by Peter Bowen
“There’s surely plenty enough old bones up there for both of them,” I says.
“Which old bones will be the question,” says Alys. “Jonathan got the Eohippus, the Dawn Horse. Othniel needs something even more spectacular.”
“Like what?” I says.
“The biggest prize would be the bones of a creature that lies between apes and man,” says Alys. “After that, anything that the press likes. Bigger. Stranger.”
“I thought they was professors,” I says. I’d met a few, and they was sort of nice fools expert in things no one gave a damn about.
“They seek to found a whole new science,” said Alys. “Now be a good guide and find me a decent place to have lunch.”
So I took her to the toniest restaurant in town and we took a discreet table behind some potted palms and aspidistra and Alys demanded a wine list, which the waiter promptly brought. Since the railroad, the hotels vied with one another in the matter of delicacies. Fresh oysters and clams and lobsters, even strawberries, though the tiny ones that grew near the rivers here were sweeter and better than any I have ever tasted anywhere. If it comes from far away, it has to better that which is under your feet.
Alys had two dozen oysters and a bottle of white Bordeaux and I had a lobster, a huge one, nearly three pounds, and some nice Sancerre.
We had coffee.
“I haven’t been entirely honest with you,” said Alys.
I tried hard not to let my moustaches fall off in surprise.
“Oh,” I says. Here it comes, Luther, you can always slink off and see the Pacific Ocean for the first time.
“Jonathan has hired me as the artist,” she says, “to do the drudgework of sketching specimens.”
“That’s what he says,” I says.
“I have other things I wish to do,” she says.
First she’ll tell me what, and then ask how much I want for helping her screw Cope. I didn’t like the man, so the price would surely be low.
“Jonathan knows I spent five years in Europe, studying art, and music, and languages, like any well-bred young lady of good family,” says Alys.
I attended the coffee in my cup.
“But that was not exactly what I did,” says Alys.
I nodded.
“I studied paleontology in France and Germany,” she says, “and I corresponded often with Darwin, who wrote back in reply to my first letter that it was not necessary for me to claim to be male. How he found out I don’t know.”
I looked at her.
“So you want to make them both look like fools,” I says.
“Only by doing better scholarship,” says Alys. “I would pay you well to help me.”
I nodded, my patented yes. Maybe. Depends—
“Can you hire someone to follow us and see dispatches of mine get to Cheyenne, to my agent. He’ll see they go where they need to.”
“Of course,” I says.
There wouldn’t be any need to hire anyone. Blue Fox would be around the whole damn time, just out of sight, and I knew that humiliating Cope and Marsh would appeal to him mightily.
’Sides, neither of the professors had gone to Dartmouth.
7
IF I WAS GOING to help Alys, who I liked, I couldn’t be sauntering off to meet up with Blue Fox. There’d have to be someone who could sneak past our guards and not blunder into one of Blue Fox’s young bloods. I had hired one, the estimable Mulligan. All I had to do was find the demented little bogtrotter. I thought hard, hoping he would read my mind but at the last I rode back to Pignuts’ place, to leave inquiries. None of the swells would go near the saloon.
When I come in Pignuts about jumped out of his skin and he began to scream if that damned bitch was with me he’d put two loads of buckshot in her, and he had his sawed-off in hand to make good on his promise.
“She ain’t with me,” I says.
“I never seen a woman like that,” says Pignuts, letting the hammers down slow on his piece. “She shot me through the other ear when I said I couldn’t stand the stink no more and when I dug up her brother’s corpse she didn’t blink. Made me chop him up and boil off the meat in the kettle. Maggots all through him. I get all the bones clean and she wraps them in linen and rides off. Flips a five-dollar gold piece over her shoulder. It ain’t right for a woman to act like that. It just ain’t right.”
Pignuts had some notions about proper female behavior, and it seemed Alys had busted every one of ’em.
He had a neat hole through each ear, precise one side to another. Alys had studied on the pistolero’s trade, too.
“Well,” I says, “them rich folks don’t have no rules anyway, you know that.”
“It just ain’t right,” says Pignuts. This from a feller chops the teeth out of them as expire in his sal-oon, in hopes of gold.
“I never seen anything like her,” Pignuts went on.
“I doubt she’ll ever be back,” I says.
“AND LOOK WHAT SHE DONE TO MY EARS!” he bellers.
Pignuts was so ugly he was actually improved as the neat holes in his ears drew the eye away from his face, which looked a lot like ferret’s been hit with a sledge.
“I’m lookin’ for Mulligan,” I says.
“He ain’t been in,” says Pignuts, automatic-like.
“Pignuts,” I says. “It’s me. Kelly. You seen Mulligan?”
Pignuts struggled with his conscience for a moment, which was made up mostly of fear that if he blabbed the feller whose privacy done been invaded would come back and blow Pignuts’ head off. It was that sort of place.
“He was in last night,” says Pignuts.
“He out in your hoosegow?” I says.
Pignuts struggled hard again.
“Maybe,” he says.
Pignuts was so exhausted by this bout of honesty he had to have some of his own whiskey, and the shot stiffened him up and his eyes teared though they was shut and he shuddered and grabbed the bar and then he shit his pants.
“Thanks, Pignuts,” I says, stepping back quick-like from the reek. “You done piled up some treasures in Heaven.”
I rode my horse round back to the place Pignuts stuck his casualties and pulled the pin out of the hasp on the door and hollered Mulligan’s name. Nothing.
I took a deep breath and stuck my head in and saw a couple bodies on the floor, none small enough to be Mulligan’s. I backed away and turned around and there was the little bastard, stroking my horse’s neck.
Mulligan grinned, showing brown stumpy teeth.
“Yumph,” he says.
“You want a drink?” I says.
Mulligan shook his head.
He clasped his hands all prayerful-like and looked up to Heaven.
“Glad to see you done been saved,” I says. “Now I got a favor to ask of you.”
It weren’t much, just sneaking off every few days to hook up with Blue Fox, who might or might not take a notion to tie Mulligan to a tree, stick a few thousand pitchwood splinters in him, and set him alight.
Mulligan shook his head.
“Mumpf havva kilpf Cheyennes,” he says.
“How many Cheyennes have you killed?” I says.
“Mumphflook,” he says. Mulligan kept his ragged pants up with a piece of clothesline. He had a sack tied to it which held his worldly possessions. He opened the sack and took out a thread which held a number of dried ears. He counted carefully.
“Elebum,” he says.
“Well, you’ll just be meeting up with Blue Fox,” I says. “You kill any of his relations?”
“Thirp,” says Mulligan.
“I’ll see I can work something out with him,” I says.
Well, it wouldn’t do to set off without having made proper arrangements, so that left me with riding up the trail in hopes of meeting up with Blue Fox, and that when he wasn’t in a mood to give me a bad end. I figured fifty-fifty. Dartmouth hadn’t took, or maybe it had.
A warm wind had melted most of the snow, and so I just set
off, figuring that I could at least get a message to Blue Fox, even if he was off someplace.
There was a well-traveled trail going north out of Laramie, lots of teamsters in trains carrying goods for the miners, and little groups of bold settlers who wanted to get in first, even if the Indians was still powerful and not eager to have new neighbors.
The trail was worthless to me, of course, but along it there was any number of places Indian scouts holed up to keep an eye on things.
One place in particular I thought a good bet. It was three small mountains stuck up out of the Plains with a good view from the top for forty miles in any direction. I’d have to go up at night and hope if there were scouts up there, they was bored by now and wouldn’t be real vigilant. There was a trail on the back side of them, and if I could get up top without being spotted and having a rock rolled down on me, I might could have a palaver instead of a fight.
I got to the range ridin’ slow and dark come and I made a little camp and a big fire and I slipped off on my big bay, ridin’ around behind the mountains. I found the trail up and I rode on—my horse could walk soft he needed to—and the mountains wasn’t real high. I tied him in a stand of bullpine and went on up toward the crest. There was a little sort of roofless cave up top kept the worst wind off and screened fire from sight below. If there was Indians, they’d be there. It was damn cold.
I got closer and kept well to the shadows, movin’ slow, and the wind brought a whiff of cedar burning. Then a pony whuffled and then another. I wetted my finger and knew my scent was blowing away from the horses, and I crept closer.
I peered through a slit in a slab of rock and saw two braves by the little fire. A rabbit was cooking on a stick. Two men, two ponies hobbled near them.
When I suddenly appeared in the firelight across from them they reached for their rifles, but I had a gun on them, and I spoke in Cheyenne.
“Easy, my brothers, I wish only to send a message to Blue Fox. I did not come to kill you.”
They relaxed. I knew one of them, Wolf Running, a good warrior with a sweet moon face and a lazy nature.
I could have killed them both, and they knew it, so they motioned for me to come and sit and I did.
I said I wished to talk to Blue Fox, that it was important, and I gave them some tobacco and I got up and left, taking some care on the way back to my horse because all I knew a couple more braves could be coming up the trail to relieve Wolf Running and his friend.
My horse was standing still where I had left him, and I untied his reins and turned him around and I got up and rode back down toward the flats.
The night was moonless and the sky was a deep, deep blue with the stars glittering, they seemed so very close. Up here near the Rocky Mountains the air is so clear the joke was you could see a bird’s tongue across a wide valley.
Some rocks cracked above me, the frost had loosened a few, and I ducked against the mountain wall and waited till they had quit flying.
The starlight on the Plains threw everything into strange pale colors, or black shadows. It could be a ghostly place, and the weird rock of formations which the wind had carved could be hellish organs if it blew just right.
I went north around the mountains and hooked back to the main trail and I made another dry camp, not wanting to attract attention to myself.
I built a tiny fire and huddled over it, waiting the light. I chewed a little jerky and wished I had a cup of strong coffee.
I dozed.
I woke up suddenly because there was something cold on my throat and someone chuckling behind me.
“You are quite careless,” said Blue Fox.
8
BLUE FOX GOT ALL hospitable after having his little joke, though he couldn’t resist giving me a shallow cut right over my jugular just to annoy me. My collar rubbed on it and it itched and I resolved to repay the favor. But that would have to wait. For one thing, if I could get Blue Fox in on the joke that Alys was thinking of playing on Cope, he wouldn’t spend so much time scalping the foolish on the expedition. Blue Fox was one of them folks has a horror of boredom.
His Dartmouth years had given him a mortal loathing of professors, and I banked on that.
So I explained the deal to him. I needed to get papers out of the camp and down to a feller in Laramie, who would take them from then on.
“The blonde who whipped and shot Pignuts?” he says. “Then boiled her brother’s corpse? A rare woman. What could a good Christian gentleman like me do but place myself at her service?”
This was a little rich, and I give him the eye.
“Far as anyone knows at my dear alma mater, I am carrying the Word of God to my heathen Cheyennes,” says this scoundrel. “Tell folks what they want to hear, they’ll believe it.”
I had noticed that in life.
We had built up the fire, and Blue Fox had provided a rack of antelope and two bottles of claret, the labels only a little bloodstained. So that was what happened to the toff took off from Cheyenne with his apartments on wagons, two flytiers, a dozen gun dogs, and four coachmen. Nobody who knew a damn thing about how this happened was out here. He hadn’t been heard from in four months and wouldn’t be again.
The rack sizzled over hot coals and we munched cattail roots from a little spring nearby for a salad, and by and by we had antelope a little smoky from the fire. It was delicious. The claret was superb.
“Yer keepin’ a good cellar these days,” I says.
Blue Fox just grinned with his white teeth, and his merry eyes twinkled. Probably at the memory of how the toff and his servants died. Blue Fox had a wider world from his years at Dartmouth, and he knew the bitter fate his people faced. Smile he might, but there was a sadness back there in his black eyes that was old as death.
“I sorta thought Mulligan might act as the go-between,” I says.
“That sawed-off bogtrotter?” says Blue Fox. “He’s killed eleven Cheyennes!”
“Fair fight,” I says.
“What,” says Blue Fox, “has that got to do with anything? He’s about the size of a ten-year-old and my warriors sort of shrugged when they saw him. When they saw him. He’s about the best of you scouts.”
Suddenly there was an eerie howling, one not from this world. But it was, and we both gave a start. It was the wind high overhead, a mad ghostly scream that meant bad weather was coming down from the north.
“Cope proposes to go out now?” says Blue Fox. “The damn bones will be in the same place they’ve been for yea how many million years.”
“He’s afeared Marsh will get there first,” I says.
“Do you have any idea how many fossil boneyards there are in Wyoming?” says Blue Fox. “You couldn’t haul a hundredth of them away you had a railroad going up there.”
“It don’t make a lot of sense to me, either,” I says.
“It does to me,” says Blue Fox. “I watched Summit Springs and the Dog Soldiers dying. Quite a scrap. I’ve only seen one other brawl worse.”
I waited. Blue Fox had been East, I guessed, when the Hayfield and Wagon Box fights had happened.
“Well?” I says finally.
“A faculty meeting,” says Blue Fox.
He opened the second bottle of claret.
We drank.
It was damned late and so we dozed for a while and in the morning we shook hands and Blue Fox rode off, a strange man. He could wear the leather clothes and paint of his people, and then tuck his braids up under his hat and put on cowboy costume and pass easily for a dark-complected white. A lot of the Cheyennes was very light-skinned. One particularly loony feller had showed up claiming that they was Welsh and he talked Welsh at ’em for some time.
The Cheyennes was real patient with him—God knows how he managed to walk right into their camp—and I’d have cut the fool’s tongue out after about hour or two, but they figured he was just crazy and therefore sacred and they let him stay. Finally, he understood that they didn’t have a word of Welsh and he left. I don’t kno
w what happened to him after that.
The wind had picked up high overhead again—the air on the ground was real still—and it began to scream. I didn’t like it one bit. It meant there would probably be a damn blizzard, and in Wyoming that meant the snow would fall and then the wind would push it round. It could fill coulees and draws that was a hundred feet deep, and if you was unlucky and wandered out on what looked like solid ground you’d sink and smother and likely they’d find your skeleton and your horse’s stuck in a cottonwood top come spring. A couple of friends of mine had died that way, found with the birds pecking on them forty feet off the ground.
This damned expedition was lookin’ worse by the minute.
Blue Fox would leave us be, but there was still the Sioux and the Sioux was Red Cloud and Spotted Tail and Sitting Bull and they knew damn well what the railroad meant. They also knew what the buffalo hunters meant. That was Sherman and little Phil Sheridan, and they was soldier enough to see that the Indians lived on the buffalo, and if the buffalo was gone, they would have to come into the reservations, to live on hardtack and salt pork left over from the War and get about half-pestered to death by Baptists, which you will admit are very pesky indeed.
No damn wonder the Plains people was ready to fight to the last man.
Oh, yes, I was not happy on that day down in Utah when the railroad pegged itself together. This was some fine country and I had rode through it early on and met some fine men and that was then and the now didn’t look at all encouraging.
The wind screaming overhead was about right, and it fit my mood exactly. I liked civilization well enough it stayed in its place, but it ain’t an improvement, you ask me.
Time I got to Laramie and was leaving my bay at the stable the wind had reached down to the ground and quartered around to the north and there was stinging little ice shards in it and we was in for a norther. The hotel, with its warm light from the kerosene lamps and the promise of steam heat looked mighty inviting. Why was I going to do this I purely could not say, as I had more than enough money in the bank to live well till spring and then see what the warm weather brought.