The Wolfer

by Loren D. Estleman

  "Still rustling, Sam?" The foreman had the rifle braced against his hip on a level with the half-breed's head.

  Sam Fire Eye smiled. He had sleepy, insolent eyes behind the spectacles, and his narrow face was so scarred by smallpox that his days-old whiskers straggled out between the pits like grass in a quarry.

  "Hell," he drawled, his voice a nasal tenor, "you know the rule. First hand on the kill is the hand that gets it."

  "Not anymore it ain't. Not for forty years. Now it's the hand that jerks the trigger." For emphasis he wriggled his finger on the trigger of the rifle. "Where's Dick?"

  Iron teeth shone dully in Fire Eye's grin. "Behind you."

  The foreman chewed thoughtfully. His eyes jumped to Fulwider and then back to the half-breed. "Take a look."

  Fulwider looked. The man with the tall hat and long black hair was standing atop the ridge over which they had just come, a Sharps carbine cradled in his hands. He wore a sheepskin vest over a blue flannel shirt and leggings, and the lack of emotion in his obsidian eyes chilled the journalist to the marrow. He informed Crippen of the situation.

  North watched Fire Eye and said nothing.

  "Reckon we walked into it this time," sighed the foreman.

  "That'd be a fair description." Sam straightened. "We figured Black Jack would head up here with you fellows dogging him. We was in town for provisions Tuesday, and when we seen you heading out we knowed who you'd be after. Figured maybe we could head you off and have us some sport."

  "For the fifty bucks these here skins will bring you? You come mighty cheap, Sam."

  The grin died. "It ain't the money! It's last November and a gristly old bastard that run us off so's he could have Jack all to hisseif. Wasn't for you, we'd of collected that six hunnert last year."

  "Excuse me all to hell. You are a higher-priced son of a bitch than I give you credit for."

  "And you're stupider than I thought, talking like that with a Big Fifty on your back. Now, give me them weapons." He took a step forward with his right hand outstretched.

  "I reckon not."

  At North's words the half-breed stopped. The Ballard was pointing at his belt buckle.

  "You're Asa North, ain't you?" Fire Eye said. The ghost of his former smile pulled at the corners of his mouth. "I seen you once in Helena, toting that big old wolf they had a two-hunnert-dollar bounty on. Old Three Toes. I was just getting set to light out after him myself. Yes, sir, you must of been something in them days. Shoot him, Dick."

  North flung himself to the ground at the very instant the Sharps roared behind him. He struck on his elbow and fired. Sam Fire Eye cried out and spun, clapping his knife hand to his right shoulder. Crippen began shooting then, working the trigger as rapidly as he could lever in fresh rounds. Fire Eye's helpless body danced as the bullets found their mark.

  There was a loud thump as of an axe sinking into soft wood. Crippen arched his back and folded forward, first to his knees and then onto his face, still clutching the Henry. The handle of a knife twanged between his shoulder blades.

  North was busy reloading. Fulwider whirled to see Dick Lightfoot, who had hurled the knife, hastily poking a new cartridge into the single-shot Sharps. The journalist lunged and tore his Remington free of his bedroll, yanking the trigger even as Lightfoot raised the carbine. He missed, but the bullet whining past the half-breed's ear threw off his aim and he fired high over Fulwider's head.

  The wolfer shouldered his Ballard, but Lightfoot's paint was close by—he got a leg up and was over the ridge in a flurry of hoofs and snow. North's bullet tore off his hat just as he dropped from sight.

  Blue smoke crawled across the suddenly still field of battle. Sam Fire Eye lay on his back in the snow, arms at his sides and spread slightly, his pale shirtfront mottled red where the coat was unbuttoned. His derby was tilted over his forehead at a rakish angle. Six feet away, Dale Crippen was stretched motionless across his rifle, scarlet seepage glistening around the hilt of the knife in his back.

  Fulwider knelt beside him and turned the foreman's head gently so that he could place his ear next to his friend's lips. After a moment of intense listening, he picked up a very faint whisper of breath fluttering in and out. Gingerly he touched the knife's leatherbound handle.

  "Leave it in!"

  The journalist started and snatched up his rifle, only to relax when he recognized North standing over him. He hadn't heard him approaching.

  "Right now that blade's the only thing that's keeping him from bleeding to death," the wolfer explained.

  "What should we do?" Fulwider's throat felt constricted.

  "What we should do is leave him here. He ain't going to make it." He was breathing heavily. "Give me a hand with him."

  Getting Crippen's one hundred and seventy pounds of sinew over his horse's back without killing him in the process was the hardest work the man from New York had ever known. Wheezing and swaying under his half of the burden, he steadied the nervous beast with one hand while the wolfer heaved the limp body across the saddle. With a length of rope they secured his wrists and ankles beneath the mare's belly. North was setting the knot when Fulwider noticed a spreading stain on the wolfer's buckskin shirt near his ribs.

  "You're hit!"

  "Grazed by the Sharps. It's a scratch." He stepped away from the horse, staggered and almost fell.

  "Let me see."

  The other raised his shirt to reveal a crimson gash four inches long on his left side just above the belt. It had bled considerably.

  Fulwider told him to take off his wolfskin and shirt. When he obeyed, the journalist cleansed the wound with water from his canteen, fashioned a pad bandage from his own shirttail and anchored it in place with more gingham strips wound twice around the wolfer's abdomen with a loop over his shoulder to keep them from slipping. North flinched when the blood was sponged off but didn't cry out.

  While his partner dressed, the man from New York removed the bundles from his and Crippen's pack horses, discarded them and turned the animals loose, keeping only North's black, whose reins he wrapped around the horn of his own saddle. North nodded in weak approval. The extra responsibility would only slow them down, and they wouldn't need as many supplies for the journey back anyway. From that point on, Fulwider was in charge.

  Chapter Nine

  In years to come he would remember the trek back to town as one of those nightmares that seem always to have reached their bleakest depth, then get worse. Because he was ignorant of the shorter route the half-breed had used, Fulwider was forced to return over the same ground while his trailwise partner, the blood soaking through his bandage and down his pants leg, floated on the edge of cooperation and expended most of his energy trying to remain upright in the saddle. In this manner the days and nights passed in a confusing blur of black and white without tally.

  They made it back to the trapper's shack without stopping except to remove the semiconscious Crippen from his horse when the pain grew too great and to eat and sleep in snatches while the horses rested. They built no fires, subsisting on squares of salt pork carved from North's meager stores and slaking their thirst with melted snow forced by the handful into their canteens. Fulwider was nearly lost when his gray missed its footing on the narrow ledge two hundred feet above the river, but the pack horse leaned back on its haunches and held the lead line taut until balance was achieved.

  "Next time lean out," barked North, enjoying a lucid moment. "When you lean in you throw his feet over the edge."

  In the shack, abandoned now and smelling of old hides, the journalist changed Crippen's bandage, a wad of gingham rudely stuffed into the wound once the knife had finally been removed. The wound was too clean. The foreman was bleeding internally, but there was nothing he or anyone else but a trained physician could do about it. Next he turned his attention to North's injury. He was concerned by the color of the puckered flesh around the gash, and used the wolfer's own blade to trim away the discolored fringe. Fulwider might have been alteri
ng his sleeve for all the reaction he got. They rested there two hours and were moving again before sunup.

  When North's bleeding had stopped he had shown signs of recovering from his weakness, but as they moved closer to the river his condition worsened. At first Fulwider put it down to exhaustion, and read little into the other's slumped posture that he didn't share. At length he halted to inquire after him, placing a hand on the roan's neck to check its movement. The wolfer immediately slid from his saddle. Fulwider caught him in both arms and with his last ounce of strength pushed him back into precarious balance astride the skittish mount. He then got down to examine him.

  He smelled the rotting flesh even before the wound was bared in all its ghastly putrescence. This was the first time he had encountered gangrene firsthand.

  This was a dilemma. In his research into the West he had come upon many tales in which festering wounds had been treated with searing knives or red-hot pokers, but in North's condition he wasn't at all sure that such a remedy wouldn't kill him from shock. In addition, the time consumed in building a fire, treating and rebandaging the wound could be fatal to Crippen, for whom each hour of delay was a fresh nail in his coffin. He had no choice but to keep moving and pray for the best.

  At the river, Fulwider turned loose the last pack horse and took Crippen across first aback the mare, leading it by the reins. Then he came back for North, whose hands he had lashed to the saddle horn to prevent his falling. He was too tired to return for the black and left it behind.

  The wolfer was babbling deliriously by the time they reached town long after nightfall. Over and over he repeated the name "Leah," and words in a guttural language that held no meaning for his partner even had he strength enough to listen. He dismounted in front of the steps that led up to the doctor's office over the general merchandise, where a crowd was gathering around the horses. His knees gave out then, and he sank as through water to the muddy surface of the street.

  "It's that journalist feller," announced a voice on the other side of a dream.

  "Who's that with him?" asked another.

  "Jesus Christ, it's Asa North!"

  "He's alive, I think."

  "They was hauling a dead man."

  "It looks like Dale Crippen!"

  Fulwider lost his purchase on reality at that point and plunged into a swirling void.

  Chapter Ten

  Following an inquest based on information supplied by R. G. Fulwider and sworn to in the presence of Sheriff Oscar Adamson, Dale Crippen was declared dead "of an injury inflicted upon him by a person known to this court" and buried with all due ceremony at Newcastle Ranch. Neither of the men who had accompanied him on his last hunt were in attendance, Fulwider suffering from exhaustion and consumptive relapse, Asa North recuperating from treatment for gangrene.

  Dr. Gedalia Earthman, a young practitioner of limited experience, had at first despaired of the wolfer's life. Immediately upon admitting him to his office he had worked swiftly to pare away the mortified flesh and cauterized the wound, but by then the poison had entered the patient's bloodstream. The doctor devoted most of his time to treating Fulwider, for whom there was far greater cause to hope, and waited for the inevitable.

  No one was more surprised than he when, on the fourth day of North's illness, the fever broke and he was heard to call for his clothes and rifle. Hours later he was pronounced on his way toward total recovery. Earthman had heard of nothing like it, and wrote to one of his former medical professors to inquire if he should present the facts in the form of a paper to a national journal.

  Meanwhile, North was held for observation until early April, when upon his return after delivering a baby out of town, the physician found the cot in his office deserted. Subsequent investigation revealed that the patient had settled his bill at the hotel and livery, collected his horse, purchased provisions enough for ten days' journey and vanished. Earthman found more money than was owed him stuffed into a beaker on his instrument shelf.

  The wolfing season was on the wane by this time, and after the first rush of homesteaders and cattlemen had plundered the stores of spring necessities, Rebellion sank back into its soporific routine. Fulwider spent much of that period convalescing in his hotel room under the care of kindly Mrs. Earthman. A pleasant plump lady of German extraction, she kept the door to the hallway decorously open during her visits, and though she knew precious little English she made the journalist's life a torment by reminding him how much he had given up when he swore off feminine companionship.

  His bleak mood didn't improve when a wire arrived from his editor in New York asking if he would mind sharing his experiences from beyond the grave with his many eager readers. Which churlish comment he took to mean that the World had grown weary of financing his stay without a single dispatch to show for its investment. Painfully, for his grief over Crippen's loss hung like a great weight from his heart, he called for paper and ink and would have completed a draft of his experiences in the mountains in one day of fevered scribbling had not Frau Earthman forcibly removed the pen from his fingers and made him rest after six hours. Under her eagle eye he paced himself over the next two days and sealed the results in an envelope for her to send off via the next mail packet east.

  Three days later, he came awake with a start from a recurring nightmare in which he was both the man leading and the corpse draped over a nervous horse on a ledge hundreds of feet above a freezing river. Cold gray light sifted through the east window, making his surroundings seem less solid than the glaring white wall of the canyon from which reality had plucked him. He blinked around stupidly, then cast aside the heavy counterpane and padded barefoot in his nightshirt across the cold floor to peer out through the clouded glass.

  His first, irrational thought as he saw the dawn procession approaching was of the notorious western lynch mobs he had read about. But as the crowd drew near the hotel he saw the leaders and abandoned that impression. Two men in clothes of an indescribable filth were carrying the carcass of a wolf up the street, slung from a pole whose ends rested on their shoulders. His initial belief that it was Black Jack fled as the diffused light took on a hard edge and he recognized it as a female, with a blue-gray coat like fogged steel and all its teeth bared in a ghastly, unnatural grin that swayed upside-down with the movement of the dangling head. Its mammaries stood out dark through the thin growth on its underside. All four ankles had been pierced and lashed with thongs to the pole, which had been fashioned from a stout tree limb.

  The man in front, smeared like his partner from head to foot with blood and old entrails, was thick-waisted, heavy in the shoulders, and had ugly features under a battered slouch hat. His partner was younger, not as stout, and though he wore a yellow walrus moustache the family resemblance was clear. With a shock the journalist recognized them as the pair North had confronted in Bismarck the day Crippen and he had stopped there. Aaron, the heavy one, appeared to have recovered quite nicely from his knife wound.

  They were abreast of the hotel when Oscar Adamson, a fat Swede wearing a hammered brass star on a canvas coat buttoned only at the neck, pried his way through the press of curiosity seekers with a sawed-off shotgun. His clean-shaven face was the color of raw horse meat, a delicacy back east during the Panic of 1873.

  "Stemmer, what in hell do you think you are doing?" He placed his bulk squarely in front of the leader. "Do you want me to haul you in for disturbing the peace?"

  Aaron grinned wickedly and stepped around him. The crowd surged past the stolid figure of the sheriff, leaving him standing foolishly in the middle of the street with his shotgun nuzzling the ground.

  Stopping before the Assiniboin, the men bearing the limb and its burden heaved it away in one smooth motion. The carcass, stiff as a rocking horse, plopped into the mud next to the porch and toppled halfway over onto its back. Some of the people watching stepped backward nervously, as if the beast might yet find life enough to snap at them.

  "Got your knife and fork ready, Meredith?" A
aron challenged, shouting at the top of his lungs. He was staring up at Fulwider's floor.

  The journalist threw up the sash. Leaning out, he saw the rancher seated half on a sill two windows down. The Englishman was fully dressed in a dark gray suit that clung to his square frame the way the foil wrapper fit the cigar he was industriously peeling.

  "What are you babbling about now, Stemmer?" He struck a match on the scaled paint of the window casing and held it beneath the cigar, revolving the latter as he did so to ignite it evenly.

  "You don't crawl out of it that easy," replied the man in the street. "You told me on this here spot two months ago that if I ever bring in a bitch wolf weighing more than eighty pounds you'd eat it. I come to see you make good on the bet."

  "I see. You have weighed it, then?"

  Aaron favored him with his lopsided grin. "All right, if you got to have your nose rubbed in it I'll see you at Grierson's in five minutes. Bring salt and pepper."

  Meredith raised a hand and withdrew. A moment later the window came down with a dull thud.

  Dressing hurriedly, Fulwider was surprised to learn how much weight he had lost. He was forced to take his belt in three notches, and even then his trousers, tailored especially for his frame, bagged comically in the seat. He studied his reflection while shaving and wondered that he hadn't noticed how big his eyes were getting, or the way the bones stood out in his face.

  The entrance of the butcher's shop could only accommodate a fraction of the crowd. Fulwider was fortunate enough to obtain space near the doorway, but those who arrived behind him had to make do with the yellowed windows. Inside, the rank odor of death was a distinct personality, and reminded the journalist sadly of Asa North, who hadn't bothered to tell him goodbye before leaving.