Dirk marveled. They pulled their drawknives along the trunks, peeling away bark. A single blow of an axe produced a shake for the roof. Dirk thought he saw one or two of the men who had found refuge at Reilly’s hog ranch, but he couldn’t be sure. These Métis wore woolen caps pulled tight over their jet hair, and it was hard to tell one from another.
“Therese, I will help,” he said.
She eyed him levelly. “I don’t want your help,” she said.
“I will help anyway.”
“You are not one of my people. You are not one of my faith.”
“I honor your people and I respect your faith.”
“You talk too much,” she said, and turned away.
Trouffant eyed him and shrugged.
The rattle and creak of the carriage changed everything. Harley Bain’s ebony vehicle rattled down the long grade from the west, pressing against the croups of his drays. It crept closer to the church site and finally turned in. Behind Bain rode a dozen cowboys, armored against the cold in chaps and heavy coats. And armored against the Métis with holstered revolvers and some scatter guns. At almost the same time, a similar crowd, but larger, marched out of Lewistown and up the grade. These were saloon men and merchants and town toughs, armed with pikes and crowbars and sledgehammers.
The Métis watched and kept right on toiling. The Métis bore no arms; the gathering mob was well armed. Dirk watched uneasily, scarcely knowing what to do. He had no weapon and knew that possessing one at that moment could be fatal. He could only wait and see, and maybe as a translator he could mediate. But even as Bain steered his shining black carriage close to the church, Dirk knew there was nothing he could do, nothing anyone could do. Whatever would happen would be entirely at the whim of the rancher in his black suit of clothes and gray coat and cream-colored hat.
The cowboys rode outward, forming a broad line on either side of the carriage, and simply waited as the city mob climbed the long grade.
But the moment came when the whole crowd had assembled, and at last the dozen or so Métis stood and waited.
“Good evening, madame,” Bain said, lifting his hat slightly and settling it again. “And you, Mr. Skye. Good evening.”
Dirk didn’t respond. Therese lifted her jaw, and let her blue shawl slide away from her smooth dark hair, and waited proudly.
Bain seemed almost apologetic. “I feel this is most unfortunate, madame, but you were told that you’re trespassing on my property. I have filed on it. You were told that your church doesn’t own it. So…” He smiled wanly. “You face eviction.”
“I was first,” she said in clear English.
Bain sighed. “It’s a pity,” he said. “Now you will kindly direct your illegal immigrants to vacate.”
“They would not even if I asked them.”
Indeed, the Métis stood rooted at their posts.
“It’s a pity, madame. Do think it over.”
Dirk watched the city mob spread wide. Some carried kerosene cans. The pikes and crowbars told him all he needed to know.
“Mr. Bain, if you have a dispute with her, then there are courts of law to settle it,” Dirk said.
Bain stared at him. “What business is it of yours, Skye?”
“I side with my wife.”
Bain was visibly startled. “Ah! Somehow that eluded me. My intelligence seems to be lacking. Is it so, madame?”
She stood icily, refusing to respond.
“So take it to court. The territory has justice courts to settle this,” Dirk said.
Bain sighed again and slowly shook his head. “One never gets proper justice in territorial courts, you know. A man sometimes has to defend what’s his.”
“Or what he steals,” Dirk said.
Bain nodded and stood up in his carriage. “Remove them,” he said. His cowboys swiftly lifted their revolvers and shotguns. Now there were a dozen black bores pointing at the Métis, and two or three more directed at Skye and Therese.
“Tell them to leave the premises, madame.”
“I will not.”
Dirk was certain Bain was bluffing. He would not command a massacre of unarmed people building a church.
The seconds ticked by, and nothing happened. The Métis stared into the bores, unmoving. The townsmen licked lips and waited, anticipating horror and blood in the earth.
Bain waited, while nothing at all happened. Then he pointed. “Get her,” he said.
Dirk saw two of Bain’s men head for Therese and piled toward them. Armand Trouffant did also, and between them they caught the oncoming cowboys in a bloody brawl. Therese fled backward, while the Métis gathered around her, their saws and axes in hand.
But in moments, additional cowboys pinioned him to the earth, and it was over. Trouffant knelt, a dozen hands holding him.
Bain stood over Dirk, smiling down. “You see? Your salary for me was to be life.”
Dirk hurt. Someone had kicked him in the ribs and bloodied his nose.
“Whose life?” Dirk said. “Yours or mine?”
Bain paused, registering that. “I’m glad you came clean, Skye. Know thine enemy is sound advice.”
He nodded, and the townsmen swarmed toward the construction, a swarm of wreckers who wasted no time prying up the floor joists, wrenching the squared foundation logs, smashing the rock footings. More of them poured kerosene over the works, drenching shakes and squared logs and planks, and then light flared, and flame leaped upward, licking the dressed wood, even as the mob tossed more and more planks and beams into the inferno.
The Métis watched silently, still guarding Therese with their lives, a wall between her and Bain and the spectators. Bain settled in his quilted carriage seat to watch. He seemed to be in no hurry. The thump of sledgehammers added to the crackle of the giant fire as Bain’s men bashed the rock foundation to bits and scattered the rock so it could never again be put to use there. The fire grew into a giant beacon that cast wavering light on the town a mile below.
No one moved. Bain was plainly going to watch until he was certain nothing could douse the fire or salvage so much as a twig. The Métis men stood sternly, axes in hand, ready to die for the woman they believed was sent from heaven. Now and then Bain eyed her, and eyed them, calculating whatever would come when the fire was beginning to die. The flames cast a ruddy and pleasant heat a great distance, warming Dirk as he lay on the ground, several cowboys keeping him there.
He wanted to rescue Therese. He had not forgotten the sinister threats the mayor had mouthed to him. But the reality was that he was helpless. He eyed the crowd and discovered a cowboy holding the rein of the buckskin.
Maybe he could bargain. He had no chips. He had no weapons. His wife, if she could be called that, was safe for the moment behind a stern wall of outnumbered and unarmed Métis. So far, no one had died. Bain probably preferred it that way. Deaths were messy. Deaths created inquests and investigations and sometimes indictments. That was the only bargaining chip Dirk had.
The crackle and thunder of the flames blotted out conversation. What had started in quietness now was a roar shooting hot sparks into the last of the twilight.
When at last the flames began to diminish, Bain stirred.
“Madame, you will leave this area at once.”
She stared stonily.
“If you do not leave, you will never see your husband again.”
She glanced briefly at Dirk, who was still pinioned on the ground. “I will rebuild my church,” she said. “This is where it will be. That is what I received.”
For once, the smooth Harley Bain seemed nonplused. He stared at her, and then at Dirk, and finally shrugged. “You have condemned your husband.”
“No, I have not. You have.”
“It is within your powers to save him, madame.”
“It is within your powers to release him.”
The odd thing for Dirk was that he sensed she had spared him his life. It didn’t make sense. But Harley Bain’s threat was now public; everyon
e in that mob fathomed it. And however powerful the rancher who dominated the whole Judith Basin was, he would not escape the law of the territory.
But now much still hung in the air. A dozen or so Métis, wielding little more than axes, stood firmly around a woman they regarded as something of a Madonna, and they would die for her if they must. There were men out in the mob with blood lust in their faces, men with shotguns and pikes.
Bain sat quietly, content to let events continue as they might. The flames withered, and the roar diminished. There was nothing left of the church and the wood intended for it but char and ash.
“I think winter will do the job,” Bain said.
He nodded. The cowboys released Dirk, who stood slowly. One gave him the reins of his horse.
“Scorched earth and Montana cold will do it every time,” Bain said. He lifted the lines and slapped them over the croups of his trotters. The ebony carriage wheeled away, climbing the long grade out of the Lewistown valley. Bain’s motley army of ranch hands and cowboys followed along behind.
The mob remained, the light playing across their faces. But then, slowly, something eased and it was over.
“Therese, I would be pleased to take you to your home,” Dirk said.
She didn’t object. Still surrounded by every Métis male, including Trouffant and his sons, she walked slowly away from the saloon men and their merchant friends, step by step, away from the firelight, through town, and finally to Trouffant’s wood yard.
She reached the cabin and turned to them. She walked from one man to the next, clasping the hands of each. “Thanks to you, we will continue. Thanks be to God. Thanks be to each of you. Tomorrow we will begin.”
She reached Dirk and peered up at him. “Thanks be to you,” she said. She clasped his hands.
Dirk looked at her, standing before him. “You are beautiful,” he said.
She turned swiftly away, and he could not see her face.
thirty
Dirk was filled with his aloneness. He made his way back to Reilly’s place, the only refuge he had at the moment. The weary buckskin carried him through darkness that matched the darkness within him.
Therese had softened a little, but what did it matter? He didn’t want her. He didn’t want a woman who calibrated her affections on some scale of loyalty to her people. He had wanted her because he loved her just as she was. She had doled out her favors based on whether he was sufficiently Métis to suit her. It would never work. He’d be better off forgetting her but that wasn’t possible. She was there, and always would be.
It was a somber night, but the darkness allowed him time to reflect on all this. Harley Bain and his gang of ranchers and cowboys were embarked on something akin to mass murder. It wasn’t called that. They didn’t shoot anyone, so far as Dirk knew. All they planned to do was drive the returning Métis out of their shacks and cabins, burn their every possession, and leave them in their nightclothes, barefoot, in a Montana winter.
Dirk found himself no longer in that half world of the half-breed, half white, half red, half European, half native. He had reached a moment as sacred as repeating an oath. As sacred as marriage vows. As honor-bound as a promise. Tomorrow he would borrow a pack animal from Reilly, if he could, and load it with emergency supplies, food and blankets and moccasins or leather to make them, and set out looking for the Métis victims of Bain’s extermination campaign. Maybe Dirk could save a few lives. There were scores of these mixed-blood Canadians filtering through the territory, maybe hundreds, wanting only one small corner of the world. They would encounter the night riders. He’d be lucky to save a dozen, somehow get them to Reilly’s place, or maybe Sylvestre’s, if indeed that family was still alive at their own homestead.
But then he thought of the futility of trying to rescue these people over a thousand square miles of land in the Judith country. They would be snow-covered, wolf-eaten corpses before he would happen on them. Tomorrow he would try something else. But what?
He knew he was dithering like some rustic Hamlet. Should he take up arms against a sea of trouble? Fight back against Bain, bullet for bullet? The idea was absurd. He was an unarmed schoolteacher. Those Métis who hadn’t been burned out of their huts and homes had a few ancient rifles barely suitable for hunting. They could not fill their stomachs, much less fight a war. War was an absurdity. In any case, Harley Bain and his allies commanded powerful private armies of ranch hands.
What could a teacher do? What weapons did Dirk Skye possess? How could he rescue these people from manslaughter? What chance did these refugees from persecution in Canada have here in the territory? Especially when they were mixed-bloods, whose crime was not being white men? Dirk mulled that as he steered the buckskin through the bleak dark, and it gradually came to him that he had some weapons, schoolteacher weapons. A pen, some paper, and a bottle of ink. The territory was well settled; even if the law ran thin in Lewistown, it was potent in the capital, Helena, and the burgeoning cities, such as Great Falls and Bozeman.
There was mail service in Lewistown, a thrice-weekly stage operated by Kinnear, from Fort Maginnis to Great Falls and points south. Dirk decided that on the next westbound stage some letters would be in the mail pouch. One would be to the territorial governor, Samuel Hauser; another to the federal marshal at Great Falls. And maybe he would write an additional letter to Major Brevoort at Fort Maginnis, urging a rescue mission to save lives, regardless of who and what were being rescued.
Those letters would describe the plight of the homeless Métis. They would describe Harley Bain’s removal policies in the Judith country. They would urge immediate relief, regardless of blood or citizenship. And he would send fair copies here and there. That was a schoolteacher’s response, but the pen could be mighty in its own right.
At last he felt the future open up to him. He was done playing Hamlet. Whatever his own fate, it would lie with the Métis he would try to rescue.
He rode quietly into the ranch yard and found a lamp still lit in the cabin. After caring for the horse, he entered and found it brimming with people, mostly lying everywhere in that fetid room. But Reilly was sitting bolt upright in his chair.
“I heard all about it,” Reilly said. “All you people do is get me into worse trouble.”
“Poor old Reilly,” Dirk said.
Reilly squinted, ready to snarl at him, but Dirk’s grin silenced him.
“You got paper and pen and ink?”
“What would I have that for, and why would I give it to you? I work my fingers to the bone, and you want everything in the cabin.”
“Do you or not?”
“Of course I don’t. What sort of idiot do ye take me for?”
“I’ll get them in town. And you can load up your wagon with food and blankets and shoe leather and go look for refugees.”
“Look for refugees! Why should I do that? I’ve got more than enough to ruin me.”
“When you got off the immigrant boat, who helped you?”
“I helped myself.”
“How did you come west?”
“They told me.”
“Who told you?”
“The bloody immigrant aid society.”
“And they got a rail ticket for you?”
Reilly stared. “I’ll load up my wagon and be off in the morning, damn your hide. Nothing but bad luck since you showed up. I can’t even talk their tongue.”
“I’ll suggest that one or two go with you.”
“I suppose you’re going to start teaching me their heathen tongue.”
“You’ll learn it. You’ll pick up some new words every time they smile at you.”
“Skye, you are a rogue.”
Dirk made his way to the newly wrought bunkhouse and knocked. He discovered astonishing brightness and warmth in what had been a shack.
“Monsieur Reilly will look for refugees tomorrow, and wishes the company of someone who can talk your tongue,” Dirk said.
“He is a man who steps down from heaven,�
� one of the Métis said.
And so it was agreed.
It took some time to find pen and ink and paper and envelope in Lewistown. Dirk got the paper and envelopes at the mercantile, but had little luck finding pen and ink until he walked into the butcher shop, where the post office operated, and borrowed the writing tools. Then he settled down and scratched a letter to Governor Hauser first, and wrote similar ones to the rest.
He assumed they wouldn’t know much, so he took his time to explain. The Métis were people arriving daily in the territory, driven out of Canada by Anglophone Canadians. They had settled in the Judith Basin in the 1870s. The newcomers driven out by the North-West Rebellion sought help there.
Dirk named no names. He didn’t want the letters to be accusatory. They were a plea for help. He did say that the ranchers accosted the newcomers, burned their possessions, left them in the winter cold, without clothing, tools, food, or shelter. Métis were dying from exposure and starvation, this was occurring on public land, and that the situation was catastrophic. Immediate aid was required to prevent further death.
He assumed the territorial officers would know exactly whom he was writing about. Whether they would come to the aid of half-bloods from across the border was the question. Maybe they would. Anyone with half a conscience would. But the territory was full of men who lacked even half a conscience when it came to mixed-blood people.
That was the best he could do. He blotted his letters, sealed them, addressed them, bought two-cent stamps, and mailed them. There would be letters to authorities in Helena, Great Falls, and Fort Maginnis. He stared at the brass slot where he had dropped the letters, returned the ink and pen and blotter, and headed into the wind. He had used a schoolteacher’s weapons. He had done what he could do alone; not what an army might do.
The First Dance Page 20
