This Old Bill Read online

  Will moved his head from side to side carefully, as if it might topple off if he shook it.

  "I'm going to tell you something I think you'll understand because you watched your older brother die when Betsy rolled over him in Iowa and because you've seen what happens to people when they get caught up in what they believe."

  Will waited. It hurt his father to talk and at times his voice receded and the boy had to lean forward to hear the whispered words.

  "You must suspend finer things like honor in times like these, Will. Know when to tell an untruth and then stick to it like fresh sap. I didn't and see where it got me. If it means your life or the lives of the ones you hold dear, lie like a nigger. It's all right as long as you know what the truth is. If you forget everything else I'm saying, remember that. God never made a worse fool than a man who's a liar to himself. Do you understand that?"

  He swallowed past the fist. The saliva burned in his throat. "Yes, sir."

  His father watched him, and it was in his eyes now. "No, you don't. You're a boy still. But you will. Just remember the words. Ask your mother to come in now."

  He gave his mother the message. She mopped nervous hands off on her apron and went in, her skirt slurring the clay floor. Will ignored the weeping of his sisters and small brother. He hadn't cried since the stabbing. Isaac lived another day, but they spoke no more and for the boy he was already dead.

  The new Leavenworth offices of Russell, Majors & Waddell, freighters, smelled cleanly of sawdust and fresh lumber. Alexander Majors, a tall man with hard eyes and a square black beard shot with gray, took the measure of the boy who stood before his desk with his mother behind him. For months his family's provider, Will was striking for his deep tan and mop of hair bleached yellow by the sun—carefully dampened and combed for this interview—but he was small for his age and skinny. He had large brown eyes with a direct cast.

  "Freighting is hard enough work for a man grown, Mary Ann," Majors told the woman. "I'm not certain that young Will could stand to it. The wagon master will be busy enough with a thousand head of beef and two and a half tons of freight without having to pick him up every time he falls."

  "I won't fall," said Will. "And if I do, I'll pick myself up."

  Mrs. Cody pinched the nape of his neck hard enough to hurt. "Don't be disrespectful." To Majors: "He can ride as well as most men and he's a fine shot. He's managed to keep us in game all this time. And he knows something of herding cattle." She paused. "If nothing else you can make him a messenger. You need messengers." Her voice was firm, but her eyes pleaded.

  Majors hooked his thumbs in his vest pockets and frowned. "Uncle Aleck" to Will and his sisters and younger brother, he was well aware of the family's plight since Isaac's death.

  "It's dangerous work," he told the boy. "The ground turns to axle grease when it rains. You could slide under one of the wagons and lose a leg. Or a bullwhacker could take your eye out with the end of his whip if you make a wrong step. Then there are Indians. And Mormons. It's them the soldiers at Fort Kearney will be fighting, with the supplies we're bringing them."

  "I'm not afraid."

  "Boys never are." He looked at the woman. "Forty a month and found. I'll hold his wages and pay them to you at the close of the drive."

  "Thank you, Alexander."

  She squeezed the boy's shoulder and went out, her back straight. Majors watched her. If he hadn't a wife and three daughters already. .. . He scowled down at Will. "Can you write your name?"

  "Not yet, sir. But I can cipher."

  "That won't help with this." He drew a copy of the pledge from a pigeonhole above his desk and read it aloud.

  'While I am in the employ of A. Majors, I agree not to use profane language, not to get drunk, not to gamble, not to treat animals cruelly, and not to do anything else that is incompatible with the conduct of a gentleman. And I agree, if I violate any of the above conditions, to accept my discharge without any pay for my services.'" He slapped it down in front of Will. "Questions?"

  "I don't understand the big word, sir."

  'Incompatible'?" Will nodded. "It merely means that you promise to be a good Christian while you're working for me. Do you find that unsatisfactory?"

  "Not at all, sir."

  "Make your mark then." Majors dipped a pen in his inkwell, shook off the excess, and handed it with a flourish to the boy, who scratched a lopsided X at the bottom of the sheet. The manager then opened a desk drawer and held out a new leather-bound Bible. "Every man receives one over and above his wages. See that you learn to read it. Sundays the crew pauses to rest the stock and make its peace with God. Work hard the rest of the week, follow those provisions, and if it's a regular job you're after, you'll look no further."

  He took along his father's Mississippi Jaeger muzzle-loader, veteran of a hundred hunts, short and heavy and carrying a slug and two buckshot to a charge. They called him an "extra," which he soon learned meant an extra pair of hands and legs whenever they were needed. They were needed every minute. From first light to last he rode or walked beside the teams of oxen, drove cattle, carried messages between wagons, handed tools to the bullwhackers when a vehicle broke down, inspected the water barrels for leaks, helped extricate bawling heifers sunk to their haunches in river mud, and when the crew made camp he gathered, chopped, and split firewood and fetched water for the animals. He wondered that Majors had thought his pledge necessary, as there was hardly an idle moment to violate its conditions. By the time he crawled into his bedroll the first night, he ached in a thousand places. Five minutes later, it seemed, someone prodded him awake with a toe to help the cook with breakfast. The sky was still dark when he rolled out.

  The wagon boss was Frank McCarthy, a former bullwhacker who called Will "Billy" and took all his meals in the saddle. He kept the wagons within sight of one another and sent drivers after stray cattle and settled disputes with a terse word and a rolled whip in one hand. Sundays he read from the Bible to all who cared to listen while the stock grazed and the men rested and wrote letters home. Will slept Sundays while his body grew and his limbs hardened.

  The prairie breathed under empty blue sky, shrugging its coat of waist-high grass in the ceaseless wind—living land, taking no notice of the backward-leaning Conestogas and their shapeless bovine escort moving sedately across its back. Great black fists of buffalo pushed northward, and a lost eagle sailed among fat clouds in search of a mountain. Quail exploded from underfoot, making a boy's heart stop until they were almost out of range. Then the thump and crash of the Jaeger and bursting feathers and the long straight drop to earth. Additional stew meat for evening camp. Meanwhile eighteen yoke of oxen watched the ground and tramped out their fourteen miles a day. The earth revolved.

  Purple twilight on the mealy banks of the Platte. Thirty-five miles of wading through brackish water alive with wigglers and silt to the knees to avoid hostile Indians. Exhaustion spreading through him cozily, Will dragged behind the train, shifting hands on the heavy rifle from time to time to ease the deadness in one arm. His face, neck, and wrists were smeared with mud to protect them from the dense cloud of mosquitoes surrounding him; close up, the cracked yellow surface resembled the skin of a very old man. Still, he was content, cloaked in the warmth of his own solitude and fatigue. Ahead of him the moon rose swollen and orange. While he was admiring it, the head and feathers of a savage came to its face and paused, looking like the engraving on a coin.

  Hunting reflex took over. The rifle raised itself, pulsed against Will's shoulder. Feathers burst and the nightmare figure toppled, rolling down the bank, picking up speed as it rustled through the reeds until it landed with a splash at the bottom, one arm in the water, while the echo of the report growled in the distance and died hissing.

  Will kept his position, swaying a little under the weight of the lifted rifle. Metallic smoke drifted up and shredded in the wind blowing across the banks. McCarthy came splashing back through the water astride his big wall-eyed roan and drew rein
. He looked from the boy to the dead Indian and back to the boy.

  "How old are you, Billy?"

  He was borne behind McCarthy's saddle to the train, where upon hearing the news the delighted bullwhackers and drivers pummeled his back and shoulders and rubbed his head for luck and called him the youngest Indian slayer on the plains. When McCarthy left to supervise camping arrangements, a long-haired bullwhacker in his late teens named Jim passed Will a canteen with a broad wink. Dry-mouthed, the boy thanked him and tipped it up and choked on his first swallow of pure grain alcohol. When he finally stopped coughing, he responded to the others' laughter with a sheepish smile and helped himself to a more judicious sip before handing back the vessel. They pummeled him some more and someone gave him berries to chew to sweeten his breath, and when he got back to his bedroll the others were busy rewriting an old ballad to immortalize his feat of arms.

  The next evening, killing some rare slack time before supper, Will turned around at the click of an iron shoe on a pebble to see Alexander Majors looking down at him from the back of a large dun. The boy hid his charred stick behind his back and stepped in front of the evidence, but the firm's manager had already read the scrawled legend "William Frederick Cody" on the wagon sheet.

  "You learn quickly," he observed. The top half of his face was shadowed by his black hat and the lower half was all beard. "Have you been reading your Bible as I directed?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Who slew Abel?"

  "It wasn't me, sir."

  Majors put a hand in front of his whiskers. "Well, read on. You've seen no Mormons?"

  "I don't know what one looks like, sir."

  "If you see one, you'll know him. They wear the devil on their faces. Keep your eyes open and report anything unusual to Mr. McCarthy."

  Will replied that he would. Majors looked him over closely.

  "I've visited three trains tonight and they're all buzzing about the boy who killed an Indian. How does it feel to take a man's life, Will?"

  "Sir, there's a commandment that says 'Thou shalt not kill."

  "I'm well aware of it."

  "Sir, I don't believe Moses ever met a Cheyenne."

  "Don't blaspheme, boy." He started his horse walking. "See me when you return to Leavenworth. We need Indian fighters."

  Watering the animals at a creek the following noon, Will felt a hand on his shoulder and glanced up at Frank McCarthy, whose gaze was directed at the top of the hill. At first, Will thought it was Majors standing there holding a rifle, but then he saw that the man's beard was too long and the crown of his black hat too high. His companions were similarly shaggy and attired in somber black suits to match their hats. They were all armed.

  "Throw up your hands, brothers," said the man in the center calmly.

  "Who are you?" someone demanded.

  "We're Danites. And you're surrounded."

  The men in the river looked back toward the bank, where the wagons were ringed in by more bearded men with black hats and rifles. McCarthy' s men raised their hands.

  "Danites?" muttered Will to the boss.

  "Destroying angels. Mormons."

  They were ordered out of the water and promptly relieved of their weapons. Two of the intruders trained their muzzles on Jim, the young bullwhacker who had handed Will the canteen full of whiskey, while a third took away his six-guns. His face was drawn tight and pale as a clenched fist.

  "We're God-fearing men, brother," the Mormon leader told McCarthy. "We will let you have one wagon with oxen to get you back to where you came from."

  "That's almost a thousand miles!" protested the wagon master.

  "Some of the others would rather you never left this spot."

  "Can we at least have our guns?"

  "No, nothing but food and blankets."

  "If you faced us like white men instead of sneaking around like thieving Indians," Jim snarled, "things might of went different."

  "And if you didn't make war on a peaceful people we'd have no need to meet at all." The leader gestured with his rifle. "Choose a wagon and load it with what you require."

  When the wagon was filled, a bullwhacker climbed into the driver's seat and the rest of the party fell into step behind it, the Mormons' eyes burning holes in their backs. When they were over the first hill someone exclaimed and they looked back and saw the smoke from the flaming wagons.

  "Devil's sons," complained a driver.

  "It's enough to make a man use profane language, ain't it, Cap'n?" said Jim, managing a feeble grin.

  McCarthy told him to shut the hell up and walk.

  Stand back and give a young colt three years to kick up fresh earth and taste the short sweet spring grass. Teach him to write more than just his name and find out who slew Abel, hand him a whip and sit him behind the oxen on an uneventful trip to Fort Laramie to feel their sure and steady pull on the traces, introduce him at the end of the trail to small, clerkly Kit Carson with his Quaker haircut and gentle speech and loud, profane, hickory-limbed Jim Bridger. Fill him with information on distinguishing a Sioux sign from a gopher mound and the way a fresh wolf track in wet sand has sharp edges until the wind comes along to blur them. Lengthen his limbs, deepen his voice, and sharpen his aim so that game that takes flight is table fare in the twitch of an eyelid. Make a man.

  "I'm fourteen, sir."

  Shooting up now, growing thick through the chest and shoulders, Will stood in the middle of the Holladay Overland Mail & Express Company headquarters grounds at Horseshoe Station, dressed in the lightweight attire favored by his fellow Pony Express couriers. Coppery down glittered on his upper lip.

  "Captain Jack," Slade grunted. Although no taller than the boy, the superintendent of the Sweetwater stage route from Julesburg, Colorado, to Rocky Ridge, Wyoming, outweighed him by sixty pounds, most of it around the belly. His face was as brutal as his reputation and there was lint in his chin stubble that looked as if it had been there long enough to get mail.

  "That's high green even for an express rider," he said. "I wouldn't of took you on at all except for that letter from Majors' partner. But you've worked out fair. Savvy the situation, do you?"

  "Indians, sir."

  "Thievin' Cheyennes been hitting every other stage I send through and running off with the teams. I'll nail their brown hides to the station wall!"

  Will resisted an urge to move his shoulders. His employer had earned his nickname of "the terrible Slade" when, while still recovering from an encounter in which a horse-stealing stationmaster had emptied a revolver into his body, he came back with a party of company agents, tied his former assailant to a corral post, and used him for target practice, finally riding off with the man's ears in his saddlebags after shooting him twenty-two times. The boy could see those hides now, drying bloody in the sun.

  "I fought Indians before, Captain."

  "So I hear. How are you at tracking?"

  "I learned from Kit Carson and Jim Bridger at Fort Laramie."

  The superintendent sucked at a bad tooth. "We'll find out on the trail what them references is worth."

  He called over a very tall man from a knot of drivers in front of the station building. In his early twenties, the newcomer had very broad shoulders tapering to no hips at all and wore his tawny hair in ringlets below his collar. His drooping moustache couldn't quite conceal a protruding upper lip that together with his short chin gave him a definite facial resemblance to a duck. He was smoking a long black cheroot and wore the company uniform of wide-brimmed sombrero, high-heeled boots, and corduroy jacket and trousers trimmed with velvet. On him it looked natural.

  "Jim Hickok, meet Will Cody. The boy's coming with us." To Will: "Jim was constable at Monticello, and you'll not find a better hand with a pistol in these parts."

  Will grinned recognition. "How are you?"

  "Hoss." Hickok nodded, but the puzzlement in his eyes made it plain that he hadn't placed the youth.

  "You two know each other?"

  "If you
don't know a man after you've hiked with him a thousand miles, I don't guess you ever will." The courier told of the Mormon raid on the wagon train, his first Indian, and his first drink of whiskey courtesy of the young bullwhacker whose last name he had only just learned. The narrative had assumed distinct shape after several repetitions to others. Will had discovered a talent for storytelling. Hickok, who knew him now, wore a faint, painful smile throughout.

  Slade said, "You let them take your guns?"

  He dropped the cheroot and ground it under the heel of an exceptionally small boot. "Reckon you had to of been there, Cap'n, and seen how it was."

  "Reckon it's too bad I wasn't. You that obliging with redskins?"

  The driver went white to the hairline, and Slade set his feet. Both men were armed, the superintendent with an old Paterson revolver in a soft holster on his hip, Hickok with two Navy Colts riding in a sash around his waist with the butts twisted forward. Will shrank back out of the line of fire. Then Hickok showed tobacco-dull teeth behind his moustache.

  "I like you, Cap'n Jack," he said. "I surely must." Tension slid away through cracks in the earth. Slade nodded shortly.

  "Folks generally do. Draw some grub, the two of you, and put on trail clothes. Let the company pay for its own advertising."

  Hickok watched the little stage officer stumping back toward the station building, his round-crowned hat tipped down to his eyes. "There is a fellow who ain't bound to die the natural way," observed the driver.

  "A body might say the same thing about you," the boy reminded him.

  Night tarred the prairie and spat stars like carpenter's tacks across the sky. Amid stitching crickets the yellow flutter of fire at the base of the long slope looked impossibly remote, yet breathtakingly close, like a bright moth trapped in the small end of a field glass. Then an owl hoot wrinkled the peace and dimmed the illusion. Slade waited, then raised his hands to his mouth and answered with a whippoorwill whistle. Crickets again, and then the soft thudding of bound hoofs on grass.