by Bowen, Peter
I wished to hell I could be perched someplace to see the faces of the Cheyennes when the damned elephants lumbered over the horizon, but then Blue Fox would explain it all away. I still had to find a way to kill the son of a bitch and nothing was occurring.
Cope’s flunks come out of the woodwork and there was frantic activity down to the warehouse and by the time the Great Man got to Laramie we was about set to go. I figured the weather could get nasty, which in Wyoming is like saying the sky might be blue. I don’t know why it has the worst weather I even saw, but it does. I saw four sheep flying overhead once, a good thirty feet up, dead but carried on like some milkweed puffs.
Cope was in a terrible swivet when he come, because when he got to Cheyenne he learned that Marsh had left a couple days before and so the race was on, in the name of disinterested scholarship.
“Not a word about what Washakie showed us,” says Alys. She then took me by the arm and we walked up the street to a shabby little jewelry store, mostly cheap clocks, run by a little white-haired man in pince-nez.
When we come in the little man curtained the windows and hung a sign in the door saying he’d be back later, and we went in the back and there was a small printing shop, with a couple type fonts and a German press.
The feller’s name was Adler and he was the one that the papers Alys wanted me to spirit out of the camp was to go to. He’d see them on, to where they was awaited back East.
It suddenly occurred to me that I didn’t need to include Blue Fox in the equation, for Cope would want messengers sent back real regular and since they was likely to be my boys—who could get through—a word and some gold and Adler would get Alys’s stuff and no difficulty. I had to meet with them later anyhows to talk the expedition over and wasn’t a one of them couldn’t be corrupted by money except maybe Sir Henry, and Sir Henry I needed close by for killing as the occasions come up.
He was as crazy as Blue Fox, but he didn’t have as much evil in him. I often wondered what it was that made Sir Henry so.
Cope ordered departure before everything was ready, and he somehow got the Army to guarantee escorts of troopers for any group of more than four wagons sent up to wherever Cope happened to be.
We left before dawn in a pissing-cold wind had little lumps of snow in it, all strung out a good mile long. I had had a word with my boys and all was set, since Alys in her wealth offered a bonus of a hundred dollars per delivery, they was more than happy to oblige.
Wagon travel is a slow business, especially on the bad trails cut by buffalo and horses but never intended for wheeled transport, and we went up at twenty miles or less per day. Once it took two whole days to cross a coulee with a sandy bottom, the horses made it over but the wagons sank to the axles and the teamsters had to put a couple dozen oxen in the traces to pull one wagon out.
The fossils Washakie had graciously shown Alys was well up north, and Bob and Will and Jake and Lou rode out daily looking for that funny-colored rock meant an old beach.
A week out they found one, and Cope looked it over—there was visible bones in it—and then he set some hardrock miners to work. Alys would sketch as they dug, so there was a record of what was where all the way along.
The bones was dinosaurs, not at all big, and Cope stuck names on ’em like Humpleforplesaurus, often decreeing a new species on a single bone in his hand, he was that sure of himself.
The Humpleforplesauruses give out in a week or so, but my boys had found other places, one of them on the crest of a long ridge. Cope was down somewheres below when Alys and I rode up there, and she got real excited, telling me that there was this huge beast there, something that lived in the ocean. She waved her hands and I began to see what she was talking about, the goddamned thing had a body the size of a big Turkey carpet and a long neck and funny head with a wide mouth and a long tail.
Alys did something then that I didn’t figure out for a while, and if I had known what it would lead to I would have stopped her, but all she did was carefully move a rock with a bone in it from one end of the skeleton to another. The rock held the bones was pretty broke up and no one could tell the switch. She didn’t tell me why she done it, and I didn’t ask.
Cope come along the next day, and Alys was already doing very detailed sketches of the beast in the rock. Cope got a little red and excited and he started with the head and he moved slowly down over what it was he could see until he come to the rock she’s moved—hell, it was maybe the size of two hands clasped—and then he let out a whoop and give off a dance, holding the rock and hollering like he’d done struck gold.
He dragged Alys back down to the tent and he stood over her describing the creature, and she deftly sketched in a fat stubby body and a big head with a mouth a yard wide, and a long tail shoving plants into the creature’s maw.
It took the rest of the day to get the drawing done to Cope’s satisfaction, and he worked late in his tent by lamplight, writing a paper on his amazing find.
Bob was the youngest of the fellers I had hired and he lacked a few items of use in the scout’s trade, so the boys let him go first. His boots was about gone and he needed a much better pistol than the stove-up old Colt he carried, and a better saddle. We was like that back then.
Bob stopped after he had been given the dispatch case by Cope and Alys handed him an envelope and he tucked it inside his shirt and he nodded and was off in the dark. Mulligan was out there, beyond the firelight, and I barely saw the little man before him and Bob vanished into the black.
We’d seen no sign of Cheyenne or Sioux, which was not the same as them not being there, and sure enough Bob and Mulligan was back late on the evening of the next day, and Bob told Cope he done give the case to Cope’s secretary at the hotel.
After Mr. Adler perused the contents.
The miners mined and the diggers dug and other flunks cased up the Flopposaurus in plaster and the heavy specimens was loaded in the spare wagons and a train was made up to take them down to the railhead.
Cope forgot hisself and tried to give an order to Sir Henry, to go along as a guard, but I saw it going on and I stepped in and got things smoothed out. Sir Henry was just amused, really, but Jake had a short temper and he wouldn’t do much more than blow Cope’s fool head off the man talked down to him, so I had a real earnest discussion with Cope and he promised not to do that again.
The wagon train headed south with the Flopposaurus, and we went on north.
Things was peaceful, and the weather was mild.
I seen an Indian just at dark on a distant ridge.
Way he moved I thought it was Blue Fox, and then he just disappeared like the ground swallered him up and I knew it was him.
I rode out after dark whistling and soon Mulligan was there, all wild hair, whiskers, and stink, and I offered a flask of whiskey and said we had some work to do.
24
MY INDIAN CHUMS, WHEN we wasn’t bent on killing each other, was a jolly bunch, and many of them had told me that the Wild West was something the whites brought. Oh, the tribes would scrap now and again, but the casualties was light. The warriors would put on best paint and feathers, and go hop up and down a while and holler insults, but it was damned rare for anyone to get killed till the whites come. The only thing that would provoke a big and very real fight was two bands and one buffalo ground, in the fall when making meat meant living through the winter.
So Washakie ate the Crow’s heart that one time, but there was more pitched battles, always over food.
What the Indians did was really more fun than not, and that was counting coup—more honor than killing an enemy was touching him with a coup stick—and stealing horses from each other. I think the women was behind it, clapping their men on the back and inviting them to go prove themselves, so the women didn’t have to listen to the pompous, boring bastards recite their exploits over and over. Just like the whites, come to think of it. Most Plains tribes the men was really allowed in camp only in the winter, plenty of time to make som
e babies and then they was booted out right smart in the spring.
What this done was make Indians the cleverest sneaks in all the world. They could come into camp and steal a horse you had in a pit under your bedroll, and when I first come here I found nothing but a cut rope more times than I cared to admit, first light in the morning and a long damn walk to another horse. The Crows was the best, or worst, depending on where you stand, and one explained to me once they liked the whites because they brought so many fine horses for Crows to steal right into Crow country. Crows would sometimes take everything, right down to boots and smallclothes, and many a man had to walk out stark naked, his outfit in some lodge up the river.
They was absolute masters of the country and they was both bold and subtle, and could lie for days chewing on a little piece of leather, not drinking and not eating and pissing down a stem of grass so it was noiseless, for that one chance to steal or maybe kill they had a reason.
All them tales of atrocities and murder committed by Indians was true, most of the time anyway, but what people don’t know is that the whites done it first, and worse, and the Indians was just trying to protect their families and way of life. Hell, when Lewis and Clark come through they had a dustup only with some Blackfeet and those bastards will fight anybody for the fun of it.
I was a fair common scout by now, and I had good teachers, Jim Bridger and Washakie and Kit Carson and old Liver-Eatin’ Jack, the monster the Crows call Bear-With-Man’s-Face.
The sight of Jack would have cheered me considerable, but I’d heard he’d retired and was liking Canada a lot, out on the Atlantic, far from the troubles he’d known over thirty years here.
I’d been in and out of Indian camps and them none the wiser till day, but I only had to fail once to be dead and each time was a dicey proposition for Mrs. Kelly’s son Luther.
What needed to be done now was the killing of Blue Fox, and he was damned good and further he was smart, in that insane way the mad are, and had to know I would be coming after him soon as I could. He was beyond dangerous. I could treat with any Indian but him, and we both knew it.
Mulligan was eccentric and hated camp, bedding down near enough but hid from everyone.
I whistled the signal we’d used for years, po-weet po-weet, and it warn’t long before the little man was by me, hadn’t seen or heard him come, of course.
Blue Fox, I says, we got to kill him.
Mulligan nodded. Well, talk was cheap and the task would likely cost dear, but as long as he was out there things could go about as bad as they could with no warning.
“I done et with Bad Knee,” Mulligan says, talking of a Cheyenne we both knew and liked. “And he says the Cheyennes is scared of Blue Fox. They can’t kill him, because Bear Man had a vision and Blue Fox is sacred. Mebbe you understand that, I don’t.”
I was gettin’ good at filterin’ words out of Mulligan’s sloppy squalls and grunts, and it surprised me to find him so well-spoke.
“No use goin’ after him,” I says. “But what would bring him near?”
Mulligan shook his head. He didn’t know neither.
Problem with a crazy man, you don’t know what they’ll do. Their thoughts run clear to them but no one else.
I could send a message I wanted a parley, but if I killed Blue Fox no Cheyenne would parley with me again.
I snapped my fingers.
“I know,” I says. “Newspapers.”
I have to explain that anyone who could read on the Plains was starved for print. A single newspaper would be passed hand to hand and tenderly cared for and finally it would crumble to dust, after many had read all the stories they really didn’t have an interest in.
Blue Fox warn’t the only Cheyenne could read English, I was fair sure, but far as I knew he was the only one graduated Dartmouth, and once you get hooked on print, well, you got to have it. He’d have books in his lodge but newspapers was something else and I bet he’d bite we baited a trap with ’em.
“We gonna peg out a newsboy like a damn goat for a mountain lion?” says Mulligan.
“No,” I says. “That’d drive him off, he’d smell the stink fifty miles away. We just need to start orderin’ up newspapers and pitchin’ them into the camp dump. And wait.”
Along with the empty tin cans and offal and such.
“How about Sir Henry low and you high?” I says.
You are hunting a man you got to have two fellers, one up high and one down low. Sir Henry was fast as a snake and Mulligan was deadly with his old Sharps. And they both knew Blue Fox.
All that remained was to start pitching newspapers out on the pile of crap maybe a quarter mile from the camp. The flies was coming on bad even up here, though the main slaughter of buffalo was south and east.
“I’ll let you know,” I says, swinging up.
Mulligan grinned. When newspapers started appearing at the dump he’d know.
I rode on back to camp and looked up Sir Henry, who was in Cope’s tent playing whist with Science, and beating him bad.
I said my piece and Sir Henry just nodded, never taking his eyes off the cards, and Cope said fine, he did trust me with such petty arrangements, like keeping us all alive.
The camp had a few newspapers, and I ordered the teamsters to haul up bales of the damn things on their next trip back. I took the dozen or so I could find and sent a camp boy out to the dump with them, ordering him to weigh them down with a rock, so they wouldn’t blow off.
Alys was in her artist’s tent, her eyes squinched, sketching yet another drawing for Cope. She did that about twelve hours a day. Where she found time for her own work I did not know, really, she must have cut it in to the bulk run as she went along.
She set down her pen and peeled off her ink-stained chamois gloves and she stretched and then she reached up and pulled me down and kissed me. I slipped into her tent most nights, unless I had to range far out and see what was moving in the country, and now that we was far away from Rosie’s and Masoud seemed to have took a wrong turn and headed east toward the Sand Hills she was a lot less short about my bad habits, of which I got a few.
There was no one else in the tent so she put her lips near my ear and told me what she was sending down to Adler, and where Cope was going with his things, and that she was having ever so much fun. Then the wench stuck her tongue in my ear and then whispered a description in detail that would have give Mrs. McGinniss the apoplexy in the matter of what lay before me tonight.
She had some whiskey for me and brandy for her and we sat and chatted about everything but what was going to Mr. Adler, and it was good just to set a while.
Then we went off to the more exclusive cook tent, where Cope and his High Flunks and Alys and me was allowed while lesser folk made do with a chuckwagon outside, and had a fine meal of antelope stew and a watercress salad—some fine feller had run though the country scatterin’ watercress seeds, which will ward off the scurvy, which killed more pioneers than Indians did. I don’t know who he was, but he was one fine feller.
I had a stogie with Cope, who expanded on the work we was doing and how he was ever so much better than that lying bastard Marsh and so forth and me and Alys listened polite.
I heard a rifle boom and knew it to be Mulligan’s old Sharps and I come off the chair and went out and saddled up and rode off toward the noise.
The dump was that way.
It took maybe two minutes for me to get there, and I seen that Blue Fox had taken the bait, all right.
Mulligan was there, down on one knee, and the boy I had sent off with the newspapers was on his knees and elbows on the ground.
Blue Fox had stabbed his eyes, stuck his knife up under the boy’s tongue and cut it away, and then rammed the blade up the kid’s arse and twisted, and gouts of blood was pumping out the hole in his trousers.
The poor kid was making bubbling noises of misery.
Mulligan reached over and cut his throat quick and the blood shot out three feet and the kid was dead in
a minute.
There was nothin’ else to do. Would have took him days to die of infection, and no way he could have lived.
“I winged him,” says Mulligan. “Not by much.”
I went to the dump. The newspapers was gone, and there was a few drops of blood on a rock nearby and horse tracks going off to the north.
“We’ll go,” I says. “Now.”
25
IT WAS MULLIGAN AND me and Lou set out after Blue Fox. I talked a little to Sir Henry, pointing out that Blue Fox, knowing I was after him, would maybe circle round and try to kill Alys. He had that in him. Sir Henry nodded once and looked at me with his heavy-lidded pale blue eyes.
We come into the tent Alys was in and I told her what had happened and that I was going after Blue Fox and she must this once do as I said and go nowhere without Sir Henry, and no place he said it warn’t a good idea to see. It would only be for a few days, I finished, surely she could swaller hard and put up with my orders that long. I saw a little gleam in her eye but it went away quick enough when I described what had been done to the boy in under fifteen seconds, likely.
“Why doesn’t he go?” she says finally, fear for me in her eyes.
“Sir Henry is a better shot than me, and you won’t distract him,” I says, “and you can talk about punting on the Thames and like that. This I got to do. Blue Fox was always crazy, but he’s past any thread to mankind anymore.”
That was true enough, and as I thought of it he’d tipped over sometime in the last few months, maybe even on the trip back East.
I had no time for more farewells and I looked at Sir Henry and he winked once, the only time I ever saw him blink and only one eye at that.
Lou was waiting; he was a gangly young Texan who’d rode up from Bandera after his folks died of the cholera and he had in the last three years got a good reputation for being brave and not foolish. He’d been caught out once and surrounded by Sioux and soon as it was dark he slipped into the river and swum till he found a dead bloated buffalo and he used that for a raft till he was a long ways away from the Sioux. Hid his head beneath a flap of hide the buffalo had sloughed off and he bore the stink and when he come to shore he’d lost one boot and so he had to toss the other and walk a hundred miles barefoot. I heard he had so many cactus spines in his feet the sawbones had him plunge his hooves into near-boiling water and then the abscesses opened up and Lou just lay there for a few days until everything festered good and the spines began to pop out. The quack would come with tweezers and a needle twice a day and Lou never complained, not once, just sat there chawing on a plug of tobacco and looking blank as a bedsheet.
