by Bowen, Peter
There was a little wind and it swept his words over the soldiers sleeping there.
He spoke for a few minutes to them, and then he walked away, and no one had heard what it was that he said but the dead.
So he was never asked to speak again, said Alys.
I nodded.
Yes, of course, good man.
*See Kelly Blue
17
WE WAS NEAR THE stomping grounds of Othniel Marsh, and so a few days after we got there we all belted up and headed off to hear him lecture some scientific society or other. Like them things at that time, the audience was all men but for Alys, who kept her eyes demurely down.
You know the types, pustle-gutted rich folks with a mild itch for the new. Or lean and hungry Yankees all with a buzzard’s eye for profit. Them last has always reminded me of critters that can’t kill their own meat, but is practiced at waiting till something else does.
Marsh heaved himself up after a long introduction which I can’t remember, frequently broken by clapping. A flunk carried in some giant easel-sort-of-tripods and then levered up huge pen-and-ink drawings of strange creatures, and all of the illustrations had a man down in the right-hand corner, for the scale.
I supposed that whales might be the same size as some of the monsters Marsh had drawn up, but not by much.
They was the god damnedest beasts. One meat-eater had a head way too big for the enormous body, and a grand piano could have made a nice snack for the son of a bitch. A much bigger one was a plant-eater, with a long skinny neck and a big fat body and a tail twenty-five feet long. The rest was smaller, but not a one looked a bit friendly. They’d either lift up a washtub-size foot and squash you, or snap you up on the run without breaking stride.
I resolved not to think so bad of them damn pale river-bottom grizzly bears no more. Had one gnaw on me once a little, but I had to admit I had lived.
Marsh was one of them sorts salts his every speech with a lot of Latin tags, so everyone knows how learned he is.
It was a great time for science, he ended, adding that it was a hell of a good time for the audience to pony up.
Mercifully, we didn’t stay for the reception.
I had a mild interest in all this, because I was to take Cope and Alys and about seventy others up the Wyoming trails come spring, but the babble about hip joints and jaw hinges and teeth passed by me. The beasts had been dead, thank God, for sixty million years.
We went out of the hall and smack into a bunch of Christers, marching around with signs mostly with the words misspelt, all bellering that heresy was being committed right there inside. Their ringleader was a pale and slack-jawed preacher who held a Bible in one knobby fist and who bellered passages from it, which didn’t seem to have any connection to anything. I was sure his flock thought him a genius.
I had noticed Digby getting a bit pale during the lecture, but his expression didn’t change. Alys had noticed, too, and she told the coachman to drive to a hospital and when we got there she summoned some surgeon and Digby went off with the man.
“He has a wound which won’t heal,” says Alys, “but McMasters is very good. Digby almost died six months ago, but McMasters got the wound cleaned out—he used maggots—and if that damned Digby wouldn’t wait until I could smell the rot, he might even get healed.”
She went off after them and I sat and smoked. She was gone maybe fifteen minutes and when she come back she said Digby wanted me to come in and talk.
He was lying on a table and there was three burly men in clean white smocks there, the orderlies hold a man down when he’s being cut on. Digby was mostly undressed, and, I could see the wound, a double one, where a ball had gone through his thigh leaving a hole so big it wouldn’t close.
Some of the flesh at the edges was black. Gangrene.
“I have to do a radical surgery,” says McMasters, “or you’ll be dead within the year.”
Digby nodded.
“You should take the ether,” says McMasters.
Digby shook his head. No.
I suddenly knew why. The speech given to the graves. Digby felt he had caused all them deaths somehow, or part of them, and the more he hurt the better he felt. Well, people don’t make a lot of sense at times, ’cept maybe to themselves.
Do or let the bastard die, I thinks, and I walked over and grabbed Digby by his shirt and jerked him up and with my face about six inches from his I said all them men he’d led in all them graves would say he was a damned fool and this was no god damned way to remember brave men.
Our eyes was locked hard for maybe a minute, and then I saw a spark in his, a little twinkle of good humor.
“Thanks, Kelly,” he says, “and I’ll take the ether.”
McMasters had it ready, and I could see the surgeon was in haste, so the wound must be right at the spot where maybe he could save him tonight but not tomorrow.
I went out and saw with Alys and it warn’t long before McMasters come out nodding, saying he’d got all the proud flesh and cut some good away, too, to make both holes like mouths that he could sew closed. Soon as Digby come up from the ether he wanted him out of here, there was infections in the air and he’d be safer at home.
“Some of the staff,” says McMasters, “still think that slapping a loaf of bread on a bad wound to assure a good flow of pus is helpful. Men like them killed ten times as many soldiers as Lee and Grant together.”
Pretty quick the orderlies come out, with two of them carrying Digby and he was stuck in the carriage and we went back to his house. The orderlies had rode along on the back and they whisked him upstairs to his bed and left him to us. The ether had worn off and the pain was getting bad, but Digby’s smile had a cheroot in it and he didn’t let on to the pain, but for the beads of sweat forming on his forehead and trickling down.
I looked at the bandage on his thigh, it was loose, as they should be, and I thought a poultice of the blue-green mold grows on bread would help. The Indians use that, they soak a moss in a paste of flour and water and let it set cool a day or two. It halts putrefaction cold.
Alys listened to me and she nodded and damned if the cook didn’t have a good stock of moldy bread, for a man come to get the kitchen slops as hog feed regular and he’d not been by because of the nor’easter.
So we scraped off the mold and got a fair amount and I made a paste and we went back and I daubed Digby’s wounds good and put fresh lint packs on them. The paste should be applied every four hours or so.
I got up that night every four hours and changed the dressing and damned if the last time, at four in the morning, if Digby warn’t sleepin’ peaceful-like.
McMasters showed up at eight sharp the next morning, and here it comes, I thought, he’ll pitch a fit over my interfering and there will be hell to pay. Not that I warn’t prepared to pay it, I had grown uncommon fond of Digby.
Folks will surprise you though, and damned if McMasters didn’t nod when I explained what I’d done. Then he watched while I put more of the paste on, and bandaged Digby back up, while Digby made jokes about how damned ugly the nurses was ’round here.
Digby was lookin’ a hell of a lot better and he had a good appetite and the doc and me left him wolfing down a breakfast and we went to the library, where McMasters pulled a notebook out and began to ask me a lot of questions about not only the tree mold or bread mold—grows both places—but about any other medical lore I had got from the Indians.
He knew about decocting red willow bark for headaches but not much else. Oh, I hadn’t a lot, but he mostly was interested in the trailing groundvine the Indians call heal-all, and I did promise to send him some next summer, when it would be growing.
Then he did the god damndest thing.
He asked me if I knew a really good medicine person he might come and study with?
Most whites thought Indians was dirty gut-eatin’ scum best all killed off, except for a few of them ladies get the vapors over cattle bein’ dehorned and the like, and to have this feller want to come We
st to see about what the Indians knew about their world was purely amazing.
I says take a trip up to the Wind River and see Washakie, who’d be happy to help. I knew plenty of others, but they was Sioux and Crow, and none of them was real fond of whites right at the moment.
Man’s inhumanity to man was well-known to both of us, so we didn’t remark on it, and McMasters said brightly he’d see me in the summer and appreciate an introduction to Washakie.
Digby healed up real quick, and McMasters looked at the fresh red scars and he beamed. He’d been working on the wound for five long years and here it was, cured.
Digby still had a limp but not so bad, and he moved vigorous-like, getting better every day.
Alys announced we was going to have to go to New York, and I threw up my hands.
Cope and Marsh was going to debate.
18
THIS HERE DEBATE BETWEEN Cope and Marsh was, mercifully, not till after the holidays, and so Christmas and the new year came and there was a lot of real happiness, because Digby was healed up at last. I couldn’t imagine five years with a wound turned gangrenous every once in a while. Digby had sand, all right.
There was galas and balls listed in the newspapers, but Alys and Digby wasn’t the sort to spend their time on such nonsense, and I was grateful I didn’t have to go to some such and have to do the polite to folks so damned dumb all they could think of to do was admire one another. For their costumes.
I whined some about having to go to New York but Alys was firm as could be, just shaking her head and pressing her lips tight together when I tried to negotiate a way I could go back to Laramie.
“And Rosie’s?” she says sweetly. “You know, Luther, I am an excellent judge of character and I know I can trust you just so long as I can see you.”
Then she asks Digby if he’ll challenge me to a duel if I should betray her honor.
“Stogies and whiskey at ten paces,” says Digby. “First man to down his drink and light up wins.”
“Then,” says Alys evenly, “I guess I’ll have to watch out for myself.”
“Kelly,” says Digby, “you ever want me to shoot you as a simple act of mercy, I would oblige.”
I laughed.
“Keep it in mind,” says Digby. “You may need it.”
Alys run that fingernail down my cheek.
“Yes,” she says. “He may.”
We took the train down the day before the debate, just a suite, since Alys had sent the private car she’d borrowed back to Chicago and though the one she owned had been repaired, the railroad had lost it someplace and thought they’d find it but they didn’t know exactly when.
The railroads was booming, growing so fast whole trains got lost.
Digby had given me a brace of fine British pocket pistols, all silver-chased and only .30 caliber, but each held five bullets and they could do some hurt at close range. He even added a couple small chamois holsters, which fit inside the waistband of my trousers.
With those on board and the knife I kept in my boot I might not be happy going to New York, but felt I could give a good account of myself.
That old New York, back in January of 1870, was dangerous. There were tens of thousands of people living any way that they could, hiding in cellars and abandoned buildings, and hordes of orphans who would swarm around unwary visitors and strip them bare and even kill them. The police was underpaid and there wasn’t many of them and they mostly just guarded the rich neighborhoods and the factories and left the immigrants and the poor to fend for themselves.
The city stank, too, of horse shit and vile smoke from the factories and coal from the houses and great piles of garbage on empty lots in the poor sections. Huge rats scurried around in broad daylight, big brown bastards I hadn’t seen before. Digby allowed as how they’d come from the China trade and killed off the smaller gray ones I knew.
“Evolution,” he says, “is not a pretty business.”
We stayed at the Hartford House, Digby in his rooms and me and Alys in a suite. The desk clerk eyed me and Alys down his long nose whilst we was registering.
Then the bastard demanded a wedding certificate.
He got the words out but barely, for Digby reached all the way across the marble counter and grabbed the man by the throat and lifted him over, explaining in a whisper that he did not care to see his beloved niece insulted, and if amends weren’t made, someone was going to die right now.
Then Digby dumped the clerk on his arse and began to slam his walking stick on the counter, bellering for the manager. Which worthy soon appeared.
He offered to fire the clerk, Digby said no, just install some manners in him.
After that you’d of thought we was the last rich relations on the face of the earth. Nothing too good.
The debate was to be held at three in the afternoon, at a hall a short distance away.
We was shown to some uncomfortable chairs, so we wouldn’t snooze whilst the great men debated, and it was a time when ladies wore hats with half an orchard and a bunch of dead birds all piled up like some natural disaster. Plenty of egret plumes, too.
So many people showed up there wasn’t chairs enough for all of them and so Digby and I offered ours to some ladies all wore-out from carrying their hats and we walked to the back where there was bunches of men near the walls.
Some of them was in the cheap suits of the workers, and I give a start when I seen a tall dark feller in a turban, he looked a little like Blue Fox had in the bandage, is all, but this feller’s was dark blue silk and had a deep green jewel the size of a plum on the front, all sparkled round with diamonds and a shimmering cloak of silk, too. A couple big, tough-looking A-rabs was to each side of him, and they was all motionless as statues.
Cope and Marsh was far off and they was introduced and their claques cheered or booed, depending. I have always admired disinterested scholarship.
Cope got to go first and he had a magic-lantern slide show which no one could see, and when he realized that he just talked louder about the little horse he’d bought off Pignuts’ bartop. Pignuts warn’t mentioned.
Then all of a sudden one of the workmen pulled out a pistol and he charged the dais, yelling something in Eye-talian I could not make out, and when he got near he leveled his pistol and Cope and Marsh was wild on the wing. I noticed both of them took cover behind their assistants and the little Eye-talian was a terrible shot and he soon went down in a mob of bluecoats and their truncheons rose and fell, long enough to kill him outright.
A couple beefy cops lifted the Eye-talian up and dragged him out, bleeding, head lolling, and then Cope and Marsh edged back up to the stage and they recommenced.
Each remarked “My learned colleague ...” before lacing into the other, and even them words dripped with loathing. These two flat hated each other.
Looked to be an interesting summer, I thought.
It got fairly boring listening to them two argue about something was hard for me to understand, so I let my eyes wander.
I was about half-dozing, really, standing there, and it took a moment for me to recognize the feller way off to my left, I suspect because he warn’t hiding his braids. It was Blue Fox, all nicely trucked out, with a soft black hat on his head. He wore a herring-bone tweed suit and had his long hands atop a gold-headed walking stick.
Digby followed my gaze.
I started toward Blue Fox, with about half a mind to just up and shoot the bastard right there and say I was a man-hunter and where the hell was my reward. Seemed a good enough idea.
I edged a little and tried to keep out of sight and I wasn’t no more than twenty feet from him, a hand on one of my pistols, when he turned and went right through some red-velvet curtains led someplace. It took me some time to go after him and I found some stairs going up and down, and since the street was lower, I went down and out a side door. It had been snowing and I could see the tracks of a man and, betting it was him, I trotted along looking up now and again to the street. It
was busy with traffic but no one on foot, and it had started to snow so bad you could see maybe a hundred feet.
I saw him, over past the cabs and carriages rumbling along.
I dodged through and saw him again, slipping into an alleyway between a couple tall buildings, and when I got to it I looked around careful, but there was no one there, and going down it I found it went off at a right angle and come out on another street.
New York had a sort of express cab that run on wooden rails, and when I got out to the main way one was coming toward me at a good clip. It passed and was maybe eighty feet away when I spotted Blue Fox clinging to the back.
He held on with one hand and waved the other and the snow swallowed him up, the cab was the fastest thing around and there was no way I could catch him.
So I went back to the hall, to find the lecture over and the journalists shouting questions.
Digby and Alys was in the foyer and we went right out to our hansom. I was wet through from the heavy snow.
Alys shrugged and so did Digby. She must have told him who Blue Fox was.
When we got back to the hotel I sent a note to the Pinkerton office, saying the man who had killed William Drouillette had been at the lecture.
But Blue Fox was gone, for sure, and nothing come of that.
19
I FINALLY GOT ENOUGH of the East and so I put my hoof down and told Alys she could kill me she wanted to but I was damn well going home. To such as it was.
Digby was sailing to England for some business and we saw him off, and he promised to look us up in Wyoming come the summer.
I expected some bloodbath, but Alys said, fine, let’s just go and so we packed up—me leaving all the expensive duds she’d bought me in Digby’s house.
“You looked so handsome in them,” she says, pouting.
“I ain’t going to show up in Wyoming in them duds,” I says. “Friends I got it would be a death sentence for me.”
Would of, too. Get grand on the boys and they’ll eat you for breakfast. I done a little chawing in my time, too.
