Wild Bill, Joshua, and Jimmy Davis detrained in Rapid City, Dakota Territory, almost exactly twenty-four hours after boarding in Denver.
After a hearty breakfast of steak and eggs, they reported to the Overland depot in the middle of town. Leland Langford had given them company passes before he left Denver, entitling them to space-available seating on any Overland stagecoach.
“We’re meeting Leland at the Martin’s Creek way station thirty miles south of town,” Bill explained to his friends. “That’s where the gold will be loaded and we’ll take over the coach.”
The next southwest-bound coach was crowded inside, but there was room for three more riders on the box and the top seat behind the driver. The road was deeply rutted and uneven, but the leather thoroughbraces supporting the coach eliminated the rough bouncing and jostling. Still, Joshua felt himself getting nauseous, at times, from the rocking and swaying motion, so much like seasickness.
“If you’re gonna chuck, kid,” Bill warned the journalist, “stay downwind of me.”
This first leg of the trip was fairly populous, winding past mining camps and homestead farms, also passing the occasional traveler in the road. Despite the relative safety, however, Josh noticed how both Wild Bill and Jimmy scrutinized everyone, even farmers walking behind their plows.
Three and a half hours after they departed Rapid City, the coach pulled in at Martin’s Creek Station. The place was laid out more or less like most of the way stations Josh had seen since coming west: A low, one-story house of cottonwood logs chinked with mud served as dining room and ticket office as well as sleeping quarters for women, children, and drivers. A nearby pole corral held the horses that served as team changes.
A big sod barn behind the corral also doubled as bunkhouse for the male passengers. It was common for travelers to show up and sometimes have to wait days for their coach. So the company supplied a bunk free of charge. Once passengers purchased their ticket, meals, too, were provided twice a day.
“Welcome, boys, welcome,” Leland greeted them, leading the new arrivals into the private office behind the ticket counter and closing the door. “Thelma will be setting out some eats shortly. Her biscuits are so light, you gotta hold ’em down. You won’t be shoving off until tomorrow.”
Leland had eyed Jimmy with some reserve at first, not expecting Wild Bill to pick a black man for the shotgun seat. But after Hickok introduced Jimmy as a fellow veteran of the War Between the States, and a sniper in Colonel Augustus Boyd’s famous regiment, Leland immediately warmed up to him.
“The soldiers are out in the bunkhouse right now,” Leland confided. “A sergeant named John Saville and a corporal named Danny Appling. They seem all right to me. Saville is posing as the Reverend Jerome Peabody, and mister, I mean he looks the part. Appling is posing as a drummer—a toupee seller named Alfred Lawton.”
“You been watching them?” Bill asked.
“As best I can. They ain’t had no visitors that I’ve noticed. You’ll see both of them when they come in to eat.”
“Looks like Overland runs a good operation,” Bill complimented him. “Clean stations, animals in good condition, and I see you’re moving the mail along ’steada letting it stack up.”
“Well, this is the best station because I’m here,” Leland admitted. “But things’re better, sure. I’ve got some good division agents now. Under Brennan? Why, Christ! The stations were always filthy, the passengers got nothing but beans and hardtack, and the mail sacks were stacked up to the ceiling.”
Bill nodded. “Hell, I remember out in New Mex how some of the drivers would toss full mailbags down over muddy stretches in the trail to get traction. I’d ride the line behind them and find mail left in the mud.”
Leland slid open the top drawer of his knee-hole desk.
“Here,” he said, tossing Wild Bill a pair of buckskin gloves. “You’ll be needing these. Normally the driver would change off at least once between here and Denver. But you’ll be pushing the coach all the way through. I notice you’ve got gambler’s hands now.”
Bill glanced at the gloves and nodded. “Been so long, I forgot how the reins start to cut after a hundred miles or so.”
“You’ll also have to use the whip plenty,” Leland warned him. “This ain’t like the New Mexico Territory you drove. This Black Hills route has plenty of steep grades. Them horses will have to be persuaded now and then.”
“Speaking of horses,” Bill put in, “I want two extra mounts tied to the rear. Combination horses. With saddle rigs and a sack of grain for ’em.”
Leland nodded. “Good idea.”
By combination horses Bill meant mounts trained to both traces and saddle riding. That way he and Jimmy would have horses in case they had to give chase to attackers, and extras in case team horses were shot up.
“Where should I ride?” Josh piped up. “In the coach so I can keep an eye on the soldiers?”
Bill mulled this a moment, then shook his head.
“I want you in the top seat behind me, Longfellow, keeping an eye on our back trail. I’m not saying Durant’s men are bent. But if our soldiers are on Gil Brennan’s payroll, they won’t be able to make their play while we’re rolling. Besides, if you want a good story for your newspaper, it’ll be topside with us.”
Leland stood up and limped to the window beside Bill. He sat on the sill to light his pipe, gazing out toward the barn with a thoughtful frown.
“Bill, there’s a lot of people coming and going around these way stations. You remember. Passengers, drivers, stock tenders, drifters on the prod looking for a meal—Brennan is a savvy sonofabitch, and he’s not one to do the obvious thing. It ain’t just them soldiers you’ll need to watch.”
Bill’s white teeth flashed under his blond mustache. “Don’t worry about me, old son. I always cut the cards, even if the Pope is dealer.”
Harness jangle outside announced the arrival of a coach.
“That’s the noon stage to Denver,” Leland said. “The one ahead of yours. They’ll be laying over until tomorrow morning. C’mon out and stick your feet under the table, boys. Thelma’s the best cook on the line.”
Joshua trailed out behind his companions, watching the tired passengers file in after washing up outside. They joined others already at the station, swelling the numbers at the long common table to about a dozen.
They made a diverse, democratic group, ranging from the wealthy and well-dressed to poor workers in threadbare clothing. However, one young woman in particular immediately galvanized the attention of every man in the room.
Even at the very first glance, her clothing set her apart. She wore a full skirt with a small waist, scallop-flounced, and a cloak with a sealskin collar. She carried an expensive swans-down muff. Her hands seemed dainty in apple-blossom pink gloves.
Joshua’s jaw dropped open in astonished wonder at her beautiful nutshell-shaped eyes the perfect blue of forget-me-nots, the lustrous chestnut hair pulled into a coil on the back of her neck. There was a pearly allure to her skin that even exhaustion couldn’t ruin.
“Better pick your eyeballs up off the floor, Longfellow,” Wild Bill joked as they scraped back their chairs. “But I can’t blame you. She’d make even a gelding feel like a stud.”
Wild Bill and Jimmy seemed more interested in taking the measure of the two disguised soldiers. One of the passengers, a coarse and burly man in butternut homespun, frowned when Jimmy took a seat beside Bill.
“I don’t eat with niggers,” he announced flatly.
“He’s a guard on this line, sir,” Leland explained politely.
“I don’t care if he’s Queen Victoria’s astrologer,” the man shot back. “I don’t eat with niggers.”
“Sir,” said the phony Reverend Peabody, assuming a pious face, “we are all God’s children, and all God’s children must eat.”
“I ain’t tryin’ to starve him, Reverend, nor beat him or put him back in chains. But I paid good money to ride this line. And I ain’t about to eat with niggers.”
By now Bill was heaping his plate with mashed potatoes. “Why not?” he asked pleasantly. “After all, he’s willing to eat with white trash.”
“Just keep your nose out of it, pretty boy, or you’ll get hurt, and hurt bad.”
Bill ignored the threat. “Leland,” he said, “if the gent objects so strenuously, then refund his money and let him go eat elsewhere. Or let him fill his plate and eat outside.”
“Now, you look here, mister, ain’t nobody asked you to stick your nose in the pie.”
Bill, like the rest of the men, had removed his hat before he sat down. His long, golden curls covered his collar.
“Well, I’ll be damned!” suddenly exclaimed a man at the end of the table. “As I live and breathe, that’s Wild Bill Hickok!”
The room went as silent as a classroom after a hard question: Joshua watched the woman, who had haughtily ignored everyone around her, stare at Bill as if he were a dog that had suddenly talked. Bill’s gunmetal eyes came up from his plate, coolly meeting those of the man who was complaining.
“Jimmy’s with me,” he explained with lethal calmness. “As I see it, you have three choices, sir. You can take your refund and leave. You can fix your plate and go eat outside. Or you can shut your stupid cracker mouth right now, and I won’t require an apology for your insults to this war hero.”
“Bill,” Jimmy objected, embarrassed by all this unwanted fuss, “it ain’t important. I don’t mind eat—”
“If he’s good enough to side Wild Bill Hickok,” the passenger suddenly relented, “then I guess it’s all right.”
“That’s the Christian spirit, sir.” The Reverend beamed his benevolence, and Joshua decided John Saville was a good actor indeed.
The tension suddenly broke like a logjam, and the hungry passengers began to make short work of Thelma’s excellent grub. All, that is, except the chestnut-haired beauty.
After only a few experimental tastes, she pushed her plate away and stood up.
“Something wrong, ma’am?” the driver asked.
“The food on this line is too salty,” she complained. “I don’t know how anyone can eat it.”
An elderly woman in a calico dress, busy at a sideboard spooning dumplings into a serving bowl, glanced up with an angry frown.
“I been the cook here almost ten years with no complaints, missy,” she fumed. “Perhaps it’s your tongue is too salty.”
“In Chicago this food would be fed to hogs at the stockyards.” The young woman directed her next question at the driver. “Mr. Donaldson, could you please tell me where the ladies’ facilities are located?”
“The ladies’ who, ma’am?”
Josh noticed that Wild Bill, greatly amused by the turn this trail was taking, had stopped eating. The young woman flushed at all of the attention she was suddenly receiving.
“I mean the place where a lady might ... might have a private moment, sir.”
“A private—? Oh, you mean that nature’s calling?”
The driver winked at the man beside him. “Why, there’s a hunnert miles of facilities right out back, ma’am. It’s called the open prairie. That’s what I use.”
Thelma grabbed the latest Montgomery Ward catalog off the sideboard. “Take as many pages as you’ll need.”
The dining room erupted in laughter, and the flustered woman blushed so deeply, even her earlobes turned pink. Joshua, who had already seen where the jakes were out back, rose gallantly to her rescue.
“I can point out the, ahh, facilities to you, ma’am,” he volunteered.
The woman glanced at Wild Bill, who was grinning like all the rest. “At least there’s one gentleman in this room,” she bit off angrily, all in a huff.
Donaldson winked again. “Ah-hanh. He just wants to watch you having your ‘private moment.’”
“You’re all vulgar and crude,” she charged.
“Well, ain’t she the prima ballerina?” Thelma remarked as Josh led the offended woman out the side door.
Bill was still grinning when his eyes met those of Corporal Dan Appling, the rabbit-faced soldier disguised as a drummer. So far, following the plan to the letter, Bill had made no contact with either soldier. The man’s eyes cut away quickly from Hickok’s. Bill had the odd conviction there was guilt in those eyes.
Interesting, he told himself.
~*~
Worn down to a frazzle from the train and coach rides, Wild Bill retired early to one of the bedrooms at the back of the station house reserved for drivers. Joshua joined the rest of the male passengers in the bunkhouse at one end of the barn. To avoid any further tension over race mingling, Jimmy selected a clean, dry stall in the barn.
“I’d just as soon sleep with animals anyway,” he insisted to Wild Bill. “They got better manners than most people I’ve met.”
Bill’s room was basic but clean: an iron bedstead with a feather mattress, a ladder-back chair, a washstand with a metal bowl and pitcher, a few nails driven into the wall for hanging up clothes and gunbelts. The lock was flimsy, so he tilted the chair under the doorknob to reinforce it.
The window, too, bothered him—there was a clear angle of fire toward the bed. So Bill decided to drag the bed to the other wall.
That was how he discovered the ingenious death trap.
Bill spotted it the moment he pulled the bedstead away from the wall. A can of blasting powder had been placed under the bed. A short fuse was paid out from the can to a knothole in the room’s front wall. It could easily and quickly be lighted from outside.
“Well, God kiss me,” Hickok said softly. A lone bead of sweat trickled across his forehead as he realized how close he had come to being blown across the Great Divide.
Leaving the fuse in place, he carefully shook the volatile powder into the metal bowl and poured water on it, neutralizing it. Then he pulled the chair out from under the doorknob and positioned it just to the right of the window. If he pressed one cheek to the wall, Bill could see anyone who came to light the fuse.
He slid each Colt .44 from its holster, palming the wheels to check the loads. Then he watched a copper sunset slowly blaze to darkness behind the hills to the west. Soon Bill realized that clouds had obscured the moon, limiting his vision out the window. He took out his clasp knife and gouged out some of the mud chinking between the logs, giving him a better view of the area near the fuse.
His vigil was long. A stage came in sometime during the night, creating a racket of people and animals out in the yard. Things quieted down eventually; the only sounds were those of a horse occasionally snuffling in the corral or a coyote howling from the distant hills. Dark moon shadows engulfed the yard and buildings. A couple times men sleeping in the barn got up to use the jakes, and Wild Bill listened carefully until they returned to their bunks.
When he caught himself nodding out, Wild Bill resorted to a trick from his days as a military scout. He removed a plug of chewing tobacco from his fob pocket and cut off a sliver with his knife. He cheeked it and got it juicing good, then smeared a little of the juice on the inside of each eyelid. The mild, long-lasting stinging thus produced was adequate to keep him alert.
Perhaps two hours before dawn his vigilance was rewarded. He heard the quiet scuff of boots just beyond the wall. Wild Bill peered through the chink and spotted a shadowy form. A lucifer scraped against something, and sudden flame revealed a beard-stubbled, sharp-featured face.
Wild Bill didn’t waste time by sliding the window open. Instead, the glass abruptly shattered as he poked one of his Peacemakers outside.
“Freeze right there, mister!” he barked, his tone brooking no debate.
There was a muttered curse, and the figure turned to run away. Hickok never once hesitated. The Colt jumped in his hand, spitting a line of orange fire. The intruder grunted once, then dropped like a sack of grain.
Jimmy came running out of the barn in his long underwear, levering his Winchester.
“Careful, Jimmy!” Bill called out. “Might be more of ’em out there. And the one I plugged might be a possum player.”
But Bill’s shot had indeed killed the would-be assassin. Leland arrived and ordered the curiosity seekers back to their beds, assuring them the trouble was over. Then he scratched a match to life and squatted on his heels to study the dead man’s face.
“It’s Race Landrieu,” he said immediately. “Used to be the stock tender at Thompson’s Canyon Station. One of the men I fired, along with Brennan, when I cleaned house.”
Wild Bill nodded, absently thumbing a cartridge into his spent chamber. “Brennan was hoping to nip the problem of Wild Bill Hickok in the bud early on. Figured the gold would then be easier pickings.”
“Christ,” Leland swore. “Well, he figured it wrong.”
Joshua, still tucking in his shirttail, had joined them in time to hear Bill explain about the blasting powder. “But how could Brennan have known, so soon, that you were on this case, Bill? It’s supposed to be a secret.”
“He’s got informers, that’s how. And I’m guessing word came from within General Durant’s command structure.”
“The soldiers out in the bunkhouse, you mean?”
Hickok shrugged. “What’s after what’s next? Damned if I know. But they were out here early enough.”
“I better get somebody to bury him,” Leland said, still staring at the corpse.
“Nix on that,” Bill told him. “You said you want to send a message to Brennan and his gun-throwers, right?”
“Right as rain.”
“All right, then. That’s what we’re going to do. This fight ain’t going to be pretty, Leland. This here tonight is just the opening volley. Now, here’s what I want you to do...”