The Kincaid County War

by Judd Cole

  “You’re burning daylight, Barry. Get to work. I don’t leave until you boys have finished the job.”

  But Tate got the last word.

  “As to finishing the job,” he assured Bill, “you ain’t even met Johnny Kinkaid yet. He’ll kill you deader than a Paiute grave! That’ll finish the job, all right.”

  Chapter Ten

  Thanks to his unscheduled stop at Lonnie Peatross’s farm, Wild Bill didn’t make it back to Progress City before the Western Union office had closed for the day. But next morning, immediately after a piping-hot breakfast of potatoes, eggs, and side meat, Bill and Josh visited the telegraph office.

  “Yes sir, Mr. Hickok,” said a fawning telegrapher, turning to a pigeonholed wall behind him. “A message came in for you late yesterday off the Denver trunk line. I sent a boy over to the hotel, but Jed Rault said you were out.”

  Behind the clerk, a sounder began tapping out an incoming message in Morse code. The clerk ignored it, for a new invention—the perforation drum— picked it up in printed code for later transcription.

  The clerk handed Wild Bill a folded yellow message form. Josh watched Bill quickly unfold it, read it, then fold it again and look at the clerk. Bill seemed to be studying his face, as if trying to read his character, the way he read those prints in front of the shack.

  “What’s your name?” Bill asked him.

  “Roundtree, Wild Bill. Jimmy Roundtree.”

  “Jimmy, did you take down this message?”

  The clerk nodded.

  “Are you a Christian, Jimmy?”

  The clerk goggled at Hickok. “Why . . . yessir. Yessir, I believe I am.”

  “Good. Then I’m asking you—swear to God now—if you’ve mentioned this to anyone?”

  The clerk raised his right hand and said solemnly, “Bill, may God strike me and my family dead if I’ve said a word to anybody. And I won’t, either.”

  “Good man.”

  “Touch you for luck, Bill?” the clerk said hopefully as the two visitors were about to leave. Bill not only gave the clerk a hearty grip, he poked a cartridge out of his shell belt and plunked it down on the counter. Bullets even rumored to be from Hickok’s very own belt had sold as high as twenty dollars.

  “Holy moly! Thanks, Bill! I mean it, thanks!”

  Josh had trouble containing his curiosity. Bill had folded the message and tucked it into his vest without a word. Out on the boardwalk again, Josh watched a peddler’s wagon rattle through town. It reminded him of Calamity Jane’s outlandish conveyance. In front of the blacksmith shop, a sweating forgeman was warping a tire around a wheel.

  “Well?” Josh finally demanded.

  Without a word, Bill handed his friend the message form. While Josh read Pinkerton’s telegram, Bill kept a wary eye on the surrounding doorways and windows.

  PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION YOU SENT JOGGED NO MEMORY UNTIL YOU MENTIONED WALKING STICK AND PIPE. THEY ARE DEAD GIVEAWAYS. HAS TO BE RICHARD STRICKLAND. FORMER TOWN-SITE PLANNER WHO NOW WORKS FOR THE BURLINGTON RAILROAD AS A “PROJECT DEVELOPMENT CONSULTANT.” MAN IS VALUED FOR HIS ABILITY TO CLEAR THE PROFIT PATH OF ALL THAT BLOCKS IT. SORRY I DON’T KNOW WHAT HE’S UP TO. BUT HE’S INFINITELY RESOURCEFUL, SO USE EXTREME CAUTION.

  Josh handed the message back to Wild Bill.

  “I had a hunch old ‘Jarvis’ is a railroad plutocrat,” Hickok said. “It doesn’t tell us what exactly he’s up to, but he sure as hell ain’t selling bolts and screws out at that line shack—just one hell of a swindle of some kind. Next time we ride, Longfellow, we’ll go poke around Turk’s Creek, see what we can see.”

  Calamity Jane bit off a corner of plug and soon had it juicing proper. She watched a cow puncher ride hard past her secret camp, a willow copse that covered the lee of a small ridge. It was the middle of the afternoon, and Jane was nursing the mother of all hangovers. Several empty bottles of Doyle’s Hop Bitters surrounded Jane’s bedroll.

  “Well, cuss my coup,” she croaked at her team, tethered nearby and taking off the grass. “That rider is one of them that’s been palavering at the line shack. They just had ’em a meetin’ yestiddy. Them buzzards’re up to no good, or I’ll eat my John B. Stetson!”

  Despite the mule kicking inside her skull, Jane forced herself to her feet. Her clothes were itchy with beggar lice. She pulled the big Volcanic pistol from her sash and swung open the loading gate to check the wheel.

  “Let’s go, General Custer,” she said to a horse with a gorgeous long blond mane. “That rider had a look on his face that was death to the devil! I got the fantods about Bill. We best dust our hocks back to the shack.”

  Jane’s team were combination horses, broke to saddle or tug chains. Jane kept a saddle, pad, and bridle in her buckboard. She rigged General Custer, wincing at the exploding pain in her head every time she tightened a latigo or stretched a cinch.

  “Lord, the trials I suffer for that man,” Jane said out loud. “Bill Hickok is my cross to bear, I reckon. He’s bound and determined to get hisself kilt. And I’m bound and determined to get that purty man nekked in my bedroll first.”

  “You see?” Johnny Kinkaid demanded. “You see it? I warned you that bastard Hickok would turn on us like a rabid dog! He’s been writ up in books and newspapers so often it’s made him prideful as a damned rajah. He don’t even respect the cattlemen paying his wages. You heard what Barry said—yesterday Hickok even shot Danny Ford’s trigger finger off!”

  “That ain’t the half of it,” Barry Tate said, his face closed and bitter in the dim light of the shack. Barry had been hazing cattle earlier, and now he still wore his roping gloves. “Hickok made us cough up forty bucks for Peatross’s spavined mule! And then he put us to work for over an hour—under the gun.”

  The man who called himself Jarvis Blackford raised both hands like a priest blessing his flock. “Would you two please stop all the calamity howling? I assure you, our coals haven’t turned to ashes yet, boys. Far from it.”

  Johnny impatiently shifted his shell belt. “Assure a cat’s tail! I warned you about letting Hickok live. Every damn thing we’ve worked for could get shot out of the saddle just like”—Johnny snapped his fingers—“that. We can’t wait, I’m telling you. The sooner we kill Hickok, the better!”

  “And I’m working on doing just that,” the older man assured him. “But this ‘urgent meeting’ you boys demanded is jeopardizing the effort.”

  “How so?” Johnny demanded.

  “There’s only so many hours in a day, son! Tonight I’m playing poker again with Hickok. But I’m also supposed to meet the Chinese kid and get Wild Bill’s new room number. The time to strike is now, right after he’s moved in and when he’s feeling safest. You boys can ride into town later and wait in my room. I’ll send the kid to you with the room number. You could be waiting for Hickok when he comes back from playing cards.”

  After the three men had ridden out, Calamity Jane quickly rose from the ground, kneecaps popping. She had been stretched out prone behind the shack, her ear to a big crack between two boards.

  “Wall, I’ll be hung for a horse thief!” she told General Custer as she grabbed leather and heaved herself into the saddle. “Them dirty sons of whores! Bill Hickok will dance over their bones!”

  Three sharp raps sounded on Josh’s door.

  “Shake a leg, junior,” Bill’s voice called from the hallway. “Time for me to collect my free money.”

  Josh threw the door open for Bill, then finished slicking back his hair in front of a warped mirror.

  “You should use axle grease, kid,” Bill admonished him, wrinkling his nose. “That bay rum tonic smells like a French whore. C’mon—let’s see how many ways ‘Mr. Blackford’ can deliberately ruin a winning hand tonight.”

  “Should I bring my gun?” Josh asked. It hung from a peg on the back of the door.

  “Sure. But if we have to bust caps,” Bill teased, “try to get it out of your holster sometime before my funeral.”

  Josh scowl
ed as he buckled on the vintage French pistol. His Quaker mother back in Philadelphia would have a hissy fit if she knew her boy was toting a weapon. And now Bill was still roweling him about that surprise attack from the Labun brothers.

  “But that all happened so quick,” Josh objected. “Why, man alive! It was over in an eye blink.”

  “It always is, kid. That’s why you’ve gotta be faster than an eye blink. When trouble comes, a man has to react with it, not after it, y’unnerstan’?”

  By now both men were in the narrow hallway, following a threadbare carpet toward the saloon in one wing of the hotel.

  “Curious, ain’t it?” Wild Bill asked Josh. “Ol’ Jarvis not only lost a mint playing poker with me— he damn near got a few air shafts in him when the Labun boys tried to snuff my candle. Yet he still wants to play. Sorta makes you wonder, don’t it, what’s his big idea for tonight?”

  Before Josh could answer, a skinny Chinese kid with an ugly carbuncle on his neck emerged from a room ahead of them, pushing a mop bucket. Josh recognized him as the same kid who kept the hot-water boiler stoked in the bathhouse out back.

  Bill nodded at the kid and he nodded back, hustling to get the bucket out of Hickok’s path. Shortly after the two friends went into the saloon, still talking, the man calling himself Jarvis Blackford descended the stairs at the end of the hall. He stopped near the Chinese worker and glanced around to make sure they were alone.

  “Where is he?” Blackford asked quietly.

  “Seven,” the kid replied.

  Blackford nodded and handed the kid a silver dollar. “Take that information to the two men waiting up in my room.”

  Then Blackford headed toward the saloon to meet Wild Bill Hickok.

  “Dirty, white-livered, back-shooting sons of bitches,” Calamity Jane muttered to herself as she pushed General Custer toward Progress City. “See how them scum-suckers like it when I spoil the surprise for ’em! Bill will shoot them bastards into rag tatters! Hold on, pretty Bill! Jane’s a-comin’!”

  Jane was a fair-to-middling horsebacker when she was sober. But now, with hangover fumes still clouding her vision and slowing her reflexes, she was pushing General Custer too fast in unknown country. Thus she wasn’t aware, at first, when they crossed into a little hollow pockmarked with gopher holes.

  By the time Jane realized her danger, it was too late. General Custer shifted hard right, then fell down fast when he plunged his right foreleg into a gopher hole. Jane flew head-over-handcart, her head striking a tree limb hard.

  She saw a bright-orange explosion inside her skull. By the time she flopped to the ground, rolling fast, she was out cold.

  Chapter Eleven

  “Wealth,” Jarvis Blackford lectured in his polished baritone voice, “should depend on achievement, not birth. That’s the American way.”

  “That’s quite true,” Wild Bill agreed as he flipped eight bits into the pot, anteing up. “But ‘achievement’ is a pretty broad word, huh? Takes in everything from murder to extortion.”

  “A good point,” Blackford said patronizingly. “And I’m caught upon it, sir! Of course, I meant honorable and legal achievements.”

  “Of course,” Bill said politely.

  “Now, for example. Wild Bill, I’m told the man who kills you will receive ten thousand dollars from an angry father in Texas? Now, that would indeed be a profitable achievement, certainly. But money is the Sirens’ song that saps our wills. Killing you would hardly be something to be proud of.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that,” Bill said amiably. “I mean, I’d be proud to kill me. I’ll take three,” he added to Josh, who was dealing and listening to the conversation.

  But Josh was having trouble concentrating on his task. The barroom was far more crowded this evening, and the nervous reporter anticipated another attack at any moment. By now it was no secret that Wild Bill Hickok was roosting in Progress City. At the bar, the loafers had shed their usual slouches; lidded eyes constantly shifted toward Hickok’s table.

  “Raise you a dollar,” Bill said.

  “Money in my pocket, Wild Bill, money in my pocket.”

  Josh figured that Blackford—Richard Strickland, he corrected himself—must have finally decided he was being too obvious. Tonight, he was not so blatantly sandbagging at poker. He had won several good pots so far. However, Bill still had more poker chips stacked beside his usual bottle of Old Taylor, the bourbon that featured Colonel Edmund Haynes Taylor’s signature on each label.

  Bill, Josh noticed, looked relaxed and at peace, as he almost always did. But by now the reporter knew Hickok well—the man’s lateral vision was constantly monitoring the barroom for trouble. And his back was flat against a wall.

  “How’s business been going, Mr. Blackford?” Hickok asked conversationally while he arranged his cards.

  The question seemed innocent enough. But as usual, Blackford did not answer immediately. This, Josh realized, was a man who figured percentages and angles. A cautious man who paused even before the simplest of answers, making sure of his own interest first.

  “Quite sound, Mr. Hickok, thank our Creator. My company’s new line of plumbing fixtures is selling great guns. It’s amazing how many folks want a bathtub right inside their homes nowadays. Prejudices against frequent bathing are finally breaking down. Perhaps someday, Bill, the average American male will be as well-groomed as you are.”

  Bill inclined his head slightly to acknowledge the compliment. One finger smoothed his neat blond mustache while he decided how many discards to throw down.

  “Actually, I meant the railroad business,” Bill said, so casually it almost sounded like an afterthought.

  It caught Josh by surprise, too. He watched Blackford’s bland face carefully. For just a moment, the mask finally cracked. But that moment passed in a heartbeat. To buy time, Blackford took a few extra puffs on his pipe. Josh heard spit rattling in the stem.

  “The railroad business?” Blackford repeated, politely baffled. “Why, I’d imagine it’s going just fine, Bill. You’ll have to ask a railroad man, though. Not a drummer.”

  Bill nodded. “Three cards, damnit,” he told Josh. Josh slapped them down onto the green baize, his eyes again cutting to the well-armed men crowding the bar.

  “I been thinking about this,” Johnny Kinkaid told Barry. “’Course I want Hickok dead. But this ain’t how I want it done.”

  The two men were waiting in Blackford’s room. A few minutes earlier, the Chinese kid had stopped by to give them Hickok’s room number.

  “I don’t believe this,” Tate objected. “You’re the one’s been arguing full-bore how we need to settle Hickok’s hash. Now you get chicken guts?”

  Johnny, busy scraping dried mud off his boots on a chair edge, looked a warning at the other man. “You’ll ease off that talk, Barry, or you’ll wear one of them suits with no back in it.”

  Barry started pacing the room, his blunt features a mask of hatred. Each time he thought about how Hickok humiliated him at the Peatross place, rage filled him like a bucket under a pump.

  “But why, Johnny? Christ! We got to do for Hickok, or he’ll make sure we all cop it.”

  “I didn’t just fall off the hay wagon,” Johnny shot back. “I know it’s important to kill him. But there’s an old saying: ‘Make a plow horse, but spoil a racer.’”

  “You wanna spell that out plain?”

  “It’s like this,” Johnny explained. “Personally, I don’t give a damn if you or somebody else murders Hickok in his damned bed. Dead is dead, and he needs killing. But you got to remember what I am— maybe the fastest draw, and the best aim, inside or outside of Bill Cody’s troupe.”

  Despite his foul mood, Barry had to nod agreement here. He’d once seen Wyatt Earp draw down on a gun-sharp in Wichita. Earp was fast, but Johnny Kinkaid was faster.

  “All right, then. I don’t have to dry-gulch Hickok. Why hide my lights under a bushel? I can stare that smirking Irish bastard straight in the eye
while I fill his guts with a load of blue whistlers! Hey? Goddamn right I can!”

  For all the world to know and respect, Johnny thought. And fear. Bill Hickok was the greatest coup feather in the West. Johnny wanted to wear that feather openly like a proud warrior—not slinking around bragging to drunk strangers how he back-shot Hickok from a dark closet.

  “All that’s air pudding,” Barry objected, nervously snapping the wheel of one of his spurs with his finger. “We just need Hickok cold as a wagon wheel, Johnny! Nothing fancy. You yourself been banging our ears about how we’re neither up the well nor down, how we got to put the quietus on Hickok quick and be shut of him. He could ruin a fortune for all three of us. He’s bound to find out about this Burlington deal.”

  Johnny’s insolent mouth twisted in scorn. “You ain’t birding there—he could sink us. But you ain’t frettin’ no fortune, Tate. For you, this whole shooting match is all about Nell. You can’t stand the thought of another man, especially Hickok, eatin’ off your plate.”

  Anger heat washed into Barry’s face. But before he could retort, Johnny heaved himself out of the chair and aimed for the door.

  “Do what you want to, Barry, I ain’t your mama. But I’m telling you, when I shoot at Hickok, it’ll be face-to-face in a showdown.”

  “There’s a few dozen or so dead men have made that same brag, Johnny.”

  But Kinkaid had spoken his piece, and now he left. Before he shut the door behind him, he repeated, “Do what you want to. But don’t queer the deal for all of us.”

  After Johnny had gone, Barry continued to mull his options while he sipped whiskey from a pony glass. Again he worked himself up to a slow boil, his thoughts rough and ugly as he recalled the galling things Hickok had said to him. Unlike Johnny, Barry knew he could never hope to face Hickok in a fair fight. Which also meant that hiding inside Hickok’s room was out of the question.

  But perhaps …

  Barry’s slightly glazed eyes cut to his Sharps .50, propped against the nearest wall. Barry was a better shot with a rifle, anyway. Maybe, just maybe, room seven would offer a good line of fire from outside?