“Why, those boys are trying to put a saddle on you, Howard,” scoffed Stuart. “You know as well as I do, a man with blue blood flowing in his veins doesn’t go out to bushwhack those ring-toters from a dry gulch. What I hear about them, good men go wide around them as if they were a swamp. Now I can’t honestly see the Marquis dirtying his hands on the likes of those, can you?”
The discussion was interrupted when Theodore Roosevelt entered, looking surprisingly fit in his trim buckskin suit. Granville Stuart accorded him the courtesy of rising from his chair, since Roosevelt was something of a foreigner and allegedly high-born as well.
Stuart was tall, wide, muscular, imposing as an outsized marble statue of a general. He offered his handshake. Roosevelt showed a definite constraint before accepting it.
Huidekoper did not know what Roosevelt might have heard about Stuart that caused such hesitation; but he had observed often enough in his lifetime that such little things could lead from the smallest start to the bitterest quarrels: they stung a man’s pride and made him lose face, and eventually the memory of the little thing could be the chancre that turned the man savage.
And he was acquainted well enough with Granville Stuart to know it might not take very much to transform him into just that state.
Roosevelt turned away from Stuart almost immediately and, strangely, addressed himself to Johnny Goodalclass="underline" “Well, Johnny. How do you find things?”
“That kind of depends on how you lost them.” As usual Johnny did not smile; but his voice expressed an offhand amusement and it elicited Roosevelt’s soft chuckle.
Huidekoper saw the way Roosevelt nodded his square sandy head. He found it extraordinary that Johnny and Roosevelt should be enjoying colloquy on such informal terms. The two men could not have been less alike—they might have been from different species—yet there appeared to be something positively warm between them, something in the easy way their eyes met and then drifted off to examine the rest of the crowd, something that suggested a camaraderie, a respect for each other and even perhaps an affection for which Huidekoper could think of no plausible explanation.
Granville Stuart was bending Eaton’s ear. Huidekoper caught a portion of it: “—the little young fellow from New York over there?”
“He’s proved himself on round-up and on the range.”
“Understand he’s been quarreling with my friend the Marquis.”
“He’s had his provocations, I believe.”
“The very thought of Jerry Paddock makes me feel positively warm toward Judas Iscariot,” Deacon Osterhaut was saying to Pierce Bolan. “Paddock’s a mendacious scoundrel.”
Bolan said, “A what?”
But at that moment Deacon Osterhaut espied Huidekoper and reached for him. Huidekoper could not escape. The Deacon’s handshake was like a Bible drummer’s: he gripped Huidekoper’s right hand in his own, folded his left over them both, stared Huidekoper unctuously in the eye and, standing a foot too close, spoke in his treacly Southern accent with foul-breathed earnestness: “I’ve lost four head to wolves. It is an unholy tragedy. Now you bring your hounds to my place at the earliest convenience, y’hear?”
Huidekoper extracted himself as quickly as he could from the clutches of the dour pumpkin roller.
Huidekoper was taken aback when he saw the glint of Roosevelt’s eyes, the flash of his teeth in comical zest. Roosevelt said sotto voce, “One might suspect the Deacon suffereth from mental carbuncles and dyspepsia.”
Huidekoper took the New Yorker away from the fireplace. In the corner past the window he said, “There’ll be a vote tonight, on the Association.”
“I know.”
“I wanted to sound you out privately.”
“About what?”
Huidekoper said, “About the Marquis De Morès.”
“What about him?”
“If the Association were in your hands—what would you do about him?”
Roosevelt blinked, his eyes artificially large behind the lenses. “I should seek to insure that the laws be enforced—and I should be prepared to journey to Bismarck or if need be to Washington to make sure they were carried out properly and vigorously. But I can’t support or condone the employment of lawlessness to fight lawlessness.”
Huidekoper said, “Then you’ve changed your mind?”
“Not about vigilantes.”
“About taking a hand here. If your name is put forward for the chair, you’ll accept it?”
“Let’s wait and see whose names are put forward, shall we?”
Roosevelt gave him a quick flash of a smile and a friendly gentle punch on the bicep, and turned to contend with a question from Pierce Bolan.
Huidekoper stood alone for a moment, pleased. He felt that in some fashion—perhaps soon to make itself more clear—his judgment had been vindicated. His early instinct had been astute: Roosevelt, for all his initial reluctance, could yet be the salvation of them. Huidekoper held what he had no difficulty admitting to himself was a nearly superstitious conviction that Roosevelt—because he was on a level with De Morès in matters not only of class and wealth but of will, acumen, leadership, spirit—Roosevelt, in spite of all the dubious attributes that made him seem ludicrous and outlandish, could be the one man who had any chance of marshaling the Forces of Good successfully against the Marquis De Morès and his ever so formidable Forces of Evil. The victory would require no less than a Crusade, Huidekoper knew, and no less a knight to lead it than the outwardly absurd Theodore Roosevelt.
Granville Stuart’s voice grated painfully on Huidekoper’s ears: “A.C.—I hear you don’t like the way the country’s developing.”
Huidekoper pulled out a chair and adjusted himself on it; the actions gave him time to compose his thoughts. “As I see it, the country has got limitations no one wants to acknowledge. Too many have made the mistake of allowing themselves to be caught up in this cattle craze. The Marquis De Morès keeps increasing his herds at a mad rate, and at the same time it seems as if every week another Texan arrives with as many cattle as he’s got left from the twelve-hundred-mile drive from the Red. We’ve got an alarming invasion on our hands—they’re increasing the number of beeves in the Bad Lands far beyond the capacity of our grasses to support them. We’ll soon be entirely overgrazed. As for such fodder as remains, I reckon horses are best adapted to it.”
Deacon Osterhaut said, “Crying wolf again, A.C.? They more than three million acres of grass on the Little Missouri. Three million. You’re irresponsible, forever fueling fears.”
Was the Deacon’s alliteration deliberate? Surely not. He hadn’t the ear.
Howard Eaton said, “I happen to agree with A.C. Too many folks seem to look at Dakota as a place to make a killing but not a living. They don’t see it as a place to settle and stay. They’ve all got plans to go ‘home.’”
Huidekoper said, “To me this is home.”
Eaton said, “What about you, Theodore? Is this country home?”
“It is for now,” said Roosevelt. “I’ve no idea what the future holds. But at this time the Bad Lands are my home, and this country has my undivided regard.”
Granville Stuart glanced unpleasantly at Roosevelt, making a show of his dislike. Huidekoper thought immediately that Stuart was not at all the sort of man who ever could apprehend the value of the little New Yorker; Stuart probably did not like Roosevelt’s cocksuredness and most likely regarded Roosevelt as no more than a nuisance that had to be tolerated—a small bull who, wherever he went, brought his own china shop with him. That was Roosevelt’s reputation. Old Four Eyes. Storm Windows. Dude Roosenfelder. But Huidekoper felt confident that his expectations of the Cyclone Assemblyman had been met. All but one, which—now that he had Roosevelt’s encouragement in the matter—he had every hope of accomplishing this very night.
Unlike the Montana baron, Roosevelt did not have a big voice but he seemed to have learned to make his limited vocal range effective by enunciating precisely and biting off words with sharp attention-commanding clicks of his teeth. He said to Howard Eaton, “What you’ve said has merit. We’re all beginning to feel crowded. As long as we have tolerable weather we can get by with fifteen acres per head of cattle, but should there be drought we’d need twice as much, and we’re nearly at that density now. It isn’t only the newcomers. We all depend on cooperation in the cattle trade—without it, there’d be no round-ups and indeed no trade at all. Now we seem to be at a point where when one outfit overstocks its range, it is not only that outfit’s cattle that suffer—it’s the cattle of everyone along the river who finds his grass consumed by visiting herds that happen to have wandered by for a bite.”