Sweet Thunder (27 page)

“Oh, this.” Hoop looked down as if just noticing his suit and tie. “You explain, Griff.”

“Sure thing. Giorgio is taking us to the matinee of the Eyetalian opera company that's in town.”

I had an awful premonition. “Grace—Mrs. Morgan as well?”

“Well, yeah, sure. He's got to invite one and all, don't he, that's only manners.”

“
Polly-atchy
, they're doing,” Hoop chimed in. “Something about a clown who bawls a lot. Should be better than it sounds.”

The despicable creature Mazzini, copying me culturally as the way to the heart of my wife? What next? With an effort I got hold of myself. “Please tell her for me I love—” Sudden emotion choked me. “Just say I miss her.”

“We'll pass that along,” they chorused heartily. Their expressions adding, for all the good it would do.

•   •   •

At the end of that day when so much was happening, perhaps it was ordained that I would coincide at the front steps of the manse with O'Malley the postman, who'd had an abjectly apologetic air ever since the intrusion of his gun-wielding impostor. “I hope himself is on the mend,” he said anxiously while handing over a package somewhat larger and lighter than the usual book box, and I assured him Sandison's recuperation was taking its course as well as its time.

When I duly took the parcel in to Sandison, he lifted it with a frown. “What the blazes is this, cotton batting? I was expecting the collected Burns with Rowlandson engravings.”

After dubiously hoisting the package a few more times and giving it another grumble or two, he got around to slitting it open. Inside was a slouch hat, the kind with the brim rakishly turned all the way up on one side. I recognized the style at once, which was not the same as grasping its significance.

“Sandy,” I exclaimed, “you mean to tell me you were a Rough Rider?”

“Don't I wish,” he intoned distantly, turning the hat over in his hands. “Dora wouldn't let me. ‘Who's going to run the ranch if you trot off like a patriotic fool?' she said. Good enough question. But I gave some horses, and three of my top hands signed on with Roosevelt after he begged me for some good men to take to Cuba. That damned Teddy. Hard to say no to.” Wincing, he managed to lift an arm enough to try the hat on. “Well? How's it look?”

“Dashing enough to conquer Cuba by itself,” I replied, not terribly far off the truth. Indeed, with it on, Montana's Earl of Hell looked like the very manifestation of wild and woolly triumph in the Spanish-American War, the grizzled rider of the range who might have led the famous charge up San Juan Hill if Teddy Roosevelt had gotten out of the way.

“Hah.” Trying to hide his pleasure, Sandison shucked open the envelope that had come with the apparent gift. Reading the accompanying letter, he began to laugh and gasp with pain at the same time. “Get an eyeful of this, Morgan. You never know what'll come around the corner in this life, ay?”

With various loops and flourishes of phrase, the missive invited none other than Samuel S. Sandison, valued patron and old pard when mounted patriots were called to the colors, to join their presence on the occasion of the twenty-second annual gathering of the 1st United States Volunteer Cavalry—better known as the Rough Riders—this year to be held in Butte on the Fourth of July, to serve as an honorary member of their honor guard—a bit redundant, that—and thereby ride at the head of their mounted contingent in the parade.

“Now I do feel guilty,” I lamented after reading over his shoulder.

“Why? You been up to something?”

“Well, I mean, if it had not been for that shooting intended for me, you could ride with them.”

“Where do you get your logic from, the bughouse?” he said peevishly. “I'm not an invalid, I'm merely laid up.” With a sharp grunt, he took the hat off, admired it, and clapped it back on. “Of course I'm going to ride with them. Heh. Watch and see.”

•   •   •

No amount of argument could budge him from that, and so I did the next best thing. Which was to turn it into news for the
Thunder
.

Jared was back in the office the next day plotting out the paper's parade coverage with Armbrister, Rab along probably because she could not be kept away. When I joined them and reported that, thanks to Sandison, we knew the Rough Riders were coming to town, Armbrister swore mightily before catching himself and asking Rab to excuse him all to hell. “That's just what Cutlass needs, an excuse to ramble on about his famous dispatch from San Juan Hill and his dear old friend, Teddy Roosevelt. Front-page feature, up top of the parade coverage. That's where I'd play it, you can damn well bet.”

Thrown by his reaction, I lamely said, “If it helps any, Sandy was on a first-name basis with him, too. Theodore, that is.”

Jared's eyebrows shot up at that, while Rab looked intrigued. “You know that for a fact? How's he ever chums with Roosevelt?” Armbrister asked doubtfully. “The Earl of Hell has never seemed to me the political type.”

“They were, ah, lynchers together, back in their cattleman days.”

“Oh, swell. What a perfect story peg—dishonoring a dead president on the Fourth of July. Got any more bright ideas, Morgie?”

“Actually, I do. Sandison is going to ride at the head of the Rough Riders color guard, at their invitation—what's wrong with a story about that?

“String 'em Up Sam is going to lead the Rough Riders? That's more like it.” Armbrister had that look of reading print in the air. “‘
Vigilante Rides Again with the Rough Bunch
.' Sensational!”

I coughed. “That is a word that does not sit well with him. Were that headline to appear, he would promptly be in here chastising you, perhaps physically.”

“Touchy about the old days of the Montana necktie, is he. All right, then—‘
Pioneer Figure Saddles Up with the Rough Riders
.' We'll run it as a parade sidebar.” The energized editor stopped suddenly. “I've got a better idea. Cross your fingers, everybody.” His already were, in that hex sign that signaled a hunch, and the other three of us guardedly waited for this latest brainstorm to strike.

“Here's what we'll do. Stick a reporter right in there with the Rough Riders. Horseback interviews, that's the ticket.” Again, print in the air that only an editor could see: “‘By Our Mounted Correspondent.'
Can you beat that for a byline? We'll scoop the sonofabitching
Post
, right out in plain sight, and Cartwright and his crew won't be able to do a thing about it.”

“Sounds good to me,” Jared immediately signed off on the idea, Rab clapping in approval.

“Very enterprising,” I approved heartily. I swept a look around the newsroom for anyone who looked fit for horsemanship. “One of the young ones, I suppose. Sibley, perhaps? Or Cavaretta? He's the daring type—”

“Nope. You.”

My skin prickled. I suppose I was not allergic to horses in the strictly medical sense, but the thought of parading through the city on the back of one had much the same ill effect. I tried to laugh. “Jacob, sorry, but I am not an equestrian.”

“Oh, but Mr. Morgan, you're much too modest!” Rab stuck her pretty nose in. “At Marias Coulee, you had to ride horseback to go anywhere, remember? We schoolgirls thought you had a very nice seat.” She giggled, all too innocently. “Of the horsemanship kind.”

“Necessity is not the same as aptitude, Rab,” I tried to evade that ambush.

Armbrister was not hearing anything but the gallop of story in his head. “It'll be a peach of a feature. I'll have Sammy set up his camera across from the Hennessy Building, so he gets a terrific shot of you riding right past Anaconda's doorstep. Let Cutlass try to top that.”

“Jake, no, really, I—” My protest was drowned out by his shout for the photographer.

“Jared?” I was running out of names to plead to.

“I'm infantry, remember?” Poker-faced, he tugged at his short ear. “I leave the cavalry up to you, Professor.” Wasn't that just like a politician, my aggrieved look told him, and words to that effect would have followed had not Armbrister got me by the arm and dragged me off to hatch his plan with the photographer. The two of them plotted his assignment out on the wall map of downtown Butte while I tried to blink out of my daze.

“Easy one. See you at the Hennessy corner, Morgie,” the cameraman said, and went back to his poker game, as Armbrister impatiently overrode my last-ditch protests against becoming the
Thunder
's mounted correspondent. “You're buddy-buddy with Sandison, he'll be right in the thick of the mounted bunch, that makes you the natural one to tag along with him and do the story. What the hell, all you have to do is get up on a horse—”

  18  

—
A
ND RIDE THROUGH THE DOWNTOWN
streets lined by a whooping crowd, with bands blaring and Fords backfiring and boys on bicycles wild as Cossacks, while simultaneously keeping track of Samuel Sandison and interviewing his Rough Rider cohorts, all of it without falling out of the saddle and killing myself, my hunch-playing editor might just as well have added to his instructions.

The Fourth of July began with the usual bangs, firecrackers going off in fusillades that added to my jumpy nerves. As parade time drew nearer, things got under way at the manse, with Sandison clomping around in his best cowboy boots, digging out his old leather chaps that shined from use and a pair of sharp-roweled spurs, and topping it all off with the Rough Rider hat. Thus assembled, he cocked a look to where I stood waiting on one foot and then the other, back and forth between dreading my horseback assignment and wanting to get it over with. “Am I seeing right? Are you going looking like an undertaker?”

Miffed, I protested that my blue serge suit, sober tie, and dove-gray vest marked me as a member of the press. “Besides, I bought a Stetson.”

“Bonnet on a rooster,” he wrote off my new hat, meanwhile lumbering to his library lair for what he said was the one last thing he needed.

He came out strapping on a gun belt with a six-shooter, the large old kind called a hog leg, in the holster.

I stared. “Where did that come from?”

“The Colt Firearms Company in Hartford, Connecticut, where do you think?”

“I meant—is that a good idea? With Anaconda's armed goons on hand? Isn't carrying a gun possibly giving them an excuse to—”

“Morgan”—he rolled his eyes toward the bullet holes in the ceiling—“I am the one who got shot merely for hanging around with you, remember? I don't want that to happen again. Nor,” this came with a full serving of growl and scowl, “do I necessarily want it to happen to you for hanging around with me, if some idiot with an old grudge decides to take it out on me and my riders. Anaconda or anyone else, this is to give them second thoughts.” The gun belt circling his girth like the equator, he rested his hand on the prominent handle of the Colt .45 as if it was a natural fit. “I have a reputation to uphold in this damn town,” he said, with all the austere dignity expected of the Butte public librarian. Then came the gleam of the Earl of Hell, reflected from his vigilante days. “More than one.”

•   •   •

Inasmuch as a good many of the Rough Riders shipped their own mounts in by boxcar, their encampment was down by the stockyards, where Sandison and I duly delivered ourselves by taxi before parade time. “You can just about bet most of them slept in a feather bed somewhere uptown,” he shrewdly guessed as we approached the camp, “then scuttled down here for a breakfast of beans around a campfire.” The cluster of weather-beaten tents carried the tang of both a military bivouac and a cattle roundup, as did the Rough Riders themselves, actually. Hip-sprung men of a certain type stood around fire circles talking in slow cadences and, likely as not, spitting tobacco juice onto the sizzling embers. I was itching to pull out my notepad and jot down just how their slouch hats and loosely knotted neckerchiefs—bandannas, I mentally corrected myself—and blue flannel uniform shirts made them look like exhibits from an earlier age. “A Frederic Remington museum diorama come to life,” was the phrase that suggested itself. But given the squints and odd looks aimed at Sandison and me as we passed through, him in his ranching getup of forty years ago and I in my city clothes and clean Stetson, I kept my reportorial materiel in my pocket.

There was a similar gang of blue-shirted figures ahead at the stockyards, some fence-sitting, some peering between corral poles to where horses were being wrangled with considerable commotion and dust. Lanky and akimbo and in some drawling world of their own, these hardened military cowhands or cowboy-soldiers did not look any friendlier than the set at the tents, so I felt compelled to ask Sandison a little tentatively, “Who will be our, ah, riding companions?”

“Who do you think,” he grunted in answer, stepping up his stride, his chaps flapping, as we neared the corral. “The James brothers.”

“Very funny, Sandy. I suppose Butch Cassidy and the Hole in the Wall Gang will be joining us later?”

“What's funny about it?” Sandison huffed, giving me a look. “Leonard James and his kid brother, Claude, both rode for me on the ranch from the time they were green saddle punks. Had to teach the young scamps every blasted thing about cowboying.” He shook his head reminiscently. “Same with Tinsley, another pea in that pod.”

“Related to them, is he?” I took the implication to be.

“For crying out loud, Morgan, where do you get these ideas? He's colored.”

I surrendered to the situation, whatever it was going to be, and simply stuck as close as possible while Sandison surveyed the dusty scene in the corral. He was grumbling, “I got carried away with that silly little war. Should never have let the three of them off the ranch to go fight Spaniards. Lost the whole batch to that old humbug, Buffalo Bill, afterward.”

My expression must have told him I was not keeping up with these particulars.

“The Wild West Show, dolt. After the charge up San Juan Hill and the tripe written by your colleague Cartwright”—he looked hard at me—“Bill Cody turned that cactus circus of his into Buffalo Bill's Wild West and Congress of Rough Riders of the World.”

Ducking behind a corral post, I busily scribbled this down while Sandison went back to scanning the swirl of lasso-swinging wranglers and dodgy mounts.

“Heh.” The tone of that made me look up, right into those eyes the blue of glacier ice. “I don't know about you,” although it hardly took a guess in this regard, “but I haven't been on a horse since”—he gave me a complicit look—“that time with you.”

I swallowed hard. That excursion, in my first Butte chapter of life, had been an unforgettable one, in the valley to the west where his ranch once stretched from horizon to horizon. Not knowing what his intentions were, I had ridden in a sweat of fear as he led me to the hanging tree where his reputation as the Strangler had been earned. Where rustlers were strung up, vigilante style, by him and doubtless the same ranch hands we were to meet with today. His anguished words echoed in me yet. “What gets into a man, Morgan, to set himself up as an executioner?” I am no stranger to redemption myself—possibly even a periodic visitor—but I had never witnessed a person turning his soul inside out as Samuel Sandison did that day. It all flooded back, overwhelming me again. And with that, my assignment, my presence, seemed out of place in his world of cowhands and cattle and horses and lasting consequences of decisions taken decades ago.

“Sandy,” I breathed out, “this is beyond me. I really don't have any business intruding into your reunion with your riders, and I'll just go back uptown and watch the parade from some convenient—”

Sandison held up a stopping hand. Casting his eyes to the heavens, he intoned, “God of fools, here is a newspaperman with an opportunity to ride with the men who made Theodore Roosevelt president of the United States, and he's scared of a little thing like climbing on a horse. Take him now, his work on earth is done.”

Wounded, I muttered, “You don't have to be like that about it. I'll stay.”

“That's better. I knew you had it in you, somewhere.” Scanning the horse-wrangling again, Sandison grunted with satisfaction. “Aha. Here come our cowboys.”

Indeed, out the corral gate and toward us came three riders, the ones on the outside of the triptych each leading a saddled horse, which, I realized with a tightening in the seat of my pants, must be the mounts for Sandison and myself.

“Good to see you again, boys,” drawled Sandison as they rode up to us.

“Sam,” the James brother introduced as Leonard acknowledged him, nodding an inch. The one called Claude, saving energy along with words, merely nodded half an inch. It was left to Tinsley, his smile a burst of enamel and gold in the dark face, to come out with, “How you been doing, boss?”

“Surviving,” the answer came as a heavy sigh, together with a weighty glance at me.

“Packing a Peacemaker these days?” Tinsley expressed the curiosity showing on all three Rough Riders, at Sandison's prominent firearm. “Butte that tough a place?”

“You might be surprised,” Sandison responded in the same weary tone before indicating me again. “Morgan writes for the newspaper. He's going to ride along with us and talk to you boys about your heroic exploits, heh, heh.”

Studying me for what seemed long moments, Leonard and Tinsley at last nodded; Claude did not make the effort. “Got horses for you,” Leonard said as though we might not have noticed the large animals standing practically atop us. “Prince and Blaze, from the show string. One of the boys in camp was gonna take whichever one you didn't choose, Sam, but he'll have to bum one somewhere else, looks like.”

“Pick a mount, Morgan.” Sandison's booming generosity was no help. Other than the camels Grace and I posed on at the Sphinx to have our picture taken, I had not been astraddle an animal in recent times and would gladly have continued that way. In this situation, however, I was stuck with the fact that horsemanship of some degree was required. All I thought I knew about horses was ears. If the ears stood straight up, I reasoned, the equine was probably spirited. Prince was a well-named sorrel, high-headed and regal, with erect ears that twitched as though batting away flies. Spirited I did not want. That left Blaze, a bay-colored steed that appeared sleepily disinterested in us and our doings. Since the animal did not appear to be any ball of fire—more as if its flame had gone out—I was at the point of foolishly asking about its name when some fortunate tic of memory suggested that the splotch of white from the horse's nostrils up to its languid ears was the sort called blaze face. “I'll try this one,” I took the plunge.

“Let's go, buckaroos,” said Sandison, swinging onto the sorrel with a painful groan before my foot even found the stirrup. Climbing as much as mounting, I scrambled into the saddle atop Blaze with the James brothers and Tinsley watching impassively, and we joined the ranks of blue-shirted Rough Riders prancing to where the parade was forming up at the west edge of the business district.

Half of Butte seemed to be there, milling into place to march down Broadway, the other half of the populace already lining the blocks ahead in joyous anticipation. The American Legionnaires at the very front in their doughboy outfits and earlier uniforms looked a bit staggered at the long, long line of marchers filling in behind them. American flags were everywhere, the air undulating with red, white, and blue. Right in with the unit of children in Uncle Sam and Miss Liberty costumes, I spotted Rab in command of our roughneck newsboys from the detention school; their newspaper bags were innocently turned inside out so the
Thunder
logotype could not be seen, and at their front, holding high the banner
YOU SHALL KNOW THE TRUTH AND THE TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU FREE
, were Russian Famine on one end, giving his restlessness something to do, and on the other the angelic urchin Punky, doubtless to keep his hands out of people's pockets.

Since horseback troupes best brought up the rear of the parade—“the manure matter,” Sandison gave all the explanation needed—we rode past innumerable contingents on the way to our position, the Daughters of the American Revolution in dowager ranks and the Grand Army of the Republic veterans lame but game beneath battle flags from Gettysburg and Antietam and other hallowed fields of conflict, and then the Hill began to make its showing, the Miners Band glorious in the green of its uniforms and the gold and silver of its instruments, the blocks-long files of miners who had served their country headed by Jared, more leaderly than ever in his Army uniform, giving me a wink of confidence as Blaze and I passed, succeeded shortly by ear-to-ear grins from Griff and Hoop in the Welsh honor guard.