Prairie Nocturne Page 40

  Grunting, Wes went down in front of the trunk in an angled half-crouch. The accumulated grime and spider output made him hesitate; he had forgotten gloves. With mental apology to his daughters, he pulled on a sleeve puppet of a giraffe with coy eyelashes and batted away the cobwebs. Then he cautiously blew the dust off the trunk and lifted its lid.

  His father’s things were the top few strata of its holdings. Brittle mummy-brown scrapbooks; on the first page of the first one that came open, a Miles City newspaper account of the inception of the Montana Stockmen’s Association in 1885. Wes could not help running his finger down the list of the men who possessed the prairie then: Granville Stuart, the bookish cattle king chosen as president; James Fergus, who had a county named after him; among the others, the invited ranch operators from just over the Dakota line, including one T. Roosevelt. Wes knew enough of the story; certain members of the cattlemen’s group had evolved immediately into vigilantes with pedigrees. Secret lynching crews—Stuart’s Stranglers—had been set loose against suspected rustlers in the Missouri Breaks and across the eastern plains of Montana. He ran down the founders’ list again, even though he was as sure as anything can be. Notably missing was the name Williamson. That was like him. Whatever else might be said about his father, Warren Williamson had always had his own way of doing things in the Two Medicine country.

  He stacked the scrapbooks aside, then with soldierly care lifted out the holstered horse pistol that young Lieutenant Warren Williamson had used with effect in the Union cavalry corps, and never after. It took Wes over for a moment, the antique pistolry of his father’s war compared to the mammoth-caliber barrages of his own. A peashooter like this to Big Bertha—there’s progress for you. He stuck the gun aside with the scrapbooks and dipped again into the trunk until he could reach what he was looking for. There, beneath it all, the box that he and Whit had long ago agreed they wanted off the ranch.

  Surprisingly light but awkward to handle, at least the thing had a carry-string, as such boxes do; he wouldn’t have to go there holding it in both hands like something that was about to spill. Not that it’s anything that will ever wash out, no matter how careful I am. The box had risen, in his grasp, only to the brass-edged rim of the trunk, insecurely resting where the corners lipped together. Holding it there he stayed in the half-crouch, still deciding, bothered raw both ways. There would have been a time when he’d have prayed, in such a position, to work out what to do; sought some justifying snippet of code in the holy accumulation of teachings, some overlooked affidavit of motive that would spell out whether to keep the silence or let this box speak its piece. But, in a wealth of confusion as unsortable as the attic around him, faith had entirely too many meanings in this situation. The word was as shifting as bits of alphabet shaken into a kaleidoscope: a twitch back or forth spun up a different color-stained letter of faith that one or another of them had put full belief into.

  Wes drew a deciding sift of breath through his teeth. He hadn’t become who he was by letting others put their spin on things. Lifting the box on up, already he was fashioning his route out past Merrinell for the evening. Benny Leonard’s bout tonight; he would say Phil had happened onto ringside tickets. Lightweights usually went the full fifteen rounds, that would give him ample time. He could cover with details from the morning paper, if she showed curiosity. That wasn’t likely.

  He lugged the box downstairs and stashed it at the back of his closet, cleaned up and changed into clothes for the evening. The preliminary with Merrinell aside, the worst he faced now was killing time until dark. It doesn’t stay killed, that’s the problem. It lies around in us in piles until something like this fans air into it.

  It was full night when he emerged from the taxi, stood stock-still on the sidewalk to see if he was going through with this, then pushed off on his good leg and approached the door.

  Quicker than he had figured, Susan was down from her quarters to answer his rap. Abruptly she stood there only the distance of the sill from him, angular but poised, still magical in the nightframe of light, which made this even worse. Surprise came and went on her face, and something else settled in as he watched.

  “What’s wrong?” Not that she had to ask.

  Everything. Us. The two of you. The history that our skins are the descendants of. The fact that life wants to be so strict with us that we only have to strike a match to catch a whiff of Hell. The skirmishes of desire that we fall into blind, and make worse. The list could go on. Wes waited, not ready to try to put any of it into words while perched on a doorstep.

  Susan gauged him some more, his elegance at odds with the thing on a string dangling in his hand as if he were an unwilling participant in a scavenger hunt. “You’re not just taking that for a stroll, I suppose. You had better come in, come up.” She led the way up the stairs, glancing at him over her shoulder. He still carried what he came with. “A bonnet box? Collecting Easter finery now, are you?” He simply trudged up after her, tread by tread, still wordless.

  They came into the organized muss of the room she used for work. Correspondence files were stacked, state by state, on the trestle table along the wall. With the typewriter on its traveling stand neatly drawn up beside the raft of paperwork, that end of the room looked scrupulously secretarial. The writing desk by the window, on the other hand, had a strew of music sheets as if a whirlwind had gone through a concert hall.

  He stood as if brought in on inspection, she stood watching him. Neither of them showed any inclination to sit. “Major,” she said as if trying out a word in another language. “You’re in, you’re up, and you have a captive audience. Has the cat got your tongue?”

  “There’s talk. About Monty and you.”

  “And not much of it for,” she estimated forthrightly. “Except your own spirited defense of our normal adult right to such conduct, I’ll bet anything.”

  “Susan, don’t mock, not now.” He gave her a gaze crimped with pain, then looked off from her unyielding eyes. Whiter than the music sheets on the desk were the coupled pages, open, with the fountain pen in the seam between them like a bookmark. It was the time of night, he realized, when she did her diary.

  “It’s all in there, I suppose? If I had any sense I’d probably make you an offer on it. Maybe that would make this go away.”

  “Wes, not even you can buy ink back from the page.”

  He felt the cut of that, but would have let parts of him be lopped off rather than betray it to her just now. As solidly as if on guard duty, he stood planted to his chosen spot of the room and challenged: “Can you drop it, this with Monty?”

  She shook her head. “Even if I could, I’m not sure I would scoot away from him on anybody else’s say. All people have to do is look the other way if they don’t like the shades of our faces together. You look all too bothered by it yourself.” Her eyes were penetrating now. “Cuba? You never?” She trailed a finger on the black leather cushion of the desk chair. “You didn’t even once touch a woman this color? Or this?” She touched the mahogany-brown corner of the trestle table. “Or this?” The warm walnut tone of the window ledge. “You really must have been an exceptional soldier if you never resorted to a woman darker than you when you were a young buck on leave, furlough, whatever. Didn’t even your Saint Augustine ask for virtue only when he was ready for it?”

  “Please, Susan, don’t—what race Monty is, isn’t the direct reason I—”

  “No? Indirect? Just a little something that sets you off like this? Wes, I suppose you’re entitled to a man’s usual hissy fit because I’m drawn to someone else and you couldn’t imagine it happening. But this other—you’d better tear that out of your bones.”

  “There’s more in back of it than that.” He undid the lid of the hatbox and brought out an old cavalry hat, battered and less than intact.

  SOLDIERS

  · 1889 ·

  A FROWN WAS not something you wanted to see on Ninian Duff, particularly when it was in connection with his trigger finger
.

  On the horse beside his, Donald Erskine also sat looking as peeved as a parson whose Sunday dinner had been interrupted, which in a sense it had. The two of them were out after deer, and there near the upper pasture salt lick where their small herd of red cattle was congregated, a sly three-point buck and his dainty does were picking their way ever so gradually to the lure of the lick. Tempting as the presence of venison was, Ninian kept on tapping his finger against the walnut grip of his rifle but made no move to draw the long gun from its saddle scabbard.

  Finally his words bit the air:

  “I don’t see my brockle-face.”

  “Nor my cow with the one horn,” Donald said bleakly.

  This was the third time since calving that cows of theirs had gone missing, no matter how anxiously one or the other of them rode up here noon and night from the labors of their homesteads to check on the livestock, and they long since had absolved bears, wolves, and other four-legged suspects. Much the greater likelihood, they were by now convinced, was a hidden corral somewhere considerably to the north of here near the agency for the Blackfeet reservation, where a few cows at a time were butchered, their hides burned, and the cheap rustled beef doled out as tribal allotment by some conniving agent who booked it at market price and pocketed the difference. Scottishly numerate as they were, Ninian and Donald had worked out that the economics of someone stealing their cattle only by twos and threes must necessitate a regular wage somewhere for the riders involved; rustling as an encouraged sideline, a bit of a bonus. It weighed constantly on both men: encouragement of that kind had only one logical home in the Two Medicine country, and its address bore a double set of the letter W.

  Donald dourly glanced across at the thundercloud that was his oldest friend’s bearded face. These were men who at the best of times were not happy with the thought that they were being toyed with.

  “Ninian, are you lighting on what I am, though? That obstinate brockle of yours—”

  “Ay, her natural element is the brush, isn’t it.” Ever a verifier, Ninian glanced behind them at the North Fork’s coil of cottonwoods and willows where the brockle-face herd quitter liked to lurk, fly season or not. He and Donald had had to fight her out of there to bring her to fresh pasture with the others. Now he turned his eyes in the direction that led to the reservation. “Let’s just see if our callers are earning misery by trying to drive her.”

  “Old Williamson thinks it’s so easy, walking over us,” Donald mused. “Sheriff in his pocket, and us thin on the ground.”

  “One day he’s going to have another think coming.” Ninian rose in his saddle as if testing the air. “Just possibly today.”

  The two men rode north at a quick trot, into a carrying wind that they somehow knew would aid their cause. Beside them but a mile loftier, the Rockies already showed early snow, November’s first bright ash of the dwindling year, the third one these determined men had expended on the landclaims that drew them and theirs to America. They used the uneven ground to advantage today, riding in short order to familiar timberline on Breed Butte so they could see across the swale of Noon Creek and all the way onward to the kettle hills between the next creeks, Birch and Badger. No horsemen nor abducted cattle out in the open, near or far. Exchanging looks of satisfaction that their objects of pursuit were not making a run for it, Ninian and Donald urged their horses down toward the jackpines and brush that hemmed the foothills.

  * * *

  They came onto the rustlers not far into the gulch country at the head of Noon Creek. The bawling brought by the wind sent them off their horses. Each man jacked a shell into the chamber of his rifle, then slid another into the magazine to have it fully loaded, and side by side they maneuvered up the low hogback ridge that the creek bent around. Just below the brow of it, they removed their hats and cautiously looked things over from behind an outcropping. The commotion was beyond a rifleshot away but, as they had figured it would be, was happening at the tangle of the creek brush. Taking her stand there in the diamond willows, the brockle was lowing like a mad thing. The pair of men on horseback who, by chance, were trying to drive the worst cow ever created kept circling her vicinity as if they were on a frustrating carousel.

  “One’s a black fellow, Ninian.”

  “Thieves are plaid.”

  The lay of the land was not bad for their purpose, they decided. “I’d say let’s try them from that coulee,” Ninian provided in the same low murmur they always used when hunting.

  To make sure they were playing the same hand, Donald countered: “And then?”

  “It’s still the old drill, isn’t it. ‘Ready, steady, fire.’ ”

  * * *

  “Hurry the hell up, Rathbun, dab the rope on her,” Flannery encouraged or jeered, it was hard to tell which, while he more or less hazed the one-horned cow away from joining the brush expedition.

  Mose flung him a look that would have taken a trooper’s head off, but had no apparent effect on his fellow taker of cows. Flannery’s qualifications for rustling apparently amounted to his having been in a scrape of some kind in Texas. Not that mine are a hell of a lot better, Mose had to admit to himself as the brockle-faced cow went one side of a willow clump and his lasso toss caught only wood. Easy money for a bit of hard riding, this was not turning out to be.

  “Roping was not in my schooling,” Mose rumbled back, but on his next throw his loop flopped over the cow’s neck. Immediately she bellowed and lurched deeper into the willow thicket before he could manage to dally his rope around the saddlehorn and get his horse started on dragging her out of there.

  “Better see this,” he heard Flannery say as if he was at a sideshow. “Couple of honyocker fools think they’re an army. Ready to take ’em?”

  Still cinched to the creature in the brush by the lariat, Mose dubiously turned half around in his saddle. Flannery for once wasn’t just woofing. The pair of men at the mouth of the coulee were a great deal closer than Mose liked to see. One figure like a mop, the other like a chopping block, both of them in antiquated infantry kneel that he had only ever seen in tattered manuals. And probably were shaking in their boots, but even so—Flannery carried just a pistol, the idiot, and right now he was a lot slower with it than advertised. Plainly it was up to Mose. In the matter of instants needed for all this to register, he kick-spurred his horse forward to take the tension off that rope while simultaneously pulling his carbine from the scabbard.

  Before Mose’s rifle was clear of the leather, Ninian shot the horse from under him.

  Donald’s rifle echoed an instant after his, and Flannery went out of his saddle backward, hit at the base of his throat.

  In the brush, the horse on its side kicking out the last of its life and the alarmed cow trying to crash its way free of rope and willow, Mose scrambled on all fours to dodge them and the prospect of hanging for rustling as well. He panted raggedly, most of his breath knocked out when the ground flew up and met him. When he had cover enough he flopped low, trying to clear his head. Bonus on these damnable cows or not, this wasn’t anywhere in the bargain with Williamson, for a person to get the life shot out of him like had just happened with Flannery. Where’d these sharpshooting fiends show up from? Opponents came and went, in soldier life, but surprise was forever the enemy. Dry-mouthed, and not liking the taste of that, Mose ever so slowly began to wriggle through the brush. The rifle he had lost in his hard spill was somewhere right here, and he hadn’t yet seen a situation he and a cavalry-issue Springfield couldn’t deal with. The damn thing could not have flown very far when he hit the dirt. As he crept in search, it was on his mind that the honyockers were not firing wildly the way a person had a reasonable right to expect, not mowing down brush every time a willow swayed. They would not be anywhere near out of ammunition, the devils. He would have to deal with that as it came, if he just could ever find the damn—

  There. He spotted the Springfield behind a thatch of willows about twice the length of his body away. Counting on the scr
een of brush to give him enough hiding place to get into action and make quick work of these down-on-their-knees scissorbills, he gathered himself and scooted low and fast to make a grab for the weapon.

  Ninian dropped him with the next shot, and when Mose went on thrashing, shot him again for good measure.

  The sound of the rifle fire repeated from gulch to gulch, then rolled away at last into the timber at the base of the mountains. Rising as righteous bearded men had from the plains of Jericho, Ninian and Donald at once began about the next of this messy business. As he stalked cautiously toward the creek Ninian worked it out in his mind that they would have to hope to get into those deer on their way back, to account for all the sounds of shooting. Not that he at all liked the prospect of alibiing that they had banged away at venison for half a day until finally hitting some, but there was no choice.

  Even with the echoes of the shots at last stilled, the silence seemed to ring. Ninian looked everywhere around. The two cows were hieing for home, the lariat still dangling from the brockle-face. Without expression he examined the hunched-over dark man he had killed. Nearby, Donald’s victim lay toes-up, an incredulous expression on his face and a red stain over his entire chest. The one in front of Ninian at least did not look as if this was never expected.

  By now Donald had coaxed the riderless horse and tied its reins to the trunk of a young cottonwood. He came puffing over and in his turn studied down at the two riders where they lay, then blew out a long breath. “Old Williamson is going to be cross toward us.”

  “I doubt that he will,” Ninian spoke in his most considering tone. “I would wager that two empty beds at the bunkhouse will give him more than he wants to think about. No, it seems our man Williamson shies away from all-out war on the likes of us or he wouldn’t have spent so much care trying to just peck us to death, a few cows at a time. The Williamson way is to work around the edges, I’d say. At any rate, he’ll know now we’re not so easily done away with.”