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

hungry. “Ain’t you got no meat?” I asked the cook.
    “Had some couple days back but et it myself,” says she, shifting the wad in her jaw and spreading the feet beneath her so she could spit between them. I reckon the unusual flavor her beans had was from spattered tobacco juice. I’ve ate a lot worse than that when famished, which like the Cheyenne who raised me I so often was as a young man. “It wasn’t no goddam good, so you didn’t miss nothing. And you could not of afforded it nowhow.”
    I’ve got a policy of seldom passing up an insult when I’m in a position to answer, so I says, “You think you run the grand dining room of the Palace Hotel?”
    She spits again, this time right near me, and grins with her teeth brown in the light from the lantern that hung from a nail in a support pole. “I got a well-to-do sweetheart. He’s made a big strike lately.”
    No matter how dubious you get about the likelihood of anybody finding significant amounts of gold on his own, there’s something magic about the very sound of the word that causes the coldest heart to pound, probably because if you find some of that substance you don’t have to go to no further work to make it salable. Everything else that brings in a profit requires more work than separating gold dust from sand by shaking a pan. So for a minute there, picking up my order of bread and beans, I considered staking a claim of my own next day.
    But then this large woman wipes her hands on her stained apron and says, “’Course, he’s never told me the truth about anything else, so maybe he never paid five dollars for that beefsteak but bought it off some Indin for a drink of whiskey. It tasted like real old bear.”
    Back at the barrel all was as before. My brother Bill was sleeping so quiet, in the same position as earlier, that I thought maybe he had up and died, and there wasn’t enough light in there to see if he was breathing, but when I poked his foot with mine he sighed and uttered an indecent word. The dog of course had been all over me right away and once again got more than his share of the grub I carried.
    I left my brother in as good a situation as he was likely to find at the moment and went back to get a night’s rest in Wild Bill’s wagon, which was real cozy in the rear where I slept. Wild Bill seemed asleep when I stepped past him, and I thought if I could so easily gain access to the wagon, so could an assassin, but Colorado Charley had not hired me to guard him twenty-four hours a day, without a weapon, and I was real tuckered out by then.
    I had a good sleep that night, waking up at dawn to look over and see Wild Bill’s blanket already empty. By time I got up and out and took a leak, careful to keep well away from Charley Utter’s tent, and returned, I see Wild Bill’s tall figure oncoming at a brisk pace up the gulch.
    “You’re up and at ’em,” I says when he gets there.
    “Generally at first light,” says he, “I trot down for a wake-me-up.”
    “Get your coffee from that big gal who cooks beans?”
    “Whiskey’s what I mean, hoss. Coffee’d put me back to sleep.”
    Colorado Charley come out of his tent at this point, looking bandbox-fresh as always, and according to Wild Bill went off to arrange a competition in which their pony express went up against a rival outfit to see who could run the Cheyenne newspaper up to Deadwood the fastest.
    I throwed some water on my face from the rainbarrel Wild Bill pointed out, and having got his schedule said I’d see him around noon at No. 10 and went into town.
    I never knowed what I’d find whenever I returned to my brother’s location, but this time I was pleasantly surprised to see him standing erect and sniffing the air, looking healthy and cold sober.
    “Well sir, Jack, what have you been up to?” says he, with a gap-toothed grin amidst the mess of whiskers that constituted his lower face.
    “You remember me.”
    “From recent days,” says he. “That