Brian Garfield (35 page)

Wil tried to watch everything at once. There was a thudding in his ears. The Marquis's arctic gaze was fixed on Roosevelt—enough to chill a block of ice.

Let's get this done
—
let's make a fight of it, by damnation!

De Morès played with his lead-filled bamboo stick. Without taking his eyes off Roosevelt he said, “Arthur, what are you doing with these gentlemen?”

Packard had to clear his throat before he could reply. “Reporting the facts.”

Joe Ferris said, “Then may be you want to absent yourself from the line of fire.” He kept his eyes on Jerry Paddock, who stood on the porch like a vulture.

Paddock's lip curled. He said to the newspaper man, “And take the crazy half-pint dude with you, while you're at it. Ain't nobody here got any use for him or his stupid big words.”

Roosevelt did not grant Paddock so much as a glance. He said, “Mr. De Morès, in this democracy you have not been authorized by divine right to make your own laws or to change ours. Listen to me, sir—if we have to move your herd, there's bound to be shooting.”

Arthur Packard eased away, off to one side. Wil Dow took note of the movement without turning his eyes or his head.

The Marquis said in a chilly voice, “Perhaps there is room to compromise.”

“I will not compromise with a man when he is plainly in the wrong.”

The Marquis smiled, sleepy-eyed, silken. “If I remove the cattle, then you shall remove Mr. Reuter from the land.”

“No.” Roosevelt chopped the word off; it seemed to reverberate afterward.

The Marquis's smile hardened. “Then I'll slaughter him where he stands.”

“Try that, sir, and I'll see you hang for certain,” Roosevelt said in a controlled voice that gave each word its full due.

Wil Dow thought there was nothing left to do now but wait for it to explode: the fuse was lit.

Jerry Paddock stirred: the rifle barrel glinted. His abrupt movement made Will realize how still Paddock had remained until now. It was a measure of the apprehension in Paddock.

The Marquis De Morès looked away toward the lights of town. After a moment he spoke in a different voice:

“A compromise then, as I said before. Shall we put it at one thousand dollars—no, make that a thousand five hundred dollars, or one dollar per head, to let them graze on the bottoms for a few weeks until they get up to proper weight? Then I shall bring them to the abattoir and they'll be out of your way.”

Wil Dow was astounded by the Marquis's retreat. He looked at Roosevelt. It was a lot of money.

Roosevelt said, “I appreciate your willingness to discuss the matter. But how am I to know when ‘a few weeks' is to end? No, Mr. De Morès. I can't back down from you, not for any sum of money. I want your cattle off my land by sunset tomorrow or I'll slaughter them where they stand.”

Wil Dow heard Arthur Packard's abrupt intake of breath.

Surely it was bluff, Wil thought; Roosevelt wasn't a wanton slaughterer of steers. All it needed was a banging of tin pans and gunshots; the herd would remove itself soon enough. It wasn't the cattle that posed a threat; it was Johnny Goodall and the De Morès crew.

Just then Madame la Marquise appeared in the doorway. The Marquis heard her step; he glanced around at her. She did not speak. Her husband held her glance a moment and then turned to face the five men below him. With a strange conciliation the Marquis said, “I'm sorry you cannot accommodate me in this favor. Very well. We shall remove the cattle from the land, as you ask.”

In a gesture to Jerry Paddock, the Marquis flapped a slack hand as if throwing something away. Paddock strolled to the steps, tucked the rifle under his arm, dropped off the verandah and walked away into the night, stroking his beard.

The Marquis turned on his heel—a smart military aboutface—and took his wife by the arm and steered her inside. She looked back briefly; Wil could not tell at whom she was looking, but he saw Arthur Packard frown furiously and then De Morès had disappeared and the door closed, and it occurred to Wil that the Marquis may have broken off the confrontation out of respect for his wife's safety. It was the only thing he could think of that could explain De Morès's sudden decision to back down.

He felt savagely dissatisfied even though clearly this was not the last of it. Things could not remain this highly charged. There would be more, he thought, and it was likely there would be powder smoke and blood.

At Elkhorn, Dutch Reuter picked a path through the clutter of dry antlers on the piazza and walked down the meadow in such obvious desolation that Wil Dow was on the point of following anxiously behind him. But he respected Dutch's privacy; he only watched as Dutch went down the bank and tossed a stone into Blacktail Creek. Dutch hunkered there a long time.

It was cold, and finally Wil went back inside the house, where Roosevelt was writing a letter—probably to his sister Bamie back in New York. Or to his other faithful correspondent: almost certainly a woman, but what sort of woman? In what way connected to him? It was a bafflement to Wil.

Dutch did not come in for supper. He did not appear at all that night, and in the morning his horse and saddle were gone from the stable; gone too was his kit. He had lit out, it seemed, for parts unknown. Wil Dow could imagine his thoughts:
To bring any more trouble on Mr. Roosevelt I do not wish. Good to me he is.

Or perhaps Dutch was only following his urge to wander—like a cloud's shadow across the ground.

Thirteen

T
his meeting at Eaton's Custer Trail Ranch was charged with expectation. A chinook howled around the house, bringing wind and rain and muddy thaw; it also had brought a powerful visitor from across the line—Montana baron Granville Stuart, who sat at the head of the Eaton table as if he owned it.

A.C. Huidekoper listened for the music in Granville Stuart's deep voice and heard none; the voice was a tuneless rasp. One could not escape the feeling there would be a similar sound if Stuart were to scrape his hand across the edge of his jaw: he was the sort who would need to shave more than once a day to keep beard-shadow from coarsening his sun-browned skin.

At every encounter with Granville Stuart, Huidekoper found himself endeavoring to dislike the man, but failing in the endeavor. Stuart—hardened pioneer—had brought one of the first herds of cattle up the trail all the way from Doan's Store in Texas to the Montana wilderness back in the war-charred days when blackleg renegades made any cattle drive a gantlet of danger, when Comanche and Cheyenne were still a deadly threat on the southern and central plains—even before Custer's army challenged the Sioux in the north; Granville Stuart had braved it all and established his cattle kingdom in the new world of Montana. He had blazed the way and earned fame and honor on the frontier, and along with it a portion of fear and distaste, for it was common knowledge that his methods of protecting his empire sometimes had much in common with the methods of the more ruthless medieval lords of the Inquisition.

It could be said politely that Granville Stuart tended not to err on the genteel side. Huidekoper often had found occasion to deplore his appalling attitudes. Yet Stuart in spite of all remained ingratiating, even likeable. There was something childlike about his innocent faith in the infallibility of righteous institutions, the simplicity of all questions, the rectitude of all answers and the propriety of brutality in a good cause.

Granville Stuart personified the legendary Texican attitude toward lawbreakers: whether they might be heinous felons or casual miscreants, whether their victims be murdered, maimed or merely inconvenienced, his answer remained the same; it adhered always to the same Old Testament simplicity:

Hang him.

Not surprisingly the news of his presence at Eaton's had drawn a sizable gathering tonight. Among the stockmen on hand were J.N. Simpson, Henry S. Boice, Gregor Lang, H.R. Tarbell, Pierce Bolan, J.L. Truscott, the unavoidable Deacon W.P. Osterhaut and half a dozen more, and of course Eaton.
And y'r ob't s'v't
, Huidekoper thought, out of respect for his sense of the precise.

Off by himself, according to his habit, stood Johnny Goodall, representing the Marquis De Morès, who was again in the East doing something that had to do with finance—something doubtless devious and sinister, of which no good would come.

They awaited the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt, who had the farthest to ride—his Elkhorn Ranch was nearly fifty miles from here. In the meantime there was desultory conversation about the end-of-winter weather and about the confused reports and rumors of an expanding bloody provincial rebellion just over the border of Canada. Several conversations buzzed in Huidekoper's ears. The gathering of men had the superficial air of a social evening but the ladies were absent and the Eaton bar was closed—sure indications of serious business at hand.

“A lot of wasted time,” Huidekoper heard Granville Stuart bark. “Save the Territory a lot of trouble and hang those two boys that ambushed the Marquis.”

Howard Eaton said, “Seems to be some dispute as to who ambushed whom.”

“Why, those boys are trying to put a saddle on you, Howard,” scoffed Stuart. “You know as well as I do, a man with blue blood flowing in his veins doesn't go out to bushwhack those ring-toters from a dry gulch. What I hear about them, good men go wide around them as if they were a swamp. Now I can't honestly see the Marquis dirtying his hands on the likes of those, can you?”

The discussion was interrupted when Theodore Roosevelt entered, looking surprisingly fit in his trim buckskin suit. Granville Stuart accorded him the courtesy of rising from his chair, since Roosevelt was something of a foreigner and allegedly high-born as well.

Stuart was tall, wide, muscular, imposing as an outsized marble statue of a general. He offered his handshake. Roosevelt showed a definite constraint before accepting it.

Huidekoper did not know what Roosevelt might have heard about Stuart that caused such hesitation; but he had observed often enough in his lifetime that such little things could lead from the smallest start to the bitterest quarrels: they stung a man's pride and made him lose face, and eventually the memory of the little thing could be the chancre that turned the man savage.

And he was acquainted well enough with Granville Stuart to know it might not take very much to transform him into just that state.

Roosevelt turned away from Stuart almost immediately and, strangely, addressed himself to Johnny Goodall: “Well, Johnny. How do you find things?”

“That kind of depends on how you lost them.” As usual Johnny did not smile; but his voice expressed an offhand amusement and it elicited Roosevelt's soft chuckle.

Huidekoper saw the way Roosevelt nodded his square sandy head. He found it extraordinary that Johnny and Roosevelt should be enjoying colloquy on such informal terms. The two men could not have been less alike—they might have been from different species—yet there appeared to be something positively warm between them, something in the easy way their eyes met and then drifted off to examine the rest of the crowd, something that suggested a camaraderie, a respect for each other and even perhaps an affection for which Huidekoper could think of no plausible explanation.

Granville Stuart was bending Eaton's ear. Huidekoper caught a portion of it: “—the little young fellow from New York over there?”

“He's proved himself on round-up and on the range.”

“Understand he's been quarreling with my friend the Marquis.”

“He's had his provocations, I believe.”

“The very thought of Jerry Paddock makes me feel positively warm toward Judas Iscariot,” Deacon Osterhaut was saying to Pierce Bolan. “Paddock's a mendacious scoundrel.”

Bolan said, “A what?”

But at that moment Deacon Osterhaut espied Huidekoper and reached for him. Huidekoper could not escape. The Deacon's handshake was like a Bible drummer's: he gripped Huidekoper's right hand in his own, folded his left over them both, stared Huidekoper unctuously in the eye and, standing a foot too close, spoke in his treacly Southern accent with foul-breathed earnestness: “I've lost four head to wolves. It is an unholy tragedy. Now you bring your hounds to my place at the earliest convenience, y'hear?”

Huidekoper extracted himself as quickly as he could from the clutches of the dour pumpkin roller.

Huidekoper was taken aback when he saw the glint of Roosevelt's eyes, the flash of his teeth in comical zest. Roosevelt said
sotto voce
, “One might suspect the Deacon suffereth from mental carbuncles and dyspepsia.”

Huidekoper took the New Yorker away from the fireplace. In the corner past the window he said, “There'll be a vote tonight, on the Association.”

“I know.”

“I wanted to sound you out privately.”

“About what?”

Huidekoper said, “About the Marquis De Morès.”

“What about him?”

“If the Association were in your hands—what would you do about him?”

Roosevelt blinked, his eyes artificially large behind the lenses. “I should seek to insure that the laws be enforced—and I should be prepared to journey to Bismarck or if need be to Washington to make sure they were carried out properly and vigorously. But I can't support or condone the employment of lawlessness to fight lawlessness.”

Huidekoper said, “Then you've changed your mind?”

“Not about vigilantes.”

“About taking a hand here. If your name is put forward for the chair, you'll accept it?”

“Let's wait and see whose names are put forward, shall we?”

Roosevelt gave him a quick flash of a smile and a friendly gentle punch on the bicep, and turned to contend with a question from Pierce Bolan.

Huidekoper stood alone for a moment, pleased. He felt that in some fashion—perhaps soon to make itself more clear—his judgment had been vindicated. His early instinct had been astute: Roosevelt, for all his initial reluctance, could yet be the salvation of them. Huidekoper held what he had no difficulty admitting to himself was a nearly superstitious conviction that Roosevelt—because he was on a level with De Morès in matters not only of class and wealth but of will, acumen, leadership,
spirit
—Roosevelt, in spite of all the dubious attributes that made him seem ludicrous and outlandish, could be the one man who had any chance of marshaling the Forces of Good successfully against the Marquis De Morès and his ever so formidable Forces of Evil. The victory would require no less than a Crusade, Huidekoper knew, and no less a knight to lead it than the outwardly absurd Theodore Roosevelt.