by Clay Fisher
Big Anse, who had taken what he called a “Sunday suit shine” to the slender scout, broke in breathlessly as he paused, requesting an expanded detail.
“What abouten thet there fust time they jumped you? Thet brush you jest mentioned? The one where you was only a boy and new in the country and all, and them dirty red scuts—”
Kelly laughed, patting the towering piney woods giant on the bulging muscles of his shoulder.
“All right, my friend,” he obliged, “there were two of them. Broken Back and Shuffling Bear, both Oglalas and both bad Indians. They ambushed me down near Red Mike Welch’s place above Fort Stevenson. That was on a little trip I made to open up the army’s mail route between there and Fort Buford, when the Sioux had had it shut off for something like six months and meant to keep it that way for a spell longer. Say maybe six years. Or eight or ten, like they bottled up the Bozeman Road after they shagged Colonel Carrington out of Fort Kearney.
“Anyway, one of them, I think it was Broken Back, had a fine double-barreled English shotgun. His partner had no gun but was one of the most interesting shots with a bow and arrow I ever met. In fact, he winged me through the knee with a broadhead buffalo arrow before I could fall off my horse and get my own artillery into action. I had a little brass-mounted Henry repeater—that was the first Model .44 short—for which I had given fifty-five dollars in prime sable but the day before. Now—”
“Cuss it all, Mr. Kelly!” exploded Anse with childish impatience for the main point and bother the minor details, “git on with it! What happened after the arrow hit you?”
“Oh,” said Luther Kelly quietly, “excuse me, Anse. I didn’t know you were in a hurry. They missed after that.”
“And, and—?”
“I didn’t.”
“Oh,” echoed Big Anse in a very small voice. And that was the end of the four and a half minute board meeting which officially formed the new Judith Basin wolf-hunting firm of Jepson, Harper, Caswell, MacDonal & Kelly, Ltd.
It was as well that no more time was wasted in its organization, for the new house was destined for a very brief career in the fur business; something less than forty-eight hours, as a matter of frontier record.
5
The following morning the party set out for the base of Judith Mountain, where Kelly’s previous explorations had determined ideal conditions for wolves. They had but a few miles to go, and hence, about eleven o’clock, the weather being cooler and Kelly’s memory of the ancient Sioux hunting trails having proved perfect, a halt was called to boil coffee and scout the immediate vicinity for their permanent campsite.
The scout’s plan was to put up a green-log, rifle-slitted living quarters of heavy timbers, with an attached shed for cooking and a lean-to for fur storage made of lighter materials. The mule, Montana born and reared, would dig for his winter supper like any Sioux or Cheyenne pack animal and would find his own shelter from the fierce blizzards soon to come.
By noon Kelly had located the spot he sought, a thirty-foot naked rock cutbank crowned by dense scrub, down which no man and few animals could scramble.
A stout cabin built against the buttress of that living stone, surrounded as it was on both flanks and the front by a timber-free level of mountain meadow, would be impregnable to red attack. To guarantee that impregnability, there was a fine spring, still alive in this driest month of the past year, bubbling happily from the base of the bluff. They had but to enclose this clean pebbled pool within the semi-heated confines of the cookshack to make sure of fresh, unfrozen water the winter through.
The spirits of the adventurers rose rapidly.
That built-in barometer of human blindness founded on the old adage of living in hope and dying in despair was functioning beautifully by the time Kelly had baked his companions a batch of the light, sweet frying-pan bread for which he was famous from Fort Berthold to the Three Forks, and had boiled them up a second pot of bitter pitchblende coffee.
They would have fresh meat that night, too, he promised them.
After a bit he would drift down south to make certain the Sioux had abandoned their trail, as it now appeared they had, to judge from the morning’s uninterrupted peace and tranquillity. Once sure their Indian friends had veered off—Kelly hesitated to admit it but under the circumstances a man had to assume Gall’s Hunkpapa had been influenced to healthier pursuits by Kelly’s joining the Fort Buford wolf hunters—then they could fire a gun without fear of the report bringing a Sioux investigating committee down about their ears. And once they could do that, Kelly would have a spikehorn blacktail or yearling bighorn buck down and dressed before they could say Red Walker or Man-Who-Goes-in-the-Middle.
Eh? Who were they?
Nobody much.
Just two other names for their recent red-skinned shadow, Gall. He was Red Walker to the Cheyenne, Man-Who-Goes-in-the-Middle to the Agency Sioux, Gall to the wild Hunkpapa.
Small concern for that, though. The main thing now was that Kelly had to stake out the floor plan for their winter quarters before he went hunting. That way, while he was gone they could start felling and notching the timbers which would be needed. They were to remember, he admonished them, that for the main cabin walls they must select prime cedar spars with no less than twelve-inch butts three feet above the ground. For the cookshack and fur shed, they could use the six and eight-inch lodgepole pine which stood everywhere thick and bristled as the hair on an angry dog’s back.
His companions accepted the orders in good part. There was no argument and everyone, even the morose Caswell, was encouraged, emboldened, eager to be at work.
Somehow it was difficult to feel any sense of depression or danger with Yellowstone Kelly in charge. The man’s knowledge of the country and its animal contents—feathered, furred, finny, scaled, creeping, crouching, crawling, walking upright, or riding a spotted Sioux pony—was astounding. And the continual cinnabar shift of his talk from the apt quotation of Tennyson, Burns, Shakespeare, Poe, and Sir Walter Scott, apparently his boyhood favorites, to the picaresque colloquial idiom of the Missouri River frontiersman, was as bright and ebullient as it was bewildering.
Kelly was a man whose spirits picked yours up by the back of the neck and lifted them high, willy-nilly. Or, as occasion might demand (and had only the night before), he could grab your emotions by the throat and throw the fear of God into them. He was a true Celt, a contrast in sunny heights and plunging dark apprehensions. Yet he was not the typical Irisher of friendly fiction; that cocksure glandular son of the Auld Sod who loved nothing better than a good clean donnybrook among friends, or to sally forth with tilted bowler and itching fist to find a playful Protestant on Saint Paddy’s Day. Kelly was that far rarer, more delightful product of Hibernian biology—the man of absolute brute strength who, fearing neither God nor the Devil, respected both. And who, being unafraid of any man who walked the earth in their images, would at once and graciously yield the path upon request, or even without asking. He was a humble and happy man, as lonely and free and clean in heart and mind as the restless wind which wandered the western plain. And he stirred men in the same way as that wind, making them sense his fierce yet tender love for this savage land and making them want to follow him wherever he might lead them across its mountained mysteries.
So his companions busied themselves almost excitedly with the routine chore of cleaning up the noon-halt camp, while less than ten minutes to the east, their new partner and self-appointed chaperon whistled softly to himself as he laid out the framing stakes for the winter quarters.
For his carefree part, Luther Kelly was well content with his new friends.
True, Jepson was a confirmed grouch, Caswell a congenital coward. But MacDonal was a delightful old pirate and Big Anse Harper promised to prove as friendly and useful as Daniel DeFoe’s man Friday.
For a single-tracker like himself, a man who even in a society of insistently in
dependent adventurers was noted as a “loner” and, in fact, actually called “Lone Wolf” by the Indians, it was not an unpleasant prospect to contemplate six months of snowed-in white companionship. Although he was then but twenty-six years old, Luther Kelly had already spent seven winters of solitary wandering along the frozen flanks of the Yellowstone and had little taste for adding a lonely eighth to the record.
Thinking back to the incident which had sent him loping off after the Fort Buford wolf hunters, the young Irishman slowed his work and frowned thoughtfully.
Dropping by Reed & Bowles on his way in to winter at one of the River posts, he had been told of the recent departure of the Judith Mountain trappers and had been suddenly seized with the compulsion to join them. Of course the fact that in glassing his back trail away from Reed’s place as a matter of routine precaution, he had seen Gall’s big party pull in and palaver with the old man, had had something to do with his decision. Especially when the Sioux had broken off their powwow to spur their shaggy ponies along the same track he himself was following—that of the four settlement incompetents from Fort Buford.
It had then become, after all, only an act of Christian charity to run up and warn the slow-witted sheep away from a certain shearing by the Sioux. Any frontiersman in his place would have done the same thing. It was a heap of bother, but what else was a man to do under the circumstances?
Kelly grinned suddenly as he considered this logical, self-justifying explanation. Bending lithely down, he drove in the last of the marker stakes and stood back to laugh.
Bushway! Why not admit the simple truth?
He was up here looking for the two things he had been living on since running away from home to join the Union army at fifteen. Freedom and adventure.
It was the opium of life to Luther Kelly, this wild free land of snowcapped mountains, dark timbered slopes, winding, clear-streamed valleys, and endless windswept leagues of golden buffalo grass. This virgin savage land and his unfettered freedom to roam in it. The freedom and the constant delicious sense of death and danger which came with it.
There can be no real life, thought Kelly, belting on his axe and turning for the noon camp, save that which is lived in the tingling shadow of death. How had Scott put it in Lady of the Lake?
Hope is brightest when it dawns from fears …
And love is loveliest when embalmed with tears.
Something like that—anyway, the idea was the same. The old law of opposites. If a man wanted to see life he had first to get a good look at death. Kelly had been getting a good look at the Grim One for some nine years now.
He got another good look at him not nine years but nine minutes later.
6
The white scout froze, one moccasin poised unplaced above the ground. He was caught. As trapped and graven in mid-motion as a brush buck surprised in a fringe timber sneak around an open pothole meadow. Not sure he has been seen, not sure he has not. And wanting to make absolutely certain before so much as flicking an ear.
Presently, it was clear to Kelly that the Sioux had not seen him.
In the following moments of strained listening to their deep voices and intent watching of their impatient hand signs as they talked, first among themselves in Sioux, then to the fearful white hunters in English, something else became clear to him.
Where they had not seen him, they were looking for him.
Where had Lone Wolf gone? Gall was demanding of the Fort Buford men in his harsh English. Did they understand that he meant Lone Wolf Kelly? The one the white brother called Yellowstone Kelly?
With the question the Sioux chief paused, letting his nervous auditors think about their answer.
As they did, he added a pertinent directive.
They had better not try to talk to him with crooked tongues, for he knew very well that Kelly had come to their camp. Furthermore, he was in a hurry. He needed to locate the missing scout at once. It would be all to the advantage of his listeners to furnish their reply with a maximum of accuracy and a minimum of delay. Hopo! Hopo! was the exact way he put it in concluding Sioux, and even the ignorant Caswell understood this to be a Hunkpapa term dealing with speed in the utmost, immediate sense.
The four white men stood miserably beyond the blowing ashes of their fire. In the mind of each lay a clear path of loyalty to the absent scout. But the heart of none encompassed the courage to advance along the path. Of the four only Big Anse felt a genuine want to defend the whereabouts of his new friend, and he lacked the wit to implement the wish.
They had all picked up their guns at the unhidden approach of the Indian cavalcade, but had had no chance then, and less intention now, of using them. The Sioux understood that perfectly. The Wasicun fools were helpless. They were in a wikmunke, a trap. There was utterly nothing they could do, save comply with Gall’s request for Kelly’s whereabouts.
The watching scout was not surprised, nor did he blame Jepson when the scowling spokesman for the wolf hunters pointed eastward.
“He’s over there a ways. By that rocky ledge. The one stickin’ up out’n the trees yonder. You see the one I mean?”
Gall checked the rearing outcrop, then looked back at Jepson, nodding. “Me see. You lie Gall, you see!”
In his hiding place, Kelly stifled a swift chuckle. He loved the Sioux sense of humor. Gall’s remark was entirely lost on his other white listeners, but it at once marked the famed war chief favorably for Luther Kelly. He had never met the murderous Hunkpapa and would have circled forty miles out of his way to avoid doing so before now. Now, suddenly, he had a strange and entirely unwarranted feeling of kinship with the great white-hater.
“Sayapi, Red Paint!” barked Gall, deep-voiced.
A young subchief spurred his pony out of the warrior circle, slid him to his haunches in front of the Sioux leader.
“Take a dozen braves,” Gall ordered in Hunkpapa. “Ride over and bring in Lone Wolf.”
The youthful savage touched the fingertips of his left hand to his forehead in the Sioux gesture of deep respect, wheeled his pony to depart.
“Sayapi!” Gall stopped him. “There will be no shooting by my order, do you understand? Lone Wolf will make no trouble. We have his friends here, and he is an honorable man. Just tell him Gall wants to see him. For the sake of his friends, he will make no trouble. Do you hear me?”
“Hau, Uncle,” nodded the youth, “my ears are uncovered. I hear you.” He spun the pony again, flung up a lean arm, muscled and menacing as the twist of a copperhead’s deadly length, swept it part way around the still-eyed circle. A dozen braves broke ranks and wheeled their mounts in behind his, returning his arm signal to indicate their understanding of the maneuver as they did so.
No oral order whatsoever was given, and for the hundredth time, Kelly marveled at the extrasensory Indian ability to communicate a complete thought without the use of a single spoken word.
But the white scout was not allowing his admiration for the red brother’s gifts of perception to confuse his own sense of social protocol.
In coming up on the camp and from force of long, wary habit, he had circled it completely. Accordingly, he now stood in the screening brush to the west, not to the east of the fire’s wind-eddied ashes. The twelve braves in charge of the young man, who looked enough like the famous chief to have sprung direct from his leather-clad loins, were kicking their ponies around to start them eastward. In the small moment of their turning, a muffled stillness blanketed the suspended motion of the tableau grouped about the white man’s dead fire spot. The sole noise to disturb that unnatural silence came from Kelly’s direction. It was the metallic slotting of steel on steel, as he levered the cocking piece of his Winchester and stepped out of the timber behind the red visitors.
“Hohahe!” he called cuttingly in Sioux. “Welcome to my tepee!”
Gall did not move a body muscle.
He had heard the sound of a cocking rifle before now.
So had his companions. They sat like wooden gargoyle images, motionless upon their raunchy, hay-bellied little horses. Not so much as a slant eye shifted.
Beyond them, the dozen braves leaving to bring in Kelly were as wise. They checked their mounts without attempting to wheel them about. But their leader lacked equal seasoning.
Red Paint was furious.
He had been made to lose face, to look foolish in front of his fellows. This white sunke, this dark-faced Wasicun dog, had done this to him by stepping out behind him with his sardonic smile and sarcastic Sioux invitation. The intent was clearly deliberate, the insult immediately intolerable.
The angry young warrior whirled his pony hard around.
He did this with his knees because his hands were occupied with hipping, on the turn, his recent model US Cavalry carbine for a snapped shot at Lone Wolf Kelly.
But the latter was not to be caught napping at his own game.
The white scout had neither to turn his body nor to hip his weapon. He was already facing forward, lean body tensed, the Winchester held butt-low off his right flank. He had only to tip its octagonal muzzle and touch off its featherlight trigger.
It was a spectacular shot, as lucky perhaps as it was skillful, certainly.
Yet it was precisely the kind of life-staking, win-or-lose-the-works gamble upon which the slender Irish scout had built his enviable reputation among these savage dark-skinned people. Had the shot missed its tiny moving target and badly wounded or killed the Indian behind it, Kelly and his four companions would have been dead within the next thirty seconds. But the shot did not miss. The infuriated young subchief’s prized Springfield went cartwheeling away out of his numbed hands like a thing suddenly seized with an independent, rebellious life of its own, its walnut stock shattered, its heavy steel trigger-guard bent irreparably askew by the smashing ricochet of Kelly’s heavy .44-caliber Winchester slug.