A.C. Huidekoper was looking around at the buildings of the town with a look that struck Pack as somewhat prideful: almost proprietary. Not that there was anything wrong with that; Huidekoper was the only one of them who still lived hereabouts so he had a right to think of the town as home if he was a mind to.
Huidekoper said, “Tomorrow he’ll make a speech right here—it’s what he wants. There’ll be crowds coming in from Dickinson and Bismarck and Helena too, I would venture to guess. But nobody knows he’s stopping here today. Today it’s just us. The old friends.” Huidekoper swept off his big hat, exposing his bald cranium to the sun. “We were privileged, I perceive, to be witness to the making of an American hero. I’m pleased to take note that a few of us were aware of it at the time.”
Joe Ferris looked pointedly at Pack: “And a few of us were not.”
“He’s a famous man now and that colors a lot of memories,” Pack said. He felt cross with them all. “The plain fact of the matter is he was a ridiculous dude in the Wild West. He was a wretch and I marvel he survived at all. Sickly young fool and half the population trying to kill him to gain favor with the Marquis.”
A.C. Huidekoper said, “It was this country made a man of him.”
“No sir,” said Joe Ferris. “He always had it in him. It took some longer than others to see that.”
“Possible,” Howard Eaton conceded. “But the Bad Lands brought it out. The Bad Lands and the Stranglers. They were enough to put gristle on any young man.”
Joe Ferris said, “I’ll differ with that. Thing about it is, the Stranglers didn’t harden him. The first time you see a man hanging by the neck it’s horrible. The second time it’s not so bad. By the fourth or fifth time most folks become indifferent. But he never got that way.”
Pack was unable to compose a further retort before Johnny Goodall ranged forward amid the crowd of horses and drawled greetings: Johnny the Tall Texan—a good man, kind and fair, who had put the lie to the myth that if you got down with dogs you had to get up with fleas. Johnny had been the Marquis De Morès’s range foreman but no one had held it against him—not even Theodore Roosevelt.
Waiting for the Presidential train the five men stood clustered in eager impatience, telling stories and waiting to tell stories, until suddenly there was a racket of steady angry explosive barks that froze them in sudden confusion.
Pack remembered that sound. Knew it.
Gunshots. Not far away at all.
Nine … ten …
Johnny Goodall said, “Forty-five hog legs. Two-gun man. Far side of the embankment.” His voice left no aperture for dispute; Johnny didn’t say much but when he did, only a fool would argue with him. Johnny generally knew what he was talking about.
A.C. Huidekoper bristled. “What kind of fool would disturb the peace out here at a time like this?”
The unseen shooter started up again with a steady banging rhythm: ten shots, evenly spaced. Echoes spanged back from the bluffs.
“Target practice,” Joe Ferris observed. “Let’s take a look.”
They swarmed awkwardly up the weedy pitch of the Northern Pacific rampart. Pack’s boots skidded under him and he had to scramble to keep from losing his balance.
At the top Huidekoper continued to scowl. It made Pack recall how the bald little Pennsylvanian’s indignations always had lingered near the surface. “There’s the rascal—there he is.”
It took Pack a moment to find the object of Huidekoper’s glare—he saw the saddled horse first, ground-hitched and waiting; then the man farther away, tall and gaunt in a long dusty black coat, fifty yards south of here along the riverbank, standing in a clutter of volcanic boulders, peppering away with steady deliberation at a pile of tin cans that individually leaped and bounced like carousing fleas. When the right-hand revolver was finished the left-hand one began with no interruption in the metronomic rhythm; there was something awful about it—as inhuman and indifferent as a machine.
Having emptied his third pair of cylinder-loads with baneful effectiveness the two-gun man paused to plug out his empties and refill the chambers from coat pockets that bulged with a weight of ammunition. Then he holstered both weapons and turned toward his horse. He put one foot in the stirrup, lifted himself aboard and adjusted the reins in his grip. Then he looked up. That was when he discovered Pack and the other four. Under the flat black hatbrim his face shot forward with an atavistic suspicion.
It was a blade-narrow face upon which two features were remarkable even at this distance: great jagged eyebrows and the drooping Mandarin-style mustache—silver-hued now, but twenty years ago they had been deep glistening raven black: as singular then as now. For there was no mistaking that Ichabod Crane angularity, the poised stance, the belligerent thrust of jaw. Even at this remove, Pack identified the villain instantly, as if the intervening years had been erased.
Joe Ferris said, in a voice soft with revulsion, “Jerry Paddock. Didn’t know he was still alive.”
“He wouldn’t be, if justice had been left to me,” said Howard Eaton.
Johnny Goodall said, “Never mind, sir. I expect you’re just as satisfied you never took occasion to lynch anybody.”
“Speak for yourself,” Eaton growled, but Pack knew Johnny Goodall had told the truth of the matter.
The villain couldn’t have heard the words at that distance but he lifted his reins as if in response, swept the five men with one final withering stare, wheeled the horse expertly on its hind legs and broke away in an immediate canter, riding off upriver with leisurely insolence.
A.C. Huidekoper said, “I put forward the suggestion we consider what might bring that vile carrion here to this place on this particular day.”
Howard Eaton chopped the blade of one hand into the other palm. “I brought my hunting rifle, in case it’s the President’s pleasure.”
Huidekoper was squinting cheerlessly toward the river bend to the south where the departing horseman continued to dwindle. “I wouldn’t care to begin to count the number of times Jerry Paddock made threats upon Roosevelt’s life.”
“Not to mention the time Theodore got the better of him barehanded against both revolvers,” Eaton added.
Pack said, “I wonder if those are the same two Colts.”
Eaton went on: “It must have been the kind of humiliation that would have galled a far less arrogant man than Paddock. You were there that time, weren’t you, Joe?”
Joe Ferris said, “I was, and I don’t think Jerry Paddock’s forgot it either. Be a good idea if we all stand close around Mr. Roosevelt today—and keep both eyes peeled on the horizons. Those of us, that is,” he added with a dry glance toward Pack, “who give a damn about the life and good health of the President.”
“Now Joe, that’s hardly fair,” Pack complained. “I’ll keep as sharp an eye as any man here, and you’re a hell of a friend if you think any different.”
“I was only pulling your leg there,” Joe Ferris said. “Let’s not all get even more tetchy than we need to.”
No one else had heard any signal yet—certainly Pack hadn’t noticed anything—but when Johnny Goodall said, “Here comes the train,” nobody doubted him for an instant. They all turned and marched toward the platform.
By the time they had reached it and Pack had bent to sweep some of the dust off the knees of his trousers, the train was in sight, coming down out of the cut between the eastern bluffs.
Watching the advance of the heavy steam locomotive, Pack felt his heart race with an unexpected thrill—and at the same time his eyes swiveled fearfully toward the trees upriver where the evil horseman had disappeared.
The run to the Elkhorn that day became a flickering confusion in Pack’s mind; later when he thought back on it there was little he remembered of the thirty-mile ride downriver except for the heat, the gritty dust in his teeth and the general sweaty discomfort of it.