Black Hills (9781101559116)

by Thompson, Rod

  “Those are right nice-looking horses you got there. What’ll you take for them?”

  The man speaking was standing beside a gracious carriage with a finely matched team and a driver sitting high on the seat waiting for the word to leave. Having just disembarked, a word he had heard used in the process seeming to mean getting off the boat, Cormac was leading the horses and walking to stretch his legs.

  “No, thanks,” Cormac answered without slowing down. “Not for sale.”

  “Everything is for sale,” the man called. “Name your price.”

  “Not for sale,” Cormac reiterated.

  “Hey! Wait a minute. Let’s talk.”

  Cormac did not want to wait a minute and continued walking. He heard the carriage before he saw it pull past and stop, blocking his way.

  “Mister, I told you, these horses are not for sale. Now, would you please move your carriage so I can move along?”

  “Everything is for sale. Now name your price. I want to buy your horses, and I’m offering to pay your price. Now don’t be a dummkopf. Tell me how much I am going to have to pay.”

  As tall as Cormac, with about ten years on him, broad-shouldered and accustomed to getting his way, the man looked fit and capable.

  “Mister, look. This lop-eared gray horse belonged to my father. My father set store by this horse, and my father is dead now. This horse is not for sale for any amount of money. He and the grulla are friends, and she’s not for sale either.”

  Cormac turned to walk past him only to have the man grab his coat sleeves. “Look, Bucko. I’m not used to being put off. I make it a habit of getting what I want, and I want those horses.”

  Eye to eye, they stared silently at each other.

  “Well, you’re not going to get ’em,” Cormac said finally, yanking his arm free and turning to leave. The man would not be shaken and again grabbed his arm. Pulling Cormac back, he smashed him hard in the face, just missing his nose. Cormac fell backward and staggered to his feet, rubbing his cheek. He pulled back to swing a roundhouse to the side of the man’s head, but found himself instead on the ground again before he could swing. Cormac had no fighting experience; he had never been in a fight in his life. He kept getting up and getting knocked down, but he continued getting up anyway.

  Presently, he remembered a wrestling move his pa had taught him. As he once again regained an upright position, the man had become overconfident and swung again, expecting the same results. Cormac sidestepped and grabbed the man’s arm as it passed, turning to go with the punch and using his attacker’s own momentum, he threw him head-first into the side of a passing carriage. As the man staggered back toward Cormac, Cormac realized he might not get another opportunity and put everything he had into a punch that snapped the man’s head back and laid him out cold. Shaking his hand and flexing his fingers, he realized his thick mittens were pretty good for hitting.

  “When he wakes up, tell him the horses are not for sale,” Cormac told the driver, an old black man grinning from ear to ear as he climbed down from his seat.

  “Ya, suh, I surely will. May I shake ya hand, suh? I been hopin’ for that for a long time. He runs over everybody. Thank you, suh. Thank ya very much.”

  Cormac took his hand. “So this is civilization and that was a gentleman,” he answered. “Not the way my pa described it. I’d be obliged if you didn’t tell him which way I went.” Cormac didn’t want the episode to turn into gunplay, but there was not enough money in the world to buy those two horses.

  “No, suh, I won’t. Which way are you goin’?”

  Cormac considered lying, but thought better of it in favor of trusting the old black gentleman. “West,” he answered.

  “Ya, suh.” The old man beamed. “Thank you, suh, east it is.”

  Cormac smiled his thanks. “You’ll do, sir,” he told him. “You’ll do.”

  They left west out of town. Cormac had heard that traveling through the territory of the Omaha Indians was a risky business at best. It being so cold should keep them in their lodges, but they still had to hunt from time to time. He didn’t know what kind of Indians had been on the riverbank, but if they were out and about, so would others be.

  Winter lasted long that year, luckily, with no sign of Indians. Storms came and storms went with Cormac sharing caves or self-made shelters with Lop Ear and Horse, and moving slowly westward in between, not really bothered by the storms and sometimes playing in them. They spent one day camping on a plateau on the wind-protected side of a pretty valley just to watch it snow. He and the horses were accustomed to cold, sometimes going weeks without seeing another living person.

  On one occasion, supplies dwindling and snow-locked in a large cave, the three of them went without food for three days, other than a soup made with the last of Cormac’s flour and sugar water to put something in their stomachs. When they had food, they all ate, when they didn’t, they all went hungry. They shared. He found the horses loved the sugary mixture and would do anything to get it. Cormac suspected that them being hungry helped. Under those conditions, teaching them to come at a call or motion of a hand-sign happened easily enough.

  Next he taught them to kneel and lie down. By the time the storm let up, both horses would kneel at the “Kneel” command, or lie down on “Down.” While they were in that position, he took to crawling on them, over them, or beside them, using them for a pillow, or just lying on the cave floor in front of them while looking into their eyes and petting their heads. The last night in the cave, he slept between them for warmth. Sometimes he just talked to them about anything and everything, or nothing, and they heard more than they ever wanted to hear about women in general, redheaded women in particular.

  Later, he would change the kneel and down commands to “kneel, please,” and “lie down, please,” or for more fun, an offhand “oh, go lie down someplace,” which was much appreciated by whoever was watching when the command was actually carried out.

  They found their first green grass of spring peeking through melting snow around the base of a travel sign: an upward-pointing arrow-shaped sign indicating that Crow Creek Crossing was fifteen miles ahead. The words CROW CREEK CROSSING were lined-out and CAMP CHEYENNE was written in smaller letters. The word CAMP had later been also struck out, leaving simply CHEYENNE. Cormac allowed as how folks in them parts had trouble making up their minds. Cormac and company camped that night beside the sign, and after traveling a short distance the next morning, come across a train track going the same direction.

  “Ain’t that great, guys? Looks like we coulda been riding all this time, and didn’t even know it.” However, Cormac didn’t begrudge the time. Had they taken the train, he would have missed spending the time and training with Horse and Lop Ear. Their friendship had grown; it had been a fun few months.

  They followed the train track until it crossed a bridge made with railroad ties over an arroyo; the ties made it too difficult for the horses to walk across and necessary for them to ride a quarter mile to find a crossing. As they neared Cheyenne, they also neared the track again in time to see a Union Pacific train passing about fifty yards away.

  Not forgetting the last train they had seen, the horses started getting a case of restless. As the train neared, the engineer spotted them and blew the whistle. Cormac could see him laughing when the frightened horses began rearing and crow-hopping, wanting to run away. The engineer kept laughing and blowing his whistle. Cormac, tired of these engineers and their shenanigans, slid down from Lop Ear for solid footing and bounced three bullets off various places around the cab of the train. The laughing and the whistling stopped. The engineer no longer thought it funny and was yelling something as they pulled away. Cormac made a big show of pretend laughter. Idiot!

  Cormac was wishful of seeing a real city. Being only a few years old, Cheyenne was still one step above a railroad camp and of little interest. “Denver,” said the stable hostler when Cormac put up the horses, “is a few years older and thriving.”

&n
bsp; A pile of potatoes and gravy and three thick pieces of fresh bread filled Cormac’s stomach right up . . . mostly. A piece of pie and three cups of coffee took care of any corners that had been missed. Maybe Cheyenne was a glorified railroad camp, but they knew how to feed a hungry man. Next stop . . . Denver.

  “Four days, if you’re pokey and only make about twenty-five miles a day, three if you’re in a hurry and watch the sun rise and set from the saddle,” said the hostler when Cormac claimed the horses the next morning and asked how long it would take to ride to Denver.

  Four days later found Cormac riding Lop Ear into Smith’s Livery & Blacksmith Shop in Denver, Colorado, with Horse trotting freely alongside. Her not wanting to be anyplace where he and Lop Ear wasn’t made keeping her on a lead rope as pointless as it was for Lop Ear to be led when Cormac was riding Horse.

  Although Denver was more city-like than Pierre or Cheyenne, it didn’t quite live up to his expectations. There were the stables, churches, general mercantile stores, saloons, clothing stores, a blacksmith shop, a red-light district, and banks, just more of them, but they were all busy; he had to give ’em that. And there were a lot of people, all going and doing.

  A passerby said Denver was only about ten or twelve years old, give or take, but was growing by leaps and bounds, what with the railroad bringing in more people every day and all. People were buying and selling and investing, and money was being made.

  In answer to his question, one of the saloon’s three bartenders directed Cormac to the First National Bank on Fifteenth Street, while he drank his first beer ever. “The bank’s existence was pretty iffy,” said the bartender, “but they put a guy named Moffat in charge, and he’s turned it around. They got a safe now as big as a house they claim is impossible to break into, but nobody has tried nitro yet, so time will tell.”

  Cormac had been getting nervous about the money he was carrying since the incident with the horses in Omaha; six hundred dollars was a lot of money. He found the place easy enough and twenty minutes later he had a piece of paper stating that Cormac Lynch had a bank account with five hundred dollars he could withdraw upon demand. It felt pretty darned good. Now he just had to figure a way to start earning more before it ran out.

  Having no idea how to even go about looking for a job, he returned to the barkeep at the Trailhead Saloon and had his second beer ever. He could get to like this stuff, he thought. When Cormac had been in the first time, he had seen Chinese and Irish, Scandinavians, blacks, and whites, businessmen in suits, miners and farmers wearing the same bib overalls as he, cowboys and railroad workers and all dressed in more different styles of clothing than Cormac had ever before seen, most of them wearing guns, either out in the open or concealed about their person as he could tell from lumps under their clothes and pieces of guns protruding in various places.

  Some were standing at the bar, others leaning against upright columns; some tables had card games in progress, and still others had two, or three, or six people in serious discussions, likely conducting business of some sort. The saloon seemed to be the town meeting place. He figured if anybody knew of a job available, the barkeep would be the one to ask what was going on around town.

  According to Patch, the bartender, The Trailhead Saloon had once been only a tent at what had been the track end of the Denver & Santa Fe Railroad. The railroad had sold the site to Patch’s boss, Doc Mason, for a share of the action. The location turned out to be centrally located and an excellent place for a saloon, and as the city grew, so grew Trailhead’s business. Inside of five years, Doc Mason bought them out for an ungodly sum of money. The railroad didn’t want to let it go, but Doc Mason had been smart enough to get an option to buy out their share put in the contract.

  The barkeep was called Patch because of the patch on his left eye, which had been poked out in a fight as a kid. The other kid had been bigger and stronger, he said, and always picked on him. The barkeep told Cormac the eye-poke was deliberate and made him furious. He said he had whupped the bigger kid within an inch of his life, and only stopped when some people pulled him off. After that, he beat on him again anytime he seen him and could catch him, all the while knowing full well his own ole man was going to give him what for for doing it. The other kid’s family finally accepted nothing was going to make him quit and moved out of town.

  The patch put Cormac in mind of Baldy, the old swaybacked plow horse his pa had let him use when he was first learning to ride at five years old. With her being blind in her left eye and shy in her good right eye, Cormac, riding bareback, had learned to quickly grab a handful of mane to stay on top of her. Whenever anything moved unexpectedly on her right side, she was just naturally goin’ to shy left every time, and that’s just all there was to it.

  “Can ya use that hog leg?” the bartender wanted to know.

  “I do okay,” Cormac answered. “Why?”

  “Well, most stagecoaches got replaced by trains, riverboats, and the like, but Butterfield still makes a spanker run back and forth between here and Boulder and sometimes they pick up gold for the bank. The only way to get to Boulder is a horseback or the stage, and they need someone to ride shotgun. It pays mighty good—twenty-five dollars a trip, if you’re interested. Their local manager just left here so I know the job is still open. If you tell him I sent ya, he’ll probably hire you on the spot.”

  “What’s a spanker, and what’s it mean to ride shotgun?”

  “Boy! In those bib overalls and farmer shoes, I thought you looked like you just left the farm, but you really did, didn’t you?”

  Six rough-looking cowboy toughs had bellied up to the bar to stand with one foot on the rail, and stare impatiently at Patch. In a voice intended to intimidate, one of the toughs called, “You gonna wait on us or what?” He stared first at Patch, then at Cormac.

  Cormac met his gaze.

  Unperturbed, Patch ignored the tone of voice. “Hold your horses, friend. I’ll be there when I get there. Wait a minute while I wait on these tough guys before they have a fit,” he told Cormac.

  After serving Cormac another beer upon his return, Patch told him, “Riding topside on a stage is no picnic to begin with, but a spanker is a rough ride over rough roads.” The beer had Cormac beginning to feel more cheerful than he had been. “They have to make the trip up and back in one day. The road is rough, and the driver hits it hard. It’ll relocate your intestines for you.”

  He stepped away to give an amiable newcomer in new-looking duds a double shot of whiskey and came back.

  “Riding shotgun means you’re along for protection. Your job is to sit up on the seat beside the driver with a shotgun and keep the outlaws and road agents from holding up the stage. It’s a rough ride, and it’s dangerous; that’s why it pays so good.” Cormac ignored the tough who was still glaring at him and looking for trouble.

  “My object is to make some money,” Cormac said, feeling his beer. “I guess I can handle a little danger. Where’s the stage office?”

  Cormac drank the last of his beer and stared back at the tough. If he wanted trouble, he sure as hell came to the right place. One more beer and Cormac Lynch just might take it to him. But he opted against it and set out in search of a job.

  Patch was right and the Butterfield Stage Line manager, a plump, well-fed individual, did little more than ask his name after hearing Patch had sent him before giving him the job. After putting up Lop Ear and Horse in the Butterfield stable, Cormac took a room at Mrs. Colwell’s Board and Room, a freshly painted two-story house with a new roof, a new front door, and new furniture in the parlor; business must be good. Money was in evidence everywhere in the city of Denver, Colorado.

  The Butterfield hostler was doing his job; the next morning, Lop Ear and Horse were munching contentedly on a generous helping of grain in their feed bags. Cormac petted and talked to them for a few minutes before digging out and strapping the .44 long-barreled Colt on his left side and climbing up onto the stage carrying their double-ought-buck-loade
d double-barreled shotgun. He was loaded for bear, his pa woulda said. The driver looked at the Colt as Cormac settled down onto the seat beside him. “Can you hit anything with that thing?”

  “Nah! Probably not,” Cormac answered. “But just the seein’ of it should scare off the boogers.”

  In the event of his demise, he made out a paper to carry in his pocket tightly wrapped in oilcloth stating that the reader would receive fifty dollars from the First National Bank of Denver for notifying them of the event. Upon receipt of such news, the bank was to honor the reward from his funds and then have somebody go find Lainey Nayle in the Dakota Territory northeast of Pierre and give her whatever was left of his money, if she would take it. If not, they were to give it to the newly formed Red Cross of which he had recently heard. Lainey was also to be given the opportunity to buy his horses and other possessions for two hundred dollars from the deliverer. Failing that, they would become the possessions of the deliverer. It was signed: Cormac Lorton Lynch 1875. Slapping the long reins across the team’s rumps, the buckskin-clothed, grizzled old driver called Cactus spit out a strong stream of tobacco juice, wiped off his chin, and let out a war whoop that would wake the dead. The team laid into their harnesses with enthusiasm, taking them out of there on high.

  Cormac remembered the excitement he felt watching the stage as a kid, and now he was part of the action. At a time when many were content to make fifteen dollars a week, Cormac Lynch had a job making twenty-five dollars a day, three days a week. His life was off to a good start. Feeling the excitement, he couldn’t restrain the urge to yell and promptly did so . . . at the top of his lungs.