by Clay Fisher
YELLOWSTONE KELLY
A Western Story
CLAY FISHER
Copyright © 1957 by Clay Fisher
E-book published in 2019 by Blackstone Publishing
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This book is a work of fiction
Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6194-0
Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6193-3
Fiction / Westerns
CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress
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For my friend
John Martin Askey
YELLOWSTONE KELLY
This book is based upon the memoirs of a remarkable old man who died in 1928 in Butte County, California. His story as told herein is fictional romance, not factual biography, yet it becomes a practical impossibility to elaborate on his real-life adventures.
General Nelson A. Miles called him “a hero in war, a true American patriot in times of peace.” The Sioux named him “the Little Man with the Strong Heart,” and feared him above all the other scouts in George Crook’s far-flung Department of the Platte. Of him, his fellow scouts cheerfully admitted, “he could smell an Indian in the pitch dark farther than most of us could see one in broad daylight.” Still, today this strangely soft-spoken, politely educated eastern youth, whose name in his long-ago time and dangerous profession, like Abou Ben Adhem’s, “led all the rest,” is remembered only by a lonely mountaintop grave site above Billings, Montana.
Like the man, the marker is no longer important. Soon even the legend will be lost. The careless winds of time cover deep with history’s cynical dust a hundred such obscure heroes and unsung stories of our western past. There can be no argument with this unhappy fact, even in fiction, nor does this account presume to advance any. It seeks, in the end, not to instruct the reader in the serious history of the Yellowstone Valley but merely to remind him, in honored passing, of the lighthearted, classics-quoting young Irishman who singlehandedly set the stage for most of that history.
His name, like his deeds, deserves better than to be forgotten.
It was Luther Sage Kelly.
C. F.
Bigtimber
Sweet Grass County
BOOK ONE:
JUDITH BASIN
1
The four wolf hunters were neither young nor old, but of that indeterminate age which lies as surely beyond youth as it does safely short of senility. They were cautious, wary-featured men, not entirely at home in that eerily still Montana land yet not ill-matched to it either.
The day itself was far gone but holding brassy hot. For early September in a mile-high northern lonesomeness where killing frosts came any summer night, June through August, it was menacingly hot.
Down canyon, looking back toward the basin they had quitted in the four a.m. bone-chill of that morning’s blackness, they could see the dust boils dancing beneath the contoured shimmerings of the heat mirage with which the low slant of the late-afternoon sun was baking the outer valley floor. Jepson, the leader, slipped the straps of his backpack, stumbled toward an off-trail deadfall. Groaning, he sat down and waited in panting silence for his companions to come up.
“Best not turn the mule loose jest yet,” he warned them. “We’ll need to set a spell and think a bit, I allow.”
The others nodded, saving talk.
Big Anse Harper, the man with the pack mule, obediently half-hitched the lead rope around a convenient snag of the deadfall, dropped gratefully alongside Jepson. “She’s a powerful long uphill haul fer only one feed of cold fatback and no noon-halt coffee,” he observed, not ill-naturedly. “Seems like we bin walkin’ since last week. My feet ain’t bin so sore since we used to make them thirty-mile night marches up the Shenandoah when ‘Old Jack’ got took with the notion to cut himse’f off a regiment of blue-bellies fer breakfast. Cripes Amighty—!”
“Well,” grumped Jepson, “we dassn’t to have lit no noon-fire out yonder on thet flatland. Likely you know thet well as I do.” He bent his head toward the distant basin, the eyes of the others following his. The talk fell off.
Presently, Alec MacDonal, the third man, nodded his shaggy gray head, agreed in his pleasant Scots burr.
“Aye, Jepson lad, what ye say is true enough. ’Tis indeed a chancy land we’re trespassin’ on.”
Caswell, the fourth man, said nothing.
They continued to sit, four thoughtful wool-shirted human limbs growing silently out of a dead-and-down Judith Mountain cedar spar seven thousand feet above sea level and twenty-seven miles from the nearest white settlement beyond Fort Buford, Montana, September 2, 1875.
Breaking the spell, Jepson dug out a big six-ounce cut of trade plug and passed it along.
“Shave it thin,” he admonished needlessly.
“How many plugs we got?” asked Big Anse, paring with proper solicitude the one he held, before handing it along to MacDonal.
“Four dozen,” answered the unimaginative Jepson. “It’ll be aplenty, mixed in with a little red willow bark or larb leaves and allowin’ fer a normal winter.”
“Yeah,” smirked Big Anse deliberately. “A normal winter and no unexpected company.”
The tense swiftness with which the others jumped their eyes from the sun haze of the basin to the big man’s calm face was the most eloquent reply they could have made. Yet Caswell, the least in years and last in experience among them, had to say it.
“You mean the Sioux, Anse?”
“Sure, why not, Yank? Them and the Cheyenne. Most likely the Sioux though, and then most likely the Hunkpapa.”
“Well, we all knew that before we started out,” challenged Jepson, not wanting the expedition to come down with a case of camp nerves the first day out. “Old Man Reed told us, and afore thet we was told at Fort Buford. No call to go to talkin’ hostiles now. We ain’t none of us come up here thinkin’ we was on no church picnic.” He paused, thinking it over.
Presently, he nodded.
“The game brings the wolves, and the wolves is what we’re after.” True to granite-headed habit Jepson picked up the dropped stitch of his own thoughts as though the others had said nothing and as though he and the cedar log were alone in the Montana world.
“To git prime wolf, you got to go where the game is. And when you git to where the game is, you wind up where the Injuns are at. It ain’t really very complicated,” he concluded with a humorless headshake for the unconvinced Caswell. “But at the same time, don’t let Anse nor nobody else josh you none. We’re passin’ likely to see some trouble.”
“Well, so long as we see it, we’re all right,” said Big Anse cryptically.
He stood up, reaching for the pack mule’s rope. “I’m cooled out sufficient, how about the rest of you?” he announced tentatively. “I say let’s git on over the ridge and set up camp fer the night.”
Jepson did not move to follow him up off the cedar spar. Instead, he shook his head, looking around speculatively. “I’d say this looks purty good right here. We got water just down the gulch, plenty firewood waitin’ to be picked up in sight of camp, reasonable decent browse fer the mule on close-in picket. I allow we’ll throw down here.”
“Aye,” muttered MacDonal wearily. “Everybody’s tired, Anse lad. We’ve done verra well today. No point in pushin’ on anymore tonight.”
“We’
d ought to git deeper into the timber afore we build a blaze,” grumbled the hulking southerner. “The heavy growth holds down the night-sky reflection. You know thet, Mr. MacDonal. You ain’t no tenderfoot.”
“Nope,” demurred Jepson, before the latter could answer for himself. “I’d druther be out here on the flank of the ridge, in the fringe scrub. This way we kin see clean up and down the draw, and we’re out where there cain’t no sneakin’ hostiles crawl up on us under cover, by Tophet. All we got to do is keep a sharp lookout.”
“That makes sense to me,” agreed Caswell quickly. “I vote with Jepson.”
“And me,” sighed MacDonal resignedly.
The wiry Scot was simply hot and tired and short on Plains Indian understanding. A Canadian woodsman, born and reared, he was a skillful hunter and trapper but relatively new, like the rest of them, to this Upper Missouri country. In no sense was he, anymore than the others, aware of the true and real depth of the hatred held by the Sioux and Cheyenne for the American invaders of their ancestral game pastures.
It would have been difficult to imagine a more dangerous combination of settlement innocents abroad in an alien and enemy country. Of them all, only Big Anse, the Georgia piney woodsman, had any instinctive feeling for the type of country they were in. And he was as tired as his companions.
“All right,” he surrendered good-naturedly, “I’ll not secede tonight.” He put his huge knee into the bulging side of the mule’s top-heavy load, called gruffly over his shoulder to the still disturbed Caswell.
“Come along, Yank. Give us a hand with this cussed pack. She’s slewed around crooked as a bluetick hound’s hind leg. I cain’t seem to git a proper bite on the infernal hitch, to shake her loose …”
2
The fire burned low. It had been carefully laid, sent up no least telltale wisp of woodsmoke against the thinly moonlit autumn night. Replete with a heavy meal of cold mashed beans, broiled salt pork, yellow saleratus biscuit and tar-black coffee, Big Anse, Caswell, and MacDonal snored with their feet to the toasting coals.
Outside the fire’s enfeebled light, crouched by a lone cedar which overhung the canyon and from whose rocky promontory there was an unobstructed 160-degree view of the campsite, John Jepson confidently kept the first watch.
It was now frosting cold and getting colder. In the four hours since sundown the temperature had dropped forty degrees.
Jepson pulled his blanket closer, shivered, and was not sleepy.
The night was so clear, it made a man’s eyes ache with the shifting glitter of its frozen stars and the silvered glare of its sickle moon. But that was good. On such a still and starlit night, nothing, not so much as a friendly marmot, a curious deer mouse, or an inquisitive rock cricket, could have crept up on his carefully chosen campsite without being seen. As for anything the size of an interested Indian, why, he would have him spotted, sighted-in, and shot square center before he could have bellied to within anywhere near smoothbore trade gun range.
The shadow arose out of the seemingly bare ground not three feet behind him. It stood over him as silently as an ectoplasmic thing without substance of human flesh, no more real, no more tangible than an evil dream. Yet when it spoke to him, the deep easy voice destroyed any palpable illusion of nightmare or mental conjuration. And very nearly dropped John Jepson dead of a heart attack.
“Get up slowly, my friend, and turn around. Gently does it now. Leave the gun against the tree.”
Jepson made a strangling noise in his throat but did as he was told. Swallowing hard to check the larynx-high hammer of his heart, he came about.
The figure which confronted him there in the coruscating light of the Montana stars was bizarre enough by itself. Yet it was not the sight but the sound of the apparition which string-halted Jepson’s pulse and hobbled his struggling tongue.
The soft rich speech, beginning again now, was more than the illiterate New Englander’s twenty-five years of self-education could surround, or his two decades of frontier settlement experience make sense of.
Still, to his credit, Jepson did not interrupt.
He simply stood there, letting his bearded jaw sag, while the vibrant baritone rolled with Orphic enchantment through the impromptu declamation—complete with a trained mummer’s professional gesture!
“I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part
And each particular hair to stand on end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine!”
Jepson’s jaw dropped another inch at the conclusion of this brief but appropriate borrowing from the Bard. Then his eyes began to smolder and his voice rasped harshly. “Jest what the infernal hell you talkin’ about? You daft or somethin’?”
The newcomer laughed softly.
“I’m talking about the Sioux, my friend. And about the way you build your fire in thin timber, and how safe you thought you were, and how easy it was to show you otherwise.”
Jepson shook his head like a surly dog with a contested bone between his teeth. “By Godfrey, I still don’t git you! Nor what you’re gittin’ at neither!”
“No? Well, then, look at it this way. Suppose it had been the Sioux rather than myself who came up on you just now. That’s where the ‘harrowing tale’ would have been unfolded and the ‘freezing blood’ spilled round about. Had I been a Hunkpapa brave, my friend, ‘thy knotted and combined locks’ would have been ‘parted’ to a final fare-thee-well by this time. Now do you see?”
John Jepson saw not.
“Dogged if I do!” he snapped. “Savin’ thet you carry on like a crazy man!”
“Oh, that!” the other’s second laugh was as quick and rich as the first. “Shakespeare, my friend. Hamlet. The First Act, I believe. You see, I’m not alone an accomplished camp-sneak but a brilliant scholar as well!”
The graceful stranger’s manner was so unique, the timbre of his voice so compelling, his moonlit smile so brightly swift, that Jepson wavered. But the disgruntled wolf hunter was thoroughly angry; angry as only a man can be who has been caught compounding an act of ignorance by a display of fear. And in front of a total outsider for more bitter measure.
“You tarnal fool,” he gritted. “Sneakin’ up on a man like thet. You tryin’ to git yourself killed?”
“My friend,” nodded the shadowed figure politely, “I might well ask as much of you. And I shall, but not here. Come along to the fire, and I’ll ask it of all four of you at the same time.” The smile was still there, but the suggestion was illustrated by an unceremonious shove from the speaker’s gun muzzle. Given precious little choice, Jepson marched sullenly to the fire.
Here, on his mysterious guest’s request, he stirred up the coals, threw on an armload of fresh-split cedar kindling, rudely aroused his sandy-eyed companions.
As the latter came muttering out of their blankets, the resinous cedar flared suddenly into new life, giving Jepson his first real look at the self-styled “brilliant scholar and accomplished camp-sneak.” His three fellows, now thoroughly awake, joined him in the startled stare and in the gaping surprise which was its natural result.
Before them stood a slender fellow of no more than medium size, swarthy as a Gypsy, slit-eyed as a Sioux. He was a white man but such a white man as they had never seen nor secretly imagined.
Despite his lack of stature, his shoulders were grotesquely broad, his arms anthropoid in length and looking of latent power. His hips were narrow as a Texan’s, his legs as bowed and bent from clinging to the barreled ribcage of a prairie mustang as those of any pureblood Crow or Blackfoot. His entire body, encased in soft pearl-gray elk skin, seemed upon the slightest shift of movement to come alive with whipcord muscle. Despite the pleasant warmth of smile,
the soothing depth of voice, and the apparent education, the impression he gave was distinctly primitive, disturbingly animal.
He wore Arapahoe moccasins, a Cheyenne bear claw choker, a low-crowned hat of the finest fifty-dollar light-cream beaver belly, a priceless belt of blazing Sioux beadwork. His armament was that of a high prairie war chieftain; a late model ’73 Winchester rifle, a seven-inch Shoshone skinning knife, a Sheffield steel Hudson’s Bay belt axe. His bearing, as well, was that of an Indian.
He stood with his trim feet set slightly apart, the toes turned just the least bit inward. His muscular back, square shoulders, and cavernous chest were frozen ramrod erect, as true and straight and unbending as the polished haft of a Hunkpapa buffalo lance. He held his dark head high, commanding notice of his hawk-bridged nose and defiant power of lean jawline. In truth, he composed a compelling yet puzzling picture of nature at cross purposes; a poised and dangerous young animal of great bodily strength and high male pride in feral manhood, yet these physical gifts compounded with gentle dignity, wry good humor, and a certain indefinable wild-creature shyness.
Returning the still resentful looks of the wolf hunters with a grin as plainly white-toothed as it was patently black Irish, the buck-skinned stranger nodded soberly.
“And now my friends we’ll have a brief lecture on the wherefores and why-nots of white men building night fires along bare ridges of fringe timber in the upper intestine of Tashunka Witko’s private hunting preserve.”
“And who the hell,” broke in Big Anse Harper pleasantly, warmed no little by the stranger’s fey manners and always ready to admit his own ignorance in front of any man, “is Tashunka Witko?”
“Crazy Horse,” replied the dark-eyed scout, straight-faced. “A somewhat prominent Oglala of whom I rather imagine you may have heard.”
“Cripes Amighty!” gasped Big Anse.