Return of Little Big Man (6 page)

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.