The Stranglers, page 5
part #4 of Page Murdock Series
"The bar will be open in Room Four at the hotel. Judge Blackthorne wired that he would hold it for me, and I never travel without proper supplies."
Jordan had turned back into the street and was slouching along toward the livery, his brothers falling into step behind. Hookstratton stood watching them for a moment, then wiped clean his gold toothpick with a white handkerchief and tucked the bright item into a vest pocket. He turned away.
"You know Mercy?" I asked him.
He started slightly and turned back. "Good morning. Yes, I met him in St. Louis in seventy-eight. My account of his adventures, Mankiller of Topeka, was published shortly thereafter and enjoyed a brisk sale from New York to Chicago. You might say with justification that I was the architect of his Eastern fame. I could do as much for you."
"I'll stand pat. Where's the Scourge of the Border?"
"Frank and Chief Knife-in-the-Belly are at the exhibition grounds rehearsing for the extravaganza this afternoon. Shall I look for you there?"
"I'm thinking about it."
"Give your name at the gate. My man there will be expecting you." He nodded thoughtfully, agreeing with himself, and walked away, his backside bulging under his tails.
I was still there a few minutes later when Springer came down the boardwalk, wearing a tight black Prince Albert and striped pants with a crease that would draw blood. His pearl-gray derby added unnecessary inches to his height. He asked me what I was doing there.
"You said yesterday we'd talk again tomorrow." I reminded him.
"I meant Monday, of course. I keep the Sabbath. Don't you?"
"I got out of the habit when I found out most of the people I was after didn't."
"It's your soul." He touched his hat and kept walking. He lived around the corner from the courthouse.
Sunday morning in Helena was a gray proposition. Chicago Joe's stayed closed by arrangement with the town council, the whiskey you bought in the only places that sold it that day was mostly Missouri River and chewing tobacco, and I had read everything in town except the Bible, and I knew how that came out. So I went to the livery for my horse and some exercise. The Mercys were coming out carrying their saddlebags as I was going in, their dusters spreading behind them like capes, spurs going ching-ching. They scarcely glanced at me as we passed.
"Mornin', Mr. Murdock," greeted the old Negro who held down the stable, from the other side of Jordan's white-face. "With you soon." He was rubbing down the horse with a napless towel soaked in liniment. The air inside the big dim building was sharp with the smell of it and of fresh manure and rotting straw, like moldy newspapers bathed in kerosene and blackstrap molasses. I told him not to hurry.
A spur tinkled behind me and I did a little side step, trying not to look like a lawman getting his back out of the line of fire. Now I was facing Jordan Mercy. His brothers hung behind him, their broad shoulders carving big chunks out of the square of sunlight framed by the wide doorway.
"I heard the black man call you Murdock," said Jordan in his flat Midwestern twang. "Would that be Deputy United States Marshal Page Murdock?"
I said it would.
His brown eyes scraped me up and down frankly. He was about my age, with sun-cracks where his lids met and windburned skin stretched taut and shiny over his high cheekbones. His moustache was as dark as lampblack. He said, "Your name follows me everywhere I go in the Northwest. They say you are the man who put the snare on Bear Anderson up in the Bitterroots. In Breen the talk is you rode with Chris Shedwell just before he was killed, and there is an army major in Dakota who is eager to talk with you."
"I'll go back to Dakota when they move it to Colorado," I said.
"Mr. Murdock done brung in Sugar Jim hisself day before yesterday."
Jordan didn't look at the Negro. I could feel his brothers watching me closely now. I said, "A kid I had along got the better of him. All I did was sign him in at the jail."
"You will not get far talking yourself down that way. I am pleased to know you." The marshal started to introduce himself. I interrupted him.
"I know who you are. I heard you and Colonel Hook-stratton talking before."
"Oh, you know the Colonel?"
"He's hard not to."
His eye crinkled. "Well, I am looking forward to working with you. What sort of boss is Judge Blackthorne?"
"He's a little like God. Only firmer."
Joshua, the heftiest of the three, chortled—a deep, phlegmy rattle. He was several years older than his more famous brother. "Sounds like you, Jord."
Jordan paid him no attention. "Are you going somewhere?" he asked me.
"Just unkinking my horse."
"Would you care to come to Room Four at the hotel afterwards? I have been rocking some fine whiskey since Bannack." He patted the saddlebag on his left shoulder.
"Afterwards I plan to watch Hookstratton's show."
"Yes, I should have guessed he would have one, this being Sunday. Maybe I will see you there, then."
"Maybe you will."
"Enjoy your ride."
He turned on his heel and went out. His brothers parted to let him through, then followed him.
The Negro finished with the whiteface and led it toward the stalls in back. "Nice gentleman."
"That's what everyone says the first time they meet him," I said.
SEVEN
Toby Shingledecker had fought the Sioux and northern Cheyenne to raise cattle on his fourteen hundred acres of grassland, then found that with wolves and sore winters and the high price of fodder he was better off running sheep. So he ran several thousand head of wool and just a hundred cattle, and called himself a cattleman who ran some sheep. A lot of men who had called him a sheep-herder were walking around with busted faces. He was short, but his arms were long and he had no neck and his shoulders were as wide across as he was tall, and no matter how hard you hit him he didn't knock down.
Because he owned a manageable number of cattle, he was the only rancher around with a proper enclosed pasture of about six hundred acres strung round with barbed wire. That was where the Colonel and Frank Willard and the Indian called Knife-in-the-Belly and whatever other volunteer help they had been able to recruit had erected bleachers from a falling-down barn Toby had been meaning to clear away for years, suitable for seating two hundred spectators if no one got rowdy and brought down the works in a tangle of sharded wood and splintered bone. There was standing room for many more if they wanted to chance being charged by one of Toby's ornery bulls. The nearest of these was standing bowlegged several hundred yards off, grinding grass in its jaws and watching the activity with its horned head erect, when I got there and hitched the sorrel to the fence next to the other horses, wagons, and buggies. But the rancher had riders posted on the edge of the exhibition grounds ready to turn aside all bovine threats.
The bleachers were beginning to fill and there was a long line at a plank table laid across two barrels where Hook-stratton himself was selling tickets. I recognized some merchants from town and a few miners and cattlemen in the line, but the rest were strangers, some with children still wearing their Sunday best. A lot of settlers had moved into the area since the last time I had been there long enough to take a hard look around. Chicago Joe was nearby, looking pretty in a solid, respectable way in dark green taffeta buttoned to her neck and a flowered hat among the more frivolous colors worn by her chattering girls under spinning pink and white parasols. She nodded to me with the tight-lipped smile she wore outside her place of business.
One of Toby's crew, a lean strip of hide in flannel shirt and jeans with flecks of gray in his moustache, was taking tickets at the gate to the pasture. Most of the workers on the ranch were past forty and getting old enough not to pick and choose between sheep and cattle work. He recognized me and let me through without asking for a ticket. Hookstratton had been true to his word. On my way past I nodded at the shotgun under the ranch hand's arm and asked him if he was expecting trouble.
"Colonel don't want nobody watching the show for free from the other side of the fence," he explained.
The circus wagon stood on the far side of the bleachers with its platform folded down and Frank Willard sitting on the edge, loading one of a row of six identical Colts lined up on the boards next to his hip. He had on the all-black outfit but not the Texas hat. The sun found blue streaks in his greased black hair. Caesar, the old buffalo, was tethered to the back of the wagon but the tether didn't look any more urgent here than in town. Files crawled in the bloody patches on its hump where the hair had fallen away in clumps. Its eyes were as dull and pulpy as skinned grapes.
Chief Knife-in-the Belly was doing deep knee bends this side of the wagon. Up close the Indian wasn't a Blackfoot at all, but a Ute, and dragging sixty behind him as fast as it dragged. His plaited hair was steel-colored and the skin on his face of knobby bone was as wrinkled as if a great fist had grasped it and squeezed. In a very few years his chin hooking one way and his nose hooking the other would meet. His breath came in short, heavy bursts through his nostrils, but his muscles responded smoothly and quickly as he squatted and rose, squatted and rose, again and again with his hands on his hips. I stopped counting at fifty and he was still going. He was naked to the waist, flesh sagging but strung with sinew like tough threads in a worn rug, and scarred like the buffalo was scarred, with thick ropes of white against his brown skin. He wore buffalo-hide moccasins and buckskin leggings, both darned many times, and a faded red breechclout that hung to the ground even when he stood. He was tall for one of his tribe, nearly as tall as Prosecutor Springer. His feathered bonnet was draped over the platform Willard was sitting on.
I spotted Judge Blackthorne's black slouch hat among a group of taller men in Stetsons and light topcoats under a cloud of cigar smoke, and since Mrs. Blackthome—round and pink and stuffed into a russet-colored dress like a sausage in its casing—was chirping with a pair of women from town ten paces away, I joined her husband. Rumor had it that she didn't approve of me a lot more than she didn't approve of any of the other deputy marshals who rode for the court. When he saw me, the Judge abruptly turned his back on the biggest mine owner in the territory, who was in the middle of a joke involving a Chinaman and his Irish mail-order bride, and smiled at me in that diabolic way he had when he wasn't wearing his teeth. "Come for a glimpse of the wild and woolly West, no doubt."
"I thought it might take my mind off my work," I replied. "I'm surprised you parted with the fifty cents."
"A dollar, counting Mrs. Blackthorne." His cigar had gone out. He struck a match on his thumbnail and relit it with none of the standard ritual, just stuck the end of the cigar into the flame and let it catch fire as it would. Shaking out the match: "Actually, we were invited by Colonel Hookstratton free of charge. It was either this or suffer another visit from the Reverend Samuel Smithson and the latest installment in the triumphs and travails of his brother the archbishop. You've met the Colonel?"
"I met him."
"By your tone I take it we cannot expect to be reading Page Murdoch, Hell-Raiser of Helena this year."
"Nor any other, comes to that."
"I warned him he would find you a reluctant icon. What's your reaction to this fellow Willard?"
"I wouldn't ask him to add one and one if I were in any kind of hurry," I said. "On the other hand, I wouldn't step on him when he was coiled either."
"So long as he confines his attention to tin cans and bottles we'll not worry about how loud he rattles. How was your session with Mr. Springer yesterday?"
"I passed fingernail inspection, but he's still concerned about the backs of my ears."
"He learned his law in a rough school. I would listen to him." He blew a perfect ring. "I'm told Jordan Mercy and his brothers arrived this morning."
"I talked to Jordan. I didn't get a chance to bring up that lynching," I added.
"No doubt you were too busy comparing me to God."
I looked at him. He was watching Knife-in-the-Belly exercise. By now the Chief was well into the hundreds and was just breaking a sweat.
"You were unaware, apparently, of Mercy's penchant for gossip," said the Judge. "You should know by this time that an animated tongue is the key to fame out here. Everything you said to him this morning is common knowledge."
"I'll remember that."
"Tomorrow morning, eight o'clock, my chambers. You, the Mercys, and I will discuss this strangling business."
"Tomorrow morning I'm talking to Springer."
It was his turn to look at me. I confirmed the appointment in his chambers. Nodding and smoking, he left me and took a seat in the front row of the bleachers, stopping along the way to pry his wife free of her companions.
"Seats, please, ladies and gentlemen!"
Colonel Hookstratton's powerful baritone rolled over the general babble. Conversations broke off and the knots of people on the grounds parted for the bleachers and places to stand on the edge of the arena, a two-acre section marked off by a ragged circle of Shingledecker men posted at its limits. There were four or five hundred spectators in the enclosed pasture. The man with the shotgun had turned away a hundred more at the gate.
I selected a likely fence post and leaned against it. The Colonel was alone on the grounds now, wearing his yellow buckskin jacket and the constant black hat. The Chief had finished his knee bends and was putting on the ornate war-bonnet, tipping his head and the feathers forward, then back like a turkey fanning its tail. The train swung around his ankles. Frank Willard hopped off the wagon platform, buckled on his gun belt, and twirled two of the six Colts into the holsters.
Hookstratton began speaking. A gusting wind snatched fragments of his introduction and shattered them against the Big Belts to the east: "... exhibition of frontier speed and marksmanship ... historic 'running of the buffalo,' sacred to the Indians of mountain and plain, never before seen by white eyes ... gladiatorial combat unparalleled since the days of ancient Greece and Rome ... the winning and losing of the West in captivating microcosm ... American history, ladies and gentlemen, no mere shadow play or circus trickery..." His words growled like distant rifle shots in the foothills.
It was a better show than I'd expected. Chief Knife-in-the-Belly led off quietly with a demonstration of the "Blackfoot," more likely Ute, death song, standing with feet spread in the center of the arena, his guttural voice rising and falling in that seemingly patternless cant that never failed to lift the hairs on the nape of my neck, taunting the death-spirit to come for him, he was not afraid. He was replaced at the end of his act by Willard, who galloped across the grounds astride a white-stockinged black, a Colt in each hand and the reins between his teeth, picking empty brown Doctor Ernest's Nectar bottles off a row of fence posts sixty paces away. The bottles burst with hollow plops and left twinkling dust at the base of the fence. Caesar's turn was next, and the old buffalo was the biggest surprise of all. When the Chief first removed its tether the beast didn't move and had to be shouldered this way and that by the pinto Knife-in-the-Belly had between his legs until it was in the center of the arena, where it stood hanging its head, flies clouding its horns and rump.
"Ain't that there what's called a buffalo stand?" shouted a male voice. The crowd laughed and applauded.
The Chief was unmoved. Maneuvering his horse behind the buffalo, he brought up his six-foot lance and nudged the stone point into Caesar's flanks.
It might have been a bolt of lightning. The woolly beast threw up its head and let loose a bellow that shook the bleachers. Then the head went down and its back knifed up as if it had broken in the middle and both razor-sharp rear hoofs lashed straight back in a mule kick that would have crushed the pinto's chest had not horse and rider instinctively lunged aside right after the motion with the lance. As it was they had to keep moving frantically to clear the buffalo's circling charge as it swung around, horns down, hoofs pounding the earth and starting the low, rolling rumble once so much a part of everyday plains life. But the pinto was an experienced hunter and managed to dodge the swift, cutting passes and the treacherous looping sideways hook of the great horned head as the buffalo swept past, going "huh" through its nostrils with each heavy footfall. For those few minutes while the mounted Indian plunged and wheeled and threaded confusedly in and out of the bull's enraged maneuvers, Caesar was young and sleek and dark, a king in his world. Gradually, though, as its wind gave out, the buffalo allowed the enemy with the lance to nudge it by means of smart cracks on the right side of its hump and rump into a controlled loping circle with the Chief cantering alongside. It took the audience a moment to realize he was in charge. Then a pair of palms smacked together, followed by a crackle and then a roar of applause pierced by shrill whistles. The Chief steered Caesar out into the open pasture and rode with him until the buffalo's momentum flagged. After that the Chief used the lance to prod it back toward the wagon, where Frank Willard looped the tether over its drooping head. The flies returned to taste the blood on its tattered coat.
After the buffalo run, the advertised "duel to the death" between Willard in a hastily donned buckskin jacket as Wild Bill Hickok and Knife-in-the-Belly as Chief Black Kettle was almost an anticlimax, with the resultant "scalping" of the vanquished Indian as preordained as the whole sham battle was historically inaccurate. More than a few men among the hundreds watching tugged watches out of their Sunday vests during the five-minute pantomime.
Willard woke them up with another shooting exhibition, this time plucking coins out of the Chief's fingers from on foot at a hundred paces and snap-firing at peach tins hurled high into the air by the Colonel while the Chief kept him supplied with loaded revolvers from the arsenal on the wagon platform. The spectators hooted and cheered. Hookstratton waved for silence.
"Having billed Frank Willard as the fastest and finest marksman of our time," he announced, "I would be remiss not to offer the many other excellent pistoleers present today the opportunity to test their skills against his. I will pay five hundred dollars to the man who exceeds his score in competition here and now. Who will be the first to accept this challenge?"
