Brian Garfield (28 page)

Wil's kaleidoscope kept spinning as the end of the long round-up approached. The days cooled; leaves turned; bushes and shrubs made a rich variety of color.

They were near the Killdeers. Headquarters camp had been pitched in the vast curve of the Little Missouri where it emerged from the Bad Lands onto the virgin prairie. Wil Dow and Dutch Reuter were pushing a batch of cows into the herd. Roosevelt swung by them, neck-reining one-handed. “You want to keep a careful eye on that steer over there—the one with the tip broken off the left horn. Bed him down and watch him, for he'll keep getting up again and he'll lead the others to mischief if you let him.”

He went to turn his mount again—and the horse slipped and fell hard, pinning him.

Wil leaped down and tugged the horse. Dutch was with him; they worked together until the beast scrambled off the boss. Wil had his own horse by the reins and used it as a shield to fend off milling cattle. Dutch was trying to help Roosevelt to his feet but when he pulled at Roosevelt's hand the boss cried out with pain.

Dutch let go. Roosevelt stood up slowly by himself and tried to lift his arm. It wouldn't move.

“Well,” he said offhandedly, “probably just a strain.”

Dutch took him by forearm and elbow and began gently to manipulate the limb. “That hurt?”

“Like the devil.”

“Something broken in the shoulder, I think. Dr. Stickney you go see.”

The clenched fist of Roosevelt's uninjured hand revealed his pain; but he said, “No doctors.”

Wil said to Dutch, “Boss has a low opinion of doctors. They've told him a lot of lies.”

“I've broken plenty of bones in my time,” Roosevelt said, as if he were some sort of old man rather than a youth of twenty-four. “No doubt I'll break plenty more before I'm finished. It's nothing.”

Dutch said, “All right. Then you wait.” He borrowed Wil's horse to go after his own. After a lively chase he caught his mount and brought it back, dismounted and dipped into a saddlebag, poured a few drops from a small bottle into a metal cup half full of water and offered the stain to Mr. Roosevelt.

Roosevelt regarded it suspiciously. “What's this?”

“Laudanum. You'll ride better.”

“Very well.” Roosevelt swallowed the mixture and made a face.

He carried his arm in a sling thereafter but he did not stop working. Once Wil Dow saw him rassling a calf one-handed. Johnny Goodall saw this. He rode off without saying anything. Covered with clay from head to foot, Roosevelt dragged the protesting calf to the fire and waited the branding iron.

It was agreed, grudgingly in some quarters, that the dude New Yorker, who was five-foot-eight and weighed no more than one hundred and twenty-five pounds, had acquitted himself some better than anybody expected. He was an indifferent roper—his eye was poor—and an inferior horseman; he talked like a priggish schoolmistress and he would never make a fair cow puncher, let alone a top hand. Nevertheless he had carried his share; he had kept up. He had a tenacity that amazed the Westerners. As Pierce Bolan put it, “He ain't a pretty rider but he's got grit.”

He was given the nearest thing to an official stamp of approval when Johnny Goodall came to him in camp, looked at the sling on Roosevelt's arm and said, “If you still want to be chairman of the stockmen's association, you have got my vote.”

Roosevelt and his men drove their cattle onto the De Morès siding. Wil Dow helped Uncle Bill; they began to chute the beeves into a holding corral.

Flanked by Johnny Goodall and half a dozen horsemen, the Marquis came along on a big black stallion and Wil surveyed him with keen interest. Here then was the fabled Monte Cristo of the Bad Lands. No denying he was picturesque in the extreme in his fringed hunting coat. Under the great white hat De Morès wore bright-colored clothes punctuated with two Colts, each on its own cartridge belt, and a scabbarded hunting knife of enormous size. He carried a large stick in one hand and there was, Dow noticed, a rifle of what looked like very large caliber on the saddle within his reach. The Marquis was a one-man arsenal.

Roosevelt was on foot outside the corral, examining his cattle. He still carried his arm in the sling; evidently it was quite painful but he didn't allow that to show if he thought anyone was looking. When he saw the Marquis he came pounding forward with his choppy aggressive stride.

They exchanged good-afternoons. The Marquis said, “It's unfortunate you couldn't have brought them in yesterday.”

“Why is that?”

“The price has dropped.”

Roosevelt said, “We agreed on a price yesterday, did we not?”

“That is true. Seventy cents less than the Chicago price. This morning there has been a drop in the price of beef on the Chicago market. I can show you the telegram if you like.”

Roosevelt said, “If the Chicago price had gone
up
I still should have made delivery at the agreed terms. A bargain is a bargain.”

“Just so. Seventy cents less than the Chicago price.”

“Seventy cents less than the price as quoted when we made the bargain.”

De Morès's reply was a dissenting grunt. “No. I do not control the Chicago market.”

“But you control your own actions, Mr. De Morès. I insist you keep your word.”

Wil Dow saw the rising roughness in the Marquis's face. “I have offered to do just that.” The brim of his white sombrero cast a sharp line of shadow across his face. “I am not trying to Jew you down.”

“I find that expression offensive, Mr. De Morès.”

“Do you.” The Marquis's eyes flashed, as if he had scored some sort of point. “I find some things offensive too. One of them is the fact that you've chosen to employ a man who's been firing his rifle into my house and my sheep.”

“What man is that?”

“You know perfectly well. Dutch Reuter.”

“I know nothing of the kind. Have you evidence?”

“If I had, your man would be hanging from a tree.”

Roosevelt looked up at the horsemen who flanked De Morès. His gaze settled for a moment on Johnny Goodall, who looked on in flinty silence. Finally Roosevelt faced the Marquis. “Mr. De Morès, I ask you one last time to keep your word. If you will not do that, then henceforth I will not do business with you.”

“I am fully prepared to keep my word. Seventy cents less than the Chicago price.”

Roosevelt turned to Bill Sewall. “We will drive the animals back out of the yards.”

The breath caught in Wil Dow's throat. His eyes flashed from face to face. He shifted his hand nearer his revolver and turned to face Johnny Goodall squarely, leaving the Marquis to Mr. Roosevelt. If it was to come to shooting, he wanted his target clearly identified.

Menace hung in the stinking air like a blade poised to drop.

Then Johnny lifted both hands onto the saddlehorn in a quiet but clear gesture of peace.

De Morès said to Roosevelt in an arrogantly amused way, “What do you intend doing, then? These are the only shipping pens in town.”

“I shall drive them to the next town and ship them from there.”

“All the way to Dickinson? You'll drop thousands of pounds off them.”

“You leave me no choice.”

The Marquis glared at him. “I'm sorry you can't see the proper side of this.” He turned his horse and rode off.

Johnny Goodall said to his men, “All right, boys, give Mr. Roosevelt a hand getting these cattle out.”

“Thank you,” said Roosevelt.

“That's all right,” Johnny drawled.

And so Wil and Uncle Bill Sewall drove the beeves three days to Dickinson and put them on a train, fifty-five yearlings to a boxcar, and shipped them to the Chicago stockyards. Mr. Roosevelt was pleased because the price had gone back up and he got a dollar more per head even after payment of shipping charges than the Marquis would have paid him.

But the incident left little doubt that they were going to have to sleep light from now on.

Before it was over, Wil Dow thought, there was going to be hell to pay.

The anticipation of it made him feel alarmed and pleased, all at once. He couldn't fathom that; but he rode through the ensuing weeks in a state of excitement that made his senses keener than they ever had been.

Ten

T
he Indian Summer heat was oppressive. Pack found it difficult to breathe inside the shack. He could hear rats scurrying in the roof. When he'd finished dressing in his evening suit it was impossible to stand the stifling closeness any longer; he went outside and tried to fill his chest but the air was rancid with slaughterhouse stink. That was but a small price to pay, however—all you had to do was take a look at the train of refrigerator cars, each painted with the Marquis's NPRC legend, making its slow way out of town, hauling dressed Bad Lands beef to the Eastern markets.

It was an evening that might prove interesting. Despite the dreadful heat Pack looked forward to tonight's formal dinner with the Marquis and Marquise and their honored guests.

He saw Dan McKenzie emerge from the smithy, remove his apron and toss it back inside, wipe sweat from his face and trudge toward the Senate Billiard and Pool Hall, licking his lips in anticipation of beer.

Riley Luffsey, who had returned three days ago from guiding a moderately successful game hunt for a party of Belgians, was jawing on the porch of Joe Ferris's store with Little Casino. Luffsey was slapping a rolled newspaper into his open palm, punctuating his ribald talk. He had just turned nineteen and, judging by the monumental scale of his celebration the other night, inevitably still must be suffering from the hangover; the insolent swagger of his manner was in no way muted, however. He flashed a proud grin at Pack and went right on talking to Little Casino. Pack couldn't hear their words but he saw Luffsey speak with dry cocky impudence and he heard the madam's bawdy whiskey-baritone laugh.

They were an odd pair, the curiously touching—almost endearing—youngster and the hardened whore. Little Casino had a soft spot for Luffsey; everybody in town knew it, including her husband, but then Jerry Paddock never seemed to care whom she sported with, or how she felt about them. Jerry's main interest in his wife seemed to be how much money she brought home.

Speak of the Devil: down the street Jerry Paddock stepped out of the De Morès store. For once he was without his funeral coat; he was in shirtsleeves and seemed a bit wilted. He glanced down toward the competing emporium, saw his wife engaged in intimate laughter with the young hunter, and wheeled abruptly back inside, sudden danger and menace implicit in his every twitch.

Pack wondered at that. Something new here?

Jerry Paddock, for all his surly conspiratorial mannerisms, was a contradiction. His dominant characteristic was an air of personal isolation; it kept him at a rigid distance from everyone. Pack saw him every day but had yet to comprehend him.

After a moment's thought, however, Pack realized why there probably would be an earsplitting row later tonight in the Paddock household. It had nothing to do with any normal feelings of masculine jealousy; if Jerry resented his wife's friendliness with Riley Luffsey it would be solely because the villain did not care to have his wife consorting with the Irish crowd of anti-De Morès hunters. He probably had forbidden it—and she seemed to miss few opportunities to defy his proscriptions.

A De Morès mechanic was driving one of Cyrus McCormick's one-hundred-twenty-dollar wheat-reaping harvester machines through town, lashing the air above the horses' ears and yelling hoarsely. Redhead Finnegan, the man from Bitter Creek, so filthy he was surrounded by his own personal cloud of flies, came out of Ferris's store followed by Frank O'Donnell, who kept rubbing his pitted cheeks and batting the flies away. Finnegan said something that took all the laughter out of Little Casino's face, and took Riley Luffsey in tow and plodded through the heat toward Bob Roberts's saloon.

Poor Luffsey, Pack thought. Given half a chance the kid might do just fine. But his chosen campanions had filled him up with dreams of ruffianly glory; Luffsey wanted nothing so much as to be another Wild Bill Hickok. It did no good to try and point out to him the squalor in which Hickok had ended his sorry days.

The sun had disappeared beyond the bluffs; the sky was grey and thick. Pack idled down the street to the cafe and was about to go inside when he saw Theodore Roosevelt ride into town with two of his hired hands. Roosevelt carried his arm in a leather sling. He was all dressed up in an elaborate buckskin suit. Sight of him stopped Pack in his tracks. Had the man ridden thirty-odd miles into town on this particular evening by sheer coincidence? Why was he wearing his Wild West best?

Roosevelt stepped down off his handsome horse and went inside Joe's store. The hired men, Sewall and Dow, came on to the cafe, towing two pack horses laden with carcasses. Curious, Pack followed them inside. They had shot more deer than they could eat; they had the excess on the pack animals outside and Pack watched the old Mennonite transact business with the slat-sided proprietress. “Five cents a pound,” she said.

Sewall—his beard jutting as ferociously as a Viking's—said, “Six,” and the woman stared back fearlessly. They settled on five and a half.

Pack said, “Now, Mr. Roosevelt appears to be dressed for a wedding.”

Wil Dow said, “He got an invite card to dine at the château.”

Sewall said, “And if you are aiming to ask why Mr. Roosevelt tolerates the French son of a bitch, don't ask me.”

Wil Dow said, “Mr. Roosevelt says you have to recognize that people from different parts of the world have different ways of doing things.”

Sewall growled, “He said he'd never do business with the Markee again.”

Wil Dow said, “Well, Uncle Bill, this isn't a business matter.”

Pack said with some astonishment, “I take it then that he's posted an acceptance of the invitation?”