by Bowen, Peter
Mrs. Kelly’s nice young son was learning a lot, but nothing he’d care to tell her about.
19
HENRY PLUMMER, KIT EXPLAINED, was one of them people who is charming, handsome, and has the morals of a tick. He’d have made a ripping good senator or a grand Revivalist preacher. He got himself elected as sheriff up in Bannack, Montana Territory, where he had run to after getting in trouble in the Idaho goldfields. Not one to pass up an opportunity, he also led a band of road agents.
Stout old X. Biedler and the Vigilantes hung Plummer. (I admire X. Biedler for a lot of good character he’s got. Some fool woman asked him if he “felt anything” when he hung Plummer. “Feeling! Damn right! I felt fer his goddamned ear!”)
While Plummer had been working the goldfields and them as mined it down to Idaho, he stole over a ton of gold. He hid it behind a waterfall on the Snake River.
“Let me guess,” I says, “when Gus Doane and me are fallin’ to a foamy death I’m supposed to look careful on the way down and holler IN HERE! with my dyin’ breath.” I told Liver-Eatin’ Jack, Kit Carson the Rope Thrower, Klaas Vipsoek, and Mulebreath what I thought of this idea. I grew eloquent on amusements free for the taking right out there in the sand and sagebrush.
Jack backhanded me so hard that it damn near spalled my face off of my head, and I did a few turns before coming to rest against a stump.
Jack picked me up like I weighed nothing and dropped me back in front of Carson.
“Wonderful idea and I’m grateful for the opportunity. Ain’t every young feller gets an opportunity like this. I’ll faithfully execute it, you’ll see. I am lucky to have such fine friends. AND I HOPE YOU ROTTEN SONS OF BITCHES ARE ALL PECKED TA DEATH BY HUMMINGBIRDS!”
“I see you get our point,” said Carson. “Brigham will worry over whether or not the letters are in the hands of an enemy. He’ll worry all the time. And now he’ll never know.”
Carson then told me about how Brigham had been guided to the Great Salt Lake, for which the Mormons graciously burned Bridger out in ’57. No good deed goes unpunished, as we Black Irish know. And they hounded Bridger every little chance they got.
“Now this is a whole lot of gold,” said Carson, “and gold is a fine thing, ask any man here.”
Ask me. I’d take the damn gold and hire Jules La Farge and be damned to Bridger, Cody, and ... I looked at Liver-Eatin’ Jack and knew I’d need heavier artillery. Longer I thought about it, divvying that much up into shares made the most sense, since I’d have to spend all of it staying well guarded if I just up and ran. I am not a terribly honest man, but I sure am practical, and if you believe that you’ll believe anything. I was a ripe old seventeen now, and I happened to be where I was and with who I was with, and I’d killed twenty-two men for certain and about that many probably.
Poor old busted-mouth Klaas come over, his jaw swole out like canteloupe halves either side. But them little eyes of his was twinkling—however bad things was he still was always happy with it. All the years I knew him I never heard him whine once.
“Viss I had me banjo,” Klaas hissed, over his butchered mouth. Goddamned if that bastard Ouray didn’t stalk over to his cache and come back with one.
I have no idea how Ouray come by all the things he has—ransom from folks who don’t want to die of old age looking across a checkerboard at that crazy Ute.
Klaas commenced into whanging on that damned infernal toy and the night air was sullied with hideous planks and plonks all crapped over by Klaas’s singing. This blugerss Dutch music is so rough on the ear that I saw whole troops of ground squirrels heading for other lands. The pain would break them every few yards and they’d clap paws over their ears and writhe in agony. Blugerss singing is whiny and at its best slobbered out over a busted set of yeller Dutch teeth by a fartulent sutler. The inventor ought to have lampreys stuck in his ears.
Carson and I walked away where Klaas’s, er, music wasn’t so near on to us.
“Jack will be running the ridges keeping an eye on you,” said Carson.
“Doane bein’ an army officer don’t give me a whole lot of confidence in his naval capacities,” I said. “Also, Gus is fearless and stupid, which is a combination makes me shaky.”
Kit and I looked out toward a faint band of red on the far western horizon. Nightjars fluttered overhead and some landed near to gravel up their craws. I heard a coyote and then another, and pretty soon they was having singing conversations across the rocky, sandy miles.
A gurgle behind us told me Mulebreath had paused to wet his whistle before joining us. He’d found two more jugs somewhere and had been happily pulling on one or the other all day long.
“Klaas and me outher go in the mornin’,” says Mulebreath. “He’s needin’ new teeth. That means Denver, it do, and I’m feared of him traveling alone with his teeth so bad busted. Could get the mortifaction and die.”
“Take four mules and such saddles and gear as you need,” said Carson, “we’re well fixed.”
The banjo music had stopped. Klaas farted companionably just behind us.
“Such good music,” said Klaas.
“Yer good music cleared everything that can walk out for twelve miles about,” I snarled, “and I saw a herd of cedars crestin’ that hill there—” I pointed “—tap roots flappin’.”
“We got to clear away, anyhow,” says Kit. “We’re a danger to Ouray and his people just bein’ here.”
When we went back to the camp a squaw come and took Klaas by the hand and led him off to the spring. We followed after, wondering on what she was up to.
She’d made some poultices and packings and she shoveled them into Klaas’s mouth and I swear I could see the swellings go down in his jaw. He’d been in terrible pain for a long time and his body relaxed not having to hold tight against the agony.
We left before dawn the next morning, Mulebreath and Klaas to Denver, and me and Kit and Jack north to hook up with Gus Doane, who was going to try to kill me every day for the next several months. I had quit complaining because Jack turned up the charge behind his swats just a little bit each time and about one more notch and my head would go flying off.
Here I’d always thought insolence was a virtue.
Until we were plumb away from Zion, we traveled at night. Two riders crossed the trail in front of us and Jack followed them a ways and he was gone for three hours and when he come back he’d fresh blood on his right sleeve. All he did was nod. Sons of Dan, scouts, could well be a passel of them just out of sight most anywhere.
Mild-looking Kit went to a little town we passed by and come back with a reward poster for me, Mulebreath, and Klaas, for having stolen thousands of dollars from Brigham and having very nastily raped several of his wives. Five thousand dollars reward for each of us. I’d never felt so worthy in all my life. It warn’t exactly a letter of credit but it was a hopeful sign for the future.
“Five thousand dollars!” I says, puffing up some.
“What you say that we bung this overpriced little shit into yonder jail and go home?” says Jack to Kit.
“A suggestion worth talking about,” says Kit.
“May you have twin doses of clap,” I says.
Jack and Kit knew where they were going and so I didn’t fret overmuch, just watched what they were doing to add to my bag of tricks. We moved mostly at night for the cover and the cool. Sometimes we were caught by sudden rainstorms that might be drenching one spot and not a quarter mile away the rain wouldn’t damp the rock.
There’s no topsoil in this country, so there’s nothing for rain to soak into. It all ends up as flash floods in the watercourses and you have to be careful crossing them and you never, never camp in them, for the night may be cold and clear and bright and twenty miles away thousands of tons of water comes down in minutes and gathers and roars off.
The first one of these I saw impressed me no end. I dropped my hat when I was crossing a dry wash and got off to get it and as I picked it up I felt the sand a
nd rock under me lurch. Not a hundred yards up the draw a solid mass of water carrying trees and rocks in it was coming down on me. My mule bolted for the far bank and he scrambled up safe and so did I, but another five seconds and I’d have been pulped by the flood.
It passed by and in an hour the sun had baked all the steam out and it looked all innocent and dry again.
Carson was up high keeping watch and he motioned toward the flood plain so I took the mule and went down the little dry wash and out into the flat pan now had an inch of water in it. There was a mangled horse with a wrecked saddle flung boneless out on the stones, and farther out what was left of the rider, his clothes just a few threads and his face wore off by the rocks the flood had banged him against. I looked through the saddlebags nearby him and found only some jerky and dried apples. I shook my head. We could have buried him but that would have left sign, so he waited on his face for the sun and the buzzards. It was a hard country then.
We cut east and went on up toward the Tetons, through high passes, Jack leading on his Shire and me tailing holding the leadrope to the four pack mules.
The Tetons is a lovely sight. I suppose someday rich folk will have summer homes all over them, but they were good when I seen ’em for the first time. We camped low down below them and Kit caught trout with a bent pin for a hook and horsehair for line. They were fine fat fish, about three pounds apiece. Jack showed me how to cover them with mud and bake them so they was moist still when cooked.
We was still pretty cautious about the Sons of Dan, one or another of us keeping watch from a dark place all night. We went out every morning and checked real good for sign, but there warn’t none. As far as they knew, we’d left the rutabaga wagons and gone straight up in the air. I hoped that Klaas and Mulebreath had a safe journey, and that Palmyra and Mountain Jim were to home in the high hanging valley.
One morning I got up and pulled my boots on and went for a walk to stretch the stiffness out, and I saw the whole meadow had sprouted big red-capped mushrooms with white stems and flecks on the caps. I gathered up a bunch of them just for nothing else to do, and carried them back thinking on cooking them up for our breakfast.
Jack took one look at the mushrooms and he nudged Kit who said, “Oh fer Chrissakes,” and they got up and ran me back out to the meadow and then they made me wash my hands good. Seems that they weren’t poisonous to kill you, they just made you insane for a week or three.
“How much of these does it take?” I says. One bite, says Kit and Jack.
I dried slices of these mushrooms down and packed the oilskin pouch with them.
Kit looked at me long as I bent to this simple task.
“Could be you’ve the right idea at that,” he said. “I never would have thought of it.”
Doane was late in coming, and we waited a week, through the summer storms where the clouds boil round your shoulders and the lightning comes from under your feet, and we ate good of rockchucks and beaver. The deer and bighorn sheep was so lean from the winter still that they had no taste at all nor fat, which is what cuts hunger.
Jack showed me how to make all manner of snares for rabbits up to grizzlies and some tricks of tracking I’d never have found on my own. My Creedmore was in the House of Brigham, no doubt, but Jack had a serviceable .45-90 for me and the same plain Colts I was so used to.
A week past the time we was to rendezvous, Doane came on a litter strung between two horses. He’d broke his ankle, he said, in an accident on the trail, a green horse had shoved Doane’s mount off a steep trail edge. His ankle was bound so tight that the skin was blue. Carson looked at it and muttered something under his breath and he cut the bandaging away with one swift flash of his knife.
Carson looked up in the sky at something, shading his eyes, and when Doane did, too, Carson grabbed Gus’s ankle and gave it a quick hard twist. Doane screamed and then he trailed off into describing Carson’s lady ancestors for the last fourteen generations, and finally he wheezed to a halt.
“Thanks, Kit,” says Gus, holding out his hand. Carson shook it.
“I didn’t really mean all them things I said ’bout your womenfolk, Kit,” says Gus.
“Well, if’n you didn’t, I’d best give it another crank, for I must not have done it hard enough,” says Kit, smiling.
Gus turned pale and put his hands to his face.
Then he stood up and put some weight on the ankle.
“Warn’t broke,” says Kit, “wrap it tight now—don’t strangle it—and you’ll be fine as a new penny in a week.”
The troopers pitched a couple of bell tents and they moved about efficiently setting up a camp. We was near a lake, a small one, and I saw a cow moose across it, stepping in up to her hips to feed. I took the .45-90 and went off, and killed her with a shot to the head at two hundred yards. When we butchered her out we found her good and fat. The troopers had been living on bacon and hardtack and watercress picked for to keep the scurvy away. Scurvy still killed more folks in the west than anything else, of the lack of green vegetables.
That evening, at supper, Gus talked about his expedition. Gus was a terrible toady and a good officer. If he saw something that warn’t right he’d say something. Even to journalists. So his superiors had, no doubt, decided to send him down the Snake in hopes of his being drowned or killed by Injuns. My favorite Gus story was the report he telegraphed from Texas to the War Department: “Out 3 mos; 1 Indian killed; my casualties 114; at this rate war will last 500 yrs; cost 100 billion dollars; and they will win. Lt. G. C. Doane.”
In the morning when we awoke Carson stood up suddenly and he went dead white and I barely caught him before he fell. I carried him to his blankets and let him set there for a while. He kept pounding his breast like there was something in there that hurt and could be drove away.
“My heart says it’s time I settled my affairs,” he said.
He and Jack left right away, Jack to take him as far as Laramie, where he could ride the stage down to New Mexico where he lived.
I never saw Carson again, for he died shortly after he got home. But I did meet him, and I’m grateful for that.
20
THE UNITED STATES ARMY wasn’t long on backstocks of boats. They had been good enough to send along some canvas ones made up during the War of 1812, green cloth things with waxed basswood frames. The frames was in great shape but the cotton hulls had gone down ten million moth gullets long since. Gus, walking gingery on his sore ankle, looked down into the crates and sighed.
“Perfect,” says Gus, “I can’t remember when I been so happy ’cept when we was half shot dead at the Wilderness and the supply folks sent us eighty wagonloads of shoelaces. I think bullets being expensive we was to strangle the Rebs with ’em.”
Them boats looked just fine to me, I was full of the satisfaction for ’em. The trip was off, to hell with Plummer’s gold, and I’d just slide on north for a while, there was new strikes every day here and in Canada.
Bad luck has a way of cropping up no matter how you try to keep it away and this time it was a weedy corporal name of Bok who hailed from some Maine outport. No doubt a small child and a number of shotgun-carrying not-yet-relations waited upon him. His English was too damn good for a soldier. Anyway, the mouthy fool says he can build us fine boats in jig time, so we can foller orders.
Worse yet, it turned out that he did know how. My last best hope was that he was lying and it went up the flume in short order.
We marched off to a stand of lodgepole pine where we was put to work stripping laps for the hulls. Bok went off and found a couple dead spruce for the frames.
Laps is long flexible strips of wood you take off lodgepole like you peel celery. After they was peeled off we weighted them down in the lake so they’d stay wet and flexible. I warn’t wholly disgusted, actually. My life was surely going to be one of narrow escapes, and if I ever needed to flee an island (I did, several times) it would be handy to know how to build a boat.
Bok was a natural l
eader and he soon had some of the soldiers gathering pitch and others whittling out keelsons and thwarts and crossties.
In a week the twenty of us had made up five small, narrow boats with high prows and sterns, sort of dorylike. They was caulked with pitch and the shredded roots of willow. We launched one, Gus spitting on it as we pushed it into the water.
“I christen thee the USS Festering,” says Gus. His ankle was still paining him some.
Bok had chopped oars out of spruce and he bound the necks with copper wire and pulled wet rawhide covers over the blades so they wouldn’t split and break on the rocks. The boats were sound, they took on no water at all. Last thing, he drove heat-hardened fir tholepins into the gunwales.
Teamsters had been moving supplies up from Fort Shaw and we had barrels of hardtack and salt pork, navigational instruments, and the sundry stores of medicines and condiments and soaps and ammunition and cooking pots and tents and several folding chairs, fer Chrissakes.
Finally, one morning we loaded the boats, even taking the chairs, and pushed away from the banks and headed for the Columbia River. We hoped. This country is so big it’s hard to tell what goes where. There were a lot of wild stories about deep canyons and whirlpools and huge manlike creatures who could carry a moose and stank of sulfur.
This country had a detailed map. It was in Jim Bridger’s head. The government wouldn’t really feel that the land was theirs until some poor soldier bled to death all over it.
The Snake was about two feet deep and rocky where we took off, and Bok’s design for our boats might have worked if we were headed to sea, but the bumping on the bottom opened up hundreds of leaks in the pitched bottoms and soon we all had a foot or more of water in the boats. We went over a smallish waterfall that couldn’t be seen from upriver, down a long green tongue of water and then into foaming backwash. Gus Doane’s armada went down like five dropped rocks. Us bold sailor men bobbed and hollered in the icy water. I had my guns and kit tied to a shot length of punky log, so I floated over to the shore and got up on it and tucked my thumbs in my pockets and watched the fun.