Within days Comstock found the mutilated remains of Kidder and his party, victims of Cheyenne Dog Soldiers and Sioux. Months later Comstock may have guided Kidder’s father, Judge Jefferson Parish Kidder, to the site to recover his son’s bones for burial in St. Paul, Minn.

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After the Hancock Expedition fizzled, Comstock returned to Fort Wallace. In January 1868, though, a strange episode threatened Comstock’s soaring scouting career. The incident contradicts Medicine Bill’s image as an amiable companion, hunting partner and, in the words of correspondent Davis, man who overflowed with “kindly feelings for the human race.” Comstock’s kindly feelings, it seems, did not extend to wood contractor H.P. Wyatt, who cheated him on a business deal. Witness David Burton Long, then a hospital steward at Fort Wallace, recalled the incident in 1903: “I was in the store [of post sutler Val L. Todd] at the time and heard loud talking, when Wyatt got up and was leaving the store, and Comstock pulled out his six-shooter and shot Wyatt twice in the back. Wyatt ran out of the store and fell dead. During the trouble, as Comstock was shooting, I stepped up and tried to prevent Comstock from killing Wyatt, and he turned on me and said, ‘You keep your hands off, or I will kill you.’ Wyatt was taken to the hospital dead room.”

Wyatt may have needed killing; there is evidence he was the notorious Missouri bushwhacker Cave Wyatt, who rode with William Quantrill at Lawrence and later with William “Bloody Bill” Anderson. Even so, Comstock was arrested and taken for trial to Hays City, where it seems friends came through for him. As Long recalled, the “rough element” of the community raised $500 for the scout’s defense. Trial judge Marcellus E. Joyce, a justice of the peace from Leavenworth, also appears to have been in Comstock’s corner. “Did he [Comstock] do the shooting with felonious intent?” Joyce asked Todd, according to Long. “I do not know what his intentions were,” replied Todd, “but I did see Comstock shoot Wyatt, and Wyatt ran out of the store and fell dead.” Joyce said, “If the shooting was not done with felonious intent, and there is no proof that it was, the prisoner is discharged for the want of said proof.”

After this brush with the law, Comstock retreated to his profitable Rose Creek Ranch, but not for long. Despite the Wyatt shooting, the scout remained in demand. The Indians started making trouble again in 1868. General Sheridan, who had replaced Hancock as commander of the Department of the Missouri, ordered Lieutenant Frederick Beecher to assemble a crack team of scouts to keep tabs on the hostiles and negotiate with them if necessary. (For the most part, Sheridan was inclined to agree with Lt. Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, who dismissed peace talks with Indians as “the same old senseless twaddle.”) Beecher hired four men—Dick Parr, Frank Espey, Abner “Sharp” Grover and Comstock. Reportedly, Comstock only agreed to take the job after Sheridan personally assured him the Wyatt business was forgotten. At $125 a month, about 10 times the wage of a private soldier, Comstock also received the highest pay of the four.

The assignment, however, marked the beginning of the end for the popular scout. Beecher, whose own days were numbered, ordered Comstock and Grover to find the village of Cheyenne Chief Turkey Leg and convince him to rein in his warriors, who were wreaking havoc in the Saline Valley and along the Solomon and Republican rivers. Both scouts knew Turkey Leg, having lived in his village during their trading days, and they were counting on Cheyenne hospitality, which held that a former friend would be safe in a man’s lodge even if the relationship had soured. The two went ahead with their mission, despite knowing that just days earlier 7th Cavalry soldiers under Captain Fred Benteen had skirmished with Turkey Leg’s warriors, killing four and wounding 10.

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