Chauncey slouched in the saddle, smiling to himself, singing some ditty or another, picking his nose all the while. I couldn't tell if he was naturally happy, stupid, or thinking on what he was going to do with his share of the clothes and such he was going to help steal from us later.
Whatever, there we were, right smack dab out in the middle of what used to be called Red Cloud's Big Open, and any minute I expected to get my brains blowed out by robbers in cahoots with Nose Picker Chauncey, or maybe by some Indians that didn't know, or didn't care, that we had won the Indian wars.
But none of that ever happened.
After we'd ridden for quite a few hours and I'd begun to feel like my butt had growed to the saddle, we came on a bad section of rocks and the trail narrowed. Lightning flashed, and when it did I seen at the top of the trail that there were a series of small caves, and those caves looked like open mouths begging us to step inside and get chewed.
When the lightning flashed again, Chauncey pointed at one of the caves, and we got the general idea which one it was, and that that was where the Indian lived.
We started along the narrow trail that led up there, and I could hear pebbles tumbling off the edge and down to the depths below. When the lightning flashed again, I looked down and wished I hadn't. If me and my horse went over, there wouldn't never be no way to sort out which of us was which.
Finally we come to a spot about halfway to the caves and stopped. Chauncey got down and had us do the same.
"We got to walk the rest of the way," Chauncey said, and he had to yell for us to understand him because the wind was whipping away his words. "We can leave our mounts here. Get the nigger to hold them."
Though it would have been smarter for Billy Bob to have left me holding the mules, since I didn't know slick mud from fresh honey, he went along with Chauncey, seeing how Albert was colored. He damn sure didn't want no white man to know he'd feel safer with a colored by his side instead of one of his own kind.
"Let's go- then," Billy Bob said.
I handed Albert the rein to my horse.
"You watch yourself, hear?" Albert said.
"I will."
So the three of us, Chauncey, Billy Bob, and me, went up."
It was a rough walk and the higher it got the less there was to walk on. Rocks slid out from under our feet and cut at our legs and the gorge loomed just to our left, and when the lightning flashed it looked deep enough for you to fall all the way down to the pits of hell.
After the jumble of rocks we come to a clear spot and the cave. There was a torch just inside against the wall, lodged in some rocks, and Chauncey lit it, which was quite a chore, as he had to take a finger out of his nose to hold the torch in one hand and the match in the other.
When the torch was lit, we went deeper inside the cave. Bats flapped above us, and their leavings were all over the floor and smelt right smart. I didn't like bats, no kind of way. They always looked to me like rats with wings, and I don't like rats either. Especially ones that can fly.
Finally it got lighter ahead of us, and we crunched through some old bones lying about, and Chauncey showed us that a lot of them were human. He said this cave had once belonged to a grizzly and that now and then some folks had come in and met him, and he hadn't been such a good host. I know I was glad when he lifted that torch and I didn't have to stare at those bones, particularly one skull with its entire right side crushed in, like a big paw had swatted it.
The light around the bend was from a campfire, and it was right cozy in there. There were a few handmade chairs, a bed, and a table, and over on the right-hand side of the wall, leaning up against it, was a rough-cut box with a lid on it.
But the thing that really got my attention was the young Indian. He wasn't all that young, I reckon. Maybe thirty-five. It's hard to tell with Indians. They seem to me to either age real fast or not at all.
He had on a dusty black suit with a yellowish shirt that was once white and he was wearing an Abraham Lincoln hat. He was a friendly looking fellow and he was smiling at us while he held one hand in his coat pocket.
I figured he had his hand on a pistol and was just smiling either out of habit, or to get us off guard. When he seen that Checkers was with us, he relaxed a mite and spoke.
"Checkers, my good comrade. I thought that I might not see you again. It was my suspicion that you had been caught for some nefarious deed, like horse thievery, but I see that this was not the case. And better yet, you have brought friends to cheer my fire."
"Why's he talk like that?" Billy Bob half whispered to Checkers.
"That damned education stuff," Checkers said. "But he's all right."
"Come," said the Indian, "please come and warm yourself by my meager fire. Take a load off your feet and your mind, and I will see to some liquid refreshment."
What he did for liquid refreshment was reach into his other pocket and take out a pint flask which he sat on a rock by the fire.
We got over near the fire and warmed our hands, but nobody sat yet.
The Indian found four cups and brought them over, then he poured us all a little splash from the bottle and we drank it.
"Please, please," he said pouring us some more. "Sit, please do sit. There is no need to stand on parade here. My home is your home. Or to take two lines from the opera Clan, the Maid of Milan: 'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home; a charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere."
Billy Bob wasn't so quiet this time. "What in hell is he talking about?"
"Just more of that education stuff," Chauncey said. "An opry is where folks yell at each other to music."
"Ah, Checkers," said the Indian, "you have no heart. An opera is the heart, the soul, the very wing tips of a bird. It soars through the breast and mind and fills the soul."
"How about we do less soaring," Billy Bob said, "and talk about this body I come to look at."
"Yes," the Indian said, "the body of the Great White Warrior, the Pistoleer Prince of the Plains, the one and only, the indescribable Wild Bill Hickok."
"That's him," Billy Bob said.
"Now you remember that deal you made me about bringing a buyer here?" Checkers said to the Indian.
"It has been a month, my good friend. But I remember." The Indian smiled. "What if you had brought them here and I had sold the body?"
"Chance I took," Checkers said. "Besides, I didn't figure you'd sold it. You don't like going down into town so much."
The Indian opened his arms wide. "Isn't that polite? That is Mr. Checkers' way of saying that I am a wanted man in Deadwood."
"What for?" Billy Bob said. "I thought it was back East where you was wanted."
The Indian sighed. "There too. But I can hide better here. As for Deadwood, well, I'm wanted for a slight altercation with a young gentleman who had some rather foul comments about my ancestry. I was forced in a moment of passion, perhaps a moment fired by devil rum, to place the full length of a Bowie knife between his top two ribs, and therefore, let the soul fly out of him."
"What?" Billy Bob said, glancing at Checkers.
"He stabbed the sonofabitch to death," Checkers said.
"And I hope, dear friend," said the Indian, "that you have been better able to quiet your tongue on that matter below than you have here this night."
"You told them, you silly bastard," Checkers said. "I was just explaining."
"So you were, so you were," the Indian said.
The Indian and Checkers grinned at each other. The way they were doing it, I figured it was hurting their lips.
"Can we just get on with what I come here for?" Billy Bob said.
"Of course," said the Indian, "but first let me introduce myself. I'm Elijah Bigshield, Oglala medicine man, retired." He held out his hand.
Billy Bob's face worked to the left, then to the right. "I don't shake hands with niggers or Indians," he said.
&nbs
p; "You don't say?" the Indian said.
"I do say. Now let's get on with it."
Checkers cleared his throat. "This here boy has got a special interest in the body. Hickok was his daddy. Some whore in Deadwood was his mother."
"You don't say?" Elijah Big shield said, but the honey in his voice had gone considerably sour. "Isn't that nice. Why you even look like him, now that it is mentioned. 'As a little childe riding behind his father, said simply unto him, Father when you are dead, I shall ride in the Saddle.' Stefan Guazzo, Civile Conversation. And now that saddle has been passed to you, and you may ride in the tracks of Hickok the killer."
I was beginning to feel a mite uncomfortable, but Billy Bob didn't show a sign of it. "I don't want to hear no more of your education," he said. "An Indian or a nigger with an education ain't nothing more than a bird that can talk. It sounds like it knows something, but any fool knows it don't. It just mocks."
"I find you most unpleasant, sir," Elijah said.
"You're going to find me leaning over your ugly face, beating you upside the head with my fist, if you don't show me this body Checkers has been carping about. And there better be a body in that damn box, that's what I'm trying to tell you."
"Anything to please the young gentleman," Elijah said snidely. He walked over to the box and rubbed a hand against it. "I'm asking twenty dollars for it, sir."
We followed him over, with Checkers standing back a bit, and Elijah opened the lid. That was the first time I seen the body, and I knew in my heart that it was none other than who they said it was, Wild Bill Hickok.
"The body possesses magical properties, sir," Elijah said stepping to the side to let Billy Bob see. "Hickok's ability with his guns was most phenomenal; and he himself said on more than one occasion that his hands were guided by spirits."
"How come you know so much about it, you being an Indian?" Billy Bob asked.
"Even the mouse must learn the ways of the hawk if he wishes to survive. That body, sir, is so full of magic, that it is said that if you put it at the foot of your bed at night, Hickok's skill with the pistols will enter into you and allow you to shoot as fast and straight and true as this man-killer ever did."
"Is that a fact?" Billy Bob said. "Who's done it to know?"
"No one. My father told me this, and he was one to know. He tried to steal the magic from the corpse and put it in a pot, but the magic was too strong to be stolen. When he died, my father's soul joined those in the wood that surround the white man-killer."
"The spirits in the wood, huh?"
Elijah nodded. The firelight flickered across his copper face, and even in that silly suit and hat, he looked very, very Indian. The smile lines around his eyes and mouth had fallen off like dead leaves.
"That is correct. The spirits in the wood are old as the world, and they collect to them new spirits when they die, providing those spirits are worthy to become the protectors of the Oglala."
"You don't say?" Billy Bob sneered.
"Oh, I do say. It is the spirits in the wood that keep the black magic of Hickok inside him, lest it be passed onto the whites. The whites have enough magic, without the gun magic of Hickok. "
"And why don't you, or why didn't your father, let Wild Bill's magic pass onto you Indians?"
"White man's magic. It cannot be used by Indians, and Indians don't want it. We have our own magic."
"Lot of good it's done you," Billy Bob said.
"That is quite correct, sir," Elijah said, "quite correct." But his voice had an edge to it, and I was beginning to get spooked. I looked at the body in the box and it seemed strangely alive. It wasn't that I expected it to get out of that box and walk or nothing. It was more like what that medicine man was saying about spirits and all, and there was something about that body, maybe the way the firelight glinted off the bone in those empty eye sockets, that made you think there was a powerful and ugly thing inside it. I somehow felt whatever spirits might have been in Hickok were bad. Maybe Hickok wasn't all bad his ownsell but those spirits were, and now they were all that was left of him. I felt better knowing he was between them boards full of Indian magic.
"You tell a good story, Indian," Billy Bob said, smiling one of his nasty smiles, "but it ain't nothing to me but spook talk."
Elijah smiled slowly, so slowly you could almost count his teeth one at a time as his lips folded back. "Yes, you white men certainly have it over us ignorant savages."
Billy Bob nodded to that. "How do I know this here is Wild Bill Hickok, and not just some drunk you've pickled?"
Elijah stepped forward, put a finger on the body's head. "Bend close and look at that hole. Is that not an exit wound from a bullet? Was not Wild Bill shot from behind and the bullet came Out the front of his head?"
"That's so," Billy Bob said, leaning forward for a look. In spite of myself, I leaned too, but I couldn't look into those empty sockets. Billy Bob was what I was looking at, and his eyes seemed to have fallen out of his head and down those sockets like two marbles tumbling down mine shafts. His face tightened for a moment, and then suddenly he turned.
Elijah, after pointing out that bullet hole, had stepped back and pulled what was in his coat pocket out. A Bowie knife. And even as Billy Bob turned, and I turned with him, that knife came flying through the air. To this day I don't know how it missed Billy Bob. I couldn't believe he could move that fast. His left hand came out of his coat pocket, and it was full of Colt's 60. The Colt jumped and roared and Elijah's lips were parted by the bullet. The gun roared again, and this time the slug hit Elijah square between the eyes. The shots were so close together, they almost sounded like one.
Before Elijah hit the ground, Billy Bob flicked his wrist to the left and had Checkers covered. Checkers had one hand to his nose and the other inside his coat.
"Don't shoot me, fella," Checkers said. "I was trying to go for the Indian. I seen what he was about to do and I tried to go for him. I swear, it was the Indian I was after. It's just you're so blooming fast . . . Grief, but you just might be the son of old Wild Bill. That was the fastest damned draw I ever did see."
Slowly Checkers went ahead and brought his gun hand out. There was a little pistol in it. He lowered his arm down by his side and let it dangle.
"I swear," Checkers said, wouldn't throw in with no Indian against a white man."
"Put the gun up," Billy Bob said, "and see if he's dead." Checkers did as he was told. While he did I smelt something burning, and glancing at the fire I seen it was Elijah's stovepipe hat. The first shot had knocked it off his head and it had rolled into the fire. It was just a black wisp now.
Checkers bent over the body, then stood. "He's dead. Course he's dead. He's got two holes in his head. I could have told you that from over there."
Billy Bob turned to look at where the Bowie had gone. It was stuck just to the right of Hickok's head. Billy Bob reached and pulled it out of the wood, and the knife 'squeaked free of it like a mouse that had had its back stepped on. Billy Bob stuck it in the belt around his coat.
"Too bad he wasn't white," Billy Bob said. "Would have been my first kill. Hickok didn't count no Indians or niggers, and I don't aim to neither."
"Didn't count spicks neither," Checkers said.
"That's right," Billy Bob said, "no spicks neither."
Billy Bob reloaded his pistol and dipped it back into his left coat pocket.
"Checkers," he said, "you look that body over for money. He got anything you give it to me. I ain't so sure you didn't lead us up here to cheat and kill us, so you don't get nothing out of the deal, not even the twenty for the trip."
Checkers' face went red and he forgot to put his finger in his nose. "That ain't fair."
"Didn't say it was," Billy Bob said. "Don't feel like being fair right now."
"I brought you up here in the rain, it storming—"
"Shut up and do as I say," Billy Bob said. He opened and closed his hands above his coat pockets where the butts of his pistols showed.
/> Checkers moved his jaw back and forth a few times, then he bent to searching Elijah.
"Don't palm nothing," Billy Bob said. "I would find that disagreeable."
Checkers brought over a pocket watch, a derringer, and a little bag full of bones, dirt, and beads.
Billy Bob put the watch in his inside shirt pocket. "Indians are hell for trinkets," he said, "but what they need to know time for?" He poured what was in the bag into his hand then back into the bag. "What's this?"
"His medicine bag," Checkers said. "Has his powers in it."
"Did him a lot of good, didn't it?" Billy Bob said, and tossed it into the fire. He flung the derringer as far as he could to the back of the cave. "Whore's gun," he said. "That and tin horns."
Billy Bob put the lid on the box, and we went out of there, back down to where Albert waited, me and Checkers carrying the box with Wild Bill in it. It was pretty heavy.
I didn't tell Albert right then all that happened. I figured he knew a lot of the story from the way I looked at him, and I thought maybe he'd heard the shots, though later he said he hadn't. With the storm like it was, and us being deep inside the cave, he hadn't heard a thing.
We strapped the box on the side of the mule, and Billy Bob took to leading it behind his mount. Me and Checkers rode behind him, almost side by side, and behind us was Albert.
We'd gone a mile or so when the storm got so bad every little bit of the sky lit up with forks of blue-white lightning and the thunder roared like there was a cannon war going on.
About the time all this storm business got built up, Checkers made his play. Maybe he and the Indian had planned such a thing all along and it hadn't gone good. I don't know. Maybe Checkers planned to rob us after we had the body and the Indian's money, that way he could make double. And maybe he hadn't planned nothing at all and was just mad because he hadn't made his share like he thought he should.