The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  I could not bear to look at the doctors who had misread Alice’s swollen fingers and yellowish cast as marks of pregnancy. Alice was lying propped up on several pillows. She recognized me, recognized me not. Her blue eyes wandered. Her lips were cracked. Her nose was filled with bloody mucus.

  I tore the nurses and doctors away from Alice, rocked her gently as I could.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” said the chief quack, peering at me through his lorgnette. “Your wife must not be moved. She would shatter in your arms. She’s frail, sir, frail as glass.”

  “Glass, you say? Dr. Peterson, I will move her to heaven or hell if I like.”

  But I held her tight now, as she trundled her head in alarm.

  “The Black Horse . . . Cavalry,” she muttered.

  I stroked her, touched her hot flesh. “Darling, no damn cavalry could keep us apart.”

  I did not want all this clutter around us, invading the privacy of our bed. I glared at the doctors and the nurse patrol. “Out,” I screamed, with the veins rippling on my forehead.

  Bamie scattered them all and stood like a sentry near the door.

  Alice laughed. I was convinced that I could cure her with my own electrical currents and the force in my arms. What did any of these quacks know? Dr. Dudley Sargent, Harvard’s physician, had diagnosed my death, and here I was, leaping up the stairs and sparring with professional prizefighters in my rooms at the Kenmore, with no more punishment or fear of fatality than a blackened eye.

  Alice laughed again. “Lee . . . holm,” she said.

  We’d built the stables and the foundation of our country manor, nothing more.

  Her smile was petulant now. She did not mention our daughter.

  “Those children on the hill.”

  What hill?

  She wasn’t delirious.

  “Promise to bring them from the Bad-lands.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I promise.”

  I’d bring every last one of those rough-clad tykes to our deserted stables and feed them and their parents with a plunder of wine.

  “We will have a carnival—on the lawn. I’ll dance with the children.”

  “We both will,” she said. “May a few of them come and live with us . . . for a little while? They’ll be so happy.”

  I’d build them a stable of their own—not a stable, a small mansion next to ours.

  “Teddy, dear, is the snow . . . hard or soft?”

  That miasma had melted the snow. But my darling must have dreamt she was on a bed with runners and we were gliding across the Badlands on yet another honeymoon. I thought that if I could manufacture this sleigh bed in my own mind, I could keep her here, beyond the outposts of time. I shut my eyes and fell into the dream of our ride. But I was rudely awakened—by my own courier, Bamie, who had come to the door.

  “Teddy, I need you.”

  “But I’m taking care of Alice, can’t you tell?”

  “If you want to see Mother while she’s still alive, you must come now.”

  There was such force in my sister’s sad, deep-set eyes, such rectitude, I could not contradict her. Bamie had to help me down one flight to Mother’s floor. Damn those doctors and their medieval instruments. Mother’s “cold” had masked acute typhoid fever. She lay under the quilts in that royal bed, wearing her chiffon coif. By Jupiter, she did not seem ill. She had that same ethereal, moonlit complexion. Her fists were clenched. “Teedie,” she said in a trembling voice, “it’s missing.”

  “What, Mother?”

  “Your father’s magnificent knife.”

  I cursed my own stupid hide. Mittie must have rummaged through Brave Heart’s silver trinket box while I was with the Albany pirates.

  “I’m the culprit, Mama.”

  I needed that knife. I wanted a piece of Papa in my pocket while I went after those renegades.

  Mother didn’t scold me. “Put it back, dear.”

  She had not forgotten a single object, could summon up the exact location of Papa’s entire repertoire. I restored Papa’s pearl-handled knife to his trinket box. Once Mama heard the familiar clink of the knife, she shut her eyes. But she did not lie still. A serpent seemed to run rampant through Mother’s body and send her into a long, agonizing spasm, with a rattling sound in her throat.

  “Brave Heart,” she managed to mutter, still suffused with that moonlit glow, still within her secret estuary. That’s where she resided since Papa’s death, in some wild country of ghosts, enduring the grim colors of Manhattan for her children’s sake. Yet we were well beyond Mother’s estuary, had always been. And she abandoned us with one final rattle, frozen into that posture of pain.

  Somehow, I returned to Alice’s room with my own feeble grip on the banister rails. That liquid fever in Alice’s eyes was gone. I stroked her, kissed her, as the light slowly left her limbs. I sat with Alice, as if I had had some umbilicus to her own interior. I couldn’t let her go. I thwarted time, and could feel Alice and myself at Leeholm. Magically, the manor had been built, every shingle, every stone in place. It was packed with Roosevelts, sons and daughters galore. I couldn’t recollect their names, my very own brood. We had ponies in the stables, air rifles for the urchins. We were hunting rabbit tails. The boys were all blond, the girls had weak eyes and royal red hair. The whole tribe wore spectacles. I didn’t care about politics. Nothing mattered but Leeholm. Alice hadn’t aged a bit. She danced with her weak-eyed children.

  “Teddy, we do not have to dress for dinner, not ever again.”

  I was wearing a soiled dickey from one of Father’s old dinner costumes. It scratched my neck. I heard a buzz in my ear.

  “Teedie, she’s gone.”

  I didn’t listen. I had Leeholm.

  There was a revolt in my brain. Leeholm unraveled a stitch at a time, as if the mansion had been manufactured on a spindle, with cotton rather than timber and stone. I had no anchors now, not Bamie, not Humble, not Morton Hall. I was bereft, a weak-eyed man without the will to linger in this world. And then Leeholm was back, not with my own brood, but with those tykes from Little Dakota. We danced around the stables, and I couldn’t tell if I was in the midst of a carnival. A fiddler was there. Was I at a mock marriage, a charivari of sorts? One of the tykes, who couldn’t have been older than ten, wore a wedding veil. I gazed under the veil. The little girl had a wizened, prunelike face.

  “Will ya dance with me, Mr. Ted?”

  I was contentious until I realized that I was the groom. We danced to the fiddler’s tune. The pain of it was a whip away.

  “Alicy,” I called, but the echo rattled into the distance and died in the thunder of all those dancing feet.

  CHAPTER 4

  BLACK ICE

  1884–1885

  ISAID GOODBYE TO HUMBLE AT MORTON HALL.

  “Ah, you will not be forgotten, Mr. Ted.”

  “Humble, I’ve already begun to vanish.”

  He was silent for a moment as he let my words sink in. “And what will be your next venture?”

  “Ranchman in Dakota.”

  I’d visited the Badlands last year and felt the pull of that wild, barren terrain, its treeless plateaus, its buttes and battlements of many-colored clay. I was the only passenger to step off the Pullman car at Little Missouri, a former army cantonment that didn’t even have a proper depot. I nearly landed in the cacti. But I fell in love with the underground fires that were fueled permanently in pits beneath clay and rock. That inferno had become my own glimpse of a strange new paradise. I acquired two ranches, the Elkhorn and the Maltese Cross.

  “Will you go to the Badlands with your baby girl?” Humble asked, but he was quick to grasp my pain. “Ah, the Territory isn’t the right venue for a child.”

  We hugged in front of his henchmen. He’d never profited from me. I was the one Nightingale he could afford in that pitiless parlor of politics.

  I realized I might never see Humble again. He was the squire of Morton Hall. He had no interest in rising above his station. The Twenty
-first was his mainstay and his coffin. Some ambitious roughneck among the ranks would mount a minor revolution and Humble would retire to a modest country estate. I couldn’t tell if he had a wife and children—he was always at Morton Hall, presiding over the dust, the mousetraps, and the spittoons.

  I had to settle accounts with Bamie before I left for the Badlands.

  “I am heartless,” I said, “a lawmaker who cannot even look after his own child.”

  “Teedie, you must heal yourself before you can attend to Little Alice.”

  “How?” I asked. “How?” Blondish she was, all blond, without a single root of red hair. Every glimpse of her summoned my departed wife. “I cannot abide to look at Baby Lee.”

  I had never seen such a furl of anger in my sister, whose lidded eyes were ablaze.

  “I will not listen. Little Alice will not be the target of your grief.”

  We sold Mama’s mansion on West Fifty-seventh Street, with its little reminders of Alicy—the bedclothes, the bric-a-brac, the sewing cushions, her archer’s quiver, the footstool in her closet. And Bamie moved into a brownstone at 422 Madison—with Baby Lee.

  That address would now be my Manhattan headquarters. But Bamie was swift in her reprisal. “This is your home away from home. I will raise Little Alice for you, become her devoted auntie, but I won’t be your invisible wife.”

  Invisible wife.

  I was furious at Bamie’s bluntness. Yet she wasn’t unfair. I had my own calling now. I would become a writer and a rancher out West.

  I departed for the Badlands, furnished with silver stirrups, a tailored buckskin suit, and a Bowie knife from Tiffany’s. I had to get outside my own country, leave the United States, to discover my own damn self in a Territory that was still uncharted and unknown. Dakota was full of desperadoes and other lost souls who needed to carve their fate in the alkali dust. The land around the Little Missouri River had been one of the last Indian hunting grounds in the West until ranchers and white trappers drove them off. So there was constant strife and bartering between the frontiersmen and the Cheyenne, the Sioux, and the Crow.

  I was the first Knickerbocker the Little Missouri Cattlemen’s Association had ever met. These cattlemen stared in wonder at my Bowie knife and buckskin suit, and welcomed me like a maharajah from Manhattan. “Roosevelt, you’re the kind of pilgrim we could use in the Badlands.” I was appointed a deputy sheriff to deal with all the strife. We had our share of vigilantes, or “Stranglers,” who disposed of their victims with a piece of copper coil. They went after horse thieves and cattle rustlers, and wanted to go after the Cheyenne, attack their villages, and burn them out of the Territory. But I wouldn’t give them that right. I didn’t rile the Cheyenne, and allowed no one else to rile them. I’d string up the Stranglers if I had to, wipe them out to the last man. So the Stranglers behaved. And whatever skirmishes there were remained skirmishes. The Cheyenne tepees still stood. We didn’t harm their women and children. And we maintained a fragile truce. There were Sioux war parties. Some young warriors might steal a horse and rob a lone mountain man. But we generally got that horse back, with the mountain man’s belongings, after a little powwow with the local Sioux chiefs. I brought food in times of famine. I watched over the little ones with my medicine bag. I was considered royalty to the Sioux chiefs because of my fancy trousers and my red hair. The chiefs called me Prince Theodore. They loved to play poker. I’d never gambled in my life, not even at the Porcellian Club. But I gambled now, in the spirit lodge. The stakes were high. They eschewed poker chips and hard cash. They gambled for possessions, theirs and mine. I lost my sweetheart of a mare, old reliable Nell, in a poker game with the chiefs. The Sioux noticed how unsettled I was. “Prince Theodore, allow us to give you back the gift of your horse.”

  “But I lost Nell fair and square.”

  “No,” they insisted in their own royal manner. “It would be a great unkindness. We would fear the ghost of your horse. We will take your repeater and your silver stirrups instead.”

  I still wasn’t far from a tenderfoot, even with my deputy’s badge. I couldn’t handle a rope with the same flair as my cowpunchers, but I wasn’t utterly useless on a cattle drive. Nell was as faithful as the North Star. I never got lost in some painted canyon while I was glued to that mare, even when I dozed in the saddle. . . .

  I’d almost been caught in a snowdrift when I arrived that spring. We had the worst blow in years. It took days to dig out of the drifts, and left us with a mountain of black ice. That’s the first sight I saw when I climbed down from the Northern Pacific car at Little Missouri—a world of black ice. The sudden freeze was so hard that the ice had become translucent, almost like a window onto the dark clay below. I had never once witnessed black ice in all my wanderings through Manhattan; it belonged in the Badlands, with its endless buttes of clay. Black ice was pernicious, because you could slide and slide and break your neck. If my own cowpunchers hadn’t met me at the depot with an extra pair of hobnailed boots, I might not have made it back to the Elkhorn Ranch.

  We trod softly in our spiked shoes and saved whatever cows we could. Then we dug out the white settlers. The mountain men, who lived in utter isolation, froze to death, sometimes in their tracks. That’s how fast the blow had hit. And later, after we fed the horses and the cows, and drank our coffee over a fire in the barn, I assembled a search party—all volunteers from the Elkhorn—and we bit into the black ice with our boots until we arrived at the nearest Cheyenne village.

  That village was buried in snow and black ice. The teepees had sunk into the hard, black morass, and the spirit lodge was invisible except for the clay roof. But there was something much more sinister than black ice. The Stranglers had arrived; they sat crouching on a butte above the village like a brace of jackals. Their leader was an ex–Army captain who had been an aide to General Grant and had also served with Custer in the Indian Wars. His name was Peter Albright, and he’d come to the Badlands five or six years ago. He had his own ranch, but the Cattlemen’s Association shunned him. He and his men displayed their Strangler’s string, a copper coil attached to their belts. That coil was as fiendish as a wire snake; Albright would wrap it around some horse thief’s gullet and choke the wind out of him. It was a terrible way to die, even for a horse thief.

  “Hello, Four-Eyes,” he said, wearing the gauntlets that General Custer had given him. He was as thick and ponderous as a barrel about to burst. I had no intention of tangling with him. He’d lost one nostril and part of his cheek to frostbite; the captain had even been scalped and survived. His face resembled a rough, indented map with eyes.

  “Captain,” I said, “you have no call to be here.”

  “I’ve as much call as you,” he said, playing up to his Stranglers.

  “We’re here to rescue.”

  “So am I,” he said. “We’ll rescue these Injuns right to eternity.”

  But I knew his weaknesses. He’d graduated from West Point at the very bottom of his class. He’d always been a malingerer who wished for a fabulous military career. And his Stranglers were the residue of that lost career.

  “Captain, you’re begging for a fight on this damn ridge.”

  He smiled with his dented frying pan of a face. “Four-Eyes, you could waltz away on the black ice.”

  “What if I tell Ulysses?”

  The sand had gone out of him. “You’re on intimate terms with the general?”

  I’d seen Grant at several soirees in Manhattan. I shook his hand once or twice. My proximity to Grant had unsettled the captain and dampened his designs on this village. He vanished into the clay with the Stranglers, like a snowman who was half asleep.

  We climbed off the butte and chipped away at the black ice with our pickaxes until we dug out every tepee and tunneled right into the spirit lodge. We did not bury the dead. But we did feed the children corn mush, and warmed half-frozen women in buffalo robes. I cradled an infant in my arms, whistled a birdsong until his eyes grew alert, yet no matte
r how I toiled, I couldn’t drive out my own demons. I’d always believed you could outrun sorrow and black care if your stride was long enough, but I couldn’t shove past the image of Baby Lee in this land of black ice. Her blondness was like my own macabre Strangler’s string.

  BLACK ICE REMAINED EVEN after the second melt of the season, that March—it clung to the clay. And a cowpuncher of mine discovered a bald act of thievery that no rancher could abide. We had one of the rare scows on the river, a watertight blue flatboat, and it was gone. We’d tied it to a tree near the riverbank. That scow had ferried ponies and supplies across the stream. The culprits had left a red woolen mitten with a leather palm in a pack of snow, almost as a mark of defiance. I knew the owner of that glove. I’d seen him wear it many a time. He liked to flaunt it in a cowboy’s face. He was a gunfighter and a bully, Red Finnegan, a giant of a man in a frayed buckskin shirt. He had a crop of red hair that reached to his shoulders. He gambled a lot. He came with a partner, an old German who was a little touched in the head. They lived together in a cabin about twenty miles upriver. Red Finnegan had been involved in several shooting scrapes. He was clever enough to evade the law, but he and his partner were under the constant scrutiny of the Stranglers. Red must have realized that the Finnegan gang didn’t have much of a future in these parts. He’d have to disappear, go deeper into uncharted land of the Dakota Territory, where sheriffs and Stranglers couldn’t follow. He’d never get there on his pony. A horse would break a leg on that black ice. And he couldn’t get there on foot. Finnegan and I had the only flatboats on the Little Missouri, and he got it into his head to steal mine. His was rather leaky and couldn’t have gotten him far in the unpredictable currents downriver. But larceny wasn’t royal enough for Red Finnegan. He had to leave his rotten glove with that leather palm to get my gall.

  I had to send a boy to town for a fresh bag of nails; the nails we had were all rusted out. Upon his return, two of my cowpunchers, Sewall and Dennison, who’d been carpenters in Maine, built a beauty of a boat with their hammers, chisels, a whipsaw, and our brand-new nails. Dennison was a widower, like myself. He talked ceaselessly about his dead wife. “Mr. Roosevelt, do ya think the hurt will ever go away?”