The Return of Little Big Man

My name is Jack Crabb, and in the middle of the last century I come West with my people in a covered wagon, at age ten went off with and was reared by Cheyenne Indians, given the name of Little Big Man, learned to speak their language, ride, hunt, steal ponies and make war, and, in part of my mind, to think like them. In my teen years I was captured by the U.S. Cavalry and went on to have many adventures and personal acquaintanceship with notables of the day and place like General George A. Custer, James B. "Wild Bill" Hickok, Wyatt Earp and many others, surviving General Custer's fight at the Little Bighorn River, which the Indians called Greasy Grass, the so-called Battle of the Little Bighorn.

Where I'm starting in here is not long after the death of Old Lodge Skins, the Cheyenne chief who was like a father to me.

I managed, traveling on foot and mostly by night, after about a month, to get down to the mining town of Deadwood in Dakota Territory, undamaged except for being three-fourthsstarved because food is hard to come by in the dark without the eyes of a catamount, and I had to eat wild turnips and unripe plums and bullberries still green and hard, along with a lot of bark and weeds. I had no weapon but a real poor knife I had begged off my recent red comrades who despite their big victory was poor as ever—a kind of standard Indian situation.

Deadwood at this time was more or less one long ditch of, depending on the weather, mud or dust, lined on both sides by saloons. They had spared from the ax one or two tall pines like what the Indians used for lodgepoles—another reason the Black Hills was precious land, the plains being treeless—a few stores, a number of harlotries and a bathhouse.

I took the lay of the land in the wee hours of the morning, by which time the streets was deserted and even the soiled doves had turned down the lamps in their rooms, else I might of tried to get past the madam (who was always a hard case) and talk one of the girls into extending me a little loan.

I hadn't ate real food in ever so long, and I was in grievous need of funds, now I wasamidst whites once more. I had to figure out a profession for myself. Looking along that street, all that immediately come to mind was something connected with whiskey, gambling and whores. There was plenty room for legitimate business establishments, but to set up ashop you had to be grubstaked to lay in your stock, and credit is mighty hard to come by in a gold-strike area. I had not washed a lot on the route down here. I hadn't shaved in ever so long, either, but the way my whiskers growed I still looked more dirty than bearded to the quick glance I give my visage now and again when I knelt to drink in a stream slow-moving enough to reflect an image.

Now, while I'm standing there on the board sidewalk in front of an establishment bearing a crude handpainted sign, The congress, which was more likely to be another saloon rather than a legislative chamber, though glass windows was rare in Deadwood, so I couldn't see inside, who should step out through the door but a frock-coated tall figure who was right familiar to me.

Under the broad-brimmed sombrero, he looked considerably older than when I had last seen him just the previous spring in Cheyenne, Wyoming Territory. His hair was still shoulder length, but it had gone wispy at the ends, as had his drooping mustache, and his once clear gray-blue eyes was red-rimmed and kinda watery. His face was real pale. That long hooked nose of his had got pointier.

"Wild Bill Hickok," I says. "So you got here too." Now that I seen him, I recalled we had talked of prospecting for gold in Deadwood.

The keen nostrils at the end of that long nose were twitching, and he backs away. "Is that stink coming from you, hoss?"

I was more than embarrassed. "I'm down on my luck, Bill," I says, "and ain't ate in some time. I don't know if you heard yet, Custer and most of the Seventh was rubbed out by the hostiles up in Montana. I happened to be there but got away with my life due to a Cheyenne I knowed. ..."

Hickok had backed away a few more paces as I spoke. He was shaking his head, his long tresses brushing the shoulders of his swallowtail. "Hoss," he says, breaking in, "I nevershot anyone for telling tall stories of that nature, which I've done myself to greenhorns. But I've knocked him down. If a handout is what you need, then you oughta ask and not try to make a fool of me." He sweeps away the coat with his left hand and plucks a silver dollar from the lower pocket in his fancy vest. Bill was famous for his sartorial taste, as well as his personal cleanliness. "I will stake you to a bath, shave and a trim."

I didn't persist with my story but right away said, "Thank you kindly. I wonder if you would mind if I get something to eat with some of the money?"

Wild Bill slowly blinks those sore-looking eyes and goes again into the vest pocket with two left fingers and finds me another dollar. This one felt funny, and I looked and saw it was nicked at one edge, but I guess it was still good, and I thanked him again.

"After a plate of bread and beans, you'll have enough left to pick up a shirt and pants where they sell used clothes, down the street. Then burn what you're wearing now."

He turns and moves away, though not with the assured stride of old. Also he stayed on the walk, instead of the middle of the street, which he had once been famous for using so he could scan the area for possible bushwhackers and also keep a certain distance between him and them who might fire on him from ambush. But one thing I was sure about: Namely, that when he played poker he still sat with his back to a wall.

I had no reason not to act on his suggestion, having some pride in my appearance when I could afford as much. I purchased a pair of canvas pants in reasonably good condition and almost clean, along with a flannel shirt that was wore through at the elbows but had no discernible odor. These with the other goods heaped in the tent of the old-clothes dealer had been sold by gold-rushers who had run out of funds, either because they never panned any dust or lost it all gambling. Imagine what the original owners had got for a pants and shirt that cost me 70 cents altogether. That dealer throwed in a beat-up old hat with so greasy a sweatband I tore it away.

I had enough money left for coffee and two orders of beans and bread, the second of which I made sandwiches from. Believe me when I say prices was greatly inflated at Deadwood, as at all gold towns.

I put the sandwiches in the pockets of my pants, which as always was too roomy for me, cinched at the waist with a length of rope and folded up at the cuffs, and went out along the street trying each of the saloons, of which already at that time there must have been two dozen or more within a mile and a half. As time went on, somebody told me the number rose to 76. Some of them I looked into had a bar consisting of a wooden plank supported by a barrel at either end, a bottle or two, and tin cups you'd never see washed out between drinkers if you watched all day. They didn't have no windows usually, so they was lighted by oil lamps at high noon in blazing sunshine outdoors. The bartender might not have a towel or apron—fact is, he was often dressed like his customers, even to the hat—but he was never without a prominent shotgun, leaning close at hand. This was used mostly as a pointer to indicate the door when the level of bad feeling among the drunks sounded like it would take another form than mere verbal abuse. But since only two or three people per week was shot to death in Deadwood at this time, it was not considered necessary yet to hire an officer of the law.

I didn't have no more money and therefore could not afford a drink, which in some of these places was as much as a dollar per shot, being at that price presumably something on the order of real whiskey, whereas the cut-rate joints, at 50 cents per, no doubt served up a kind of concoction of tobacco juice, gunpowder, pepper and snake venom.

I hadn't looked in more than three or four places when in the darkest place I had been yet, I made out a table full of poker players back a ways, under the light of a hanging lamp, and one of them was Wild Bill Hickok.

For a number of reasons I did not want to disturb Wild Bill, who took his poker real serious, so I returned outside to eat my sandwiches.

Wild Bill was just leaving the poker game when I was done, and was asking them standing at the bar if anyone wanted to take his seat, and one fellow went over and pulled the stool up to the table. He had a sandy mustache and there was something wrong with his eyes, which in his case were slightly crossed.

"You're greatly improved, hoss," Wild Bill says to me, inspecting me at close quarters. He buys me a shot of whiskey, which I drank down real slow, as I had not tasted any for ever so long. Even so, I felt its vapors hit my brain shortly after the first sip.

Wild Bill introduced me to the (continued on page 84)Little Big Man(continued from page 68) bartender, man name of Harry Sam Young, and told me he knew him too, from back in Kansas.

"This town's full of friends," he went on. "California Joe, Colorado Charley Utter, White-Eye Jack Anderson, they're all here. But the real news is I recently got married." He got a refill from Harry Young. I was still working on my first. "Which reminds me." He looks around like he's worried somebody's listening in, and decides maybe they might yet, and asks me to step aside for a confidential matter.

Coming into the bright sunlight from a semidarkness smelling of lamp oil, liquor and sweat was probably more the cause of my swimming vision than even the fiery hooch (which in case you never knew it is an Indian word, though not Cheyenne).

Wild Bill's own eyes was squeezed into sightless slits, and it's funny that what I thought of was how helpless he would be if someone was to shoot him at such a moment.

He takes me by the elbow of my shirt and bends down and in a subdued voice he says, "Hoss, I seem to recall being in your company once in a certain kind of establishment, or am I wrong?"

"That's right, Bill, you and me went to a whorehouse."

He flinches and says, "Keep your voice down, willya?"

I had not been shouting, but I did as asked, and went on. "That was right after you shot Strawhan's brother, which was the damnedest thing I ever witnessed. Not only did he have the drop on you, he was about to shoot you in the back. You seen him in the mirror. My God, you was fast."

He showed a thin smile, lifting his head and opening his eyes away from the sun. "I'm not that good anymore, hoss. I don't say I'm bad, but I don't see as well as I used to. They still get me to shoot coins on edge, but nowadays it's dollars, not the dimes of the old days."

I reflected that one of the dollars he give me had that nick in it. "I saw you put ten loads into the O in the sign across Market Square in K.C., a hundred yards away."

Wild Bill continues his distant smile. "The Odd Fellows' sign," says he. "I couldn't do that nowadays. I'm taking something for my eyes. It makes me pale, and maybe it is doing something to my well-being. But here's what I wanted to tell you, hoss. If you remember that sporting house, well, I'd as soon you forgot about it insofar as I am personally involved."

Now Wild Bill Hickok wasn't the sort of man from who you would deny a favor requiring as little effort as this, so I hastened to reassure him.

"I got nothing against sporting women," he goes on. "Some of them been real good friends of mine. Fact is, the wagon train we brought up here from Cheyenne stopped at Laramie and loaded on Dirty Emma, Sizzling Kate and others who have set up shop down the street here, should you have a natural need." Now his smile became something you might of seen on a preacher. "Now I'm married I have changed my ways." He looked real high-minded, lofty eyebrows, pious mouth under the drooping mustache. "Agnes," says he, "owned her own show, she and her previous husband, one of the noted clowns of the day until some little bastard shot him through the heart on account of not getting in free one day."

Wild Bill had told me about Aggie on a previous occasion, so I was able to say, "I do believe she is a celebrated equestrienne," says I, using the word as he originally did, and he was right pleased now.

"That's right, hoss, also a tightrope walker, but them days is behind her now. You might of heard of Ada Isaacs Mencken, who is renowned for a theatrical presentation called Mazeppa, where she is tied buck naked to a horse that runs around the stage. Well, those who saw both of them in the part gave their preference to Agnes, and she never rode naked, I'll tell you that: She always wore tights that looked that way." He frowns. "I don't even like that, for I know there were sons of bitches who thought she was naked." He clears his throat. "Well, like I say, that's a thing of the past. No wife of James B. Hickok, Wild Bill, is ever going to work. I want her home in our little nest, sweet Agnes of mine."

He had taken to calling himself by the whole two names together, like it was some legal matter of correct identification, and maybe it was, for Wild Bills were all over the West in that era, at least one of them a white man who claimed to have joined the Cheyennes at an early age—no, not me, obviously some goddamn liar.

"I'd be proud to meet her, Bill. Has she come along with you to Deadwood? Or is she back in Cheyenne?"

Wild Bill snorted. "Neither, hoss. She's a fine lady. I wouldn't let her set foot in a hog wallow like this. I just come here to make some money. She's back in what they call the Queen City, Cincinnati, Ohio, waiting for my return.

"Say," Wild Bill says now, "come on back to my wagon and I'll show you her picture."

We walked not far along Deadwood Canyon to what was still then the outskirts of town and found there, amongst a goodly number of tents that constituted the residential district, a covered wagon that was a bit smaller than the vehicle in which me and my family come West years earlier. I believe this one was from the Army.

Bill climbs up inside and comes back out with a photo, which he hands down. "Now tell me if that isn't the finest-looking woman you ever seen."

Wild Bill was not the kind of man I would have disagreed with even if he wasn't lovesick, so I was as complimentary as I could be, but as it happened I admit I found his Agnes to be remarkably plain in appearance, at least as she was represented by the camera, which is not to say I doubted what he said about her talent.

"What you might wonder is why a person of her high type would be interested in me," he says with what I took as real modesty for a man many ladies had had a crush on, but then I never knew any dead shot on either side of the law that did not attract more women than anybody peaceful. "I'm trying my hand at something more dignified than what I done previously, and also more profitable. You can't put aside much on a lawman's eighty-to-a-hundred per month, and you can always get shot for your trouble."

He brought a bottle with him when he clumb down from the wagon, and we sat on a couple wooden boxes, former Army ammunition crates. He took a big gulp himself and then passed the bottle to me.

That whiskey was nowhere near the quality of that which Harry Sam Young had poured for us at No. 10, but Wild Bill didn't seem to notice. I could hardly get it down or keep it there.

"I ever tell you about my time as a showman?" Wild Bill asks.

"Wasn't you at Niagara Falls with a herd of buffalo?"

"That's right," he says and takes another slug from the bottle. "But later I traveled around the East for a time, performing in a stage play with Bill (continued on page 153)Little Big Man(continued from page 84) Cody, but I forgot my lines half the time even though they was the same night after night and I was playing myself, so it didn't call for much acting on the face of it. But the fact is, hoss, the hardest thing I ever tried to do was to be a make-believe Wild Bill Hickok. It got to be too much for me to be the real myself pretending to be the fake Wild Bill, speaking words written by some little fellow that never been west of Chicago, and shooting blank rounds, which foul up a barrel real awful. I got to drinking too much and having some fun to pass the time, like using live ammunition and firing too close to the toes of them real actors, and they whined to Cody, who asked me to tone it down. But I couldn't take it for long, even though the pay was real good, the best I ever made. I ain't got Bill Cody's way with horseshit. Nothing against Bill, God bless him, he always dealt straight with me, but he's got a natural talent for showmanship. I don't, that's for sure." He swallowed more of that awful whiskey and was just offering me the bottle when somebody spoke nearby.

"This is what you been doing?" asked a peevish voice. It come from a fellow not much bigger than me but all duded up in fringed buckskin and wearing a pearl-handled pistol in a fancy holster held by a tooled belt with an enormous silver buckle. His hair was long and fair, as were his mustache and pointy little beard. "Sitting here with him and that bottle?"

"Simmer down, Charley," Wild Bill said in a mild tone. "Me and him are old friends from Kansas. Shake hands with——"

But as this dandy turned up his nose at the idea of meeting me, the shaking did not take place.

"My pardner, Colorado Charley Utter," Bill said, when the other went into a tent that was pitched nearby. Most of the other Deadwood tents was all torn and tattered, but the canvas of this one looked brand-new and was tautstretched and well-pegged. "We got plans for an express service between here and Cheyenne."

I had never seen Wild Bill so bluffed by anybody else. The next instant, out comes Charley Utter from his tent, saying, "Goddamn it, Bill, you been sleepin' in my blankets again? They're all messed up."

Wild Bill smirks and shrugs. "I'm real sorry, pardner. They're nicer than that scratchy old Army blanket of mine."

"I want you to stay out of there," Utter says. In the old days Wild Bill would have laughed in the face of a little fellow like that, as he had laughed at me first time I flared up at him. But now the once fearsome gunfighter only repeated his apology. When Utter went back into the tent, where he could be heard fussing with his property, Bill says to me, "He's a good friend and has got a real head for running businesses. My own specialty is the ideas: I don't always have the knack for the practical details." He tilts his head back till the rear of the brim of his big hat, touching him between the shoulders, stops him, at which he removes the sombrero so as to align his throat with the verticaled bottle, and he drains the remaining liquid in the latter down the former. Now that he is momentarily bareheaded for the first time since I become reacquainted with him, I see his hair is thinning in front, and I got a right funny feeling, for Custer too was losing some hair on top, which is why the Indians claimed they never scalped him. Never knowing baldness themselves, redskins see it as still another strange and distasteful thing about whites, whereas they find cutting off an enemy's crowning glory and hanging it on their belt perfectly normal and even admirable, and when I lived as a Cheyenne I admit so did I.

Having emptied the bottle, Wild Bill tossed it over his shoulder into the area between his wagon and Charley Utter's tent, and no sooner than he did, out come Colorado Charley, who picked it up and brought it back to hand to Wild Bill without a word.

"Oh," Wild Bill says. "Sorry about that."

"If you're back here this time of day," says Utter, "you already lost the money you was advanced."

Hickok replaced his hat. "Well, you wouldn't believe the hands that I had, Charley."

Charley hooked his thumbs in that fancy gunbelt. He hmmphed and said, "It's like that every single day, ain't it?"

Wild Bill got to his feet real slowly. He didn't seem to be drunk though he had undoubtedly been drinking for hours before he topped it off with the remainder of that bottle. But he could still apparently hold his liquor as of old.

He tossed the empty bottle up into the wagon and dumb up to follow it. "I'm going to catch 40 winks, so I'm rested for tonight's game." Then, on hands and knees, he looked down at me. "Hoss, if you ain't got a place to stay, why there's lots of room here, and I got an extra blanket if you don't mind the smell of horse."

"Right nice of you, Bill," says I. When he had crawled back into the interior, I told Colorado Charley I wouldn't do it if he objected, for I wasn't in no position to make enemies at this time.

"Hell, that's between he and you," Charley said in a kinder tone than he had used theretofore. "I noticed you ain't a drinker."

He had been watching Wild Bill from his tent. "Never to excess," I said, which was true except when it wasn't.

"You don't look like you've had the best luck lately."

"Thank you for noticing," I says, but then decided it sounded too sarcastic, so I added, "That ain't the half of it."

"Well, spare me the facts," Charley says hastily. "I got an offer for you. There are them in Deadwood who like it fine without law, and maybe I agree with them up to a point, but some think Wild Bill come up here to be marshal, like he was in Abilene, and will clean up the town. They're wrong about that, but I hear they might be gunning for him. Nobody's going to come at him straight on, I tell you that. He might of lost some of his powers, but he's still better than anybody hereabouts." Charley fingered his fair mustache and goatee. I found it amazing that he looked as clean and shiny as he did in that place. "What worries me is he might get absentminded while playing cards." He glanced with concern up at the wagon and spoke in a lowered, confidential-type voice. "Also lately he's been feeling real low. He told me the other day he thinks his days is numbered."

"He ain't the Wild Bill I once knowed," I told him. "I'll swear to that. But maybe he'll change if he begins to win at poker."

Colorado Charley screwed his face up. "He told me he wrote a letter to the same effect to that new wife of his. Now, ain't that some weddin' present!" He had raised his voice some to say this, and he glanced up at the wagon again as he lowered it. "Now, what I want to offer you ... your name is?" I told him, and he continued. "I'll pay you to keep an eye on him. I'll give you a dollar a day, which seems to me mighty generous considering all you got to do is watch his back."

I can't be condemned for trying to sweeten the deal. "Bodyguarding Wild Bill Hickok ought to pay a little better than that."

"Did I say bodyguard? Bill don't need none, and from the looks of you, you couldn't do much anyway, and I ain't going to supply you with no firearms. What I'm talking about is just keeping an eye on him—and just when he's playing cards. Rest of the time I'm with him, or California Joe Milner or his other friends. You see something funny going on behind his back, you give a holler. He'll do the rest himself. He can still use a gun better 'n anybody who'd go up against him: He can see that good."

I didn't like his insults, but a dollar a day would keep me going till something better turned up, so I accepted his offer but did ask why he trusted me. How'd he know I wasn't one of them who wanted Wild Bill rubbed out?

"You'd of made your move by now," says Colorado Charley.

He wasn't necessarily right about that, but not wanting him to mistrust me after all, I didn't say anything more on the subject, but I did promise to show up that evening at the No. 10 Saloon and watch Wild Bill's back, then walk him home and collect my dollar.

•

I got to No. 10 before Wild Bill showed up, but the poker game was already in progress. I explained to Harry the bartender I was working for Colorado Charley Utter, but he said I couldn't sit there unless I was drinking, so I waited outside till Wild Bill showed up, which he did before long, looking none the worse for all the liquor he had drunk earlier.

"Charley says you're working for us now," says he.

"You know about that?"

"I'm not too proud to have somebody watching my back. Way I've lasted up till now is not because I'm faster or shoot straighter than every one of them I've gone up against. It's because I never lie to myself. I never lied much to others, but I would do so if my life depended on it, like everybody else. But not to myself."

"All I can do is holler," I told him. "I ain't got no gun."

"Just as well, hoss," said Wild Bill. "You might shoot yourself in your manly parts."

This jibe irked me some, for it was him, back in Kansas City, who taught me to use a pistol well. "Your pal Harry Sam Young won't let me hang around without spending money, and Charley won't be paying me till later."

"I'll speak to Harry," Wild Bill said. "Now, about Charley, such money as he advances me for cards ain't his own but from the funds of our partnership. I threw my savings into the pot, which he manages better than I ever could, but I'm not on his charity."

This information made me feel better about him. "I ain't forgot I owe you two dollars, Bill."

"You'll pay me when you can," says he and saunters through the door into No. 10 looking more like the old Wild Bill than I seen him for a while. One of the fellows at the card table wanted to vacate his stool immediately, though I don't think the hand was finished, so influential a presence was Wild Bill Hickok, but the latter grandly waved him down and stepped over to the bar, where Harry had already poured him one.

Wild Bill swallowed the whiskey, then throwed a thumb towards me and says, "This little fellow is working for me 'n' Charley. Put him on my tab, don't serve him so much he can't see." He laughed at that statement.

As it happened, all I swallowed that evening was some of the coffee which Harry, like all bartenders I ever met, drank instead of what he sold. Unfortunately they didn't serve no food there, and I guess Harry had already ate his supper, so there wasn't anything I could mooch. I just stayed there, watching Wild Bill's back for hours while they played hand after hand, with the usual curses, grunts and other such noises made by the participants that don't mean anything whatever to anyone not in the game.

But what was special, I gathered, was that Wild Bill was winning for a change. After a while, one of the original players, being busted, had to drop out, and the same short fellow with the same sandy mustache and slightly crossed eyes who had took Wild Bill's place the day before come over from where he had been watching the game to claim the vacated stool, as he had taken Wild Bill's place that afternoon. But now Wild Bill stayed in the game, winning hand after hand, his luck still holding, and before long this man too was cleaned out, and he pushed away from the table, looking more sad than mad.

"Damn," says he, head down, "I ain't got enough left to get a bite to eat."

Wild Bill stood up too. "Look here, Jack, I done well tonight after a long run of bad luck. I'd be proud to stake you to your supper." He picked up some of the piled coins in front of him and proffered them to this Jack McCall, as Harry Young told me he was called.

McCall took the money, nodding, still not looking at Wild Bill, and left the premises.

To the other players Wild Bill said he was turning in, being not as youthful as he once was, but tomorrow would give them all their chance to get even.

We walked back to the wagon. It was still early enough on the midsummer evening to see our way there without a lantern.

"You must of give me luck, hoss," said Wild Bill. "I always square my debts, so you're getting a dollar bonus for tonight, and I'm also canceling what you owe me."

"That's mighty generous of you, Bill."

"Well, I want to do it while I can, for luck that's good today won't necessarily hold on forever, or even tomorrow." He was taking such long strides, tall as he was, I had to make two for every one of his. "Custer's luck," he says. "He was famous for it, till it went bad."

I considered trying again to tell him a first-person account of the Little Bighorn fight, but decided against taking the chance as yet, for I needed this job.

"I believe you was acquainted with him."

"And liked him," said Wild Bill. "I had to shoot a couple of his men when four or five of them jumped me once in Hays, and I had a difference of opinion one time with his brother Tom, but the general was always mighty nice to me. Couple years back, he complimented me in the written word, or so I was told. His lady is a fine woman, and now a widow at a tender age, poor little gal."

"Beautiful," I says with feeling. "I saw her once."

"Well," Bill says with that new sanctimoniousness of his, "you might be right about that, hoss, but I am married to the most beautiful lady in the world myself."

I figure his eyesight must be even worse than I thought, on the basis of that photograph of his Aggie, but naturally did not say anything, and we had by now arrived at the camp, where I was looking forward to getting my wages from Colorado Charley.

But when I peeked into the door of his tent, the interior of which was arranged neat as a hotel room in a city, with a cot and square-folded blankets, a leather-strapped trunk, and a nice hide rug on the ground, no Charley was in evidence.

When I informed Wild Bill, who was still standing there breathing the evening air with apparent satisfaction before mounting the wagon, he said, "He's probably down to the bathhouse. He missed his bath this morning, being too busy at the time. He takes one every day whether he needs it or not. He's famous for that habit."

"I thought the same was true of yourself, Bill."

"Not to that extreme," says he, and by now it was getting too dark to accurately judge by his expression if he was joking. He goes into the pocket of the rock coat where he had put his winnings and withdraws two dollars and drops them clinking into my now outthrust hand. "There you go, hoss. After you drink it all up, if you want to come back and bunk in the wagon, kindly don't kick me when you climb in. You'll find that extra blanket in back."

I went back to town to find the place, a kind of lean-to open on three sides, where a burly woman, one of the few females in Deadwood at the time not working as a harlot, cooked up beans and the stone-heavy loaves she called bread, in which you was likely to find not just hairs but whole strands as well as other substances not so easily identified.

I was still real hungry. "Ain't you got no meat?" I asked the cook.

"Had some couple days back but ate it myself," says she, shifting the wad in her jaw and spreading the feet beneath her so she could spit between them. I reckon the unusual flavor her beans had was from spattered tobacco juice. I've ate a lot worse than that when famished, which, like the Cheyennes who raised me, I so often was as a young man. "It wasn't no goddamn good, so you didn't miss nothing. And you could not of afforded it nohow."

I've got a policy of seldom passing up an insult when I'm in a position to answer, so I says, "You think you run the grand dining room of the Palace Hotel?"

She spits again, this time right near me, and grins with her teeth brown in the light from the lantern that hung from a nail in a support pole.

I went back to get a night's rest in Wild Bill's wagon, which was real cozy in the rear where I slept. Wild Bill seemed asleep when I stepped past him, and I thought if I could so easily gain access to the wagon, so could an assassin, but Colorado Charley had not hired me to guard him 24 hours a day, without a weapon, and I was real tuckered out by then.

I had a good sleep that night, waking up at dawn to look over and see Wild Bill's blanket already empty. By time I got up and out and took a leak, careful to keep well away from Charley Utter's tent, and returned, I see Wild Bill's tall figure oncoming at a brisk pace up the gulch.

"You're up and at 'em," I says when he gets there.

"Generally at first light," says he, "I trot down for a wake-me-up."

"Get your coffee from that big gal who cooks beans?"

"Whiskey's what I mean, hoss. Coffee'd put me back to sleep."

Colorado Charley come out of his tent at this point, looking bandbox fresh as always, and according to Wild Bill went off to arrange a competition in which their pony express went up against a rival outfit to see who could run the Cheyenne newspaper up to Deadwood the fastest.

I throwed some water on my face from the rain barrel Wild Bill pointed out, and having got his schedule said I'd see him around noon and went into town. No. 10 was crowded at midday as always, by which I mean a dozen or so persons, for it wasn't spacious. A game was in progress with three players, one of them occupying Wild Bill's favored place, that which had a view of the front and back doors and only a wall behind it. Carl Mann, part owner of the joint with a man named Jerry Lewis, was one of the men at the table, and a gent called Captain W.R. Massie, who like old Sam Clemens had been a Mississippi riverman, was another.

I went outside and leaned against the raw boards of the wall and begun to think about a deal for myself. If I performed in the current part-time employment to Colorado Charley's satisfaction, then maybe he would promote me to something better in his express operation. My luck had turned up on running into Wild Bill Hickok.

Who I now saw coming along the street, looking real tall and stately in his sparkling clean-looking linen (which he must not have worn to bed in the wagon), Prince Albert coat and wide sombrero, walking the confident way he had in the old days when he was the mostfeared man on the frontier, with eyes like an eagle.

But he never recognized me now till he almost reached the door of No. 10.

"Hoss," says he, blinking, like I appeared out of nowhere. "I been looking for you. Step over here for a spell." He moves to the corner of the building.

He stares down at the rough wood boards underneath us, an uncharacteristic thing for him, for there was nothing significant to see at our feet. "I got this feeling my days are numbered. I can't shake it off." He raised his head and looked at the high and cloudless sky on that August day in Dakota Territory, which reminded me some of the one in June over the Greasy Grass, and he said, "If your number's up, you've got to go." He shrugs.

His voice had taken on such a melancholy tone that to change the subject to something lighter, I says, "Ever notice how most everybody you meet west of St. Louie turns out to be named either Bill or Jack?"

This had the desired effect. Wild Bill brooded on the matter for a moment, and then he threw back his head and uttered a big guffaw. "You're a comical little fellow, and that's a fact, hoss. My own real name ain't even Bill, but Jim." Which seemed to amuse him even more, so he was feeling good when he strode into No. 10, as usual attracting the attention of all present. Nobody paid me any mind, bringing up the rear.

I glanced over the little crowd again but still couldn't see nobody who looked like a threat to anybody's life but their own, if they kept drinking like that. Several wasn't even carrying visible weaponry, which didn't mean they didn't have any hid out, but if so it would take longer to bring it into play, by which time even a somewhat impaired Wild Bill could have emptied five cylinders into their vital areas.

All of them except one or two soon turned to the bar, backs to the game. Speaking of backs, Wild Bill sat down on the empty stool that presented his own spine to the world at large. It was a man name of Charley Rich who had Bill's habitual seat on the wall side. Wild Bill thought it only a temporary arrangement, for he says, "Let's swap places, Charley. You got mine."

Rich snickers and says, "There's nobody in Deadwood man enough to take you on, even from behind. You know that, Bill."

So Wild Bill had sat down, but he asks again a little while later, and Rich just shrugged, examining the hand he had been dealt, while Captain Bill Massie says with good-natured impatience, "Come on, Bill, I wanna win back what you took off me last night." The other player was Carl Mann, as before, and he too had no interest in the subject.

So Wild Bill begins to play without further complaint, maybe because he was counting on me to do my job behind him. I say this with the guilt that has bothered me ever since, whenever I think of this episode, and not till this moment have I found the nerve to tell of my role, or lack of it, in what happened that August 2, 1876, in the No. 10 Saloon. But here it is now, blame me if you will.

Wild Bill proceeded to lose hand after hand this evening, and Captain Massie did win back his losses and more, to the point at which Wild Bill was out of the ready money, and he twists on the stool and calls me over to him. What he wants is for me to get him 15 dollars' worth of pocket checks from Harry Sam Young at the bar.

So I tell Harry, and he says all right, he would bring them himself, and while he was doing that, the door opens and in comes that cockeyed fellow Jack McCall who Wild Bill had staked to supper the night before. Now, McCall was nothing to look at except if you wanted the perfect picture of a loser, so as he slinks along the bar I don't pay no further attention to him, he being if not a close pal of Wild Bill's then an acquaintance anyhow, who Wild Bill furthermore had lately befriended.

What I was doing instead was keeping an eye beyond McCall on the rear door, through which a bowlegged, red-mustached fellow had lately entered, showing a horse tied up right outside, a fact that bothered me a little, as if it was for a quick getaway. But that man proved to be no trouble, just drinking whiskey at the bar.

My attention was claimed by Wild Bill saying, with some spirit, to the river captain Massie, "You broke me on that hand!"

And right at that point Jack McCall, now directly behind Wild Bill's stool, cursed loudly and brought up a pistol so close the muzzle all but touched him, and he shot Wild Bill through the back of the head, just under the brim of the sombrero, which flew off in the short forward pitch of the body, after which Wild Bill went over backwards off the stool and crashed onto the floor like a felled tree.

Still cursing at his fallen victim, Jack McCall next turned his smoking gun on everybody else at hand, shouting, "Come on, you sons of bitches, and get yours!" He keeps pulling the trigger, but his weapon proves defective after that one cowardly shot that dropped the greatest of all gunfighters and never fires again, so he drops it, and at that I run at him, but he's quick out the back door, and by the time I get there he's mounted that horse right outside and starts to ride away, but the cinch was loose and he don't get far before the saddle slips off the horse, him sprawling with it.

I'm almost on him at that point but stumbled on something hard in them soft-soled Indian moccasins, laming me briefly, and he gains ground. We was out on the main street now, and the people rushing out of No. 10 had joined the chase, yelling, "Wild Bill's shot!" "He kilt Wild Bill, get the little bastard," and the like, with McCall still out well ahead of us, but then he does a fool thing for himself, ducks into one of the stores there which turns out to be Jake Shroudy's butcher shop, and I run in and corner the yellow skunk cowering behind a bloody side of beef hanging from a hook in the ceiling, and though he is if on the small side still bigger than me, I pull him out and draw my knife to cut out his gizzard, but the others who now arrive stopped me, presumably in the name of the law which did not exist in Deadwood at that time.

If you're wondering why revenge seemed to mean more to me than Wild Bill's health, why I chased McCall instead of checking to see if my friend was still alive and could have been helped, all I can say is I seen enough violent deaths by that time in my life to recognize one that took place within a few feet of me. You get shot through the head point-blank with a lead slug the weight of them used in those days, you was a goner beyond all doubt.

And it could be seen as my fault. I knew Colorado Charley would sure see it that way. The least I could do was catch the killer. After I done that but was prevented from doing him in on the spot, I sadly returned to No. 10. The others took McCall someplace where they held him, there being no jail.

They had already locked the saloon up, waiting for the doctor to come, and I had to talk Harry Young, the state he was in, into letting me enter. First other person I seen was Captain Bill Massie, with his forearm wrapped in a bloody kerchief. The bullet that killed Wild Bill had passed through his brain to strike Massie, across the table, in the wrist.

Wild Bill's body lay on its side, his knees bent in the position they had assumed when he had sat down to play poker. From the flow around him, it looked like he had already lost every drop of blood that ever circulated through his tall person. His fingers too was bent as they had been when he held his last hand, but the cards had stayed on the table: the aces of spades and clubs and two black eights, ever afterward known as the Dead Man's Hand.

Finally, in hurried the aproned barber whose shop I had visited the day before on the money Wild Bill give me. He turned out to be the local doctor as well, which was not necessarily as bad as it sounds, for haircutters learned how to staunch wounds, apply bandages, etc., and Doc Pierce acted like he knew his way around a corpse.

Colorado Charley Utter made his appearance not long after. It took him a while to get around to me, and I could have avoided him that night if I had tried, but like I say I did believe I was at fault, so after they carried Wild Bill out to prepare him for burial, probably at Doc Pierce's barbershop, I went up to Utter, who was talking to Carl Mann, and I says, "All right, Charley, shoot me if you want."

"I heard what happened," says he. "You couldn't have done much about it, with him sitting where he was. There's nothing can be done about somebody who decides his number's up." He nods in his decisive way and goes back to a practical discussion of funeral arrangements with Mann. That's the kind of fellow Charley was and why he was a good businessman. And next day he gave Wild Bill a good send-off, out there at their camp.

The coffin had been quickly pounded together from some pine boards of the type used as siding on the Deadwood shops, but it was made presentable by covering the outside with black cloth and the interior was lined with white. Wild Bill himself looked nice, his long hair all cleaned of blood and brushed out, the big mustache with a more agreeable curve in death than the melancholy droop it had lately acquired in life. You could hardly see the wound the slug had made on exiting through the cheek, like only a little scratch. Doc Pierce was also an accomplished undertaker, having much practice locally. He had even, so somebody said, changed Wild Bill's underwear for clean, though that sounds like Colorado Charley's idea. And Wild Bill Hickok did not go into the afterlife unarmed: his Sharps rifle lay alongside the body. As to his famous ivory-handled six-guns, somebody must have walked away with them between his death and now, for they wasn't buried with him or ever seen again.

Once Wild Bill had been lowered into his mountainside grave, the assembled throng rushed back in a mob to the town saloons and had I not been quick on my feet I'd of been trampled down. Within a few seconds nobody was left but Charley Utter and, standing back a ways in respect, me. Charley had found a rock and was using it to hammer a flat board into the earth at one of its short ends. When he finished, I went close enough to where I could read what was cut or really scratched into the wood with a knife-point. I can't quote it verbatim after all these years, but I do recall that after giving Wild Bill's age and day of death at the hands of Jack McCall, Charley Utter had wrote, "Goodbye Pard Till We Meet in the Happy Hunting Ground."

I was right affected by the sentiment. Them two really was good friends, unlike me and Wild Bill, who I knew for a number of years but would have to admit not closely for all that. In fact, I was privately critical of him for a large part, maybe mostly because of envy, even though all in all he done me a number of favors.

Charley had been alone with his thoughts, but when he turned to head back to his camp, he noticed me. Now, in distinction to the way he acted in the No. 10 Saloon just after Wild Bill was murdered, he narrows his eyes to mean slits, and he says, with real bad feeling, a hand on the butt of the gun in the holster at his hip, "If I ever see you again, I'll kill you."

"What?" I was not prepared for this.

"You heard me."

"You said you wasn't blaming me," I reminded him.

"I wasn't standing by his grave at the time," said Charley Utter. "God damn you!"

"All right," I told him. "I got it coming, I admit, and you have a right to hold me responsible. I do myself. I'm leaving Deadwood directly anyway."

Charley drew his pistol. "By God, I think I'll kill you anyway. You rotten little son of a bitch, to stand there and lie through your teeth on a sad occasion like this." His eyes was bulging with fury, and I judged it would not be long before he couldn't restrain his trigger finger, so I didn't try to make the point that he ought to first shoot Jack McCall, but went away as ordered and kept going without looking back, taking the shortest route out of town.

In the days to come I heard about what happened to Jack McCall, who was tried right away for the cold-blooded murder committed before the eyes of a dozen witnesses, but was found not guilty by a jury of Deadwood miners, a number of who even cheered him on announcing their verdict, and despite all the threats by Wild Bill's friends, the murderer left town with his skin intact.

But before long it was determined that the first trial had been illegal, due to Deadwood's own illegality as a town, being part of an Indian reservation! Which was real ironic, for none of the Americans would of been there, including General Custer, had the treaty forbidding them from the area not been broken when gold was discovered in the Black Hills on land guaranteed to belong to the Sioux unto eternity.

Anyway, a few weeks later Jack McCall was rearrested and retried in Yankton, and they hanged the bastard. Nobody ever knew for sure why he did the deed, and his own explanation was a barefaced lie: He never had a brother for Wild Bill to kill. Probably he was hired by people who was afraid Wild Bill Hickok would bring law to unlawful Deadwood—there's another example of how reality can be at odds with what's supposed to be.

Bill comes back out with a photo. "Now tell me if that isn't the finest-looking woman you ever seen."