Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page A

place that afternoon. But now Wild Bill stayed in the game, winning hand after hand, his luck still holding, and before long this man too was cleaned out, and he pushed away from the table, looking more sad than mad.
    “Damn,” says he, head down, “I ain’t got enough left to get a bite to eat.”
    Wild Bill stood up too. “Look here, Jack, I done well tonight after a long run of bad luck. I’d be proud to stake you to your supper.” He picked up some of the piled coins in front of him and proffered them to this Jack McCall, as Harry Young told me he was called.
    McCall took the money, nodding, still not looking at Wild Bill, and left the premises.
    To the other players Wild Bill said he was turning in, being not as youthful as he once was, but tomorrow would give them all their chance to get even.
    We walked back to the wagon. It was still early enough on the midsummer evening to see our way without a lantern.
    “You must of give me good luck, hoss,” said Wild Bill. “I always square my debts, so you’re getting a dollar bonus for tonight, and I’m also canceling what you owe me.”
    “That’s mighty generous of you, Bill.”
    “Well, I want to do it while I can, for luck that’s good today won’t necessarily hold on forever, or even tomorrow.” He was taking such long strides, tall as he was, I had to make two for every one of his. “Custer’s luck,” he says. “He was famous for it, till it went bad.”
    I considered trying again to tell him a first-person account of the Little Bighorn fight, but decided against taking the chance as yet, for I needed this job.
    “I believe you was acquainted with him.”
    “And liked him,” said Wild Bill. “I had to shoot a couple of his men when four or five of them jumped me once in Hays, and I had a difference of opinion one time with his brother Tom, but the General was always mighty nice to me. Couple years back, he complimented me in the written word, or so I was told. His lady is a fine woman, and now a widow at a tender age, poor little gal.”
    “Beautiful,” I says with feeling. “I saw her once.”
    “Well,” Bill says with that new sanctimoniousness of his, “you might be right about that, hoss, but I am married to the most beautiful lady in the world myself.”
    I figure his eyesight must be even worse than I thought, on the basis of that photograph of his Aggie, but naturally did not say anything, and we had by now arrived at the camp, where I was looking forward to getting my wages from Colorado Charley.
    But when I peeked into the door of his tent, the interior of which was arranged neat as a hotel room in a city, with a cot and square-folded blankets, a leather-strapped trunk, and a nice hide rug on the ground, no Charley was in evidence.
    When I informed Wild Bill, who was still standing there, breathing the evening air with apparent satisfaction before mounting the wagon, he said, “He’s probably down to the bathhouse. He missed his bath this morning, being too busy at the time. He takes one every day whether he needs it or not. He’s famous for that habit.”
    “I thought the same was true of yourself, Bill.”
    “Not to that extreme,” says he, and by now it was getting too dark to accurately judge by his expression if he was joking. He goes into the pocket of the frock coat where he had put his winnings and withdraws two dollars and drops them clinking into my now outthrust hand. “There you go, hoss. After you drink it all up, if you want to come back and bunk in the wagon, kindly don’t kick me when you climb in. You’ll find that extra blanket in back.”
    I went back to town to find the place, a kind of lean-to open on three sides, where a burly woman, one of the few females in Deadwood at the time not working as a harlot, cooked up beans and the stone-heavy loaves she called bread, in which you was likely to find not just hairs but whole strands as well as other substances not so easily identified.
    I was still real