The Return of Little Big Man

by Thomas Berger

  I never knowed what I’d find whenever I returned to my brother’s location, but this time I was pleasantly surprised to see him standing erect and sniffing the air, looking healthy and cold sober.

  “Well sir, Jack, what have you been up to?” says he, with a gap-toothed grin amidst the mess of whiskers that constituted his lower face.

  “You remember me.”

  “From recent days,” says he. “That wagon-train story of yours is another matter.”

  “I got me a job,” I says. “It don’t pay much but will feed us till something better comes along. I know some people starting up an express between here and Cheyenne and Laramie. If it pans out, they’ll probably be hiring.”

  Bill raises his chin in a superior way and says, “I was going to offer you a partnership in my claim. Due to circumstances beyond my control I lost my pan and shovel and the wood I had bought for a sluicebox, and all, and if you could help me with—”

  “Goddammit, Bill, I’m trying to be serious. You ain’t got no hopes for gold. Just forget about that.”

  “It’s why I’m here at all, Jack,” he says loftily.

  “You’re laying around drunk for days on end.”

  “That’s just in my off time,” says he. “I’m usually out working my claim.”

  I tell you, it hadn’t been that long since I found my brother and already I was real sick of him. I glanced around and asked, “Where’s your dog?”

  “How do I know?” says Bill. “I never asked him to join up with me. He goes off when he feels like it. Maybe he’s giving it to some coyote girlfriend.”

  “I got enough money to take you for a bath and breakfast.”

  Bill wrinkles his nose under its layer of grime. “What I could use is a little—”

  “Yeah, but what you’re getting is a bath and some beans and coffee.”

  When we reached the bathhouse, where you sat in a tin tub while some fellow poured hot water on you from a bucket he dipped out of a big pot over a wood fire, and then after you soaped yourself, rinsed you with another, I forced Bill to take the dousings with all his clothes on.

  “Jeezuz,” he whined afterwards, when we went outside. “I’ll catch my death all wet like this.”

  It was a warm morning in August, as I pointed out, and he’d be dry in no time. “Come on, a cup of coffee will warm you up.”

  I took him to the husky woman’s open-air kitchen, where she says, “Hey there, Billy, I wondered where you was lately.”

  “You already know one another?” I asks, looking at each.

  “Hell,” says she. “He’s the one I was telling you about.”

  “He’s your boyfriend?”

  “You tell him, Billy,” she asks my brother, but he just keeps looking miserable from being wet.

  “He’s my brother,” I said sourly. “Feed him some coffee and beans.”

  Bill now spoke up. “Nell, if you could sweeten my cup with a little bitters, I’d think kindly of you.”

  Bitters is what some in those days called whiskey, probably because it sounded like medicine and could be pronounced before ladies and children.

  “Don’t you do it, Nell,” I broke in. “I just got him washed, and I’m taking him to get shaved.”

  She slams down a tin plate of beans on the board counter stretched between barrels, but so neatly none of it slopped over. “I don’t want him shaved,” said she. “I think he’s real handsome with his whiskers, like President General Grant.”

  “You’re mighty pushy.”

  She glared at me with little blue eyes set in a big red face. “He might be your brother—if so, he’s got all the looks in the family—but he happens to be my intended.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “I won’t stand for cursing in my establishment,” says she. “Any more of it, and I’ll wipe the floor with you.”

  “You ain’t got a floor,” I says, real annoyed. “And earlier on, you had quite a foul mouth yourself.”

  We was eye-to-eye for a while, and she turns her head and spits a long brown stream just past the coffeepot, and she says, turning back, in a nicer voice, “You’re a spunky little runt, ain’t you? But I guess I just got a soft spot in my heart for the Crabb boys.”

  I didn’t want a row with her, so making up suited my purpose. “All right then,” I says. “I’m going to leave my brother in your capable hands, Nell, for I have an appointment. I don’t think he should drink any more right now, is all. I think he should eat them beans.”

  I tried to pay her, but Nell said, “How’d it look if I charged for his grub?” To Bill she says, “I was saving that steak for you, Billy, but it was going bad, so I et it.”

  “Goddammit,” says he, and of course she don’t chide him for the language. “That was a prime piece of beef: I stole it at Jake Shroudy’s when he went out to look at somebody getting shot in the street.”

  She winks at me, over the head he lowered to the beans, and says sweetly, “Tenderest I ever tasted, dearie, only a little high.”

  I took my leave of them two lovebirds and went down to No. 10, which was crowded at midday as always, by which I mean a dozen or so persons, for it wasn’t spacious. A game was in progress with three players, one of them occupying Wild Bill’s favored place, that which had a view of the front and back doors and only wall behind it. Carl Mann, part owner of the joint with a man named Jerry Lewis, was one of the men at the table, and a gent called Captain W. R. Massie, who like old Sam Clemens had been a Mississippi riverman, was another.

  I went back outside and leaned against the raw boards of the wall. As I said, I found it a real relief to know my brother had a girlfriend, even if I was baffled as to what she saw in him, her with a successful business, and him not even washing unless I made him, but I was disinclined to examine the teeth of a gift horse. I begun to think now that if Bill had Nell to look after him, then I might be in the clear to go ahead and find a deal for myself. If I performed in the current part-time employment to Colorado Charley’s satisfaction, then maybe he would promote me to something better in his express operation. My luck had turned up on running into Wild Bill Hickok.

  Who I now saw coming along the street, looking real tall and stately in his sparkling clean-looking linen (which he must not have worn to bed in the wagon), Prince Albert coat, and wide sombrero, walking the confident way he had in the old days when he was the most feared man on the frontier, with eyes like an eagle.

  But he never recognized me now till he almost reached the door of No. 10.

  “Hoss,” says he, blinking, like I appeared out of nowhere. “I been looking for you. Step over here for a spell.” He moves to the corner of the building. When I gets there he says, “I ask you to do me a favor.”

  “Anything at all, Bill.”

  He reaches into an inside pocket of the tailcoat, where I remember he often carried a hideout gun useful if there was trouble when seated at the poker table and it was awkward to draw a weapon from the belt, but what his fist come out with now was not a pistol but a roll of paper money, which was not awful popular with men of the West at that time, especially card players, who preferred coin, which you could bite to see if it was silver or lead.

  Glancing around to see if we was being observed, he slips me the roll in his closed hand, saying, “Put this away before anybody sees it.”

  So I did as asked, without counting, though I pointed out that having no armament I could hardly give it effective protection.

  “Nobody’d think looking at you that you was carrying that kind of money, hoss,” says he.

  “I’ll do a better job of protecting your cash than you can?”

  He stares down at the rough wood boards underneath us, an uncharacteristic thing for him, for there was nothing significant to see at our feet. “I got this feeling my days are numbered. I can’t shake it off.” He raised his head and looked at the high and cloudless sky on that August day in Dakota Territory, which reminded me some of the one in June over the Greas
y Grass, and he said, “If your number’s up, you’ve got to go.” He shrugs. “Now that wad I been keeping aside. Even Charley Utter don’t know about it. If I get mine any time soon, as I think I might, I ask you to take enough from this roll for the train fare to Cincinnati, Ohio, and back, and whatever other expenses you run up—don’t be stingy, nor lose your head neither—and carry the rest of it, by hand, to my bride, Mrs. James Butler Hickok, with the compliments of her late loving husband, so-called Wild Bill. Now can you make me that promise, hoss?”

  “Why sure I can, Bill,” says I, though not taking it seriously. I shoved the bankroll into my pants pocket, where it would be safely anchored by that Indian knife, the blade of which I kept wrapped in a piece of leather so it wouldn’t cut me. I didn’t have no belt in which to carry the latter, just that piece of rope. “I guess you better give me her address.”

  “It’s back at the wagon,” said he, “but you wouldn’t have no trouble in locating her in any event. She’s famous.” He frowned and stroked his handlebar mustache. “You sure you can do this for me? That’s a long trip, but you oughta see more of the country before you cash in your chips. Maybe you won’t like it back East: I didn’t much myself, but I’m right glad I saw it when me and Cody traveled with that show. You’re an American, you ought to see where most of them live, which is real close together.”

  His voice had taken on such a melancholy tone that to change the subject to something lighter, I says, “Ever notice how most everybody you meet west of St. Louie turns out to be named either Bill or Jack?”

  This had the desired effect. Wild Bill brooded on the matter for a moment, and then he threw back his head and uttered a big guffaw. “You’re a comical little fellow, and that’s a fact, hoss.” Which seemed to amuse him even more, so he was feeling good when he strode into No. 10, as usual attracting the attention of all present. Nobody paid me any mind, bringing up the rear.

  I glanced over the little crowd again, but still couldn’t see nobody who looked like a threat to anybody’s life but their own, if they kept drinking like that. Several wasn’t even carrying visible weaponry, which didn’t mean they didn’t have any hid-out, but if so it would take longer to bring it into play, by which time even a somewhat impaired Wild Bill could have emptied five cylinders into their vital areas.

  All of them except one or two soon turned to the bar, backs to the game. Speaking of backs, Wild Bill sat down on the empty stool that presented his own spine to the world at large. It was a man name of Charley Rich who had Bill’s habitual seat on the wall side. Wild Bill thought it only a temporary arrangement, for he says, “Let’s swap places, Charley. You got mine.”

  Rich snickers and says, “There’s nobody in Deadwood man enough to take you on, even from behind. You know that, Bill.”

  So Wild Bill had sat down, but he asks again a little while later, and Rich just shrugged, examining the hand he had been dealt, while Captain Bill Massie says with goodnatured impatience, “Come on, Bill, I wanna win back what you took off me last night.” The other player was Carl Mann, as before, and he too had no interest in the subject.

  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 hi
s 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.