Abilene had been booming for a couple of years. It had a schoolhouse, two churches, banks, and real estate offices. It had stores and shops of every kind. It had photography studios. It had hotels as fancy as you’d find anywhere east of Frisco and west of St. Louie. It even had a damn newspaper.
But more than anything else, Abilene had cows. One big herd after another got packed into the rail-yard pens at the end of town for shipment to the East. And with those cows came the wild boys from Texas. Outfit after outfit rode in from three hard months on the trail, looking to have a good time. And ready to give it to them were dozens of saloon-keepers and flocks of hard-eyed whores and more quick-fingered gamblers than you could shake a pair of dice at. Abilene got so damn loud they said you could hear it all the way over in K.C. Cowboys whooping and howling, cows mooing day and night, train whistles blasting at all hours. There was brawling in public and drunks reeling on the sidewalks and horse racing in the streets. And sometimes—in spite of the ordinance against carrying guns in town—there was shooting. Usually it was in fun and only busted up some glass. Sometimes it was in earnest and somebody got shot.
Right from the start, Abilene loved the cowboys’ money—but as the town had prospered and grown, many of the good citizens began to take offense at the cowboys’ kind of fun. Bad enough the cowboy money stank of whiskey and whorehouse perfume by the time it reached the good citizens’ hands, but the cowboys’ wild ways in the streets got to be more than they could bear. What was needed, they decided, was a hardcase lawman who could keep the wild boys under control. And so, in the summer of ’70, they hired Bear River Tom Smith to be the town marshal.
Bear River Tom was a big redhead from back east where he’d been a policeman, and he was tough as they come. But Abilene was tough as they come too, and Tom hadn’t been marshal but about five months when one night somebody chopped off his head with an ax. Nobody wanted the job after that, and the town got wilder than ever. It took months to find somebody to take Tom’s place. But they finally hired themselves the best there was—Wild Bill. That was in April of 1871, about two months before Hardin got to town.
Bill was already a legend at the time he came to Abilene. The “Prince of the Pistoleers,” the dime novelists called him. And he truly did love being a famous man. He was always ready to cooperate in promoting his heroic reputation, which mostly meant telling magazine and newspaper writers the kind of adventurous bullshit stories they wanted to pass on to their gullible readers back east. He had a natural flair for being a public figure, and he damn sure looked the part—the long yellow hair, the fancy Prince Albert or the fringed buckskin, the wide red sash holding his pearl-handled navies butt-forward. He spent most of every day and night at his special table in the Alamo, the fanciest saloon in town, with double-glass doors and a mahogany bar and shiny brass cuspidors as high as your knee. He drank steady and gambled and joked and told tall tales. Every now and then he’d tour the town and let the citizens see that Wild Bill was on the job. Tyler or myself would sometimes follow along to keep watch for back-shooters, but it wasn’t necessary. Bill had a sixth sense for guns being pointed at him, even from behind. A gunshot would flame from the alleyway shadows and he’d already be spinning and ducking down and returning fire, all in one smooth motion. In his first month on the job he wounded two ambushers and scared off a half-dozen others. There were plenty of pistoleros hankering for some celebrity of their own, and killing Bill was a sure way to get it. But even when he was drunk—Wild Bill Hiccup, some called him, though never within his hearing—there wasn’t a one who had the guts to take him on face-to-face. (His sixth sense finally quit working for him five years later—in the Number 10 Saloon in Deadwood, where some dirty-nose tramp named McCall shot him in the back of the head. But even in death, he looked the legend: the Deadwood doc said Bill was the prettiest corpse he ever saw.)
I ought mention that just before Hardin got to Abilene, Bill had some trouble with Ben Thompson that heated up a lot of Texan tempers. It started over a sign Ben and his partner, Fancy Phil Coe—both of them Texans with lots of friends—had recently hung over the door to their Bull’s Head saloon, which happened to be directly across the street from the jail. The sign showed a huge red bull reared up on its hind legs, proudly displaying to all the passing world a monster pair of balls and a giant pecker ready for action.
The first time Bill saw it he looked sad. “A sight like that,” he said, “is apt to make a lady feel cheated the next time a feller lets down his breeches for her. I don’t generally mind a fanciful exaggeration, but it shouldn’t be of a sort to disappoint the ladies nor diminish a man’s sense of his own manhood.” Just the same, he wouldn’t have done anything about the sign—live and let live whenever possible, that was Bill’s motto—except that Mayor T. C. Henry got a storm of complaints from henpecked storekeepers, red-faced mothers with giggling children, and preachers having purple fits. He came into the jail like a man being chased by yellow jackets. “You got to do something about that sign, Bill, that’s all there is to it.”
So Bill told Johnny Coombs the painter to get his equipment and come along with us to the Bull’s Head. Johnny no sooner got up on the ladder and started to paint over the offending portions of the big bull when Phil Coe came out of the saloon and asked what was going on. When Bill told him, Phil shrugged and said, “I warned Ben that sign would rile the good folk.” Fancy Phil Coe was easy enough to get along with and had fairly decent manners for a Texan—which is why it seems all the more pitiful that of the only two men Bill killed in Abilene he was one of them.
While him and Bill were talking and watching Johnny paint, Ben Thompson came stomping out. He wasn’t nearly so agreeable a fella as Phil. He was as stocky as the bull on the sign and had a reputation as a good pistolman. They said he’d killed at least ten white men in Texas and served two years in prison for trying to kill his wife’s brother for beating up on her. I believe Bill was one of the few men Ben Thompson ever truly feared in his life—and so naturally Ben hated him.
“If they don’t like the sign,” he told Bill, “tell them not to look at it, damn their eyes!” He was wearing a gun in defiance of Bill’s ordinance. Sorry, Bill told him, but the sign was going to change whether Ben liked it or not.
There was but six feet between them and you could see Ben trying with all his might to beat his fear and pull on Bill. He got all sweaty and tight in the face but he just couldn’t do it. When he finally broke off the stare, his face was splotchy with shame. Phil Coe looked embarrassed for him. Ben pretended to watch Johnny paint for a minute, then started back into the saloon with his back as stiff as a fence post.
“Don’t wear that useless hogleg on the street again,” Bill called after him. He normally wasn’t one to rub a man’s face in it, but Ben brought out the worst in him. Ben’s ears got red as beets but he went on inside without looking back. You could smell the rank hate he left in the air.