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inspecting me at close quarters. “You was the worst I seen until that drunk staggered in here in his underwear a while ago and Harry kicked him out the door.” He indicated the bartender with a nod, and he rubs his sore eyes with the back of his left hand. He buys me a shot of whiskey, which I drank real slow, as I had not tasted any for ever so long. Even so I felt its vapors hit my brain shortly after the first sip.
    Wild Bill introduced me to the bartender, man name of Harry Sam Young, and told me he knew him too from back in Kansas.
    “This town’s full of friends,” he went on. “California Joe, Colorado Charley Utter, White-Eye Jack Anderson, they’re all here. But the real news is I recently got married.” He got a refill from Harry Young. I was still working on my first. “Which reminds me.” He looks around like he’s worried somebody’s listening in, and decides maybe they might yet, and asks me to step aside for a confidential matter.
    Coming into the bright sunlight from a semidarkness smelling of lamp oil, liquor, and sweat was probably more the cause of my swimming vision than even the fiery hooch (which in case you never knew it is an Indian word, though not Cheyenne).
    Wild Bill’s own eyes was squeezed into sightless slits, and it’s funny that what I thought of was how helpless he would be if someone was to shoot him at such a moment.
    He takes me by the elbow of my shirt and bends down and in a subdued voice he says, “Hoss, I seem to recall being in your company once in a certain kind of establishment, or am I wrong?”
    “That’s right, Bill, you and me went to a whorehouse.”
    He flinches and says, “Keep your voice down, willya?”
    I had not been shouting, but I did as asked, and went on. “That was right after you shot Strawhan’s brother, which was the damnedest thing I ever witnessed. Not only did he have the drop on you, he was about to shoot you in the back. You seen him in the mirror. My God, you was fast.”
    He showed a thin smile, lifting his head and opening his eyes away from the sun. “I’m not that good any more, hoss. I don’t say I’m bad, but I don’t see as well as I used to. They still get me to shoot coins on edge, but nowadays it’s dollars, not the dimes of the old days.”
    I reflected that one of the dollars he give me had that nick in it. “I saw you put ten loads into the O in the sign across Market Square in K.C., a hundred yards away.”
    Wild Bill continues his distant smile. “The Odd Fellows’ sign,” says he. “I couldn’t do that nowadays. I’m taking something for my eyes. It makes me pale, and maybe it is doing something to my well-being.... But here’s what I wanted to tell you, hoss: If you remember that sporting house, well, I’d as soon you forgot about it insofar as I am personally involved.”
    Now Wild Bill Hickok wasn’t the sort of man from who you would deny a favor requiring as little effort as this, so I hastened to reassure him.
    “I got nothing against sporting women,” he goes on. “Some of them been real good friends of mine. Fact is, the wagon train we brought up here from Cheyenne stopped at Laramie and loaded on Dirty Emma, Sizzling Kate, and others who have set up shop down the street here, should you have a natural need.” Now his smile became something you might of seen on a preacher. “Now I’m married I have changed my ways.” He looked real high-minded, lofty eyebrows, pious mouth under the drooping mustache. “Agnes,” says he, “owned her own show, she and her previous husband, one of the noted clowns of the time until some little bastard shot him through the heart on account of not getting in free one day.”
    Wild Bill had told me about Aggie on a previous occasion, so I was able to say, “I do believe she is a celebrated equestrienne,” using the word as he originally did, and he was right pleased now.
    “That’s right, hoss, also a tightrope walker, but them days is behind her now. You