(1986) Deadwood Read Online Free Page A

seen them—you could never tell when Bill wasn't sure of himself, he didn't give anything away—but he passed Charley and the boy and went right to Al Swearingen's rig. The whore man sat on his cushions eating boiled eggs and watched him come.
    "It's a beautiful day to enter the Hills," Swearingen said. "An omen for the future."
    "You got somebody can handle horses?" Bill said.
    The whore man smiled and swelled. "I got these girls trained to do everything I tell them," he said. "Completely obedient."
    "Get one that can drive," Bill said, "and move your person inside the wagon." The whore man didn't blink. "Don't show me your face again," Bill said.
    The whore man patted down his beard. Everybody in earshot stopped what they were doing to watch. "Al Swearingen drives his own wagon," the whore man said.
    "Then Al Swearingen mistood his omen," Bill said.
    The whore man looked at Bill half a minute, long enough to see what he needed to, and then called one of the whores from another wagon. Smooth Bones. From what Charley had seen, she was the best of the lot. She wasn't more than seventeen or eighteen, the same age as the boy, and if she'd had teeth in front she might of been pretty. Of course, if she'd had teeth in front they mightn't of named her Smooth Bones too. You could what if yourself right out of this world.
    She sat on the cushion next to Swearingen and he gave her the reins. "Tell that boy it ain't settled," he said. And then he crawled into the back.
    Bill sent the boy ahead to scout, mostly to get him out of his sight. Thirty-two wagons were safe from Indians. He climbed up next to Charley and said, "I ought to of finished it and got the whole episode out of my mind."
    Bill could put things out of his mind, once they were dead. The boy moved a quarter of a mile out in front, and beyond him were the Hills. The wagons strung out in back of Charley and Bill, the wheels creaked and the mules blew and complained and once, just after they'd straightened into a line, Charley looked back and saw old Peerless lying in the dirt, next to a hole that was supposed to be his grave. It looked like God Himself had dropped him out of the sky, and he'd bounced once when he hit.
    Let the Indians figure that out.

    They came into deadwood downhill, from the south, the gulch fell out of the mountains, long and narrow, following the Whitewood Creek, and where things widened enough for a town sign, that was Deadwood. It was noon, July 17. The place looked miles long and yards wide, half of it tents. The Whitewood joined a smaller creek—the Deadwood—at the south end and ran the length of the town. The mud was a foot deep, and every kind of waste in creation was thrown into the street to mix with it. The mountains that defined the boundaries were spare of live trees. There were thousands of the dead, charred black trunks lying across each other on the ground.
    "How's it look to you?" Bill said. He was handling the reins, sitting tall and handsome, nodding at voices when somebody called to him from the street. The word of who it was in the wagon got through town before Charley and Bill made a hundred yards.
    "Like something out of the Bible," Charley said. They rode through, the mud sticking to the wheels and the mules until it broke off from its own weight. It took most of an hour to get the train down Main Street, stopping to shake hands and once to give an interview to a reporter from the Black Hills Pioneer . Although he enjoyed a taste for the printed word, Charley winced to hear there was already a paper in town.
    They went farther north, and the population changed. Whores and roughs and gamblers stood in the doorways, holding drinks, shooting their guns into the air. It was a part of the city called the badlands, and it was as far as the whore wagons went. The place was shabby, but the ladies there looked better to Charley than the load they'd delivered. Some stood in the windows, as good as naked. "What part of the Bible?" Bill