The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  I heard a whistle and looked over at the far north shore to see Liver-Eatin’ Jack standing there. He give me the thumbs up sign and I nodded some, and then shook my head. It warn’t me he was wondering about, it was Plummer’s pocket change. Shit. Friends.

  Jack grinned at me. I grinned back. The words I was saying behind my teeth were not nice words. At all. Jack scrabbled up a cliff two hundred feet high and was gone in less time than the telling of it takes.

  Gus took the smallest of the boats and rowed out to where I was. I jumped in and sighed with relief. I still couldn’t hear a damned thing, and I was bruised all over and pummeled about half to death. I was sure looking forward to dry clothes and trade whiskey.

  I was slumped against the gunwale with my eyes half closed, and suddenly they flew open. There was an oar floating away. I sat up and looked at Gus, who was standing in the bows with his binoculars trained on the far bank. The other oar was out in an eddy, fifty feet away.

  “What the fucking hell are you doing?” I screamed. Gus waved a hand back at me, to indicate he was busy and I should shut up.

  There wasn’t anybody on the shore. I hollered and yelled but it was futile, the falls covered my puny sounds like a rug.

  I hollered for Jack, but he was nowhere to be seen. I was to be rescued. So why should he be worried.

  The boat was moving. Not much, but it was. I turned and saw I couldn’t reach the rock I’d been on. We were being drawn back toward the falls. Not quickly yet, but drawn nonetheless. I was too stunned and battered to get up and kill Doane. The one satisfaction I might have time for between now and dying and I’m too weak to take advantage of it.

  Gus took the binoculars off his eyes and turned around, all radiant.

  “A Harrington’s Plover!” he said. “Not one has been seen in twenty years! What luck.”

  “Luck,” I says, puking weakly over the side, “luck, you dumb bastard. WE’RE GONNA DIE NOW OF YOUR GODDAMNED HARRINGTON’S PLOVER. SHIT.”

  Gus looked confused for a few minutes and then he sat down hard in the bows.

  “I see,” he says. “It was just so exciting.”

  (Teethadore Roosevelt was a birdwatcher, too. I think they all ought to be hanged on account of how dangerous they all are. Or shot, or skinned alive, or dipped in tallow and set on fire. Something.)

  The boat was picking up a little speed and the thundering maw of the waterfall was just a little closer each second. I saw a buffalo carcass come down, and it didn’t come up. I’d lost my knife in the plunge and couldn’t even attack Doane, who was sitting there looking embarrassed.

  There was a whole tree, a cottonwood, that come over, one with the leaves mostly on it. It was crushed against the rocks and most of the small limbs snapped off. We was battered by twigs and chunks of wood. The trunk had wedged between a couple of big toothy slabs of lava.

  I reached out to grab hold of the tree. I stretched as far as I could without going in. I couldn’t get to anything. So I jumped out and swam to the trunk and got a deathgrip on a shattered stub of branch. Gus wasn’t far behind me.

  We shipwrecks clung and whined while the waterfall ate the boat.

  “Harrington’s Plover,” I says, my teeth chattering. The water was damned cold. “Harrington’s Plover. You stupid, accursed, moronic, goddamned idiot. I quit, if I get out of this alive I quit ...” I went on resigning for some time while Gus hung his head and nodded and apologized.

  The soldiers had seen us in trouble and had a bigger boat, which four of them rowed out in and they stopped, sensiblelike, and threw out a line with a chunk of wood on it, not daring to get in to where the backwash was fast. I grappled with the rope and got a good grip on it and they hauled me back. I tried hard to talk them into leaving Doane clinging to the trunk of the cottonwood, but several of the soldiers allowed as how ol’ Gus was all right with them, not too bright, maybe, but he meant well. They’d known lots of worse officers.

  Doane got into the boat and we returned to shore without incident, and when I got my feet on dry land I fell face-forward and cussed into the sand. I was tired as hell and having just had death before my eyes and teasing I was maybe not so much in possession of my self as usual.

  Gus still had his binoculars, and he was looking across the pool at the far shore.

  “It’s still there! The Harrington’s Plover! See it?” he hollered, nothing daunted.

  He handed the binoculars to me. I saw this not awfully impressing bird diddling on the sand. I gave back the binoculars.

  Gus clapped them to his eyes and went on chortling.

  The boom from the .45-90 sent Gus about twelve feet straight up and he lit looking wild-eyed around him. There I stood, the buffalo rifle on its bipod, arms folded on my chest. I could make out a few feathers still fluttering to earth over across the water.

  Gus looked at me in horror. He clapped his binoculars back to his eyes.

  “You murdering son of a bitch,” he says.

  Yup, I thought, that’s me in a nutshell.

  Not many folks get to render something extinct. I am happy to have been of service, and it is with pride I tell you a plover like that ain’t never been seen since.

  We packed up and went on down the river the next day, and now it was broad and purling. I saw a sturgeon in one pool that was at least fifteen feet long, and there were hundreds shorter than that. The river was gentle and fairly slow.

  One late day we found a whole lot of dead folks on a ferry, so we got serious again.

  22

  WE COME ON TO the ghost ferry at last light, and the canyon made what little sun there was paler yet, with a yellow and unhealthy tint to it that made the green of the grass and the bushes rotten and putrid-looking. It was a place of death—there are such spots on earth—where crimes of such loathsomeness have been done that everything is touched by it, time, too. Some battlefields are like that, and the places where scaffolds stood and the innocent and the guilty was hung alike.

  The ferry was deadheaded into the opposite bank, and we rowed over the placid water. Our heads in the boats were lower than the freeboards of the ferry. I gripped one and pulled myself up and blanched so quick Doane grabbed my britches to keep me from falling off. I turned and nodded and he heaved me over. First there were the five set against the little house for the tillerman. They had arrows in them and their throats had been cut clear back to the spine. The deck had thick mats of blood on it. There weren’t any bloodstains around the arrows. The arrows had been shot into them after they were dead. And it took a lot more than five people to put this much blood on the decks.

  “Injuns!” a soldier screamed behind me. He hung over a rail and puked his guts out before dissolving in tears.

  Looks like Brigham Young’s fair work, I thought, much like the Sons of Dan. But why? Most of the bodies must have been thrown overboard. I lifted a big tarpaulin in the stern and found them, stacked like cordwood. I wanted more than anything to see Salt Lake City again and be at the head of a conquering army when I did.

  “Oh, my God,” says Gus. He was as shaken as I was. We’d done our share of killing but hadn’t gone on to butchery, at least not yet.

  I tugged one of the arrows out of a corpse and held it close to my eye. The fletching was crude and the head was Injun, but it was flaked so finely it didn’t look right with the shaft and the botched feathers. The feathers was pinions, all right, but they were swapped from the way the Injuns do it, the big part of the quill was forward.

  We camped that night but didn’t build a fire and all of us was watching the shadows. The air was so still above the water curtains of midges and gnats hung undisturbed, fish rose and ate them when they touched the water. There was a full moon and the light made ghosts, things moved. No one shot, but we all had our guns up one time or another, and our hearts in our throats.

  Gus and the troopers dug a single grave in a small pocket of soft soil. We laid eleven bodies in it and covered them over and Gus read the Twenty-third Psalm
. Whence cometh my help?

  We piled the largest chunks of rock we could roll on top of the turned earth, to keep out the coyotes, skunks, and badgers.

  We’d searched thoroughly for wallets, papers, letters, any name or date or address that would lead to the names of those under the cairn.

  “They wasn’t Injuns,” I says to Gus, pointing to the crude shaft and fletching and the fine arrowhead. “For all we know, it could be robbers trying to have us think the Mormons done it.”

  Gus nodded. He finally sent three soldiers west to Fort Boise—the military was all the law outside of a few towns in Idaho—we had no horses and I had found some tracks headed off north, but it was useless to try going after them on foot.

  Gus got to be unnatural silent for him, and he scanned the clifftops and wrinkled his forehead thinking. We abandoned a boat, leaving it on the opposite bank from the ferry, so that if folks needed to get across they could.

  There had been enjoyable parts of the trip, deaths and murders aside. The birds was thick, other than that damned Harrington’s Plover, and the canyons with the blacky-red lava walls held strange and beautiful light.

  I hadn’t seen Jack in a long time, which meant nothing. I supposed he was out there nearby. He was the size of a damn foothill, but he disappeared easy enough if he wanted to.

  A couple days later—the river was pretty slow and we didn’t make the kind of time we had upstream—we heard the rumble of a waterfall, and beached the boats and walked down to see how bad it was and if there was a good place to portage.

  The falls was fairly shallow, only dropping maybe thirty feet, and the river had chewed hardest in the center, so the falls was shaped like a horseshoe.

  I sauntered on ahead of Gus and managed to clamber down a narrow trail, and about halfway to the bottom shingle I swung my face to my left and saw a rattlesnake about the size of the Sons of Erin Fire Company’s biggest hose, all rared back with his mouth open so far it looked like a porcelain dinner plate with fangs sticking out of it. I become one with the birds and even flapped my arms a bit before plunging into the cool green water below. I sunk down maybe ten feet before I come up, and the current was so gentle I could make way dogpaddling.

  I clumb up on the rocks piled at the south end of the falls, and then I got to thinking that since Plummer would have come down from the North, like most folks, since there was no water south of the river, he’d likely have gone in here rather than on the heavy-traveled side. I swam up to the far south edge of the falls and put my hand through the curtain of water and there wasn’t any water or force to speak of in it, it was only about an inch or so thick. I swam through the shimmering wall and there in front of me was a wide ledge, and on it was a batch of small crates, the size I expected the assay office in Idaho City used.

  My heart was hammering. I hauled myself up and walked to the crates and pried off the rotted wood top of a crate with my fingers. I took out one of the bars and found a rock and hit it, and when I took it out to the light, it showed gray. Lead. I was full of the perplex.

  On a hunch, I pulled off the top few layers of boxes and opened one in the middle of the pile, and when I picked up a bar, it was too heavy to be lead. I hit that one with the rock, it felt different. In the light coming through the thin curtain of water, I saw gold. Plummer’s gold.

  This presented me with a moral dilemma. Plummer had stolen this gold, killed for it, deprived women and children of its benefits, caused great hardships, and any decent, law-abiding citizen would inform the army, which would hold it until the courts of law returned the gold to the rightful owners.

  So I put the bar of gold back, piled the lead on it, and picked up a lead pig and walked over to the curtain and stepped through it, barely managing to get a good foothold on a rock just the other side.

  Gus was running up and down the shingle shouting and a couple soldiers was diving out in the pool.

  “You see the body?” said Gus.

  “Over here,” I says. Gus looked over and gave a jump. I walked down to the shingle, and dripped my way to him, the lead pig in my hands. In the sun, I could see the hash mark of the Hudson’s Bay Company on the bar.

  “Whereinhell you been?!” Gus roared.

  I told him I’d been near struck by a rattler and had found a cache of lead pigs behind the waterfall. (Hoping to Christ Gus had never heard of Plummer’s gold.) Seemed to be left over from the fur trading days. I pointed to the hashmark and looked sincere.

  Gus nodded and forbade any of the troopers to go into the backside of the waterfall. He’d already lost five and was not going to enjoy explaining how.

  Good enough, I thinks, I can signal Jack to come on in and he can bag it up and pack it out after Kelly and the soldier boys is long gone.

  I saw a sudden flash of white in a copse of red cedars a short quarter-mile away. Leaving Gus to go on with his lecture to his troops—he’d lost the thread and no telling when he’d be back on it again—I walked soft and casual toward the trees, casually carrying my pistol.

  It didn’t seem a likely spot for a bushwhacker, but I come on boulder to boulder for cover and I would have shot right pert if I’d seen another flash. Thank God I didn’t.

  When I was up to the sweet-smelling grove I heard a soft sobbing, breathless, tears spent. Just exhaustion, and waiting for something to come and kill the sobbing. Despair.

  A little girl of maybe eight was slumped against a cedar trunk. She had one little hand on her hair, which was all matted and tangled, and she shook from fear and hunger.

  I knelt down and looked closer for a minute. She sensed me there and turned her face to me and she screamed weakly and then she tried to stand up.

  “I won’t hurt you,” I said, offering my hand. “And I won’t let anyone else hurt you either.” She looked about wildly for a way to escape, crying.

  She scampered away, and ran to a wall of yellow rock maybe fifty feet high, and she tried to scrabble up it, tearing her fingernails and hands. I caught her and held her and she tried to scratch my eyes. She was too small and weak to do much, and she finally went limp, and I put her head on my shoulder and carried her out, saying over and over again that no one would hurt her. She relaxed, her whole body loosening, and then she clung tight to my neck.

  I couldn’t imagine how she had got here, unless someone had thrown her off the ferry and she grappled on to a log and came down the river, and the falls flung her up on the shore.

  Her skin was near transparent, she was starving to boot. Children show that quicker than anyone.

  The band of yelling loudmouthed men went silent and as soon as I come close to them they all stared and their foreheads puckered in pity.

  We fed her bits of jerky and hardtack and plum preserves someone had hoarded up. She ate ravenous, and wanted more and right now, but I told her if she ate too much it would make her sick.

  Any sudden movement or a shadow from a cloud would make her start and clutch tight to me. She had been terrified out of her wits and she was living on fear.

  She ate a little more and I gave her sips of water, and then Gus mixed a little whiskey in water and gave it to her and she burrowed into my shoulder and went to sleep. We made up a bed for her, and when I would try to put her down on it she would wake up and cry and cling tighter.

  So I sat through the night slumped up against a cedar, keeping her from nightmares, I guess. It was a clear night and a waning moon, it was peaceful by the river.

  She woke in the morning looking much improved, children heal fast, too. One of the troopers had snared a groundhog and made up a rich, dark stew full of fat. The little girl tucked into it and when she finished a good-sized bowl she smiled and nodded at everyone.

  “Do you have a name, child?” I asked.

  She nodded her head and tried to speak, but her throat wouldn’t work and no sounds came out. We bothered her with a couple of questions, but her voice was back with the bloody horror on the ferry and it would be a time before she could tal
k at all.

  One of the soldiers pulled out a harmonica and played some lullabies and other sweet airs on it. The whole camp now turned completely around the little girl. There were near on to fistfights over who was going to feed her her soup, which was stupid, because she only allowed me to do that.

  The rank black injustice of what had happened to this poor child set Gus in the only blazing fury I was ever to see him in. He was madder at Brigham Young than he had been at the Confederacy, and I do believe only his oath of duty kept him from heading for Salt Lake City in forty-foot bounds, there to tear Brigham in half with his bare hands, as so much more personal than a gun or rope.

  The girl, who we had named Hazel Eyes, could likely nail the gate on the Sons of Dan, but until she spoke there warn’t any witnesses and I myself was trying to withhold judgment. It sure looked like them and the fact of the arrow, and the valuables just left—some jewelry and guns—and the throatcuttings all to the Prophet’s specifications was a powerful argument. I suddenly quit wobbling. The Sons of Dan were bastards, they’d get death from me every chance, and it didn’t matter a sparrow’s fart if they was guilty of this crime. There were plenty of others.

  It was time for me to go. There was a lot of river on to Fort Boise, and it went through country so parched and miserable a bird would have to pack a lunch to fly over it. There warn’t any danger, that was upriver.

  I explained this to Hazel Eyes, who looked at me gravely and nodded, and then she very practically adopted Gus for her new slave.

  Doane thanked me civil and said he’d send a draft for my services if he had an address.

  “Put it in the bank for her,” I said.

  I went up above the falls with four troopers and they rowed me across and we wished each other godspeed and I walked north. I thought the mountains looked about ten miles away, across a black lava plain dotted with sagebrush. Not the prettiest sight I’d ever seen but it didn’t daunt me much ’cause I knew no better.

  So I walked all the rest of that day, and I walked all night, and in the morning the mountains looked no closer. I hadn’t much water, just a canteen, and I drained that and pressed on. I soon tossed away my clothes that was so hot, and in the afternoon I heard water rushing beneath my feet.