Give-A-Damn Jones: A Novel of the West

by Bill Pronzini

  “He can’t on account of the libel laws,” I said. “He’s one of the few who believes it. Most folks think Tarbeaux hid or buried the money somewhere and that he’s come back to fetch it. The editorial probably won’t change their minds.”

  “Who does your father think stole the money?”

  “Rufus Cable. He’s the only one who could have. He was a hotel clerk at the time and for about a year afterward. Dad figures he bought the saddle shop with part of the stolen cash, but he couldn’t prove it and neither could anybody else. He—”

  Dad came in just then and I shut up quick. He tended to be grumpy and short-tempered on press days. This Thursday he was already scowling and snappy when he passed through the rail divider into the press room.

  He looked at Artemas and demanded, “What’s this I hear about an altercation between you and Elrod Patch in the Occidental last night?”

  “It wasn’t exactly an altercation, Mr. Satterlee.”

  “No? I was told you knocked him cold with a beer mug.”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I take a dim view of my employees brawling in public, Jones.”

  “I don’t make a habit of it. And I had cause.”

  “I was told that, too.”

  “Seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”

  “Yes, evidently you were justified,” Dad admitted. “Saved young Rheinmiller from a beating or worse.”

  This was all news to me and it had me wide-eyed. I wanted to ask Artemas why he hadn’t mentioned the incident to me, but maybe he wasn’t one to brag. Instead I asked, “Was Patch hurt bad?”

  “No. He was seen in his smithy this morning.”

  In a way that was a shame, Patch being a lout and a bully. But I knew Dad wouldn’t have liked me saying so, so I kept still. I vowed to ask Artemas when we were alone together again just what had happened last night. Any man who would stand up to Elrod Patch was a hero in my view.

  “Do you intend to write an account of the incident, Mr. Satterlee?”

  “It is my duty to report the news.”

  “Yes, sir,” Artemas said, “but it’s not much of a story. The layouts for this issue are all complete—we’d have to drop column inches and reset.”

  “And it would just make Patch madder than he already is,” I blurted.

  Dad narrowed his eyes at me. But he gave it some thought and then allowed that I was right. “There is nothing to be gained in provoking the man,” he said. “A brief mention in next week’s issue will suffice.”

  I went on spreading ink with a palette knife, moving the roller through it until it was full, then taking the roller to the press to ink the forms once Dad tightened down the quoins. It wouldn’t have been as difficult a job if the roller hadn’t been so worn at one end that we kept getting monks on the outside columns. Each time I had to reink and Dad had to fix a fresh sheet of paper to the marks in the tympan, snap the tympan down, and roll the form under the platen for another try. The monks got him so frustrated he started pulling harder than necessary on the elbow-shaped chill that slammed the platen down on the bed. Then when he let go of the lever and the platen jumped back up again, he had to roll the bed out, lift the printed sheet off the form, toss it aside, and replace it with another.

  Give-a-Damn Jones being there made the work easier than when it was just Dad and me. He had all the page forms finished and ready, except for having to reset part of the editorial. But setting type wasn’t all he did this day. Some typographers won’t do anything but set type; Jones wasn’t one of them. He helped wet down the newsprint in preparation for the run, carried the heavy finished forms to the Albion, showed Dad and me a little trick that helped get rid of the monks, and made a couple of adjustments on the old press that soon had it operating more smoothly than normal.

  We finished the press run early as a result. The four sheets looked fine, very clean for a change, with no typos or misplaced lines. Dad lost some of his grumpiness and allowed as how he was satisfied, an admission he seldom made and that for him amounted to high praise.

  I had the papers bundled and ready when the delivery boys, Spence and Pete Donovan, came in to pick them up. We closed shop and Dad and I went over to the Elite Café for a late, light midday meal. I invited Artemas to join us, but he begged off, saying he had some business to attend to. He winked at me as he said it—Dad’s back was turned. A kind of man-to-man wink that I took to mean his “business” involved a visit to Tillie Johnson’s parlor house behind the Free and Easy Saloon—a place I wasn’t supposed to know about but had since I was about twelve.

  “In the daytime?” I blurted.

  He laughed. “No law against it.”

  “No law against what?” Dad asked.

  I couldn’t think of an answer and I felt my face getting warm. Artemas saved me by saying, “Against a man wetting his whistle after a hard day’s work.”

  “I suppose not.” Dad wasn’t a teetotaler, but he didn’t believe in drinking alcohol of any kind until after nightfall. Or indulging in any other pleasures, likely, though he’d never spoken of such matters.

  I hid an embarrassed smile as I watched Artemas walk off toward the railroad depot. Dad would have been furious if he knew that I was more than a little envious of where I figured Give-a-Damn Jones was bound.

  COLONEL ELIJAH GREATHOUSE

  Mary Beth was saddling Southwind, her leopard-spotted Appaloosa, when I came into the stable. She was dressed in her riding habit, but she had on that silly little porkpie hat she favored instead of the Stetson she usually wore, and her hair was combed down long instead of braided and rolled.

  “Where you off to, girl?”

  “Just out for a ride. All my chores are done.”

  “Gone how long?”

  “I don’t know, a while. I may go into town.”

  “Stay away from Jim Tarbeaux,” I said.

  She turned as I spoke so I couldn’t see her face. Without saying anything, she slung her sidesaddle onto Southwind’s back, easy as a man would, and began cinching it tight.

  “You heard me, Mary Beth. Stay away from him.”

  “What makes you think Jim’s come back?”

  “One of the hands saw him in town yesterday. Kinch told me when I came home last night.”

  “I’m of age, Father. You can’t tell me what to do or whom I can see anymore.”

  “I can, by God, as long as you’re still living under my roof.”

  “Well, maybe I won’t be much longer.”

  I could feel my spine stiffen. “That better not mean you’re thinking of running off with him.”

  “You can’t stop me if I do.”

  “The devil I can’t. He’s a no-account thief, an ex-convict—”

  Mary Beth said in that half angry, half snotty way she had when she was defending Tarbeaux to me, “I’ll say it again for the hundredth time—he didn’t steal Tom Kendall’s money.”

  “It doesn’t matter whether he did or not. He’s still a jailbird. No daughter of mine is going to shame me by taking up with a jailbird!”

  “Shame you. That’s your real objection, isn’t it? Not that people will think badly of me, but that they’ll think worse of you than they already do.”

  “You watch your mouth, girl!”

  She didn’t say anything else. Just backed Southwind out of his stall, took hold of the reins and swung up to curl her leg around the saddle horn, then rode past me up the runway. Mad as I was, I couldn’t help feeling a cut of pride at the way she sat and rode, straight and easy and sure-handed. Not like Gloria, God rest her soul, who hadn’t cared for riding horseback and was clumsy whenever I talked her into it. Like a man born to the saddle. Like a soldier.

  Her mother had tried to make a pure lady out of her, and so had I for a time after Gloria died. She flat-out refused when I tried to send her back East for a year or two at one of those ladies’ finishing schools. Too high-spirited for her own good. Spent most of her time honing her tomboy tendenci
es—riding, roping, riding fence and helping with the branding, rifle shooting with a fair amount of accuracy. Well, if I couldn’t have the son I’d wanted for my heir, at least Mary Beth and whoever she married would be capable of running the Square G when I went to my reward. If she ever married. The girl had a doltish streak when it came to men, taking up with wrong ones like Tarbeaux and turning up her nose at the right ones who came courting.

  I watched her ride out of the ranch yard. On her way to see him, for sure. And for sure I was not about to let her throw her life away on that goddamned good-for-nothing jailbird. I hadn’t liked the cut of him when he’d been sparking her before the robbery; a wild and worthless range bum in the making. He hadn’t been good enough for Mary Beth then, and he sure as hell wasn’t good enough for her now. I’d put a stop to the fool romance then and I’d put a stop to it again now.

  One more aggravation in a week’s worth. The trip to Billings had been a waste of time, left a sour taste in my mouth. The goddamned bank had refused for the third time now to give me a loan, and the goddamned Prairie Cattle Company refused to increase the number of steers they were willing to buy this fall, mine and those owned by the other local ranchers in the Association, or to raise their price per head. Same old excuse—times were still hard, the beef industry in such a severe decline it likely would never recover. The glory days of open-range cattle ranching were a thing of the past, they said, finished off by the Great Die-Up. Bullshit. But they just wouldn’t listen.

  And as if those turndowns weren’t enough, Frank Wickwire had failed to use his lawyer’s wiles to convince the Territorial Legislature to put a moratorium on the deeding off of any more rangeland to the goddamned sodbusters. Montana was due for statehood next year and settlement was being encouraged now instead of the other way around. That was their excuse.

  I went into the house, into my study, and futzed around with tally sheets and other paperwork for a while, but I was too damned restless and upset to concentrate. I wanted to have a talk with Jada Kinch, but he was out mending fence with a couple of the other hands and wouldn’t be back until late afternoon. I poured myself a large whiskey and went out onto the porch and stood surveying my property.

  The compound was on high ground, backed and shaded by cottonwoods and a couple of big box elders, the main house higher than the rest so I had a broad view of the hip-roofed barn, the two bunkhouses, the cookhouse and smokehouse, the clumps of buffalo berry and chokecherry that lined Big Creek, the bunch-grass prairie that stretched out beyond the whitewashed fences, the Knob in one direction and the glint of the Yellowstone in the other. When I came out here to settle at the end of the war, the prairie had been black with buffalo. They were mostly gone now, killed off by hide hunters and parties of Easterners and Englishmen hunting for sport. Gone same as the vast herds of cattle that roamed the open prairie land before the Great Die-Up.

  It had taken me nearly twenty years to build the Square G into the biggest, most productive cattle ranch in this basin. I had had to step on a few that got in my way, as well as fight off Sioux raiding parties before and after that fool Custer got himself and his troops slaughtered at Little Big Horn, and hunt down and hang rustlers white and red, but that was the kind of hard country it was those days—survival of the fittest.

  Then that goddamned disastrous winter. Should’ve seen it coming. Should’ve paid attention to what the reservation Blackfeet and Crow were saying, the preparations they were making. And to the summer being so hot and dry that range fires kept breaking out in the shriveled grass. And to the bark on the young cottonwoods thicker than ever before in the fall, birds bunching earlier than usual, heavy coats on the wild animals.

  All the signs were there, but I’d been too busy to see them and take the necessary precautions to protect my herd, what with the goddamned greedy speculators shipping cattle in from all directions, overland and on every westbound train. Texas longhorns, Durhams, mixed-blood shorthorns from Missouri, Canadian beef, breeding stock and pilgrim steers from the Midwest … thousands grazing everywhere you looked that summer and fall, encroaching on my land, intermingling with my stock. At the last fall roundup tally before the blizzards came, more than six thousand head of blooded native beef had carried the Square G brand and I employed a permanent crew of twelve and several more for each roundup. Now the tally ran to less than fourteen hundred head at the spring roundup, a third of those no longer pure, and I had a permanent crew of five and couldn’t afford but a handful of loose riders in the spring and fall.

  It used to be that viewing my holdings from here and from out on the range gave me a feeling of pride and satisfaction, the same feeling I’d had when I surveyed the troops under my command before the Franklin-Nashville Campaign and our pursuit of Hood and what was left of his division to the Tennessee River at the tag end of the war. But not any more. These days the vista made me feel bitter and angry. It just wasn’t the same anymore. The mass buffalo slaughter, the Great Die-Up, the sodbusters with their plows and barbed-wire fences, the sons of bitches in Billings and Great Falls and Helena … change, progress, statehood … all combining to rob me of what was rightfully mine and tarnish my view of what was left.

  But that wasn’t all there was to stick heavy in my craw today. Oh, hell, no. One of the cook’s helpers came back from town with a wagonload of supplies and a copy of the latest issue of the Box Elder Banner. And there smack on the front page was another of Satterlee’s goddamned editorials, this one an even greater outrage than the ones he’d written before. Box Elder’s Little Napoleon. Christ! A petty tyrant, he called me, a scourge, a blot, a danger to the welfare of the valley’s future prosperity on account of “his relentless crusade against change and growth and the rolling wheels of progress.”

  It made me so crazy mad I couldn’t see straight. I tore the paper into shreds, threw them on the ground, stomped them into dust with my boots. And then I stalked to the barn to saddle my claybank. A man can only take so much crap, and I’d had my fill of Satterlee’s and then some.

  He would pay for this repeated soiling of my good name, just as Tarbeaux would pay for trying to soil Mary Beth’s. One way or another, by God. One way or another.

  RUFUS CABLE

  Jim Tarbeaux was back. Came in on the noon train yesterday, rented a horse and headed out to what’s left of Keystone ranch. Word gets around fast in Box Elder—it hadn’t taken long for it to come to me, from the first man I encountered when I left the shop last evening.

  Why hadn’t Tarbeaux come straight to me? He must’ve walked right past the shop on his way to the livery. Unarmed yet, maybe. Or just making me sweat some more. I tried to tell myself five years behind bars might have changed his mind about carrying out his threat, but I didn’t believe it. He wasn’t the kind to stop hating. If anything, prison had made a hard case out of him and even more determined. Sooner or later he’d keep his vow.

  No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t stop thinking about the spring of ’83. It was all as vivid in my memory as if it had happened five days instead of five years ago.

  Twenty years old that spring, me and Tarbeaux both. Knew each other because we’d gone to school together, grown up together, but we weren’t friends. I was a town kid, he was a rancher’s son. Too little in common. Too much free spirit in him and none in me—I knew it about myself even then. He went places and did things I was too timid to even consider.

  After he turned eighteen he’d started hanging out with Bob Kendall, who lived on Anchor a few miles from George Tarbeaux’s Keystone. The reckless streak in him widened out over the next two years, as did an even more irresponsible streak of wildness in Bob Kendall. Drinking, gambling, whoring. Neither of them had gotten into serious trouble, just enough to make Marshal Jennison pay some mind to them.

  No one paid much mind to me, meanwhile. Quiet and steady, that was the best anybody had to say about Rufus Cable. Quiet, steady—and honest. Saddle-making and leatherwork were what I craved to do with my life. Vernon
Norris, the only saddle maker in town, had let me help in his shop for pocket change, but he was too cheap to hire me as a full-time apprentice. I would have moved to another town, Billings or Miles City, except that Ma’s arthritis got so bad she could no longer do seamstress work, and she was too old and set in her ways to want to live out her days anywhere but Box Elder. All up to me then to take care of her, put food on the table. And the only job I could find that paid a decent wage was night clerk at the Box Elder Hotel.

  Ma died sudden in March of that year. And I was alone and miserable, facing a future as bleak as a Montana winter, until that day in late April when the chance of a lifetime, a temptation impossible to resist, came my way.

  Tarbeaux and Bob Kendall had led the drive of a combined herd of Anchor and Keystone cattle to Miles City for sale to the Prairie Cattle Company. George Tarbeaux’s share of the tally had been paid by bank draft, but Tom Kendall didn’t trust banks and had insisted on cash. Five thousand four hundred dollars. Bob was supposed to come back right away and deliver the money to his father, but he had a woman in Miles City and was hell-bent on a few days of fun. Tarbeaux wanted to remain in Miles as well, to blow off some steam of his own, as he put it, but Bob paid him twenty-five dollars to return to Box Elder and make the delivery in his stead.

  It was after dark when Tarbeaux got back. He was tired and didn’t feel like riding all the way out to Anchor and then home to Keystone, so he rented a room from me at the hotel for the night. A few minutes after he went upstairs, he came back down with the money belt he’d been wearing loosely rolled up under his coat. The lobby was empty when he laid it on the counter and said, “Rufus, put this in the hotel safe for tonight. I’ll fetch it first thing in the morning.” But he didn’t think to ask for a claim check.

  He went out to the café for a quick meal, then up to the saloons in Shantyville to drink and gamble. It was three hours later by the hotel clock when he returned, half drunk.