by Peter Bowen
“We’d do well to act the way the British do,” says Digby. “When they run the Union Jack up the flagpole the natives have rights and standing in the courts. It ain’t perfect, but it has to be better than treating mere tribes as nations and disregarding the treaties as soon as that can be done.”
“America is money,” I says. “We worship it, and when there is money to be made nothing else matters.”
We got to Laramie in the early evening and my rooms was still mine, though when I took Alys to them I smelled perfume and so the hotel had kept an eye peeled for me while renting the rooms out, but they’d kept a close eye on my things so I couldn’t really complain.
Alys was tired and said she’d sleep a little so I went on down to the lobby and found Digby and we went out and I showed him the better saloons.
We was standing at the bar having a snort in one of them when a drunk bellered that there was gold a-plenty in the Black Hills.
That meant the death of the Sioux. They was a great people and I was sad, for they had been true friends when they wasn’t trying to kill me.
“You were here when it was good,” says Digby.
I nodded.
Yes, I had, and now it was to be chawed up like the whites had done everything else.
Wyoming was full of stinking-water springs. I supposed it would not be long till there was resorts there, where fat idiots could take the waters and mud baths.
Couldn’t say I thought it was an improvement.
42
DIGBY STAYED IN THE parlor car and me and Alys in my suite of rooms, so as to not be too much in each other’s pockets. I was just weary from the trip East and I spent most of the next two days dozing and even missed having lunch the second day with Digby and Alys, though they promised fresh oysters which is a food I love above all else.
So there I was sleeping when there come this fearful racket out in the hall and a pounding on the door and I come up from slumber ready to kill because the voice belonged to Buffalo Bill and he was drunk as usual.
“Why ain’t you in Denver at Big Bessie’s gettin’ your damn bell rope pulled,” I snarls through the door.
“Open up, Kelly,” says Bill. “Me and the prince would have a word with you.”
I opened the door, glaring at Bill. Masoud and his two guards was right behind this drunken clotheshorse. I thought I saw the barest of smiles on Masoud’s lips.
Nothing Buffalo Bill liked better than an audience and I seen him perform to a deaf-mute once as there was no one else about he had not completely worn out.
Having a prince of Araby to play to would likely keep him going till Masoud got tired of him. I wondered if our friendship was deep enough so I could quietly propose that Masoud’s guards behead Cody, but I expected I would not get far. Ah well, where are your friends when you need ’em?
Bill was in new clothes, a fringed beaded coat, white duck pants tucked into thigh-high cavalry boots, a creamy new Monarch of the Plains Stetson hat, and jewelry. Lots of jewelry. He was favoring silk waistcoats and sashes these days.
“No ostrich plumes.” I says, looking at his hat.
You can’t insult the man, he just don’t hear it, and God knows I have tried.
“Together again!” says Bill, throwing an arm around my shoulders.
Now the only time we’d ever been together was when we was tied up in the Hitchfoot Hotel behind a saloon once. The owner was one of them smart sorts and he cared deeply that his customers not die on him, at least till they was broke, and me and Bill had got grass-grabbing drunk and passed out and I woke up with my right foot tied up to an eyebolt in the wall. I was lyin’ on fairly fresh sawdust only puked in a little.
The barkeep had figured out that his customer, having drink taken and likely to die of exposure or an enterprising skunk gnawing him to death, could be kept safe from harm and when said customer was sober enough to reach up and untie his foot he was sober enough to stagger back into the saloon and spend more money.
While we was so inconvenienced Bill give me the full story of his life, as I frantically scrabbled and clutched at the rope to get away from his flowery lies, and after that session I had vowed never to be caught outcountry with him. He was brave and no denyin’ that, but bravery is common where brains isn’t and dyin’ a noble death was not something I aspired to. Even if I did have my own paragraph in Cody’s latest pack of lies. Hear him tell it he done defeated about every great warrior the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahoes, Apaches, and so forth had in mortal combat before picking his vanquished enemy up off the ground and handing him a Bible to comfort him in defeat.
I could think of about a hundred Sioux I knew would make very short work of him and resolved if I could arrange for Bill to meet them, it was sort of a public duty.
“We shall ride with our brothers, the horsemen of Araby,” says Bill.
“What happened to the elephants?” I says.
“They all died,” says Masoud. “It was foolish to bring them, but it was thought nothing less would do for me to ride.”
I thought of Masoud at Cambridge, in his student gown, riding his damn elephant off to class.
“The press is fascinated with our quest,” says Bill.
“Excuse me,” I says to Masoud, and I swung and caught Bill on the point of his chin and he crashed into the sideboard and slid down and blinked at me.
“The press,” I says, “is to stay away from us, if you mean to come along with me.”
“It’s the American story,” says Bill, getting up.
“He don’t come,” I says to Masoud. “Can’t trust him.”
“I have never lied to you!” whines Bill.
“That ain’t the problem,” I says. “Now why don’t you just mount up and head for Big Bessie’s.”
“But Luther,” says Bill, looking all stricken, “we’s friends.”
“Damn it,” I says to Masoud. “I am the one got to get us in and out alive and I do not need ol’ Bill here speechifying when silence is our best bet.”
He had been done in by fame. I had seen it happen to others.
Masoud nodded, and he went to Bill and spoke softly and Bill brightened a little. I assumed he was being paid off.
Bill give me a hurt look and walked out and Masoud burst into laughter, rich and roaring. I had never so much as heard the prince chuckle before and assumed he didn’t do that sort of thing.
“Afternoon, Luther,” says Digby from out in the hall. He come in, and the grin told me everything.
“I ain’t never had an enemy do much to me,” I says, “but my friends is a whole other matter.”
“Had you goin’,” says Digby. Him and Masoud was real thick.
“He leaving for Denver?” I says. I had an interest in it.
“No,” says Masoud, “he’s to stay here and announce our discoveries to the press. My harem has been sent home, so he will have to make do with Rosie’s, but I somehow think he’ll manage.”
“You actually think he’ll stay put,” I says. I had visions of Bill at the head of a regiment of reporters thundering north. Pay him and top him up with good whiskey and he would, too.
“If he stays here,” says Masoud, “his expenses, including Rosie’s, will be met, but he only gets paid if he does not leave until our return. Should he follow us, the agreement is null and void.”
“We couldn’t just kill him?” I says hopefully.
Masoud shook his head.
“Schoolchildren would weep,” he says, “if their hero died.”
“Well,” I says, “I hope the poor little bastards never get to know that son of a bitch.”
“He means well,” says Digby.
My mother used that phrase, by which I believe she meant that though the damned fool might get us killed he had no malice in him. I never will understand women, especially the Irish ones.
“Means well!” I snarls. “God help us all.”
Bill seemed to be safely pinned in place so I shrugged and let it pass.
Digby grinned.
Alys swept into the room carrying a few newspapers, and she stuck her pretty finger on some articles said that both Cope and Marsh had announced the discovery of a huge meat-eating dinosaur.
“All the time we’ve been gone,” she says, “their paid prospectors have been digging and sending back specimens. God damn them.”
Digby looked at one of the articles carefully and he nodded and finished it and he held up a hand so Alys might stop cussing and it took her a moment to wind down but she did.
“It seems that this beast,” says Digby, “is indeed quite large but if I recall the one you found has a skull seven feet or so long and this one is about four.”
Cope had provided a sketch for his find, a mean-looking bastard all teeth and head.
Alys calmed right down.
“You’re right,” she says. “It’s not the same.”
“I think,” says Digby, “perhaps it would be wise to go and exhume your giants, and then allow Luther to arrange for the transport next year. We could pay men to guard the place through the winter.”
I heaved a sigh of relief. Pay enough money and you can get men to do anything, but that didn’t mean that a blizzard wouldn’t wipe the teamsters out and leave the wagons full of the sort of riches Cope and Marsh would pay very highly for.
“That can be done easier than the other,” I says. “I’ve mentioned it before.”
Alys didn’t like it. I could see her point. Here was what she wanted most in the world and to get it out and safely locked up was real important, and she wouldn’t rest easy till it was done.
“How far is it?” says Masoud. “I have good horses. I expect to travel simply.”
“Ten to twenty days for horses,” I says. “Depends on the weather and the Indians.”
“Wagons?” says Masoud.
“Fifty or sixty this time of year,” I says. I went on to explain about the gumbo mud forms when it gets wet. Dry land turns to grease and a man can’t walk too far before the mud on his boots stops him cold.
“I want to go now,” says Alys.
“Just as soon as we can,” says Digby.
43
“NO,” I SAYS.
“But Kelly,” says Masoud, “you recommended it so highly. Surely you had a good reason.”
Play a little joke and it comes back to haunt you.
Masoud, that A-rab son of a bitch, had the Abercrombie & Fitch Highly Revolving Duck Plucker loaded up and ready to go, in a cart drawn by a pair of A-rab horses, which is not what I’d choose for a draft animal.
Digby was standing next to the thing, idly spinning the wheel. The little rubber fingers wiggled, reaching for a duck.
“You have some use for this we don’t know of?” says Digby. He was grinning, like you do when you find a good friend tossed off a horse.
“All right, all right,” I says, “I was funnin’ a little. Masoud was about the strangest dude I ever encountered and he was waving that damned catalog at me so I ...”
The cart was all gilt and ivory and ebony, probably worth enough to buy a large ranch and the cows for it.
“I will take it,” says Masoud, “as a memory of our first meeting.”
I threw my hands up.
“I’m honored,” I says.
“No doubt,” says Masoud, “as I am.”
Time might be gettin’ short for us, and so we was packing and getting ready for the ride. Jake was hiring three other men and would come later with two wagons and enough grub and blankets to live the winter through. They’d guard the fossils till the late spring, when a train of wagons could come to remove them and ship them down to the railhead.
Buffalo Bill galloped past, white hair streaming in the wind, all fringe and beads. He was a hell of a horseman when he was sober. I figured he was displaying his gorgeousness so we’d relent and let him come with us.
I knew him well. Too bad. Oh, I liked Bill, he was one of the kindest men on earth, but ever since the penny dreadfuls had made him famous he was impossible. Fame does that to folks, I have often noticed.
“How ’bout we take a photograph of that there Highly Revolving Duck Plucker?” I says. “You could hold it up when you felt it was necessary to embarrass me. Work just as well.”
“Forbidden by my religion,” says Masoud with a straight face. “Photographs are graven images.”
You always knows when your friends are up to something when their faces is straight and they are solemn as owls. I didn’t have any idea what was up, but there was a stink of conspiracy about that would fair knock your hat in the creek.
“Okay,” I says, “I got it, and you fellers best mind your backs as the best defense is an offense and bein’ offensive is something I practice. Not perfectly, as I find myself with you two bastards headin’ into Indian country to gather rocks, but hell if I didn’t try.”
I’d hired on a muleskinner and his five best friends to pack supplies to us. A mule could carry two hundred pounds or more a long damn ways and though there would be wagons moving supplies as far north as fast as they could, the broken country could hold up a wagon for a damn week where a packer with a string would move easily through. There was rain here, of course, not a lot, but it often came in great soaking storms, and there was countless coulees and gullies cut by flash floods.
There was a couple of flunks in uniforms specially designed to announce they was the Keepers of the Highly Revolving Duck Plucker. The crest on their turbans was a duck with a bare ass and the rest feathered and a blur of what initiates would recognize as speeding rubber fingers.
“An awful expensive joke,” I says.
“My subjects give me my weight in precious gems once a year,” says Masoud, “on top of the oppressive taxes they pay.”
“Must love you a lot,” I says.
“Oh, they do, they do,” says Masoud.
I shrugged. That goddamned Highly Revolving Duck Plucker was going to follow me the rest of my days, and there was no helping that. Then I thought it might spare me the vaudeville circuit, which a lot of my friends was on, a hazard of them penny dreadfuls. Being so corrupt, you see, I can be bought.
Then I had one of them flashes of inspiration I get just often enough so I stay alive.
“We could make a gift of it to the Sioux,” I says. “It’s just the sort of handy thing they like.”
“Oh, really?” says Masoud. “What a brilliant thought.”
I looked at that six-foot-six bastard with the gob of silk on his noggin and I put on my most solemn face.
“Why, yes,” I says.
Masoud nodded. There was never even a flicker across his face, of mirth or devilment.
It had been right rude of me to suggest to the gullible prince this ridiculous implement, but I’d done it and he had me and damned if I was going to let on now that I knew he’d let me make a fool of myself and he warn’t prepared to forget it.
The Highly Revolving Duck Plucker ran out of use as a conversation piece and we went back to the lists of supplies, double-checking everything. There was, for instance, an entire twenty-mule pack train for whiskey, two kegs to a mule, except three which had better stuff in patented india-rubber bags with spigots.
Digby knew soldiers and he knew men, and the other thirty-four kegs was there to assure the three with our booze got through.
Them muleskinners stank like distilleries, and with a steady diet of dust and mule kicks I couldn’t blame them. The West was a place back then where about four out of five men was more or less drunk more or less all of the time. We didn’t have much by the way of pecksniffs. But they’d be along. They always are.
We finished the lists about four in the afternoon. Alys had come for the last hour or so, all her sketching materials and journals in a couple of l
eather trunks, small so they’d fit on a horse.
She looked at that damned duck plucker and let out a bellow and that finally touched off Masoud and Digby, and they bellered. I had to laugh, too.
Well, it was pretty damn funny.
We would ride out in the morning, me, Alys, Digby, Masoud, and a mixed lot of rascals, some of them mine, armed to the teeth and known to the country, and Masoud’s thugs in their robes and scimitars and them long rifles called jezzails. Other than the costumes they all looked pretty much alike.
The lists was checked and the skinners was doing final checks on their tack and they’d load up before dawn and we’d leave then. Digby and Alys and me went up to the better saloon for a drink. Masoud begged off, since he’d invited us to supper and needed to go and look over the food. Though he was generous with booze to his guests, he never drank, and said he followed Mohammed’s rule. No pork. No alcohol.
Jake was there and Lou and Whinny and we drunk a toast to Sir Henry. Blue Fox was dead all right, but it didn’t help. Sir Henry was an odd and murderous duck, but we had a lot of them folks, and all we asked of them was that they keep their word and Sir Henry did.
Digby was immediately accepted, and I thought what a hell of a colonel of cavalry he must have been, for he put on no airs and he bought some drinks, enough to be sociable but not so many as to leave the boys feelin’ obligated. They was not inclined to like the rich much—as a group they’re pretty awful you will admit—but it turned out Whinny had been a sergeant in another brigade and he’d heard of Digby and so pretty soon they was refighting the whole damn war and so I tipped my hat and said good evening and Alys took my arm and we walked out to the warm night. It would be cold soon enough, and usually was even in September after the sun went down, but that evening the air come up from the south and it was damp enough so your skin didn’t feel parched and stretched.
Alys wanted to walk down the boardway to the spot where Adler had his shop, and so we sauntered on. A bullbat clacked past overhead—there was a couple of gaslights now—and the bird was gorging on the moths attracted to the glow.