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:
When I went down to eat in the hotel dining room, two days later, I discovered that I had become the most famous person in Deadwood. Over antelope steaks, the five other hotel guests—all rough miners—plied me with bourbon and questions about my recent activities. Like the proprietor, Mr. Perkins, they were exceedingly polite in their manner, and everyone kept their hands on the table when they ate. But I noticed, polite or not, that they did not believe my story.
It took some time to learn why. Apparently anyone who claimed to have crossed from Montana into Dakota was on the face of it a liar, since anyone who tried it would be certain to die at the hands of the Sioux. But the fact was I had encountered no Indians at all since the attack on the wagon; Sitting Bull’s Sioux must have been to the north of us when we had made our crossing.
But in Deadwood, the story was not believed, and this drew attention on my “bones,” which I had stored. One interested guest was a hard customer called Broken Nose Jack McCall, whose moniker was likely the result of a barroom altercation. Broken Nose also had one eye that looked steadfastly to the left, with a pale blue cast to it, like a bird of prey. Whether because of this eye, or some other reason, he was very mean, but not so mean as his companion, Black Dick Curry, who had a snake tattoo on his left wrist and the unlikely nickname “the Miner’s Friend.” When I asked Perkins why he was called the Miner’s Friend, the proprietor said it was a kind of joke.
“What do you mean, a joke?” I asked.
“We can’t get proof of it, but most folks reckon Dick Curry and his brothers, Clem and Bill, are the highwaymen who rob the stagecoaches and gold shipments going from Deadwood down to Laramie and Cheyenne,” Perkins explained.
“We’re near Cheyenne?” I asked, suddenly excited. For the hundredth time I cursed my lack of geographical knowledge.
“Near to there as anywhere,” the proprietor said.
“I want to go there,” I said.
“Nobody keeping you here, is there?”
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.