by Judd Cole
“New construction,” Josh remarked needlessly, for Bill had already seen it. Both men watched a work gang nailing up boards a quarter-mile south of town.
“Cattle-loading corrals,” Bill replied. “That’s about where the Burlington spur line will cut through. Doesn’t need to come directly into town, because it’s mostly for cow trains.”
Josh could tell from Bill’s tone that he was still trying to find a good connection between the spur line and distant Turk’s Creek. There was plenty of water closer to hand, including some nobody had yet bothered to claim. So why were Johnny Kinkaid and Barry Tate so obviously grabbing up the land sections around distant Turk’s Creek?
The town was just stirring to life for the day. A thin, bald-headed man in a dirty apron looked up from sweeping the boardwalk in front of the mercantile store. He stared at the riders for a long time before deciding to nod. As usual, the forgeman was clearly visible in the big, open doorway of his shop. He was busy rasping the hoofs of a pony smooth, preparing to shoe it.
The hotel seemed nearly deserted. Two old men played checkers in the lobby, spitting at the cuspidor behind the door and missing it more often than they hit it.
“Morning, Wild Bill,” Jed Rault greeted the famous frontiersman. “Message for you.” The hotel clerk added a knowing wink, “Judging from the smell coming off it, the author is of the female-type persuasion.”
Bill actually winced as he took the envelope, the perfume smell was so powerful. “Definitely female,” Bill repeated. “But she pours on the cologne like a soiled dove, not a Jenny Lind.”
Josh deftly ignored Bill’s maneuvering, elbowing in close and reading the note over Bill’s shoulder. The reporter couldn’t help a little sting of anger—and jealousy—as he read Nell Kinkaid’s bold and suggestive note.
Why, in Philadelphia it would be a scandal! So what if Bill was famous and handsome and all that? Did that mean that women had to ignore everybody else? Just turn into his concubines when Hickok came to town? But in his heart of envious hearts, Josh had to admit: If he had received that note, not Bill, he’d be calling Nell “spirited,” not a painted woman!
Wild Bill, however, hardly seemed elated by the note.
“Who left this?” he asked Jed.
The clerk grinned. “You think whoever she was wanted me to know? This ain’t New Orleans, brother! I just found it on the counter.”
“Mmm,” was all Bill said, reading the note again. “C’mon, Longfellow,” he added absently. “Let’s send off your latest batch of lies to the crapsheets. Seems I’ve got an appointment to keep in a few hours.”
“Can I go, too?” Josh demanded.
Bill snorted. “What? You like to watch, do you?”
Josh hung fire for a few seconds, not understanding. Then he flushed beet red. Bill laughed so hard, he had to pull his cigar out of his teeth. “Ahh, I’m just playing the larks with you, kid.”
Bill’s smile lingered. But all mirth suddenly deserted his eyes. “I’ll go alone. That note might be from Nell, all right. She’s bold enough. But seems to me, Nell’s the kind wouldn’t dip a letter in perfume— she’d give it a trace, not slap you in the face with it. Let’s move it, kid. We’re burning daylight.”
On the ride back to the deserted soddy, Wild Bill lapsed into a long, thoughtful silence. Although Hickok hadn’t said much about it, Josh suspected he was thinking more and more about Barry Tate. But even more, Wild Bill was fretting about Johnny Kinkaid.
There’s a hole in him somewhere, Elmer had admitted about his son. Bill’s concern wasn’t just because Johnny was a top hand with a gun—Josh knew Wild Bill better than that by now. Hickok wasn’t scared. Wild Bill seldom faced danger in his imagination. Bill had already called that a sure way for a man to turn himself into a coward and ruin life’s peaceful moments.
No. Josh knew Bill was worried about Elmer, not Johnny. Bill liked the crusty but decent old man. Just as he liked Waldo, even though the feckless loser was poor shakes as a sheriff.
Bill Hickok liked an odd assortment of persons, with special fondness for the decent underdogs of society. Bill knew that Elmer loved his only son, warts and all. Yet Bill seemed almost certain by now that Johnny Kinkaid was pushing toward a showdown with him. That arrogant punk would be no loss to anyone but Elmer.
The two riders were crossing a stretch where Russian thistle abounded in the low elevations while centuries of hard winds had polished the knolls bare higher up.
“Bill!” Josh warned, suddenly drawing rein. “Eyes left!”
Ahead and below, a gaudy buckboard with painted sideboards blocked the old stage road.
“Katy Christ!” Bill swore. Josh watched his face drain just as Pickett’s must have before his ill-fated charge at Gettysburg. Bill glanced desperately around, seeking immediate cover. “It’s Calamity Jane. She’ll be looking for me,” Bill added grimly.
Hickok stared at the grinning kid. “Looking for you, too, slim britches! Two men ain’t even a side dish for Jane when the appetite is on her.”
Hearing this, Josh lost his smug grin. “There’s a cutbank to our right,” he suggested. “We could cover down before she spots us.”
But by now Wild Bill had realized that Jane’s wagon had broken down.
“Oh, hell, it’s no use! She’s sprung an axle, Longfellow. See it trailing? She’s trying to reseat it by herself, but she needs a ratchet jack—or some strong arms to help her.”
Josh started to protest.
“Bite the bullet, kid,” Bill cut him off. “She’s coyote ugly and smells like a bear’s cave, but how many times has she put her bacon in the fire for us?”
Josh pressured his horse with both knees and followed Bill down the slope. But still he complained. “Man alive, Bill! Don’t you ever relax your code?”
Bill grinned, liking that. “Nope,” he answered cheerfully. “It wouldn’t be a code then. It’d be an Indian treaty!” Bill ground his cheroot out on the saddle horn and pocketed the long butt. “C’mon! Hah! Gee up, there!”
But destiny, Josh wrote later in his next wire story, had different plans for them that day. Jane never spotted them, and they never reached her. Because halfway down the long slope, Wild Bill glimpsed something else in the corner of his eye—something, experience told him, that wasn’t right.
He reined in, staring toward a copse of box elders and willows on their right. Josh followed his penetrating gaze and saw a saddled horse, minus its rider. He didn’t recognize the horse. But the sight didn’t strike the youth as particularly sinister.
Nonetheless, Bill said in a tone heavy with foreboding, “Kid, a horse is a naturally curious animal. It likes to look around. You see one with his head down, like that one, he’s either ailing or someone has pitched feed. That animal ain’t eating. C’mon.”
The horse stood in the middle of a little cup-shaped hollow. Josh heard the obscene buzzing of bluebottle flies as they drew nearer through the scattering of trees. Then he saw why the horse was ailing: Crusted blood covered its belly like a plaster. Even from here, Josh could see the puckered flesh of a bullet wound.
But a curse from Bill focused Josh’s attention square on the real horror: About twenty feet beyond the dying horse, Sheriff Waldo lay murdered.
“That bullet in his back,” Hickok said, squatting near the massive corpse and pointing, “didn’t kill him. Knocked him off his wounded horse. He tried to run for it. The killer rode him down like game and did that.”
Bill nodded at the pebbly mess where the top of Waldo’s head had been lifted off like the lid of a cookie jar.
“Point blank with a rifle,” Bill added.
It was Wild Bill’s quiet tone that alerted Josh to the true depth of Hickok’s anger at this cold-blooded killing. For all his limitations, Sheriff Waldo had been a man of conscience in a heartless country. That rated aces high with Wild Bill Hickok. It was going to go hard, Josh predicted, for whoever killed him.
Nell Kinkaid was no coward. She had survi
ved spooked horses, gully washers, stampedes, killer twisters, and rattlesnakes. But she couldn’t help a little inner tickle of nervousness as her fringed surrey rolled east along the old stage road that bisected Kinkaid County. Rumor had it the local Indians were out again, having jumped the rez in anger over yet another cut in their government rations.
A clean linen sheet lay folded on the seat beside Nell. The dust hereabouts was already awful, even this early in spring. Nell meant to wrap up her dress, after she picked it up at Holly Nearhood’s place, to protect it from the dust on the ride home.
It was the most gorgeous dress in the world! Organdy and tulle, shipped all the way from Paris, France, special order. A dress as elegant and fancy and fine as any of Hickok’s famous ladies had ever owned. Just wait until Wild Bill saw her wearing it! The trail entered a long, blind turn with steep banks of thornbushes towering high on both sides. The pleasant smile faded from Nell’s lips. She flicked at the horse’s glossy rump with a light sisal whip, hurrying the animal along.
Barry Tate had taken up an excellent position in a natural nest of rocks. From here, he could see the entire countryside as it rolled up to a pinnacle where the stage road intersected with Old Evansville Pike.
He had smoked the sights of his Sharps .50 to cut reflection when he aimed in this glaring sunlight. Barry still wasn’t sure exactly how he missed Hickok when he fired on him through the hotel-room window. Maybe, in his eagerness, he bucked his gun a fraction of an inch.
Whatever. But Barry was damned if that was going to happen again. He had found an opening between two boulders and erected sturdy cross-sticks. Now he could lay the muzzle of the Sharps down steady as a brick on mortar.
Barry wondered idly if anyone had yet discovered Waldo’s body. Barry hadn’t been looking to kill the meddling sheriff. But the fat fool had revealed his hiding place while Johnny and Barry were poisoning cattle. So Barry had cut him down. Served the dirty traitor right for turning on the cattlemen.
Waldo not only bit the hand that fed him—but he jumped ship to help an outsider, a skirt-chasing gunslick, at that. Hickok not only believed he could kill whomever he chose—but that he could bed any man’s wench, like some godlike feudal landlord, and no man could say anything about it.
“Well, mister, we’ll see about that,” Barry said in a voice just above a whisper.
Finally, after a long and boring wait in his hiding place, Barry heard it: the rattle of tug chains as a conveyance approached the intersection below.
There was Nell! Just now easing out of that long bend around Turkey Tail Mountain. Her sun bonnet was a bright white speck from up here. She’d reach the intersection, Barry estimated, in about five minutes. So where in the hell was Hickok?
Barry forced himself to relax, willed his nerves and his breathing steady. He eased his finger inside the trigger guard, ready to take up the slack the moment he found his target.
Just before noon, Wild Bill picketed his roan well off the stage road in a bracken of ferns. He approached the intersection on foot, trying not to break cover. But he could move in only so close before the trees and bushes thinned to open dust flats, vulnerable to any marksmen above.
Bill did not expect trouble. At least, no more trouble than he usually expected. While it was true this was a good ambush spot, it was also a logical place to meet someone. And now Hickok relaxed even more when he spotted Nell Kinkaid, alone in her surrey. If the note was forged in her name, why was she here right on time?
As Nell’s conveyance rattled over a plank bridge, Wild Bill stepped out from behind the chokecherry bushes where he’d been hiding. He removed his hat and waved at her with it.
That’s when all of it happened, so fast it was over in seconds. But it seemed to take extra long to Bill. Only later was Hickok able to sort out the deadly sequence of events.
The first clue was Nell’s reaction upon seeing him. Her smile was genuine, all right. But so was the surprise in her eyes. As if, Bill realized in a heartbeat, meeting him was completely unexpected.
“Nell!” Bill roared out. “Stop there and cover down!”
Even before he finished speaking, the first shot from above tagged Bill’s left shoulder. It would have nailed him between the shoulder blades, however, had he not already leaped aside.
Nell screamed, the horse reared in its traces, and Bill was scrambling to save his hide. That first bullet had passed through his shoulder clean, causing more heat than pain. But now the shots came rapid as drumbeats. Bill rolled desperately across the trail, just inches ahead of each impacting bullet.
If that was Tate up there, Bill realized desperately, he had fourteen shots in that rifle of his. And Bill was running out of room to outmaneuver them.
Even as he scrambled, however, Wild Bill’s trained eyes were looking for target markers. And now he caught a sun glint up above in the corner of his vision. It could easily have been a speck of reflecting quartz or mica. Lacking anything better to shoot at, however, Wild Bill began busting caps at it.
Each time he rolled onto his back, Bill squeezed off a shot toward the rocks and the reflection. At his third close-spaced shot, he heard a man grunt hard. A rifle came crashing and bouncing down the rocky bank, a human body right behind it.
Barry Tate, dead as King David, thumped hard into the trail just in front of Nell and sprawled on his back, his rock-battered, wide-eyed face staring up at her in a grinning death rictus. Nell was so utterly shocked and horrified that she never even bothered to scream— she simply fainted dead away on the spot.
Chapter Fifteen
Wild Bill took a minute to scan the rimrock, making sure no other marksmen were waiting. Then, wincing at a sudden pulse of pain in his shoulder, he hurried around to the driver’s side of the surrey. He loosened Nell’s high-buttoned collar and gently cuffed her cheeks back to some semblance of their rosy hue.
Nell’s thick-curving lashes twitched open. A moment later, realizing that Wild Bill was bleeding, she sat up and gasped audibly.
“Oh, good heart of God! You’ve been hit, Bill!”
“Just winged me,” Bill said modestly but truthfully. As far as combat wounds went, he knew this one was piddling. The bullet passed harmlessly through flesh just beneath the shoulder bone. Bill had carbolic acid in his saddlebag, and he’d pour some of that into it. Carbolic got him through several wounds during the war.
But Nell sucked in a hissing breath when she tugged Bill’s shirt away. The way blood had streamed all over Hickok’s left pectoral made it appear, at first glance, that he’d been hit somewhere in the upper chest.
“My lord, Wild Bill, what are you doing on your feet, you brave, foolish thing! Here, lie down on the seat, that’s it, just lay your head in my lap. I’ll stop the bleeding—Oh, Bill, does it hurt terribly, you brave man?
After her initial shock, Nell now hardly paid any attention to Tate’s sprawled body. Her first concern was for Bill’s well-being. As she hovered close, her clean, fragrant hair tickling his bare chest, Bill said weakly: “Well, maybe there is some pain...”
“Of course there is, enough to kill a lesser man. Don’t play tough for me, poor thing!”
Nell, an avid fan of ladies’ romances, now played the heroine to the hilt. She ripped a frilly strip from the bottom of her cotton chemise, baring quite a bit of shapely leg to do so. Lying snugly in her lap, Bill got a firsthand look at that leg. Even better when, as she bent forward to do this, the full weight of her ample bosom smothered Hickok’s face in pure pleasure.
Bill lay still, groaning now and then to ratchet up Nell’s petting and cooing while she gently wrapped his wound.
“We’ll get you to help,” Nell fussed, carefully tying the bandage. “Can I do anything else, Bill?”
“Just in case it’s—it’s curtains for me,” Bill managed weakly, “could you ... I mean, would you consider kissing me? Just an angel’s kiss to recommend me to Saint Peter?”
This was a stroke of devious genius. Nell was startled but
flattered. Here this handsome man lay, at death’s door, gallantly requesting a kiss for the sake of his immortal soul! Even Jane Eyre or The Monk wasn’t this exciting and romantic!
“I’d be absolutely honored,” Nell whispered. Slowly her pretty face came lower and closer to Bill’s, the heart-shaped lips spreading invitingly for a passionate kiss.
Calamity Jane was gutting a fish on a stump when she heard shots ring out across the ridge. First came the powerful cracks of a rifle, perhaps four or five shots, all close-spaced. These were followed immediately by a string of pistol shots, then an ominous silence.
“Wild Bill!” Jane exclaimed. “That damned litter of prairie rats is after him again!”
Jane gripped her scaling knife and raced toward the crest of the razorback ridge that sheltered her camp. “Any of you bastards kill Bill,” she vowed, “I’ll hunt you down and cut you from neck to nuts!”
The stage road to Progress City wound around the base of the ridge. Jane immediately spotted the surrey stopped in the road, a well-dressed woman supine on the front seat. A new corpse lay sprawled in the trail. And there was Wild Bill, bleeding a little at the left shoulder but obviously sound as he carefully scanned the terrain for more bushwhackers.
“Them peckerwoods tried to kill you again, purty Bill,” Jane said softly. “But the Lord still favors you on account of all my prayers.”
Jane’s relief, however, quickly turned to a smoldering jealousy as she watched events transpire below. Bill, showing no pain or other sign of serious injury, suddenly turned helpless as the pretty girl revived and began fussing over him.
“Why, that slyboots is play-actin’ so’s she’ll drop her linen!”
But Jane’s anger did not focus on the young woman. In one of the rare signs of solidarity with other members of the female tribe, Jane seldom blamed Hickok’s ladies. Hell’s bells, man! How could any woman, even a Carmelite nun, be expected to resist Wild Bill Hickok?
