“Oh, is that all?” says I when Bill had apprised me, for to tell you the truth I thought all this was perfectly normal, having never known a case among white men where the fellows with authority and connections did not make the most of it. I think a good case could be made for the modesty of Orvil Grant’s operations, considering whose kin he was.
“Well,” Bill says, slightly irritated, “you asked about Custer. That’s why he isn’t going out after the Sioux: he went to Washington to testify in the hearings.”
Now to show you how limited my idea of Custer was, I says: “Wants to get himself in good with the President.”
Hickok shook his head. “You stick to poker, hoss,” he says. “Politics is too much for you. Custer’s going to testify against Belknap and Orvil. Grant will probably run him out of the Army for it.”
“What’s Custer want to do that for?”
And Wild Bill says: “Because he always does what he thinks is right. There are a lot of people who hate his guts, but there isn’t anybody who can say that he doesn’t back up what he believes in.”
Then Hickok returned to the subject of getting married. “Agnes,” he says, “is a fine lady, and not to be confused with the kind of women you and me knew in K.C. That’s the reason why I have decided to go for gold and become rich. I hear you can pick it off the ground, practically.” He ordered another round of drinks and we got to talking over what gear we’d need and whether we should take in other partners, for we was sure enough going as soon as he got hitched and come back from his honeymoon which he and the Mrs. was going to take back East in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Wild Bill had sure changed. In K.C. I could swear he never knowed the name of the President, let alone the ins and outs of politics he now spouted. Nor do I think he really cared about money in the old days. Obviously it was this woman of his that had made him more of a normal human being. I noticed he was learning to use his right hand occasionally to drink with, and he wasn’t nearly so nervous about the other customers of the saloon; nor did he jump when I went into my vest pocket for a dollar.
I don’t mean he was turning to butter. As a matter of fact, a day or so later he killed a man who drew on him in front of a livery stable. But there wasn’t no question of his being under less pressure, or maybe in view of what he was going to do before the summer was out, just another kind.
I certainly didn’t bother the man none about my sister Caroline, so I don’t know to this day whether her romance with him was purely imaginary or had a basis, for I’ll tell you something about that gaclass="underline" she was losing her mind, poor thing. I should have seen it coming years back. Now that I thought of it, I remembered that everything I had ever heard about her unhappy love affairs come from her alone. It was right likely that Frank Delight, for example, never had asked her to marry him.
The point was that while Caroline survived them romantic disasters in her earlier years, she wasn’t getting any younger. Indeed, she was forty-four if she was a day, and hadn’t so far as I knowed ever got married yet, which she had been trying to do as far back as ’52 when the drunken Cheyenne massacred our menfolk.
But you couldn’t have told it from her appearance. She had looked much the same for twenty years except, as I mentioned, her front teeth was knocked out and her ear was some chawed up, etc. But I couldn’t see a gray hair on her head; and her features, which had always been strenuous, didn’t need to get more so as she went through life, as they usually do with the rest of us.
However, her mind had definitely sprung some bad leaks. For example, when I come back from that meeting with Hickok to the hotel where me and her had rooms, I decided to confront her with the truth, like slapping a hysterical person in the face to bring him out of it.
“Wild Bill is getting married,” I says.
Caroline was setting on her bed, with her leg cocked up, a-scraping at the sole of her boot.
“And not to Calamity Jane,” I goes on.
She lifted her head and folded up the jackknife and says, real smug: “I know. It is me that he is marrying.”
Right then is when I realized she should be put in the booby hatch, though I didn’t go right out and look for one then. But I should have, for once she fixed upon the theme of the wedding she kept it up day after day, and I guess was pathetic enough, for I had to lock her up in her room so as not to be embarrassed by a crazy sister in front of the other people I had got acquainted with in Cheyenne, and she would drape the window curtains about her like a bridal veil and parade around, etc., though never trying to bust out of the door or window, which in itself showed how far gone she was, for Caroline had never been able to stay in one place for long.
They didn’t yet have a nuthouse in Cheyenne, and while there was surely one down in Denver, I hadn’t been to that city since leaving it with Olga and Gus in ’64 and would have felt funny returning there now with a loony sister in tow, so I took Caroline on the Union Pacific, which we had helped to build, east to Omaha.
She didn’t give me no trouble, on account of I convinced her the wedding ceremony was going to be held there, for Wild Bill liked to do things up right and wanted to get married in a big town. Omaha was real big by then and had a gloomy home for the mentally defective, run by people who you would have took for the patients had they not been wearing uniforms. So it wasn’t no pleasure to hand Caroline over to them, I’ll tell you, but it had to be done, and I don’t believe my sister was unhappy with the arrangement, for she immediately took that home for her own house and them attendants for her servants and become so involved with her wedding plans that she never even said goodbye to me.
That is how I happened to miss Wild Bill’s real wedding, which took place in Cheyenne while I was gone, and I never did see his wife.
I never went prospecting with Wild Bill, either. In fact, I never laid eyes on him again. He come back from his honeymoon alone, leaving Agnes in Cincinnati, and went on up to Deadwood in the Black Hills where they was scratching for gold in that celebrated gulch, only he didn’t do no mining. He played poker. On the afternoon of August 2, 1876, he took a seat with his back to the door, and in come a man named Jack McCall and shot him dead. Nobody knows why he left his spine unguarded that day, for the first and last time, unless it was that he had reached the point in life where he had to have confirmed what he always suspected.
Anyhow, what he was holding when he died has ever since been called the dead man’s hand: two pair, aces and eights. R.I.P., J. B. Hickok.
It was April when I deposited poor Caroline in the nuthatch, and seeing as how Omaha lays on the Missouri River, I decided to go by boat up into Dakota Territory, maybe as far as Pierre, and then overland to the Hills. The river was just opening up from the winter, and I got me passage on a sternwheeler and rode it as far as Yankton, where I changed to another boat by the name of Far West. I did that so I could be at Custer’s Last Stand.
I’m kidding. But you know how them things look later. The way it really happened was that the first boat had a little layover in Yankton, in the course of which I heard a lot of talk about the Far West and its captain, a man named Marsh who was famous along the Missouri. There used to be quite a body of legend about riverboating-captains who could navigate in a heavy dew, etc.-and Marsh was part of it, not having been hurt any by being a friend of an author named Mark Twain who wasn’t noted for understatement.