Brian Garfield (43 page)

Roosevelt stepped down. “There's the mother cow. You can see plainly it's not my brand.”

Wil Dow said, “It's De Morès's brand, sir.”

The hired hand said, “I know what I'm doing here—I know who I work for.” He had a big hat, rusty spurs and a sly confidential smile.

Roosevelt said, “Put down that iron. I'll give you your time. You're fired.”

The hired man reared back on his haunches. “I always look out for my boss's interests. What's wrong in that?”

“By George, a man who will steal
for
me will steal
from
me. We don't need your kind here.”

After they had distributed the cattle among the greening pasture lands there was one more halfhearted storm. Huidekoper loomed through the rain. “They scared out George Medlock, Bill Roberts and Jim Monroe. Three good men by my reckoning. They heard the Stranglers were coming, and they rode out of the country.”

“I am sorry to hear it,” said Roosevelt.

“The Stranglers went on down Beaver Creek and yesterday they hanged Tom Allen. He stood up against his house with a cocked rifle and taunted them—I hear he winged one before they knocked him down. They put a rope around his neck and demanded information, and when he didn't tell them anything, they hanged him.”

Wil Dow said, “I heard Tom Allen had a habit of branding cattle that weren't his, that he acquired in ways that wouldn't stand up to research.”

“He couldn't stand up to a lynching,” Uncle Bill Sewall said.

Roosevelt stood with Sewall and Dow on the covered piazza. “For Heaven's sake step down and come in—don't sit there drowning.”

“No thank you. I won't stop. I'm on my way to the Killdeers. But I felt I had to warn you about the Stranglers. They don't leave room for doubt, these boys. They give every suspect the benefit of the noose.”

Wil Dow said, “Seems to be having the desired effect. I haven't heard anyone complain of stock theft just lately.”

Huidekoper let it go by. “I don't mean to alarm you, Theodore. But the Stranglers are vigilante-ing in force. Your small outfit is a very possible victim, especially since you've sided against De Morès more than once.” Huidekoper took a long breath. “They have killed more than twenty men.”

“
Twenty?
”

“Including more than one through carelessness and mistakes. One of the masked fellows went to a new widow last week and admitted a slight mistake had been made when they hanged her husband. They tell me the fellow in the mask said, ‘Madam, the joke is on us.'”

“You made that up.”

“I'm afraid I didn't,” Huidekoper said. “I've heard this also—that two of the so-called rustlers were found shot dead by exploding bullets. I know only one man on this range who uses such things.”

“A serious accusation requires more than hearsay evidence. You know that.”

“Of course I do. But I've been gathering facts, and some of them are of uncommon peculiarity. For example the lynchings seem to be directed entirely against permanent settlers—men with houses or at least cabins. Doesn't one ordinarily think of horse-thieves as migratory transients? If so, why are all the victims men who live in their own houses? Also I put forth for your attention the singular fact that, in spite of twenty-odd killings, and in spite of their having frightened and driven scores of squatters out of the country, not one stolen horse or cow has been recovered.” He lifted the reins. “Not one.”

The rain left with him.

Bill Sewall went about grumbling in his beard but Roosevelt refused to allow his spirits to be daunted. “Right, lads. Bring out the tally sheets if you please.”

Having consulted the round-up records they concluded they had lost no more than twenty-five head all winter from cold, wolves, bogs and illness. “They seem in admirable shape,” Roosevelt said. “We've got thirty-three hundred and fifty head of cattle, market value about eleven thousand dollars, and it appears our cows have dropped eleven hundred and forty calves this season. I'm certain now—I shall make this my regular business. Old fellows, I count us a resounding success!”

Bill Sewall said, “Give or take a Strangler or two.”

The boss gave him a tough square look and, after a moment, reluctantly nodded.

Sixteen

From The Bad Lands Cow Boy:

We neglected in our last issue to mention the minstrel entertainment given by home talent at the rink on the evening of the Twenty-sixth of June. The variety part of the entertainment would have been a complete success if we had brought our guns along and killed all the performers at the beginning of the first act. The orchestra led by Mose de Spice was simply indescribable. To escape a popular uprising Mose fled the next morning for the Pacific Coast.

Several men have been hung for horse-stealing, most recently Modesty Carter, but the plague of outlawry still goes on. We wish to be placed on record as believing that the only way to cure horse-stealing is to hang the thief wherever caught.

Pack took a running start to trundle his wheelbarrow-load of papers up the embankment to the depot platform. The train chuffed to a halt and Pack handed the newspapers up to a porter, an armload at a time. While the porter stacked them in a corner of the vestibule, Joe Ferris came out of the car past him and stepped down off the train.

Pack said, “I wondered where you were. Another buying trip to Bismarck?”

“Just so.” Joe picked up one of the copies of
The Bad Lands Cow Boy
and glanced through it, stepping aside to allow a handful of passengers to climb aboard. Joe looked up and Pack saw his head rear back; Joe blinked rapidly, then gripped Pack's elbow and steered him rapidly away from the train steps.

Pack said, “What's wrong?”

“You see who just got on the train?”

“No, I didn't notice. Why?”

“The fellow in the Mexican hat? That was Modesty Carter.”

“What of it?”

Joe folded the newspaper and pushed it in front of Pack's face. “Read your own column. Modesty Carter got hanged for horse stealing, did he?”

“Now, I had it on the best authority,” Pack muttered, while he allowed Joe Ferris to haul him away from the embankment.

“If he picks up that newspaper,” Joe said, “you'll be explaining things to him down the business end of a six-shooter. You had better arm yourself.”

“I never carry a gun.”

Joe regarded him with narrowing suspicion. “This best authority of yours. Did it tell you Modesty Carter was dead—or
was going
to be hanged?”

Pack turned a palm upwards. “It was three days ago. I assumed by now they'd have had the job done.”

On the Fourth of July Pack dressed in his good suit and groomed himself appropriately for the speakers' platform and went outside with a stern scowl on his face to indicate his disapproval of the bursts of shooting that cluttered the morning. The boys never seemed to think about the fact that when bullets were fired into the air they had to come down somewhere. Last Christmas McKenzie's mule had been killed outright by a shot that appeared to have been fired straight down into the top of its head. McKenzie was still upset about it and whenever the subject came up it still caused uproars of laughter from Redhead Finnegan and that irresponsible short-sighted crowd of Irish hunters.

Joe Ferris emerged from the store, locked up and joined him. Joe had a sour reluctant expression on his round face. “You heard they took Modesty Carter off the train and killed him.”

“Did they. Too bad he didn't read the
Cow Boy.
”

“Too bad for him he couldn't read at all. So now lynching's the price of illiteracy, is it?”

“The man was a horse-thief, Joe. I even heard him brag about it one night.”

“When he was drunk.”

“
In vino Veritas.
”

“What about the
veritas
in your God-damn newspaper?” Joe said, not masking his disgust. Then he walked away. Pack stared after him, affronted.

The sunlight thrashed Pack. Flies swarmed incessantly and he tried to ignore the suffocating blood stink of the abattoir. It was closed for the holiday but the heat and the motionless air had trapped its spoor.

None of that seemed to discourage the celebration. In one street the heavy traffic of pedestrians had made way for a whooping horse race. It kicked up a great thunderhead of powder dust. In another street eight men in their trapdoors ran a frantic foot race. Pack thought,
Riley Luffsey would have distanced them all.
But poor young Luffsey had chosen the wrong course and had paid for his race. It continued to amaze Pack that such a clear lesson in the fruits of evil seemed to have made no difference in the behavior of Finnegan, O'Donnell and the jackanapes pack, not excepting such unfortunates as the late and unlamented Modesty Carter.

High across the river a group of ladies was gathered under parasols and Lady Medora was amusing them with her target practice. She fired from a kneeling position toward a target against the backstop of the bluff. Pack knew she was a crack shot—better than her husband. The Diana of the Bad Lands.

It made Pack slightly uneasy; he preferred to think of this woman of exquisite delicacy painting beneath her parasol or playing Verdi on the piano in her southwest room.

The last time he had seen her at close range, a week ago, she had looked positively gaunt, and Pack had felt a savage bafflement: was she Innocent? Or was she trapped in a painful limbo between secret love and outward loyalty?

He made his way toward the depot. This morning in town the shooting was especially promiscuous and annoying. When Pack elbowed through the crowd and climbed onto the speakers' platform to join Huidekoper and Roosevelt and the others he was of a mind to put as much distance between himself and Roosevelt as he could. He sat down at the far edge of the platform beside Deacon Osterhaut while the noisy formalities commenced with a parade that included the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band, the members of Fort Sumter Post G.A.R., and from Montana the Onward Lodge R.R.B.

There was a rolling mighty display of farming and reaping machinery and it was followed by citizens in carriages, on horseback and finally on foot.

Bill Sewall stood just below the edge of the platform. He beckoned and, when Pack bent over, remarked in his ear, “Trouble with it is, everybody in five hundred miles is so enthusiastic they had to get in on the procession there, so there's nobody left to watch it except you and me and those gents over there who appear to be too drunk to see a thing.”

Sewall by now was widely known for his fundamentalist disapproval of the heavy drinking of the Bad Landers. It would have made him a laughingstock if he had been a less formidable man.

The parading seemed endless in the heat but finally it was over and Howard Eaton mounted the platform and recited the Declaration of Independence very loudly. The band struck up an overture and the entire crowd joined in singing “America.” Deacon Osterhaut offered up an interminable prayer.

Sewall looked at Huidekoper's bald head. “Old A.C. ain't careful he'll get the sunburn on his beaver slide there.”

Pack's turn came. He took out his printed speech and read it aloud with as much fervor as he could manage in the wilting heat. His message to the throng was one of good tidings—Progress!—and when he concluded his remarks he was pleased by the length and enthusiasm of the applause, liquored up though it may have been.

Then he glanced to his right and announced as briefly and brusquely as decency permitted, “And now it is my privilege to give you former Minority Leader of the New York State Assembly, prominent Bad Lands citizen and chairman of the Little Missouri Stockmen's Association—Theodore Roosevelt.”

There was too much applause to suit Pack. After prolonged yelling and whistling and the firing of far too many gunshots, Roosevelt smiled at Pack without visible rancor as he rose to speak. He had put on a healthy amount of muscle-weight in the past year but to Pack he seemed owlish and foolish. He spoke without notes. His voice was reedy but it had a penetrating whine. Admittedly he spoke with precise clarity; Pack, who sat clear of Huidekoper where no one would jostle his arms while he wrote down his notes, had no trouble understanding him.

Roosevelt said, “My fellow citizens of Dakota, we—ranchmen and cowboys alike—have opened a new land. This is our land—all of us. Let us be reminded that the Lord made the earth for us all, and not for just a few who may have been chosen by their purple bloodlines. We all are the pioneers, and we know that the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them. Their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities. So it is particularly incumbent on us here today to act so as to leave our children a heritage for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse.”

Roosevelt went on. Ebullient and histrionic, he gathered energy until he was declaiming with intense galvanic explosions of sound and crazed facial contortions. Yet he held them in thrall. You had to grant it to him. His bombastic rhetoric would have wrung tears from a statue of General Sherman.

Showing his whole mouthful of huge tombstone teeth he enlisted their emotions: “Rampant barbarism must be countered by clarity and courage!”

A clear enough reference to the Stranglers. So foolish. Roosevelt's maniacal bravado in the name of justice—his naive fastidiousness regarding due process—these things could bring him down, Pack thought. There were exceptional occasions when the ends justified the means; you had to acknowledge that, or you had no decent contact with reality.

“I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity,” the dude went on. “Like all Americans I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But it is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it. We must keep in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.”