“I find that expression offensive, Mr. De Morès.”

“Do you.” The Marquis’s eyes flashed, as if he had scored some sort of point. “I find some things offensive too. One of them is the fact that you’ve chosen to employ a man who’s been firing his rifle into my house and my sheep.”

“What man is that?”

“You know perfectly well. Dutch Reuter.”

“I know nothing of the kind. Have you evidence?”

“If I had, your man would be hanging from a tree.”

Roosevelt looked up at the horsemen who flanked De Morès. His gaze settled for a moment on Johnny Goodall, who looked on in flinty silence. Finally Roosevelt faced the Marquis. “Mr. De Morès, I ask you one last time to keep your word. If you will not do that, then henceforth I will not do business with you.”

“I am fully prepared to keep my word. Seventy cents less than the Chicago price.”

Roosevelt turned to Bill Sewall. “We will drive the animals back out of the yards.”

The breath caught in Wil Dow’s throat. His eyes flashed from face to face. He shifted his hand nearer his revolver and turned to face Johnny Goodall squarely, leaving the Marquis to Mr. Roosevelt. If it was to come to shooting, he wanted his target clearly identified.

Menace hung in the stinking air like a blade poised to drop.

Then Johnny lifted both hands onto the saddlehorn in a quiet but clear gesture of peace.

De Morès said to Roosevelt in an arrogantly amused way, “What do you intend doing, then? These are the only shipping pens in town.”

“I shall drive them to the next town and ship them from there.”

“All the way to Dickinson? You’ll drop thousands of pounds off them.”

“You leave me no choice.”

The Marquis glared at him. “I’m sorry you can’t see the proper side of this.” He turned his horse and rode off.

Johnny Goodall said to his men, “All right, boys, give Mr. Roosevelt a hand getting these cattle out.”

“Thank you,” said Roosevelt.

“That’s all right,” Johnny drawled.

And so Wil and Uncle Bill Sewall drove the beeves three days to Dickinson and put them on a train, fifty-five yearlings to a boxcar, and shipped them to the Chicago stockyards. Mr. Roosevelt was pleased because the price had gone back up and he got a dollar more per head even after payment of shipping charges than the Marquis would have paid him.

But the incident left little doubt that they were going to have to sleep light from now on.

Before it was over, Wil Dow thought, there was going to be hell to pay.

The anticipation of it made him feel alarmed and pleased, all at once. He couldn’t fathom that; but he rode through the ensuing weeks in a state of excitement that made his senses keener than they ever had been.

Ten

The Indian Summer heat was oppressive. Pack found it difficult to breathe inside the shack. He could hear rats scurrying in the roof. When he’d finished dressing in his evening suit it was impossible to stand the stifling closeness any longer; he went outside and tried to fill his chest but the air was rancid with slaughterhouse stink. That was but a small price to pay, however—all you had to do was take a look at the train of refrigerator cars, each painted with the Marquis’s NPRC legend, making its slow way out of town, hauling dressed Bad Lands beef to the Eastern markets.

It was an evening that might prove interesting. Despite the dreadful heat Pack looked forward to tonight’s formal dinner with the Marquis and Marquise and their honored guests.

He saw Dan McKenzie emerge from the smithy, remove his apron and toss it back inside, wipe sweat from his face and trudge toward the Senate Billiard and Pool Hall, licking his lips in anticipation of beer.

Riley Luffsey, who had returned three days ago from guiding a moderately successful game hunt for a party of Belgians, was jawing on the porch of Joe Ferris’s store with Little Casino. Luffsey was slapping a rolled newspaper into his open palm, punctuating his ribald talk. He had just turned nineteen and, judging by the monumental scale of his celebration the other night, inevitably still must be suffering from the hangover; the insolent swagger of his manner was in no way muted, however. He flashed a proud grin at Pack and went right on talking to Little Casino. Pack couldn’t hear their words but he saw Luffsey speak with dry cocky impudence and he heard the madam’s bawdy whiskey-baritone laugh.

They were an odd pair, the curiously touching—almost endearing—youngster and the hardened whore. Little Casino had a soft spot for Luffsey; everybody in town knew it, including her husband, but then Jerry Paddock never seemed to care whom she sported with, or how she felt about them. Jerry’s main interest in his wife seemed to be how much money she brought home.

Speak of the Devil: down the street Jerry Paddock stepped out of the De Morès store. For once he was without his funeral coat; he was in shirtsleeves and seemed a bit wilted. He glanced down toward the competing emporium, saw his wife engaged in intimate laughter with the young hunter, and wheeled abruptly back inside, sudden danger and menace implicit in his every twitch.

Pack wondered at that. Something new here?

Jerry Paddock, for all his surly conspiratorial mannerisms, was a contradiction. His dominant characteristic was an air of personal isolation; it kept him at a rigid distance from everyone. Pack saw him every day but had yet to comprehend him.

After a moment’s thought, however, Pack realized why there probably would be an earsplitting row later tonight in the Paddock household. It had nothing to do with any normal feelings of masculine jealousy; if Jerry resented his wife’s friendliness with Riley Luffsey it would be solely because the villain did not care to have his wife consorting with the Irish crowd of anti-De Morès hunters. He probably had forbidden it—and she seemed to miss few opportunities to defy his proscriptions.

A De Morès mechanic was driving one of Cyrus McCormick’s one-hundred-twenty-dollar wheat-reaping harvester machines through town, lashing the air above the horses’ ears and yelling hoarsely. Redhead Finnegan, the man from Bitter Creek, so filthy he was surrounded by his own personal cloud of flies, came out of Ferris’s store followed by Frank O’Donnell, who kept rubbing his pitted cheeks and batting the flies away. Finnegan said something that took all the laughter out of Little Casino’s face, and took Riley Luffsey in tow and plodded through the heat toward Bob Roberts’s saloon.

Poor Luffsey, Pack thought. Given half a chance the kid might do just fine. But his chosen campanions had filled him up with dreams of ruffianly glory; Luffsey wanted nothing so much as to be another Wild Bill Hickok. It did no good to try and point out to him the squalor in which Hickok had ended his sorry days.

The sun had disappeared beyond the bluffs; the sky was grey and thick. Pack idled down the street to the cafe and was about to go inside when he saw Theodore Roosevelt ride into town with two of his hired hands. Roosevelt carried his arm in a leather sling. He was all dressed up in an elaborate buckskin suit. Sight of him stopped Pack in his tracks. Had the man ridden thirty-odd miles into town on this particular evening by sheer coincidence? Why was he wearing his Wild West best?

Roosevelt stepped down off his handsome horse and went inside Joe’s store. The hired men, Sewall and Dow, came on to the cafe, towing two pack horses laden with carcasses. Curious, Pack followed them inside. They had shot more deer than they could eat; they had the excess on the pack animals outside and Pack watched the old Mennonite transact business with the slat-sided proprietress. “Five cents a pound,” she said.

Sewall—his beard jutting as ferociously as a Viking’s—said, “Six,” and the woman stared back fearlessly. They settled on five and a half.