The Yellowstone (26 page)

Chapter 14

Plum moon

Bumping along on some damned litter, out on the Great Plains but unable to see beyond the backside of a horse, his ass hollering pain at him, accompanying a man who meant to kill his son—all that made things come wonderfully clear to Mac Maclean. Mac hated Owen.

Probably Owen was counting on Mac to act indecisive at the crucial moment. Owen was going to be surprised.

Mac enjoyed mulling on how surprised Owen was going to be. He mulled on it all day, mulled on it in the hours before dawn while he was on watch. He was enjoying it so much he almost didn’t pay attention to the coyote calling out in the sagebrush. Yip-yip, yip-yip-yo-o-owl. Yip-yip, yip-yip-yo-o-owl.

Mac remembered a summer twenty-two years before, on the Yellowstone River. Three
compadres
in flight from the Blackfeet came splashing down Sweet Grass Creek into the Yellowstone. In the big river they were obliged to swim, held in the grip of the mighty and mysterious current. They swam down the right bank and (bund a rock chimney where they could pull themselves out. And Jim Sykes raised his marvelous, musical coyote call in celebration—hadn’t they escaped the Blackfeet? Mac had answered in coyote talk. And his friends whooped and hollered and begged him not to ever use his coyote call—they said he sounded like a bowel-blocked buffalo.

So now Jim Sykes was checking his back trail. He and Smith knew they were being tracked. And who the trackers were. Very satisfying.

It was not long before first light. Mac decided to risk it. He sang out loudly like a coyote.

“What the hell?” snapped Owen, fully awake in an instant. The kid was sitting up with his gun in his hand. The kid was way too quick with that gun. He even practiced how fast he could get it out of the holster.

Mac turned toward Owen and repeated the call once more. After all these years, he still probably sounded bad, but surely not like a bowel-blocked buffalo. Mac kind of liked his coyote call.

“What are you doing?” snapped Owen.

“Time to get up,” Mac said.

“What the hell are you doing?” Owen barked again.

“Calling that coyote in for fun,” said Mac. “Making him think I’m gonna bang him. And waking you up.”

“You ass,” said Owen. The kid was still all too ready with the gun.

Mac stirred himself and started making the fire. “Coffee’s coming.”

Jim called once more, a thank-you note.

On the third day Mac was able to ride awhile, and on the fourth all day. He had applied Calling Eagle’s poultice each morning and night, the wound looked less angry, and the saddle hurt less. He’d never been so grateful to be astride. The litter bounced uncomfortably. It kept him in the dust of the horses. Worse, he couldn’t see.

Owen spotted where Thomas had left the main trail and headed toward the Greasy Grass, or the Little Big Horn, as the whites called it. And Smith and Jim on his trail. The Chapman kid interpreted the signs easily, maybe half a dozen horses headed south in the last day. Where the track crossed a little creek, he read it out thoroughly. Six horses, four of them shod, those moving fast. That fit. Jim and Smith were riding shod horses and leading others. Thomas was moving slowly at night on the Indian ponies, without shoes, and the trackers were moving alter him quickly.

Mac wondered what Owen had in mind. Even if they never caught up with Thomas, Mac meant to kill Owen.

Mac was comfortable in his mind about Thomas, or as comfortable as he could be. Jim would not lead Owen up on Thomas. Jim would arrange some sort of deception first.

The question was, where was Thomas headed? To join the Cheyennes on the Greasy Grass, or maybe on the Tongue? That would be good. The Cheyennes would protect Thomas from bounty hunters, and he would have no access to the drug—things should improve.

Or would Thomas circle back to Yellowstone House, for another attempt at patricide? How much laudanum, or even morphine, did he have? What was in his heart?

You raised a lad from child to man, and you didn’t know what was in his heart.

“The child is headed back to strike his pappy,” said Owen, grinning like an ogre.

They were standing over a nameless cut that crossed the trail. It bore a trickle of water now. Most of the summer and fall it would be dry. A rain in the mountains had given it this tiny flow, much of that standing in puddles.

Thomas had done well, but Jim and Smith had spotted it and left their tracks for Owen to behold.

Thomas had ridden past the tiny stream twenty yards, left the trail on some rocky ground, dismounted to lighten his horse’s prints, and led his animals along some grass back to the cut. Then he’d ridden in the water back toward the Yellowstone. Maybe the water had been moving better yesterday. Now it was mostly standing, and Thomas’s tracks were visible.

What Mac couldn’t read from a track was, which way would his tracks go on the main trail by the river? Downstream, toward Powder River country or Fort Union? Or upstream, toward Yellowstone House? And when he got to Yellowstone House, would he come inside for dinner? Or watch the fort through the V of his sights? Sleep in the room that was his since childhood? Or murder his father?

Chapter 15

Plum moon

Thomas Jefferson Maclean lay atop a hogback. He was watching three men make their camp and their dinner half a mile to the north, on the right bank of the Yellowstone. In the old word game the words for them were the Jerk, the Kid, and the Traitor. He was watching them with the Traitor’s fancy Dolland telescope. Which was satisfying.

He fished the German silver flask out of his shooting pouch and took a deep swig.

Thomas wondered who the Kid was. In fact there was a lot here he didn’t understand. He’d circled to watch his back trail and spotted two groups of men and horses following his tracks toward the river. Smith and Sykes he could identify just from the way they sat in their saddles. The three behind he didn’t even have an idea about, at first. Then he identified the Traitor, sitting his saddle awkwardly, like something was wrong, plus the Jerk and the Kid. He assumed the two outfits were together, but then they camped apart. Did they even know about each other? Were the Jerk, the Kid, and the Traitor following Smith and Sykes? And Smith and Sykes following himself, Thomas Jefferson Maclean? Except that he had them spotted, and they didn’t know where he was? The word for this foolishness was “funny.”

It would stop being funny tonight when he took care of a job. They thought they were the pursuers, but they were wrong.

The joker in the deck here was the Jerk, Owen goddamn Mackenzie. Thomas and Smith had had some good times with the Jerk. He liked to ride hard, drink hard, and fight hard. But he didn’t care whom he fought for. In fact, he proclaimed grandly that he usually fought for the white man, because the white man paid cash. So after a couple of weeks with the Cheyenne and Lakota raiders, where he had taken Thomas and Smith, the Jerk went off to get a scouting job with the Army. Chuckling, he said, at the grave faces on both sides. Jerk.

Still, the Jerk believed Thomas was his friend, and that would help when it came time to do the job.

Maybe the Jerk was here because the Traitor hired him. Cash is cash, ain’t it? The Traitor probably figured Smith and Sykes would be sentimental fools and just warn Thomas to get clear of the country. The Traitor wanted to get his hands on Thomas.

Thomas nursed from the flask again. He was keeping just right, just a little afloat. Later, when the time came, he would lift himself right up on the wave and come crashing down on the Traitor. Probably the Jerk would congratulate Thomas. The Jerk didn’t give a damn who lived and who died. He always just chuckled. But you’d have to be careful of the Kid. Probably a spear-carrier for the Jerk, but you never knew.

Thomas had made up his mind to kill the Traitor close up, if possible face-to-face. He’d seen it over and over in his head the last month, to martial music. He’d fronted the bastard and humiliated him. More than a week ago he’d gone ahead in fantasy and struck the ultimate blow—raised his sights and blown the Traitor to kingdom come. He died as easy and ugly as any man. And it had felt fine to Thomas. Grand.

This was the gift of the drug—this ability to perceive the way of the warrior. To imagine great deeds, to envision them clearly, and then make them real. A week ago he’d run out of the drug, but he had its gift in his heart and mind. And he would get more soon and celebrate tonight’s achievement.

He would approach from the river. At this point, the inside edge of a big bend, the current was against the far bank, and the near side was slack and shallow. The bank was thick with willows, which would give him protection. The swoosh of the river would cover any sound.

The Traitor so worshiped the Yellowstone, the great brown god, he called it. He so-called renewed himself in the Yellowstone. Wagh! When the sun went down, his death was going to come from the Yellowstone.

Chapter 16

Plum moon

Mac was thinking of Lisette. She would go after this fish more methodically. She would watch it feed, observe the little bugs it was sipping from the surface, search her tackle box for something that looked like those, and match with her artificial fly. She would also watch the fish’s feeding rhythm, the pattern of its wait, rise, and return to position, and get her fly there at the time of rise. And she would probably catch the fish.

Mac didn’t have the finickiness for any of that. He’d borrowed this rig from Owen, to have something to get out of camp for an hour, the last hour before full dark. He caught six or eight grasshoppers. He was standing knee-deep in the shallows and casting the hoppers one by one upstream of the fish and letting the slight current drift the bug into range. The fish was ignoring the grasshoppers completely. Mac probably wouldn’t catch the fish. He would quit when he ran out of hoppers. He didn’t care how dark it got—he would pretend to fish. Anything was better than having to sit beside Owen and the Chapman kid.

Fifty yards away the two bounty hunters were sitting by a big fire, a fine beacon to go home by. They hardly ever spoke and seemed to communicate with glances. They seemed always watchful, always alert. Predators. They were superb trackers, skilled fighters, easy, natural killers. For them life was killing, and everything else was waiting to kill.

Mac lifted the line off the water, brought the bamboo rod back, and nailed it out the way Sir George Gore had taught him. The hopper floated in a pool of light, a soft reflection of the mother-of-pearl sky to the west. On the edge of the shadow beyond, the trout was feeding. Now it was invisible, and Mac was casting to a feeder he could sense but not see. He was also thinking of Lisette because she had changed recently. She had always been willing at houghmagandie. But when he came back from Virginia City, and again when he got back from Fort Union, she came to him as soon as he got into the courtyard at Yellowstone House and took him to their quarters and made love to him, fast and hard and with a little air of desperation. He found it intriguing, satisfying, and endearing.

He brought back the line, changed hoppers, and flicked the new bug into the current above the fish. He was thinking of his wives because he couldn’t think of his son. Where was Thomas? Mac would have bet Thomas had checked his back trail, seen the numbers against him, and cleared out—maybe made tracks for Fort Alexander, maybe even gone home. He couldn’t decide: Had Thomas meant to kill him? Why? Or was Thomas drunk, or drugged? Who had turned Thomas against his father? And how?

Mac tried to find it in his heart to harden himself against Thomas, to dispose of Thomas as he would a rabid wolf. Mac was a hard man. He could almost do it. The cold fact of that hot lead roaring past his nose, when he was naked and worshiping, that was nearly enough.

But not quite enough. He was in possession of a thousand pieces of evidence that commanded love instead of vengeance. He could feel in his arms where he had held Thomas the infant. Where he had circled the boy on the horse’s back, teaching him to move with the animal. Where he steadied the big Hawken for the boy’s first shot. Where he did what a father does. And these memories and a thousand others meant it couldn’t be.

So Mac would have to understand better first. He had to know. He had rehearsed a hundred speeches from Thomas, a hundred explanations, but none of them seemed to promise sense. Mac knew that a man divided against himself is a man helpless in action, but he could do nothing about it. He fished instead.

He raised the line into the backcast and shot it forward again. This time he made a lousy cast and got the hopper, line, and thin gut leader in a pile halfway to where they belonged. Before he lifted the line off the water again, he heard a little splash upstream. He looked that way, into gray-lit clouds of the sunset, but didn’t see anything. Probably a beaver. Beavers made that sort of splash when they slid down their mud-slick runs into the water. The run must be near that dark stump by the bank.

He cast again. The bait landed in just the right spot this time, where the current would drift it right where the fish was slurping up the bugs. He watched it sharply. The water dimpled right next to the hopper. Mac almost struck, but he waited. Nothing.

“The word for you is
traitor
.”

The whisper came from a little way upstream, the direction of the stump.

The stump had moved closer.

Thomas was clever. He had gotten down into the water to make the stump short and had turned sideways to disguise the dark human silhouette.

Now the stump stood up, turning to show shoulders and head.

“The word for what happens now is
die
.”

Cold rose into Mac from the river, the cold of melted snow, of bottom mud, of humus, of death.

“Thomas,” Mac whispered fiercely, “get out of here.”

“You aren’t giving the orders anymore, old man.”

“Get out!” Mac could project authority, even into a whisper.

“Got anything to say before you die?”

He slurred it a little—
anyshing
. Thomas was drunk. Mac eased his hand into his belt for his pistol. He told himself it was because even his whispering might bring the predators. He told himself he had no intention of shooting his son.

“Thomas,” Mac practically hollered in a whisper, “there’s an Army bounty on you. Five hundred. They mean to collect it.”

“Guess you don’t have anything to say,” Thomas said full voice, the words echoing over the soft dark of the river, words of doom. The click of his hammer echoed just as loud.

The Chapman kid fired from the bank. Thomas’s head snapped back. His body toppled backward into the river. The moment Mac saw the kid’s gun blaze, he fired at the shadowed form in the willows. He heard a satisfying gargled outcry.

Owen’s rifle sounded almost simultaneously with Mac’s pistol. Mac Maclean felt the fire in his chest. He realized he was in the river, on his back. He felt the little waves lap over his mouth and nose. He felt the delicious cool all over his body, soothing the fire inside.

As though from a great distance, he saw once more what had happened. Thomas. His words, the old family game. The predators creeping close, unheard, making out which form was which in the last light.

Mac knew he was sinking. He was drowning. He saw his wives and smiled at them. It crossed his mind to warn them against Owen, but that seemed unimportant. He smiled good-bye at them. He blessed his daughter Felice and her coming marriage to Zach Lawrence. He blessed his daughter Christine, palsied, perhaps the person he loved most unreservedly. He blessed Smith and spoke without words to his elder son of his great future. He blessed Thomas, tortured Thomas, his younger son, and urged him to live if life would let him.

Mac could feel the pleasant motion of the river rocking him gently, softly lifting his body and letting it dip, dancing his arms and legs fluidly to the rhythm of some stately melody—he could feel the music and so did not need to hear it. And in the grace ofthat last, lovely dance, Mac Maclean gave himself up to the dark, delicious grasp of the Yellowstone River.