Then I realized we hadn’t ought to stay at that hotel, which was not buggy or anything, but it was in the rougher part of town, flanked by a couple of saloons, and there was uncouth fellows sitting around the front, spitting tobacco juice all over the floor, and some of them might have knowed Amelia from Dolly’s. So by God if I didn’t go to the swellest place in K.C., with fancy gaslights and plush furniture in the lobby and flunkies in gold- braided outfits, and hire us a combination of connecting bedrooms with a nice parlor between. Must have cost seven-eight dollars a day or more. I don’t recall. I do remember the management was right snooty, but I threw money around like seed and their attitude changed directly.
Amelia herself didn’t do me no harm there, for it is amazing how she took to the new life. I suppose that Mormon upbringing hadn’t been so bad, as a foundation, and then her natural spirit added the rest, along with what she got from ladies’-fashion papers I bought her and the studying she did of the high class of women who resided in the hostelry: Senators’ wives and daughters, and those of Army generals and leaders of commerce. She developed a walk that looked like she was on tiny wheels beneath her long skirts, and when she took a cup of tea her dainty hand was raised like a bird in flight.
And pretty, right pretty she proved to be, with that turned-up nose and little mouth, and her hair was bright as a fall leaf when it had been washed a couple times and set by a professional hairdresser. The men around the hotel was fascinated by her, but discreet and respectable, not gawking nor licking their lips and such, like the kind of louts I always hung out with heretofore.
Well, this was costing me a plenty and within a few days I had peeled so many bills off my roll that it was down to the size of my little finger, with the hotel account still unpaid and growing by the hour, for Amelia was continually ordering things to be sent up to our rooms. And that was as it should be, for I wanted to keep her in seclusion until the genteel way of life become a habit that replaced whoring in the way she thought of herself.
I had been to several schools so far without finding the right one, for various reasons: at some, the withered spinsters in charge looked at me over their pointy noses and says they was full for the next five years; and I’ll tell you this, there was others who reminded me of Dolly.
But I had to get more dinero somewhere. Now the only thing I could figure doing to raise it was to go back over in the Market Square area again and play poker. Them buffalo hunters had real big games every night, generally starting after twelve o’clock, when they returned from the theaters and dance halls, and running into the morning. When I say big, I mean with luck you might walk away from the table at about four-thirty A.M. with two- three hundred dollars. This time was good from my point of view: I could see Amelia safely to bed and then slip out, play all night, get back in before she arose, and nobody the wiser. For I didn’t want her to know her uncle was gambling: that was the sort of life from which I had sworn to protect her.
The first night I was over to Market Square, I run into Wild Bill Hickok. He was sitting in his favorite corner of that saloon where he shot Strawhan’s brother, and when I entered, he waved me over. He was with some others in a poker game and had just won a big pot.
“Hoss,” he says to me, “I have missed you. I never took you for the type of man who would run off with a crib-girl.”
I did not like this reference to Amelia, but to protest against it effectively I would have had to admit she was my kin, and I didn’t want to do that.
“Yes sir,” he goes on, “if you are as mighty a poker player as you are a lover, I’d take it kindly if you would sit in. You,” he points at the man directly across the table, “give him your chair.”
This man looks miserable, but ain’t slow about complying. Now of all people I did not want to play against Wild Bill. For I neglected to say earlier that I intended to cheat. I know there are people who take dishonesty at cards as one of the nastiest sins in the world. I don’t admire it greatly myself, but figured my cause was sufficient to justify it in this circumstance. I guess that’s what everybody says about every type of unscrupulosity employed by himself, but I ain’t preaching morality here, I’m merely recording history, and what happened at that time was I proposed to cheat my opponents to the hilt. Except I never expected to be in a game with Wild Bill Hickok.
So I played honest for a couple hours and by two o’clock in the morning I was down to my last five dollars. Now I took hold of myself and reflected that little Amelia was all I had in the world. Either I got the money to make a proper woman of her, or we was back where we started, in which case it didn’t matter if I was shot by Wild Bill. I saw I never had a choice in the matter.
Now, Frank Delight who had a crush on Caroline and was a master of games of chance, had showed me several devices that put the odds on the side of the man what employed them. I really had not practiced enough to manage the ace-up-the-sleeve, which the expert can make to appear more swiftly than the eye can follow; and the same weakness applied to the fake shuffle, in my hands. So what I done was to use the mirror-ring. This is an ordinary finger ring that has a good flat surface on it somewhere, highly polished, which will reflect the markings on the cards as you deal them facedown. So that you know what your opponents are holding and can play accordingly.
I had purchased a brass ring and filed down a plane surface for about a quarter-inch on the underside of its good wide band and buffed her up, and she was small enough not to be detected, yet adequate to transmit the information. I hadn’t dared to use it so far, but now when the deal came to me I rubbed my palms on my coat as if to dry off the sweat but in reality polishing up the tiny looking-glass on the inside of my left hand, and started in.
Directly, Wild Bill’s winnings started to dwindle, and I reckon it was five-thirty in the morning when he finally pushed over the last of his pile and with a funny smile says: “Well, friend, if you are as good a lover as you are a gambler …” His voice trails off and he gets up and strides out the saloon door into the morning, showing his back all the way, so you could see he was right upset.
I haven’t mentioned them two other slobs we played with, being they was the kind who figured it a privilege to be beat by Wild Bill. There was a number of flunkies around there who took turns losing to him every night. Now as I was putting away my win-it turned out to be a little over a hundred dollars-these men smirked at me and then each other.
And the one says: “I recall the late Hank French. He also won from Wild Bill at poker.”
I just sneered at them and went out from the nightlong stink of smoke and liquor into the pure morning. You had to keep your face in them days, and it is just as well they was behind me when I seen Hickok waiting in the street outside, his silk hat cocked forward, his golden hair streaming over his shoulders, his fine white hands hooked by the thumbs into his lower vest pockets, with them two pearl handles a-jutting out of both hips. Down the street come a man trundling a handcart, and across the square someone was saddling a mule which was blowing out its belly as they always do so the cinch straps would be loose, and the owner was fixing to kick him in it.
Well sir, I thought, here’s where I get it after all these years of close calls, for Hickok was going to drill me for cheating him, and Amelia would return to whoring, and I had failed again.
But I would not back down to Wild Bill even though in this instance he was right. I don’t know why: I was afraid of him, yet at the same time his presence was a challenge to me.
So I stepped out through the swinging doors onto the porch and says: “You waiting on me?”
He gives me that famous level look for one long, breathless moment, and then he suddenly relaxes and says: “Come on, hoss, let’s get some breakfast.”
It was over our steak and eggs and fried potatoes that Wild Bill says: “Anybody who plays poker as well as you ought to learn to handle a gun.” I don’t know whether he meant it sarcastic or not, nor did I understand his motive in offering to give me his expert instruction free of charge. But I accepted, and that’s what we got to doing every morning after them games: me and Wild Bill would eat and then we’d ride to the edge of town and we’d shoot. And I found that though I had carried a revolver for years and had used it upon occasion, in comparison with Hickok I knowed very little of the weapon.
He talked more of the technical specifics of pistols, holsters, cartridges, etc., but we spent most of our time practicing marksmanship and the fast draw. I gathered that, before he took me along, he come there anyway by himself, for like a fine piano player a gunfighter had to rehearse continually lest he lose the precise touch. Here’s the exercises Wild Bill used to keep his hand in: driving a cork through the neck of a bottle and splitting a bullet on the edge of a dime, both at a range of forty-fifty feet, starting with the guns in his pants. I would hold a silver dollar chest-high, drop it, and before it struck the earth he’d have drawed, fired, and hit the dime so that the soft- lead .45 slug was cut in two equal parts.
Maybe the first thirty times I tried this, I even missed the length of the board in which the dime was
