by Peter Bowen
Drunk. Well, like I said, we mostly was back then.
Cody kept on coming, his hair a-flying and that little pennon snapping in the breeze.
He thundered through the pack train behind us, making a few of the mules buck, and the skinners added heartfelt cussing to the noise of his passage.
Cody kept coming on, and it occurred to me he might be drunk enough to trample anyone in his patch, so I sort of took Alys’s arm and tugged her back and Masoud come to the same conclusion and so did Washakie. Digby, too.
When Bill got close he pulled his horse up, so he could do his patented rearing act on the big white gelding.
But his timing was off and the horse stopped dead and Cody flew over the animal’s head, turning in the air and crashing down on his back hard enough so the bushes quivered nearby.
There he was, out cold.
“I could just cut his throat,” I says.
“The poor man might be dead!” says Alys. Cody let out a frightful snore, sounded like a walrus with a bad sinus infection.
“Ah,” says Washakie, “our good friend.” Masoud shook his head, but he was smiling.
46
WE’D EATEN THE LOADS off a couple of mules so the skinners rigged up a pad and we hung Bill over the mule and tied him on so he wouldn’t maybe fall off and hurt something. He was sleeping right peaceful and my original suggestion, that we just hang him upside down from the neartest cottonwood was met with them sort of stares tell you that you’re bein’ unsporting.
“I thought he was your friend,” says Alys.
“Oh, a bosom chum,” I says, “and he’d understand he woke up hung by the ankles. Why, if I presented him an opportunity like that, well, he’d take it.”
It was about noon and Washakie said if we rode now, we’d make his camp by dark. The skinners could come along in the morning, but for tonight there was a dance we was to be honored guests at and besides I knew Washakie was bored and wishing to charm folks some. And here he had lovely Alys, Digby, and Masoud. Me, he knew better.
Digby and Masoud wanted to take Bill along, but I said no, we had to travel and it suited me not to have that son of a bitch until tomorrow, as he was so potted he’d still be drunk when he woke up.
So it was just me and Alys, Digby, Masoud, and his two guards, and Washakie.
Washakie led and then when we was maybe a couple miles from camp the trail widened as it went straight across a plain and I rode on up ahead and got near the old chief who glanced back at the folks following and then said something that made me damn near fall off my horse.
“Blue Fox is near,” says Washakie.
That was impossible. I’d seen his head. I watched the guard swing his sword, it could not be—and yet the face I had looked at was mostly red scars and healed flesh.
I swore and swore.
When we stopped at a spring to let our horses rest for a few minutes and drink I went to Digby and Masoud and told them.
“He’s vowed to kill me,” I says. “And crazy as he is he’ll kill Alys and try to kill you before he kills me. The man’s insane.”
Masoud looked a little uncomfortable. I didn’t want to embarrass the prince, but I nodded off and we walked a hundred yards away and I asked what was he fussed over.
“The man who tried to kill me at the ball was known to us,” says Masoud, “a man from a sect sworn to kill all of my family.”
I was enraged.
Masoud looked at my face, and he held up his hands.
“It pleased you to think it was this Blue Fox,” he says, “so we let you think so.”
“Digby know?” I says.
Masoud shook his head,
“I am sorry, Kelly,” he says. “It seemed of no moment at the time, and of course on the journey we are well protected.”
The country around that had been so lovely only moments before now only held menace. I had no idea why Blue Fox was so damned intent on killing me, and I couldn’t for the life of me understand why this had all started. I had killed few Cheyennes, and that in honorable combat, and no one in that damned tribe held a thing against me but Blue Fox.
I looked rapidly round trying to see places where a sharpshooter could set up. Damn, damn, damn.
“My young men are to either side of us,” says Washakie, “so you are safe. But you must guard and well.”
“Blue Fox,” I says. “When did you hear this?”
“I saw it,” says Washakie. “He was riding north and I came upon him and he cut from the trail, driving his remounts before him. There were fresh scalps on his saddle.”
“Just him?” I says.
Washakie nodded.
“The Cheyennes wish him dead, too,” says the old chief. “He came on some young women by the Platte River, and he killed them. He is mad. He is dangerous.”
I looked at Washakie.
“My horse was tired,” says the old chief. “I would have chased and killed him, but he had fresh horses and I only one.”
Digby and Alys had joined us and so we let the matter drop. No use in spreading panic any farther than me for now. I was good at what I did, but Blue Fox had the advantage. He was mad, and sometimes that makes men more animals than men, with an animal’s sense of night and cover.
We mounted up and went on, and I recalled a place where the trail led through a long defile barely wide enough for a man and horse, a good quarter mile and then it opened again, but there was all sorts of places to hide up and wait. That’s what a hunter does, wait, and if Blue Fox was up top and us below he would be many miles gone before we could pursue.
There was Washakie’s young warriors, and I hoped they knew their damned job.
“We will go around that place,” says Washakie. He could read other’s minds, I was sure of that.
I nodded. We were in his country and perhaps he was great enough to outfox even that mad Cheyenne. Blue Fox scared me more than any other man I have ever known. He would scare anyone. He warn’t human.
And now he was so far gone his own people would kill him if they could find him.
“Mulligan is out there somewheres,” I says suddenly.
Washakie laughed.
“He came to see me three days ago,” he says. “We played chess.”
“So does Masoud,” I says, remembering the board by his divan in the big blue tent.
“Ah!” says Washakie, happy at last.
In an hour I could see the gap where the hills reached down close to the plain and the trail was choked off, and Washakie went east on a narrow trail and past a few buffalo wallows and then we began to climb up a strange slanting gangplank of rock, clear to a pass where we could see many miles to the east and west.
On the south side of the narrow place we’d avoided I suddenly saw the bastard, rising up out of the ground and then ducking behind a long slab of rock and then he came out mounted with three horses I recognized from the parson’s party. Blue Fox must have killed the young warriors. He was pure evil now.
He moved off south, pushing the remounts ahead of him, and then I saw Mulligan riding like he meant to cut him off. The little man come to a place of vantage and he slid down and run up this pile of rocks, carrying his buffalo rifle and he laid down up top and waited for Blue Fox to reappear.
He never did. There was no damned way he could have got past Mulligan, he had gone to ground there, and then I saw Blue Fox and he had doubled back and was going to cut his own trail and move off east.
It was too damn far for my voice to carry and so I put a cloth on a stick and waved it frantically, which gave me something to do, but Mulligan had his mind on Blue Fox and would soon know the bastard would be heading elsewhere.
“Get these folks on, would you?” I says to Washakie, and I mounted up and headed back down toward the plain we’d just rode up from. I pushed the horse, he was a good one and used to mountain travel and he made good time and when we got to the bottom I pulled up to scan the horizon and looked behind me and there come Digby.
He might be a fine soldier but this was pure killer’s work and he’d likely be more trouble than help. I was ready to tell him to go back when he waved his hat at me and come up.
“Alys was going to come,” he says. “I said I would, and she agreed to go on with Washakie and the prince.”
That was that.
“Stick close to me, do what I do,” I says. “We got maybe one chance get that bastard.”
I recalled the land we were headed for and remembered a blind canyon actually had a trail up to the rims; we’d have to lead our horses but the climb wasn’t much, maybe fifteen minutes and we could then try to cut Blue Fox’s trail. He’d be ahead but not by a lot, there was a couple deep coulees he had to cross that would slow him some, too.
We rode like hell and found the canyon and I shot up it, my horse runnin’ like a rat up a drainpipe, and when I got to the trail I swung down and took my horse’s reins and began to climb. It was steep and the shale there slippery and broken, and you’d put a foot down on a rock and it would scoot off. Bad enough for me but horses hate bad footing, and mine was no exception, but without me on his back his balance was better and so we made it up. Digby had trouble and had to blindfold his and so we lost fifteen minutes and by the time we was moving again I knew Blue Fox must have maybe three miles on us.
We crested a ridge and saw Mulligan and he saw us and he gestured he was moving west, to cut the trail if Blue Fox went that way.
In half an hour we looked down at the muleskinner’s train and I sent Digby down to round up Jake and the others and send them after.
There’d be a lot of us, and that was the only hope.
Digby went right then; he knew what he was about.
47
WE FINALLY MADE IT to Washakie’s camp two days later, and Blue Fox was still very much alive and damned if we knew where. We’d fanned out and the boys knew their business and Mulligan was as good as anyone, but the advantage was Blue Fox’s in that broken country. We found his tracks, and he’d double back and circle wide and never quite show up where we could put a bullet in him. Then a storm had come up and he was gone out into the Plains and his tracks washed away. He might as well have sunk in the ocean.
Much of this didn’t make any sense. There’s nothing puts your enemies at ease more than them knowing you’re dead. I’d been careful not to offend the Sioux and Cheyennes, and had an eye peeled for their young warriors out making mischief, but that damned Blue Fox could have picked us off he had a mind to, could have shot one or two and fled, and come back, and since he was dead I at least would have been sure I was dealing with someone else.
It was puzzling. I puzzled a lot.
Washakie had rolled out the best for Alys and me and Digby and Masoud, and him and the prince was engrossed in chess games and the old chief allowed as how Masoud could stay all winter if he liked. Washakie would like.
But that warn’t why we were here so shortly after me and Digby got to the camp we packed up and got ready to go on to the two big dinosaurs Alys coveted.
“It will make me at one swoop one of the world’s leaders in the field,” she says.
Why she gave a damn was beyond me. She was rich and could go pick bones anywhere. But she hated Cope and she hated Marsh and she wanted to do one better on ’em.
I recalled my Uncle Angus, who’d been a trapper and had his fingers sawed off by a Sioux, he was playing dead and I knew him because he kept right on playing dead while the warrior got his rings and his fingers on his left hand. Angus was a wry man and when I was twelve or so I had said I wanted to join the Union Army and win medals.
Uncle Angus nodded.
“Ambitions you have, laddie,” he says. “Weel, ambition is a bushwhacker and ye’d best make of yourself a small and moving target but ye’ll not listen to me. One day ye’ll wish you had.”
I thought he was an old fool.
The skinners had had some rest and the mules had eaten good grass and the place we was heading was about two days, three if the weather turned bad.
Washakie said he’d come along, with some of his young men. He wanted Blue Fox dead, too. I saw him praying just before we left, and they was war prayers, for strength and cunning.
Even Washakie was worried, and that man never worried. Why, when he was young—he’d been a leader since birth, I gathered—his buffalo-hunting party come on some Crows and they all got ready for a scrap and Washakie calls a parley and offers to fight their best warrior, winner take all. If they did it that way, he pointed out, there would be sorrow in only one lodge rather than in many.
The Crows agreed and sent their best warrior and Washakie killed him and then cut out his heart and ate it. Most of Wyoming warn’t mapped yet, but all of us knew where Crowheart Butte was.
We left early in the morning and a fog was low on the ground and it had teeth, we was all bundled. The fog muffled sound some and I found myself with Washakie riding in the cloud, we could see the track but anyone who wandered off would get good and lost in fifty feet. But the trail was wide and well traveled.
Washakie was lost in thought and he would time to time look up as he was thinking, and finally he nodded, and he turned back to me, one hand on his horse’s rump, and said my name.
“Uh?” I replied.
“Blue Fox is doing white man’s business,” said Washakie. “I don’t know what, but there is nothing of the Cheyennes in this. That lie about him killing the women is Bull Shield, he is jealous and wants to be chief. He spreads those rumors about many.”
News you don’t want to hear comes any way and you got to listen to it.
My mind went to Cope and Marsh right off, but though I knew they’d not stick at having their men shoot each other, it still seemed a long stretch for them to want to murder a woman over some fossils, when there was so many in Wyoming. Or kill me, for the doing of it. The bones was what they wanted, and it seemed a high price to pay.
The sun come up and burnt the fog away and there was the desert again, and the grass and the antelope fleeing, white rumps bright as bleached shirts.
Beautiful it was and very cold with menace.
Then it hit me. Blue Fox hadn’t shot at anyone, because if it was Cope or Marsh or the pair of them—and they’d scratch each other’s backs or cut each other’s throats like any other pair of disinterested scientists—they’d want those bones. I whirled around and rode to Alys, she was with Digby.
“Them drawings was stolen,” I says. “Were any of them of the fossils where we’re going?”
She nodded.
I didn’t even try to get her to go back.
“You knew this all along, didn’t you?” I says.
She cast her eyes down.
“I was hired on,” I says, “but that’s all. And you may go to hell, Miss de Bonneterre.”
Nothing I hate more’n bein’ used.
I’d begun to love her some, she was a lovely woman and had great fun and laughter in her. But she was just as cold and determined as them two goddamned professors, and that was that.
Never trust the rich, my Uncle Angus used to say, for they got rich for a reason.
I was furious cold now and if that damned Mulligan had come out of the landscape and I could have talked him into doing my job I would have headed for someplace and not looked back. But I was here and no helping it and as furious as I was if I left I would have broke my word. That ain’t a reputation a man can afford out here.
My fury run down to ice and I kept well away from Digby and Alys and Masoud, too, hell, all I knew now he could be in it, too.
Digby finally come riding up and he asked to confer with me in private and I couldn’t think of a good reason not to, so we rode on up a side hill and sat there until the others had gone on out of earshot.
“I don’t understand,” says Digby. “Alys is crying, and you look like you’d shoot her if you got a chance.”
So I told him and he looked down at his saddle horn and said he’d no real idea, but he supp
osed it was so. Alys was determined to be well-known, and as a scientist, and she was as ruthless as any, if a bit more gracious. Or just smoother.
“I’m sorry, Luther,” says Digby. “I never thought of any of this.”
She’d always be the little girl he was the only family to in all the world.
Digby was an honorable man.
“Is it so bad,” he says, “to want something like that? Women are routinely insulted, thought to be featherheads. It’s made her angry since she was a little girl. She didn’t want to go to finishing school. She didn’t give a damn about making a good marriage.”
“I don’t mind wars,” I says, “but I purely hate not knowing what and why I am fighting. This ain’t a great question, Digby, like the War was. This is ambitious people.”
They all was. Buffalo Bill wanted fame, and I knew he would get it. He wanted that more than anything.
Me, all I wanted was to roam this country and then lay up somewhere with good whiskey and an orderly and well-run whorehouse, to rest up. I didn’t ask for anything more. But others had decided some things for me. Like it or not I was a captain in the United States Army, and I knew I’d be called whenever there was a bit of nasty work I was best qualified to do.
“I should have stayed home and rolled pills,” I says, “or become a damn lawyer.”
Digby laughed.
“Alys wants her bones,” he says. “Perhaps that will be enough for her.”
I shook my head. I never seen anyone that determined who would ever be filled up enough; it summoned up a hunger that never would be glutted.
We made camp that night in a pleasant grove of aspens near a clear spring, with grass deep and all cured standing in what was once a beaver pond and was now a meadow. You find a flat place in the mountains, likely them beaver made it. Their ponds fill up with mud and go to grass.
I camped off, sulking, and I was back to my half drowse at night, hearing everything. I heard her coming and I feigned sleep and she slipped into my robes and out of her clothes and she held me close and she wept and wept and begged my forgiveness.