Point Rider (A Wild Bill Western Book 7) Read online

  Even as he oozed these words of praise, Pinkerton slid an envelope from the breast pocket of his coat. Josh glimpsed the official seal of the U.S. War Department in one corner.

  “Joshua, an extraordinary and dramatic chapter in American history is now unfolding up north in the South Platte country of Nebraska. Do you know who General Jeremy Schuster is?”

  Josh nodded. It was his job to know such things. Schuster was known as Old Sobersides to his men, for the strict Methodist had never been seen to smile or laugh.

  “Schuster’s commander of the Department of the Dakotas, which is mainly Sixth Cavalry troops.”

  “Precisely.”

  Pinkerton handed the youth the letter.

  “A stern, sometimes petty, but effective and fair officer. Takes his duties very seriously. Read that, lad.”

  Josh did. As he progressed, his reporter’s instincts became alert like hounds on point.

  Dear Mr. Pinkerton,

  The U.S. Army requires your agency’s assistance in a matter of grave importance. Or more accurately: the services of just one of your operatives, J. B. “Wild Bill” Hickok.

  A precarious situation exists regarding the Sioux Indian tribe under Chief White Bear, all officially wards of the U.S. Government since they live on the reservation near Ogallala. Repeated raids, presumably by renegades who have jumped the reservation, have cut off almost all food supplies to the Sioux.

  As you know, they are forbidden by treaty from hunting. But most food crops planted by the Indians have been deliberately destroyed. Fish streams and game watering holes have been poisoned, and the few remaining buffalo this far north have been slaughtered or driven south. Making a bad situation even worse, I have just learned that Chief White Bear has been murdered.

  At this news Josh looked up, his beardless face astonished.

  “Why, I knew Chief White Bear! It was his tribe that Wild Bill and Professor Vogel saved from mountain fever with Vogel’s ice machine.”

  “I remember,” Pinkerton said coyly. “Oh, I remember, Joshua. You had every literate man, woman, and child in America on tenterhooks waiting to read how that one turned out.”

  Josh returned to Old Sobersides’s letter.

  In light of this dire situation, the Army has received an unusual command. We are ordered to procure 1,000 head of good butcher beef and see that it gets up north to the starving Sioux. Since trouble is expected, the drovers will not be cowboys per se, but well-armed enlisted soldiers with experience handling cattle.

  I consider it imperative that Hickok serve as point man for this mission of mercy. Based on my at times spotty intelligence reports, the dangers are considerable. I relied on Hickok’s vital reconnaissance at Antietam Creek during the Great Rebellion. This man has protected U.S. mail, stagecoaches, freight wagons, and railroad crews. He’s also the only sheriff who ever managed to clean up Abilene, Kansas, albeit only temporarily.

  Upon receiving a favorable response from you, Allan (please use the telegraph, as time is urgent), a detail of ten soldiers, under the command of Lieutenant Mart Carlson, will be immediately detached for special duty from Fort Trinity to San Antonio.

  The Sioux have ample reasons, some fantastic, others real, for mistrusting white men. But Wild Bill is a hero to them. Their plight, I repeat, is dire. I hope to tell them, very soon, that the Ice Shaman is returning to save them.

  On behalf of the Army and the American Government, I thank you for your urgent attention to this matter.

  Josh handed the letter back. “Schuster mentions renegades who’ve jumped the rez,” the reporter said, a skeptical dimple appearing at the corner of his mouth. “Is he sure renegades have done all these things he’s mentioned? I mean, it doesn’t make sense they’d poison Indian water holes. And where did they get poison?”

  Pinkerton spread his hands in a gesture of Gallic diplomacy. “I think the general understands, without stating as much, that somebody besides the Sioux is causing the trouble. That’s why he needs Jamie on this drive.”

  “I don’t know,” Josh said doubtfully. “I mean, the Sioux are in a dirty corner, all right, and it’s a crying shame. But Wild Bill riding point for a cattle drive? I’ve been sidekicking with Bill over a year now—he’s not so fond of the saddle anymore.”

  Pinkerton conceded this with a nod. “Danger doesn’t bother Hickok nearly so much as hard work.”

  “Yeah, and punching cattle is hard work. So I wouldn’t get too set on him for this job.”

  “Oh, I’ve already wired Schuster. I told him Hickok will definitely take the assignment.”

  Josh winced. “What, you mean before you talked it out with Bill?”

  “Son, time is nipping at our sitters! I took the liberty of speaking for Jamie. Those soldiers are on their way here. But I want you to think carefully about all this, Joshua. Think like a newspaperman, understand?”

  Josh did. And he grasped instantly what Pinkerton was up to—promotion. He wanted the weight of the New York Herald behind this one.

  “Bill saved this tribe once before,” the youth pointed out. “And when he did, it got more ink than anything since Charles Dickens visited America.”

  “Yes, and that one incident,” Pinkerton confessed, “sold the ‘detective’ to Americans. I opened three branch offices to handle all the cases I received.”

  “So if Wild Bill could save the same tribe once again, the story would be even bigger.” Josh marveled as Pinkerton’s thinking became his own.

  Pinkerton beamed at the kid’s growing enthusiasm. One of the best writers in America was about to take the hook.

  “Joshua, the American people love a winner because they are staunch optimists. Absurdly so, at times. Why, I was there when the First New York Regiment marched off for Bull Run. My hand to God, they wore uniforms from Brooks Brothers and carried sandwiches from Delmonico’s! We know how their ‘two-day war’ turned out, don’t we? All the more reason to adore Hickok—he’s the quintessential American winner.”

  The wily detective-turned-entrepreneur paused, altering his tone slightly.

  “But Joshua, as you just mentioned—you aren’t the only scribb—ahh, I mean writer eager for exclusives on Hickok. I won’t be able to sit on this much longer.”

  Josh didn’t need a map to see where Pinkerton was going. This story had all the elements of a true Western saga: cowboys, Indians, bad guys, and Wild Bill Hickok, an international hero. Whoever first filed this one would get credit for breaking one of the biggest stories since Custer’s Seventh was rubbed out.

  “One thing I know about Jamie,” the detective added with a confident nod, “is how much he eats up the attention. He understands the vital link between the printing press and his ‘legend.’”

  Pinkerton donned his derby hat and gave Joshua a hearty handshake.

  “Remember, laddie-buck, the early bird gets the worm. And no man in America has told the saga of the sagebrush heartland better than you. This story belongs to you—don’t let some other jasper beat you to it.”

  On this flattering note, Pinkerton made his exit. Joshua debated for only a few minutes.

  “I’ll do it,” he muttered aloud, “and I’ll deal with Bill later.”

  Joshua opened his inkbottle, dipped a steel nib into it, and unwittingly began creating what would soon become Bill Hickok’s worst nightmare.

  Chapter Two

  “Boys,” said Harding Ott, looking around at three of his subordinates, “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. You ever notice that?”

  None of the men drinking whiskey at the oilcloth-covered table had a response, at first, for this odd remark. The two white men were brothers, Jip and Olney Lucas. The third was a full-blooded Hunkpapa Sioux called Bobcat.

  “What’s your drift, boss?” Olney finally asked. “You settin’ up to be rainmaker now?”

  Olney and Jip laughed, and seeing them, Bobcat joined in. His English, which was limited, became almost useless once he start
ed drinking strong water.

  Ott was not the least offended by their taunts. He was a big man, better than six feet and carved from granite, hatchet-faced, with shrewd, hard eyes the color of blood onyx.

  “No,” he replied mildly, pouring himself another jolt of forty-rod. “I’m setting up to be a town maker. My drift is quite simple, gents. Big ideas, and big talkers, are a penny the dozen. But I’m the kind of man who gets ten miles down the road before most men can even decide when to leave.”

  Ott banged the empty bottle on the table a few times. A beautiful Crow Indian woman—still quite young, but already showing hard treatment— stepped past the ratty chenille curtain separating this room from a little slope-off kitchen. The house was cottonwood logs chinked with mud, so crude that nearly transparent animal hides were stretched over the windows in place of glass.

  “Woman Dress,” Ott called out, wagging the bottle at her, “more whiskey.”

  She nodded and hurried to take the bottle from him, going outside to the cellar to fill it from the big barrel of wagon-yard whiskey he kept there.

  Olney kept his glassy-eyed gaze on the woman until she was gone. Both of the Lucas brothers were towheads, but that was where the resemblance ended. Olney, the youngest, was small-framed, wiry, and lithe, with good looks and the cocky swagger of a natural-born killer. He wore two Colt Lightnings tied low, the inside of his holsters lightly oiled for an effortless draw.

  Jip, in contrast, was middle-sized and quite ordinary, with dull eyes and a weak chin in a completely unremarkable face. He was one of those men who “run to type,” and thus could easily mingle unnoticed in any crowd. That was handy, especially since he knew how to kill a man six ways to Sunday without ever firing a gun.

  “That squaw of yours puts out good grub,” Olney told his boss. “She put out anything else that’s good?”

  Jip sniggered again, and Bobcat dutifully chimed in. The Sioux had been named for the deep red scars, inflicted by a puma, that ran from his left ear to the point of his chin. His mouth, too, was a mean gash in a face ugly as proud flesh.

  Harding shrugged indifferently. “All cats look alike in the dark.”

  “I only take ugly women in the dark,” Olney assured him. “Not when they’re peart as Woman Dress.”

  “I’ll tell you what, Olney,” Harding offered in affable tones. “You boys manage to do a little job for me, and besides the usual eight bits a day, you can have Woman Dress all you want. You too, Jip. She’ll do anything I tell her. She has to—I paid her clan a good price to own her.”

  The Lucas boys exchanged a long glance.

  “Boss,” Olney assured him, “them’s interestin’ wages, all right. What’s the game?”

  “Money, boys. Mammon. Legem pone. I heard a stump-screaming politician call these Great Plains ‘the broad front door of the westward movement.’ Well, by God, I’m opening that door. I sought my fortune beyond the hundredth meridian, and now I’m finally about to hit pay dirt. So all in all, this is a damn good time for you fellows to hitch your wagons to my star.”

  Jip and Olney exchanged a bemused glance.

  “Boss, did you kiss the Blarney Stone?” Olney asked. “You sent word you had a business proposition for us, not a buncha damned peyote talk.”

  Woman Dress returned and filled all their glasses, then set the bottle near Ott. The moment this was done, she sat on a low, cowhide-covered stool in the back corner; she began grinding wheat in a hand gristmill. Not once did she look at any of the men.

  “Hey, Woman Dress,” Olney called over. “You like being topped by a white man? Are we better’n ’em red bucks, hanh?”

  “What I hear,” Jip tossed in, “is how Injuns ain’t got no hair down there. That true, boss?”

  Ott just laughed and shook his head.

  “You two do beat all,” he reprimanded them good-naturedly. “Did you ride thirty miles to ask me that?”

  “Hell no,” Olney said. “Let’s get down to cases.”

  “Now you’re whistling! All three of you know I’m currently attempting to, ahh, shift some Indians to a new position south of the Platte River. They’d still be on their reservation, just another part of it.”

  He didn’t need to add what all three of them already knew: The part he was “shifting” them to was the worthless part of the reservation. Mineral-poor, sandy soil good for nothing but weeds and johnsongrass, better known as locoweed. No trees for windbreaks from the blowing grit, and no water—not even a rain cistern—for miles around them.

  In contrast, the area presently occupied by the Sioux was perfectly located for Ott’s needs. It was a huge swath of land between the Kansas Pacific Railroad and the Colorado border. A little too dry for dependable crops, it was excellent grazeland if a man had big acreage, for the grass was good but somewhat sparse.

  “This land I’m trying to free up,” Ott told them, “could easily be irrigated. These Indian farmers are just primitive dirt-scratchers growing piddlin’ kitchen truck. White men with science could fetch forty bushels of wheat an acre off that land someday.”

  “You bet your bucket!” Bobcat suddenly spoke up, so drunk by now he was simply spouting English phrases. The other three men laughed at him.

  “Drink up, Bobcat,” Olney encouraged him, filling his glass again. Few things were more entertaining than Injuns drunk on their asses.

  “Problem is,” Ott went on, “I’ve received some information from a soldier I know at Fort Platte. He claims there’s a cattle drive making up right now in Texas. The Army evidently plans to point some beeves north—beeves meant to feed the Sioux.”

  Ott topped off Bobcat’s glass with more coffin varnish. The Sioux was in charge of the twenty-man reservation police force, and somewhat divided in his loyalties—but only when sober. Ott knew the drunker he got, the “whiter” he got.

  “Feed the Sioux?” Olney repeated, a smirk easing his lips apart. “Why? Are the Noble Red Men hungry?”

  All three white men laughed again, and Bobcat joined in only a few beats late, so inebriated by now his eyes were glass buttons.

  In fact, Ott, the Lucas brothers, and the well-bribed Sioux policemen had all joined forces in an effort to drive the tribe south of the Platte. They had robbed shipments of government rations, deliberately destroyed crops, and poisoned any game the Indians might illegally hunt. Ott had even personally killed Chief White Bear and replaced him with a puppet leader named Chinook.

  “By now,” Ott told the others, “the Sioux headmen are finally talking about moving. They’ve got no choice—most of the tribe are so hungry they’re eating their dogs and the tar paper off the reservation school.”

  Ott’s face took on a granite edge. “But if that beef gets through, boys, we’ll be right back where we were—running hard just to stand still.”

  Only now did the full extent of Ott’s meaning— and his dogged determination—show in his voice. Right now Commerce Bluffs—his name for the thriving community that would soon replace the scattered Sioux lodges—existed only in an illegal contract with foreign investors.

  But nearby Ogallala, too, had been nothing but a tent town beside the Union Pacific Railroad two short years ago. Now they were putting down boardwalks and electing a mayor. Commerce Bluffs, too, could be built up in jig time—especially with rich foreigners champing at the bit to get even richer in America.

  “I want that trail drive headed off,” Ott told the Lucas boys. “One way or the other. It’s just a handful of soldiers, and that’s a long drive. If it’s necessary, you can draft a few of Bobcat’s rez policemen to help you.”

  Hearing his name, Bobcat giggled drunkenly. “Kiss my ass, Cochise!” he called out, and the three whites laughed as if it was a capital joke.

  But then the mirth just suddenly bled from Ott’s hard eyes.

  “I don’t care if those cows are rustled, shot, poisoned, or just scattered onto free range,” he told his toadies. “Anything, just so they don’t get through to the tribe. I want
those damned redskins relocated by the first frost. I’ve got investors to pacify and a town to build!”

  On the fourth morning after he rode out of Del Rio, Hickok was wide-awake and smoking the day’s first cheroot. He watched the sun edge over the eastern horizon, still dull and rosy.

  He tapped the cigar out on his boot heel, then dropped the butt in his vest pocket to smoke later. He rolled up his blanket and groundsheet, then gathered some gnarled mesquite wood to build a cook fire. He fixed a good meal of bacon and pan bread, washing it down with strong black coffee.

  While he drank the last of the coffee, taking his time, he made sure to keep his back to a wide cottonwood tree. He had made camp in a little hollow beside a creek, a spot where he could see anyone approaching from any direction.

  Fire-away, grazing on a long tether behind him, trotted over when he saw Bill stirring. The strawberry roan nuzzled his shoulder, then snorted a complaint.

  “I know, boy,” Hickok told the horse, scratching his withers good. “This wiry palomilla grass is poor shakes as fodder. But we’ll make San Antone by noon. I promise—after today, it’s corn and oats and plenty of rest for you.”

  At these words, a smile pulled at Bill’s lips. Plenty of rest for both of us, he vowed. Bill had been invited into a high-stakes poker game in Del Rio, and the luck of the Irish was on him. Now sixty dollars in gold and silver coins bulged the breast pocket of his coat, burning a hole.

  Pinkerton could go piss up a rope for all Bill cared. He was sore and saddle-weary, his tailbone aching from damn near two weeks of steady riding. He was taking a few well-deserved weeks off before he accepted another case.

  Hickok broke camp, rigged his gelding, then quickly washed up at the creek, making sure to carefully comb out his long blond mustache. While he did this, he was careful not to stand too long in one spot, and he always tried to keep his back covered.

  By now it was general knowledge that the man who delivered Hickok’s head to a wealthy Texan named Linton Lofley would earn ten thousand dollars. While sheriff of Abilene, Kansas, Hickok had killed Lofley’s son Harlan in a fair fight.