I haven’t mentioned them two other slobs we played with, being they was the kind who figured it a privilege to be beat by Wild Bill. There was a number of flunkies around there who took turns losing to him every night. Now as I was putting away my win-it turned out to be a little over a hundred dollars-these men smirked at me and then each other.
And the one says: “I recall the late Hank French. He also won from Wild Bill at poker.”
I just sneered at them and went out from the nightlong stink of smoke and liquor into the pure morning. You had to keep your face in them days, and it is just as well they was behind me when I seen Hickok waiting in the street outside, his silk hat cocked forward, his golden hair streaming over his shoulders, his fine white hands hooked by the thumbs into his lower vest pockets, with them two pearl handles a-jutting out of both hips. Down the street come a man trundling a handcart, and across the square someone was saddling a mule which was blowing out its belly as they always do so the cinch straps would be loose, and the owner was fixing to kick him in it.
Well sir, I thought, here’s where I get it after all these years of close calls, for Hickok was going to drill me for cheating him, and Amelia would return to whoring, and I had failed again.
But I would not back down to Wild Bill even though in this instance he was right. I don’t know why: I was afraid of him, yet at the same time his presence was a challenge to me.
So I stepped out through the swinging doors onto the porch and says: “You waiting on me?”
He gives me that famous level look for one long, breathless moment, and then he suddenly relaxes and says: “Come on, hoss, let’s get some breakfast.”
It was over our steak and eggs and fried potatoes that Wild Bill says: “Anybody who plays poker as well as you ought to learn to handle a gun.” I don’t know whether he meant it sarcastic or not, nor did I understand his motive in offering to give me his expert instruction free of charge. But I accepted, and that’s what we got to doing every morning after them games: me and Wild Bill would eat and then we’d ride to the edge of town and we’d shoot. And I found that though I had carried a revolver for years and had used it upon occasion, in comparison with Hickok I knowed very little of the weapon.
He talked more of the technical specifics of pistols, holsters, cartridges, etc., but we spent most of our time practicing marksmanship and the fast draw. I gathered that, before he took me along, he come there anyway by himself, for like a fine piano player a gunfighter had to rehearse continually lest he lose the precise touch. Here’s the exercises Wild Bill used to keep his hand in: driving a cork through the neck of a bottle and splitting a bullet on the edge of a dime, both at a range of forty-fifty feet, starting with the guns in his pants. I would hold a silver dollar chest-high, drop it, and before it struck the earth he’d have drawed, fired, and hit the dime so that the soft-lead .45 slug was cut in two equal parts.
Maybe the first thirty times I tried this, I even missed the length of the board in which the dime was embedded, or tore up the prairie on either side, front and back, of the bottle. But then I got to where I was missing only by about six inches, and consistently to the right of the target, so I adjusted my technique to pull left, and made my first score one morning after we had been going out there only a week. This was with the dime; later I shot the cork through the bottle, too, an easier accomplishment.
But I couldn’t get the sense of merely being the fastest draw or the best shot, with no further purpose to it. Take Wild Bill, the only thing he was suited to be was a peace officer, patrolling the streets of a cowtown in hopes someone would offer him resistance so that he could use his guns on them. He couldn’t even be an outlaw, for suchlike had to be more interested in robbing than gunplay-or in the case of Johnny Jump and his gang, murder and mayhem. Something concrete, that is. But gunfighting was all idea when you got down to it, devoted to testing the proposition: I’m a better man than you. It might have been fair, for size and weight did not enter, and a midget was on the same terms as a giant, when they both held Colt’s. But the question was, what did you establish when you found the better man?
That’s what I got to thinking about, for no sooner had I developed my proficiency than Hickok says: “Of course, firing at bottles is the least part of it. It’s the man-to-man encounter that proves everything. I’ve known champion shots who froze when going against men who hardly knew a butt from a muzzle, and died.”
I was playing poker every night, all night, and needless to say I was winning with my mirror-ring. Now I was not such a fool as to get recklessly overbearing about it. After that first session, I held my earnings down, twenty dollars one night, thirty the next, maybe falling back on the next to as little as fifteen; and if I’d get as high as fifty, then I’d balance it some by maybe losing five-six dollars the following night. In the aggregate I was making a good income, but not so conspicuous as to rouse serious suspicion, though of course any success at a game of chance is apt to be suspect to them off whom it is gained. But I was deft with my ring, and if my opponents looked for anything, it was the obvious tricks like palming cards or stacking the deck, of which I was utterly innocent.
Then I’d take them shooting lessons and afterward go back to our hotel and find little Amelia just arising from her slumbers at around eight o’clock, and I’d pretend I just got up myself and we’d take our morning coffee brought by the help to the sitting room between our bedchambers. It was real nice, and she didn’t seem in the least bored by this new life, as I feared she might be, and I could afford the bills, so the shank of the morning would find us visiting the expensive ladies’ shops where she’d buy more dresses and shoes and hats, and then in the afternoon we’d rent a carriage and ride about or stroll through the parks, and in the early evening we’d take in the genteeler entertainments: piano or violin recitals, dramatic readings, and the like.
In between all this, and the meals we ate, I tried to catch a few winks of sleep; but I didn’t need much in that period. I was twenty-nine years of age, and in the prime of life; had somebody to straighten out, and someone to cheat; was an acquaintance of Wild Bill Hickok; made money, ate and dressed to the hilt.
But the main thing was my fondness for Amelia. I’d have done anything for that girl. She was developing into such a lady that shortly I believe I could have took her back to Dolly’s and nobody would ever have recognized her. It was not just her fine clothes, but she had picked up, from them magazine pictures and watching the respectable women in the better places of K.C. where I took her, the most elegant way of carrying herself. She had a longish, willowy neck to begin with, and now she held her head, with that great pile of red hair cunningly arranged with pins of shell and amber, above it like a wonderful bird’s nest upon a marble pillar.
“Uncle Jack,” she would say, coming to the door of her room as we was fixing to go out, “would you prefer I wore the paletot or the basque or the sacque this evening?” These was all types of women’s coats of that day. Now I didn’t know one from the next, but since I was flattered to be asked, I’d make a choice and she would don it, for her major delight lay in pleasing me. Now you have that attitude on her part, and then you have mine: I found pleasing everything she did, for it was all graceful and sensitive, and her voice, which had been right tinny when at Dolly’s, had turned as pretty as the sound of a spring bubbling out among ferns. I got an immense joy out of just seeing her eat a plate of food. I’ll tell you how refined she was: you couldn’t see her teeth when she chewed, and she was so quiet about spooning up a bowl of soup that if your eyes was closed you’d never know what she was up to.
All this she had worked out on her own, for them ain’t the kind of things you can teach a person, and God knows I am hardly an instructor in deportment. But my experience with Mrs. Pendrake had give me at least this: I know class when I see it, and insofar as was within my power I could encourage Amelia when she headed in the right direction, which meant I had to maintain that flow of money, which in turn kept me cheating at cards.