Brian Garfield (3 page)

It was a topic that provoked Pack to drag his horse forward, prying a place amid half a dozen trudging strangers, to plunge in with a question: “What do you think of this new Teddy Bear they've put on the market?”

“An abomination,” said the man who hated to be called Teddy. “I'm not yet fool enough to believe what you boys say about me in the newspapers.” Never slowing his quick pace he grinned and looked Pack straight in the eye: “I don't make a sport of shooting baby bears. It's your bloody cartoonists who're the ones who ought to be shot.”

“Those cartoons haven't appeared in my newspaper, sir.”

“But your editorials have.”

Pack tried to reply to the President's broad grin in kind but he was no match for those teeth. And then he was squeezed back when the leader indicated, by climbing back aboard his horse, that it was time to resume the run.

Down along the riverbank Roosevelt galloped in a whirl of dust. On his heels drummed the gallant company of old friends. The President rode heavily, bristling, tipping pugnaciously forward in the saddle.

The final dash was a mad confused gallop, the horses strung out in a loose bunch, with Colonel Roosevelt a nose ahead of his old friend Huidekoper. The President rode into the clearing on the run, his horse heaving. Huidekoper, who had to be near sixty, riding like an Indian, slithered his horse to a pirouette and Roosevelt glowered at him. “You old rascal—tried to beat me!”

“I tried,” Huidekoper agreed.

“Oh, boys, this is the life. Look at that stand of cottonwoods. By George it is still the loveliest spot in the Bad Lands.” The President got off his horse and led it about. “This horse is breathing some—and then some.”

The Elkhorn ranch house was gone, broken up for lumber, but there was still the great stand of trees to which he had referred, and beyond them on all sides the magnificent multi-colored slopes and buttes of the Bad Lands. Now Roosevelt whipped off his hat to drag a sleeve across his brow. In that dreadful choppy irritating voice he said, “‘Thank God I have lived and toiled with men.' So spake my friend Kipling. By Godfrey, boys, I know every crease of this country. I've ridden over it, hunted in it, tramped it in all weather and every season. And it looks like home to me.” He drew an immense breath into his barrel chest, slapped both palms against his breast in manly satisfaction, then poked a finger toward Huidekoper, then Eaton, then Johnny Goodall, then Joe Ferris. “We'll set up our tents and you'll share my quarters, gentlemen, and we'll talk about old times.”

And finally the poking finger turned toward Pack. When Pack looked up, the President's big square face was grinning right at him: that grin famous round the world—huge tombstone teeth, currybrush mustache, Prussian-style close-cropped sandy hair and glittering eyeglasses—and suddenly Pack felt the full warmth of it.

“You too, Arthur,” said the President. “I'll win your vote yet, by George, or die trying!”

With a hearty bellow of laughter the President slapped him on the shoulder and Pack felt a flush of heat suffuse his face all the way down into his shoulders.

Roosevelt moved on to the next crony. After a moment Pack swung away, awkward and uncertain, to stride to the edge of camp. His heart was pounding.

He felt weight beside him and turned to see Joe Ferris peering into the trees.

Pack felt the edge of the same fast-traveling thought that must have goaded Joe. “A nice spot for an ambush.”

Joe nodded slowly. Then his expression changed and he began to shake his head. “No. Not Jerry Paddock. He's killed from ambush before, I guess, but this is a matter of pride. He'll come in straight up if he comes at all.”

“And you are aiming to be ready for him.”

“If it comes to that,” Joe agreed with even-voiced gravity. “We lost one President to an assassin two years ago and I don't believe it would be seemly to have it happen again.”

Joe left him then. Pack wandered the edge of the wood, annoyed with himself because even after all the intervening years he still didn't seem able to get close enough to clarify the fuzzy borders of his perception of Theodore Roosevelt. You listened to TR bragging and saw him for nothing but a blowhard—opinionated, arrogant, so full of himself he seemed ready to burst. And yet they all loved him, these men of wide experience and mature judgment.

There was no doubt in Pack's mind that in the days since Roosevelt had become famous by rough-riding his way up San Juan Hill and dispatching the fleet to the Philippines and swaggering his way into the White House at the unheard-of unseasoned age of forty-one, his past life had moved from the province of actuality to that of legend. Joe Ferris and these others were remembering the Roosevelt they wanted their hero to have been. They seemed conveniently to have forgotten the foolish ridiculous loudmouthed dude who had stepped off the train at that same spot exactly twenty years ago.

Pack sat down with his back to the bole of a tree and tried to remember how things really had been.

One

I
t had become the custom on the Little Missouri to greet trains by shooting into the air over the roofs of the railroad cars. The Cantonment had a reputation for deviltry and the boys felt a duty to live up to it. The Northern Pacific had learned to warn its passengers to cower beneath the sills because it was not extraordinary for the intoxicated frontiersmen to shoot through windows.

Some travelers, and even a few residents of the encampment, objected to this boisterous behavior on grounds that it was not only barbaric but downright dangerous. Personally Joe Ferris thought it was fair retribution in behalf of animals on the plains that had been maimed or slaughtered and left to rot by bullets fired by tourists from the bibulous comfort of their seats on the fast-moving trains. Sauce for the goose.

You had to admit, sometimes it did go a bit far. Last month “Bitter Creek” Redhead Finnegan, stimulated by an excess of bug juice, had emptied his revolver into the dining car. Two bullets had struck a breakfast tray carried by a waiter, scattering eggs and terrifying passengers.

Mostly, though, the ammunition passed harmlessly above the railroad cars, eventually to plunge into what at the present rate must soon turn into a lucrative lead mine half a mile upstream.

Tonight the train was several hours late and the noisy welcoming ceremony awakened Joe Ferris from his temporary lodgings in the bare room above what used to be the sutler's store. He looked out the window and saw nothing. Darker than the inside of a cow out there. He heard an impatient chuffing of steam. Far ahead a trainman's disembodied signal lantern swayed and the train began to clank away. Nobody appeared.

Irritation turned Joe Ferris's mouth down. He wouldn't have come in today except for this train. He had received a letter from a man in New York named Theodore Roosevelt. Near as Joe could make out, it asked if he would take the undersigned out after game. The spelling was something awful. Joe had written a reply on the back of the dude's own letter: “If you cannot shoot any better than you can write, I do not think you will hit much game.”

The response had come immediately, by telegram: “Consider yourself engaged.”

Joe didn't want to take the dude out. He didn't want to go out at all. He didn't want to hunt. He hated the killing.

But a fellow had to eat. So here Joe waited, with the train pulling out, and he still hadn't seen anybody get off.

Must be near eleven o'clock. The front door of Jerry Paddock's bar flapped open, dropping a fan of lamplight across the alkali earth. The boys went inside; their silhouettes canted left, toward the foot of the stairs—time to go up to bed, now that the train had departed.

In the reflected glow Joe could make out shadows of the Cantonment's half-dozen drab structures. Then the door closed. Like a curtain descending on a play it effectively ended all discernible life: one moment bedlam and the next a Stygian silence.

May be the client had missed the train, or slept through his stop. It wouldn't be the first time for one of these dudes. There had been a pair two months ago that had drunk themselves into a stupor and slept half way across Montana. They'd sent a telegram from Billings and turned up three days later on the eastbound, woebegone from too many hairs of the dog.

Above the door lights began to glow behind the paper windows of Jerry Paddock's makeshift hotel dormitory where the boys were turning in.

Joe Ferris put a hand on the windowframe, ready to return to his blankets. Then he heard hammering across the parade ground. The door of the flyspecked saloon opened and a tiny stranger was outlined against the weak flame that guttered behind the smoky chimney of Jerry Paddock's lantern. Jerry wasn't a huge man by any means but he loomed ferociously over the newcomer.

So the little dude had managed to jump down off the wrong side of the train and now he'd carried his belongings across forty yards of sagebrush without anyone's knowing.
You'd make a fine Indian. For sure you are in the wrong line of work
, Joe told himself.

He could see the dude wore eyeglasses—an adornment said to be evidence of physical decay and defective moral character.

The newcomer went inside; the door closed, once again shutting off that light; there remained a few dirty illuminations from the papered windows of the second floor. Joe remained at his post a while, curious whether the half-pint dude would take a whiff of the unwashed men on the musty cots in Jerry's big common room and prefer, as Joe did, to sleep elsewhere—even outdoors if necessary. But the visitor did not reappear.

May be he not only suffered from poor eyesight but also lacked a sense of smell.

After a time Joe went back to bed and had trouble getting to sleep. Things didn't seem to be going well. He was making a living, unlike some, but never seemed to get ahead of the price of tomorrow's supper. It had been like that most of the time since he'd first come here seeking his fortune. The railroad brought immigrants to the West without charge; but try to return home and you found the ticket cost five cents a mile.

In the morning Joe Ferris went across to Paddock's first thing and found the newcomer already waiting by the horse trough. The initial impression was one of a high voice and a lot of teeth. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt had the look and manner of a brat from one of those academies to which wealthy folks sent their children to learn useless foolishnesses such as Latin, geometry and the overweening pronunciation of English through locked aristocratic jaws.

The dude was ready and eager, dragging a huge duffel bag, carrying across his shoulder two cased rifles: a waif in a New York suit with a heavy revolver holstered squarely in front where it could do a man irreversible damage if it happened to go off by accident or if the buckboard seat should happen to lurch under him.

Behind the bravado of his sandy mustache he looked sickly, as if he had some wasting disease. He looked very young.

A few of the boys came outside and watched and snickered while Joe introduced himself to the stranger, confirmed to his dissatisfaction that the new arrival was actually his contract, winced at the screeching high pitch of the dude's voice and led the young man to the buckboard.

The boys paid close attention because there was naught else to hold their interest. Most of them had been hide hunters; now they were scratching to find work: they had come here to feed the construction men but the construction men wouldn't arrive in strength until next month. Nevertheless quite a few men on the drift had found their way to the Cantonment, may be because Jerry Paddock's pop-skull tonsil varnish was the cheapest whiskey on the plains. This morning you could tell most of the boys had been painting their noses with it.

Then this fellow Roosevelt piped, “I have come west to shoot buffalo while there are still buffalo left to shoot.” He announced it loudly.

The boys laughed.

Evidently it was not the response the Easterner had desired. He glared at them.

Joe greeted the newcomer's boast with a dour grunt. He didn't tell the whole truth in reply; it might have cost him a badly needed commission.
You are about five months too late. They exterminated the last buffalo herd last spring.

What he said was, “Bad Lands are a hunter's paradise. Plenty big game downriver just now, sir. Blacktail and whitetail, antelope, mountain sheep, beaver if you're so inclined, maybe a bear now and then, and I believe we'll find elk as well.”

“Capital. And buffalo. Most important.”

“We'll scare up plenty of game, sir.”

This was going to be a glorious hunt, Joe thought. Glorious. He put his gloomy regard on the dude. This Mr. Roosevelt was a head shorter than most of the men in the pack. He could not weigh more than 120 pounds, Joe thought. The large blue-grey eyes seemed mournful and painfully sickly. They peered rapidly about from behind big gold-rimmed spectacles that kept slipping down his nose.

The boys had already sized up the new ground and found it wanting in just about every respect. One of them said, “Looks like his deck's shy a joker. Likely don't know near side from off side.”

Roosevelt ignored the insults; perhaps he didn't understand them, or didn't realize he was the butt. He settled a disapproving glance on the buckboard. “What's this?”

Joe said, “Supplies for a fortnight.”

The face twisted and clenched. He had a tic or something; he kept grimacing. “And how far might it be to the hunting ground?”

“This time of year, generally find your luck around the Killdeers. Fifty miles, give or take.”

“I have not come a thousand miles to ride a wooden wagon seat, Mr. Ferris. Where's my horse?”

“I don't own any extra saddle horse, Mr. Roosevelt.”

Wheezing, the dude turned to the onlookers. “Might any of you gentlemen have a spare horse?”

Jerry Paddock swept off his hat and bowed with a flourish. “E.G. Paddock at your service. I happen to have a little herd in my stable.”