The Pistoleer (20 page)

W
e had the Texas reward poster for weeks before he showed up. Besides Bill, who I mean by “we” is me and Tyler McBride and Mike Williams, his main deputies. Every cattle outfit arrived with more news on him than we’d got from the one before. It was that way all spring. We never had to ask about him, all we had to do was listen. We heard about the Indian and we knew all about the fight with the Mexicans on the Newton Prairie. When he was told Hardin had dropped four of the six Mexes that went down in the fight, Bill’s blond mustache spread in a smile over his glass of whiskey—he was in his favorite chair at the Alamo at the time—and he said, “Four, was it? That’s a smart of killing. The boy must be all they say.”

Abilene had been booming for a couple of years. It had a schoolhouse, two churches, banks, and real estate offices. It had stores and shops of every kind. It had photography studios. It had hotels as fancy as you’d find anywhere east of Frisco and west of St. Louie. It even had a damn newspaper.

But more than anything else, Abilene had cows. One big herd after another got packed into the rail-yard pens at the end of town for shipment to the East. And with those cows came the wild boys from Texas. Outfit after outfit rode in from three hard months on the trail, looking to have a good time. And ready to give it to them were dozens of saloon-keepers and flocks of hard-eyed whores and more quick-fingered gamblers than you could shake a pair of dice at. Abilene got so damn loud they said you could hear it all the way over in K.C. Cowboys whooping and howling, cows mooing day and night, train whistles blasting at all hours. There was brawling in public and drunks reeling on the sidewalks and horse racing in the streets. And sometimes—in spite of the ordinance against carrying guns in town—there was shooting. Usually it was in fun and only busted up some glass. Sometimes it was in earnest and somebody got shot.

Right from the start, Abilene loved the cowboys’ money—but as the town had prospered and grown, many of the good citizens began to take offense at the cowboys’ kind of fun. Bad enough the cowboy money stank of whiskey and whorehouse perfume by the time it reached the good citizens’ hands, but the cowboys’ wild ways in the streets got to be more than they could bear. What was needed, they decided, was a hardcase lawman who could keep the wild boys under control. And so, in the summer of ’70, they hired Bear River Tom Smith to be the town marshal.

Bear River Tom was a big redhead from back east where he’d been a policeman, and he was tough as they come. But Abilene was tough as they come too, and Tom hadn’t been marshal but about five months when one night somebody chopped off his head with an ax. Nobody wanted the job after that, and the town got wilder than ever. It took months to find somebody to take Tom’s place. But they finally hired themselves the best there was—Wild Bill. That was in April of 1871, about two months before Hardin got to town.

B
ill was already a legend at the time he came to Abilene. The “Prince of the Pistoleers,” the dime novelists called him. And he truly did love being a famous man. He was always ready to cooperate in promoting his heroic reputation, which mostly meant telling magazine and newspaper writers the kind of adventurous bullshit stories they wanted to pass on to their gullible readers back east. He had a natural flair for being a public figure, and he damn sure looked the part—the long yellow hair, the fancy Prince Albert or the fringed buckskin, the wide red sash holding his pearl-handled navies butt-forward. He spent most of every day and night at his special table in the Alamo, the fanciest saloon in town, with double-glass doors and a mahogany bar and shiny brass cuspidors as high as your knee. He drank steady and gambled and joked and told tall tales. Every now and then he’d tour the town and let the citizens see that Wild Bill was on the job. Tyler or myself would sometimes follow along to keep watch for back-shooters, but it wasn’t necessary. Bill had a sixth sense for guns being pointed at him, even from behind. A gunshot would flame from the alleyway shadows and he’d already be spinning and ducking down and returning fire, all in one smooth motion. In his first month on the job he wounded two ambushers and scared off a half-dozen others. There were plenty of pistoleros hankering for some celebrity of their own, and killing Bill was a sure way to get it. But even when he was drunk—Wild Bill Hiccup, some called him, though never within his hearing—there wasn’t a one who had the guts to take him on face-to-face. (His sixth sense finally quit working for him five years later—in the Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood, where some dirty-nose tramp named McCall shot him in the back of the head. But even in death, he looked the legend: the Deadwood doc said Bill was the prettiest corpse he ever saw.)

I
ought mention that just before Hardin got to Abilene, Bill had some trouble with Ben Thompson that heated up a lot of Texan tempers. It started over a sign Ben and his partner, Fancy Phil Coe—both of them Texans with lots of friends—had recently hung over the door to their Bull’s Head saloon, which happened to be directly across the street from the jail. The sign showed a huge red bull reared up on its hind legs, proudly displaying to all the passing world a monster pair of balls and a giant pecker ready for action.

The first time Bill saw it he looked sad. “A sight like that,” he said, “is apt to make a lady feel cheated the next time a feller lets down his breeches for her. I don’t generally mind a fanciful exaggeration, but it shouldn’t be of a sort to disappoint the ladies nor diminish a man’s sense of his own manhood.” Just the same, he wouldn’t have done anything about the sign—live and let live whenever possible, that was Bill’s motto—except that Mayor T. C. Henry got a storm of complaints from henpecked storekeepers, red-faced mothers with giggling children, and preachers having purple fits. He came into the jail like a man being chased by yellow jackets. “You got to do something about that sign, Bill, that’s all there is to it.”

So Bill told Johnny Coombs the painter to get his equipment and come along with us to the Bull’s Head. Johnny no sooner got up on the ladder and started to paint over the offending portions of the big bull when Phil Coe came out of the saloon and asked what was going on. When Bill told him, Phil shrugged and said, “I warned Ben that sign would rile the good folk.” Fancy Phil Coe was easy enough to get along with and had fairly decent manners for a Texan—which is why it seems all the more pitiful that of the only two men Bill killed in Abilene he was one of them.

While him and Bill were talking and watching Johnny paint, Ben Thompson came stomping out. He wasn’t nearly so agreeable a fella as Phil. He was as stocky as the bull on the sign and had a reputation as a good pistolman. They said he’d killed at least ten white men in Texas and served two years in prison for trying to kill his wife’s brother for beating up on her. I believe Bill was one of the few men Ben Thompson ever truly feared in his life—and so naturally Ben hated him.

“If they don’t like the sign,” he told Bill, “tell them not to look at it, damn their eyes!” He was wearing a gun in defiance of Bill’s ordinance. Sorry, Bill told him, but the sign was going to change whether Ben liked it or not.

There was but six feet between them and you could see Ben trying with all his might to beat his fear and pull on Bill. He got all sweaty and tight in the face but he just couldn’t do it. When he finally broke off the stare, his face was splotchy with shame. Phil Coe looked embarrassed for him. Ben pretended to watch Johnny paint for a minute, then started back into the saloon with his back as stiff as a fence post.

“Don’t wear that useless hogleg on the street again,” Bill called after him. He normally wasn’t one to rub a man’s face in it, but Ben brought out the worst in him. Ben’s ears got red as beets but he went on inside without looking back. You could smell the rank hate he left in the air.

A
couple of days after the business with the sign, I arrived at the jail one morning just as Columbus Carol was coming out. He was puffing a cigar and calling “So long, Bill” over his shoulder. He saw me and gave one of those big winks that always made me want to shoot him in the eye. “Howdy, Deputy!” he yelled. “Arrested any bad hombres lately? Har-har-har!” I never did understand how Bill came to be good buddies with that loudmouth son of a bitch.

Carol had pastured his herds at the North Cottonwood, about thirty miles south of town, and intended to keep them there awhile. He wasn’t the only drover doing that. The cattle market was glutted and the price of beef was on the floor. But he’d been to the bank and borrowed enough to pay off his men, and it was mostly them we heard across the street in the Bull’s Head. Bill told us all this—and that the main reason Carol had come to see him was to square Wes Hardin. He smiled and said, “I want you boys to give that young hoss wide room, hear? If he gets wildhair, you fetch me. I’ll be the one to deal with him.” What about if we saw him wearing his guns, I asked, but he didn’t answer. He was already going out the door and on his way to the Alamo for his morning toddy.

I couldn’t help but admire Bill’s smarts. He knew Carol would brag to everybody in town about squaring Hardin with his good buddy Wild Bill. It was a reason everybody would understand for Bill not coming down on Hardin. They’d all think,
Hell, Hickok ain’t shying from Wes, he’s just doing Columbus a favor is all.
Just the same, there was only so much slack Bill could give. If Hardin pulled on his string too hard, Bill would have to do something about it, consequences be damned.

T
he following night Bill was wearing his best Prince Albert, so I knew something was up but couldn’t figure what. I went out on a turn with him and he headed us over to the Applejack. We had to make our way through swarms of drunks and yahooing cowhands in the street. We kept a lookout for guns but didn’t spot a one. The wild boys had seen Bill head-knock too many gun-toters not to take him serious about wearing guns on this side of the river.

The piano player in the Applejack was practically hitting the keys with his fists to be heard in all the clamor of talk and laughter and shouting and dealers’ calls. When Bill ordered a drink for me as well as himself, I knew for sure something was going on and wished he’d let me in on it. He normally didn’t like for us to drink on the job. “One drunk lawman out on the town’s enough,” he’d say, meaning himself. He clinked his glass against mine and said, “To love, Tommy boy, wherever it’s keeping its pretty ass.”

He tossed off the drink and the barkeep poured him another, but I only sipped at mine to be polite. No matter what Bill was up to, I wasn’t about to do any real drinking in a crowd like that. It was practically all Texans, and we were getting a lot of eyeballing. Bill noticed the grip I had on my shotgun down alongside my leg and told me to put it up on the bar. “These fellers are mostly just gawkers,” he said. “Don’t let them think they got you twitchy.”

Pretty soon George Johnson pushed in beside Bill and hollered, “Wild Bill! Got somebody here you ought to meet!” George was a friend of Bills, an easygoing railroad agent who knew most of the Texas cowhands. He reached back and put his hand on the shoulder of a tall young fellow wearing a new black suit with a red plaid vest and a black hat with a silver concho band around it—and two big army .44s tied down on his legs. “Bill,” George said, “meet Wes Hardin. Wes, this here is the one and only Wild Bill Hickok.”

My hand instinctively went to my shotgun, but Bill tapped my arm, so I let it be. It was clear he’d had George set up the meeting, and it irritated hell out of me that he hadn’t let me in on it beforehand. It’s how he was about a lot of things, lousy with secrets.

Neither one put his hand out. They just nodded and said they were proud to make each other’s acquaintance. Bill offered to buy him a whiskey, but Hardin insisted the drinks were on him and ordered a bottle. They clinked glasses and drank to each other’s health. While they had a couple of drinks more, Bill told him he’d heard about the fight with the Mexicans on the Newton Prairie and was impressed by the shooting they said he’d done. “You did the republic a service, getting rid of so many troublemakers all at one time,” he said.

Hardin smiled big as the moon. “Glad you feel that way,” he said. “I’d been wondering how I stood with the law hereabouts.” For all their pleasantries, they were both doing everything left-handed. Hardin kept his right hand hooked by a thumb in his gunbelt, and Bill had his on his hip, from where he could snatch the navy just quick as a blink.

“Got something to show you, Little Arkansas,” Bill said. I don’t know anybody who knows why in hell Bill called him by that name, but that’s what he always called him from then on—and for some damn reason Hardin seemed pleased by it. Bill took the Texas reward poster out of his coat with his left hand and shook it open for Hardin to see. Hardin gave it a glance and his smile got tight. Bill crumpled it up and said, “It don’t mean jackshit. Nor any other papers they send on you. The way I see it, Little Arkansas, I got enough to do just keeping all these wild hairs from tearing up the town—and
you
got enough troubles back home without adding to them here. Now you impress me as a bright fella who’s his own man. I don’t believe you’re likely to be influenced by any bitter souls in town who try to use you for their own low purposes.”