THE WOLFER
By Loren D. Estleman
The Wolfer is a Dimension W eBook
Dimension W is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Copyright @ 2013 by Loren D. Estleman
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To John Wayne
(1907-1979)
In Memory
Feo, fuerte yformal
A wolf
I considered myself
—Santee Sioux song
Chapter One
R. G. Fulwider hated winter, which in his view was another good reason why he shouldn't have been where he was.
It was early March, and back in New York the sun would be warm on the pavement and attractive women would be bicycling through Central Park in culottes and starched white blouses and flowered bonnets, heads held high while they pretended ignorance of the admiring looks they drew from male passersby. But along this stretch of the recently completed Northern Pacific Railroad it was still winter, and to remind himself of that depressing fact he had only to rub the frost off his window and glower out at the treeless, snowswept terrain of northern Dakota Territory hunkering under a sky the color of mildew.
He was grateful for two things only: the even seventy degrees at which Pullman interiors were maintained regardless of the plunging temperatures without, and the nearly six feet square of living space afforded by the design and placement of the deep plush seats. A tall man for his time, Fulwider luxuriated in the ability to stretch his long, thin limbs without disturbing the passenger seated next to him.
The pair had been companions since Fargo, and yet scarcely a word had passed between them since their meeting, when the easterner had determined that the rangy old fellow with the ill-fitting suit and massive handlebars was returning to his ranch in Idaho from a cattle-buying trip to Grand Forks. He, in turn, had learned nothing about the man from New York beyond the fact that he was out here on business. If the cattleman was curious about this pale and rather emaciated traveler who appeared to be in his early forties, and who drew out a silk handkerchief from time to time to cough decorously into its folds, he gave no indication.
At length Fulwider grew bored with the sameness of the flat scenery and returned his attention to his fellow passenger.
"I thought you cowboys generally did your buying down in Texas." Traces of his New Hampshire beginnings lingered in his pronunciation of thought and down, which came out thot and don.
"I'm a foreman, not a cowboy." The westerner studied his watch, snapped shut the face and returned it to his vest pocket. His great grizzled moustaches appeared by their sheer weight to be dragging his sun-browned flesh away from the bone. "The man we're buying from owns the only complete herd of Herefords in the country. Ranch manager wants to breed out the Texas longhorn strain." His tone was derogatory.
"It doesn't sound as if you agree," said his companion.
"I reckon what I think don't much matter."
For a while they rode in silence. Steel wheels clicked rhythmically over the joints in the rails. "Have you ever been in Deadwood?" Fulwider asked then.
"Been there."
"I'm going to write about it. R. G. Fulwider. I work for the World." He proffered his hand.
The foreman grasped it. His palm was dry and horny with calluses. "Dale Crippen. What's the R. G. stand for?"
"My parents never told me. I've been assigned to do a series about the West. Mr. Pulitzer feels we've been ignoring what he calls 'an untapped vein of pure gold for the journalist.' Confidentially, he's jealous because the Herald scooped him on a serial based on the life of Jesse James and picked up five thousand new readers. So I'm on my way to write about Wild Bill Hickok. I'm supposed to get off at Bismarck and take the stage south to Deadwood. That's where he was killed, you know."
"Ten years ago," Crippen pointed out.
"It didn't seem to make any difference to readers of the Herald that Jesse James has been in the ground four years," said the journalist. "What's it like in the Black Hills?"
"It ain't like New York."
Fulwider waited for more, but none was forthcoming. Deciding his companion wasn't in the mood for conversation, he sank back in his seat and resumed his morose scrutiny of the tabletop country beyond the thick window.
"This here is what you ought to write about," said Crippen.
Turning back, the easterner was handed an eight-byeleven sheet of stiff white posterboard. He had wondered about the bundle wrapped in brown paper on the seat between them, but had been too polite to ask what it was. The top line was printed in bold black capitals.
$600 REWARD $600
For the Whole Hide, or other Proof of Death or Capture, of a Black-Mantled Wolf weighing in excess of 100 pounds, and known as Black Jack, Leader of a Large Pack in the Caribou Foothills whose Depredations among local Herds of Cattle and Wild Game have been the Source of much Concern among the Good Citizens of Rebellion.
$5 BOUNTY $5
For each Wolf Scalp taken in the Vicinity of the Snake River Valley, or more than Twice what the Territory of Idaho is offering for the same Item. Redeemable from any Member of the Idaho Stockmen's Association.
Nelson Meredith, President
Meredith's signature was a daring indigo slash above the printed name.
"I mean to tack some of these up at every stop 'twixt here and Rebellion," the foreman announced, as the leaflet was returned.
"Who is Nelson Meredith, besides the president of the Idaho Stockmen's Association?" asked Fulwider.
"Englishman who runs the Newcastle spread. He pays my salary."
"He must be a crown prince, or at least an earl. Six hundred dollars seems rather a stiff bounty to pay for a wolf."
"Not for this wolf."
The conversation swung back to Deadwood, which Crippen said was an ugly collection of ramshackle huts and tents that leaked during the rainy season and stank to high heaven when the weather was warm, and where a man had to shake scorpions out of his boots each morning before pulling them on.
"What you want to go there for anyway?" he concluded. "No one's there who knew Wild Bill. They all drifted on when the claims started drying up."
"Well, I don't really have to write about Hickok. That was just one of the suggestions. I'm mainly here to find colorful characters whose life stories would interest our readers." He didn't mention the real reason why he had sought the wide open spaces. Thus far, no one west of Park Row knew that Fulwider was a consumptive, and that was the way he would have it.
"You won't find nothing down there but digger injuns and panhandlers." The foreman used a folding knife to saw an inch and a half off a tobacco plug he had taken from a coat pocket and popped it into his mouth. Immediately a black porter in a white coat appeared with a cuspidor of gleaming brass, set it at the passenger's feet and was gone. "What you ought to do is come out to Rebellion with me. Bet you find someone there worth making famous."
"What sort of place is Rebellion?"
"Well, it ain't New York neither, but nothing's made from canvas and you won't have to shake varmints out of your boots."
"
If there's a hotel and a place to get a drink I'll consider it," Fulwider said.
A mischievous glint lit up the cattleman's faded blue eyes, set deep in a forest of cracks. "Man after my own heart," he chuckled, and poked a bony elbow into the journalist's ribs that sent him into a violent coughing fit. Concerned, Crippen drew back the offending arm. "That's a bad cold."
"It's an allergy." The reply was muffled by the wadded handkerchief.
"Maybe Idaho ain't the place for you, then. In springtime the Snake River Valley's nothing but grass and flowers."
Fulwider glanced at the handkerchief, wiped his eyes and put it away. "I'm told altitudes are just what this kind of allergy requires."
"Well, then, Rebellion's your place. The valley's three thousand feet above sea level. Last time we buried a farmer it was because he fell off his potato patch."
In Bismarck the train stopped to take on wood and water, and the two travelers repaired to a respectable-looking saloon on a street of rutted mud frozen hard as granite. A stiff breeze gnawed at their faces as, hands deep in their overcoat pockets, they dodged heavy horse and wagon traffic, bounded across the boardwalk and plunged through the doorway onto a sawdust floor.
It was early afternoon, and the establishment was all but empty. Fulwider warmed himself at a rusty stove in the corner while Crippen ordered a bottle and two glasses from a bearded, bear-like bartender and brought them to a nearby table. For twenty minutes they sat drinking, the Newcastle foreman trying to explain how they would transfer from the Northern Pacific to the Oregon Short Line, by which means they would proceed to Rebellion. The journalist paid scant attention. He had already made up his mind to accompany the older man.
Had he been interested enough to notice, the casual customer might have wondered at the relationship between the unlikely pair. Apart from their dependency on alcohol they had little in common. One had lived all but the first six of his fifty years west of the Rockies (for so Crippen narrated between descriptions of what lay ahead of them as the whiskey loosened his tongue), fought Indians and Mexicans, been shot twice and driven more beef to market than the average man could envision. The other, ten years his junior, had grown up on the Atlantic Coast and spent most of his adult life with fellow journalists and ward politicians. No foundation existed upon which they could build a healthy discussion, and yet from the beginning each felt an unshakeable bond developing.
Fulwider was refilling their glasses when the door opened to admit a gust of arctic air and a figure that awakened his reporter's instincts as suddenly as a whiff of smoke or a cry of murder.
It was not the stranger's savage costume that caught his eye, though the tattered wolfskin hanging below his knees and floppy-brimmed fur hat with a black-tipped eagle's feather in the band would have been singular enough back home. Rather, it was the way the man moved.
Broken down to its basic elements, his stride as he approached the bar was not properly a stride at all, but rather a fluid display of well-toned muscles working in perfect coordination, as smooth and graceful as water sliding over rock. The journalist was tempted to describe it as sailor's roll, except that there was not enough sway in the shoulders and there was nothing remotely nautical about the man. It was animal-like, the slouching gait of a dog or a big cat. Or a wolf.
"Do you know that fellow?" asked Fulwider, taking advantage of a lull in his companion's monologue.
Scowling at this irrelevance, the foreman craned his head around to peer in the direction indicated. He was still scowling when he turned back.
"Some wolfer," he said sourly, and drank. "I can smell him clear over here."
The journalist thought this an exaggeration, but when he redirected his attention to the newcomer he became aware of a faint, foul stench reminiscent of dead rats in an alley. It wasn't lost upon one of the two men beside whom the man was standing at the bar, who sniffed loudly and set down his glass with a "Pah!"
The stranger, whose medium height barely brought his hat brim to the bridge of the thick-built brute's nose, ignored him and ordered whiskey in a quiet voice barely audible across the room.
"Jim," called the brute, louder than necessary to be heard by the imbiber at his other elbow, "there's a real bad stink in here. You reckon something crawled into the beer keg and died?"
"It do smell like that's the case." His partner gulped at his foaming glass and drew a faded gingham sleeve across his mouth. Constructed along slimmer lines than his companion, he was every bit as tall. "I thought it was you."
"No, Sir. Way I see it, a man that don't bathe before he goes out in public, he's worse'n a hydrophoby skunk. That the way you see it, Jim?"
"That's the way I see it, Aaron."
"How about you, Mister?" Aaron sneered at the stranger.
He went on drinking and gazing at nothing in particular behind the bar. The bartender had moved to the far end, and a fourth customer who had been standing beside the one called Jim had paid for his beer and left. Suddenly Aaron inhaled again and reeled back as if struck, holding his broken lump of a nose between thumb and forefinger.
"Holy Christ!" he exclaimed, feigning shock. "I just found our hydrophoby skunk!"
The target of his jibes flicked a finger at his empty shot glass. The bartender moved in reluctantly to refill it, spilling some of the red-tinted liquid, then retreated to his position of safety.
"Mister," the brute bored in, "do you know what folks in these parts do to mad skunks?"
"I wouldn't," warned the other calmly.
"Wouldn't what, Mister?" Aaron backed away. His hand fell to the butt of a revolver nosing above his belt. His stomach hung out on either side of it like dough escaping a pan.
"Wouldn't what, Mister?" He tugged at the curved handle.
Afterward, Fulwider was unable to say for certain what happened next, even though like everyone else in the room he was watching closely. One second the man in the wolf-skin was leaning on his elbows with his back turned, and the next he and Aaron were facing each other across two feet and something was shining in the stranger's hand and the brute was clutching his abdomen and watching incredulously as something bright red oozed between his fingers. The gun was still in his belt.
His partner stared from one face to the other, still uncomprehending. Then his eyes fell to Aaron's stomach and color fled his face.
"Get him to a doctor," the man in pelts told him. He might have been ordering a third whiskey for all the emotion his tone betrayed.
Jim was unarmed. His gaze was riveted on the skinning knife's double-edged blade, where his friend's blood was trickling down the sloped edges in twin rivulets. Then he threw a supporting arm around Aaron's hunched shoulders and helped him toward the door—the latter, his mouth forming a silent o, allowing himself to be led out like a tame fawn.
"Bar towel." The knife-wielder held out his free hand to the bartender. When the drink-sopped rag was in his possession he wiped the blade clean, then discarded the towel and dried the weapon on his wolfskin before returning it to its sheath behind his back. Fulwider noticed then that the fur was split for easy access to the hilt.
"Don't move."
The stranger had been turning back to the bar when the lean man entered, wearing a corduroy coat with a shaggy collar and a fur hat. He carried a short-barreled shotgun and had a star pinned to his lapel. His quarry froze while he drew near and reached out to disarm the man in pelts.
"Who are you?" demanded the lawman, holding the knife down at his side. He wore a thick black moustache with tips waxed shiny.
"North."
"North? Is that your name or the direction you came from?" There was no reply. "Since when is having a little fun with a stranger a capital offense?"
"Since when is pulling a gun on a man having a little fun?" North watched his reflection in a clouded mirror behind the bar. It was an ordinary face, sunburned and a little stubbled.
"Anybody see that?" The lawman's eyes flicked around the room, sharp as pinpoints.
&nbs
p; Only two customers remained besides Fulwider and Crippen. No one spoke. The bartender was busily polishing a glass with a fresh towel.
"Let's go." The shotgun nuzzled North's back.
"Oh, Christ." Crippen flashed the journalist a sour look and pushed himself out of his seat.
The lawman watched warily as he approached and stopped six feet short of prisoner and captor.
"He's telling it true, Marshal. The big one went for a Peacemaker. North could of kilt him, but he didn't. If you got to arrest him for something, arrest him for that."
"You saw that?" The other's face was a blank slab.
"Seen the whole thing. Him too." The foreman indicated Fulwider, who raised his empty glass in uneasy acknowledgment.
The marshal took a deep breath and clapped the wolfer's knife down on the bar beyond his reach. "You figure on staying long?" he snarled.
"No longer than I got to." North resumed drinking. He had not looked at the lawman once.
"Make it short." He left, banging the door behind him.
Crippen returned to the table without so much as a word to the wolfer. A train whistle blew hoarsely, setting glasses and bottles buzzing. "That's us," he told Fulwider.
The journalist accompanied him to the door. "He might at least have thanked you."
"That'd be like thanking a man for not stealing your poke."
On his way out, the man from New York made a mental note to work the rejoinder into a future article for the World.
Chapter Two
There were no Pullmans on the Oregon Short Line. After three days of racketing over the rails in a swaying coach, Fulwider was grateful when the train whooshed to a halt amid a cluster of dark log buildings that looked as if they had started out weary and had long since sunk past despair into tragic resignation. A moldy sky hung so low over the rooftops it seemed a man might reach up and grab a handful if he thought he could wash it off right away.
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