Brian Garfield (11 page)

Since then no one had molested the wheelbarrow.

Today therefore he had no gantlet to run. All the boys were down at the Northern Pacific line, preparing the ritual hoo-rawing of the train. Pack had the street nearly to himself; there was only a desultory traffic of pedestrians and horsemen, and there were the two young men on the porch of Nelson's drygoods store, catty-corner across the wide intersection from the shack that housed the
Cow Boy.
Pack set the wheelbarrow down in front of Nelson's steps, stood up, jammed both fists in the small of his spine and arched himself backwards.

Swede Nelson, pink and plump, shifted the weight of the shotgun on his shoulder. He was preoccupied—staring down the street toward the cafe; when Pack looked that way he saw the girl Katie by the cafe door. She came out every morning to watch the train. She would stand motionless until the train disappeared to the west. For several months now she had watched it with dreamy despair.

Pack said to Joe Ferris, “Now, I thought you were on the trail with Theodore Roosevelt.”

Joe only grunted.

Pack said, “Where's Roosevelt then?”

“Hunting, I expect.”

“Without you?”

“I am tired of trundling tenderfeet,” Joe Ferris said.

“Good money in it, though,” said Swede Nelson, his gaze intent upon the girl down the street.

“Be that as it may,” said Joe, “it's my life's aim to work indoors.”

The girl who stood at the cafe watching for the train was sixteen or seventeen and had a quick bold eye and a restless body. When Katie and her mother had come to work in the cafe it had been easy to see she was ripe to be plucked by the first sharp-dressed man who might step off the train for a day and give her a second glance on an evening when her mother was looking the other way. She wasn't a whore but she was known to have stepped out with quite a few men who were not reputed to be gentlemen.

Lately somehow the bashful storekeeper Swede Nelson had worked up the boldness to approach her. During the past few weeks Pack had seen them arm-in-arm several times. He wondered if it was serious between them—or for just one of them.

Now Katie looked up this way and Pack saw the way she smiled at Swede before she stepped off the wooden sidewalk and strode, hips swinging healthily, toward the Northern Pacific platform.

Pack heard the whistling exhalation of Swede's pent breath.

When he caught Swede's shy grin, half pride and half guilt, Pack said, “Why don't you go along there with her?”

Swede made no answer, other than a vague shifting of the shotgun on his shoulder.

Joe Ferris selected a soda cracker from the open barrel. He said, “Swede's afraid if he leaves the store alone the boys will clean it out again.”

“In broad daylight?”

Swede made a face. “Night or day don't matter. Can't afford another loss.”

Joe Ferris bit off half the soda cracker with his neat teeth. “I keep telling him he's got too much inventory of goods that nobody wants much—stocks that don't turn over fast enough. What's the news today, Pack?”

Pack unfolded the top copy. “Chinese Gordon's still under siege in Khartoum.” He glanced through his inside-page headlines, reading upside-down. “Major league baseball elects to allow overhand pitching as well as underhand—batsman to call his choice.”

“Well now—that could be fun. We going to inaugurate that rule Sunday?”

“I'll put it to a vote.” Pack glimpsed one brief item before he folded the newspaper. “In New York City they've opened a swank new apartment block they call the Dakota. Because it's so far north in the wilderness. Isn't that a howl?”

“Someday I want to see New York,” said little Joe Ferris. “May be I'll open a bank there.”

Still plugging along on a previous train of thought, Swede Nelson said calmly, “If you keep a shop you must keep everything folks may want. Otherwise they buy at the competition.”

“They won't go to the competition long as you keep under De Morès's prices,” Joe Ferris argued. “Which is not hard to do, the way Jerry Paddock keeps doubling the price of things over at the Markee's general store. You've put a crease in that, which is why he wants you out of business.
He
minds the competition. Jerry Paddock does. He'll do you harm. He's got no compunctions. Bullet or knife, and likely in the dark. And he's got the Markee's protection. Swede, I keep telling you, you're stretched too far.”

“A man's got to take risks if he's to get ahead,” said Swede.

Joe Ferris swung his face from side to side; he tossed a bland glance at Pack. “There's prudent risks and there's foolish risks.”

Swede put his owl-wise gaze on Pack. “Listen to the mercantile master.” He pointed a thumb at their friend Joe Ferris. “Joe gets his experience in high finance from cutting trees. And from laying track like a Chinee.”

“And wrangling stock and guiding damn fool dude hunters,” Joe Ferris said. “Be that as it may, you got yourself at risk with the commission house in St. Paul. You've bought too much goods on credit, and friend Paddock knows that. I hear he's been buying up your IOU notes from the commission house.”

Swede's mind was nearly transparent. Pack watched him while he decided to pretend he wasn't alarmed. Swede let a ragged moment go by before he permitted himself to ask quietly, “Where'd you hear that?”

“He had a little conversation elixir in the hotel bar and he was bragging. I heard him.”

“It's not true,” Swede decided. “Jerry Paddock wants to scare me. He knows you'd tell me what you heard.”

“I don't think he knew I was there,” said Joe Ferris. “But you're right he's a liar.” He looked at Pack. Joe Ferris was short and easygoing and very thick everywhere except in the brain. He had the muscles of a man twice his size. He wore a plaid shirt and coarse butternut trousers; he was a rough young man from the woods of Canada but somewhere he had learned an agreeable grace. His droopy mustache overhung a mouth curled into a quick and sometimes dour sense of humor. “What do you think, Pack? I wonder how much you could win on a bet that Jerry Paddock wouldn't know the truth from one of his own black lies?”

“Now, nobody's proved a thing against him,” Pack said. “The Marquis seems to trust him.”

“And that's good enough for Pack,” Joe said to Swede Nelson. “Pack's a true believer. Why, the way he's convinced of the Markee's infallibility, you'd think the Markee was the pope of Dakota Territory.”

“I do think he's a great man,” Pack conceded. He lifted the wheelbarrow's handles and resumed his journey toward the train.

Behind him Joe Ferris said, “Be that as it may, your great man's bringing in ten thousand head of sheep. What do you think of that?”

Pack called back over his shoulder: “You hear that nonsense from Jerry Paddock too?” And went on his way.

Pack knew he needed to have a serious talk with Joe Ferris. For a man who was ambitious to get ahead in the world Joe had an altogether too jaundiced view. Cynicism had no place on this frontier. It ought to be a man's mission to alert the world to the benefits that derived, as Pack had written jubilantly in
The Bad Lands Cow Boy
, “from ingesting the electrifying purification of the fresh pure ozone of the Bad Lands.”

Everything that happened in Medora stirred Pack's proprietary feelings. Sometimes it was as if he (and not the Marquis) owned the town.

In actual fact the Marquis De Morès owned just about everything in sight. But then, Pack told his friends, the Marquis had a couple years' jump on him. After all, the Marquis was twenty-five years old; Pack was merely twenty-two, and not yet a year out of the University of Michigan.

At any age the Marquis was a singular figure. Pack thought him a Great Man. He had said as much more than once in his newspaper—and not simply, as cynics would have it, because De Morès was
The Bad Lands Cow Boy's
biggest advertiser. Anyone with half a brain could see the Marquis was a Visionary. It wouldn't be long before the world would be mentioning him in the same breath with Astor, Carnegie and Morgan. The dashing Marquis De Morès was bringing reality to the Dream: he was putting meat and flesh on the bones of the nation's imperative Manifest Destiny.

For a Frenchman he was the next best thing to Lafayette: an American Hero.

Medora town's streets had been plotted and surveyed on a tidy grid strictly by the compass, due north-south and due east-west, with haughty disregard for the fact that the town's basic intersection—that of the railroad bridge with the river—ran on the diagonal, with the river flowing northeast while the Northern Pacific track sliced across the butte canyons to the northwest.

The interesting result of this clash between nature's reality and ambition's rigidity was that every single street in Medora led to the railroad.

From wherever you stood in town you could see—at a forty-five degree angle—the high abutment that supported the steel tracks.

The town sat on river flats on the east bank of the Little Missouri sheltered by scarred looming bluffs of clay and stone and lignite coal. The buildings, of brick and of lumber, had been constructed of materials imported by rail. Already more than a dozen blocks on the plat had been built nearly to capacity, and this was remarkable because the town had been founded as recently as the spring of the previous year.

Before that there had been the tiny community on the far side of the river—the scrofulous camp called Little Missouri: an outgrowth of the army's Bad Lands Cantonment, inhabited by those who had remained behind after the Indian-fighting troopers and railroad-building roughnecks had departed.

Little Missouri—one big shabby hotel-saloon and a seedy litter of shacks and tents—had been presided over by the sinister Jerry Paddock, onetime sutler and permanent man of mystery.

The Marquis De Morès, planning a site for the headquarters of his proposed meat-packing empire, had disdained the Cantonment and built his private railroad siding on the east side of the river. Here he parked his sumptuous private railroad car the
Montana
and used it for a residence while he directed and paid for the construction of the packing plant, the mansion on the overlooking bluff, and the town.

Not quite seven years after George Custer had camped here enroute to his Centennial Summer appointment with catastrophe the young Marquis De Morès—who only a year earlier had been clerking in a New York bank—had cracked a bottle of French champagne over a tent-peg on April Fool's Day, 1883, and christened the place Medora after his bride, who happened to be the daughter of the owner of the bank that had employed him.

The metamorphosis from ambitious dream to brick-and-wood reality had taken place with amazing speed. De Morès, Pack saw, was a man who understood his own dreams. Within months the town had been built and populated … herds and herdsmen had arrived from as far away as Texas … Jerry Paddock, taken into the Marquis's confidence and onto his payroll, had cooperated eagerly in the demise of what was left of the Cantonment and had moved his enterprises, along with those of his few neighbors and colleagues, into the brand-new settlement on the right bank … and the De Morès abattoir's butchers had begun slaughtering beef by the ton and shipping it east by rail aboard the Marquis's refrigerated freight cars.

From no building in town was it more than three blocks to the railroad, or more than four blocks to the slaughterhouse.

These proximities might have been convenient for the residents were it not for the noise and smell and ash. Still, the few ill-tempered skeptics had been encouraged to leave town or to think less about their discomfort and more about the advantages of modern progress.

Today fortunately the abattoir was downwind of town and the breeze was robust enough to keep the flies off the streets, which were empty of inhabitants in any event; and so Pack's journey with his wheelbarrow to the railroad platform was uneventful and pleasant enough until the Lunatic grenaded into his life.

The usual racketing fusillade of enthusiastic gunfire greeted the train as it entered town. The sulphurous acridity of black powder smoke stung Pack's nostrils and eyes as he heaved the wheelbarrow up the ramp.

The onset of De Morès-style civilization had done nothing to curb the custom of greeting trains with .44-caliber barrages. Passengers were wise to duck low. Just last month the Marquis De Morès's father-in-law, the irascible New York banker Nicholas Von Hoffman, had stepped off the train wearing a derby hat—a certain invitation to target practice. Several shots had been fired. The hat had been shot off the banker's head by party or parties unknown in the crowd.

When found an hour later the derby hat was a shredded ruin.

The banker was humiliated, the Marquis indignant.

De Morès had posted a two-hundred-dollar reward for the identification of the marksman.

Nothing had come of that. Generally it was assumed “Bitter Creek” Redhead Finnegan or one of his friends had ventilated the derby hat but no one had sought the reward; it was taken for granted that the two hundred dollars would have to be collected by the heirs of any such claimant, for Finnegan was malevolent—as untamed as a mountain lion.

The Marquis had been furious. For a while he had taken to bursting unannounced into saloons, perhaps in the hope of catching someone in the act of boasting about the celebrated victory over the derby hat.

In turn, Finnegan and his friends had doubled their armament and made clear how they intended to defend themselves if any libelous accusations were laid against them by that son of a bitch of a Markee.

Tempers only eased after Pack, as the representative of the community, assured the Marquis that the derby hat never would have been assaulted if the culprits had known the man under the hat was related to him. A brand-new derby hat was presented with the compliments of the citizenry, and the Marquis—perhaps because his father-in-law had returned to the East—allowed himself to be mollified.