One

It had become the custom on the Little Missouri to greet trains by shooting into the air over the roofs of the railroad cars. The Cantonment had a reputation for deviltry and the boys felt a duty to live up to it. The Northern Pacific had learned to warn its passengers to cower beneath the sills because it was not extraordinary for the intoxicated frontiersmen to shoot through windows.

Some travelers, and even a few residents of the encampment, objected to this boisterous behavior on grounds that it was not only barbaric but downright dangerous. Personally Joe Ferris thought it was fair retribution in behalf of animals on the plains that had been maimed or slaughtered and left to rot by bullets fired by tourists from the bibulous comfort of their seats on the fast-moving trains. Sauce for the goose.

You had to admit, sometimes it did go a bit far. Last month “Bitter Creek” Redhead Finnegan, stimulated by an excess of bug juice, had emptied his revolver into the dining car. Two bullets had struck a breakfast tray carried by a waiter, scattering eggs and terrifying passengers.

Mostly, though, the ammunition passed harmlessly above the railroad cars, eventually to plunge into what at the present rate must soon turn into a lucrative lead mine half a mile upstream.

Tonight the train was several hours late and the noisy welcoming ceremony awakened Joe Ferris from his temporary lodgings in the bare room above what used to be the sutler’s store. He looked out the window and saw nothing. Darker than the inside of a cow out there. He heard an impatient chuffing of steam. Far ahead a trainman’s disembodied signal lantern swayed and the train began to clank away. Nobody appeared.

Irritation turned Joe Ferris’s mouth down. He wouldn’t have come in today except for this train. He had received a letter from a man in New York named Theodore Roosevelt. Near as Joe could make out, it asked if he would take the undersigned out after game. The spelling was something awful. Joe had written a reply on the back of the dude’s own letter: “If you cannot shoot any better than you can write, I do not think you will hit much game.”

The response had come immediately, by telegram: “Consider yourself engaged.”

Joe didn’t want to take the dude out. He didn’t want to go out at all. He didn’t want to hunt. He hated the killing.

But a fellow had to eat. So here Joe waited, with the train pulling out, and he still hadn’t seen anybody get off.

Must be near eleven o’clock. The front door of Jerry Paddock’s bar flapped open, dropping a fan of lamplight across the alkali earth. The boys went inside; their silhouettes canted left, toward the foot of the stairs—time to go up to bed, now that the train had departed.

In the reflected glow Joe could make out shadows of the Cantonment’s half-dozen drab structures. Then the door closed. Like a curtain descending on a play it effectively ended all discernible life: one moment bedlam and the next a Stygian silence.

May be the client had missed the train, or slept through his stop. It wouldn’t be the first time for one of these dudes. There had been a pair two months ago that had drunk themselves into a stupor and slept half way across Montana. They’d sent a telegram from Billings and turned up three days later on the eastbound, woebegone from too many hairs of the dog.

Above the door lights began to glow behind the paper windows of Jerry Paddock’s makeshift hotel dormitory where the boys were turning in.

Joe Ferris put a hand on the windowframe, ready to return to his blankets. Then he heard hammering across the parade ground. The door of the flyspecked saloon opened and a tiny stranger was outlined against the weak flame that guttered behind the smoky chimney of Jerry Paddock’s lantern. Jerry wasn’t a huge man by any means but he loomed ferociously over the newcomer.

So the little dude had managed to jump down off the wrong side of the train and now he’d carried his belongings across forty yards of sagebrush without anyone’s knowing. You’d make a fine Indian. For sure you are in the wrong line of work, Joe told himself.

He could see the dude wore eyeglasses—an adornment said to be evidence of physical decay and defective moral character.

The newcomer went inside; the door closed, once again shutting off that light; there remained a few dirty illuminations from the papered windows of the second floor. Joe remained at his post a while, curious whether the half-pint dude would take a whiff of the unwashed men on the musty cots in Jerry’s big common room and prefer, as Joe did, to sleep elsewhere—even outdoors if necessary. But the visitor did not reappear.

May be he not only suffered from poor eyesight but also lacked a sense of smell.

After a time Joe went back to bed and had trouble getting to sleep. Things didn’t seem to be going well. He was making a living, unlike some, but never seemed to get ahead of the price of tomorrow’s supper. It had been like that most of the time since he’d first come here seeking his fortune. The railroad brought immigrants to the West without charge; but try to return home and you found the ticket cost five cents a mile.

In the morning Joe Ferris went across to Paddock’s first thing and found the newcomer already waiting by the horse trough. The initial impression was one of a high voice and a lot of teeth. Mr. Theodore Roosevelt had the look and manner of a brat from one of those academies to which wealthy folks sent their children to learn useless foolishnesses such as Latin, geometry and the overweening pronunciation of English through locked aristocratic jaws.

The dude was ready and eager, dragging a huge duffel bag, carrying across his shoulder two cased rifles: a waif in a New York suit with a heavy revolver holstered squarely in front where it could do a man irreversible damage if it happened to go off by accident or if the buckboard seat should happen to lurch under him.

Behind the bravado of his sandy mustache he looked sickly, as if he had some wasting disease. He looked very young.

A few of the boys came outside and watched and snickered while Joe introduced himself to the stranger, confirmed to his dissatisfaction that the new arrival was actually his contract, winced at the screeching high pitch of the dude’s voice and led the young man to the buckboard.

The boys paid close attention because there was naught else to hold their interest. Most of them had been hide hunters; now they were scratching to find work: they had come here to feed the construction men but the construction men wouldn’t arrive in strength until next month. Nevertheless quite a few men on the drift had found their way to the Cantonment, may be because Jerry Paddock’s pop-skull tonsil varnish was the cheapest whiskey on the plains. This morning you could tell most of the boys had been painting their noses with it.

Then this fellow Roosevelt piped, “I have come west to shoot buffalo while there are still buffalo left to shoot.” He announced it loudly.

The boys laughed.

Evidently it was not the response the Easterner had desired. He glared at them.

Joe greeted the newcomer’s boast with a dour grunt. He didn’t tell the whole truth in reply; it might have cost him a badly needed commission. You are about five months too late. They exterminated the last buffalo herd last spring.

What he said was, “Bad Lands are a hunter’s paradise. Plenty big game downriver just now, sir. Blacktail and whitetail, antelope, mountain sheep, beaver if you’re so inclined, maybe a bear now and then, and I believe we’ll find elk as well.”

“Capital. And buffalo. Most important.”

“We’ll scare up plenty of game, sir.”

This was going to be a glorious hunt, Joe thought. Glorious. He put his gloomy regard on the dude. This Mr. Roosevelt was a head shorter than most of the men in the pack. He could not weigh more than 120 pounds, Joe thought. The large blue-grey eyes seemed mournful and painfully sickly. They peered rapidly about from behind big gold-rimmed spectacles that kept slipping down his nose.