Friends (16 page)

I looked from the young man to Marsh and back and forth again, not knowing exactly who to talk to. "A horse with three toes? Are you sure it's a horse?" I ask.

"Oh, yes," the young man said. "Most early paleolithic horses have three toes, except
Eohippus,
which has four. I'll show you a whole skeleton when we're done here, and you'll see it's a horse all right."

"Very good, Mr. Sargeant, very good. You next, Mr. Ballard. Any inaccuracies in Mr. Sargeant's recitation?" It was clear the professor was enjoying himself.

The next young fellow, who was big in the belly and wore specs, stood up. "Basically, what he said was correct, I think, though I'm not so sure that the foot would be the most obvious difference we would notice if a specimen of
Mesohippus
had walked up to us while we were eating Billy's delicious stew."

The boys all clapped their hands and whistled, but the cook looked more embarrassed than pleased.

"No," the chubby fellow said, drawing out the sound of it, "I think we'd notice the difference in size first, and that's the contrast I wanted to talk about.
Mesohippus
stood about sixteen or eighteen inches at the shoulder, about as tall as the coyotes that keep us awake at night. A little higher at the rear, probably." After that he sat down.

"Finish the contrast, Mr. Ballard," the professor said.

The fellow wearing specs looked puzzled for a minute before he spoke. "Oh yes, and
Equus
is, well, as big as a horse!"

We all laughed at that one, even the professor. "Questions, Willie?"

"You mean to say this horse was no bigger than a good-size dog?"

The chubby young man nodded his head.

"Then how could anyone ride him?" I ask.

Everbody chuckled at that, too.

The professor answered that one himself. "That was not a problem, Mr. Goodwin, for there were no men around at that time!"

I never saw folks enjoy themselves any more than those fellows did that afternoon, talking and arguing and joking about a critter that'd been dead for thousands of years-so they said-though I couldn't see how the bones would last that long in the ground. I had dug up a few dead things too in my day. They went around 'til everyone had his tum to say what he knowed, and they knowed a lot. I admit I didn't understand very much of what was said toward the end. Besides not knowing some of the words they used, I kept picturing that little horse with three toes on each foot scampering around and around with no cowboys to rope it, and that kept me from listening to some of it.

He stuck his head out the front of the covered mule wagon and looked both ways before jumping down. Buttoning up his pants, he walked to where the boy lay and poked at him several times with the toe of his boot. Then he rolled Walter Turnbull over on his back.

He mounted the paint, spurred her hard, and noticed how tired she was. The tall man reined her in and turned her around. There stood the muleskinners horse at the back of the wagon, and he laughed at how forgetful he was getting as he rode back for it.

"Very good, gentlemen, very good," the professor told them. "I'm quite pleased at the progress you're making, and we have about eight tons of fossils to send back to the Museum, which is excellent. But now we have another matter to attend to before you return to you shovels and trowels for the remainder to the day's dig. Mr. Goodwin is an officer of the law in this Territory, and he has come here in search of information concerning a murderer who may be in the vicinity. Just another reminder, gentlemen, that you are no longer in Connecticut. I'll let Mr. Goodwin tell you the rest."

I stood up, like they done before, and told them about the man Clete and me was after, told them what he did, what he looked like and what kind of horse he was mounted on. They thought on it a while, but none of them'd seen him. The fellow with the specs'd seen a muleskinner's wagon to the south a little after dawn, before the rain stopped, he guessed, but none of the rest seen no one else. I thought to ask them about Mandy then, and I told them what
she
looked like and the horse
she
was on, but none of them'd seen her either. From the looks on their faces, though, it was plain they'd of rather run into her than him.

"I want to thank you young men," I said. "I enjoyed your speeches here about them tiny horses you're digging up. And I appreciate you trying to help me find those people I spoke about. Let me give you some advice, now. If you see the man I told you of, stay the hell away from him. Don't try to capture him or nothing like that, 'cause he'll kill you–he's had practice at it. One last piece of advice and then I'll stop. When you're diggin' up the bones of them little horses, be on the lookout for golden crowns. You just might find one or two. Might be worth some money."

They looked at me so queer for a minute, and then they talked quiet among themselves, and finally started to laugh some. I guess they believed I was telling them some kind of a Western joke, but I wasn't.

Marsh and me started back toward his camp not long after I ask the students about our man and Mandy. The professor give me a lecture all the way along about something he called geology, but it wasn't 'til we'd went a ways that I figured he was talking about why the clay hills and the gullies washed into them was the way they was. Something about an ocean being here once, he said, but I didn't see how that could be. I guessed he could make mistakes like anyone else, Yale College or no. Then he ask me what I was getting to about them golden crowns I had told his students to look out for, but I just winked and said he'd have to wait 'til he got to the end of the Book to figger it out.

We were on top of that high place when I told him that, and when we got near the bottom, his face looked like he still had some chewing left to do on it. In a brushy draw between two buttes, I saw a rider making his way toward us slow. I thought for a minute it was the man Clete and me was chasing-only he wasn't on a paint. But he
was
tall and thin, and I warned the professor to be on his guard. After he looked good, Marsh said he knowed the man and gave him a big wave and a haloo.

We sat and waited for him, and he was in no hurry at all to get to where we was. He was dressed all in buckskin, only it was fringed down the legs and all along the sleeves and at the bottom of his open coat. And everywhere there wasn't fringes there was strips of fur sewed on, over the shoulders, mostly. His light gray hat had a wide floppy brim and eagle feathers hanging off the back of it, tied with rawhide strips to a hatband of mttlesnake skin, so I thought for a minute he might be a halfbreed. But when he got up close, you could see he wasn't, for his skin was pale as a woman's and his eyes blue as a lake.

Though he wore no shirt, he had a red silk scarf, or something fancy like that, tied around his neck. A sash of the same color stuff was wrapped around his middle, and stuck underneath it was a big old Colt. Looked like an uncomfortable way to carry a revolver, pokin' into your side the least little bit you turned around. His hair, which was dark and wavy with just a few streaks of gray, hung down below his shoulders. He had a narrow little chin beard, long as your thumb, and his mustachios was full and waxed and they stuck way out, straight as anything, to beyond the sides of his face. More than anything else, he resembled a drawing of Bill Cody on a handbill I seen once, only younger and more rakish.

"Good day, Mr. Crawford!" Marsh called. "What have you found for us?"

The tall man reached around behind himself and held up a string of nearly a dozen grouse, prairie chickens and some other kind I didn't know, tied together at the foot. His saddle, if that was what you could call it, was a strange affair, unlike any I ever saw before. A buffalo robe formed the base of it, and the hide, decorated with wolf tails and porkypine quills where the fur was scraped off, hung over the horse's rump and draped halfway to the ground. It was double cinched, I saw, but I couldn't tell just what was underneath him, or under the hide. Firm enough, I guessed, for he had a piece of the buffalo skin folded over and sewn to form a sheath for his rifle. "Should feed you and the young gentlemen, sub," he said real soft. He was a Son of Dixie, you could tell by his talk. He let the birds dangle back to where they hung behind him and then looked at me square.

Marsh noticed and glanced at me and then back to the man. "This is Mr. Goodwin, Jack. He's an officer of the law."

Jack Crawford stuck his nose a little up in the air. "Is he, indeed? How do you do, suh?" he said, nodding his head low then, but keeping his eyes on me the whole time.

"How do," I said.

"Meet Captain Jack Crawford, Willie," Marsh boomed in that big friendly voice of his. "Jack is our guide, and when he's not leading us, he fills our larder with game. And when he's doing neither, he writes poetry." Marsh turned back to the tall fellow. "Is it three volumes you've published so far, Jack?"

The mention of his poem books seemed to smooth Crawford's hackles some. He smiled real bashful and patted the neck of his horse, which hadn't calmed yet. "Only two thus far, Professor Marsh. As you well know."

"Well, I'm sure the third will be coming off the presses any day now." He waited for Crawford to speak his mind, but the hunter seemed to have nothing to say-to that or to anything else. "If you are going back to camp, we would be happy to have you escort us, Jack."

Crawford gave another dip of his head and we started off, three abreast, the professor in the middle.

"Mr. Goodwin is searching for a man who killed some people in his jurisdiction," Marsh said after we'd went some distance. "Have you seen anyone?"

"Why, I don't believe I have, Professor Marsh," Crawford drawled, looking at the clouds.

"One of the students saw some folks in a mule wagon. Surprised you didn't see 'em," I said. "That's where we was, up talking to Professor Marsh's gang. Not a bad bunch of fellows–for Yankees."

Crawford leaned forward and looked me over good. "Are you from the South, sub, or do you jest with me?"

The look on 0. C. Marsh's face was pretty dark, like he wisht I hadn't stirred up this particlar hornets' nest.

"Yes, I am from the South, though I didn't grow up in the same parts you did, judging from the way you say your words, Captain Crawford. But I guess you will recall that one of the stars in the Stars and Bars was for Texas." I let him look me good in the eye after I said that, for I wanted him to know that I told the truth.

After a time he decided I had. "I apologize, sub, and pray you will accept it. Indeed, the Texans fought bravely in the recent conflict. Were you in their ranks?"

"Wasn't so recent," I said. "About twelve years since, now."

"Twelve years … It seems only yesterday to me." The way he said that, and how he put his hand to his heart while he said it, I could see how he might fancy poems. Professor Marsh looked relieved we wasn't about to go at one another's throats.

"Seems like a lifetime to me," I said.

Crawford sat up straight in that funny saddle he rode. "What was your regiment, Colonel Goodwin?"

"I am sad to say that I was not in the army," I told him. "Some of us was forced to stay in Texas. Chained to our work, you could say. I'd a thousand times rather been in the war than doing what I was doing, though."

"I understand that completely," the tall poet said.

"I appreciate you saying so," I told him.

The sun come out about then, and soon the clouds begun to scatter more than they had before. Where the path got narrower in a gully, Crawford dropped back some, so just Marsh and me was beside each other for a while. Once when I looked back, Crawford motioned with his head for me to drop back with him. I told Marsh I wanted a word with his guide, for directions, and then eased back.

"I am sorry, Mr. Goodwin. I didn't want to say so before, for reasons of my own, but just past midmomin', I saw that mule wagon ovuh toward the rivuh. Seemed to be a family, I believe."

"Not our man," I said. "Fellow we're after's astride a paint. A tall man, like yourself."

Crawford turned his head so sharp, I thought he might snap it off. "Ridin' a paint?"

"That's right."

"What'd he do, this criminal you're chasin' down?" Crawford ask. I figured right then that he had saw our man. "He ambushed someone, the sheriff! work for."

"A
Yankee
," Crawford said, like he was correcting me. "A
Jankee
sheriff."

"Where was he when you saw him?" I ask, knowing he just might draw that old Colt he wore and shoot me instead of answering. I don't often bluff a hand, but when I do, I give 'er all I got. He looked mad enough to bite my nose off, but I just stared at him.

"I have given my word of honor, suh, to a gentleman of the South that I would not divulge any information about him," Captain Crawford said, drawing himself up real tall and righteous.

"No, you give your word to help protect a backshooting sonofabitch who don't have enough honor to fill a percussion cap, let alone to be called a true Southerner. That's what you done." Crawford started to say something, but I put my hand up to stop him. Can't believe I ever tried anything so foolish, for you could tell he was a man who would not abide an offense of any kind and would shoot
any
man, once he believed he was in the right, and not blink an eye about it. I just kept my hand up to stop him from talking and plowed ahead. "You, sir, are siding with a man who murdered a woman in her sleep by settin' her house afire. A bam-burner, I believe you call them in your part of the South. That's the kind of man you have swore to help-a sniper and a bam-burner."

Captain Jack kept glaring at me like he was measuring my head for a watch fob, but I turned and looked straight down the trail. After a while, he dropped back so that we were riding single file. I was still trying to figure out how I could get him to tell me what he knowed about our man when we got to Marsh's camp. When we pulled up, Professor Marsh's wrangler come out to take his horse, and the professor dismounted and went toward the big tent. I walked the bay in the direction the wrangler took with Marsh's animal, thinking maybe Crawford would do the same, and after a time he did. We climbed off beside the rope corral and I fussed with my bedroll, hoping Crawford would feel inclined to talk. I could see no way to force it out of him, for I suspected I couldn't beat him in a fight. Maybe I would have to wait for Clete to have a word with him.