Deadwood

PART ONE

BILL

1876

The boy shot Wild Bill’s horse at dusk, while Bill was off in the bushes to relieve himself. It was lucky for everybody but the horse that it happened when it did, but not so lucky it had to be God’s hand in it. It always took Bill a while in the bushes—it wasn’t dusk when he’d gone in there—and things have to happen sometime.

The boy’s name was Malcolm Nash. He was the younger brother of Charley Utter’s wife, and had ridden with Charley and thirty-six mules up from their home in Empire, Colorado, first to Cheyenne, where they met Bill, and then east and north toward the Black Hills.

Charley always had a hard time saying no to his wife.

The boy tried to be helpful, but anything he couldn’t break, he lost. The more Charley studied his awkward deportment, the more he wondered at the unreliable nature of human jizzom. The boy and Charley’s wife didn’t look like each other, even the coloring, and the boy hardly spoke. It was something Charley wouldn’t have minded studying, the contrary results of spilled seed. The boy was a strong back, though, and he was polite. He addressed Bill as Mr. Hickok and called everybody else by the same names that Bill did, and he carried a broken-handled old Smith & Wesson in a sash around his waist, butt-first, the way Bill carried his Colts.

Charley had been against bringing the boy from the first suggestion. In his wife’s eyes, that amounted to a confession of all the unsafe and unfaithful behavior he and Bill got into when he was away from home. It was peculiar, the way her feelings about Bill had changed. She’d spoken well of him before they were married, and once told Charley he was half famous just for being his friend. Of course, Bill had seen her compromised since.

The boy had no such reservations. Bill had made four visits to Colorado in the last ten years, to hunt bear or watch Charley get married or just get drunk, and Bill was always good to him, keeping the whores and whiskey out of his gunfight stories so he’d grow up right. Bill did not recognize the boy when they all met in Cheyenne, but said it was because Malcolm had become a man.

The boy would have worn carrots in his hat if Bill did.

They’d left Colorado late in the spring, Charley and Malcolm and the mules, and met Bill in Cheyenne, where he was organizing a wagon train. They got to his rooming house at seven o’clock in the morning, June 22. The lady superintendent reported Bill had already combed his hair and walked up the street to the Republican Hotel for cocktails, which she implied was his morning habit. I expect he’ll be back in half an hour, walk through the door carrying a full glass of whiskey, and finish his toilet, she said.

Charley wasn’t surprised. It was the history of things that Bill would wear out his welcome.

Charley saw the lady was not going to invite them in to wait, and so he and the boy walked down the street too, and found Bill standing at the far end of the Republican Hotel bar, squinting into the light from the doorway as they came in, trying to decide if it was trouble.

Charley had been to Cheyenne in March, when Bill had married the famous circus performer Agnes Lake, and even getting married, Bill had been in a brighter mood than he was now.

Did you know they held elections last week? he said when he saw who it was.

Charley said, Where?

Right here. Cheyenne. Bill was a good American but he never liked elections. It was like the railroads, an unrefutable sign that things were going to hell. The new city officers have published a list of fifty men they charged with vagrancy, he said. Put it up all over town, issued warrants for the arrests.

Charley waited. Bill pulled a piece of paper out of his sash and unfolded it on the bar. Charley bent over and looked. The boy stood still, watching everything they did. The list was alphabetical, and most of the names on it Charley recognized for thieves or killers of one sort or another. The twenty-seventh name was James Butler Wild Bill Hickok.

Well, Charley said, it’s the price of fame.

Look down there at the bottom, Bill said.

Charley’s finger went to the bottom of the list and started up. The fifth name he touched was his own, only they’d misspelled it. Charles Colorado Charley Udder. Charley hated it when they spelled him like that.

What kind of slander is this? he said. I am a respectable businessman from Empire, Colorado.

Bill picked the paper up off the bar, folded it, and put it back in his sash. Nobody from the police department has been by to arrest me, he said. I gave them a few days to make up their mind if they were going to.

That night at the hotel bar, Bill laid down the rules of his wagon train. He would take only seventy wagons to Deadwood, nobody who was sick, no firebugs, no whores. Seventy wagons was enough to be safe from any party of Indians, but more than that and you couldn’t be safe from yourself. Bill didn’t want any bad apples. The trip would take two weeks, and each man, woman, and child had to carry a firearm, and pay him fifty dollars.

None of this discouraged the assembly at the Republican bar, which applauded him. The Black Hills was the wildest and the richest place on earth, and no man into his cups would admit things were wild enough for him right there in the hotel. Wagons on the way to the Hills had already come through from California, where the gold had begun to peter out, and pilgrims were headed there from the other direction too. Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Iowa—for three years the grasshoppers in the States had come in over the crops like black clouds, and when they left, they’d taken it all with them. Bill had seen that with his own eyes in Iowa after he’d taken Agnes Lake home to St. Louis to wait for him until he got back on his feet.

It wasn’t the way Bill would have put it to Agnes Lake, but some time had passed since he’d had a pot to piss in. Charley couldn’t see him telling her about that at all. There was a respect between Bill and Agnes that did not invite inspection of the parties.

Bill and Charley and Malcolm and the mules waited four days, until Bill was satisfied nobody was coming to arrest them, and then he set a time to leave. Daybreak, June 27.

By nine o’clock Bill saw none of the boys from the Republican were going to show up. What had shown up was a Jew that wanted to set up a hardware store, and two peddlers. Four wagons, if you counted Bill and Charley’s. Bill collected fifty dollars from each of them, and they started east, Charley driving the wagon, Bill sitting on his horse, a handsome old gelding he’d named Peerless, drinking cocktails.

The boy rode one of the mules.

Anyone but Bill would have rethought it right there. He had it in his head there was something waiting for him in the Hills, though. Charley couldn’t get him to say exactly what; he thought Bill might not know either.

They met another wagon train at Fort Laramie, five days out of Cheyenne. Twenty-eight wagons, most of them full of whores. Some Chinese, some American. The filthiest whores Charley had seen up to then, here is what the Americans had for names: Dirty Emma, Tit Bit, Smooth Bones, and Sizzling Kate. The Chinese had little feet. They couldn’t walk more than a few steps and stayed close to their whore man.

Bill joined wagons. He didn’t like it, but the Indians were a fact. Once the whores heard who it was, they came after Bill’s person night and day. Bill never gave them a look, and in the end he went to one of their wagons and talked to a whore man named Al Swearingen, who was importing a fresh load of girls for his place in Deadwood, and they didn’t come by again.

The boy went to the wagon with him, carrying that old Smith & Wesson in his sash, and came back with a new purpose in life. Charley didn’t see what it hurt, and didn’t stop the boy when he went back to the wagon later, after sunset. He went that night and the night after, and the night after that. That’s where he was before he shot Bill’s horse.

They’d stopped early in the afternoon, in sight of the Hills. On that day, in that light, the Hills were as black as the Devil’s dreams. It looked to Charley like once you got inside you might lose the sun’s light forever. Charley put it out of his head.

The boy tethered and fed the mules, washed his face, and headed over into the whores’ wagons. Al Swearingen, the man that Bill had spoken to about his whores, came over a little later carrying a bottle and three glasses, and offered up a drink of whiskey to celebrate finding the Hills. He was pale-eyed and bearded, the kind that was planning ten days ahead every day of his life. Bill took the drink, Charley didn’t. The whore man’s fingers had been all over the insides of the glasses.

Bill drank half of what the whore man poured him and waited to see what it would do. The man said, This is a historic day, pards, and threw his down. Bill looked at him. The man said, I mean, finding the Hills.

Bill studied his glass. He put his finger in the whiskey and came out with a speck of a gnat and rolled it off his fingers. Charley said, Did you think we were going to miss the Black Hills? North to south, they ran a hundred miles.

No, he said, I certainly didn’t mean nothin’ like that. And Bill laid his eyes on him again, calm and cold, until he went away. That was the way Bill handled annoyances when he could. He never threatened a soul unless he meant it.

The whore man went back to his own wagon. It was bigger than the others and brand new. The boy had been inside it, and said it looked like the finest hotel. The boy had never been in a hotel room in his life. Charley saw them then, the boy and the whore man, climbing into the back with two of the girls.

Malcolm’s back with the whores, he said. Bill smiled and shook his head. He couldn’t see that far himself.

It’s a sign of health, knowing what you want, Bill said.

He’s young, Charley said.

That’s another sign, Bill said. He was thirty-nine years old. One of the whores shrieked and came halfway out of the back of the wagon, and then something grabbed her from behind and pulled her back in. What are we, a day out of the Hills? Bill said.

More, Charley said. The Hills had been in view since early that morning. It wasn’t like coming into the Rockies, that seemed to grow out of the earth in front of your eyes. Until you were close, the Hills just seemed to get darker.

What do they look like? Bill said.

Shit, Bill, you seen the Black Hills. Bill shook his head, stubborn. Charley said, They look black.

Another whore went into the wagon, and then a couple others followed her. The wagon shook and rocked and somebody in there started to sing. A weak, whining voice that strangled itself on the up notes.

Could you tell them I once killed a woman for singing like that? Bill said.

Charley thought it over. I can’t tell something like that, he said. I won’t make you a woman-killer. As he said that, the voice stopped cold, right in the middle of Beautiful Dreamer. Maybe the boy killed her for you, he said.

He’s been with us what, ten days, and we already made him an opera critic, Bill said.

Charley said, Of course, maybe he stuck his peeder in her mouth.

Bill shrugged. Then we made his peeder an opera critic. Bill stood up, still holding the whore man’s glass. You see that dog? he said. The dog belonged to the whore man too. It was resentful and short-haired and never looked you in the eye, and it had a head the size of a cow’s. It was walking through the wagon horses now, worrying them, about thirty steps away.

I see it, Charley said, surprised that Bill did. Thirty steps was farther out than Bill’s eyes usually went.

A gentleman’s wager? Bill said.

They bet five dollars, and Bill turned his back to the animal, dropping the arm holding the glass, and then he spun, his arm half a second behind the rest of him, and when he let go of the glass it carried the distance like a line of piss, sparkling in the light, and hit that monster square in the head. The dog screamed. Sounds like he saw a snake, Bill said.

Charley had never seen anybody throw like Bill. It was magic, the way things connected for him. Bill climbed into the wagon and came out with a bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and spit it onto the ground, signaling his intentions. It was a bottle without a future. He took a drink and handed it to Charley. Charley wiped off the lip and joined him. The whores were shrieking again.

They passed the bottle back and forth two or three times and then Bill stood up to go into the bushes. He walked around the wagon horses and up a little hill. There were some weeds there and trees, thick enough to afford privacy.

Whatever kind of blood disease Bill had, it had gotten worse since March. The morning Charley found him in the hotel bar, he’d asked how it was, and Bill told him he thought his piss had to cut a new bed through there every time he went. Charley didn’t ask him about it again, there was such a thing as leaving some distance. He knew, though, that Bill was afraid he’d given a case of it to Agnes, and thinking he’d done that made him love her the more.

He’d been in the bushes half an hour when the whore man came scrambling out of the front end of the wagon. The boy came out the back end, half dressed and trailing whores, carrying that old Smith & Wesson in his right hand. One of the whores had a bottle, there wasn’t a trace of color to what was inside. She was holding on to that with one hand and trying to hold on to him with the other. It don’t mean nothin’, she said to him. Come back in the wagon, ’fore you get injured.

The boy got himself loose and headed toward the front of the wagon, with intentions to use the gun. Charley saw right away that he meant it. The whore man had run from his wagon and climbed into the back of another. It belonged to one of the paper-collars that had signed up in Cheyenne. There was a needle gun back there—the peddler had shown it to Bill at the first camp—and if the whore man found that, the boy was as good as dead.

Charley moved to slow things down. Here now, Malcolm, he said, get hold of yourself. And the boy turned, shooting before he could see who it was. Old Peerless was tied to Charley’s wagon, and he never even flinched. He was like Bill in a fight. The ball went in right behind the shoulder. Peerless stood still for half a minute; the boy froze at the size of the mistake. Then the old horse turned his head back, like he was trying to see what it was changing things so fast, and then he dropped onto his knees and a tremor took over his hindquarters, and he wasn’t looking back anymore, because he knew what it was by then.

He died in no time at all. The boy forgot the whore man, and in the time it took him to walk over, the horse had passed to the other side. Malcolm was still holding the broken-handled pistol, but he’d forgot it was there too. Mr. Hickok’s horse, he said.

Charley said, Damn near Mr. Hickok’s friend, although in truth the ball had been a long ways from finding him.

He can kill me if he wants to, the boy said.

Charley said, He doesn’t need your permission for that. He saw the boy was having trouble holding on to his feelings.

I’ll leave the train, the boy said. I’ll tell him what I done, give him my mule, and set out on my own.

Charley went over to the wagon where Bill had left the open bottle. He took a drink and offered one to the boy. The Indians would cut you up and leave you staked out to dry with your peeder in your mouth, he said. As it turned out, that was an unfortunate choice of warning.

It turned out, the boy had been in the back of the whore man’s wagon, encumbered with the soft parts of several women, and felt a mouth on his member. It wasn’t the first time, all of them liked to do him like that. But the whiskey had made him reckless, and with all the nipples and legs and hands to occupy him—the boy said he loved to kiss their hands; Charley said, You don’t have to tell everything—he didn’t notice who it was doing their business down there.

It was a lot of giggling, he said, and I had a head of steam. But when the seizure passed I looked down, and Mr. Al Swearingen had his mouth where it should of been one of the ladies.

Charley was twice glad he hadn’t drunk from the whore man’s glass. The boy told him the story while they were waiting for Bill to come out of the bushes. Malcolm was standing shoeless in his long johns, still holding the gun. The whore man hadn’t come out of the peddler’s wagon. Charley didn’t like him in there with a Springfield needle gun, so he walked over and kicked the side.

Come out of there, Mr. Swearingen, he said, or I’ll burn it. There was a gathering of whores watching now, even some of the Chinese. Charley never saw such hopeless faces. Something moved in the wagon, but nothing came out. A minute passed.

You got that boy’s gun away from him? the whore man said.

What I got is kerosene.

Another minute went by. It ain’t my wagon, the whore man said.

Or mine, Charley said. I’ll give you one minute. The whore man came out the back, yellow-toothed and nervous, smoothing his hair. He hadn’t cleaned the wetness from his beard yet. One of the whores giggled, but he shot her a look and it died.

Where’s the boy? he said.

Let it alone, Charley said.

Tell that boy that him and me got unfinished business, he said. He owes me for the girls. It ain’t no free ride with Al Swearingen, tell him that.

Charley turned around for one more look at the whores, and then he went back to the boy. He was sitting cross-legged on the ground beside old Peerless. In the dark the horse seemed bigger. Listen, Charley said, there’s no reason your sister’s got to know about this.

What I heard, the boy said after a bit, was it ruins you for girls.

Where’d you hear that? Charley said.

The boy shrugged. I heard once you been with a man you don’t want a woman no more.

"You weren’t exactly with him," Charley said.

I been sittin’ here, thinkin’ of every girl I seen over there, and I don’t want one of them, he said.

Charley said, Shit, that’s not your manhood talking, that’s good taste.

Then the boy looked over at Peerless, like he’d just remembered he was there. And now I went and shot Mr. Hickok’s horse. In my whole life, things never gone so bad all at once like this.

Charley stood right over the boy, the old horse was still giving off heat. You want me to explain to him what happened? Charley said. Bill’d had that horse a while.

No, the boy said, I got to tell him myself. Charley started off, thinking he’d need some room to do it. The trouble is, the boy said, I don’t know how it happened. Things just never went to hell before like that, all of a sudden.

Charley said, You keep your eye out for Mr. Swearingen so it doesn’t get worse.

The boy laughed. He ain’t even a man, he said.

Malcolm, Charley said, the first thing you learn will be the first thing you know, but listen to me on this. When they’re bad, there’s things that kind will do to you that nobody else could think up.

But the boy wasn’t paying any more attention than the horse was, so Charley took a walk up the hill to catch a last look at the day. He met Bill coming out of the bushes, buttoning his trousers. Bill put his death eyes on him, cold and steady. It’s me, Charley said. Bill was stone blind at dusk.

I heard the shot, he said. Charley saw him wipe a tear out of the corner of his eye. You just get settled down to piss, and then somebody’s shooting, and the piss ducks back inside and you got to start all over …

Maybe they got a physician in Deadwood Gulch, Charley said. Or Belle Fourche. They got to have medicine in Belle Fourche. Bill smiled at that. Something had told him there was an issue to be settled in the Black Hills, maybe between him and God, and he couldn’t see anything as inconsequential as a doctor getting in the middle of two such forces.

Besides, he’d been to doctors. In Cheyenne, and before that. He had a saddlebag full of pills and medications. I hate to be in the bushes with my peeder out when the shooting starts, he said. A little later he said, It’s not as easy to forget there’s people around as it used to be, you notice that? You can’t just walk forty yards into the trees and feel like you got it all to yourself. Somebody is always grabbing a gun over a whore to remind you it ain’t all yours, and who you got to share it with. He dropped a line of spit between his moccasins.

You always liked it quiet, Bill, Charley said. You spent a life in pursuit of quiet. Charley didn’t talk that way except to get Bill off his pessimism and morbidity.

Bill reached out and grabbed the back of Charley’s neck, and Charley kicked his feet out from under him, and they rassled on the ground until Bill got Charley’s windpipe. Bill let him get him in some holds before he ended it, though—Charley knew he’d let him—so by the time Bill let go they were both good and stretched. They lay on their backs, breathing hard and wet. Bill was chuckling.

What I was saying, he said, I don’t mind the noise, it’s just getting to be a weaker class of people all the time that’s making it.

That’s true, Charley said.

Bill said, It’s got too damn easy to make noise.

Bill, Charley said after a while, the boy shot old Peerless. Bill sat up in the dark, Charley stayed where he was. There was a warm place over Charley’s eye where they’d cracked heads. He touched it and found a lump about the size of a spoon. He got all excited in the wagon with the girls, and somehow the whore man ended up suckin’ on his peeder.

So he shot my horse?

He was shootin’ at me, thought I was the whore man, and hit Peerless instead. Got him dead in the heart. Bill sighed and pulled his knees up to his chest and circled them with his arms. Charley’s legs had been broken, and he always noticed the things other people could do with theirs.

That was a consequential animal, Bill said. Charley sat up then and his nose started to bleed. He’d tried to butt Bill, but Bill had sensed it coming and got underneath him. I had him a long time.

Six, seven years, Charley said. Since Kansas, at least. He was there at Abilene. It seemed like the time to mention Abilene, where Bill shot Mike Williams. Mike was the only man Bill ever killed by accident, to Charley’s knowledge. He was a policeman—they’d had an election and the winners hired their nephews as policemen, after Bill had made the place safe to be a policeman—and it was the luck of things that when Phil Coe came after Bill in the street, Mike Williams came around a corner and Bill shot him through the head, thinking it was one of Phil Coe’s brothers. Then he shot Phil.

The newspaper wouldn’t let it heal. It brought Mike Williams back from the dead every week, like a blood relative. The editor called him a fine specimen of Kansas manhood, and declared a Crusade to Rid Abilene and the State of Kansas of Wild Bill and All His Ilk. Those were the exact words, because for a while after that Bill called him Ilk.

It wasn’t the newspaper that got Bill and Charley out of Kansas, though. It was a petition. It was left with the clerk at the hotel where they stayed, three hundred and sixteen signatures asking Bill to leave, not a word of gratitude for what he’d done. He sat down in the lobby with the petition in his lap, running his fingers through his hair. He read every name—there were six sheets of them—and when he finished a sheet, he’d hand it to Charley and he’d read it too.

It was the worst back-shooting Charley had ever seen; they even let the women sign. Bill shrugged and smiled, but some of the names hurt him. He thought he had friends in Kansas, and looking at the names he saw they were all afraid of him.

What ran Wild Bill out of Abilene was hurt feelings. This business with the horse might of hurt him too, it was hard to tell. The heart? he said.

He never felt it, Charley said. Never believed it if he did. Bill ran his fingers through his hair. There were leaves and twigs in it from the rassling. He stood up and slapped the same from his britches, and headed off down the hill for the wagons. Charley waited a minute and went down there too.

Al Swearingen had sent some of his whores out for firewood and built himself more fire than he needed. The Chinese had smaller fires. Most nights, the Chinamen let their girls out among the rest of the wagons, but with the shooting they kept them close and shouted at them in Chinese when one got too far away. Charley admired the excitement in their language.

They had their own manners, too. The first time Charley saw them eat, it was a day and a half before he could look at food again. Charley wasn’t any paper-collar, and everybody west of Boston ate with their fingers. He’d sat down to feed with all kinds of human beings, including Indians, but he never saw anybody but the Chinese put their fingers inside their mouth, at least not three at a time up to the second knuckle.

On the other hand, if you lined up fifty Chinese to take a bath every day for a month, every day the same Chinaman would get the water first, the same Chinaman would go second, and so on right through to number fifty. They had a way to arrange everything, and an order to everything, and Charley expected that was a kind of manners too.

That’s how their wagons always ended up in the same place. They drove in every night behind the Americans and then went off to themselves. The head Chinaman had the youngest girls, although in truth there wasn’t much reason to pick one over another. From the point of looks, it was a dead heat. There was one, though, that the head Chinaman kept to himself.

She rode alone in the back of his wagon, and nobody ever got a look at her except at night, when he’d let her out. Just a few minutes. He stayed at her side and wouldn’t let anybody close, so you might see her climbing in or out of the wagon, or you might see her hobbling along beside the Chinaman out beyond the light of the fire, face like a statue from Egypt, but you’d never get close enough to see what it looked like. Charley heard that Al Swearingen had tried to buy her, but the Chinaman wanted too much money.

When Charley got back to the wagon, Bill was sitting on old Peerless. He’d found a fresh bottle. The boy was five feet away, digging a grave. The ground was wet and heavy—it rained every day of the spring there, but it wasn’t hell storms like the ones Charley had experienced in his previous visit to the Hills—and the boy was throwing mud over his shoulder at a pace that figured to kill him in three minutes.

Sit down and watch this, Bill said, and he slapped a place next to him on old Peerless’s belly.

Even in the dark, Charley could see that the horse had begun to swell. He sat down on the ground instead, then reclined to an elbow to stop the hurting. He didn’t know how, but in the last few years the leg problems had crawled up into his hips. When he was settled Bill handed him the bottle, and when he’d taken a drink he called the boy off and asked if he wanted some too. The boy’s labor had produced a trench nine feet long east and west, and he was digging off toward the south now.

He put the shovel down and took the bottle. He drank three swallows as fast as gravity let him, and gave it back. He couldn’t last long at that speed either. You plantin’ a garden, Malcolm? Charley said in a soft way.

The boy didn’t answer. He just picked up the shovel and began throwing mud again. Bill took the bottle out of Charley’s hands and had at it. You never seen anybody bury a horse before? Bill said.

The boy dug south for six feet, and then started west. He was breathing hard, and now and again Charley could hear it catch in his throat. There was a family resemblance about this. Back in Colorado, the boy’s sister would sometimes cut firewood until her hands bled after Charley went into the mountains and got drunk.

For a while, Charley and Bill just sat still, watching. The boy came nine feet west, until he was even with the place he’d started, and then spaded his way back north to meet it.

What kind of a missionary have you become? Charley said.

He stopped digging again and took another drink. Charley could see they were going to need another bottle. I intend to give him a proper burial before I leave here, the boy said. I kilt him for no reason, and it’s the least I can do to set it right.

Charley dropped off his elbow and lay on his back, and looked up at all the stars in the sky, trying to empty his mind. Against all efforts, he began to laugh.

The sound of that set something off in Bill too. As long as Charley had known him, however bad things got, Bill always found something to smile at, but there weren’t five people in the world who ever heard him laugh like he did then. He laughed and rocked back and forth on old Peerless’s belly until he fell off. The whole time the boy was still digging. If anything, the sound of it seemed to drive him harder. When he could talk again, Bill said, And this is the easy part. Think of the box he’s got to build.

The boy would not stop, though, except to drink. He got drunk and threw mud from one side of the hole into the other. Bill and Charley got drunk too, quieter now, and watched until the boy hit himself in the head with the shovel and stumbled down into the bed he’d dug for the horse. It might have been two feet deep by then. He landed on his back and lay still. Then he turned over and got his knees under him. He seemed to settle there, and then he just fell over and went to sleep.

That’s where they found him in the morning, still asleep. Bill picked him up under the arms, so when he opened his eyes he was already standing up. There was blood on both of the boy’s hands where blisters had broken and he’d worn through the skin underneath. So he was useless to work. He held on to Bill for a minute, finding his balance and looking around him, shocked, like raiders had come in the night, shot the horse, and torn up the earth.

I got to finish it, the boy said.

Leave the damn horse be, Bill said. He’d done all his laughing the night before. There were noises from the other wagons as the whores kicked each other awake. Some of the Chinese had kept their fires through the night and the smell of their food was everywhere. There wasn’t a clean breath of air in two miles. Charley thought of fingers inside those mouths.

You can have my mule, the boy said to Bill. He ain’t much … The boy’s mule was tied with some of the others. They were blowing to get started. One of the whores was screaming at her whore man over at the other end of camp. Bill didn’t like any kind of emotion before his morning cocktail, and climbed up into the wagon and poured himself a drink into a glass. He sat up there, sipping it and chewing jerky, while the camp got itself ready to leave.

After a while he climbed down the other side, walked up the hill, and disappeared into the bushes. The boy hitched the wagon and threw Bill’s saddle into the back. Charley washed and shaved and cleaned his teeth. He had a real mirror to shave in. The boy said, You think Mr. Hickok might change his mind? I wisht he’d take my mule.

Bill doesn’t want to talk about transportation this morning, Charley said. By now old Peerless was swollen twice his regular size around the stomach, and the place where the boy’s ball had gone into him was black with insects. Bill had had that horse a long time.

He came out of the bushes just as the sun broke the sky over the Black Hills. He’d combed his hair and tied it in a knot. He walked down the hill, right past the wagon. Charley thought he might not have seen them—you could never tell when Bill wasn’t sure of himself, he didn’t give anything away—but he passed Charley and the boy and went right to Al Swearingen’s rig. The whore man sat on his cushions eating boiled eggs and watched him come.

It’s a beautiful day to enter the Hills, Swearingen said. An omen for the future.

You got somebody can handle horses? Bill said.

The whore man smiled and swelled. I got these girls trained to do everything I tell them, he said. Completely obedient.

Get one that can drive, Bill said, and move your person inside the wagon. The whore man didn’t blink. Don’t show me your face again, Bill said.

The whore man patted down his beard. Everybody in earshot stopped what they were doing to watch. Al Swearingen drives his own wagon, the whore man said.

Then Al Swearingen mistood his omen, Bill said.

The whore man looked at Bill half a minute, long enough to see what he needed to, and then called one of the whores from another wagon. Smooth Bones. From what Charley had seen, she was the best of the lot. She wasn’t more than seventeen or eighteen, the same age as the boy, and if she’d had teeth in front she might of been pretty. Of course, if she’d had teeth in front they mightn’t of named her Smooth Bones too. You could what if yourself right out of this world.

She sat on the cushion next to Swearingen and he gave her the reins. Tell that boy it ain’t settled, he said. And then he crawled into the back.

Bill sent the boy ahead to scout, mostly to get him out of his sight. Thirty-two wagons were safe from Indians. He climbed up next to Charley and said, I ought to of finished it and got the whole episode out of my mind.

Bill could put things out of his mind, once they were dead. The boy moved a quarter of a mile out in front, and beyond him were the Hills. The wagons strung out in back of Charley and Bill, the wheels creaked and the mules blew and complained and once, just after they’d straightened into a line, Charley looked back and saw old Peerless lying in the dirt, next to a hole that was supposed to be his grave. It looked like God Himself had dropped him out of the sky, and he’d bounced once when he hit.

Let the Indians figure that out.

THEY CAME INTO DEADWOOD DOWNHILL, FROM THE SOUTH. THE gulch fell out of the mountains, long and narrow, following the Whitewood Creek, and where things widened enough for a town sign, that was Deadwood. It was noon, July 17. The place looked miles long and yards wide, half of it tents. The Whitewood joined a smaller creek—the Deadwood—at the south end and ran the length of the town. The mud was a foot deep, and every kind of waste in creation was thrown into the street to mix with it.

The mountains that defined the boundaries were spare of live trees. There were thousands of the dead, charred black trunks lying across each other on the ground.

How’s it look to you? Bill said. He was handling the reins, sitting tall and handsome, nodding at voices when somebody called to him from the street. The word of who it was in the wagon got through town before Charley and Bill made a hundred yards.

Like something out of the Bible, Charley said. They rode through, the mud sticking to the wheels and the mules until it broke off from its own weight. It took most of an hour to get the train down Main Street, stopping to shake hands and once to give an interview to a reporter from the Black Hills Pioneer. Although he enjoyed a taste for the printed word, Charley winced to hear there was already a paper in town.

They went farther north, and the population changed. Whores and roughs and gamblers stood in the doorways, holding drinks, shooting their guns into the air. It was a part of the city called the badlands, and it was as far as the whore wagons went. The place was shabby, but the ladies there looked better to Charley than the load they’d delivered. Some stood in the windows, as good as naked. What part of the Bible? Bill said, when they were alone again.

Where God got angry, Charley said.

A hundred people suddenly came together in the street in front of them. Bill steadied the mules, and one of the men climbed halfway onto the wagon with them and shook Bill’s hand. He was wearing a cheap leather coat, fringed, and two pistols.

Captain Jack Crawford, the man said. Bill gave him his left hand. On behalf of the city of Deadwood, Dakota Territory, I would like to welcome you and your party, and express the hope that you are here to settle and prosper. We can use men of your ilk here.

Ilk again.

Thank you, Bill said.

The man seemed to notice Charley then, but couldn’t bring himself to let go of Bill’s hand. Captain Jack Crawford, he said to Charley. Scout, poet, and duly authorized captain of the Black Hills Minutemen. We can always use volunteers, lads, with the Indian situation.

Charles Utter, Charley said. Does this place have a bathhouse?

The question drew its share of comment from the crowd, which Captain Jack pretended not to hear. He pointed back up the street and said it was five blocks on the left. You passed it on the way in, he said. Then he looked around and said, It’s too bad there’s not more who have asked the question. Before they could get him off the wagon, Captain Jack had told them where to graze the mules and where to find women, and that he had personally ridden with Custer and Buffalo Bill Cody.

They turned around and found a place to camp on the other side of the Whitewood Creek, between the badlands and the bathhouse, across the street from the Betwix-Stops Saloon, which was a canvas tent. The proprietor had turned two barrels upside down in the doorway and laid a piece of lumber across them, and was selling whiskey from the States at fifty cents a shot.

They left the wagon three yards from the creek and blocked the wheels with logs. The boy took the mules to the north end of town beyond the badlands, where the canyon widened and the ground was flat and grassy. Charley got his blankets from inside the wagon and threw them over the top to air out. Bill sat on a tree stump curling his hair around his finger.

I’ve got a feeling about this camp, he said, a premonition.

Charley stopped his chores. He had known those who made a career of black feelings, but Bill was never like that, and Charley took this seriously.

A month after the shooting in Abilene, for instance, a reporter appeared from Philadelphia—that was a class of paper-collars Charley would like to have studied, reporters—and told Bill how Bill had stood in the middle of the street, Phil Coe and four of his brothers shooting at him from every cowardly angle the area afforded, and that Bill had operated there, calm as an engine, picking them off one by one. The reporter said, How do you sustain your courage in the face of death’s odds?

Bill never blinked. He said, When you know in your heart the bullet hasn’t been made with your name on it, there is no tremble in your hand at the weight of a Colt.

The reporter took it down word for word—Bill had to say it twice for him—and then he got drunk four nights straight and then he got on the stage east and went home to Philadelphia. Bill said later he was a good reporter, although he never straightened him out on how many Coes he killed that day—or how many policemen—but what he said about knowing the bullet hadn’t been made yet for him, that was true. He’d told Charley much the same thing.

The change in him came with the blood disease, or with Agnes, or with losing his sight. Charley was not sure those were separate things.

What kind of premonition? he said.