Return of Little Big Man (7 page)

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.

L
IKE ALL MY INTENTIONS
regarding the Custers—like that time I intended to assassinate General George A.—this one had to be delayed in execution, me being at the moment on the trail to Fort Laramie, owning nothing but the clothes on my back, unarmed except for that Indian knife, and with no better prospects than I had on reaching Deadwood. The last time I seen her, Mrs. Libbie Custer was up at Fort Abraham Lincoln, Montana Territory, from which her husband had marched away never to be seen again amongst the living. It was not the time to head up there, through hundreds of miles of country where the war between the hostiles and the U.S. Army sure had not ended with the Indian victory at the Greasy Grass, and the Fifth Cavalry was in fact going north along more or less the same route I was traveling going south, as I found when I finally reached Laramie, but it was easy to miss even a large collection of people or animals in the wide open spaces of that day, unmarked by the billboards and Burma-Shave signs that come later along with foot-long hotdogs and soft ice cream squirted out of a machine.