Brian Garfield Read Free

say he runs around the White House grounds every day. That beef you’re talking about is muscle.”
    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.”
    â€œHe’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.”
    â€œNo sir,” said Joe Ferris. “He always had it in him. It took some longer than others to see that.”
    â€œPossible,” 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.
    â€œTarget 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