The Yellowstone (18 page)

“Newspaper’s out ever’ Friday,” said Jacobs with a smile.

Until now, Mac reflected, to get the Montana news you read prints—hoof prints and moccasin prints, not newsprint.

Jacobs looked sideways at Mac, considering. “Maybe we’d best think on how to get your dust home together,” said Jacobs. “And then you keep your own counsel.”

That was Mac’s thought. The two mountain men moved on, stepping around a drunk who was puking into the street.

“Mae Jhong will be straight arrow with you, I believe—she counts the world in two parts, her friends and everybody else. You’re her friend now. But anything you tell anybody could get out.”

They passed a stone building, an assay office, according to the sign, founded by a man actually named Con Weary. A few steps beyond, Mac stopped for a moment to look through wavy glass at the wonders of the white man’s culture displayed by the drugstore. Face powder, curling irons, desk spittoons like Mae Jhong’s, gulfweed (for obesity), and toothpaste of the Clorox and Walrus brands. The Walrus brand displayed two gleaming tusks.

“Wanna wet your dry?” Mac nodded, and Jacobs went on, “Let’s go to one of Mae’s.”

“Why do they say ‘saloon’ instead of ‘tavern’ these days?”

“No lodgings. Know why Mae’s laundry’s profitable?”

“Why?”

“They pan the dirty water for dust. Find plenty.”

Mac chuckled.

Jacobs led the way into the Golden Belle. It looked like a rough club where men sought entertainment. A fiddler was sawing away in a corner, and two miners were starting to dance without benefit of female companionship. Men crowded around round tables, some big enough for card games, covered with green felt, and manned by a dude in the traditional gambler’s black and white. The floor was made craftily of the tongue-and-groove boards that came atop keg lids, except that real boards formed the dance area. At a small table sat Smith and Jim, with whiskey. Mac was relieved to find at least one of his sons.

Jacobs and Mac headed that way. Mac wouldn’t have identified the Golden Belle as an Oriental establishment from the decor, but blue-smocked Chinamen were scurrying about bringing drinks, clearing tables, and sweeping.

Smith and Jim smiled up at Mac kind of funny, he noticed. Then something caught his eye. The second story was surrounded by a rail and open hallway, with many doors opening onto the hall. Women leaned over the railing, some dangling braceletted wrists. Some of the women were white, some black, some Mexican, some Chinese. They wore shirts of gold silk.

Three of them were coming down the stairs now, and Mac could see them better. Gold shirts on top, scarlet paper flowers in their hair, silk stockings below, fastened by elaborate garters. In between garter and jacket, they were bare.

Mac sat down. “Where’s Thomas?” he asked Smith.

“Upstairs,” Smith said simply.

Mac took a breath. “He would.”

“So did I,” said Smith. Typical of Mac’s elder son to say that easily.

“Me, too,” said Jim.

The fiddler was belting out “The Arkansas Traveler,” everybody’s favorite dance tune, and two gartered ladies partnered the dancing miners.

Well, what the hell, thought Mac. “Where’d you get the money?”

“We’re on the house here,” said Smith with an enigmatic smile. “Convenient.”

“All you Macleans,” Jacobs reminded Mac, “and Jim.”

Jacobs ordered whiskey from a Chinaman. Mac noticed people staring at their group, in half-open hostility. He ignored it, as he had taught his sons to do.

But it made no sense. His sons were somewhat dark and Indian-featured. They accented their Indian blood, maybe three-eighths, with feathers and quillwork. Jim Sykes, dressed as a white man, had a much more distinctively Indian face. Mostly people automatically treated all three either like servants or like scum.

Yet all three could read and write, which was more than most of these miners could say. Smith could do it really well. His sons knew more of the ways of polite society than most frontier ruffians. Jim Sykes could travel safely alone from here to St. Louis without benefit of roads. Smith and Thomas could find their way through the wilderness, and comfortably. These white people would get lost and perish, even on a road, without a guide such as Jim or Smith or Thomas. They couldn’t find water or wood or the easy route or game—they were helpless in the face of simple realities. Riots because they didn’t have flour. Mac snorted.

And the way they were living—crowded, unsanitary, and unhealthy. Killing each other over trifles. Constantly getting drunk and brawling. Madness.

But what was most mad was that they looked down their noses at Mac’s sons. Why on earth?

Well, Mac thought, America was a new world, and the West was a new way of living, and such thinking would never shine here. It would die out. He only had to wait.

Mac saw Smith was watching him with bemusement.

“You learn anything upstairs?” Mac asked his elder son.

“Yes,” said Smith seriously, “I saw something. While I was getting ready, a huge dust devil came up. It blanketed the town in a cloud of dust. Nothing could be seen. In the murk, though, there passed before my eyes the things the white man loves—hats, blankets, an empty dress, the pages of a newspaper, and a tin sign advertising
ASSAYS
. I don’t know if these things were real, or a vision.”

Smith never cracked a smile, but maybe his eyes showed he was having fun.

“Then all grew dark again, and I could see nothing. Slowly came into view something dark, slowly flopping and rolling, over and over. At first I couldn’t make it out. At last it came to a stop, right in front of me, unmistakable. A buffalo robe. It lay there, brown and brooding. The wind flicked at it but it wouldn’t move. Through the dust storm it held its ground. As the big wind eased, it rose up onto four legs and trotted off.”

Jacobs was slack-jawed. He wasn’t used to these little improvisations of Smith’s yet.

“I was wondering if this meant that the things of the white man will blow away with the wind—‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity,’ says the poet—but the buffalo will live forever.

“Just then my new acquaintance came up close behind me at the window, touched me interestingly, and reminded me of the meaning of life.”

Mac was shaking his head. “That’s what you get for educating them,” he said to Jacobs, chuckling. And it was Smith all over.

Thomas pulled up a chair. Thomas was slender, sinewy, attractive. Mac recognized that his younger son resembled him closely—a boyish, dashing quality that appealed to women. Smith, though huskier, was round-bodied and sweet-faced. Smith loved reading, but Thomas hadn’t the patience. Mac land of wished he looked more like Smith and less like Thomas.

“Brother Thomas,” said Smith, “what were they this time?”

“Plain flour sacks,” Thomas said. “Nothin’ fancy.”

“The walls between the rooms upstairs,” Smith explained to his father, “are cloth.”

“Lumber’s been mighty scarce,” Jacobs put in. “Mills can’t keep up.”

“I got plain flour sacks the first time,” Smith went on, “basted together. And printed flour sacks the second time. A
XE FLOUR
, in red and blue letters on white. A touch of…something extra.”

“I had cotton domestic,” boasted Jim, “the one time. I’m no young bull like Smith and Thomas.”

“The first time,” Smith went on, “Thomas had cotton domestic with pictures from
Harper’s Weekly
pinned up. A show of taste. We’ve been trying to figure out if it’s a subtle indication of social structure. The classier whores get better rooms. Or the white whores. Or something. But it’s not panning out so far.”

“Panning out” was new slang, born of the gold diggings.

The whiskeys came. Thomas reached across, took his dad’s whiskey, gulped it down, and motioned to the Chinaman for another. Two more. He looked restless. After a moment he got up and started wandering around. He passed a Mexican-looking whore, admiring her bare bottom. Finally he sat down at a card table.

Jim stood up. “Believe I better teach the lad something.” Mac often called them “the lads.” He nodded to Jim in appreciation.

“The games are square,” said Jacobs.

Jim looked hard at the gambler at Thomas’s table. After a moment he said, “Three-card monte?”

Jacobs laughed. “No,” he admitted, “the monte’s not straight.”

Jim walked over—Mac noticed again the way his moccasins moved, slick as goose dung—and put his hands on Thomas’s shoulders from behind. Three-card monte was a simple variation on the shell game. The dealer turned three cards, all hearts, faceup. One was a queen. Thomas gestured to indicate that he was ready. The dealer turned the cards facedown and, as Thomas watched sharply, moved them around with one finger. And then took his hands away.

A Chinaman brought Thomas a whiskey, and the young man tossed it down, eyes on the uninformative backs of the cards. At last he pointed to the one on his left. The dealer turned it over. The six of hearts. He turned over the middle card—the queen of hearts—and raked away Thomas’s money, four bits.

Thomas put another four bits out. The dealer made his show, Thomas made his guess, and the dealer took Thomas’s money. Thomas slapped his knee in frustration.

Jim interrupted. “I’ll give you five dollars silver to show him how it works.”

The dealer looked up offended and started to speak. “Five bucks is enough,” said Jim. “You’re not taking any more of his money at monte anyway.” Jim put five dollars in silver coin from Taos on the table. It occurred to him to wonder whether, in this town, coin was worth more because it was scarce, compared to dust.

The dealer gave an exaggerated shrug. He was a natty man with flourishing chestnut side-whiskers. He laid out the cards, showing the queen in the middle, flipped them, didn’t even move them around, and let Thomas take his guess. Then he showed Thomas the queen—in his hand. The dealer then turned over all three facedown cards with the edge of the queen. They were all small hearts.

“How do you palm it?” asked Thomas. “That’s clever.”

The dealer shook his head, mouth pursed.

“Then do it again,” demanded Thomas.

The dealer went through the routine once more, slowly.

“I still didn’t see you palm it,” exclaimed Thomas.

“I don’t palm it,” the dealer said with a shrug. He took the cards away and put out two decks. “Faro?” he asked. “It’s square.”

Jim rugged on Thomas’s arm, and the young man got up. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Thomas demanded. “Why did you let me lose more?”

“That’s how you really learn,” murmured Jim.

Chapter 3

Fat moon

They walked quietly, the two of them, past the end of the street and into the darkness. Since they were mountain men, they moved softly. Since one of them was Man Who Doesn’t Stir Air in Front When He Walks, more than softly.

The road to Nevada City was well worn, but they stepped off it into the darkness. They stood still in the shadow of some boulders for about half an hour, the Delaware Indian and his friend of a quarter century, the Scots trader. Slung onto the Indian’s back with rope was a keg, the sort used for water or whiskey. In the keg, toward the bottom, was a paraffin seal. Under the seal, in sacks, lay more than twenty-five pounds of gold dust worth almost seven thousand dollars.

That was as much money as a skilled man could earn in five years. Mac felt fine about sending Jim away with it. That was what real friends were for. And Jim could take care of it. He must be nearly sixty, but not a bit gray or soft. And he still didn’t stir air.

Each carried a long gun, Mac a shotgun. Each also carried a cap-and-ball pistol stuck in his belt, at least two knives, and a tomahawk. They were dangerous men.

After the half hour, they began to move slowly down the gulch, walking parallel to the road. They walked in a way that looked casual, standing upright, making no attempt to hide. But they were silent, their eyes and ears alert. And they padded from hill shadow to hill shadow, stopping in each dark place, looking and listening.

It took them two hours easing through the night this way to get to the outskirts of Nevada City. Jim waited in a shadowed coulee. Mac went into town to get the two horses from the livery stable. Smith had come down and bought them this afternoon. He hadn’t known why. No one else had known anything, and Smith was instructed not to say anything to anyone, not even Thomas. Next to Jim, Smith was as reliable a man as Mac knew, whereas Thomas was sometimes the victim of dramatic teenage emotions.

Mac spoke briefly with the liveryman, hoisted the saddle Smith had left onto one of the animals, and hitched a light load of food and bedding onto the other. Then he rode the opposite way out of town, down the gulch, and waited there in the blackness. No one followed. He tied the horses to a burned tree and went to get Jim. The two of them checked out the area carefully before Jim went to the horses and mounted.

They slipped together down to the creek and filled the gold-bearing keg with water. Mac had joked earlier today that Jim should check the paraffin seal from time to time and look at the color of the water, lest he drink the profits.

The two of them had worked out the plan alone. Jim would now slip off with the gold and head for Fort Benton. There he would make American Fur Mac’s depositor and bring back a load of trade goods. The keg ruse should work. A mountain man could travel alone safely. By pushing hard the first night, Jim could get well clear of the gold diggings before anyone knew he was gone.

Tomorrow morning Mac would pay a visit to Sheriff Hospers and ask for advice on getting the gold back to Yellowstone House. If Hospers was crooked, that would lead his outfit astray.

Jim would keep off the traveled routes for a few days, far enough to get clear of anyone following him, and then take the new Mullan Boad, which used the old Indian trail, on to Benton. Openness would keep suspicion away. Besides, who would expect a dirty Indian to be carrying nearly seven thousand dollars?

They did not shake hands, a white-man custom. A nod and Jim was off.

Mac wasn’t worried about Jim. Jim was sneaky and mean and smart. Also courageous and true. If Mac spread the word after several days that the gold was gone, he could feel okay about his and the boys’ going home.

He walked away from the creek a little way and sat on a head-high rock. He filled his clay pipe and lit it with a match. After about ten minutes he felt a touch on his shoulder.

He turned. Strikes Foot, and behind him his son Red Hand. “Well done, Father,” said Mac in Cheyenne. “Good to see you.”

“We would say it’s good to see you,” said Strikes Foot, grinning. “But we have seen plenty of you. It was you who didn’t see us.” It was a statement.

“Sure didn’t.” And wasn’t supposed to. “Thanks.”