Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  “No bills,” he said. “How about this?” He reached into the leather poke he carried and handed me a lump of yellow something the size of a tooth, which was exactly what it was. I recognized it as the loosened gold molar he had extracted from his mouth the night we had met in the métis camp. I hefted it in the palm of my hand.

  “Quarter of an ounce, maybe a little more,” I judged. “Let’s say nine dollars.”

  “It cost me twelve.”

  “Someone saw you coming. All right, that gives us sixty-eight dollars, enough to buy two good horses in Helena.”

  “It won’t buy us one from Tyrone.” He drew up the poke and returned it to his saddle bag.

  “We’ll worry about that tomorrow.”

  Tomorrow was bleeding into the purple overhead like cheap red dye when I awoke to find Jac standing over me, moccasined feet spread apart and the muzzle of his Spencer dangling in front of my face. I thought, You can’t trust anyone, pushed it away before it could blow off one of my best features, and drew the Deane-Adams, pointing it at his groin.

  The movement startled him. He stepped back quickly and glanced down at me as if he’d forgotten I was there. He hadn’t been watching me at all, but something far beyond me. The muzzle of the five-shot brought him back in a hurry. Without a word he raised his arm and pointed in the direction he’d been looking. That trick being as old as the rock that had been digging into the small of my back all night long, I didn’t look right away but climbed out of my bedroll and took two steps backward, keeping him covered. Then I looked.

  My first thought when I saw the curl of black smoke drifting up against the distant haze was that I had made a horse’s ass of myself again. Then the significance of it hit me and that didn’t seem so important any more. A spot of bright yellow flickered at the base of the curl. The group of dark lumps clustered around it might have been rocks, but they weren’t.

  “How long?”

  “I cannot say. I noticed it at first light.”

  “Get Hudspeth up.”

  “Too late. I’m up.”

  I turned to my left. The marshal was standing next to his bedroll facing west, where the campfire was. No doubt about it, I’d been living too soft of late, sleeping too soundly. It didn’t comfort me that I’d come off watch only three hours before. “Got your glass?”

  He thrust it at me. “I reckon the injuns found the ammo in my saddle bags more interesting. But you won’t see anything.”

  “My eyes are ten years younger than yours.” I pointed the glass in the direction of the fire and twisted it. Behind me the sun had begun to top the buttes, casting their shadows just short of the other camp. When I had the flames in good and clear I shifted a little to the right. As I did so, one of the lumps stirred, cast something into the fire, and stood up. It was dressed in black. No, blue. It turned to look up at the buttes and sunlight glittered off the tiny, polished surface of what had to be a glass eye. I lowered the telescope.

  “Shades of the U. S. Army,” I said.

  “Harms?” suggested Hudspeth.

  “Worse, if what Jed Hoxie told us is worth anything. Sergeant Burdett.”

  “How many with him?” He took back the glass and trained it in that direction, as if the fresh knowledge might improve his vision.

  “Eight or ten. Either they don’t know we’ve got Ghost Shirt or Burdett talked the major out of loading him down with more men than he needed. I’m betting on the second.”

  “How good you figure this guy is?”

  “If he’s good enough to have followed us this far, he’s good enough for us not to worry about trying to cover up our tracks from here on in. We’d just be wasting our time. He wants us to know he’s there, or he wouldn’t have lit that fire. He hopes we’ll panic and make mistakes.”

  While we had been talking, Pere Jac had begun to saddle the horses. “Speaking of wasting time,” he said pointedly. We took the hint and turned to break camp.

  I walked over to where Ghost Shirt was lying with a blanket drawn up to his chin and watched his face for a second or two. His eyes were closed and his breathing was even. “Get up,” I said. “I know you’re with us.” I nudged him gently in the ribs with the toe of my boot.

  Something the size of a newborn calf came roaring up from beneath the blankets and struck me full in the chest, knocking me down hard on my back. I found myself looking up into a savage face with hatred in its eyes and a double row of sharp, curving teeth in a gaping mouth. The jaws closed on my right arm when I went for my gun. I tried to extract it and felt the flesh tearing away from the bone. Hot breath seared my face. My ears rang with the thing’s frenzied snarling, which grew shriller as I fought to keep it from my throat. It shook my wrist like a dead snake. I had about given up the battle when something blurred across my vision, there was a loud thump followed by an earsplitting yelp of rage and pain, a name was called sharply, and suddenly the weight was gone from my chest.

  “Are you all right, Page?” Pere Jac was standing over me, gripping his Spencer by the barrel like a club—which was an appropriate comparison, since that’s what he had just used it for. Behind him, Hudspeth had his Smith & Wesson out to cover Ghost Shirt, who was on his feet now, and Custer, the yellow mongrel I’d seen him with back at the mission, who was at the Indian’s side. The dog was scrubbing its head against the grass to clean the blood from the cut Jac had opened over its right eye. It was still snarling.

  I got up, holding my torn wrist together with the other hand. Almost reluctantly, I peeled back the ragged sleeve to inspect the damage. It wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, although it was bad enough. A good deal of meat had been exposed and rearranged, but as far as I could tell the muscle was intact. I tore a fresh strip from what was left of my shirttail and began to bind it up. Jac finished the job.

  “All right,” I said, once the blood was out of sight. “Where’d the animal come from and how’d he get into camp? It wasn’t during my watch.”

  “Nor mine,” said Jac. “I never left this spot.”

  We looked at Hudspeth. He fidgeted.

  “It must of been after I stepped into them bushes.” He jerked his head toward a prairie rose bramble fifty yards away. There was no apology in his tone. “It was only a couple of minutes. Hell, a man’s got to—”

  “Damn smart dog, picking just that moment to sneak into camp.”

  “He is smart.”

  It was Ghost Shirt who had spoken. He was down on one knee beside the dog with his hand on its bleeding head. Not stroking it or patting it, just holding it there, the way he might handle anything else that belonged to him.

  “He is trained to follow me at a distance and to join me at night in silence.” The commanding strain had not left his speech in spite of his captive state. Although he spoke without accent, the fact that he gave each syllable its proper value made it clear that for him English was a foreign tongue. “I did not train him to attack in my defense. That he does naturally.”

  He sneezed, winced at the shock to his own injured head, and climbed unsteadily to his feet. I was surprised. It was the first time we had stood face to face, and even then we weren’t, not exactly. I knew that most Indians only ran to about five and a half feet, but from his reputation I had expected this one to top off a lot taller. The crown of his head came to my nose. It didn’t make me feel superior, though. Some of the hardest fights I’ve had have been with runts.

  He was a fine specimen, at that. The shirt he wore sashed about his waist, once red, now faded to a desert tan, barely contained his chest and shoulders, and his solid, heavy-muscled thighs strained the seams of his buckskin leggings. From there they swelled into powerful calves, then tapered to trim ankles and a pair of feet small and delicate-looking enough in their fringeless moccasins to arouse the envy of a beautiful woman. His reddish brown breechclout nearly swept the earth.

  “Why’d you call him off?” I asked.

  I got the hypnotic stare. “For his own safety. One more blow like t
he first would have killed him.”

  “Is he going to behave himself now?”

  “He always has. I said that he is trained.”

  “Let me put it another way. Are you going to behave yourself?”

  He smiled then, which took me aback. I hadn’t seen him do that before. It didn’t suit him. “I have not been unconscious all the time,” he said. “I have overheard your conversation. With what will you threaten me? I am worth nothing to you dead.”

  Daring me. Just like a twenty-two-year-old boy. Aloud I said, “We’d rather keep you alive, sure, but we’d heaps rather stay alive ourselves. If you’re the genius they say you are you’ll try to fix it so we won’t have to choose. Besides, there’s a group of men in blue coats back there who don’t care whether they bring you back sitting a saddle or draped over it. If you decide to pitch pennies you’d better be sure where they’ll land.”

  I’d expected that last statement to go over his head, but he understood. He hadn’t spent all his time while out East inside the classroom. Anyway, the smile was gone.

  Hudspeth mounted the mustang. In spite of the situation and the pain in my wrist I suppressed a grin. He looked like a fat padre on a scrawny burro. He scowled at the dog.

  “If that mutt goes with us he eats grass,” he said. “We ain’t got enough jerky we can afford to waste it on no mangy cur.”

  “He is Cheyenne. He will hunt for his food,” said Ghost Shirt.

  We straddled our horses, Jac favoring his wounded shoulder, me my wrist, the Indian his head. Only Hudspeth remained unimpaired, unless you counted the fact that he was deprived of his whiskey and that he was riding a horse that didn’t fit him. Followed by a dog with a burst scalp, we must have looked like a hospital train returning from a battlefield as we steered single file down the narrow trail that led to the flatlands. I turned in my saddle for one final glance at our pursuers before we passed below the ridge. There was now no sign of a fire.

  The haze burned off around five o’clock, when the air turned hot and dry as the inside of a brick chimney. The grass had gone from green to brittle brown. The harsh smell of baked earth stung our nostrils. Suddenly I missed the sultriness of the past several days. The back of my neck grew skillet-hot and water splashed into my mouth from the buckskin bag I carried seemed to evaporate before it reached my tongue. The landscape swam behind shimmering waves of heat.

  Tyrone, it turned out, owned several sections on the western edge of the Drift Prairie, smack in the middle of which stood a tiny sod hut with a privy behind it and a corral roughly the size of Montana. Here and there horses grazed in groups or galloped off alone to kick up their heels in the open acreage. A windmill towered over the hut, its blades stock still. It was either tied down or the air was just as stagnant up there as it was at ground level.

  To the northwest, beyond the fenced-in section, several hundred acres had been turned over quite recently. As a matter of fact, it was being turned as we approached it, by a pair of huge workhorses pulling a large plow with a scrawny old man at the handles. As he pushed, he kept up a steady rhythm of curses in a rich, bellowing cant that carried for miles. Since there was no one else around to receive them, it was evident that they were directed at the two grays straining at the traces. The horses didn’t appear to be paying any attention to the abuses he was hurling at them as they worked. They were probably used to it by now and couldn’t function without it.

  We had reached the west end of the plowed field when the farmer rounded the opposite corner. Maybe I was getting old, but I was sure he hadn’t noticed us yet. The bullet that struck the ground in front of my gray’s hoofs and kicked dirt up over its fetlocks told me different.

  Chapter Fourteen

  “I spent too much time plowing these furrows to mess them up with a bunch of graves. But I’ll make the sacrifice if I don’t start hearing some names I trust damn soon.”

  However many years it had taken Tyrone to pick up the American way of speech west of the Mississippi, they hadn’t been enough to eradicate his Scottish burr, which showed itself most prominently in the acrobatics his r’s went through before they left his tongue. His voice was deep and rich, the way it had been when he was cursing at the horses earlier. He was standing behind the giant grays holding a Remington rolling-block he had hooked from a special scabbard on the plow handle as he was coming around the end of his last furrow, so smoothly that I hadn’t realized what he was doing until the shot rang out.

  The breed spoke up. “Tyrone, do you not remember me?”

  “Jacques!” It was strange hearing Jac called by his right name. I found myself resenting it without knowing why. For all his obvious delight, however, the Scot maintained his grip on the rifle. “Where have you been these twenty years? I thought you were dead.”

  Several items of gossip were exchanged, none of which is crucial to this narrative. We did learn that the rancher was breaking ground for late oats after an argument with his feed supplier had resulted in their terminating their working agreement. Then Jac introduced us—all except Ghost Shirt, to whom he referred simply as our prisoner. Only then did Tyrone step out from behind the horses and approach us, still holding the rifle. His figure beneath the shapeless work clothes was small and wiry and he walked with a definite bounce. A worn tweed hat with a slouched, finger-marked brim was crushed on top of his head. The lower half of his face was completely hidden behind a reddish beard, streaked with white and cut square at the bottom. Over this swooped a moustache that must have dressed out at a pound and a half, the waxed ends of which dipped down to the corners of his jaw before jutting back up to tickle his ears. A pair of wire-rimmed spectacles glittered astride a bulb of flesh in the middle of his face. I placed his age at about sixty, but it could have fallen ten years either side of that. He got to within a few yards of us when he stopped short, his face reddened, and he raised the Remington to his stringy shoulder.

  “Ghost Shirt!” He made it sound like one of the names he had been calling the horses. The dog, which had just caught up with us, hunkered down and growled threateningly at him through bared teeth.

  “You know him?” I asked.

  “I saw him in the stockade at Fort Ransom last March when I went there to raise hell about the Crows stealing my horses. What are you doing with him?”

  “Judge Flood plans to decorate a pole with him in Bismarck if we can keep ahead of the army.” I made a quick decision based on what Jac had told me of the Scot’s character on the way there and gave him a rundown. He listened in silence.

  “How far are they behind you?” he asked, when I had finished.

  “Not more than a couple of hours.”

  “So why are you stopping?”

  For an answer, Pere Jac stepped down and held up his pony’s damaged hoof for him to see. Tyrone nodded.

  “I can give you a good price on a three-year-old I broke last fall. What’ve you got to spend?”

  “You broke him?” Hudspeth cut in. He had all the discretion of a heckler at a church service.

  “Somebody had to.” Tyrone glared up at him defiantly. “Every last hand I had lit out when Ghost Shirt broke jail. I was busting broncos before you were born.”

  “Did they have horses then?”

  I decided to steer the conversation back onto the main track before bullets flew. “What can you give us for sixty-five dollars?”

  The Scot discovered he had a mouthful of worms. There is no other way to describe that expression.

  “You’ve guts, I’ll give you that. Not that they’ll do you any good now or in the long run. In your situation I could soak you a thousand dollars.”

  “Not when sixty-five is all we have.” I sighed. All right, so maybe that was overdoing it a little. I was tired. “I guess you’ve got us figured out. I was saving some for emergencies. Sixty-eight dollars.”

  Worms again. “Get off my land.”

  “Seems to me it would be worth the difference to keep three of your fellow citizens from be
coming criminals and robbing you.” I didn’t draw my gun. That would have been too obvious, and fatal under the circumstances. But I shifted my weight in the saddle to bring the butt of the Deane-Adams within easy reach.

  “Is that how it is?”

  “You certainly have a way with words,” I said.

  I’ll give him credit for one thing: He didn’t say, “You’re sworn to uphold the law” or anything like that, although I could see that he was considering it. I had a whole speech made out for that one. But what he did say was just as predictable.

  “This Remington is trained on your belly. Are you betting that your hand is quicker than my finger on this trigger?”

  Another gambler. The West was full of them. I said nothing. There’s a time to raise and a time to stand pat.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear his name before.” Hudspeth was backing my play. “This here’s Page Murdock. He’s the one brought in that scalp hunter Bear Anderson last year in Montana, right under the noses of Chief Two Sisters and the en-tire Flathead nation.”

  I thought he was laying it on a little thick, but it appeared that Tyrone was not a man to be subtle with. His murky green eyes did things behind the spectacles. He was a strong man, and a brave one, but sustained tension is a hard thing for anyone to take. I knew, because I was on the other end of the same taut string. Five or six seconds shuffled by. My shoulder began to ache from holding my arm in the same position. I supposed the rifle was growing heavy in the old Scot’s hands, although you wouldn’t have guessed it by the way he held it. Finally he lowered the piece about the width of a butterfly’s eyelash.

  “You throwing in the pinto?”

  Jac said he was.

  “You’re getting a good pony damned cheap.”

  I had handed the treasury over to Pere Jac on the trail. He reached into his poke, withdrew the crumpled bills and the gold tooth, and turned them over to Tyrone, who took them in one hand while he balanced the Remington in the other. I could have taken him then had I wanted to, but there was no longer any reason and anyway I liked him. Maybe I was looking at myself in thirty years.