When the lightning flashed again, Chauncey pointed at one of the caves, and we got the general idea which one it was, and that that was where the Indian lived.
We started along the narrow trail that led up there, and I could hear pebbles tumbling off the edge and down to the depths below. When the lightning flashed again, I looked down and wished I hadn't. If me and my horse went over, there wouldn't never be no way to sort out which of us was which.
Finally we come to a spot about halfway to the caves and stopped. Chauncey got down and had us do the same.
"We got to walk the rest of the way," Chauncey said, and he had to yell for us to understand him because the wind was whipping away his words. "We can leave our mounts I here. Get the nigger to hold them."
Though it would have been smarter for Billy Bob to have left me holding the mules, since I didn't know slick mud from fresh honey, he went along with Chauncey, seeing how Albert was colored. He damn sure didn't want no white man to know he'd feel safer with a colored by his side instead of one of his own kind.
"Let's go then," Billy Bob said.
I handed Albert the rein to my horse.
"You watch yourself, hear?" Albert said.
"I will."
So the three of us, Chauncey, Billy Bob, and me, went up.
It was a rough walk and the higher it got the less there was to walk on. Rocks slid out from under our feet and cut at our legs and the gorge loomed just to our left, and when the lightning flashed it looked deep enough for you to fall all the way down to the pits of hell.
After the jumble of rocks we come to a clear spot and the cave. There was a torch just inside against the wall, lodged in some rocks, and Chauncey lit it, which was quite a chore, as he had to take a finger out of his nose to hold the torch in one hand and the match in the other.
When the torch was lit, we went deeper inside the cave. Bats flapped above us, and their leavings were all over the floor and smelt right smart. I didn't like bats, no kind of way. They always looked to me like rats with wings, and I don't like rats either. Especially ones that can fly.
Finally it got lighter ahead of us, and we crunched through some old bones lying about, and Chauncey showed us that a lot of them were human. He said this cave had once belonged to a grizzly and that now and then some folks had come in and met him, and he hadn't been such a good host. I know I was glad when he lifted that torch and I didn't have to stare at those bones, particularly one skull with its entire right side crushed in, like a big paw had swatted it.
The light around the bend was from a campfire, and it was right cozy in there. There were a few handmade chairs, a bed, and a table, and over on the right-hand side of the wall, leaning up against it, was a rough-cut box with a lid on it.
But the thing that really got my attention was the young Indian. He wasn't all that young, I reckon. Maybe thirty-five. It's hard to tell with Indians. They seem to me to either age real fast or not at all.
He had on a dusty black suit with a yellowish shirt that was once white and he was wearing an Abraham Lincoln hat. He was a friendly looking fellow and he was smiling at us while he held one hand in his coat pocket.
I figured he had his hand on a pistol and was just smiling either out of habit, or to get us off guard. When he seen that Checkers was with us, he relaxed a mite and spoke.
"Checkers, my good comrade. I thought that I might not see you again. It was my suspicion that you had been caught for some nefarious deed, like horse thievery, but I see that this was not the case. And better yet, you have brought friends to cheer my fire."
"Why's he talk like that?" Billy Bob half whispered to Checkers.
"That damned education stuff," Checkers said. "But he's all right."
"Come," said the Indian, "please come and warm yourself by my meager fire. Take a load off your feet and your mind, and I will see to some liquid refreshment."
What he did for liquid refreshment was reach into his other pocket and take out a pint flask which he sat on a rock by the fire.
We got over near the fire and warmed our hands, but nobody sat yet.
The Indian found four cups and brought them over, then he poured us all a little splash from the bottle and we drank it.
"Please, please," he said pouring us some more. "Sit, please do sit. There is no need to stand on parade here. My home is your home. Or to take two lines from the opera Clari, the Maid of Milan: 'Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam, be it ever so humble, there's no place like home; a charm from the skies seems to hallow us there, which sought through the world is ne'er met with elsewhere.'"
Billy Bob wasn't so quiet this time. "What in hell is he talking about?"
"Just more of that education stuff," Chauncey said. "An opry is where folks yell at each other to music."
"Ah, Checkers," said the Indian, "you have no heart. An opera is the heart, the soul, the very wing tips of a bird. It Oscars through the breast and mind and fills the soul."
"How about we do less soaring," Billy Bob said, "and talk about this body I come to look at."
"Yes," the Indian said, "the body of the Great White Warrior, the Pistoleer Prince of the Plains, the one and only, the indescribable Wild Bill Hickok."
"That's him," Billy Bob said.
"Now you remember that deal you made me about bringing a buyer here?" Checkers said to the Indian.
"It has been a month, my good friend. But I remember." The Indian smiled. "What if you had brought them here and I had sold the body?"
"Chance I took," Checkers said. "Besides, I didn't figure you'd sold it. You don't like going down into town so much."
The Indian opened his arms wide, "Isn't that polite? That is Mr. Checkers' way of saying that I am a wanted man in Deadwood."
"What for?" Billy Bob said. "I thought it was back East where you was wanted."
The Indian sighed. "There too. But I can hide better here. As for Deadwood, well, I'm wanted for a slight altercation with a young gentleman who had some rather foul comments about my ancestry. I was forced in a moment of passion, perhaps a moment fired by devil rum, to place the full length of a Bowie knife between his top two ribs, and therefore, let the soul fly out of him."
"What?" Billy Bob said, glancing at Checkers.
"He stabbed the sonofabitch to death," Checkers said.
"And I hope, dear friend," said the Indian, "that you have been better able to quiet your tongue on that matter below than you have here this night."
"You told them, you silly bastard," Checkers said. "I was just explaining."
"So you were, so you were," the Indian said.
The Indian and Checkers grinned at each other. The way they were doing it, I Figured it was hurting their lips.
"Can we just get on with what I come here for?" Billy Bob said.
"Of course," said the Indian, "but first let me introduce myself. I'm Elijah Bigshield, Oglala medicine man, retired." He held out his hand.
Billy Bob's face worked to the left, then to the right. "I don't shake hands with niggers or Indians," he said.
"You don't say?" the Indian said.
"I do say. Now let's get on with it."
Checkers cleared his throat. "This here boy has got a special interest in the body. Hickok was his daddy. Some whore in Deadwood was his mother."
"You don't say?" Elijah Bigshield said, but the honey in his voice had gone considerably sour. "Isn't that nice. Why you even look like him, now that it is mentioned. 'As a little childe riding behind his father, said simply unto him, Father when you are dead, I shall ride in the Saddle.' Stefan Guazzo, Civile Conversation. And now that saddle has been passed to you, and you may ride in the tracks of Hickok the killer."
I was beginning to feel a mite uncomfortable, but Billy Bob didn't show a sign of it. "I don't want to hear no more of your education," he said. "An Indian or a nigger with an education ain't nothing more than a bird that can talk. It sounds like it knows something, but any fool knows it don't. It just mocks."