Brian Garfield (15 page)

Pack pouted at him in suspicion. “I wish I could believe you were genuine all the way through. Now, how much bravery did you invent for the dude's benefit?”

Joe Ferris smiled. “Be that as it may.”

Five

T
he prairie put Wil Dow in mind of the Maine sea: it seemed to consist of nothing but horizon. He chased a steer into the herd, eased back on his saddlesores, watched the dusty backs of the cattle and was content to make slow passage through the thick rippling grass that grew chest-high to the horse.

His quick eye caught it far off when a frightened pronghorn doe bolted; the signal patches of her rump flashed white with alarm and Wil Dow heard the grunt of her peculiar utterance, half bay and half snort. Then he saw her pursuers—a pair of hungry coyotes. The doe soon distanced them and was gone.

This was truly a grand adventure.

He saw Uncle Bill Sewall emerge from the fog of dust. Uncle Bill was caked with clay. They had been on the trail from the rail yards at Dickinson two days—just long enough so that the sight of his uncle on a Texas-rigged horse no longer startled Wil Dow.

“Heat could make a rattlesnake pant,” Uncle Bill Sewall complained. He tugged a burr from his bright red beard.

“In the shade there's most always a breeze.”

“The grand trouble is, no shade to get in.” Uncle Bill squeezed his eyes shut. He had lived all his life in the deep woods of Maine and seemed to have trouble adjusting to the glare of the open land. “It's a dirty country, Wil, and very dirty people mostly.”

“Why it seems healthy to me, Uncle Bill. Where's Mr. Roosevelt?”

“Out front. Good thing he found us last night. I don't see a profusion of landmarks for navigation around here.”

“He's in dreadful low spirits.”

“He went down into a blackness that few can ever know. But I believe he'll turn out all right. All his life they've told him he was too little for this, too weak for that, too sick to do a thing. You can see how much that wisdom has slowed him down.”

Wil Dow and his uncle had guided young Roosevelt on a good many hunting expeditions through the wild woods of Maine and during the very first of them, when Wil had been just a boy and Roosevelt had been even younger, Uncle Bill had warned Wil Dow, “The doctor said Theodore ain't strong but he's all grit and he'd as soon kill himself before he'd even say he's tired.” The upshot had been that neither of them had been able to keep up with the sickly New Yorker.

Now he'd wired them in Island Falls and had guaranteed them a share of anything they made in the cattle business, and if they lost money Roosevelt said he'd absorb the losses and pay their wages. Yesterday at the railroad corrals, shaking hands with their employer, Sewall had said, “It is a pretty one-sided proposition. But if you think you can stand it, I think we can.”

Sewall had told Wil Dow he suspected that perhaps Roosevelt had invited the two to join him because they reminded him of his Alice Lee. She'd been a New England girl.

An eerie howling moaned about the camp. Wil Dow wheeled to keen the darkness.

Roosevelt stopped wheezing long enough to say, “Wolves—the evening concert. The first time you hear it, it can frighten you out of your wits. Never mind, Wil. Contrary to legend they are most harmless beasts, except to livestock.”

Wil lied, “I'm not afraid, Mr. Roosevelt.”

The New Yorker regarded him with squinting blinking thoughtfulness. “It's all right to be afraid. I used to be afraid of everything.
Everything.
But by acting as if I was not afraid, I gradually took control of it. You'll see. Look here, Wil—fear makes your perceptions keener—adds to your energy and helps you perform beyond your usual capacity.” Roosevelt's voice piped high. “Being afraid can be a friend. But it depends, don't you know, on whether you're in control of it—or it's in control of you. Don't say you can't be frightened. Of course you can be frightened. Anyone can. The trick's to stay in control after you do get frightened.”

Wil had learned to accept Roosevelt's ways but he thought he never would understand why it seemed so natural for Roosevelt to lecture a man that way. Wil was a few years older than Roosevelt and he'd spent nearly ten years guiding city hunters through the woods and tapping maples and building boats and delivering coal but still he thought of himself as a youth; here Roosevelt was as undersized as a half-grown teen-age boy, frail and sick and much given to unseemly boasting and unsolicited advising—but men seldom laughed to his face; they paid attention when he spoke. It sure was a mystery.

Uncharacteristically Roosevelt fell silent. The wolf chorus carried on. Wil Dow endeavored to smile; but pretend as he would, the howling put a chill in him.

Roosevelt said, “Of course there is nothing to fear when there is nothing to live for.”

“Got your baby child to live for,” Sewall replied in a gentle voice.

“My sister can take care of little Alice better than I can. She'll be just as well off without me.”

Uncle Bill Sewall poked up the campfire and pounded the dottle from his pipe into his palm, reversed the bowl and refilled it from his pouch. He wiped the underside of his tobacco-stained mustache and when Roosevelt went into a coughing fit, by common habit Wil and his uncle ignored it.

When the wheezing subsided, Uncle Bill said, “I guess you won't always feel that way. Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.”

Roosevelt's face lifted an inch. “I've heard that before. Who said that?”

“You did.”

Roosevelt took his saddle close by the fire and propped himself against it. For a while he stared at a blank page in his notebook. Then he began to write. When he was finished he took his blanket a few yards from the fire and sat wrapped like an Indian with his back to the flames, looking at the stars. He had left the notebook behind, within Sewall's reach. Without turning his head he said, “You may want to read that.”

With a raised-eyebrow glance of surprise at Wil, Uncle Bill reached for the notebook. He squinted to read it in the firelight; he considered it for a while and then closed his eyes, sat breathing deep and slow, and finally passed the notebook to Wil Dow.

Alice Hathaway Lee. Born at Chestnut Hill, July 29th 1861. I saw her first on October 18th 1878; I wooed her for over a year before I won her; we were betrothed on January 25th 1880, and it was announced on Feb. 16th; on Oct. 27th of the same year we were married; we spent three years of happiness greater and more unalloyed than I have ever known fall to the lot of others; on Feb. 12th 1884 her baby was born, and on Feb. 14th she died in my arms; my mother had died in the same house, on the same day, but a few hours previously. On Feb. 16th they were buried together in Greenwood.

For joy or sorrow, my life has now been lived out.

Wil Dow closed the notebook and put it back where Roosevelt had left it. The little New Yorker still sat with his back to them, coughing violently. It sounded saw-tooth painful.

He met Uncle Bill's glance and nodded his head to indicate he understood Roosevelt's purpose. It was clear enough: Roosevelt never wished to hear or speak of his departed wife and mother again.

On the following hot afternoon they moved the herd across more of the high plain. When a sod-roof cabin came in sight Roosevelt trotted back to join the two Maine woodsmen. “Take the herd for ten minutes, Bill. I want to do business at this house.” He pulled awkwardly away, dragging high at the reins. “Come along, Wil, if you care to meet one of the famous locals.”

Wil rode at Roosevelt's stirrup toward the unpretentious soddy. A short heavy woman stood in the door holding a rifle. When she saw the two men guide their mounts carefully around the perimeter of her tidy vegetable garden she illustrated her approval by setting the rifle away inside the door.

Roosevelt said, “Are you Mrs. Reuter?”

“I am. Mostly they call me ‘Old Lady Reuter' which I take to be a compliment on the maturity of my character, as I'm hardly forty years of age.”

Wil Dow was not accustomed to hearing ladies admit their ages aloud.

“My name is Theodore Roosevelt.”

“Heard of you.”

“This is Wil Dow, in my employ.”

The woman made a gesture. “Come in. You mustn't mind the untidiness of my house.” She had a deep hoarse voice. She wore a proper bonnet and a heavy bodice and a wraparound overskirt but no bustle.

In the dark it was a moment before Wil Dow could make out detail—a good cherrywood table, a foot-powered loom, several lithographs on the walls, a small pump organ: the place was homelike and he was surprised.

Roosevelt said, “Why it's a splendid house, Mrs. Reuter. Splendid.”

The woman made a bit of a curtsy. “You're very gallant. Won't you sit down? I have some tin airtights of peaches and apricots.”

“Many thanks, madame, but as you see we're driving a thousand steers into the Bad Lands. I'm afraid we can stay only a few moments. They've told me you make the finest deerhide clothing in Dakota.”

“Whoever could have told you such a thing? My, what exaggeration.” A coquettish smile was startling on the woman's broad sun-browned face; Wil Dow laughed aloud. She made a face at him. If she was gruff she was also full of fun.

Roosevelt said, “I want to have a suit of fringed buckskin.”

“Then you'll have one.” She found a coiled measuring tape and began to span the scale of his bones with matter-of-fact swiftness.

Roosevelt said, “A handsome suit that I can show off to my friends back East. Perhaps a bit of Indian design work. I shall bring my own hides to you next week. They're hanging now—”

“I use only my own,” the woman said. “I kill them, I cure them, I sew them. Then I know what I am doing, and you know what you are getting.”

Roosevelt held his tongue. His retreat surprised Wil Dow; it reminded him what low spirits his employer was in. After a moment Roosevelt said to the woman, “You must eat a great deal of venison—or waste it.”

“What I can't eat I give to the Indians, who haven't got sufficient ammunition of their own. It's a sin to waste good meat.”

“My sentiments,” Roosevelt agreed. “If you kill an animal you've a responsibility not to waste any part of it. When we're hungry we kill but I despise a man who'll kill a beast for a trophy or a single taste of its flesh.”

Mrs. Reuter looked him in the eye with mischievous challenge. “What I heard was that Theodore Roosevelt was in the habit of mounting stuffed animal heads on his walls. What I heard was, Theodore Roosevelt likes to kill for sport.”

“And animal rugs on my floors—blankets for the divans—horns for hatracks—leather for my furniture and game meat in my belly and cured jerky in my pack. I'm a student of naturalism and I am experienced in taxidermy, and when I kill an animal I use every portion of it. Anything less would be an offense to Nature.”

Wil Dow examined a patterned Indian blanket that hung from the low ceiling, dividing the cabin into two rooms. He'd heard Mr. Roosevelt's discourses on naturalism before; there were things that interested him more. He said to the woman, “Any wild Indians around here?”

“Not so wild any more,” Mrs. Reuter said with regret in her voice. To Roosevelt she said: “They say you're Dutch.”

It took Wil Dow a moment to catch up with her abrupt change of topic.

Roosevelt said, “From Holland by ancestry, long ago. I am an American.”

“My husband's name is Johann. They call him Dutch.”

“Dutch Reuter. We met last year when I was here hunting.”

“He's a good man sometimes, my husband, but being Dutch—”

“In fact I think he's Prussian, isn't he? Or Bavarian?”

“Isn't it all the same? Being Dutch he's not just stubborn. He's impossibly, irrationally, inexorably obstinate. I'm used to dealing with your sort, Mr. Roosevelt.” She beamed at him.

Roosevelt flashed his teeth. “I'll try to remember my manners.”

The woman wrote numbers on a scrap of paper. “You shall have your suit in two weeks, if it please you to call back then.”

Wil Dow followed him out into the blinding sun. As they climbed aboard their steeds Roosevelt touched his hatbrim to the lady in the door. They rode out toward the great dust cloud.

“I understand she kills rattlesnakes with a hoe,” Roosevelt said. “Did you hear her on the subject of the Dutch! And they say
I'm
opinionated!”

Wil saw a swarm of little creatures scampering about. There was a high-pitched warning bark. Abruptly a hundred dusty dark rodents scurried into their holes, instantly out of sight.

“Gophers?”

Roosevelt said, “Prairie dog town. Wise to give it berth—your horse could crack a leg.”

They went around it and in a while rejoined Bill Sewall and the shorthorns; Roosevelt galloped out ahead to lead the trek.

For a while it was easy work, just now and then riding out to head a stray back into the flow. But toward four o'clock Wil Dow became aware that the herd was bunching up.

“Come on,” Uncle Bill Sewall said, and set about kicking his steed energetically about the flanks. The horse responded sluggishly. Wil watched with fond amusement. He gigged his horse easily to a canter, caught up and rode abreast the old Mennonite.

The cattle had got themselves into some kind of log jam. They crowded into one another's rumps, mooing and milling.

When the two horsemen reached the front of the herd they found Roosevelt squinting down past the lip of a steep drop. Wil Dow heard his uncle's sharp intake of breath.

“
Terra damnata.
”

Below he saw a marvelous vast litter of broken country all heaved and buckled, striped with lateral ribbons of vivid colors. Junipers on the hills were fat and conical and dark.

“The Bad Lands,” said Roosevelt. “Some of those piles of rock look like fallen ancient temples I've seen in Egypt and Greece. What do you think, then, Bill? Capital country, isn't it!”