Pack consulted his notebook. “‘Antoine—if Theodore were to be killed in the Bad Lands, by you, I’m rather afraid there might be repercussions throughout New York Society.’”
“New York Society,” Joe said. “That means her father the banker—who happens to be the source of the Markee’s fortune. Well you said she wasn’t stupid and you were right. I guess she saw right away—and she reminded the Marquis that a duel might have killed more than Theodore Roosevelt. So you see, Pack, the Marquis didn’t withdraw out of the goodness of his heart. More like greedy cowardice.”
Pack said, “You’ll have a hard time proving that to me.” He turned to go, and then stopped abruptly; he swung back with surprise all over his face. “Now, you’ve run another confidence game, haven’t you. This time on me.”
Joe said with wide-eyed guilelessness, “What’re you talking about?”
“When you asked me to intercede with Madame. It wasn’t your idea at all. It was his.”
Joe grinned. “What ever makes you say that?”
“If it had come from him—if he’d been the one to ask me, I wouldn’t have done it. He put you up to it. He used you, Joe. He knew I trusted your friendship and he used us both.”
“Ah, well, then, may be,” said Joe Ferris. “Be that as it may, do you really feel ill-used?”
* * *
There were distressing reports from the hills as the cattlemen went out with the spring round-up. For two weeks Pack waited while they scoured the Bad Lands, finding no cattle, growing to believe the storms must have drifted the main herds pretty far from their home ranges. They found a few steers, most of which they killed for food. They ranged farther and wider, and to his disbelieving consternation Pack learned in the end that the terrible winter had wiped out the greater part of every herd in the Bad Lands—ironically, with the sole exception of the De Morès herd; the Marquis’s tough Dakota-bred three-year-olds had survived, and Johnny Goodall had the unhappy duty of selling them off to settle a small portion of the Marquis’s massive debts.
The only blessing was that the Stranglers were gone. Evaporated with the snows. With the departure of the Marquis their payroll likewise departed—and therefore so did they. Pack supposed the ugly Mr. W.H. Springfield had returned to Chicago to take a new assignment for his employers at the Pinkerton Detective Agency. As for the identities of the men who had ridden in the noose-party posses, no one had found any further clue to those, and he doubted anyone ever would. It was certain Jerry Paddock knew more about them than he was admitting—it was Jerry who had slipped Pack the embarrassingly premature information about the hanging of Modesty Carter—but Jerry had very little to say to anyone about anything these days. Little Casino had not returned with him from Bismarck; apparently she had found a high-roller there who suited her temper better and she had run off with him to the East, while Jerry took solace in lugubrious portions of whiskey abetted by profits from his multifarious shady schemes.
At the end of the round-up, seventy men rode into Medora driving one limping steer. When Pack interviewed Theodore Roosevelt, the ranchman said he had ridden across his entire home range and not found a single live steer.
Neither Sewall nor Huidekoper had the ill manners to say “I told you so.”
Roosevelt’s ranch was a casualty—but Roosevelt was not. On that final day he came to the train station wearing a derby hat, in defiance of local custom. No one knocked it off; no one fired a shot. Huidekoper was there, and Eaton and Joe Ferris and even McKenzie; there were a score of well-wishers, most of them long-faced because of the dreadful winter kill.
Jerry Paddock, perhaps still nursing his sore jaw, was noticeably absent.
Before he followed Dow and Sewall aboard the Express, Roosevelt said, “You see, Arthur, I intend to wear any hat I please.” He lifted the derby off his head and held it high, grinned at the onlookers and replaced the hat square across his eyes.
A.C. Huidekoper stepped forward to shake his hand and Roosevelt said, “The land will recover, and you with it. You’re a capital fellow.”
“Yes, it takes more than a few blizzards to get rid of a long-winded geezer like me. Good luck to you, Theodore.”
Pack said, “Have you a parting quote for the Cow Boy?”
Roosevelt squinted through his glasses at the towering bluffs. He looked all around. “I came to the hills of this fair Territory in great despair, and it has blown the cobwebs from my eyes. This great and glorious West has made me strong and whole, and ready as well as eager to return to my spirited career of honorably stirring up the hack politicians of the Empire State.” At that last bit he flashed his brash many-toothed mischievous grin.
“What are you going to do?”
“My good lady Edith is waiting in New York to marry me and I have a little daughter whom I haven’t seen in far too long a time. And after such experiences as those we have enjoyed with the royalist Mr. De Morès I am resolved to plunge myself back into politics, for it seems more than ever important to me that the ideals of our precious democracy be defended. I’ve decided to run for the office of Mayor of New York.”
“Well good luck to you, Theodore.”
For it was true: Pack had been admitted to the circle of those permitted to address Roosevelt by his first name.
He still was not certain it was a circle to which he cared to belong.
Roosevelt pointed to the precarious stack of newspapers in the wheelbarrow behind Pack, and said offhandedly, “Why don’t you tie those in bales so they won’t get away from you?”
As the train departed, Pack wondered, Why didn’t I ever think of that?
That night, by pure accident, The Bad Lands Cow Boy burned to the ground.
Epilogue
June 1903
A considerable crowd had gathered in the ghost town. Several hundred people waited by the embankment for the eastbound flyer. Looking out the window of the train, Pack saw women and old men in the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic and children and young men in the ragtag outfits of the Cuban campaign. Many of them were too young to remember this town when it had been alive; but Pack recognized some who had been cow hands here.
He saw dozens of men draw sidearms and check their loads.
The train, preceded by the howl of its whistle, slowed a-clatter across the Little Missouri River bridge. The President and his party were aboard, including Pack, having joined the train five miles west at Huidekoper’s loading pens; it wasn’t for the local celebrants to know that Colonel Roosevelt and his hand-picked cronies had spent the night at the site of his old Elkhorn ranch swapping ebullient yarns about the old days in the Wild West.
Not that those days were so far gone. Pack saw dozens of arms lift above the hats of the crowd. Each hand had a gun in it.
One of them was Jerry Paddock’s.
Joe Ferris saw him too. When the train stopped Joe was out first, moving fast despite his considerable girth. Pack followed him into the crowd but when they reached the point where Paddock had been standing, the villain was nowhere to be seen.
“Come on,” Joe said. “We’ve got to find him.”
Pack knew what was in the front of Joe’s mind. Roosevelt was President only because of the assassin’s bullet that had killed McKinley; Jerry Paddock was just crazy enough to want to replicate that bit of history—and there was no question Jerry Paddock had a score to settle with Theodore Roosevelt.
Pack and Joe jumped up on the platform and swiveled, trying to peer in all directions at once. The crowd swayed maddeningly; it was difficult to see anyone clearly. A blustery wind—buff-colored from the sand it carried—stung Pack’s eyes and lashed his coat against his knees and made it difficult to see; he squinted and once he thought he saw Paddock and he reached out to tug at Joe Ferris’s sleeve but it wasn’t Paddock at all.