Elijah nodded. The firelight flickered across his copper face, and even in that silly suit and hat, he looked very, very Indian. The smile lines around his eyes and mouth had fallen off like dead leaves.
'That is correct. The spirits in the wood are old as the world, and they collect to them new spirits when they die, providing those spirits are worthy to become the protectors of the Oglala.'
'You don't say?' Billy Bob sneered.
'Oh, I do say. It is the spirits in the wood that keep the black magic of Hickok inside him, lest it be passed onto the whites. The whites have enough magic, without the gun magic of Hickok.'
'And why don't you, or why didn't your father, let Wild Bill's magic pass onto you Indians?'
'White man's magic. It cannot be used by Indians, and Indians don't want it. We have our own magic.'
'Lot of good it's done you,' Billy Bob said.
'That is quite correct, sir,' Elijah said, 'quite correct.' But his voice had an edge to it, and I was beginning to get spooked. I looked at the body in the box and it seemed strangely alive. It wasn't that I expected it to get out of that box and walk or nothing. It was more like what that medicine man was saying about spirits and all, and there was something about that body, maybe the way the firelight glinted off the bone in those empty eye sockets, that made you think there was a powerful and ugly thing inside it. I somehow felt whatever spirits might have been in Hickok were bad. Maybe Hickok wasn't all bad his ownself, but those spirits were, and now they were all that was left of him. I felt better knowing he was between them boards full of Indian magic.
'You tell a good story, Indian,' Billy Bob said, smiling one of his nasty smiles, 'but it ain't nothing to me but spook talk.'
Elijah smiled slowly, so slowly you could almost count his teeth one at a time as his lips folded back. 'Yes, you white men certainly have it over us ignorant savages.'
Billy Bob nodded to that. 'How do I know this here is Wild Bill Hickok, and not just some drunk you've pickled?'
Elijah stepped forward, put a finger on the body's head. 'Bend close and look at that hole. Is that not an exit wound a bullet? Was not Wild Bill shot from behind and the bullet came out the front of his head?'
'That's so,' Billy Bob said, leaning forward for a look. In spite of myself, I leaned too, but I couldn't look into those empty sockets. Billy Bob was what I was looking at, and his eyes seemed to have fallen out of his head and down those sockets like two marbles tumbling down mine shafts. His face tightened for a moment, and then suddenly he turned.
Elijah, after pointing out that bullet hole, had stepped back and pulled what was in his coat pocket out. A Bowie knife. And even as Billy Bob turned, and I turned with him, that knife came flying through the air. To this day I don't know how it missed Billy Bob. I couldn't believe he could move that fast. His left hand came out of his coat pocket, and it was full of Colt's 60. The Colt jumped and roared and Elijah's lips were parted by the bullet. The gun roared again, and this time the slug hit Elijah square between the eyes. The shots were so close together, they almost sounded like one.
Before Elijah hit the ground, Billy Bob flicked his wrist to the left and had Checkers covered. Checkers had one hand to his nose and the other inside his coat.
'Don't shoot me, fella,' Checkers said. 'I was trying to go for the Indian. I seen what he was about to do and I tried to go for him. I swear, it was the Indian I was after. It's just you're so blooming fast… Grief, but you just might be the son of old Wild Bill. That was the fastest damned draw I ever did see.'
Slowly Checkers went ahead and brought his gun hand out. There was a little pistol in it. He lowered his arm down by his side and let it dangle.
'I swear,' Checkers said, 'I wouldn't throw in with no Indian against a white man.'
'Put the gun up,' Billy Bob said, 'and see if he's dead.'
Checkers did as he was told. While he did I smelt something burning, and glancing at the fire I seen it was Elijah's stovepipe hat. The first shot had knocked it off his head and it had rolled into the fire. It was just a black wisp now.
Checkers bent over the body, then stood. 'He's dead. Course he's dead. He's got two holes in his head. I could have told you that from over there.'
Billy Bob turned to look at where the Bowie had gone. It was stuck just to the right of Hickok's head. Billy Bob reached and pulled it out of the wood, and the knife squeaked free of it like a mouse that had had its back stepped on. Billy Bob stuck it in the belt around his coat.
'Too bad he wasn't white,' Billy Bob said. 'Would have been my first kill. Hickok didn't count no Indians or niggers, and I don't aim to neither.'
'Didn't count spicks neither,' Checkers said.
'That's right,' Billy Bob said, 'no spicks neither.'
Billy Bob reloaded his pistol and dipped it back into his left coat pocket.
'Checkers,' he said, 'you look that body over for money. He got anything you give it to me. I ain't so sure you didn't lead us up here to cheat and kill us, so you don't get nothing out of the deal, not even the twenty for the trip.'
Checkers' face went red and he forgot to put his finger in his nose. 'That ain't fair.'
'Didn't say it was,' Billy Bob said. 'Don't feel like being fair right now.'
'I brought you up here in the rain, it storming-'
'Shut up and do as I say,' Billy Bob said. He opened and closed his hands above his coat pockets where the butts of his pistols showed.
Checkers moved his jaw back and forth a few times, then he bent to searching Elijah.
'Don't palm nothing,' Billy Bob said. 'I would find that disagreeable.'
Checkers brought over a pocket watch, a derringer, and a little bag full of bones, dirt, and beads.
Billy Bob put the watch in his inside shirt pocket. 'Indians are hell for trinkets,' he said, 'but what they need to know time for?' He poured what was in the bag into his hand then back into the bag. 'What's this?'
'His medicine bag,' Checkers said. 'Has his powers in it'
'Did him a lot of good, didn't it?' Billy Bob said, and tossed it into the fire. He flung the derringer as far as he could to the back of the cave. 'Whore's gun,' he said. 'That and tin horns.'
Billy Bob put the lid on the box, and we went out of there, back down to where Albert waited, me and Checkers carrying the box with Wild Bill in it. It was pretty heavy.
I didn't tell Albert right then all that happened. I figured he knew a lot of the story from the way I looked at him, and I thought maybe he'd heard the shots, though later he said he hadn't. With the storm like it was, and us being deep inside the cave, he hadn't heard a thing.
We strapped the box on the side of the mule, and Billy Bob took to leading it behind his mount. Me and Checkers rode behind him, almost side by side, and behind us was Albert.
We'd gone a mile or so when the storm got so bad every little bit of the sky lit up with forks of blue-white lightning and the thunder roared like there was a cannon war going on.
About the time all this storm business got built up, Checkers made his play. Maybe he and the Indian had planned such a thing all along and it hadn't gone good. I don't know. Maybe Checkers planned to rob us after we had the body and the Indian's money, that way he could make double. And maybe he hadn't planned nothing at all and was just mad because he hadn't made his share like he thought he should.
Doesn't matter now. With Billy Bob in front of him, he had the perfect chance to do to him what Jack McCall had done to Hickok.
I seen him go for his gun, and I tried to yell, but with the thunder and lightning like it was, I didn't know if Billy Bob could hear me. But he did, or maybe he'd just been waiting for Checkers to make his play all along. Billy Bob swiveled on his critter, and as he did, I seen there was a smile on his face, like he was about to get a present he'd been waiting a long time for.
The way Billy Bob's hand moved was too fast to be real. I figured it was a trick of the lightning or something. One second his hand was on his knee and the next it was full of pistol and the pistol was cocked.
Only he didn't get to kill Checkers. The lightning did it. It was faster even than Billy Bob, and it reached down out of the sky and hit Checkers' little pistol and there was the sound like a giant whip cracking, then Checkers and his horse exploded and I was wearing some of him and some of his suit and some of his horse.
Billy Bob, with a wail, threw himself off his horse onto the ground and started pounding his hand against the ground, screaming. 'I had him beat. My first white man. I had him beat,' then he began to cry.
