by Peter Bowen
“I ain’t going to show up in Wyoming in them duds,” I says. “Friends I got it would be a death sentence for me.”
Would of, too. Get grand on the boys and they’ll eat you for breakfast. I done a little chawing in my time, too.
“Matter of fact,” I says, “if there was a way I could arrive ordinary-like instead of in that damn wheeled mansion of yours it could be healthier.” The boys would have growed bored there not having much to do but cadge drinks and lose at cards, and they got especially savage at such times.
“No,” says Alys, “I am not going coach.”
She had a point. Her car was comfortable. The railroad had finally found it and it was right here in Boston awaiting us.
So we loaded up and Alys had several reddish-leather trunks with her supplies—inks and papers and reference books and such—and a cook, a skivvy, and Mrs. McGinniss got on board. Mrs. McGinniss spent a good deal of time praying to all the saints for deliverance from the merciless savages, and I couldn’t blame her. It had been a terrifying time during the attack. I remembered the sound the arrow made as it went more’n two foot into the conductor, from the top of his head down. A wet, slipping sound, like bootheels on ice.
And that crafty bastard Blue Fox, slipping onto the train, out of the warpaint and into the dude’s duds like that. He moved easy between the white and Indian worlds.
Too damn easy. I wished to Christ I’d been able to bore him through a few times with my little pocket guns. I’d feel easier about the expedition, sure enough.
I warn’t in no hurry to get home, long as I knew I was at least headed there, and Alys was all sunny at the prospect of a couple months in a knocked-up railroad town hadn’t been there ten years before, and all them cultural amenities Laramie was so justly famous for.
We was stuck for an entire day at a bridge had washed out, and things was so jammed up behind us took that long for the railroad to dig us out and send us by another route.
We finally got to Chicago and I was feeling all generous so I says, well, we could stay here a few days I guess. New York and Boston had great pretensions, but Chicago was rough as a cob and there was a few rich fools tryin’ to gild the city, but it was still a crude frontier town grown up too fast, and most folks in it was interested in making money and nothing else. The Irish was there in mobs and they was getting a grip on the city’s politics, and your Irisher is a born liar and cheat, so they took to office like ducks to water.
Good thing we stayed, for one of them blue northers come howling down across Nebraska and Kansas and it carried a big load of snow, so heavy that trains was stalled all along the tracks, the plows couldn’t get to them, and lots of people froze to death when the fuel run out, even though they burned the wood furniture in the cars. Behind the snow come the cold and it was forty below.
Time they got that all sorted out three weeks had gone past. The newspapers reported that all sorts of greenhorns thought they could make a fortune shooting buffalo, and was caught out in the storm. Almost all of them soon froze to death, but three didn’t, though their arms and legs had to be amputated, and they was sent back to their relatives to be carried around like sacks the rest of their days.
Then it got warm and the snow went mostly and off we went, on the end of a long passenger train had three big pullers on the front, the railroads was desperate to get people moving.
Alys flat asked me about the possibility of being attacked by the Cheyennes and I told her Indians wasn’t so dumb as to do that this time of year—the worst blizzards is near the spring. They’d stay warm in their lodges and wait for good grass. Their horses would be tucked-up and weak from the winter.
We passed little stations had coffins stacked high on the platforms, settlers who’d died and was being sent back East for burial. The two winters before had been mild and then along come the deadly one, and these folks had no idea there was storms on earth so bad you couldn’t make it from the barn to the house without a rope to guide you. They had built flimsy and they had to heat with buffalo chips, and they couldn’t outrace the cold reaching in through the walls.
Whole families was found holding hands around tables, where they’d died praying for deliverance that hadn’t come.
Time we got to Laramie the sun was out and there was just a little blustery wind and Alys’s car was put off on a siding. It was late March by now and the thaw could come anytime, and then the rivers would choke with ice and jam and flood. And the carcasses of buffalo shot and skinned would begin to rot and there would be flies in clouds everywhere.
Oh, it was real romantic, let me tell you.
I allowed as how I’d saunter up to the saloons and see the boys, and Alys said, fine, but you saunter as far as Rosie’s, you will wish the Sioux had caught you first.
I nodded. I’d got back into my rough clothes and old beaded coat and I jammed my worn John B. Stetson on my head and I went up the street, glad that the mud was still frozen. When it thawed you’d sink to your knees and there was many a good pair of boots under the streets hadn’t been buried there a-purpose.
Bob and Will and Jake and Lou was at the first place I went. They was happy to see me as only broke fellers can be when they encounter a prosperous friend, and I bought a few bottles for them and settled the tabs they’d run up, taking their promises of repayment but not expecting anything.
Sir Henry was in the next place, looking prosperous as he always did. He was good at cards, hell, good at anything he done, and I could see from the chips in front of him the afternoon had been profitable.
I had a drink at the bar and Sir Henry cashed in and he come on over, smiling a little, and we shook and I inquired about the health of all.
“Pignuts is dead,” he says. “Somebody cut his throat and scalped him and took off in the snow and no one felt like goin’ after him.”
“Blue Fox,” I says, and I mentioned our encounters.
“I will kill him on sight,” says Sir Henry.
“Fine by me,” I says. Would be, too, if Sir Henry’s sight was a piece away from the expedition. I thought of offering him a reward, but didn’t. Sir Henry was here because he liked it, and killing come real natural to him.
I saw one of the men Sir Henry had been playin’ cards with turn and commence gettin’ up and he had a gun in his hand, and I was about to warn Sir Henry but he’d seen it in the bar mirror. He wore his guns backwards and he cross-drawed so fast I hardly saw it and he killed the man, four shots to the heart, before the fool could get his iron up.
The other two men at the table goggled and kept their hands well away from their coats.
A big puddle of blood run out from the dead man. The barkeep pushed a mop bucket around the end of the bar and the wheels went skreek skreek across the rough planks. The barkeep grabbed the dead gent by the boots and drug him out the door and left him on the boardwalk porch. Then he come back in and mopped ’fore the blood got all sticky. He was right practiced at it.
Sir Henry had tucked his guns back away and gone back to sipping whiskey and chatting pleasant. Soon a constable come in and he talked to the barkeep, slapped Sir Henry on the back, and went out.
Inquests wasn’t long on formality in them days.
Suddenly there was some hollering out in the street, and Sir Henry and me and some others went out the doors see what the commotion was.
There was a horse, pretty exhausted, shambling down the street, and the body of a man on it, bent over the saddle backwards so far his spine was broke. His legs and arms flopped with the horse’s walk.
“That’s Mopey’s horse,” says Sir Henry.
Sir Henry caught the horse and I cut the rawhide thongs that held Mope on and slid him down to the mud. He’d been castrated and his face skinned, but not scalped.
“Mope was just goin’ twenty miles up,” says Sir Henry, “get a coat he left at Lost Soldier Station.”
Lost Soldier warn’t no more than a roadhouse and a couple cabins, a day’s travel away by wagon.
“Won’t be anybody alive up there,” says Sir Henry.
Just Blue Fox, I thinks, by way of welcoming me back.
20
A SQUADRON OF TROOPERS left the next morning for Lost Soldier, and I went along, telling Alys that I expected I should. Blue Fox had killed everyone there for the pleasure of it, and to warn me that he was around. I couldn’t trust the bastard, and it would be best I just killed him and hope the Cheyennes was as tired of his antics as I was.
He wouldn’t be there, of course.
Alys wanted to come along, but I said no, what we was going to find would be past unpleasant and I would be back by nightfall tomorrow.
The lieutenant leading the squadron was green as grass, out of West Point less than a year. When I asked if I could go along he looked so grateful I thought he’d cry. He was a boy still, though he was older than I was, I was sure. This country puts age on you quick.
The trail was dry, the wind had scoured off the snow and it was fairly well laid, only a couple places were flooded and we went round those easily. We rode hard, needing to get there well before nightfall, to bury the dead and make arrangements to live through the night.
I had seen plenty of what we found there, but for one thing.
There was one living man. He’d been blinded, castrated, and his wound fired, hamstrung, and then his hands was nailed palms up to the floor with long heavy spikes. He was just moaning a little when we found him, and the lieutenant gave him whiskey and the man sobbed out that there had been eleven people at the station, and they’d been picked off one by one, he was the last and he’d been clubbed from behind, and when he woke up the knife was cutting off his balls and then the iron was slammed to his groin, red-hot. He had fainted and come to nailed to the floor.
Rats had chewed his fingers.
“Never ... saw ... nobody ...” he says. His eyes had been gouged out first thing. “Nobody ... shoot me ... Mother of God shoot me ...” he moaned.
“Go out and check your troopers,” I says to the looie, and he went and I put one of my little pistols in the man’s earhole and pulled the trigger. Wasn’t no more than a pop, but he was dead as he slumped to the floor. Poor son of a bitch, he’d been two days like that, at least.
I went outside and the lieutenant was swallowing hard and I motioned for him to come along and we walked away from the sergeant he’d been talking to.
“He’d have died of infection,” I says. “I give you some advice. That sergeant of yours, listen to him, things here ain’t like you was taught to West Point.”
“One man?” says the boy.
I nodded. I didn’t tell him about Blue Fox, he was scared enough as it was.
Hell, I was scared. Blue Fox had gone ’round some corner and met the Devil and they liked each other.
The troopers buried them all in a common grave, the ground was hard and stony even when it wasn’t froze, and then they piled up rocks good and thick. Blue Fox had let the pigs out of their pen, so none of the ten dead when we come had a face or hands left. Two was women, their intestines pulled out in a long loop, fore they had their throats cut.
One of the troopers gave a holler and we went to him. He’d been back in the little truck garden the stationmaster kept, and there was this scarecrow there, except it was real well dressed. In the herringbone tweed I had seen Blue Fox in New York.
“Animals,” says the young lieutenant. “Vermin. No human would do these things.”
Some, I says, like Blue Fox, but I’d seen worse butchery that whites had done, even soldiers. Not many soldiers, but some. And if we was so civilized, I says, how come there was twenty thousand starving orphans in New York?
The lieutenant wanted to set up a heavy guard and feed bonfires all night and I told him go ahead, but Blue Fox is long gone and we won’t see nor hear anything but the wolves and coyotes howling.
“He’s right, sorr,” says the sergeant.
The lieutenant went off a ways to puke and me and the sergeant looked at each other.
“Let him stand guard,” I says. “He ain’t going to sleep anyways.”
“It was me, we’d head back now,” says the sergeant. “Blue Fox come and gone, but there’s nothing to be done here now.”
I nodded. I got on my horse and rode over to the retching lieutenant and I told him he could stay he wanted but I was going back now. It would be a couple hours after dark when I got there, but staying the night in the station held no appeal. And I rode on.
The troopers caught up before I’d gone five miles, and we made time, pausing only to let our horses’ wind recover for a half hour and then riding hard again.
I left my horse at the stable and walked to Alys’s car. I pulled off my boots and I hollered her name and after a time Mrs. McGinniss come out of her quarters and said that Miss de Bonneterre had gone up to town.
This was right interesting, since there warn’t no place a lady could go in alone, all there was was saloons and dance-hall girls and ...
“That connivin’ wench,” I says, knowing just exactly where the hell she’d gone. “Mrs. McGinniss, you pray for Miss de Bonneterre’s lovely arse, because if she’s where I think she is, I am going to welt it up real good.”
“She needs that, sorr,” says Mrs. McGinniss. “She’s willful as the Devil and stubborn as a mule.”
I made my way to Rosie’s and stalked in and brushed through the beaded curtains that covered the entrance to Rosie’s private quarters, to find Alys and Rosie having a snort and laughing like hell. They each had a Spanish cigarette lit.
The both looked up when I crashed in. Alys looked startled for about half a second, and then she thought she’d brazen it out.
“What a nice surprise, Luther,” she says. Her eyes wavered just a little. I think my face was black with blood.
“Luther,” says Rosie, “you behave.”
Alys weighed possibilities a moment and then she come off the chair like a greyhound gating and scooted through another set of beaded curtains and headed for the back of the house.
I leaped after her, and was in full stride when I stumbled, and I looked down to see it was Rosie’s leg, just sort of out there, accidental-like, before I crashed into the doorjamb hard enough to knock the curtains down.
I seen stars and I fell back hard and I lay there a moment before bellering with rage and struggling up to my feet, but the monstrous Kraut was there by then and he grabbed hold of my collar and held me up like I was a kid. I squirmed and flailed but it did no good.
“Luther,” says Rosie, “you must behave. Miss de Bonneterre and I was just having a discussion of a pro-fessional nature.”
I blew off with a string of compliments I usually save for my horse when he steps on my foot.
“Wolf is not going to be patient forever,” says Rosie. “Now why don’t you just sit down and have a nice drink.”
Wolf twisted me round so I could look into his pale yellow eyes for a moment. He nodded once.
“Seems a good idea to me,” I says. “I’ll tan her ass later.”
Wolf shook his head once.
No.
“Right,” I says. “I am all calm now.”
Wolf pulls up a chair for me and drops me in it like I was a bag of laundry and he padded off. Rosie was pouring me a nice drink. I had my pocket guns but I doubted they’d do more than piss Wolf off and besides if I did kill him I would hang, as Rosie was a good deal more respected in Wyoming than President Ulysses S. Grant.
For excellent reason, too.
“Drink your drink, Luther,” says Rosie.
I did.
“You can come out now,” Rosie warbles.
Alys slid back in through the busted doorway. She kept a wary eye on me.
“Don’t fear,” says Rosie. “Wolf and Luther had a nice talk, and Luther is the very picture of calm and decency.”
I started to say something smart but Rosie put a finger to her lips and I shut up.
She and Alys went back to
the discussion they’d been having.
What did I like, exactly, that Rosie and her girls provided.
Rosie launched in to a straight-faced lie, about trapezes and batteries and feather dusters and what-all, and I swelled and was going to cry foul, but Rosie kicked me under the table.
Alys was rapt, and time to time she’d give me a sly glance.
I had a drink or five and sat there listening to this fabulous tale, and if Rosie’d not had such a poker face even Alys would have caught on.
Finally, we took our leave.
“Come back anytime,” says Rosie, to Alys.
I was about to roar the hell she would when I was lifted up by a giant, Teutonic arm and spun around.
Wolf shook his head.
No.
21
MUD AND SLUSH TURNED to dust and wind, which is a Wyoming spring, and the god damnedest assortment of fools arrived. They had the notion that since there was a railroad to Wyoming, it was a resort. Oh, there were plenty of stinking hot springs here and there, and at the time they was thought to cure just about anything from consumption to imbecility. Never mind the local gentry might slow-cure your lumbago head down over a small, very hot fire.
It had been a killing winter for the buffalo hunters and great stacks of flint hides was all along the railroad clear through Nebraska and Kansas, and the flies was coming up, a little slow because the nights was still cold, though there was plenty during sunny days. Alys hated the little bastards and she got in a frenzy, every morning there’d be windrows of them on the sills and drifts on the floors and she’d shriek for Mrs. McGinniss and the other two servants to clean them up.
“Hell,” I says. “This ain’t nothing. Wait two weeks and the whole town will be six inches deep in the bastards.”
Cope hadn’t arrived yet and wouldn’t for two more weeks, and I figured Alys would be needing a long rest in a place with padded walls by then. For a girl who boiled her own brother down she sure hated bugs. We all got our weaknesses.
Cheyenne got most of the crowds and the fools hired other fools claimed to be guides and off they went, south if the guides had any wits at all, there was a little miserable country between Cheyenne and Denver and enough of bad weather and alkali water to make the dudes think about how nice it was back to home. But others went north, and the small pack trains of dudes and their guides—all one notch up on the fool stick from them as was payin’ them—were just the sort of prey Blue Fox would eat and leave only the pips. There was also a band of bored Sioux roaming around like a pack of wolves off their heads to the north.