by Peter Bowen
We was all drained, and so not much was said. Alys went off to bathe and me and Digby sat looking at each other a while.
“It don’t make no sense,” I says, “for me to be slogging through Nicaragua. I never been there and don’t know the ways of the country and you’d be better off you had a local guide.”
“We’ll hire them, of course,” says Digby. He was looking off out the window and altogether too innocent.
“Without provokin’ a duel,” I says, “this would not all easily lie at the feet of that blond wench in there?”
“More whiskey?” says Digby.
I fumed. I was being dragooned into going off to a damn jungle because the president thought Digby and Alys would like that. It warn’t fair.
“Travel,” says Digby, “is broadening.”
No use in talking to him about it, the one I was going to chew on good was perfuming herself at the moment.
I liked Digby, and distrusted him, too—oh, it warn’t that he had a dishonest drop of blood in his body, it was he was so damn dutiful and noble he was likely going to get killed and me with him. He was actually a good deal more dangerous than an idiot like Custer, at least in the matter of Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther.
I went off soon to clean up and sleep, and Alys was already in the bed, lying on her side, her hair still damp from the bath.
When I slid in beside her and breathed deep, about to let go in the matter of how little I appreciated all this, she turned and clung to me and she sobbed and shook and shook and sobbed and she leaked so many tears and sounded so frightened she fetched up manly twinges in me, which I guessed was the whole damned idea.
When she would quiet down I began to say NO NICARAGUA but all I got out was about half the NO.
She wailed and blubbered and wound herself around me and I give up.
Then she laughed, a small giggle.
“You wouldn’t disappoint me, Luther?” she says.
I swear I’d have wore the hide off her butt if that damned Digby wasn’t in the next room.
But I was beat, and I knew it.
40
LONG-DEAD CRITTERS LIKE DINOSAURS and woolly mammoths and such was all the rage in Philadelphia, which figures.
Society ladies wore hats with little cloth dinosaur puppets on them and the papers was full of breathless stories about the great Cope and his discoveries in Wyoming.
Cope looked out from the engravings, with such a noble expression on his face he needed some cherubs with trumpets to stand on. I thought I’d mention this to the editor, should I run into him.
His exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania was a society event, and he actually sold tickets to it, fifty dollars each, in the name of disinterested science.
Digby had got tickets, of course, and that afternoon we queued up with the bored rich and filed into the hall. A couple of flunks been with us in Wyoming started when Alys and me come in, but we had them tickets and they didn’t know what to do and then we was in and it was too late.
Cope hadn’t had time to do much with the specimens he’d sent back, so they was piled here and there still in the plaster, with drawings on easels beside them to let the eager throngs in on what was behind the uninteresting lumps of plaster and rock.
Alys let out a little gasp when she come to one drawing. There was a pale space down in the right corner with some numbers on it, where her name had been rubbed out.
“Adler?” I says.
She nodded grimly.
So here were the drawings she’d snuck out of camp, some of them anyway, now the property of Professor Jonathan Cope.
There was mounted specimens in the hall, too, the biggest a woolly mammoth about fifteen feet tall, the whole skelton wired together and sitting on a steel frame poked up here and there from the wide long plinth it stood on. The tusks was dark brown with yellow streaks and I thought that the West seemed to have been getting tamer for the last thirty thousand years or so. There was also a monstrous bear, much bigger than a grizzly, flat-faced and well supplied with teeth.
Other than the little gasp Alys made no other sound, she just clung to my arm and looked stony-faced at her drawings, both the ones she’d let Cope have and the ones Cope had stolen.
Digby saw friends and he chatted gaily with them, never once letting on how angry he must have been. Not the time for it.
Alys steered me to an exit and Digby was right behind. The appearance was the thing, and having arrived we departed. All Alys had to say was that after the fossils we would gather in Wyoming soon were exhibited, these bastards would get theirs.
We stopped in New Haven and looked at Marsh’s collection, too, and Alys was startled to find some of the drawings she had tried to smuggle out there, too.
“I never thought,” she said later, “that the two of them ...”
This made no sense at all to me, and it’s things make no sense that you look for on dangerous ground. Marsh and Cope hated each other, were jealous of every advantage the other gained. It just didn’t fit.
Back in Boston Digby wound up his affairs, and Alys saw to replacements of what she needed for the expedition.
I’d long since gone to travelin’ with the least I could get away with. Most of that stuff offered by the merchants is worthless anyway, and making time across Indian country you pack just enough to keep you alive. Every ounce on the horse may be a large matter, you just never know.
We had a couple dinners back in the big tent of Masoud’s, and I noticed that there seemed to be no sign of him packing. He had plenty of flunks, true, but to move all this was a huge job. The elephants was gone, though, and gardeners was replanting the trees and shrubs that they’d eaten.
I sent a telegram to Lou and Jake to get ready.
Masoud said that Mulligan had already gone. Well, he’d find us if he’d a mind to.
One morning Digby caught me standing outside and he nodded off toward the maze of barbered yew in the backyard and we went there walking slowly.
“Alys wants to be known as a scientist,” says Digby, “and that’s damn hard for a woman to do. What with the petty jealousies and the ways of the academic world. There are few enough positions as is.”
I’d just seen an editorial in the paper by some professor of anatomy said that women’s minds were weaker because their brains was smaller and too much learning could derange them. He cited cases of women once hard at work who’d gone mad and been put in asylums as proof.
“Thing bothers me,” I says, “is that both Cope and Marsh had her drawings, the ones she was trying to smuggle out.”
Digby nodded.
“I would expect money is the culprit,” he said. “Neither Cope nor Marsh has the stomach for murder, but they don’t care how the knowledge and the specimens they want are got.”
So that was it. They offered rewards and there was plenty of men in the West would kill for a ten-dollar gold piece. And if the offer was big enough you’d get top talent, easy money, and who gave a damn about some rocks? Rob a bank or a train and you’d have hard men after you. Bushwhack some feller had a dinosaur bone out well past the law’s reach, and no one would be the wiser.
“They’re both independently wealthy,” says Digby. “Most professors are at the great schools. It’s another means the wealthy have of keeping control of the country.”
I looked at him curious.
“The best students come to Harvard, Yale, the others,” said Digby, “and the best aren’t necessarily from moneyed families. But this is a means that assures vast abilities may rise. Otherwise they’d be plotting revolution. You know that the rich worry constantly about revolution? Most of them have done nothing to arrive where they are, and the thought that it might all be taken away gives them nightmares.”
I could see where it would. I’d had my share of rich fools to guide, and once a damned idiot when we was flat in the middle of trading shots with a party of Cheyennes offered to go out and parley and see what they’d take by way of money to go
away.
I damn near let him do it. Now, them Cheyennes didn’t know what money was, for one thing, and they had no place to spend it if they did have it. It was a long moment before I told him to keep his head down, I doubted they’d be interested.
“I gather that the specimens Alys found when riding with you are exceeding large,” says Digby.
I nodded. The biggest of them extinct bastards was a good seventy feet long, and a ton a foot wasn’t too low an estimate. A Democrat freightwagon could carry a ton. Seventy wagons, teams for them, the lot, for one dinosaur.
And they was a lot farther north than where Cope and Marsh had been. It was a good twenty days by wagon if they took no time off and there was no interruptions, and there’s always interruptions.
“Be hard to get them out before the snow,” I says.
“When does it snow there?” says Digby. I’d forgot he’d never been West. “Well,” I says, “you can have a blizzard anytime, but the heavy snow comes in December. Or if it’s a warm winter it may not come at all. I been six feet under in August there, it’s a strange place.”
“Could we find men to guard it over the winter?” says Digby.
I shook my head.
“Be safe enough just left,” I says. “Washakie’d look after it, and then early as travel could begin in the spring, why then they’d have the summer and all to do it. Probably that’s what will happen.”
“Do you know honest men?” says Digby.
“Some,” I says. “They’s rare.”
Digby laughed.
I was completely lost, and had no idea where in this barbered hedge we happened to be. Digby sat down on a marble bench.
“We could go to Nicaragua in December, then,” he says.
“Shit,” I says.
Digby laughed.
“I’m afraid Grant has you by the neck,” he says, “and so do I. I’m still a colonel, detached duty. That means ...”
“Oh,” I says, “don’t bother explainin’. I know!”
We each had a cheroot and then we got up. Digby led us out in about three turns. I’d be in there yet.
Alys saw us and she waved and come out through the French doors.
“My niece is uncommon fond of you,” says Digby.
Digby’s voice was soft as always, but there was a good bit of steel in that last.
I looked back at the maze.
41
THE EAST HAS SEEMED unreal to me, even when I was growing up in it, and ever since the day I had taken my friend Gus Doane’s advice—he was my commanding officer in Minnesota—and rode for the sunset without waiting to be mustered out, the West was my home. I belonged there and I didn’t much of anywhere else.
When we got under way to Wyoming, I relaxed some. Blue Fox was dead, it was fall—the best of seasons, and I knew the dangers there. The East was packed with people, and I couldn’t read them or the land. It had become a foreign country.
Alys brightened considerably, and she seemed to have shrugged off the loss of the drawings and Herr Adler, or they was buried some. She was tough and determined and that carried her on.
Digby asked thousands of questions, it seemed, and they was good questions. He wanted to know what was, for instance, the list of truly important things to keep in mind when traveling in that high cold dry country.
I told him good clean water, adequate clothing, and a camp could be defended if there was enough guns, or had a lot of ways out if there wasn’t.
He wanted to know how Indians fought and I said very well and they was masters of ambush and attack, resonably enough since they had to get every rifle and every bullet from traders who sold dear for robes and furs. Their favorite spots was out in the Plains in country looked all innocent when you was far away and when you got to it there would be draws and coulees, deep enough to hide men and horses, and they would try to rise up when you was on a bald patch and drive you into another band hid in the ground behind you.
“Them damned newspapers,” I says, “is always gassing on about what savages they are, and then on to how stupid they are. Well, they are losing their whole world and they are outnumbered and they didn’t ask us how to make war and they’re plenty smart. And out in the country they only got to be smarter than you the one time.”
Digby showed me a brace of pistols he’d carried in the War, British they was, with a stubby shotgun barrel up top held a few ounces of buckshot and a five-shot cylinder below and barrel for bullets. They was heavy, which is an advantage shooting from a horse. Mean-lookin’ guns. German, of course.
He asked me about some of the characters I knew like Buffalo Bill and Hickok and Bullwhip Annie, who was this big woman worked as a teamster and who could outfight, outcuss, and outshoot most men on the frontier. The papers was full of Calamity Jane, who was drunk most of the time, but Bullwhip Annie was a Christer and a teetotaler and when she was shooting at Indians she’d touch off a round and then quote the Bible, favoring St. Paul.
Being sober, she tended to hit more of what she aimed at than Calamity did, and the Indians called her Sharp-Eyed Woman and hugged the ground when she unlimbered her buffalo rifle.
Once a passel of drunk nasty hide hunters sneaked up on her intendin’ to rape, but found themselves full of bullets, some of them provided by Indians, who divined their intentions and just did not like seein’ a warrior of Annie’s merits despoiled. Annie whacked the nuts off the ones still alive, while the Sioux cheered. I didn’t know what portion of the Bible she’d quote at such a time.
Digby laughed softly.
“Custer is out here somewhere,” he says.
“Ah,” I says, “Goldilocks. Now there’s an idiot going to get himself killed and a lot of troopers with him.” I would not myself go more’n half a mile away from town with the bastard—he was just a cold killer, stupid and aggressive, and he killed women and children real easy in his heart.
“I know him,” says Digby. “Properly guided, he’s useful, but God help troops if he’s the officer commanding.”
Digby asked me to review the things he’d brought—like a soldier he’d laid them out on a small tarpaulin on the floor of his room. High boots at lower right, the pistols in the center, his saber, a pair of binoculars in a black-leather case with bullet scars on it, a small kit with needles and bandages, and coffee boiled down dry and chopped up so when you put it in water it made coffee and no grounds. Ammunition pouches, a light blanket and the ground cloth and a repeating rifle, one of them revolving carbines gets off nine shots in about seven seconds.
“Very good.” I nodded. “One other thing.” And I told him that compasses was untrustworthy out here and he should learn to tell where he was by where he’d been, easy in the West with the mountains and all.
Alys brightened considerably when we crossed the Rain Line and the West rose up in sagebrush and grass where there had been trees and corn. Most of Nebraska was still empty, but you couldn’t see it from the train, for the farmers come and the closer they was to the railroad the better for them. Or it would have been if the fellers who owned the railroad wasn’t so good at fixing freight rates high enough to let the farmers barely hang on for another year but not low enough so that they could put anything by.
But past the Rain Line there was cattle, and few of them could be seen from the train; everything was gnawed down by the railroad for the cattle had to be shipped, too.
We stopped in Cheyenne for a couple of hours and we three got out and walked around to stretch our legs and damned if a mob of fools in red coats and white breeches didn’t gallop past behind a mixed pack of hounds and terriers. They was after a coyote who led them on, wholly unworried. Coyotes is smart, and I suspected in time they would learn to draw the toffs into bands of Indians and damned if that didn’t happen not a half hour after they’d passed.
There was the sound of rifle fire a few miles north and it quit quick enough and Digby looked at me and I looked at him and we busted out laughing.
“I am sure,�
�� says Digby, “that the coyote survived.”
In about fifteen minutes a bunch of men mobbed up on horses and rode off toward where all the ruction come from and we heard no more gunfire. In half an hour or so they started to trickle back, long faces on them and the smallest men with a body over the saddle in front of them, limp and boneless.
A troop of cavalry finally headed out after the Indians, but they never could catch them except when they was stuck in winter camp. Then if they could sneak up they’d kill mostly old folks, women and children, and count it a victory. But they never did even once catch the warriors by just ridin’ after them.
Red Cloud had said to me once that fighting the whites was so very easy. They blew a horn, he said, when they woke up, when they ate, when they rode out, when they were ready to charge, and so the Sioux could go on playing mumblety-peg or scratching their arses and then mount up and be gone.
We was headed back to the parlor car when there was a bugle off to the east and damned if it wasn’t Custer and his unlucky troops parading in after, I guessed, once again finding no Indians at all except old people ready to die anyway. The ancient Sioux when they decided they’d had enough of life would sometimes stay in camp and keen insults until the troopers cut them down. The interpreters was Metiś—them Frenchy-Indian mixed bloods from the Red River of the North country, and knowing what the oldsters was up to they’d faithfully translate until some brave soldier split the old person’s head in half with a saber.
I was feeling real sour when I mentioned this, and Digby looked sad and said he doubted if most of the soldiers cared anything at all for any of this.
That shamed me. Oh, I hated what was happening here, but Custer and a few others was almost unique in their murderousness and the officers and men of the Army hated the whole damned business and it was not right of me to tar them all with Custer’s behaviors.
But you get a bunch of scared-to-death boys shooting and it sort of takes on its own life, that bloodlust, and it ain’t confined to any particular Army or people. Just the lousy human race.