The upshot was Dora got to have him for six weeks while he was mending. They were quite lovey-dovey. It was a rare opportunity for Dora, and Blue got nursed so well I imagine he’ll come back and try to break something next winter, Dora’s nursing has got to be an improvement over ranching in the blizzards up in the Musselshell.
Billy Cody finally went off. If he was discouraged by Blue’s stroke of luck you couldn’t tell it:—Billy don’t let much discourage him. He is getting together the biggest Wild West show of all, he has even got Sitting Bull to agree to be in it. I finally agreed to try it too, if old Sitting Bull thinks he can stand it I guess I can stand it also.
Janey, being scared by the blizzard and then by the bear has made me moody, it takes nothing to make me cry. Yesterday Doosie made me a pie and I cried, she thought I didn’t like it and got upset. It don’t take much more to upset Doosie than it does to upset me. I did like the pie, I made it up with Doosie later, we ate the whole thing ourselves except for a little piece Doosie gave Teat. There was none for Blue, he was outraged, Dora has spoiled him so now he thinks every sweet has to be for him.
In these low moods I will cry over anything, I cry because I miss you, Janey. I fear I will be old soon or even dead and never know my girl. Then I get to thinking of Wild Bill, if I could see him as I once saw him, if I could love him as I once loved him I would be the happiest woman in these territories. Well, Jack McCall spoiled that.
Lost is lost, why think of it? If the sun would shine more maybe I’d stop. Now Blue has gone back to his ranch and his wife, Dora is terribly down, she got used to Blue being here.
I told her it would happen and that it would take her six months to get over it when he got: well and left. She got mad of course. What do you want me to do, send him off crippled? she said. I am sure Billy Cody saw through the woodpile story, he’s a bulldog, I expect he thinks Dora will get tired of Blue sooner or later, she’ll play out from all the coming and going.
Billy is younger than both of them, I guess he thinks he’s got time on his side. Don’t you listen to people who say bide your time, Janey, nobody knows if they’ve got time on their side or how much, younger people than Billy Cody have died in this country. Blizzards or bears or ruffians, there’s plenty of things that can get you and get you quick.
I don’t know why you would even want to read these letters, Janey. I mean to write cheerful things and then I write of dying. You are just a child and should not have to always be reading such things.
It takes a lot to amuse me when I am like this. Doc Ramses the fortune-teller was some help while he was here. He was a magician, he’ll slap Teat on the cheek and pull a bear tooth out of his ear. Once he stuck a glass eye on his forehead and looked at me strangely, he said he knew a secret about me nobody else knew. I got annoyed, he knows nothing about me, he can’t see much with a glass eye.
Still some of his tricks were funny and helped pass the time, but then Billy got restless to go round up Sitting Bull and all the other people in the Wild West show. They left a week before Blue left, now the town feels empty. Dora stays in her room all day and Skeedle is in vile spirits too, the other day we were all the three crying at the same time.
I said to both of them, we ought to hang ourselves if we can’t do better than this, they agreed, but we won’t do it, no energy.
I had word that Ragg and Bone are in Deadwood, it does not sound good, Jim is sick. I am going to head that way in a few days, No Ears said he would go. He is very interested in Doc Ramses’s magic, he says it is better than most medicine men can do.
I am awfully scared of bears now, I’m almost too scared to ride to Deadwood and Deadwood ain’t far. I had no fear once, I would just ride on by a grizzly if I saw one, none ever bothered me. No Ears says we will be safe, he doesn’t smell any bears on the road to Deadwood. I think he is just bragging, nobody can smell every animal between Miles City and Deadwood.
Do you ever see the morning star in Springfield, Janey? I saw it today, the clouds broke, it shone so bright it made me sad and lonesome. I got up and knocked on Dora’s door, she was just sitting there in her chair by the window. I felt silly for knocking, what was I going to say, Look at the star? But Dora wasn’t mad, she invited me to come sit with her, I sat there with my thoughts, she sat there with hers.
I don’t know what Dora was thinking about but that bright star called back old times for me—sad times, some of them. I remember when I went with Custer and his expedition into the Black Hills, it was the first big expedition to go there, it was a mistake. The Sioux didn’t like it, and the land was theirs by treaty.
But Custer went in anyway and discovered gold, how I hated him, he looked at me as if I was no better than a cow, I can’t describe his cold look. It was hard, Janey, all those soldiers and me. I tried to hire on to scout, at least I knew the main trails and the Indians didn’t mind me, I didn’t make a penny, Janey, they even begrudged me food. I finally offered to do laundry for the soldiers, otherwise I suppose they would have let me starve.
I hope you will never experience such hardship as your mother has, Janey, I was washing the soldiers’ old filthy clothes in the same creek Custer discovered the gold in. All I got for that work was a little grub, I finally left camp alone, the Sioux were kinder to me. I guess they thought I was crazy, but they fed me and I wasn’t asked to do no washing.
I knew then that war would come. What is a treaty when there is gold in the bottom of the creeks? It was that damn Custer that found it too, I hated him. He sat outside his tent feeding his pack of hounds while I washed clothes in the creek. Custer’s dogs ate better than I did—you don’t forget such things.
I shed no tears for Custer when he fell. I lost many friends in the battle—of course I regret they got massacred, it was all Custer’s doings, he behaved as if he could do no wrong. I saw him quirt soldiers for the least little thing, he deserved what he got, good riddance.
You will read of all this in the histories, Janey, do not let them tell you Custer was a hero, he was cold and careless, listened to no one. If he had listened to his Crows he would have lived—of course the Crows knew what was waiting for him.
This will not interest you much, I am sorry to write at such length. The days drag sometimes. Ordinarily I’d just mount up and go, that’s what people have always done out here—they mount up and go. But my nerve is not what it used to be—that’s all there is to it.
Your mother,
Martha Jane
11
BARTLE HAD NEVER HAD SUCH A TIME WITH JIM RAGG. JIM did not appear to be very sick, not by the standards of the day—a phrase Bartle enjoyed using—but nothing Bartle could devise or invent had any effect on Jim’s spirits, which descended rapidly once they arrived in the vicinity of Deadwood, and had so far refused to rise again.
“Your spirits are at worm level,” Bartle remarked one day. “Camping with you is like camping with a worm. You wiggle once in a while, but you don’t put out no conversation.”
Jim was thoroughly tired of Bartle’s efforts to cheer him up. He decided to prove Bartle’s point by saying nothing. Maybe if he said nothing Bartle would shut up, though it wasn’t likely.
At Jim’s insistence they had camped about twenty miles from Deadwood, east toward the plains. Being in a settled community was more than Jim felt he could tolerate. Deadwood had its raw side, but it was still a settled community and Jim preferred to avoid it.
Many years before, not far from their present camp, Jim had killed the largest grizzly bear anyone had ever seen. Bartle had been in the camp at the time and not present at the kill, but when he walked out and saw the carcass he agreed that it was the largest bear he had ever seen.
Then three Sioux warriors came riding up—later they admitted that they had come with the intention of killing Jim and Bartle, but the sight of the great bear carcass distracted them from their purpose. They lost all thought of killing.
News quickly spread; before the sun set that day two hu
ndred Indians or more had come to see the bear. As a gesture of courtesy, being conscious that they were guests in the Black Hills and not necessarily welcome guests, the mountain men gave the bear to the Sioux. The gift was accepted with dignity and the mountain men were invited to the feast that followed. The feast was a nervous occasion, though. Several important warriors—Black Moon, Pretty Bear, and Slow—were there; they were young men and had not yet acquired the fame that would attend them in later years, but it was not the young warriors who caused the feast to be such a nervous occasion.
The problem was a medicine man, an old Sioux whose eyesight was weak. As the feast was just commencing, the medicine man had a vision and announced that it had been a terrible mistake to kill the bear. He claimed that the beast had been the Grandmother Bear.
Indeed, the grizzly had been a she-bear. The medicine man felt the great skull of the she-bear and chanted and carried on for a long while. The Indians became fearful and somewhat agitated, the mountain men fearful and agitated, too. It was undoubtedly a giant she-bear, but did that mean it was the Grandmother Bear? The medicine man predicted that the end of the world might come as a result of the death.
Then, in the midst of the feast, a shower of falling stars was observed, which continued for half an hour. This alarmed the Indians still more; it seemed as if the medicine man’s prophecy might come true almost immediately. A kind of panic resulted, during which Jim and Bartle slipped away. They headed south, traveled only by night, and didn’t stop until they were two hundred miles below the Platte. They counted themselves lucky not to have been killed on the spot, and felt they would have been, had they not been invited guests. But the word would spread, and they knew they could expect a violent welcome in the lodges of the Sioux for some time to come.
They didn’t return to the Dakotas for more than ten years, by which time the old medicine man’s prophecy had proved to be invalid; the world had not ended, after all, and the Sioux who were still alive and remembered the great bear had decided it had merely been a very large she-bear, and not the Grandmother Bear. In Sioux opinion the Grandmother Bear would never have delivered herself up to the white man’s bullet anyway.
“It wasn’t a mile from here that I killed the big bear,” Jim remarked. “I think that was probably the biggest bear that was ever grown.”
“You would think it, since you shot it,” Bartle said. “It was a large bear but not the biggest that was ever grown—in Canada bears get twice that size.”
“How would you know?” Jim asked. “You’ve never been to Canada.”
“I’ve never been to the moon, either,” Bartle said. “That don’t mean I doubt it exists. Everybody knows bears grow bigger in Canada.”
“Name one person that knows it,” Jim demanded.
“Lonesome Charley knows it,” Bartle replied immediately—on the rare occasions when Jim could be taunted into asking a question, he liked to have an answer close at hand.
“Lonesome Charley is no judge of bears,” Jim said. “He’s only got one eye. Of course a bear will look bigger if you’ve only got one eye to look out of.”
Bartle was making a stew as they talked. They stew consisted of a squirrel and a few wild onions. The squirrel had been so inept as to actually fall out of a tree. It had landed right at his feet and he had brained it with his gun stock. Jim’s rejoinder took him so completely by surprise that for a moment he was speechless. Why would anyone suppose that the loss of one eye doubled the size of what one looked at? And yet, that seemed to be what his friend had suggested.
“What you just said was so crazy I don’t want to discuss bears anymore,” Bartle said.
But Jim’s memory had seized on the bear and the Sioux feast and the old medicine man’s prophecy.
“Suppose it was the biggest bear ever grown,” Jim said. “If it was, then that old blind Sioux was right. The world started ending about then. The biggest bear was dead—the west won’t ever grow one that big again. That’s a kind of ending.”
“You’re paddling with the wrong end of the paddle,” Bartle said. “The world ain’t ending and the old man was wrong. If you enjoyed town life we’d be eating better, too.”
Bartle saw that Jim’s gaze had frozen suddenly. He looked where Jim was looking and saw three riders watching them from a ridge to the north. It startled him so that he almost overturned the squirrel stew. Riders on a ridge had often made him jump—they could be hostile, and there could be a hundred more just beyond the ridge.
“What do you think?” Jim asked.
“That there ain’t enough stew to go around,” Bartle said. “It’s just one squirrel.”
“If they’re killers it won’t matter,” Jim said. “Are they white or Indian? I can’t tell.”
Bartle couldn’t tell either. All he could see were three dots on a ridge—now that he looked with more attention it seemed to him that he saw less. He would not even have sworn the figures on the ridge were mounted men. They might be men without horses, or horses without men, for that matter. They might be elk. It was unlikely they were buffalo, a thought he immediately voiced.
“I don’t think they’re buffalo,” he said.
“Of course not—what a fool!” Jim said. “There’s no buffalo now.”
“I wish No Ears was here,” Bartle said. “He could smell them and help us judge the danger. It’s awful to be so weak-eyed you can’t see your own murderers coming.”
Jim kept his eyes on the ridge—he was pretty sure the dots were mounted men, approaching slowly.
“I am embarrassed,” Bartle admitted. “Something must have happened to my eyes during the winter—and to yours, too.”
The dots dipped from sight and didn’t reappear for fifteen minutes, during which the mountain men ate the stew. Bartle ate more rapidly than usual.
“Are you gobbling that stew because you don’t want to share it?” Jim asked. “Those was probably just elk we saw.”
“I think those were Blackfoot we saw,” Bartle conjectured. He knew it was a wild guess, but then why not guess wild?
“You ate that stew so fast it drowned your brain,” Jim said. “The Blackfoot country is hundreds of miles away. What would Blackfoot be doing here?”
“Looking for old-timers to scalp,” Bartle said. “There’s fewer and fewer old-timers. They have to travel a good ways from home to find one worth scalping.”
The dots emerged from a valley, no longer dots. They were very obviously three men on horseback, and they were not Blackfoot, either.
“It’s Lumpy Neck, Billy Cody, and a short fellow,” Jim said. “I expect Billy paid Lumpy Neck to track us.”
Lumpy Neck was an old drifter they had known since their days on the Santa Fe trail. He had once been an indefatigable rider with a great reputation—he was said to have been the most daring rider ever to ride for the Pony Express. When that played out he had switched to stage driving and had driven stages over the high passes to California. Once the railroad put him out of business, he merely drifted, doing little insofar as anyone knew. Miles, Crook, Custer, and several other generals sought his services as a scout, but he refused to have any dealings with the military. He considered the whole west his home and could be encountered anywhere in it. He had an enormous goiter, thus his name, which some said had been given him by Crazy Horse. Jim and Bartle knew that to be a lie, for they had met the man in Albuquerque long ago, when Crazy Horse was no more than a boy. He had been called Lumpy Neck then—of course it was the kind of name an Indian would bestow. Of late he had mainly been seen in the company of an even older desert drifter named Tucson Jack, a desert rat whose beard was so long he could tuck it under his belt.
“I don’t see Tucson Jack,” Bartle observed, as the riders came closer. “I guess he died.”
“He might have declined the company,” Jim said.
“I’ll be kind of glad to see Billy myself,” Bartle remarked. “I’m interested to see if he’s got any prettier.”
Jim too fe
lt a little perked up at the thought that Billy Cody was coming—for all his airs no one could deny that he was merry company, something in short supply in the environs of Dead-wood these days. It was an odd thing the way attitudes toward Billy Cody varied. It was easy to criticize him and impossible not to be glad to see him.
“Who’s that short fellow?” he asked. “What’s that? He’s riding a white mule.”
“What would possess anyone to ride a white mule?” Bartle wondered, astonished.
“Hello, you beaver boys, we found you at last,” Billy Cody said, jolly as could be. He jumped off his horse and shook hands warmly with both of them. He was still the dandy—his buckskins were clean and he wore a silk scarf at his throat.
The sudden rush of company tied Jim’s tongue, but Bartle experienced no such problem.
“Howdy, Bill. There’s nothing to eat, but tell your crew to dismount anyway,” he said. “I admire the white mule. How are you, Lumpy? Did Tucson Jack pass away?”
“No, fell in love,” Lumpy Neck said. “We may see him before the night’s over. I doubt this passion will last more than a few hours.”
“Well, none of mine have, and some of them ain’t lasted that long,” Bartle said.
“I know you,” he added, suddenly recognizing the short man on the white mule. “You’re Pillsbury, who used to have the medicine show. We rescued you once when you were lost on the North Canadian, or am I mistaken?”
“No, that was myself,” Doc Ramses admitted. “I found it hard to keep my bearings that day. It was around the Canadian somewhere that I left my name behind. I’m plain Doc Ramses now.”
“Oh,” Bartle said. Courtesy forbade him to inquire further into the name change.
Lumpy Neck was leading a pack mule loaded with food—sausage, cold hen, pickles, and cheese that had traveled all the way from St. Paul.
The mountain men felt a little embarrassed at having nothing to contribute other than a few shreds of elk jerky, which would have looked poor indeed in the company of such provender as the visitors brought.