Stamping Ground

by Loren D. Estleman

  When I raised my eyebrows he gestured with the flask in the direction of the baggage car, where Custer was barking up a storm.

  “Damn!” I plunked into the vacant space beside the marshal. “I got so used to his racket I forgot to turn him loose when the Indians left. Gus won’t stop now, not with several hundred tons of freight breathing down his neck.”

  “Shoot him when we get to Bismarck.”

  “I suppose we’ll have to.” I sighed.

  “What do you mean, we? I ain’t no dog killer!”

  We stared at each other. For no reason at all we burst out laughing. We hadn’t forgotten Pere Jac or Ep the fireman or Ghost Shirt and all our wasted efforts. It was just that after everything that had happened to us since we’d made this trip in the other direction, we had either to laugh or shoot each other, and we’d both done enough shooting to last us for a while. We roared until our sides ached, and for the next four hours we didn’t dare look at each other for fear of starting it all over again.

  The usual curiosity seekers were gathered on the platform in Bismarck as we eased into the station. I felt a pang, not of remorse at the end of a mission that should never have been undertaken in the first place, but for the trouble ahead. Curiously, my chief concern was for my partner. I wondered what would happen to him when Judge Flood learned we had failed to deliver his stepping-stone to the Congress. I got up, took down my carbine, and handed him the Spencer—his by inheritance.

  “We’ll let the local law take charge of the mongrel,” I told him. “Pick up our gear afterwards.”

  “Suits me.” He heaved himself to his feet. He really was a big man, six foot one and solid as two hundred and fifty pounds of salt pork. I let him go ahead of me down the aisle.

  I was behind him on the coach platform when something exploded and his chest was enveloped in smoke. I was forced to let go of the Winchester as he fell backward into my arms, losing his own rifle. Mine clattered on the railing and dropped through the slot between the cars before I could catch it.

  “You son of a bitch, this is for the fire.”

  I scarcely recognized the voice rising above the hubbub of panic-stricken spectators, because I’d heard it only once before. Dry and whispery, like sand sifting through a screen, it went with the man it belonged to, whom I placed right away. Sergeant Burdett, his shiny rain cape thrown open to expose his gun belt, stood alone in what was now a cleared space on the station platform, a heavy Army Colt smoking in his gloved right hand, its muzzle pointing at me. His good eye was cocked in my direction, its dead mate and the powder-burned cheek in shadow beneath the shiny black visor of his Yankee cap. He gave everything time to sink in before his finger tensed on the trigger.

  Senator Firestone chose that moment to come waddling along the station platform from the direction of his private car, leaning backward to balance the forward pull of his enormous belly. He’d just awakened. Pink scalp showed in patches where his hair stuck up in tousled spikes and his eyes were still puffed from sleep. He walked right up to Burdett as if he were approaching the Senate podium.

  “What do you think you’re doing, soldier?” he demanded in his trumpeting baritone. “You’re upsetting everything! Early, much too—”

  The Colt roared twice. I heard both slugs slap his great mound. He staggered backward, puffing and blowing through his whiskers, and sat down on a packing crate beside the station door. He died in that position, looking like a passenger who had fallen asleep waiting for the train. By that time Burdett had forgotten all about him, and swung the revolver back to me.

  I reached over and tore open the door of the baggage car. Eighty pounds of crazed animal bounded out through the opening, hesitated on the car’s platform for half a heartbeat, then leaped eight feet for the first uniform it saw. Surprise and fear kindled in the sergeant’s eye. He fired, blowing a hole through the bellowing monster, but not in time to stop its spring. The bellow soared to a shriek and it piled into its killer, bearing him down to the platform. Burdett’s own roar was nearly as bestial as he shoved the lifeless weight from his chest, but before he could raise his Colt, Hudspeth, propped up on his left elbow where he had fallen after the first shot, pumped six bullets from his Smith & Wesson into the sergeant’s heart as fast as the cylinder would turn.

  The sigh of steam exhaling from beneath the boiler was the loudest sound when the marshal reached inside his still-smoldering coat and drew out Colonel Locke’s steel flask. A thumb-sized hole was punched in it near the base.

  “Bastard,” he grumbled as he shook the last drops out of the aperture. Burdett’s bullet rattled inside. “Wish I could do it all over again.”

  Judge Blackthorne was in a foul mood when he came back from court. His false teeth were clamped so tight they creaked and his robes, cut for a man an inch taller, made an angry noise as the hem scuffed the floor. He didn’t look at me seated in the chair before his desk as he undid the cord behind his neck and spiked the sober black garment on its peg.

  “Rough session?” I asked.

  “Damn Philadelphia lawyers.” He shrugged into a shiny black coat with beaverskin facing on the lapels and sank heavily into the high-backed leather chair behind his desk, where he sat working his porcelains for some time in silence. Then he pounced.

  “Why in the name of sweet Jesus did it have to be Harold Firestone? Have you any idea how many friends that man had in the Congress? Have you any idea how hot they’ve been making things for me since the news got out?”

  “It wasn’t my choice. And stop acting like I’m the one who pulled the trigger. You got my report.” Written in our own special code, it had run to eleven pages and cost more to send out collect over the wire than I would have paid for two good horses, saddles included. His reply, not in code, had been much more brief and, I suspected, considerably toned down by cooler heads at Western Union. Now I went over it again, filling in the blank spots. The words came easily since I had repeated the story several times at the top of my lungs for Judge Flood’s benefit. Refusing to speak until we saw him had cost Hudspeth and me two hours in the Bismarck jail. Local law and the marshal had not gotten along for years. Following our report—received in stony silence—Hudspeth had bought a ticket on the next train to Fargo, where he planned to rent a horse and pay a visit to the métis camp to inform Pere Jac’s widow and family of their loss. Blackthorne listened with his short beard on his chest and his fingers laced across his spare middle. He was proud of that trim waistline, although he did nothing whatever to maintain it.

  “It fits with what I was told by the commanding officer at Fort Ransom,” he grunted, when I had finished. “The slant was different. That man doesn’t like you much.”

  “I got that impression.”

  “You know, of course, that the papers are calling the incident at the station a planned assassination.”

  “The papers are always good for an afternoon’s entertainment.”

  “In this case we’re encouraging it. It’s better for all concerned if the public thinks the killing of ex-Senator Firestone was carried out with malice aforethought by a demented army deserter. Which is technically correct. Sergeant Burdett had orders to return to camp if he was unable to prevent you from reaching the railroad. He went on alone after the others turned back.”

  “Except that it was Firestone who was demented, and that Burdett didn’t know him from Adam when he put him under. He just got in the way. He took one look at that uniform and thought it was one of his own toy soldiers jumping the whistle on his grand revolution. Where does that leave Hudspeth and me?”

  “Nowhere. Officially, you weren’t there. As the senator’s bodyguard, Andrew Locke was the one who shot the assassin. The earlier reports will be forgotten eventually for lack of substantiation.” He tried out his diabolic smile, but it wasn’t the same with his teeth in. “I’m sorry, Page, but there’s no glory in it for you this time. In the long run, though, it can only help your reputation to leave the public ignorant of your part
in the thing. It really was a wasted trip, with nothing to show for it.”

  Nothing but a pile of corpses, I thought. Aloud I said, “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  He shrugged. “Don’t apologize to me. I’m ahead of the game. I had a debt to pay and now it’s square. Now I don’t owe Abel Flood a damned thing, the hypocritical bastard.”

  “I wish you’d told me he was a hypocritical bastard before I left,” I snapped.

  “I figured you’d find out soon enough. Have you put in a voucher yet for that lost gun?”

  I patted the new Colt in my holster. “This will do until I find another Deane-Adams.”

  “Not much chance of that, here in Colt country. Where are you going?”

  I had gotten up and put on my hat, a new one to go with my first bath and shave in many days. “To get as close to dead drunk as my credit at the Belmont will take me.” I took a step toward the door.

  “No need for that.” He opened his bottom drawer and tossed me a full bottle of the expensive Bourbon he had shipped in quarterly by the case from Kentucky. I caught it in one hand.

  “Don’t turn cow eyes on me,” he snarled. “It’s coming out of your salary.”

  I said something a man doesn’t usually say to his boss and expect to remain employed, and left.

  Don’t look for anything like an ending to this, because no such thing exists, not in real life. Too many details overlap, and offshoots of one incident go on to weave themselves into something else that sprang out of something else before that, just as the Civil War never ended but went on in Mexico with much of the original cast. For me the Dakota episode was over. I don’t know about the others.

  Colonel Andrew Locke dropped out of sight after we had parted in Bismarck and I never heard from him again. If he found the upward mobility he was looking for when he left the army, it wasn’t in any profession that got headlines or I would have caught wind of it one way or another. I doubt that he stuck with what he’d been doing. There isn’t a lot of call for bodyguards who let their charges get killed, no matter what the papers said about their quickness on the trigger after the fact. The best guards never get their names in print.

  Speaking of names, Abel Flood’s didn’t appear on the ballot during the 1880 presidential election because he died on the bench late in ’79. He succumbed quietly to a stroke while court was in session, and all the parties involved with the case under consideration went on screaming and yelling the way they always did so he could hear them until someone noticed that he hadn’t moved or blinked for ten minutes. The next day the Bismarck Tribune devoted eight columns to his three decades of service and the territorial governor decreed that flags throughout Dakota be flown at half-mast for thirty days in his memory. A street was eventually named after him, then dropped in favor of another after local law enforcement reminded the mayor that every major cathouse in the city was located along the original.

  I was told by a friend that Major Quincy Harms had issued an order to place me under arrest the next time I entered Dakota following the death of Sergeant Burdett, but I don’t know that for certain because I never found reason to go back. In the winter of 1882 he and two of his officers were separated from the rest of the command by a sudden blizzard during a raid on a camp of renegade Sioux. His body and that of his adjutant were found in a cleft between two buttes after the spring thaw, but they never recovered the third, which led to some ugly rumors about the others that persist to this day.

  Whether he retired, quit, or was sacked, A. C. Hudspeth left Bismarck within a year of our adventure and rode for a time with a Wild West show operating out of Chicago. I know that because I saw his name on a poster in Rock Springs, Wyoming, while escorting a prisoner back to Helena for trial. According to the date on it I had missed him by a day. After that I scanned the newspapers fairly regularly in the hopes the show might come to my neighborhood, but I never heard of it again and it’s likely it folded along with the dozens of others that couldn’t hope to compete against a name like Buffalo Bill. Sometime around ’85, an old girlfriend who knew more about my past than I preferred wrote me from the home she was sharing with her new husband in St. Paul that a candidate named Hudspeth had just made a bid for public office there on a law and order ticket. That didn’t sound much like the marshal, unless he had caught the bug from his employer, but then I suppose if it weren’t contagious we wouldn’t have politicians at all. Whatever the case, he lost by a landslide. That must have been particularly hard to take for a man who didn’t like the taste of dregs.

  Everyone knows what happened to the Indians. The railroads resumed building the following year, settlers poured westward, and no man, primitive or otherwise, stands in the way of progress for long. Many Ponies, the Miniconjou chief who was more interested in pleasing his new squaw than fighting the white man, died doing both at what the official military histories would one day christen the Battle of the Missouri, while sharing a buffalo robe with his eighteen-year-old bride in their tipi. His fellow tribesman Tall Dog was captured and taken under heavy guard to Fort Abraham Lincoln, where, according to the report, he hanged himself in the guardhouse with a lace from one of his moccasins. Broken Jaw buried his dead in state on the west bank of the James and was leading his decimated band back to the Mormon stronghold when the reinforcement troops General Sherman had promised Fort Ransom fell upon them and cut them to pieces. In so doing, they lost three troopers to every brave. If you flip through a recent book entitled Conquest of the Frontier you’ll see a picture of Broken Jaw’s bullet-riddled corpse propped up on a door alongside those of two of his warriors, taken by a New York photographer while on a visit to the fort.

  And last month in Washington City, the Smithsonian Institution opened a new exhibit centered around a glass jar containing a gray something said to be a piece of Ghost Shirt’s brain.