The Kincaid County War Read online

  Issuing classic fiction from Yesterday and Today!

  Wild Bill Hickok was a legend in his own lifetime. Wherever he went his reputation with a gun preceded him—along with an open bounty for ten thousand dollars for his arrest. But Wild Bill was working for the law when he went to Kinkaid County, Wyoming. Hundreds of prime longhorn cattle had been poisoned, and Bill was sent by the Pinkerton Agency to get to the bottom of it. He didn’t expect to land smack dab in the middle of an all-out range war, but that’s exactly what happened. With the powerful Cattleman’s Association on one side and land-grant settlers on the other, Wild Bill knew that before this was over he’d be testing his gun skills to the limit if he hoped to get out alive.

  THE KINKAID COUNTY WAR

  WILD BILL 2

  By Judd Cole

  First published by Leisure Books in 1999

  Copyright © 1999, 2014 by Judd Cole

  Published by Piccadilly Publishing at Smashwords: September 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 The Dalton Gang at Coffeyville, 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

  “Keep your eyes skinned, kid. We’re easing into good ambush country now.”

  James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok made this remark as the trail in front of the two horsebackers began to wind through a rocky gorge in central Wyoming’s Powder River country. Steep slopes on either side were thick with wild plum and chokecherry bushes.

  “What’s your plan, Wild Bill?” demanded his eager, fresh-scrubbed companion, nineteen-year-old Joshua Robinson. The young greenhorn from Philadelphia rode his first-ever horse, a gift from Wild Bill. The Sioux-broke grullo, or blue mustang, possessed exceptional wind because its nostrils had been slit.

  Josh watched Wild Bill’s calm, fathomless eyes constantly scan the rocky slopes. He rode a big strawberry roan with a white blaze on its forehead.

  “Same plan as always, comfort before business. First we get rooms and a hot bath in Progress City,” Bill replied. “Then I plan to wrap my teeth around a beefsteak or two before I scare up a poker game and a bottle of bourbon. After that, we look up a gent named Elmer Kinkaid.”

  “Is he the gent who hired a Pinkerton man?” Josh pressed.

  “To chew it fine,” Wild Bill corrected the kid, “it’s the Kinkaid County Cattlemen’s Association that hired me. But Allan tells me this Elmer fellow is the big bushway hereabouts.”

  “Allan” was Allan Pinkerton, founder of the American West’s first detective agency. Hickok had worked with the Scotsman during the Civil War, gathering reconnaissance for the Army of the Potomac. Now Wild Bill, somewhat reluctantly, had become Pinkerton’s best “continental operative.” Bill vastly preferred the glory days, when his reputation was worth a lucrative hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month salary for bouncing cowboys around as marshal of Abilene.

  But Josh, a newspaperman who was also the official western bureau for the New York Herald, knew that Bill’s reputation as a dead shot had finally turned against him, as such reputations inevitably do. Now Hickok was the most sought-after human target in America—especially since, while marshal of Abilene, Bill had killed a trouble-seeking Texan named Harlan Lofley. After that, Lofley’s wealthy and doting father had placed an open bounty on Hickok’s head: ten thousand dollars in gold double eagles to the man who could prove he killed Hickok.

  “Yeah, Bill, but besides just talking to Kinkaid,” Josh persisted, “what else you got planned?”

  Before he replied, Bill nodded off to their right. Josh watched a fat, shaggy yellow coyote slink off through a gully.

  “He’s been eating good,” Bill said, as if thinking out loud. “I never saw a coyote that fat and sassy. Matter fact, they all look that way around here.”

  Josh assumed Wild Bill was just making another one of his odd observations. The lad admired Hickok greatly. But Wild Bill was a puzzling study. As Josh had written in one of his nationally read columns about Wild Bill: “The man measures corn by his own bushel.”

  “Bill?” Josh reminded him. “What else you got planned?”

  Bill, head still swiveling slowly from side to side as they rode, flashed strong white teeth under a neatly trimmed mustache.

  “You’re a damn good scribbler, Longfellow. Better than Ned Buntline, and that jasper made me famous, the ink-slinging son of a bitch. But my granddaddy, Otis Hickok, told me writers are the maggots of society.”

  Josh purpled with anger, but Bill laughed. “Ahh, don’t get your pennies in a bunch, kid. I’m just playing the larks with you. Otis was a writer. You’re a good man to ride the river with. But sometimes your tongue swings way too loose. I don’t want the whole damned Kinkaid County to know my next move before I make the damn thing. Y’unnerstan’?”

  Actually, Josh did understand, and his anger eased away like a snowflake melting on a river. Some men, Bill was reminding him, came out west to escape injustice; others to escape justice. A man had to be careful, for often it wasn’t easy to tell them apart.

  They finally cleared the gorge and rode around the shoulder of the last big bluff before the rolling graze-land began.

  “There it is, kid,” Bill announced. “A grazer’s paradise.”

  Josh saw lush green grass rolling off toward the eastern horizon, so thick the wind moved through it in waves. Cattle grazed in little, isolated bunches, mostly splotchy Longhorn stock drifted north from Texas ranges. But Josh also saw a few plowed fields with the new “devil wire” strung around them to keep cattle off.

  Wild Bill sat his saddle, gazing below them while he slid a cheroot and a sulfur match from the pocket of his leather vest. He struck the match with his thumbnail, then fought the wind for a light, barely winning. He watched a farmer, tiny as a grasshopper from here, walk slowly back and forth behind a mule and plow, cutting furrows.

  “See those sheep clouds?” Bill remarked, gazing into the vast blue dome of sky. “That means rain in twenty-four hours. Place could use it. Don’t let that green grass fool you. Spring snowmelt was down this year, way down. One drought, this far west, spells bad trouble for the hoe-men. Means the wheat won’t head. This is better cattle country than farmland. But it’s the damned government’s fault. Preaching all that swamp gas about how ‘the rain follows the plow.’”

  Josh knew Bill was alluding to the Homestead Act, which allowed new settlers 160-acre land grants at $1.25 per acre, provided they established dwellings and “proved up” the land. The railroad barons and other entrepreneurs were eagerly enticing eastern farmers farther and farther west to establish new communities along the railroad lines. But this reckless expansionism was pitting the homesteaders against the cattle kings, and something had to give.

  “Gee up, Fire-away!” Bill pressured the roan with his knees, and the two riders moved down onto the open ranges. Though it was still late April, the afternoon was brittle with hot sun. But Josh knew that, come dawn, there would be a thin powdering of frost on the grass.

  The trail, two thin ruts
established by the Overland coach, dipped between two broad knolls covered with jack pine. Abruptly, a dead Longhorn steer cropped into view ahead of them, lying perhaps ten yards off the trail.

  Wild Bill reined in, swung down, and handed his reins to Josh. Walking a bit stiff-legged from an old leg wound, Bill crossed to the bloated carcass and knelt to examine it.

  “Poisoned,” Bill finally announced. “With strychnine, just like Pinkerton said. You can tell by how the tongue twisted and turned blue.”

  Josh wrinkled his face in disgust at the putrid stench. The corpse was crawling with bluebottle flies. And it wasn’t the only dead Longhorn they spotted— piles of bleaching bones dotted the area as they rode on east toward Progress City.

  More and more barbed wire—“bobwire” to the cowboys—showed up as they rode into the heart of Kinkaid County. In many places, the wind had piled Russian thistles against the fences. Toward sundown, the riders reached a spot where an old plank bridge crossed a clear, sand-bottomed creek.

  “If we keep on,” Bill said, consulting an Army map Pinkerton had given him, “we won’t likely make Progress City until midnight or so. Might as well pitch camp right here for the night, ride in by daylight. I don’t like to kick hotel clerks awake.”

  Josh could hear the disappointment in Bill’s voice. The man was indifferent to human company but not to human comforts, particularly poker and his beloved Old Taylor bourbon. Nor was he one to ignore a high-toned woman, if one was available.

  The two riders loosed their cinches and pulled their saddles, then dropped their bits and bridles before tethering the horses in good graze near the creek. Following Bill’s example, Josh used handfuls of dry grass to rub down his sweaty mustang. Both animals were also curried and checked for saddle galls before the men turned to their own needs.

  Josh watched Wild Bill carefully study the terrain around them in the gathering darkness.

  “We’ll build a fire,” he decided. “But we’ll keep it in a pit. Pinkerton warned me before we rode out of Denver, somebody will likely be watching for us. Before you turn in, make sure that gun I gave you is loaded and ready to hand.”

  Josh, busy crumbling bark kindling into a fresh-scooped pit, watched Bill carefully select a cottonwood with a five-foot bole, then sit down with his back to it. Josh had never known a man more constantly aware of his surroundings—or a man with greater need to stay aware.

  As usual, Bill relaxed and tended to his weapons while Josh took care of the camp details.

  “You know, Longfellow,” Bill remarked, rolling out the cylinder on one of his pearl-gripped Colt Peacemakers and checking the loads, “Bill Hickok is usually a one-man outfit. I didn’t think much, at first, about your idea to sidekick with me for a while. But I have to admit it, you’re a handy man to have along. Handy as a pocket in a shirt, matter fact. Good cook, too. Say, knock us up some grub, wouldja? You cook damn fine beans, kid.”

  Josh was plenty proud to actually be riding shotgun with the most famous gunman in the West. But he couldn’t help wondering sometimes if Bill didn’t tolerate him just to get a free cook and manservant.

  Darkness settled over them like a black velvet cloak. The hum of cicadas rose and fell in a sweet, harmonic cadence. A fish jumped in the nearby creek.

  “Put a trotline out before you turn in,” Bill suggested. “We’ll have fresh bass for breakfast.”

  Josh separated the halves of his bull’s-eye canteen, turning it into two metal dishes. He began spooning hot pinto beans into them. Both men ate in silence for a few minutes.

  “Wild Bill?”

  “Mmm?”

  Bill finished his first helping of beans and pushed back from the glow of the fire pit. Josh could barely make him out against the cottonwood, picking his teeth with a twig. Josh started spooning more beans into Bill’s dish.

  “All this cattle poisoning—you think it’ll get rough for us?”

  “Kid, it can get rough in cattle country. Rough as boar bristles. Especially in the cow towns like Abilene and Hays City on a Saturday night. But say? If you ever spent some time in the mining camps of the Black Hills, you’d call everything else a Sunday stroll. We may never have to bust a cap on this job. These cowmen and farmers, why, they’re tough and stubborn, sure. But they’re no shootists. I’d wager that—”

  The sudden, nearby detonation of a rifle cartridge instantly closed Josh’s throat. The dish he had just handed to Wild Bill flew from Hickok’s hands, hot beans spattering both men.

  Bill reacted before Josh could even get his heart started again. He leaped forward, tackled Josh, and rolled hard with him, flinging him into a natural sink for cover.

  “Cover down, kid, and stay there!”

  There was just enough buttery moonlight for Josh to see what happened next. Wild Bill utterly amazed him by quickly rolling out into the open. The man came up on his heels, fanning the hammer of one of his Colts.

  Because Bill couldn’t exactly pinpoint the dry-gulcher, he opted for overwhelming firepower. Josh watched him tuck and roll, tuck and roll, firing again each time he came up from the ground. Red fire streaked from his barrels. He emptied both guns, twelve rapid shots in a sweeping arc.

  Cartridges clinked as they fell against rocks. Josh whiffed the acrid stink of spent cordite. When Bill’s guns fell silent, Josh heard distant cursing, then a horse’s hooves pounding out across the flats.

  “You okay, kid?”

  Josh swallowed the stone in his throat. “I think so. See anything, Bill?”

  “All I spotted was the blue barrel of a Winchester.”

  Wild Bill slapped dust from his trousers and retrieved his flat-brimmed black hat. Before he did anything else, he thumbed cartridges into his empty revolvers.

  “I started to say,” Bill commented sarcastically, “I’d wager this job will be easier than rolling off a log. But I forgot how sly Pinkerton is. That old skinflint has sent us up Salt River once again, kid. From here on out, keep your nose to the wind. I see now that lead will fly.”

  Chapter Two

  A fancy fringed surrey, with fresh blacking on the dashboard and a new whip in the socket, eased to a stop in the narrow alley behind the Progress City Land Registrar’s Office. The driver wrapped the reins around the brake handle and leaped athletically to the ground.

  Johnny Kinkaid hustled around to the passenger’s side and handed down a young woman encumbered by hoop skirts and a huge silk bustle. She wore widow’s black, although the period for a veil and gloves was long past.

  “Won’t be but a few minutes in here, Dottie,” Johnny assured her. “Then I’ll drive you back to your place.”

  The woman was pretty, but had a coarse, roadhouse manner about her. “Could you maybe stay out to my place a bit?” Dottie suggested, searching to make eye contact with him. “Like you done last time? Maybe have a look at that busted pump? It gets .. . difficult for a lady that’s lost her man in this godforsaken wilderness. I mean . . . there’s so many things that go ignored when a woman’s by herself, if you take my meaning?”

  “I take it,” Johnny muttered, biting off the rest of his sarcastic thought. Firmly pressuring her by one elbow, he led her toward the raw plank door at the front of the land office. “We’ll see, hon. Business before pleasure.”

  The scornful twist of Kinkaid’s mouth was a family trait. He was about twenty-one, good-looking and well aware of it, with cold eyes as gray as morning frost. He wore a big, Cavalry-issue Smith & Wesson pistol, holster tied low on his right thigh.

  Dottie scowled at his brusque manner. The pig! Nothing came before a Kinkaid man’s pleasure, and they’d tell any lie to bed a woman. But she could feel the weight of new Liberty Eagles clinking in her drawstring purse. So as they entered the cramped cubbyhole of the land office, Dottie dutifully tried to look sad and grieving.

  “Mornin’, Sam!” Johnny called out to an anemic little clerk wearing sleeve garters and a green eyeshade. He was swatting at flies behind a scarred deal counter. “S
tir your stumps, buddy! We got another title transfer. Section 977. It’s a quarter-section down on Turk’s Creek.”

  “You betcha, Johnny! G’day, Mrs. McGratten.”

  Sam Watson tossed his feather flyswatter aside and began searching in his file drawers. They held titles, and records-of-claim for titles, representing thousands of sections of land in vast Kinkaid and Converse Counties. Good land sold for next to nothing under the Homestead Act.

  “Here we go,” Sam said, pulling a title out and studying it through thick bifocals. “Section 977. Will that be transferred into Elmer’s name, Johnny, or yours?” Sam asked in his best ingratiating manner.

  “Mine,” Johnny said. “And just in case your trail should cross my old man’s, which ain’t likely with him crippled up like he is—you keep all this dark from him, y’hear?”

  A gold coin bounced off the counter and was whisked into Sam’s fob pocket before it could bounce twice.

  “You betcha, Johnny. Just sign here in your husband’s place, Mrs. McGratten, may Corporal McGratten rest in peace.”

  “An American hero,” Dottie agreed piously, though in fact her man had died of syphilis while on an extended scout in Sioux country. It had been reported as a combat death to spare the frontier Army’s already tarnished image.

  Dottie scrawled her name with a steel nib Sam dipped in a pot of ink for her.

  “Heard of any new soldier’s widows?” Johnny asked the clerk bluntly while Dottie pretended deafness.

  “Not yet, but I’m watching the Police Gazette.”

  Sam assured Kinkaid. “It lists every soldier killed, by location, and names his immediate family.”

  “Good man.” Johnny nodded, affixing his own signature to the deed as the new owner of Government Section 977. “Don’t forget, Sam. One gold shiner for every name.”

  For the past year or so, Johnny Kinkaid had secretly been hiring soldier’s widows to register land filings. He was usually able to buy the titles within months of filing—sometimes even weeks. By federal law, the service period of a soldier killed on duty was subtracted from his widow’s required period of residence upon a homestead.