Calamity by Libbie Hawker

Author:Libbie Hawker [Hawker, Libbie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Running Rabbit Press

That night, I stayed out late on the streets of Cheyenne. Dread had gripped the whole town, and the streets was full to busting with an air of wild abandon. A desperate certainty had fallen over Cheyenne: certainty that doom would soon come—indeed, that some dark and foreboding fate would shortly envelop the whole West. That sickening air of impending disaster made men rowdy. They was all unpredictable, reckless and loud. Every sensible woman had shut herself away at home, there to weep frightened tears into her kerchief. But I had never been especially sensible—and anyway, a private melancholy all my own settled over me, making me near as desperate and wild as the men. I had no reason to believe Wild Bill had attached himself to Custer’s Seventh, but Bill had been a soldier in the war, and the last time I’d seen him it had been in Indian territory. The two facts seemed most ominously connected. I couldn’t shake a terrible certainty that Wild Bill Hickock, my true and abiding love, was laying dead somewheres along the banks of Rosebud Creek, bloated like a dropped deer, his pretty hazel eyes picked out by vultures, leaving nothing but black pits and a void where his spirit used to be.

I spent a few fruitless hours drifting about the streets, searching for some way to drive the image of Wild Bill’s corpse from my head. The alleys and lanes of Cheyenne was all filled with angry shouts, with the tight, coiled tension of violence waiting to be unleashed. Big and strong I may have been, but I didn’t wish to encounter any men that night. Their fear and grief made them unpredictable. I wasn’t keen to be any man’s victim, so I stuck to the patches of light that spilled out of taverns and saloons; I hung about the hitching posts and patted horses’ necks, listening to cries of disbelief that seemed never to end—listening to the pianos in the bars, playing too loud and forceful to sound happy. An ill omen had descended upon Cheyenne, all right—maybe on the whole damn West.

Finally, I knew my lonesome state would drive me mad, even there in the midst of the crowded Cheyenne streets. I resolved to find a card game and join in, just for the sake of having someone to talk to, though I knew already that no one would talk of anything but Custer’s disastrous battle. And joining a card game meant stepping foot inside a saloon. I had kept myself well away from whiskey since leaving the road ranch; the persistent headaches had only vanished a couple days before.

You ought to go back to the boarding house and take to your bed, I told myself even as I made for the nearest bar. No good will come from putting yourself within reach of a glass.

But I couldn’t bear the thought of laying in my hard, narrow bed, staring up at the dark ceiling. There, I would read no answers to the questions that chased themselves around and around inside my head.

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