Stamping Ground (4 page)

“And you expect this Colonel Broderick to co-operate?”

“He has no choice. If Ghost Shirt is not brought to justice soon he faces court-martial for criminal negligence. You will find him most eager to help.”

“What's your interest in this?”

A fresh guffaw exploded from him. “Harlan was right, by thunder! You're nobody's fool. Very well, I'll be honest.” He folded his hands upon the swell of his stomach, which for him was quite a reach. “I have interests in several hundred acres of land situated along the railroad right-of-way. If the land boom fizzles, so do my interests. But that's only a small part of it. I'm genuinely concerned with the welfare of the territory, and I'll make use of all the power I possess to insure its future. It will never be anything more than a rest stop between stations if everyone who passes through thinks he has to hold onto his scalp with both hands for fear of losing it. It's in your power to change that. Will you accept the assignment?”

“I didn't realize I had a choice.”

“Of course you do. I can't order a man to go on a mission from which the odds are he won't return. Hudspeth has volunteered. If you wish, you can be on the next boat back to Helena and no one will think less of you because of it.”

“What makes you think I can do the job at all?”

He smiled, I think. At least, something stirred his mammoth jowls. “I've done my homework. Anyone who takes on the entire Flathead nation as you did last year and lives to tell about it is capable.”

“You're doing your damnedest to make it impossible for me to refuse.”

He shrugged.

“What the hell?” I said. “I couldn't face another boat ride so soon anyway.” That kind of breezy nonchalance fit me like a tent, but something was going on here that he wasn't telling, and since I had gone to all the trouble of
coming to my least favorite spot on earth I decided I might as well find out the reason. I figured he'd buy my vanity act, that being the West's most available commodity. “When do we leave?”

“Tomorrow morning, on the six-fifteen to Fargo. As I said, time is of the essence.”

I put on my hat. “In that case I'll be seeing you. I've got just enough time to grab a meal and a bath and get some sleep.”

“I thought you had a bath.” This from the marshal, in a suspicious tone. He was still holding my receipts.

“Don't worry. I won't charge this one to the taxpayers.”

Hudspeth leered. “Amity Morgan,” he said knowingly. “Just be sure and keep an eye on your poke. Her girls would steal the pennies off a dead man's eyes.”

“I'm not dead yet.”

I looked to the judge to see if that was worth another belly laugh, but he didn't appear to be paying attention, frowning as he was at his enormous paunch and pushing his lips in and out. He was preoccupied with something, and I had a pretty good idea what it was. I'd been overconfident in assuming he hadn't seen through my act. I should have known better. A liar is quick to recognize a peer.

Hudspeth didn't like trains. That much was obvious once we had taken seats in the coach and, precisely on the stroke of six-fifteen, jolted into motion. He gripped the arms of his seat as if clutching the brasswork of a storm-tossed clipper and held on, eyes staring straight ahead and the veins in his nose standing out, until we had left the station and topped off at a steady twenty-five miles per hour. Then he relaxed by degrees until his teeth stopped grinding and the color returned to his knuckles.

The seat opposite us, like most of the others in the car, was empty. But the crowded runs west more than made up for the deadheads away from the land of opportunity. I settled back into the plush upholstery and stretched out my legs in the half acre that separated the seats. Space was George Pullman's long suit.

“You don't look like the kind that volunteers,” I ventured after five or six miles. I watched the telegraph poles flitting past the window. They were more interesting than the flat scenery beyond, scrawny and misshapen as they
were. Trees were scarce in northern Dakota, and the linemen made use of what they could get.

“Neither do you.” His voice sounded almost normal. “So how come we're here?”

“I asked you first.”

He grumbled some and shifted around on the cushions. But he could see that didn't satisfy me, so he sighed and stared at the floor. That bought him some more time. “I won't lie,” he said at length. “I've petered down to considerable less of a lawman than I was when I started out. My eyes ain't half what they was, and you can cook and eat a fair-size meal in the time it takes me to get a gun out of a holster. That's why I hide it under my arm.”

“I noticed. It's obvious as hell.”

He scowled, as at the unwanted logic of an impertinent child, and went on. “I got two years before my thirty's in, then I can retire and collect my pension. That's if I can stick it out without getting fired. The judge has been handing out some heavy hints lately, mostly about my drinking. He's a damn dyed-in-the-wool teetotaler, and in his thinking every man who takes a sip now and then is a drunk. Anyhow, he doubts my ability to carry out my duties, he says, and with the territory filling with settlers like it is he's wondering if some young jackanapes from out East might be more suitable. Then he brings up this Ghost Shirt business. It's blackmail, pure and simple, but what've I got to put up against it? I'm too old to drive teams any more, and that's all I know how to do besides enforcing the law.”

“I guess all judges are alike,” I said, and related how I came to be in Dakota. He snorted.

“Them law schools ought to be made illegal. They turn out more crooks than the prisons.”

I agreed. “Flood, for instance. Assuming we can pull off the impossible and beat the army to Ghost Shirt, what's he to gain? I don't for one minute buy his story about land interests, and that's easier to swallow than the one about saving this glorious territory.” I waved a hand toward the window just as we happened to be passing a group of ragged
bone-pickers reaping the rotting harvest of last winter's buffalo slaughter along the railroad right-of-way.

“The White House. That's what he's got to gain.” The marshal slid a metal flask from the inside breast pocket of his coat and uncorked it. As he did so, the coat buckled and I caught a glimpse of the gun reposing in a special pocket of his vest beneath his left armpit. Small wonder it bulged. It was an army-size Smith & Wesson .44 caliber, christened the American, big and heavy enough to drive nails with the butt. The Deane-Adams English .45 I carried in my hip holster looked insignificant by comparison. This one was about as suited to be carried beneath a man's arm as a grand piano was to be played in a third-floor cathouse. He took a long pull at the flask's acrid contents—the odor of bad traveling whiskey assaulted my nostrils—replaced the cork, although without conviction, and returned the container to his pocket. His bright little eyes clouded for an instant, then cleared brighter than ever.

“The White House?” I prompted.

He nodded. “Flood ain't been satisfied just being judge since he first dumb onto the bench. He made two tries for governor of the territory and damn near got the appointment the second time. He would of, too, if some nosy reporter on the
Tribune
hadn't wrote that he took money from the Northern Pacific back in seventy-one to clear a track foreman of a charge of murdering a Chinaman on government property.”

“Did he?”

“Kill the Chinaman? I reckon so.”

“Not that. Did Rood take the money?”

“Oh, that. Who knows. I'd be mighty damn surprised if he didn't. Everybody takes money from the railroads. The only reason the choice went against him is he got caught. That didn't cool him off any, though. He just aimed higher.” Hudspeth went for the flask again, then changed directions and, instead, loosened his gun in its leather-lined sheath as if that had been his intention all along. I recognized the standard drunk's way of cutting down: Take
plenty of liquor along just in case, but only hit it half as hard. Rood's threats worried him more than he would admit. “Ever since Custer got it,” he went on, “being an injun fighter brings in more votes than promising to cut taxes. The judge figures if he can get to Ghost Shirt ahead of the army and hang him in Bismarck, he'll collect enough publicity between now and eighteen eighty to step into Hayes's shoes.”

“In that case, why send just us? Why not a posse?”

“That's easy. If the posse gets wiped out, he has to explain to Washington City what they was doing butting in on the army's business, and probably get himself impeached, or whatever it is they call firing a judge. This way, if we don't make it back—which strikes me as more than likely—he can say we was acting on our own or at most just offering our services to the authorities already involved. Two more scalps on Ghost Shirt's belt don't make a hell of a lot of difference in them drawing rooms back East. Besides, the judge can spare me, and since you ain't his man anyway he can afford to toss you down the same hole. It's like betting someone else's money on a fair hand. He's got nothing to lose and the whole pot to gain.”

“He's told you this?”

“A skunk don't have to announce himself for you to know he's there. My nose is as good as any lard-bucket newspaper reporter's.”

“Greedy, isn't he?”

“Your judge ain't?”

I returned my attention to the landscape beyond the window. We were shuddering now through the buttes—huge, flat-topped stumps of weathered granite whose red sandstone caps glistened with the remnants of a recent rain. Beyond them to the northeast, gunmetal-colored clouds were gathering for a fresh offensive upon the newly planted, still vulnerable crops in the Red River Valley. If it wasn't torrential rains, it was drought. If it wasn't drought, it was grasshoppers, “Mormon crickets,” that swarmed in by the hundreds of millions to blight everything
in their path. Fate and the elements stood in line for a lick at the unsuspecting settlers who dared take a plow to God's country. For the rest of us He saved the Indians and the politicians.

“I hate Dakota,” I said.

The canvas-to-clapboard story in Bismarck found its echo in Fargo but intensified a hundredfold. Here, where the busy, backward-flowing Red River of the North transected the railroad jumping-off point for merchants and developers laden with hard-to-get goods and peddled dreams from Minnesota and points east, Chinamen, Scots, Germans, French and Scandinavians teemed the muddy streets and temporary shacks in greater variety than anywhere else west of the Old World. Hudspeth and I hoisted the bedrolls, slickers, saddles and rifles (his a single-shot Springfield, mine a Winchester so new it squeaked) that were our only luggage down from the rack and stepped into the sea of humanity on the platform in search of a livery.

“It used to be over there,” said the marshal, pointing out a building two blocks down the street, which now, if the sign was to be believed, sheltered the Golden West Emporium and Tonsorial Parlor.

“It's come up in the world,” I observed.

On our third try we found someone who spoke English well enough to direct us to a livery on a street with the optimistic name of Broadway. There, we haggled with the stony-faced old Scot who ran the place over some serviceable-looking horseflesh, including a pack animal, and at length agreed upon a mutually unreasonable price, for the payment of which we asked for and were given receipts made out in flowing European script that neither Flood nor even a skinflint like Blackthome could doubt. One hour, a meal, and four exorbitantly priced drinks later we were astride our new mounts and on our way to a métis camp which the bartender at the Old Fargo Saloon assured us was two miles south of the city limits. We were still riding five miles beyond that point.

“I thought you said you knew where the camp was,” I
growled at Hudspeth. Light was fading fast and the weeks between me and my last hard ride were beginning to tell in various places.

“I did once. I can't help it if they moved.”

“They must move a lot. The bartender said they were camped an hour's ride back just last night.”

“You can't believe everything a bartender says.”

“You should know.”

Half a mile farther on we spotted scattered fires in the distance, and another twenty minutes found us on the outskirts of a village of primitive lodges and skin tents. The usual menagerie of yapping mongrels heralded our arrival. Despite the racket, the dogs were all that crowded around us, snapping at the horses' heels as we made our way through the camp. I was unprepared for this reception, or lack of it. Where I came from, a visit by whites to an Indian camp was an event worthy of note, if it was anything less than suicide. A brave who let a stranger, any stranger, within a mile of his lodge without raising the alarm wasn't worth his feathers. We had gone a hundred yards before we came across the first sign that the place was inhabited at all. This was a boy with long black hair cropped straight across the back of his neck at the nape, wearing a bright calico shirt and new Levi's cut down and stuffed into the tops of calf-high moccasins (the only part of his attire that could have come from inside the village), who was busy sewing up a rip in the side of a lodge covered with scraped buffalo hides. He paid us no attention as we rode up to where he sat cross-legged on the ground bent over his labors. Although he couldn't have been older than ten or eleven, he manipulated the bone needle and gut thong with the assurance of an old squaw stitching a new ornament onto her warrior's tunic.

“We're looking for Pere Jac,” Hudspeth announced.

The boy looked up uncomprehendingly. The light of the torch that blazed before the lodge fell across a set of features finer than I'd expected, set off by flashing black eyes and lashes that swept his dark cheeks. The marshal repeated
the query, or one like it, in bastard French. After a moment the boy nodded and pointed with the needle toward the rusty glow of a large fire east of camp. Hudspeth thanked him and we moved off in that direction. The boy resumed working.