The Tall Men (19 page)

As usual, the horsemanship of their red masters was superb. Time and again the awestricken cowboys saw its incredible evidence. A feathered brave, off his pony and down and helpless on the ground: a companion riding full gallop under the nose of certain, crushing death, scooping him up to safety and somehow getting the double-mounted pony out of the herd and away. A bonneted chief, knocked or horn-hooked from his pony, bounding up and swingvaulting to another riderless and loose-galloping mount on the dead, wild run. The bravery and skill of the Sioux were literally unbelievable, and the spellbound cowboys sat and stared in simple, speechless amazement.

But in the end the herd began to thin, and Crazy Horse to gather his battered forces about him in the slowing dust of its drag.

This was the moment for men from Texas and rifles from Illion Forge, New York.

Ben led the charge down the ridge squarely into them, his riders fanning into a spread line as they bore down on the dismayed Sioux. At a hundred yards they opened with the Rolling Blocks, the effect of the volley instant and deadly at the range and into such close packed ranks. Then the hard-running cowponies were at seventy-five and at fifty yards, and the Remingtons were being jammed back into their saddle scabbards and Colonel Colt was out and speaking extemporaneously on the informal subject of
“Longhorn Stampedes for Water and Hip-shooting Sioux at Forty Feet.”

It was more than red flesh and blood could bear—or intended to.

The Sioux broke it off as short as a buffalo lance in a dead bull’s bottom. They streamed away north and south by the tens, the scores, the hundreds. And as they went, Ben’s cowboys slipped the Rolling Blocks back out, legged off their horses, hit the ground in bowlegged, offhand stances and continued to pour it on until the last buck was luckily beyond the extreme range of the Remingtons.

Which was something like four hundred yards and five minutes later.

The Battle of the Bozeman Grossing of the Yellowstone was over as of 5:25
P.M.,
October 23, 1866.

And the only scratch Ben Allison’s Texans took in it from start to finish was the one Waco gave himself while celebrating the event by shaving with Chickasaw’s straightedge the following morning.

On the third day west of the Yellowstone the snows, threatening since October and Fort Kearney, began. The morning of the fourth day there was six inches on the ground and the heavy promise of more to come in the sullen clouds to the north.

But the clouds held back. They continued to crouch in respectful place along the horizon of the Three Forks country and the high sourcelands of the Big Muddy, bade, as it were, by old Ka-dih himself, to stand and cry “Halt! enough!” and to let his quarter-bred Comanche grandson finish his mighty journey in peace.

Whether it was the will of the venerable Kwahadi god, or the work of a simple, squaw-winter vagary of Montana weather, the 1500-mile hegira of Nathan Stark’s great herd ended peacefully.

It was twilight of December 3 when Ben ordered the leaders thrown into a halting mill and the herd bedded on the Emigrant Gulch headlands. Shortly after 10:00
A.M.
the following day, the 4th, the point steers ambled out of the gulch’s western terminus, led their motley-colored, high-withered followers down upon history and the little settlement of Bozeman, Montana.

Here Stark left the wagons, pushing on with the Texans and the herd around the hills north of Virginia City and so, at last, into the trails-end grasslands of the Gallatin. On his orders, the cattle were
moved out across the great valley’s floor, to the river. There they were turned loose and scattered, ten miles north and south, along the reaching shelter of the Gallatin’s timbered brakes. It was December 8, 1866.

By nightfall of the 9th, Nathan Stark was seated at his desk beyond Esau Lazarus’s little green door in the Black Nugget Saloon, paying off his twenty-five hired Texas hands.

To each man he gave, in addition to his regular wages, a $100 bonus, the Remington Rolling Block rifle he had been issued below Fort Kearney, a house-tab for all the whiskey he could personally carry out of the Black Nugget before he himself was carried out of it, and stage fare from the nearest linepoint station in Montana Territory to Fort Worth, Texas. To each, as well, he gave a firm clasp of his tough hand, a steady blue-eyed statement of his personal thanks and obligations, and the expressed hope they would one and all think well of Nathan Stark along any trail the future might see them riding.

It was an impressive thing, this slow passing of awkward, highbooted Texas riders through Esau Lazarus’s banking room, seeing them take the big Montanan’s hand, not quite knowing what to do with it, stammering, blushing, trying in their rough ways to pass it off as though it was the regular thing to get cash bonuses, gift guns, free whiskey and first-class fare home from just any old cattle drive.

Watching them come and go, from where he and Chickasaw and Waco waited uncomfortably on a spindle-legged settee in the far corner of the little room, Ben swallowed hard. At the same time Waco was digging a bony knuckle into the eye that had
offended him at Curly’s grave-side and Chickasaw was blowing the creases out of a brand-new back-pocket bandanna.

When the last of them had gone, Stark called Chickasaw and Waco over to the desk, handed each of them a Mastin Bank of Kansas City draft for $500. He shook hands with them as he had with the others, soberly asked them not to say anything to their companions about the added bonus. It wasn’t that the others didn’t deserve every penny as much, he told them, but only that they had backed Ben Allison on every turn from Red River to the Yellowstone. And without Ben’s way having prevailed, he guessed that neither he nor anyone else would have to tell them where they and himself and every last head of the San Saba herd would be right now.

Then, at final last, they too were gone, and Ben was alone with Nathan Stark.

They looked at each other a long time, neither faltering in his regard, neither offering to put words to what was in the mind of each. In the end it was Stark who nodded slowly, spoke in his dry, flat voice.

“Well, Ben, what are we going to do about you?”

“I could say what
I
think we’re goin’ to do, Mr. Stark,” he said quietly. “But it’s my way to listen fust. You tell me.”

“We had a deal,” said Nathan Stark.

“We did,” said Ben Allison.

“You’ve always believed I meant it, and would go through with it didn’t you, Ben?”

“Likely.”

“Your brother never agreed with you.”

The shadow darkened Ben’s pale eyes only for a moment, then faded out and was gone. “Clint never
believed in nobody, exceptin’ mebbe onct in a while me.”

“Clint was right, Ben. About not believing in anybody. And about me. He was smart, Clint was.
Real
smart. A lot, lot smarter than you. Did you know that, Ben?”

“I reckon I did, Mr. Stark. Clint alius figgered it was him takin’ care of me, stead of the other way around. I allow mebbe in his way he many times was, too. I wasn’t never very sharp.”

Stark’s eye corners wrinkled quickly. His wide mouth bent to one of his dodo-rare, stiffly awkward grins. “God save me,” he said, “from ever meeting a sharp Texan.”

Ben didn’t ask him what he meant. He didn’t care. It was hot in the little room and the talk getting way too deep for him.

“I reckon we’d best git on with it,” he frowned.

“I reckon we had,” agreed Nathan Stark. “What do you want?”

“My third of the herd.”

“In money?”

“Greenback cash.”

“That wasn’t the deal. The deal was one third of whatever the herd earned. It hasn’t earned a nickel yet. We could have the biggest die-up ever, with a bad winter. There might not be a steer left alive in the Gallatin, come spring.”

“Your gamble,” said Ben dryly. “I made mine on the Yellerstone.”

“And figure you won it. That it, Ben?”

“Easy.”

“I see. What do you figure one third of the herd is worth?”

“Three times what it was in Fort Worth.”

Stark looked at him. The herd was worth eight, possibly ten times what it had cost in Texas.

“You’re crazy,” he said.

“And stickin’ to it,” nodded Ben quickly.

“You want ten thousand dollars, then?”

“In small bills. Tonight.”

“You’re a fool, Ben.”

“Tell me suthin’ ev’rybody don’t know. And gimme the money.”

“What about Clint’s share?”

“He’s got it.”

“Make sense, Ben.”

“I give him your bankdraft, thet’s all.”

“That doesn’t settle anything, man! It was just a piece of paper.”

“It does,” was all Ben would say. “It was the way Clint wanted it. He asked fer his pay and you give it to him.”

Stark shrugged. You couldn’t talk business with these Texans. Not the ones like Ben Allison. To them, their word or yours, once given, was the end of the matter. Maybe in his simple, plodding way he was right. Maybe, as he saw it, Clint had been honestly paid off. It didn’t make sense, but the longer you knew Ben Allison the more you wondered what
did.
And the more you thought about who was
really
right.

Shaking his head, Stark pulled the desk drawer open; began quickly counting the bills into precise stacks before him.

“Do you know what you’re selling for this money, Ben?” he asked.

“One thousand head of San Saba cows,” grunted Ben.

“Nothing else?”

“Yeah—my chances of bein’ a Montana millionaire.”

Stark stopped counting and looked up at him.

“It’s a bad deal, Ben.”

“Best I ever made,” nodded Ben. “Keep countin’.”

“What do you mean, ’the best you ever made’?” asked Stark curiously.

Ben knit his brows, fingered his long jaw. It was something that had been turning in his mind for a long time, and he didn’t hurry it now.

“Mr. Stark,” he said at last, “your kind grows big. Mine alius stays the same size. We don’t eat the same grub, you and me, nor we ain’t meant to share the same bunk. I could stay in yer Gallatin Valley a hundred years and never learn yer ways nor profit by ’em. We ain’t cut from the same stick and we’ll never sprout good nor do well in the same soil. Your kind of tree puts roots a mile down, sixty sections square. You pull all the water and sap out’n the ground as fur as you kin reach, and any man thet’s tryin’ to grow on it alongside of you is goin’ to drouth-out and die young.”

He paused, the painful lines of the hard-dredged thought easing away.

“I jest reckon,” he said quietly, “thet I’d ruther die my own size, and in my own way and time.”

Nathan Stark stood up. His wide blue eyes were for once warm. The flat timbre of his voice, in that final minute, fell as softly as Ben’s. He handed him the money and Ben took it, standing there uncertainly with it in his hand.

“Ben,” he said, “you’re the only man I ever envied. You’re what every man thinks he’s going to be when he’s a little boy. And wishes he had been when
he’s an old man. Ten months ago I meant to cut you and your brother into the ground. Six months ago it was the same. And three, and two, and one. You had taken my money from me and I owed you nothing but to get it back in any way I could, and with compound interest. Clint saw that. You never did and you never will. I tried to take the girl from you. You didn’t even see that. You won’t even see it now that I’ve told you.

“Ben,” he added slowly, “goddam your simple soul and slow, straight mind. You’re the only man who ever beat me, or ever will.”

He paused, putting out his hand.

“We never did shake hands,” he said quietly.

Ben took his hand, let it go quickly, all the strange feeling he held for the big Montanan coming up in him in an embarrassing, tongue-tying wave.

In the little moment he gripped his hand, bringing his pale eyes up to meet the harsh blue ones, he knew what it was about Nathan Stark a man would never forget, or let anybody take away from him. Coldbrainy hard-dealing, wolf-tough. Call him what you would, and watch him close because of it. Be maybe a little afraid of him, too, and want to get away from him and stay away from him. In the end he was your kind of man and you knew it:
he was a fighting man, pure and simple.

He turned to go then, and was at the door when Stark’s last words caught up to him.

“Sometime, Ben,” called the bearded Montanan, “when you want to measure a real big man, step against the nearest wall and make your mark.”

“I was never any good,” said Ben, “at makin’ marks—”

He closed the little green door on the words. He
went quickly through the Black Nugget and to the eagerly whickering black gelding at the hitching rail outside it. Swinging up, he turned the gelding into the freezing slush of Van Buren Street, toward the coal-oil lamplight of the Arbor Restaurant, where Nella and the others would be waiting. He did not look back and he never saw Nathan Stark again.

They brought their horses to a stop on the divide, sat them looking back and down on Virginia City.

Ben Allison had been on this skyline and in this wind before. Ten months ago, on a winter night no different from this one, he had reined the black in and gazed down upon the distant, twinkling lights of Alder Gulch and the Grasshopper Diggings.

He had been an outlaw then, a hunted man without money, or friends, or any future longer than the seven-inch barrel of his Army Colt. Now he had all these things—and much, much more.

With the first of the thought he felt, subconsciously, for the strange, thick feel of the moneybelt beneath his wolfskin winter coat, and he looked across the night to where the two cowboys held their ponies, back-hunched to the bite of the wind, waiting to follow him home to Texas, and beyond, into whatever of future he and the trailherd money could make for all of them.

With the last of the thought, he reached in the darkness for Nella’s hand. As he found it, the little paint mare sidled closer to the black.

“Penny for your thoughts, Ben,” Nella laughed softly.

“Wouldn’t sell ’em for all the gold Stark’s goin’ to make on our cows,” smiled the big Texan.

“A kiss then,” said Nella, and leaned quickly in
the saddle to brush her lips against his dark skinned cheek.

“Thet’s a heap different,” murmured Ben. “They’re cheap at half thet price.”

“So, boy—”

“I was thinkin’ of suthin’ I said to Clint when fust we rode down off’n this same ridge inter Virginy City. I told him I had a hunch we was goin’ to make the biggest strike since Comstock stumbled on his lode in Six-Mile Canyon.”

His long arm circled her slender shoulders, his drawling southern voice slowed.

“I reckon you’re it, Nella girl,” he said softly.

“And goddam it!” cut in Chickasaw testily,
“I
reckon thet me and Waco are freezin’ our Texas tails. Iffen you two have got done with yer infernal pawin’ and rumpin’-up to one another, I got one vote says we put the Petmakers to these here Red River crowbaits and p’int ’em fer Fo’t Wuth!”

“Second the motion,” complained the diminutive Waco. “I ain’t got nobody’s love to keep me warm, savin’ my own. And she’s done froze clean up to my shortribs a’ready”

“Three votes for the Sunny San Saba,” laughed Nella Torneau. She reined the little paint around, flashing her old bright smile at Ben. “What do we hear from Comanche County?”

“She’s unanymous,” grinned Ben. “Three cheers fer the Indypendent Republic of Texas!”

They were gone then, the eager ponies moving quickly down the far slope of the Virginia City stage road and into the waiting southern darkness, the black gelding and the paint mare first, the bony gray and the ewe-necked chestnut last.

“Wal, Chickasaw,” drawled Waco, nodding idly
toward Ben’s lean back, “what you acherally think o’ him, now thet ev’rythin’s said and did and we’re only sixteen hundred miles from home?”

Chickasaw thought it over. He spat contemplatively, and carefully, downwind.

“He’ll never amount to nothin’ on God’s green prairie, exceptin’ six foot four of dumb-simple San Saba cowboy,” said the old cattleman softly.

Then, more of pride and meaning in it than any book could put in print, or clumsy storyteller spell out:

“He’s jest another tall man from Texas—”

Seventy-five miles south of Billings is the Cheyenne Agency town of Lame Deer, Montana. Speaking there in the summer of 1915 at a Nathan Stark Memorial Day program arranged by the Society of Montana State Pioneers, the famed Cheyenne chief, Two Moons, then over seventy years old and straight as a sapling pine, had this to say of the Battle of the Bozeman Crossing of the Yellowstone: