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  Marshal, gunfighter, stage driver, and scout, Wild Bill Hickok had a legend as big and untamed as the West itself. No man was as good with a gun as Wild Bill, and few men used one as often. From Abilene to Deadwood, his name was known by all—and feared by many. That’s why he was hired by Allan Pinkerton’s new detective agency to protect an eccentric inventor on a train ride through the worst badlands of the West. With hired thugs out to kill him and angry Sioux out for his scalp, Bill knew he had his work cut out for him. But even if he survived that, he had a still worse danger to face—a jealous Calamity Jane.

  DEAD MAN’S HAND

  WILD BILL 1

  By Judd Cole

  First published by Leisure Books in 1999

  Copyright © 1999, 2014 by Judd Cole

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: Ju;y 2014

  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.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each reader.

  Our cover features Wild Bill’s Last Deal, 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

  Series Editor: Ben Bridges

  Text © Piccadilly Publishing

  Published by Arrangement with the Author.

  Chapter One

  Joshua Robinson felt nervous butterflies stirring in his belly as he pushed open the slatted bat wings and crossed from the deserted hotel lobby into the raucous saloon.

  The fresh-scrubbed youth felt anxious, all right, but also excited and determined, his blood thrumming with the power of all these strange new impressions on his East Coast sensibility.

  Josh paused just past the entrance, turning his bowler hat nervously around in his hands while he tried to get his bearings. A pall of blue smoke hung over the huge, high-ceilinged room, so thick it had no room to move and just hung there like bunting. An S-shaped mahogany bar snaked along the far side of the room, with two barkeeps in sleeve garters and string ties hustling to serve a demanding crowd. A huge back-bar mirror doubled the occupants of the room. It was more people than Josh had seen in any one place since coming west of the Mississippi River three days earlier.

  “God Almighty!” the youth breathed, too awestruck to do anything but stand there. He’d seen it all before in a hundred dime novels. But now Josh understood—looking at a map of France was nothing like visiting Paris.

  His eyes searched the motley crowd, looking for a face he had never actually seen but could draw in the dark from memory, for Josh had studied every known photograph or drawing of the bigger-than-life figure he had come to meet.

  The men at the crowded bar represented every social stratum and occupation, from lowly buffalo-skinners to wealthy cattle buyers. Denver, once a little mining camp called Cherry Creek, now boasted it was becoming “the Chicago of the high plains.” These men were dressed in everything from fringed buckskins to the “reach-me-downs” produced by America’s thriving new ready-to-wear industry. Josh felt a special thrill of excitement at all the weapons in evidence. No one back in Philadelphia carried firearms, not even the city roundsmen who kept the peace.

  The youth’s eager eyes cut to the right side of the big saloon, where well-dressed men were playing games of chance at a scattering of green-baize card tables.

  There! There he was, coming down the rear stairway.

  “Man alive!” Josh said out loud, but softly. “It’s really him!”

  “Boy, you best clean your ears or cut your hair!” growled a voice like rough gravel behind Josh. “I said stand away from the damn door, you gaping mooncalf! Make room for your betters!”

  A hand like a steel trap gripped Josh’s shoulder and threw him roughly to one side. He crashed hard into a heavy table and barely caught himself before he sprawled headlong to the floor.

  Sudden anger made his temples throb. Josh glanced left, into the bearded, grinning face of one of the meanest-looking hardcases he had ever seen. The man reeked of rotgut and had little, pig like eyes set close together. Lumps of old scar tissue around his eyes betokened plenty of bare-knuckle brawling.

  Josh somehow managed to force the words past the lump of fear in his throat. “Mister, you had no call to lay a hand on me. Nor to insult me.”

  “Well now, she talks!” the bearded bully exclaimed, taking in Josh’s new wool suit and glossy ankle boots. “And lookit how her little chin quivers when she gets riled! You’ll pipe down, you damned little barber’s clerk, or next time I’ll cowhide you.”

  “Baylis!” snapped a clear, imperious female voice behind Josh. “Do your duties for my fiancé include picking on children? Leave that lad alone!”

  Despite his excitement about finally spotting the legend he came to see, Josh suddenly had eyes only for the young vision of beauty who now stepped into the saloon. She looked curiously about her, as if entering an exotic square in Persia.

  “Oh, Randolph!” she cried out to someone behind her in the lobby. “It’s positively breathtaking! So much grim masculinity! Is this how you lucky men spend your time when you’re away from your wives and sweethearts?”

  “This is your lucky day, boy,” the hardcase named Baylis muttered to Josh. “The old man’s fancy woman takes pity on weak things. But I’ll settle your hash later.”

  The woman who had called Josh a child was in fact, he decided quickly, no older than he was. He stared openly and boldly at her as she surveyed the big room. Lord God, but she was a beauty! The pale, mother-of-pearl skin, those pronounced cheekbones—she was Josh’s ideal of Spanish royalty. A gay ostrich-feather boa was draped loosely around slim white shoulders. But Josh glimpsed an exciting plunge of cleavage where tight stays thrust her breasts up prominently.

  She smiled at him briefly while Baylis swaggered up to the bar, hitching his Levi’s. His eyes stayed in constant sweeping motion, like those of payroll guards. Josh noticed that his hand-tooled holster was tied down with a rawhide whang.

  A second man emerged through the bat wings and took the young woman protectively by one elbow.

  “Elena,” he said, his suave baritone sharp with disapproval, “this is not a good idea, I tell you. Your kind of woman doesn’t enter such places. Only singers and soiled doves.”

  She tossed back her pretty head and laughed, showing Josh even little teeth white as pearls. “My kind of woman may not do anything,” she pouted. “Darling, you promised! We agreed I was to come west with you this trip and have a real frontier adventure before I become an old married lady. Besides—it’s safe. Baylis is watching in case any of these men should . . . lose control.”

  “Don’t be coarse,” the man named Randolph snapped irritably. “Besides, I don’t require Baylis to protect you.”

  This new arrival, Josh guessed, was at least twice the girl’s age. His hair was silver at the temples and his sharp face slightly puffy and lined. Despite his fine tailoring, he had the smug, self-satisfied air of what Josh’s mother primly called “new money.”

  The man finally noticed Josh gawking at his fiancée and frowned at the youth. “You lose your home, sonny?” he demanded. “Or are you looking for someone?”

  “I found him,” Josh replied, taking one last, approving look at the pretty Elena. Then the youth picked up his hat from the floor, dusted it off, and
headed back toward the card tables at the rear of the saloon.

  The man he had come more than sixteen hundred miles to find was returning from the bar, carrying a bottle of Old Taylor bourbon and a pony glass. He walked a bit stiff-legged, and Josh felt proud for knowing exactly why: In 1866, while on an extended scout in western Kansas for Custer and Sheridan, his horse was shot out from under him. His left foot got hung up in a cinch, and the horse went down on his leg, crushing it.

  All the photographs, Josh decided, did not do the living man justice. He was somewhere in the prime years just after thirty, exceptionally handsome if somewhat of a “fashion dandy,” quiet in manner but with an air of possessing deep reserves of inner strength. Nothing about his manner suggested the frontier bully, yet most bullies surely gave him a wide berth. For the man’s confidence in himself was palpable.

  The man scraped back a chair and was about to sit down at a table of poker players. Then Josh watched him glance back and notice a doorway behind that chair.

  “Excuse me, friend,” Josh heard him say politely to one of the players. “May I trade places with you? My eyes aren’t what they used to be. I need to be closer to the light.”

  Josh knew all that was a smoke screen. He watched the speaker settle into a chair facing the doorway. This new spot also left the man with an excellent view of the entire room.

  Josh swallowed a nervous lump and stepped closer to the table, remembering his plan of action, “Excuse me, gentlemen. My name is Joshua Robinson, and I am not a card player. But with your permission, may I watch?”

  The man Josh had come to meet just ignored him, frowning over his cards. But an older man with a soup-strainer mustache looked up at the youth curiously.

  “The hell for, son?”

  “I. . . I’ve read that a man can learn to play poker, monte, and faro just from watching others, sir. And no man ignorant of cards need bother going west.”

  That comment finally caused the handsome dandy in the long blond curls to glance up at Josh for a moment, squinting a bit in speculation. It should have, Josh thought. He’s the very gent who first said that.

  The older man shrugged one shoulder. “Boy, you haven’t even grown into that new hat yet. But you speak up like a man. G’wan, pull up a chair. But no spirits and nary a peep, hey?”

  “Yes, sir, I promise.”

  The game went quietly forward, cards slapping the green baize, chips clinking. Josh looked away long enough to check on the hardcase, Baylis. He was nursing a bottle at the bar while the rich man named Randolph escorted Elena around the saloon, pointing out such details as the new player piano and the war bonnets mounted on the walls. When the seated male customers spotted Elena on Randolph’s arm, they came hastily to their feet, doffing hats and many bowing gallantly.

  “Oh look, darling!” Josh heard her exclaim. “Those men are gambling!”

  Hearing a woman’s voice nearby, the players at the isolated tables glanced up in surprise. As the couple drew nearer, the men at Josh’s table rose politely to their feet, Josh included.

  All, that is, except the handsome man frowning over his cards. “I’ll take three, damnit,” he muttered to the dealer, ignoring the new arrivals and all the sudden fuss around him.

  “Sir!” Elena called out gaily, her voice more teasing than censorious. “You are the best-dressed man at the table, yet no gentleman, I see.”

  Still mulling his cards as if they’d betrayed him, the man replied absently, “Madam, you are quite beautiful and clearly right out of the top drawer. But you see, I am a man fixed in his little habits. I stand up to pee, lie down to sleep or make love, and sit when I’m playing cards. Right now, as you may observe, I’m playing cards.”

  Josh watched his eyes flick up to meet the woman’s as he added pointedly, “Although I might be talked into changing my position.”

  His innuendo was clear, and Elena blushed to her very earlobes. Randolph flushed with rage. Before he could get himself under control to speak, a likewise offended young cowboy, clearly well into his cups, came blustering closer.

  “Listen, mister,” he said loudly. “This here is a lady. I don’t know what hole you crawled out of, but here in Denver we respect a lady.”

  “Three cards,” the man repeated to the dealer, still ignoring all the commotion. The young puncher was about to move in even closer when a friend suddenly gripped his arm and said something in his ear. He pointed toward the seated player. Josh saw that the man’s coattails had dropped open, revealing two Colt .44s with fancy pearl grips.

  The cowboy looked closer at the man’s calm, fathomless eyes and neatly trimmed mustache. And abruptly he realized his big mistake.

  “Pardon me all to hell, Mr. Hickok,” the cowboy stammered. “There’s no offense meant.”

  “Nor none taken,” James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok assured him quietly. He fished into the fob pocket of his vest and flipped the cowboy two bits. “Go have a drink on me, waddie. She’s a fine lady, and you were right to stick up for her.”

  To verify this, and pour oil on the waters, Hickok rose, bowed graciously, and sat down again to his cards. But Josh had noticed something: the moment the cowboy said “Mr. Hickok,” Baylis almost dropped his glass. Now Josh saw him slide his six-shooter from its holster and cover it with his hat. That’s when Josh remembered there was an open bounty—ten thousand dollars in gold double eagles—on Hickok, the legacy of a killing while Bill was marshal of Abilene.

  “Wild Bill!” Josh called out. “That man at the end of the bar has a gun aimed at you! It’s hidden under his hat!”

  At these words, Randolph pulled Elena well out of the line of fire.

  “I already know that, son,” Bill replied in his quiet way. “But I thank you sincerely for that information. You may still be quite green, but you’re solid wood.”

  Josh flinched hard when Hickok fired from under the table, one deafening shot that drilled Baylis through the heart and spun him off his stool. He hit the floor with a sound like a sack of salt dropping on hardpan. It was so sudden that Elena, although horrified, forgot to scream.

  “My apologies, miss,” Bill said, holstering his Colt even as men gathered around the body, exclaiming at the accuracy of the shot. “But once a man draws, it’s best to shoot him quick.”

  Hickok’s eyes shifted to Elena’s flabbergasted fiancé. “I’d wager that. . . man was on your payroll. But don’t worry. This city is full of thieves and stinking, murdering bag-line bums like him. I’m sure you’ll quickly find a replacement. Check the manure pile at the livery.”

  Randolph saw how his fiancée was watching Bill, her face frozen in fascination like a bird watching a snake. Josh could tell the wealthy man was fit to be tied.

  “I’ve heard of you, Jim Hickok. Who the hell hasn’t? ‘Wild Bill’ my sweet aunt! You’ve got every damned ink-slinger in the country selling your supposed exploits to a bunch of gullible greenhorns. I don’t credit the lies, not by a jugful. Some men don’t eat out of your hand.”

  “That’s right,” Bill agreed amiably as he again considered his cards. Then he glanced up at Elena, smiled, and added, “Only horses and women do that.”

  “Now you listen, Hick—”

  “No, you listen,” Bill cut in, his voice going so low it was almost a whisper. “It’s no say-so of yours what Jim Hickok does, is it? Don’t miscalculate yourself, stranger. That corpse on the floor just overrated himself, too, and it was his last mistake.”

  Randolph, enraged beyond words now, roughly took Elena by one arm and stormed out. Bill sighed and tossed down his cards. “Call. I’ve got two pairs: aces and eights.”

  “Sorry, Wild Bill.” The man with the soup strainer chuckled. “Three deuces. You watching this, son?”

  Two men were dragging Baylis out while another ran for the undertaker and the sheriff. Hickok looked at the deuces, grimaced, then met Josh’s eyes and grinned.

  “When will I learn to fold on aces and eights, kid? That hand has always bee
n bad luck for me.”

  Chapter Two

  “The New York Herald, huh?” Bill Hickok repeated without much enthusiasm.

  “Yessir, Wild Bill,” Josh said proudly. “The greatest newspaper in America.”

  “Guess that makes it the Queen of the Crap-sheets,” Bill said, but so mildly that Josh hardly noticed. The youth had been waiting out front of the Commerce Hotel several hours for this chance; now his words fairly tumbled over each other in his eagerness to explain himself and his purpose while he could.

  He told Bill how the newspaper’s eccentric publisher, James Gordon Bennett, had never once been west of the Hudson River. Yet the timid soul suffered from the powerful “westering fever” of the 1870s—he even made his outraged wife sleep under buffalo robes instead of eiderdown quilts!

  “Mr. Bennett decided to open the nation’s first permanent far-west bureau for East Coast newspapers,” Josh added. “And I’m it!”

  “A nineteen-year-old, wet-behind-the-ears kid,” Bill said, still very unimpressed. “Wears a paper collar and doesn’t even shave yet. Come to see the big elephant, huh? Does your mother know you’re out here?”

  While this conversation went forward, Josh persistent, Bill sarcastic, both men were strolling briskly along the raw-lumber boardwalk of Denver’s busy South Platte Street. Vendors with wooden pushcarts hawked honeycombs, sacks of ginger snaps, buffalo tongues pickled in brine. Bill’s eyes stayed in constant motion, and he used reflections in plate-glass windows to monitor his surroundings.

  “When you were nineteen,” Josh shot back defensively, “you were elected a constable in Johnson County, Kansas.”

  “Not wearing a bowler hat, I wasn’t. Look, kid, I appreciate that warning you gave me last night. But even if I wanted a sidekick, which I don’t, I’d want one that knows gee from haw, at least. C’mon—let’s eat.”

  They ducked into an eating-house and Bill treated the young journalist to a hearty meal of beef, biscuits, potatoes, gravy, and greens, with big slices of apple pie for dessert.