Defending Cody Read online

  BILL BROOKS

  LAW FOR HIRE:

  DEFENDING CODY

  For Greg & Manon,

  who live out there and pursue the ghost horse still.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Drunk as weasels, Billy Cody and Texas Jack fell into…

  Chapter 1

  The door ringer sounded like loose change in a cowboy’s…

  Chapter 2

  Billy wired and told ’em all to come quick.

  Chapter 3

  Saturdays they held dances in the plaza. John Sears could…

  Chapter 4

  Word of death traveled by wire: The white man’s wire…

  Chapter 5

  Morning sun crept along the streets, climbed the east walls…

  Chapter 6

  Billy rose early. Louisa slept like a rock still. Poor…

  Chapter 7

  Mysterious Dave Mather had not planned to murder Buffalo Billy…

  Chapter 8

  They rode toward Silver City cautious, John saying how it…

  Chapter 9

  It was later reported in the Times-Picayune that the old…

  Chapter 10

  Teddy and John arrived in North Platte on a day…

  Chapter 11

  Dora Hand soon came quickly to realize that palm reading…

  Chapter 12

  Teddy rose early and walked over to the telegram office…

  Chapter 13

  Bob figured the night storm was an omen. He awoke…

  Chapter 14

  The gentleman Billy and Teddy were waiting on stepped forth…

  Chapter 15

  White Eye and Yankee Judd and Jane Nebraska had set…

  Chapter 16

  The hunting party arrived midafternoon of the next day.

  Chapter 17

  After Mysterious Dave rolled the dead man into the river…

  Chapter 18

  There was a dusting of snow fine as sugar on…

  Chapter 19

  They got off the train in Omaha; it was as…

  Chapter 20

  Teddy came up the canyon in a hurry. Ahead, he…

  Chapter 21

  Mysterious Dave took respite for several days and nights following…

  Chapter 22

  White Eye felt plum in love. He watched Jane lasso…

  Chapter 23

  There was a heavy knock at the door and Bob…

  Chapter 24

  White Eye warned Jane that they probably shouldn’t tell Billy…

  Chapter 25

  Mysterious Dave made sure to skirt wide the ranch of…

  Chapter 26

  The hunting party rode at a good clip, up the…

  Chapter 27

  The telegram arrived just as the blizzard began.

  Chapter 28

  They awoke to howling winds and a driving, blinding snow.

  Chapter 29

  White Eye and Jane had been wrapped in each other’s…

  Chapter 30

  Mysterious Dave felt lost in a world that suddenly turned…

  Chapter 31

  The storm raged throughout the night, but by morning it…

  Chapter 32

  Louisa stoked the fire. Wind rattled the windows. Outside the…

  Chapter 33

  A blue dusk settled over the land as they rode…

  Chapter 34

  The shot rolled like thunder and Teddy Blue sat bolt…

  Chapter 35

  They arrived in North Platte, wounded and not the same…

  Chapter 36

  Louisa had just finished washing the blood from the porch…

  Chapter 37

  Teddy was in his room waiting for John when there…

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bill Brooks

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Drunk as weasels, Billy Cody and Texas Jack fell into a mud wallow.

  They lay there looking up at the stars.

  “We’ll be up there someday, you and me,” Billy said.

  “With Georgie and Wild Bill and all the rest of them old boys.”

  “We’ll die like they did and become one of them stars.”

  A mongrel dog ran up and began licking their faces.

  Billy said, “Shoo!”

  “We go home drunk and muddy,” Jack said, “the girls will skin us…”

  They thought of their wives: Louisa and Josephine.

  “Ain’t it funny we both married foreign women,” Billy said.

  “I like to think of it as exotic.”

  “Me too.”

  Henry Egg, a constable with a belly that hung over his belt and a sidearm riding high on his hip, came and stood over them and said, “You boys better crawl out of that mud hole before a wagon comes along and runs over you.”

  “You know who this is?” Jack said with drunken indignation to the lawman.

  “Why, by God, it looks like none other than the beautiful Buffalo Bill,” Henry said. “And wouldn’t it be a shame for everybody to read in tomorrow’s newspaper how the famous scout and Indian slayer was run over and killed by a goddamn lumber wagon whilst lying drunk in the middle of the street.”

  Billy rose to one elbow and looked at the fellow.

  “You’ve no respect for your betters,” he said.

  “Why, Bill, I knew your daddy and he’d be rightfully ashamed he was to see you thus.”

  “Oh, it’s you, Henry,” Billy said. “I didn’t recognize you in this poor light.”

  The deputy scratched behind his ear, said, “I wonder, is this what they mean when they say fallen heroes?”

  Suddenly Billy felt badly for his public behavior of drunkenness.

  “Come on, Jack,” he said as he rose out of the mud wallow, taking Jack by the wrist and pulling him to his feet. Henry Egg watched the two of them staggering down the street like the last two of their breed, slouching off toward an unknown destination and uncertain future.

  They slept on Billy’s front porch rather than go into the house and rouse the women, knowing as they did the temperamental capacity of their wives—one being of French blood, the other Italian.

  “It’d be better if we was to just sleep here on the porch,” Billy suggested. Jack did not argue but promptly fell asleep in one of the high-back rockers.

  Before they knew it, morning light crawled over the porch slow as a snake. The warmth of the autumn sun touched Billy’s cheek and Jack’s boots about the same time. Billy opened his eyes to see the severe face of Louisa staring down at him.

  “You stink like a saloon,” she said.

  “It ain’t no wonder. Me and Jack about drank the Yellow Dog dry last evening. But it could always be worse, you know.”

  “I don’t see how.”

  “I could be lying out in them toolies dead instead of just here on the porch hungover.”

  “I might prefer the former rather than see you thus—covered in mud, bleary-eyed, and stinking.”

  “Oh, you know how to hurt a man’s pride…”

  He saw her look over to Jack and shake her head before going back inside.

  The silence, once inside around the breakfast table, was mean enough Billy could have shot it. He could hear the others breathing through their noses, hear their teeth grinding food. And each time he looked up, he saw Louisa’s cold stare. He thought at such moments how preferable it was to be out fighting Indians or flirting with actresses than sitting there in his very own home with wife and daughters acting churlish toward him.

  Jack’s wife had been much more magnanimous about Jack’s disheveled condition. Josephine was young and pretty and still stained by new love such
that she was capable of overlooking Jack’s indiscretions—at least for now, Billy thought. But wait till later on after you’ve been married a few years…You’ll see, Jack, old son, how tolerant wives remain of you. He thought of that old Bible passage about a man being honored everywhere but in his own home. Ain’t I still a most famous and honored man everywhere but here in my own house?

  Later, after hot baths and fresh clothes, Billy and Jack went riding out a good distance from the large house with its wives and children and hunted rabbits with a pair of needle-guns Billy kept for just such sport. The trick was to shoot the hares on the run and not catch them squatting by some sage, warming themselves in the sun.

  “There’s no sport in shooting a creature that is napping,” Billy said to Jack.

  But Jack couldn’t get the hang of it, shooting a rabbit that ran and dodged the way that rabbits did. A man had to be an uncanny shot to hit a running rabbit.

  “I’d need a scattergun to hit them dang things.”

  “Like this,” Billy said, and showed him, knocking down the first three rabbits they flushed; Jack thought Billy’s shooting was akin to magic.

  But in his heart, it made Billy sad to be shooting rabbits on such a pretty day. For rabbit shooting hardly held the thrill to it that riding into a thundering herd of buffalo and firing down on them did. But the buffalo were all gone from the prairies now. Nor did shooting rabbits hold a candle to riding scout for the army in pursuit of the warrior Sioux. But the Sioux were mostly all gone too. And shooting rabbits sure didn’t compare to consorting with the likes of Georgie Custer and Wild Bill—both now as gone as the buffalo and wild Indians. Someday the land would be so tamed a man wouldn’t even need to arm himself, except for the poor sport of shooting rabbits. Billy didn’t care much for the thought of such a day coming. But he knew the West was going away fast and that there had to be some other diversion for him, and the only one thing he thought he’d still be good at was being a showman. The West was about gone, except in the memory of men who’d been there and lived it.

  About noon they paused along a sparkling stream so they could water their mounts and Jack said, “It looks like our ponies are drinking diamonds.” And when Billy looked, he could see the sun-shattered water dripping from the horses’ muzzles. Billy admired Jack for his poetic ways.

  They rested while their horses drank and cropped a circle of grass. Billy looked off toward the aspens with their gold leaves fluttering in the branches while Texas Jack took a short siesta. The trunks of the aspens looked like scarred bones and the sky above was blue as a china plate. It was a pretty place all the way around and he hoped someday there wouldn’t be houses built all over it and railroad tracks and fences and towns to mar its beauty. He took a short siesta too, and awoke with his head full of new ideas. Texas Jack climbed out from under his sombrero and said, “That was refreshing.”

  “I was thinking,” Billy said, “about putting together a new combination show.”

  Texas Jack suddenly looked sheepish.

  “I didn’t know how or when to tell you, Billy, but me and Josephine has been talking about putting together a show of our own…”

  It was disappointing news to Billy’s ears—especially after all that had happened over the last few months with Georgie Custer getting slaughtered and Wild Bill shot dead by a drunk. It felt like some sort of extra hole through his heart he couldn’t put a bung in.

  But Billy’s pride was such that he made out like it was wonderful news what Jack had just told him, and he smiled until all his teeth showed and slapped Jack on the back in congratulatory fashion, saying, “I can’t blame you for wanting to make a great name for yourself, old son.”

  Texas Jack’s cheeks grew crimson with embarrassment.

  “It was more Jo’s idea than mine. You know I ain’t never been one to make a big show of myself, don’t you, Bill?”

  “Can’t blame a woman for wanting to succeed, old son. Jo’s a pretty gal with lots of talent and ambition. You’d do well to keep your wagon hitched to her.”

  “I know it,” Texas Jack said. “I’d jump over the moon for her.”

  A flock of geese honked their way out of the sun and flew south along the course of the Platte River like it was a water road they were following.

  “If we had the right guns we could knock some of them fat geese down,” Billy said.

  Jack knew Billy was disappointed that he and Josephine would be striking out on their own; he could tell by the sound of Billy’s voice—the way it sort of cracked with melancholy as he was talking and watching those geese fly away.

  “I’m sorry, Bill…”

  Billy walked over and adjusted the cinch of his saddle, saying over his shoulder, “Oh, don’t worry none about it, I reckon I can still put together a good combination, even if I don’t have you and Jo in it.” But Jack knew that Billy was thinking about how Wild Bill would be missing too, and how it would never be the same again as when all three of them had gone East together to play the theaters.

  They rode back to the house in the midafternoon, the light weaker now than it had been, and the shadows lying long across the land. The sun in that season had lost the fierceness it had when Custer and his boys got trapped down in that Powder River country. And surely it must have been hot as hell that August day Wild Bill went into a saloon and never came out again but feet first.

  Soon enough the sun would lose all its strength and snow would come to that country and turn the rivers black and every speck of land would become quiet as death as it slept under winter’s white blanket.

  Billy rode ahead, stately, like a man leading a parade, the needle-gun balanced across the pommel of his silver-studded saddle, and Texas Jack knew the man had a history to him few other men had.

  They say dying comes in threes and Jack wondered if Billy Cody might be next on fate’s list to be taken. Georgie and Wild Bill had both been about the same age as Billy was now—men in their thirties and of good vigor when struck down within six weeks of each other. Men in their prime, like Billy was in his.

  Jack sure hoped not. Once Billy Cody was gone, it would signal the end of something great. He spurred his horse ahead to catch up to Bill’s and said, “We don’t none of us know what the future holds, do we?”

  At first Billy did not reply and Jack thought maybe he hadn’t heard the question, and they rode along for several minutes with just the creaking of their saddles to interrupt the silence.

  Then another larger flock of geese flew high overhead and Billy looked up at them with eyes that seemed to Texas Jack to be more sorrowful than he ever remembered them looking. And when the geese had disappeared in the ocean of blue sky, Billy said, “We’ve no more control over our fate than those geese do, Jack. We’re just another of God’s unprepared creatures doing what’s natural in us to do…”

  That night Billy lay abed next to Louisa. Unable to sleep he slipped from the covers and went to the window and looked out at the moonlit yard. He had thought he’d heard a noise, somebody walking around, their boots crunching on the dry grass.

  It still darkened his mood, the fact Jack and Josephine were breaking off to go on their own. He adored them both and their loss would be great, both as friends and performers. Still, it felt to him a bit like betrayal. The bad dreams he’d been having lately didn’t help his mood. Then too there was Louisa and her many manifest moods. She bedeviled him with her concerns about all manner of things, money and children and his being gone a great deal of the time. Seemed like ever since their son Kit died that spring, things had not been good between he and Louisa. He called her Lulu when he was pleased with her and Louisa when he was not.

  He left the room and walked down the hall and looked in on his sleeping daughters—Irma, Orra, and Arta. They were like angels resting in their white beds with the moonlight flush in their golden hair.

  He went down the stairs thinking he would have something to drink to relieve his unease. Found a bottle in the cabinet and poured two f
ingers of whiskey in a glass and took it out onto the porch.

  Oh, he felt somehow cursed of spirit. Clouds drifted before the moon, then drifted away. The land lay quiet until coyotes set to yip off in the distance, creating a good kind of ruckus, then fell silent again. Wind blew gently up from the south, carrying with it the smell of the river, that ancient scent of something that had existed as long as time itself and would never pass from the land.

  He sat in one of the rockers and sipped his whiskey and thought about the combination he’d put together for the tour. Captain Jack Crawford, the cowboy poet, might be a good man to have onboard. Maybe Crawford could play the part of Wild Bill. Ned Buntline was probably available to help him write a play or two. He could write an act about the killing of Yellow Hand…call it First Scalp for Custer.

  He thought of the irony, how he’d killed the old Indian quite by goddamn accident. The dudes back East would pay to see it. Maybe he could get Buck Taylor to play Yellow Hand; Buck was himself a swarthy fellow…

  “Hey,” he thought he heard somebody say.

  It gave him a start that caused him nearly to spill the whiskey out of his glass.

  He didn’t see anyone.

  Instinct told him to rise, go in the house and get a gun…

  But then he saw them and eased himself down again.

  “Oh, it’s just you two.”

  Georgie Custer and Wild Bill stood there in the moonstruck yard looking at him.

  “Shit, I thought you boys was gone under…”

  In unison they said: “It was no fault of our own, darlin’ Bill…”