Yellowstone Kelly Read online

“Good Lord!” breathed Caswell with great difficulty. “Isn’t he about the biggest Sioux there is? Next to Sitting Bull, of course.”

  “Next to nobody,” said the slender man unsmilingly.

  “Sitting Bull’s a politician, a medicine man. He doesn’t fight. Crazy Horse is their real leader and a fanatic white-hater named Gall is their main war chief. That would make Sitting Bull about number three in my book.”

  Jepson looked at him without liking.

  When he finally put the big question, he did so behind the lingering scowl left over from his earlier mortification.

  “And jest who do you think you might be, mister, to be writin’ any books on the subject?”

  “Kelly,” said the stranger evenly. “Luther S. Kelly.” Then, after a searching look and a slow nod in receipt of their slack-jawed stares of disbelief:

  “Yellowstone Kelly …”

  3

  “Cripes Amighty!” reiterated Big Anse. “I don’t believe it. It’s like seein’ Jesse James or shakin’ hands with Jed Smith!”

  The others said nothing, just made sounds without words.

  Each knew he was looking at a legend. The sort of ethereal human fabric most men die without ever seeing. Or ever coming near to seeing. Let alone standing close enough to, to reach out and touch for hand-feeling real. It was a vastly unsettling thing, and of them all only Big Anse Harper was able to answer for his amazement.

  The huge Georgian was like a small boy who had hand-watered half a dozen circus elephants in happy exchange for five minutes of staring at Colonel Wm. F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody & His Sixty Real-Life Sioux Indian War Chiefs in Their Death Defying Circle of the Flaming Wagon Train! all performed, of course, within a thirty-five foot cartwheel of soggy tanbark to the wheezy brass pumping of Mazeppa’s Ride or Entrance of the Gladiators.

  He was, in a word, bug-eyed.

  “I seen Custer once!” he blurted hopefully. “It was thet fust mornin’ outside Appomattox Courthouse. My outfit was close up to the front ranks. We always was. General John Brown Gordon’s boys, Mr. Kelly. The Raccoon Roughs from La Grange. Likely you heard of ’em. Most have, I reckon.”

  Kelly nodded, either out of agreement or the kindness of an easily reached Irish heart, and Big Anse plunged excitedly on.

  “And it’s blessed little wonder the Injuns calls him Yeller-hair, too! He was awearin’ it thetaway even in them days. Clean down to his danged epaulets, it were! And yeller? Say, it was thet yeller it’d make a Fed’ral Gov’ mint gold piece look new-grass green!”

  Across from the aroused southerner, the intense darkness of the legend’s face dissipated to another of the quicksilver smiles.

  “You gentlemen would be the four wolf hunters out of Fort Buford by way of Reed & Bowles,” said Kelly, somehow making it sound right and not like an interruption or an ignoring of Big Anse’s friendly-dog harangue.

  “We would,” admitted Jepson, sensing the other’s seriousness, smile or no. “And what business of yours might thet be?”

  “That will keep,” countered Kelly. “First you’re going to sit still for that little lecture I promised you. Subject: ‘The Cure and Prevention of Premature Baldness in Judith Basin,’ or, ‘A Fool and His Scalp are Soon Separated in Siouxland,’ or—”

  “Verra amusin’, lad.” MacDonal squinted narrowly. “Verra humorous indeed. But git on wi’ it now, will ye? Ye’re keepin’ us up.”

  Kelly nodded and got on with it.

  He did so in staccato bursts of five and six-letter words that had nothing at all in common with his previous flowery appropriation from Shakespeare or production of facetious titles for informal talks on Sioux haircutting techniques.

  When he wished to, it was quickly clear, Luther Kelly could talk as plain and to the point as a Missouri muleskinner.

  It was only the more remarkable that the blistering effect was achieved entirely without either the use or abuse of the Lord’s good name, any reference whatever to the Devil’s dwelling place, or any mention of the possible lack of legal wedlock surrounding the birth of a fellow man.

  Profanity, dog-eared or highly decorated, was for less talented talkers than Luther S. Kelly.

  When he had finished, the members of his hushed little captive audience understood several things inherent in their situation which had not been too clear to them previously.

  One: they should never have left Fort Buford.

  Two: before that, they should never have departed from Fort Berthold, and before that should never have waved farewell to St. Louis.

  Three: they should now break camp and run for the Basin, bypassing Reed & Bowles, hitting straight for the River, and praying every jump of the way that the hostiles didn’t spot their dust.

  Four: once at the Big Muddy, they should lie up in the bank brush until Far West, Prairie Queen, or Yellowstone Belle came along, then halloo for help, go aboard, and stay aboard until the gangplank touched levee in St. Louis again.

  His pertinent points made, Kelly stood back to await their acceptance or rejection.

  Alec MacDonal, who in this moment of decision seemed to have taken over from the slower-witted Jepson, continued as spokesman for the wolf hunters.

  “Aye,” he averred thoughtfully, rolling the word as though it were a quid of high grade plug. “And what might ye say would be our alternative, Mr. Kelly?”

  “Six months of Hunkpapa poker. With you boys betting your good hair against a problematical stack of wolfskins. And the odds ninety-nine to nothing in favor of the red brother taking the last pot and your precious pile of blue-chip peltries along with it.”

  “Verra, verra interestin’. And yer conclusion, lad?”

  “Get out of the country and stay out of it.”

  The silver-haired Scot nodded, eying Kelly carefully. “It’s fair drastic advice, mon. I imagine ye’ve some fair drastic reason fer offerin’ it.”

  “I have.”

  “And ye might be induced to reveal thet reason?”

  “For a reasonable consideration.”

  “Hmmmm.” The craggy-faced Canadian hunter conceded Kelly the merest twinkle of a frosty blue eye. He was beginning to like this murderous-looking, gentle-talking, hard-bargaining, Indian-clad son of a black Irishman. He was clearly a man of parts and, moreover, of thrifty, unwasteful ways. “Now what might ye call a reasonable consideration, lad?”

  Kelly shrugged.

  “If I throw in with you, those Sioux odds drop to less than fifty-fifty, our way. You can stay up here with a better than even chance of going out next spring with your scalps still attached and with enough prime wolf to keep you in squaws and shag-cut for several summers.”

  “Aye, aye,” MacDonal went along warily. “But the price, mon, the price!”

  “My regular one-fifth of the total catch, plus ten percent of your four-fifths,” said Luther Kelly.

  It was not an unreasonable demand for the professional services of the most renowned Indian fighter and commercial meat hunter on the Upper Missouri. His uneasy listeners did not need MacDonal’s conceding head-bob to understand that. But Jepson had had time to catch up with the conversation again. As nominal leader of the little company, he felt called upon to at least try to resume command thereof. He darkened his chronic scowl for the attempt.

  “Fust things fust, mister. You said you had some fair drastic reason fer advisin’ us to cut our sticks. Now you’re offerin’ to help us stay. I don’t like a man that talks two ways at once. Now suppose you jest give us thet fust reason ’fore we go to talkin’ peltry percentages. You hear me now?”

  “I only hope you can hear me as well.”

  “Don’t you worry about me. Git on with it.”

  Kelly smiled softly, shifted from his parade rest to lean lightly, palms crossed, on the muzzle of his Winchester.

  “From a certain cedar ridge t
en miles south of this campsite at dusk the present evening and through an excellent, thoroughly reliable pair of Union-issue field glasses,” he recited flowingly, “I observed diligently engaged in following your clumsy track a war party of thirty-nine Hunkpapa Sioux Indians under a chief whose name is considered distressingly bad news from the Black Hills to the Big Horns.”

  Jepson shook his head growlingly. He had just been kicked in his stumpy teeth and did not like it.

  But MacDonal was in no mood to await his companion’s recovery. His Scots’ spine was beginning to crawl a little, his old hunter’s instinct commencing to close in on him.

  “What chief?” he asked, head cocked sharply.

  “Only the worst you could want.” Kelly shrugged.

  “His name! For God’s sake, what’s his name?” broke in the overwrought Caswell, uttering his first words since the scout’s arrival.

  “His name?” Kelly delayed, savoring the situation with that curious detachment which is the particular narcotic of those long addicted to the drug habit of imminent danger. “His name is as bitter for the white brother as his heart is black for him. Even in Hunkpapa it leaves an evil taste on the tongue. Pizi! The Sioux say it as though they were spitting it out. In English it has the same effect—an acid, caustic, scalding word.”

  He paused dramatically, sweeping them with his fierce dark eyes.

  Caswell was gray-faced, the beaded dank moisture of near nerve-break peppering his temples. Kelly, watching him, knew that he had finally gotten through to at least one of the four white fools confronting him. He knew something else as well. If his closing words did not convert the other three, none of them would live long enough to plant and poison his first wolf bait.

  “His name,” he repeated with deliberate monotone softness, “is Gall.”

  4

  The Fort Buford men seemed to shrink unconsciously closer to one another. Noting this instinctive reaction, Kelly was satisfied. Clearly, none of his listeners was that new to the Upper Missouri he had not heard of Gall the Hunkpapa. Which was precisely what he had anticipated. And precisely what was fit and proper, considering the time and place and the nature of Gall’s Montana reputation.

  Sitting Bull’s number one war chief was, in contemporary fact, far better known to the various white trespassers upon the Laramie Treaty Lands than was ever his more famous tribesman. He was to Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa what Crazy Horse was to Red Cloud and the Oglala. Sitting Bull and Red Cloud made the headlines of the national news-press. Gall and Crazy Horse made the troop ambushes and emigrant wagon train burnouts behind those headlines. In the local way of looking at it, the former were very big Indians back east, the latter, very bad Indians out west. If some further comparisons might be made for the sake of character delineation, Crazy Horse, had he been born white, would have been of the stuff of Presidents—and of the very greatest Presidents. It would not have been too much, in Kelly’s opinion, to have called him an Oglala Lincoln, so deep was his passion for freedom, so humble his love for his people.

  By exactly the reverse token Gall was quite another Indian.

  The Hunkpapa field marshal was pure, uncomplicated fighting man.

  He was a red guerrilla raider in the murderous white tradition of Poole, Quantrill, Anderson, and Jesse Woodson James. His love for his people was savage, not humble. His passion for freedom was an instinct, not an ideal. He fought not for tribal liberty or to preserve a way of life, but only to defend his own personal right to take what he wanted, when and where he wanted it—including a settler woman’s scalp or a Pony Soldier’s hair.

  Kelly had no personal experience upon which to base this vicious picture of the famed Hunkpapa. Neither had he any good reason to doubt its authenticity. A man heard what he heard in the river posts. If he didn’t choose to believe all of it, or if he refused to testify vehemently and circumstantially to every last bit of its rumored fact, he could very quickly get himself considered an incipient squaw man and find himself cut off from the trust and confidence of his precious few white fellows in this alien red land. The far easier alternative to these natural doubts that any human being, even one of Sitting Bull’s Sioux, could be as all-bad as Gall was painted by the settlement artists, was to simply accept the white version of his villainy uncensored by logical questions or common sense inquiries. Kelly had learned this very early. And he had not forgotten it. Weary and worn as the old saying was, a man in Kelly’s moccasins had to buy it and believe it—the only good Indian was still the dead Indian.

  And right now Gall was very much alive.

  Waiting half-amusedly for his companions’ plainly hesitant decision, Kelly was idly puzzled by the mixed bag of resentful scowls and suspicious side-glances being flung at him over the hunched shoulders of the conferees. Presently, Big Anse cleared the air. Seizing the corporate stumbling block, he brought it over and dumped it unceremoniously in Kelly’s lap. “Them cussed hammerheads,” growled the impatient giant, “are holdin’ up over you bein’ a bogtrotter. Kin you beat that?”

  “Beat it?” laughed Kelly. “I can’t even tie it.”

  “Well, all the same it’s so. They’re purely fretted over signin’ on a flannelmouth.”

  “A what?” said Kelly, taken off guard.

  “You know, a snake-chaser, a toe-kisser.”

  “Now, see here, Anse,” grinned the unworldly scout, “are those supposed to be insults? If so, they’re a waste of time. I’ve been worked over by experts. You should hear a Ree or Mandan or a Gros Ventre squaw cut loose and claw a man’s hump for tracking dirt into the tepee or stumbling over the cradleboard in the dark and waking the baby. Mister, that’s real Three Rivers insulting. White folks just can’t shine with that kind of competition. You tell your friends to get on with the business meeting and never mind my politics.”

  “No, no,” admonished Big Anse unhappily, “it ain’t your politics, Mr. Kelly. It’s your religion.”

  “My what!” burst out the other, losing half of his good-natured grin.

  “Aw, you know.” The big hillman was plainly upset. “Your bein’ an Irisher and all that. Me, I don’t care, though I will say I ain’t no Pope-lover. But Jepson, him, and MacDonal, they’re thirty-second-degree Masons, and Caswell, he’s a hardshell shoutin’ Baptist, and, well, damn it all, Mr. Kelly, you know how it is.”

  Of a sudden, albeit belatedly in view of his customary astuteness, Luther Kelly did indeed know how it was. It was, in fact, far from the first time his Irish name had run him up against the stubborn wall of settlement prejudice toward the legitimate sons of St. Patrick and toward their presumed first allegiance to the so-called “Pope of Rome.” Kelly had never liked this experience in frontier intolerance, and he didn’t like it now. Dropping the last half of his grin, he eased up off his haunches and moved over to the scowlers.

  “My friends,” he greeted them with warning softness, “it has been brought to my attention that you fear my religion more than you respect my professional ability. Or my Indian opinions.”

  He eyed them without amusement and until they dropped their defiant gazes in self-conscious confusion. Then he went on, scathingly.

  “Allow me to amplify my pedigree. Also my social standing. Likewise my moral convictions.

  “Firstly; I never knew of anyone in the American branch of the family who was bothered a great deal by prayer-rail knee calluses.

  “Secondly; we are mainly North of Ireland stock, our line coming to this fair land in 1638 by way of one John Kelly, a merchant sea captain of strong character and more or less Episcopalian convictions. Old John came over not from the Emerald Isle but from Jolly Old England. He was a member of the original Roger Williams Colony in Rhode Island, and if he owed anything to the Pope, he never paid it. I myself do not believe in churches, nor do I attend the services of any church. I am a man of strong belief, nonetheless, and a devout disciple of the Christian
faith. I hold there is a God and hope one day to meet him.

  “Thirdly, however; I consider each man’s religion his entire personal concern. I have as much respect for the Sioux’s Great Spirit as I do for the Catholic’s Holy Ghost or the Protestant’s Heavenly Father,” Luther Kelly said. “To me one man’s god is as good or as bad as another’s, but it is his god. Hence, I don’t cotton any small part to the drift of this talk, and I’ll give you exactly five minutes to stop it, to come off worrying about the Pope, and to get on with taking or leaving my business proposition—amen!”

  It then took less than Kelly’s five minutes for the chastised company to declare him a full partner in the firm, plus his extra ten percent as required.

  At first, with the empty-headed exception of Big Anse, who admittedly “didn’t have good sense enough to be properly skeered,” they all wanted to give up and to turn back at once. The discussion deteriorated along these frightened lines of total, immediate abandonment for perhaps the opening three minutes. Then Kelly, having allowed each of the three dissidents what he felt to be his full minute of floor time, stepped in and took over for his own sixty seconds.

  Within that limited space, he somehow managed to convince the thickheaded Jepson, the wary MacDonal, and the shadow-jumping Caswell that if they would but follow his instructions, they could avoid any serious trouble with the Sioux. He made it honestly plain that there was no hope of avoiding the Sioux themselves, only of avoiding serious trouble with them.

  “Doing business with these wild Indians,” he told them, “is like riding a green-broke pony. You never know when he’s going to pitch but you do know that he is going to, and so you are ready for him when he does.

  “I myself,” he announced simply, “have traveled many a lovely summer and long winter through these forbidden lands of theirs, and always alone, with no real protection whatever, save my reputation for sleeping lightly and shooting straight. In all that time, I have been attacked but once, and that when I first came onto the River as a youth of eighteen.”