Brian Garfield (22 page)

When Dutch Reuter had heard their destination he had told Wil this much: he used to live in the soddy with that woman but she had sassed him and he had set out to beat her and she had damn near broke his face with a stove-lid lifter and called in a couple of passing Indians to haul him away.

Since then Dutch had left her peacefully in full possession of the house. He advised Wil to give that woman wide berth.

Now Wil Dow heard Mrs. Reuter's version. She had ejected her husband, she said, after “such profanity as I never expect to hear again.”

She hadn't intended to settle for the first man who asked. She had wanted to wait for a man who would talk to her, who would listen to her, who would pull back her chair for her. But times were hard. Dutch had got half drunk and proposed marriage—and she'd had no other offers. “I am a plain woman. But I have made a good life for myself here. It is a good place.” The abrupt smile, cozy and jolly, illuminated her face.

Roosevelt came out of the back room dressed in his new suit. Wil Dow's eyes opened wide with admiration. He couldn't recall ever having seen such soft golden buckskin. The fringed yoke and the cut of it made Roosevelt look taller and more powerful—handsomer all round.

Uncle Bill Sewall said without enthusiasm, “You'll be the most beautiful cowboy in the corral.”

Mrs. Reuter enjoyed provocation. While Roosevelt was admiring his suit she poked his arm. “I want to know why a woman can't vote in this free country. You are a politician. I want you to look me in the eye and tell me why I can't vote.”

Roosevelt seemed pleased to be asked: he seemed both amused and serious. “Well I'm no longer in politics, you know. But I still have opinions. I feel it is exactly as much a right of women as of men to vote. I believe in suffrage for women, because I think they are fit for it. But the important point—man or woman—is to treat suffrage as a duty. A vote is like a rifle. The mere possession of it will no more benefit men and women not sufficiently developed to use it than the possession of rifles will turn untrained Egyptian fellaheen into soldiers. You see I believe, for women as well as for men, more in the duty of doing well and wisely with the ballot than in the naked right to cast the ballot.”

“If we women had the vote we wouldn't be so ready to send young men off to war.”

Roosevelt said, “As to that, madame, war is not necessarily a bad thing. It can be beneficial when it encourages people to forget their selfish concerns and lend themselves to great national effort.”

“My father was killed in the war,” she replied. “I hope your outfit suits you.”

Roosevelt studied himself in the mirror she'd handed him. “It's a splendid suit. Splendid.” Whether or not he realized he'd been chastised, he said no more to Mrs. Reuter about the benefits of war.

It was too late to ride home; they camped for the night not far from Mrs. Reuter's.

“How do you spell Audubon? One
or two?”

Sewall said, “Two u's, one
o
.”

“I'm a dreadful speller.”

Roosevelt could read things at amazingly high speed while simultaneously carrying on a running conversation. He seemed to see and hear everything—at least he had strong opinions about everything. Wil Dow saw him find endless magic in the books against which he squinted every evening in the inadequate light of lantern or campfire. He had an especial passion for natural science books and made notes as he read them.

Roosevelt considered the page on which he was writing. He seemed agitated with a hint of his old enthusiasm. “D'you know, Bill, narrow ideas cannot survive on these prairies. This is a wholesome place to dream in.”

Sewall only grunted; but Wil Dow was pleased to see even so small a sign of recovery in Roosevelt.

Suddenly, for no particular reason, it struck him that Roosevelt had no sidewhiskers this season; he thought back and decided Roosevelt must have shaved them off in 1883.

The pencil scratched across the tablet. Roosevelt was writing a book about ranching. It was a serious endeavor; he had already written a book that had been published—a history of the naval battles of the War of 1812—and now it seemed his literary ambitions were revived. Maybe that was another good sign.

After a while he set the notebook aside and took out his letter-writing paper. He had received several letters along with the last batch of possibles that Dutch had picked up at Joe Ferris's store. Most of them, Wil gathered, were from his sister Bamie. Now Roosevelt opened one of the letters, consulted it briefly and began to set down his response. A soft smile hovered around his mouth.

That night he didn't seem to wheeze as much as usual.

In the morning Roosevelt impishly decided they must sate their curiosity with a visit to the Indian camp that Mrs. Reuter had told them about. Wil Dow nearly danced with eagerness.

As they broke camp, Dutch Reuter appeared from the coulees and joined them without comment; it was as if he had been spying on them from afar in order to join them as soon as they were clear of his formidable
frau.

Dutch rolled a quirly from his makin's. He offered it to Roosevelt, who said, “I have a gentleman's distaste for tobacco.” Dutch, not offended in the least, kindled his snoose and puffed away with content. They rode along together and presently Sewall saw something out yonder on the plain. “What's that? Big rock?”

Wil Dow searched the distance and found it—a white spire, perhaps a pyramid.

Dutch studied it a while before he replied. “Tepee, I think.”

It was evident by the way he squinted at the horizon that Roosevelt couldn't see what they were talking about. He yanked off his glasses and polished them.

They rode forward for a good half hour before Dutch said quietly to Wil Dow, “How you find her?”

“Your wife?”

“Yah, yah.”

Wil Dow was uncertain how to reply. Finally he said, “Fine stout woman.”

“For me she don't pine,” Dutch said. “That's good.”

Wil Dow grinned. “You miss her, do you?”

Dutch licked his fingers before he pinched out the lit end of the cigarette stub between thumb and finger. He dropped the remains into his tobacco pouch and did not look at Wil Dow at all.

In the end the white pyramid turned out to be an Indian tent, shut up against the world. Dutch clapped his hands in lieu of knocking. There was no reply. He let his call sing out in English and in French. After having observed those amenities he lifted the flap and looked inside.

The smell hit them immediately. Dutch said, “
Mein Gott.
”

An Indian man lay curled up on his side on a blanket. Roosevelt said, “Is he dead?”

Old Bill Sewall said, “Dead and ripe. A ‘good Indian'—isn't that what they say? The only good Indian?”

Roosevelt dismounted and crouched for a better look. “I say. He doesn't seem very old.”

Wil Dow said, “I expect he took sick and the rest of them left him here.”

Uncle Bill Sewall said, “They just left a sick man behind to die?”

Roosevelt said, “I understand that's their way.”

Uncle Bill backed away, making a face against the smell. “Barbaric.”

Wil Dow said, “I don't know. It makes sense, you think about it.”

Roosevelt was holding his nose, still hunkered to peer inside. “What tribe is he?”

“Teton Sioux,” Dutch said. “East from they usual range.” He scanned the horizons. “If there be trouble, better not you take cover. Before you know, crawl up on you they do. Better stay in open—they coming, you see them—with your rifle you must make a show. You good rifle shot, you scare them. Most of them very poor shots unless inside bow-and-arrow range they get.”

*    *    *

Dutch yipped and whooped as they approached the encampment. It was considered good manners, he explained, to announce yourself as loudly as possible. It showed you had nothing to hide.

There were quite a few lodges on the high ground. They threw long shadows in the evening sunlight. Indians were converging on foot and horseback from the day's hunt, some of them dragging the game they'd killed.

Their outfits varied. Dutch identified them as Sioux and Mandans and Gros Ventres. “Friendly ones,” he said.

“I remind you Sitting Bull surrendered only three years ago,” Uncle Bill Sewall growled.

Dutch Reuter said, “No war today. Is etiquette to do a bit of trading.” He winked at Wil Dow, which made Wil feel better: it restored the confidence that had been draining out of him as they drew closer to the crowd of Indians who were emerging before them. Dutch knew what he was talking about. He was a genuine specimen of a frontiersman. He had been mail carrier and scout and free trader and hunter ever since he had come to America. He said he had been shot with bullets seven times and with arrows five times, and once had his head split open with a tomahawk. Of course he had also said he'd been in the Prussian army. But he'd been drunk on that occasion. From what Wil had seen, Dutch had plenty of scars to prove his injuries.

A group of women came forward, took their horses by the bridles and led them quite a way through the encampment. The women wore beaded deerskin dresses. The inhabitants of the camp regarded the visitors with an interest intense enough to set Wil Dow's nerves on edge but still he had the presence of mind to note the elaborate variety of color and styles amid the Indians' costumery and the intricate designs painted on the slopes of the leather tepees. The colors were as rich as fine paintings in the dying sunlight.

There was a great deal of chattering among the Indians; it dispelled at once Wil Dow's previous understanding of them as laconic savages who grunted at intervals. These people were as animated and talkative as ladies at a Sunday social.

Naturally it was Roosevelt who commanded the most attention. The Indians regarded him with admiring astonishment. Some of them squinted and shaded their eyes, pretending to be blinded by his regalia. By their reaction they incited Wil Dow to have another look at his employer's outfit, which included not only Mrs. Reuter's fringed buckskin suit, which he was breaking in, but also a wealthy New Yorker's idea of wilderness wear: alligator boots, silver spurs, leather chaps, huge beaver sombrero, engraved Colt revolver in an elaborately tooled holster on a carved belt with an enormous silver buckle upon which was sculpted the head of a snarling bear, and silver-decorated hunting knife from Tiffany in New York.

Then there was his horse Manitou—as handsome a beast as could have set foot in these people's midst. Wil Dow was not pleased by the fascination with which the Indians examined the big gelding.

Undismayed, Roosevelt dismounted and went about energetically examining everything with the belligerent scowling interest of a new dog sniffing his way around a pack's home ground.

Wil Dow followed Dutch's lead: he dismounted with the rifle in his hand and kept it there.

With cartridges and gold pieces they purchased moccasins, war plumes and cured buckskins from a happy old pirate called Sitting Owl. Roosevelt kept going back to a red blanket with five parallel black stripes. “How much does he want for it?”

“Buffalo blanket?” Dutch spoke rapidly to Sitting Owl and the old Indian talked back to him. Dutch's English might be atrocious but it appeared he could speak Gros Ventre as well as any Indian; Sitting Owl seemed to have no trouble conversing with him. There was a great deal of headshaking and shouting.

“He says worth twenty gold dollars. More like four or five, you ask me.”

“What about that robe?”

The Gros Ventre buffalo robe was beautiful, Wil thought. It was painted with quills and flowers. Sitting Owl said he had been offered twenty-five dollars but Dutch argued amiably with him until he gave it up for eight, being hard up—“I am a deadbroke Indian”—and the blanket for five. They bought war plumes and a mountain lion skin.

To settle a matter in his mind Roosevelt asked Sitting Owl which white men had discovered the Bad Lands first—French? Spanish? English?

After several Indians broke into raucous laughter, Dutch translated the Indian's reply: “‘Then it's true—You think nothing can exist before by a white man it be discovered.'”

Then Dutch said, “Horses you want to buy? A bargain here.” You could buy Indian ponies for forty to eighty dollars; that was good business if you were capable of training the animals because anywhere in cattle country a more-or-less tamed saddle horse could go for ninety-five to a hundred and twenty-five dollars.

But Roosevelt said, “We've more than enough horses to keep tame as it is.”

Then there was the matter of scalps. Sitting Owl brought them out, appended to a pole; they were dried and shrunk down to a few inches across. Among the dark ones it was hard not to take note of a single scalp of pale sandy hair. It was about the hue of Roosevelt's. Dutch said, “Five dollar. Don't buy. Cheaper take one yourself, if you want one.”

Roosevelt said, “I don't think I want one that badly, thank you.”

Uncle Bill Sewall's long red whiskers captured the interest of Sitting Owl, who clearly was a leader of fashion among the Indian dandies; he wore beaded finery and his hands were bejeweled with brass trade rings. He looked at Sewall's whiskers, felt of them, then began to braid them. Sewall dourly let him work while Wil Dow urgently watched Dutch Reuter to find out whether he should be alarmed. Dutch didn't seem concerned. The Indians were laughing, taking it in what Wil Dow hoped was good nature. After Sitting Owl got Uncle Bill's whiskers braided he reached for a very large knife and that was when Sewall grabbed him by the top of the head quick and lofted his free hand threateningly.

Sitting Owl shrank back; the other Indians laughed—but the crowd was pressing in closer and Wil Dow tasted fear.

Dutch said in a calm way, “Wil, the deadfall yonder—you see?”