Dusk Along the Niobrara Read online

  “Oh. I’d forgotten about it for a moment. Yes, there was.”

  “It’s too bad. I understand he was very poor and had very little to leave his wife.”

  “It’s sad, all right. Dunbar and I rode over there. The woman was very . . . distraught. Not just because she was poor, which she is, but because people don’t seem to care enough to do anything about what happened.”

  Emma’s brows drew together again. “But someone will look into it, won’t they?”

  “Oh, yes. It’s been reported to the sheriff’s office. But you know what people say. If it was someone a little higher up in status, people might be quicker to pay attention and do something about it.”

  “Do something about it. Isn’t that the way people talk? It’s so vague.”

  “Well, yes, it is.” I decided she was not criticizing me in particular. “Mrs. Pearson says it’s the same as what happened with the old horse trader. We passed by his place on the way over here.”

  “Old Alex Garrison. I’ve heard that story. My father was around at the time. And you’re right—or she is. Not much was done.”

  “Well, I certainly feel sorry for her.”

  “So do I. To be poor and to be widowed, and to think that nobody cares. I don’t know her, but my heart goes out to her.” Emma drew her lips together, then spoke again. “We think that these things happen to other people—people who aren’t like us. But the truth is, or my thought is, that if someone can do something like this to one group or set of people, they can do it to another.” She moved back half a step and blinked her eyes. The sun shone on her brown hair and light blue dress. “I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s as if I came back to worrying about myself, or my family, after all.”

  “You’ve got good reason. You make sense.”

  “What should be important right now is helping her and trying to do something about this terrible thing. You see? I said it myself. Do something about it.”

  “She said she’s going to go stay with a sister. So she has a plan that doesn’t call for anyone’s help from here. As for doing something about what happened to her husband, I don’t know what you or I could do.”

  “Conscience itself is better than nothing. At least in our conscience, we don’t go along with it.”

  “No, we don’t.”

  Silence hung for a few seconds until she said, “On the lighter side, we might go to Lincoln.”

  My heart sank. “That’s nice. When might you go?”

  “Not until the fall. After the steers are shipped.”

  “Oh, well, that’s a ways off.” I was trying to think of how I could see her more often in the meanwhile.

  “Yes, but it’s the only thing that’s new with us.”

  Being brought back to the moment, I was afraid her father and Dunbar would appear at any time. I said, “I don’t know when I’ll be able to see you again.”

  She smiled. “When you get a chance.”

  “What if I brought you something?”

  “Depends on what it is. Don’t bring me a toad, or a baby rabbit that’s going to die in captivity. What are you thinking of?”

  “Nothing in particular right now. Just the idea.”

  “That’s fine. Oh, here they come.”

  As I was holding the reins of the horses with my right hand, I held out my left, palm upward. She reached forward with her right and pressed four fingers against mine. Our eyes met, and she had a perfect, sweet smile with the sun falling in a soft glow on her brown hair and sky-blue dress.

  “Goodbye,” she said. “I’ll see you when you come again.”

  “Yes, I’ll see you again soon. And goodbye to you.” I did not let myself watch her retreating figure for more than a couple of seconds. I turned to see her father and Dunbar on their way from the barn.

  “Ready to go?” called Dunbar when they were a few yards away.

  “I believe so.” I gave the reins a shake and separated them.

  Dunbar drew to a stop, and before taking the reins, he turned to Del Bancroft and held out his hand. “It’s been good to meet you.”

  “Likewise.” The two of them shook.

  Del reached forward and shook my hand. “Good to see you as well.” Stepping back, he took in both of us and said, “Come again when you can stay longer.”

  “We sure will,” said Dunbar.

  “You bet,” I added.

  I handed Dunbar the reins to the brown horse. We led our horses apart and tightened our cinches. As we mounted up, I noticed that Dunbar pulled himself aboard with only one hand on the saddle horn. I imagined he was used to keeping his right hand free for the lead rope of his packhorse. Still, I thought he had to be very sure of a horse he was riding for the first time.

  I turned the bay horse around, touched my hat brim in farewell to Emma’s father, swept a glance at the house, and rode out of the yard.

  Dunbar rode up alongside me. “Day’s still young,” he said. “We would have had to contrive a long conversation in order to be invited to stay for noon dinner.” When I didn’t have an answer, he said, “It’s just as well. We should have time for whatever work Lou has in mind for us this afternoon.”

  “I believe so.” The thought came to me that I could have let the horses have another drink before we left, but I knew where there was a windmill if we took a straight line back to the ranch. I felt self-conscious, knowing that my nervousness at being seen with Emma had allowed me to forget to water the horses a second time. Then I had a good thought. I appreciated Dunbar not saying anything about her.

  The gentle decline lay behind us, and the sun was nearing its high point of the day. The air did not stir. I was keeping an eye out for the windmill and beginning to feel guilty about the horses. I had to lift my hat every few minutes and wipe the sweat from my brow. Dunbar did the same, but he was not one of those fellows who turned red in the face and complained about the weather. To the contrary, he had a cheerful air about him.

  We rode along without speaking. I fell into my own thoughts and was wondering what kind of a trifle I could buy or find for Emma when Dunbar spoke up. To me, his comment came from out of nowhere.

  “Seems like a long way off in time, but this place gets covered with ice and snow in the winter, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes, it does. The drifts pack hard, and sometimes it’s next to impossible to travel across them. Your feet or your horse’s hooves break through and sink in to the knees or deeper. Legs get chafed. Each step is a chore. Cattle get stranded. People do, too.”

  “Then it all melts off, and you find the dead cattle, or even dead buffalo in some places, that died in the winter.” He made a clucking sound.

  “Seems like a long ways away, that’s for sure.”

  “Time, of course. Not distance. But there are places, far from here, where it never melts.”

  “The frozen North.”

  “That’s right. The northern part of Canada, on across Iceland and Greenland, northern Europe, and Russia. And farther south as well, places like the Alps, or even the Rockies. Snowfields, avalanches, glaciers. Now that’s where people and animals really get stranded. Your field scientists excavate some of those places, and they’ve found mastodons and hairy mammoths that could be thousands of years old. Well-preserved.” He pursed his lips in a droll way. “People, too. Frozen for centuries.” His chest went up and down as he took a leisurely breath. “Then there’s the more recent ones, recent being relative, but something that someone has a record of. For example, a man falls into a crevasse and is trapped in a glacier.”

  “Must be a terrible way to die,” I said.

  “Oh, yes. They say that freezing to death, in itself, is not so bad. Like a dream. But the panic and terror in the meanwhile— well, it has to be terrible, as you say. But once he’s frozen, there he is, preserved. Sometimes the body comes out in the moraine—that’s the rubble left behind—maybe seventy-five or a hundred years later. Another generation finds ’em. People who lose friends and family that way kn
ow they’ll never see the person again, but there he is, all that time.”

  “It’s too bad.”

  “Yes, it is. People who die like that most often have an idea of what they’re doing—mountaineers, expeditionists, packers, traders. But they make a mistake, or they have bad luck. If things had happened differently, they could have lived longer, but at least it wasn’t caused by someone else.”

  I thought I saw what he was getting around to, even if he hadn’t begun with that intention. “I see what you mean.”

  “Not like the late Bill Pearson, or the old horse trader Garrison, years ago.”

  He made such easy reference to Alex Garrison that I thought he must have taken more interest than it seemed earlier. I said, “I sure agree with you, along with what you said the other day about people thinking they can get away with things like that just because their victims are lower class.” As soon as I said those words, I felt as if I had sounded crass. I added, “That is, lower from the perspective of the person taking the liberty.”

  “Well, not everybody is equal in terms of their station in life. That’s evident. And some of the generalities people form are based in real life, like the idea that a poor man has a poor way of doing things. But still, this is supposed to be a country of opportunity where everyone is created equal and deserves an equal chance. That’s why people come west. People like Bill Pearson or Del Bancroft. They believe in an equal chance. So do you and I.”

  “Of course I do.”

  “Sorry. I almost got stirred up there. I drifted away from those easy thoughts about people going off in a pleasant dream when they freeze to death.”

  “That’s all right. It bothers me, too. Not to mention that if they get away with it in one instance, they might think they could do it again.” I felt I should give Emma credit for part of my idea, but I preferred not to mention her at the moment.

  “Oh, yes,” said Dunbar. “If it hasn’t happened already.” I must have given an expression of surprise, for he added, “I meant the possible connection between Bill Pearson and the horse trader. Two things in the past. I’m not the kind who sees a mirage in the clouds and knows what’s on the trail ahead.”

  We made it to the ranch in good time, having spent but a few minutes at the windmill. When I checked with the bunkhouse clock, I saw that the round trip took about five hours. Not only did we arrive on time for the noon meal, but we were ahead of the other three men.

  Dan was setting plates on the table as we took our seats. “What’s the news from up north?”

  “Greenland?” I asked.

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Of course I do. And I can’t remember anything new.” I tossed a glance at Dunbar.

  “We stopped off at Blue Wolf Spring on the way up,” he said.

  “Uh-huh.” Dan did not look up.

  “Bard told me a little about the old horse trader who used to live there.”

  Dan took spoons out of his apron pocket and placed them upright in the crockery jar. “Garrison. His name was Alex Garrison.”

  “That’s what he said. I guess it’s a well-known story.”

  “Oh, it is.”

  “Do you know when it happened, like what year?”

  Dan stood up straight. “A little over fourteen years ago. It was in ’82, early in the year. January, I believe.”

  Dunbar nodded. I had the impression now that perhaps he already knew some of the story and was comparing versions. He asked, “How did he die? I understand he was killed, but I wonder how.”

  Dan took in an audible breath through his nose. “The first story that came out of there was that he had been lynched, which would fit for a horse thief, but there weren’t any trees tall or stout enough for that.”

  “We didn’t see any today.”

  “You can’t hang a man from sagebrush or a chokecherry bush. Oh, I suppose you could hang him from the peak of his cabin. They hang ’em from barns and telegraph poles. But, anyway, no one hung him. They found him dead on the ground with two bullet holes in him.”

  “Do you think he was a horse thief?”

  Dan tightened his mouth. After a few seconds, he said, “My opinions don’t matter much.”

  Dunbar shrugged. “I don’t have any reason to repeat them. I’m just curious.”

  “Do you want to know what I really think?”

  “Sure.”

  “I don’t think he was.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  The boss squinted as he rolled his second cigarette of the morning. The haze hung low in the bunkhouse, as Bob and George had each smoked a cigarette as well. Dan had fried up a mess of bacon to begin with, so the wisps from the skillet contributed to the cloudy atmosphere, as did the kerosene lamp, which sent up smoke and fumes until George trimmed the wick. My coffee cup was empty, and I felt like going outside for a breath of fresh air, but I held my seat and waited for the day’s orders.

  The boss lit his cigarette and shook out the match. “Bob and George, you can go ahead with what’s next on your sequence. You know what to do.”

  Bob was bent over, lighting a cigarette from the flame of the lamp. He drew back and nodded his head as he blew out a stream of smoke sideways.

  George kept to his chair and tipped his head side to side, as if he was waiting to hear what the boss had in mind for the other half.

  Bob stood up with his cigarette in his mouth and shook his arms. “We might as well get goin’.”

  George stayed put.

  The boss rubbed his nose and said, “Bard, I need to send a note to Crowley. But I want you to go by Pearson’s first and see if Bill’s wife needs anything.”

  “She might be gone by now.”

  “Well, if she is, you can find that out. Dunbar can go with you. Not that it takes two to deliver a message, but he can see a little more of the country, and I think it’s safer with two.”

  George opened his eyes wider. “What’s so dangerous about Crowley’s?”

  “Nothing that I know of. But a man was killed over there where they’re goin’ first. It’s no trouble for me to send someone along with the kid. That’s one of the reasons we send men out in pairs to begin with, you know.”

  “But we split up.”

  “Of course you do. But you meet up every so often. That’s the whole idea. Look after one another.”

  “Yeah, yeah. I know.” George stood up. “I’m not complainin’.” He and Bob put on their hats and went out to their work.

  The boss took a drag on his cigarette. “You’d think goin’ to Crowley’s was some kind of a prize.”

  Dan said, “Oh, you know George. He likes to gossip with the other punchers, trade doodads, come home with a new pocketknife.”

  “Well, there’ll be time enough for that. We’ve got the corrals to build, and roundup right after. Though I don’t think I’ll send him and Bob to work on the corrals.” The boss turned to me. “Are you boys ready for today’s chore?”

  I said, “As soon as I have the message.”

  “Oh, yes. Here it is.” The boss reached into his vest, took out a sealed envelope, and handed it to me. “You’ll probably be at Crowley’s at about the time they ring the dinner bell, so don’t be shy. At least his grub’s good.”

  The sun was clearing the hills in the east when Dunbar and I rode out of the ranch yard. I had saddled a red dun for the day, and Dunbar had fitted out a sorrel. The horses blew and snorted in the cool morning, so we let them move at a brisk pace.

  The day was warming up when we rode into the Pearson yard. The place was vacant and still, with no chickens or livestock about. The front door was closed, and the doorknob was tied with a piece of telegraph wire to a nail that had been driven into the doorframe.

  “Looks like she’s gone,” I said.

  Dunbar nodded. He was studying the house, yard, and animal pens. “It’s not easy makin’ it in a place like this, even when things are fair.”

  A slight movement of air tumbled a chicken feather in th
e dust, and my horse sidestepped.

  “Wish ’em the best,” said Dunbar.

  I had a sense of how little a person’s life could come to, with Bill Pearson and his wife packed up and gone, and I recalled Mrs. Pearson’s complaint about people not wanting to put themselves out when something unjust happened to unimportant people. It all seemed rather forlorn as we lingered in the abandoned homestead.

  A magpie came floating over the house and into the yard. Seeing us, it veered and flew away with a zigzag and a dip. We rode out of the yard with the sun at our backs.

  Away from the chalky buttes, I turned and headed us north toward Borden Crowley’s ranch, the BC. Our route took us across a broad grassland once again, not unlike the trip we had made the day before. On the way to Bancroft’s, I had detoured us to the right to go past Blue Wolf Spring. Now the spring lay on our left, to the west, on the other side of a broad swell in the landscape. I did not see a reason to pass by that way again so soon, so I held us on a straight course toward the BC.

  The melancholy feeling I had picked up at the Pearson place began to fade, but it was not replaced by happy prospects of friendship and frolic at the BC. I did not care for Crowley, from the little I had seen of him, and I did not know any of his men well enough to have friends among them. I might even say that they had a tendency not to be congenial with outsiders. But a job was a job, and I had a bit of pride that Lou Foster had entrusted me as his messenger, even if he felt he had to send along a bodyguard.

  The sun was reaching its slow span overhead when we rode into the BC headquarters. The place had not changed since my last visit. The ranch house stood by itself, straight ahead, with fifteen-foot trees growing around it. On the left, a large, whitewashed barn with a hayloft and pulley track rose up above the stable on one side and the corrals on the other. Across the yard, on our right, sat a long building that combined a cook-shack with a bunkhouse large enough for twenty men. The trees around the ranch house were the only ones in view. The rest of the place was dry and dusty but clean.

  The bunkhouse door opened, and the cook stepped out to look at us. I recognized him from before, a balding man with a fringe of dark hair. His eyes drifted over Dunbar and settled on me.