“Does sound a bit fishy,” I said, remembering that Grant’s administration was rocked by scandals. Had the transcontinental line been one? I couldn’t recall.
“Mark me, sir,” said Beard. “When everything comes to light a foulness will rise under heaven!”
Johnny yawned prodigiously and got up to pursue a train butch who’d passed through hawking plums.
Beard quit his polemic as my long looks out the window grew more frequent. Actually there was little to see: tumbleweeds blowing in acres of sun-blasted gray grasses that undulated like flowing water; it was as if we weren’t moving at all, but were adrift in a hot, monotonous sea. Not even the Platte, which we’d followed for miles, was now visible.
At length Johnny returned with plums. In a low voice he said, “I went up and down the cars. Looked in every one. There’s a passel of card games going on. I checked those especially close.”
“And?”
“No sign of them on this train.”
So far, so good, I thought.
Chapter 25
Night was a relief. Not only from the heat, but from the constant selling. As if the train butches weren’t enough, local peddlers were out in force at each station pushing food, clothes, handmade goods. Competition made the butches more aggressive. They thrust day-old newspapers at us, magazines, postcards, dime novels, handbooks, guidebooks, maps, joke books; whispered that we might like spicier fare, flashing dog-eared copies of Police Gazette and naughty novels, Velvet Vice and Fanny Hill. They hawked apples, pears, oranges, California grapes, dried figs, fresh bread, country butter, maple sugar, cigars, razors, candy, peanuts—the last salty and followed by noisy campaigns for soda water. Peace came only when we pulled down our shelves at night, crawled into them two by two, and fastened the curtains.
In the night we crossed the north fork of the Platte. Morning found us well on toward Cheyenne. The look of embarking passengers roughened. Open drinking increased and the number of women diminished. Turnover was frequent, and it became clear that few in our car were going all the way to California.
The guidebooks touted Cheyenne as the largest city between Omaha and Sacramento, leading us to expect more than we got. It was a rough, dreary, filthy collection of unpainted board-and-canvas structures. There were the customary card and billiards tents, saloons, railroad sheds, government offices, and crude hotels with signs saying SQUARE MEALS & LODGINGS. I was no longer surprised at seeing a theater. Like small-town movie houses of the future, they were everywhere.
It was a study in brown. Nothing green grew anywhere. Beyond the tracks, stirring dust against an infinity of dun plains, horsemen idled with ridge-spined, long-horned cattle. The town itself numbered about four thousand, almost all men—menacing, slouching types in boots and broad-brimmed hats, conspicuously armed with revolvers, rifles, knives. I bumped into one, a grizzled miner with wiry whiskers and mad staring eyes. “’Scuse me,” I said, provoking a double-take and a curse. Shootings and stabbings were nightly occurrences. When things got too far out of hand—that must have been something—the local Vigilance Committee sent the offenders a drawing of a tree with a man dangling from it, and the message “Clear out.”
Sweet place. It was one thing to see quaint, rough-hewn towns in movie Westerns. Quite another to be in one of the stinking, depressing places, where every hitching area was a cesspool. I was fast getting my fill of the Old West.
We’d all been hoping for a better-than-average breakfast, but the only attraction in Cheyenne’s dining room was a row of stuffed big-game animals staring down at us from the walls. Two Chinese waiters, the first we’d seen, worked frantically to feed everybody.
Just as our turn came to order, the conductor shouted, “Get aboard!”
“Steak looked tough as whipcord anyway,” Johnny said.
We bought cheese sandwiches from a butch.
“Smile?” a burly man in buckskins said, taking a seat in front of us.
“What?”
“He’s askin’ if you want a drink,” said Johnny.“Oh,” I said. “No, thanks.”
He snorted and spat a fountain of tobacco juice that missed the nearest spittoon by a yard.
“How’d you know what he meant?”
“Circus,” Johnny said. “You run into all kinds.”
“Here, too.”
As we chuffed upward toward Sherman Summit, the man in buckskins began a discourse on buffalo hunting, an art he’d practiced with single-minded dedication.
“We was droppin’ ’em so fast the skinners ’n scrapers couldn’t keep up. Get upwind of ’em, you know, and they’re so thick brained they just stand there with their mates falling all around. Three . . . four thousand. Don’t know how many I kilt. The barrel got hot enough some days to set the grass afire just touchin’ it. That was when I worked for the Goddard brothers feedin’ the Kansas Pacific crews.” He took a pull from his bottle and belched. “Hell, I knowed them days was doomed even then. Too sweet a thing to keep others away from. Got so there was a thousand hide-hunters out there a-stalkin’ our buffaler. Soon after, weren’t nobody makin’ money. Price dropped from five dollars a hide to less ’n one. How you gonna kill a animal for one measly buck? Got so’s the skinners’d slit the buffalers’ bellies and rip their hides off with teams of horses. Left the carcasses to rot.” He took another long pull. “Yep, I saw the end a-comin’.”
A black-and-white image: bones heaped on the prairie, gathered by scavengers to sell to soap makers; the pathetic remains of the endless herds. I'd seen the photograph somewhere; now, in my imagination, rotting hulks in the prairie grasses were interspersed with the corpses of Indians killed in their villages—the vast West, a killing ground.
“Don’t look like my story’s settin’ too good with you,” Buckskin said, spitting.
“I don’t like slaughter.”
“Eat meat?”
I nodded.
“Wearing shoes, ain’t you?” he said, pointing at my feet. “Leather shoes?”
“You’re right, I’m part of it.”
“You sure as damnation are!” He snorted and looked around triumphantly, laughing. “What’s your line?” he
