It was a dismal summer all around. Too hot even for baseball. The abattoir made the town virtually uninhabitable but miraculously the Marquis, harried and beset by enemies, only seemed to keep going faster and faster.
Among other things the Marquis was livid because his stagecoach line had been the victim of obvious calculated sabotage. Two months ago the Northern Pacific Railroad had designated the town of Dickinson—not Medora—as its terminus for Deadwood freight. The churlish railroad lackeys claimed that Dickinson was closer to the Black Hills and the route easier. “Lies,” the Marquis trumpeted. “The Beef Trust is undermining my business everywhere. They’re behind the Dickinson coach line—my men in the East are investigating information I’ve received that the Chicago Jews bribed the Postmaster to award the mail contract to the Dickinson line.”
The fact remained: after only seven months of operations and a loss of a great deal of money, the Medora-Deadwood line was defunct. The stagecoaches were sold and the thirteen way-stations abandoned.
There was much speculation as to how much money the Marquis had lost.
It was a dreadful shame, Pack said to his supper companion in the cafe.
Joe Ferris gave him a wry look and a bleak shake of the head. “You poor blind idiot. The stage route sank in the gumbo slough because the Marquis is a puffed-up fool. I didn’t know anybody who’d travel on those coaches. You ever poke your newspaper nose into their safety record?”
“They never had a single fatality. The Marquis is very proud of that.”
“He had plenty fatalities if you count the poor horses. He had bad roads, loads too big to carry—”
“You can’t blame him for foul weather.”
“He should have taken it into account. Not to mention Jerry Paddock stole so much there wasn’t enough left to provide decent service.”
“Now, where’s your evidence of that?”
“Everybody knows Jerry Paddock bought disintegrating harness for the price of new, and untrained horses for the price of broke ones.”
“Now, one trouble around here,” Pack railed, “is that there are altogether too many things that ‘everybody knows’—if I were to listen to you, I’d believe Jerry Paddock shot a man for breakfast every morning.”
“If he doesn’t, it’s not for lack of the urge to.”
“It’s fortunate for you I’m a tolerant man and I understand when you keep blaming all the problems of the world on Paddock and the Marquis. I suppose you’d like to find a way to blame this drought on them too. It’s only natural, what with the suspicion that Paddock’s the villain who emptied the store and drove Swede Nelson from town, you’d have a score to settle with Paddock. Now, I’m tolerant again because I know you are beholden to Theodore Roosevelt—”
Joe growled, “Be that as it may, gratitude’s one thing. Right and wrong’s another.”
“—and you notice I haven’t badgered you too much just because you’ve taken to wearing that Remington revolver all the time now, even though I know what ‘everybody knows’ about how you’ve been hiding out Dutch Reuter so you can be sure to deliver him alive to testify at the Marquis’s trial. Incidentally tell me—isn’t Dutch getting pretty restless, what with the legal delays persisting?”
“There’ll be a trial,” Joe said. “Before the end of the year.”
“How do you know that?”
“You have my word on it.”
“Are you the one who keeps writing letters all over the place, stirring things up?”
“Me? No. I’m not much on writing letters.”
Pack said, “Then who is it? Roosevelt? Huidekoper?”
“There’ll be a murder trail, that’s all I can tell you.”
“Nothing will come of it. The Marquis has the Allen brothers on his side—foremost lawyers.” Pack pushed his chair back. “Where’s Dutch Reuter?”
“Why? So you can publish it in the Cow Boy and next week we can find his carcass hanging from a cottonwood?”
Pack stood up, filled with anger. He pushed the cafe door open. The hot wind blasted in fitfully, reeking of slaughter. Joe tipped his head back and smiled beatifically. “You can put this in your newspaper—you can tell the Markee that he can scheme and plan all he wants, and he can send out all the Stranglers in the world, but before the end of the year he’ll be on trial for murder and old Dutch Reuter will be on that witness stand to tell what really happened out on that road where Riley Luffsey was murdered.”
Seventeen
The months began to run together in exhaustion for Wil Dow. At the conclusion of fall round-up, with its distressingly small tally, Uncle Bill said, “I call it the abomination of desolation. It makes me pretty fierce to think of the green forest back home in Maine.”
Wil was not quite willing to say so aloud but he was ready to agree with Uncle Bill’s assessment. The heat seemed to have no end. Mr. Roosevelt was the only one who didn’t seem to mind it. He went on with unflagging drive.
Wil felt very low. He saw that Uncle Bill had been right after all. In this drought each steer needed as much as thirty acres. The Bad Lands were crowded together thicker than that now. Beef prices were falling every day and yet just last week another Texas fool had brought in six thousand head from the south.
Then again, Wil sometimes thought, drought really wasn’t much of a threat if there was no one left alive to suffer from it. The Stranglers had killed more than forty men. Seemed as if they were burning another ranch every day—or maybe it was the poor starving Indians hungry for red meat. They had been setting grass fires to cover their thievery and, some said, to get revenge against the whites because the Stranglers had murdered three or four of them. Every stockman had been injured by the scorched-earth behavior of the infuriated Indians. Wil and Uncle Bill and Roosevelt had worked heroically to extinguish several grass fires. They would slaughter a steer, split and splay it bloody-side down, and rope-drag it forward, smothering the line of flames, fighting their fire-maddened horses at every step. In that manner the ranchmen had contended with blazes day after day—as if the miserable round-up hadn’t been discouraging enough, with its dying cattle and panting horses.
Yet Roosevelt remained in high spirits and Wil felt shamed that he too had fallen behind, unable to match the boss’s inexhaustible energy. On top of it all, Roosevelt was writing again, working on a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri Senator; his previous book had just been published—Hunting Trips of a Ranchman—and Wil had been admiring the leather-bound edition and hoping to find time to read it. He had glanced through it and been gratified to see that someone had fixed the boss’s spelling.
By November Huidekoper and his hounds and huntsmen had wiped out the last of the grey wolves who had preyed on the stockmen’s livestock. “They’ve driven the species to extinction in the Bad Lands,” Roosevelt growled, “and I believe if the Stranglers are left to run wild much longer they’ll accomplish the same end with the human inhabitants.”
By this time the Stranglers were said to have murdered more than half a hundred men. Bill Sewall said, “I believe we’re the only inhabited outfit left in a ten-mile radius. Six months ago there were eight including Pierce Bolan, who is a man I still miss. A prudent fellow would think about pulling up stakes.”
“No one would count you a coward if you did that,” Roosevelt said with surprising equanimity.
Wil said, “That’s what they want us to do—De Morès and his vigilantes. They want us to go. I say we should take the fight to him.”
Roosevelt looked at them both in turn. “Speaking for myself, I shall not run, and I shall not be alarmed into attacking a man against whom I have no proof.”
Uncle Bill was exasperated. “Then what the blazes do you aim to do?”