Dusk Along the Niobrara

by John D. Nesbitt

  CHAPTER NINE

  We found Del Bancroft sitting on the shady side of the wagon that held the hinges, bolts, and nails for the corrals. He was reading a book. When he saw us, he tucked in a small slip of paper to hold his place, closed the book, and raised his eyes to meet us.

  As we drew close, I saw that he was reading the second volume of Grant’s memoirs.

  “What’s new?” he asked.

  Dunbar answered. “I ended up with three bottles of beer, and I thought you might like to join us.”

  “Do you have a place in mind?”

  “What do you think of going over to the corrals and admiring our work?”

  Del’s brown eyes searched both of us. “Sure. Let me put this book away and put on a hat.”

  A minute later, he was ready to go. The three of us walked to the corrals, where we were out of earshot of the camp. We found a patch of shade where the floor planks of the first ten feet of the catwalk overhead had been nailed in place. We sat on the ground, and Dunbar uncapped the three bottles.

  Del said, “This news about Hodel does not sound good.”

  “Not at all,” said Dunbar. “And he seems to have fallen victim to the very thing he was railing about. No one seems inclined to look for answers.”

  “What do you think?”

  “I don’t want to put things in strong terms, and I don’t want to make accusations, but I don’t think he drank himself to death.”

  “I don’t disagree, but how do you think he would have died?”

  “There are ways that don’t draw blood or leave bruises. Chloroform is common. And injection is becoming more so. Then there’s good old-fashioned poison, which would have been harder to administer to him. It’s favored by people who live under the same roof, though someone could slip it into a drink.” Dunbar took a quick survey of the area around us. “It’s easier to say what I don’t think it was.”

  Del nodded and took a sip of beer. “I go along with your sense of caution, or maybe reluctance, in regards to saying things outright. A fellow needs proof.”

  “Oh, yes. No need to make accusations at this point. It’s better to work on finding evidence.” Dunbar tipped his bottle and took a swallow. “I have a hunch that these things—that is, what Hodel talked about and what happened to him—are related and that they go back to the death of Alex Garrison.”

  “Which in turn goes farther back to the question of why.”

  “Correct.” Dunbar nodded. “And I think there’s more to be known or brought out.”

  Del gave him a close look. “You mean you think there’s a way of finding an answer about Alex.”

  “There might be. You know, he’s buried out there somewhere. As I told Bard, he’s been here all this time. If you believe in such things as the truth—that is, as something that has a life of its own, the answer has been here all this time as well.”

  “And you think there’s a way of getting at it.”

  “I believe it exists, and I think it’s worth a try. As I mentioned to the lady who runs the alehouse, I told Bill Pearson’s wife I would do something if I could.”

  I thought Dunbar was waiting for some kind of indication that Del Bancroft was with him.

  Del said, “Somebody’s got to do something. I’m not sure that I’m the one to do it, but I would give it my support.”

  “That’s good to hear.” Dunbar took another glance around. I did the same, and I saw no one. Dunbar lowered his voice. “So tell me. Did Alex Garrison have any friends back then? Anyone who’s still around?”

  Del pursed his lips. “Seems to me that he was friends with a woman named Rona. Not a romantic friendship. You’ll know what I mean if you ever meet her. They were both—well, not outcasts or misfits, but just not part of what you might call society—to the extent that we have it here. They didn’t fit in very well, but they had a kind of kinship between them. Every once in a blue moon, you’d see her on her way to his place or on the way back.”

  “Rona,” said Dunbar. He turned to me. “Do you know her?”

  “Not personally. I know who she is, and I think I know where to find her. The last I knew, she worked for Luke Hayward.”

  “That’s right,” said Del. “He’s got quite a menagerie, and she tends to his animals. Feeds ’em, nurses bum calves, cleans pens, and such.”

  “How far out is it?”

  Del looked at me. “A couple of hours, maybe more?”

  I nodded and yawned. The beer was making me drowsy in the hot weather, and I did not relish the idea of going on a long ride.

  Dunbar, meanwhile, seemed to have perked up. “Sounds good. What do you say, Bard? We’ll play guessing games to keep you awake.”

  “Such as?”

  “Who died first, John Adams or Thomas Jefferson?”

  I said, “They died on the same day. The fiftieth anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.”

  “Yes, but who died first?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t believe I ever learned it.”

  “Guess.”

  I heaved out a short breath. “I don’t know. John Adams.”

  “That was what he thought. His final words were something like, ‘Thomas Jefferson still lives,’ but unbeknownst to him, Jefferson had died earlier in the day. Easy mistake. News didn’t travel as fast in those days.”

  I said, “Well, it was a fair question, I suppose.”

  “And it was a true guessing game. Not like some of these riddles.”

  “Like the one about walking on four legs, two legs, and three legs.”

  Del said, “Oh, yes. I remember that one. We learned it somewhere along the way.”

  “Like geometry,” said Dunbar. “Here’s another one. And I’ll promise not to plague you with any more. What is it that no man wants to have, but no man wants to lose?”

  “I don’t know. There are too many possibilities. This is a riddle, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Shall I tell you the answer?”

  “Go ahead. Get it over with.”

  “Said with true irony. A bald head.”

  I thought, that was a safe joke. Everyone present had a full head of hair.

  Del said, “You’ve got a regular supply of gallows humor.”

  Dunbar tipped the neck of his beer bottle as he gave a mild shrug. “Or guillotine.”

  As Dunbar and I rode away from the work camp, I cast a glance backward. Seeing the main gateway with its crossbeam, plus the catwalk to the right, I had a momentary vision in which I put the two parts together. They made a scaffold or gallows. I had never seen such a structure in person, but I had seen illustrations, including one that showed the four conspirators being hanged for the Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

  We stopped long enough for Dunbar to skip into the alehouse and return the empty bottles. Between the hot sun and the beer I had drunk, I was feeling drowsy. I shook my head and focused on the ride that lay before us. Luke Hayward’s place lay south and west of town in an area where the grassland was a little poorer and the Niobrara wasn’t much more than a muddy trickle.

  Dunbar was whistling a tune. After a few bars, I recognized it as the song about the woman who died in the snow. At some point he quit whistling, but I didn’t notice, because the tune was running through my head as well.

  I led us west out of town about five miles until we came to a trail leading south. We turned left and followed the trail through rolling country.

  A couple of miles later, Dunbar said, “Let’s ride for that high spot over there.” He pointed to the left.

  When we gained the high ground, we had a good lookout for several miles in each direction. I said, “What do you have in mind?”

  He had his brows drawn together as he studied the country. “I want to see if we’re being followed. If we’re going to talk to someone who might know something, I don’t want to be giving away a witness.”

  “A good thought.” I let my gaze wander across the landscape, and I felt the atmosphere
pressing on me. The air was still, and the summer heat lay like a blanket upon the land. Here where the grass was sparse, the soil absorbed and reflected the rays of the sun. A man standing on the ground could feel it through his boots, and I wondered if the horses felt it in their hooves.

  “Big country,” said Dunbar. “You’d think there was enough room for everyone. But no matter how far people are spread apart, there’s always someone who has to encroach on others. He’s not happy under his own vine and fig tree. He’s got to pester and meddle, or covet, or antagonize, or violate someone else’s health and happiness.”

  “It’s a bad part of human nature,” I said.

  “That’s it. It’s a constant part, not just a strange occurrence or an occasional exception. You can go a thousand miles in any direction under Heaven’s dome, and they’re scattered everywhere. Maybe at wide intervals, but they’re out there, devising pain and suffering and death because they’re not happy with what they’ve got. It’s perverse. Sometimes it’s as if they want others to suffer because they themselves are miserable.”

  “Do you think they choose to be that way?”

  “It’s hard to say. In some way, people don’t choose the way they are. Old bachelors for example, or men who can’t keep their hands to themselves. But they can choose how to act or behave.” Dunbar peered at me in a sidelong way. “Are you trying to nail me down on the subject of free will? I should never have talked about the Presbyterians and the Methodists.”

  “It’s just something to think about.”

  “Oh, yes. Predestination and free will. I suppose we all have to think about it sooner or later. When it comes to deep ideas, though, I’m more of a cowpuncher than a philosopher. And when I do indulge, I don’t tie hard and fast to a single theory. For example, our friend Hodel. I wouldn’t say he was that way because he wanted to be, and I wouldn’t say he couldn’t help it. For me, it’s a combination. It’s the way he was.”

  Still scanning the country, I said, “Well, however he was, including a bit offensive, I don’t think he deserved to die the way we think he did. That is, if he did.”

  “Especially the ‘if’ part.”

  “No assumptions.”

  “Not hard and fast. Just hypothesis. At this point, at least.”

  We rode into Luke Hayward’s place in the late afternoon when the shadows were growing longer. I took in the barnyard with a broad sweep, noting pens that held milk cows, calves, hogs, sheep, and goats. Chickens and geese wandered loose. And on the peak of a shed, a peacock perched, with its long tail reaching to the eaves. For as long as I had known of the woman referred to as Rona, I understood that she lived and worked there. I knew her only by sight, and I had not seen her for a year or two. But when the door of a weathered shed opened and a bulky figure walked out, I recognized her.

  She had the heavy build of a woman in later middle age, and she was dressed in loose-fitting men’s clothes. She wore tall, common boots, too thick for riding, with her trousers legs tucked in—the better to avoid manure and spatter, I imagined. She walked at an uneven gait, using her stock-tending stick as a walking stick as well. In her free hand she carried a feed bucket.

  I waved to her and swung down from my horse. Dunbar dismounted as well. Rona set down the feed bucket and walked toward us.

  She came to a stop a couple of yards away. She was wearing a canvas cap with a short, wide bill. I noticed her hacked gray hair, clouded face, and full, round nose. When she spoke, I saw yellow teeth with a gap on the lower row.

  “Afternoon. Are you lookin’ for someone?”

  I said, “We were hoping to find a woman named Rona. Is that you?”

  “I answer to that. My original name is Verona, but people shorten it.”

  “Well, my name’s Bard Montgomery, and this is my work partner, Mr. Dunbar. We work for Lou Foster.”

  Her eyes went to Dunbar and back to me. “Good to meet you,” she said. She took out a bag of Bull Durham from her trousers and began to roll a cigarette.

  “Likewise,” said Dunbar, unhurried. “We hope not to interfere with your work.”

  “I figger you come for somethin’.”

  “We did. You know, there have been some suspicious things going on.”

  She nodded without looking up.

  “And to some of us, at least, they seem to go back to Alex Garrison.”

  Verona’s eyes narrowed as she studied her work. “I don’t know how much good it does to talk about any of that.”

  “I know what you mean. People get hurt, or worse, for seeming to know too much and for talking about it.”

  “Either or both. So that’s why I don’t talk much. About that kind of thing, anyway.”

  Dunbar waited for her to meet his eyes. “I don’t know if you’ve heard the most recent—”

  “If you mean Bill Pearson, I have.”

  “I meant something more recent than that. Just last night, a fellow named George Hodel died. He had drifted into town, stayed a couple of days. He worked where we were building corrals. Worked hard, but he had a tendency to drink and then talk. He got wind of the Bill Pearson story and the Alex Garrison story, and he made a public case about how no one does anything about these killings.”

  Verona licked the seam and tapped it. “Not much sense in that. Talk that way.”

  “You’re right. They found him dead in the alley. This morning.”

  Verona stopped with the cigarette halfway to her mouth. “Just like that?”

  “Well, he wasn’t like the others, because they didn’t find a bullet hole or bruises or stab wounds or anything.”

  She let out a tired breath and made ready to light her cigarette.

  “So here’s how I see it,” said Dunbar. “If a person knows something and holds it back, he makes it easier for the bad ones to get away with it.”

  Verona had a troubled expression on her face as she looked down her nose, struck a match, and held the flame to the end of her cigarette. “I know what you mean.” She puffed, and a cloud of smoke rose in front of her face. “I’ll tell you this much. Alex and I were friends, nothing more. I went to see him every now and then. Often as not, it was about a horse. I lived on my own at the time. We talked about other things, never anything big. Just more than business, that was all, and I might hang around for an hour or two. Just gabbin’, really.”

  “Normal enough.”

  “Seemed like it.”

  “I would say you knew him better than many others did.”

  “Maybe so. But my point is, I knew him well enough to stick around and chat. And that’s how I happened to be there one time when something happened.”

  “Oh,” said Dunbar, in a tone that invited her to go on.

  I thought she was still unsure about how much to tell, for she wrinkled her nose and stared at her cigarette. Then she spoke.

  “It’s one of those things that you don’t ask for, and it doesn’t make any sense, but you get drawn into it. Or Alex did, anyway, because it happened at his place.” She hesitated again. “But like I say, I don’t know how much good it does to talk about it. I don’t think Alex mentioned it to anyone, and look how he ended up.”

  “What do you think he would want?”

  “Oh, at this point?” She turned to me. “Excuse my language, but I think he would say don’t let the sons of bitches get away with it.”

  Dunbar said, “From what I know of him, I think you’re right.”

  She narrowed her eyes on him. “What stake do you have in this, then?”

  “I told Bill Pearson’s wife I would do something if I could. Beyond that, I don’t like to see people get away with crooked and dirty things.”

  She puffed a couple of times on her cigarette, as if it was a pipe, then let out a long, slow breath without smoke. “Well, all right. It was like this. I was visiting Alex one time, talking about trading a horse, when a kid showed up.” Her lips flattened out on the stub of her cigarette, and she took a drag to inhale.

&nbs
p; “Traveling?”

  “On foot. And scared to hell. Alex gave him something to eat, and the kid blubbered out a story.” Verona shook her head. “I’ve thought about it a thousand times, and it’s always the same. Bad. Just bad.”

  It seemed to me that she kept stopping short but knew she should follow through. I said, “And both you and Alex heard it?”

  “Yes.” She took a breath. “It went like this. The kid was workin’ at a sheepherding camp up on Old Woman Creek. North of the Hat Creek Breaks. I don’t know where for sure. That creek flows for a long ways as you go up the trail.”

  “Sure,” said Dunbar.

  “Anyway, the kid was the camp tender, and there was one sheepherder. The way the kid told it, one night an overbearing kind of man came into their camp. A stranger, and he was on horseback. He rode up close to their fire. The sheepherder asked what he wanted, and the man said that he wanted them to get the hell out of the country, that he hated sheep, and he’d brought along a club to kill a thousand of ’em. The kid said he went on threatening like that, and the kid wondered if he was tryin’ to work himself up to it. The man’s voice got shaky, and the sheepherder laughed at him. He said he didn’t think the man had the nerve to kill any sheep. That did it. The stranger flew into a fit. He piled off his horse, grabbed hold of the sheepherder, and clubbed him to death. The kid tried to stop him, but the stranger threw him aside. The kid tried to pull himself together, but he was half-paralyzed with fear and he didn’t know what to do. He tried to run. The stranger chased him down, grabbed him by the shirt, and dragged him back to the fire.” Verona took a drag on her cigarette. “The kid said he thought the man had run out of energy, or had lost his nerve again, or somethin’ like that. The kid looked him in the eye, and the man couldn’t take it. That was what the kid said. He gave the man a look that said, I know what you are and I saw what you did. The man let him loose.”

  I nodded to her to go on.

  “The kid said the man’s voice was shaking again, but he still lorded it over him. He told the kid that if he didn’t leave the country for good, never come back, he would have him hunted down and killed in a way that no one would think a thing of it. So the kid ran while he had a chance. He thought that as soon as the stranger got his nerve together again, he would send someone after him.”