Fifteen

With spring came somehow an increase in the intensity of Uncle Bill Sewall’s complaints. True the frost was out of the ground, but it seemed the chinook must have blown the tops off all the buttes for dust had curled everywhere; and being made of heavy clay it sank into clothing, well-water, food—everything.

Then there was rain. It came in all directions—slantways, sideways, upside down—and it fueled the mighty onslaught of the melting ice pack. The river rushed and boiled. Here at its confluence with Blacktail Creek the Little Missouri, tortured into a narrow chute, crashed around the bend with great twisting leaps of froth. There was one particularly nasty morning when the flood nearly reached the barn.

On the opposite bank, scattered along the hillsides, Wil Dow saw great dark chunks of rock that looked like cattle—he had to stare at them a while to see if they moved. If they did, the Elkhorn riders had to swim their horses across the foaming muddy torrent and hope to survive.

After a week the boiling river became impossible to ford at all. They had to use the skiff—ferry their saddles across and then attempt, on the west bank, to catch horses that had been running wild all winter.

It all turned the earth to mud and Bill Sewall’s mood to something even worse. But Wil Dow loved all of it. When Uncle Bill’s pumpkin-rolling became too strident he cheerfully interrupted: “Come on, Uncle, you know if it hadn’t been for Mr. Roosevelt we never would have got to see this Wild West.”

That always provoked Uncle Bill to a fit of caterwauling about how he had never wanted to see the filthy Wild West and hoped never to see it again.

On the far bank the horses were fresh and frisky in the morning. They had to be gentled and retrained for use before spring round-up could begin.

Wil picked out a roan and, with Uncle Bill holding its head down, climbed into the saddle and settled his boots in the stirrups. “All right. Turn him loose.”

Uncle Bill let go of the bit and backed away. Wil waited. The roan stood bolt still. Wil pulled his hat down tight and experimentally gigged his small blunt spurs into the roan’s flanks.

The horse burst forward. Ears down, it unwrapped like a loosed steel spring. A thin tight spasm of pain shot through Wil’s spine and he saw Uncle Bill’s lips turn white. He felt his backbone try to break up through his head. The roan swapped ends and started pile-driving on four stiff legs; it wheeled and reared, humped and uncoiled, headed for a tree to scrape him off, changed its mind at the last minute and went to more hammer-bucking. It slammed down on all fours with an impact that snapped Wil’s head forward on his neck. The sun whipped up and around; clots and damp wisps of clay roiled, choking Wil’s nostrils. He grinned, and stayed glued to the reeling saddle while his vision dimmed and filmed over with a red haze and he tasted blood. His grip started to loosen; he knew he was going over—and then the roan quit fighting. It subsided into a few perfunctory pitches, did one more music-hall turn, trotted spitefully back and forth and finally stood still, head down. Its ears moved forward, cocked up, a gesture of surrender.

Uncle Bill said in a very dry voice, “Ride him, cowboy.”

He accompanied his uncle Bill on a swath through a rough section of ravines, past rainbow-colored shale strata, heading up toward the short grass country. Everything that grew in the Bad Lands seemed dwarfed, with the exception of some ashes and cottonwoods that grew to a fair height in sheltered clusters against high cutbanks near the river. Above on the steep rough slopes clung red cedar and juniper and all manner of scrub brush.

Sometimes it was necessary to throw a riata noose around bogged cattle and pull them out before they sank into the gumbo and died. Sometimes horses needed rescuing as well. Sometimes you didn’t get to them until it was too late.

They prowled the forty-mile width of the Bad Lands. The strata were so clearly defined, so sharply contrasting in colors that they looked like painted ribbons. There was a chalky blue Bentonitic clay in a few of the parallel lines. The rain had made it run like inkstains.

By happenstance on an afternoon that might have been a Wednesday or a Friday they crossed paths with Mr. Roosevelt himself. Riding his favorite horse Manitou he came out of a coulee with a pleased look and reined in beside them. The wind drove bursts of rain in under his hatbrim so that he had to keep removing his spectacles and wiping them. “I love the wild desolate grandeur of the solitude. Sometimes you feel certain to the rock-bottom of your soul that no one’s ever been there before you, no human eye ever seen what you’re seeing.”

Sewall said, “You’d generally be wrong. Every time I make up my mind I’m where no human man ever traveled I run on a tobacco tag or a beer bottle.”

Wil Dow thought: William Wingate Sewall, philosopher on horseback.

At first glance, despite Uncle Bill’s dour predictions, the herd looked pretty good. The Elkhorn seemed to be prospering. “Long as we can keep from getting lynched,” Uncle Bill grumbled.

In intervals between downpours the occasional rider passed by from upstream, bringing news from the world beyond the Elkhorn. After the first flurry of lynchings, mostly the word was unexciting: the Marquis’s lawyers continued to win delays in court, and most folks believed he never would stand trial for the Luffsey murder.

Roosevelt asked every rider for news of Dutch Reuter—who would be one of the key witnesses against the Marquis if it ever came to trial—but no one knew a thing. Wil Dow told the boss, “At least we can take heart from not hearing he got hanged.”

After a few weeks’ respite the news from upriver turned downright bad again—the Stranglers were riding in force and purportedly had strung up more than a dozen “outlaws” and, as a result, a good many men had taken flight from their small outfits in the Bad Lands.

“Good riddance,” said Uncle Bill. “They must have guilty consciences.”

Wil Dow retorted, “Maybe they’re just scared of getting lynched by mistake.”

“It’s all right to listen to the boss, Wil, but you don’t need to swallow every word he says as Gospel truth. There’s all too many stock-thieves hidden out in these Bad Lands and they’re by no means the innocent band of independent ranchers Mr. Roosevelt makes them out to be. He’s inclined to take too much on faith.”

“They’re innocent,” Wil Dow said, “until proven guilty. So say I.”

“Aagh,” Uncle Bill growled in disgust.

In any event each of them traveled well-armed wherever he went, even if was only from the house to the barn.

Stranglers or no, the commerce of the prairie must go on. Spring round-up, with its attendant sorting out and branding of the season’s calf crop, could not await the whim of night-riding vigilantes.

Roosevelt left a hired man to look after things at the Elkhorn while the boss took his two New Englanders south with their cavvy to join round-up headquarters. The temporary caretaker they left behind was a cowboy recommended by Eaton’s foreman; he had injured his Achilles tendon and Eaton wanted to spare the man the rigors of round-up.

By general consent Johnny Goodall once again was elected round-up manager. Wil found the first two days in the headquarters camp near Custer Trail given up mostly to re-educating remuda ponies that were grass-fed, unshod and frisky. That first campfire evening was a delight to Wil Dow even though his bones ached so from bucking that no matter how he lay down he could not find a tolerable position. But bruises and aches could be forgotten in the swapping of good-natured lies. The Stranglers were not forgotten; but here in the heavily populated camp they could be set to one side while the ranch hands played cards and checkers, braided rawhide riatas and spun tall tales.