Brian Garfield (30 page)

That was when Madame Medora swept into the room. Somehow her delicate voice penetrated everything. “Antoine!”

The Marquis stepped back. He lowered the saber. An easy smile spread beneath his mustache. “
ça va.
” He endeavored to laugh. “Just having a bit of sport, aren't we, Wibaux. Amusing our visitors with a bit of Wild West adventure, eh?”

Wibaux had nothing to say; he was breathing heavily—the blood had rushed into his face and he tried to put on a smile for the others but it wavered. He tossed the saber to the floor and walked unsteadily from the room.

Roosevelt watched the Marquis with a fixed narrowed gaze.

Pack began to relax. He smiled. It was nothing, really. Two hot-blooded gents got a bit drunk and showed their tempers; nobody hurt.

It brought the evening to an abrupt and ragged close.

A sense of propriety led Pack reluctantly to seek out Roosevelt, to walk back to town with him, but he found that the dude had already departed.

In a sense he felt relief. But there was also a degree of frustration. In challenging the Marquis, Roosevelt had thrown raw meat on the floor. Pack knew De Morès would not let it lie there to grow maggoty. There was a clear conflict between the two men—their attitudes, ambitions, even their very personalities were clearly marked for collision, and Pack wanted to see it concluded. He wanted to see the boisterous little New Yorker's comeuppance; more, he wanted this potentially hazardous obstacle removed from the Marquis's course of destiny.

In the morning Pack returned to the château to ask the proprietor further questions about the stagecoach line for his article in the
Cow Boy.
He found the Marquis on the verandah awaiting the arrival of his saddle horse. Pack began to speak but he'd hardly got four words out when, triggered by his instant reflexes, the Marquis wheeled.

Pack hadn't heard a thing, but when he looked that way he saw a horseman coming uphill from the river bottoms.

It was Jerry Paddock. He arrived with a rifle in his scabbard. He was dressed in his threadbare formal clothes but he hadn't quite groomed himself accordingly: Pack observed that as usual he hadn't stood quite close enough to his razor. The early sun sliced in under the hatbrim and glittered off the slitted surfaces of Paddock's hooded eyes. He scowled; his eyebrows crawled together like black caterpillars. “Frank O'Donnell and Dutch Reuter and Riley Luffsey been seen on their way into town armed to the teeth. They been bragging about how this time they going to burn the château down. You got to teach them a lesson, and there is only one kind they understand. The kind with gunpowder behind it.”

Pack said, “Now, they're just baiting you. It's the custom to hoo-raw foreigners.”

“They shot up my house. They endangered the life of my wife. You were here, Arthur.”

Misgivings made him say, “I didn't see their faces. Neither did you.”

“I know who they are, Arthur, and so do you. The sheriff and his brother—that craven deputy!—have elected to remain away from here and take no part in the matter. Very well. I've given the law every chance. I'm not a greenhorn any longer. If these men want a fight I shall be pleased to give them one.”

Several of the Marquis's men arrived—the news had spread; perhaps Jerry Paddock had dropped a word at the stable on his way up here. The Marquis told them to remain where they were, and Pack saw the disappointment in their faces. He watched the Marquis smoothly mount his handsome but mettlesome creamcolored stallion. On a Navajo blanket the Mexican saddle was ornamented with silver horn, cantle and taps.

The Marquis said, “I shall deal with the hunters—we'll see how they appreciate the French code of law.”

Pack noticed Jerry Paddock riding away at a casual angle into the brush. Behind him he heard one of the hands say, “What's old Jerry armed with? I didn't get a look at it.”

“Springfield trapdoor.”

“Army carbine?”

“Rifle, not carbine.”

“Long range, then. Big cartridge.”

“It's chambered down to .38-56. And only one shot.”

“One's all you need, if you know where to put it.”

The events that followed were confusing. All anyone knew at first was that there was the racket of shooting—a lot of it.

LUFFSEY KILLED

… The
Cow Boy
has learned that The Marquis De Morès saw Luffsey, O'Donnell and Reuter riding toward him at full speed with guns drawn. De Morès raised his hand as a gesture for them to stop, but this gesture was returned with gunfire.

De Morès opened fire and the riders' horses were soon down, the hunters using them for cover as they fired at De Morès. During the ensuing gun battle, which took minutes, Luffsey was killed by a bullet through the neck; O'Donnell was wounded, his thigh shattered, and Reuter was slightly wounded. All three horses were killed. The stock of O'Donnell's rifle was smashed, so badly so that it could not be used.

O'Donnell and Reuter seeing Luffsey dead tried to make a run for it. In the face of this rout, the Marquis must be credited with great restraint. In this part of the West more men are shot where their suspenders come together than any other spot on their anatomies, but De Morès held fire.

In Bob Roberts's place that night there were varying degrees of maudlin drunkenness. The morose hunters rehearsed obituaries and vowed retaliation.

Pack confessed, “Now, I miss him a bit, you know. He had a bad streak, no doubt of it, but there was good in the lad. Given a better chance he might have made his mark on the world.”

It was the extent to which he was willing to display his sense of loss in this company. In truth he felt a deep sorrow—perhaps in part for what the youth might have become. If the wildness could have been tamed in time Luffsey might have come to something; he'd had intelligence and enthusiasm and you just couldn't help liking him. Pack had tried to enlist the lad as a protégé and the regret ran deep that he had failed.

He heard Joe Ferris say, “Only one way Frank O'Donnell's rifle could have been busted up that bad. One of the Marquis's exploding bullets.”

Pack said, “What of it? Luffsey must've got off several shots before he died, for his rifle was empty and there were three empty cartridge cases in his revolver and two loaded ones. The Marquis was defending himself, it's plain to see.”

Dan McKenzie remarked, “The bullet that killed Luffsey went straight through. Nobody found the slug.”

Bob Roberts said, “Could it have been a .38-56?”

“Who knows.”

Joe said to Pack, “So maybe the Marquis wasn't out there by himself all alone face-to-face with three murderous miscreants. What do you say to that?”

“There's no evidence of anything of the kind. Even Reuter and O'Donnell don't claim to have seen more than one man, although they say the Marquis opened fire first. Naturally they'd claim that. Otherwise they're finished.”

“Your big brave Marquis went out there all alone to face three seasoned hunters armed to the teeth. You really believe that hog swill, Pack?”

“Now, I saw him ride out by himself. It is the truth.” And so it was.

Amid gossips in town the killing of Luffsey was laid, without evidence Pack could credit, on the doorstep of Jerry Paddock, because he was disliked generally and was said to be a killer and probably was the best shot of any of the men the Marquis employed. Never mind that nobody could place Paddock at the scene of the event. It was assumed he had lain up in the brush and done the long-range shooting from across the river.

The Marquis himself was not generally believed to have fired the lethal shot, because the bullet that had killed Luffsey had not been of the exploding kind. The reasoning was specious, of course. The boys were far too quick to assume the Marquis carried only exploding bullets.

Pack found a certain savage satisfaction in being able to report in the
Cow Boy
, to what he hoped would be the chagrin of the loudmouths and cynics and especially his misguided friend Joe Ferris, that the Marquis had manfully agreed to submit to arrest any time by Sheriff Harmon, and meanwhile was endeavoring honestly and earnestly to calm things down by guaranteeing to remain available within the jurisdiction at any time for hearings and/or trial in custody of the territorial courts.

Nevertheless, to Pack's profound disgust, by the time the story of the gun battle on the Little Missouri had made the rounds it had grown into a full-scale massacre.

And not two days after the gunfight, Joe Ferris remarked softly, “You notice who hooked up his private car to the train this morning and headed out east? None other than the great Innocent—your friend De Morès. So much for his promise to stay put in the jurisdiction.”

“Roosevelt's gone east too,” Pack sputtered.

“What the hell's that got to do with it?”

“I don't know,” Pack admitted. It had been something to say, to fill the empty moment that seemed to require a response. He felt foolish. He said, “You may call the Marquis quite a few things but hardly a coward. He will be back.”

In that, as it turned out, he was quite right.

At the boneyard on the butte Luffsey was planted with his boots on. Huidekoper, the Langs, Joe Ferris and others were in attendance—most of the mourners being people who had had little or no use for him during his lifetime, but this was a show of force and a choosing-up of sides; thus the incongruous adjacence of Ferris and Finnegan, and the notable absence of the Marquis and all his men.

Pack noted disapprovingly that Joe Ferris wore his Remington revolver blatantly on his hip—a rudeness, God knew, at a funeral; but there it was.

Did Joe expect Jerry Paddock to blaze away from ambush at the funeral party?

As the new white wood cross went up there was a great deal of muttering, much of it old-sod accented. “Why, darlin' Riley Luffsey had so soft a heart, he could hardly kill a fly.”

Frank O'Donnell was not there; he was confined to his bed by his bullet wound. But Dutch Reuter had the gall to put in an appearance, and was surrounded with immediate loyalty by Redhead Finnegan and a crowd that seemed to include every Irishman in the district. Finnegan kept running his hand down his face—pretending to wipe away his crocodile tears, Pack thought savagely. They are such brazen hypocrites in their bleeding sentimentality.

Tempers ran very high. Dutch Reuter was not bashful in honking out his story. He had just happened to encounter O'Donnell and Luffsey on the trail, and accompanied them on their quiet ride toward town. They were peaceful folks. They nobody no harm meant.

If this were indeed the case, Pack thought angrily, how was it that the Marquis was able to show such a large number of bullet holes through his clothing and a soft lead bullet smashed against the buttstrap of his revolver?

Deacon Osterhaut, reading over the corpse, said self-righteously, “Perhaps it is true young Luffsey may have been headed for certain eventual arrest. Yet we cannot know anything but his Innocence in the eyes of the Almighty. In any event he now is in the Highest Custody.”

As the Deacon intoned the prayer, Pack saw Little Casino try to hide a tear in her eye. He felt moisture in his own eyes; and it occurred to him that there was hope for us all in the knowledge that even so low a creature as Luffsey had friends and loved ones to cry for him.

Sotto voce
, Joe Ferris said in Pack's ear, “You know damn well it was Jerry Paddock killed the kid from ambush.”

“Nonsense. Paddock wasn't even there.”

Joe's suspicions obviously had to be chalked up to his foolish prejudice against the Marquis and his virulent dislike of Jerry Paddock.

I don't like the villain any better than you do, Pack thought, but that's no proof he murdered Luffsey.

It must continue to be Pack's mission to set his misinformed friend on the path of Right and Truth.

Eleven

J
oe Ferris climbed up on the seat and ran the wagon out of town, happy to get away from slaughter smell and treacherous tempers—these latter still running high after several weeks of a strange suspension during which none of the principals had been on the scene. The Marquis and Marquise were away, allegedly on business, for nearly a month. Redhead Finnegan hadn't shown his face in town during that time. Frank O'Donnell was recovering slowly from his wound after a bout with blood poisoning; he drank profusely but kept to himself. Dutch Reuter had stayed away from town. A.C. Huidekoper seemed to have been spending all his free time traveling from ranch to ranch trying to organize the owners and managers against De Morès, with no success Joe could see. Even Roosevelt had been away in the East for three weeks, taking care of family business matters.

But now he was back. And so was the Marquis.

It seemed inevitable there was going to be a dust-up between those two gents. Somehow you could feel it coming.

The trail north to the Elkhorn crossed and recrossed the Little Missouri River more than twenty times. At intervals Joe went bouncing in the ruts past holding pens where hired hands were gathering cattle for the ravenous De Morès abattoir. He passed the turnoffs to Wibaux's ranch and Pierce Bolan's. As he came onto the Elkhorn the colors of the Bad Lands changed subtly—the horizontal stripes seemed to become more pale and there was more greenery on the slopes. The trees in the bottoms were lush, even this late in the year. Easy to understand why Roosevelt had chosen this location.

Joe tied the team in front of the log ranch house. Dutch Reuter evidently had watched his approach; now he set aside a rifle, came up from the barn and lifted a dipperful of water from the basin by the door. Dusty and shaggy, Dutch gulped a refreshing drink and then poured cold water over his head so that it ran down his face. It dripped from his beard. He wiped at it clumsily. “That French bastard still going me to shoot?”