“Well yes sir, I do believe today’s the day.”
In truth Joe had given up all expectation but he willed the buffalo to appear because he did not want any more of this absurdity.
He was even too tired to feel surprise when he saw two buffalo grazing along a grass slope.
He had to point them out several times before the dude spotted them. Roosevelt slipped his rifle from leather. Joe said, “Not yet, sir. Too far.”
They moved forward. But all the same Roosevelt in his excitement fired too soon, from too far away.
Normally buffalo were too stupid to flee from the sound of gunfire—their bovine indifference to noise was one reason it had been so easy to exterminate them; that was one of the things that had altogether sickened Joe—but in this case a ricochet must have stung one or both of the lucky animals, for they were off in an instant at full gallop. Roosevelt fired his magazine empty but it was no good; and by the time the two horsemen found their way across the intervening canyons the hairy beasts had disappeared.
Joe concealed his relief. They tried tracking but lost the spoor in shale. Roosevelt was momentarily dejected but brightened quickly enough. “We’ll go on until we find more.”
“May not be any more to find,” Joe said gloomily.
“Nonsense. Why, there are millions of them.”
“Not any more.”
“What’s that you say?”
“Mr. Roosevelt, fact is the army and the railroads wiped the herds out.” No good stringing the dude any farther; the truth might hurt him but without it they might be out here all winter long. Joe said, “They killed the last big herd last spring, sir.”
“Why, that has the sound of utter nonsense!”
Joe was ready to take offense then. “It’s my word.”
Of course that was the precise moment when a good-sized buffalo bull browsed into sight not a hundred yards below in the tall grass of a butte-protected meadow.
“Aha!” Roosevelt cried in triumph. Quickly he dismounted and lifted his rifle.
“Have a care with the downslope,” Joe said wearily. “And mind the wind off your starboard quarter.”
The dude got down on one knee and sighted with care. Joe put his hands over his ears and squeezed his eyes tight shut. There followed the great crashing boom of the rifle shot and Roosevelt’s exasperated “Drat!” and then another booming rifle shot and Roosevelt’s delighted whoop.
Joe opened his eyes. He saw the buffalo stumble and go down. Roosevelt was clambering onto his saddle.
By the time Joe rode to the place the dude had already dismounted and was prodding the buffalo with the rifle muzzle to make sure the poor thing was dead.
Then the strangest thing happened. Roosevelt began to leap about, spinning violently in the air as if he had been possessed by infernal spirits. A violent grunting sound erupted spasmodically from his mouth. His arms and legs jerked; his feet barely seemed to touch the earth: it was as though he were being whipped hither and yon by some invisible giant puppeteer.
His lips peeled back. A high screech issued from between his teeth. And suddenly he whirled and stood with one foot planted on the carcass in the age-old gesturer of the conqueror. Eyes gleaming behind dusty lenses, he pulled out his purse and gestured his guide forward.
Hesitant, not knowing whether to expect another rictus St. Vitus’ dance, Joe approached him.
“Jolly fine work, old man!” Roosevelt shook coins into Joe’s palm.
Joe looked down. He spread the coins with a finger. Ten-dollar gold eagles and twenty-dollar double eagles. One hundred dollars’ worth.
Well may be one buffalo more or less didn’t matter that much after all.
Two
Ten months later it was quite a different and darker Theodore Roosevelt who returned to the Bad Lands.
Tuesday, June tenth, 1884: Joe Ferris knew his friend Pack’s newspaper would mark it an outstanding day in the brief history of Medora town.
Roosevelt was not the first to alight. Before the train pulled forward to the depot platform, Madame la Marquise’s private railroad car had to be detached and shunted onto the abattoir siding where, at some remove from the scene of the usual gunshots and profane antics, she could be spared unseemly excitement. Her attendants, concerned for her sensitivities, were determined that she and her two babies be spared exposure to the ruffians of the depot.
From her sumptuous railroad carriage the young Marquise—pert and delicate with masses of dark auburn-red hair—disembarked into the Dakota Bad Lands with two babies, twenty-one trunks and nine servants.
Nearly knocking Joe down when he trotted past, the Marquis De Morès rode his horse across the tracks with cool disregard for the snapping gunfire and hooting yells that greeted the rest of the train.
Much to Joe’s disgust there was a cheer when De Morès stepped down to greet his wife. Evidently most of the town witnessed their impassioned embrace.
It was for sure a sizable crowd—Joe guessed it must have been the largest ever to have gathered in Medora town. Must have been at least five hundred, of whom perhaps two-thirds were employees of the De Morès ranch, the De Morès packing plant, the De Morès coal mine, the De Morès Hotel, the De Morès general store and the Northern Pacific Refrigerator Car Company (Marquis De Morès, Prop.).
The rest of the crowd was an assortment of the respectable and the verminous: hunters, trappers, guides, miscreants, cowboys, coal miners, whores, Indians, ranchmen and their wives, a few score townspeople. Not many were altogether sober, though it was not yet noon.
They’d gathered from everywhere. Bad Landers were taking the day off: many of them lived alone in the wilderness but they were not granite; the time came when they had to be with people or go crazy.
It might have been Christmas or the Fourth of July. De Morès had given his employees a holiday. He’d announced that his workers had earned it but the way Joe saw it he was aiming to impress the Marquise, his petite bride of three years—the lovely Medora after whom De Morès had named the town, either because he adored her or because he wanted to be on the good side of his filthy-rich father-in-law.
Impress her he undoubtedly did, with the most populous welcoming turnout in the history of Dakota.
Gangly tall Arthur Packard, “Pack” to his friends, caught up with Joe and accompanied him toward the tracks. Pack was youthful, big-eared and the editor-publisher of the town’s only newspaper. Evidently he’d hurried around the corner of the half-built chapel in time to observe the Marquis dismounting to embrace his wife and kiss the two infant children who were held up to him by maidservants. “Really touches the heart, doesn’t it!”
“Touches me someplace else,” Joe said roughly. He was watching two dozen De Morès employees swarm around the private carriage, beginning to unload all the impedimenta. Along with the Marquise’s twenty-odd trunks there were the servants’ luggage, the elaborate Concord hunting coach—somebody had told Joe it was a custom-built replica of Napoleon’s coach—an iron bathtub and a variety of massive furnishings and hunting equipment to augment the already impressive collection housed in the château on the bluff across the river. Relays of ox-drawn wagons would be going up and down the bluff for hours.
It was beyond show-off, Joe thought; it was downright indecent. But he held his tongue. No point stirring up Pack to argument. Pack was a De Morès man, heart and soul, and Joe had given up trying to reason with him.
By the time they reached the siding, the Marquis was riding up and down shouting instructions from under his white sombrero and pointing vigorously with his silver-headed bamboo walking stick.
The stick seemed a part of De Morès’s personality. He carried it at all times and often held it out at arm’s length. Stained dark and lacquered, it looked slender, even fragile—but Pack had told Joe how he had handled it on two or three occasions at De Morès’s invitation; it was monstrously heavy, Pack assured him. De Morès had filled it with lead. It weighed ten or twelve pounds.