“Make it real slow,” he says, and hooks his thumbs into that red sash just forward of the white gun-butts on both sides.
My left hand crawled upwards like a caterpillar on a wall, caught the brim, and depressed it an inch. Then I turned my palm forward and flung open my fingers.
At the same time I went for my gun with my right hand. For a particle of a second I didn’t know what Wild Bill was doing; if you remember, he had trained me to concentrate on myself at the instant of action. So I didn’t rightly see him draw, but I sure saw the muzzle of his Colt’s spit lead and smoke directly at me.
CHAPTER 22 Bunco and Buffalo
I SURELY WOULD HAVE BEEN KILLED had I not employed a trick.
I caught the sun in my mirror-ring and reflected its glare into Hickok’s eyes, then dived to the ground. Though momentarily blinded, he drew as efficiently as always and sent two shots a-roaring through the space occupied by my head a scant instant before. But he couldn’t see nothing but green spots for a time, I reckon, for he next lowered his sixguns and stood there blinking. He looked right pathetic, now that I think of it, for all his six foot of dressed deerskin, trimmed with fur.
I laid quite safe there in the street, under his fire, but I daren’t speak a word on account of he could then have sighted on the sound of my voice. I had my own pistol out, and could have killed the great Wild Bill at that point and gone down in history for it.
Well, the moment of silence wasn’t any longer in reality than the moment of gunfire, and then Bill says: “All right, hoss, you whipped me again. Blast away.” I don’t answer. He says: “I tell you you better fire, because in a second I’m going to kill you if you don’t.”
That fellow with the wagon had pulled to the side of the street and crawled under his vehicle, still several blocks distant. But two shots wasn’t enough to wake anybody out of bed in them days, especially that early of a morning, so we as yet did not have no other audience so far as I knowed.
“You trying to play me for a fool?” says Bill, right exasperated, and he sent three more hunks of lead blowing through the air that I had lately vacated, then does that so-called border switch, the flying transfer of his guns. And his vision cleared some by now, so I guess he could make out I was laying on the ground, and he come over and prodded me with his boot and says: “Oh, I got you anyway,” taking me for dead and wounded. I laid there with my eyes closed.
Then he says: “I’m sorry, hoss. But it was fair, wasn’t it? I taught you, didn’t I? And now I’m going to carry you over to the doc, and if you are dead I’ll buy you a nice funeral.”
I figured by now he would have put away his gun, so as he bent over to pick me up, I come to life and shoved my pistol into his nose.
“Are you satisfied?” I asks. “I could have killed you ten times by now.”
Living his type of life, he didn’t have much energy to spare for astonishment. He squinted and backed up with his hands in the air. Then he let them down slowly and laughed a huge guffaw.
“Hoss,” he says, “you are the trickiest little devil I have ever run across. You know there are a couple of hundred men who would give all they owned to get a clear shot at Wild Bill Hickok, and you throw it away.”
He was laughing, but I reckon somewhere deep he was actually offended, such was his idea of himself. He would rather I had killed him than take pains to show I was basically indifferent to the fact of his existence so long as I could protect my own hide.
He tried one more thing to pry from me an admission that I was fascinated by him. He says: “I guess you can go about now saying how you put a head on Wild Bill Hickok.”
I says: “I’ll never mention it.” And I have kept my word from that day to this. I wasn’t going to give him no free advertisement of any kind. That was the trouble with them long-haired darlings like him and Custer: people talked about them too much.
His mustache drooped in disappointment, but he laughed again to keep up the hearty front, and he says: “I’m going over to Abilene to be the marshal. If you ever get over that way, hoss, why I’ll be proud to buy you a drink. But damn if I’ll ever play poker with you again.”
He shakes with me. I don’t know that I have mentioned that his hands was right small for a man his size, and his feet as well-as little as my own, almost. Then he turned and walked away down the street, straight as a die and certainly not swaying, yet with that hair hanging down his back and the long buckskin tunic descending almost to his knees like a dress, I was reminded of a real tall girl.
I stayed in Kansas City all the summer of ’71 and continued to earn my and Amelia’s living at the poker table and continued to cheat and was finally caught a time or two at it and shot once in the calf of the leg by a fellow, but it wasn’t permanently damaging, being only a derringer, and on another occasion a man took a knife after me, and I had to shoot him in the hand.
Anyway, after a few such incidents, I commenced to get a bad reputation. It got more difficult to find people to play cards with, and once I did have a game, I was watched close. If I played with any of them other able practitioners of the violent arts that was in K.C. that summer-Jack Gallagher, say, or Billy Dixon-you can be damn certain I kept my nose clean: for the more you know about gunfighting, the more respect you have for those to whom it is a specialty.
Little Amelia’s spending grew to wondrous proportions. I come back to the hotel one day and found a grand piano, made of mahogany, in our parlor-room, and along with it some elderly German gentleman with a beard and eyeglasses, come from St. Louie along with the instrument to tune it and give lessons in the playing thereof. Not only did I owe for the piano and the shipping costs, but also for this individual’s wages and his room and board-so far as he was concerned, in perpetuity, I suppose, for though in time Amelia might learn to play unassisted, the instrument would need tuning for the rest of its life.
I never did figure out whether or not he was a confidence man, but he seemed a real German all right, and sure knowed his music, except it was hard as the devil to get the bastard to play any piece as such and not just the scales over and over, in the course of which he’d get out his set of tuning forks and monkey about with the wires and hammers.
The whole bill was well into four figures, though I don’t recall the precise sum, for I blacked out when I saw it. However, when I recovered from the shock, I was really kind of proud of Amelia for her initiative. Seems she had just got the address of the piano manufacturer, sent them a letter on the stationery of the hotel saying send your best model, and by God if they never, without even a deposit, upriver from St. Louie along with that German. Lucky for me, he didn’t care nothing for the nature of his accommodations, being a pure fanatic for his music, so I had him bunk down on a cot in the corner of my bedroom, and that was all right with him, and he lived on sausage and rye bread, when he remembered to eat at all, so I saved a little that way.
I must say though that Amelia never did learn to play the piano well. That was the one thing she did awkward, and the result wasn’t much more tuneful than had a cat got to walking on the keys. Used to drive the professor crazy, and he’d storm and yell and tear his beard, and once I recall when she was attacking a particular exercise for the ninety-ninth time and making the same mistake at every instance, the German cried like a baby.
After a couple months, Amelia come to me and says: “Uncle Jack, do you mind if I send the piano away? It has grown to be a dreadful bore.” That’s the way she talked now, sort of like an English person, with her mouth made small and sending the words through her nose. Sure classy it was.
And of course I agreed, for I wanted her to be happy, so I bought the German a return passage, a loaf of bread, and a hunk of cheese, and I hired some brawny fellows to take the piano out and crate it up and put it upon a riverboat back to St. Louie. But as it happened that boat got into a race with another craft, which they was always doing in them days, and fired up so high its boilers blowed and the son of a bitch burned right down to the waterline, the piano with it. I still owed something like $930 on that instrument, and was the frequent recipient of threatening correspondence on the subject, followed by duns wearing derby hats and carrying various types of documentation: dispossess papers and all, and when they found there wasn’t nothing to reclaim, they believed I ought to be imprisoned for it, but a lawyer I hired worked out some arrangement by which I would pay them fifty dollars a week for the rest of my life, so they eased off, and the lawyer charged me only two hundred dollars for
