Brian Garfield (31 page)

“I expect he knows better, Dutch. He wouldn't try it a second time. Most likely you're safe, specially long as you're under Mr. Roosevelt's protection.”

“Don't need nobody's protection.” Dutch took out his tobacco, rolled up a paper-collar stiff and ignited it. Then he said, “Before, he Mr. Roosevelt did not like. Hate, now.”

Sometimes it was hard to decide what Dutch meant; his fractured English made for poor understanding. Joe said, “You mean the Markee hates Mr. Roosevelt—more than he did before?”

“Just so. And worse if I stay. He Mr. Roosevelt try to kill, maybe.”

“I don't think even the Markee's that big of a fool.”

“I hear cowboys talk about Roosenfelder the Jew bastard. This from the Markee they got. He Jews don't like.”

“I met a couple Jew folks,” Joe said. “I buy from them all the time, stocking the store. They ain't nearly as crazy as some. They don't shake, they don't refuse to ride the railroad, they don't mind if you take a drink or a smoke. Practical folks. What's the Markee got against them?”

“Don't know. Ask him. Hey, Joe—Mr. Roosevelt, he Jewish?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Sure be funny if he was not.” Then Dutch said, “Maybe I favor for boss make—kill Markee and go away.” He suddenly grinned, as if to take the edge off it; but Joe wasn't entirely sure he was joking.

At one side of the barn Wil Dow was milking a cow, squeezing loud jets one-two, one-two into an echoing tin pail. This probably was the only childless ranch in the territory where they took milk. Mr. Roosevelt's fondness for drinking the stuff was one of his suspect foreign traits. Like his eyeglasses and his accent, it set him apart and made him the object of saloon jokes that were more insulting than fond.

Joe said to Dutch, “I expect the Markee isn't happy about Mr. Roosevelt keeping you on. But let Mr. Roosevelt worry about that, Dutch.” He helped himself to water and tried to keep his tone casual. “What really did happen out there?”

“Heap of shooting.”

“I know that.” Exasperation nudged Joe's patience. “Who did it?”

“Didn't see 'em.”

“How many, then?”

“Don't know.”

“Tell me this. There's talk you boys were riding on the château to set fire to it. That a fact?”

“Hell no.”

“Well then. Was De Morès the only one?”

“Paddock—on the rise of the hill, us he saw. He horse turns, back out of sight rides—back to the Marquis, I guess. That mile we go. Over hill we go, and everyplace guns was. Three, four, five, don't know. Too busy we was, from horses jumping.”

“Hidden guns? You never saw who was shooting?”

“Yah. Never saw.” Dutch stepped to the edge of the piazza to drop ash on the ground. The breeze carried it away. “What happen, you want to know? I you tell, Joe—too scared, we was. Too scared to remember. Too scared to see.”

“I guess I can understand that. Who started the shooting, then?”

“Don't know. Wasn't us.”

“Was it De Morès?”

“No. Was from the bushes.”

“Ambush. Jerry Paddock. That bastard Markee.”

Roosevelt came riding in past the house. Joe turned toward him in indignation. “You hear that, Mr. Roosevelt?”

“Hear what?”

“Dutch and his friends were ambushed. They were fired on from the bushes. I always knew the Markee was a shifty son of a bitch, but this—”

Roosevelt thrust a rigid index finger toward Dutch. “Have you changed your mind? Do you want to file a complaint and press charges against Mr. De Morès?”

“No. No law stuff.”

Roosevelt returned to his gaze to Joe. “There you have it. It would appear there's little to be done.”

“We could organize a party and hang him for murder.”

“Not without due process of law, by thunder! Not while there are men of civilized decency left alive!” Roosevelt dismounted. As he led the horse toward the barn he called back over his shoulder, “Are you ready to head west in the morning?”

“Sure enough,” Joe replied without enthusiasm.

Roosevelt had tolled him into this two days ago when he'd returned on the train from back East. The New Yorker wanted to go out on a hunting expedition before the onset of winter. He wanted Joe Ferris with him. Joe didn't care to go hunting but it seemed a prudent time to be away from town for a while; anyhow he needed money to keep the store alive; so he had agreed, after McKenzie and Pack had offered to take turns looking after the store in his absence.

Roosevelt had been in a good mood in spite of the fact that he had the
other
arm in a sling. Seemed he'd no sooner arrived on Long Island than he'd gone out on a hunt, following the hounds, and his horse had pitched him into a stream, breaking some bone or other in his arm. It really wasn't safe to allow the poor dude near any sort of horse.

But Roosevelt had been cheerful when he'd stepped off the train and he couldn't wait to set out into the wilderness.

Joe couldn't help wondering what had perked him up so. He knew of few things that could have such an effect. Strong drink and pretty women, mainly. Joe knew this much: Roosevelt didn't drink.

Did he have a woman back East?

If he did, he wasn't talking about her.

In the morning Dutch Reuter came along. Dutch drove the wagon; he was to be mainly the cook. Bill Sewall was invited to accompany the hunters but the old Mennonite stayed behind to help young Dow look after the ranch—he said he preferred that to traveling the endless boring prairie.

It was easy to see by the way he moved that Roosevelt was favoring the injured arm. Nevertheless he was carrying his entire armory. “I want a grizzly bear above all. And a mature buffalo—a great bison bull.”

Joe made a face.

They came across the cabin at midmorning, that first day out. Joe remembered the place all too well. From the outset that shack had been fated ill.

Mr. Roosevelt said, “I've passed this place a score of times and always wondered about it. It seems sound enough. Why doesn't someone live in it?”

“It happens you're asking the right man that question, sir. I can tell you the whole sorry story of this miserable excuse for a house.”

Joe went on to tell it:

Two years ago in the railroad-building days, someplace nearly two hundred miles away south in the Short Pine Hills, some poor fool had thought to make his fortune cutting logs for ties. The fool aimed to float the ties north down the Little Missouri and sell them to the NPRR.

He was a fool because he should have asked. Anybody could have told him not to trust that river.

A storm had swelled the Little Missouri; the fool had lost control of his ties—the binding ropes snapped, his rafts splintered into giant toothpicks, and after wild rides the logs had been tossed helter-skelter onto riverbanks from here to Louisiana.

No one knew how fate had disposed of the fool. May be he'd been swept along in the flood; may be he'd given up in good cheer and gone farther west.

One accumulation of ties got trapped in a whirlpool eddy at a sharp bend 25 miles north of Medora town. When the flood subsided it left the stack of logs high and drying.

That was two years ago; Joe remembered it because he had camped here with Dutch and a hunting party, waiting out the storm. As they'd broken camp, Dutch had made a note of the location of the lumber pile. Then a couple of months later when the wood was mostly dried Joe had helped him set the ties on end like stockade fencing and they'd packed the chinks with mud and laced a sod roof across it and hung a horseshoe points-up over the doorway. They had nailed paper over the window openings and Dutch had talked vaguely about settling his wife here but then Deacon and Mrs. Osterhaut had offered fifty dollars for the place, which was far more than its worth, and without a second thought Dutch accepted the money.

Dutch would have kept it all, too. Joe remembered having words with him in Big Mouth Bob's Bug Juice Dispensary. It had required three drinks' worth of reasoning, after which Dutch had parted with a double eagle and a half eagle. They'd shaken hands and bought more drinks and forgiven each other. At the drunken end of the evening they'd lurched outside into the darkness and been rolled by a hard-breathing villain who had escaped in the dark with their gold pieces.

Joe always suspected Jerry Paddock had done the deed but he couldn't honestly swear he'd recognized the man by sight or by scent, dark as it was and drunk as he was.

So no profit had come, after all, from the cabin of ties. It had started hard-luck and stayed that way.

Joe had gone back to work hunting. Dutch had disappeared into the wilderness according to his habit.

Now, riding beside Roosevelt, Joe looked back at the wagon to make sure Dutch was not in earshot; then he reined closer to Roosevelt and confided, “You know, sometimes Dutch ain't the most reliable of men.”

Joe liked him anyhow. He'd put up with Dutch for a whole season during which they had provided the NPRR construction crews and dining-car passengers with fresh-killed venison for five cents a pound.

When it got to be too much killing for Joe he quit. But nothing seemed to get Dutch down. He was what flap-eared Arthur Packard called a free soul.

There was for example the time when Joe and Dutch rode across the tracks complaining of the heat and noticed an eastbound passenger train approaching in the distance—and the next thing Joe knew, Dutch was flagging down the train.

It labored to a juddering halt with great effort. When the engineer shouted down at Dutch, inquiring what the emergency was, Dutch only waved with great cheer, climbed aboard the dining car and helped himself to a pitcher of ice-water.

Joe watched from his saddle while, in the face of the train crew's outrage, Dutch leaped off the train, still clutching the silver pitcher of ice-water. He drank deep and then proffered it up to his companion but Joe didn't have the nerve and only shook his head. Dutch had another swallow and then tossed the pitcher up into the hands of the surprised conductor. He said in his German accent, “The alkali water in the river I don't like. Thank you,” and made a cheerful bow of thanks before he gathered the reins and mounted.

Joe remembered how he'd cringed as they rode away followed by shouted threats upon the safety of their persons.

He remembered it all as they approached the cabin he and Dutch had built. Its luck hadn't changed. It stood abandoned, weeds crowding the doorway, windows gaping vacantly. Joe said, “I'm not sure if it's still Osterhaut's.”

“What happened, then?”

“Ever put your nose in the door?” Joe replied.

Dutch watched with amusement. Roosevelt reined toward the cabin. The sorrel tried to shy away. Controlling it with difficulty the Easterner bent low to peer inside. “I don't see anything.”

Dutch said, “Go closer.”

The horse balked. Roosevelt sank his heels. “Great Scott!” He lashed the rein-ends across its flanks; it only shied back.

“It doesn't like something—”

There was a gust of wind. The sorrel all but pitched its rider; just the same, Joe saw it when the stink hit Roosevelt's nostrils: his face contorted violently. The nervous horse backed up.

Now at last Roosevelt understood the animal's behavior. He allowed it to trot back to the trail.

Joe said, “May be ten years before the smell clears out, if it ever does. They tell it, the nice kitty was under the bed when the Deacon and Mrs. Osterhaut came home with the hired hand. The hired man favored waiting for the nice kitty to leave. Mrs. Osterhaut put her chin in the air and said this and that. You met them—you recall their dispositions? Hired man tried to talk reason but Mrs. Osterhaut made a fuss and the Deacon wasn't ready to listen to a hired man, so he went in after the skunk with a pitchfork, with the result that you can smell.”

By now Dutch had caught up with the wagon and began laughing. “Polecat Hollow, this place his new name.”

Roosevelt wrinkled his nose. “And where are the Osterhauts living?”

“Trying to farm beef cattle over on the Little Cannonball. As you can tell from the round-up tally they aren't making much of a go of it. He makes a dollar here and a dollar there for doing confirmations and such—I guess it's enough to keep body and soul apart.” He chuckled then. “That skunk didn't improve their mood any. Deacon's still complaining about everything in sight.”

“It baffles me,” Roosevelt said, “that such fellows fail to realize how their complaints make people dislike them. Everyone despises a whiner.”

There was one thing, Joe conceded in the privacy of his thoughts, that you could say for Roosevelt: he never whined.

In fact that was one of the exasperating things about him.

Under a racket of rattling rustling cottonwood leaves they departed the river bottoms and climbed west toward the high prairie, dragging the wagon up sharp-pitched slopes until they reached an eminence from which they could see clear across the colorful Bad Lands behind them.

Not far ahead of them a wolf stood alone on a promontory. With gentlemanly generosity Roosevelt said, “Your shot, Dutch.”

Dutch Reuter found his rifle under the seat and slid it from the scabbard but he did not lift it. He cocked the hammer, uncocked it and put the weapon away. The wolf ran down off the skyline and disappeared. Roosevelt said, “Why didn't you shoot?”

“I am no good shot.”

“You made your living shooting buffalo.”

“Buffalo was big target, close by, not move.” Dutch waved toward the promontory. “Three, four hundred meters must be.”

“Then you need more practice. Most of us are not born experts. If we choose resolutely to apply ourselves, we can by sheer industry make ourselves fair rifle shots.”

Joe Ferris said, “May be he's just tired of shooting and killing.”