The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  There was a mob of vultures circling above and the water was down below. I tore my hands bloody on the rocks. Gold and gray spots danced in front of my eyes.

  I crawled under a ledge mostly out of my mind and I waited to die and I would have but for Jack, who come a couple hours later and he poured water down me and over me. My tongue was black and the size of a shoe.

  Jack bundled me over a shoulder and about as casual as a man hangs a bath towel at that, and he strode off for the far mountains, which got closer in a hurry as he loped in his moccasined feet. He stank of old grease and tobacco, and I stank of hopelessness.

  In the middle of the night he stopped at a stream and we drank deep and I threw up. I felt some better.

  In the morning we fed up good and Jack had packed a parcel of my clothes along—I hate admitting how stupid I was, even more I hate him knowing just exactly what I’d do.

  My tongue had shrunk.

  “I found Old Plummer’s gold,” I says.

  Jack nodded.

  “A cours’ ya did,” he says.

  23

  PLUMMER’S GOLD IS STILL there, if you’ve a mind to go looking for it.

  After I had recovered and we’d gone to Idaho City to get me a saddle and guns and such, we bought eight pack mules, to carry the gold off with. We had rawhide shoes for these pack mules made up, so they wouldn’t cut their dainty feet on them black lava rocks, and stout panniers with pouches for the bars so the weight wouldn’t slop around. We were in the gold moving business in a big way.

  The night before we got to the falls we was all sound asleep under the stars when there was this sound like the biggest freight train in all the world went by ten feet away. The ground shook a little and we went back to sleep.

  On we went in the morning, and we come on to the edge of the canyon. Me with my heart in my throat, and ready to tot up just how many of them bars there was. My own whorehouse, my racing stables, my watered-silk vests, all them useless things so nice to think on.

  Well, the waterfall was gone.

  Matter of fact the cliffs was gone and where the short falls had been there was this jumble of rock, chunks the size of houses, and the water roaring white through them.

  I run on as many cusswords and ripe phrases as I had to hand, but I run down soon.

  Jack looked at it impassive.

  “WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH WAUGH,” he roared. “WE’S SAVED FROM REESPECTABILITY! THANK GOD AMIGHTY!” And he laughed loud enough to spall chunks off the canyon walls.

  Well, it was funny as hell. I’d had my hands on a three-million-dollar hoard of gold just long enough to find it, and now it was so gone it might as well been on the floor of the Pacific Ocean.

  “Goddamn,” I said. “You know, I have always had this fear I’d end up owning a big house with tennis courts on it. Pretty ladies in linen shirtwaists on it. My worst nightmare. Cold-eyed beautiful women on a lawn of a summer’s morning. Makes me quake, fears me.”

  So us and them mules that we no longer needed turned round and went back toward Idaho City, biggest town in the state, with ten thousand miners panning and dredging for the gold. We sold the mules and bought some grub and went over the mountains to the Pahsimeroi country, desert and mountains, and over to Bannack in the Montana goldfields, where they hung Henry Plummer in ’64.

  Bannack was played out pretty good—just the Chinese working the old dredge tailings and a few miners digging little lodes of paydirt.

  Jack and I parted ways there—he was going over to the high Absarokee to look around, and I hadn’t anyplace much I was thinkin’ on. I supposed I could winter over with Washakie, but the memory of Eats-Men-Whole was too bitter and new.

  When I wandered into Fort Owen in the middle of October the colonel there was waiting on me and had sent a couple of soldiers down the Bitterroot to make sure I would stop. There was a thick envelope there, for me personally, and the colonel made it plain he didn’t want me to read it there. I found a roadhouse a few miles north and I opened the thick vellum and saw a commission in the United States Army unaccountably made out in my name and a letter from U. S. Grant, which said in a friendly way I could ride posthaste to Laramie for further orders, or hang as the skulking deserter I was. Grant was General of the Army and was to be the next President of the United States. I’d heard he was a man of few words who meant every damn one of them he chose to utter.

  I thought it best to feed all of it to the flames. The lieutenant’s commission was a nice touch, but I had my doubts that I’d be commanding regular troops. The recruiting depot at Albany was a long way and a couple lifetimes ago. Why, in just three months I’d be eighteen. A few more years and they’d let me vote.

  I bought a couple good remounts at Missoula and went up the Hellgate Road and cut down across the Great Divide at Monida Pass, and with the spares I was traveling fast, better than a hundred miles some days.

  Washakie greeted me beaming and laughed about me and Jack and Plummer’s gold. The old man had gone off against his old enemies, the Crows and Blackfeet, and had come back with a few scalps. Without me to gibber and faint he cut back his slaughters.

  He’d been tending Eats-Men-Whole’s bier, and the rawhide was fresh wrapped around the poles. A few tatters of the yellow silk scarf whipped in the wind.

  I went on to Laramie the next morning, taking four days to get there, and wondering what in the name of God’s Own Drawers I was going to be ordered to do when I got there. I hadn’t any doubt that U. S. Grant meant every word he said. Hell, he could just ship me back to Utah, without horses, guns, and a head start I’d not last long.

  The second packet told me to find Red Shirt—he was a warrior every bit as feared as Washakie, but young, with only a few dozen dead enemies to show. Washakie’s thousands were trumps, no doubt.

  Red Shirt’s lodges were supposed to be clear up on the Bighorn, and any day they’d pack and go off toward the winter grounds on the Tongue.

  It took me two weeks to find him. I was to talk with him about the Black Hills. The government was trying to avoid a war, especially with Red Cloud, who had run the army right out three times so far. Things had been peaceable other than the Fetterman massacre, and there was something prodding Uncle Sam to try to sweet-talk the Sioux and Cheyennes out of the Black Hills. The Pa Sapa, sacred ground, the Cathedral of the Sioux.

  Gold. There was gold up there in the Black Hills and that one word could be whispered in the dead of night with a bad wind and ten thousand prospectors thousands of miles away would hear it by morning. They’d pour in in their thousands and then they would demand protection.

  “So the Sioux should lie down in their graves now,” I said, riding toward the Bighorn. Well, they’d be there soon and no mistake about it.

  Red Shirt was the handsomest man I ever laid eyes on. He was the color of bronze, with broad shoulders and a small waist. His face was chiseled, and he had more laugh lines than anyone I ever saw but Washakie. He was a Santee Sioux, and their war leader even though he was barely thirty.

  Red Shirt didn’t like any of what he could see coming, but he was a dog soldier and couldn’t run, even though he must have known that his time was going to be damn short.

  The lot of soldiers isn’t pleasant. You get to freeze, roast, or starve, and bleed and die for nothing. It don’t matter if you’re Red Cloud or Marechal MacMahon of France, the job’s damned difficult.

  Red Cloud had closed the Thieves’ Road, had run the United States Army right out, and now the army had to come back because two drunken prospectors had found gold just under the grass roots, gold everywhere. Them two stumblebums signed the Plains tribes’ death warrants. They probably couldn’t even read.

  Now, flannelmouthing is a gift I got, but I felt plumb inadequate to this task, of talking Red Cloud and Red Shirt and Crazy Horse into living on reservations and developing a taste for canned goods and an ear for the lower sort of preachers.

  I liked Red Shirt. We rode side by side as the lodges went nor
th to the Tongue, and all Red Shirt knew was the sky and the grass and the water and the seasons and the buffalo. He’d been at Big Piney Creek, where he killed three soldiers and a man in dungarees—a few civilians went along to pot Injuns, to brag to the folks back home over—and he told me that when the Injuns split up to go off to their lodges for the winter, very few were going to brag on the victory.

  The world seemed strange, Red Shirt said, it had turned and was no longer the world they had known. If a tribe had been as badly defeated as the bluecoat soldiers, it would be generations before they tried again.

  But the whites didn’t think that way. They’d be back, more and more of them until the tribes were massacred. Crazy Horse knew that. It was just that Red Cloud and Red Shirt and Crazy Horse were five thousand years out of fashion. Or whenever it was men began to plant grain and eat too much and stay in one place and invent slavery, cannon, and money.

  “I don’t understand what you do with gold,” he said to me. “You cannot eat it or cure sickness with it or make useful things, you can only carry it from place to place. You whitemen are all crazed and lost. Your foolish prospectors cannot see the land they walk, our young men kill them with rocks. The miners act drunk when they have not had firewater in months, they stumble through the Sacred Hills and fall off rocks and die, they eat poison plants and go mad, they drink bad water, their clothes are thick with dirt. They hide from one another and all for something that they cannot use.”

  Well, I ain’t never understood money either, come to think of it.

  I suppose that I hoped that Spotted Tail could talk some sense into the Sioux—he tried, but they just couldn’t see it. Not that anybody would be happy to lie down and die, or find it a good idea.

  We was moving slow, north, and there had been skiffs of snow and the steel gray snow clouds grabbed the mountains close—it was deep winter up there already.

  Good thing this particular chore had come to me, as it was to turn out. A couple of young braves come riding fast back down the trail and they said there was two wagons up ahead and whites in them. Just a driver for each was all they could see. Now if Red Shirt would just give the word, they’d go wipe them out.

  “Making horrible noises, one in front,” said the brave, “it hurts the ears.”

  A dim light come on somewheres in my mind.

  “What kinda noises?” I says.

  The driver was screeching and the thing he was beating on twanged like a bowstring, only higher and painful.

  “Shit,” I says, knowing just who was up a stump out there.

  Moral dilemmas is horrible things. I wondered if I could live with having Klaas’s tongue cut out and one or both of his hands cut off.

  “These whites die,” said Red Shirt. “They must know that is the fate of whites on this trail.”

  Klaas was a good friend and I thought maybe if I pleaded with Red Shirt I could get him and Mulebreath spared—I knew he was up ahead because of the fresh-broken whiskey bottle I had just passed. Jaysus Kay-rist.

  Red Shirt shook his head. The braves went off and I thought that it meant they’d kill them two lunatics.

  They didn’t. Reason was an older man, called Water Prophet. He had rode up close and seen the mules clopping down the trail, Klaas bellering and plunking and Mulebreath in full Confederate uniform waving a saber and hollering at men who weren’t there.

  Folks we call primitive everywhere spare those obviously insane, so Klaas and Mulebreath was let be, protected even.

  I cantered up ahead, passing a few naked birds likely knocked out of the sky by Vipsoek’s blugerss, and I passed Mulebreath’s wagon first. Mulebreath was leading Pickett’s Charge again, I thought.

  “Mulebreath!” I hollered. He looked at me bleared up.

  “Kelly?” he says.

  “Yes,” I says.

  “Well, goddamn,” he says, falling off the far side of the wagon.

  The screeching and twanging and pickled egg farts was a foul trail behind Klaas. My horse snorted and shied and shook his head. I come up on Klaas’s blind side and after a moment I couldn’t stand it no more so I reached over near him and fired my Colt about an inch from his right ear.

  Klaas jumped about twenty feet straight up and lit yelling Dutchy curses. I watched happily as the iron-rimmed wheels of the wagon crushed the banjo. I even rode over and shot it so I could be sure that it’s dead.

  Klaas hauled back on the reins and stopped the mules. He was hopping mad, but the first thing he done is go back and see what was left of his deceased twangbox. He picked it up and waggled a finger through the hole I’d shot in the skin top.

  “Shelly,” Klaas snarled foamily. “You haff terrible idea of joke.”

  “Follow Me!” Mulebreath bellered, as his mules stopped and he fell hard on the wagon tongue.

  We was distracted for a few moments pulling Mulebreath out from under some of his mules, who were trying hard not to step on him, but would pretty quick. We heaved him up into the wagon bed and I checked his pulse, which was slow, four or five a minute, but still there.

  “Is it the catfish these Southern boys eat so much of does this to their minds?” I says, pointing with a shrug at the slumbering General Mulebreath in the wagon.

  First I noticed a sign on the side of the wagon.

  VIPSOEK & MUCKLEBREECH

  PURVEYORS

  OF

  FINE

  MUSICAL

  INSTRUMENTS

  Red Shirt had come up, and he was setting easy on his horse watching life unfold before him. I walked over to him and stood with my back to the wagons and Klaas.

  “Kill them,” I says. “Please.”

  “Can’t,” says Red Shirt. “Is that what you whites call singing?”

  “No,” I says.

  I helped Klaas move Mulebreath’s wagon off the trail and out of the way. And then Klaas’s. They planned to go north and trade among the Injuns, said Klaas, which they could do with impunity now.

  Red Shirt and I rode on. We talked of the coming council. Spotted Tail wanted full citizenship for his people and money for the land.

  “What will we do with money?” says Red Shirt.

  “Pay lawyers. That’s what money is for,” I says, and not joking.

  “My people will vanish like grass before a fire,” says Red Shirt. “I have nothing left to give them but hope.”

  He would fight.

  I kept quiet, and wished I was somewheres else.

  24

  THE SIOUX ON THE Tongue was scattered up and down maybe fifteen miles of river. They’d made meat on the plains, and the drying racks were full and the caches packed and the last few berries gathered. There was plenty of saltweed for their horses, and cottonwoods to strip the bark from if the horses ran short of grass. The high hills cut that fierce north wind that could chill you to death in an hour if it was sixty below and the sun carried suns on its shoulders. Time of the sundogs, time of bitter cold. Hard country up there in Montana, hard country.

  Spotted Tail stood beaming out in front of his lodge, all decked out in quilled white deerskins and beaded moccasins and eagle feathers and the only Royal Purple Hudson’s Bay blanket I ever saw in all my life. He was a dude, that’s for sure, looked good in his savage finery here and he’d look good in a stovepipe hat and tails years on when he wore them. (When he got into the tails he also discovered whorehouses and burlesque shows. He was the sort of charming scoundrel who made money only to spend it all on beautiful women. No fool he.)

  (He was to die of ice cream, and that story is another time, but suffice it to say if he hadn’t had a mouthful of fresh peach ice cream, and he hadn’t been thinkin’ so hard on the charms of Sally Parmenter, who was like a whole lot of fresh peach ice cream, he’d have minded things like the flash of a rifle shot from a nearby ridge. The second shot got him, and I’m sure he couldn’t be bothered hearing the first, and, well, boys, there you have it, and us all.)

  He nodded to Red Shirt, and he made a sh
ort welcoming speech, much of it praise for the child of his heart, Stands-in-the-Fire-and-Argues. He remarked on how I fucked turtles, I ate things a coyote would run from, I had amazing talents for treachery and cowardice and ingratitude, and so forth and so on and I will have to admit that no one who knows me well could find much fault with Spotted Tail’s speech.

  It is customary for the recipient of such an honor to respond gratefully, so I remarked upon how white his brains had bleached his deerskins, how swift he was to fly from enemies, how quick to toady up to anyone who could shoot, and how the scalps on his warpole was sent to him a dozen at a time from a wig factory in Cleveland.

  I thanked him for having given me such a good seat at the Big Piney massacre, and though I saw many there I hadn’t seen him. I finished off with a fond description of his little habits with ducks and groundhogs and all the civilized greetings out of the way we both turned to Red Shirt, who had been stifling his laughter with the back of both hands.

  “Why don’t you two get married?” says Shirt, taking the prize for most vicious undercut.

  We went into Spotted Tail’s lodge and et dog stew and cattails. He asked after Washakie and I said he was fine, for an old fart, but he needed more Blackfeet hearts to eat and a couple young men to torment with his infernal bloodlust.

  Red Shirt told Spotted Tail of the two spirit-touched whites coming along, and he gave a pretty good imitation of Klaas singing blugerss, and plunking sounds.

  “I know him,” says Spotted Tail. “Is that really how the whites sing?”

  “He was an opery star fore he fell on hard times,” I says. “His partner was a hero in the Civil War. He was shot through the head six times at Kennesaw Mountain but the holes healed up and he’s here now.” I had just reduced everything south of the Mason-Dixon line, but not by much.

  “My scouts say that the fat one’s farts are simply awesome,” says Spotted Tail.