The Smoky Years

by Alan Lemay

  One of Bill Roper's eyebrows flickered. His first thought was that Lasham himself had hired this girl to spy upon him.

  Y•"

  "Because you do," Marquita said.

  "You know who I am, then," he suggested.

  "Yes; I found that out." Her face was childlike and tired, but behind its resignation a certain intensity burned.

  Roper dropped his eyes to his game, but Marquita's slim hand shot out to grip one of his.

  "Listen," she insisted. "You have to listen to me. Walk Lasham's in town. He came in this afternoon."

  So, Roper thought, the time had come to move on again, with his work undone. He didn't like it, much.

  "Well, thanks," he said; "I'm glad to know."

  "He knows you're here and what you're here for."

  "I suppose he does," Roper said.

  "You're waiting here for Lasham," she accused him. "You know he'll come here. You're going to try shooting it out-"

  Roper shrugged and was silent.

  "Bill, it's hopeless! Walk Lasham is the fastest gunfighter in the north!"

  Roper shrugged again. "Walk wants no fight with me."

  "You're going to force the fight yourself! That's what you've been waiting here for, ever since you came to Miles City. Any moment Lasham may walk in that door-"

  "Well?"

  "You think I want to see you killed?"

  He turned to his cards, impatiently. "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you."

  "Can't anything ever turn you at all?"

  o.

  Marquita sat staring at him hopelessly, in her eyes a fixity of devotion which his taciturnity seemed to increase. Against his will he was becoming something that was happening to Marquita. There was enough untouched fire in that girl to burn a long time; perhaps it was already too late to end their curiously one-sided relationship here, or prevent its cropping up at other times, other places, with results that could not be foreseen.

  He remained silent; and, in a little while, she went away.

  An hour passed, while Roper, drinking slowly, played his solitaire and watched the door.

  Then suddenly Marquita was back. She came behind his chair to speak close to his ear in a panicky whisper. "He's coming! He's coming along the walk"

  "All right"

  "Walk has two of his men with him," she said rapidly. "You haven't a chance, not a ghost of a chance. I can't bear to see you killed! I know you don't care anything about me. If you did I'd go anywhere in the world with you. But now you have to come out of here-quick by the back way. I'll do anything-"

  Roper turned his head to look up into her face, very close to his. There was more to this girl than there was to the rest of her kind. Even now he was unable to recognize that Marquita was capable of a sincerity of purpose, and a passionate preoccupation in her purpose, not to be expected here. "I wouldn't step aside two feet," he told her, "to pass Walk or any man. I tell you, Walk won't fight!"

  "It's you I'm afraid of! You're the hardest"

  Suddenly she whimpered. Bill Roper saw that three men had come into the front of the Palace Bar.

  The first of the three, a dark, lean man with wide, bowed shoulders, was Walk Lasham.

  Marquita caught Bill's head in her arms, forced up his chin, and kissed him. He was surprised at the unexpected softness of her lips, hot against his mouth. Then abruptly Marquita stooped, and as she sprang away from him he felt the weight of his gunbelt ease. She flung over her shoulder, "It's for your own sake!" Her face was white, frightened.

  He half started up, in instant anger, but the girl was running down the room. He saw her put something under the bar, and he knew it was his gun.

  Roper rang his whiskey glass upon the table, trying to catch a bartender's eye. If Lasham had not seen what the girl had done, one of them could bring him his gun before it was too late. But the bar was thronged; the bartenders were working fast, in the thick of the evening rush.

  The bar-flies had made room for Walk Lasham at the end of the bar, and Lasham and his two cowboys had their heads together now, consulting.

  One of the cowboys, a man with a scar across his face that distorted his mouth in the manner of a hare lip, went quickly behind the bar, hunted beneath it, and returned to Walk. Roper saw Lasham's long face set. He said to himself, "Walk knows...."

  Walk Lasham was fiddling with his empty glass on the bar, and the scar-mouthed man was watching Roper covertly with one eye from under the brim of his hat. Lasham reached for a bottle, filled his glass, tossed it off. Then he turned squarely toward Roper, and came walking back through the big room.

  Roper played his cards, his hands visible upon the table. It seemed to take Lasham a long time to walk the length of the room. Roper glanced at the lookout chair, where a salaried gun-fighter usually sat. It was empty now.

  Walk Lasham was standing in front of him.

  "So you," he said, "are the tough gunman that killed Cleve Tanner."

  Bill Roper raised his eyes to Walk Lasham's face. "And you," he said, "are one of the dirty cowards that murdered Dusty King."

  Sparks jumped in Lasham's eyes, and instantly disappeared again.

  "And I suppose," Walk Lasham said, "it's in your mind to get me, one of these times?"

  "When I'm ready, I'll get you, all right."

  Lasham drew a deep breath and held it for a moment; the corners of his nostrils were white. "Well-I'm here."

  A hush had fallen upon the room, unbroken by the clink of a glass or the rattle of a chip. Lasham and Roper looked at each other through a moment of silence, while the bartenders stood immobile among their bottles, and men who feared they were in the line of fire moved out of the way, stepping softly.

  "Not ready, now?" Lasham said.

  "You'll know it when I am."

  "I happen to be ready now!"

  He dropped his eyes to Roper's hands, and his own right hand started a tentative movement toward the butt of his gun. His spread fingers shook a little as his hand crept down. But he was grinning now, sure of his ground.

  "Looks a little different to you now, huh?"

  "A coyote always looks like a coyote to me."

  The smile dropped from Lasham's face. "I'm going to give you every chance," he said. His voice swung in even rhythms, low and sing-song. "I'm going to count five. Draw and fire any time you want to; because on five I'm going to kill you where you sit."

  "I don't think you are."

  "One; two-" Lasham said.

  Roper scratched his left shoulder with his right hand; he was trying to reach the back of his chair with his finger tips, for he believed now that that was his only hope to buck the gun with the chair.

  "Three!"

  But now the scar-mouthed man spoke suddenly; from his position at one side he had dared flick his eyes to the door. "Walk, look out! Don't turn! Watch this buzzard, but wheel back and stand by me!"

  Into the front of the bar two men had come; they came striding back the length of the room; their spurs ringing brokenly. Roper did not see their guns come out. But suddenly the weapons of both of them appeared in their hands, smoothly and easily, from no place.

  The two men were Lee Harnish and Tex Long.

  Tex Long's .45 clicked in the palm of his hand as it came to full cock. He said, "Howdy, Bill. A spic girl just brought us word. Dave Shannon and Hat Crick Tommy are up the street. And Dry Camp Pierce."

  "Jesus," Lee Harnish said, "we've been hunting you for two months! You want us to blast these Indians, boss?"

  Bill Roper drew a deep breath, and grinned. At first he could not even appreciate that here, at last, were the leaders he needed for his great raid. All he could think of was that he had been reprieved from certain death; and he knew that life was good.

  'HE tribute implied by the re-gathering of the wild bunch leaders was one of the most extraordinary things that had ever happened in Bill Roper's life. There was not much to their story. Driven out of Texas on the eve of Bill Roper's victory, for a whil
e they had gone their separate ways. But gradually they had drifted together again, in the Indian nations, at Dodge, in the northern cow camps. With Cleve Tanner broken in Texas, and the roots cut from under Ben Thorpe's organization by the loss of his breeding grounds, the outlaw riders found themselves unwilling to leave their work unfinished. So at last they had come looking for Roper and had found him.

  None of them had much to say. "A couple of us ain't doing anything right now," Lee Harnish said casually. "We figured maybe you could get us some sewing to do."

  With these men Roper had busted the toughest organization in Texas 5 there was a bare chance that with them he could accomplish the impossible again, this time in the north.

  "Yeah," he said, keeping to himself the stir of warlike triumph their arrival had brought him. "Might be I could help you out! Can any of you boys ride a horse?"

  The first thing was to get them out of there. The open gathering in Miles City of the same outlawed riders who had smashed Cleve Tanner in Texas was a gauge of battle that Walk Lasham would be forced to take up. Roper was not ready for that; might not be ready for many weeks.

  He therefore named as rendezvous a lonely shanty on Fork Creek, and hazed his reunited wild bunch out of town by ones and twos, before Walk Lasham could get into action.

  Roper himself was the last to ride out of Miles City. Seasoned night riders though these men might be, with names now famous the length of the trail, most of them were youngsters still. No one of them could be trusted not to get a skinful of liquor, and go gunning for Lasham's men on his own hook.

  Roper was relieved, therefore, upon riding into the Fork Creek rendezvous in the dreary February twilight, to find his Texas men already waiting for him there. They were eating fresh beef, but not their own, as Roper came into the little cabin, stamping the snow off his boots.

  "Glad to see you're eating again," Roper said. "We've got to up-stakes, mighty soon."

  Lee Harnish looked sheepish. "Say, I forgot something. I got a letter for you here."

  Roper took the worn envelope and stood turn ing it over in his hands. The date showed it to be three weeks old-no great age, everything considered. But what took hold of him, so that for a full minute he dared not break the seal, was that the letter was from Jody Gordon.

  "Where where'd you get this?"

  "I got it off the Wells Fargo man at Sundance. You'd already come on here, when I was there."

  Roper ripped open the envelope; the weatherfaced riders in the little cabin ostentatiously avoided watching his face as he read. The whole note covered no more than half a page; but as he folded it and put it into a pocket, his hands were shaking in a way that would have cost him his life if he had been walking into a gunfight then. There was a long silence.

  "What you got figured, Bill?" Hat Crick Tommy was asking.

  With a visible effort, Roper pulled himself together. Briefly he told them what his new wild bunch had done.

  "But we haven't even scratched the surface," he finished. "Unless we hit Walk Lasham quick and hard, Thorpe will get his balance again, and reach his roots back into Texas; and all the work we did down there will go for nothing."

  "Me," Tex Long said, "I dm to swing with you, and try to finish up what we begun. But, way I see it, the layout up here is terrible bad, for our style of work."

  Dry Camp Pierce spoke for the first time. "Worst thing is, we've got no place to get rid of our stock, even if we lift it. If all those boys we had with us in Texas was here, we could run some bunches southeast to the railroad camps, and maybe try some drives down into Wyoming. But the way we're fixed"

  "There isn't any profit in the way I figured," Roper admitted. "I've been taking a pasear up along the Canadian border; I figure it's an easy drive. If you criminals are willing to come on and take one more crack at Thorpe and Lasham-"

  "There's no one beyond the border that's needing any stock," Dry Camp Pierce said gloomily.

  "Dry Camp," Bill Roper said, "I'm thinking of the tribes."

  There was a moment's silence. "Granting that Canada's full of war paint," Tex Long said; "how the devil-"

  "I've talked to Iron Dog."

  Every one of them, each in his own way, pricked up his ears at that. Iron Dog was a famous warrior chief of the Gros Ventre Sioux. Ragged and starving, his decimated band driven far out of their home country, Iron Dog no longer was the stubbornly resisting force which had once made his name. But though he was broken and helpless now, remnants of his leadership remained; his influence extended over many bands, and more than one tribe,

  "I don't hold with dealing with red niggers, much," Dave Shannon said,

  "These bucks are forced out of their ranges without any deal made whereby they get fed," Roper said. "Half of them are in as pitiful a state of starvation as you ever saw. A big part of the blame for that is on Walk Lasham. Now I aim to square the deal."

  "Starvation is good for Indians," Dry Camp said. "Makes 'em more pious."

  "I already made us a rendezvous with Iron Dog, before I knew you were in on this," Bill Roper told them now. "Inside of a month Iron Dog will be camped on the Milk River with anyway seven or eight bands."

  "Seven or eight bands!" Tex Long shouted at him. "My God, there'll be worse than a thousand Indians on the Milk!"

  "A thousand, hell!" Roper said. "If there aren't that many buck warriors alone, I'll eat the beef myself!"

  The men in this little cabin were not easily surprised, and less easily shocked or awed; but their usually unrevealing faces now gave them away.

  "God Almighty!" Dave Shannon said. It was almost a prayer.

  "He's done it now," Hat Crick Tommy said slowly. "You know what happens when you throw that many loose Indians together? You got a war on your hands, by God! They'll come whooping down Montana they'll tear the country wide open! The whole frontier will go up in a bust of smoke. Nothing'll ever stop 'em, once they get together like that!"

  "One thing will."

  "What will?"

  "Grub," said Roper.

  "That might be so," Dave Shannon admitted. "I never yet see an Indian go to war on a full stomach...."

  A tensity had come into that dark cabin; they were realizing now that they stood in the shadow of events of a magnitude they had not dreamed. In the quiet, Bill Roper's hands kept creasing and recreasing the letter from Jody Gordon. A faint dampness showed on his forehead, but his fingers acted cold and awkward.

  "There's five of us here," Tex Long said. "You expect us to just suddenly feed every Indian in creation?"

  "I've got twenty-seven riders waiting to throw in with us at the first word."

  "Twenty-seven riders? Where?"

  "All over Montana. What do you think I did all winter? Holed up like a she-bear, and had cubs?"

  Silence again, while they all studied Roper.

  "How many you figure to move?" Tex Long asked at last.

  Roper's voice was so low they could hardly hear his words. "Between twenty and thirty thousand head."

  Tex Long threw his hat against the roof poles in a gesture of complete impatience. "Dead of winter," he said; "maybe having to fight part of the time; why, thirty-forty cowboys couldn't drive-"

  "We don't have to handle this stock like fat beef," Roper reminded him. "We don't have to pull up for quicksand, or stampede losses, or high water. If a hundred head get swept down a river, what the hell? Some different Indians will get hold of 'em downstream. Working that way, hard and fast, thirty cowboys can move every head in Montana!"

  "We're terrible short of time," Tex Long said.

  "I know it; in another couple of months their chuck wagons will be heading out, and the deep grass will be full of their riders. We have to move and move quick."

  "What do they look like, these twenty-seven riders you got?"

  "Mainly cowhands-laid off for the winter. Every one of 'em hates Lasham's guts; none of 'em look for any pay."

  "It might be," Dry Camp Pierce declared himself, "it just could be
done." A hard gleam was com ing into the old rustler's wary eyes. "And if it can - great God! There's never been nothing like this!"

  The others seemed to have had the breath knocked out of them by the unheard-of scope, the bold daring, the headlong all-or-nothing character of the plan.

  "This is bigger than the Texas raids," Tex Long said wonderingly. "This is bigger than anything has ever been!"

  Suddenly Dave Shannon smacked his thigh with his huge hand. "By God, I believe it'll bust 'em!"

  Over the pack of outlawed youngsters had come a wave of that fanatic enthusiasm which sometimes sways men as they face the impossible, but Roper, strangely, was unable to share it. The great raid he had planned all winter now seemed futile - a plan senseless and cold.

  "Bill," said Lee Harnish, "what's the matter with you? You got chills and fever, or something?"

  Roper spoke to Harnish alone, as if he had forgotten the others. "That letter was from Jody Gordon," he said.

  "Bad news, son?"

  "I don't know. She wants me to come to Ogallala."

  "When?"

  "Now right away."

  "What for? Does she say?"

  "She says she needs me; she says she needs me bad, and right away. I guess she does, all right. If she didn't, I don't believe she'd ever write, to me."

  There was silence in the little cabin.

  "Bill," said Lee Harnish at last, "if you quit on us now-" He stopped.

  Dry Camp said, "You reckon something's happened to Lew Gordon?"

  "Looks like she'd say, if that was it."

  "Hell musta bust some place," Pierce said. "I know that girl; those people don't holler before they're hit."

  Roper lifted his eyes from the floor to look at the others. He had never dared to hope he would hear from Jody Gordon, of her own initiative. The piece of paper upon which she had written, the handwriting that was her own, seemed to bring her suddenly near and close, nearer than the cabin walls, nearer than his side-riders here in the room. She always had the ability to get inside his defenses, and break his heart with a glance or a word.