Six Toes, a Kiowa woman, stretches out a pelt, hair side down, pegs it to the ground for drying, then rubs it with buffalo brains to cleanse it. She’s not happy in this work. Bow String, her male counterpart, skins a buffalo. Stone-faced and impassive, the picture of suppressed rage. When a grasshopper crawls across his face, even as it moves over his open eye, he suppresses any movement, not a flinch, not a twitch, not a blink.
Howard Dewey mounts a dark brown mare. Over his long buffalo hide jacket he wears a looped belt holding forty or fifty sizeable cartridges and a skinning knife. He carries a.50 caliber Sharps rifle. Beneath his sweat-darkened ten gallon hat, below his menacing eyes and rum-blossom nose, a gold tooth glimmers in the sun.
The horse saunters over to Bow String and Six Toes. Dewey spits tobacco so close to Six Toes, a few drops splash her. Then his horse pisses so close to Bow String, some of it splashes on him. “A thousand pardons, Mr. Bow String and Miss Six Toes.” He tosses them a coin each. “Hey, squaw, you really got six toes?” Six Toes continues with her chores. “Show me them toes. Hurry up.” He throws her another coin. She removes her moccasin and splays her toes. “Well, skin me alive. Wiggle ‘em fer me.” She wiggles all six for him. “One, two, three, four, five, six. There they are. Damned if I ain’t seen everything now…. Well, you two git back to work.”
Bow String and Six Toes watch Dewey ride out of the camp. Bow String says, “When the white man is gone, the Great Spirit will be satisfied.”
The open prairie, buffalo grazing. Numbering in the thousands, the animals face into a brisk wind and feed at a leisurely pace among dozens of their own dead, some of which have been skinned and left to the scavengers. Picked-clean bones litter the landscape. Among them are hundreds of prairie dog towns, the prairie dogs standing alert in their mounds. A muffled, distant, almost inaudible gunshot rings out. One of the buffalo falls. The others titter and snort, but remain calm. The prairie dogs disappear into their holes. Another distant shot, another buffalo falls. Again, the rest of the animals startle but return quickly to a calm state.
On a low, rounded hill above the herd, Dewey’s big rifle is held steady by a Y-shaped stick stuck in the hard sod. Grasshoppers crawl over his body and along the barrel of his rifle. Taking a plug of tobacco from his pocket, he bites off a chunk and looks at the herd below through a telescope. He folds the scope, yanks his “Y” stick out of the ground, mounts his horse and rides down the hill.
As he nears the dead buffalo, the horse loses its footing in a prairie dog hole and falls, propelling Dewey into the air. His rifle fires and a bullet rips through the leather of his boot, severing his Achilles tendon. He falls to the ground hard, knocking himself unconscious.
A prospector’s claim in the Colorado Rockies, 1875. A cobbled-together cabin sits near a swift mountain stream in a small, hidden valley. Smoke billows from its rusted metal chimney. A mule feeds on lush grass at the stream’s edge. Accompanied by raucous calls of feuding magpies, the sound of a shovel blade digging into gravel echoes against the high bluff overlooking the valley.
With a British accent, a rawboned prospector sings as he works: “Then if beneath the evening star…beside the great Pacific’s wave… thou find’st an early tomb afar…his grace will there thy spirit save.”
Atop the cliff, a slightly older, dirtier and more grizzled Dewey leans on his Sharps. His hide jacket and wide-brimmed hat show the wear of several years. He takes a few awkward steps toward the edge of the cliff. His right foot dangles, so every step is carefully taken and measured. He’s watching the prospector shovel sand and gravel from the streambed and dump it into one end of a twelve-foot-long wooden sluice known among gold panners as a “long tom.” Stream water rushes down the sluice, washing sand and gravel through an up-tilted, perforated iron sheet called a “riddle,” which filters out the gold.
Dewey lies on his stomach and pulls himself to the edge of the cliff for a better view. Below, the prospector harvests several small gold nuggets from the riddle, along with an abundance of gold flakes, then a much larger nugget. He picks up the prize nugget, examines it, bites it, rubs it, holds it up to the sun. “God’s blood!” He drops the big nugget into a pouch that is already nearly full of smaller nuggets, packs it in for the day, and plods toward the cabin singing: “Oh Susanna, don’t you cry for me. I’m bound for Coloradee with my washbowl on my knee.”
Having seen all this, Dewey slides a shell into his buffalo gun and makes his way stealthily down the side of the bluff, until he kicks a rock and starts a small landslide. As the prospector opens the door to the cabin, he hears the tumbling rocks. Stepping toward the stream he shades his eyes from the sun and looks up and down the side of the bluff. Dewey has curled into a ball behind a stump and can’t be seen from below. Shortly the last few falling rocks settle. Only a bit of dust remains.
Satisfied that the rock-fall was a natural event, the prospector’s attention focuses on a hawk spiraling toward the top of the cliff. It disappears for a moment, then flies off with a plump copperhead in its talons. The snake struggles to free itself and succeeds, dropping inches from the prospector’s foot. The frightened mule hee-haws and kicks the air. The prospector back-paces slowly from the snake, retreats to the cabin, enters, slams the door to an interior sparsely furnished with table, chair, bunk, wood stove, and a drawing of Queen Victoria on the wall. He bolts the door, takes a cautious peek out the window, has a swig of whiskey from a jug and sits at the table. On it is a balance scale, tweezers, a two-barreled Derringer, a bottle of nitric acid, a small anvil and hammer, a bottle of lye, a can of baking soda, a tin of oysters, and a jug of whiskey. He opens his pouch, removes the largest nugget, places it on the anvil and hammers it gently. The nugget flattens as he hammers it, causing him to smile. He places the slightly flattened nugget in a small saucer and pours nitric acid on it. The acid bathes the nugget but shows no reaction with it. “Absolutely pure,” the prospector whispers to himself. “No reaction at all.”
He pours the day’s take of dust, flakes, and smaller nuggets onto the balance scale and weighs it.
Dewey creeps through twilight shadows to the cabin. He peeks into the window and sees the gold glimmering in the candle’s light. His parched lips break into a gold-toothed smile. He raises his rifle and takes aim at the door.
Inside, the Sharps’ deafening boom and the explosion of the lock sends the prospector leaping from his chair. He backs into a wall, too far from the Derringer to defend himself.
Dewey swaggers in, slides another shell into the rifle, and sweeps the Derringer from the table with the barrel. “Hold it right there, you limey son of a bitch. So much as twitch and you’re a dead man.” He reaches for the pouch of gold. The desperate prospector lunges to the table, grabs the bottle of acid, flings the contents at Dewey. With quick reflexes, Dewey removes his hat and holds it in front of his face. The hat catches most of the splash. A few drops land on the front of his buffalo hide coat. He fires a shot that leaves a gaping hole in the prospector’s chest and in the wall of the cabin behind him. Dewey backs out of the cabin with the gold, foot flapping, his hat and jacket with smoldering acid burns.
A stormy night, heavy rain falling in sheets. When lightning strikes, the Binder place is illuminated: a house, barn, other outbuildings, a small family cemetery and the Binder Store, a sagging wooden structure with a rusty tin roof. Nearby, a grim-looking apple orchard, most of its trees dying or dead, buzzards roosting in their branches.