The Last Crossing (13 page)

Crooked Back then formed another liaison with a Scottish trader, Alexander Harvey, who, in Cooke’s florid telling, seems to have exceeded the brutality and depravity of Dickens’s Bill Sykes. Crooked Back soon fled Harvey to return to the Blood tribe, leaving behind her baby son in Harvey’s charge.

When, bewildered, I asked why a woman would do such a thing, Mr. Cooke simply remarked with a nonchalant shrug, “Maybe Harvey wouldn’t surrender the boy so’s to punish her. Maybe Crooked Back thought it would be best if her son was raised white.”

Mr. Cooke spat into the cuspidor on his lap with an air of reflection, leaned towards me across his scarred desk, and with great relish launched into a series of gruesome anecdotes touching upon Harvey’s depravity. The heat of the close, stuffy office threatened to overwhelm me as these blood-soaked yarns were related. It was a struggle to curtail my impatience, but being determined to find Potts, I hoped that if I bore with Mr. Cooke, in the end he might impart some useful information that would be of assistance in locating the scout.

Everyone, it seemed, had been terrified of Alexander Harvey, white and Indian alike. When the American Fur Company engages at Fort Mackenzie could no longer bear his presence, they organized a petition to company headquarters in St. Louis, asking that he be removed. Harvey caught wind of it, beat every signer to a pulp, and went so far as to murder one of the petitioners within the very walls of the fort.

Harvey was a law unto himself. When a Blackfoot took a pig which he found wandering outside the walls of the fort, the Scot tracked him down and put a musket ball in his leg. “He sauntered up to the wounded brave, cool as you please,” Mr. Cooke continued, “lit a pipe and offered it to the groaning Indian. While the Blackfoot smoked, Harvey commented on the pleasing warmth of the sun, the prettiness of the view. When the Blackfoot had finished the pipe, Harvey said, ‘Take one last look at this fine world and think of how you’re going to miss it.’ Put his musket to the Indian’s ear and blew his brains out.”

But according to Mr. Cooke, the escapade which brought this madman’s career in the fur trade to an end involved a slave owned by one of the managers of the American Fur Company. In the depths of winter, the poor Negro was sent out to cut fuel in the woods near Fort Mackenzie. There he was discovered by Blackfoot who killed and scalped him. For Harvey, the murder of a black man was of no consequence, but the destruction of a piece of valuable company property was. He was determined to teach the Blackfoot a lesson. The next spring when they rode up to the fort ready to trade their skins, Harvey met them with a loaded cannon and, without warning, fired
into their party, killing and wounding a score of them. Apparently, these particular Indians were not the perpetrators of the crime in question, but that did not matter to Harvey. However, his action did not instill in the Blackfoot a respect for the white man’s property, but only a great hatred for the American Fur Company. The Indians inaugurated a campaign of harassment and murder of such ferocity against the traders that the fort had to be evacuated and abandoned.

Cooke gave me a yellow-toothed grin after relating this incident. “There was mighty hard feelings towards Harvey after that. The one thing you don’t want to interfere with is a man’s pockets. It was decided the only way to be rid of Harvey was to kill him. For every one of them put a knife into him at the same time. But Harvey was too cute and canny for them bumblers. He got wind of the plot, stole a boat, and headed downstream. The bastard purely disappeared without leaving a trace.”

“And Jerry Potts? What of the boy?”

“Well, it’s a hard thing, but a man’s life is precious to him and I reckon a kid so young would have only slowed him down so Harvey left him behind. There’s some who say the only soft spot Harvey had in his black heart was for the little tyke. But for him, Harvey didn’t have a friend in the world. I’ve heard from engages at Fort Mackenzie that when Harvey got drunk he’d keep the boy up all night playing cards with him in his quarters, they could hear him ranting to young Potts how everybody was against Alexander Harvey, how he didn’t dare turn his back on a man-jack of them for fear of getting shot or stabbed. Would Jerry stand by him? Could he count on him?”

Delicately, I made the observation that the fashion in which Potts was raised surely must have encouraged criminal tendencies in the boy. The more I heard, the more I wondered how suitable a guide Jerry Potts would be.

“How he was raised did toughen him some,” Mr. Cooke remarked matter-of-factly. “I’ll grant you that. Rumour has it that after Harvey lit out on him, Potts lived like a stray dog at the company posts, sleeping in any corner, eating whatever table scraps he got thrown. But he
survived it, and that recommends him in this part of the world. And then another Scotchman, Andrew Dawson, came along and took him under his wing, put him to work in the trade, tried his best to make a honest, sober Scotchman out of him.”

“And the experiment was a success?” I said, growing more hopeful.

“Up to a point,” said Mr. Cooke. “Over the years, Potts had occasionally seen his mother when the Bloods came in to trade. Finally, she decided to take him off to live with her and her people for a time. The Bloods watered down the white in him a good deal, I reckon. Taught him to hunt like a Indian, ride like a Indian, read land like a Indian, fight like a Indian. They taught him Blackfoot religion. So he’s neither fish nor fowl. No man can tell where the white in him stops and the red starts.”

The question needed to be asked of Mr. Cooke. If he were in my position, would he hire Potts?

“Potts carries a map of every river, every butte, every coulee, every pimple on the prairie’s ass up there in his head. But, more important, once you set foot into Blackfoot country he’s your safe passage. Potts is worth a troop of cavalry. He stands mighty high in their estimation. The Blackfoot call him Bear Child, and that’s more than just a name like John or Joe, it’s a title of honour. They gave it to him after he led them in a mighty battle with the Crow. If Jerry Potts is with you and your party keeps its nose clean, don’t give offence, the Blackfoot won’t touch a hair on your heads.”

Mr. Cooke lit the remainder of my cheroot. His tiny office had all along been an oven, but now it was becoming a smoky oven. I could tolerate it no longer. “What you must tell me, Mr. Cooke, is how to find Potts. It is a matter of great urgency.”

“Well,” said Mr. Cooke, “if he’s anywheres about town, or near town, I’d recommend a tour of the drinking establishments. Sooner or later Potts will turn up in one of them, or some barfly will have seen him. Jerry Potts is a boy with the taste for the booze.”

After thanking Mr. Cooke, I hastened to apply his advice. However, I did not find Jerry Potts last night in any of the saloons and taverns I
visited. And none of the patrons were very helpful when I attempted to solicit information. They treated me with thinly veiled contempt, calling me pilgrim, tinhorn, and tenderfoot to my face.

This morning I must resume my quest for the dipsomaniac frontiersman despite my reservations about employing such a man as Mr. Cooke described to me. But a fire must be lit under Addington and so, whatever Potts’s deficiencies of character, he must do.

ALOYSIUS DOOLEY
It’s good to have the funeral parlour closed and the Stubhorn back to business. Lucy Stoveall left yesterday, cleared out of Custis’s room upstairs. He tried to hold her, but lost that battle. I like her style, she’s about the only one I know can knock Custis back on his heels. Right now, he’s setting over at his regular table by the window, just short of noon and sucking up whisky, reading his pocket Bible. I don’t know what he hopes to find in it.

Custis Straw does his best to hide his bruises. He took it hard that Lucy Stoveall brushed off his charity, and I know the tittle-tattle blowing round town about him and Madge is eating at his guts like lime. That fool business with the belt proved that. Last two days he’s scarcely set foot outside the Stubhorn, whisky and that black book his only occupations.

This hour of the day, I got nothing to do but think about doleful Straw, rinse glasses, and hop for Danny Rand, that wet-behind-the-ears young tough, pal to the Kelsos. I got no use for anybody who sticks himself at the far end of a counter just to make a man walk to pour a drink. Though maybe the distance between us is a benefit, seeing how he stinks. Filthy jacket and filthier shirt, trousers stiff with dirt, horsehair, and sweat. Rand’s been riding bareback, meaning either he lost his saddle in a poker game, or he’s helped himself to somebody’s stray horse. Little wonder he’s so friendly with those scapegrace Kelso boys. Rand carries himself with the same nasty swagger as Titus Kelso. Walks around with a chip on his shoulder, just asking for somebody to knock it off.

Everybody is entitled to make a mistake, but Custis runs to big ones. Maybe there’s some excuse for him hiring Joel Kelso, but how Custis could miss Titus’s nature is a mystery. He is a nasty piece of work altogether, one of them little gamecocks set on proving he’s got the sharpest spurs in the barnyard, and the biggest crow. Custis might have seen it too, if he weren’t so damned lazy, happy to be a rocking-chair horse dealer, whiling away his days with a glass in his hand, instead of minding to his own property and his business concerns. I told him that straight to his face, but he just flashed a toothy grin and said, “You rate money too high, Aloysius. You want to be rich and I only ask to be comfortable. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.’ ” What I ought to say to him now is, “What you’re arrayed in, Custis Straw, is shit. Head to toe. And nobody thinks you smell like a lily.”

But to make excuses for him, I reckon the Kelsos pulled their horns in whenever Custis took the trouble to hoist his big arse out of a easy chair and sally out to the ranch. But that was infrequent enough. I don’t know how the man makes a dollar with his carefree ways.

The day McIntyre came in here looking for Custis to buy a string of pack horses off him, it was me, out of the goodness of my heart, that drove out to Custis’s property on the off-chance he might actually be found overseeing his concern and I could bring him back to town so’s he wouldn’t lose a opportunity to cut a deal with McIntyre.

Rolled up to the breaking corral just as Titus was bucking out a buckskin gelding every bit as cantankerous as himself. Set my buggy brake just in time to receive the joy of seeing that mustang flop himself to the ground with Titus’s boot hung in the stirrup and go for a roll, mash Titus between saddle and hardpan like he was a boiled spud. When Titus was ready for a ladle of gravy, up that horse bounced to his feet, cinch broken and saddle half-twisted off his back. Couple of bucks and the surcingle snapped, and there went the saddle, flying high as a mortar round.

Titus was a pitiful, broken sight. He tried to gather his legs under him, but they’d collapse and plunk down he’d drop to his hands and
knees. Joel and me went over the rails to help him, but Titus just cursed us, pawing through the horseshit like a crawling baby, nose sprinkling blood in the dust. Joel tiptoeing after him, squeaking, “Tite, how you doing? How you doing, Tite?”

Tite weren’t doing too good, but after a bit he got himself upright and said to Joel, “I’m going to burn that whoreson to the ground. Get me that other saddle and a spade bit.” Joel hopped to it, he takes orders from Titus like his brother was the resurrected Christ.

Titus edged up on the horse with a lariat. When he dropped a loop on him, the gelding took off like a scalded cat, skidded him around the corral on his boot heels, teeth jolting in his jaws. Titus ploughed a lot of ground before the buckskin quit his fight, planted himself spraddle-legged, and stood watching Titus pull himself hand over hand down the rope towards him. Soon as Titus got to within five feet of the buckskin, that mustang laid his ears back and struck like a snake. Sank them big, ugly teeth in Titus’s chest, shook him like a terrier on a rat, Titus screeching and flopping. My, but wasn’t that a sweet serenade to Aloysius Donald Dooley’s ears.

After the horse had his chew, he let Titus loose. Titus reeled away, ripping at his shirt buttons. The bite mark was big as a soup plate and bloody. Once he seen the damage, Titus hugged his chest, scrunched himself up around the pain of it for a fair while, uttering blasphemies.

Joel was doing his best to persuade Titus to see sense. “Hell, you don’t need this, Tite. He ain’t about to quit fighting you. Just leave him be.”

Well, that was not the approach to take. I reckon Joel was saying the last thing Titus could tolerate, that this was too much horse for him. “Latch on to that rope,” Titus snapped at him. “And hold him.” Off he stomped in a rage.

Joel obliged, but he kept a respectful distance between himself and those teeth. The horse never stirred a foot awaiting the next eventuality.

Titus come back with a pair of hoof clippers. “All right,” he told Joel, “give me that son of a bitch.” Joel made tracks out of harm’s way and Titus commenced dragging himself back down that lariat. Same as before, the horse went for Titus, but this time Titus was
ready, he chopped them clippers smack into the gelding’s head, flung all his weight on the rope, and yanked the mustang down hard to the ground. You could hear the breath whistle out of that horse when he hit.