by Peter Bowen
When we got close we ambled through a covey of scribblers and camp tenders and got off at the rope corral and stripped off our saddles and bridles and blankets and set them on the lodgepoles cut and hung for the purpose.
A young feller on a lathered horse come up the trail and I heard some shouting and saw a bunch of fingers pointed at me.
Lucretia. Something was wrong. I lassoed a big fresh horse and was pulling him to the side when the feller said Mrs. Kelly was ill and I should return right away. I threw my gear on that horse cursing the straps and rings and swung up and rode, unseeing, I didn’t know or care what I rode over or what might be follering behind me.
I took care the horse didn’t pull or break anything, but if the way was clear and the footing good I made the bastard stretch. He was about windblowed when I got to the hotel and I just slid off him and run inside. I was rushed down the main hall and through a couple sets of double doors where they had an infirmary, and a couple doctors were standing there looking grave.
One motioned me over to the far wall of the room.
“Mrs. Kelly has had a miscarriage and then a mild hemorrhage,” he said. “It is grave, but she has much improved. Please don’t excite her.”
She lay propped on several pillows to ease her breathing, but she opened her eyes when I parted the curtains and I leaned over and she put her arms around my neck and just cried for a time.
“I wanted a child so,” she said. “The odds were against it. But I wanted your child.”
She cried herself out and then she went to sleep, the dead sleep of the exhausted. I sat there watching her and thinking on how I was a bit old to be starting a family. I knew I’d give her anything she wanted, and now I couldn’t remember how it had been when I didn’t know her. She’d got into every corner of my life somehow. I’d wandered to her, and the sun came up inside me.
I got into the bed, snuggling close beside her. Her sweet breath touched my face.
There were a lot of places that I wanted to take her.
And the list would sure grow in the morning.
Kelly and the Three-Toed Horse
A Yellowstone Kelly Novel
Peter Bowen
For Russell Hope, horseman, eccentric, and autodidact, who is never, ever sarcastic ...
Contents
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CHAPTER 1
WE WAS ALL DRUNK that day.
After years of graft, corruption, chicanery, double-dealing, theft, death, and all them other exercises in basic American character the two mobs of thieves had finally met in Utah, and the railroad stretched from coast to coast.
“I’m so happy I don’t know whether to puke or go blind,” says 3-Card Thurman. He had gotten fairly rich from the fool laborers on the Union Pacific, whose callused fingers couldn’t feel his shaved decks of cards. 3-Card could gamble honest if he had to, and he only had to if some smart feller had an assistant stick a gun in his ear.
We was back a ways from the big party, around the spot where the two tracks met, what with all the nobs and speculators and politicians and journalists clubbed up close to where the Golden Spike was to be drove home. Me and 3-Card was on top of a water tower, and we could see good right down to the spot where Durant and Crocker was going to symbolically nail the nation together.
It was quite a ceremony.
After some speechifying, Durant staggered over to the tie that binds and a flunky handed him a sledge. He was grass-grabbin’ drunk, and he swung the sledge up, damn near busting the jaw of some scribbler, and he dropped the head wobbly-like and it hit the tie and bounced off and got a politician in the knee.
“This ain’t as bad as it could be,” I says to 3-Card. “A couple of ’em might die.”
A couple of Durant’s toadies lifted him off the ground he’d folded up on and one of ’em held the sledge up high and the other wrapped Durant’s fingers around the handle.
Durant hit the dirt and fell over, nose down on the rail.
He didn’t move, and the flunks lifted him up and a feller in rough honest workingman’s clothes drove the spike home. Durant’s head was lolling.
Then Charley Crocker of the Central Pacific lumbered forward to take his swings at the spike the sledgeman had set. Charley was so damn fat he couldn’t see the spike over his belly, and time he bent over far enough to tell where it was, he’d missed it again.
He did manage to get a lawyer’s foot, though, with his last swing.
“How the hell can you tell it’s a lawyer?” says 3-Card.
“He was tryin’ to pick Crocker’s pocket,” I says. “What else could he be?”
The lawyer’s foot was poorly for it. He was writhing on the ground and screaming.
Finally, Charley Crocker wore hisself out swinging, and he dropped the sledge and gasped and put a hand to his chest. I was hoping for him dropping dead, but after a few heaves he seemed fine, damn it, and he stood with Durant, while Durant’s flunks held him up, and photographers set off a lot of flash powder and everybody hurrahed, everybody near ’em, anyway. A lot of us on the outside had a different opinion.
“More riffraff,” says Blue Fox, a Cheyenne acquaintance who’d gone through Dartmouth College and didn’t think much of it. I sorta suspected he was the Indian who come up to one of General Grenville Dodge’s sentries three years before and asked in a plummy English accent for directions; it seemed his hunting party had got lost. The poor soldier got all helpful and ended up dead and scalped and all Dodge’s horses were stolen.
When I asked Blue Fox about that he got all horrified-looking and said he was desolate that I could think such a thing of him. Well, it was goddamned easy. The horse thieves had been Cheyennes and I purely couldn’t think of one of them had English good enough to pull that off, but ...
There was a boom toward the west, and a big cloud of smoke with timbers flying everywhere and I even saw a couple bodies flopping through the air. Some Irish lads had set off fireworks by way of celebration.
“Shit,” says 3-Card, “there’s that goddamned Luke Gooding. I will see you boys around,” and he slid down the timbers and rode off casual-like. Luke was a Federal Marshal, and if he wished to speak with 3-Card, it was a sure bet 3-Card would really not like to speak to him.
Luke was sort of not looking but looking and finally he seen me and he began to mosey over toward the water tower me and Blue Fox was on.
“As concerned citizens,” says Blue Fox, “perhaps we should have made a citizen’s arrest.”
“You ain’t a citizen,” I says to Blue Fox. “And besides, Luke is a good man and maybe he’ll just shoot you by way of the public good.”
I couldn’t help liking that Cheyenne son of a bitch. And I sure as hell couldn’t blame him for killing every soldier and track layer he could manage. This damn railroad meant the end of his people, and he knew it.
Luke was gettin’ closer, slipping through the crowd, never looking up. He went round the back of the water tower, to cut off escape, and I heard him cuss a little and then he cl
ambered up.
“I’d like to swear out a complaint,” says Blue Fox.
“I’ll goddamn bet you would,” says Luke. “Likely arrest and hang everybody here.”
“What a wonderful idea,” says Blue Fox.
“Kelly,” says Luke, keeping an eye on Blue Fox, “I know damn well you been with 3-Card. Now where is he?”
Luke was a good man, but not a real patient one, and if I hemmed and hawed, he’d throw me off the tower, see it improved my memory.
“Left when he seen you,” I says.
“3-Card cut a whore over to Rosie’s couple days ago,” says Luke, “for no more than laughin’ at his pecker.”
“CUT A WHORE!” me and Blue Fox bellers together.
This was one of them things just ain’t allowed out here. Whores is just as good as anybody else out here, and that is that.
“That bastard,” I says.
Blue Fox had stood up on the timber.
“Rosie’s is a good place,” he says.
Was, too. You come in, you take your bath and put on clean clothes, you go to the big parlor, pick your girl out, and go on upstairs. You behave. You don’t, Rosie’s bouncer, a four-hundred-pound Kraut named Wolf, beats hell out of you and then throws you out the third-floor window. A couple of drunk drummers pulled guns on him once, shot him five times. He smashed their heads together so damn hard Rosie had to put new wallpaper in the room, since the old wallpaper was covered in spatters of brains.
“Cut her and left her tied,” says Luke, “and sneaked off.”
“Didn’t know Luke had them habits,” says Blue Fox. This from a feller once slowly skinned a couple soldiers, for three days, while sixteen of us was bottled up in a blind canyon, just to make sure we didn’t sleep so good.
Us whites was just as bad, and you don’t hear the stories because we won, whatever that is.
“Well,” says Federal Marshal Luke Gooding, “I expect I’ll just have to go after him.”
“Stuff and nonsense,” says Blue Fox. “Kelly and me are headed that way. 3-Card’s a good cheat, but he ain’t what you’d call a plainsman.”
Christ on a stickhorse, here I was being volunteered to ride with one of the worst cutthroats I ever knew, and I knew plenty, after goddamned 3-Card. Still, cutting a whore was about as bad a thing as you could do out here.
“When you catch him,” says Luke, “arrest him and bring him to the nearest stop on the railroad.”
“Guaranteed,” says Blue Fox.
“I mean it,” says Luke.
“Of course you do,” says Blue Fox.
“This all right with you, Kelly?” says Luke.
“No,” I says, “but it’ll have to do.” I had business on toward Cheyenne, and Blue Fox would be a handy companion. He wouldn’t kill me because he was smart enough to know I might be of use to him some day.
“I got to go west a little,” says Luke. “Them damn Loper brothers robbed a train a hundred miles west. Thing ain’t even been built all the way through, and they’re at it.” And he slid down to the ground and went off to kill the Loper brothers. Thing about Luke was he hated paperwork, and it was a rare time when whoever he was after survived. I’d seen a report of his.
“Whun i fend hem he’s shotted,” it read.
Blue Fox and me was sober, maybe the only ones in the ten thousand or so celebrants all clustered around the Golden Spike. We got some grub on our way east and settled into a lope along the old trail. 3-Card would stay on it till he got over the mountains, at least.
We come on his tracks soon enough, and long before sundown we caught up to him. He was maybe a half mile ahead, bouncing along in the saddle like his ass was india rubber.
Blue Fox was riding along beside me easy as you please, and then I looked south for a moment—something had moved—and he tore the reins out of my hand and slipped the headstall off my horse just like that and spurred his horse and left me. Mine slowed down and looked at me, not knowing what to do.
I watched. Blue Fox held close down on his horse’s neck, and he come up behind 3-Card, and I saw his war club, a stone in a rawhide quirt, whirl up and come down. 3-Card threw his arms up and fell back, his skull smashed.
Blue Fox had tossed my headstall onto a greasewood bush. I got down and put it on my horse. Time I was back up Blue Fox was gone.
I rode past 3-Card, facedown, blood leaking from his head. His horse was rearing, scared bad, but the gelding calmed when I grabbed the reins. I got down and made a hackamore out of my rope and slipped off 3-Card’s saddle and left it by him and went on.
I needed a spare mount, and there wasn’t a thing I could do for 3-Card.
2
I GOT BACK FROM the trip to the East with Sitting Bull & Company* and what with one thing and another it was the middle of the fall before I found myself in Pignuts’ saloon, the sort of low-class place in which I have always felt most comfortable. Pignuts was a half-addled Rebel with a great white scar on his forehead, got, he claimed, at Ball’s Bluff. I suspected there was less to the story than he told, but the West was full of heroes of the War then, and it went on in drunken fights when the arguments about who was right got out of hand.
Pignuts had bought one of them three-story railroad cars the Union Pacific had made for bunkhouses for the gang laborers and after a little fine handiwork with an ax and a sledge and some spikes he opened for business. The bar was a slab from a cottonwood tree set on stacks of cracker boxes. Pignuts had a pal, some cracker from the swamps of Alabama, who made whiskey out of just about anything up Deadman’s Gulch. The house booze was piss yellow with an oily film on top and them as drank enough to get the horrors sometimes died. Pignuts had set up another smaller railroad car about a quarter mile back from his establishment for folks to stagger off to and maybe die in, and the local sheriff left him alone, having a lot of work in Laramie.
I bought a bottle and I carefully looked at the seals to make sure Pignuts hadn’t diluted my whiskey with his gopher poison, and they seemed all right.
Since I had last been here Pignuts had invested in decorations, I suppose to give a little class to the place, which was damn hard. He had the usual plump woman a-layin’ back on a red-velvet couch, draped just a little by filmy scarves, in a big fat gold frame, and decks of French postcards of women screwing donkeys and goats.
Right in the middle of the bar Pignuts had this glass case with a funny little skeleton in it, which try as I might I could not make into a critter that I knew. It was about the size of a spaniel and there was little pieces of yellow-brown rock stuck to the bones.
“What the hell is this?” I says to Pignuts. He had a walleye and it floated around a while before settling on me.
“Feller needed a drink bad, and he traded it to me,” said Pignuts. “I give him the drink and he sorta stiffened up and fell over dead. Too bad, he had another five comin’. Nobody knew him, so we buried him out back. Well-dressed feller, and he talked educated.”
Another black sheep sent here by a shamed family. The West was a great place to send the family drunk and claim they was ranching. Often they was all down to the telegraph station first of the month, waiting on the money they got paid to stay here.
“It has three toes there,” I says, looking at the front feet. “Damned if I know a critter we got has three toes.”
“Well,” says Pignuts, pouring himself a drink of my whiskey to hold his shakes back, “we got Sorefoot.”
Sorefoot was a feller who, havin’ drink taken, bet he could hit his own toes and he shot off four of them and felt no pain until he sobered up. That god-awful whiskey Pignuts sold would get a man so damn drunk you could shoot him in the brain and he wouldn’t die till he sobered up.
The West was a good place to have fun in, for sure.
A couple of cowboys was sleepin’ it off facedown on one of the tables by the wall. Their hats had come off and rolled to the floor. Flies buzzed and settled on them.
A quiet day in Pignuts’ Emporium.
“Luke Gooding was by asked where you was,” says Pignuts. “Said if I seen you, tell you it warn’t what he had in mind. I dunno about what.”
“Well, it warn’t what I had in mind neither,” I says, which was some true, though both me and Luke knew the moment that Blue Fox was more or less deputized 3-Card was dead. I suppose I could have done something about it, but 3-Card had cut the whore—it was worse than we knew, the whore was 3-Card’s sister and he had done it for the family honor, which is rich for a tinhorn gambler, and the whores especially at Rosie’s tended not to work long before marryin’ and there’s a lot of First Families of Wyoming would like me to keep my damn mouth shut so I will.
A couple shiftless Irish come in, muddy to the knees.
“We got your damn skeleton in the coffin out there,” says one of them, a broad short man with a coat so ragged I could see white skin in places.
Pignuts nodded and he walked round the bar and give them a little money and they left.
“Skeleton?” I says, wondering.
“Feller I got this varmint from was from a rich family back East and they offered a re-ward for the body, so I had them Paddys dig up some bones.”
“The right bones?” I says.
“Feller ain’t been in the ground long enough,” says Pignuts, “He’d be kinda ripe. Out of consideration for their feelin’s I thought some cleaner bones would do.”
Pignuts was a thoughtful man, and his kind heart shone through.
“How much you make on this?” I says.
“Thousand,” says Pignuts. “There’s a teamster on the way, haul the coffin down to Laramie.”
Someone come in, lifting the buffalo robe served Pignuts’ establishment for a door. He stood there blinking in the dim light a while and then he sauntered over to the bar and he looked at the skeleton in the glass case. He nodded.
“My good man,” says the dude, “I will pay a hundred dollars in gold for that.”
“I ain’t a good man,” says Pignuts. “I’ll take two.”
The dude nodded and fished some double eagles out of a purse and counted out ten.
“Case is extra,” says Pignuts. Nothing a bit bashful about him.
