So in the face of all that I submit this experience of mine with the man in Kansas City in ’71. It wasn’t everything he done that period by a long shot; he even played poker with others and won. But I’m saying what I knowed of him personally. When I weigh all the pros and cons he comes out even.
He learned me about the precision handling of a revolver. However, had I never met him it was likely I could have got on right well without that specialty, which was not the necessity you might imagine for surviving in the West. Take the incident with Strawhan’s brother: if Wild Bill had not been expert at gunfighting he would have got killed; but if he had not been a gunfighter, Strawhan’s brother would not have been after him in the first place. So what did Hickok actually do for me? Show me how to save my life? No, rather he give me a new means by which to risk it.
I felt a curious relief when them lessons had ended, and somehow I got to believing that I wouldn’t see him no more across the poker table, either. Nor did I for a night or two, and a fellow told me Hickok had been offered the marshal’s job in Abilene, which was one of them new towns on the railroad to which the Texas men drove up their cattle for shipment East and when they got there the cowboys collected their pay and went wild till they was broke, drinking and whoring and shooting, and not long before had killed the then marshal, Bear River Tom Smith, who had enforced the law with his fists. So now Abilene wanted to hire a gunfighter.
“Reckon he’ll take it?” I asked.
“Sure do,” said that fellow. “He ain’t killed nobody since Strawhan’s brother.”
This was a typical opinion about Hickok: that he enjoyed sending people under. So many of them who admired him liked this idea, for in any white population there is a vast number of individuals who have murder in their hearts but consider themselves too weak to take up its practice themselves, so they substitute a man like Hickok. A Cheyenne enjoyed killing, but not Wild Bill: he was indifferent to it. He had barely looked at the corpse of Strawhan’s brother except to check whether it would draw on him again. In fact, I don’t think Hickok enjoyed anything. Life to him consisted of doing what was necessary, endlessly measuring his performance against that single perfect shot for each occasion. He was what you call an idealist.
Well, it appeared a day or so later that my assumption he had left town was erroneous, for we had just started up our nightly poker session when Hickok’s big form swung into the saloon, and he stepped aside so his back would not be in a direct line with the door while he sized the place up as was his custom. He wore a new outfit; no longer the frock coat, but a beautiful soft deerskin shirt that fell to his knees, trimmed at the collar and cuffs with fur and a four-inch fringe hung from the hem. At his waist was tied a sash of red silk, with fringed tassels dangling from the knot. Into this, above both hips, his ivory-handled sixguns was thrust butts forward.
I knowed he was looking for me; there weren’t no point in trying to hide, so I give him a holler, and he come and set in, and of course I won all night as usual, perfectly honest, not using my ring, and along about dawn he called me for a hundred dollars and showed an ace full house.
At which I says: “I got two pairs.”
It was unusual to see Wild Bill grin, but he did now and tugged at the end of his sweeping mustaches, and he says: “Well, I finally did it.”
And I says: “Two pairs of queens.”
However, he just kept smiling as he pushed the money over, more than I ever took off him in the past at one setting, and he even bantered a bit with the other men, and then followed them out. I don’t know why I had toyed with him like that: it was mean to let him think for a moment he had at last beat me. But it had been instinctive on my part. I ain’t the first or last man to needle an individual who presents his weakness so obviously.
Well, I left the saloon myself finally, last man in the place, and the barkeep yawns and bid me goodnight, and I get to the porch and there of course is Wild Bill standing in the street at a range of twenty paces. It struck me that had been the distance in our gun practice, for when you have trained so much, your eyes gauges them things automatic.
I says: “You want to go to breakfast, Bill?”
He says: “No.”
I comes down into the street, and he backs up for the same distance, hands hanging loose at his sides.
I says: “Something wrong?”
He says: “You have been cheating me.”
“No, I ain’t,” says I. “Maybe that first night we played, but never since. And I’ll refund what I won then.”
“Don’t go for that pocket,” he says.
“You can see my gun,” I points out, “here in the belt.”
“I think you have a hide-out derringer in that vest.”
