The Yellowstone Kelly Novels: Yellowstone Kelly, Kelly Blue, Imperial Kelly, and Kelly and the Three-Toed Horse

by Peter Bowen

  I idly asked Mountain Jim what the hell he was doing out here. I was struck by their fine faces in the soft canyon light. Good people. Jim was a Britisher and as a young feller he left home and school—he was the second son of a peer, wouldn’t say who—and he come to America to seek his fortune. Kind of like me, he was westering at a young age. He saw the Rockies, and he looked in the high valleys for gold. Didn’t find much, but he was curious, and soon he knew the west slopes of the Colorado Rockies pretty good. In truth, like no other man but a few Utes. He’d found the silver where Silverton is now, got cheated out of his claim, shot the cheat, and like so many of us skedaddled from the swift grip of the law. We all tended to be short on temper and scruples and long on imagination and curiosity.

  It was coming on dark and Ouray came back with a young man of fifteen or so, called Owl-Walks-West, and Ouray said he would guide me to the camp of the McMullinses and leave me there to whittle down the tribe as much as I liked. The Utes had been so badly treated they daren’t be thought of as raiders, or they would be hounded and shot down mercilessly.

  When Ouray said that his sadness cloaked him and shrouded his humor.

  “When you have lost the McMullins Owl-Walks-West will find you and bring you to us.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me where you’ll be?” I asked.

  “And if you are captured?” said Ouray. I hadn’t thought of that, though it was possible.

  I dressed in dark clothes and put charcoal on my face and strapped the long-bladed killing knife to my leg and saw to the Creedmore and my two Colts. Ouray gave me a nice beaded bag full of red cedar shavings for the carrying of Elder McMullin’s head.

  “The beadwork is Cayuse,” said Ouray, grinning. I’d never heard of them, they lived over in Washington, eight hundred miles away.

  Off we went, Owl leading. The night was black and a haze of clouds broke the starlight up; we was just two more shadows, with feet. I had long since wrapped all the jingling things on my saddle and bridle, and other than the sound of hooves and the creak of leather we made no sound at all.

  An hour before dawn we come up to the edge of the rimrock and saw below the red beds of several dying campfires far below. Owl gripped my hands in both of his, turned, and vanished. Ouray was wise enough to know that we outnumbered his people a thousand to one and we could make guns and they had to buy or steal them. Ouray had lost both of his sons at war and it pained him bad yet. He saw war as the vicious foolishness it is. Plain common sense is as rare as lips on chickens, you ask me.

  There was a small spring purling out of a band of yellow rock, good cold water. I gave my horse a hatful and drank deep myself, drank till I sloshed like a bottle, for I didn’t know when I’d be able to drink again. The cool wet felt woke me up good when I put the hat back on. I nosebagged the pinto and tethered him good in a dense stand of red cedars. There ain’t anything, to my mind, as distressful as needing to make tracks in a hurry and finding your horse went missing. (The few times that has happened to me has caused me to blaspheme elaborately and it is a serious drain on my stores of good nature.)

  There was a water channel cut down the face of the rimrock and the left side went out into a horn maybe two hundred feet above the McMullin camp. The walls below that was sheer and I took a good close look around from the top of the horn. It would be at least two hours before the men down below could even make it up to where I was, and two hours in this country of mazes and false canyons was a long head start. And the slickrock country don’t take tracks on its face much.

  I chewed on a piece of raw bacon and sipped water. I piled up some stones for a screen so that there wouldn’t be visible movement for anyone to see who was standing down below.

  I slid the telescopic sight out of the hollow stock of the Creedmore and screwed it on. There hadn’t been time enough to sight the thing in, so I’d have to see where it threw if I missed and adjust accordingly. I looked through it and followed one of the good Elder’s sons as he fed the campfires. It was a powerful telescope, the fire tender looked only maybe seventy yards away.

  Sleep came over me. I hadn’t eaten right or slept well in days. I had a sudden vision of Eats-Men-Whole lying naked on a pile of robes, and my eyes teared up and I tasted copper in my mouth. I chewed hard on the bacon but the dream wouldn’t go away.

  The camp stirred about a half hour after sunrise. I saw Elder McMullin come out of his tent with his galluses flapping and his pant legs piled on his boot tops. He waddled to the edge of camp and squatted with his back to me. I put the crosshairs two feet below where I wanted the slug—bullets rise a little if you are shooting down at a steep angle—and I squeezed the trigger and the Creedmore boomed and I ducked down behind the screen and grabbed the binoculars.

  The slug had got him low in the back, and he had tumbled forward several rolls and come to rest with his head under his right leg. His spine was smashed and his mouth was open in a scream. I could see but not hear his dying bellers. The wound was mortal and I felt quite satisfied.

  My smugness vanished about a minute later when the stone screen exploded to the right of me. No one in the camp had fired, so I whirled and looked up and there was six of them God damned hats up on the rimrock, near to the only trail out.

  I rambled on with some elaborate cussing that would have dried out Mulebreath Mucklebreech if he’d been in earshot. I had a fresh cartridge in the Creedmore, and whatever else them boys up there might know I doubted a long killing rifle like this had occurred to them. If the damned Creedmore had been a repeater I’d have made short work of them. Sharps had left the gun singleshot so the barrel would have time to cool between firings. I meant to speak to them about that, if I lived.

  Well, I shot three of them just under their hat brims. The last one jumped up after the bullet had furrowed his skull and he run, jerking like a puppet, till he stepped off the edge and fetched up as a pile of bloody rags down below.

  That left three still firing and they was getting close. I scrabbled a ways to my right and found a narrow cave opening and ducked inside. I found a miracle in there. There ain’t no other way to explain what was in that cave.

  A palace. The cave was a low-browed sort of arrangement stained with soot from ancient campfires on the ceiling, and when I crawled in further I found a high and vaulted six-story castle in it, deserted except for the pack rats and ghosts. Water belled somewhere in the dark behind the palace. A shaft of light come down on top of it, and when I got close I saw there was handholds cut in the rock. I had two ways out now.

  Life had suddenly gone sweeter, and I knew I could easy hold off them damned McMullins and then slither out or slither up in the night. I fretted some about my horse, and then remembered that Washakie, when we were out of grub or a horse pulled up lame, would grin and say that the enemy had plenty of food and horses and scalps to boot. So I planned to take down as many McMullins as I could—they’d have to stick their heads out, and be backlighted, and I’d kill them till they ran and take what I needed in the way of horses.

  I watered myself and washed off some of the dust and then I crept back up to the cave’s mouth and waited right on the edge of the shadows and not ten feet from the cave entrance. If they came this way they’d be sunblinded, and the cavemouth, though wide, had only one place to crawl into it from in the mother rock. I counted my cartridges and figured that sixty-two of the bastards would die before I was down to just the Creedmore. That gun was so powerful I’d just hold fire till they lined up, and get ten at a whack.

  Not one McMullin came, of course. Mountain Jim was right, with the old man dead—I found out later he screamed for four hours before he died—they’d no idea what to do. The three I’d brainshot was an object lesson, and so these disgusting fools rolled up their dear Pappy in a tent and tossed him over a horse and they took off for their filthy ramshackle McMullinage and so help me Gawd, they got lost. Lost, lost, lost, and a month later less than half of them wandered into their nest, the others having peri
shed of heatstroke, thirst, Gila monsters, tainted food, and rattlesnakes. Dear Pappy had swelled up to the size of two oxen in the heat, so he was inconvenient to pack farther and they dropped him down a sinkhole. Even now when I am mellow with age I am proud of my accomplishment by way of improving the country.

  They never even found my horse. He was wanting water, but that was all.

  I headed east and north, figuring on crossing Ouray’s trail. The third night I was traveling I come round a blind turn and there was Owl-Walks-West. He give me a big grin and a handshake and a pipe and tobacco. I got off and had a sociable smoke with him. He was pleased at the damage I’d done to the McMullins, and told me about them being lost down in the deep desert.

  Owl took me by some paths I’d surely have missed, and then suddenly I smelled sweet cedar smoke, and Owl led me into another hidden place.

  There was some fuss in the camp. Some of the hot-blooded young warriors wanted to drive the whites back across the Mississippi or something, and when I come on to Ouray there was a lot of ripe criticism of Ouray’s manliness.

  “Chess?” said Ouray. I allowed as how a nice game of chess was just what I come for.

  The Arrow put up with these little peckerheads until the three of them disturbed him as he contemplated a nasty choice—he could concede that I had whipped his ass at chess now or let me do just that about three moves hence.

  The lead peckerhead, all six pimply feet of him, ran through his prepared list of Ouray’s failings and added “fish-hearted old woman.” Ouray looked at me, annoyed, pulled out a revolver, shot the little bastard in the middle of the forehead, roared about how much he hated being disturbed by shitbrains whilst he was at chess, and casually flung the arm of the corpse off his knee where it had flopped during his late critic’s death throes.

  That sure done put a damper on public displays of disapproval for the peaceful and conciliatory policies of the Arrow, who didn’t even look up as the little shit’s friends dragged off his body.

  “Kelly,” said Ouray, “these damned kids try my patience awful. I won’t have to do that for six months or so, I guess. ’Nother game?”

  All this murtheration and hot travel had me plumb drawed, so I went off to get some sleep.

  Not long after Mountain Jim and Palmyra come in, they’d been off someplace.

  They walked hand in hand over to where I lay, looking pink and healthy, so I guessed that they’d been enjoying themselves.

  “I don’t want to hear it,” I says, holding up a hand. “It may be twins and in fact it may be pumpkins but I don’t want to hear it for an hour.”

  They both roared with laughter and went away. I sank into deep sleep right then.

  16

  THE LETTERS ARE IN a big jar of chokecherry preserves in the root cellar of Lion House,” said Palmyra. “Brigham hates chokecherry preserves, so no one would dream of using them, and he hates waste, so no one will throw them out either.”

  She was curled up against Mountain Jim’s considerable chest while he stroked her hair. “How,” I says, delicatelike, “did you get these letters in the first place? Sounds to me like any Mormon would have burned them right off upon finding them.”

  “Brigham kept them,” said Palmyra. “When Joseph Smith and his brother were murdered in the Carthage jail, Brigham moved to take over the church. Joseph Smith had decreed the leadership of the church would pass to his heirs. Brigham collected all the letters, to use as he saw fit over the years. Because I was blind and he knew I didn’t believe in his folderol, he’d read them to me, to see what I thought. He called me his little Gentile. But he grew careless, and though I can’t see, my hearing is very, very good. So I found them and hid them away. He despised me in my blindness, and it took him a long time to mark off those who might have, and then he just had me.”

  She didn’t need to tell me what happened next. One close breath around Elder McMullin and she’d know what she was in for.

  So Mountain Jim and Palmyra wanted a little peace and quiet and the only way that they’d ever get it was having a club to hold over Brigham big enough to make him flinch. If they didn’t have that, their heads would be on his desk, come now, come later.

  “When I get ’em,” I says, “where can I find you?”

  “We’ll find you,” said Mountain Jim. “You might get caught.”

  “They wouldn’t have to torture me,” I says. “I’d nobly tell them whatever they wanted to know flat out and save them the work.”

  I do try to be right honest about my best qualities, which is cowardice, chicanery, avarice, lechery, gluttony, sloth, blasphemy, mortal untruth, and, yes, I knowed even then what a good lawyer I would have made but life worked out better and I didn’t even slip and get elected to Congress.

  So Kelly loaded up and went back up the trail to Salt Lake, figuring that the news of the Elder’s expiration would most certainly cause large red carpets to unroll and give me a clear shot at that goddamn Prophet.

  The desert country rolled red and yellow before me and I made good time, coming up one dusk to a stage station and I thought I’d have a home-cooked meal and then bed down a few miles away so I wouldn’t have to feed the bedbugs.

  The stage station didn’t have a coach in it, but there was a line of hay wains piled high with fodder. I rode past them and saw how the forage contractor had cut a lot of willows into the hay to bulk it up. That much woody stuff would damn near founder the horses unlucky enough to get it.

  The contractor was a fat, rumpled, piggy redgait of an Irishman who had the leavings of a hundred dinners down his waistcoat. His teamsters was a rough-looking crew, all armed with pistols and knives. The station agent was a small bookish feller with garters on his sleeves and a popgun in his right-rear pants pocket.

  I watered my horse and tied him to the hitching post and then I went in the low building, which was spotlessly clean. The three gents who belonged to the other horses were just inside the door, looking out at the contractor and the agent. Two of them was ordinary-looking youngsters. The third was an impossibly clean gent in a white shirt and black pants and boots and black silk coachman’s gloves. He had a black spade beard and eyes that flicked here and there constantly. He had his right hand on the ivory grip of a Colt and a sawed-off shotgun in his left hand.

  “Evenin’,” I said.

  “Are all our friends out there through unloading?” said the dandy. His voice was whispery; I thought it would be what a snake would sound like if he talked.

  “Not yet,” I said. “But they’ll be done in five minutes if they don’t smell whiskey.”

  The dandy laughed, a soft whispering sound.

  “Pay up, Gilson!” the Irisher bellered. “Pay up, Goddamn you!”

  “Let us now,” said the dandy, and he walked toward the door on the balls of his feet, which were tiny for a man his size.

  They went on out and I stood in the doorway, so I could see and be handy to cover behind the thick logs the place was built out of. I wondered idly how many folks was going to die in the next two minutes.

  The dandy walked up to the fat contractor and said, very mild, “I believe that the KC stage line is unhappy with the quality of your hay.”

  The Irisher said something unpleasant, which he et next breath, because he was looking into a sawed-off double-bore. I’ve done that. Them bores look big as train tunnels.

  The contractor’s knees started to shake. The station agent took his popgun over to the teamsters, and them boys unloaded all their artillery right there. The dandy’s friends hadn’t even pulled their pieces out.

  “Chain this bastard to that log,” said the dandy. His sidekicks slapped the contractor face down on a pine log and chained him good and tight to it. They padlocked the ends of the chain and stood back.

  “I’m Jules La Farge,” said the dandy, “and the KC line employs me to inspect purchased goods.” He lifted a five-gallon can of coal oil and he poured it over the haystack, very slowly. He struck a patent match an
d touched it to the oil, which caught and burned smokily. Pretty soon the stack was well ablaze.

  “When the fire gets hot enough throw the log in,” says La Farge to his sidekicks.

  Then he walked back toward the station door.

  “Buy you a drink?” I says.

  “Not during business hours,” says La Farge. “But I think the office will close shortly.”

  The contractor was screaming his lungs out by now. He was sure he’d roast soon, and he was swearing that he’d bring in real hay and never even think of padding it out with brush again and he’ll give the hay to KC for years and he will wash and currycomb this hay he brings in and he sounds awful enthusiastic and not ’tall like the surly feller he was such a short time ago.

  La Farge and I listened for a while, me laughing and La Farge smiling, and when he went back out I followed along. I always have admired folks who are good at what they do.

  “My good man,” he said, “a word.” He knelt and looked almost sorrowfully at the red-faced, sweating feller. “If you should forget our conversation here I will have to return. I do not like this godforsaken wasteland. I will kill you. I’m not to leave here for a couple of days. I’ll also kill you if the hay the line wants is not here by sundown tomorrow. So I will have my associates unchain you. I think that then you should go and cut hay, yes?”

  The Irisher allowed as how he would be cutting hay by lamplight and arranging it stem by stem any old way La Farge wanted it.

  “Just good hay will do nicely,” said La Farge, standing up. “Oh, I believe your contract has another ... eighteen months to run?”

  All the Irisher could do by now was nod and gasp.

  There is men who sell buttons and patent medicines and there is men who sell fear, and La Farge, soft-spoken and foppish, was about the most frightening feller I was ever to see. Most gunfighters potted folks in the back (like me) but some liked a contest.

  One of the teamsters suddenly plunged a hand in the footwell of his wagon, and La Farge shot him in the head before the man laid a hand on the shotgun there. The sound of the shot died away and the teamster flopped out of the wagon and lit with a thump in the dust, blood running out of his mouth.