I pretended my horse had strayed somewheres, so Johnny Jump lent me an extra animal they had took from the stage. I still didn’t have no gun, though. We rode till twilight, and then I pointed at a grove of trees and said that was the place my boys would be or come to later, and so we stopped and built a fire and ate some bacon and beans from a bag of loot they had, for as they went about the countryside this bunch would kill anyone they met and take whatever he was carrying. In fact, we had passed a little farm on this trip, and I only had kept them from pillaging it by promises of the mayhem we all would wreak after collecting the rest of my boys.

I didn’t notice that Jim Smoker had dropped behind, for he rode always in back anyway, but he was gone when we went into the grove and only showed up later while we was feeding. He wore a different hat and carried two bottles of whiskey and led another horse behind his, to which was lashed all manner of booty: bags of sugar and corn, blankets, coal-oil lamps, and even a little footstool.

Johnny Jump spoke to him in Creek and then laughs hee-haw. “My cousin just had to drap by that place we went past back a piece. He cain’t resist a thang, being a chile at heart.”

I was sorry for the poor folk what had lived on that farm, but I guess they was out of pain now, and the way it turned out, the ill wind that blowed them a sudden death saved my life. For I couldn’t have kept up the pretense of meeting my gang beyond the following morning and would have gone under for sure. But what happened instead was that Johnny Jump and Jim Smoker shared them bottles of whiskey, and after Johnny got a bellyful of liquor he commenced to turn sentimental. It seemed he was a poet in addition to an outlaw, and setting there beside the fire, with tears running down his cheeks to mingle with the whiskey leaking over his chin, he recited verse of his own composition.

The darlin’ love of all my life,

In women I never had no other,

The sweetest thang in this vale of strife,

Was always my dear Mother.

And now she is in heaven

Where the angels play them harps,

For in years it is six or seven

Since I laid away her carpse.…

There was ten or twenty more stanzas to it, which I don’t remember no more, and when he gets through he lets out a great howl of agony and picks up his rifle and shoots Jim Smoker between the eyes. Then he gives Cockeye a couple in the spine where he lays sleeping, and finally empties the rest of the magazine of his sixteen-shot Henry into the blanket roll topped by the coonskin cap which I had earlier arranged to represent myself.

After which he lays back and goes peaceful to sleep. I come back from behind the tree where I had watched all this, picked up the Henry he had dropped, got me the two best Colt’s in the bunch and all the horses, and left, heading north. I considered putting a bullet into Johnny Jump’s head and so do a lot of his future victims a favor, but in addition to my dislike for cold-blooded murder, I had developed a soft spot for him. It might have been on account of that poetry.

The next couple years I spent in transit, mainly looking for Caroline and Frank Delight, so as to get some money from them, for as I have said, I couldn’t go kill Custer as broke as I was. What I had not known when down in the Nations was that the U.P. had reached Utah and linked up with the Central Pacific around the time I left the Creek family with whom I spent the winter of ’69. The railroad was done building, that is, having spanned the continent. But with the proceeds from selling Johnny Jump’s little horse herd, which I had drove to Topeka without further incident, I rode the coaches on out west from Omaha, anyway, figuring my relations might have settled their saloon business in one of the towns that had sprung up along the line.

At every station I inquired for Caroline and Frank, with no result, but I had always wanted to take a look at San Francisco anyway, so rode on out there, by when I was sure glad to get off the railroad for a spell. That transcontinental road was a wonder of civilization no doubt, but what with stopovers I had been riding them lurching cars for a week and had swallowed an awful lot of smoke and ashes as they blowed in the open windows, and every now and again a live spark would start a little fire in the green plush seat-upholstery or someone’s clothes. However, they said the train went twenty-five miles an hour, and I don’t doubt it.

I wasn’t in San Francisco long before I run out of my money, for everything was terrible expensive. You couldn’t get a decent meal for less than fifty cents. And I don’t know why, but them hills the town was built on commenced to depress my spirits: you feel great upon the summit, but then you always have to come down sometime and when you do, it’s like you been demoted. I had lived too long on the flat.

Nor could I locate Caroline and her husband, though I must have traipsed through every cheap saloon and bawdy house in the place, and that took me several months, for that town wouldn’t take a back seat to none in the disrespectful entertainments. When my money was gone I got work in a livery stable, forking hay, shoveling manure, and the like. It was all I could get at the time. Then one day a fellow come in from the south of California and I heard him say they was a-looking for wagon drivers down there, to haul freight from San Pedro to Prescott, Arizona, and would pay good money for it.

It was the spring of ’70 when I reached Pedro and found the man who had the hauling business. At first he doubted a man of my size and figure could handle that employment.

“This is a hairy job, my friend,” he says. “If the desert don’t get you, the Apache will, and if not him, then the outlaws. The Salton Sink is a hundred mile of fiery hell where you feed your animals in the harness and keep moving lest you shrivel in your tracks. You got twenty days to make four hundred and fifty mile, and I don’t want my mules kilt doing it.”

Suffice it to say I convinced him to take me on, and he says: “I’ll take a chance on you. Couple years back I hired a boy of seventeen and he turned out fine, though he was big for his years.”

That’s the kind of thing you have to put up with if you’re my size. But the reason I mention this is he said the boy was called Wyatt Earp. First I ever heard the name, but I remembered it because of its unusual sound, sort of like a belch.

The boss wasn’t exaggerating none about the hairiness of that run, and during the time I was making it we encountered all the obstacles he listed, but thinking it over, I’ll take heat, sand, Apache, or bandits in preference to ten mules every time. What I found toughest to manage was to refrain from getting a club and beating them animals to death. I drove mules in the grading of the U.P., but that beast’s character worsens with the kind of terrain he has to cover. Though as I guess can be said of a lot of humans, his very nastiness is what pulls him through.

Same goes for me. I stuck at it throughout most of ’70 and never got no sweeter in the process. But I earned good money, and then went back to San Francisco in the winter, bought me a fine outfit of clothes and a Smith amp; Wesson revolver of the model called “American” that had just come out, a beautiful .44-caliber weapon.

Then I bought me a first-class ticket on the U.P. to Omaha for one hundred dollars and two dollars a day for a sleeper on top of that, for I was going back to kill George Armstrong Custer in style.

CHAPTER 20 Wild Bill Hickok

I REACHED KANSAS CITY in the spring of ’71, which had growed considerably since I had knowed it as Westport, and if you recall, Fort Leavenworth was nearby. No sooner had I hit town when I found that none other than the Seventh Cavalry itself had wintered there, General Custer commanding. He was often to be seen over in K.C., at his tailor’s, at restaurants, and at theatrical performances, being extremely fond of the last, as might be supposed from his character. His Lady was ever by his side, and she was so pretty it was said both men and women turned around when she passed by. Of course, the General was right comely himself.