“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.