Dragon Teeth

On the Plains

From the journal of William Johnson:

They got lost.

Their own trail from the day before should have been easy enough to follow, but large stretches of the plains were as flat and featureless as any ocean, and they lost their way several times.

They expected to reach the plains camp before noon, but instead finally found the camp in late afternoon. They loaded the wagon with the remaining ten wooden crates of fossils, which weighed about a thousand pounds in all, plus some final supplies and Johnson’s photographic equipment. He was pleased they had come back, for among the fossils they now packed was of course the box with the X, containing the precious Brontosaurus teeth. “Couldn’t go home without these,” he said.

But by the time they were ready to head back, it was after four o’clock, and growing dark.

They were pretty sure they could never find their way to Cow Island in darkness. That meant they would have to spend the night on the plains—and in another day, the advancing Sioux might come upon them. They were debating just what to do when they heard the savage, bloodcurdling cries of Indians.

“Oh my God,” Toad said.

A dust cloud, stirred up by many riders, appeared on the eastern horizon. It was coming toward them.

They scrambled aboard the wagon. Toad broke out the rifles and loaded them.

“How much ammunition have we got?” Johnson asked.

“Not enough,” Toad said. His hands were shaking, dropping shells.

The whooping grew louder. They could see a single rider, hunched low in the saddle, pursued by a dozen others. But they heard no gunshots.

“Maybe they don’t have any guns,” Toad said hopefully. At that moment, the first arrow whistled past them. “Let’s get out of here!”

“Which way?” Johnson said.

“Any way! Away from them!”

Johnson whipped up the team, and the horses responded with unaccustomed enthusiasm. The wagon rumbled forward at frightening speed, bouncing and tossing over the prairie, the cargo creaking and sliding around in the bed. In the growing darkness, they headed west, away from the Missouri River, away from Cow Island, away from Cope, away from safety.

The Indians closed in on them. The solitary rider drew abreast of their wagon, and they saw it was Little Wind. He was soaked in sweat; his horse lathered. Little Wind came very close to the wagon and gracefully leapt aboard. He smacked his pony, and set it racing to the north.

Several Indians chased it, but the main party continued in pursuit of the wagon.

“Damn Sioux! Damn, damn Sioux!” Little Wind shouted, grabbing a rifle. More arrows streaked through the air. Little Wind and Toad fired at the pursuing Indians. Glancing over his shoulder, Johnson estimated there were a dozen warriors, perhaps more.

The riders came closer, and easily surrounded the wagon on three sides. Toad and Little Wind fired at them, and both hit one at virtually the same time, blasting him backwards off his horse. Another veered closer until Toad took careful aim and fired; the Sioux warrior clutched his eye, slumped forward, arms limp, then toppled sideways off his horse.

One Indian managed to climb aboard the wagon, as Little Wind had done. He was swinging his tomahawk over Johnson when Little Wind shot him in the mouth. In the same instant that the blade cut across Johnson’s upper lip, the warrior’s face burst red and he fell back, off the wagon, and was lost in the dust.

Johnson grabbed his bleeding face, but there was no time for horror; Little Wind turned to him. “Where you drive? Go south!”

“South is the badlands!” It was already quite dark; it would be suicide to enter the abrupt cliffs and gullies of the badlands at night.

“Go south!”

“We’ll die if we go south!”

“We die anyway! Go south!”

And then Johnson realized what he was being told. Their only hope, a slim hope, was to head where the Indians would not follow. He whipped the team, and the wagon plunged southward, toward the badlands.

A mile of open prairie stretched ahead of them, and the Indians again surrounded them on all sides, whooping and shouting. An arrow seared Johnson’s leg, pinning his trouser leg to the wooden wagon seat, but he felt no pain and drove on. It was darker and darker; their guns glowed brightly with each discharge. The Indians, recognizing their plan, pursued them with greater intensity.

Soon Johnson could make out the eroded dark line of the badlands at the edge of the prairie. The flat plains just seemed to drop away into black nothingness. They were approaching at frightful speed.

“Hold on, boys!” he shouted, and without reining his horses, the wagon plunged over the lip, into darkness.

Badlands

Silence, under a waning moon.

Water trickled over his face, onto his lips. He opened his eyes and saw Little Wind leaning close. Johnson raised his head.

The wagon sat upright. The horses snorted softly. They were at the base of dark cliffs, looming high.

Johnson felt a pinching in his leg. He tried to move.

“Stay,” Little Wind said. His voice was tight.

“Is something wro—”

“Stay,” he repeated. He put down his canteen and held out another. “Drink.”

Johnson sipped, sputtered, coughed. The whiskey burned his throat, and some splashed on the slash above his lip, making that burn, too.

“Drink more,” Little Wind said. He was cutting the cloth of Johnson’s trouser leg with a knife. Johnson started to look.

“No look,” Little Wind said, but it was too late.

The arrow had pierced the flesh of his right leg, passing under the skin, pinning him to the seat. The flesh around the wound was puffed and purple and ugly.

Johnson felt a wave of dizziness and nausea. Little Wind grabbed him. “Wait. Drink.”

Johnson took a big drink. The dizziness returned.

“I fix,” Little Wind said, bent over Johnson’s leg. “No look.”

Johnson stared at the sky, at the moon. Thin clouds drifted past. He felt the whiskey.

“What about Toad?”

“Stay now. No look.”

“Is Toad all right?”

“No worry now.”

“Where is he? Let me talk to him!”

“You feel hurting now,” Little Wind said, his body tensing. There was a whacking sound, and Johnson felt a pain so sharp he screamed, his voice echoing off the dark cliffs. Immediately he felt a searing, burning pain that was worse; he could not scream; he gasped for breath.

Little Wind held the arrow up, bloody in the moonlight.

“Finish now. I finish.”

Johnson started to get up, but Little Wind pushed him back. He gave him the arrow. “You keep.” Johnson felt warm blood pouring from the open wound; Little Wind bandaged it with a strip of cloth cut from his bandana.

“Good. Good now.”

Johnson pushed up, felt pain as he stood, but it was bearable; he was all right. “Where’s Toad?”

Little Wind shook his head.

Toad was stretched out in the back of the wagon. One arrow had pierced sideways all the way through his neck; two others were lodged in his chest. Toad’s eyes stared to the left; his mouth gaped open, as if he were still surprised to be dead.

Johnson had never seen a dead man before, and felt odd as he closed Toad’s eyes and turned away. He was not sad so much as he felt that he was not here in this desolate Western place, that he was not alone with some Indian scout, that he was not in mortal danger. His mind simply refused to accept it. He sought something to do, and said, “Well, we better bury him.”

“No!” Little Wind seemed horrified.

“Why not?”

“Sioux find him.”

“Not if we bury him, Little Wind.”

“Sioux find place, they dig him, take scalp, take fingers. Women come, take more.” He pointed to his crotch.

Johnson shivered. “Where are the Sioux now?”

Little Wind pointed to the plains above the cliffs.

“They leave, or they stay?”

“They stay. They come in morning. Maybe bring more warriors.”

Weariness overcame Johnson, and his leg throbbed. “We’ll leave as soon as it’s light.”

“No. Leave now.”

Johnson looked up. The clouds were heavier, and there was a faint blue ring circling the moon.

“It’ll be pitch-dark in a few minutes. There won’t even be starlight.”

“Must leave,” insisted Little Wind.

“It’s a miracle we’ve survived this far, but we can’t go on through the badlands in darkness.”

“Leave now,” Little Wind said.

“But we’ll die.”

“We die anyway. Leave now.”

They moved through utter blackness.

Johnson drove the wagon, with Little Wind walking a few paces ahead. Little Wind carried a long stick and a handful of rocks. When he could not see the terrain ahead, he threw rocks.

Sometimes, it took a long time for the rocks to land, and when the sound came back, it was distant and hollow and echoing. Then Little Wind would edge forward, tapping the ground with the stick like a blind man until he found the edge of the precipice. He would then point the wagon in a different direction.

Their progress was exhausting, and painfully slow. Johnson could not believe they were making more than a few hundred yards in an hour’s time; it seemed pointless. At dawn, the Indians would charge down the ravines, pick up their trail, and find them in a matter of minutes.

“What is the point?” he would demand when the throbbing in his leg became especially bad.

“Look at sky,” Little Wind would say.

“I see the sky. It’s black. The sky is black.”

Little Wind said nothing.

“What about the damned sky?” he demanded.

But Little Wind explained no further.

Shortly before dawn, it began to snow.

They had reached Bear Creek, at the edge of the badlands, and they paused to water the team.

“Snow good,” Little Wind said. “Unkpapa warriors see snow, know they follow us easy. They wait, stay warm by fire one, two hours in morning.”

“And meanwhile, we go like hell.”

Little Wind nodded. “Go like hell.”

From Bear Creek they headed west across open prairie, as fast as they could with the horses. The wagon jolted over the prairie; the pain in his leg was severe.

“Where are we going, Fort Benton?”

Little Wind shook his head. “All white men go to Fort Benton.”

“You mean the Sioux expect us to go there?”

He nodded.

“Then where are we going?”

“Sacred Mountains.”

“What sacred mountains?” Johnson asked, alarmed.

“Thunder Mountains of Great Spirit.”

“Why are we going there?”

Little Wind did not answer.

“How far away are these sacred mountains? What will we do when we get there?”

“Four days. You wait,” Little Wind said. “You find many white men.”

“But why are you going there?”

Johnson noticed now that Little Wind’s buckskin shirt was seeping red, staining with blood.

“Little Wind, are you hurt?”

In a high falsetto voice, Little Wind began to chant a song. He did not speak again.

They turned south, across the plains.

Little Wind died silently on the third night. Johnson awoke at dawn to find him lying stiffly by the smoldering campfire, his face covered with snow, his skin cold to the touch.

Using his rifle for support, Johnson dragged Little Wind’s body to the wagon, painfully hoisted it up into the bed, next to Toad’s, and drove on. He was feverish, hungry, and often delirious. He was sure he was lost, but he did not care. He began to remind himself to keep sitting up, even as his mind separated itself from his ordeal, creating distracting and confusing visions. At one point he believed that the wagon was approaching Rittenhouse Square in Philadelphia, and that he was searching unsuccessfully for his family’s mansion.

Early in the fourth day, he found a clear wagon track, freshly used. The track wound eastward, toward a range of low purple hills.

He went into the hills. As he continued on, he found places where timber had been cut and initials had been carved in trees—evidence of white men. It was very cold and the snow was falling heavily when he climbed a final ridge and saw a town in the gulley below—a single muddy street of square, utilitarian wooden buildings. He whipped up the horses and rode down to it.

And that was how, on August 31, 1876, William Johnson, nearly fainting from hunger, thirst, exhaustion, and blood loss, rode with a wagonload of bones, and the dead bodies of a white man and a Snake scout, into the town of Deadwood Gulch.

Deadwood

Deadwood presented a bleak aspect: a single street of unpainted wooden buildings surrounded by bare hills—the trees had been cut down to provide lumber for the town. Everything was covered in a thin crust of dirty snow. But despite the dreary appearance, the town had the charged excitement of a boomtown. The main street of Deadwood consisted of the usual mining-town variety—a tin shop, a carpenter shop, three dry goods stores, four stables, six grocery stores, a Chinatown with four Chinese laundries, and seventy-five saloons. And in the center of it all, boasting a wooden second-story balcony, stood the Grand Central Hotel.

Johnson staggered up the front steps, and the next thing he knew he was lying on a padded bench inside the hotel, attended to by the proprietor, an older man with thick glasses and thinning greased hair.

“Young fellow,” he joked, “I seen men in worse shape, but a percentage of them was dead.”

“Food?” Johnson croaked.

“We got plenty of food here. I’m going to help you into the dining room and we’ll get some vittles into you. You got any money?”

An hour later, he was feeling distinctly better and looked up from his plate. “That was good. What was it?”

The woman clearing the table said, “That’s buffalo tongue.”

The proprietor, who was named Sam Perkins, looked in. Considering the rough surroundings, he was extremely polite. “I’m thinking you need a room, young man.”

Johnson nodded.

“Four dollars, payable in advance. And a bath can be obtained down the street at the Deadwood public baths.”

“Much obliged,” Johnson said.

“That pretty slash on your face is going to heal by itself, leave a scar, but that leg needs attention.”

“I am in agreement,” said Johnson wearily.

Perkins asked where Johnson had come from. He said he had come from the badlands of Montana near Fort Benton. Perkins looked at him in disbelief, but said only that it was a long way to come.

Johnson stood up and asked if there was someplace he could store the crates on his wagon. Perkins said he had a room in the back, available to hotel guests, and that only he had the key to the lock on its door. “What do you have to store?”

“Bones,” Johnson said, realizing the warm food had given him some strength.

“You mean, animal bones?”

“That’s right.”

“You making soup?”

Johnson didn’t appreciate the joke. “These are valuable to me.”

Perkins said he didn’t think that anyone in Deadwood would be interested in stealing his bones.

Johnson said he had gone through hell and back for these bones, and he had two dead bodies in his wagon to prove it, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Could he please store his bones in the storeroom?

“How much space you need? It ain’t a barn.”

“I got ten wood boxes of bones and then some other supplies.”

“Well, let’s see them.”

Perkins followed Johnson back out onto the street, looked in the wagon, and nodded. While Johnson started moving crates, Perkins inspected the snow-covered bodies. He brushed the snow away.

“This one’s an Indian.”

“That’s right.”

Perkins squinted at Johnson. “How long you had these two with you?”

“One’s been dead almost a week. The Indian died yesterday.”

Perkins scratched his chin. He asked, “You thinking of burying your friend?”

“Now I’ve got him away from the Sioux, I guess I will.”

“There’s a graveyard at the north end of town. What about the Indian?”

“I’ll bury him, too.”

“Not in the graveyard.”

“He’s a Snake.”

“Good for him,” Perkins said. “We don’t have no problem with Snakes that is alive, but you can’t bury any Indian in the graveyard.”

“Why not?”

“Town won’t stand for it.”

Johnson glanced at the unpainted wood buildings. The town didn’t seem to have been there long enough to have formed a civic opinion on any subject, but he simply asked why not.

“He’s a heathen.”

“He’s a Snake, and I didn’t bury him for the same reason I didn’t bury the white man. If the Sioux found the grave, they’d dig him up and mutilate him. This Indian led me to safety. I owe him a decent burial.”

“That’s fine, you do what you want with him,” Perkins said, “long as you don’t bury him in the graveyard. You don’t want to cause trouble. Not in Deadwood.”

Johnson was too tired to argue. He carried the crates of fossils inside, stacking them to take up as little space as possible, and made sure Perkins locked the room after he exited. Then he asked the proprietor to arrange for his bath, and went off to bury the bodies.

It took a long time to dig the hole for Toad in the graveyard at the end of town. He had to use a pick before shoveling out the rocky earth. He dragged Toad out of the wagon and into the grave, which didn’t look comfortable, even for a dead man. “I’m sorry, Toad,” he said aloud. “I’ll tell your family when I get the chance.”

When the first shovel of earth landed on Toad’s face, Johnson stopped. I’m not who I used to be, he thought. Then he finished filling in the grave.

He took Little Wind’s body outside the town, along a side road, and dug a grave beneath a spreading fir tree on the slope of a hill. The ground was easier to dig in this location, which made him think the town should have located the graveyard there instead. The hill faced north, and from the site you could not see any sign of habitation or white men.

Then he sat down and cried until he was too cold to stay out anymore. He returned to town, had his bath, carefully cleaning and bandaging his wounded leg. Then he pulled on his dirty, blood-crusted clothes again.

In his hotel room, there was a small mirror above the washbasin, and he inspected the slash above his lip for the first time. The edges of the wound had started to heal but hadn’t closed up. There would be quite a scar.

The bed was a thin straw mattress over a simple lumber frame.

He slept for thirty hours, straight through.

From Johnson’s journal:

In high excitement, thinking of Lucienne, he returned to his room to pack. But after he unlocked the door, he discovered the room had been searched, and his personal articles scattered around. His wallet was missing; all his money was gone.

He went downstairs to Perkins, at the desk.

“I’ve been robbed.”

“How can that be?” Perkins said, and accompanied him upstairs. Perkins viewed the room with equanimity. “Just one of the boys, burdened with curiosity, checking out your story. They didn’t take anything, did they?”

“Yes, they took my wallet.”

“How can that be?” Perkins said.

“It was here, in my room.”

“You left your wallet in your room?”

“I was only going downstairs to dinner.”

“Mr. Johnson,” Perkins said gravely, “you’re in Deadwood. You can’t leave your money unattended for a breath.”

“Well, I did.”

“That is a problem,” Perkins said.

“You better call the town marshal and report the robbery.”

“Mr. Johnson, there’s no marshal in Deadwood.”

“No marshal?”

“Mr. Johnson, there was no town here this time last year. We surely haven’t gotten around to hiring a marshal. Besides, I don’t think the boys’d stand for one. They’d kill him first thing. Just two weeks back, Bill Hickok was killed here.”

“Wild Bill Hickok?”

“That’s him.” Perkins explained that Hickok was playing cards in Nuttal and Mann’s Saloon when Jack McCall came in and shot him through the back of the head. The bullet passed through Hickok’s head and lodged in the wrist of another player. Hickok was dead before his hands touched his guns.

“The Jack McCall I had dinner with?”

“That’s him. Most folks figure Jack was hired to shoot Wild Bill by folks who were afraid he’d be hired as town marshal. Now I reckon nobody’s eager for the job.”

“Then who keeps the law here?”

“There is no law here,” Perkins said. “This is Deadwood.” He was speaking slowly, as if to a stupid child. “Judge Harlan presides over the inquests, when he’s sober enough, but other’n that, there’s no law at all, and people like it that way. Hell, every saloon in Deadwood is technically against the law; this is Indian territory, and you can’t sell spirits in Indian territory.”

“All right,” Johnson said. “Where is the telegraph office? I’ll wire my father for funds, pay you, and be gone.”

Perkins shook his head.

“No telegraph office?”

“Not in Deadwood, Mr. Johnson. Not yet, anyway.”

“What do I do about my stolen money?”

“That is a problem,” Perkins agreed. “You been here three days now, you owe six dollars plus your dinner tonight, that’s a dollar more. And you stabled your horses with Colonel Ramsay?”

“Yes, down the street.”

“Well, he’s going to want two dollars a day, so that makes six or eight dollars more you owe him. I reckon you can sell him your wagon and team to square it.”

“If I sell my wagon and team, how can I leave with my bones?”

“That is a problem,” Perkins said. “It surely is.”

“I know it is a problem!” Johnson began to shout.

“Now, Mr. Johnson, keep a cool head,” Perkins said soothingly. “You still intending to go to Laramie and Cheyenne?”

“That’s right.”

“Then that wagon is no good to you, anyhow.”

“Why not?”

“Mr. Johnson, why don’t you come downstairs and allow me to pour you a drink? I suspect there’s one or two facts that ought to make your acquaintance.”

The facts were these:

There were two roads to Deadwood, north and south.

Johnson had driven into Deadwood unmolested only because he had arrived from the north. Nobody was ever expected from the north; the route was bad and there were hostile Indians in the north, and consequently the road was unattended by brigands and highwaymen.

On the other hand, the road to Laramie and Cheyenne ran south. And that road was thick with thieves. They sometimes preyed on emigrants coming up to seek their fortune, but they especially preyed on anything moving south out of Deadwood.

In addition, there were marauding bands of Indians, assisted by white bandits, such as the notorious “Persimmons Bill,” who was said to have led the savages responsible for the massacre of the entire Metz party in Red Canyon earlier that year.

The stagecoach line had started up that spring with a single armed guard, or messenger, riding shotgun up with the driver. Pretty soon they laid on two messengers, then three. Lately there were never less than four. And when the Gold Stage went south once a week, it traveled in a convoy with a dozen heavily armed guards.

Even then, they didn’t always make it through. Sometimes, they were driven back to Deadwood, and sometimes they were killed and the gold stolen.

“You mean the guards were killed?”

“Guards and passengers both,” Perkins said. “These highwaymen just naturally kill anyone they come across. It’s their way of doing business.”

“That’s appalling!”

“Yep. It’s bad, too.”

“How am I going to leave?”

“Well, this is what I’ve been trying to explain,” Perkins said patiently. “It’s a good deal easier to come to Deadwood than to leave.”

“What can I do?”

“Well, come spring, things should cool down a bit. They say Wells Fargo will start a coach line, and they have experience cleaning up desperadoes. You’ll be safe then.”

“In the spring? But this is September.”

“I believe so,” Perkins said.

“You’re trying to tell me I’m stuck here in Deadwood until spring?”

“I believe so,” Perkins said, pouring him another drink.

Life in Deadwood

There was a good deal of gunfire during the late hours, and Johnson spent a restless night. He awoke with an aching head; Perkins gave him strong black coffee, and he went out to see what he could do to raise funds.

The snow had melted during the night; the street was now ankle deep with stinking mud, the wooden buildings streaked with damp. Deadwood looked especially dreary, and the prospect of remaining there for six or seven months depressed him. Nor were his spirits improved when he saw a dead man lying on his back in the muddy street. Flies buzzed around the body; three or four loungers stood over it, smoking cigars and discussing its former owner, but no one made any attempt to move the corpse, and the passing teams of horses just wheeled past it.

Johnson stopped. “What happened?”

“That’s Willy Jackson. He was in a fracas last night.”

“A fracas?”

“I believe he engaged in disputing with Black Dick Curry, and they settled it outside in the street.”

Another man said, “Willy always did drink overmuch.”

“You mean Dick shot him?”

“Ain’t the first time. Dick likes to kill. Does it when he can.”

“You just going to leave him there?”

“I don’t know who’ll move him,” one said.

“Well, he’s got no relatives to fret over him. He had a brother, but he died of dysentery about two months back. They had a small claim couple of miles east of here.”

“Whatever happened to that claim?” one man asked, flicking his cigar.

“I don’t believe it amounted to nothing.”

“Never did have luck.”

“No, Willy never did.”

Johnson said, “So the body will just stay here?”

One man jerked a thumb to the store behind them. The sign read kim sing washing and ironing. “Well, he’s in front of Sing’s place, I reckon Sing’ll move him before he gets too ripe and ruins business.”

“Sing’s son’ll move him.”

“Too heavy for the son, I imagine. He’s only about eleven.”

“Naw, that little ’un is strong.”

“Not that strong.”

“He moved old Jake when the carriage ran him down.”

“That’s so, he did move Jake.”

They were still discussing it when Johnson walked on.

At Colonel Ramsay’s stables, he offered his wagon and team for sale. Cope had purchased them in Fort Benton for the inflated price of $180; Johnson thought he could get forty or perhaps fifty dollars.

Colonel Ramsay offered ten.

After a long complaint, Johnson agreed to it. Ramsay then explained Johnson owed six already, and plunked down the difference—four silver dollars—on the countertop.

“This is an outrage,” Johnson said.

Silently, Ramsay picked one of the four dollars off the counter.

“What’s that for?”

“That’s for insulting me,” Ramsay said. “Care to do it again?”

Colonel Ramsay was a hard-bitten man well over six feet tall. He wore a long-barreled Colt six-shooter on each hip.

Johnson took the remaining three dollars, and turned to leave.

“You got a mouth, you little bastard,” Ramsay said. “I was you, I’d learn to keep it shut.”

“I appreciate the advice,” Johnson said quietly. He was beginning to understand why everyone in Deadwood was so polite, so almost preternaturally calm.

He next went to the Black Hills Overland and Mail Express, at the north end of the street. The agent there informed him that the fare to Cheyenne was eight dollars by regular coach, and thirty dollars by the express coach.

“Why does the express cost so much more?”

“Your express coach is pulled by a team of six. Standard coach is pulled by a team of two, and it’s slower.”

“That’s the only difference?”

“Well, of late the slow coach hasn’t been making it through regular.”

“Oh.”

Johnson then explained that he had some freight to transport as well. The agent nodded. “Most folks do. If it’s gold, it’s one and a half percent of appraised value.”

“It’s not gold.”

“Well then, it goes at freight rate, five cents a pound. How much you got?”

“About a thousand pounds.”

“A thousand pounds! What on earth you got weighs a thousand pounds?”

“Bones,” Johnson said.

“That’s highly unusual,” the agent said. “I don’t know as we could accommodate you.” He scratched figures on a sheet of paper. “These, ah, bones can ride up top?”

“I guess they can, if they’re safe up there.”

At five cents per pound, Johnson figured, the cost would be fifty dollars.

“Be eighty dollars, plus five dollars loading fee.”

More than he expected. “Oh, fifty for the freight and thirty for the express. Eight-five in all?”

The clerk nodded. “You want to book passage?”

“Not right now.”

“You know where to find us if you do,” he said, and turned away.

As Johnson was leaving, he paused at the door. “About the express coach,” he said.

“Yes?”

“How often does it get through?”

“Well, it gets through mostly,” the agent said. “It’s your best bet, no question of that.”

“But how often?”

The agent shrugged. “I’d say three out of five get through. A few of them get ventilated on the way, but mostly they’re fine.”

“Thank you,” Johnson said.

“Don’t mention it,” the agent said. “You sure you don’t got gold nuggets in them boxes?”

The agent wasn’t the only one who had heard about the boxes of bones. All of Deadwood had, and there was plenty of speculation. It was known, for example, that Johnson had arrived in Deadwood with a dead Indian. Since Indians knew better than any white man where the gold was in their sacred Black Hills, many people figured the Indian had shown Johnson the gold, and then Johnson had killed him and his own partner and made off with the ore, now disguised as crates of “bones.”

Others were equally sure the crates didn’t contain gold, since Johnson hadn’t taken it across the street to the assayer, which was the only sensible thing to do with gold. But the crates might still be plenty valuable, containing jewels or even cash money.

But in that case, why didn’t he take them to the Deadwood bank? Here, the only possible explanation was that the crates contained some recognizable stolen treasure that would be identified at once by the bankers. What that treasure might be was hard to say, but everybody talked about it a great deal.

“I think you might want to move those bones,” said Sam Perkins. “People are talking. I can’t guarantee they won’t get stolen from the storeroom.”

“Can I carry them up to my own room?”

“Nobody will help you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“I wasn’t asking that.”

“Suit yourself. You want to sleep in the same room with a lot of animal bones, nobody will say nothing.”

So that is what he did. Ten boxes, up the stairs, stacked carefully against the wall, more or less blocking all the light from his one window.

“Course everybody knows you moved them upstairs,” said Perkins, tagging along. “That makes them look even more valuable.”

“I thought of that.”

“The posts in that wall are good, but anybody could bust open that door.”

“I could build a thick timber slide lock on the inside, same as a stable door.”

Perkins nodded. “That keeps those boxes safe when you are in the room, but what about when you ain’t?”

“Cut two holes around the post, one in the wall and one in the door, use a chain with a padlock.”

“You got a good padlock?”

“Nope.”

“I do, but you got to buy it from me. Ten dollars. Came off a Sioux City and Pacific boxcar door that caught fire. Heavier than it looks.”

“I would be much obliged.”

“You would be further obliged, financially speaking.”

“Yes.”

“So I expect you’ll have to get a job,” Perkins said. “You need to raise over a hundred dollars, plus what you owe me. That’s a good deal of money to come by honestly.”

Johnson didn’t need to be told that.

“Any work you can do, useful work?”

“I dug all summer.”

“Everybody here can dig. That’s the only reason folks come to the Black Hills—to mine. No, I mean can you cook or shoe horses or do carpentry, anything like that. A skill.”

“No. I am a student.” Johnson looked at the crates of fossils. He rested his hand on one, touched it. He could leave the fossils here. He could take the stage from Deadwood to Fort Laramie, and from there cable home for money. He could tell Cope—assuming Cope was still alive—that the fossils had been lost. A story formed in his mind: they had been ambushed, the wagon had overturned, fallen over a cliff, all the fossils were lost or smashed. It was a pity, but it couldn’t be helped.

Anyway, he thought, these fossils weren’t so important, for the entire American West was full of fossils. Wherever you dug into a cliff, you found old bones of one sort or another. There were certainly far more fossils than gold in this wilderness. These few wouldn’t be missed. At the rate Cope and Marsh were collecting bones, in a year or two these would hardly even be remembered.

Another idea came to him: leave the fossils here in Deadwood, go to Laramie, wire for money, and with proper funds return to Deadwood, collect the fossils, and leave again.

But he knew that if he ever got out of Deadwood alive, he’d never come back. Not for anything. He must either take them now, or turn tail and run without them.

“Dragon teeth,” he said softly, touching the crate, remembering the moment of their discovery.

“What’s that?” said Perkins.

“Nothing,” Johnson said. Try as he might, he could not diminish the importance of the fossils in his mind. It was not merely that he had dug them with his own hands, his own sweat. It was not merely that men had died, that his friends and companions had died, in the course of finding them. It was because of what Cope had said.

These fossils were the remains of the largest creatures that ever walked on the face of the earth—creatures unsuspected by science, unknown to mankind, until their little party had dug them up in the middle of the Montana badlands.

“With all my heart,” he wrote in his journal,

While Johnson was examining the fossils, Perkins pointed to a jumble of material under a tarp. “This yours, too? What’s all this?”

“That’s photographic equipment,” Johnson said absently.

“Know how to use it?”

“Sure.”

“Well then, your troubles are over!”

“How’s that?”

“We had a man who made photographic pictures. He took his camera out on the road south out of town last spring. Just him and a horse, to take photos of the land. Why, I do not know. Ain’t nothing there. The next stagecoach found him on his back, with the turkey vultures on him. That camera was in a thousand pieces.”

“What happened to all his plates and chemicals?”

“We still got them, but nobody knows what to do with them.”

The Black Hills Art Gallery

“How quickly can one’s disadvantages be turned to profit!” Johnson wrote in his journal.

Johnson rented a location in the south bend of Deadwood, because the light was stronger there for more of the day; the Black Hills Art Gallery was located behind Kim Sing’s laundry, and business was brisk.

Johnson charged two dollars for a portrait and later, as demand increased, raised his prices to three. He could never get used to the demand: “In this rude and bleak setting, hard men want nothing more than to sit as like death, and walk away with their likeness.”

The life of a miner was backbreaking and exhausting; all these men had come a long and dangerous way to seek their fortune in the rugged wilderness, and it was clear that few would succeed. Photographs provided a tangible reality to men who were far from home, fearful and tired; they were posed proofs of success, souvenirs to send to sweethearts and loved ones, or simply ways of remembering, of grasping a moment in a swiftly changing and uncertain world.

His business was not limited to portraits. When the weather was bright, he made excursions to placer mines outside town, to photograph men working at their claims; for this he charged ten dollars.

Meanwhile, most of the businesses in town hired him to portray their establishments. There were moments of minor triumph: on September 4, he tersely records:

And he was apparently pleased to become a full citizen of the town. As the days passed, “Foggy” Johnson (a contraction of “photographer”?) became a familiar figure in Deadwood, known to everyone.

He also acquired the frustrations of commercial photographers everywhere. On September 9:

Apparently Johnson knew the rudiments of retouching photographs; by the judicious use of pencils, it was possible to soften signs of scarring and to make other adjustments.

Not everyone wanted his picture taken.

On September 12, Johnson was hired to photograph the interior of the Deadwood Melodeon Saloon, a drinking and gambling establishment at the south end of the main street. Interiors were dark, and he often had to wait several days for strong light to carry out a commission. But a few days later the weather was sunny, and he arrived at two o’clock in the afternoon with his equipment and set up to make an exposure.

The Melodeon Saloon was a dingy place, with a long bar on the back wall and three or four rough tables for playing cards. Johnson went around throwing back the curtains on the windows, flooding it with light. The patrons groaned and cursed. The proprietor, Leander Samuels, cried out, “Now, gents, be easy!”

Johnson ducked under the cloth of his camera to compose the shot, and a voice said, “What the hell you doing, Foggy?”

“Taking a picture,” Johnson said.

“Like hell.”

Johnson looked up. Black Dick, the Miner’s Friend, had risen from one of the card tables. His hand rested on his gun.

“Now, Dick,” said Mr. Samuels, “it’s just a picture.”

“It’s disturbing my peace.”

“Now, Dick—” Mr. Samuels began.

“I’ve said my say,” Dick threatened. “I’m playing cards now and I don’t want no picture.”

“Perhaps you’d like to step outside while the picture is made,” Johnson said.

“Perhaps you’d like to step outside with me,” Dick said.

“No thank you, sir,” Johnson said.

“Then you just take yourself and your contraption out, and don’t come back.”

“Now, Dick, I hired Foggy. I want a picture for the wall behind the bar, I think it’d look fine.”

“That’s all right,” Dick said. “He can come back any time he likes, long as I’m not here. No one takes my likeness.” He poked a finger at Johnson, showing off the snake tattoo on his wrist, which he was vain about. “Now you remember that. And you git out.”

Johnson got out.

That was the first sure indication that Black Dick was a wanted man somewhere or other. Nobody in Deadwood was surprised to hear it, and the mystery it added to Dick only increased his reputation.

But it was also the beginning of trouble between Johnson and the three Curry brothers—Dick, Clem, and Bill—that would later cause him so much misery.

But while his business prospered, he didn’t have much time to amass his profits. On September 13 he wrote:

His journal for the next few days was filled with despairing comments, but two days after that, Johnson’s fortunes again underwent a dazzling change.

“My prayers are answered!” he wrote. “The army has come to town!”

The Army Arrives

On September 14, 1876, two thousand miners lined the streets of Deadwood, firing pistols into the air and shouting their welcome as General George Crook and his column of the 2nd Cavalry rode through the town. “It would be hard to imagine a more popular sight to the locals,” wrote Johnson, “for everyone here fears Indians, and General Crook has waged a successful war against them since spring.”

The arriving army presented a notably rugged appearance after their months on the plains. When General Crook signed into the Grand Central Hotel, Perkins, in his polite way, suggested that the general might wish to visit the Deadwood baths, and perhaps also to obtain a set of new clothing from a dry goods store. General Crook took the hint, and was cleaned up when he stepped onto the Grand Central balcony and made a brief speech to the throng of miners below.

Johnson viewed the festivities, which ran long into the night, with an entirely different perspective. “Here at last,” he wrote, “is my ticket to civilization!”

Johnson asked Crook’s quartermaster, Lieutenant Clark, about joining the cavalry for the march south. Clark said that would be fine, but he would have to square it with the general himself. Wondering how to meet the man, Johnson thought perhaps he should offer to take his picture.

“General hates pictures,” Clark advised him. “Don’t do it. Go up directly and just ask him.”

“Very well,” Johnson said.

“One other thing,” Clark said. “Don’t shake hands. General hates to shake hands.”

“Very well,” Johnson said.

Major General George Crook was every inch a military man: short-cropped hair; piercing eyes; a full, flowing beard; and ramrod-erect posture as he sat in his chair in the dining room. Johnson waited until the man had finished his coffee and some of his admirers had departed for the gambling halls before he approached and explained his situation.

Crook listened patiently to Johnson’s tale, but before long he was shaking his head, murmuring that he could not take civilians on a military expedition with all the hazards involved—he was sorry, but it was impossible. Then Johnson mentioned the fossil bones he wished to take home.

“Fossil bones?”

“Yes, General.”

Crook said, “You have been digging fossil bones?”

“Yes, General.”

“And you are from Yale?”

“Yes, General.”

His whole manner changed. “Then you must be associated with Professor Marsh of Yale,” he said.

After the briefest hesitation, Johnson said that he was indeed associated with Professor Marsh.

“Marvelous man. Charming, intelligent man,” Crook said. “I met him in Wyoming in ’72, we went hunting together. Outstanding man. Remarkable man.”

“None quite like him,” Johnson agreed.

“You’re with his party?”

“I was. I became separated from it.”

“Damned bad luck,” Crook said. “Well, anything I can do for Marsh, I will. You are welcome to join my column, and we will see your fossil bones safely to Cheyenne.”

“Thank you, General!”

“Have your bones loaded on a suitable wagon. Quartermaster Clark will assist you in any way you need. We march at dawn, day after tomorrow. Happy to have you with us.”

“Thank you, General!”

Last Day in Deadwood

On September 15, his last full day in Deadwood, Johnson undertook two final photo assignments.

In the morning, he rode out to Negro Gulch to photograph the colored miners who had made a fabulous strike there. Six miners had been taking out nearly two thousand dollars a day for weeks; their ore was shipped home, and they had already sold their claim. Now they were posing, putting on their old work clothes and standing by the flume for the photograph, then dressing again in their new duds and burning the old clothes.

They were in high spirits, and wanted the picture to take to St. Louis. For his part, Johnson was pleased to see miners so well disciplined that they were taking their findings home with them. Most left their earnings in the saloons or on the green felt of the gaming tables, but these men were different. “They are ever so cheerful,” Johnson wrote, no doubt cheerful himself, “and I wish them the best of luck in their journey home.”

In the afternoon, he photographed the facade of the Grand Central Hotel for its owner, Sam Perkins. “You photographed everyone else,” Perkins said, “and since you’re leaving town, it’s the least you can do.”

Johnson was obliged to set up his camera across the street. Had he set up closer, the passing horses and carriages would have kicked mud in the lens. The intervening street traffic would appear to obstruct the view of the hotel, but Johnson knew that moving objects—horses and wagons—would not leave more than a ghostly streak in a time exposure; for all intents and purposes, the hotel would appear to stand on an empty street.

Indeed, it was a problem when photographers tried to represent the busy street activity of towns, because the movement of horses and pedestrians and wagons was too quick for the film to record.

Johnson made his usual exposure—F11 and 22 seconds—and then, since the light was especially strong and he had a spare plate that was wet and waiting, he decided to try to capture the street life of Deadwood in a final quick shot. He exposed the last plate at F3.5 and 2 seconds.

Johnson developed both plates in his darkroom at the Black Hills Art Gallery and, while they were drying, purchased a suitable wagon to transport his bones with the cavalry. Then he went to the hotel to load the fossils, and have his final dinner in Deadwood.

He arrived just in time to see a body carried out into the street.

Norman H. “Texas Tom” Walsh had been found strangled in his room on the second floor of the Grand Central Hotel. Texas Tom was a short, feisty man who was rumored to be a member of the Curry gang of stage robbers. Suspicion of murder naturally fell on Black Dick Curry, also staying in the hotel at the time, but no one was brave enough to make an accusation.

For his part, Black Dick claimed to have spent all afternoon in the Melodeon Saloon, and to be innocent of any knowledge of what might have happened to Texas Tom.

And there the matter might have ended, had not Sam Perkins decided to stop by Johnson’s table and ask, during dinner, about the hotel portrait.

“Did you make it today?” Perkins asked.

“I did.”

“And how did it turn out?”

“Very nicely,” Johnson said. “I will have a print for you tomorrow.”

“What time’d you take it?” Perkins asked.

“Must have been about three o’clock in the afternoon.”

“Aren’t there shadows then? I’d hate the place to look all depressing, with shadows.”

“There were some shadows,” Johnson said, but he explained that shadows made a picture look better, giving it more depth and character.

It was then that Johnson noticed that Black Dick was listening to their conversation with interest.

“Where’d you take the picture from?” Perkins asked.

“Across the street.”

“Where, over by Donohue’s store?”

“No, farther south, by Kim Sing’s.”

“What’re you fellers yammering on about?” Black Dick asked.

“Foggy took a portrait picture of the hotel today.”

“Did he.” The voice went cold. “When was that?”

Johnson instantly felt danger in the situation, but Perkins was oblivious to it. “What’d you just say, Foggy, ’bout three o’clock?”

“Something about there,” Johnson said.

Dick cocked his head; he fixed Johnson with a watchful eye. “Foggy, I warned you once about photographin’ when I was around.”

“But you weren’t around, Dick,” Perkins said. “Remember, you told Judge Harlan that you were at the saloon all afternoon.”

“I know what I told Judge Harlan,” Dick growled. He turned slowly to Johnson. “Where’d you take the picture from, Foggy?”

“Across the street.”

“Turn out good?”

“No, as a matter of fact it didn’t turn out at all. I’m going to have to take it again tomorrow.” He kicked Perkins under the table as he said it.

“I thought your pictures always turned out.”

“Not always.”

“Where’s the picture you did today?”

“I scrubbed the glass plate. It wasn’t any good.”

Dick nodded. “All right, then.” And he turned back to his meal.

“You thinkin’ what I’m thinkin’?” Perkins asked later.

“Yep,” Johnson said.

“Texas Tom had a room right at the front of the hotel, facing out on the street. Middle of the afternoon, sunlight would shine right in. Did you look real close at your picture?”

“No,” Johnson said. “I didn’t.”

At that moment, Judge Harlan came in, puffing. They quickly told him the conversation with Black Dick. “I can’t see as there’s any case against Dick at all,” he said. “I’ve just come from the Melodeon. Everybody swears Dick Curry was playing faro there all afternoon, just like he says.”

“Well, he must have paid them off!”

“There’s twenty or more seen him. I doubt he paid ’em all,” Judge Harlan said. “No, Dick was there all right.”

“Then who killed Texas Tom?”

“I’ll worry over it at the inquest, in the morning,” Judge Harlan said.

Johnson intended to pack after dinner, but curiosity—and Perkins’s urging—led him to the Black Hills Art Gallery instead. “Where are they?” Perkins asked when they had locked the door behind them.

They inspected the two exposed plates.

The first exposure was as Johnson had remembered—a deserted hotel, with no people visible at all.

The second plate showed horses in the streets and people walking through the mud.

“Can you see the window?” Perkins asked.

“Not really,” Johnson said, squinting, holding the plate to a kerosene lantern. “I can’t see.”

“I think there’s something there,” Perkins said. “You have a glass?”

Johnson held a magnifying glass to the plate.

Clearly visible in the second-floor window were two figures. One was being strangled by a second man, who stood behind him.

“I’ll be damned,” Perkins said. “You took a picture of the murder!”

“Can’t see much, though,” Johnson said.

“Make it bigger,” Perkins said.

“I have to pack,” Johnson said. “I’m leaving with the cavalry at dawn.”

“Cavalry’s drunk in the saloons all over town,” Perkins said, “and they’ll never leave at dawn. Make it bigger.”

Johnson had no enlarging equipment, but he managed to rig an impromptu outfit and exposed a print. They both peered into the developing tray as the image slowly appeared.

In the window, Texas Tom struggled, his back arched with effort, his face contorted. Two hands gripped his neck, but the killer’s body was blocked by the curtain to the left, and the killer’s head was in deep shadow.

“Better,” Perkins said. “But we still can’t see who it is.”

They made another print, and then another still larger. The work became slower as the evening progressed. The rigged system was sensitive to vibration at great magnification, and Perkins was so excited he could not stand still during the long exposure.

Shortly before midnight, they got a clear one. At great magnification, the picture was speckled and grainy. But one detail came through. There was a tattoo on the left wrist of the strangling arm: it showed a curled snake.

“We got to tell Judge Harlan,” Perkins insisted.

“I got to pack,” Johnson said, “and I got to get some sleep before I leave tomorrow.”

“But this is murder!”

“This is Deadwood,” Johnson said. “Happens all the time.”

“You’re just going to leave?”

“I am.”

“Then give me the plate, and I’ll go tell Judge Harlan.”

“Suit yourself,” Johnson said, and gave him the plate.

Back in the Grand Central Hotel lobby, he passed Black Dick Curry himself. Dick was drunk.

“Howdy, Foggy,” Dick said.

“Howdy, Dick,” Johnson said, and he went up to his room. It was, he observed in his journal, a fine ironic last touch to his last day in notorious Deadwood.

He had been packing for half an hour when Perkins showed up in his room with Judge Harlan.

“You take this picture?” Judge Harlan said.

“I did, Judge.”

“You doctor this picture in any way, pencil touch-ups or whatever?”

“No, Judge.”

“That’s fine,” Judge Harlan said. “We got him dead to rights.”

“I’m glad for you,” Johnson said.

“Inquest will settle it in the morning,” Judge Harlan said. “Be there at ten o’clock, Foggy.”

Johnson said he was leaving town with General Crook’s cavalry.

“I’m afraid you can’t,” Judge Harlan said. “In fact, you’re at some risk right here tonight. We’re gonna have to take you into protective custody.”

“What’re you talking about?” Johnson asked.

“I’m talking about jail,” Judge Harlan said.

The Next Day in Deadwood

Jail was an abandoned mine shaft at the edge of town. It was fitted with iron bars and a solid lock. After spending a night in the freezing cold, Johnson was able to look through the bars and watch the cavalry under the command of General George Crook ride south out of Deadwood.

He shouted to them—shouted until he was hoarse—but no one paid any attention. No one came to let him out of jail until nearly noon, when Judge Harlan showed up, groaning and shaking his head.

“What’s the trouble?” Johnson said.

“Bit much to drink last night,” the judge said. He held the door wide. “You’re free to go.”

“What about the inquest?”

“Inquest’s been cancelled.”

“What?”

Judge Harlan nodded. “Black Dick Curry hightailed it out of town. Seems he got word of what was coming, and chose the better part of valor, as Shakespeare would say. An inquest’s beside the point, with Dick gone. You’re free to go.”

“But the cavalry’s a half day ahead of me now,” Johnson said. “I can never catch up with them.”

“True,” the judge said. “I’m real sorry for the inconvenience, son. I guess you’ll be staying with us in Deadwood a while longer, after all.”

The story of Johnson’s incriminating photograph, and how he had come to miss leaving with the cavalry, went through the town. It had serious consequences.

The first was to worsen relations between Johnson and Black Dick Curry, the Miner’s Friend. All the Curry brothers now were openly hostile to him, especially as Judge Harlan seemed uninterested in setting another inquest into the death of Texas Tom. When they were in town, which was whenever there was no stage leaving Deadwood for a day or so, they stayed at the Grand Central Hotel. And when they ate, which was seldom, they took their meals there.

Johnson irritated Dick, who announced that Johnson behaved superior to everybody else, with what he called “his Phil-a-del-phia ways. ‘Pass the butter, would you please?’ Faugh! Can’t bear his fairy-airy ways.”

As the days passed, Dick took to bullying Johnson, to the amusement of his brothers. Johnson bore it quietly; there was nothing he could do since Dick was only too ready to take an argument out into the street and settle it with pistols. He was a steady shot, even when drunk, and killed a man every few days.

No one in town who knew Dick would go up against him, and certainly Johnson did not intend to. But it got so bad that he would leave the dining room before finishing his meal if Dick entered.

And then there was the business of Miss Emily.

Emily

Women in Deadwood were few, and no better than they needed to be. Most of them lived in a house called the Cricket, down at the end of the south bend, where they plied their trade under the cold watchful eye of Mrs. Marshall, who smoked opium and owned the house. Others were independent, like Calamity Jane, who in recent weeks had made a great show of mourning the death of Bill Hickok, much to the disgust of Hickok’s friends. Calamity Jane was so masculine she often wore a soldier’s uniform and traveled undetected with the boys in blue, giving them service in the field; she had gone with Custer’s 7th Cavalry on more than one occasion. But she was so male that she often boasted that “give me a dildo in the dark, and no woman can tell me from a true man.” As one observer noted, this left Jane’s appeal somewhat obscure.

A few Deadwood miners had brought their wives and families, but they did not often show in town. Colonel Ramsay had a fat squaw wife named Sen-a-lise; Mr. Samuels had a wife, too, but she was consumptive and always stayed indoors. So for the most part, the feminine element was provided by the Cricket women, and the girls who worked in the saloons. In the words of one Deadwood visitor, they were “pleasant women of a certain age, but in appearance as hard and mean as the rest of the landscape of that wretched mining town. The ones that ran tables in the saloons smoked and swore with the best of the men, and were so full of tricks that seasoned gamblers avoided them, and preferred men as dealers.”

Into this hard-bitten world, Miss Emily Charlotte Williams appeared as a floating vision of loveliness.

She arrived one noon on a miner’s buckboard, dressed entirely in white, her blond hair tied back fetchingly. She was young—though perhaps a few years older than Johnson; she was immaculate; she was delicate and fresh and sweet, and possessed some notable curvatures. When she took a room at the Grand Central Hotel, she became the most interesting new arrival since young Foggy had showed up with a wagonload of mysterious crates and two dead men covered in snow.

News of Miss Emily, her lovely appearance and her tender story, raced around the town. Perkins’s dining room, never before full, was packed that night as everyone came to get a look at the creature.

She was an orphan, the daughter of a preacher, the Reverend Williams, who had been killed in the nearby town of Gayville while building a church. At first it was said that he had been shot by a devilish desperado, but it later turned out he had fallen from the roof under construction and broken his neck.

In her grief, it was also said, Miss Emily had collected her few belongings, and set out to find her brother Tom Williams, whom she knew to be prospecting somewhere in the Black Hills. She had already been to Montana City and Crook City, and had not succeeded in finding him. Now she was in Deadwood, where she planned to stay three or four days, perhaps more.

The men in the Grand Central Hotel that night had bathed, and were wearing the cleanest clothes they owned; Johnson recorded in his journal that “it was amusing, to see these hard men preen and puff up their chests while they tried to eat their soup without slurping.”

But there was a good deal of tension in the room as well, which was increased when Black Dick went over to Miss Emily’s table (the object of all eyes was dining alone) and introduced himself. He offered to escort her around the town that evening; with admirable poise she thanked him but said she would be retiring early. He offered to assist her in finding her brother; she thanked him but said that she had already had many offers of assistance.

Dick was being watched by all the others, and knew it. He sweated; his face turned red and he glowered.

“Seems I can’t be of help to you, then, is that it?”

“I appreciate your courteous offer, I surely do,” she said softly.

Dick appeared somewhat mollified as he stomped back to his table and huddled, commiserating, with his brothers.

And there the matter might have rested, had not Miss Emily turned to Johnson, and said in her sweetest voice, “Oh, are you the young photographer I have heard so much about?”

Johnson said he was.

“I should appreciate seeing your gallery of pictures,” she said. “Perhaps my brother is among them.”

“I will be happy to show them to you in the morning,” Johnson answered, and she responded with a graceful smile.

Black Dick looked fit to kill—Johnson, in particular.

“There is no greater pleasure than to win what everyone desires,” Johnson noted in his pages; he went to bed a happy man. He had become accustomed to sleeping in the room next to the stacked crates, accustomed not only to the fine powder that fell from them and dusted the floor, but also to the tomb-like darkness of the room itself and a strange sense of intimacy to be sleeping with the bones of the great creatures themselves. And of course the immense teeth, the teeth of actual dragons that once walked the earth. He found their presence oddly comforting.

And tomorrow would bring his appointment with Emily.

But his happiness was short-lived. Emily was disappointed by his pictures, not finding her dear brother among them.

“Perhaps you could look again,” he suggested. She had gone through them very quickly.

“No, no, I know he is not to be found in these.” She prowled his shop restlessly, looking around. “Have you shown me all you have?”

“All I have taken in Deadwood, yes.”

She pointed to a corner shelf. “You haven’t shown me those.”

“Those are from my time in the badlands. Your brother is not among those plates, I assure you.”

“But I am interested to see. Bring them here, and come sit beside me, and tell me about the badlands.”

She was so charming he could not possibly refuse her. He brought down the plates and showed her his pictures, which seemed now to belong to another lifetime.

“Who is this man with the tiny pick?”

“That’s Professor Cope, with his geological hammer.”

“And that beside him?”

“That’s a skull of a saber-tooth tiger.”

“And this man?”

“That’s Cookie. Our teamster and cook.”

“And this? Is he standing with an Indian?”

“That’s Charlie Sternberg and Little Wind. He was a Snake scout. He died.”

“Oh dear. And this is the badlands? It looks like the desert.”

“Yes, you can see how eroded it is.”

“How long did you spend there?”

“Six weeks.”

“And why would you go to such a place?”

“Well, where there is erosion, the bones stick out and are easier to uncover.”

“You went there for bones?”

“Yes, of course.”

“How very odd,” she said. “Did bones pay you a lot?”

“No, I paid my own way.”

“You paid your own way?” She pointed to the desolate picture. “To go there?”

“It’s a long story,” he said. “You see, I made a bet at Yale and then I had to go.”

But he could tell she was not listening anymore. She thumbed through the glass plates, holding each to the light, glancing quickly, going on to the next.

“What do you hope to find?” he asked, watching her.

“It is all so strange to me,” she said. “I was merely curious about you. Here, put them back.”

As he replaced them on the shelf, she said, “And did you find bones?”

“Oh yes, lots of them.”

“Where are they now?”

“Half were taken down the Missouri River by steamer. I have the other half.”

“You have them? Where?”

“In the hotel.”

“Can I see these bones?”

Something about her manner made him suspicious. “Why would you want to do that?”

“I am just curious to see them, now that you have mentioned them.”

“Everyone in the town is curious to see them.”

“Of course, if it is too much trouble—”

“Oh no,” Johnson said. “It’s no trouble.”

In his room, he opened one crate for her to see. Some gritty dirt fell to the floor.

“That’s just old rocks!” she said, peering at the pieces of black shale.

“No, no, this is a fossil. Look here,” he said, and he traced the shape of a dinosaur leg. It was a perfect specimen.

“But I thought you had found old bones, not rock.”

“Fossil bones are rock.”

“There’s no need to snip.”

“I’m sorry, Emily. But you see, these things have no value at all in Deadwood. They are bones which have lain in the earth for millions of years and which belonged to creatures long gone. This bone is from the leg of an animal with a horn on its nose, like a rhinoceros, but much larger.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“That seems wonderful, Bill,” she said, having decided to call him by that name. Her gentle enthusiasm touched him. She was the first sympathetic person he had come across in a long time.

“I know,” he said, “but no one believes me. The more I explain them, the more they disbelieve. And eventually they will break in and smash them all, if I don’t get out of Deadwood first.”

And despite himself, tears rolled down one cheek, and he turned away, so that she would not see him cry.

“Why, Bill, what’s the matter?” she said, sitting down close to him on the bed.

“It’s nothing,” he said, wiping his face and turning back. “It is just that—I never asked for this job, I just came west and now I am stuck with these bones and they are my responsibility, and I want to keep them safe so the professor can study them, and people never believe me.”

“I believe you,” she said.

“Then you are the only one in Deadwood who does.”

“Shall I tell you a secret of my own?” she said. “I am not really an orphan.”

He paused, waiting.

“I am from Whitewood, where I have lived since the summer.”

He still said nothing.

She bit her lip. “Dick put me up to it.”

“Put you up to what?” he asked, wondering how she knew Dick.

“He thought you would confide in a lady, and tell me what the crates really contained.”

“So you said you would ask me?” he said, feeling hurt.

She looked down, as if ashamed. “I was curious myself, too.”

“They really contain bones.”

“I see that, now.”

“I don’t want them—I don’t want anything to do with them—but they are my responsibility.”

“I believe you.” She frowned. “Now I must convince Dick. He is a hard man, you know.”

“I know.”

“But I will talk to him,” she said. “I will see you at dinner.”

That night in the Grand Central dining room there were two new visitors. At first glance, they seemed to be twins, so similar was their appearance: they were both tall, lean, wiry men in their twenties, with identical broad mustaches, and identical clean white shirts. They were quiet, self-contained men who emanated a forceful calmness.

“Know who those two are?” Perkins whispered to Johnson, over coffee.

“No.”

“That’s Wyatt Earp and his brother Morgan Earp. Wyatt’s taller.”

At the mention of their names, the two men looked over at Johnson’s table and nodded politely.

“This here’s Foggy Johnson, he’s a photographer from Yale College,” Perkins said.

“Howdy,” the Earp brothers said, and went back to their dinner.

Johnson didn’t recognize the names, but Perkins’s manner suggested that they were important and famous men. Johnson whispered, “Who are they?”

“They’re from Kansas,” Perkins said. “Abilene and Dodge City?”

Johnson shook his head.

“They’re famous gunfighters,” Perkins whispered. “Both of ’em.”

Johnson still had no notion of their importance, but any new visitor to Deadwood was fair game for a photograph, and after dinner he suggested it. In his journal, Johnson recorded his first conversation with the famous Earp brothers. It was not exactly a dramatic high point.

“How would you gents like a photograph?” Johnson asked.

“A photograph? Could be,” Wyatt Earp said. Seen close, he was boyish and slender. He had a steady manner, a steady gaze, an almost sleepy calmness. “What’ll it cost?”

“Four bucks,” Johnson said.

The Earp brothers exchanged a silent glance.

“No thanks,” Wyatt Earp said.

Emily’s News

“It’s no good,” she whispered to him outside on the porch of the hotel before dinner. “The Curry boys are rattled by the Earp brothers arriving. It makes them jumpy. So they’re coming for your bones tonight. They boasted about it.”

“They’re not going to get them,” Johnson said.

“I believe they’re in the habit of getting whatever they want.”

“Not this time.”

“What’re you going to do?”

“I’ll stand guard over them,” Johnson said, reaching for his gun.

“I wouldn’t.”

“What do you think I should do?”

“Best thing is step aside, let them have ’em.”

“I can’t do that, Emily.”

“They’re hard men.”

“I know that. But I must guard the bones.”

“They’re just bones.”

“No, they’re not.”

He saw her eyes light up. “They’re valuable, then?”

“They’re priceless. I told you.”

“Tell me really. What are they, really?”

“Emily, they really are bones. Like I told you.”

She looked disgusted. “If it was me, I wouldn’t risk my life for a bunch of old bones.”

“It’s not you, and these bones are important. They are historical bones and important to science.”

“The Curry boys don’t care a hoot for science, and they’d be happy to kill you in the bargain.”

“I know it. But I got to keep the bones.”

“Then you better get help, Bill.”

He found the famous gunfighter Wyatt Earp in the Melodeon Saloon, playing blackjack. Johnson drew him aside.

“Mr. Earp, could I hire your services for the night?”

“I imagine so,” Earp said. “In what capacity?”

“As a guard,” Johnson said, and explained about his fossil bones, the room, and the Curry brothers.

“That’s fine,” Earp said when he had heard it all. “I will want five dollars.”

Johnson agreed.

“In advance.”

Johnson paid him, right there in the saloon. “But I can count on you?”

“You surely can,” Wyatt Earp said. “I will meet you in your room at ten o’clock tonight. Bring ammunition and plenty of whiskey, and don’t worry any further. You have Wyatt Earp on your side now. Your problems are over.”

He had dinner with Emily, in the hotel dining room.

“I wish you would give this up,” she said.

They were exactly his sentiments. But he said, “I can’t, Emily.”

She kissed him lightly on the cheek.

“Then good luck, Bill. I hope I see you tomorrow.”

“Rest assured,” he said, and smiled bravely for her.

She went up to her room. He went to his room and locked himself in.

It was nine o’clock in the evening.

Ten o’clock passed, and ten thirty. He shook his pocket watch, wondering if it was running right. Finally, he unlocked the room, and went down into the hotel lobby.

A pimply boy was behind the desk as night clerk. “Howdy, Mr. Johnson.”

“Howdy, Edwin. You seen Mr. Earp?”

“Not tonight, I haven’t. But I know of his whereabouts.”

“What do you know?”

“He’s at the Melodeon, playing blackjack.”

“He was at the Melodeon this afternoon.”

“Well, he’s still there.”

Johnson looked at the wall clock. It, too, said ten thirty. “He was supposed to meet me here.”

“Probably forgot,” Edwin said.

“We had an arrangement.”

“Probably drinking,” Edwin said.

“Can you go over there and get him for me?”

“I wish I could. But I have to stay here. Don’t worry, Mr. Earp is a responsible sort. If he says he’ll come, I’m sure he’ll be along shortly.”

Johnson nodded and locked himself back in his room.

And waited. If they come in the door, he thought, I better be ready. He put a loaded pistol into each of his boots at the foot of the bed.

The hours dragged by. At midnight, he went out again in his wool socks to ask about Earp, but Edwin was asleep and Earp’s key was on the wall behind him, which meant he had not yet returned from the saloon.

Johnson went back to his room and waited.

All around him, the hotel was silent.

He stared at the hands of his watch. He listened to it tick, and he waited.

At two, there was a scratching on the wall. He jumped up, raising his gun.

He heard the scratching again.

“Who’s there!”

There was no reply. More scratching.

“Get away!” he said, his voice quavering.

He heard a low squeaking, and the scratching moved quickly off. He recognized the sound now.

“Rats.”

He slumped back down, tense and exhausted. He was sweating. His hands were shaking. This was not his line of business. He didn’t have the nerve for it. Where was Wyatt Earp, anyway?

“I can’t figure what you’re so hot about,” Earp said, the next day.

“We had a deal,” Johnson said. “That’s what I’m so hot about.” He had not slept at all the night before; he was angry and tired.

“Yes, we did,” Earp said. “To protect your fossils from the Curry boys.”

“And I paid you in advance.”

“Yes, you did.”

“And where were you?”

“Doing what I was hired to do,” Earp said. “I played blackjack all night. With the Curry boys.”

Johnson sighed. He was too tired to argue.

“Well, what do you expect me to do,” Earp said. “Leave ’em to come and sit in the dark with you?”

“It’s just that I didn’t know.”

“You look peaked,” Earp said sympathetically. “You go get sleep.”

Johnson nodded, started back to the hotel.

“You want to hire me again tonight?” Earp called to him.

“Yes,” Johnson said.

“That’ll be five dollars,” Earp said.

“I’m not paying you five dollars to play blackjack,” Johnson said.

Earp shrugged. “Suit yourself, boy.”

That night he put the loaded pistols and extra bullets in his boots again. He must have fallen asleep after midnight, because he awoke to the sound of wood splintering. The broken door opened, and a figure slid into the room. The door closed again. It was pitch-dark because of the crates blocking the window.

“Foggy,” a voice whispered.

“Wyatt?” Johnson whispered.

The sharp clock of a gun being cocked. A footstep. Silence. Breathing in the dark. Johnson realized he made an easy target and eased out of the bed and beneath it. He took one of the pistols out of its boot and flung the boot against the wall.

At the sound of the boot hitting the wall, there was a tongue of flame as the man fired at the noise. Someone yelled immediately elsewhere in the hotel.

“You get out, whoever you are!” Johnson said, the room filled with smoke now. “I have a loaded gun, you get on out.”

Silence. Another footstep. Breathing.

“That you, Foggy boy?”

The door opened again and another man came in.

“He’s in his bed,” came a voice.

“Foggy, we are going to light a lamp now. Just sit still and we will get this all straightened out.”

Instead, the men opened fire into his bed, splintering the frame. Johnson grabbed his second pistol and lifted both guns, emptying each without skill.

He heard wood splintering, groaning, something falling, then maybe the door being opened.

He paused to reload, fumbling in the darkness. He heard breathing—he was sure of it. That made him nervous. He could imagine the killer squatting there, listening to Johnson’s panicked exhalations, listening to the clink of the bullets going into the chambers, focusing on the sound, locating Johnson…

He finished reloading. Still nothing.

“Oh, Carmella,” came a sad and tired voice. “I know I’ve been—” The man’s breathing became labored. “If’n I can just get my breath good…” He coughed and there was a kick against the floor. Then a crackling, choking noise. Then nothing.

In his journal, Johnson wrote,

There were three neat bullet wounds in the man’s broad back.

Perkins rolled the body over. In the guttering light of the lamp, he looked into the sightless eyes of Clem Curry. “Dead as a doornail,” he muttered.

The hallway filled with voices, and then heads poked their way through the doorway to gawk.

“Stand back, folks, stand back.”

Judge Harlan pushed roughly through the onlookers into the room. Harlan was in ill humor, probably, Johnson thought, because he had been called out of bed. It turned out to be nothing of the sort. “I left a hell of a poker game,” the judge said, “to deal with this here murder.”

He stared at the body.

“That’s Clem Curry, isn’t it?”

Johnson said it was.

“No loss to the community, as far as I’m concerned,” the judge said. “What was he doing here?”

“Robbing me,” Johnson said.

“Figures,” Judge Harlan said. He took a drink from a hip flask, passed it to Johnson. “Who shot him?”

Johnson said he had.

“Well,” the judge said, “as far as it matters to me, that’s fine. The only trouble is, you shot him in the back.”

Johnson explained that it was dark, and he could not see.

“I am sure of it,” the judge said. “But the problem is, you shot him three times in the back.”

Johnson said he hadn’t intended to kill anyone at all.

“I am sure of it. You have no problem with me, but you may have some difficulty when Black Dick hears of it, tomorrow or the next day, depending if he’s in town.”

This had already occurred to Johnson, and he did not like to think about it too long.

“You planning to leave Deadwood?” the judge said.

“Not just yet,” Johnson said.

Judge Harlan took another pull from the flask. “I would,” he said. “Myself, I’d be gone before daybreak.”

“Well, damn me,” Sam Perkins said, fingering the bullet holes in the wall after the crowd had left. “You surely had some hot work here, Mr. Johnson.”

“They didn’t get the bones.”

“That’s so, but they got every one of my guests out of bed in the middle of the night, Mr. Johnson.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Scared Edwin the night clerk so bad he wet his trousers. I’m not fooling.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I can’t run a hotel this way, Mr. Johnson. The Grand Central has its reputation. I want these bones out of here today,” Perkins said.

“Mr. Perkins—”

“Today,” Perkins said, “and that’s final. And I’ll charge you to repair the bullet holes. That’ll be on your bill.”

“Where am I going to move them to?”

“Ain’t my problem.”

“Mr. Perkins, these bones are valuable to science.”

“We’re a long way from science. Just get ’em out of here.”

Moving the Bones

With the crates loaded in his wagon the next morning, he went first to the Deadwood bank, but they had no space to store anything but gold dust.

Then he tried Sutter’s Dry Goods. Mr. Sutter had a strong room in the back where he stored his firearms for sale. Mr. Sutter refused outright. But Johnson took the opportunity to buy more bullets for his guns.

The National Hotel was not as particular as the Grand Central, and was known to be accommodating. But the man at the desk said he had no storage facilities.

Fielder’s Saloon and Gaming House was open around the clock, and the scene of so many altercations that Fielder kept an armed guard to maintain order. He had a back room that was large enough.

Fielder said no.

“It’s just bones, Mr. Fielder.”

“Maybe so, maybe not. Whatever it is, the Curry boys are after ’em. I want no part of it.”

Colonel Ramsay was feisty, and had plenty of room in his stables. He just shook his head when Johnson asked him.

“Is everybody afraid of the Curry brothers?”

“Everybody with sense,” Ramsay said.

The afternoon was drawing to an end, the light starting to fail, and the temperature in town was dropping quickly. Johnson went back to his photo studio, the Black Hills Art Gallery, but he had no customers. It seemed he had become extremely unpopular overnight. He was looking around the studio, trying to see whether he could store the bones there, when his landlord, Kim Sing, came in from the laundry with his young son, the one who had dragged away the dead body out of the street.

Sing nodded and smiled, but as usual said nothing. The son said, “You need place to store some things?”

The boy’s English was pretty good. “Yes, I do. What’s your name?”

“Kang.”

“I like your boots there, Kang.”

The boy smiled. Chinese boys never wore leather boots. His father said something to him. “You store your things in Chinese Town.”

“I can?”

“Yes. You can.”

“It would have to be a safe place.”

“Yes. Ling Chow has tool shed, very strong and just new, it has lock and no windows except small windows at the top.”

“Where is it?”

“Behind Ling Chow restaurant.”

In the middle of Chinatown. It would be perfect. Johnson felt a rush of gratitude. “That’s very kind of you, I appreciate your offer very much. No one else in this town will even—”

“Ten dollar a night.”

“What?”

“Ten dollar a night. Okay?”

“I can’t afford ten dollars a night!”

Unblinking: “You can.”

“That’s outrageous.”

“That’s the price. Okay?”

Johnson thought it over. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.”

“At this time, I still had more than a thousand pounds of fossils,” Johnson later recalled.

He did not have long to wait. Around ten, shadowy figures appeared around the high transom windows. Johnson cocked his gun. There were several figures outside; he heard whispered voices.

The window creaked open. A hand reached down. Johnson saw a dark head appear in the narrow glass. He aimed his gun.

“Get away, you bastards!”

A sharp giggle startled him. They were kids, Chinese kids. He lowered his gun.

“Get away. Go on, get away.”

The giggling continued. Scraping footsteps, and he was alone again. He sighed. It was a good thing he hadn’t shot hastily, he thought.

There was more scraping.

“Didn’t you hear me? Get out of here!”

Probably they didn’t speak English, he thought. But most of the young ones had passable English. And the older ones spoke a lot more English than they were willing to admit they did.

Another head at the window, shadowy.

“Get away, you kids!”

“Mr. Johnson.” It was Kang.

“Yes?”

“I have the bad news for you.”

“What?”

“I think everybody know you here. People in laundry say talking you move boxes to this place.”

Johnson froze. Of course they knew. He’d merely exchanged one room in town for another. “Kang, you know my wagon?”

“Yes, yes.”

“It’s at the stable. Can you get it and bring it here?”

“Yes.”

It seemed he returned only a few minutes later.

“Tell your friends to load the boxes as fast as possible.”

Kang did that, and soon the wagon was loaded. Johnson gave them a dollar and told them to run away. “Kang, stay with me.”

Chinese Town was larger than it looked, with new streets being built constantly. Kang showed him how to guide the wagon through the narrow lanes. At one point they stopped as four horsemen went by in a hurry in the street ahead.

“Look for you, I think,” said Kang.

They eased out onto a side road, and in a few minutes they came to the tall pine where Johnson had buried Little Wind. The ground was still soft, and he and Kang gently exhumed Little Wind, holding their breaths as they pulled him out of the hole. The stench was wretched. The ten boxes took up the space of about two more graves, and Johnson widened the hole he had made for Little Wind and stacked the boxes as evenly as he could. Then he laid Little Wind on top of the boxes, as if he were sleeping atop them.

If I had my camera and it was daytime, I would take a photograph of that, Johnson told himself.

He piled the dirt back over Little Wind, spreading it around so the excess would not be so apparent, then brushed pine needles over the spot.

“This is our secret,” he told Kang.

“Yes, but it can be a better secret.”

“Yes, of course.” Johnson pulled a five-dollar gold piece from his pocket. “You do not tell anyone.”

“No, no.”

But he did not trust the boy not to talk. “When I leave, Kang, I will pay you another five dollars if you have kept the secret.”

“Another five dollar?”

“Yes, the day I leave Deadwood.”

A Shootout

Black Dick showed up in a rage at the Grand Hotel at breakfast time the same morning. He kicked open the door. “Where is the little bastard?”

His gaze fell on Johnson.

“I’m not a shooting man,” Johnson said, as calmly as he could.

“No coward is.”

“You may hold whatever opinion you like.”

“You shot Clem in the back. You are a yellow-bellied snake.”

“He was robbing my property.”

Dick spat. “You shot him in the back, you son of a poxy whore.”

Johnson shook his head. “I won’t be provoked.”

“Then hear this,” Dick said. “You meet me outside now, or I’ll go to that shed in Chinese Town and plug every one of your precious crates with dynamite and blow ’em to smithereens. Might blow up some of those Chinamen who helped you, too.”

“You wouldn’t dare.”

“I can’t see who might stop me. You care to watch me blow your precious bones?”

Johnson felt a strange deep fury fill him. All his frustrations, all the difficulties of his weeks in Deadwood, overwhelmed him. He was glad he had moved the crates. He began to breathe deeply, slowly. His face felt oddly tight.

“No,” Johnson said. He stood. “I’ll see you outside, Dick.”

“That’s fine,” Dick said. “I’ll be waiting on you.”

And Dick left, slamming the door behind him.

Johnson sat in the hotel dining room. The other breakfasters looked at him. Nobody spoke. Sunlight came in through the windows. He heard a bird chirping.

He heard the rattle of wagons in the street outside, the people shouting to each other to clear out, that there was going to be some gunplay. He heard Mrs. Wilson’s piano lessons in the next building, a child playing scales.

Johnson felt completely unreal.

Minutes later, Wyatt Earp hurried into the dining room. “What’s this foolishness about you and Dick Curry?”

“It’s true.”

Earp stared at him a moment, then said, “Take my advice and back out.”

“I’m not backing out,” Johnson said.

“Can you shoot?”

“Not real good.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“But I’m going up against him anyway.”

“You want some advice, or you want to die your own way?”

“I will be grateful for any advice,” Johnson said. He noticed that his lip was quivering, his hand shaking.

“Sit down,” Earp said. “I been through lots of these, and it’s always the same. You get a pistoleer like Dick, he is pretty full of himself, and he has shot a man or two. He’s fast. But mostly his victims have been drunk or scared or both.”

“I surely am scared.”

“That’s fine. Just remember, most of these gunmen are cowards and bullies, they have a trick that works for them. You must avoid his tricks.”

“Such as what? What tricks?”

“Some of ’em try and rush you, some of ’em try and distract you—they smoke a cigar, toss it away, expecting your eyes naturally to follow it. Some of ’em try and talk to you. Some of ’em yawn, try to get you to yawn. Tricks.”

“What should I do?” Johnson’s heart was hammering so loudly he could hardly hear his own voice.

“When you go out there, you take your time. And never take your eyes off him—he may try and shoot you while you’re stepping into the street. Never take your eyes off him. Then take your position, put your feet wide, get your balance. Don’t let him engage you in talk. Concentrate on him. Never take your eyes off him, no matter what he does. Watch his eyes. You’ll see in his eyes when he’s going to make his play, even before his hand moves.”

“How will I see it?”

“You’ll see it, don’t worry. Let him fire first, you draw deliberate, you aim deliberate, and you squeeze off one shot right to the middle of his stomach. Don’t do anything fancy like aim for the head. Make it count. Shoot him in the stomach and kill him.”

“Oh God.” The reality of it was settling in on him.

“You sure you won’t back out?”

“No!”

“Fine,” Earp said. “I believe you’ll come out. Dick’s cocky, he thinks you’re a mark. You can’t ask for better than a cocky man to go up against.”

“I’m glad to hear of it.”

“You’ll come out,” Earp said again. “Is your gun loaded?”

“No.”

“Better load it, boy.”

Johnson stepped out of the hotel into the morning light. The main street of Deadwood was deserted. There was silence, except for Mrs. Wilson’s piano lesson, monotonous scales.

Black Dick was at the north end of the street, waiting. He puffed on a cigar. His broad hat put his face in deep shadow. Johnson had trouble seeing his eyes. He hesitated.

“Come on out, Foggy,” Dick called.

Johnson stepped away from the hotel, into the street. He felt his feet squish in the mud. He did not look down.

Keep your eyes on him. Never take your eyes off him.

Johnson moved to the middle of the street, stopped.

Get your balance, get your feet wide.

Clearly, he heard Mrs. Wilson’s voice say, “No, no, Charlotte. Tempo.”

Concentrate. Concentrate on him.

They were thirty feet apart, on the main street of Deadwood in the morning sunshine.

Dick laughed. “Come closer, Foggy.”

“This’ll do,” Johnson said.

“I can’t hardly see you, Foggy.”

Don’t let him talk to you. Watch him.

“I see fine,” Johnson said.

Dick laughed. The laugh trailed off into silence.

Watch his eyes. Watch his eyes.

“Any last requests, Foggy?”

Johnson did not answer. He felt his heart pounding in his chest.

Black Dick threw his cigar away. It sailed through the air, sputtered in the mud.

No matter what he does, never take your eyes off him.

Dick drew.

It happened very fast, Dick’s body was obscured by a cloud of dense black smoke, and two bullets whizzed past Johnson before his own gun was out, and he felt the third knock his hat off as he aimed and fired. His gun bucked in his hand. He heard a scream of pain.

“Son of a bitch! I’m hit!”

Johnson peered through the smoke, more confused than anything else. At first he could see nothing; Dick seemed to have disappeared entirely from the street.

Then the smoke cleared and he saw the figure writhing in the mud.

“You shot me! Damn! You shot me!”

Johnson stood and stared. Dick struggled to his feet, clutching his bleeding shoulder, his wounded arm hanging limply. He was covered in mud.

“Damn you!”

Finish him, thought Johnson.

But he had already killed a man and didn’t have the heart to shoot again now. He watched as Dick staggered across the street and swung onto his horse. “I’ll get you for this! I’ll get you,” he cried, and he rode out of town.

Johnson watched him go. He heard scattered cheers and applause from the surrounding buildings. He felt dizzy, and his legs went watery.

“You did good,” Earp said, “excepting you didn’t kill him.”

“I’m not a gunman.”

“That’s fine,” Earp said. “But mark, you should have killed him. It didn’t look to me his wounds were mortal, and now you have an enemy for life.”

“I couldn’t kill him, Wyatt.”

Earp looked at him for a while. “You’re a down-Easter, that’s the trouble. Haven’t got any common sense. You’re gonna have to get out of town pronto, you know.”

“Why is that?”

“Because, boy, you have a reputation now.”

Johnson laughed. “Everybody in town knows who I am.”

“Not anymore,” Earp said.

It turned out that Foggy Bill Johnson, the man who gunned down Clem Curry and then went up against his brother Dick, was indeed a notorious celebrity in Deadwood. Every man who fancied himself sharp with a gun was suddenly asking to meet him.

After two days of extricating himself from gunfights, Johnson realized that Earp was right. He would have to leave Deadwood soon. He had just enough money to buy fare and freight on the express stage, and purchased his ticket for the following day. When the light was low, he took one of the horses and checked to see that Little Wind’s grave had not been disturbed. So far, it hadn’t. The ground had hardened up in the cold and he had left no tracks. Even so, he forced himself to leave immediately, lest he be noticed.

Earp, meanwhile, had grown tired of gambling and a desultory courting of Miss Emily. He had expected Deadwood to offer him a position as marshal, but no offer was forthcoming, so he was going to head south for the winter.

“When’re you leaving?” Johnson asked.

“What’s it to you?”

“Perhaps you could ride with me.”

“With you and your bones?” Earp laughed. “Boy, every bandito and desperado from here to Cheyenne is just waiting for you to leave Deadwood with those bones.”

“I’d be sure to make it if you rode with me.”

“I think I’ll wait, to escort Miss Emily.”

“Miss Emily might come tomorrow, too, especially if you were riding with us.”

Earp fixed him with a steady look. “What’s in it for me, boy?”

“I bet the stage would pay you as a messenger.” A messenger was a guard; they made good money.

“Can’t you do any better than that?”

“I guess not.”

There was a silence. Finally, Earp said, “Tell you what. If I get you through to Cheyenne, you give me half your shipment.”

“Half my bones?”

“That’s right,” he said, smiling broadly and winking. “Half your bones. How’s that sound?”

“I realized then,” Johnson wrote on the evening of September 28,

The stage would leave Deadwood the following morning.

He woke a few hours past midnight. It was time to retrieve the crates of bones. By prearrangement he had hired Kang to help him again, since no white man would want to dig up a dead Indian. They rode the wagon out of town, and the first thing they did was excavate Little Wind, who did not smell quite as bad as he had before, because of the cold air.

One by one the crates went into the wagon. They were dirty and moist from being underground but appeared otherwise fine. This time Johnson filled in most of the grave before returning Little Wind to the earth. He paused at the sight of him. The grotesquery was not Little Wind’s rotting, gray visage, Johnson realized; it was that he had now buried this poor man three times. Little Wind had died to protect him, and in return, he had not let him rest in peace.

The Cheyenne Road

Once in town, he continued to the stagecoach station. The coach was already there. It had started to snow again, and a chill wind moaned through Deadwood Gulch. Johnson was glad to be leaving, and methodically hoisted the crates onto the coach. Despite the assurances of the agent, the bones could not all ride up top with the enormously fat driver, Tiny Tim Edwards. Johnson was obliged to purchase an extra passenger seat and place some of them inside. Fortunately, the only passengers were Miss Emily and himself.

Then they had to wait for Wyatt Earp, who was nowhere to be found. Johnson stood in the snow with Miss Emily, looking up and down the bleak street of Deadwood.

“Maybe he’s not coming after all,” Johnson said.

“I think he will come,” Miss Emily said.

While they waited, a redheaded boy ran up to Johnson. “Mr. Johnson?”

“That’s right.”

The boy gave Johnson a note, and scampered away. Johnson opened it, read it quickly, and crumpled it.

“What is it?” Miss Emily asked.

“Just a good-bye from Judge Harlan.”

Around nine they saw the Earp brothers coming down the street toward them. They both appeared heavily burdened. “When they were closer,” Johnson wrote, “I saw that the Earps had obtained a collection of firearms. I had never seen Wyatt Earp wearing a gun before—he seldom went armed in public—but now he carried a veritable arsenal.”

Earp was late because he had to wait for Sutter’s Dry Goods to open, to obtain guns. He carried two sawed-off shotguns, three Pierce repeating rifles, four Colt revolvers, and a dozen boxes of ammunition.

Johnson said, “It appears you are expecting some warm work.”

Earp told Miss Emily to climb into the stage; then he said, “I don’t want to alarm her any.” And then he told Johnson that he thought they faced “a deal of trouble, and no point in pretending it won’t come.”

Johnson showed Earp the note, which read:

“That’s fine,” Earp said. “We’re ready for him.”

Wyatt’s brother Morgan had made a lucrative deal to haul firewood and was planning to stay in Deadwood for the winter, but said that he would ride with Wyatt and the stage as far as Custer City, fifty miles to the south.

Tiny Tim leaned over the box. “You gents gonna palaver all day, or are you ready to crack leather?”

“We are,” Earp said.

“Then climb aboard this item. Can’t go nowhere standing in the street, can you?”

Johnson climbed onto the stage with Miss Emily, and for the tenth time that morning attended to his crates, cinching them down tightly. Morgan Earp climbed onto the top of the stage, and Wyatt rode shotgun.

A Chinese boy in cowboy boots came running toward the stagecoach. It was Kang, with a worried look on his face.

Johnson fished in his pocket and found a five-dollar gold piece.

“Kang!”

He leaned out the open door and flipped the glittering coin high into the air. Kang caught it on the run with remarkable grace. Johnson nodded at him, knowing he would never see the boy again.

Tim snapped his whips, the horses snorted, and they galloped out of Deadwood in the swirling snow.

It was a three-day journey to Fort Laramie: one day to Custer City, in the center of the Black Hills; a second day through the treacherous Red Canyon to the Red Canyon stagecoach station at the southern edge of the Black Hills; and the third day across the Wyoming plains to the newly built iron bridge that crossed the Platte River at Laramie.

Earp assured him the trip would get safer as they went, and if they reached Laramie, they would be entirely safe; from then on, the road from Laramie to Cheyenne was patrolled by cavalry.

If they reached Laramie.

“Three obstacles stood between us and our destination,” Johnson later wrote in his journal:

Johnson had steeled himself for a dangerous journey, but he was unprepared for its sheer physical hazards.

The Black Hills roads were bad, necessitating slow travel. Drop-offs were precipitous, and the fact that the coach swayed ominously near the crumbling edge under its load of bones did not reassure them. Several creeks—the Bear Butte, Elk, and Boxelder—were transformed from the recent snows into swollen, raging rivers. The fact that the coach was so heavily laden made the crossings especially dangerous.

As Tiny explained it, “This item gets stuck in the quicksand, middle of the river, we don’t go anywheres less we ride back for an extra team, pull this item out, and that’s a fact.”

And along with the difficulties, they lived under the continuous threat of attack at any moment. The tension was nerve-racking, for the smallest impediment could be dangerous.

Around noon, the coach stopped. Johnson looked out. “Why are we stopping?”

“Keep your head in,” Earp snapped, “if you don’t want to lose it. Fallen tree up ahead.”

“So?”

Morgan Earp peered over from the top of the coach. “Miss Emily? I’d be much obliged, ma’am, if you would get yourself low and stay there until we’re moving again.”

“It’s just a fallen tree,” Johnson said. Soil was thin in many places in the Black Hills, and trees often fell across the road.

“Maybe so,” Earp said. “Maybe not.” He pointed out that high hills surrounded the road on all sides. The trees came right to the road, providing good close cover. “If they’re going for us, this’d be a good place.”

Tiny Tim got down off the box and went forward to inspect the fallen tree. Johnson heard the sharp clash-clack of shotguns being cocked.

“Is there really danger?” Miss Emily asked. She did not seem the least anxious.

“I guess there is,” Johnson said. He withdrew his pistol, looked down the barrel, spun the chambers.

Beside him, Miss Emily gave a little shiver of excitement.

But the tree was a small one, fallen by natural causes. Tiny moved it, and they drove on. An hour later, near Silver Peak and Pactola, they came upon a rockslide and repeated the procedure, but again, they had no trouble.

“When the attack finally came,” Johnson wrote, “it was almost a relief.”

Wyatt Earp shouted, “You below! Heads in!” and his shotgun roared.

It was answered by gunfire from behind them.

They were at the bottom of Sand Creek Gulch. The road ran straight here, with room on both sides for horsemen to keep up and discharge their guns into the open coach.

They heard Morgan Earp, directly above them, scraping over the roof of the coach, and they felt it sway as he took a position near the back. There was more firing. Wyatt called distinctly, “Get down, Morg, I’m shooting.” There was more firing. Tiny whipped the horses, cursed them.

Bullets thunked into the wood of the coach; Johnson and Emily ducked down, but the crates of fossils, precariously strapped to the seat above, threatened to tumble down on them. Johnson got up on his knees and tried to cinch them tighter. A horseman rode alongside the coach, aimed at Johnson—and in a sudden explosion disappeared from the horse.

Astonished, Johnson looked out.

“Foggy! Get your head in! I’m shooting!”

Johnson ducked back in, and Earp’s shotgun blasted past the open window. More gunshots from riders outside splintered the doorposts of the carriage; there was a scream.

Cursing and shouting, Tiny whipped the horses; the coach rocked and jolted over the rough road; inside the carriage, Johnson and Miss Emily collided and bounced against each other “in a manner which would be embarrassing were circumstances not so exigent,” Johnson later wrote. “The next period—it seemed hours, though it was probably a minute or two—was a nervous blend of whining bullets, galloping horses, shouts and screams, jolts and gunshots—until finally our coach rounded a bend, and we were out of Sand Creek Gulch, and the shooting died off, and we were safely on our way once more.

“We had survived the attack of the notorious Curry gang!”

“Only a damn fool would think so,” Wyatt said when they stopped to rest and change horses at the Tigerville coach station.

“Why, wasn’t that the Curry gang attacking us? And didn’t we get away?”

“Look, boy,” Wyatt said. “I know you’re from back East, but nobody’s that stupid.” He reloaded his shotguns as he spoke.

Johnson didn’t understand, so Morgan Earp explained. “Black Dick wants you pretty bad, and he wouldn’t risk all in such an ill-made attack.”

Johnson, who had found the attack terrifying, said, “Why was it ill-made?”

“Riskiest attack there is, on horseback,” Morgan said. “Riders can’t shoot worth a damn, the coach is always moving, and unless they can shoot one of the horses in the team, it’s very likely to get away, just as we did. There’s no certainty in a horseback attack.”

“Then why’d they try one?”

“To put us at our ease,” Wyatt said. “To put us off our guard. You mark my words, they know we have to stop and change teams at Tigerville. Right now they’re riding like hell to set up again.”

“Set up where?”

“If I knew that,” Wyatt said, “I wouldn’t be worried. What do you think, Morg?”

“Somewhere between here and Sheridan, I figure,” Morgan Earp said.

“That’s what I figure, too,” Wyatt Earp said, cracking his shotgun closed. “And the next time, they’ll really mean business.”

The Second Attack

Half an hour farther on, they halted at the edge of the pinewoods, before the sandy banks of Spring Creek. The meandering water was deceptively low, and more than a hundred yards wide. The late-afternoon sun glowed off the slow, peaceful ripples. On the far bank, the pinewoods were thick and dark.

They watched the river silently for several minutes. Finally, Johnson poked his head out to ask why they were waiting. Morgan Earp, on top of the stage, leaned over and tapped him on the head, and held his finger to his lips, to be silent.

Johnson sat back in the coach, rubbed his head, and looked questioningly at Miss Emily.

Miss Emily shrugged, and slapped a mosquito.

Several minutes passed before Wyatt Earp said to Tiny, “How’s it look to you?”

“Dunno,” Tiny said.

Earp peered at the tracks on the sandy riverbank. “Lot of horses passed here recently.”

“That’s usual,” Tiny said. “Sheridan’s just a couple of miles south on the other side.”

They fell silent again, waiting, listening to the quiet gurgle of the water, the wind in the pines.

“You know, there’s usually birds hereabouts at Spring Creek,” Tiny said finally.

“Too quiet?” Earp said.

“I’d say too quiet.”

“How’s the bottom?” Earp asked, looking at the river.

“Never know till you get there. You want to make a play?”

“I guess I do,” Earp said. He swung down off the box, walked back, and looked into the coach at Johnson and Miss Emily.

“We’re going to try to cross the creek,” he said quietly. “If we get across, fine. If we get trouble, you stay down, no matter what you see or hear. Morg knows what to do. Let him handle things. Okay?”

They nodded. Johnson’s throat was dry. “You think it’s a trap?”

Earp shrugged. “It’s a good place for one.”

He climbed back onto the box and cocked his shotgun. Tiny whipped up the horses, and they started across at breakneck speed, the coach lurching as the wheels hit the soft sandy banks, and then splashing and jouncing over rocks in the riverbed.

And then the shooting started. Johnson heard the whinny of the horses, and with a final lurch the coach stopped abruptly, right in the middle of the river, and Tiny shouted, “That tears it!” and Morgan Earp began firing rapidly. “I’ll cover you, Wyatt.”

Johnson and Miss Emily ducked down. Bullets whined all around them, and the coach rocked as the men moved above them. Johnson peeked over the sill and saw Wyatt Earp running, splashing through the river toward the far shore.

“He’s leaving! Wyatt’s leaving us!” Johnson cried, and then a fusillade sent him diving for cover again.

“He wouldn’t abandon us,” Emily said.

“He just did!” Johnson shouted. He was completely panicked. Suddenly the coach door swung open and Johnson screamed as Tiny threw himself in, landing on top of them.

Tiny was gasping and white-faced; he pulled the door shut as a half dozen bullets splintered the wood.

“What’s happening?” Johnson asked.

“Ain’t no place for me out there,” Tiny said.

“But what’s happening?”

“We’re stuck in the middle of the damn river, that’s what’s happening,” Tiny said. “They killed one of the team, so we ain’t going nowhere, and the Earp boys are shooting away like blazes. Wyatt took off.”

“They have a plan?”

“I surely hope so,” Tiny said. “’Cause I don’t.” As the gunfire continued, he clasped his hands together and closed his eyes. His lips twitched.

“What’re you doing?”

“Praying,” Tiny said. “You better, too. ’Cause if Black Dick takes this stage, he’ll just naturally kill us all.”

In the reddish afternoon light, the stagecoach sat immobile in the middle of Spring Creek. On top of the stage, Morgan Earp lay flat and fired into the trees on the opposite shore. Wyatt made it safely to the far bank, and plunged into the pinewoods opposite.

Almost immediately, the shooting from the far side diminished: the Curry gang had something new to worry about now.

Then from the far shore there was a shotgun blast and a loud scream, agonizing. It trailed away into silence. After a moment, another shotgun blast, and a strangled cry.

The Curry gang stopped firing at the coach.

Then a voice cried, “Don’t shoot, Wyatt, please don’t—” and another blast.

Suddenly half a dozen voices on the far shore were shouting to each other, and then they heard horses galloping off.

And then nothing.

Morgan Earp knocked on the roof of the coach. “It’s finished,” he said. “They’re gone. You can breathe now.”

The passengers inside struggled to their feet, brushed themselves off. Johnson looked out and saw Wyatt Earp standing on the far bank, grinning. His sawed-off shotgun hung loosely in his hand.

He walked slowly back through the stream toward them. “First rule of a bushwhacking,” he said. “Always run toward the direction of fire, not away.”

“How many’d you kill?” Johnson asked. “All of them?”

Earp grinned again. “None of them.”

“None of them?”

“Those woods’re thick; you can’t see ten feet ahead of you. I’d never find ’em in there. But I knew they were spread out along the bank and probably couldn’t see each other directly. So I just shot my gun a few times, and made a few hideous cries.”

“Wyatt can really make hideous cries,” Morgan said.

“That’s so,” Wyatt said. “The Curry gang panicked and ran.”

“You mean you just tricked them?” Johnson said. In a strange way he felt disappointed.

“Listen,” Wyatt Earp said. “One reason I’m still alive is I don’t go asking for trouble. These boys are none too quick, and they got an active imagination. Besides, we got a bigger problem than getting rid of the Curry boys.”

“We do?”

“Yeah. We got to get this coach out of the river.”

“Why is that a problem?”

Earp sighed. “Boy, you ever tried to move a dead horse?”

It took an hour to cut the animal loose, and float it downstream. Johnson watched the dark carcass drift with the current until it had disappeared. With the five remaining horses of the team, they managed to haul the coach out of the sand and onto the far shore. By then it was dark, and they drove quickly to Sheridan, where they obtained a fresh team.

Sheridan was a small town of fifty wooden houses, but it seemed everyone had turned out to greet them; Johnson was surprised to see money changing hands.

Earp collected a lot of it.

“What’s going on?”

“They were wagering on whether we’d make it,” Earp said. “I had a few bets myself.”

“Which way’d you bet?”

Earp just smiled and nodded to a saloon. “You know, it would be sporting for you to go inside with me and buy a round of whiskey.”

“You think we should drink at a time like this?”

“We won’t see any more trouble until Red Canyon,” Earp said, “and I’m thirsty.”

Red Canyon

They reached the town of Custer at ten o’clock at night. The night was dark, and Johnson was disappointed; he couldn’t see much of the most famous place in the Black Hills, the Gordon Stockade at French Creek.

Just one year before, in 1875, the first miners of the Gordon party had built log cabins surrounded by a wooden fence ten feet high. They had entered the Black Hills in defiance of the Indian treaty, and they intended to pan for gold and hold off the Indians with their stockade. It had taken a cavalry expedition from Fort Laramie to get them out; in those days the army was still enforcing the Indian treaty, and the stockade stood deserted.

Now, everyone at Custer was talking about the new Indian treaty. Although the government was still fighting the Sioux in the field, the cost of the war was high—already in excess of $15 million—and it was an election year. Both the expense of the fighting and the legitimacy of the government’s position were hot campaign issues in Washington. Therefore, the Great White Father preferred to conclude the war peacefully, by negotiating a new treaty, and to this end, government negotiators had arranged to meet with Sioux chieftains in Sheridan.

But even specially picked chiefs were disgusted by the new proposals. Most of the government negotiators agreed with them. One of them, now on his way back to Washington, said to Johnson that it was “the hardest damn thing I ever did in my life. I don’t care how many feathers a man wears in his hair, he’s still a man. One of them, Red Legs, looked at me and said, ‘Do you think this is fair? Would you sign such a paper?’ And I could not meet his eyes. It made me sick.

“You know what Thomas Jefferson said?” the man continued. “In 1803, Thomas Jefferson said that it would take a thousand years before the West was fully settled. And it’ll be settled in less’n a hundred years. That’s progress.”

Johnson recorded in his journal that “he seemed an honest man sent to do a dishonest job, and now he could not forgive himself for carrying out the instructions of his government. He was drunk when we arrived, and drinking more when we left.”

Morgan Earp left them at Custer, and they went on without him. By midnight, they had passed Fourmile Ranch, and headed into Pleasant Valley. They passed Twelvemile Ranch, and Eighteenmile Ranch in the darkness.

Shortly before dawn, they reached the entrance to Red Canyon.

The Red Canyon coach station had been burned to the ground. All the horses had been stolen. Flies buzzed around a half dozen scalped bodies, evidence of Persimmons Bill’s depredations.

“Guess they didn’t hear about the new treaty,” Earp said laconically. “I reckon we won’t be eating here.”

They proceeded immediately through the canyon. It was a tense journey, slow because they had no fresh team, but they made it without incident. At the far end of the canyon they followed Hawk Creek toward Camp Collier, which marked the southern entrance to the Black Hills.

Now, in the morning light, they stopped for an hour to graze the horses, and to breathe a long sigh of relief. “Not long now, Mr. Johnson,” Earp said, “and you’ll be owing me half those bones.”

Johnson decided it was time to tell him the truth. “Mr. Earp,” he began.

“Yes?”

“I appreciate everything you have done to help me get out of Deadwood, naturally.”

“I’m sure you do.”

“But there’s something I have to tell you.”

Earp frowned. “You’re not backing out on your deal?”

“No, no.” Johnson shook his head. “But I have to tell you, the crates really are just fossil bones.”

“Uh-huh,” Wyatt Earp said.

“They are just bones.”

“I heard you.”

“They are of value only to scientists, to paleontologists.”

“That’s fine with me.”

Johnson smiled wanly. “I only hope you won’t be too disappointed.”

“I’ll try not to be,” Earp said, and winked, and punched him on the shoulder. “You just remember, boy. Half those bones are mine.”

“He had been a strong friend,” Johnson wrote, “and I suspected he would make a dangerous enemy. Thus it was with some trepidation that I resumed the journey to Fort Laramie, and the first civilization I had seen in many months.”

Fort Laramie

Fort Laramie was an army outpost that had grown into a frontier town, but the army garrison still set the mood, and its mood was now bitter. The army had fought the Indians for more than eight months, and had suffered serious losses, most especially the massacre of Custer’s column at the Little Bighorn. There had been other bloody engagements as well, at Powder River and Slim Buttes, and even when they were not fighting, the campaign had been harsh and arduous. But all the news from the East told them that Washington and the rest of the country did not support their efforts; numerous articles criticized the military conduct of the campaign against “the noble and defenseless red man.” For young men who had seen their comrades fall, who had returned to a battle scene to bury the scalped and mutilated bodies of friends, who had seen corpses with their genitals cut off and stuffed in their mouths—for these soldiers, the Eastern commentary made for difficult reading.

As far as the army was concerned, they had been ordered to undertake this war, without being asked their opinion of either its feasibility or its morality; they had followed orders as best they could, and with considerable success, and they were angry now to be unsupported, and to be fighting an unpopular war.

The fact that the politicians in Washington had underestimated both the difficulty of a campaign against “mere savages” and the outrage that it would cause among the liberal establishment of the Eastern cities—uninformed writers who had never set eyes on a real Indian, and who had only fantasies of what the Indians were like—was no fault of the army.

As one captain put it, “They want the Indians eliminated, and the lands opened up to white settlers, but they don’t want anybody to get hurt in the process. That just ain’t possible.”

Added to this was the ugly fact that the war had now entered a new phase. The army was engaged in a war of attrition with the Indians, in which they planned to kill all the buffalo and thus starve the Indians into submission. Even so, most military men expected the war to drag on for at least three more years, and to cost another $15 million—although nobody in Washington wanted to hear that.

The arguments, back and forth, raged in the coach station on the outskirts of town. Johnson had an unappetizing lunch of bacon and biscuits, then sat in the sun outside the station. From where he sat, he could see the iron bridge crossing the Platte.

For more than a decade, the Platte River valley had been trumpeted by Union Pacific brochures as “a flowery meadow of great fertility clothed in nutritious grasses, and watered by numerous streams.” In fact, it was harsh, god-awful country. Yet the settlers were coming.

From the earliest pioneer days, the Platte River itself was known as especially treacherous and difficult to cross, and this new iron bridge represented one small improvement in a series of changes that were opening the West to settlers, making it more accessible.

Johnson dozed off in the sun and awoke when a voice said, “Hell of a sight, ain’t it?”

He opened his eyes. A tall man was smoking a cigar and staring at the bridge.

“That it is,” he said.

“I remember last year, that bridge was just talk.” The tall man turned. He had a scar running down his cheek. The face was familiar, but the recognition came slowly.

Navy Joe Benedict.

Marsh’s right-hand man.

Johnson sat up quickly. He had only a moment to wonder what Navy Joe was doing here before a familiar heavyset figure emerged from the coach house and stood beside Benedict.

Professor Marsh glanced at Johnson and said in his formal way, “Good morning to you, sir.” He gave no sign of recognition and immediately turned to Benedict. “What’s the delay, Joe?”

“Just hitching up a new team, Professor. We’ll be ready to leave in the space of fifteen or twenty minutes.”

“See if you can quicken it,” Marsh said.

Navy Joe left, and Marsh turned to Johnson. He appeared not to recognize him, for Johnson looked very different from the last time Marsh had seen him. He was leaner and more muscled, with a full beard, and hair that had not seen scissors since leaving Philadelphia more than three months before. It hung down almost to his shoulders. His clothes were rough and dirty, caked in mud.

Marsh said, “Just passing through?”

“That’s right.”

“Which way you going?”

“To Cheyenne.”

“Come from the Hills?”

“Yeah.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Deadwood.”

“Mining gold?”

“Yeah,” Johnson said.

“Strike it rich?”

“Not exactly,” Johnson said. “What about you?”

“In point of fact, I myself am going north into the Hills.”

“Mining gold?” Johnson asked, to his private amusement.

“Hardly. I am the professor of paleontology at Yale College,” Marsh said. “I study fossil bones.”

“That right?” Johnson could not believe that Marsh had not recognized him, but it seemed he had not.

“Yes,” Marsh said. “And I hear there are some fossil bones to be had in Deadwood.”

“In Deadwood? That right?”

“That’s what I hear,” Marsh said. “Apparently a young man has them in his possession. I hope to obtain them. I am willing to pay well for them.”

“Oh?”

“Yes indeed.” Marsh took out a fat roll of greenbacks, and inspected them in the sunlight. “I would also pay for information about this young man and his whereabouts.” He looked closely at Johnson. “If you take my meaning.”

“I don’t reckon I do,” Johnson said.

“Well, you’ve just come from Deadwood,” Marsh said. “I wonder if you know anything of this young man.”

“This man got a name?” Johnson asked.

“His name is Johnson. He’s quite an unscrupulous young fellow. He used to work for me.”

“That right?”

“Indeed. But he left my company and threw in with a band of thieves and robbers. I believe he’s wanted for murder in other territories.”

“That right?”

Marsh nodded. “You know anything of him?”

“Never heard of him. How you going to get those bones?”

“Buy them if necessary,” Marsh said. “But I intend to have them, by whatever means may be required.”

“You want ’em bad, then.”

“Yes, I do,” Marsh said. “You see,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “these bones I’m talking about are actually mine. Young Johnson stole them from me.”

Johnson felt rage sweep over him. He had been enjoying this charade, but now he was flushed with anger. It took every bit of self-control he could muster to say laconically, “That right?”

“He’s a lying skunk, no doubt of it,” Marsh said.

“Sounds a bad one,” Johnson said.

At that moment, Wyatt Earp came around the corner and said, “Hey, Johnson! On your pegs! We’re moving out.”

Marsh smiled at Johnson. “You little son of a bitch,” he said.

The Laramie Bone Deal

“It seemed,” wrote Johnson in his journal, “that many pigeons had come home to roost in Laramie.”

Most of the town was preoccupied with another figure from Johnson’s past, Broken Nose Jack McCall. Jack had run from Deadwood and had gotten to Laramie, where he had bragged about killing Wild Bill Hickok. The reason he spoke so freely was that a miners’ court in Deadwood had tried him for that murder, and had acquitted him when he claimed that Wild Bill had killed his young brother many years before, and he was just avenging that crime. In Laramie, Jack talked openly of killing Hickok, certain that he could not be tried twice for the same crime.

But Jack didn’t realize that the Deadwood miners’ court was not legally recognized, and he was promptly thrown into jail in Laramie and formally tried for Hickok’s murder. Since Jack had already publicly admitted to it, the trial was short; he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, a turn of events that “irked him mightily.”

While Jack’s trial was going on, an episode far more important to William Johnson was occurring down the road in Sutter’s Saloon. Wyatt Earp was sitting at a table, drinking whiskey with Othniel C. Marsh and negotiating for the sale of half Johnson’s bones.

They were both hard bargainers, and it took most of the day. For his part, Earp appeared amused.

Johnson sat with Miss Emily in the corner and watched the proceedings. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said.

“Why does it surprise you?” she asked.

“What were my chances of running into that professor?” He sighed. “One in a million, or less.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Wyatt knew Professor Marsh was in the territory.”

A slow creeping sensation moved up Johnson’s spine. “He did?”

“Surely.”

“How did he know?”

“I was with him in the hotel dining room,” she said, “when he heard the rumor that there was some college teacher in Cheyenne buying up all manner of fossils and asking about some bones in Deadwood. The miners were all laughing about it, but Wyatt’s eyes lit up when he heard the story.”

Johnson frowned. “So he decided to help me get the bones out of Deadwood to Cheyenne?”

“Yes,” she said. “We left the day after he heard that story.”

“You mean Wyatt always intended to sell my bones to Marsh, from the beginning?”

“I believe so,” she said softly.

Johnson glared across the saloon at Earp. “And I thought he was my friend.”

“You thought he was a fool,” Emily said. “But he is your friend.”

“How can you say that? Look at him bargaining there, haggling over every dollar. At this rate they’ll be at it all day.”

“Yes,” Emily said. “Yet I’m sure Wyatt could conclude the deal in five minutes, if that was what he intended.”

Johnson stared at her. “You mean…”

She nodded. “I’ve no doubt he’s wondering why you are sitting here while he stalls Professor Marsh for you.”

“Oh, Emily,” he cried, “I could kiss you!”

“I wish you would,” she said softly.

“Too many things were happening at once,” wrote Johnson.

He found yet another Chinese laundry and paid a small sum to use the fire and iron kettle with which they heated water. He spent three hours boiling fresh rice paste, making sure the concoction was gelatinous enough, and clutching the rocks with bamboo laundry tongs and dipping them into the pasty ooze, coating them. When they were dry, he poured dust over them, to make them suitably grimy. Next to the heat of the fire, they dried quickly. Finally, he removed the precious bones from all ten crates, and placed the new stones in the old crates, closing them carefully so that there would be no marks indicating they had been opened.

By five that afternoon, he was exhausted. But all of Johnson’s fossil bones were safely hidden in the back of the stable, wrapped in tarp cloth and buried under a pile of fresh manure, the shovel hidden in the straw with them and the substitutions set out with a tarp covering, as the originals had been. Earp and Marsh arrived soon after. Marsh grinned at Johnson. “I expect this will be our last meeting, Mr. Johnson.”

“I hope so,” Johnson said, with a sincerity Marsh could not have imagined.

The division was begun. Marsh wanted to open all ten crates and inspect the fossils before dividing, but Johnson steadfastly refused. The division was meant to be between him and Earp, and it would be done randomly. Marsh grumbled but agreed.

Midway through the process, Marsh said, “I think I had better look at one of these crates, to satisfy myself.”

“I have no objection,” Earp said. He looked directly at Johnson.

“I have plenty of objections,” Johnson said.

“Oh? What are they?” Marsh asked.

“I’m in a hurry,” Johnson said. “And besides…”

“Besides?”

“There’s your father,” Emily prompted him suddenly.

“Yes, there’s my father,” Johnson said. “How much did Professor Marsh offer you for these stones, Wyatt?”

“Two hundred dollars,” Wyatt said.

“Two hundred dollars? That’s an outrage.”

“It is two hundred more than you have, I believe,” Marsh said.

“Look, Wyatt,” said Johnson. “There’s a telegraph office here in Laramie. I can cable my father for funds, and by this time tomorrow I can give you five hundred dollars for your share.”

Marsh darkened. “Mr. Earp, we have made our deal.”

“That’s so,” Earp said. “But I like the sound of five hundred dollars.”

“I’ll give you six,” Marsh said. “Now.”

“Seven fifty,” Johnson said. “Tomorrow.”

Marsh said, “Mr. Earp, I thought we had a deal.”

“It’s amazing,” Earp said, “how things keep changing in this world.”

“But you don’t even know if this young man can come up with the money.”

“I suspect he can.”

“Eight hundred,” Johnson said.

Half an hour later, Marsh pronounced himself happy to take Earp’s share of the bones, at once and without inspection, for a thousand dollars in cash. “But I want that box,” he said suddenly, spying the one with the small X on the side. “That means something.”

“No!” yelled Johnson.

Marsh drew his weapon. “It would appear that box has contents that are especially valuable. And if you believe that your life is also especially valuable, Mr. Johnson, which I do not, then I suggest you let me remove this crate without further discussion.”

Marsh had the boxes loaded onto a wagon, and he and Navy Joe Benedict headed north, toward Deadwood, to retrieve the rest of the bones.

“What does he mean, the rest of the bones?” Johnson asked, as he saw the wagon drive off into the sunset.

“I told him there was another thousand pounds we left behind in Deadwood, hidden in Chinese Town, only you didn’t want him to know about them,” Earp said.

“We better get moving,” Johnson said. “He won’t go far before he cracks open one of those cases and finds he has bought worthless granite. And he’ll be back hopping mad.”

“I’m ready to go,” Earp said, thumbing through the money. “I feel well satisfied with my return on this trip.”

“There’s one problem, of course.”

“You need crates to replace the ones you just lost,” said Earp. “I bet the army garrison has some, given their need for provisions.”

Within an hour they had procured ten crates of more or less equal size as the ones Marsh had taken. Johnson unearthed the bones from their manure bed, and packed them carefully but quickly. The box containing the dragon teeth received another X, which satisfied him more than he could say.

They left, within minutes, for Cheyenne.

Earp was up on the box with Tiny. Inside the coach, Miss Emily stared at him. “Well?”

“Well, what?”

“I think I’ve been very patient.”

“I thought you might be Wyatt’s girl,” he said.

“Wyatt’s girl? Wherever would you get an idea like that?”

“Well, I thought so.”

“Wyatt Earp is a scoundrel and a drifter. The man lives for excitement, gambling, shooting, and other pursuits of no substance.”

“And me?”

“You’re different,” she said. “You’re brave, but you are also refined. I bet you kiss real refined, too.”

She was waiting.

“I learned,” Johnson wrote in his journal, “one immediate lesson, which was the unwisdom of kissing aboard a bucking stagecoach. My lip was deeply bitten and the blood flowed freely, which inhibited, but did not stop, further explorations of this nature.”

He added, “I hope she did not know I had never kissed a girl before, in the passionate French way which seemed to be to her liking. Except for that one time with Lucienne. But I will say this for Emily. If she did know, she did not say anything, and for that—and for other experiences with her in Cheyenne—I am eternally grateful.”

Cheyenne

In the unimaginable splendor of a room at the Inter-Ocean Hotel (which he had previously seen as a roach-infested dump), Johnson took his ease for several days, with Emily. But first, upon arrival and signing the hotel register, he ascertained that the Inter-Ocean maintained a steel-walled strong room, with one of the new combination time locks, developed for banks against would-be bank robbers. The boxes were carried into the room by the porters. He tipped them generously so that they would not resent him and whisper about the boxes to their less friendly colleagues.

The first day, he soaked in four baths in succession, for after each he found his body was still dirty. It seemed as though the dust of the prairie would never leave his skin.

He visited the barber, who trimmed his hair and beard. It was startling to sit in the chair and inspect his own face in the mirror. He could not get used to it; his features were unfamiliar; he had the face of a different person—leaner, harder, determination now in his features. And there was the scar over his upper lip; he rather liked it, and so did Emily. The barber stepped back, scissors in one hand, comb in the other. “How’s that look, sir?” Like everyone else in Cheyenne, the barber treated Johnson with respect. It wasn’t because he was rich—no one in Cheyenne knew he was rich—but rather because of something in his manner, his bearing. Without meaning to do so, he looked like a man who might shoot another one—because he now had.

“Sir? How does that look?” the barber asked again.

Johnson didn’t know. Finally, he said, “I like it fine.”

He took Emily to dinner in the best restaurant in town. They dined on oysters from California, and wine from France, and poulet à l’estragon. She recognized the name of the wine, he noticed. After dinner they walked arm in arm on the streets of the town. He remembered how dangerous Cheyenne had felt when he had been here before. Now it seemed a sleepy little railway junction, populated by braggarts and gamblers putting on airs. Even the toughest-looking customers stepped aside on the boardwalk when he passed.

“They see you wear a gun,” Emily said, “and you know how to use it.”

Pleased, Johnson took Emily back to the hotel early, and to bed. They stayed in bed most of the following day. He had a wonderful time, and so did she.

“Where will you go now?” she asked him on the third day.

“Back to Philadelphia,” he said.

“I’ve never been to Philadelphia,” she said.

“You’ll love it there,” he said, smiling.

She smiled back, happily. “You really want me to come?”

“Of course.”

“Really?”

“Don’t be silly,” he said.

But he began to feel that she was always one step ahead of him. She seemed to know the hotel better than he would have expected, and enjoyed an easy overfamiliarity with the men behind the desk and the waiters in the dining room. Some even seemed to recognize her. And when he and Emily strolled the streets and window-shopped, she recognized Eastern fashions readily.

“I think this one’s very pretty.”

“It seems out of place here, not that I am the expert.”

“Well, a Western girl likes to know what’s fashionable.”

He would have reason to ponder this statement later.

A few steps along the wooden walkway, she said, “What sort of person is your mother?”

Johnson had not thought of his mother for a long time. The very thought was jolting in some way. “Why did you ask that?”

“I was just wondering about meeting her.”

“How do you mean?”

“Whether she will like me.”

“Ah, of course.”

“Do you think she’ll like me, Bill?”

“Oh, she’ll like you fine,” Johnson said.

“You don’t sound convinced.” She pouted prettily.

“Don’t be silly,” he said, and squeezed her arm.

“Let’s go back to the hotel,” she said. And quickly, she licked his ear.

“Stop it, Emily.”

“What’s the matter? I thought you liked that.”

“I do, but not here. Not in public.”

“Why? Nobody’s looking at us.”

“I know, but it’s not proper.”

“What difference does it make?” She was frowning. “If nobody is looking at us, what possible difference could it make?”

“I don’t know, it just does.”

“You’re back in Philadelphia already,” she said, stepping away and staring at him.

“Now, Emily…”

“You are.”

But all he said was, “Don’t be silly.”

“I’m not being silly,” she said. “And I’m not going to Philadelphia.”

He did not know what to say.

“I just wouldn’t fit in,” she said, wiping a tear from her cheek.

“Emily…”

She cried openly. “I know what you are thinking, Bill. I’ve known for days now.”

“Emily, please…” He had no idea what she meant, for the last three days had been the most deliriously pleasurable of his life.

“It’s no good—don’t touch me, please—it’s no good, that’s all.”

They walked back to the hotel, side by side, not speaking. She held her head high and sniffled occasionally. He was uncomfortable, clumsy, not knowing what to do.

After a time, he glanced at her and saw that she was no longer crying. She was furious. “After all I did for you,” she said. “Why, you’d be long dead from Dick if I hadn’t helped you, and you’d never have gotten out of Deadwood if I hadn’t talked Wyatt into helping you, and you’d have lost your bones in Laramie if I hadn’t helped you see a plan…”

“That’s true, Emily.”

“And this is the thanks I get! You cast me aside like an old rag.”

She was really angry. Yet somehow he realized it was he who was being cast aside. “Emily…”

“I said don’t touch me!”

It was a relief when the sheriff came up to them, tipped his hat politely to Emily, and said, “You William Johnson of Philadelphia?”

“I am.”

“You the one staying at the Inter-Ocean?”

“I am.”

“You have some identification of who you are?”

“Of course.”

“That’s fine,” the sheriff said, taking out his gun. “You’re under arrest. For the murder of William Johnson.”

“But I am William Johnson.”

“I can’t see how. William Johnson is dead. So whoever you are, you’re surely not him, are you?”

Handcuffs were snapped on his wrists. He looked at her. “Emily, tell him.”

Emily turned on her heel and walked away without a word.

“Emily!”

“Let’s go, mister,” the sheriff said, and pushed Johnson toward the jail.

It took a while for the details to come out. His first day in Cheyenne, Johnson had cabled his father in Philadelphia, asking him to send $500. His father had immediately cabled the sheriff’s office to report that someone in Cheyenne was impersonating his dead son.

Everything Johnson produced—his Yale class ring, some crumpled correspondence, a newspaper clipping from the Deadwood Black Hills Weekly Pioneer—was taken as proof that he had robbed a dead man and probably killed him as well.

“This fellow Johnson’s a college man from back East,” the sheriff said, squinting judiciously at Johnson. “Now that couldn’t be you, could it.”

“But it is,” Johnson insisted.

“He’s rich, too.”

“I am.”

The sheriff laughed. “That’s a good one,” he said. “You’re a rich college man from back East, and I’m Santa Claus.”

“Ask the girl. Ask Emily.”

“Oh, I did,” the sheriff said. “She said she’s real disappointed in you, you gave her a big story about yourself and now she sees you for what you are. She’s living it up in your hotel room and selling off those crates of whatever it is you brought with you to town.”

“What?”

“She’s no friend of yours, mister,” the sheriff said.

“She can’t sell those crates!”

“I don’t see why not. She says they’re hers.”

“They’re mine!”

“It’s no good getting all hot like this,” the sheriff said. “I checked with some folks come down from Deadwood. Seems you showed up there with a dead Indian and a dead white man. I’ll lay you a hundred to one that white man was William Johnson.”

Johnson started to explain, but the sheriff held up his hand. “I’m sure you got a story to explain it,” he said. “Your type always does.”

The sheriff went out of the jail. Johnson heard the deputy say, “Who is that fella?”

“Some desperado, putting on airs,” the sheriff said, and he went out for a drink.

The deputy was a boy of sixteen. Johnson traded him his boots to send a second telegram to Philadelphia.

“Sheriff’ll be mighty angry if he finds out,” the deputy said. “He wants you to go to Yankton to be tried for murder.”

“Just send it,” Johnson said, writing quickly.

The deputy read the telegram slowly, mouthing the words. He looked up. “Pinky?”

“Just send it,” Johnson said.

“Pinky?”

“That was my name as a baby.”

The deputy shook his head. But he sent the telegram.

“Now look here, Mr. Johnson,” the sheriff said, unlocking the cell a few hours later. “It was an honest mistake. I was only doing my duty.”

“You got the telegram?” Johnson said.

“I got three telegrams,” the sheriff said. “One from your father, one from Senator Cameron of Pennsylvania, and one from Mr. Hayden at the Geological Survey in Washington. For all I know there are more coming. I’m telling you it was an honest mistake.”

“That’s fine,” Johnson said.

“No hard feelings?”

But Johnson had other things on his mind. “Where’s my gun?”

He found Emily in the lobby of the Inter-Ocean Hotel. She was drinking wine.

“Where are my crates?”

“I have nothing to say to you.”

“What have you done with my crates, Emily?”

“Nothing.” She shook her head. “They are just old bones. Nobody wants ’em.”

Relieved, Johnson collapsed in a chair beside her.

“I can’t see why they are so important to you,” she said.

“They are, that’s all.”

“Well, I hope you got some money because the hotel is asking for the bill and my smiling at the desk man is wearing thin.”

“I have money. My father sent—”

She wasn’t listening, however, but staring across the room past him. Her eyes lit up: “Collis!”

Johnson turned to look. Behind him, a heavyset, dour man in a dark suit was checking into the hotel at the front desk. The man looked over. He had the mournful expression of a basset hound. “Miranda? Miranda Lapham?”

Johnson frowned. “Miranda?”

Emily was standing, beaming. “Collis Huntington, whatever are you doing in Cheyenne?”

“Bless me, it’s Miranda Lapham!”

“Miranda? Lapham?” Johnson said, not only confused by Emily’s new name but by the sudden idea that he might not have known her real identity at all. And why had she lied to him?

The heavyset man embraced Emily with warm and lingering familiarity. “Why, Miranda, you look wonderful, simply wonderful.”

“It’s delightful to see you, Collis.”

“Let me look at you,” he said, stepping back, beaming. “You haven’t changed a bit, Miranda. I don’t mind telling you I’ve missed you, Miranda.”

“And I you, Collis.”

The heavy man turned to Johnson. “This beautiful young lady is the best lobbyist the railroads ever had in Washington.”

Johnson said nothing. He was still trying to put it together. Collis Huntington, Washington, railroads… My God—Collis Huntington! One of the Big Four of the Central Pacific in California. Collis Huntington, the blatant corruptionist who traveled each year to Washington with a suitcase full of money for the congressmen, the man once described as “scrupulously dishonest.”

“Everyone misses you, Miranda,” Huntington went on. “They all ask for you still. Bob Arthur—”

“Dear Senator Arthur—”

“And Jack Kearns—”

“Commissioner Kearns, what a dear man—”

“And even the general—”

“The general? He still asks for me?”

“He does,” Huntington said sadly, shaking his head. “Why don’t you come back, Miranda? Washington was always your first love.”

“All right,” she said suddenly. “You’ve convinced me.”

Huntington turned to Johnson. “Aren’t you going to introduce me to your companion?”

“He’s nobody,” Miranda Lapham said, shaking her head so her curls moved prettily. She took Huntington’s arm. “Come, Collis, we’ll have a delicious lunch and you can tell me the news of Washington. And there is so much to do, you will have to find me a house, of course, and I will need some setting up…”

They moved away, arm in arm, to the dining room.

Johnson sat there, stunned.

At eight the next morning, feeling he had lived a decade in a few months, he took the Union Pacific train east, all ten crates stored in the rattling luggage car. The monotony of the voyage was most enjoyable, and he marked the greening of the landscape. The arrival of autumn could be seen in the top leaves of the oaks and maples and apple trees. At each stop, he would get off and buy the local newspapers, noticing an Eastern point of view creeping into the editorials about the Indian Wars—and various other topics.

On the morning of the fourth day, in Pittsburgh, he telegraphed Cope to say he had survived and would like to come speak with him; he said nothing about the crates of bones. Then he telegraphed his parents and asked that they have an extra place set for dinner that night.

He arrived in Philadelphia on October 8.

Four Meetings

At the train station, Johnson hired a man with an empty greengrocer’s wagon to take him to Cope’s house on Pine Street in Philadelphia. It wasn’t a long trip, and he arrived to find that Cope owned two matching three-story stone row houses, one a residence and the other a private museum and offices. Most surprising was that Cope lived perhaps only seven or eight blocks from Rittenhouse Square, where Johnson’s mother was even now preparing for his arrival.

“Which house is the residence?” he asked the wagon owner.

“I do not know, but I think that fellow will tell you,” the man said, pointing.

It was Cope himself, bouncing down the steps. “Johnson!”

“Professor!”

He gave Johnson a firm handshake and a decisively strong hug.

“You’re alive and—” He spied the tarp over the back of the wagon. “Is it possible?”

Johnson nodded. “It wasn’t impossible, is perhaps my best answer.”

The crates were taken directly into the museum half of Cope’s property. Mrs. Cope came in with lemonade and wafers, and they sat down; they oohed over his stories, fussed over his appearance, exclaimed over his crates of bones.

“I will want to have a secretary transcribe an entire account of your adventure,” said Cope. “We need to be able to prove that the bones we excavated in Montana are the bones that sit now in Philadelphia.”

“A few may have broken from the way the wagon and stages bounced around,” Johnson said. “Plus there may be a few bullet holes or bone chips, but mostly they’re all here.”

“The Brontosaurus teeth?” Cope asked, his hands twitching in excitement. “Do you still have the teeth? It may not reflect well on me, but I have been worrying about this since the day we thought you had been killed.”

“It’s this crate here, Professor,” Johnson said, finding the box with the X.

Cope unpacked it on the spot, lifted the teeth one by one, and stared at them for a very long time, transfixed. He set them down in a row, much as he had done on the shale cliff many weeks earlier, nearly two thousand miles to the west. “This is extraordinary,” he said. “Quite extraordinary. Marsh will be hard put to match it for many years.”

“Edward,” said Mrs. Cope, “hadn’t we better send Mr. Johnson home to his family?”

“Yes, of course,” Cope said. “They must be eager to see you.”

His father embraced him warmly. “I thank God for your return, son.”

His mother stood at the top of the stairs and said weepily, “The beard makes you look frightfully common, William. Get rid of it at once.”

“What’s happened to your lip?” his father said. “Are you wounded?”

“Indians,” Johnson said.

“Looks like teeth marks to me,” Edward, his brother, said.

“That’s so,” Johnson said. “This Indian climbed aboard the wagon and bit me. Wanted to see what I would taste like.”

“Bit you on the lip? What, was he trying to kiss you?”

“They are savages,” Johnson said. “And unpredictable.”

“Kissed by an Indian!” Edward said, clapping his hands. “Kissed by an Indian!”

Johnson rolled up his trousers and showed everyone the scar where the arrow had pierced his leg. He produced the stump of the arrow. He chose not to tell them many details, and said nothing of Emily Williams or Miranda Lapham or whatever her true name was. He did tell them about burying Toad and Little Wind.

Edward burst into tears and ran upstairs to his room.

“We’re just glad to have you back, son,” his father said, looking suddenly much older.

The fall term was already under way, but the dean of Yale College permitted him to enroll anyway. Johnson was not above the dramatic effect of putting on his Western clothes and his gun and striding into the dining room.

The entire room fell silent. Then someone said, “It’s Johnson! Willy Johnson!”

Johnson strode over to Marlin’s table. Marlin was eating with friends.

“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said, in his best tough voice.

“How colorful you look,” Marlin said, laughing. “You must introduce me to your tailor, William.”

Johnson said nothing.

“Should I presume you had many dime Western adventures and killed men in actual gunfights?” Marlin said, hamming it up for their listeners.

“Yes,” Johnson said. “That would be correct.”

Marlin’s antic smile dropped, unsure of Johnson’s meaning.

“I believe you owe me money,” Johnson said again.

“My dear fellow, I owe you nothing at all! If you remember, the terms of our bet were that you would accompany Professor Marsh, and the entire school knows you did not get far with him before he cast you aside as a rogue and scoundrel.”

In a single swift movement, Johnson grabbed Marlin by the collar, effortlessly hoisted him to his feet, and slammed him against the wall. “You snotty little bastard, you give me that thousand dollars or I’ll break your head open.”

Marlin was gasping, and noticed Johnson’s scar. “I don’t know you.”

“No, but you owe me. Now tell everybody what you are going to do.”

“I’m going to pay you a thousand dollars.”

“Louder.”

Marlin repeated it loudly. The room laughed. Johnson dropped him in a crumpled heap to the floor and walked out of the dining room.

Othniel Marsh lived alone in a mansion he had built on a hill outside New Haven. As he walked up the hill, Johnson had a sense of the loneliness and isolation of Marsh’s life, his need for approval, for status and acceptance. He was shown to the drawing room; Marsh was working there alone, and looked up from a manuscript he was preparing.

“You sent for me, Professor Marsh?”

Marsh glared at him. “Where are they?”

“You mean the bones?”

“Of course I mean the bones! Where are they?”

Johnson held Marsh’s gaze. He realized he was no longer afraid of the man, in any way. “Professor Cope has the bones, in Philadelphia. All of them.”

“Is it true you have found the remains of a hitherto unknown dinosaur of great size?”

“I am not at liberty to say, Professor.”

“You are a fatuous fool,” Marsh said. “You have squandered your own opportunity for greatness. Cope will never publish, and if he does, his report will be so hasty, so filled with inaccuracies, that it will never attain the recognition of the scientific community. You should have brought them to Yale, where they could be properly studied. You are a fool and a traitor to your college, Johnson.”

“Is that all, Professor?”

“Yes, that’s all.” Johnson turned to leave. “One more thing,” Marsh said.

“Yes, Professor?”

“I don’t suppose you can get the bones back?”

“No, Professor.”

“Then it’s gone,” Marsh said wistfully. “All gone.” He returned to his manuscript. His pen scratched on the paper.

Johnson left the room. On his way out, he passed a small skeleton of the miniature Cretaceous horse Eohippus. It was beautifully formed, beautifully assembled, this pale skeleton from the distant past. Somehow it made Johnson sad. He turned away, and hurried down the hill toward the College.