Return of Little Big Man by Thomas Berger Page A

East. It was expected of you, you felt you owed it to the landscape, but the real reason was you could get away with it to some tenderfoot who traveled by parlor car and never ate a meal except by knife and fork. And also I was drunk.
    I don’t remember after all these years and, at the time, all that whiskey, exactly what I said, but it is likely I come out the hero of the event even though failing to stop Jack McCall from shooting Wild Bill in the back. Maybe my gun misfired—though I never had one at the time. But at least there was a grain of truth within it, unlike a good many first-person accounts around in them days, and it seemed to go over with my friend, who poured me regular refills at the rate of about half the frequency with which he poured for himself while remaining cold sober.
    “I never had the good fortune,” he said at one point, “to personally meet Wild Bill, and I am sorry I now won’t ever have the chance.”
    “Well sir,” says I, “I can tell you anything you’d like to hear. And not only concerning Bill Hickok. I’ve knowed them all, General Custer and his lovely wife”—it was true I had some personal association of the General though only seeing Mrs. Libbie once—“and old Kit Carson”—just barely factual, for on my sole face-to-face with him, he slammed his front door in my face when I asked him for a handout. But then I made a big mistake, I picked up my brother Bill’s line on another famous gunfighter. “I expect the fellow still alive that I know best is Wyatt Earp, whose name might be recognizable. Fact is, I taught him most of what he knows about shooting.”
    I had met Earp briefly once, down on the buffalo range, and he coldcocked me with the barrel of his pistol for a fancied insult. He had went on to make a name for himself as peace officer in the Kansas cattle camps like Ellsworth and Wichita. He never came up this way to my knowledge, so I felt safe with my claim.
    “Is that so?” my drinking pal asks, his blue eyes twinkling in what I took for admiration. He put his glass down for a second while checking in the back-of-bar mirror on his appearance and then changing slightly the angle of the derby hat, his gold-headed stick secured under his arm. “I’ve met Mr. Earp myself. I always wondered how he got to be the fine shot he is.”
    I should have stopped at that point, but the liquor had taken away all my good sense, so I goes on. “Met him, did you? Well sir, if that ever happens again, you just ask him who learned him how to handle a sixgun.” I grins foolishly. “Of course, he might not be man enough to admit it, with the rep he’s acquired since.”
    “I’ll be glad to,” says my friend. “I’m thinking of heading back to Dodge one of these days soon. I’ve decided not to waste my time going up to Deadwood.”
    “That where old Wyatt is now?” I asks. Well, I wouldn’t be going anywhere near.
    “And what name should I mention?”
    “Jack Crabb is what they call me,” I says. “And what, sir, may I ask, is yourn?” Exchanging names was a polite matter amongst whites, and I always enjoyed the gentility of it, but with Indians it’s actually rude to ask a man his name: it might end up being used for bad medicine that would destroy its owner, so you do better to ask a third person. I should of done that in this case.
    “W. B. Masterson,” says he, giving me a salute with the gold top of his cane. “I’m pleased to make your acquaintance, Mr. Crabb.”
    “Just call me Jack.”
    “All right, Jack, I’m usually ‘Bat’ to those I drink with.”
    “You’re Bat Masterson?”
    “At your service,” he says, with another lift of the stick.
    “I’m a fool, Mr. Masterson. I want you to know I admitted that before you kilt me.”
    He has a good laugh at that. “I’m not going to kill you, Jack. I wouldn’t have the nerve to draw on the man who taught Wyatt Earp to shoot.”
    Drunk as I had been, I was immediately all but sober. “Aw,