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 gibe 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, but 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 nothing 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 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 without a lantern.
“You must of give me good 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 frock 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 et 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 Cheyenne who raised me I so often was as a young man. “It wasn’t no goddam good, so you didn’t miss nothing. And you could not of afforded it nowhow.”
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 got a well-to-do sweetheart. He’s made a big strike lately.”
No matter how dubious you get about the likelihood of anybody finding significant amounts of gold on his own, there’s something magic about the very sound of the word that causes the coldest heart to pound, probably because if you find some of that substance you don’t have to go to no further work to make it salable. Everything else that brings in a profit requires more work than separating gold dust from sand by shaking a pan. So for a minute there, picking up my order of bread and beans, I considered staking a claim of my own next day.
But then this large woman wipes her hands on her stained apron and says, “’Course, he’s never told me the truth about anything else, so maybe he never paid five dollars for that beefsteak but bought it off some Indin for a drink of whiskey. It tasted like real old bear.”
Back at the barrel all was as before. My brother Bill was sleeping so quiet, in the same position as earlier, that I thought maybe he had up and died, and there wasn’t enough light in there to see if he was breathing, but when I poked his foot with mine he sighed and uttered an indecent word. The dog of course had been all over me right away and once again got more than his share of the grub I carried.
I left my brother in as good a situation as he was likely to find at the moment and 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 twenty-four 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 rainbarrel Wild Bill pointed out, and having got his schedule said I’d see him around noon at No. 10 and went into town.
I never knowed what I’d find whenever I returned to my brother’s location, but this time I was pleasantly surprised to see him standing erect and sniffing the air, looking healthy and cold sober.
“Well sir, Jack, what have you been up to?” says he, with a gap-toothed grin amidst the mess of whiskers that constituted his lower face.
“You remember me.”
“From recent days,” says he. “That wagon-train story of yours is another matter.”
“I got me a job,” I says. “It don’t pay much but will feed us till something better comes along. I know some people starting up an express between here and Cheyenne and Laramie. If it pans out, they’ll probably be hiring.”
Bill raises his chin in a superior way and says, “I was going to offer you a partnership in my claim. Due to circumstances beyond my control I lost my pan and shovel and the wood I had bought for a sluicebox, and all, and if you could help me with—”
“Goddammit, Bill, I’m trying to be serious. You ain’t got no hopes for gold. Just forget about that.”
“It’s why I’m here at all, Jack,” he says loftily.
“You’re laying around drunk for days on end.”
“That’s just in my off time,” says he. “I’m usually out working my claim.”
I tell you, it hadn’t been that long since I found my brother and already I was real sick of him. I glanced around and asked, “Where’s your dog?”
“How do I know?” says Bill. “I never asked him to join up with me. He goes off when he feels like it. Maybe he’s giving it to some coyote girlfriend.”
“I got enough money to take you for a bath and breakfast.”
Bill wrinkles his nose under its layer of grime. “What I could use is a little—”
“Yeah, but what you’re getting is a bath and some beans and coffee.”
When we reached the bathhouse, where you sat in a tin tub while some fellow poured hot water on you from a bucket he dipped out of a big pot over a wood fire, and then after you soaped yourself, rinsed you with another, I forced Bill to take the dousings with all his clothes on.
“Jeezuz,” he whined afterwards, when we went outside. “I’ll catch my death all wet like this.”
It was a warm morning in August, as I pointed out, and he’d be dry in no time. “Come on, a cup of coffee will warm you up.”
I took him to the husky woman’s open-air kitchen, where she says, “Hey there, Billy, I wondered where you was lately.”
“You already know one another?” I asks, looking at each.
“Hell,” says she. “He’s the one I was telling you about.”
“He’s your boyfriend?”
“You tell him, Billy,” she asks my brother, but he just keeps looking miserable from being wet.
“He’s my brother,” I said sourly. “Feed him some coffee and beans.”
Bill now spoke up. “Nell, if you could sweeten my cup with a little bitters, I’d think kindly of you.”
Bitters is what some in those days called whiskey, probably because it sounded like medicine and could be pronounced before ladies and children.
“Don’t you do it, Nell,” I broke in. “I just got him washed, and I’m taking him to get shaved.”
She slams down a tin plate of beans on the board counter stretched between barrels, but so neatly none of it slopped over. “I don’t want him shaved,” said she. “I think he’s real handsome with his whiskers, like President General Grant.”
“You’re mighty pushy.”
She glared at me with little blue eyes set in a big red face. “He might be your brother—if so, he’s got all the looks in the family—but he happens to be my intended.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“I won’t stand for cursing in my establishment,” says she. “Any more of it, and I’ll wipe the floor with you.”
“You ain’t got a floor,” I says, real annoyed. “And earlier on, you had quite a foul mouth yourself.”
We was eye-to-eye for a while, and she turns her head and spits a long brown stream just past the coffeepot, and she says, turning back, in a nicer voice, “You’re a spunky little runt, ain’t you? But I guess I just got a soft spot in my heart for the Crabb boys.”
I didn’t want a row with her, so making up suited my purpose. “All right then,” I says. “I’m going to leave my brother in your capable hands, Nell, for I have an appointment. I don’t think he should drink any more right now, is all. I think he should eat them beans.”
I tried to pay her, but Nell said, “How’d it look if I charged for his grub?” To Bill she says, “I was saving that steak for you, Billy, but it was going bad, so I et it.”
“Goddammit,” says he, and of course she don’t chide him for the language. “That was a prime piece of beef: I stole it at Jake Shroudy’s when he went out to look at somebody getting shot in the street.”
She winks at me, over the head he lowered to the beans, and says sweetly, “Tenderest I ever tasted, dearie, only a little high.”
I took my leave of them two lovebirds and went down to No. 10, which 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 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 back outside and leaned against the raw boards of the wall. As I said, I found it a real relief to know my brother had a girlfriend, even if I was baffled as to what she saw in him, her with a successful business, and him not even washing unless I made him, but I was disinclined to examine the teeth of a gift horse. I begun to think now that if Bill had Nell to look after him, then I might be in the clear to go ahead and find 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 most feared 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. When I gets there he says, “I ask you to do me a favor.”
“Anything at all, Bill.”
He reaches into an inside pocket of the tailcoat, where I remember he often carried a hideout gun useful if there was trouble when seated at the poker table and it was awkward to draw a weapon from the belt, but what his fist come out with now was not a pistol but a roll of paper money, which was not awful popular with men of the West at that time, especially card players, who preferred coin, which you could bite to see if it was silver or lead.
Glancing around to see if we was being observed, he slips me the roll in his closed hand, saying, “Put this away before anybody sees it.”
So I did as asked, without counting, though I pointed out that having no armament I could hardly give it effective protection.
“Nobody’d think looking at you that you was carrying that kind of money, hoss,” says he.
“I’ll do a better job of protecting your cash than you can?”
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. “Now that wad I been keeping aside. Even Charley Utter don’t know about it. If I get mine any time soon, as I think I might, I ask you to take enough from this roll for the train fare to Cincinnati, Ohio, and back, and whatever other expenses you run up—don’t be stingy, nor lose your head neither—and carry the rest of it, by hand, to my bride, Mrs. James Butler Hickok, with the compliments of her late loving husband, so-called Wild Bill. Now can you make me that promise, hoss?”
“Why sure I can, Bill,” says I, though not taking it seriously. I shoved the bankroll into my pants pocket, where it would be safely anchored by that Indian knife, the blade of which I kept wrapped in a piece of leather so it wouldn’t cut me. I didn’t have no belt in which to carry the latter, just that piece of rope. “I guess you better give me her address.”
“It’s back at the wagon,” said he, “but you wouldn’t have no trouble in locating her in any event. She’s famous.” He frowned and stroked his handlebar mustache. “You sure you can do this for me? That’s a long trip, but you oughta see more of the country before you cash in your chips. Maybe you won’t like it back East: I didn’t much myself, but I’m right glad I saw it when me and Cody traveled with that show. You’re an American, you ought to see where most of them live, which is real close together.”
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.” 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 goodnatured 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 2nd, 1876, in the No. 10 Saloon. When I recounted the first part of my life to that R. F. Snell, I lied and said I never again saw Wild Bill Hickok after running into him earlier in the year at Cheyenne. I done that because I was ashamed to tell the truth, even three-quarters of a century later. 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, I expecting to be asked for the return of his roll or some of it anyway, but what he wants is for me to get fifteen 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 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 proved 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 (where my brother stole that steak he give Nell), 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, but I pull him out and draw my knife to cut out his gizzard, but the others who now arrived 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 of 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 Peirce 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 of 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 Peirce’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 Peirce 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 sixguns, somebody must have walked away with them between his death and now, for they wasn’t buried with him or ever seen again.
There was quite a crowd out at the funeral, including my brother Bill and Nell his big girlfriend, and I’ll say this for her: she kept him sober so he acted with proper respect for the occasion, though without alcohol in his veins he had begun to look real pale and weak.
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 knifepoint. 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. It was different with Custer, who I never much liked but who I realized, seeing him die, had been more than what I thought he was when I hated him most. I doubt I ever could of been Custer’s friend in the best of times—and to be fair to the man, what would he have seen in me? But it might of been different with Wild Bill. Fact is, nearest I ever come to having any friends was amongst the Cheyenne, and there race came into play sooner or later, even with Old Lodge Skins, who was more of a father than a friend anyhow. I just wasn’t an Indian, but I sure hadn’t done well amongst whites.
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, to keep the promise I made to Wild Bill not an hour before he died: to travel to Cincinnati and see his wife. I wanted to ask you: I seen you cut that lock of hair from Bill’s head before the coffin was nailed shut, and Doc Peirce said it was for Mrs. Agnes. I know you don’t think much of me, but would you trust me to take it to her?”
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. I expected my brother and Nell was in one of the saloons. Well, I didn’t have time to say goodbye.
It was on the trail just outside Deadwood, now become a crude road by reason of the deep ruts resulting from all the gold-rush traffic, I heard some barking behind me and turned and seen that yellow dog formerly partnered with my brother Bill but who was now taking up with me. I was glad to have his company, though I could not right away meet his expectation I was a sure source of grub, for I never had any myself at that point, facing the long hike to Fort Laramie, the nearest white place. In fact I had little more means than I had arrived in Deadwood with a couple of days before, except that roll of money I was supposed to take across the continent to Mrs. Hickok.
... Well, as it turned out, I didn’t have that either. I searched my person four or five times, but I no longer was in possession of the nest egg Wild Bill had put aside for his widow. I must of lost it on that chase of Jack McCall, maybe when I pulled out my knife. Or maybe someone picked my pocket at some point, could even have been at the funeral, for in them days there was a lot of rotten people around when you wasn’t on the lookout for them, but maybe that’s always the case in any age.
So that was the real end of Wild Bill Hickok, who unfortunately won’t be coming back again in my story. He was the third of the influential people in my life who had died in hardly more than a month, and the only one with regard to which I felt guilty. How much was in that roll I never knew, never having counted it, but I intended to take some amount of money to the bereaved Mrs. Agnes soon as I earned enough, living up to that promise.
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.
I’ll tell you what I had in mind now, with no serious means for bringing it about at this time: looking up Mrs. Elizabeth Custer and consoling her. I say that with all respect.