“I will not compromise with a man when he is plainly in the wrong.”
The Marquis smiled, sleepy-eyed, silken. “If I remove the cattle, then you shall remove Mr. Reuter from the land.”
“No.” Roosevelt chopped the word off; it seemed to reverberate afterward.
The Marquis’s smile hardened. “Then I’ll slaughter him where he stands.”
“Try that, sir, and I’ll see you hang for certain,” Roosevelt said in a controlled voice that gave each word its full due.
Wil Dow thought there was nothing left to do now but wait for it to explode: the fuse was lit.
Jerry Paddock stirred: the rifle barrel glinted. His abrupt movement made Will realize how still Paddock had remained until now. It was a measure of the apprehension in Paddock.
The Marquis De Morès looked away toward the lights of town. After a moment he spoke in a different voice:
“A compromise then, as I said before. Shall we put it at one thousand dollars—no, make that a thousand five hundred dollars, or one dollar per head, to let them graze on the bottoms for a few weeks until they get up to proper weight? Then I shall bring them to the abattoir and they’ll be out of your way.”
Wil Dow was astounded by the Marquis’s retreat. He looked at Roosevelt. It was a lot of money.
Roosevelt said, “I appreciate your willingness to discuss the matter. But how am I to know when ‘a few weeks’ is to end? No, Mr. De Morès. I can’t back down from you, not for any sum of money. I want your cattle off my land by sunset tomorrow or I’ll slaughter them where they stand.”
Wil Dow heard Arthur Packard’s abrupt intake of breath.
Surely it was bluff, Wil thought; Roosevelt wasn’t a wanton slaughterer of steers. All it needed was a banging of tin pans and gunshots; the herd would remove itself soon enough. It wasn’t the cattle that posed a threat; it was Johnny Goodall and the De Morès crew.
Just then Madame la Marquise appeared in the doorway. The Marquis heard her step; he glanced around at her. She did not speak. Her husband held her glance a moment and then turned to face the five men below him. With a strange conciliation the Marquis said, “I’m sorry you cannot accommodate me in this favor. Very well. We shall remove the cattle from the land, as you ask.”
In a gesture to Jerry Paddock, the Marquis flapped a slack hand as if throwing something away. Paddock strolled to the steps, tucked the rifle under his arm, dropped off the verandah and walked away into the night, stroking his beard.
The Marquis turned on his heel—a smart military aboutface—and took his wife by the arm and steered her inside. She looked back briefly; Wil could not tell at whom she was looking, but he saw Arthur Packard frown furiously and then De Morès had disappeared and the door closed, and it occurred to Wil that the Marquis may have broken off the confrontation out of respect for his wife’s safety. It was the only thing he could think of that could explain De Morès’s sudden decision to back down.
He felt savagely dissatisfied even though clearly this was not the last of it. Things could not remain this highly charged. There would be more, he thought, and it was likely there would be powder smoke and blood.
At Elkhorn, Dutch Reuter picked a path through the clutter of dry antlers on the piazza and walked down the meadow in such obvious desolation that Wil Dow was on the point of following anxiously behind him. But he respected Dutch’s privacy; he only watched as Dutch went down the bank and tossed a stone into Blacktail Creek. Dutch hunkered there a long time.
It was cold, and finally Wil went back inside the house, where Roosevelt was writing a letter—probably to his sister Bamie back in New York. Or to his other faithful correspondent: almost certainly a woman, but what sort of woman? In what way connected to him? It was a bafflement to Wil.
Dutch did not come in for supper. He did not appear at all that night, and in the morning his horse and saddle were gone from the stable; gone too was his kit. He had lit out, it seemed, for parts unknown. Wil Dow could imagine his thoughts: To bring any more trouble on Mr. Roosevelt I do not wish. Good to me he is.
Or perhaps Dutch was only following his urge to wander—like a cloud’s shadow across the ground.
Thirteen
This meeting at Eaton’s Custer Trail Ranch was charged with expectation. A chinook howled around the house, bringing wind and rain and muddy thaw; it also had brought a powerful visitor from across the line—Montana baron Granville Stuart, who sat at the head of the Eaton table as if he owned it.
A.C. Huidekoper listened for the music in Granville Stuart’s deep voice and heard none; the voice was a tuneless rasp. One could not escape the feeling there would be a similar sound if Stuart were to scrape his hand across the edge of his jaw: he was the sort who would need to shave more than once a day to keep beard-shadow from coarsening his sun-browned skin.
At every encounter with Granville Stuart, Huidekoper found himself endeavoring to dislike the man, but failing in the endeavor. Stuart—hardened pioneer—had brought one of the first herds of cattle up the trail all the way from Doan’s Store in Texas to the Montana wilderness back in the war-charred days when blackleg renegades made any cattle drive a gantlet of danger, when Comanche and Cheyenne were still a deadly threat on the southern and central plains—even before Custer’s army challenged the Sioux in the north; Granville Stuart had braved it all and established his cattle kingdom in the new world of Montana. He had blazed the way and earned fame and honor on the frontier, and along with it a portion of fear and distaste, for it was common knowledge that his methods of protecting his empire sometimes had much in common with the methods of the more ruthless medieval lords of the Inquisition.
It could be said politely that Granville Stuart tended not to err on the genteel side. Huidekoper often had found occasion to deplore his appalling attitudes. Yet Stuart in spite of all remained ingratiating, even likeable. There was something childlike about his innocent faith in the infallibility of righteous institutions, the simplicity of all questions, the rectitude of all answers and the propriety of brutality in a good cause.
Granville Stuart personified the legendary Texican attitude toward lawbreakers: whether they might be heinous felons or casual miscreants, whether their victims be murdered, maimed or merely inconvenienced, his answer remained the same; it adhered always to the same Old Testament simplicity:
Hang him.
Not surprisingly the news of his presence at Eaton’s had drawn a sizable gathering tonight. Among the stockmen on hand were J.N. Simpson, Henry S. Boice, Gregor Lang, H.R. Tarbell, Pierce Bolan, J.L. Truscott, the unavoidable Deacon W.P. Osterhaut and half a dozen more, and of course Eaton. And y’r ob’t s’v’t, Huidekoper thought, out of respect for his sense of the precise.
Off by himself, according to his habit, stood Johnny Goodall, representing the Marquis De Morès, who was again in the East doing something that had to do with finance—something doubtless devious and sinister, of which no good would come.
They awaited the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt, who had the farthest to ride—his Elkhorn Ranch was nearly fifty miles from here. In the meantime there was desultory conversation about the end-of-winter weather and about the confused reports and rumors of an expanding bloody provincial rebellion just over the border of Canada. Several conversations buzzed in Huidekoper’s ears. The gathering of men had the superficial air of a social evening but the ladies were absent and the Eaton bar was closed—sure indications of serious business at hand.
“A lot of wasted time,” Huidekoper heard Granville Stuart bark. “Save the Territory a lot of trouble and hang those two boys that ambushed the Marquis.”
Howard Eaton said, “Seems to be some dispute as to who ambushed whom.”