The Yellowstone Kelly Novels

by Bowen, Peter

  We tossed our traps in the wagon, and I checked to see what in the way of grub we might need. It was all there and the water barrel was freshly filled.

  We took off to the north—had some hundred and fifty miles to do, and there wasn’t no railroad spur to that lonely country. By the second day we had long outrun the last of the little spreads—here you had to have the water, the land was worthless without it. So a feller who proved up on a homestead that contained a spring could have tens of thousands of acres to call his own. It made the ranch holdings circular.

  Wang Chu was awful put out at dinner because all there was to eat was bacon and beans and corn dodgers.

  “You live on this?” said Wang. “No damn wonder you are all so pale.”

  It took us two weeks to get to the country I remembered and it was such a bleak place that there wasn’t even a trace that pointed to men ever having been there. The water in the springs was poisonous—arsenic and what have you.

  I poked around and found the boulder, still gleaming apple-green where the rock I had tossed on it twenty-five years before had hit.

  Wang went on his knees before it and stretched a trembling hand out to it.

  “There’s an even bigger boulder up there,” I said, pointing up the dry wash to a six-by-six rock face half eroded out of the yellow earth.

  Wang Chu give off with croaks.

  “I don’t expect to winter here,” I says, “so if you’ll oblige we need to get this here boulder onto the freight wagon and back to the railroad and back to San Francisco where another hundred thousand is due me.”

  My lack of sentiment hurt Wang’s feelings. “Such jade is seen only once in ten thousand years.”

  “Balls,” I says, “I can see twenty of them boulders in a five-minute walk.”

  Wang’s mind came a bit unhinged at that and he scampered off in them funny Chink slippers they wear, and I could hear him drooling and babbling around the curve of the wash.

  “Jaysus Kayrist, Kelly,” I says. “Think of all the pain and suffering you could have avoided if you had known ...” Such thoughts is discouraging so I quit having them.

  While Wang, my esteemed tailor and partner, was having the vapors I went up to the wagon and got a six-foot spud bar and came back down and shoved the chisel end under the boulder and slammed a piece of rock under the bar and levered for all I was worth. The boulder shook in the earth. A ton or so. Well, it could be rolled down the wash to a flatter place and I could build some sort of skid to get it up the bank and into the wagon.

  After a bit of grubbing the earth away I was able to get the boulder to move, and by crowing it up and sticking rocks under it I got it out of its hole and onto the big gravel of the dry wash, most of which was jade, too.

  Entertained enormously by the sounds of my Chinese chum becoming completely unhinged I occupied myself rolling the boulder along. It was shaped like a giant prune.

  After much reflection I was able to wrap this here giant prune with chains and I hitched up the draft horses and dragged the boulder up a shallow incline, to a sort of high bump cut straight off on one side damn near the height of the sides of the freight wagon.

  As the sun sank I crowed the boulder the last fraction of an inch and it crashed down onto the bed of the freight wagon, crushing the bits of driftwood I had piled there to slow the fall. The wagon went flat on the springs and then they bounced back up and the wagon rocked a little. It was about as much load as the wagon could take. I wedged things in around the boulder, made sure it was about centered between the axles, and went in search of my Chink chum.

  Wang Chu was sitting on a jade boulder twitching now and again.

  “Wang,” I says. He snapped some out of his daze.

  “All the jade here is priceless,” he said.

  “Well, we got a boulder in the wagon and that’s all the weight that we can afford. So in the morning you come on down because I am leaving for the railroad.”

  I was getting a mite tired of beans and bacon so I allowed as how I would shoot an antelope tomorrow and so I et the beans and bacon anyway and then had a seegar and some coffee and went to sleep whilst Wang sat in a daze of overpowering greed most of the night. I heard him walk in about three in the morning. I heard him climb up in the wagon, and when I got up at four-thirty he was asleep next to the jade boulder.

  I hitched up the horses and looked round and figured we was packed.

  I clucked to the horses and off we went. It took near on to three weeks to make it back with the heavy-loaded wagon, the narrow wheels would sink in the sand and once we got caught in a sudden cloudburst crossing a white clay plain. The clay turned to something like axle grease and the horses both went down. I jumped off to untangle them and I landed on my butt and skidded fifteen feet before a handy tarbush stopped me.

  The sun come back out and in half an hour everything was dry again. That is some strange country.

  Wang was recovering and after the first week when he spent all his time petting the boulder and crooning to it his true self come forward and he was once again the greedy, avaricious little Chink bastard I liked as I could expect him to act reasonable, or anyway predictably.

  We got to Cheyenne, saw the boulder crated and onto a car, insured for ten thousand dollars. It was worth a lot more than that but the insurance was large enough so it would be checked on regular. I told the train folks it was a meteorite.

  San Francisco looked very good to us and Wang punctually paid me the second hundred thousand dollars. I thought this business was over and done with but of course it weren’t.

  6

  I HAD ANY NUMBER of irate letters and telegrams from Teethadore, who had suddenly discovered where the Philippines was and wanted me to go and see if they were really still there. I read the letters and telegrams in sequence, hoping against hope that the next one would say “I am finishing this letter for the late Theodore Roosevelt who died of the apoplexy this morning.” No such good and glad tidings.

  I had been living by the month in the Palace, paid up six months ahead, and I was therefore a valued customer. So I saunters up to the clerk and says, “Any strange folks been around asking for Kelly?”

  “Just the police,” said the clerk.

  I couldn’t remember when I had last been so happy.

  “The what?”

  “Mr. Kelly,” said the clerk, “you left no note and somehow a rumor got started that you had been murdered and dropped in the Bay, chained to a cast-iron lamppost. So the police heard it and came around. That’s all. This Roosevelt fellow is certainly rude, isn’t he, Mr. Kelly?”

  “You could easy say that.”

  A couple of Army captains come in the front door and Army captains don’t get paid enough to come in the front door of the Palace Hotel in San Francisco on their own affairs. I did a quick slither behind a potted aspidistra and hung both ears on one side of my head. “He show yet?” says one of them.

  “No, sir,” said the clerk.

  They left. I went over to the clerk and inquired if it was me that they was after. It was. I dropped a double eagle on the counter and said how much I liked him not having seen me yet.

  He allowed as how he would not see me for a considerable time. Years, perhaps.

  I had this gut-sure feeling that I ought to get low and stay there someplace far away. No doubt booking passage wouldn’t do any good, the customs officers would be on the lookout for me. I would have to go slithering away and devil take the stamps and passport.

  There was one likely way, and I snuck round to Wang Chu’s shop and went through the laundry to where he tailored. A young man said Wang Chu was not in. I said that was fine, I’d wait. The young man said he didn’t think that Wang Chu would be back anytime soon. I said to tell Wang Chu that the Jade Soldier would wait until Wang Chu could speak to him.

  “Why in hell didn’t you just say Kelly?” said Wang Chu a few minutes later. “All you pasty Europeans look alike as so many frog’s bellies.”

&nbs
p; “Kelly is something of a valued acquaintance to many who Kelly does not wish to see right now.”

  “Roosevelt?”

  I nodded.

  “You have been to China?”

  “Once. But just a couple of the Treaty Ports.”

  “I gather you are something of a cocksman,” said Wang Chu. “I think the girls of Soochow would like you.”

  “I can get my bellrope hauled on right here,” I says, a little testy. “I would like not to find myself sketching fortifications in wherever Teethadore wants to invade next.”

  “The Jade Soldier, eh?” says Wang Chu. “That would solve a couple of difficulties for me. The Jade Soldier can guard the priceless boulder of jade. It is a gift to the Emperor.”

  “Now just a gaddamn minute,” says I. “I am damned if I am going to Peiping. Canton will be fine.”

  “You wish to miss the City of Northern Peace?”

  “I wish to miss that deranged bitch who rules China. I know about that one.”

  Wang Chu laughed so hard tears flew from his eyes. “She might hang you up by the plums,” he said. “She would enjoy such a sight.”

  “Not to blunt the edge of yer merriment, ya little shit, but I am not finding any of this funny.”

  “Hoo hoo hoo,” said Wang Chu.

  I pondered a moment that my misspent life now had me asking an obviously deranged Chink to help me avoid the attentions of an obviously deranged Dutch dwarf. Christ, I said to myself, I hate these little short bastards.

  “Ah,” said Wang Chu finally, “enough laughter. We shall get you out of the city and send you to China.” He clapped his hands once. A gigantic Chinese stepped out from behind a curtained doorway. The son of a bitch must have weighed three hundred pounds. He looked as big as Liver-Eatin’ Jack, which I had never thought I’d see.

  It was going on dark and the fog was rolling in. I took a cloak and wrapped up good, and me and the huge Chink stalked through the fog, coming down the wharves. There was a longboat waiting with eight stout oarsmen in it, all Chinese. The moment that we had hopped in the stern the oarsmen pulled away. They’d a steady stroke, and in an hour we pulled up to a small steamer, a lacquered one, red and black. I stepped up on board and so did my escort—he caused the whole boat to quiver over to one side—and the steamer’s engines began to thrum and we moved up against the gentle current of the Sacramento in the delta and braided channels at the head of the Bay.

  There are over two thousand miles of channels in that delta, and to this day I have no idea how the pilot found the right ones on that night.

  We kept winding up through cattails and water weeds, the moon lit the fog from above, and ghostly ducks would rise from the water, once a flock of geese rose up, honking shrilly.

  The fog was even thicker in first light of morning. The luminous mist seemed weightless, we could have been chugging along two thousand feet in the air.

  A dock appeared. The little steamer slowed her engines, Chinese roustabouts came out of the mist and tied her to. I stepped up on the dock. I walked along it and smelled the marsh gas. I followed a path which led soon to a little Chinese village—right there in California.

  There were perhaps thirty houses, some sheds, racks for fishing nets to dry on. Young Chinese mothers and their exquisite and spotless children walked past me. The recent immigrants call whites “ghosts.”

  I found a little inn, went in, the owner brought me rice wine and cakes. I could well have been in China.

  I stayed there in the little village for a week. No one spoke to me, or indeed even looked at me. Except for the giant, Wu, and the innkeeper. I tried to pay only once, and the innkeeper set up a fearful great caterwauling.

  “You no pay,” said Wu. “Wang Chu pay. You dishonor him not again.”

  Wang Chu also sent lovely girls to me every night. They would dance on my spine before we screwed. I liked this ever so much better than stomping around some malarial swamp counting Igorotes for Teethadore.

  The Chinese who were in the village did almost all eventually speak to me, the Jade Soldier, and the girls who came at night laughed prettily with their hands over their mouths. I smelled like raw beef to them, because of my usual diet with half of it meat.

  The fog went on and on. Sometimes it would lift and I could see a mile or two out across the waving tules, but it never pulled far enough up and away for me to get a fix on a mountain or any landmark.

  One fine early morning Wu fetched me. We went down to the dock and got on the little steamer and chugged off through the mist. At nightfall we reached the Bay and a light skiff come out of the fog. I got in and sat in the stern. The oarsman got out, and Wu took his place. There wasn’t but a few inches of freeboard what with Wu in the middle and me in the stern. I weigh near on two hundred myself.

  Wu danced that skiff along the Bay right speedy, never slackening his pace until we saw a green lamp blinking off to starboard. Wu looked at it, turned the boat, and we come to a tramp steamer, a rusty tub that had likely seen a thousand ports. It was so common I took to it right away. It would not attract the eye.

  We cleared the Golden Gate before dawn, threading our way through the foghorns and answering with our own.

  When we stood well out to sea Wu come up on deck. He had changed out of his Chinese duds into seaman’s truck—wool shirt and pants and seaboots.

  “Where is our next stop?” I asked him.

  “Macao.”

  Hoo boy, I thought, maybe the most dangerous city in the world. Well, I supposed I could jump overboard and go back to Teethadore’s tender mercies. I elected to go where the violence and depravity was of a general nature, rather than directed at me alone.

  The voyage, such of it as there was, was the usual nauseating bore for me, as I get seasick easily and stay that way. For some reason I am all right in very small boats and very large boats but the ones in between near on the fatal for me. Wu, in whose charge I was, plied me with all manner of foul soups and noxious potions. I wasted away and practiced looking pitiful, which weren’t hard.

  The Pacific is a very broad ocean indeed, also it has waves and swells, all of which settled in the stomach of Kelly, though nothing else did for long.

  The ship itself was registered in Hong Kong to a Chinese company, but the company was registered in London so the flag was British even though none of the officers or crew were. Matter of fact, I was the only European on the ship. Some wag who had been asked to translate the Chinese to English had got the ship named Glanders. It amused me even in my sorry state.

  Then one fine morning all seasickness went away and I felt weak but otherwise all right. I gorged myself on rich foods for a week and got back most of the weight I had lost—I didn’t need all of it back—and as the little steamer plodded slowly across the Pacific I paced around and around the decks.

  The jade boulder had been carefully crated and sealed, even to a bolted double band of iron with one big eyebolt welded on top, so the steam winch could hook it easy.

  Everything was tickety-boo save for the time of year, which was the one in which typhoons live. A Pacific typhoon is sort of like an Atlantic hurricane. You know, lethal and unexpected.

  One afternoon after a bloody red dawn the sea itself took on a coppery sheen and the swells were disturbed by crosscurrents; the air itself was thick and wet and choked you when you breathed.

  The crew looked scared when I passed them. The captain would step out of the flying bridge and look off toward the southern horizon and scream more orders at the sailors, who were lashing everything down in the holds and on deck.

  I hadn’t been in the chartroom and other than a vague sense that we were headed east by south I couldn’t have told you where in the hell we were, except in the Pacific someplace. For all I knew, we could have been plodding in a large circle just over the horizon from California. I didn’t even know how many days we had been at sea.

  The typhoon hit us in the middle of the night. The wind picked up and went from a l
ow moan to a scream through the thrumming rigging. The ship nearly broached to, and it gave three sickening lurches before going back to its customary wallowing.

  For three days and nights the little ship battled to stay afloat. Wu, my guardian, was killed on the second day. A sea anchor had been tossed out in a desperate attempt to help the rusty tub hold into the wind. A sudden burst of wind and a crossing sea snapped the cable; the broken end lashed back and took poor Wu’s head off as neat as a muleskinner flicks horseflies off a mule’s rump. Wu was maybe twenty feet from me. His headless body crouched and the arms and legs quivered and then the boat rolled and he was tossed into the sea.

  The third day the ship began to come apart. All of the crates and cargo on deck had long since burst their stays and gone overboard. The lifeboats were still usable, but the seas were so big they would have swamped, most likely.

  The constant twisting and pummeling was working the plates loose. The pumps were running at full capacity and falling a little farther behind every hour. The ship was becoming crank with the extra water in the holds.

  Then suddenly the winds died and we drifted to a flat glassy calm. The eye of the storm. Hundreds of thousands of seabirds floated on the smooth black water.

  Even with the bilges pumped dry and the decks cleared and the hatches sealed it was damn clear to Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther that another three days of pummeling would tear the ship apart, and that when it went it would go all at once—and likely with little warning.

  There was a very small lifeboat abaft of the after smokestack, and I simply appropriated it. It had a canvas cover in good condition and oars shipped to it and a full water keg. I tossed the boat over the side—well, slid it, actually, and let it drag behind on a rope. The ship was hardly moving and the crew was all below trying to make the ship seaworthy and the lookout couldn’t see behind him, so I was able to lower a bag of food—canned stuff and ship’s biscuit—down and I took a medical kit from another boat. Then I shinnied down the rope to the little boat and cut myself free. I shipped the oars and drifted, and before too long I was alone on the flat, black, glassy sea, except for the seabirds. Some of them was ducks and I was able to use a fishing rod I found in the boat and a loop of catgut to catch them round the neck. They seemed dazed and wouldn’t swim away even if another duck was frantically strangling two feet from them.