Stamping Ground Read Online Free PDF Page B

hang him in Bismarck, he’ll collect enough publicity between now and eighteen eighty to step into Hayes’s shoes.”
    â€œIn that case, why send just us? Why not a posse?”
    â€œThat’s easy. If the posse gets wiped out, he has to explain to Washington City what they was doing butting in on the army’s business, and probably get himself impeached, or whatever it is they call firing a judge. This way, if we don’t make it back—which strikes me as more than likely—he can say we was acting on our own or at most just offering our services to the authorities already involved. Two more scalps on Ghost Shirt’s belt don’t make a hell of a lot of difference in them drawing rooms back East. Besides, the judge can spare me, and since you ain’t his man anyway he can afford to toss you down the same hole. It’s like betting someone else’s money on a fair hand. He’s got nothing to lose and the whole pot to gain.”
    â€œHe’s told you this?”
    â€œA skunk don’t have to announce himself for you to know he’s there. My nose is as good as any lard-bucket newspaper reporter’s.”
    â€œGreedy, isn’t he?”
    â€œYour judge ain’t?”
    I returned my attention to the landscape beyond the window. We were shuddering now through the buttes—huge, flat-topped stumps of weathered granite whose red sandstone caps glistened with the remnants of a recent rain. Beyond them to the northeast, gunmetal-colored clouds were gathering for a fresh offensive upon the newly planted, still vulnerable crops in the Red River Valley. If it wasn’t torrential rains, it was drought. If it wasn’t drought, it was grasshoppers, “Mormon crickets,” that swarmed in by the hundreds of millions to blight everythingin their path. Fate and the elements stood in line for a lick at the unsuspecting settlers who dared take a plow to God’s country. For the rest of us He saved the Indians and the politicians.
    â€œI hate Dakota,” I said.
    The canvas-to-clapboard story in Bismarck found its echo in Fargo but intensified a hundredfold. Here, where the busy, backward-flowing Red River of the North transected the railroad jumping-off point for merchants and developers laden with hard-to-get goods and peddled dreams from Minnesota and points east, Chinamen, Scots, Germans, French and Scandinavians teemed the muddy streets and temporary shacks in greater variety than anywhere else west of the Old World. Hudspeth and I hoisted the bedrolls, slickers, saddles and rifles (his a single-shot Springfield, mine a Winchester so new it squeaked) that were our only luggage down from the rack and stepped into the sea of humanity on the platform in search of a livery.
    â€œIt used to be over there,” said the marshal, pointing out a building two blocks down the street, which now, if the sign was to be believed, sheltered the Golden West Emporium and Tonsorial Parlor.
    â€œIt’s come up in the world,” I observed.
    On our third try we found someone who spoke English well enough to direct us to a livery on a street with the optimistic name of Broadway. There, we haggled with the stony-faced old Scot who ran the place over some serviceable-looking horseflesh, including a pack animal, and at length agreed upon a mutually unreasonable price, for the payment of which we asked for and were given receipts made out in flowing European script that neither Flood nor even a skinflint like Blackthome could doubt. One hour, a meal, and four exorbitantly priced drinks later we were astride our new mounts and on our way to a métis camp which the bartender at the Old Fargo Saloon assured us was two miles south of the city limits. We were still riding five miles beyond that point.
    â€œI thought you said you knew where the camp was,” Igrowled at Hudspeth. Light was fading fast and the weeks between me and my last hard ride were beginning to