CHAPTER 21 My Niece Amelia

I RECKON of all the things that ever happened, this give me the greatest turn, meeting my niece under them conditions. Suppose I had—My flesh crawled to think of it. Would have had to blow my brains out, I expect, for damn me if I ever been a degenerate.

Now the more I looked at her, the more obvious was the relationship: I never cared for the way my beak turned up as if someone pushed me in the face when I was small and it moldable, but you know, I saw the same type of nose on this girl-niece of mine and it looked right cunning. I had a real kin-feeling for her, I expect, right from the first, which is why I picked her from the lineup and also why she did not attract me in the fleshly way.

That is the positive side of the situation. The negative is that she was a whore. There was no getting away from that fact, and it give me a deal of shame. I didn’t know what to do, so said again: “Get on them clothes.” Kindly though, like an uncle, and I reached her dress down from the hook and turned my back while she put it on.

Then I was suddenly embarrassed by my presence in this type of place. Funny, ain’t it, that I should apologize to her? I says: “Amelia, I just want you to know I come here only as a favor to that other fellow.”

“Mr. Hickok?” she asks. “Yes, he is always hereabout.”

I says: “I am going to take you away from all this. Beginning this very minute, you ain’t a crib-girl no more. Why, in a week you will have forgot all your unfortunate experiences, and in six months you’ll be a fine lady.”

For I did suddenly get this idea, standing right there. All my life I had yearned for a bit of class, and I purposed to achieve it in this niece of mine. I was going to put her into one of them schools run by a maiden lady. I had my little roll to start on, and then, from what I gathered from the talk of them who hunted buffalo, there was wealth to be made in that profession. Two to three thousand dollars in a single season from September to March, which most of them would bring here to K.C. and spend over the summer on whiskey and women. Not me. I had an aim, the reclamation of Amelia. I had lost two families in violent circumstances; now I had found the beginnings of another in a house of ill fame.

First, though, we had to get out of that house. I expected some trouble about that, and took my gun out of its holster and put it into my waistband like Hickok had advised. But then I thought, little Amelia might get hit if there is gunplay. Better to buy out. Which is something you can do anywhere among white people.

So I went for my roll—and could not find it, though I had just earlier paid her that five dollars. I was sure I had kept it in my vest.

“Amelia,” I says, “did you see where I put my money?”

Now I have been talking here exclusively about my own reactions. That’s because my niece was apparently thrown into a state of shock by the revelation of our kinship. She had got dumbly into her dress and then stood primping her hair with her fingers, and when I briefly indicated my intention to take her out of there, had received it with a vague smile involving only the mouth. But now she gets a keen expression again and says: “I expect it might have fell out and rolled under the bed.”

So I gets down to take a look, and she pushes the door open quick and offers to run through it, but her old uncle proved more dexterous than she figured. I got her ankle and held on.

“I guess,” I says, “it’ll take you a while to straighten out. Now cough up that roll of mine or I’ll have to shake it out of you.”

She takes it from her hair. She had lifted it while telling the story of her Mormon years and clutching me, during which time she was going through my pockets. I wasn’t angry, considering the associations she had had for two years, poor kid.

We went up a back staircase to her room, and it was hardly an improvement on the crib, and she gathered together a few sorry possessions, powder and stuff, and put it into a cardboard suitcase, and I made her get into a more seemly outfit than that whore dress, and with my hand firmly under her arm, I steered her down and out to the front, in the course of which we passed through the hall again, and now noises come from all the cubicles and the dance floor was crowded with a gathering of men, drunk and disorderly, so that you could see the point in lifting their firearms on the way in, else they’d all killed one another in short order. This was when I seen that big bouncer Harry beating the heads of them three buffalo hunters and pitching them into the street.

Well sir, I pulled Amelia through and into that office near the front door. Dolly was still there though Wild Bill wasn’t. I always remember she was rebraiding the lash of a rawhide riding quirt as we come in. If she swings it at me or Amelia, says I to myself, I’ll put five soft-nosed bullets in her, woman or not.

She looks up, smiles with her mustache, and says: “Enjoy yourself, Short Arm? Whyn’t you go take another, be a sport. Billy won’t be out for a while yet.”

“Looky here, Dolly,” I says, “I’m a-taking this kid along.” I was ashamed to tell of our relationship. I just said: “Don’t try and stop me.”

She tied a knot at the end of that quirt and swung it against her palm. Then says: “Why should I do that? This is Liberty Hall, hoss.” And chuckles hoarsely and in her grand swagger leaves the room and passes through the dancehall crowd towards the rear, them drunks falling away on either side of her as when a big ship comes into the harbor at San Francisco and the smaller craft make way.

I took Amelia to the hotel where I was staying, and the desk clerk started to grin with his bad teeth but I cut him off short by renting her a room next to mine on the second floor, and we went upstairs and I turned down her bed for her, sniffed at the pitcher on the dresser to see if the water was fresh, give her a flannel nightshirt of my own, for she didn’t have no decent sleeping garment, and kissed her goodnight on the forehead.

She had gone through all this right docile, without a word; not, I expect, having yet recovered from the surprise of finding her kin.

I was too excited to sleep much that night. “Amelia Crabb” is what I had wrote down on that hotel register. I didn’t know her Mormon name and did not want to. Nor was I really curious to hear more about her earlier life—not even about her Ma, my sister Sue Ann. I had been too long away from them people of my regular family. It kind of depressed me to think of their life in Salt Lake among the Latter-day Saints, being so foreign to all I knowed. I had asked Amelia, on the way to the hotel, about my own Ma, her granny, and she said she didn’t recall her, so I reckoned she died somehow. I don’t mean I was without feeling, but all I had was now centered in this young girl, and more as to what she would become than what she was at present. Somebody to take care of. And I was going to do a better job than I had in the past. I hadn’t no Indians to worry about here, nor no U.S. Army. I could handle anybody else, even Wild Bill Hickok if it come to that.

Next day, pretty late, for Amelia had got into the habit in that whorehouse of sleeping through most of the light, we went out and got some clothes and in a dress what buttoned up to the throat and with her face washed clean you’d never have taken that girl for anything but the gentlest-born. She was right pale, but then that made her look all the more respectable, for a lady in them days never let the sun touch her skin.

Then I realized we hadn’t ought to stay at that hotel, which was not buggy or anything, but it was in the rougher part of town, flanked by a couple of saloons, and there was uncouth fellows sitting around the front, spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, and some of them might have knowed Amelia from Dolly’s. So by God if I didn’t go to the swellest place in K.C., with fancy gaslights and plush furniture in the lobby and flunkies in gold-braided outfits, and hire us a combination of connecting bedrooms with a nice parlor between. Must have cost seven-eight dollars a day or more. I don’t recall. I do remember the management was right snooty, but I threw money around like seed and their attitude changed directly.

Amelia herself didn’t do me no harm there, for it is amazing how she took to the new life. I suppose that Mormon upbringing hadn’t been so bad, as a foundation, and then her natural spirit added the rest, along with what she got from ladies’-fashion papers I bought her and the studying she did of the high class of women who resided in the hostelry: Senators’ wives and daughters, and those of Army generals and leaders of commerce. She developed a walk that looked like she was on tiny wheels beneath her long skirts, and when she took a cup of tea her dainty hand was raised like a bird in flight.

And pretty, right pretty she proved to be, with that turned-up nose and little mouth, and her hair was bright as a fall leaf when it had been washed a couple times and set by a professional hairdresser. The men around the hotel was fascinated by her, but discreet and respectable, not gawking nor licking their lips and such, like the kind of louts I always hung out with heretofore.

Well, this was costing me a plenty and within a few days I had peeled so many bills off my roll that it was down to the size of my little finger, with the hotel account still unpaid and growing by the hour, for Amelia was continually ordering things to be sent up to our rooms. And that was as it should be, for I wanted to keep her in seclusion until the genteel way of life become a habit that replaced whoring in the way she thought of herself.

I had been to several schools so far without finding the right one, for various reasons: at some, the withered spinsters in charge looked at me over their pointy noses and says they was full for the next five years; and I’ll tell you this, there was others who reminded me of Dolly.

But I had to get more dinero somewhere. Now the only thing I could figure doing to raise it was to go back over in the Market Square area again and play poker. Them buffalo hunters had real big games every night, generally starting after twelve o’clock, when they returned from the theaters and dance halls, and running into the morning. When I say big, I mean with luck you might walk away from the table at about four-thirty A.M. with two-three hundred dollars. This time was good from my point of view: I could see Amelia safely to bed and then slip out, play all night, get back in before she arose, and nobody the wiser. For I didn’t want her to know her uncle was gambling: that was the sort of life from which I had sworn to protect her.

The first night I was over to Market Square, I run into Wild Bill Hickok. He was sitting in his favorite corner of that saloon where he shot Strawhan’s brother, and when I entered, he waved me over. He was with some others in a poker game and had just won a big pot.

“Hoss,” he says to me, “I have missed you. I never took you for the type of man who would run off with a crib-girl.”

I did not like this reference to Amelia, but to protest against it effectively I would have had to admit she was my kin, and I didn’t want to do that.

“Yes sir,” he goes on, “if you are as mighty a poker player as you are a lover, I’d take it kindly if you would sit in. You,” he points at the man directly across the table, “give him your chair.”

This man looks miserable, but ain’t slow about complying. Now of all people I did not want to play against Wild Bill. For I neglected to say earlier that I intended to cheat. I know there are people who take dishonesty at cards as one of the nastiest sins in the world. I don’t admire it greatly myself, but figured my cause was sufficient to justify it in this circumstance. I guess that’s what everybody says about every type of unscrupulosity employed by himself, but I ain’t preaching morality here, I’m merely recording history, and what happened at that time was I proposed to cheat my opponents to the hilt. Except I never expected to be in a game with Wild Bill Hickok.

So I played honest for a couple hours and by two o’clock in the morning I was down to my last five dollars. Now I took hold of myself and reflected that little Amelia was all I had in the world. Either I got the money to make a proper woman of her, or we was back where we started, in which case it didn’t matter if I was shot by Wild Bill. I saw I never had a choice in the matter.

Now, Frank Delight who had a crush on Caroline and was a master of games of chance, had showed me several devices that put the odds on the side of the man what employed them. I really had not practiced enough to manage the ace-up-the-sleeve, which the expert can make to appear more swiftly than the eye can follow; and the same weakness applied to the fake shuffle, in my hands. So what I done was to use the mirror-ring. This is an ordinary finger ring that has a good flat surface on it somewhere, highly polished, which will reflect the markings on the cards as you deal them facedown. So that you know what your opponents are holding and can play accordingly.

I had purchased a brass ring and filed down a plane surface for about a quarter-inch on the underside of its good wide band and buffed her up, and she was small enough not to be detected, yet adequate to transmit the information. I hadn’t dared to use it so far, but now when the deal came to me I rubbed my palms on my coat as if to dry off the sweat but in reality polishing up the tiny looking-glass on the inside of my left hand, and started in.

Directly, Wild Bill’s winnings started to dwindle, and I reckon it was five-thirty in the morning when he finally pushed over the last of his pile and with a funny smile says: “Well, friend, if you are as good a lover as you are a gambler …” His voice trails off and he gets up and strides out the saloon door into the morning, showing his back all the way, so you could see he was right upset.

I haven’t mentioned them two other slobs we played with, being they was the kind who figured it a privilege to be beat by Wild Bill. There was a number of flunkies around there who took turns losing to him every night. Now as I was putting away my win—it turned out to be a little over a hundred dollars—these men smirked at me and then each other.

And the one says: “I recall the late Hank French. He also won from Wild Bill at poker.”

I just sneered at them and went out from the nightlong stink of smoke and liquor into the pure morning. You had to keep your face in them days, and it is just as well they was behind me when I seen Hickok waiting in the street outside, his silk hat cocked forward, his golden hair streaming over his shoulders, his fine white hands hooked by the thumbs into his lower vest pockets, with them two pearl handles a-jutting out of both hips. Down the street come a man trundling a handcart, and across the square someone was saddling a mule which was blowing out its belly as they always do so the cinch straps would be loose, and the owner was fixing to kick him in it.

Well sir, I thought, here’s where I get it after all these years of close calls, for Hickok was going to drill me for cheating him, and Amelia would return to whoring, and I had failed again.

But I would not back down to Wild Bill even though in this instance he was right. I don’t know why: I was afraid of him, yet at the same time his presence was a challenge to me.

So I stepped out through the swinging doors onto the porch and says: “You waiting on me?”

He gives me that famous level look for one long, breathless moment, and then he suddenly relaxes and says: “Come on, hoss, let’s get some breakfast.”

It was over our steak and eggs and fried potatoes that Wild Bill says: “Anybody who plays poker as well as you ought to learn to handle a gun.” I don’t know whether he meant it sarcastic or not, nor did I understand his motive in offering to give me his expert instruction free of charge. But I accepted, and that’s what we got to doing every morning after them games: me and Wild Bill would eat and then we’d ride to the edge of town and we’d shoot. And I found that though I had carried a revolver for years and had used it upon occasion, in comparison with Hickok I knowed very little of the weapon.

He talked more of the technical specifics of pistols, holsters, cartridges, etc., but we spent most of our time practicing marksmanship and the fast draw. I gathered that, before he took me along, he come there anyway by himself, for like a fine piano player a gunfighter had to rehearse continually lest he lose the precise touch. Here’s the exercises Wild Bill used to keep his hand in: driving a cork through the neck of a bottle and splitting a bullet on the edge of a dime, both at a range of forty-fifty feet, starting with the guns in his pants. I would hold a silver dollar chest-high, drop it, and before it struck the earth he’d have drawed, fired, and hit the dime so that the soft-lead .45 slug was cut in two equal parts.

Maybe the first thirty times I tried this, I even missed the length of the board in which the dime was embedded, or tore up the prairie on either side, front and back, of the bottle. But then I got to where I was missing only by about six inches, and consistently to the right of the target, so I adjusted my technique to pull left, and made my first score one morning after we had been going out there only a week. This was with the dime; later I shot the cork through the bottle, too, an easier accomplishment.

But I couldn’t get the sense of merely being the fastest draw or the best shot, with no further purpose to it. Take Wild Bill, the only thing he was suited to be was a peace officer, patrolling the streets of a cowtown in hopes someone would offer him resistance so that he could use his guns on them. He couldn’t even be an outlaw, for suchlike had to be more interested in robbing than gunplay—or in the case of Johnny Jump and his gang, murder and mayhem. Something concrete, that is. But gunfighting was all idea when you got down to it, devoted to testing the proposition: I’m a better man than you. It might have been fair, for size and weight did not enter, and a midget was on the same terms as a giant, when they both held Colt’s. But the question was, what did you establish when you found the better man?

That’s what I got to thinking about, for no sooner had I developed my proficiency than Hickok says: “Of course, firing at bottles is the least part of it. It’s the man-to-man encounter that proves everything. I’ve known champion shots who froze when going against men who hardly knew a butt from a muzzle, and died.”

I was playing poker every night, all night, and needless to say I was winning with my mirror-ring. Now I was not such a fool as to get recklessly overbearing about it. After that first session, I held my earnings down, twenty dollars one night, thirty the next, maybe falling back on the next to as little as fifteen; and if I’d get as high as fifty, then I’d balance it some by maybe losing five-six dollars the following night. In the aggregate I was making a good income, but not so conspicuous as to rouse serious suspicion, though of course any success at a game of chance is apt to be suspect to them off whom it is gained. But I was deft with my ring, and if my opponents looked for anything, it was the obvious tricks like palming cards or stacking the deck, of which I was utterly innocent.

Then I’d take them shooting lessons and afterward go back to our hotel and find little Amelia just arising from her slumbers at around eight o’clock, and I’d pretend I just got up myself and we’d take our morning coffee brought by the help to the sitting room between our bedchambers. It was real nice, and she didn’t seem in the least bored by this new life, as I feared she might be, and I could afford the bills, so the shank of the morning would find us visiting the expensive ladies’ shops where she’d buy more dresses and shoes and hats, and then in the afternoon we’d rent a carriage and ride about or stroll through the parks, and in the early evening we’d take in the genteeler entertainments: piano or violin recitals, dramatic readings, and the like.

In between all this, and the meals we ate, I tried to catch a few winks of sleep; but I didn’t need much in that period. I was twenty-nine years of age, and in the prime of life; had somebody to straighten out, and someone to cheat; was an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok; made money, ate and dressed to the hilt.

But the main thing was my fondness for Amelia. I’d have done anything for that girl. She was developing into such a lady that shortly I believe I could have took her back to Dolly’s and nobody would ever have recognized her. It was not just her fine clothes, but she had picked up, from them magazine pictures and watching the respectable women in the better places of K.C. where I took her, the most elegant way of carrying herself. She had a longish, willowy neck to begin with, and now she held her head, with that great pile of red hair cunningly arranged with pins of shell and amber, above it like a wonderful bird’s nest upon a marble pillar.

“Uncle Jack,” she would say, coming to the door of her room as we was fixing to go out, “would you prefer I wore the paletot or the basque or the sacque this evening?” These was all types of women’s coats of that day. Now I didn’t know one from the next, but since I was flattered to be asked, I’d make a choice and she would don it, for her major delight lay in pleasing me. Now you have that attitude on her part, and then you have mine: I found pleasing everything she did, for it was all graceful and sensitive, and her voice, which had been right tinny when at Dolly’s, had turned as pretty as the sound of a spring bubbling out among ferns. I got an immense joy out of just seeing her eat a plate of food. I’ll tell you how refined she was: you couldn’t see her teeth when she chewed, and she was so quiet about spooning up a bowl of soup that if your eyes was closed you’d never know what she was up to.

All this she had worked out on her own, for them ain’t the kind of things you can teach a person, and God knows I am hardly an instructor in deportment. But my experience with Mrs. Pendrake had give me at least this: I know class when I see it, and insofar as was within my power I could encourage Amelia when she headed in the right direction, which meant I had to maintain that flow of money, which in turn kept me cheating at cards.

Which brings me back to Wild Bill. I didn’t want to play against him, and some evenings managed to elude his company. But he’d come looking for me from saloon to saloon, and when he caught up, would run one of the three other fellows out of their chair, take it, and proceed to lose. It was strange, too strange for my stomach, and I got to not using the mirror-ring after he set down—while making the most of it before he showed up, so the evening would still show a profit.

Now what that ring done, it never gave me better cards than the next, but rather the knowledge of what hands the other fellows held and then only when I was dealer; it was not nearly so dishonest as palming an ace, say; a certain skill was still required, and pure luck determined what cards a man would get from the deal. I can’t say my luck either improved or worsened when using the ring. But here’s the oddity, whenever Bill set down and I refrained from employing the tiny mirror—played square, that is, my luck commenced to run extreme and fantastic. Flushes, straights, three of a kind, pairs: they flowed to me as if by magic.

Bill played doggedly on. And always we went to breakfast afterwards and then out to our range; and other than that queer look that come over him when I took my first pot of the evening and never left it till I walked from the saloon to meet him in the street outside—for he continued to leave first—he did not display anything that could be termed bad feeling, suspicion, spite, or envy.

As to the shooting lessons, I figure they served him as an exercise in pride, reminding me directly after every poker session that, whereas he had lost, he was pre-eminent in the more serious game of chance in which the stakes is life and death—for though we was shooting at dimes and corks, you could not overlook their similar diameter to that of the human eye.

However, I believe that when Wild Bill Hickok faced a man he looked at his opponent’s eye as if it was a cork.

I was getting real good with my weapon against them inanimate objects, and I was fast. Though speed itself was of lesser concern than accuracy, for as Bill said what mattered was putting your bullet where you wanted it to go. He had seen a fast man fire three shots before a slow man got off one; but the three missed, whereas the laggard’s struck the quick man dead center.

’Course, he says, there’s where the personality come in; whether fast or slow, there was one perfect shot for each occasion, and you killed or died according to how close you come to achieving it. Once arriving at your decision to fire upon a man, your mind become a blank, and your will, your body, and your pistol merged into one instrument with a single job. It was as if the gun growed out of your hand, your finger spat lead and smoke. Indeed, that was the technique of aiming: like you was pointing to make emphasis in a argument. On such an occasion the ordinary person is naturally accurate: notice next time, he says, when you are in a verbal quarrel; if your opponent’s finger was a gun, you’d be dead.

One morning we set up twin boards with dimes protruding from slots in them, and both me and Wild Bill went back twenty paces and fired. We both split our bullets perfect on the dimes’ edge, and the two shots sounded as one explosion.

“Hoss,” says Hickok, looking down at me over his hooked nose and blond handlebars, “I have taught you all that can be learned out here. The rest is to be had only from a target that shoots back.”

“That must have been luck,” I says. I meant it. He could have repeated that performance all day; whereas I knowed I couldn’t have done it more than say twice out of five: you can tell that about yourself. I also had the definite feeling he had not used all the speed of which he was capable.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he answers, and his voice was like the cracking of a whiplash. But he drops the subject then and appeared his old self on the ride back to town.

Wild Bill Hickok had devoted friends and sworn enemies. Mention his name anywhere in Kansas during the ’70’s and you could get a sharp reaction on one side or the other, and there might have been more men killed in arguments about him than he himself ever sent under. There was some people, I suppose out of envy, who even insisted he was a second-rate shot as well as a coward, and of course that greater number who had him doing impossible feats.

So in the face of all that I submit this experience of mine with the man in Kansas City in ’71. It wasn’t everything he done that period by a long shot; he even played poker with others and won. But I’m saying what I knowed of him personally. When I weigh all the pros and cons he comes out even.

He learned me about the precision handling of a revolver. However, had I never met him it was likely I could have got on right well without that specialty, which was not the necessity you might imagine for surviving in the West. Take the incident with Strawhan’s brother: if Wild Bill had not been expert at gunfighting he would have got killed; but if he had not been a gunfighter, Strawhan’s brother would not have been after him in the first place. So what did Hickok actually do for me? Show me how to save my life? No, rather he give me a new means by which to risk it.

I felt a curious relief when them lessons had ended, and somehow I got to believing that I wouldn’t see him no more across the poker table, either. Nor did I for a night or two, and a fellow told me Hickok had been offered the marshal’s job in Abilene, which was one of them new towns on the railroad to which the Texas men drove up their cattle for shipment East and when they got there the cowboys collected their pay and went wild till they was broke, drinking and whoring and shooting, and not long before had killed the then marshal, Bear River Tom Smith, who had enforced the law with his fists. So now Abilene wanted to hire a gunfighter.

“Reckon he’ll take it?” I asked.

“Sure do,” said that fellow. “He ain’t killed nobody since Strawhan’s brother.”

This was a typical opinion about Hickok: that he enjoyed sending people under. So many of them who admired him liked this idea, for in any white population there is a vast number of individuals who have murder in their hearts but consider themselves too weak to take up its practice themselves, so they substitute a man like Hickok. A Cheyenne enjoyed killing, but not Wild Bill: he was indifferent to it. He had barely looked at the corpse of Strawhan’s brother except to check whether it would draw on him again. In fact, I don’t think Hickok enjoyed anything. Life to him consisted of doing what was necessary, endlessly measuring his performance against that single perfect shot for each occasion. He was what you call an idealist.

Well, it appeared a day or so later that my assumption he had left town was erroneous, for we had just started up our nightly poker session when Hickok’s big form swung into the saloon, and he stepped aside so his back would not be in a direct line with the door while he sized the place up as was his custom. He wore a new outfit; no longer the frock coat, but a beautiful soft deerskin shirt that fell to his knees, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with fur and a four-inch fringe hung from the hem. At his waist was tied a sash of red silk, with fringed tassels dangling from the knot. Into this, above both hips, his ivory-handled sixguns was thrust butts forward.

I knowed he was looking for me; there weren’t no point in trying to hide, so I give him a holler, and he come and set in, and of course I won all night as usual, perfectly honest, not using my ring, and along about dawn he called me for a hundred dollars and showed an ace full house.

At which I says: “I got two pairs.”

It was unusual to see Wild Bill grin, but he did now and tugged at the end of his sweeping mustaches, and he says: “Well, I finally did it.”

And I says: “Two pairs of queens.”

However, he just kept smiling as he pushed the money over, more than I ever took off him in the past at one setting, and he even bantered a bit with the other men, and then followed them out. I don’t know why I had toyed with him like that: it was mean to let him think for a moment he had at last beat me. But it had been instinctive on my part. I ain’t the first or last man to needle an individual who presents his weakness so obviously.

Well, I left the saloon myself finally, last man in the place, and the barkeep yawns and bid me goodnight, and I get to the porch and there of course is Wild Bill standing in the street at a range of twenty paces. It struck me that had been the distance in our gun practice, for when you have trained so much, your eyes gauges them things automatic.

I says: “You want to go to breakfast, Bill?”

He says: “No.”

I comes down into the street, and he backs up for the same distance, hands hanging loose at his sides.

I says: “Something wrong?”

He says: “You have been cheating me.”

“No, I ain’t,” says I. “Maybe that first night we played, but never since. And I’ll refund what I won then.”

“Don’t go for that pocket,” he says.

“You can see my gun,” I points out, “here in the belt.”

“I think you have a hide-out derringer in that vest.”

“I swear I have not, Bill.” I’ll tell you a funny thing: I wasn’t scared now, whereas I believe he was. I wasn’t, because I had no intention of shooting it out with Wild Bill. As to him, he could hardly worry much about our respective talents at gun-handling; he was scared of some treachery or other, especially now that I had admitted cheating him that once. Few men of that time would ever admit anything even when caught in the act.

“Go for it if you want,” he says.

“I don’t want,” I says.

“God damn it,” says he, “I taught you everything I know. You saw you were as good as me. It’s fair, ain’t it?”

I never answered.

“Well, ain’t it?” he repeats, sort of pleading. “Look here, hoss, nobody cheats Wild Bill Hickok. If you wanted money, all you had to do was ask.”

“I said I never cheated you but once.”

“Then,” he says, “you are also a liar, hoss. And nobody lies to Wild Bill Hickok.”

Now there was two things to note about this colloquy. One was that he referred to himself like he was an institution: personally, he didn’t care so much about these supposed outrages of mine, but he could not let the noble firm of Wild Bill Hickok, Inc., be loosely dealt with. You know, like you’re supposed to say “Your Honor” not to the person setting up there, but to the office of judge.

Secondly, he was getting gradually more abusive, adding “liar” to “cheat,” both of them shootable insults in the West at that time though they seemed to have lost their force as the years have went on. I reckoned he would eventually get to “son of a bitch,” the ultimate, except for “horse thief,” which wasn’t appropriate here.

If you was called any of them names in public, you was expected to do something about it. However, lucky for me there wasn’t yet another soul along the street to hear my degradation in the fresh light of the rising sun. Them other fellows from the card game had gone on, and the barkeep left the saloon by the back door on the alley.

But somebody might show at any moment; and before they did, I had to decide on whether to choose quick death or lingering shame. I think I have made it clear that I didn’t like to draw on Wild Bill. However, I wouldn’t want my backing down to be general knowledge. If it so became, my poker playing was at an end. Not only would everybody soon know I had been cheating, but would take me for a coward who from then on could be pushed around with impunity. It was really the last-named that mattered, for cheating was no rarity at that time. Everybody tried it, but I was just cleverer than most. Hickok himself would occasionally sneak looks at the discard in a poker game, what they called the “deadwood.” You couldn’t tell what a man was holding by that means, but you could learn a good deal by seeing what he throwed away. Therefore the practice was frowned on to the degree that if you was caught at it, you could get your head blown off. Except that Hickok usually played cards with men who was afraid of him.

So he didn’t stand on no firmer moral ground than me, and in addition, he was talking about fairness, but he had no idea of how I cheated him, was prosecuting me for murder without a corpus delicti. I tell this so you won’t have too hard an opinion of me when you hear what followed.

The next moment, I seen a wagon coming way up the street, as yet too far for the man driving it likely to realize what we was about, but he would within another hundred yards. I had moved my position so it lay due west of Wild Bill, which meant the rising sun was just above his head and consequently shining at my eyes. Ordinarily, I would have reached to pull down the brim of my planter’s hat, but facing a man like Hickok you don’t make the most innocent move.

So I commenced to squint. “You claim I am a cheat, do you?” I asks.

“That is right,” says he.

“And a liar?”

“Yes you are.”

I says: “I want to lower my hatbrim against the sun. I’m a-going to use my left hand.”

“Make it real slow,” he says, and hooks his thumbs into that red sash just forward of the white gun-butts on both sides.

My left hand crawled upwards like a caterpillar on a wall, caught the brim, and depressed it an inch. Then I turned my palm forward and flung open my fingers.

At the same time I went for my gun with my right hand. For a particle of a second I didn’t know what Wild Bill was doing; if you remember, he had trained me to concentrate on myself at the instant of action. So I didn’t rightly see him draw, but I sure saw the muzzle of his Colt’s spit lead and smoke directly at me.