by Peter Bowen
“Kelly,” he said, “you no-good sonbitch, vott you do mit banjos?”
“Nothing,” I says. “I’ve been in the Hitchfoot Hotel there.”
Klaas looked at me blearily for a while, then he signaled to Sam, who brought him a fiery oyster special. Klaas drank it down and seemed to glow with health all of a sudden.
“I buy drinks!” he said.
“Could you please kill him,” I says, pointing a feeble finger at Buntline.
Buntline went on scribbling.
“The two scouts, recognizing each other as noble Christian gentlemen, paused in their slaughter of the howling savages ...” Buntline read from his pad.
“KILL HIM!” screams Cody and me.
Klaas picked up the malevolent little dwarf and carried him to a window over the slops pit. We heard a wail and a splash.
By and by, as we recovered, we thought we might cut our losses and so we took the wagons—Mulebreath was damn near dead in the back of one—and we left town to heal up at a quiet spring. Bill and I had only a fair hangover and Mulebreath could walk to town if he’d a mind to. I soothed my gouty toe in the spring. We had the blind staggers. My brain felt like it was crawling with fleas, and Bill held long conversations with something green and scaly and had purple teeth and was after him for money.
My toe hurt too bad to bother much with whiskey visions.
The third day we was there a godawful stink of decay come up the wind and a line of skinner’s wagons come into view, all piled high with hides. The skinners was coated and crusted with blood, everything dark brown and stinking, everything, clothes and hair and beards. They lived in clouds of flies, though it was late enough to trim them down some.
The horses pulling the wagons shied and fought, wild from the stink of blood.
There must have been a hundred wagons, and the skinners was drinking from stoneware jugs, which they mostly did all of the time. Being drunk, they could mostly stand the life. The skinners was men with poor eyesight. The hunters, who had good eyesight, made the money, and the skinners died of skin infections for three dollars a day and bacon and beans.
A few skinners a little cleaner than the others was riding out to the sides to look for Injuns. I saw one high up on a ridge, just setting on his horse, against a lowering mackerel sky. I wondered if the Injun knew that what he was seeing before him was the death of his people, in those stacks of hides and gouts of blood from the mouths of lungshot buffalo. Like the tale of the apprentice sorcerer spills the potion on the grass, which turns black and curling, dies, and the stain spreads faster and faster, and it was too late with the first drop to stop it.
26
BOYS WILL BE BOYS and Bill was a boy all of his life, as open and honest as the morning sun, and plain damned dumb about all of the crooks that would hang off him like ticks all his life. Buntline made Bill famous, and Buntline got rich off Bill, and Bill spent his money on beautiful women, whiskey, cards, and his friends. Not a bad life, now is it?
Bill was making good money, a few hundred a day when he was working, which consisted of carrying a sixteen-pound .45-120 and a bipod to a hilltop and shredding buffalo lungs with it. He left the hard work to his skinners, but he was a most generous employer, giving them whiskey in addition to bacon and beans. He even bought them coffee.
Buntline was pretty indestructible, his hungry sense of how much he could make off of Bill holding him close, even though Bill and I played an endless succession of practical jokes on him, jokes designed to maim or to kill. (I cannot forgive him for marking me as “Yellowstone” Kelly. It’s annoying to get a nickname that sticks like paint on you.)
I tried the buffalo hunting trade but didn’t take to it much, as I didn’t need the money that bad and the Injuns was tumbling to what the buffalo hunters were doing to their way of life, and what they did to buffalo hunters they captured would make your hair stand on end.
I shot buffalo till March of ’69 and then I sold my traps and recommended my skinners highly to the next set of clumsy butchers who wanted to get rich killing critters that wouldn’t even run. I ain’t making a case for how fine a feller I am, I’d have gone on if I needed the gold.
Klaas had gone off to St. Louis with a hot notion of setting up a medicine show, which he did mostly, I think, to have an excuse to play his damned banjo.
He thought a life peddling Chief Mushbutt Stump Water, a fine formula he had come by in a poker game, was the finest sort of life. I told him I hoped that the stump water would cure the rolling fits caused by his infernal blugerss music. I further hoped that his flatulence would be much reduced.
“You havff poor tastes,” says Klaas, shaking his head as though he’d just gotten a fatal diagnosis.
“I like ’em and I think I’ll keep ’em,” I says.
April come and the grass greened up, so I said tall grass and deep watering holes to Bill and such friends as I’d made. At the Hitchfoot Hotel and better establishments. I purchased at great expense several ounces of fleas and bedbugs and I sprinkled them around Buntline’s room. I had hoped he’d be bit so bad and itch so much his scratchings would bleed him to death. All them fellow bloodsucking parasites went off to chew on everybody else, leaving Buntline alone as a professional courtesy.
I’d had it worse than usual with the gout and such from the farewell party Bill throwed me—it lasted three days and resulted in two deaths, one accidental and the other more or less. The dead fellers had gone up on the roofs to sing, and one was drunk and clumsy and fell off the rooftree headfirst onto a pile of dressed stone, and the other was some mistook for a lovesick tomcat and blowed near in half by a feller nursing the whips and the staggers.
I headed north, queasy at the movement of my horse and near worried to a frazzle about catching the clap or the syph from the whores—you know how it is when you’re drunk and reckless—and my throbbing big toe kept me from thinking of anything else, mostly. By the time I had crossed the Niobara and the Platte some days later I was eating good and hardly shaking and twitching at all and there was no untoward burnings down there when I drained my tanks.
What was on my mind was the Big Dry, the country to the east of the Judith Basin, up in Montana Territory, between the Yellowstone and the Missouri. I’d heard from Bridger that even the trappers hadn’t gone there—too dry—and the mountain ranges were like islands, unconnected bunches of mountains, not all stuck together like the Rockies. Out east was the Badlands, the Mai Pais, and the Black Hills the Plains tribes were going to die for. The badlands was shaped by the wind, not by water, and ghosts sang and danced in the night.
There might be an abandoned city or castle, no one knew. So I aimed to go through and find what there was there.
I made for Billings, one of the major ports of trade, where the shallow-draft steamboats transferred their cargo to bigger steamers for the run down to St. Louis. From Billings I thought I’d head down the north bank of the Yellowstone till I come to a good place to cut upcountry. I figured it would be quiet there and I could damn sure lose myself there, and I needed quiet and a place to get lost in.
The tale I will now tell you is true, as incredible as it seems, and will perhaps point out why I am not overfond of governments. Or them as runs them.
I bought four mules in Billings, big matched cream-colored bastards out of Thoroughbred mares and the tack for them and two mule-loads of canned delicacies, and in mid-May I paid off a ferryman to haul me and my gear across the Yellowstone. I packed up and led the four-mule string north and east, to what I did not know.
My God, what a country, where rising plains stretched for sixty miles any way you cared to look and the coulees and cutbanks was pale yellow, red, and chocolate and the sage fairly made soup of the air. I feasted on antelope ribs and such canned goods as suited me. I found sweet water by looking for Injun plum trees, easy to see because their leaves was two-toned and lightly hung and they flashed and shimmered like nothing else and could be seen at ten miles. The air was so clear th
at I swear I saw colors for the first time, all the usual tints, shades, and tones, but more so. No sign of another human being. I should have stayed there.
One night I come to a good place to camp particularly late, and I unrolled my blankets hard by a short cliff no more than fifty feet high. It had a little spring of water coming out on one side and the smell of wild strawberries all round it. The cliff looked a little odd even in the pale starlight, and I was tired and slept soon after a cold supper. A coyote opera went on just long enough to send me to sleep. I am fond of the coyotes, you see, they share many character traits with me, and though I can’t sing a note I wish I could every time I hear them.
The morning sun come up on me and I squinted out and went back to sleep and dreamed of monsters charging out of a cliff wall and it woke me up and by God, they were there. There was two heads sticking out of the cliff face, huge horrible things all gone to minerals, but they had once walked the earth.
They were about six feet across, these heads, with a bony flaring helmet in back and three good-sized horns a foot thick at the base. They had horny, lizard-looking mouths and their jaws was set open, and supported by limestone columns that had been protected by the fossils above.
For a moment I wondered if these damn things was still around, before deciding that if they were they’d have run everything else out long since and pretty well own the damn continent. A quick figuring told me a buffalo with a head that big would be fifteen feet high at the shoulder and a couple of dozen feet long. My .45-120 would mean no more to this beast than a gnat’s bite to a man.
The countryside was full of such marvels. I found a shoulder blade off something that was nine feet by five—a man’s is the size of his hand, and also a lot of shark’s teeth, perfect triangles about a foot on each side.
Strange country, it was. Quiet during the early part of the day, nothing but the dust, the hoof sounds, the jingle and creak of tack, wind in the afternoon, thundershowers before sunset, and then at night the tortured hills and cliffs gave off weird music, moans and cries and shrieks that made the mules jittery and me pretty spooked, too. I didn’t believe in ghosts, but out there it pretty much stood to reason.
By and by I came over a divide so scant I didn’t even notice it and the streams, such as they were, began to head north. I went up the easiest route, toward the breaks of the Missouri. The big river pooled some here and I could see where it had wandered over the land. What pushed the river is a mystery to me—there weren’t any mountains hemming it in.
From a clifftop maybe two hundred feet above the brown water I watched many steamboats going up and going down. Upstream they was hauling miners and supplies. Downstream they hauled those who had gone broke or struck it rich or the coffins of those who had enough money in their pockets to be pickled and sent back to where they’d come from. Damn lonely country here to be buried in, if you believe all that Christer claptrap about Judgment Day and the resurrection of the dead, you’d suspect this country was forgotten even by God. No one would recall to blow the trumpet here.
There was Injuns to the south, east, and north, and I had had a bellyful of the wars. I hoped for nothing more than maybe finding an island range and maybe wintering over in it, far away from the army and Injuns, living simply and peaceably in a range of mountains no one much wanted.
These pleasant reveries was all sort of stumbling through my mind and the steamboats was whistling jolly tunes below, and all of a sudden the mules gave off bellers and run right off the cliff. I looked back and thought for about half a second, and I went over, too.
A huge pale river-bottom grizzly was coming at a dead run. I had a glimpse of an arrow buried in his hindquarter. I scrambled down the cliff, which was a soft sandy thing, more like earth than rock, and I grabbed a handy cedar about three feet long and hung on.
The bear was stymied—my horse and the mules was dead a couple hundred feet below. The bear kept taking swipes at me and damn near did knock me off with showers of small rocks he dislodged time to time.
I clambered up to sit on the cedar, which obligingly started making cracking noises, and it bent down just enough to scare me good and then quit. I could see below me and it was sheer, right down to the sausage meat that used to be my horse and mules. I couldn’t recall when I’d last been so happy.
My remarks on this subject scorched and blackened all about me for fifteen feet. The bear joined in the chorus.
Someone was loudly bellering from a steamboat below. When the bear went off for a moment I could hear, faint and far off below me, the stentorian pipes of Lt. Gustavus Cheney Doane, USA.
I thought I’d best jump.
“We’ll save you,” hollers Gus.
Certain death, I thinks, so why jump?
Seems that Gus had been buying them fancy books with the engravings of insane Swiss climbing up rock faces with tent pegs and rope and had talked someone in the government into outfitting him with all sorts of expensive mountain-climbing gear, so Gus could do what Gus does best, busting the various parts of Doane but nothing fatal, goddamn it.
In jig time a boat was lowered—all of a foot and a half, these steamboats didn’t run to freeboard much—and Gus and three stout lads rowed over to the cliff face and they scrambled up to maybe fifty feet below me, where the cliff turned sheer.
Gus commenced hammering tent pegs into cracks and come up maybe halfway to me when the slab he’d loosened with his hammering fell off and damn near killed his troopers before landing square on the boat, which went to matchwood instantly.
The river belched and gurgled appreciatively, and soon all the foam was gone, too.
“How can I ever thank you enough?” I says to Gus.
“I was looking for you as a matter of fact,” says Gus. “I have a major’s commission for you.”
“A WHAT?”
“You have your choice,” says Gus, “either accept the commission or I hang you for desertion. U. S. Grant himself ordered me to find you and present you with your choice. He has a task someone like you can do.”
I began to beller out patriotic hymns somewhat altered for the occasion, and then I commenced on Grant’s family tree.
“Now if you’ll excuse me,” I says, “I’m going to go and commit suicide.”
“You can’t commit suicide,” says Gus. “It’s a violation of regulations.”
“Oh, I think I’ll just jump,” I says. “Save us both a lot of trouble and inconvenience. But before I die why would good old Unconditional Surrender make me a major while cruelly leaving you a mere lieutenant?”
“It’s a long story,” says Gus.
So far I thought the whole business was funny.
The steamboat captain come backing and pulling his boat near on to the cliff, and a couple of deckhands leaped out and made the boat fast. There was no current to speak of here and the boat come so close to the cliff it must be sheer below the waterline, too.
Gus and I sat up there chattering for two or three hours until some soldiers appeared on the cliff above me and they tossed down a line and hauled me up. Gus was still high and dry and if I still had my horse I would have made my escape and to hell with U. S. Grant. Finally the steamboat captain pieced together a ladder (over my heated protests) and Gus clambered down to safety, too damn spry for my comfort.
Gus took me to what passed as his stateroom, which stank of sprouted grain and old salt pork, and he handed me my commission and my death warrant before allowing me to burn both of them in the brazier.
Seemed that the Sioux was raising hell and Grant wanted some of them to come to Washington and parley. Kelly, who was well known for surviving encounters with the Sioux in most improbably curious circumstances, was to carry the message. The last three messengers had been skinned, no doubt alive, and the hides returned with rude messages on them in Sioux pictograms and English and French. The hides all more or less told Grant to put them where the sun don’t shine.
“Red Cloud is up toward Canada,” says Gus.<
br />
“Why the major’s commission?” I asked, not thinking I’d get an answer.
“I have never really understood the army,” says Gus, “but here it is with all pay and rank long as you don’t mention them.”
“No one would believe me,” I says.
“There’s something else,” says Gus, “and it is so strange you may think that I am joking. I’m not. This order simply cannot be written. We have found where John Wilkes Booth is hiding, up in Canada. You are to go there and kill him.”
“Ah, Gus,” I says, “I am truly sorry that such a fine officer as yourself has taken up smoking opium in large quantities. Why don’t you have some more and we’ll say no more about it.”
“Kelly,” says Gus, whipping out his Colt and tapping me on the temple with it, “I am authorized to shoot you if you won’t do as Grant requests. And I will.”
Damn, that was a persuasive argument.
“John Wilkes Booth is as good as dead,” I says. I had got the notion that it would be one or the other of us, and that kind of arithmetic.
“So where the hell is John Wilkes Booth,” I says.
“In Canada, working as a storekeep on the Belly River.”
“Do the Canadians know this?”
“Of course,” says Gus.
“I see,” I says.
“No, I don’t think that you do,” says Gus. “But Grant does and the Canadians do, and we very much need Booth removed.”
“What possible use can the damned Canadians have for John Wilkes Booth?” I snarled. I was confused and that always makes me angry.
“Guano,” says Gus. “Bird shit to you.”
“Of course,” says I. “I knew we were headed for guano all along, knew it deep in my soul.”
“If you kill Booth, we can tell you the rest of the story,” says Gus.
“I don’t want to know the rest of the story,” I says.
“Good,” says Gustavus Cheney Doane, Lieutenant, United States Army.