Brian Garfield (17 page)

“Now, all I know is what I used to read in the newspapers when I was a boy. My father put out a newspaper, you know. Still does. When Custer and Hickok died I was about fifteen. Now, I remember the reports. I guess everybody does who was old enough at the time. What did you want to know?”

“Dutch says he actually saw Wild Bill Hickok once, down in Kansas. He says you saw Hickok too. That true, Mr. Packard?”

“Wild Bill? Yes, I saw him once. My dad took me to see him on the stage in Chicago when he was traveling in that show with Buffalo Bill and Ned Buntline. I was eleven or twelve. I was mighty impressed.”

“What's he look like?”

“He looked tall, I guess, but then all grown men look pretty tall when you're a kid looking up at them from a theater seat. He had hair down to his shoulders—”

“Golden hair, like a lion?”

“No, it was brown as I recall, and he had a mustache, and he was dressed up in a buckskin outfit that my dad said he never wore except in that make-believe play. Why do you want to know all this, Riley?”

“Well I'm just kind of curious, is all. What kind of holster he carry his gun in?”

Pack gave him a suspicious look. “Now, what did Dutch Reuter tell you about that?”

“Said he carried his guns in cut-down army holsters.”

“Like that one you're wearing there?”

“Yes sir, like this one.”

“Now, I happen to know Hickok didn't like holsters. Never used them.”

“Where in hell'd he carry his gun, then?”

“Hickok had two guns, in the first place.”

“Dutch didn't mention that.”

“What did Dutch tell you, exactly?”

“I don't know. Just things. I guess Wild Bill must have been the best gunfighter ever, wasn't he?”

“And look at the good it did him,” Pack said.

“He lost his eyesight. That wasn't his fault. Up until he started to go blind there wasn't anybody could beat Will Bill with any kind of handgun.”

“Now, that may be true,” Pack conceded; give the devil his due.

“You said he wore two guns. What kind?”

“I think they were the old style forty-four army Colts with no top-strap—Theuer cartridge conversions, I believe. I could be wrong about that but that's what I remember. I do know he was partial to wearing a wide sash around his waist. He was a big eater and he was vain about his looks and he liked to hobble in his pot-belly with a sash. He generally wore the Colts inside the sash, with the handles sticking out over.”

“That ain't what Dutch said.”

“Dutch has a flexible way of telling the truth sometimes.”

“I don't see how you could draw a gun very quick if it was all knotted up inside a big sash.”

“I never heard of Hickok having to draw his gun very quick. When he sat down to play cards, I understand he'd keep one revolver in his lap under the table, just in case. He generally walked around with at least one gun already in his hand if he felt there might be any need of it. Now, that got him in trouble—I guess you heard.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Hickok was a man with a unique talent for marksmanship—he could hit anything, at any distance, without even seeming to aim—but he drank too much whiskey and when he was drunk he got belligerent and trigger-happy, not unlike some of your friends hereabouts, and there was one time, I think in Abilene, when he was chief of police there, and he was walking around drunk one night and he heard somebody come up behind him and he already had that gun in his hand so he just turned around and shot the man behind him, and it turned out to be his own town constable.”

“Oh, now, Mr. Packard, I do believe you're runnin' a sandy on me.”

“No, it's the truth. It was in all the dispatches. Hickok was fired after that little mishap. Now, he couldn't get a job enforcing the law anywhere after that, so he went on the stage with Cody for a little while but my dad told me he just couldn't stand play-acting, and his eyesight was starting to go bad on him so he just drifted around, drunk mostly, until somebody shot him in the back. He was thirty-something years old. It's not a very glorious life if you were thinking of following in his footsteps. If I were you I'd read more newspapers and not so many dime novels.”

Riley Luffsey said, “I don't take partial to having my leg pulled, Mr. Packard.”

Pack was too busy setting type to argue the point. And next time he looked up, the kid was gone.

Luffsey had strange dreams, sure enough; but he was a likeable youngster and Pack hoped he'd outgrow some of his turbulence. Keep nudging him along gently and it might yet be possible to make a printer's devil out of him.

That afternoon Pack received a visit from Joe Ferris, who put his head in the door of the
Bad Lands Cow Boy
shack and said, “News.”

“What?”

“Come on and see.”

Pack closed the newspaper door and joined Joe Ferris on the boardwalk. They had to wait out a traffic of half a dozen horsemen—Pack recognized two or three of them as hands who worked around the De Morès corrals; he wondered momentarily why they were heading east, for the Marquis had no nearby enterprises in that direction.

In the drovers' dusty wake Pack and Joe stepped down into clay powder that half-buried their boots.

Jerry Paddock's place was the first saloon they came to. Against Pack's nostrils a thick current of whiskey and beer and tobacco smoke rolled out through the half-open door. He didn't need to see the inside of Paddock's saloon with its low ceiling and small paper-covered windows; even in the daytime the place had an aura of dim dusk—the better to cloak Jerry's habits of behavior?

Pack reached for the door but Joe's hand stayed him. “Not here,” Joe said. “I'll walk a little farther and spend my money in Bob Roberts's place if it's all the same to you.”

“All right,” said Pack. They walked on. “How's trade?”

“Picking up.” Joe had stocked the store with provisions ordered on the strength of his loan from Theodore Roosevelt and Pack had seen a fair stream of customers in and out of the place in the past week. He had also made note of the Remington revolver Joe wore at all times, handle-forward on his hip, and the bellicose challenge with which Joe stared back at those of Jerry Paddock's crowd who made it a point to drop in each day to inspect his progress.

Pack said, “Who's minding the place?”

“I rigged traps,” Joe Ferris said. “Anybody tries to bust in, we'll hear it.”

“Hear what? Pots and pans?”

“More likely screams,” Joe said. “They're bear traps.”

“Now, isn't that a little ferocious?”

“I'm not Swede Nelson,” Joe replied. “They're not going to break me.”

At the corner, smiling in a shapeless burlap dress and a pathetic sunbonnet, stood Jerry Paddock's professed wife, a painted woman known around town as Little Casino. In dubious distinction she probably was the most famous or infamous madam in western Dakota. At this moment she was bending the ear of young Riley Luffsey, who giggled at everything she said. She looked up as the two men walked by, said, “Hello boys,” and winked at Pack.

Pack granted the stiff nod the occasion required. Joe Ferris muttered a greeting as they went by.

Pack had spent a silly hour once with Little Casino and she had treated him like a dirty little boy. Apparently that was what most of her customers liked. Pack hadn't enjoyed it at all; he preferred a softly languorous vulgarity that allowed room for dreams of Romance.

A wagon was parked in the alley beside the De Morès store; a small boy slept full length on its seat. Children, Pack thought—a sure sign of growing civilization.

But he felt irritable. Booster's passion seemed to have deserted him on this ragged afternoon. Instead of an incipient metropolis the town for all its raw newness seemed but a shabby camp: ramshackle and makeshift. It probably had less to do with architecture than with the clinging dirt, the glutinous smell, the ubiquitous insects and the barren landscape that, by overhanging the place, dwarfed it. But on this particular day he found himself wondering if Progress was, after all, worth the price.

“What news is coming to town?”

“You'll see.”

“What's the mystery?”

“Seeing's believing. Best for you to witness it with a fresh clean open mind. I wouldn't want to go coloring your editorial opinions.”

“Now, Joe, you're an exasperation.”

“I know I am.” Joe seemed pleased with himself.

They walked on, bootheels kicking up little whorls of powder dust. Masking his nose with a curved palm against the abattoir stink, Pack recalled the six or seven De Morès horsemen who'd ridden out east just now. Something odd about them nagged at him and it struck him now that all of them had been carrying rifles and wearing holstered revolvers. He glanced at Joe Ferris's belted sidearm and wondered what things were coming to.

Riley Luffsey came hurrying up behind them. “Mr. Packard? I hope that's not a wool shirt you're wearing.”

“Why?”

Joe Ferris made a face at Luffsey and pushed Pack forward into Bob Roberts's Bug Juice Dispensary. There was much more of a crowd than one should expect at this hour on a Monday afternoon; and come to think of it, why was Joe Ferris closing the doors of his store in the middle of the afternoon?

A man nearly backed into him; Pack put his hand gently against the man's shoulder and eased past him. He heard someone say, “Strong? Naw. I wouldn't say this snake juice was strong. But you give a shot of it to a fifteen-pound puppy and he'll pull a freight train.”

Dan McKenzie, the blacksmith, was swapping tall stories with a friend. “Why that's nothing. Just last fall I seen a petrified bird sitting on a petrified tree singing a petrified song.”

Some of them were onetime buffalo hunters fretting their lives away in unemployed bitterness. But why wasn't McKenzie at work?

Pack sensed expectancy in the air. He said to Joe Ferris, “What is it?”

“May be we'll find out soon enough.”

By the barroom piano a group of men sang in rough voices the popular song “What Was Your Name in the States?”

At the long plank bar Redhead Finnegan—surly, unkempt, quarrelsome, thickly muscled, chin like a curbstone; the man from Bitter Creek, Pack thought dryly—was holding court amid his louts and sycophants. Pack bent an ear in that direction. Sure enough, Finnegan and O'Donnell and Luffsey were vying to see who could utter the gamiest threats against the Marquis, whereupon Dutch Reuter—as inebriated as the others, and trying to eat with one hand while smoking a Single Twist with the other—stopped feeding his Teutonic appetite momentarily and lurched away from the freelunch tray proclaiming, “I in the war of Franco-Prussia fought, and I always to go after any Frenchman am ready!”

Finnegan yelled, “The fences cut the game trails. And they cut off all us ranchers from the river. And the God-damn French cattle kingdom driving out the game. And I ain't going to have it no more. I'm tired of riding sixty miles to find game and I'm tired of cuttin' wire.”

“You want to know what I think?” asked young Riley Luffsey. No one encouraged him but he went on anyway: “I think he's no French nobleman at all. I think it's a lie—just a way to avoid having to hobnob with common folks.”

Frank O'Donnell said, “I don't care if he's the king of England and France both—he comes on my outfit I'll shoot that son of a bitch of a Markee like a dog on sight.”

Pack drew breath to retort but Joe Ferris pulled him aside. “You want a Donnybrook? Keep it quiet now,” he adjured. “They're right, Pack. You need to learn to listen to them. The hand of De Morès is upon everything in this place and they're sick of it.”

“Now, don't scream at me, Joe.”

“I thought we were friends. Why have a friend if you can't scream at him? I'm trying to save you a beating—or worse.”

“The Marquis has every right to fence his own land.”

“Sure, I know. The Markee can do no wrong. To hear you tell it, the sun shines out of his hind end. But don't tell it that way in here—these boys will make wolf meat out of you.”

Dutch Reuter came weaving away from the bar, drunk and mildly angry. “They not ready yet to fight are. What good they are?” He pushed toward the door.

Joe Ferris said, “Where you going, Dutch?”

“Clearing out. Someplace where a man the air can breathe.”

“Don't you like it around here any more?”

“Like, not like—no matter, Joe, I got no job. Maybe Dickinson I try, maybe Black Hills.”

“Wait then. I know a man who may give you a job. I'll have a word with him.” Joe moved away, his arms across Dutch's shoulders. Pack recalled that Joe had ridden with Dutch back in the buffalo-hunting days. If you had ever been a friend of Joe's you could always count on his help.

Behind the bar Bob Roberts examined both sides of a papermoney note before he shoved it in his pocket and counted out a handful of coins in change. A filthy hunter elbowed his way to the bar, leaned across and spoke rapidly in Roberts's ear. Roberts looked startled. Then he threw his head back. His big round voice boomed out into the room. “They're coming!”

At first Pack had no clue to the saloonkeeper's meaning; but in the abrupt silence that followed, he heard a faint drumming thunder.

The crowd listened with a religious intensity of silence. The rataplan grew slowly louder.

Bob Roberts broke the spell:

“By the Lord God, it's true then!”

There was a continuing stillness of some duration, punctuated by a growing racket of hoofs and followed by a surprisingly quiet statement from Redhead Finnegan:

“The blackhearted devil.”

There was a surge toward the doors. Pack caught Joe Ferris's eye. They waited out the crush and afterward followed the crowd outside.