Return of the Tall Man

by Clay Fisher

  This intelligence would, conceivably, make no least difference in either the personal plans or military preparations of Colonel McNair, but it salved Big Bat’s official honor, allowing him to march on north with his friends secure in mind as well as emotion. And, besides, he said, the army had not paid him his salary in sixteen months, and he was thinking of looking for other work regardless.

  Beyond Fort Defiance, but one serious situation remained. This was in striking and following down the San Juan River through the Jicarilla country of extreme northwest New Mexico Territory into southeast Utah Territory. They set out on this dangerous passage with earliest dusk of the fifth night, reaching the Rio Pajarito and the camp marked “Little Bird” on Joe Meeks’ map shortly before sunrise. They were then still in New Mexico, some twenty-five miles west of the main Jicarilla rancheria on Rio Plata. That day they saw three parties of Apaches but did not believe them to be on the search for them, as they had women and children along, as well as camp equipage on pack animals. That night, the sixth from Boulder Meadow, they struck for the Utah line. By dawn, driving hard, they had made forty miles and were fifteen miles past the Rio Marcos Fork of the San Juan, which on Meeks’ map marked the famed “Four Corners” of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico.

  One month to the day later, they were in Montana.

  33

  The Return of the Tall Man

  They had come through Wyoming on the same track Ben and Go-deen had traveled to, and away from, Wind River; this to let Amy see her homeland and to visit the good old chief of the main Shoshoni, Washakie. This latter move, an idea of Go-deen’s, was successful in its aim of letting the Indian-reared woman see her people once more and, most importantly, to get from the head of the tribe the advice which Go-deen felt Washakie would provide.

  The patriarch of the Wind River Shoshoni did not disappoint the breed’s canny expectation. He embraced Amy, treated her rescuers with every dignity and respect, including the provision of an escort of Snake warriors as far as Gallatin Valley and first civilization, the large, newly founded cattle ranch of Nathan Stark at the valley’s head. As well, he informed Amy of the death of her Horse Creek husband, Iron Eyes, giving Go-deen a poor moment until it was added that the brave had been found scalped on the trail, dead by an unknown hand. He also told of the recent cleaning out of Crowheart’s band by the cavalry from Fort McGraw, down on the Popo Agie, and the long-delayed trial and imprisonment of the renegade Horse Creek chief. So instructed, Amy realized she had no home to return to, and when Washakie gently told her it was her duty as a good Shoshoni to go with the white men to Montana and there find and live with her aged father, thus serving both the cause of peace between red man and white and the blood loyalty a proper daughter owed her sire, she agreed with an alacrity which was no small payment to the adventurers who had ridden and fought two thousand miles to bring her back to her own people.

  The only reservation to the glad, good feelings with which the white party started on north were on the part of Lame John. The Nez Percé still pined over Amy Johnston, who had not helped matters when, during the latter stages of the journey from New Mexico, she had begun dividing the “arrows in her glances” between him and Ben Allison. Previously, he had been able to nurse a good healthy case of envy and of noble, injured pride. When Amy began to include him in her continually increasing consciousness of her ability to attract male attention, he became confused and did not know what to substitute for the defense formerly provided by his wounded Nez Percé ego. To cap the bewilderment in his Indian mind, she also practiced a little admiration for the great bulk, bulging muscles, huge black beard, and brilliant white smile of Baptiste Pourier, whose Latin vulnerability to a tender look was frankly admitted in his ribald motto, “Cherchez la squaw.” In worrisome fact, the only one he did not have to watch was Frank Go-deen, who, having a woman of his own waiting up on Milk River—not to mention eight children, whom his friends had not learned of until revealed in a fit of melancholy induced by crossing into Montana—required no attention, save a generous helping of sympathy.

  So the friends, enjoying their various moods of elation, depression, relief, and confusion, came through the last mountain pass into the upper valley of the Gallatin River.

  Here, in long sight of the Stark Ranch, their Shoshoni escort said goodbye. Westward, through the low passes of the Beaverhead range, lay Madison River and Virginia City, only some thirty miles as the mountain crow flew. From the “ranch of the spotted cattle,” which they saw below them along the Gallatin, there was an easy trail that rounded the mountains northerly and came to Alder Gulch and Virginia City on a road that even wagons could travel. They had but to go to the ranch, the Shoshoni escort leader told them finally, and ask the way to the big settlement “where the gold was ripped from the stones.”

  With that, and with a shaking of hands all around, Washakie’s men turned their ponies and were gone back over the narrow trail to Wyoming and Wind River.

  Ben, a strangely mixed feeling of eagerness and foreboding arising within him, led the way down the steep flank of the canyon to the fertile meadows of the river. Somehow it hammered upon the closed door of his memory that he had been here before, had seen this place and knew it and not, either, from too long ago. The lush grasslands, the sweep and sparkle of the sunlit stream, even the red and white and multicolored specks of the long-horned Texas cattle grazing the deep forage, struck hard at the fetters of his mind. He was still frowning, still trying to let the remembrance free, to force it to come back to him, when his horse, unfamiliar with the wet northern mountains, lost its footing in a spring seep of mossy bedrock running across the trail. The fall was not a fatal one only because a warped cedar, growing from the canyon side, caught man and mount as they went over the edge. Ben recalled trying to get out of the saddle as the little Apache mustang twisted in midair, and that was all. He didn’t see the contorted cedar or feel the smashing impact with which he and the pony struck and hung on its rough-barked fang, four hundred feet above the rocky bed of the Gallatin.

  When Ben regained consciousness, a handsomely blond, big man was bending over him. Ben knew him at once.

  “Mr. Stark,” he muttered. Then, puzzled, “What the devil happened?”

  “Don’t you remember, Ben?” said Nathan Stark.

  “No. All I remember is me and Nella and the boy starting home to Texas from Virginia City. I was riding lead, and the road just went out from under me.”

  “You remember the road?”

  “Sure I do.” Ben sat up, fighting a momentary nausea induced by the fierce ache in his head. “It was the Virginia–Salt Lake stage road over Rotten Rock.”

  “They never found you,” said Stark, “or the money.”

  “The money!” said Ben. “Good Lord, I was packing ten thousand in a belt, wasn’t I?”

  Stark nodded. “Your split of the trail-herd profit, Ben. There was a snowslide that night. Took out a quarter-mile of the road and you with it. Nella and the others looked all night for you down below, but all they found was your drowned horse.” He paused, shaking his head. “We’ve all thought you dead these nine months.”

  “Nella!” said Ben suddenly. “Where’s Nella?”

  “She’s my wife, Ben. We were married when she was convinced you were gone. There’s a child now.”

  “Just born?” said Ben.

  Again, Stark nodded, and Ben bowed his head.

  It was all in his mind now, clear as spring water. He and his young brother, Clint, killed by Sioux on the drive, had trail-bossed three thousand head of Texas cattle for Stark, bringing them all the way from Fort Worth to Virginia City and Gallatin Valley. Stark had insisted on giving him his full share of the herd’s huge profit when sold off in the beef-hungry mining camps of Alder Gulch. With the ten thousand, he had started home to Texas on a bitterly cold December night in 1866, almost a full year ago. Accompanying him had been his
two top trail hands, Chickasaw Billings and Waco Fentriss. Also in the party, his promised-to-be, green-eyed Nella Torneau, an adventuress who had come with Stark from Texas, only to fall in love with Ben on the long drive north. Now she was here with Stark again, his wife now and with a baby to seal it. It was a hard way to go that Nathan Stark had just handed Ben, and thinking of it, his lean head moved uncertainly.

  “There’s more,” said Stark quietly and reminded him of the dangerous trail he had just ridden to bring Amy Geneva Johnston back to Montana. “Very plainly,” he concluded, “you’ve bought yourself a new life that will not fit into the old one. You are going to have to begin all over again, the same as myself. I want to wish you luck, Ben, on any trail you take from here.”

  He paused, smiling, as Ben gingerly fingered his bandaged head. “Your friends brought you in to the ranch early this morning, sacked over the spine of a china-eyed mule. Said your horse had gone over the edge up yonder, and you’d taken a bad spill. You remember any of that now?”

  “Yes, sir.” Ben grinned painfully. “It’s beginning to shape up some. I must have took a hell of a belt. Here I been nine months gone, clean down to Texas and New Mexico, and it don’t seem ten minutes since you and me settled up in Virginia City.”

  Stark nodded wordlessly to this, adding abruptly that his old friends Chickasaw and Waco were still on the ranch payroll and would take him over to Nameless Creek with the Amy Johnston girl when he felt up to the effort. Stark himself would have taken him, but he had other and personal business which would not allow him to leave just then. When he came to this latter statement, Ben noted the stiffening of his blunt-chinned face and asked quietly:

  “You want I should go now, Mr. Stark? I feel all right.”

  Stark stared at him, hard-eyed.

  “You do what you like, Ben,” he said.

  “It’s Nella, isn’t it?” said Ben. “She ain’t here, and you want me to move on before she gets back.” He looked at the blond Montanan steadily. “I agree, Mr. Stark,” he said softly. “I better get along before she shows up.”

  “No, Ben,” said Nathan Stark, “that won’t be necessary. Nella’s not coming back.”

  The way he said it warned Ben, and he asked very quietly:

  “Where is she, Mr. Stark?”

  “In the next room,” said Nathan Stark and turned and went out the door, leaving Ben on the edge of the bed where he had been placed when brought in from the canyon trail. After a moment, he stood up. His head swam, and he had to grip the nearest upright of the four-poster. When he could, he walked across the room, following Stark through the door. Two steps into the long-walled living room, he stopped short.

  Stark stood near the stone fireplace looking down at the coffin placed upon two chairs in front of the hearth. He heard Ben enter and glanced up.

  “Do you want to see her?” he said.

  Ben shook his head mutely.

  “It happened two days ago,” said Stark. “It was the baby; she never got over it, never quit bleeding inside, the doctor said. She didn’t suffer. Just went weak and slipped away. The boy’s fine, normal and strong.”

  Ben bobbed his head, his feelings too complex for his straightforward mind to separate into meaningful differences or useful facts.

  “Well, Mr. Stark,” he said gently, “I’m glad you have the baby—your son—to remember his mother by. That’s somewhat, I reckon.”

  “No, Ben,” replied the still-faced rancher, “it isn’t. I don’t have a thing left but my love for her; not even her love for me. She never forgot you, Ben.”

  “But the baby—” Ben began.

  “The baby,” said Stark, “is yours, Ben. You have your son to remember his mother by. Nella told me that at the last.” He paused, sighed deeply. “I knew it anyway. A man feels a thing like that. But I’m glad she played it fair.”

  “She always played it fair, Mr. Stark,” said Ben, “the same as you.”

  Nathan Stark raised his eyes, a faint, constrained smile tightening his wide mouth.

  “And you, Ben,” he answered with acrid softness, “still see roses where ragweed grows alone.”

  The rest of it went swiftly to its destined end.

  Stark would not keep Ben’s child, though Ben believed he should. There was a bitterness in the big Montanan, however, which would not down. He could see only that Ben was the boy’s natural father. Neither did he appear to want the baby around to remind him of the woman he had loved and lost. That same night Ben and his friends, declining the guidance and company of the cowboys Chickasaw and Waco, left the Stark ranch with the child.

  By the wagon road skirting the Beaverhead Forest, they came into Alder Gulch and Virginia City about midday of August 15, 1867.

  Amy Johnston created an immediate sensation, and Ben nearly came to the point of gunfighting before he could get her through the brawling, crooked streets of the mining community. Big Bat had physically to restrain Lame John to prevent the fierce Nez Percé from knifing several of the rude and suggestive men from the creeks who crowded in to eye the “white Injun” and to make their leering, raucous comments as to her obvious good looks and lithe figure. The travelers halted only long enough for Ben to purchase a decent outfit of settlement clothes for Amy, then pushed on rapidly out the Salt Lake stage road, away from the Gulch and its crude citizens. The experience, however, had shaken up the Shoshoni-reared woman, and she rode now stirrup to stirrup with Lame John, as though unconsciously seeking the Indian’s clean company in this unfamiliar, frightening, and disgusting world of the white man.

  At the foot of the Nameless Creek trail, Ben ordered a halt while he instructed Amy—from behind a screen of deadfall timber—in the secrets of getting into a white woman’s clothing. The instinct of the female for adornment being what it is, his help was largely wasted. Amy reappeared moments later to the applause of a company gasp and an unabashed round of whistling stares which had her blushing to the roots of her long blond hair. Even Malachi, following along in the rear with young Ben tied securely in an Indian cradleboard atop his pack load, gave her a good look and brayed three times; his equivalent of canonization or, as Ben grinningly put it, “Anyways, getting elected to congress.”

  The old mule’s bray served, also, to bring Chilkoot from his cabin and stumbling down the rough bank of the creek to meet them.

  “By God!” he cried, seeing Ben round the last turn into the cabin clearing. “I knowed it was you, boy; I could call the voice of that Madison Canyon canary just as far as you could hear a cannon shot on Appomattox Day. Malachi! You moth-eaten old sonofabi—” He had started toward the prodigal pack mule, arms spread to embrace his scrawny neck, when his dimming eyesight discovered Amy. He halted as though struck in the face. He turtled his neck, squinted, put his hand to his eyes to shade them. Then he stepped back, lips moving but no words issuing from them. He turned helplessly to Ben, and Ben nodded simply.

  “It’s her, old-timer.”

  After that, it was rough for a while. Chilkoot broke down and cried for half an hour. Amy couldn’t, or wouldn’t, take to the idea that he was her father. Go-deen got mad and quit translating. Ben nearly wore out his hands trying the sign talk, but it was no use. Finally, it was Lame John who stepped forward and asked her soberly, by hand sign, if this were the way a good Indian woman greeted her white father who loved her and who had sent Brother Ben to bring her to see him before he should die, never knowing that she lived or lay dead herself in some far, unfriendly place. At this, Amy hung her head, said something in Shoshoni, shyly reached out, and touched Chilkoot on the face and smiled. That did it.

  For the rest; it went as happily as such a thing should. The old man had just shot a deer two days before, and Go-deen now prepared a roast of venison banquet which lasted until nine o’clock that night. In the waiting upon and the eating of the feast, many things were settled which had seemed to Ben ins
oluble.

  The baby would stay with Amy Johnston, and Amy Johnston—all long looks at Ben Allison aside—would stay with John Lame Elk. In the last choice, she was what Frank Go-deen had first said she was those long months gone on Wind River. In Lame John, a Christian Indian who knew he must take the white man’s road, and who had vowed to take it before ever he met Amy Johnston, she had found the perfect mate for a woman who must meet and overcome the handicaps of her savage upbringing, as she sought to live and to rear her own children in a white world. With the grave and thoughtful Nez Percé youth, she could bridge the difficult chasm between settlement and reservation, and Ben, feeling that this was so and seeing, too, the shining light in the dark eyes of John Lame Elk, knew a depth of contentment which was to ride with him along many a lonely trail.

  The agreement was that Lame John and Amy would take Chilkoot with them to Lapwai and the Oregon-Idaho homeland of the Wallowa Nez Percés. The old man could stay and find work on the reservation, where he would have white company. Lame John and his blue-eyed woman would return to the people of Joseph, in the Valley of the Winding Water, Oregon’s lovely Wallowa Basin, there to resume the horse ranching which was Lame John’s life work. The ten thousand dollars, which was now legally Ben’s, would be taken half in trust for young Ben by Lame John and Amy and half to be invested in the horse ranch by way of what the lanky Texan called “a quarter-blood wedding present from your Comanche cousin.” There were arguments, of course, but to no gain. Ben wouldn’t have it any other way, he said, and his head was harder than any Indian’s who ever lived.

  Lame John conceded the point, and they shook hands for the last time.