The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King

by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt

  He left off when I would not answer and returned to his hammer and chisel.

  The culprits had six days on us. We packed our flat-bottom with supplies and warm bedding. My two cowpunchers were quick as cats, and I could rely on them in case of an ambush. But Red Finnegan was desperate now; he’d have shot out our eyes if he’d had half a chance. That was his calling card—a bullet hole where an eyeball had once been. But I had a feeling for the hunt; I meant to capture Finnegan alive. We had our woolen socks and our Winchesters, and we couldn’t have survived the cold currents without a fur coat.

  We shoved off downriver and took our seats, maneuvering with paddles, oars, and iron-shod poles. We had to respond to the violent twists in the current with an artful distribution of our weight and plunge after plunge of our poles, or we would have crashed into the sandstone cliffs. And while we bobbed on the river, leaning in one direction and then the other with all our might, we fell upon a calamity; some tepees were burning on one of the buttes. It was no deserted campsite—a Cheyenne village was on fire. The smoke swirled dark and thick in the north wind. Attuned as I was to birdcalls, I listened to the slightest human cry, the muffled whimper of a child. The fire crackled in its own deep silence.

  “Sewall,” I said to my steersman, “we have to stop.”

  Dennison answered for him. “The Stranglers wouldn’t leave any witnesses, sir. They kill completely by force of habit. And if we’re mired in the shoals, we’ll never repair the scow in time to catch Red Finnegan.”

  “We have to stop.”

  We escaped the shoals, and Sewall landed the flat-bottom near a solid wall of black ice. We scaled that wall with the help of our pickaxes and hobnailed boots. The sweet, sickly odor of burnt flesh was unbearable. We had to gird ourselves with neckerchief masks. We wore wet blankets to shield us from the relentless licks of fire as we wandered into the seared skeletal remains like ghoulish ragmen looking for some miraculous sign of life. The fire wasn’t nearly as treacherous as the plumes of black smoke that bit right into our lungs.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” Dennison muttered under his mask, “give it up, for God’s sake, give it up, before we perish in this conflagration.”

  Just as I was about to quit this charred plateau, a white man ventured out of the fire—with feathers, beads, blue eyes, and blond hair. He’d camouflaged himself, of course. He had black dye on his scalp and a mask of war paint. But the fire had melted off the mask and the dye. He still kept up the pretense, whimpering to us in Cheyenne. I’d dealt with these flimflam artists before, and it made little difference whether they were hiding in Manhattan or Dakota.

  “Son,” I said, “you have thirty seconds to explain yourself, or you’re going back into the fire, feet first.”

  His foolery ended right there. “That’s rather harsh,” he said in English as melodious as mine. “I thought you were with the Stranglers.”

  He referred to himself as Brother Bear, claimed he was married to the daughter of a Cheyenne chief, that he was as pious as a parson, and had been faithful to the tribe and his Cheyenne princess. But there was something too sly about that quilt of words he’d surrounded himself with.

  “I didn’t ask for your spirit name. Who are you?”

  Dennison recognized him under the leaky war paint. He was Black Jack McGraw, a pistolero, backstabber, and cardsharp who had a bounty on his head and had been hiding out among the Cheyenne. The Stranglers had attacked the camp, he said, swooping down with their torches and their Winchesters. They forced themselves upon the women and obliged the warriors to watch. Then they herded the tribe into several tepees, set the tepees on fire, and as the Cheyenne came running out, they ripped them to pieces with their rifles.

  I couldn’t imagine carnage worse than that. I wanted to shake Black Jack to pieces.

  “How did you manage to survive?”

  Black Jack didn’t flinch. He had the ice-cold blue eyes of a cardsharp. He was involved in the massacre. I was convinced of that. But I led him along on my own Strangler’s string.

  “Well?” I asked again.

  “I was hiding—in a dugout.”

  “And the Stranglers pranced right over your head. . . . What were the Cheyenne doing here on this bluff—during a blizzard?”

  “Where else could they winter, where else? They’re not reservation Indians. They’re hunters.”

  A hunter wouldn’t let himself be herded into a tepee with his women and children, and bear witness to his own immolation—a hunter would have clawed back until his last breath.

  “You son of a bitch, you steered Captain Albright to this camp.”

  “You can’t call me that, sir,” said this renegade white man. “That’s lethal business.”

  Son of a bitch wasn’t used lightly in the Badlands, not in a country of cows and horses, of thoroughbreds and half-breeds, of strict blood ties. Gunfighters had their own sense of gallantry, like half-mute knights with a poetics that belonged to them alone. But this outlaw had no claim to gallantry. He started to blubber.

  “Albright made me do it—he threatened me, Colonel.”

  Black Jack liked to heap titles onto a deputy sheriff with a stolen scow.

  “How much did he offer you to betray your own tribe?”

  “Five dollars,” said Black Jack. “But, hell, Colonel, I was biding my time, running from the law.”

  “And why didn’t the captain take you with him?” Dennison asked.

  “That’s silly, sir. I can’t run with the Stranglers. I got a price on my head.”

  We didn’t quite know what to do with this renegade. As deputy sheriff, I had the legal right to dispatch him on the spot, but I was no damn executioner like Captain Albright. I couldn’t murder Black Jack just like that, no matter what harm he had done.

  “Mr. Roosevelt,” Sewall said, “we can’t bring Blackie with us. He’ll slow us down. We’d have to watch him every minute. We’ll never catch up with Red Finnegan. And this whole campaign will be an exercise in futility, sir.”

  “We could leave him where we found him,” Dennison said.

  I wasn’t slow to answer. “He’ll die.”

  We had to carry the renegade down that wall of black ice, hoist him from hand to hand, since he didn’t have hobnailed boots, while we worried about falling blocks of ice and snow. We settled him in the scow, tied his hands and feet with leather strips, and poled downriver. The wind was fierce, and we had to navigate all the savage bends in the river, or spin out of control in a whirlpool of our creation. Blackie had a raucous laugh, as he mocked us, and it was hard to resist hurling him overboard. The poles would freeze near nightfall, and we had to make camp on some wooded point of land that wasn’t canopied in black ice. Sewall was our cook and our steersman, and he prepared a feast of coffee and bacon and flatbread. Black Jack was eating into our provisions, and the flour and bacon wouldn’t last. I didn’t have to guess what my little posse was thinking: Drown the son of a bitch, or leave him here on this spit of land.

  But I couldn’t become like the Stranglers, who were a horde of killer wolves on the prowl. We packed the renegade into the scow and pushed on. But he could have loosened the leather strips on his hands, and we couldn’t afford to stray, or he would steal our rifles and shoot us into the water. I hardly slept at all.

  “You won’t keep me here very long,” he sang, rocking in the scow. “I’ll catch you winking, I will.”

  But he never did. And on the sixth day of our journey, as we came around a precipitous bend, poling as hard as we could, we spotted my handsome blue boat, moored to the riverbank with Finnegan’s own battered flat-bottom. I worried that Blackie might whistle or shout to the culprits, and I warned him. “One word, one peep, and I’ll split you right down the middle like a pumpkin.”

  We tied my boat to the other two and slipped ashore. I could sniff the pungent odors of a campfire in the north wind. Then we heard a live crackle, and saw a wisp of smoke. I stripped off my fur coat and readied myself for battle with
the Red Finnegan gang.

  The old German half-wit was all by himself in the camp, with a Winchester nestled in his lap. His eyes went mean when he saw us. “I’ll kill every last one of you,” he cackled. He never had a chance to pull. I kicked the rifle off his lap with a hobnailed boot. He got down on his knees, in a bed of black ice.

  “Don’t hurt me, Sheriff. . . . ’T wasn’t me who wanted the boat. I came downriver to catch some fish.”

  “Old man,” Sewall said, “what kind of fish would you catch in this ice storm? A warm-weather whale?”

  The half-wit nodded his head. He didn’t have one particle of sense in his whiskey-raw eyes. He sat on a frozen log, playing cat’s cradle with an imaginary string. The half-wit had stripped off his mittens; his fingers flew with amazing agility, as he went from figure to figure, and for a moment I was caught in his spell.

  “Old man,” I barked in that biting cold, “put your mittens back on before your fingers fall off.”

  He obeyed, and sat there in meek resignation, his mittens idle now, dead objects in his lap. We didn’t ask him about Finnegan. He wasn’t capable of connecting one tale to another, and would only have lied. We heard the crack of a man singing, his voice like rifle shots in the glacial air, as he reveled in a bawdy song about bungholes, a harlot, and a cowpuncher with a live rattlesnake in his chaps.

  Charlotte the harlot ran afoul of the law . . .

  He was having such a good time, with his rifle slung on his shoulder and his bullet pouches bobbing up and down, that he walked right into camp, while we came out from behind a bank of black ice with our Winchesters cocked. “Hands up,” I shouted in that high pitch of mine, while Red Finnegan was half crazed with the will to fight, his pink eyes daring us. Still, he dropped his Winchester in disgust.

  “Hi ya, Blackie,” he said to the renegade, “are you part of this bunch?”

  “No, sir, Red, they corralled me while I was walking out of a fire.”

  “They’re always corralling folks, these Elkhorn people.”

  “It’s that damn colonel,” Blackie said.

  Red Finnegan did a white man’s war dance, hopping along the black ice with his hands still in the air, but he had to be a bit cautious with his gestures and his words; we were in the wilderness after a blizzard, and I could have repeated his specialty and shot out his eyes. He knew that. I didn’t have to bargain with him. He’d stolen a scow in the Badlands, and was as guilty as a horse thief. A deputy in the wild was also judge and executioner. So he berated Black Jack while he settled in with his hands in the air.

  “Roosevelt ain’t no colonel, you dummy,” he said. “He’s a literary fellah with a fat bankbook.”

  “Have ye read his other books?” Blackie asked.

  “What’s there to read? He writes about birds and battleships.”

  The bandits chuckled, but they weren’t bitter about it, not with rifles close enough to caress their hides. A back wind rose up, and we couldn’t break camp, not with three prisoners. Sewall and Dennison chopped away at some dead cottonwoods, while I stood guard with a duck gun that could have splattered all three of them in one pull, and pretty soon we had enough logs for a very long blaze. The cold was so sudden and so fierce, we couldn’t tie up our charges, or risk having their limbs freeze off. That would have been a sight—capturing a bunch of legless men. We buttoned them down in their bedclothes, but first we had them shuck off their boots. They couldn’t run very far in cactus country—the cactus spines would cripple them for life. We all had our beans and flatbread near the fire, sometimes sharing the same spoon. It was almost congenial. But Finnegan wouldn’t let off bragging.

  “If I’d had any show, Mr. Roosevelt, any show at all, you sure would have had a fight.”

  I wanted to keep him calm, so I nodded once, but Sewall was less kind.

  “Finnegan, save that tale for Charlotte the harlot. I’d have cut your ears off with Mr. R’s Bowie knife before you had a chance to pull on us.”

  “Hell,” Finnegan said, roostering under the bedclothes, “that damn knife is a piece of Manhattan furniture.”

  “Furniture or not,” Sewall told him, “it’s still fine enough to reshape your ears into a trophy.”

  Finnegan fell asleep after that, and he snored like an engine plagued with asthma. I was familiar with that strangled, staccato music. I lay there in the howling wind, with coyotes attracted to our fire. It must have soothed them against the cold. Their eyes were as red as hot magnets. The fire had put them in a trance. I could have stroked each one with my gloves. I almost did. But when they tried to gnaw into a flour sack, I chased them with a stick. These coyotes would have torn our arms off at the socket.

  We went back downriver in the morning, with the crazy old German and Blackie in Finnegan’s flat-bottom, equipped with one paddle, while Finnegan stayed with us in my blue boat. They couldn’t have gone far, couldn’t have escaped, in that winding river. And neither could we; the river was all buckled up in black ice. We had to pitch camp and reconnoiter a bit, dragged down by prisoners who would have murdered us in our sleep. We were hunters who couldn’t hunt; all the game was gone.

  We stumbled upon the very last outpost of a downriver ranch that rose out of the wilderness like a castle baked in mud. This mud castle was run by a ragged plainsman who had a prairie schooner for hire and two ornery bronco mares. This plainsman was curious why I would risk my own carcass catering to rattlers like Red Finnegan and his lot.

  “Hang them all,” he said. “You have that privilege, Deputy.” He squinted at me. “Tell me if you’re an Easterner?” And when I nodded, he looked askance.

  “That reduces the mystification of it. No deputy worth his salt would walk these skunks to jail. It’s forty-five miles to Dickinson, sir, on a road of black ice. That schooner will tip, and your captives will overwhelm you. They’ll roast you in their fire with a pinch of paprika—hang them, hang them now.”

  The prairie schooner came with a cowpoke who didn’t satisfy me much. He was a cattle drover from a distant ranch. And he seemed to have some acquaintance with Red Finnegan. But I didn’t have a choice—it was this drover, or none at all.

  Red was the real danger. I couldn’t trust him on a riverbed of black ice. He might drown us all in a mad rush to escape.

  So I said goodbye to Sewell and Dennison, who took the renegade cardsharp—that fake Cheyenne—and the old German and went back to the boats. They’d ply their way downriver with their poles and pickaxes and wait for the big spring thaw, while I was stuck with the job of delivering Red to jail.

  Dennison was suspicious of my whole enterprise. “Boss, that drover you have isn’t much of a saint. He needs watching.”

  I elected not to ride in the prairie schooner with Red Finnegan. My drover kept whispering to Red. I told him to cut it out. I walked behind the schooner. I couldn’t afford to sleep while standing in my hobnails, or I wouldn’t have woken up. I kept the Winchester cradled in my arms. That river-road of black ice soon turned to sludge, and I was mired in the black earth and blacker mist. At times I had to push the wagon on my own, while the drover sat there humming to himself. The broncos stopped in their tracks, and I had to play up to these mares, coo at them, caress their forelocks, comb their withers with a metal brush, or I couldn’t have gotten them to move out of that black mud.

  Red sat inside the schooner, whispering to himself, his pink eyes juggling in his head, as if he were planning some magical event. Red was waiting until I grew drowsy, until my Winchester spilled into the mud. I had to educate that whoreson as quick as I could. Dickinson was the nearest town with an elected sheriff and a legitimate jail, and we had miles and miles to go.

  “Red, I can kill you now—or later.”

  He guffawed with his rotten yellow teeth. “That ain’t your style, Mr. Roosevelt. You’re a gent who wears the Tiffany label.”

  I plowed a bullet into the prairie schooner. The rifle’s report woke the stillness with a muffled clap that was akin to
thunder. The broncos lurched, and the drover leapt high in his seat.

  Red’s toothy grin was gone. “You’re loco, Mr. Roosevelt, you really are.”

  “Then sit tight, Finnegan, and stay put.”

  I had to feed the son of a bitch every six hours or so. I served him beans from the stock of that downriver ranch. The drover had some hardtack. I fed the mares, scooped some water out of the pail, and let them lap at it from the hollowed-out gourd of my hand. The drover slept in his seat, clutching the reins. I didn’t sleep at all.

  I marched in the rain, sloughing through sludge that ran to the ankle. I spotted the first barn sparrow after the frost, welcomed its piercing chatter, reveling in its song. I knew I was a little safer now. I wouldn’t fall behind in my spiked shoes. Each birdcall would waken me out of my slumber.

  I could swear that other renegades were right behind me.

  —Four-Eyes.

  It was Captain Albright and his Stranglers. I couldn’t have been asleep, or I’d never have caught the crooked outline of his frying-pan face. That lunatic pressed his advantage. He was clutching Baby Lee.

  I hadn’t mentioned Little Alice once in my letters to Bamie. The Badlands had gobbled up her existence.

  —Captain, I said, you shouldn’t have murdered those Cheyenne and set fire to their camp.

  I couldn’t help noticing how comfortable he was with Baby Lee, how tender. She could have been the captain’s daughter.

  —Pshaw, he said, serves those hostiles right for wintering here.

  I’d written Bamie about everything—the blizzard, Red Finnegan, the black ice, my blue boat, the Cheyenne fire, everything but Baby Lee. And here she was in Albright’s arms, that lunatic with his missing nostril, his frostbitten cheek, the furrows in his crown where he’d been scalped. And then I realized that the baby in his arms didn’t have blond hair. He was clutching a papoose, a little girl in her swaddling board that he must have plucked right out of the fire. Why that one papoose?