The afternoon was filled with explosive noise and destructive danger. It was mostly O’Donnell and Finnegan—drunk and shooting up the town. Using the Marquis’s importation of sheep as an excuse they had a rip-roarin’ time. There was a great promiscuity of gunfire that made Pack wonder, not for the first time, how these boys could afford such profligate expenditures on ammunition. The De Morès Hotel was shot full of holes. Blaspheming vigorously, the boys shot up all the stovepipes they could see.

During the fusillade Pack stayed indoors like any prudent citizen but it nearly didn’t save him; as he was studying the reflection of his face and thinking about shaving, a bullet parted his whiskers and smashed his mirror.

By evening the celebrants were sleeping it off somewhere, probably in the scabrous dormitory above Paddock’s dingy saloon. With the danger abated and the pressures of his weekly deadline in abeyance, Pack emerged from his toilet in stiff collar and cravat with his hair all wet down and his bottle-green frock coat dusted clean and his evening boots polished to a patent-leather gleam.

The sun was low above Graveyard Butte when Pack strolled across the railroad bridge—it was that or use the horse-and-wagon ford downstream, and a man dressed for dinner at the château could hardly select that alternative, regardless how hot his feet might be.

He was intercepted at the end of the bridge by a man on horseback. At first Pack could not make out the man’s face against the sunset—but he recognized A.C. Huidekoper’s Pennsylvania voice. “Beautiful evening.”

“It is indeed.”

Huidekoper dismounted with the easy grace of a born horseman. He was dressed with odd formality, as if for courting, in a lingerie shirt and a boiled collar. He removed his hat in a sort of punctuation to indicate an emphasis upon the importance he attached to this meeting. He was slight but not delicate, a compact man with a small round bald head and bright alert birdlike eyes.

“I’ve been lying in wait for you.” Huidekoper pronounced his words with care. Pack envied the Pennsylvanian his ear for mimicry; depending on the occasion he was capable of speaking innumerable appropriate varieties of English from cowboy to proper to stuffy.

“Now, that’s ominous.” Pack smiled with his mouth.

“You’ve been summoned to an audience with De Morès. Possibly as you grow a bit older you’ll learn to pick your dinner companions with more care,” Huidekoper said, “but as it happens, I’m pleased you’re going up there tonight. I’ve a message for him.”

“Why not give it to him yourself?”

“Hell will freeze over before I get an invitation to visit that house. I’ve made no secret of my feelings against him. But I’m not the sort of fool who’s eager for carnage—any civilized man has a duty to head off catastrophe if he can. Will you try to make clear to De Morès that he’s courting a violent debacle?”

Pack didn’t want to hear more. He had suffered his share of the garrulous horse-rancher’s fulminations. He liked Huidekoper well enough: the man was good-hearted and well-intentioned. But everyone knew Huidekoper’s eccentric prejudices against Progress and Industrial Growth, and Pack was in no frame of mind to be buttonholed this evening for an endless harangue.

Pack made as if to continue on his way. With a departing flap of a hand he walked down off the NPRR embankment and approached the bend in the wagon-road that led up toward the De Morès residence.

Huidekoper, leading the horse, hurried along beside him.

“Tell him we ranchers are not going to tolerate it any more—his fences and his Valentine Scrip frauds, and the irresponsible arrogance with which the man disregards the rights and feelings of his neighbors. The sheep are the last straw. There’ll be an explosion of tempers, mark me.”

“Will there? Most of the people around here owe their prosperity to the Marquis.”

“There’s a growing population that does not. Why are you so determined to see only one side of the issue?”

“It’s the side that counts.” Pack lengthened his stride. As soon as he could reach the vegetable garden at the foot of the driveway he’d be able to leave his companion behind, for Huidekoper had spoken the truth about one thing: he was not welcome on the Marquis’s land.

Huidekoper, half a head shorter, had to hasten awkwardly to keep up, tugging all the while on the reins of the saddle horse.

“You’ve got his ear. He respects you. For Heaven’s sake warn him off. Tell him to pull back before it’s too late.”

“Why? Because a few saloon ruffians have been shaking the leaves?”

“There’s talk of shooting. There’s talk of assassinating De Morès.”

“Now, there’s always talk. I don’t believe the Marquis sets much store by it.”

“These are not university boys, Pack. They’re a rough crowd.”

“The Marquis is no shrinking violet, you know. He’s killed several men.”

“He claims to have done. But these toughs don’t abide by the rules of formal duelling. More like a shotgun from a dark alley. Is that what you want? Bloodshed upon bloodshed? Unrestricted range warfare?”

“It won’t come to that. They’re only a few hotheads with nothing better to do than hang around bar rooms and boast to one another about what bad men they are. Why, I had a run-in with a roomful of them just yesterday. They had every chance to rend me limb from limb but nothing came of it except a drunken idea to send a threatening letter to the Marquis. Ease your mind. They’re not gorgons and hydras and chimeras dire.”

“What’s that? Shakespeare?”

“Milton.”

They reached the garden fence at the foot of the drive. Huidekoper stopped, as Pack had hoped he would. He climbed into the saddle and removed his hat and wiped a sleeve across the round ball of his hairless scalp. “It’s not just the hunters and wild ones your friend up there has antagonized. The sober element as well. He makes enemies too easily. It’s a habit that could cost him his life. Please understand what I’m saying, and why I’m saying it.”

Now, you’re an old woman, Pack thought. He walked on.

Huidekoper called after him: “At least tell him to keep away from the windows!”

Château De Morès overlooked the town, the railroad and its bridge, the river, the abattoir and the horizontally streaked colors of the heaving Bad Lands. On the lowlands along the river bend beneath the bluff were coach garage, stable and a house for the coachmen—and beyond them a pattern of corrals and vegetable gardens from which Pack commenced the strenuous climb to the wide terrace on which stood the residence of the Monte Cristo of the Bad Lands.

There were deer horns over the door. The house was large—twenty-six rooms looming two stories high at the edge of the bluff on the eastern promontory of Graveyard Butte. Everyone in the Territory knew it had an indoor bathroom—the first in Dakota. The walls were clapboard wood painted French grey with slate grey trim; the roof and shutters were deep red. The front porch faced the southern sun and was outfitted with easy chairs overseen by racks of antelope and elk horns—trophies of the De Morès’s hunts.

It was the Bad Landers who had named it “the château”; in fact it was an ordinary frame lodge, though a large one, and its owners preferred to call it “the summer house” because once their operations were fully organized they intended to spend their winters in the East.

Pack as usual was punctual; the Marquis and Marquise as usual were not. A maid admitted Pack to the front room and the butler came through quickly, dismissed the maid and led Pack to the front corner parlor. There he was left to himself for several minutes to consider the staring enormous buffalo head and the square Kurtzmann piano from which Madame la Marquise’s impassioned renditions of Verdi and Bach and Liszt sometimes could be heard in the town across the river when the wind was right.