Brian Garfield (19 page)

Amid the metal-roofed factory buildings the two riders approached each other like challengers in a joust. They stopped; neither dismounted; the horses, made uneasy by the noise and stink, pranced around each other in a short-fused minuet. Through it all the Marquis sat his horse like a centaur—a noble figure in sombrero, wild yellow shirt and flaming red neckerchief. His golden skin seemed to glow. When he greeted the diminutive New Yorker, De Morès slapped the heavy lead-filled bamboo stick against the palm of his hand.

Roosevelt wore butternut trousers and a flannel shirt under his brown Eastern-cut jacket. He wore a wide-brimmed hat that didn't quite seem to fit. Covered from head to foot with the dust of Bad Lands travel, he kept grabbing leather as the horse jumped about. While he fought to control the beast he was speaking swiftly, jaws chopping, head jutting emphatically.

De Morès, easily keeping his seat as the spirited stallion skittered around, replied with equal vigor. Clearly it was a confrontation of some kind. Pack ran full out.

He approached in time to hear the Marquis say, “I'll have the secretary look into the papers. I don't foresee any difficulty. As to Paddock, when I came here I understood very quickly that to control the town I must control the worst of its denizens. You will leave him to me—that's a good chap. Now if you'll forgive me I must be about my business. We must always keep moving. Otherwise time will cheat us of our good years—you agree?”

De Morès acknowledged Pack's presence with a casual wave and urged the horse away. The Marquis always wanted to go faster; it was one of his few failings—he had no patience.

Pack looked up at Roosevelt, who was watching the Marquis—watching, perhaps, the quality of De Morès's horsemanship.

Pack said tentatively, “Mr. Roosevelt?”

“Good day to you, Mr. Packard.”

“Conducting business with the Marquis?”

“I do admire his plumage.”

“Is there anything my readers should benefit from knowing?”

“Thousands of things, I've no doubt,” Roosevelt replied. His teeth made a brief but large appearance.

Panting from his run, Pack gathered breath for another try but his attention was drawn by Madame la Marquise. She came up from the ford in a surrey driven by a coachman in livery. Roosevelt rode out from between the factory sheds to meet her. Pack ran along behind him.

As Madame approached, Pack tried not to stare at her large brown eyes and masses of lovely red hair. She was so beautiful she made his eyes ache.

The coachman drew rein and braced his foot against the brake handle. There was a screech of chock against rim. The sudden high noise frightened Roosevelt's horse; it reared, nearly spilling the rider.

When Roosevelt regained control Madame said, “I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to—”

Roosevelt said, “I disapprove of self-reproach. Please don't apologize.”

She seemed about to speak again but then her glance touched on Pack; she changed her mind. “Hello, Arthur,” she said gaily. “It's a wonderful column about Antoine. He felt very complimented.”

“Thank you. Merely writing the truth as I see it.”

She said to Roosevelt, “Have you seen the paper?” And suddenly it was in her hand. She held it out of the surrey at arm's length and Roosevelt awkwardly spurred his horse forward, leaned out of the saddle and nearly toppled as he took a fingertip grip on the newspaper. After all that he dropped it. Pack stepped forward to pick it up and handed it up to him. In that moment, when perhaps they thought he wasn't looking, Pack thought he saw a spark of something more than ordinary friendliness in the way Medora's eyes met Roosevelt's.

“Thank you,” said Roosevelt. “And now if you'll excuse me I must be on my way.” He touched the folded newspaper to his hatbrim, gave Pack a glance and a nod, and rode off into town. Something about his carriage—something in the posture of his back—conveyed a quiet melancholy.

The afternoon was filled with explosive noise and destructive danger. It was mostly O'Donnell and Finnegan—drunk and shooting up the town. Using the Marquis's importation of sheep as an excuse they had a rip-roarin' time. There was a great promiscuity of gunfire that made Pack wonder, not for the first time, how these boys could afford such profligate expenditures on ammunition. The De Morès Hotel was shot full of holes. Blaspheming vigorously, the boys shot up all the stovepipes they could see.

During the fusillade Pack stayed indoors like any prudent citizen but it nearly didn't save him; as he was studying the reflection of his face and thinking about shaving, a bullet parted his whiskers and smashed his mirror.

By evening the celebrants were sleeping it off somewhere, probably in the scabrous dormitory above Paddock's dingy saloon. With the danger abated and the pressures of his weekly deadline in abeyance, Pack emerged from his toilet in stiff collar and cravat with his hair all wet down and his bottle-green frock coat dusted clean and his evening boots polished to a patent-leather gleam.

The sun was low above Graveyard Butte when Pack strolled across the railroad bridge—it was that or use the horse-and-wagon ford downstream, and a man dressed for dinner at the château could hardly select that alternative, regardless how hot his feet might be.

He was intercepted at the end of the bridge by a man on horseback. At first Pack could not make out the man's face against the sunset—but he recognized A.C. Huidekoper's Pennsylvania voice. “Beautiful evening.”

“It is indeed.”

Huidekoper dismounted with the easy grace of a born horseman. He was dressed with odd formality, as if for courting, in a lingerie shirt and a boiled collar. He removed his hat in a sort of punctuation to indicate an emphasis upon the importance he attached to this meeting. He was slight but not delicate, a compact man with a small round bald head and bright alert birdlike eyes.

“I've been lying in wait for you.” Huidekoper pronounced his words with care. Pack envied the Pennsylvanian his ear for mimicry; depending on the occasion he was capable of speaking innumerable appropriate varieties of English from cowboy to proper to stuffy.

“Now, that's ominous.” Pack smiled with his mouth.

“You've been summoned to an audience with De Morès. Possibly as you grow a bit older you'll learn to pick your dinner companions with more care,” Huidekoper said, “but as it happens, I'm pleased you're going up there tonight. I've a message for him.”

“Why not give it to him yourself?”

“Hell will freeze over before I get an invitation to visit that house. I've made no secret of my feelings against him. But I'm not the sort of fool who's eager for carnage—any civilized man has a duty to head off catastrophe if he can. Will you try to make clear to De Morès that he's courting a violent debacle?”

Pack didn't want to hear more. He had suffered his share of the garrulous horse-rancher's fulminations. He liked Huidekoper well enough: the man was good-hearted and well-intentioned. But everyone knew Huidekoper's eccentric prejudices against Progress and Industrial Growth, and Pack was in no frame of mind to be buttonholed this evening for an endless harangue.

Pack made as if to continue on his way. With a departing flap of a hand he walked down off the NPRR embankment and approached the bend in the wagon-road that led up toward the De Morès residence.

Huidekoper, leading the horse, hurried along beside him.

“Tell him we ranchers are not going to tolerate it any more—his fences and his Valentine Scrip frauds, and the irresponsible arrogance with which the man disregards the rights and feelings of his neighbors. The sheep are the last straw. There'll be an explosion of tempers, mark me.”

“Will there? Most of the people around here owe their prosperity to the Marquis.”

“There's a growing population that does not. Why are you so determined to see only one side of the issue?”

“It's the side that counts.” Pack lengthened his stride. As soon as he could reach the vegetable garden at the foot of the driveway he'd be able to leave his companion behind, for Huidekoper had spoken the truth about one thing: he was not welcome on the Marquis's land.

Huidekoper, half a head shorter, had to hasten awkwardly to keep up, tugging all the while on the reins of the saddle horse.

“You've got his ear. He respects you. For Heaven's sake warn him off. Tell him to pull back before it's too late.”

“Why? Because a few saloon ruffians have been shaking the leaves?”

“There's talk of shooting. There's talk of assassinating De Morès.”

“Now, there's always talk. I don't believe the Marquis sets much store by it.”

“These are not university boys, Pack. They're a rough crowd.”

“The Marquis is no shrinking violet, you know. He's killed several men.”

“He claims to have done. But these toughs don't abide by the rules of formal duelling. More like a shotgun from a dark alley. Is that what you want? Bloodshed upon bloodshed? Unrestricted range warfare?”

“It won't come to that. They're only a few hotheads with nothing better to do than hang around bar rooms and boast to one another about what bad men they are. Why, I had a run-in with a roomful of them just yesterday. They had every chance to rend me limb from limb but nothing came of it except a drunken idea to send a threatening letter to the Marquis. Ease your mind. They're not gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire.”

“What's that? Shakespeare?”

“Milton.”

They reached the garden fence at the foot of the drive. Huidekoper stopped, as Pack had hoped he would. He climbed into the saddle and removed his hat and wiped a sleeve across the round ball of his hairless scalp. “It's not just the hunters and wild ones your friend up there has antagonized. The sober element as well. He makes enemies too easily. It's a habit that could cost him his life. Please understand what I'm saying, and why I'm saying it.”

Now, you're an old woman
, Pack thought. He walked on.

Huidekoper called after him: “At least tell him to keep away from the windows!”

Château De Morès overlooked the town, the railroad and its bridge, the river, the abattoir and the horizontally streaked colors of the heaving Bad Lands. On the lowlands along the river bend beneath the bluff were coach garage, stable and a house for the coachmen—and beyond them a pattern of corrals and vegetable gardens from which Pack commenced the strenuous climb to the wide terrace on which stood the residence of the Monte Cristo of the Bad Lands.

There were deer horns over the door. The house was large—twenty-six rooms looming two stories high at the edge of the bluff on the eastern promontory of Graveyard Butte. Everyone in the Territory knew it had an indoor bathroom—the first in Dakota. The walls were clapboard wood painted French grey with slate grey trim; the roof and shutters were deep red. The front porch faced the southern sun and was outfitted with easy chairs overseen by racks of antelope and elk horns—trophies of the De Morès's hunts.

It was the Bad Landers who had named it “the château”; in fact it was an ordinary frame lodge, though a large one, and its owners preferred to call it “the summer house” because once their operations were fully organized they intended to spend their winters in the East.

Pack as usual was punctual; the Marquis and Marquise as usual were not. A maid admitted Pack to the front room and the butler came through quickly, dismissed the maid and led Pack to the front corner parlor. There he was left to himself for several minutes to consider the staring enormous buffalo head and the square Kurtzmann piano from which Madame la Marquise's impassioned renditions of Verdi and Bach and Liszt sometimes could be heard in the town across the river when the wind was right.

Pack stared enraptured at the celebrated portrait of Madame Medora. It was an excellent likeness, beautifully rendered by the celebrated Charles Jalabert; it captured Madame's delicate beauty and impish good humor and the richness of her masses of auburnred hair.

He knew these things about her achievements: she spoke seven languages fluently; she painted well; she played the pianoforte with accomplished technique and great feeling; she created divine needlepoint; she was an accomplished horsewoman and huntress. There were some, Huidekoper among them, who said she could outride and outshoot her own husband. In a
Cow Boy
column two weeks ago Pack had christened her the Diana of Dakota.

Pack found it significant that the hunting trophies—the envy of every sporting gentleman and lady in the Territory—were juxtaposed matter-of-factly with shelves of books and magazines published in more than half a dozen languages, all of which both the Marquis and his wife could read effortlessly. There were books on cattle and banking and finance and history and the French monarchy—as well as volumes of Longfellow, Hugo, Emerson, Goethe. The family De Morès, making no concessions to wilderness, had brought every refinement of Civilization to the Territory. Therein, Pack was sure, resided the hope of the Future.

Fitfully distracted by Huidekoper's alarums, Pack wandered through the dining room, laid with its settings of Minton china; the complete set contained five hundred pieces. Fine table linens, delicate crystal glassware and expensive silver caught his eye. Like all rooms in civilized homes the chamber was wallpapered. The dominant color was deep red, to go with Madame's hair.

His interest lay mainly in the windows just now. There was still daylight; he peered out one pane and then another, judging angles of fire….

He prowled past several hard-working servants in kitchen and scullery to the long trophy room where most guests tended to congregate during gatherings here. The maid who'd admitted him was on her knees polishing the floor. Except for the rugs, which were from the Orient, most of the furnishings and draperies were French. Here and there, sometimes with startling rudeness, a Wild West artifact boomed: a red Mackinac blanket over a chair, a racked elk head above the doorway and of course that magnificent grizzly bearskin and the huge knife beside it. Pack recalled his previous visit when the Marquis had pointed out the knife, eyes glittering with pride, and gripped Pack's arm until Pack thought gangrene would set in. The Marquis's voice had trembled with feeling:
I adore the thrilling excitement of the chase and the hunt. It's no longer enough to shoot game. The spirit craves more. With glistening steel I met this grizzly bear. I wrestled the great beast with nothing but my knife.