The Marquis turned on his heel—a smart military aboutface—and took his wife by the arm and steered her inside. She looked back briefly; Wil could not tell at whom she was looking, but he saw Arthur Packard frown furiously and then De Morès had disappeared and the door closed, and it occurred to Wil that the Marquis may have broken off the confrontation out of respect for his wife’s safety. It was the only thing he could think of that could explain De Morès’s sudden decision to back down.

He felt savagely dissatisfied even though clearly this was not the last of it. Things could not remain this highly charged. There would be more, he thought, and it was likely there would be powder smoke and blood.

At Elkhorn, Dutch Reuter picked a path through the clutter of dry antlers on the piazza and walked down the meadow in such obvious desolation that Wil Dow was on the point of following anxiously behind him. But he respected Dutch’s privacy; he only watched as Dutch went down the bank and tossed a stone into Blacktail Creek. Dutch hunkered there a long time.

It was cold, and finally Wil went back inside the house, where Roosevelt was writing a letter—probably to his sister Bamie back in New York. Or to his other faithful correspondent: almost certainly a woman, but what sort of woman? In what way connected to him? It was a bafflement to Wil.

Dutch did not come in for supper. He did not appear at all that night, and in the morning his horse and saddle were gone from the stable; gone too was his kit. He had lit out, it seemed, for parts unknown. Wil Dow could imagine his thoughts: To bring any more trouble on Mr. Roosevelt I do not wish. Good to me he is.

Or perhaps Dutch was only following his urge to wander—like a cloud’s shadow across the ground.

Thirteen

This meeting at Eaton’s Custer Trail Ranch was charged with expectation. A chinook howled around the house, bringing wind and rain and muddy thaw; it also had brought a powerful visitor from across the line—Montana baron Granville Stuart, who sat at the head of the Eaton table as if he owned it.

A.C. Huidekoper listened for the music in Granville Stuart’s deep voice and heard none; the voice was a tuneless rasp. One could not escape the feeling there would be a similar sound if Stuart were to scrape his hand across the edge of his jaw: he was the sort who would need to shave more than once a day to keep beard-shadow from coarsening his sun-browned skin.

At every encounter with Granville Stuart, Huidekoper found himself endeavoring to dislike the man, but failing in the endeavor. Stuart—hardened pioneer—had brought one of the first herds of cattle up the trail all the way from Doan’s Store in Texas to the Montana wilderness back in the war-charred days when blackleg renegades made any cattle drive a gantlet of danger, when Comanche and Cheyenne were still a deadly threat on the southern and central plains—even before Custer’s army challenged the Sioux in the north; Granville Stuart had braved it all and established his cattle kingdom in the new world of Montana. He had blazed the way and earned fame and honor on the frontier, and along with it a portion of fear and distaste, for it was common knowledge that his methods of protecting his empire sometimes had much in common with the methods of the more ruthless medieval lords of the Inquisition.

It could be said politely that Granville Stuart tended not to err on the genteel side. Huidekoper often had found occasion to deplore his appalling attitudes. Yet Stuart in spite of all remained ingratiating, even likeable. There was something childlike about his innocent faith in the infallibility of righteous institutions, the simplicity of all questions, the rectitude of all answers and the propriety of brutality in a good cause.

Granville Stuart personified the legendary Texican attitude toward lawbreakers: whether they might be heinous felons or casual miscreants, whether their victims be murdered, maimed or merely inconvenienced, his answer remained the same; it adhered always to the same Old Testament simplicity:

Hang him.

Not surprisingly the news of his presence at Eaton’s had drawn a sizable gathering tonight. Among the stockmen on hand were J.N. Simpson, Henry S. Boice, Gregor Lang, H.R. Tarbell, Pierce Bolan, J.L. Truscott, the unavoidable Deacon W.P. Osterhaut and half a dozen more, and of course Eaton. And y’r ob’t s’v’t, Huidekoper thought, out of respect for his sense of the precise.

Off by himself, according to his habit, stood Johnny Goodall, representing the Marquis De Morès, who was again in the East doing something that had to do with finance—something doubtless devious and sinister, of which no good would come.

They awaited the arrival of Theodore Roosevelt, who had the farthest to ride—his Elkhorn Ranch was nearly fifty miles from here. In the meantime there was desultory conversation about the end-of-winter weather and about the confused reports and rumors of an expanding bloody provincial rebellion just over the border of Canada. Several conversations buzzed in Huidekoper’s ears. The gathering of men had the superficial air of a social evening but the ladies were absent and the Eaton bar was closed—sure indications of serious business at hand.

“A lot of wasted time,” Huidekoper heard Granville Stuart bark. “Save the Territory a lot of trouble and hang those two boys that ambushed the Marquis.”

Howard Eaton said, “Seems to be some dispute as to who ambushed whom.”

“Why, those boys are trying to put a saddle on you, Howard,” scoffed Stuart. “You know as well as I do, a man with blue blood flowing in his veins doesn’t go out to bushwhack those ring-toters from a dry gulch. What I hear about them, good men go wide around them as if they were a swamp. Now I can’t honestly see the Marquis dirtying his hands on the likes of those, can you?”

The discussion was interrupted when Theodore Roosevelt entered, looking surprisingly fit in his trim buckskin suit. Granville Stuart accorded him the courtesy of rising from his chair, since Roosevelt was something of a foreigner and allegedly high-born as well.

Stuart was tall, wide, muscular, imposing as an outsized marble statue of a general. He offered his handshake. Roosevelt showed a definite constraint before accepting it.

Huidekoper did not know what Roosevelt might have heard about Stuart that caused such hesitation; but he had observed often enough in his lifetime that such little things could lead from the smallest start to the bitterest quarrels: they stung a man’s pride and made him lose face, and eventually the memory of the little thing could be the chancre that turned the man savage.

And he was acquainted well enough with Granville Stuart to know it might not take very much to transform him into just that state.

Roosevelt turned away from Stuart almost immediately and, strangely, addressed himself to Johnny Goodall: “Well, Johnny. How do you find things?”

“That kind of depends on how you lost them.” As usual Johnny did not smile; but his voice expressed an offhand amusement and it elicited Roosevelt’s soft chuckle.

Huidekoper saw the way Roosevelt nodded his square sandy head. He found it extraordinary that Johnny and Roosevelt should be enjoying colloquy on such informal terms. The two men could not have been less alike—they might have been from different species—yet there appeared to be something positively warm between them, something in the easy way their eyes met and then drifted off to examine the rest of the crowd, something that suggested a camaraderie, a respect for each other and even perhaps an affection for which Huidekoper could think of no plausible explanation.

Granville Stuart was bending Eaton’s ear. Huidekoper caught a portion of it: “—the little young fellow from New York over there?”