Friends (14 page)

"Hal-ooo, Banty!" the hefty man called before we was there, giving a big friendly wave.

Banty tied up and hurried up to the big man I guessed was the boss of this outfit. "These here men are lookin' for somebody," he said.

That good-size man bent over some and looked at Banty's face. "Why, Mr. Foote, you're injured. Have you been fighting again?"

Banty looked at the ground and gave it a good kick. "Yes, I was, Perfesser Marsh. I know I said I wouldn't, but I did. It was this man here I fought. Wasn't his fault, though. I ast for it."

The hefty fellow put his hand on Banty's shoulder and looked at us with a long, sad face. "I see you've met our Mr. Foote," he said. "I'm very sorry, for his sake. I hope you will accept his apology."

Clete said nothing so neither did I.

"He's a fine collector, takes great care not to damage the specimens, but he has an odd personality aberration. A peculiar aggressiveness that's associated with his diminutive size, I believe." I would have described Mr. Banty Foote a little different. I'd a said he was a feisty halfpint and let it go at that.

"We're looking for a man who rode through here, maybe last night, maybe this morning," Clete said. "My name's Shannon and I'm the sheriff of Two Scalp, about a hundred or so miles east of here. This's my deputy, Willie Goodwin. We'd appreciate it if you could ask your men if anyone saw the man we're chasing-tall and skinny, riding a paint mare. He's a killer is why we're after him. Been trailing him for several days, but the rain last night washed out the sign we were following."

"I see, I see!" the hefty man said. "I'm Professor Othniel Charles Marsh of Yale College, leading the Summer Paleontology Brigade. I would be happy to-" He walked up close and looked from Clete to me and back to Clete. "Are you men waiting to be asked to dismount?" he ask.

"Folks around here generally wait 'til they're invited," Clete said.

"Yes, of course. Please step down from your horses, gentlemen." He swept his arm in such a way as to welcome us, I guessed.

"Please excuse my rudeness," he said, giving Clete's hand a good pump and then mine. "The customs here are quite different from those I'm used to. I meant no offense."

"None taken," Clete said, touching his hat brim. Marsh touched his hat too, but it looked like he was saluting a Mexican general.

"Will you take tea with us, or is your business too urgent, gentlemen?" the professor ask.

"Thanks, but we'd best ride on," Clete said. "Where are your men, anyhow?"

"The students are in the western field this morning, searching for mammal bones."

"You brought a bunch of boys out here and let them run off by themselves?" I asked.

"The Yale students are young men," Marsh said, kind of uppity. "The youngest is twenty, I believe. And our military escort is with them, eight soldiers."

I felt kind of taken back then. "When you said students, I thought-"

Professor March had a good belly laugh, throwing his head back and roaring, but he didn't seem to be making fun of me by doing it. "Imagine, bringing young boys out here for field work!" He finished up his laugh and shook his head a couple of times, but then he noticed that Clete still had business on his mind. "Come and look at my map," Marsh said. "I'll show you where the students from Yale are digging, and where we are, exactly, and then I'll take you up there to talk to them, if you like."

Banty and the wrangler fellow who hadn't said anything went off together while Clete and me followed Marsh under the main tarp. We stopped at a big map of just this washed-out country, laid out on a table. I seen the way we had come into this place and where Clete's camp of the night before was. These badlands was a lot bigger than I thought, for we'd come only a short ways through them, with better than thirty miles more stretched out to the southwest.

Thin wavy lines connected places of the same level, and you could see the shape of the hills and the steepness of things real plain. "What are these pins for?" I ask.

"Those represent our major digs," the professor explained. "We're working some Jurassic beds for dinosaur fossils here at this red one. This blue one shows where the students are today, recovering the petrified skeletons of Eohippus, the dawn horse."

I took a step back from the table and looked at him. "You mean you come all the way out here from the East to dig up dead horses?" I could tell Clete was itching to move, but I had never heard nothing to beat this.

"Yes, the calcified bones of all sorts of prehistoric species–reptiles, birds, and mammals-one of which is the horse."

"Could we go talk to your men now?" Clete ask. "This is important work for you, I can see, but ours is catching a killer, and it's important to us."

"Of course, Sheriff. If you're sure you won't have tea first, I'll just have a word with my men here and then we'll leave."

"No tea," Clete said.

I shook my head. "No tea for me, neither. I'm feeling all right." Marsh give me a odd look and went out from under the tarp. While he was seeing to whatever he had to see to, I looked around in there. There was leg bones longer than a man, and one skull with three curved horns, a head the size of a boulder off some creature I hoped never to run into. "What do you make of all this?" I ask Clete.

"Reminds me of some bone pickers I came across on the way up from Abilene. Only they were after buffalo bones on top of the ground. These fellows are a whole lot pickier about the bones they want, and more polite, but beyond that, I can't see a lot of difference between the two. Bones are bones, and they don't interest me much right now, unless they're the neck bones of that bastard we're chasing."

Marsh come back wearing a regular hat. "We can go speak to the Paleontology Brigade now, gentlemen."

Clete studied the map. "How far is it to the river from here? Looks nearly three miles."

"Yes, I'd say that's accurate," the professor said.

Clete looked at the map some more. "And about twelve miles up to where the students are working?"

"Perhaps a bit more," Marsh said. "It will take us about two hours to get there. Pretty rough going right here." He pointed to a spot on the map that looked all cut up and steep.

Clete turned to me then. "We could cover more ground if we split up," he said. "How about you go along with the professor here and I'll go scout the river, unless you want to do it the other way." I could see what he was gettin at. If none of them young fellows had seen our man, we'd be burning nearly five hours and getting nowhere for our time. If there was sign along the river, Clete could see them as good as I could, since the rain'd turned this clay into some of the easiest tracking ground there is-fresh mud.

"Makes sense to do it that way. Suit yourself who goes where," I told him.

"I'll take the river, then. If I find his sign, I'll follow them and leave a broad trail-like you did coming up along the Bad. You catch up with me this time. Shouldn't be hard, that damn nag I'm riding. If I don't see anything, I'll come back here tonight. That is, if you don't mind us camping with you, Mr. Marsh."

"Not at all!" the professor said. "The hospitality of the camp is yours. Not very elegant, I'm afraid, but we do have fresh elk steak for this evening's supper, which our hunter brought in last night. You know, I'm very fascinated by this business of yours, chasing-"

"I'd best go," Clete said, nodding his head and then starting toward our horses.

Professor Marsh seemed surprised to be cut off and left hanging like that. He was a man who was used to finishing off his ideas to a high polish, I guessed, no matter how long-winded they was. Only Clete was a man who knew when he'd heard enough.

"Just you and I, then, will be going out to the dig, Mr., uh … "

"That's right," I told him. "And you can call me Willie."

Clete was already mounted up when we got over there. "If I'm not back by morning, come after me," he said.

"All right, but don't go trying to find his campfire along the river tonight," I warned him.

I didn't notice 'til then that Banty Foote'd climbed up on that little animal of his and here he come along and pulled up right beside Clete, who looked down at him for a minute.

"Where do you think you're going?" Shannon ask him.

"I'm goin' with you," Banty said.

"No, thanks," Clete told him. "I'll look for him by myself."

"Well, I'm goin' anyway," the little man said, looking right up at my pardner. "Free country, ain't it?"

"The sheriff has to go by himself, Banty," Professor Marsh said. "He feels your presence may hinder him in his search, and he may not be coming back here. Is that correct, Mr. Shannon?"

"Close enough," Clete said, spurring that old roan into a trot, the best it would do. I'd intended to trade horses with him, but he rode off before I could offer. Marsh and me and Banty Foote watched him coax his horse up onto the sod table to the south.

"An impetuous man, your Sheriff. Obviously a solitary man of action," the professor said. I didn't know just what to make of him saying that about Clete, but he didn't sound like he was taking my pardner down any, so I let it ride.

"I wouldn't a been in the way," Banty said, almost bawling the words.

"You come with Willie and me, Banty," Marsh said, walking toward the saddled horse his wrangler was bringing over. "We'll need you along if we run into the Sioux."

Well, I didn't see what good a midget without a gun would do if we run into a war party, but then I figured out the professor was only trying to gentle the little fellow. Marsh and me climbed up and the three of us started west. I saw that Foote kept watching Clete ridin' toward the south, and we didn't get more than a hundred yards 'til Banty spurred his pony hard in the flanks and pulled him off sharp to the left, after Clete.

The professor called after him, but that little man was ridin' like thunder, bent low over that pony's neck and he didn't even look back. "Oh, well," Marsh said. "I suppose it will be all right-if he doesn't go too close to your sheriff, and if Mr. Shannon doesn't decide to shoot him."

Where the White River turns and runs due nonh, he sat his horse on the eastern shore and scanned the banks in one direction and then the other with his long glass. Upriver, almost a mile off, he spotted a mule wagon on the other side. Even at this distance he could see that it was stuck in the mud. Two men, one in the water and one astride a mule, were heaving and straining, but they were making no headway.
Stupid sonsabitches,
he thought, and started across. When the tired paint stopped on her own to drink, he got out his glass again and studied the banks a second time. It wasn't 'til then that he noticed the riding horse tied to the back of the mule wagon. He crossed the swollen current and turned the mare upriver once he cleared the deep mud.

I was surprised how well Professor Marsh sat his horse, a tall creature with big, swelled-out jaw muscles. Looked like they'd raised him on walnuts. The schoolmaster was less a dude on his horse than off, that was certain, though he still talked as odd as he done before.

"You have been in pursuit this man how long, Willie?" he ask me after we was up the trail a ways.

"A week, I guess, maybe longer. I sortalost track of the days."

"And what has this fellow done that you and your sheriff are so intent upon apprehending him?"

I told him about the gun our man'd used to shoot Clete and about the fire that killed Nell Larson and Jesse McLeod. He shook his head and said something about how raw the West was. He wanted to know where I was born, and was surprised when I told him. He asked about my schooling and my folks and everthing like that, no more ashamed about doing so than a prairie dog is of settin' up on his hind feet beside his hole. I could see then what he meant about folks doing things different where he come from. He got even more curious when it come out I'd worked for the Pinkertons a few years back.

"Why on earth did you quit Allan Pinkerton's Detective Agency, Willie? You seem to have had a good position there with a considerable future!"

"I guess it could of been, but it wasn't the kind of a future I wanted, not after that business with the James boys' family." I told him.

"You took part in the attack on Castle James, their stronghold?" he ask, looking real serious.

"Shoot, there wasn't no
stronghold
to it, nor no castle, neither. Just an old country doctor's house was all, and the James boys wasn't even there, as I told Billy Pinkerton at the time."

"I've heard quite a few conflicting stories about that occurrence, and I've read that contradictory evidence was presented on both sides. What really happened?"

"Well, it wasn't like the papers had it, if that's what you mean. And it wasn't no bomb Dave Farley dropped in the window, neither-just an old turpentine flare to make it smoky inside was all it was, so's they'd have to come out. Dave'd never of throwed a bomb at no one, not even the James boys themselves. Still, what Billy Pinkerton did to them James people in Missouri just wasn't right, firing on a house with women and children inside. Never was and never will be."

When Walter Turnbull first saw the man walking his horse up the river, he had a notion to go get his rifle. But when the tall stranger waved, Walt changed his mind and went back to kicking his nigh wheeler in the flanks. But it was no use. They just couldn't budge it.

"Want help?" the scrawny man called from the bank.

"Yeah, if you think you can get these critters pullin' any harder than me and the boy can, "the broadbacked muleskinner replied.

The stranger came down the bank, glanced at the tow-headed boy standing in water up to his knees beside the lead pair, and plodded his paint through the eddy out to Turnbull. "Got another whip?" he asked.

"Shore, always carry a spare. Toss the other out, Ellie."' The blond-haired woman in the wagon threw the coiled fourteen-foot bullwhip to her husband, who handed it to the scarecrow with rotten teeth.