by Peter Bowen
The horse he had found was small, but its bones were that of a horse.
No huzzahs. The audience was Mormon, true enough, but before this they had been Baptists and the like, and here Cope was explaining that the Bible wasn’t true.
They didn’t like it one bit.
Some cleared their throats.
Cope went on, but he’d lost his audience, and I could hear flaps shutting on ears with soft pops. These was people who were not over particular about what they believed, but they damn well had to do it hard.
Cope thanked them for their attention and he quit and walked back to me and Brigham. There was a lot of men muttering and glancing our way, and not even Brigham’s stern stare could stop them.
Brigham shrugged and he led us out the back door of the hotel, with Levi the giant close behind, and we got into a carriage and the driver took us to Lion House, the mansion Brigham had built to house him and his forty-odd wives.
Levi went somewhere when Brigham and me and Cope ended up in Brigham’s study. It was musty and cluttered and Utah was governed from this room, not to mention other places the Mormons had gone to. They was hardworking and brave and they had taught themselves irrigation and the desert really had bloomed. The railroad meant that Mormon crops would now go east and west, and it also meant that the folks they called Gentiles would come in numbers. Things would never be the same.
“You’ve been most kind,” says Cope, “but I fear I have perhaps shaken the faith of some of your flock.”
“Don’t worry about it,” says Brigham. “They’re too stupid to be bothered long. This wasn’t for them anyway, you saw all the journalists. By the time the newspapers get done garbling what you said all that they will have right is that there were horses in North America like the Book of Mormon says. This will help my missionaries.”
“Well,” says Cope, “we need to return and get on with our expedition.”
“I see your friend Marsh is also planning one,” says Brigham.
The name Marsh got Cope all stiff, and his face flushed. It was right obvious that whoever this Marsh was Cope did not like him one damn bit a-tall.
“Scholarship has room for all,” says Cope, trying to be noble, but there was a petulant whine in his voice.
“Room it may have,” says Brigham, “but the top of any place is big enough for only one man.”
I had been looking around at the photographs and carved furniture and gaudy lamps by Tiffany, and my eye fell on a small table that had something on it covered by a red cloth. It was lumpy, whatever it was underneath.
Brigham walked over to it and he pulled the cloth away and there was a reddish rock with something yellow-white on the top of it.
Cope went to it, his head began to bend forward, he was very excited but chose not to show it more than he could help.
I looked at the thing. It was a claw, a hooked one. It looked like the curved spur of a fighting cock.
It was just about a thousand times larger, was all.
“Where did you get this?” says Cope.
“One of my faithful found it,” says Brigham.
“It’s new to science,” says Cope.
“That may be,” says Brigham, throwing the cloth back over it. “But we will see about that, in time.”
The two men locked eyes for a moment.
There was a fierce glow between those two strong-willed fellers.
I had seen that glow before. It was the kind that other men die in.
*See Kelly Blue
5
AS LUCK WOULD HAVE it, when we stopped in Laramie the first feller I happened to see was Mulligan. Mulligan went barefoot all the year round, dressed like a poor white’s scarecrow, and spoke with such an adenoidal accent it was damn hard to dig words out of the noise.
But as a scout he had no peer. Now, I ain’t bad and there’s plenty others that ain’t bad, too, but damned if he couldn’t smell Indians at thirty miles, adenoids notwithstanding. He was also a few inches shy of five feet and many a man who bullied the little Irishman regretted it. He fought with fists and bare feet and speed and fury. He could live on rocks and small lizards for months at a time.
“Cope wants to hire you,” I says.
“Whynnadoat?” says Mulligan.
Cope was looking dubious, but I offered Mulligan a hundred dollars a month and he nodded. Then Mulligan loped off.
“He didn’t ask when he was to start,” Cope complained.
“When we start, he’ll be there,” I says. “He’s about the best scout there is.”
Cope shrugged and went off to the hotel, dodging the tumbleweeds that the wind was rolling along. Red Cloud told me the white men had brought them. He said there were no words to describe them in the old songs.
With the winter coming on the buffalo hunters were getting ready to go out as soon as it had been cold long enough to make prime robes of ratty summer hides. It varied with the weather and the years, and the hunters would start high where it was already winter and work down to the Plains. They was hard men, and the hunter had one thing his men didn’t—good eyesight. In the West you had to have good eyes, or you’d end up a skinner covered in blood all the time, till your clothes was stiff as they’d been painted, filthy and lousy, with the buffalo mange, itchy red patches all over your body. A hunter might employ as many as ten skinners.
There was others come on in, too, and it was them I was interested in. Prospectors who had been looking for gold, some of them with good educations. They had ranged all over the Rockies looking for float quartz, and many of them wanted only to find the gold. They’d sell out right away and move on, for it was the looking that they liked. Strange people, perhaps, but we all have our own hearts.
Sir Henry was a Brit, and he well may have been a lord—we had some of them around, too. He was well-spoke and a crack shot with pistol or rifle and he rode one pale mule and the other mule carried the few things he needed to live. He had a big black umbrella about six feet across that you could spot him easy a long ways off, what with the black cloth so wide above his head.
I found Sir Henry at Rosie’s whorehouse, consuming a fresh lobster the train had brought, while a wench sat on his lap naked feeding bites of sweet white meat to him. He washed down the last of the lobster with a mug of champagne and the wench went off laughing, telling him to hurry.
“Cope,” says Sir Henry. “Pennsylvania. Marsh is Yale. I expect they hate each other’s guts. Did you inquire if we might have to fight a small, nasty war?”
“What over?” I says. I knew there were fossil bones all over Wyoming, surely enough for anybody.
“You don’t know many college professors, I take it,” says Sir Henry.
I shrugged. A couple had come west and paid me to escort them round the country, seemed decent enough fellows to me.
“They have,” says Sir Henry, “the morals of Apaches and the honor of Turks. Odd people. They will backstab one another over trifles and claim scholarly disinterest. Cope and Marsh are rich, too. Almost all professors in this country are. The colleges pay little.”
“Cope is wealthy,” I says. “He’s got a couple private railroad cars.”
“Marsh has three,” says Sir Henry. “I saw ’em in Cheyenne. How much does he propose to pay?”
“A hundred a month,” I says.
Sir Henry nodded.
“Tell that cheap bastard I wish to offer my services gratis, out of interest in the work.”
I nodded. I had always suspected Sir Henry was not in all this for the money. Other thing was once Sir Henry had been set on by three drunk brothers who took exception to his monocle and his accent, and Sir Henry had killed all three in seconds, just as soon as the first of the fools reached for his gun.
Sir Henry had very pale blue eyes that never blinked, and he was almost effeminate in his dainty habits and snaky walk. But he was a killer and damn good at it and I expected I might have need of him and not for the Indians.
It took a short tri
p around the saloons for me to find another five men who between them had a good century of looking carefully at all the land between Mexico and Canada. Bob, Will, Jake, Lou, and Mopey, and I left it to them to round up some teamsters and wagons.
Cope had rented a warehouse and supplies come in daily, crates and crates of food and scientific instruments, tents and bales of blankets and what-all. He told me he’d done a couple other expeditions and more or less knew what to get, but I should read the manifests and see if there were things we might need. So I took the papers back to the hotel and I had a bottle sent up and a seegar and I began to read through them.
Cope was meticulous, right down to needles and thread and a seamstress to repair things. A carpenter and tools and a list of lumber, a good medical kit.
I was used to traveling a thousand miles with a few pounds of jerky and oats for my horse and some coffee if I was feeling like indulging myself.
There was a soft tap at my door and I got up, with some papers in my hand, and went over and opened the door and it was a moment before I looked up.
Alys de Bonneterre was standing there in a silk gown with a necklace around her long white neck and rings glittering on her fingers. A rich perfume wafted in the door.
“I need to talk to you,” she says. She walked past me without waiting for my answer and took a seat on the little sofa, prim as an aunt stopped by for tea.
She asked questions about Wyoming and the trail we were to take, very acute ones, and so I got a sheet of paper from the desk and I drew the mountain ranges on it and the trail that led up the eastern side.
She wanted to know about Washakie and so I told her he was one of the greatest men I had ever known. There was a butte up there called Crowheart Butte. Long ago the Shoshones and Crows had met there and prepared to battle for the hunting grounds, and Washakie had called a council with the leader of the Crows. It was foolish to make too much sorrow, he argued, I will fight your best warrior and who wins, his tribe will win the hunting grounds.
The Crows agreed and Washakie and the Crow warrior fought and Washakie killed the man and then he cut out the warrior’s heart and he ate it.
Most ladies would have dithered at this tale, but I suspected Miss de Bonneterre was made of sterner stuff.
She was. She laughed, a rich deep laugh.
“I must meet him,” she says.
“He’d like that,” I says. “He purely loves beautiful women. He says they are the best thing on the earth.”
“He sounds charming,” says Alys.
“He’s a randy old goat,” I said, “and he is charming.”
Alys looked at my bottle of brandy and so I offered her some, and having only the one glass we had to share it.
She took a little case from her purse and opened it. It was full of little Spanish cigarettes. I lit one for her.
I’d been right, this hoyden was used to getting what she wanted, and I suspected that right now that was me. Well, Washakie could wait his turn.
Alys asked a few more questions and the last one I was looking down into the snifter while I spoke, something about my worries about the Cheyennes.
When I looked up she had that same little pistol Pignuts had gotten to know so well pointed right between my eyes. Her hand didn’t waver, and her face had gone all smooth and her eyes very cold.
Now this was baffling. One minute she’s giving off heat and the next she’s got her shooter pointed between my lights.
“What the hell are you doing?” I says, getting angry.
She just looked at me for a long time.
“Take off your clothes,” she says finally.
“I will not,” I says, and she fired the gun once and I heard a lamp bust across the room right behind me.
There was something in her eyes said I’d better, so I peeled down till I was naked as a jaybird and I stood there, turning red. I had been with a lot of women, but this was embarrassing.
Alys began to laugh and laugh. She stood up and let the hammer down on the little pistol and before I could lunge for it she said, “Now it’s your turn to hold the gun on me.”
6
ALYS SLIPPED OFF IN the night, about maybe fifteen minutes before she would have screwed me to death. Some of the furniture was limping if not downright busted, and the bed looked like there’d been a couple bull buffalo fighting in it.
Outside it was snowing, big fat wet flakes that would be piling up high. I have seen blizzards in Wyoming every month of the year. July is no exception. I damn near died in one up to the Wind River, and the day before it hit was hot enough so I wasn’t wearing a shirt and by the next morning I was scrabbling for wood to keep a fire going and wishing I had my buffalo overcoat along. It snowed six feet.
And Cope wanted to head off into this dangerous country at a time anything with a grain of sense was in a burrow, sleeping for the next few months.
The clerk was a friend of mine and I gave him money to discreetly replace the busted furniture and wire the chandelier back together. Some of the cut crystal had flown out the window to the muddy alley below. I found a snot-nosed urchin and advanced him a quarter and said a dollar would await him if he found all the pieces. He set to work with a vengeance.
I limped down the street to a restaurant and had a big breakfast and a lot of coffee, and felt some repaired. Then I went back to the hotel and got the manifests Cope had me read and I moseyed on down to the warehouse.
There was people running in and out of it and a couple of the city’s law there, and Cope, looking cool and enraged, was standing just inside the door, tapping one elegantly booted foot and chewing an unlit cigar.
“Someone broke in last night and tore up the place,” says Cope.
I waited, figuring his speech warn’t done.
“It’s that bastard Marsh,” says Cope.
“Lookin’ for what?” I says. “We ain’t been out to find nothing yet.”
Cope looked at me like I warn’t too bright.
“He wants,” says Cope, “to steal my ideas!” He had a look in his washed-out eyes that I’d seen before, in folks the syphilis had mostly et up.
Oh, joy, I thinks, off to the Great Unknown with a madman I got to figure on.
Cope’s flunks were putting things back in crates and checking lists and rushing to and fro.
“Here’s your manifests,” I says, handing them to him. “Seems you thought of everything.”
That was crap. I couldn’t think of everything. Cope even had a bakery wagon and a passenger list for that carrying a dozen laying hens and a milch cow.
Alys de Bonneterre arrived, looking fresh and lovely, decked out in men’s riding clothes, obviously tailored to her. Her pants was soft calfskin and her coat Morocco and she had on a big John B. Stetson hat much like mine, cream-colored with a band made of, so help me, rattlesnake skin.
I resolved to temper my strong lust with caution. This wench could be a lot of trouble, and worse yet, she’d be that only if she decided to.
There was a lot of flap these days about what women could and could not do, but Alys was going to do as she damned pleased and to hell with everybody. I had to admire her, and suspected if the neighbors had a grain of sense they’d burn her for a witch.
She ignored me, which I expected.
She went to Cope and the Professor spoke angrily for a moment, glancing once in my direction, but Alys said something that brought him up so short he turned very pale and then he straightened his shoulders and went on over to the flunks, who began to work even faster.
Alys looked at me blank-faced and then gave me a slow wink and then she walked over to a couple of big leather trunks and she opened them and looked briefly and shut them up again.
I thought for a moment of the fellers I had hired and recalled that they was all steady enough except Mopey, who had been bit by the Bible snake and was given when in his cups to beller about the end of the world and the bad habits of his friends. Usually he did this and fell over backwards, passed
-out drunk, but once he’d got it in his fool head to lecture Will and Bob in a whorehouse, Mopey’s text a pick handle and some garbled mush from the Old Testament.
The Kraut, I seemed to recall, had interrupted Mopey’s sermon with one hammerlike blow to the top of Mopey’s head, delicately catching the unconscious Mope with finger and thumb and tossing him in the snake bin out back, where Rosie installed the drunks who had got into bad whiskey. There was a lot of that around, and some of it even had strychnine in it, not enough to kill you but plenty to make you foam and twitch and see things usually weren’t there. That had happened to me only once and since I had been mighty careful of my whiskey’s provenance.
It was the big black bugs runnin’ around just under my skin I remembered best.
Mopey and I had to reach a deep understandin’ about him mindin’ his own goddamned business. Also that he wasn’t to touch a drop of booze on the trip or I’d fire him and he could take his chances ridin’ down alone, with the Cheyennes about. I got along fine with Blue Fox and the rest, but Mopey would end up screamin’ for three or four days, the Cheyennes was every bit as good as the Apaches in that department.
Cope walked past me without a word and out the door. Alys sauntered over, insolent hips swaying just a little.
“Poor Jonathan,” she says. “Othniel knows just about all ways to upset him. Jonathan is brilliant, but rather high-strung.”
“So who the hell is Othniel?” I says.
“Surely Jonathan has mentioned the distinguished professor Othniel Marsh?” says Alys.
“The name,” I says. “But who is he? Exactly.”
“When Mister Darwin opened the box,” says Alys, “he changed the way we think about the world. The Bible became nothing more than some good poetry and suspect history. Science is God now, Kelly, and Jonathan and Othniel both seek to be the Prophet. They haven’t got a scruple between them. I hope you have been acute enough to hire some very hard men. Othniel and Jonathan would kill for a good specimen, just so long as they didn’t have to do it.”