by Judd Cole
Deadwood, South Dakota, held a place in the pantheon of frontier hellholes. Even to a man like Wild Bill Hickok, it was the toughest town in the west, a town where only the strongest and most daring could survive. But that’s exactly where Bill had to go, whether he liked it or not. He was sent there by the Pinkerton Agency to investigate reports of stealing at a particularly dangerous mine—dangerous even by Deadwood standards. The mine was guarded by Regulators, vicious hard cases who made sure no one interfered with their plans. Three Pinkerton men had already been killed when Bill went up against the Regulators—and he was determined not to be the fourth!
BLACK HILLS HELLHOLE
WILD BILL 6
By Judd Cole
First Published by Leisure Books in 2000
Copyright© 2000, 2015 by Judd Cole
First Smashwords Edition: November 2015
Names, characters and incidents in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons living or dead is purely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information or storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.
Our cover features Sundown Deliverance, painted by Andy Thomas, and used by permission.
Andy Thomas Artist, Carthage Missouri
Andy is known for his action westerns and storytelling paintings and documenting historical events through history.
This is a Piccadilly Publishing Book ~*~Text © Piccadilly Publishing
Series Editor: Ben Bridges
Published by Arrangement with the Author.
Chapter One
“This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my life,” W. B. Hickok announced solemnly. “It’s tough saying goodbye to an old friend like you.”
Bill sighed, then squared his shoulders to do his unpleasant duty. “It can’t be helped, damn it all. So long, old companion.”
Whistling the sad German dirge “I Once Had a Comrade,” Wild Bill bent closer to a polished-metal mirror nailed to the wall. In a series of fancy flourishes, he used an ivory-handled straight razor to scrape off his neat blond mustache.
New York Herald reporter Joshua Robinson stared at his famous companion, impressed by the striking transformation. Hickok had also just finished hacking off his long curls with a skinning knife. Most of the blond was in those curls, the hair not protected from sun bleaching by Bill’s hat. The hair he had left uncut formed a dark brown thatch.
“You look like a different man,” Josh marveled.
“Give the lad from Philly a cigar,” Bill replied. “That’s the whole point of butchering my good looks. Kid, in the name of duty I just disappointed every red-blooded woman in America.”
“But at least you’ve still got your modesty,” Josh baited him.
“Modesty,” Bill repeated in a curious tone. “Modesty, modesty ... I know that word. French, ain’t it?”
Josh laughed and gave up. No man was harder to rowel than Wild Bill Hickok.
The two of them shared a supply-train boxcar that had been made surprisingly comfortable for them and their horses. The sliding door was half way open for ventilation and light. But the blast furnace air gave little relief. These were the dog days of August in the Dakota mining country. To Josh, sweat-soaked from his hair to his socks, it felt more like Dante’s First Circle of Hell.
“What kind of town is Deadwood?” Josh inquired.
“Town? Huh!” Wild Bill scoffed. “It’s a bear pit. And all new arrivals are the bait.”
Wild Bill’s fear of being recognized in Deadwood, Josh realized, must be strong indeed. Not only had the frontier dandy sacrificed his hair and mustache—he had abandoned all vestiges of his usual sartorial elegance.
Gone were the silk vest and gold watch, the dark twill suit with a long duster to protect it. Now Hickok was dressed “common as your Uncle Bill” in modest range clothes and a clean neckerchief— everything faded enough to suggest a working cowboy now turned saddle tramp. Even his custom-made Miles City boots had been replaced by clumsy work shoes with welt stitching.
“One thing I don’t get,” Josh said, thinking out loud. “Pinkerton says three of his operatives have been killed trying to infiltrate this vigilante gang. But how’d the bad guys know who and what they were?”
Bill cursed mildly when he nicked himself with the razor. “Kid, do you have to keep mentioning dead Pinkerton ops?”
Josh watched Bill dab a little calomel lotion on the cut. Hickok was not an edgy man by nature. But the mining town of Deadwood, South Dakota, held a special place in the pantheon of frontier hellholes. Hickok considered it infinitely tougher than even the cow town of Abilene, Kansas, which Bill had once tamed as sheriff—though only briefly.
Besides all that, a prophecy made popular by Martha “Calamity Jane” Canary predicted that Hickok would someday meet his fate in that wide-open, untamed mining town. Bill wasn’t superstitious. On the other hand, Deadwood was a damned likely place to die when your hide was worth ten thousand dollars in gold.
“Speaking of mentioning things,” Bill added, patting the shaving soap off his face, “you be damn careful what you write for that crap sheet of yours up East.”
His eyes met Josh’s in the mirror.
“This is an open case,” Hickok added, “which means every dispatch gets cleared through me before you send it.”
Josh started to protest, but Hickok cut it short.
“You heard me, kid. You reveal the wrong de tail, the bosses are going to know they’ve been bamboozled again. And we could end up feeding those fellers out there.”
Bill inclined his head toward the vista beyond the open door. In the distance overhead, vultures wheeled like well-oiled mechanisms of death—the frontier’s ever vigilant symbols of a hard fate.
It was a grim view beneath the vultures, too. No homesteads in this Black Hills country, no land under fence. Not even the crude little half-section nester farms Josh had spotted dotting much of the West. Just jaggedly seamed hills covered with dwarf cedars and jackpine, their gullies washed red with eroded soil.
“Does this train go all the way into Deadwood?” Josh asked. When they had laid over at Fort Hammond, in Montana, Bill had pored over the Army’s map file of the Black Hills, taking notes.
Bill shook his head. “We’ll detrain at Belle Fourche. That’s about twenty miles north of Deadwood. We’ll follow an old federal freight road. It’ll give our horses a chance to stretch out the kinks before we have to board them in a livery again. And us a chance to run our traps.”
“Run our traps” was Bill’s phrase for gathering information. Josh watched Hickok now thumb his hat back to get a better view of the country hereabouts. The few rough roads they glimpsed were sandy and rocky, with washouts that had to be laboriously detoured.
Erosion dust made the hot air feel gritty and the mouth chalky. Bill tied the neckerchief over his nose and mouth to screen it.
“Bill?”
“Hmm?”
Josh pointed at Hickok’s world-renowned, ivory-grip Colt .44 Peacemakers.
“If you can’t be Wild Bill in Deadwood, what about them? My grandma could describe those guns.”
Bill nodded, crossing to the far corner of the boxcar where they had tossed their saddles and bridles. This half of the car also contained two stalls filled with fresh straw. Bill’s strawberry roan and Josh’s line back dun were peacefully enjoying nosebags filled with crushed barley.
Bill untied a buckskin sh
eath from his pannier. He slid a pump-action shotgun from the sheath. The weapon, manufactured by Spencer Arms Company of Windsor, Connecticut, had a pistol-grip stock of deep-grained walnut.
“I won this little honey a few years back in a poker game up in the Canadian Rockies,” Bill explained. “It served me well when I was the star man in Abilene and Hays City. It’s my weapon of choice for clearing out choke points.”
By “choke points,” Josh realized, Bill meant crowd control at close range against saloon ruffians and lynch mobs.
“I’m loading twenty-gauge bird shot,” Bill added.
“And I’ve packed the shells with less powder. With birdshot, it’s not usually fated to humans. But I’ve blinded men with it, and I’ll double-dog guarantee you—it’s an effective deterrent against bully boys.”
And bullyboys, Josh knew, were precisely what they were going up against in Deadwood. Pinkerton’s information was woefully inadequate to ensure their safety. Nor had Bill told Josh all the details yet. All the reporter knew for sure, right now, was their destination: Harney’s Hellhole. The popular name for the most productive gold mine in the Dakotas—and lately, the most ruthless.
“These so-called Regulators,” Josh said. “Who do they answer to?”
By long habit, Wild Bill raised a finger to stroke his now missing mustache while he mulled the kid’s question. According to Pinkerton, Harney’s Hellhole was owned by an international bankers group. It was one of the overseas directors—a Brit—who first contacted Pinkerton about a suspicious rash of “robberies” of gold ore. That same director warned that no one connected with the stateside operation was above suspicion—including the top dogs in management.
“Just who they answer to ain’t clear,” Bill finally replied. “But sure as Sam Hill, they knew a Pinkerton man when they smelled one, didn’t they? Either they’re smart as steel traps, or they’ve got people at the very top. That’s what we’ve got to nose out—just how deep the rot goes and just who we can trust.”
By looking hard right out the door, Josh could barely glimpse the grassy flatland they had crossed to reach this point. Pronghorn antelopes and wild horses moved in herds still visible from the ascending train.
But when he pointed this distant spectacle out to Hickok, Josh noticed something he’d been seeing more frequently of late. Bill looked, all right, turning his gunmetal blue eyes in the direction Josh pointed. However, despite a deep squint, Bill remarked with seeming indifference:
“Can’t quite make it out, kid. I must be losing it in the sun.”
He’s losing it, all right, Josh thought. So far it was only very long distances that gave Bill trouble. But Hickok was starting to lose the one thing he couldn’t spare: His hawkeyed vision.
However, Bill derailed Josh’s train of thought by suddenly grinning at the reporter.
“What?” Josh demanded defensively.
“Kid, I’ve let you side me now for over a year. By now I know you’ve got good leather in you. If not, I’d’ve sent you home to your Quaker ma by now. But in Deadwood? With that derby hat and square-tipped bow tie, you’ll stand out like a rhinestone yo-yo.”
“I spoze. Well, should I get duds like yours?”
Bill shook his head. “Nah, just be careful. This time it’ll be all right to look like a big-city whippersnapper. Harney’s Hellhole is booming right now. Pinkerton says they ain’t just desperate for miners and ore freighters—they need clerks that can write and cipher, too. That’s where you’ll come in. We’ll work both sides of the operation, the sweat and the brains.”
Josh glanced left out the open door. The front of the train eased into a long S-turn. Josh could see the diamond stack of the locomotive belching black smoke and orange sparks. Streamers of white steam hissed from the escape valves.
“Seems funny,” he remarked, “to see silver rails.”
This was a steel narrow-gauge railroad, only three feet between rails instead of the usual five. Otherwise a railroad could not have been constructed in this prohibitively expensive terrain. Even now the engineer had to slow way down for a boggy spot that had been reinforced with crushed rock.
“You’re going to see plenty of queer sights in the Black Hills,” Wild Bill assured him. “This place ain’t like nothing else on God’s green earth.”
Josh could sure believe that. He stared out at the shale-littered slopes of big hills and small mountains. Bright red Indian Paintbrush flowers dotted the lower slopes. They should have seemed like signs of life.
But even those bright daubs of color were all wrong. Josh felt goose bumps forming when he realized why: They looked exactly like blood dotting the landscape.
~*~
“This letter is to advise the Indian Bureau,” Owen McNulty dictated to his young clerk, “of an extremely dangerous and volatile situation involving the Hunkpapa Sioux at the Copper Mountain Reservation.”
“That a c or a k in Hunkpapa, sir?” the clerk asked.
“A k,” McNulty replied. He paused in his pacing, listening to the steel nib scratch as Danny Ford, the clerk, caught up. McNulty was in his early fifties, courtly and gaunt. A Methodist preacher who firmly believed red men possessed eternal souls, he had volunteered for the tough job of serving as the Indian agent at Copper Mountain. At times he regretted the idealism that brought him here.
McNulty resumed his pacing. The study was dim save for the circle of light made by Danny’s coal-oil lamp. Outside the little clapboard residence, a black-velvet cloak of darkness settled over the Pahasapa—the Sioux name for the Black Hills, the sacred center of their universe.
“An alarming number of Indians,” McNulty resumed, “are being murdered in cold blood by so-called ‘security forces’ employed by the mining company in Deadwood. The Sioux have been accused of robbing ore wagons bound for the smelter at Spearfish, South Dakota.”
Behind him, Danny’s chair made a sudden scraping sound. McNulty, busy composing in his mind, hardly noticed it.
“This accusation against the Sioux,” he resumed, “is utterly preposterous. Very few Plains Indians place any value whatsoever on smelted gold, much less raw ore. Even a gold double eagle, to a Sioux, is merely a bauble to sew on one’s council shirt.”
“Just shows how goddamn hawg-stupid the featherheads are, don’t it?”
The sudden, unexpected voice made shock and fear hammer McNulty’s temples. He whirled around, then cried out at the horrible scene before him.
“Oh, merciful God! Danny!”
The clerk’s steel nib now lay on the puncheon floor in a gathering pool of ink and blood. Danny, a fresh-scrubbed young lad fresh out of high school in Zanesville, Ohio, was slumped dead over his blotter. The bone handle of a knife was centered between his shoulder blades.
“You!” McNulty gasped, recognizing the intruder.
“Yeah, it’s me, you Indian-loving, God-mongering gal-boy. You had your chance, McNulty. You was warned. You coulda been a rich man just by sticking to your own people. But no, you had to get all sweet on the Noble Red Man, dintcha?”
McNulty backed away, turning pale, as the big intruder stepped closer, wagging a huge Borchardt 44.40 six-shooter equipped with a metal back strap.
In his shock and confusion, McNulty resorted to officiousness.
“Now see here, Labun. You—you have no authority to enter this house or the reservation. This is all federal property.”
“Oh, shucks! There goes my spot in heaven, huh?”
“No!” McNulty begged when the man clicked his hammer back to full cock. It was the loudest, most terrifying sound McNulty had ever heard.
“No?” the intruder repeated, laughing. “I say yes, you milk-knee’d Indian lover.”
He pulled the trigger. The big pistol exploded with deafening force in the quiet room. McNulty shuddered once as if violently cold. Then his knees came unhinged and he flopped hard onto the floor. His heels scratched the floor for several seconds as his nervous system tried to deny the fact of death.
Chapter Two
On their first night in South Dakota’s Black Hills, Wild Bill and Josh made camp on a bench of grass beside the Belle Fourche River. With trout in every river, walleyes in every reservoir, supper was never a problem in the Dakotas.
Early the next morning, before the August sun began to heat up in earnest, they followed the Old Federal Road south to Deadwood.
“Don’t forget we’ve got summer names,” Bill reminded the young reporter when they were only a few miles from town. “I’m Ben Lofley and you’re Charlie Mumford. Above all, remember we didn’t know each other prior to Deadwood.”
Josh nodded, curiously eyeing the hills surrounding them like a pod of whales. Juniper and limber pine covered many of the slopes. This gave them the dark shading, from a distance, that had earned this area its name.
“Where’s your pinfire?” Bill asked Josh. Hickok meant the kid’s old, but vintage condition, Le-Faucheux six-shot pinfire revolver. Bill had given Josh the gun when they first met in Denver. He had also made sure the greenhorn learned how to use it.
“It’s in my saddlebag,” the kid replied. “I’ve got an armpit holster. Should I carry it under my shirt?”
Bill shook his head as he skinned back the wrapper of a slim cheroot.
“Leave it where it is,” he advised. “Concealed weapons are dicey out West, kid. A man’s expected to carry his weapons for the world to see. It’s all right for a woman, maybe. But anyhow, a clerk shouldn’t carry a gun, open or hidden. They find one on you after you’re hired, you’ll be up Salt River. Prob’ly kill you for cause on the spot.”
This suggestion made Josh’s belly stir with apprehension. He let his line back dun drop back a few more paces, studying the country all around them in pensive silence. Bill covered a sly grin.
Despite their bleak appearance from the railroad train, the Black Hills, Josh soon realized, were abundant with wildlife. Near the numerous streams and ponds he spotted beaver, muskrat, and Great Blue Herons. Golden eagles circled the higher peaks, and mule deer and moose were plentiful in the bottom woods.