by Judd Cole
He just hung there a moment, getting his breath and unlimbering his cramped muscles. The confluence of the Smoky Hill and Republican rivers eased past. Dog Man glimpsed walls of sawed-off cottonwood logs—the big trading post that dealt with reservation Indians. In the ghostly moonlight, Dog Man could spot gleaming liquor bottles dotting the prairie as far as the eye could see in any direction.
Good whiskey . . . his share of the blood money for Hickok would buy plenty of top-shelf liquor.
That thought was like an elbow to the ribs, goading him on. The athletic Dog Man nimbly caught hold of the next rope loops and carefully eased his face close to the window.
His right hand slid the Walker Colt from its oiled holster. Dog Man’s hard, flat eyes peeked inside. A moment later, strong white teeth flashed through his lopsided smile.
Hickok’s blond curls were pressed against the window glass. He had been playing cards and evidently dozed off. It was all so easy that Dog Man felt almost disappointed as he slipped the leather thong off his hammer and thumbed it back. His finger curled around the trigger and began to take up the slack.
“Time to call in the cards, Hickok,” he whispered. “You saw your last sunrise yesterday.”
Dog Man’s hammer was only a cat whisker away from releasing when his well-trained nose caught it: a very strong whiff of alcohol.
Confused, Dog Man glanced overhead just in time to glimpse a woman’s homely face in the moonlight, staring down at him as if he were a snake in her baby’s crib. Dog Man heard some lively cursing, saw the big outline of a Smith & Wesson, and leaped from his shaky perch even as the short iron spat orange flame at him.
Chapter Eleven
“Damn you yellow-bellied egg-suckers!” Calamity Jane screamed as four grim-faced Kansas City constables bodily dragged her into a lockup wagon. “Ain’t a man among you, you damned city squaws!”
Josh watched one of the constables go sprawling as the fighting wildcat managed to land a hobnail boot hard in his crotch.
“Don’t hurt my war bonnet!” Jane roared out when her beloved Stetson flew off. “Bust my bones, not my conk cover!”
“By the Lord Harry,” marveled Yellowstone Jack, watching Jane fight like a she-grizz. “No wonder you’re hiding back there, Cap’n Bill! That ain’t no woman, it’s a Harpy loosed from hell.”
Wild Bill was indeed “hiding,” or at least hanging back near the caboose with Professor Vogel. The rest of the passengers on the Ice Train were still detraining at the huge Kansas City terminal.
“I talked to Caswell Jones,” Yellowstone said. “Cas is one of the night brakemen. He saw somebody on top the cars last night, but thought it was no doubt a vet down on his luck. Him being a fellow veteran, Cas never enforces the railroad policy of no free riders. Nor do I. But once the shot was fired, it forced him to report him—ahh, her, as it turned out—to the chief conductor.”
“I just figured out,” Wild Bill announced, “why she fired her gun. Look here, fellows.”
Josh, Yellowstone, and the professor all stared at the rope loops still tied to the side of the caboose. Josh saw Wild Bill actually pale a bit when he spotted the last set of loops—right under the window where Bill had passed most of the night.
“Dammy, Cap’n Bill,” Yellowstone said. “She’s got a face like thirteen miles of bad road, and a smell to match. But looks like she saved your life.”
Wild Bill nodded. His eyes cut to Josh. “Kid, have you seen that beady-eyed half-breed get off the train? Bodmer’s ‘servant’?”
Josh shook his head. For a moment, Bill grinned. “I don’t see any blood. But if we’re lucky, he’s feeding worms somewhere back on the plains.”
A few moments later, however, Josh saw Bill’s grin melt like a snowflake on a river. Reality had just set in.
“Damn it all!” he cursed. “The woman saved my damn bacon! A man can’t just walk away from that.”
Bill fished several double-eagles out of his pocket and handed them to Josh.
“Kid, the K.C. jail is downtown in the courthouse building on Division Street. Wait a bit. Then take this and pay Jane’s fine. Even with it paid, they’ll hold her a few days for disturbing the peace. Stop at a florist shop on the way and get her a nice bouquet, too, wouldja? Just sign the card ‘Thanks from your friend, Wild Bill.’”
“Take a care, sir,” Yellowstone warned. “You know this will only make her love flame burn brighter?”
“It can’t be helped,” Bill said crossly. “Looks like the woman saved my hide, damnit.”
“Ach! Ziss is a vooman?” Professor Vogel, who had slept through the commotion the night before, harrumphed impatiently at all this foolish skullduggery. He loved the attention his ice-making machine was generating. But he had also come to the conclusion that Americans were little more than baboons who were permitted to vote. Just look at this vulgar, dangerous female! What else could you think about a race of people who threw eggshells into a perfectly good pot of coffee and covered their new floors and walls with tobacco spit so strong it killed flies? They were all insane!
“We’ll be here for two days,” Bill told Josh. “Then it’s north to Omaha and back out west again. No gunplay is likely here in K.C. It’s a law-and-order town. Their gun ordinance is strictly enforced—it’s unlawful to carry or wear any firearm in a public place. Nor will they tolerate killings like Denver will.”
Bill paused to nod in the direction of Randolph Bodmer. “But I can tell you right now: Soon enough, more lead will fly. Not only does Bodmer want to get at that machine, but I’ve ruffled his feathers one time too many.”
Wild Bill looked disgusted, and Josh could guess why. For Bill, this “nurse-maid’s” job was getting damned confining and boring. He couldn’t get a decent poker game going, nor (despite her tempting proximity) could he do much more than enjoy the occasional flirtation with the beautiful Elena. But boring or no, this had not proved to be any featherbed assignment. Even on a moving train, a man couldn’t put his back to a window.
“Hell’s bells, Cap’n Bill!” Yellowstone interjected, reading Hickok’s mind. “What have we sunk to, hey? In our day we drank Indian burner with the best of the mountain men, didn’t we, sir? Bridger, Harris, Carson, Ogden, Fitzpatrick.”
“The Sublettes,” Bill chimed in.
“Christ yes, the Sublettes! We raised some hell, didn’t we, chappie? Now look at us. I don’t even own a horse no more, and no doubt you’ve forgot what yours looks like.”
Vogel, tired of all this laymen’s foolishness, mounted the steps of the caboose. He must prepare Hilda—soon train crewmen would again haul her out for more public demonstrations. Since security for the machine was critical, Bill, Vogel, and Josh would remain in the caboose while most of the passengers enjoyed luxury hotel rooms in the city.
Joshua set out on his mission to pay Jane’s fine and deliver flowers to her. He also meant to stop by a Western Union office and file his latest dispatch. Man alive, but things were happening nineteen to the dozen now!
“Kid,” Bill called out behind him. “Take some of that extra money and stop at Roundtree Brothers Gunshop on Seventh Street. Pick me up a hundred-count box of .44 shells. And get yourself a box of .38-caliber pinfire cartridges for that shooter I gave you. I got a feeling you’ll be needing them before this trip is over.”
Toward the end of the Ice Train’s second day in Kansas City, Randolph Bodmer met with his paid dirt-workers at a smoky establishment called the Alibi Saloon. The three men shared an oilcloth-covered table in the back corner. The Dog Man, bruised and cut but otherwise undamaged, had stolen a farmer’s nag and finally limped ingloriously into Kansas City only two hours before.
“You look like hell warmed over, chumley,” Big Bat told Dog Man, pouring him a stiff belt.
“I damn near looked dead,” the half-breed shot back. His tone made it clear he was in no joking mood. “Your foolproof plan,” he told Bodmer, “didn’t allow for a fool named Calamity Jane.”
Bo
dmer, lost in a private, brooding silence, said little at first. The gnawing worm of jealousy cankered at him. Elena had gone off for the day, claiming to visit one of the city’s thriving “hydros,” for Austria’s water cure spas were currently all the rage in America.
But was she lying? Hickok’s mocking words goaded like spurs in memory: I won’t have to pick the lock. Was that overbearing bastard putting the horns on him right now?
“Hickok’s clover is deep,” Bodmer finally said again. “But it doesn’t matter how lucky he is— luck comes in streaks, and streaks have to end. Boys, I go a great distance while most men are debating whether to start today or tomorrow. And I’ve fought too long, too hard, to get where I am today. I’m damned if I’ll come a cropper over some old foreign fart with his nose stuck up a test tube!”
Big Bat, deprived of his side arms by city ordinance, had brought his beloved blacksnake whip along. He laid it on the table while he crimped a paper and licked it.
“You will so long as Hickok is alive,” he reminded his boss calmly.
“I have a remarkable grasp for the obvious. We’ve got to stop doing this thing slapdash. Look at it logically. Hickok can’t live in that damned caboose forever. Once we pull out tomorrow, I want both of you to watch him like cats on a rat. Find out his routine. We’ve got to find the chink in their armor and then pound away at it.”
Bodmer showed them a front-page story in that day’s Kansas City Star. The headline proclaimed: THE ICE AGE ARRIVES!
“Vogel’s refrigeration compressor is catching on great guns. I hear this new factory in Omaha is already half finished. This could sink me, boys. We have to move full-bore now. My entire fortune is bound up in ice. And now, ironically, it’s all melting away in front of my eyes.”
“Speaking of chinks in Hickok’s armor,” Big Bat said. “Don’t forget that snot-nosed whelp that follows him like a pet dog. Hickok may be a coy bastard, but that brat doesn’t know his ass from his elbow. He may be the key to dousing Hickok’s light.”
“Good point,” Bodmer said. “We’ll watch him, too.”
By the time the three men left the Alibi, Big Bat was drunk enough to be in a trouble-seeking mood. Bodmer watched for a hansom cab. Meantime, two hard-knit, dirty, bearded riders wearing butternut-dyed cloth trotted past on gaunt mules.
“Damned dirty jayhawkers,” Big Bat said loudly. “Stink worse’n pig shit!”
Both riders halted. Their greasy flop hats were burned and stained from doubling as pan holders.
“If you’re feelin’ froggy, mister,” one of them said in his toll man’s twang, “you jist go right ahead and jump.”
“Jump this, you toothless sheep-humper!”
Quicker than a finger snap, the whip expert merely flexed his wrist, and the whip wrapped around the rider like a tentacle. One quick, hard tug, and he lay sprawled in the street, howling over a broken arm.
When the man’s partner made the mistake of pulling out a ten-inch bowie knife, Landry roared like an enraged bull. His singing whip savagely lashed the knife man’s face, ripping off a great strip of flesh. Again, again, and yet again the whip cracked. Big Bat, completely unaware now, continued lashing long after the second man, too, lay beaten in the street.
“Landry! Damnit, stop! STOP, Landry!”
Finally, with both Bodmer and Dog Man restraining him, Big Bat returned to his senses. The jayhawker lay moaning in the dirt, half skinned and unrecognizable as human.
“You goddamned fool!” Bodmer berated him as the three men ducked into a narrow alley between the Alibi and a hardware store. “This isn’t Deadwood! You can’t just kill a man and finish your supper in peace. Save it for Hickok, I’m telling you.”
But later, when his anger passed, Bodmer secretly marveled at his hireling’s display of brutal whipmanship. And once again he recalled that galling moment in Denver when Hickok’s randy-stallion eyes had mesmerized Elena.
A bullet was too merciful for a woman-stealer like Hickok. He should be taken down a few pegs first—peg by painful peg. Bodmer crossed his fingers and placed his hopes on the whip.
Chapter Twelve
“There passes another Iron Horse,” the Lakota Chief named Catch-the-Bear said bitterly. “Have you noticed a thing? Almost every time it goes by, we build a new death wickiup.”
Catch-the-Bear and a shaman named Coyote Boy sat near the fire pit outside the chief’s lodge. It was too dark now to actually see the distant Iron Horse or its yellow-glowing eyes. But they could clearly hear it chuffing past, just south of the reservation boundary—an imaginary line white men forced red men to respect, or else.
“The hair-mouths brought this fever to our ranges,” Coyote Boy replied. “And now Death rides on their Iron Horse.”
“I have ears for this! Just as they have brought us their dripping disease, their devil water, and other ‘marvels’ to make our women into whores and our warriors into spineless drunkards. Even now, my only daughter lies wasting with the yellow vomit! So are dozens more. Hear the grandmothers even now, singing their sadness?”
It was true. The Lakota winter count would record this period as the Death Moons. Night and day now, the old clan matriarchs were chanting the ancient, minor-key notes of the cure songs—the same sad, monotonous rhythm once chanted when warriors used to ride proudly off to battle.
Death’s powerful fetor hung over Catch-the-Bear’s fever-ravaged village in the upper Niobrara River valley of northwestern Nebraska.
Catch-the-Bear’s sad, almost liquid eyes gazed around the clan circles out of a seamed face that had seen fifty winters. Normally, this camp would look vastly different. The younger braves would be wrestling, gambling, and running footraces, the little ones playing at war or the hunt dance. But the men who weren’t taken sick, or already dead, were staying quiet inside their clan lodges. Even laughter was discouraged amid so much death and sadness.
“The Wasichus have made women of us!” Catch-the-Bear stated. “A new hair-mouth law will soon take away even our hunting rifles! Nor will we even be permitted to wear our bone breastplates—these are for making war, the white skin headmen have declared.”
Both men were silent, turning this problem over carefully to examine all of its facets. Even now, the wild flowers were ablaze on their ancestral hunting ranges. In the glorious days of freedom, before the hair-mouths and their “maps” and their lies, this would be the time to send out scouts in search of Uncle Pte, the buffalo.
Even now, their painted horses in the common corral were rested and in good fettle. But to what purpose? They, too, were no longer free to run on their own ranges. Now they spent their days stamping their hooves in irritation at pesky flies.
“Hear it?” the Chief demanded again, meaning the mournful cry of the steam whistle. In his present mood, the sound goaded him to a white-hot rage. “Not enough to kill us, they must mock us, too!”
“Earlier, I threw the bones,” Coyote Boy announced. He meant the Pointing Bones, ritually tossed inside a magic circle to seek advice from the All Knowing Ones. “The high holy ones demand blood atonement.”
Catch-the-Bear showed little in his face. He said only, “Young Man Afraid of His Horses has told me this same thing. He is our last great chief now that Sitting Bull has fled north to the Land of the Grandmother Queen.”
“And Young Man is right. The bones point west, toward the direction of death. The Day Makers are telling us: Only when Catch-the-Bear acts like a great Lakota war chief will this hair-face curse of the Yellow Vomit pass. How can we obediently stand and answer roll calls by those who kill our people?”
The chief’s deep-set eyes looked out over this silent, ravaged camp. Finally he nodded.
“Before the Wasichus came upon us like locusts, then there were always two fires burning in my lodge. One for food, and one for friendship. But today, thanks to white skins, I must give my daughter a new name in hopes of fooling death! Now this place hears me when I say it, the friendship fire is no more.”
> Again they heard the mournful, retreating cry of the steam whistle. Both Indians finally met each other’s gaze. The talking part of it was over; now came the hard doing.
“Blood atonement,” Coyote Boy repeated. “I have heard a thing. There is a way, using tools stolen from the hair-faces, to tear up the road for their Iron Horse. The Mountain Ute, west of here, have done it, and so have white criminals. Young Man has these tools hidden in the sand hill caves.”
Catch-the-Bear was cautious here. All red men flat out refused to touch the talking wires of the telegraph—one could actually hear the big magic humming in these. But the tracks . . . why not? Desperate situations required desperate remedies.
Catch-the-Bear finally nodded. “As you say. Go round to the headmen and tell them we meet in war council in one full sleep. Meantime, the blooded warriors are to make ready their battle kits. We will all first cut short our hair to mourn our dead. And then we will paint our faces to avenge them!”
To Joshua Robinson’s young, impressionable eyes, Omaha was a wide-open, raw-lumber, hurly-burly city with one obvious drawback, at least to a man with an untrained nose: the constant manure stench from the feedlots encircling the city. “The smell of money,” locals proudly called it. But Josh had smelled finer perfumes.
From Omaha, the Ice Train bore west toward Ogallala, another major cattle-loading railhead of the era. Despite his excitement at the prospect, Josh secretly worried about one stretch of track after Ogallala—a forty-mile stretch that bordered the Sioux and Cheyenne reservations.
Common wisdom of the day held that Indians—even the once-great Plains warriors—were no longer a real, organized threat. The widespread Army crackdown, following the humiliating shock of Little Bighorn, had ensured that. A bunch of ignorant, gut-eating savages had defeated West Point graduates, and this at a time when the new “professional soldiers” had plenty of critics in a land carved out by citizens’ militias. Reprisals had been brutal. The red men, except for a few holdouts, were cowed.