The Veteran (35 page)

The spring turned to early summer and still no-one came. He began to wonder where he should turn to ask where the Cheyenne had gone and where they had taken Whispering Wind. Only then could he follow. But he feared to ride east to Fort Smith or north-west to Fort Ellis, where he would surely be recognized. If he learned the army still wanted to hang him, he would take the name of Donaldson and hope to pass unknown.

He had been there a month when the visitors came, but he was away in the mountains trapping. There were eight in the party and they came in three long steel tubes that rolled on spinning black discs with silver centres but were drawn by no horses.

One of the men was their guide and the other seven were his guests. The guide was Professor John Ingles, head of the faculty of Western History at the University of Montana at Bozeman.

His chief guest was the junior senator for the state, all the way from Washington. There were three legislators from the Capitol at Helena and three officials from the Department of Education. Professor Ingles unlocked the padlock and the party entered on foot, staring about them with curiosity and interest.

“Senator, gentlemen, let me welcome you to Fort Heritage,” said the professor.

He beamed with pleasure. He was one of those lucky men to possess limitless good humour and to be hopelessly in love with the very activity from which he made his living. His work was his lifelong obsession, a study of the Old West and the detailing of its history. He was steeped in knowledge of Montana in the old days, of the War of the Plains, of the native American tribes who had warred and hunted here. Fort Heritage was a dream he had nursed for a decade and coaxed through a hundred committee meetings. This day was the crowning moment of that decade.

“This fort and trading post is an exact replica, to the last and tiniest detail, of what such a place would have been at the time of the immortal General Custer. I have supervised every detail personally and can vouch for them all.”

As he led the party round the timber cabins and facilities he explained how the project had had its birth in his original application to the Montana Historical Society and the Cultural Trust; how funds had been found in the dormant Coal Taxes fund held by the Trust and allocated after much persuasion.

He told them the design was inch-perfect, made from local forest timber as it would have been, and how, in his pursuit of perfection, even the nails were of original type and steel screws banned.

His enthusiasm overflowing and infecting his guests, he told them:

“Fort Heritage will be an involving and deeply meaningful educational experience for children and young people not only from Montana but, I expect, from the surrounding states. Tour bus parties have already booked from as far away as Wyoming and South Dakota. At the very edge of the Crow Reservation, we have twenty acres of paddocks outside the walls for the horses and we will take a hay crop in due season to feed them. Experts will scythe the hay in the old-fashioned way. Visitors will see what life used to be like on the frontier a hundred years ago. I assure you this is unique in all America.”

“I like it, I like it a lot,” said the senator. “Now, how will you staff it?”

“That is the crowning glory, Senator. This is no museum but a functioning, working 1870s fort. The funds run to the employment of up to sixty young people throughout the summer, right through all the main national holidays and above all the school vacations. The staff will be mainly young, and drawn from the various schools of drama in the principal cities of Montana. The response from the students wishing to work through the summer break and fulfil a worthwhile task at the same time has been impressive.

“We have our sixty volunteers. I myself will be Major Ingles of the Second Cavalry, commanding the post. I will have a sergeant, corporal and eight troopers, all students who know how to ride. Mounts have been loaned by friendly ranchers.

“Then there will be some young women, pretending to be cooks and laundresses. The mode of dress will be exactly as it was then. Other drama students will play the roles of trappers in from the mountains, scouts from the plains, settlers moving west to cross the Rockies.

“A real blacksmith has agreed to join us, so the visitors will see horses being shod with new shoes. I will take services in the post chapel over there and we will sing the hymns of those days. The girls will of course have their own dormitory and a group chaperon in the form of my faculty assistant. Charlotte Bevin. The soldiers will have one bunkhouse, the civilians the other. I assure you, no detail has been overlooked.”

“Surely there have to be some things that modern young people cannot do without. How about personal hygiene, fresh fruit and vegetables?” said a congressman from Helena.

“Absolutely right,” beamed the professor. “There are in fact three areas of subterfuge. I will not be having any loaded firearms on the post. All handguns and rifles will be replicas, save a few that fire blanks and only under supervision.

“As to hygiene, you see the armoury over there? It has racks of replica Springfields, but behind a false wall is a real bathhouse with hot running water, toilets, faucets and basins and showers. And the giant butt for rainwater? We have underground piped water. The butt has a secret entrance at the back. Inside is a gas-operated refrigeration unit for steaks, chops, vegetables, fruit. Bottled gas. But that’s it. No electricity. Candles and oil lamps only.”

They were at the door of the travellers’ bunkhouse. One of the officials peered inside.

“It seems you have had a squatter,” he remarked.

They all stared at the blanketed bunk in the corner. Then they found other traces. Horse dung in the stable, the embers of a fire. The senator roared with laughter.

“Seems some of your visitors can’t wait,” he said. “Maybe you have a real frontiersman in residence.”

They all laughed at that.

“Seriously, Professor, it’s a great job. I’m sure we all agree. You are to be congratulated. An asset to our state.”

With that they left. The professor locked the front gate behind him, still wondering about the bunk and the horse dung. The three vehicles ground down the rough tracks to the long strip of black rock. Highway 310, and turned north for Billings and the airport.

Ben Craig returned from his trapping two hours later. The first clue that his solitude had been disturbed was that the door in the main wall near the chapel had been barred from the inside. He knew he had left it closed but wedged. Whoever had done it had either left by the main gate or was still inside.

He checked the big gates but they were still locked. There were strange tracks outside which he could not understand, as if made by wagon wheels but wider with zigzag patterns in them.

Rifle in hand, he went over the wall, but after an hour of checking he was satisfied there was no-one else there. He unbarred his door, led Rosebud inside, saw her stabled and fed, then re-examined the footmarks in the main parade ground. There were marks of shoes and heavy hiking boots, and more of the zigzag tracks, but no marks of hoofs. And there were no shoe-marks outside the gate. It was all very odd.

Two weeks later the resident staff party arrived. Once again Craig was out tending his traps in the foothills of the Pryors.

It was quite a column. There were three buses, four cars with spare drivers to take them away and twenty horses in big silver trailers. When they were all unloaded the vehicles drove away.

The staff had changed back in Billings into the costumes appropriate for their roles. Each had a backpack of changes of clothing and personal effects. The professor had checked everything and insisted that nothing ‘modern’ be brought along.

Nothing electrical or battery-operated was allowed. For some it had been a wrench parting with their transistor radios, but it went with the contract. Not even books published in the twentieth century were allowed. Professor Ingles insisted that a complete change by one entire century was vital, both from the point of total authenticity and from a psychological angle.

“With time you really will get to believe you are what you are, frontier people living in a crucial time in Montana’s history,” he told them.

For several hours the drama students, having volunteered not only for a summer job that beat waiting tables but also for an educational experience that would help with their careers, explored their new environment with growing enthusiasm.

The cavalry troopers stabled their horses and fixed their sleeping quarters in the military bunkhouse. Two pin-ups, of Raquel Welsh and Ursula Andress, were tacked up and immediately confiscated. There was high good humour and a growing sense of excitement.

The civilian workers, the farrier, traders, cooks, scouts and settlers from back east, occupied the second large bunkhouse. The eight girls were marshalled to their own dormitory by Miss. Bevin. Two covered wagons, prairie schooners, covered in white canvas and drawn by heavy draught horses, arrived and were parked near the main gate. They would prove a focal attraction for future visitors.

It was late afternoon when Ben Craig reined in Rosebud half a mile away and studied the fort with a rising sense of alarm. The gates were wide open. Scouting from that distance, he could make out two prairie schooners parked inside and people crossing the parade ground. The flag of the Union fluttered from the pole above the gate. He made out two blue uniforms. He had waited weeks to be able to ask someone where the Cheyenne had gone or been taken, but now he was not so sure.

After deliberating for half an hour, he rode in. He came through the gate as two troopers were about to close it. They glanced at him curiously but said nothing. He dismounted and began to lead Rosebud to the stable. Halfway there he was intercepted.

Miss. Charlotte Bevin was a nice person, good-natured and welcoming in the American way, blonde, earnest and wholesome with a freckled nose and a wide grin. She gave Ben Craig the latter.

“Well, hallo there.”

It was too hot to be wearing a hat, so the scout bobbed his head.

“Ma’am.”

“Are you one of our party?”

As the professor’s assistant and herself a postgraduate student, she had been involved in the project from the outset and had been present at the numerous interviews leading to the final selection. But this young man she had never seen.

“I guess so, ma’am,” said the stranger.

“You mean, you’d like to be?”

“I suppose I do.”

“Well, this is a bit irregular, you not being on the staff. But it’s getting late to spend the night on the prairie. We can offer you a bed for the night. So stable your horse and I’ll talk with Major Ingles. Would you come to the command post in half an hour?”

She crossed the parade ground to the command post and tapped on the door. The professor, in full uniform of a major of the Second, was at his desk immersed in administrative papers.

“Sit down, Charlie. Are the young people all settled in?” he asked.

“Yes, and we have an extra one.”

“A what?”

“A young man on a horse. Early to mid-twenties. Just rode in off the prairie. Looks like a local late volunteer. Would like to join us.”

“I’m not sure we can take any more on. We have our complement.”

“Well, to be fair, he has brought all his own equipment. Horse, buckskin suit, pretty soiled, saddle. Even had five animal pelts rolled behind his saddle. He’s obviously made the effort.”

“Where is he now?”

“Stabling the horse. I told him to report here in half an hour. Thought you might at least take a look at him.”

“Oh, very well.”

Craig did not have a watch, so he judged by the fall of the sun, but he was accurate to five minutes. When he knocked he was bidden to enter. John Ingles had buttoned up his jacket and was behind his desk. Charlie Bevin stood to one side.

“You wanted to see me. Major?”

The professor was at once struck by the authenticity of the young man before him. He clutched a round fox-fur hat. An open, honest-looking nut-brown face with steady blue eyes. Chestnut hair that had not been trimmed for many weeks was held back by a leather thong in a ponytail, and beside it hung a single eagle feather. The buckskin suit even had the straggling hand-stitching he had seen before on the real thing.

“Well now, young man, Charlie here tells me you would like to join us, stay a while?”

“Yes, Major, I surely would.”

The professor made a decision. There was a bit of slack in the operating fund for the occasional ‘contingency’. He judged this young man to be a contingency. He pulled a long form towards him, took a steel-nibbed pen and dipped it in the inkwell.

“All right, let us have a few details. Name?”

Craig hesitated. There had been not a hint of recognition so far but his name might ring a bell. But the major was plump and somewhat pale. He looked as if he had just come out to the frontier. Perhaps back east there had been no mention of the events of the previous summer.

“Craig, sir. Ben Craig.”

He waited. Not a hint that the name meant anything at all. The plump hand wrote in clerkish script: Benjamin Craig.

“Address?”

“Sir?”

“Where do you live, son? Where do you come from?”

“Out there, sir.”

“Out there is the prairie and then the wilderness.”

“Yes, sir. Born and raised in the mountains. Major.”

“Good Lord.”

The professor had heard of families who lived in tar-paper shacks deep in the wilderness, but this was usually in the forests of the Rockies, in Utah, Wyoming and Idaho. He carefully wrote ‘No Fixed Abode’.

“Parents’ names?”

“Both dead, sir.”

“Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Gone these fifteen years.”

“So who raised you?”

“Mr. Donaldson, sir.”

“Ah, and he lives ... ?”

“Also dead. A bear got him.”

The professor put down his pen. He had heard of no fatalities due to a bear attack, though some tourists could be remarkably careless with their picnic garbage. It was all a question of knowing the wild. Anyway, this handsome young man was clearly without family.