Manhunter / Deadwood

by Matt Braun

  “You already know the rest,” Butch concluded with an offhand gesture. “We got run out of Utah and ended up at Hole-in-the-Wall.”

  Starbuck studied him a moment. “Suppose you got the chance to make a clean break? Would you take it?”

  “Probably not.” Butch caught his eye for an instant, looked quickly away. “Mike always says, the trouble with life, it’s so goddang daily. I guess that holds for me too. The straight and narrow just don’t suit my style.”

  “How do you know?” Starbuck asked. “You’ve never really given it a try.”

  “I tried it long enough to get burnt out on psalm singin’ and an empty belly.”

  “Well, I’m no soul-saver,” Starbuck said, grinning. “But if you ever change your mind, look me up. I might be able to steer you into something that wouldn’t be so ‘goddang daily’.”

  “I’m obliged, Luke.” Butch kept his gaze averted, slightly shamefaced. “I’ll likely stick to rustlin’, though. The way I got it figured, it beats workin’ for wages.”

  “Suit yourself.” Starbuck let it drop there. “You want to stay over in Denver awhile?”

  “Naw!” Butch said cheerfully. “Mike’s like an old hen. I’d better get on back before he comes lookin’ for me.”

  “There’s a morning train to Cheyenne.”

  “Guess I’ll catch it,” Butch said without hesitation. “That’ll put me on the trail to Hole-in-the-Wall by tomorrow night.”

  Starbuck nodded and resumed staring out the window. He pondered the future of a likable kid turned outlaw. Sooner or later, a hangman’s noose or a stiff prison sentence was in the cards. Or perhaps a quicker death, at the hands of a manhunter. The thought struck a nerve, and he silently wished the youngster Godspeed. Hole-in-the-Wall was, in the end, the only choice.

  He hoped they would never meet again.

  Chapter Fifteen

  The stage slid to a dust-smothered halt. There were nine passengers crammed inside and six more clung to the top of the coach. The driver set the foot brake with a hard kick and looped the reins around the lever. Then he leaned over the side and let loose a raspy shout.

  “All out for Deadwood!”

  Starbuck was the first passenger to alight from the coach. His hair was dyed raven black and a spit-curl mustache was glued to his upper lip with spirit gum. A black eyepatch, which was held in place by a narrow headband, covered his left eye. The patch broke the line of his features and further distracted attention from his general appearance. The getup he wore was an advertisement of sorts, almost a uniform. He was attired in a black frock coat and somber vest, topped off by a low-crowned hat. A diamond stickpin gleamed from his four-in-hand tie and a larger stone sparkled on his pinky finger. He looked every inch the professional gambler.

  Dusting himself off, Starbuck moved to the rear of the coach. There he waited while the luggage was unloaded from the storage boot. He took a thin black cheroot from inside his coat and snipped the end with one clean bite. Then he fished out a match and lit the cigar. Puffing smoke, he hooked his thumbs in his vest and scanned the street. All around him was a tableau of bedlam in motion.

  Deadwood was surrounded by the pine-forested mountains of the Black Hills. The town proper twisted through a narrow gulch, and wooden stairways intersected terraced side streets up and down the slopes. Wagons drawn by oxen clogged the main street, and bullwhackers scorched the air with curses and the sharp pop of their whips. The boardwalks were thronged with men, and the riotous atmosphere of a gold camp pervaded the town. There was a sense of carnival madness to the milling crowds and the deafening hubbub.

  Some six years past, the gold rush had transformed a wooded gulch into a boomtown. Yet, like most mining camps, Deadwood still wasn’t much to look at. It was simply bigger and brassier, with a population of thirty thousand, and more arriving every day. The upper end of Main Street was packed with stores and rat-infested cafés, three banks and some thirty hotels, and one public bathhouse. The lower end of town—known locally as the Bad Lands—was a beehive of saloons, gaming dives, and cheap brothels. Sanitation was virtually unknown, and ditches carved out of the rocky terrain served as sewers. The stench of refuse and unwashed men was overpowering.

  Starbuck hefted his valise and walked downstreet. He thought it unlikely anyone expected him in town. The link to Deadwood, established by the bank records in Denver, was his card in the hole. James Horn had no way of knowing he’d stumbled upon the connection and at last put the pieces together. Still, he had gone to extreme measures to insure he wasn’t followed. After a day’s layover in Denver, spent collecting the paraphernalia for his disguise, he had secretly made his way to Cheyenne. There he’d boarded a stagecoach for the three-hundred-mile run to Dakota Territory. The trip had consumed three days and two nights, with stops in several lesser mining camps in the western reaches of the Black Hills. Today, lost in the crowds, he seemed just another gambler touring the circuit. His cover name was Ace Pardee.

  At the corner of Main and Lee, he spotted the Custer Hotel. Aptly named, it honored the man responsible for Deadwood’s very existence. General George Armstrong Custer, in 1874, had commanded an expedition into the Black Hills. Apart from a thousand soldiers, he was accompanied by a geologist and two reporters. The discovery of gold was duly publicized in newspapers throughout the nation. Hundreds of prospectors, in direct violation of the Laramie Treaty of 1868, immediately invaded the holy ground of the Sioux. Within a year, the hundreds turned to thousands, and the Black Hills gold rush was on. By early 1877, with the army unable to stem the flood, the government legislated yet another treaty into extinction. The Sioux’s sacred Paha Sapa—the Black Hills—were opened to settlement. And Deadwood roared to life.

  Starbuck was an iconoclast where government was concerned. He considered bureaucrats the blight of mankind, and lumped all politicians into two categories, the corrupt and the stupid. The army was viewed with a somewhat more charitable outlook. Yet he made an exception in the case of George Armstrong Custer. Long ago, he’d tagged the flamboyant general as an exhibitionist, with delusions of grandeur. The Black Hills expedition was symptomatic of Custer’s thirst for recognition and fame. Only two years later that same thirst led to the Battle of the Little Big Horn. By all accounts, Custer had his eye on the presidency and needed a splashy victory to garner the nomination. The 7th Cavalry had been sacrificed not to quell the Sioux, but for the greater glory of the one called Yellowhair. In Starbuck’s opinion, that made Custer something worse than a meddling bureaucrat or a corrupt politician. He was a fool.

  On general principles, Starbuck checked into another hotel. He paid in advance and was shown to a cubbyhole on the second floor. The furnishings consisted of a swaybacked bed, one wooden chair, and a washstand. A chipped and fading johnny-pot occupied one corner of the room. He dumped his valise on the bed and stripped to the waist. Then, gingerly avoiding his dyed hair, he took a quick bird bath. After a shave, he toweled dry and slipped into a clean shirt. Somewhat refreshed, he put on the gambler’s outfit and went downstairs. The desk clerk obligingly pointed him toward the Bad Lands.

  A couple of blocks down the street, Starbuck happened upon another landmark. The No. 10 Saloon, located on the edge of the Bad Lands district, was famed as Wild Bill Hickok’s last watering hole. There, on a warm August day in 1876, a deadbeat named Jack McCall had shot Hickok in the back of the head. The assassin was ultimately hanged, and his victim was laid to rest in Deadwood’s budding cemetery. The funeral marked the birth of a legend.

  Like many westeners, Starbuck had a jaundiced view of the man a journalist had once dubbed Prince of the Pistoleers. Hickok had reputedly killed several dozen men in gunfights, and touted himself as the most deadly shootist on the frontier. It was commonly believed he could drill the cork into a bottle without touching glass, and further, that he could handle two guns simultaneously, blazing away from the hips and never missing the target. He was credited as well with having brought law and order to at
least two Kansas cowtowns, Hays City and Abilene. The truth was somewhat more mundane.

  Starbuck, through friends in the law community, had gradually put together a factual account. The Prince of Pistoleers was a showboat and braggart, who followed the axiom of shoot first and ask questions later. He was known to have killed six men, four of whom had been gunned down in coldblood. The only man he’d ever killed in the line of duty—in a face-to-face shootout—was a drunken gambler in Abilene. Thereafter, he had toured the East as an actor, capitalizing on his notoriety. As a peace officer, he was a joke, and as a gunman, he was little more than a common killer. Among those who knew him best, he was renowned as a man who never gave the other fellow a ghost of a chance. He always rigged the game.

  A pragmatist himself, Starbuck took few chances. Yet he was contemptuous of any man who killed in coldblood. Showboats like Hickok, who pandered to the press, were almost beneath contempt. Throughout his lifetime, Wild Bill had courted dime novelists and eastern journalists who dealt in sensationalism. The result was an entire mythology based on invention, distortion, and outright lies. Hardly a noble servant of the law, Hickok was a spinner of windy tales, all of them about himself. The eastern reading public was ravenous for western heroes, particularly those who were painted larger than life and possessed all the sterling attributes. Hickok simply gave them what they wanted to hear.

  Walking along the street, Starbuck was struck by a curious juxtaposition in time. General George Armstrong Custer had gone under at the Little Big Horn in June, 1876. Not quite two months later Wild Bill Hickok had been murdered in the No. 10 Saloon. Never had any two men deserved less to be enshrined in the mythology of a nation. Yet, in an orgy of print, both of them had been immortalized in newspapers as well as books and periodicals. The general public accepted what it read as truth carved in stone. So it was that Custer and Hickok had achieved in death what they had vainly pursued in life—the glory of everlasting fame.

  Sadder still were the unsung paladins of the frontier. The men who deserved public acclaim, men who actually were legend in their own time. Yet, because they shunned the limelight and sought no personal glory, their names were virtually unknown outside the western territories. Starbuck felt himself privileged to have met a few of them personally. Foremost in his mind were three peace officers of unquestionable courage: Tom Smith, Heck Thomas, and Dallas Stoudenmire. He was on his way now to meet yet another such lawman. A grizzled veteran by the name of Seth Bullock.

  Starbuck made a leisurely tour of the Bad Lands. To all appearances, he was a gambler out surveying the prospects. Deadwood, the richest of all gold camps, was a magnet for the sporting crowd. The stakes were high, the play was fast, and suckers were soon parted from their money. The vice district was contained within a few square blocks, and there the action was nonstop, night and day. Whores, whiskey, and games of chance were the principal attractions. A man out to see the elephant saw it all in Deadwood.

  While he walked, Starbuck searched his memory for everything he knew about Seth Bullock. Their acquaintance stemmed from his correspondence with peace officers throughout the West. He’d first written Bullock last year, selecting him for the best of all reasons. No better contact existed in Dakota Territory.

  Seth Bullock was universally feared and respected by the outlaw element. He had served as a sheriff in Montana before joining the rush to Deadwood in ’76. Upon arrival, he’d opened a hardware store, prospering as the boom got under way. Yet he was bothered by the lawlessness and violence of a raw mining camp. In league with other responsible citizens, he had organized a Board of Commissioners to police the town. Their first act was an ordinance restricting the vice district to lower Main Street. Their second act was the appointment of Bullock as sheriff, and with it a mandate to enforce the law. Within a year, he’d driven the outlaws out of Deadwood and convinced the sporting crowd to toe the line. In 1878, the territorial attorney general had secured his appointment to the post of U.S. deputy marshal. He was the law in Deadwood.

  Over the years, Bullock had become a man of influence and prominence in Dakota Territory. After one term as sheriff, he’d devoted himself to various business enterprises. In addition to the hardware store, he invested in several mining ventures and established a cattle ranch on the Belle Fourche River. Yet, despite his wealth, he had retained his commission as a U.S. deputy marshal. He was one of that rare breed of men who served the law out of personal commitment and a sense of duty. He still risked his life chasing stagecoach robbers and murderers, and he’d acquired a fearsome reputation with a gun. He was the man to be reckoned with in the Black Hills.

  Starbuck wanted advice and information. He nonetheless thought it wiser to approach Bullock in secret. Their association, should it become public knowledge, might very well affect the plan he’d mapped out. Accordingly, he went to the end of the Bad Lands district, then crossed to the opposite side of the street. He casually strolled back uptown, pausing now and then to check out a gambling dive. At the corner of Main and Wall, he stepped into the hardware store. A couple of clerks were busy waiting on customers, and paid him no notice. He browsed his way toward the rear of the store, moving slowly toward a door marked private. He knocked once and entered unannounced.

  The man seated behind the desk was tall and lithely built. He had piercing gray eyes, a droopy mustache, and wild bushy eyebrows. His nose was hawklike, almost hooked, and his jawline slanted to a prominent chin. He held a pistol trained on Starbuck’s belly button.

  “You oughtn’t to pop in on a man without an invite.”

  Starbuck stood rock-still. “You must be Seth Bullock.”

  “Who might you be?”

  “Luke Starbuck.”

  “That a fact?” Bullock eyed his funereal attire. “If you’re Starbuck, how come you’re tricked out like a tinhorn?”

  “I’m working undercover,” Starbuck told him. “I trailed a murderer here and thought you might be able to give me an assist.”

  “If you’re who you say you are”—Bullock gave him a dark look—“what was the last thing I wrote you about?”

  Starbuck smiled. “Your last letter was in reply to my inquiry about a bank robber, Jack O’Hara. You said he hadn’t been reported in Dakota Territory.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned!” Bullock holstered his pistol and rose with an outstretched hand. “It’s a pleasure, Luke. I’ve been wanting to meet you for a long spell now.”

  “Same here.” Starbuck accepted his handshake. “I would’ve telegraphed ahead, but it’s too risky. The bird I’m after probably has ears all over town.”

  “Who’d he murder?”

  “A lawyer in Denver.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “James Horn,” Starbuck said slowly. “Alias Ira Lloyd.”

  “Never heard of either one.”

  “That figures,” Starbuck remarked. “He’s one cagey son-of-a-bitch.”

  “Sounds the least bit personal.” Bullock motioned, then resumed his seat. “Grab yourself a chair and lay it out for me.”

  Starbuck sat down and took a moment to light a cheroot. Then he told Bullock the entire story. He skipped certain details about Hole-in-the-Wall, honoring his word to Mike Cassidy. Yet the salient points were covered in sum and substance. The link to the Black Hills Land Company was underscored as the most vital lead in the case. He concluded with a physical description of James Horn.

  “I put his age at twenty-seven,” he noted. “Any of that ring a bell?”

  Bullock’s voice was troubled. “Skyrockets would be more like it.”

  “You know him?”

  “Oh, hell, yes!” Bullock paused, jawline set in a scowl. “He goes by the name of John Eastlake.”

  “How long has he lived in Deadwood?”

  “Since day one!” Bullock said with a grim smile. “He showed up the fall of ’76 and started throwing money around like it was going out of style. Bought himself a whole batch of claims, and then he organized the land co
mpany. Today, he owns about half the real estate down in the sporting district, and he’s the second or third biggest mine owner in town. So he’s nobody to mess with unless you’ve got the goods.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Pretty obvious,” Bullock speculated. “He tried to kill you and now you’re set on returning the favor.”

  “So?”

  “How’d you figure to do it?”

  “Call him out,” Starbuck said coldly. “Pick the time and show my hand—force him to fight?”

  “Won’t work!” Bullock waved the idea aside. “He knows you’d kill him. So why should he fight?”

  “He’ll fight before he’d let me expose him as a murderer!”

  “What evidence you got that it was him who killed the lawyer?”

  Starbuck looked surprised, then suddenly irritated. “None.”

  “You can’t even prove for a fact that Eastlake is Horn—can you?”

  “No.” Starbuck’s features were immobile. “Even if I could, it wouldn’t change things. There’s nobody left to testify against him … they’re all dead.”

  “So that’s that!” Bullock dusted his hands. “You call him out and he’ll just laugh in your face. Then he waits till things cool down and hires himself another backshooter to get you. His kind don’t never do their own dirty work! You ought to know that, Luke.”

  “Yeah, you’re right.” Starbuck gave him a bitter grin. “I guess I lost sight of that … took it too personal.”