Guy Vanderhaeghe - The Englishman’s Boy

They were still so distant he could not make them out, but he presumed they were horsemen. The sun came nudging up behind him, soaring above the folds of the river bluffs. On they came, figures swimming in the waxing light. The Englishman’s boy shielded his eyes with his hand and squinted. He wasn’t sure, but he thought the three might be afoot. White men didn’t go abroad without horses. He took the Winchester off his back and laid it across his knees. The Colt he put no real stock in as yet, having never owned or even fired a short gun before. It was the carbine he trusted because he had been a hunter since the age of seven and a crack shot with a rifle. He sat and waited, hands relaxed on the gun-stock.

By the time the great yellow yolk of the sun was completely clear of the earth, he knew the men descending the slopes to the river flats were not mounted; but it was only God’s guess whether they were white or red. At six hundred yards the heads became dots and the bodies tapered. At four hundred yards they still lacked faces. At three hundred yards the heads were blurred, but now he knew they were white men. At two hundred yards they began to resolve into individuals.

Without more delay they were upon him, three men in stinking clothes stiff with grease and blackened with old blood, one of them in a slouch hat with eagle plumes stuck in its beaded band, another who called to mind a flour barrel with legs, the third, a redhead with a wispy beard the colour of a fox’s brush and the burned red face and white cracked lips of a man cursed with a complexion unsuited to constant sun and wind. They halted at the rock and leaned on the muzzles of their rifles.

“Morning,” said the redhead.

The Englishman’s boy nodded warily.

“What’s this?” said the stocky one. “Welcoming committee?” He was evidently in an ugly mood.

“Don’t pay no mind to Vogle,” the redhead told the boy. “He’s out of sorts from riding shank’s mare. He ain’t too light on his feet so’s it’s a chore.”

“Lost your horses?”

“Had twenty head lifted,” said the redhead. “Camp’s five mile from here up on the Teton. Didn’t think there was any need to ride night-herd so close to Benton, but we was wrong. Goddamn Indians would steal horses stabled in your front parlour.”

“Ten thousand wolf pelts sitting out there in six wagons and no horses to move them,” said the one the redhead called Vogle.

“We can borry teams from I.G.,” said the man in the slouch hat. “We’ll get them pelts in. I didn’t freeze my ass all winter skinning carcasses to get my carcass skinned come spring.”

“Not to worry,” said the redhead. “We’ll get them pelts in right smart and we’ll get on the trace of them horses right smart, and we’ll spank them red scamps right smart, won’t we, boys?”

“Hardwick,” remarked Vogle, “I swear to Christ you’re happy as a pig in soft shit that them Indians lifted our horses. You’re just looking for an excuse to take a crack at them.”

Hardwick flashed an uncanny smile. “Happy is the man doing the Lord’s work,” he said.

“Happy, happy, happy,” said the one in the slouch hat. He didn’t smile but he spat.

As Hardwick had said, with the loan of six teams and a couple of saddle horses to haze them out to the Teton, the wolfers ran their pelts into Fort Benton right smart. Bumping up Front Street in wagons, they cut a sorry sight, the grim set of their jaws testifying that they knew they were laughing stocks for getting carelessly relieved of their horses on the very doorstep of civilization. In the saloons to which they dispersed, there were sly remarks and winks about infantry and church parades and having to visit a cobbler to get your boots half-soled. That is unless the redhead, Tom Hardwick, happened to be present. He and John Evans were standing drinks all around in an endeavour to recruit a posse to recover the horses and punish the Indians. Both men were well-known in Benton. Most considered Evans an easygoing, affable sort, but Hardwick was held to be a dicey proposition and nobody to mock to his face.

As the day wore on the wolfers got drunker, touchier, and blood-thirstier. There was no stampede of volunteers to help retrieve the horses, and a reluctance to sign on often occasioned charges of cowardice and name-calling, a scuffle or two. Among the wolfers themselves there was resentment against Hardwick for threatening to turn them out of Benton so soon to pursue the horse-rustlers, nipping their fun in the bud after a solitary, cold winter. Philander Vogle, for one, was trying to cram as much amusement as he could into an afternoon at a crib on the line. The crib girls were the cheapest a jump, but they didn’t allow you to take your boots off, so Vogle stood at the end of the bed with a bottle in his fist, his pants down around his ankles, waiting for Nature to reassert herself with the wherewithal for a repeat poke. However, the lazy whore kept dozing off in between times – which wasn’t much encouragement to Nature.

Throughout the course of the day the Englishman’s boy kept moving, drifting up and down the town. He had nowhere to stop, nothing to do, nothing to eat but a box of crackers bought at a general store for an exorbitant price. Left high and dry by the Englishman’s untimely death, starvation seemed a probable fate. When he tired of tramping, he perched himself on a wagon tongue or a barrel, the flies and dust from Front Street settling on him as he gnawed his dry crackers and cogitated plans. Maybe he should try to swap his fancy pistol for a double-barrel and shells to keep himself in meat, potting grouse or rabbit or duck. The truth was, no matter how much sense such a scheme might make, no matter how hungry he might get, he knew he was not going to part with the pistol. The pistol made him, for the first time in his life, any man’s equal.

When night drew down, Fort Benton grew a good deal livelier even than it was during the day. The saloons poured light and music and drunken patrons into the street where they pissed and fought in the roadway. These fights, noisy affairs with much loud cursing and bellowing of threats, riled the horses tied to the hitching posts to a terrible pitch. They thrashed about, rolling their eyes and tossing their heads until their terror and tension became unbearable. Then they flew at one another, like the men in the street, kicking and biting and rearing until a tether broke and one went careering off helter-skelter down the dark street.

Meanwhile, the Englishman’s boy kept on the prowl, sidling out of the way when any particularly dangerous-looking drunk came lurching and muttering out of the gloom. A clear sky spelled that a chilly night was a certainty and staying on the tramp was the only way to keep the cold out of his bones until the livery-stable office closed and he could sneak into the barn and burrow in the hay.

By and by he found himself procrastinating outside the Star Saloon, debating whether or not to invest two bits in a drink. A tot in the belly and a warm place to stop would ease him through the cold hours until it was safe to scare up a place to sleep. It was a thorny, troublesome calculation, money weighed against comfort, but then, through the smeared saloon window, he spied the redheaded Hardwick seated at a poker table. A face he recognized somehow decided him. He went in.

The bar was packed. A fug of dense smoke, animal heat, stale sweat, and rancid grease greeted him as he stepped through the door. The smell of unwashed hide-hunters, mule-skinners, prospectors, and bullwhackers came as a shock after the crisp, clean night air, even to him, who couldn’t remember the last time a scrub cloth had touched him. At the far end of the room, behind a low fence with a swinging gate in it, he could see roughnecks galloping hurdy-gurdy girls in dizzy circles to a breakneck air battered out of an untuned piano. Picking his way amid the gambling tables to the bar, he bumped into a man who shot him a drunken, hostile stare. For a moment, the boy couldn’t place the stranger and then he recognized the headgear, a collapsible black silk top hat which Dawe had kept stowed in his steamer trunk. Its wearer was none other than the owner of the Overland Hotel, the same man the Englishman’s boy had blackmailed into renting them a room.