The Montanans (v1.0), page 19
“No evidence? Hogwash! I told you Lloyd Cooper saw them stealing my Indian in the middle of the night.”
“That’s not exactly what Lloyd saw. I just talked to him myself a few minutes ago. He saw Tom and Charlie, all right, on board a wagon with something in the bed under a piece of canvas, but he didn’t see what that something was. Not so much as a glimpse of it.”
“It was my Indian. You know it was!”
“I don’t know any such thing,” I said. “I didn’t find that statue of yours out at the reservation, nor anybody who knew anything about it”
Bandelier shaped his lips like a man about to spit. “Just how carefully did you search, Sheriff?”
“Carefully enough.” I fixed him with a hard eye. “And I don’t like your tone, Mr. Bandelier. You implying that I haven’t done my duty?”
“If the shoe fits,” he said, prissy.
“Well, it don’t fit,” I said. “Now suppose you take yourself back behind your store counter and let me eat my lunch in peace and quiet.”
“I’m warning you, Sheriff Monk…”
“You’re doing what?”
He didn’t like what he saw in my face. He scraped back his chair, not meeting my eyes now, and said to my left shoulder, “If you won’t do anything about those two thieving Flatheads, then I will.”
“Such as?”
“That’s my business.”
“Not if it involves breaking the law. You do anything illegal, like going out to the reservation yourself with mischief in mind, and I’ll cloud up and rain all over you. And you can damned well count on that.”
I spoke loud, so that the five other citizens in the Elite could also hear my words plain. Bandelier’s face got even redder than it already was. But he didn’t sling any more words of his own; he put his back to me and walked out all stiff and righteous, like a sinner leaving a tent meeting.
Well, hell, I thought.
Now I’d lost my appetite.
Henry Bandelier was born without the sense God gave a picket-pin gopher: He tried to stir up trouble in spite of my warning. He talked long and fast to anybody who’d listen about the “red heathens out on the reservation,” and what lowdown thieves they were, and even though it had been years since we’d had any problems to speak of with the Indians, there were some hotheads who believed him. There’d have been an incident come out of it, too, with white men and red both getting hurt, if I hadn’t got wind of a midnight meeting in the back of Bandelier’s store. Half a dozen men were there, armed with ax handles and fortified with free liquor, and they were getting ready to ride on out to the reservation to “teach those Indians a lesson,” as Bandelier was saying, when I busted in.
I chased the others home and threw Bandelier in jail on a charge of inciting to riot. He squawked long and loud, which was fine with me; he also made some thinly veiled threats, which wasn’t fine with me. So I added “threatening a peace officer with bodily harm” to the charges against him.
In the morning Bandelier demanded his lawyer. When Jack Dunlap showed up I talked to him first, after which he consulted with Bandelier in private for the better part of an hour. What he said must have put the fear of God into the storekeeper; Bandelier was some subdued when we all went trooping over to see Judge Cooney. The judge let Bandelier out on bail, and I promised to reduce the charges against him on the proviso that he quit trying to provoke conflict with the Indians and leave the matter of the missing statue in the hands of the law.
That put an end to the trouble. Bandelier had too much self-esteem to suffer a public disgrace lightly; he retreated into his store and his humiliation, and from then on kept his big mouth shut.
I continued to investigate the theft, off and on for two days, but there just wasn’t anything to find out. I was considering another drive out to the reservation when Abe Fetters showed up in town with the news that Chief Victor had died.
I talked to Abe over at the train depot, where he was picking up a consignment of supplies from the government. He said the old man had passed on two nights ago, in his sleep. Yesterday there’d been the usual tribal ceremony presided over by the medicine man. Today, though, there’d been something that wasn’t usual.
“What’s that, Abe?” I asked.
“Well, the burial,” he said. “They took his remains out to the burial ground before dawn without telling the medicine man. Or me, for that matter. I didn’t find out until after it was already done.”
“Who did?”
’Tom Black Wolf and members of his family. Funny breach of custom. First time anything like it has happened.” ’Tom give you an explanation?”
“No,” Abe said. “I asked him and so did the medicine man, but he wouldn’t say. He must have had a good reason, though. Indians don’t do anything without a good reason.” “You got any idea what it might be?”
“Not a one.”
Neither did I, right then.
But I sure did that evening.
The official part of my day ends at six o’clock, when my night deputy, Gus Beemis, comes on. Since I lost my wife Tess two years ago, my evenings tend to be pretty quiet and of a sameness. Usually I have supper at the Elite Cafe, go on home, do such chores as need doing, turn in, and read myself to sleep. Gets lonely sometimes, especially around the holidays, but a man learns to live with that, same as he learns to live with all the other things, good and bad, that make up his life.
Some evenings after supper I stop by the library before I head home, to pick up and return books. In my early days I wasn’t much of a reader, but after Tess passed on I took it up on a regular basis, just as Tom Black Wolf had, and found that I’d been short-changing myself most of my life. Books are more than just tools of knowledge; good books are friends. Better friends, some of them, than the human variety.
This was one of my nights to stop by the library. And I chanced to walk in while Mary Ellen Belknap was having a conversation with Lydia Cranston, Doc Cranston’s wife. Indians was what they were talking about—Chief Victor’s passing, at first. The library is small, so I couldn’t have helped overhearing them if I’d wanted to. And I didn’t want to when their talk shifted to Tom Black Wolf.
“I swan,” Mary Ellen said, “I’ll never understand Indians.”
“Why do you say that?” Lydia asked.
“Well, you take Tom Black Wolf. He’s always been such a good boy. Smart, well-mannered, and respectful of property. That’s why I’ve let him check out books since he was in high school; he never abused the privilege. But now…well, I hope he isn’t going to start running wild.”
“Why would you think he’d start running wild, for heaven’s sake?”
“It’s the little things, isn’t it?” Mary Ellen said. “That’s how it always starts. And now that Chief Victor is gone, the authority figure in Tom’s life—”
“What little things?”
’The last batch of books he checked out were overdue for almost two weeks. He’s never had overdue books before.”
“Well, my land, with his grandfather so sick—”
“That’s not all,” Mary Ellen said. “He also mutilated a book.”
“He did what?”
“Mutilated a book. Don’t look at me that way, Lydia, it’s true. He tore a photograph out of an expensive history book. Oh, he pasted it back in but you can see plainly where it was ripped out—”
I was over at the desk by then. I said, “Mary Ellen, when did you find out about this tom photograph?”
She blinked at me. She’s six feet tall and horse-faced and when she blinks she looks like a startled mare. “Why…just this afternoon, Sheriff. Tom brought in the books that were overdue. One was the history text—”
“You have that book handy?”
“Yes, it’s on my desk.”
“Mind letting me see it?”
“Of course not, but what—”
“Just let me see the book, Mary Ellen.”
She got it for me. The title and subtitle were stamped in gilt on the front cover: Sons and Daughters of the Nile. A History of Egypt from Ancient to Modern Times. I opened it up and found the photograph that had been tom out and pasted back in, and took a good long look at it, and that was when I got my notion. The damnedest notion I’d ever had, but there it was.
I said to Mary Ellen, “I’d like to borrow this book until tomorrow.”
“Check it out, you mean? But it needs to be properly repaired—”
“Just until tomorrow, Mary Ellen.”
Before she could say anything else I tucked the book under my arm and went on out. I could feel the two women’s eyes on my back, and I could hear them start to whisper even before I shut the door.
When I got home I sat in my Morris chair and did some studying on the history book. Then I did some studying without the book, working that notion of mine from different angles. And by golly, all the pieces fit together as pretty as you please:
The missing wooden Indian…the sawdust on Tom’s shoes the morning after the theft…Chief Victor’s illness and delirium…Tom and his family not letting either the tribal medicine man or Abe Fetters come along to the burial grounds…and the tom-out photograph in the Egyptian history book—the photograph of a sarcophagus, one of those stone coffins made in the likeness of the kings and queens and other royalty that were buried inside them.
Suppose Tom and Charlie Walks Far hadn’t cut that wooden Indian into pieces; suppose they’d sawed it clean in half, lengthwise, and then hollowed out both halves with hammers and wood chisels. And suppose they’d put Chief Victor’s remains inside and buried Indian and Indian both.
Chief Victor himself would have had to ask for it. And he might have, even if it went smack against tribal custom, if he’d been addled enough in his sickness. Could be he’d got hold of the Egyptian history book—Tom always had books lying around their shack—and could be he’d seen that photograph of the sarcophagus, and torn it out because it fascinated him, and in his delirium determined that he was royalty, too, descended from the Great Chief Victor, so why shouldn’t he have a coffin like the Egyptian royalty did? Tom wouldn’t have refused anything his grandfather asked, no matter how daft or heretical; he’d likely have tried to argue against it but in the end he wouldn’t have refused. And since there was no time to build a sarcophagus in the old warrior’s true likeness, with Chief Victory already knocking at death’s door, Tom and Charlie Walks Far had had to make do with what came easy to hand.
But, hell, it was a crazy notion. Pure foolishness, even if all the pieces did fit. Must be some other explanation that made better and saner sense.
And yet…
Well, I could tell Abe Fetters about it and we could go out to the reservation burial ground and find out for certain. But that struck me as downright sacrilegious. Those poor Indians had enough trials and tribulations without a bunch of white men digging up their sacred burial ground. Besides which, if it did turn out to be true, then the citizens of Elk Basin would have a field day at the Indians’ expense and the whole thing would get written up in newspapers around the state and maybe around the country, too. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, I’d have to arrest Tom and Charlie, and Henry Bandelier would sure as hell press charges against them. There’d be no justice in that. Tom couldn’t go to the university and become an agronomist and help his people if he was serving a stretch in the state penitentiary.
No, I decided, the best thing for me to do was to keep that crazy notion of mine to myself. Better yet, dismiss it as a pipe dream and forget all about it.
* * *
That’s just what I did. And to this day nobody in Elk Basin has ever found out what really happened to Henry Bandelier’s wooden Indian. Including me.
Some things, I reckon, folks are just better off not knowing.
This poignant vignette about the last days—in 1929—of a “forgotten” train and bank robber is evocative of both Montana and the entire frontier experience. A student of Western history in general and Western outlaws in particular, Arthur Winfield Knight has published dozens of poems about Jesse James, the Younger brothers, and other historical figures, some of which were collected in 1988 under the title, Wanted!; two plays, Blue Earth and Burning Daylight; and several short stories of the caliber of “Buffalo Horns,” which have appeared in Western fiction anthologies and small-press publications.
Buffalo Horns
Arthur Winfield Knight
We haven’t seen Tom Alexander in two years.
The gate to the farm is sagging on its hinges, and a sign saying it costs fifty cents to visit the birthplace of Tom and Emmett Alexander has a line drawn through it. Beneath it someone has scrawled, “Admission: Two Bits,” but even at that there don’t seem to be many takers. Maybe no one cares about old outlaws anymore. Or maybe Hardin, Montana, is too far away from anything else that interests people twenty-nine years into a new century. The Old West is dead.
Driving up from Buffalo and Sheridan, Wyoming, where I’d been on an assignment for my newspaper, we’d crossed the Big Horn Indian Reservation. We stopped, listening to the wind, to the silence, at the site of the Custer battlefield. It had been fifty-three years since Custer and his men had been killed by the Sioux at the Little Bighorn River. Probably most people wouldn’t even know Custer’s name. Wouldn’t have heard of Cassidy or Curry or the Tall Texan. The only cowboys they’d know now are William S. Hart and Tom Mix, cowboys who ride across the screen. Not much is real anymore.
When Wyatt Earp died earlier in the year, an old man in the Los Angeles sun, most papers hadn’t even reported his death.
“If they don’t know Wyatt’s name, I guess it’s no surprise they don’t know Tom’s,” I tell Kate as we approach his cabin.
Tom and his brother had robbed trains and banks throughout Montana and Wyoming at about the same time the Wild Bunch had been active. In fact, Tom said he’d ridden with Butch Cassidy and Kid Curry. Butch had been killed in South America, and the Kid had shot himself with his last bullet when he was trapped by a posse in Colorado. When Tom read about their deaths, he said he felt like he was reading his own obituary.
I met Tom thirty years ago when I was in my early twenties. He was in his mid-forties then, and he still had the vigor he must have had when he was shooting it out with Plummer and his gang over near Virginia City. “Henry and I were both outlaws,” Tom said back then, “but we never got along. He liked to hurt people. I even remember seeing him slap his wife once. I kept telling myself it wasn’t any of my business, but I never forgave him for that. Never forgave him for taking money from all sorts of ‘little’ people. It all seems like such a long time ago.”
I’d seen Tom occasionally through my twenties, then I’d moved away and married and we lost touch because he never answered my letters, although he could write as well as most people I knew and he could be eloquent when he spoke. Then my wife and I had separated and I’d moved some more until I met Kate when I was working for the paper in Missoula.
It takes Tom a long time to answer the door when we knock—we’ve almost decided to go away—and I hardly recognize him at first. He puts his weight on a cane, shuffling across the room. It hurts to watch.
“Why don’t you make drinks for yourselves,” he says.
“Since the strokes, I’m not as good a host as I used to be. Not much good to myself, even. Something just seemed to go in me when my wife died, and I hardly ever see my daughter. She’s in Great Falls and has a family of her own, so here I am: the last outlaw.” He lights a cigarette and sips at some bourbon. He always had consumed a lot of alcohol and he probably smoked sixty cigarettes a day but it had never seemed to slow him down. Now his face looks like someone has cut the lines into it with a knife, looks like old leather, and his body shakes when he coughs.
When Kate had met him a couple of years ago, he’d still seemed resilient. We’d driven up to the Bear Paw Mountains, where Chief Joseph and his Nez Perce had surrendered to the U.S. Army only thirty miles from the Canadian border. He’d traveled more than a thousand miles, fighting thirteen engagements with ten army divisions. When he surrendered he’d said, “My heart is sick and sad. From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,” and he’d spoken for a nation that, by that time, had been defeated.
When we’d driven down from the Bear Paw Mountains, it had been a hot afternoon. Miles from anyplace, we’d seen a cowboy sitting by the side of the road. At first we’d thought he might want to hitch a ride, but he just sat on a boulder in the sun. He was smoking a cigarette and the smoke curled around his neck like a bandanna. He waved as we passed and we waved back, then I kept my eyes on the road again. The clouds were reflected on the asphalt so it looked like there was water on the highway, but the water always evaporated as we approached it “Why is it things are never the way they seem?” Tom had asked then. There probably hadn’t been any rain in weeks.
“It’s hard for me to go anyplace anymore,” Tom says now. “Going to the bathroom is tougher than robbing a train used to be. I’m as defeated as poor old Joseph, but at least they haven’t carted me off from my land. They won’t even do that when they bury me, if I can help it I’d like to be buried on this place.”
“You shouldn’t talk about dying,” Kate says.
“The next time you see me it’ll be in a pine box.”
Neither of us knows what to say. Maybe that’s why Kate starts to tell him about her interest in buffalo. She thinks the buffalo would be a better symbol for America than the bald eagle but Tom says, “No, the buffalo isn’t aggressive enough. That’s why they were almost wiped out. They just stood there while people shot them. Hundreds would be killed in a day. If it hadn’t been for Teddy Roosevelt I don’t think there’d be any left.”
Kate had told me there’d only been a hundred and four left at one point, but they were coming back. Slowly. Some ranchers were raising them along with cattle.
