by Bowen, Peter
Things was ready, everybody was bored. The horses was broke, the wagons packed, and the teamsters and the two Mexican drovers and me and Tom and Marion hadn’t anything better to do than braid two-color horsehair ropes, the Plains needlepoint.
23
THE GREAT DAY FINALLY came, and the stationmaster at North Platte wired ahead to let us know if the train didn’t fall off the track, our nabobs would arrive at 3:10. They were two minutes early. The train looked like an ordinary train, except for the two enormous custom cars attached to the caboose. Wouldn’t do to have the peasants walking through, you know. The engineer pulled ahead far enough so that our customers and their servants and god knows what all could step directly to the platform, while ordinary passengers had up to three hundred feet of mud to wade through before gaining anything substantial to stand on.
Bill was first off, all in his buckskins and wearing the smile he used for encores. He strode right up to me and shook my hand, and while the loafers and bummers and cowhands cheered and he waved his hat, he hissed at me out of the side of his mouth.
“Where’s Jack?”
“He’s out at the camp, wanted to save himself some pain, I guess.”
“Come on,” says Bill, “I’ll introduce you to our ... uh ... illustrious guests.”
The Duke of Ironheath was first off, and he leveled a hand for his lady to lean on, and she stepped out into the bright Wyoming summer light and commenced to glow. I have seen a lot of beautiful women in my day, but never one before or since like Lydia, Duchess of Ironheath.
Tall she was, and wearing blue satin and white lace, with a huge flowered hat atop a pile of gold hair. I could have reached round her waist with my two hands.
“This is my friend Yellowstone Kelly,” says Bill. “He’s going to be your guide some of the time.”
The Duke shook my hand without looking at me, but the Lady Lydia offered hers, and as I bowed and kissed it (I came from a good home, you see) she gave a little throaty laugh.
“To find such manners here, Mr. Kelly,” she said, in a deep husky voice. And she laughed again. She was used to being looked at by thunderstruck males. She disengaged her hand and swept off, looking up at the sky and out over the prairie.
Next I met the Marquess of Wiggins, who was married to the Lady Lydia’s sister, who was known as Lady Violet. Another gorgeous creature. After that there were three Englishmen with one chin between them. I never really did get them all straight, as they looked about as different from each other as a half-grown litter of prairie dogs. They was buddies of the Marquess. All that those three did the whole damn trip was stay in the big Sibley tent and giggle. Except for ... oh, hell, I’ll tell you later.
The Duke walked slowly down the station platform, and his head kept moving side to side, like a mechanical toy. I had taken one look into his too-pale blue eyes and decided that no one was home and the lights were out. If Bill’d had any trouble with any of them he’d be the one. I’d hear about it in due time.
The Union Pacific Railroad had built a special siding for the two custom coaches, and when the westbound train pulled out, having disgorged fourteen of what I presumed were the Duke’s servants into the mud along the tracks, a little donkey-puller came out and shoved the cars off on the siding. There was even water lines and slop-pipes set, to hook up to the cars.
By this time most of the loafers had left. The Lady Lydia and the Lady Violet were down at the far end of the platform, the Duke standing stolidly nearby, staring off across the prairie at something I suspect that only he could see. There were clouds on the western horizon. Soon it would begin to rain.
The servants had managed to wallow out of the mire by the roadbed, and they trailed off in the direction of the hotel, a medium-good place, since the bedbugs was of a very high order.
Oliver Johnson sauntered out on the smoking platform at the rear of the first car, and when he happened to glance my way—I knew damn well he’d been watching everything from behind a curtain—he waved real offhand-like, and then looked out over the prairie.
The two ladies came swaying back to Bill and me, twirling their parasols.
“You two must come to dinner,” said the Lady Lydia. “Shall we say at eight o’clock?”
Bill and I accepted. Some time in the next three hours maybe Bill will tell me what it is that’s eatin’ on him, I thought.
“Buy you a drink?” I says to Bill. He nodded.
We squelched through the mud to the Club, and wiped most of the dirt off before walking on the red plush carpets. We might as well not have bothered; the carpet by the front doors looked like an otter slide, and was damn near as slick. There was about thirty fellers in there, including Shanghai and Charley, who were glaring at each other from opposite sides of the room, and no doubt thinking of new ways to make each other miserable.
I bought a bottle, and Bill carried the glasses. We went to a table in one of the bay-window alcoves. There was quite a bit of light there, so I pulled the curtains.
“What happened?” I asks.
Bill poured himself about four fingers and tossed it down. “The Duke killed one of Madame Patch’s whores. He was doing something made her scream and to shut her up he hit her alongside the head with a champagne bottle, and caved her skull in.”
Bill was silent for a minute. “Patch had her thugs drop the girl’s body in the river. The Duke departed as though nothing was amiss, and when Patch sent her attorney to try a little genteel blackmail, he beat the man half to death. Oliver Johnson paid out many thousands of dollars to hush everything up. I knew the Duke was a wrongun’, but I had no idea ...”
“You still need his money, right?”
Bill nodded.
“All we have to do is take them on this tour, and then we bring them back here, to Cheyenne, and wish them well and good-bye. There ain’t that many places for the Duke to get into trouble out there.” I gestured toward the mountains.
Bill began to cheer up some. I reminded him of all the times we’d come upon the whoremasters with their wagonloads of chippies, headed for the next gold town, the girls half dead of whiskey and hopelessness. Sometimes that was a whore’s life.
I got up and bought a fresh deck of cards, and Bill and me played dollar-ante seven-card stud until it was time to go to dinner.
Not knowing just which door to knock on, I let Bill take the lead. We went to the coupling that held the two cars, and then up the left-hand stairway. Oliver was acting as doorman or greeter or whatever you call it, and he took our coats off to somewhere.
We was the first to arrive, and Oliver took our orders for drinks and in what seemed no time at all we were sipping fine old Scotch and admiring the paintings on the walls of the dining saloon. Oliver made a little jerking movement with his head, and I followed him into the cloakroom.
He looked at me steadily for a moment. “Kelly,” he said, “you were smart to leave when you did. Your room was ransacked that night. It seems that the clerk had connections with some footpads. The police had been watching him for some time.”
Well, I didn’t know but what Oliver wasn’t in on it, but I smiled and thanked him. “Wondered why they didn’t forward my trunk,” I said.
“It is right for you to suspect me,” said Oliver, “but you are wrong. When they were done with your room they came to mine.” He fingered a barely healed welt on his left temple.
There not being much to say to that, I rejoined Bill.
The Duke come in and nodded to us, and when the Lady Lydia and the Lady Violet had been seated the servants began to scuttle in, and I settled down to a ten-course meal. I had found my card next to the Lady Lydia’s, and one of the chinless dudes was on my right. She asked me all sorts of questions about where we were going, how many men I had killed, were we likely to encounter hostile Indians, and would there be plenty of game for the Duke to shoot.
I told her a mild pack of lies. Dinner over, the two lovely ladies departed, and seegars and port was passed around. The
Duke held us enthralled with accounts of his slaughtering expeditions in Europe, Africa, India, and Australia, where he single-handedly halved the population of kangaroos in a matter of a few weeks. He talked about partridge and pheasant hunts on his estates, where the tally of birds went into the thousands. All in a monotone, one more wholly unnerving thing about this strange feller.
The evening ended abruptly with Oliver bringing Bill and me our coats. We shrugged into them. As I was going out the door, I reached into my right coat pocket for my kerchief and found a short note. “Come to the rear door of this car at one o’clock. L.”
“What’s holdin’ you up?” Bill said.
“Oh, nothin’,” I said.
24
BILL AND I HAD a couple drinks, and then he took off for the camp, winking at me and rolling his eyes.
“Mind you don’t turn out like Jack,” he says, grinning like a dog with a fresh cow turd.
He’d read the sign, all right.
A few minutes before one I left the Cattle Club as quiet as I could, not wishing to be remarked upon by the loafers, most of whose eyes had long since been crossed so far over the whole world looked flesh-colored.
The rear door of the coach opened silently, and Lydia, wearing just a mite more than nothing at all, grabbed my hand and pulled me inside. I wasn’t slow in shedding my boots and duds, and we commenced to screw on every available flat or inclined surface and a couple times swinging from the chandelier. Lydia had obviously made a study of the subject—she said, once when we had paused for breath, that a lot of her ideas came from some carving on the walls of a temple in India, a place she went to often whilst the Duke was off slaughtering tigers and leopards and panthers and the occasional beater.
We plumb wore out each other, and whilst we was waiting for our second wind Lydia started fingering the various scars my hide has picked up over the years. I was lying on my stomach, and my back is where most of the scars is, on account of how I refuse to stay over-long where I’m not wanted.
She seemed satisfied with my explanations, and we had another hour of acrobatics. I was worried about the noise, but Lydia told me that her “class” was trained from birth not to notice anything, which I guess explains the imbecilic bravery of Her Majesty’s soldiers and sailors—and especially the officers.
Lydia was purring like a tabby cat on my shoulder when there commenced a bit of glow in the east, and I rose and dressed and slipped out before there was anyone up to remark upon my early rising, and further, upon my early rising from—gasp!—the rolling mansion.
By the time I come to the camp everybody was up and about. The teamsters had the oxen hitched, and were lumbering off toward the northwest. Tom had caught and saddled seven of the best horses for our dudes—with many choice comments about the English saddles, which are called pancakes out West and considered as sightly as turds in a punch bowl.
“There’s no place to sit on these damn things,” said Tom. “I can’t see how they’ll stay on.”
“Well,” I says, “aside from the fact that you put them all on backwards, you have done a real good job. Now take that string in and tether them near the Pullman, and me and Jack and Bill will be along shortly.”
“How can you tell they’s backwards?” Tom asked, reasonable enough.
I sent the three teamsters with the Cape Cart and light wagons to pick up the servants at the hotel, and run them to where we would make our first camp, about twenty miles to the northwest, five days by wagon from South Pass and fifteen from the Grand Tetons.
Bill and Jack put on their best duds, pale doeskin trousers and dragoon boots, silk kerchiefs, fringed and beaded buckskins, and great big sombrero-looking Stetsons that looked like they ought to have come equipped with tent poles and guy wires just to stand up.
Bill had hired a few tame Indians, and they was to make a mock attack on the Pullman cars. They was to swoop down just as Bill and Jack and I rode up, and we were to playfully fire blank cartridges at them, eventually knocking all of the savages off their horses—some sort of re-enactment of something or other. Well, hell, here it was the wild west.
The nabobs had taken an early breakfast, and were variously lounging on the open deck at the rear of the last coach, or walking on the roadbed. The ladies were nowhere to be seen.
The three of us dime-novel heroes rode up, and then reared our horses—they was show ponies, trained to stand on their hind legs and paw the air—and when the horses set down we all swept off our hats, and the horses made curtsies. If I’d tried that with what I usually ride, I’d have been kicked halfway to China, out of the horse’s embarrassment.
The hats was the signal for the twenty or so mostly drunk braves to commence whooping down, all painted, waving their lances and decorated shields. The Indians commenced to circle, while Bill and Jack blazed away at them—me, I had got off to check the saddles that Tom had by now got pointed the right way.
The blanks from Jack’s and Bill’s revolvers made a kind of a loud pop. Suddenly I heard the unmistakable crack of a strictly-for-business cartridge. I run toward the sound, and there was the Duke, with one of his double-barreled guns, drawing down on one of the Indians. He fired again before I could reach him, and the slug tore into the horse’s ass and knocked both horse and rider back about twenty feet.
The Duke’s loader handed him another double-barreled gun, and I leaped up to the platform in time to shove the barrel skyward just as the Duke pulled the trigger.
“Sir,” I hollered, “it’s only a joke, they’re only funnin’ you.” The Duke looked at me with those flat blue eyes, and he was fair foaming at the mouth.
Oliver come out of nowhere and helped me subdue the Duke, who seemed to be having some sort of fit. As soon as he was prone he commenced to bang his head on the floor. Oliver stuck his foot under the Duke’s head, in a practiced sort of way, and Bill and Jack come up. The Indians had wisely departed.
The seizure didn’t take very long. The Duke sat up after a minute, then grabbed a chair and hauled himself upright.
“Will we have sport today?” he said to Bill, as calm as though nothing had happened. Maybe for him nothing had. He went into the Pullman, and when he come back, the two ladies was with him, all decked out in riding habits.
“Luther,” says Bill, “Jack and me will take the men and go do a little bird hunting, and if you would be so kind as to take care of the ladies, we will meet for supper at the camp.”
The two ladies tripped down the steps and Tom brought two horses over for them. I stepped down from the platform and made a stirrup of my hands, to give them a leg up. They was riding side-saddle, of course.
“You ride herd on the Duke’s chums,” I grunted. “Camp’s twenty miles past our present one, due northwest.”
“I suggest that we ride fairly hard a bit, and then do some sightseeing,” I said to the ladies. “That will leave the Duke’s party with plenty of unstirred-up game.”
I swung up on my horse and started to move at a brisk trot. The Lady Lydia whipped her horse into a gallop, closely followed by the Lady Violet, just like they was riding over a groomed course instead of a plain studded with prickly pear cactus and perforated with prairie-dog and badger holes.
I cursed plenty, and rode after them. They went about ten miles, passing the teamsters with the ox-drawn wagons, and they didn’t pull up until their horses were just about winded. They knew the business of riding, though. The three of us walked the horses to cool them, and then we remounted and headed for the place that we would camp that night.
Herds of antelope dashed off to both sides of us, and I saw a couple of wolves, quick dark flashes between clumps of sagebrush and stunted cedar.
The ladies approved of the campsite, and they chattered like sparrows as we watered our horses.
“Mr. Kelly,” said the Lady Violet, “this is such ... mysterious country. Do you know its secrets?”
For my money, the country was flatter than piss on a plate, and there wasn’t
much interesting until the Big Horn mountains, but after a bit of carefully posed head-scratching I said that I knew of a spot not too far off where the Indians had been making arrow points since before Moses took to the weeds.
They thought that was a good idea, so we rode over to a water-cut, which had exposed a small cliff of obsidian. The Indians would build a hot fire against the base of the cliff, and then throw water on it, which made the volcanic glass shatter off in useful sizes. Over the centuries the Indians had tunneled in about fifteen feet. The cliff base was littered with flawed arrow points and broken spear points and little flakes of glass popped off the points by the maker’s elkhorn flaking tool.
They each filled the dainty saddlebags they had on their horses with such rocks as they could find, and then they remarked how nice it would be to have luncheon.
“God,” I said, “I’m sorry. I forgot to get anything, and all that I have is some jerky and dried fruit.”
“Let’s go back to the campsite, and have your ... jerky,” said the Lady Violet.
“And with the dried fruit and spring water it will be a feast!” continued the Lady Lydia.
We rode back to the spring, and sat on fallen cottonwood logs and ate jerky and dried apricots. The way those two ladies tucked into my travelin’ rations, you’d have thought it was fooey-grass and horse doovers.
“Most interesting,” said Lydia.
“It’ll do you if need be,” I says.
“Is that a blanket tied up behind your saddle?” she asked, looking innocent. “Do fetch it. Violet, should anyone come, do whistle, won’t you?”
I took the blanket and followed her into the dogwood bushes that grew thick on the hill behind the spring.
25
THINGS DON’T TAKE LONG to become routine. I spent the days guiding either the ladies or the chinless three, and the nights in my tent with Lydia, who arrived in the dark and left each morning before first light. I was beginning to feel a mite tired, but Lydia seemed to thrive on no sleep. Violet had taken up with Jack again, and Bill and me wondered when she’d drop him. I’d told Marion my worries, and the poisonous little dwarf was never very far from Jack. Marion blended well, he was about the same color as the prairie dust, except for the red blood in his kerchief.