Chapter One from The Kid and Wild Bill tells of Hickok's looming fear of being assassinated in a frequent dream:
There was only a void. Blackness without form.
Then there was a sound; the hot, labored breathing of a horse at full gallop.
Creaking leather.
Ringing spurs.
Out of the void came a rider.
If this were the real world, he would have been easy to see, dressed in white buckskins; but his horse was all but invisible, for it was as black as the void it had emerged from. Steam blew heavily from its flared nostrils.
The man sat straight, rigid in the saddle; his long blond hair flowed around his head and shoulders as a ship’s bellowing sail might during a storm.
Horse and rider continued to dash straight ahead as if on a movie screen toward an unseen audience. There was something odd about the speed in which they moved. Not quite slow motion, but not quite real, either. As the pair continued to charge through the void, nothing could be seen above, below or behind them.
The rider pulled imperceptivity on the reins; the horse immediately slowed to a trot as they came up to a lone building. It was as strange as the sight of horse and rider had been. It consisted of one wall, as if a set piece from a play.
The horse, Black Nell, and rider approached the building from the left side. On the other side of the wall was the bare skeletal outline of a saloon: men sat at tables playing cards; others leaned against a long bar, drinking; while another man walked up stairs that led nowhere.
The rider drew two ivory-handled, long-barreled cap-and-ball, Colt 1851 .36 Navy pistols from his the red sash around his waist and spurred his horse through the saloon doors.
The action was fast and deadly.
The man fired rapidly, killing three men at the bar. The horse reared up as the others in the room jumped aside to escape the slashing hooves.
They pulled their guns.
Smoke filled the room as bullets flew in every direction. Nothing could stop the rider; he fired his pistols and killed two more men; then he ran down another with the horse.
However, no matter how many men he shot down, others would spring forward to take their places.
Like actors appearing from the wings, the gunmen stepped onto the strange stage, firing at the rider as they came, only to fall from his deadly guns, again and again.
Just when there seemed to be no end to the killing, it was suddenly over.
The longhaired gunman sat astride the sweaty horse in a room filled with smoke and debris—alone.
All the bodies had vanished.
He looked around as if he had gone through this many times before. Slowly, he put his guns away. Then as he began to turn the horse to leave the saloon, the man who had gone up the stairs earlier appeared behind the rider with a shotgun.
As the apparition raised the weapon, he shouted in a ghastly voice, “Hickok!”
The rider started to reach for his guns. The ghostly creature fired both barrels into his back.
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