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.
Which brings me back to Wild Bill. I didn’t want to play against him, and some evenings managed to elude his company. But he’d come looking for me from saloon to saloon, and when he caught up, would run one of the three other fellows out of their chair, take it, and proceed to lose. It was strange, too strange for my stomach, and I got to not using the mirror-ring after he set down—while making the most of it before he showed up, so the evening would still show a profit.
Now what that ring done, it never gave me better cards than the next, but rather the knowledge of what hands the other fellows held and then only when I was dealer; it was not nearly so dishonest as palming an ace, say; a certain skill was still required, and pure luck determined what cards a man would get from the deal. I can’t say my luck either improved or worsened when using the ring. But here’s the oddity, whenever Bill set down and I refrained from employing the tiny mirror—played square, that is, my luck commenced to run extreme and fantastic. Flushes, straights, three of a kind, pairs: they flowed to me as if by magic.
Bill played doggedly on. And always we went to breakfast afterwards and then out to our range; and other than that queer look that come over him when I took my first pot of the evening and never left it till I walked from the saloon to meet him in the street outside—for he continued to leave first—he did not display anything that could be termed bad feeling, suspicion, spite, or envy.
As to the shooting lessons, I figure they served him as an exercise in pride, reminding me directly after every poker session that, whereas he had lost, he was pre-eminent in the more serious game of chance in which the stakes is life and death—for though we was shooting at dimes and corks, you could not overlook their similar diameter to that of the human eye.
However, I believe that when Wild Bill Hickok faced a man he looked at his opponent’s eye as if it was a cork.
I was getting real good with my weapon against them inanimate objects, and I was fast. Though speed itself was of lesser concern than accuracy, for as Bill said what mattered was putting your bullet where you wanted it to go. He had seen a fast man fire three shots before a slow man got off one; but the three missed, whereas the laggard’s struck the quick man dead center.
’Course, he says, there’s where the personality come in; whether fast or slow, there was one perfect shot for each occasion, and you killed or died according to how close you come to achieving it. Once arriving at your decision to fire upon a man, your mind become a blank, and your will, your body, and your pistol merged into one instrument with a single job. It was as if the gun growed out of your hand, your finger spat lead and smoke. Indeed, that was the technique of aiming: like you was pointing to make emphasis in a argument. On such an occasion the ordinary person is naturally accurate: notice next time, he says, when you are in a verbal quarrel; if your opponent’s finger was a gun, you’d be dead.
One morning we set up twin boards with dimes protruding from slots in them, and both me and Wild Bill went back twenty paces and fired. We both split our bullets perfect on the dimes’ edge, and the two shots sounded as one explosion.
“Hoss,” says Hickok, looking down at me over his hooked nose and blond handlebars, “I have taught you all that can be learned out here. The rest is to be had only from a target that shoots back.”
“That must have been luck,” I says. I meant it. He could have repeated that performance all day; whereas I knowed I couldn’t have done it more than say twice out of five: you can tell that about yourself. I also had the definite feeling he had not used all the speed of which he was capable.
“I don’t believe in luck,” he answers, and his voice was like the cracking of a whiplash. But he drops the subject then and appeared his old self on the ride back to town.
Wild Bill Hickok had devoted friends and sworn enemies. Mention his name anywhere in Kansas during the ’70’s and you could get a sharp reaction on one side or the other, and there might have been more men killed in arguments about him than he himself ever sent under. There was some people, I suppose out of envy, who even insisted he was a second-rate shot as well as a coward, and of course that greater number who had him doing impossible feats.
