This Old Bill

by Loren D. Estleman

  Will looked hard at the trooper to Hickok' s right, who said, "We went out looking for wood and found him."

  "He was using this here for a crutch." His companion held up a Cheyenne lance stained dark back to the haft.

  "Get him to the sawbones."

  They hammered on the door until the post surgeon opened it in his nightshirt, then tramped through the office into the living space in back and deposited their burden in a bed that was still warm from their host's body. Will cleared the room of everyone but the surgeon and remained to assist. Hickok flinched but didn't regain consciousness as his gore-plastered trouser leg was cut with scissors and peeled away from the wound. Unstopping a bottle of alcohol, the sawbones sponged down the leg gently with cotton, then instructed Will to grip the patient's shoulders as hard as he could and poured clear liquid directly into the ragged hole.

  Hickok's howl rattled the bottles on the shelves of the cabinet in the office outside. Will leaned his weight onto his friend's shoulders, astonished at the strength he had left after losing so much blood. Meanwhile the surgeon resumed cleaning the flesh around the wound.

  "Hang on," he said. "It's deeper than I thought."

  More alcohol was introduced. Will struggled to maintain his grip. Then the patient lapsed back into unconsciousness. The surgeon went into his office and returned after a long time with a sterilized needle and suture. At his request, his assistant removed the shade from the coal-oil lamp and held it up while the older man's deft fingers manipulated the thin steel rod with a seamstress's skill. Finally a cotton pad and gauze bandage were applied. Hickok's chest meanwhile rose and fell in even rhythm. His face was peaceful under a sheen of perspiration. The surgeon covered him with a blanket and crooked a finger at Will, who followed him through the door into the consultation room. Still in his nightshirt, the professional man resembled an old woman from behind, with his thin hairless legs and varicose veins exposed and the soles of his slippers slapping his feet. He opened a door in a cabinet next to his desk, filled two glasses with copper-colored brandy from a cut-glass decanter, and handed one to Will, who put down half its contents in a gulp. Warmth spread through his system like a fist opening.

  "He'll make it," the surgeon announced. "He's lost a great deal of blood, but if they survive the alcohol, they're damn near indestructible."

  "Aren't you supposed to put him out with chloroform or ether or something like that?"

  "In most cases. But I got out of the habit at Shiloh, where a clean scalpel was a luxury."

  "When you reckon he can get back to scouting?"

  "Never."

  Will stared.

  The surgeon touched his lips to the edge of his glass and made a face. It was a long face, with muttonchops whose gray hairs curled in on themselves. Thick bifocals straddled his veined nose. "He's no longer young as scouts go, and the older he gets the more trouble he's going to have with that leg. There was muscular damage. Muscle doesn't replace itself like most tissue, and surgical thread can't put back what's lost. He'll always have a limp. If he tries to sit a horse too long, he'll wish he was back here with the alcohol. A true friend would advise him to seek another line of work. Indians smell out weakness like wolves. The frontier is a place for young whole men. Unless you're a damn fool or a doctor."

  "He won't like hearing that."

  "That's why I'm counting on you to be the one to tell him." He lifted the decanter. "Refill?"

  The next day orderlies moved the patient to a bed in the post infirmary, where Will visited him that afternoon, pulling a quart of whiskey out of his coat when the men in white smocks were engaged elsewhere. After the bottle had passed back and forth a couple of times, he told Hickok what the surgeon had said. His friend nodded distractedly, as if the news concerned someone he knew by name only.

  "It was a running fight," the patient explained. "They was doing all the fighting and I was doing all the running. Shook myself loose from all but one. Bastard unhorsed me with a lucky throw and left me for dead."

  Exhausted from just that short speech, he rested his head on the pillow wedged between his back and the brass bedstead. His pomaded curls and sunburned face were as dark as old wood against the striped ticking and starched white of his nightshirt. "I'm an old man, Will."

  "Buffalo shit, Wild Bill. You can't be thirty."

  "I'm thirty-one. My pa was thirty-six when I was born and he was an old man as far back as I can remember. All the scouts I started with are dead or retired."

  "What you going to do?"

  "Go back home and work my ma's farm, I reckon, or help my brothers in the store."

  "You wouldn't stick six months."

  "I sure don't want to stack peach tins the rest of my life. Or walk behind a mule neither."

  "What about marshaling? There's a lot of new railroad towns need a fair hand with a pistol."

  "I never heard tell of any thirty-year-old marshals." "You could be the first."

  "Ten dollars a month and a nickel for every rat and stray dog I shoot inside the town limits? Forget it." He stroked his injured leg absently. "I could play cards for a living."

  "That's no life. Spend half your time broke and the rest sneaking out of town on a stole horse."

  Hickok nodded, sighing. Then he opened bright eyes and turned them on Will. "But not if I'm marshal too."

  "Wild Bill," his friend said, smiling, "you are a one."

  Heat ribbons crawled over the sand hills, reflecting blue sky like pools of water always atop the next rise. Through them, like shadows on a wavy mirror, waded Carr's 5th Cavalry and companies of the 10th and 7th, the white regiments burned as dark as the black, faces breaded with sand and sweat. The horses' sticky coats glistened like powdered glass under the white sun.

  Can paused atop a high mound to let his horse blow while the men took position, tracking their progress through his glass. The maneuvers were carried out in silence but for the tinkling of bit chains, an eerie noise in the empty desert. From time to time the general trained his glass on the ponies grazing the bunch grass at the top of a bluff to the west to assure himself that the Cheyennes were still camped on the other side. As the dust drifted and settled he folded the instrument and returned it to his saddlebag.

  "Bugler, sound charge."

  The corporal mounted behind him raised the bugle to his lips—and paused.

  Can twisted in his saddle. "What are you waiting for? Sound charge."

  "I—I disremember it, sir." The youth's face was flushed to the hairline.

  "I suggest you start remembering."

  The flustered bugler started to blow recall.

  "Quartermaster!" shouted the general.

  "Yes, sir." A beefy sergeant trotted forward, tore the bugle out of the corporal's grasp, blasted the proper call, and, flinging away the horn, drew his side arm and put spurs to his horse.

  They caught the enemy sleeping. Two wings of regular cavalry and a third of Pawnee scouts under Major North—the latter stripped to their drawers so that their wounds would bleed clean and riding bareback—converged on the village, slithering sabers from their scabbards and creaking revolvers and rifles out of leather with a racket like tortured buggy springs. Will's Springfield roared against the crackle of lighter fire between the camp and the river. The surprised Cheyennes yelped and hooted and scrambled for their mounts. Bullets plucked them off their feet and flung them like loosely baled rags to the ground. Stinging blue smoke fouled the air.

  The fighting crested in the first five minutes, subsided to isolated reports, and ended on a solitary shot that laid down a crisp period to the day's bloodletting after a quarter of an hour. After that a man with imagination could hear the shadow of smoke skidding along the ground. Carr strode through the vanquished camp afoot, upwind of the crackling tipis and Indian corpses already stinking in the heat. Shards of broken pottery crunched under his boots. The squaws' wailing made a weird rhythm, like wind rising. There were no Army casualties.

  "They killed one
of the white women, sir," reported an officer, saluting wearily. "The other one's pretty badly used, but the surgeon says she'll pull through."

  The general nodded grimly. "Anything else?"

  "Their chief, Tonka Haska, was killed. Major North says that translates into Tall Bull."

  "Who killed him?"

  "No one seems to know. But that's his horse Cody's riding."

  Carr glanced at the frontiersman, maneuvering a big bay between rows of prisoners seated glumly on the scorched earth. "Write it up that way, then. Cody killed the chief."

  "Yes, sir."

  Chapter Five

  "Colonel Judson, did you say?" Major Frank North, chief of Pawnee scouts under General Carr at Fort McPherson, Nebraska, the 5th's new home, stared dubiously through the sun cracks in his leathern face at the little round man in a raveled brown suit smeared with dust. A gray hat clung to the back of the newcomer's shaggy head, and the prairie sun found whiskey welts among the pouches on his face and gray hairs in his wilting moustache and an ugly red scar that might have been an old rope burn around his neck. He looked like a drummer fallen on evil times.

  "The title is a battlefield gesture, conferred upon me during the all-but-forgotten unpleasantness in Mexico," explained the little round man in his lecturer's voice, throwing it away with a theatrical flip of his oddly beautiful left hand. "We are all civilians in the sight of God. Edward Z. C. Judson awaiting your convenience." He bowed, snapping out his expansive rear under the tails of his claw-hammer coat.

  "I think you want the chaplain. You won't find much God around my outfit."

  "To which my very good friends in the clergy might respond that He is everywhere. However, while your recommendation convinces me that your chaplain is an exemplary fellow worthy of any man's time, it is you, Major, whom I have journeyed four hundred miles by rail to see."

  North suppressed a sigh. They were standing in the midday heat, twisting and shimmering from the bare, trampled surface of the compound. "What can I do for you, Colonel?"

  The man thus addressed beamed. "Rather, the question is what service I can render you. My sources have provided me with an account of your company's recent action at Summit Springs, most particularly the death of the Cheyenne chief Tall Bull. It is, I feel most strongly, my honorable duty to bring to the attention of our brothers and sisters in the East the details of your personal bravery in that stirring duel. In short—"

  "You're a journalist."

  "An humble biographer, sir. A minstrel sans music, a prose troubadour if you will, destined to wither in the shade of that same history shaped by the men whose exploits I am called to chronicle. My readers know me as Ned Buntline."

  "Dime novels, Colonel?"

  "Popular literature, Major. In the hallowed tradition of Homer and the Bard of Avon, if I may be pardoned the comparison. Millions who have never ventured west of Chicago look to myself and my colleagues for an example of the rugged American. I offer you immortality in exchange for a few hours of your time."

  The chief of scouts cast a disgruntled glance around the post and grinned suddenly.

  "You're talking to the wrong man, Colonel. If you want a fellow to fit that bill you'll find him over there under that wagon."

  Judson followed the direction of North's pointing finger and frowned at a long pair of buckskin-clad legs protruding from under half a ton of stacked cartridge boxes.

  Stretched out in the shade of the heavy Army ammunition wagon with flies on his face, Will dreamed that renegades had overrun his camp, barking like feral dogs and splitting skulls with the heavy trade axes the missionaries had given their grandfathers. One of the savages, a lean buck with his face painted to resemble a death's head and wearing a necklace made from brown shriveled human fingers, seized Will's shoulder and swung a tomahawk. Will snatched up Lucretia Borgia and prepared to blow out the Indian's brains.

  "Easy, lad. What do they call you?"

  He hesitated with his finger on the trigger, blinking sleep out of his eyes. Squatting with one hand still on the young man's shoulder and his back to the light, the round man looked like an enormous sage hen sitting its nest.

  "Will Cody, sir."

  The sage hen scowled thoughtfully. "It has a ring. It needs something, but it has a ring indeed. Come out from under there and we'll talk."

  Funny, fat Ned Buntline. That day Will invited him on a scouting expedition, not telling him that the Indians had withdrawn from the region for the present, and smiled at the journalist's exaggeratedly furtive behavior, coughing to cover a snicker when his companion stood in his stirrups to survey the surrounding terrain with a hand shielding his eyes like a paunchy cigar-store chief. The scout lent him his war-horse Powder Face and rode the big bay he had named Tall Bull for its late master. Buntline's borrowed buckskin jacket and slouch hat with the brim turned up in front added to the element of burlesque.

  "The corpses were piled knee-deep like felled trees and the blood on the ground splashed up to the ankles." He uncorked his canteen, took a pull, and handed it to Will, who sniffed at the mouth before partaking. The potent odor took him back to that long-ago wagon train and young Hickok's surreptitious gesture to celebrate the boy's first Indian. "I scurried up the ladder even as the Roman Catholic devils were pushing it clear of the wall, gained purchase of a battlement, and shot the first six Mexican faces that showed themselves with my reliable Colt Paterson. Encouraged by my success, the siege crew redoubled its attack; by nightfall Montezuma was ours."

  "What did you do when your pistol came up empty?" Will asked.

  Buntline cleared his throat loudly. "I turned it around and used it as a club until reinforcements arrived. But I am not here to discuss ancient history. How did you come to shoot the chief?"

  As daylight retreated, they adjourned to nearby Cottonwood Springs, where as Colonel Judson the easterner was scheduled to deliver a temperance lecture later in the week, and took a back table in a dim saloon. There they drank red whiskey and laid out the book from the first scalp to the last gunshot. The unlikely pairing of the schoolmaster's aging son gone wrong and the loose-limbed frontiersman drew stares and whispers from the drinkers at the bar.

  "How old are you, Will?"

  "Twenty-three."

  "A lad in truth! Tell me, did anyone ever call you Buffalo Bill?"

  He jerked, down the contents of his glass and laughed. "Me and every runner I rode with for the KP that chanced to be christened William, and a fair number that didn't."

  "When I am finished there will be but one. 'Buffalo Bill, the King of the Border Men.' The wildest and truest story I ever wrote, by God! I know an editor who will swallow it like strawberry jam and cry for more."

  "I got to say some of those tales I told are plenty tall."

  "Literary license, lad. The sum total of the difference between a democratic free press and Old World totalitarianism."

  "You're the writer."

  "Biographer," the other corrected. "A troubadour sans music, a prose minstrel if you will, destined—

  "Don't you have that backwards?"

  "The sword cuts both ways." He raised his voice. "Innkeeper! Another flagon of this devil's milk. Now, lad, it would be advisable, purely in the interest of story value, to add another thousand buffalo to that Kansas Pacific score."

  "Every time you take a drink a thousand more buffalo die. If we stay here much longer there won't be none left."

  "Isn't that the way of it, though?"

  Dusk met evening. Walking to Will's horse, the scout breaking stride from time to time to avoid outdistancing his hobbling companion, the two embroidered an unsteady line between yellow oblongs of light scalloping the dark street from windows on both sides. The air had a snap to it, the day's heat having drained into the sand hills. Will's head felt hollow and his feet didn't seem to be touching earth.

  "Been meaning to ask, Colonel. How'd you come by that limp?"

  "A misunderstanding involving a woman's husband slain in a fair due
l and a large gathering of displeased citizenry in my improvident youth." The large words were somewhat slurred. "Seriously wounded and compelled to seek refuge in a Nashville hotel, I subsequently gained egress through an upstairs window and bounded forty-seven feet three inches to a broken leg, whereupon I was seized and hanged from an awning post."

  "What happened then?" Will asked breathlessly.

  "Remind me to send you the account in which I treat with that episode in my mobile and variegated, sometimes triumphant, often tragic, but always fascinating forty-six-year existence on this sadly benighted planet."

  "Life you've led, I don't see why you got to go looking for stories."

  "I am written out on the subject of one Edward Zane Carroll Judson. It falls to me to preserve on tame foolscap the living history of God's earthly Eden in its pristine state. An Herculean task and well-nigh impossible for a lone mortal, but a just one and necessary."

  "I like the way you talk. Just like a novel."

  "You must live your books, lad, or your books will most certainly live you. Remain faithful to your ideals, respectful of fair womanhood, and touch not the brew that boils up from the pit of hell." He belched pleasantly, releasing a sour stench of fermented grain.

  "A good deal of truth comes out of your mouth, Colonel."

  "I have an ulcer. A handsome beast, by the by."

  The scout untethered the bay. "Cheyennes don't have any ugly ones." He mounted. Tall Bull grunted and shook off a cloud of flies that buzzed about it& ears and lighted. Powder Face was back in the Fort McPherson stable, Buntline having ridden his buggy into town.

  "Where can one get in touch with you?" asked the journalist.

  "At the fort, or if I'm not there, they'll send messages on to me or to my wife in St. Louis. She'll know where to reach me. She always has."