“When he was drunk.”
“In vino Veritas.”
“What about the veritas in your God-damn newspaper?” Joe said, not masking his disgust. Then he walked away. Pack stared after him, affronted.
The sunlight thrashed Pack. Flies swarmed incessantly and he tried to ignore the suffocating blood stink of the abattoir. It was closed for the holiday but the heat and the motionless air had trapped its spoor.
None of that seemed to discourage the celebration. In one street the heavy traffic of pedestrians had made way for a whooping horse race. It kicked up a great thunderhead of powder dust. In another street eight men in their trapdoors ran a frantic foot race. Pack thought, Riley Luffsey would have distanced them all. But poor young Luffsey had chosen the wrong course and had paid for his race. It continued to amaze Pack that such a clear lesson in the fruits of evil seemed to have made no difference in the behavior of Finnegan, O’Donnell and the jackanapes pack, not excepting such unfortunates as the late and unlamented Modesty Carter.
High across the river a group of ladies was gathered under parasols and Lady Medora was amusing them with her target practice. She fired from a kneeling position toward a target against the backstop of the bluff. Pack knew she was a crack shot—better than her husband. The Diana of the Bad Lands.
It made Pack slightly uneasy; he preferred to think of this woman of exquisite delicacy painting beneath her parasol or playing Verdi on the piano in her southwest room.
The last time he had seen her at close range, a week ago, she had looked positively gaunt, and Pack had felt a savage bafflement: was she Innocent? Or was she trapped in a painful limbo between secret love and outward loyalty?
He made his way toward the depot. This morning in town the shooting was especially promiscuous and annoying. When Pack elbowed through the crowd and climbed onto the speakers’ platform to join Huidekoper and Roosevelt and the others he was of a mind to put as much distance between himself and Roosevelt as he could. He sat down at the far edge of the platform beside Deacon Osterhaut while the noisy formalities commenced with a parade that included the Dickinson Silver Cornet Band, the members of Fort Sumter Post G.A.R., and from Montana the Onward Lodge R.R.B.
There was a rolling mighty display of farming and reaping machinery and it was followed by citizens in carriages, on horseback and finally on foot.
Bill Sewall stood just below the edge of the platform. He beckoned and, when Pack bent over, remarked in his ear, “Trouble with it is, everybody in five hundred miles is so enthusiastic they had to get in on the procession there, so there’s nobody left to watch it except you and me and those gents over there who appear to be too drunk to see a thing.”
Sewall by now was widely known for his fundamentalist disapproval of the heavy drinking of the Bad Landers. It would have made him a laughingstock if he had been a less formidable man.
The parading seemed endless in the heat but finally it was over and Howard Eaton mounted the platform and recited the Declaration of Independence very loudly. The band struck up an overture and the entire crowd joined in singing “America.” Deacon Osterhaut offered up an interminable prayer.
Sewall looked at Huidekoper’s bald head. “Old A.C. ain’t careful he’ll get the sunburn on his beaver slide there.”
Pack’s turn came. He took out his printed speech and read it aloud with as much fervor as he could manage in the wilting heat. His message to the throng was one of good tidings—Progress!—and when he concluded his remarks he was pleased by the length and enthusiasm of the applause, liquored up though it may have been.
Then he glanced to his right and announced as briefly and brusquely as decency permitted, “And now it is my privilege to give you former Minority Leader of the New York State Assembly, prominent Bad Lands citizen and chairman of the Little Missouri Stockmen’s Association—Theodore Roosevelt.”
There was too much applause to suit Pack. After prolonged yelling and whistling and the firing of far too many gunshots, Roosevelt smiled at Pack without visible rancor as he rose to speak. He had put on a healthy amount of muscle-weight in the past year but to Pack he seemed owlish and foolish. He spoke without notes. His voice was reedy but it had a penetrating whine. Admittedly he spoke with precise clarity; Pack, who sat clear of Huidekoper where no one would jostle his arms while he wrote down his notes, had no trouble understanding him.
Roosevelt said, “My fellow citizens of Dakota, we—ranchmen and cowboys alike—have opened a new land. This is our land—all of us. Let us be reminded that the Lord made the earth for us all, and not for just a few who may have been chosen by their purple bloodlines. We all are the pioneers, and we know that the first comers in a land can, by their individual efforts, do far more to channel out the course in which its history is to run than can those who come after them. Their labors, whether exercised on the side of evil or on the side of good, are far more effective than if they had remained in old settled communities. So it is particularly incumbent on us here today to act so as to leave our children a heritage for which we will receive their blessing and not their curse.”
Roosevelt went on. Ebullient and histrionic, he gathered energy until he was declaiming with intense galvanic explosions of sound and crazed facial contortions. Yet he held them in thrall. You had to grant it to him. His bombastic rhetoric would have wrung tears from a statue of General Sherman.
Showing his whole mouthful of huge tombstone teeth he enlisted their emotions: “Rampant barbarism must be countered by clarity and courage!”
A clear enough reference to the Stranglers. So foolish. Roosevelt’s maniacal bravado in the name of justice—his naive fastidiousness regarding due process—these things could bring him down, Pack thought. There were exceptional occasions when the ends justified the means; you had to acknowledge that, or you had no decent contact with reality.
“I do not undervalue for a moment our material prosperity,” the dude went on. “Like all Americans I like big things: big prairies, big forests and mountains, big wheat-fields, railroads—and herds of cattle, too—big factories, steamboats, and everything else. But it is not what we have that will make us a great nation; it is the way in which we use it. We must keep in mind that no people were ever yet benefited by riches if their prosperity corrupted their virtue. It is of more importance that we should show ourselves honest, brave, truthful and intelligent, than that we should own all the railways and grain elevators in the world.”
After Roosevelt took his seat and the shouting and applause and gunfire were done, the crowd flowed away toward the picnic tables and the kegs and jugs.
Pack cornered Roosevelt on his way off the platform. “Now, does this speech presage your return to active political life?”
“It jolly well does not. I’m a ranchman, pure and simple.”
On the contrary, Pack thought. There was nothing either pure or simple about the pompous dude from New York. You never could tell what devious schemes were being hatched behind the protective reflection of those flashing eyeglasses.
Jerry Paddock loomed before Roosevelt like a woolly mastodon. “You talk real loud.”
Roosevelt faced him. “Mr. Paddock, I’ve heard that you boasted you’d shoot me on sight. Perhaps I’ve been misinformed. If it’s true, I’m at your disposal. Now’s the time for you to get at it.”
Roosevelt pulled his coat back to show that he was indeed armed.
Jerry Paddock looked at Roosevelt’s gunbelt, then at his face. Jerry let a while go by, and Pack wondered what he was thinking. Finally Jerry said, “I must have been misquoted. Had a few drinks, maybe. You know how it is.”
“Then we understand each other.” Roosevelt did not conceal his scorn. He turned his back and walked away.
Jerry was in an easygoing mood, Pack observed; but then Jerry was invariably in whatever mood he wanted or needed to be in.