Read Online Brian Garfield by Manifest Destiny - Free Book Online Page A

from last time. Roosevelt still looked as frail as he’d looked last summer when he’d come for the hunting. Consider yourself engaged. That hunt had been a true misery. Please God let us not repeat it. Let this one be easy.
    He listened absently to thudding hoof-falls and squeaks of saddle leather. As they rounded each bend there was a new shape to the horizon. Roosevelt said, “Don’t the colors amaze you?”
    â€œGuess so.” They clattered across a rock-fall of loose shale colored like rainbows. Above, a few chalk-white lateral stripes had bled down over the darker strata, leaving stains like whitewash. This stretch wasn’t much for green—nothing but a few stunted cedars on the hills.
    â€œThis air—” Roosevelt puffed his narrow chest to draw a wheezing breath, coughed, recovered “—fine clean sting to it, like the Alps. Like good tart cider. Look at the size of that sky. ‘Wild Lands’ I might better understand. But they’re not bad. Who called them Bad Lands?”
    â€œEverybody. Indians first.”
    â€œWhich Indians?”
    So he hadn’t changed much; hadn’t grown up any. He was still asking questions like a schoolboy. The dude seemed to want to stuff into his head every useless fact in the world.
    Joe extended his hand palm-up in a gesture. “Indians. Lakota, Crow, Cheyenne, Arikara, Mandan, Gros Ventre. Whichever. You know. Indians. ”
    â€œThey can’t have all lived here.”
    Joe contained his vexation. “Indians don’t live anywhere, Mr. Roosevelt. They drift on the plains. All the tribes camped and hunted here in the olden days. Sioux called the country Mako Shika , ‘land bad.’ Take a look at the old map in Arthur Packard’s newspaper office—must be a hundred years old—you see where some French-Canada voyageur put down ‘Bad lands to cross.’”
    â€œ Mauvaises terres pour traverser. ” Roosevelt showed teeth, proud of his French. Then his face closed up again.
    â€œThey tell it twenty years ago old General Sully chased Sioux through here—he’s the one supposedly called the place ‘Hell with the fires put out.’” Joe considered the buttes. “He was partly wrong. Some fires still burning.”
    â€œI remember those. Wasn’t there a coal vein burning near Huidekoper’s?”
    â€œStill on fire. Lignite. They burn for years.”
    â€œI make them ‘Good Lands,’” Roosevelt insisted. “When you come from a life of crowded noisy little rooms filled with tobacco smoke—it’s a stalwart country, Joe.” His face twisted and squinted. “Why, when I was a boy my whole ambition was to take a horse and a rifle out on the prairie and ride day after day without encountering another human soul—far off from all mankind. That’s freedom.”
    â€œYes sir. For you I guess. I never did take to range-riding. I’ll have four walls and a roof—I am of an indoor disposition. A little luck, I’ll be the second banker in Medora.”
    â€œWho’s the first?”
    â€œMarquis De Morès.”
    Roosevelt made no reply; he gigged the horse and rode on. Not like him to be so uncommunicative and glum.
    May be just a bad moment—he must be tired from the train journey. Better wait, drop more hints another time.
    â€œWe’ll get outfitted at Eaton’s ranch.” Joe added hopefully, “Unless you’d rather go fishing?”
    â€œI never fish,” Roosevelt said. “Can’t bear to sit still that long.” He seemed on the brink of tears.
    A three-strand wire fence crossed the trail. Someone had cut it and left the curled strands to dangle. When they rode through the gap Roosevelt said, “Is this Eaton’s fence?”
    â€œNo sir. Marquis De Morès’s.”
    â€œDoesn’t the man know enough to put a gate where there’s an obvious