Legends of the Fall

CHAPTER 1

Late in October in 1914 three brothers rode from Choteau, Montana, to Calgary in Alberta to enlist in the Great War (the U.S. did not enter until 1917). An old Cheyenne named One Stab rode with them to return with the horses in tow because the horses were blooded and their father did not think it fitting for his sons to ride off to war on nags. One Stab knew all the shortcuts in the northern Rockies so their ride traversed wild country, much of it far from roads and settlements. They left before dawn with their father holding an oil lamp in the stable dressed in his buffalo robe, all of them silent, and the farewell breath he embraced them with rose in a small white cloud to the rafters.

By first light the wind blew hard against the yellowed aspens, the leaves skittering across the high pasture and burying themselves in a draw. When they forded their first river the leaves of the cottonwoods stripped by the wind caught in the eddies, pasting themselves against the rocks.

They paused to watch a bald eagle, forced down by the first snow in the mountains, fruitlessly chase a flock of mallards in the brakes. Even in this valley they could hear the high clean roar of wind against cold rock above the timberline.

By noon they crossed a divide, a cordillera, and turned to take a last view of the ranch. That is, the brothers took in the view not the less breathtaking in the raw wind which blew the air so clean the ranch looked impossibly close and beautiful though already twenty miles distant. Not One Stab, though, who feared sentiment and who stared straight up in disdain when they crossed the railroad tracks of the Northern Pacific. And a little further on when they all heard the doleful cry of a wolf at midday, they pretended that they had not heard it for the cry at midday was the worst of omens. They took lunch as they rode as if to escape the mournful sound and not wanting to sit at the edge of a glade where the sound might descend on them again. Alfred, the oldest brother, said a prayer while Tristan, the middle brother, cursed and spurred his mount past Alfred and One Stab. Samuel, the youngest, dallied along with his eyes sharp on the flora and fauna. He was the apple of the family's eye, and at eighteen already had one year in at Harvard studying in the tradition of Agassiz at the Peabody Museum. When One Stab paused at the far edge of a great meadow to wait for Samuel to catch up, his heart froze on seeing the roan horse emerge from the woods with its rider carrying half a bleached buffalo skull against his face and his laughter carrying across the meadow to the old Indian.

On the third day of their trip the wind let up and the air warmed, the sun dulled by an autumnal haze. Tristan shot a deer to the disgust of Samuel who only ate the deer out of instinctive politeness. Alfred, as usual, was ruminative and noncommittal, wondering how One Stab and Tristan could eat so much meat. He preferred beef. When Tristan and One Stab ate the liver first Samuel laughed and said he himself was an omnivore who would end up as a herbivore, but Tristan was a true carnivore who could store up and either ride or sleep or drink and whore for days. Tristan gave the rest of the carcass to a honyocker, a homesteader, whose pitiful barn they slept in that night preferring the barn to the dense ammoniac smell of the cabin full of children. Typically the honyocker did not know there was a war going on in Europe, much less owning any firm notion where Europe was. Untypically Samuel took a liking at dinner to the oldest daughter and quoted a verse of Heinrich Heine to her in German, her native language. The father laughed, the mother and daughter left the table in embarrassment. At dawn when they left the daughter gave Samuel a scarf she had spent the night knitting. Samuel kissed her hand, said he would write, and gave her a gold pocket watch for safekeeping. One Stab watched this from the corral when he saddled the horses. He picked up Samuel's saddle as if he were picking up doom herself, doom always owning the furthest, darkest reaches of the feminine gender. Pandora, Medusa, the Bacchantes, the Furies, are female though small goddesses beyond sexual notions. Who reasons death anymore than they can weigh the earth or the heart of beauty? They rode the rest of the way into Calgary in the full flower of a brief Indian summer. There was a bad incident at a roadside tavern where they tethered their horses to have a beer to cut their dusty mouths. The owner refused to let One Stab inside. Samuel and Alfred reasoned with the owner, then Tristan entered after watering the horses, sized up the situation and pummeled the beefy tavern owner senseless. He flipped a gold piece to the porter who nervously held a pistol, took a bottle of whiskey and a pail of beer and they had a picnic under a tree outside. Alfred and Samuel shrugged, long accustomed to their brother's behavior. One Stab liked the taste of beer and whiskey but would only rinse his mouth with it before spitting it on the ground. He was a Cheyenne, but had spent his last thirty years in Cree and Blackfoot territory and had decided he would only get drunk if he ever returned to Lame Deer before he died. His spitting brought laughter from Samuel and Alfred but not Tristan who understood and had been close to One Stab since the age of three while Samuel and Alfred tended to ignore the Cheyenne.

In Calgary they were given an uncommon welcome for enlistees. The major forming the local cavalry came from the same area of Cornwall as their father, in fact, he shipped out of Falmouth on a schooner the same year, but for Halifax rather than Baltimore. The major was baffled by the refusal of the United States to enter the war, which he accurately saw as more monstrous and enduring than reflected in the easy optimism of those Canadians who envisioned the Kaiser and his Huns in flight the moment the locals landed on the Continent. But then such simpleminded braggadocio is appreciated in soldiers, who are largely cannon fodder for international economic and political machinations. In the month of training before shipping by train to the troopships in Quebec, Alfred quickly became an officer, Samuel an aide-de-camp due to his scholarly German and ability to read topographical maps. Tristan, however, brawled and drank and was demoted to wrangling the horses, where he in fact felt quite comfortable. Uniforms embarrassed him and the drills bored him to tears. Were it not for his fealty to his father and his notion that Samuel needed looking after he would have escaped the barracks and headed back south on a stolen horse on the track of One Stab.

Back near Choteau, William Ludlow (Colonel, Engineers U, Army. Ret.) spent sleepless nights. He had taken a chill the morning the boys left and spent a week in bed staring out the north window waiting for One Stab to return with some news however feeble and scanty the news would be. He wrote long letters to his wife who wintered in Prides Crossing north of Boston, also keeping a house on Louisberg Square for her evenings at the opera or symphony. She loved Montana from May through September, but equally loved to board the train back to the civilities of Boston, not an uncommon thing for rich landholders in those days. Against the popular misconception, cowboys never did own ranches. They were not much more than the expert, wandering hippies of their day, cossacks of the range who knew animals much better than each other. Some of the grandest ranches in north central Montana were actually owned by largely absentee Scottish and English noblemen. (A loutish Irishman, Sir George Gore, of suspicious noble birth had enraged the Indians by killing a thousand elk and an equal number of buffalo on a "sporting" trip.)

But Ludlow wrote his wife in a state of grief. She had insisted that Samuel be kept from the war. The year before she had cherished their Saturday lunches in Boston, talking of his always exciting past week at Harvard. She had babied her last born while Alfred had been stodgy and methodical from youth and Tristan uncontrollable. In September, a month after Sarajevo, she had quarreled with her husband then left after the three days it took to pack. Now Ludlow knew he should have kept Samuel and sent him back to Harvard if only to please his mother. The young second cousin, Susannah, she had brought from the East in hopes that Alfred would make a good marriage, had instead become engaged to Tristan. This amused Ludlow who secretly favored Tristan's misbehavior even though after the engagement dinner Tristan inexcusably disappeared with One Stab for a week on the track of a grizzly that had taken two cattle.

Ludlow lay under the comforter looking at the scrap-books of his life, his mind enlivened by a mild fever. He had reached the age where his habitually romantic frame of mind had turned to the ironies; the past had become a dense puddle out of which he could draw no conclusions. Though he was sixty-four his health and vigor had not diminished and his parents, both in their mid-eighties, were alive in Cornwall, which meant barring an accident, he was likely to live longer than he cared to. In his scrapbooks he read a sappy poem he had written in his Vera Cruz days and noted with amusement it was pasted next to a newspaper clipping about "The Fecundity of Codfish." As a mining engineer he had ranged from Maine, to Vera Cruz, to Tombstone in Arizona and Mariposa, California, to the copper country in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. He had not married until thirty-five and then the choice had been mutually unlikely—the daughter of a vastly wealthy investment banker from Massachusetts. And not that wealth was a part in this absurd nesting influence—he still drew some five hundred pounds a month from a Vera Cruz silver mine, nearly four thousand dollars in the exchange of the time. But it gathered in a bank in Helena where he traveled several times a year to look after his investments and carry on at the Cattleman's Club. His marriage had burned out, had gradually transmogrified from its previously Keatsian fire into a remote and cranky elegance. Their extended honeymoon voyage to Europe had civilized them to the point that he did not greatly care if she took a winter lover in Boston, usually far younger than herself. Her most recent discreetly scandalous affair would be a Harvard student, John Reed, who would become a famed Bolshevik and die in Moscow of typhus. Like many wealthy feminists of the time her interests were ardent and captious. After the first son had been properly named after the grandfather, the second caught the brunt of her few impulses, being named "Tristan," gleaned from medieval lore in her years at Wellesley. Somewhat typically she was the first woman to play polo with anything equal to the capabilities of those male horse sybarites who take the world as their stable. But she was a grand one, even in her fifties, a preposterous beauty with her once thin body verging on lushness. She had tried to make poor Samuel an artist but he owned his father's scientific bent and wandered around the ranch with his nature guidebooks studiously correcting their Victorian inaccuracies.

For the first time since the boys left Ludlow came down for dinner and noted with despair the single place set at the head of the dining room table, the coolness of which the roaring fireplace did not allay. Roscoe Decker, his foreman, sat drinking coffee with his wife, nicknamed Pet, a Cree noted for her beauty whom Ludlow's wife had taught to cook well over the past few years from an antique French cookbook known as the Ali Bab. Decker (for no one called him Roscoe, a name he disliked) was about forty with the slender legs of a horseman but with a bullish chest and arms, got from a youth full of digging fence-post holes.

Ludlow said he was lonely and wondered aloud if they all might eat together in the dining room. Pet poured him a cup of coffee and shook her head no. Decker looked away. Ludlow felt his face redden thinking he might have to order them to eat with him no matter the ten years they had spent in each other's distant good graces. So Ludlow and Decker drank their afternoon coffee under strain, disarming the odor of a Normandy venison stew Pet was cooking in cider in the wood range. Decker attempted to talk about the cattle but Ludlow stared into the distance unhearing in his anger. He watched Isabel, Decker's nine-year-old daughter, named after Ludlow's wife, make her way across the barnyard carrying something. She came through the pump shed and in the kitchen door and the something turned out to be a little badger a few weeks old that Tristan had given her. Pet told her to take the beast outside but Ludlow interrupted out of curiosity. The badger seemed ill and Ludlow said the milk must be warm and it might take meat ground into paste. Pet shrugged and began rolling biscuit dough while Ludlow warmed some milk and Decker examined the creature. They found a cache of old nursing bottles and nipples in the pantry and Isabel fed and rocked the badger which ate hungrily. Now Ludlow was happy and took out a bottle of Armagnac and poured himself and Decker glasses to add to their coffee. Isabel refused to go to school because of a certain half-breed onus, so Ludlow said he would finally undertake to tutor her starring the next morning at eight sharp.

The mood lightened so markedly that Ludlow went into the cellar for a good bottle of claret to go with the meal. For years he had been indifferent to his wife's taste for good wine, then having become a gradual convert, he read a vinology book and went on a binge to the point his cellar was chocked, partly from a derailed Northern Pacific bound for San Francisco that he cagily bought from a railroad official. And in the cellar he solved the problem; they would all eat in the kitchen including One Stab when he returned. That way he hoped that his sons' absence would not be so raw and glaring. He construed it back in the kitchen as a natural winter fuel measure. The dining room would be closed off. Decker's family would move to the guest room and the three ranch hands could have Decker's cabin. They all knew One Stab would not move from his hut which only he entered short of Isabel when she was sick at three and One Stab asked to perform some private ceremony. Ludlow knew, though, that One Stab owned a coup bag full of scalps, not a few Caucasian, but he privately approved.

After dinner they played pinochle all evening with Pet and Isabel winning owing to the wine and brandy Ludlow and Decker had consumed. Ludlow announced that Decker must take tomorrow off and they would take the setters and go grouse hunting. Decker said he expected that One Stab would be back in a few days. Pet served a pudding made from ripe plums from the orchard and Isabel fell asleep in her chair with the badger staring from his blanket on her lap. At midnight Ludlow went to bed with a warm steady feeling that the world indeed was a good place, that the war would be quickly over, and that he and Decker would have a good hunt the next day. He said his nightly prayers, adding for a change One Stab, who as a pagan was no doubt impervious to their influence.

At a little after three A.M. he awoke in a night sweat after a dream so crisply actual that he was still shuddering a half hour later. In his dream he had seen his sons die in a battle while he stood helplessly on the outcrop of a butte; then he had looked down and noted that he wore elkskin leggings, and was, in fact, One Stab. He wondered as he lit his pipe watching the shadows of the kerosene lamp flicker against the wall where he himself had been in the dream all the more poignant because in 1874 he had been encamped at Short-Pine Hills and One Stab had arrived and rather casually said that Sitting Bull with five thousand braves was coming south toward them from the Tongue River. So they rode hard day and night for three days to escape the trap with some men tying themselves to their saddles in exhaustion.

Ludlow drew his robe close and left his room, walking down the hall and peeking first into Alfred's room with all its sentimental bric-a-brac, dumbbells, self-help books, and then Samuel's, littered with microscopes, stuffed animals including a snarling wolverine, botanical specimens, a piece of driftwood drawn from the river in his youth that owned a startling resemblance to a hawk. Tristan's room which Ludlow had not entered in recent memory was stark and bare; a mule deer skin on the floor, a badger skin covering the pillow on the bed, and a small trunk in the corner. Ludlow grimaced, knowing the skin on the pillow was from Tristan's pet when he was ten years old that Ludlow had shot after it had killed his wife's lapdog and she had gone into hysterics. Normally a most truculent animal, Tristan's pet would ride horseback with him, perched rotundly across the pommel of the saddle and hissing gutturally at anyone who came near except One Stab. Ludlow stooped holding the lantern over the trunk. He felt a bit like an old snoop but could not resist his curiosity. Inside the trunk the lamplight caught the glitter from the sterling rowels of a pair of Spanish spurs Ludlow had given Tristan on his twelfth birthday. There were some cartridges for a Sharps buffalo rifle, a rusty handgun of unknown origin, a jar of flint arrowheads, and a bear claw necklace, no doubt a gift from One Stab whom Ludlow often felt was more the boy's father than he himself.

On the bottom of the trunk wrapped in antelope hide Ludlow found with surprise his own book printed in 1875 by the Government Printing Office with "my father wrote this book" in a childish scrawl inside the cover.

He stood abruptly with the lantern teetering dangerously in his hand. He had not opened the book in three decades mostly out of grief that his recommendations on the Sioux had been not taken, even scorned, after which he resigned his commission and left for Vera Cruz. He noted that Tristan had underlined and notated the pages and was curious about what so unlearned and obdurate a lad would make of what he considered a technical work. He took the book back to his room and poured a glass from a demijohn of Canadian whiskey kept under the bed for insomnia.

The title itself was bland if one neglected certain historical ironies: "Report of a Reconnaissance of the Black Hills of Dakota, made in the Summer of 1874 by William Ludlow, Captain of Engineers, Bvt. Lieut. Colonel U.S. Army, Chief Engineer Department of Dakota." As a scientist, or what passed for one at the time, he had been attached to the Seventh Cavalry under the command of an officer of his own rank, Lieut. Colonel George Armstrong Custer. Ludlow with his Cornish reticence loathed Custer and kept the company of his scientific group which included George Bird Grinnell of Yale College, a boon companion. When Custer became especially worried or angry he would mimic Ludlow's English accent, an inexcusable frivolity in a fellow officer. Ludlow privately celebrated when he heard of Custer's demise at Little Bighorn three years later in '77. His own recommendations in the conclusion of his report had been terse and direct. After enumerating the obvious advantages of the region, including the protection it afforded against the torrid heat and arctic storms of the neighboring prairies, Ludlow advised:

To this, however, the final solution of the Indian question is an indispensable preliminary. The region is cherished by the owners as hunting grounds and asylum. The more farsighted, anticipating the time when hunting the buffalo, which is now the main subsistence of the wild tribes, will no longer suffice to that end, have looked forward to settling in and about the Black Hills, as their future permanent home, and there awaiting the gradual extinction which is their fate . . . The Indians have no country farther west to which they can migrate.

He sipped deeply from his whiskey, more interested in Tristan's squiggles than the horrors and chicanery of the government which had made him a near recluse. He remembered well the plague of grasshoppers Tristan had found interesting:

I counted twenty-five one morning on what I judged to be an average square foot of ground. A brief calculation at that rate over a million to the acre . . . exceedingly rapacious, their capacity for destruction to living vegetation may be imagined. Their powers of sustained flight, too, are wonderful. . . they appear able to keep on the wing of a whole day, always moving with the wind, and filling the air to a vast height . . . the wings reflecting the light make them appear like tufts of cotton floating lazily in the wind . . . in descending through the slanting rays of the sun, they resemble a fall of huge snowflakes.

Ludlow remembered Custer making an erratic speech to the troops with his long blond locks punctuated with clinging grasshoppers. He read on, fixing only on the portions Tristan had underlined, including a passage on a blood-red moon that fired the beige landscape, to which Tristan had added "I seen this phenom. once with Stab who would not talk at campfire." The most haunting paragraph, though, was a description of buffalo skulls which Ludlow recognized foresaw One Stab's Ghost Dance superstitions and Tristan's boyish passion, "A man who shoots a buffalo and not eat the entire body and make a tent or bed of the skin should himself be shot, including the bone marrow which Stab says restores all health to the human body." Ludlow recalled the skulls and the light on the feathers of a peregrine falcon that had flown under his horse in pursuit of a doomed passenger pigeon: "It is but a few years since the country through which we passed was the favorite feeding ground of the buffalo, and their white skulls dot the prairie in all directions. Sometimes these are collected by the Indians, and arranged on the ground in fantastic patterns. In one of these collections which I noticed, the skulls had been painted red and blue in stripes and circles, and were arranged in five parallel rows of twelve each, all the skulls facing the East."

He finished his drink and dozed, not extinguishing the lamp because he was afraid the dream would return with its fatal questions, the wildly colored and operatic doom. Ludlow was not fool enough to try to order a life already lived, but he was rawly conscious that his secondary life lived through his sons had been mismanaged, not so much with Alfred and Samuel who merely were what they were, but with Tristan. Ludlow would entertain, at least temporarily, any scientific notion touched by the bizarre and there was an idea current that character often skipped a generation. Ludlow's own father had been a schooner captain, in fact at eighty-four still was, of unremitting fierceness and charm whom they tended to see in off years while growing up. His own tamer wanderings had been engendered by his father's tales of seeing giant squid fighting in the moonlight in the Humboldt swells off Peru, and how a man is never the same after rounding the Horn in a seventy-knot gale. One year Ludlow's Christmas present would be a shrunken head from Java and the next a small gold Buddha from Siam and a constant flow of mineral specimens came from throughout the world. So perhaps Tristan in a genetic lapse had become his own father and would like Cain never take an order from anyone but would build his own fate with gestures so personal that no one in the family ever knew what was on his seemingly thankless mind. At fourteen Tristan had quit school and trapped enough lynx to buy anything but had the pelts made into a coat and sent off to Boston to his astounded mother. Then he borrowed Ludlow's Purdey shotgun and disappeared, arriving back at the ranch three months later with a sack of money he won at competitive trap and skeet shoots at sporting clubs. That money had gone to buy One Stab a new saddle and rifle, Samuel a microscope, and Alfred a trip to San Francisco. The whole family was sheltered with perhaps too much money, but Tristan had his own golden touch. The sheriff in Helena had written that Tristan had been seen in the company of prostitutes at age fifteen and his mother had had a nervous fit and Ludlow had given an obligatory lecture that degenerated into his curiosity over whether the whores had been attractive. Ludlow's own bimonthly trips to Helena always included a few nights spent with a schoolteacher he furtively had courted for a decade. To his old cronies at the Cattleman's Club he liked to quote Teddy Roosevelt's "I like to drink the wine of life with brandy in it" and felt foolish afterward, considering as he did all politicians to be knaves. But now Tristan was beyond his sphere of influence and he knew that there was small chance of hearing from him, just as they had never heard from his own father. A few years back his father had gone aground in the Orkneys and Ludlow had arranged the purchase of another ship to which he got small thanks, only a note: "Dear Son. I trust your family is well. Send the boys over for seasoning. Goddamn your money. You'll get back every cent." And the small amounts arrived periodically at his bank in Helena from places as varied as Cyprus and Dakar. As his eyes dimmed with sleep he knew he would have to write Susannah, Tristan's betrothed, to get any news. She was a frail, lovely girl of surpassing intelligence.

Ludlow slept late and was embarrassed knowing that Decker had been ready to hunt for hours. He looked out the window and saw how his lemon-ticked setters sleeping on the lawn gave the effect of sunlight coming down through the leaves of birch trees. They were fine dogs, shipped straight from Devonshire by a friend who came every other year to shoot.

By noon they had shot seven brace of ruffed grouse and both dogs and men were fatigued from the rare late October heat though the northern horizon was dark and they knew that snow was possible by nightfall in the vagaries of Montana weather. While roasting two grouse Decker suggested they buy a thousand calves the next spring because the war would up the price of beef. Also he needed two new hands just to replace Tristan and Pet had cousins over near Fort Benton, one being half-black, if Ludlow didn't mind and they were fine cowboys. Ludlow fed his dogs the hearts and livers of the two grouse and agreed with everything Decker suggested, wondering idly what a half-black Cree would look like. Probably wonderfully ugly. He dozed in the sun smelling the grouse skin roasting on the coals. Decker noticed One Stab far up the hillside of the box canyon and knew he would not come down until after lunch out of etiquette because there were only two cooking grouse. It was One Stab who brought Decker back from Zortman and Ludlow took him on even though he knew he must be on the lam from some unnamed crime. Ludlow was prodded awake and ate with relish. He loved this box canyon and intended to be buried here near where a small spring seeped from the canyon wall. He had been able to buy the twenty thousand acres—not really very large for a ranch in the area—for a song because of his mining connections when it was determined that there was nothing of mineral value on the land. There was plenty of water, though, and the ranch could support cattle to a degree that equaled ranches three times its size though Ludlow limited the number sharply out of a lack of greed and not wanting the problems of too many hands. Also if cattle foraged on the ridges the game birds would leave. The dogs scented One Stab as he descended the hill and wagged their tails frantically. The old Indian took a drink from Decker's flask and spit it on the fire where it flamed upward. Decker was always amused that One Stab spoke with a strong trace of Ludlow's English accent.

Late that night winter came. And the next day brought an angry, imploring letter from his wife begging him to use his influence to free Samuel from the army. Her sleep was troubled though Alfred had written from Calgary that all was going well. But what in God's name did the boys have to do with defending an England they had never seen and Ludlow's own misbegotten sense of adventure had pushed them off with no thought of her feelings. These letters continued through the late fall into January with a menopausal hysteria becoming so extreme that Ludlow, who anyway was full of dull foreboding, no longer opened the letters. He had skipped a pre-Christmas trip to Helena and short of any impulse of romance he read and brooded except for the few hours each morning he had taken it upon himself to teach little Isabel to read and write. He sent Decker off to Helena to buy supplies and presents and the day after he left, a United States marshal had stopped by inquiring if he might know the whereabouts of a Jon Thronburg wanted for bank robbery some years ago in St. Cloud, Minnesota, and rumored to be in this area. Ludlow showed no surprise at the early photo of Decker and replied that the man in fact had passed through three years before on his way to San Francisco to catch a boat for Australia. The marshal nodded wearily, ate a big meal and rode off in the gathering dark for Choteau.

Ludlow waited an hour in case the marshal might be waiting then sent One Stab off to Helena to warn Decker to avoid all towns and main roads in his immediate return. Things seemed to be going badly. By an absentminded mistake he had caught Pet standing drying herself after her bath which conspired to leave him feeling weak, heavy and congested. He would have gladly given his ranch to have even one son back.

In Boston Isabel had taken up with an Italian basso profundo. He had no English so their affair was conducted with her minimal tourist Italian. They would lie back in a pretentious oriental chaise before the fire, his head on her breast, and talk about opera, Florence and the wild redskins he hoped to see on his concert trip to San Francisco and Los Angeles. She, in fact, had become bored with him: his brief, strenuous lovemaking did not suit her for she was far less spiritual than her lovers supposed. She had dreamed unpleasantly of her son Tristan and the singer's head against her breast reminded her how as a boy when he had pneumonia she cuddled and read to him in the same position, a closeness that was fatally rended in the fall of his twelfth year when she opted to return to Boston for the winter. And how the passionate boy had tortured her for her decision, writing in the winter that he had prayed daily for her return by Christmas and when she hadn't returned by Christmas he had cursed God and had become a steadfast nonbeliever. In the spring when she returned he was cool and so distant that she complained to Ludlow who couldn't get a word out of Tristan on the subject of his mother. Then she feigned illness and when the boys filed into her room to kiss her goodnight she detained Tristan and brought him to temporary heel by an onslaught of sentiment and weeping, using the total arsenal of her wiles. He told her that he would love her forever, but he could not believe in God because he had already cursed Him.

The first tentative blow reached the parents individually in late January when they received word that Alfred, never a very good rider, had shattered his knee and broken his back in a fall from his horse near Ypres. The prognosis from the field hospital however was good and they could expect him home by May. The major from Calgary sent a special note of condolence to Ludlow. Alfred had been a brilliant young officer and would be sorely missed. It was unfortunate that Tristan's recklessness diminished the effects of his bravery but the major assumed he would further mature in battle. Samuel had proven spectacularly useful and the major feared losing him to a general as he was such a golden boy all officers had taken note. Ludlow read through the lines to the extent that he understood the degree Tristan was chaffing under army discipline. He felt momentarily guilty when he found himself wishing that it was either Samuel or Tristan returning in the spring, rather than Alfred. In France the Canadians were camped between Neuve-Chapelle and St. Omer. Still in the early and optimistic stages of the war they were considered a bit haphazard and clumsy by their English counterparts, especially the curt and dashing officers from Sandhurst who rather typically saw the war as part of their own brilliant military careers. Such Teutonic nonsense had never been limited to the Huns. But no one faulted the Canadians on the matter of aggressiveness in battle—if anything, their courage was excessive.

Tristan was tented with the worst of the ruffians in his company. Alfred was embarrassed when Tristan visited him in the field hospital, swaggering and sloppily dressed with manure on his boots. Tristan had smuggled in a bottle of wine which Alfred had refused. One of Alfred's fellow officers came for a visit and Tristan had failed to salute, sitting there drinking the bottle of wine and leaving without saying good-bye except to have Alfred tell One Stab to take his favorite horse if he didn't return. Outside the hospital tent Tristan's companion, a huge French-Canadian named Noel, a trapper from British Columbia, waited with downcast eyes in the rain. The news that Samuel and the Major were dead had just reached camp. They had been on a reconnaissance up toward Calais with a group of scouts when they had been hit with mustard gas, then cut to ribbons by machine gun fire as they wandered numbed in a glade of a chestnut forest. A lone surviving scout had come back with the story and was now being debriefed. Tristan stood there dazed in the rain and mud with his friend embracing him in sorrow. The scout who was from their tent approached with an officer in tail. They raced to the paddock and quickly saddled three horses. The officer commanded them to stop and they knocked him aside in full gallop northward toward Calais reaching the forest by midnight. They sat still and fireless through the night and then at dawn in the fine sifting snow they crept forward in the snow and wiped it from the faces of the dozen or so dead until Tristan found Samuel, kissed him and bathed his icy face with his own tears: Samuel's face gray and unmarked but his belly rended from its cage of ribs. Tristan detached the heart with a skinning knife and they rode back to camp where Noel melted down candles and they encased Samuel's heart in paraffin in a small ammunition canister for burial back in Montana. An officer interrupted, but left wordlessly when it occurred to him he would be strangled if he interfered. When they finished, Tristan and Noel drank a liter of brandy from their booty from a farmhouse and Tristan then left the tent and howled Goddamn God until Noel subdued him and he slept.

In the morning Tristan awoke and heartlessly refused to commiserate with Alfred when a messenger came to bring him to the hospital tent. He wrote a note and taped it to the canister saying, "Dear Father, this is all I can send home of our beloved Samuel. My heart is broken in two as yours will be. Alfred will bring it back. You know that place he should be buried up near the spring in the canyon where we found the horns of the full curl ram. Your son Tristan."

Then Tristan went mad and there are still a very few old veterans up in Canada that remember his vengeance, because he was captured and restrained before it reached full flower. Tristan and Noel first feigned new seriousness as soldiers and volunteered for the scouts on nightly reconnaissance missions. At the end of three nights seven blond scalps hung in various stages of drying from their tent pole. On the fourth night Noel was fatally wounded and Tristan reached camp at mid-morning with Noel over the pommel of his saddle. He rode past crowds of soldiers to his tent where he laid Noel on his cot and poured brandy down his lifeless throat. He sang a Cheyenne medicine song One Stab had taught him and a group of soldiers gathered around the tent. Alfred was brought on a stretcher by the commanding officer to reason with Tristan. When they opened the tent flap Tristan had made a necklace of the scalps and had laid his skinning knife and rifle across Noel's chest. They put him in a straitjacket and sent him off to a hospital in Paris where he escaped within a week.

The doctor who attempted to treat Tristan in Paris was a young Canadian from Hamilton who was given the psychiatric ward somewhat by default. In his postgraduate studies at the Sorbonne he had dabbled a bit in this new science of behavior but was ill-prepared for the shell-shocked and hapless victims of fear that arrived daily. His youth and adopted Parisian cynicism at first led him to believe that the men were merely cowards, but their odd behavior soon disabused him of that notion. They were traumatized puppies who either cried out for their mothers at night or retreated into a permanent and inconsolable silence. The doctor so doubted his ability to knit up their souls that he became almost bored with his patients and did all he could to have them shipped home. Thus he was fascinated with the arrival of Tristan when the ambulance driver advised him that a true "crazy" was waiting to be unloaded. The doctor sent attendants and read the report from Tristan's commander. He felt himself oddly unmoved by the scalpings and was surprised at the commander's horror. How could mustard gas be considered normal warfare and not scalping, in reaction to the death of a brother? All the doctors had been prepped on the medical complications of mustard gas which in fact constituted the beginning of truly modern warfare. The doctor had studied the classics at Oxford and felt himself learned on the subject of vengeance. He had Tristan brought to his office, excused the attendants and released the man from his straitjacket for which he got a polite "Thank you" and "May I have a drink?" The doctor loaned Tristan a uniform and they walked through the Bois de Boulogne to a small café where they ate and drank in silence. Finally the doctor said that he was aware of what had happened and there was no need to talk about it. Unfortunately it would take a number of months to process Tristan out of the army and send him home but he would do the best he could to make Tristan's stay as pleasant as possible.

It took several weeks for the news to reach Montana. One afternoon late in February on a day that was cold but sunny and clear after a storm had abated, Pet was driven by one of the new hands to Choteau for groceries and to pick up the mail. Ludlow wiped the frost from a kitchen window and stared at the mere ounce of sun he figured to be hovering above the bluish snowbound shadows of the barn. Decker and One Stab sat at the table drinking coffee and arguing about altitude with maps spread before them. One Stab was correcting the maps because he had covered the area from Browning to Missoula with a Cree friend known reverently as One Who Sees As A Bird, a man with an uncanny topographical perception of territory. One Stab disliked the altitude numbers attached to mountains. How high above which of the seven seas Tristan had told him about? What did the numbers mean if there were no sea near them? Some large mountains have no character while certain smaller ones are noble and holy places with good springs.

Then One Stab released them from the argument by asking Decker to read to him from In the Grip of the Nyika by J. H. Patterson who had also authored The Man-Eaters of the Tsavo, both books about adventures hunting and exploring in East Africa by the British colonel. Decker was bored by the books but Tristan had started years before and One Stab would close his eyes and listen with deep satisfaction to his favorite parts, including the lions that would jump on a moving flatcar to grab railroad workers to eat, the rogue elephant with one tusk that gored the horse named Aladdin, and best of all, the rhinos that died in great numbers from charging the new train that passed through their territory. The latter gave One Stab visions of thousands of buffalo charging the Northern Pacific railroad and tipping over the train. Many years before when he was involved in the tattered remnants of the Ghost Dance movement, One Who Sees As A Bird told him that he had created a new buffalo by throwing a buffalo skull in a sulphurous fumarole at Yellowstone when Ludlow measured the great waterfalls for the government. The trip had been humorous to One Stab who looked at the great mass of falling water and yelled numbers until the disquieted Ludlow asked him to be quiet. Tristan had promised to take him one day to the place where the animal fights the train.

Pet came in the door stomping the snow from her boots. She handed Ludlow the letter from Tristan and looked away. So did Decker. Only One Stab watched Ludlow open the letter, not fearing the worst possible or probable because he owned the Cheyenne sense of fatality that what had happened had already happened. You couldn't change it and trying to was like throwing stones at the moon.

Still very much in his late prime Ludlow grew old overnight. His stunned grief lapsed in and out of anger, and he took to drink which exacerbated his remorse. In a certain state of drunkenness his anger would turn into rage and this broke the threads of his vigor as if his tendons had been sprung, and he became stooped and careless of his appearance. He read Tristan's fatal letter so many times it became frayed and soiled. When the official letter of condolence came he did not open it nor did he respond to his wife's daily stricken letters. He was not beside himself so much as he was submerged in his own powerlessness. And how could they lock Tristan up before he scalped every Goddamn Hun on the continent. And what was this mustard gas that killed so that men ran around helplessly with blinded eyes and burning lungs and the horses screamed under them. The world was no longer fit for a war and he privately seceded from it. Pet mourned and little Isabel stayed out of the way, reading children's stories to One Stab who one evening joined his friend and mentor in drinking, not spitting it out for a change. But within an hour Decker had to restrain him, then give him more drink so that he would sleep and carry him to his hut after One Stab sang a song in Cheyenne about Samuel's life and his forest hikes and microscopes that revealed invisible worlds, then moved into the Cheyenne death song at which Ludlow broke down not having heard the song since forty years before in the Mauvaises Terres when a scout had died.

In Paris Tristan began to plan his escape after the first night in the ward, the noise of which was a symphony of the deranged. Unlike Ludlow who was wealthy and of a generally sentimental nature, the wealth in recent years protecting him from the actual machinery of civilization, Tristan's guilt was specific and limited to the dead body of his brother, the heart sunk in a canister of paraffin. Only Alfred as a child of consensual reality escaped this guilt. So Tristan told the doctor by the third day that he could not bear the asylum and would travel somehow to his grandfather's in Cornwall. The doctor said you can't do that but without conviction. He spoke of the matter to his superior officer who knew of Ludlow's reputation—the military world being somewhat clubbish in those days. The colonel said merely to let Tristan escape saying that the man was totally disabled and should be given swift passage home. On Tristan's daily walks through the Bois and over to the nearly deserted stable of Longchamps he had watched horses being ridden and exercised. One day he bought a fine mare, knowing that the trains demanded official passes. He told the doctor his intentions and the doctor wrote a note. At dawn Tristan packed his meager duffel and slipped by a sleeping attendant. It took him five days to ride to the coast through rain which changed to sleet and periodic snow. He rode swiftly through checkpoints saluting wildly at a full gallop, the horse throwing a shoe at Lisieux which was quickly repaired at an exorbitant rate by a blacksmith. At Cherbourg he caught a freighter with relative ease to Bournemouth outside of which he bought another horse riding west to Falmouth on the coast of Cornwall. One cold midnight with the Atlantic roaring outside the breakwater he presented himself at his grandfather's door. This late night knocking brought his grandfather in his nightshirt armed with a Beasley purchased in New Orleans. Tristan said, "I am William's son, Tristan." And the grandfather held the lantern high and recognized him from photos and said, "So you are." The captain woke his wife who made a meal and the captain drew out his best bottle of Barbados rum to welcome this madman he had heard of for twenty years.

Tristan spent a taciturn month in Cornwall with the word reaching Ludlow he was safe after his escape. The first morning the captain had him working on the schooner at the most menial jobs, Tristan not knowing anything about ships but quick to learn of hawsers, knots and sails. The captain had a load of rebuilt generators bound for Nova Scotia, in March, to return with a load of salted beef to be picked up in Norfolk on the way back. He would drop Tristan in Boston to be with his grieving mother and he could make his way home from there. They set sail in March on their antique ship crewed by four old sailors and tight watches—able men were needed for England's war effort. Tristan hacked ice from the rails for a week before the weather turned only a shade warmer, but fair. He was dropped without ceremony in Boston after three weeks at sea. Tristan made his way to South Station and nursed a bottle of rum on the mile run to Dedham where Susannah fainted when he arrived at her father's door. She did not know that he had promised to meet the old captain three months later in Havana.

Tristan, Alfred, Isabel and Susannah sat in a darkened parlor in Louisberg Square; two sons, a mother, a betrothed lover who felt she had improperly invaded their grief. Tristan was stiff and abrupt and Alfred gray and somehow coarsened, and Isabel could not control herself. They readied themselves to attend a memorial service arranged by Samuel's Harvard College friends. Then Tristan announced he would marry Susannah in a few days and his mother denied him permission saying that it was improper to marry even before the funeral. Tristan was curt and manic telling her she might attend if she wished.

Tristan and Susannah married at her family's country place near Dedham and the occasion was hopelessly solemn. Only Susannah's two sisters understood how she could marry a man her parents disliked though they had long been friends of Isabel's.

One late April morning Ludlow went to meet the train in muddy clothes which betrayed his increasing eccentricity. He had been repairing the frost damage to the Cornish stone fence surrounding the ranch house. It was not that he had any sentimental dislike for barbed wire, only that he did not like to look at it. Isabel had requested the Presbyterian minister for the funeral the next day but Ludlow hadn't contacted the man, failing to understand what he had to do with Samuel.

Tristan and Susannah scarcely had left their compartment on the train trip which Isabel thought was indecent and which enlivened Alfred's secret jealousy. Tristan had in mind the making of a son to replace his brother and that was the sole purpose of his marriage, in essence a cruel impulse he knew, but could not help himself. When he embraced his father at the railroad heading he trembled but did not weep until he embraced One Stab.

Early the next morning, a brilliant spring morning with the fresh green pastels of budding aspens and new grass, they buried Samuel's heart up in the canyon near the spring. Isabel saw all their lives becoming history in units of days and nights so fatally private there was no one left for her to love. One Stab watched Decker fill the hole from up on the hillside. When everyone left he walked down the hill and looked at the stone but could not read the words.

SAMUEL DANT LUDLOW 1897-1915

WE WILL NOT SEE HIM BUT WE SHALL JOIN HIM

CHAPTER 2

Tristan's midsummer dreams were full of water; the rolling cold Atlantic swept through his sleep in green unfurlings. If he awoke in the night he would slide his hand hopefully across Susannah's belly. In the two months of their marriage he had been a truly crazed lover though not for any biological reason, but the wound in his brain over Samuel. He idly considered prayer then laughed to himself thinking that God would likely give him a muskrat for a son. He was a week from his unannounced departure to Havana to meet his grandfather, a matter he knew to be unshakably perverse but he could not help himself. A hundred years before he would have been content to travel the land, the mountains and rivers seemingly without end, but now at twenty-one in 1915 there was little or none of that left, and his compulsion was to see beyond the seven millionth wave and further. And not that he didn't love where he was: in fact short of Canada north Montana was his sole option. And perhaps he loved his wife as much as a young man of his unique nature could. He doted on her, kept her to himself, and they talked for hours of mostly imaginary (on his part) plans for the future: to ranch and raise a family and blooded horses and, of course, cattle to support the venture. Susannah would sit near the corral under a parasol to protect her fair skin and watch Tristan and Decker break and train horses aided by the strange half-black Cree who stuck to most difficult mounts like a burr in a setter's hair.

Ludlow had been kept busy entertaining Susannah's father, Arthur, who had come west on a sporting expedition with a large trunk full of H. L. Leonard fly rods. It seemed odd to Ludlow that the man seemed openly to care more for Alfred than Tristan. Alfred's back had repaired itself, but he still needed a cane for his leg. After a few weeks fishing, though, the financier having enjoyed himself so thoroughly looked for something to buy in that curious tradition of the rich who in a state of general good feeling cast about for something to buy. He settled on a large adjoining ranch calling it a wedding present for his daughter and son-in-law though he retained a half share to insure what he referred to as "prudent business practices."

Ludlow became courtly again with his wife: their grief finally too large to be held privately. The rawest time had occurred one hot Sunday afternoon when they were having a picnic on the lawn and a girl in a cheap summer dress rode bareback up to the gate. Tristan immediately strode out and lifted her from the mount, recognizing her while the others watched puzzled but mildly bored: it was the honyocker's daughter from up near Cut Bank to whom Samuel had given his gold watch for safekeeping. She approached the table hugging her satchel to her breast. Tristan introduced her, brought her a plate of food and a glass of lemonade. He sat down beside her and balefully watched as she drew Samuel's watch from her satchel. She had heard of his death in the Helena newspaper and had made the three-day ride to return the watch, and if anyone cared to, they might read Samuel's letters to her. There were a hundred or so, one for each day of his service, and each in his meticulous script. Isabel began to read, then was overcome. Ludlow paced the lawn cursing while Alfred stared at the ground. Susannah took the girl off to give her a bath and a rest. In the middle of the afternoon she said she had to leave and asked that they send the letters to her when they were finished. She would accept nothing, not clothing, money or the gold watch though she asked for a photo of Samuel because he had neglected or was too shy to send one. Tristan rode silently with her a few miles wishing that she were pregnant and that would somehow bring back Samuel, but no, he died pure and virginal. And now she rode off with only a photo to console her. He wanted to strangle the world.

Tristan returned from the short ride in a mood so foul that he tried to break a young stallion that they had had no luck with. It was a tough beefy-looking animal that years later would be referred to as a quarter horse. He intended to breed it to three of his father's thoroughbred mares which Ludlow thought to be an interesting idea, but which Susannah's father, an aficionado of racehorses, thought outrageous. Tristan worked through the late afternoon until it occurred to the watchers at twilight that one of the beasts in the corral, whether the horse or Tristan, would likely end up dying in the match. Susannah's father quipped that the horse would serve a better purpose as dog meat, and Tristan stared at him and said he would name the horse in his honor Arthur Dog Meat at which he stomped off refusing to join them all later for supper and demanding an apology which he didn't get.

Late that night the ocean again entered Tristan's dreams: he tossed his bruised body and saw the black sky and immense rolling swells of the night watch, the rattling of an ice-stiffened foresail, and later the sky shot with stars too large to be stars. He awoke with Susannah covering him and the curtains blowing as if they were sails. He went to the window and stared down at the stallion in the corral; in the moonlight he could see the outline of its thick swollen neck. He told Susannah that he would be going away for a few months, or perhaps even a year, to meet his grandfather's ship in Havana. She said that she could tell that he needed to go and she would wait for him forever. At breakfast he kissed his father and mother good-bye and rode off with One Stab to Great Falls to meet the train. One Stab gave him his skinning knife and Tristan remembered that his own was buried with Noel at Ypres. He embraced the old Indian and said that he would return, to which One Stab only said, "I know it," as he rigged a lead line for Tristan's horse.

The voyage never really ended, except as it does for everyone: in this man's life, on a snowy hillside in Alberta late in December in 1977 at the age of eighty-four (a grandson found him beside the carcass of a deer he had been gutting, his hand frozen around the skinning knife One Stab had given him that day in Great Falls—the grandson hung the deer in the tamarack and carried the old man home, his snowshoes sinking only a little deeper in the snow).

Tristan took the train east to Chicago, spent a few days out of curiosity studying the Great Lakes ships at the docks, then went south to New Orleans and over to Mobile where he spent a few days on a schooner owned by a Welshman out of Newfoundland and on down through Florida to Key West where he took a night ferry to Havana after watching a load of green turtles being unloaded at a kraal from a Cayman's schooner, a graceful but filthy ship.

It was his first time in the tropics and on the night passage to Havana he was sleepless, spending the hours pacing the deck and wondering at the moist dense heat which the slight breezes of the Gulf Stream did not dispel; and beneath the bow where he walked to escape the smell of coal smoke from the stacks, the waves were phosphorescent. In the first light with Havana in distant view he sipped rum from his flask watching his first porpoises cut across the bow, lie back, then hurtle across the wake: turning he saw the strange vast purple penumbra of the Gulf Stream casts in the sky. He was red-eyed and strained from his travel but for the first time in half a year he felt something akin to ease in his soul, as if the dawn shore breeze laved the surface no matter the currents and turmoil below. He smiled at the water and the thought of his grandfather's schooner which though relatively new held so small a place in the world of the great steamers anchored off Havana. But it was a matter of less money and going where you wanted, the ports undesirable to the large shipping companies, or bays too shallow for big drafts and heavy tonnage. Besides the old man said he disliked the smell of smoke or the sound of engines at sea and it was too late for him to develop an interest in the grotesque.

People finally don't have much affection for questions, especially one so leprous as the apparent lack of a fair system of rewards and punishments on earth. The question is not less gnawing and unpleasant for being so otiose, so naive. And we are not concerned with the grander issues: say the Nez Perce children receiving the hail of cavalry fire in their sleeping tents. Nothing is quite so grotesque as the meeting of a child and a bullet. And what distances in comprehension: the press at the time insisted we had won. We would like to think that the whole starry universe would curdle at such a monstrosity: the conjunctions of Orion twisted askew, the arms of the Southern Cross drooping. Of course not: immutable is immutable and everyone in his own private manner dashes his brains against the long-suffering question that is so luminously obvious. Even gods aren't exempt: note Jesus's howl of despair as he stepped rather tentatively into eternity. And we can't seem to go from large to small because everything is the same size. Everyone's skin is so particular and we are so largely unimaginable to one another.

Thus Tristan had not more than a shred of comprehension of the agony he caused Susannah. On the morning of his departure she took a long walk and became lost. One Stab found her at nightfall and after that Ludlow asked One Stab to keep an eye on her if she left the yard. Her walking continued for weeks and her father truncated his vacation out of disgust when she refused his plan to have the marriage annulled. But Susannah's character owed more to the early nineteenth than the early twentieth century and as an abandoned lover she was unwilling to commiserate with anyone; this resolve was impenetrable and she spent her time either walking with Samuel's botanical and zoological handbooks or sitting in her room reading Wordsworth, Keats and Shelley, favorites from the two years at Radcliffe before her marriage to Tristan. She enjoyed talking to her mother-in-law whose intelligence was as extraordinary as her own as long as the conversation didn't lead to Tristan. But most of all she enjoyed her long summer walks and such were her preoccupations that she never noticed One Stab following her. Sometimes she invited little Isabel along and she marveled at the child's quick wit and her knowledge of the natural world gathered from her mother and observation rather than from books. One especially hot afternoon while they were bathing in a pool formed by the spring near Samuel's grave Isabel noticed One Stab back in the forest and waved. Susannah cried out and covered herself then was embarrassed by the child's puzzlement. Then Isabel laughed and said she was going to marry One Stab when she grew up if he didn't get too old because Susannah had already married Tristan and there were no other choices on earth. Susannah slipped back to her neck in the water remembering how one day in this pool Tristan had imitated an otter chasing the fingerling trout and eating watercress. Isabel was saying that One Stab only followed to prevent her from getting lost or straying inadvertently between a sow grizzly and her cubs.

In Havana that morning Tristan took breakfast then walked the streets until noon came, the appointed time when his grandfather would make his daily visit to the shipping office. The meeting was casual at first but when they stepped away from the clerks out into the crude heat of the day his grandfather became grave and walked quickly tilted forward as a man in a rainstorm. The crew had been sent home and he had been ill with dysentery, the only complaint Tristan had ever heard from his mouth, but it was a veil over the inevitable: the schooner would be seized on its return to Falmouth for the war effort. To keep control of the ship they must cooperate. When they passed the guards at the British Consulate the old man paused and looked at Tristan with his cold blue eyes and told him not to say anything: the bargain had been struck. Then the old man pulled long from a flask of rum and offered it to Tristan saying that his senses had to be dulled a bit to bear these nitwits.

Later that afternoon they loaded supplies on the schooner with a new first mate, a Dane down from San Francisco named Asgaard, and three Cuban deckhands of evident experience. The captain of record was now Tristan and his grandfather was listed as a passenger bound for Falmouth. They slipped from their mooring after dark, raising an American flag before the mainsail and recording their heading in a brand new logbook. In a strong northeaster they rounded Cape Antonio the next morning and headed southwest down the Yucatan Channel toward Barranquilla to pick up a neutral cargo of mahogany and rosewood, and not incidentally, an important British subject. Then they headed east, passed south of the Caymans, up the Windward Channel and out the Caicos Passage turning north to catch the Gulf Stream whose current would aid them toward England.

In his cabin the old man barked an occasional order up to Asgaard and continued to school Tristan relentlessly. They took double watches keeping awake with Jamaican coffee. For a month all else was wiped from Tristan's mind except ingesting sixty years of his grandfather's experience: his sleep was troubled by imagined line squalls, frayed mooring lines, split masts, the strange giant waves found off Madagascar on occasion in the winter. They saw no sign of a German blockade as they neared the southern coast of England. They slipped into Falmouth at night where they were met by British intelligence. It was the old man's last arrival and he took permanently to bed that night aided by Tristan and his wife who had tallied his returns for over a half century. He was nearly merry when he took her hand and said that he was home for good.

Tristan was briefed the next day by an officer who had formerly been a factory manager in the Midlands. The officer was deferential and poured Tristan a drink as he nervously fingered a file. Then he asked if Tristan minded showing him how one went about scalping another human being; in his youth he had read a great deal of the literature of the American West but none of the authors had described the precise technique and he was curious. Tristan silently moved his hand in a slicing motion beneath his widow's peak and then made a swift ripping motion. It attracted his rarely used sense of humor and he said that one waited until the man was dead or nearly so depending on the degree of one's dislike and that you couldn't scalp a beheaded man because you needed an anchor to gain a good fulcrum. The Englishman nodded appreciatively and they went on about their business. The next morning the schooner was to be loaded with wooden cases marked tinned beef but which in fact held weaponry of a certain advanced nature. The cargo was bound for Malindi on the Kenyan coast to aid the British in their anticipated problems with the Germans at Fort Ikomo in Tanganyika. In this relatively early stage of the war they should have no trouble with the Germans in that they were flying an American flag but the situation could change momentarily and if Tristan were under fire he must scuttle the schooner. If the skirmish were of a minor nature as they neared Kenya a case of hunting rifles and shotguns consigned for Nairobi might be used in defense and that he should school his crew for that eventuality.

Tristan spent the afternoon sitting beside his grandfather's bed waiting for his midnight departure. While the old man slept he wrote Susannah and his father that he was on a mission for the government not realizing his letters would be censored and that he had been followed everywhere that day by an intelligence officer disguised as a Cornish fisherman. And writing the notes brought a strange sweep of sentiment over him as if for a moment his destiny was no longer so inalienably private and buried within himself. He imagined his father and Decker arguing about breeding lines and his mother in the parlor with the gramophone playing Cavalleria Rusticana. He saw Susannah sitting up in bed and stretching her arms in the first light, how her slight figure walked to the window to look at the weather surrounding the mountains and how she would come back to bed and look at him a long time without saying anything.

Some of our strangest actions are also our most deeply characteristic: secret desires remain weak fantasies unless they pervade a will strong enough to carry them out. Of course no one ever saw the "will" and perhaps it is a cheapish abstraction, one blunt word needing a thousand modifiers. When Tristan set sail for Africa that morning after a silent lamplit breakfast with his grandmother—she gave him a Bible wrapped in an untreated lambswool sweater she had knitted—-he was fulfilling a number of inevitabilities. Since his sixth grade geography class in a country schoolhouse he had dreamed of going to Africa, not for the hunting because One Stab had taught him a much more honorable and functional sense of hunting than to shoot an animal to gratify his ego, but merely to see it, to smell and feel and know it, to see how it jibed with the dreams of that child crazed with maps he once was. Another obsession was caused by the tales his father told of his few short youthful trips with his own father: a trip to Göteborg in Sweden one summer and another to Bordeaux and of the whale seen breaching in the North Sea. Always the expert horseman, once in his dreams Tristan envisioned a schooner as a giant seafaring horse jumping wave froth and pitching full tilt against swells. And there was the unspoken, unthought, unrehearsed sense that time and distance would reveal to him why Samuel died.

A week of brisk chill winds brought them around Cape St. Vincent where they headed southeast toward Gibraltar. Asgaard figured they had been averaging a hundred and fifty nautical miles a day, a grand pace that would slacken somewhat when they entered the Mediterranean. Twice they had dropped the sails for rifle practice. Tristan had been delighted on opening the case to find seven Holland & Holland rifles of varying caliber including an elephant gun plus four shotguns. But the seas were too rough and it was nearly impossible to time the aim on a rising or falling swell to hit the bottle off the stern. Only Tristan and one of the Cubans who was later revealed to be an exiled Mexican could do it. Asgaard, the peaceful Dane, closed his eyes as he pulled the trigger; one of the Cubans couldn't stop giggling and the other was stiff and serious but inexperienced.

A day and a half into the Mediterranean passing Alboran, a German destroyer in the early evening signaled them to reef and heave to but a squall and the gathering dark gave them a clean escape. For safety Asgaard thought it wise to skirt the Algerian and Tunisian coast beyond which point they would supposedly be safe, at least until they reached the Indian Ocean. It proved true though Tristan was enervated and sleepless when they were becalmed for three days off Libya. Against orders they stopped in Crete at Ierapetra long enough to take on fresh water to replace their brackish supplies. At the wharf an obviously German shopkeeper studied them furtively and the Mexican offered Tristan to cut the man's throat. The crew had not been apprised of the mission but none of them believed the cases in the hold held beef. And to Asgaard's dismay Tristan dispensed totally with the shipboard formalities that separate captain from crew, formalities that he had loathed and chaffed against in the army. He ate with the crew, occasionally trying his hand at the cooking, played cards with them and had begun taking guitar lessons from the especially shy and taciturn Cuban who called him caballero instead of captain. Neither was the liquor rationed to the time-honored two ounces a day: the liquor stores were left unlocked though no one abused it. Asgaard was pleased two days out of Falmouth, though, when Tristan announced at dinner that anyone who didn't work out would simply be pitched overboard. But the crew was swift and efficient with a high morale partly because they were headed south into the warmer climes they loved.

The schooner arrived one dawn at Port Said and passed into the Suez Canal uneventfully. Only Tristan and Asgaard were disturbed by the extreme heat of the Red Sea. The heat was mitigated a great deal when they made the Strait of Bab el Mandeb and entered the stiff southerly breezes of the Indian Ocean in the Gulf of Aden. Two weeks later they reached Malindi only to find that the rendezvous had been changed to Mombasa two days' sail further south. Tristan had relapsed into grief to the point that he secretly wished to encounter a German gunboat, but the exchange in Mombasa was hitchless. The British officer said they were under no immediate further obligation for a partial reward for the danger of their voyage. The officer said he was recommending a decoration at which point Tristan became heartsick and walked from the room. After more than a month at sea the sight of this officious popinjay sickened him. Asgaard had been to Mombasa before and was spending his shore leave with a French widow so Tristan with the two Cubans and a Mexican in tow took the new train to Nairobi where they spent three days drinking and whoring themselves to exhaustion. Tristan made a deal to take a load of ivory, elephant tusks and the false ivory of rhinoceros' horns thought to be to the Chinese an aphrodisiac, to Singapore. In Nairobi he smoked some opium and rather liked its dreamy mind-banishing propensities. On their way back to the port Tristan had his photo taken at a fuel stop with a dead rhino's head across his lap. He paid a frayed, alcoholic English photographer twenty dollars to send the photo to One Stab, c/o William Ludlow, Choteau, Montana, USA. The message was to read, "Here is a dead one who stopped the train if only for a moment."

Back in Montana it was autumn again, only a fated year since the boys left for the war. Isabel and Susannah had left for Boston after Susannah was cured from a bout of pneumonia caught on a long cold walk in the rain. That year there were only three days of true Indian summer and one afternoon on the porch Ludlow was fiddling with a crystal set while One Stab and little Isabel gravely watched. When the first strains of music came over the airwaves from Great Falls they were simultaneously appalled. The sleeping bird dogs on the porch stood and barked, the male with his shoulder pelt ruffed in threat. Ludlow nearly dropped the set which he had spent two days assembling. Then Isabel laughed and clapped, jumping in a circle. One Stab lapsed into a deep brooding state as Ludlow explained the notion that everything owned its own sound. Within an hour of thought One Stab considered the crystal set to be as essentially worthless as the gramophone.

Susannah spent the winter in Boston at Isabel's Louisburg Square address. Still alienated from her parents over the matter of her marriage, she found Isabel to be a good companion and their relationship progressed from the artificiality of daughter-in-law and mother-in-law to close friends. Isabel had decided to take no lovers that year and had instead devoted her energies, other than to the usual symphony and opera, to the learning of French and Italian and to the questions of feminism and suffrage. She held a dinner for a distant cousin, the poetess Amy Lowell who was somewhat a scandal, given as she was to smoking cigars in public. Susannah, whose health had been weak, was delighted with the grand orotund lady who asked for a goblet of brandy after dinner, lighted a cigar and read her slight, fragile poetry so absurdly different from the bearer.

Susannah never received the letter from Tristan from Falmouth, only a note from the British government that the letter would be held until such time as its sensitive nature would not endanger the war effort. This puzzled and grieved her and she nearly contacted her father who had received news of Tristan of a somewhat congratulatory nature. The British Consul in Boston had advised him that Tristan would receive the Victoria Cross for successfully undertaking a mission of an extremely perilous character, the exact nature of which could not be revealed. Susannah's father could not help but mutter "damned adventurer" when he heard the news though it came out at a Harvard Club luncheon and he was roundly congratulated for having so noble a son-in-law. He was cut somewhat from the same cloth as J. P. Morgan and Jay Gould though from a decidedly smaller pattern. The war in Europe would clearly provide him with his financial heyday, and he plunged heavily into cattle and grain from a base of mining and manufacturing. He had set Alfred up with an office in Helena, encouraged him to enter politics and to send him weekly reports on any economic intelligence he might garner. Alfred had already made him a nearly extortionary profit on a wheat deal and Susannah's father could not help but think what a fine son-in-law he would have made. Arthur was heavily into Standard Oil which had bought the Montana copper interests from Anaconda, forming Amalgamated Copper. Alfred clearly understood the prerogative of those who owned the capital while Ludlow who tended to dotter was sentimental about miners' wages and living conditions. When scab vigilantes hanged a Wobbly from a bridge in Butte, Arthur saluted them.

In the spring Alfred came east for Arthur's counsel in mapping out his future, to see his mother and not incidentally Susannah whom he loved in secret. Alfred was a bit cloddish compared to Tristan and Samuel but he was steadfast in his admiration of his brothers, and of a loving and faithful nature. He wept one evening at bedtime when he found himself wishing that Tristan wouldn't return and Susannah would somehow fall in love with him. In fact Alfred was a bit too guileless, a characteristic his political career would speedily change. It hurt him deeply in Boston when Susannah seemed almost not to notice him across the dinner table at a celebration over the reunion of the family. In the days that followed she was friendly but distant on a number of April walks across Boston Common when it seemed his heart would burst. She gave him on parting a book of Amy Lowell's poetry which his essentially stodgy nature could make nothing of, but the inscription, "Dearest Alfred, you are such a good, noble man, love, Susannah," kindled his spirits to a point that in the privacy of his compartment on the long train ride home he opened the book jacket, smelled her inscription and trembled thinking he caught the scent of her.

The schooner was not fairly beyond sight of Dar es Salaam where they had loaded the ivory when Tristan was struck with acute dysentery so virulent that he fainted at the wheel. The first stage of the disease flattened him and he ran a temperature of over a hundred and five during a week when the seas ran so high Asgaard feared both for the life of the captain and the boat. And had not Tristan and the schooner both owned nearly supernatural constitutions they both would have rested unshrouded on the bottom of the Indian Ocean. At the end of the first week the fever did not break but diminished to the point that Tristan was at least ambulatory in his tropic nightmare. In his waking dreams he had seen the gates of hell and wanted to walk through them and God alone knows what held him back one midnight when he perched naked on the bowsprit like a gargoyle with the warm spray of the ocean cooling him only a little until the Mexican sapped him with a belaying pin and put him back to bed.

For Tristan the dead were on deck and in his cabin he drank, despite his fever, and heard their footfalls. Samuel laughed and talked about botany but there was snow in his hair and his white hair blew in the shore winds as they neared Colombo in Ceylon. Susannah appeared with blue wings and One Stab howled off the bow wake. He heard them, even saw them, through teak and white-oak slabs. He did not know what was delirious sleep or delirious waking so that both his waking and sleeping dreams were soul chasers. One dawn Asgaard found him down in the hold nude, clasping a huge elephant tusk to his chest and examining the bloody root which had darkened and smelled horrible. Tristan grappled upward to the deck and tried to heave the tusk overboard when Asgaard restrained him and he was confined to his cabin with the Mexican on guard.

Tristan had in his fever achieved that state which mystics crave but he was ill-prepared for: all things on earth both living and dead were with him and owned the same proportion, he did not recognize in any meaningful sense his naked foot at the end of the bed, or the ocean under whose lid it was always night even at high noon, the blood at the end of the great tusk did not belong on the schooner and throwing it overboard would somehow return it to the elephant's head. Susannah arrived as a pale pink sexual ghost and her womb covered him, saline like the spray off the bowsprit until he was a ghost, too, and he was the ocean, Susannah herself, the bucking horse beneath him, the wood of the sea horse beneath him, both wind ripping the sails and the moon above the sails and the light of the dark between.

He had largely recovered by the time they hit the entry of the Strait of Malacca and sailed in fair soft winds toward Singapore. The ivory was dumped without ceremony at a shipboard conference not the less profitable because of the Chinese businessmen's fear of the cutthroats that watched the bargaining. Tristan was stretched thin by his disease as cable about to be sprung but fully in command. He agreed to take at an exorbitant price a trunk of pure opium to San Francisco to be accompanied by one of the businessmen. Asgaard hedged but over dinner Tristan made an even split of the ivory profits with the crew, saving out an extra share for his grandfather as the owner of the schooner. He said the same would happen with the opium profits and Asgaard lapsed into a dream of a small farm on the coast of Denmark that could easily be his own. The Cubans celebrated thinking how overwhelmed their families would be with this new wealth. Only Tristan and the Mexican were rootless, cared next to nothing for the pile of money before them because they wanted nothing that could be bought with it: one could suppose that the Mexican thought of his far-off and beloved country he could not return to without dying. And God knows what Tristan wanted other than to revive the dead: his brain was the remnant of carnage, a burned city or forest, cold scar tissue.

The schooner headed north through the South China Sea stopping at Manila for fresh supplies and water. The opium courier was panicked at that infamous port, so Tristan set Asgaard and the two Cubans armed with hunting rifles on deck. He then went down to his cabin and wrote a short but fatal note to Susannah (Your husband is forever dead, please marry another) which he posted with the captain of a fast steamer he met when he and the Mexican began their binge in Manila. Just before dawn on the way back to the ship they were set upon by four thugs near the dock and might have died were it not for the Mexican disarming one of the assailants while Tristan attacked the largest man. The Mexican cleanly beheaded one with the man's machete and the others, save the one Tristan was strangling, fled, but not before Tristan received a severe leg wound, a deep slice across the side of his knee which cut the tendon. The Mexican applied a tourniquet and they made their way singing back to the dinghy which they rowed drunkenly to the mooring. Asgaard cleaned and sewed up the wound with catgut improvising knots around the tendon. The wound had healed by the time they reached Hawaii though ever after Tristan walked with the trace of a limp.

No one but his far-flung crew knows much of Tristan's next six years except for a few details, all the more teasing because of their incompleteness: we know he reached San Francisco then headed south to Panama hoping to pass through the new canal but the landslide at the Gaitland Cut had temporarily closed the new passage so he rounded the Horn and had a small steam auxiliary put in at Rio. Then the schooner had a relatively stable three years in the Caribbean working as an island trader ranging from Bermuda to Martinique over to Cartagena. Tristan bought a small ranch on the Isla de Pinos then set off for Dakar on another escapade for the British government in the last year of the war. He rounded Good Hope returning to Mombasa where he took aboard a Galla woman for a week but she feared the rocking of the schooner and was put ashore with a small sack of gold in Zanzibar. He was repeating his ivory and opium run as he made his way again east to Singapore, Manila, Hawaii and San Francisco, down through the open canal late in 1921 and thence back to Havana where Asgaard and the rest of the crew left him except for the Mexican. He spent a few months on his ranch and when he returned to Havana he learned of the death of his grandfather five years before and that his father had suffered a stroke and that he wished him to come home so that they might see each other before Ludlow died. Tristan and the Mexican hired another crew and made their way to Vera Cruz where the Mexican now had enough money to bounty his life with power. Tristan put the schooner in the Mexican's care and journeyed north by horse and train arriving in April of 1922, still sunblasted, limping, unconsoled and looking at the world with the world's coldest eye.

It is not for us to comprehend Ludlow's speechless delight when he and One Stab sat on the porch listening to the symphony on the radio one warm April afternoon and saw Tristan's horse picking its way around the melting snowdrifts in the road and up through the gate. Tristan jumped from the horse and caught his father falling into his arms from the porch and he repeated father over and over but the old man was truly speechless now because of his stroke. One Stab stared straight upward and felt the first tears of a life so rough as to be incomprehensible as Ludlow's delight. One Stab began singing. Decker ran from the corral and Tristan and Decker tried to lift each other at once. Pet came from the kitchen hearing the noise and tried to bow as Tristan embraced her. A girl of sixteen with a long pigtail wearing men's clothing came around the corner carrying a bridle: windburned but not quite Indian in her darkness. She stared at Tristan who caught her glance but then she walked away. Decker said it was his daughter Isabel but she was shy.

Pet killed and dressed a spring lamb, built a fire behind the kitchen and began roasting it. They sat on the porch drinking but mostly silent. Ludlow wrote questions on a slate board with chalk. His hair was white but his carriage erect. Decker looked off in the distance and explained that Tristan's mother was in Rome, then paused adding as a false afterthought, that Alfred and Susannah had been married the year before and were on an extended though belated honeymoon tour through Europe and would be at Cap d'Antibes for the summer. Decker was relieved and drank deeply when Tristan seemed unconcerned. Tristan walked a circle on the lawn and said he wanted to take a quick ride and hoped they wouldn't be too drunk by dinner.

He rode quickly up the creek that led to the spring in the box canyon. The remnant of a snowdrift covered Samuel's grave and a magpie flew off the stone as he arrived and unhorsed. He watched the invisible tracery in the air the bird made climbing to the canyon top above his head. He decided he wasn't good at graves because the grave under his feet was merely snow and earth and a stone dulled by the weather. On the way back to the house he watched Isabel grooming three spring foals in the sunlight. Decker called her Two to avoid confusion with Tristan's mother. He asked her where the badger was and she said the animal disappeared but his children still lived up behind the orchard. She took him into the barn and showed him an Airedale puppy Ludlow had bought for her birthday. Though only ten weeks old the pup advanced growling on Tristan and he swept it up gradually calming it until it chewed on his ear. Then he stared at her closely until she flushed and looked down at her feet.

At dinner Ludlow carved the lamb ceremoniously, then wrote "tell us tales" on his slate board and passed it to Tristan. Oddly, and like many men compelled to adventure with no interest in the notion of adventure but only a restlessness of the body and spirit, Tristan did not see anything particularly extraordinary about his past seven years. But he had an extravagantly accurate idea of what the table wanted to hear so he talked on for his father: the beheading of the Filipino thug, a typhoon off the Marshall Islands, an anaconda he bought while drunk in Recife that wound itself so tightly around the mast that it could not be detached until they offered it a piglet, the beauty of some of the horses he left in care of his crew hands in Cuba, and how some of the citizens in Singapore eat dogs, which shocked everyone at the table except One Stab who asked Tristan about Africa. After dinner he distributed some presents from his saddlebags including a necklace of lion's teeth which he placed around One Stab who set off a few days later on a three-day ride to Fort Benton to show the necklace to One Who Sees As A Bird. Tristan impulsively gave a ruby ring meant for his mother to Two, placing it on her ring finger and kissing her on the forehead. The table was silent and Pet started to interfere but Decker calmed her.

Later that night after everyone had gone to bed Tristan walked far out in the pasture in the moonlight: the snow patches were a ghostly white and far to the west he could see the even whiter peaks of the Rockies. He listened to the coyotes yelping and chattering in pursuit and occasionally a short howl. Back near the corral he heard the puppy crying and went into the barn and picked it up. He took it in the house and up to his room where he put it on the mule deer skin and built a nest around it with a comforter against the chill of the night. Tristan slept then until the middle of the night when the puppy growled and in the moonlight from the window he saw Two standing at the foot of the bed. He reached for her hand and after a while she joined his deep and dreamless sleep, wound about each other with all loneliness faded at last from the earth.

Tristan's life seemed to be moving through time in increments of seven: and now he was to have seven years of grace, a period so relatively peerless and golden in his life that far into the future he would turn back to that time; the minutiae of the book of days, a hieratica relived slowly so that each page was turned with some eagerness. No grace is isolate, and it was to a greater part the people he loved, but could scarcely comprehend as people when he left, who led him into light and warmth; but on that first morning he could see them clearly from the window after Two slipped back into her nightgown, kissed him and left the room: first there was a loud unidentifiable noise far out in the pasture which proved to be a Ford flivver jouncing over the rocks and through mud in great circles with One Stab at the wheel and Ludlow sitting erect beside him in his buffalo robe. Decker leaned against the barn in an Irish wool cap having a morning smoke in a patch of sunlight and scratching the nose of a Hereford bull as it poked through the slats of the fence: Pet scattering grain to the chickens and a few geese and shooing away the pup who chased the chickens. And when he came down for breakfast the wood cookstove was warm and sunlight flowed through the south window with a view of the valley. Two poured him coffee and he looked into the crockery bowl of herring Roscoe Decker was addicted to and fetched a piece with some pickled onions. Two served him fried trout that One Stab had caught at dawn. He stared at her back and the black shiny hair in a single plait as she washed the breakfast dishes. He closed his eyes and the floor rolled beneath him for the moment as the sea and he could smell brisk sea air at northern low tide in the herring. He opened his eyes and asked Two with a smile if she would marry him soon and thus avoid scandalizing the house with nightly visits. She dried her hands and took her ruby ring from the window sill as if she were holding a chalice and said yes if he were sure of himself, and yes if he weren't sure of himself.

There was a grand early October wedding, delayed until then so Isabel could get back from Europe and at Pet's insistence because she feared that Tristan would leave at any whim, an idea remote from his thoughts. Tristan spent the summer building a lodge house up in the box canyon overlooking the spring. A group of Norwegian carpenters came from Spokane along with three Italian stonemasons from Butte. The lodge was simple in design with one huge main room with a kitchen and fireplace at one end, and on the other end a wall-sized fieldstone fireplace. There were two wings of three bedrooms apiece. Two was embarrassed at the size of the place and One Stab and Ludlow visited daily in the flivver carrying lunch for the workers. Ludlow had taken to writing longish, eloquent letters to which Tristan would answer around the fire after dinner.

In Montana the Depression came ten years early. On the eastern plains the grain market goaded to affluence by the war collapsed totally aided by two years of severe drought. Banks failed and the cattle market inflated as the hunger of soldiers dwindled. Decker pared the stock back to registered Herefords, but the sole income of the ranch was the get of the foundation stallion, still referred to by all as Arthur Dog Meat, that Decker bred to the thoroughbred mares. The offspring didn't own the strength or the sturdiness of the quarter horse but they were exquisite cutting horses and class pleasure mounts, pretty faced and spirited. And they were powerfully fast at the quarter mile and Tristan and Decker raced them at fairs in Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon. With gambling winnings, Tristan bought Ludlow a Packard touring car that One Stab drove with dignity and care, still in his lion's tooth necklace. Men came from as far as San Antonio and Kingsville, Texas, to buy horses for amounts that Decker and Ludlow found boggling, but which Tristan insisted upon with shrewdness.

The fall wedding had passed into memory without the presence of Alfred and Susannah. In fact it was four years before Tristan saw Susannah over a polite but festive Christmas dinner. Alfred arrived from time to time when he was in the area campaigning for the United States Senate, a contest which he won handily helped not a little by the coffers and influence of his father-in-law. No one but Two and Pet saw Susannah's grief that Christmas. She was still childless and when Tristan's children, Samuel Decker and Isabel Three, caressed her yellow hair in the parlor, she wept.

The economics of the time grew more questionable and on Arthur's advice Ludlow slowly withdrew his capital from the Helena Bank and for want of a better idea buried gold beneath a huge stone on Tristan's hearth. Tristan with his habitual though charming arrogance insisted the ranch be self-supporting. He still sent formal notices and amounts of money to Susannah and her father for the use of the land they mutually held.

CHAPTER 3

What doomed him again (for there is little to tell of happiness—happiness is only itself, placid, emotionally dormant, a state adopted with a light heart but nagging brain) was a trip to Great Falls with Two and the ranch hands to drive a group of fall steers to the railhead. It was a pleasurable trip, not the less happy because of its almost antique nature. It was October and the stock market, whatever that was, had just collapsed. But Tristan had got a small amount of cash for the cattle and they all—Two, Tristan, Decker, the half-black Cree, a Norwegian who remained on from the carpentry crew years before—stayed to celebrate after an arduous hot summer. They had the best meal in town with plenty of drinks, but were put off by the finery and wealth of a neighboring ranch crew that had gotten rich by smuggling liquor in from Canada in defiance of the Volstead Act.

One Stab was coming next day in the Packard to take Two home with her fall shopping, so Tristan told the smugglers' leader he would take ten cases of whiskey for his own use and to sell to his neighbors. He told his crew he would split the profits and they were drunk with pleasure thinking of the quick money, ordering even more whiskey to carry in the panniers of the packhorses.

They made a strange procession filing down a narrow canyon into a valley near Choteau, the horses not far behind the Packard bogged and slowed in the October rain. Then at the mouth of the canyon near where the road turned north toward Choteau, the law with two armed men and a Ford coupe blocked the road. They fired vaguely into the air as they had been instructed as Federal officers. And the procession still in good humor stopped. The Federal officer said they had learned of the shipment and Tristan would have to give up the whiskey. They recognized Tristan and were apologetic saying he would face charges in November in Helena but they would have to destroy the liquor. Tristan turned from the officers hearing One Stab wail. He walked to the Packard, looked at One Stab's face, then at Two where she sat in the back with the supplies and gifts. She sat there as if built of stone with a ricocheted bullet from the canyon wall neatly piercing her forehead like a red dime.

Tristan went berserk then, reached for a nonexisting gun, then slugged each startled officer, putting one of them near death for months. He drew Two's body from the Packard and ran with it down the canyon. The procession followed him as he carried her body for miles through the cold rain. He carried her body howling occasionally in a language not known on earth.

Three days later the marshal came to Ludlow's house saying that Tristan would have to serve thirty days in the Helena jail because of the severity of the crushed skull of one of the Federal officers. The lightness of the sentence was due to Alfred's enormous influence in Montana politics. Pet interrupted to say that Isabel Three was gone. Tristan rode out covering a dozen miles until he found her close by up in the woods near the spring. One Stab was singing his Cheyenne death song and she was joining in with a voice so high and plaintive that the remnants of Tristan's heart broke in half. He lifted her slight body to the saddle and carried her home.

It is still argued by old men in the area whether it was alcohol, jail or grief, or simply greed that made Tristan an outlaw: but this is only gossip to nurse the drinks of pensioners and interesting in that forty years later Tristan was still an object of fascination, somehow the last of the outlaws, rather than a gangster.

In fact after he found six-year-old Three up at the spring singing with One Stab, he was mute for a number of months, except with his children. He was mute in jail refusing all visitors, including Alfred who came to offer his condolences and those of Susannah in a letter. The Helena press covered the meeting under the heading "Senator Visits Bereaved Brother in Jail."

In fact, Alfred was hoping for some solace and intervention from Tristan. He had arrived at the ranch the day after the funeral and only a few hours after the Marshal accompanied Tristan to jail. Ludlow stayed in his room and would not see his eldest son. He sent Pet down into the parlor carrying his slate saying he could not talk to Alfred as long as he represented the U.S. Government and its base practices. Ludlow in fact had thought of Two as a daughter and had loved her as a daughter. Years before he had been delighted to teach her to read and write and was constantly to Pet's and Decker's dismay trying to spoil her with gifts. It was Ludlow who wrote Isabel and told her to bring from Boston the grandest and costliest wedding gown possible. Now when he rode out to the grave with One Stab in the flivver he felt far more than his seventy-five years thinking of another October when he sent the boys off to war, and then the beautiful October afternoon seven years before when Tristan and Two had been married in a grove of cottonwoods, the sun glistening off the white gown against the sere colors of autumn, faded grass and yellow aspens. Two deaths in fourteen years of loved ones are not all that uncommon except to the mourner who has lost all sense of common and uncommon and is buried in the thoughts of things left out and how it might have been.

Alfred returned to Washington spending a long train trip in a sleepless turmoil. As a political issue, Prohibition had been a senseless obscenity to him and had only served to promote the interests of the criminal element, all the more evident in the waning years of the Volstead Act. His father had always been a hero to him. And he liked to quote the elegant old frontiersman in speeches to the Senate though Ludlow, to be sure, had no such notions of himself. Popular ideas as basically silly as "cowboys" or "frontiersman" or the law of Prohibition itself came after the fact in self-congratulatory phases of history, when the energies turned toward labeling and social order.

But Alfred's problems were more profound in nature than politics and an alienated father. Susannah in fact was quite ill, had always been ill in a quiet nonobvious manner. And Washington, the social demands of being a senator's wife exacerbated her problems. Alfred had bought a country house and stables out in Maryland where they boarded many of his father-in-law's racehorses. She stayed there most of the time with twice-weekly visits from a professor of forensic psychiatry from Johns Hopkins, an old French Jew sworn to secrecy, as a mad wife has always been a political liability. In the blindness of his affection, Alfred had refused to admit the severity of the problem. One afternoon years before when they were being driven from Vallauris to Nice to take the boat home, Susannah insisted the driver stop and they walked off into a wooded hillside and made love. She had seemed terribly happy for weeks though there were intermittent fits of weeping. Despite this Alfred thought himself never so gloriously happy, but then Susannah had descended into her particular torment, refusing to leave the stateroom for the entire two-week trip back to New York. The country place and release from the immediate pressures of Washington seemed to help.

But in each of the nine years of their marriage there had been periods of what must be called insanity of varying degrees of severity. The psychiatrist hadn't been encouraging though in the past few years Susannah had been his most endearing patient. He had pushed her activity with the racing stable, understanding as he did that a preoccupation with animals tended to calm a patient, that the horses benignly seemed to draw the poison away at least temporarily.

The weeks that followed Alfred's return from Montana had been totally hellish. Susannah had reached the pinnacle of her manic phase where all things on earth had become too vivid to be borne up under: she could see a horse's heart through the skin, muscle and bone, and the moon was only a foot beyond the window; cut flowers in vases were dead and terrifying and certain paintings from France had to be turned to the wall; she claimed she lacked an imaginary child no matter how hard she tried to invent one and she used Tristan's refusal to answer her note of condolence as a lever to descend into depression.

In April Alfred came back west ostensibly to visit his constituency. He bought a large house in Helena, thinking that if Susannah began spending her summers in Montana it might help. Isabel would be there and Tristan and Pet might allow Susannah to help with Three and Samuel. As he drove into the muddy yard near Choteau his heart, always optimistic, lifted at his plan and at the beauty of the ranch.

Tristan and Decker were outside the shed building frames for packsaddles while Ludlow and One Stab watched smoking their pipes. When Alfred got out of his car Ludlow slipped through the fence and walked far out in the pasture with One Stab following. Tristan, Decker and Alfred watched Ludlow make his way around the melting drifts as if he intended to walk to the end of the world. Tears streaked down Alfred's cheeks and Tristan took his arm. Alfred asked for his forgiveness but Tristan was matter-of-fact and only said, "Forgive you for what, you didn't shoot my wife." Decker sat on a sawhorse and watched Tristan and Alfred walk into the pasture after the receding figures of Ludlow and One Stab. Decker's own sorrow owned a harder Nordic remorselessness. (He waited three years until he was at a cattle auction in Bozeman before he had the opportunity to shoot one of the Federal officers on the Bozeman to Livingston road the officer traveled every day. He sat on a rock up in the loblolly pines with a .270 on his lap, first shooting out a tire, and when the man got out of the car he shot him ten times with great satisfaction. The other Federal officer had been transferred east and Decker had to be satisfied with the one.)

Halfway into the pasture Alfred stopped and in a rush of words explained that Tristan must write Susannah and relieve her of her twisted guilt. Tristan nodded in sympathy for his brother. When they reached Ludlow, who was leaning exhausted against a boulder, One Stab walked away out of earshot. Tristan took his father's arm and asked him to forgive Alfred who was his son and not the government. Ludlow shivered in a chill and stared at Alfred with hard but watery eyes, nodding at Tristan and looking away. He was without his slate so he merely embraced Alfred and began his walk back home.

When Alfred left the next morning he felt airy and positive though it was raining. He had been forgiven and they had a fine evening with Tristan's children sitting on Alfred's lap as he told them stories of life in the great cities of the East. He paused on the way to the main road to let a large band of packhorses and mules pass driven by two hands he recognized, the negroid Cree and the huge Norwegian carpenter. He wondered idly why Tristan wanted so many pack animals.

By early May when it was sure that spring had solidly broke and that any mountain storms would be short and fitful, One Who Sees As A Bird came down from Fort Benton and led Tristan, Decker, the Norwegian and Cree from Choteau up past Valier and Cut Bank to Cardston in Alberta where they loaded fifty packhorses with four cases of whiskey each, cut back down past Shelby and Conrad to Great Falls where Tristan got rid of the whiskey for six thousand dollars. The large profit was due to the fact that the whiskey was first-rate Canadian blended, not cut into working-class rotgut, a practice of the more venal smugglers. The other factor in the large profit was the scarcity of roads in northern Montana making it a relatively easy area for police. One Who Sees As A Bird made it an assured run though his friend One Stab was sad that Tristan had insisted he stay home to take care of Ludlow and the ranch.

Unfortunately, Tristan wasn't satisfied. Without realizing it he had half hoped to meet some resistance. Then Decker counseled him to think of his children and the fact that the small population of Montana would lead to their eventual capture. Tristan agreed though Decker's quiet anger was such that he only voiced these reservations at the insistence of Pet who feared for her grandchildren. Tristan made one more run in high summer and when they got home One Stab said Pet had disappeared with the children. One Stab said he would have followed but Ludlow had been ill. So Decker and Tristan rode up to Fort Benton in the Packard with the hole in the back seat and brought Pet and the children home.

Tristan laid off then after wiring the Mexican in Vera Cruz to bring the schooner to San Francisco by the following spring. There was money to be made. Isabel had come west for the summer helping Susannah settle in an appropriate house for a senator in Helena. Isabel had her grandchildren and Pet down for a month and Susannah's tentative health thrived caring for them and Three and Samuel adored her in return. No one knew that Susannah's apparent health was based on the most fragile of misconceptions. When Tristan had answered her letter at Alfred's insistence he had dwelt overmuch on the fact that fate had separated them and despite what had happened they must live with it with grace. The letter was unwittingly cruel because it somehow gave her hope; she had entered a period again when her world was somehow too errantly vivid, peeled back so that her days were a sequence of the essence of things. Alfred was planning a big dinner and party for all his political and social friends in Montana and she went rather manically about the preparations with the help of Isabel who was an expert at such matters.

Tristan went down to Helena to see a representative of a Canadian distiller he had met up in Cardston. The man had discussed with Tristan the trouble caused by a group known as the Irish Gang based in Seattle and the apparent stranglehold they had on the liquor distribution in the Northwest and California. Certain demanding clients in San Francisco were unable to get the first-class whiskey their clients preferred. The two men had tentatively agreed that Tristan would make a schooner run from Vancouver Island to San Francisco and Tristan intended on this sunny day in Helena to strike an exorbitant deal. He had brought along five cases of Haig & Haig as a gift for Alfred though he had declined to attend the party. He had always been repelled by the ostensibly important friends that Alfred had brought up to the ranch for hunting season: they played cards and drank all night, got up late and with few exceptions, the Cree filled their elk and deer licenses, though Tristan refused to cooperate any longer after a rich haberdasher shot a grizzly sleeping on a hillside.

Tristan had his meeting then drove around Alfred's ornate Victorian mansion until he found the back entrance. He intended to greet his mother, deliver the whiskey, avoid Susannah somehow and get back to the ranch. Helena unnaturally enervated him, all those men dubiously referred to as civil servants wandering around, not to speak of the cold limbo of his month in jail there when his throat and chest were continuously on the verge of choking him with his memories of Two. Even after bearing the children she would spring to her mount on a horse without using the stirrups and when she rode the roan gelding hard her hair would fly out in the back as the mane of a wild animal. But he was well past simple notions of vengeance and perhaps grief had coarsened and poisoned him to the point that he knew there was no evening the score with the world, because even if he could that would not recreate the woman whom the rain had beat against until her long black hair had swung against his legs.

So for this man it was no more than rather belligerently fateful that he should walk into his brother's kitchen and find Susannah laughing and talking with Samuel and Three. He greeted and hugged his children, then they ran off to help their grandmother direct the hanging of the decorations for the party. Susannah and Tristan sat there in a condition of discomfort so extreme that it seemed the kitchen would explode. Susannah half lied and said she dreamt that she had become the mother of Samuel and Three, but Tristan shook his head no and she stood clasping her hands as if to pull her shoulders together. She left the table and walked into the pantry. Tristan sat at the table sweating in the close August heat and then she called his name in her soft clear voice. He pressed his hands hard against his face and went to the pantry where she stood naked with glistening eyes, her hair released around her shoulders, her clothes about her feet. He closed the pantry door and tried to calm her, then gave up without hesitation when she said if he did not make love to her she would begin screaming and scream until she died. They sank in each other's arms, their skin sticking to the cool tile floor.

Later when Tristan left, Susannah cut off her hair with sewing scissors and was confined to her room for the duration of the party under a doctor's and nurses' care. Early the next morning Susannah was driven north to Choteau with the doctor, Isabel, Pet and the children. They drove in two cars and Alfred was distraught, but kind, utterly uncomprehending. When they arrived Tristan took the children up to a hunting cabin he had built some dozen miles into the mountains for a few days.

But when he returned Susannah was excited and graceful again, and everyone was relieved and Alfred left in a few days to return to Helena to take care of his political business. Tristan was only a week away from leaving for San Francisco to meet the Mexican and the schooner. He would keep the crew thin, taking the Cree and the Norwegian because he trusted them.

It was now early in September, and a brief cold spell had arrived and left within two days dusting the foothills with snow that had melted off the aspens by mid-morning. Tristan sat alone in the lodge after One Stab and Ludlow had picked up the children to take them down to have lunch with Isabel. He brooded over the smoldering log in the fireplace thinking bleakly of his betrayal of his brother, no matter the circumstances. He placed not a shred of blame on Susannah recognizing that she was periodically less responsible for what she did than the youngest of children. His heart ached over the confusion and pain he had caused on earth. He poured a glass of whiskey, and began packing for San Francisco early, knowing that it would be best to be far from Susannah if she collapsed again.

Tristan quickly packed, noting to tell Decker where he hid his money should he not return. But when he got back to the main room Susannah was sitting on the couch before the fire. He called her name but she didn't answer. He walked to the couch and looked at the fire and down at her short rain-dampened hair and clothing. She spoke low and clearly, asking his forgiveness for what she had done. She couldn't help herself because she loved him so terribly and knew at one time he had loved her and it wasn't fair so she broke down just to be with him once more on earth. She was unwell and a senseless torment to everyone so when things had settled down and she and Alfred returned east she would take her life. She assured Tristan that there was no self-pity involved, only that she could no longer bear the phases of insanity and his absence.

When she stopped Tristan tried to gather time for a few moments with his brain whirling in panic. He rushed his words and thoughts, feeling his heart dull and sinking further from reality. He said that she mustn't take her life because life was so awkward and complex that one day they might be together again. He would at least return in a year and they would see each other again when their spirits and minds had cleared and they could talk calmly.

So he left, and she had hope again, and held his lie that saved her life close. She had more hope than when he had left so many years before because she thought she knew how desperately he wanted to be with her again. Her health took an abrupt upturn and when they got back to Washington Alfred and the psychiatrist were delighted by her behavior over the next ten months and had hopes as ebullient and false as her own.

In San Francisco Tristan, the Cree and Norwegian quickly made contact with the Mexican, boarded the schooner and left under cover of darkness. On the advice of the distiller's representative, the Mexican had given the impression on the dock that the schooner was headed for Hawaii for delivery in Maui. They made their way in cold stormy weather north up the coast and reached the inlet near Church Point on Vancouver Island in a week of brisk sailing. They loaded in the dark and headed back toward the rendezvous point in Bolinas Bay just north of San Francisco.

Their luck held at Bolinas and the unloading and full payment were uneventful. Tristan and the Mexican were driven down to San Francisco by a man who was helping to arrange the next shipment to be paid for by a group of restaurant owners. After a meeting in an apartment above a speakeasy on North Beach the man drove them back toward Golden Gate, stopping against orders at a wharf restaurant for a quick meal. The Mexican was nervous thinking he recognized a dusty Model A from earlier in the afternoon. When they got out of the parking lot four men quickly surrounded them and beat Tristan and the Mexican senseless with blackjacks and dumped them back in their car, cutting the throat of the other man. Before the beating the most elegant of the attackers said they best keep away from the liquor business on the coast. Tristan remembered his gray suit and smiling eyes, his Irish brogue, when he awoke in the car after midnight. Tristan revived the Mexican and they dragged the man with the cut throat out of the car, drove back to the speakeasy and asked if the deal was still on. It was.

When they returned to California from Canada, this time to Tomales Bay near Point Reyes, they were ready when at dawn a launch approached their anchorage. Those in the launch did not know that Tristan had already unloaded a few miles further up the coast. As the launch drew near the schooner Tristan and the Mexican lay under wet canvas watching, with the Norwegian and Cree down below ready for a second wave of assault if necessary. The launch raked the main house with a short burst of machine gun fire before Tristan and the Mexican opened up unerringly with the elephant gun and a .375. He recognized two of the men that had beat him and they went first with the five-hundred-grain shells designed for the largest walking mammal on earth blowing them in shattered pieces out of the boat. The Mexican worked on the waterline of the launch, then potted the heads of the remaining two men as they dog-paddled in the incoming tide.

They sailed south for Ensenada then, with Tristan recognizing that though he had won the battle he could not win the war. He spent a winter of utter dissolution and the Mexican returned to Vera Cruz, his wallet full but knowing the game was over. After a month Tristan had sent the Cree and Norwegian home to the ranch with a long letter to his children and the message to Ludlow and Decker that he would return home after visiting Alfred and Susannah during the racing season at Saratoga. He hired an old Mexican fisherman and his wife to take care of the boat and cook for him. He drank and thought of Susannah and what he might possibly tell her in June when there was nothing to tell her. He began to miss his children and allowed the fisherman and his wife to move their three grandchildren on board when their mother abandoned them. He spent his days drinking and fishing with hand lines with the old man in a small scow powered by sail. Early in May he came not so much to his senses but to the realization of how much he missed his children so he left the schooner in the care of the old couple and traveled north. He had not an inkling of how he might urge Susannah to longer life, but he would go home before traveling east to Saratoga.

Tristan had not more than a few hours of ease in the Montana June when he reached the ranch. Everyone seemed fine after a hard winter though it was obvious that Ludlow was failing somewhat and Isabel had come by mid-May with that thought in mind. Then at dinner Decker mentioned that two old friends of Tristan's, Irishmen from California, had stopped by the day before but unfortunately he had told the friends that Tristan was already headed for Saratoga. Tristan felt a deathly cold flow up his spine, also anger knowing that all those he loved had been in grave danger.

By dawn the next morning Decker and One Stab had driven him to the train station in Great Falls. Decker was fearful and wanted to come along but Tristan said no that he must watch the ranch. Before they left late in the evening the Cree and Norwegian had been stationed on the porch and told to shoot strangers on sight. Tristan got on the train in an old suit of Samuel's (he owned none) and a satchel full of money and underwear, a Beasley pistol owned by his grandfather and One Stab's skinning knife.

When Tristan reached New York he hastily bought clothes and a car and drove north at top speed to Saratoga Springs. The racing season was in full tilt despite the Depression and he couldn't find accommodations, so he settled on a tourist cabin near Glens Falls. He shaved his mustache and the next morning he bought some clothes from a groom and changed them under the stands with the roar of the crowd above him. Between the races he carried a pail of water and a currycomb and watched the stately parade of horses on the mowed grass behind the grandstand on show for the next race. He studied the crowd closely and picked out Alfred and his father-in-law, Susannah under parasol, standing with a group of fashionable horse owners, including a sprinkling of Whitneys, Vanderbilts, Guests and Wideners: then he spotted what had to be one of the Irishmen standing near an ornate flower bed, nattily dressed but still somehow obvious. Tristan walked to the paddock near the barn, passing a large florid man talking to a jockey. When he passed he recognized the voice of the third man who had beat him on North Beach. Tristan did not turn but walked into the stables where he was told to keep busy cleaning stalls. Then the man came into the barn and looked around diffidently. He walked into an empty stall to piss. Tristan followed and slammed his head to the wall catching his head with two tines of a heavy manure fork. Tristan buried him under straw and manure in the corner of the stable and went back to the grandstand toilets and changed his clothes. He located the second Irishman and followed him to a tourist home after the man had looked around for his companion until the racing grounds were nearly deserted. Tristan followed the man until late in the evening for want of an opportunity until the man walked home from dinner and drinks on a shady sidestreet near the tourist home. Tristan broke his neck, emptied a garbage barrel and stuffed the man into it, gently replacing the lid.

The next morning after a sound sleep helped along with whiskey, he drove back to Saratoga wearing an expensive suit bought in New York. He hoped to separate Susannah for a little while and somehow assure her of his love enough to keep her alive. His chance came after lunch when she stood alone staring at a bay stallion favored in the first race. He stood beside her until she noticed him but she showed no surprise, saying only that she knew he would come.

They quickly walked away from the racing grounds to a house a few blocks away her father kept for the racing season. Tristan was hesitant but she said that it would be at least an hour or more before she was missed. Unfortunately, Alfred had assigned one of his Senate aides to keep a continuous eye on Susannah because of her mental problems. After the aide watched Susannah enter the house with a strange man he rushed back to the track to notify Alfred.

Susannah led Tristan to the master bedroom to avoid any intrusion by the maids. At first she was cool and demanding, asking that Tristan meet her in Paris by the middle of October. He refused, saying that the time was not yet appropriate. She became hysterical and he offered the following spring as a compromise beyond which she could not go. Then there was a long unbearably painful silence at the end of which he recognized again the signs of her impending madness. He forestalled it by drawing her to him and assuring her that by the following May he would be ready. She shuddered in his arms and as he gazed over her shoulder Alfred walked into the room. Susannah felt Tristan's hands tighten on her back and heard the door close. She guessed what had happened and her heart lightened thinking that at last it was all over and she could go with Tristan.

They were still as marble figures in a garden hearing their own breathing and the distant noises of the race grounds. Alfred said only to Tristan, "I want to kill you," and Tristan released himself from Susannah and handed Alfred his pistol. Alfred stared at the pistol then pressed the muzzle to Tristan's temple. They looked at each other and Susannah came to them as if sleepwalking. Alfred turned the pistol to his own head and Tristan knocked it from his hand. Alfred slumped to the floor weeping and Susannah stooped beside him and with cool and detached words said that it was a terrible misunderstanding, that she would stay with him always. Alfred stood then and he and Tristan exchanged a strange look that went beyond any comprehension they might have been able to voice, but Alfred's look held not a little hate. Susannah followed Tristan into the hall, kissed him and laughed saying perhaps they would meet one day in hell, or perhaps heaven, wherever people go if they go anywhere.

On the trip home Tristan stayed dulled by his thought and liquor, laughing once in Chicago when he changed trains and saw on the newsstand that the Volstead Act had been repealed, Prohibition ended. Back home he worked hard with the horses, amused his children and hunted with One Stab who owned the false and waning agility of the aged who refuse to accept age.

Near the end of September Tristan received a telegram from Asheville, North Carolina, from Alfred saying, "You have won her. I am sending her home . . ." He rode to Choteau and checked the return address by phone, and found out disturbingly that it was the address of a private asylum. He borrowed a Ford truck and drove over to Great Falls to meet the train, a little puzzled but somehow imagining that he would spend the rest of his troubled life caring for Susannah though he envisioned that she might finally get well at the ranch. He met the train feeling cold in his stomach but disregarding it. A politician friend of Alfred's approached Tristan, led him to the baggage car, handed him a list of burial instructions as the porter unloaded the highly polished rosewood coffin.

There's little more to tell. Susannah was buried next to Samuel and Two and the reader, if he or she were a naive believer, might threaten God saying leave him alone or some such frivolity. No one has figured out how accidental is the marriage of the blasphemy and fate. Only a rather old-fashioned theologian might speculate on Tristan damning God so many years before in France when he and Noel encased Samuel's heart in the paraffin. The contemporary mind views such events properly as utterly wayward, owning all the design of water in the deepest and furthest reaches of the Pacific.

One warm Sunday morning in mid-October a few weeks after the burial Samuel and Three were playing on the porch swing with their ponies saddled and tethered to the railing. Isabel had brought breakfast upstairs to Ludlow who wasn't feeling well. She was reading to him from Melville's Pierre, or the Ambiguities. Ludlow loved Melville while Isabel found the author tiresome.

In the kitchen Pet packed lunches for Tristan and the children's outing. She listened carefully to the talk of Decker and Tristan. They were trying to speculate themselves out of an impossible quandary: the fact that the Irish could very well return out of simple vengeance. Tristan stretched and walked over to Pet and asked her opinion. She said that they all cared most about the children and that the only important thing to her was that they were safe. Three came in and tugged at her father's arm. Tristan kissed her and said ten more minutes and she ran through the parlor yelling ten minutes to Samuel.

Decker suggested Cuba where Tristan had a small finca he had bought years before and now managed by his two Cuban crew members who had shipped up two good mares the previous spring for breeding. Tristan worried aloud about the children's schooling and Decker said their father's life was more important than schooling. Pet went rigid, first hearing the car, but Samuel called out that the police were here and she relaxed. Decker followed Tristan out onto the porch and paused with his grandchildren as Tristan approached the two troopers standing by the Ford coupe.

Tristan was easeful and almost bored as he nodded to the troopers but then his heart jumped against his ribs when he saw that one was actually the elegant Irishman from San Francisco, and the other a thug looking ungainly in a uniform. They studied each other for a moment.

"I've lost my two brothers. We best settle this," the man said.

Tristan glanced back at the porch where Decker stood next to Samuel and Three and One Stab. He knew he had come to the end and his heart ached for his children standing in the sunlight on the porch.

"Would you mind if I went with you, I don't want the children to see," Tristan said.

The Irishman nodded yes then was startled at Ludlow tottering across the dry brown grass barefoot in a nightshirt with the big buffalo robe wrapped around him. Tristan said politely that this was his father but Ludlow shook his white head holding his slate upon which he had written "What is the meaning of this?"

The Irishman began a quiet speech with an apology saying that he was sorry but Tristan must pay his debt to society by a long term in prison. Ludlow shook, his body jerking as if he were a hawk hooding its prey. He lifted the Purdey twelve-gauge shotgun along his leg up through the parting in the robe and blew the two Irishmen into eternity.

EPILOGUE

That October morning was the end of Tristan's story for our purposes. In the stunned aftermath Ludlow collapsed but revived by dinner. Tristan embraced his children to whom Pet later explained that the evil men had come to murder their father. Isabel was quietly hysterical. Decker, the Cree and Norwegian buried the bodies and that night the Cree dumped the car in a deep pool in the upper Missouri. But it was One Stab who went mad before the full echo of the shots had faded. He danced and sang around the bodies, his body arched and prancing and his voice crooning, then he stooped and held the fainting Ludlow in his arms. Tristan knew if it were not Ludlow's kill, One Stab in the excitement might have taken scalps. Tristan took the children then to Cuba on the schooner and left only twenty-three years later during the beginning of the revolution for a ranch owned by Three and her husband up near McLeod in Alberta. If you are up near Choteau and drive down Ramshorn Road by the ranch, now owned by Alfred's son by his second marriage, you won't get permission to enter. It's a modern efficient operation, but back there in the canyon there are graves that mean something to a few people left on earth: Samuel, Two, Susannah and a little apart Ludlow buried between his true friends, One Stab and Isabel; and a small distance away Decker and Pet. Always alone, apart, somehow solitary, Tristan is buried up in Alberta.