by Peter Bowen
Folks was quiet. A prairie fire is a natural disaster and living through it, or just even watching close by, will shut up the gabbiest folks.
We was all smudged and smoked from the fire, and them as had consumption was coughing and coughing—there were many folks come west for the dry air and was better, at least till something like this came along.
Cope come by all beaming—he was changeable as a little kid, too—since he realized that we’d have to stay and that meant he’d have more specimens time we left.
Early the next morning the teamsters took four wagons and went off to cut hay, and they found a good patch not too far and was able to come back with enough forage for all the stock by noon. The horses, mules, and oxen ate hearty and drank deep and I relaxed, for if the stock got desperate enough, some of them at least would wander off.
Alys was caught up enough so she rode with me as I went off south to see about the best way to get back. I took some robes and food and a frying pan on a packhorse so we’d be able to stay the night in some comfort. The camp was crowded and it stunk and there was too many people in too small a place.
About ten miles south we seen where the wind had veered off to the east and it took the fire with it and there was still good cured grass, more than enough to graze the animals, so my fears of us being trapped altogether was gone.
Alys said she’d like to get atop the mountains about twenty miles to the west, and I shrugged. Longer I was away from Cope the better I felt anyway. The man was purely beginning to grate on me.
We rode on up to where the trees began and on to a little dell I knew, where there was grass and water and firewood and we et beans and bacon and had lots of strong tea, and finally Alys looks at me narrow and I fished some good brandy out of my saddlebags. The wood burning was cedar and it smelled like incense and the smoke pooled along the ground, which meant there was rain coming on.
Storms up this high could be real wet and so I cut down a fir and branched it and laid the boughs up against the trunk, which was still stuck to the stump about six foot high, to have some shelter. I cussed at myself for not bringing canvas.
I cut more boughs and piled them deep, and of course some rain would get through but most of it wouldn’t, and it would keep us from the worst of the storm.
When it come it come hard, lightning crashing down hard. I had hobbled the horses and covered their eyes. They whinnied and complained a while and then quit.
Alys and me had a romp between the thick robes and then lay in each other’s arms for a while, trading little stories. The rain was gentling off, but felt like it would keep on till morning.
The horses started whinnying again and I pulled on my boots and took my rifle and Navy Colts and went to see what the matter was.
They kept looking back west, to the trail led there. We hadn’t been on it at all, and it was an odd time for anyone to be coming this way, what with the rain and the dark.
I gentled the horses some and moved off quiet and found a place of deep shadow and waited.
Something moved a little just inside the deep shadows where the trees ate the starlight, almost nothing but still it wasn’t the sort of thing I cared to leave go, and I waited a long time and then I seen it again, just a shadow moving over another, if I’d been blinking I would have missed it.
I thought I heard another horse whicker to the west, with the rain and the wind rising I couldn’t be sure.
’Fore I left Alys I said may be a while before I come back and keep damned quiet; if there’s Indians sneaking around I will have to sit till I can see them and figure what to do. I hoped to hell she’d do that.
The storm cleared off sudden and the stars was there and I could see another storm not far off—they come through, sometimes regular as the hours falling away, clear up, storm, clear up, storm, and I have never seen that anywhere but in the Rockies.
I’d been there long enough and began to slip back to Alys, taking care to move in the cover of shadows, wondering if what I had heard had been there, or perhaps if it was Indians they had swung way round to avoid the trail altogether.
I waited in shadow maybe fifty feet from the bower Alys was in, and I could see good, except behind a big boulder maybe forty feet from the fir I’d chopped down. I just laid there waiting, which is what scouting mostly is, finding a good spot and setting, for days if necessary.
Nothing moved, and the next storm come on just as vicious as the one just left. Lightning started crashing around and gave a harsh sudden light, like photographer’s flash powder.
A close bolt lit up the landscape, the boulder come out good, and there was a man on the top of it, crouched, and I swung up my rifle and shot and he screamed and fell back.
I run like hell to see if I’d winged him bad, but when I got round the boulder I saw a horse almost into the trees and a rider hugging down close, and then he was gone. I went ’round for sign and there was only the one horse. I found a little blood.
He wouldn’t be back, so I went to Alys, and we slept real good.
32
BEFORE PACKING US UP I walked over the ground around the boulder and followed the tracks of the horse. The Indian had moved from the boulder about a hundred feet to his tethered pony. I swore that I hit him in arm or shoulder, but he was dragging a leg. I shrugged. The light was fast and he had been moving, I could have hit him twice with the same bullet.
Cope, by the time we got back, was anxious to leave, and said we could return next year. He was fussed about something, but then he always was.
So the crew spent that day loading up and the next morning the train slowly pulled out, a good mile long, with ten miles to go for grass.
Me and my boys ranged out, our job after all was to keep Indians from attacking. It was the middle of August and the time seemed to have gone somewheres on its own and I couldn’t think of that much I had done since we come up here in the spring.
We was all worn out and bored, so much so that Mulligan actually began to come close enough to be seen. The crazy little man would pop up like a dirty leprechaun and grin and then go to ground again.
The Indian I had winged bothered me, stuck in my mind, and though I said nothing I had a feeling he may have been Blue Fox. The Kraut gunners had pounded the top of the rock to rubble, but shells miss soldiers down in the ground and it wasn’t impossible that he had managed to live. We never found nothing but blood and bits, but that all could have come from the horse.
I told only one man, Sir Henry, and he nodded and drifted slow like to a place near enough to Alys to protect her but not near enough to alarm her.
You can easy spot some people just by the way that they move, or ride a horse, at a long distance, longer than you can see a face. Blue Fox was supple as a snake and fast as a rock lizard. The Indian I seen didn’t move like that, but if Blue Fox had been bad wounded he wouldn’t.
About like that evil son of a bitch. Hard to kill.
We saw no Indians all the damn way to Laramie, and come to town riding ahead of the train. They would take another day or so to come on in. Me and Alys and Cope and Sir Henry and Will and a couple journalists showed up after we headed back come riding into the shabbly little thrown-up railroad town late in the afternoon and me and Alys went to my rooms in the hotel—I’d paid through October—and got acquainted with hot water and soap. Bucket baths just ain’t the same, try as you will.
We was refreshed and in clean clothes and having a drink before seeing what we could find in Laramie by way of dinner and there was a knock at the door and a bellboy stood there, with a long white envelope addressed to Alys.
Just her name. I gave the kid a dime and I walked back to her and handed the envelope to her and her face got pale and she ripped it open and then she began to cuss, in English and French and even passable Sioux.
She offered me the letter.
Your services are no longer required.
Jonathan Cope
“That dirty bastard,” I says.
&n
bsp; “He is that,” says Alys. “I’ll have one hell of a time getting my personal things back from him now.”
And then she began to laugh, and I did, too. Many parcels of drawings had come down to Mr. Adler. Alys was clever, and there wouldn’t be anything left in her trunks to make Cope suspicious.
“Jonathan eventually suspects everyone, and I mean everyone, of plotting against him,” says Alys. “He had one of his assistants jailed once, accusing the man of stealing specimens, but then it came to light that Marsh had bribed a watchman. So Jonathan had to drop the charges, but the assistant had his career ruined, as though it was his fault the guard was corrupt.”
I had known men like that. The whole world was against them. Usually the ones did that out here shot themselves, I don’t know why. I remembered a captain of cavalry whose voice got higher and higher as he screamed his suspicions and then there was a shot and we found him in his office with most of his head gone, them Navy Colts have a fierce load of powder, and you stick the barrel back in your throat your whole head explodes.
We ate and then we went out on the wooden walk and moseyed down the street, Alys turning time to time to see if we were being followed, down the two blocks and change to the little jewelry store. I smelled a sharp smell of burnt wood. There weren’t streetlamps on that short, poor section, which was butt up against the warehouses and hide yards.
The jewelry shop was gone and there warn’t nothing but a hole and some ashes and sour water puddled. It must have burned maybe the day before, at most two.
Alys never batted an eye, but I could feel her arm trembling and she clutched mine tight as we went back up the street to the hotel. We went in and on up to my rooms and when we was inside she raged, stomping back and forth. Then she slumped in a chair and steepled her fingers.
“Could you please see if you can find out what happened?” she says.
I went on down the stairs and out the door and across the street to the Crosstie, and found a couple loafers there who was thirsty and had nothing better to do than catch the town news.
It had done caught fire and the little Jew was passed out drunk and burned to death. The coroner ruled it accidental, there was fires all the time what with the new lumber in the dry air and oil lamps gettin’ knocked over.
Time the folks had got there to fight the fire the place was gone right up and they had best try to save the buildings on either side, and they had—they was newer and had asbestos sheets in their walls.
Adler had been buried quick, no one knew him and there was no folks back East anyone knew either. He’d been in the ground for about twelve hours, they’d planted him when we was lookin’ down on Laramie from the hill to the north.
I found Alys drinking brandy, her eyes swollen from crying. She had a Spanish cigarette in her hand and another in the ashtray, and a long look in her eye. She’d tried something and it hadn’t worked and months of her scheming had gone to nothing.
“Adler tried to help me,” she said. “He came here to do that, and they killed him.”
“Pretty serious business, science,” I says. Men out here killed for gold and they killed for land, but the thought of professors killing didn’t make no sense. They was already rich, but not in the things they wanted most.
Of all things that crawl upon the earth, says Homer, there is nothing so dismal as man.
I wasn’t going to add my two cents’ worth, figuring Alys was the one who lost the most, and so I waited for her to speak.
“Herr Adler was a tutor of mine,” said Alys. “Uncle Digby hired him and he lived in the house and he taught me German and French and Italian and the beginnings of natural science. He had retired and Digby had settled a pension on him. He loved me and he came here to help me and now he’s dead.”
She could change, for sure, remembering the first time that I seen her, shooting Pignuts in the ear and marching him off to dig up her poor brother and boil off the rotting flesh so his bones could rest peaceful back East.
“I want to go home,” says Alys. “Luther, will you please come with me? Please?”
I had got drawn farther into this than I cared to be, and when my wife died I got cold inside and didn’t want no one in there again and Alys was chewing away to get there.
I had money, and I could pick and choose my work.
I hated the East, the cities made me sweat and so nervous I was afraid I might kill some poor bastard run up behind me or looked at me funny. It was that bad.
She got up and come to me and put her arms around my neck and her head against my shoulder and she wept, her tears warm through my linen shirt. She didn’t plead or wail, the bitch, all she did was stand there smellin’ wonderful and leaking.
They don’t play fair.
“Of course,” I says, I expected before she rolled up the big guns and said of course I could refuse and disappoint her.
Well, havin’ said that I had to go and no mistake.
We was a few days getting things sorted out, and her private stuff recovered from Cope, who wouldn’t even talk to her direct, but had one of his flunks observe her gathering her things.
We was waiting on the train from the west, and Alys was taking a long bath in her private car, and so I went down to the loading platform.
Some troopers injured bad enough to be sent east for discharge was lying on stretchers there and the ones could walk or manage crutches was outside leaned up against the wall.
One tall feller with a battered uniform had been burned and his face was all swathed in bandages, only his eyes left open a little, a narrow slit across. He had an arm in a sling and his hand curled up like they get when they ain’t moved.
Our eyes met and we nodded and I went back to the parlor car.
33
WHEN I GOT BACK to the car it was still sided off and it seemed we had guests for the journey.
Stefano and Libretta was loading their traps in the car. Oh, good, I thinks, all across America with arias from Eye-talian operas and a fug of bird shit and feathers rising every time we hit a bump.
Stefano beamed when he saw me, from under a giant cage which held a vexed golden eagle staring out through the screen with mad yellow eyes.
“Kell-ee,” says the little bastard, “good-a morning.”
I smiles and says the same thing and steps up into the car and there’s a gleeful yelp and one of them sausage dogs clamps on to my ankle. It was long-haired and I’d never seen one before. The little bastard kept growling hard while trying to puncture my boot.
“Ah, Alys,” I says, lifting an eyebrow at the wee nasty beast, “what the hell is going on?”
“Stefano and Libretta needed a ride,” says Alys. “They’re going to New York.”
“Them and their goddamned buzzards and purebred Eye-talian ankle gnawer?” I says.
“It’s German,” says Alys.
The sausage dog started flailing its body around to drive its teeth deeper.
“First trestle,” I says to the dog, “you can bite air till you hit the rocks.”
“Lucia!” says Libretta. “No!”
The dog bit harder.
I lifted my foot and shook it a while, which made the dog happy as now it was a game, my hundred-dollar boots notwithstanding.
“Jaysus,” I says, “the Krauts got nothing better to do than sit around dreaming up beasts like this?”
Libretta swooped down cooing at the little bastard and she stuck a thumb in its jaw hinge and the sausage dog let go, whining and trying to lick Libretta’s face.
Alys looked at me straight-faced, just the barest hint of a smile at one corner of her mouth.
All oil and smiles I saunters over to my lovely and I grabs her arm and lifts some and propels her off to the sitting room.
“It looks really lovely,” I says, looking at more cages. “Them pigeons go so nice with the wallpaper.”
Three crates of them fat dumb birds what crap all over everything was standing near a window.
I sneezed.
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“Stefano was here collecting birds,” says Alys.
“No shit,” I says, as an eagle screamed back in the guest room.
“He’s collecting them for Prince Masoud,” says Alys.
I nods. Of course.
“And we are carrying Prince Masoud’s falconer and such back to him,” I says, “WHEN THAT GODDAMNED TURK COULD RENT A WHOLE TRAIN!”
“He’s not a Turk,” says Alys, “and I like Stefano and Libretta.”
I sort of did, too, but expected I would like them less as I understood more of their lingo.
Stefano broke into song and the birds set up a screechy counterpoint and then there was a yelp and a lot of Eye-talian cussing.
“Oh dear,” says Alys, starting to move toward the noise.
“No fair,” I says, keeping hold of her arm. “They caught him fair and square and now they get a chance to eat him. You wouldn’t want to interfere with Nature, now would you?”
Stefano screamed, and I heard Libretta running.
She cussed in counterpoint to Stefano’s cussing.
“We need to go and see if they’re all right,” says Alys.
“They have to be,” I says. “Why don’t we go when it’s been silent for five minutes?”
She punched me in the ribs and strode off and I grinned and followed.
The couple in the guest room was deeply involved in trying to get a golden eagle to let go of Stefano’s shoulder. The bird huffled as we come in, spreading its huge wings and cracking Libretta a good one. She cussed and grabbed her eye.
“These here birds,” I says happily, “would make a nice stew.”
Everybody ignored me.
“We could trade the feathers to the Indians,” I says. The Indians had fine feelings for hawks and eagles, and had catchers who dug pits in the earth and covered them with branches and hid under them and when the eagle or hawk come to the bait they’d reach up and grab their feet. The most successful had very few fingers left.