The sound of voices came to him. Men singing in Dukurika Shoshoni. Two of them. He shifted, made himself sit up. Mountains rose around him, a crystalline blue lake just down from where he lay. Overhead the sky was light blue, sunlight just cresting a ridge. The smell of sagebrush, juniper, and water rode down from above on the chilly breeze.
He was sitting before a big gray boulder, and as he started to stand, he froze. There—engraved on the rock—was the nynymbi. The short and squat figure seemed to stare out at him from the depths of the stone.
“Holy jumping Jesus,” Butler whispered.
Images came rolling up from his memory. It had to have been a dream—and a fevered one at that. Or it had been a version of madness that would have even horrified Philip.
He sucked in gulps of cold air, his body shivering. Nynymbi, rock ogres, Water Ghost Woman, these were stories. Stories he’d heard from Cracked Bone Thrower. But why would he have fixed upon them and dreamed so fervently…?
The spirit plant. What was it called? Toyatawura.
He’d heard of the phantasms conjured in opium dens. It had to be similar, a drug-induced haze of imagination.
He stood, bracing himself on the rock and avoiding the nynymbi’s gaze. Looking down the slope he could see the two men. Recognized the rounded shape of the sweat lodge.
Puhagan sat cross-legged, head back, his painted face turned to the sky, arms resting palms up on his knees. Cracked Bone Thrower was thumping a small drum, his eyes closed. He sat across the fire from the medicine man.
I don’t take care of the men? They take care of me?
He stumbled slightly, Water Ghost Woman’s eternally dark eyes watching from the depths of his soul. He’d never had a dream that vivid, erotic, or terrifying.
His stomach felt like an empty hole. His bladder ached with the need to empty itself.
“Hey?” he croaked through a rusty and swollen throat. “What the hell happened? Where are my clothes?”
Cracked Bone Thrower opened his eyes, the drumming stopped. “You were dead.”
“Pa’waip killed me.” He made a face. “But that was only a dream. My dream. You couldn’t know.”
“Your body was dead, Man Who Talks to No One. You stopped breathing. Your heart no longer beat. We have been making medicine to appease your mugwa and suap so that they would not come back and plague our people.”
“Pa’waip?” Puhagan asked. His eyes opened but remained fixed on the sky. He said something that Cracked Bone Thrower translated as, “She is not known for mercy. The puhagan asks why she let you live?”
“She said I was a good man.”
When that was translated, Puhagan asked something else.
Cracked Bone Thrower seemed to hesitate, then asked, “Did she tell you anything? Give you a gift?”
“Something about a silver eagle. If I save it, I condemn it.” Butler couldn’t stop shivering. His flesh felt like ice. “Puhagan, she’s not merciful. I wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if she’d just devoured my souls.”
“Why is that?” Cracked Bone Thrower asked.
“Because she left me with the truth, and now I have to live with it.”
99
November 26, 1867
That day in Fort Benton, Billy sat at a back table in the restaurant at Baker’s Chouteau Hotel. He had his foot up on a second chair. His cup of coffee rested by his right hand, and a cigar perched on a tin ashtray before him. Even at midmorning the establishment was busy. Billy could hear the hollow thump of boots through the plank floor overhead. The place was loud with the clink of dishes and utensils and the animated talk and laughter shared by the patrons.
In the wake of Danny’s betrayal, he’d come back to Fort Benton, certain he’d take a berth on one of the boats. That he’d ride on a steamboat. Go to St. Louis. See what a real city was like. Try once and for all to rid himself of Maw’s and Sarah’s ghosts. Maybe drive the demons from his head.
But the last of the boats had gone, racing winter and low water.
He’d tried drink, but that didn’t seem to make a difference. Strangling a whore? Sometimes it worked, other times she just fixed herself in his dreams with the other ghouls, and stared hollowly out from his memory with dead eyes.
He picked up his cigar and drew, enjoying the euphoria that tobacco sent pulsing through his veins. One thing for sure, if you could afford it, Fort Benton had everything. Fine cigars, good drink, real beds with mattresses, tinned oysters and pickled fish, fine clothing, and anything a fella needed to freshen his trail outfit.
Word was that no less than thirty-eight steamboats had unloaded their cargo at the levee that summer. One boat had carried more than a million dollars in gold back to St. Louis. If there were a center to Montana, Billy was smack in the middle of it. But it was a curious sort of center: a smattering of frame buildings in the midst of a haphazard mixture of tents and dugouts that looked sort of half circus and part prairie-dog town. So copious had been the cargo unloaded at the levee—and the transport so insufficient—that bullwhackers were still arriving, loading their wagons, and pulling out next day for the mining camps. Even at this late date and after the first hard blizzard.
He washed down the taste of the cigar with another swig of coffee. Real coffee. At I. G. Baker’s store he’d even traded in his old worn Sharps for a brand new Model 1863 sporting rifle. It shot flatter than his old gun, and he was still learning how to adjust the sights at distance.
He nodded as the boy came around with the coffeepot and watched as his cup was filled. At the
