Buffalo Girls (13 page)

“Your spirits are at worm level,” Bartle remarked one day. “Camping with you is like camping with a worm. You wiggle once in a while, but you don't put out no conversation.”

Jim was thoroughly tired of Bartle's efforts to cheer him up. He decided to prove Bartle's point by saying nothing. Maybe if he said nothing Bartle would shut up, though it wasn't likely.

At Jim's insistence they had camped about twenty miles from Deadwood, east toward the plains. Being in a settled community was more than Jim felt he could tolerate. Deadwood had its raw side, but it was still a settled community and Jim preferred to avoid it.

Many years before, not far from their present camp, Jim had killed the largest grizzly bear anyone had ever seen. Bartle had been in the camp at the time and not present at the kill, but when he walked out and saw the carcass he agreed that it was the largest bear
he
had ever seen.

Then three Sioux warriors came riding up—later they admitted
that they had come with the intention of killing Jim and Bartle, but the sight of the great bear carcass distracted them from their purpose. They lost all thought of killing.

News quickly spread; before the sun set that day two hundred Indians or more had come to see the bear. As a gesture of courtesy, being conscious that they were guests in the Black Hills and not necessarily welcome guests, the mountain men gave the bear to the Sioux. The gift was accepted with dignity and the mountain men were invited to the feast that followed. The feast was a nervous occasion, though. Several important warriors—Black Moon, Pretty Bear, and Slow—were there; they were young men and had not yet acquired the fame that would attend them in later years, but it was not the young warriors who caused the feast to be such a nervous occasion.

The problem was a medicine man, an old Sioux whose eyesight was weak. As the feast was just commencing, the medicine man had a vision and announced that it had been a terrible mistake to kill the bear. He claimed that the beast had been the Grandmother Bear.

Indeed, the grizzly had been a she-bear. The medicine man felt the great skull of the she-bear and chanted and carried on for a long while. The Indians became fearful and somewhat agitated, the mountain men fearful and agitated, too. It was undoubtedly a giant she-bear, but did that mean it was the Grandmother Bear? The medicine man predicted that the end of the world might come as a result of the death.

Then, in the midst of the feast, a shower of falling stars was observed, which continued for half an hour. This alarmed the Indians still more; it seemed as if the medicine man's prophecy might come true almost immediately. A kind of panic resulted, during which Jim and Bartle slipped away. They headed south, traveled only by night, and didn't stop until they were two hundred miles below the Platte. They counted themselves lucky not to have been killed on the spot, and felt they would have been, had they not been invited guests. But the word would spread,
and they knew they could expect a violent welcome in the lodges of the Sioux for some time to come.

They didn't return to the Dakotas for more than ten years, by which time the old medicine man's prophecy had proved to be invalid; the world had not ended, after all, and the Sioux who were still alive and remembered the great bear had decided it had merely been a very large she-bear, and not the Grandmother Bear. In Sioux opinion the Grandmother Bear would never have delivered herself up to the white man's bullet anyway.

“It wasn't a mile from here that I killed the big bear,” Jim remarked. “I think that was probably the biggest bear that was ever grown.”

“You would think it, since you shot it,” Bartle said. “It was a large bear but not the biggest that was ever grown—in Canada bears get twice that size.”

“How would you know?” Jim asked. “You've never been to Canada.”

“I've never been to the moon, either,” Bartle said. “That don't mean I doubt it exists. Everybody knows bears grow bigger in Canada.”

“Name one person that knows it,” Jim demanded.

“Lonesome Charley knows it,” Bartle replied immediately—on the rare occasions when Jim could be taunted into asking a question, he liked to have an answer close at hand.

“Lonesome Charley is no judge of bears,” Jim said. “He's only got one eye. Of course a bear will look bigger if you've only got one eye to look out of.”

Bartle was making a stew as they talked. They stew consisted of a squirrel and a few wild onions. The squirrel had been so inept as to actually fall out of a tree. It had landed right at his feet and he had brained it with his gun stock. Jim's rejoinder took him so completely by surprise that for a moment he was speechless. Why would anyone suppose that the loss of one eye doubled the size of what one looked at? And yet, that seemed to be what his friend had suggested.

“What you just said was so crazy I don't want to discuss bears anymore,” Bartle said.

But Jim's memory had seized on the bear and the Sioux feast and the old medicine man's prophecy.

“Suppose it was the biggest bear ever grown,” Jim said. “If it was, then that old blind Sioux was right. The world started ending about then. The biggest bear was dead—the west won't ever grow one that big again. That's a kind of ending.”

“You're paddling with the wrong end of the paddle,” Bartle said. “The world ain't ending and the old man was wrong. If you enjoyed town life we'd be eating better, too.”

Bartle saw that Jim's gaze had frozen suddenly. He looked where Jim was looking and saw three riders watching them from a ridge to the north. It startled him so that he almost overturned the squirrel stew. Riders on a ridge had often made him jump—they could be hostile, and there could be a hundred more just beyond the ridge.

“What do you think?” Jim asked.

“That there ain't enough stew to go around,” Bartle said. “It's just one squirrel.”

“If they're killers it won't matter,” Jim said. “Are they white or Indian? I can't tell.”

Bartle couldn't tell either. All he could see were three dots on a ridge—now that he looked with more attention it seemed to him that he saw less. He would not even have sworn the figures on the ridge were mounted men. They might be men without horses, or horses without men, for that matter. They might be elk. It was unlikely they were buffalo, a thought he immediately voiced.

“I don't think they're buffalo,” he said.

“Of course not—what a fool!” Jim said. “There's no buffalo now.”

“I wish No Ears was here,” Bartle said. “He could smell them and help us judge the danger. It's awful to be so weak-eyed you can't see your own murderers coming.”

Jim kept his eyes on the ridge—he was pretty sure the dots were mounted men, approaching slowly.

“I am embarrassed,” Bartle admitted. “Something must have happened to my eyes during the winter—and to yours, too.”

The dots dipped from sight and didn't reappear for fifteen minutes, during which the mountain men ate the stew. Bartle ate more rapidly than usual.

“Are you gobbling that stew because you don't want to share it?” Jim asked. “Those was probably just elk we saw.”

“I think those were Blackfoot we saw,” Bartle conjectured. He knew it was a wild guess, but then why not guess wild?

“You ate that stew so fast it drowned your brain,” Jim said. “The Blackfoot country is hundreds of miles away. What would Blackfoot be doing here?”

“Looking for old-timers to scalp,” Bartle said. “There's fewer and fewer old-timers. They have to travel a good ways from home to find one worth scalping.”

The dots emerged from a valley, no longer dots. They were very obviously three men on horseback, and they were not Blackfoot, either.

“It's Lumpy Neck, Billy Cody, and a short fellow,” Jim said. “I expect Billy paid Lumpy Neck to track us.”

Lumpy Neck was an old drifter they had known since their days on the Santa Fe trail. He had once been an indefatigable rider with a great reputation—he was said to have been the most daring rider ever to ride for the Pony Express. When that played out he had switched to stage driving and had driven stages over the high passes to California. Once the railroad put him out of business, he merely drifted, doing little insofar as anyone knew. Miles, Crook, Custer, and several other generals sought his services as a scout, but he refused to have any dealings with the military. He considered the whole west his home and could be encountered anywhere in it. He had an enormous goiter, thus his name, which some said had been given him by Crazy Horse. Jim and Bartle knew that to be a lie, for they had met the man in
Albuquerque long ago, when Crazy Horse was no more than a boy. He had been called Lumpy Neck then—of course it was the kind of name an Indian would bestow. Of late he had mainly been seen in the company of an even older desert drifter named Tucson Jack, a desert rat whose beard was so long he could tuck it under his belt.

“I don't see Tucson Jack,” Bartle observed, as the riders came closer. “I guess he died.”

“He might have declined the company,” Jim said.

“I'll be kind of glad to see Billy myself,” Bartle remarked. “I'm interested to see if he's got any prettier.”

Jim too felt a little perked up at the thought that Billy Cody was coming—for all his airs no one could deny that he was merry company, something in short supply in the environs of Dead-wood these days. It was an odd thing the way attitudes toward Billy Cody varied. It was easy to criticize him and impossible not to be glad to see him.

“Who's that short fellow?” he asked. “What's that? He's riding a white mule.”

“What would possess anyone to ride a white mule?” Bartle wondered, astonished.

“Hello, you beaver boys, we found you at last,” Billy Cody said, jolly as could be. He jumped off his horse and shook hands warmly with both of them. He was still the dandy—his buckskins were clean and he wore a silk scarf at his throat.

The sudden rush of company tied Jim's tongue, but Bartle experienced no such problem.

“Howdy, Bill. There's nothing to eat, but tell your crew
to
dismount anyway,” he said. “I admire the white mule. How are you, Lumpy? Did Tucson Jack pass away?”

“No, fell in love,” Lumpy Neck said. “We may see him before the night's over. I doubt this passion will last more than a few hours.”

“Well, none of mine have, and some of them ain't lasted that long,” Bartle said.

“I know you,” he added, suddenly recognizing the short man on the white mule. “You're Pillsbury, who used to have the medicine show. We rescued you once when you were lost on the North Canadian, or am I mistaken?”

“No, that was myself,” Doc Ramses admitted. “I found it hard to keep my bearings that day. It was around the Canadian somewhere that I left my name behind. I'm plain Doc Ramses now.”

“Oh,” Bartle said. Courtesy forbade him to inquire further into the name change.

Lumpy Neck was leading a pack mule loaded with food—sausage, cold hen, pickles, and cheese that had traveled all the way from St. Paul.

The mountain men felt a little embarrassed at having nothing to contribute other than a few shreds of elk jerky, which would have looked poor indeed in the company of such provender as the visitors brought.

Billy was disturbed by the condition of Ragg and Bone, two men who had encouraged him and helped him in his youth. Once, a four-hundred-mile stroll over the Rockies had been as nothing to them. Now they looked old, gaunt, and weary. Their tack was ragged, and they seemed almost starved.

“Boys, are you still beavering, or what?” he asked.

“Mostly just what,” Bartle admitted. “There ain't no beaver, though Jim's reluctant to admit it.”

Jim felt embarrassed—their quest for beaver must seem ridiculous to someone like Billy. More and more it seemed ridiculous to everyone, even to Bartle. But gold lay undiscovered in the ground for hundreds of years and no one criticized miners because they kept looking. Silver miners prospected for years without making a strike. Beaver were a lot easier to spot than silver or gold; it seemed wrong that a man could become a laughingstock for seeking beaver while miners were still considered serious men.

“Say, Bartle, are you kin to young Billy Bone, down in New
Mexico—Billy the Kid?” Billy asked, feeling that the subject of beaver was not a comfortable one to have broached.

The new choice of subject proved a little prickly also.

“No kin,” Bartle said bluntly. It had begun to irk him that everyone he met on the road asked him if he was kin to the New Mexico whiz.

“Well, I just wondered,” Billy said, gacking up quickly.

“You men look gaunted out,” Lumpy Neck observed. He had faded blue eyes and was anything but gaunt himself.

“We ain't of a stout build like you, Lumpy,” Bartle replied, a little offended.

“Boys, I can't dawdle,” Billy said. “You were kind to me earlier in life and now I'd like to return the favor. Come join my show and I'll make you prosperous.”

“I'd go farther,” Doc Ramses said. “I'd say we'll make you rich.”

“Oh, don't excite them,” Billy said. In fact, such talk excited
him
—he couldn't help it. The thought of how rich he would soon be was just too pleasant.

“Well, we've got some expositions coming up this year,” Doc Ramses said. “Chicago is having one, and there's Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee.”

Jim and Bartle exchanged glances.

“What are expositions?” Bartle asked finally.

“They're just fairs, really,” Billy said modestly.

“I'd say they're considerably more than that,” Doc Ramses said. “They're only held in the top cities, and countries around the world send their top heroes to them. There's a fortune to be made from expositions.”