"I see, I see!" the hefty man said. "I'm Professor Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale College, leading the Summer Paleontology Brigade. I would be happy to-" He walked up close and looked from Clete to me and back to Clete. "Are you men waiting to be asked to dismount?" he ask.
"Folks around here generally wait 'til they're invited," Clete said.
"Yes, of course. Please step down from your horses, gentlemen." He swept his arm in such a way as to welcome us, I guessed.
"Please excuse my rudeness," he said, giving Clete's hand a good pump and then mine. "The customs here are quite different from those I'm used to. I meant no offense."
"None taken," Clete said, touching his hat brim. Marsh touched his hat too, but it looked like he was saluting a Mexican general.
"Will you take tea with us, or is your business too urgent, gentlemen?" the professor ask.
"Thanks, but we'd best ride on," Clete said. "Where are your men, anyhow?"
"The students are in the western field this morning, searching for mammal bones."
"You brought a bunch of boys out here and let them run off by themselves?" I asked.
"The Yale students are young men," Marsh said, kind of uppity. "The youngest is twenty, I believe. And our military escort is with them, eight soldiers."
I felt kind of taken back then. "When you said students, I thought-"
Professor March had a good belly laugh, throwing his head back and roaring, but he didn't seem to be making fun of me by doing it. "Imagine, bringing young boys out here for field work!" He finished up his laugh and shook his head a couple of times, but then he noticed that Clete still had business on his mind. "Come and look at my map," Marsh said. "I'll show you where the students from Yale are digging, and where we are, exactly, and then I'll take you up there to talk to them, if you like."
Banty and the wrangler fellow who hadn't said anything went off together while Clete and me followed Marsh under the main tarp. We stopped at a big map of just this washed-out country, laid out on a table. I seen the way we had come into this place and where Clete's camp of the night before was. These badlands was a lot bigger than I thought, for we'd come only a short ways through them, with better than thirty miles more stretched out to the southwest.
Thin wavy lines connected places of the same level, and you could see the shape of the hills and the steepness of things real plain. "What are these pins for?" I ask.
"Those represent our major digs," the professor explained. "We're working some Jurassic beds for dinosaur fossils here at this red one. This blue one shows where the students are today, recovering the petrified skeletons of Eohippus, the dawn horse."
I took a step back from the table and looked at him. "You mean you come all the way out here from the East to dig up dead horses?" I could tell Clete was itching to move, but I had never heard nothing to beat this.
"Yes, the calcified bones of all sorts of prehistoric species–reptiles, birds, and mammals-one of which is the horse."
"Could we go talk to your men now?" Clete ask. "This is important work for you, I can see, but ours is catching a killer, and it's important to us."
"Of course, Sheriff. If you're sure you won't have tea first, I'll just have a word with my men here and then we'll leave."
"No tea," Clete said.
I shook my head. "No tea for me, neither. I'm feeling all right." Marsh give me a odd look and went out from under the tarp. While he was seeing to whatever he had to see to, I looked around in there. There was leg bones longer than a man, and one skull with three curved horns, a head the size of a boulder off some creature I hoped never to run into. "What do you make of all this?" I ask Clete.
"Reminds me of some bone pickers I came across on the way up from Abilene. Only they were after buffalo bones on top of the ground. These fellows are a whole lot pickier about the bones they want, and more polite, but beyond that, I can't see a lot of difference between the two. Bones are bones, and they don't interest me much right now, unless they're the neck bones of that bastard we're chasing."
Marsh come back wearing a regular hat. "We can go speak to the Paleontology Brigade now, gentlemen."
Clete studied the map. "How far is it to the river from here? Looks nearly three miles."
"Yes, I'd say that's accurate," the professor said.
Clete looked at the map some more. "And about twelve miles up to where the students are working?"
"Perhaps a bit more," Marsh said. "It will take us about two hours to get there. Pretty rough going right here." He pointed to a spot on the map that looked all cut up and steep.
Clete turned to me then. "We could cover more ground if we split up," he said. "How about you go along with the professor here and I'll go scout the river, unless you want to do it the other way." I could see what he was gettin at. If none of them young fellows had seen our man, we'd be burning nearly five hours and getting nowhere for our time. If there was sign along the river, Clete could see them as good as I could, since the rain'd turned this clay into some of the easiest tracking ground there is-fresh mud.
"Makes sense to do it that way. Suit yourself who goes where," I told him.
"I'll take the river, then. If I find his sign, I'll follow them and leave a broad trail-like you did coming up along the Bad. You catch up with me this time. Shouldn't be hard, that damn nag I'm riding. If I don't see anything, I'll come back here tonight. That is, if you don't mind us camping with you, Mr. Marsh."
"Not at all!" the professor said. "The hospitality of the camp is yours. Not very elegant, I'm afraid, but we do have fresh elk steak for this evening's supper, which our hunter brought in last night. You know, I'm very fascinated by this business of yours, chasing-"
"I'd best go," Clete said, nodding his head and then starting toward our horses.
Professor Marsh seemed surprised to be cut off and left hanging like that. He was a man who was used to finishing off his ideas to a high polish, I guessed, no matter how long-winded they was. Only Clete was a man who knew when he'd heard enough.
"Just you and I, then, will be going out to the dig, Mr., uh … "
"That's right," I told him. "And you can call me Willie."
Clete was already mounted up when we got over there. "If I'm not back by morning, come after me," he said.
"All right, but don't go trying to find his campfire along the river tonight," I warned him.
I didn't notice 'til then that Banty Foote'd climbed up on that little animal of his and here he come along and pulled up right beside Clete, who looked down at him for a minute.
"Where do you think you're going?" Shannon ask him.
"I'm goin' with you," Banty said.
"No, thanks," Clete told him. "I'll look for him by myself."
"Well, I'm goin' anyway," the little man said, looking right up at my pardner. "Free country, ain't it?"
"The sheriff has to go by himself, Banty," Professor Marsh said. "He feels your presence may hinder him in his search, and he may not be coming back here. Is that correct, Mr. Shannon?"
"Close enough," Clete said, spurring that old roan into a trot, the best it would do. I'd intended to trade horses with him, but he rode off before I could offer. Marsh and me and Banty Foote watched him coax his horse up onto the sod table to the south.
"An impetuous man, your Sheriff. Obviously a solitary man of action," the professor said. I didn't know just what to make of him saying that about Clete, but he didn't sound like he was taking my pardner down any, so I let it ride.
"I wouldn't a been in the way," Banty said, almost bawling the words.
"You come with Willie and me, Banty," Marsh said, walking toward the saddled horse his wrangler was bringing over. "We'll need you along if we run into the Sioux."
Well, I didn't see what good a midget without a gun would do if we run into a war party, but then I figured out the professor was only trying to gentle the little fellow. Marsh and me climbed up and the three of us started west. I saw that Foote kept watching Clete ridin
' toward the south, and we didn't get more than a hundred yards 'til Banty spurred his pony hard in the flanks and pulled him off sharp to the left, after Clete.
The professor called after him, but that little man was ridin' like thunder, bent low over that pony's neck and he didn't even look back. "Oh, well," Marsh said. "I suppose it will be all right-if he doesn't go too close to your sheriff, and if Mr. Shannon doesn't decide to shoot him."
Chapter Fourteen
Where the White River turns and runs due nonh, he sat his horse on the eastern shore and scanned the banks in one direction and then the other with his long glass. Upriver, almost a mile off, he spotted a mule wagon on the other side. Even at this distance he could see that it was stuck in the mud. Two men, one in the water and one astride a mule, were heaving and straining, but they were making no headway. Stupid sonsabitches, he thought, and started across. When the tired paint stopped on her own to drink, he got out his glass again and studied the banks a second time. It wasn't 'til then that he noticed the riding horse tied to the back of the mule wagon. He crossed the swollen current and turned the mare upriver once he cleared the deep mud.
I was surprised how well Professor Marsh sat his horse, a tall creature with big, swelled-out jaw muscles. Looked like they'd raised him on walnuts. The schoolmaster was less a dude on his horse than off, that was certain, though he still talked as odd as he done before.
"You have been in pursuit this man how long, Willie?" he ask me after we was up the trail a ways.
"A week, I guess, maybe longer. I sortalost track of the days."
"And what has this fellow done that you and your sheriff are so intent upon apprehending him?"
I told him about the gun our man'd used to shoot Clete and about the fire that killed Nell Larson and Jesse McLeod. He shook his head and said something about how raw the West was. He wanted to know where I was born, and was surprised when I told him. He asked about my schooling and my folks and everthing like that, no more ashamed about doing so than a prairie dog is of settin' up on his hind feet beside his hole. I could see then what he meant about folks doing things different where he come from. He got even more curious when it come out I'd worked for the Pinkertons a few years back.
"Why on earth did you quit Allan Pinkerton's Detective Agency, Willie? You seem to have had a good position there with a considerable future!"
"I guess it could of been, but it wasn't the kind of a future I wanted, not after that business with the James boys' family." I told him.
"You took part in the attack on Castle James, their stronghold?" he ask, looking real serious.
"Shoot, there wasn't no stronghold to it, nor no castle, neither. Just an old country doctor's house was all, and the James boys wasn't even there, as I told Billy Pinkerton at the time."
"I've heard quite a few conflicting stories about that occurrence, and I've read that contradictory evidence was presented on both sides. What really happened?"
"Well, it wasn't like the papers had it, if that's what you mean. And it wasn't no bomb Dave Farley dropped in the window, neither-just an old turpentine flare to make it smoky inside was all it was, so's they'd have to come out. Dave'd never of throwed a bomb at no one, not even the James boys themselves. Still, what Billy Pinkerton did to them James people in Missouri just wasn't right, firing on a house with women and children inside. Never was and never will be."
When Walter Turnbull first saw the man walking his horse up the river, he had a notion to go get his rifle. But when the tall stranger waved, Walt changed his mind and went back to kicking his nigh wheeler in the flanks. But it was no use. They just couldn't budge it.
"Want help?" the scrawny man called from the bank.
"Yeah, if you think you can get these critters pullin' any harder than me and the boy can, "the broadbacked muleskinner replied.
The stranger came down the bank, glanced at the tow-headed boy standing in water up to his knees beside the lead pair, and plodded his paint through the eddy out to Turnbull. "Got another whip?" he asked.
"Shore, always carry a spare. Toss the other out, Ellie."' The blond-haired woman in the wagon threw the coiled fourteen-foot bullwhip to her husband, who handed it to the scarecrow with rotten teeth.
"Are you certain the James brothers weren't at Doctor Samuels' house when the raid took place?" Professor Marsh ask.
"Am I sure? Why, I was the man shadowing Jesse! I had trailed him from his ma's place to Missouri City, and that's where I wired Mr. William Pinkerton from. We was supposed to wire him three times a day–concerning their whereabouts-but damned if I could stay on Jesse James' trail and do that. Even sent a copy to Billy care of the station master in Kearney, in case the train'd left by the time my first telegram got to the Northland Hotel where he was staying. Nosiree, Jesse wasn't even near. Fact is, Mr. Jesse James was havin' his ashes hauled in a cathouse in Missouri City while Billy Pinkerton was leading the noble raid that killed the James boys' kid brother and hurt their ma so that she had to have her arm cut off. And Frank was elsewheres too."
"I see," Marsh said. "Did you ever find out whether or not Mr. Pinkerton received your telegram before he conducted the raid?"
"Indeed he did," I told him. "That was the first thing I checked on afterward. Fact is, he got both of them. A telegraph man in Kansas City delivered the one, put it right in his hand, so he told me. And the other, Billy picked up himself in Kearney. Said so later."
We rode along silent a while after that.
"I been haulin' for ten years," the broadbacked skinner said, standing on the high bank and offering his hand, "an' I never seen nobody whup mules like that. "The boy understood why his father admired the stranger, for under his lash the team had pulled like they never had before. Still, he pitied the beasts as they stood quivering and bleeding and dripping river water on the high bank.
"Oh, you jest got to know where to tech em, and how, "the skinny man said, giving the man back his whip instead of shaking with him. A bashful smile slid over his narrow face. "I enjoy a good bout with mules now and again, jest to let em know how it is."
"Will you stay and eat with us?" Ellie called from the wagon. "Seems the least we can do."
"Why, surely, main. I'd be pleased to."
We come to the steep place I'd saw on the map and we had to go single file, but after we got up on top and took a good look across the valley, the professor wanted to talk some more. "What I can't understand, Mr. Goodwin, was why you felt obligated to resign your position simply because William Pinkerton had done something you considered to be morally reprehensible."
Took me a minute to understand him, and even then I had to ask. "Do you mean to say that you don't agree with what I done or do you really not understand why I done it?"
"Why, the latter, of course! I do not mean to set myself up as a paragon of pragmatic expediency, but I would not have done what you did, under similar circumstances, and I simply wondered what your motives were."
By that, I took it to mean he was just wondering about why I quit, not wanting to tell me I was wrong for doing it, though I wasn't completely sure. Any one of the man's words could make you see double, and strung together like that they'd crack your skull wide open.
I just looked at him, not knowing what to say.
"Let me put it this way," he said. "At Yale, the dean refuses to fund my expeditions to the extent he should, even though my uncle underwrites the entire Scientific School-through which my funds come-as well as the money for the library and the Peabody Museum, named for my dear uncle, of course. Now, my question is this: do you feel I should resign my position, as well as my Chair in Natural History, simply because the dean acts improperly in witholding money that my uncle donates? Is science well served if I resign, letting the knowledge of prehistoric life lie buried in this clay?"
I took off my hat and rubbed my head good. I like a good soft chair myself, and his throwing one into the middle of this thing made it a lot stickier. "See if I got this straight," I told
him. "Your uncle gives somebody money and furniture that should go to you, for scratchin' around out here, but the man he gives it to don't tum it all over, the part he should, right?"
"That is essentially correct," he said, nodding his head slow and smiling.
"Why, of course you should quit," I told him. "Just take your uncle's money yourself and dig for bones all you want. He trusts you with it, don't he, your uncle, I mean?"
He got a good laugh at that. "Of course."
"Take the money direct and tell that fellow back at Yale College to kiss your ass," I said.
Well, if I thought he'd laughed his hardest before, I was wrong.
Ellie Turnbull spread a tablecloth on the ground beneath a single cottonwood tree growing along the White River, and the scrawny man watched her walk back to the wagon. The second trip, she brought biscuits she had baked that morning beside their breakfast fire, cold sliced venison, and gooseberry jam all the way from Indiana. Walter stood talking of mules and weather and the way to Fort Laramie, but he had to carry most of the weight of the conversation on his own broad shoulders. Before very long, Tum-bull noticed that their guest was more interested in his wife's figure than his talk, and it made him fume. Still, the skinny man had helped them through a hard place, and if it got no worse, he would let it slide.
Ellie called the boy up from the river and they all sat down crosslegged to eat.
"And what would happen to a fine institution like Yale, to any civilized institution, for that matter, if the men who were a part of it put their individual principles above the good of the whole? If they all resigned whenever one of their superiors violated a moral precept?"
He gave me no time to answer.
"Another example: the Christian religion has committed heinous crimes in the course of its advancement. Take the Spanish Inquisition, for instance. Does the fact of that atrocity mean we must abandon the Church because it temporarily abrogated one or two of its tenets? Would Western culture be the better for it?"
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