Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger

up to defend my pal if so.
    But this fellow, who wore the standard droopy mustache of the day, just smiled down at the dog, then at me.
    He says, “He looks like he could use a good feed.”
    “I expect he could,” says I. “Him and me just come in off the trail from Laramie, and there ain’t much game around.”
    “Lots of people have gone that way for gold,” says he. “That was the reason I came here, but before I could get outfitted to haul up to Deadwood, a lot of them started to come back. They say all the good claims are gone and the vein is already running thin.”
    “That’s where I come from myself,” I told him. I was trying to decide whether to say much further when he up and asks me if I happened to be at Deadwood when Wild Bill Hickok was shot.
    I decided on caution. “I might of been.”
    He grins under his black mustache. “What kind of answer is that? Either you were or were not.”
    Now speaking well as he did, and being so nicely dressed, he was a far cry from the usual type I run into. In fact he struck me as probably hailing from back East, like one of them writers what came West looking for colorful topics to write about for the cake-eaters in the big cities. He didn’t look like no sissy, being of a husky build though of the middle height, and talking in a straightforward manly way. But I decided he was likely a tenderfoot in matters pertaining to the frontier and therefore just the right person to tell my story to, and not just about Wild Bill but also Custer and all. I starts in, but he says his whistle could use some wettening and he’d be glad to buy me one as well.
    Pard was already lowering his head and long nose, giving me a dirty look from the tops of his eyes, because by now he could foresee things in that canine way. “Sorry,” I told him, “saloons and gambling halls are just for them with two feet, probably to their detriment. You’re lucky to get to stay outdoors. Just wait here for me. If you spot somebody with a drawn gun, you run away and hide.”
    “You’re fond of him,” said my new acquaintance.
    “Friends of any breed come in handy out here where your back is often to the wall,” I says self-importantly as we enter a big fancy establishment I wouldn’t of had the nerve to try alone, shabby as I was at present, and I sure wouldn’t have got in now, I figured, had the big mean-looking, Colt’s-wearing fellow posted at the door not recognized my companion, nodding at him respectfully, from which I gathered my benefactor was wont to spend a lot of money on the premises.
    Now this place was enormous, being a complex under one roof of full-sized theater, hotel, gambling hall, and a bar all full of polished brass and mirrors and big shiny hanging lamps, where we bellied up and my friend tells the bartender to leave the bottle.
    He proceeds to throw down three fingers in one swallow, and I wondered if he knew what he was doing, for I had been told once that liquor has more effect in the high air of the West than at Eastern sea levels. I was myself more sparing, having so little food in my belly. I didn’t rightly care if he got drunk, though, for he might then listen with more credulity.
    But the one who got plastered, and soon enough on an empty stomach, was me, not him. By my second shot I was feeling it, and with the third all that glass and glitter lost its clear edges and I felt more and more like I was trying to see things with my head immersed in a stream.
    But the other fellow just kept drinking without no visible effect, at least to my impaired vision. This situation however did not stop me from not only telling the truth about Wild Bill’s last days but embellishing it quite a bit. Why would I do this when the facts was remarkable enough as they stood? Well, remember what a poor job I done as bodyguard: I wouldn’t want to boast about that. But why boast about anything? Because that’s what Westerners always done when in the presence of them from the