CHAPTER 20 Wild Bill Hickok

I REACHED KANSAS CITY in the spring of ’71, which had growed considerably since I had knowed it as Westport, and if you recall, Fort Leavenworth was nearby. No sooner had I hit town when I found that none other than the Seventh Cavalry itself had wintered there, General Custer commanding. He was often to be seen over in K.C., at his tailor’s, at restaurants, and at theatrical performances, being extremely fond of the last, as might be supposed from his character. His Lady was ever by his side, and she was so pretty it was said both men and women turned around when she passed by. Of course, the General was right comely himself.

The man who told me the foregoing had long blond curly locks falling to his shoulders and a silken mustache of the same hue, was above six foot in height, slim in the waist and broad as to chest, and in clothing a remarkable dandy. He wore a black frock coat with velvet facings on the lapels, an embroidered vest, turn-down collar with a black string tie, and topped it off with a silk hat.

No, he wasn’t Custer, but blonder, curlier, warmer blue of eye, and his face was softer, with a hooking nose and short chin. He was James Butler Hickok, so-called Wild Bill after he rubbed out the man who named him Duck Bill.

But back to Custer, for whom Wild Bill had scouted on the Kansas campaign a year before the Washita. He knowed him well, and liked him and vice versa, and had a harmless crush on his wife and let her believe much exaggeration concerning himself, which Custer also believed, and so everyone was friends, as big, pretty, handsome, and powerful people always are. For everything goes their way, until some wretched, crosseyed, broken-nosed bum shoots them in the back, as Jack McCall did to Hickok in Deadwood in ’76, only two months after the Indians did in the other Long Hair.

However, that was five years into the future, and here we was on Market Square in K.C., and I was fully intending to find Custer before the week was out and do my duty. Let me say about Market Square that it was the hangout for buffalo hunters in the summer when the hides run poor, and scouts would come there when off a campaign, and mule drivers between trips, and it was where you’d go for news if you was my type of case rather than read the papers.

And that is how I met Wild Bill, who was one of the centers of attraction thereabout, having already got his reputation a year or two before as marshal of Hays City, Kansas.

During the day, Hickok generally set on a bench outside of the police station where his friend Tom Speers, the marshal in K.C., encouraged the frontier types to congregate partly because he knew and liked most of them, but also I believe because it tended to keep them out of trouble. They could palaver with one another and even hold target matches without bothering the respectable element in the better part of town, and being that Speers and his deputies was around, real fights was rare.

Not that celebrated gun-handlers ever fought each other much, anyway. Anybody who specializes in violence has the greatest respect for another such expert.

Now, as to my revenge against Custer. Well, you can go to the history books and read how he died fighting Indians on June 25, 1876, so you know I never killed him in Kansas City. If he had been a nobody, I could have kept up the suspense till the last minute, whereas the way it stands I got to admit it was near the first of April when I reached K.C., and the Seventh Regiment had been recalled from the plains in March, Custer going back East. I had missed him by a few days!

You might wonder why I did not follow him. After all, it wasn’t that he had gone to China. I already come across the western half of the country expressly to shoot him down. The image of that deed was what I had been living on for two years, ever since my vow on the banks of the Washita.

All I can say is that there was something about the Missouri River that took my drive away. Old Lodge Skins felt the same about the Platte, and look what happened to him when below it: Sand Creek and the Washita. I hoped he had now learned to rely on his instincts rather than his pride, and gone up north to stay.

In my case, I stopped right there in Kansas City, where the Missouri takes its big bend for the run to St. Louie. I looked at its muddly swirl and thought: Well, Custer’s anyway gone off the prairies; that’s the important thing. Maybe it was me who scared him off, in a spiritual or medicine sense, for it was right queer the coincidence of our comings and goings. Anyhow, I didn’t go East. I had a funny idea of that part of the country: I figured it to be cityfied from St. Louie right on to the Atlantic Ocean, and mainly slums at that, filled with poor foreigners from Europe who had pasty faces and licked the boots of powerful, glittering people like Custer. I would be at a peculiar disadvantage there.

In Kansas City I was not far from the place where the Pendrakes had lived thirteen years before, and probably were still residing, for people in their situation maintain it forever, and I thought about going over there and just riding down the street once and be done with it, but didn’t have the stomach for even that much. I tell you this, I was still in love with Mrs. Pendrake as ardently as I had ever been, after all them years and battles and wives. That was the real tragedy of my life, as opposed to the various inconveniencies.

The subject came to mind now because with the news of Custer’s departure I felt more let down, despondent, and bereft than at any time since I had left Missouri years before, and naturally, in such a mood, thought of Mrs. P. was inevitable.

Well, if Custer ever come West again, I would kill him. I swore to that, but rather mechanically, for I didn’t have no hopes he would.

The central plains was all cleaned up now of hostiles. The summer after the Washita battle, troops under General Carr whipped the Cheyenne Dog Soldier band at Summit Springs, killing their chief, Tall Bull. That was the end of the Human Beings in Kansas and Colorado.

So what did I do? Well, I met Wild Bill Hickok, and knowing him become almost a profession in itself for a while. I had inquired around about Custer, and a fellow pointed out Wild Bill as having been sometime scout for the General. I had never heard of Hickok at that time, but he was the celebrity of Market Square, and I recall that when I come up to him for the first time he was showing to some other fellows a pair of ivory-handled revolvers he had been give by a U.S. Senator he guided on a prairie tour.

I pushed amidst the throng and says: “You Hickok?” He had been pointed out to me as such, but I had to say something for openers.

“I am,” says this tall, lithe man with the long fair hair and gives me but a fleeting glance from his sky-blue eyes, and then lifts the pistol in his right hand and fires the entire cylinder faster than you could count the shots, at a sign upon the wall of a saloon a hundred yards and at a slant across the square.

This incident later went down in history, I understand—without any mention of my part—but standing there at the time, I was not impressed. I was intent on finding out about Custer, and the flowing hair of this specimen made me think he was another of the same ilk.

So when he had exhausted them five shots, I says impatiently: “Well, Hickok, if you can spare the time, I’ll have a word with you.”

He throws the fresh gun from his left hand into the right, while at the same time and in the same fashion transferring the emptied revolver from his right hand to his left. This maneuver was called the border shift, and constituted a neat-looking trick as both pistols traveled through the air for a second.

Following which Hickok fired five more shots at that sign, and then the whole bunch walked on across the square to see how good he did. One of them at the back of the crowd comes over to me and says: “I reckon you must know Wild Bill purty well, to bother him at a time like this.”

“Don’t know him a-tall,” says I, “and don’t know as I want to. What makes him so important?”

This fellow says: “You never heard how he took care of the McCanles gang ten year ago at the Rock Crick stage station down in Jefferson County? There was six of them, I believe, and they come for Wild Bill, and he took three with his pistols, two with his bowie, and just beat the other to death with a gunstock.”

I immediately reduced that by half in my mind, for I had been on the frontier from the age of ten on and knew a thing as to how fights are conducted. When you run into a story of more than three against one and one winning, then you have heard a lie. I found out later I was right in this case: Wild Bill killed only McCanles and two of his partners, and all from ambush.

“Yes sir,” this fellow goes on, who belonged to the same type as Custer’s striker, “that is what he done. And over in Hays City when he was marshal he had a run-in with Tom Custer, the General’s brother, who he locked up when drunk and disorderly, and Tom come back with two soldiers to put a head on him, and Wild Bill knifed one and shot the other.”

Now this interested me, so I asked how he got Custer’s brother, with knife or gun.

“It was the soldiers he killed, not Tom.”

That figured.

Hickok and the others now returned from looking at the saloon sign, and this suck-up who had been talking to me, he asked what happened and another man says: “He put all ten inside the hole of the O, by God!” And everybody was whistling and gasping at the wonder of it—well, not exactly everybody, for there was other scouts and gun-handlers around, people like Jack Gallagher, Billy Dixon, Old Man Keeler, and more who was well known in them days, and they looked thoughtful so as not to display jealousy. As elsewhere in life, there are specialists on one hand, and the audience on the other.

I steps up to Wild Bill again and says: “If you can spare the time—”

He is feeling good what with his performance and the adulation rising from it, and I guess it might have irritated him that I should be totally occupied with my own matters, and he says quite negligent to one of them men at his elbow: “Run him off.”

So that fellow comes towards me with a contemptuous look on his ugly, hairy face, and he is right large, but then he stops abruptly. For my S & W .44 is on a dead line to where his belly sagged over his belt.

“Pull in your horns,” Hickok tells him with a guffaw. “That little bastard has got the drop on you.… Come on,” he says to me, “put aside your popgun and I’ll buy you a drink.”

So Wild Bill and me went over to the saloon and passed under the sign where he had put ten shots in the hole of the O at a hundred yards, and I glanced up at it and saw he sure enough had. Inside, we got us our whiskies and then he found the farthermost corner from the door and put his chair in the angle of it and pulled his frock coat back on either side to expose the handles of the pistols stuck into his waistband, and all the while we was there he was eying every individual who came and went without it making any difference in his attention to our talk, except once when the bartender dropped a glass, at which Hickok automatically responded like a cat, coming half out of the chair.

So that was where he told me about Custer’s going East and all, and the stuff I related earlier.

“Why did you want to know about the General?” he asked, but of course I never told him of my true interest but some lie about hiring on as a scout, and then to cover up whatever emotion I might have showed, I says: “I understand you had some trouble with his brother Tom.”

“Well,” he says, “that is all over.”

Now this is a good example of a point I want to make. Wild Bill Hickok was never himself a braggart. He didn’t have to be. Others did it for him. When I say he was responsible for a ton of crap, I don’t mean he ever spoke a word in his own behalf. He never said he put a head on Tom Custer, nor wiped out the McCanles gang, nor would he ever mention them ten shots inside the O. But others would be doing it incessantly, and blowing up the statistics and lengthening the yardage and diminishing the target. Until about thirty year ago, I was still meeting people who claimed to have been on Market Square that day when Wild Bill put ten shots one on top of another into the point of an i at two hundred yards.

It was just after this that the bartender dropped the glass and Hickok come out of his chair, hands ready at his gun butts.

When he sat back again, I says: “What are you so nervous about?”

“Getting killed,” says he, as simply as that, and takes a sip of his red-eye. And then he looks at me, a little amusement crinkling his blue eyes, and says: “Maybe you figure to do it.”

That just made me laugh, and I says: “It was you who asked me to have a drink.”

“Look,” says he, “tell me straight, was it Tom Custer who sent you here? For as far as it goes with me, that is over and done with. But if he wants to start it up again, he ought not to send a fellow around carrying a S & W American in a tight calfskin holster. I tell you that for your own good, friend.”

I was insulted, being proud of that new piece of mine, and I also took it hard that I would be considered as working for anybody named Custer.

“Look yourself, Hickok,” I says. “I ain’t no man’s flunky. If I got any killing to do, it’ll be for myself and no other. If you want to fight, we’ll drop the guns and I’ll take you on bare-knuckle though you be big as a horse.”

“Settle down,” he says. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. Let me buy you another.” He called the bartender, but that individual had gone into a storeroom in back and couldn’t hear him, so Wild Bill asks me would I mind fetching the bottle?

Still sore, I says: “Are you lame?”

He answers apologetically: “I don’t want to get shot in the back.” Hastening to add: “I don’t mean by you. I believe you, friend. But I don’t know about these others.”

Meaning the ten or twelve harmless persons who shared the saloon with us at the moment. It wasn’t crowded, being the middle of the afternoon. There was a table of four, playing cards; another couple or three men was down towards the lower right of the bar. And I recall a person dead drunk at a table in the middle of the place. His head and shoulders was flat limp on the tabletop in a pool of spilled whiskey, sort of like a piece of harness dropped in some standing rainwater.

So I felt a contempt for this Wild Bill, thinking he was either batty or yellow if he couldn’t walk across a peaceful room. Then it occurred to me that he might be putting on an act for my benefit. Maybe he was waiting for me to turn my back on him so he could drill me.

This is a good example of the suspiciousness which warps the minds of gunfighters. I had fell into it right quick, just being in Wild Bill’s proximity. You feel like your whole body is one live nerve. At that moment one of them cardplayers, having just won a pot, let out a holler of triumph, and both Hickok and myself come out of our chairs, going for our iron—and he had been right about that tight calfskin holster of mine, which fitted the piece like a glove: the faster you pulled at it, the more it gripped the revolver.

I says: “Now you got me doing it.”

“I never,” says Hickok, “have held by a holster.” Now that he seen my deficiency I reckon he finally did trust me. “Always carry my weapons in the waist. You have to get a tailor to make a real smooth band there, no excess stitching nor suspender buttons, and of course your vest ought to be cut so its points don’t interfere. And,” he goes on, “see how I had my coat designed so it swings away on the sides.”

“The only thing,” I says, “is I wonder that sometimes when walking, your guns just don’t slip on through and run down your trouser legs.”

“Ah,” says he, “you open the loading gate and catch it onto your pants-tops.”

He was warning up to me through this technical talk, a man generally being fascinated by his own specialty and the tools for it. Bill proceeded to lecture me on the merits of the various means of toting a pistol: silk sash, shoulder holster, hideout rig inside the vest, derringer harness along the underside of the arm, back pockets lined with leather, and so on. He even claimed to know a fellow who carried a small pistol in his crotch, and when cornered he would request to take a leak before dying, open his fly, and fire. The trouble was onetime he got overhasty and shot off his male parts.

I learned an awful lot that afternoon. I had thought I was pretty handy with a gun before reaching K.C., but I was awful raw alongside of Wild Bill Hickok. Of course, I could see he was a fanatic. You had to be, to get so absorbed in talk of holsters and cartridge loads and barrel length and filing down the sear to make a hairtrigger and the technique of tying back the trigger and earing the hammer to fire, etc., etc. He had forgot about that drink and even his suspicions and commenced to call me “partner” and “hoss,” rather than that sinister “friend.”

I got tired after a bit and reminded him we was going to wet our whistles again, and started up, but he says: “Sit down, old hoss, I’ll get them.” And makes for the bar, despite the fact that the saloonkeeper had sometime since returned from the storeroom and could have fetched the bottle over.

One thing that amused me: Wild Bill carried that silk hat of his with him rather than leave it behind. I figured this was the last bit of suspicion he held towards me, that maybe I would swipe that article. Or maybe it was just that he didn’t want to forget and sit upon it when he come back.

Now he had got within six feet of the bar and was already in the process of giving his order, when that drunk I have mentioned at the middle table suddenly reared up, revealing a pistol at the end of the arm that had been crumpled under him, thrusts it purposefully in the direction of Hickok’s tall, broad back, and pulls the trigger. I would estimate the range as fifteen feet. Now this was quick. I mean if you had sneezed you would never have knowed anything happened, for in the next instant the “drunk” was sprawled once again in exactly the same position he had just emerged from, the difference being that blood was leaking out of a small hole between his eyes, adding to that pool of liquor.

He had fired all right, only his bullet went into the ceiling, for in the time between his rearing up and pulling the trigger, Wild Bill had seen him in the mirror back of the bar, turned, flipped his silk hat into the left hand, revealing the pistol he had carried under it in his right, and killed the man. Then he put the hat upon his head, went over, and inspected the corpse. The other fellows gathered around, and shortly in come Marshal Tom Speers, and Speers says: “Know him, Bill?”

“No,” says Hickok, expelling the empty cartridge and replacing it with a new load. Then he shrugs, gets that bottle from the bar, and joins me again.

Somebody says: “That’s Strawhan’s brother.”

Now I was some agitated by this event, being no stranger to violence but not having looked for it here. I gulped the drink Hickok poured me with his calm hand, and coughed, and says: “The name mean anything to you?”

He shrugs again, sips his whiskey, and his eyes is heavy as though he is going to fall asleep. Finally he answers: “I recall a man of that name in Hays.”

“Have trouble with him?”

“I killed him,” he says. “Now then, about that S & W you carry. It is a handsome weapon, but the shells have a bad habit of erupting and jamming the chambers. I’d lay the piece aside and get me something else: a Colt’s, with the Thuer conversion.…”

Meanwhile, Speers had got two fellows to drag the body out and he says to Wild Bill: “Drop by the station later when you have a minute.”

I reckon the marshal had to make a report. Hickok gives him a little wave of the hand—the left one, of course. I should have known something was up when I seen him carrying that hat in his right, which he reserved absolutely for his gun. Pointing, gesturing, scratching, going for money—think of everything you do with your right hand: he did none of these, but kept it totally free at all times. The one exception was shaking hands, in which case he barely touched your fingers before whipping his back.

Not that afternoon, but later on I asked Wild Bill if he had really suspected that apparent drunk or if he always crossed a room gun in hand.

“I did, indeed,” he answered. “I suspect any man whose gun hand is out of sight, be he even dead. I am wrong ninety-nine times out of a hundred; but I am right once in that same space, which pays me for my trouble.”

Hickok was a marvelous observer of anything which pertained to killing. He noticed now how I had been shaken by the incident, though otherwise I don’t think he would have recognized me if I had gone off to the outhouse and come back. He was like an Indian in his single-mindedness. For example, he never reacted at all to the quality of the whiskey we was drinking, which was fairly rotten. And later I come to realize that he had talked about General and Mrs. Custer in that apparently interested way only because he suspected me of being out to get him and playing for time. Actually he did not care anything about them or anybody else as persons.

But he could be considerate, if it fell within the area of his obsession. So now he says to me: “It is always harder on a man to watch trouble than to be in it. Best thing for you to do now is go get yourself a woman. Come on, I’ll show you the best place in town.”

He had to stop first at a restaurant and eat a big steak, because he said it was funny, but trouble give him an appetite, but other than for those two references, I never heard Wild Bill mention the shooting of Strawhan’s brother, though in the street and at the restaurant, various individuals who had heard about it congratulated him and others got out of his path in a marked way.

This place he took me to was a dancehall, though by the time we got there it was early evening, for he ate that steak slow and with great relish and afterwards had some pie, and it took so long that I come back to normal, for after all, killing was no novelty to me. So I had some baked ham, for the steak looked mighty tough. The ham was no better, I might add, and I complained to the management, but Hickok seemed to find the grub just perfect.

Then we went to the dancehall, and as I say it was early, with us being the first customers and the girls come straggling out of a door at the back, yawning and stretching for I figure they had just got up after sleeping the day. At the entrance there was a sign reading: PLEASE CHECK YOUR FIREARMS, and when we walked past it, a big man in a striped shirt come out and states: “Sorry, fellows, that means what it says.”

Wild Bill just looks at him with his clear blue eyes and says in his quiet voice: “Is Dolly around?”

“You’ll have to check them weapons,” says the other. And then, I guess because he allowed Wild Bill was an imposing-looking fellow, he explains: “They’ll be all right with me. You see, I put one of these here tags on each piece and write on it who it belongs to.” He goes into his vest pocket undoubtedly to get that tag and pencil, and knowing Wild Bill’s principles, I thought oh my God, there goes another one!

However, just at that moment, a big woman appears from the office. In her forties, heavy-set with a great high bosom, to show the grand divide of which her red satin dress, embroidered with black beading, had been cut low. She had a wealth of black hair piled upon her head and a faint mustache of the same color.

She cries “Billy!” in her bass voice, comes over and hugs Hickok, pushing the breastwork into his waistcoat and planting a fiery kiss on his cheek. Then she tells the bouncer: “Mr. Hickok has the privilege.”

“Hickok!” says he and his face goes to pieces and he makes himself scarce. Which shows you how a reputation worked. That man was a bouncer by trade and done a good job: I later seen him beat up three rough and drunken buffalo hunters with only the help of a middle-sized club. But soon as he heard that magic name, he was beat so far as facing the individual who owned it.

“Who’s your cute little short-armed pal?” the woman asks Bill, and he gets my name for the first time and tells her.

Then Dolly grabs me, smothering my face in her spongy cleavage, and damn if she don’t slide her hands around onto my posteriors and grind and bump her treelike thighs against me. I don’t say it wasn’t somewhat interesting, for she was quite a bit of woman, though it was also rather disquieting as if an aunt got fresh with you, and in addition I had my pride to think of, so I pushed her off.

“Ooo,” says she, making a coy thing of her heavy lips, “he’s a spunky little fox, ain’t he now?”

Hickok says, laughing: “You got a nice girl for him? He’s nervous, you see.” So she calls the women over, and they was a good deal better-grade than you could find on west of there until you got to San Francisco. One or two was right pretty, even, and all was fairly clean-looking and showed no old knife-scars or bad pock-marks. Dolly run a first-rate place, I’ll say that for her.

I looked them over, and some made lewd remarks to me while others acted standoffish and even cold, for as a group they had to appeal to all tastes, but the one I chose wasn’t either forward nor snotty. She was kind of sad and wistful-looking, in figure short and slight, with dull reddish-brown hair that appeared to have been set to curl but come out rather wispy. Some faint freckles showed in the tender skin underneath her eyes. She wore a red dress that exposed her shoulders and her legs to the knee, and the heels of her slippers was run over so she stood slightly bowlegged.

Don’t sound spicy-looking, do she? Well, she wasn’t. But neither was I in need of a whore at that point. That was Hickok’s idea and not mine; and I’ll tell you when a fellow like him suggests something, you take it under consideration, especially when you have just seen him shoot down a man with such little ceremony.

So not feeling any desire, I chose this here girl as the least desirable when it come to the fleshly, and we danced some to the pounding of a baldheaded man on a tinny piano, who was addressed like all such as the “Professor.” I ain’t much of a dancer, and you wasn’t supposed to be in a place like that, where your partner would shove out her belly and roll it against yours for a minute and then drag you off down the back hall and into her little cubicle or crib from which the expression “crib-girl” derived.

Now that’s what this little gal done hardly had the music commenced, come grinding into me, only she didn’t have no stomach worth the name, and was instead raking me with her sharp hipbones, and being I was skinny too, the last thing it brought to mind was lust. So I pushes her away, meanwhile trying to jig a little in my heavy boots, for the Professor was beating out a lively tune, but she takes this action as indicating that I was raring to head for the crib, and wearily, mechanically, yet with positive force, pulls me down the hall.

Her cubicle had an iron bed in it and a rickety chair that would have collapsed had there been space to do so, for its width consumed the distance between bed and wall, and as to the length of the room, you can gather that from the fact that its door had to swing out into the hall.

She lit a coal-oil lamp on a bracket, and I set upon the bed, being there was no place further to go, and in one movement she shucks her dress, hangs it on a hook, and mother-naked, takes a seat upon my knee.

Now I had knowed she was right young, but not until this moment did I realize to what degree. Her flat little bosom, her slender flanks and bony knees: she wasn’t just skinny, she was hardly more than a child, which condition her facial rouge had misrepresented.

I asked how old she was.

“Twenty,” says she.

I leaned back to put some distance between our heads. “Go on,” I says.

“Well, eighteen, then.” She lays further into me and begins to work at my collar.

So I dumps her off and stands up, which a wider man could not have managed, and I don’t see how a man of Hickok’s length could have stood erect under that low ceiling.

I guess she was worried I was about to leave, so she assured me in consternation that she knowed how to do everything and anything, and never had a complaint yet.

I says: “All I require at the moment is the truth about your years. I can’t use nothing more at this time, on account of I believe I picked up a dose the other day, but I’ll be glad to give you the dollar anyway.”

“Dollar?” she cries indignantly, and all thoughts I had of her basically innocent and wistful ways had to change. “You cheap bastard, it costs five times that to let your pants down in this house.”

“Well,” I says, “damn me if I would pay five dollars to top the Queen of Russia.” I was amused by her anger. Them freckles lit up and her hair went redder. She reminded me of someone. “No, indeed,” I goes on, “let alone some skinny kid of fourteen.”

“I’ll be seventeen any day now,” she says. “And you get on out of here with your dollar or I’ll call Harry and have him throw you out.”

I was took by something in this little gal. Still not lust, for I have always preferred them seasoned and sturdy for that purpose. I guess I just liked her spunk.

I says: “All right, I’m good for the fare. But I’ll tell you what I want for it. I just want to sit here long enough so my friend will think I had a good time. You’ll get your money and not have to work for it.”

That was O.K. by her when she saw I meant it and creased her little paw with the cash. In fact, I reckon she liked it a whole lot better: there wasn’t much opportunity in them days to make five dollars by setting.

Now since she had revealed her cockiness once, she didn’t go back to that drab, melancholy style no more, which was merely a role. I have said they tried to offer all types at this place. I reckon she appealed to the hombre who liked to imagine he was laying some little overworked servant girl, maybe an orphan to boot, under the back stairs.

In her true character she was right impudent. She could have put her clothes on now, but she didn’t, just lay back with her hands behind her head and her knees raised in the glare of the kerosene light, and says: “Say, you ain’t got a cigar?”

“Smoke, too, do you?” says I. “My, ain’t you the rough one.” I was needling her for the fun of it. I had to kill some time and didn’t know what else to do. I set down again on the foot of the bed, where there was ample room, for she lay along the length of it but was small and besides had her knees lifted. “I expected,” I says, “to find the K.C. gals more refined and ladylike.”

Well, her green eyes looked as if they started to flash, then suddenly she flung an arm across them and her thin chest commences to quake with sobs. Shortly I felt terrible, and I gathered her up in my arms, setting her on my lap again, and she cried against my shoulder, clutching into me as if it was her last hope upon earth.

“Now, now,” I says, giving her a fatherly kiss into the tangled red curls on the top of her head and patting her bare, bumpy spine, “you tell your troubles to Uncle Jack.”

She snuffles into my neck a bit, and then tells me the following.

“I was born and bred in Salt Lake City to one of the most respectable families there, my Ma being married at fifteen to a famous Mormon leader. You would know the name right off if I was to tell it. Now, outside folks have a funny idea about Mormons on account of the number of wives they take, but I tell you that is the reason why you won’t find a den of iniquity like this in Salt Lake. My Ma was my Pa’s eleventh wife, and you take us girls here at Dolly’s, why, we fight amongst ourselves all the time, but my mothers never did exchange a harsh word with one another. I had fifteen sisters and twenty-one brothers, and we lived in a house that was like a hotel. All we did was work and pray from early in the morning until night.

“Up to the age of fourteen, I guess there wasn’t a purer girl on earth than myself, for I regarded the human body as the holy temple of God and wouldn’t have dared to profane my mind with other than a wholesome thought. I had grown right pretty by then. One day my mothers sent me over next door to borrow some sugar. Now the people that lived there was another Mormon elder named Woodbine and he had only six wives and ten children, and as it happened all the women and younguns was out working in the fields at this moment, only the elder was to home, a man of fifty with a big black beard.

“ ‘Amelia, isn’t it?’ he says as he lets me in. ‘What a pretty girl you have become. The sugar is I believe in the pantry.’ So he goes along with me there, and says: ‘I believe it is on the high shelf. I’ll lift you up.’ Which he does with his huge hands, and that’s all that happened then, except that when he put me down he was purple in the face and breathing hard though I couldn’t have weighed much.

“But a day or so later, my Pa calls me into his presence and informs me that Elder Woodbine would like to take me as his seventh wife. It wasn’t no good to protest, for my Pa had decided on it and I didn’t dare to cross him, so what I done is run away that very night.

“Well,” she says, sobbing at the thought of it, “there have been many times after when I regretted my foolishness, for in these two year since I have seen little but the worst side of the Gentiles, many of them just as whisker-faced as the Elder Woodbine and as old, and some with bodies furry as a bear; whereas instead of a device of pleasure to any man who comes down the road I would have been an honored Mormon wife.”

It could have happened, I reckon, though it was the typical story you could get out of any whore: they always stemmed from good families, by their account. I don’t say I swallowed the entirety of it. The mention of Salt Lake and Mormons, in themselves, would not have take my especial note, though you may recall my Pa’s aim away back to head for Utah, which is why I fell in with the Cheyenne and had all the subsequent adventures.

But while this here Amelia was setting on my lap, jaybird-naked, I noticed a tiny mole she had in the hollow at the base of her neck. Now the peculiarity of this was that my sister Sue Ann, who was thirteen when I last seen her, had a similar mole in that exact spot. I said before that this little harlot reminded me of somebody. But other than for the blemish, it wasn’t my sister, who was fairer and different of feature.

“Say,” I says to Amelia, “I might have some kin in Salt Lake. The last time I seen them, years ago, they intended to go there and become Mormons. You might have heard of them if they made it.”

She pulls her head up and looks at me straight. For all that crying, her eyes was utter dry, but she had succeeded in rubbing away much of the powder and rouge on the lapels of my black coat. She was basically as freckled as me, underneath it all; and her hair was quite reddish.

“What did you say was the name?” she asks, with a shrewd squint.

“I never,” I says, “but if you want to know, it was Crabb. It would be my Ma and my sister Sue Ann, who I reckon might now be more than—well, thirty years of age, and then Margaret, a little younger—”

“Sue Ann,” cries Amelia. “That’s my mother’s name!” She laughs and shakes her hair and starts to cry again, clutching me about the neck.

That was when I finally figured out who she resembled: Myself.

“Then you are my Uncle Jack!” she says.

“Here now,” says I, “you better get your dress back on.”