A.C. Huidekoper stepped forward to shake his hand and Roosevelt said, “The land will recover, and you with it. You’re a capital fellow.”
“Yes, it takes more than a few blizzards to get rid of a long-winded geezer like me. Good luck to you, Theodore.”
Pack said, “Have you a parting quote for the Cow Boy?”
Roosevelt squinted through his glasses at the towering bluffs. He looked all around. “I came to the hills of this fair Territory in great despair, and it has blown the cobwebs from my eyes. This great and glorious West has made me strong and whole, and ready as well as eager to return to my spirited career of honorably stirring up the hack politicians of the Empire State.” At that last bit he flashed his brash many-toothed mischievous grin.
“What are you going to do?”
“My good lady Edith is waiting in New York to marry me and I have a little daughter whom I haven’t seen in far too long a time. And after such experiences as those we have enjoyed with the royalist Mr. De Morès I am resolved to plunge myself back into politics, for it seems more than ever important to me that the ideals of our precious democracy be defended. I’ve decided to run for the office of Mayor of New York.”
“Well good luck to you, Theodore.”
For it was true: Pack had been admitted to the circle of those permitted to address Roosevelt by his first name.
He still was not certain it was a circle to which he cared to belong.
Roosevelt pointed to the precarious stack of newspapers in the wheelbarrow behind Pack, and said offhandedly, “Why don’t you tie those in bales so they won’t get away from you?”
As the train departed, Pack wondered, Why didn’t I ever think of that?
That night, by pure accident, The Bad Lands Cow Boy burned to the ground.
Epilogue
June 1903
A considerable crowd had gathered in the ghost town. Several hundred people waited by the embankment for the eastbound flyer. Looking out the window of the train, Pack saw women and old men in the uniform of the Grand Army of the Republic and children and young men in the ragtag outfits of the Cuban campaign. Many of them were too young to remember this town when it had been alive; but Pack recognized some who had been cow hands here.
He saw dozens of men draw sidearms and check their loads.
The train, preceded by the howl of its whistle, slowed a-clatter across the Little Missouri River bridge. The President and his party were aboard, including Pack, having joined the train five miles west at Huidekoper’s loading pens; it wasn’t for the local celebrants to know that Colonel Roosevelt and his hand-picked cronies had spent the night at the site of his old Elkhorn ranch swapping ebullient yarns about the old days in the Wild West.
Not that those days were so far gone. Pack saw dozens of arms lift above the hats of the crowd. Each hand had a gun in it.
One of them was Jerry Paddock’s.
Joe Ferris saw him too. When the train stopped Joe was out first, moving fast despite his considerable girth. Pack followed him into the crowd but when they reached the point where Paddock had been standing, the villain was nowhere to be seen.
“Come on,” Joe said. “We’ve got to find him.”
Pack knew what was in the front of Joe’s mind. Roosevelt was President only because of the assassin’s bullet that had killed McKinley; Jerry Paddock was just crazy enough to want to replicate that bit of history—and there was no question Jerry Paddock had a score to settle with Theodore Roosevelt.
Pack and Joe jumped up on the platform and swiveled, trying to peer in all directions at once. The crowd swayed maddeningly; it was difficult to see anyone clearly. A blustery wind—buff-colored from the sand it carried—stung Pack’s eyes and lashed his coat against his knees and made it difficult to see; he squinted and once he thought he saw Paddock and he reached out to tug at Joe Ferris’s sleeve but it wasn’t Paddock at all.
Paddock was somewhere else—out of sight, working up his rage, perhaps drawing his two guns even now.
When he stepped out onto the rear vestibule President Theodore Roosevelt was clearly pleased by the size of the crowd, by the earsplitting shout of welcome and by the racketing fusillade of gunshots that roared overhead.
“By Godfrey, a true Bad Lands reception.” The President laughed with magnificent vitality. His wide face shone in the sun—that famous broad cartoon of huge teeth, shaggy mustache, glittering eyeglasses. “Thank you all, my fine friends! My goodness—this must be the entire population of the Bad Lands down to the smallest baby. What a fine day!”
His autograph was much in demand. He bent over the railing to receive books and papers, signed them and handed them back. Then after a short time—short enough to prevent the crowd from growing restive—he removed his rough hat and held it up in one hand while from the platform at the back of his private railroad car he obliged the multitude with a torrent of talk.
The election campaign was still a year away but the President was taking no chances; this tour of the West was unabashedly designed to mend old fences and build new ones. There was the issue of Roosevelt’s unelected Presidency: he had not been voted into the office; he had inherited it, and those who disapproved of his politics resented that. And there was also the fact that in the last election large portions of the West had voted for William Jennings Bryan—and against the McKinley-Roosevelt ticket—on the freesilver proposition, which was an issue both sides of which still bestirred great wrath among Westerners. It seemed transparent to Pack that Roosevelt was trying to repeal the free-silver sentiment by exploiting his close ties to the region.
The Bryan partisans had not folded their tents. Quite the contrary; they had risen to the challenge with the fervor of zealous fanatics. Pack knew that earlier whistle-stops on this journey had been enlivened vividly by several hostile audiences. A few had broken into serious mob riots.
“Even discounting Jerry Paddock, there may be trouble here too, from the malcontents,” Huidekoper had said to Pack just ten minutes ago. And sure enough he heard the angry murmuring sounds of discontent rumbling from several quarters of the crowd as Roosevelt plunged into his hearty speech.
Trying to watch everyone at once, Pack stood under flailing shadows as the great restless rolling buffalo of a man (when he was orating you didn’t notice how short he was) thrashed his powerful arms, peppering the air with spirited high-pitched exclamation.
Roosevelt engaged the crowd with what some of them wanted to hear: he talked of his new designations of National Wildlife Refuges; he talked of San Juan Hill and of his intention to send the Navy to the Isthmus of Panama to protect the proposed canal route against resistance from what he called “those homicidal corruptionists of Colombia.”
Much of the President’s harangue had the hollow ring of campaign malarkey. Yet the man actually meant what he said. The President could spout bombast and bluster but he was no fool. The world, Pack thought, had seldom known such a contradictory array of conflicting qualities in one man.
There were boos and hisses now—catcalls; a segment of the crowd was turning unruly. Pack heard the rallying cry “Cross of gold!” and there was a nasty growl from a dozen throats.
That was when the gaunt two-gun pushed forward through the crowd. Jerry Paddock!
Joe Ferris reached under his coat.
Jerry Paddock smiled his wicked saturnine smile and shook his head at Joe Ferris.
Joe’s Remington lifted.
The President watched—silent for a change—for a brief moment while Jerry Paddock waved a hand at Joe Ferris and, keeping his hands in plain sight, climbed onto the train and stood facing the crowd, a gun on each hip, his arms folded, whipping his stare instantly toward anyone in the crowd who showed any signal of disapproval.