That was the beginning of his partnership with Raleigh Fitzroy McKay, Esq., late Captain of Infantry, 18th North Carolina regiment, C.S.A.
WITH A SUDDEN, clattering change in the roar of its wheels, the train rolled onto a trestle. They were crossing the Mississippi River. Otto gazed down at the coiling, dun-colored Father of Waters and suddenly felt sad. No, perhaps only apprehensive. This is truly the Great Divide, he thought. The nation east of the Mississippi was now the country of comfort, or at least what passed for it in the America of that day—a land of farms, towns, homes, jobs, libraries, newspapers, churches, schools, a country suited to sensible men, level-headed women, and their gentle children. West of the river lay wilderness, dry plains and bleak mountains, wolves and buffalo and wild Indians, a vast reach of country nibbled at only feebly by the main-chancers and the desperate—railroads, mountain men, hide hunters; soiled doves, homesteaders, gamblers, and cowboys.
He felt at home in that far country, but he feared that Jenny would not. Her presence alone would change things for him, he was sure. The joy he’d felt in his solitude and self-sufficiency along the Smoky Hill River would now be diluted by his concern for her welfare. And how would his partner, McKay, react to her presence? Raleigh was ostensibly an officer and a gentleman, if only by act of the Rebel Congress, but he was also a hot-blooded Southerner and a damned handsome man. Women melted in his company—even tough old horn-hided hookers turned giddy as schoolgirls when McKay switched on his charm. Otto had seen it happen again and again in bawdy houses and honky-tonks from Abilene to Hays City. Well, he’d have to ride herd on Raleigh, that was for certain sure.
With a frown and a sigh, Otto took one last drag on his cheroot and flipped the stub into the river. He watched it fall, spinning on the wind, tumbling, sparking, until it blinked out in the muddy waters.
PART
II
4
THE BONES BEGAN a mile east of town. They were piled in ricks, twice as high as a man is tall, overarching the tracks on both sides of the right-of-way. The steel rails ran straight through them, as if diving into a skeletal mineshaft that shut out the light of the prairie. High-angled hipbones, bracketed ribs, the concave graceful plates of shoulder blades, skulls gaping emptyeyed with the black sweep of horns hooking up, down, sideways, black splintered hooves, leg bones knobbed like giant clubs, the shallow, knuckled curve and recurve of spinal columns. All tumbled together in the ricks. Some were whiter than others, some tan, some moss green or the hectic pink of diseased gums. Some were a dark, sickly brown, like rotten teeth.
And the straight lines of the steel heading West, right through them.
The train slowed, chuffing, and clouds of steam billowed up through the bones, ghosting out through eye sockets. It was getting on toward dark now and the headlight of the locomotive reflected off the steam.
Otto and Jenny stepped down out of the cars, knocked cinders off their shoulders, and there it was: Buffalo City, Kansas, as they used to call it, now Dodge City. They might have named it Golgotha, Jenny thought, if they’d had any imagination.
“Pfui,” she said, and wrinkled her nose.
“I told you so. It isn’t called the Land of the Stinkers for nothing,” Otto said. “You’ll get used to it, though. The whole West smells like this now, from the Platte and the Republican clear on down to the Cimarron.”
They walked past the bone ricks and the new frame station-house, past the yards of the big hide dealers—Rath & Wright, Myers & Leonard—where the stacks of stiff, flint-cured hides loomed twelve feet high. Smell of hair, dead meat, arsenic. Out onto wide-open Front Street—no blue laws in Dodge.
Otto carried the carpetbag and Jenny’s small trunk along the wooden sidewalk past the lighted saloons with their breath of stale beer cutting sharply into the buffalo smell, the quiet gaming hells, festive honky-tonks, and F. C. Zimmerman’s dry-goods store. Otto stopped to look at the new rifles in the window, a sidehammer Sharps in .44 caliber that took a bottlenecked, 25/8-inch cartridge packing 90, 100, or 105 grains of powder, and a .44 Remington rolling-block Creedmore that fired a slightly shorter 90-grain cartridge. Both rifles would throw a heavy, 550-grain bullet with great accuracy, but the Sharps allowed more latitude in terms of powder loads, and certainly it possessed greater range. On the other hand, the Remington looked tidier, racier, more “modern,” with its small center-mounted hammer and sleek, neatly checked pistol grip.
The weapons leaned behind the window against the glass-eyed head of a buffalo. The stub-horn bull stared out into the street. Not mournfully, Otto thought, but resignedly, almost philosophically. As if it knew its days were numbered, as were those of all its kind. Sure, he thought. Philosophically. But at least it made him feel better to think so.
They passed a dovecote. The girls, some of them older than Frau Wieland, looked out the door and giggled as Otto and Jenny walked by. The soiled doves made little O’s of their painted mouths, and one of them flipped her skirt to display her unclad nether parts, grinning and saying, “Whoops!”
They hurried on, Otto glaring back at the fallen women, Jenny a bit flustered by the display. No girl in Heldendorf was that brazen, not even Gretel Schlimm, who had been known to flirt in church.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To the livery stable. Then camp—about an hour west of town.”
“Can’t we eat first? Or anyway, get something to drink? I’ve got coal smoke in my Kehl’.”
“Plenty of coffee out at camp. Clean, cold water. And buffalo steaks. Over at the Cox House they’ll give you thin, lukewarm coffee, canned pork and beans, yesterday’s bread with pepper sauce to disguise it, and then charge you six bits for your supper. A man would have to skin out three buffalo to pay for a meal like that, though he’d still be wolf-hungry half an hour later.”
He walked on glumly, his back stiff with suppressed anger. At what?
“Another thing,” he said, “you’ve got to stop talking half Deutsch, half English. You sound like some Dutchy peasant fresh off the pickle boat.”
“I’ll try,” Jenny said as humbly as she could. “But at least let’s stop for something cold and wet right now. Even if it’s nur ein Bier—sorry, just a beer. Bitte, Otto, please, it won’t take long.”
“I hate this town,” Otto said gruffly. “All towns, for that matter.”
But he was unstiffening a bit. She vowed to speak only English from now on, if it would make him happy.
Ahead of them a man strode along, slow and full of himself. He was tall, pigeon-chested, with a wide black flat-brim hat, a tailored broadcloth suit of pinstriped gray, hand-tooled boots with high heels, and when he turned quickly to look at them they saw a ruffled white shirt with a black silk string tie. His flabby upper lip stuck out, sparsely mustached, under a long, sharp nose. His eyes, close-set, were rheumy but quick. The ivory grips of two Colt pistols stuck out of his waistband, sharp-curved against the dark figuring of his waistcoat.
“Why, Otto, you old sausage stuffer!”
“How’s you doing, Jim?”
“Just fine, feller. How were things back East?”
“Crowded. They’re all still talkin’ about you, though.”
“Sure,” the man said in a scoffing tone. But he laughed in his long nose nonetheless, pleased, for all his self-deprecation.
Then the tall man tipped his hat politely to Jenny, spun on his heel, and walked on, mournful and sudden as his earlier smile.
“Who’s that?”
“Duck Bill Hickok.”
“Wild Bill?”
“So they call him,” Otto said. “His real name’s Jim.”
THE BARMAN SLICED the head off two lagers with a single slash of his spatula, then topped the schooners. He slid them over, along with the free-lunch bowl. A drunken teamster was weeping at the end of the bar. Six cowboys played poker at a corner table, but quietly. The evening was young.
“You got you a ladyfriend,” the barman said to Otto, smiling. “Do
n’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”
Otto took a long pull at his beer and wiped his mustache with the back of his hand.
“This here’s my sister, Miss Jenny Dousmann,” he said. “Jenny, meet Fred Peacock.” They nodded across the bar, Peacock still smiling playfully. “Jenny’s going to hunt with me and Captain McKay this winter; she’ll rustle for the outfit, maybe skin some.”
And shoot, too, Jenny added silently.
“You look for a good season?”
“Good as last year, anyway,” Otto said. “We sold Rath & Wright about three thousand hides all told, and McKay figures this year to be better.”
“Not around here,” Peacock said. “They’re mighty thin on the ground up along the Arkansas, I hear. Say, I can remember when Bob Wright and me shot buff from his corral, to feed his pigs with. Down at the feedlot they had to hire guards to keep them durn shaggies away from the haystacks in the winter, right here in town, and that’s not long ago.”
“We’ll probably hunt farther south this fall,” Otto said. “Plenty of buff down toward Indian Territory. McKay’s scouting the Cimarron country right now. He’ll sniff out them shaggies wherever they are.”
“And you want to skin a few, do you, young missy?” Peacock asked. “We’ll, I hope you’ve got a strong stomach, I do. And a itchproof hide. I wouldn’t stick a butcher knife into one a them stinkers again for love nor money.” He reached both hands across his chest and clawed at his shoulders. “Why, just the mere idea of it gives me the rampagin’ ek-zeemer.”
“Miss Dousmann has skinned pigs and sheep and steers on the farm back home,” Otto said. “And plenty of deer, too; even a bear once, when we were hunting up north.”
“A pig comes close to a buffalo for tight,” Peacock said. He leaned his elbows on the wet, dark wood, smiling at Jenny with a teasing look and moving his mouth around playfully. “And a bear for smelly. But there’s nothing like a shaggy for bed rabbits.”
He was flirting with her, Jenny suddenly realized. “Bed rabbits?”
“Yes, missy. Linebacks, some fellows call ‘em. Graybacks? Lice.”
Jenny took a sip of her beer. Felt the fizz tickle her nose.
“And buffalo gnats? And fleas? And the maggots come later.” Peacock shuddered. He reached under the bar and brought up a water glass half full of whiskey. “Nope,” he said, “I done it one whole winter, that’s enough.” He drank off a big swallow of the whiskey. “Here, missy, have a plover egg.”
He forked a small egg out of a jar filled with brine and peeled it. Jenny ate it. She was hungry. Then she forked herself another from the jar, peeled it, and popped it in her mouth. The eggs lay like pale pink, bloodshot eyeballs on the grainy rock salt at the bottom of the jar. She chewed down the second egg and forked out a third.
“Well, Otto, she sure eats for a buffalo runner,” Peacock said. He laughed loud and approvingly, then reached under the bar again and brought up a bottle of whiskey. He winked at Otto. “Would you care for a sip of Old Baldface, ma’am, to settle your stomach? Or p’raps a proper cocktail—I do a nice Citronella Jam? It’s on the house.”
“Thank you, no, Mr. Peacock. This beer suits me nicely.”
When they left the saloon Otto led them back to Zimmerman’s. The shop was still open.
“I need a new rifle, and that .44 Sharps looks just fine,” he told Jenny.
“What about me? Something to fight off the bed rabbits?”
“Oh,” he said, smiling, “you can use my old buffalo gun on those fellows.” A thought occurred to him. “No, it’s .50 caliber. Probably kick too hard for you, and it’s only a single-shot rifle. You might need something faster than that.”
“For what?”
“Well, camp meat for one. Unwelcome visitors for another.”
“Are there likely to be bandits?”
“Always a possibility, though a slim one, but it was Hostiles I had in mind. You never know when redskins are likely to go on the warpath.”
Jenny laughed, but Otto remembered the Santee Sioux uprising in Minnesota back in ‘62. During the course of it, the Indians had attacked a small German community called New Ulm, where the Dousmanns had friends. The militia finally fought the Santees off, but not before they’d killed or wounded nearly a hundred townsmen and burned all but a few of the houses. A childhood friend of his had written to Otto about it, just after Antietam, reporting in shocked words that more than seven hundred whites, many of them women and children, had been slaughtered before the uprising was suppressed. The atrocities were too horrible to relate in detail, the friend wrote. Otto had been scornful at the time—at Antietam, the single bloodiest day of the war, some 23,000 men had died or been wounded on both sides. But now, visualizing Jenny as the victim of an Indian attack, New Ulm seemed horrible enough.
“How’s about that little repeater there?” she asked, pointing to a rifle in the window. It was a lever-action carbine, an improved model of the Henry with a loading gate on the side of the receiver.
“Ja,” Otto said. “Just the thing. Holds seventeen bullets, .44 rimfire—the same round I use in my pistol. We can share bullets for economy’s sake. You wouldn’t want to use it on buffalo except up close, it doesn’t pack much punch, but for antelope it’ll work just fine. Come on, we’ll go in and buy it. Then we’ve got to get packing for our rendezvous with McKay down toward the Cimarron.”
Good, Jenny thought. He’s willing to let me hunt. She had worried that he would keep her campbound day and night, cooking and cleaning.
Later, at Durgen’s Livery, she waited outside with the bags and the newly purchased rifles, humming happily to herself while Otto settled his bill. He led out a pair of mules and she helped him harness them to a light wagon parked in the corral. He tied his saddle horse, Vixen, to the tailgate.
“So I may hunt?” she asked as they drove out of town. She wanted confirmation, his word on it, so that he couldn’t change his mind.
“Ja sicker,” he said, “certainly. Not buffalo, or at least not at first, but camp meat surely. There are always prongbucks or turkeys to be found in the country we’re headed for. They’ll make a welcome change from a steady diet of buffalo meat. And I want you to keep your rifle close at hand.” He turned to look at her. “My partner and I will be out all day, along with our skinner, scouting or shooting or working the hides, and there are dangers. Wolves or bears, you know, attracted to the smell of meat. And snakes. And always the chance of, well, Indians.”
“Who’s the skinner?”
“His name’s Tom Shields, a good worker. You’ll meet him tonight if McKay’s found buff.”
Otto’s camp was a few miles west of Dodge. They saw the looming light of its fire in the dark hills along the Arkansas River and the mules pulled for it at an eager trot. Jenny was chilled and weary by the time they arrived. A man rose from beside the fire, a rifle in his hands, and stepped back into the shadows as they approached.
“It’s all right, Tom,” her brother shouted. “I’m home at last.”
The man stepped into the firelight, lowering his rifle. Jenny jolted wide awake, her shivering stopped. Tom Shields was a red Indian.
“Any word from Captain McKay?” Otto asked.
“He’s found ‘em, sure enough,” the Indian said. “He’s still out there with ‘em. And he wants us to come quick, while the killing’s good.”
THAT MORNING RALEIGH McKay was standing on the bales of hides piled in the wagonbed, scanning the horizon with field glasses. No buffalo in sight. Not even a tree. There was no horizon. In the middle distance, sky and grassland blended to a pale tan monochrome. To the east, low, the morning sun glinted like the stud of a silver finishing nail tacked to the wooden sky. He lowered the glasses. They were excellent, long and heavy, made by B. H. Horn of Broadway, New York City. He had taken them from the body of a dead Yankee major, eleven years earlier, near White Oak Swamp on the way to Malvern Hill. The brass was scratched in places, the blacking rubbed through with use,
but the lenses were still clear. McKay could never have afforded them himself back during the war, much less before it. Even now, when he found himself rich beyond counting, he would hesitate to lay out the gold eagle necessary to buy even these battered binoculars. Hell, and he had all of five thousand Yankee dollars in the bank back at Leavenworth.
He raised the glasses again and swung them slowly in a full circle. Still nothing. Not a dot of movement, no dark wavering line wriggling like a worm through the far frost haze. Squinting from the lens-gathered glare, he decided that perhaps the haze was a bit thicker to the northwest. Maybe they were coming from that direction. Even here, standing on the thick bed of hides, he thought he could feel the tremor of their movement.
It was that faint quivering of the ground which woke him before dawn, a subtle vibration, directionless, almost imperceptible, as if the atoms of earth and sky were shivering together ever so slightly, colliding like the shoulders of an anxious crowd. Soldiers awaiting the first bugle calls to battle. It had jostled him out of an uneasy sleep into the cold dark, from another dream of the war. He had been in the woods again, at dusk, with the gunfire growing louder as it neared. Scrub oaks and pines. They lay or knelt behind hastily felled tree trunks, in a semicircle, waiting for whatever was coming up the line to reach them. From off in the murk came rebel yells, rising and falling in counterpoint to the spurts of musketry. Now and then the far thump of cannon. Harsh, indecipherable cries at a distance, an order edged in hysteria, its meaning swallowed by distance, and the thud of his own fast heart. Then the louder, slower thud of hooves through the earth, tiny, palpable punches in his chest and belly. Stronger as the horses neared. They heard the whistle of horse breath, a nicker, the clank of a brass-tipped scabbard against a stirrup. Dim, tall forms moved toward them in the dusk. Swaying. Lumpy. Greasy glint of steel.
Tie My Bones to Her Back Page 4