The Bold Frontier (39 page)

A hoarse voice called from the train. “There’s a man down in here!”

“If that madman has enough bullets, we’ll all
die
,” Swanny cried. “Somebody stop him!”

“Who?” Redbird shouted. “Who?”

“Mr. Seelbinder.” Lamar yanked the braided sleeve. “Mr. Seelbinder, I’m going to try something.”

“What, run for help?” Redbird belched, weaving on his feet. He clutched one of the great engine drivers for support. He’d fortified himself too liberally.

“No, sir, something else. I’ve got a scheme.”

“Why, that’s the silliest, maddest—”

“Mr. Seelbinder, you’re drunk,” Lamar exclaimed, prodded to anger by his despair. “Nobody else is doing anything—”

“Because we’re whipped,” Swanny said.

“We are if we say we are,” Lamar protested. Redbird paid no attention. He tilted his bottle and guzzled. “Oh, hell,” Lamar cried. He snatched the bottle, leaped on the cowcatcher, and jumped down on the other side.

It took Redbird a moment to realize that his hand no longer contained a bottle. The terror of deprivation infused him with courage. “Come here, you give me that!” He lunged past the cowcatcher in pursuit of Lamar, who now stood in the open, all watery in the knees.

“Give that back, you crazy rapscallion,” cried Redbird in quavering tones.

Lamar didn’t dare look toward the farmer. If he did, he’d fall apart with fright. He commenced dancing around, kicking up his heels and rolling his head from side to side in a lunatic way. He uttered nonsense words, roughly approximating
yiii-yiii-yiii,
with maximum lung power.

Redbird was agog, staring at the caterwauling youngster dancing around beside the cowcatcher.

Suddenly Lamar flung the bottle away into the field and hopped backwards, thumbing his nose. “Yah, yah!” he cried, windmilling his arms and then turning a somersault. As he flipped over, he had a weird, upside-down view of the farmer standing near the train, the faintly smoking rifle in his hands.

The farmer observed Lamar and the conductor, and raised the rifle. With a cry, Redbird loped for cover. “Dern boy’s lost his mind. Must be scared. Thought he was made solider than that. …”

His heart hammering like a sinner’s before the Judgment Throne, Lamar went skipping through the weeds toward the farmer.

He’d never been so frightened in all his days. He flapped his arms and lolled his tongue and rolled his eyes around. He jiggled his head back and forth like a scarecrow in a cyclone, and soon he came within thirty feet of the terrible stout man with the wild blue eye.

Lukendorf brought the rifle up and levered another shell into the chamber.

“You, boy, stop right there.”

Twenty feet away, Lamar danced and chanted madly. He spun like a dervish. He spit out everything in his mouth, hoping it bore some resemblance to foam.

Ten feet—

“Boy, you keep coming at me, I’ll shoot you.”

Lamar kept coming. He gnashed his teeth and yanked his hair.

“What’s happening, Papa?” That was Belle Beechley, inside the train.

“I don’t know, Belle. The poor lad’s apparently having some kind of fit.”

Five feet—

Lukendorf stepped back a pace, uncertain. He shouldered the Winchester and aimed at Lamar.

Lamar sprang in the air, fell back, landed hard and painfully on his spine, knocked nearly dizzy.
Don’t pass out, don’t pass out,
he said to himself. He thrashed wildly on the ground, moaning, beating his head from side to side.

Suddenly he arched his back. He beat his heels on the ground and bit his lips and uttered a long, piercing wail. He flopped down again and shut his eyes and lay motionless, his chest heaving.

He listened.

Silence. Absolute silence.

Then crunching footsteps.
Oh God, he’s going to put a shell in my head.

The footsteps stopped. Lamar squinted his eyes open. Saw the farmer towering over him, a queer expression on his face. He no longer looked wrathful, merely old and worn out.

“Boy?” Carl Lukendorf said. “What’s the matter with you?”

The rifle hung at the farmer’s side. Lamar let out a light, fluttery moan.

“Are you sick? You need a sawbones?”

Lamar rolled over and slapped both hands on the hot metal barrel. Lukendorf swore in German and kicked at Lamar’s head. But the farmer didn’t have a tight grasp on the piece, and Lamar got it away with one stout yank. He dodged the German’s dung-caked plow shoe, panting, and whirled around and around and sailed the rifle high up into the air, away on the other side of the steaming, hissing locomotive.

“Mr. Seelbinder! Pick up Stopper’s gun and get him,” Lamar yelled.

Lukendorf turned and ran across the triangular field. But it was a lumbering, shambling, tired old run, as if he knew it was all up.

They had him behind bars in Paxton two hours later. The sentencing judge gave him life imprisonment by reason of insanity.

The exciting, not to say blood-freezing, events of that morning in Nebraska changed Lamar Tisdale’s life forever. He decided that he was cut out for bolder things than peanut butchering. Although he had instantly conceived a dislike of Bart Stopper, the man’s profession intrigued him. Many years later, in San Francisco, Lamar was the highly successful and affluent operator of the Golden Gate Police Detective Agency, which employed one hundred nineteen operatives throughout California and the Southwest. He paid for C. O. Seelbinder’s care at a decent old folks’ home in Berkeley until the old conductor died at ninety-three.

One day Lamar had a rare opportunity for revenge. Stopper, now an aging derelict discharged by Pinkerton’s for insobriety and general ineptitude, turned up in Lamar’s office begging for work. Stopper didn’t recognize the agency’s owner. Lamar wanted to rebuff him by saying something like, “Sorry, Stopper, we hire only Westerners; they can deal intelligently with any situation.”

But he felt sorry for the stumbling wreck of a once-renowned detective and hired him as a messenger and general handyman. Stopper lasted for two weeks, then disappeared.

Each evening Lamar went home to his mansion in South Park, where he resided with his wife and their eleven children. Seldom did a week go by without a parental discussion with one or the other of the children to the effect that each of them, in his or her own good time, and the Lord’s, would meet a snakehead.

“When you do, remember this advice passed on to me by Redbird Seelbinder. He was an inebriate, which wasn’t to his credit, but he was a wise man. ‘If you meet a Chinaman,’ he said, ‘try to act like a Chinaman. If you meet a mountain lion, try to act like a mountain lion.’ That time in Nebraska, we met a poor crazy man. I decided that the only way out of our predicament was for someone else to act like a crazy man too. It confused him. That’s how I got his gun. I was full of fear, but Redbird’s advice saved the day. Keep it in mind.”

“Yes, Father,” chorused several children.

His beautiful, adoring wife, the former Belle Beechley, beamed and squeezed the hand of Lamar Tisdale.

Dedicated to the memory of Karl May

T
HE FREE TRAPPER, A
strapping shaggy white man of indeterminate age, waded into his secret stream about a quarter mile above the wide beaver dam. His darting glance revealed no dangers; nor did he truly expect any, this far into the wilderness.

His buckskin shirt was wet, and soiled by many hasty meals. His buckskin leggings were stagged at the knees, where he’d sewn on pieces of fine English blanket, which wouldn’t shrink. Leggings and his wool-lined moccasins were last year’s tipi of a Crow chief of his acquaintance.

Shadows of quaking aspens and bending willows were growing longer. It was nearing the twilight hour, the ideal time for setting out traps. He would set this one, his fifth of the afternoon, then one more before returning to his campsite, there to rest until he rose before daybreak to clear the traps. He shifted his campsite nightly; a professional precaution of those who worked alone. Also, he now had eighty plews to protect—a valuable mixed bale of beaver, marten, and otter, weighing nearly a hundred pounds. So far the spring trapping season had been bountiful.

The late afternoon air was light and warm, but the water was still icy from the melted snows. The soft-burbling stream froze his bones and set his hands to aching, the good right one and the mangled left one he concealed with a filthy mitten except when he was at his trade, as now. He went by the name “Old Ironhand,” though he really wasn’t old, except in spirit. The snowy white streaks in his long hair were premature. There was a bitter cynicism in his eyes, the oldest part of him.

Once his name had been Ewing. Ewing Something. It was a name he no longer used, and struggled to remember. Ever since he’d split with the Four Flags outfit, and Mr. Alexander Jaggers—ever since they’d crippled his left hand, causing him to compensate with exercises that strengthened the other one, welding five digits into a weapon—to the free trappers and those who still gave allegiance to the large outfits, he was Old Ironhand.

He waded along, carrying the seven-pound trap and chain in his left hand, the pin pole in his right. He moved carefully, the small sounds of his passage undetectable because of the water’s purl. This was a fine stream; he’d been working it for a year. It yielded fat mature beaver, fifty to sixty pounds each, with choice tails he charred, skinned, then boiled as a mealtime delicacy. Hip deep in his secret stream, he felt good as he approached a natural beaver slide worn into the bank at the water’s edge. The shadowed air was sweet. The trees were a-bud, the mountain peaks pristine as a new wedding dress, the sky a pale pink, like a scene from a book about fairyland. He saw a mockingbird singing alertly on a bush. It was 1833, in the Stony Mountains, far from the civilized perfidy of other white men.

He laid the pin pole on the bank. He crouched in the water and lowered the trap to the bottom, drawing out the chain with its ring at the end. By now he was bent like a bow, half his beard immersed. The water smelled icy and clean.

He pushed the pin pole through the ring on the chain. Then he grasped the pole with both hands and began to twist it into the marly bottom. He leaned and pushed and twisted with his great right hand bloodless-white around the pole. If the trapped beaver didn’t gnaw his paw off and escape—if he died as he should, by drowning—the pole would site his carcass.

In order to leave as little man-scent as possible, Ironhand worked obliquely backward toward the bank, to a willowy branch he’d already selected for its pronounced droop. He unstoppered his horn of medicine, which he compounded from secret ingredients added to the musky secretions of beaver glands, and with this he coated the end of the drooping branch. The strongly scented end of the branch hung near the pin pole.

Hands on his hips, he inspected his work. Though by now his teeth were chattering—the spring warmth was leaching from the plum-colored shadows—he was satisfied. Felt better than he had in a long spell. One more trap to place, then he’d have his supper, and a pipe.

He was turning to move on to the next location when the rifle shot rang out. The bullet hit him high in the back. Toppling, he thought not of the awful hot pain but instead of his failure to hear the rifleman stealing up for the cowardly ambush.
Careless damn fool! Should’ve kept your eyes skinned!
He was reasonably sure of his attackers identity, but that wasn’t much damn satisfaction as the muddy bank hurled up to strike him.

And that was all there was.

Someone had dragged him to level ground.

Someone had rolled him on his back.

Someone had built a fire whose comforting heat played along the left side of his seamed face, and the back of his ruined hand. The fire was vivid, shooting off sparks as brilliant as the mountain stars. A curtain of smoke blew away on a puff of breeze.

He elbowed himself to a raised position, clenching his teeth against the pain. The Samaritan was squatting on the other side of the fire. A young Indian, with a well-sculpted nose, firm mouth, light brown skin that shimmered bronze in the firelight. His glowing dark eyes were not unfriendly, only carefully, unemotionally observant.

Bluish-black hair hung like a veil down his back, to his waist. His costume consisted of moccasins ornamented with porcupine quills and bright trade beads, fringed leggings, a hunting coat of elk leather. Around his neck hung a small medicine bag that nestled inside his coat against his bare chest. Outside the coat, ornamentation was a three-strand necklace of bear claws. A double-barrel rifle rested within his reach.

“I put medicine on you. The ball is still there. It must come out. Do you understand?”

“Delaware,” Ironhand grunted, not as a question. He understood perfectly.

“Yes.” The Indian nodded. “I am Manitow.”

“My pardner, the one they killed at the rendezvous two year ago, he was Delaware. Named after the great old chief Tammany. Fine man.” So were most of the members of the tribe who roved the Stony Mountains. The Delaware had been driven from Eastern hunting grounds eighty to ninety years ago; had migrated over the Mississippi and successfully taken up farming on the plains. A few, more restless and independent, had pushed farther on to the mountains. Enemies of the Delaware, including ignorant whites, sneered at them as Petticoat Indians. That was not only stupid but dangerous. Ironhand knew the Delaware to be keen shots, excellent horsemen, superb trackers and readers of sign. They were honest, quick to learn, resourceful in the wilderness. You could depend on them unless for some reason they hated you.

The Delaware could find the remotest beaver streams as handily as a magnet snapped bits of iron to itself. Thus they were prized pardners of the free trappers, or prized employees of the outfits such as Four Flags.

The white man licked his dry lips, then said, “I’m called Old Ironhand.”

“I have heard of you. Who shot you?”

“I think it was the Frenchman,
Petit Josep. Petit Josep Clair de Lune.
Little Joe Moonlight.”