De Morès: “Where are you going?”

Madame: “To get rifles.”

De Morès: “Stay down.”

Pack said, “I’ll get them. On the porch?”

“Never mind. They’ve retreated.”

“How do you know?”

De Morès made no answer. Everything went still. Pack held his breath. Then he heard a sudden clatter of hoofbeats—several horses running away.

De Morès: “Sauve qui peut! … Ma chérie—ça va?”

“Nothing injured but my bustle. Antoine? Are you all right?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly the front door was open: a faint rectangle defined by starlight. De Morès stood outlined in it. He was making a target of himself, Pack thought—hoping to draw fire; but the cowards had fled. He saw De Morès stoop to pick up something. It rustled—a piece of paper, tied around a small rock on the porch. De Morès waited long enough for anyone to draw a bead on him, then came inside, shut the door and shoved the paper in a pocket. He fumbled about; after a moment he struck a match and held it to a lamp.

Madame said, “Such drunken lawlessness can no longer be tolerated. We must send for the sheriff.” Pack helped her to her feet. She groped a bit and sat down quickly and a bit weakly on the piano bench. In the weak light she looked pale but resolute. A woman of remarkable courage, Pack thought. He endeavored to smile reassuringly but it was difficult; his pulse continued to pound, nearly deafening him.

“Sheriff Harmon is at Mandan,” De Morès muttered. “One hundred and thirty miles away.”

Pack shoved his hands in his pockets. He didn’t want either of them to see how badly he was trembling. “Madame’s right. Send for him. You can’t have this riffraff laying siege to your house.”

“Hardly a siege,” De Morès said. “Who were they, Arthur? Roosevelt?”

Madame said sharply, “Antoine!”

Pack said, “I don’t know Roosevelt, really. I couldn’t say, sir.”

Madame said, “It wasn’t. Teedie Roosevelt? Don’t be ridiculous.”

The Marquis soothed his wife, stroking her hair. As if to mollify her he said, “Very well, Arthur. Who was it, then? Finnegan and his fools?”

“Now, if I had to guess—that would be my first thought. Maybe you’ll find something by daylight. They must have left tracks.”

“Tracks all look the same in Bad Lands clay. But we’ll see what we’ll see. Very well—I shall send for the sheriff, if only out of propriety.” De Morès was reloading the revolver. “Where the devil are the servants?”

Madame said, “They’re not soldiers, Antoine. You’ll probably find them in the wine cellar—and please don’t berate them.”

Pack said, “Did they put a note on the porch? May I see it?”

De Morès pulled it from his pocket and handed it to Pack without a word.

Git out Or Git killt.

Pack said, “Vile cretins.”

De Morès’s voice was low, well modulated, controlled; he was furious. “I shall post armed guards, with orders to kill. God help the soul of any craven poltroon who places my wife in danger, for he shall find no mercy from any hand here on Earth.”

Seven

Wil Dow climbed onto a fresh pony. It tried to buck him off and he ran it down into the river to cool it out.

Five minutes later on the bottomland bank he lit out in pursuit of a skittish heifer.

He rode at full gallop and his eyes fell upon a deep sinkhole immediately before him; there was nothing to do except slam both palms down onto the saddlehorn and swing himself up as high as he could on his arms. He was still kicking free of the stirrups when the horse plunged both forefeet into the chasm.

The horse went down and Wil was in flight then, an amazing sensation for a moment before he hit the clay running and couldn’t keep up with his feet and toppled over, breaking the fall on one shoulder.

When he hit ground it felt as if he’d rattled the brains inside his skull.

He got up quickly, testing his joints with a reckless need to find out if any bones were broken, and was nearly caused to jump out of his boots by the earsplitting crash of a gunshot.

He wheeled to stare behind him.

Standing over the dead horse, Dutch Reuter was punching an empty cartridge case out of his revolver. “Very fast you jump—save your balls. A cool head you have got. But next time you will try not ride a hundred-dollar horse into a leg-breaker hole, yah?”

“Sweet Jesus, you scared me half to death. You have to do that to the poor horse?”

Dutch loaded a new round into the chamber. “Both legs broke.”

“How’d you know?”

“Heard them snap. Seen it.” Dutch buttoned the revolver into its holster.

“Well Jesus, you scared me.”

“Yah, yah. Go on, go to work. The horse dispose.”

Wil Dow glanced across the river. He could see through the narrow wagon-gap they had thrashed through the dense mat of thorny brush.

Up on the knoll, visible amid the cottonwoods, Roosevelt was watching them. He had been taking pictures of the site of the Elkhorn Ranch. He must have seen Dutch shoot the horse but evidently he decided it was all right because Wil Dow saw him return underneath the hood of his tripod-supported glass-plate camera. Shaded by the stately trees it stood on the site of what soon would be the verandah, which the boss insisted upon calling the piazza—a term that seemed peculiar to his class of New Yorker; the boss pronounced the word to rhyme with a minstrel-show darky’s “Yassuh.”

Dutch Reuter gathered the reins in easy synchronization with his swift rise to the saddle. He loped off toward the horse corrals. Wil Dow stripped the tack off his dead horse and was trying to decide what to do with the carcass when Uncle Bill Sewall emerged on horseback from the trees, driving a little gather of beeves. “You shoot that horse?”

Wil Dow had to explain what had happened.

Sewall grunted. “Killed it and left it. What’s he think you are—his servant? These Westerners have got no manners at all. That Dutchman offends me. People here go ragged and as dirty as they can be. Can you point out to me one social advantage of the Bad Lands? Half the time I don’t even know when Sunday comes.” Uncle Bill wasted no opportunity to express his opinion of Dakota, which was a jaundiced one at the best of times. He allowed no one to go ignorant of the fact that he saw no future in this God-forsaken country.

“Dutch is all right.” Wil Dow was eager to learn cowboying and he was learning it from Dutch, whom Mr. Roosevelt had hired on the recommendation of the storekeeper and had brought back from town to break horses and assist in the building of the ranch.

There was a puckered two-inch scar below Dutch’s left temple—souvenir of perhaps a fight or a tumble from a horse, or a woman. He had unkempt hair and a greying beard wilder and thicker than Uncle Bill Sewall’s, and bloodshot little eyes that looked weak but seemed to miss nothing. He was a lumpy sack of a man with no grace whatever except in the confident economy with which he did his work.

Sewall complained continually about Dutch—they’d even had to teach the barbarian to use the outhouse. Not that he didn’t know how, but he preferred open-air squatting; he said nobody should have to put up with the stink inside an outhouse—and he didn’t seem to care who might be around to see him relieve his bowels on the open ground.

For all that, Dutch was a first-class plainsman and Wil Dow found him an excellent teacher.

In the afternoon a young horseman came along the river with a worried smile. Dutch watched him approach and said out of the side of his mouth, “Riley Luffsey. You heard of him?”

“No.”

“He is good boy.”

Inasmuch as that was more of a compliment than Wil Dow had heard Dutch utter about anybody, he watched the newcomer with interest.

It was customary to invite a visitor into camp; this was done, and Roosevelt came down from the knoll. “We have met.” He said it in a neutral way, leaving Luffsey the choice between friendship and bellicosity.