The Romance of Certain Old Bones Read online

  THE ROMANCE OF CERTAIN OLD BONES

  A Jacob Tracy Adventure

  HOLLY MESSINGER

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this work are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  THE ROMANCE OF CERTAIN OLD BONES.

  Copyright  2016 by Holly Messinger. All Rights Reserved.

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, by any means now known or yet to be invented, without the express written permission of the copyright owner, excepting brief quotes used in reviews or scholarly journals. The purchase of a copy of this book does not confer upon the purchaser license to use this work or any part therein in other works, including derivatives.

  First Edition: May, 2016

  ISBN #: 978-1-365-11195-2

  TLA Press,

  Lawrence, KS 66046, USA

  www.hollymessinger.com

  Cover art by Chelsea Mann. www.philosophicate.com

  Wild West fonts and clip art from WaldenFonts.com

  For Tony, whom I would rather have at my back during

  a monster attack than anyone else.

  =

  With special thanks to my agent Amy Boggs, for her

  advice and support on this manuscript and all the others.

  Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

  declare, if thou hast understanding.

  – Job 38:4.

  Dakota Territory, June 1875

  1

  The Aberdeen brothers were the last to leave Yankton. They had traded their wagon for picks and cradles and a mule, their oxen for a couple of mustang ponies, and they rode off into the setting sun at a pace that suggested they were eager to find their fortune… or hoping to avoid pursuit.

  Jacob Tracy supposed it was a bit of both. The Aberdeens had invited him along, promising an equal share of any gold they found. There was a very real possibility of striking it rich—General Custer’s expedition had confirmed the presence of gold in the Black Hills the year before—but Jacob thought it more likely the boys would get rousted out by federal troops, if they were lucky. Scalped, if they weren’t.

  Still, he wasn’t the brothers’ keeper. The other five families in their small wagon party had already resupplied and struck out to find their fates in the territories. Jacob pocketed the last of his fee from the Aberdeens and headed for the livery where he’d left his horse, and where the last of the drovers, John Bosley, was waiting for his pay.

  Bosley was a hard, rangy colored man, a few years older than Jacob and no less weathered. Jacob didn’t know him well—he’d hired him in St. Louis on the word of a mutual friend—but three months on the trail had proved him a worthy companion. He was good with horses, frugal with supplies, and didn’t pry into the business of others. He had once let slip that he’d served in the Tenth Cavalry, but that was about the only personal fact Jacob knew about him. And that was fine; Jacob didn’t much talk about his own past either.

  Bosley was talking with the livery owner, an older Negro with a bad limp, when Jacob walked into the stable. They were leaning on a rail, relaxed and sociable, but the livery owner straightened and sobered at the approach of a white man. Bosley drew himself up, too, but he met Jacob’s eyes on a level. Given that Jacob was six foot two, that was saying something.

  “Hey Boss,” Bosley said easily, and then to the livery owner, “This is him. Mister Tracy. The big red quarter horse is his.”

  There was something in this introduction that conveyed, He’s all right, for a cracker, and the liveryman’s face relaxed subtly. He shook the hand Jacob offered. “Redman Davis, at your service.”

  “Pleasure,” Jacob said, and handed over a couple of gold eagles. “That’s for our two horses and tack. He tell you about that shoe?”

  The livery owner nodded. “I’ll see to it, sir. Have it right for you in the morning.”

  “No rush,” Jacob said. “We’ll probably be here a couple days. Where’s a good place for dinner?”

  “You’ll want the Republican Hotel, sir. Best steak dinner around here.”

  “What about you?” Jacob said to Bosley.

  “There’s a saloon down the street that’ll suit me,” Bosley said, which Jacob took to mean the saloon was run by a Negro proprietor, or at least would serve black customers.

  They had been eating together every night for weeks, of course—all the drovers and bullwhackers hunkered down around the same fire, spooning out hunks of cornbread from the same skillet, even sharing canteens, sometimes. There was no time for social distinctions on the trail, and Jacob made sure the men he hired knew it. But in town, particularly a frontier town, walking into the wrong establishment could get a nigger killed, if some good white citizen decided to get ornery about it.

  But there was no law against a white man going into one of their places. And Bosley was too self-possessed to raise an eyebrow when Jacob said, “Mind if I join you?”

  2

  The steak dinner might not’ve been the best in town, but it was pretty damn good. And the clientele at Simpson’s saloon was mostly white but with a few black faces sprinkled in. There were few Negroes in the Territories, and plenty of Territory to go around, so they were mostly left alone. Not like the Indians, say, or the Chinese.

  Jacob pushed the rest of Bosley’s pay across the table in a leather purse. “Count it if you want,” he said, but Bosley just nodded once and made the purse vanish. “And if you got a notion to make more, I’m thinkin I might scout for another job around here. Odds are we can pick up another party headed for Montana or Oregon.”

  “Maybe worth it,” Bosley allowed. “You been to Oregon?”

  “Not yet. But I been through the Pass a few times. Ran cattle for a rancher out in Wyoming til a few years ago. And I’d be glad to have you along, if it works out. Fifty-fifty.”

  Bosley gave him a long measuring look, weighing the proposal and the white man who made it. That was one thing Jacob liked about him—that boldness, that pragmatism that bordered on fatalism. “Get out to the coast by October… then what? Stay the winter there?”

  “Ride down to Sacramento, get on the train to cross the Rockies. Be back in St. Louis by Christmas, dependin on the weather.”

  Bosley sucked his teeth. “Or there’s security.”

  “For the railroad?”

  “For the prospectors.” He nodded across the room. “Or whatever those dudes are here for.”

  Jacob followed his gaze. The dudes in question stood by the bar, dressed in practical dusters and slouch hats, but a little too neat and self-conscious to pass for seasoned locals. Jacob’s eye instinctively picked out the man in charge, fair-haired and poker-assed, with a neat Van Dyke beard.

  Priest? Jacob thought first. No—scholar, though. He knew fanaticism when he saw it. The fellow’s tight-wound intensity was enough to intimidate the younger, taller man to whom he was speaking. The youngster was even more of a greenhorn, with the stooped shoulders and rabbity eyes of a chronic worrier.

  “Heard ’em talkin out in the lobby,” Bosley said. “Seems they were out here last year, found some strike they’re eager to work, but they’re worried about some other dudes beatin ’em to it, or stealin their find. The little banty-rooster there is tryin to hire some local guns to guard their passage.”

  “Passage to where?”

  Bosley took a swallow of his beer. “Badlands. Hell Creek.”

  “Off the Yellowstone?”

  Bosley nodded once.

  “That’s right through Sioux territory.”

  Bosley nodded again.

  “That don’t scare you?”


  “Nothin scares me no more,” Bosley said, in a tone that suggested he’d already seen the worst.

  And because Jacob felt the same, he got up and went over to the bar.

  “—Utterly unacceptable, Mr. Ryan,” the older man was saying, while the young beanpole squirmed. “I warned you these yokels would take advantage of us. You should have haggled him down.”

  “I tried, professor, but he wouldn’t budge.” Ryan spoke with the whine of the perpetually put-upon. “Supplies are at a premium because of the prospecting rush and the traders are gouging everyone. We should have outfitted in Omaha, like I told you.”

  “Coffee,” Jacob said to the bartender. “Sugar.”

  “And it would have taken us three times as long to get here,” the professor snapped, “as I made clear to you in Omaha. I shall have to deal with this Willoughby myself, since you seem incapable of completing the simple task I set to you.”

  “You’re welcome to try,” Ryan muttered, “but this late in the season there’s not gonna be much available.”

  “Excuses,” the older man said. There was no particular vitriol in his manner, just a sour triumph, as if he’d anticipated this outcome. “It’s always excuses with you, Ryan. More and more I doubt your sincerity in following this course of study—”

  “He’s right, though,” Jacob interrupted, and the professor looked around, distracted from his recreational flaying, speechless for the moment. “Excuse my overhearin, but you gentlemen are gonna get hustled by the locals, unless you find a middleman who speaks their language. And I’d stay away from that Willoughby character, unless you want horses lame in all four feet and wind-broke besides. Davis is the man you want, over on third street. He’s a smaller operation but he takes better care of his stock.”

  “And no doubt you get a tip from the referral,” the professor said.

  “Not a cent. But I know horseflesh, and Davis is the only man I felt right about leavin my mount with. Thanks,” Jacob said to the bartender as his coffee arrived. He took a sip and asked, “You boys from Boston?”

  “I am a professor of natural sciences at Yale,” that fellow said pompously. He was no older than Jacob, mid-thirties at most, but determined to project authority. “Dare I hope you have heard of it?”

  “I’ve heard of it,” Jacob said. “Though I was educated near St. Louis myself, and the Benedictines weren’t too concerned with the natural sciences.”

  That got the professor’s attention, as Jacob had guessed it might, so he added, “Vires idoneos requires, certior fio.” I hear you need a few worthy men.

  Ryan frowned, but the professor’s smile was dry and appreciative. “And might you be such a ‘worthy man,’ sir?”

  “I like to think so,” Jacob said.

  3

  Hope was the man’s name, C.L. Hope, a professor of biology and zoology at Yale, come west to look for old bones, of all things.

  “Bones?” Bosley repeated, when Jacob relayed the conversation to him. “Indian bones? He’ll get us all scalped for sure if—”

  “No, not human. Older than that. Like, before the Flood old. Creatures that died out a long time ago.”

  Bosley chewed his lip. “Like that big lizard skeleton in New Jersey. Hydro-whatsis.”

  “Hadrosaurus,” Jacob corrected, but he was impressed. He knew Bosley couldn’t read much, so the man’s breadth of knowledge was a recurring surprise, and one of the things that made him interesting. “I think so, yeah. All those kids with him are college boys from Yale, out here for a summer jaunt before they go back East to be bankers or lawyers or whatnot. They’ll be doin most of the heavy work, he claims—”

  Bosley snorted.

  “—but he needs some seasoned locals to get ’em out to the site and back safe, and look scary enough to keep the curly wolves away.”

  “He’s crazy as a coot if he thinks a couple roughnecks are gonna keep away any renegade Sioux party with a mind to murder white men.”

  “I said as much,” Jacob said. “He told me since we were a scientific expedition, the Indians would have no interest in harassing us.”

  Bosley gave him a pained look.

  “Yeah, I know,” Jacob said. “I think he’s more worried about this other party of bone-hunters. Some other professor named March has been jumpin his claims or buyin off his men to save out the good bits for himself.”

  “What’s that to us?” Bosley said.

  “Nothin. We just gotta get the supplies and the wagons.”

  They had debated, himself and Bosley, and then himself and Hope, whether to take a steamboat up the Missouri, to where the Yellowstone split off near the Dakota-Montana border, and outfit at Fort Buford. It would certainly save time, and was possibly safer than riding across Indian territory. But it would cost an extra thousand in fares, not even allowing for the markup in prices they were sure to find upriver. And if the boat broke down or wrecked, as they often did, then they’d be stranded in northern Dakota Terriority without provisions, mounts, or protection, until another boat chanced along and picked them up—probably gouging out another fare in the process.

  Hope had blanched and agreed that overland was probably the surest route, and handed over an advance of a thousand dollars, though Jacob warned him it would likely take four times that to outfit their party. He’d demanded three hundred apiece for himself and Bosley, which made Hope sputter, but Jacob knew his own worth and so did the professor, to his extreme annoyance. Over the next four days he and Bosley scraped together four wagons, eight mules, twelve horses, a cook, provisions, and a Crow Indian boy named Stanley Williams.

  Stanley was eighteen years old, he said, though Jacob guessed he was three or four years short of that birthday. He said he’d been schooled at the St. Pierre mission in Minnesota, but claimed to have been born along the Yellowstone and said he knew the Hell Creek Badlands like the back of his hand. His English was so good that Jacob was inclined to doubt this claim, but Bosley had picked up enough Crow during his army days to verify that Stanley could speak it, and said his signing was as good as any he’d seen on the Plains.

  “I don’t think he’s as Christian as he lets on,” Bosley said to Jacob, privately. “He wears a medicine bag inside his shirt and the old trapper who told me about him said he calls himself Many Tongues.”

  “So he’s a liar,” Jacob said.

  “No. He’s hidin in plain sight. Doin what he has to, to get by.” Like the rest of us, he might’ve added, given his sidelong glance at Jacob’s open vest and shirt collar.

  Jacob put a hand to his breastbone to make sure his crucifix wasn’t hanging out—a gold ornament like that could get his throat slit. But it was hidden, and Bosley averted his gaze without comment. Just as he had said nothing that morning, though he had taken a good long look while Jacob was shaving. He supposed Bosley wondered why he still wore it, when he displayed no other outward sign of devotion. Sometimes Jacob wondered himself.

  And that was, he supposed, Bosley’s point. One never really forgot the lessons learned in childhood, even after one had learned to say ain’t no chance in hell and move your goddamn ass to the roughnecks one worked with, or Our Father to the missionaries who cut your hair and gave you boots instead of moccasins, or Pardon me sir to the white shitheel who had stepped on your foot.

  So they had their guide, and two days later they set out for the mouth of the Yellowstone, six hundred miles away through hostile Indian territory.

  It was perhaps a measure of Jacob’s life to this point that he wasn’t even much worried.

  4

  “Whoa!” Bosley’s bellow echoed through the narrow canyon, bounced off yellow and pink stone chimneys, and caught up to Jacob at the head of the trail.

  “Cripes, now what?” Jacob muttered, and hollered back, “Whoa!” lifting a hand so the riders and wagons behind him came to a creaking, stumbling halt, horses and men alike groaning at the third such delay that morning. Jacob and Stanley Many Tongues turned in their saddles to peer bac
k as far as the last hairpin turn where, once again, there were only three wagons following, and Professor Hope nowhere to be seen.

  “That same wagon,” Stanley said matter-of-factly. “Wheel gave way, like you said.”

  Swearing profusely, Jacob dismounted and tossed Blackjack’s reins to the Indian boy, then marched back along the column, squeezing between horses’ flanks and the rock walls, then clambering up across the wheels and canvas-covered stock of the last wagon, until he dropped down to the canyon floor again in time to see Bosley ride up around the turn.

  “Axle this time,” he reported. “Ground’s so rough it’s shakin ’em to pieces. We oughtta cache half this plunder and ditch the wagons—”

  “Yeah, tell me about it,” Jacob growled, and continued on around the turn to see the two Yalies driving the busted wagon had got down and were standing around scratching their heads as if it were some kind of wonder. The professor was still nowhere in sight. “Where is the sonuvabitch?”

  “He’s down the trail a ways,” Bosley said. “I can see his horse from here—somethin in the wall caught his fancy.”

  “Get these mules unhitched and start sortin out what we can carry and what to leave. Might set Stanley to findin us a likely place.”

  “Got it,” Bosley said and swung out of the saddle. He began calling out orders while Jacob continued up the narrow pass.

  Sandy, crumbling walls of stone rose up on all sides, extending skyward into weirdly smooth spires. Some of them looked as if the rocks had melted and run together like a pudding. Others had boulders balanced atop, like stone toadstools. From a distance the badlands had looked like an ancient city, but here in the bowels of it Jacob heard echoes of things older than hoofbeats and men’s voices. He braced a hand against a knobby protuberance as he climbed over a rough patch of ground, and felt it vibrate as if alive, which he didn’t like at all. He snatched his hand away and continued down the canyon to where Professor Hope’s pony stood riderless at the base of a steep draw.