by Judd Cole
“Oh, there were rules,” Bill said in his amiable way. “F’rinstance, if you found a body with a bullet hole in the front, it was ruled death by misadventure. Case closed. Bullet holes in the back, however, were ruled murder.”
“In other words,” Liddy said sarcastically, “murder from the front was accepted. Some ‘code’, Mr. Hickok. The landscape out here may be rough and majestic; the men, however, are just rough.”
A delicious dessert of French custard ice cream was followed by after-dinner cordials. Now and then Liddy cooled herself with a palmetto fan.
“So, Mr. Hickok,” Liddy said, baiting him with her tone as she smiled behind her fan. “Why don’t you regale all of us with tales of your. . . conquests out west? I’ve read that you sometimes disappear, for days at a time, in the company of some beautiful woman or other?”
Bill bowed slightly in her direction. “Well, Miss McGinnis, they say you can’t tell if the wood is good just by looking at the paint.”
Liddy flushed deeply, for his innuendo applied to her, also.
Liddy had gotten herself into this mess. But Josh gallantly rescued her by quickly changing the subject to the village of Chimayo. He briefly described the desperate situation there when he and Bill rode through three days ago.
Liddy lamented that the church there, El Santuario, was closed and the village quarantined.
“It is an unpretentious little chapel,” she told Josh while Bill and Mitt listened. “But some insist it is the Lourdes of New Mexico. Do you know, Joshua? One entire wall is covered with the crutches of those who were healed there.”
Josh gazed into her bottomless blue eyes, mesmerized. “That is remarkable,” he said enthusiastically. “I’d love to see it with you sometime.”
Bill had his belly full of this haughty bitch and her love struck puppy. He wiped some crumbs from his mustache with the corner of a linen napkin.
“Hunh,” he said, winking at Mitt. “Think about that. All those crutches, but not one wooden leg.”
Mitt, who like Wild Bill was not known for piety, burst out laughing. He got so carried away that he even smacked the table repeatedly with his fist.
Josh tried to keep a straight face, out of loyalty to Liddy. But Bill’s joke was a capital hit. Despite his best effort, Josh, too, burst into paroxysms of mirth.
“That one’s going into my next dispatch,” he declared.
All this cynicism was too much for Liddy. She flushed red to her very earlobes and rose from the table, throwing down her napkin.
“All three of you are coarse and vulgar!” she accused them. “Benighted savages! It is not a joke what happens in Chimayo. It’s terrible, simply horrid. If you were even half the man you pretend to be, Mr. Hickok, you’d help those poor people!”
“Liddy!” Josh said, rising to stop her. “Wait, I didn’t mean—”
But she had already stormed out of the room in high dudgeon. Before anyone could say anything else, there was a thunder of hooves and a hideous racket of braying camels out in the yard.
“Martha’s back with the herd,” Mitt said. “C’mon, boys, you’ve got to see this. It’s a caution to screech owls.”
Wild Bill’s dinner almost came back up at the mention of the name Martha. Can’t be, he told himself as he and Josh followed Mitt out into the yard. What are the chances?
Dust hazed the main yard, stirred up by the camel herd. Bill spotted a familiar gray Stetson, and he groaned out loud. He was about to turn and flee back into the house. But he was too late.
“Yoo-hoo! Wild Bill! I knew fate would toss us together again, you purty critter!”
Martha “Calamity Jane” Burke spoke from her sheepskin-pad perch high atop the hump of the lead camel, Ignatius.
“Jane,” Bill greeted her in a neutral voice while Josh covered a grin with his hand. “This is a . . . genuine surprise. Mitt didn’t tell me you were working for him.”
“You two know each other?” Mitt demanded. He had heard some wild tales about a woman called Calamity Jane. But this woman hadn’t used that name when he hired her on.
“Not in the biblical sense,” Jane retorted. “Not yet. But we will—we got us a shared destiny.”
By now Liddy had been drawn out onto the porch, lured by all the commotion. She heard this last remark and saw the deep discomfort in Bill’s face.
“Why, this must be serendipity!” she exclaimed with false enthusiasm. “I mean, Wild Bill and Jane meeting like this. Joshua, why don’t we take a ride? That way, these two lovebirds can get reacquainted while I finish showing you the ranch.”
Bill turned white as a fish belly. He turned to say something. But a camel in a foul mood chose that moment to crane its neck and spit right in Bill’s face.
“Careful, handsome,” Jane warned. “They’re mighty jealous of my affections. And being ugly as sin, they won’t abide a pretty face.”
Josh and Liddy shared a laugh while a scowling Wild Bill wiped his face dry with his handkerchief.
“Rider coming in,” Mitt remarked. “He’s sure sittin’ his saddle funny. Maybe he’s hurt.”
Everyone turned to watch a big, seventeen-hand blood bay trotting through the yard gate.
“Why, that’s Sam Baxter,” Bill said, stepping off the porch.
“So it is,” Mitt agreed. “Is he sleeping? Look how his head’s slumping.”
Sam’s horse stopped cold where it was, afraid to approach the herd of camels.
“Who’s Sam Baxter?” Josh asked, but Bill ignored him. He walked out to meet his friend.
“Sam, you ugly son of trouble,” Bill called to his former mentor. “Light down and . . . Christ!”
With an unceremonious flump, Sam’s big body slid lopsided from the saddle and landed on the ground.
Liddy screamed, biting her knuckles. Bill rushed forward to check on the marshal.
“Dead,” he announced grimly. “He took three slugs. The one in his neck severed an artery. He bled to death.”
Gingerly, Bill touched some of the blood. Tacky, but not yet completely dried out. Josh came up beside him.
“He was a U.S. marshal,” the reporter said, spotting Sam’s five-point star.
“Best there was,” Bill said tersely. “He taught me tricks that’ve saved my life more than once. Matter fact, kid, I think he saved your life, too.”
“Mine? Man alive! But how? When?”
“Today. That ambush we got caught in earlier.”
“Sure, I take your meaning. Those shots we heard on the other side of the ridge.”
Bill nodded, still looking at Sam’s seamed, lifeless face. He gave his all for America. Served and protected and never asked for a thing in return but a modest wage and the right to respect himself. Bill recalled Mitt’s comment: A good star man is a national treasure.
“He died taking that sniper’s bead off of us,” Bill said thoughtfully.
Mitt came closer. “I knew Marshal Baxter as a damn good lawman. I’ll have a couple hands dig him a grave. And I’ll send Manuel to fetch Padre Salazar. We’ll give him a decent burial.”
“Send for the priest,” Bill agreed. “But give me the shovel. It’ll be an honor to dig this man’s grave.”
“Who did this, Bill?” Josh asked in a hushed voice.
“I got an idea, but I can’t say right now. But I know Sam deserved better than this. I guess our little pleasure trip is officially over, Longfellow. Because I sure-God intend to find the bastard.”
Chapter Eight
One day after he killed Marshal Baxter, Frank Tutt met with his boss in a mountain pass just northeast of San Juan Pueblo in northern New Mexico. San Juan was situated about halfway between Santa Fe to the south, and Taos to the northeast.
El Lobo and his hard-bitten riders had made camp in the lee of a long spur of rock. The cross-winds were fierce here, and colder than the lower elevations. They buffeted the men from every direction. The Apaches, as was their custom, had slept behind low windbreaks made of stones. The Mexican riders had sim
ply wrapped themselves in their Saltillo blankets and crowded under the buckboard that carried the huge church bell.
Tutt arrived just after sunup, tired and trail-worn. He had ridden day and night to reach this rendezvous point, and he was red-eyed and snappish from exhaustion. Nor was El Lobo’s mood any better. Within minutes, the two were at loggerheads.
“All right, damn it,” Tutt said. “So Hickok got away this time. I killed Baxter, didn’t I? He’s been dogging you like a shadow for years.”
“So what? Has your brain come unhinged? Killing Baxter won’t earn you jewels in paradise. It is Hickok we must fear above all others.”
For a long moment both speakers fell silent. The only sound was the horses champing grass and the wind blasting through a nearby canyon, shrieking in the caves and crevices.
“I have modified the plan,” El Lobo finally resumed in his quiet, dangerous voice. “I sent Jemez”—this was the best scout among the Apaches—“to scout the country around Taos. We are in luck, mano. Do you remember the silver mine that used to operate there?”
Tutt nodded. In that early light, his eyes looked as hard and cold as two chips of obsidian.
“German bunch, right? Made good money until it went bust right after the war?”
El Lobo nodded. Several days’ beard growth shadowed his cheeks and jaw. Silver conchos circled the brim of his low shako hat.
“The Germans are long gone, the mine sealed. But there is still forty miles of narrow-gauge railroad between the old mine and the town of Springer, which was once their freight station for the silver ore.”
“So what?” Frank pried open a can of peaches with his bowie knife. He began slurping them down without a spoon. El Lobo stared in disgust at the juice dribbling off Tutt’s chin.
“Our old friend Witter Boyd took over the line and the train when the Germans pulled stakes. Now Witter runs a short-line railroad between Taos and Springer. He himself operates the steam locomotive.”
“I take your drift, Wolf. That means we can shake off any followers in Taos. The trail will disappear once that bell is loaded on a train and hauled to Springer.”
“Not disappear,” El Lobo corrected him. “I will send a false trail north toward Colorado. We will load one buckboard in Taos and send the other one on, loaded with rocks. For a price, Witter will gladly haul the bell secretly after dark. No one will know. Then it will be a straight shot south from Springer to the smelter at Los Cerrillos. In less than one week, I will have new gold bars.”
“Don’t you mean we will have new gold bars?”
El Lobo’s thin lips eased away from his teeth. In that moment he did resemble a wolf.
“Chinga tu madre,” he swore without heat. “That gold is mine. But each man who helps me will get a fair share.”
By now the rest of the men were stirring to life and starting cooking fires in little pits. The Apaches and the Mexican deserters carefully avoided each other, sticking to their own groups.
“As for you,” El Lobo told Frank, “I want you back on Hickok. Until you kill him, or he kills you, he must be constantly watched.”
Joshua was shocked.
In the year he had personally known and observed Wild Bill Hickok, he had seldom seen the famous gunman perform any manual labor. Hickok would face down any killer in a gunfight, and he had the endurance of a doorknob. But he avoided hard work the way horses avoided bears.
Yet Wild Bill refused to let anyone else help him dig Sam Baxter’s grave. Josh was further shocked when the irreverent Hickok bowed his head as the priest prayed over the departed. Almost everyone on the Lazy M, from Mitt to the lowest-paid hands, turned out in their Sunday best for the lawman’s funeral.
“America was made possible by men like Sam Baxter,” Bill said in a brief, quiet-spoken, but sincere eulogy. “He always gave more than he asked for, and he never gave any man an order that he wouldn’t gladly carry out himself. When food was scarce, Sam was the last in line to eat. But when trouble came, he was the first man into the breach. He never got rich nor famous, but he’s an American hero. No man’s ghost will ever say, ‘If only Sam Baxter had been a braver man.’”
Josh, like everyone else present, was deeply moved. Liddy sobbed openly, and several grizzled cowhands had to swipe a tear or two from their eyes. As the ropes holding Sam’s pine coffin were lowered into the grave, Josh decided that U.S. Marshal Sam Baxter’s obituary would be his next story for the New York Herald.
Bill Hickok was not a troubled, brooding man who wallowed in regrets. Yet Josh could tell that something was rankling at him. Even the considerable charms of Liddy McGinnis failed to interest Bill right now. Once Sam was in the ground, Bill took a bottle to his room and proceeded to get snockered.
“C’mon in, kid,” Bill said when Josh appeared at his door to see how his friend was doing. “Joshua, you’ve always kept your word to me. If I tell you something off the record, does it stay that way?
“You kidding? Is Paris a city?”
Bill nodded. Though he’d consumed half a bottle of bourbon, his speech was clear and coherent. Succinctly, he explained the real reason why Elena Vargas had sent for him on their first night in Santa Fe. Josh’s eyes widened when he learned about the golden bell stolen from Chimayo.
“Sam was there waiting at Elena’s house. He asked me to help him get the bell back,” Bill said morosely. “But I was too busy with visions of naked flesh and straight flushes.”
“You think it was this El Lobo who killed him?” Josh asked.
Bill shook his head. “No, not by his own hand. But I got a hunch now there’s some kind of connection to him and that bell. The killer, I’d wager a year’s pay, is a young gun tough named Frank Tutt.”
“Tutt,” Josh repeated. “Tutt... I know that name! You killed a fellow named Dave Tutt right near the end of the war.”
Bill nodded. “Man was a traitor. I used to scout and spy with him for the Union. But Dave sold out for gold—told Johnny Reb all about our troop movements. Got my unit damn near massacred near Vicksburg. I ran into Dave in Springfield, Missouri, in—”
“In 1865,” Josh took over the story, his voice tight with excitement, “you faced him down right in the town square, even let him make the first play. Then you planted two slugs dead to the heart.”
Josh smacked his right fist into his left palm as it all came clear.
“And that’s it! That explains those clues. The numbers eighteen and sixty-five, plus the letter D for Dave.”
Bill nodded. “I killed Dave Tutt in a fair fight. A dozen people confirmed that. But scuttlebutt went all over, how I plugged him in the back. Now Frank is determined to settle a blood score.”
“So what now?” Josh asked.
Bill started to pour more liquor into a pony glass. Instead, he corked the bottle and pushed it away.
“Bring me paper, ink, and a nib,” he instructed the reporter, a new resolve in his tone. “And tell Mitt I need somebody to run a message into Santa Fe.”
When Josh returned to Bill’s room, he watched Wild Bill pen a cryptic, one-line note: Elena, Sam’s dead and I’m on the case. Wild Bill.
“There goes your pleasure trip,” Josh remarked.
“Know what? It was gone when I rode over that pitfall trap. And now you got your next big story. Happy, scoop?”
“I s’pose,” Josh said without much enthusiasm.
Bill snorted. “Christ, you look like somebody just kicked your dog. I’m wise to your disguise, kid. You don’t want to leave Liddy, do you?”
Josh flushed, but he nodded. “No, not now. She’s really starting to take a shine to me, Bill.”
Bill had to snort again. “Longfellow, you know how to put one word after another, all right. Damn good newspaperman. And when trouble hits, you’ve got enough guts to fill a smokehouse. But you’re still a babe in the woods when it comes to wily women.”
“Wha’d’you mean?” Josh demanded, offended.
“What, did I speak Navajo? I mea
n Liddy, you young jackass. That little cottontail is playing you like a fiddle. She’s trying to use you to make me jealous.”
“That’s a lie!” Josh fumed.
Bill dismissed the discussion with an impatient wave. His gunbelt hung from one of the bedposts. Hickok slid both custom-made Peacemakers from their holsters. He began breaking them down to clean and oil them.
“Leave it alone,” Bill said. “Get your gear ready. We’ve got to move quick. It’s going to be a while before you sleep in a soft bed again.”
“Where we headed?”
“North to Taos. That’s the direction Sam said El Lobo was headed with that bell. Since it’s on the way, we’re also going to stop in Santa Fe and Chimayo.”
Bill stood up and moved to the window, parting the curtains. Josh watched him peer out cautiously.
“Who you looking for?” the youth demanded.
“Who else? That damned horny man-eater Calamity Jane. Hell, I’ll be safer looking for killers. Hurry up and get ready. We best put this place behind us before she gets liquored up.”
Only a few hours after Sam Baxter’s funeral, Wild Bill and Josh were ready for the trail.
Mitt and Liddy prevailed upon their guests to stay. But that fresh grave, on a low hill behind the house, was like a prod to Bill’s determination.
There was a final, brief delay while one of Mitt’s wranglers pulled and reset those loose horseshoes on the sorrel. And now, Josh noticed with a bitter sting of disappointment, there had been a sea change in Liddy’s attitude toward him—and toward Wild Bill.
Her haughty, flippant, prideful manner ceased. She had been badly shaken by what happened to Marshal Baxter—and by Hickok’s deep-felt response. She understood now that he was heading into grave danger. It was a reminder that he hadn’t gotten famous simply for intriguing with women.
Liddy contrived to catch Bill alone for a moment while he was rigging his chestnut gelding in the paddock behind the barn. But she made the mistake of coming up silently behind him. Her foot snapped a small stick. At the sound, Hickok tucked and rolled, coming up on his haunches with a .44 leveled on her.
