BARTLE HAD NEVER HAD SUCH A TIME WITH JIM RAGG. JIM did not appear to be very sick, not by the standards of the day—a phrase Bartle enjoyed using—but nothing Bartle could devise or invent had any effect on Jim’s spirits, which descended rapidly once they arrived in the vicinity of Deadwood, and had so far refused to rise again.
“Your spirits are at worm level,” Bartle remarked one day. “Camping with you is like camping with a worm. You wiggle once in a while, but you don’t put out no conversation.”
Jim was thoroughly tired of Bartle’s efforts to cheer him up. He decided to prove Bartle’s point by saying nothing. Maybe if he said nothing Bartle would shut up, though it wasn’t likely.
At Jim’s insistence they had camped about twenty miles from Deadwood, east toward the plains. Being in a settled community was more than Jim felt he could tolerate. Deadwood had its raw side, but it was still a settled community and Jim preferred to avoid it.
Many years before, not far from their present camp, Jim had killed the largest grizzly bear anyone had ever seen. Bartle had been in the camp at the time and not present at the kill, but when he walked out and saw the carcass he agreed that it was the largest bear he had ever seen.
Then three Sioux warriors came riding up—later they admitted that they had come with the intention of killing Jim and Bartle, but the sight of the great bear carcass distracted them from their purpose. They lost all thought of killing.
News quickly spread; before the sun set that day two hundred Indians or more had come to see the bear. As a gesture of courtesy, being conscious that they were guests in the Black Hills and not necessarily welcome guests, the mountain men gave the bear to the Sioux. The gift was accepted with dignity and the mountain men were invited to the feast that followed. The feast was a nervous occasion, though. Several important warriors—Black Moon, Pretty Bear, and Slow—were there; they were young men and had not yet acquired the fame that would attend them in later years, but it was not the young warriors who caused the feast to be such a nervous occasion.
The problem was a medicine man, an old Sioux whose eyesight was weak. As the feast was just commencing, the medicine man had a vision and announced that it had been a terrible mistake to kill the bear. He claimed that the beast had been the Grandmother Bear.
Indeed, the grizzly had been a she-bear. The medicine man felt the great skull of the she-bear and chanted and carried on for a long while. The Indians became fearful and somewhat agitated, the mountain men fearful and agitated, too. It was undoubtedly a giant she-bear, but did that mean it was the Grandmother Bear? The medicine man predicted that the end of the world might come as a result of the death.
Then, in the midst of the feast, a shower of falling stars was observed, which continued for half an hour. This alarmed the Indians still more; it seemed as if the medicine man’s prophecy might come true almost immediately. A kind of panic resulted, during which Jim and Bartle slipped away. They headed south, traveled only by night, and didn’t stop until they were two hundred miles below the Platte. They counted themselves lucky not to have been killed on the spot, and felt they would have been, had they not been invited guests. But the word would spread, and they knew they could expect a violent welcome in the lodges of the Sioux for some time to come.
They didn’t return to the Dakotas for more than ten years, by which time the old medicine man’s prophecy had proved to be invalid; the world had not ended, after all, and the Sioux who were still alive and remembered the great bear had decided it had merely been a very large she-bear, and not the Grandmother Bear. In Sioux opinion the Grandmother Bear would never have delivered herself up to the white man’s bullet anyway.
“It wasn’t a mile from here that I killed the big bear,” Jim remarked. “I think that was probably the biggest bear that was ever grown.”
“You would think it, since you shot it,” Bartle said. “It was a large bear but not the biggest that was ever grown—in Canada bears get twice that size.”
“How would you know?” Jim asked. “You’ve never been to Canada.”
“I’ve never been to the moon, either,” Bartle said. “That don’t mean I doubt it exists. Everybody knows bears grow bigger in Canada.”
“Name one person that knows it,” Jim demanded.
“Lonesome Charley knows it,” Bartle replied immediately—on the rare occasions when Jim could be taunted into asking a question, he liked to have an answer close at hand.
“Lonesome Charley is no judge of bears,” Jim said. “He’s only got one eye. Of course a bear will look bigger if you’ve only got one eye to look out of.”
Bartle was making a stew as they talked. They stew consisted of a squirrel and a few wild onions. The squirrel had been so inept as to actually fall out of a tree. It had landed right at his feet and he had brained it with his gun stock. Jim’s rejoinder took him so completely by surprise that for a moment he was speechless. Why would anyone suppose that the loss of one eye doubled the size of what one looked at? And yet, that seemed to be what his friend had suggested.
“What you just said was so crazy I don’t want to discuss bears anymore,” Bartle said.
But Jim’s memory had seized on the bear and the Sioux feast and the old medicine man’s prophecy.
“Suppose it was the biggest bear ever grown,” Jim said. “If it was, then that old blind Sioux was right. The world started ending about then. The biggest bear was dead—the west won’t ever grow one that big again. That’s a kind of ending.”
“You’re paddling with the wrong end of the paddle,” Bartle said. “The world ain’t ending and the old man was wrong. If you enjoyed town life we’d be eating better, too.”
Bartle saw that Jim’s gaze had frozen suddenly. He looked where Jim was looking and saw three riders watching them from a ridge to the north. It startled him so that he almost overturned the squirrel stew. Riders on a ridge had often made him jump—they could be hostile, and there could be a hundred more just beyond the ridge.
“What do you think?” Jim asked.
“That there ain’t enough stew to go around,” Bartle said. “It’s just one squirrel.”
“If they’re killers it won’t matter,” Jim said. “Are they white or Indian? I can’t tell.”
Bartle couldn’t tell either. All he could see were three dots on a ridge—now that he looked with more attention it seemed to him that he saw less. He would not even have sworn the figures on the ridge were mounted men. They might be men without horses, or horses without men, for that matter. They might be elk. It was unlikely they were buffalo, a thought he immediately voiced.
“I don’t think they’re buffalo,” he said.
“Of course not—what a fool!” Jim said. “There’s no buffalo now.”
“I wish No Ears was here,” Bartle said. “He could smell them and help us judge the danger. It’s awful to be so weak-eyed you can’t see your own murderers coming.”
Jim kept his eyes on the ridge—he was pretty sure the dots were mounted men, approaching slowly.
“I am embarrassed,” Bartle admitted. “Something must have happened to my eyes during the winter—and to yours, too.”
The dots dipped from sight and didn’t reappear for fifteen minutes, during which the mountain men ate the stew. Bartle ate more rapidly than usual.
“Are you gobbling that stew because you don’t want to share it?” Jim asked. “Those was probably just elk we saw.”
“I think those were Blackfoot we saw,” Bartle conjectured. He knew it was a wild guess, but then why not guess wild?
“You ate that stew so fast it drowned your brain,” Jim said. “The Blackfoot country is hundreds of miles away. What would Blackfoot be doing here?”
“Looking for old-timers to scalp,” Bartle said. “There’s fewer and fewer old-timers. They have to travel a good ways from home to find one worth scalping.”
The dots emerged from a valley, no longer dots. They were very obviously three men on horseback, and they were not Blackfoot, either.
“It’s Lumpy Neck, Billy Cody, and a short fellow,” Jim said. “I expect Billy paid Lumpy Neck to track us.”
Lumpy Neck was an old drifter they had known since their days on the Santa Fe trail. He had once been an indefatigable rider with a great reputation—he was said to have been the most daring rider ever to ride for the Pony Express. When that played out he had switched to stage driving and had driven stages over the high passes to California. Once the railroad put him out of business, he merely drifted, doing little insofar as anyone knew. Miles, Crook, Custer, and several other generals sought his services as a scout, but he refused to have any dealings with the military. He considered the whole west his home and could be encountered anywhere in it. He had an enormous goiter, thus his name, which some said had been given him by Crazy Horse. Jim and Bartle knew that to be a lie, for they had met the man in Albuquerque long ago, when Crazy Horse was no more than a boy. He had been called Lumpy Neck then—of course it was the kind of name an Indian would bestow. Of late he had mainly been seen in the company of an even older desert drifter named Tucson Jack, a desert rat whose beard was so long he could tuck it under his belt.
“I don’t see Tucson Jack,” Bartle observed, as the riders came closer. “I guess he died.”
“He might have declined the company,” Jim said.
“I’ll be kind of glad to see Billy myself,” Bartle remarked. “I’m interested to see if he’s got any prettier.”
Jim too felt a little perked up at the thought that Billy Cody was coming—for all his airs no one could deny that he was merry company, something in short supply in the environs of Dead-wood these days. It was an odd thing the way attitudes toward Billy Cody varied. It was easy to criticize him and impossible not to be glad to see him.
“Who’s that short fellow?” he asked. “What’s that? He’s riding a white mule.”
“What would possess anyone to ride a white mule?” Bartle wondered, astonished.
“Hello, you beaver boys, we found you at last,” Billy Cody said, jolly as could be. He jumped off his horse and shook hands warmly with both of them. He was still the dandy—his buckskins were clean and he wore a silk scarf at his throat.
The sudden rush of company tied Jim’s tongue, but Bartle experienced no such problem.
“Howdy, Bill. There’s nothing to eat, but tell your crew to dismount anyway,” he said. “I admire the white mule. How are you, Lumpy? Did Tucson Jack pass away?”
“No, fell in love,” Lumpy Neck said. “We may see him before the night’s over. I doubt this passion will last more than a few hours.”
“Well, none of mine have, and some of them ain’t lasted that long,” Bartle said.
“I know you,” he added, suddenly recognizing the short man on the white mule. “You’re Pillsbury, who used to have the medicine show. We rescued you once when you were lost on the North Canadian, or am I mistaken?”
“No, that was myself,” Doc Ramses admitted. “I found it hard to keep my bearings that day. It was around the Canadian somewhere that I left my name behind. I’m plain Doc Ramses now.”
“Oh,” Bartle said. Courtesy forbade him to inquire further into the name change.
Lumpy Neck was leading a pack mule loaded with food—sausage, cold hen, pickles, and cheese that had traveled all the way from St. Paul.
The mountain men felt a little embarrassed at having nothing to contribute other than a few shreds of elk jerky, which would have looked poor indeed in the company of such provender as the visitors brought.
Billy was disturbed by the condition of Ragg and Bone, two men who had encouraged him and helped him in his youth. Once, a four-hundred-mile stroll over the Rockies had been as nothing to them. Now they looked old, gaunt, and weary. Their tack was ragged, and they seemed almost starved.
“Boys, are you still beavering, or what?” he asked.
“Mostly just what,” Bartle admitted. “There ain’t no beaver, though Jim’s reluctant to admit it.”
Jim felt embarrassed—their quest for beaver must seem ridiculous to someone like Billy. More and more it seemed ridiculous to everyone, even to Bartle. But gold lay undiscovered in the ground for hundreds of years and no one criticized miners because they kept looking. Silver miners prospected for years without making a strike. Beaver were a lot easier to spot than silver or gold; it seemed wrong that a man could become a laughingstock for seeking beaver while miners were still considered serious men.
“Say, Bartle, are you kin to young Billy Bone, down in New Mexico—Billy the Kid?” Billy asked, feeling that the subject of beaver was not a comfortable one to have broached.
The new choice of subject proved a little prickly also.
“No kin,” Bartle said bluntly. It had begun to irk him that everyone he met on the road asked him if he was kin to the New Mexico whiz.
“Well, I just wondered,” Billy said, gacking up quickly.
“You men look gaunted out,” Lumpy Neck observed. He had faded blue eyes and was anything but gaunt himself.
“We ain’t of a stout build like you, Lumpy,” Bartle replied, a little offended.
“Boys, I can’t dawdle,” Billy said. “You were kind to me earlier in life and now I’d like to return the favor. Come join my show and I’ll make you prosperous.”
“I’d go farther,” Doc Ramses said. “I’d say we’ll make you rich.”
“Oh, don’t excite them,” Billy said. In fact, such talk excited him—he couldn’t help it. The thought of how rich he would soon be was just too pleasant.
“Well, we’ve got some expositions coming up this year,” Doc Ramses said. “Chicago is having one, and there’s Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.”
Jim and Bartle exchanged glances.
“What are expositions?” Bartle asked finally.
“They’re just fairs, really,” Billy said modestly.
“I’d say they’re considerably more than that,” Doc Ramses said. “They’re only held in the top cities, and countries around the world send their top heroes to them. There’s a fortune to be made from expositions.”
“Yeah, but how do you make it once you get to one?” Bartle wondered.
“We dress up and put on our show,” Billy said. “I know the show might be thought a little silly, especially by old-timers and folks who came to the west early. But the crowds love to see our show—the riding and shooting and Indians and the rest.”
“It might be too silly for me,” Jim said, though in a friendly voice. He saw no reason to be critical of Billy, who, after all, had traveled a long way to find them—and had brought them a feast, to boot.
Billy Cody wasn’t offended. It was the kind of statement he met with every day from old-timers such as Jim Ragg and Bartle Bone.
“Boys, you’ve got to look at it from the point of view of the younger generations,” he insisted. “The whole eastern part of the country is civilized now, and the plains are filling up with towns. California is mostly settled, thanks to the gold rush. Colorado will be civilized soon—look at Denver! It won’t be long before the only chance people have to see riding and shooting will be in a show.”
There was a long silence. Lumpy Neck carefully sliced off a piece of St. Paul cheese. Doc Ramses was trimming his nails.
“I blame it on the Indians,” Bartle said. “They gave up too soon. You’re partly to blame, Billy. You’re the one made a great name killing buffalo—next thing we knew they were all killed and the Indians were too starved to fight. If we had just kept the buffalo I believe the whole business would have lasted my lifetime,” he added.
It was a theory he had been refining for years. What a monstrous mistake it had been to popularize buffalo hunting. Millions of them had roamed the plains—it still seemed hardly credible to men who had seen the great herds in their glory that so many animals could be killed in only three years. But it had occurred: it weakened the Indians, armies had marched, brave men had died, and now they were down to expositions.
“Yes, I regret that myself now,” Billy said. “I’ve been buying them, you know—I buy every buffalo I see. I’m gonna try and bring them back. I have more than a hundred already, grazing on my ranch. I just sold ten to Quanah Parker—he’s going to try and get them started again on the south plains.”
“What was the most you ever killed in a day, Bill?” Lumpy Neck asked. His curiosity was mildly perked.
“I confess it was four hundred,” Billy said lamely. “Of course I didn’t often kill that many.”
“What’s our part in the exposition?” Jim Ragg asked. What Billy had just said about the buffalo interested him—he had never imagined that he would hear of anyone buying buffalo. But he had just heard it, and it gave him a sudden, mighty inspiration. If people could buy buffalo, why couldn’t they also buy beaver?
Suddenly, rising clear as the moon, was the solution that had eluded him for years. Buy beaver! Spread them around in the creeks and ponds—let them breed! If Billy and Quanah could restore the buffalo, why couldn’t he and Bartle do the same for the beaver?
Jim was glad it had grown dark. He felt he would have had a hard time concealing the excitement he felt. Of course, it would not do to reveal his plan to an astute businessman like Billy Cody—Billy would march off and beat him to it. After all, he had beaten everybody in the west to the notion of the Wild West show. He would surely be quick to see the profit in beaver farming, if that was what it ought to be called.
“What part would we take in the exposition?” Jim repeated, startling Bartle considerably. It had not occurred to him that Jim Ragg would even consider being in a Wild West show, much less an exposition.
“Well, you’re mountain men, almost the last,” Billy said. “What we plan for the Queen is to do the whole west, from start to finish.”
“We may take it all the way back to Coronado,” Doc Ramses said. The entrance of a few conquistadores seemed to him the perfect way to start the pageant. He had history on his side too; but it sometimes took more than history to sway William F. Cody.
“Now, I don’t know about Coronado,” Billy snapped, a little annoyed that Doc was so quick with his ideas. “He was Spanish and I don’t know that we ought to bother with the Spanish part—it ain’t what people want to see.”
Doc Ramses let it pass—clearly, now was not the time to advance his argument for starting with Coronado. He was not giving up, though. It might be possible to insert the idea into Billy’s head in such a way as to make him think it had been his to begin with. If he decided it had been his to begin with, then the conquistadores might still lead the parade.
“I see you two as Lewis and Clark,” Billy said to the mountain men. “After all, that’s when the west started—with their expedition. And you men are perfect to play them. You’ll be my stars, boys!”
Jim’s mind was still on the wonderful prospect of buying beaver—perhaps some could be purchased in Canada. Working for a bit in Billy’s exposition would no doubt be the easiest way to make enough money to get things going.
“I’ll do it,” Jim said. The Lewis and Clark part hardly mattered; getting money to buy beaver with was what mattered.
“How about you, Bartle?” Billy asked. “Here’s your chance to outshine your young cousin in New Mexico.”
“I told you he wasn’t no kin,” Bartle said, more than a little put out with his old partner, Jim Ragg. For years, ever since the Custer battle, he had been trying to get Jim to consider a new line of work; now Billy Cody had ridden up and seduced him with a hunk of cheese and the promise of a lead role in what was, after all, just a glorified medicine show.
Calamity Jane would have fainted had she been there to witness such a disgusting turn of events.
“Lewis and Clark are no heroes of mine,” Bartle said stiffly. “Anyone can walk to Oregon.”
“Don’t you be stubborn,” Jim said. “Lewis and Clark will do. Who do you want to play—Custer?”
Bartle was astonished. Now Jim was reprimanding him for his reluctance to be in a medicine show.
“Boys, don’t quarrel, just say you’ll do it,” Billy said. “It’s easy work and you’ll get to see the sights. You’ll come back so rich you can buy a white mule like Doc’s, to carry your equipment around.”
Bartle looked at Jim, who fixed him with the murderous glare he commanded when out of sorts.
“Oh, well, was we quarreling?” he asked mildly. “I don’t care if we go. It might do the Queen a passel of good to meet a fresh fellow like me.”