Little Big Man (46 page)

But back to Custer, for whom Wild Bill had scouted on the Kansas campaign a year before the Washita. He knowed him well, and liked him and vice versa, and had a harmless crush on his wife and let her believe much exaggeration concerning himself, which Custer also believed, and so everyone was friends, as big, pretty, handsome, and powerful people always are. For everything goes their way, until some wretched, crosseyed, broken-nosed bum shoots them in the back, as Jack McCall did to Hickok in Deadwood in
’76, only two months after the Indians did in the other Long Hair.

However, that was five years into the future, and here we was on Market Square in K.C., and I was fully intending to find Custer before the week was out and do my duty. Let me say about Market Square that it was the hangout for buffalo hunters in the summer when the hides run poor, and scouts would come there when off a campaign, and mule drivers between trips, and it was where you’d go for news if you was my type of case rather than read the papers.

And that is how I met Wild Bill, who was one of the centers of attraction thereabout, having already got his reputation a year or two before as marshal of Hays City, Kansas.

During the day, Hickok generally set on a bench outside of the police station where his friend Tom Speers, the marshal in K.C., encouraged the frontier types to congregate partly because he knew and liked most of them, but also I believe because it tended to keep them out of trouble. They could palaver with one another and even hold target matches without bothering the respectable element in the better part of town, and being that Speers and his deputies was around, real fights was rare.

Not that celebrated gun-handlers ever fought each other much, anyway. Anybody who specializes in violence has the greatest respect for another such expert.

Now, as to my revenge against Custer. Well, you can go to the history books and read how he died fighting Indians on June 25, 1876, so you know I never killed him in Kansas City. If he had been a nobody, I could have kept up the suspense till the last minute, whereas the way it stands I got to admit it was near the first of April when I reached K.C., and the Seventh Regiment had been recalled from the plains in March, Custer going back East. I had missed him by a few days!

You might wonder why I did not follow him. After all, it wasn’t that he had gone to China. I already come across the western half of the country expressly to shoot him down. The image of that deed was what I had been living on for two years, ever since my vow on the banks of the Washita.

All I can say is that there was something about the Missouri River that took my drive away. Old Lodge Skins felt the same about the Platte, and look what happened to him when below it: Sand Creek
and the Washita. I hoped he had now learned to rely on his instincts rather than his pride, and gone up north to stay.

In my case, I stopped right there in Kansas City, where the Missouri takes its big bend for the run to St. Louie. I looked at its muddly swirl and thought: Well, Custer’s anyway gone off the prairies; that’s the important thing. Maybe it was me who scared him off, in a spiritual or medicine sense, for it was right queer the coincidence of our comings and goings. Anyhow, I didn’t go East. I had a funny idea of that part of the country: I figured it to be cityfied from St. Louie right on to the Atlantic Ocean, and mainly slums at that, filled with poor foreigners from Europe who had pasty faces and licked the boots of powerful, glittering people like Custer. I would be at a peculiar disadvantage there.

In Kansas City I was not far from the place where the Pendrakes had lived thirteen years before, and probably were still residing, for people in their situation maintain it forever, and I thought about going over there and just riding down the street once and be done with it, but didn’t have the stomach for even that much. I tell you this, I was still in love with Mrs. Pendrake as ardently as I had ever been, after all them years and battles and wives. That was the real tragedy of my life, as opposed to the various inconveniencies.

The subject came to mind now because with the news of Custer’s departure I felt more let down, despondent, and bereft than at any time since I had left Missouri years before, and naturally, in such a mood, thought of Mrs. P. was inevitable.

Well, if Custer ever come West again, I would kill him. I swore to that, but rather mechanically, for I didn’t have no hopes he would.

The central plains was all cleaned up now of hostiles. The summer after the Washita battle, troops under General Carr whipped the Cheyenne Dog Soldier band at Summit Springs, killing their chief, Tall Bull. That was the end of the Human Beings in Kansas and Colorado.

So what did I do? Well, I met Wild Bill Hickok, and knowing him become almost a profession in itself for a while. I had inquired around about Custer, and a fellow pointed out Wild Bill as having been sometime scout for the General. I had never heard of Hickok at that time, but he was the celebrity of Market Square, and I recall that when I come up to him for the first time he was showing to
some other fellows a pair of ivory-handled revolvers he had been give by a U.S. Senator he guided on a prairie tour.

I pushed amidst the throng and says: “You Hickok?” He had been pointed out to me as such, but I had to say something for openers.

“I am,” says this tall, lithe man with the long fair hair and gives me but a fleeting glance from his sky-blue eyes, and then lifts the pistol in his right hand and fires the entire cylinder faster than you could count the shots, at a sign upon the wall of a saloon a hundred yards and at a slant across the square.

This incident later went down in history, I understand—without any mention of my part—but standing there at the time, I was not impressed. I was intent on finding out about Custer, and the flowing hair of this specimen made me think he was another of the same ilk.

So when he had exhausted them five shots, I says impatiently: “Well, Hickok, if you can spare the time, I’ll have a word with you.”

He throws the fresh gun from his left hand into the right, while at the same time and in the same fashion transferring the emptied revolver from his right hand to his left. This maneuver was called the border shift, and constituted a neat-looking trick as both pistols traveled through the air for a second.

Following which Hickok fired five more shots at that sign, and then the whole bunch walked on across the square to see how good he did. One of them at the back of the crowd comes over to me and says: “I reckon you must know Wild Bill purty well, to bother him at a time like this.”

“Don’t know him a-tall,” says I, “and don’t know as I want to. What makes him so important?”

This fellow says: “You never heard how he took care of the McCanles gang ten year ago at the Rock Crick stage station down in Jefferson County? There was six of them, I believe, and they come for Wild Bill, and he took three with his pistols, two with his bowie, and just beat the other to death with a gunstock.”

I immediately reduced that by half in my mind, for I had been on the frontier from the age of ten on and knew a thing as to how fights are conducted. When you run into a story of more than three against one and one winning, then you have heard a lie. I found out later I was right in this case: Wild Bill killed only McCanles and two of his partners, and all from ambush.

“Yes sir,” this fellow goes on, who belonged to the same type as Custer’s striker, “that is what he done. And over in Hays City when he was marshal he had a run-in with Tom Custer, the General’s brother, who he locked up when drunk and disorderly, and Tom come back with two soldiers to put a head on him, and Wild Bill knifed one and shot the other.”

Now this interested me, so I asked how he got Custer’s brother, with knife or gun.

“It was the soldiers he killed, not Tom.”

That figured.

Hickok and the others now returned from looking at the saloon sign, and this suck-up who had been talking to me, he asked what happened and another man says: “He put all ten inside the hole of the O, by God!” And everybody was whistling and gasping at the wonder of it—well, not exactly everybody, for there was other scouts and gun-handlers around, people like Jack Gallagher, Billy Dixon, Old Man Keeler, and more who was well known in them days, and they looked thoughtful so as not to display jealousy. As elsewhere in life, there are specialists on one hand, and the audience on the other.

I steps up to Wild Bill again and says: “If you can spare the time—”

He is feeling good what with his performance and the adulation rising from it, and I guess it might have irritated him that I should be totally occupied with my own matters, and he says quite negligent to one of them men at his elbow: “Run him off.”

So that fellow comes towards me with a contemptuous look on his ugly, hairy face, and he is right large, but then he stops abruptly. For my S & W .44 is on a dead line to where his belly sagged over his belt.

“Pull in your horns,” Hickok tells him with a guffaw. “That little bastard has got the drop on you.… Come on,” he says to me, “put aside your popgun and I’ll buy you a drink.”

So Wild Bill and me went over to the saloon and passed under the sign where he had put ten shots in the hole of the O at a hundred yards, and I glanced up at it and saw he sure enough had. Inside, we got us our whiskies and then he found the farthermost corner from the door and put his chair in the angle of it and pulled his frock coat back on either side to expose the handles of the pistols stuck into his waistband, and all the while we was there he was eying every individual
who came and went without it making any difference in his attention to our talk, except once when the bartender dropped a glass, at which Hickok automatically responded like a cat, coming half out of the chair.

So that was where he told me about Custer’s going East and all, and the stuff I related earlier.

“Why did you want to know about the General?” he asked, but of course I never told him of my true interest but some lie about hiring on as a scout, and then to cover up whatever emotion I might have showed, I says: “I understand you had some trouble with his brother Tom.”

“Well,” he says, “that is all over.”

Now this is a good example of a point I want to make. Wild Bill Hickok was never himself a braggart. He didn’t have to be. Others did it for him. When I say he was responsible for a ton of crap, I don’t mean he ever spoke a word in his own behalf. He never said he put a head on Tom Custer, nor wiped out the McCanles gang, nor would he ever mention them ten shots inside the O. But others would be doing it incessantly, and blowing up the statistics and lengthening the yardage and diminishing the target. Until about thirty year ago, I was still meeting people who claimed to have been on Market Square that day when Wild Bill put ten shots one on top of another into the point of an
i
at two hundred yards.

It was just after this that the bartender dropped the glass and Hickok come out of his chair, hands ready at his gun butts.

When he sat back again, I says: “What are you so nervous about?”

“Getting killed,” says he, as simply as that, and takes a sip of his red-eye. And then he looks at me, a little amusement crinkling his blue eyes, and says: “Maybe you figure to do it.”

That just made me laugh, and I says: “It was you who asked me to have a drink.”

“Look,” says he, “tell me straight, was it Tom Custer who sent you here? For as far as it goes with me, that is over and done with. But if he wants to start it up again, he ought not to send a fellow around carrying a S & W American in a tight calfskin holster. I tell you that for your own good, friend.”

I was insulted, being proud of that new piece of mine, and I also took it hard that I would be considered as working for anybody named Custer.

“Look yourself, Hickok,” I says. “I ain’t no man’s flunky. If I got
any killing to do, it’ll be for myself and no other. If you want to fight, we’ll drop the guns and I’ll take you on bare-knuckle though you be big as a horse.”

“Settle down,” he says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Let me buy you another.” He called the bartender, but that individual had gone into a storeroom in back and couldn’t hear him, so Wild Bill asks me would I mind fetching the bottle?

Still sore, I says: “Are you lame?”

He answers apologetically: “I don’t want to get shot in the back.” Hastening to add: “I don’t mean by you. I believe you, friend. But I don’t know about these others.”

Meaning the ten or twelve harmless persons who shared the saloon with us at the moment. It wasn’t crowded, being the middle of the afternoon. There was a table of four, playing cards; another couple or three men was down towards the lower right of the bar. And I recall a person dead drunk at a table in the middle of the place. His head and shoulders was flat limp on the tabletop in a pool of spilled whiskey, sort of like a piece of harness dropped in some standing rainwater.

So I felt a contempt for this Wild Bill, thinking he was either batty or yellow if he couldn’t walk across a peaceful room. Then it occurred to me that he might be putting on an act for my benefit. Maybe he was waiting for me to turn my back on him so he could drill me.

This is a good example of the suspiciousness which warps the minds of gunfighters. I had fell into it right quick, just being in Wild Bill’s proximity. You feel like your whole body is one live nerve. At that moment one of them cardplayers, having just won a pot, let out a holler of triumph, and
both
Hickok and myself come out of our chairs, going for our iron—and he had been right about that tight calfskin holster of mine, which fitted the piece like a glove: the faster you pulled at it, the more it gripped the revolver.

I says: “Now you got me doing it.”

“I never,” says Hickok, “have held by a holster.” Now that he seen my deficiency I reckon he finally did trust me. “Always carry my weapons in the waist. You have to get a tailor to make a real smooth band there, no excess stitching nor suspender buttons, and of course your vest ought to be cut so its points don’t interfere. And,” he goes on, “see how I had my coat designed so it swings away on the sides.”