Black Hills Hellhole (A Wild Bill Western Book 6) Read online

  Bill held to the point as they ascended a brush-covered bluff. Wind gusts pelted their faces with dust and grit, and both riders pulled up neckerchiefs against it.

  Hickok halted at the crest of the bluff and thumbed back his hat for a better view below. Josh hauled up beside him, slacking the reins so his mount could crop grass.

  “I dared to dream,” Hickok announced with evident sarcasm, “and now it’s come true. I’m back in Deadwood.”

  “Man alive!” Josh’s voice was keen with disappointment as he stared at the squalid sight below. “That’s it?”

  Bill snorted. “Longfellow, I’ve seen some pleasant foothill towns in my time. Deadwood ain’t on the list.”

  Josh stared at rutted, garbage-choked streets and a haphazard collection of hovels and huts. The original mining camp had been established in a saddle between two hills. Now it spilled up the slopes of both hills, spreading like a rash.

  “I see there’s a few new redbrick buildings since I was here last,” Wild Bill remarked. “There’s the brick kiln, see it? And that big headframe above it must be Harney’s Hellhole.”

  Even as the two men watched, gunshots and shouting erupted. A mob burst out of a saloon, dragging a struggling man. They tied him behind a horse and whacked it on the butt. The animal bolted, dragging his unfortunate victim along the ground like a loose picket pin.

  Josh winced. “He’s bouncing over rocks, Bill!”

  Bill nodded. “Out in Tombstone,” he pointed out calmly, “it’d be cactus.”

  “I wonder what he did?” Josh said.

  Bill found this amusing and shook his head. “Kid, you’re a caution. He exists, doesn’t he? That’s a felony in Deadwood.”

  Josh paled slightly as it finally sank home: In search of an exciting story, he was entering that frontier death trap. A town so risky and dangerous that it humbled even Wild Bill Hickok.

  As if reading the kid’s thoughts, Bill added: “According to Calamity Jane, I’m going to die down there someday. In the Number 10 Saloon.”

  “The Number 10?” Josh repeated.

  “There’s so many saloons in Deadwood,” Bill replied, “most with girls in rooms topside, that the owners decided it’d be easier just to number ’em. Daddy Driscoe’s Number 10 became the most popular.”

  Bill pointed to a ramshackle building with water-stained boards.

  “That’s the feed stable,” he told Josh. “You can inquire there about rooms for let. We’ll split up now. You ride in from here, I’ll circle the bluff and come in from the southeast.”

  Josh nodded, trying to quell the nervous thudding of his heart. He had faced plenty of trouble at Hickok’s side. But now he was riding—alone— into the most dangerous hole in America.

  “Since I mentioned the Number 10,” Bill added dryly, “let’s meet up there later, around nine tonight. At the bar. We’ll just be two strangers chewing the fat over a cold beer.”

  “The Number 10?” Josh glanced at his companion. “Tempting fate, are’n’cha?”

  Hickok’s strong white teeth flashed. “When don’t I? You didn’t come out here from New York City just to write about a prudent man, now didja?”

  Josh grinned back. “Nope,” he admitted. “But how did I get in the middle of all the danger?”

  “Just lucky, I guess,” Bill informed him, kicking his roan into motion.

  ~*~

  Cassie Saint John was in a dangerous mood as she reported for work on Monday morning.

  Cassie was the wildly popular faro dealer at Deadwood’s Number 10 Saloon. The Number 10 had always been fancier and more respectable than the rest of the clapboard-and-canvas watering holes in town. It featured a stair railing of antique brass that wound up toward the rooms of the sporting girls. There were even a few battered billiard tables sporting bullet holes and patched felts.

  Cassie sat within a half-circle of clamoring bettors, pretty and proud and demure, while a well-armed case-tender called out each card like a circus barker.

  Her foul mood had been triggered by news of the brutal death of her friend Owen McNulty. But as usual, Cassie’s outward manner remained calm and benignly indifferent to her seamy surroundings. A thoughtful person, however, might notice that Cassie’s little Mona Lisa smile was always restive—as if she were a woman who harbored secret ideas and ambitions.

  Just past noon three men, all dressed much better than common miners, entered the Number 10. They took their reserved table at the back of the huge barroom. A Chinese waiter hustled to take their order: three strip steaks, bloody rare, and a pail of cold beer.

  Spotting the trio, the bar dog sent a replacement dealer to relieve Cassie. It was tacitly understood that when Deke Stratton, manager of Harney’s Hellhole, entered the Number 10, Cassie must be free to join him—if she chose to.

  Today she did. All three men stood politely when Cassie approached their table, silk bustle rustling. With Deke were his two most constant companions, Keith Morgan, Mine Captain, and Earl Beckman, chief of company security.

  “Cassie,” Deke greeted her in his suave Boston baritone. “As usual, you look pretty as four aces.”

  He drew back a chair for her.

  “Always the gentleman, aren’t you, Deke?” Cassie murmured as she sat down between Stratton and Beckman.

  “Always,” Deke assured her with a little ironic smile. “Unless I need to be something else.”

  Cassie let that comment lie. Deke Stratton was no man’s—or woman’s—plaything. He had started out in commerce by making a cotton fortune in the rich black soil of east Texas. Stratton quickly learned that money is like manure—it works best when you spread it around. So he went into mining, both investing in and learning the business.

  And now look at him. Tailored to the very image of success, with real pearl snaps in his cuffs and a diamond belt buckle worth half the real estate in town. He once told Cassie that if you know how much money you have, you can’t be very rich. His singular goal in life was to become so rich that he’d be the most influential private citizen in America.

  Cassie, too, burned with ambition. She meant to follow Emerson’s advice: “Hitch your wagon to a star.” More than once Deke Stratton had parked his boots under her bed.

  But right now Cassie ignored her occasional lover. Instead, she turned to Earl Beckman. The former Confederate officer was in his early forties, with a sharp little face like a fox terrier.

  “I heard something interesting,” Cassie told him, meeting his eyes directly. “A teamster said he saw Merrill Labun heading toward the Copper Mountain Reservation yesterday. Just hours before Owen McNulty and his clerk were murdered.”

  Beckman blew the head off his beer and took a sip. Then he exchanged brief glances with Stratton and Morgan. Everyone knew that Labun was one of Beckman’s favorite dirt-workers.

  “Now, now, Miss St. John,” Beckman replied in his mellifluous Southern drawl. “You’re commit ting a common fallacy of logic. In Latin it’s called post hoc, ergo prompter hoc. ‘After this, therefore because of this.’ There’s no proof linking Merrill to the death.”

  “That’s a female for you,” Stratton said kindly. “Letting emotions tug them along.”

  “Sure. It’s more likely,” chimed in Keith Morgan, a thickset, balding man with a lumpish chin, “that it was redskins that did the dirty deed. Those godless savages probably sacrificed them to their pagan idols.”

  Cassie glowered at all of them, her pretty face stern with rebuke.

  “The Sioux at Copper Mountain admired Owen,” she retorted. “And they don’t worship idols. They worship the Black Hills—even though they’ve been stolen from them despite a treaty guarantee.”

  “The hell’s got into you?” Morgan demanded bluntly. “Religion?”

  Stratton, however, silenced his subordinate with a glance. Then he looked at Cassie and smiled urbanely. When he spoke, his tone was a thinly disguised warning.

  “Friendship is a fine thing, Cassie. I know that you and Ow
en used to enjoy reading poetry to each other and discussing theater. He was a… cultured man.”

  Morgan started to smirk, but Deke’s eyebrows arched and his mouth set itself hard. Morgan coughed to cover his slip.

  “Unfortunately,” Stratton continued, “South Dakota is no schoolman’s Utopia. And Owen could not distinguish between an idealist and a fool. A fool may be defined as anyone who lets philosophy hinder profits.”

  “Meaning what, precisely?” Cassie demanded.

  “Well, to give it to you with the bark still on it,” Deke clarified, “I mean that Owen was a damn fool.”

  “So was Don Quixote,” Cassie told him evenly. “But I still admire him.”

  This time when the overseer of Harney’s Hellhole spoke, impatience crept into his tone.

  “What’s done is done. Owen’s gone now, and even God can’t undo the past. So why keep tilting at windmills, eh?”

  Cassie wanted to slap the smooth bastard, but Deke Stratton scared her. She watched him now, gazing around the Number 10 with condescension at all these crude men unfamiliar with opera houses and good grooming.

  He seemed to reign over all of them with patrician reserve. And he did own controlling interest in this saloon and several others. But in truth, she knew, Stratton’s fatherly mien was deceptive. He could be absolutely ruthless in controlling events for his own benefit.

  “I guess you’re right, Deke,” Cassie relented, prudently giving up for now.

  “That’s my girl,” Stratton assured her. “This world belongs to the living. The dead are just smoke behind us.”

  Cassie almost choked on his hypocrisy. But fortunately, there was now a diversion unfolding up front. It took Deke’s mind off Cassie’s dangerously nosy questions.

  It all started when the batwings were banged open so hard they almost tore loose from their leather hinges. A stout man wearing greasy teamsters clothing and clumsy hobnail boots stomped in. He clutched the HELP WANTED—ORPHANS PREFERRED sign from the front window.

  “My name is Jim Bob Lavoy, and I’m double rough!” he roared out. “I triple hog-tie dare any of you needle-dicked bug-humpers—’scuze me, ladies—to brace me!”

  Everyone, Cassie included, stared in open-mouthed wonder. Despite his greasy, trail-worn appearance, the new arrival wore an immaculate gray John B. Stetson. Nor could Cassie miss the huge Smith & Wesson tied low on his stout thigh.

  “You, bar dog!” the man roared out in a voice like gravel scraping. “You lookin’ to hire on some help?”

  The man behind the bar, Dabney “Dabs” Boudreaux, nodded.

  “I could use a nighttime bartender. But this place ain’t Fiddler’s Green, mister. Can you shoot?”

  “Can I shoot? Hell, can the pope pray?”

  In an eye blink the six-shooter filled the stranger’s fist. At the first shot, a brass cuspidor on the far side of the barroom leaped into the air.

  But that was only the beginning of a remarkable show. In rapid succession he fired his remaining five loads. The cuspidor flew around the periphery of the building, never once touching the floor until all six shots had struck it.

  In a civilized city like Denver or St. Louis, such a public display would have landed the marksman in jail. Here in Deadwood, however, it drew an immediate round of applause, cheers, and whistles.

  “Hired, by God!” Dabs shouted, and laughter rippled through the saloon.

  “Make him wash, though,” a miner complained loudly. “He stinks like a dung heap!”

  In a heartbeat the new arrival holstered his weapon. With the same movement, he produced a sawed-off pool cue from under his filthy linsey shirt. It whapped solidly against the miner’s skull, and he toppled like the walls of Jericho.

  “You ornery sons of bitches can kill each other for aught I care!” Jim Bob Lavoy called out. “But lay a hand on me, or insult me, and I’ll pop you right on the snot locker!”

  More laughter and cheers. But now Cassie frowned slightly, noticing something strange about the newcomer. He was stout and strong enough, all right. And obviously he was an ace shooter who could cuss like a trooper.

  However, where was his beard—or even the faintest beard shadow? Obviously this “man” hadn’t bathed in days, if not weeks—but he had bothered to shave so smoothly? Hardly likely.

  Cassie thought again about that remarkable shooting demonstration. That was a trick shooting, not usual survived marksmanship. Suddenly, she had a good idea who this “fellow” was, all right.

  But it’s none of my picnic, she reminded herself. Live and let live, Cassie figured. Her only goal was to enjoy life as much as possible without hurting anyone.

  That last thought, however, reminded her of Owen again. Live and let live.... Cassie glanced at Deke Stratton. His kind was capable of any abomination for one simple reason: They always hired it out.

  As if reading her mind at that very moment, Deke chilled her to her core when he warned her in quiet words: “Don’t go tilting at windmills like your hero Don Quixote, Cassie. Around here, that’s not just wildly romantic and foolish. It’s downright deadly.”

  Chapter Three

  Wild Bill didn’t have to worry about drawing attention to himself as he entered Deadwood on horseback. The narrow main street bristled with big, high-wheeled ore wagons pulled by long double teams of mules. These huge conveyance screened a lone rider.

  The rammed-dirt sidewalks were crowded with staggering drunks, most of them miners or drifters on the dodge. Vendors hawked everything from matches to Rocky Mountain Oysters—deep-fried bull testicles, a popular and cheap food in mining country.

  Bill passed a harness shop, a stage-line office, a myriad of saloons, and an undertaker’s parlor— this last quite prominent and prosperous looking. The stench in Deadwood was strong enough to tickle Bill’s gag reflex. Chinese workers in floppy blue blouses and long braids hustled to water down the dust choking the streets.

  Hickok reined in at the feed stable and turned his roan over to a doltish-looking kid with a big goiter on his neck.

  “Curry him good, then grain him,” Bill said, flipping the kid a silver dollar. “Don’t stall him nights unless the weather’s bad. No spurs or whips either. This is a docile animal unless he’s mistreated—then he’s trained to be a man killer.”

  “Yessir, don’t you worry none. He’ll get treated good here. I like horses a helluva lot better’n I like most folks. No offense meant, sir,” he added quickly.

  Bill grinned. “None taken, son.”

  “That there is a fine horse.”

  Bill nodded, watching him. “What’s your name?”

  “Lonnie, sir. Lonnie Brubaker.”

  “No need to call me “sir”, Lonnie. I work for my living same as you. The name’s Ben. Glad to meetcha.”

  They shook hands. Wild Bill eyed the young hostler thoughtfully. True, he didn’t appear to be the brightest light in town. But Bill’s roan was usually a standoffish animal around strangers. Yet, he had instantly taken to the lad and now nuzzled his shoulder. Men good with animals, Bill knew, usually possessed other useful traits, too. And here in Deadwood, Bill needed any help he could get.

  Hickok saw Josh’s line back dun in a nearby stall, still feeding. He decided to test this kid.

  “I’m looking for a fellow,” Bill lied. “Young kid, little older than you, clean-cut, wears a derby. Seen him? Nuther dollar in it for you.”

  Bill wanted an element of danger to the question. So he deliberately grabbed his sheathed scattergun as he asked his question. The kid eyed it, swallowing audibly.

  “No, sir,” he lied right back. And that was exactly the answer Bill wanted to hear. Rather than profit, the kid chose to protect a man from possible wrongdoing. He was a rare thing in this hellhole: decent.

  “We’ll talk again, Lonnie,” Bill promised as he walked off, lugging his gear.

  Bill’s altered appearance left him feeling somewhat secure from the challenging glares of Deadwood ‘s denizens. Nonetheless, Hi
ckok’s first priority was to find a place where he could get off the busy street.

  He knew of a big boarding house at the far edge of town, owned by an old trapper’s widow named Elsie Nearhood. Hickok stayed there last time he drifted into Deadwood—before he had become a “celebrated frontiersman.” And before a grieving father in Texas placed a ten thousand dollar bounty on Bill’s life for gunning down his outlaw son.

  Wild Bill crossed the street, waiting first to let an ore wagon rattle past, sideboards straining. Above town, on the treeless slopes where men scurried like insects, a huge steam whistle blasted—announcing a shift change at the mine.

  Hickok was in luck. Elsie Nearhood was still in business and had one room to let.

  “It’s itty-bitty,” the stout, steel-haired matron warned him as she led him up a flight of rickety stairs at the rear of the house. “Used to be a servant’s quarters. No window, so it gets a mite warm. But I’ll knock eight bits a week off your room and board, Benjamin.”

  The room Elsie showed him was hardly more than a cubbyhole. A pedestal washstand with a metal pitcher and bowl, a crude bed of leather webbing, and one ladderback chair comprised the furnishings. Several nails in one wall took the place of a closet.

  “Looks fine,” Bill said stoically, paying her for two weeks in advance.

  “No women up here,” Elsie added when the money was already in her pocket.

  Bill grinned. “Where would I put ’em in this packing crate?”

  Elsie was talkative and prone to gossip. Bill needed to get a sense for the way the townies felt about Harney’s Hellhole and the men who ran it. Back downstairs in her parlor, as Elsie wrote out Bill’s receipt, he remarked casually:

  “I’m planning on applying at the mine for work. Think they’re hiring?”

  “Oh, you’ll get on,” she assured him. “If you’re that crazy to want to. That old hellhole kills men about as quick as the big nabobs can hire them. Matter-of-fact, that’s why I’ve got a room empty.”