Four

Arthur Packard set out to meet the train; today was Tuesday. Every Tuesday he pushed a wheelbarrow full of freshly printed newspapers down the two blocks to the platform for delivery to Mingusville and the other towns along the railway line to the west beyond the nearby Montana border.

Today seemed unexceptional. Of course he didn’t expect a Lunatic to bolt from the train.

Pack, with an itch somewhere under the cobwebby dark beard that he cultivated in an effort to make the world recognize that he was mature and responsible, teetered along the rough ground, balancing the precarious tower of newspapers and resolving, not for the first time, to hire a boy to act as printer’s devil and general chore-handler for The Bad Lands Cow Boy so as to absolve the owner-publisher from the indignity of picking up the four hundred newspapers that fell off the wheelbarrow at least once during each week’s perilous trek. If the papers didn’t topple of their own accord there had been until recently a contingent of ne’er-do-wells from Big Mouth Bob’s Bug Juice Dispensary to tip the load “accidentally” and inspire brays of yelping laughter from the saloon porch.

It didn’t matter that Pack, enraged, had boxed two of the ruffians to their knees within the month of April. Too drunk to feel the punishment, they and their friends had only continued laughing.

Then one of them—the kid, Riley Luffsey—had come forward in a brief show of cocky conscience. He was a lout, no more than eighteen, who strutted everywhere with an insolent swagger and tried to appear dangerous. Pack had heard him announce more than once his life’s ambition to become a pistolero as celebrated as the late Wild Bill Hickok; yet on that singular occasion, moved by some stray impulse from a better world, Luffsey had found the decency to help Pack gather up the spilled newspapers and wipe off the worst of the clay dust and help him heap them in the wheelbarrow.

But the kid had been assailed with such a thunder of hazing and hoo-rawing that he’d seen better than to come to Pack’s aid a second time.

Later the same Riley Luffsey had come to the side door of the Cow Boy. Pack remembered the kid’s hushed confession—“I can read and write!”—as if it were a secret of felonious shamefulness.

When Pack had offered the job of printer’s devil Luffsey had reared back on his dignity—“I’m a hunter, sir, not anybody’s hired hand!”—but he’d looked over his shoulder as he said it, and Pack got the feeling the bravado was mostly for the benefit of any of the ruffians who might be eavesdropping. Pack had tried to invite the boy in for a look at the printing press—there was something you couldn’t help liking about the kid, despite all his boasting—but Luffsey declined, hurrying away skittishly to rejoin his friends.

Like the rest of Redhead Finnegan’s unsavory crowd Luffsey usually could be found hanging about Bob Roberts’s saloon, sometimes weeks at a time, awaiting the arrival of trains carrying dudes who might be induced to hire guides and wranglers for big-game expeditions into the Bad Lands.

Luffsey might be tractable but his companions were incorrigible. Pack sometimes thought of buying a revolver but realized what an invitation to disaster that could be. At the same time certain notions of order and decency, inculcated in him since infancy, had to be defended.

Therefore last month he had taken to carrying a type iron in the wheelbarrow.

It was a metal side-stick that he used for locking type forms in the press—three feet long and heavy. Pack, having been a baseball batsman of some repute at Michigan, knew how to swing it.

That Tuesday a month ago “Bitter Creek” Redhead Finnegan and his assortment of ruffians had circled round in their customary baiting taunt and Pack, setting down the wheelbarrow with unhurried care and picking up the type iron, had knocked the nearest of them to the ground with one blow.

Since then no one had molested the wheelbarrow.

Today therefore he had no gantlet to run. All the boys were down at the Northern Pacific line, preparing the ritual hoo-rawing of the train. Pack had the street nearly to himself; there was only a desultory traffic of pedestrians and horsemen, and there were the two young men on the porch of Nelson’s drygoods store, catty-corner across the wide intersection from the shack that housed the Cow Boy. Pack set the wheelbarrow down in front of Nelson’s steps, stood up, jammed both fists in the small of his spine and arched himself backwards.

Swede Nelson, pink and plump, shifted the weight of the shotgun on his shoulder. He was preoccupied—staring down the street toward the cafe; when Pack looked that way he saw the girl Katie by the cafe door. She came out every morning to watch the train. She would stand motionless until the train disappeared to the west. For several months now she had watched it with dreamy despair.

Pack said to Joe Ferris, “Now, I thought you were on the trail with Theodore Roosevelt.”

Joe only grunted.

Pack said, “Where’s Roosevelt then?”

“Hunting, I expect.”

“Without you?”

“I am tired of trundling tenderfeet,” Joe Ferris said.

“Good money in it, though,” said Swede Nelson, his gaze intent upon the girl down the street.

“Be that as it may,” said Joe, “it’s my life’s aim to work indoors.”

The girl who stood at the cafe watching for the train was sixteen or seventeen and had a quick bold eye and a restless body. When Katie and her mother had come to work in the cafe it had been easy to see she was ripe to be plucked by the first sharp-dressed man who might step off the train for a day and give her a second glance on an evening when her mother was looking the other way. She wasn’t a whore but she was known to have stepped out with quite a few men who were not reputed to be gentlemen.

Lately somehow the bashful storekeeper Swede Nelson had worked up the boldness to approach her. During the past few weeks Pack had seen them arm-in-arm several times. He wondered if it was serious between them—or for just one of them.

Now Katie looked up this way and Pack saw the way she smiled at Swede before she stepped off the wooden sidewalk and strode, hips swinging healthily, toward the Northern Pacific platform.

Pack heard the whistling exhalation of Swede’s pent breath.

When he caught Swede’s shy grin, half pride and half guilt, Pack said, “Why don’t you go along there with her?”

Swede made no answer, other than a vague shifting of the shotgun on his shoulder.

Joe Ferris selected a soda cracker from the open barrel. He said, “Swede’s afraid if he leaves the store alone the boys will clean it out again.”

“In broad daylight?”

Swede made a face. “Night or day don’t matter. Can’t afford another loss.”

Joe Ferris bit off half the soda cracker with his neat teeth. “I keep telling him he’s got too much inventory of goods that nobody wants much—stocks that don’t turn over fast enough. What’s the news today, Pack?”

Pack unfolded the top copy. “Chinese Gordon’s still under siege in Khartoum.” He glanced through his inside-page headlines, reading upside-down. “Major league baseball elects to allow overhand pitching as well as underhand—batsman to call his choice.”

“Well now—that could be fun. We going to inaugurate that rule Sunday?”

“I’ll put it to a vote.” Pack glimpsed one brief item before he folded the newspaper. “In New York City they’ve opened a swank new apartment block they call the Dakota. Because it’s so far north in the wilderness. Isn’t that a howl?”

“Someday I want to see New York,” said little Joe Ferris. “May be I’ll open a bank there.”

Still plugging along on a previous train of thought, Swede Nelson said calmly, “If you keep a shop you must keep everything folks may want. Otherwise they buy at the competition.”