“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,
that Mr. Earp was like all the others, and did not believe that these crates contained bones at all. I was faced with a moral dilemma. Mr. Earp had been friendly to me and helpful more than once. I was asking him to face real danger and he thought he was risking his life for treasure. It was my obligation to disabuse him of his greedy misconception. But I had received quite an education out West, one that Yale had been unable to provide. A man has to look out for himself, I’d learned. So all I said to him was, “Mr. Earp, you have cut yourself a deal.”
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:
I PROMIS YOU ARE A DED MAN TO-DAY OR MY NAME IS NOT DICK CURRY.
“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:
The first was Black Dick and his gang of ruffians. We could expect to meet them during the first day. Second was Persimmons Bill and his renegade Indians. We could expect to meet them in Red Canyon on the second day. And the third obstacle was the most dangerous of all—and wholly unanticipated by me.
Johnson had steeled himself for a dangerous journey, but he was unprepared for its sheer physical hazards.