Showdown at Buffalo Jump (4 page)

Max shook his head. “Miss Catherine's waiting in the wagon.”

“She might as well learn to wait,” Jensen shouted. “She'll do plenty of it.” It was whiskey talk, and a ripple of whiskey laughter spread through the saloon.

Max shrugged and stepped up to the bar, and the men cheered. They were far enough into their cups to appreciate declarations of independence, particularly if they themselves didn't have to fight the civil war.

The men surged toward the bar, and Max's teeth bared as he noticed the banker Phillips standing in a little knot of men.

Max held the banker in contempt, and Phillips reciprocated with a vehemence that made his teeth hurt. The bad blood was bone deep and as old as their acquaintance, but the feud had been exacerbated by an incident that occurred not long after Phillips became president of the Prairie Rose Bank.

And every time Phillips saw Max, that time came back to him clear as the glasses hanging on the back bar. Phillips had just arrived in town, and he had spent a few weeks studying the populace. Hayseeds, he thought, and not two dollars to rub together among the lot of them. But they had land—mile after mile after mile of land.

The key to his fortune, the banker decided, was to separate these rubes from their land.

Phillips had spent the next couple of weeks poring over county records, determining which homesteads were worth stealing. That done, he set his nefarious mind to plotting.

The idea had come to him one night while he was soaking in the bathtub at the Harris boarding house. The flyer he was reading cautioned bankers to beware of those who wanted to poke pipes into the pockets of oil that underlay the Montana prairie. Some of these oil men, the flyer said, were as slippery as the gushers they were looking for.

Phillips's forehead furrowed as he studied the flyer, and then the corners of his mouth twitched into a smile. A moment later, Mrs. Harris was surprised at a peal of laughter from the banker's room. (Phillips was not a particularly jocular man.)

The plan was brilliant in its simplicity. First a letter to cousin Milburn. Milburn would collect some “oil men” who would spend a few weeks poking around the land bordering Pishkin Creek. They would peek through surveyor transits, set pins, and occasionally dig a hole. Asked what they were doing, they would answer cryptically that they were seeking signs.

Once all the ranchers in the area were properly primed, the oil crew would leave for a couple of weeks to allow the rumors to build and swirl along the banks of Pishkin Creek, and then the advertisements would begin appearing in the
Prairie Rose Printer:

Eastern oil interests have discovered major oil field in Prairie Rose area. First for the state. Huge development seen. People will flock to area by thousands. Prairie Rose will prosper and become major Montana city. Those interested in lining their pockets with oil money may attend meeting seven o'clock in the evening of August 19 at Millard's emporium. Free beer for the men. Free sarsaparilla for the
children. Free coffee for all, and free money for the taking. New day on Prairie Rose horizon
.

Milburn had collected as august a body of con men as ever breathed Montana's big sky, and the banker wanted to cry Bravo as he watched them play the crowd.

“As all of you good people are aware,” the pitch began, “oil is the product of vegetation and animals living long ago on these plains.”

The crowd nodded collectively. They were not about to admit their ignorance of how oil was formed to these big-city oil men.

“And as all of you know, fossils indicate where these oil-producing plants and animals lived.”

Nods again.

“And here we have some fine examples of fossils we have discovered along Pishkin Creek,” one oil man said, dumping a sackful of ancient shells and bones on the table.

Some of the people in the audience whispered smugly to their neighbors: “Yup. I figured them fossils were a good sign. Said so all along.”

Excitement was building, and when the people began to fidget in their seats, the oil men slipped in the sting. If the good people of Pishkin Creek were to invest five hundred dollars apiece, the operation could be under way within a week, and Prairie Rose would be on its way to riches.

The air exited 150 sets of lungs in one collective sigh. It was just like everything else. You had to have money to make money. Opportunity was walking right out the front door, and no one there had legs long enough to trip it.

Phillips let desperation build for a moment, and then stood: “Good people of Prairie Rose. These men have excited me with the prospect of new wealth for all of you and for this community, which I hold so dear.”

“I will not let this great opportunity slip through your fingers just because some of you may be suffering temporary financial problems. So I will march with you over to the bank right now—no banker's hours for the president of the Prairie Rose Bank—and give you money to invest in this worthwhile enterprise.”

“You can pay me back when the oil payments begin rolling in a few months from now. Don't think of this as a loan. Think of it as an advance on the fortunes you will be depositing in my bank in the coming good years.”

Then Milburn stood. “I will, by God, take some of that free money.”

“Me, too's” were popping up around the crowd like corn in a hot pan, and Phillips smiled to himself.

All his life, he'd been looking for the perfect con, and now he'd found it. He would lend the ranchers a quarter of their land's worth on a short-term loan. Half that money would go to cousin Milburn and the phony oil men and half to himself. It was, after all, his idea.

The oil men would skip town. The banker would be mortified, but what could he do? He had lent the bank's money, and he had to collect it. So he would foreclose ranches for a quarter of their value. Then he would use money from the swindle to buy the ranches from the bank—through Milburn, of course—and sell them in a year for four times his investment, which he had stolen from the ranchers in the first place. The bank's board of directors would praise him for protecting their interests by ensuring the loans were well backed with collateral, and in three years the banker would be lying on the beaches of the south of France, drinking wine and looking for the women on those pictures he kept in his room.

But then that damn Maxwell Bass stood, and every eye in the place focused on him. “If this is such a good investment, why doesn't the bank just lend the money to the oil men?”

Damn! Who would have thought that one of these hayseeds would come up with that, but when Phillips rose, he was all smiles. “The Prairie Rose Bank is committed to the good people of this community. We want to
share
the wealth.”

And Max grinned. “In my experience,” he said, “a banker is about as anxious to share the wealth as a coyote is to share chickens.”

Laughter roared through the room, releasing the excitement and tension of the past few minutes, and in that respite, the people began to rethink the proposition.

“Suppose,” Zeb Lenington asked, “you want a mortgage on our places? What if there isn't any oil?”

That and other questions killed the scam as quickly as it had kindled, and with it, Phillips's dreams of the ladies of France. That son of a bitching cowpoke had as much as stolen the banker's money, and Phillips had vowed to get even. He was still biding his time.

Phillips was thinking about that now as he limped to the bar. He was thinking, too, about the hole Max's bride had poked in his leg that afternoon.

The banker was a careful man. His opinions were usually delivered secondhand, but his natural caution had washed away two whiskies ago, and he was ready to tell that son of a bitch Bass what he thought of him and that high and mighty “lady” from Boston.

Phillips pulled himself to his full height and sneered, “I'd like to know what kind of woman would come clear out here to marry a man like you.”

There was silence broken only by the whisper of necks against stiff collars as the men turned to watch. And now that the banker realized the magnitude of what he had done, there was no one more intent on that question than he.

Max eased his beer to the bar as though it were thin shelled and fragile. Then he stepped off the stool and walked stiff-legged to Phillips.

The banker's eyes were wide and wild.

Max's face was hard as Beartooth granite.

“No man talks about my wife like that.” Then his hands moved so fast the banker saw only a blur, and he waited helplessly for the blow.

Max's hands came together,
crack!
, a half inch from the banker's nose. He had only clapped his hands, but Phillips recoiled as though he had been struck. He stumbled back, and a chair caught him at the back of the knees. He tripped and crashed into a table, dumping glasses, cigar butts, and himself on the floor.

Max was still on his way back to the bar when the laughter struck like a thunderclap in a summer rainstorm. The banker scrambled to his feet and scuttled red-faced to the door, pelted on all sides by the derision of the men in the saloon.

He slunk out the door and hurried toward his office. Every step of the way, he vowed he would make Max Bass rue the day he had humiliated Aloysius Phillips.

Max choked down the beer, motioned to Thomsen, and a moment later the two of them appeared at the front door of the saloon, Max tugging Thomsen toward the wagon as awkwardly as a rowboat trying to tow a river steamer.

Thomsen was squinting against the light, but the moment Catherine fleshed out her silhouette, he smiled his approval.

“Jake, this is her. This is … my wife, Catherine O'Dowd … I mean, Catherine Bass.”

“Ma'am,” Thomsen said. “I'm thinking Max got the better of the deal.”

Max grinned like a man showing off a prize heifer at the remark, but Catherine stiffened.

“There was no transaction, Mister Jake,” she said, drawing out the mister until it stung.

“Jake Thomsen's the name, ma'am,” he said, cocking his head the way he sometimes did when deep in thought. “Didn't mean to offend.

“Got a little something here for you and Max.” With that he hoisted a hogshead into the back of the wagon, lifting a corner of the red cloth cover to reveal a bottle of champagne in a bed of ice. “Hope you enjoy it.”

Thomsen waved off their thanks and said, “Suppose you're anxious to get to your new home.”

“Oh, yes,” Catherine said, brightening. “In his letters, Mr. Bass told me about the coal mine and the cattle and how the sun rises on one edge of the ranch and sets on the other.”

Max cut in, “I didn't have time to tell her everything, but we'll be there quick enough.”

“Quicker than you might think,” Thomsen said, turning a quizzical eye on Max. Then he said to Catherine, “Remember who I am, ma'am. If I can ever do anything, let me know. I call Max friend.”

“Thank you, Mr. Thomsen, I shall keep that in mind.”

“And ma'am, that champagne bottle isn't very fancy, but it's good wine, the best I could buy—in Montana, anyhow. Sometimes the best wine comes in plain bottles.”

“And sometimes a man blows across the mouth of a jug and thinks he's making music,” Max retorted with a grin.

“You've got me there,” Thomsen said.

Despite the smile, Max felt uneasy. Wouldn't be long before he pulled the buckboard to a stop on his ranch and Catherine would know. He wasn't looking forward to that—not even a little bit.

It isn't good to travel midday on the Montana prairie in summer. There is the heat, of course, always the heat except on those rare occasions when thunderheads boil over the horizon and drench the land with rain or run hail like a rasp over it.

Nobody travels then. Fine dust that billows in the heat turns to glue when wet, and weeds grow thick and fat and high. Horses pick up buckets of gumbo and walk as though on mud stilts. Mud quells the spirit that sprouts in the rare prairie rains.

Midday, the sun shines straight down and washes the prairie out. Color, contour, and distance are lost to glare and heat waves. These are the beauty of the plains, and midday hides them from the eye.

Max drove the wagon in desperation. He wanted to speak to his wife, tell her the truth about his ranch and his mine. He wanted to tell her not to judge the prairie until she had learned its secrets, glimpsed the beauty it hid from strangers; not to judge him until she knew what he would be, not what he was.

But he couldn't do that.

He had used lies to lure her to Prairie Rose as a hunter uses a whistle to pull an elk to his rifle. Normally, he was not a man who lied, but he had lied greatly in this, and he had lied to a woman who deserved more than he would ever be.

He wondered how those green-flecked eyes would look at him when she saw the ranch, when Catherine O'Dowd learned that she had married a liar.

And on they rode in sun-drenched silence; a wagon laden with lumber and whitewash and chickens and guilt, trailing a plume of white dust across the Montana prairie.

About fifteen miles out of town at Myer's Corner, Max clucked the mare off the main track to ruts leading to his home.

Catherine asked, “Here?” and Max nodded. During the ride, only that word had been spoken between them, each hating the silence; each afraid to break it. They crossed a rocky creek ford and climbed the other side, water cascading from the wagon's wheels. Max pulled the rig to a stop.

“Is that your creek, Mr. Bass?”

“Some of it.”

“What's it called?”

“Pishkin.”

Catherine's brow wrinkled, and Max explained.

“Blackfeet. Means
buffalo jump
. Used to be that Indians would start a herd of buffalo running and drive 'em right off a bluff upstream from here. Spill off the edge like a river running brown in the spring.”

“If they tried to stop, the weight of the animals behind would push them over. Once they started running, it was certain they'd wind up on the edge of that bluff.”