“Uncle Jack,” she would say, coming to the door of her room as we was fixing to go out, “would you prefer I wore the paletot or the basque or the sacque this evening?” These was all types of women’s coats of that day. Now I didn’t know one from the next, but since I was flattered to be asked, I’d make a choice and she would don it, for her major delight lay in pleasing me. Now you have that attitude on her part, and then you have mine: I found pleasing everything she did, for it was all graceful and sensitive, and her voice, which had been right tinny when at Dolly’s, had turned as pretty as the sound of a spring bubbling out among ferns. I got an immense joy out of just seeing her eat a plate of food. I’ll tell you how refined she was: you couldn’t see her teeth when she chewed, and she was so quiet about spooning up a bowl of soup that if your eyes was closed you’d never know what she was up to.

All this she had worked out on her own, for them ain’t the kind of things you can teach a person, and God knows I am hardly an instructor in deportment. But my experience with Mrs. Pendrake had give me at least this: I know class when I see it, and insofar as was within my power I could encourage Amelia when she headed in the right direction, which meant I had to maintain that flow of money, which in turn kept me cheating at cards.

Which brings me back to Wild Bill. I didn’t want to play against him, and some evenings managed to elude his company. But he’d come looking for me from saloon to saloon, and when he caught up, would run one of the three other fellows out of their chair, take it, and proceed to lose. It was strange, too strange for my stomach, and I got to not using the mirror-ring after he set down-while making the most of it before he showed up, so the evening would still show a profit.

Now what that ring done, it never gave me better cards than the next, but rather the knowledge of what hands the other fellows held and then only when I was dealer; it was not nearly so dishonest as palming an ace, say; a certain skill was still required, and pure luck determined what cards a man would get from the deal. I can’t say my luck either improved or worsened when using the ring. But here’s the oddity, whenever Bill set down and I refrained from employing the tiny mirror-played square, that is, my luck commenced to run extreme and fantastic. Flushes, straights, three of a kind, pairs: they flowed to me as if by magic.

Bill played doggedly on. And always we went to breakfast afterwards and then out to our range; and other than that queer look that come over him when I took my first pot of the evening and never left it till I walked from the saloon to meet him in the street outside-for he continued to leave first-he did not display anything that could be termed bad feeling, suspicion, spite, or envy.

As to the shooting lessons, I figure they served him as an exercise in pride, reminding me directly after every poker session that, whereas he had lost, he was pre-eminent in the more serious game of chance in which the stakes is life and death-for though we was shooting at dimes and corks, you could not overlook their similar diameter to that of the human eye.

However, I believe that when Wild Bill Hickok faced a man he looked at his opponent’s eye as if it was a cork.

I was getting real good with my weapon against them inanimate objects, and I was fast. Though speed itself was of lesser concern than accuracy, for as Bill said what mattered was putting your bullet where you wanted it to go. He had seen a fast man fire three shots before a slow man got off one; but the three missed, whereas the laggard’s struck the quick man dead center.

’Course, he says, there’s where the personality come in; whether fast or slow, there was one perfect shot for each occasion, and you killed or died according to how close you come to achieving it. Once arriving at your decision to fire upon a man, your mind become a blank, and your will, your body, and your pistol merged into one instrument with a single job. It was as if the gun growed out of your hand, your finger spat lead and smoke. Indeed, that was the technique of aiming: like you was pointing to make emphasis in a argument. On such an occasion the ordinary person is naturally accurate: notice next time, he says, when you are in a verbal quarrel; if your opponent’s finger was a gun, you’d be dead.

One morning we set up twin boards with dimes protruding from slots in them, and both me and Wild Bill went back twenty paces and fired. We both split our bullets perfect on the dimes’ edge, and the two shots sounded as one explosion.

“Hoss,” says Hickok, looking down at me over his hooked nose and blond handlebars, “I have taught you all that can be learned out here. The rest is to be had only from a target that shoots back.”

“That must have been luck,” I says. I meant it. He could have repeated that performance all day; whereas I knowed I couldn’t have done it more than say twice out of five: you can tell that about yourself. I also had the definite feeling he had not used all the speed of which he was capable.

“I don’t believe in luck,” he answers, and his voice was like the cracking of a whiplash. But he drops the subject then and appeared his old self on the ride back to town.

Wild Bill Hickok had devoted friends and sworn enemies. Mention his name anywhere in Kansas during the ’70’s and you could get a sharp reaction on one side or the other, and there might have been more men killed in arguments about him than he himself ever sent under. There was some people, I suppose out of envy, who even insisted he was a second-rate shot as well as a coward, and of course that greater number who had him doing impossible feats.

So in the face of all that I submit this experience of mine with the man in Kansas City in ’71. It wasn’t everything he done that period by a long shot; he even played poker with others and won. But I’m saying what I knowed of him personally. When I weigh all the pros and cons he comes out even.

He learned me about the precision handling of a revolver. However, had I never met him it was likely I could have got on right well without that specialty, which was not the necessity you might imagine for surviving in the West. Take the incident with Strawhan’s brother: if Wild Bill had not been expert at gunfighting he would have got killed; but if he had not been a gunfighter, Strawhan’s brother would not have been after him in the first place. So what did Hickok actually do for me? Show me how to save my life? No, rather he give me a new means by which to risk it.

I felt a curious relief when them lessons had ended, and somehow I got to believing that I wouldn’t see him no more across the poker table, either. Nor did I for a night or two, and a fellow told me Hickok had been offered the marshal’s job in Abilene, which was one of them new towns on the railroad to which the Texas men drove up their cattle for shipment East and when they got there the cowboys collected their pay and went wild till they was broke, drinking and whoring and shooting, and not long before had killed the then marshal, Bear River Tom Smith, who had enforced the law with his fists. So now Abilene wanted to hire a gunfighter.

“Reckon he’ll take it?” I asked.

“Sure do,” said that fellow. “He ain’t killed nobody since Strawhan’s brother.”

This was a typical opinion about Hickok: that he enjoyed sending people under. So many of them who admired him liked this idea, for in any white population there is a vast number of individuals who have murder in their hearts but consider themselves too weak to take up its practice themselves, so they substitute a man like Hickok. A Cheyenne enjoyed killing, but not Wild Bill: he was indifferent to it. He had barely looked at the corpse of Strawhan’s brother except to check whether it would draw on him again. In fact, I don’t think Hickok enjoyed anything. Life to him consisted of doing what was necessary, endlessly measuring his performance against that single perfect shot for each occasion. He was what you call an idealist.