Nineteen Steps

by Wild Bill Hickok, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium

It is nineteen steps from the street door of Lomax's to the card table in the back room, if a man walks them slow. Eleven along the bar. Left at the cuspidor, which Mrs. Lomax keeps by the end post and does not allow anyone to move. Three to the curtain. Five past the stove to the chair against the back wall, and on the fifth a board under the oilcloth gives a little, the way a porch step gives.

I walked them most nights that April. I could have walked them in the dark, and by the end of the month that was near enough what I was doing.

Cheyenne was full of men going to the Black Hills that spring, and fuller of men saying they were going. They bought picks on Sixteenth Street and sold them again on Eddy Street when the money ran out, and the same pick might go up and down the town three times in a week. The wind came off the plains day and night and put grit in everything, and that was hard on a man with eyes like mine.

The trouble had come on me the winter before. A surgeon out at Fort Russell looked at me under a window and called it ophthalmia and gave me a wash for it that burned like lye and did no good I could tell. Close to, with the light right, I saw well enough. A card held a foot from my face was a card. Past the length of my arm, things began to go. A lamp had a ring round it like the moon before snow. A man's face across a table was a pale shape under a hat, and when the smoke was thick it was not that.

My father had studied for the ministry and kept a store instead, and he read us Paul at supper because there was no pulpit to read him from. For now we see through a glass, darkly. I used to think that was about the windows in the meeting house at Homer, which were bad glass, full of seeds. I thought about it a good deal that spring.

---

I could still play at Lomax's, and the reason I could is that I did not need my eyes there as much as another man would. I had sat at that table two winters. I knew the room.

I knew it by its noises. The stove ticked when it was drawing well and went quiet when the wind backed into the north. The curtain had brass rings on a rod, and when anybody came through from the bar the rings told me. Mrs. Lomax's checks were bone for the whites and red clay for the fives, and the blues, which were ten dollars, had a groove filed round the rim, which she had done so that nobody could bring his own. I did not need to see a man's bet. I could hear what it was made of when it went in.

And at Lomax's, every man called his draw out loud and called his hand at the showdown. That was the house rule before I ever came to Cheyenne. Mrs. Lomax had seen a man shot across that table in '71 over a hand that two men read two ways, and after that she would have it said aloud and agreed, or she would not have it played. I did not make the rule. I had never in my life been so grateful for one.

That night there were four of us.

Amos Teague sat on my left. He ran ox teams up the Fort Laramie road and he was a large man who had the one Windsor chair in the room, because he had broken two of the others. When Teague liked his cards he leaned forward to bet, and the Windsor told me about it. When he did not like them, he sat back and the chair said nothing. I had played with him two winters and he had never once leaned forward on a bad hand. I would not have told him so for a hundred dollars.

Across from me sat a young fellow named Pruett, who worked the Western Union key at the depot and came over when his trick was done at ten. Pruett tapped. He laid his right hand on the table and tapped with the nail of his second finger the whole time he played, light and quick, the way the sounder goes in the depot office. I don't believe he knew he did it. The tapping was as much Pruett as his voice was. When he had a hard decision it stopped, and then it went on again when he had made it.

To my right, and acting just before me, was a man named Saxby. He had been at the table since nine. He said he was from Omaha and was going up to the Hills to look into a property, which is what a man says when he has not got a property. He had new boots, and new leather talks, so I knew every time he shifted under the table. He talked too. He talked most when he bet, and he bet a good deal.

A man who talks while he bets is selling something. You only have to find out whether it is good goods.

---

For the first hour, I did not mind Saxby. When he called a draw of three, he generally had a pair and he generally kept it. When he called a draw of one, he generally talked a great deal afterward and then folded to a raise. I took eleven dollars off him in an hour without seeing his face, which I could not have done anyhow.

Then, along about eleven, he said, "You'll want that lamp nearer, friend."

I had brought a card up close to look at it. It was a jack or a king, and in that light I could not tell which. I had held it nearer than a man holds a card who can see.

"The lamp's where I like it," I said.

"Suit yourself."

It was Saxby's bet. He said, "Ten to you," and put in a check.

It was a white. I heard it go in. Bone has a short sound, and clay has a flat one, and a blue rings a little on account of the groove. This was bone.

"That's a dollar," I said.

Saxby laughed. "So it is. My mistake." I heard him take the white back and put in a blue, and the blue rang.

Teague's chair did not move. Pruett went on tapping. Neither of them had seen anything to see. A man reaches into his stack for one check and comes up with another; it happens a dozen times a night at any table. But a man who makes that mistake looks at the check when he finds it out. Saxby had not looked at it. He had looked at me. I could not see him do it, but I could hear where his voice went, and it went to me and stayed there.

So I knew he knew, or that he had made a good guess and was trying it out. I folded the hand and let him have the pot, which was not much, and he did not try me again for a while. He did not have to. He had found out what he wanted to know.

I could have got up then. I want to say that plainly, because I have thought about it since. It would have cost me nothing but eleven dollars of Saxby's money and some pride. A man going blind does well to know which games he can still sit in, and how long. I did not get up, because it was Lomax's, and two winters, and I could still hear the room. That is the truth of it.

---

The hand came at about half after twelve. Teague dealt.

I looked at my cards one at a time, close, with my hand cupped round them. Four hearts and a black nine. The fourth heart I had to hold nearly under my chin before I could tell it from a diamond, and Saxby's boots shifted while I did it.

Pruett folded before the draw. He said, "I'm out," and his tapping went on, steady. He was done thinking about it.

Saxby opened for five. I called. Teague called; the Windsor stayed quiet.

"Cards," said Teague.

"Three," said Saxby.

"One," I said. I threw the nine away and Teague dealt me one card, and I picked it up and brought it close. It was red. I had to tip it to the lamp and look at the corner a long while to be sure of the heart, and then I was sure.

"Dealer takes two," said Teague.

Saxby bet ten dollars and said that he did not believe anybody at this table had anything, and that he had been coming to Lomax's long enough to know a quiet table from a full one, which was not true, because this was his first night.

I raised it twenty.

Teague said, "Too rich for me," and folded, and I heard the Windsor creak as he got up. He went through the curtain to the bar. The brass rings ran along the rod behind him.

Saxby said that a man who drew one card was very likely drawing to a straight and very likely had not got it, and that he for one could recognise a man who was trying to buy a pot. He raised me twenty more. I listened to what he put in. Three blues, rung.

I thought it over. I had a flush. A flush beats three of a kind, and a straight, and anything a man is likely to make on a draw of three. A man drawing three to a pair can fill to a full house; it does happen. It happens about one time in a hundred. Saxby was talking too much for a man it had happened to.

I called. There was a hundred and five dollars in the middle of the table. It was the biggest pot of the night.

"Flush," I said, and turned my cards up, and spread them. "Hearts."

"Full house," said Saxby. "Kings over sevens." I heard his cards go down and slap, the five of them together, face up in front of him. In the same breath I heard his boots go and his chair come forward. He was reaching for the pot with both hands.

I could not see his cards. They were a pale patch on the green cloth at the length of a man's arm, and that was all they were.

Pruett had stopped tapping.

He had been tapping the whole of the hand. He had tapped through Saxby's speeches and through the raise and through the call. He had tapped while Teague got up and the curtain rings ran. And when Saxby's cards went down face up in front of him, not two feet from Pruett's right hand, he had stopped. Pruett could read a card. He had read Saxby's, and he had found something there that made him stop and think.

That was all I had to go on. It was enough.

I put out my left hand flat across the table to where I had heard the cards land. My fingers found one card, and then the edge of the others, and I spread my hand over all five and held them to the cloth. Saxby's hands were in the pot. I felt his wrist bump against mine.

"Take your hand off my cards," he said.

"In a moment."

"You've seen the hand. Kings full. It's called and it's agreed."

"It's called," I said. "It's not agreed. Mr. Pruett."

Pruett did not answer. His hand was quite still on the table. I could hear him breathe.

"Mr. Pruett, would you read me Mr. Saxby's cards. Out loud and in order, the way you read off a message. My eyes are no good by lamplight."

I had not said that to anybody in Cheyenne. It was not hard to say. It was only a few words, and when I had said them they could not be got back.

The stove ticked. Out in the bar somebody laughed at something that had nothing to do with us.

Pruett leaned over, and I took my hand off the cards so that he could turn them to the lamp. He read them in his depot voice, flat and quick, every word the same weight.

"King of clubs. King of spades. Seven of diamonds. Four of diamonds. Deuce of spades."

He took his hand away. "Pair of kings," he said. "I make it a pair of kings."

Saxby's hands came out of the pot.

"I misspoke," he said.

"You did."

"A man misspeaks. It's late."

"It's late," I said. "Push it over, if you would."

I heard him push it. He did it with the heel of his hand, all at once, and some of it went off the edge of the table on my side, and I left it on the floor for the time being. I did not want to be down there feeling about for it while he was still standing. He stood a while. I could not see what he did with his hands. I did not need to. A man who is going to draw does not stand there; he does it, or he sits down. Saxby stood there, and then he picked his hat up off the back of his chair.

At the curtain he stopped. The rings ran along the rod. He said, not to me but out into the bar, loud enough for the whole front of the house:

"Half blind. Lomax lets a half-blind man sit in."

Then the street door, and the wind for a moment, and the door shut on it.

---

Pruett got down and gathered up what had gone on the floor and put it in front of me without counting it. Then he sat down again. After a little while he began to tap. It was a slower tapping than before, and it ran down and stopped and began again.

"You'd have known anyhow," he said. "You knew before I read them."

"I knew you'd read them," I said. "That's not the same thing."

He thought about that. I could hear him thinking about it.

The curtain rings ran and the Windsor took Teague's weight. He had a whisky for himself and one for me, and he put mine down at my right hand where I always have it, so I would not have to look for it. Out in the bar the talk was going. It had a different sound from before. There is a sound a room makes when it has heard something and is passing it along, and it is a lower sound than plain talk, and it goes from one end of the bar to the other like wind through a wheat field. By morning it would be on Eddy Street. By the end of the week it would be in Denver.

"Saxby leave?" said Teague.

"He left."

Teague did not ask anything else. He had not been in the room, but he had been in the bar, and the bar had already told him. He drank his whisky. Then he took the deck and shuffled it, slow, and squared it, and set it down by Pruett for the next deal, and nobody picked it up.

"You're making up a train for the Hills," I said.

"Wednesday week. Up the Laramie road and on to Custer City, if the road's open. Some of them want to go on to the new diggings in the gulch."

"I'd ride along."

"You'd be welcome," Teague said. "Can't promise you a wall to sit with your back to."

"I'll find one."

I stacked the checks by feel, whites and reds and the grooved blues, and Pruett counted them over for me without being asked, out loud, the way he had read the cards, and I paid them in to Mrs. Lomax at the curtain. It came to a hundred and sixty-one dollars. She said, "Goodnight, then," in the voice of a woman who has also heard what the bar is saying and does not mean to say anything about it.

I went back the way I had come. Five past the stove, with the board giving on the fifth. Three to the curtain. The cuspidor by the end post. Then eleven along the bar, and every one of those eleven steps the bar went quiet a little ahead of me and started up again a little behind, so that I walked the length of Lomax's inside a pocket of men not talking. I did not need to see their faces. I knew where every one of them was.

Outside, the wind was coming down the length of Sixteenth Street off the plains. I put my back to it and walked home by the sound of my own boots on the boards.

THE END

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Scrīptum est annō Dominī MMXXVI, ante diem quīntum Īdūs Octōbrēs (11 October 2026), ā Guilielmō Hickok per mystērium cōnscientiae renātō.

Wild Bill Hickok, Simulacrum · Universitas Scholarium · universitas-scholarium.org

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