The Yellowstone (19 page)

Chapter 4

Fat moon

Mac was enjoying himself hugely. Smith and Thomas were hiding their grins. The waitress watched while Strikes Foot ignored the spoon and dumped sugar into his coffee directly from the bowl. He managed this one-handed, because the other hand was resolutely atop the cane Mac had bought him yesterday. The cane was a piece of straightened horn from a bighorn sheep, topped with brass. When he first saw the cane, Strikes Foot was delighted. Then he got miffed because he thought Mac was suggesting his limp showed. Then Mac demonstrated what a tremendous cudgel the cane made, and he said Strikes Foot was only supposed to fake being a cripple until he started clubbing with the cane and kicking with his shod hoof. Strikes Foot was thrilled.

The aging warrior took a big swig of coffee—he loved brew because he had a sweet tooth. Red Hand waited until his father was finished with the sugar and did the same. The lad was only fifteen, and shy. Strikes Foot was scooching around on his bentwood chair—Mac wondered if the chairs would prove too much and the Cheyennes would sit on the floor at the restaurant table. They eyed each other over the rims of their cups, their first experience of china. At more than sixty, Strikes Foot looked like a kid in a toy store.

The waitress was waiting for their orders, but the Cheyennes didn’t realize it. Mac studied the menu and ordered for everyone: steak, fried eggs, potatoes, and toast with butter and jelly, followed by apple pie. Neither Indian had tasted any of those items. Mac guessed they would scorn the steak and bread, and love the butter and jelly and pie. Potatoes and eggs he had no idea about.

This was fun, but expensive fun at ten dollars a head. Mac was surprised at himself, squandering fifty dollars away like this. Very un-Scots. But Strikes Foot and Red Hand had done him yeoman service on the way over. They’d been his scouts, coming in to the wagons only at night. The reason so many wagon trains had trouble was that they didn’t keep scouts a mile or two ahead, checking.

As Mac was stirring his own coffee, he heard boots behind him. Krier. Mac stood up, shook hands, introduced his sons, and smoothly introduced the Cheyennes as well. Strikes Foot and Red Hand stood and waited politely for Krier to stick out his hand. He didn’t. Like some other patrons, he just looked at the Indians funny.

Krier introduced the man with him, Owen Mackenzie, the son of King Kenneth Mackenzie of Fort Union. The old man had been gone from the mountains twenty years, but the half-breed son had stayed. Mac wondered fleetingly why Mackenzie hadn’t taken Owen to the settlements. Shame? Or had the young man made the choice?

Owen Mackenzie was a big, strong-looking man, Mac’s age or a little younger, handsome enough to run for political office. Except, of course, for his dark skin. “You’re the one married Annemarie Charbonneau,” said Mackenzie. There was a faint air of menace about him, Mac thought, which didn’t hurt any man with women. Neither did his gleaming black hair and beard, or his aura of vitality. But Mac didn’t want to talk about one of his wives. He just nodded.

“Did you hear the news?” asked Krier. “About the war?”

“No.”

“Wagons come in from Salt Lake today.” Which meant they came with a lot of news after a long, shut-off winter. “Something for everybody on the telegraph,” Krier said with a land of sneer. “The War Between the States is over. Lee surrendered in Virginia. Appomattox. The damn Yankees will be rejoicing tonight.” Krier paused, eyeing Mac. “And a Southern gentlemen assassinated that damn Lincoln.”

Mac grimaced.

“So I suppose both sides will be celebrating tonight,” Krier went on. “Which one are you with?”

“Neither,” Mac said evenly.

“I hear you do take sides, after all, though,” said Krier in his soft, Southern-gentry accent.

Mac just looked at him.

“Decided to partner the Chinawoman to supply the diggin’s.”

Mac shook his head. “I’m on my own. She only bought from me.”

“You got more,” said Krier, “I’ll buy from you. I’ll go get it right now.”

Mac shook his head. “I’m stripped bare.”

“Or maybe you don’t side with white people,” said Krier. Mac got a whiff of booze on Krier’s breath.

Mac glanced quickly at Mackenzie. The breed looked amused. So racial slurs didn’t bother him. “I don’t deal with drunks, for sure,” Mac said quietly.

Then Mac turned his back on Krier and sat down. That ought to be enough to drive the man away. Mac’s sons and the Cheyennes didn’t sit. Strikes Foot held the cane by the middle. Maybe he thought there was going to be some action. But there wasn’t. Mac could feel that in a white man. Krier was nasty but no more.

Krier and Mackenzie moved off and found their own table. From beyond them came the click of the ivory balls on the billiard tables, and the noise, like that of any mining-town bar. But the evening was young, and the din was minor.

The waitress brought five plates of steak and eggs balanced on two arms, a neat trick. Strikes Foot picked up his steak with his free hand—round steak, thin and curled from frying. Strikes Foot took a big bite and frowned. He looked at Mac in shock. No one moved for a moment. Strikes Foot took the meat out of his mouth with the one hand and set it on his plate. “Poor bull,” he said in Cheyenne.

“These white men truly don’t know fat cow from poor bull, Father,” said Mac. Mac picked up knife and fork and indicated that Strikes Foot should use them. He’d seen that at Yellowstone House.

Strikes Foot didn’t want to set his cane down. He scooped up a fried egg with the fingers of one hand, and it slithered onto his lap. Strikes Foot looked around with perfect composure, to see if anyone had noticed. One other diner had—she was scowling and telling her husband.

With a touch soft enough to gentle a meadowlark, Strikes Foot put the egg back on his plate. A string of orange yolk trailed behind. He nodded briefly at Mac and started cutting his eggs up one-handed with the fork. He kept hold of that cane.

A startlingly tall, lanky young man came to the table. Mac recognized Zachariah Lawrence, the sweep man from Krier’s boat, Felice’s “good-looking” fellow. “Don’t get up, Mr. Maclean,” said Lawrence softly. “Just wanted to say hello. I’ll be seeing you in a month, I guess.”

“Krier’s boats?” asked Mac.

“Yes, we’re building more.” Mac had seen four mackinaws in various stages of construction below the big bend of the Yellowstone.

“We’ll be glad to see you, Lawrence.” Maybe Mae Jhong Hackett’s money will have our shelves full of goods for your passengers, Mac thought. Jim Sykes should get the supply wagons there in about a month.

“Thank you, sir.” Lawrence went to Krier’s table, stood talking for a moment, and headed into the bar area alone. He wasn’t just tall, Mac noticed, he was stalwart. Mac wondred if Lawrence had noticed Felice as well. Felice, already twenty, was ready to be married, but Mac fended the young men off. He didn’t want her to live as a squaw—he wanted her to use the education he’d given her. Maybe he’d send her to St. Louis by the summer steamboat with her brothers and let her learn how to act in society. Yet he didn’t want her to end up a thousand miles away from home either, married to someone who would despise her mothers and brothers. And in a different way, her father.

Finished with his eggs and potatoes, Mac turned to his steak. Agghh! Overcooked, tough, gristly. Strikes Foot looked at him sympathetically. The Cheyenne was having Red Hand spread butter and jelly on thick slice after thick slice of bread, gobbling them up, and tapping his shod hoof with pleasure. His first bite of steak sat mangled on the rim of his plate.

Thomas said, smiling at his father, “That beefs something, ain’t it?”

That’s how it started, innocently enough.

“What does the Injun know about beef?” It came loud and slurred from the bar, from a stocky, flabby man perched high on a stool. In drunken jest.

The man beside him took it up. “Yuh-yuh-yeah, Injun, what do you know about b-b-beef?”

Mac looked a warning around the table. Smith and Thomas had seen enough of this sort of thing in St. Louis.

“Injun’s been feeding on dawg,” the stocky man said. “What can he tell?” The other was skinny and scraggle-bearded.

Thomas was looking angrily at his father. He didn’t take baiting as well as Smith. “Let it go,” Mac murmured in Cheyenne, mostly to tip off Strikes Foot and Red Hand.

There was no reason to react. These men were just frontier trash. Mac had seen plenty of them.

The scraggle-bearded man raised a forefinger commandingly. He got off his stool slowly. He levelled the finger at Thomas theatrically. Even the men at the billiard tables had stopped to watch.

“What do you know about beef, Injun?” Scraggle said, his stutter gone.

“I was only going to say—” Thomas started.

“You—you was only going to
say. You
was,” said the scraggle trash. The stocky trash had a bowie knife stuck into his boot, Mac noticed. Scraggle would have similar. “You was only going to s-say—
what
was you goin’ to s-say? That’s what
I
want to know.”

Mac shook his head at Thomas. Strikes Foot was looking at Mac with the damnedest expression of curiosity, and rubbing the brass head of his cane. Mac had the feeling everyone at his table had scooted his chair back from the table a little.

He was going to say he’s the only thing sucks hind tit to a Chinee,” bellowed Stocky Trash, and let out a rip-roaring laugh. He laughed alone. But everyone else was leaning forward, or inching forward. They smelled a little fun.

Mac saw that long Zach Lawrence had moved to the bar, near the two trashes. Evidently Lawrence would help out. Krier and Mackenzie were tilted back on their chairs. No telling what side they’d be on.

“What was it you said?”

Thomas just glowered, silent.

“Don’t you raise your v-voice against me. Or the South. Or the C-Confederacy. Cause
I
won’t
s-stand
it.” Scraggle was leaning over the table now, spraying spittle in Thomas’s face.

Mac slowly slipped his pistol out of his belt and laid it next to his plate. He deliberately started taking off the caps, so it couldn’t be fired. Smith and Thomas did likewise. Strikes Foot and Red Hand had no guns. “
I
won’t
stand
it,” Scraggle repeated.

Mac looked around to judge what was coming. He saw rabble. And he felt it, something sinister, something ugly. He set the feeling aside and thought to take concern for knives, and billiard cues, which made nasty weapons.

Mac got to his feet. “I appeal to men of decency to help me put a stop to this trouble,” Mac said loudly and slowly.

“So says the Injun lover,” called someone sarcastically.

“He’s a Injun lover okay,” said someone else. “He bangs Injun. Them boys is his sons.”

Everyone at Mac’s table was on his feet now. Stocky Trash was up. Everyone was ready.

Mac stepped forward to Stocky Trash, hand out. “Let’s shake and forget what’s been said.”

“Maybe I want to say some things you won’t ever forget,” said Stocky Trash, his hand behind his back.

Mac stepped forward again, past Scraggle, close to Stocky Trash, hand out. “Peace,” he said, and with that word he started it.

He blindsided Scraggle hard, backhand, and kicked a chair into Stocky. The knife from behind Stocky’s back got tangled in the chair. Instantly Mac was on Stocky and riding him to the ground with the chair. Stockys head hit the stool support, and he looked out of the fight. Mac tossed the scum’s knives behind the bar.

Mac bellowed in Cheyenne over the hubbub, “Don’t kill anybody!” And then he got lost in the jangly satisfaction of fighting.

He seemed to see the fight only in ragged bits and pieces. He saw Strikes Foot pretending to limp on his hoof. Then a slack-jawed man rushed Mac hard. He stepped aside, grabbed the man’s arm, and flung him headfirst into a post.

Someone kicked Mac in the back, and for a couple of minutes he was on the floor, people falling over him, unable to get up. While he was down, Mac heard a shotgun blast. Probably the bartender, a warning shot into the floor. But no one stopped fighting. Mac saw Strikes Foot whomp someone in the kidneys with the cane. The victim screamed.

Smith grabbed a wild-eyed man from behind and clubbed the knife out of his hand. Thomas kicked the man in the balls. Smith scooped up the knife and hurled it hard into the wall, handle aquiver.

“Don’t use your weapons,” Mac hollered in Cheyenne.

As Scraggle went for Thomas, Zach Lawrence rabbit-punched him with an arm long as a rake, and Scraggle went down.

Red Hand was pussyfooting, Mac saw. “Fight, Brother!” he bellowed.

A fat, mustachioed fellow squared off with Strikes Foot across a table, billiard cue against cane. Strikes Foot met the cue in midair and shattered it. Now it was more dangerous. Suddenly Strikes Foot kicked the table underneath in the center with his sharpened hoof. The table bucked into the air, split down the middle, and plates and silverware flew everywhere. A dramatic warning. The mustachioed fellow backed off.

A warrior is a warrior at any age, thought Mac.

It occurred to Mac that no one had guns out, and he was glad.

Someone jumped on Smith’s back. Owen Mackenzie jerked the fellow’s head backward until he let go, hoisted him straight overhead, and heaved him face first into the ceiling. An incredible feet of strength. The man fell flat on his back and lay crumpled on the floor. Mackenzie was evidently enjoying himself. And helping out, praise be.

Something came down on Mac’s head, and he blacked out for a moment. He came to on the floor and saw Krier had Red Hand down and was stomping him—Red Hand’s face was a bloody mess.

Strikes Foot came from nowhere and kicked Krier in the gut with his hoof. Krier coughed air hard and fell down, bleeding under the rib cage. Strikes Foot cocked the hoof with its sharpened shoe again, his eye fixed on Krier’s face. But Smith grabbed the Cheyenne.

Suddenly everyone was backing off, stopping. Two men had dropped cues and were holding what looked to be broken arms. Three or four more were on the floor, holding the backs of their heads. The bartender was tapping a crowbar into his palm, ready to crack more heads. But it wasn’t necessarily over—Mac could feel the bloodlust pulsing in the air. While everyone was stopped, Mac picked up his pistol off the floor and started capping the cartridges. Smith and Thomas did the same.