by Judd Cole
Just before Jarvis Blackford came down from his room, the hotel clerk approached Wild Bill’s table.
“What’s the word, Yank?” Bill greeted the Civil War vet.
Jed Rault glanced around the nearly empty room. “Could be trouble shaping up, Wild Bill. Barry Tate, the foreman of the Rocking K, was in town earlier. He made a point of noising it all around that Wild Bill Hickok was in town—open reward and all.”
Josh watched Bill mull this over while he riffled through a new deck of cards. “The ramrod of the Rocking K, huh? Hmm. . . tell me, Jed, you just an employee here?”
The clerk shook his head. “Part owner.”
Bill frowned. “I was afraid of that. Look, there’ll likely be some damage. But I will personally deliver the repair bill to Allan Pinkerton. That old skinflint is tighter than Dick’s hatband, but he’ll pay any bill I tell him to pay.”
Jed nodded. “Your word’s better than gold around me, Bill. Let ’er rip!”
“Wyoming,” Jarvis Blackford said expansively, pouring Wild Bill another shot of bourbon. “It’s a Delaware Indian term, you know. Means ‘at the big plains.’”
“It’s big, all right,” Bill agreed as he studied his cards. “A man’s got room out here to swing a cat in. But good land tends to draw a lot of boomers.”
Bill spoke casually but chose those words deliberately. Josh studied Blackford’s long, aristocratic face, but the man didn’t blink an eye. “Boomers” was the frontier term of contempt for those who tried to be first on hand at every new settlement—those who simply cashed in and moved on, often a few steps ahead of the law.
As he always did, Wild Bill made sure his chair was placed against the wall. Josh knew that was not only to cover his back, but it left the entire room, and all in it, open to Bill’s view.
“I’ve noticed,” Jarvis commented while Josh dealt the next hand, “that you’re a very cautious man, Wild Bill.”
“I’ve learned a simple fact,” Bill replied genially. “My existence is central to me, but it’s only peripheral to others. I’ll take three, kid.”
Jarvis, busy scraping the bowl of his pipe with a penknife, laughed outright. “Why, you’re quite the philosopher, Bill!”
Josh could keep only half his mind on the game. Since Jed Rault’s warning earlier, the youth had divided his attention between the saloon’s few occupants and its two doors—one leading from the hotel lobby, another opening into the alley behind.
The game went forward, cards whispering, chips clinking, each man alive with his thoughts when Blackford wasn’t expounding. Soon, it became apparent that Jarvis was again deliberately losing to Bill. Josh dropped out, remaining as dealer, when the ante rose to a dollar.
Still Bill went on winning. Hickok was purposely holding his cards so Josh could read them. Even when Bill intentionally killed three deuces, discarding to reduce them to a lowly pair, he still won.
Jarvis made a good pretense of being a real competitor. “Money in my pocket,” he boasted each time he recklessly saw another raise. And he won now and then to make it look good. But Bill was right—the man was deliberately tossing his money down a rat hole. Why?
Again Josh’s eyes swept the room, dwelling on both doorways. He could feel the awkward weight of the stiff leather holster on his right hip. Bill’s words snapped in memory like burning twigs: Tonight, somebody’s going to put at us.
Blackford, Josh abruptly realized, was talking to him.
“So you are the golden quill behind those stirring newspaper tales about Wild Bill? I can still recall your descriptions when you and Bill visited that Sioux village in Nebraska. Something about ‘the beat of callused palms on a wet skin drum.’ Quite vivid, lad. Makings of a Fennimore Cooper there.”
Josh flushed with pride. Hell, maybe this Blackford wasn’t such a bad sort. The man clearly had good taste.
“The Philly Kid here,” Bill tossed in, “is like a three-year-old colt. He’s got his size and strength, but no sense yet to use them. See your dollar, Mr. Blackford, and raise you two more.”
“Oh, the lad has sense, Bill. He was quite inspiring when he wrote, ‘A man brave for one second can change the course of history.’ Hear, hear! Bill Hickok has proved that point several times. But what do most men die for out here in the Wild West? To change history? Pah! For mince pie, that’s what.”
“It’s what a man lives for that matters,” Bill interjected amiably, speaking with a slim cheroot in his teeth. “I’ll see you, and raise you two more.”
“Speaking of what a man lives for, Bill...”
Blackford leaned forward on the table. His tone became a bit more intimate. “The West is finally starting to settle, thank the Lord. I can recall the day when women were so scarce out here a man had to marry whatever got off the train. Now we’ve got some real beauties. Gals like Nell Kinkaid. Seen her yet?”
“She’s easy to look at,” Bill agreed. “I’ll take three, damnit,” he added to Josh.
Josh had watched Blackford closely during this exchange about Nell Kinkaid. A slight movement of the older man’s neck muscles suggested his remark was far from casual.
“Hit me, kid,” Bill said, slapping down his discards.
“I’m fine,” Jarvis told the young dealer.
Josh flipped two cards at Bill and set the deck down. Bill squinted to see through his cigar smoke, sorting out his hand. A moment later he slanted it so Josh could read it: a pair of aces and a pair of eights.
Aces and eights . .. Would Bill hold or fold? Josh wondered. Blackford hadn’t taken even one discard. Since he wasn’t one to bluff, that probably meant he had either a straight, a flush, or a full house. Any of which would beat a pair. On the other hand, Bill had been winning all night with far less in his hand.
The pot was up to ten dollars. Two days’ wages for a Pinkerton op. He’ll hold, Josh decided.
“Fold,” Bill said promptly, tossing in his hand. And that’s when Josh remembered what Bill had told him in Denver about aces and eights: That hand has always been bad luck for me. And in fact, as Josh realized later when it was all over, by folding just when he did, Wild Bill saved both their lives.
It turned out that Blackford also had only two pairs, sixes and nines. But precisely at the moment when Hickok would have been scooping in his winnings, it happened: Both doors leading into the saloon suddenly banged open hard.
Everything happened faster than a finger snap. But to Josh, who froze to the edge of his seat, it all had a dreamlike slowness to it, as if it were all happening underwater. He remembered the white-faced barkeep leaping under the counter. In the doorway behind the bar, Josh glimpsed a swarthy, heavyset man with hairy hands—hands clutching a Winchester repeater. Josh never even saw the other man.
Because he was not scooping in or stacking his winnings, Bill’s hands were right where he always liked to keep them—thumbs on the seams of his trousers. Even before he had visual confirmation of his targets, Hickok had both guns out. Then he rolled off his chair, as the first rifle blasts splintered the wood.
Later that night Josh would write it exactly as it happened: “Wild Bill rolled three times, sat back on his heels, and emptied both Peacemakers in seconds, killing both would-be assassins.” One stray rifle shot had snapped Blackford’s fancy walking stick, and Bill’s barrage of lead destroyed the back-bar mirror. But no one was hit besides the gunmen.
Jarvis Blackford, Josh saw immediately, was not part of this attack. His face had drained of color, and his hands trembled so that he couldn’t even hold his pipe. Bill, in contrast, was calmly thumbing cartridges into his still-warm guns.
“Kid,” he said sarcastically to Josh, “I taught you to shoot, but we’ll have to work on your draw. I killed both those turkey buzzards before your gun cleared the holster. You’re supposed to back me up, not bury me.”
The barkeep ran to fetch Sheriff Waldo. Bill picked up his cheroot off the floor, stuck it in his teeth, and sat back down.
“Deal,”
he ordered Josh.
Chapter Six
Later that night, after the rainsqualls had let up, a bitter-cold wind turned the soft mud to iron. While Wild Bill was keeping the undertaker busy in Progress City, homesteader Dave Hansen was hard at work in the chilly moonlight.
Despite the near-frozen ground and late hour, Hansen trudged up and down, up and down behind a plow with rusty shares. Because of the tense war lately in Kinkaid County, the big Swede was seriously behind in his work. Now he was plowing fireguards between his fields, anticipating moves by the cattlemen to burn him out as they had others.
For hours Hansen had been repeating the monotonous process—plowing long furrows and then burning the strips between them to keep flames from leaping. His cousin Ned, before finally being gunned down, had been burned out last summer during the dog days of August, when most of Wyoming would be natural tinder.
“Git! Git!” he shouted to his flagging dray horse. “One more row, Dobber, and then it’s fresh oats. Gee up there, git!”
Normally Hansen would have been in bed hours before. But he had needed several plowing days lately just to repair his cut fences. Without them, Rocking K cowhands would deliberately haze cattle across his fields. Hansen wished to God he could find out who was poisoning cattle around here—it sure as hell wasn’t him or any farmers he knew.
The wind still shrieked and howled like damned souls in torment. Hansen could hear little else above it as he shivered behind the plow. Thus, he had no warning at all before a loop of rope dropped over him and suddenly tightened, pinning his arms to his sides.
“Drag him over here, boys!” a voice shouted from the darkness. “Over here by this big cottonwood tree!”
Hooves thudded and Dave bounced along behind the horse like a helpless rag doll, pain grating through him.
“Goldang furriners!” somebody hollered. “Cow killers don’t last long in Kinkaid County, Hansen!”
Fear numbed Hansen when one of the shadowy figures dropped a hangman’s noose over his neck and tightened the coils against his windpipe. He watched his tormentor toss the other end of the rope over a thick tree limb. A scud of clouds blew away from the moon, and Hansen recognized one of the mounted tormentors despite the bandanna over his face.
“I know you, Barry Tate! I know those red sideburns!”
“Don’t matter what you know, hoe-man. Don’t matter a jackstraw!”
Three men had gathered around the other end of the rope. They tugged together, and Hansen was abruptly choked as he was pulled off the ground.
They didn’t actually string him up—this time. Instead, Dave was pulled just off the ground and choked until he was on the verge of passing out. Then he was lowered for a few seconds before being hoisted aloft again.
While Dave watched, gasping, Barry Tate shifted his heavy weight, threw a leg around his saddle horn, and built himself a cigarette in the moonlight.
“You flea-bit farmers got a free ride west,” Tate shouted. Hansen, like many local farmers, had come out west on the Northwestern Railroad, which gave free passes to the destitute. “And by God, you’ll get a free ride back east—in a coffin!”
For about twenty minutes Hansen was jerked from the ground and held aloft, then lowered again briefly, choked to the verge of passing out. By the time his tormentors turned him loose, the farmer was coughing blood and struggling for breath.
“This is just dry-firing tonight,” Tate assured the heap of twitching humanity that lay on the ground below him. “But you will stretch hemp, Swede, if you don’t pull foot outta this territory. No farmers, sheepmen, nor coyotes welcome!”
Most people figured cows were stupid. But Johnny Kinkaid knew they could grow quite fond of their human handlers over time. He had heard beeves raise the dickens when separated from their drovers after a long drive.
So Johnny did feel sharp pangs of guilt as he twisted the cork stopper from a bottle of strychnine powder. He shook some into a metal washtub half filled with cool water. These cows in this far-flung holding pasture were especially thirsty. Johnny waited and watched, letting perhaps two dozen drink from the tub before he finally emptied it into the grass.
He knew from experience that all the animals that just drank would be dead within an hour. Though it troubled him deeply to poison his father’s—and thus his own—cattle, the younger Kinkaid had finally squared with the facts.
The fact, for example, that Johnny was up to his goddamn ears in gambling debts, all owed to creditors in nearby Evansville and Barr Nunn. Or the fact that he was sick and tired of the hard, unpredictable life of a cattleman. Hell, a fortune made one year could all be lost during a hard freeze the next.
And now, like the answer to a prayer, Jarvis Blackford had arrived.
The railroad plutocrat was offering Johnny a life of easy wealth and comfort. Johnny knew his old man was decent, but Elmer Kinkaid was also a flintlock rifle in the age of the Winchester ’72. Gone were the days when a man must work “from can to can’t” to make his fortune. Nowadays, Johnny knew, a man got rich from speculation and investment—that is, by profiting off the hard labor of others without breaking a sweat himself.
For a moment, as he tied the washtub to one of his saddle straps, Johnny thought about Barry and the rest of the nightriders. By now they should have thrown a good scare into that mouthy Dave Hansen.
Hansen ... Hickok rode out to his place earlier that day. But it wasn’t the farmers around here who were paying Hickok. It was the cattle barons doing that. There was no proof, yet, that Hickok would mean trouble for Johnny.
But if he did, Johnny was more than ready to face Hickok in a gunfight—he was downright eager. Johnny could drop a silver dollar, then draw and fire his gun twice before that dollar hit the ground. As one awed admirer wrote in the Progress City Beacon, after watching Johnny win a county shooting match: “It’s as if Johnny Kinkaid draws his gun today and fires it yesterday.”
So let Hickok start turning over rocks, Johnny thought as he stepped up into leather. When it came time to post the pony, Johnny meant to be ready.
“This ain’t factory ammunition, you young fool,” Bill complained to Josh. “You bought reloaded shells! See where this one’s been hand-crimped? They’ll fire, but they won’t be near as accurate.”
Josh flushed and took the carton of .44 shells back from Wild Bill. “Sorry,” he mumbled. ‘That’s what the clerk gave me. I’ll run get some of the right ones.”
“Wasn’t your fault, kid,” Bill said, dismissing it. “Greenhorns are always an easy mark. We’ll both walk over. You seen the local paper?”
Josh nodded. A front-page story—some of the most vivid details pulled from the very dispatch Josh had filed at the telegraph office—had added more information about Butch and Mike Labun, the brothers Wild Bill had killed the night before. A pair of dirty hard tails who used to make their living selling buffalo hides, until their ilk had almost wiped out the last herds.
“I’m thinking it likely had nothing to do with the war hereabouts,” Bill said as the two men exited the Medicine Bow Hotel. Josh watched Wild Bill carefully survey the street along both sides. “Just a couple of lazy profiteers hoping to turn my bones into a fortune.”
The two friends waited on the narrow boardwalk while several cowboys drove a small herd through town. A large bull started to peel away from the main gather. Abruptly, a puncher hazed it back by emitting the high-pitched Rebel yell from the war years.
Josh watched Bill start and actually begin to draw one of his Colts. Then Hickok shook his head.
“Damn but I’m glad I was a scout and spy during the war,” he told Josh. “Being captured and tortured was rough. But how could the infantry face that damned, unnerving yell?”
The gun shop was on the other side of the street. The herd trailed out of town toward the east, and the two men crossed the still-muddy street. Bill exchanged the reloaded ammo for factory fresh, ignoring the stammering clerk’s profuse apologies for “the unfortunate mistak
e.”
They emerged just in time to see a fancy fringed surrey carefully negotiate the muddy ruts. The passenger was Nell Kinkaid, pretty in a yellow shirtwaist and a split buckskin riding skirt.
Josh and Bill touched their hats as the surrey drew near. Nell touched the driver’s arm, and the surrey stopped in front of them.
“Well, Mr. Hickok!” Nell called in her teasing manner. “Already up to mischief, I see in this morning’s paper. I suppose that means you’ll be too busy to come visit me again?”
“Not at all, Miss Kinkaid,” Bill replied gallantly. “I’ve never found any real conflict between business and pleasure.”
At this, the driver scowled.
“Mr. Hickok,” Nell added, “this is Barry Tate, my father’s foreman.”
Bill took the man in with one hard look. Not only was Tate wearing a .44 double-action Colt in a hand-tooled holster, but a Sharps .50 in a leather sheath lay on the seat beside him.
“I’m familiar with your work, Tate,” Bill said in a toneless voice.
“How’s that?”
“Last night I killed two of the boys you sicced on me.”
Nell, surprised, stared at the foreman.
“You’re out of line, Hickok,” Barry said.
“Next time,” Bill added, “send better men to do your killing for you.”
Josh watched Wild Bill again touch his hat to Nell before a red-faced Tate lashed the horse into motion.
“Man alive,” Josh commented. “That Tate looks mad enough to wake snakes.”
“There’ll be plenty getting mad before I’m done with ’em,” Bill promised as they headed back toward the hotel again. “And some that are getting mad will be getting dead.”
Chapter Seven
Wild Bill paused in front of the door to his hotel room and placed his ear against it, listening carefully. He felt a curious sense of foreboding, but had to admit he had no solid evidence to justify it. Hearing nothing, he keyed the lock and swung open the door.
