by Bowen, Peter
I hung a hankie on the end of my rifle and waved it, it was sort of white, and I rode down toward the three men been potting away at Jake. Jake had been firing back good and so there wasn’t any blood shed, but Jake had that evil, terrible temper and I thought it might take more work to cool him off than the three fools started this mess.
Turned out I knew ’em all. There was Whinny, and Blackie O’Fallon, and Bill Bolt.
When they seen me they let their guns down and waited and I rode up and got off and lit into them.
“What in the pluperfect fucking hell are you boys doin’?” I says.
“That’s our dee-posit,” says Blackie, looking uncomfortable.
“Assholes,” I says. “Shit fer brains. Wyoming’s got about ten million tons of this crap and you got to start killin’ for it?”
Whinny looked pained.
“We was just tryin’ to run him off,” he says.
“Jake don’t run,” I says. “And it’s a miracle he don’t kill you all, you know what a head of steam he builds up.”
The three looked past me and their guns come up and I whirls around and there’s Jake, stalking our way with the black look of a man needs some blood and right now.
“Just hold it, Jake,” I says. “We don’t want to start killin’ each other.”
Jake stopped, I supposed because he wanted a clear line of fire and I was in the way. Whinny and Blackie and Bill sorta crowded in to what cover I provided.
I was about to point them off toward a place I knew had some bones, just to keep the peace, and then there’s this holler and I look over and that fat bastard Othniel Marsh is bouncing down a hill toward us, with a couple of his assistants in tow.
Marsh rode like a turd hit with a club, his hat was gone, and his face was red as a beet.
“I claim all this in the name of science!” Marsh wheezes when he gets up to us.
Whinny and Blackie and Bill looked real uncomfortable.
“It’s already claimed,” I says.
“You ignorant Irish nobody,” says Marsh. “Who are you to tell me this.”
I had half a mind just to step back and let Jake work off his mad, but this could get out of hand real fast.
“There’s another place,” I says, soothing-like, “off that way, just as good.”
I pointed.
“I’ll take that one, too,” says Marsh.
The three in front of me looked past me then and their eyes got wide and I turned and there was Jake, carrying his scattergun, a bastard thing that was an eight-gauge cut down and with duckbills on the front of the barrels so the shot spread about thirty feet in a flat line.
“Put them guns down,” says Jake, “or I’ll kill you all.”
Jake was known to be a man of his word, so Whinny and Blackie and Bill shed their armaments right quick.
“You must defend my property!” Marsh screamed, standing up in his stirrups.
“Kelly,” says Jake, “explain to that fat sack of shit that it is time for him to go. Now.”
Marsh was so furious he was deaf.
His assistants was well back and looking like leaving.
Marsh’s horse began to get shifty, and I could see his ears go back, which give me an idea. I pulled out my Colt and shot a couple times in the air, just for the noise.
Marsh’s horse was right grateful for the excuse, and he wound up and let loose and that fat sack of shit flew off like that and he went whumpf on the ground and lay there goggling up at the clouds.
“Get his horse, Whinny,” I says. Free of his burden, the horse had decided to stand there all nice and see what happened.
Marsh breathed deep and rolled over to an elbow.
“If you have to kill them,” he wheezed at Blackie and Whinny and Bill, “it may be for the best.”
That was enough. I walked over and kicked his fat ass hard as I could and I kept on kicking while he squealed and rolled and then he got up. He was frantic.
“Do something!” he screamed at his fellers.
They was all lookin’ at the ground.
“Marsh,” I says, “you get on your horse and get out of here. If there’s any more of this bushwhacking nonsense, I’ll kill you myself.”
Marsh’s life had been kissing asses till he could shit on heads, and he had no real stomach for a fight. He went to his horse all meek and got on and rode away, all disheveled and slumped in the saddle.
“You boys,” I says, “probably are in need of work. I’ll see what I can do.”
Jake saunters up, with that damn bastard shotgun pointed up and the hammers down.
“We’s sorry,” says Blackie to Jake. “We’s rode together and now we done this. We warn’t really trying to shoot you.”
“Done and done,” says Jake, for as hot as his temper was it cooled down pretty quick—and he must have been thinking he could have killed them all and he would be feeling right bad about it just about now.
He shook hands with all of them.
“Fight a war over a bunch of rocks,” says Whinny, “that’s about right.”
Somebody view-hallooed to the southeast of us, and I turned and there was Cope trotting up with his flunks ranged out behind him.
We all stood while the Great Professor went past and down to the old beach stuck in mud that was a hundred million years old and gone to stone. He walked around nodding.
“Capital!” he kept shouting. He even did a little jig.
When he was more or less calm finally I rode over to him and said I’d like to hire these three fellers, well-known to me and we could use them the farther north we went, more the danger from Indians.
“Yes, whatever,” says Cope, never taking his eyes off the rocks.
I rode back and told the three they was hired, and they nodded and waited for me to tell them what to do.
“Go north and keep an eye on the main trail for three days,” I says.
They could slip off and get their traps and such, and I didn’t know how much trouble that would be for them.
It was getting to be good war weather, with the grass up some and the trails drying.
The weather come from the south or west, I thought, and war, well it will come from the east or north.
My sixth sense was itching like a half-healed wound.
28
THINGS WAS SORT OF peaceful for a few days and the digging went on and this time it was yet another New to Science lizard dead so long I wondered if it mattered. Cope was so damn pleased with the find that he actually was almost pleasant. It must have been a strain for him, for he surely warn’t much practiced at it, and so I thought, well, hell, this might not be so bad after all.
Whilst I had been gone, though, running down Blue Fox, the order I put in for newspapers was filled and so we had about a wagonload of out-of-date ones and I thought nothing of it till I heard Cope start screaming in his tent one evening.
Some of the papers was new.
He was screaming at Alys.
She come out of the tent pale-faced and angry, but her lips was in a shadowy grin.
We went clear out to the edge of camp, and she filled me in.
It seemed that Cope had come a cropper, over that single bone Alys had moved. He had described a creature that floated in a sea, sweeping vegetables into its mouth with its tail, but his description of it was dead wrong, for Alys had slipped a neck bone into the works and he’d bitten, swallered, and was hooked deep down in the gut.
The newspapers was full of Cope’s blunder, and Marsh had got in on it, too, Cope’s most hated rival, and the papers was more or less calling him a damned fool over it all. I couldn’t really follow the arguments, but then I didn’t much care.
Cope ripped into Alys’s tent and he drug out all the sketches that she’d made of the skeleton of the Beast That Bit Cope on the Arse, and he pored over them hard. They was all detailed and he swore and swore as he looked at them and kept badgering her about was she sure she had got it right?
Alys
snapped back that she was good at what she did, and the drawings was dead on accurate.
“Someone moved that bone,” says Cope. “Some foul treacherous bastard! It could only be Marsh!”
The newspapers was so full of the story they actually sent some scribblers all the way up the trail from Laramie to interview Cope.
The scribblers was them supercilious youngsters come of money and went to good schools and were doing a little journalism till dear old Dad croaked and left them the brokerage or sweatshops or whatever. A bunch of perfumed weasels, you ask me, but nobody did.
I also suspected that some of them was paid by Marsh, since they was dedicated slippers of specimens into pockets, or maybe they was just good capitalists bred in the bone.
Cope gritted his teeth and put up with them because disinterested science wasn’t worth a fart in a bottled ’less the press hollered it from the rooftops.
Alys got some mail, among them a letter from her Uncle Digby saying he would be along about September, that the press of business was hard, and that his wound was all healed up. McMasters, the sawbones, would be coming too and would Kelly know an Indian quack he could pester?
Cope his own self was stuck on the debacle of the Flopposaurus and he’d try to put his mind off it but it just plain did not work. He’d made a fool of himself the world over in the small select world of disinterested scientists, who was plenty interested in their careers and them at the expense of anyone else’s. They acted like a bunch of society women clawing and scratching for the best grade of guests come to their godawful balls.
Cope went over and over Alys’s drawings and then one day he had them crated along with some other stuff and sent down the line to be shipped back. I hoped this would ease his mind.
Blackie and Whinny and Bill was ranging far and wide, and they brought back bits of what they’d found, including a shark’s tooth nine inches on a side and triangular as the teeth of sharks are.
Cope was mighty interested in that, and he said such a shark would be a hundred feet long. I got a chill thinking about it. Wyoming was full of tough customers today, but they was nothing compared to what had been. We lacked critters that could bite a grizzly in half.
Cope had to go off and see where this shark tooth come from, and I sent the three new boys with him as guards, since they’d found the beast. Also I wanted a day or two without Cope screaming about the goddamned Flopposaurus.
Alys and me took the time Cope was gone to go out riding together, far from the camp and the stink and the rest of everybody, and we saw an amazing sight coming up the trail from the railhead.
It was a wagon all painted red with gold symbols, crosses and the like, and a statue of the Virgin in a little alcove on each side. There was some little cages built into it and a blond woman at the reins went to a couple of nags and a little feller in cheap black suitings up at the horse’s head leading it along.
He was singing in Eye-talian, operas I guess.
They was down below us and of a sudden the man halted the horses and he run to the back of the wagon and fished out a shotgun and he crept forward and flushed a couple of prairie chickens and he took two shots and the chickens just sailed right on without losing a feather.
There was a long aria from him after that, but it weren’t from no opera.
Then he opens one of the little cages and he takes out this hawk and with it setting on his wrist he runs toward where the prairie chickens landed and they flush up again and he lets the hawk loose and it flies up and dives on one of the chickens and that was that.
We could see the hawk land on the bird and the little Eye-talian rush up and clap a blindfold on it and pull it off the prairie chicken. He lifted up the bird and put the hawk back on his fist and he bounded back toward the wagon. The blond woman had hove to and was letting the nags loose to graze.
“Jaysus” I says, “this is as silly as that damned Chinaman.”
“What?” says Alys.
So I told her a few years before I was riding up near the Utah border and I come upon a Chinaman pulling one of them carts and he had this huge gong in the thing, hanging from a trestle.
So I went down to see what was up and he stopped and he had enough English to tell me he’d made it this far and when the Indians come close he’d beat the gong and scare their horses.
He give the gong a nice thump and my horse looked a moment at the noise and went back to eating.
“It ain’t foolproof,” I says. “You got a gun?”
“No need gun,” says the Chinaman. “Got gong.”
I never give advice when it ain’t wanted so I just shrugged and rode off and thought no more of it till about six months later I was in a Ute camp and I seen this pigtail on the warpole of mine host.
The Indian looked at me looking at the pigtail and he says:
“Horse deaf.”
And that was that and everybody had a good laugh except the Chinaman who was with us only in spirit.
“Lots of folks come here thinkin’ that the West is just what’s in the penny dreadfuls,” I says to Alys. “But there’s plenty of parts where you get killed you ain’t real cautious, and sometimes even if you are.”
So we wanders on down to where the Eye-talian is and him and his wife was setting a table. Then the lady went off a little ways and plucked and drew that bird in about ten seconds.
When they finally saw us at a range of about fifty feet they both smiles wide and welcomes us and I was pleased to find about half the wagon was taken up with kegs of Eye-talian brandy, they call it grappa.
Alys had Eye-talian, of course, and she and them chatted gaily while I wondered what’s being said.
I had more grappa and didn’t give a damn anyway.
They fed us a wonderful meal whipped up out of nowheres and we smiled a lot at each other and then I looked over toward some weather and saw it was going to rain damn hard soon, so I tugs on Alys’s arm and says we better go, and further they’d better get to high ground, as the place they was setting in might be about ten feet underwater and soon.
The man and his wife nodded and folded up camp and was going up a sidehill trail in fifteen minutes—they was good with their wagon and stock, even if they was probably going to end as hair on a warpole.
Sure enough, they had just got to the crest of a little hill when a mass of water come rumbling down the wash, and we had a dirty boiling river between us. We waved and headed back to Cope’s camp.
“He is an editor for an Italian magazine,” says Alys, “devoted to hunting and especially falconry. He is here, he said, to get some golden eagle chicks and train them. Stefano and Libretta,” says Alys.
“Golden eagles?” I says.
29
COPE HAD MAYBE CAUSED his name to be a joke back East, but there was one place he was highly regarded, and that was Salt Lake City, especially after he described the full-sized horses even though he said they was zebras. The cartoonists had had a lot of fun drawing tiny monkeys riding the little three-toed horse he’d bought off the late Pignuts, and joshing the Mormons. ’Fore they was Mormons most of the Saints was members of one or another of them dismal churches where they spend most of their time persecuting each other or themselves or something. It always has amazed me how the ones who scream loudest how they love Jesus is the ones ought to add except for everything the man was, or did, or taught, or thought, or said.
But when the zebras come along I imagined there was great happiness in Deseret. Was, too, and being Mormons they thought hard about what to do nice for the good Professor Cope and that was send six missionaries to see about convertin’ him.
Mormon missionaries was the sort of folks could bore a coat of paint off a wall, and they showed up in their long glooms and dark clothes and began stalking Cope, who said, well, no, and then anyone else they could pin down for a while, until the fine day they stumbled over Mulligan.
Now Mulligan wasn’t in the camp, as I’ve said, he preferred to sleep in a burrow with the rest
of the badgers and how they come on him I can’t explain, but Mulligan must have wanted to set them up, there ain’t no other explanantion for it.
Him and them two Eye-talians was wandering about with a wagonload of grappa and assorted mean birds.
Had the defunct Chinaman and his gong been along, it would have been perfect.
Anyhows, the Mormons announced that Mulligan had done seen the light and was soon to be baptized, as soon as it rained and there was water enough to dunk him in. I was right interested, since it would be the first recorded instance of Mulligan taking a bath, however brief, and the rest of the boys was interested, too.
Name like Mulligan the little bastard had to be a filthy Papist, and I am here to tell you he was, especially the filthy part.
Situation like this I would not trust Mulligan at all, but the missionaries was so starved for a convert they overlooked many of Mulligan’s more dubious qualities, such as no one could understand what he was saying, exactly.
For the rest of us, either we done read too many books to be much interested in one as silly as the Book of Mormon—it’s cribbed a lot from a bad novel published in 1819, written by some professor, wouldn’t you know—or we was surely going to hell at the end and preferred it that way ’cause our friends would be there, too.
Finally, the day come when Mulligan was to be baptized—the Mormons had got tired of waiting on rain and so they dug a pit in a seep that filled enough with water so Mulligan could be dunked all the way, if there was a standby to the baptizer ready to poke down any parts that stuck up.
There not being much entertainment in deepest Wyoming, there was a good deal of interest in the proceedings, and one of the missionaries announced he would do it, him being a Bishop, which meant he run a pack of Mormon farmers around some miserable patch of alkali Brigham had pronounced heaven only in need of a little hard work, none of which he himself would care to do.
I had friends among the Mormons, but they was poor folk from Europe—Scandinavia, mostly, who had been peasants there for maybe a hundred generations, never owning a bit of land. They come from there to America and Utah, and if the free land cost some time listening to Brigham’s bullshit, well, they still had the land.
