickok, and I’ve come to talk to you!”
“Hickok? Yah, shoor! And my name is Queen Victoria!”
“I can believe that, you dumb Swede. She’s a trigger-happy hothead, too!”
“I don’t know your voice, mister, so I’ll hold my fire while you two show yourselves. But by God, don’t get cute on me! Hands up high. Yah, that’s it.”
Despite their predicament, Josh grinned at the disgusted look on Bill’s face as he slapped the muck off his clothing. The fastidious Hickok would rather face a blazing six-gun than get his wardrobe messy.
Josh saw their captor coming toward them across the moon-bleached landscape, a long Henry rifle trained on them. Dave Hansen was a big, barrel-chested man—“strong as a sheepman’s socks,” as a local saying went. But he also had tired eyes and a quick, nervous manner that irritated Josh. He was clearly a high-strung and excitable man—the wrong type to thrive out west.
“By grab, you are Bill Hickok!” the farmer said, lowering the muzzle of his Henry. “I don’t know why you’re on my property, Bill, but I know you wouldn’t come to harm a dirt-poor farmer. So welcome.”
Bill quickly explained that Pinkerton had sent him to investigate the troubles in Kinkaid County. He didn’t mention, however, that the cattlemen were paying him.
“I already talked to Elmer Kinkaid,” Bill concluded. “He says you and the farmers are the problem, not the cattlemen. Says you’re poisoning his cattle.”
“The farmers, my sweet aunt!” Hansen exploded. “Why, it’s Tammany politics in the short-grass country! When the cowmen first started this war, I had half a mind to tie the cow to the end gate and just move on. But common troubles will knit men. Now, by the living God, us hoe-men mean to give as good as we get.”
“You deny poisoning any cattle?” Bill pressed.
“Yah, shoor, you goddamn right I deny it! And my cousin Ned Droullard didn’t kill no cows neither. He was a Lutheran preacher, had a little farm out on Grass Creek. We found him dead of colic, Bill. Lead colic.”
“So who is killing the beeves?” Wild Bill demanded.
“I’ll be damned if I care, Bill! Let ’em die! All I know is, eastern capital is the goddamn enemy of the westering man. Every week, we got a new sheriff’s sale of abandoned land. And always, cattlemen buy it up. It’s easy for them to get land, even after it’s been claimed. After six months desertion, any plot can be claimed by a new owner. The cattlemen buy up relinquishments—more men fail out here than make it. And for a fat bribe, the public officials let the land grant settlers suffer at the hands of the cattlemen. They fence government land, fence off the public water holes, trample our crops.”
Bill nodded at the familiar story. Josh could see that Hickok was doing the same thing he had done with Elmer—he was listening. Listening, and observing both men for signs they were lying.
“In Kinkaid County,” Hansen said bitterly, “the word ‘rustler,’ has been stretched to include anybody who’s not on a cattle payroll. A man of strong opinions, Mr. Hickok, is never forgiven. That’s why my cousin Ned got killed. He’s like me, he wouldn’t shut up. Jesus Christ commanded us to smash the teeth of sinners, and like Ned, I’m a tooth-buster! I won’t truck with criminals, and it’s criminals that own Kinkaid County.”
Bill nodded, saying little. He thanked Hansen for his time, and promised the Swede he’d try to get to the bottom of this mess. As Josh and Bill rode back toward Progress City, Josh said, “Bill? Who you figure is lying? Kinkaid or Hansen?”
“Neither one,” Bill replied cryptically. But no matter how hard Josh pressed him, Hickok would say no more.
Chapter Five
The wet, muddied, tired friends pounded their horses across the flats, fighting fitful rainsqualls and harsh wind gusts. But they made it back to Progress City with time to spare before Bill’s 8 pm poker game at the Medicine Bow. Josh had learned poker from watching Bill play, and was now a good hand himself. He meant to sit in tonight, as long as the stakes stayed low.
As usual, the horses were tended to first. Once nosebags full of crushed barley had been strapped to both mounts, Wild Bill and Josh soaked thei
r rain-chilled limbs in hot baths, then filled their bellies at the town’s only cafe.
The stormy weather and dark night had almost cleared the town’s sole street. Still, Josh noticed that Bill kept forgetting to puff on his cheroot—a sure sign he expected trouble sooner rather than later.
“Kid,” Wild Bill said as they crossed back to the hotel after supper, “remember to keep a weather eye out for Jane. I know she’s around here. That woman is sneaky—and crazy as a shite-poke bird. And you can smirk all you want, Longfellow, but don’t you forget. She’s struck a spark for you, too.”
Josh felt himself coloring like a bumpkin at the horrible memory of Bill’s treachery down in Denver. With Calamity Jane about to barge in on Bill (who happened to be in a beautiful woman’s boudoir at the time), Hickok had used Josh as a romantic distraction. He had in fact, as Josh accused him angrily afterward, “thrown an innocent Christian to a ravenous lion.”
But Jane aside, neither did Wild Bill forget the more deadly threat to both men. When each of them headed to his own room just before the poker game, Bill said, “You got loads for that shooter I gave you?”
Startled, Josh nodded. Bill meant the old, but mint-condition, LeFaucheux revolver Bill had given him in Denver, shortly after Josh introduced himself to Hickok. The venerable French revolver required pin-fire cartridges, which could be difficult to find in smaller towns.
“Good,” Bill said. “Stick six beans in the wheel, then strap the gun on in plain view. I’ve got what the mountain men used to call a God fear. It’s been too quiet since we hit town. Tonight, somebody’s going to put at us.”
“Who?” Josh demanded.
Bill shrugged. “Where do all lost years go?” He left Josh standing alone in the hallway, gaping stupidly.
The saloon and gaming room attached to the hotel was small but comfortable, with green-baize card tables and fancy wallpaper patterned with gold fleur-de-lis. The nights still had a snap to them, and now red coals glowed inside the firebox of the stove.
