Dead Man's Hand Page 6

  Even hungover, Jane had no trouble shooting a plump rabbit at fifty yards. She skinned it and cooked it on a spit over a driftwood fire. By the time she had scattered the ashes, she heard it in the distance to the northwest: the chuff-chuff-chuffa of an approaching train.

  Jane knocked the dottle out of her pipe and moved closer to the stone bed of the tracks, where she hid behind a brushy knoll.

  “Bill Hickok, you handsome bastard,” she declared out loud, “you’re worth a sight more to me than ten thousand dollars! God wants us together, Wild Bill, and you need my steady hand. Here I come, honey!”

  All through the night, while Vogel slept like a dead man, Josh napped and woke, grabbing sleep in handfuls. Each time the young reporter’s eyelids fluttered open, Wild Bill and some affable, bearded giant in a pillow-tick cap were bluffing each other over a hand of poker.

  It was still pitch black outside when Josh gave up and rolled out of his bunk. Bill nodded toward a fresh pot of coffee on the little stove. He and the giant, bleary-eyed man were still playing cards.

  “Yellowstone Jack,” Bill said, nodding toward the sleepy youth, “meet Joshua Robinson, a newspaper fellow from the City of Brotherly Love. High school graduate, too, by God! He could solve all the world’s troubles, if only someone would hire him to write about them. All that, and he’s fresh off ma’s milk.”

  Josh flushed while the brakeman flashed a snaggle-toothed grin. “Cap’n Bill’s a son of a bitch, ain’t he, pup?” Yellowstone said cheerfully, sorting out his discards. “He’s been cheating all night long.”

  The Ice Train steamed into La Junta, in southeastern Colorado, near dawn and remained on a sidetrack all day long, drawing fair-size crowds to see the ice machine in action. The once sleepy little cattle town was currently booming, and no wonder. With prices for beef back east going sky-high, a modest herd of three thousand Longhorns might fetch a rancher a hundred thousand dollars—yet, he could drive the whole herd to the railhead here at La Junta for about a dollar a mile.

  For the demonstration, the machine was placed on a loading dock under Vogel and Wild Bill’s watchful eyes. The milling crowd included townies, cowboys, cattlemen, buyers for the feedlots, as well as local sheep men and outlying homesteaders and miners lured in by all the fanfare.

  Josh spotted Bodmer and Elena several times, venturing into town to frequent the cafes and shops. He also spotted Bodmer’s two hirelings, skulking about the edges of the throng. But the onlookers included deputies and soldiers, too, and Bill and Vogel were safe, for the time being, in this crowd.

  “You see how close Bodmer got to the ice machine earlier?” Josh asked Bill. “He even tried to peek inside while the professor was distracted.”

  Bill nodded. “We’re coming between a dog and his meat. Bodmer made a mint from ice, but now he stands to lose everything if his competitors get that machine first.”

  “The professor told me,” Josh said, “that man-made ice will bring the cost down to less than a tenth the cost of natural ice. But there’ll be even more profit in it.”

  Professor Vogel had cheered up noticeably during the demonstrations. He seemed bolstered by the crowd’s oohs and aahs when glittering gems of ice tumbled improbably forth into the furnace heat of the hard-baked plains.

  Free cocktails and soft drinks were provided, deliciously chilled with Hilda’s ice. Vogel also demonstrated how emergency “ice beds” were being used to successfully save fever patients once given up as dead.

  Josh and Wild Bill occupied ladderback chairs beside the humming and vibrating machine. Bill had pulled his hat low and was keeping his distinctive pearl-gripped Colts covered with his coattails to reduce the chance of being recognized. Even so, now and then a tongue-tied cowboy asked permission to touch him for luck.

  “I’ve read every book Ned Buntline ever wrote about you,” Josh said. “Does he tell the truth?”

  Wild Bill mulled the question while his eyes stayed in easy motion, scanning the busy scene around them. “Ned Buntline” was the pen name of E. Z. C. Judson, a smart and cynical dime novelist and “promoter” who had made first Buffalo Bill Cody, then Wild Bill Hickok, a legend—and Judson himself wealthy.

  “No,” Bill finally admitted. “Mostly he lies. The mountain men call it ‘tossing in another grizzly.’ But nobody wants him to tell the truth, kid. Facing the truth is like staring right into the sun. So Ned ‘shades’ things a little for popular consumption.”

  “I won’t do that,” Josh swore.

  “If youth but knew.” Bill grinned, watching Bodmer emerge from the train, alone this time, and head toward the nearest saloon.

  “I won’t,” Josh insisted again. “Even if my editor won’t print it. I’ll record the real truth for . . . why, for posterity, I suppose. Somebody will print it someday. Times will change.”

  “If youth but knew,” Bill repeated, still tracking Bodmer’s retreating figure. He stood and brushed cigar ashes off his clothing. “Look, kid. Stow the idealistic chinwag and keep your eyes peeled for trouble. I’m going to stretch my legs a bit.”

  Elena was so furious and depressed that she had locked herself in her private sleeper for nearly an hour to cry into her pillow. How dare Randolph demand that she let him into her sleeper tonight! If she loved him, perhaps demands wouldn’t even be necessary. Hers was a passionate Latin temperament, and she was unrestrained by the usual chaperones. But in this case, she thought, there would be more honor in selling her favors outright. At least then she would be an honest whore!

  Now, hearing her fiancé exit the train in a huff, she quickly fixed her tear-streaked makeup and went back out into the privacy of the Pullman. Elena curled up on a cushioned sofa with one of her penny dreadfuls.

  She was still trying to pick up the silly plot thread when someone tapped at the door behind her.

  “Go away!” Elena called petulantly.

  The visitor rudely disregarded her command and let himself inside. Elena’s eyes widened and she put her book aside, sitting up. “You! But. . . but I said go away.”

  “And I will,” the handsome man assured her. “Madam, I intend no disrespect. But your ... male companion paid an unwelcome visit to my car yesterday. I just wanted to return it.”

  Wild Bill Hickok touched the brim of his hat, smiled, then started to turn and leave.

  “Perhaps your presence is not unwelcome to me,” Elena said, surprising herself at her bold words.

  A smile touched her visitor’s thin, expressive lips. “May I ask you a question?” he said.

  “Is it personal?”

  “Very.”

  She flushed slightly, not expecting such candor. But curiosity led her on. “Yes? What is it?”

  “I’ve read that the tight lacings on ladies’ corsets kindle impure desires. Have you found that to be true?”

  This time Elena flushed deeply to her very hair. But she met his mischievous eyes boldly.

  “They crack the ribs,” she replied. “They weaken the lungs, constrict the internal organs, impede circulation, and disrupt digestion. They sometimes make us swoon, too. However, I do not believe they inspire prurient interests.”

  “I’m sorry to learn that,” Bill said, touching his hat again and turning to leave.

  “However,” her voice called out behind him just before Bill shut the door. “You certainly inspire them. Do stop by again, Mr. Hickok.”

  The dining car was located behind Bodmer’s private car. Bill wove his way past white-jacketed waiters, who moved around cat-footed, balancing trays on their fingertips. Then Bill realized Bodmer was back, staring at him from the opposite end of the car—obviously trying to figure out if Bill had just come from seeing Elena.

  “Did you enter my private car, Hickok?” Bodmer demanded when Bill reached him.

  “Just came to see what’s for dinner,” Bill replied quietly. “Get out of my way.”

  Bodmer squared his shoulders, standing his ground. “Don’t piss down my back and tell me it’s raining
, Hickok! Did you enter my car?”

  “If and when I do, I won’t have to pick the lock. Now, I won’t say it again, Bodmer. Get out of my way.”

  Something in Hickok’s tone sank through to Bodmer, and he did as ordered. But he called out to Bill’s retreating back: “The worm will turn, Hickok! It’s going to be a long tour. We’ll see who gets the last laugh!”

  Chapter Ten

  Bill Hickok had learned, during his lonely vigils as a military scout, that a man never had to go without sleep. In fact, he was carrion bait without it. But the trick to staying alive was not to sleep too deeply.

  It was just past midnight. Bearing due east now, the Ice Train was rolling through the grasslands of central Kansas. They had just crossed the all-important hundredth meridian, the official rainfall-demarcation line where the long grasses of the wetter East gave way to the short-grass prairie of the drier West.

  Josh and Vogel were asleep in their bunks, lulled by the rocking caboose and the metronomic click-clack of the wheels on the tracks. Wild Bill, mistrustful of both doors, sat with his back to the south wall of the caboose. This left him with a clear view of—and a clear shot at— both doors.

  Bill had dozed off some time earlier while playing five-card draw against himself. Now cards lay scattered on the table in front of him. But his confrontation earlier with Bodmer had left Bill primed for trouble. So now, to make sure he didn’t sleep too well, the frontiersman employed a reliable trick he had invented years earlier while he was sheriff of Abilene.

  Wild Bill’s right hand, clutching a heavy bunch of keys borrowed from Vogel, dangled over a metal washbasin he had placed on the floor. As he settled deeper into sleep, Bill’s fingers began to relax their hold on the keys.

  Bill dreamed of high stakes and pretty women and friendly saloons. But soon all the cards in his dream had somehow ended up spattered with blood and scattered on a saloon floor. The rhythm of the train wheels began to whisper to him over and over with sinister clarity: Aces ’n’ eights, aces ’n’ eights, aces’ n’ eights.

  “What?”

  The keys jangled hard as they fell into the washbasin, and Bill started awake, his face rigid with the focus of combat. A Colt filled his right hand even before he realized it was his voice that had just spoken that single, perplexed word.

  But all seemed well. Both doors were still closed and securely locked. Vogel, sawing logs like a rusty crosscut blade, slept with one protective arm draped around Hilda’s temperature gauge.

  Bill’s heart quit thudding so loudly in his ears. Still ... he felt the cool tingling of his scalp that often preceded danger.

  “You awake, kid?” Bill said in a low voice. But Joshua only muttered something incoherent, smacked his lips a few times, and resumed his steady breathing.

  Bill yawned. He stretched the kinks out of his muscles, then poured a few more fingers of bourbon into his pony glass.

  He cast his eye about for something to read. The first thing he spotted, poking out of Josh’s new left boot, were the pages of the next dispatch the kid meant to file. He had fallen asleep working on it.

  Knowing he shouldn’t look, but too bored and curious not to, Bill pulled the pages out and let his eyes fall to one of the body paragraphs:

  Wild Bill does not, like the mountain men who blazed the trails before him, despise civilization. He likes bourbon and gambling and women, among other amusements and comforts. But since youth Hickok has always been close friends with solitude. He has no deep need of human company or to sink roots in one place. He has always spent most of his time out beyond the settlements, always needful of pushing over the next ridge, always ducking the ultimate arrow.

  “‘The ultimate arrow,’” Bill repeated out loud, forgetting himself. “God kiss me! The kid is better than Buntline!”

  Josh’s sleepy voice abruptly surprised him. “You really think so, Wild Bill?”

  “Sleep tight, kid,” Bill assured him. “A man can’t even shovel it this deep. You’ll get on.”

  Soon Josh was asleep again. But Bill, wide-awake now, drew each Colt in turn and palmed the wheel, checking his loads. He found himself wishing, once again, that Yellowstone was on duty nights instead of sound asleep right now in the crew caboose.

  Bill had never had much patience with men who acted like superstitious squaws. Nonetheless, he couldn’t shake that ominous dream voice from earlier: Aces’n’ eights . . . aces ’n’ eights . . . aces ’n’ eights.

  Randolph Bodmer sat alone in his Pullman, drinking strong black coffee laced with whiskey and stewing over his earlier brush with Hickok. He started when a conductor poked his head in.

  “Just a quick water stop, Mr. Bodmer,” he explained. “We’re at a little hamlet called Rushville. Be here about ten minutes.”

  Bodmer nodded and came to his feet instantly. It was well past midnight, and Elena had locked herself inside her sleeper hours earlier. Even before the train squealed to a stop, Bodmer leaped down and waited for Big Bat and Dog Man to join him in a smoke, as arranged earlier in La Junta.

  “Got the ropes?” Bodmer demanded.

  Big Bat nodded. A crewman was busy swinging a water hose into place to fill the train boilers from a storage tank mounted on tall stilts beside the tracks. Smoking and making small talk about the weather, the three men began strolling back toward the blue-black shadows at the rear of the train.

  Despite the late hour, other men, too, had detrained to catch some fresh air and stretch their legs. Like different instruments tuning up, snatches of disparate conversations reached Bodmer’s ears as he passed the various groups.

  “—one hell ’a gold strike up in Dakota territory,” a portly businessman in vest and suspenders was explaining to several listeners. “The Homestead Mine is now the most productive gold mine in the Western Hemis—”

  “—so the night before they drive the beeves to market,” the next fellow, a richly tailored cattleman, was narrating, “they fed the entire herd massive amounts of salt. Next morning they watered the herd, just before weigh-in, and friends, those cows tipped the scales! They—”

  “—was in Harpers magazine, my hand to Jesus! This doctor says the bathtub is a carrier of diseases, especially when filled with hot water and—”

  “Why, who is he? Just the son of the Russian tsar, is all! Imagine it. Grand Duke Alexis Romanov will soon be touring the American West—”

  “—read how this new Vaseline has become all the rage with cowboys. Those yahoos all keep a jar of it in their saddleba—”

  Bodmer and his companions drew deeper into the silent shadows, even with the final caboose and well away from the other passengers.

  “Stay below the windows,” Bodmer warned them. “Work quick!”

  While Bodmer kept watch, Big Bat pulled several short lengths of rope—tied into loops— from under his shirt. He tied these at key spots on the side of the caboose—located so that a man might grab hand-and footholds and reach the windows.

  Meantime, the slim and lithe Dog Man had slipped into a cramped space between the wheel well and the frame of the caboose. With great care and discomfort, he could hug the axle housing.

  “All ahh-bohh-ord!’’ a conductor sang out from up front. Bodmer headed back toward his car, gravel crunching under his boots.

  “Remember,” Big Bat whispered to Dog Man, now tucked out of sight. “Vogel is small potatoes compared to Hickok. You heard that cocksure son of a bitch. He made his brag to our faces that he means to kill us. Let daylight into that bastard!”

  The brief water stop, and Vogel’s wheezing snores, roused Josh from his fitful sleep.

  For the next hour or so, while the Ice Train steadily ate up the prairie, Bill sat with his head against the window and taught Josh the rudiments of survival poker. Josh noticed that Bill kept one of his cocked Peacemakers on the table.

  “It’s mostly water stops now, kid,” Bill remarked at one point, tossing down a hole card. “But right after the war? Christ, trains had to make
unscheduled stops all the time so the crews could cut down horse thieves vigilantes used to hang from the bridges.”

  However, Josh had happily noted that the “Wild West” was still alive and kicking. Each time the train passed through an especial notorious cow town, for example, the brakemen were ordered to douse their running lamps— drunk cowboys loved to shoot them out. And once, men had to be recruited from the third-class coaches to help shovel grasshoppers off a stretch of track—the crushed mess was too slick for the iron wheels to gain a purchase.

  Finally, sometime around two a.m., Josh felt his eyelids growing heavy. “A flush beats a straight,” he muttered to himself. “And a full house beats a flush.”

  He returned to his bunk, still muttering.

  “Don’t let the bedbugs bite,” Bill told him, riffling the deck. The last thing Josh saw, before tumbling over the threshold into sleep, was Wild Bill sitting there at the little table, his head resting against the window.

  And behind Bill, the black-velvet fabric of night, its inky fathoms the color of death.

  Dog Man could barely twitch a muscle for fear of tumbling off his precarious perch. But he could glimpse an opening above him. Now and then, when the tracks passed near water, trees abruptly crowded the rail bed, and branches over Dog Man’s head made cracks in the moon.

  The half-breed bore his present discomfort with a stoic indifference. He had learned, while riding with Roman Nose in the days before the Indian Wars, to develop the endurance of a saddle horn. A man simply needed to close his eyes and visualize his suffering as a bright red ball. Then he only had to visualize putting that ball in a box outside of himself.

  Thus Dog Man was able to wait a full hour before he carefully extricated himself from his perch. One groping hand found a loop of rope; he swung out, dangling like a mail sack, and cursed when his flailing legs failed at first to find another rope loop. But in a few more seconds, Dog Man was securely flattened against the south side of the swaying caboose, both feet jammed into loops like stirrups.