In Montana the Depression came ten years early. On the eastern plains the grain market goaded to affluence by the war collapsed totally aided by two years of severe drought. Banks failed and the cattle market inflated as the hunger of soldiers dwindled. Decker pared the stock back to registered Herefords, but the sole income of the ranch was the get of the foundation stallion, still referred to by all as Arthur Dog Meat, that Decker bred to the thoroughbred mares. The offspring didn't own the strength or the sturdiness of the quarter horse but they were exquisite cutting horses and class pleasure mounts, pretty faced and spirited. And they were powerfully fast at the quarter mile and Tristan and Decker raced them at fairs in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. With gambling winnings, Tristan bought Ludlow a Packard touring car that One Stab drove with dignity and care, still in his lion's tooth necklace. Men came from as far as San Antonio and Kingsville, Texas, to buy horses for amounts that Decker and Ludlow found boggling, but which Tristan insisted upon with shrewdness.
The fall wedding had passed into memory without the presence of Alfred and Susannah. In fact it was four years before Tristan saw Susannah over a polite but festive Christmas dinner. Alfred arrived from time to time when he was in the area campaigning for the United States Senate, a contest which he won handily helped not a little by the coffers and influence of his father-in-law. No one but Two and Pet saw Susannah's grief that Christmas. She was still childless and when Tristan's children, Samuel Decker and Isabel Three, caressed her yellow hair in the parlor, she wept.
The economics of the time grew more questionable and on Arthur's advice Ludlow slowly withdrew his capital from the Helena Bank and for want of a better idea buried gold beneath a huge stone on Tristan's hearth. Tristan with his habitual though charming arrogance insisted the ranch be self-supporting. He still sent formal notices and amounts of money to Susannah and her father for the use of the land they mutually held.
CHAPTER 3
What doomed him again (for there is little to tell of happiness—happiness is only itself, placid, emotionally dormant, a state adopted with a light heart but nagging brain) was a trip to Great Falls with Two and the ranch hands to drive a group of fall steers to the railhead. It was a pleasurable trip, not the less happy because of its almost antique nature. It was October and the stock market, whatever that was, had just collapsed. But Tristan had got a small amount of cash for the cattle and they all—Two, Tristan, Decker, the half-black Cree, a Norwegian who remained on from the carpentry crew years before—stayed to celebrate after an arduous hot summer. They had the best meal in town with plenty of drinks, but were put off by the finery and wealth of a neighboring ranch crew that had gotten rich by smuggling liquor in from Canada in defiance of the Volstead Act.
One Stab was coming next day in the Packard to take Two home with her fall shopping, so Tristan told the smugglers' leader he would take ten cases of whiskey for his own use and to sell to his neighbors. He told his crew he would split the profits and they were drunk with pleasure thinking of the quick money, ordering even more whiskey to carry in the panniers of the packhorses.
They made a strange procession filing down a narrow canyon into a valley near Choteau, the horses not far behind the Packard bogged and slowed in the October rain. Then at the mouth of the canyon near where the road turned north toward Choteau, the law with two armed men and a Ford coupe blocked the road. They fired vaguely into the air as they had been instructed as Federal officers. And the procession still in good humor stopped. The Federal officer said they had learned of the shipment and Tristan would have to give up the whiskey. They recognized Tristan and were apologetic saying he would face charges in November in Helena but they would have to destroy the liquor. Tristan turned from the officers hearing One Stab wail. He walked to the Packard, looked at One Stab's face, then at Two where she sat in the back with the supplies and gifts. She sat there as if built of stone with a ricocheted bullet from the canyon wall neatly piercing her forehead like a red dime.
Tristan went berserk then, reached for a nonexisting gun, then slugged each startled officer, putting one of them near death for months. He drew Two's body from the Packard and ran with it down the canyon. The procession followed him as he carried her body for miles through the cold rain. He carried her body howling occasionally in a language not known on earth.
Three days later the marshal came to Ludlow's house saying that Tristan would have to serve thirty days in the Helena jail because of the severity of the crushed skull of one of the Federal officers. The lightness of the sentence was due to Alfred's enormous influence in Montana politics. Pet interrupted to say that Isabel Three was gone. Tristan rode out covering a dozen miles until he found her close by up in the woods near the spring. One Stab was singing his Cheyenne death song and she was joining in with a voice so high and plaintive that the remnants of Tristan's heart broke in half. He lifted her slight body to the saddle and carried her home.
It is still argued by old men in the area whether it was alcohol, jail or grief, or simply greed that made Tristan an outlaw: but this is only gossip to nurse the drinks of pensioners and interesting in that forty years later Tristan was still an object of fascination, somehow the last of the outlaws, rather than a gangster.
In fact after he found six-year-old Three up at the spring singing with One Stab, he was mute for a number of months, except with his children. He was mute in jail refusing all visitors, including Alfred who came to offer his condolences and those of Susannah in a letter. The Helena press covered the meeting under the heading "Senator Visits Bereaved Brother in Jail."
In fact, Alfred was hoping for some solace and intervention from Tristan. He had arrived at the ranch the day after the funeral and only a few hours after the Marshal accompanied Tristan to jail. Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U.S. Government and its base practices. Ludlow in fact had thought of Two as a daughter and had loved her as a daughter. Years before he had been delighted to teach her to read and write and was constantly to Pet's and Decker's dismay trying to spoil her with gifts. It was Ludlow who wrote Isabel and told her to bring from Boston the grandest and costliest wedding gown possible. Now when he rode out to the grave with One Stab in the flivver he felt far more than his seventy-five years thinking of another October when he sent the boys off to war, and then the beautiful October afternoon seven years before when Tristan and Two had been married in a grove of cottonwoods, the sun glistening off the white gown against the sere colors of autumn, faded grass and yellow aspens. Two deaths in fourteen years of loved ones are not all that uncommon except to the mourner who has lost all sense of common and uncommon and is buried in the thoughts of things left out and how it might have been.
Alfred returned to Washington spending a long train trip in a sleepless turmoil. As a political issue, Prohibition had been a senseless obscenity to him and had only served to promote the interests of the criminal element, all the more evident in the waning years of the Volstead Act. His father had always been a hero to him. And he liked to quote the elegant old frontiersman in speeches to the Senate though Ludlow, to be sure, had no such notions of himself. Popular ideas as basically silly as "cowboys" or "frontiersman" or the law of Prohibition itself came after the fact in self-congratulatory phases of history, when the energies turned toward labeling and social order.