“Hardly. I am the professor of paleontology at Yale College,” Marsh said. “I study fossil bones.”
“That right?” Johnson could not believe that Marsh had not recognized him, but it seemed he had not.
“Yes,” Marsh said. “And I hear there are some fossil bones to be had in Deadwood.”
“In Deadwood? That right?”
“That’s what I hear,” Marsh said. “Apparently a young man has them in his possession. I hope to obtain them. I am willing to pay well for them.”
“Oh?”
“Yes indeed.” Marsh took out a fat roll of greenbacks, and inspected them in the sunlight. “I would also pay for information about this young man and his whereabouts.” He looked closely at Johnson. “If you take my meaning.”
“I don’t reckon I do,” Johnson said.
“Well, you’ve just come from Deadwood,” Marsh said. “I wonder if you know anything of this young man.”
“This man got a name?” Johnson asked.
“His name is Johnson. He’s quite an unscrupulous young fellow. He used to work for me.”
“That right?”
“Indeed. But he left my company and threw in with a band of thieves and robbers. I believe he’s wanted for murder in other territories.”
“That right?”
Marsh nodded. “You know anything of him?”
“Never heard of him. How you going to get those bones?”
“Buy them if necessary,” Marsh said. “But I intend to have them, by whatever means may be required.”
“You want ’em bad, then.”
“Yes, I do,” Marsh said. “You see,” he said, pausing for dramatic effect, “these bones I’m talking about are actually mine. Young Johnson stole them from me.”
Johnson felt rage sweep over him. He had been enjoying this charade, but now he was flushed with anger. It took every bit of self-control he could muster to say laconically, “That right?”
“He’s a lying skunk, no doubt of it,” Marsh said.
“Sounds a bad one,” Johnson said.
At that moment, Wyatt Earp came around the corner and said, “Hey, Johnson! On your pegs! We’re moving out.”
Marsh smiled at Johnson. “You little son of a bitch,” he said.
The Laramie Bone Deal
“It seemed,” wrote Johnson in his journal, “that many pigeons had come home to roost in Laramie.”
Most of the town was preoccupied with another figure from Johnson’s past, Broken Nose Jack McCall. Jack had run from Deadwood and had gotten to Laramie, where he had bragged about killing Wild Bill Hickok. The reason he spoke so freely was that a miners’ court in Deadwood had tried him for that murder, and had acquitted him when he claimed that Wild Bill had killed his young brother many years before, and he was just avenging that crime. In Laramie, Jack talked openly of killing Hickok, certain that he could not be tried twice for the same crime.
But Jack didn’t realize that the Deadwood miners’ court was not legally recognized, and he was promptly thrown into jail in Laramie and formally tried for Hickok’s murder. Since Jack had already publicly admitted to it, the trial was short; he was convicted and sentenced to be hanged, a turn of events that “irked him mightily.”
While Jack’s trial was going on, an episode far more important to William Johnson was occurring down the road in Sutter’s Saloon. Wyatt Earp was sitting at a table, drinking whiskey with Othniel C. Marsh and negotiating for the sale of half Johnson’s bones.
They were both hard bargainers, and it took most of the day. For his part, Earp appeared amused.
Johnson sat with Miss Emily in the corner and watched the proceedings. “I can’t believe this is happening,” he said.
“Why does it surprise you?” she asked.
“What were my chances of running into that professor?” He sighed. “One in a million, or less.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” she said. “Wyatt knew Professor Marsh was in the territory.”
A slow creeping sensation moved up Johnson’s spine. “He did?”
“Surely.”
“How did he know?”
“I was with him in the hotel dining room,” she said, “when he heard the rumor that there was some college teacher in Cheyenne buying up all manner of fossils and asking about some bones in Deadwood. The miners were all laughing about it, but Wyatt’s eyes lit up when he heard the story.”
Johnson frowned. “So he decided to help me get the bones out of Deadwood to Cheyenne?”
“Yes,” she said. “We left the day after he heard that story.”
“You mean Wyatt always intended to sell my bones to Marsh, from the beginning?”
“I believe so,” she said softly.
Johnson glared across the saloon at Earp. “And I thought he was my friend.”
“You thought he was a fool,” Emily said. “But he is your friend.”
“How can you say that? Look at him bargaining there, haggling over every dollar. At this rate they’ll be at it all day.”
“Yes,” Emily said. “Yet I’m sure Wyatt could conclude the deal in five minutes, if that was what he intended.”
Johnson stared at her. “You mean . . .”
She nodded. “I’ve no doubt he’s wondering why you are sitting here while he stalls Professor Marsh for you.”
“Oh, Emily,” he cried, “I could kiss you!”
“I wish you would,” she said softly.
“Too many things were happening at once,” wrote Johnson.
My head was fairly spinning with these developments. I hurried outside with Emily, and postponed kissing her in order to send her off for a hundred-pound sack of rice, a bolt of tarp cloth, and a long-handled shovel. Meanwhile I hastily obtained the requisite large rocks, which fortunately were near at hand, remnants of the blasting that had been done to erect the new Platte bridge.
He found yet another Chinese laundry and paid a small sum to use the fire and iron kettle with which they heated water. He spent three hours boiling fresh rice paste, making sure the concoction was gelatinous enough, and clutching the rocks with bamboo laundry tongs and dipping them into the pasty ooze, coating them. When they were dry, he poured dust over them, to make them suitably grimy. Next to the heat of the fire, they dried quickly. Finally, he removed the precious bones from all ten crates, and placed the new stones in the old crates, closing them carefully so that there would be no marks indicating they had been opened.
By five that afternoon, he was exhausted. But all of Johnson’s fossil bones were safely hidden in the back of the stable, wrapped in tarp cloth and buried under a pile of fresh manure, the shovel hidden in the straw with them and the substitutions set out with a tarp covering, as the originals had been. Earp and Marsh arrived soon after. Marsh grinned at Johnson. “I expect this will be our last meeting, Mr. Johnson.”
“I hope so,” Johnson said, with a sincerity Marsh could not have imagined.
The division was begun. Marsh wanted to open all ten crates and inspect the fossils before dividing, but Johnson steadfastly refused. The division was meant to be between him and Earp, and it would be done randomly. Marsh grumbled but agreed.
Midway through the process, Marsh said, “I think I had better look at one of these crates, to satisfy myself.”