“If he doesn’t, it’s not for lack of the urge to.”

“It’s fortunate for you I’m a tolerant man and I understand when you keep blaming all the problems of the world on Paddock and the Marquis. I suppose you’d like to find a way to blame this drought on them too. It’s only natural, what with the suspicion that Paddock’s the villain who emptied the store and drove Swede Nelson from town, you’d have a score to settle with Paddock. Now, I’m tolerant again because I know you are beholden to Theodore Roosevelt—”

Joe growled, “Be that as it may, gratitude’s one thing. Right and wrong’s another.”

“—and you notice I haven’t badgered you too much just because you’ve taken to wearing that Remington revolver all the time now, even though I know what ‘everybody knows’ about how you’ve been hiding out Dutch Reuter so you can be sure to deliver him alive to testify at the Marquis’s trial. Incidentally tell me—isn’t Dutch getting pretty restless, what with the legal delays persisting?”

“There’ll be a trial,” Joe said. “Before the end of the year.”

“How do you know that?”

“You have my word on it.”

“Are you the one who keeps writing letters all over the place, stirring things up?”

“Me? No. I’m not much on writing letters.”

Pack said, “Then who is it? Roosevelt? Huidekoper?”

“There’ll be a murder trail, that’s all I can tell you.”

“Nothing will come of it. The Marquis has the Allen brothers on his side—foremost lawyers.” Pack pushed his chair back. “Where’s Dutch Reuter?”

“Why? So you can publish it in the Cow Boy and next week we can find his carcass hanging from a cottonwood?”

Pack stood up, filled with anger. He pushed the cafe door open. The hot wind blasted in fitfully, reeking of slaughter. Joe tipped his head back and smiled beatifically. “You can put this in your newspaper—you can tell the Markee that he can scheme and plan all he wants, and he can send out all the Stranglers in the world, but before the end of the year he’ll be on trial for murder and old Dutch Reuter will be on that witness stand to tell what really happened out on that road where Riley Luffsey was murdered.”

Seventeen

The months began to run together in exhaustion for Wil Dow. At the conclusion of fall round-up, with its distressingly small tally, Uncle Bill said, “I call it the abomination of desolation. It makes me pretty fierce to think of the green forest back home in Maine.”

Wil was not quite willing to say so aloud but he was ready to agree with Uncle Bill’s assessment. The heat seemed to have no end. Mr. Roosevelt was the only one who didn’t seem to mind it. He went on with unflagging drive.

Wil felt very low. He saw that Uncle Bill had been right after all. In this drought each steer needed as much as thirty acres. The Bad Lands were crowded together thicker than that now. Beef prices were falling every day and yet just last week another Texas fool had brought in six thousand head from the south.

Then again, Wil sometimes thought, drought really wasn’t much of a threat if there was no one left alive to suffer from it. The Stranglers had killed more than forty men. Seemed as if they were burning another ranch every day—or maybe it was the poor starving Indians hungry for red meat. They had been setting grass fires to cover their thievery and, some said, to get revenge against the whites because the Stranglers had murdered three or four of them. Every stockman had been injured by the scorched-earth behavior of the infuriated Indians. Wil and Uncle Bill and Roosevelt had worked heroically to extinguish several grass fires. They would slaughter a steer, split and splay it bloody-side down, and rope-drag it forward, smothering the line of flames, fighting their fire-maddened horses at every step. In that manner the ranchmen had contended with blazes day after day—as if the miserable round-up hadn’t been discouraging enough, with its dying cattle and panting horses.

Yet Roosevelt remained in high spirits and Wil felt shamed that he too had fallen behind, unable to match the boss’s inexhaustible energy. On top of it all, Roosevelt was writing again, working on a biography of Thomas Hart Benton, the Missouri Senator; his previous book had just been published—Hunting Trips of a Ranchman—and Wil had been admiring the leather-bound edition and hoping to find time to read it. He had glanced through it and been gratified to see that someone had fixed the boss’s spelling.

By November Huidekoper and his hounds and huntsmen had wiped out the last of the grey wolves who had preyed on the stockmen’s livestock. “They’ve driven the species to extinction in the Bad Lands,” Roosevelt growled, “and I believe if the Stranglers are left to run wild much longer they’ll accomplish the same end with the human inhabitants.”

By this time the Stranglers were said to have murdered more than half a hundred men. Bill Sewall said, “I believe we’re the only inhabited outfit left in a ten-mile radius. Six months ago there were eight including Pierce Bolan, who is a man I still miss. A prudent fellow would think about pulling up stakes.”

“No one would count you a coward if you did that,” Roosevelt said with surprising equanimity.

Wil said, “That’s what they want us to do—De Morès and his vigilantes. They want us to go. I say we should take the fight to him.”

Roosevelt looked at them both in turn. “Speaking for myself, I shall not run, and I shall not be alarmed into attacking a man against whom I have no proof.”

Uncle Bill was exasperated. “Then what the blazes do you aim to do?”

“By Godfrey, I will stand my ground!” Roosevelt’s eyes and teeth glittered ferociously.

Wil drew himself up. “Well then,” he said, “I expect my uncle and I will stand it with you, sir. If the Stranglers want us, then by Godfrey let them come and try!”

There was a ferocious rainstorm—far too late to be of any service; all it accomplished was to wash away tons of caked dry earth and fill the rivers with clay silt. The downpour lasted two days. In the middle of the following week on a bitter evening Mrs. Reuter came down Blacktail Creek riding sidesaddle with a matted buffalo coat over her divided buckskin riding habit. Wil helped her dismount in the barn and began to unsaddle her horse but the stout woman would have none of that. She took care of her own animal—it looked to Wil as if it had endured a lengthy wearying journey—and, once it had been watered and curried and stalled and grained, Mrs. Reuter accompanied Wil up to the house. Roosevelt welcomed her with a big pleased grin and gave her a seat by the fire.

She said, “Well look at you. I shall have to let out that suit again—you’re coming through the seams.”

“This wonderful country has built me up, by George. I’m ready to go fifteen rounds with any man in Dakota.”

“You look it.”

Uncle Bill pulled on his pipe, Wil boiled coffee and Mrs. Reuter said in a different voice, “There’ll be no more trouble with Indians setting grass fires.”

“How so?”

She accepted a tin cup of coffee from Wil Dow, smiled a tired sad thank-you, blew across the steaming surface and said, “I saw a line of riders the other night. They turned east to give my house wide berth, which is not usual, and I wouldn’t have known they were there at all if my horses hadn’t started acting up. I climbed the hill and saw them circling past the place—a large number of white men, at least forty of them, strung out single-file and they rode with no talk at all. Such silent stealth that I knew they’d been up to something monstrous evil. So I saddled up and backtracked them.”

“In the middle of the night?” Sewall said, astonished.

“Well that’s when it was,” she replied.

Wil Dow said, “Did you recognize any of them?”