Yellowstone

by H. V. Elkin

  “Got room for all this?” Cutler asked.

  “Well, if I didn’t, I’d make room for a horse like that bay and two of the prettiest mules I’ve ever seen. You bet I got room. Name’s Horace Miller. Folks call me Gums.”

  Cutler smiled for the first time. “John Cutler.”

  “Cutler?” The man scratched his head. “John Cutler? Not the one who cleaned up the Boone gang.”

  “Folks make too much of that.” Cutler got down and out spanned the mules.

  “I can do that for you. Part of the service.”

  “These two like me to do it.”

  “Sure.” Gums understood. He was the right man for the job he had. “Want me to take care of the dog, too?”

  “Red takes care of himself.”

  The dog was still sitting on guard on the wagon seat.

  “Bet he does, too,” Gums said. “Bet he does at that.”

  “Red,” Cutler said, and the Airedale jumped to the ground. “Give me your hand,” he said to Gums.

  Gums held out his hand. Cutler took it and placed it on Red’s head.

  “Now he knows you’re okay with me. Scratch him behind the ears a little.”

  Gums did, and Red wagged his tail.

  Then the dog tensed and growled. Gums pulled his hand back quickly. “What happened?”

  “It ain’t you,” Cutler said, and he followed the dog’s look to spot the scar faced cowboy and another man approaching through the alley.

  “The big one with the scar’s called Hedge Bannister,” Gums said quietly out of the side of his mouth. “Other one’s George Hobson, runs a taxidermy here.” Gums acted as if he had a lot more to say about the two men, but they had come into earshot.

  “Maybe you didn’t hear my question back there,” Bannister told Cutler. “Gonna give you the benefit of a doubt, seein’ as you’re a stranger here.”

  Cutler said nothing and stared into the man’s eyes for the first warning of possible trouble.

  “I asked you what kind of dog that is.”

  The silence was broken by Gums, who had become nervous. “That there’s an Airedale, Hedge. Ain’t it, George?”

  The taxidermist shook his head. He was a small man in a derby hat, who dressed and looked like an undertaker. It was as if he had a habit of measuring everybody for wooden boxes. “Wouldn’t know,” he said. “Only know the bigger game.”

  “That right?” Bannister grinned at Cutler, but it wasn’t what you’d call a friendly look. “I said, that right?”

  “In a minute,” Cutler said, “you’re gonna want to do somethin’ foolish. Don’t.”

  Bannister pretended he was dismayed. “What on God’s green earth are you talkin’ about? You don’t seem too friendly to me. And after I went to all the trouble of findin’ out at the hardware where you were goin’. After I went and got George here so we could talk a little business. I just don’t get it. Do you, George?”

  “Lay off,” Hobson said. He was smarter than Bannister. “The man don’t want to talk to us. Let’s go.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Bannister said and looked as if he were squaring off.

  “One word to that funny-lookin’ dog,” Cutler said, “and you’ll be wearin’ your gun arm in a sling.”

  “Big man like you need a dog to fight for him?”

  “Hedge,” Gums cautioned, “this man is John Cutler.”

  “Well, I don’t care if he’s . . .” Bannister began, then broke off. “John Cutler? The one who . . .?”

  “Yes!” Gums said.

  “Oh, hell now, I’m sorry, Mr. Cutler. I woundn’t’ve made such a big thing about it if you’d been friendly enough to tell me who you was.”

  “Let’s go,” George repeated. “Mr. Cutler won’t be interested in our proposition.”

  “Not now he won’t,” Bannister said. “Might be later, after he’s had some Kentucky bourbon at the Silver Dollar. How about it, Cutler?”

  “We got work to do.”

  “Sure. Don’t want to get in your way none. Know how it is. Never lost a wife myself, but I can guess.”

  Cutler’s eyes went cold. “Stop right there. Not one more word out of you, or you won’t have to settle for the dog.”

  Bannister weighed the situation, decided Cutler always meant what he said, grinned again, then turned and walked out the alley with Hobson.

  “You ain’t seen the last of him,” Gums said.

  “Know that,” Cutler said.

  “He can be mighty ornery, Cutler.”

  “Call me John, Gums.”

  “He’s the type that . . .”

  “I know the type,” Cutler said. “There’s one of ’em in every town this side of the Mississippi.”

  “You faced him out. He can’t forget a thing like that.”

  “I can take him.”

  “He might get lucky.”

  “Yeah,” Cutler said. “I’m beginnin’ to think, one of these days, some kid like that’s gonna use me to make a name for himself.”

  “What’re you gonna do, John?”

  “Hell, Gums, what would any man do in a situation like this? I’m gonna get these mules in the stable.”

  The barber poured a bucket of hot water into the tub. “How’s that?” he asked. “Better than a creek,” Cutler said and stretched his large body as much as he could in the small tub. “You’re looking better already.”

  “You’re a good man with a razor.”

  “What about them clothes? Got a good Chinese laundry in town.”

  “Get yourself a ten-foot pole,” Cutler said.

  “Pick them clothes up by the end opposite you and carry them to the closest grass fire.”

  “They’re not that bad.”

  “I can smell them from here.”

  “Well, I’m not so delicate as to need a ten-foot pole or a grass fire neither.” The barber picked up the clothes and carried them out to the front room.

  Cutler reached over the tub and picked up the half-empty bottle of bourbon. He downed another eighth of it and settled back in the tub. It had been easier this time; he’d had some bourbon with him while he was on the trail. Usually, he was good for a couple of dry months when he was working. He never drank when he was working. Then the memories would return, and he needed a bottle or two to down them—almost as much as he needed a bath. No, more. A lot more.

  With his hair cut, his face shaved, and smelling of bay rum, Cutler walked in his new clothes through the swinging doors of the Silver Dollar. He was feeling almost human again, but he needed another drink. He walked up to the long bar, put one of his flat heeled boots on the rail, and ordered.

  “Want to check your gun?” the bartender asked.

  “What I want is your best Kentucky.”

  “We like our customers to check their guns.”

  “It’s all right, Sam,” a soft female voice with the trace of an English accent said. “Mr. Cutler knows how to hold his liquor.”

  Cutler turned and looked into the gray eyes of Iris Shannon, eyes that flashed tenderness and spunk in alternate messages that confused most men. Her black silk dress hid the ripe contours of her figure but not very well. It had probably come from Paris. She removed a hat shaped like a bird, and her flaxen blonde hair caught the rays of the electric lights. Her father had committed suicide after most of his cattle had frozen in the winter of ’86, and she had brought herself from the depths of bankruptcy to become the owner of four other saloons, all of them like this one. That is where her spunk came from. The many nights she had spent with John Cutler accounted for the tenderness in her voice.

  Cutler smiled. “I wasn’t sure you’d be here.”

  “It’s a little like roulette, isn’t it?” she asked. “I could have easily been in Tensleep, Casper, Thermopolis, or Laramie. But I happened to be in Cheyenne when John Cutler came to town. Do you believe in fate, John?”

  “I believe in you,” he said.

  “Maybe I’m your fate.” She spoke to the bartend
er: “Make it a bottle, Sam. The good stuff.”

  The bartender put a bottle of Kentucky on the bar with two shot glasses. Cutler took them to a table in the corner. He sat with his back to the corner. He had learned to do it when working as a federal marshal for Isaac Parker in Oklahoma. He had learned it the hard way, almost getting killed. Now he always sat where he could see the whole room, where nobody else could get behind him, especially in saloons. It had become a habit. He did it even in saloons where patrons were requested to check their guns. The problem with a policy like that was, even though it might avert trouble from cowhands who couldn’t hold their liquor, it disarmed people who might get shot by people who did not check their guns and were in the habit of shooting. The bartender usually had a club under the bar and knew how to use it, but a bullet went faster.

  Cutler never checked his gun because, even though the West was getting to be more civilized than in the old days, there were still some men around who regretted it and tried to return things to the way they used to be . . . like that scar faced cowboy, Hedge Bannister.

  Cutler filled the glasses. “I’ve already met some of your citizens.”

  Iris smiled. “Well, I know you’ve met the liveryman, Gums, and the barber.”

  “Fella they call Hedge.”

  Her smile faded. “Was George Hobson with him?”

  “That the taxidermist?”

  “That’s the one. John, what is it about you that attracts trouble?”

  “Think those two are trouble, do you?” Cutler downed his drink and poured another.

  “Hedge Bannister has a chip on his shoulder a mile high.”

  “What makes him so touchy?”

  She sipped her bourbon. “Maybe the fact he doesn’t have much to do anymore.”

  “Lots of cowboys are out of work these days.”

  “That’s no comfort to Hedge. He’s still fighting the Johnson County War.”

  Cutler nodded. It had happened just about the time when Doreen’s death had started his new career. It was an old story about cattlemen versus sheep men. The Johnson County war was probably the most famous of the lot. In the end, after a lot of blood had soaked the ground, the farmers and sheep men prevailed, and the days of the open range were over.

  “This Hedge,” Cutler said, “he was in on the war?”

  “Yes,” Iris said. “He was one of the men who got arrested and brought to Fort Russell. But you know what that was like.”

  Cutler knew. The cowboys who were caught and brought three-hundred miles south found little punishment at Fort Russell. Most of them had got off easy, and some of them had stayed on in Cheyenne.

  “Anyway,” Iris said, “the war’s his chip. Or perhaps it’s only an excuse for being nasty. Whatever the reason, the result is the same. I do my best to keep him out of here. But now and then he drinks in another saloon, then comes here after he doesn’t care what happens.”

  “How’s he pay for his drinks?”

  “Nobody knows for certain. Whatever it is, it probably isn’t an honest job. He’s often seen with George Hobson, and Hobson’s had a few brushes with the law himself. You’ll probably think he’s an worse than Hedge.”

  Cutler raised his eyebrows.

  “I think so,” she said. “Hobson’s made a living selling trophies to hunters.”

  “Bighorns?”

  “Yes.”

  Cutler shook his head. The magnificent but elusive bighorn sheep had been highly prized by hunters the last ten years, since Teddy Roosevelt—who was now working with the New York City police—had started the Boone and Crockette Club to promote manly sport with the rifle. The Club recorded the largest heads cut off dead sheep, which gave the hunters a record to beat. Some hunters were content to do their hunting at a taxidermist’s and pay for the prize heads they couldn’t capture any other way. The market was good. You might easily come across the headless rotting body of a bighorn in the mountains, food for carrion.

  “They make a good pair,” Cutler said. “Hobson and Hedge.”

  “A bad pair,” Iris corrected him.

  Cutler thought the country would be better off if conservation was practiced by having open season on hunters. Something like that should have happened before the railroad had brought the rifles that slaughtered the buffalo on the plains, and left them to rot with no more thought for them than for a whisky bottle shot in the air.

  The hunters who were to be named a protected species should be made to take lessons from the Indians to learn there were two reasons to kill an animal: to protect your own life and for use as food or clothing. That was the way the Shoshone used elk. They ate nearly all of the animal, including the brains and bone marrow. What they could not eat today, they preserved for tomorrow by drying and jerking it, even the tough neck meat. The sinews were used for thread, the entrails for casings, the bones for pack handles and saddle crosstrees. Hides were tanned for clothing.

  The white hunter had been known to kill an elk just so members of the Elk’s lodge, the B.P.O.E., would have teeth for their watch fobs.

  Cutler sighed and drank some more. When he was ready, he asked the big question.

  “I got word from you about a bear.”

  “Yes,” she said. ‘There was a man who came through Tensleep saying he’d seen your grizzly.”

  “What’s his name? Where can I find him?”

  “I’m sorry, John, he’s dead.”

  “Damn it!”

  “All I can tell you is, he said he saw the bear in the Big Horn Mountains somewhere, and that it seemed to be heading west.”

  “That bear could be anywhere now. Pick the place no bear would ever go at this time of year, and that’s where the silvertip could be.”

  She was silent. She knew when to be.

  “The man might not’ve even seen the bear at all. When an animal gets famous like I’ve made that one, folks want to see it. And they do. Hell, it’s been seen in two places thirty miles apart at the same time. Next thing, they’ll explain it by sayin’ the bear’s a ghost. Some people are crazier than that grizzly.” He sat still a long moment. When his thoughts came back, he lifted the bottle.

  Iris brought herself back into the picture by sliding her glass toward him. He looked up, then poured for both of them.

  “If the bear was a real one,” she said, “it could be in the Rockies by now.”

  “Wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t headed there to hole up for the winter.”

  “Winter’s coming. You can begin to feel it in the air..”

  “Come earlier in the mountains—and harder. Just the sort of place that rogue would go. Might not even hole up once it got there.” He drank. “But the Rockies is a big place.”

  “Well,” she said, “there might be some other excuse for you going there.” She drew an envelope from her dress and handed it to him. It was addressed to Cutler in care of Iris in Tensleep. It had come from Fort Yellowstone.

  Cutler started to open the envelope, but stopped when he saw Hedge Bannister enter the saloon. Iris tensed beside him.

  “Let Sam handle this,” she told Cutler.

  Cutler shook his head. “Sam would have to get mighty lucky.” He could see that Bannister, true to the pattern Irish had told him of, had been doing some heavy drinking in another saloon. He knew that Bannister had come into the Silver Dollar, where he was not welcome, because he had a score to settle with Cutler.

  “Iris,” Cutler said.

  “This isn’t like Tensleep,” she said. “I don’t have a door nearby with my rifle behind it.”

  “Don’t worry about that. You’ve never needed it before.”

  “There’s always a first time,” she said. Then she was sorry she had said it when she saw how it made his face darken. “I’m sorry, John.”

  “Just get out of the area,” he said.

  She nodded and saw him shift his weight in his chair, hitching his right leg forward, giving extra clearance to the butt of his holstered Colt. Cutler kept
his eyes on Bannister and did not glance at Iris as she moved to the far edge of the room. He could sense that others were moving with her. They had received a message: that trouble might be about to happen.

  Bannister was arguing with the bartender. Bannister was not going to leave until he was damned good and ready. He would rot in hell before he would turn his gun over to anybody. He wanted a drink right fast, and he was looking for a business acquaintance named John Cutler.

  The bartender poured a shot of redeye and nodded toward Cutler. Bannister picked up the glass and turned. It was not hard to spot Cutler sitting alone in the corner with no one closer to him than ten feet.

  Cutler’s left hand held a glass of whisky. His right hand was flat on the edge of the table. His eyes were on Bannister. Neither his hands nor his eyes moved even a fraction of an inch. He could have been a statue, except that he radiated a power you would not see in a stone. He was more like the lava that bubbled and grew under the surface of a volcano until it erupted and burned everything in its path. He could see that Bannister was worrying a little bit. Bannister downed his drink knowing he was going to need extra courage.

  Bannister asked the bartender to pour him another shot. He raised his glass in mocking salute and drank. Then he sauntered through the uninhabited clear space to Cutler’s table. It was obvious he was aware of the attention he was getting from the borders of the room. It was a dangerous situation, one Cutler knew well. This cowboy was mad at the world. Less of the kind of work he did was available, which gave him less reason to sit high on his horse and feel like a superior man. He had been on the losing end of the Johnson County war and was not the type who could accept defeat gracefully. That was bad enough, but what was worse was that this cowboy had already been faced down once by Cutler.

  “Howdy, Cutler,” Bannister said. “Where’s your dog?”

  It was a taunt. Cutler would not have answered it under ordinary circumstances. He might also have allowed the situation to run its natural course to a showdown. But in the back of his mind still lurked the thoughts of his own mortality, that each encounter of this kind brought him closer to what might be this last encounter, which might happen before he found his bear. Cutler decided to try to be friendly.